A Thinking Reed

Category: Conservatism

  • The limits of Berryism

    A couple of liberal bloggers point out, apropos of the AmCon interview with Michael Pollan (see here for my ramblings), that Wendell Berry is, in fact, not a liberal. Rather, his criticisms of big agriculture, big business, and big government are rooted in a basically traditionalist worldview. I take it that’s why unconventional conservatives and traditionalists of various stripes like him.

    I will admit to having only limited interest in Berry, which will no doubt destroy any crunchy cred I may have had. While he definitely scores some points in his criticism of the national security state/global capitalism/industrial food nexus, I don’t find his positive vision nearly as captivating as others seem to. Maybe it’s because I’ve never thought that the solution to the ills of modernity and the shortcomings of liberalism should – or could – involve their wholesale repudiation. And Berry seems to me to come close to this.

  • The limits of Pollanism

    UPDATE: Now with links!

    The current issue of the American Conservative, in addition to featuring John‘s very cool cover story on “conservative cuisine” (which I may blog about later), carries Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan. This passage, where Dreher tries to draw a connection between Pollan’s “organic” conception of the environment and an organic conception of human society, caught my attention:

    DREHER: What about human society as an organism? Many people think of Wendell Berry as a man of the Left because he criticizes humankind’s unnatural exploitative relationship to agriculture and the environment, but Berry has argued on similar grounds against the indvidualist sexual ethic pervasive in contemporary culture. Is he on to something?

    POLLAN: Berry’s on to a lot of things. He’s a very wise man. Is he Right or Left? Those categories don’t fit him. He is a fierce critic of capitalism because he sees it destroying community, destroying traditional sexual relationships, destroying family. I agree with a lot of that, but not all.

    There is a blind spot in a lot of contemporary conservatism–not understanding that while capitalism can be a very constructive force, it can also be very destructive of things that conservatives value.

    DREHER: It’s also a blind spot of contemporary liberalism to fail to see how pursuing a sort of autonomous individualism when it comes to social forms undermines a community in the same way that capitalism does.

    POLLAN: That’s right. The Left can be blind to that possibility also.

    Now Pollan, being a good liberal, backs away somewhat from this idea, and with good reason – excessively “organic” conceptions of society tend to be quite illiberal. While everyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher agrees that our well-being is intimately tied up with our social context, traditional organic conceptions of society go much further than this.

    The question, in essence, is whether individuals exist for the sake of society or whether societies exist for the benefit of their members. The former tended to be the pre-modern view, while the latter is more a result of a post-Enlightenment outlook. While any society may, under certain circumstances, call upon members to make sacrifices for its well-being (in times of war, say), a strong “social holism” sees the value of individuals as being entirely, or almost entirely, constituted by the contribution they make to the whole. This, in turn, has justified routinely sacrificing the interests of some group for the putative sake of the the well-being of the whole. For instance, keeping a permanent class of slaves might be justified on the grounds that it enabled a society to reach an otherwise unattainable level of art and culture.

    Meanwhile, moderns generally see society as something that can, and should, be reformed in the interests of its members. Slavery is wrong, we think, because it permanently subordinates the interests of one group of people to others, regardless of what social goods it may or may not be conducive to. Likewise, over the centuries, the institution of marriage has been modified in light of widespread beliefs that it was hampering the well-being and happiness of various groups of people. Marriage based on property interest was challenged by marriage based on personal happiness. Patriarchial marriage was challenged by feminists. Exclusively heterosexual marriage is being challenged by gays and lesbians. And so on.

    The underlying idea here is that social institutions exist in order to allow people to flourish and can be modified accordingly; people don’t exist for the sake of social institutions. You might even say that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

    But, as Dreher suggests, an “organicist” way of thinking isn’t entirely foreign to Pollan’s outlook. Take, for instance, his discussion of animal rights in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan complains about the “individualism” of an animal rights movement that is concerned exclusively about the suffering and well-being of individual animals:

    [T]he animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals. […] [Peter] Singer [insists] that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests–in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat–just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animal rights’ exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in nature? Is the individual animal the proper focus of our moral concern when we are trying to save an endangered species or restore a habitat? (p. 323)

    Now, I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that “surely a species has interests” looks to me like it’s stealing a few argumentative bases. In fact, it’s far from obvious to me that a species has interests and I have a hard time seeing why the goods Pollan refers to couldn’t be secured by focusing on indvidual animals. After all, don’t individual animals have interests in survival and in the health of their habitat? What is gained, exactly, by positing an additional entity – the species – that has interests over and above the interests of its members?

    Pollan here seems to be expressing sympahty with the ecological analogue of social holism, a view usually traced back to Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” where an action is right when “it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” This ecological holism, like its social counterpart, locates value in the whole, with the value of individuals playing a subordinate role.

    In my view, the problem with ecological holism, like social holism, is that it can all too easily justify the sacrifice of sentient creatures for the alleged benefit of the whole. After all, if the value of individuals consists in their contribution to the whole, their interests don’t carry any weight apart from whatever contribution they may or may not make. Instead of being concerned with individuals, it gives overriding precedence to the whole. This is why Tom Regan dubbed ecological holism – perhaps unfairly – “eco fascism.”

    Fortunately, hardly anyone actually adheres to the strong versions of social or ecological holism that would deny any intrinsic value to individuals, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Pollan does. Nevertheless, there is a real opposition between pre-modern social organicism and ecological holism on the one hand, and post-Enlightenement social ethics and animal liberation on the other which focus on the well-being of individuals. The former give precedence to the “stability” and “integrity” of the whole, while the latter focus on the interests of individuals. Both the traditional pre-modern conservative and the ecological holist can tend toward the affirmation that “Whatever is, is right.” We see Pollan doing this when he justifies meat-eating as “natural,” as though morality doesn’t often require us to do things that are “unnatural.”

    I don’t think it’ll come as a shock to anyone if I put my cards on the table and say that, at least in this case, I’m with the small-l liberals, animal rightists, and other post-Enlightenment philosophies. Which is not to say that there aren’t legitimate critiques of these philosophies – especially in their more extreme individualist forms. Certainly, part of an individual’s value lies in her role in community and the good of the whole can, in particular instances, trump the good of an individual, but, overall, a community has to be judged by the extent to which it enables its members to lead flourishing, satisfying lives.

  • More Red Toryism, plus “atheism is bourgeois oppression”

    Russell has a nice post tying together some of the recent threads about “dissident conservatives” and “red tories.” Meanwhile, John Milbank expands a bit on his views in this interview. Pertinent passage:

    To my mind then, modernity is liberalism, liberalism is capitalism (‘political economy’) and capitalism is atheism and nihilism. Not to see this (or rather not to fully see this) is the critical deficit of Marxism. Again, Taylor is right: all critical resistance to modernity is ‘romantic’’ in character: it 1. allows that more freedom and material happiness is a partial good; 2. yearns also for elements of lost organic values and 3. realises that the anti-body, anti-festivity, anti-sex and doctrine of hell-linked disciplinary and over-organised character of Latin Christendom is ironically responsible for the Enlightenment mentality.

    I’m starting to think that this triple romanticism is more fundamental than left/right characterization, which after all is a kind of accidental result of the French Revolution. Both left and right, as André de Muralt argues are nominalist: either one favours a strong single centre of money or power or both (right) or the rights of the many singly or when totted up (left). Both positions are also in the end atheist.

    We need instead a new kind of ‘romantic’ politics that is specifically religious, and often Christian, in thinking that one can only get distributive equality on the basis of agreed values and an elite transmission and guarding of those values. A more Carlylean and Ruskinian politics then—basically left yet with elements that are not really right so much as pre-modern and traditionalist. Strictly speaking the pre-modern predates right versus left. In Great Britain Phillip Blond is developing a crucially important new mode of ‘Red Toryism’—which might in my view equally be seen as a kind of ‘traditionalist socialism’. This is starting to be noticed in very significant public places and in effect marks the political translation of the paradox of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ and the beginning of its entry upon the political stage.

    The hard thing now for critical thinkers to do is to think outside ‘leftism’. They have to see that if neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have totally triumphed this is because the left in traditional mode is incapable of carrying out an adequate critique. In the end this is because it’s atheistic – one needs to be religious to recognize objective values and meanings as not just epiphenomenal. Today in Great Britain the left is more or less now defining itself as scientistic which actually permits an underwriting of a new mode of fascism and ‘racism’ as said above.

    ‘Left Christians’ now have much more to stress the Christian bit if they are truly going to be able to make a critical intervention.

    Atheism is bourgeois oppression. Atheism is the opium of the people—it claims to discover an ontology which precludes all hope. This is what someone like Žižek now openly says. We need now to celebrate instead the faithful legacy of peasants, learned, honourable and paternalist aristocrats, Christian warrior kings like Alfred the Great, yeomen farmers and scholars. Péguy is the man for the hour. William Cobbett also. Chesterton and Belloc likewise.

    Lots of interesting stuff in there, but lots of stuff I think is deeply wrong too. Milbank steals way too many argumentative bases here for me to endorse his call for a romantic pre-modern politics. (Though, presumably he either has or will expand on this in his more formal writings.)

  • John Milbank and “red toryism”

    This short piece from arch-Radical Orthodoxist John Milbank has generated a bit of buzz in the theologican blogosphere. Milbank seems to be calling for a socially conservative/economically leftist (or perhaps agrarian/distributist is a better description) “Red Toryism” to combat the hegemony of what he deems a failed neoliberalism (i.e. social liberalism plus relatively unregulated corporate capitalism or what Europeans call liberalism and Americans know as conservatism):

    Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime. But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters – the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science – it is on the side of “progress”.

    Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites.

    An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a “traditionalist socialism” or a “red Toryism”. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.

    On the one hand, the article Milbank is responding to is virtually a shrill parody of go-go liberalism that allows for absolutely no limits on exploiting human embryos for scientific and medical purposes, and sees the dark specter of theocracy (especially Catholic) in any opposition to unbridled Brave New Worldism. Her article reads like a mirror version of some conservative writing you get over here: forget about war, poverty, the criminal justice system, etc. – it’s all about abortion!

    Still, Milbank’s “new sort of politics” strikes some odd notes. For instance, what is he referring to by “hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites”? Sounds a bit like “traditional values” boilerplate we get a lot of from Bill Bennett types. Moreover, and granting that what I don’t know about British politics could fill a library, who is the constituency supposed to be for this rather odd amalgam of religious traditionalism, culutral elitism, and economic egalitarianism?

    I actually see some kind of social conservatism/economic liberalism combination having more promise here, but that’s partly because our version of social conservatism tends to be much more populist (see: Huckabee, Mike) and thus has a natural constituency. By contrast, an elitist, aristocratic conservatism combined with economic anti-capitalism has usually been the preserve of intellectuals (Coleridge comes to mind) and often seems to involve a rather dreamy picture of sturdy traditionalist yeoman farmers and artisans happily tending their fields and workshops. Appealing as that is in some ways, it’s hard to see it gathering much of a following on either side of the Atlantic.

    For what it’s worth, the one really interesting recent example of genuine Red Toryism that I can think of is the Canadian philosopher George Grant, who was a Christian Platonist, an economic egalitarian, a sometimes-anarchist, a staunch opponent of war and empire, and a Jacques Ellul-style technophobe. But again, not exactly the basis for a mass political movement. The American political thinker Christopher Lasch also has some affinities with this outlook. While I think both can make valuable contributions to a sound political perspective (especially when it comes to criticizing the excesses of liberalism), I’m not convinced they can provide the whole package.

  • Hippie cons?

    Dan McCarthy writes that, along with Ron Paulites, post-industrial localist conservatives are a hopeful sign on the Right, and kindly mentions this blog as a small data point. Whether this adds up to a “movement” is anyone’s guess, but the blogosphere (ironically) has given me the opportunity to be exposed to people who take issues like localism, food, sustainability, and the environment seriously, but from a distinctly conservative point of view (often, but not always, rooted in a religious view of the world).

    I have in mind here folks like Russell Arben Fox, Patrick Deneen, John Schwenkler (who Dan also mentions), Rod Dreher, the Caelum et Terra bloggers, and the now defunct New Pantagruel webzine, among others. It remains to be seen, though, whether a) this impulse is confined to a few blogospheric eccentrics and malcontents (and I mean that with all affection!) and b) whether it’s properly seen as part of “the Right.” On the last point, I’m not terribly hopeful that American conservatism can or particularly wants to address the concerns that these folks are raising.

  • Doings among the Libertarians

    The Libertarian Party has nominated former Republican congressman (and Clinton impeachment manager) Bob Barr as its presidential candidate. Barr seems to be courting some of the same anti-war/small government conservative support as Ron Paul’s campaign (which is still going, incidentally).

    The natural conclusion to draw here is that this will hurt McCain, if anyone. Barr is the most mainstream figure the Libertarians have nominated in years and is likely to get decent and respectful media coverage. He also represents the obvious alternative for disaffected Republicans in the traditional limited government mold. (Rather than, say, Republicans who are disappointed that McCain isn’t pro-torture enough.)

  • Paleos, Obama, Right, and Left

    Surprisingly, two debates have largely occupied the newly live American Conservative blog: one about what exactly constitutes “paleoconservatism” and one about whether conservatives should support Barack Obama for president. The two debates are intertwined in that several of the TAC writers seem uncertain whether paleos should continue to think of themselves as a dissident minority within the conservative movement, or whether, under present conditions, their ideas might get more traction on the Left.

    At the risk of oversimplifying, what sets “paleoism” apart from much mainstream conservatism can be boiled down to three positions: they’re restrictionist on immigration, protectionist on trade, and anti-interventionist in foreign affairs. At the other end of the conservative spectrum, neoconservatives generally take the opposite position on all three issues.

    On the Left, though, at least two of the pillars of paleoism can gain a respectful hearing. The apparently resurgent left wing of the Democratic Party is definitely more hostile to free trade and military interventionism than the centrist-DLC wing of the party that was dominant during the 90s. Immigration restriction is a harder sell, but even here some on the Left are receptive to restrictionist arguments for labor and/or environmental reasons.

    For example, Herman Daly and John Cobb, an economist and a theologian who are, by any definition, on the Left, advocate protectionism, anti-interventionism, and reduced immigration. Their reasons are largely environmental, but also social justice-oriented (see here for my review of their book For the Common Good). Obviously, paleocons would have disagreements with them on other issues, but to the extent that these issues drive the paleo outlook, a potential Left-Right alliance is discernible.

    The connecting thread of paleoconservatism is a kind of particularistic nationalism that takes the nation-state to be the most important political unit, and one that is in danger of being dissolved by unchecked immigration, global capitalism, promiscuous interventionism, and supranational governments-in-embryo like the WTO. So, much of the paleo program is dedicated to resisting this erosion of national sovereignty. While the Left casts a much more jaundiced eye on nationalist sentiment (though there are exceptions), I think the Left’s concern for democracy can, at times result in remarkably similar policy preferences. Left-wing criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, for instance, are often couched in terms of those institutions’ anti-democratic nature. It’s not too much of a leap, then, to connect national sovereignty and democratic self-determination.

    For many the key issue, of course, is the war. Most of the writers at TAC express skepticism that Obama is any kind of consistent anti-interventionist. Where they seem to differ among themselves is over how likely Obama actually is to extricate us from Iraq, and how likely he is to start further wars. Some TACers see Obama as essentially a globalist Wilsonian interventionist who would take America into varous do-good interventions around the world.

    Obviously no one can predict what a president will do once in office with any great ceratainty, particularly in foreign affairs where the president has a much freer hand. But my hunch is that extricating us from Iraq, attempting to root out al-Qaeda from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, and dealing with Iran would provide plenty to keep President Obama busy and prevent him from, say, invading Sudan.

    Now, some of the TAC writers are just frankly opposed to Obama’s views on key domestic issues: the welfare state, health care, abortion, etc. (I have some differences with him here too.) So the question for Obama-leaning conservatives becomes twofold: how likely do you think Obama is to actually end the war in Iraq, and is the issue of the war important enough to override disagreement on other issues?

    I sit much looser to any self-definition as a “conservative” (and was, despite my anti-Iraq war views never a “paleo” per se) than do the professional conservatives over at TAC, but, for me, the war issue, combined with the broader issues of executive aggrandizement, civil liberties, and abuse of power is more than sufficient to justify rooting (and probably voting) for Obama. But, more broadly, seeing the virtual implosion of the GOP and organized conservatism over the course of the Bush presidency has spurred a reevaluation of a lot of the conservative views I once held.

    I used to think it was desirable to salvage a kind of “conservatism rightly understood” from the wreckage of Bushism, but that seems a lot less important now. For instance, it’s become pretty clear to me that global warming is a very serious issue, possibly even a catastrophic one, that will require the sustained attention of the next president and Congress. Is this a “conservative” or a “liberal” position? In the US it’s de facto a liberal position, because organized conservatism still essentially doesn’t recognize it as a problem and is forced to resort to increasingly implausible conspiracy theories about socialist climate scientists in cahoots with Al Gore who want to take away your car.

    Likewise with the war. I think there was a “conservative” argument to be made against it, but the more important question is whether there was a fundamentally moral and prudential case to be made against it. I don’t know if conservatism has been betraying its essence in falling down on these two huge issues, but I just don’t have enough invested in the survival of “conservatism” to worry too much about it.

    There will likely always be a “liberal” and a “conservative” party in the U.S., even if their definitions change over time. Right now the “conservative” party still stands for a cavalier attitude to war, environmental protection, and economic justice, even if the positions it takes aren’t necessarily for good conservative reasons (it’s hard not to think, for instance, that Russell Kirk would be aghast at contemporary conservatism; and I think someone like Wendell Berry has as good a claim to being a conservatism as anyone). Whether or not more conservatives will find themselves migrating to the Left will be interesting to see.

  • AmCon on the blogwagon

    The American Conservative, which snatched up paleocon uber-blogger Daniel Larison a while back, now has a group blog featuring several of its regular writers. It’s good to have a more regular outlet for anti-war conservatism in the blogosphere.

  • The Keystone State and the nomination

    It may just be a quirk of this drawn-out primary season, but as a native of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I’m happy to see some attention finally being paid to the state’s political complexity.

    Here’s a NY Times piece about Barack Obama trying to learn to speak Pennsylvanian by bringing his celestial rhetoric down to the earthy reality as experienced by blue-collar industrial workers (or, more to the point, former industrial workers). Obama has been traveling the state with Senator Bob Casey, Jr., son of the late Governor Robert Casey, who, famously, fell out with the Clintons over abortion during the 92 election.

    This piece from CBS news does a pretty good job dispelling the caricature of PA as “Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabam in the middle” (a cliche, as the article points out, that can be traced to a characterization offered by the ragin’ Cajun James Carville). The idea of liberal big cities swimming in a sea of red-state conservatism is a vast oversimplification. Indeed, as the piece points out, the Philly suburbs are one of the last preserves of that fast-disappearing species the Rockefeller Republican, while the PA heartland, including many small once-industrial towns, is full of socially and culturally conservative blue-collar workers who would hardly fit in at a meeting of the Club for Growth.

    In fact, the split between Bob Casey, Sr. and Bill Clinton, which in most accounts is invariably painted as the “conservative” Casey versus the “liberal” Clinton, is in many ways almost the opposite. While Bill Clinton was moving the Democratic Party to the right on nearly every major issue (crime, welfare, trade, foreign policy), Casey was an unapologetic New Deal liberal who crafted a statewide health insurance program for children. However, Casey also believed that the Democrats’ mission of protecting the most vulnerable members of society should extend to the unborn, which, in our typical political narrative, forever brands him as a “conservative.”

    Wheter “Casey Democrats” will turn out for Obama remains to be seen, but it’s still nice for PA to have its moment in the sun.

  • The dismal prospects of anti-war conservatism

    Speaking of the prospects for anti-war conservatism, Michael Tomasky reviews (free registration required) Bill Kauffman’s upcoming Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism. Tomasky gives a largely sympathetic hearing to Kauffman’s history-cum-commendation of conservative isolationism and notes that “it wouldn’t be a bad thing to see the Republican Party, and even a good third to 40 percent of the Democrats in Washington (the ones who voted for the Iraq War and continue to support it or the Bush doctrine to some degree), pay the man some heed.”

    However, Tomasky dissents (rightly, in my view) from Kauffman’s revisionist take on World War II, and, to a lesser extent, the Cold War. This has always seemed to me to be a weak spot in the paleocon/libertarian take on US military history. It’s well and good to point out, for instance, that the US didn’t face an imminent threat in World War II, but are we supposed to have been sanguine about the prospect of Hitler overruning Western Europe?

    Where Tomasky and Kauffman agree, of course, is that the present-day GOP and the conservative movement are precisely 180 degrees away from the non-interventionism of the Anti-Imperialist League and the other conservative stalwarts who populate Kauffman’s story. As Tomasky puts it:

    The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.

    I once thought that the Republican Party could be the anti-war party. During the 90s Republicans in Congress opposed the Clinton administration’s military adventures, and some even talked in ways that suggested we could become a normal country again rather than a globe-straddling colossus. I even remember a New Republic cover in the late 90s asserting that the parties had switched places: the Republicans were now the doves and the Democrats the hawks (to the liberal hawks of TNR this was a welcome development). But, in any event, we’ve all seen how that turned out.

    For the foreseeable future, whatever opposition to a policy of US global hegemony there’s likely to be will largely come from the Left. Paleocon isolationist-types make up a miniscule part of the conservative movement and the GOP coalition, as Ron Paul’s candidacy amply demonstrated. We can talk about the betrayal of “true conservatism” till the cows come home, but conservatism–like any political perspective–is as conservatism does. To moan about the loss of true conservatism is like Marxists complaining that “real” socialism hasn’t been tried yet.

    P.S. I reviewed Kauffman’s last book here.