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I discovered (via Clark Stooksbury) that the current issue of The American Conservative features a lengthy article on factory farming and why conservatives should care about it by Matthew Scully (It’s not online at the AmCon site, but you can read the article at Scully’s personal site here). Scully is a former speechwriter for President Bush and the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.

Conservatives often balk at the notion of “animal rights,” but Scully points out that if you think (as nearly everyone does) that we have moral obligations toward animals, such as to not treat them with wanton cruelty, this is effectively the same as to say they have a right not to be treated cruelly by us. (Come to think of it, I made a similar argument here, in one of my very first blog posts.)

The other main plank in Scully’s argument is that it makes no sense to say that, for instance, dogs must be protected from cruel treatment but not pigs since there are no morally relevant differences between dogs and pigs that would justify different treatment. As Scully says:

Having conceded the crucial point that some animals rate our moral concern and legal protection, informed conscience turns naturally to other animals—creatures entirely comparable in their awareness, feeling, and capacity for suffering. A dog is not the moral equal of a human being, but a dog is definitely the moral equal of a pig, and it’s only human caprice and economic convenience that say otherwise. We have the problem that these essentially similar creatures are treated in dramatically different ways, unjustified even by the very different purposes we have assigned to them. Our pets are accorded certain protections from cruelty, while the nameless creatures in our factory farms are hardly treated like animals at all. The challenge is one of consistency, of treating moral equals equally, and living according to fair and rational standards of conduct.

This seems to me about as good an example of iron-clad moral argument as we’re likely to get.

I give you…the Bush fish.

(via Jim Henley)

Henley comments: “Despite all the talk among the pro-Administration media about ‘Bush hatred,’ the truly interesting phenomenon is Bush love. Who could have imagined that this well-born gladhander could become the object of the strongest personality cult in my lifetime?”

Good question.

Another interesting piece from NR this morning is by Warren Bell, who says he’s conservative on everything but food:

I am against the modern food industry. I think industrialized food, especially beef, is a menace to our way of life. I stand athwart the checkout line, shouting “Don’t eat that crap!” The weird thing is, this is a fairly new belief. When I was 21 and voting Crazy Insaneson for President, my favorite food was a snack of my own brilliant design called Fri-Nuts — take a bag of Fritos and a jar of Planter’s, mix, enjoy. My left-ward progress regarding food began with a 2002 New York Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan called “This Steer’s Life.” After that, it was Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and then some other books and articles, all leading me to the same conclusion — food as big business is a disaster.

[…]

The profit motive of the food industry drives them to do two things: They need to make food cheaper, and they need to make it taste better. This couplet of motives is not in itself bad, but one of the outcomes is the feedlot system of raising cattle. If you want details, read the sources I’ve cited, but the goal of the cattle farmer is to feed a cow as much corn as possible as fast as possible and then slaughter the cow just before eating all that corn kills it. The corn diet causes diseases in the cow, so bring on the antibiotics. The corn also makes the meat more fatty, what we beef-lovers call marbled, and this is why the phrase “corn-fed beef” is still used to mean a top-quality steak. It really means “cow that was poisoned” and double up on that Lipitor.

But maybe such a stance isn’t so “liberal” after all:

[F]ood should be natural. I’m not saying that all natural things are good, and unnatural is bad — for instance, Pamela Anderson is fine by me. But food is a thing found in nature, and the food industry has turned it into Food, a scientifically derived substance found in your supermarket. Cookies are made from flour, sugar, and butter (and a few other mystery things — what is baking powder?). So why do the major brands have those other 42 ingredients? Well, one makes the cookies stay crispy even after a month on the shelf. Another makes them that awesome rich color. Another dozen or so are the hydrogenated oils that create truly unbeatable taste — that make cookies taste better than cookies! This witchcraft is the inevitable result of the “Better Living Through Science” ethic of the post-WWII generation, and what has it caused? Generation upon generation of Americans conditioned to eat only the zestiest, new and improved, nacho cheez crème-filled food-like product substances. Real food is dull in comparison.

Hey, wait a second. Follow me here. I am against the modern food industry. I prefer more natural foods, cows the way they used to be raised, cookies the way they used to be baked, real food without science’s “progress.” When it comes to food, I am a…traditionalist.

Amen, brother!

Start thinking like this, though, and you may end up questioning several tenets of the modern conservative creed. Unhampered corporate capitalism is hostile to traditions in areas besides food. Watched TV lately? And how about the replacement of small tight-knit communities by sprawl and big box stores? Hard to see anything particularly traditional about that.

As Marx saw, capitalism is actually one of the most revolutionary forces in history, not a conservative one. Which is why the alliance between social conservatism and libertarian economics has often been an uneasy one.

In fact, the article on “traditionalist conservatism” from the New Pantagruel I mentioned yesterday offers a more genuinely traditionalist take on economics. The author, Mark C. Henrie, writes that traditionalists (as opposed to libertarians) are concerned to “box in” the market with strong social and cultural institutions:

To box in the market would mean, first of all, to recognize that there are some things which should not be bought or sold because to do so would directly violate human dignity or the common good. Thus, drugs, pornography, and prostitution are appropriately controlled. So too, perhaps, various biotechnologies. In a more speculative mode, religious traditionalists even raise questions about nursing homes and day care: ought care to be placed “on the market?” To embed market logic within a strong social setting also means to recognize man as something more than a consumer. Thus, no one would disagree that Wal*Mart and free trade spell lower prices and often greater choice for Americans as consumers. But, to take the case of Wal*Mart, is there not something lost, some kind of social capital, when the proprietors of a small town’s chamber of commerce are “converted” into corporate employees — even if, as managers, they may earn a higher wage?

Henrie mentions Swiss economist Wilhelm Roepke, an economist in the Austrian tradition who nevertheless broke with the more extreme laissez-faire views of thinkers like von Mises. Roepke was a free marketeer, but he advocated what he called a “humane economy” – a decentralized, human-sized economics that had some affinities with distributism or the views of E.F. “Small is Beautiful” Schumacher.

More crucially, Roepke insisted that the rules governing the free market should be hedged in by strong social institutions; a strong framework of law and morality is necessary both for the effective functioning of the market and to ensure that the values of the market don’t displace higher human values (which, for Roepke, a Lutheran, were largely to be identified with those of Christendom).

A traditionalist, therefore, will not necessarily be averse to regulation of the market, but it will be in service to traditionalist values, rather than the values sometimes championed by left-wing critics of the market. The food industry is just one manifestation in which corporate capitalism as it currently exists will tend to undermine the values traditionalists cherish.

Two pieces of note expressing conservative dissent from the general drift of the Bush administration. And these are not grouchy fringe figures, but writers at the two most important conservative magazines.

The ever-gloomy John Derbyshire contends that, measured against the traditional canons of conservative thought, conservatism has demonstrably lost ground since Bush took office. He also makes the obvious (yet often overlooked) point that there is no necessary connection between evangelical Protestantism and conservatism as traditionally understood (cf. William Jennings Bryan). This might be partly demonstrated by the apparent shift of the energies of religious conservatives away from a “leave us alone” quasi-libertarian stance toward the embrace of a more activist government agenda.

In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson laments the onset of “big government conservatism” under Bush. Ferguson accuses Bush of “overreach” in embracing the mantle of “reform” (i.e. reforming the Middle East, reforming Social Security, the tax code, Medicare, etc.) which inevitably demands “a whirlwind of government activity. Each is a formula for politics without end–splendid indeed for politicians and government employees, but a bit tiring for the rest of us.”

A lack of modesty and self-restraint is one excellent reason Americans grew to despise liberals in the first place. The high-water mark of American liberalism came in 1993 and 1994, when President Clinton and his wife, under the guise of “health care reform,” decided they would assume control of one-seventh of the nation’s economy in order to make it more rational and fair. Voters responded by handing the federal legislature to the Republican party. History may record that what offended them wasn’t liberalism but busybodyism–the endless, frenetic search by elected officials for ever-new ways to make the country more fabulous. Bush and his Republicans are close to proving that busybodyism can become a creature of the right as well as the left.

A propos of the discussion below, historian Niall Ferguson has an op-ed (reg. req’d) in the LA Times about the “moral shortcuts” to victory in WWII.

Specifically he mentions our alliance with Stalin with its concomitant tolerance of his crimes:

Most historians today would give the lion’s share of the credit for the Allied victory to the Soviet Union. It was, after all, the Soviets who suffered the largest number of wartime casualties (about 25 million). That reflected in large measure the appalling barbarity with which the Germans waged the war on the Eastern Front. Yet it also reflected the indifference of Stalin’s totalitarian regime to the lives and rights of its own citizens. It might have been expected that in the crisis of war, Stalin would suspend the terror that had characterized his regime in the 1930s. On the contrary. The lowest estimates for the period (1942-1945) indicate that 7 million Soviet citizens lost their lives via political executions, deportations or death in the gulag system. All of this reminds us that to defeat an enemy they routinely denounced as barbaric, the Western powers made common cause with an ally that was morally little better.

Ferguson also discusses the Allied bombing campaigns, though he does suggest that they may have had more strategic value than previously thought:

For many years it was fashionable to deny that the bombing made any significant contribution to the Allied victory. Certainly, the damage to German and Japanese morale was far less than the prewar strategists had predicted.

But bombing Germany did divert air cover away from the Eastern Front. In the spring of 1943, 70% of German fighters were in the western European theater, leaving German ground forces in the east increasingly vulnerable to Soviet air attacks. Lack of air cover was one of the reasons the German tanks were beaten at Kursk.

Strategic bombing also greatly hampered Albert Speer’s considerable efforts to mobilize the Nazi economy for total war. In January 1945, Speer and his colleagues calculated the damage done in terms of what they couldn’t produce: 35% fewer tanks than planned, 31% fewer aircraft and 42% fewer trucks. The impact of bombing on the Japanese economy was even more devastating.

(We might point out, though, that just because something may have aided the war effort, it may not have been necessary. Surely justice in war may sometimes require taking the less expedient course.)

Nevertheless, says Ferguson

And yet the moral cost of this strategy, whatever its military benefits, was appallingly high. What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is said to have ushered in a new atomic age. It also represented the extent to which the Allies threw moral restraint aside in their pursuit of victory.

After the war, the charges against the Japanese leaders who stood trial included “the wholesale destruction of human lives, not alone on the field of battle … but in the homes, hospitals, and orphanages, in factories and fields.” Yet this had been the very essence of the Allied policy of strategic bombing. At Potsdam and in the subsequent Nuremberg trials the victors also struck splendidly sanctimonious poses. The leaders of Germany and Japan had “set in motion evils which [left] no home in the world untouched.” Yet the Soviet Union had been on Hitler’s side in 1939 — something the Baltic states invaded by Stalin have not forgotten.

UPDATE: Historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft comes to similar conclusions here:

For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.

Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the fighting.

Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.

Another positive (indeed, nigh-gushing) review (warning: here be spoilers) of Episode III.

(via The American Scene)

There’s a new edition up of The New Pantagruel.

I haven’t delved in yet, but there appear to be some goodies, including:

• “Harsh Medicine” by Wesley J. Smith
• “Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism” by Mark C. Henrie

Also, speaking of vaguely countercultural online Christian journals, Harbinger directs us to the latest edition of The Other Journal, featuring an essay on capitalism by Daniel M. Bell, Jr.

A tidbit:

[C]apitalism is wrong not only on account of its failure to aid the poor and needy, but also because of what it does succeed in doing, namely, deforming human desire. As Augustine noted long ago, humans are created to desire God and the things of God. Capitalism corrupts desire. Even if capitalism succeeds in reducing poverty, it is still wrong on account of its distortion of human desiring and human relations. As Alasdair MacIntyre has noted, “although Christian indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, Christianity has to view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them. . . .Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize.” Capitalism is wrong not simply because it fails to succor the impoverished, but also because where it succeeds it deforms and corrupts human desire into an insatiable drive for more. Capitalism makes a virtue of what an earlier era denounced as a vice, pleonexia or greed – a restless, possessive, acquisitive drive, but which today is celebrated as the aggressive, creative, entrepreneurial energy that distinguishes homo economicus. Diagnoses and critiques of this cancerous desire and its effects abound and need not be repeated here.

I don’t agree with everything in Bell’s essay, but it is well worth reading.

As a follow up on yesterday’s post here are a couple of relevant articles from the Journal of Libertarian Studies:

• “Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Contradiction: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Nonviolence” by Richard O. Curry and Lawrence B. Goodheart
• “The Radical Libertarian Tradition in Antislavery Thought” by Carl Watner

John Brown seems to have had some ideas in common with Lysander Spooner, the radical libertarian lawyer and theorist. The argument for violent action against slaveholders was premised on the slaves’ inalienable right of liberty and self-defense. According to Spooner and Brown, sympathizers with the anti-slavery cause were entirely justified in coming to the aid of slaves in forcibly resisting their enslavement.

Pacifists like Garrison, on the other hand, saw slavery as part of the broader problem of the use of coercion over one’s fellow man. They were opposed to all use of force, and so would not consent to the use of force even to free slaves. However, Garrison himself seems to have waffled, basically saying that it was ok for those who were not convinced of the truth of nonviolence to use force in the service of a just cause. Ultimately he came to support the war effort and even conscription (though, he favored exemptions for conscientious objectors). It was only a small minority, such as Garrison’s sons Francis and Wendell Phillips, and Adin Ballou who clung to the pacifist position to the bitter end.

What’s interesting is that proponents of violence like Spooner and Brown and pacifists like Garrison and Ballou started from the same natural rights individualist premise that no man had the right to rule over another without his consent and yet reached startlingly different practical conclusions.

Here’s a really interesting post by Caleb McDaniel on the rehabilitation of John Brown‘s reputation, slavery, and violence vs. non-violence.

McDaniel notes that a new book seeking to refurbish Brown’s stature has met with several laudatory reviews from folks like Barbara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hitchens that favorably compare Brown’s “more radical” willingness to deploy violence with the supposed weakness and ineffectiveness of pacifist abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.

(Incidentally, why is it that Hitchens always seems willing to advocate other people’s deployment of violence in the service of causes he considers just? Oops! Cheap shot!)

McDaniel comments that, contrary to accusations that pacifists are cowards or that it is a privilege of literary types who don’t have to live in the “real world,” Garrison, for one, was nearly lynched and lived much of his life with a price on his head.

As Frederica Mathewes-Green once said about her opposition to the first Gulf War, anti-pacifists seemed to assume that “it took more courage to stand before your enemy holding a gun than it took to stand there empty-handed.”

Anyway, McDaniel also points out that the pacifism of Garrison, et al. was not just a means to ending slavery (a particularly ineffective one, their opponents would say), but was integral to their entire worldview:

[N]nonviolence was not merely an instrumental strategy for many radical abolitionists; for many of them, it was integral to their most radical ideologies. If we view their pacifism as nothing more than a strategy or personal trait, then it is easier to portray that pacifism as a sign of whimsy or weakness. But in fact, for many Garrisonians, a commitment to “nonresistance” was much more than a mere strategy, and certainly more than a simple sign of courage or its lack. It was at the core of their critique of slavery, government, and much else. According to nonresistants, any exercise of violence was an unjust usurpation of God’s authority, an immoral abuse of power. From their perspective, that was a large reason why slavery was wrong–it assigned to the master violent power that did not belong to him or her. For many Garrisonians, then, their renunciation of violence was of a piece with their renunciation of slavery. To call their pacifism a mere lack of spine ignores how it shaped their posture towards slavery and other violent abuses of power–like the treatment of Native Americans, the hawkish expansionism that sparked the Mexican War, and unequal marriages.

A propos of Memorial Day, Pen at The Gutless Pacifist links to this interview from last year with pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas. The ever contrarian Hauerwas, as we might expect, rejects the received view of World War II:

This Memorial Day, the new monument to World War II veterans formally opens on the Mall in Washington, D.C., commemorating the war we regard as blameless, since it fought Nazism. Is World War II a blameless war, from the nonviolent Christian’s point of view?

Not at all, because World War II was not a just war, because the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender. In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that. Those actions were also not in keeping with just-war theory, since they involved the intentional killing of civilians.

I think there are (at least) two senses in which we might say World War II was “not a just war,” and it might be helpful to distinguish them.

In the first place, Hauerwas is right that certain actions of the Allies violated the norms of the just war tradition as generally understood. The bombings of civilian population centers, whether with conventional or atomic weapons, pretty clearly violates the requirement of discrimination, i.e. that civilians never be deliberately targeted.

The demand of “unconditional surrender” is often thought to violate just war criteria because it seems to require the enemy to be totally subjugated to the victor. It is, effectively, to demand that the enemy submit to a condition of slavery.

On the other hand, to show that the war as actually fought by the Allies failed to comport perfectly with just war criteria in certain ways is not to show that no possible war against the Axis would have been just or that it would have been better not to fight at all. It’s certainly conceivable (though historians would have to judge whether it would have been feasible) that the Allies could have resisted German aggression but conducted that resistance within the constraints of just war criteria.

For instance, instead of insisting on unconditional surrender they could have demanded that Germany surrender its ill-gotten territorial gains and return to its pre-war borders (similar to the demands that were made upon Iraq in the first Gulf War). And they would have had to refrain from deliberately targeting civilians in enemy countries (it has been argued by several historians that this wasn’t militarily necessary anyway).

This still leaves untouched the question of Germany’s treatment of the Jews, which, quite apart from German territorial aggression, would seem to have called for some kind of intervention (though it’s doubtful that any of the powers of the day would have been willing to undertake such an intervention on purely humanitarian grounds). Conceivably some kind of intervention could’ve been undertaken without requiring unconditional surrender, though, since it entails disregarding the offending nation’s sovereignty it might come to amount to the same thing. But in the case of massive extermination of innocent people, unconditional surrender may well look like the lesser evil.

The upshot, I would say, is that though Hauerwas may be right that some of the actions of the Allies violated the canons of just war theory, there was still a just war to be fought against the Axis. And, moreover, the war as it was actually fought may well have been vastly preferable to not fighting at all (unless, that is, we follow Hauerwas in taking the pacifist position).