Conservatives, purely striving

Thoughtful people will change their minds.  Or perhaps we should say that people who can’t recognize truth when they see it are likely to change their minds.  (And since they have nothing very solid to stand on, they seem doomed to keep doing so.)  Conservatives, thankfully, do not need to be those kind of people.  They have no reason to change their minds, at least about the things that matter.  They already know the important things that are worth knowing.  And they are comfortable and confident that what they know is right.  So no sense looking for something else.  (After all, what can be more right than right?)  And so changing their minds will never be an attractive option.  They will work hard to keep from doing anything of the kind.  Best not raise uncomfortable questions when you have little interest in searching out answers.

But flaky liberal thinkers who have little idea what truth is (poor, sad creatures) will insist on asking strange questions that decent folk do not need to have answered.  They go on asking anyways, just to cause trouble.  But since we’ve already entertained and dispatched a few of these strange, pointless observations, we might amuse ourselves by indulging one more.

Observation 5: Conservatism is a sacred mission to purify society.  Yet that hardly seems like an accusation at all, even from a wishy-washy liberal.  Purity is obviously a good thing, surely the best that any particular thing can strive to be.  Who could object to the business of purifying?  But purifying society, you say?  Of what, exactly?  Of whatever decent folk (the best of society, obviously) don’t care for.  Almost anything will do.  Conservatives think that by purifying society of low achievers, dead-weights and undesirables, they can restore it to its proper working condition.  And we know that the proper condition is the one intended by the wise designer.  A good society must have good people.  It needs healthy, fit, well-thinking folk who recognize the simplicity of truth.  Simple truth is always better than complex uncertainty.  And society needs morally fit people, those who recognize truth and serve God’s good order.

Virginity is one of the most preeminent kinds of purity, highly prized by most conservative societies.  The ancient Athenians revered their maiden goddess—the Parthenos.  The Virgin (a different one) is likewise the Holy Mother to pious Catholics everywhere.  What purer sort of mother is there than one unsullied by base sexuality?  Conservatives of the Middle East guard the purity of their wives, daughters and sisters by keeping them well wrapped, carefully escorted, safely out of cars, offices and schools.

Work is another sort of purity.  The members of a fit society display their moral fitness by working hard (those who labor and those who don’t) and by knowing their place in the working order.  That’s why there is no room for shirkers, free-riders, welfare-cheats, dissidents, or other fifth-columnists.  If conservatives must endure the disorders of democracy (such as the possibility of wives voting against their husbands), at least they can make sure that only right-thinking, decent sorts of people are allowed to have a say.  So strict voting laws and tight electoral security are essential.  Else the cheaters and liberals will steal their way to power.  An overly-generous franchise will only lead to muddy results.  No sense giving the vote to those who don’t know what kind of leaders to vote for.  To prevent contamination, a conservative society must have stern laws, solid barriers, strong borders.  Purity begins at the border, after all.

It helps to live on an island.  The English have been successfully resisting Continental interlopers and foreignness for centuries.  Brexit is just the latest word for an ancient desire to preserve their identity.  The Japanese have a deep cultural appreciation of the value of cleanliness, essential to bodily, social and moral purity.  They overwhelmingly prefer the tidiness of cremation to the lingering contamination of shallowly-buried corpses.  The Japanese also don’t care much for used clothing, furniture, even cars.  They much prefer anzen (safety).  They naturally want their daily rice to be of the best kind, rather than that cheap imported stuff.  Watery borders help keep their society pure—or at least foreigners out.  Such natural protections seem a divine support for good sense—after all, sanity is just a word for cleanliness of mind.

After all, conservatives only want a peaceful, secure and orderly society—hardly a lot to ask.  They would rather avoid unpleasant scenes, so find it best to remain well-armed.  A bit of careful breeding doesn’t hurt either.  Dog-breeders are rightly obsessed with purity and go out of their way to guard it and expel the unworthy.  Horse-breeders similarly fixate on pedigree.  No one would pay top money for a horse if not perfectly satisfied as to the purity of its lineage.  Pigeon-fanciers (admittedly, rarer these days) understand that pigeons can only do what they are meant to do if breeders hold fast to the purest lines.  Spanish conquistadors of five or six centuries past understood that their salvation depended on the purity of their faith, which rested on pure devotion to defending the faith (by arms, their specialty), which depended on the purity of their lineage, which depended on the absence of impurities of ancestry (Jewish or Morisco), and thus the untainted blood of their ancient race.  They called this limpieza de sangre.  Pure faith, pure blood, pure society.  (And so a pure society required reliable genealogists and heraldic authorities!)  Purity of blood is generally the hallmark of any noble caste, and a priority of any well-structured society.  India’s officialdom may have given up on the distinctions of the ancient caste system, but ordinary Indians have not forgotten.  Even America, the land of immigrants, has always recognized purity.  Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 ruled that even one drop of mixed blood was enough to prohibit its unfortunate bearer from marrying another of pure white blood.  Sadly, the Sterilization Act of the same year was ultimately overturned, allowing anyone of mentally unfit background to breed and pollute the population.

Conservatives recognize that the only society worth striving for is the best kind, and that the best is meaningless without a clearly-enforced notion of purity.  A good Brahman knows he would become contaminated eating food prepared by a lower caste person (though obviously the reverse would not be true).  A Muslim lifestyle upholds rigorous notions of purity, including taharah, salat, halal, and fitra, and includes a purifying ritual called ghusl.  Judaism likewise specifies numerous ritualistic ablutions.  But the only way to ensure sustained purity is to purge the impure—heretics, infidels, mixed breeds.  This is not to suggest that conservatives are liable to racist thinking.  That would hardly recognize their forbearance toward lesser folks.  But it is curious that self-acknowledged racists so often identify as conservative.  But the decent majority will keep in check the misjudgments of their overly-enthusiastic brethren.  After all, sin is the perpetual burden of a fallen human race.  And sin too is a form of contamination.  The Church Father Augustine knew well that the least taint of sin corrupts the soul and warrants eternal punishment.  And so committed conservatives show mercy to the man by allowing no scope for sin.  The struggle against sin is a war in defense of purity.  And any faltering is a betrayal of the pureness of the divinity.

Conservatives hate betrayal above all other sins.  Disloyalty is an insidious form of impurity—the worst kind really, worse than untruth.  Conservatives therefore demands plentiful evidence of loyalty from their countrymen.  Who else but patriots could love their country so passionately, so unreservedly, yet despise most of their countrymen?  Social mistrust is bound up with the requirements of loyalty.  For conservatives, social trustworthiness must be maintained through public displays of loyalty—honoring the flag, standing for the anthem with correct posture and attitude (and setting your beer carefully aside so as not to spill and lose attention), boisterously celebrating the glorious nation’s birthday, ritualistically enjoying a thanksgiving holiday or tailgate party.  Such transparent advertisements simplify and clarify (more words for purity) the problem of social trust—trust can be given safely to strangers who demonstrate tribal loyalty by adhering to the customs that look most like your own.  The safest policy is to trust people who look and act like yourself.  It follows then that one should vilify those who do not look or act or speak like yourself.  Loyalty is the best kind of inequality, for it is always found among the most discriminating of decent folk, and always rewards the noblest kind of partiality.  Loyalty requires that in order to love the best, you must despise the rest.

Fiscal conservatism.  Small government.  We cannot hope to keep a pure and godly nation if we transfer money and resources from the true owners to the unworthy.  Drug addicts, homeless vagabonds, socialists.  Laziness and moral degeneracy are always found together—corruptions of the honest lifestyle of decent folk.  GMO.  Frankenfoods.  Processed food.  Corruptions all.  One cannot be pure unless one takes in what is pure.  Honest foods are those that nature has created, the true archetypes.  Modifications or derivations are inherently corrupt.  So trust the farmers.  They are the patriots, the grounded folk.  And they are conservative, most of them anyways.  They can be counted on to know what is pure.  They’re always reliably sure of what they stand for—it’s right there on their ballcaps.  Purity is knowing who you are and who your friends are.  And the pure upright folk always know exactly who they are.