How to revive and transform intellectual conservatism

Conservative intellectuals are thought of as old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy by modern liberal intellectuals, but from my experience modern liberal intellectuals do not even read conservative intellectuals. The conservative intellectuals who write for Modern Age, Chronicles or the American Conservative actually kick their ass.

Nevertheless, the tradition of Edmund Burke-conservatism has not effectively dealt with the existential individualism of modern intellectuals, whose relativity of values has usually led them to affirm the omnipotent state and globalism. Conservatives rightly respect family, church, localism, and decentralization, but real intellectual respect for ethnocentrism, even natural xenophobia, and respect for group-selection as the primary unit of selection, has been largely missing from conservatism.

This eliminated neo-Darwinist sociobiology as one of the best defenses of conservatism, which recognized the primacy of group-selection or ethnocentrism within basic human nature, even over the all-important family in the history of successful survival and reproduction.

Conservatives instead centered on the family in contrast to individualism, which was of course important, but it was not enough. Friedrich Nietzsche, the intellectual hero of postmodern intellectuals, missed the dynamic religious transformation of the material evolution of life to Godhood, which he rejected, thereby killing God and traditional religion for his postmodern followers.

Conservatism could not get past their dislike and even hatred of the evolutionary sciences, perhaps due mainly to their religious demand for universal altruism, which was based in non-materialism or spiritualism. Altruism has always been based in group-selection and ethnocentrism, leading to localism and ethnopluralism, and not leading to religious or political forms of universalism. Modern liberal intellectuals pounced on this metaphysical error. But then modern liberal intellectuals made the same error with the universal altruism they demanded in the cultural Marxism they espoused.

The religious philosophy of theological materialism can revive intellectual conservatism, which has been largely shut down by way of eliminating neo-Darwinist sociobiology as one of the best defenses of conservatism for the modern world. As I wrote yesterday, group-selection and ethnic selection can balance and harmonize with the constitutional separation of powers and states in the U.S., so this need not be a radical change---although it may require the sacking of political correctness and cultural Marxism. This is deep conservatism.

Theological materialism retains the virtues and values of conservative Edmund Burke but adds the values and virtues of sociobiologist E.O. Wilson. Theological materialism affirms the religious and philosophical transformation of the symbolic Inward God to the real Outward Godhood reached by material and supermaterial evolution. Science and altruistic group-selection can affirm this dynamic.

Ethnopluralism with regions and states set aside (gradually) for distinct ethnic cultures, will greatly slow the social disruptions of ethnic conflicts now increasing, while remaining within the legal constitutional tradition of the United States. Again, as I wrote yesterday, we can continue to love our country as patriots while including religion and still more closely following real human nature.