Why I'm not a conservative, again

Every so often I come across something that reminds me why, and here's the latest, a post on the ironically(?) titled Postmodern Conservative blog by Johnathan Jones, called "The Quest for Community". It's a review of a book with the same title by Robert Nisbet first published in 1953 -- a date that, in itself, tells you something about it -- and now re-issued. Back when I was myself a lefty, this was just the sort of thing I abhorred, confirming my fervent anti-conservative, left-wing beliefs:

Humans are, intractably, social creatures built for communion. So prevalent is the belief that an equal satisfaction of preferences is a high social good, and that the purpose of politics and morality is the working toward that supposed good, that Nisbet can be a bit of a shock. As this blog argues, liberalism is very insufficient to maintain social order. Freedom and equality as high principles can harm other realities necessary for social harmony.

And it still bothers me. What, prey tell, is "equal satisfaction of preferences" supposed to mean? If human creatures are "built for communion", then wouldn't communion/community also be a preference? Is "social harmony" really supposed to trump everything else -- freedom, equality (of status), and even justice?  In other words, this seems like vague, abstract, confused, and even somewhat menacing mush.

But, being wiser at least than I was, I can now pick out some threads that do make some sense, even if incomplete and poorly grounded. Here, for example, he brings up a theme I've called "hubristic Reason", originating in the Continental (as distinct from the British/Scottish) Enlightenment, and that is a serious flaw in contemporary collectivist/liberal statist schemes:

... the aspirations that inspired the founders of modern thought – the conquest of nature through science, perhaps even the conquest of human nature, and the emancipation of power from moral restraint – could be “achieved” at a great and unpredictable cost. [my emphasis]

And the emphasis on family and association generally is a good theme, however simple, and a welcome contrast to the sort of politicized "solidarity" that characterizes the left. This I think, as another example, makes a good point about the need to bring together things that contemporary liberal orthodoxies tend always to oppose:

Far too many lifestyle choices and social, political structures shatter what the authentically familial would hold together – consumption and production, sensuality and fertility, freedom and virtue.

So fine, but where does that leave us? If Jones' answer is that it leaves us stuck in a 50's style time warp, then he's no help, and this perverse mock rallying cry -- "Down with the statist-individualist symbiosis!" -- just underlines his confusion and haplessness. It also points to his crucial mistake -- to accept, uncritically, the left-wing denigration of the individual, leaving him with the only apparent alternatives of leftist collectivism or an antique conservatism. But the modern individual is a much more complex, and still evolving, phenomenon, that is at the heart of new and potentially richer sorts of community. Like any emergence, this process is not without its tribulations, but the true progressives are those who support the individual and the freedom that defines him -- and resist the reactionaries on both the left and the right that would try to re-submerge her in collectives either traditional or statist (or both).

Multiculturalism and the left

A while back now, German Chancellor Merkel caused no small amount of consternation within the liberal-left everywhere with her announcement that the German experiment with "multikulti" was a failure (e.g., Yahoo News: "Merkel says German multi-cultural society has failed"). Now, partly this failure is just a result of some short-sighted labor policies that Europe in general, Germany in particular, has followed for years after WW2, of using immigrant labor to first rebuild, and now maintain, their societies (a policy that the US is having trouble with now as well). But little or no effort was made to assimilate these workers into the Western societies, and, whether out of necessity or a naive idealism, an ideology of "multiculturalism" was used to justify this, the idea being that "tolerance" will allow all the world's cultures to mingle freely while still preserving intact their distinct customs, beliefs, values, and practices. In Canada, this ideology underlay the use of a new metaphor for this mingling -- the idea of a cultural "mosaic" as opposed to the supposedly less tolerant American notion of the "melting pot". As a mosaic, however, it's a facade that's crumbling here as  everywhere.

One reason for this failure, which one would think would have been obvious, is that mixing cultures in this way changes them -- not a bad or insupportable thing in itself, but there is a rate of change beyond which people everywhere begin to feel that they are foreigners or aliens in their own land, and they resist this. But there's a larger and much more significant reason as well -- it can be seen in an essay by a self-described liberal, Susan Jacoby, entitled "Multiculturalism and Its Discontents": "I am an atheist," she writes, "with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect."  After quoting Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the effect that "'All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. . . . The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.' (italics in the original)", Jacoby goes on to lament the fact that so many of her fellow liberals have failed to grasp this about what's supposed to be their own cultural heritage.Worse, it's as though they're unnerved by such a clear and frank statement and are driven to a perverse sort of relativism that forces them to disavow it as a result. And this leads Jacoby to make some observations that, perhaps unwittingly, also say much about the relative positions of the political left and right in the contemporary world:

Finally, it is a politically strategic error as well as a form of moral blindness for liberals to push people like Hirsi Ali into the eager arms of the political Right. ...

This muddled thinking allows the American religious and political Right to misrepresent itself as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. More important, reflexive liberal multiculturalism fails every child being denied, in the name of faith and family, full access to the promise of this nation.

 At some point, it may be possible for Jacoby and many others like her to come to a realization that perhaps the American right today is representing itself accurately as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. And at that point a choice will be necessary -- between continued allegiance to an old but now reactionary political label, or to the values they thought that label stood for.