On not wanting to learn about what you think you probably should

[nancylebov]

John Derbyshire, on what happened to his religious faith, such as it was.

It doesn’t necessarily die — I know plenty of cases where it didn’t — but people of really feeble faith, like mine, need every possible support, and emigration knocks one prop away. In America, at any rate for most conservatives (taking my Episcopalian colleague as an exception), you are actually supposed to think about your faith, and even, for heaven’s sake, read about it! With the keen immigrant’s desire to be more native than the natives, I did my best with this, but found I constitutionally couldn’t. The books sent me to sleep; and when I tried to think about Christianity, it all fell apart.

Partly of interest because I feel as though I should research the local races before the upcoming elections, but I can't honestly say I care, and partly because it's an interesting essay from a rather alien point of view. For example, it had never occurred to me to wonder whether an atheist could be a conservative.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

He strikes me as an honest and thoughtful person.

An atheist can't be a religious conservative, but if by a conservative you mean someone who favors limited government, low taxes, and perhaps a traditional view of morality, then there's no contradiction in an atheist's being a conservative.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Derbyshire's idea of conservatism isn't entirely the same as your list--he includes a strong national defense, for example--but what I found interesting was being so surrounded by people who thought being religious is part of conservatism that you needed to ask the question.

[avram]

There's not even any contradiction in being an atheist and supporting elite political and social privilege (another meaning of conservative).

Objectivists tend to be conservative on a lot of social issues, and that's an atheistic philosophy.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

There's a chapter near the beginning of John Dean's _Conservatives without Conscience_, in which he tries to define conservatism. It's like science fiction--people who don't read science fiction think they know what it is. People who do read science fiction have definitions which seem obviously correct to them, but are shocked to discover that other sf readers have different--sometimes very different--definitions.

[avram]

In the case of conservatism, there are a bunch of different -- contradictory! -- strains of thought all claiming the name. I've got my notion of what it is from reading a little Russell Kirk, a bit of GK Chesterton, and some history of the 18th-20th centuries.

[madfilkentist]

Ayn Rand was violently opposed to being called a conservative, and it's on social issues such as victimless crimes that the difference is strongest.

[avram]

I've never met Rand, and never will, what with her being dead and all. Most Objectivists I've met either describe themselves as conservatives, generally vote Republican, or engage in frequent knee-jerk liberal bashing. In some cases, all three.

From what I can glean online, it looks like Rand was cosier with conservatives in the early 1960s, but broke off in the name of ideological purity in the '70s.

[madfilkentist]

I have no idea who these Objectivists are who describe themselves as conservatives, or where you've met them. As for the characterizations you offer, I'm not going to rise to your picking a fight in Nancy's home space.

[avram]

A couple of those Objectivists were gaming buddies (one still is, the other’s moved away) of several years standing. Others I’ve met online, or through APAs.

And if you’re going to accuse me of picking a fight, you’d be better off waiting till I actually do so.

I find it telling that his interest in science [sic] comes from

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

none other than Steve Sailer...

And my conservative asshole sexist-authoritarian-nuke-the-hippies grandfather has been an atheist all his life.

Re: I find it telling that his interest in science [sic] comes from

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Everything he says about science in that essay is unexceptionable. I wonder if he was just on his best behavior, or went on to other scientists, or came up with a good parts version of Sailer.

As for your grandfather, I think Derbyshire feeling the need to explain about being both an atheist and a conservative says more about his social circle than about the range of possible conservative views.

Re: I find it telling that his interest in science [sic] comes from

[zsero.livejournal.com]

His interest in science didn't come from Sailer - he's written two books on mathematics. His interest in biology came from being on HBI, Sailer's mailing list, which features high-level discussion by scientists and scholars in many fields, including biologists.

As for bellatrys's disdain for Sailer, it seems based on the curious belief that intelligence either doesn't exist or can't be measured. Sailer's crime seems to be that he rejects this PC nonsense, and believes instead that the IQ tests available today are reasonably accurate measures of something significant. The link bellatrys provides doesn't actually rebut Sailer's quoted opinion, it just pillories him for daring to have it, as if its falsity were immediately obvious. Or, more to the point, as if its truth or falsity don't matter, because it's heresy and must be exterminated.

Re: I find it telling that his interest in science [sic] comes from

[avram]

Sailer also believes that “African-Americans [...] tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.” Though he does think that “African-Americans tend to be better than whites at certain mental abilities that IQ tests are bad at gauging, such as the improvisatory creativity that makes them world-beaters in jazz, basketball, rap, running with the football, and preaching.”

Wow. I’d never taken a look at Sailer’s writing before. If he is just an honest scientist motivated solely by a quest for scientific truth, without a racist bone in his body, then he displays staggeringly bad judgment in his writing.

Re: I find it telling that his interest in science [sic] comes from

[avram]

Ack, I botched the second link. Here: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/iq.htm

well, he and Sailer are both VDARE buddies

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

the Derb has written before for VDARE about the superiority of the Anglo-American White Race over the swarthy Other and the necessity of defending ourselves against the alien hordes (despite his Chinese wife and half-Asian kids) and is a gender essentiallist as well as being the guy who claims that women are only sexually desirable up to about 16, so that Sailer is his science mentor is not surprising. It's just kind of telling that he doesn't see anything credibility-damaging in admitting it in public. (then again, he didn't see anything credibility-damaging in admitting that he considers women who aren't jail-bait age to be disgustingly aged...)

And the increasing rigorousness of conservative orthodoxy is both amusing in itself, and amusing to watch previously-oblivious conservative pundits crash up against it: Andrew Sullivan was apparently totally unconscious during the 1980s, and didn't notice Buckley et al calling for the mandatory tattooing of people like him along with the constant denunciation of homosexuals and their civilization-destroying Agenda from circa 1978 on, and wonders why they can't all just get along with gays now and accept that legalizing SSM is indeed the conservative thing to do; Rod Dreher missed all the enviro bashing of the 80s and 90s and laments that he and his wife are called heretics and treated like Trotsky for daring to prefer organic food over factory farmed and tries to start a Reformation - and a bunch of atheist conservative doctors suddenly noticed that theocons were getting preferential treatment last August and canceled their subscriptions to American Spectator after an issue devoted to Intelligent Design. It isn't like the linkage of GodAndCountry was something new, nor the insistence that Religion, specifically Christianity but with a loophole for Judaism, was vitally necessary to promote civilization and Order, wasn't there all along in conservative propaganda throughout the Cold War.

The pressure to conform, agree, and to hide/suppress any of one's own feelings of dissent has always been enormous, within the conservative umbrella *and* its various splintery subgroups. But it used to be possible to pretend that the other conflicting orthodoxies and dissenters didn't exist. Now they've won (however briefly it shall turn out to have been) and are all fighting for a piece of the power pie, they can't avoid social contact (not to mention the boundary-breaking provided by the internet, which means that the various frothing subsections get forced to be aware of each other by means of links and trackbacks...)

And then there's the internal social pressure to borgify the more outside hostility they generate, to maintain [the illusion of] a united front, which is just another way of describing the fight over the power pie really.