First, a nice bon mot from George Bernard Shaw–vicious, but clever human being: “All retrogressions and blunders, like all genuine reforms, are lucrative to somebody, and so never lack plausible advocates.”
It is an ironic comment, since he intended to benefit from the implementation of his own retrogressions.
What I had intended to say, though, is the following: human life is movement. We are never still, even when we appear to be still. What we are doing is RECREATING ourselves. Conservatism is the process of recreating yourself according to a template.
Many indoctrinated college students have joined what amounts to a death cult (read history, if this sounds excessive. Start with what happened in South Vietnam after we withdrew and then cut off all military and financial support.) This sort of advocacy becomes particularly venal when combined with the sort of flippancy you see on the left. They go to “the demonstration” during the day, then smoke weed at night and spend all their waking hours trying to “find themselves”. It’s really quite ugly, once you really grasp the humanity that has been deducted, as if surgically. Horrible, horrible things happen to men, women and children BECAUSE of the positions they take, which are poorly thought through, sloppy, and almost actively hostile to the actual process of sincere understanding.
Be that as it may, you can’t just say “stop”. Part of their indoctrination has been the removal of all moral “props” that could be available as alternatives. Their meaning system and their politics are one and the same.
There must always be an escape valve. As Sun Tzu said thousands of years ago, an army that can’t retreat will fight the more fiercely for it, to the end. They have no choice. In our own case, what we want is for them to relax, and then recreate themselves–self organize themselves–in personally and socially beneficial ways. This is an attack on delusion, not people, and the means is adding information to their environment such that they can reach new conclusions on their own.
The means by which this happens is dialogue. What dialogue does is force you either to reimagine the political “Other” as an actual human being, with whom you can talk, or reject them with extreme prejudice. The more times we–well meaning people–try to facilitate dialogue, with sincerity, and the more times they reject it, with prejudice, the more likely we will see an erosion of the violent certainty and dogmatism that successful propaganda enables. It’s a question of waves rolling away solid rock, with enough time.
The two ideologies which most threaten what is good in this world are radicalized Islam and what we may as well call Communism, or fascist Socialism. (note that Shaw himself noted that fascism was a trait BOTH of the far right and far left.)
It is for this reason that I have tried to propose a version of Islam that does not require the murder of non-Muslims, and yet which does not require the rejection of any part of their core beliefs; which is scripturally faithful. As I have framed it, I think the doctrine that could be built would in fact be an immensely powerful force for Good in the world.
Likewise, Goodness is my proposed alternative to Leftism. Note I am unwilling to reject in principle social welfare programs, or the use of the government for social improvements. What we have to do is contextualize things. We have to look at the situation as a whole, and observe changing circumstances.
You always start from where you are, not where you ought to be. What should be true is nothing more or less than a prospective template of where we should move FROM HERE.