I have a question about progressive/liberal politics and culture and I was hoping for some feedback from the community. This may get a little personal, so bear with me, but my question ultimately is relevant to politics.
Last night, I was thinking about death. I won't lie, I am terrified of death. I believe that after you die, you simply disappear completely and totally. Once in my life I thought that I was going to die, and I kept looking around expecting the world to stop and notice, but it didn't. People just kept on doing their normal thing like just another day. Someone is dying today, right now, as we are thinking about doing chores, getting to work and what we are doing this weekend. Sure you can try to ignore death, just live in the moment, but I realized that after living in the moment for my entire life, I want to be prepared for death.
But how does one prepare for death, if one can? If what death tells us is the ultimate triviality of self, then to prepare for death is to try and transcend the self. No one person is complete in themselves, but only a part of a huge larger whole of the web of biological life connected through time and across organisms. Fortunately the human mind is a changeable thing. We can choose to identify not with ourselves, but with our world, with our community or nation, with a god or a cause, and in doing so try to make a meaningful imprint that will last longer than our bodies.
This imprint then becomes the shadow of ourselves that lasts beyond ourselves, and there are different qualities of this shadow- some better than others.
Through family and reproduction, we perpetuate ourselves. We can give back to the community by work, volunteer, and acts of kindness to other people, as well as being there for friends and family, and being involved in political causes. But no one generation or set of generations complete in themselves. As a generation, we also all die together. Our friends, our family, our community, can do things for one another, but at the end of the day this is also the impermanent giving to the impermanent. Gradually, children are different from their parents, who are different from their grandparents, and so on and so on, even in societies where ancestors are worshipped.
It seems to me that a difference between liberals and conservatives is that the former are happy to be blowing in the wind, while the latter seek to identify with some kind of artificial permanence outside the self. This is not to say one is superior to the other. When it comes to social issues, liberals think in terms of individual rights and negative rights; the justice owed to the individual by the state. Conservatives seek to transcend the self by identifying with a permanent banner, whether this be nation, culture, or religion. And it is this desire that I came to understand upon contemplation of death.
It could be argued then that Christian conservatives are not trying to be bigoted when for example, they oppose gay rights. Rather they are trying to hold onto something permanent in the culture, which in American culture is Christian religion and tradition. Rather than identifying with themselves, they identify with this culture, because this culture is to them the fabric of the American community, and it is belonging within the community that provides meaning beyond the impermanent, mortal individual person. Similarly, illegal immigrants, abortion, and secularization of all sorts threatens the culture and the culture's link with our nation, the United States (which arguably is an important part of the culture itself). It imposes what in their minds is an impersonal, soulless liberal state with many different individuals and a diversity of subcultures, but no real connecting, human fabric across all of society.
They see the liberal insistence on sexual freedom, the liberal tendency towards economic compassion, the liberal tendency towards inner-searching spirituality, as self and individual focused and therefore flawed, because the self and individual is ultimately trivial. They see liberalism's acceptance of change and disregard for tradition as an insult to past generations, who unique human imprint is contained within these traditions and still valuable despite-- or rather, precisely because, these generations are dead in body.
I do have problems with the conservative view of culture. Membership in a community implies contribution to that community, but traditional Christian culture provides no real way for the average Christian to make a contribution that is both uniquely meaningful and permanent. God and the prophets have already done the work necessary, it is only left to the individual to accept God's love and sacrifice. Nationalism meets the same objection; very few individuals achieve the status of formative myth in national identity; an individual's contribution to the greatness of his or her nation is usually in the impersonal form of manual labor to enchance his or her nation's material wealth; or death in the battlefield; it is impersonal, and in a way, inhuman.
In Christianity, the individual lies passively and accepts his or her fate (salvation). He or she can evangelize for God, but the content of Christianity itself is already fixed; he or she does not leave any personal imprint on the web of life, as he or she would if each Christian were to write, for example, a passage of the Bible that could be understood by future generations.
Of course, Christianity short circuits this objection by telling believers that they have an immortal soul, but as someone who does not believe in the afterlife, I cannot accept this- the argument I am laying out is purely secular; I examine Christianity solely from a secular philosophical perspective.
A self-written Bible passage, for example, would be personal and communicate the feelings and thoughts that at are the center of a person's individual humanity (as opposed to manual labor for example, which contributes only a person's energy and none of what makes them unique as an individual); these feelings and thoughts would be read by future generations and pass from author to reader; thus the writer's personal feelings and thoughts, which are the closest thing to he or she that there is without his or her body itself, would gain a personal sort of transcendence from death.
In this way it is writers like Shakespeare, Hemingway, Eliot, Joyce, and all other writers of artistic works that have endured through time who have achieved the most transcendence from death.
None of this means I have switched to social conservatism. I still believe in separation of church and state, I support support full gay equality, I am still pro- choice, I still think illegal immigrants should be treated humanely, and I am still skeptical of tradition for its own sake. But on a philosophical level, I think I am beginning to understand what motivates social conservatives.
My question to the community is, first, am I understood or crazy? Second, is my desire to transcend death by transcending myself in itself naive and impossible? Third, is my characterization of the attitude of social liberalism and conservatism accurate? Does social liberalism oppress community and continuity in favor of the individual, but in doing so concede the individual's ability to transcend his or her own death through subversion of self identity? Or is nature and naturalism the 'liberal religion'?