Likewise, there is no conservative position on whether global warming exists or does not exist, that is a matter for those scientists. But conservatism has much to say about whether the science has been proven concerning global warming, or climate change if you prefer, to a degree that we can rightly justify using it to restrict other people's liberty, confiscate their property, and tax them. Conservatives, much like less blessed humans, are liable to assume that certain truths which we accept about human nature, the natural state of man, whether he is good or evil, a saint or a sinner, should be applied to matters of science or medicine. It works the other way around, too.
Sublime as it is to be conservative, it is nevertheless our lot to share with every other human, albeit to a lesser degree, the penchant for social engineering. If the cause excites our instinctual reactions strongly enough, like aversion to sodomy or the carnage caused by drug abuse, we are nearly as likely as liberals to turn to government to impose our nostrums on others for their own good. If we add additional emotional incentives, such as dealing with the welfare of children, we like all humans are even more prone to unleash government to sacrifice liberty for what we perceive to be the greater good.
In a constitutional republic, even in a constitutional republic constructed with separation of powers and checks and balances, protected by competing institutions, enjoying free speech, with the right to petition government, and overseen by judicial review, the human tendency, especially tendency of the human herd, is to resort to social engineering. The result is to lose liberty often for dubious advantage. Every instance of social engineering can be justified and always is justified by the perceived evil and a presumed good. Each instance is always justified but after 2 1/2 centuries of examples of doing good, we as a nation must concede that the cumulative effect has been to deprive us of liberty. This state of affairs endues conservatives with a healthy if limited sense of humility but it only motivates liberals to do more good. We weigh the costs but they imagine they have finally perfected human nature.
I can think of few areas of social engineering where conservatives should be more wary of unintended consequences than in empowering government to deal with alcoholism. The greatest example of social engineering (the 13th amendment not considered here as an example of social engineering because it attempts to undo not free choice but the absence of free choices for African-Americans endorsed and fortified by government) up until the New Deal was prohibition. America learned a great lesson from prohibition but did not apply the lesson to any subject other than alcohol. In fact, the political impulse that led to the repeal of Prohibition, New Deal Progressivism, led to a binge of social engineering imposed on America by the very same people who hated prohibition.
Prohibition ultimately failed because it misread human nature and stimulated a series of unintended consequences which have affected society to this day. The new deal, the great society, Obamacare, are all doing the same.
I would add propositions I know will find disfavor in this forum: The war on drugs and criminalization of sodomy leads to unintended baleful consequences because they also misread human nature. When it comes to the war on drugs it is as though we have learned nothing about the unintended consequences which occurred during prohibition. We see the same lawlessness, the same irresistible encroachment of the drug culture into the whole of society, the corruption of the rule law and those who enforce the law. Worse, we see the same cynicism growing in the public about the rule of law. Prohibition failed and the war on drugs has been lost because criminal laws are blunt instruments wholly unsuitable for changing human nature or for dealing with the ultimate questions of human depravity. The criminal law is scarcely suited but it is better than other alternatives for dealing with the consequences of the abuse of alcohol or drugs but it is very ineffective in controlling the use of alcohol or drugs. In other words, arrest the alcoholic for drunk driving but not for drinking. Arrest the addict for driving under the influence but not for using.
I am not convinced that criminalizing homosexual intercourse among consenting adults in private changed sodomites habits and I'm not sure that it is the proper province of limited government to attempt to do so. Rather, bashing down bedroom doors is hardly an example of humility, rather it is the epitome of government arrogance and the belief in the infinite capacity of government to change human nature.
The first thing government should do in dealing with alcoholism is to examine critically its own role in enabling it. It is the height of hypocrisy for a government to condone, glorify, subsidize and otherwise enable the drinking of alcohol on the one hand and criminalize the alcoholic on the other. That is not to say that the criminal law cannot or should not be used as a lever to force a problem drinker who has broken criminal law into therapy. That is not to criminalize the status but to acknowledge the existence of a disease and the need for therapy in lieu of punishment. Statistically, those who are forced into therapy generally fare as well in maintaining abstinence as those who voluntarily undergo therapy.
One last word about human nature in an attempt to connect the conclusion with the opening of these remarks: Alcoholism remains a mystery as deep as nature vs. nurture. There is something in the human nature of some people which leads them to alcoholism and there is something in the culture of several countries which generates alcoholism.
An anthropologist would look at American Indians from Terra Del Fuego to the Arctic Circle and conclude that there must be some gene in these people which leaves them so desperately vulnerable to alcohol. I recall being warned about driving at night in Ecuador on rural roads because the Indians become so inebriated they simply go to sleep in the middle of the road. One need only visit a few reservations to see the ravages of alcoholism on a statistical basis that is overwhelming.
Yet there are other races almost immune to alcohol they evidently have been spared the alcoholism gene. There is a saying among Jews who see one of their own in an inebriated state, "he drinks like a goy" meeting he drinks like a Gentile, a practice foreign to the Jewish culture. Don't worry, Jews have their own share of neuroses and problems. There is a reason why alcoholism has been called, "the Irish virus" others have suggested that the reason is to keep the Irish from overrunning the earth.
My point is that we do not know the role genes play in predicting alcoholism much less the role of culture. For example, if one ventures into the Scandinavian countries or most northern climes (which includes Russia, the subject of this article) one finds a high statistical incidence of a certain kind of alcoholism associated with hard liquor, loss of control, binge drinking, and severe dislocations. On the other hand, if one looks at the cultures around the northern shores of the Mediterranean one finds alcohol use, or rather alcohol abuse, mostly associated with wine and tending more toward addiction rather than binge drinking. Is this a function of the potency of the beverage, the culture, or the genetic makeup of the people in these regions? Science does not give us conclusive answers and we as conservatives ought to have a great deal of humility in presuming those answers.
That humility should be extended to other areas and make us very wary of trying to police human nature.
