What is Conservatism?

 

I don't think that conservatives are evil.  Thinking of conservatives as "the bad guys" is totally wrongheaded and ineffective as a strategy, because it misses the point.

I think that conservatism is something that happens to most people - probably to everyone, to one degree or another, especially as people get older, although different people become conservative in different ways.  As they age, people become more and more stuck in their ways.  It becomes more and more difficult to change your mind.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," as the saying goes.  People become more and more convinced that they are right, more dogmatic, more authoritarian, less and less open to new ideas.  

In much the same way that, if you don't exercise, you will become out of shape, and if you don't exercise your mind, with reading, sudoku, crosswords, or something, your mind will gradually deteriorate as you get older - similarly, most people gradually become conservative, unless they are constantly, conscientiously training themselves to resist conservatism.  It's a form of entropy.  The flame of their youthful idealism gradually dims and dims until it completely sputters out.

It happens to everyone.  In a communist country, or a country that was formerly communist, old people become conservative communists; in a Muslim theocracy, old people become conservative Muslims, and so on.  Even Darwinists can become dogmatic and rigid in their thinking.  And so can Jews, Christians, and even Buddhists.  The most likely to become conservative are those who believe in especially dogmatic belief systems, like Austrian economics.  Of course, liberals can be conservative, too.  The ideological filters through which people understand the world harden, until people are incapable of removing them or even imagining what it would be like to take them off, and try a different filter for a while. 

This sounds like confidence, or pride, and there's probably some of that in there.  But I don't think that's the predominant emotional motivation behind conservatism, which I see as something closer to annoyance, or irritation.   Not only do you lose the capacity for open-mindedness, but you come to resent those who do have more open minds.

One becomes convinced that one's own perspective is "common sense," the basic, fundamental intuitive basis for all of truth that all conscious people have in common.  One becomes incapable of imagining how it could be possible to access any kind of truth in any other way - because one is not experiencing other cultures which operate under different assumptions - or if one does, one only does so in a profoundly alienated way, with fundamental mistrust.  Anyone who disagrees with you, you dismiss as "lacking common sense," no matter how self-contradictory that phrase may be (if it's common sense, doesn't that mean that everyone has it?  If people don't have it, it's not very "common," is it?).  (Anyway, Albert Einstein believed that common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.)

One of the risk factors for conservatism is, as previously mentioned, age.  Another is having children: many people become conservative after they have children of their own.  Your brain gets rewired.  And these feelings may be intensified during periods of immigration, when one senses that the young people around you belong to a different culture than the culture you remember from your own youth.  People who live "up-river," in the farm land and the mountains, away from the coast, are less likely to come across different cultural perspectives and thus their narrow viewpoint may harden faster. 

One day, you may become irritated with everyone who doesn't have (your) "common sense."  The unconscious motivation behind this irritation may very well be a whole complex of emotions.  As you get older, you may develop some resentment towards younger generations, who look more and more like they're there to replace you - and, of course, they are.  You might feel that these young people are naive and don't know what they're doing.  Or you may feel that they don't respect their elders.  Inevitably, this gets mixed with feelings of frustration, the sense that you never reached your full potential, that you were never recognized for your gifts.  You may feel powerless - especially if young people have power over you.  You may feel emasculated.  There might be a twinge of envy, or jealousy.  You may feel that young people have it easy, that they don't have to struggle like you did, that they are spoiled and decadent and narcissistic.  Perhaps, lingering deep within these emotions is the will to power and the fear of death.

One loves young people, of course.  There's something undeniably lovely about them.  But the emotions one feels towards them are extremely complicated.

"Oh, you pretty things / Don't you know you're driving your mamas and papas insane?" 

And these feelings are even more complex: at the base of all conservatism is fear: fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar - a sense of unease, bewilderment, even horror.  You may feel disgust at the strange or different.  But these feelings are all unpleasant, and so few people really want to feel them, at least directly.  And so it is very common to dismiss them, to laugh them off, to make your conservatism into a kind of joke.  "I'm not mad - I just think it's funny."  You make fun of those who are different from you - partly to establish that they are different from you.

It's normal and even healthy to become somewhat conservative about certain things as you get older.  You may like the music from your own youth, and dislike modern music, or like the old tv shows and movies and dislike the current ones.  That's fine.  

But there is a major danger to conservatism, which is that there is a ruling class.  Quite often, the ruling class is not conservative at all.  But they can be very clever, and as you become more conservative, often this makes it much more easy for them to manipulate you for their own benefit and enrichment.  The ruling class are young, tech-savvy entrepreneurs, who "move fast and break things," including all the old traditions, and who use algorithms to gain greater and greater control.  Soon, the ruling class will be the algorithms themselves. Maybe they already are.

So how do you avoid turning conservative?  That is to say, how do you keep an open mind to new ideas?  First, you have to have a little intelligence.  But it doesn't take much.  Second, you have to do the work.  And it takes a ton of work to avoid conservatism: reading, thinking, talking, listening, etc..  Sometimes, it can help to have a good teacher.  But you can't lean on them too much.  Ultimately, you have to do the work yourself.  Remember, they're turning conservative, too.   Everyone is.