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Of Work and Generational Conflict

In Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Western Civilization, Writing on March 27, 2024 at 8:00 am

This post originally appeared here in The Troy Messenger.

A recent report by ResumeBuilder.com found that 31% of employers won’t hire Gen Z candidates. Another 30% claimed they fired Gen Z employees who were on the job a month or less.

Why is this happening? The proffered reasons are that youth dress inappropriately, communicate poorly, request higher pay than is warranted, and avoid necessary tasks.

The company TrueBlue warns that 90% of human resources managers believe half their workforce needs retraining within five years. Why? Talent shortages and skills gaps.

“Kids these days” is a perennial complaint, but maybe there’s more to this story.

The new generation of workers—say, ages 18-25—grew up on social media and smartphones and suffered through the coronavirus pandemic, an alienating period of distancing and isolation, lockdowns and quarantines, downturn and depression, stagnation and strife. Early career professionals have trouble assimilating into the workforce because their social habits are unlike those of Millennials and Boomers. Reared on memes, tweets, and soundbites, they prefer online to face-to-face interaction.

Is this bad? Perhaps. It’s too early to tell.

Some eras undergo dramatic changes that shock older generations. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized Europe, enabling the mass production of books, the dissemination of groundbreaking ideas, mass literacy, scientific progress, and resurgent arts and culture. It also caused religious wars and class conflict.

The Industrial Revolution shifted the commercial focus from agriculture to manufacturing and urban technology. Although it tolerated poor working conditions and pollution, child labor and rising inequality, it also sparked ingenuity and modernization, vastly improving living standards across the world.

Even during periods of radical disruption, life goes on. Humans adapt to their circumstances and adjust practices to meet novel challenges. Exigencies require invention and entrepreneurship. “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils,” declared Sir Frances Bacon, “for time is the great innovator.”

On the other hand, history isn’t a continuous sequence of inexorable progress. Sometimes it involves regress and degeneration. Civilizations once august and glorious collapsed: the Egyptian, Mayan, Khmer, Aksumite, Hittite.    

The Fall of Rome led to economic downturn, the loss of infrastructure, and political upheaval that undermined material and intellectual advancement.

Whether our age is one of improvement or decline remains to be seen.

Let’s return from the grand to the practical. If I were a “Gen Zer,” I would use the past as my guide for the future. Historical examples, good or bad, contribute to personal and professional growth. You needn’t reform society writ large; just reform yourself.

Start with small things. Dress appropriately for an interview. Suitable attire is contextual or situational. A job at a law firm is different from occupations on the farm or in factories. Anticipate your audience’s expectations for your appearance and meet them. Don’t expect employers to conform to your standards.

Remain open to continuous learning and different perspectives. Don’t presume you know better or more than others. You may have fresh ideas and unique proficiencies, but stay humble and use those to lift up your peers and organization.

Admit weaknesses and highlight strengths. Collaborate with colleagues who complement your talents. Seek answers. Don’t be ashamed to be wrong or confused.

Monitor your online presence. Do your social media accounts feature words or images you wouldn’t want your grandmother seeing? If so, edit or remove them.  

Show gratitude and deference while maintaining confidence and poise. Be diligent and tenacious and don’t presume some task is beneath you. Most importantly, work hard! Complete assignments with excellence.

The novelist Robert Lewis Stevenson furnishes our “Word to the Wise” this week. “The obscurest epoch,” he submits, “is today.” We’re as likely to be as mistaken about essentials as our ancestors were and our posterity will be. In work as in life, for young as for old, we do well to remember that abhorring other generations only invites abhorrence upon ourselves.

Gen Z will grow old and become gatekeepers. The question is, of what?

Note: This piece is adapted from Allen Mendenhall’s regular segment “Word to the Wise” on Troy Public Radio.

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What Austrian Economists Can Learn From Roger Scruton

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Britain, Conservatism, Economics, Essays, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, liberal arts, Libertarianism, Literature, Philosophy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 17, 2020 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here in The Imaginative Conservative. 

The room is alive with happy discussion, the clanking of plates and silverware, hearty laughter, and the pitter-patter of smartly dressed servers buzzing about the room. Wine flows. We’re on the final course, awaiting dessert and coffee, when suddenly the lights dim, leaving dancing candlelight on the tables and the illicit glow of cell phones. On an enormous screen behind the stage comes a loud, hoarse voice: “It is a great honor to be named Defender of Western Civilization.”

I look up, puzzled. There before me in magnified form, filling the screen, is Sir Roger Scruton, sitting beside a lamp, his face framed by a flux of flaxen hair, his chair squeaking as he readjusts himself.  It’s evening, both here and in England, and the sun is down, so the faint light beaming on his face through an obscured window betrays the disappointing reality that we’re watching a recording, not a live feed. The moment, at any rate, is exciting. Scruton goes on to ask, “What is a civilization?”  And to answer: “It is surely a form of connection between people, not just a way in which people understand their languages, their customs, their forms of behavior, but also the way in which they connect to each other, eye to eye, face to face, in the day-to-day life which they share.”

That, anyway, is how I recall the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 14th Annual Gala for Western Civilization that honored Scruton, who, because of his chemotherapy treatment, was unable to attend.

Sir Roger, as he’s affectionately known, departed from this world on January 12, 2020.  This erudite philosopher of a bygone era raises grave questions about the compatibility between traditionalism and classical liberalism, custom and markets, the individual and the state, convention and innovation. From Scruton, we can, I think, learn the following. That a society of modest scope and scale functions optimally when its people are good and virtuous, when they voluntarily organize themselves into charitable communities, fearing the eternal consequences of wickedness. That free societies thrive where crime is rare and private property rights are both recognized and respected, where families work hard and support one another and leaders are classically and rigorously educated, having wrestled with the greatest thinkers and texts from across the ages. That lasting social harmony develops in cohesive communities where solidarity involves kindness and benevolence and members do not superciliously dismiss received wisdom and norms.

Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands—first published in 1985 as Thinkers of the New Left, reworked and rereleased in 2015, produced in paperback in 2016, and reissued in 2019 as yet a newer edition—demonstrates that Scruton wasn’t tilting at windmills as conservative pundits and talking heads on television and popular media seem too often to do. Scruton’s chief targets were, not senseless and sycophantic politicians, but ideas. He traced these ideas to particular leftist luminaries: Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, J.K. Galbraith, Ronald Dworkin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Źižek. His concern was principally philosophical and cultural. He took ideas seriously and didn’t simplify or exploit them merely for entertainment value.

Scruton acknowledged that the term “Left,” referring to the object of his opprobrium, covers a wide range of intellectuals and ideological movements, but that all of these, to some degree, “illustrate an enduring outlook on the world, and one that has been a permanent feature of Western civilization at least since the Enlightenment, nourished by … elaborate social and political theories,”[1] namely those which hold “that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practiced by a dominant class.”[2] The word “Left” or “leftist,” then, suitably encompasses a multiplicity of views that, although singular in their particulars, hang together as a classifiable category at a certain level of generalization.

Scruton added that leftists “define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed,”[3] and that they pursue two abstract goals: liberation and social justice. The liberation Scruton refers to is not necessarily a libertarian version of personal autonomy; rather, it refers to “emancipation from …. ‘structures,’” e.g., from “the institutions, customs and conventions that shaped the ‘bourgeois’ order, and which established a shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society.”[4] The Left seeks to deconstruct and dismantle historic associations (families, churches, clubs, sporting leagues, etc.) that provide order and stability in the absence of overarching government rules and regulations.

If that’s “the Left” in a nutshell, then what’s “the Right,” according to Scruton?  In short, the Right is a community of individuals believing in the primacy of those personal relationships, prevailing norms, and controlling institutions that precede government, mediate between private actors and the State, and celebrate the intrinsic worth of every human being. “The right,” explains Scruton, “rests its case in representation and law,” advocating a “civil society that grows from below without asking permission of its rulers.”[5] The Right, accordingly, treats government as accountable to its citizens in light of its dangerous capacity for mischief and violence. The Right also recognizes the sinful, flawed nature of human beings and, therefore, attempts to offset or neutralize—rather than to amass or centralize—power.

By contrast, the Left promotes institutionalized coercion and centralized power. Its attempts to realize concretely the abstractions of social justice and equality necessitate the use of a forcible apparatus, controlled by a select group of people, to press resistant communities into compliance. “Who controls what and how in the realm of pure equality,” asks Scruton on this score, “and what is done to ensure that the ambitious, the attractive, the energetic and the intelligent do not upset whatever pattern it is that their wise masters might impose on them?”[6] No true and absolute equality of talent or wealth can ever be achieved in tangible reality because humans are wonderfully and brilliantly diverse, even as they are made, universally, in the image of God.

Given a binary choice between the Left and the Right so described, libertarians ought to side with the Right, cultivating a literate society characterized not only by self-ownership, free markets, and private property, but also by aesthetic appreciation, religious worship, obedience to successful and constructive customs, and concern for the souls and material wellbeing of the generations not yet born. Libertarians and conservatives can agree that everyone is plugged into vast networks of commerce and activity, however remote their neighborhoods or habitats. They can agree with Scruton that self-regulating, disciplined communities of caring individuals administer felt, proportional restraints more fairly and efficiently than do faraway government bureaucrats or impersonal agencies of mechanical functionaries who enjoy a compulsory monopoly on the implementation of force.

Scruton suggested that the Right, more than the Left, benevolently esteems the multiplying, bewildering variety of human behavior and interests. Whereas the Left reduces human beings to determined products of intractable systems and rigid social structures, the Right marvels in the mystery of quotidian experience, mining the past for evidence of good and bad decisions, prudent and imprudent courses of action, and workable and unworkable approaches to difficult challenges and exigent circumstances.

There can be no freedom, however, absent some authority. Conservatives and libertarians alike may locate that authority in mediating institutions of modest size, recognizing the importance of consent and localism, family and place, to good government. Scruton’s example shows that certain conservative cultural conditions enable market-based economies to flourish. Conservatives and libertarians may agree that, in Scruton’s words, “[Ludwig von] Mises and [Friedrich] Hayek between them destroyed the possibility of a socialist economy,” giving the “conclusive argument against it.” Mises’s and Hayek’s argument, a tenet of the Austrian School of Economics, involves the recognition that humans are fallible creatures with limited knowledge and perspective who prosper when society writ large values humility over hubris, and economic exchange over warfare or coercion.

Despite the rancor between them lately, conservatives and libertarians need each other. Dividing them unites the Left. Scruton was no libertarian, but his ideas, if thoughtfully considered by libertarians, could enable a more fruitful, contemplative, and beautiful libertarianism to emerge.

[1] Pg. 1.

[2] Pg. 3. Note: I have Americanized Scruton’s spelling so that, for instance, “practised” has become “practiced.”

[3] Pg. 3.

[4] Pg. 3.

[5] Pg. 286.

[6] Pg. 274.

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Russell Kirk on Higher Education

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, higher education, History, Humanities, Imagination, liberal arts, Liberalism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on February 12, 2020 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal 

Russell Kirk isn’t known as a policy wonk. The Great Books, not the mathematical or statistical models of economic technicians, were his organon of choice. He devoted essays to broad, perennial themes like “the moral imagination,” “liberal learning,” and “the permanent things.”

Read his numerous columns about higher education, however, and you might come away with a different impression, one of Kirk as a political strategist with a strong grasp of educational policy.

Kirk wrote on a wide variety of issues involving higher education: accreditation, academic freedom, tenure, curriculum, vocational training, community colleges, adult education, college presidents, textbooks, fraternities and Greek life, enrollment, seminaries, tuition, teachers’ unions, collective bargaining, student activism, British universities, urban versus rural schools, boards of trustees, university governance, the hard sciences, grade inflation, lowering academic standards, libraries, private versus public schooling, civics education, sex education, school vouchers, university presses, and more.

One of his go-to subjects implicates several of those issues: federal subsidies. He believed that federal money threatened the mission and integrity of universities in numerous areas.

For starters, he believed that federal subsidies—and, it must be added, foundation grants—created perverse incentives for researchers, who might conform to the benefactor’s “preferences” and “value judgments.”[1] Recalling the proverb that “[t]he man who pays the piper calls the tune,”[2] he cautioned against financial dependency on outside influences, which, he worried, could impose ideological conditions on grants to advance or purge particular viewpoints.

Moreover, the grantors, whether they were foundations or the government, would, he believed, quantify the value of their funded work according to measurable outcome assessments that were “easily tabulated and defensible.”[3] The intrinsic value of reading Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, or Euripides, however, is not easily assessed in instrumental terms.

More fundamentally, Kirk viewed federal involvement in higher education as a step toward the centralization and consolidation of power at the expense of local variety. He foresaw the creation of the U.S. Department of Education long before it occurred.[4] Fearing the growth of an “educationist hierarchy” or an “empire of educationism” corrupted by “sinecures” and “patronage,”[5] he favored small, private, liberal-arts colleges, which, he believed, flourished when they committed to mission and tradition.[6]

“The American college—the small liberal arts college—is worth preserving,” Kirk wrote, “but it can be preserved, in our time of flux, only if it is reformed.”[7] Kirk’s reform was reactionary, not progressive.[8] It rejected the popular focus on vocation and specialization and sought to train “men and women who know what it is to be truly human, who have some taste for contemplation, who take long views, and who have a sense of moral responsibility and intellectual order.”[9] Even if they can’t be calculated precisely, these vague-yet-discernable qualities of literate people are beneficial to society writ large, in Kirk’s view. In other words, there’s an appreciable difference between literate and illiterate societies.

Kirk decried the alarming escalation of tuition prices. In 1979, he wrote, “Attendance at colleges and universities is becoming hopelessly expensive.”[10] Forty years later, the costs of attending college have risen exponentially. Kirk opposed federal aid or scholarships to students,[11] but not, from what I can tell, for the economic reason that the ready availability of federal funding would enable universities to hike tuition rates to artificially high levels. Perhaps, even in his skepticism, he couldn’t conceive of university leadership as so systematically exploitative.

We continue to hear echoes of Kirk’s observation that the typical college student “oughtn’t to be in college at all: he has simply come along for the fun and a snob-degree, and his bored presence reduces standards at most American universities.”[12] Elsewhere, he claimed that “[w]e have been trying to confer the higher learning upon far too many young people, and the cost per capita has become inordinate.”[13] The question of why students attend college is closely related to that of the fundamental purpose of college.

Uncertainty regarding the point of higher education—whether it’s to develop the inquisitive mind, expand the frontiers of knowledge, equip students with jobs skills, or something else entirely—seems more pronounced today in light of technological, economic, and population changes. Moreover, it remains true that “most of the universities and colleges are forced to do the work that ordinary schools did only a generation ago.”[14] Shouldn’t higher education accomplish more than remedial education? Doesn’t it have a greater end?

Kirk certainly thought so—at least if higher education were properly liberal. “By ‘liberal education,’” he explained, “we mean an ordering and integrating of knowledge for the benefit of the free person—as contrasted with technical or professional schooling, now somewhat vaingloriously called ‘career education.’”[15]

Kirk’s surprising wonkishness, and his facility in policy debates, always submitted to this overarching goal: Defending order against disorder, in both the soul and the larger polity.[16] “The primary purpose of a liberal education,” he said, “is the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake.”[17]

The aspiration of policy wasn’t policymaking. Kirk’s short-term strategies serviced a paramount objective: Namely, to seek wisdom, virtue, truth, clarity, and understanding. You can’t simply quantify the value of that.

[1] Russell Kirk, “Massive Subsidies and Academic Freedom,” Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1963), 608.

[2] Ibid. at 607.

[3] Ibid. at 611.

[4] Russell Kirk, “Federal Aid to Educational Bureaucracy,” National Review, Vol. 10 (February 25, 1961), 116.

[5] Russell Kirk, “The Federal Educational Boondoggle,” National Review, Vol. 5 (March 15, 1958), 257.

[6] See generally Russell Kirk, “The American College: A Proposal for Reform,” The Georgia Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 1957), 177-186.

[7] Ibid. at 177.

[8] Ibid. (“our age seems to require a reform that is reactionary, rather than innovating”).

[9] Ibid. at 182-83.

[10] Russell Kirk, “More Freedom Per Dollar,” National Review, Vol 31 (April 13, 1979), 488.

[11] Russell Kirk, “Federal Scholarships,” National Review, Vol. 2 (November 24, 1956), 18.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Russell Kirk, “Who Should Pay for Higher Education?” Vol. 23 (May 18, 1971), 534.

[14] Russell Kirk, “Federal Education,” National Review, Vol. 4 (December 28, 1957), 592.

[15] Russell Kirk, “The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education,” in The Essential Russell Kirk, edited by George A. Panichas (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007), 398.

[16] Ibid. at 400.

[17] Ibid.

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St. George Tucker’s Jeffersonian Constitution

In American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Civics, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, liberal arts, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 30, 2019 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here in Law & Liberty. 

One could argue that there are two basic visions for America: the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian. The former is nationalist, calling for centralized power and an industrial, mercantilist society characterized by banking, commercialism, and a robust military. Its early leaders had monarchical tendencies. The latter vision involves a slower, more leisurely and agrarian society, political decentralization, popular sovereignty, and local republicanism. Think farmers over factories.

Both have claimed the mantle of liberty. Both have aristocratic elements, despite today’s celebration of America as democratic. On the Hamiltonian side we can include John Adams, John Marshall, Noah Webster, Henry Clay, Joseph Story, and Abraham Lincoln. In the Jeffersonian camp we can place George Mason and Patrick Henry (who, because they were born before Jefferson, could be considered his precursors), the mature (rather than the youthful) James Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, John C. Calhoun, Abel Upshur, and Robert Y. Hayne. The Jeffersonian Republicans won out in the early nineteenth century, but since the Civil War, the centralizing, bellicose paradigm has dominated American politics, foreign and monetary policy, and federal institutions.

St. George Tucker falls into the Jeffersonian category. View of the Constitution of the United States, published by Liberty Fund in 1999, features his disquisitions on various legal subjects, each thematically linked. Most come from essays appended to his edition of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Born in Bermuda, Tucker became a Virginian through and through, studying law at the College of William and Mary under George Wythe, whose post at the law school he would eventually hold. On Tucker’s résumé we might find his credentials as a poet, essayist, and judge. He was an influential expositor of the limited-government jurisprudence that located sovereignty in the people themselves, as opposed to the monarch or the legislature, which, he believed, was a surrogate for the general will in that it consisted of the people’s chosen representatives.

Tucker furnished Jeffersonians with the “compact theory” of the Constitution:

The constitution of the United States of America . . . is an original, written, federal, and social compact, freely, voluntarily, and solemnly entered into by the several states of North-America, and ratified by the people thereof, respectively; whereby the several states, and the people thereof, respectively, have bound themselves to each other, and to the federal government of the United States; and by which the federal government is bound to the several states, and to every citizen of the United States.

Under this model, each sovereign, independent state is contractually and consensually committed to confederacy, and the federal government possesses only limited and delegated powers—e.g., “to be the organ through which the united republics communicate with foreign nations.”

Employing the term “strict construction,” Tucker decried what today we’d call “activist” federal judges, insisting that “every attempt in any government to change the constitution (otherwise than in that mode which the constitution may prescribe) is in fact a subversion of the foundations of its own authority.” Strictly construing the language of the Constitution meant fidelity to the binding, basic framework of government, but it didn’t mean that the law was static. Among Tucker’s concerns, for instance, was how the states should incorporate, discard, or adapt the British common law that Blackstone had delineated.

Tucker understood the common law as embedded, situated, and contextual rather than as a fixed body of definite rules or as the magnificent perfection of right reason, a grandiose conception derived from the quixotic portrayals of Sir Edward Coke. “[I]n our inquiries how far the common law and statutes of England were adopted in the British colonies,” Tucker announced, “we must again abandon all hope of satisfaction from any general theory, and resort to their several charters, provincial establishments, legislative codes, and civil histories, for information.”

In other words, if you want to know what the common law is on this side of the pond, look to the operative language of governing texts before you invoke abstract theories. Doing so led Tucker to conclude that parts of English law were “either obsolete, or have been deemed inapplicable to our local circumstances and policy.” In this, he anticipated Justice Holmes’s claim that the law “is forever adopting new principles from life at one end” while retaining “old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off.”

What the several states borrowed from England was, for Tucker, a filtering mechanism that repurposed old rules for new contexts. Tucker used other verbs to describe how states, each in their own way, revised elements of the common law in their native jurisdictions: “modified,” “abridged,” “shaken off,” “rejected,” “repealed,” “expunged,” “altered,” “changed,” “suspended,” “omitted,” “stricken out,” “substituted,” “superseded,” “introduced.” The list could go on.

The English common law, accordingly, wasn’t an exemplification of natural law or abstract rationalism; it was rather the aggregation of workable solutions to actual problems presented in concrete cases involving real people. Sometimes, in its British iterations, it was oppressive, reinforcing the power of the king and his agents and functionaries. Thus it couldn’t fully obtain in the United States. “[E]very rule of the common law, and every statute of England,” Tucker wrote on this score, “founded on the nature of regal government, in derogation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind, were absolutely abrogated, repealed, and annulled, by the establishment of such a form of government in the states.”

Having been clipped from its English roots, the common law in the United States had, in Tucker’s view, an organic opportunity to grow anew in the varying cultural environments of the sovereign states. In this respect, Tucker prefigured Justice Brandeis’s assertion in Erie Railroad Company v. Tompkins (1938) that “[t]here is no federal general common law.” Tucker would have agreed with Brandeis that, “[e]xcept in matters governed by the Federal Constitution or by acts of Congress, the law to be applied in any case is the law of the state.”

In fact, summarizing competing contentions about the Sedition Act, Tucker subtly supported the position that “the United States as a federal government have no common law” and that “the common law of one state . . . is not the common law of another.” The common law, in Tucker’s paradigm, is bottom-up and home-grown; it’s not a formula that can be lifted from one jurisdiction and placed down anywhere else with similar results and effects.

By far the most complex essay here is “On the State of Slavery in Virginia,” which advocated the gradual extirpation of slavery. With admirable clarity, Tucker zeroed in on the hypocrisy of his generation:

Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty, and sacrificing hecatombs upon her altars; whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies, and hurled defiance in their faces; whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free, or die, and imprecated curses on their heads who refused to unite us in establishing the empire of freedom; we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained.

Despite his disdain for the institution of slavery, Tucker expressed ideas that are racist by any measurable standard today—for instance, his notion that slavery proliferated in the South because the climate there was “more congenial to the African constitution.”

On the level of pure writing quality and style, Tucker had a knack for aphorism. “[T]he ignorance of the people,” he said, “is the footstool of despotism.” More examples: “Ignorance is invariably the parent of error.” “A tyranny that governs by the sword, has few friends but men of the sword.”

Reading Tucker reminds us that for most of our country’s formative history the principal jurisprudential debates were not about natural law versus positivism, or originalism versus living constitutionalism, but about state versus federal authority, local versus national jurisdiction, the proper scale and scope of government, checks and balances, and so forth. To the extent these subjects have diminished in importance, Hamilton has prevailed over Jefferson. Reading Tucker today can help us see the costs of that victory.

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El Why Liberalism Failed de Deneen ataca una versión falsa del liberalismo

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Christianity, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humanities, Liberalism, Modernism, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 2, 2019 at 6:45 am

This post originally appeared here at Mises.org. 

Sólo los audaces titulan un libro Why Liberalism Failed. Patrick Deneen, el Profesor Asociado de Ciencias Políticas David A. Potenziani Memorial de la Universidad de Notre Dame, ha hecho precisamente eso, proponiendo que tal fracaso ha ocurrido realmente y estableciendo la expectativa irrazonable de que él pueda explicarlo. Su premisa operativa es que el liberalismo creó las condiciones para su inevitable desaparición, que es una ideología autoconsumidora y autodestructiva que sólo tiene unos 500 años. (p. 1) «El liberalismo ha fracasado», declara triunfante, «no porque se quedara corto, sino porque era fiel a sí mismo. Ha fracasado porque ha tenido éxito». (p.3)

Deneen no define el término liberalismo, que no está en su índice a pesar de que se encuentra en todo el libro. Tengo la certeza de que uno de los revisores del manuscrito pre-publicado recomendó su publicación a los editores de Yale University Press, siempre y cuando Deneen definiera el liberalismo de manera convincente y luego limpiara sus descuidadas referencias a él. Deneen ignoró este consejo, dejando el manuscrito como está. Su genealogía del liberalismo es aún más problemática a la luz de esta negativa a aclarar.

Deneen presenta una aparente paradoja, a saber, que el liberalismo, bajo la bandera de la libertad y la emancipación, produjo su opuesto: un vasto, progresista y coercitivo Estado administrativo bajo el cual los individuos se han vuelto alienados, amorales, dependientes, condicionados y serviles. «El proyecto político del liberalismo», afirma, «nos está moldeando en las criaturas de su fantasía prehistórica, que de hecho requería el aparato masivo combinado del Estado moderno, la economía, el sistema educativo y la ciencia y la tecnología para convertirnos en: seres cada vez más separados, autónomos, no relacionales, repletos de derechos y definidos por nuestra libertad, pero inseguros, impotentes, temerosos y solos». (p.16)

En esta línea se oyen ecos de Sartre, y el existencialismo recomienda un cierto individualismo: la libertad del agente racional, que ha sido empujado a la existencia sin elección ni culpa propia, a querer su propio significado en un mundo absurdo y caótico. Pero el existencialismo es una especie de individualismo diferente de la que motivó a Hobbes, Locke y Mill: los principales objetivos de la ira de Deneen. Es cierto que a Mill no le gustaba la conformidad dogmática con la costumbre, pero es una costumbre, incluso se podría decir que es una posición conservadora. Hay que mantener o conservar, después de todo, un modo crítico de abordar cuestiones difíciles sin suponer que ya se han encontrado todas las soluciones adecuadas. Cada época debe revisar sus enfoques de los problemas perennes. Hay muchas cosas que no le gustan desde una perspectiva cristiana, pero sus desagradables conclusiones no necesariamente se derivan de su método de indagación o de su apertura a examinar de nuevo los rompecabezas y los problemas con los que nuestros antepasados lucharon.

El liberalismo clásico o libertarismo al que se adhieren los individualistas cristianos promueve la paz, la cooperación, la coordinación, la colaboración, la comunidad, la administración, el ingenio, la prosperidad, la dignidad, el conocimiento, la comprensión, la humildad, la virtud, la creatividad, la justicia, el ingenio, y más, tomando como punto de partida la dignidad de cada persona humana ante Dios y ante la humanidad. Este individualismo prospera en culturas fundamentalmente conservadoras y no cuadra con la caricatura de Deneen de una caricatura de una caricatura de un individualismo «liberal». Este individualismo conservador, una criatura del liberalismo clásico, aboga por la libertad a fin de liberar a los seres humanos para que alcancen su máximo potencial, cultivar una ética y una moral generalizadas y mejorar sus vidas e instituciones mediante el crecimiento económico y el desarrollo. ¿Y quién puede negar que la economía de mercado con la que está vinculada ha dado lugar, en todo el mundo, a mejores condiciones de vida, avances tecnológicos y médicos, descubrimientos científicos, curiosidad intelectual e innovación industrial?

Deneen desea rebobinar el tiempo, recuperar la virtuosa «autogestión» de los antiguos que, según él, se basaba en el «bien común». (p. 99) Ve en la antigüedad un arraigo social que se alinea con el cristianismo tal como lo ejemplifican en el mundo moderno las comunidades amish (p. 106-107) Su celebración de las artes liberales tradicionales adopta, dice, «una comprensión clásica o cristiana de la libertad» (p. 129) que enfatiza las normas y localidades situadas, las culturas arraigadas y las continuidades institucionales. Esta, sin embargo, es una curiosa visión de la antigüedad, que contradice los rasgos anticristianos del pensamiento clásico y antiguo, ensalzada por Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand y Julius Evola, que valoraban los elementos paganos de «la antigua alabanza de la virtud» (p. 165) y menospreciaban el mundo moderno por ser demasiado cristiano.

A Deneen no le interesan los liberalismos, es decir, la multiplicidad de conceptos que vuelan bajo la bandera del liberalismo. Prefiere casualmente agrupar variedades de enfermedades genéricas (desde la agricultura industrializada hasta el enamoramiento con el STEM, la diversidad, el multiculturalismo, el materialismo y la autonomía sexual) como productos del único enemigo común de todo lo bueno que los períodos clásico y medieval tenían para ofrecer. Luego le da un nombre a ese enemigo: liberalismo. Nos sumergiría, si no en la antigüedad, en el tribalismo medieval, en períodos en los que los acusados eran juzgados por la prueba o el combate, cuando los juramentos de sangre y el parentesco, en lugar de la confianza, la buena voluntad o el intercambio económico, determinaban las lealtades y lealtades de uno.

No es correcto que el liberalismo «requiera la liberación de toda forma de asociación y relación, de la familia a la iglesia, de la escuela a la aldea y a la comunidad». Por el contrario, el liberalismo libera a la gente de la coerción tiránica e institucionalizada que les impide disfrutar de las asociaciones y relaciones locales, incluidas las de las familias, las iglesias, las escuelas y las comunidades. El liberalismo bien entendido empodera a la gente para que se agrupe y defina su experiencia según sus propias costumbres y costumbres. Gracias al liberalismo, el propio Deneen goza de la libertad de criticar al gobierno en rápido crecimiento que cada vez más intenta imponerle normas y reglas contrarias a las suyas.

Extender el individualismo que caracterizó al liberalismo clásico al progresismo del siglo XX y a la política de identidad moderna, como hace Deneen, es un error. La política de identidad moderna trata sobre el colectivismo en nombre de la autodefinición, la autoconciencia y la autoconstitución, sobre la elección de qué comunidades (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, los Socialistas Demócratas de América, los neonazis, etc.) abrazan lo físico (por ejemplo, lo étnico o lo racial), lo ideológico (por ejemplo, lo pannacionalista, marxista, ecosocialista, feminista, anarcosindicalista, supremacista blanco), o características normativas (por ejemplo, justicia social o igualitarismo) en torno a las cuales se forman asociaciones de grupo.

La verdad es que el individualismo prospera en comunidades morales y virtuosas, y que el bien común y las asociaciones de grupos florecen en sociedades que reconocen y comprenden el valor y la dignidad inherentes de cada individuo. De la interdependencia y el fortalecimiento mutuo de la libertad y el orden, del individuo y de la sociedad, Frank Meyer proclamó que «la verdad se marchita cuando la libertad muere, por justa que sea la autoridad que la mata; y el individualismo libre, desinformado por el valor moral, se pudre en su centro y pronto crea las condiciones que preparan el camino para la rendición a la tiranía.1 Para aquellos que insisten en que el individualismo es antitético a la creencia religiosa, que es en sí misma indispensable para el conservadurismo y el bien común, M. Stanton Evans declaró, «la afirmación de un orden trascendente no sólo es compatible con la autonomía individual, sino con la condición de la misma; […] una visión escéptica de la naturaleza del hombre [es decir…] una visión escéptica de la naturaleza del hombre», como intrínsecamente defectuoso y propenso al pecado] no sólo permite la libertad política sino que la exige».2

En una sociedad libre, los empresarios y productores miran a los demás, a las comunidades, para determinar las necesidades básicas que deben satisfacerse. El interés personal racional que motiva la creatividad y la inventiva consiste fundamentalmente en servir a los demás de manera más eficiente y eficaz, en generar recompensas personales, sí, pero recompensas personales por hacer la vida mejor y más fácil para los demás. El Adam Smith de La Riqueza de las Naciones es el mismo Adam Smith de La Teoría de los Sentimientos Morales. Los seres humanos están conectados tanto para cuidar de sí mismos, proteger sus hogares y a sus seres queridos, como para sentir y sentir empatía por los demás. La beneficencia y la generosidad son aspectos principales del individualismo liberal que Deneen calumnia.

La «segunda ola» del liberalismo, en el paradigma de Deneen, es el progresismo. Sin embargo, el progresismo moderno y el Partido Demócrata no tienen casi nada que ver con el liberalismo clásico. Curiosamente y, me atrevo a decir, perezosamente, Deneen desea conectarlos. Sin embargo, no puede trazar una clara línea de conexión entre ellos, porque no la hay. La supuesta conexión es la supuesta ambición de «liberar a los individuos de cualquier relación arbitraria y no elegida y rehacer el mundo en uno en el que prosperen aquellos especialmente dispuestos al individualismo expresivo». (p. 143-44) ¿Debemos interpretar esta afirmación en el sentido de que Deneen preferiría que nuestras relaciones e interacciones fueran arbitrariamente coaccionadas por un poder central en una sociedad cerrada en la que los individuos subordinados siguen habitualmente las órdenes incuestionables de los superiores establecidos?

F. A. Hayek dijo una vez que, «hasta el ascenso del socialismo», lo opuesto al conservadurismo era el liberalismo pero que, en Estados Unidos, «el defensor de la tradición estadounidense era un liberal en el sentido europeo».3 ¿Está Deneen tan inmerso en la cultura estadounidense que no puede reconocer esta distinción básica? Deneen premia el bien común y colectivo que se manifiesta en las comunidades locales, culpando al interés propio racional de la supuesta tendencia universalizadora del liberalismo a erradicar las venerables costumbres y normas culturales. Pero parece confundido por la taxonomía norteamericana en la que ha caído el liberalismo y haría bien en revisar las obras de Ludwig von Mises, quien explicó: «En Estados Unidos, “liberal” significa hoy en día un conjunto de ideas y postulados políticos que en todos los aspectos son lo opuesto de todo lo que el liberalismo significó para las generaciones precedentes. El autodenominado liberal estadounidense apunta a la omnipotencia del gobierno, es un enemigo resuelto de la libre empresa y defiende la planificación integral por parte de las autoridades, es decir, el socialismo».4

Una comparación de la teoría política especulativa de Deneen y su narrativa abstracta de la decadencia con la de Larry Siedentop, profundamente histórica e ideológicamente neutra, Inventing the Individual (Belknap/Harvard, 2014), revela fallas críticas en el argumento de Deneen, comenzando con la proposición de que la clave del individualismo para el liberalismo tiene apenas 500 años. Siedentop menoscaba la imagen común de una Europa medieval asediada por la pobreza y la superstición, la monarquía y la tiranía, la corrupción generalizada y la muerte temprana de la que supuestamente nos rescataron el Renacimiento y, más tarde, la Ilustración. Siedentop ve, en cambio, el ascenso del cristianismo —mucho antes del medievalismo— como la causa del ascenso del individualismo liberal, que, de hecho, tiene sus raíces en las enseñanzas de San Pablo y de Jesucristo. Mientras que Deneen teoriza que el individualismo es reciente y anticristiano, Siedentop traza su historia actual como claramente cristiana, trazando sus características concretas a lo largo del tiempo a medida que proliferaba y sustituía a las antiguas culturas y costumbres paganas que carecían de una comprensión estructural de la dignidad y primacía de la persona humana.

Siedentop atribuye el individualismo liberal al cristianismo; Deneen trata el individualismo liberal como contrario al cristianismo. Ambos hombres no pueden corregir, al menos no completamente.

Caminando hacia atrás en algunas de sus grandes afirmaciones, Deneen reconoce en sus páginas finales que el liberalismo, en ciertas manifestaciones, ha existido por más de 500 años y que tiene mucho en común con el cristianismo:

Mientras que el liberalismo pretendía ser un edificio totalmente nuevo que rechazaba la arquitectura política de todas las épocas anteriores, se basaba naturalmente en largos desarrollos desde la antigüedad hasta la Baja Edad Media. Una parte significativa de su atractivo no era que se tratara de algo totalmente nuevo, sino que se basara en reservas profundas de creencia y compromiso. La antigua filosofía política se dedicaba especialmente a la cuestión de la mejor manera de evitar el surgimiento de la tiranía, y la mejor manera de lograr las condiciones de libertad política y autogobierno. Los términos básicos que informan nuestra tradición política —libertad, igualdad, dignidad, justicia, constitucionalismo— son de origen antiguo. El advenimiento del cristianismo, y su desarrollo en la filosofía política de la Edad Media, ahora muy descuidada, puso de relieve la dignidad del individuo, el concepto de persona, la existencia de derechos y deberes correspondientes, la importancia primordial de la sociedad civil y de una multiplicidad de asociaciones, y el concepto de gobierno limitado como el mejor medio de prevenir la inevitable tentación humana de la tiranía. El atractivo más básico del liberalismo no era su rechazo del pasado, sino su dependencia de conceptos básicos que eran fundamentales para la identidad política occidental. (págs. 184 a 85)

Perdóneme por estar confundido, pero pensé que Deneen se había propuesto criticar el liberalismo y trazar su fracaso, no exaltarlo ni defenderlo, y ciertamente no vincularlo a un antiguo linaje asociado con el cristianismo. Este pasaje representa la desorganización en el corazón del libro de Deneen. El liberalismo no tiene la culpa del estado administrativo masivo y sus redes de agentes y funcionarios que coaccionan a las comunidades locales. Deneen es parte del problema que describe, defendiendo formas de pensar y organizar el comportamiento humano que socavan su esperanza de que se reaviven los valores tradicionales y los lazos familiares o de vecindad a nivel local.

Deneen expresa sus opiniones con una certeza tan enloquecedora que parece altivo y tendencioso, como un manqué celosamente anti-libertario con un hacha que moler. Carece de la delicadeza y la caridad con que los eruditos razonables de buena fe se acercan a sus oponentes ideológicos. No tiene en cuenta la posición de quienes, como yo, creen que el individualismo liberal es una condición necesaria para el florecimiento de las comunidades locales, el cultivo de la virtud y la responsabilidad, la formación de instituciones mediadoras y asociaciones políticas de abajo hacia arriba, y la descentralización y difusión del poder gubernamental. Simplemente no puede entender la posibilidad de que el individualismo liberal cree un vehículo para la preservación de las costumbres y el patrimonio, la unidad familiar y los vínculos sociales a nivel local.

«El estatismo permite el individualismo, el individualismo exige el estatismo» (p. 17), insiste Deneen con pocas pruebas más allá de sus propias teorías ahistóricas especulativas, irónicamente dado su llamado a «formas locales de resistencia más pequeñas: prácticas más que teorías». He aquí una propuesta alternativa: el individualismo liberal y los lazos comunitarios que genera se protegen mejor en una sociedad cristiana que es solemnemente consciente de la falibilidad de la mente humana, de las tendencias pecaminosas de la carne humana y de la imperfección inevitable de las instituciones humanas.

Leyendo Why Liberalism Failed, uno podría salir cuestionando no si Deneen tiene razón, sino si es lo suficientemente culto en la historia del liberalismo como para juzgar esta amplia y centenaria escuela de filosofía que surgió del cristianismo. Qué impresión tan desafortunada para alguien que escribe con tanto estilo sobre tendencias y figuras tan importantes! La realidad, creo, es que Deneen es erudito y culto. Su descripción tendenciosa del liberalismo es, por lo tanto, decepcionante por no poner en evidencia su erudición y su aprendizaje, por promover una visión idiosincrásica del liberalismo que, en última instancia, podría socavar el compromiso clásico y cristiano con la libertad que desea revitalizar.

  • 1.Frank Meyer, «Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism», en What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), pág. 12.
  • 2.M. Stanton Evans, «A Conservative Case for Freedom», en What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), pág. 86.
  • 3.F.A. Hayek, «Why I Am Not a Conservative», The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Editio, Vol 17, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek(Routledge, 2013), p. 519.
  • 4.Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1927) (The Foundation for Economic Education y Cobden Press, 2002) (Ralph Raico, trans.), pgs. xvi-xvii.

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On Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed”

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Christianity, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law, liberal arts, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on August 28, 2019 at 6:45 am

The original version of this piece appeared here in the Journal of Faith and the Academy. A later version appeared here at Mises Wire.

Only the bold would title a book Why Liberalism Failed. Patrick Deneen, the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, has done just that, proposing that such failure has actually occurred and setting the unreasonable expectation that he can explain it. His operative premise is that liberalism so called created the conditions for its inevitable demise—that it is a self-consuming, self-defeating ideology only around 500 years old. (p. 1) “Liberalism has failed,” he declares triumphantly, “not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.” (p.3)

Deneen doesn’t define the term liberalism, which isn’t in his index even though it’s littered throughout the book. I have it on reliable authority that one of the peer reviewers of the pre-published manuscript recommended publication to the editors at Yale University Press, provided that Deneen cogently defined liberalism and then cleaned up his sloppy references to it. Deneen ignored this advice, leaving the manuscript as is. His genealogy of liberalism is all the more problematic in light of this refusal to clarify.

Deneen presents a seeming paradox, namely that liberalism, under the banner of liberty and emancipation, produced their opposite: a vast, progressive, and coercive administrative state under which individuals have grown alienated, amoral, dependent, conditioned, and servile. “[T]he political project of liberalism,” he claims, “is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” (p.16)

One hears in this line echoes of Sartre, and indeed existentialism recommends a certain kind of individualism: the freedom of the rational agent, having been thrust into existence through no choice or fault of his own, to will his own meaning in an absurd and chaotic world. But existentialism is a different species of individualism from that which motivated Hobbes, Locke, and Mill: chief targets of Deneen’s ire. It’s true that Mill disliked dogmatic conformity to custom, but that is a customary—one might even say conservative—position to take. One must preserve, or conserve, after all, a critical mode for undertaking difficult questions without assuming to have already ascertained all suitable solutions. Every age must rework its approaches to perennial problems. There’s plenty of Mill to dislike from a Christian perspective, but his unlikable conclusions do not necessarily follow from his method of inquiry or openness to examining afresh the puzzles and issues with which our ancestors struggled.

The classical liberalism or libertarianism to which Christian individualists adhere promotes peace, cooperation, coordination, collaboration, community, stewardship, ingenuity, prosperity, dignity, knowledge, understanding, humility, virtuousness, creativity, justice, ingenuity, and more, taking as its starting point the dignity of every human person before both God and humanity. This individualism prospers in fundamentally conservative cultures and does not square with Deneen’s caricature of a caricature of a caricature of “liberal” individualism. This conservative individualism, a creature of classical liberalism, advocates liberty in order to free human beings to achieve their fullest potential, cultivate widespread ethics and morality, and improve lives and institutions through economic growth and development. And who can deny that the market economy with which it is bound up has, throughout the globe, given rise to improved living conditions, technological and medical advances, scientific discovery, intellectual curiosity, and industrial innovation?

Deneen wishes to rewind the clock, to recover the virtuous “self-governance” of the ancients that, he believes, was predicated on “the common good.” (p. 99) He sees in antiquity a social rootedness that aligns with Christianity as exemplified in the modern world by Amish communities.(p 106-107) His celebration of the traditional liberal arts adopts, he says, “a classical or Christian understanding of liberty” (p. 129) that emphasizes situated norms and localities, embedded cultures, and institutional continuities. This, however, is a curious take on antiquity, one that flies in the face of the anti-Christian features of classical and ancient thought extolled by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Julius Evola, who valued the pagan elements of “the ancient commendation of virtue” (p. 165) and disparaged the modern world as being too Christian.

Deneen is not interested in liberalisms, i.e., the multiplicity of concepts that fly under the banner of liberalism. He prefers casually to lump together varieties of generic ills (everything from industrialized agriculture to the infatuation with STEM, diversity, multiculturalism, materialism, and sexual autonomy) as products of the one common enemy of everything good that the classical and medieval periods had to offer. He then gives that enemy a name: liberalism. He would plunge us back, if not into antiquity, then into medieval tribalism, into periods in which the accused were tried by ordeal or combat, when blood oaths and kinship rather than trust, goodwill, or economic exchange determined one’s loyalties and allegiances.

It isn’t correct that liberalism “requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships, from family to church, from schools to village and community.” (p. 38) On the contrary, liberalism frees people from the tyrannical and institutionalized coercion that prevents them from enjoying local associations and relationships, including those in families, churches, schools, and communities. Liberalism properly understood empowers people to group themselves and define their experience by their own customs and mores. Thanks to liberalism, Deneen himself enjoys the freedom to critique the rapidly growing government that increasingly attempts to impose on him standards and rules at odds with his own.

Extending the individualism that characterized classical liberalism to twentieth century progressivism and modern identity politics, as Deneen does, is misguided. Modern identity politics is about collectivism in the name of self-definition, self-awareness, and self-constitution, about choosing which communities (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, the Democratic Socialists of America, neo-Nazis, etc.) embrace the physical (e.g. ethnic or racial), ideological (e.g., pan-nationalist, Marxist, ecosocialist, feminist, anarcho-syndicalist, white supremacist), or normative characteristics (e.g. social justice or egalitarianism) around which one forms group associations.

The truth is that individualism thrives in moral, virtuous communities, and that the common good and group associations flourish in societies that acknowledge and understand the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. Of the interdependence and mutually strengthening nature of freedom and order, of the individual and society, Frank Meyer proclaimed that “truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”1 To those who insist that individualism is antithetical to religious belief, which is itself indispensable to conservatism and the common good, M. Stanton Evans stated, “affirmation of a transcendent order is not only compatible with individual autonomy, but the condition of it; […] a skeptical view of man’s nature [i.e., as inherently flawed and prone to sin] not only permits political liberty but demands it.”2

In a free society, entrepreneurs and producers are looking to others, to communities, to determine basic needs to satisfy. The rational self-interest motivating creativity and inventiveness is fundamentally about serving others more efficiently and effectively, about generating personal rewards, yes—but personal rewards for making life better and easier for others. The Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations is the same Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Human beings are wired both to look out for themselves, protecting their homes and loved ones, and to feel for, and empathize with, others. Beneficence and generosity are principal aspects of the liberal individualism that Deneen maligns.

The “second wave” of liberalism, in Deneen’s paradigm, is Progressivism. (p. 142) Yet modern progressivism and the Democratic Party have almost nothing to do with classical liberalism. Curiously and, I daresay, lazily, Deneen wishes to connect them. He cannot draw a clearly connecting line between them, however, because there isn’t one. The alleged connection is the supposed ambition “to liberate individuals from any arbitrary and unchosen relationships and remake the world into one in which those especially disposed to expressive individualism would thrive.” (p. 143–44) Should we take this assertion to mean that Deneen would prefer our relations and interactions to be arbitrarily coerced by a central power in a closed society where subordinated individuals habitually follow the unquestioned commands of established superiors?

F. A. Hayek once stated that, “[u]ntil the rise of socialism,” the opposite of conservatism was liberalism but that, in the United States, “the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.”3 Is Deneen so immersed in American culture that he cannot recognize this basic distinction? Deneen prizes the common, collective good as manifest in local communities, blaming rational self-interest for the allegedly universalizing tendency of liberalism to stamp out venerable customs and cultural norms. But he seems befuddled by the American taxonomy into which liberalism has fallen and would do well to revisit the works of Ludwig von Mises, who explained, “In the United States ‘liberal’ means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations. The American self-styled liberal aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by authorities, i.e., socialism.”4

A comparison of Deneen’s speculative political theory and its abstract narrative of decline with Larry Siedentop’s deeply historical, ideologically neutral Inventing the Individual (Belknap / Harvard, 2014) reveals critical flaws in Deneen’s argument, starting with the proposition that the individualism key to liberalism is merely 500 years old. Siedentop undercuts the common portrayal of a medieval Europe gripped by poverty and superstition, monarchy and tyranny, widespread corruption and early death from which the Renaissance and, later, the Enlightenment allegedly rescued us. Siedentop sees, instead, the rise of Christianity—long before medievalism—as the cause of the rise of liberal individualism, which, in fact, has roots in the teachings of St. Paul and Jesus Christ. Whereas Deneen theorizes individualism as recent and anti-Christian, Siedentop traces its actual history as distinctly Christian, mapping its concrete features over time as it proliferated and supplanted ancient pagan cultures and customs that lacked a structural understanding of the dignity and primacy of the human person.

Siedentop attributes liberal individualism to Christianity; Deneen treats liberal individualism as inimical to Christianity. Both men cannot correct, at least not fully.

Walking back some of his grand claims, Deneen acknowledges in his final pages that liberalism, in certain manifestations, has in fact been around longer than 500 years and that it has much in common with Christianity:

While liberalism pretended to be a wholly new edifice that rejected the political architecture of all previous ages, it naturally drew upon long developments from antiquity to the late Middle Ages. A significant part of its appeal was not that it was something wholly new but that it drew upon deep reservoirs of belief and commitment. Ancient political philosophy was especially devoted to the question of how best to avoid the rise of tyranny, and how best to achieve the conditions of political liberty and self-governance. The basic terms that inform our political tradition—liberty, equality, dignity, justice, constitutionalism—are of ancient pedigree. The advent of Christianity, and its development in the now largely neglected political philosophy of the Middle Ages, emphasized the dignity of the individual, the concept of the person, the existence of rights and corresponding duties, the paramount importance of civil society and a multiplicity of associations, and the concept of limited government as the best means of forestalling the inevitable human temptation toward tyranny. Liberalism’s most basic appeal was not its rejection of the past but its reliance upon basic concepts that were foundational to the Western political identity. (pp. 184–85)

Forgive me for being confused, but I thought Deneen had set out to criticize liberalism and chart its failure, not to exalt or defend it, and certainly not to tie it to an ancient lineage associated with Christianity. This passage represents the discombobulation at the heart of Deneen’s book. Liberalism is not to blame for the massive administrative state and its networks of agents and functionaries that coerce local communities. Deneen is part of the problem he describes, championing ways of thinking and organizing human behavior that undercut his hope for the reawakening of traditional values and familial or neighborly bonds on local levels.

Deneen airs his opinions with such maddening certitude that he comes across as haughty and tendentious, as a zealously anti-libertarian manqué with an axe to grind. He lacks the delicacy and charity with which reasonable scholars of good faith approach their ideological opponents. He does not entertain the position of those who, like me, believe that liberal individualism is a necessary condition for the flourishing of local communities, the cultivation of virtue and responsibility, the forming of mediating institutions and bottom-up political associations, and the decentralization and diffusion of government power. He just can’t grasp the possibility that liberal individualism creates a vehicle for the preservation of custom and heritage, the family unit, and social bonds on local levels.

“Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism,” (p. 17) Deneen insists with little proof beyond his own ahistorical speculative theories—ironically given his call for “smaller, local forms of resistance: practicesmore than theories.” (pp. 19–20) Here’s an alternative proposition: liberal individualism and the community bonds it generates are best protected in a Christian society that is solemnly mindful of the fallibility of the human mind, the sinful tendencies of the human flesh, and the inevitable imperfection of human institutions.

Reading Why Liberalism Failed, one might come away questioning not whether Deneen is right, but whether he’s even sufficiently well-read in the history of liberalism to pass judgment on this wide-ranging, centuries-old school of philosophy that grew out of Christianity. What an unfortunate impression to impart for someone who writes with such flair about such important trends and figures. The reality, I think, is that Deneen is erudite and learned. His tendentious depiction of liberalism is thus disappointing for not putting his erudition and learning properly on display, for promoting an idiosyncratic take on liberalism that could ultimately undermine the classical and Christian commitment to liberty that he wishes to reinvigorate.

  • 1.Frank Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism,” in What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), p. 12.
  • 2.M. Stanton Evans, “A Conservative Case for Freedom,” in What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), p. 86.
  • 3.F. A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition, Vol 17, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek(Routledge, 2013), p. 519.
  • 4.Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1927) (The Foundation for Economic Education and Cobden Press, 2002) (Ralph Raico, trans.), pgs. xvi-xvii.

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Michael Anton vs. Samuel Gregg

In America, Civics, Conservatism, Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on July 17, 2019 at 6:45 am

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John William Corrington on Science, Symbol, and Meaning

In American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Essays, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on November 28, 2018 at 6:45 am

John William Corrington’s essay “Science, Symbol, and Meaning” (1983) is archived at Centenary College as “Houston Talk.” It was the opening address at the Second Annual Space Industrialization Conference of the National Space Society in Houston, Texas. It has been included in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on this image:

The subject of “Science, Symbol, and Meaning” is man’s exploration of outer space and the potential physical instantiation of certain theories about the structure of the cosmos. Corrington sets out to “reconstruct” Western culture, first by defining and describing it and then by diagnosing what he calls its “deformity,” which involves confusion regarding the differences between mythical and scientic modes of knowing.

This essay uses the subject of space exploration as a starting point for recommending remedies to this so-called deformity. Corrington purports to derive his thesis about time and cosmic order from Eric Voegelin, Martin Heidegger, and Giorgio de Santillana. He critiques the “illusion” that scientific thinking displaced mythopoetic thinking in the West because, he says, theological and symbolic thinking has been used to make sense of the data that has been objectively arrived at and disinterestedly gathered. This illusion will no longer stand, Corrington suggests, as the expanse of space becomes more intimately known to us and we begin to acknowledge the role that myth plays in ordering our experience within the observable cosmos.

Rationalism and empiricism are, Corrington suggests, themselves forms of myth about our ability to know the cosmos that we occupy.

Corrington emphasizes the limits of human knowledge and submits that modern science is, however useful, myth; science, he says, is not “co-extensive with the manifold of reality.” Science equips us with symbols that can be manipulated to structure and explain our thinking about the phenomenal universe.

The drive for the enterprise of space exploration, in his view, represents a repressed desire to know and order our experience; it is in this sense a structural element of our psyche, something that is not new to modernity but long felt and expressed. For this reason Corrington believes the “leap into space is the heritage and destiny of Western Man.” Corrington’s prescription, in light of his comments on space exploration, for  the “deformity” in Western thinking is as follows:

We must re-learn and carry to the heart the old verities that existed before the rise of metaphysics and science, the truths that were carried on and carried down through the mythological structure of the psyche: the unity of humanity and the cosmos, the illusory and ephemeral quality of the ego, the one law common to all that penetrates and encompasses the fine structure and the gross structure of reality.

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Is Ocasio-Cortez Right About Rights?

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Christianity, Civics, Conservatism, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Liberalism, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on August 29, 2018 at 8:45 am

This article originally appeared here in The Intercollegiate Review. 

Colin I. Bradford writes fawningly that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, reaffirms “the centrality of the individual, individual rights, liberty, and freedom in which respect, trust, fairness and responsibility loom large.” He depicts Ocasio-Cortez as the embodied union of individualism and collectivism, someone who, in his words, “sees the individual as both a solitary being with certain inalienable rights and as a citizen and member of society.”

There’s much to unpack in Bradford’s frightfully grand statements, but let’s briefly consider some historical context for them.

“Modern Western ‘democracies,’” says John W. Danford, “are actually better described as liberal commercial societies. They rest on principles of individualism and individual rights—especially legal rights—which are more fundamental than democracy, and also much newer.”

Individual Rights Came from Christianity

The belief that humans by their nature possess “rights” against which governments may not transgress has not always been commonly held. Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014) made the compelling case that natural rights theories are distinctively Christian in origin. He presents the ancient pagans as tribal and patriarchal, characterized by fierce loyalty to kin and clan and lacking conscientious differentiations between public and private life. (The operative differentiation was between public and domestic life.) Inequality was accepted as a given; the notion of rights was practically nonexistent. What mattered was the family unit: secure lineage, child bearing, and glorification of the paterfamilias as the powerful hero. Cities emerged from familial corporate associations around which property relations were structured according to class hierarchies.

Correlated with the rise and spread of Christianity in the West was the proliferation of the concept of the individual as a rights-bearing creature with inherent dignity, which any legal order properly so called must recognize and protect. The teachings of Jesus Christ and St. Paul redirected political thought away from the material, phenomenal world and toward the afterlife, eternity, and the soul. The message that grace through Christ was available to anyone, not just rulers or the highborn, underscored the autonomy of the individual, the self-aware subject. A Christian emphasis on personal moral agency and responsibility, moreover, undercut Greek and Roman aristocratic culture and its attendant traditions of ancestor worship.

Siedentop contends, therefore, that Christianity, not the Renaissance, was the fountain of individualism. If the Enlightenment was the height of philosophizing about the relationship of the individual to society, then it was also the natural outflow of earlier eras shaped by Christianity. This narrative runs counter to the portrayal of medieval Christianity as closed and authoritarian and of the Enlightenment as predominately secular. It illuminates Danford’s description of modern liberal societies as fundamentally committed to individual rights embedded in the law.

Mutual Submission, Similar Ethics

A distinguishing feature of Enlightenment thinking was social contract theory, which is particularly important to the Anglo-American legal tradition as manifest in Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1789–91). These documents enshrine the principles of equality under the law, basic human dignity, rule of law, consent of the governed, popular sovereignty, and natural rights.

The most celebrated delineations of social contract theory belong to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. A simplistically synthesized account of their three hypothetical origins of political society runs like this: humans once existed as free agents in an ungoverned state of nature and eventually banded together in protective social units to enforce claims to property and defend against outside threats; voluntarily entering into these social units required individuals to give up unfettered liberty by consenting to the authority of a superintending body—a government— that exercised only those powers to which the individuals in the society corporately assented, either expressly or impliedly.

The social contract for a mature, successful society involves a collection of individuals wise enough to appreciate the reciprocal advantage of mutual submission and similar enough in ethics and morals to prescribe the proper scope, limits, and structure of the approved ruling authority. The U.S. Constitution, in theory, represents a social contract: a pact between citizens and its rulers that restrains government, divides power, and sets competing interests against one another with offsetting effect.

U.S. Supreme Court “Expansions”

The U.S. Supreme Court, in cases regarding the Fourteenth Amendment, began in the twentieth century to evaluate claims of unremunerated, allegedly fundamental rights in light of the history of judicial safeguards. A purported right was deemed presumptively fundamental if it enjoyed an established tradition of formal recognition by Anglo-American courts. Under this interpretive scheme, when the Supreme Court determined that an alleged right was nonfundamental, the alleged right would not be incorporated (via the doctrine of substantive due process) to apply against the states. The Supreme Court, however, gradually recognized particular suspect rights within broader categories of long-established rights. The so-called right to privacy, for example, that had valid antecedents in the common law was repurposed to include phenomena unknown at the common law.

The tendency of the Supreme Court in the twentieth century to expand (and, in some cases, to limit) the scope of alleged rights reveals, I think, that a privileged group of robed lawyers are inadequately equipped to philosophize about rights. The validity of alleged rights accrues socially, from the bottom up, when they can be traced over time to long-standing, if not immemorial, usage, customs, mores, and traditions, and when their practical applications have been tested by successive generations. Certain rights are natural, that is, prior to government promulgation, but their intelligibility is deeply historical, rooted, contextual, situational, and embedded.

Rights or Privileges?

One could argue, and Siedentop suggests, that Christianity’s institutionalization of rights discourse created the conditions necessary for secularization, in effect that Christianity ushered in a culture that led to its gradual removal from civic society. Siedentop postulates, in other words, that the success of Christianity eventuated its demise in the Western public sphere. The story of rights discourse in U.S. Supreme Court decisions lends credence to this perspective, revealing that prevailing notions of rights have grown to encompass what were once merely privileges.

If institutions follow culture, however, then a constitution that contemplates individual rights is only as good as the people it controls: a populace without extensive virtue will weaken or decline regardless of its organizational governance and administrative framework. Christianity may not have promoted ideas that caused its erasure from our governing institutions; rather, the people of the United States may have drifted away from the Christian ideas that made those institutions effective and stable.

Bradford recognizes that “individualist values of liberty, property rights, freedom and sovereignty worked well in the 20th century as the foundations of competition, free markets, democracy and the nation state.” Yet he sees these concepts as inadequate today, lacking something he believes Ocasio-Cortez can supply, to wit, a form of collectivism that in his representation facilitates community and social harmony. He simply fails to see that the unique individualism that emerged out of Christianity generated the community and social harmony he now desires.

There is no individualism absent the recognition that every human life, anywhere and everywhere, is precious and important. It follows from that premise that no one may violate the rights of others who themselves have not violated another’s rights. This principle, extended to society writ large, creates the conditions necessary for community to flourish. Individualism in Christian societies aided the growth of cities, institutionalized the dignity of the human person as a bearer of rights, and challenged rather than empowered abusive government. Ocasio-Cortez should not hope to eradicate this kind of individualism, for it has accomplished more good for humanity than the socialism she purportedly embraces.

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Richard Bulliet on Transformations in Europe, 1500-1750

In Academia, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Teaching, Western Civilization on July 18, 2018 at 6:45 am

In the following lecture, Professor Richard Bulliet discusses transformations in Europe during the period of 1500 – 1750: