The Great Debate

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the  Birth of Right and Left
© 2013 Yuval Levin
296 pages

The Great Debate uses the war of letters between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine  to explain the philosophical differences between conservatism and progressivism. Both men were political actors, albiet in different spheres, and both achieved renown during the period of the American and French revolutions. While both the respectable MP Burke and the revolutionary Paine supported the American cause, they broke furiously over the French.  Drawing on each party's respective works, some written as direct rebuttals to the other, Yuval Levin explores their opposing philosophies in different sections: the meaning of 'nature', the role of choice,  reason versus tradition, and so on.

As a pair, they remind me faintly of  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, with Adams as the cynic and Jefferson the romantic. Burke emerges here as a man constantly aware of human frailties, and desiring to mitigate them as much as possible -- chiefly by preserving the structure of government passed down from generation to generation, which he assumes as custom-tailored for its people through the ages -- and making marginal, cautious changes as circumstances dictate.  Paine is marked more by idealism, mindful only of the good which we are capable of.  For Paine,  tradition and custom are the mere baggage of time. For him, there are certain principles which, if followed, guarantee freedom and progress. The trick is that these principles have to be built into the foundation, so  virtually everything has to be torn down to make room for them. It is in that vein that he argues that the American states should adopt a tack that would later be embraced by the French: erasing the historical boundaries of distinct places, and instead creating new little subdivisions of the State, purely for administrative purposes. Burke did not see the American revolution as a revolution; he saw Parliament's recent presumption of absolute powers over the colonies as all-too-new preogative, at odds with the facts of distance and precedent. (For Paine, the Amercan revolution was the start of a global revival, the dawn of an Age of Reason applied politically.)  Paine can see no reason to create internal checks and balances: so long as the beginning principles are sound, there will be no need of conflict.

 For me,  I think back to Adams and Jefferson, and wonder whose vision I trust more -- the skeptic of human nature Adams,  who mistrusted too much democracy but refused to own or  hire slaves...or the idealistc Jefferson,  who could sing 'liberty' to the heavens but who maintained his own stock of enslaved persons. Give me Adams -- his actions have more weight than the prettiest words.  The same goes for Burke and Paine. While I can disagree with Burke time and again, ultimately erring on the side of caution strikes me as as better than ripping apart society and allowing for creatures like Napoleon.  While Levin doesn't reduce Paine to caricature, the amount of time he gives to Burke -- required given Burke's sheer complexity --  gives the book a Burkean balance.   Paine's idealism survived as long as it did, I think, because he never held an office of political responsibility. He thus enjoyed the luxury of never having to put his ideas into practice personally, rather like a few other political philosophers of the 19th and 20th century.   I found The Great Debate fascinating  dialogue between two equally sympathetic men, of idealism mixing with cognizance of our limitations.  The title is total oversell, though,  since Paine's connection with progressivism only appears in the conclusion.

Unstoppable

Unstoppable: the Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State
© 2014 Ralph Nader
224 pages

George Carlin groused that when he heard the word bipartisanship, he knew a larger than usual deception was in the works. Ralph Nader's Unstoppable offers a different kind of bipartisanship -- cooperation, not conspiracy. Written primarily to a progressive audience, Nader draws on his reading of Russell Kirk and F.A. Hayek to share the good news:  there are people who share the similar values in both political wings, and plenty of room to work together against a common enemy. What common enemy? The crony-capitalist state, the nemesis of both progressives who fear the power of modern-day robber barons, and of libertarians and conservatives who value free markets, the rule of law, and civic order.

Nader opens Unstoppable with a victory several decades old: the termination of a particular nuclear project based on a alliance between progressive environmentalists and fiscal conservatives.  Although joining forces with conservatives was initially a pragmatic move, in the decades that followed, Nader familiarized himself with both conservative and libertarian literature.  Nader deserves kudos, for while it's not unusual for those passionate about politics to learn their opponents' arguments merely to demonstrate to them while they are wrong, Nader seems to have gained a genuine sense of empathy for those on the other side. Humanistic concern runs through each political camp considered here, a commonality that can be the basis of cooperative action.  What most progressives think of as conservatism, Nader writes, is a new thing, the product of decades of slow corporate corruption of the political state.  Its subsidies to multinationals, the benefaction rendered by regulations that smother competition, conserve nothing -- and nor do they promote liberty. Nader may still disagree those on the right, but underneath the ideology, he writes, we are still human beings who, when confronted with abuses, want to help one another.

The alliances that can be created vary. Progressivism's opponents may agree on opposing the State's growing activity in everyday life, but they don't agree with one another.  Take the environment: some of the United States' most sweeping conservationist legislation was enacted by presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and environmentalism lends itself well to the language of conservatism; think 'stewardship'.  Progressive horror at the inroads consumerism is making in the lives of children can find kindred spirits in the ranks of social conservatives, especially the religious who fear their children becoming selfish and materialistic.  Libertarians who swear more by the market than moral order may object to progressive-conservatives limiting choice by barring certain kinds of advertising, for instance, but when it comes to forswearing money given to corporations they're stalwart allies. Another area of progressive-libertarian camaraderie is ending the drug war, which even Old Right types could be convinced to join if shown how the war has completely destroyed civil law enforcement in favor of pseudo-military police enforcement.  Free trade is a particularly thorny issue: libertarians may be for it, and paleo-conservatives against it, but there's a fuzzy thin line between protectionism (which progressives might  back) and cronyism.

In the latter half of his book, Nader puts forth a list of twenty-five issues that progressives can work with either libertarians or paleo- and populist conservatives on, or both. Some of them involve the federal government doing more, which I don't think will sell well in allying with groups who view federal overreach as the entire point of opposition. It's a let's-get-the-Wehrmacht-out-of-Paris-before-we-strengthen-it-against-Stalin situation.  Others involve a heart dose of localism. like promoting 'community self reliance', and distributive electrical grids. At one point Nader quoted Who Owns America?, the classic agrarian-distributist critique of the then- nascent plutocracy, and I may have swooned.  Considering that two of the major contenders for the presidency have nebulous connections to their respective parties -- the independent socialist Sanders and the populist Trump --  Americans' frustration with the reigning RepubliCrat scheme seems ripe for this kind of cooperation. I only wish Nader had put more emphasis on local cooperation, which is further removed from ideology, and more motivated by  having to work with the facts at hand. Non-progressives will find Nader's repeated assertion that progressives have less interest in ideology than facts to be  dubious, and  for the record I think that comes a little too close to holding that the ends are more important than the means.  It's not enough to take steps to take care of what ails us:  we should have some idea of where we are going. If we allow power to accrete in the name of "doing something", then we'll simply pave the way for future abuses.

Quarrels withstanding I found Unstoppable to be an immensely heartening book, a reassuring dose of civility and cooperation. I think if more Americans read it -- progressives, liberals, conservatives, and even those power-enabling rascals in the middle, the liberals and neocons, we might see each other more as people with genuine convictions, and not merely wrongheaded enemies who need to be defeated and driven from the field.   When the talking heads on TV, both the announcers and the candidates, drive one to despair, consider Nader's humane rebuttal. Genuine hope for America may not be forlorn.

(And where else are you going to find a book with a Green party progressive hailing decentralism and lamenting over the problems of regulatory capture and bureaucratic quagmire?)

Related:
Crunchy Cons, Rob Dreher
Citizen Power, Mike Gravel
What's Wrong with the World?, G.K. Chesterton
We Who Dared Say no to War, ed. Murray Polner and Tom Woods. (Men of the left and right, respectively.)

The American Tory

The American Tory
© 1972 ed. Morten Borden, Penn Borden
141 pages

American colonists yearning for independence from Britain called themselves Patriots, not in opposition against the not-yet-arrived royal army, but to set their cause against that of the Loyalists. Not all colonists supported separation from Britain; even in the steamy summer of 1776, with war already waging, some congressmen were reluctant to shove away any hope of reconciliation with the mother country. They were bristling against their rights offended as Englishmen, were they not?  The American Tory collects the reactions and thoughts of loyalists during the revolutionary period to the turmoil happening around them, as well as accounts of how they were treated by the revolutionaries, and how they and the patriots regarded one another.

'Tory' first described the defenders of the king's cause during the English Civil War, and is sometimes used as a byword for conservative. In the United States, 'tory' seems have been hurled at loyalists with particular hatred. Good, then, that they be given a chance to speak. This is exclusively a collection of excerpts from letters, speeches, assembly minutes, and official proclamations from the period, including two essays comprising histories of the revolution from the patriot and loyalist views. The collection offers a look into the myriad reasons that loyalists gave for staying true; ardent devotion to England,  fear of revolution driving everything to ruin,  and an abiding distrust of those agitating for separation. The Congress made a lot of noise about violated rights, but what if their real motives were more base? What if Adams and Washington simply wanted to create grander names for themselves than peace and cooperation allowed for?  And where did those rights come from, after all, if not the English law, embodied in the person of George III?

Although the patriots liked to dismiss the loyalists as fainthearted and timid, too afraid to make a progressive leap into the future, the abuse many endured for their abiding convictions puts the lie to that. The far easier course would have been the sunshine patriotism Tom Paine grumbled about in The Crisis.  There is pragmatic sense in the tories' belief that rights depended on the application of force -- rights unobserved have no functional existence--  and the able bedrock of the law --  but who wants to depend on the state for the defense of their rights?  The United States still avers to live by natural rights, but do the actions of its government live up to that? Certainly not, and nor did the king and his parliament's.  The struggle between a people's rights and their government's desires is never over, and the strife between the tories and patriots was less a battle between good and evil and more the ancestor of our own debates today.   There is much value in this little book, not only for giving the loyalists a nuanced opinion, but in showing how similarly their passions were expressed.  Both sides used the same language, referring to the respective opposition as a junta, and both taking stands in defense of liberty. The tories saw liberty threatened by disorder and wars; the patriots, by a peace accomplished at the price of subservience; both feared the others' banditti. 

Such realizations are helpful now, as in any time, to realize how people are more often linked than their passion will allow them to admit. There is still room for civility, here evidenced by one Tory expressing his admiration of George Washington and hoping, if he is defeated, it is a noble defeat, one worthy of the man.   This is in short a fascinating and profoundly helpful work for those seeking to understand the revolution and its causes.

Getting it Right

Getting it Right

© 2006 William F. Buckley Jr

2003

        Getting it Right is a political history disguised as a love story,  both tales told amid the radically shifting political climate of America's 1960s, as Americans reacted to the growing global power of the Soviet Union and the increasing role of government in their own lives.  Woodroe Raynor is an earnest young Mormon whose narrow escape from Russian soldiers invading Hungary cements his contempt for the Soviet Union, who finds similarly zealous spirits in the nascent John Birch Society. Leonora Goldstein is a bright young Jewish girl in the employ of the Objectivists, who adopts Ayn Rand as her mentor.  Through  the tumultous years of Kennedy and LBJ, the two  test their ideas against one enough, struggling to build a relationship on their mutual conservatism despite different values. The real stars of the novel are the historical characters for whom Raynor and Leonora are mere appendages, including General Edwin Walker, Ayn Rand,  JFK, and Barry Goldwater. Buckley incorporates a lot of historically-derived quotations into their dialogue, which makes some passages seem overly formal, but such casual pompousness would not be out of character for Ayn Rand.  The story can't help but be personal for the late Buckley, a central figure in the movement, and one whose National Review denounced both the Birchers and Objectivists in his day. Buckley's highbrow scorn for the paranoid and self-impressed fringe is initially dampened in the novel. Both of its central characters initially find a world of meaning in their respective organizations, rising to high positions within them throughout the Kennedy administration, but by the reign of LBJ both have reconsidered as the founders reveal themselves to be utterly mental.  The plot climaxes in the failed Goldwater challenge for the presidency, an election in which Johnson played on the public's fears that Goldwater's extremism would lead to global war. The famous "daisy" commercial isn't mentioned here, but the crackup of both the Birchers and Objectivists takes the wind out of the more moderate conservatives' sails. It's a quite a piece of work, an extended debate about political philosophy enmeshed in a lively retelling of the 1960s, a period which contributes action scenes in the form of assassinations and rioting.  If the specter of Ayn Rand talking can be endured, most readers of a moderate bent will find this engaging.

Related:

• Radicals for Capitalism, on "the Objectivist crackup".  
• The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk

Look Homeward, America!

Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists
© 2006 Bill Kauffman
250 pages

"The Little Way. That is what we seek. That -- contrary to the ethic of personal parking spaces, of the dollar-sign god -- is the American way. Dorothy Day kept to that little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not beautiful, at least it is always human."  p. 39

           Look Homeward, America collects the stories of eccentric individuals who, in a century marked by the advance of corporate and state power, rebelled against the machine. Planting their flag above small towns and in the countryside, they held on what they regarded as valuable and defied or attempted to resist the march of a more inhumane world. Bill Kauffman is a sympathetic soul, a die-hard "placeist". He calls himself the anarchist love-child of Henry David Thoreau and Dorothy Day, and Look Homeward is his tribute to peaceable troublemakers like his 'parents'. They are farmers and social workers, politicians and miners, men and women whose faith is the family and the local community. They champion self-reliance, local interest, and peace; they scorn war, industrial agriculture, big business, and government bureaucracy.  The expression thereof varies; some are hands-on activists, like Day and Mother Jones,  others very frustrated political candidates, still others authors who sing the song of their places and peoples in novel and verse.No political labels apply here; although most are out to protect traditional expressions of civil society, or are vigorously insisting that the powerful leave them be, these conservatives and libertarians are joined by men like Eugene Debs. A book that can honor the six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist party in the same breath as Wendell Berry (a Kentucky farmer, novelist, and proponent of agrarianism)  is wonderfully eclectic. A strong sense of the meaningful life pervades and is carried forth by both religious personalities (Catholic Dorothy Day, featured prominently) and the irreligious, like Robert Ingersoll.   (The great agnostic only receives a mention, which is too bad; his view of the American republic was quite Jeffersonian.) The expression of this common spirit differs from In essence, Look Homeward is a lively championing of localism, a tribute paid to people whose lives were a great raspberry in the face of war and modern alienation. It's a ball to read, not only because Kaufman is so personable,  but because of his colorful-but-not-obscene vocabulary.

Related:

• The Plain Reader,  assorted authors (including Berry)
• Crunchy Cons; The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rob Dreher.  Like Kauffman, a writer at Front Porch Republic
• Any of Wendell Berry’s works
• Review: "All American Anarchists"

"....this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship."  - G. K. Chesteron, What's Wrong with the World?

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Blacks Rednecks and White Liberals
© 2005 Thomas Sowell
360 pages

Thomas Sowell's provocatively-titled Black Rednecks and White Liberals casts a critical eye toward  conventional understandings of race, class, and history, collecting a half-dozen extensive essays in one volume. Although each essay is written as a standalone piece, some concern common subjects and refer to one another.  Sowell principally writes on African-Americans and Jews here, aside from an apologia written on Germany.  His central argument essentially blames the welfare state for the continuing degradation of black Americans, by way of historical arguments, one of them deliciously twisted -- the title essay.

"Black Rednecks and White Liberals" sets the stage by contending that the woeful culture of poverty keeping urban blacks in a despairing state is not one which they created themselves, but one inherited from poor whites, and specifically the poor whites who emigrated from a border region of Scotland during a specific timeframe in which Scottish 'crackers' of the area were slobbering savages, having not yet been tamed by the graces of English civilization. The poor whites of this ‘cracker culture’  exhibited the same self-defeating behaviors lamented over in the ghetto today; a disdain for education and work, a painfully abbreviated approach to the English language,  wanton sexuality,  and a gleeful embrace of violence, along with an ‘honor’ system that promoted the use of such violence.   It is Sowell’s opinion that southern blacks were acculturated into the behaviors of the ‘white trash’ and dragged it around the country with them. Given its self-defeating nature, Sowell comments that this cracker culture largely died out among the poor whites, and even the first waves of southern blacks who carried it around the country – but after the 1960s, when the welfare state  sprang into being,  those behaviors were propped up – being no longer culled by the scythe of sheer necessity.  After arguing for this, Sowell later builds off it in an essay on education, and again in his final essay on the historical perspective, condemning modern approaches as too forgiving, too soft:  blacks and whites who lifted themselves up out of poverty and despair did so not by accepting substandard English as their cultural heritage, nor by taking self-esteem classes, but by acknowledging the relative inferioty of their station in life to others:. The Scots became intellectual titans after abandoning Gaelic for English, and consequently gaining access to the English literary world, and the Japanese adopted western means of science, government, and economics to catapult from feudal island to global power in the Meiji revolution. In putting aside defensive pride and setting a superior standards for themselves, they both catapulted themselves from backwards hinterlands to first-world countries who would be active players in shaping world history..

Thomas Sowell, it should be noted, is black himself, and is a product of this process of enlightenment, having been reared in the kind of schools he now advocates,  having set for himself superior standards.  To multicultural sensibilities, he may seem like a self-loathing black man at times, for all the abuse he heaps on poor blacks and whites and for all he waxes poetic about the glorious intellectual and moral history of the west, problematic as it was. Were he white, Sowell would almost certainly be condemned as a racist, and a cavalier of western chauvinism.  His entire argument is simultaneously thought-provoking and problematic. Some is straightforward history, like his account of slavery or the reactions of northerners to white southern emigrants, which as they are quoted sound exactly like what you might expect to hear of those participating in 'white flight' decades later.  It's not surprising that long-term residents of an area would react with hostility toward the sudden intrusion of poor immigrants, flooding into areas the residents rightfully considered their own.  Sowell's belief that the culture of contemporary 'ghetto blacks' was one passed down directly by 'crackers' is a much harder sell. Given that slaves were owned not by 'white trash', but by the plantation elite, would they really have spent enough time around the 'crackers' to acquire the values? And why would they adopted those values, considering that impoverished white sharecroppers were just as economically miserable as themselves, and loathed the former slaves to boot?  The statistics Sowell quotes to demonstrate that the black story of the 20th century is sometimes one of regress are damning: even if a reader doesn't accept his condemnation of welfare as causing the erosion of black family life, and stymieing the natural processes that would reverse self-destructive behaviors,  the  analysis is staggering in its implications.  This isn't exactly a national secret -- Bill Cosby has written books despairing about the woeful condition of black family life and communities in the latter half of the 20th century -- but Sowell's  work puts the decline into sharp focus.

Although I find Sowell's contempt for the poor, self-defeating they may be, highly uncomfortable -- especially his frequent brandishment of 'cracker', which in certain counties of the Deep South is a pejorative on the level of kike or wop -- I appreciated various elements of this collection. The almost tributary history to Germany's ancient cultural heritage, for instance, was a relief compared to the  Omnipresent Nazi approach to German history, and the statistical work offers data that can be considered regardless of one's opinion on the unintended consequences of particular welfare policies. I'm increasingly sympathetic to the idea that improperly-designed welfare can exacerbate social problems, but think it more likely that certain destructive behaviors are endemic to the human experience, rather than being the legacy of Scottish emigrants to urban ghettos. Not for nothing have humans created so many religions, philosophies, and institutions to curb the worse of our instincts. Though readers will find a lot of food for thought in this collection, it has a sometimes bitter edge. 

The New Faithful

The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy
© 2002 Colleen Caroll
320 pages

 Every action produces its reaction, and to Colleen Carroll decades of religious liberalism have born their fruit in the form of young people flocking back to conservative religious traditions, complete with smells and bells. One of the new faithful herself,  Caroll’s own views mingle with those of the Generation Xers she interviews:.  Raised in broken families, they are resacralizing marriage; burned out by one night stands and shallow relationships, they are embracing chastity;  frustrated by Pontius Pilate’s question, ‘what is truth’, they are sneering at relativism and declaring: the truth is whatever the Bible says.  The Youth Faithful mixes anecdotes and statistics, and despite being part of her subject matter, Carroll tries valiantly to be objective: some conducted interviews are with theologians and intellectuals critical of this trend ,and see it  merely as a reflection of the age-old defiance of the reigning generation by the young.

But what if that's not the only motive? Even considering that the now-historic trend commented on here (this book is nearly twelve years old) may be being reversed (considering the surge  of people reporting as Nonreligious),what if these young people have motives which can open our eyes to the fact that society-as-usual isn't providing something they want or need? No one here offers a real reason for  re-adopting old dogmas, beyond deferring to St. Augustine or C.S. Lewis, but the prevailing idea that all of reality is subjective is no doubt frustrating. Even if you believe it, who wants to? It rails against every instinct: something must be true.  Part of this conservative morality seems linked to the resurgence of the religious right in general in the 1980s, rather than being connected to a return to Orthodoxy.  The historic appeal of orthodoxy is touched on --- there's a sense of security in associating with long-established traditions --   as is the sense of order and peace that comes from daily rituals.  More importantly are the practical reasons for the reversal: Generation X grew up after a series of profound, society-changing movements had started to take effect. They grew up in an era of skyrocketing divorces and sexual license. They were the children whose homes fell apart, whose adolescent peers' lives were ruined by the rise of STDs and early pregnancy.  They are the generation who first experienced these effects, and they are rallying against the cause of them - "liberalism", used generically . More than anything, the people interviewed in this book are yearning for stability -- stability in beliefs, in practice. They want a faith that can be counted on to guide them through the hard times. It's worth pointing out, though Carroll doesn't, that her 'young adults' are not so young: while there are college students here, many more are thirty-somethings with young families, and thus a heightened appreciation for morality and security are not too surprising.  It's a lot easier to want to set the world on fire with change when you don't have children of your own who can be burned.

The Young Faithful is a thought-provoking book, if grating by the end as a result of the casual use of 'liberal' as an attack word, which damages the general sense of professionalism conveyed by Carroll's writing.  It is out of place in a more serious work like this.  Considering that current religious growth is in fact in 'conservative' branches of Christianity like Catholicism, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, Pentecostals, and the like, as opposed to the more liberal mainline denominations,  The Youth Faithful remains of interest despite its increasing datedness, if not wholly appealing.


Related:
Crunchy Cons, Rob Dreher. Dreher is a Gen-Xer who left the Baptists for Eastern Orthodoxy.

What Are People For? (Comments & Selections)

What Are People For?
© 1990, 2010 (2nd Edition) Wendell Berry
210 pages

Did the Lord say that machines oughta take the place of livin'? ("John Henry", Johnny Cash)

Wendell Berry is a softly outspoken critic of the triumph of inhumanity. What are People For? collects essays both literary and critical, with topics ranging from poetry to economy, but settling most around the meaningful life and obstacles to it. Before locavorism and community-supported agriculture, Berry preached the diverse benefits of local, organic agriculture: before James Howard Kunstler, he talked about the value of Place, and mourned the destruction of it by the expansion of sprawl. But Berry is no progressive prodigy: he is, in fact, a traditionalist, who sees great value in a nation of small agriculturists and great danger in one of big agribusiness corporations and consumers. Berry sits in judgment of a modernity that destroys families, communities, people's connection to the land, and their ability to derive pleasure and independence from it. He has little regard for economic arguments for Free Markets that allow tumorously huge food-factories to drive out the little farmer: he moved by a man of flesh and blood, more concerned with his "fellow humans, neighbors, children of God, and citizens of the Republic" than economic principles and statistics that prove people are better off even as their places are destroyed by progress.  You can't stop progress, Berry might say with a sigh, but you can wish mightily for it to choke on its own exhaust.

One need not agree with Berry in entirety to appreciate his work, and I have found this collection of his essays, the first I've read (aside from "Health is Membership" in The Plain Reader), to be full of a great many humbling, gracious, and troubling thoughts. Below are a few excerpts.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Waste"
The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators, but we must count ourselves among the guilty nonetheless. In my household we produce much of our own food and try to do without as many frivolous 'necessities' as possible -- and yet, like everyone else, we must shop, and when we shop we must bring home a load of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers designed to be thrown away, and 'appliances' designed to wear out quickly and be thrown away.

I confess that I am angry at the manufacturers who make these things. There are days when I would be delighted if certain corporate executives could somehow be obliged to eat their products. I know of no good reason why these containers and all other forms of manufactured 'waste' -- solid, liquid, toxic, or whatever -- should not be outlawed. There is no sense and no sanity when objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands."

"Economy and Pleasure"
In the right sort of economy, our pleasure would not merely be an addition or by-product or reward; it would be both an empowerment of our work and its indispensable measure. Pleasure, Ananda Coomaraswamy said, perfects work. In order to have leisure and pleasure, we have mechanized and automated and computerized our work. But what does this do but divide us ever more from one another and the world?

"The Pleasures of Eating"
"Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. 'Life is not very interesting,' we seem to have decided. 'Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast'. We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work to 'recreate' ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation -- for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the 'quality' of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world."

"Word and Flesh"
"Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence -- that is, to the wish to preserve all its humble households and neighborhoods. [...]
We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make."

"Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer"
I should give my standard for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Do engines get rewarded for their steam? ("John Henry", Johnny Cash)

The Conservative Mind

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
© 1953 Russell Kirk
534 pages (7th Edition)

For most of human history, change has been a glacier -- slow to move, retreating as much as it advances. Since the scientific and industrial revolutions, however, change is  less a glacier and more a snowball, moving with rapidity, becoming ever more drastic, and picking up speed. Russell Kirk would remind modern readers that snowball modernity is moving, like other snowballs, downhill. In The Conservative Mind, he collects and comments on the thoughts of those who, since the Pandora's box of revolutions was opened, have tried to clap it shut again.  It is a large, thought-provoking work, often melancholy considering its authors are ever lamenting the loss of order, privilege, and the 'permanent things' against the advance of equality, democracy, and ideology. It attempts to demonstrate an intellectual conservativism, one based on more than an instinctual aversion to change. It succeeds in part, but its ideal audience is the half-converted, for modern readers who do not share its views are unlikely to be convinced by, or even warm appreciably to, authors who spend so much time attacking concepts like democracy, individual judgment, and equality which we hold dear.

The Conservative Mind begins with Edmund Burke, writing against the French Revolution, and continues to leapfrog between Britain and the United States for a century and a half thereafter, as the world continue to change beneath the feet of those who yearned for stability. Such changes were first material, then cultural, and finally political: as industry and commerce eroded the base of the old agricultural economy,  farmers displaced by mechanization streamed into the cities, becoming 'proletarians' in the process -- landless, resourceless men whose skills, along with those of artisans, were no longer needed, and whose only strength was in their numbers.  Converting those numbers into political power, they pressed on the reigning powers and pressed for changes that might relief their burden -- for if they had been denied the ability to provide for themselves, the state could be turned to do it for them; and if the new economic powers wanted to oppress them, they would turn the tables and put into force laws that checked the excesses. As the great tug of war pulled the national fabric hither and on, the men featured here fretted that said fabric was coming apart at the scenes.

Though I have scorned conservatism in the past for being bereft of its own ideas, incapable of doing anything other than resisting any kind of change at all, what I take for weakness, Kirk posits is a strength, and one of the themes uniting his authors' work. Conservatism is not an ideology, he writes; it is an exercise in pragmatism, of recognizing that rapid changes in anything as complex as society or the economy will have unexpected consequences, and if experience is any guide, most of those consequences will be unfortunate. His ideal conservatism is or should be the voice of rational prudence, keeping passion from doing anything too silly.  But while some of his featured authors' complaints can be appreciated as being sensible (not necessarily correct, but a perfectly rational view given the facts at hand), others are firmly in the camp of irrational reaction. One English author protests the 1832 Reform Bill for eliminating a handful of 'rotten boroughs', or election districts which no longer held populations worthy of seats in Parliament, or populations at all: these granted certain M.P.s a say in the nation's doings without their having any person at all to be responsible to.  The writers' protest was that one such seat had been the home of many a distinguished M.P, and to abolish their seat to fulfill some ideal of efficiency was outrageous. The starting point of the French Revolution is an ideal example of the value and limits of this conservative approach: while the Revolution was in many respects a catastrophe for France and Europe's stability, it did unleash positive forces. It gave lie to the fact that the people of Europe had to remain subjects to self-serving lords and priests; it gave them a reason to believe they could take command of their own fortunes, and better them in the process. As lamentable as the fire of revolution that destroys everything in its path is, so to is a conservatism that squelches all flames before they cause any kind of disruption. Superior would a flame of change that puts a fire under the seat of reactionary forces and prompts them to get out of the way of  'progress'.

At the same time, a criticism of conservatism as being nothing but a break or a nay-voice is not quite right, for Kirk maintains that his impaneled authors do believe in certain things, in protecting or restoring them. They believe, for instance, in the principle of prescriptivism, that people by and large ought to defer to the received wisdom of their elders and institutions, for the great reservoir of experience passed down from generation to generation is a far better guide to truth than any one individual, regardless of their belief in the power of objective Reason.  It's an argument one can find sense in -- collected knowledge will surely outweigh any individual knowledge, and reason without evidence  can fall into debates over how many angels can dance on the head of an Ideal Form of a pin --  but an individual may be in possession of facts that collected knowledge simply does not know.  If an astronomer identifies a source of light in the sky and posits that it is is approaching the Earth rapidly, the fact that the collected wisdom of the ancestors contains no accounts of astronomical bodies flying into the Earth does not negate the possibility. Collected beliefs are no more removed from the prospect of error than any new thought formed of reason. This is why science is such a valuable tool, for it combines free reason with the experience of evidence.   But scientists obtain their knowledge through trial and error, by performing experiments that rule out certain ideas and support others. The conservatives in this work, so keenly engrossed by the idea of man as a fallen creature who had to be kept from chaos and barbarity by stern rules and moral authority, would doubtless oppose experimenting with anything as volatile as human society, especially given that they consider some of the values of humankind to be valuable in their own rights, apart from us. Religion is at the heart of Kirk's conservatism, and he maintains that those who see it as simply a convenient curative to fix moral failings of people are doing it wrong. Religion is a dedication to Higher Things, and if people do not acknowledge the supremacy of God over the world, if they do not submit entirely to Divine Will, they will err time and again.

This is not a happy book. It is a work of reproach and lamentation, of distress, argument, and grievance. I think it valuable in terms of  the history of political philosophy, for it  offers the perspective of those who fought against changes like universal suffrage that we take for granted. Barring the collapse of civilization, it is unlikely that universal suffrage will reversed; at the same time, I find it useful to ponder the consequences of said acts, and to wonder: did they live up to the expectations of progress, or did they diminish the body-politic by putting power into the hands of people who have neither the time nor the inclination to gather facts, reflect upon them, and decide on the wisest course of action.  What has expanding the power of central governments done to the effectiveness of those governments, and to the engagement of citizens?  Do we live up the the ideal of the self-empowered Citizen, contributing to the well-being of our nations while pursuing our own individual interests, or are we simply consumer-citizens,  our only act of participation being which product we choose to buy in the election booth: Blue or Red?  The conservative mind is too damning of the species, too quick to defer to the tyranny of tradition and authority, but all the time...perhaps it is a mind that ought to be considered, if only to ward off  the possibility of modern hubris with a little humility.

This week at the library: politics, Star Trek, a Cold War fantasy for kids, and trains

Last week's titles: 

The Price of Everything, Russell D. Roberts  | What It Means to be a Libertarian, Charles Murray |  Star Trek Silent Weapons, David Mack |  Day of Reckoning, Pat Buchanan | Getting There, Charles Goddard

Dear readers:

This week has seen some grappling with politics, with Star Trek, fantasy, and trains for relaxation.  Both The Price of Everything and What It Means to be a Libertarian  were on the...well, libertarian side, with Roberts exploring how prices work and vouching for markets as a better way of arranging things than government fiat. Murray was more philosophical, starting off by establishing that libertarianism is fundamentally against coercion of any kind, whether physical force or taxation. After a strong start, he then attempts to explore what a libertarian society would look like: it's one with courts and interstates, and not much else, though allowances can be made for government control of 'natural monopolies' like infrastructure that requires an enormous amount of capital and coordination (hence, highways). As much as I like his philosophy in theory, its widespread application depends entirely too much on the hope that things will sort themselves out for me.  I prefer concrete evidence, not idealism -- even Murray's very attractive kind, which posits that the government putting citizens' responsibility for their lives will suddenly witness a rebirth of civic virtue. a rebirth I'd delight to see. 

I resumed reading the Cold Equations trilogy by David Mack,  which actually took a potshot at libertarianism by putting the action on crime-ridden Orion, where the government stays out of business and out of most everything else.  I didn't plan Mack as a counter to Murray, so it must have been Fate. Obviously. The book was a fantastic mystery-turned-political thriller, which sees the powers within the Typhon Pact vying for dominance, while keeping a close eye on NATO the Khitomer Accord, which consists of the Federation, the Klingon Empire, the Cardassians, and a few other races who were not quite all the way evil.  The Typhon Pact strife seems to hint that the Downfall series of books being planned for autumn will see the Evil League of Evil, not the Justice League of the Federation, disintegrate. 

Speaking of self-defeating evil, Pat Buchanan thinks the United States has become that, invading everyone while simultaneously letting cheap goods destroy American manufacturers and American jobs. He rails against a handful of ideas -- imperialism, the triumph of ideology, the decline of Anglo-Americans, the glorification of free trade --  but only the first two really piqued my interest. Buchanan is called a paleoconservative, and they seem to  differ from 'neoconservatives' on the key issues of invading people and free trade.  Buchanan believes we shouldn't invade people, but should have the ability to do so if need be, and we should raise protective tariffs to keep other people's stuff from invading us. We should have an export surplus, not a trade deficit.  Out of self-interest I'm given to agree, but if the other fellows take the same stance it seems we'll have  a lot of nations with trade walls up, with the ships of commerce unable to pass them. This seems a story with a sad ending. You could invade people and force them to buy your stuff (he's all for mercantilism), but invading people is out, so.....

On the subject of strife between nations, I recently read a fantastically funny Cold War fantasy about a middle-schooler named Jane whose parents flee McCarthyist witch hunts to live in London, where Jane immediately complicates their lives further by getting involved in a battle between intelligence agencies and an ancient order of chemists. But really, how often do you make friends with someone who just happens to be heir to arcane knowledge passed down through uncountable generations, knowledge that can heal the body, turn it into a bird, and even -- maybe -- squelch an atom bomb of the earth-shattering kaboom sort?  Soon enough Jane and her friends (a trio, naturally) are on the run from both the British government and the Soviets. The resulting shenanigans make for hilarious light fantasy, the only fly in the ointment being the fact that the kids are expected to read a book composed in ancient Greek and Latin by means of their grammar school Latin primer.  I can't even read Der Spiegel on my uni-Deutsch, let alone a technical journal.

So! Next week! Today being the 14th, I should be concluding a series of French reads right about now. I am not. Call it poor planning, but my interlibrary loan books haven't arrived, so today I've been reading an oddly personal survey of French history called The Outline of French History.  I'll be continuing that this week, along with (perhaps) The Body Electric, the last in the Cold Equations trilogy. After that, who knows?  Once I've paid honor to France there are a few essay collections I'm itching to read, from Wendell Berry to Bertrand Russell.  I also have a book on airplanes checked out, because airplanes are fun.  Not as much fun as trains, but fun still. Oh, and speaking of trains -- I also read Getting There, about the struggle between railroads and highways for transportation dominance. Remarks will be posted later in the week.

Day of Reckoning

Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Greed, and Ideology are Tearing America Apart
© 2009 Patrick Buchanan
309 pages

What’s wrong with America? Change, brown people, and wars, judging by Day of Reckoning.  Published in 2009, presumably to capitalize on the election, Day of Reckoning puts forth Patrick Buchanan’s vision for America: less war, stronger borders,, protectionism, and more white babies, especially the good Anglo kind.  (Nothing is said about Saxon babies, but one assumes they’re OK.)  Although marred by stupefying sketchiness at times, and more a thought-dump than a coherent argument, Reckoning makes a couple of good points about imperialism and the perils of ideology. Even so, I would have probably passed on it had I not been curious about the 'paleoconservatives'.

Pat Buchanan might not find the lack of one dominating theme tying his book together a bad thing: coherent worldviews, especially forceful ones, are his target. Ideology has ruined politics, he writes, encouraging people to interpret everything that happens through the lens of their particular system of belief, and motivating them to change everything to fulfill their dream – whether the ideology is Leninism or Free Trade. Change is bad.  This is at the heart of Buchanan’s writing. Things that cause change, like energetic politics and mobs, are to be avoided. It doesn't matter if Yugoslavians want to break up, or that Chechnyans want freedom from Russia: stability is god.  Although I found some of his grousing sympathetic (I'm still mulling over global free trade, but much prefer a United States with factories to one without),  the evidence he presents in favor of his causes isn't exactly convincing. Did the early American and British empires, when they were strong and rising, have free trade? No, Ergo, free trade destroys empires.  Isn't that a good thing? Again, Mr. Buchanan isn't consistent. He's an impassioned critic of American misadventures in nation-building and wars on terror/drugs/etc, but he protests them not out of the principle that imperialism is malevolent, but  because these badly-managed affairs have sapped American strength.  Glory, power, empire -- all good things, but they have to be managed with great efficiency. He is a grim pragmatic: whatever is working now, keep it.

Although a healthy respect for the destructive power of ideology is warranted (witness the French and Russian revolutions),  the author's revulsion for change on principle strikes me as more reactionary than thoughtful,  and his conservatism as more or less self serving: he's fine with democracy among fine white western folk, but generic eastern Europeans and Arabs? Best to let them be managed by reasonable strongmen, like that Saddam Hussein fellow who kept Iraq in such good order until our tanks mucked things up. I'd give points for brazen self-interested honestly had he been consistent there, but in cataloging America's imperial wars, he managed to completely skip the invasion of Mexico, a fact worth nothing considering that he's staunchly against immigration.

Day of Reckoning is a book that I should have left on the shelf, I think. I will say this, though: unlike so many other political works, it doesn't feature the author on the cover, a marketing tactic I find particularly obnoxious.

Crunchy Cons

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of counterculture conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican party)
© 2006  Rob Dreher
272 pages

Imagine a Republican who praised Jimmy Carter instead of dedicating a Two-Minute Hate to him. That's Rob Dreher. In an age of bitter partisan rancor, it's refreshing to encounter someone who looks beyond the asnine liberal-conservative divide and realizes that politics and values aren't as simple as they tell you on the television. Alas, values are still simple to Dreher, who knows there's still an Us and a Them; it's just that the Thems and the Us's sometimes swap sides.  The Us's are those people on the left and right who seek a meaningful life and are prompted by their inner convictions to live differently than the mainstream; the Thems are those wretched modernists, the consumerists, the cafeteria Catholics, and the individualists who defy culture and brazenly think for themselves. (You know, because thinking for yourself makes you so mainstream.)

The title alone may give you a feel for the goings-on of crunchy cons. Various sections cover Dreher's (who is the authority on who may be and who cannot be a Crunchy Con) thoughts on consumerism and technological dependence (bad), food (industrial food bad, CSAs awesome), homes (modern architecture bad -- read Jim Kunstler), and religion (orthodoxy for the win). While the thoughts as expressed can be found in other books*, Dreher's positions and criticisms are couched in the language of conservatism and traditionalism; he attacks agribusiness not on the grounds of social justice (as Eric Schlosser did in Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness), but because he wants  to promote the rugged  old values of small farmers and promote self-reliance.  Dreher doesn't attack consumerism because mindless consumption plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie, or destroys Mother Earth; his hostility stems from the fact that there's more to life than owning stuff, and the idea of our being able to buy happiness is not only unhealthy, it's impious.

Religion undergirds Dreher's approach: for him, being a 'crunchy conservative' means living sacramentally; "viewing the physical aspects of life -- the food we eat, the places we live, the world in which we move -- as being inseparable from spiritual reality."  Dreher's aim in being a crunchy con is to live a meaningful life, and for him, religion supplies that meaning. The problem with mainline conservatism is that world changes too quickly for traditionalism-for-principle's-sake to mean anything. Yesterday's raging liberals are today's  conservatives, because the status quo is a moving target. Dreher's people stand out among  other conservatives by defining what they intend to conserve, instead of being content to resist change on principle. Hence, while most conservatives are fine defending relatively recent developments like automobile oriented sprawl, Dreher is still defending the old-fashioned, traditional, human-oriented cities that have now been embraced by progressives.

There's a lot to like about Crunchy Cons, but there were a few too many flies in the soup for me. Like the authors of The Plain Reader, Dreher puts a lot of stock behind parents being the chief cultivators of their children.  And while I get the reason for concern -- I, too, would prefer not exposing children to television for numerous reasons, the values it imparts among them --  as someone who was raised in a "conservative", no-television household, I'm awfully glad I was able to view TV and other media from time to time that let me see the world beyond the prison walls of my controlled environment. I was able to compare my parent's worldview with another, and figure out what I wanted out of life. This obsession with controlling children, witnessed in both The Plain Reader and in Crunchy Cons, and displayed in the authors' hatred for public schools and media, strikes this escapee as sinister and unhealthy. Your values mean nothing if children cannot grow into adults who can make a choice. And therein lies the rub with Dreher's work, for as much as he advocates choice in other areas -- people should be free to run small farms, instead of being forced to play by agribusiness' rules; people should be freed from compulsory education, raising their children whatever way they decide; when it comes to belief, people should Learn their Place and believe what they're told. Tradition is God, and if you think you can modify it you are a degenerate loser who is responsible for the imminent destruction of humanity.

At times, Crunchy Cons was an eye-opening delight. Like The Plain Reader, it demonstrates how people can lives of purpose and value amid the noise of an entertainment-obsessed world.  The author's contempt for those who do not seek more meaning, however, and his anti-human belief in the primacy of tradition, left me feeling sick. The Plain Reader was a far better example of a conservative counterculture, and though problematic in ways, it was far gentler.

 *In Praise of Slow, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Fast Food Nation, The Geography of Nowhere, Technopoly, Amusing Ourselves to Death, To Have or to Be, American Mania, and Bowling Alone.