Conservative
Intellectuals
The invisible hand just gave you the finger, son.
Clyde "the possum" Ridenour
The expression “conservative
intellectual” was, at least until the nineteen-fifties, an
oxymoron. Conservatives, with their founder, Edmund Burke, insisted
that not reason but custom was the true foundation of freedom. The
rights of Englishmen, founded in long tradition and customary
practice, were real. “The rights of man,” the brainchild of
Enlightenment thinking, was but a chimera, a brainstorm without
substance. The “reason” of the Enlightenment produced only a
wind-egg and worse, the Terror. Conservatism attacked reason itself,
so how could it then turn around and spawn conservative “think
tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, peopled with conservative
intellectuals?
The change seems to have come with
books like The Origins of
Totalitarianism by Hannah
Arendt. Totalitarianism was what linked the regimes of Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia together. Before that everyone thought one was
extreme left and the other extreme right. No two regimes could have
been more different. But no, they shared a new kind of political
structure never imagined by the ancients who otherwise identified all
known political structures.
Totalitarianism, it seemed, needed an ideology, a set of ideas that
cling together to inspire citizens to embrace the totalitarian
movement, set out for its illusory Shangri-la, and perish in confusion. The
ideas within the ideology were unimportant because the ideology
served the same purpose in any totalitarian structure regardless of
the ideology's content. That the Soviet Union was to the far left and
Nazi Germany to the far right didn't matter. The actual ideas in the
ideology factored out, so to speak, leaving just the path, the
unreachable Shangri-la, and the pit.
The totalitarian
structure was not really a structure at all, but, perhaps an
anti-structure, a whirlwind where everything changed from day to day.
Its kaleidoscopic chaos hypnotized the population then led them into
the maw. In its grip people turned away from lifelong friends. In
politics they fervently embraced policies and motives only to abandon
them a day later. Such is the instability of ideas. Under
totalitarianism, in the spell of ideology, people abandoned all
morality. They shoved others into gas chambers in Poland, or,
bizarrely, confessed to crimes they did not commit, after which they
trundling off proudly to their own executions in Moscow. Nothing held
fast; everything was in flux. Oh ideas, evil ideas. Spiraling into
hell, those in their grip hallucinated that they marched all
together towards paradise.
The
conservative intellectual's task was to raise the alarm against
ideas--to persuade people that state planning, reason, ideas used to
achieve some state purpose, led to disaster. Their objection was to
practical reason, planning and carrying out that plan, not rhetoric.
Unlike Burke, they did not object to the use of the art of
persuasion. Talk away. Just don't do any non-market thing if you are
in the government. State programs launched for the common good were
the enemy. All plans were the germs of ideologies that pointed to
some hair-brained utopia whose vision hypnotized governments and
turned leaders into zombies. Indeed anything a government might do to
achieve any goal was the germ of horrible ruin. The
conservative intellectual wanted to point out that our own liberal
democracy was itself in mortal danger to the extent that the
government had ideas that led them to do things. To make policy in
the hope of achieving some social program was to invite
totalitarianism. Thinking to help, you create disaster. “The
tyranny of good intentions” discredited all good intentions. Since
ideology, ideas used to plan action, always leads to totalitarianism,
government regulation was only a step away from the gas chamber.
Burke's
attack on reason was incoherent. He argued against the firebrands of
the French Revolution in a rhetorical war to see who could persuade
the English to either embrace the ideas of the French Revolution or
repudiate them. Burke argued rhetorically that the rhetorical appeal
of his enemies should be repudiated because all
rhetorical appeals
are bad.
Ideas, no matter how good, tear up custom and make the ship of state
rudderless. Custom is the steady guide. But custom does not need
Burke to exhort you to follow it, for then you would be following
Burke and not custom. He reasoned that one should not trust reason.
His
modern disciples have solved that problem. Because their quarry is
not a gaggle of soap box firebrands, but the government itself, they
have withdrawn their objection to rhetoric and have thrust their
lance at practical reason. That is where the totalitarian danger
comes from. What they object to is “government regulation” to
achieve a social program. Regulations deprive us of “free choice.”
The government sets up rules and enforces them -- with violence if
necessary. This is coercion. The conservative intellectual includes
all government regulation and all commands in the category of
“coercion.” The government is identified with the highwayman. Both coerce. Thus all government regulation is bad, and will lead
to catastrophe-- depressions, gulags, holocausts, totalitarianism.
Government should act only as a referee to prevent force and fraud and so be
a shelter for the free market, but otherwise do nothing. Individual
free choice, allowing the “invisible hand” to shape the world,
replaced custom as the guide through the wilderness.
The
conservative intellectual does not object to the use of commands
within a commercial enterprise, that is, within the free market. The
workers have chosen to work in the factory. They have chosen to obey
the commands of the boss. Even though their entire lives are spent
obeying commands, they are free. For they freely chose to go to work.
If they don't like it they can leave. Such a situation remains within
the realm of “choice.”
In
the Introduction to Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman,
make up a little bit of American history. It goes something like
this. Our founding fathers created the United States of America to
protect men from the encroachment of government. For quite some time
Americans were largely free, and the country blossomed. But in spite
of this there were still many evils. Intellectuals forgot that it was
free choice that produced all the good and thought they could use
government to correct all the evils. When these intellectuals were
able to influence the government, the Great Depression resulted.
Here, in the Friedmans' own words, is how the story ends:
However, government's
responsibility for the depression was not recognized —either then
or now. Instead, the depression was widely interpreted as a failure
of free market capitalism. That myth led the public to join the
intellectuals in a changed view of the relative responsibilities of
individuals and government. Emphasis on the responsibility of the
individual for his own fate was replaced by emphasis on the
individual as a pawn buffeted by forces beyond his control. The view
that government's role is to serve as an umpire to prevent
individuals from coercing one another was replaced by a view that
government's role is to serve as a parent charged with the duty of
coercing some to aid others.1
The
Friedmans offers us no example of an intellectual who embraced their
bizarre idea of the duties of a parent. But what Friedman objects to
here is coercive social programs. Such governmental interference
coerces the rich to aid the poor. The Friedmans, as usual, assimilate such
“coercion” to that of the highwayman. But given these two
very dissimilar cases, just where does the boundary lie? The
Friedmans do not want to say that natural limitations coerce us. “I
would prefer to fly but my lack of wings coerces me into walking.”
No. What is, is. Coercion is something people do and has nothing to
do with our natural limitations, which are neither good nor bad but
simply something an adult must live with. The starvation of a
worker's children, for example, does not coerce him into taking a
job that he otherwise would have spat upon. He still makes a free
choice. To complain about this is to complain about not having wings.
What is, is; one makes choices within the context of reality. If
your children are starving that is what is. You try to fix it, but
within the market place. “What is” in this case as well, is not
coercion, according to Friedman. What distinguishes “what is”
from minimum wage laws? Why is it not coercion when they are? No
doubt it is that only people, or social institutions can coerce. No one made the children starve.
Now
the worker with starving children might say that the rich man who
owns all the food is coercing him when he comes to get some
food. Instead of letting him take it he had guards, the police, who
use coercion, even violence, to keep him from the food. The worker
did not use force; He would have been happy to take the food
peacefully. Force was used against him. And this coercion arose with
people, namely, the police. So it is not like “just the way things
are.” This is a simple case of government coercion. “But a man has a right to protect his own property,” the
conservative intellectual will say indignantly. “Protection of
property is what the United States is all about. It is essential for
the free market. ” Very well, but then the Conservative
intellectual must admit that coercion is good in the protection of
property. Since “protection of property” is an idea and the
police an agency for carrying out government regulation to realize
that idea, when the conservative intellectual accepts police
coercion he violates his own principles.
Coercion to protect property rights is governmental regulation to realize a social good. Why is this regulation good but not
one guaranteeing enough food for your children? The answer, whatever
it may be, comes from ideas, verboten ideas, and an attempt to
realize them. So there is no possible justification for choosing one
right, “ protection of property,” over the other, “the right to not be hungry,” without contradiction of the
principle forbidding social programs to realize ideas of the good.
The conservative intellectual is left with a conceptual train wreck.
Friedman
wants to say that good things happen when the umpire favors property
and not starving children. But this good thing is a social good the
Government uses regulation to realize. The free market is a
cornucopia! Maybe so, but the poor man with no share in it might not
call it a good thing. What is it to him? He would not allow that any
good thing can happen while his children starve. Since we are all
individuals any opinion is as good as any other. For we must not try
to realize any social good through means outside the market place.
What is good and what bad coercion depends upon one's point of view.
The intellectual argument objecting to coercion has vanished and the
conservative intellectual is revealed as simply having taken sides.
Once there can be good and bad coercion “coercion” loses its
place as a criterion for what is good or bad. And the conservative
intellectual can offer no other criterion without violating his own
principles.
The
distinction between “free” and “coerced” also disappears,
since freedom, The Friedmans agree, requires a coercive umpire to
keep people from coercing one another. In other words freedom
requires coercion to remain free. So how can “freedom” and
“coercion” inhabit mutually exclusive realms? What is freedom now
that coercion must be inevitably mixed in with it? For governmental use of coercion to achieve
social ends is, in his setup, identical to highway robbery. If one
tries to argue that the police do not really influence anyones actual
choices and thus to distinguish between good coercion that does not
influence market choice and bad coercion that does, the highwayman
will object. For, he will argue, his coercion does not influence
market choices either. His pistol is like a deed of trust that
proves that he already holds his victims life in his hand. He does
not threaten his victim's life; he already possesses it and can do
with in what he will. The victim can choose to buy back his life with
his money or not. Whichever he chooses, he is not coerced. The highwayman offers him a deal: his money for his life. He is
free to choose. The highwayman does not
influence him either way. That his life is at stake is irrelevant.
For lives are often at stake in the market. In the quote above the
Friedmans want us to think of the citizen as [responsible] “for his
own fate” rather than as a “pawn buffeted by forces.” Very
well, then why shouldn't he be responsible for the protection of his
own life and goods? The market is a translation of a Darwinian jungle
into a paper city. It is a duel to the death fought with documents
rather than with tooth and claw. But why exclude tooth and claw? The
exclusion of these weapons is unjustified. Why deprive the con man or
thug of his skills? No argument without an appeal to the general good
is possible. Any rules restricting a jungle where the fittest survive
will keep the fittest from surviving unless one assimilates the rules
to “what is.”
The
discourse of the conservative intellectual is really an ideology, a
set of ideas that don't hold together, but set us off towards a
utopia and to our doom. This utopia is perhaps different in that the
conservative intellectual refuses to offer any picture of it. The
“invisible hand of the market” will take our hands and lead us
there, but we will not know where we are going. Just the human
penchant for boredom will guarantee that if we ever think we know
where we are going the enormous urge to not continue in the same
direction for yet another day will set us off in a different
direction. Knowing where you are going is a sure sign of not knowing
where you are going. This utopia has no fixed shape. Its citizen is a
man who constantly tries to peer into the future and then get there
first. He tries to glimpse the next “what comes next” and point
his own market activity towards it. Superior human beings, capable of
guessing the desires of tomorrow, will emerge. The Conservative
Utopia, the best of all possible worlds, sometimes called “whatever
comes next” is just whatever emerges from the rough and tumble of
the marketplace (but it will be good!). In our blind march towards
the utopia of market success some find the way, but most fall by the
wayside. If you do it is your own fault; you lack character or
energy, stability or imagination, in short either one thing or its
opposite. That is the Darwinian way of the world, and it is good.
This Utopia's indistinctness, far beyond the formidable
indistinctness of previous utopias, gives it plausibility in our
present habitual mistrust of planning and clear goals (except within
a market context). But since all such utopias are unreachable, the
unrecognizablity of this one hardly matters. If an hallucination
without any qualities can be called an hallucination, this utopia is
as hallucinatory as any other, or even more so, since whatever
happens is a step in the right direction. Recent events have revealed
that this utopia is a fatal snare , but its web of ideas continues to
entangle us.
What you would normally think
Has more to it than that.
Behind the surface truth
Something else appears.
When you focus there
You find a silver path
Whose forks, seeming choices,
Are outposts, points of view,
From which the beauty of the whole plan
Shows up.
But someone else is there.
A spider in that web
Views you as you flail
In
the trap he set for you.
1Milton
and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose:(Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1980) 5
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