A few weeks ago, I posted an extensive rebuttal of a rather lazy claim at one of two Oz blogs that represent significant ophthalmic health hazards – Blog RightThinker. I figure it’s about time I took a look at the other major cause of ocular muscle fatigue, Oz Conservative.
The problem that Oz Conservative has at the moment is that – beyond Alannah Hill dresses – he doesn’t know what he stands for. He knows what he stands against – “liberalism” and various offshoots of “liberalism” – such as feminism. But, without the liberal to lambast he’s at a loss to enunciate what it is he stands for.
I’m sorry – that last paragraph was fatuous and inaccurate. It should read:
The problem I have with Oz Conservative has at the moment is that – beyond Alannah Hill dresses – I don’t know what he stands for. I know what he stands against – “liberalism” and various offshoots of “liberalism” – such as feminism. But, without the liberal to lambast he seems at a loss to enunciate what it is he stands for.
When Mark Richardson, proprietor of Oz Conservative uses the word “liberal” it has a special meaning, akin to the US usage of “liberal” as shorthand for “not a Republican”. According to Mark, liberals of all stripes are slaves to a notion of personal autonomy that originates with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. No, I’d never heard of him before either.
Anyway, thanks to old Giovanni, everyone to the left of Mark and his supportive readers is a sad, hag-ridden neurotic striving against the forces of biology, gender and race, to achieve some sort of Kantean autonomy or Sartrean authenticity. Or something like that. Mark has recently discovered “modern liberalism” citing a column by someone else I’d never heard of before, Lawrence Auster:
Liberalism began, in the 17th and 18th centuries … by declaring that convictions about God and religion should play no role in politics because they lead to deadly conflict. Instead of being ordered by religious authority, society was to be ordered according to neutral procedures based on the recognition of everyone’s equal rights.
According to Mark this doesn’t explain the origins of liberalism – it predates John Locke, for instance, who was its first significant exponent. Just how far liberalism predates Locke might be gauged from Liberalism by John Gray, a “Liberalism 101″ text that I recently acquired:
…Especially noteworthy among the Greeks are the Sophists, sceptical thinkers who, in making a sharp distinction between the natural and the conventional, tended to assert the universal equality of men… The special force of the Sophistic distinction between nature and convention was, of course, to reject the idea of natural slavery. The rhetorician Alcidamas is reported to have asserted that ‘The gods made all men free; nature made none a slave.’
However, having made that one small, progressive step towards understanding that liberalism might not be about pursuing genuine autonomy for oneself and inflicting on others the social arrangements that make it possible, Mark seems to be backsliding again. Here, he trots out the old “equal but different line” on the Venus/Mars problem and here he’s gone right back to his favourite liberal straw man:
Let’s say that liberals want us to be self-defined. What kind of communal identity might allow us to achieve this goal?
Certainly not the traditional ethnic one. A traditional ethnic culture is inherited rather than self-selected, so it fails the test of allowing self-definition.
But that was just the warm up – in his latest post, he gets right off the planet, with the help of Antony Esolen (no, never heard of him before either):
Women do not in fact civilize men; they domesticate men, as I’ve said before. Men civilize men. There’s a difference.
What is that difference? A soldier in a cavalry unit who spends most of his time in barracks or under the skies, may well be more civilized, more trained to think of and to act for the common good, to command other men or to obey, than many a high-priced lawyer or even college professor. He’s not domesticated, though, and his new bride at first might find him pretty hard to live with.
On the other hand, men who live comfortable lives apart from other men, taking no initiative for the common good, considering only their wives and children and not the welfare of anybody else’s children, never to be relied upon in time of public need, may be domesticated but not civilized. You might find plenty of men of the former sort at the inception of a great nation. You will find plenty of men of the latter sort at its decline.
That’s from Esolen. Here’s what Mark reckons to it:
It’s an argument worth considering. I think perhaps my father’s generation might fall into the domesticated but not civilised category. They were generally good family men, but they didn’t seem to take a wider responsibility in the defence of their own tradition.
Sorry mate, but fables about the US Cavalree sitting around in wooden forts waiting for the injuns to attack, or riding the prairies looking for wagon trains to rescue in the nick of time don’t amount to an argument. Wishful thinking is more like it.
To his credit, Mark doesn’t go all the way with Esolen, whose ideas suggest that the best way to keep men civilised is to keep the sexes equal but separate – as the Spartans did in ancient Greece and these blokes do, in present day Papua New-Guinea. No, Mark wants us to get back to the more domesticated state of his father’s generation and be civilised as well. Assuming, of course, that the two goals aren’t mutually exclusive.
like, took from yer previous…
as a fiend of LOVEJOY
comin’ sometimes outa the so called OPPOSITION to confuse…END the ACCEPTED, WHAT TOO MANY SAY, YESTERDAY
keep on keepin’ on…
a raise a beer ta ya!
lol…
N’
Gummo, I think you did a reasonable job in presenting my views. There are a few things, though, that I’d like to respond to.
First, it’s true that I mostly focus on criticising liberalism. This doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t know what I stand for. I focus on liberalism because it’s the reigning political orthodoxy which undermines the things I consider to be important.
Second, I do use the word liberal in a particular way to refer to the principles underlying mainstream modern politics. Although there may be genuine conservatives in the right wing parties, it’s my view that both left and right generally share underlying liberal principles, and that the distinction between them mostly has to do with secondary questions within liberalism (such as how best to regulate a society based on the liberal view of the individual).
Third, I do believe that one important principle of liberalism is that we are made human by our capacity to be self-defining (to determine for ourselves the nature of who we are, to be self-authoring etc).
I’ve given countless examples of this belief at work, including from recognised figures within liberalism. I’ve also tried to spell out the (largely unforeseen) negative consequences in adopting this principle.
But two points. First, although I’ve mentioned Pico as having been the earliest writer I’ve found to clearly express this idea, I don’t view him as the “liberal founder” or anything like it. Something like liberalism must have evolved from a more generalised intellectual culture, rather than from any single mind.
Second, I don’t think liberalism is made up of only one strand or principle. As you mention, I’ve also written about the “neutrality strand” within liberalism, which is how many liberals prefer to understand their own politics.
So it’s not a question of backsliding from one idea to the other, but of developing a more comprehensive view.
You what??
I have to put in a word for Mark here, he is one of the most thoughtful and consistent conservatives posting in broad or narrow media. Far better than the trash that appears under op-ed pages marked as ‘conservative’. His articles need to be engaged for themselves and not sneered at.
South Sea Republic is very close to what Mark calls liberalism, and most of what Mark writes I disagree with entirely. But at least he is thoughtful and consistent about it. Since the collapse of Marxism, liberalism’s political competition has become conservatism. It is almost back to the tensions of the enlightenment in that respect.
How liberalism, of which a ‘left’ site like LP is a part, engages and debates proper conservatives (not trash-sensationalist conservatives like devine-bolt-ackerman) will probably end up defining the dominant political, social, cultural and economic policy for the next century.
Conservatisms main challenge isn’t multiculturalism or nationalism (economy and liberty are too strong for them); it is how it can define progress without allowing for liberalistic rationalism. Liberalism looks to the rationalistic leap, or the idea for the sake of it, in order to enable human progress. John Dean argues that the rationalistic (and hence liberal) leaps of the US Republic has robbed American Conservatives of antiquity. Whereas Au conservatives can always argue that Au is incomplete without Britain. American conservatives lost that in a successful revolution.
Conservatism denies the rationalistic jump of progress and looks to the past for the future. Part of that is empiricism, which is a positive virtue, but utlimately it ends up static, and a rechurn of what has come before. Tradition ends up dominating progress such that there is no progress.
Some conservatives have looked to economic liberalism (or economic rationalism as it was known under Hawke/Keating) for human progress, while seeking tradition in social and cultural aspects of human expression. The problem there is that unbridled economics uses sex to sell amongst other things including a degradation of morals/ethics/etc. Rather than blaming this on economic liberalism, conservatives in the US have blamed this on ‘hollywood liberals’.
That is the area that conservatism has to come to terms with. Until it can define a path for human progress that is ideologically and empirically consistent, liberalism will blast it out of the water.
Mark: so what’s the demarcation line between Liberalism and Conservatism?
That’s a serious question, BTW. From a lot of other perspectives (Prussian Junkerdom ala 1815, or Anarchism) Liberalism and Conservatism are pretty similar in this year of our lord 2007. Both ideologies support a State.
Geez Gummo,
You use some cool expressions, man: “Kantean autonomy or Sartrean authenticity.”
Buggered if I know what they mean.
But, from what I could understand, you’re right Richardson: He’s a Twat. And yes, he ses the word “liberal” like those in the US right used to use the word “nigger” (and probably still do, in private at least).
As for this Esolen character, he’s clearly been watching too many John Wayne movies and his scribblings have got poor Richo all hot and bothered.
Dontcha think there’s some sort of weird gay subtext in this Men being Men together thing?
On second thoughts, maybe it isn’t John Wayne Westerns, but Brokeback Mountain they’ve been watching together.
Oho, here’s a recrudescence of obscurantism.
So Pico and presumably all those other heretical Italian humanists are to blame.
Naughty, naughty Renaissance!!
So, what did we lose? (Apart of course from the honour of being barbequed for our mistaken beliefs.)
Well I imagine Richardson might argue that we have lost the Unquestionable Truth. That at the core of every culture there ought to be a set of principles that are beyond scrutiny. The corollary of this blessed state of affairs is decadence when “civilised men” (it’s always men, isn’t it?) succeed in destroying the previously unquestionable.
Trouble is, in the long, premodern history of humankind there have been many, many Unquestionable Truths. Many, many unbelievers and sceptics have gone to grisly deaths as a result of questioning those Unquestionable Truths.
But here’s the problem. You see, when you make a list of these Unquestionable Truths over time and place, it becomes immediately apparent that these Unquestionable Truths are mutually contradictory.
Now how can you have contradictory Unquestionable Truths? That just doesn’t seem to make sense.
Well, our recrudescent obsurantists have two (hilariously enough, contradictory) answers to this question.
1. Only one set of Unquestionable Truths is in fact valid. Thus Taliban and Christian Fundos scrap over the ownership of Truth.
or
2. There is such a thing as culturally relevant Unqustionable Truth. What works for the Zulu is fine for them. What works for us White Bread godfearin’ gun-totin’ soldier-boy Christians is fine for us.
How post-modern.
How absurd.
Is this Gummo the Blog Plod’s site ?
Out patrolling the murky nether regions of the blogosphere, fearlessly sticking his nose into other’s deliberations?
What’s the point Gummo ?
If I want to read Oz Conservative I can go there and do it myself and if I get all rilled up about the writing there I can shove my opinions onto the comments section.
Thanks for the predigested digust but how about an original contribution from you instead?
Mark: This is what has always annoyed me is that what I consider important,Conservatives view as unimportant and what I consider unimportant is claimed by them to not only be important but also ‘good for me’,or a country etc.
In the end not only do the conservatives not only drag us back into the past while they try to work out the future but every action props up the rich and powerful at the expense of the poorer and disadvantaged within society.
“Mark: so what’s the demarcation line between Liberalism and Conservatism?”
At it’s most essential, it’s probably that Liberals believe there’s no progress without change all the time whereas conservatives would be skeptical of that notion. The former have some idealised notion of some increasing logarithmic function of progress over time, approaching some asymptotic nirvana in the future, whereas the latter reject that notion completely. In fact the latter would say that’s more often than not a recipe for disaster, usually because of unforeseen consequences. You know- what seems like a good idea at the time, quickly becomes the object of affirmative action and then the downright compulsory. Essentially the slippery slope ride to hell like this
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,21353970-401,00.html?from=public_rss
Now hands up those liberals who always thought it was everyone’s right to do with their body as they wish?(unlike genetically modifying plants which should be much more natural of course)
Obby – There is no slippery slope to hell. Hell is conservative opinion.
Observa, it’s probably that Liberals believe there’s no progress without change all the time whereas conservatives would be skeptical of that notion.
That isn’t true. That is a conservative fallacy that liberals deny the power of empiricism. Yet the enlightenment, which was based on reason through empiricism, is firmly grounded on practical and pragmatic change; where conservatism blesses tradition for the sake of it – despite empirical proof where tradition is a negative on political, social, cultural and economic mores.
This goes back to the internal inconsistency conservatism has with itself that it cannot translate to human progress with its ideology. A conservative would argue that it is tradition, history and community which give the individual meaning- but economic progress, which is one of the few areas that conservatism allows for non-empirical experimentation, is dependent on disruptive technologies; which are ideas for the sake of being ideas, and under the empirical scrutiny of market decisions change an economy.
This is why conservatism has arguments inside itself that are debilitating; and why it cannot realistically challenge liberalism until it solves these internal contradictions.
Well, I regard OzConservative as fundamentally a forum for the expression of anti-feminist opinion. Check out the archive on gender, for instance:
http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/search/label/gender
Or masculinity:
http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/search/label/masculinity
What’s more significant, I think, Gummo, is why Mr Richardson’s almost invariable line of attack on “liberalism” is fundamentally misogynist. I will give him credit where it’s due though and observe that the other issue that gets up his nose is “multiculti”. It’s a reactionary blog. Not a conservative one.
Kim, I will give him credit where itâ??s due though and observe that the other issue that gets up his nose is â??multicultiâ??. Itâ??s a reactionary blog. Not a conservative one.
That is the other problem for conservatism. Liberalism has moved the goal posts for what is political, and hence legal, equality. The cries of multiculturalism making the nation weak or unsafe are all about the state’s ability to leverage inequality and be discriminative. If you look at the ABS statistics they are highly sexualised. The next battle is to make to make individualism sufficiently dominant that sexualisation of statistics is irrelevant. The muslims are the current beating pad for conservatives, yet immigration statistics suggest that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the Australian born (Victoria IIRC is the only state that records the country of birth). Interestingly the next generation, the children of immigrants, get integrated so well that they commit crimes at the same rate as Australians.
This goes back to conservatism seeing economic liberalism as the vector for human progress, where liberalism allows for maximum liberty which enables social, cultural, political and economic liberty as the mechanisms for progress. Under conservatism there is too many contradictions in economic liberalism being progress as it directly undermines social, cultural and political tradition. A recent example of this undermining is women becoming part of the workforce. Conservatism has no answer to this. Which I think is why US conservatives have turned to authoritarianism and an Aristotlean ‘best man’ thesis to supply the answers. Which is self defeating; no-one likes tyranny.
cam, I think that you’re giving Mr Richardson too much credit for having a coherent position. I suspect that his angst about feminism and multiculturalism has led him to embrace conservatism, rather than the other way around.
Kim, I consider Mark thoughtful opposition despite being in direct conflict with nearly all of the liberal republican writings on SSR. The devine-ackerman-bolt-etc are easy to dismiss as sensationalist trolls – because they are. Mark is proper conservatism and for that reason I want him to resolve the internal conflicts of conservatism in terms of equality and progress so the individualist based political movements which include; liberalism, republicanism, progressivism (which I would define loosely as LP being a part) and even libertarianism; can determine where the common ground ground is and where the repugnant differences are.
We wont get that from Devine/Bolt/Ackerman or even Kelly as they are products of the party machine and more interested in internal party politics and grabbing up audiences. Matt Price’s recent blog post was a good example of how removed that lot are from citizen understanding of politics. Mark Richardson, the Wild Colonial Boy and Righthinker are three of the most interesting conservatives in the Au blogosphere. Righthinker would be more powerful if he dropped his reliance on strawmen; if he got past that it would probably produce some good discussions and he might be surprised on the amount of common ground.
The other issue I find is that 80/20 rule, which conservatives are going to come up against. Which is individual vs state that is the only binary political differentiation that can be made. Fi we make that distinction, left-right becomes meaningless; if anything it becomes a fraud perpetuated by the conservatives seeking to divide the world in 50/50 terms.
If we divide the political world between those that think the individual being dominant political, or the state being dominant politically, suddenly we find all the liberals, progressives, republicans and libertarians on one side, and the conservatives, nationalists and big-statists on the other.
The argument, rather then being the impression of 50/50 with political groups that are supposedly diametrically opposed to each other under the left-right rules of thumb, becomes 80/20, with groups supposedly in opposition under left-right dichotomy discovering they are in union because they put the individual first politically. We otherwise know this as political and legal equality.
Er no, Obby, if you check your Popper, you’ll find that Utopian vision is actually the Marxist, wholesale big-picture social-engineering one. With maybe a hint of Trotskyist “continual revolution” tossed in (think that was Leon’s contribution to theory)
Conservatives are prone to a Utopian vision of their own – the myth of the Golden Age. For the past ten years, going on eleven, John Howard – the self-styled “Burkean Conservative” is having a great time engineering a trade union-free back to the glorious 19th Century free market economy on one hand while, on cultural and so-called “values” issues he wants to wind back to the nineteen fifties. He’s just shifted utopia into the past, that’s all. He’s more of a Bismarckian reactionary when it comes down to it. It’s easy to imagine Old Blood and Iron boasting about Prussia punching above its weight on the European stage.
In your case obby, I’ve decided, on behalf of the left-liberal-eschatological-utopian-zombie-sheep collective, that come the revolution you’ll be booked in to a sex reassignment clinic, followed by several weeks of intensive re-education in lesbian separatism. Expect the midnight knock on the door as soon as we’ve knocked off all the anarchists and deviationists.
As for the link – next time give us a precis of whatever weird irrelevant shit you’ve decided to throw into the mix. Those news.com pages are a bugger to download and I’m not prepared to waste bandwidth on them any more.
“At it’s most essential, it’s probably that Liberals believe there’s no progress without change all the time whereas conservatives would be skeptical of that notion. The former have some idealised notion of some increasing logarithmic function of progress over time, approaching some asymptotic nirvana in the future, whereas the latter reject that notion completely. In fact the latter would say that’s more often than not a recipe for disaster, usually because of unforeseen consequences. You know- what seems like a good idea at the time, quickly becomes the object of affirmative action and then the downright compulsory. Essentially the slippery slope ride to hell like this”
Like the iraq war, you mean?
At its heart ‘cultural conservatism’ is a cry for an imagined past where men were men, and women knew their place. I know this sounds simplistic, but why complicate what is in essence, straight forward, good old fashioned, misogyny dressed up as some kind of history or sociology. It has been well said here by a number of bloggers. Until cultural conservatives can resolve the tension (this time without violence please!) between the production of things with the production of values that the production of things require, then I for one, no matter how much a young man may appear to be pining for better manners, will always smell the faint stench of the ‘as you were’ brigade, whose last line of defence against the contradictions this ridiculous pose conjures, is violence, always violence, in the name of a past that is nothing more than the mental product of the very present they profess to abhor.
yuk.
Choice quote from Mr R, courtesy of Ken Parish’s Missing Link:
http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2004/07/masculinity-is-good-for-you.html
That overthinking us chicks do… well!
Amused, I’m told all the time that feminism is about choice and that I’m mistaken to imagine that feminists don’t support more traditional choices.
Yet your comment seems to imply that the traditional family (which, far from being a figment of the imagination is easily the predominant form of family life where I live) represents women being “put in their place” and is “misogynistic”.
The left can’t have it both ways. Either the left admits that it wants to exclude traditional choices which very large numbers of people are still making, or else it doesn’t disqualify such choices as being oppressive or misogynistic.
Kim, I’ve written lots of articles I would expect to be controversial. But not the one you link to. It simply quotes some health professionals who point out that women often dwell on slights too much, and that this contributes to worse rates of mental health amongst women.
I pointed out that this information runs counter to the advice which is frequently given to men, that they must “get in touch with their feminine side” to avoid mental health problems; and that it can be supportive of women if men keep to the masculine way of dealing with things.
(I’m reminded of the comment of Ruby Wax who once described her husband as her “human Valium”.)
My piece said nothing about the matters referred to in your remarks to me Mark. You have either misread it entirely, or, more likely, you just don’t ‘get’ the problem with your overall position. On the issue of what you write as your beliefs or stance on gender for example, I find your views about women requiring masculine presence as a prophylactic against thinking too much, to be about as nauseatingly condescending as anything I have read since the burblings of 19th century reactionaries who opposed higher education for women on the grounds that it would shrivel their uteruses.
My criticism with your overall philosophical position is that you appear to have absolutely no idea how to account for social change, other than as an outcome of liberal philosophers’ mistaken understandings about the essentially biological basis for traditionalist views about gender for example. I would be interested in reading your views about an appropioate social program to prevent the undermining of social change by pernicious and mistaken liberalism and I would be particuallry interested in knowing how you would propose to maintain an economic system which relies on constant change and revolutions in production techniques and technology, with unchanging, conservative and ‘traditionalist’ social structures. When you have something to say about those matters, I will be interested to read and I may respond, but cease telling me what I think on the basis of what you think I meant when I wrote a post. Thanks.
Amused, I can use the same argument you just did, namely that you don’t seem to have read accurately.
For years the wider culture was “condescending” to men, telling men that masculinity was mentally unhealthy and that they ought to follow the lead of women and be more emotional.
Then the whole argument was overturned, not by me, but by a number of health professionals quoted in The Age. These professionals claimed that one reason why women suffer greater levels of depression than men is because of a greater tendency to dwell on perceived slights, rather than brushing them off and moving on to other things.
So this is the sense in which health professionals believe that women “think too much”. It doesn’t refer to everyday thought, but something specific, the “tendency to dwell on petty slights, to mentally replay testy encounters and to wallow in sad feelings”.
If men are generally less affected by this, and if I then note that men can therefore be a source of emotional stability within women’s lives, does this mean that I am being condescending to women?
Yes, I am arguing for the benefit of a masculine presence within a woman’s life. I don’t see why this is so difficult to accept.
Most men would readily accept the idea that having a feminine presence in their life is of benefit to them. Nobody would think this to be a condescending idea.
So why the problem arguing the other way around? And why wouldn’t a man think his presence in the life of his wife or daughters to be beneficial?
Amused, as to your other point, you seem to assume that I am a “free market” liberal. I’m not. I put the needs of the family above those of the market.
Nonetheless, the real assault on the family today is an ideological one, rather than a capitalist one.
The latest HREOC campaign is a case in point. The human rights commission wants to change the family so that there are no distinctive motherhood and fatherhood roles (no ‘gendered’ roles). It has urged the government to use the force of the tax, legal and educational systems to achieve this aim.
No Mark,
The HREOC Report is devoted to proposals making it easier for women who want/need to work, to be able to do so. I presume your position is either:-
1. Women should not be able to engage in paid employment, or at least not on the same terms as men, or
2. To the extent they do so, it must be in circumstances where the decision to do so is made as uncomfortable, and as difficult as possible, in order to discourage them from thinking/acting, as though they have some right to the same aspirations and desires as men. You know, being able to earn money, and be able to have a family and ensure their care.
Just what is so objecionable to the proopsals in principle (as opposed to criticism of the specifics) here?
Why are policies that actually enlarge the sphere of choices for women and men always decried as policies that ‘destroy the family’? Your position is an old and ultimaetly reactionary one. Women should just shut up and men should be allowed to do what they like. Because you know it makes (biological) sense.
Amused, the HREOC report is an attempt to railroad men and women into a single parental role, with children largely brought up in various state funded institutions. There is to be no significant choice in family life, and certainly no choice of a more traditional arrangement.
One of the significant problems with the new family favoured by HREOC is that there is no necessary role in it for men. For the short time that women are to stay home with their children they are to be supported by government funded maternity leave; after this, men and women are to work equally and to achieve equal incomes. Nor is there to be a distinctive paternal role for men within family life; instead there is to be an equal sharing of what was once the maternal role.
Again, in your comment you imply that women who choose a traditional arrangement are oppressed in doing so. That it is a case of men doing what they like and women shutting up.
Hasn’t it occurred to you that women today could, if they really wanted to, be full-time careerists, but that most women past a certain age simply don’t want to?
Why can’t you respect the choices of these women? Why force them into something only a minority of women opt for?
Finally, it’s contradictory to claim that traditionally men could do whatever they liked, but that the HREOC measures will enlarge their sphere of choice.
Obviously, men didn’t just “do what they liked” in previous generations. If they had, there would be no functioning society. Men did what they believed to be the right thing to do by their families and by their societies.
Gummo, can I thank you for exposing me to OzConservative’s genius commenter “Bobby N”, and in particular this gem on the thread you linked to:
One is prompted to wonder whether Bobby’s ever tried doing it another way. Someone might tell him there are books, and so on.
I am sorry I have nothing substantive to add (and am so late in saying even this), but my brain has gone to mush since my baby was born recently. Heh.
liberalism is now under attack from scientific empiricists as well, with Steve Sailer the most prominent example on the web.
Saying ‘we are back to the enlightenment’ with science and reason on one hand, and reactionary conservatives on the other, is incorrect, because liberalism and science were buddies back than, now science has more in common with conservatism.
We’ve had the age of dogma, and the age of reason, perhaps now its time for the age of realism.