Obit. (belated)

William F. Buckley Jr. died today at the age of 82.

Buckley was one of those rare charismatic figures of the right and was in many ways the conservative movement's own Hugh Hefner- charming, intelligent, and highly influential in his own perverse way. He was the founder and publisher of the The National Review, a magazine that is to conservatives what Bitch magazine is to lesbians. He was an opinion maker, in fact a movement maker, influencing conservative greats and smalls alike.

Of all the weird conservative creatures of the last century, Buckley would rank among the creepiest. He was, by his own admission, an avid harpsichord player. For those of you who are not classical musicians, it must be understood that unless you are Flemish, Austrian, or 400 years old, playing the harpsichord is simply not a natural state for mankind. And while Buckley appeared at times to come close to qualifying for this last category, he did fall short by some 200-300 years. Besides this particular deviation, Buckley had a strange an affected nature. His manner of speaking seemed a mix of Boston Brahman and Virginia genteel, but in actuality, he was born in New York City, and raised largely in France and England. And while being raised in Europe could be used as an excuse for almost any depravity, the dude was beyond a doubt weird. Like pedophile weird? Well he was certainly not a pedophile (unlike so many others of his movement), but if you were to want to cast one in a movie, you would be hard pressed to do better than Buckley.

But what about the movement he spawned? Amongst my friends, conservatism tends to have a bad reputation. But most of my friends have never seriously looked into it. Conservatism, like any ideology, is extremely compelling once you "get it." What makes conservatism different from other appealing ideologies is its appalling simplicity. It has therefore earned a reputation for being the ideology of the stupid. If socialism, environmentalism, existentialism could be considered ideologies of the bright, conservatism is the ideology of the dim. In keeping with the conservative style, I will make my case for this point with just one letter: W.

But in its simplicity there is hidden great wisdom. The conservative viewpoint, like the economical viewpoint, is essentially paradoxical. It more or less proposes the opposite solution to any problem that one has from the solution most logically applied. It is best described by the Mephistophelean trait that "Desires to do only evil, yet does only good." This is in contrast to the Liberal approach to things which seeks to do good but really only makes things worse.

On the conservative side, a striking example of backwards logic is the idea of tax-cuts. It seems ridiculous to non-conservatives that you could get the government more money by cutting taxes. And yet the productivity of the tax-cut companies is increased when they have more money on hand. They can invest more, grow more freely, and make more money when they have more money. Then when they do pay taxes, they have more money to be taxed and therefore the government gets more money. Simple and elegant. That the government would somehow do better with the money than the companies would is ludicrous since the government has no motivation to be efficient or practical with money that they did not earn but simply appropriated. So the argument that the less money the government has, the more they need to cut taxes is absolutely logical in a round about way.

The non conservative point of view is that you take more so you can do more. You raise taxes so you can spend more money. This is the smart person fallacy, which assumes that someone, somewhere (the government no less!) is smart enough to know what the best use of the money is. To know what is best would be to be able to assimilate, weigh, balance, and compute based on absolutely every byte of information- past, present, and future. Including how one's own computations affect the outcome of the process. There are people who think they are that smart (Paul Krugman, maybe?), and there are people that think that there are other people (somewhere) who are that smart. There are people who think scientists, economists, and computers might be that smart. But they aren't. They can't be, and they never will be. The quantity of information present at any moment is infinite. In fact, to know it all, one would have to be literally omniscient. And this is where the conservative economic position dovetails nicely with the conservative religious position. By leaving the system alone to its own inherent omniscience, one is effectively trusting a superhuman force to take care of the details. It is not many steps further that one runs squarely into that intellectual pariah- the G-word. Most modern thinkers prefer "Nature," "The Market," or "The laws of supply and demand" to the G-word, but they're all basically talking about the same thing.

And so it is not so difficult to see how religious fervor can be tapped- and is essentially required -to adopt the conservative position. The other alternative is what many Christians would call "The Triumph of the Will" or "The Triumph of the Ego." These are pejorative terms used to describe those who think they are smarter than God. And they are used with the same mix of contempt and pity with which intellectuals hold religious thought in general Funny.


Take those very intellectuals who espouse Marxism, communitarianism, egalitarianism and the like. They are by and large dissatisfied individuals who hold conservatism with its ridiculous simplicity in extreme contempt. Smart people hate dumb people. That's obvious. But is it natural? Most of these smart people don't get into their ideologically-based bashing until they get to college, i.e. when the escape the clutches of mediocracy that tyrannized their childhood days. Smart people generally feel themselves to be misunderstood, underappreciated, and generally resented by their intellectual inferiors. More often than not, these intellectual inferiors are not just their young classmates, but almost always the majority of their teachers. The schools these people teach in are biased towards the stupid- or at least against the smart. Intelligent people seemed to be fascinated with science and its primary tenet - averages. Schools and the modern American way are designed to turnout statistically average people. If you are below average, you are prodded, coerced, or medicated to do better. But if you're exceptionally bright, you are required to do less than you are capable of- a highly frustrating state of affairs. So the frustration is usually (mis-) applied against the dumb people themselves. But it is the system that discourages intelligence that is the problem, not the dumb people themselves (in fact, it is more likely the mediocre that are hated by the truly brilliant. The brilliant and the dumblings are actually in the same boat- being pushed in directions they don't want to go it. It may in fact be the mediocre people with their disdain for the dumber that feel themselves smart enough to decide what's best for everybody- the true mediocre liberals).

But whose idea was it that we were all supposed to come out the same? Well the 1960s and 1970s political agendas were led by smart people, pushing progressive agendas that were aimed at equality. But that very progress is what shoots the intelligentsia in the foot and causes them to be frustrated and resentful overachievers in a "fair system."

The dumb solution would be to skip education altogether. If you want to be a fireman, why do yo need to learn calculus? If you want to be an astronaut, why learn Medieval poetry? And so on. With this system, in which we stop funding schools entirely, people would be fulfilled as they learned what exited them at the level to which they desired to achieve. Should everybody desire to be a mid-level manager? Not really. But you wouldn't guess that from the academic agenda. Mid-level everything seems to be the most important thing in modern education- that no one feel left out or, worse, too special.

From a conservative perspective, people would be smarter if you stopped educating them. Sounds crazy, but it makes sense. Intelligent people will often spend their whole live trying to develop a communal system in which their exceptional gifts will be accepted. The lucky will get this in college (and then lose it forever after graduation), but for the truly brilliant, such systems will always prove fruitless. Fighting stupid people is an unending task, as there will always be more of them. But the fighting for justice, through regulation, control, and scientifically "proven" ideas is a circular path, reinforcing the conditions that created the problem in the first place.

We raw foodists are familiar with this concept. The more we try to scientifically target what nutritional supplementation we need, what we need to fix, the worse the problem gets. The more w leave it alone (fast, cleanse), the quickest the natural order of things returns. It is the endless fiddling of the restless mind that created the turmoil.

Perhaps William H. Buckley was just smart enough to understand this. There comes a time in the development of genius when one simply stops trying and just has fun with the genius one has. Buckley left behind a system in which idiots could flourish, knowing that there will always be idiots on this planet, and it would be better for everyone if they were usefully occupied. Conservatism provides just that occupation.