Political, Economic, and Social Spheres Interact Some More

The Fall 2011 issue of The Intercollegiate Review arrived recently, so I’ve begun wading through during some odd hours. These articles are always mind-bending, sometimes making my head hurt for hard work. But often I glean something valuable. 

I just read the article, “The Change We Can Actually See (But Only Half Believe In)” by Peter Augustine Lawler. He philosophically compares the free individual ideas of both Locke and Tocqueville, in contrast to each other and to Marxist progressivism. I know Locke and Tocqueville only superficially. Our founders studied Locke. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, following his visit here around 1830, examining the new freedom experiment that was the United States. So when Lawler starts talking about Lockean ideas, my understanding is limited. 

What I do glean from this is that, when we combine our belief in individual political and economic freedom, we must do so in conjunction with voluntary, moral, mainly family social connection. That is what I have been saying at the Spherical Model. 

Here are a few samples: 

Individualism and the Birth Dearth

He [Tocqueville] thought that the natural limit to individualistic self-absorption would be the family: even in a democracy, free individuals would persist in thinking of themselves as parents and children. He had a kind of sociobiological faith that the limit to individual liberation would be the natural social inclinations that lead the species to perpetuate itself. Locke seems to have had that faith too. He thought people would continue to have children, and their natural inclination, supported by law, would cause them to stay together long enough to raise them (p. 32). 

The Entitlement Implosion

The primary experience of most ordinary Americans these days is the erosion—with the prospect of implosion—of the various safety nets of our relatively minimalist welfare state. The change we can actually see has been, and will continue to be, from defined benefits to defined contributions. Private and even public pensions are done for. They will continue to be replaced by 401(k)s. That kind of change will also be true of health care, as employer-based plans become unsustainable. It will also soon be true of Medicare and probably Social Security—if not quite as soon as Representative Paul Ryan thinks. Ryan, it is already obvious, will come to be known as a man just slightly ahead of his time. In that sense, just as obviously, he is the real progressive—the prophet of the more or less inevitable world to come. And his opponents, who are called Progressives, are just as obviously the real reactionaries.

            The good news here, the new birth of Freedom celebrated by the Tea Party, is more choice—a lot more choice—for individuals. The bad news is that risk is being transferred from the employer and the government to the individual….

            There really is a lot of good to be said about a renewed emphasis on individual responsibility, just as there is a lot of good to be said about perfecting the productive meritocracy that is the main source of our prosperity. Perhaps there will also be a new birth of voluntary associations—such as the extended family, the church, and the neighborhood—and voluntary caregiving for the social support even free individuals need to live well (pp. 35-36). 

The Change We Can Actually See

People are, it turns out, stuck with working. And the demands of productivity actually accelerate as technology progresses. They are also in some ways more future-obsessed than ever. Free individuals tend to believe that their own deaths are the extinction of being itself, but as Lockeans we are less whiny-existentialist and fatalistic about that than we are powerfully resolved to do what we can to stay around as long as possible. (We can exempt our religious minority of observant believers from this view of who we are, just as we can notice that they are actually the ones who are mitigating our birth dearth with their many babies. It is always possible that there could be a religious solution to the crisis of our time.)

            Our libertarians were wrong, however, to think that we could flourish in abundance by understanding ourselves with ever-more-perfect consistency as free and productive individuals progressively untethered by biological direction. It turns out that it is not free individuals but men and women in touch, so to speak, with who they are by nature who have enough babies to secure our productive future and so to pay for our minimalist entitlement programs….

            The next stage in American progress, we can hope, is that we will discover, or rediscover, the truth that the free or personal being is necessarily a relational being (p. 38).

As I’ve said, we want political and economic freedom as a goal, but to have civilization as an outcome, we need a religious people, who honor God as the source of their rights, and who recognize and honor family as the basic unit of society.

Negatives of Optimism

Some things I leave lying around for rereading. The Intercollegiate Review (available at ISI.org) is one of those things. At the back they book reviews, and there’s one from the Spring 2011 issue I’ve reread a couple of times (even though I still haven’t gone to get the book itself). The book being reviewed is The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope by Roger Scruton. The review is by Molly Brigid Flynn. 

This has gotten my attention because of the idea that optimism doesn’t always lead to good things; sometimes a good dose of reality is actually more positive. The book outlines some logical fallacies that are common pitfalls of the optimist. Since yesterday we talked about the need for change in order to regain our hope, following losses caused by the hope-and-change president, I thought this might be instructive.  

One of the things I’m looking at is how the “let us control your life” types are likely to fall into these pits—so maybe there’s even more reason we shouldn’t trust them. Here are the fallacies: 

• Best Case Fallacy—a person puts out of mind the possible bad outcomes and acts on the assumption of inevitable success. If you’re debating an issue and say, “But what if this happens?” and they say, “That will never happen,” beware. (I’m thinking, for example, about the amount of oil imported from countries that express hatred for us, and when we say, “Shouldn’t we develop our own resources, rather than risk their control over us if they decide no longer to supply what we need,” and we get, “That would never happen—and we shouldn’t be using so much oil anyway.” Reason to worry.)
• Aggregation Fallacy—ignores mutual limits on various human goods, for example: liberty and equality, safety and excitement, offering help and allowing individual initiative. If a politician tries to impose a maximization of both at once, rather than finding an appropriate balance, the inevitable outcome will be less satisfaction with both.
• Born Free Fallacy—“conceives of human liberty as our primordial state, to be re-won by the overthrow of legal and traditional barriers.” While we do indeed have God-given rights to life, liberty, and property (liberty and property being extensions of the right to life), we do not have those rights where they interfere with the life, liberty, and property rights of another. So to pursue whatever you want as an end in itself, in Spherical Model terms, is southern hemisphere in the right, or anarchy, quadrant.
• Moving Spirit Fallacy—“imagines history to be a determined progress of ages…. We need only identify and eliminate another splint by which civilization cramps the growth of some natural human desire.” In fact, human nature has remained pretty much intact throughout the ages of mankind. Those who believe in evolution are inexplicably impatient with humans, assuming we have evolved in a mere few millennia when they describe the process as taking eons for any other species. It is simply more accurate to say “mankind is likely to be this way,” and then deal with those qualities and flaws.
• Zero Sum Fallacy—“identifies the villains spoiling our plans as whoever is prospering when other people are not.” Assuming the rich got that way on the backs of the poor is a common tool of the liberal to manipulate people with class envy. “The Zero Sum Fallacy refuses to see that the common good is not diminished by sharing; it records any person’s good as a social debit.”
• Utopian Fallacy—the optimistic dream that doesn’t have to defend itself. “The impossibility of my visionary, better future—which is obvious, but stated only by the irreverent and boorish—protects me from having to take responsibility for my failures to achieve it, or its failure to live up to what I prophesied.” Three years ago, the “hope and change” utopia wasn’t even spelled out, but anyone who asked for details was derided as hopelessly negative. Now that the results are obviously disastrous, maybe a little more negative detail-requiring would have been a good thing.
• Planning Fallacy—“presumes that all goods enjoyed by people living together can be achieved through planned action. It failed to see that much of what we need and love arises not by planned cooperation but by a type of unplanned coordination arising from shared place, habits, and laws.” I’ve been especially interested in this one, since the economic dichotomy in this country consists of mutually exclusive planners and free marketers. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom delineates this debate and shows why the planners can never have the needed information that dispersed individuals easily hold. The review continues, “The activist stance of the Planning Fallacy is blind to how our common goods often come about as by-products, not goals, the unplanned result of many unorganized persons acting according to their own plans. This fallacy is dangerous because many of the schemes hatched in the minds of would-be central planners undermine the goods secured only by persons running their own lives in their own smaller places.”

I like this summary: “The politics of hope often blames normal people—non-busybodies—for being selfish, for not realizing how ‘we’ must take care of all, rather than each taking care of his own.” If only those busybodies would limit themselves to giving what is their own, rather than assuming what is mine is theirs to give to whomever they deem worthy, we would all be positively better off.