As much as I dislike conservatism in general, diversity of lifestyles and opinions is needed in case some part of the dominant culture turns out to be deadly in the long run.
but no matter which culture gets dominant, it's the conservatives who will try and maintain it (by definition) and the progressives the ones trying to change it
But then libertarians like to change things too, but in very different ways to what you'd approve of if you identify as left/progressive.
So it's not that simple.
There will always be a spectrum of opinion and values, and people will always try and simplify it down to a "left" and a "right" wing, and it won't work very well but people will insist on doing it anyway.
For what it's worth I don't believe it's genetically hard-coded; it's as much adaptive to culture and responsive to what people see happening in their own lives and in the world around them.
The problem with this definition is that it'd invariably result in a swapping of nomenclatures once one side became dominant. And while we do tend to swap between dominant ideologies on about 20 year spans (roaring 20s, warring 40s, hippy 60s, big business 80s, identity politics 00s, ?? 20s) the nomenclature remains attached to broad ideologies rather than whichever side happens to be dominant.
In practice I think it comes down more to the desired direction of change. Conservatives tend to value pragmatism and liberals optimism. 'If everybody was kind to one another, we could have a utopia so let's work in this direction!' 'People will never all be kind to one another, so let's focus on systems that work even when people engage in bad behavior.' It even has direct parallels in game theory. Do you focus on achieving the max possible (exploitative) system where possible gains are maximized, but so are possible losses? Or do you focus on systems that minimize the worst possible outcome (game theory optimal) but, in practice, also tend to reduce the general case best possible outcome as well?
To be fair, it was also conservatives who didn't want people to embrace the car and so many other environmentally unfriendly new ideas. It may be that if more people were conservatives early on, we wouldn't be in this environmental mess. Turns out, we rushed forward with too much enthusiasm and not enough forethought.
Environmental conservatism was originally a right-wing idea. And to this day, there are plenty of environmentalists that consider themselves right-wing (myself included). You are judging a group by their pathetic leadership. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to replace the people maintaining control of the system.
