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Posted May 13, 2005
re: principles
Jonah Goldberg recently wrote about the meaning of conservatism. Is there one meaning? Could there be? Do conservatives even have principles by which their ideas might be identified? He gave a hesitant yes. The bedrock notion, he suggested, was comfort with contradiction. It's hard not to immediately respond with a quite emphatic Yes!
Yes, conservatives are very comfortable with their contradictions. So often their own promises mean the very opposite of their deeds! They've got contradiction down, as they say in the 'hood.
This is not a cheap shot. For poor ol' Jonah not to notice this is just to show how partisan a Republican-coddler he is. Like most modern ideological partisans, he strikes me as utterly corrupt. He doesn't even bother seeing the pink elephant that lumbers through the room, destroying the furniture. And when stuff gets busted, he'll perhaps blame it — as do so many whining conservatives — on the trampled donkey, bloody and quivering in the corner.
Actually, Jonah had a point that has some respectability. If I saw some evidence that conservatives could successfully combine their nuanced stance regarding trade-offs and tensions in life (contradictions
) with a commitment to principles, I'd treat his point with more respect. But they don't, so I won't. Thankfully, Jonah moved on. He quoted somebody named John Derbyshire on the nature of conservatism. Conservatives do share some core principles. Here are the ones Derbyshire lists:
I note that this not my set of principles. I hold with conservatives on point 1, and on point 2 (with a reservation); somewhat less so on point 3 (for an obvious reason that Jonah G. touched upon), and much less on point 4 (which I note was written in a moronic fashion); further, I am almost completely in disagreement with point 5, and point 6 strikes me as a confession to knavery. Were Derbyshire to have presented the list as a set of principles to be ranked in descending order of importance and reliability, then the list would have been characterized to my taste.
Let's start with agreement: I too am deeply suspicious of the power of the state. But for reason of this very principle I loathe most conservative politicians and thinkers: they keep on trying to get the state to enforce their way of life, and almost never bother actually to dismantle portions of the state that have been built up into monstrosity. If this be the primary principle of conservatism, then perhaps it is the case that I'm a conservative and most self-proclaimed conservatives are not.
I also prefer liberty over equality. But conservatives don't seem much concerned about people on the margins of life, people with a faint hold on civility or prosperity. One reason I'm for liberty is not to increase my personal wealth or scope of action (I don't feel downtrodden), it's to increase the well-being of some of the poorer-off members of society. But with this general attitude, it doesn't follow that I'm what is called, these days, a liberal.
I don't think that giving wealth away is a very good way of helping the poor; giveaways don't have just one effect, and of the many effects giveaways have, permanent improvement in quality of life is rarely it. So, I'm not a liberal, or (as I think modern self-proclaimed liberals should be called) a prodigal. I am, instead, a libertarian, and want equality of liberty for all peaceful people. Even ugly ones, even ones who worship gods I wasn't trained to prostrate myself before, even ones who may talk funny and have different customs. So, in a sense, on the important issue of liberty, I want equality too. Saying that I prefer one over the other is a red herring. Society, in order to improve and improve well, needs equality of liberty. From what I can tell, conservatives don't give a hoot about equality of liberty. It seems too constructivist
or radical for them. My judgment? They are fools for fearing it, and knaves for opposing it.
On the question of patriotism, I must confess: I've always feared self-proclaimed patriots. Those on the right who blather about patriotism seem always to be seeking to take away somebody's freedom. They want the draft. They want to make me salute the flag in a certain way, or mumble some words when the flag is raised. They want to kick me out of the country if I won't sign the Constitution (yes, I've met conservatives who insisted that this was reasonable and ethical). And yet I am, by Jonah's standards, a patriot. I wish to better society, and the people around me, by returning to principles, by trying to get society to more closely adhere to some basic principles of civilization that we've discovered as civilization has progressed. Like Jonah says, this has little to do with nationalism. Nationalism is a dangerous weed that too many conservatives nurture close to their hearts. It's infected their foreign policy, today. It's the worship of the state power of one's own nation at the expense of rights and powers elsewhere. It is an abandonment of civilized principle for warlike ones. It is what's wrong with conservatism today. And yesterday. Conservatives become unhinged when they think about loyalty to country and loyalty to military and the like. They don't know how to say No to tyrants who masquerade as conservatives. A real patriot with real republican principles would know precisely what to say to a usurping neocon. And he would feel a twitch of a trigger finger every time one of these serpents spoke glowingly of big government and rebuilding the world according to their principles (such as they are; since neocons are largely followers of the vile elitist Leo Strauss, they believe it's just fine to lie to the people at large to do the right thing,
and one never knows quite where such people really stand on principles; the principles shift like sand under the feet of a beachcomber, or wallets in the gleeful hands of a pickpocket).
Human beings are both remarkably egalitarian and hierarchical. There will always be hierarchies of some sort. And so, too, shall many other relationships be run on egalitarian bases. And I've little problem with either situation, as such. If some people are smarter than others, or richer than others, or more popular than others, that's just always going to be the case. And if we want chains of command in large organizations, that's fine, too. But entrenched caste and class systems are not my idea of civilization, and the great benefit of American civilization has been the extent to which class systems have broken down. But one class system has grown and solidified: the governmental class system. And this is not good.
Further, I've no trouble with families as institutions, either, or churches, or corporations. But that doesn't mean that these won't change over time. They certainly have. Corporations needn't exist in the exact legal framework they do today. And the family c. AD 33, when Jesus was executed in Judea, did not look exactly as it does in the rosy view of modern conservatism. And, we should note, Jesus was all for breaking that institution down, pitting, as he said, brother against brother, father against son, etc.
I bring up Jesus not merely to slap, gratuitously, conservatives in the face, reminding them that their beloved family-values
religion started out as an anti-family cult (though it did). I also want to note how unphilosophic and crude the phrasing of this alleged principle is: a belief in established . . .
Well, I believe in all sorts of things I oppose. A person who wants to destroy private property and capitalism still believes that these institutions exist. Only unthinking boobs let words like belief
mean commitment
when the two terms might easily exist at odds. This is a corruption of an element of Christianity that even Christians have reason to oppose. The word belief
has a clear epistemic meaning, and a much less clear — and sometimes quite contradictory — evaluative meaning. The latter is an offshoot of a Christian doctrine, and one that is corrupting our language. Conservative writers should be smarter than this. That they aren't doesn't surprise me much, though.
With principle 5, we slide into trendy post-modernist balderdash. It was the left that first made so much of their skepticism of progress. Why? Because they couldn't accustom themselves to the idea that progress would be uneven. The left could never handle the fact that, during the 19th century's amazing rise in living standards, some people's lots seemed to become worse. They couldn't countenance the idea that progress had allowed more people to live, and that if some people's lives were filled with tedium and grinding labor, the option those people faced previously was nonexistence. Contexts were utterly lost on the left. A philosophic perspective — contemplative and long-term in view — was just not possible for them. And they became so unhinged on the subject of inequality that, by the beginning of the 20th century, when real progress across the board was in evidence, the major theoreticians and scholars of inequality actually fudged statistics to prove things like the Marxian immiserization thesis. The left leapt to prevarication, all to protect their prejudice. And their bigotry was most directed against the haphazard nature of progress.
Meanwhile, the chief theoretician of progress in the 19th century, Herbert Spencer, explained the constant possibility of its opposite: dissolution. But the general trend, he thought, was for evolution, or an increase in complexity, integration, and diversity. He carefully laid out the nature of progress, and showed how it could happen, in general, without a guiding hand. And how attempts to provide an over-arching guidance to the process could, in turn, make things worse.
He was, in a sense, a great skeptic of progress, for he knew it could be scuttled. Every process, like life, does (after all) end in that ultimate dissolution, death. When horrible things happened, it might be best to simply label that historical event an instance of progress's very opposite, and then study to see to what extent it can be avoided in the future, and to what extent it is inevitable. Leftists, on the other hand, were skeptical of real progress, because they couldn't control it. They sought to deny inevitable lapses, and the chaotic nature of life. They thought it could all be controlled. (And thus totalitarianism was born, in the desire to control. From a small seed a great tree can grow.)
It is obvious that conservatives suffer too often from the leftist complaint. And we note that in the 19th century, the proponents of progress were called liberals. Spencer was a liberal. Conservatives of his day wanted to control markets, enforce across-the-board regulations, and establish intrusive institutions to ameliorate
the condition of either an elite or the masses. That they did so, with Bismarck in effect inventing the welfare state, at the same time setting the world to war and turning the masses into serfs without much gumption of their own, well, these are consequences predictable from their acts. And the masses fit well the elitist assumptions of conservative minds. Only a few people, you know, can govern themselves. The rest must be cared for, like sheep. With the right response, this prophecy (like so many others) can be filled. By those who prophesy. (It's quite a racket.)
And so we reach the final point in this diminishing scale of principles: elitism. Once again, I know good and well that I'm smarter than most people; and I know even more clearly that a sizable chunk of humanity is smarter than I. So, if this be elitism, make the most of it.
But that's not the meaning of the term. There are systems that everyday people aren't meant to have much input on, and these are elitist systems.
Government must not be one of those systems. Conservatives, to the extent that they think the people
can't rule their own lives, succumb to the elitism at the heart of leftism. And they nurture and increase the welfare state, a great corrupter of civilization. (This has been the legacy, with Nixon and now Bush increasing the size and scope of the welfare state to a degree that should make leftists envious.)
The truth is that people can, indeed — most of them — run their lives tolerably well. But in a context. That context is the rule of law, treating all people equally, with limited coercion defending reasonable limits and boundaries. The context is a generally private property-based society, with no tax-supported subsidies and a freedom to contract. This system provides a set of incentives and disincentives that people can learn to deal with. Unfortunately, this system — most promising in America — was thoroughly abandoned during the Great Depression, which was itself a result of government mismanagement of economic policy, an abandonment of restraint and an endorsement of a decades-long intrusion into balanced rule-enforcement. One bungle leads to another, and each new problem caused by government gives those in government yet another opportunity to increase the scope of government interference and the ranks of the elite.
Is this what Jonah was talking about? Probably not. But that is the main problem with conservatism. Conservatives don't really trust others to rule their lives. They see sin and failure in their neighbors' lives, so when they get in power they cannot bring themselves to dismantle the welfare state, and they cannot bring themselves to act honorably on the field of politics: they shore up their power in underhanded and extremely slimy ways. Just the kind of thing we saw in the left, when they took over revolutionary controls in third world countries.
Now, the conservatives have a chance of making America a third-world nation. By unleashing all restraint, increasing further the national debt, and increasing yet more the size of government. All in the name of smaller government!
Ah, yes: contradictions. Conservatives are very comfortable with their contradictions.
As a libertarian I'm said to share much with conservatives. And yet nearly every time I hear a conservative politician speak, a shiver goes down my spine: this person is betraying principles that I hold, and is corrupting the very principles that he himself claims to endorse. How can anyone trust these people?
Philosophically, they are often very simple-minded, even silly (though many can use big words well). Take Russell Kirk. Jonah prefers Kirk's rather different set of six principles:
classless society.
conserveregardless of the value of the thing conserved rears its hideous head. Unless, of course, what we are really witnessing is that conservatives want a middle-of-the-road Leviathan, one that does not trump civil society in toto, but one that they can manage, when in power, to further their own class interests.
sophisters, calculators, and economistswho would reconstruct society upon abstract designs.
sophistersis quite rich, as was his phrase
chirping sectaries,with which he maligned all libertarians while attacking one (see the eponymous essay). I might be with him on this; I might not. I note that one can try to get society to run on certain principles, but that the wrong principle will be disastrous while the right ones would be beneficial. And I note that all principles abstract from the diversity of actual possible motives and actions. I have long suspected that conservatives, by going on this rap, merely do so to sound sophisticated when they go about, hypocritically and heedlessly, doing precisely what their prejudices (a large body of inchoate gibberish mixed with a few nuggets of wisdom) seem to direct. Until they can make meaningful distinctions of a philosophic nature then it's best to ignore them when they go off on this tangent: they are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
And contradictions? Well, keep them to yourselves. Don't package them up in the form of Principles that don't hold together and then expect us to buy the resultant loose assemblage of prejudice as wisdom. Too long conservatives have coddled their ideas with the palliative well, at least our ideas aren't as dumb as the liberals' naiveties are.
Set yourselves that low a standard, and of course contradictions seem wise! But when you yourselves can't manage to honor for the small space of one legislative session even one of your principles, perhaps it's time to realize that higher standards of thought are not only possible, but necessary.
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