The Next Conservatism

The Grand Strategic Context, Part II
By William S. Lind
March 6, 2006

During the Cold War American conservatives faced an easy choice. On one side was the United States and the free world, which represented good. On the other was the Soviet Union and world communism, which was evil.

The next conservatism must deal with a more complex grand strategic context. On the one hand are the forces of the Fourth Generation, which I described in the previous column; al Qaeda is an example. We easily recognize these forces as evil.

But on the other hand we find not a force for good but another evil, Brave New World. And while the old United States did represent good during the Cold War, the new, post-1960s America, or at least its elites, is the global leader of Brave New World.

When I was in high school, which was sometime ago, students everywhere had to read two books that laid out two alternate totalitarian futures. One was 1984, which described a future similar to Stalin's Soviet Union. The other book was a short novel written in the 1930s by a British author, Aldous Huxley, titled Brave New World. I suspect few public school students read Brave New World today; it might lead them to question the direction in which America is heading, led in part by the public schools.

Brave New World presents a totalitarian future where the first rule is, "you must be happy." Happiness comes from a combination of materialism, consumerism, electronic entertainment and sexual pleasure. The world is ruled by a global government, which controls all culture and subjects people everywhere to endless psychological conditioning. Does this begin to sound familiar? It should because America has already gone far down the road Huxley envisioned.

Even reproductive processes are becoming much as Huxley foresaw them; in his Brave New World, children were born from bottles in laboratories, not mothers, and were genetically conditioned for their later roles in life. Sex was purely recreational, and everything was permitted except long-term relationships such as marriage. Soon enough, genetic engineering (one of the technologies of which the next conservatism should be extremely skeptical) will give us the genetic conditioning Huxley foresaw to add to the already ever-present psychological conditioning. Together, they will create an inescapable prison for the human will. At that point, we will face what C.S. Lewis called the Abolition of Man.

America's elites have added to Brave New World one element Huxley did not foresee, the ideology of cultural Marxism, otherwise known as Political Correctness. Cultural Marxism has as its goal the destruction of the Christian religion and Western culture, two obvious obstacles to Brave New World's total control over the human will. Cultural Marxism now holds sway over all Western elites; to deny or contravene it (without groveling apologies) is to cease immediately to be a member of the elite. Ordinary people are psychologically conditioned, especially through television and the public schools, to be unable to contravene cultural Marxism. Its marriage with Brave New World is mutually convenient.

Just as Brave New World is correct when it says that the forces of the Fourth Generation represent a return to the Dark Ages, so the Fourth Generation is correct when it calls Brave New World Satanic. Yet as I said at the outset, the collision between these two vast forces will define the grand strategic context in the 21st Century.

How should the next conservatism deal with this situation? Choosing the lesser of two evils is not an option because if there is one thing Brave New World and the Fourth Generation agree on it is that "Western culture's got to go." Western culture defines who we are as conservatives.

Rather, we must do what seems impossible. We must rally the remnants of the Christian West to fight the Fourth Generation and Brave New World simultaneously. The next conservatism must strive to keep the old faith, the old morals and old ways of living alive as, hopefully, Brave New World and the Fourth Generation destroy each other. Will that be possible? With God, all things are possible. But it certainly is not going to be easy.


William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation.