The Shape of Conservative Thought

I've often said that I have a lot of sympathy for religious communities, especially the ones that live up to the expectations I perceive in the foundational documents of those religions, such as Buddhism or Christianity which talk a lot about peace, loving the poor, caring for your community, and finding your home. Christine Emba's essay, Liberalism is Loneliness, talks a lot about how "liberalism" (and by this I guess she means the Enlightenment's project to free inquiry from dogmatism, the "classic liberalism" that many conservatives talk about shortly after mentioning how many books they own) has a take on the current in her review of Patrick Deenan's Why Liberalism Failed, in which she writes:

As liberalism has progressed, it has done so by ever more efficiently liberating each individual from “particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities — unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will.” In the process, it has scoured anything that could hold stable meaning and connection from our modern landscape — culture has been disintegrated, family bonds devalued, connections to the past cut off, an understanding of the common good all but disappeared.

And in the end, we’ve all been left terribly alone.

She goes on to talk about how "conservatism" has given us a free market "to buy back what has been destroyed," and "liberalism" has given us regulation to "to protect what you can't!"

Emba goes on to say,

To overhaul liberalism, we will have to overhaul ourselves, exchanging an easy drift toward selfish autonomy for a cultivated embrace of self-discipline and communal responsibility. As daunting a project as reforming a political order might seem, this internal shift may be just as hard.

She's right, but that's not the whole story, and to argue that this is "liberalism's" fault is to ignore, viciously and with malice aforethought, the history that brought us to this place.

I mulled a lot about trying to put my finger on what bothered me about Emba's essay when I read Nandini's Ramachadran's essay on Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, in which she talks about how the movie is "about the mysteries and melancholy of kinship."

Keeping kin is a perplexing thing. We are all tethered to a world made significant through others, they lend weight and shape and texture to the stories we tell ourselves (and about ourselves) to survive. We choose the kin we keep and we hope to be so chosen in turn; knowing how and whom to love often demands the full measure of a person’s ethical intelligence. Love is the luxury of intimate witness: to grant another person an irreducible importance that no one can ever fully deserve.

Ramachadran addresses our individualism by talking about chosen kin, about the community we choose.

In the United States, the history that brought us to this place, in this time, is one of Social Darwinism run amok.

Ramachadran's comment on love and intimate witness ends with this:

If this last year has taught us anything, besides, it is that lots of people (most of them men) don’t strive to deserve it; they expect such affectionate rescue from their own irrelevance without cultivating the habits of thought necessary to return a similar solace. What does one do, then, if most men simply don’t know how to stop being entitled monsters?

And that is, ultimately, the entirety of the tension between Ramachadran and Emba. Emba wants us to go back to a place of kinship, and Ramachadran says we can't until we unlearn the psychopathic tendencies that live among us, and have been steadily growing worse in the past fifty years.