It's liberal feelings versus conservative values. That's the mantra you hear from a number of conservatives these days. Conservatives are steadfast and true, with their lives founded on timeless rational values. Liberals are skittering all over the lot, depending on what they feel today.
But I disagree. It is liberals that are guided by disengaged reason, proposing relentlessly rational schemes for the bureaucratizing of everything into a comprehensive universal set of rules.
It is conservatives that believe in life and love, mothers and babies, fidelity and families. What could be more emotional than that?
The truth is, of course, that humans operate at many levels; that is our magic. We are instinctive, we are emotional, we are rational.
The point of conservatism is grounding. We believe in embodied reason. We believe in the one and only fleshly life that we are given, and we experience ourselves as connected in a web of responsibility between the dead ancestors and the generations yet unborn. We feel the tug of the past and also of the future.
That is why conservatives cannot get away from the burr under the modern saddle, abortion. For abortion cuts the cord between the generations. It privileges the adolescent present, the whims of the moment against the claims of eternity.
In the modern world of disengaged reason people have come to believe in the metaphor rather than the reality. Our liberal friends believe in the generation of creativity rather than creating a new generation. They seek immortality in creative work of originality, rather than in the creation of children to carry their genes into the future.
Well, nature takes care of things like that. If you don't have children you won't have immortality, not unless you are Einstein. The way things are going, there won't be any liberals by 2100. Just as there won't be any Europeans.
Liberals may be driven by feelings, but their feelings are curiously disengaged, learned responses to the world taught to them by their government teachers and government university professors. These learned feelings teach them to honor the principle of rational government control, that whenever you have a feeling, it should lead to a government program.
As for me, I don't get it. I don't understand how anyone could live in that kind of a culture without going mad.
I say: Give me the life I am given, and the glorious divine madness that is conservatism.
And to heck with liberal rational control and its mindless rational government programs!
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