Not that the choice of our perspective is a purely arbitrary matter. After all, we are each and everyone supposed to be the collective products of an inconceivably intricate tapestry woven from cords of individually invisible quarks. To pick away carelessly at even the smallest of these threads could conceivably unwind the Whole Shebang into an incompressible tangle of gibberish and bring on Armegedeon--or at least madness.
And perhaps there lies the appeal of one of mankind's Weirdest mental obsessions: "Conservatism", a confused social and political philosophy whose mantra is, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it," but in practice usually tends to do something like, "Throw out the baby instead of the bathwater." Some profess to believe that continuity, not innovation, is the best guarantor of ideals like social equality and economic efficiency. To its fiercest proponents, Conservatism isn't just a perspective or a strategy--it's a moral principle. Maybe the moral principle, the only thing that can keep The Madness at bay.
Taken entirely on its own terms, it does have a certain compelling logic. The narrowing of focus inherent in Conservatism does imply the freeing up a vast amount of cognitive bandwidth--bandwidth the average punter might find much more productively employed in the conduct of business rather than contemplating airy theoretical arcana like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Many have pointed to the conservative Midwestern and Southern U.S. heartland as a shining example of the divine favour which inevitably rewards adherence to Correct Principle, Narrowly Defined. This is how We beat Polio. This is how We won WWII. This is how We became the Most Powerful Nation on earth.
This formulation solidly demonstrates the 3-C's required of any good advertising campaign: Concision, Concreteness and Congratulations. Which must go some way toward explaining the popularity of the philosophy, especially given its notable blind spots. Its articulation is typically deficient in or missing all together at least two other Big C's: Completeness and Consistency.
Of these deficiencies, Completeness is the least interesting to me personally. It usually comes down to an uninspiring exercise in shooting statistical fish in a barrel that is as little fun for me as it is effective in making an impression on persons already committed to view the world in Conservative-coloured glasses. I could point out the obvious fact that most of the developed world reduced incidences of polio to less than 0.35 per 100,000 of population at roughly the same as the U.S. Indeed, none other than the Godless communist regime of the former Czechoslovakia was the first to scientifically demonstrate eradication of the disease in 1960. And if that didn't impress you, I doubt you'd assign any particular importance to the production and strategic military advantages afforded the U.S. during the Second World War by its relative geographic isolation from major combat theatres. Even less would you be inclined to consider the significance of China's #1 ranking in terms of foreign currency reserves. Facts are of no concern to the True Believer. So I'll skip the "blah-blah-blah, fact-fact-fact"; I'd just be boring the both of us.
Consistency, however, is a far more interesting matter. Because here is where we see the weft wind back to be warped, if I may return to philosophical implications of the String Theory analogy with which I began. This is where we can see some of history's more intriguing characters engaged with their fellows on a for-real, human scale basis, rather than see them as the marble-sh*tting Olympians their PR people would like us to see. Presumably the subject is more free to be himself or herself in less formal encounters where a reduced level of scrutiny may be expected, and they are therefore less constrained by the expectations of an image conscious public.
Therefore, here, in the coming weeks I propose to publish a series of imaginative exercises examining the darker corners of the hillarious practice of down-home Conservatism, showing how its obsession with holding tight to a poorly articulated principle often leads to a shabby fraying of at its moral tethers.
Of course, like anything else, my selected approach does bear some inherent constraints. Unless the subject in question is Josh Harris or a completely tactless idiot, there is going to be a real dearth of reliable, multiply sourced accounts of intimate moments upon which analysis can be conducted. Judgments will inevitably have to be made with regard to the sufficiency of the event's documentation, reliability of witnesses, existence of aggravating or mitigating factors, and the consistency of the demonstrated behaviour with the subject's broader reputation. Judgments. Subjective judgments. Ergo dependent upon imagination. Which seems fair play to me, as the zeitgeist has more or less demanded as much by its refusal to indulge in more critical analysis of the statistical evidence.
But that doesn't mean that I abandon notions of fairness and objectivity altogether. Far from it. Instead I invoke as guiding spirit in conducting such reviews, as indeed I would in any rigorous evaluation, the famous "Conservation of Energy" law of physics (i.e., "energy can neither be created nor destroyed"). In order for a person to achieve the minimum psychic equilibrium necessary to conduct his or her affairs in a coherent manner, I believe there must be an ordered provisioning of emotional resources among the basic motivating drives. Those drives are classically defined as Logos (rationality), Eros (instinct for love, life) and Thanatos (violent aggression, compulsion to irrational risk-taking). In short, I believe that there are so very few instances of absolutely pure good or evil to be found in our world that emotional compensation is a virtual necessity.
Even highly partisan advocates of social and political Conservatism must recognize this to be the case. For every closeted gay preacher advocating homophobic legislation à la George Rekers, an adherent of Conservatism could probably point out a politician simultaneously supporting womens' reproductive rights and conducting an extramarital affair à la John Edwards.
Before moving on, however, I must digress a bit and say that in my view these particular cases are NOT moral equivalents. The one is NOT exactly bad as the other. There is a very real, undeniable difference here: The first man is intent on punishing others under the very same laws he himself has no intention of keeping; the second man is surreptitiously taking a liberty which is in no way inconsistent with the liberties he publicly advocates for others. The first man is a hypocritical scumbag while the second is merely an uninspiring coward. BIG difference.
The first subject I have selected for analysis, Pat Nixon, was chosen by an almost serendipitous happenstance, a chance encounter with a bizarre Rorschach Test of a photograph that left me not only howling with laughter, but full to bursting with the questions that have become the foundation of the formal aproach to moral analysis outlined above.
NEXT WEEK: "What do you get when you cross a Lawrence Welk groupie with a quart of gin?"
