The Unbearable Emptiness of Being a Conservative

In the first installment of this Conservative Dilemma series “ReadHayek” (whoever he is) began his comment: “It's all about individual liberty and economics man. Conservatives don't believe in the collective.”

Seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) founded modern Western philosophy. He coined the famous aphorism: “I think, therefore, I am.” In saying this he also founded modern man’s social, economic, political and ecological dilemmas. Courtesy: mlahanas.de

(CALGARY, Alberta) - What if ReadHayek is demonstrably wrong?

Take away man’s uniqueness as an individual and conservatism withers away.

Western society, America in particular, worships an individualistic, every man for himself ethic. Individuality is the fundamental underpinning of conservatism. It was former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who famously said, “there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” (But, if there is no such thing as society—what did she think she was Prime Minister of?)

Where individualism began

Seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) founded modern Western philosophy. He coined the famous aphorism: “I think, therefore, I am.” In saying this he also founded modern man’s social, economic, political and ecological dilemmas.

By putting the focus of certainty on his own awareness of self, Descartes’ first-person theory of knowledge dominated subsequent centuries of philosophy despite counter-attacks from philosophers who urged public or social starting points. Descartes’ mistake, compounded in the following centuries by most of the philosophers and those who, in retrospect, we would call social scientists, was to argue the pre-eminence of the individual over the group, instead of the opposite. Everyone fell for it.

From the seventeenth century on, the individual was the basis of almost all political and economic philosophies. The United States, the political and economic colossus that bestrides the world is based, constitutionally, on the pre-eminence of the individual over the group. So it is with economics and Adam Smith who, in the 18th century, made the individual the key player in economics. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.”

In the early 19th century the political economist Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population. His theme was that population growth was geometrical—1,2,4,8,16 (increasing by multiples) while growth in food production was arithmetical—1,2,3,4,5,6 (only increasing by integers). Under this assumption it was clear that subsistence would always be a hardship for most people. Although Malthus thought famine and poverty were natural situations, the ultimate reason for those outcomes was divine intervention. He believed that such natural outcomes were God's way of preventing man from being lazy.

In 1838 Charles Darwin read the Essay, and in it he found the key to the idea of natural selection as the mechanism for adaptation. He realised that the continual need for animals to compete for the means of life provided a constant pressure for selection that might work with the facts of variation and inheritance to create new species as circumstances changed.

Here is the key point in history where individuality went bad. The human race came to be seen as an animal arena.

Herbert Spencer, the founder of Sociology, coined the term survival of the fittest in the mid-19th century, applying Darwin’s idea to human populations. Social Darwinism in its original Spencerian form was overwhelmingly popular in America (and in imperial Germany before the First World War). In both cases it was an ideology used by the strong to say that their subjugation of the weak was necessary and good. Spencer, for example, opposed government support of the poor. “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”

As writer Andrew Brown summed them up: “The Social Darwinists stamped around the world like Vogon guards. ‘Resistance is useless’ was their message to the weak. ‘But before I kill you, you must hear my poetry.’” Today, replace “Vogon guards” with “Republicans”

Social animals can only adapt to group behavior. Bees and ants, for example, have no option when isolated, except to die. There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.

Many species practice social behavior. An excellent example of social creatures whose very survival is locked into their interdependence is the bee colony. A bee colony comprises three different types of bees: queens, drones, and workers, each of whom perform complementary tasks for survival. No individual bee could survive on its own. They are so interdependent, that one could say the entire colony is the real organism; subdivisions of it do not exist independently. Deepak Chopra makes this analogy:

“The body itself is not a fixed package of atoms and molecules—it is a process, or rather billions of simultaneous processes being coordinated together. I once watched with fascination as a beekeeper reached into a swarm of bees and, by gently enfolding the queen in his hands, moved the whole hive, a living globe of insects suspended in midair. What was he moving? There was no solid mass, but only an image of hovering, darting, ever-changing life, which had centered itself around a focal point. The swarm exists as an outcome of bee behavior. It is an illusion of shape behind which the reality is pure change.

“Such are we, too. We are a swarm of molecules hovering around a center, but with diminishing confidence. The old queen, the soul, has decamped, and the new queen seems reluctant to hatch from her cell. The great difference between us and a swarm of bees is that we find it hard to attribute reality to the unseen center that holds us together. It is obvious that one does, for otherwise we would be flung apart into chaos. But a queen looks like any other bee, only larger, while we cannot hope to find a lump of cells that contains what we consider to be central to us—love, hope, trust, and belief.”

The Bill Gates fantasy

Imagine that Bill Gates had been born and left alone on a desert island and somehow magically stayed alive to reach adulthood. How intellectually developed would he be as an adult, with no one to teach him, no one to imitate, no pre-existing tools, no spoken or written language? He would certainly possess basic skills for dealing with the physical world, but they would not be particularly impressive. He could not invent for himself English (or any spoken language at all because there would be no one to communicate with), Arabic numbers (let alone binary numbers, the basis for computer languages), metal tools, or money. These are products of human beings who, in a society, cooperate and put their heads together to achieve goals, impossible for any individual human organism to accomplish. He would not even have a name.

In the real world this has actually happened There are well documented cases of what are called feral children, children raised in the wild by animals and when found and returned to society, they cannot be fully socialized. Depending on age, some cannot even learn to speak, even though they have the same vocal cords as you and I.

Law professor John O. McGinnis said:

“Conservatism will certainly be easier than liberalism to integrate with evolutionary biology. The constraints of our biological nature explode the most persistent delusion of the Left: that man is so malleable that he can be reshaped or transformed through political actions.” (emphasis added)

McGinnis is still promoting the idea that the human world is like an animal arena.

Man is a social animal with human individuals more strongly entwined with each another’s lives than members of any other species. We live our lives within families and networks of friends amid a cacophony of opinions from television, newspapers and, more ubiquitously, the Web. As social individuals we are inextricably embedded in a cultural web that influences what we wear, what we eat, the work we do and the thoughts and opinions we carry around in our heads. What we believe, and why, depends on our interactions with others. When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so that, when they separate, you’ve got two different people.

Our society, and conservatives in particular, worships individualism to the detriment of society as a whole. We feel ourselves to be individuals but in actuality we are:

* the product of our formative years and background

* the product of our accumulated experiences

* the product of our symbiotic relationships with others

We can be likened to the atoms of the social body. In the physical world, says physicist Henry Stapp, “each atom turns out to be nothing but the potentialities in the behavior pattern of others. What we find, therefore, are not elementary space-time realities, but rather a web of relationships in which no part can stand alone; every part derives its meaning and existence only from its place within the whole.” And so it is with human individuality.

A single human being—in fact, there cannot be such a thing as a single human being, because he has two parents. So, the very first thing you can say about any human being is that it is a child which defines its relationship to two biological adults, whether still alive or not. This child was raised and socialized by those adults or other caregivers. And those two adults are related to their own parents, their siblings and the siblings of their parents—aunts and uncles and cousins. That child at birth is immediately part of a web of relationships—an extended family.

Humans are born in groups, raised in groups, work in groups, and play in groups. These groups are organized, specialized, interdependent, and greater than the sum of their parts. Individuals owe their apparent individual existence to group behavior.

Kanisza people

A whirlpool or vortex in a river has a definite location in space and persists over time. It appears to be real. Yet vortices have no independent existence apart from the water that creates and supports them. The vortex exists through being continually created, at every instant expiring, then being recreated. An individual within its social net is analogous to the vortex in that neither the individual nor the vortex are fixed, rigid structures, but rather maintain their features and “solidity” through constant, ongoing flux. The flow of water in a river gives a vortex an apparent reality and solidity. The ebb and flow, creation and disintegration of relationships, give the “individual person” the same apparent reality.

Consider the Kanizsa triangle below. Visually, it is three black circles with a segment removed. The result is an expanse of nothing that appears to block out a shape as if it is inscribed in ink. This “nothing”, overlaying the three circles gives us the illusion that we can “see” a triangle. It is as “real” as a whirlpool.

We are, analogously, Kanizsa creatures in that we are a psychological expanse of relationships and experiences overlaying a social reality. When you look at a group, you can “see” individuals that have the same “reality” as a Kanizsa triangle. Without the group, we are undefined—we don’t exist. A simple thought experiment demonstrates this. Imagine that, after you were born, you were immediately put into the wild and raised by animals—wolves or coyotes, say. If you come into society ten or fifteen years later, “who” are you? You have no identity, no consciousness of a “self”, no ego, no place in the social web. You exist biologically (as a conservative), but no different than all the other wild animals of the world. But, society has made you (as all of us) who you are as a social being. I suggest, that it is the belief in, and pursuit of, faux individualism that is the source of virtually all of society’s problems and dysfunctions.

Where and what is an individual? Like a vortex, we are the confluence of an enormous range of current and past psychological influences and, like a vortex, we are not constant. Memory gives us the illusion of physical and ego continuity. As George A. Seielstad describes it, "Since everything is the product of its environment and since the environment is always changing, what an object is depends upon when it came into being." This is where our feeling of individuality comes from. We are all “created”—whatever that might come to mean—in differing environments.

Consider a family of two parents and two children. The two siblings, for example, have different parents. The younger sibling has parents that are older, with more life experiences, and in different life circumstances than the older sibling at the same ages. The younger is part of a family of four, whereas the older sibling was, until the younger was born, part of a family of three.

Real individuality

My argument above implies that we don’t really exist, yet we feel/believe that we do.

Consciousness has only one component: time. We measure our experience of the world by how long it takes for something to happen. Ten minutes in a line at the bank seems a lot longer because there is not much consciously going on. A ten minute exciting experience seems shorter.

Here’s an experience we’ve all had at one time or another. You’re driving from A to B and somewhere on the trip you zone out. Suddenly (or so it seems) you arrive at B or some intermediate point. There is a period of conscious nothingness. You have no recollection or knowledge of part of the trip. This is because we measure our consciousness through the experience of talking to ourselves which takes up successive increments of time. Our mind is always filled with chatter or of our observations of what we are doing and seeing. When we stop the chatter, stop observing, we become unconscious. This is what happens when we fall asleep.

Let’s return to the chatter. When the talk is going on who is doing the talking? Your brain is doing the talking and you, whoever you are is doing the listening. We are not our consciousness and our consciousness does not control anything! Our consciousness fools us into believing it is in charge. The fact is that every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second—at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, we discard millions of bits in order to arrive at the special state known as consciousness. But in itself, consciousness has very little to do with information. Consciousness involves information that is not present; information that has disappeared along the way.

An important part of our experience of the world is that we can never experience the world as it happens. All the information we receive through our senses, takes about a half second to be processed and register in consciousness. In other words, we are always about a half second behind what is going on in the world. Covering up this discrepancy is one of the things that consciousness does.

So, the idea of individuality is a lot deeper and more complex than any conservative could acknowledge without losing his conservative orientation. But conservatives, by denying the greater social and spiritual aspects of being human, arrive at the unbearable emptiness of being a conservative.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place