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Thursday, 08 December 2005 07:26 |
| Marc Mullinax
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?®What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried??∆
?? Abraham Lincoln
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MARS HILL ?? This column continues a conversation with Asheville about its religious diversity. Let??s look today at conservatism.
I like conservatives. A lot. They keep me honest. They help me define who I am by what I am not, what I believe by what I refuse to believe. The contrast they offer is a helpful touchstone for my own thought. Many of my students are conservatives, and they teach me a great deal.
A conservative ideally returns to the campfires of the past, to retrieve not ashes, but live coals. Thus, their points of view can be very progressive, and not just old. Some countries, such as The Netherlands, retain social welfare as a bedrock ?®conservative?∆ value. Following conservatism??s godfather, Edmund Burke, conservatism seeks to conserve heritage, not blindly advocate the status quo ante. A true conservative would never seek to overthrow; there is too much of value to retain, too much wisdom from the past to mine. We need conservative people who serve as ?®safe deposit boxes?∆ for modern society.
I like conservatism when it suggests there are fixed (religious and otherwise) stars by which we may guide our
ships of soul and state. We need voices that say there is an order to the universe that may be descried and safely followed.
I used to be a religious conservative. But I got saved by doubt. I doubt whether one age, one faith, one way of star-observation, or one way or one anything can reliably teach total truth, truly once and truly for all. Some truth comes only with change, and only in the new. As wonderful as conservatism can be, it is most often a restrictive diet that rarely engages (or even knows how to engage) modern thought. ?®Just say no!?∆ is about as good a response as it gives. ?®Doubt?∆ (and thus ?®humility?∆) is not a part of its program. It cannot say ?®yes?∆ to much that is modern.
Conservatism can, and often does, get entangled with patriotism, that ?®last refuge of the scoundrel?∆ (Samuel Johnson, 1775). Conservatives often think that the values they wish upon everyone must not only be enshrined by, but spray-painted, on every institution of the state. This is fine as long as the democratic process continues, but not so fine if the conservative voice becomes the only one that matters. Nothing is more dangerous to a democracy than one idea when presented as the only option.
Most distressing to me is how conservatism tends to bunch up in the wallet. Often the richest of a nation are its conservatives, who seek stability at any cost to retain their investments?? value. Therefore, conservatives ?? traditionally unexposed to folks different from them, or to conditions dissimilar to the ones in which they live ?? tend to be the least progressive in matters of diversity, race relations and gender equality. Conservatives have signaled that racism and sexism are dead ?? that is, solved ?? in our nation, when they have no intelligence-gathering apparatus to know how wrong they are.
The problem here is elitism. Money, and the power it buys, orders life so that one may never rub elbows with poor folks, or with other races, or with other religions, or with different language groups. Thus, a conservative can easily live in a ever-self-referencing mirror, where what one increasingly sees is merely what one increasingly is. While liberals are susceptible to this tendency, for conservatives it is congenital. The logic of conservatism disables its adherents to turn from the mirror toward open windows, to sunlight and air, the two strongest disinfecting agents.
We need our conservatives, hopefully indiscriminately compassionate and open to viable new ideas and doubts. But if they were, would they still be conservative?
Next week: Promises and perils of being a liberal in Asheville.
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Dr. Marc S. Mullinax, chairman of the philosophy and religion departments at Mars Hill College, can be reached at mmullinax-at-mhc.edu.
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