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Re: Conservatives and conservation
[Rod Dreher 03/21 10:51 AM]I write in Crunchy Cons how reading former Bush speechwriter (and NR writer) Matthew Scully’s book Dominion turned me around on the way I see the natural world. Frederica brought it up earlier in the Food chapter discussion, where its take on factory farming had obvious resonance. I chose to put my discussion of the Scully book in the Environment chapter, because the philosophical ideas informing Matthew’s important book had more to do with mankind’s view of the natural world, of which food is a subset.
As I write in my own book, I was one of those conservatives who had vague positive feelings about the natural world, but who despised environmentalists as neopagan loons. I was unwilling to examine my own assumptions and prejudices, until I picked up Matthew’s book — and the only reason I picked it up was because I know Matthew is a good man and a staunch conservative. In other words, I trusted him. What did he see that I didn’t? Here is a passage from Crunchy Cons in which I have a dialogue with Matthew: In a world where efficiency is the highest value, honor comes at too high a price. If you think about it, conservatism today often takes on the characteristics of what conservatives say they hate most of all about liberalism: self-interest above anything else. It is a vision of man as an autonomous being who has only needs to meet and demands to make, no obligations to fulfill.
“At a certain point, they tend to see people more as consumers,” Matthew said. “I remember when a particular conservative columnist strolled into my office one day at the White House. We started talking about this issue” – animal welfare – “and I told him I was writing a chapter in my book about how we needed to get away from factory farming. His response was ‘But that’s going to cost more money.’ Conservatives should be the first to understand that we’re not just here to make money, that we have other duties in life.”
I admitted to Matthew that for years I had looked at environmentalism, especially animal welfare, as something essentially trivial, something that I could shrug off. I found lots of company on the right.
“My response to that is that you don’t get to shrug things off just because they’re little things,” he said. “Little moral wrongs have a way of growing into much greater moral problems unless you take care of them. And that has happened in the case of industrial farming. All moral values have been subordinated to economic values.”The philosophical dynamic in this conversation can be seen across the political spectrum in contemporary America. A pastor’s wife I know who recently moved to a conservative suburb told me how shocked she was to find out that many of the moms in her neighborhood group — not liberals! — were taking fertility treatments that would inevitably result in the creation of human life that would be aborted or otherwise discarded. All they could think about was the end — a baby — and not the monstrous means it took to get them to that good end. The cover story in Sunday’s NYT Magazine is all about how prosperous but unmarried American women today are shopping for sperm donors to give them the child they want. On stem cell research, even some conservatives can’t understand the fuss about it; so what if it can involve taking embryonic life, or even creating human life to be destroyed — hey, we might cure some dread disease.
Taking human life is obviously a graver moral problem than factory farming or despoiling the environment. But the instrumentalist mentality that dominates American life undergirds all these things.
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