Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Ayenbite of Inwyt (Consciences and Conservatives, Part 1)



I read the other day that Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, had written a book in 2017 called Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle. Considering that Flake’s more famous predecessor as a Republican senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, had written his Conscience of a Conservative in 1960, the newer book might seem to be superfluous to requirements. 

Why is it, I have long wondered, that conservatives defaulted to “conscience” when defending their beliefs?(1)

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If my head is anything to go by (God help us all!), one is best served when one has a “clear conscience.” Unfortunately, more often, one is aware of one’s conscience when suffering “pangs of conscience.” That is, one has been called to account by that great nanny, the superego, for having done something that was underhanded, unethical, immoral, or otherwise under-, un-, or im-. 

As a joke, the conscience is sometimes externalized in cartoons as a contest between the devil and the better angel of our nature—as, for example, in this New Yorker drawing by Alex Gregory:


But we are not fooled; we know it’s all inside us—the conscience is in us and about us. The pangs of conscience, if we let the devil make us do it, are our torments, not any other person’s and certainly not society-at-large’s.

Politics, however, is external—about the organization of the state and the welfare of its citizens. 

And so I’ve been perplexed (for almost six decades) why, when it comes to politics, do conservatives default to their own state of mind as enforced by their Big Brother, nanny, superego (call it what you will)—their “conscience”? Is it all about them?

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I will do something here that I’ve never done before—say something nice about George W. Bush. He campaigned on a platform of “compassionate conservatism.” Though some have complained that the phrase was an oxymoron, nevertheless, whether his platform was good, bad, or indifferent, at least, being outwardly directed, it spared us the mental navel-gazing (how’s that for my weird locution of the week?) of all those conservative consciences.

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(1) A quick fingers-and-toes addition of Amazon offerings turned up a count of 16 conservative conscience books versus 2 non-conservative conscience political books.

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