11.19

Conservative Impulses

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the politically conservative impulses that we all have. I say this as a pretty avowed progressive, so hear me out (and thanks Bill Maher for giving me a current-events thread to tie this to after I’d already written the piece).

The origin of these musings is Sebastian Junger’s short book Tribe, where he proposes that we should look to our evolutionary roots (close-knit communities) for ways to be happier in modern society (as a former war journalist, he begins with looking at PTSD recovery). He touches on too many topics to cover here, but at one point he struck me with an interesting argument: that liberal and conservative are natural counterweights that have evolved to be present in all healthy societies, and shouldn’t be cast as enemies.

Here’s the basic thought experiment: imagine you live in a community (anywhere, in any time period), and one day a stranger shows up and wants to join your town. The more liberal people say absolutely, this person should be greeted with open arms and welcomed! The more conservative people say, this is a new and unknown situation, we should be skeptical!. The people living in that town wouldn’t think of this as a political issue, they’d simply go with their own personal feelings depending on whether they’re generally conservative (risk-averse, closed to new things/ideas) or generally liberal (more open to them). The church group is probably the former, the local band or bartenders probably the latter.

And as time went by, it would become clear that some people’s instincts were more correct in this particular situation. If the newcomer started a musical program with the local children, and brought them new opportunities and knowledge from outside the community, then the liberals would proclaim victory: “You see? These conservative kin of ours are just too closed, they’re hateful and scared of new ideas/people, they can’t accept that the world would be a nicer place if we’re all more liberal!”

But then if it was revealed that the newcomer’s music program was simply a scam to steal the community’s money, then the conservatives would get the I-told-you-so: “You see? These liberal kin of ours are just too open, they’re naive and want a new idea for everything, they aren’t realistic about how much safer the world would be if we’re all more conservative!”

Either side will be correct some of the time. And as situations evolve and more information is revealed, people would switch sides and argue and all of that would be a healthy reaction for a community facing a new challenge/opportunity.

I worry about our modern politics, with no reasonable conservative voices to be found. A few at least pretended until 2008-ish, but it’s not hard to see that conservative values stopped driving the conservative movement sometime around the Southern Strategy’s invention in the 1960s. At the end of the day I am interested in progressives asking ourselves, “what are my conservative instincts?” Don’t we all have them?

Lafayette

November 19th, 2019