How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch With Reality

"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.


Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.

A great article which hits hard at the core reason why today's Republicans have lost their ability to reason. Today's Conservatism is not the traditional Conservatism that made America great, and was based in reality, but is one that, much like the Liberals, is based on nothing but abstraction. There were, and still are, some great Conservative thinkers in our time.... Buckley, Buchanan, and Goldwater. What have they been replaced with? Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, and Ryan. The party of ideas, the GOP, has gotten stuck in a ditch, and can't seem to get out of it, and right now, the Conservative movement desperately needs a great thinker once again, to help restore the Republican party to sanity. To those hyperpartisans on the right who maintain that "Liberalism is a disease", I say "Physician, heal thyself".

Evidence for Intelligent Design?

As the creationist agenda has been stymied in the courts, which have ruled that it's teaching amounts to promoting religion in government (a violation of the separation of church and state), they have turned to another strategy in order to inject religion into the teaching of science in the classroom. They call it Intelligent Design. It is still creationism, but worded differently in an attempt to circumvent court rulings against it. It still teaches that our universe did not evolve, but that a higher power created it all. From Albert Einstein to Steven Hawking, scientists have been attempting to put together a "theory of everything", over a period that spans almost 100 years. yet, in what seems like a fortnight, the creators of Intelligent Design have come up with all the answers, or so they tell us.

There is quite an irony here, because there is a possible case to be made for intelligent design. According to the theory of the Holographic Universe, of which there is at least one mathematical construct for, everything that we know, see, and are, is nothing more than a projection. According to this theory, a prediction was made that there would be found in the universe a graininess, or pixellation of sorts. Last year, that graininess in the universe was found. This give rise to the possibility that this universe is a simulation. Still, it's only a theory, and it is not proven, but it is a possibility.

Now comes the irony. The people in the political think tank that came up with the idea of Intelligent Design are just too dumb to understand string theory and tensors, which is what is required to attain only a very elementary understanding of the theory of the holographic universe, let alone the mechanics of how it works.

Out of the mouths of idiots sometimes comes wisdom. As Jesus said, forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.