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In On Ordered Liberty: A
Treatise on the Free Society, Samuel Gregg offers a splendid summary of
the political philosophy sometimes called Traditionalist Conservatism. He
rescues the word liberty from a host of abuses, insisting on the phrase
“integral liberty”: the freedom to fulfill one’s human nature or potential. He
carefully balances a defense of law as educator and regulator of negative human
actions with the principle of prudence as a guide to governance. Gregg
concludes that “the case for ordered freedom continues to rest on its ability to
meet the requirements of right reason, and the inability of the various
utilitarian, consequentialist, and emotivist alternatives to do so.”[1]
In these arguments, he resembles no one more than Russell Kirk.
I have little substantive quarrel with any part of
his argument; count me as an advocate for “integral liberty,” “right reason,”
and “prudence;” label me a Traditionalist Conservative. All the same, there may
be “limits” to the applicability of this philosophy to contemporary American
life; that is, there may be new circumstances and situations which defy the
tenets of ordered liberty. To his credit, Gregg is aware of most of these
limits and acknowledges them to some degree in his text. As my contribution to
this colloquium, I will examine and expand on five of these: lack of
predictability; democracy, equality, and modern political correctness; the
cultural crisis; modern sentimentalism; and the crippling reality of the servile
state.
(1) Lack of predictability.
Like Kirk before him, Gregg ably dissects the
utilitarianism and latent “libertinism” to be found among modern libertarian
analysts such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and John Rawls. He exposes
how their understanding of liberty is, at best, of the “negative” sort: “The
less others interfere with my choices, the greater my freedom.” He shows how
the libertarian argument tends toward a form of “cheerful nihilism,” a liberty
without any teleology beyond maximizing pleasure.
All the same, modern libertarian philosophy has one
great advantage: predictability. From certain key principles –
individualism, free markets, nonintervention in the affairs of other countries,
decentralization, small government – contemporary libertarians are able to craft
policy responses to new issues with a high degree of consistency. Should the
Federal government “bail out” Chrysler and General Motors? No, these failed
corporations should be allowed to die. Should property taxes to support public
schools be raised? No, the state should not be in the education business to
begin with. Should the United States topple Sadaam Hussein in Iraq? No, he has
launched no attack on us. Should Congress abolish the U.S. Department of
Education? Yes, and also the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Transportation,
and Energy and the U.S. Post Office, as well. Should the United States have an
“Intelligence Czar”? No, it would be better to abolish most of the spy
agencies, starting with the CIA. Indeed, on just about any new issue, it is
easy to predict how the CATO Institute, as example, would respond. Whatever
shakiness is to be found in the libertarian definition of liberty, this
philosophy is remarkably adept at giving logically consistent guidance to
political affairs.
Conservative critics dismiss such predictability as
the work of “radical simplifiers,” with an “ideology as confining and as unreal
as Marxism.” As Kirk once explained, “[t]he representative libertarian of this
decade [the 1980’s] is humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled,
and dull.” And he added for good measure: the libertarian is also “repellant”
and “metaphysically mad.”[2]
It is true that advocates of ordered liberty such as
Gregg and Kirk offer up their own guiding principles. Kirk’s “Canon of
Conservatism” is exemplary:
•
The conservative believes there exists an enduring moral order.
•
The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.
•
Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of
prescription.
•
Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.
•
Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.
•
Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.
•
Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.
•
Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose
involuntary collectivism.
•
The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and
upon human passion.
•
And the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must
be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.[3]
These are splendid principles. I affirm them all.
However, they provide no clear answer to any of the policy questions offered
above. Should the car companies be bailed out? It depends. Should property
taxes be raised? It depends. Should the Department of Education be scrapped?
It depends.
The current war in Iraq exemplifies the problem. As
some self-described Kirkians have done, you could use several of the above
principles (e.g., “there exists an enduring moral order,” “permanence and
change,” “oppose involuntary collectivism,” and “prudence”) to justify the
American invasion in 2003. Yet you could also appeal to several of the Canon’s
principles (e.g. “variety,” “imperfectability,” and “prudence”) to argue
for staying out of Iraq. Notably, Kirk did oppose American entry into the First
Gulf War of 1991. Yet I am unsure how he would have responded to George W.
Bush’s war.
The essential problem may be that Kirk’s model
politician was Edmund Burke. Without question (from me, at least), this English
statesman was a wise, morally grounded, courageous figure, who could be trusted
to act with “prudence.” Unfortunately, few – if any? – contemporary American
political leaders exhibit the same qualities. Giants of the Burkean sort are
probably rare in any age. This may explain why, on any given day in Washington,
self-styled conservatives will decry the massive, and soon-to-be crippling,
federal debt and then vote another $100 billion dollars for wars in the Middle
East, to be paid for with borrowed money. In short, the Canon of “ordered
liberty” – particularly the principle of prudence – is an uncertain guide to
real, contemporary policy problems.
(2) Democracy, equality, and political correctness.
With Alexis de Tocqueville as his source, Gregg gives proper attention to the
perils of democracy and progressive equality. As the former wrote in 1835:
Democratic peoples always like equality, but there are times when their passion
for it turns to delirium.... It is no use pointing out that freedom is slipping
from their grasp while they look the other way; they are blind, or rather they
can see but one thing to covet in the whole world.[4]
Who can doubt that Americans today have gone mad over
equality? Changes in public policy to end racial inequality were long
necessary; they came in the 1950’s and ’60’s. However, the passion for equality
quickly spread to inappropriate arenas. For example, public policies carefully
calculated to protect the natural complementarity of men and women were
demolished by the gender egalitarians between 1963 and the mid-1970’s. When
reason had prevailed, the great majority of Americans – women as well as men –
affirmed the justice of the “family wage,” a system of job preferences for men
that protected motherhood, fatherhood, the needs of children, and family life in
the industrial age. Today, polls find fewer than 2 percent of Americans
supporting this principle.
More recently, delirium over equality has led to a
legal revolution in the sexual arena. Once “deviant” behaviors – homosexuality,
bisexuality, “transvestitism,” etc. – are now fully normalized, and in some ways
even favored in public life. Questions of health, family integrity, and child
well-being have been dismissed, in favor of a remarkable form of
egalitarianism. The only issue still at question is that of same-sex marriage.
Even there, the trend is toward complete equality, whatever the cost.
Gregg might also have used another passage from
Tocqueville: “I know of no country in where there is so little independence of
mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.... freedom of opinion does
not exist in America.” Tocqueville explained that democratic majorities in
America raised “formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion.” Authors
could write as they pleased so long as they stayed within those barriers.
However, “woe” to them who ventured beyond. In the American democracy, bodies
were free but souls “enslaved.” Majoritarian opinion ruled with absolute
authority:
The
smallest reproach irritates its sensibility, the slightest joke that has any
foundation in truth renders it indignant.... No writer, whatever be his
eminence, can escape paying this tribute of adulation to his fellow citizens.
The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause....
The tyranny of political correctness in our time is
clear; even Tocqueville might be surprised by our new “hate” laws. The range of
acceptable opinion in the U.S. Congress is extremely narrow: witness the
effective exclusion of outliers like Ron Paul. Rival major opinion magazines –
from The Nation to The Weekly Standard – also dance
their dance on a fairly small stage. The worst forms of thought control are
found at the universities, where dissents from the egalitarian agenda are
quickly crushed. Honest research and writing on questions such as gay parenting
are simply forbidden.
As Gregg correctly notes, ordered liberty rests on
right reason, which requires in turn minds open to natural truths. If
Tocqueville is correct, ordered liberty and democracy are incompatible. Indeed,
Kirk himself recognized this. As he explained in his principle of “variety”
from the Canon: “For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any
civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material
condition, and many sorts of inequality.” Even among self-styled contemporary
conservatives, few would probably affirm this today. The hard truth, posed here
as a question, may be: Are we too far gone down the path of egalitarian
democracy for ordered liberty even to be possible?
(3) The cultural crisis. The oddest thing about the
deterioration of family law and family life in America over the last 50 years
was the manner in which it occurred: with relatively little attention or
debate. Birth control, which separated the sexual from the procreative, became
nearly universal during the 1960’s. No-fault divorce, which eliminated the
public’s interest in marital stability, swept through the country in the late
1960’s and 1970’s. Aside from a random Catholic bishop or two, it faced little
opposition. Co-habitation, which undermined what was left of marriage, gained
legal recognition in the 1970’s and now has become almost the norm for young
adults. The concept of “illegitimacy,” designed to protect the interests of
all children by discouraging non-marital procreation, completely lost legal
standing in the 1980’s...again, without notable dissent. Only “same-sex
marriage” has stirred up strong opposition; however, the things called
“marriage” and “family” now being defended are but frail remnants of once-real
institutions.
Consider another example. As late as 1915, federal
and state laws had completely destroyed the American trade in pornography. Book
publishers and librarians conspired to suppress “bad” books, favoring instead
literature that celebrated family life, mother’s love, and duty. Even the
original Pulitzer Prizes were to go to published works exhibiting the virtues of
American life. During the 1930’s, Protestant and Catholic boards cleaned up the
new medium of film; Hollywood turned from soft-core pornography to Going
My Way.
Of course, all that changed, again visibly starting
in the 1960’s. The Sexual Revolution was swift. Pornography came out of the
back alleys and was soon on racks in the grocery stores. Hollywood freed itself
from the church film boards in 1965; explicit sexual content became the new
norm. Hugh Hefner, who would have been jailed in 1915, or even 1940, instead
had a Chicago street named in his honor in 1975. The broad shape of this
Revolution are well known. Let’s allow The Playboy Press’s own “Official
History of the Sex Revolution” to summarize the results as of 1973:
What happened to America...? Everything got devalued. Not just the dollar, but
everything in American life. The American flag was devalued. Marriage was
devalued. Virginity. Love. God. Motherhood. Mom’s Apple Pie. General
Motors has less value now, and so does the Bill of Rights. War was devalued,
and so was the air we breathe. The quality of men available to lead was
devalued. Our technology was devalued; our institutions and our customs were
devalued; the worth of an individual was devalued. All the Pleasures were
devalued. [Sex] too. Especially too.[5]
Does the author exaggerate? Alas, I think he actually
underestimates the scope of change.
My point is this: Has our cultural decay gone too
far to allow for a regime of ordered liberty? Up against Larry Flynt and
celebrity transvestites, talk of “human flourishing,” “acquiring virtue,” “moral
ecology,” and “integral liberty” all sounds a little fusty. Liberty of
appetite, or “libido,” rules virtually everywhere without challenge. Small
communities of virtue survive, some decent towns as well, perhaps the better
part of a state or two. Even in those places, though, the internet is an open
sewer into many homes. Can we plausibly reverse the moral revolution of the
last fifty years by an appeal to integral liberty? Or need we look to another
strategy?
(4) Modern sentimentality. Gregg refers to philosopher
Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book, After Virtue, noting its argument
that Western peoples have, in general, lost the ability to reflect on moral and
political issues. MacIntyre argues that words such as “will,” “reason,”
“virtue,” and “morality” are widely used, without any understanding of their
classical content and mutual relationship. He calls this new orthodoxy
“emotivism,” where people using such language “are doing no more and no other
than expressing their feelings and attitudes, disguising the expression of
preference and whim by an interpretation of their own utterance and behavior,
which confers upon it an objectivity that it does not in fact possess.”[6]
This elevation of whim and personal preference feeds
into a broader emotionalism, a modern sentimentality that is unable to
comprehend right and wrong or duty and responsibility. A dominant American
conviction is that no one should be made to feel bad about his or her life
choices. This is the only current moral imperative. In our time, there is no
one life pattern against which all choices might be measured. Heterosexual,
homosexual, or bisexual; married, single, cohabiting, or divorced; having or
rejecting children; serving one’s community or cultivating one’s
eccentricities: all are of equal worth to the contemporary mind. Sixty years
ago, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin described this mindset as a symptom of the
Sensate Culture, where logic, reason, and morality surrendered to emotion. This
orientation is poisonous to any effort to cultivate a regime of integral liberty
premised on right reason.
MacIntyre shares the Catholic faith with Gregg. It
is significant, I think, that the former’s closing advice in After Virtue
is to mount a retreat to the modern equivalent of the monk’s cave, where small
communities of virtue might survive the descending darkness.
(5) The crippling reality of the servile state. Gregg
is correct that the free market is the only economic system compatible with a
regime of integral liberty; that commercial society places limits on the state,
discourages irrationalities such as racism, and makes free choice possible; and
that the contract – “the encounter of the free will of two human beings” – is an
exemplary expression of ordered liberty. He quotes approvingly from
Tocqueville: “Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves
moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger. It is
patient, supple, and insinuating.... [I]t leads [men] to want to manage their
own affairs and teaches them how to succeed therein.” Accordingly, it
“inclines” men toward liberty.
Gregg acknowledges, as well, certain limits to the
market. He properly labels homo economicus – “the human person as the
ultimate pleasure calculator” – as something of “a sociopath.” He notes that
“the multiplication of wants” in a commercialized society brings not only
material goods but also “much disappointment” and the potential corruptions of
wealth and pleasure.[7]
All the same, he defends the market economy as the only real option.
However, what if we Americans no longer live in an
authentic market economy? One hundred years ago, Hilaire Belloc warned that
“the effect of socialist doctrine upon capitalist society is to produce a third
thing different from either of its two begetters – to wit, the Servile State.”
By Servile, Belloc meant precisely slavery, where “an unfree majority of
non-owners” works for the gain of “a free minority of owners.” In the servile
state, most persons willingly abandon aspirations to own productive property, in
exchange for a wage and government benefits tied to their status as laborers.
Belloc’s Servile State encompasses more than the welfare state; it implies a
merger of government and monopoly capital into a “corporate state” or “state
capitalism.”[8]
Belloc’s contemporary, G.K. Chesterton, expanded on
the implications of this new hybrid. Even in the 1920’s, he noted that business
leaders in England had already abandoned true capitalism. Instead of believing
in the free play of a labor market, for example, they now pleaded with workers
not to strike “in the interests of the public.” Chesterton quipped: “The only
original case for capitalism collapses entirely if we have to ask either party
to go on for the good of the public.” Instead, “ordinary conservatives are
falling back” on Communist arguments “without knowing it.”[9]
The emerging economy actually consummated the merger of capitalism and
socialism: workers abandoned their liberty for a minimum level of existence and
security; owners and employers saw their wealth protected from unwanted
competition and worker unrest. Chesterton warned that this “new sort of
Business Government will combine everything that is bad in all the plans for a
better world.... There will be nothing but a loathsome thing called Social
Service.”[10]
Have not the political-economic events of the last
nine months proved that we now reside in something approximating the Servile
State? We have surely lived through a profound revolution, the full
implications of which are not yet clear. We do know that vast, unprecedented
public sums have been turned over to the Great Banks and Merchant Houses, to
salvage their balance sheets and secure the assets of their owners (the
exception was Bear-Stearns, which was uniquely forced to pay for its sins;
perhaps the explanation lies in the predominance of old hands from rival Goldman
Sachs in key policymaking positions during the last year). Hundreds of billions
have literally vanished into select hands, with little real accounting.
Meanwhile, politically well connected manufacturers are being bailed out while
hundreds of thousands of small family businesses die, unknown and unlamented in
Washington. At the same time, other signs of Belloc’s servile state – notably,
unemployment insurance – have enjoyed a grand expansion.
Viewed globally, the same Servile State might be
seen in the oligarchic capitalism of Russia (where wealthy former KGB agents
rule over a mass sustained by the residual Soviet welfare state) and in the
strange hybrid of China, where capitalists are now invited to join the Communist
Party.
In short, and except at the local and perhaps
regional levels, we may no longer live in a true market economy. Rather, we now
have a managed economy, a servile order, where state power protects the well
connected and the masses tend toward minimum wage jobs supplemented by state
benefits. While entrepreneurs still exist, they face vast new barriers of
entry. If this is our circumstance, is there any real meaning to Gregg’s
defense of “the freedom of commercial order” for our time?
I offer these comments or challenges for
the advancement of our conversation. In every case, I dearly hope that I am
wrong, for I do yearn for a lively regime of ordered liberty. Such a system
requires leaders of wisdom and integrity, a well-grounded public morality, a
general deference to right reason, the broad ownership of productive property,
and a free economic system. All of these also seem distant or imperiled in our
time.
Endnotes:
[1] Samuel Gregg,
On Ordered Liberty: A
Treatise on the Free Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Book,
2003), 102.
[2] Russell Kirk, “A Dispassionate Assessment of
Libertarians” Address at the Heritage Foundation, April 19, 1988, 5.
[3] Russell Kirk, “Ten Conservative Principles” from
The Politics of Prudence (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books,
1993); at
http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirk/ten-principles.html (10 June
2009).
[4] Quoted in Gregg,
On Ordered Liberty,
p. 91.
[5] Allan Sherman,
The Rape of the A*P*E*
(*American *Puritan *Ethic): The Official History of the Sex Revolution
(Chicago: Playboy Press, 1973), 389.
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre,
After Virtue: A Study
in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981), 16-17; quoted in Gregg, On Ordered Liberty,
7-8.
[7] Gregg,
On Ordered Liberty, pp.
99-101.
[8] Hilaire Belloc,
The Servile State
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1977 [1911] ).
[9] G.K. Chesterton,
The Outline of Sanity
(Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2001 [1926]), 41-43, 55-56.
[10] Chesterton,
The Outline of Sanity,
173-74.
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