While I have been accused of being a contrarian and even (absurdly) a neocon, I have never identified as a conservative. At one time, I confess, I profited from reading the writings of Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, and Milton Friedman and a few others of that caliber. 

 

For some time, though, there have been no new major conservative thinkers. In fact no conservative thinkers at all, apart from columnists like the odious Charles Krauthammer and the clapped-out George Will. 

 

What happened? The proximate cause was the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush. Surrounded by "National Greatness" loons, he sought to extend US domination throughout the world by bluster, intimidation, and military invasions. Regrettably, that behavior was in accord with one strand of conservative thinking, which seeks simply to clobber opponents. What was not in such accord was his fiscal profligacy, saddling us with an enormous debt that still looms ominously over everything, despite the fatuous assurances of the "deficits don't matter" crowd. 

 

Yet more fatally damaging to the coherence of the conservative cause was a basic antinomy. The unfettered operations of the market have been ruthlessly eroding the social-conservative imperatives of religion and "family values." Since I have never rallied to those latter causes, I see no grounds for lament. Yet the contradiction between the two impulses has made the link between social conservatism and economic conservatism untenable. Honest observers from that camp have detected this disconnect, which explains why so many have fallen silent--and why above all there is no new intellectual product of this kind coming off the assembly line.

Seven years ago when I retired from teaching I resolved to attempt some major reading of authors I hadn't had time to address when I was working. So I tackled the major works of Aristotle, finally finished Dante's Divine Comedy, and fought may way through Montaigne's Essays. Then I thought: why must I turn into a reading machine? I want to read for pleasure as well as instruction. Now a Facebook acquaintance, the Australian Andrew Rutherford, has devised a way of testing this commitment. Take 15 minutes to write down 15 authors that are most important to you (disregarding such universal favorites as Plato and Shakespeare). I did this, and I was surprised to see how dominated it was with counterculture favorites starting, more less, with Verlaine and Rimbaud and concluding with Ginsberg and Kerouac. Once a rebel, always a rebel, I suppose.

Now for the full set of 15.  In looking over my list, I notice that there are no living authors. Apparently I am not keeping up with the times. But in my view it is hard to compete with the truly charismatic works that have come down to us from the past. 

Anyway, here is the full list: Daodejing (ascribed to Laotse), Rabelais, Blake, Leopardi, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, Pessoa, Pound, Dos Passos, Céline, Stein, Bulgakov, Ginsberg, Kerouac. 

 Of course I have evolved over the years. At one time John Donne meant a lot to me; but I tried him again the other day and, except for a few famous pieces, I just couldn't get back into it. And of course new (or semi-new) figures are looming on the horizon.

A couple of weeks ago, Bill Maher broke a taboo that forbids using the words "liberalism" and "bullshit" in the same sentence. Maher is one of a kind, and I am not advocating this practice as a general rule. Still, I am struck by the way that liberalism has become the default setting in this country. 

Conservatives, the few that are left, ascribe this hegemony to the dominant position of liberals in academia, the media, and Hollywood. Supposedly, the influence spread from those loci; absent these citadels liberalism would not be in charge. In all likelihood, though, the effect proceeds in a reverse direction: the media and so forth lean liberal because that is where most thinking people are. I know that I will catch hell for saying this, but is this monothink a healthy situation? 

Forty years ago there was a substantial revival of Marxism, causing a healthy rethinking of issues having to do with class, the economy, and social change. Gradually, this trend faded. There was a little bit of pickup as a result of the economic crisis of 2008, but no much. All too often these days, though, what is left of Marxism is represented by such charlatans as Slavoj Zizek. It almost seems that the popularity of this crazy figure is designed to convey the message that Marxism is indeed dead. That is too bad in my view. 

Another casualty of today's groupthink is libertarianism. Forty years ago, reading writers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman was eye-opening. But now libertarianism is dismissed as simply having led to too little regulation--our present pickle--and that is it. At all events, I am seeking to tackle these issues in my next book project.  This will be historically oriented, starting in the fourteenth century.

 Afternote.  I have just heard the good news that Delaware has become the 11th state to adopt marriage equality. The momentum that this movement has achieved in just a short time is extraordinary, but it may not be an irresistible force, at least not just yet. Most of the progress has been made in the blue states, and by contrast the red states, by and large, have erected formidable barriers. Nor are these restrictions purely formalistic, for many in the heartland still believe that same-sex marriage is immoral and should be blocked. 

Will they be won over? One hopes so, but previous experience with efforts at fundamental social change suggests that this may prove an arduous process. I note also that not all the opponents of same-sex marriage are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. Two of my closest friends, who are long-term gay activists, have reservations about same-sex marriage. In fact they are resolutely opposed to it. Why so? They believe that marriage as such is a reactionary institution, and for GLBT people to rally to it is to blunt the transformational potential unleashed by the original movement for gay liberation. We will simply become stolid bourgeois conformists--like most everybody else. Asked about this, I would have to tell my dissident friends that, regrettably, theirs is a dwindling cohort, as young people have quite a different mindset. 

At all events, these differences of opinion throw some light on my remarks above on the hegemony of liberalism (a political philosophy which may well, I hasten to add, deserve to be hegemonic). But in the matter of marriage equality the "approved" view is flanked by two others, one conservative the other on the left. They may be the skunks at the party, but they are here.

I heartily dislike the new odium theologicum that decrees that one must never quote from news sources that are deemed politically incorrect. For one thing, with all the news sources out there representing various points of view, it is impossible to prevent people from consulting "forbidden" sites. Maybe in Putin's Russia, but not here. 

 

At all events, yesterday I committed what some seem to regard as a cardinal sin on Facebook: I cited a piece from the The FrontPage, an internet magazine maintained by David Horowitz. Some years ago, when I read Horowitz' autobiography, I recognized that David and I were soul brothers--up to a point. For one thing, we were both raised in Communist Party households. We both chafed under the reign of conformity demanded by the Eisenhower years, and longed somehow for a better society. Then in the seventies we both participated in what was broadly termed the New Left, David as a full-fledged combatant with Ramparts Magazine and the Black Panthers, myself more sectorially as a gay liberationist. 

 

Gradually, we both began to have doubts about radicalism as it had developed in the United States. My disillusionment did not in fact take me very far, reflected nowadays mainly in my distrust of both political parties (resulting most recently in the absurd misperception that I was a supporter of George Romney). Yet David became a neocon. I was and am repulsed by that political orientation. David Horowitz and I have never met, but as I indicated we are in some sense linked. Even if we were not, I reserve the right, under the principle of freedom of speech and expression, to quote, when appropriate, from things that he has published. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz

Re: The Events in Boston.

A few days ago the journalist David Sirota published a specious column in which he expressed the hope that the Boston criminals would prove to be native Americans, and not Muslims. Even though it turns out that they actually were Muslims, Oliver Bullough tries to rescue Sirota's thesis by comparing the most recent perpetrators to the murderous Columbine boys. 

I say "Fail"--for this reason. In reality there are ethnic and religious valences attaching to many such atrocities. Rarely are they simply random expressions of individualism, but reflect group values. If one can acknowledge this point in the case of Timothy McVeigh, who represented a kind of far-right insurrectionism, why not mutatis mutandis with the perpetrators in Boston? Reflecting the intensity of the quarrel with the Russian authorities, Chechnya has proved an exceptional breeding ground for jihadists. It is idle to pretend otherwise. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/opinion/beslan-meets-columbine.html?_r=0

I have long subscribed to Isaiah Berlin’s principle of incommensurabilty. That is to say, some differences of opinion are based on such radically different premises that even the most sustained efforts in reasoning together will find great difficulty in succeeding: there is no common ground. In practice, though, the principle need not be a counsel of despair. Take same-sex marriage, for example, where as recently as ten years ago differences seemed unbridgeable. But in fact they were bridgeable, through the ideas of equality (a foundational value in our society, however neglected in practice), and in some cases friendship or consanguinity, when a close friend or relative proved to be gay or lesbian and would benefit from marriage.

 

By contrast, in the matter of the current passions aroused by the death of Margaret Thatcher, there seems to be no bridge to soften or erase incommensurability.  Hence the bitterness of the conflict.

My account of The Homophobic Mind, presented seriatim below, may now be more easily accessed in a reformatted version:  http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/BIB/Hompho/index.html

In my account of the many facets of The Homophobic Mind, set out at length in the following postings, I have stressed its origins in Europe and the Abrahamic Middle East.  Ideally, a more global approach would be adopted.  The following piece is an interesting sketch (though the picture it paints is a little too rosy, in my view):  http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-31/the-global-gay-rights-revolution#r=rss


 Here is my review of a recent book edited by David A. B. Murray, Homophobias: Lust and Loathing Across Time and Space (Duke, 2009).

Several general accounts--including those by Byrne Fone and Louis-Georges Tin--exist that address negative attitudes towards same-sex love, what is commonly termed homophobia, its causes, prevalence, and the prospects for reducing it. Existing studies mainly analyze the problem in Western societies. Yet news reports indicate that homophobia also blights Third World countries, where it seems to be on the rise.

There is a clearly a need for a comprehensive study of homophobia on a worldwide basis. Regrettably, this book fails to achieve that aim.

The essays in this book treat only a few countries, notably Australia, Greece, India, Indonesia, and Jamaica. The information offered is mainly anecdotal and little effort has been made by the editor to knit the contributions together into some sort of integrated whole.

Highly present-minded, the book is geared towards the concerns of the guild of academic anthropologists. The writers have neglected to avail themselves of the work of historians with regard to same-sex behavior and homophobia in non-Western countries. This effort began a century ago with the massive study of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack, not cited in this book.

Examination of the larger picture disclosed by this diachronic approach shows that over time homophobia has largely thrived in countries dominated by the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are four exceptions to this generalization: ancient Iran under Zoroastrianism; the Manchus of East Asia; and the Aztecs and Inca in the New World. Why? Recognition of this larger pattern would have gone a long way to fostering an understanding homophobia worldwide.

The essay on Jamaica does acknowledge the role of Christian churches in the intense antihomosexual attitudes that have emerged there. However, there is an almost total blackout on Muslim homophobia. The contributors seem to think that raising this issue is politically incorrect. Yet what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

In short, this book is disappointingly patchy and limited. The need for a worldwide analysis of homophobia must still be met.