Rethinking the `C'-Word

ONCE they find out that I am a conservative, Harvardite liberals sometimes ask me what being a conservative on a liberal campus is like. Their cheerfully cynical attitude is something like this: "so tell us, what's it like to be a blind person in a community of people who can see."

The other thing that happens when people find out that I am conservative is that I am almost invariably called upon in the occasional dining hall argument to take the conservative side on whatever issue is being debated over a cold pu-pu platter.

As a conservative, I dread being sucked into such debates (maybe that's why I try to make it a point to go to dinner just before the dining hall closes), because being a conservative heading into a political or social policy debate at Harvard is like leading the charge of the Light Brigade. You know you are going to be outgunned, possibly outwitted or, at the very least, shouted down, so the best you can do is hold your own and die honourably. If you try to show your liberal friends that you don't disagree that drastically with them on a certain issue, they immediately claim that you finally saw the light, and assume you have abandoned your conservatism.

This same allegation frequently comes from the staunch Republican power-types who are a bit disappointed when their fellow "fascist ally" (yours truly) seems to jump off the conservative bandwagon and join the liberal enemy when it counts most--at the dinner table. They can't understand why a so-called conservative would argue for things like the feminist critique of male-dominated society or the need to genuinely address and not simply pay lip service to the increasing social inequality of our nation, as manifested in the festering inner-city, the plagued family farm and the inhabited park bench.

So what's the scoop? Is mine a case of being a liberal sheep in a wolfish conservative's clothing, of being a hypocrite? Or is a Harvard liberal education claiming the mind of yet another previously close-minded conservative?

WHILE Harvard has exposed me to new perspectives, I should like to think that it has not forced me to abandon my conservative precepts. The problem instead lies with the many common misconceptions about the nature of conservatism--an ideology many associate with old, doddering men or reactionaries whose minds are like concrete (all mixed up and permanently set).

Or more precisely, the problem lies in what now passes for conservatism on this campus and in this country: neo-conservatism. This is, by and large, a callous socio-economic philosophy that expresses the self-interested traditionalism of those fortunate enough not to be among the dispossessed.

The key of true conservative thought is that it seeks to save elements in the social order worth preserving. The mistake of vulgar neo-conservatives is believing that everything is worth preserving (after all, things are usually rosy enough for them personally).

The truth of the matter is that while much in America is good, much is not. The fact that minorities, inner-city families, the homeless and the poor suffer gross social injustice, and that American foreign policy continues to perpetuate much evil abroad, means that the present order should not be saved as it is or as it was.

This is something that self-centered, well-off neo-conservatives regrettably (no, disgustingly) do not see.

TRUE paleo-conservatism has, as Dostoevsky explained, compassion and a sense of responsibility for "the insulted and the injured." It is not the callous libertarianism of Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick or Margaret Thatcher, which lends itself well to upper-class twittery and renunciations of social responsibility.

While neo-conservatives are content with throwing crumbs to the dispossessed, we should not be so content. It should be the goal of society to bring to the feast the groups and individuals that it is responsible for systematically excluding. One must progressively construct a society worth conserving before one can save it.

But humanitarian conservatism is more than just a philosophy of noblesse oblige applied to a bourgeois capitalist setting. It seeks to show that while the ideal worlds of Plato, Marx and the socialists might make great places to live (and maybe not), this is an imperfect world.

Indeed, perhaps pessimistically, humanitarian conservatism accepts the good, together with the bad, until time and circumstances allow for the attainment of the better. While common neo-conservatives mouth similar views, the humanitarian conservatives accept that people must move actively to bring those times and circumstances about. It is this belief that brings true conservatives closer to liberal reformers than to their heirs in the now-warped conservative tradition.

Conservatism should seek to achieve as much good as possible, given the available means. It holds forth no social panaceas or utopias--and perhaps that is what makes it unattractive for some.