Democracy and Capitalism in Adam Smith’s Mutual Sympathy and Sociability

 Commentary  No Responses »
Aug 152012
 

I continue to slowly wend my way through Adam Smith, both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, with the help of James R. Otteson (Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life) and Ryan Patrick Hanley (Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue). I’m finding it fascinating that Adam Smith’s views on human psychology, as it impacts morality, seem so modern. About a quarter of the way through his book, Otteson summarizes Smith’s psychology of morality. There are two features which describe Smith’s views, the notion of mutual sympathy; and sociability, the idea that humans are made to live in society.

We desire mutual sympathy, as Smith puts in the TMS (13); “nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary.” Through this mutual sympathy, we attempt to win praise and avoid blame; but more importantly, Smith believes, we seek to be praiseworthy and blameless. “Nature, accordingly, has endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men.” (TMS, 117) If we want to be what we approve of in other men, it is not that other men can appear praiseworthy even when they are not; it is that we want to be praiseworthy like them.

Smith also thinks that the characteristic of sociability is innate in human nature. We are born dependent on others to survive, but more importantly, we have a psychological need to be a part of community. It is in society that we are able to exercise of sense of mutual sympathy; we need to be seen by others as praiseworthy and blameless to be psychologically whole. Both the need for mutual sympathy, and the innate characteristic of sociability, lead to the notion of the impartial spectator, where we are able to judge ourselves by recognizing how others judge us, just as we see them doing with us.

Otteson makes one other point about Smith’s views in this summary. He notes that Smith believes that in spite of mutual sympathy and sociability, we care more for ourselves than for others, and more for those closest to us than for those most remote. Man is driven by self-interest, as well as by sociability. Recognizing that others also are driven by self-interest leads to the impartial spectator procedure, since we realize we need to temper our own sentiments so that they are seen as praiseworthy to others, and to give us the grounds to better understand our fellows.

I also continue to listen to the lectures on Political and Economic Thought by Professor Charles Anderson. He describes Rousseau’s “general will” (la volonté générale) as being the means by which individuals can give up some measure of autonomy by joining with a group on a particular issue while still retaining their freedom of thought and action by adopting the group’s opinion and feeling it as their own.

Otteson, noted above, titles his book as the marketplace of life, and uses this idea of humans interacting in the marketplace to describe both the development of our morals and sensibilities as well as our economic life. Prof. Anderson’s describes Smith’s views of individuals creating contracts with each other, but maintaining individual freedom because the contracts are freely chosen. It strikes me as being very close to Rousseau’s general will, individuals giving over some measure of freedom by binding themselves to a contract, but maintaining freedom because they freely choose to do so.

According to Prof. Anderson, the theory of capitalism begins with Adam Smith, specifically with the Wealth of Nations. The year was 1776. We often conflate democracy with capitalism, and our modern political discourse often assumes that the role of the state is to further capitalistic freedom. But the theory of capitalism and Thomas Jefferson’s penning of the Declaration of Independence occurred in the same year; Jefferson could not have been thinking capitalism when describing government and the rights of individuals. Nor can one expect the Constitution to be grounded on a theory of capitalism, so soon after The Wealth of Nations.

Still, democracy feels like the marketplace; individuals come together, interact, form unions, and create government. Prof Anderson notes that individuals coming together in the marketplace gives form to community, society, and government without having to predefine it. Similarly, democracy does not guarantee that we will do the right thing, or the best thing. It is, in a sense, neutral; democracy does not tell us what we ought to do, but rather merely provides the marketplace out of which our politics grows.

Education: Training, or Cultivating?

 Commentary  No Responses »
Jul 112012
 

Dr. David Safir, a pediatrician, believes that spanking your children can be an effective tool for parents. In To spank or not to spank, where do you draw the line?, Sari Zeidler examines the benefits and drawbacks of physical punishment. Dr. Safir insists that children need to learn that society has rules of conduct and consequences for bad behavior. ”Of all the crimes that children commit, contempt for authority is the biggest one. It leads to nothing but trouble in a child’s life,” he contends.

The Republican Party of Texas has a new political platform in which they reject the teaching of critical thinking in the schools. Such programs “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” According to Danny Weil, writing in Texas GOP Declares: “No More Teaching of ‘Critical Thinking Skills’ in Texas Public Schools”, there is a long tradition of opposing critical thinking in the schools going back to William Bagley and his book Classroom Management, published in 1907, where he defines the purpose of education as “slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fit for the life of civilized society.”

Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind, YourMorals.org) has a schema for classifying the traits which define conservatives and liberals. Conservatives favor loyalty, authority, and sanctity; liberals favor compassion and fairness. Liberals are more open to new ideas, while conservatives prefer the well-known, and like change to come only gradually. Conservatism or liberalism is part of our psychological makeup, part of our genetic heritage, part of what evolution made us.

For conservatives, education is more like training. We know what kind of individuals will do best in our society and which we want in our society, and the purpose of education is to form them into those individuals. Dr. Safir is a conservative. He has tremendous respect for society as it is constructed, and believes that we need to spank out the contempt for authority which children, at least these days, are wont to hold. The Texas GOP is conservative; it believes the purpose of education is to reinforce the fixed beliefs we want as part of our social order, and to teach children to obey authority.

For liberals, education is more like cultivating, providing the ground in which children grow. In liberal education, we don’t know how the individuals will turn out; we expose them to new ideas and critical thinking, and let them flower in their own unique ways.

A more traditional conservatism believes there is a natural law which does and should guide us and our society, and that our faculties of reason are sufficient to approach an understanding of that natural law. A more traditional Christianity also believes that individuals can use reason to approach an understanding of God. Danny Weil sees in the view of education being espoused by the Texas GOP and their political platform, and the currents of which it is a part, as being insidious. In his view, this movement is not trying to train students to use reason to understand the natural law, a conservative project in itself; rather, it is trying to undermine reasoning so that the powerful can maintain control of society for their own means. If Weil is not overdoing it in his criticism, what he critiques is not conservatism, but something tending toward tyranny.

I was in high school in the years around 1970, the tail end of the radical hey day. I remember thinking it rather quaint when people talked of education as training citizens for participation in our democratic society. Now, like Jonathan Haidt’s move from unabashed liberalism to a more centrist position, I find myself seeking balance between what is current, and what is potential. We do need to train students to be good citizens, and be capable of participating in our society; we also need to provide critical thinking so students can fulfill their potential in ways we may not imagine, and be capable of managing the change which is inevitable.

William Saletan, commenting on Haidt’s The Righteous Mind in Why Won’t They Listen, watches Haidt try to navigate between his views that our politics and our morals are intuitive and unreflective, and his irresistible need to call on our capacity for reason to help us navigate the shoals of life. We are preformed, as the conservatives might argue; but we also have reason, which needs cultivating so that we can rise up to the challenges which face us in an ever-changing world.

The Obamacare Ruling, Natural Law, and Change

 Commentary  No Responses »
Jul 012012
 

I continue to listen to Charles Anderson’s lectures on Political, Economic, and Social Thought. We just finished Plato and have started Aristotle. Professor Anderson made the point that the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers tried to deal with and come to terms with the notion of change. According to Anderson, the Greeks appreciated stability and were unnerved at the notion that the only constant in life is change. In discussing Plato, he notes that the theory of the forms is a way for Plato to reestablish stability in a changing world–the reality behind the things in our world is stable and unchanging.

My Mind&Politics colleague Archibald Grea, in his inimitable way, critiques Stephen Presser’s account of the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling (Liberty lost? The Supreme Court punts). I think Grea misses the point, however. Presser insists that, in the tradition of the English legal system, “ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that the Constitution exists to reign in arbitrary power.” Presser, it seems to me, channels Plato. He is extremely uncomfortable with the notion of arbitrariness in the unfolding of human society; which is much akin to the Greek discomfort with the idea that all is changing. As Plato posits that the unchanging forms provide the necessary stability to our world, so Presser posits that the unchanging Constitution provides stability to our society.

Plato believed that in theory the best society would be that ruled by the Philosopher-King, who truly understood justice. But Plato realizes two things; one, that there can be no Philosopher-King, since absolute truth is beyond the ability of men; and two, that the people would not understand and accept a Philosopher-King, and would rise up to kill him. Plato then turns to The Republic, where the Guardians are educated to come closer to understanding truth and justice, but this, too, is unsatisfactory. In his later writings, particularly The Laws, Plato acquiesces to human imperfection and describes the laws, which is a best-effort attempt to put a restraint on human society.

It is interesting to note that the framing of the Constitution, and the nation, followed very much from this understanding that humans have a hard time governing themselves, and need a framework which allows for balance between destabilizing tendencies. But more interesting, I think, is that this need for something to counteract relentless change and arbitrariness seems visceral to much of humanity.

Victoria Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted Kennedy, recounted in an interview with George Stephanopoulos that “This health care reform was the cause of my husband’s life. He believed that it was a moral issue, that it defined the character of who we were as a society, who we were as a country, and that decent quality, affordable health care should be fundamental right and not a privilege.” (See Paul Ryan: Repeal health law because rights come from God.)

In rebuttal, Paul Ryan added, “What Ms. Kennedy and others were saying is that this is a new government-granted right. We disagree with the notion that our rights come from government, that the government can now grant us and define our rights. Those are ours, they come from nature and God, according to the Declaration of Independence — a huge difference in philosophy.” What I find telling is Rep. Ryan’s silence on the Constitution, as if to say that the Constitution, granting the Supreme Court the right to make decisions like these based on principles like that of taxation written in the Constitution, has failed us, and we must now turn to something more fundamental, nature and God, with a word thrown in that these are the foundations of our country as stated in the Declaration of Independence. If a government can’t grant and define our rights, can it even know what our rights are? And if not, how do we govern ourselves?

These philosophic arguments and psychological needs point back to that more fundamental question, “Who gets to decide how we structure our lives, our society, and our nation?” Is it our contemporary selves, acting in accordance with our beliefs, experiences, and traditions; or must we adhere to natural law and those who have come before us? If the latter, even Plato recognized the problem; the Philosopher-King who can make those judgements does not exist and would not be allowed to rule. Who are, then, the proper group of people who can determine from nature and God what rights citizens have?

Evolutionary Group Selection and the Risks of Climate Change

 Commentary  No Responses »
Jun 022012
 

Nature has a new article about research from Yale’s Dan Kahan on how we choose to accept or deny climate change arguments less on our scientific literacy and more on the beliefs of those with whom we share close ties (The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks). The study tests what it calls SCT, for “science comprehension thesis”. SCT predicts that those who score higher on numeracy, the ability to make use of quantitative information, will exhibit more concern for the seriousness of climate change than those who don’t. These predictions, however, are unsupported. The study then applies CCT, or cultural cognition thesis, which posits that “individuals form perceptions of societal risks that cohere with values characteristic of groups with which they identify.” The study describes the two groups that this application of CCT applies to, hierarchical individualists who will be less concerned with climate change risks and egalitarian communitarians who will be more concerned. The data support this thesis.

I find it interesting that the study notes that we take on the views of the groups with which we identify, and then asserts that views of climate change risks depend on whether we are hierarchical individualists or egalitarian communitarians, as if these are the two main groups we can divide individuals into, and that individuals organize into groups around these, and not other, behaviors or characteristics. Another interesting thing is what this division contributes to our understanding of the political mind. I have been reading, and commenting on, Jonathan Haidt’s six moral foundations, around which he distinguishes liberals from conservatives. With this climate change study and CCT we add another node to the calculation, that which has hierarchical individualists and egalitarian communitarians at each end of the node. The description that the study’s authors and CCT give to hierarchical individualists also has a lot in common with George Lakoff’s take on conservatism, which I have also written about in earlier columns. As this column’s investigation into the Political Mind continues, it will have to explore how these, and other approaches, cohere or contradict, in laying out a fuller understanding of what goes into our political beliefs.

The study also dovetails nicely with two other books I am currently reading, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind; and somewhat peripherally, Murray Rothbard’s Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. I’m on Chapter 11, Mercantilism and Freedom, where Professor Rothbard comes down hard on “quantophrenia” when discussing the influences of Bacon, Petty, and Devenant. The Austrian School of Economics, of which Rothbard is an adherent, eschews the heavy reliance on metrics and modeling in economics, and prefers to apply reason to human economic activity. The climate change study that indicated how little humans are persuaded by data seems to complement well with the Austrian school belief that economic models and statistical methods, in a word “data”, are insufficient to understand human economic thought and activity. It would be interesting to see if our resistance to data correlates with an instinct that causes us to understand either that data alone is not enough to understand our world, or that we cannot comprehend the data well enough to trust our analyses, or perhaps that we comprehend the data, but we do it intuitively. Gail Collins writes in Mr. Edwards and the Shrimp that on the surface John Edwards was an attractive candidate–in other words, the data emanating from John Edwards was attractive–but that “Voters’ gut instincts are generally pretty good,” and they rejected him; in other words, we understand more than the data shows.

I’m about halfway through Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, where he talks about group selection. In evolution, through individual selection, individuals adapt and evolve through natural selection. In group selection, groups can also evolve and adapt through natural selection. Haidt notes that in the 1970′s, group selection was heresy, and bringing up the subject is still able to “start a brawl at an evolution conference” (Individual versus Group in Natural Selection.) But group selection, rebranded as multilevel selection, is becoming more accepted, due to the work of E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson. Haidt presents ideas and evidence in favor of group selection; he talks about humans having crossed a threshold to become ultrasocial, which few other animals, even social animals which live in groups, have crossed. (Among those which have crossed are a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips and beetles, along with wasps, bees, ants, and termites.) A key feature among ultrasocial creatures is the need to defend a shared nest. As humans, our territoriality, lengthy childhood requiring care and protection, and living under threat from neighboring groups, gave us the background for the leap to ultrasociality. Haidt references Tomasello on shared intentionality, the ability of small groups of humans to cooperate by having a shared mental representation of a group task at hand, and then adjusting our own actions in concert with the actions of others in the group to achieve our goal. Surveying the data, Haidt hyothesizes that shared intentionality began with Homo heidelbergensis around 600-700,000 years ago; ultrasociality developed and must have been in place before humans wandered out of Africa 50,000 years ago.

Haidt’s views on reason and intuition, consistent with those from Kahneman mentioned in the Nature article on climate change, where we act based on intuition, and use reason mostly to persuade others; and his views on the importance of groupishness in humans, both reinforce the conclusions in the Nature article. We maintain beliefs that are consistent with our group, so as to not to look bad to the other members of our group, and that extends to our beliefs on the risks of climate change; then, rather than using reason to analyze the data on climate change in order to come to a conclusion, we use reason to reinforce our prior beliefs.

More on Three-Dimensional Conservatism

 Commentary  No Responses »
May 272012
 

E. J. Dionne, in Conservatives used to care about community. What happened?, comments on several divergent elements in conservative thought and practice. He begins by lamenting that conservative Republicans “have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual.” This description of conservatism follows closely with what Patrick Allitt, in the course I’ve written about earlier, refers to as traditional conservatism, in the mold of Russell Kirk and going back to Edmund Burke. Dionne further laments that conservatives no longer care about community, instead concentrating on ‘the heroic and disconnected individual — or the “job creator.”‘ This is more closely allied with the libertarian strand of conservatism.

Professor Allitt’s course discussed various strands of conservative thought and practice; what stands out in American conservatism are three strands, traditional conservatism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism. While we tend to think of conservatism/liberalism on a continuum, this three-fold division of conservative thought can be more productively thought of as intersecting planes or areas, making it three-dimensional conservatism.

I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Righteous Mind. He, too, imagines individuals in a single-dimension as being more or less conservative, more or less liberal. But he uses his six moral foundations to plot a graph of this movement from liberalism to conservatism, or conservatism to liberalism. Those six foundations are:

  • care/harm
  • fairness/cheating
  • liberty/oppression
  • loyalty/betrayal
  • authority/subversion
  • sanctity/degradation

Moral responses of liberals are heavily weighted toward the care, fairness, and liberty foundations, while conservatives respond with a more even mix of all six.

When I saw the graph, I was struck by the sense that it was pigeon-holing individuals onto this single dimension, more or less conservative or liberal. But since the graph used the six moral foundations to plot this information, it seemed more meaningful to think of our moral/political belief system in many dimensions. It seems that each foundation is a line, or a plane, or even an area, which intersect and diverge from each other in various ways in a three-dimensional space, giving us three-dimensional conservatism, or liberalism, or moral foundations.

With E.J. Dionne we have an analysis of conservatism from the point of view of contemporary political commentary; with Patrick Allitt the same from the point of view of historical investigation and analysis; and with Jonathan Haidt, from the point of view of the moral bases of conservative/liberal thought. I hope I can, with continued investigation, come up with a better multi-dimensional model of conservative/liberal/political thought which can accommodate the nuances in all of these positions, but also their affinities with each other.

Austrian Economics: Scholasticism, Calvinism, and an Arbitrary God

 Commentary  No Responses »
May 202012
 

I’ve been enjoying listening to a reading of Murray Rothbart’s Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. I’m even finding the slow monotone of the the reader quite a pleasure. Rothbart is a contemporary adherent of the Austrian School of Economics; this book examines the development of economic thought in the context of philosophy, theology, and history from the Greeks down to Adam Smith (I’m about halfway, in the 13th to 16th centuries.)

The Austrian school proper was founded by Carl Menger, with Principles of Economics, published in 1871. His work resurrected the Scholastic-French approach to economics, an approach which can be traced back to fifteenth century Scholastic followers of St. Thomas Aquinas at the University of Salamanca in Spain.From these Scholastics came the recognition of the existence of economic law and many of the basic features of economic activity, including supply and demand, inflation, and the subjective nature of economic value. They were (relatively) pro-market, in favor on individual economic freedom to trade and make contracts and opposed to taxes, price controls, and regulations which inhibited enterprise.1

There have been a few particular ideas which stand out in the course so far. Rothbart compares his Austrian school views on economy with those in the tradition of Adam Smith by noting that the school of economic thought he follows originated and established itself in Catholic countries. In Catholicism, he maintains, consumption is the goal of production, and consumer utility and enjoyment in moderation are valuable, all of which leads to a subjective utility theory of economics, that the value of an item is determined by its value to an individual consumer. Adam Smith, on the other hand, from a Calvinist country, with its stern emphasis that hard work is a great good in itself and consumer enjoyment merely a necessary evil, proposed the labor theory of value, wherein the value of an object is tied up in the amount of labor that went into its production. This insight into how the religious traditions can influence economic thought in fundamental ways, is quite engaging, and more so when we imagine applying it to other areas of thought.

Rothbart makes a second interesting point when he contrasts Scholasticism with Calvinism in the way they view God, and in the consequences of those views. For Scholastics, God can be approached and apprehended by all of man’s faculties, not only faith, but also reason and the senses. There is a natural law which governs our world, which can be discovered by reason and which we can use to guide our actions. Calvin, on the under hand, saw man as too depraved to have reason capable of approaching God in this same way. God was outside of man’s faculties; for men, then, God is unknowable and seemingly arbitrary. Nor can reason apprehend natural law, and this diminishes its value. Rothbart mentions a few consequences of this. Calvinists, unable to use reason to guide their lives, either had to rely on instructions, which they found in a strict adherence to the Bible; or had to rely on revelation. Rothbart details some of the almost humorous, if tragic, consequences which followed the revelations of certain individuals and their adherents. A second consequence is that the early Calvinists (and Lutherans) supported the absolutism of the state and the mingling of state and religion.

Rothbart also makes what I thought was a rather provocative critique of the scientific method. After decrying the split between reason and empiricism in later European thought, with Descartes and the continental rationalists practicing reason divorced from empiricism; and English empiricists concentrating on empirical facts without applying reason; Rothbart maintains that modern scientific method is hobbled by emphasizing empiricism without man’s reasoning faculties. I wonder what more a scientific method informed by reason might accomplish.

My understanding of Austrian (and classical, Adam Smithian) economics is thin, but I suspect that my political leanings lean away from the direction of the Austrian school. Nonetheless, Rothbart uses reason to interpret facts about economics, bringing in history, theology, and politics to bear on the investigation in a manner much as I hope to do in examining and thinking about the political mind.

1 What is Austrian Economics?

Also, Austrian School of Economics, Austrian School of Economics, Austrian School, and The Austrian School of Economics

Society on a Slippery Slope

 Commentary  No Responses »
May 142012
 

Adam Smith describes society, both economic and social/moral, as developing from webs of human interactions. We build our societies from the bottom up by virtue of our unscripted person-to-person interactions. Natural law, on the other hand, defines society in a more top-down fashion. Society does, and should, follow the dictates of a natural law which stands outside of the members of the society.

Richard Thaler, in Slippery-Slope Logic, Applied to Health Care, in Sunday’s New York Times, lambastes slippery-slope logic in general, and how it was applied to the health care debate in particular by the justices of the Supreme Court. Referring to Justice Scalia’s remark that, “Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli,” Thaler notes, “The irony is that Justices Roberts and Scalia are warning of a risk that they and their colleagues have the power to prevent.”

My guess is that just as the natural law is regarded as an outside force that does and should guide how we construct our society, so frequent citation of the slippery slope in argumentation is based on a sense that there is an outside force which does and will govern how our lives unfold. Thaler’s reference to the power of the justices to guide society is a counterbalance to that. We, the citizens of the society, in our myriad interactions with each other, form our society and guide our lives.

This notion of a slippery slope which Thaler rejects fits in well with my previous attempts at a taxonomy of the political mind. As we go about designing and directing our society, who’s advice do we take, that of the wise persons who have gone on before us and whose wisdom has stood the test of time; or ourselves and our neighbors, who are in the midst of this life and society, and should best know its features and our desires?

Congress will not pass a law which requires the eating of broccoli; and if they did, in the reverse of Prohibition, people would refuse to eat it anyway. Maybe that’s the natural law; or maybe it’s just that humans have some sense, and some ability to regulate themselves.

Conservatism in Three Dimensions

 Commentary  No Responses »
May 022012
 

As I get to the end of Patrick Allitt’s lectures on The Conservative Tradition, he summarizes the different strands of conservatism. While our political discussion these days seems to take place in a two-dimensional world, more or less conservative, more or less liberal, I’m struck at the three dimensional world of conservatism that Professor Allitt lays out.

As a prologue, perhaps, Professor Allitt returns to the notion that conservatives believe in stability, and gradual change, a notion which traces its roots back to Edmund Burke. But Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, emphasizes the revolutionary spirit at the core of conservatism, as in the Reagan Revolution. The main difference between these two forces, one quiet, the other forceful, depends on whether conservatives feel they are in power and in control of their society. In Burke’s time, conservatives were in power, and his notion was to conserve; Reaganites, by contrast, and today’s Tea Partiers, sense a society out of their control, and want to take the nation back in a way that requires a bit of the revolutionary spirit.

Professor Allitt, a historian analyzing people and events empirically, categorizes conservatives into Paleoconservatives (Traditionalists), Neoconservatives, Theoconservatives, and Libertarians. They do not all get along! But it is the several poles that make conservatism three dimensional.

One pole is has the modesty of the Traditionalists at one end and the vigor of the Neoconservatives at the other. The Traditionalists want small, modest government; the Neoconservatives a government strong enough to project itself in the world. The concern of the Traditionalists is that a government forceful in foreign affairs will be so large and complex that it can’t help but be forceful in domestic affairs, as well.

But the Traditionalists and the Neoconservatives tend to share in a strong sense of group identity; for the Neoconservatives it is a more abstract notion of an America that needs to wield its power in foreign affairs in order to protect itself from its enemies, and extend its influence into the world. Traditionalists tend to see a relatively homogeneous society which must be kept so. This leads to opposition to immigration, and opposition to a secularism which believes in diversity. The other end of this pole might be the Libertarians, focusing on the freedom of individuals rather than the cohesiveness of the group.

Another, related pole has virtue at one end and individual liberty at the other. The Traditionalists, and particularly its religious conservative strand, believe that virtue should be the guiding principle of society, a virtue which should be enforced. The Libertarians believe very strongly in the other end of the pole, individual liberty. Another perspective on this pole has on one end a belief in hierarchy and some disdain for egalitarianism; the other end of the pole is, again, a strong sense of individual liberty and a government and society which do not intrude into individual’s lives.

The notion of virtue itself creates another pole, evident even in recent conservative thought. Many traditionalists have been historically and continue today to be repulsed by modernism and commercial society, retreating into an appreciation of agrarian society, or at least small-town society. The other end of this pole sees virtue in economic liberty, in rugged capitalism, and its heroes in capitalists, though often personified in small businesspersons.

This three-dimensionality of conservatism lends a richness to it, if at the cost of some clutter. As this investigation continues and we view conservatism from different perspectives, historical, psychological, evolutionary, it will be necessary to keep this diversity in mind.

Karma, the Confidence Fairy, and the Debt Spiral

 Commentary  No Responses »
Apr 292012
 

Floyd Norris’ article in Friday’s New York Times, In Europe, a Marriage Shows Signs of Fraying, quotes Jens Weidman, president of the Bundesbank. “A widespread lack of trust in public finances weighs heavily on growth,” he said. “There is uncertainty regarding potential future tax increases, while funding costs are rising for private and public creditors alike.” In those circumstances, continued austerity “might inspire confidence and actually help the economy to grow.” Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury secretary, could not have said it better.

Paul Krugman has called it the confidence fairy, and follows up in his Friday column, Death of a Fairy Tale. As Professor Krugman puts it, “the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.”

I have referenced, in earlier posts, Jonathan Haidt’s What the Tea Partiers Really Want. In it he concludes that what conservatives such as Tea Partiers have is a moral passion, and what they want is not liberty, but karma. Defining karma simplistically, if you do the right thing, you should receive good fortune; do the wrong thing, and you should suffer.

If, as several commentators have noted, we tend to project our sense of how the family should manage onto the government and the world at large, we would believe that just as it is a moral good to manage our family’s finances to keep us out of debt, it is a moral good for governments to avoid debt as much as possible. There should be karma in this; if governments make the proper moral choice to avoid debt, good fortune should follow.

In the near term, as Professor Krugman notes, this has not worked out. Austerity seems to be leading to a debt spiral as economies shrink and see their debt loads increase. Maybe karma requires patience, and in the long-term, austerity will result in more stable economies. Or maybe our sense of karma is misplaced when it comes to global economics, maybe there is no confidence fairy, and maybe we’ll find out before it’s too late.

Conservatism, Nominalism, Empiricism and Truth

 Commentary  No Responses »
Apr 252012
 

Today’s lecture from Patrick Allitt’s course on The Conservative Tradition included information on Richard Weaver, a conservative American writer in the 1940′s and 1950′s. Weaver believed that western thought went wrong with William of Occam’s nominalism. In realism, or what we might call idealism, taking the common example of the chair, there is an ideal of a chair that physical chairs partake of. Nominalism, on the other hand, holds that there are real items that we sit on, and we create the word chair to describe these items. Plato was an idealist; philosophy is a striving to understand the ideals which underly the world of senses. (Aristotle, on the other hand, while not a nominalist, was an empiricist, believing that knowledge is gained by studying the world around you.)

Nominalism, in Weaver’s view, leads to relativism, to each man becoming his own priest, and to moral degradation. He rejected the dehumanization that is brought by materialism, science, and technology. There must be a center, a transcendant truth around which people can structure their beliefs and their lives. If there is no transcendant center, then we are just making it all up out of thin air, and what would be the point.

Professor Allitt notes that the concept of natural law underlies much of conservative thought. Natural law comes from nature, is universal, and can be discovered by reason. This gives it a standing which is outside of human invention; it is truth. When we are in accord with natural law, we are in accord with a truth beyond ourselves.

Much of today’s political commentary sounds as if the commentators are speaking from a foundation of natural law, that is, they have discovered the truth, and they can use that to defend or rebuff ideas and information. This certainly applies to our discourse on economic subjects, and is evident in the use of terms like liberty and fairness. But it also applies even to things we would think of as empirical, or scientific; evolution and climate change being two examples.

While I am a religious person, and do have some sense of grounding in natural law, I think of myself much more as an empiricist. I do believe that we can take a moral approach to subjects like economics; but before we bandy about terms like liberty or fairness, we need to investigate the real world and come to some conclusion about which policies lead to prosperity, since that is what economics is about, in the end. We do not want a “fair” economic system if it makes everyone poor; nor do we want to prioritize economic “liberty”, if it leads to economic desolation.

Approaching scientific subjects with this same a priori sense of truth seems discordant, since science is empirical by its nature. If we have evidence that the economic policy we espouse leads to prosperity, we can apply our moral values of liberty, or fairness, to persuade others to support our policies. While it is certainly proper to challenge the veracity of scientific findings, it seems incoherent to challenge them on the basis of a sense of right and wrong.

As we continue these investigations, it will be interesting to see how closely these notions of nominalism and idealism, empiricism and natural law, play out in our understanding of the conservative and liberal mind.

 Older Entries