Personality Divide, Part II

In Monday’s post, we talked about the philosophical differences between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, and how their worldviews translate to a today’s political dichotomy.

Burke is about being thankful for whatever works, and conserving that in any effort toward improvement. Paine is about being outraged by whatever isn’t perfect, because scientific progress gives us no excuse for whatever doesn’t meet expectations.

It’s good to understand how different minds work, so we can find common ground and work together. But it might be true that one way of thinking leads to better outcomes (the one in which thinking and evidence are more valued than emotion and intention). So, in defense of the more-or-less Burkeian conservative mind, here is Part II.

There’s a tendency to think of “conservative” as boring, staid, unadventurous, and to think of “progressive”/liberal as trendy, “with it,” and up for revolution. Yet if you look at the ideas behind the American Revolution, what you see is the man-of-action effort to maintain the individual freedom Englishmen were supposed to have been guaranteed (see the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence), rather than lose them to the whim of a dictatorial monarch. They worked through all the institutional pathways first, but then they risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to separate from the Mother Country and live by the known principles of freedom in the New World.

You can see a similar sense of “revolution” in today’s public school debate. It might seem to go against expectation, but conservatives are much more open to alternatives to public school institutions. Maybe it’s because public schooling is a relatively new and not demonstrably successful (in fact often demonstrably less successful) system of educating the next generation. So you have people concerned about education, and finding better and best practices, open for experimentation—among “conservatives.”

And among conservatives you find both “conservative” and “fast action” personalities. There are those who patiently work for incremental changes—more local control, more school choice, vouchers for private school tuition. And you also find those with no faith in public schooling, who are willing to see radical reform—abolishment of public schooling, turning to all private schooling, homeschooling, combinations of classroom and online learning, and whatever a parent decides will work for their children. That “conservative” side, the “northern” hemisphere, accommodates both types of thinkers. (By personality, I’m typically more conservative, yet I was radically willing to pull my kids out of school and educate them myself for a decade, because kids only grow up once, and you can’t mess around and lose the opportunity.)

But in the public school debate, what we see is democrat/liberal/progressives absolutely bound to protect the status quo. Odd.

So the “progressive” experiment, which threw out the parent-run education system that had led to the great thinkers of our founding (and pretty much throughout the millennia), and replaced it with a “new” factory-style model with centralized one-size-fits-all control, hasn’t actually been an improvement. Yet there are “bitter clingers” who refuse to let go so the system can be improved. And those change resistors are the self-proclaimed “progressives.” Hmm.

There’s something about faith in science/knowledge and politics about the Spherical Model south (maybe a prideful refusal to acknowledge God’s hand in our lives), and sometimes Paine-type thinkers are led there. We know, from evidence, principle, and scripture, that tyranny, lower prosperity, and social decay lie in that southern hemisphere.

While I was exploring this idea of two types of minds, I reread the December Imprimis article, “A Rebirth of Liberty and Learning” by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn. He begins with the assertion, “There is a proper way to educate and there is a proper way to govern, and they are both known.” His piece is about where we’ve gone wrong in governing and educating, and how to get redirected.

Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College
photo from Imprimis

What classical education seeks is ultimate good—and identifying how to live as a good person. There is an assumption that ultimate truth exists, and we should seek it. We are aided in this quest by building upon a core set of knowledge passed down through the ages, recognizable by its beauty—it’s ultimate goodness.

The “progressive” new way is to throw out the idea of educating for the purpose of building better human lives, and instead educating for career preparation—“students chiefly as factors of production.”

Dr. Arnn makes the comparison for us:

Although we all wish productive jobs for our children, as parents we know that they are not chiefly job seekers or factors of production. After all, how many of us, if we were given the choice of our children earning a lot of money and being bad, or struggling economically and being good, would choose the former?

Then he spends half a page quoting from a modern teachers guide for AP English, which says some nonsense about helping students “construct their own realities” that will somehow “help them live in a mad, mad world.”

Dr. Arnn summarizes:

Could the difference be more stark between the older and newer ways of education? Between leading students toward an understanding of the right way to live in a comprehensible world, and telling them they must shape their own values and make their own reality in a world gone mad? And by the way, think of the definition of “reality”; then think of making one’s own reality. Do you see that it destroys the meaning of the word to use it that way?

Then he show similar contrasts in ways of governing:

One way to see the difference is to see that laws in America used to be simple and beautiful. They were written with care, and citizens could read them quickly and understand their meaning. Of the four organic laws that founded America—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Constitution of the United States—none of them was more than 4,500 words long.

Clear, understandable by those affected, based on long-held principles—those are the ways that tie in with ultimate good, truth, and beauty. That is the older way, yet it seems fresh and clear and connected to human dignity even centuries later. Then there’s the new, bureaucratic, central control way preferred by the “it’s old so let’s throw it out and do our own thing” seekers of progress. For instance,

…the Affordable Care Act, which when it was passed in 2010—and this does not include the countless rules and regulations it has generated over the past three years—ran to 363,086 words. This law—and in the true sense of the word it wasn’t a law at all, but something different—was not readable or comprehensible to any member of Congress who voted for it or to the citizens whose lives it was aimed at manipulating in a detailed and intrusive way. Could anything be uglier? And is it surprising, being governed in this way, that the richest nation in human history is going broke?

James Madison clearly declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then simply listed the God-given unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and he declares government’s purpose to defend these rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, he misconstrues that clarity this way:

Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

You can’t get from that point A to that point B; there is no such path. As Dr. Arnn put it, “How did Barack Obama come to believe something so foreign to America’s heritage as the idea that in the name of liberty we must reject absolute truths—which necessarily includes rejecting those truths I just quoted from the Declaration?”

Here’s what I think. There are known ways of living together as human beings that lead to the best (though still imperfect) outcomes. We can have freedom, prosperity, and civilization by living according to these known core principles. But we’d better teach these core principles far and wide, because, as truth and freedom seeker Ronald Reagan used to say,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Personality Divide

I’m not an expert on either Edmund Burke or Thomas Paine, but I heard a lecture online of author Yuval Levin, speaking at the Heritage Society, related to his book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. [The lecture is only a half hour, but there's another half hour of Q&A. And yes, I'm aware that the way I spend my spare time is a little odd; thank you for pointing that out yet again.] Understanding something of these two contemporaries of our nation’s founding might give us insight into an ongoing differences today.

Yuval Levin proposes that the ideas of right and left, which affect our politics and policies, “seem to represent genuinely distinct points of view, and our national life seems almost by design to bring to the surface the sorts of questions that divide them.”  And, “There are no perfect representatives of the two side of the debate, but there may be no better representatives than Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.”

Burke is essentially conservative, what is referred to as “right.” And Paine is essentially progressive, or what is referred to as “left” today. That said, they both debated during the American Revolution, both in favor of it, both in favor of basic human rights, and both from within traditions and elements of society that worked. So there's nothing here as simple as right and wrong. 

Here at the Spherical Model, I don’t use right and left, but rather north for freedom, south for tyranny, with an east/west position depending on the level of society whose interests are at stake. I’m not suggesting that Burke is purely “north” and Paine is purely “south.” But I’m hoping the debate they had can enlighten us as we identify where on the sphere certain ideas and policies lie. And, maybe more important, I’m hoping we can identify ways of thinking, so that we can persuade those who think differently to live in the northern hemisphere with us, instead of dragging us ever southward.

Yuval says, of Burke and Paine,

Their disagreement, though it was always directed to real events and practical questions, took place on the plain of philosophical argument. They argued about the meaning of nature and history and politics, what sort of standards of justice should govern political life. They argued about the tension between rights and duties in society, between choice and obligation. They argued about whether politics could answer to stark and universal principles that we could learn through reason, or whether it had also to answer to the traditions and forms and inherited practices of each society.

It seems to me, even today, if we can debate on these terms, instead of accusations of hatred toward opposing views, we might at least get some mutual understanding.

At about 15 minutes in, Levin outlines three areas of differences between Burke and Paine, and how each relates to certain issue areas today. This struck me as approximately the three spheres: political, economic, and social:

·        Their basic dispositions toward society and politics.

o   What gets the left and the right energized or angry.

·        Their sense of what kind of knowledge is available to us in solving social and political problems.

o   How conservatives and liberals think about a lot of economic issues.

·        Their views of how the past and the present relate to one another in politics, and in human life more generally—the question that gets to what may be the deepest differences between the left and the right.

o   How we think about a lot of the social issues.

If there are philosophical truths from each, both worth considering, then Burke and Paine are not simply north and south. Still, one path of thought may get to usable truth better than the other. Levin said,

Edmund Burke, like many of the conservatives who have followed him, approached that world by first and foremost being impressed with and grateful for what works about it—so trying to build on what is good to address what is not.

Thomas Paine, like many progressives and radicals since, approached that world first and foremost by being struck and outraged by what was failing about it—so trying to root out the bad in order to make room for good things to take its place.

Burke begins in gratitude; Paine begins in outrage.

Because people think differently, we are always going to have this divide. There’s a difference in the way the two consider human beings, to begin with. Levin continues with this description:

Burke begins with a sense of man as a fallen creature, as highly imperfect, prone to self-destructive passions and excesses, in need of correction and balance. And that means that Burke is basically simply surprised that anything works at all in society. He thinks it’s much easier for human communities to fall into chaos and disorder than to achieve order and happiness. And any human institutions that do manage to work, to make something worthwhile of this imperfect raw material, deserve to be revered and treasured and protected. He’s grateful for those institutions, grateful for the people who created and sustained them, because he thinks they’re very far from guaranteed.

Paine, on the contrary, begins from much higher expectations of human reason and human power and knowledge. And so he thinks that achieving social order and tranquility and happiness is a matter of applying the right principles—principles that he thought were becoming well known in his day, thanks to a new enlightenment science of politics. And so there was really no excuse for persisting in failure. Social order and prosperity and happiness should be the default condition of the human race, and any deviations from them are a reason to be outraged.

His expectations are almost utopian, where Burke’s are far lower and more modest. And so Paine is inclined to tear down what isn’t working and is confident that it can be replaced with something better, while Burke is cautious to protect all standing institutions. He thinks they were built over generations of trial and error by countless people working together to address enduring human problems. And so he wants to preserve those institutions, and to fix their problems in targeted and modest ways, because he’s not at all sure that we can build new or better ones from scratch on our own.

Here we find, I think, a basic difference of disposition that is still, in a lot of ways, evident in our own politics now: one approach that begins in gratitude for the good in the world; another that begins in outrage at the bad. The first seeks gradual reform to sustain a working system; the second seeks wholesale transformation to move beyond a failed system and create a working one. So one is conservative, the other progressive. One is outraged at seeing valuable possessions lost; the other is outraged at the sheer injustice of the status quo.

So, if you were to categorize, people are likely to fall into one of the two types: “conservative” or “progressive.” I more often fall on the Burke side (so does Yuval Levin). But it is possible to respect the Paine side. Then the debate can be about what works to get what we agree are better ends, or better policies.

However, it may be that Burke’s point of view is more provable in evidence, whereas the supposed possible “better” world progressives envision is not going to be reached using the non-angelic people, incomplete knowledge, and limited resources available.

I propose that there are things we know—about what is good, what is right, what is best for human prosperity and happiness. I think it would be worth spending another post discussing what we know, and why we ought to be choosing those things, instead of what we’ve been choosing.

Measuring Mitt Part V

As you can probably tell, I’ve been leaning toward Mitt for a while. I have a lot of respect for most of the other candidates, particularly Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum—the ones I haven’t yet covered in this Measuring the Candidates series. (I also like much about Rick Perry, but I did spend a day covering him back in June, here and here. Ron Paul probably deserves a day as well.)

So I was in something like stunned confusion yesterday. I was watching Glenn Beck’s Christmas episode from the day before, and the news segment announced that Mitt Romney had said he was a moderate and a progressive. This week? When people are starting to see that side (and the various other concerns) of Gingrich? Why would he say such a thing? I thought I may need to totally rethink considering my endorsement.

But the first thing I did was do a search online to find the actual quote. I found it, and it does sound bad—but it’s from 2002, not this week.

Think about what you knew about progressivism in 2002. I’m fairly aware of words, and sometimes I notice when meanings change. For example, when I was 18 I was given a journal and started writing in it. I began by describing myself, and I included an assessment of myself as “liberal.” But this wasn’t a political statement. At that point in time, and in my life, the word meant “open-minded” or “generous.” I was going into a “liberal arts” field; the word was positive and unrelated to politics. In addition, while I have always been somewhat conservative in dress and daring, and politically what we now call “conservative,” at that point in my life “conservative”—meaning “stuck on the status quo and unwilling to change and grow”—was not how I would have described myself. Some 20 years later, as I went back and read that first journal, I added a sticky note pointing out that the meaning of the word had changed, and I had never been politically “liberal.”

It bothers me that the opposition so frequently hijacks words that I previously found useful. “Progressive” is one of those. It was around 2001 when my homeschooling children and I went through a history book that enlightened us about the seriously negative turn the country took in the first couple of decades of the 20^th century. I had known very little about the inception of the income tax (that was never supposed to go above 7% for even the most wealthy), the Federal Reserve, and government intervention by Woodrow Wilson and others. I didn’t learn much more about Wilson until maybe 2006 or so, at which point I became aware of the Marxist use of the word “progressive.” So it was only shortly before candidate Hillary Clinton used the word  that I became aware of the alternate meaning. It had always meant what you’d expect: making progress, moving forward, positive movement. Suddenly it was code for Marxist socialist policies.

But back in 2002, even though experts who had read Wilson’s actual writings from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries may have known the code meaning, most of us used the word “progressive” in its traditional positive sense. I can’t be certain how Mitt Romney defined the word in 2002, but my guess is that, to the liberal but politically uneducated Massachusetts constituency he was speaking to, it wasn’t socialist code. When Hillary used it, she intended the Wilsonian meaning, but used the word knowing her audience was unaware of the Marxist connotations; she was taking advantage of the positive connotations people were familiar with. And that was at least five years after Romney is accused of using the word with the current nefarious meaning.

Similarly, the word “moderate” didn’t really have its negative meaning until McCain’s candidacy four years ago. Although this word began gaining baggage over a longer time, it mostly meant “not extreme.” The Tea Party didn’t exist for another seven years . “Extreme” meant something very different from “wanting low taxes and adherence to the Constitution,” which isn’t extreme in reality but gets labeled that way; back in that day, “extreme” meant anti-government wackos like Timothy McVeigh or KKK members. I’m not acquainted with anyone in the GOP that qualifies as that older definition of “extreme,” so in 2002 we were all “moderates.” So, to a liberal Massachusetts audience in 2002, Mitt was probably saying, “You don’t need to worry about me doing anything completely at odds with your will; I’m just here to fix the state budget problems.”

Of course, I could be wrong. But when you look at everything Romney said during the last campaign—all conservative (using our current definition)—and at his record, which qualifies as conservative (with the proviso that we discuss health care, which we’re about to do), then you can see he is neither a stealth nor overt “progressive” by current definition.

I’m wondering who put forth the 2002 clip as “news,” and I wonder what agenda those outlets that ate it up are admitting to. The actual story was, “Back in 2002 Mitt Romney used the words ‘progressive’ and ‘moderate’ in describing himself, using the definitions they held back then.” The story was not, as purported, “Mitt Romney admits he is ‘progressive’ and ‘moderate’ after spending a career speaking and acting as if he is ‘conservative.’”

My intention had been to cover Massachusetts health care today, which is the biggest concern for most people (including me). But I felt like we had to cover that “definition” thing first, so we can go in with an open mind—what we used to call a “liberal” mind.

So I’m seeing two more posts in this Measuring Mitt series: Massachusetts care, and then a day on Romney's specific skills. I think I can get these out tomorrow and Monday. I’d still like to give the other candidates their due, but Christmas is coming, so no promises about regular posts for a couple of weeks.