Dead To Rights:
A Systemic Explanation for Why Conservative People and Belief Systems Exist
Further Subtitled
"You Are Not Suffering For No Reason"


Copyright © 2008 By Robin Artisson
All Rights Reserved.




Veteran of the Culture Wars

The term "culture war" has been coined to refer to many things, but it chiefly refers to the clash of opinions in Western cultures regarding many topics including sexual lifestyle choice, religion, morality, the structure of family, the moral basis of laws, the contentious "right to life" and "pro-choice" stances, and even spending. It even extends to opinions regarding what is "moral" or proper with respect to the arts and sciences.

People on both sides of the "opinion fence" often refer to themselves as a "culture"- those holding the anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia stances refer to themselves as members of a "culture of life", for instance; they (not surprisingly) call their opponents members of a "culture of death", though this is clearly a slanted label, a product of their own thinking which is merged with a purposeful use of language to act as a weapon against their enemies. Their opponents, on the other hand, may refer to themselves as a "culture of choice" or say that they support "reproductive freedom". Language, and how it is used, is all-revealing in these matters.

It is right that people who hold similar values and opinions should refer to themselves in terms of "culture"- the term "culture" is derived from "cult", which originally referred to a group of people who held the same beliefs and practiced similar patterns of behavior and expression of their ideals.

No matter who you are, you fall into some "culture"- whether you self-identify that way or not. Inevitably, your range of opinions and behaviors will fall into harmony with some group out there, whether or not that "group" consciously identifies itself as a group. When a group of people achieve enough communication and realize enough similarity of opinion and behavior, they usually attain what I call a consciousness of aggregation, and begin to feel the conscious and unconscious influence of the group as an entity which seems to be “more than the sum of the parts”. They begin to think and act in terms of the group at times, allowing the group’s goals and tendencies to affect how they interact with the world and others. They may give themselves a name as a group, try to organize, and try to protect one another or act in ways that lead to mutual benefit on the social level.

Whether you are part of a consciously identified group or not, you are enmeshed in a culture war that has been going on in some form for quite a long time. Unless you can do the impossible- refuse to have opinions and ideas- you will be drawn into this struggle, on some level. Even if you could find a "stance of no stances", you will still be affected by the culture war because you still have to live within a system of society in which all parts affect the other parts. Humorously enough, your "stance of no stances" will place you (usually) within the "liberal" segment of society, somewhere in the region of the agnostic/centrist/undecided population, which historically leans towards support for "sides" of the war that don't inhibit personal freedoms of thought and action.

The culture war is often broadly divided between the broad labels of "liberal" and "conservative". Of course, such an oversimplification is perilous: within the "liberal" spectrum (as with the conservative) there is enormous room for variation in thinking and acting. However, few people really see this; most people prefer the simpler, easier route of polarized labeling and the comfort of "hard dualism", no matter what important details get lost in the mixture.

The entire issue is extremely emotional. If you have identified yourself as a "liberal" in any manner, you've probably had moments of frustration or disgust when watching the wheels of conservative politics turn- and conservatives, of course, have the exact same reactions when the situation is reversed. What I would like to do is take a theoretical look at why categories and labels- and the locked-down perspectives that accompany them- arise at all, and how they persist.

I will do this, here in this paper, by examining the creature that is broadly (and dangerously) referred to as "conservative". For the purposes of this work, I will (with great reservation) allow myself to use the terminology of my polarized society, and refer broadly to "liberals" and "conservatives" as though they were two monolithic entities. I hope that my conclusions will justify this unfortunate initial oversimplification, and lend themselves to more subtlety of thought.



Enamored of Existing Evils

I have reasons for concentrating on conservative establishments of thinking or conservative institutions for this work; between the "liberal" and the "conservative" spectrums, conservative groups and people who self-identify as conservative represent persistence and a special breed of stability in my own view of social reality. They resist changes that more liberal thinkers would embrace. And in so doing, I believe they are adhering to a strategy- whether consciously or unconsciously- that they truly believe will lead to the best ends for them and their families. However annoying they may be to liberals, conservatives are often aiming for the same ends- they want their families to be safe and do well, and they want to be safe and do well. Motivationally, people may be the same all over, but what is different are their strategies for achieving those ends. Why so many strategies? It isn't primary motivation that divides "liberals" from "conservatives"; it is the variance in their strategies on all levels.

Going back to our initial over-simplified social perception: The conservative perspective is (at least outwardly) one of strong conviction and decision, whereas the liberal perspective is more ephemeral and prone to change. The liberal perspective is therefore harder to pin down, and harder to explain. The liberal perspective is, in my opinion, more complex. This is not to say that liberals do not share some of the "conscious or unconscious strategies" that conservatives share; liberals too, are doing what they think is best; the underlying logic and causes which inspire their route to this goal, however, are not so easy to see or predict.

Let it be said that I am not making any value judgments here regarding "complexity"- just because the liberal matrix of thinking or acting may be more "complex" doesn't make it "more true" or "more desirable", at least not in the way those words are usually understood.

Ambrose Bierce, one of my favorite humorists, defined a conservative as "A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others." What he is saying, in his lovely, equalizing manner, is that conservatives wish to go on making the same sorts of mistakes that people have always made, while liberals wish to make new ones. I enjoy this sort of thinking, and I quote it here, at the beginning of my essay, because I want to remind my readers (and myself) that this issue isn't simple, isn't a matter of "right vs. wrong". To engage in that sort of thinking at the outset will doom us to ending in a similar situation of simplicity. I am trying to move myself and my reading audience into an appreciation of how complex these things really are.



I’m No Unbiased Angel

Now that the first formalities have been dispensed with, let me tell you a few things about my personal biases. I consider myself to be on the "liberal" end of the spectrum, when compared to the "mainstream" of Western social thinking regarding laws, spending, religion, and social life. I personally think it very desirable that people overcome addiction to "either/or" thinking, and approach situations in a systemic way, from a perspective of inter-relatedness and mutual causality. Such a non-linear approach is characteristic of my own systemic thinking, which I unashamedly claim as my "paradigm": the horse of epistemology upon which I ride through life.

In my experience, I do not notice many of the people that I label as "conservative" making much effort to understand or implement the perspectives that I just mentioned. I notice a lot of polarized thinking, a lot of simplistic "it's either this way or that" thinking, and I see a lot of resistance to natural and sometimes necessary changes or alternative perspectives that I think society as a whole really needs. This represents my perspective, but I thought it fair to warn you, reader, that I am no more capable of true "objectivity" than anyone else.

I do not believe in the existence of a truly "objective" person. As human beings, we are characterized and defined by our perceptions- which are all slanted and skewed by our unconscious epistemologies, by our emotions, and by our desires. We all see the world through the goggles of our conscious opinions, and our unconscious tendencies. I, too, have a strategy, which is both conscious and unconscious, for how I believe I will achieve good ends, and how I can help my family and loved ones to attain those same ends. And I'm very comfortable with that.

Unlike many of my opponents, I am far more aware (I think) of where my "strategies" come from- I have spent time working on understanding how and why I think the way I do, and even exploring where the seeds of my unconscious tendencies may derive from. I believe that I can speak with a special "authority" (if you want to use that word) which is given to me by my awareness of much of my own conditioning.

That I continue to "go along" with aspects of my conditioning is anchored in the fact that I feel- after considering how my conditioning tends to affect this world of my experience- that it leads to more constructive ends for myself and for other people. By "constructive" I mean it leads to "outcome perspectives", perspectives that I embrace which treasure diversity, value the humane, equitable treatment of others, and which place a premium on people having the education and information needed to study themselves and this world deeply, allowing them to make up their minds about things based on something more than unconscious compulsion or habit of conditioned social thinking. Aristotle said that "an unexamined life wasn't worth living", and I have to agree with him on this point- and goodness knows I don't agree with him on everything.

I have looked into the deep soil from which my roots grew, and I have derived from that place a vision of where my branches will eventually reach- I believe that I have, in a strange sense, brought the beginning and the end together.

So now you know- I am biased. However, the difference between me and most of my conservative opponents is that I know I’m biased- and that is the “difference that makes a difference.”



Defining “Conservative”

Now, to the meat of the matter. Conservativity is a system, like anything else. Conservative views, beliefs, and institutions, operate according to the principles of a system. Systems theory leads us to view all organizations of energy or patterns of communication (such as the human body, the ecosystem, or even ideological institutions) as being similar. They operate according to similar laws. This may sound like a dangerous a priori assumption, but it holds up to observation quite well. Like anyone else, I frame my reality with the language and perspectives that I hold dear; for me, it is that of systems theory. I punctuate my experiences in systemic terms.

I justify this by pointing out the fact that systems theory does not make value judgments about the parts of systems or the interactive products of systems: outcomes are only given "value" by the observer or experiencer. Thus, my epistemology is not an invader of other people's minds; it does not demand that they see how "wrong" they are; it only helps me to understand relationships, outside of the notion of "value". What I myself decide thereafter, regarding the "value" of what I have seen, is a personal matter, and one that I choose to either lay aside, or engage fully, depending on what good I believe will come of it.

Conservativity, defined by me, is "the tendency to resist change with respect to traditional (long-held and perpetuated patterns) of belief, value-assignment, thinking, and behavior." And it is no surprise that such a resistance should exist- this resistance is characteristic of all systems. One might say that all systems are necessarily conservative by nature. Even "liberality" and "liberal systems" resist changes on some level- and in this sense, they can easily become (and often do become) new "conservatives".

The true question is "to what extent are systems prone to change, prone to revision, and open to new input from outside the system?" This line of questioning defines how "liberal" a liberal system truly is- and how conservative a conservative system is. The fact that systems of conservative or liberal thought vary greatly is reflected, even in our language, by the existence of people who are described as "liberal conservatives" and "conservative liberals".



Homeostasis

"Resistance" is an important concept to understand here. In every system, organic or non-organic, certain "rules" organize and maintain the system. Certain oft-repeated actions, ideas, motions, and understandings dominate every system. Every system, after a point, attains what we call "homeostasis"- it achieves homeostatic optima- and then, it works, through a combination of all its parts, to maintain that homeostasis. It resists- again, through a combination of its parts working together- any attempt on the part of an outside force to change the system. The mechanisms that arise within any system that resist outside change are called (appropriately) "homeostatic mechanisms".

The organic system of the human body is an excellent illustration of this concept of homeostasis. Your body- every person's body- has a homeostasis that it fights to maintain every day, which assures its healthy operation. The intrusion of outside "input"- in the form of potentially dangerous bacteria, viruses, diseases, and the like, must be met with resistance by the body- these things must either be harmoniously integrated into the body, or destroyed.

Even a blade or a bullet suddenly blasting into the body is an outside input or intrusion which immediately causes catastrophic changes to the body's state of homeostatic optima. If those changes cannot be met with reciprocal changes, brought in by the body to stabilize the system, and allow for the integration we call "healing" to occur, the body will die; the system will be so altered that it can no longer function as it did before.

In the case of a dying body, the system will no longer be able to maintain it's boundaries- it will dissolve into the greater system of life around it, and give its parts over to decay and transformation, becoming a part of a larger system of organic transactions which are always going on, and which the body is always a part of. "Human life" in terms of the body only occurs during the time that the body-system can maintain its "boundaries" in a successful manner against the larger "suprasystem" of life.

Of course, we use language to "identify" and label each "body" as an individual system within the larger system of life, and this, among other things, leads to our self-identity with our bodies. But the fact remains that the body isn't discrete or ultimately separate from the larger system; we are the ones, with our labeling minds, who nominate the "boundaries" and set it so with words.

Even during its "life" as a discrete system (so defined by us), the body is dependant on the operations of the "larger system" in which it is embedded. It is dependant on certain inputs and transactions with its "environment". The body-system simply has mechanisms that determine what inputs are useful and which are dangerous. And it does its best to maintain that status quo. We are all mortal beings- the body cannot maintain that status quo indefinitely. Eventually, sweeping changes will occur to the body system which will dissolve it.



Nobody Thinks They’re a Bad Person

When we deal with conservativity, we aren't dealing with a biological system; we are dealing with a system of thinking and ideas. Of course, as I said before, the "entity" may be quite different, but the rules will remain precisely the same. To discover the genesis of conservative idea-systems, we have to venture into the world of theory now, and suggest some possible seeds from which they may grow.

In this region of thinking, we run up against the same old danger of over-simplification. It is tempting to try and nominate "just this" or "just that" as the "ultimate causes" of things. But over-simplification is a danger, and I am trying to walk a thin line in this work, a line between nominating some reasonable "root causes" that constitute the basics of a good theory of the underlying forces that give foundation to various conservative edifices of thinking, and becoming too over-simplistic.

To mitigate this danger, I will try to limit my theoretical thinking to causes, goals, and motivations that are common to all life-forms, and therefore to all systems. We all know what systems seem to "desire"- they work and interact for stability in operation, or homeostasis. A better, simpler way to put it might be "survival".

In my way of thinking, I would rather consider conservative people as holding belief and behavior-systems which are ultimately rooted in a basic, natural desire to survive (and thrive) rather than to assume some "later" tertiary cause, such as a desire to "be right about religion" or "be right about the proper way to be a moral person". So many people I know think that conservatives are the way they are because "they want to feel superior to others" or because "they think they know the right way to live". In systems thinking, we have to consider that every person, despite what they may consciously think, is influenced by many unconscious factors as well, and that every person is doing the best they can do, given the limitations of their own conscious and unconscious conditioning.

This is a radical notion. This is also why few people (if any) think that they are a "bad" person- even when a large amount of other people may scream out at them or accuse them of being positively horrendous. People may interact in very destructive ways (from our various perspectives) and still be fully unaware of the fact- they have little choice but to act according to "what they have to work with", on the level of idea, concept, perception, belief, and on the level of the unconscious machinations of their personal mental system. Their behavior always makes sense to them, on some level, within their sphere of understanding and interaction.

And no matter how "horrendous" we may consider another's thinking or behavior, we can be certain that the thinking or the behavior is meaningful- it serves a crucial covert or overt purpose within their personal mind-system. That purpose, of course, is the maintenance of homeostasis. People think what they think and do what they do because these things serve a needful function within the systems of their lives and minds.

They resist changes to that thinking and behavior because that is the nature of systemic interaction. But no system is "cut off" totally from the larger system of interactions of which it is a part; outside data and input is constantly bombarding us and entering our psychic sphere, and the extent to which we can be flexible enough to integrate it, or strong enough to resist it, defines how rigid we are, how "open minded" we are, how prone to anxiety or frustration we are, how "flighty" we may seem, and all the other qualities we name.



The Landscape is Survival

Now, the time has come for me to drop the name of the beast. I said earlier that I wanted to "explain" conservative belief systems- and, perhaps, all belief systems- in terms of something "universal" and deeply fundamental to mankind. And, in honor of that, I have evolved a theory which does just that. The primordial, deeply-rooted beast of an "ultimate cause" in my theory is the simple biological imperative of survival. I doubt I'm the first to settle on "survival" as an explanation for complex human realities; I won't be the last. But let's fly with this for a while.

Question one emerges: does survival, a fundamental and universal biological urge and need, manifest itself within the highly complex mental and social systems of human beings, to act as the first and most important foundational basis for systems of thinking and acting? I believe so. I will suggest a model that would seem to support this contention. But first I must ask a "leading up" question: what is the relationship between the basic imperative of survival, and the complexity of human cognition, behavior, and epistemology? I believe that the urge to survive is nothing less than the hidden impelling factor, the real "wind in the sails" of our complex behaviors and beliefs that have evolved to great complexity in the vast sweep of human cultural, mental, and social evolution. No matter how complex beliefs get, no matter how complex societies get, no matter what secondary or tertiary justifications evolve to rationalize human behavior and thinking, the enormous emotional power behind it all flows from one of the most hard-wired facts of our existence: our need to survive.

We may live in a modern world which is far distant from the "fang and talon" brutality of the most primitive times, but one thing certainly remains the same- how we think and act, and how we interact, still determines whether or not we survive or thrive. As the world has increased in social complexity, so have strategies for survival.

I believe that in the modern day, as in distant pre-history, two natural imperatives exist that all people work to realize:

1. All human beings try to maximize resource availability: including food, money, and shelter among others. All of these things are necessary for survival.

2. All human beings try to maximize the benevolent regard of others in their community: this assures safety and status, both of which increase the chances of survival greatly.


It is clear that these two imperatives are tied together- one will have more resource availability if one is established in the benevolent regard of other human beings alongside whom one must live and interact. Recursively, people with more resources will have an easier time establishing themselves in the benevolent regard of other people, for a variety of reasons.

Either way, I believe these two motivations are universal within human groups, and the need to implement them is native and natural to every human being. Those human beings who are "more successful" at attaining these goals are those who have better mental and interactive strategies for attaining them. This is a very important point.

Certain strategies can be tried and abandoned in favor of more successful ones- a constant sequence of natural selection is presented here, which inevitably results in a few strategies being "selected" for inclusion within a range of thinking and behavior which a society or a group of people will declare "the best"- and then, with those selected strategies in full operation, a system of life-transaction will arise which will resist change to those systems, and be defended by the various mechanisms of mind that stringently defend any system- and thus, in the realm of the mind and society, conservativity is born.

Again I must caution both my reader and myself that this sort of thinking may pass close to the "oversimplified" pitfall that I have pledged to avoid. The reason why I don't think this is "over-simple" is because, (despite the fact that I have tried to trace all social/mental systems to two basic goals and the strategies that form around them), these goals are not themselves simple things, and they certainly have not been “simple things” in conjunction with the amazing complexity of the societies that have sprung up in the last 4000 years.

Many "life strategies" of great complexity have been attempted by all people and all societies. Many have, at times, been held up as the "right" or proper way to establish ones prosperity and the prosperity of society. Many have crumbled or been ejected by force; many still exist. This is not a simple matter, any more than a forest of oak trees is a "simple" matter, even though the entire forest may have begun from an acorn or two.



Time-Honored Strategies of Conservative Living

In every modern society, (in common, perhaps, with many pre-modern societies) there are time-tested ways of establishing oneself and one's family within the positive or benevolent regard of your fellow man. Certain of these "time honored ways" stand out more than others.

To conform to the dominant religious patterns of your society is one of the best ways to establish oneself in the benevolent regard of one's social group. To pay homage to the dominant religious pattern of your group assures the others that you are a person of "character", or a person who embraces the same moral codes, and whose behavior (and to an extent, thinking) will be predictable within a broad range. This predictability, which is somewhat assured by consent of belief, makes a person "safe" in the eyes of his fellow man. It diminishes fear.

Conforming your family's reproductive life-pattern to that of the social group is another: if you marry "properly"- seeking intimacy within the boundaries of dominant social sexual propriety, keep the correct number of acceptable spouses or mates, and condition your children to act in the same manner, you not only show further allegiance to the values of the group, but you make available, in an acceptable and easy-to-access manner, the genetic resources of your family to the genetic pool of your social group. Oftentimes, religious patterns add their sanction to these activities of marriage and mating, and by conforming to the acceptable mold, one "doubles" their conformity to the religious standards of a society.

Living in a conservative manner, one must never vary too much from the mainstream's perception of what is right or wrong. The collective guilt of societies over wasteful living or their destructive treatment of other societies (or even minorities within their own group) must be resisted as a threat to the stability of the dominant, shared mental system. That guilt must be "discharged" or re-allocated into acceptable places; the acceptable place is never squarely within the system, or on the shoulders of the members of the system. Extraneous causes or convenient scapegoats have to be found and implicated.

In some cases, as in the modern day, the discharging of guilt has again fallen under the auspices of religion- dominant modern religions have arisen to offer an "acceptable place" to unload the burden of guilt, in the form of scapegoat Gods, redeemers, and saviors. To stand contrary in belief to such a religious pattern is devastating to the goal of keeping oneself within the benevolent regard of others who are enmeshed in the pattern; one’s seeming acceptance of the “guilt” of the society indicates to others (who are not ready or capable of accepting it) that the accepting person views society as wicked or flawed, or is otherwise not in full mental agreement and allegiance with society.

The criticism (or even persecution) of non-conforming members of society is another time-honored method of keeping oneself well established within the group. Upholding the traditions and beliefs of the society is a "positive" way of showing support; this criticism and attacking of nonconformists is a "negative" way of showing support, but it has a positive impact on the pundit: it re-affirms to the mainstream of the group the good character and reliable, predictable behavior of the person. It shows their desire to protect the group from possible dangers. By forcing a strong contrast to become apparent between the person who makes the criticism of the “undesirables” and the “undesirables” themselves, an enfranchised member of the society seems very noble or loyal.

Point for point, these ways of behaving, these strategies, serve a very useful, profound, and powerful function- they make survival as assured as it can be. They also make prosperity more likely.



Sunk Deep, Deep in the Ground

It is important now to discuss how the above basic "social strategies", which I believe derive from the more basic survival needs, become distanced from their primordial roots, and become concealed within more complex "wrapping". My basic idea is this: the more society evolves and increases in population- and therefore increases in the likelihood of problematic interactions or situations- increasingly complex social solutions are presented to maintain the homeostasis of the system of society as a whole.

A point comes when social strategies have become so complex, and have been in existence (in various antecedent forms) for such long stretches of time, that the awareness of the origins of their weighty, immense patterns eventually becomes lost to the culture's historical memory, and furthermore, the entire body of the habitual "social choreography" sinks- or becomes "deeply embedded" in the collective mind and reasoning of society as a whole.

From this point, there is no longer a discernable connection between "what people are doing" and "what the original purpose was"- "as far "back" as anyone can remember, this is always how it was done" is all the average member of the society can usually tell you, and the authorities of the society (like the common enfranchised member) cannot normally rouse themselves from their enmeshment with the long-established pattern to consider doing things too differently. It is possible to do something for so long that one forgets why they are doing it, and yet, feels anxious if they try to question it or do something different; I think this fact of human behavior affects societies as a whole, because (as stated before) both the individual mental system and the group/social system are goverened by similar laws.

Religions may create and maintain a justification for a society's original ancient pattern-setting, though by this theoretical "late date" that I am discussing, the time of the "sinking" and severing of the "pattern origins", those justifications are themselves entangled within a system of mythology which is normally very obscure or so metaphorical as to be bewildering to the average person, who will (at any rate) accept the myths as having some sort of "truth" to them worth preserving, and with them, society itself.

The underlying, ultimate purposes for the society-system, which are survival and prosperity, are still (during these periods) motivating the entire systemic edifice from deep "below", and, usually, the entire edifice is succeeding, more or less, in its original goals. And within that edifice, within the minds of people who have only ever known the system in its late stages of operation, many homeostatic mechanisms proliferate within the psychic sphere of each individual, mechanisms based on simpler goals and strategies, but which have emerged in new, more surface-level forms, and which assure obedience and resistance to change. Some of those mechanisms are easy to see; some of them, being unconscious and covert, are not so easy, but they operate all the same.

There is a deeply-embedded notion that divergence from the conservative framework will constitute a betrayal of family and friends; that it may constitute a betrayal of “God” or the vows of religion; that it may betray the standards of morality espoused by society, religion, or both; that it may betray some “chosen status” or “elect status” which the society programs the members to accept as a personal identity. There are covert and overt mechanisms in place that lead a diverging member to feel that they may be responsible for “misguiding” their children or other youth whom they come into contact with, or that they lose the approval of others for many other reasons.

A more deeply buried, mechanism is the memory of the “initial stability” experienced during childhood, when the foundations of the conservative worldview and system were laid down within the mind- you may think of it as the “original benevolent regard” that some children felt through acceptance by parents and peers and which they were able to easily generate through conformity to family and social expectations. This “fond memory” of the first and most foundational experience of acceptance and stability is not easily shaken off, and to an extent, many spend their lives seeking to re-establish it, in a like manner to the way in which they first established it: through conformity to rules and expectations, or integration into families and groups of people who themselves conform.

All of these deeply embedded mechanisms of homeostasis will act as covert or overt justification for the resistance of inputs, transformations, and ideas foreign to the conservative system. Few people have the strength of will or differentiation of character required to overcome these packets of mental inertia.

As time passes, and as the world-system proliferates into complex ranges of interaction that even dwarf those that were once called "complex" in earlier times, personal and social systems and strategies- even those given great and holy sanction by cultural traditions and cultural religious institutions- may begin to lag behind or fail in their goals. Oftentimes, contact with other societies- perhaps societies with more aggressive or workable strategies for survival in the new realities of the world- causes various levels of catastrophic or sweeping change for a society, which themselves lead to new levels of crisis that require extraordinary measures to answer. Societies can become unstable or crumble during such stressful times, and their “extraordinary measures” put in place to spare themselves from the crisis can range from bizarre to brutal or inhumane.

In the same manner that the human body must one day succumb to disease or old age after a long lifespan, the empire of the ancient, complex social system must eventually pass away when its time has run out, and the complexities or changes of the outside world can no longer be successfully integrated or resisted.



Religion Takes a Walk on the Deathly Side

Religion, as you may have noticed, emerges at all levels of my theorizing here. The character and systemic reality of religion is, in my estimation, one of the most powerful, mobilizing, stabilizing, and potentially dangerous forces in any society, and in all of human social history. This is not to say that I am against religion; no, I am a very religious man, myself. I just don't personally allow my religious considerations or beliefs to "sink" me within an unconscious mire of compulsion and unquestioned thinking and behavior.

And yet, it seems that this very thing is what religion amounts to in the modern world, for most people. The problem here, which I must discuss, deals with how "religion" has changed, over the last 1700 years, into something very different from what it originally was. The reasons why it changed are simple, and a good guess at the systemic realities behind those changes has been made in this paper: religious systems, like all systems, perpetuate themselves through modification and integration of new data and inputs, or through resistance of certain inputs from the "outside". Religious systems in the West changed through modification, as a means to survive, and those that could not, died.

My "religion", for lack of a better word, is a modern recension of the old polytheistic religious-patterns which once upheld the edifice of ancient Pagan societies in Europe. The original polytheistic religious patterns and systems were either altered into a very new form, or destroyed by the incursion of new religious patterns and ideas from outside of Europe. Now, in the modern day, I have made a conscious decision to study, compare, and attempt to recreate, as well as I can within a modern context, the patterns of polytheistic belief and behavior as a means to re-capturing what I believe was the wisdom of those times- wisdom that was largely lost through various phases of cultural change.

Ancient polytheistic religions in Europe didn't deal with the idea of "death" in the same way that modern religions do. In a way, modern religions are like a lifelong preparation for death- and offer a way of living that results in eternal life or happiness. Such an idea was foreign and practically unknown in the ancient world. Death was a transition out of the social group, and into a new order of being which was either mysterious, or pictured as a dim, distant, or dark condition. The glory of the dead was honored, but their "existence" after death was a shadowy and mysterious as the kingdom of Hades or the Underworld to which they were believed to descend.

Those societies in Pagan Europe that took a "brighter" view of the afterlife, allowing visions of peace and happiness to enter into their thinking on post-mortem existence, still put more emphasis on worthy living and memory than they did on death and what would happen afterwards. Life was not a preparation for death; death could be a glorious occasion for those who sought glory and fame through battle, but life was chiefly about living well according to the patterns laid down by society.

Did the ancients fear death? Certainly it seems likely; we are not so different from people who lived just 1000-1700 years ago. But what is important to remember is that they had different models of death- different traditional understandings of death which altered their emotional experience of it, and which gave them a context to place death within- and all of this is very different from the emotional experience we have of death now, and the context we place it in, which is born in the Judeo-Christian religious complex.

Whereas death was once a transition into another shadowy realm, or some other place, with little or no notion of "judgment" after death, now death is a passage into the great and unpredictable anxiety of judgment, after which many believe they may enter into terrific and eternal torment and perdition. This "anxiety beyond the grave" has an equal, mutual reaction within this life: an "anxiety to get in the doors of the correct church" so that one can assure the best possible chances at the judgment after death. Religion, which once focused its celebrations on life and interactions within this life, now focuses on death and judgment in the afterlife, and inspires great fear as its primary motivator of conformity.



The Decline of Religion and the Fall of an Age

"Religion", which literally means "to bring together again" or "to tie together again", once focused on bringing people together as communities, both as members of a community of human beings, and as members of a community with the Gods. Pagan sacrifices dealt with having a communal meal, blessed by the Gods, which tied all of those who shared in it together. Pagan religions sanctified the sexual realities of human life, and the Gods and Goddesses blessed lovers and married couples alike; no notion of guilt was attached to the simple natural biological realities of human life.

Today, religion has fallen to become a list of superstitious and arbitrary instructions telling people "the right way to live" to avoid torment in the afterlife. Modern religions in the west are morbid in the extreme, focusing on their perceptions of the constant presence of death and danger in the world, the constant fearful judgments of their "God", the pervasive nature of "evil" present in people and society, and always focusing on the ephemeral nature of life. They turn a suspicious, sometimes hateful eye towards the pleasures of this life in what appears to be a need to force people away from appreciating the positive organic realities of human existence and forcing them towards a focus on "eternal bliss" in a supposed afterlife.

Modern mainstream Western religions have no means by which to allow people feel comfortable in this world, or to view this world as anything other than “fallen” and temporary. Such attitudes towards earthly life are very dismissive, and lead to other, more terrible implications for social peace, environmental responsibility, and the nature of conflict between societies and nations.

Some modern Christian groups have attempted to stave off these harmful attitudes, and begun emphasizing the supposed "loving" side of their deity, and the "life-affirming" aspects of their faiths, but the attempt really comes too late, and too little. They cannot overcome the world-despising and flesh-despising messages found in their scriptures; they cannot overcome the harmful anthropocentrism, nor unpack the scriptural metaphors whose “deeper” meanings- if, indeed, they ever had “deeper meanings- have long ago been forgotten. They cannot overcome the contradictions inherent in their scriptures; and they cannot mitigate the intolerant attitudes captured in their scriptures towards other people of different religions and lifestyles, without abandoning mainstream participation in their faiths-communities.

In a situation of fateful irony, mainstream religions are packed full of people who have the normal human desire to “be” good, and to “do” good, but their religions, in their present day forms, can offer them little true support or resources in the pursuit of that goal, and more often than not actually condition them to fail or be inhibited in their quest for goodness. Furthermore, their epistemological notions of “goodness” are often tainted at the source by the harmful patterns and understandings born in scriptures and traditional teachings.

"Religion" has become tainted by fear. Fear is the singular force that makes the blossoming of true wisdom an impossibility, though in a sick study of contrasts, Christian scriptures give fear the honor of being the "beginning of wisdom". For those of us in the modern day- myself included- who refuse to become a victim of other people's fears, such a belief is beyond unacceptable.

Religion once existed to sanctify the activities of human life and establish humans consciously within a larger context of life, which included the Gods and other spirits, with whom mankind could have a positive relationship. Today, religion has degenerated into a narrow context, an exclusivist context of elitism and resistance to any form of free-thinking that might upset the scheme of control and fear which together compel people to become and remain members of a certain religious organization, and to give money to them.

Ancient religions allowed for flexibility within the system of human mind, life, and society by accepting the worship of many Gods and ideals; the modern religions scorn any notion of “other Gods” and thus set themselves up to resist the simplest and most essential part of the human experience of the Unseen world: the reality of spiritual diversity. Such a limitation cannot last for long, as the world (and the weight of human experience) will destroy such a notion. In the time that notion persists, more and more people will feel the disturbing quandary caused by it- the heart knows that it does not dwell alone in this universe, and that the source of our diversity is not singular, unless one wishes to do as the ancients wisely did, and see Nature herself as the singular source of all things.

Religion's evolution has not been a positive one- though it is important to recall that, strictly speaking, “evolution” is never truly predictable and linear, nor always from a “lesser thing” to a “greater thing”. Evolution simply refers to change over time, and from the perspective of many, things don’t necessarily get “better” over time. It is interesting and telling to me that the decline of modern Western religion seems to correspond well with the decline of conservative social systems, and conservative society as a whole.

As a reaction to the decline of religion, I, and many others like me, have looked to the past, with a modern and flexible lens of investigation, to see if it is possible to recover what was lost before the "divergence". As it turns out, it is possible; and ironically, it is the increasing complexity of the modern systemic realities of the world- and the corresponding decline of conservative institutions- that made our undertaking of reviving such ancient things possible.

People may wish to argue this point, but religion has never been sucessfully separated from any human society. It is a part of society, on a fundamental level. The success of societies, the success of social strategies, necessarily includes the participation of religious structures.

I might argue that personal success, personal internal strategies and patterns of thinking and behavior rely on "religion", though "religion" will mean different things to different people here. For those people most integrated with a society, the mainstream religion or religious pattern of that society will be of crucial importance to them on more than one level. If religion has fallen into bizarre, self-approving and self-perpetuating patterns of defeatism, limitation, and strange gulfs of despise for the basics of human nature, and helped to distance people from nature itself, religion can (and I believe has) quickly become a threat to future survival of societies and individuals.

I think that history can support my contention- many individual lives and societies have been lost to religiously-motivated nonsense. And within those societies that embrace harmful patterns of religion, cancerous conflicts have sprung up around the topic- conflicts driven, as you might have guessed, by conservative vs. liberal interaction. Could it be that the "neo-Pagan" movement, or the "Earth-centered" spiritual movements, are attempts, on the part of the greater, worldwide system of society, to "heal" itself of an imbalance caused by other parts of the system that have grown malignant through long-term interaction?

Is there a homeostatic balancing act that stretches over countless thousands of years, and whose "balances" and "imbalances" are not so apparent? It is easy to think that Judeo-Christianity simply plopped along and established some new "homeostasis" within Western societies- but did it? Perhaps the entire "history" of the Christian West has been a "swing", and not a "stability", and only now are we seeing the "counterswing" as the system attempts to re-establish a deeper, healthier homeostasis. It's an interesting thought, regardless of the reality.



Is Conservativity Necessary?

Survival and fear have an easy-to-understand relationship. We know on the deepest levels that we must do our best to survive, for the alternative is to fall by the wayside, and give up our personal boundaries- of mind and body- to the larger system of life, in dissolution. Whether or not this leads to some new existence is not the point- the body itself, on the biological level, resists catastrophic changes, and this manifests in our emotional and psychic spheres as a natural fear of injury, disease, and death. It is unavoidable.

Being conservative, and everything that stands for- the safe operation of and participation in successful strategies for survival and stability- is the ultimate panacea against fear. Modern religion, mutated as it is into a "threat in the afterlife" monstrosity, both adds to that fear and then offers to take it away- though never completely, for one can never be too certain of "God's" judgment- in the form of "saving truths" and "sacraments" by which "redemption" MAY be affected.

Is there a need for conservativity? It may surprise you to hear me say it, but absolutely. The stability of society is certainly held in place by the presence of so many predictable patterns of behavior and thinking on the parts of so many people. There is no doubt that "conservativity" is a part of the larger system of society that plays an important role in social homeostasis.

But what are the dangers of conservativity, really? To be clear, I do not believe it had as many dangers in the past as it has now. Now, in the proliferation of complexity which we call our "modern world", in our world with no real borders and free information superexchange, in a world where power is invested in numbers and virtual space and radically different cultures have mingled freely and rapidly, old conservative strategies of survival, prosperity, and stability- and all the complex layers of culture that have grown up over them, up to and including religion- simply may no longer work. If they have not ceased working yet, they are moribund; they are in advanced stages of decrepitude.

As I said earlier in this work, the constant changing and growing complexity of world-situations causes an eventual death-blow to come to social systems. Everything has a lifespan, from a man or a woman to an empire.



The Last Hope

The only hope for social systems is the extent to which they can be flexible in the face of changes and inputs that are becoming more and more rapid and extreme. And the "elements" within those systems which allow for acceptance, flexibility, and integration of new information are not the conservative members- it is the liberal members. Liberal strategies are no less about survival, but they are strategies that are based on acceptance, testing, and integration of large amounts of data from the "outside", based on what parts of that new data seem to integrate best.

Liberal strategies for resistance and integration necessarily have a lower "standard" for what gets in the door than conservative ones, but like any other system with homeostatic mechanisms, not everything is allowed to remain "within" or be integrated. Even liberal systems will discard certain information or fully resist certain changes. Conservative systems may prove to have longer life-spans in the long run, or maintain a more cohesive identity for a longer period of time compared to liberal ones- but is the purpose of human society and life to “last the longest”? Or is it to have good quality of life? The answer to this question casts a long shadow over everything we strive for in our modern world.

My final point is that the modern world, the modern "spinning" of the suprasystem of life, can and will wash away- with massive crushing blows of information and complex interactions- rigidly conservative systems. A living tree bends with the wind; a dead tree snaps in it. There is no doubt that conservative systems once served the stability of society in some positive way, at a previous time. But times change; systems must evolve, Fate’s wheel must turn, and the character of societies undergoes constant revision.

What remains, when this process is moving forward (as it always must) is the omnipresent reality of change, the people who are outfitted well to cope with change and adapt to them, and, of course, the people who are addictively entwined with the older “well-worn strategies”, who can find little release from their frustration and fear as all they love and know is washed away.

Their reaction to this experience is to criticize, blame, persecute, and denounce. And so it goes- this is where we are now. You've seen the ranting, the blaming, the persecution, and the denunciations. You’ve seen what looks like willful ignorance on the part of presumably intelligent people, and willful, blind resistance to what would otherwise be considered reasonable ideas or changes. Chances are, you see them on the news every day, or read them in papers. You see them on the internet. You might have them in your house.

How strange to think that even these final products of the doomed, rigid edifices of countless conservative belief systems and social systems still serve a function, a function which is logical and understandable (and some might say predictable) within the greater, deeper context of systems thinking. Truly “sunk” conservatives cannot simply change- the idea is not just unlikely; it is fully impossible.

Too much time, effort, energy, and emotion has been invested in their strategies- strategies that once worked well, in former times- and which have assured, thus far, their approval, their prosperity, and their survival, at the basic level. Their entire measure of self, of goodness, of morality, their entire “lifeboat system" of beliefs that staved off the fear of death and extinction, the approval of their families and even their beliefs regarding the well-being of their families: all of it rides on their conformity to the strictures of their system.

To give it up would mean the end of their psychic order, of the very basic pylons of their personalities, and perhaps their sanity. There is no going further. Only catastrophic events- which the world will inevitably provide- can shatter the crystallized system and (possibly) free these people, though it will more likely drive them mad or kill them first. Welcome to our human fairy tale- which is every bit as dark as any Grimm tale ever told.

If you want to blame something for the outrageous conservatives you have to suffer through everyday on TV or the internet, or at work or school, blame whatever forces drove human societies to proliferate into reaches of extreme complexity- for it was that complexity that caused basic survival strategies to become exponentially more and more complicated, until the basic common sense needed to "see" the connection between what we do and why we do it was lost. The "new" explanations for the connection between what we do and why we do it are drawn from religious myth and metaphor, from the shallow and biased rhetoric of social leaders and forces, and from a deep core of homeostatic tendency that everyone feels but from which only a few can really shake free.

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