Cultural Conservation :: essays research papers

One problem with cultural conservationTo put it simply, and its not a problems that only conservatives very often confuse(or conflate morals and estheticals. When Gertrude Himmererfarf lambastes out (as sheperceives it) amoral, sexually deviant and polymorpously perverse culture she isprimarily responding to virtuallything that she finds culturally foreign and estheticalallythreatening.I agree with her that values be oftentimes a good thing, only only when they areborn of an ethical and pragmatic perspective, not an aesthetic one.The conservatives want a seemingly neat and compartment society wherein stableappearances are maintained and archaic cultural archetypes are adhered to religiously. Igrew up in a world of cultural archetypes. I grew up with white business community going tooffice buildings while their wives stayed at home and their kids went to school. or , muchaccurately, I grew up with alcoholic, adulterous business men who lives culturally insularlives while th eir wives took sedatives and smoked cigarettes and vented their frustrationson there kids, and these same kids took reams of drugs, got abortions, swarm drunk, andvictimized the weaklings. I grew up in what most conservatives would consider a utopialots of money, prestige, cultural cohesion, and good conservative values. But their values were in fact aesthetics, and maintaining these aesthetics ruled andruined their lives. Almost everyone in this suburban bourgeoisie system hated their lives, barely because they had been brought up to worship aesthetic myths they felt that toquestion them was an admission of personal failure.What are these myths? theyre old and unoriginal but Ill trot on them againthats money makes you happy, that society is flop and that poverty is bad, thatmaintaining convention in every aspect of your life is the final good, that aberrancefrom these ideas is sin. ect.Im not going to say that the polar opposites of the clichs is true, that would beone of the fa ilings of the radical left. I believe that for the most part these criteria areirrelevant. Money crowd out make life easier, but it also can make life miserable. Poverty canbe bad but it can also be fine. Convention has some good points and some bad points. What it all comes down to is flexibility that should allow for the well be of theindividual without compromising the rights of other individuals.When conservatives trot out their litany of evils-homosexuality, single rebootfamilies, multiculturalism, ect. Im always asking why?. If people are happy being joyousthen whets wrong with that? it may be a lifestyle thats aesthetically different from what