What is a “real” conservative?

Andrew Sullivan, in his new book The Conservative Soul, spends a good part of the beginning of the book exploring the mindset of the fundamentalist believer, whether a believer in Christianity, Islam, Communism, or some other widely appealing dogma. He is concerned because he thinks “real” conservatism has been captured by the religious right Christian fundamentalists. It’s a good book, and I recommend it to liberals, centrists and conservatives alike.

However, his definition of what a real conservative is (pg 172) really brought me up short:

“The defining characteristic of a conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know……

…… While the fundamentalist knows the truth, the nihilist believes it is an illusion, that nothing is true and everything is valid. The conservative differs from both. While not denying that truth exists, the conservative is content to say that his grasp on it is always provisional. He may be wrong. He begins with the assumption that the human mind is fallible, that it can delude itself, make mistakes, or see only so far ahead. And this, the conservative avers, is what it means to be human.”

From this Sullivan deduces what he thinks is the essential conservative approach to problems: try things but always be prepared to change the game plan if they don’t work or if the situation changes. Don’t put too much power into the hands of any fallible central group (like the government). Don’t constrain the options. The true conservative, he argues, is always aware of his/her fallibility and the fallibility of humans in general, and never assumes that she/he “has the only answer”.

This is certainly a marked departure from some of the liberal thinkers who from their ivory towers and think tanks devise and prescribe answers (almost always government imposed) to all sorts of social problems. And it is certainly a marked departure from the bull-headed certainty of the current crop of neoconservatives who have been steering the government in recent years.

If this is what a real conservative is, I’m all for it.