CONSERVATIVES: A PROBLEM IN THE MODERN ERA
Back when I was in college a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to join the republican club. I told him that I wasn’t sure about getting into politics. So he asked me the following questions.
- Are you for business and free enterprise?
- Are you for private ownership?
- Do you favour social stability and continuity?
- He pretty much listed the political stances of the Republican Party.
In general, my answer to all his questions was yes. The fact that the Conservative party was the party of Abraham Lincoln was also in my mind. I didn’t want to get into politics, but the notion had a certain ring to it.
However, I asked further questions regarding immigration, abortion, civil rights, and how he viewed the world. And it was from those answers that I told him that the Republican Party wasn’t for me.
According to the dictionary, a conservative is:
- a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values.
- (in a political context) favouring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially conservative ideas.
At first glance there is absolutely nothing wrong what that. I am all for family values, I am all for unnecessary government intervention and all of that. But I am absolutely not for the hypocrisy that you inevitably run into.
If you have a look at how wikipedia describes conservatism what you actually find is that there are several variants of conservatism. I am not sure exactly how I would position myself, but I am a liberal in certain ways and a conservative in others.
CONTRADICTIONS
I can’t stand hypocrisies. I simply can’t take someone seriously when they say one thing and do another. This goes back to what I consider the root of a good society, which I covered in this post. The basic gist of it was:
“You are in contract with society and society is in contract with you”
Society is supposed to create a level playing field for all, to allow individuals to succeed and contribute back to society. If this is not the case that society has failed those individuals getting the short end of the stick, and if individuals don’t contribute back they are essentially leaches in the system. I see this as the foundation of society.
RELIGION
I agree that people should have the freedom of religion. And conservatives have a tendency of touting this the world over. From the United States, to the Middle East, India and beyond.
However, I take major issue when people use their “freedom” of religion to impose on the freedoms of others. In doing so you break that one principle of society. You force your religious beliefs on others, yet take offence when it is done to you.
Religious conservatives in the United States are at the moment hell bend on abolishing women’s abortion rights. They believe that it is against Gods’s will, that is evil etc etc. However none of this is based on “fact”, on scientific fact. Some even go as far as demanding jail time, or even a death sentence. How is that different from some extreme views in the Middle East where women should be killed, or severely punished for wanting to get an education, or turn down a marriage proposal? Yes yes I am sure that they would say that it is different, but it is not. They believe something and they force it onto others without anything to back the up other than their religious believes.
I mean… the “pro-life” people calling for a death sentence for abortion. If that is not hypocritical then what is???
IMMIGRATION
Every single person in the United States of America, who is not a descendent from a Native American, is there due to immigration. And those ancestors come from far and wide, with various religious backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs. Yet it seems like the word immigrant seems to cause an averse reaction in conservatives. I have seen video clips of conservatives yelling at foreigners to go back home, spitting on them, and even performing violent acts. That is not the freedom, equality, and dignity that I would expect from someone who claims to be all for the constitution, and the American ideals.
Maybe this is a little below the belt, but it reminds me of pedophile priests. On one hand are all about peace, understanding, bring a “moral pillar” for the community, while on the other hand they are sexually abusing children. And when those children speak up, or even when they are caught those in their community aggressively defend them, as if an affront to them is an affront to all.
A CONTINUATION OF ATROCITIES
Lets take the first part of the definition of conservative:
a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values.
Let’s start with a society where white people are slaves. Women have no rights at all, and children are essentially property. You as a white conservative, what do you think of that? Great situation? Would you demand that that change?
Well in the conservative point of view it shouldn’t change. Having slaves, peddling children for financial and social gain, and treating women as non-equal citizens would be the traditional value.
It is one thing to be conservative regarding good things, but it is completely different when it is about keeping the bad for the benefit of some. It is especially bad if after a civil war, massive sacrifices and decades of fighting for change those conservatives would try to change the narrative and claim that slaves had it good, or that there was no slavery at all. Even if the slaves did have it “good” THEY WERE NOT FREE, and that is a complete and absolute affront to the notion of “freedom”. This is yet one more hypocrisy from the conservative bunch.
SCIENCE
This is yet another puzzling topic that is full of contradictions. Today the right has a tendency of ignoring and denouncing science. From climate change, pollution, the on going pandemic and so forth.
Yet surprisingly I see loads of conservatives online, driving their cars, using electricity, phones, computers and ALL of the benefits that SCIENCE HAS AFFORDED them. I don’t see them throwing their phones on the ground and claiming that it is a work of the devil, or an illusion, or whatever other terms they use regarding other scientific information out there. And pretty much none of their counter arguments are based on anything other than their believes. No matter how illogical their reasoning is they just don’t recognise it.
Take flat earthers as an example. They believe that the earth is flat. However, they too rely on technologies that absolutely require the earth to be spherical. Yes, absolutely required. Our global communications network is heavily reliant on satellites. Those satellites require a spherical earth in order to be in orbit. All of the science and engineering that goes into those satellites, and their launches is heavily depended on this fact. Yet they won’t budge.
Do scientists get it wrong sometimes? Sure they do, they are human after all. However, one should ask themselves. If you go to 100 Oncologists and 99% of them tell you that it is highly likely that you have cancer, but if you treat it now by radically adjusting your eating habits, stop smoking, and get treated that you can be cured or at the very least expand your life and improve your quality of life, what do you do? Do you call them crazy, denigrate them, and completely ignore their advice?? Most logical people would take their advice to heart, and many would follow their advice. But, medicine is considerably less precise that base science. This is in essence the situation with climate change.
We have global consensus from scientists that human driven climate change is real. In fact I presented a logical walk through on the matter. Yet, like flat earthers, many conservatives have a tendency to claim despite of the logic, despite of the mounting evidence, that all this is false. That it must be some “extremist left” conspiracy to force change in their way of life.
CHANGE IS INEVITABLE
Do I really need to elaborate on this? Just look at human history for the past 5 thousand years. Empires rise and fall. The millions of Native Americans were wiped off the face of the planet… not directly by the Europeans, but the decease and plague that they brought over when they first “discovered” America.
Heck, right now everything has changed drastically due to the pandemic wreaking havoc on the planet.
What is that saying? Roll with the punches? You either adapt, go with it, and minimise the impact of change or you risk going down for the count.
I AM A CONERVATIVE… IN PART
Now don’t get me wrong. All of the above might seem to imply that I am one of those extreme leftists that conservatives are always railing about. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
A TEHCNIAL EXAMPLE
I am an engineer/scientist by profession, but I also have a heavy interest in how business are run, project management and all of that. In engineering and business one needs to have a health balance of liberal and conservative thinking.
Let’s say I have an assembly line producing thousands of cars a day. And one of my engineers presents an idea, he is excited about, to change one of the assembly robots drastically because it would improve efficiency or downtime or whatever. What should I do? Implement his idea right on the spot? Of course not. I would inform him that we will follow the proper procedures. There would have to be a series of steps to be taken with reviews and a go/no-go decision between each step. Those steps would be… a proposal, concept design, detailed design, extensive testing, and then planning and implementation.
But the most important thing is to objectively and openly consider his proposal. Implementing change would be the liberal part of it, while the procedure is the conservative approach. If I don’t consider it I risk losing the potential to innovate, to improve, to SAVE MONEY AND TIME in the long run. If I simply throw caution and a systematic approach to it out of the window I have a major risk of breaking the whole assembly line down, costing the company time and money.
As most things in life, it is always about balance. Have we not learned that from nature yet???
A SOCIAL EXAMPLE
I believe in family values. A nuclear family (mother and father) is in my opinion the minimal ideal for children. It allows for the adults to support one another, and it gives children a continuous example of how two adults interact, resolve differences, provide, and so on.
But how about a gay couple, or whatever combination beyond the “conventional” woman and man setup? Well what about them?? Would they not present the children with an example of how two loving people interact with one another? How these two people dedicate their lives to raise, and love them? I can point to several situation where the man-woman couple were in fact VERY BAD for the children under their care, while I can point to non-conventional couples that do an above average job at raising children.
THE BIBLE… OR WHATEVER ELSE RELIGIOUS BOOK ONE WOULD USE AS COUNTER ARGUMENT
But the bible… ya ya. I already covered that that is the belief of some. How about the Koran, the Thora and all of those religious books and ideas out there? What makes your religion, better than the others? Besides, of course, your religion saying that it is? I have often engaged with many religious Christians (yes I have read the bible, I was raised christian). And I can tell you that it is not very difficult to trip them up. Certain logical reasonings can always lead to certain situations where the whole religious argument falls apart. You can’t build a society of equality and inclusion on such shaky logical ground in this day and age. This is the age of science and logic. All of the technologies and science that EVERYONE takes for granted was not created by any shape or form by religion or GOD. They were all created out of the logic of man.
Mind you that regardless of that last statement I do believe in the existence of GOD… but that is for another day.
ADAPTATION AND FOLLOWING
One might say that the ability to adapt to our circumstances is THE factor that has made humans the dominant species on the planet. But that is in fact not entirely correct. It is adaptation as well as our ability to follow and learn from others.
I once saw a documentary about the human brain, and they compared us to apes. Apes also have the ability to adapt, and to learn relatively quickly. However, I was surprised to see test they conducted where at first glance it would seen that the chimpanzee in the test was smarter than the children in the test. It goes something like this.
THE EXPERIMENT
A black box is presented to the chimpanzees/children (separately of course). The box has an opening in the front. The tester takes a stick and taps the box (top, left, right), and then reaches into the opening and takes out a treat (candy for the child and apple for the ape). The research leaves for a moment to reload the box and comes back. Both the chimp and the children copy the research to get their treat. Seems even right?
Now difference between humans and the apes is shown. The researcher comes back with the box that is supposed to be the same as the previous, but it is transparent. He hands over the stick to the subjects and…
The child does the exact same actions tapping top, left and right, and gets his treat. The chimp on the other hands looks the thing over and simply reaches in and grabs is apple.
To me at least that was mind blowing. It crossed my mind… is the chimp actually smarter than us? Why are they not the dominant ones on the planet??
This documentary, however, explains that this is a strength for humans. We have a tendency simply accepting certain things that we are taught. Religion is one example of this. We are taught it, our parents tell it is true, or it is this way and that, and we simply accept it. In this day and age though, it should be obvious that this tendency to simply follow can lead us to trouble. Racism is one example of this, science denial is another.
The right has been taught to be conservative in the way they see things, and regardless of humans’ vast capacity to reason, to think, and to adapt we also have the tendency of just repeating what we are thought even though reality is literally staring us in the face showing is that if we just stopped to access the situation, we might realise that maybe just maybe we are wrong.
My advice to everyone is… ALWAYS approach problems with an open mind. It is alright to have an opinion, but why be stuck in the old way of thinking? History has shown us all that things change. We need to change accordingly and evolve if we hope to make this planet, our home into a better place.
Out with the bad and in with the good.