Polarization and the Cult of Conservatism

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His “Sacred Democracy” columns appear monthly in readthedirt.org.

Last month I coined the phrase “trickle-down polarization,” to highlight what historical studies show has been a top-down campaign to put America at war with itself. In not-so-subtle ways this is a semantics war, by which verbal tactics produce pejorative labels that distort perceptions some citizens harbor for others (and their government) to a point of bellicose enmity. In that column, I summarized historians’ assessments of our past half-century, which reveal the patrons of this campaign to be a consortium of uber-moneyed corporate plutocrats who have taken ownership of an ideological label, under whose respectable cover they operate deceptively-cloaked: the label of conservatism.

In “just” thinking, there’s nothing unrespectable about a conservative outlook per se, which at least some of the time is a natural and reasonable response. It simply meant “caution” or “action with restraint” to the bankers I grew up respecting in the fifties. Their children were my schoolmates. Yet, those familiarities aside, I and infamous others became impatient with the cultural ethic of cautious resistance to change, flawed and paranoid as that era was. So, as younger generations had done before us, we rebelled against the conservatism of our time, rigidly self-satisfied and stuck, in favor of a new “liberalism” — i.e. “exploring alternatives to the status quo.” We didn’t intend to undo conservatism entirely though. It still offered much we valued.

Yet the liberal surge of the sixties and seventies did kill the old conservatism. Our quest for rights exceeded the civil, in an orgiastic conjuring of approaches beyond liberal on any sociopolitical spectrum. The concept became simply too tame and un-hip for us. Thus the blame was on us when the Reagan revolution rescued society from the radical excesses of our idealized “counter-culture.” Reaganism wasn’t a return to our parents’ conservatism, though. It brushed aside fiscal restraints in its contempt for all government oversight over licentious corporatism, and soon we were impatient all over again: with its deregulation of fiscal unfairness, but also with its re-regulation of personal moral choice.

“Liberalism” isn’t a strong enough term for today’s conservatives either. “Nanny-statism” and “socialism” are more volatile labels to contrast against “conservatism.” The conservative “base” presume to know what socialism is, yet they know just enough about any “ism” to enable a drumming up of incendiary mojo over what it seems to mean. Wow! Obama a Socialist! Isn’t that almost as evil as a Muslim? Is it any wonder the STEM curriculum is hyped preeminently in the schools? In a parallel liberal arts program, students would learn to spot propaganda devices lacking the balance to be credible propositions. They’d be reading 1984; they’d be studying American history.

But a worthwhile history book in the hands of every American student isn’t high on the to-do list of the billionaire cabal. Historical perspective breeds a wily resistance to “doublespeak,” which just might be the liberal impulse after all, moderating us to wonder open-mindedly if what we’re being sold as “conservative,” genuinely is. If we’re going to live and die by our labels, it behooves us to be sure what it is that we mean by them.

Moreover, shouldn’t we be taught to doubt the validity of the polarization of any set of opposites, to a degree that we deny one in favor of the other? Don’t both poles, as with the yin/yang of the Tao, always merit their just due? Indeed, any quality has its meaning and value in terms of its opposite. It’s impossible for one to exist without the coexistence of the other. Obviously, “conservative” and “liberal” have accrued an almost uncountable number of value contrasts, increasing the possibilities of polarization all the further. Yet doesn’t common sense tell us we can’t have either value in our lives without its polarity? If we were to find a hypothetical person untainted by our polarized political climate, and were to ask that person to contrast these universal opposites, a likely reply might be something like “prudent” and “pliant.” Then how can such a pair of options be so utterly irreconcilable? Who among us can say only one is ever appropriate? What part of ourselves do we surrender, when we fall into line with those who lean invariably and unreservedly one way or the other? Polarities are omnipresent. Polarizations deny that.

What effect must it have on our psyches to be willingly wedged into narrowing prisms of vision, by which perceptions arise according to Orwellian “groupthink” instead of according to our own presence of mind and particular conditions at hand? Don’t we owe it to ourselves to reflect on our personal story and ask if we’ve allowed our integrity to be homogenized into a cult of polarized perceptions, whether by birth, class, education, belief, or whatever combinations of criteria have determined our mode of thinking for us? And once we’re conditioned to what those criteria are, is that it? Is it who we are forever?

We’ve learned much about cults over the past few decades, and how polarization is the operational process by which members are insulated from an impure world outside their circle. The “impure” world of today knows that our history extends beyond a few thousand years, that the flora and fauna were not created as they are in less than a week, that fossil fuels are named for what they actually are and took billions of years to become so, that there have been five extinctions until now, and due to the burning of those fossils we’re on the brink of a sixth. Meanwhile, conservative cultists disbelieve any of this to be true. Their leaders may be charlatan manipulators, but it’s impossible to say what they do and don’t believe. Apparent are the short-term profits they gain from the faith of their followers — who number nearly half the population of our 21st Century nation.

An intervention on their behalf seems indicated (not to mention on behalf of the rest of us), yet how that might be managed remains the vexatious mystery of our time.

Just thinking….