What is Conservatism?

I often feel unqualified to make political statements, as I feel so unlearned. A wise man surely said "I don't even know enough to know that I don't know." But, some thoughts: I am reading an interesting book entitled The Devil Knows Latin- Why America Needs the Classical Tradition. In it, E. Christian Kopff writes in erudite, with lots of latin jargon, lots of greek root words, lots of references to intelligent thinkers that are way beyond me. Mostly, every few pages I have a new insight into history, politics, and thought in general. Today's chapter was called "The Ghost Dance: Liberalism in Crisis." He defines conservatism by defining liberalism:

That liberalism is in crisis has been clear for some time. Since the Enlightenment, liberalism has maintained a consistent antipathy to attitude rooted in tradition and supported by prejudice, especially religious tradition and prejudice. As a political theory, liberalism is closely tied to the possibility of a secular moral culture founded on something other than the controversial religious and metaphysical ideas of any particular group within that culture.
But independent of particular religious and metaphysical assumptions, can there be a nonarbitrary basis for making moral judgments? Without a positive answer to this question, liberalism must self-destruct as a coherent moral ideology. If it would be out of bounds for the liberal state to base moral arguments - and, in particular, to base its own claims to legitimacy- on the ultimate convictions of any particular group, then the liberal state is a logical monstrosity, and the problems it is now undergoing are a necessary and inevitable prelude to its own implosion. To state all this another way: if, in order to maintain neutrality among religious beliefs and metaphysical arguments, a liberal state must never claim any rational basis for values, then the foundational assumptions of the state undermine its very legitimacy, because any claims that can be made on behalf of the liberal state, including the claim to neutrality, are merely arbitrary. In other words, liberalism cannot even answer the question most important for it, "Why neutrality?"


Is it that a conservative is less a disciple of the dictionary definition of the word and more of one who is less willing to reject the past because it happened a long time ago? because it is old-fashioned? because it is not the norm now? My definition of the word "creativity" is more closely linked to "conservative" than I felt before reading: "combining various elements of what is already in one's personal culture and distilling elements to the favor of the creator".