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.