Conservative Idealism

[Jeff]

I would like us to think about conservative idealism. That’s not an oxymoron. The democrats get accused of pie-in-the-sky-ism all the time, but the conservatives are just as guilty of it. If we can get clear on exactly how their views are abstract and inadequate to reality, then I think we’ll have some nice arguments for the 2006 campaign season and beyond. I want to focus only on the Obviously False claims of conservatism. These should be claims such that if you stated them clearly and perhaps gave a sentence or two about the nature of their inadequacy, then even the staunchest conservative would start to tack on some qualifiers. That is, I don’t want to debate these claims. Rather these are sandtraps that intelligent conservatives know to avoid, but which Fox News Analysts (that IS an oxymoron) traffic in.

I’ll get us started with the first three:

1. Claim: Only you are to blame for your failure (moral, financial, or otherwise). Corollary: Only you deserve the rewards of your success.

Obvious Inadequacy: Ignores all social context of human achievement and failure. The relationship between merit and effort is complex and deep.


2. Claim: Individual freedom implies access to free markets.

Obvious Inadequacy: Free markets often work against individual freedom. For example, free markets tend to promote efficiency, which often competes with morality. So, markets often decrease our moral freedom. Again, the relationship between individual freedom and the market place is complex, too complex for such a simple view.


3. Claim: Smaller government is always better government. Corollary: Big government is always bad.

Obvious Inadequacy: Big Government works…sometimes. Small Government fails…sometimes. And vice versa. Cases where Big Government works: Social Security, the G.I. Bill, publicly-funded universities, and on the legislative side of things: laws against discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and gender, and laws enforcing workplace safety and the minimum wage. Cases where Small Government fails: protecting consumers from exploitative companies (USDA, FDA), protecting human rights/overcoming prejudice (think southern state governments during the 50s and 60s). Again, the point is that reality is more complex than this ideological stance.

I’d like to hear your thoughts for other items on this list. Please, keep your additions uncontroversial. Well, maybe I should say uncontroversial except among complete idiots.

Jeff

[kyle]

A quick question:

Corollary: Only you deserve the rewards of your success.
Does someone else deserve my reward for my success?

It would be nice if no qualifiers where needed but in every ending statement you make you talk of the complex issue. How can you have such a complex issue when you summed it all up and request no further elaboration? Your obvious inadequacy for #1 lends absolutely no weight to the fact that there are choices to be made. There are social barriers that need to be overcome for some people but that doesn't excuse them from possibly making poor choices.

[jtmx1]

I don’t think I’ve stated anything at all controversial. Every success (financial or otherwise) in a modern society is (at least in part) a social achievement only possible in a rather complex social context. My point isn't that your success isn't yours. It's that your success isn't only yours. That's completely obvious, no?

I am not trying to specify the proper relationship between reward/sanction and individual effort. I am only saying that whatever it happens to be, it isn't simple. There are choices to be made. I agree! And those will be important when we finally get to specifying this complex relationship.

[chris]

I don't know that elucidating the inadequacies, obvious or otherwise, of objectivist individualism is really productive. I think the disconnect was best illustrated by a Bush White House staffer's words to Ron Suskind, a writer for the New York Times Magazine (2004):

--
"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." "
--

Well, we see how well ignoring reality is doing for these willing ignoramuses, but still, there's a sense among these people, and among the Ayn Rand acolytes like them, that even if reality is a certain way, it has no *right* to be that way, and it *should* be this other way that fits into what they want. So, if they just steamroll their own take on a non-existent reality, eventually it will just become that. That's the logic that allows Karl Rove to stand up with a straight face (as he did yesterday) and say that 60 percent of Americans like G.W. Bush. I think he really believes it, reality be damned.

So when you say, "These should be claims such that if you stated them clearly and perhaps gave a sentence or two about the nature of their inadequacy, then even the staunchest conservative would start to tack on some qualifiers," I would reply that there is no such thing.

Your effort at this thread, Jeff, is noble, but I fear it's wasted. That said, carry on -- I'm sure I'll throw in my two cents in as well.

[Tyler]

Some people, maybe most people, care absolutely nothing for reason.

[chris]

Plenty of liberals as well. They're just not in power.

[jtmx1]

Great post, Chris.

If our disagreement goes that deep, then there really is nothing left to say but “Pass the ammunition, these barbarians must be destroyed for the greater good.” I’ve resisted that angle, as David knows. But if you’re correct, then David and Tina were right all along: There is no talking cure.

The sentiment expressed by the staffer is stupid and dangerous. Perhaps some right-wing insiders buy into that sort of relativism, but the average Christian Republican could never. (BTW: Isn’t it strange to compare the relativistic right of today with the relativistic left of the 1980s! How stupid they both are!) Relativism is a tough sell to fundamentalist Christians, who like Muslims (the spiritual group with which they share the most affinities), tend to be absolutists. The insiders will be forced to deceive those who put them in positions of power. And this can only work for so long…

Anyway, I really want to parse that quote you gave more carefully.

1. The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community"

As opposed to what? The fantasy based one? True, reality can be characterized in many ways, but to give up on it altogether is not a viable option. When you sacrifice a notion like truth to political expediency, you are only left with means. The ends all disappear, because any end worth its salt is self-justifying, to some extent. Justification, in any respectable sense, is lost with a meaningful reference to reality.

(N.B. Einstein said there is no absolute frame of reference (as far as motion is concerned). We can all agree about that, and much that it seems to imply. But it is something else entirely to say that reality doesn’t make any difference whatsoever. How would the Einsteinian equations have been tested in the absence of a truth-making reality. Answer: They couldn’t have been.)

2. [You]… "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore,"

You can believe both sides here without contradiction. Solutions emerge from the study of reality AND they emerge from our actions in the world. The latter is what the Hindus call Karma-Yoga, and this practice was defined in the modern age by Gandhi and those like him who made the world a better place. I think everyone should believe both parts.

But you can’t believe that there is no reality apart from human actions AND that there is a way the world works. (Note how this is implied in the quote.) The key difference between folks like MLK Jr. and this staffer is that the former sought a deeper and truer connection to a mysterious Reality, while the latter are content to let their prejudices rule them.

As soon as any idiot starts talking like this staffer, he should be attacked with knives. (Hyperbole, of course) If he is right, then he can just deny their reality.

3. "We're an empire now”

Fuck empire. And fuck those who support it. Russia may have been an evil empire in the 1980s, but if they were it was only because all empires are necessarily evil.

4. “when we act, we create our own reality.”

This is true for everyone. And the reality that I find most important is the one created by all those competing interests. The staffer must be thinking about power not reality. In fact, if we switch the words his statements make a lot more sense. Power is defined by one’s ability to get what one wants. And simply steamrollering others is proof that you have the power you claim to possess. But it’s evil to do so, as we all know.

5. “We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Actors, sure, I buy it. But they have no control over their roles, since these are more or less objective…or at least they require others to agree about them. I don’t agree. Obviously Chris doesn’t either. Does anyone else? No? Then Knives Out.

6. Here’s something I do agree with: “Even if reality is a certain way, it has no *right* to be that way.” Absolutely correct. The way things are, though susceptible to various interpretations, doesn’t always correspond to our wishes about what would be best. But that’s good news, we could learn nothing about the world were it otherwise.

7. There is a bright side. I don’t think that many of the folks on the right have swallowed this much Kool-aid. If they have, they will soon be trying to walk on water and stop busses with their minds. And we’ll have an end. Most folks hear the loud right wing and reason that anyone talking with such volume and anger must be right. But, of course, one can megaphone idiocy more easily than truth, since the latter is so very hard to know and the former goes down easy and stirs the cerebral cortex hardly at all.

Jeff

[chris]

Just a brief note (I'm supposed to be editing): if you believe the liberal meme that's been circulating since that passage was written, the polar opposite of the "reality-based community" is the "faith-based community." That's a bit absolutist a distinction for my blood, but it's there. (One popular T-shirt/bumper sticker among webtrolling liberals: "proud member of the reality-based community")

Aha, leave it to Wikipedia to lay it all out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

[jtmx1]

No wonder I missed that distinction. I think there is a reality-based approach to faith, though it is a subjective one.

Religion starts in personal isolation, solitude. When we make the leap to others we can be seeking lots of different things: Power, relief, comfort, etc... I think the reality of the religious impulse can be found in the strange fulfillment of making the leap to others for the sake of others, i.e., in responding to the full recognition of our necessary and ultimate isolation by loving without demand for exchange.

At any rate, I should have anticipated that one. Little slow today, I guess.