Why I Am Not A Conservative, Conclusion

In the end, the reasons I am not a conservative (the reasons that label doesn't apply to the views I do hold, and the reasons I don't agree with views to which the label more readily does apply) are roughly the same as those Hayek set out.

Hayek's essay of this title was published in the very same year as the Goldwater book I've been examining: 1960.  Hayek said that in our day (in this respect, he speaks even more to ours than to his own) "movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty."  A conservative and a real liberal, a defender of individual, may well be thrown together in mutual opposition to those progressive movements which may call themselves liberal.

But Hayek also said that the problem with conservatism is that it offers no alternative.  "Let-us-keep- the-good-things-we-have" is not an alternative to change, because the world will necessarily change, and the real struggle has to be over the direction of change.  Toward more liberty, or toward less?

Hayek wrote, "the tug of war between conservatives amd progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments."

That sentence echoes remarkably Goldwaters sentence, written at roughly the same time, about how the trouble with liberals is that they are in a hurry.  That is just what Hayek warned us conservatives would falsely say the trouble with "liberals" -- the folks he called progressives -- is.  The real trouble, on the other hand, is that the progressives are pulling us in the wrong direction.

I am reminded of a buddy of mine in college who was arrested for drunk driving.  That was the 1970s, and -- so long as no one was hurt -- drunk driving was not yet regarded as the horrendous offense it is nowadays taken to be.  It was under the general category stupid-college-kid offense.

Anyway, my buddy was driving along a sidewalk when he was arrested -- which made the breathalyzer test almost entirely unnecessary.  The next day, after I bailed him out, he complained to me that among the 6 or 7 charges for which the police officer had written him up, there was "speeding."  This was too much.  How could he have been speeding when he was driving on a place he shouldn't have been driving on at any rate!

I'm not, BTW, making fun of DWI offenses.  I was simply amused by my friend's indignation, and it comes back to me now because Hayek was offering in all seriousness -- and I think rightly -- the same complaint against the Goldwaters of the world.  They should not pretend that any part of the offense is speeding.  The problem is that progressives have us on a sidewalk!

This problem won't be resolved by complaints that suggest that a slower rate of speed on the sidewalk would be okay.

So: what are we to say about Goldwater's opposition to Brown v. Board?  Does it tell us anything beyond that one historic incident?   It tells us, I submit, that at a time when the progressive agenda demanded the end to Jim Crow, the conservative attitude reflexively defended Jim Crow.  Of course, many people defended Jim Crow out of self-interest.  It helped a lot of white people avoid competition in the job market,  for example.  The privileged generally abstain from challenging the grounds of their privilege.  But even those who lived in states without Jim Crow often reflexively defended the system, or opposed its opponents, out of the knee-jerk reflex Hayek understood.

It tells us, also, that when the progressives won that one, when Jim Crow was dead, conservatives in time came along, and posed as the true defenders of equality of opportunity for the Linda Browns of the world-- not because their principles had changed, but because the real objection posed by those principles had been one of velocity, and that is irrelevant given an accomplished fact.

A true liberal -- a believer in liberty, and in such forms of progress as serve liberty, consistent with the preserving of such liberty as has been attained -- would have found the root of the problem in the whole notion of mandatory public education.  Naturally, if there are government-run mandatory schools, if taxes are used to pay for them, if people under an arbitrary age are ordered to attend them absent specific state-sponsored exemptions -- then virtually everything that is done in the administration of that system will seem tyrannical to someone.  Evolution is taught or it isn't -- coercion either way.  The pledge of allegiance is made part of a regular ritual, or it isn't -- coercion either way.  The races are separated or they aren't -- coercion either way IF one understands that the system itself is coercive.

The real direction of progress (not of progressivism) would involve getting people to see market alternatives, and understand that the forces of spontaneous order will address all such dilemma to the extent they are allowed to do so. 

In some moments Goldwater seems to want to follow that rule.  Alas, though, he was all too often a conservative instead.

Why I Am Not A Conservative, continued

I tried recently to discuss some of the material in yesterday's post with a self-identified conservative.  He replied that he didn't think Goldwater's observation about liberals being "in a hurry" had anything to do with Linda Brown and the state's decision that she had to walk one mile, through a railroad switchyard, rather than attend the neighborhood school with white classmates.

My interlocutor said, further, that this should have been obvious even from the passage I quoted.  He re-pasted that quote, emphasizing the phrase "the satisfaction of economic wants".  Then he asked (this took my breath away):  "Linda going to school with her white neighbors has much of anything to do with 'economic wants,' how?"

The idea behind this question, if I understand it at all, is that Goldwater was defining liberalism as a view exclusively concerned with economic want.  Linda's wants were something other than economic, thus they didn't pertain to the liberal-versus-conservative riff he was engaged in, in that passage.

I gave the obvious answer:   people growing up together make connections with each other. They become friends, or at least get accustomed to each other, and become part of a common network. That network, in later years, has a lot to do with who gets what job. There's an old saying. "it's not what you know, it's whom you know." Segregating people from their earliest years helps ensure that the personal networks will be separate. It ensures that white people in the position to make employment decisions will think first of those whom they know best -- those they went to school with. Coercively enforced separation enforces inequality, as to economic wants. That is one reason why the expression "separate but equal" was always a lie.  That lie is what Goldwater was supporting when he called for a constitutional amendment that would undo the Brown decision. But there is a broader point here.  What the heck is an "economic want"?  A specific kind of want?  What would be a non-economic want, then?  A spiritual want?

Economics is "the study of how society allocates scarce resources and goods."

Resources are always scarce, however sacred or spiritual may be the use I want to make of them.  Land is a scarce resource, whether I want to build a factory on it, a school, or a church.  None of those three types of building is "non-economic."  Any of the three of them may be understood economically, or understood spiritually, but none of them is non-economic!  Likewise, no wants are non-economic.

Suppose the greatest want of my life is that I could pray more often.  Why can't I pray now?  Is it because my life is too hectic, and I haven't been able to set aside some time in which to focus on my gratitude to God?  If that's the problem, it is an economic problem -- I want to rearrange the use of my time, a limited resource.  How much am I willing to pay to get that extra time?  From which of my other activities am I prepared to take it.  That is the economists way of looking at such questions and, I submit, it is an essential way of looking at them.

To look down on economics, as somehow an unfitting or unspiritual study, as both Goldwater and my interlocutor seemed to do, is unserious at best and pragmatically disastrous for the society that engages in it at worse.  This may get to the heart of why I am not a conservative.

Why I Am Not A Conservative

That title served for some famous reflections by Fredrich Hayek.  It will serve for me as well.

Should I be a conservative?  After all, many in our own day who use that label for themselves happily define their creed as the distrust of government, central planning, etc.   That is valid enough for me, since I'm an anarcho-capitalist.  (Going further in the libertarian economic direction, then, than did Hayek.)

So: am I a conservative?

Fortunately, conservatism conserves enough of a memory of its own past that some of its proponents today quote classic texts, and these texts can give me a fix on what I am or am not.  For example, in the mid-20th century US one of the most prominent conservatives was Barry Goldwater, long-time Senator from Arizona, 1964 presidential candidate, author of a book entitled The Conscience of a Conservative (1960).

Let us see if he had anything to say that helps me fix ideas about what I am, or should be, or perhaps should not be.

"Conservatism," Goldwater says rather early on in that book, "therefore looks upon the enhancement of man's spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy.  Liberals, on the other hand, -- in the name of a concern for "human beings" -- regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society.  They are, moreover, in a hurry.  So that their characteristic approach is to harness society's political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel 'progress.'  In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature."

There is a good deal of confusion in those sentences, and I believe the respects in which they are confused will help me get to me goal: clarifying why I am not a conservative in any sense in which the late Senator Goldwater was.

The pause to blame liberals for being "in a hurry" is one loose thread on which we might want to tug.  After all, if somebody wants something that is wrong, then it hardly matters whether he wants it quickly or slowly. It is wrong to move quickly to do a bad thing and it is wrong to move slowly to do a bad thing.  

Someone is trying to rob a bank.  Oh, a bad thing.  And what is more, they're in a hurry! they have a getaway car all revved up out front and they're motioning to the teller to be quick about putting the loot in the bag.  Is that an aggravating factor?

Consider another set of bank robbers.  More methodical, they take days to create a tunnel beneath the bank into the vault.  They aren't in a hurry, then,  They are showing some patience in working toward their goal.  Are they the "good" bank robbers?  Are conservatives more firmly against the one set of bank robbers than the other?

I think not.  Indeed, the only relevance of this "in a hurry" qualification would arise if there were things that would be good only if accomplished slowly.

My inference is that Goldwater was doing two things in this passage.  First, he was trying to link his conservatism with the views of Edmund Burke, as expounded in the 1950's by political theorist Russell Kirk.   The rest of his (Goldwater's) book has relatively little to do with the Burke/Kirk constellation of ideas, but Goldwater wanted to bow in that direction.

Second, though, Goldwater wanted to anticipate what he would say about the civil rights struggles of black Americans later in his book.  He would say "It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision.  I believe that it is both wise and just for Negro children to attend the same schools as whites, and that to deny them this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority."

But, of course, he didn't want to desegregate in a hurry.  That would be fighting against nature.  He wanted the Justices to leave the decisions to the state legislatures, and he hoped that moral suasion would in time bring the state legislators around.

I have to wonder about the pragmatic significance of this sort of "agreement with the objectives."  After all, the 14th amendment was enacted in 1866.  It was 90 years later that the Supreme Court ordered desegregation, and even then it included the key phrase "all deliberate speed."  The word "deliberate"  (i.e. you in the states and towns can think about this and make sure you do it right) was an invitation to further foot dragging -- an invitation that was immediately accepted.

So 90 years plus is "in a hurry"?  

But let us return to the passage in the introduction, the passage I italicized above. Goldwater is unhappy that liberals "regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission in society."  What does that mean?

Can "wants" be divided into economic and non-economic "wants"?  Or are all wants economic wants?  I hope to take things up from this point tomorrow.