Diversity and Conservatism

I am largely thinking of Conservatism these days as the possible saving grace of America and Western Civilization. What concerns me the most is how socially conservative our Conservatism will have to be in order to be that in the face of Jihadism and Relativism.

As The Looming Tower is making clearer for me, the Khomeinists are at war with modernity and secular rule. As the American Opposition is making clear to me there is no single unifying principle in the American ideosphere they believe is worth fighting for. And so it is likely that they will relent and face their own destruction rather than to stand for something. I make the case extreme for the purposes of illustration, but it isn't clear to me that the mainstream of Democrat politics is willing to create a defensible unity. You know, Eclexia.

Eclexia is characterized by a restless antipathy to the established and an overweening desire to get away from it. The eclexic is eclectic to a fault. Their fatal flaw is that once the novelty of the thing has worn off, once it becomes established, their interest and respect fades rapidly.

Eclexia is a sin because it is fundamentally disrespectful of the efforts made by people who bother to study something specific. It acts against collaboration in solving standing problems. It refuses to focus. Thus the eclexic requires some outre personality which allows him to eschew the 'mundane' tasks that are faced by all of us. In that regard, eclexics are dependent on an established alternative subculture - something that allows them to easily be understood as 'cutting edge' or 'radical' even if they are not talented or committed in any way.

So last night I complimented Los Angeles because of its ethnic and religious diversity. But as I did so, I realized I did so in the context of a balance which is not necessarily permanent. You see what America offers previously persecuted minorities and immigrants is the opportunity to move from the Third World to the Second and then possibly to the First. So long as that material opportunity survives, then participation in mainstreaming is a useful, even critical source of national unity.  I've always said that the act of raising the flag is patriotic and it is the struggle of snatching that honor from one generation, or one ethnicity to the next which insures the integrity of patriotism. The overkill of PC is a reasonable reaction to the oppression of ethnic minorities, but the eclexic aren't necessarily demanding that the ethnic be patriotic, and therein lies the problem. Inclusion for it's own sake is not good enough. It has to be inclusion into the nation which requires demonstrated affinity for national principles. But that is not how anti-conservatives see it. The very idea that 'Nobody is illegal', demonstrates this problem.

As I remarked in Derbyshire's Dilemma, what cuts us to the chase is the question of black progress. More generally, it is this same question of progress which should be the razor on any matter of diversity. It's not inclusion for its own eclexic radical chic sake of 'social change', but inclusion for the purposes of social progress, of real self-enabled elevation, of taking advantage of what the nation has to offer.

For Conservatism to be right and proper, it has to assure that inclusion is reflective of a diversity of sources and a unity of purpose, rather than a many-to-many relationship. That is because it is under attack from those who expect nothing less than conversion of the planet to Islam. And so Conservatism has to be defensive of liberty and religious freedom, but not absolute freedom to the point of eclexia and disposable consumerist culture. We must conserve Modernism, we must conserve Rationalism, we must preserve the road to social mobility and mainstreaming.