Unpleasant Truths: A conservative view of the world today.

NRO ^ | August 2, 2002 8:45 a.m | John Derbyshire

[Grig]

ne of the disorienting things for an Old World conservative settling in America is that over here, even conservatives are optimistic. This really won't do. A conservative ought to be a pessimist, at least about human nature, human society, and the prospects for improving them. The facile cheeriness of the lefty world-perfecters are not for us, with their New Soviet Man, their Socialist Spiritual Civilization, their City of the Sun, their coming reign of peace, justice, and absolute equality. We are more of the temper of H. P. Lovecraft, who began one of his short stories with the arresting observation that: "Life is a hideous thing."

In an attempt to redress the balance, to tug my conservative American friends back towards a properly gloomy outlook on events, I have given over today's column to a list of unpleasant truths. This is stuff you don't want to hear, but that, if you are a true conservative, you cannot dispute. Remember the slogan of the 1964 Goldwater campaign**: "In your heart you know he's right."

Most of us will die in poverty. There is no way that systems devised to provide for mid-20th-century retirees will be able to cope in the mid-21st, with imploding demographics and a centenarian on every block. "Defined-contribution" pension plans will have to be baled out by the federal government, if private enterprise is to survive. The dollars we get from them will therefore be massively devalued. Since there is no one to bale out Social Security, benefits will soon be restricted to citizens more than 80 years old. Similarly for Medicare. In fact...

Quality health care for all is not possible. Quality health care is what rich people get. (Actually, according to one of the depressingly tiny number of rich people I know, even they have trouble getting it.) The rest of us must wait on line to be misdiagnosed by ill-trained, paperwork-swamped, litigation-shy doctors, assisted by nurses imported from the less hygienic parts of the Third World, and unionized hospital staff with no-way-you-can-get-me-fired attitudes. This could only change if the U.S.A. devoted her entire Gross National Product to health care; and even then, it probably wouldn't stay changed for long.

Pop culture is filth. It is now completely degenerate. Why do you never hear anyone humming a current pop song any more? Because none of them is hummable, or even worth bothering to remember. What is the main topic on TV sitcoms and "dramedies"? You know what. Why do you stand in the aisle in Blockbuster muttering to yourself: "There isn't a single damn movie in here I want to watch"? Because Hollywood produces nothing but crap, crap, crap.

Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. The saddest true thing ever said (by Henri Estienne, 1531-98). Translation: "If youth only knew, if age only could."

The environment is collapsing. The U.S. will get the blame for it, of course, but the main culprit is the Third World. Take a trip to China: The air is a soupy smog, even in quite remote places. Vast dust storms sweep periodically across the north of the country, sometimes continuing right on across the Pacific. (And in one case last year, the Atlantic, too!) The rivers run purple, orange, and turquoise. People tell me India is worse. The inhabitants of Africa are busily stripping their continent of all vegetation, having already pretty much exterminated the fauna, except in a few tourist reservations. The oceans are being fished out, and near-earth orbit is filling up with lethal junk.

Science has stopped. None of the really major scientific advances that you have been reading about since 1970 as "just over the horizon" is ever going to happen. Cheap fusion power; the colonization of Mars; artificial intelligence; supersonic air travel you can afford; contact with extraterrestrial civilizations; the conquest of cancer, tooth decay, or the common cold; fuhgeddaboutit.

Not all groups are equally good at all things. East Asians will continue to win Olympic diving events, and runners of West African ancestry will continue to win the 100-meter dash. Similarly, nobody will ever be able to devise a test of knowledge or understanding on which groups with different population-genetic histories all record identical statistical profiles. You can have meritocracy, or you can have equality of outcomes by ancestry-group, but you can't have both. Which one do you want? It seems we have already made up our minds. Corollary.....

Affirmative action is absolutely essential to social order. Think about it.

Socialism is popular. Practically all of the Socialist Party platform on which Norman Thomas ran in 1928 has been implemented. Thomas himself noticed this as far back as 1962, exulting that: "The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly." Yet the main negative factors in the national life today, according to spokespersons for this country's largest political party, are corporate greed, tax cuts for the rich, and poverty-stricken old folk crying out for life-saving medications. Plainly we need still more socialism. Don't worry, we'll get it. Conversely...

Conservatism is dead. No genuinely conservative policy will ever be enacted, ever again, by any U.S. government or the government of any important state. Great masses of ordinary Americans believe that "conservative" means "repressed fundamentalist freak." Why would they not believe this? Every medium of mass entertainment and mass information has been preaching it to them, over and over and over, for twenty years. The Ronald Reagan of 1980, if he were to stride onto the national stage today, would be unelectable. Calvin Coolidge would be laughed out of public life, if by some bizarre accident he were permitted to wander into it. Even when large majorities of Americans favor a conservative policy, nothing will be done to implement it. For example....

Nothing will be done about immigration. Business leaders and economic decision-makers all believe (perhaps correctly) that mass immigration is the main reason for this country's continuing economic vitality. The Left sees poor immigrants as clients. Huge numbers of Americans are now "Hispanic," and believe that anti-immigration activists hate them. The Joint Chiefs have no intention of letting their commands be used to police the southern border, understanding perfectly well that they would never be allowed to open fire on anyone — which is the main thing that trained soldiers are trained to do, and the inability to do which leads to collapsing morale and cratering recruitment. (It is also, of course, the only thing that would have any actual effect.)

Only Anglo-Saxon countries can do democracy. The natural state of human society is despotism. If you tally up all the human lives that have ever been lived on this planet under organized systems of government, no more than five per cent were lived under consensual systems. Even to get up to five per cent, you have to include places like ancient Athens and Tudor England, which wouldn't pass muster as "democratic" by modern standards. In the last couple of centuries, practically all consensual systems have been Anglo-Saxon. Other cultures can fake it for a few decades, as France, Germany, and Japan are currently doing, but their hearts aren't really in it and they will swoon gratefully into the arms of a fascist dictator when one comes along. As a corollary of this...

China will get stronger and richer, without moving one inch closer to constitutional government. The Chinese Communist Party has got "over the hump" into a plateau of stability that, barring severe environmental catastrophe (see above), will last for decades. Rich and confident, unrestrained by electoral considerations or Judeo-Christian ethics, or any other kind of ethics, they will do all the things we dare not do: human genetic experimentation, culling of "useless mouths," militarization of space, minor wars of aggression, etc. In particular...

Taiwan will be re-united with the Motherland....by some combination of economic carrot and military stick. The U.S. will grumble ineffectually, up to the point where the Chinese ambassador loses his patience and asks the U.S. Secretary of State point-blank: "How many cities are you willing to lose over this? We ourselves are willing to lose three or four." Then we will stop grumbling.

Something inconceivably horrible will happen in the Middle East. Probably the following: The Arabs will commit some huge, gross atrocity against Israel. Surviving Israelis will respond by massacring the Palestinian Arabs, and perhaps erasing a couple of Arab capitals. 100 years of peace in the Middle East will follow.

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride. Just to remind you, their names are: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. No. 4 will presumably always be with us, but at least we have got Nos. 1, 2, and 3 pretty much fenced off in sub-Saharan Africa, right? The chance that you or me, or your kids or mine, will die in a genuine mass-mobilization-type, carriers-going-down-with-all-hands-type, flattened-cities-type war, or from starvation, or in some horrid medieval-type, communal-grave-type, 1918-flu-type plague, is actuarially insignificant, right? Well, believe it if you like, but your belief has no foundation more substantial than wishful thinking. History suggests that it is most likely false.

The next version of MicroSoft Windows will be even buggier and more counterintuitive than the last. That one you know perfectly well, of course — I don't know why I bothered to include it. Further bad news on this front: e-mail will be rendered completely useless by spam, all that wonderful free information on the web will gradually be shut off into fee-paying sites, and NRO will start posting my photograph again.

Poverty and hardship build character; prosperity and security destroy it. Look around you.

The U.S. constitution is incompatible with a war on terrorism. It is absurdly easy to commit a terrorist act in the U.S.A. This state of affairs could be changed only by abandoning key constitutional protections. We shall be very reluctant to do this; but if deaths from terrorism reach a certain number, we shall do it anyway. That number has either seven or eight digits.

Justice is dead. As the last of the generation of judges who actually believe in the law heads into retirement, the administration of justice will be divvied up between avaricious trial lawyers and ideology-addled graduates of lefty law schools. Their morale destroyed by "brutality" and "profiling" hysteria, police forces will sink into corruption and paper-pushing. Ambitious public prosecutors will concentrate on framing up law-abiding citizens with "hate crime," "corporate corruption," "dangerous product" (guns, fast food) or "child abuse" charges. Actual crime — murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and assault — will skyrocket, but it will be illegal to talk about it.

We are living in a golden age. The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!

While trying not to remember the counter-slogan put out by the LBJ campaign: "In your guts you know he's nuts."

— Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor.

[91B]

Your post is a useful reply to Derbyshire's gloom and doom-thanks.

[BikerTrash]

This article would make me even more pessimistic than I am, but I doubt if it would do any good. </Eeyore>

[Grig]

It would be smarter to judge me by my own words than by my nationality. I posted this to show how wrong the writer is and to give you all some sport tearing into it, not because I agree with it.

FYI: Canada has a Conservative government now and is on the road to recovery. Yes there is a long way to go, but our direction has changed for the better.

[B-Chan]

He's 99% correct on every issue. Bravo.

The only -- ONLY -- thing he's wrong about is the future. The future is going to be great, because the current global system -- the "Empire" -- cannot go on for much longer. Sooner or later the whole Modernist house of cards is going to collapse, and the world as we know it will end. A Dark Age will likely follow -- but out of the darkness a Christian leader will arise, a warrior-king with the charisma, the will, and the military prowess to bring order out of chaos. This new Charlemagne will re-light the fire of civilization, renew Christendom, and unite the human race beneath Crown and Cross.

It's likely that this Christian king will speak some form of English. It's less likely, however, that he will be primarily of European or American descent, because the Empire began here. Charlemagne was not a Roman; he was a Frank. It is from the Third World -- the "Franks" of our modern Empire -- that the new civilization will emerge.

[Cecily]

"Having said all this, I agree that the Arab world is a different story. It may well be hopeless."


All the more reason for Christians (hello, GWB) to lay off the "Islam is a religion of peace" claptrap, and get more serious about preaching the Gospel to the Arab and Muslim world. I am talking about the real Gospel, not the Osteen/Warren/Copeland/Hinn "you are wonderful and God is your genie in a bottle" false gospel.

[Zack Nguyen]

Socialism is popular only insofar as people do not have to pay for it. As long as we can "afford" to run massive deficits to give people prescription drugs, health care, child care, farm subsidies, etc. people like it.

Force them to dramatically increase the amount they are forced at gunpoint to give to the government, and they won't be so happy.

[B-Chan]

With notable few exceptions (e.g. Russell Kirk), American "conservatism" isn't conservative at all. It is mercantilist liberalism, and shares liberalism's fixation on individual liberty as the sine qua non of human existence.

[Doug Loss]

I wouldn't disagree with that. The basic problem is that the internationalist socialists on both sides of the Atlantic (the international left) are pretty much the same philosophically, so the assumption has risen that those who opposes them must also share a philosophy. Manifestly not true. I take it that you are more of an old-world conservative and don't think all that much of individual liberty. If you want to call a dedication to individual liberty not conservative, then I guess you'll have to put me in that camp too. Maybe we need a different label for American "conservatism."

[Billthedrill]

ROTFLMAO! I'm thinking that quite a few too many readers missed Derbyshire's intentions here - it was to act as a corrective to what a European conservative would undoubtedly consider unwarranted optimisim on the part of American liberals. I say "liberals" because that's what our conservatives really are by Continental standards. Us.

One of the disorienting things for an Old World conservative settling in America is that over here, even conservatives are optimistic. This really won't do. A conservative ought to be a pessimist, at least about human nature, human society, and the prospects for improving them. The facile cheeriness of the lefty world-perfecters are not for us, with their New Soviet Man, their Socialist Spiritual Civilization, their City of the Sun, their coming reign of peace, justice, and absolute equality. We are more of the temper of H. P. Lovecraft, who began one of his short stories with the arresting observation that: "Life is a hideous thing."

I'm not sure you can get your tongue much further into your cheek without tissue damage. Nearly all of these points are rhetorical exaggerations but nearly all have a kernel of truth as well.

"In the long run we're all dead." Keynes was a far cry from a conservative but I think Mr. Derbyshire might be pointing that direction. In the meantime there's all sorts of fun to be had poking pins into liberal (our style liberals) pretensions. Life is good.

[x]

The only -- ONLY -- thing he's wrong about is the future. The future is going to be great, because the current global system -- the "Empire" -- cannot go on for much longer. Sooner or later the whole Modernist house of cards is going to collapse, and the world as we know it will end. A Dark Age will likely follow -- but out of the darkness a Christian leader will arise, a warrior-king with the charisma, the will, and the military prowess to bring order out of chaos. This new Charlemagne will re-light the fire of civilization, renew Christendom, and unite the human race beneath Crown and Cross.

Yes, after a few hundred years of turmoil, a great leader will arise to set things right. Afterwards, things will procede as they usually do until we reach a point much like today in terms of religion and morality, though not of science and technology.

Then after centuries of darkness, a great leader will come forth and establish order. Afterwards the world will evolve as expected to a condition not unlike the present in terms of irreligion and immorality, if not science and technology.

But fear not, a great leader shall arise who ...

So it goes. Great leaders and renaissances don't last. Perhaps it's better to make do with what we have, rather than to wish for great changes. There's something more than a little chilling about the "great leaders" previous generations expected to save them.

And what -- on earth or in heaven -- makes you so sure that those leaders who arise will be Christian or any more Christian than today's leaders? Or are you just choosing the one or so who might be Christian and ignoring all the other world saviors who'll present themselves?

[Serb5150]

LOL! I was just thinking the very same thing.

jwfiv - Moz ping.

[Hardastarboard]

Good point. Even I missed that one, and I looked over the spelling twice.

[mthom]

Now thats just hyperbole. There is nothing more depressing than a Morrissey song.

[NZerFromHK]

"Sooner or later the whole Modernist house of cards is going to collapse, and the world as we know it will end. A Dark Age will likely follow -- but out of the darkness a Christian leader will arise, a warrior-king with the charisma, the will, and the military prowess to bring order out of chaos. This new Charlemagne will re-light the fire of civilization, renew Christendom, and unite the human race beneath Crown and Cross."

You mean someone like this?

"Then I stood on the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name. Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast. So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast; and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?”" - Revelation 13:1-4 NKJV

Ping!

[B-Chan]

< sarcasm >Yeah... that's exactly what I meant. Suuuuurrrrrre. < /sarcasm >

Whatever.

[NZerFromHK]

A lot of Christians have the problem with conservatism in the Derbyshire/Kirk/Tory flavour. Precisely because evangelical Christianity is particularly strong here, a lot of us pause and ask "What does God say about...". The idea that someone is good because it is "old" may be British, but is definitely not Christian.

Fopr instance, Randy Alcorn, an evangelical Christian, wrote this piece ten years ago. I don't think he has much beef with the conservatism as espoused by the Reagan coalition, but he will definitely have a lot of issues sitting next to Derbyshire on political beliefs:

---

http://www.epm.org/articles/conservx.html

Conservative Christians, on the other hand, like to conserve and hold on to the existing or past norms. In a society they believe to have been recently ruined by liberalism, they want to go back to the way things used to be, i.e. the old status quo. They want to go back to when America was a Christian nation, when there was prayer in public schools, when abortion and homosexual behavior were illegal and known to be immoral.

Conservatives seem to want every-thing the way it used to be, like it was when kids weren't bringing guns to school and killing each other in gangs and dying of AIDS and when television wasn't filled with garbage (which many of them watch, despite their complaints).

Well, that all sounds good. But you have to qualify what you're talking about. "The way things used to be" includes women being unable to vote. "The way things used to be" includes slavery. In the post-slavery era it included notoriously racist Jim Crow laws and segregation. And frankly, to their shame, many, even most conservatives wanted to conserve these unjust practices.

Many conservatives today want to go back to the days when prayer was allowed in the schools. But they forget the same schools that allowed in prayer did not allow in black children. To be nostalgic without qualification about times that were racist and demeaning to many Americans is unjust and insensitive. Politically conservative Christians can thus end up being conservatives first and Christians second.

As undiscerning liberalism tries to liberate us from not only the bad but the good, undiscerning Conservatism tries to conserve the bad along with the good. Liberals live under the false notion that change is always good, conservatives under the equally false notion that change is always bad. ("Who do those northern agitators think they are comin' down here and stirrin' up our niggers?")

So when conservatives talk about going back to our godly roots, theologically conservative but socially liberal Christians (both black and white) are understandably skeptical.

"You mean go back to those godly roots where black people were enslaved and beaten and raped and had their families torn apart by plantation owners who were deacons in their conservative churches? Or back to those days of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver, where you wouldn't let black people in your restaurants and theaters and schools, and you wouldn't let us drink out of your water fountains?"

...

May God preserve us from a liberalism hell-bent on liberating us from what is good. And may He preserve us from a conservatism hell-bent on conserving for us what is bad.

Let's change the bad and preserve the good. In doing so we will sometimes look like conservatives, sometimes liberals. But what we look like to men shouldn't matter. What we look like to God, the Audience of One, should. (He is neither Republican nor Democrat. He rides neither on elephants or donkeys. He is the ultimate independent.)

God doesn't care about conservative and liberal, he cares about what is true and right and just and compassionate and biblical. (He does therefore care about political party beliefs, platforms, moral positions and policies. Before standing behind any party we better be sure these harmonize with his Word. That's part of being a Christian first.)

So, when the status quo is right, let's conserve it. When the status quo is wrong, let's get liberated from it.

Is Jesse Jackson right about some things? Sure. About everything? No way. So if you defend Jesse Jackson, you better qualify your defense. If you attack him you better qualify your attack.

"Rush is right" cries out for clarification. Right about what? Some things? Sure. (Keep this in mind if you're a Rush basher. Better qualify your attack.) Most things? Maybe. All things? No way. So if you defend Rush Limbaugh, you better qualify your defense. After all, Rush is no more God than he is the devil.

[NZerFromHK]

An American evangelical Christian Randy Alcorn wrote an article 10 years ago dissing "uncompromised conservatism" by Christians. From the article, it seems Mr Alcorn would have most issues with Derbyshire/Russell Kirk's brand of conservatism:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1616901/posts

(Posted in response to this article)

[Esther Ruth]

Such an irony it all is that a Christian nation and it's people seem be the ones "reigning in" all this stuff, seem to be the power, money etc behind all the push toward the climatic end times for told of - and at the same time they are abandoning The Word of God and the very things He told us would be for their new and improved version of how it will all play out - quite an idol being created (The End Times Idol, mother of all) being created by the very ones who had it all in their hands to go the right direction with His Word and His Gospel and instead...well.. such a delusion. Not my will but Yours Dear Lord Jesus!