Conservatives and Anarchy

Paul Adams has written a wonderful piece over on the Ink Desk entitled America and the Irrelevance of the Tea Party in which he points out the affinity between so-called "conservative" and the moral anarchy toward which their philosophies and policies are leading them and us.

I commented on Paul's piece in the combox at the Ink Desk:

The fact is that the philosophy of Materialism continues to effect all aspects of our lives. I don't mean Materialism in the popular sense of "consumerism", but Materialism properly so-called, the doctrine that everything that exists is but a mere aggregation of atoms, free will and reason being but illusions created by the interplay of molecules.

This philosophy is what is behind the libertarianism of the modern "conservative". It is the notion, as you suggest, that individuals are the atoms that compose the social unit, atoms whose wills are arbitrary and meaningless, which means, of course, that the conglomeration of these disparate wills is just as arbitrary and meaningless.

Materialism is a form of nominalism - there is nothing but individuals, no types, no generalities. This kind of thinking obliterates "nature", including "human nature". It leads to a world where nothing connects to anything, which is more or less what T. S. Eliot called "hell".