Ethnopluralism as the new/old conservatism

Burke's conservative view that “political institutions grow from customs and conventions cultivated through long generations” needs also to include the long biological origin of much of cultural behavior, or the sociobiology perspective, which can go deepest. Then we can more clearly see that some of the promotions of universal abstract conceptions, for example, by the global desiring neoconservatives, are impossible---impossible abstractions would include not only the quixotic extremes of Marxism but libertarianism, more or less, which has been preferred by many American conservatives. The group remains the central unit of selection, individualism follows.

The power of history (historicism) can and does limit politics and abstractions, as Burke believed, but biology circumscribes politics even more so. People and their genetic traits are the founders of our cultures, culture doesn't found people. Biology is more a “universal” element than the Platonic abstractions of Leo Strauss.

Burke would have opposed the Straussian dominance of universal classical “natural rights”over living Christian morals, but the concept of natural rights can adjust to universal sociobiology without losing Anglo-American Christianity, which many say is at the foundation of the West. To understand Christianity in the face of the biological origin of much of cultural behavior, including religion, requires a theological shifting, not abandonment, from emphasis on the abstract and symbolic Inward God of Christ to the Outward Godhood of material and supermaterial evolution, which is the realization of the Inward God of Christ. Religion can join universal evolution and science this way, then both can embrace the world.

Our evolution toward Godhood requires the Ordered Evolution of conservatism, because improvements are slow, stable conservative societies are needed, nine-tenths of mutations are unfitting.  And we should not bypass the evolution of life for the evolution of intelligent machines, which almost seems to be a sly way of avoiding the touchy but vital subject of human evolution.

This sociobiological political understanding also revives Southern Agrarian ideas of the land and localism, and shifts the bigger Burkean political and cultural institutions toward the side, but not out of sight. What then appears is Ethnopluralism, many states that are virtual ethnostates, which can live within the classical conceptions of human rights and republicanism, on the Left or the Right, protected by a light federalism, even within the U. S. Constitution.