Conservatism and ideologies

(or oil and water)

“But continue thou in those things which thou hast learned, and which have been committed to thee: knowing of whom thou hast learned them” (2Tim 3:14) Photo by Paolo Bendandi on Unsplash

(Sorry for the long absence. I had a massive heart attack and it pretty much knocked me out of any productive activity for the last months)

A friend wrote me, asking whether I thought Elon Musk could be considered “Conservative”. I pointed out that a guy who wants to go to Mars and gives the children he fathered with several different unwed women absurd names has a long way to go if he ever wants to understand what it means to be Conservative. He is somehow helpful for the political Right at the moment, if only for the money he donates to their causes, but any ideology, be it Right- or Left-wing, is the opposite of Conservative.

After all, the original Right and Left wings were the guys who would sit on the right or the left side in the French Revolutionary Assembly. Many things could be said about the French Revolution, few in polite conversation, but it could never be accused of Conservatism. Together with the American Revolution, which happened a few years earlier, the French Revolution marks the historical triumph of ideology over Civilization. Conservatism — true Conservatism, that is, not whatever ideologues want to sell by that name — is about Civilization, and Civilization is the opposite of ideology. Ideologies are the social byproduct of Descartes’ Cogito. Civilization is the permanence of real forms of social organization.

When Descartes tried to “doubt everything”, he famously discovered something that could not be doubted: the fact that there was someone (him) who was thinking. Perhaps his very body was an illusion, perhaps the room he was in was a dream, but if there was someone thinking, that thinker’s existence was above any doubt. It’s not good philosophy; many good arguments could be made, on the same premises, against it. Anyway, that’s what he wrote. Ideas, though, tend to trickle down, and when it happens they often take shapes that the original thinker wouldn’t recognize.

And that is what happened. The notion that somehow thinking was more real than reality itself slowly gained traction, and that is what ideologies are all about. All ideological thinking, be it Right-wing, Left-wing, Islamofascist, Ecofascist, Hindu-fascist, based on the supposed superiority of any given ethnicity, or whatever else can be found in the market, is based on a very simple notion: if only reality can be changed so that it conforms to our delightful idea of how society as a whole should be, all problems will have been solved.

If only the means of production can be taken away from private hands…

If only contractual obligations can replace all other forms of societal adhesion…

If only all criminals and antisocial elements can be captured and punished…

If only the State can organize society as a well-oiled machine…

If only Nature can be preserved and Mankind’s footprint drastically reduced…

If only the Koran and the Hadith can replace “man-made law”…

If only that other ethnic group can be expelled or made to serve the superior one…

They have a wondrous idea, and if only reality changes and agrees with it, all problems will be solved. It’s the Universal Key to Happiness®. Of course, reality has a way of being more real than any idea, especially when the said idea is simple enough to gain a vast body of followers. It’s easy to venture a spoiler and say that the adequation of society to any One Simple Trick will not work. Ever.

Nevertheless, precisely because ideologies make the world seem simple, they are often popular, especially among young folk without much experience in the many ways things can get pretty complicated all the time. Young people have another thing going on that leads them to ideologies: both the youth and ideologies are, by necessity, future-oriented. The best is yet to come, always, for both. After all, reality hasn’t been fully converted to The Fabulous and Simple Idea (yet!). That’s why up to the 1980s it didn’t help any to point to Communists that there were plenty of Communist countries around and it was uniformly bad there; they would answer that they had not yet reached True Communism. It was, however, in the future. As it always is with ideologies. All ideologies are future-oriented, all of them place The Good Times in the future, when pesky reality eventually folds and is rearranged according to their One Simple Trick

Sometimes it’s not obvious from all points of view. Leftists, for instance, tend to accuse rightists of being stuck to the past, or of dreaming of bringing society back in time. All it means, however, is that The Amazing Future® rightists intend to build is loosely based on their (mis)reading of elements of the past. They see the past through highly distorting ideological glasses and often project onto it their vision of a glorious future in which the “values” they isolated from their vision of that past (which, more often than not, would be quite surprising for the people of that time, even if they were ideologues themselves) will at last triumph and transform the whole of society.

Moreover, there is an element in the dynamics between Right and Left that gives the Left a tremendous advantage while allowing the Right to pretend it’s Conservative: Leftism of all kinds is inherently an ever-changing ideology. Marx saw History as composed of successive and increasingly better revolutions to overthrow oppressors. The Bourgeois overthrew the Nobles, the Proletariat would someday overthrow the Bourgeois, and so on. As the general idea trickled down and got distorted, it became a game in which the trick is to find an oppressed category of beings and liberate them from oppression. They don’t even need to be human; Peter Singer wants to liberate the chickens, and lots of young ladies with strange haircuts think they are morally superior to the rest of us because they will only eat plants.

The most fashionable categories of oppressed beings these days are those defined by sexual taste and sex-adjacent categories. That’s why marriage was redefined so as to include relationships between people of the same sex as long as they have sex with one another, for instance, or why all of a sudden so many guys declare themselves to be girls and vice versa. It’s very nice to be declared a card-carrying member of an oppressed category because liberating one becomes the business of all well-meaning Leftists.

The ever-changingness of Leftism, which is always on the prowl for a new and exciting category of beings to liberate, necessarily leads their ideological adversaries on the Right into a reactionary corner. That’s why the Right spends so much more time reacting to the latest madness proposed by the Left than trying to make society conform to their own One Simple Trick and thus reach Utopy. The left, like Muhammad Ali, floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. Or, rather, floats like a massive migration of butterflies and stings like a whole furious beehive, because as soon as one understands one of their nonsensical proposals another will come out of nowhere. “Let’s liberate the chickens!” is almost immediately followed by “This huge macho athlete who fathered six children is a girl because he says so!” Who has time to react to all that and still fight for the total elimination of the income tax?!

Thus the Left forces the game to be played on their field; however, their main problem is that as soon as someone misses the latest memo about a new category to be liberated, they lose one of their own. The lady who wrote Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling, is a very good example of this phenomenon. She was a run-of-the-mill leftist, mildly feminist, but she didn’t accept the New Truth About Gender. Lots of other otherwise mild feminists had the same reaction, as they saw the new Revelation about transgenderism as an attack on women, allowing men to enter their hard-won exclusive spaces, both social and physical. The Left devised a term to refer to them that phonetically alludes to that worry: the women who care about their turf are now branded as TERF, “Transgender-Excluding Radical Feminists.” There was nothing radical about them or their run-of-the-mill feminism a few years ago; they just missed the memo. They’re still trying to forge the future every single leftist was fighting for a few years ago.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is not about the future. It’s not about reacting to proposed futures, either, even if often needs to be done. It’s about Civilization, about the preservation what what has been built with immense effort in the last few millennia. There is no fabulous future to be built, no One Simple Trick. Quite the opposite: it’s about preserving a very complicated structure that has been built from the bottom up and gave all of us, including the ideologues among us, our moral guidelines.

After all, as famously wrote my beloved Chesterton:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

When a young lady with too-short bangs refuses to consume milk and honey because she doesn’t want to steal from the calves and bees, what we have is a deeply disordered form of “Thou Shall Not Steal”. When a Communist wants to take the means of production away from the hands of their rightful owner, what we have is a deeply disordered version of “oppress not the widow, and the fatherless, and the stranger, and the poor” (Zech 7:10). When an eco-terrorist burns down a ski resort, what we have is a deeply disordered form of “the earth brought forth the green herb, and such as yieldeth seed according to its kind, and the tree that beareth fruit having seed each one according to its kind. And God saw that it was good” (Gn 1:12). And so on.

Our Civilization gave us essential morals (from the Latin “mos”, meaning manner, custom, usage, or habit), and to an extent that can only be realized when we compare our sense of right and wrong to that of other Civilizations (the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indian, the Muslim…) it still informs everything, albeit more often than not in deeply disordered forms nowadays. But the same essentials are there. They are Christian, more exactly Catholic, because the converted Roman Empire is at the root of our Civilization. Our roots can be traced to Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens: Rome gave social order, Athens gave us critical thinking and logic, and Jerusalem gave us, above everything else in social terms, the then-revolutionary and still today completely unique idea not only “God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27), but also that God “was made flesh” (Jo 1:14). The corollary of this extraordinary belief is that every single human life is infinitely precious because each human being is connatural with God. The worth of man comes not from his riches, his wisdom, or his social position; a beggar can be worth more than a king.

It’s an absolutely revolutionary idea, and it is the essential difference that separates our Civilization from any other. Others may believe that man was made in the image of God, but only ours believe that every single man is connatural with Him. Even a heathen, even a criminal, even our worst enemy. It is not only a theological concept, even if its origin is theological. This peculiarity of our Civilization makes us value human life to an extent that is unique in the history of mankind. That’s what makes us want to protect the poor, the widow, and the orphan. That’s what makes us see all men as our equals at a very basic level. That’s what built our world.

It’s very important to realize that our Civilization — and true Conservatism is about conserving that Civilization — was based, as virtually all others, on theological thinking, but a very peculiar theological thinking that deeply believed that we must render “to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's” (Mk 12:17). In other words, we have at the root of our Civilization a theological prohibition of theocracy. Our civilizational cousins, the Oriental Christians (nowadays first and foremost represented by Russia), took it to the extreme of rendering religion itself to Caesar (or the Tsar; it’s the same word), but we, alone among virtually all Civilizations, consider that there are two different dimensions at play at the same time in society, one that is God’s — in other words, what is moral, what is right and what is wrong — and another that is Caesar’s — in other words, what pertains to government and social organization. The latter, of course, must act morally, submitting in that sense to the former. But we cannot make a theocracy, because if we did we would fail to render to Caesar what is his.

A true Conservatism, for anyone who lives in a country whose culture is the direct or indirect offspring of the Catholic Roman Empire, will be centered on making moral decisions instead of ideologically-inspired decisions. Ideologies simplify the world, transforming the complexities of human life into stick figures, or even fleshless figures stuck on a spreadsheet. “Oh, there are oppressors”, or “criminals”, or “political enemies”, or any other reduction of living human beings to a category; “let’s punish them”. Well, true Conservatism can’t. Each person is different from the other, each case has its complexities that must necessarily inform the moral judgment of the situation. Which, of course, will take as its premise the infinite value of every single human life, the unfathomable dignity of every single human being, and so on. We cannot reduce human beings to categories, because the tree that grew in Rome, ordered by the logic of Athens, from the theological root in Jerusalem, forbids us from doing it.

We cannot simplify reality, because our moral system is a very complex version of Aristotle’s Ethics in which theological teaching raised man much above his natural station. Our moral system deals with reality, in which there is almost never pure black or white, in which nothing is ever simple. A true Conservatism cannot be reductionist, because reality is above any idea. Even the best idea of all ideas pales in the face of reality. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,”, said Mike Tyson, and that’s how reality deals with ideas: its complexity punches the idealist in the mouth. Another sportsman, the football (or soccer, if you prefer) player Garrincha, after a long explanation by his team’s coach about how they would deal with the Russian team, asked whether the coach had arranged everything with the Russians. It’s the same notion: “The best-laid schemes of mice and man often go awry and leave us nothing but grief and pain for promised joy”, wrote Robert Burns.

So, there is reality, and that is what we have to deal with. Case by case, acting morally, being the “Caesar” of our little domain, even if it’s just a small room. Now, what is more real in life than what is around us? Our ever-nagging and ever-loving spouse, sibling, or close friend can torment and delight us much more than any distant politician or nobleman in his palace. We can stub our toe on our own furniture, not on the concept of furniture.

That’s why a true and realist Conservatism will worry about what’s next to us. Reality is made from the bottom up. That’s why families are much more important than schools, and schools are much more important than the Senate. The former build, while the latter can only spoil. That’s why the importance of the family in our Civilization is inherited from Rome, not Athens or Jerusalem. Jerusalem polished off the rough edges of the Roman model, but the emphasis on the social order that grew from the Roman root is what makes us want to protect the family.

After all, when a couple gets married, it’s implied that they will have children and raise them. That’s where the true future is, not on any ideas or “best-laid schemes”. Each family has its own world, in which each new member of each new generation will grow. There’s nothing more important, and at the same time, there is nothing less prone to centralization.

The Spartans famously centralized child-raising. The Israeli kibbutzniks tried to do the same. But we can’t; we come from Rome, and Athens, and Jerusalem, and we know the infinite value of the family. Hey, it’s so important God Himself decided to be born in one! The greatest among all creatures is a mother, His mother.

Society, thus, is not “constituted” by some piece of paper called “Constitution” by the arrogant men who wrote it. It is constituted in each household, it is constituted by what each child hears from his mother (or on the lap of his grandmother, as the Pope likes to say) when she tells him what is right and what is wrong. Millions of households, each of them unique, each of them its own small world, forming each new member of our culture, our society, our Civilization. Giving him or her the tools to discern the morality of his acts, and therefore, in the aggregate, transmitting to each new generation the ethos of our Civilization. That is what Conservatism is about.

When politicians forget that sex is only important insofar as it is how babies are made and make having orgasms, not babies, the touchstone of what should be considered a marriage or a family, it is sad not because sex between people of the same sex is sinful (it’s their problem), but because it means the creation and raising of the next generation lost its societal protection.

A family is, at its core, the place where the future is made, the place where civilizational values are transmitted to each generation. A convent or monastery is not a family, just like any other infertile reunion of people who live under the same roof is not a family. That’s why I love the English expression “to be in the family way” as a synonym for “being pregnant”. Families are pregnant with the future. The true future, that has nothing to do with grandiose ideas of how to build a Utopia by applying One Simple Trick. In real life there are no tricks: the future is built when each new tiny human being learns to breathe, then to sleep, then to crawl, then to walk, then to talk, then to say “please” and “thank you”. Baby by baby, mother by mother, household by household. No centralization is possible, no ideology can survive.

From the family up goes the ordering of society. The school, which acts and teaches in loco parentis, that is, acts on behalf of the parents, teaching their child what they want him taught but can’t teach themselves. The small businesses and small farms, that are a continuation of the family and will often be where the new generation will learn to work, and maybe inherit it and preserve it for their own children. This is what a true Conservatism must preserve, because these are the places where the real future is built, from the bottom up, case by case, place by place, with no centralization possible or desirable.

There are no blueprints for the future because reality is too complex for blueprints. Conservatism means realism. Moral decisions instead of ideological ones. Decentralization. Not putting down fences unless we know for sure why they are there. A healthful wariness of novelties — something that would have prevented the present problems with microplastics everywhere, even in our brains!

This is Conservatism: the antidote to the poison of ideological thinking.