Thinking Right

“When I was 17, I had wrists like steel / And I felt complete,” croons Ezra Koenig in “Giving Up the Gun,” a song to which I was particularly given when I was seventeen myself. To this day, I think it a good mantra for intellectualized seventeen-year-old maleness in all its invincibility and unbridled individualism.

My initiation into pure, triumphalist classical liberalism did to some degree have its roots into the spirit of my age: “You can’t tell me what to do.” But more than anything, it was a rebellion against longstanding, self-imposed order.

By casual accident of my parents’ soft-R partisan affiliation, I entered the world of political consciousness as a self-identified Republican. By my early adolescence, my childish admiration for John McCain had blossomed into something much more dramatic: a tyrannical, rigid religious puritanism (much more Calvinist than Jewish in its character, little did I know), wedded to a Weekly Standard-style giddiness for imperial adventure. Political circumstance, having packaged these things together with a belief in unbridled corporatism, had me stumping for rock-bottom tax rates as well. To my credit, I was moderate on guns and immigration.

Recovery from this miserable worldview was an exercise in both the personal and the political: I succumbed to the commonsense truth of evolutionary theory. I became a “Powell Doctrine” realist after studying the follies of neocon warmongers. I rejected the Torah as divine writ after admitting to myself that history didn’t bear out its narrative claims. My Iron Age theology eroded into deism and, very soon, into nothing at all. All the dissonance and intrusive structure evaporated in an instant. Freedom.

Freedom, I have since accepted, isn’t free. But in the meantime, I spent my late high school years sitting up all night with fellow freethinking friends, denying value, breaking all existence down into constructs, and pooh-poohing “the rules” and “authority.” I entered Harvard as a perfect classical liberal, a libertarian tempered by pragmatism who reveled in stirring up Hillel dinner conversations with nihilistic confessions, reliably followed by the cheery, enigmatic qualifier: “But if nothing matters, then the fact that nothing matters doesn’t matter!”

I had no patience for either the social conservatives on campus, brimming with epistemological certainty and fanatical sexual idealism, or the left-liberals – bleeding-hearts with their own sacred cows, grown too comfortable in the Ivy League echo chamber. I joined neither party, I zoned out of American politics, and I made a big deal out of voting for Gary Johnson. (I would again, to be fair.)

Over the last few years, I have come to learn a lot from both groups’ styles of thinking. That is to say, I’m no longer so sure about the triumph of the unbridled individualism—in issues of culture or markets. The experience of growing up found tremendous resonance in Jon Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” and Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”—two masterfully pragmatic cases for classical conservatism made by liberal psychologists.

In a strange development, I find that I agree with the basic thrust of the campus Right’s jeremiads against the excesses of soulless hook-up culture—but one of many “conservative” realizations about the drivers of anomie in a society of endless choices and attenuated consequences. If they weren’t so insistent that we were all going to hell for it, I might sign up.

A world without religion, rotary clubs, wealth-equalizing measures, and norms of decency might be a better one for me, Joshua Lipson. But data and intuitive reflection make eminently clear that it’d be a worse world for all of us—devoid of such existential essentials as structure, comfort, and subjective value. The complex and yet compassionate arguments of Jane Jacobs, Robert Putnam, Jaron Lanier, and Jon Haidt ring far truer than the easy, brutal triumphalism of Ayn Rand (and, I’m tempted to say, Ray Kurzweil).

What my new sympathy for Burke and “The American Conservative” does not mean, however, is an increase in sympathy for the Republican Party: a strange coalition of corporate fetishists, jingoistic bullies, and uncareful thinkers of all stripes. Though Democrats are no angels—and no classical liberals, the Right likes to remind us!—it is hard to think of anything more antithetical to the ideals of classical conservatism than contemporary Republicanism.

To the average contemporary Republican, nothing is sacred but sexuality, American military force, or the personhood of corporations. The environment, the broad middle class, and the well-evolved developmental norms of pre-sprawl communities are unworthy of conservation. In an earlier iteration, I would have had an inkling of cause to agree: Nothing was sacred, after all.

On this matter, my metaphysics haven’t changed one bit. The universe remains empty of objective meaning, as far as I can conclude. But meaning is the currency around which life has been structured since the dawn of our advanced cortical structures. A healthy, post-partisan social conservatism must rise to this challenge.

Joshua B. Lipson ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Mondays. Follow him on Twitter @Josh_Lipson.