Posted on 02/17/2011 4:51:51 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
Anyone who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last weekend knows that, although Republicans won big in November, the conservative movement is still facing an identity crisis.
There are many facets to this, but one way of looking at it is to say that libertarian ideas are encroaching on conservatism.
Of course, social conservatism -- which I would argue is an implicit component of traditional conservatism (though many Christian conservatives in America were politically dormant prior to the 1970s) -- has been, perhaps, the most vulnerable victim of the political times.
Most people view the arguments relating to conservative social policy simplistically. They hear the term "social conservative" and think only of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. This perception ignores the fact that conservative social policy has been a fundamental component of traditional conservatism, an intellectual and philosophical movement going back to Edmund Burke (whom most view as the founder of modern conservatism).
You know the negative stereotypes: Conservatives who embrace both fiscal and social conservatism are either prudes who want to tell you how to live -- "bigots" and hate-mongers -- or people who derive their policy positions solely from the Christian Bible (which, depending on your views, may seem either admirable or dangerous).
But what is not widely understood or appreciated is the philosophical rationale for traditional conservatism, especially as it relates to creating a strong and vibrant society. (In may ways, this philosophy actually traces all the way back to Aristotle, whom many view as the father of political conservatism. Though he was a pagan, Aristotle argued that political life requires a moral foundation, and viewed the family as the fundamental political element.)
But before we get too deep into that, it's important to note what conservatism is not.
(Excerpt) Read more at politicsdaily.com ...
Instincts for day-to-day survival have to kick in. When chaos reigns, the social conservatives are the ones with the guns.
I don’t like to be pigeon holed into one term or another.
My small l libertarianism is strongly influenced by my conservatism and common sense.
for instance....gay marriage...I personally dont care who is sleeping with whom...BUT.... if we allow this form of marriage, we are inviting in, ultra repressive groups like Islam....as nature abhors a vacuum, they will pick up more converts than ever and take over the country from within, as they are doing in Europe...so if you want a free country, dont even think of letting groups like Islam into the country....by definition, they’re goal is to conquer either from without or within...why give them the opportunity to take over from within...I prefer a straight fight from without...Molon Labe.
Conservatives adhere to proven practices which are known to make a society successful. The family. Rule of law. Property rights. Personal responsibility. Rooted in Western civilization and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Conservatism deals with the reality of human nature, and not ivory tower ideals of what man "ought to be" or "could be".
That’s a very good summation.
do not know who this guy is, and after reading his article, probably never will....makes as much sense as an orange garbage can...
Likewise, the pure libertarian (as opposed to those of us who have some libertarian leanings) sets up liberty as the highest good. Liberty is the end goal of all policy. The conservative looks to the libertarian and asks, "Why does that idea become valued over all others?" Liberty is obviously a great good, but as the highest end goal, it can also lead to devastating consequences.
The conservative argues that the greatest instructor on what laws should exist in a civil society is human experience. So, it would seem libertarianism hits its own walls when it ventures out of its world of make-believe theories and steps into the world of reality.
What a fascinating morning read. Thank you, rightwingintelligentsia.
I would venture to comment further, but I'm quite sure someone would misinterpret my meaning.
How about “Americanism”?
It’s an ideology based on founding principals of freedom, individual responsibility, work ethic, and minimal government interference.
That was very good... kudos.
Utopian Libertarianism is just as bad as Utopian Statism. Neither speak well to the realities of Human Nature.
But I despise Federal Governance
It magnifies the consequences of
Megalomania an Narcissism
And if I had to choose between a Liberal Libertarian
And a Conservative Statist, it would be a tough call
Just read post #7 then. Those three paragraphs from the article are excellent observations of political thought.
There are libertarians who think everything should be legal, and some conservatives who think nothing should be legal. Between those two extremes, there is a lot of common ground.
The conservative argues that the greatest instructor on what laws should exist in a civil society is human experience. So, it would seem libertarianism hits its own walls when it ventures out of its world of make-believe theories and steps into the world of reality.
What a fascinating morning read. Thank you, rightwingintelligentsia.
I would venture to comment further, but I'm quite sure someone would misinterpret my meaning.
A conservative, ie, a traditional American,
understands that you CAN’T HAVE liberty without morality.
When a people does not self-govern, they MUST be governed by force/government, otherwise there is chaos.
John Adams’ rejoinder that the Constitution was meant for a “moral people” and would not work for any other proved true. If “conservatism” is in “turmoil” or even “dead” it is ONLY because the Constitution was abandoned by liars and grifters who took the reigns of power through the ballot box—and that started happening long ago.
We’re not going to get back to something worth really having without morality being central to the cause. Name a secular poltiican of our time who was not a liar. Exactly, you can’t.
Whereas, so-called “social conservatives” have the distinction of being trustworthy. And that is vital if you are taking an oath to uphold the values of a document like the Constitution.
However I find the following incongruent:
This...
Alternatively, traditional conservatives believe the rise and success of Western society was not merely a lucky accident or the result of a couple Enlightenment period thunderbolts, but rather the product of diligent work, trial and error, and human experience -- and in may ways the result of Christian civilization.
As such, they argue that preserving a strong moral order -- an order that took shape over millennia -- is vitally important to a functioning society (including a functioning economic system).
Does not agree with this...
In some ways, this is humbling, inasmuch as it argues that Western civilization is not great because its people were inherently superior but that it evolved over centuries because its ideas were based on recognizing the realities of human nature.
It IS the people, in no small part, that made it what is was and what it can be. Call it/us whatever you want 'superior', different or our own but it works and works for US. It is not some 'universally' accepted nor practiced social order and/or government and never has been. Different peoples define, accept and practice ideas and concepts such as our ideals in different ways. So called 'universal ideals' and concepts are not always so universally defined in the same ways. It is in part organic, a part of us and who we are at our core. Take us away and it no longer exis. It is way more than just 'ideas' and ideals'. They are attempting to rip that way. Destroy it all. And they destroy it all by destroying us. They destroy us by trying to make us believe we are all Borg. "Equal". They say it is because of 'racism' and all kinds of isms that we must change/destroy it. There are no distinctions & no preference to anyone or anything except 'equality'.
I hesitated in answering you, because the words have to be just right, otherwise those that seek to reduce my rights under the constitution will rip my words apart. These people are both liberal and conservative. Let me explain my position.....
I am a firm believer in the constitution, as written, not as interpreted...this includes both liberal and conservative interpretations...both liberals and conservatives wish to restrict my rights under the guise of the “Moral Good”...now, moral good is subject to interpretation, depending on who is in power at the particular time...our framers understood this, yet stated, not under law, but on their own, that this document is meant for a moral people. Under no other people will this work...this is a stunning quote....It means that the law of the land does in no way allow for others to interpret what is moral and what is not...the people have to have a moral standard to ensure that the government as framed functions as intended....it also ensures that the individual states maintain power over the feds...this in itself makes all politics local, which is what gives the people power over a runaway fed....the 17th amendment was the first assault over this power...
Anyone, and I mean anyone, who tries to dictate to me what is moral and what is not, is my enemy..and an enemy of the republic...period...liberals want to pass laws that render my personal moral standards irrelevant, that makes them my enemy...conservatives want to pass laws that render my personal moral standards irrelevant, that makes them my enemy.....the legislation of morality by the federal govenment is a long and slippery slope to totaltarian dictatorship....look at history...
Now, the individual states have the right to legislate what their citizens feel is appropriate to the state they live in...example, abortion ( i feel it is murder ) but the feds have no right to legislate this in any way, shape or form...if new york wants drive up roadside abortion, the citizens have the right to allow this...If texas wants to sentence abortion provideres to death, the citizens have a right to allow this...the feds have no say in the matter...
this is my opinion, what say you?????
I will offer Hayek's view of the traditions of liberty in general, without the labels, as taken from the Constitution of Liberty.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sub-chapters 1 - 5
1. Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design. The institutions of freedom, like everything freedom has created, were not established because people foresaw the benefits they would bring. But, once its advantages were recognized, men began to perfect and extend the reign of freedom and, for that purpose, to inquire how a free society worked. This development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty; the second did not.
As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic –the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalistic, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline.
This distinction is obscured by the fact that what we have called the “French tradition” of liberty arose largely from an attempt to interpret British institutions and that the conceptions which other countries formed of British institutions were based mainly on their descriptions by French writers. The two traditions became finally confused when they merged in the liberal movement of the nineteenth century and when even leading British liberals drew as much on the French as on the British tradition. It was, in the end, the victory of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals over the Whigs in England that concealed the fundamental difference which in more recent years has reappeared as the conflict between liberal democracy and “social” or totalitarian democracy.
This difference was better understood a hundred years ago than it is today. In the year of the European revolutions in which the two traditions merged, the contract between “Anglican” and “Gallican” liberty was still clearly described by an eminent German-American political philosopher. “Gallican Liberty,” wrote Francis Lieber in 1848, “is sought in the government, and according to an Anglican point of view, it is looked for in the wrong place, where it cannot be found. Necessary consequences of the Gallican view are, that the French look for the highest degree of political civilization in organization, that is, in the highest degree of interference by public power. The question whether this interference be despotism or liberty is decided solely by the fact who interferes, and for the benefit of which class the interference takes place, while according to the Anglican view this interference would always be either absolutism or aristocracy, and the present dictatorship of the ouvriers would appear to us an uncompromising aristocracy of the ouvriers.”
Since this was written, the French tradition has everywhere progressively displaced the English. To disentangle the two traditions it is necessary to look at the relatively pure forms in which they appeared in the eighteenth century. What we have called the “British Tradition” was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudent of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Condorcet, are their best know representatives. Of course, the division does not fully coincide with national boundries. Frenchmen, like Montesquieu and, later, Benjamin Constant and, above all, Alexis de Tocqueville are probably nearer to what we have called the “British” than to the “French” tradition. And in Thomas Hobbes, Britian as provided at least on e of the founders of rationalist tradition, not to speak of a whole generation of enthusiasts for the French Revolution, like Godwin, Priestly, Price, and Paine, who (like Jefferson after his stay in France) belong entirely to it.
2. Though these two groups are now commonly lumped together as ancestors of modern liberalism, there is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than that between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. The difference is directly traceable to the predominance of an essentially empiricist view of the world in England and a rationalist approach in France. The main contrast in the practical conclusions to which these approaches led has recently been put, as follows: “One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose”, and “one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberativeness; one for trail and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern.” It is the second view, as J. L. Talmon has shown in an important book from which this description is taken, that has become the origin of totalitarian democracy.
The sweeping success of the political doctrines that stem from the French tradition is probably due to their great appeal to human pride and ambition. But we must not forget that the political conclusions of the two schools derive from the different conceptions of how society works. In this respect, the British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the rationalist school was simply and completely wrong.
Those British philosophers have given us an interpretation of the growth of civilization that is still the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty. They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful. Their view is expressed in terms of “how nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of human design.” It stresses that what we call political order is much less the product of our ordering intelligence than is commonly imagined. As their immediate successors saw it, what Adam Smith and his contemporaries did was “to resolve almost all that has been ascribed to positive institution into the spontaneous and irresistible development of certain obvious principles—and to show how little contrivance or political wisdom the most complicated and apparently artificial schemes of policy might have been erected.”
This “anti-rationalistic insight into historical happenings that Adam Smith shares with Hume, Adam Ferguson, and others” enabled them for the first time to comprehend how institutions and morals, language and law, have evolved by a process of cumulative growth and that it is only with and within this framework that human reason has grown and can successfully operate. Their argument is directed throughout against the Cartesian conception of an independently and antecedently existing human reason that invented these institutions and against the conception that civil society formed by some wise original legislator or an original “social contract.” The latter idea of intelligent men coming together for deliberation about how to make the world anew is perhaps the most characteristic outcome of thos design theories. It found its perfect expression when the leading theorist of the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes, exhorted the revolutionary assembly “to act like men just emerging from the state of nature and coming together for the purpose of signing a social contract.”
The ancients understood the conditions of liberty better than that. Cicero quotes Cato as saying that the Roman constitution was superior to that of other states because it “was based upon the genius, not of one man, but of many: it was founded, not in one generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men. For, said he, there never has lived a man possessed of so great a genius that nothing could escape him, nor could the combined powers of all men living at one time possibly make all the necessary provisions for the future without the aid of actual experience and the test of time.” Neither republican Rome not Athens – the tow free nations of the ancient world—could thus serve as and example for rationalists. For Descartes, the fountainhead of the rationalist tradition, it was indeed Sparta that provided the model; for her greatness “was due not the pre-eminence of each of its laws in particular…but to the circumstance that, originated by a single individual, they all tended to the same end.” And it was Sparta which became the ideal of liberty for Rousseau as well as for Robespierre and Saint-Just and for most of the later advocates of “social” or totalitarian democracy.
Like the ancient, the modern British conception of liberty grew against the background of a comprehension, first achieved by the lawyers, of how institutions had developed. “There are many things specifically in laws and governments,” wrote Chief Justice Hale in the seventeenth century in a critique of Hobbes, “that mediately, remotely and consequentially are reasonable to be approved, though the reason of the party does not presently or immediately and distinctly see its reasonableness…Long experience makes more discoveries touching conveniences or inconveniences of laws than is possible for the wisest council of men at first to foresee. And that those amendments and supplements that through the various experiences of wise and knowing men have been applied to any law must needs be better suited to the convenience of laws, than the best invention of the most pregnant wits not aided by such a series and tract of experience…This add to the difficulty of the present fathoming of the reason of laws, which, though it commonly be called the mistress of fools, yet certainly it is the wisest expedient among mankind, and discovers those defects and supplies which no wit of man could either at once foresee or aptly remedy…It is not necessary that the reasons of the institution should be evident unto us. It is sufficient that they are instituted laws that give a certainty to us, and it is reasonable to observe them though the particular reason of the institution appear not.”
3. From these conceptions gradually grew a body of social theory that showed how, in the relations among men, complex and orderly and, in a very definite sense, purposive institutions might grow up which owed little to design, which were not invented but arose from the separate action of many men who did nto know what they were doing. This demonstration that something greater than man’s individual mind may grow from men’s fumbling efforts represented in some ways an even greater challenge to all design theories than even the later theory of biological evolution. For the first time it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of designing human intelligence, but that there was a third possibility—the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution.
Since the emphasis we shall have to place on the role that selection plays in this process of social evolution today is likely to create the impression that we are borrowing the idea from biology, it is worth stressing that it was from the theories of social evolution that Darwin and his contemporaries derived the suggestion for their theories. Indeed, one of those Scottish philosophers who first developed these ideas anticipated Darwin even in the biological field, and later application of these conceptions by the various “historical schools” in law and language rendered the idea that similarity of structure might be accounted for by a common origin a common place in the study of social phenomena long before it was applied to biology. It is unfortunate that at a later date the social sciences, instead of building on these beginnings in their own field, re-imported some of these ideas from biology and with them brought in such conceptions as “natural selection,” “struggle for existence,” and “survival of the fittest,’ which are not appropriate in their field; for in social evolution, the decisive factor is not the selection of the physical and inherited properties of the individuals but the selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits. Though this operates also through the success of individuals and groups, what emerges is not an inheritable attribute of individuals, but ideas and skills – in short, the whole cultural inheritance which is passed on by learning and imitation.
4. A detailed comparison of the two traditions would require a separate book; here we can merely single out a few of the crucial points on which they differ.
While the rationalist tradition assumes that man was originally endowed with both the intellectual and moral attributes that enabled him to fashion civilization deliberately, the evolutionists made it clear that civilization was the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error; that it was the sum of experience, in part handed from generation to generation as explicit knowledge, but to a larger extent embodied in tools and institutions which had proved themselves superior—institutions whose significance we might discover by analysis, but which will also serve men’s ends without men’s understanding them. The Scottish theorists were very much aware of how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested upon man’s more primitive and ferocious instincts being tamed and checked by institutions that he neither had designed not could control. They were very far from holding such naïve views, later unjustly laid at the door of their liberalism, as the “natural goodness of man,” the existence of “a natural harmony of interests,” or the beneficent effects of “natural liberty” (even though they did sometimes use the last phrase). They knew that it required the artifices of institutions and traditions to reconcile the conflicts of interest. Their problem was “that universal mover in human nature, self love, may receive such direction in this case (as in all others) as to promote the public interest by those efforts it shall make towards pursuing its own.” It was not “natural liberty” in any literal sense, but the institutions evolved to secure “life, liberty, and property,” which made these individual efforts beneficial. Not Locke, nor Hume, nor Smith, nor Burke, could have argued, as Bentham did, that “every law is an evil for every law is an infraction of liberty.” Their argument was never a complete laissez faire argument, which, as the very words show, is also part of the French rationalist tradition and in its literal sense was never defended by any of the English classical economists. They knew better than most of their later critics that it was not some sort of magic, but the evolution of “well constructed institutions,” where the “rules and privileges of contending interests and compromised advantages” would be reconciled, that had successfully channeled individual efforts to socially beneficial aims. In fact, their argument was never antistate as such, or anarchistic, which is the logical outcome of the rationalistic laissez faire doctrine; it was an argument that accounted both for the proper functions of the state and for the limits of state action.
The difference is particularly conspicuous in the respective assumptions of the two schools concerning individual human nature. The rationalistic design theories were necessarily based on the assumption of the individual man’s propensity for rational action and his natural intelligence and goodness. The evolutionary theory, on the contrary, showed how certain institutional arrangements would induce man to use his intelligence to the best effect and how institutions could be framed so that bad people could do least harm. The antirationalist tradition is here closer to the Christian tradition of the fallibility and sinfulness of man, while the perfectionism of the rationalist is in irreconcilable conflict with it. Even such a celebrated figment as the “economic man’ was not an original part of the British evolutionary tradition. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that, in the view of those British philosophers, man was by nature lazy and indolent, improvident and wasteful, and that it was only by the force of circumstances that he could be made to behave economically or could learn carefully to adjust his means to his ends. The homo oeconomicus was explicitly introduced, with much else that belongs in the rationalist rather than the evolutionary tradition, only by the younger Mill.
5. The greatest difference between the two views, however, is in their respective ideas about the role of traditions and the value of all the other product of unconscious growth proceeding throughout the ages. It would hardly be unjust to say that the rationalistic approach is here opposed to almost all that is the distinct product of liberty and that gives liberty its value. Those who believe that all useful institutions are deliberate contrivances and who cannot conceive of anything serving a human purpose that has not been consciously designed are almost of necessity enemies of freedom. For them freedom means chaos.
To the empiricist evolutionary tradition, on the other hand, the value of freedom consists mainly in the opportunity that it provides for the growth of the undesigned, and the beneficial functioning of a free society rests largely on the existence of such freely grown institutions. There probably never has existed a genuine belief in freedom, and there certainly has been no successful attempt to operate a free society, without a genuine reverence for grown institutions, for customs and habits and “all those securities of liberty which arise from regulation of long prescription and ancient ways.” Paradoxial as it may appear, it is probably true that a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society.
This esteem for tradition and custom, of grown institutions, and of rules whose origins and rationale we do not know does not, of course, mean – as Thomas Jefferson believed with a characteristic rationalist misconception – that we “ascribe to men of preceding age a wisdom more than human, and… suppose what they did beyond amendment.” Far from assuming that those who created the institutions were wiser than we are, the evolutionary view is based on the insight that the result of the experimentation of many generations may embody more experience than any on man possesses.
Never in historical analysis have I seen it outlined better.
Gertrude Himmelfarb does similar analysis when comparing the Scottish/English, French and American Enlightenment differences and comes to similar, but less analyitical distinctions.
It has always seemed to me that libertarianism is more in tune with the rationalistic brand of the enlightenment when looked at from the historical standpoint.
As Levin said on last night's broadcast, saying the social side of conservatism is not necessary is saying morality is not necessary and nothing calls for liberty more than true morality.
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