Commentary on Conservatism

I have been absent for quite sometime. I cannot say that that will be remedied at this point, but know that I start school in the fall, and somehow, I take out whatever thoughts are left over from classes and deposit them here. Why? Who knows. But I do feel better later.

Anyway, so the thoughts today run along the lines of conservatism.

For starters, I found an amusing and cute post by a blogger on the Washington Post site.

Whiny? Crazy? You Just Might Be A Conservative (Posted 03/21/2006)

You know that one loud, whiny kid in the supermarket yesterday? He's probably the future George W. Bush, according to a Toronto Star article about a study from the Journal of Research Into Personality.

"Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative," says the article. "At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals."

This story goes on to mention another study by John T. Jost of Stanford, one in 2003 that was roundly mocked by conservatives for lumping the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan and Limbaugh together as socially warped right-wingers. (Much of the mocking turned to anger when it was discovered that $1.2 million in taxpayer dollars helped pay for the study.) Whiny, socially warped, borderline insane - if that's true of conservative kids, how do red states ever find good public school teachers?

Of course, we should never question social psychologists in their line of work. They are, after all, professionals. So the idea that perhaps a small number of kids from the Berkeley area may not be a truly representative slice of the American population is just silly. Professor Jack Block, the author of the study, defends his work by explaining to the Star that "within his sample.... the results hold." Surely, his statistics professor is very proud.

Meanwhile, as the academy tells us that social ineptness, insanity, and insecurity can all be motivations for conservatism, the MSM doesn't want us to forget the other side of the scale: hence, Ruth Marcus's column in today's Washington Post. Marcus maintains that the real problem with George W. Bush is that he's too focused on being a manly man's man.

Apparently, this violent testosterone-fueled psychological imperitive - not a coherent and just strategy for defending America in response to the first major attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor - is the real reason for our war in Iraq. Oh, and Condi Rice? Don't worry, women can have manly envy, too. Clearly, Maggie Thatcher did.

If these columnists and scientists are to be believed, then President Bush is just a real-life version of Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper - blustering, impotent and murmuring about conspiracies to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, just another spineless conservative wussyboy who has to prove he's a big brave man in cowboy boots.
This is ridiculous and wrong. It's always better to just let kids be kids and keep the psychologists out of the way - to follow the dictum of an aging hippie couple I know who, despite their pacifist beliefs, still let their boys run around playing army with sticks made into guns. After all, someone has to defend America.

In closing, I leave you with the words of Russell Kirk, who certainly summed up my thoughts on the conservative/libertarian issues. [FYI, in my book of political who's who's, Russell Kirk and Henry Kissinger are pretty close in the top of that list.]

Order, Justice, and Freedom

Yet the fact remains that this conservative movement does not march in lockstep. In one respect, this lack of unanimity is a virtue: it means that conservatives are no ideologues; they believe in diversity and individuality. Utopianism, oddity, and extreme positions, nevertheless, are not conservative virtues. Those failings are easily discerned in various aspects and factions of the growing drift rather clumsily labelled "conservative." Permit me to touch briefly upon some of these excesses.

One of them is the continuing obsession, particularly among some people well endowed with the goods of fortune, with economics. I do not mean to denigrate the Dismal Science. A good economic system has produced America's prosperity; and, still more important, it is closely connected with America's private liberty. Those "civil libertarians" who somehow fancy that we can reconcile an extreme of personal freedom with a servile and directed economy simply do not understand the great mysterious incorporation of the human race. And, as Samuel Johnson put it, a man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money.

But economic activity is no more the whole of the civil social order than wealth is the sole source of happiness. Economic success is a byproduct, not the source, of America's success as a society. The sort of ignorant understanding to which I refer may be illustrated by one of the inimitable anecdotes of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. On one occasion, that compulsive traveller was addressing a gathering of Catholic businessmen in Detroit. At the conclusion of his remarks, a gentleman in the audience inquired, "Doc, do you know what history is?"

"Why, no," Kuehnelt-Leddihn replied. "Can you instruct me?"

"Sure. History is just economics, that's all just economics."

In the mind's eye, one may see the ironic Kuehnelt-Leddihn replying: "Indeed? Tell me, sir, are you a Catholic?"

"Sure. I just made a novena."

"What a pity, sir, what a pity."

"Why is it a pity I'm a Catholic?"-this belligerently.

"Because, sir, if you were not a Catholic, you might be made a professor at the Marx-Lenin Institute."

To embrace Marxist materialism and determinism in the name of another abstraction called "capitalism" is to deliver up one's self bound to the foe. Conservatives do defend a free economy; they defend it, however, as bound up with a complex social structure of order and justice and freedom, founded upon an understanding of man as a moral being. To reduce ourselves to economic determinists offering sacrifices to the great god Mammon is to ruin the prospects of all of us.

Sometimes allied with this economic obsession is the mode of belief which calls itself "libertarian." I willingly concede that there exist some very sensible and honorable men and women who allow themselves to be tagged with that label. Both F.A. Hayek and your servant reject the term; and we have our reasons, as men who have learnt considerable from Burke and Tocqueville. Those reasons, as applied to current controversies, have been sufficiently detailed recently in National Review by Ernest van den Haag.

Let me say here only a few words by way of general principle. Any good society is endowed with order and justice and freedom. Of these, as Sir Richard Livingstone wrote, order has primacy: for without tolerable order existing, neither justice nor freedom can exist. To try to exalt an abstract "liberty" to a single solitary absolute, as John Stuart Mill attempted, is to undermine order and justice-and, in a short space, to undo freedom itself, the real prescriptive freedom of our civil social order. "License they mean, when they cry liberty," in Milton's phrase.

John Adams and John Taylor of Caroline carried on a correspondence about the nature of liberty. Liberty as an abstraction, Adams said in substance, is either meaningless or baneful: there is the liberty of the wolf, and there is the very different liberty of the civilized human being. We owe our American freedoms to a well-functioning civil social order that requires duties as well as liberties for its survival.

I find it grimly amusing to behold extreme "libertarians," who proclaim that they would abolish taxes, military defense, and all constraints upon impulse, obtaining massive subsidies from people whose own great affluence has been made possible only by the good laws and superior constitutions of these United States-and by our armies and navies that keep in check the enemies of our order and justice and freedom. There is no freedom in anarchy, even if we call anarchism "libertarianism." If one demands unlimited liberty, as in the French Revolution, one ends with unlimited despotism. "Men of intemperate mind never can be free," Burke tells us. "Their passions forge their fetters."

Some momentary encounters become images that fix our future thought. When a college freshman, debating in Indianapolis, I happened to stroll into the great railroad station in that city, with my freshman colleagues; and we watched from high above the intricate shuttling of long trains in and out of the station. Because my father was a railroad engineman, I understood what care, precision, and complex scheduling necessarily were involved below. The functioning of a railway station, like the functioning of the American economic apparatus generally, like the functioning of the whole American society, was dependent upon a wondrously high degree of duty, discipline, and complex cooperation. I pointed out to my companions that ineluctable truth. The libertarians still have not grasped that point. It was well for the safety enjoyed by railway passengers that my father and other railwaymen were not libertarians: they did not permit their private interests, such as a glass of beer, to conflict with their duties. Yet those railwaymen were freemen, not ashamed of the American constitution.

Some of the people who style themselves libertarians, I repeat, in fact do subscribe to the body of common beliefs I mentioned earlier. What's in a name? Actually, they remain conservative enough. But as for those doctrinaire libertarians who stand ready to sweep away government and the very moral order why, that way lies madness. If the American public is given the impression that these fantastic dogmas represent American conservatism, then everything we have gained over the past three decades may be lost. The American people are not about to submit themselves to the utopianism of a tiny band of chirping sectaries, whose prophet (even though they may not have much direct acquaintance with his works) was ~ean Jacques Rousseau.

If they are to lead this country, conservatives must appear to be, and in fact must be, imaginative but reasonable people who do not claim that they will turn the world upside down. Genuine conservatives know that man and society are not perfectible; they are realistically aware that Utopia-including the dream-paradise of absolute, unfettered liberty to act just as the individual pleases-means literally Nowhere. It is one of the conservative's principal functions to remind mankind that politics is the art of the possible.