Posted by
Doctor Demex on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 8:50:23 PM
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 14, 2006]
Why do more people migrate from liberalism toward conservatism than the
other way around? At one level, humans tend to move away from
centuries-old traditions and create their own. Fewer and fewer
societies look today as they did a thousand years ago. But within
the realm of social and political philosophies, people on the "left"
tend to drift "right" as they get older. Why is that?
The reason is that the Left does not pay much attention to absolute
truths that anchor human existence to meaning, and most people, even
liberals, want to be able to say by the time they are on their
deathbeds that their lives "had meaning." In many ways, the Left
reinvents the wheel with every undertaking then starts it rolling
before it's round. As we get older, our experience teaches us to
look for patterns. We then look for the unifying principles or
universal truths behind the patterns so we can identify the next
important pattern sooner. This is a survival trait, the purpose
of which is to prevent unnecessary death.
The Right believes that there are universal, absolute truths, while the
Left generally does not. There are more people on the left who
believe in nothing but feel a need to believe in something than there
are people on the right who believe in something but would rather
believe in nothing. When people learn to see small patterns, they
eventually learn to see large patterns. These large patterns can
be sweeping historical movements that threaten our civilization with
extinction. Extinction tends to concentrate the mind in a way
that makes vacuous bumper-sticker slogans less persuasive.
But this works both ways: People who believe that they cannot
influence the course of events leading to their demise tend to be
live-for-today liberals who would rather spend their remaining time
gallivanting. In contrast, those who believe that extinction is
within their power to avoid tend to be conservatives who look toward
building a longer, better future for their descendants to enjoy.
There is a certain ironic interdependence between the liberals and
conservatives in one respect: The liberal artist who works
feverishly to complete his masterpiece before succumbing to his
libertine lifestyle will be more likely to be remembered by, and more
likely to be significant to, those who would "conserve" his short
life's work into the future generations. At least the best
artists know that the more conservative among us will ensure their
remembrance. After all, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever,"
said the dissolute Keats who died at age 25.
By the way, I'm sure readers will come up with examples that don't fit
my generalizations. If you believe that exceptions necessarily
disprove generalizations, then three things are clear: You do not
understand what generalizations are, you have a compromised survival
instinct, and you consider yourself liberal.