A Thinking Reed

Category: Conservatism

  • Moneybags Paul

    Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in Internet contributions in a 24-hour period yesterday as part of a concerted fundraising campaign. Wow!

    Paul’s total deposed Mitt Romney as the single-day fundraising record holder in the Republican presidential field. When it comes to sums amassed in one day, Paul now ranks only behind Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, who raised nearly $6.2 million on June 30, and Barack Obama.

  • Rudy’s brain?

    I’m not wild about anybody currently running for president next year, but I’ve been convinced for a while now that Rudy Giuliani is objectively the worst candidate of either party in the 2008 race. He appears to display all the authoritarianism and militarism of the GOP circa 2007 without any shred of pro-life restraint or traditional conservative prudence. Adding fuel to the crazy fire, I see that Rudy has enlisted “Stormin’” Norman “World War IV” Podhoretz as one of his foreign policy gurus. Now that’s scary.

    As far as I’m concerned, organized conservatism has already sold its soul in tolerating the unitary executive, preventive war and the torture state. But if conservatives rally behind Giuliani, they’ll effectively have shown that a civilizational war against the Islamic world trumps every other possible conservative principle. Fortunately, a Giuliani candidacy also seems to stand the greatest chance of driving principled evangelicals and other conservatives to a third-party or even to the Dems, thus significantly reducing his chances of winning.

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century.

    Small Is Still Beautiful is one among a recent spate of books re-thinking what it means to be conservative in light of the apparent triumph of global capitalism and the preeminence of America as global hegemon. Fans of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons (review here) and Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America (review here) will find much to like here, as Pearce upholds the small, familiar and local against the forces of globalized homogeneity.

    Pearce doesn’t break much new ground in terms of fundamental ideas; this book is more of an update of Schumacher’s original. But this actually works well since Schumacher’s ideas seem just as timely now as they did thirty years ago. The issues that this book grapples with – our insatiable appetite for growth, environmental despoilation, and the plight of local communities – have gained a new resonance in recent years.

    If you had to boil down Schumacher’s (and Pearce’s) message into a pithy maxim, I think it would be that “Economics was made for man, not man for economics.” Schumacher’s vision was rooted in a view of humankind as having transcendent worth, but also part of an ordered cosmos that has its own beauty and integrity. For Schumacher, much of the problem of conventional economic thinking was that it subordinated the ends of human life to the means of economic production – a complete reversal of the proper order of things.

    Pearce sees both cause for worry and celebration in the events that have transpired since Small Is Beautiful was originally published. On the one hand, many of the worrying trends Schumacher identified have only accelerated: neoliberal globalization and its attendant monoculture, skewed theories of development that privilege intensive industrial production and agriculture, and, of course, the worship of centralization and “giantism.” On the other hand, a counter-movement of organic farmers, craft brewers, proponents of local economies, co-ops, and movements for political decentralization have also made a surprising amount of headway.

    The underlying premise of Schumacher’s work is that unlimited economic growth in the pursuit of meeting a never-ending stream of consumer demands is “unnatrual” in the deepest possible sense. It goes against the grain of human nature in that it won’t satisfy our deepest longings, and it threatens to destroy the fragile biosphere upon which we and all other life depend. Only a reorientation of our economic and political life toward proper human ends – joy, wisdom, peace – can stave off an ecological disaster.

    This view is both radical and conservative in that it requires a massive re-thinking of the political and economic status quo, but does so in the name of a very traditional, even religious, view of human beings and their destiny. Schumacher’s less-known work, A Guide for the Perplexed, actually presents the key to his thought here. His aim in that work was to recover the traditional metaphysical view of humanity and the universe that underlies what Huston Smith calls the “wisdom traditions” of the world. This philosophia perennis stands in stark opposition to the materialism of post-Englightenment modernity.

    Pearce, like Schumacher, is a practicing Catholic who combines what we’d call social conservatism with economic positions well to the “left” of most Democrats, much less Republicans. He opposes “free trade” and thinks government policy should favor small businesses and local producers. He takes the issue of climate change and environmental degradation with the utmost seriousness, seeing them as direct consequences of growth-oriented and inequitable economic policy. He excoriates the World Bank and IMF and their regimes of “structural adjustment” programs for developing nations. And he opts for organic farming as the only way to save the land from destruction at the hands of intensive agriculture.

    Somewhat confusingly, and despite the subtitle, Pearce says little directly about families. There are a few asides about the ways in which market capitalism breaks up social bonds, leaving atomized individuals in its wake. But very little is said about how families in particular are affected. For instance, it seems to me that Pearce could’ve made a lot of hay out of the way that our current economic practices force parents to work long hours, depriving them of the opportunities to spend time with their children as well as to participate in their communities.

    I have to say that this book likely won’t convince anyone who isn’t already at least somewhat familiar with and somewhat sympathetic to Schumacher’s original arguments. But Pearce has done us a service even if the only effect of his book is to send people (particularly the more conservative-leaning people likely to read this) back to Schumacher’s original works. And beyond that, it’s nice to see Schumacherian principles applied to the current scence, giving us a picture of their continuing relevance.

    P.S.     Dear Publishers: I would be happy to review books like this when they come out instead of waiting till they’re available at the library. Please feel free to send review copies. 😉

  • Is Ron Paul crazy?

    Well, maybe. But he also manages to combine uncompromising rhetoric with political savvy, according to Jeremy Lott (via). This may help explain why Paul is doing better than anyone expected (his campaign reportedly now with more cash on hand than John McCain’s, for instance).

    One of the interesting thing about Paul is that he’s able to attract a variety of people who would otherwise likely be at odds with one another: libertarians, American nationalists skeptical of free trade and the “New World Order,” Christian homeschoolers, anti-war conservatives, and at least a few people on the left. The Republican base, however, remains steadfastly opposed to Paul’s anti-war stance and he’s probably too much of a libertarian for the mainstream Christian right, but it now looks like he at least has a chance of having a significant impact on the race, rather than simply being a gadfly.

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post.

    The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a bit too close to Jerry Falwell.

    I definitely thought of myself as a conservative at one point, though lately I’ve been toying with the idea of “Christian humanist” as the best descriptor of my overall outlook.

    Anyway, here are a handful of posts on my various statements of political principle and self-identification, if anyone’s interested.

    “Apologia pro vote sua” (On voting for the Green Party in 2004)

    “…on Sort of Going from Right to Left or How I Became a Quasi-Pacifist Conservative Vegetarian Pro-Lifer”

    “Am I a Conservative?”

    To me, what a “Christian humanist” position would emphasize is the dignity of the human person rooted in a transcendent moral order while at the same time recognizing human frailty and our limited apprehension of that order this side of the eschaton.

    This leads me to be in favor of strong limits on government power and to oppose, or at least be extremely wary of, the destruction of human life in the forms of abortion and euthanasia (traditional “conservative” views).

    On the other hand, economics was made for human beings not vice versa, so the idolatry of the free market has to go (see Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Roepke’s A Humane Economy). State killing in the form of war and capital punishment is at least equally as troubling and difficult to justify as other threats to life. And human beings can’t flourish while despoiling the environment.

    Throw in a general skepticism about bio-engineering (see Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Huxley’s Brave New World) and trepidation about unchecked technology more generally (Borgmann, Jardine, Ellul) and you’ve got an electric conservative-liberal-green-libertarian stew.

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises:

    In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

    Roepke was a free market economist, widely credited with Germany’s post-war economic recovery. He was also a deeply conservative thinker in the best sense who recognized that life is more than the market. His A Humane Economy argues that the market requires strong social, cultural and legal frameworks in order to function as it should without reducing social values to market values.

    Here’s a snippet:

    The questionable things of this world come to grief on their nature, the good ones on their own excesses. Conservative respect for the past and its preservation are indispensable conditions of a sound society, but to cling exclusively to tradition, history, and established customs is an exaggeration leading to intolerable rigidity. The liberal predilection for movement and progress is an equally indispensable counterweight, but if it sets no limits and recognizes nothing as lasting and worth preserving, it ends in disintegration and destruction. The rights of the community are no less imperative than those of the individual, but exaggeration of the rights of the community in the form of collectivism is just as dangerous as exaggerated individualism and its extreme form, anarchism. Ownership ends up in plutocracy, authority in bondage and despotism, democracy in arbitrariness and demagogy. Whatever political tendencies or currents we choose as examples, it will be found that they always sow the seed of their own destruction when they lose their sense of proportion and overstep their limits. In this field, suicide is the normal cause of death.

    The market economy is no exception to the rule. Indeed, its advocates, in so far as they are at all intellectually fastidious, have always recognized that the sphere of the market, of competition, of the system where supply and demand move prices and thereby govern production, may be regarded and defended only as part of a wider general order encompassing ethics, law, the natural conditions of life and happiness, the state, politics, and power. Society as a whole cannot be ruled by the laws of supply and demand, and the state is more than a sort of business company, as has been the conviction of the best conservative opinion since the time of Burke. Individuals who compete on the market and there pursue their own advantage stand all the more in need of the social and moral bonds of community, without which competition degenerates most grievously. As we have said before, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature. Man can wholly fulfill his nature only by freely becoming part of a community and having a sense of solidarity with it. Otherwise he leads a miserable existence and he knows it. (A Humane Economy, pp. 90-91)

    Here Roepke sounds a bit like John Paul II, who recognized the value and importance of markets for production and exchange, but the equal or greater importance of maintaining the value of things, especially human life, that cannot be reduced to exchange value. As he wrote in the encyclical Centesimus annus:

    It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. But this is true only for those needs which are “solvent”, insofar as they are endowed with purchasing power, and for those resources which are “marketable”, insofar as they are capable of obtaining a satisfactory price. But there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish. It is also necessary to help these needy people to acquire expertise, to enter the circle of exchange, and to develop their skills in order to make the best use of their capacities and resources. Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to man because he is man, by reason of his lofty dignity. Inseparable from that required “something” is the possibility to survive and, at the same time, to make an active contribution to the common good of humanity. (Para. 34)

    It’s probably no coincidence that Roepke, the son of a Lutheran pastor, enunciated a similar kind of Christian Democratic vision. American conservatism has, unfortunately, tended toward a kind of “vulgar libertarianism” in theory, which valorizes “the market” as the solution to all social problems. And in practice it has ironically tended toward corporatism – favors for big business that actually end up shielding them from the vicissitudes of the market.

    The interesting question to me is whether there is a space for Roepke-style “humane conservatism” to join with McKibbon-style grass-roots progressivism in offering an alternative to the kind of neoliberal version of globalization that many would argue threatens the social, moral, political, and ecological health of our society.

  • The conservatism of Ray Davies

    Apropos of yesterday’s post, the lyrics from The Kinks’ “God’s Children”:

    Man made the buildings that reach for the sky
    And man made the motorcar and learned how to fly
    But he didn’t make the flowers and he didn’t make the trees
    And he didn’t make you and he didn’t make me
    And he got no right to turn us into machines
    He’s got no right at all
    ‘Cause we are all God’s children
    And he got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

    Don’t want this world to change me
    I wanna go back the way the Good Lord made me
    Same lungs that he gave me to breath with
    Same eyes he gave me to see with

    Oh, the rich man, the poor man, the saint and the sinner
    The wise man, the simpleton, the loser and the winner
    We are all the same to Him
    Stripped of our clothes and all the things we own
    The day that we are born
    We are all God’s children
    And they got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made
    Oh, the Good Lord made us all
    And we are all his children
    And they got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all
    Yeah, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

    The Kinks are probably the only great reactionary rock band. Not reactionary in some kind of mean-spirited sense, mind you. But in the sense of writing wistful songs about the English countryside getting chewed up by sprawl and the drab conformity engendered by the welfare state. And in this case a quasi-Luddite opposition to the mechanization of modern society. The albums Muswell Hillbillies and The Village Green Preservation Society are the loci classici here.

  • Paging Dr. No

    Here’s a pretty sympathetic if not uncritical profile of Ron Paul in the New York Times Magazine by Christopher Caldwell.

    One of the things I took away from this piece is that Paul’s ability to attract a broad spectrum of support from people who are alienated from the political status quo is the flip side of his tendency to attract people from the political fringes (money cranks, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, etc.).

    Still, I’ll give him this: on some really important stuff where all the “sensible” and “serious” people went badly wrong (the Iraq war, civil liberties in the post-9/11 national security state) Paul got it right. Sometimes it pays to stand outside the bipartisan consensus.

  • Does God want us to be free?

    (Switching gears here; we’re talking about political freedom now, not the metaphysical variety.)

    There’s been an interesting debate recently, swirling around some of President Bush’s more exuberant comments about political freedom being a “gift from the Almighty.” The reference comes from a recent David Brooks column (not accessible to us proles who don’t subscribe to the Times), the implication being that Bush’s confidence in the policies he’s pursued is rooted in a conviction that a providentially-ordered history is on his side.

    This belief has met with a storm of criticism from some of the more thoughtful conservative pundits and bloggers (Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher), with Ramesh Ponnuru offering something of a defense.

    The issue I take it has two parts. Bush, allegedly, believes that there is something of an innate telos toward freedom in the created order in virtue of God’s creative and providential care. The second part is that his policies have a good long-run chance of success precisely because they are aligned with the “grain of the universe” so to speak. It might be helpful to point out that these two claims are detachable. Even if there is an inherent tendency toward freedom in human nature, it doesn’t follow that the best way to promote that tendency is the way Bush has chosen. In fact, it seems to me that there are good reasons to think otherwise, since going to war with and invading other countries requires coercion on a massive scale.

    But regarding the first claim – whether political liberty is part of what God wills for his creatures – I come at this from a slightly different angle. My take is that political liberty follows from human fallenness. Precisely because human beings are frail, selfish, limited in knowledge, prone to self-assertion, and vulnerable, liberty is necessary to create a sphere within which people are protected from the impositions of others. As fallen creatures we are prone to mistake our partial visions of the good with the Good itself and to be insufficiently modest in trying to get our fellow creatures to go along with them. If people weren’t sinners, political liberty as we know it would be superfluous because everybody would spontaneously do the right thing. Because our own knowledge is limited and our motives are suspect, the political order should limit the extent to which we can enforce our preferences on others. So, I guess I’m something of a post-lapsarian about freedom.

    It should be obvious that this is a more modest version of liberalism than the kind of progressive optimistic Whiggery criticized by some of the conservatives cited above. In fact, Christopher Insole, whose book on theology and political liberalism helped me clarify some of these ideas, expressly distinguishes a liberalism of human frailty from what he calls “crusading liberalism.” This is Whiggish liberalism that identifies the triumph of freedom with a single kind of political and economic order that will spread by means of inevitable historical progress.

    So you might say that the institutions that foster political liberty are a means of protecting vulnerable human selves from each other. This view doesn’t identify liberalism with any kind of utopia or “end of history,” and it recognizes that liberty can be embodied in a diversity of forms. It is also respectful of historically developed institutions that have acheived a measure of freedom and stability and would be wary of rashly overturning them in the name of some revolutionary project. Certainly I think any Christian would say that God wills the flourishing of human beings in this good but fallen world, and to the extent that the institutions of liberty contribute to that by creating spaces for human flourishing we can indeed say that God wants us to be free.

  • Green is the new Right(?)

    Philosopher Roger Scruton has a pretty good piece on conservatives and the environment in the latest American Conservative. He mostly avoids the ususal conservative pitfalls when talking about the environment, namely snarky dismissal or ad hominem attacks against Al Gore and dirty hippies.

    Scruton does make some solid points about the dangers of any “movement”: how it can take on crusade-like qualities. He contrasts this with a genuinely political approach to environmental problems that assume the legitimacy of various interests and try to reach a reasonable accomodation among them.

    He also emphasizes conservative distrust of centralized statist solutions but also points out that it is a cardinal conservative principle that one should take responsibility for the consequences of ones actions. In other words, costs should be internalized wherever possible. He also thinks that a specific contribution that Anglo-American conservatives can make is the idea of our environmental inheritance as a “trust” – something that we received from earlier generations and will pass on to the generations after us.

    One criticism I have is that Scruton seems to underestimate the degree to which legal remedies are a necessary part of environmental stewardship. He’s certainly right that popular grassroot initiatives are preferable to the heavy hand of centralized top-down control other things being equal, but regulation has acheived a lot, especially in terms of clean air and water. If the state has a role in ensuring that people don’t foist the cost of their actions off on others, then this applies to the environment as well. And if climate change is as serious a problem as we’re led to believe, it will likely require government action and coordination between nations, even though Scruton is rightly skeptical about some of the proposed approaches.

    Further reading here and here.