This thread is split from one with a tasteless socialist title.
Would you say that a good amount of your personal identity and general feeling about the world revolves around ideals? That maybe you feel more at home in an ideal structure (even if not standard) than concrete references?
Could you rephrase this? I didn’t get it. The reason I’m asking is I think I would almost say the opposite, if anything. Not that they are mutually exclusive. I do have ideals.
So the reason I ask is this:
You have been describing a sensation of having no profound attachment to conservative roots, to a specific heritage or locale. You do describe some home feeling, specially regarding the more nature parts near where you grew up, and your mother’s home country. You mentioned your parents’ heritage being significant in your life experience, but, if I understood you right, you also mentioned a feeling that none of that is strong enough for you to identify with, for you to call necessarily a “home” of the heart.
I also know you to be, though uncommonly reasonable, a person of ideals. I wish I could be more specific, because that is the kind of statement that could be stretched to apply to anyone, but I mean that you have a structure of ideas of the type we call ideals and that this structure is fairly solid and stable, and defined. I could never call you a fanatic, because I have seen you reason an idea out, but I think it’s fair to say that you possess this solid, stable, and, perhaps, idealistic, in the sense of not tied to a concrete place or set of things, but rather applicable regardless of place, simply to humans, to a fair enough extent, structure.
Now, given these two elements: lack of feeling of belonging to a concrete conservative tradition and strong adherence to an idealistic structure, all the preceding caveats applying, my theory is the following:
That a great mass of humanity, feeling an abstraction from a conservative tradition, actually feels the same home feeling that a conservative (a real one, not a cosplaying socialist) feels towards a specific place and tradition, but towards an idealistic structure. That the same feeling of nurturing and safety that the conservative gets from those sources, an idealist gets from these.
It may be oversimplified and abstract all laid out like this, which may falsify it, which is why I wanted a more raw, unprepared answer firtst, to see if my feeling has any traction in reality.
Pardon the coming narcissism.
I identify with my parent’s cultures. But this is immediately very tricky. On the how one goes through life level they were completely different. Yes, man vs. woman played a role in their differences, but they constantly referred to each other’s cultures and the problems with the other one. For most looking at a map or thinking of the UK, this might seem like being picky, but actually on the how one does things: communicate, celebrate, argue, decide, express oneself emotionally, organize – they were very different cultures.
But let’s get concrete. What are traditions we had. Saturday night pizza - it is a European dish. We did celebrate Christmas and in a more or less north European way - so that might be thought of as white or European, though the blacks and Hispanics (as they were called then) did many similar things on that holiday. But yes, Christmas Eve we went to the home of a friend of mine and celebrated and I liked that feeling. But this is something that Mr. A. can presumably do. I understand that there are likely places where public Xmas trees and public celebration might now be not allowed. But that’s not really something I’m attached to. There’s still the big one near St. Patrick’s church in Manhattan, so it must be ok at least in some places.
There are parts of both of my parents’ cultures I love, though I tend to be more fond of my mother’s Irish origins. But mining songs from England I fell in love with and a lot of Irish music and later myths and tales. Literature, sure. Humor.
But I can still celebrate these things and I could be proud of them, though I think I tend to be proud of what I make, not what people genetically or culturally similar to me made. I That’s why I was asking Mr. A about this. What is it he wants to do that he can’t do as far as celebrating his culture? I can understand that a lot of people think he shouldn’t be proud, even be ashamed, but he can mostly ignore them. Or he will tell me how this is not the case.
I don’t quite connect to the proud to be white. Whatever pride I have or identification is more specific. Not that I am ashamed to be white or feel guilty about it. I did when I was younger in certain ways, but I got out of that long ago. I do know that in many places in the US - college campuses, many corporations, simply being white can cause you problems or make your opinions supposedly less valid. I am not saying that things are fine. I was focused on this idea that he can’t celebrate his culture. I guess I don’t really think white is a culture. Whites have cultures, and there is the kind of can do pragmatist, all economic classes are equal and have equal rights culture of the US, and in some ways I identify with that. That’s getting onto the ideals side of things.
I have to say I don’t connect to most people, regardless of tribe or political persuasion or religion or none. So, for me my tribe has to do with a deeper identification with individual people - these are my people - are people who share certain, yes, ideals, but also a deep curiosity and understanding of interpersonal and intra-personal relations. They also tend to love nature. And there is a tendency to be creative in some art form or other (taking ‘art’ broadly) They tend to think we’ve all been tricked into hating ourselves, on an even more fundamental level than most people look at it. I see all cultures and certainly religions but also modern supposedly rational technocrat what I would call left brain systems of belief as turning us against ourselves. Turning us against our emotions and bodies for example. So, my literal tribe is fairly diverse in the old categories that led to tribes.
The cultures that I come out of I do care about but I’m not team Ireland say. And the mass of people in any category I supposedly fit in, they would judge the shit out of me if they knew me. Democrats or Republicans, capitalist or socialist, religious or atheist, woke or radical right. I used to identify with the Left, further left than liberals. But those people also would reject me and I them, even if they are better than the present woke left. I suppose this could all come off as, oh he thinks he is outside, and doesn’t give a shit or won’t take a position so it’s facile. No, I do take positions on issues and there are activities that feel more me, and I feel fairly European when I’m cultures that are not European.
I think someone else pointed this out in one of these threads: not long ago the Europeans would not have identified as Europeans and would have considered people from other European nations as heartless zombies or idiotic barbarians or….etc. White culture doesn’t go back in the sense of celebrating or being white that far in time. But it certainly goes back into nation states and then things like Celts and Saxons and Romans and so on.
But I’d probably get along better with an indigenous shaman who has some Western education or has lived in a diverse city than I would with 98% of Brits, say. And like a traditional US american, I will take what works, tradition be damned. Isn’t that to some degree being American, tradition be damned unless we still like it? Isn’t that traditional American, to choose your own way? Didn’t the founders get this in part from the very individualistic proto-democratic Iriquois in part? I say this still going back to his seeming claim that he can’t celebrate his own culture because he is white. I’m not sure what that means.
My sense is I wandered around what you are asking and I appreciate the clarification of your question.
I’m not really interested in this whole “can one or can one not celebrate,” that’s not my question. My quesiton is about a feeling of home.
No, of course not, it is an obscene fantasy of Gothic origin. We agree.
Now we are getting to what I really want to analyze.
No. You are squarely a leftist, if you don’t mind my boxing you, but your way of reasoning and the specifics of your ideal structure is, as far as I can judge, completely unique, and leaves a trail of individualistic thought. You asked the quesitons and forumlated the answers, this is discernable. What I am getting at is something different. My question is more, however individually reasoned out and arrived at, whether one might fairly say that your feeling of home, comparable to a conservative’s based on concrete places and things and traditions, exists, at least to a large extent, in this idealistic structure.
Well, this can be said of warring clans even within tiny Pacific islands where the tribal pool was miniscule.
I think European already begins to be a more specific category with discernable attributes.
In certain places, calling a man “indigenous” would get your ass kicked. Not really to the point at all but maybe a little.
But then we are veering from the question. It’s not about an identity and its reality, its about the feeling of home and in what type of psychic structure it resides (sorry if I have a psychoanalyst’s pendant for using “psychic” instead of “psychological,” it refers to the same thing).
Hey, look, it’d be nice to have a group. But if I talked about Biden, Covid, Epstein, the Clintons, the Ukraine/Russian war and a whole host of other topics I wouldn’t just be called right wing, I’d be called a dangerous right wing extremist conspiracy theorist - that last is correct at least. I mean, I could talk to Naomi Wolf about some of that and not get called that, but otherwise…..The country I am in now is at least liberal, if not lefty in some way still, but my reactions are often quite conservative or right wing when it comes to privacy and the condescension of experts which is built into the system even more than in the US. I’m often assumed to be middle to conservative here by people who don’t know me. I’ve gotten into trouble for my views on Islam (though also Israel, sure), trans stuff - and the irony there is in my belief system there actually is room for someone being ‘in the wrong body’ while there isn’t in the belief systems of the people who think I’m transphobic.
My roots are in the left, if on the anarchist can get along often with libertarians in many ways left. I am vastly more comfortable with diversity than most on the right or left - the left having very shallow ideas of what diversity is. My wife who shares many of the same ideas and did before I met her is much more likely to blurt things out. Me, I don’t bother, there’s no gathering where being honest about stuff wouldn’t end up with me surrounded in boring heated discussions.
Are you conservative? If yes, could you contrast from your own life. I had trouble following the above quote. Well, actually whatever you are, as long as you are like a conservative related to that paragraph, let me know how you would describe your relation to place and idealism etc.
Feeling of home: I tried many times to create a feeling of home only to have it disintegrate. I grew up in NYC, but moved to a very different kind of neighborhood at 8. I made close friends, family was a mess, but these scattered out of love, work, college. I suppose in a way people are my home. Then I set up a new life somewhere outside of cities, but there also people moved and shifted. My connection to nature there felt like home. But I could no longer stay there. I moved out of the states when I fell in love with someone in another country. I moved there. She is my home, I guess. There is an island my mother’s side of the family owned part of. That feels like home. But will I ever go there again. I doubt it. I feel scattered bits of home and I am in touch with most parts but mainly by distance. I’d love to have and have had a place to go with home, but modern life made that pretty much impossible. Having people as home is very tricky since they move and turn inward to their families.
This is all quite personal and but if you’re asking about psychic structures here’s some of it.
You could take this as a political stance or a philosophical stance, that people are home, which might make me not conservative in this way. But it’s not like I have this as an ideal. I deal with life as it comes as best I can. And thinking of people as home has torn me apart at regular intervals. Place - I would love it. But where would that be….? A painful question for me right now, extremely.
Anyway, given how pissed off everyone gets and how fast they want to identify your team and either smash you or have a shared hate session, it’d be great if you could give me a ‘he is a lefty’ certificate. Then maybe I’ll feel like I can talk with half the crowd. With right wing people, hm, if they are pro-trump, well, then they will likely reject me, while yelling things at me that I already believe about Harris, the Clintons and Biden. I’m not sure what Obama did. He increased radically the destruction of whistleblowers and after attacking Wall st. invited them in right away to key positions. But put me with what get’s called the nutjob right wing and I breathe a sigh of relief and talk freely about many taboo things. But sooner or later, sure, we’ll end up on something we don’t agree on.
Well, you are probably finding that being against the current command in the slightest puts you in a pool that, today, is basically conservative. That doesn’t make you one, but I am not surprised that it is the crowd you get along best with. We are, after all, used to that shit.
I’m a conservative. That means a whole host of things, but it boils down to local and locally brewed values. Values in the old sense, including traditions and feelings, not the euphemism for moralism that it is now used as.
A more immediate way to intuit what I mean that I am is that I am a redneck. If you think about it, that is what most of humanity is. The problem is that idealism comes in as an active agent, with missions and plans and projects, catching conservatism, which is just a passive mish mash of tradition, completely at its mercy. A redneck just wants a red Transam, not thinking about how and why to establish control over the whole globe. Rhetorically, we are handicapped. We like Trump. Why? If we have to explain it, you won’t get it.
Like you, I have lived in more than one place. Unlike you, I don’t really have a ideological thread that stays with me as I go. I have a feeling of home for where I grew up, a strong one. It has to do with the place, the people, the mentalities, the traditions, the feelings. When I went to another place, I fell in love with it. On purpose, because I thought of it as my duty as a visitor, as an alien in an established world that took as much pain and effort to build, as many generations, as the one I came from. I put a lot of effort into understanding its own conservatism, its own mentalities and traditions and places. There are, thus, places I could never move to, like Iran, which will hopefully now change.
That’s conservatism. Contrasted to a running ideological thread which is abstracted from any one place, any one group of people.
My attachments to all the places I have lived are personal and have been my source of comfort, of nurture, of warmth, of belonging. My idea is that, for an idealist, ideals fulfill this function.
Rednecks seem like idealists to me. I understand that it might seem very concrete and scattered, but most people are pretty scattered. They just don’t notice it. Liberals are scattered: wokism vs. trad. feminism, or 1st and second wave feminism. They can move from one to the other and contradict themselves within seconds and not notice that they have just used two incompatible idealisms. As one example among many. People shuttle around all the time. We’re bricoleurs.
And much as I am critical of such things, I’d also be afraid, of anyone who is utterly consistent down to the bone.
No, I’m not conservative. And I remember when conservatives had the strings on political correctness. I did not thrive with that either.
I don’t know where I could move to now. I don’t like where I am, though a big part of that is that it is a city. Yes, I wouldn’t want to move to Iran either. My best friend that I am in regular contact with is from Iran. So, we have some interesting discussions these days.
I also feel attachments to the places I have lived, not all of them, but a few of them. Ideals do not help me now. People have been home for me. My wife passed a few months ago, and I will not be home again in this life. There are places I could move to that I resonate better with. But they are not and would not become home. And those places I have lived that were home can’t be home now. The people were integral parts of those ecosystems for me. Inspired by an insult an old high school teacher would make about our abilities: with some great ideals and $2.45 I could get a tall black coffee at Starbucks.
Though home be impossible now, may God grant you beauty.
I think you missed some of the fineries of what I said, but I don’t hold it against you.
It’s funny. I remember feeling very alienated during those days, not doing very well either. I thought it made me a leftist. Then when leftism took over, I realized how good I had had it, but I also understood many of the whys and wherefores of things that drove me crazy then. It’s hard to communicate what about conservatism makes sense, or why. That’s why it relies so much on tradition, on “just pay attention to me because I’m old and I know better than you.” Some things cannot be understood unless their causes are lived, which I have now had the misfortune to. The old timers were fucking right. In my heart I knew. Or, in my heart, my feeling was always, really, “I see problems here, and I see where I want to go with it,” and leftism just went the exact opposite way. So, I suppose, I was really always a conservative. Conservatism is additive, constructive in the sense that layer of structure builds upon layer of structure. Tradition is more amalgamation than it is ossification. Idealism is revolution, it’s universalism, it’s Rasaing the Tabula so you can start with the real dope. That was always foreign to my spirit.
You also come to understand that these splits are fundamental. A leftist can’t convert, nor vice versa. It’s almost like a genetic thing, or as good as. The best one can hope for is, like yourself, a gentleman that, as a leftist, sees no reason to abandon reason. And then we can converse.
Thank you for the slack. I read it again. So, outside ideals in some way but can can swept up, almost against their nature, in ‘conservatism’ and politics. I guess I can see that as different from what I was brought up in. Politics were just phrases and reactions, but positions, in my world, even if I was fairly uninterested - people, play, creativity were more the interest (creativity coming in my teens). But I think I get better what you meant here.
But we do move forward and the conservatives seem glad that people in the past were revolutionaries and idealists, or?. (I’m sure you can hear this echoing what I consider the trite version of this)
I think this is more true. I think both progressive and conservative (and liberal though for different reasons) are all misnomers. I think there is an underlying taste issue or set of tastes. It’d be great if every group could have their own planet. On top of these differences all sorts of consequentialist and moral issues get argued about. But really there are fundamentally different desires for what life is like. I am not saying the moral issues are not also there, but I think there’s a mistake thinking the arguments are really ever going to get at the core differences.
I’ll restate it a little more formally and succinctly now that we have taken it out for a bit of a real world walk:
Ideals are abstract, divorced from specific, concrete circumstances (meaning that, even when aiming to create or influence them, they themselves exist apart from and uninfluenced by), and need a clean slate (we appreciate in Marx and Molotov that they at least admitted it).
Leftism is that political structure that arises from ideals.
Conservatism is not. It is a strictly specific, concrete phenomenon. It is inheritance. If it were overly concerned with the idealism of its inheritance, it would already be idealistic and socialist. It starts from givens, from existing circumstances. There are no universals. If the slate went clean, conservatism would disappear, it would have nothing to suggest.
It even exists at all as a single concept only in contrast to revolution, it is a reaction.
I’ll have to mull that for a while. What do you mean by idealism? It seems a conservative idealist would be an oxymoron to you. It seems like conservatives idealize what was. I mean, I can see this at the redneck level, but not quite at the conservative level one meets in philosophy forums or debates or in politics or town meetings.
I am trying to also see this in moments in time. Would this mean no conservative would want to repeal or go back to practices and traditions from before their birth. What I inherit I work with. I defend it and become more conscious of it as specific when it is challenged by radicals.
What if what we inherit goes against the body and emotions? A lot of my reactions to society and my problems with conservatives and liberals come from there: what their worldviews, down to ontology, do to my soul and body.
In any case, my ideals have never replaced home or been home for me.
“The old timers were fucking right. In my heart I knew”
If i knew more details about you - your work history, how you ended up in Canada, rehab, all that - i could show you why you developed this infatuation with the America John Wayne tough-guy culture. Its basis is your internal stuggle to feel like a man… and you’ve always felt a little short of that, hence the obsession with your cowboy conservatism. None of it is real, though. You live in a reality completely divorced from reality, and philosophy is partly to blame for this. You are one of those who should have never been shown it.
That’s the only real level. Every other use of the word is affectation.
This is why the “conservative” establishment hates the Big Man, but rednecks to a man love him.
You don’t become more conscious of it. You react to revolution, based on a set of things that are obvious to you and you are aware of. But it is only the reaction that makes it a political stance. Otherwise it is just life. Idealism is what comes in and starts changing things, has a positive existence.
All of that is prior to the political stance. Political conservatism means only one thing: reaction against the revolutionary positive. Otherwise, it has nothing politically positive to posit. It is just life as it would be.
To some extent, I cannot see how it would, at least partially, not give you a sense of identity and grounding.
Do you love Trump?
I think I understood that. But what I meant was can’t the redneck feel in his or her bones when something inherited is anti-body anti-emotions anti-self? If the default is conserve what is inherited (without this being and ideal or thought out, but de facto) how do we extricate ourselves from the toxic in the past?
How is living in socialist canada, btw? Pretty chill? Low rent housing and good healthcare? I hear they play a lot of chess in socialist canada. Must not be having to work much since socialist Canada takes such good care of em.
Absolutely, best president since Reagan. Better than Reagan.
In seriousness, I can’t think of a US president who will have had a more dramatic impact on world history for the good.
If this is your question, then I don’t think you did understand. None of those are political quesitons for a conservative.
Well, that’s a theory or a hypothesis. All I can say is people ground me perhaps first and foremost. My tribe. I think if I’d been in one place, the right one, then perhaps this would be at the same level. Nature, time in it, can ground me. I do feel, suddenly, like I am not made wrong there. I can breath. I have my preference for that nature (mixed deciduous/coniferous forest, with enough health to sustain large wild mammals and not flat land - much of healthy Appalachia, for example). Ideals, no. And they have changed over time. But ideals to grounding no. Political ideals nothing. Love, that’s what grounds me and gives me identity. I don’t think that’s as cheesy as it might sound. Body, emotions, these too.
And the ideals of the left - they seem to think they know how it should be organized. I really don’t know how and economics, forgetaboutit. I suppose non-redneck conservatives also, I find them stunned by how they are so such about what will work and how we should live.
It happens, but it is very rare, when I walk into a room and there are more than 3 people and I feel I am with my tribe. And it has nothing to do with how we think taxes should be handled, for example.
But does it have to do, say, with an attitude towards opression?
I thought more about this, and it is not an unfair question. But it is really still not a political one. It is a broader philosophical one. The reason I think it’s still fair is that I would agree that there would be an inevitable correlaiton between political conservatism and a broader philosophical approach to life.
I do think it would be a different thread, it would require extreme focus because it would be a huge topic. I would join this thread with happy enthusiasm.