Conservatism encourages discipline, obedience to authority, and facing the consequences of our actions. In the words of Lakoff, conservatism is "
strict father morality". And in all fairness, nobody really feels that discipline, obedience, or facing conquences are actually
bad things, in and of themselves.
But even though we accept some convervative values, we fight tooth-and-nail against the conservatives themselves. Why? This question has been rolling around in my mind lately. But this morning, I found an answer in the writings of C.S. Lewis. He argued that if you took an individual virtue, and made it your sole god, you turned it into a great evil. And the conservatives have done just this: they have taken an important virtue and enthroned it as the whole of morality.
And like any exercise in idolatry, the consequences are disasterous.
This risk of idolatry, of believing that a single virtue is all of morality, can be found almost anywhere. When C.S. Lewis described the dangers of idolatry, he was
writing about love, and how it can become twisted:
"St. John's saying that God is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that 'love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god'; which of course can be re-stated in the form 'begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god'. This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.
I suppose that everyone who has thought about the matter will see what H. de Rougemont meant. Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to override all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done 'for love's sake' is thereby lawful and even meritorious.
An adulterer believes that romantic love excuses anything. A war criminal believes that patriotism is the highest virtue. A sweatshop owner staunchly supports economic freedom. A brutal dictator believes a Communist utopia justifies the destruction of family farms and the murder of the kulaks.
The conservatives aren't wrong because they believe in strict father morality. Strict father morality--discipline and punishment--has a place in the most nurturing of families. The conservatives are wrong because they take this one small piece of morality, put it on a throne, and worship it.
And like anybody who worships a single, isolated virtue, the conservatives soon decide that the ends justify the means. They betray the trust of the American people, they betray common morality, and ultimately, they betray conservatism itself.
How can liberals avoid the same mistake? We cannot afford the moral myopia of modern conservatism. We must remember that individual virtues must be a part of a complete morality. Or, as C.S. Lewis argued, individual virtues must be ultimately subordinate to the whole of God's commands.