I don’t talk about politics often on here. The way I see it, those subjects are best left to Facebook arguments with relatives, awkward family dinners, and first dates. (I’m only joking!) Having said that, I’m going to get a bit political today since this has been on my mind. You see, I used to be a conservative, and now I’m not. Weird, right? People are usually said to get more conservative as they get older, not less; but what can I tell you: I’ve seen the light, hallelujah! I’m kidding, of course. I am quite humbled by this. While it’s tempting to rag on conservatives for some of the—ahem—current troubles facing Western societies, I understand why they think as they do… truly! But before I go any further, I would like to clarify what exactly I mean by conservatism because most people only ever associate it with the brain-dead Reaganomics of the 1980s. (And I do sincerely mean brain-dead. Talk about a trickle-down, FFS!)

Conservatism is what it sounds like: it’s about conserving things. When I talk conservation, the first thing that comes to your mind might be the environment, and fair enough: we only get one home, so we should do our best to protect and conserve its natural beauty. I can appreciate that. But oddly enough, conservatives tend not to fuss about the environment very much—at least not from what I’ve seen. No; rather, it tends to be about culture, or cultural values. It’s about preserving the cultural inheritance of a civilisation; or, more commonly, it’s about going back to some “golden” age. Example: “Make America Great Again!” Things were good, but we lost our way, and now we’ve got to find our way back. This is the sort of culture war conservatism that I identified myself with.

So, what happened? To understand that, I have to look at what made me that way in the first place. Obviously, thinking about this, I need to acknowledge the role my environment and social circle had in shaping my political perspectives, especially since I was so young when they began to develop. I was only 16 when Trump was elected President, for example, and so there was no avoiding political discussions. Everybody talked about it.

Nevertheless, to understand my views, you also need to understand the way I perceived the society I was born into, and this might best be explained by exploring the opinions I had about art. Years ago, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), I saw a canvas on display that was painted black… That’s it! Sure, you could see brush strokes, but it was nothing that any one of us couldn’t have done. I also saw a painting of a single black circle on a white canvas, and that caught my attention as another one of these “rubbish pieces” that exemplified what art had become. Compare that to the beauties I saw when I was in Rome last summer, and there’s truly no comparison! Oh, how I long for the days when closeted gay men would open a door to Heaven on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! That was so much better than the shit we get nowadays. And you know what? I still believe that. I could go on and about how in awe I was of Michelangelo’s work. Having said that, were I to go back in time to those “good old days”, I would quickly find myself a stranger because even if I shared many of the same beliefs as these people (which is hyperbole, but I digress), I am just as defined by my beliefs do not exist in a vacuum: they are also a product of the age I am in, and so it could well be my hatred of modern art that caused my love for the Sistine Chapel rather than the actual sense of the transcendent that had inspired Michelangelo to paint it.

The trouble with conservatism is that, despite conservatives’ protests against it, it amounts to relativism. What traditions do we conserve? What myths do we propagate? Those of our culture, of course! So, I think you’ll find, if you look into it, that there is no consistent conservative philosophy in any nation on earth. A conservative in England and a conservative in Spain or Germany may well be trapped in the hostilities of the past as the conservatism they claim to hold to was the product of an age in which these countries hated each other. Likewise, conservative Christians might be trapped in antagonism towards Muslims because of the history of the Crusades. And if I were to pluck one conservative from Japan and another from France, we would encounter two entirely different types of men. So, which one is it? Which conservatism is the right one? And that’s the thing: there may well be wisdom in either nation’s past that would be worth conserving—and there is plenty—but there is also a lot that should be chucked in the bin.

Consider that Eve couldn’t un-eat the apple; Pandora couldn’t put everything back in the box and close it again. Likewise, once society develops, it cannot retreat to an earlier state, much like an adult cannot (in a healthy manner) completely regress to infancy. Were a well-adjusted adult to attempt to do so, they would be unable to regain their innocence and truly experience that state of life again. Similarly, a society might act out an age-gone-by, but it cannot escape the reasons that age had “gone-by” in the first place. One cannot consciously deceive themselves as such, and that is why I no longer consider myself a conservative. As a worldview, it is ultimately groundless and exists only in frustration with the present and anxiety about the future because ultimately it is an attempt to grapple with a loss of meaning. However, this is not to degrade the past. (I think it’s fairly obvious I find a lot of good in the past.) Rather, my call to action is that we should learn from it, and then express something new.