There is just enough truth in the tired, old cliché that claims “If you are not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you are not conservative when you get older, you have no brain” to evoke an amused (and often self-congratulatory) response. The trend that moves from youthful idealism to mature circumspection is a familiar one. We forgive and even expect a certain amount of intemperance in youth, and we are sad when we see young spirits crushed. We find comfort in the reassurance that the enthusiasms of youth which threaten to outlive their endearing cuteness fade with age and that most of us become more moderate and less emotionally volatile over time. Having lives that are reasonably peaceful, productive, and fulfilling depends on adults embracing a somewhat staid appreciation for orderliness and the good sense to not make things worse by stirring things up too much. Experience does tend to weed out unrealistic and impractical ideas about changing the world.
It is not uncommon (and it is in fact the natural order of things) for the youthful heart to be animated with an excess of passion, even to the point of sometimes being mindlessly violent. The same set of human traits that leads innocent youth to recklessly fall in love can also lead young men (and occasionally young women) to chase a romanticized and distorted mirage of heroism, going off to some remote battleground to join a radical insurgency or flying airplanes into tall buildings. There are in fact young reactionaries who have been hardened by their early experiences in life, even though the mismatch of passion and cruel indifference to the suffering of other human beings is jarring. Their mean-spirited political beliefs might seem heartless, but their stance might actually spring from a deep well of heartfelt allegiance to their cause and its values.
While we might find the seeming heartlessness of some young conservatives disturbing, we often heap the greater portion of our contempt on clueless old softies whose perpetual immaturity and naïveté trap them in a fantasy world where having good motives is supposed to win the day. Aren’t they old enough to know that is not how the world works? Do they suffer from the Peter Pan Syndrome? But there is more to growing up than going through a hang-dog abandonment of childishness, getting rid of all frivolity, and becoming thoroughly serious about making money. Forgetting what it is like to be young can lead to unfortunate developments. There is a tragic overabundance of bitter old men who, having lost touch with their hearts a long time ago, are afflicted with a sense that they no longer matter and that life has passed them by. They are sad and lonely because their grim outlook on life drives everyone away. And just as pathetic is the embarrassing behavior of middle aged men, transparently driven by insecurity and raw lust, speeding along, chasing their lost youth, in their fancy new sports cars equipped with the latest young trophy wives. Obviously, there is more to acquiring good sense than letting go of youthful idealism. Fortunately, we are not all doomed to a disheartening journey through foolish youthfulness and jaded adulthood nor must we all go through the unseemly spectacle of a middle-age crisis. We can buck the trend and question the assumptions that pave the well-traveled conventional pathway.
It is not even true that growing an adult brain inevitably leads to conservatism. There are compelling intellectual reasons for adopting positions that are generally associated with liberalism. Climate change is not going away on its own. Doing nothing about global extreme poverty destabilizes the social and economic institutions upon which we depend and degrades all of us. Racism and economic injustice not only leads to a society that fails to reap priceless talents and contributions; it also feeds into a dark underground where desperate malcontents become outright enemies. It’s more typical of liberals than conservatives to be circumspect instead of complaining about the changes that have come with modernity, to objectively assess the challenges that are inherent in a culturally and religiously plural society, to question ethnocentric and anthropocentric bastions that can present obstacles to a well-functioning civil society, to accept rather than bemoan the loss of traditional values, and to seek rational approaches in the pursuit of equitable resolution of deeply-embedded cultural and moral conflicts.
In matters of morality, liberals have a greater tendency than conservatives to reject a strict deontological approach to ethics and to lean toward the other end of the spectrum, a way of thinking known as consequentialism. Deontologists stress duty, following rules, being guided by moral values that come from religious or other traditional sources, and abiding by status quo cultural norms. Consequentialism, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with ultimate outcomes. It entails challenging traditional forms of authority, and while most liberals who lean toward consequentialism are not without scruples or principles and don’t automatically believe that ends justify the means, their propensity for analyzing and questioning habitual moral inclinations, for overriding natural responses, and for not just going along with prevailing social customs is frequently interpreted by conservatives as mere rationalization and as evidence that they lack sound moral values.
The point is that liberals, even old liberals, far from having no brains, tend to be overly intellectual and to incline toward an emotionally detached, objective attitude, thus the charge that liberals are elitist, since not reacting emotionally can seem condescending and haughty. It is a charge whose credibility is buttressed by actual examples of liberals lacking human feelings where the rubber hits the road, viewing social problems as a remote abstraction, and wanting to address human suffering through social programs as a way of distancing themselves from the front line of human need. The converse is also true. Many conservatives have hearts and are deeply compassionate, at least with regard to certain kinds of people. The very idea that equates folly with liberalism and hard-heartedness with conservatism is dismissive of many actual smart young liberals and kindhearted old conservatives. There are in fact plenty of good-hearted folk, young and old, liberal and conservative, with perfectly fine brains. To be human is to possess both a head and a heart. Embracing one need not be at the expense of the other whether we are young or old. We all bring strengths to the table, young and old, liberal and conservative, those with warm hearts and those with sharp heads.
Conventional wisdom that brands young conservatives and old liberals alike as aberrant might be comforting in its familiarity and might reinforce fond beliefs about why things are the way they are, but the problems humanity now faces demand a larger and more compelling narrative. This would involve exploration of an overlooked and neglected path. There is another fork in the road that lies beyond the two well-known forks that are about the sensible rejection of, respectively, heartless conservatism when we are young and foolish liberalism when we get older. The third fork opens up a new way that veers away from conventional political distinctions, takes us beyond bleeding heart liberals and callous conservatives, bridges the generation gap, and merges head and heart. It is not crazy, nor does it demand anything extraordinary. It is well within reach.
The inevitable disappointments of adult life do not automatically lead to everyone of a certain age being shut down, shut off, selfishly indifferent to human suffering, resigned to the belief that rampant social and economic justice in the world is just the way it is. Not all old men are consumed by impotent rage. Not everyone in middle age goes through a crisis that is marked by asinine self-indulgence. A truer perspective views maturity as a process of ripening and coming to fruition. Many adults find renewal and resilience through the experience of grandparenting, simultaneously finding their hearts freshly enlivened by new possibilities and, being free of having to micro-manage the day-to-day challenges that were involved in raising their own children, discover the sublime power of circumspection. And most adults, at some point, come to terms with their own mortality and, having let go of petty resentments and unproductive attempts to control, become liberated and begin to get a sense of what really matters. In fact, the vast majority of people are, under the right circumstances, very capable of being in touch with the best of what it means to be human and of engaging life with wide open hearts and fully awake brains.
