Can a Pagan be a Conservative?

July 21, 2011 by Gus diZerega

Continued from Page 2

This "conservative" ideology, if it can be dignified with that name, actively denies the webs of interconnections between people and between people and customs that has been the chief political insight of conservatives from Burk to more recent ones such as Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott. Their vision is either an asocial egoism a la Ayn Rand, or the theology of the baboon troop with an Alpha God on top, His appointed human bullies below, and everyone else at the bottom—the universe as a kind of divine corporation or bureaucracy.

Genuine conservatives in America have often focused on preserving nature. Our national parks have been as popular with conservatives as with liberals. Look up Barry Goldwater on the subject some time, a man who was once called "Mr. Conservative." Nature is an ecosystem as intricate as society, probably more so, and needs to be protected from too radical a change.

Opposing global warming, depletion of the seas, and industrial agriculture are conservative values. Supporting organic agriculture, sustainable forestry, and complex ecosystems is the essence of traditional conservatism. Conservative insight conflicts with corporate visions of complete control and manipulation. These latter have far more in common with Josef Stalin's idea of a Five Year Plan than they do with anything Edmund Burke ever wrote. As with the revolutionaries of the French Terror, and many violent revolutionaries since who have treated "human resources" with the same ruthlessness and ignorance as BP and EXXON and Massey Energy treat their "natural resources." Modern right wing 'conservatives' reject conservative insights about nature in favor of a Stalinist approach with as much vehemence as they reject conservative insights about society.

This vision is perfectly suited to serving the powerful, which is why so many corporate and ultra wealthy people support them, for in their fantasies of exercising domination over those around them who are weaker than they, they are facilitating those far stronger than they in dominating everyone else, including they themselves. These so-called conservatives would reject Burke's defense of the rights on Englishmen and Paine's defense of human rights in favor of George III's rule by domination and manipulation. Conservatives allow for piecemeal change, 'conservatives' reject change except when they can cram it down others' throats through the force of law.

To add to that, consider the "conservative" alliance with theocracy, as epitomized with its love affair with Michele Bachmann. Only a Pagan with a death wish could support these people.

And so my answer to the question "Can a Pagan be a conservative?" is yes. But for the life of me I cannot see why or how a Pagan can be a right-winger, a modern "conservative," any more than I can understand why a Jew would be a Nazi.

And yet, at the deepest level, I think Paganism is particularly open to genuine conservatism. Certainly as I understand it, I see us as embedded within a living world far greater than any of us in time and depth. The ideal of humans dominating nature is worse

than simply mistaken, it is disastrous. Paganism as I understand it heals the rift between liberalism and genuine conservatism by situating recognition of ourselves as existing within a social and natural ecology in a recognition that both we and the whole are sacred, and each element of the whole is best treated in accord with that recognition.

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7/21/2011 4:00:00 AM

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About Gus diZerega

Gus diZerega is a Gardnerian Elder with over 25 years practice, including six years close study with a Brazilian shaman. He has been active in interfaith work off and on for most of those 25 years as well. He has conducted workshops and given presentations on healing, shamanism, ecology and politics at Pagan gatherings in the United States and Canada. Follow Gus on Facebook. Gus blogs at Pointedly Pagan

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