I arrived at what I am forced to call "conservatism" by way of extreme skepticism.

I admit that there is something like nature and reality, but maintain that we glimpse such objectives only "through a glass, darkly," and that even the stablest, most empirically rigorous data set is the mere product of human cognition, a feeble and faulty thing at best, and a totally and dangerously delusional thing at worst.

With all knowledge subject to doubt, modesty and prudence must rule the practice of politics.

We can agree that when it comes to navigating through darkness, you sticks to the basics. Imagine walking through an unlit room at midnight. You keep your hand to the wall, maybe, or walk in a deliberate, plodding shuffle. You don't take off at a full sprint, even if you do have in your head some conceptual map of the room, some plan of navigation.

That's because you recognize, at least semi-consciously, the limitations of your own mind. Why rely on abstraction when you can rely, point-to-point in a practical manner, on your senses, on discreet steps which figure, in the most basic manner, "if this, alright, then that."

If you do choose to sprint, you crash your shin into a chair or bust your nose against a refrigerator, whatever.

Yet, despite ours fundamental ignorance, we humans have managed to develop certain systems that protect our needs, nurture our desires, and fulfill basic instincts and urges. Those associations which are ancient and organic have proven their worth by virtue of longevity and must typically be given prejudicial treatment, not because they are 'good' or 'ideal,' but because they have been educated by generations of the old plod and shuffle of daily existence, trimmed and shaped from this direction and at that angle by the awesome variety of human experience.

My reservations regarding verifiability and modes of empiricism which attempt large rather than small statements may seem to put me in the postmodern camp. However, as Slavoj Zizek effectively demonstrates, early in its emergence modernity was a very humble affair.

Liberalism, modernity's initial political manifestation, stated simply and elegantly: "Yes, we have different existential outlooks; no, we cannot seem to resolve them short of reducing our whole civilization to ash; okay then, let us agree to disagree in a kind of demilitarized zone and . . . voila, secular civil space, a prefiguring of the libertarian idyll." So perhaps I am actually proto-modern? Or something?

I need a drink.