Continuing my deconstruction of conservative principles. As I've said, conservativism is a contradictory mix of Traditionalism and Libertarianism.
When conservatives bring up "freedom" or "liberty" and "the free market" it is Libertarianism which is dominant and this is what we get most often from conservative politicians.
This Libertarianism is based on a philosophy of "Individualism," which is a theory of cause and effect; which claims that great things will happen if only individuals are free of government intervention in our lives.
The difficulty a liberal might face in countering Individualism is in dealing with the claims that conservatives make about the negative effects of government on our character and lives. We're often reduced to saying, "It is not either so." But the best rebuttal, I think, is to demonstrate that Individualism is an abstraction which is divorced from specific times and places and conditions in the real world. Here are some thoughts about how Individualism fails to be anchored in reality.
INDIVIDUALISM
The rhetoric advanced by contemporary conservatives is based on the doctrine of Individualism. Their rhetoric lauds personal responsibility and disparages collectivism. It is a collection of untruths and distortions which I shall do my best to puncture.
Individualism is a denial that life has any meaning except gratification of the ego. One cannot be a Christian and an individualist at the same time. [Russell Kirk, obviously not an admirer of Individualism, yet Individualism is the dominant view in contemporary conservatism]
Individualism asserts that the individual does everything for himself and is responsible for everything which happens to him and this results in the best of all possible worlds.
Success (as well as failure) is the result of one’s own talents, morals, decisions and actions. [Clarence Thomas]
That is the dominant conservative rhetoric; but conservatives also believe in another theory that concerns the consequences of an individual’s activities when considered as part of millions of decisions and activities by millions of individuals.
In the relations among men, complex and orderly institutions might grow up which arose from the separate actions of many men who did not know what they were doing. [Hayek]
So, an individual’s actions affect him directly but who knows what the consequences of his actions might be for society when mixed with millions of other actions.
How The World Is: Poverty, Inequality and War
Conservatives accept the ancient evils of mankind, such as poverty, inequality, and war, as necessary - and therefore permanent - attributes of the human condition. [Harry Jaffa]
The typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude and misery. [Milton Friedman]
The conservative reasoning begins with the tragedy of the human condition. To those whose reasoning begins with the tragedy of the human condition, evil is diffused throughout humanity. [Thomas Sowell]
I think the above statements are representative of a pervasive pessimism among conservatives. But conservatives are schizophrenic. Side by side with the pessimism is a series of optimistic beliefs which I’ll return to later, but for now I’d like to look at the questions raised by the above statements.
Sowell explains what he means by the tragedy of the human condition.
By tragedy I don’t simply mean unhappiness but I mean the inescapable fate inherent in the nature of things. [Sowell]
There are many conditions that make up the nature of things, such as the physical geography of the earth, the dispersal of people around the globe, the diversity of human beings, the uneven distribution of wealth in countries, the immutability of human nature, the equality of men’s souls and the presence of good and evil in the world.
I found in my reading of conservative literature a profound sense that conditions are fated for human beings for one reason or another; a sense that nothing could be done to alter the way things are; and, also, that nothing should be done to alter the human condition.
Inequality and poverty, as Jaffa says, are to be accepted by the wise conservative as just the way things are. Liberals, conservatives say, are naïve in believing that human beings can and should lessen inequality and poverty.
No social system, however unjust and deformed, justifies the abrogation of the natural law as a means of reforming or replacing it. Human society is by its nature organic and hierarchical. It may not licitly be leveled. Prescriptions for various social ills are more often than not more pestilential still than the diseases they were intended to alleviate or cure. [Chilton Williamson, Jr.]
What Williamson is saying is that conditions of human beings - such as poverty and inequality - are the natural human condition, just the way of the world. Liberal attempts to ameliorate such conditions usually result in making conditions worse than before.
By asserting that human society is naturally organic and hierarchical he points to an often unrecognized conservative principle: that order and stability are the most important considerations for conservatives, more important than anything, including liberty, justice or virtue.
Some Things Conservatives Wouldn’t Change Through Purposeful Human Intention
Probably most conservatives will tell you that they are not against change per se. What they are against is rapid and unpredictable change. "Organic" is a word they use a lot to describe how society or culture is supposed to operate.
We must all obey the great law of change. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. [Burke]
This is "creep" not change. Here are some words about people who have found themselves in unhappy conditions. Many people would say that the unhappy conditions are not of these people’s making, but conservatives would probably not be among them.
In thirty-seven years the New York Children’s Aid Society has sheltered quite three hundred thousand outcast, homeless, and orphaned children in its lodging houses and has found homes in the West for seventy thousand that had none. In the last fifteen years of this tireless battle for the safety of the State the intervention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has been invoked for 138,891 little ones; it has thrown its protection around more than twenty-five thousand helpless children, and has convicted nearly sixteen thousand wretches of child-beating and abuse.
Only the poor abandon their children. They come in rags, a newspaper often the only wrap, semi-occasionally one in a clean slip with some evidence of loving care; a little slip of paper pinned on: "Take care of Johnny, for God’s sake. I cannot." [Jacob A. Riis in How The Other Half Lives, about life in the New York City tenements, published in 1890]
At what age do conservatives start blaming the children for being abused? I’m not being mean. Conservatives have two conflicting theories about social cause: one theory is that the individual is responsible for everything that happens to him; the other theory is that systemic processes - Sowell’s language - is responsible for social structure.
Conservatives hold adults responsible for what happens to them. When does a child reach that age? It’s a fair question.
Man has never permitted woman to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men. Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. If married he has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it. [Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from the Seneca Falls Declaration, in 1848]
I ask the same questions again. Was it systemic processes that created the discrimination against women or was it their individual lack of character which resulted in women getting their just deserts? Men made the laws that discriminated against women. Do conservatives view that as "just the way the world is" and counsel one another that "nothing can or should be done?"
*The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body; whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.* [W.E.B. Dubois, The Soul of Black Folks, published 1903]
Character? Systemic processes? Just the way the world is?
Poverty, Inequality And War: How Did The World Get To Be The Way It is?
In the Burkean world God is responsible for the way the world is, which includes assigning an individual to poverty or discrimination.
One’s place in society is the consequence of a Divine Tactic. God has ordained the existence of orders and classes. [Edmund Burke]
I suspect most people today wouldn’t subscribe to that stark an explanation. Yet there is the question of how one country ends up with no outlets to the ocean; how one country ends up with great mineral wealth and another does not; how one country ends up a third world country and another ends up a leader in industry and science; how one country ends up poor and another country ends up rich beyond imagination.
It just happened. That’s just the way the world is. Resources are distributed unevenly. Individual talent and intelligence is distributed unevenly among people. Some people are born with healthy bodies, some are born deformed. That’s just the way the world is.
Moral Inequality And "Just Deserts"
The Individualist explanation for poverty is that it is caused by indolence and vice. [Charles Murray]
I asked this question once of a conservative: If character is the determining factor of a person’s success, do you mean to tell me that all the poor people in the world, all the poor in the third world are poor because they have bad character? He said no. He realized there were exogenous reasons for poverty in other countries. It is in the United States, with our humming free-market system, that anybody can achieve anything they want and that the only explanation for remaining poor in the United States is that the individual chooses to have poor character. I kid you not, but then I know you’ve heard this same rhetoric millions of times yourself.
Charles Murray has written about the deserving poor and the undeserving poor in the United States. [This is language which was also applied to the poor during the Dickensian era in England]. Murray detects a difference in morality between the deserving poor and undeserving poor.
The unfortunate fact is that there is a moral inequality among those who are poor. Some poor people are brighter or of better character or more industrious than others. Poor people with good character are the "deserving poor," while poor people with bad character are the "undeserving poor." [Charles Murray. Murray does not comment upon the moral inequality of the undeserving rich]
Conservatives have created an improbable theory about the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States. The theory is that the free-market is perfectly sensitive to character and will produce results accordingly. The free-market will respond to people with good character by making them successful. It will respond to people with bad character by making them failures. Conservatives invented the term "just deserts," meaning that everyone gets exactly what they deserve according to the goodness or badness of their character.
What Do We Want To Do About Inequality, Poverty And War?
Inequality may be a human condition, but a specific distribution of inequality is not a human condition.
Among the human conditions that conservatives want to do nothing about is the current status quo, current being defined as any day that the conservative is thinking about it.
Conservatives don’t care how the status quo is caused. They figure that in some way it is inevitable. But while some degree and distribution of wealth and power are inherent in the nature of things, liberals argue that a specific distribution of wealth and power is not inevitable. We can form an intent to make a change. And this is where liberals part company with conservatives: at the beginning. Liberals choose to form an intent to change the status quo: we will choose to try to change slavery and discrimination and to alleviate poverty through planning and purposeful actions. Conservatives believe that either mysterious processes or bad character are responsible for unhappy conditions and are willing to let the same causes keep on working without interference.
This is a choice based on a preference because there are other possible choices. Conservatives seem to feel that - as Frank Meyer makes clear - that individuals are the only thing that matters; that conservatives are not connected to the larger society - which, again, Meyer says does not exist - through any reciprocity or responsibility. As George Will notes:
The political philosophy of modernity [by which I’m sure he means Individualism] does not emphasize, and so does not nurture, the habit of regarding our fellow citizens as united in a great common enterprise. [George Will]
Dinesh D’Souza also implies this conservative disconnect from society in writing about morality.
Conservatives tend to define morality personally, while liberals define it socially. [D’Souza]
Whatever the accuracy of this statement D’Souza seems to be distancing conservatives from taking any moral responsibilities for conditions in their own society.
It’s A Question Of Relationship
What relationship did conservatives imagine they had to the immigrant children in the New York tenements in 1890; or white people to black people during our whole history as a country; or men to women all during the time that "the rule of law" discriminated against women? Or the relationship of straights to gays today?
As far as I can tell Individualism imagines only one relationship; and that is the relationship of one individual to one other individual while they are involved in one voluntary exchange transaction. The relationships imagined between members of a family or church or voluntary little associations are part of the Traditionalist heritage, not Individualism’s.
If individualists would be supportive of an improvement in income or equality of the immigrants, blacks and women at those times and in those places their support is restricted to the mysterious process that occurs when all the individual transactions aggregate. Their support is contingent on their idea of how the world gets to be the way it is.
A conservative is properly concerned simultaneously with two things: the first, the shape of the visionary or paradigmatic society toward which we should labor; the second, the speed with which it is thinkable to advance toward that ideal society with the foreknowledge that any advance upon it is necessarily asymptotic. [William F. Buckley]
Meaning that we can never reach our ideal society. J. W. Forrester captures the basic conservative outlook about trying to change things for the better.
Efforts to improve things often make them worse. [J.W. Forrester]