Ikle writes:

The fabulous success of conservative economic policies has seduced many in our midst into taking economic growth as the defining attribute of conservatism. These brethren now believe that conservative policies can and must make all good things in society grow, and that this good growth can and must continue indefinitely. They act as if conservative thought were nothing but the philosophy of perpetual growth.

Thirty-five years ago, Marshall McLuhan supplied a partial answer when he observed that "everyone experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, and not understanding, that influences behavior." McLuhan was primarily concerned, of course, with the shift in communications from print to the electronic media, and the statement can be seen as a brief elaboration of his catchy aphorism, "the medium is the message." But the principle applies more broadly as well. To the extent that our daily experience is at all humanly mediated-"brought to us by" human ideas, technologies, architectures-it is necessarily suffused with implicit moral values. Churches and synagogues can tell us what we should believe, continuing to teach traditional virtues, but if the grounds and rounds of daily life are calibrated differently, our behavior will begin to shift accordingly. We can continue to "talk the talk" but won't "walk the walk" as, in Hamlet's words, "that monster, custom, who doth all sense eat," silently reconfigures our daily actions.