Growing up, I didn’t realize there was such a thing as a conservative intellectual tradition, or, to be honest, even a moderate one. I assumed (in a similar vein to people on the far right) that all real thinking was being done outside the mainstream. In the bubble I was raised in, people read Noam Chomsky and Charles Eisenstein like the bible, attended conferences on Ecoterrorism and how to build your own permaculture communities, embraced the idea of defunding the police before it was an Instagram slogan. The New York Times was a fine place to get basic news, but if you wanted a real perspective you had to go to The New Republic or Mother Jones. Anarcho-Communism was not a radical ideology, rather a natural and necessary next step for human civilization.
Of course, we were almost all white, well-off, and well-educated. My community was also quite old. Many people I grew up around had gone to Berkeley, Brown, and other such institutions in the 1960s. They’d been enthusiastic participants in the protest movements. They’d formulated their beliefs in the womb of that turbulent and vital era of American history and hadn’t changed them much since.
I agree with my community on many things: the urgent need to address climate change, socialize healthcare, and seek social justice. But I am also highly suspicious of both their dogma and their lack of dogma. This is to say, that I am suspicious of their dogmatic commitment to rejecting dogma. I don’t think that anarchy is a viable method of approaching the dazzling, if unfeasible, communist ideal. I also believe that that ideal in and of itself is inherently flawed because of how it seeks to suppress history instead of reckoning with it.
Here is where I come back to the conservative intellectual tradition I am only recently discovering. In some ways, at their healthy hearts, conservatism is about embracing the spirit of the past, while liberalism is about embracing the forever moving target of the future. Another, less conventional, way of thinking about it is that conservative thinkers cherish the idea of place (literal land, country, state of mind) and everything that has contributed to the creation of that place, while the liberal tradition is about new pollen, about harnessing the winds of time.
I believe both are necessary ways of thinking. Though, because of the current climate crisis, I also think that the latter is more immediately relevant than the former. That being said, transforming the present into something beautiful, something livable, means learning to have a cautious trust, a cautious love for the ground you are standing on. And sometimes, despite their naturalist pretenses, their professed adoration of top-soil, my community isn’t grounded enough.
*** I feel it is important for me to add that I have huge respect for my community (especially the topsoil lovers:). Many of these people are single-handedly restoring Tarboo Creek, an important salmon run, and doing other beautiful, vital projects.
Of course, we were almost all white, well-off, and well-educated. My community was also quite old. Many people I grew up around had gone to Berkeley, Brown, and other such institutions in the 1960s. They’d been enthusiastic participants in the protest movements. They’d formulated their beliefs in the womb of that turbulent and vital era of American history and hadn’t changed them much since.
I agree with my community on many things: the urgent need to address climate change, socialize healthcare, and seek social justice. But I am also highly suspicious of both their dogma and their lack of dogma. This is to say, that I am suspicious of their dogmatic commitment to rejecting dogma. I don’t think that anarchy is a viable method of approaching the dazzling, if unfeasible, communist ideal. I also believe that that ideal in and of itself is inherently flawed because of how it seeks to suppress history instead of reckoning with it.
Here is where I come back to the conservative intellectual tradition I am only recently discovering. In some ways, at their healthy hearts, conservatism is about embracing the spirit of the past, while liberalism is about embracing the forever moving target of the future. Another, less conventional, way of thinking about it is that conservative thinkers cherish the idea of place (literal land, country, state of mind) and everything that has contributed to the creation of that place, while the liberal tradition is about new pollen, about harnessing the winds of time.
I believe both are necessary ways of thinking. Though, because of the current climate crisis, I also think that the latter is more immediately relevant than the former. That being said, transforming the present into something beautiful, something livable, means learning to have a cautious trust, a cautious love for the ground you are standing on. And sometimes, despite their naturalist pretenses, their professed adoration of top-soil, my community isn’t grounded enough.
*** I feel it is important for me to add that I have huge respect for my community (especially the topsoil lovers:). Many of these people are single-handedly restoring Tarboo Creek, an important salmon run, and doing other beautiful, vital projects.
Comments
Log in or register to post comments.