It's easy to pick a side - left-wing, right-wing, conservative, liberal etc. - and then self-righteously fulminate about the stupidity and ignorance of the other guy's persuasion. If there is a Truth somewhere I expect it's a complicated - perhaps even schizophrenic - one. I think it might have been Churchill who claimed he'd never met a socialist in his twenties who wasn't a conservative by his sixties.
I mean, I can't stand the circling-the-wagons mentality, the jingo patriotism, the blinkered cultural outlook and voluminous celebration of tedious repetition that conservatism revels in. However, I think it would be entirely wrong to suggest that it is a bankrupt ideology. There's an excellent section of Alastair Cooke's
America: A Personal History in which he talks about the Mormon exodus (or banishment) to Utah where conditions were so inhospitable to life (scorching temperatures, few clean water sources, poor soils etc.) that even the most well-meaning deviation from an extremely narrow set of freedoms could bring calamity down upon the group.
The mere fact that human beings are the most dominant species of the millions, perhaps billions which have walked, crawled or swum the earth is at the very least testament to our resilience. But, as the Arabs say,
"All sunshine makes a desert". A group may survive by restricting its outlook and options - but without change, without embracing external stimuli - culture, belief, political doctrine etc. - it must ultimately whither and die. Many of the freedoms we enjoy today were won precisely because people wanted something other than threadbare, dog-eared doctrine.
The problem societies throughout the ages have faced is deceit. Those who study power - from the notorious Alcibiades to Cicero, Machiavelli to Gibbon - Orwell to Chomsky have recognised how it attempts to encourage needless conservatism to protect itself. This is achieved by projecting larger-than-life but - in reality - non-existent threats. There's a great book by the Italian author Dino Buzzati called
The Tartar Steppe in which men, alarmed by the government's threat of imminent invasion by the Tartars, enlist in the army and spend the rest of their lives anxiously peering over the ramparts of some remote Alpine fortress on the border without ever seeing so much as a hair of the enemy.
Recently there's been criticism of Obama who seems to have committed America to an all-too-Orwellian foreign policy of "Endless War". The similarities to the famous Joseph Shumpeter quote about Rome are obvious:
There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest--why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people.It's hard to believe the threat to America is anything close to the Godzilla-devouring-New York vision spewed out by the likes of FOX. But given that the days of infinite resources are well-and-truly gone I'd say the future - especially the long term future - is very uncertain with possibilities ranging from optimistic to grave. My guess is we will continue to see governments whittle away civil liberties, restrict freedoms and deny long-standing rights. After all, they generally have the media in their pocket (US tv is little more than a government mouthpiece these days whilst the BBC is nowhere near as impartial as it loves to preach) and given most people's dependence - in some cases outright
addiction - chances are we'll not just see our hard-won freedoms disappear from under us like a magician's tablecloth but
applaud such like the ignorant pigs of Orwell's
Animal Farm.
