19 -- social aggregates

19.  Individuals are subject to a given intentionality.  Aggregates of individual, properly speaking, are not.  We might speculate, for example, whether a colony of ants has something resembling a group intelligence and by implication a group intentionality and a social consciousness that transcends the consciousness of any one ant, but it remains just that, speculation.  Even if it were true, I have no way of entering into -- no way of being subject to the subjectivity -- of some transcendental subjectivity.   I may feel hunger, you may feel hunger, and all about us may feel hunger, but it is my hunger, not yours, not theirs, that I feel. 

This is an important point, with implications, but first what it does not imply.  When I say conjointly that 'intentionality is given from without' and that 'I am brought into being by intentionality,' I am not making transcendental claims regarding intentionality.  I am saying, on the one hand, that it is given from within the brute facts of my physiological existence (e.g. the felt need to satisfy hunger) or that, on the other hand, it is given from within the constituted facts of my social existence (e.g. the felt need to satisfy the conditions of checkmate).   Moreover, when I say, 'the constituted facts of my social existence,' the past tense of 'constituted' is a recognition, at once, that human beings are born into a "functioning world populated by others," and that society is historically prior to the individuals in it.  I am, properly speaking, no more my desire to satiate my hunger than I am my desire to achieve checkmate, but each intentionality brings me into being in a particular way as a consciousness of the world. 

Although few would think of hunger, and the physiology that leads to our need to satiate hunger, as a "construct of human freedom," our instrumental response to hunger we nevertheless believe, intuitively, "can always be unmade or remade through free human action."  If one thing doesn't work, another might, and most subject to extreme hunger, would continue searching until energy or imagination failed them.  Conversely, however, most would think of checkmate, and the need to satisfy the conditions of checkmate, as a genuine construct of human freedom.  Imagine here someone suggesting that, instead of capturing the king as the desired state of affairs, we each seek to capture the queen, all else remaining the same.  The game would, as a result, be wholly different.   The instrumental response to the newly defined checkmate would likewise need to be unmade and remade through "free human action."  Imagine here, an opponent who simply seeks to capture the queen, without, so to speak, announcing the fact.  The game would fall apart.  I might capture his king, declare checkmate, and my opponent might say, "we're not finished yet.  I haven't captured your queen."  The statement would be meaningless, or irrational, within the game as I have defined it. 

To make the leap, I am nevertheless suggesting that 'social organization' is brought into being by the commonality of a common intentionality.  Although I do not feel your hunger and you do not feel my hunger, we each feel hunger and behave accordingly.   Although I do not feel your desire for checkmate and you do not feel my desire for checkmate, we each desire checkmate and behave accordingly.        

Appendix Concluded

George F. Will, in a recent editorial (Jan 23, Washington Post) characterizes Romney as "the first presidential candidate from the economy’s now deeply unpopular financial sector," though I don't think the financial sector itself is the cause of the anyone but Romney mentality that has been a continuous undercurrent in this primary race.   I think rather Will comes closer when he writes that "Romney is suffering because this sector’s arcane practices and instruments seem to many people, as indecipherable things often do, sinister.  His tax returns perhaps testify to no more than sophisticated exploitation of the baroque tax code’s opportunities for — even encouragement of — tactics to minimize liabilities. This, however, may exacerbate the impression many Republicans seem to have of his slipperiness. And this attribute is related to the suspicion that there is something synthetic about him."  If Gingrich has a saving grace grace relative to Romney, and was able to prevail in North Carolina, it is in part the incipient xenophobia.  As a southerner, Gingrich is on of them, or perhaps more precisely, if not exactly one of them, not a white evangelical Christian, at least he is emphatically NOT a big city Boston or Chicago Yankee, not black or brown, and most emphatically not slippery and synthetic in the way of Romney.  Obama has three strikes against him, and while it is absurd to think of Obama as a socialist, at least in the commonly understood definition of that term, it is somewhat less absurd to think of him as a synthetic product of the secular-scientific machine, one who believes that we can plan and engineer our way out of difficulty -- do it rationally, incrementally, methodically.  Romney has only two strikes against him, and no one is calling him a "socialist," but if the term has expanded to include Obama, it might as well include Romney as well.  He too is a synthetic product of the well greased secular-scientific machine, one who has demonstrated an ability to plan and engineer companies into a personal profitability.  

A recent review of Gingrich's new polemic (Jan 12, NYRB), To Same America, is essentially a re-write of his earlier polemic, To Renew America, and "the main difference between the 'renew' book and the 'save' book," as Bromwich points out, "is the overlay of piety."  Gingrich is a recognizable type -- political opportunist, and the opportunity of the moment lies in an affected piety.  Bromwich tell us that To Renew America is "a work of right wing utilitarianism" and its "whole method and appeal" lay in "its trust in fast-track innovation on the corporate model."  Given the spectacular success or failure of that model (depending of course on whether one is among Romney's income strata or among the expanding low-income sub-strata) it is not surprising that Gingrich has had a change of heart, the sincerity of which need not necessarily be too deeply questioned, in part because it is a political opportunists "representative" change of heart.  It is not surprising that he has taken on some of the apocalyptic tones of the evangelical right, "the phraseology of 'secular oppression'" and the convenient conflation of the Bible with the Constitution -- that  is to say, secular oppressors who "do not merely violate the spirit of the Founders," but who are "holding the constitution hostage."  A good portion of the constitution was framed of course to protect the people, not from "secular oppression," but "theological oppression," but Gingrich's assertions have no more to do with history as it is understood by most historians than the snake oil salesman has to do with medicine as it is understood by most physicians.  It strikes me as odd, not that someone like Gingrich is on the circuit selling the snake oil of revisionist history and pseudo piety and doing it in grandiloquent tones -- there will always be opportunists among us, and they will always bamboozle some.  No, it strikes me as strange rather that so many know it's snake oil and prefer it regardless.  That it will neither renew nor save America seems a wholly secondary concern.                  

Appendix Continued

Gingrich's title, To Same America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, begs a number of questions.   Whether the evangelical frame of reference is ipso facto anti-socialist being one matter.  Just last MLK day, I listened to an academic speaker use similar Gospel-based arguments, while railing against the capitalist machine.  His frame of reference was overtly Marxist, with several direct quotations of Marxist thinkers winking among the Biblical references.  Because he had made several slighting comments about the right's use of the same Gospel, I asked if that, in an of itself, might not be the danger -- the theocratic justification of political positions -- and he responded, as did several of a sympathetic audience, that one could not read the Gospel well and come to the conclusions of the evangelical right, that any good reading would lead one down King's path of liberation theology, a path necessary to America's salvation.  I didn't dispute the response, but it did reinforce for me a version of the two-cultures-argument -- setting secular pragmatism against the religious right, but on a broader scale setting those who Hayek referred to as the "planners" against those predisposed to "faith."  It is not simply, or not only, a distrust of government, but as Hayek put it, the "habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer," and here one might add, the "social scientist," particularly those who practice the dismal science of "economics."  Hayek, of course, was concerned with just "how these at the same time tended to discredit the results of the past study of society which did not conform to their prejudices and to impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate," those spheres which should be left to the invisible hand of the market and, by extension, the equally invisible hand of God in the fulfillment of His plan for mankind.  The "planers" have engineered an assault on the more accessible truths of revelation, and the absolute personal recognition implied in the evangelical versions of salvation -- one need only believe.  For the "planers," not only is the individual reduced to a data point, but the truths of science and engineering, the truths of the economists, have grown so arcane and often so counter-intuitive as to be inaccessible to the lay public, those who do not have the 10,000 hours that it takes to become expert in a field.

To be Continued

Appendix

I have made the claim, adapting Lilla, that there are essentially two types of American conservative, those whose interests are largely secular and economic, and those whose interests are redemptive and theocratic.  There is an uneasy alliance between the two in their distrust of government in its current historical manifestation.   The Jeffersonian sentiment -- that government is best which governs least -- might well be a watch word.  I should point out that I am thinking of the federal government.  Those same conservatives are often quite willing to allow local and state government to intrude into the lives of citizens in as much as those laws reflect the prevailing opinions and attitudes.  The arcane liquor laws in the state of Utah, a bastion of conservatism, are a case in point.

The New York Times (Jan 17, 2012) recently reported "Discord in G.O.P. as Conservative Air Differences," and there has been speculation that the party might unravel at the seams, though from my perspective, it seems more a struggle for ascendancy between those more moderate, more mainstream candidates represented by the likes of Romney, who have made their fortunes within the secular state, and the evangelicals who favor Santorum and, almost inexplicably, Gingrich.  I say, almost inexplicably, because there is much to dislike about Gingrich, from an evangelical point of view, not least his philandering, but he is, perhaps, more than any of the other candidates, an evangelical by temperament. Gingrich ultimately had the best argument, telling voters "if you vote for Senator Santorum in effect you're functionally voting for Governor Romney, because he's not going to beat him.  The only way to stop Governor Romney for all practical purposes is to vote for Newt Gingrich."  They did, and they put a crimp in the candidacy of Romney, effectively ignoring the advice of Huntsman, who endorsed Romney, suggesting that "the party needed to focus on defeating President Obama in November."

Whether the squabbling will ultimately be of benefit to Mr. Obama is an open question, but it is clear enough that there are competing interests within the Republican Party, and at the federal level, where it matters most, the secular wing has a clear interest in the creation and conservation of wealth.  One might argue that insofar as wealth is the principle instrumental means of wielding agency within our contemporary society, they also have an interest in conserving the power of the "monied" one percent, to include their political power wielded for the most part indirectly through the shadow governance of the so-called super PACs and influence peddling.  I wouldn't necessarily argue against this incipient paranoia, but I wouldn't argue for it either.  There is nothing nefarious about money in and of itself, and even if there were, I don't suppose a cabal of the monied one percent would be any more successful at subduing the rabble than Mubarek or any other tyrant.  While the super PACs have amplified political discourse, particularly on the right, they haven't changed the basic message that, as Hayek put it, "political freedom is meaningless without economic freedom," and economic freedom means a freedom from the restrictions placed on wealth creation that come of the regulatory state and the encroachments on wealth conservation that come of taxation. 

I don't think there is much illusion that the creation and conservation of wealth in the hands of small percentage of Americans does much in the way of job creation.  Although of late, with unemployment still at 8% or better, everyone has jumped on the jobs bandwagon, there is no compelling interest in jobs, per se, at least not on the secular side of the conservative party.  Within our economy, as the labor unions have always known, jobs and the labors costs associated with jobs are the principle means of redistributing wealth.  Jobs play against the creation and conservation of wealth.    At the risk of over-simplification, in business terms, jobs are an expense, often a necessary expense, but an expense nevertheless, and as everyone knows, expenses are to be minimized if profits are to be maximized.  It's a relatively simple calculation, and Romney's work at Bain Capital, as his apologists have pointed out time and again, was predicated on this simple calculation.  He may well have eliminated jobs, but he did so to enhance profitability and preserve those jobs that remained.  It's a tough job, but someone had to do it, and he did it well enough to amass a considerable fortune.  He also invested it wisely enough to avoid the earned income taxes that most American's pay, to end up with an effective tax rate hovering around 15%.  If the creation and conservation of wealth is the object of the game, then Mr. Romney has played it well, better than most of us can imagine.

The so-called social conservative wing of the party, the political theologians, has a deeper distrust of government, at least any government that is not predicated on the basic assumptions of Christian evangelicalism.  I should point out right away that the assumption of shared assumptions has a much broader reach than actual shared assumptions, and devolve quickly more to a set of common fears than anything resembling a coherent intellectual frame, or a theology proper.  It is tacitly, if not overtly racist, and xenophobic, and I would feel slightly embarrassed making these claims today if it weren't so apparent.  Despite the actual declines in Mexican immigration, despite the actual evidence to the contrary, the various "tough stands" on immigration, among other things, probably have more to do with incipient racial attitudes and a fear of the foreign than any actual threat to the job pool for locals.  Alabama has discovered this the hard way.  There is perhaps a slightly more subtle fear, one that wraps candidates like Romney in its maw for mastication.  The presumptive fear is not the loss of power, not even the loss of a privileged social position relative to blacks and Hispanics (though that might be more a factor than we are willing to admit), it is rather a loss of revelation to what Gingrich in the title of his most recent tome called the "secular-socialist machine," and the imperative to save America from it. 

To be Continued

      

Conservatism & Liberalism Concluded

If the recent primary cycle for the republican presidential nominee has shown anything, it is showing that the odd convergence of free market capitalists and social conservatism in the Republican Party too is showing its signs of stress.  The two are bound together only by an ostensible distrust of government.  On the one side of the republican party, it is chaffing under the reigns of the regulatory state, all that which limits the acquisition of profit, corporate profit in particular.  It s the republican party of Mitt Romney, a member of the 1%, whose tax rate of 15% is likely less than that of his secretary, whose Caymen Island accounts all signal a life unavailable to the vast majority of Americans.  That no less than Newt Gingrich and his conservative opponents are referring to him as a vulture capitalist signals an irony, if not an outright hypocrisy.  For the proponents of the free market, like Hayek, "the right of choice," the right of economic self determination, "inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right."  Of course the most recent banking crises and recession has raised the question of just who carries that responsibility.  The most passionate proponents of laissez-faire economics, it seems, are those least damaged by the crises, giving some credence to populist writers like Noam Chomsky, who points out that "for you, market discipline, but not for me, unless the 'playing field' happens to be tilted in my favor, typically as a result of large-scale state intervention."  The American economy has never really been, nor can it be wholly, a free market economy, but is rather a state sponsored capitalism.  The ideological wars of the 20th century, and the military-industrial complex they spawned, provided a level of sustained government intervention supporting, if not guaranteeing, a certain level of Keynsian prosperity.  This is money, taken from the tax-payer, laundered through the government, and placed in the hand of defense contractors, who returned it to the tax-payer in the form of wages.  While it supported corporate wealth, one could also argue that it supported national wealth, that it was a cycle both vicious and virtuous.  The Bush attempt to reinstate the cold war dynamic in a crusade against terrorism failed in part because the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan simply did not require the infrastructural support required by the cold war, the sustained investment in everything ranging from uranium mining to missile silos, most accomplished by American workers on American soil.   Beyond that, the Bush attempt to reinstate Reganomics with the laissez-faire deregulation of the banking industry, among others, served simply to tilt the money trough in the direction of the wealthy.  The subsequent democratic bail outs of those deregulated industries once again took money from the tax-payers, laundered through government, and placed in the hands of bankers, who in turn kept it, thank you very much.  It is the welfare state -- a welfare state predicated on nothing resembling social justice, but a welfare state nonetheless. 

It is not a story that inspires much confidence in government, and gives some credence to the argument advanced by Robin that "conservatism is a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."  It is difficult to imagine the conciliatory centrism of Barak Obama as much of a threat on this front, but perhaps any threat is a real threat and deserving of the hyperbole heaped upon it.   In the meantime, on the other side of the republican party, the social conservative side, there may have been a sense of power possessed under the Bush administration, and the evangelical tone of his administration may invoke a momentary nostalgia, but the social conservative tilt of the Republican party, I believe, portends something more ominous than power politics pure.  The redemptive reactionary, like Christ, is in possession of Truth, revealed incontrovertible Truth,  not power.  Their conservatism is not so much "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes." The rank and file of the social conservatives perceive themselves to be members of a subordinate class, an oppressed class, and they are distrustful of wealth as any liberal, and if they can occasionally bring themselves to forgive it, they can do so because wealth, as such, is not the principle threat.   Their conservatism, if it can be called conservatism, is a reaction to and resentment of that which threatens their Truth, whether it be the Roman Empire or the secular state represented by the conciliatory liberalism of Barak Obama.  Robin is right in part.  If I can quote him out of context, the social conservative "reaction is not reflex," and goes on to write that "it begins from a position of principle -- that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others -- and then re-calibrates that principle in light of a challenge from below" or rather, re-calibrates that principle, not simply in light of, but rather more directly as a challenge from below.  The social conservative seeks their own freedom from subordination.  It is the re-emergence of the Puritan America, the desire to be free from a corrupt and cynical state, the desire to be free to create a state under God's law -- one that at the very least prohibits abortion and sanctifies the nuclear family -- one that, in short, exemplifies an evangelical frame of reference.  Those who are fit, and thus ought, to rule others but as one evangelical, quoted recently in the New Yorker, put it, "I teach our congregation that we should make our political decisions like we make all our other decisions: based on how closely aligned the candidates are to the Bible."  The liberal state, a state predicated on the great separation, should be replaced with the new Eden of the evangelical state.  That such a state would be anything but free, in any conventional sense of the word free, and would devolve into the same sorts of factionalism that plague the middle east, is an irony lost on those who most desire the evangelical, the Christian, state.

Conservatism & Liberalism Continued

Excursis Cont.  Although extremists have always been among us, both on the left and on the right, the history of the 20th century has been one of disappointment in the promise of the rational secular state -- it's devolution into Stalinism and Maoism on the left, the various forms of fascism on the right.  While capitalist democracy seems to be the last secular state standing, it too is showing a legacy of disappointment.  As Lilla reminds us, "the first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who saw the failure of a large number of Great Society programs to deliver on the unrealistic expectations of their architects."   If a government dominated by "the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer," to use a phrase of Hayek's, could not make rational determinations, then perhaps the invisible hand of the market could make better decisions on our behalf, and along with that comes the imperative to remove the more visible hand of the state.  As Hayek put it, "the economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice; it must be the freedom of our economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right."  Or to quote McChesney on Friedman, "because profit-making is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues anti-market policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much popular support they might enjoy."  As a consequence, following thinkers like Hayek and Friedman in the  direct equation of a free market and a free people, many of the social welfare programs of the Great Society have already been eviscerated, and if the debates of the current presidential electoral cycle are any indication, next on the list are the social welfare programs of the New Deal.           

Again McChesney paraphrasing Friedman, it is "best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit political debate to minor issues" like abortion, like gay marriage, and if not exactly minor according to those affected or those who care, at least ancillary to the core issues surrounding the distribution and the uses of wealth.  Lilla argues elsewhere that the "great separation" of church and state, for which he credits Hobbes as the point of origin, was a point of departure for Western culture and world history.   It opened the path for the development of the rational secular state, with the necessary constraints of any state posited on the material and economic conditions of life.  It's principle opposition has not been the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, but rather the revealed the revealed theological state.  The state predicated on a revealed theology -- in Rawls' term, a comprehensive doctrine, whether Koranic, Biblical, or Marxist -- has a much longer standing historically, and also a much greater appeal, in part because the rational secular state posits no greater end for the whole humanity, the entirety of the state, and leaves it in the perpetual position of arbiter against the individual "pursuit of happiness."  For those who know the truth, and who wish their government to reflect and protect this truth, who wish it to serve as the governing intentionality of their government, the very rationality of the rational secular state is drawn into question, particularly when it appears that the social consensus around that revealed doctrine is under threat, when it appears that the government is going to hell in a hand-basket and taking those who know and those who believe down with them, when it appears there is no escape from the anti-Eden of Gomorrah.  Lilla, I think, is correct when he writes that what we are seeing now "are redemptive reactionaries who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given" -- everything from the devaluation of redemptive labor in the social welfare state and the devaluation of labor in Roe vs. Wade -- destroy what history has given "and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos."  They are redemptive reactionaries defined less by their aspirations, more by the intensity of their aversions.                      

Conservatism & Liberalism Continued

Excursis Continued:  How did we get to this impasse?  That, of course, is an historical question, but it is questionable whether one can have a view of history without a mythology of history that gives it a narrative arch.  I have said elsewhere that the principle American myth is the Eden story -- or perhaps more precisely, the faith that Eden could be recovered, if not at the "fresh green breast of the new world," if not in the settlements just a bit further to west, then through a continuous refinement of the state.  It is the faith that innocence could be recovered, not only the innocence that derives from obedience to law, in the Edenic case the revealed law of divinity, but also the innocence that derives from ignorance, in the Edenic case not-knowing what we have, unfortunately, come to know now.  The myth demands an answer to the question, "when did we go wrong?" and "what then should we do?"  American's it seems, more than others, obsess over the answer to that question, and the answers are, inevitably, and oddly, both deeply reactionary and deeply progressive.  Lilla writes that there are basically two types of reactionaries "with different attitudes toward historical change."  On the one hand, the prevailing American type, there are those who dream "of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution."  On the other hand, something Lilla feels to be new to the American political landscape, there are those who "take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back," but they also believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over" from scratch.   On the one hand, there is the faith that the way forward is to "get back to where you once belonged," and on the other hand, "to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos."

The answer to the question, "when did we go wrong," seems to be the so-called sixties,  the period of time that spanned the Vietnam war.   I don't want to dwell on the obvious, but the war itself marked the death knell of American moral exceptionalism.  If we could believe before then that government entered into conflict, not (or at least not only) to serve our self-interest, but to serve the moral and ethical imperatives of the American way, but as the war extended, as the conduct of the war seemed less and less congruent with the American way, less and less congruent with the conduct of the so-called "greatest generation," as the outcome of the war seemed less and less likely of success, there was the corresponding loss of secular faith in government.  Then too, with the growing recognition that even the constitutional protections of "freedom for all" did nothing to eradicate the Jim Crow laws of the south or the other instrumental forms of institutional racism, the civil rights movement served to dispel any illusion that American political liberties guaranteed anything resembling "justice for all," and this too came with its corresponding loss of secular faith in government.  The anti war movement and the civil rights movement, both brought revolutionary politics, if not exactly to the mainstream, at least well within the purview of the mainstream, and if civil society is an "inheritance we receive and are responsible for," then both made it easy to repudiate the inheritance and deny any responsibility for the past.  The collapse of the Soviet Union, not with the apocalyptic bang of nuclear Armageddon, befitting the great ideological struggle between secular good and evil, but with a whimpering collapse into an all too familiar oligarchy.  The cold war was won, and along with it, not only the great ideological struggle against totalitarianism, but also the enlightenment faith that people could -- whether with the "slow changes in custom and tradition," as favored by the conservatives, or with "explicit political action," as favored by the liberals -- actually fix things.   We had reached the end of history, and the only answer to the question, "now what?" seemed to be the shoulder shrug, "more of the same."

It is not surprising that people would look back to the happy days of the so-called fifties and see, if not a "state of perfection," then a loss of innocence.   The enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of our social contingencies, and with that the perfectibility of human-kind, is a secular faith, conceived outside of and in response to the excesses of religious faith, but the two are not wholly incompatible.  The fall and expulsion from Eden was a set back, and it came with consequence, but mankind could redeem themselves through labor of both sorts, for men with the sweat of one's brow and for women with the birth of children, both activities sanctioned within and valued by civil society.  It is not difficult to credit the reactionary response, the desire to restore a time before the social revolution that resulted not in a new Eden, but in a penurious attitude -- "money for nothing and your chicks for free."  The 60s were paradigm busting, and the paradigm they most successfully busted was the largely agrarian paradigm of redemptive labor, the marriage of the socially pragmatic and the spiritually redemptive that had been the hallmark of the American dream.  One could argue, of course, that the American dream had always been more fantasy than reality, but the radical fringes of the 60s brought us another sort of pipe dream, the more immediate transcendence brought about by psychedelic drugs and a newly liberated female sexuality, a sexuality freed from the biological consequences of reproduction.  The idea of redemption divorced from labor has proved a virus of sorts, sticking with us even as the instrumental means to redemption have morphed.  It is now the digital transcendence, the alternative realities of psychedelic drugs displaced by virtual gaming worlds, the sexual revolution displaced by undreamed of cornucopia of pornography, a communal utopianism displaced by the varieties of social media.  The conservative desire to hit the reset button, restore the 50s, and start over is not terribly surprising.      

                  



 

Conservative & Liberalism Continued

Excursis Continued:  I don't want to make too much of what might be the trivial, and trivializing, illustration of baseball.  It is enough to recognize the basic stance of conservatism and liberalism.   The conservative agenda is not, as Lilla suggests, hostile to change, and if they are hostile to change, it is to "doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism."  There is, however, a directionality to the changes they can accept.  Although the express intent of conservatism may not be to conserve privilege and power, if the game, as constituted, differentiates power and privilege, creates winners and losers, the result nevertheless is substantially the same.  As one might easily imagine, the freedom to act is wholly contingent upon the instrumental means of action and being, so to speak, in a position to act.  If I do not have the means to act, and I am not in a position to act, any individual rights I might have, any theoretical freedom from legal or other constraints, have no bearing on the reality of my life.  I still cannot act.  If I do, however, have the instrumental means to act, and if I am positioned to act, any freedom from legal or other constraint simply enlarges the sphere of my action.  There is a common human aversion to despotism, but one suspects some duplicity in the conservative valuation of freedom.  I would agree with Lilla that conservatism need not be perceived as "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes," and there is nothing in the conservative position that provides a consistent, much less profound, "argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will," as Robin would have it.  Indeed, conservatism is what it purports to be, the theoretical voice of animus against the coercive power of the government, and if they present a consistent argument, it is against the regulatory and redistributive government.  It is against the curtailment of individual rights for individuals, not only for individuals, per se, but for individuals more broadly conceived -- the individual corporate identity.  The result, however, is substantively the same as if they had argued as Robin suggests, the consolidation and conservation of power in the hands of those already empowered to act -- a wider gulf between those with (and those without) the instrumental means to act, and diminishing prospects of crossing the gulf.  The increasingly libertarian stance of conservatism, theoretically, would expand the field of freedom for all, but practically it expands the field of freedom for those already in possession of the instrumental means to act and contracts the field of freedom for those who "live and labor in conditions of unequal power."

There is a sort of odd oxymoron in a phrase like "the increasingly libertarian stance of conservatism," as if the classical liberal rhetoric of "free human action" had been co-opted.  Lilla is, I believe, correct in asserting that America is basically liberal in its attitudes and government.  Our constitution is, after all, a genuine construct of human freedom, and both in its body and in its amendments, it demonstrates a consent to transcendent principles.   As a people, we genuinely believe in both freedom and justice for all -- that is to say, we are free to construct our own realities, and if our actions are to be constrained, they are the constraints of justice broadly conceived as equal access to opportunity.  We have not achieved a perfect union, but that does not preclude our ability to work toward a more perfect union, and we can point to steady progress in civil rights as evidence that, when it borne in on us, we recognize and reform arbitrary barriers to opportunity.  It is (or was) an object of deep secular faith that such disparities that do exist between individuals reveal, on the one hand, individual preference (we are not, after all, in pursuit of the same happiness) and, on the other, individual character (one's willingness, for example, to work hard).  It is easy enough to smirk cynically and point out that we have largely lost our secular faith, but why?  As David Brooks has written in a recent editorial, we tend to think "the whole system is rigged," or to put it in other terms, we tend to think the "government has been captured by rent-seekers," or welfare-seekers, those who use government to extract benefits.  The iconic image at the low end of the spectrum is clear enough, the welfare seeker who uses a government subsidy to support her crack addiction, not her children.  The iconic image at the other end of the spectrum is a bit less clear, but is becoming clearer.  As Brooks notes, some of these welfare-seekers are "corporate types.  The federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers."  The recent automotive and bank bail outs are, perhaps, sufficient evidence of the corporate welfare seeker.  We are living, or so we tend to feel, not with redistributive justice, but redistributive injustice, with little faith on either side of the isle that government can correct itself.              
   

Conservative & Liberalism

Excursis:  Mark Lilla has published a review article in the The New Review (January 12, 2012).  It is one of the best that I've read in some time.  He is reviewing Corey Robin's, The Reactionary Mind, and takes exception to its central thesis, which can be reduced to "conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes" -- that is to say, it is about power, and the desire to maintain power.  I need to admit up front that I have not read Robin's book, and so cannot comment on the accuracy of Lilla's characterization, the degree to which it has been taken out of context.  I like the review for other reasons, that I will develop over the next several posts, particularly his recognition of the importance of taxonomy, clear categories.  He sets out a clear differentiation between conservatism and liberalism on two planes, the first being a reaction to notions about human nature, the second being a reaction to notions about history.  Each implies a different governing intentionality for the state, and consequently a differing set of actions instrumental to that governing intentionality.

On the first plane, Lilla traces the fundamental conservative stance to Burke, who, according to Lilla, believed that, since human being are born into a functioning world populated by others, society is -- to use a large word [Burke] wouldn't -- metaphysically prior to the individuals in it.  The unit of political life is society, not individuals, who need to be seen as instances of the societies they inhabit."  To use a jargon that Burke certainly wouldn't have used, within the socially constructed intentionality game, the game itself takes precedence over the individuals engaged in it.  Individuals are no more than (and perhaps no less than) their role in the game, which gives, priority to deontology, our moral and ethical obligations within the game, over individual ontology, the nature and effects of the game itself on those individuals who are caught up in it.  As Lilla put it, within Burke's and the conservatives schema, "we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights."  At the risk of a reducto ad absurdem, let me illustrate the basic stance with baseball.  Imagine, for example, one batter decides to run directly to third base instead of first.  From a conservative stance, there is a violation of the basic premise of the game, and the batter's action is, at best, incomprehensible, at worst mad.

There is nothing, however, in the structure of reality that prevents a runner from going clockwise instead of counterclockwise.  It is only in the structure of the rules of the game, and our fealty to those rules, that demands a progression from first to second and only then to third.  As Lilla suggests, "classical liberals like John Stuart Mill ... give individuals priority over society, on anthropological as well as moral grounds.  They assume that societies are genuinely constructs of human freedom, that whatever we inherit from them, they can always be unmade or remade through free human action."  Liberals, conversely, given precedence to individual ontology over deontology, and the appeals to ethics must come from a transcendent position, but one metaphysically subsequent to its ontogological implications for individuals.  As Lilla put it, "liberals, like conservatives, recognize the need for constraints, but believe they must come from principles that transcend particular societies and customs.  Principles are the only legitimate constrains on our freedom," and the intentionality game itself must be unmade and remade to conform to the greater principle, however that comes to be defined.  We see the liberal impulse occasionally on the little league diamond, when all are given an equal chance to play, an equal opportunity to bat and run the bases, an equal chance to field, and no score is kept.  It recasts the governing intentionality of the baseball game from 'winning' to something like 'justice for all,' and modifies the rules of the game to accommodate the new intentionality.  A conservative might argue that it is not baseball at all, and does little or nothing to toughen the young soul for the realities of competitive baseball, the real sting and disappointment of losing thereby placing fealty to the game before its adverse effects on some young players.  The liberal looks at the adverse effects of the game on the young players, and modifies the game to ameliorate them, thereby placing the individual players before fealty to the rules of the game.

(To be Continued)        

State of Nature

16.  When I play chess with another, we each enter into a contractual arrangement, both formal and informal -- that is to say, we each agree to pursue a self-interest in the form of checkmate (a mutually governing, if not a cooperative, intentionality).  We also agree to play by the rules, and in doing so, our acts are mutually comprehensible, if not fully transparent, each to the other.   One may still cheat, but even the cheating, as such, is still comprehensible relative to the advantage produced within the intentionality-game -- relative, that is, to the governing intentionality.  It is merely an impermissible utility, and its impermissibility is already set out, as it were, in the rules that govern play.  It is worth noting that I am using the word 'govern' in two distinct ways.  It is one thing to say that the given intentionality governs play, quite another to say a given set of restrictions on the permissible moves make governs play.  Consider: imagine a game of chess that is identical to the existing game of chess, with the exception that no desired state-of-affairs, no terminus for the game has been given.  The players each move, but they do so aimlessly.  Consider: imagine a game of chess that is identical to the existing game of chess, with the exception that no rules have been set out to govern the moves of the pieces.  With chess, the absence of rules governing moves is virtually unimaginable, but consider the activity governed by hunger, with the only rules in the competition for food being those imposed by physiological capacity of the players.  The latter, an intentionality game without rules governing the permissibility of moves, resembles a state-of-nature, and the condition of life within it would resemble, if the food were scarce and the competition for it real, the Hobbesian state-of-nature, a Darwinian survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw.  The former, rules governing the permissibility of moves without a governing intentionality, resembles the extreme state of the modern democratic state -- that is to say, the state's governing intentionality, if it can be characterized as such, is simply to make and enforce the rules governing the permissibility of moves within the state.  There is no mutually governing intentionality, at least none prescribed by the state, and individuals within the state are each free to engage in the pursuit of happiness as they see fit insofar as they abide by the rules.  This is not to say that a state with a governing intentionality is inconceivable.  Indeed, it is imminently conceivable, and has defined the condition of life for most of history, where the state is conceived, to use Rawl's term, under a comprehensive doctrine, or to use Lilla's term, a political theocracy, that prescribes a mutual (if not always cooperative) self-interest in one form of salvation or another, as well as the various moves, both obligatory and impermissible, that govern play.   

Utility

15.  The commonsensical claim that some acts are (others are not) instrumental to a given intentionality gives precedence to utility.  If I am in a state-of-being, subject to a subjectivity that I must free myself from, the utility of certain acts are set in relief, foregrounded against all the possible acts that might otherwise be free to engage.  I am suggesting, of course, the commonsensical idea that, in some absolute sense, I am free to do whatever I might do, but in some more immediate sense, some more pragmatic sense, I feel the limitations on my freedom first and foremost in the difference between the demands of utility and what is available as capacity.  Consider:  I am hungry, a subjectivity I must free myself from, and I am, in some absolute sense, free to do whatever I might do, but I am in circumstances far from Edenic.  There is food to be eaten, but it is not freely available, and I lack the means to purchase it.  I continue to suffer under my subjectivity, and ponder stealing the food.  Consider: I am evaluating my next move while my opponent is off in another room, and I see that I am stymied.  No matter how I move, I have no clear path to checkmate, and each move opens a path for my opponent.  I see, however, if one of my opponent's pawns were only positioned slightly differently, I would have a clear path.  I continue to suffer under my subjectivity, and ponder shifting his pawn.  There is a difference, of course, between the two considerations, and I might feel that I am more justified in meeting the demands of utility by stealing the food than cheating at chess (the stakes, after all, seem much higher in the former than the latter).  Finally, then, I am suggesting the likewise commonsensical idea that, in some absolute sense, I might have the capacity to act, but the demands of utility and my capacity to act do not, as it were, justify my acts.   

The Good

14.  Intentionality, then, regardless of its origins, subjects one to a given demand that we act, that one moves oneself from this state-of-affairs to that state-of-affairs.  It is an act that brings me into being insofar as, on the one hand, I am inconceivable without motivating desire, this subjectivity, and on the other hand, I am engaged instrumentally in a transaction with the world, such as it is (a contingent reality that is, if not wholly intransigent, then independent of 'me,' a 'not-me,' an 'outside-me' that within which, on which, I must act).  Here, I want to reiterate as well that this transaction with the world, such as it is, comes with guarantee.  It may or may not prove efficacious, may be handled ineptly, and because we are not Adam in Eden, involves others who may (or may not) have my best interests at heart, as the example of chess illustrates.  My freedom to act leaves open the possibility that I will not (perhaps cannot) free myself from my subjectivity, that an efficacious act does not present itself to me, or that an act that has proved efficacious in the past fails me, or the like.  The instrumentality, the utility, of any instrumental act is always an open question, though clearly some questions are more open than others.  One can imagine a digression on 'the good,' where 'the good' is always conceived as an instrumentality, a good-for-this-or-that, a good that is always to one degree or another contingent on my subjectivity within this world.  I do not want to imply that 'the good' is a mere instrumentality, though it does imply some ambiguity in our use of 'the good,' where the shift from the adverbial this-is-good-for-that to the nominal this-is-the-good implies as well a shift from the qualitative assessment of this or that to the referential -- that 'the good' must refer to something in and of itself -- if not a person-place-or-thing, as such, then a moral and aesthetic imperative that transcends (and envelops) my particular subjectivity to this intentionality and its imperative to act within the world, on that world -- a good above and beyond me.   It is "eating well" as opposed to simply "eating."  The origins of this 'good,' whether a social or divine construct, and the imperative to act within it, my point to a difference in origin, but not of kind.  It simply moves the bar.  It is an intentionality-game among intentionality games, a subjectivity within a subjectivity.