Sophists, economists and calculators

The NYT has an article on a group of fresh-faced young interns at the conservative Heritage Foundation – a think-tank in D.C. for those blissfully ignorant of the world of policy wonkery.

While there is something inherently disturbing about conservative youths, this bit in particular struck me as summing up a lot of what’s wrong with contemporary conservative politics in America:

While the prestige of Heritage is part of the appeal, so is the work, which rarely involves making coffee or copies. Joel Peyton, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, is helping to write a paper on privatized services in national parks. That is a task for which he may be especially well suited: after spending three summers working in a Kentucky state park, he published a paper this year denouncing “the inefficiencies of a government-run park system.”

Not to pick on the kid, but … gah! “The inefficiences of a government-run park system”!?! How exactly is a park – a park! – supposed to measure up to the standards of efficiency? Aren’t parks sort of the quintessence of inefficiency? I mean, often people are just sitting there!

At the risk of making a mountain out of a molehill, what American conservatism seems to lack is any sense of Russell Kirk’s “unbought graces of life”; the romantic spirit you find in thinkers like Burke and Coleridge or, closer to my heart, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. All this policy wonkery and obsession with “efficiency” (with its concommitant obsession with the glories of the market) is about as far from the spirit of these men as can be.

Not that this tendency is confined to the right side of the political spectrum; I’m sure you’d find a similar attitude at the Brookings Institution. But surely conservatism, if it means anything good, means conserving some things from the relentless march of the utilitarian, efficiency-obsessed society. Somebody send these kids some copies of Brideshead Revisited or something.