Conservatism Considered

Chris Bertram posts about the rhetoric of reaction, linking to an interesting Tanner Lecture of that title. Me? I've got eye-strain issues these days. Gonna give the computer a rest in the evening - for a couple days probably - and curl up with my new Gene Wolfe book, while the rest of the world apparently curls up with Quicksilver.

My thought for the night about conservatism. I've been sort of mulling a long post, but it's really a simple idea: there is no way even to begin to conjoin so-called social or cultural conservatism and economic conservatism. Because the latter assumes that (economic) laissez faire is good: change will tend to be for the better. And the former assumes that (cultural) laissez faire is bad: change will tend to be for the worse. It would of course be possible to render these theses consistent by arguing that human beings tend to make good economic decisions but bad cultural or social ones. But it's a little hard to see how this could be made plausible.

In a sense it's all more complicated. In another sense, it's just plain obviously right that these things can't possibly go together. What's the point? This is supposed to be a first step on the way towards reforming political terminology, 'conservative' (like 'liberal') being an almost terminally infirm designation ... But I'll leave it there for now. My eye is bugging me.

Comments

[Henry]

If you follow this up, you should maybe take a glance at John Gray's "Beyond the New Right," which tries to square exactly this circle, without notable success.

[Russell Arben Fox]

I wish more people would think about this perfectly obvious problem. Or rather, since many people (partisans of all stripes, mostly) do, in fact, think and talk about it a lot (usually with the aim of exposing politically useful faultlines and inconsistencies in whatever group or ideology they oppose), I should say that I wish more people were willing to think about how we should rework our political labels, groupings, ideological clusters and so forth, and then act upon those thoughts. Of course, I suppose a comment like that shortchanges libertarians, who have been trying to pull together this sort of rethinking in the U.S. for years. But on the opposite, communitarian side of things (which is where I find myself), little headway has been made, or even attempted. Try to find a social conservative who is willing follow through on their cultural beliefs to a demand for stability and equity in the fabric of the economic order. Or worse, try to find an economic redistributivist who understands that achieving fairness in society requires a collective concern for the moral prerequsites for said society. Unfortunately, you probably won't have much luck.

[Walt Pohl]

Russell: I read your comment about "economic redistributivists" several times, and I can't figure out what you mean.

[Russell Arben Fox]

Walt: I mean, much too simply, that someone who wants to redistribute wealth, opportunities and/or income (or at least strive towards a less regressive distribution) with the aim of achieving a more equal society, ought to (in my mind at least) be attentive to the cultural bounds and presumptions which make said "society" possible in the first place. It's an argument Will Kymlicka and many others made against John Rawls: for his theory of justice to work, it had to kind of implicitly presuppose the existence of a fully functioning "rational" culture or state from the get-go. Yet such communities can't (or at least, in my view, shouldn't) just be presupposed; they require moral cultivation and collective work.

[Walt Pohl]

Hmmm. What you're saying can be interpreted to either be a) obviously true, or b) controversial. Which do you mean?

(By obviously true, I mean, a world where everyone agrees that the most desirable thing is to stick it to the other guy is not one where the value of equality is going to make much headway. A controversial interpretation would be one that required, say, everyone to be a devout Christian.)

[Russell Arben Fox]

I'd like to think that the alternatives a) and b) aren't necessarily as stark as you present them (i.e., a community of bare minimal rule of law and tolerance vs. a culture of, for example, deeply embedded traditional Christian orthodoxy). Still, if push comes to shove, then yes, I'm talking about something which is, for most people, rather more controversial than otherwise.

[baa]

This is a tension much explored in 'right' thought, as you might imagine.

One very nice place to start would be Michael Oakeshott's essay "On Being Conservative," and the sideways response by Irving Kristol (Kristol, amazingly enough *rejected* the essay as editor of, I think, encounter). Briefly, Oakeshott takes a purer route, describing conservatism as a temperament, a Conradian appreciation of the fragility of current goods. Kristol notes that conservatism in the American context, defined as "faithfulness to the principles of the founding" essentially means a conservative commitment to revolutionary, transformative notions of freedom and human equality. Both seem to me exactly correct.

[Walt Pohl]

Russell: in what way more controversial? I'm genuinely curious -- I can't decide if I agree with your point or not.

[jholbo]

Greetings, all. I'm proud to be the possessor of such a lively comments box. Henry, I'll check out the Gray. Baa (if that IS your name) I've never read Oakeshott. He's one of those I sort of should have gotten around to reading by now. Walt and Russell - talk amongst yourselves. Oh, all right, one little comment. Russell writes in his first post:

"Try to find a social conservative who is willing follow through on their cultural beliefs to a demand for stability and equity in the fabric of the economic order. Or worse, try to find an economic redistributivist who understands that achieving fairness in society requires a collective concern for the moral prerequsites for said society. Unfortunately, you probably won't have much luck."

The first of these failings does seem hopeless to me. That is, if you are a social/cultural conservative, you have just got to distrust capitalist creative destruction. Otherwise you're incoherent. The second has its risks but strikes me as not patently hopeless. You can be a redistributivist without being a communitarian. (But maybe that isn't quite what you meant to claim, Russell. In which case, what exactly are you claiming? I think that's Walt's question, too. I'm not quite seeing it either.)

[dsquared]

The way in which these two strands of "conservative" thought are brought together is hinted at in my favourite JK Galbraith quote ...

[BAA]

Oh god, not Galbreith again! D^2 -- stop quoting him! He's not smart, and the quote to which you refer is not insightful. It's just elegant aristocratic partisanism.

Walt, there are *lots* of conservatives willing to hinder the free market. Irving Kristol even wrote a book "Two Cheers for Capitalism" arguing basically this point. And there's also Hegel. Of course 'equity' may not mean to them what you want...

(and BAA are initials...)

[dsquared]

He is smart, and it is insightful. If you want an alternative, try Michael Oakeshott's definition: "A conservative is a man with something to lose".

[Realish]

Casino, you make some good points, but I'm a little unclear on what you mean when you say "woman lingeries lingerie boobs boob tits big." Perhaps this ties back to some work of Oakeshott's that I'm not familiar with. Can you clarify?

[jholbo]

We may never know, Realish, because I have so rudely deleted the man's thoughts. I think he expressed himself poetically.

[Jacob T. Levy]

By now I would think of Gray as someone who does *not* try to square the circle, who embraces social-cultural reaction along with economic etatisme, precisely because the economic liberalism he once endorsed is too unsettling, too associated with change. (I recognize that "by now" is a dangerous thing to say about Gray; by this week he may have declared himself to be a Camille Paglian gender-subverter. But for most of the past ten years he's been arguing that social conservatism of one sort or another-- including Greenism-- is of such great importance that the market must be overthrown. He's actually gone all Ruskin/ Carlyle on us.)

Pat Buchanan's turn to etatisme in 1992 had much the same character-- he finally understood that the market meant change and that he was agin' it.

Serious conservatives-- cf Russell Kirk-- have always been uneasy about the market, and for very sound reasons. That's part of why I insist that libertarianism is a species of liberalism; and lots of the folks at NRO seem to agree with me. And, in a way, this was the Big Idea of Virginia Postrel's first book, for those who don't feel like wading through Gray, Kirk, Ruskin, etc etc.

[Jacob T. Levy]

(Or, for a very serious and grown-up academic take-- besides that of the better-knwon Charles Taylor-- see the collected works of David Miller. He's not a liberal, he's a social democrat; not a liberal, a nationalism; not a liberal, a civic republican-deliberative democrat. his whole career he's been maybe the key example of what Russell calls for above: "an economic redistributivist who understands that achieving fairness in society requires a collective concern for the moral prerequsites for said society."

[Henry]

When reading Gray, I'm always reminded of a Bloom County strip from years back where Bill the Cat runs for President with a campaign ad that runs something like - "He's been a pro-choice gun-smuggling Moral Majority member. He's been a dope-smoking Republican Scientologist. Vote for Bill: He's one of us." Millsian liberal, post-Millsian, Rawlsian for half a second, green pro-market conservative, green managed market conservative, und so weiter; I'm sure I'm missing a couple of stages in his evolution there.

I suspect that David Miller may be a bit liberal for Russell Arben Fox's tastes. In some ways, he's very pro-market. I've always liked that chapter in "Market, State and Community" where Miller argues that Marx implicitly embraced the idea that markets were a good thing if you wanted to create fully realized individuals. I don't think that it's a very good exegesis of Marx; but that's beside the point.

[dsquared]

You've gotta check out "Straw Dogs", where Gray develops fully into nihilism and explains in painstaking detail why nobody ever, ever, ever will give a tiny little toss whether any of us live or die.

[dsquared]

>>That's part of why I insist that libertarianism is a species of liberalism

I insist that in its common language use, it isn't, because a) it's a natural rights theory, which is inconsistent with all forms of liberalism except liberal natural rights theories, and b) it assimilates all natural rights to property rights, which means that it fundamentally doesn't recognise liberal rights, except conditionally as exercises of property rights. I honestly think that it would be better called "propertarianism", because that's the distinguishing feature.

[jholbo]

Reading Jacob's comment, my eye fell on 'Gray', then darted for reasons best known to itself to "this week he ... declared himself to be a Camille Paglian gender-subverter"; and for a moment I thought it was true. Which just goes to show: 1) Gray IS Bill the Cat-grade weird, that I would actually think that; 2) I've got a pretty bad cold and I'm not thinking straight. You all can stay up and chat some more. There's beer in the fridge.

Before I go: I like dquared's last comment because, frankly, I've always agreed with what Jacob says: libertarianism is a species of liberalism, and our political terminology will be more healthy when we come to regard it as such. (In fact I was rereading chapter 1 of "Multiculturalism of Fear" when I composed the original post. So I am most gratified its very own author wandered by to meet this small grandchild of his mind.)

As I was saying: I feel somewhat blindsided by dsquared's comment. There is something right about what he says, and I just never thought about it that way before. But I don't buy it. So I'll sleep on it. (I think I am unmoved because I think metaphysics always gets spatula-ed on last in political philosophy - like frosting on the cupcake. Dsquared is right that the frosting is a different flavor here. Natural rights flavor. But I think the cake is the same, as Jacob says. But I'm really not sure what I think, now I think about it)

[baa]

These "x are a kind of y" arguments are awful tricky with ill-defined political tags. Libertarians seem a species of liberals when libertarian = Nozick and liberal = John Locke; this is less obvious if liberal = John Rawls and libertarian = consequentialist public choice theorist. The politics/philosophy pairings are far more mix-and-match than one might imagine. Certainly, there are many roads to libertarianism besides natural rights arguments, as our host suggests.

D^2: We'll have to agree to disagree of the higher justification of selfishness quip. I think Right = selfish belongs with Left = envious in the basket of plausible but ultimately unhelpful polemics.

[Jacob T. Levy]

[blink] [blink] I'm not at all sure what to make of D^2's comment. For one thing, libertarianism isn't simply a natural rights theory. There are natural rights libertarians, just as there are natural rights liberals (and the latter category isn't as anomalous as the comment seems to suggest)-- but there are also utilitarian versions of each theory, something like virtue-ethics versions of each, second-order institutional versions of each, etc. "Liberal" and "libertarian" (and "conservative") describe clusters of political theories and positions, not metaethical stances. Seems to me that for libertarian as for other forms of liberalism, it's perfectly easy to find arguments that take any of the following forms:
1) Freedom is justified by the natural rights (or "moral rights") of individuals.
2) Freedom is justified because a system made up of freely choosing individuals leads to the greatest overall good. (Mill on free speech as much as Friedman on free exchange.)
3) Freedom is justified because of the moral primacy of individuality, diversity, self-development and self-cultivation (Humboldt, Mill in some moods, Whitman, Thoreau, Kateb, etc-- though a theory like this is only a liberal one if the moral good of individuality is equally available to all, else it's aristocratic or Neitzschean or something).
3) Freedom is justified because coercive interference with free choices requires implausible levels of trust that state officials have either or both of a) greater knowledge of state officials than of other persons or b) greater virtue than other persons, greater ability to resist temptation to abuse power, to resist the urge to self-aggrandize, etc. (This is present in the liberal defense of the rights of accused criminals and in procedural checks on police, military, etc, as much as it is in public choice theory.)

And so on. Contractarianism: fully a part of the intellectual heritage of libertarianism and egalitarian liberalism, alien to genuine conservatism. etc, etc.

I'm not claiming that the standard liberal defenses of religious freedom or free speech are just the same as libertarian defenses of free exchange; but they do take the same kinds of (and the same variety of) forms. If there's a bright line to be drawn between libertarianism and [what I still want to call "other kinds of"] liberalism, it can't be a metaethical line.

[Walt Pohl]

I don't think utilitarianism versus natural-rights _is_ necessarily a good dividing line, but I'm one of the tiny minority of natural-rights liberals, so I would say that, wouldn't I. One of the hallmarks of utilitarians, in practice, is that they are as equally committed to a certain view of human psychology as they are to utilitarianism. If they discovered that human happiness required that we be ruled by an iron hand, they would be more likely to give up utilitarianism than they would liberalism.

But for libertarianism the distinction between natural rights libertarians and other kinds of libertarians _does_ seem like it makes sense. If you're a libertarian who thinks that while social spending is a good idea in theory it will be a bad idea in practice, then we at least share a _goal_. You're someone who liberals can do business with. If you are the type of libertarian who thinks that all questions on social spending can be answered by invoking "taxes are theft", then there is no definition of "liberalism" large enough to include both you and me.

(Note: I'm using "you" in the generalized sense, not directed at anyone in particular.)

[Micha Ghertner]

Jacob,

I'm not claiming that the standard liberal defenses of religious freedom or free speech are just the same as libertarian defenses of free exchange

This reminded me of Ronald Coase's article, "The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas", in which he makes precisely that claim.

Also, while free-market social conservatives and social laissez-faire redistributivist liberals are both inconsistent when viewed from the libertarian/communitarian perspective, libertarians have a few contradictions of our own. We tend to fall back on both natural rights and utilitarian arguments simultaneously, even though they are incompatible. Read (and I assume you probably already have, Jacob): "What's Wrong With Libertarianism," by Jeffrey Friedman from Critical Review, Vol. 11, No. 3. (Summer 1997)

[bill]

Wouldn't subscribing to Natural Rights ascribe the ability to believe in an individuals right to engage in free-trade and to simultaneously place judgements and restrictions on other human behaviors?