Conservative Immaturity

“You can be in the middle of a hurricane, or you can be on a calm day — north is still north. You could be in a thunderstorm — north is still north.”

These words are Justice Clarence Thomas’. From a speech given in the nineties at the Heritage Foundation. They were approvingly rediscovered (or at least repromoted) by conservative thinkers (I came across them on Christian apologist Rod Dreher’s Twitter feed) in the aftermath of the Roe overturning.

They are notable for me as a useful compendium of the conservative intellectual attitude in the current moment. For Thomas, “north” is obviously, perhaps pedantically, a noumenal morality, easily identifiable for the correctly initiated, with a valiance beyond all contextual, and most especially temporal, contingency.

This interpretation of Thomas’ words is fair given the basic tenants of the judicial and worldview the conservative intellectual movement he represents espouses.

Constitutional Originalism, presented as an innocuous interpretative method, is in practice a rather radical means of applying 18th century schemas, both practical and ethical, to the year 2022. Even the theory’s proponents must admit that definitionally the approach is anything but conservative. How incredulous would be the reaction of the founders themselves, men who for their time represented the vanguard of social progress (however repugnantly hypocritical), to a reading of their document which ignores centuries of civic, scientific, and ethical advancement? A mindset which contends that the rights and responsibilities outlined in our founding document are static would be anathema to the palpable intellectual curiosity exhibited by men like Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton.

A refrain of the conservative intelligentsia today is that conservatives represent common sense in the face of liberal overreach. Yet a cornerstone of their political philosophy is the completely unintuitive notion that a document written before the invention of the lightbulb, in its original, unaltered form, should be the guiding light of our republic. Such an outlook only makes sense within a moral constellation predicated on the existence of received moral precepts. Precepts presumably present in our Constitution but delicately so. Because as recent decisions suggest, the extension of reasoned 21st century compassion to the “others (rights) retained by the people” would apparently collapse Thomas’ omnipotent but fragile north star.

What specifically are these sublime tenets so dependent on a static reading of the Constitution? For Thomas, as explained in a recent New Yorker article, the morality of the Constitution hinges on the document’s emphasis on individual rights. The efforts of the framers to ensure that the prerogative of property owners, small states, and specific economic interests (namely slavery) went unencumbered is, for the Federalist Society crowd, the defining ethical characteristic of the Constitution. The storms through which Thomas claims “north is still north” presumably represent the chaos inherent in any politics which seeks solutions beyond the limits of 18th century natural rights philosophy. However unethical the Constitution’s contemporary intent was in practice, the theory of a glacial legislature, anemic administrative state, and strictly negative personal rights allocation radiates a transcendental goodness in the conservative mind.

For Thomas personally, this morality is elucidated in his (selective) references to state condoned racism. He frequently cites Progressive Era eugenics policies, unforgivable but historically anomalous, which targeted black female fertility. The contention being that a government equipped with powers beyond those delineated in 1789 will always oppress. Today’s conservative writers and commentators, reacting to the inexorable and often complicated expansion of identify awareness, frequently suggest we are on the the verge of an American Cultural Revolution. The barrenness of the prediction is obvious, given the massive historical incongruities and the sclerotic nature of our institutions, but also revelatory of the deeply sentimental moral lens through which conservatives construct their notions of government. Syllogistic and ahistorical reasoning is frequently the result of an emotionally charged attachment to dogmatic belief.

The roots of conservative fealty to this severely limited view of government lies not in obscurant or alarmist intimations of “classic liberalism” and the slippery slope to Stalinism, but rather in the archaic desire for a supreme moral truth detached from the complications of expanding consciousness, conflict, and progress. The sleight of hand conservatives increasingly employ is to lead with a criticism of liberal excess, conflating the failures of neoliberal economic policy with curated examples of “wokeness,” and then follow, seemingly reasonably, with the intuitive assertion that solutions abound in an instinctual morality beyond the hubris of modernity.

Crucial for this line of reasoning is its presentation almost exclusively in the negative. As well as its cynicism. Something presumably novel for middle America will be offered out of context (students exposed to LGBTQ issues, conflicts over Confederate statues in southern cities, indicators of increasing sexual lassitude among some subset of adults…). The conservative writer, poster, or pundit then suggests that their target audience consider this instance of liberal excess in the context of their own challenging lives. The implication, stated or unstated, being that the priorities of progressives are aligned, based on the (selective) evidence, with an oblivious, frankly hedonistic worldview unconcerned with the price of gas or your mortgage payments. The latent conservative solution, predicated on pure Thanatos, being the complete gutting of the public schools, the welfare state, any non religious institution designed to inhibit wolf to man dynamics.

The appeal of such tactics is understandable. The last fifty years, defined by a liberal economic consensus, has been difficult, if not disastrous, for large swathes of Americans. This, combined with awakenings in issues relating to identity which are too often mangled in the translation from the grassroots to the academy (or the boardroom), engender apathy and skepticism in an increasingly immiserated populace. Nihilism being one step removed from cynicism, conservatives pounce.

For the conservative intellectual apparatus though, from the lowliest poster to the beltway elite, this aversion to collective responsibility, to the merest notion that “we live in a society,” is not nihilism. This is not, as Thomas clearly implies with his “North is North” clarion call, a rejection of secular governance, based in science and democracy, in favor of a state of nature mediated by the meagerest of social contracts. It is instead, at least in theory, a rejection of secular principles in favor of an eternal and purportedly universal Christian morality. The (for their time) progressive, liberal principles upon which our country was founded are reconstrued as an extratemporal and discreet collection of revealed wisdom exclusively related to religious freedom, property rights, and firearms ownership. The limited nature of our civic blueprint is not a function of the myriad contradictions inherent in our nation’s origins, but rather, in tandem with a reified conception of the founders’ nominal Christianity, evidence of their true intention — the amelioration of those and all future contradictions via Judeo Christian virtue .

Again the appeal, at least with the explicit Christianity elided, is understandable. The technocratic penchant for marketization favored by both parties since the 1970’s, in addition to its concrete failures for the non investing classes, is uninspiring in its amorality. An atomized society of rational optimizers engaged in free exchange may be palatable to that minority with the capacity and disposition necessary for ascension in the meritocracy, but for everyone else it is experienced as dressed up social Darwinism. Values like community, responsibility, and charity, a general affinity for others irrespective of their quantifiable attributes, remain the bedrock of most people’s moral compasses. We find these values unreflected, often inadvertently opposed, in a liberalism myopically concerned with the maximization of personal liberty. Sans specifics, the seduction of a reactionary and purportedly values laden alternative is predictable. The appeal of the conservative cultural critique is not in the quality of the values extolled, but the seeming temerity of the values focused approach itself.

I confess to the temptation. The promotion of total freedom, without a corollary discussion of responsibility's place as needed intermediary, can feel empty on the individual and the collective level. The struggles and subsequent celebrations of identity, so vital to the functioning of a democracy, appear shallow and ego driven when presented, as they increasingly are, through a vacuous cultural anarchism. The moral complications which are the byproduct of the elevation of any marginalized group into the polity proper, difficult topics such as transition surgery for transgender youth or the utility of race based affirmative action, demand nuanced consideration. On a personal level, the task of mapping these new paradigms, particularly in regards to gender, onto my lived experience has proved challenging. As I’m sure it has for many.

But responsibility adverse mainstream liberalism tends to present this struggle for social equality, a struggle we all play a role in regardless of our positionality in various hierarchies, as relatively uncomplicated, practically and intellectually. Awareness campaigns and “representation” rather than an invitation to authentic commitment. Jargon and soft but stultifying theoretics rather than subtle, difficult dialogue. Even the leftwing, social democratic approach I support devolves at times into a similar reductionism, one in which the ethics, which should be at the forefront of any socialist agenda, are eclipsed by a gotcha class moralism. In short, many left, liberal, and politically unengaged Americans crave a politics and a society which reflects and activates a commonly held sense of justice. The absence of this approach from progressivism today goes a long way in the explaining the situation we find ourselves in.

Moral ambiguity is the defining characteristic of a democracy. People’s natural inclination towards moral truth, rooted in a native sense of commonality and species serving altruism, is mitigated by the plethora of specific, competing moral claims inherent to the democratic process (but futile in a broken one). This in combination with the tensions always present at the individual psychic level, a generalized urge to belong forever vitiated by the paranoid pressure to dominate or transcend, provokes a feeling of discomfort. The conservative remedy, that there is a simple and manifest morality capable of cutting through ambiguity, does not present, as conservative intellectuals are fond of pretending, meaning in a bereft world. Instead it proffers a balm of contraction. The potential convert’s dormant moral inclinations are activated, but in the direction of revealed dogma rather than authentic engagement with the world.

The deeper target of conservative intellectual ire, certainly of Thomas’ “north is north” declaration, is moral relativism, of which there are two definitions. The first is the belief that there are no moral truths, that all actions and beliefs are permissible pending context, and that absolute liberty should be the only referent when judging human affairs. This definition I find rare in practice and common mostly in uncharitable readings of continental philosophy. The second is the belief that moral truths, originating in a humanist tradition which seeks the maximization of wellbeing, do indeed exist, but that these truths are complicated, sometimes severely, by the contingencies of history, of geography, genetics and psychology, of the myriad factors which produce human diversity. This moral relativism, of which I am an adherent, does not reject the existence of moral truth, but humbly recognizes that in practice we are “doomed to an approximation.”

Consider this example employed by the liberal podcaster and author Sam Harris. As a challenge to those who subscribe to my first definition of moral relativism, Harris presents the tragedy of Taliban adherents on an Afghan side street, straddling their getaway bikes, having just thrown battery acid in the faces of schoolgirls. He correctly asserts that the wrongness of this act is absolute. We are in total agreement. However, and especially when considering an ethical response, it would be consequentially deleterious to stop there, to fail to consider this tragedy within the appropriate context. By taking into account the overlapping factors which contribute to such barbarism, in this case a history of imperialism, the contagious nature of reactionary fanaticism, and our own country’s recent misguided adventurism, we are not excusing the act itself. Rather, we are situating the act within a larger moral framework in order to better understand and better respond. The condemnation of the act itself, while certainly important, accomplishes little in isolation. Furthermore, while emotionally satisfying, the condemnation, when unmediated by thoughtful recognition of extenuating circumstance, often leads to rash action.

Today’s conservative intelligentsia gains a great deal of leverage from performative fulminations against moral relativism. Thomas’ “north is north” is the precursor to a profusion of posts, YouTube video clips, and polemics in subsidized periodicals challenging opponents to commit to a fixed moral position on gender, crime, the education of children, any ambiguity laden topical issue. If you consider the callous lingua franca of the modern media space, combined with a national psychology steeped in frontier bravado, then the rhetorical upper hand of the conservative side is apparent. The recognition of context, of the socially determined nature of so much in human behavior, requires a level of thoughtfulness and compassion antithetical to the norms of contemporary discourse. Antagonistic truisms regarding the immorality of crime or the aggregate fixity of gender routinely outperform, at least for their intended audiences, seemingly insipid pleas as to the necessity of a wider aperture.

This is all to say that as a negative argument, as a reactive fusillade aimed at the many shortcomings of the neoliberal consensus, the conservative critique remains psychically viable regardless of the massive flaws in its reasoning. Thomas’ “north is north” admonition, allergic to the decaying effects of circumstance and contingency, has a trenchant psychic vallance those opposed are remise to ignore. But what about as a positive argument? What about as generative way forward rather than topical inveigh? It is here that the modern conservative project, hoarse and sore from its shrill chorus of stop athwart an idealized past, collapses. Not necessarily into illogic or wanton cruelty. As discussed above, there is a general cultural immunity to those criticisms, germane as they may be. Instead, in attempting a way forward, modern conservatism collapses into an adolescent and at times precious theocratic idealism.

The insistence that there are transcendent moral truths is not in itself the issue. Nor is the association of said morals with Christianity. These are beliefs which I personally subscribe to. I find them best articulated in one of the pivotal scenes in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The hesitant aristocrat Levin, having spent much of the book struggling to assimilate the enlightened western heresies (Darwinism, atheism, republicanism) percolating among his social class, is confronted by a peasant who tells him of a death in village. The peasant remarks that the deceased was a good man. In this instance, Levin realizes that he knows, ecstatically, what it is to describe someone as good. Extended, he realizes that there exists a concept of good which supersedes rational materialism. His faith in the divine is preserved and the pervasive doubt that which has plagued him for the majority of the book, a doubt which hinders his duties as husband, father, and authority figure, slowly lifts.

Like many in his class then, and many Americans today, Tolstoy, through the character of Levin, struggles with, but does not reactively reject, modernity and its accompanying crises of meaning. Though his seeking nature demands more than a scientific accounting of the world, Levin does not retreat into the the revealed precepts of tradition, despite their persistent hold on his soul. His epiphany does not involve the reception of or recommitment to specific Christian dogma, but rather is a reaffirmation of the Christian humanist principles which animate both character and author. The novel’s contention, exemplified in Tolstoy’s social ministry, is that a transcendent and universal morality exists, that it is the bedrock of the great religious traditions, but that access to this morality is a sedulous, deeply human process.

Conservative thinkers today would see themselves heirs to this legacy. Heirs to a tradition of moral truth, embodied in popular American history by figures like Lincoln and Dr. King, in which Christianity serves as righteous conduit. Missing however, is the obvious point that Lincoln and King were inarguably progressive figures. Christianity for them was a fount from which wisdom could be drawn, in combination with wisdom from other spheres, as a means of rectifying the present and forging a just future. For the conservative intelligentsia today, as evidenced by their almost universal acquiescence to a decidedly unchristian candidates' platform (regardless of performative reluctance), Christianity is instead the gateway to an idealized past.

Which past? A medieval past in which the church was the state? The antebellum past, deeply Christian, in which citizenship was a privilege to be bestowed? The gilded past, with its temperance movements and muscular Christianity, ruled by an oligarchy of the avaricious? There is simply no reference point for the contention that this or any nation once reveled in a halcyon of Christ centered virtue. If the project was to employ the Christian faith, with its inherent egalitarianism and compassion, as a vehicle for a better tomorrow, that would be laudable pending specifics. But the most casual inventory of contemporary conservative rhetoric reveals the opposite, that the project insists on a retreat into retrograde delusion.

There is the numbers delusion. To be clear, we remain a religious country. According to the most recent Gallup Poll, 76% of Americans identify religion as a “very important” or “fairly important” part of their lives. We remain a Christian country, too. 70% of Americans indicate a generalized belief in Christianity or adherence to a specific denomination. However, these number are complicated by the statistics relating to church participation. Only 29% of Americans report attending church in last seven days (down from 44% in 2000). Additionally, the number of unreligious Americans, now 1 in 4, has risen sharply over the last forty years. Consider these numbers in relation to Americans’ opinions on the following social issues. Only 39% of Americans identify as pro-life. 71% of Americans support same sex marriage. The numbers indicating moral acceptance of birth control, divorce, and premarital sex are 92%, 81% and 76% respectively. For answers in the affirmative regarding religion, older people are overrepresented, while younger people are overrepresented in answers affirming the more liberal opinion on social issues, indicating that secularism is trending.

These numbers reflect the expected distribution in beliefs of a Christian country only a few generations removed from a revolution in social behavior. Older Americans who resisted the changes of the 1960’s, some still exercising influence on their children and grandchildren, continue to cleave to tradition, while the aggregate moral arc bends unabated, in this case towards a more expansive justice. The initial conservative reaction is to brandish the unintended consequences. And they certainly abound. The impact of divorce and out of wedlock birth, particularly on children with low socioeconomic status, or the psychological impact of hook-up culture on young people, are relevant topics which our current discourse lacks the maturity to fairly consider. But this, of course, misses entirely the larger point. In a free society, any law which would inhibit the nonviolent choices of its citizens is an illegitimate nonstarter. Any government actions which could conceivably reverse the above trends, be it Biblical law, codes of honor, or some sort of social credit system, are the exclusive purview of totalitarianism and would be antithetical to the American project. Put simply, we (ostensibly) live in a democracy, in a democracy the laws of the country should reflect the attitudes of the people, and the people’s attitudes have shifted.

The conservative thinker will carp that I am “straw manning,” that they have offered no extralegal challenge to the alleged social dissolution despite their vocal condemnations. Perhaps, but what exactly then are they proposing? When Senator Josh Hawley constructs a political image around the recovery of “American masculinity” and traditional gender roles, or when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, he of “ethnonationalism” and the “godless families, rainbow families” critique, is invited to speak at the country’s most prestigious conservative convention, concern is warranted. Such views represent a shrinking minority in the United States today. The aim of the conservative project must therefore be either the reversion of social mores through cultural persuasion or the achievement of minority rule. The former, in the current moment, is manifestly doomed. The data suggests that increasingly Americans can no longer countenance moralism at church, let alone from public officials. The latter, uncoupled from reactionary mystification, should make the stomach of every American churn.

Living in a democracy, even a failing one, comes with the responsibility to cultivate tolerance. Each citizen is duty bound, by the implicit pluralism present in our founding documents, to tolerate the existence and nonviolent choices of others, no matter our personal objections. As identity consciousness grows and individual mores change, laws, norms, and traditions evolve, often torturously, in unison. Increasingly, today’s conservatism rejects tolerance and seeks to bypass the basic functioning of democracy. The details, of Trumpism, of “post liberal rightism,” are left purposely vague, but the intent is discernable nonetheless. To somehow transition from a moderately secular society and culture, one which despite its many shortcomings has tended to protect individual rights, to a theocratic one defined by morals which a growing majority of Americans today reject.

This is the terminus of Thomas’ “north is north” declaration. A moralism so certain that it supersedes democratic will. That its realization requires an open conspiracy of six unelected justices, their lifestyles and belief systems alien to the mainstream, is not a bug but a feature.

The justifications are as numerous as they are flawed. There is the federalism justification, that the court is merely handing usurped power back to the states. The most cursory examination of US history reveals the moral dubiousness of the point. There is the religious freedom justification — the insistence that the court is a needed bullwork against religious oppression from a militantly secular state. There are little to no documented instances in the US today regarding government suppression of a person or group’s private religious inclinations, excepting those instances where this belief restricts the autonomy of others. In fact, omitting (until recently) healthcare policy, which all but the most zealous must admit requires secularization, religious freedom continues to boom in this country. Fundamentalist Christianity is something of a litmus test for one of our two major political parties. On a personal note, living in a blue state, I am routinely confronted on my drive to work by manipulative billboards demanding I consider the heartbeat and ocular functioning of an embryo.

Above all, there is the “belief under siege” justification. The assertion that secularism in the private sector, or the dissemination of secular ideas in public institutions such as schools, infringes upon individual religious freedom. Again, to state an obvious I should not need to, a gay, trans, or queer public employee, be they a teacher, teacher’s aid, DMV clerk, or active duty soldier, has the unequivocal right to express their identity, provided they are not violating the best practices of their profession. A gay (or straight) teacher discussing the specifics of his sex life with third graders would be inappropriate. If someone can produce for me evidence of the widespread practice of this and likewise incidents, I am all ears. A gay teacher telling second graders that he and his husband purchased a new house, or a trans teacher introducing gender neutral language in their classroom, is at worst innocuous to all but the most hysterical. As for this mentality and the private sector, the Disney betrayal conservative parents languish over, there are two options. One, create and market an alternative media apparatus capable of outcompeting these corporate behemoths which simultaneously promotes values a steadily declining subset of the population adheres to. Or, two, renege on the last forty years of conservative economic policy and join the diverse, religiously expansive, LGBTQ friendly left movement in the United States, which shares some of your concerns regarding corporate accountability. Excepting the subversion of democracy, or a complete retreat from the public sphere (the so called “Benedict Option”), there is no third way forward.

Implicit in these justifications is perhaps the defining characteristic of conservative rhetoric today— its infantilism. Richard Hofstadter, writing several generations ago, diagnosed a paranoid strain in American reactionary politics. A vast and amorphous enemy, tendentiously rooted in legitimate antidemocratic threats such as Masonry or Stalinism, is uncovered in broad daylight, meticulously documented, then railed against. Hofstadter correctly diagnoses that this paranoia is predicated on psychic projection. The paranoid, incapable of assimilating the libidinous aspects of themselves contrary to their ego conception, projects them onto their opponents. For Hofstadter’s contemporary John Birchers, the goal was reaffirmation of a pre New Deal vision of America in which individual initiative, unencumbered by the state, flourished across a virgin continent. Incapable of countenancing the rapacious, exploitative, and genocidal realities implicit in the vision, the beholder conveniently discovers them in communist conspiracy. That for Joe McCarthy, Robert Welch and their acolytes this conspiracy eventually enveloped conventional American heroes like the Roosevelts, Eisenhower, and George Marshall is not at all contradictory. The submerged guilt which catalyzes the projective mechanism is most poignantly activated by examples, in this case the anodyne representatives of a flawed but working progressive consensus, which confirm the repressed cruelty of the paranoid.

In America today, Hofstadter's paranoia no longer computes. The burgeoning social democracy of the mid 20th century has receded and substantive, material politics have been replaced by an asymmetrical culture war. The liberal side, afflicted with a fatal tone deafness resulting from their capitulation to capital, attempts to protect the civil rights gains of the mid 20th century. While the conservative side attempts their demographically compromised repeal of those rights. Absent an authentically egalitarian political movement to oppose, the conservative thinker is to some extent freed from the guilt that their positions engendered a few generations prior. All Americans increasingly face precarity or at least its potential. Driven by an unbridled “north is north” moral atavism, which at its core is simply the definitional characteristic of an immature mind, the conservative suppresses not their guilt but their shame, the embarrassment inherent in a state of blatant puerility. Wanton sinfulness is projected onto those elements of society most in conflict with their values, but this results not in the paranoia born of assumed balefulness. Ultimately, it results instead in the sense adolescent aggrievement born of a parental transference.

Moral and intellectual maturity require what the poet John Keats, in an appraisal of Shakespeare, deemed “negative capability.” Essentially, this is the ability to be comfortable in doubt — the ability to recognize the intrinsically multifaceted nature of human experience. When considering a great leader, a Gandhi or a Mandela, their genius in ameliorating difference and building coalitions is often remarked upon. While this is certainly the result of personal charisma, it is to an equal degree the result of their aptitude in the authentic and actionable consideration of multiple perspectives. When negative capability is lacking, as it so often is in those clinging to received tradition, an immature impudence develops as compensation. The psyche resists the expansion of subjectivity, internally and in the other, in order to preserve an embryonic intimation of absolute security. The present and future, replete with the possibility of change, are threatening to this disposition, leading to associations between the recovery of amniotic wholeness and ideologies that preserve tradition.

Maturity is of course separate from intelligence and theological acumen. Many members of the modern conservative hierarchy boast degrees from elite colleges and are capable of mustering impressively erudite apologetics. But beneath this façade there roils a shame. The ability to countenance ambiguity is the basis of maturity and the absence of this ability can only result in deep shame. Said shame, so antithetical to the conservative self conception as paragons of probity, is projected onto the deviant subaltern. This, of course, creates a positive feedback loop of moralist fervor, but additionally, due to the protean nature of shame as a psychic phenomenon, also unconsciously activates the repressed immaturity. The chastened boy, sulking in his room, detects his parents’ shame in the experience of his own. This inchoate inkling of hypocrisy is expressed in subsequent tantrums. The origins of the experience of shame ensure that for both shamer and shamed there is some degree of parental transference, always accompanied by the attendant hysterics.

I confess to the tenuousness of my attempted psychoanalysis. But I can think of no other way to to contend with a movement that has become this baldly ignorant, this completely sundered from reason. Ivy league educated senators oppose the certification of a presidential election on the basis of nothing. A mainstream news station covers the arrival of a “caravan” of desperate migrants as a declaration of war. Republican representatives carry firearms daily into the capital building. We are far past the critical salience of identifying contradictions and condemning hypocrisy. Beneath the American right’s exterior of callous reactivity there looms a petulant crusading instinct, imbued with Thomas’ moral certitude, focused not on the conservation of American values but on apocalyptic replacement.

The main concern of these theocratic levelers today seems to be the protection of children. Protection from “groomers” in the educational system and their dastardly intentions to expose students to the existence of queer people and the unsavory aspects of America’s past. Protection from books in public libraries which attempt the same. Protection from imperfect virus mitigation policies which have clearly disrupted the objectors’ sense of consumerist agency. Protection, descending only bit further into the delusion, from a cabal of globalist pedophiles intent on the kidnap, rape, and ritual sacrifice of their children. JD Vance, the former principle at Thiel Capital and current Republican candidate for Senator in Ohio, has suggested that America’s struggles are the result of a “childless left” more concerned with their cats than the welfare of children.

The love of a parent, particularly a mother, is perhaps the most psychically potent drive in human experience. This assertion is born out in biology, psychology, art, any endeavor concerned with our essential makeup. That this drive has been so absurdly activated in recent years goes a long way in affirming the constitutionally adolescent nature of the current moment’s conservativism. Mature parenthood, at its basis, requires the acceptance of the child’s essential autonomy. The understanding that the child is not an extension of the parent’s ego but rather a separate being for whom the parent is responsible for but not coterminous with. Though the parent has the legal right to attempt to instill their beliefs, acting on this right, let alone constructing a political movement around it, is deeply misguided. On the individual level, this parenting philosophy often requires the repression of the child’s innate curiosity and can lead to regret, resentment, and alienation as the child matures. On a group level, this parenting style is in direct conflict with the liberal ideal of an open exchange of ideas — an ideal whose transmission is fundamental to democracy.

Two teachers at the middle school where I work at assigned a YA novel to a 6th grade class as part of cross curricular unit. Much work went into the planning and several months of coverage were expected. A group of parents objected to the book, a work of historical fiction, because it tangentially covered the concept of crossdressing and employed rape as plot point. They raised a fuss, the administration caved, and the unit was cancelled. Striking to me was that the parents’ pique seemed primarily rooted not in their opposition to the content of the novel but in the fact that they were not consulted first. The term narcissistic applies not because it is a fancy word, but because no other word more accurately describes this method of social engagement. The dearth of proportion that comes from being presented, as all possessing a modicum of consciousness are, with a deeply mysterious world, a world whose infinite variegations necessarily redound in the education of children, and then insisting each aspect of your child’s learning be filtered through the preferences of your moralism. To call this a “parents’ rights” movement is generous at best.

But nowhere is this infantile religious impulse more obvious than in the debate over abortion. Here archetypal intuitions regarding the sanctity of life and the beneficence of motherhood come into conflict with an unidealized reality of biological processes, material concerns, and female subjectivity. The ambiguity is thick. No satisfying threshold for life can be gleaned from science, philosophy, or faith. In its absence, we have only approximation, compromise and the democratic process. A conservative tact in the aftermath of Roe’s overturning has been to factiously reference laws in other developed countries, born out of democratic compromise, which affirm a women’s right to choose with some degree of limitation. Typically, abortion is unrestricted for the first trimester and after there is some requirement of physician's assent. The disingenuous implication being that the conservative intention is not the prohibition abortion but rather more measured abortion legislation at the state level. The efforts of religious conservatives to ban the procedure as completely as possible at the state level of course belies this purported reasonableness.

The logically consistent rhetoric employed by the antichoice movement is entirely saturated with naïve idealization. We have the iconography of the baby, helplessly beaming from billboards, pamphlets, and Twitter banners. We have the benediction of the mother, ebullient in her suburban domesticity, and of the Christian couple, eager for the fruit of the wayward white girl’s womb. We have Erin Hawley, Yale educated wife of the would be insurrectionist senator, explaining in an op-ed how the look in her daughter’s eyes at a Mississippi legal office (the babysitter was late) confirmed the summons of her lord — to serve as legal counsel in an effort to ban a democratically validated healthcare procedure 2,000 years removed from the purview of her ostensible savior. The obvious subtext of all this being that if you are prochoice, or worse a nonevangelical, you are allergic to that which undergirds of human love.

I contend the opposite. The so called “pro life” position is not the exclusive domain of the fundamentalist antichoice movement. In fact, theirs is the position inconsistent with the term. To truly love and foster human life requires the integration of both the ideal, the swaddled child nestled in the parents’ warm embrace, and the shadow, the legion inborn hiccups, genetic, psychic, and social, which are equally constituent of child development and family life. Any legitimate biophilia requires the understanding that too often the shadow overcomes the ideal and that the norms of a compassionate society must reflect this. To do otherwise is to succumb to a reductionism rooted not in humanity but in medieval ignorance.

You’re on the deck of a galley during a terrible storm. The slaves are restless, the single sail is tattered, the coast is a jumbled memory. The captain, you know him as sharp and humane, points up at the sky. “North is North,” he says. “The north star remains visible.” The crew is calmed and invigorated. You’re on the deck of a frigate during a terrible storm. An encroaching wave washes away the first mate’s sextant.. The captain, you know him as an excruciatingly severe fellow, points up at the sky. “North is North,” he says. “The north star remains visible.” The officers exchange nervous smiles and then head below to consult the charts. You’re on the deck of a container ship during a terrible storm. A slight recalculation is required on the central computer. “North is North,” the captain says. “The north star remains visible.” His is escorted politely back to the infirmary.