Being conservative in interesting times: Flashback

I dug this out of the archive, from almost exactly 9 years ago, and we are still in interesting times. We got our disruption, but not the one we need.

This was originally written on December 27, 2015. Forgive the stale celebrity references. We got our disruption, but not the right one. —Ed

Back in 1966, when miniskirts were worn by actual women, Star Trek was Gene Roddenberry’s idea for a “wagon train to the stars” and real life Don Drapers slithered around elevator lobbies on Madison Avenue, then-Senator Robert Kennedy gave a speech in apartheid South Africa. Speaking to an all-white crowd at the University of Capetown, he addressed students and faculty, invoking a Chinese curse, “May he live in interesting times.”

Actually, that curse isn’t really a curse. And it’s not Chinese either. Nobody really knows where it came from, but everyone who wants to feel more comfortable because they’re speaking to an organization founded on peace though racial separation tends to quote it.

Whether we are living in 1966 or 2016, the apocryphal Chinese curse is dead on. Kennedy went on to say, “Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged…” Stopping right there for now.

What makes it interesting? Disruption. Every generation disrupts the previous one with whom they share the planet. The Baby Boomers disrupted the Greatest Generation. The Gen Xers disrupted the Baby Boomers; and the Millennials are disrupting all of us. Conservatives have the advantage of relying on a doctrine immune to disruption, should we choose to use it. Kennedy said “everyone here will ultimately be judged.” Conservatives must believe that we will all be judged by God, or we stand for nothing at all.

Every so often, someone comes around who disrupts everyone. Hitler and Stalin managed to ruin several decades, transforming them into multiplied tens of millions of corpses. Communism is responsible for more deaths than any single -ism in human history. That includes every war in the name of every god, prophet or religion ever fought.

Yet today’s progressives in America very much blame God for our problems, calling people of faith bitter clingers to our religion and our guns. The very positions the progressive Left accuses conservatives (social or political, of all stripes) of espousing out of some irrational emotional fervor ignores the fact that, absent God, all human morality is born of one of only three wombs: utilitarianism, pragmatism, or emotionalism.

Unmoored by a transcendent moral lawgiver, we humans are continually disrupted into interesting times, with the same old dresses being trotted out by social engineers, just trimmed with varying skirt lengths (miniskirts being favored in the second half of the 1960’s). Utilitarians measure good as maximizing happiness among humans: Everyone chooses what makes them happy and gives them pleasure. They fail to see that pleasure, especially, as the coin of social economy has an astonishingly diminishing return at the high end of the curve. Hence, the daily parade of rich, famous celebrities wallowing in their misery (and tabloids making a career of Charlie Sheen or the late Michael Jackson).

When pleasure itself fails to maximize happiness, riches lose their value, and those who find themselves “pleasured out” turn either to the ruthless pursuit of power, the amusement of manipulating others to their liking, or other quite anti-social activities. Utilitarianism folds on itself like a Mobius strip, because in order to make everyone else happy, those who achieve high position must be brought down, flattening every wave in the ocean into a glassy, unreflective, matte gray, sort of like Soviet architecture or Boston’s “brutalist” architecture in Government Center (both inspired by the same philosophy).

Pragmatists, at least, acknowledge that a purely utilitarian society would—in a word—suck. They realize that in order for one person to trip their light fantastic, someone else must sit outside the party. Pragmatists go with facts: If Americans want to shut down immigration to all Muslims, give it to them. If Coloradans want to toke and smoke all day long, let every clock read 4:20 every hour of the day. Disruptors love pragmatism because they can claim to represent a majority and “speak for the people.” On the American left, President Obama is a pragmatist with utilitarian stripes. Donald Trump claims to speak for “the silent majority” on the right, but is really a populist pragmatist.

Politics born of pragmatism work (literally: By definition, pragmatism does what works); many times, all too effectively. Depending on the leader and their goals, pragmatism has led to India’s independence (Gandhi knew that mass nonviolent noncooperation would unyoke the Brits), and to the Holocaust (Hitler was nothing if not pragmatic in his domestic policies—his paranoia of his own military notwithstanding). Pragmatism is neither “good” nor “evil” because in the end, pragmatists yearn to explain “why” things are as they are. As Trotskyite and empiricist philosopher John Dewey said, we’re just giving a “place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.”

Scratching off utilitarianism and pragmatism, we’re left with either pure emotional response: Fear, revenge, love, hate, boredom, greed—all the vices—or with God, as the basis of values, morals, and government. America’s founders chose God. Say what you will about Jefferson and Franklin: They knew that without God as the bedrock, our experiment in self-government would collapse. We shouldn’t mistake their theology with their worldview.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires,” says the Apostle Paul in Galatians. None of the -isms without God freely gives these attributes to people; and progressives who think we are born with them have listened to John Lennon’s “Imagine” one too many times.

Conservatism as another -ism without the bedrock of God isn’t good for anything. It’s just utilitarianism, pragmatism, or emotionalism dressed up like Cait wearing spiked heels. Everybody publicly admires Jenner’s courage, but no woman-loving guy seriously wants to date her (him). And Jenner knows this, deep down inside, where his DNA screams “XY” with no way to fix it.

Therefore, true conservatives need God like Britney Spears needs autotune or Mila Kunis needs makeup. Actually it’s even deeper than that, although noisy and ugly are fit descriptions of the right bereft of God’s spirit. It’s more like lungs need air or brains need blood: Conservatism is dead without God, undefined, directionless, and beyond salvage.

There’s only one true conservative in America: one who really believes that the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitle people to exercise the powers of the earth (from the introduction to the Declaration of Independence, before the part that says “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”). As such, a true conservative should aspire to be marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Not anger, sarcasm, mocking, and coarseness. We are, by definition, happy warriors, with varying levels of obnoxiousness (nobody’s perfect).

America—the conservative movement—needs a disruption, but one that relies on the bedrock of God’s purpose, power, and sovereign will for mankind, not the populist musings of politicians.

I stopped quoting Robert Kennedy halfway through his incomplete thought on interesting times. Here it is, completed.

Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged - will ultimately judge himself - on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

Kennedy was right. He lived in interesting times, as do we. But Kennedy was also very wrong. If we only judge ourselves using man’s ideals and goals as the measure of all things, we will have accomplished nothing but changing the scenery. It’s unfortunate that fate or providence dealt him such a weak hand to play.

Kennedy delivered his Capetown speech on June 6, 1966, exactly one year before the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, and exactly two years to the day before his own assassination. Sirhan Sirhan—a Palestinian—killed Kennedy because he supported Israel in that war. Today, both men would be judged kindly by the progressive left. Interesting times, indeed.

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