Thanks to Mr. Stuttaford & Mr. Hume for their responses. A few points at random.<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 (1) Is conservatism coextensive with libertarianism? You’d think so from reading the exchanges here. However, it seems to me there\u00a0ought to be political room somewhere for good old instinctual hostility to unnecessary change, even if that change increases individual freedom of\u00a0action. Why change something that works reasonably well\u00a0\u2014 as well as anything does in human affairs? How do you know what the\u00a0consequences will be? That there is some injustice going\u00a0on, some wrong to be righted, that was first noticed in 1997, having escaped the attention of absolutely everybody for the previous 10,000 years,\u00a0seems to me implausible and frivolous. Conservatism is made up of attitudes like mine. Well, I thought it was.<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 (2) The discussions here have all been very smart-centric. That’s why they have such a libertarian flavor. It’s not<\/em> the case that\u00a0you can’t be a conservative without being a supernaturalist; but I’m beginning to suspect that the number of us who are (a) conservative in\u00a0temperament, and (b) in the top IQ quartile, yet (c) neither supernaturalist nor libertarian, may be vanishingly small. Perhaps I should start a\u00a0new blog for Secular Non-Libertarian Smart Conservatives. \u00a0If there are any others.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, arguments that take no account of the left-hand side of the bell curve\u00a0\u2014\u00a0which is to say, most of the arguments on these comment threads\u00a0\u2014 are missing some important point. Ordinary unintellectual people\u00a0depend, much more than do grad-school types, on stable and customary social institutions. Disturb social equilibriums at your peril.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0 However: (3) The notion expressed here by Mr. Hume\u00a0\u2014 though as he’s made clear, it didn’t originate with him\u00a0alone\u00a0\u2014 that we are going through some great collective psycho-social shift which includes a return to some paleolithic\u00a0values, is persuasive to me. (In fact I’ve written about it here<\/a>.)\u00a0This change seems to be happening extraordinarily fast, as Ice Ages are supposed (by some theorists) to come and go in just a few decades. Sell\u00a0marriage, monotheism, capitalism, patriarchy, sumptuary codes, and law. Buy pleasure-bonding, unstructured spirituality, “primitive\u00a0communism” (K. Marx), sexual egalitarianism, transient fads, and “empathy” (B. Obama).<\/p>\n Looking at the first derivatives here,\u00a0I’d say Andrew is probably right that there is no stopping this train. Nothing is ever utterly inevitable, though, and for all anyone knows we might\u00a0be proscribing homosexual behavior again in 50 years. Or we might have cured<\/em> it\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the Cochran\/Ewald pathogenic\u00a0theory<\/a> of homosexuality has never been refuted, so far as I know. (Of course, homosexuals don’t believe<\/em> they have a disease;\u00a0but then, as Greg Cochran has pointed out somewhere, neither do schizophrenics.)<\/p>\n Ooops, I’ve set off all the political correctness alarms\u00a0\u2026 \u00a0Bad, bad me!<\/p>\n \u2022 (4) I see that Sweden has just become the 7th nation to legalize homosexual marriage. (The list<\/a> includes, surprisingly, South Africa.) I wonder what Charles XII<\/a> would have said? (IIRC his sexual orientation has been much debated.)<\/p>\n \u2022 (5) The modal attitudes to homosexuality down through the ages have been that male homosexuality is to some degree disgusting (the degree I think being milder among ordinary people than in law), while female homosexuality is comical. \u00a0To judge from common talk, jokes, sitcoms, and the like, these attitudes are still very persistent. \u00a0Do pro-SSM people think they will disappear? \u00a0Go underground? Or what?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thanks to Mr. Stuttaford & Mr. Hume for their responses. A few points at random. \u2022\u00a0 (1) Is conservatism coextensive with libertarianism? You’d think so from reading the exchanges here. However, it seems to me there\u00a0ought to be political room … Continue reading