Why I Cannot Be a Conservative/ Part I: The Humanist Perspective

Quick, take on this challenge!

Name the greatest writer of the past two centuries who has been of a declared right-wing or conservative ideology. If you can, then name five great ones.

Do the same for the greatest intellectuals or philosophers of the past two centuries.

Now try the same for composers, painters, sculptors, architects.

How about great social reformers?

Similarly, how about the great scientists, or the great filmmakers and actors?

How many names have you got in total one, two, five or ten? You would be really hard pressed to find more than a handful in each category, even when you spend a lot of time researching and Google-ing.

Let me help you out, but before I do, here are some caveats.

a) The list is based on truly great contributions to the human cultural and intellectual heritage.
b) Pop stars and most figures of popular culture are not included. Unless they have left a real lasting legacy (which is usually more the exception than the rule).
c) Economists, financiers and business leaders are not included. It is doubtful that their legacy is of a really lasting nature. After all, no one can name the richest man during the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, or the top businessman of the Renaissance.
d) Political leaders and monarchs are excluded, because a political conviction and position is part of their raison-d’être. We are only interested in these individuals in as much as their political position is a secondary variable, not a primary one.
e) It is important to look at the past two centuries, because the political conceptualization of the right vs. left is shaped throughout that period. One would be very hard-pressed to define the ideology of Socrates or Shakespeare within those relatively modern constructs. Also, the political or ideological positions must be attributable either through the actions of the named individuals or their public statements.
f) Any racially motivated declaration or public espousing of discrimination is deemed to be automatically those of a right-winger. Also, criticizing Israel does not make one an anti-Semite and hence a right-winger, whereas openly expressing disdain and hatred for Jews does. The former is a democratic right, the latter is hate propaganda.

So, here is the list:

Great writers:

Unequivocal right-wingers:

1. Winston Churchill - (Nobel winner for literature - 1953). He of course needs no introduction, but it is a little known fact that he was however a member of the Liberal Party of Britain from 1904 to 1924.
2. Ezra Pound - An American genius of an innovator in modern English poetry and literary criticism. He lived in Italy, was a notorious supporter of Mussolini’s fascists and a self-declared anti-Semite in his radio broadcasts supporting the Axis powers during WWII.
3. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - (Russian author, Nobel winner for literature – 1970). Suffered tremendously in Soviet prison camps. A Russian ultra-nationalist who had very public anti-Semitic positions and publicly called for the continued bombing and the destruction of Vietnam to “save” them from Communism.
4. Knut Hamsun - (Norwegian author and Nobel winner for literature - 1920). Notorious supporter of Norwegian Nazi collaborators as well as an outright Hitler admirer, who even wrote a glorifying obituary of Hitler when he learnt of the latter’s death.
5. Yukio Mishima – Arguably, one of the greatest Japanese writers and intellectuals of the post WWII era. He was also a filmmaker and militarist who organized his own right-wing militia that attempted a military coup in 1970. When it failed, Mishima committed suicide through ritual seppuku (hara-kiri).
6. André Malraux - (French author, and Minister of Culture 1959-1969). Fought Franco’s right-wing Falangist militia during the Spanish Civil War, he was a member of the French leftist coalition of the Front Populaire, as well as of the French Resistance. After WWII, he became a supporter of De Gaulle and a very influential intellectual and minister in France.

Potential right-wingers:

7. T.S. Eliot - (Nobel winner for literature – 1948). Accused of anti-Semitism. He might have been innocent of it ideologically, but he certainly has expressed some slight (veiled) anti-Semitism in his literary works.
8. C.S. Lewis - (author of the Chronicles of Narnia). A born again Christian at the age of 33, his political views cannot be classified as right-wing, but his views about Christian morality and faith would probably place him closer to the right side of the political spectrum. It would of course be a stretch, since he has clearly declared himself for a strong democratic tradition, separation of church and state and a despiser of theocracies.
9. Jorge Luis Borges - One of the greatest of all Latin American writers (and my personal favorite on this list) with an incredible imagination and an extremely creative sense of the aesthetics of language. Borges was a staunch anti-Peronist (Peron had a particular disdain for Borges and demoted him to a meat inspector’s job); although that alone would not make him a right-wing thinker, he was sympathetic towards the military dictators that governed Argentina in the 1970s, perhaps because they were anti-Peronists themselves.

Great intellectuals/philosophers: None !!!!!

Great Social Reformers: Doubly None !!!!!

Great Scientists:

1. Edward Teller - The principal scientist whose team invented the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. He was a member of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project (atomic bomb) team who later denounced Oppenheimer as unpatriotic and untrustworthy. He was opposed to the US-Soviet nuclear disarmament initiatives and treaties, and assisted in the setting up of the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapon program.
2. William Shockley – (Nobel prize in physics – 1956). The co-inventor of the transistor, originally of Bell Labs. He was a paranoid inventor who espoused racist views and was a proponent of eugenics and government control of populations via sterilization and the enhancement of intelligence with selective breeding.

Great Painters and sculptors:

1. Salvador Dali – As an artist, Dali needs no introduction. While in the early part of the 20th century he did move in left-wing intellectual circles and had close collaboration with many artists of the same group, he eventually became a supporter of and an apologist for Franco’s dictatorial right-wing Spanish regime.

Great Architects:

Potential right-wingers :

1. Antoni Gaudi – One of my all time favorite architects. He was a very devout Catholic and that would be enough to swing him over to a right-ideology classification. However, as a Spanish Catalan, he was also very nationalist and stood up to the Spanish dictatorial authorities in defense of Catalonian national interests such as the defense of Catalonian culture and language.

Great Composers:

1. Richard Wagner - A prolific, talented and innovative composer, Wagner was also a self-declared anti-Semite who wrote against what he called “Jewishness in Music” and attacked Jewish composers. He also wrote about the purity and superiority of the German race. It is no coincidence that his work was appropriated by the Nazis.

Great Filmmakers:

Potential right-wingers :

1. Elia Kazan – Winner of three Academy Awards, Kazan was a member of several left-wing and progressive movements in his youth, including the Communist party. During the McCarthy “Hollywood witch hunts” of the early 50s, Kazan denounced several of his former left-wing colleagues. He is listed here only because of that act. He however, never considered himself a conservative, but quite the opposite. Orson Welles, while condemning his act of denouncing said that he remained one of the greatest film directors.

Great Rock Stars:

1. Elvis Presley - He asked for an audience with President Richard Nixon and offered to help rid the US of hippies and the Black Panthers. He wanted to have an FBI mandate to clear the minds of youth from the “Communist and anti American propaganda of the Beatles”.
2. Eric Clapton – Supported Enoch Powell’s British ultra right-wing party (the Ulster Unionists) of Northern Ireland and, in a drunken stupor screamed that he wanted a “white and clean Britain”.

Great Actors:

1. Charlton Heston – This Academy Award winner also needs no introduction. My personal favorite roles he portrayed are those of Col. George Taylor in the original Planet of the Apes (1968), and Michelangelo in The Agony and the Esctasy (1965). It is a lesser known fact that prior to becoming a gun-shaking right-wing advocate of R. Reagan, George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush, Heston was actually once approached by the Democratic Party to run for office. In his younger days he opposed the Vietnam War, supported civil rights and even gun control. After the late seventies, he opposed affirmative action, became the president of the NRA and was caught on camera by Michael Moore with a blatant racist discourse.


That’s it. That’s the list. All glorious 3 pages of it, including my relatively detailed descriptions.

I suspect, that if you apply the criteria I am outlining, it would be really difficult to add any substantial number to this list and expand it significantly; you can see that even though I am a politically biased anti-conservative, I have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to some on the list and have “generously” classified them here.

The real question is why is this list so small? Why are so few advancements of the human intellectual achievement attributable to right-wingers and conservatives? The opposing list would literally be contained in a volume per category. They are not comparable neither in quantity and one could successfully argue that nor even in comparative quality.

I believe that the reason is intrinsic to conservatism. By definition, conservatives would like to preserve the status quo, or to reach an ideologically romantic state of the “good old days”. An illusory state which existed in the early Victorian period but for only wealthy upper class white male industrialists and financiers.

That state of existence however was far removed from the reality of most people of the planet at the time. Here is what that dream-like state includes:

a) A yearning for empires and “great military achievements and conquests”. It was the time of empires and colonization (the fact that cannons were used against spears and that it was hardly an equal contest seems to elude the advocates). The British, French, Russian and to a lesser extent German. The American one was forming. Empire building was of course at the expense of the people that are conquered.

b) It was also the time of uncontrolled, unregulated and unfettered industrial and capitalist expansion (very similar to our own times right now).

c) The only modern “democracies” were the French and American republics. The French one rapidly degenerated into a reign of terror and then to Napoleon’s personality cult, the American one was founded upon the toil of slaves.

d) Women have no rights. No legal abortion, no votes, no equal rights in the workplace. The workplace of course being that of servants or brothels and slightly later that of the grueling factories.

e) Workers have no rights. Neither do children. Most of the latter worked in mines and factories.

f) Most social mores are governed by a strict, puritan and strongly religious code of conduct. The religious hierarchy has unbelievable influence on the daily lives of all layers of society.

g) Science is tolerated, in as much as it allows the monetization of new discoveries and inventions. When it challenges religious doctrine, it is frowned upon, declared dangerous and censored.

h) Censorship in artistic expression is the rule, not the exception.

i) Non-whites do not exist as people.

j) Homosexuals are imprisoned.

In general, this is the conceptual framework of conservatism. This is the springboard from which their discourse is launched. Granted, it has changed much over time and is now cloaked under such guises as “traditional and family values”, “religious and ethical morality”, “the supremacy of the markets”, “deregulation and globalization of business”, ”support for our military” and so on.

In the end, if you really think hard about it, it is a question of power and a lament that power has been lost to all those who initially never had power over their own lives. Those who had to give away that power, as it had to be wrested from them with the blood of literally hundreds of millions of human beings, are definitely not content and want to conserve what they have or rather what they had, essentially to turn back the clocks of time.

The way to do that is by ultimately imprisoning ideas, creativity, human rights, artistic expression, and thoughts for social justice etc. etc. Reread human history after the Renaissance with this critical view and you will see it in a totally different light.

The human intellect only thrives upon redefining the boundaries of thought. By definition, creativity will want to reframe debates about art, culture, history, science, societal development, politics, and human rights. In a word, everything. There are no sacred cows for the human mind. There will always be someone who will want to challenge the status quo.

The human intellect and creative spark constantly want to make us see ourselves in a new light. We cannot help it. We have been genetically conditioned throughout millions of years of evolution to be problem solvers in order to survive. Creativity is the ultimate tool allowing for the adaptability of our species.

Conservatives have no interest in that. They want to conserve things the way they are, or rather the way they were. Oops, I forgot. Real conservatives do not believe in evolution.

I wish they spent their efforts trying to conserve the planet.

Watch for Part II of this series. Why I Cannot Be a Conservative, The Canadian Perspective.


Montreal, October 10, 2008
© Viken L. Attarian