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

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.

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall has been studying chimpanzees for fifty years now, and The Wall Street Journal this weekend has published an extensive essay in which she reflects on this golden anniversary of her life's work.

As is much of her work, this essay is a rebuke to human chauvanism. Goodall atributes to the chimps such a "human" trait as a sense of wonder, or what one might call in recognition of the writings of Edmund Burke, a sense of the sublime.

After writing of the elaborate rituals of chimpanzees in the magnificent presence of the waterfall in Kakombe Valley, "swaying thythmically from foot to foot, hurling huge rocks, then sitting and watching the water as it falls," she says, "Surely these displays are triggered by a sense of wonder."

Here's the complete essay.

Health Care and the Polls

There is a lot of talk about where public sentiment stands, as measured by various polls.

The fact of the matter seems to be that only a sliver of "the public" is paying close attention. Outside that sliver, reactions are to the presence or absence of certain buzzwords. So non-substantive changes in the way questions are worded have a huge impact on poll results.

Here's a detailed analysis of the issue, that concludes that the best thing to do is to ignore the polls and talk about the issue.

Of course, I done just the opposite in this post. Still, call it a brief discussion of a meta-issue, of whether the polls are a non-issue.

After all, why poll at all? Because it gets results more genuine than representatives will get by going to town meetings or listening to those who bother to contact them, results less subject to astro-turfing?

Perhaps. But then again, they could listen chiefly to those who seem to have studied the subject and have something to say ... which will be a smaller number than those who bother to contact them.

And then they could make up their own mind about what is the best for the public, use their own judgment, and act accordingly.

As Edmind Burke told his constituents at Bristol, they should not expect their representative in Parliament to unquestioningly follow their will (however polled, we might add): his "unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

Fourth Estate

One sometimes hears the phrase "Fourth Estate" employed casually as a synonym for "the press."

Or,sometimes not. In one of the bulletin boards where I go to vent, a conservative fellow expressed his unhappiness that the "Third Estate" had sided with Obama. Evidently he, too, meant "the press," tried to seem elegant, and ended up saying something very much at odds with what he meant.

Both terms derive their continued significance from 18th century French history. When Louis XVI called the "Estates General" together to address the budget crisis in May 1789, his expectation was that they would meet and deliberate separately. The first estate was the clergy, the second the nobility, the third the lower classes (in practice, the most well-off of the non-nobles, the bourgeoisie).

Once convened, though, things went badly awry for Louis, within two months the Third Estate was calling itself the Constituent Assembly and deliberately ignoring the other two -- and a mob supportive of that revolutionary decision was heading for the Bastille.

Presumably he didn't mean to concede that the "3d estate" is on Obama's side. But that would mean that Obama is playing the part of who ... Marat? Who is Louis XVI this time around?

As to the 4th estate, the usual story is that years after the French Revolution, British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, giving a speech in the House of Commons, looked up at the gallery and saw reporters busy scribbling down his words. he said: "Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than the other three."

In our own day of blogger and citizen journalist, the "Fourth," to the extent it ever had a distinctive social/institutional identity, may be sinking back into the generality of the 3d. We can say "yippee!" or we can say "alas," since the two reactions are equally futile given the fact.