Winning over conservatives

Minding my own business at lunch in a food court, I overheard two women at the next table talking about the AWARE saga. One looked like she was in her forties, the other looked a few years younger. Both, however, shared similar opinions. The word "god" appeared in every sixth sentence.

Their conversation wasn't particularly interesting to me. One woman would say something, the other would agree, signalling empathy and affirming the proffered point of view while embellishing the idea a little more.

It got a wee bit more interesting when their conversation drifted to homosexuality. There was the usual crap: "As God says, we must love them, despite their sin", but they also revelled in exchanging stories about how disgustingly "out" some gay people were.

"They put their arms around each other's shoulders."

"Aiyah, that's not as bad as in some countries where they want to marry each other."

"That's really going too far. It's not that we discriminate against them, right? You can be homosexual, but as the good lord says, you can avoid having sex.

"Yes, exactly. If you say you cannot change, never mind. Just be celibate."

* * * * *

  
Last night, some friends of mine were talking about mobile phones. One remarked that nowadays, many people don't have a land line into their homes anymore.

Another said, "For a long time, I really didn't want a handphone, but then everybody else started having one, and everybody expected me to have one too. So no choice, have to get one." Laughing, he added, "Now, I can't do without it."

* * * * *

 
I didn't quite catch what mother and son were talking about, but I did catch her saying, "You must respect tradition."

"That's all baloney," said the son, in his army uniform. "Nobody believes in that kind of thing anymore."

"It's just a matter of respect, that's all. They are your elders."

"Oh please, lah. You're sounding like that old hag at AWARE."

I had to scrunch my face to suppress a laugh.

* * * * *

 
What is conservatism? Who are conservatives? What are they trying to conserve? -- a question that reader YCK posed in a comment to the earlier essay What 'secular state' should mean.

This present essay is an exploratory one, tossing about some ideas that may move the conversation forward. Some have been contributed by readers' comments to the earlier essay. Here, I'd like to pull the ideas together.

Perhaps we can begin thus: What conservatives tend to want conserved is the status quo. Conservatism is the social and political manifestation of an attitude that prefers the known and the habituated to the unknown and the experimental.

As I have mentioned in earlier articles, conservatism is also associated with a high regard for order, authority and certainty.

When conservatism is cast as a preference for maintaining the status quo, it explains one of the most aggravating characteristics of it -- logical inconsistency. As we all know, one can expound till one is blue in the face that the same arguments that supported racial equality or women's rights, support gay equality today, and yet it never seems to move them. One can point out to the bible-thumpers that they are being selective when citing Leviticus, yet they are not the least embarrassed.

Conservatism is therefore, not, in the main, an intellectual position, but a gut reaction in the face of change. Conservatives are people who by their nature resist change. It doesn't matter very much what the logical arguments for change are; they just don't like things to change.

What usually happens is that a pseudo-logical rationalisation is constructed to counter opposing arguments. And where there are weaknesses in the rationalisation, they are bolstered by appeals to authority.

For example, we find it mind-boggling that some conservatives would argue that homosexuality must be bad because it is against the law. It doesn't take much intelligence to point out such an argument is akin to putting the cart before the horse, but we'd be missing the point of it if we only saw it that way. That formulation is really saying: Here is something established and institutionalised through the wisdom of the ages... and we should respect tradition. Age is venerable to conservatives.

"You must respect your elders," Thio Su-Mien said.

At the same time, in any society, there are lots of people too who embrace change, not resist it. They think change is "cool". Their life experiences have been that experimentation has generally yielded more fun and more self-fulfillment than sticking to the tried and tested. That's the big bluish group just to the right of the centre line.

The change embracers usually follow in the footsteps of the intense blue group at the far right end of the graph. These are what technology marketeers call the "early adopters" -– people who are quick at trying new things. They revel at being at the forefront of change and experimentation. With gadgetry, we generally see them as harmless; with socio-political causes, such as recycling, gay families, save the sharks and ban the car, we often see them as so far out, we sometimes don't know what they are talking about.

At the other end, there is a small group that are more than conservative, people who actively want to undo some recent changes. To them, even the world that exists today is intolerable; things would be better if we reverted a few steps back, typically to a romanticised picture of a bygone age. I call them the extreme conservatives or the regressives.

A single individual may find himself at different points of the scale depending on the issue. Someone who loves experimenting with food and cooking styles may be very conservative in terms of technology, and politically middle-of-the-road.

But, probably throughout the ages, young people are more to the right of the graph than older people. They are less wedded to the tried and tested, less fearful of new things and new ideas. In some countries like Singapore, the young have better education than their parents, and are therefore more able to use their intellect to work out issues for themselves rather than rely on established authority.

This bias towards change, led by each succeeding generation, is what explains a steady rate of change through human history.

* * * * *

 
If conservatism is ultimately a matter of gut feel and not an intellectually-arrived-at position, how does one win people over from that side?

Rational arguments are probably not the best tools. This is not to say they are useless; they are certainly helpful to win over those in the middle, whose instincts are not conservative, but who do not (yet) understand the issue at hand.

But since conservatism is essentially based on feeling comfortable with the known and uncomfortable with the unknown, the mobile phone anecdote above is probably apt. Conservatives eventually follow when the world around them has moved, and they just get used to the new situation.

That is why, for the gay cause, coming out is so darn important. When conservatives see gay people all around them, they just get used to it. Ditto with media portrayals of gay people. Ditto with discussion of sex and homosexuality.

"Getting used to it" is an underestimated but powerful force. That's how conservatives today have come to think nothing of magazines replete with scantily-clad women, and how nobody bats an eyelid anymore when someone goes to an orchestral concert in jeans and sneakers.

This explains why the more determined conservatives, and most certainly the regressives, fight hard to invisibilise and silence the new, through censorship in the media and in schools. They know that given enough exposure, most conservatives eventually get used to the new, and the war would be lost.

* * * * *

 
Now let me turn to the government's stance. On the question of homosexuality, I would place the policy position somewhere in the moderately conservative zone. The government accepts that it should not attempt to reverse the progress to date, but it argues that anything other than the status quo is "too controversial".

As you can see, this immediately suggests a conservative bias, manifested in their eagerness to maintain censorship and keeping Section 377A of the Penal Code, the law that criminalises sex between men.

Yet, the government will aver that they are merely maintaining a neutral position. How do they delude themselves thus?

In their minds, they dismiss progressive-minded Singaporeans as the liberal fringe, the "whackos". To the government, these Singaporeans do not understand how Singapore works, and therefore their views aren't important. In any case, they are not reliable voters for the People's Action Party, since these pinko liberals believe in things like human rights, freedom of speech and so forth.

After netting off these "liberal whacko" voices, leaving only what the government calls "the heartlanders", the government see its position as well-calibrated to be in the middle.

Yet, are heartlanders necessarily conservative? Or are we being bulldozed into thinking so by the insistent framing of the issue in this way?

My view is that, as hypothesized above, conservativism is more a character trait than a reflection of socio-economic class. The extreme conservatives that popped up in the AWARE saga, for example, were middle class or better. There is no reason to believe that someone living in a small flat in a public housing estate can't be liberal-minded. If there is any correlation between socio-economic class and conservatism, it may be more a function of education than income.

That in turn points to another dilemma: On the one hand, the government wants to prioritise education and critical thinking. On the other hand, the government wants conservative values defended. Can the circle be squared?

I think you can guess the answer if you look at the nearly schizophrenic messages being put out by the Education Ministry over sexuality education... but that's another topic for another day.

© Yawning Bread 

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