In our interview, Michael Blowhard had this to say about conservatives and their temperament: “Conservatives are often practical, non-theoretical people with an aversion to flossiness and silliness. And the American literary world as it’s currently constituted is pretty damn pretentious and silly.”
My musician friend Martin has similar thoughts. He feels a vast gulf separates the liberal and conservative mind. He describes conservatives (again, generally) as serious in thought, and more apt to value personal responsibility and spiritual-based morality, while artists, he says, tend to have, and maybe even need to have, more lax work and personal ethics. Creative people, he tells me, want to push the envelope, move beyond the status quo, an attitude which they tend to apply to all aspects of life. Again, it comes down to messiness. Conservatives don’t like a mess; liberals love ’em.
The lifestyle of Bohemia is a prefect example – late nights, sundry substances, many partners; these and other staples are less likely to tempt the conservative temperament by definition.
But even granting that conservatives are temperamentally less inclined to participate in the Bohemian lifestyle, it is a vile (and destructive) myth that Bohemia and artistry necessarily go hand in hand. Many writers and artists, many great writers and artists, have lived stable, relatively tranquil lives consistent with the conservative temperament.
There are no tales of debauchery or overindulgence surrounding Virgil’s life, for example. Instead, the man who authored the Aeneid seems to have been a shy man given to study and composure. Then there is Shakespeare. The scant evidence of his life, mostly legal and church documents detailing births, baptisms, financial transactions, etc., show zero taste for Bohemian recklessness (leaving aside the question of the autobiographical nature of the sonnets, on which topic there is much disagreement). By all appearances, the Bard seems to have been an eminently stable and sensible family and business man, who by his death had managed to amass a healthy sized estate to bequeath to his children and grandchildren.
And it is important to remember that, while conservative temperament and conservative politics often go hand in hand, they do not always. Nor do liberal politics necessarily flow from liberal temperament; there are those rare souls who contain within them both the philosophical love for the free market as well as a liberal temperament given to personal messes and artistic extravagance.
So temperament, while a factor, need not be a determinative one. Perhaps the rest of the puzzle comes down to values.
Conservatives do not value art less than liberals. But it does seem that they value art in a different way. Conservatives tend to put art in perspective, putting it quite sensibly after things like family, God, and country. In other words, conservatives are less likely to value art in that all consuming fashion necessary if one is to devote one’s life to the pursuit. The result, of course, is fewer conservatives than liberals gravitating towards a profession in literature and the arts generally.
Tomorrow we will examine possible solutions to this conundrum, and conclude the series.
[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters -Part one, two, three, four, five and six.]
Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media. He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.” His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.
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