One further thought after last weekend's conference...
As I see it, the tension between Front Porch Republic's agrarianism and urbanism has something to do with what Caleb Stegall describes as "standing on your own two feet." People who take inspiration from Wendell Berry emphasize doing things for oneself, or knowing the people who do the things you can't do. "Self-reliance" is the wrong phrase for this virtue, because that's too individualistic. Perhaps we should say: flourishing in a community requires attention to place.
Now, an urbanist can certainly pay attention to her city. But the problem I'd expect Front Porchers to split on is how community itself can flourish in urban settings. Because I'll admit it's hard to know your neighbors. Do you locate the problem in post-war urban design's capitulation to automobile culture? Is it the organizational necessity of impersonal institutions? Is there something in the nature of cities that undermines attention to community and place? Do the distributivists think that there's an inherent problem in city dwellers' renting of abodes? I'd love to see some of the Porchers tackle these questions.
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
03 October 2011
30 September 2011
The Crunchy Con Conference.
I blame the weather. Now that the worst part of summer has passed, I've spent more time walking around Baltimore and less time with the computer. And so it's taken me almost a week to get out a quick blog post on the conference I went to last weekend in beautiful Emmitsburg, Maryland. The event's title was "Human Scale and the Human Good: Building Healthy Communities in a Global Age," but everyone knew that it was really the Front Porch Republic conference.
I should admit now that I haven't been a regular reader of Front Porch Republic in a while. It's a general thing about writers or groups of writers: once you get the main themes, sometimes you need to move on. But I wanted to see these guys in the flesh, so I paid my registration fee and reserved a rental car for my trip to Western Maryland. I'll talk about some of the speakers below, but I won't say much about some of the other talks I enjoyed: Christine Rosen on geolocation technology, David Cloutier on luxury and choice, Darryl Hart on the dangers of Protestant ecumenism, and Caleb Stegall on Jayhawk Federalism.
This being a Front Porch Republic gathering, the brand of localism on offer was decidedly agrarian. I'm a city dweller, so my mind kept moving to the problem of urbanism. Patrick Deneen spoke about Wendell Berry's two American tendencies: the strong tendency to displace ourselves and the weaker tendency to put down roots. I wondered what it looks like to put down roots in a city. Mark Mitchell talked about local currencies in western Massachusetts, but he didn't mention the BNote, Baltimore's fledgling currency. And Phillip Bess's excellent presentation on small-town urban design certainly held lessons for larger cities, but he seemed to despair of getting past municipal bureaucracies.
Perhaps the most obvious opportunity to raise the question of urbanism came during Allan Carlson's lecture. Carlson described vividly the agrarian civilization of pre-WWII Iowa: the civic associations, the regional artists and poets, the local farms. But he also pointed out that fecund farming cultures produce too many children for them all to remain in the community: the non-inheriting children move to cities or try to find another place to buy farms of their own. (Apparently, the small-farm owners in France have managed to keep themselves reproducing more or less at the replacement rate, but this will be more difficult for the kind of devout Catholic agrarians that read Front Porch Republic.) So if an agrarian civilization produces spillover, it seems that we ought to talk about cities.
Another, less obvious opportunity to bring up urbanism came with the keynote speaker, Bill Kauffman. Kauffman gave a hilarious, feisty speech lecture on the beauties and banalities of life in Batavia, NY. It was full of love -- not abstract nostalgiac love, but angry and hard-earned love -- for the people of the town and scorn for the highway-building technocrats who would tell his people that they live in an insignificant backwater. You know who Kauffman reminded me of more than anyone? He brought to mind David Simon (creator of The Wire) talking about Baltimore: about how the city he made his life in continually screws itself up, how it's looked down on by New Yorkers, how abstract technocratic institutions screw up the lives of ordinary people. Despite the gulf in political opinions, there's something there.
So how does agrarian localism approach localist urbanism? I imagine that this question would show some real fault lines in the FPR crowd. But maybe it's just my myopia.
(A big thanks to John Schwenkler for helping organize the conference and inviting me to make the trip!)
I should admit now that I haven't been a regular reader of Front Porch Republic in a while. It's a general thing about writers or groups of writers: once you get the main themes, sometimes you need to move on. But I wanted to see these guys in the flesh, so I paid my registration fee and reserved a rental car for my trip to Western Maryland. I'll talk about some of the speakers below, but I won't say much about some of the other talks I enjoyed: Christine Rosen on geolocation technology, David Cloutier on luxury and choice, Darryl Hart on the dangers of Protestant ecumenism, and Caleb Stegall on Jayhawk Federalism.
This being a Front Porch Republic gathering, the brand of localism on offer was decidedly agrarian. I'm a city dweller, so my mind kept moving to the problem of urbanism. Patrick Deneen spoke about Wendell Berry's two American tendencies: the strong tendency to displace ourselves and the weaker tendency to put down roots. I wondered what it looks like to put down roots in a city. Mark Mitchell talked about local currencies in western Massachusetts, but he didn't mention the BNote, Baltimore's fledgling currency. And Phillip Bess's excellent presentation on small-town urban design certainly held lessons for larger cities, but he seemed to despair of getting past municipal bureaucracies.
Perhaps the most obvious opportunity to raise the question of urbanism came during Allan Carlson's lecture. Carlson described vividly the agrarian civilization of pre-WWII Iowa: the civic associations, the regional artists and poets, the local farms. But he also pointed out that fecund farming cultures produce too many children for them all to remain in the community: the non-inheriting children move to cities or try to find another place to buy farms of their own. (Apparently, the small-farm owners in France have managed to keep themselves reproducing more or less at the replacement rate, but this will be more difficult for the kind of devout Catholic agrarians that read Front Porch Republic.) So if an agrarian civilization produces spillover, it seems that we ought to talk about cities.
Another, less obvious opportunity to bring up urbanism came with the keynote speaker, Bill Kauffman. Kauffman gave a hilarious, feisty speech lecture on the beauties and banalities of life in Batavia, NY. It was full of love -- not abstract nostalgiac love, but angry and hard-earned love -- for the people of the town and scorn for the highway-building technocrats who would tell his people that they live in an insignificant backwater. You know who Kauffman reminded me of more than anyone? He brought to mind David Simon (creator of The Wire) talking about Baltimore: about how the city he made his life in continually screws itself up, how it's looked down on by New Yorkers, how abstract technocratic institutions screw up the lives of ordinary people. Despite the gulf in political opinions, there's something there.
So how does agrarian localism approach localist urbanism? I imagine that this question would show some real fault lines in the FPR crowd. But maybe it's just my myopia.
(A big thanks to John Schwenkler for helping organize the conference and inviting me to make the trip!)
16 February 2009
Bacevich and the traditionalist syllogism.
A stray thought.
I'm finally getting around to Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power, only half a year after everybody else read it. I think that Bacevich's biggest virtue might be the degree to which he eschews “metaphysical” speculation in his Niebuhr-inspired realism. His case for self-restraint doesn't rest on a natural law argument. You can take his arguments to be entirely consequentialist if you want. Global power projection isn't going to work because we can't afford it. Massive consumer and government debt isn't going to work because it will ruin us in the future.
Take the traditionalist syllogism from the other day:
What's important is that we take a clear view of the consequences of our actions and decide what kind of freedom is worth the price that we won't be able to escape paying when the creditors come calling.
I'm finally getting around to Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power, only half a year after everybody else read it. I think that Bacevich's biggest virtue might be the degree to which he eschews “metaphysical” speculation in his Niebuhr-inspired realism. His case for self-restraint doesn't rest on a natural law argument. You can take his arguments to be entirely consequentialist if you want. Global power projection isn't going to work because we can't afford it. Massive consumer and government debt isn't going to work because it will ruin us in the future.
Take the traditionalist syllogism from the other day:
- Premise 1: Democratic values displace the older virtues of self-restraint and self-government.
- Premise 2: The older virtues of self-restraint and self-government are necessary to human flourishing.
- Conclusion: Therefore a democratic culture is inimical to human flourishing.
What's important is that we take a clear view of the consequences of our actions and decide what kind of freedom is worth the price that we won't be able to escape paying when the creditors come calling.
12 February 2009
I'm doing my best to exercise self-restraint right now.
I shouldn't read Damon Linker, and you shouldn't either, but he's been trying to go back and forth with Andrew Bacevich and Patrick Deneen, who have good and interesting things to say.
In his short article, at The New Republic, Bacevich argues that any conservatism with a future will have to address the inability of Americans to restrain themselves, saying:
“When it comes to the culture, conservatives should promote an awareness of the costs of unchecked individual autonomy, while challenging conceptions of freedom that deny the need for self-restraint and self-denial.”
So Bacevich believes that unchecked autonomy can have costs and that some measure self-restraint and self-denial are components of any true freedom. This is not exactly a new idea. But because Bacevich uses the phrase “culture of choice,” Linker reads his argument as—I am not kidding—a call for theocracy, a call for “fixed limits on human choice are set by absolute political, spiritual, and moral authorities.” Linker concludes with this:
“Does a culture founded on choice lead to problems of its own? Of course it does. But an authoritarian culture is no solution to those problems, which flow from the depravity of human nature itself. And that's why the paleocon critique of modern America is so troubling and radical: The object of its enmity is not this or that aspect of our society or culture but rather the human condition itself. ”
Patrick Deneen tries to sort out the difference between Republican self-restraint and masochistic slavish servitude to religious authority, but it is to no avail.
“A culture that would seek to reign in our propensity to depravity would not rest either on private liberation nor "authoritarianism," but the inculcation of the faculties and abilities of self-government. Only one who seeks private liberty in all respects would regard such cultivation of self-government as oppressive, and would ultimately have to face the reality that such thoroughgoing private liberty is purchased by means of the expansion of public power and a truly frightening prospect of authoritarianism. Already we can see that much of the American public would be willing to sacrifice liberties in the name of sustaining a growth economy that encourages near-infinite, but never fulfilled, personal satiation. This, however, is not liberty.”
Deneen's definition of freedom, by the way, is “self-government resulting in freedom from the self-destructive slavery to appetite.”
Linker comes back with this:
“…let's begin by returning to Bacevich's first criticism of the United States, which Deneen tacitly endorses. Among their many other sins, Americans affirm the ‘right to choose’ above all other social and moral principles, producing a nation in which individuals freely ‘fornicate, marry, breed, abort, divorce, and abandon.’ To take the first item on this list, Bacevich and Deneen would clearly prefer that their fellow citizens not "fornicate" as much as they currently do. How might this goal be achieved? One possibility is that we pass and enforce laws upholding sexual chastity. That sounds pretty authoritarian to me. But of course, Bacevich and Deneen deny that they're advocating any such thing. Okay, then, let's take them at their word: What they want is for Americans to restrain themselves, to resist their sexual appetites, to repress their desires, to rein them in. And that's not authoritarianism; it's ‘self-government.’
“Except for one thing: It now appears that Bacevich and Deneen aren't really opposed to a ‘culture of choice’ at all. Rather, they're opposed to a culture in which people make the wrong choices -- in this case, the choice to fornicate instead of the choice to resist their sexual appetites. But here's what I don't understand: Why would a free man or woman choose to resist rather than act on his or her sexual appetites? I mean, we've invented birth control. Sex is very pleasurable. It's a way to enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with another human being. Why not choose for fornication? Why, in other words, is it wrong, in itself, to fornicate? Can we even imagine a response to this question that does not make reference to the authoritative teachings of an orthodox religious tradition?” [emphasis mine - wbr]
I guess Plato's Republic doesn't count as imaginable? Nor the Nicomachean Ethics? It's not like those works have had a major influence on Western thought or anything. Or was Plato a secret Catholic or something?
Now that I'm in the last chapter of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition, I'm pretty sure that Stout's pragmatism can justify a culture of self-restraint. In fact, it's instructive to see how Stout and Linker differ in their responses to traditionalist critics. The traditionalists (Milbank, MacIntyre, and Hauerwas, in Stout's case) challenge modern democracy with a syllogism:
To sum up: Read Andrew Bacevich. Read Patrick Deneen. Read Jeffrey Stout.
Exercise democratic self-restraint, and don't read Damon Linker.
UPDATE: Somehow I missed John Schwenkler's post, which goes into more detail on why Linker's reading of Bacevich is so misguided. Read that one too.
In his short article, at The New Republic, Bacevich argues that any conservatism with a future will have to address the inability of Americans to restrain themselves, saying:
“When it comes to the culture, conservatives should promote an awareness of the costs of unchecked individual autonomy, while challenging conceptions of freedom that deny the need for self-restraint and self-denial.”
So Bacevich believes that unchecked autonomy can have costs and that some measure self-restraint and self-denial are components of any true freedom. This is not exactly a new idea. But because Bacevich uses the phrase “culture of choice,” Linker reads his argument as—I am not kidding—a call for theocracy, a call for “fixed limits on human choice are set by absolute political, spiritual, and moral authorities.” Linker concludes with this:
“Does a culture founded on choice lead to problems of its own? Of course it does. But an authoritarian culture is no solution to those problems, which flow from the depravity of human nature itself. And that's why the paleocon critique of modern America is so troubling and radical: The object of its enmity is not this or that aspect of our society or culture but rather the human condition itself. ”
Patrick Deneen tries to sort out the difference between Republican self-restraint and masochistic slavish servitude to religious authority, but it is to no avail.
“A culture that would seek to reign in our propensity to depravity would not rest either on private liberation nor "authoritarianism," but the inculcation of the faculties and abilities of self-government. Only one who seeks private liberty in all respects would regard such cultivation of self-government as oppressive, and would ultimately have to face the reality that such thoroughgoing private liberty is purchased by means of the expansion of public power and a truly frightening prospect of authoritarianism. Already we can see that much of the American public would be willing to sacrifice liberties in the name of sustaining a growth economy that encourages near-infinite, but never fulfilled, personal satiation. This, however, is not liberty.”
Deneen's definition of freedom, by the way, is “self-government resulting in freedom from the self-destructive slavery to appetite.”
Linker comes back with this:
“…let's begin by returning to Bacevich's first criticism of the United States, which Deneen tacitly endorses. Among their many other sins, Americans affirm the ‘right to choose’ above all other social and moral principles, producing a nation in which individuals freely ‘fornicate, marry, breed, abort, divorce, and abandon.’ To take the first item on this list, Bacevich and Deneen would clearly prefer that their fellow citizens not "fornicate" as much as they currently do. How might this goal be achieved? One possibility is that we pass and enforce laws upholding sexual chastity. That sounds pretty authoritarian to me. But of course, Bacevich and Deneen deny that they're advocating any such thing. Okay, then, let's take them at their word: What they want is for Americans to restrain themselves, to resist their sexual appetites, to repress their desires, to rein them in. And that's not authoritarianism; it's ‘self-government.’
“Except for one thing: It now appears that Bacevich and Deneen aren't really opposed to a ‘culture of choice’ at all. Rather, they're opposed to a culture in which people make the wrong choices -- in this case, the choice to fornicate instead of the choice to resist their sexual appetites. But here's what I don't understand: Why would a free man or woman choose to resist rather than act on his or her sexual appetites? I mean, we've invented birth control. Sex is very pleasurable. It's a way to enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with another human being. Why not choose for fornication? Why, in other words, is it wrong, in itself, to fornicate? Can we even imagine a response to this question that does not make reference to the authoritative teachings of an orthodox religious tradition?” [emphasis mine - wbr]
I guess Plato's Republic doesn't count as imaginable? Nor the Nicomachean Ethics? It's not like those works have had a major influence on Western thought or anything. Or was Plato a secret Catholic or something?
Now that I'm in the last chapter of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition, I'm pretty sure that Stout's pragmatism can justify a culture of self-restraint. In fact, it's instructive to see how Stout and Linker differ in their responses to traditionalist critics. The traditionalists (Milbank, MacIntyre, and Hauerwas, in Stout's case) challenge modern democracy with a syllogism:
- Premise 1: Democratic values displace the older virtues of self-restraint and self-government.
- Premise 2: The older virtues of self-restraint and self-government are necessary to human flourishing.
- Conclusion: Therefore a democratic culture is inimical to human flourishing.
To sum up: Read Andrew Bacevich. Read Patrick Deneen. Read Jeffrey Stout.
Exercise democratic self-restraint, and don't read Damon Linker.
UPDATE: Somehow I missed John Schwenkler's post, which goes into more detail on why Linker's reading of Bacevich is so misguided. Read that one too.
31 January 2009
Someone take the baton, please.
So Culture11 is done, though I don't know when the site will go down. I'm sad that it didn't work out, but I'm sure the bloggers will find new haunts or return to their old ones in due time. (John Schwenkler's got some links for you.) What I'll miss is the articles: the range and energy of the young writers they found, some on their first commissions, exploring weird corners of the world. I was pretty sold on Conor Friedersdorf's take on journalism, and it was great to see him put it into practice.
With some tweaking, I think the formula could work again. Maybe a better site design, maybe a less explicit commitment to conservatism. Then again, maybe I'm just wishing again that everyone on the planet had the same taste as me.
Joshua Treviño has written an analysis of why the business model didn't work, etc. It seems pretty smart to me.
With some tweaking, I think the formula could work again. Maybe a better site design, maybe a less explicit commitment to conservatism. Then again, maybe I'm just wishing again that everyone on the planet had the same taste as me.
Joshua Treviño has written an analysis of why the business model didn't work, etc. It seems pretty smart to me.
05 December 2008
A further note on secularism and politics.
I guess her anti-Palinism wasn't enough: Kathleen Parker is still trying her best to get kicked out of the conservative club:
“How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one's values, but let reason inform one's public arguments.
“That was and remains my point. It isn't so much God causing the GOP problems; it's his fan club.
“How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one's values, but let reason inform one's public arguments.
“That was and remains my point. It isn't so much God causing the GOP problems; it's his fan club.
“The broad perception among centrists, moderates, conservative Democrats, renegade Republicans, etc., is that the GOP is the party of white Christians to the exclusion of others, some of whom might also be social conservatives.
“One can believe this or not. But as the gazillions who have written me to say either that ‘God Is Here To Stay’ or that ‘Conservatives Won't Be Silenced’ ought best to know: Just because you don't believe something doesn't make it untrue.”
So here's the first problem with Parker's argument: it invites mostly the responses of the “gazillions” of people who are angered by it, which convinces her even further that this wing needs to go, so she writes another diatribe, gets more responses, and the calm and collected continue to sit things out. Again, the ugly cycle.
The second problem is that she doesn't distinguish between different types of invocations of religion. This is, for me, the problem that kills her essay.
Here's a reason that it's actually good for Christians to make their religious motivations explicit: the history of Christian theology is open to the world. If I hold that some religious premise P implies some political conclusion Q, then you can hit the books in hopes of finding an argument either that my premise P is theologically wrong or that it does not in fact lead to Q. If you're a secularist against the death penalty, I imagine you could actually convince a fair number of your Christian friends to agree with you if you can invoke the right theologians.
On the other hand, if I know that you do not accept my religious premise P, then it would be a waste of time to try to convince you of the conclusion Q for that reason; in order to persuade you, I should try to find a secular argument that you will accept. This is just how arguing works.
Now, in a climate where people are hostile to my religious premises, I can't just go flinging them about and expect to find wide agreement. In such a situation, I should do what I can to find supplementary arguments that will be persuasive. But “leaving God out of it” and pretending like these supplementary arguments are the only ones that matter to me just makes things unnecessarily complex. In fact, it makes public discourse into a liar's game.
(Via Larison, whose discussion of the matter is worth reading.)
04 December 2008
The secular right.
So there's a hot new blog out there called “Secular Right.” Here's their mission statement:
“We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of ‘Human Flourishing,’ what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.”
Daniel Larison's take:
“If the point is to say that non-believers and secular people can be conservatives, too, that seems to be something in no need of demonstration or argument. . . . If the point of the project is to say that modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary, I will have to laugh, because here our secular friends will have then embraced a popular myth that does not have much in the way of evidence to support it. If it is simply to argue for inclusion among other conservatives, I haven’t seen many efforts to cast them or keep them out.”
There's some good stuff in the comments of Larison's post, and in the comments section of the SR post that links to it. (There's also some dreck from people who are too convinced that they know the deep essence of what it means to be conservative.) But let's take Larison's guesses about the purpose of the SR blog one at a time:
1.) “Non-believers and secular people can be conservatives too.”
Larison's absolutely right: this should be obvious. Conservatism as a political movement is fundamentally about a set of policy goals. SR contributor Heather Mac Donald, in particular, has made her career by being very, very good at constructing social-science based arguments for conservative policies. Take vouchers, for example. You can want them because you think they'll get kids into Christian schools and thereby save their little souls, but you can also want them because you think the empirical evidence shows that more choice leads to better education. (Or you can go the other way. Doesn't matter to me.)
What about conservatism as a political philosophy? This one's harder, because conservatism isn't a single political philosophy; it's a bunch of variations on a theme—but the theme only exists in its variations! And, yes, I do think you can easily transpose deep skepticism about human potential, disdain for faddish multiculturalism, opposition to big government, original-intent constitutional interpretation, etc., into a non-religious key. It's not even hard to find examples of this. Just look at the SR contributors' pen names. Strike that; look at the contributors themselves. Derbyshire, Mac Donald, and Olson have conservative bona fides I couldn't dream of. (And Razib's on his way to the top.)
2.) “Modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary.”
Now we have to look at landscape of American conservatism. John Derbyshire is firmly embedded at National Review, and Heather Mac Donald and Walter Olson seem to get plenty of space in City Journal. So there's plenty of space for secularists at the top, where the policies are put together.
On the other hand, John Derbyshire gives away the game by mentioning Damon Linker's book on “theo-conservatism,” which is basically supposed to be Catholic neo-conservatism à la First Things. So that's the faction that SR is jostling against. It's not the movement as a whole that they want to resist, but rather a particular faction that they want to counter-balance. And if there really is going to be soul-searching in the conservative movement, this faction at least deserves a blog, since most other factions have their own journals and glossy magazines.
3.) “To argue for inclusion among other conservatives.”
Maybe if you're good enough to write for City Journal, nobody's going to kick you out, but I imagine it's kind of tough to be a secular conservative in certain parts of the country (just as it's tough to be a certain kind of religious conservative in others). Think of how much attention the stupid “Holiday Wars” seem to get every year, and how frustrating it would be to be seen as on the same team as Christmas Warriors if you're not even religious. I mean, I'm a Christian, and these controversies drive me crazy when I pay attention to them.
I imagine that SR is going to have a faithful contingent of readers that are just glad to find a place where they can read smart secular conservatives who are not primarily libertarians. So maybe a function of the blog is to provide secular conservatives in less secular regions with a haven. Maybe this isn't a huge group of people, but, hey! It's the Internet! And they certainly get more comments than I do…
EDIT: But are they right? What does WILLIAM think about non-religiosity? Just wait for the big Hitchens report that I want to write after exams are done…
“We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of ‘Human Flourishing,’ what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.”
Daniel Larison's take:
“If the point is to say that non-believers and secular people can be conservatives, too, that seems to be something in no need of demonstration or argument. . . . If the point of the project is to say that modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary, I will have to laugh, because here our secular friends will have then embraced a popular myth that does not have much in the way of evidence to support it. If it is simply to argue for inclusion among other conservatives, I haven’t seen many efforts to cast them or keep them out.”
There's some good stuff in the comments of Larison's post, and in the comments section of the SR post that links to it. (There's also some dreck from people who are too convinced that they know the deep essence of what it means to be conservative.) But let's take Larison's guesses about the purpose of the SR blog one at a time:
1.) “Non-believers and secular people can be conservatives too.”
Larison's absolutely right: this should be obvious. Conservatism as a political movement is fundamentally about a set of policy goals. SR contributor Heather Mac Donald, in particular, has made her career by being very, very good at constructing social-science based arguments for conservative policies. Take vouchers, for example. You can want them because you think they'll get kids into Christian schools and thereby save their little souls, but you can also want them because you think the empirical evidence shows that more choice leads to better education. (Or you can go the other way. Doesn't matter to me.)
What about conservatism as a political philosophy? This one's harder, because conservatism isn't a single political philosophy; it's a bunch of variations on a theme—but the theme only exists in its variations! And, yes, I do think you can easily transpose deep skepticism about human potential, disdain for faddish multiculturalism, opposition to big government, original-intent constitutional interpretation, etc., into a non-religious key. It's not even hard to find examples of this. Just look at the SR contributors' pen names. Strike that; look at the contributors themselves. Derbyshire, Mac Donald, and Olson have conservative bona fides I couldn't dream of. (And Razib's on his way to the top.)
2.) “Modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary.”
Now we have to look at landscape of American conservatism. John Derbyshire is firmly embedded at National Review, and Heather Mac Donald and Walter Olson seem to get plenty of space in City Journal. So there's plenty of space for secularists at the top, where the policies are put together.
On the other hand, John Derbyshire gives away the game by mentioning Damon Linker's book on “theo-conservatism,” which is basically supposed to be Catholic neo-conservatism à la First Things. So that's the faction that SR is jostling against. It's not the movement as a whole that they want to resist, but rather a particular faction that they want to counter-balance. And if there really is going to be soul-searching in the conservative movement, this faction at least deserves a blog, since most other factions have their own journals and glossy magazines.
3.) “To argue for inclusion among other conservatives.”
Maybe if you're good enough to write for City Journal, nobody's going to kick you out, but I imagine it's kind of tough to be a secular conservative in certain parts of the country (just as it's tough to be a certain kind of religious conservative in others). Think of how much attention the stupid “Holiday Wars” seem to get every year, and how frustrating it would be to be seen as on the same team as Christmas Warriors if you're not even religious. I mean, I'm a Christian, and these controversies drive me crazy when I pay attention to them.
I imagine that SR is going to have a faithful contingent of readers that are just glad to find a place where they can read smart secular conservatives who are not primarily libertarians. So maybe a function of the blog is to provide secular conservatives in less secular regions with a haven. Maybe this isn't a huge group of people, but, hey! It's the Internet! And they certainly get more comments than I do…
EDIT: But are they right? What does WILLIAM think about non-religiosity? Just wait for the big Hitchens report that I want to write after exams are done…
02 December 2008
Modern conservatism and instability.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was trying to avoid talking about The Future of Conservatism. Scott Payne called me out on it. But now I’ve finally found an article that has what looks like a good angle on the whole thing.
R.R. Reno posted an article called “The Challenge Facing Conservatism” at First Things yesterday, in which he flips around all the labels in a really good way. Modern American conservatism, in Reno’s reading, is anything but a Burkean defense of some big-business status quo. Deregulation has been radically destabilizing. There are opportunities to get fantastically rich; it’s just as easy to lose everything. In foreign policy, too, we’ve seen an idealism that doesn’t hesitate to “destabilize” (or rather, destroy) an entire region in hopes of building something new and better.
The result of this instability is an anxious feeling of vulnerability. Reno argues that Obama won because he addressed this kind of worry: “Obama’s election signals a collective American desire for stability.” Conservatives since Reagan have been enamored of creative destruction, but “freedom to fail” scares even the successful. Thus:
“So, conservatives need to face this singular political fact squarely: The people who have benefited the most from free-market policies were the ones who led the charge against the Republican party. And if my analysis is correct, they did so because of a deeply felt insecurity—an insecurity that we can trace back to our collective experience with something conservatives fought to achieve: a raucously creative, productive, and invariably unpredictable economic system.
[…]
“Voters are reading the ideological situation accurately. And they are pushing back against the instabilities that arise from conservative economic philosophy and foreign policy.”
This explains, I think, what is going on with most Obamacons, and with the so-called centrism that drives the further-left segments of the Democratic Party absolutely crazy. And it implies that the liberal (“classical liberal”) strain of American conservatism has been much more effective than the traditionalist one. John McCain campaigned as an outsider (I refuse to use that M-word here), after all, trying to convince people that he would shake things up in Washington, to break up the old system. Obama’s promises of change, on the other hand, were not fundamentally about any sort of socialist utopia: they were about a turning away from the politics of destabilization.
If deregulation is meant to unleash latent energy in an economy, re-regulation clamps down on it. If the voters start to see the economy as a runaway train, it’s only natural for them to support the person who promises to hit the brakes. In this analogy, conservatives who pushed for further free-market reforms sound like they’re arguing that a runaway train just gets you to your destination faster. (Unless it crashes…)
I hope it’s clear that I see the problem of stability and dynamism as one of balance, of figuring out where to set limits. And here Reno asserts that it is most important for conservatism to set its sights on creating cultural stability through “a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority.” (I’m surprised that James Poulos hasn’t commented on this part yet.) One could see this as just another attempt to get some attention for the social conservative agenda, but I’m inclined to take it as a philosophical point. If we don’t attend to our culture, we won’t be able to handle instability that would be otherwise salutary. And I don’t mean attending to culture through government; I mean working through cultural institutions.
That’s the part of conservatism I’m most interested in. So many of my most talented peers are confused, rootless, and often depressed. Extra instability doesn’t help: it just makes the future look bleaker. I hate to have to come back to MacIntyre again, but Stanley Hauerwas draws on him to make this point in his inimitable (i.e. hyperbolic) style:
“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are probably deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account for what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”
This is what is at stake in questions of cultural authority. And I’m by no means convinced that conservatives have the best side of the argument. But I think conservatives have to recognize that in the absence of a public philosophy of cultural authority, an obsession with tax cuts and aggressive foreign policy is going to keep losing. The trick is that cultural authority can’t be primarily created through politics.
I have to add: Reno only talks about what instability does to economic winners. I hope that he writes about the other side sometime soon. Even if you can make the argument that the material standard of living has been rising, the less tangible consequences of economic inequality can be crushing.
So that's my “The Future of Conservatism” post. You can see why I was so reluctant to write it…
R.R. Reno posted an article called “The Challenge Facing Conservatism” at First Things yesterday, in which he flips around all the labels in a really good way. Modern American conservatism, in Reno’s reading, is anything but a Burkean defense of some big-business status quo. Deregulation has been radically destabilizing. There are opportunities to get fantastically rich; it’s just as easy to lose everything. In foreign policy, too, we’ve seen an idealism that doesn’t hesitate to “destabilize” (or rather, destroy) an entire region in hopes of building something new and better.
The result of this instability is an anxious feeling of vulnerability. Reno argues that Obama won because he addressed this kind of worry: “Obama’s election signals a collective American desire for stability.” Conservatives since Reagan have been enamored of creative destruction, but “freedom to fail” scares even the successful. Thus:
“So, conservatives need to face this singular political fact squarely: The people who have benefited the most from free-market policies were the ones who led the charge against the Republican party. And if my analysis is correct, they did so because of a deeply felt insecurity—an insecurity that we can trace back to our collective experience with something conservatives fought to achieve: a raucously creative, productive, and invariably unpredictable economic system.
[…]
“Voters are reading the ideological situation accurately. And they are pushing back against the instabilities that arise from conservative economic philosophy and foreign policy.”
This explains, I think, what is going on with most Obamacons, and with the so-called centrism that drives the further-left segments of the Democratic Party absolutely crazy. And it implies that the liberal (“classical liberal”) strain of American conservatism has been much more effective than the traditionalist one. John McCain campaigned as an outsider (I refuse to use that M-word here), after all, trying to convince people that he would shake things up in Washington, to break up the old system. Obama’s promises of change, on the other hand, were not fundamentally about any sort of socialist utopia: they were about a turning away from the politics of destabilization.
If deregulation is meant to unleash latent energy in an economy, re-regulation clamps down on it. If the voters start to see the economy as a runaway train, it’s only natural for them to support the person who promises to hit the brakes. In this analogy, conservatives who pushed for further free-market reforms sound like they’re arguing that a runaway train just gets you to your destination faster. (Unless it crashes…)
I hope it’s clear that I see the problem of stability and dynamism as one of balance, of figuring out where to set limits. And here Reno asserts that it is most important for conservatism to set its sights on creating cultural stability through “a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority.” (I’m surprised that James Poulos hasn’t commented on this part yet.) One could see this as just another attempt to get some attention for the social conservative agenda, but I’m inclined to take it as a philosophical point. If we don’t attend to our culture, we won’t be able to handle instability that would be otherwise salutary. And I don’t mean attending to culture through government; I mean working through cultural institutions.
That’s the part of conservatism I’m most interested in. So many of my most talented peers are confused, rootless, and often depressed. Extra instability doesn’t help: it just makes the future look bleaker. I hate to have to come back to MacIntyre again, but Stanley Hauerwas draws on him to make this point in his inimitable (i.e. hyperbolic) style:
“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are probably deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account for what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”
This is what is at stake in questions of cultural authority. And I’m by no means convinced that conservatives have the best side of the argument. But I think conservatives have to recognize that in the absence of a public philosophy of cultural authority, an obsession with tax cuts and aggressive foreign policy is going to keep losing. The trick is that cultural authority can’t be primarily created through politics.
I have to add: Reno only talks about what instability does to economic winners. I hope that he writes about the other side sometime soon. Even if you can make the argument that the material standard of living has been rising, the less tangible consequences of economic inequality can be crushing.
So that's my “The Future of Conservatism” post. You can see why I was so reluctant to write it…
22 October 2008
Changing labels (jumping ship).
(Warning: election-season emotional reaction ahead. Probability of craven reversal in a month or so: moderate to high.)
When I read something like this, it makes me realize: there are only so many times I can tell people that I'm a conservative, but not that kind of conservative before it becomes clear that I'm using the wrong word. Like all words, the meaning of “conservative” emerges from a complex communal process. It's not mine to control. So do I spend the next few years putting the word in dissociative quotation marks? Or do I just let it go free, knowing that if the word does not come back, then we were never meant to be together in the first place?
It might be fun to try to keep the word for contrarian purposes, or just out of sheer stubbornness, but: what's the point?
From here on out, if you have to reduce me with your political labels, man, use a phrase like “centrist, with some conservative sympathies.” Or maybe “small-government liberal.” Or “traditionally-inclined pluralist.” Even “center-right” seems like a decent enough label, as it makes intuitive sense to people further left than me, politically, and signals people to the right of me that I am secretly liberal.
Goodbye, conservatism. I'll keep reading your brightest, but I'm getting sick of your movement.
(Thanks to Freddie for putting the question.)
When I read something like this, it makes me realize: there are only so many times I can tell people that I'm a conservative, but not that kind of conservative before it becomes clear that I'm using the wrong word. Like all words, the meaning of “conservative” emerges from a complex communal process. It's not mine to control. So do I spend the next few years putting the word in dissociative quotation marks? Or do I just let it go free, knowing that if the word does not come back, then we were never meant to be together in the first place?
It might be fun to try to keep the word for contrarian purposes, or just out of sheer stubbornness, but: what's the point?
From here on out, if you have to reduce me with your political labels, man, use a phrase like “centrist, with some conservative sympathies.” Or maybe “small-government liberal.” Or “traditionally-inclined pluralist.” Even “center-right” seems like a decent enough label, as it makes intuitive sense to people further left than me, politically, and signals people to the right of me that I am secretly liberal.
Goodbye, conservatism. I'll keep reading your brightest, but I'm getting sick of your movement.
(Thanks to Freddie for putting the question.)
10 October 2008
I suppose I should just say it.
Just in case anyone wanders over here from my comments on the Great PoMoCo Throwdown of October 2008:
I don't really have many policy opinions, and the ones I have, I hold loosely.
I'm conservative and Christian (Presbyterian, to be specific) because I was raised that way, and I still think I can make it work, although I often have to warp the former to fit the latter.
I'm trying to bootstrap my way to some understanding of the world I live in.
My imagined audience here is “people who see the world as I do.”
At the same time, I try to refrain from saying things that would seem stupid to, say, atheists or liberals or leftists, though it certainly happens. This reticence is a bad strategy for blogging, because saying (bold) stupid things generates large numbers of comments, and hopefully some readership (e.g. the one time I got quoted anywhere else was for something I can't actually defend).
So does saying smart things. But I'm pretty sure I always land somewhere in the middle (although my “middle” may be someone else's “stupid”).
I like these Postmodern Conservatives very much, but I'm not exactly one of them. I take their project to be something like this:
“Unreflective traditionalism is no longer possible because of modernity. How, then, can we conceive of a new, more fluid traditionalism that carries the good things of the past forward, past modernity, without necessarily founding it on an absolute?”
In my reading of post-structuralism (and I haven't read much, so I could be completely wrong about everything that follows), it seemed apparent that the significance of the event of structuralism was taken for granted. Or, rather, the major thinkers had evaluated the significance of structuralism, and their acolytes took it for granted.
The temptation with postmodern conservatism, for me, is to take the evaluation of political modernity for granted. (I mean, have you read MacIntyre?) The PoMoCons have their reasons. But, suffice it to say, liberalism as a political theory may still have a few things to recommend itself to me. I'll find out when I get around to Jeffrey Stout.
And so I'll keep reading them and supporting them, but as long as the failure of the Enlightenment is an open question for me, I can't be one of them.
And though I wish I could offer settled opinions, as long as I have all these live hypotheses playing in my head, I'm going to keep jumping around.
I don't really have many policy opinions, and the ones I have, I hold loosely.
I'm conservative and Christian (Presbyterian, to be specific) because I was raised that way, and I still think I can make it work, although I often have to warp the former to fit the latter.
I'm trying to bootstrap my way to some understanding of the world I live in.
My imagined audience here is “people who see the world as I do.”
At the same time, I try to refrain from saying things that would seem stupid to, say, atheists or liberals or leftists, though it certainly happens. This reticence is a bad strategy for blogging, because saying (bold) stupid things generates large numbers of comments, and hopefully some readership (e.g. the one time I got quoted anywhere else was for something I can't actually defend).
So does saying smart things. But I'm pretty sure I always land somewhere in the middle (although my “middle” may be someone else's “stupid”).
I like these Postmodern Conservatives very much, but I'm not exactly one of them. I take their project to be something like this:
“Unreflective traditionalism is no longer possible because of modernity. How, then, can we conceive of a new, more fluid traditionalism that carries the good things of the past forward, past modernity, without necessarily founding it on an absolute?”
In my reading of post-structuralism (and I haven't read much, so I could be completely wrong about everything that follows), it seemed apparent that the significance of the event of structuralism was taken for granted. Or, rather, the major thinkers had evaluated the significance of structuralism, and their acolytes took it for granted.
The temptation with postmodern conservatism, for me, is to take the evaluation of political modernity for granted. (I mean, have you read MacIntyre?) The PoMoCons have their reasons. But, suffice it to say, liberalism as a political theory may still have a few things to recommend itself to me. I'll find out when I get around to Jeffrey Stout.
And so I'll keep reading them and supporting them, but as long as the failure of the Enlightenment is an open question for me, I can't be one of them.
And though I wish I could offer settled opinions, as long as I have all these live hypotheses playing in my head, I'm going to keep jumping around.
11 August 2008
My (Conservative) To-do List:
1. Develop a believable theory of the relation of economic and political power.
2. Buy tickets to Superchunk/Rosebuds show.
3. Learn to tell the difference between mainstream liberals and the more radical Left; apparently,
they aren't the same thing.
4. Try to remember that partial deregulation is probably worse than the status quo (health care!).
5. Pick up milk at the grocery store.
6. Consider a compromise in which I agree with liberals on the scope of the legitimately political, while asking them to consider more localism, less state action.
7. Stop blaming liberals, especially in light of the fact that the USA, on the whole, has been conservative for almost thirty years now, i.e., take responsibility.
8. Go jogging.
2. Buy tickets to Superchunk/Rosebuds show.
3. Learn to tell the difference between mainstream liberals and the more radical Left; apparently,
they aren't the same thing.
4. Try to remember that partial deregulation is probably worse than the status quo (health care!).
5. Pick up milk at the grocery store.
6. Consider a compromise in which I agree with liberals on the scope of the legitimately political, while asking them to consider more localism, less state action.
7. Stop blaming liberals, especially in light of the fact that the USA, on the whole, has been conservative for almost thirty years now, i.e., take responsibility.
8. Go jogging.
23 June 2008
Deeper than Conservation
“Indeed, in many important respects environmentalism is deeply conservative. It takes no great feat of logic to show that conservation is conservative, of course, but the conservatism of the environmental movement runs far deeper than that. The movement seeks to preserve a given balance which we did not create, are not capable of fully understanding, and should not delude ourselves into imagining we can much improve—in other words, its attitude toward nature is much like the attitude of conservatism toward society.”
-Yuval Levin, “Science and the Left” in the Winter 2008 issue of The New Atlantis
Hmm. Hadn't thought of it that way before.
-Yuval Levin, “Science and the Left” in the Winter 2008 issue of The New Atlantis
Hmm. Hadn't thought of it that way before.
18 June 2008
Dr. Esolen in the Land of the Corralled Geldings
I'm trying to type out a rough taxonomy of traditionalist conservatism for a new friend, but I haven't read enough to do the job right. I'm trying to cover Burke and De Tocqueville broadly, then Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss (&co.), Alasdair MacIntyre, and perhaps John Finnis and Robert George. I wish I had more to say about Voegelin and Oakeshott than I do.
At any rate, Anthony Esolen has come up with a way to distinguish between the sort of conservatives I like and the ones I can't stand. Here's the whole paragraph, because I just love it when Dr. Esolen goes off on our culture:
“…I've been on a few radio shows to talk about The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Naturally, most of the shows are what is called conservative, meaning that the hosts believe that there is something they ought to conserve: traditional morality, American sovereignty, some shreds and patches of civic liberty in our nation. I have enjoyed these interviews, yet I have wanted to cry out, ‘Don't be fooled! Detach yourselves from the flies of the day! Read Kirk, read Eliot, read something written by men of letters before last week, something written by people whose long view of history included Thucydides and Tacitus.’ That might not make me too popular a guest -- though I do try to pepper the interview with what my students would recognize as typical lines, as for instance that a man has more freedom of speech in the bar across the street from the college than in the college itself. Still, I'm beset by that disjunction between keeping one's eyes on those Permanent Things, the truths of human nature that do not change, and following, wide-eyed and gaga and breathless (hey, we are all blondes now) the latest chatter of the latest political nonentity. Back in the day, when a William McKinley blathered, though he was a regular Edward Gibbon compared with our ‘orators’ now, he at least blathered in the style of a responsible man of the world, who had read a lot, fought in a terrible war (the Civil War, wherein he attained the rank of Major), ran a business or was the child or neighbor or friend of dozens of people who owned farms or ran businesses, and was old enough to know what people were like, and religious enough to know what to think of it. Now we blather like spoiled and ignorant children; our political discourse is below the juvenile. And ‘conservatives’ take part in it, too.”
In other words, there are those who have some impulse to conserve the past, and there are those who have taken the time to find out what parts of the past are truly worth conserving. I could do without the first group.
At any rate, Anthony Esolen has come up with a way to distinguish between the sort of conservatives I like and the ones I can't stand. Here's the whole paragraph, because I just love it when Dr. Esolen goes off on our culture:
“…I've been on a few radio shows to talk about The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Naturally, most of the shows are what is called conservative, meaning that the hosts believe that there is something they ought to conserve: traditional morality, American sovereignty, some shreds and patches of civic liberty in our nation. I have enjoyed these interviews, yet I have wanted to cry out, ‘Don't be fooled! Detach yourselves from the flies of the day! Read Kirk, read Eliot, read something written by men of letters before last week, something written by people whose long view of history included Thucydides and Tacitus.’ That might not make me too popular a guest -- though I do try to pepper the interview with what my students would recognize as typical lines, as for instance that a man has more freedom of speech in the bar across the street from the college than in the college itself. Still, I'm beset by that disjunction between keeping one's eyes on those Permanent Things, the truths of human nature that do not change, and following, wide-eyed and gaga and breathless (hey, we are all blondes now) the latest chatter of the latest political nonentity. Back in the day, when a William McKinley blathered, though he was a regular Edward Gibbon compared with our ‘orators’ now, he at least blathered in the style of a responsible man of the world, who had read a lot, fought in a terrible war (the Civil War, wherein he attained the rank of Major), ran a business or was the child or neighbor or friend of dozens of people who owned farms or ran businesses, and was old enough to know what people were like, and religious enough to know what to think of it. Now we blather like spoiled and ignorant children; our political discourse is below the juvenile. And ‘conservatives’ take part in it, too.”
In other words, there are those who have some impulse to conserve the past, and there are those who have taken the time to find out what parts of the past are truly worth conserving. I could do without the first group.
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