The Venetian Model for Conservatism

Perhaps no city in the Western world does as much to prove left-wing ideology incorrect as Venice. Dotted with cathedrals that emerge from the ocean, pouring with ideas and commerce, Venice stands alone as a marvel of man’s intellect.

However, Venice should not exist if you subscribe to left-wing models of civilizational development. Take for example, Jared Diamond’s model of civilization. His model is a highly popular and widely cited explanation for the development rates of various civilizations. It boils development down to a series of material factors like macroeconomics, geography, and technology. He contends that these are the primary determinants for differences in wealth and societal development across the globe.

In materialist circles, this rings a chord and his work is widely celebrated as an achievement. It is appealing to them, because it absolves the individual of responsibility for the quality of their thoughts and ambitions. In fact, it removes the human mind, the most important achievement of Darwinian evolution, entirely from the equation.

Yet, when put to the test, his theory clearly fails. There is no explanation for how the Israelis could have made the desert bloom after the Holocaust in Diamond’s model.

Likewise, from a purely geographical perspective, Venice should not exist. First, the city is built on unusable land—the wetlands of an Italian lagoon that suffered flooding from the nearby Adriatic Sea? The structural platforms that support the city’s streets were built using heavy logs transformed into stilts and planted into the mud of the lagoon to provide a surface for life.

Another impossibility, the city has no fresh water. To solve this problem, the Venetians had to engineer an ingenious system that used stone gravel to purify rainwater and run the water into underground cisterns. Without these two marvelous inventions of the mind, there would be no Marco Polo, no Casanova, no Vivaldi, and no Titian. All these men arose from the lagoon and were certainly inspired by their daily surroundings. It is almost as if the daily reminder of the impossibility of the place where they lived encouraged the production of some of the greatest minds to ever exist.

Let’s draw from this a rule: the fertile ground for a conservative society grounded in excellence and faith rests on the strength of its engineering foundations. Where you have the inspiration to build, you trigger something deep in the minds of men that spurs them to take their fate into their own hands. It is no accident that the return of our modern-day John Galt, Elon Musk, was heralded as a moment of revival for Edmund Burke’s movement.

Too long have the worn hands of tradesmen and the works of engineers been stymied by regulation and modernist warfare. Our mission should be to free the spirits of our builder class to produce the fertile ground of entrepreneurship, engineer modern marvels, and acknowledge a Creator that feeds the energy of a great society.

Our opponents, to usher in a new order which could be managed technocratically, embarked on an ambitious exercise to boil the ingredients of history down to material factors. The effects of religion, personality, and will to greatness were removed from the annals of history and replaced with things that could be managed by a scientific technocratic class. These sanitized factors included; economic statistics, demographic information, market fluctuations, and educational certifications.

We would be remiss to ignore the horizontal benefits provided by this data—Western ideas and money exported large amounts of prosperity to the rest of the world by providing repeatable development playbooks. However, global prosperity has started to come at the expense of our own Western citizens. Their requirements for a healthy home, education, healthy lives and are being ignored in favor of internationalism and financialization. The population has instead, however, received increasing degrees of virtualization, AI messianism, and assaults on freedoms in many forms.

The technocratic system has worn out its welcome. It should be replaced by a superior successor that integrates the globe expanding openness of the old model with an emphasis on Western Exceptionalism through the belief in God. The active development of the spiritual core of individual will is what generates a great society. I call this a Venetian Model for Conservatism after the fervently religious, ingenious creators of St. Mark’s Basilica, who when inspired by their Creator were superior inventors, having constructed perhaps one of the most beautifully-crafted civic treasures in the world. 

Conservatives today find themselves in a predicament. The reality is that our ability to build new things lags behind our opponents. They dominate the scientific and engineering realms with the majority of professorship and scientists leaning towards their beliefs. They do so because a significant amount of scientific literature has been built specifically to dispose of conservative ideas through biased studies and research. However, it is evident that their disposal of these ideas has caused a form of schizophrenia in the academy and amongst our governing class. This is because, by disposing of these ideas, they are unable to synthesize coherent plans. The effect is evidenced in Dr. Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary published in 2009. The excruciating lack of big picture focus has left the establishment without the ability to actuate and resulted in increasing degrees of erratic behavior. The most concerning being the emphasis on AI messianism found today in our elite circles.

Hence from their thesis (our anti-thesis), a better society would be built on the following items: a belief in God, the freedom to build, abundant capital to support new ventures, lifelong education, direct involvement of scientific and religious leaders as prominent members of our daily affairs, and a focus on developing a revived neoclassical architectural style à la the Venetian model for Conservatism.