Community and the problem with libertarianism

That's the topic of this interesting post over at Secular Right by the pseudonymous "David Hume":  Why I am not fundamentally a libertarian.  "David Hume" is the pen name of Razib Khan, a writer of pronounced atheist convictions. While I disagree with a good deal of what Khan writes about when it comes to religion and politics, I think on this point he makes a very worthwhile observation.

Now that we are in a post-materialist era in the developed world I believe that these easily reducible and atomized concerns are fading into the background. Though many of the basic “Culture War” issues like abortion or gay rights are framed in an individual rights context, I believe that more deeply they’re really about a collective vision of society. Individual liberty and tolerance quickly cedes ground to a collective moral vision. This is not a prescriptive model, this is for me a descriptive one. 

The reality is that for a minority of humans a fundamentally liberal/libertarian moral framework is profoundly appealing. It makes intuitive sense to us. I say us because I’m one of those individuals. But I don’t think it describes most human beings. And we have to begin with the modal human being when generating an empirically informed rich moral framework. Don’t we?

For the most part, human beings are made to live in community. Insofar as the libertarian vision is one that seeks atomized individualism at the expense of community, it is doomed to failure -- it's as contrary to human nature as Soviet totalitarianism was. While there are some people who seek to live apart from society (hermits, people of poor disposition, solitary monks & nuns, and a few who simply wish to dwell in the wilderness unbothered) this is not the normative condition of human beings. As the author of the Book of Genesis puts it, "it is not good for the man to be alone" (Gen. 2:18).

While Mr. Khan may object to the Lord being brought into this conversation, his essential point is well-supported by Genesis. Human beings need each other, need to live in society with each other, and as such, must live under norms and values that are at some level mandatory, not voluntary. Conservatism understands and embraces this reality. Libertarianism, alas, does not. Which is yet another reason why libertarianism, while a helpful perch from which to critique government activism and statist ideology, is not itself a sufficient replacement for the things it critiques. It's view of humanity is too thin, its reflexes too distorted, for that.

"Civilization" as defined by Will Durant

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

- Will Durant, Story of Civilization, vol. 1, page. 1 (1935), quoted over at The Imaginative Conservative.

Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address

On this day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most powerful orations in the history of our country.  The Gettysburg Address was widely panned at the time -- it was considered to be too brief and too austere to be a suitable commemoration for the men who had died in the fight to preserve the Union.  Yet, the very characteristics of the speech that were criticized -- its economy of expression, it's severe tone, it's lack of triumphalism -- are precisely those characteristics that lend the speech its unique power.  Lincoln did not rely on stage tricks and rhetorical flourishes to make his point, rather he crafted a speech that summarized his entire vision of the Union within its short compass.  

What was the Civil War about?  Lincoln's speech makes plain that it was a struggle for the Union, but not the Union alone.  It was also a struggle for freedom and the notion of government by consent.  Lincoln's speech sums up the great themes of our republican tradition:  of liberty under law, of human dignity and human rights, of the heritage we received from our founding fathers.  While the Southern rebels fought for their own particular culture and their own particular institutions -- above all the peculiar institution of chattel slavery -- the Union was fighting for its own existence and for the idea of free, republican government.

And key to this notion of republican government was an idea that formed the basis of Lincoln's political philosophy -- the idea of the equality of all men.  Not the squalid egalitarianism of the ideologue, with its uniformity and dull conformity, with its equality of squalor.  Instead, Lincoln at the beginning of his speech described the equality that he saw at the heart of the American experiment:  the equality that was embraced by the Founders of our nation and expressed in the Declaration of Independence.  While human beings differ in talent and ability and drive, we share a common humanity, a common nature that we all share, given to us in our creation by God.  It was upon this ground that the struggle for the Union took place.

Here's the text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal." 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.  We are met on a great battle field of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might life.  This we may, in all propriety do.  But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow, this ground -- The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.  

It is rather for us, the living, to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of their devotion -- that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. 

This text used to be a staple of American education.  It should be restored to its rightful place in the civic education of our people.

"In Praise of the Commonplace Book"

That's the title of this worthwhile post over at The Imaginative Conservative.  I feel inspired to start my own commonplace book!

In defense of a liberal education

Tertium Quid explains the importance of an education focused on broadening the human person rather than simply learning utilitarian skills: "Why We Study Useless Things." Well worth a read.

Personally, I think that perhaps the worst thing to happen to public eduction -- the one vice from which have sprang all the other problems in the public schools -- was the wide-spread abandonment of Latin and ancient Greek as regular parts of the curriculum.

Federalist jurisprudence might save the notion of limited government in the face of Obamacare

Federalist in the sense of tracking back to the early Supreme Court's case of McCulloch v. Maryland, as David Koppel explains in this post over at The Volokh Conspiracy law blog: Will the Necessary & Proper clause save Obamacare? Not if the Court follows McCulloch v. Maryland.  McCulloch was written by that great Federalist jurist John Marshall, the nemesis of Jefferson, and a man of stalwart commitment to the rule of law in the face of efforts by the elected branches of the federal government to ignore the Constitution.  It would be particularly fitting if Marshall's vision of a truly federal government with limited powers and strong constitutional polity triumphed over the notion of expedient big government without limit.

Liberty not equality is at the core of the American experiment

That's Pat Buchanan's argument against the big government-regulatory state in this op-ed published at the American Conservative online: The Equality Racket. Well worth a read. Equality under the law and in the eyes of God is a necessary predicate to the idea of civic liberty. But absolute equality does not exist; no two people are precisely equal in terms of mental & physical ability or moral virtue. Consequently, to try to create a legal order where absolute equality is enforced is an impossible quest doomed to degenerate into tyranny. It is an ideology that leads to inexorably to enslavement, to an equality of squalor and misery.

Conservatism is not ideology

This point is explained quite nicely by the late Russell Kirk:

The conservative understands that the circumstances of men are almost infinitely variable, and that any particular political or economic policy must be decided in the light of the particular circumstances of time and place -- an enlightened expediency, or prudence ... Conservatism, I repeat, is not an ideology.  It does not breed fanatics.  It does not try to excite the enthusiasm of a secular religion.  If you want men who will sacrifice their past and present and future to a set of abstract ideas you must go to Communism, or Fascism, or Benthamism.  But if you want men who seek, reasonably and prudently, to reconcile the best in the wisdom of our ancestors with the change which is essential to a vigorous civil social existence, then you will do well to turn to conservative principles.  The high-minded conservative believes in Principle, or enduring norms ascertained through appreciation for the wisdom of dead generations, the study of history, and the reconciliation of authority with the altered circumstances of our present life.  He is a highly reasonable person, although he looks with deep suspicion on the cult of Reason -- the worship of an abstract rationality which asserts that mundane planning is able to solve all our difficulties of spirit and community.  But the high-minded conservative detests Abstraction, or the passion for forcing men and societies into a preconceived pattern divorced from the special circumstances of different times and countries. 

- from Kirk's book, Prospects for Conservatives (Regnery Gateway: 1989), pg. 8-9.

Within that passage from Kirk is the antidote to virtually all of the big picture problems that have developed within the Right for the last 25 years.

A poem for Veterans Day

The one poem that best captures the somber spirit of today's holiday.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scare heard amid the guns below. 

We are the Dead.  Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high,
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- Lt. Col. John McCrae (1872-1918), MD, Canadian Army, World War I, In Flanders Fields.

A prayer for wisdom from a surprising source

"O powerful Goodness!  bountiful father!  merciful Guide!  Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest.  Strengthen my resolutions to perform what that wisdom dictates.  Accept my kind offices to thy other children as the only return in my power for thy continual favours to me."

-  Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), American founding father, from his Autobiography, quoted in In God We Trust:  The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers, edited by Norman Cousins (Harper & Brothers:  1958), pg. 30.

Quote of the day: on being a disciple of the Federalists

"Being myself a disciple of the Federalists, I respect their practical wisdom."

- Russell Kirk, Why Edmund Burke is Studied (1986).

Amen, Russell Kirk, amen.

Why study Edmund Burke?

Russell Kirk provides an answer in this essay provided by The Imaginative Conservative website:  Why Edmund Burke is Studied.  In short, because Burke stands as a key proponent of the notion of ordered liberty that nurtured the birth of our own Republic:

Because he was a principal defender of that world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue in which the United States participated, through its inheritance of civilization.  Constitution, custom, convention, and prescription give society a health continuity, as Burke knew; and he pointed out that prudent change is the means of our preservation; he understood how claims of freedom and claims of order must be kept in a tolerable tension.  Such truths he taught not as a closet-philosopher, but as a practical statesman and manager of party.  His speeches and pamphlets were read by the men of 1996 and the men of 1787 -- and studied with yet closer attention after 1789.  No other political thinker of their own time was better known to the American leaders than was Burke. 

Indeed, at the foundation of the American concept of liberty is, among other sources, Burke.  And as Kirk points out, not even the American Federalists can substitute for Burke's wisdom in guiding the course of prudential politics.

Was Jefferson a conservative?

Historian and defender of the Old South Clyde Wilson argues that he was, as this post over at The Pittsford Perennialist reports:  Clyde Wilson on Jeffersonianism.  As Wilson writes,

Jefferson does not call for an overturn of society and its reconstruction according to some abstract plan. Think of the root meaning of the term revolution. Jefferson, in fact, is mostly satisfied with his society (Virginia), although he is interested in a few small reforms that might broaden its base. So are his followers satisfied with their portions of America. That is why they support him. Despite the hysterical and sometimes insincere denunciations of the New England clergy, the Virginia planter is no Jacobin. As he sees things, any government, with the passage of time and the accretion of abuses and bad precedents, becomes corrupted. It needs to be revolved back to its original principles.

As I commented over at The Pittsford Perennialist, Clyde Wilson is a serious academic historian and a Southern gentleman with whom I have had the privilege of sharing a brief e-mail correspondence. I certainly respect his commitment to his beliefs, however, I think his take on Jefferson is seriously flawed. As the Irish writer and Burke scholar Connor Cruise O'Brien has documented in his detailed book The Long Affair, Jefferson was no reactionary or conservative, but rather a radical who was entranced by the bloodlust of the French Revoultion. Wilson's good friend the late Russell Kirk largely shared that view, and consistently identified the Federalists as the true conservatives during the Founding period and the early republic. If one picks up a copy of Kirk's Portable Conservative Reader (sadly now out of print), one finds selections from John Adams, Fisher Ames and Alexander Hamilton, and precisely none from Jefferson.

Wilson is a devoted son of the South, and his love for his region and it's traditional culture has lead him to disdain the Federalist-Whig-Republican conservative tradition in favor of an attempt to characterize the Jeffersonian tradition as conservative. Unfortunately, Wilson overlooks the centralizing and overtly totalitarian aspects of Jefferson's ideology and political practice. While there are many on the Right who look fondly on Jefferson, he is no model for conservatives to emulate.

The increasing scope of federal criminal law

That's the topic of this thought-provoking post over at From Burke to Kirk and Beyond: As Federal Crime Grows, Threshold of Guilt Declines". The ever-growing reach of federal criminal law is an under-discussed aspect of the centralization of our society. While there is a legitimate role for the federal government to play in our polity, the use of federal criminal sanctions for what are in effect local crimes is a sign of the decay of the proper division of authority between the states and the federal government. Thanks to Tertium Quid over at From Burke to Kirk and Beyond for shining light on this important phenomenon.