Conservatives Needed

And, you know, there is no such thing as society. 

There are individual men and women, and there are families.  

           —  The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher

Tory Prime Minister, United Kingdom, 
31 October 1987

            I've been mulling over the headline in my local newspaper, The Ventura County Star, for 13 April 2017, "Local group kicks off in bid to empower conservatives" and recalled Aldous Huxley's comment in his preface to the 1946 re-issue of Brave New World, "For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives […]."

            Huxley overstates, but he had a point about much of the 20^th century, one still relevant today.

            Conservatives reject the general statements "Change is good"/"Thrive on Change" and insist that change is inevitable and often necessary but "Continuity is good" as well, and "If it's not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

            Conservatives insist on people as both individuals and members of societies and on "the continuity of the generations," where each generation is obligated to past generations and to posterity.

            So, what are the great generators of change? Three are revolution, war, and capitalism. A real conservative is suspicious of all three. Others may praise "creative destruction"; real conservatives count the costs of revolutions, wars, and capitalism.

            What are individuals' duties to society? They include contributing our fair share. And society's duties to posterity? Those including bequeathing our descendants a sound economic system, a livable world, and natural resources for them to use.

            American conservatives face complexities since American tradition includes strong individualism, capitalism, revolution, and a religious mix with a lot of radical ideals on social justice that would make necessary many changes.

            Some things though, are easy: conservatives should be for socially responsible environmental conservation and socially responsible public expenditures and budgets.

            And since even the easy things are difficult for so many, it's understandable that there are few genuine conservatives. 

* * *

ADDENDUM:

            Conservatives serve another useful purpose in balancing liberals and radicals on how they "image" society and government. Since the Enlightenment, what became the Left (for a while) saw the world in mechanistic terms whereas conservatives favored organic. If you talk of "checks and balances," you're picturing a mechanism — and mechanisms can be tinkered with. If you talk of "the body politic" and "head of state" and "members of society," you're thinking more biologically — and however careful you need to be tinkering with mechanisms, you need to be a whole lot more careful trying to tinker with living things.

            So conservatives traditionally have held a kind of ecological view, where "Everything is connected to everything else" and (therefore) "You can't change just one thing." Even with machines but more so with organisms, it's hard to tell the final results of any change. With a drug, "There aren't 'side effects'; there are a range of possible effects, some of which you may not want." Even so, thinking in images of organisms keeps one cautious about change. With machines, indeed, "If it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it"; but less is at stake than with an organism, where messing up may result in death.

            

PERSONAL STATEMENT:

            I see myself as a variety of conservative; many of my readers will see me on the Left. And we're correct: (1) See below. (2) In a nice irony, 19th-c.-style Radicals are part of the recent Right; as often as not, for a variety of reasons, American old-style conservatives are on the Left. And America needs more of us old-fashioned fogies. 

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," 1848, chapter 1

Doing What We Ought to Do Anyway: Meat and Water (8 July 2014)

   In a moment of candor, an official of the Alumni Association or U of I Foundation or other money-raising activity of the Univsersity of Illinois told me that soliciting people like me — nonrich people — barely repaid the effort. We were solicited, persistently, so we'd give something and the "Development" people could record that gift and add it to their statistics and appeal to serious potential donors with "Hey" (or the equivalent in rich-people's speech), "89.37% of alums have contributed, so don't you want to do your part?!" Also, getting us to contribute small amounts early on in life kept or got us "invested" in the Big U, which would be of use to the solicitors if they hit us up later on, when we might have made some money.

      Something like that is going on in California where our Governor, Jerry Brown, is asking — with increasing intensity — ordinary folk to conserve water. 

      We in California do need water discipline. In a surprise best-seller, Brian Fagan looks at The Great Warming of about 900-1500 C.E., with the arresting subtitle Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Viking and more generally Nordic and European people did rather well the last time Earth warmed up; peoples in water-sensitive areas — including what is now the US Southwest —  often did not come through well, if at all.

      Which is why out here arguments on the causes of climate change and the details of proper responses can seem weirdly pedantic and perversely political.

      Right now, immediately, without debate, we ought to be taking the more obvious actions on all levels, including individuals: doing things we should be doing anyway.
      Given that future generations might want petroleum and maybe some coal for what are significantly called "petrochemicals," we should be leaving a fair amount in the ground and not, for God's sake, burning it.

      Given that beef is good and good for you — the film operation I work on is looking for money from ranchers ... — but Americans should reduce beef and pork consumption on health grounds, we would do well to go over to more chicken and fish to reduce methane release, a greenhouse gas.
     And for the last part — personal conservation of water — a story.

     I had Legg-Perthes disease as a child:  bone death in the ball and, in my case, socket of the hip. I recovered completely by sophomore year in high school, but I still found it of karmic appropriateness that I got through adolescence and young adulthood with no broken bones beyond one finger and a couple of toes. Anyway, I had never worn a cast until one time well into adulthood I slipped on black ice while jogging and got myself a carpal navicular fracture and wore a cast for three months. The cast removed, I went into high-rehab mode squeezing balls — and was back at my internist's office very quickly thinking I'd sprained every ligament and tendon in my hand.

      My doctor checked me out and said my hand was fine but that I should start with the big ball (a tennis ball) and work my way to the little ball of Silly Putty. He reminded me that I hadn't used that hand in three months and that the pain was normal and, indeed — "If you weren't feeling pain I'd have you at the hospital for neurological tests. ... Didn't the orthopedist explain that to you?" I told him the orthopedist had said, "There may be some discomfort," and my GP replied, "Ah! Doctor talk. You layfolk would say, 'There will be pain.'"
     And we got to talking of other things, one of which is relevant here. I told the doctor that I was happy to be showering again regularly, though I'd gotten proficient at sponge baths and had received no complaints on body odor. He said that spong-bathing was good — it turned out to be a crucial skill for when I broke my foot and that took a year to heal — he said it was good I'd learned about alternatives to showers since, "Americans bathe too much."

     My doctor was convinced that we showered and bathed more than was good for our skin and that this would become an increasing issue as I aged and — strongly relevantly here — as the US population aged.

      It won't make up for much of the water wasted on golf courses or sloppily used in agriculture, but Californians to start with can start adjusting to long-term drought with learning to take more sponge baths; and rich Californians (et al.) can cut back on demands for private swimming pools.


      We should be cutting back there already, and if we ordinary folk start conserving, the Governor can go to the heavy-users of water and say, "Hey," or the proper agri-biz form, "89.37% of your human-individual fellow citizens have cut back even on showers; so it's time to do your part." And we ordinary folk will have "investments" in water conservation — and maybe laying off the lamb and beef and pork — to support conservation by important people.