Pro and con

In advance of election day, I got into a conversation with a bunch of folks around the topic of conservatism. I've always wondered why it was that conservation -- the practice of conserving -- is somehow not an aspect of modern conservatism. The conversation helped me deepen my understanding of that disconnect.

First, it's necessary to understand that the entire American public is divided into two camps: progressives and conservatives. (Apparently the last living liberal died in 1989 of disappointment. There is rumored to be a small community of radicals still living in disused tunnels under Washington Square, but these reports have not been confirmed.)

So, with only two camps left, it's important that everyone understand the difference.

First, progressives. Progressives are people whose dreams involve an idyllic vision of a future which has never existed, but towards which they want society to move.

Second, conservatives. Conservatives are people whose dreams involve an idyllic vision of a past which has never existed, but towards which they want society to move.

While there are differences in the specifics of the visions, they have a lot more in common than most people (and all demagogues) would have us believe. Indeed, much of the impact (and, I presume, the intent) of demagoguery is to preclude meaningful conversation around the topic.

Conversation is readily precluded when the potential conversants share no common vocabulary. And while progressives and conservatives know and use a lot of the same nouns and verbs, their vocabularies differ in both tense and mood. They differ in tense, because of that future/past thing. They differ in mood because progressives operate in the optimistic subjunctive while conservatives speak in the confident normative.

Unfortunately, while it's easy to have a meaningful conversation with someone whose opinions differ from yours, it's difficult (not to mention irritating) to try to converse with someone in a mood diametrically opposed to your own.

If meaningful public discourse on the subject of sustainability is ever going to happen (talk about operating in the optimistic subjunctive!!), we're going to have to find a way to align our mood with that of the audience to which we're trying to communicate.

So I'm going to try (no guarantees of success) to start idealizing a fictional past (the actual past having been somewhat less than ideal), to start treating it as the only possible norm, and to become more confident in my vision of where I want society to move (oops, I mean "return") to. Then I can get self-justifiedly angry at how things are, align myself with powerful social currents, and maybe have the opportunity to guide conversations toward those idealistic aspects which appear in both the pro and con visions for the country.