BLOG/RELIEF: RIGHT TURN ON RED. JWB donated to disaster relief, and asked for five ways of completing the sentence, “I am a conservative because…”. [lightly edited for clarity]

First, some caveats: 1) Yes, I could also do five ways of completing the sentence, “I am a liberal because…” and maybe at least three ways for, “I am on the Left because…”. (Maybe.) Those would probably be more boring than the conservatism answers, for a number of reasons: I’m liberal in the way that Americans are inescapably liberal, and that’s not exciting; I was raised on the Left, so my conservatism requires more introspection and gnawing-on than the other options; liberalism is a more clearly-delineated tradition, by which I mean that it makes more sense to call Aristophanes a conservative than to call Socrates a liberal (although you could make a case against the former and in favor of the latter, if you for some reason wanted to), and Leftism is even more clearly-delineated; and for reasons having much more to do with my personality than with the merits of any political philosophy, I’m more interested in working out the ways in which I’m conservative than the ways in which I’m liberal or leftist.

2) The ideas below are not going to get you to a welfare policy, or many other specific policy positions. They’re part of the general philosophy I consult when I need to work out what I think of an issue, but I do understand that you can get to different places from these premises. So, like, don’t yell at me because you agree with the premise but think it leads to different conclusions–I’m laying out the platform from which we can begin a discussion of political philosophy, not the end-state.

3) These are ideas I’m chewing on at the moment. (And perhaps for that reason, this list is neither as interesting nor as coherent as I’d like!) It is entirely possible that what I hope is “the next conservatism” is actually “the conservatism I made up in my mind”… or maybe even “the next liberalism,” although I doubt that sincerely, which is one major reason I call myself a conservative even while disagreeing radically with most Americans who use the term.

Uh, okay, enough disclaimers. Let’s get out the candles, the whiskey, and the Crab Rangoon, and start talking!

…because power corrupts. First of all, get it out of your system: Insert snark about current administration here. I’ll likely agree. But this is one basis of my remaining feathers of libertarianism. I see people on the Left correctly identifying various loci of power in the private sector, like corporations, and attempting to use the government to limit that power. First off, I hope we can all keep in mind that corporations give us butter and disco, and for this we should be grateful. But also, isn’t this strategy a bit like the old woman who swallowed the fly? It’s not great to have a fly inside you, but that doesn’t mean swallowing a spider is the right response…. See my second post about Wendell Berry for more.

Look, I volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center. I see the grinding edge of capitalism (as well as, of course, the hard consequences of replacing daddy with the dole). That doesn’t mean shifting yet more power to the people who brought you the DEA is the best response.

…because man is made in the image of God. This is something whose immediate application to politics I’m still struggling with. It obviously comes out in torture. I want to think hard about how it relates to the next item:

…because we are dependent rational creatures. Liberalism, and other processes of applying the acid of Reason to social forms, tends to work very well for competent, rational people with the wherewithal to display their competence and reasoning power. It has a much harder time understanding unchosen responsibility, unchosen debility, and other forms of dependence. Abortion and euthanasia are logical consequences of liberalism.

This is the primary, and best, critique of liberalism by the Left–and one of the Left’s great failures in the contemporary era is that it has failed to apply its defense of the defenseless to the old, the sick, and especially the unborn. Understanding why the Left failed here, what it got importantly right and why it came to ignore its own best impulses, seems like a basic project for any “next conservatism” I’d approve.

(I wonder if this Orwell essay isn’t a good place to start? Understanding dependence requires understanding our universal dependence on God….)

…because religion is the heart of culture. And by “religion,” I mean an understanding of the nature of love.

And also, a related but separate thought: Culture includes, but surpasses, government, and can’t be untangled from government. That was part of what knocked me out of my “conservative libertarian” phase–while obviously you need to give specific attention to specific issues, in a way that this post just isn’t going to attempt, I basically no longer believe that you can sustain a good-enough society with a rights-shaped governing philosophy. (This is related to my suggestion here that it becomes hardest to separate Christianity from politics when citizens disagree on the nature of justice.)

…because traditions give meaning and beauty to necessary suffering. That’s one of the very few interesting things I said in that AFF marriage roundtable. The pithier way to say it–which is probably closer to what I mean, anyway–is, “because I prefer the suffering of constraint to the suffering of alienation”… but I wanted to give you guys something original-ish, not just the Cigarette Smoking Blog‘s commonplace book! (And I can’t find the link where that phrase is roughly from, so if she wants to send it, I’d be grateful.)

(I speculated half-jokingly at one point to the Rattus that left-wing novels were about how suffering is bad, and right-wing novels were about how suffering is good…. Dunno if that’s true, and would love to hear examples, counterexamples, and theories….)

Tradition, like constraint, is based in relationship. So it should come as no surprise that ideologies of choice and reflexive suspicion of tradition dissolve the social forms that sustain relationships, and leave freedom, relief from the previous form of suffering, banality, and alienation in their place. This is pretty much the entire point of my senior essay, a.k.a. Nietzsche vs. Eros: This Time It’s Personal.

It’s also one of the really insightful points in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which is my current reading–I’m on chapter three. The guy’s critique of modern alienation is about four hundred times better than his proposed fluffy, “Believe in whatever!” solution, but I still really appreciate that he understands that meaninglessness is worse than pain.