Author: Clarissa

The Unconservative Disposition

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

I received this great question in the anonymous comments:

What you call a conservative disposition seems to be the normal human disposition. What would be its opposite and where do you see it?

Yes, it’s normal to get attached to people and the traditional ways of doing things. But it’s not the only approach on offer. The unconservative disposition (I’ll call it the fluid one) is very much in existence and it’s having the conservative one for lunch.

Here’s an example. The Math and Stats Department needed a secretary. It’s a real need because they have a large operation and absolutely do need clerical support. What would you do if that situation arose and you wanted to solve it from a conservative approach? Let’s assume that, for reasons completely outside your control, you can’t hire. Your largest program can’t start the semester without a secretary. What would you do?

You’d reassign a secretary to Math and Stats, right? Find a program that’s smaller and doesn’t need much clerical help and you’d reassign their secretary to Math and Stats. Is that what you would do? Congratulations, you have a conservative disposition.

But that’s not at all how it was done at my university. Everybody got reshuffled. My secretary went to Math and Stats while Anthro’s came to me, History’s went to Geography, Geography’s went to Chemistry, and Chemistry’s ended up in English. Which, in turn, sent its secretary of 18 years in the same workplace to Anthro.

We are at the beginning of the semester. Having every department train a new person at this very busy time disrupts everybody’s work. It seems like the most unproductive way of handling things. Secretaries spend half the day trudging back to the buildings where they worked for many years to visit old buddies, use the vending machines they like, get coffee from the best coffee cart which, of course, is located at the corner of their old building. It just doesn’t taste the same if it’s not from that familiar coffee cart!

The mentality that finds what I just wrote incomprehensible and that believes “you should never let a good crisis go to waste” is the fluid, anti-conservative mentality.

I talked yesterday to a colleague who accepted early retirement. She doesn’t want to but she’s not allowed to teach European history, which is her specialization. Instead, she’s pushed into teaching colonial American history. And she can’t because she doesn’t know it or have any interest in it. If you think it’s ideological, it’s not. She’s the wokest person known to humanity. But the Dean says, and I quote verbatim, “I don’t understand this weird attachment people have to teaching within their specialty.” He doesn’t understand attachment. He sincerely doesn’t get why you’d want to hold on to the field to which you have dedicated decades of your life. And then we expect him to get the pain of an office worker who misses her friend at the copy center and her tradition of walking together to the same vending machines at the same time every day.

Disruption for its own sake is what fluid mentality is about. Disrupt, change, reshuffle, “just move.” It’s a coherent and consistent way of being in the world. It’s very real and all the fancy people have adopted it.

The Dumbest Kid

~ Clarissa ~ 33 Comments

The dumbest kid in my class in the USSR, who was so dumb we literally thought he was retarded, became a history professor in the US, and I’m not even kidding.

Definitions of Conservatism: Lincoln Allison

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

Let’s now talk about different definitions of conservatism that have been advanced over the years because they are all interesting and they all give us some food for contemplation. One day I hope to teach a course on conservative thought, and I would start it with these definitions that I found in all sorts of places.

In the definition of conservatism that he wrote for the The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (2009), Lincoln Allison explains that conservatism doesn’t organize itself in opposition to change as such. Instead, it opposes a very specific kind of change. Conservative thought, he says, dislikes the kind of change that is driven by idealistic, aspirational and abstract ideas instead of change that is driven by developing the already existing practice.

Allison also mentions that many people of a clearly conservative disposition do not refer to themselves as such because conservatism has been tainted by people associating it with Nazism. This is quite extraordinary, given that the Nazi worldview was very revolutionary in many ways. It is also curious that leftism has somehow avoided the taint of Stalinism rubbing off on it. Allison is not wrong, though. He observes correctly that since 1945 the number of intellectuals, artists, philosophers and thinkers in Europe and the US who have described themselves as conservative has been minuscule. In intellectual circles, it’s only a bit worse to be a self-avowed pedophile than a conservative. Nobody wants to be a pariah, so people conceal the truth from others and often even from themselves. Conservatism has become a political orientation, quips Allison, that dares not speak its name.

Let’s think about what it means that people who simply oppose the kind of change which aims to create an ideal society are scared of confessing to holding this belief. Let’s think what it means for all of us. Can it be a good thing? Shouldn’t there be some limitation on the human drive to pursue abstract ideas? Apparently, we all as a civilization have decided that no, there shouldn’t be. Because Nazis. Who – and this is the really cute part – wanted no limitations on their drive to pursue the most radical change formulated in the abstract. We hate Nazis so much that we defend the organizing principle of their existence at any cost. Makes total sense.

Allison points out that, since the times of J.S. Mill, the standard, mainstream attitude towards conservatism as a philosophy has been not only negative but downright contemptuous. It became “a truth universally acknowledged” that conservatives are morons. They are stupid, plodding individuals who are too intellectually limited to cast off the shackles of obscurantism and bigotry. Is it any wonder that almost nobody wants to be seen as a stupid, bigoted Nazi? Especially if they are very smart, very unbigoted and very much not a Nazi?

One reason why I like Allison’s definition of conservatism is that he says very correctly (and, God, finally somebody managed to articulate it) that there is no scenario under which “an extreme belief in ‘free’ markets and a minimal state of a kind that never existed or existed only in the distant past” can be called a conservative idea. In other words, neoliberalism is not conservative. It’s in the bloody name, people. Why is it so hard to get anybody to process this simple idea? I don’t mean any of the readers of this blog, of course, but I will be a happy person if I never again hear the question, “But didn’t you say you are against neoliberalism, so how can you be conservative?”

The text of the definition is very short, so I attached it here because I have not been able to find it in open access and had to request the volume through the library. I am hoping that more people will start integrating these ideas into their research and teaching and I want to make the text available to them.

By the way, just for fun I asked the in-built WordPress AI to generate an image to accompany the text of the post, and it gave me an image of some Andrew Tate type wiping his nose, probably after sniffing cocaine. I decided not to inflict the image on my readers.

5_Lincoln Allison_Def_Oxford_2009Download

Finns and the World Order

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

The Finnish leader is either a clinical moron or plays one on TV:

Those countries aren’t liberal. Why will they preserve the liberal world order if they get the power? Most of those countries are completely controlled by Russia. This dude is a Finn. On what planet does he think it’s a good idea for Finland to be ordered around by Russia-controlled Chad or Niger? Leaving aside Russia, what exactly about today’s situation in Chad or Niger can prompt this absolute retard to think that their inhabitants should be in charge of the world order?

Oakeshott and Being Forever Young

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

OK, one last post on Oakeshott and I will move on to other conservative thinkers on my voluminous list. Oakeshott believed that young people should not have much of a place in politics because the great qualities of youth are poisonous for politics.

But here is the problem. When I read Oakeshott’s description of youth, it becomes clear to me that, in a setup where the most important thing is to remain always young to avoid being replaced by a newer, shinier model, everybody is like this at any age:

Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands – unless it be a cricket bat. We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. . . Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own.

Our politics today is a battle between the eternal adolescents described perfectly by Oakeshott. He was conservative in a different world, one in which people were people very unlike to how we are people. What he said is still very much on point but in a much larger way than what Oakeshott himself could have imagined.

Who likes this new series and how much do we like it? I’m liking it a lot.

Earthquake

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

It’s important always to trust your instincts. I woke up in the middle of the night recently because I felt like there was an earthquake. A small one but still clearly an earthquake. But I thought it was impossible because we are in Illinois. I lay there half the night, trying to figure out what it could have been if not an earthquake. And then today somebody at work mentioned that yes, there had been a 3,8 earthquake.

Feeling extremely excited to have experienced my second earthquake, I texted N with the news. His response was, “We are insured”, once again demonstrating that men are not women.

Conservative Disposition and Politics

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

Michael Oakeshott says that people who are not of a conservative disposition are “disposed to recognize government as an instrument of passion.” For them, “the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire.”

I want to add that, writing 70 years after Oakeshott penned these words, this is all true but the object of desire changed because we changed. The greatest erotic attachment of a neoliberal subject is to the self. Consequently, his or her inflamed desire is directed towards the self, and the role of politics is to provide one with access to a climactic enjoyment of the self. I’m sure you can find examples of this everywhere. It’s not about any actual political measures any more. It’s about how being for or against the measures makes one feel. Of course, the feeling is internally manufactured. The measures are but an excuse.

People Hack

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

The new secretary arrived. Making an extraordinary amount of noise and speaking at a rate of 500 words a second, she informed us at great length that she is a quiet, unsociable individual who doesn’t like to speak much.

One of the best sociability hacks I have encountered in life is that whenever somebody says, “I’m the kind of person who”, the reality is that they are the exact opposite kind of person. The smartest people in the world understand everything except themselves.

The Best Dating Strategy

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Two of the young women at Vespers came with boyfriends but one came alone. That’s a very bright young woman because there’s no better place to go to find a good dude. There are so many great guys, and you know for a fact they are looking to get married. Young men with serious spiritual lives, what can be better? The best guy to marry is one with a complex, multilayered inner life. Then you are 19 years into the relationship and still completely mesmerized.

I hope the word begins to spread and we’ll soon see a bunch of young families in the church.

This is happening in many Orthodox churches throughout the country. Please get the word out if you know young women in search of good men who won’t waste their time.

Wednesday Vespers

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

At Vespers today there were so many people that the priest joked that there’s barely any space for the angels. Most of the people are under 30. This is amazing because we used to have 3-4 people at Wednesday Vespers.

Only to think that all these young men (and 3 young women!!) would want to come to church after work on a Wednesday night. Things are looking up.