Against Conservatism

Conservatism is a plaintive whimper, a sigh from those who feel that they have something to lose. It's a lament for a disappearing simulacrum.

It is reactive and defensive. It is an inability to grapple with the world as it is and a plea to avoid taking up one's cross, so that one may have a comfortable life.

That's why it is a loser's ideology.

Conservatism is about nostalgia, the longing for the country of one's childhood. A comfortable country where the rule of law allowed all to co-exist in peace.

As a longing for a simulacrum, conservatism is a life-style choice, like being a goth is. It's about the clothes you wear, the bars you like to go to, the art you prefer to look at and the music you listen to.

Conservatism presupposes that there is a cordon that keeps away chaos so that one's comfortable life continues. The cordon might be geography (the sea), it might be formed by a competent police force, it might be the army. Conservatism is about getting others to take up one's cross for one so that one's comfortable life may continue. Roger Scruton in How to be a conservative wrote:

the state exists to protect civil society, not to shape it according to some purpose that is not already implicit in the social fabric.

The conservative thus places faith in the state to maintain the conditions under which the preferred lifestyle may continue The conservative does not deign to interfere with the state, while wanting a minimal state. No thought is given as to who might be running the state, or what if the state grows to bolster the cordon within which one's comfortable life exists.

By leaving the state alone, the conservative becomes the hapless aristocracy of Tolstoy's War and Peace. He becomes Oblomov from the eponymous novel.

The conservative would like to LARP as a gentleman, sipping cocktails in his living room, while not concerning himself that the society, the one that made the cocktails and living room possible, might be collapsing all around him.

Much conservatism involves pining for a society, that one imagines existed when one were a child. This is especially true of people who had the fortune to be born in 'the West' and who remember the 1950s and 1960s.

Being a conservative means discarding the notion that one's life then was the result of happenstance: the confluence of the influence of the institutions and flows of history up until that point. Being a conservative means being unaware that one's memories might be coloured by the innocence of childhood. Being a conservative means discarding the notion that one's views might be filtered by the media one has consumed.

The media that the younger conservative consumed were a creation by society and are thus cultural artefacts that provide unreliable testimonies. As for the flows of history, they were a unique event. Since our conservative's birth, history has continued to develop and water flowing under the bridge cannot be towed back up-stream.

To rescue himself from disillusion, a conservative might try to construct a whimsy of an idyll. Perhaps listening to ClassicFM will evoke a world where people only listened to the sort classical music that conservatives like. Alternatively, perhaps putting on repeat pop songs that one listened to during one's teenage years will bring alive the simulacrum which one thought was the real world.

The conservative must face the fact that none of this will bring into being a gentler and kinder society, the one where one can sit at a picnic table on a finely cut lawn and drink Pimm's between rounds of croquet.

The filter through which one might view those golden-olden days is fake. It's like a Merchant-Ivory film evoking a biased one-sided view of history, which people who lived through that time almost certainly would not recall were they able to be asked.

Yet there is that nagging, empty feeling that there was a perfect way to live when one were younger, but, for some reason, this way of life disappeared and one was left with a feeling of loss and emptiness. If only the conservative could grasp that past idyll, and, by caring for it, nurture it and bring it into the present day.

Such a view of the past is a lie delivered by the corporate media. One must live in the world as it is, examine it closely whereupon the lies that we have been told will be revealed. These are the lies that are told at school, lies that are told in the media and which parents and friends repeat.

There is no point at raging at the television, a film, or a new fashion trend. That is no path for someone who identifies as a conservative to forge a better life. The world has been crafted by those who form public opinion. Both the rage and the thing raged against are constructs of the media super structure.

What the conservative thought he had, can never be claimed; if the world around barely resembles the world for which the conservative wishes, then it is for the conservative to work with others to put it right.

People will be motivated to make a better life for their children, their broader families and their friends. Conservatism does not supply this. The corporate media push drug-taking, self-mutilation and destructive relationships while simultaneously constructing a counterpoint in the form of a faux gentility - a simulacrum of fabricated past. This establishes a manufactured dialectic in the public discourse.

One has to turn away from this false dialectic and reorient oneself as far as is possible to build supportive communities. There is only one way for such a transformation that can withstand the moral, psychological and physical storms that always gather:

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit – Titus 3; 3-9