Embracing My Inner Conservative

So I've been self-consciously conservative for the better part of three months now.  In both senses: conscious of myself as in fact more inclined to conservative ways of thinking about our current political circumstances than I had previously appreciated, and embarrassed as all get-out to admit it lest I lose all of my friends, alienate my readers, and anger my loved ones.  But it's been long enough and I've done enough reading for the ideas to be starting to settle, so much so that I think I may actually be able to articulate some of them without going into a tailspin.

(Although, as I suspect you can tell by how stilted my prose is here, I am not entirely comfortable saying any of this out loud just yet.  Don't worry, I'm sure it's just a phase.  No, not in that way.  I've learned too much already to go back to my situational liberalism.  Truth to tell, I'm not sure I ever really was that much of a liberal, not in the way that I understand the term now.  I've always been a bit of an oddball, even in academia.  It could explain a lot of things, e.g. about why so much contemporary scholarship drives me nuts.  But I digress.)

So what do I mean when I say I am a conservative?  It's complicated and I'm still reading, but these are some of the things I now realize that I actually believe.

I believe in private property.  Okay, so who doesn't?  But are you sure?  I believe that I have a moral--and should have a legal--right to the things that I possess, to the money that I have earned, to the home that I and my husband own.  I also believe that I should have a legal right to determine how I dispose of my possessions and earnings, whether to keep them for my own use or give them away.  I believe that the government has a duty to protect this moral right legally, not to interfere with my use of my property or to tell me how I should spend it.  If you are not sure about this and believe instead that the government should be able to take as much of your property as it determines is necessary for the common good, think about how you would feel if government agents showed up this minute and told you you had to move to a place of their choosing and couldn't take any of your stuff.  Right.

I believe in equality before the law.  This is an amazing human accomplishment, to believe that the law should be the same for everyone regardless of wealth, status, religion, ancestry, or skin color.  Think about it.  Medieval Europeans weren't quite so clear (although they were close--they were Christians, after all--but earlier on they did have such things as weregild); ancient Romans most certainly weren't (to begin with, they had slaves, and then there was the distinction between patricians and plebs).  There are even people alive today who believe that some people should be treated differently before the law, whether because of their religious beliefs or their ancestry or the environment in which they grew up.  Often people even argue that there should be different laws for people based on belief, ancestry, or environment, which more or less brings us back to ideas of weregild, although we no longer distinguish between Romans and Franks.  Society is fair when the laws are the same for everyone, not when the law seeks to maintain such differences.

I believe in the separation of church and state.  Which does not mean, however, that I believe religion should have no place in public discourse.  Rather, I believe that for whatever reason our country ended up this way, the United States has been politically and spiritually much better off not having a religion established by the state.  Europe has not been so lucky, and look how religion has fared there.  I know, I know; secularists like Europe, but they are confusing the issue.  Religion dies when it is coerced; this is the reason that the United States is so rich in religious movements.  Likewise, the state becomes tyrannical when there is nothing to keep it in check--which there most certainly isn't when the State becomes the Church.  (Thus the Investiture Controversy; maybe Gregory VII actually knew what he was doing.  Likewise Anselm.)  This is the principal danger that I now see in modern liberalism as it is typically defined by the likes of people like our current president: it makes the state a religion ("the thing to which we all belong") and looks to the state (a.k.a. government) for salvation.  It is likewise the danger that I see in certain religious claims popular among a large part of the world's population today.  I would say, but I am too much of a chicken.  You know what I mean.

I believe in freedom of speech.  Oddly, we all say this, at least in America, but do we really believe it?  I have been terrified to say anything about the things I've been reading and thinking about, not because someone from the government might come to shut me up, but because of my family and friends.  What if they found out that I disagreed with them?  That I didn't want to vote for their candidate anymore?  Can I put up a sign in my window that doesn't include the rainbOw?  Probably not in my neighborhood, not without consequences.  Now think about what that means, if even under such legal protections as I most certainly have to express my electoral preferences, I am scared.  Now imagine how I might feel if I were a Christian living almost anywhere else in the world and wanted to wear my cross.  Or pray in public.  Or disagree about how best to worship God.  Or even who God is.

I believe that certain cultural values are better than others.  Put that way, who would disagree?  But what values, and how do you decide?  Well, there's the rub: you do have to.  Otherwise you can't act.  What would you do if you had been with Cortés and seen the human sacrifices performed by the Aztecs?  What would you do if you saw a girl having her feet bound?  Or sold as a slave?  Or forced to marry against her wishes (i.e. raped)?  Would you excuse it as "cultural" and, therefore, none of your business?  Do people actually have rights as human beings, or is this just another of those ideas that are indefensible because culturally-bound?  Toleration of religious differences is another such value, but not everyone in the world shares it.  To whom do we bow?

I just read out this list of beliefs to my son, who said, "Those don't sound particularly conservative."  (Except for the one about the religion of the State, which he thought silly.  "Nobody worships the government."  Um.)  What do you think?