I wrote this essay just over a week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I had heard his name in passing over the years, but I only began paying closer attention in the last month, largely because of South Park. I don’t regularly watch the show, but I came across a YouTube podcast featuring Kirk reacting to a 2025 episode in which South Park spoofed him. The gag had Cartman delivering wildly racist speeches, allegedly modeled after Kirk himself. Rather than being offended, Kirk was amused. He said something along the lines of finally having “arrived,” since being mocked on that long-running series is almost a rite of passage in American pop culture.
Whether the South Park satire was clever or stupid, it still falls within the realm of art, not political discourse. The same cannot be said of the dozens of contemptible responses to his murder from the Left. Many people seemed more concerned with virtue-signaling about Kirk’s supposed racism than with showing the basic decency of respecting a man killed for his words. Even worse were those who went out of their way to praise the assassin, to romanticize him, or to weave him into some half-baked conspiracy narrative about the Right.
But my focus here is not political ranting. This is, first and foremost, a philosophy blog, and what I find most important is the clash of what I call two ethical systems that underlie nearly all political behavior: the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing. These are two sides of the same human nature, repeated in countless forms across history. In our time, the Keeping-ethos manifests as conservatism; the word “conserve” itself connotes holding onto whatever goods one possesses. Liberalism, by contrast, derives from the idea of “freeing.” But in practice, modern liberalism is not primarily about freeing people—it is about ensuring that the “freed” receive a share of what has allegedly been denied them. Thus, liberalism becomes a political tradition of Sharing. These parallel concepts both originated in the 14th century, and by the 19th century they had become closely linked to America’s two dominant parties.
Yet liberals often define conservatism as little more than the creed of greedy hoarders. This logic is false—not only because there are plenty of rich liberals too, but because the Ethos of Keeping is necessary for organized society at every level. Consider the simplest tribal case: if Tribe A controls the headwaters of a river, Tribe B cannot simply share in that resource without consequence. Doing so would mean less water for each member of Tribe A. Tribe B may access the river only through trade—exchanging goods with Tribe A—or by violence, conquering Tribe A outright. Sometimes tribes merged peacefully, but even then it was usually done for practical advantage, as in joining forces against a common enemy, Tribe C.
The practice of Sharing most often emerged only within families, where parents provided for children even if they received no material return, sharing instead in symbolic rewards like continuity and legacy. Some tribes extended similar charity to their injured or indigent members, and from there grew traditions of philanthropy as tribes coalesced into city-states. Still, this form of Sharing generally remained confined to the ingroup.
The Keeping-ethos was also deeply tied to ancient slavery. In archaic societies, no one would have believed a slaveholder bore a moral obligation to free his slaves. Slaves were usually taken in war, alongside other forms of plunder. To return them would have seemed as senseless as giving back captured treasure. People could sympathize with a slave yearning for freedom, but they did not treat that desire as an ethical duty. Ancient rulers occasionally freed slaves not out of obligation, but as acts of generosity or magnanimity—the Hebrew festival of Jubilee being one example. The story of Cyrus the Great freeing the Jews from Babylon aligns with this tradition: one can speculate that Cyrus hoped for a return benefit, but since none is recorded, his gesture remains one of largesse.
The Ethos of Sharing became central only with the rise of pietistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. In these faiths, charity ceased to be optional and became a moral command. At the same time, great empires like Rome and China continued to depend on Keeping—on conquest, tribute, and hierarchy—while simultaneously absorbing Sharing-oriented systems like Christianity, Buddhism, or Confucian ideals of communal duty. But slavery still persisted, and, in the case of Islam, expanded into a vast commercial enterprise.
This perspective informs my views on the American Confederacy. When I write about the South, I don’t rush into simplistic denunciations of slavery, not because I excuse the practice but because I see it as a consistent application of the Keeping-ethos. American slaveholders, both North and South, imported Africans for the express purpose of using them as slaves, just as they would have been treated in Persia, Turkey, or China. What distinguished America was its ethic of emancipation, born from the Revolution and reinforced by the Sharing-ethic of Christianity and sects like the Quakers. This mix produced the abolitionist movement, which though small and marginalized, aligned by circumstance with Great Britain’s ban on the slave trade and with Northern politicians’ desire to weaken the South.
But it must be said that most Northerners were not abolitionists in the true moral sense. Their politics were as rooted in Keeping as their Southern counterparts. Even when they framed themselves as “liberals,” they often pushed codes that barred free Blacks from entering their own states. They demanded that the South sacrifice its resources while insisting on preserving their own.
A century and a half later, the same dynamics play out. Liberals still demand that conservatives Must Share. Conservatives still answer that they Must Keep. Racist movements may exist on the Far Right, as reactionary impulses can be found within the Center-Right. Yet the anti-racism of today’s Left has increasingly detached itself from practical moral reasoning. They insist on Sharing, but only on their terms. And when confronted with the assassination of a political opponent, they could not even share in the simplest of condemnations. Instead, the ethos collapsed into Keeping—keeping hold of their ideological stance at all costs.
Of course, many conservatives are guilty of the same impulse, seeking to Keep the controversy alive for their own purposes. But here the Left squandered its moment. Had they shown even a basic form of humanity, even a symbolic gesture of Sharing in tragedy, they would look far better than they do now.
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English (US) · 