What is conservative ideology?
I'd say, there isn't one.
To me, being "conservative" is a kind of antithesis to "ideology." It is a rejection of ideology itself.
It's why, while recognizing that my beliefs fall generally into the conceptual grab-bag that people, perhaps lazily, call "conservatism," the word has no power, no draw, no magnetism for me.
I don't belong to it.
Thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray--who, interestingly, do not themselves run around squawking what "conservatives" they are, like some photographic negative of the obsessive Woke-mantra-braying mobs--as I was saying, Peterson and Murray have repeatedly explored the question of just what cliff, what edge, it is that the Left, in the extreme, goes over, in comparison with the well-known cliff the Extreme Right has been known to go over in history. If you want to pose Nazism and racism as Extreme Right, then where is that cliff for the Extreme Left? And, more importantly, WHY is it there? What IS it about "Left-ism" that gets you to that edge, whatever it is?
I would say that, first of all, one hardly needs to go hunting under every rock to identify the historical atrocities of the Extreme Left. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, the cataclysm of today's Venezuela, not to mention frenzied, full-of-themselves idiots trashing cities, shooting cops, and bellowing, "I'm not sorry a fascist was killed here tonight"--that's the collective Face of the monumentally, stratospherically self-assured Ideology to which human lives are just a few eggs that have to be broken if you're ever going to make that utopian omelette.
As for "WHY" the Lefist cliff is there--it's there because it IS ideology. Ideology absolute, imperious, ruthless, even bloodthirsty, hungering to destroy whatever it didn't build.
And then, clueless how to build anything at all in its place.
See "Venezuela". See "USSR."
It is supremely telling how rapidly the ideology-drunk Left flits, like a fickle butterfly, from mantra to mantra and from savior to savior, because it's ALL about belonging, belonging to the collective, belonging to the Great Leader, whoever is the latest "Kennedyesque", whoever can be dubbed "iconic" after five minutes in the news feed, whether it's Greta, or Beto, or that sleazy porn-lawyer whose name I blessedly forget.
And when those props crash and burn, it doesn't matter, because it's on to the next convenient props.
The mobs screech, "No Justice, No Peace! Hands up, don't shoot! Say her name!", etc., and in fact launch into the delirious chants even when the chants bear no connection in the slightest conceivable degree to the reality of the given situation, or non-situation. The "situation" doesn't matter: it's the ideological imperative that rules all. Circumstances are nothing but fodder, a fig leaf, today's dose of octane for The Revolution.
The Left's "cliff" can seem hard to pinpoint precisely because it's so monstrous it blocks all horizons and perspective. It's right there under your nose and you don't see it.
Speaking of cliffs, it reminds me of once when I was in Ireland with my family, out on the Dingle peninsula. We went for a ride along the usually beautiful Slea Head drive, where the road winds along right next to the mountains--you can practically put your hand out the window and touch them. But this day was extremely foggy. Having done this ride many times, we knew perfectly well there was a MOUNTAIN right there next to us. Yet it was completely invisible. We could just as well have been driving down the middle of Manhattan. We gave up on it that day and came back when the sun emerged.
The Left's "cliff", its intolerable edge, its pernicious end-game, is precisely the all-blanketing fog of ideological, conceptual, affective, interpersonal, all-pervasive totalitarianism. Its "diversity" is the shallowest charade of accidental distinctions--race, gender "identity", sexual orientation--cartoonishly elevated to the level of all-determinative values (you notice they are suddenly The Thing That Matters Most, because the Left has failed to convince society on just about everything else)--it is a papier mâché diversity masking a core rigidity of lockstep thought-control.
Only, recently, that mask has slipped a bit, hasn't it, and the thought-control gambit, with its accompanying armaments of social ostracism, intimidation, and finally violence, has broken out into the open. They're showing their hand. And it's nothing new.
Truly nothing new under the sun.
To be "conservative" is a kind of ideology-free, default position. It's a rejection of mantras, a refusal to "belong."
The vital difference is not between Left and Right. That's a con game.
The vital difference is between the ideologies, on the one hand, and a kind of default, non-ideological "conservatism" (which at its root suggests "refusing to jettison what works simply to satisfy an ideology") on the other.
Here is the irony: Extreme Right isn't conservative in the least (though extreme rightists, racists, etc., will try to capitalize on the non-ideology of conservatives by horning in on their playing field and pretending solidarity), but Extreme Leftism IS, indeed and in fact, Leftist.
There is no extreme trajectory of a non-ideological conservatism. The trajectories of Leftism and Rightism are inevitably extreme and pernicious...and though they seem to move in opposite directions they always go round the corner, meet each other coming the other way, and merge into indistinction. From the Holocaust to the Gulags and Killing Fields, their legacy is horror.
The real racists (as opposed to the millions and millions of good people the Totalitarian Left will, in their psychosocial campaign of terrorism, call racists simply for not marching in goose-step with them), naturally look for the easiest field to run their plays on, and that is a field empty of all-pervasive ideology. It is, therefore, against such malignant incursions that an ideologically minimalist "conservative" must maintain watch.
The Leftist playing field, on the other hand, requires no such incursions in order to finally produce its own Gulags, Killing Fields and bloody Cultural Revolutions. As history has shown over and over, that's actually the name of the game.
Which, again, is why it can be difficult to see. "I'm looking at the field and I don't see the problem." The FIELD is the problem. It's what it's there for that's the problem. It's the soul-crushing ideology that demands you come down to the field and stay there, and never think about any other game, ever.
I have thought about these things (obviously) for some time now, and so I was, naturally, impressed with this, released this week by Jordan Peterson:
It is reasonable to note that a reductionist and totalitarian exercise like that conducted by the ideologue may have some pedagogical uses, in addition to whatever light it might shed on the heretofore forbidden. It can provide its adherents with some discipline, as it is useful to learn how to organize arguments according to a principle. The requirement for logical coherency thereby demanded can aid in the development of intellectual rigor, as the arguments thus organized must exist with one another coherently and memorably. It can be an effective exercise in rhetoric—the art of persuasive and effective use of language. Ultimately, however, it’s a failure, because the world is too complex for its many manifestations to be reduced to a single cause. It becomes an exercise in post-hoc rationalization, rather than an attempt to understand, predict and control (the proof of understanding). It’s camouflage, façade and fraud. It looks like analysis. It sounds like thought. But it’s just an algorithm: content in, machine-like rules applied, wisdom out. Technically, in fact, it’s the equivalent of a compression algorithm, and a biased one, at that. It simplifies the world, as all systems of category simplify the world, but it does so in part by simply ignoring those elements of reality that are not easily explained by the theory. This is a parody of the use of reductionism in science. Scientists have a rule: Do not multiply explanatory concepts beyond necessity. Or, as Einstein said, “explanations should be as simple as possible (but no simpler).” The test for the utility of a simple explanation is its ability, not to account for the past, and not to be merely logically coherent, but to actually predict something that will happen in the future—within, let it be noted, a specified and definable time frame. Furthermore, to simplify something properly the simplification should sample the domain it is attempting to account for in a manner that equally samples all of it, so that the simplified version (like a low-resolution photo) does not purposefully or accidentally exclude anything of true but undesirable importance.
