Advanced Philosophy

The Top Four Criticisms of Conservatism

How to demonstrate that conservatism is a sham.

Superficially, “conservatism” can be defined as “caution about pursuing any alleged benefit of reforming society, so as to preserve the gains that are reflected in traditions.” Conservatives thus prefer the status quo to progress beyond what’s been established, whether that’s in the area of family values, religion, the structure of government, or economic regulations.

As we’ll see, though, this definition doesn’t take us far, not because conservatism is more complicated, but because in the larger picture, conservatism is propagated by subterfuge which obscures what this kind of political orientation is really about.

The following criticisms will therefore brush aside the disinformation to expose where conservatism truly stands with respect to the political alternatives.

(1) Conservatism Reduces to Social Darwinism.

Regardless of what the conservative’s intentions might be or what you might expect from her religious or economic rhetoric, the effects of her policies are social Darwinian, assuming the policies are allowed to run their course. What this means is that the organization of a purely conservative society would be dictated by sociobiological principles, lacking any input from human imagination, moral sense, or high culture. The more sophisticated, human elements of conservatism apply only to how that regression is sold, rationalized, or obscured.

The default biological social structure — the one found in animal species that lack the freedom to innovate or imagine alternatives — is the dominance hierarchy in which a strong, ruthless minority rules over the subordinates. Resources are distributed very unequally as determined by the results of crude contests for dominance which reflect the contestants’ relative genetic fitness, the ability to survive long enough to reproduce in an amoral environment. The leaders rule like Machiavellian tyrants, jealously guarding their privileged access to mates, food, and territory, often by bullying the weaker members.

In short, the conservative’s cherished traditions are so many excuses for preserving sheer animality in human societies. The reason this is so is that any improvement of the dominance hierarchy as a social framework is, by definition, liberal or progressive. Indeed, the main alternative to conservatism is just humanism — which is to say pride in our ability to act like people rather than as animals. Behavioral modernity is precisely the willingness to live according to cultural conventions that aren’t reducible to biological laws or to cold-blooded, game-theoretic calculations.

Therefore, whenever the conservative appeals to a “tradition” that upholds a humanistic advance on an animal norm, the conservative lands herself in a contradiction. Once the conservative concedes there’s some such social advance available or that some advance has been established, she has no excuse for standing in the way of further advances.

Take, for example, late “arch-conservative” and “originalist” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who championed the idea that American justice shouldn’t deviate from the principles of the constitution, as those principles were originally understood by the early-modern framers.

For some reason, we were supposed to have conceded to the labeling of Scalia as a “conservative” even though the American constitution was a wildly revolutionary, liberal, progressive, anti-conservative document, the principles of which were manifestly secular and humanistic even as understood by those framers. Once you accept those principles, you’ll recognize the grotesqueness of treating the constitution as an idolatrous, infallible substitute for the Bible.

No, “conservatism” that explicitly takes as its cornerstone a masterpiece of liberal progressive thought is an Orwellian fraud.

Imagine if Adolph Hitler gave a speech boasting of his Nazi bona fides by saying he grounds his political policies exclusively in…Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. What kind of cockamamie Nazi would that be?

Likewise, the American constitution was a liberal document that went back to ancient Greco-Roman humanism to overturn the centuries of genuine conservatism that supported European Christian monarchies (i.e. those transparent dominance hierarchies). Once Scalia, Amy Comey Barrett, or any other rock star “conservative” admits openly he or she takes as sacrosanct that constitution. This so-called conservative has to answer why anyone acting on those liberal principles shouldn’t deem every conservative prejudice — that is, every effectively social Darwinian, patriarchal, theocratic, plutocratic or other primitive animosity — a nonstarter.

Whence the conservative opposition to abortion if the liberal constitution is meant to secure what it calls “the blessings of liberty”? Whence the opposition to regulations of the economy to prevent the corruption, servitude, depressions, and thus loss of mass liberty associated with the plutocracy which emerges from a laissez-faire economy and from that judicial negligence? Whence the zealous defenses of private gun ownership, when guns are deadly weapons that routinely deprive innocent people of their life and liberty?

Liberty is the quintessential humanistic, progressive, anti-natural value. There is no real liberty in the wild. Even the animal predators and dominators fear going hungry or being challenged by subordinates, because the only law that protects them is the amoral, indifferent law of the wilderness. Animals are often beset by scarcity conditions and by the threats of rivals, not to mention by human encroachment.

Once you base your political philosophy on the human right to liberty rather than on, say, a religion that commands everyone to surrender to God and to some regressive piece of theology, good luck trying to defend conservative policies without contradicting yourself!

Similarly, the genuine conservative’s defense of philosophy, science, technology, morality, or spirituality must be only superficial. One and all, these humanistic goods represent anti-conservative triumphs of ingenuity, experimentation, and bold faith in progress or in a supernatural order that makes a mockery of the mundane, animalistic status quo. As such, we can expect the conservative to support these advances in an underhanded fashion, to sabotage them, roll back progress, and insult personhood for the sake of returning our societies to the tyranny of evolutionary norms.

As far as the effects of their policies are concerned, the conservative stands for the blasphemy of human animality, while the anti-conservative — the humanist, liberal, socialist, or progressive — enshrines human personhood.

(2) Conservative Religion is Propaganda for Theocracy.

At first glance, a conservative society should be the opposite of a savage struggle for dominance, because conservatives are the most vocal proponents of morality and of theological narratives of transcendence. Yet again, no matter how sophisticated or sanctimonious the religious rhetoric in which they’re cynically couched, the effects of conservative policies conflict with the upshot of that rhetoric.

This is most obvious in the case of conservative religion. Think of the kind of society the conservative advocates. Features that should come to mind are the protection of amoral, self-destructive capitalist enterprise, absolute property rights (for those who can afford to own property), patriarchy, the lack of a welfare state (no public support for the poor, the sick, or the downtrodden), strict adherence to traditional family structure (no abortion, feminism, or homosexuality), and a celebration of the hunter’s code of honor (preoccupation with guns, hunting, aggressive competition, and war).

Now think of the religious myths the conservative brings to bear to convince you to live in that sort of society. There are so-called conservative versions of all the world’s major religions, but in each case the spiritual interpretation of the scripture or tradition is always the more mystical (anti-natural), progressive one. Conservative theology stifles the religion’s revolutionary potential.

This is plain in the case of Islam, for example. Muslim societies are infamous for their religious conservatism and for their resistance to modernization. These Muslims obey their traditions in a primitive, literalistic fashion which is especially convenient for their ruling classes, because any deity that meant to impose such an oppressive, inhumane way of life wouldn’t be worth worshipping.

In short, the Muslim’s creedal notion of God is incoherent, so the authoritarian caliphs, imams, and dictators stand-in for the absent, nonsensical deity. Meanwhile, the spiritual implications of monotheism shatter theocracy as so much wicked idolatry, since of course the point of monotheism is that no one should be treated as infallible or as worthy to rule in a godlike fashion except God. Bowing down to human tyrants or even to prophets or messiahs and kissing their ring is only part of a conservative scam.

Once a religion passes through its spiritual reformation, as happened in the Axial Age and in the European Renaissance, the practitioners discover they shouldn’t act as slaves to a theocratic nightmare but should accept the limitations of religious language. The primitiveness of literalistic readings of scripture is a gateway to the full gamut of conservative primitiveness, to the failure to understand the subversive implications of myths and of peak states of consciousness, known as “religious experiences.”

In the case of Christianity, Jesus preached the exact opposite of what conservative Christian authorities would eventually codify in their creeds and institutions. The conservative reading of the Bible, therefore, isn’t just literalistic but devious in its casuistic harmonizations.

The Jesus of the Gospels said outright that hypocrites who love their material wealth more than doing God’s work of helping the lower classes will burn forever in Hell. But that hasn’t stopped so-called conservative Christians from looking for loopholes to safeguard their anti-spiritual dominance hierarchies: the wealthy can hoard their private possessions as long as they verbally confess that they love God, since they presume those confessions are somehow able to fool God into overlooking the evidentiary weight of the grotesque hoarding.

What religious and social conservatives really want is theocracy; at least, that’s what their policies would produce: a mammalian dominance hierarchy that pays mere lip service to lofty spiritual values and beliefs. Even Jesus’s emphasis on morality only inverts the positions in the hierarchy, in his theological projection of the dynamics of dominance in the afterlife. God becomes the eternal alpha male, angels and Christians his beta and gamma followers, and unrepentant sinners the ostracized omegas. Monotheism thus primes the religion’s conservative practitioner to long for what are actually unjust, corrupting social arrangements.

(3) Laissez-Faire Economics is Propaganda for Plutocracy.

Conservatives are supposed to be champions of private enterprise, wanting to shrink the powers of government to prevent central planners from interfering with the miracle of the capitalist marketplace.

But because of their incoherence, we’re entitled to disregard conservative rhetoric and intentions in toto and look only at the systematic effects of their economic policies. Neoclassical, “free-market” economics produces not a utopian, self-regulating society, but a plutocracy such as the one that prevailed in the US in the Gilded Age or in the roaring 1920s or the one that’s been gaining strength since the 1980s. That is, this absence of central planning produces an economy dominated by monopolies or oligopolies (the corporate equivalents of alpha-male dominators in the wild), which inevitably become reckless and self-destructive, owing to their unchecked power.

If the government doesn’t violate free-market principles and break up the monopolies or clean up their mess, the country would become a Third World basket case. Thais is, this country would be a failed state with sham elections at best, one in which the vast majority of the population would be disenfranchised and impoverished and whose social structures would improve little on those of pecking orders for wolves or gorillas.

In place of the theological rigmarole in the case of the social conservative scam, the economic conservative’s fraud appeals to the scientistic utopianism of neoclassical economics. In the former case, you’re supposed to genuflect when presented with the King James Bible or with a Quran; in the latter, you’re supposed to marvel at the mathematical models that prove “free” markets are self-sustaining and necessarily more efficient than planned ones.

Never mind the looming threat of ecological catastrophe caused by short-term pseudo-capitalist thinking and unchecked economic growth, and never mind the history of capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycles. You’re meant to take for granted that conservatism is a legitimate, even venerable alternative to liberal humanism so you won’t notice the captive economist’s math applies only to a fictional world populated by Homo economicus.

With this economic propaganda in tow, conservative politicians are gifted with arguably the easiest job on earth, since they get to be the foxes guarding the henhouse. All these politicians have to do is behave as badly as possible in the office to disgust the voters until they lose respect altogether for democratic politics. That empowers the private sector’s wealthy minority (the paymasters of the conservative and centrist or neoliberal political parties), whose “rate of return on capital” would be free to outstrip the rate of the economy’s growth, in which case inherited wealth would “always grow faster than earned wealth,” as a summary of Thomas Piketty’s argument puts it.

That inherited wealth, which is so prevalent in illiberal societies, is a cultural equivalent of genetic control of the host organisms in the wild. If wealth is allowed to be privatized without restriction and to accumulate and be passed on from one generation to the next, we have the makings of a caste system. Instead of the genes dictating order of rank in the power hierarchy, money and crony capitalism, those equally digital or short-sighted and amoral value systems would perform a comparable function, separating the fittest (luckiest) members of our artificial environments from the destitute and desperate masses in perpetuity.

(4) There’s No Such Thing as a Conservative Philosophy.

On the contrary, in conventional discourse you’re supposed to assume there’s something called “conservative thought.” Academic departments are informally divided along liberal and conservative lines, at least in the humanities or the arts. So you’ll hear the liberal take on some political, judicial, or economic issue, and the conservative will pipe up and offer her opposite interpretation, perhaps appealing to the illustrious George Will or Julius Evola.

But that’s a scam, so try not to be fooled by it in the future.

There’s no such thing as conservative thought. Once you’re thinking philosophically, contemplating abstract concepts, and applying rules of inference in an intellectually responsible fashion, you’re being a humanist who demonstrates some of the differences between a person and an animal, and you’re implicitly agreeing it’s better to be the former than the latter.

Yet the conservative’s actual policies entail the opposite, which is that it’s better to be an animal than a person. And they entail that human progress should be rolled back so that our most beastly, sociopathic members can have carte blanche to tyrannize the domesticated, neutralized human herds.

As soon as the conservative thinks, she’s already refuted herself. Formulating academic arguments in defense of conservatism is like a virus pondering the moral downside of its invasion of host bodies.

To be sure, so-called conservatives have put forward arguments against liberalism, but those arguments show only the incoherence of the worldview we’d be left with if liberalism were disproven. What actually persuades people to be conservative isn’t anything as distinctly human as a philosophy, but just certain tribal prejudices and authoritarian character traits.

People feel rather than think their way into conservatism, into wanting instinctively to return to jungle law. Once you switch from feeling or intuiting to thinking philosophically and scientifically, you’re implicitly demonstrating the real-world basis of liberal, progressive humanism. You’re showing why every person should take pride in his or her godlike human potential and why we should strive to create a society that doesn’t belittle any of us by mistaking us for smaller-minded animals.

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