When a person calls himself a “conservative” what precisely is it that is conserved? Is it ideas? Do conservatives wish to keep valued ideas intact and pure?

Or is it a wish to conserve our limited store of moral energy? Despite what we would like to believe, we cannot just will this energy into existence, because will itself is constituted of this energy.

And even if energy were unlimited, time is indisputably limited. If we so expend most of our energy and time sifting through a near-infinite number of details, then wrestling to organize the mess into something clear and cohesive, wouldn’t the result of this effort be so complicated and unwieldy that our efforts would be hopelessly encumbered (not to mention pleasureless)?

It seems our choice is somewhere on a continuum ranging between “analysis paralysis” in the face of innumerable disorganized facts on one hand an or decisive, energetic action based on simplification verging on willful ignorance on the other. To put it in Yeats’ words, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” I think this tendency grows more and more exaggerated as the old fundamental thought-structures of a culture begin to give out under the pressures of new social conditions, and new underdeveloped and over complicated ones vie (lamely) to replace them.

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Does change resulting from consideration of new and multiple perspectives necessarily mean appending and complicating our idea-world, and making it increasingly unlivable? Probably at first. But thinking deeply can also have a simplifying effect. But this simplification itself takes time and energy, and modes of thinking many people find even more uncomfortable than dealing with baroquely-rehacked, elaborately epicycled and recycled concepts.

Perhaps it is not over-simplification that makes ideologies so damaging to the world — since, after all, all thinking and all abstraction involves selective forgetting and remembering (what we call discerning relevance and discovering generalities) — but rather that the simplifications take into account only what one group or another considers relevant.