DISCUSSION: liberals and conservatives

["Doug Jones" <credenda@moscow.com>]

Visionaries,

 

The “Community Divide” story in the weekend Daily News was interesting but curious in several ways. Most importantly, to picture the Moscow divide as between liberal and conservative is to fundamentally miss the trend. To many of us labeled “conservative,” conservatism is just as much a product of modernity as liberalism/progressivism. I think the Reagan era, for example, was one of the biggest disasters in U.S. history. All of these ideologies find their center of life in politics, i.e., they are obsessed with coercive relations.

 

I continue to be amazed that the Vision 2020 list itself is so obsessed with politics, as if that were the core of the Moscow vision. All the invitations to talk about beauty and the arts and the good life have been quickly ignored (because, I venture, both progressivism and conservatism are inherently hostile to the arts).  Politics is always the admission of failure, always the admission that your vision can’t inspire freely and so you must invoke the threat of violence. Both progressivism and conservatism share this ugliness. They both have to love coercion because their universe is just material cause and effect. It brings to mind Gandalf’s observation about Sauron’s lust for power in the Tolkien trilogy: “That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind.”

 

Instead of a simplistic liberal/conservative divide, I see several Moscow factions; I’m sure there are more: (a) a panicked progressive/liberal  corner, (b) typically boring secular conservatives, (c) pietistic evangelical conservatives who don’t like beer, and (d) Trinitarian Christians who seek to celebrate the good and the beautiful life beyond the pettinesses of politics (though continuing to mock those idols with more “campaigns”).

 

If the Moscow Civic Association doesn’t want to become quickly obsolete, they’ll have to understand that they aren’t fighting a political vision but fundamentally a vision about the nature of beauty and the good life. If they want to have a public dialogue on those topics, I’d be one of the first to volunteer. Perhaps we could talk about the question: “Does progressivism undermine the arts?” But I think deep down inside they know that in their vision Darwin has already killed Bach. Politics is all that’s left for them.

 

Doug Jones