Conservatism ctd.: responses to Freeden
Jake,
Thanks for continuing your examination into the origins and current meaning of American conservatism. I look forward to hearing your own perspective in the future. In your last post, you outlined Michael Freeden’s definition of conservatism as 1) commitment to organic progress and 2) belief in the extra-human origins of society. While I know you have not endorsed Freeden’s perspective, I wanted to offer a few critiques to his argument.
Focusing on the second factor, I wonder how “conservative” the natural order of society ends up. Marx’s argument was not necessarily that political institutions should institute a radical change in their social order; rather, Marx argued that the natural order of society pointed inevitably towards the collapse of capitalism and the institution of common ownership over the means of production.
Certainly Freeden would disagree with Marx’ analysis, but that’s exactly my point. There’s strong debate over the proper definition of “natural orders,” and no guarantee that an analysis of that order will suggest traditional conservative policy goals.
Focusing on Freeden’s first factor, the commitment to natural evolution of policy seems questionable when faced with contemporary problems. Climate change, for example, demands radically new methods of market regulation and social organization. While the gradual destruction of the environment would eventually make “organic” change inevitable, climate science reminds us that once the costs of climate change are apparent, it will already be too late to act. Modern science can point to radically new needs and solutions that Burke could not possibly have anticipated. While organic change may generally be good policy, the exceptions that must be made are both urgent and radical. Perhaps this is why the modern American conservative movement has sought to deny climate change science.
Finally, I wanted to discuss the underpinnings of your project as a whole. Are the goals of this project to define a forward direction for American conservatism? If so, is the project bound solely on finding the most beneficial path forward from a normative perspective? Should our definition of conservatism include questions of political expediency? By this, I mean if we establish Oakeshottian conservatism as the normative ideal, who would vote for it? Certainly not the religious right. Would normatively coherent conservatism require a third party?
-John
Fish on Habermas
Stanley Fish posted an oddly long discussion of the religious turn of Jurgen Habermas. It’s well-worth reading. Let me start by saying that despite reading a bit of Habermas in graduate school, in no way do I claim to fully understand his position. This post should be seen to engage with Fish’s characterization in his article, which is by necessity incomplete.
Habermas’s argument (again, according to Fish), is that a secular liberal state does not have the tools to compel action to desirable ends.
The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”
I’m surprised this argument has taken such an important turn in Habermas’s thought as it seems to have been widely discredited already. (Again, this might have much to do with Fish’s characterization.) A few thoughts:
- It’s not perfectly clear here why this is a weakness. I don’t think Habermas has identified here any kind of blinding new insight on liberalism. Of course it allows a breadth of possible lifestyles; that’s the idea. It would be interesting to see if Habermas had pointed to examples of failed liberal states, and made explicit how they had failed due to lack of clear moral vision.
- Mores do seem to form quite easily in secular states. France, for example, seems to have a fairly widely-shared view of what their state should look like, despite being fiercely secular.
- This seems empirically false. Even secular states can and do decry crimes like genocide; they don’t let their lack of official faith get in the way of clear moral judgments. The secular state might not be able to distinguish shades of gray the way a theocracy could, but, to paraphrase Leo Strauss, they can distinguish a mountain from a molehill.
-John
Make it better David Brooks
It was nice to read David Brooks’ latest column, “Relax, We’ll Be Fine.” Amid all the discussion of American decline, it is nice to be reminded that America still leads the world in productivity and innovation. Brooks concludes:
In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.
I was glad to see Brooks address the “rotten political culture” that has been at the center of the national debate, and central to Brooks’ own columns. But it’s instructive to see how Brooks has handled our core national weakness — wishing it away on the hopes of generalized national greatness. Much like a fad diet program, we’re led to believe that everything will be alright and we need not change course ourselves; the success of America as a concept will pull us through hard times.
I agree with Brooks that the United States canmaintain it’s position as a global leader in the near future, but if that’s to be the case it seems that an ethic of action is called for, not an ethic of optimism. Brooks has a national platform equaled by few others. If he’s serious about heading off political stagnation, his message of optimism must be tempered the very real possibility that continued inaction could lead to decline.
-John
David Brooks for eternity
Yglesias taps Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence to counter David Brooks’ arguments about happiness:
There’s more to life than being happy. There’s something to be said for extraordinary achievement as a goal apart from its hedonic value, and there’s something a bit perverse about the idea of saying that Tolstoy shouldn’t have wasted so much time working on Anna Karenina because at the end of the day having a warm relationship with your kids is more conducive to happiness than producing a literary classic. Quality time with the family doesn’t meet the eternal recurrence test, achieving preeminence in your field perhaps does.
I think this is questionable; while Nietzsche certainly valued professional success over family life for himself, one suspects that for a very large number of people quality time with the kids would really be what they would choose for eternity. (See: last man). In fact, given the degree of suffering (physical, mental, and philosophical) that Nietzsche endured, one could be forgiven for choosing many other lives besides that of the family man over Nietzsche’s fate.
-John
On commuting and value neutrality
Happiness research, to me, is an incredible window into the human psyche. David Brooks leverages this research:
If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.
Commuting is a fascinating test case — so many people choose long commutes over lower salaries, lower perceived position, or any number of other factors. But this research is widely known that this decision tends to decrease happiness.
Is the conclusion that people are misinformed, or have they simply valued money/status over happiness?
Brooks’ conclusion is that governments should start making happiness a policy goal (in addition to or in place of material well being). However, free people repeatedly choose those material goals over happiness. It seems that happiness is a point of legitimate value disagreement, one that the state should be more cautious in adjudicating.
-John
Shame and Viagra
In the wake of the passage of the health care bill, it’s worth talking a bit about shame. Senate Republicans are introducing a host of amendments, all which will eventually no doubt be rejected, in an effort to slow the passage of the bill or, ideally for them, to have the bill sent back to the House. The one making the news, of course, is the amendment to forbid the supply of Viagra to sex offenders. I haven’t seen any commentary suggesting that this is a serious provision; it’s aimed at creating some low-budget “Democrat X wants sex offenders to have Viagra” commercials, with a video of children playing in the background.
This is distasteful on a number of levels. Leaving aside the standard obstructionism and general poor sportsmanship, setting up opponents to make these distasteful ads seems, well, shameful. (This is not to mention that the issue of repeat sex offenders is a serious one to be dealt with in a serious manner, though this is not a serious proposal). This seems categorically different from other tactics to me. One can compare this tactic to complaints that the bill is “too long,” making it somehow suspect. The length complaint is transparently false and made in bad faith, but it’s goal is to impugn the bill. This new strategy is designed to paint opponents as monsters — though it may be a subjective judgment that being labeled a friend of sex offenders is worse than being labeled a socialist and fascist at the same time.
How can someone behave in this manner without feeling a deep sense of discomfort at having done wrong? One can imagine a CFO quietly cooking the books, with a very low chance of being caught; it’s easier to overcome shame in secret than in public. What’s surprising about these antics is that they are so transparent, and so public. There’s something deeply troubling about a person, or group of people, that would engage in tactics like this, almost regardless of the stakes. If this behavior is allowable, is there any assurance that any action whatever would be out of bounds?
-John
What to do with clergy who do not believe
Via Sullivan, WaPo has an interesting debate regarding what action clergy must take if they have privately come to doubt God. Clergy that resign face terrible job prospects — older, with no training to do any other job, little personal savings, and having just alienated their personal and professional network.
My own take is that religious leaders play a critical role in maintaining a community, a service that is separate from belief in God. As long as that leader is able to carry out his duties, I see no problem. My view may be informed by a good college friend who, despite his atheism, has been able to become a successful rabbi. (Though one could certainly argue important differences between Judaism and Christianity, the focus of this debate).
-John
Whose fault is Glenn Beck?
A friend and I were discussing Glenn Beck’s comparison of social justice (ie. the authentic original teaching of the Jesus of the Christian gospel) to Nazism and Communism (which, to the radical right, seem to always be pretty much the same thing). My friend’s claim was that Beck, as a general charlatan in this case making clearly irresponsible claims, holds the moral responsibility for making the claims that he does. However, I suspect that more responsibility should be placed at the feet of Beck’s viewers.
Beck’s ilk have existed in all times and places — showmen who will say anything for popularity and prestige. Before Beck, I’m guessing there were hundreds of unknown bloggers saying the same things. What makes Beck different is that people actually listen to him. In this way he is a symptom of cultural degradation rather than a cause. I’m not sure we can let his viewers off the hook as sheep, free of agency or responsibility for associating themselves with these views.
Do we get the media we deserve?
-John
The financial man
Yves Smith tries to locate the historical basis for the entitlement of the financial industry:
In the early 1990s, Sallie Krawchek, then an equity analyst covering publicly owned investment banks for Sanford Bernstein, remarked, “It’s better to be an employee of a Wall Street firm than a shareholder.” Being public changed all the incentives. Management had less reason to be cautious. Indeed, that also showed up in her analysis. The most profitable business was fixed income, meaning the debt-trading business, and even then the firms were on a trajectory of taking on more risk.
And more risk changes the meaning of trader profits. The private partnerships had managed against the fact that the non-partner market-makers didn’t share in the downside, and a key device was making sure that joining the partnership was the richest reward. That alone encouraged underlings to be more judicious.
Smith identifies an old guard that attempted to hold the line on compensation, but failed as the logic for irresponsible risk-taking became clear.
-John
Obesity and personal responsibility
Rod Dreher is struggling to determine how best to deal with obesity:
So how do we discourage obesity? How do we treat those suffering from obesity with compassion, while at the same time maintaining enough stigma on obesity to encourage people to hold the line against it in their own lives? It’s a very difficult question, I know, because you don’t want to add to the suffering of obese people, but at the same time, to declare obesity as nothing that needs to be overcome is to accept a destructive, expensive condition that ought not be accepted so easily.
On one hand, obesity is a very personal challenge for millions of people, one that it’s not clear a liberal society should take a stand on. Dreher also reminds us that there is a significant element of genetic determinism in obesity. However, there is a real cost to society at large in terms of health care; further, we as a society should feel some obligation to help those, particularly in poor communities, that don’t have access to (as much) nutritious food and information about proper nutrition.
Society functions around mores. The image of the rail-thin celebrity exists as a rare ideal, counter-posed with the image of 1/3 of the adult population being obese. It’s right and good to continue to exert some kind of pressure on the population to lose weight, but that pressure has been disfigured by the image of Paris HIlton et al. The imagery, it seems to me, makes the small steps necessary for real weight loss seem futile. The “big is beautiful” camp is right to condemn the imagery of our emaciated starlets as ideal, but their critique of popular culture imagery shouldn’t necessarily extend to the more positive pressure we should continue to place on each other to stay healthy.
-John
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