time off

RG Collingwood once said that there are two reasons why people don't write: they either have nothing to say or they don't know how to say what they want to say. At this point, I have nothing to say so I'm taking a break (some might say that I have never known how to say what I want to say anyway, but I'll leave that one alone. I'll post a quote when I find one, and if I get the urge again I'll start posting. Thanks to those who have read and commented and to those who have merely read.

quote for the day

Some curious additional information might be given if I took myself more seriously.
V. Nabokov

quote for the day

We must be aware of one of the permanent optical illusions of historical study—the impression that all would have been well if men had only done “the right thing”.
Herbert Butterfield

quote for the day

I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased—short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
Max Beerbohm

quote for the day

The correspondence of human activities to their avowed purposes is in most spheres so dim and uncertain that one wonders how anything is ever achieved.
Lewis Namier

quote for the day

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

quote for the day

The founders of modern socialism…did much to give Continental capitalism its peculiar form; ‘monopoly capitalism,’ growing up through the intimate connection between banking and industry…, the rapid development of joint-stock enterprises, and the large railway combines are largely Saint-Simonian creations.
Hayek

quote for the day

The social institution of the future will direct all industries of the whole society and specially of the peaceful workers…The system will comprise in the first instance a central bank which constitutes the government in the material sphere: this bank will become the depository of all wealth, of the whole productive fund, of all the instruments of production, in short of everything that today makes up the whole mass of private property.
St. Simon (not Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, or Mr. Bernanke, for that matter)

conservative populism

The nomination of Sarah Palin and the subsequent division within the self-described conservative movement over her qualifications provided one of the most interesting and entertaining sidebars to the last presidential election. The differences between so-called mainstream conservatives around the country who rallied around her nomination and supported her more fervently than they supported Mr. McCain and the haughty disdain of soi-disant conservative talking heads like David Frum and David Brooks made overt what was an inchoate fact about the Republican Party and the conservative movement itself: populism is now central both to the self-conception and to the electoral success of conservatives and Republicans.

The immediate question that arose in my mind was, ‘how did the populists, who originally were identified with the anti-elite political left in the US, come to identify themselves as conservative Republicans, and why do they strike fear into the hearts of the Frum/Brooks wing of the Republican Party?’ The second part of the question is, of course, easy to answer. Frum/Brooksers went to Ivy League-type schools with liberals; they married Ivy League-educated liberals; they go to cocktail parties with them; their children play with them, etc. The Frum/Brooksers are a part of the American pseudo-educated class and would rather not be associated with the hoi polloi. (Frum is not only pseudo-educated, he’s pseudo-American. He’s a smug, self-satisfied Canadian who knows just enough to sound foolish about every subject he touches.)

The first question, however, is a great deal more interesting, but the answers on offer are unsatisfactory. There are, of course, the silly quasi-Marxist maunderings of Thomas Frank, who manages to be both condescending and cornpone at the same time, and there are the usual rantings about the conservative appeal to the innate racism, sexism, or generic wickedness of the lower and middle classes. But these answers say more about the authors than about the populist movement, and, in any case, these folks are closer to the Frum/Brooksers than to the people they want to vilify anyway.

I want to suggest something quite different, which might explain not only why many traditionalist conservatives are uncomfortable with populism, but also why populists are now uncomfortable with the American welfare-liberalism. First, conservatism historically has been quite suspicious of ‘the people’, a phrase which brings to mind barricades and mob rule. John Lukacs, among others, has made a career out of pointing out the incoherencies of populist conservatism, with the primary one being that conservatives have traditionally maintained that political life is a practice which takes years to master and, thus, should be left to the connoisseur. Experience here is central, and it cannot be gained by merely reading a book or two. In fact it may take a generation or two of practical participation to master the art of politics (just as it might take as long to master the art of carpentry or dancing or academic life).

This old type of elitism, which informed the conservatism of the British Conservative Party in the 19th century, has faded away and it has been replaced by a new technocratic elitism based upon several ill-founded epistemological notions and some vague claims about meritocracy. The technocrats presuppose that all knowledge can be reduced to a set of communicable rule-like propositions, and that, upon learning these propositions well (let’s say, for example, at a Ivy League-type university), any one ought to be able to engage in the activity learned (thus, the success of how-to books on everything from bridge and cooking to politics and art).

The early populists were opposed to the kind of elitism of taste and connoisseurship exemplified by the British Conservative Party and by the early American Federalists, the Whigs, and the Randolph/Calhoun portions of the old Democratic Party. The Civil War in America destroyed the old elite and replaced it with the new technocratic elite, at least in the Republican Party (see OW Holmes for exhibit one). Remember, most of the early Progressives were Republicans. However, after the wholesale appropriation of technocracy by the Democratic Party during the Depression, Progressivism became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratics, and the populists, who now opposed the technocratic elitism of the Progressives, became fractured. Since the Democratic Party now believes wholly in the rule of a technocratic elite, the populists have moved to the Republican Party, where they found a comfortable home for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, most of the prominent players in both the contemporary conservative movement and most powerful Republicans are just as much committed to rule by technocrat as the most Panglossian Democrat, so when populism really rears its head, the Frum/Brooksers retreat to their pseudo-educated compatriots (technocracy offers vocational training not liberal education, which is why the American political class is now and has been for the past century almost completely uneducated).

I must admit that populism makes me cringe, as well. However, contrary to reports in the mainstream media, its anti-intellectualism is shared by both the political class and the commentariat here. Tocqueville noted the American impatience with anything other than vocational education almost two centuries ago, and, if anything, the situation has worsened. The old teachers’ colleges, cow colleges, and vocational institutions have not become places where one can receive an authentic liberal education. Instead, the liberal arts colleges and large state universities have vocationalized themselves. The primary difference between the Palins and the Frum/Brooksers is the price of their vocational training, and, in this equation, the Palins of the world actually get a better bargain.

quote for the day

In the tragic view, all doctrines of perfectibility are seen to be dangerous, whether in politics, philosophy, or aesthetics. It is not merely that we are sometimes unlucky, and that we fail in our highest and most sustained endeavors: it is that this failure is intrinsic to our nature.
Michael Roberts

quote for the day

The work of the conservative in any civilized society…is like that of the groundskeeper of any good property: keeping the grass cut, the hedges trimmed, the staff trained and all of the holdings under observation, including the plants and animals to be found there…Some art is required in such preservation—husbandry.
Mel Bradford

quote for the day

We shall concern ourselves not with the conservatism that resists all changes, not with any passion to preserve the past just as it ‘really was’; but rather with the methods by which continuity has been reconciled with change, and the past has been used to assist our purposes.
Butterfield

exceptions

As you might guess, I’m rather dubious about the practical usefulness of the whole tradition of American exceptionalism, though it certainly has played a central role in the contemporary self-definition of the American polity. It is certain that Americans are not exceptional in their claims to being some sort of chosen people. As some readers of the blog are certainly aware, the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries maintained one rather strenuous version of the exceptionalist legend (I believe that Pieter Geyl has written a book on the subject, but could be wrong about this), and, like much else in the American experience, our own exceptionalism is at least in part an inheritance from our English ancestors, who sustained a robust tradition of their own singularity, at least, until Suez. I could also mention the strange particularities of the French, Russian, and German versions, and the Romans and the ancient Israelites were also ‘chosen’ in their own special ways. (I think that the Romans were the only group who, in some way, thought that they had chosen themselves, but I’m not an ancient historian so I could be wrong here.)

One interesting aspect about American exceptionalism is that it has become connected with a series of political and ethical propositions which purport to have universal validity. Thus, the American version contains the usual notion of divine favor combined with a well-defined and often dogmatic secular religious vision of the good society. The kind of secular messianism which Voegelin condemned as modern Gnosticism is central to this type of political legend, and it is quite dangerous. Though a much more virulent strain, a comparable version in recent history was expounded by the old Soviet Union (RIP). Once again, I would attribute the more benign character of America’s version of the chosen people story to the conservatism of the English tradition, but I would add that the inherent political skepticism of neo-Augustinian Christianity, which informed much of the American Protestant tradition, contributed as well. As both of these practices fade, however, I’m not particularly sanguine about the uses to which such self-inflation could put by an ambitious self-righteous statesman/politician. (Yes, I’m talking about you, St. Barack. Pay heed to the lesson of W.)

I was actually speaking with a friend a few weeks ago about American exceptionalism, and we both agreed that Americans are actually most unique in their ability to invent new games. American football, basketball, and baseball are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg (though my interest is limited to football and baseball). Unfortunately, as always, the damned English appear to have staked a claim to this type of originality already. I was reading Noël Annan’s book ‘Our Age’ the other day and came across this quote by Annan: ‘the most enduring legacy Britain gave to the twentieth century…was organized games.’ So, if you count rugby, soccer, and cricket, then I suppose that the English were there first once again. One difference, however, is that, when the English create a game, they export it and quickly become second-rate powers. America rarely exports its games (though basketball and baseball are becoming more widespread), and thus can still justifiably talk about ‘world championships’ with regard to our national sports leagues.

quote for the day

The concept of the ‘American dream’ according to which America is a kind of second chosen nation, ordained to save democracy after the effete nations of Europe proved themselves incapable of the task, is a milder form of...nationalistic messianism.
Niebuhr

quote for the day

The only ‘ism’ that has justified itself is pessimism.
Orwell

quote for the day

I believe that man is, by nature, an exile;…that his chances of happiness and virtue…generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives; I believe…that there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other; that the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace. I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination; that men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes; that such a system is necessary for any form of co-operative work…I believe that Art is a natural function of man; it so happens that most of the greatest art has appeared under systems of tyranny, but I do not think it has a connection with any particular system, least of all representative government, as nowadays in England, America and France it seems popular to believe.
Evelyn Waugh

She Blinded Me with Science

There is a new blog called ‘Secular Right’ which features one of my favorite conservative journalists John Derbyshire, and I have been reading it a bit and commenting on occasion. It’s an odd sort of place because it’s not merely secular (which I take to mean non-religious), but both aggressively critical of religion and committed to dogmatic materialism, which is unfortunate. I posted a version of the following on their site but thought that I could manifest my laziness by posting it here as well.

I’m neither a theologian nor a particularly orthodox adherent to Christianity. Nonetheless, the skepticism on display at ‘Secular Right’ is notably limited in its application. It certainly doesn’t apply to what should certainly be only referred to as SCIENCE. (Every time one of the posters there mentions the term, there should be a link to the old Thomas Dolby song so that we can all shout it aloud together.)

The naive materialism in evidence at the site reminds one of the following positivist conundrum. The only meaningful statements that can be made are either tautologous or empirically provable. Unfortunately, this particular proposition is neither tautologous nor empirically provable.

This particular problem doesn’t even begin to address what ‘empirical’ actually means. As so many have pointed out, even Popper’s minimal falsifiability standard does not describe how science has historically worked. (Lakatos once notoriously said that the history of science should actually be written not according to how things developed but according to how they should have developed.) According to my empirical observations, the sun does indeed appear to rise and set every day (and, of course, we still speak of these situations in this way). I certainly cannot ‘observe’ the workings of sub-atomic particles, in any case.

Galileo, speaking in the voice of Simplicius in one of his dialogues, says that it is precisely the Aristotelian method that relies upon ‘experiment’ while the new science depends upon mathematical conjecture and the reduction of any observation to number.

Does science produce things, like nuclear weapons, automobiles, high rise buildings, etc (this is not meant to be pejorative)? Yes, but the Egyptians built the pyramids, medieval Europeans built Mont St. Michel and Chartres, etc. Most people have not historically been particularly unhappy with the state of their technology, so the current satisfaction with what ‘science’ produces is not particularly exceptional anyway.

I’m happy that some of those with a scientistic bent are supportive of limited nomocratic government, but I would be just as happy with a bunch white-lightening-drinking hillbillies supporting the same (and I would likely enjoy their choice of entertainment a bit more).

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

A reader responded to a post from last week by suggesting that ‘skeptical conservatism has long been reduced to a distant pipe dream, surpassed by reality.’ He did so, not in a hostile mood, but as a part of a general query expressing a considered resignation concerning the ubiquity of teleocratic forms in contemporary western politics. Other conservatives, skeptics, and suchlike have made similar observations in the past few decades. For example, Mel Bradford decided that he could no longer call himself a conservative because he didn’t see much worth conserving in contemporary political and cultural life, and he issued a book of essays entitled ‘The Reactionary Imperative’ to signal this rejection.

I’m doubtful that things are all that desperate. I think that most people are conservative or skeptical in the general sense of the term about things that they love or cherish. We are wary of radical alterations of character in our spouses, parents, and children because we love them as they are, and we are suspicious of significant changes in our routines or habitual activities because we are used to doing things in a particular way. Oakeshott notes that this disposition expresses ‘not, Verweile doch,, du bist so schön, but, Stay with me because I am attached to you.’ This general conservatism might explain why old people have a tendency to be rather critical of novelty. They have seen most of the things which they held dear change or disappear during their lives, and often feel out of place in the world.

This type of conservative skepticism is unlikely to disappear from our lives, given the chaos that an unmitigated alteration of settled habits necessarily produces. However, it is possible that certain attitudes or dispositions about human activity might change and, in so changing, make nomocratic skepticism about politics a less convincing idea for many people. If the mass of humanity in the west decides that it prefers a warm servility to the uncertainty of individual choice and responsibility, then it will most assuredly get it. I’m not sure that the modern individual has traded his moral inheritance for a mess of government-issue pottage yet, but it could come to pass.

Nomocratic skepticism is an appropriate attitude to take toward a particular conception of the state as a nomocratic institution, and if that understanding of the state became so tenuous and rare that it was nowhere manifest in the actual institutions of government, then it would certainly be an anachronism, as it does not pretend to appeal to any metaphysical claims about the natural law or the transcendent order of things. However, I don’t think that we’ve come to that point yet. There are plenty of individuals in the US, Canada, Western Europe, and even in the non-European states who are suspicious of the socialization of all human activities under even the most seemingly benign regime (St. Barack, please forgive me). In fact, despite my apprehensions about Mr. Obama, his decisions to retain Mr. Gates as Secretary of Defense and to make Mr. Jones his National Security Advisor seem steps in the right direction (i.e. toward the more humble and more realistic foreign policy which we were promised by the unfortunate Mr. Bush).

What other evidence is there? Here in Canada, there has been vehement opposition to the inclusion of the National Socialist Party, I mean the Bloc Quebecois, in the new left-of-center coalition, and there is a surprising amount of outrage at the whole possibility of the coalition government taking charge. In the US, although the financial meltdown has emboldened the old teleocratic left, the inability of the government to effect any kind of improvement (despite daily injections of newly printed greenbacks) has skeptics like me looking forward to the further discrediting of large-scale government direction of the economy. And, most importantly, the west still speaks in the language of moral individualism, even when it betrays an almost invincible ignorance of what that language entails. So, I don’t find that there is any need to despair, though I won’t hold my breath waiting for a truly skeptical political party to emerge, at least in part because most of the statesmen and philosophers who I admire (Halifax, Hume, Oakeshott, Gadamer) were just as skeptical about the usefulness of modern ideological political parties as they were about ideological politics in general.

quote for the day

Those who have clear ideas on what life ought to be always have difficulty in reconciling themselves to what it is.
Noel Annan

Incompetent Conservatives in Canada

There are interesting political happenings here in Canada. The Conservative government led by Stephen Harper proposed last week to get rid of the public financing of political parties here. The Conservatives are a minority government, and thus cannot do whatever they want, but, given the widespread notion amongst his enemies that Harper is some type of evil genius, I assumed that such a proposal would not have seen the light of day without it having been given substantial forethought. Alas, Mr. Harper appears no more competent than the so-called conservative to the south, and has already withdrawn the proposal. This doesn’t mean he’s safe, however, as the Liberals still plan a confidence vote next week.

As I understand it, Canadian political parties get a certain amount of money based upon their showing in the last general election ($1.90ish per vote, I believe). This grand socialization of the party structure took place under a recent Liberal regime, and it quickly became the leading if not sole means of income for most of the parties (Liberals, BQ, NDP, and Green). The Conservatives are the only party to have maintained a significant non-socialized fundraising operation. Given the parlous state of the Liberal Party’s financial affairs, the bill would have harmed it significantly, but the BQ also receives something like 80% of its budget from the federal government, as well (which is quite ironic given that the stated goal of the BQ is the destruction of Canada as it now exists).

The Liberal response has been to call Harper’s bluff and threaten the minority government. It is in talks with the NDP and the Bloc (it would have to include the Bloc in some capacity because Liberal and NDP numbers won’t make a majority) concerning the creation of a coalition government. All this is a transparent defense of their corrupt and corrupting jobbing of the federal fisc, but politicians rarely have any other skills and thus attacking their jobs is one certain way to gather strange bedfellows together.

The fact that Harper either didn’t recognize this or was too foolhardy to put this proposal in a stimulus bill which would have left-footed the Liberals and NDP is a rather obvious indication that he deserves neither his reputation as a strategic magus nor his position as leader of the Conservative Party. I’m looking forward to seeing how the BQ works with the other left-of-center parties, however.

The placeholder coalition would be an appropriate name for the new government. Perhaps it’s time to break out the Bolingbroke and ‘The Structure of Political at the Accession of George III’.

quote for the day

It [social science] is what phrenology was in the early nineteenth century, and astrology and alchemy in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: the fashionable scientific fraud of the age.
RG Collingwood

quote for the day

If it is boring to have to listen to the dreams of others being recounted, it is insufferable to be forced to re-enact them.
Oakeshott

nomocratic skepticism

If the state should not be understood as an association of fellow travelers united by their commitment to a common goal, what is the alternative? There are, of course, other kinds of association. Although much of our lives are spent in attempting to secure or satisfy our own purposes or the purposes of a collectivity to which we voluntarily belong, we also engage in such non-purposive relationships as friendship or love and non-purposive activities like stamp-collecting, walking, or reading. Generally, these non-purposive relations and activities are considered to be intrinsically valuable, and, thus, in no need of any external explanation or goal. (This is not to say that no one treats friendship as a means to professional advancement or that no one walks in order to lose weight, but that the character of these activities is not defined by their abuses or by their secondary effects.)

There are other relations which we enter which appear to be non-purposive, as well. As speakers of English, we are related to other English speakers when we converse with them, and, though our relations might be those of goal-seekers or purpose-satisfiers here (I want to buy a haircut and my local barber wants to make a living), our goals and the pursuit of them are conditioned by the general rules of the English language. Our grammar doesn’t prescribe what we say but it does condition how we say it. The barber won’t be able to understand that I want a Mohawk haircut if I resolutely refuse to communicate with him according to the conventions of English (though, of course, these conventions are not a set of rigid and unchangeable formulations, but a fluid set of usages made current by being in use). Thus, our relation as speakers of a language is non-purposive in a general way.

Oakeshott suggests that the most coherent way of conceiving the modern state is as an association of individuals united by their acknowledgment of a common set of general and non-instrumental rules which condition the pursuit of their own purposes. He sometimes calls this conception of the state a nomocracy, and, in a nomocracy, the role of the government is not to manage a common enterprise because there is none, but instead to take care of the rules of association. The government is a ruler because it not only makes the rules but also because it makes rulings about violations of the rules. The analogy of the umpire is useful because the government also punishes violations of said rules. Under such an understanding, the citizens retain their freedom to pursue their own purposes and/or to combine with others in purposive associations to achieve goals. What they do not possess, however, is the right to convert the government itself into a tool to achieve these purposes. Thus, a skeptical politics of an Oakeshottian type actually does have a conceptual content which distinguishes it from a generically skeptical disposition about political life.

This nomocratic skepticism would quite obviously reject any attempt on the part of the citizens or the government to empower the government with the authority to pursue substantive purposes, like the redistribution of some notional ‘national income’ (the state is a not a nation and it has no income), the creation of jobs or of economic growth (the state is not a business enterprise because it is not an enterprise of any sort), or the conversion of the rest of the world to its own peculiar ideology (the state has no ideology as such, but merely a commitment to preserving its non-purposive character), among other things. The government would not necessarily be a weak one, but its power would be appropriate to its authorized duties, which are not comprehensive. The only exception to the general considerations would be if the state’s physical existence were threatened, but, since war-making is an inherently teleocratic activity, nomocracies would quite naturally be reluctant to engage in such risky behavior. For, as we have seen time and again in modern politics, so-called war measures are rarely discarded or abrogated after the war is over, and governing by crisis management is one of the quickest and easiest ways in which governments attempt to convert themselves into teleocracies.

quote for the day--special thanksgiving edition

Up to a point [i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like], go for quantity rather than quality.
Kingsley Amis

quote for the day

Indolence, when it is not the result of weakness or vice, is a very great virtue.
Lord Shelburne

quote for the day

[I]n ordinary colloquial speech in the United States, a conservative is a defender of legislatively untrammeled free enterprise, of the absolute rights of property-ownership, with an eccentric fringe of adherents who drive around in vans with placards on them, proclaiming the unconstitutional character of the federal income tax. That is the ideology of the moneyed interest that was the other main enemy, alongside radical doctrinaires, of English conservatism from Bolingbroke to Disraeli.
Anthony Quinton

quote for the day

Sir, the first Whig was the devil.
Dr. Johnson

More complaining about contemporary politics

So then, some of the things which a political skeptic opposes include natural rights liberalism, contractarian conceptions of political obligation, utilitarian notions of value, and emancipatory projects of all sorts.

I have been asked quite often if there any positive content to such a disposition. Skepticism can inform almost any kind of small ‘c’ conservatism which prefers the known to the unknown (the bird in the hand, the devil I know, etc.), and is thus suspicious of those (like Mr. Obama during the campaign) who advocate major changes in the structure of political life. (About the only the change that I believe in is the movement from baseball to football to basketball seasons and back again.) In this sense of the term, a skeptical conservative in Sweden could support socialized medicine, while one in the US would likely be reluctant to change so radically an institution which works reasonably well (perhaps this claim is arguable, but I can already tell you from personal experience that socialized medicine in Canada is as poorly run and more expensive than its American counterpart).

However, I want to suggest that the traditions of European and especially Anglophone political communities in the modern world point to a more robust understanding of skeptical politics. Hegel correctly suggests that the primary achievements of modern Europeans consist in their development of a self-conscious individualism which is manifested not only in a proprietary attitude toward the law and the state but also in the creation of a civil society intermediate between the quasi-natural life of the family and the authoritative character of the political community. These two institutions, ethical individualism and the self-creative and subjective freedom of civil society, are not, however, autonomous, but presuppose a system of law which conditions both the relation between the individual and the state and the relation between individual members of the state.

According to Oakeshott (and there are striking similarities to Hayek, here), there are two ways of conceiving what kind of state is entailed in this presupposition. In the first, the state is understood to be a great and common enterprise in which citizens are conceived as comrades moving towards a single substantive goal and the government is understood as the manager of that goal. The state is a teleocracy, and all projects, purposes, and interests in it are subordinated to the grand and common telos of the people, whether it be full employment, the maximum exploitation of territorial resources measured as GNP, the equitable distribution of collective wealth, the creation of Soviet Man, the purification of the Aryan race, the tutelary guidance of a community of moral imbeciles, or the therapeutic care of a community of invalids.

Of course, the problem with viewing the state in this way is that it is both morally incoherent and epistemologically utopian. There is no common substantive purpose that modern individuals share with each other, and to be forced into an enterprise such as posited by the teleocratic view is a moral enormity insofar as it involves precisely the destruction of the individuality that is purportedly being protected. Further, and in brief, the notion that there is a common telos is questionable and the defense of any particular version is fraught with confusion. Why ought we to believe that the single purpose of human life is ultimately about economic growth, the ‘equitable’ distribution of material goods, racial purity, mental health, etc.?

Thus, a political skeptic would rightly oppose any and every attempt on the part of the government to convert itself into the teleocratic manager of the ‘common good’, because there is no such thing. For example, the notion that the US is a productivist enterprise and that government exists to manage the economy is an obvious, though somewhat benign version of this idea. Government bailouts of large enterprises based upon the assumption that the government is responsible for the smooth sailing of all economic enterprises are good examples of such actions. So are many forms of redistributionist tax policies, protectionist economic policies, nationalized public education (especially when teachers, subjects, and curricula are directly controlled by government), nationalized health care, corporate welfare, and moralizing or crusading foreign policy.

In the next few days, I’ll talk about what Oakeshott calls nomocracy and what implications it has for contemporary policy considerations.

quote for the day

Fear the sea, even when it is calm.
St. Augustine

quote for the day

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
Evelyn Waugh

quote for the day

The attempt to realize ideals which are effectively unrealizable leads to disorder and instability, which becomes cumulative.
Elie Kedourie

quote for the day

Liberty comes to the world from English traditions, not from French theories.
Herbert Butterfield

skepticism and phronesis

Skeptical politics in both its religious and epistemological forms addresses both the reality and limits of practical activity. It does not offer a methodological solution to the dilemmas of political life, but a lens through which to observe that life.

So, does it have any practical value? Insofar as it offers an adequate characterization of the nature of practical and political life, it can serve in what Wittgenstein calls a therapeutic role by allowing us to see through the nonsense that passes for political discourse these days and by clarifying what is and what is not of value in the various blandishments of contemporary politicians. That is, it can help us to make a distinction between the possible and the risible. A skeptical political disposition would also encourage us to appreciate those statesmen who understand that political life should be more concerned with calming emotions than with inflaming them.

In terms of the American political tradition, a skeptic might observe that American political discourse has been informed from almost the beginning by untenable ideological claims. If John Dickinson had not been dubious about declaring independence prematurely, we Americans might have been saved from such nonsense. Dickinson would have probably been asked to write such a declaration (he was considered the most formidable polemicist amongst the rebels), and he had never relied upon abstract rationalizations, preferring instead to argue on the basis of British constitutional principles. Had John Adams successfully defeated Mr. Jefferson in the election of 1800 perhaps the vocabulary of American politics would have become less ideological. Adams, as he aged, became a great deal less sanguine about universalist political crusades and he refused to participate or acknowledge the emergence of ideologically informed political parties. But, we have what we have, after all.

On the other hand, the US inherited the traditionalism of English politics, and, in its better moments, has acted accordingly. For most of its existence, the US has rejected emancipatory politics, at least at home. It has engaged on several disastrous crusades abroad, and, in the more recent history of the Democratic Party, the pinkish wing of that Party has made alliances with intemperate groups. However, the primary example of political skepticism in American politics is the US Constitution, which, despite its constant misreading by dirigiste judges, politicians, and other busybodies, is a non-aspirational, procedural document, and an obvious manifestation of the admiration of the founders for the English tradition of politics. It neither posits nor creates a substantive purpose uniting the American people and defining their government, but instead constitutes a set of procedures which authorize a non-teleological state.

For other examples of skeptical politics, see England in the 18th century, European diplomacy during the 18th and 19th centuries (other than the French, of course), and American diplomacy during much of 19th century.

quote for the day

Men are said to seek pleasure and shun pain; but as 'there is no accounting for taste', the statement is tautological--they seek what they seek.
Lewis Namier

quote for the day

The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a Theatrical Show.
John Adams

'join the army if you fail' b. dylan

In the past five presidential elections, Americans have chosen candidates with no military experience over veterans of foreign wars in each election (and, no, Bush’s National Guard service does not count and Gore’s stint as a cub reporter in Vietnam does). Should this be troubling or is this a sign of a healthy polity?

I’m not completely certain, but I think that it is definitely a sign that the American public remains unconvinced that there is a real threat to the US posed by Islamic terrorism. Obviously, only two of these elections have occurred since 9/11, and, in one of them, the most convinced proponent of the GWOT won.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that most Americans view the American military in the same way that they view their local sports teams. That is, American service men are considered as mascots who travel around the world doing a bit of business, taking a few casualties, and projecting American superiority. The actual nature of their activity is quite unknown to the American public (especially to American intellectuals) and, were it known, it wouldn’t necessarily be an object of public approbation. Thus, while Americans are grateful in some way to veterans for their service, they don’t necessarily care to hear about them or their personal exploits, and they no longer consider those exploits to be qualifications for public office.

The primary problem with this state of affairs (i.e. the consideration of foreign relations as analogous to the support of sports teams) is related to what George Kennan recognized as an inherent problem of conducting international relations in a democracy: the fact that mobilizing public opinion almost always involves governments ceding control over their own decisions to the uniformed. There is little to be done about this unless responsible public officials can convince the great unwashed to mind their own business and let those who actually know a bit conduct the affairs of state.

Absent the emergence of this sort of disciplined sensibility on the part of both public officials and the citizenry (and I have no doubt that it will remain absent), the best that can be hoped for is a reinvigoration of the (ancient) American tradition of isolation best enunciated by JQ Adams when he said:
[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

quote for the day

This is from Konrad Kellen's introduction to Jacques Ellul's book 'Propaganda'.

Ellul...designat[es] intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda for three reasons: (1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information; (2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information; (3) they consider themselves capable of 'judging for themselves'. They literally need propaganda.


After that, am I supposed to lay out some opinion on the issues of the day? Maybe tomorrow.

quote for the day

The hope that everything recalcitrant in human behavior may be brought under the subjection of the inclusive purposes of ‘mind’ by the same techniques which gained man mastery over nature is not merely an incidental illusion, prompted by the phenomenal achievements of the natural sciences. It is the culminating error in modern man’s misunderstanding of himself.
Reinhold Niebuhr

Skepticism: political not metaphysical (with apologies to Mr. Rawls) II

Skeptical politics as a style of politics is more often than not defined by what it rejects. As I noted before, it is first and foremost skeptical of ideological politics. In addition to that, it is suspicious of the concentration or centralization of power. This is the case for several reasons. First, humans can’t be trusted in these situations. Acton’s old bromide about the corrupting nature of power is appropriate to both religious and epistemological skeptics. Second, concentrating power in the hands of the few tempts those in power to impose their limited conceptions of the good life on all. There is a false assertion of certainty on the part of the rulers which, even in its benign form, manifests itself in oxymoronic programs like mandatory charitable giving and affirmative action/discrimination programs. This suspicion of concentrated power on the part of political skeptics generally leads them to be suspicious of big government (and big business, as well). Oakeshott noted that, ‘like garlic in cooking, government should be so discreetly used that only its absence is noticed.’ This disposition also manifests itself as a rejection of what Hayek (and Oakeshott) called teleocratic politics in any of its forms (e.g. the productivist, the distributist, the tutelary, or the therapeutic state).

Second, a skeptical politics would also likely be wary of the supposedly benign characteristics of mass participation. Democracy might be a reasonable way to think about the legitimacy or authority of governments, but it involves no substantive results (i.e. it bakes not bread). In fact, democracy is more often than not understood these days in purely abstract terms, and, as such, it is as much of an ideological problem as socialism, liberalism, fascism, etc. Further, according to the political skeptic, there is absolutely no reason to think that people are good, pure, etc. As Hume writes, 'it is…a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave: Though at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact…Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries.' Further, if, as those like Gadamer and Wittgenstein claim, knowledge is related to immersion in practices, then the masses will inevitably not know much about political life (though this doesn’t mean that they know nothing). Inexperience, unfortunately, is the lot of most human beings in most of the affairs of the world, and there is no reason to believe that consulting the opinions of the hoi polloi will produce anything other than incompetence.

Third, a skeptical politics would doubt that political activity is either necessary for the achievement of the good life or that it is the central activity in the creation and sustenance of a community. Like Augustine, the political skeptic views order as the chief good that politics can achieve, and believes that it is both vain and dangerous to expect political activity to accomplish our salvation or to even create a virtuous civil body. As Oakeshott the poet once wrote,
Those who in fields Elysian would dwell
Do but extend the boundaries of hell.
Individuals and groups have their own distinctive interests and practices and it is these practices which constitute a community’s mores as much if not more than political activity. Thus, politics should be concerned primarily with managing a given state of affairs in a way that accords with the customs and traditions of that specific political community. To use Halifax’s old metaphor, the job of the government is to keep the boat afloat in whatever waters it happens to be sailing.

These very general notions do not, however, prescribe particular political policies. Indeed, the political skeptic claims that there is no such thing as a foolproof method of doing so, whether it be advertised as a categorical imperative or a set of hierarchical principles of justice or a doctrine of scientific/historical materialism. Skeptical politics instead might serve as a prophylactic against those irrelevant and insidious forms of political discourse which justify attempts to do the impossible (e.g. Marcuse’s formulation of ‘an historical calculus’ by which we could demonstrate whether a revolution was on the side of ‘progress or reaction’; or, as Kedourie describes the typical Keynesian conception of administrative control, ‘like virtuoso organists, the minister…and his learned and expert calculists, pressing these keys, pulling those stops, and depressing those other pedals produce a happy economy and a harmonious body politic’).

Depending upon one’s own disposition and the traditions of one’s political community, a skeptical politics could endorse a wide range of activities (from national health care to complete privatization; from an aggressive assertion of national self-interest to Swiss-style isolation; from a high-powered market economy to a localist, small-producer-based economy, etc.). However, the reasons offered in justification of any of these institutions and activities would be limited by the inherent skepticism of ideological justifications (i.e. an appeal to defending a ‘free’ market is no more an argument in reference to the regulation of the financial system than an appeal to the defense of human rights or making the world safe for democracy is with reference to military intervention), and thus our politics would be more honest, less violently emotional, and less visible.

Tomorrow I think I’ll write a short bit on political skepticism and the American political tradition.

quote for the day

Nothing can compensate for our stay in this country... And all Poland is not worth one drop of the blood which we are shedding for it.
Talleyrand (1807)

Skepticism: political not metaphysical (with apologies to Mr. Rawls)

I’ll try to answer some of the questions offered thus far about what a politics of skepticism might look like by addressing where it comes from. There are two sources of modern political skepticism. One is religious and the other epistemological. As Oakeshott notes, ‘the politics of skepticism…may be said to have its roots either in the radical belief that human perfection is an illusion [the religious version], or in the less radical belief that we know too little about the conditions of human perfection for it to be wise to concentrate our energies in a single direction by associating it with the activity of governing [the epistemological version].’

The religious kind of skepticism in its Christian form points backward to St. Augustine and Martin Luther, while counting Herbert Butterfield and Reinhold Niebuhr among its many contemporary proponents. There is a general claim made by these political skeptics that the inherent weaknesses of human nature limit the possibilities of human achievement. For these folks, it is precisely their religious commitments which make them skeptical about the promises of political action (pace both contemporary American religious conservatives and liberals).

The epistemological version of political skepticism is stated in its most theoretically coherent form in the works of writers like Montaigne, Hobbes, Hume, Oakeshott, Gadamer, and the later Wittgenstein. These writers share the notion that practical understanding is inherently conditioned by the circumstances and character of practical activity, and that these general conditions exclude the possibility of the kind of highly abstract and rationalized politics which has come to characterize modern political discourse.

Both groups can be called political skeptics because they are skeptical of the most characteristic form of modern political discourse, namely ideological politics. Ideologies, or ‘armed doctrines’ as Burke called them, include almost all of the various idioms in which politics is now discussed. For example, any version of political skepticism looks dubiously on the kind of emancipatory politics which emerged out of the left Kantian and/or left Hegelian conception of radical critique which is most obviously associated with Marx and neo- or post-Marxism in all its forms (difference feminism, critical race theory, colonialism, etc). However, skeptics are also doubtful of the liberalism of Lockean natural rights tradition and the utilitarianism of the recent Anglo-American legal tradition, viewing them both as abstractions which misunderstand the fundamental characteristics of community and ethical value.

In fact, any attempt to permanently ‘solve’ the inherent incoherence of practical life and reduce politics to the mere application of a set of a priori rules or the universal application of a previously created blueprint would be anathema to political skeptics. Elie Kedourie notes that the skeptical disposition is ‘hostile to…policies or movements…that…are the outcome of ideologies which misapprehend the character of society and which prescribe aims impossible to fulfill.’

Thus, political skepticism does not offer a particular program, but instead involves a series of reactions against attempts to create and institute ideological political programs. Oakeshott’s comment on Hayek is appropriate here. He suggests that a plan against all planning may be better than the alternative, but it is still speaks in the same idiom as the planners. Nonetheless, now that I have provided a very brief historical conspectus, I’ll try to offer the outlines of a possible skeptical political disposition tomorrow.

quote for the day

Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.
Wyndham Lewis

quote for the day

Here am I who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies — except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.
David Hume

quote for the day

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken

what is to be done?

That is obviously a trick question, given its ancestry. The answer is, not much. The election of Obama is at one and the same time not a particularly surprising or necessarily dangerous thing while also being a sign of serious degeneracy. To strike an optimistic note, the American Republic has survived, in one form or another, the presidencies of sanguinary and self-absorbed despots before (e.g. Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, W), and I assume that it will survive Mr. Obama and his forthcoming ‘ministry of All the Talents’ (though I would certainly prefer Grenville’s version).

On the other hand, the election of such an obvious charlatan is a manifest signal of the sheepishness of the American public. Free people don’t need leaders; they need rulers (i.e. people who make rulings). Americans these days, however, offer all of the signs of a people who are desperately seeking a duce, and whose newly elected president gives every indication that his will be a cult of celebrity of a very high order indeed. Perhaps, we will soon see the cultural mandarins in Hollywood produce a homegrown Leni Riefenstahl to do our dear leader justice.

Whatever the case may be, however, Mr. Obama doesn’t seem completely sui generis, and my guess is that the 4th American Republic will endure his tenure.

For political skeptics, my suggestion is to keep your head down and cultivate your own garden. As Oakeshott noted:

'The things that political activity can achieve are often valuable, but I do not believe that they are ever the most valuable things in the communal life of a society. A limitation of view, which appears so clear and practical, but which amounts to little more than a mental fog, is inseparable from political activity. A mind fixed and callous to all subtle distinctions, emotional and intellectual habits become bogus from repetition and lack of examination, unreal loyalties, delusive aims, false significances are what political action involves…[Finally], political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the concurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the false simplification of human life implied in even the best of its purposes.'

So, instead of worrying about the identity of the next Secretary of the Interior, go read some Nabokov.

quote for the day

Democracy...while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams

the council of trent and conservative silliness

I've chosen not to describe the politics of this blog (and blogger) as conservative because the word has been transformed beyond recognition by self-described American conservatives. One example of their silliness is the notion that, after a Republican electoral defeat, there needs to be a meeting of conservative minds to determine the forward march of conservatism. This notion is one of the least conservative ideas that I have ever heard of.

In so far as conservatism is anti-ideological (and its traditional Anglophone meaning has been just that), then setting out an abstract roadmap for conservatism in the future is oxymoronic. Of course, herein lies the problem. American politics is played out almost solely in the language of abstraction, and it has been this way since Mr. Jefferson made those ridiculous comments in the first paragraph of the Declaration. You can't get a purchase on the American polity without a program. Thus, from the beginning, the American conservative movement has been programmatic, ideological, and rationalist in the worst (i.e. Oakeshottian) sense of the term. Irving Kristol, in one of his rare moments of lucidity, said that the US was an ideological state, like the Soviet Union (an odd way of thinking about a supposedly conservative political community). Nonetheless, material success and military power can neither prove nor disprove the validity of abstractions.

Instead of focusing on what the essence of conservatism is (by the way, there is none) these jokers should worry about winning elections. That is, after all, the purpose of political parties.

If they want to think in more grandiose terms, they might consider first and foremost the inherent limitations of practical activity generally and political activity specifically. Then, perhaps, they wouldn't have misconceptions about remaking the world in their image or making housing affordable for everyone or nationalizing major American industries so that no one is allowed to suffer for their own mistakes. Alas, a pipe dream in every connotative sense of that phrase.

quote for the day

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
Flaubert

fair weather fans?

The celebration of the victory of the annointed one yesterday involved a great deal of flag-waving and jingoistic caterwauling by a cast of characters that one rarely finds associated with such tomfoolery, that is the loopy left. It is, of course, somewhat troubling that these folks are only ‘proud to be Americans’ when their side wins.

This attitude also informs their notion that they have 'taken their country back'. Taken it back from whom? Are they suggesting that anyone who did not support their candidate in the past and any candidate who they did not support in the past was/is illegitimate? If I recall correctly, the same process by which Mr. Obama was selected last night was used in the previous presidential election. That is to say, it was Americans who were electing other Americans to office. However, to paraphrase Orwell, some Americans are obviously more American than others.

Further, though the bien pensant types in the academy and the press seem to forget this fact, the Democratic Party has controlled both houses of Congress for the past two years (in fact, contrary to popular belief, the Republicans only controlled the White House and Congress for 4 ½ years of Mr. Bush’s tenure). Since the Dems still control Congress, I don’t suppose that ‘we have taken the country back’ from that particular set of party hacks.

By the way, the most interesting piece of exit poll information that I have seen thus far suggests that Obama won the racist vote. Of the people who responded that race was an important or very important factor in their decision, 58% voted for Obama. So, should we call Obama the first affirmative action president?

So what?

So what?, is the theme for the day. It is my first post and I hope that it conveys a modicum of skepticism about politics in general and about the chiliastic fervor observed in those rowdies at Hyde Park. If they believe in nothing else, they certainly think that they have successfully immanentized the eschaton.

I'm not excited or particularly interested. Obama is a smart fellow, but almost completely uneducated. His advisors will be like him, progressives who believe that they have a rational/administrative solution to all of life's problems. His bi-partisanship is a sham, and his natural political instincts are tied to democratic party political hackery. He's not 'an agent of change', whatever that means, but a manifestation of the incompetence of the Republican Party, and he will likely govern like the wary Democratic party hack that he is. Plus ca change.