Peter Suderman and I must have different measures of excellence when it comes to blog comments. One man’s example of excellence is another man’s example of fallacious nonsense, I suppose. Here he signals his agreement with Will Wilkinson’s comment, to which I took so much exception earlier today, and has this to say:
Will, in his excellent comment, makes pretty much all the points I would’ve in order to counter Michael’s economic arguments. Globalization and the interdependence through trade creates far more stability than an inwardly focused economy. Technology has been the engine that has exponentially increased the potential for human productivity, allowing faster, cheaper, more available goods to anyone and everyone (goods which, I’ll add, free trade makes even more readily available, eliminating more poverty). China may not be a glittery paradise today, but Thomas Sowell recently published a column in which he quoted undercover economist Tim Harford as saying that “China is lifting a million people a month out of poverty.” While there are still clearly many gains to be made there, this is no small feat. Wealth, trade and prosperity create peace and well-being far better than nationalistic self-centeredness.
What does it mean to say that globalisation and interdependence through trade create more stability? What sort of stability do we mean? Certainly not international political stability. The world economy had never before been more integrated than it was in 1914, and the worst military conflict in world history to that point happened among the very industrial nations whose every economic incentive should have directed them to avoid conflict with one another. At the very least, these things do not discourage political instability, and in my view they can make nations even more interested in interfering militarily in the affairs of others to pursue ever more and more remote economic interests created by this blessed interdependence.
The libertarian will point to trade barriers that existed before the war, or will blame nationalism (fair enough) or the structure of the nation-state itself, but if he is right about the power of markets to create “stability” he has to explain why the most integrated international economy up till that time collapsed in a bloodbath of massive instability. The rest of this is rhetorical. What Mr. Suderman calls “nationalistic self-centeredness” I would call common sense patriotism and looking after the national interest.
Trade serves the national interest when it provides things that a nation cannot provide for itself, when it fulfills a need. To that extent, trade is natural and good. Absolute economic independence, or autarky, is obviously a practical impossibility for an industrial society, but it does beg the question why it is so objectionable as an ideal and undesirable when possible. It is the ultimate expression of the virtue of apragmosyne, minding our own business, which has nothing to do with being self-centered and everything to do with looking after one’s own kin and neighbours. It might be said that no man was ever so peaceful as when he was busily tending to his own backyard.
If past nationalists have chanced to stumble on this old piece of wisdom I am hardly going to dismiss it simply because I find nationalism offensive (as I most certainly do) or because they misused the concept. But speaking of nationalism, how is it that conservatives, almost always the most constant enemy of nationalism, are the ones getting tarred with this label? Why were economic liberals in the 19th century always the first and most obnoxious political nationalists? Because, among other reasons, they liked the nation-state as a way to break down trade barriers. No local, particularistic self-centeredness for them!
Now the nation-state constrains them and annoys them, so they will need something to come along and smash new barriers. Generally, conservatives tend to be fans of barriers of all kinds, so the liberal/libertarian proclivity for smashing them always puts us on edge. As the old conservatives would have defended a plurality of German principalities against a single German nation-state, so we today prefer a world of nation-states to any form of globalist order, be it market- or bureaucracy-oriented (with the WTO, it is becoming both). Most seem to think that “the market” or “globalisation” will break down nation-states all on their own, and the media is awash in stories about the decline of the nation-state, ignoring that in the final analysis what broke the sub-national polities was force employed by the liberal nation-state. The same thing will happen to nation-states when supranational bodies achieve some coherent, working order and turn to suppress and gobble up those “self-centered” nations that do not see the big picture a la the background to The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
Trade is not in itself a political good, which is to say a good of the polity. Trade that exists to fuel consumerism is simply a blight, a parasite on a nation. To want to curtail that is not to engage in “nationalistic self-centeredness,” and to want to encourage it is to endorse a society of consumers, at once subject to passions and politically and economically dependent in a way that makes a mockery of the claim that they are free men. No one will be able to argue successfully that a consumerist economy is morally edifying–it prizes and extols an acquisitive spirit, which is precisely the sort of spirit any traditional understanding of virtue rejects.
No one is really questioning that technological advance improves productivity. That isn’t the question, and no economic alternatives Michael or I are going to put forward will deliver more efficient productivity. Libertarians always talk about how these or those people are “better off,” but there is never much sense that this being “better off” brings them any closer to living a sane, humane life. They have more and cheaper stuff and more cash–yes, we know. And? That’s just the point. In the order of “cultural libertarianism” there often isn’t much more than those things for most people because “cultural libertarianism” will sanction no public norm or public morality, much less religion, and are content to see countless tens of millions of their countrymen sink into a moral and spiritual torpor in the midst of a culture bereft of aspirations to beauty, truth or the eternal. That’s freedom, they’ll say. But it is not the freedom of morality, to say nothing of a higher order of freedom found in the control of the passions and, ultimately, in dispassion itself.
For me and Michael, I think it is fair to say generally, economic goods are of secondary importance and cannot take precedence in our vision of order. In any event, what also seems obvious is that such advances and increased productivity can also have corrosive side-effects, which is what I think Michael was saying. You can either hope that private organisations have the means to cope with the numerous corrosive side-effects of a multi-trillion dollar economic machine (which seems simply ridiculous to me), as Mr. Suderman does, or you can say that communities and nations have legitimate authority to restrain the causes of that corrosion. This is not to impose an austerity regime, but simply to have moderation and restraint govern affairs. The other alternative is that you can, like Mr. Wilkinson, pretend that there is no corrosion or degradation at all.
How the principle of legitimate regulation is enforced, and at what level of government it occurs, are things that should seriously be debated, and I cannot emphasise strongly enough the need for an extremely decentralised solution. Subsidiarity and common sense demand this. But to rule regulation out prima facie, as libertarians do and indeed must, seems to me to be equivalent to throwing up one’s hands all together in the face of cultural decay.
In this country, many conservatives have been inclined to entertain laissez-faire ideas on both economics and morals on the assumptions that economic growth was either neutral or actually contributed to the good order of society and that traditional “values” would fare well in the “marketplace of ideas.” Those assumptions were wrong. The conservatives who have realised this have accepted that, even as economic goods are secondary, economic growth has far more potential to harm the primary goods that we treasure than some of us have allowed up till now and that, as with everything else we consider significant, we believe there should be some means beyond whatever can scrounged up voluntarily to protect those primary goods, because those goods touch on the moral and cultural welfare of the commonwealth. Because these things are vital to the well-being of the commonwealth, it seems clear enough that there is a genuine public interest in them that calls for some sort of legal authority to involve itself in these affairs.
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January 31st, 2006 at 10:34 pm
MJK
Daniel - I’m glad to see you and Michael engage in this debate. Sometimes it does seem pointless to engage these folks as they seem to be so programmed…quick to label reasonable, intelligent interlocutors out of serious discussion. One may come to expect such behavior from such leftist. I am also not surprised by the level of intellectual pretension that marks the responses of these libertarians. It becomes quite boring and rather inane to read such responses.
I had attempted to provide a similar comment on Michael’s site and wanted to post a portion of it here:
“The presumption that the open exchange of goods and its extreme cousin the worship of markets represents a panacea is awfully tiresome at best and morally wrongheaded at worst.
It further illustrates the anemic political and philosophical anthropology that seems to under gird libertarianism. As an ideology, it continues to misrepresent and misread human tendency and human nature.
The eminent historian John Lukacs puts it quite rightly –so on the mark is Prof Lukacs that his latest compendium: Remember Past, received a requisite hatch job from an otherwise reasonable libertarian (David Gordon). But, as Tom Fleming notes, libertarians are more unforgiving than other leftist when one goes of the ideological ranch…
“The capitalists, depending on the abstract myth of Economic Man, mistake the interstate movements of capital as a supreme reality; they believe that these things determine the everyday lives and desires of different peoples. They ignore the condition that, especially in the democratic age, economic transactions, indeed material realities in the lives of men and women, depend on what they believe and on what they think.” (John Lukacs - The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern World, p.81.)
Regarding Wilkinson’s charge of moral wrong-headedness, I refer to Lukacs again that he “finds the Catholic concept of human nature utterly convincing: As Pascal said, men are both beasts and angels—because of the essential inclinations of their souls. By the way, my view of human nature is the opposite not only of Karl Marx, but also of someone like Alan Greenspan, or Bill Buckley, or Adam Smith. I believe that the most important thing in the world is what people think and believe and that the entire material organization of the world is the consequence of this…”
Libertarians and market worshipers have for far too long co-opted the moniker cosmopolitan implying that markets per se produce or guarantee sophistication. The current cultural barbarism fueled by an unadulterate worship of the market and supported by conspicuous consumption flies in the face of such a presumption.
Civilization should not be reduce to commerce and consumption, nor do human beings reduce to consumers and worker insects.
The bedrock purpose of economic activity is to support human survival and reproduction, and an economy’s proper function, then, is to ensure the continued existence of a people and its society and civilization. Unfettered pursuit of money is destructive to conservative values.
As argued so eloquently by the late John Attarian:
“America’s other dominant ideology is economism, the worldview which reduces humans to utility-maximizing, appetite-driven economic animals, reduces life to economics, and argues that only economics matters, for both individuals and public life. Economism maintains that man’s proper course in life is to manipulate matter, money, and other people so as to attain affluence and gratify his appetites, which are by assumption insatiable. One corollary of this is that the pursuit of material appetite gratification is the primary, or even only, source of happiness. Another is that economic efficiency is a primary value. Another is that noneconomic concerns, such as national identity, loyalty to kin, place, religion, nation, ethnic group, race, or way of life are irrational, unimportant, and expendable.”
It is absurd to assert that one’s place of birth is “largely a morally arbitrary fact.” Taking this ridiculous claim to its logical (or illogical)conclusion, than the prospect of being — being born — at all becomes a largely morally arbitrary fact as I – the subject, the agent, and the self – has had no say in where or if to be born. This further illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the tyranny of place argument made by the likes of Tyler Cowan.
January 31st, 2006 at 11:37 pm
Will Wilkinson
Hi Daniel, If only I’d known my dashed off comments in a blog post would be a source of such detailed and vehement analysis! We can all, I’m sure, be more careful.
About trade and peace, this is a very well-mined field with clear results. There is no need for historcial speculation. Here’s an abstract from a representative paper:
Your animosity toward trade reminds me of Carlyle and Ruskin’s conservative anti-commercialism. They were also in favor of barriers of every kind, which I fear is not a point in their favor, as is evident from this wonderful article by David Levy and Sandra Peart.
Best, Will
February 1st, 2006 at 9:06 am
Will Wilkinson
Regarding MJK’s comment, neither the Lukacs nor the Attarian quote are compelling.
Lukacs: Why the false alternative? Interstate movements of capital plainly do determine everyday lives and desires AND material realities depend on what people believe. Economic institutions just are human institutions. When it is the case that capital moves freely across borders, it is generally because the people involved believe in the goodness of fair cooperation for mutual advantage. Perhaps you’ll like my essay on “moral infrastructure” as an antecedent to well-functioning markets.
Attarian sets up a classic strawman: Spiritually empty money grubbers vs. the churchgoing, land-loving volk. There is such an economistic ideology, but only among a decided minority of economists. It is patently ridiculous to characterize it as “dominant” in the broader culture. And does ANYONE think money is good for its own sake? Money, obviously, can be a means to good ends and bad ends.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Russell Arben Fox
Daniel,
A very fine post; thanks for writing it. I stumbled across your blog recently and found much that I like, but nothing more so than this truly excellent piece. I read both Douthat’s and Franke-Ruta’s contributions to the debate, but it’s very nice to find someone capable of putting it all together the way you have here. “Economic goods are of secondary importance and cannot take precedence in our vision of order. In any event, what also seems obvious is that such advances and increased productivity can also have corrosive side-effects….You can either hope that private organisations have the means to cope with the numerous corrosive side-effects of a multi-trillion dollar economic machine….or you can say that communities and nations have legitimate authority to restrain the causes of that corrosion.” Rarely have a read a blog post which makes this crucial point better.
I’m not on the right as you define it; my “conservatism” is that of Red Tories and John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Christopher Lasch. Among other things, I think about the nation–and thus the nation-state–differently that you do. You’d probably suggest that at the heart of my willingness to ascribe genuinely civic and communitarian and virtue-inculcating qualities to the nation is a result of some kind of cultural romanticism; you’d be right on that point, which would require an argument about romantic philosophy. In the short-term though, you’re making an argument which insists in principle that free societies need to have “some means beyond whatever can scrounged up voluntarily to protect,” and that I wholeheartedly endorse.
Wilkinson’s gloss on MJK’s reference to Lukacs is revealing, by the way: “Interstate movements of capital plainly do determine everyday lives and desires AND material realities depend on what people believe.” The mores of actual persons can be brought in, but only so long as it’s all tied together into a mutually self-constructive package. The possibility that one ought to actually order one’s desires in accordance with something that is not part of an ever-continuing materialist flux…well, that’s just strange.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Daniel Larison
Thanks to you both for your comments. I’d like to address Will’s points first. I would have been glad to be less vehement in my response had your comment been more careful, as you say. Besides being a friend of mine, Michael was hardly making the sort of argument that merited such a rhetorical thrashing. I think if we can leave aside all accusations of either of us preaching “poisonous” and “dangerous” ideas, we will be on our way to a meaningful discussion.
Naturally, I do agree with Prof. Lukacs and Attarian (incidentally, I was sorry to hear that he had passed, and I did not realise that he had).
Prof. Lukacs, if I understand him correctly, claims that what he calls “non-material causes” are what are most decisive in history. That seems entirely right to me. Of course, material circumstances constrain and affect these causes, but it seems clear that the “non-material” is always prior in any chain of causality. This is true whether we are talking about broad, cultural mentalities or single acts of volition. As a matter of understanding how things happen in history an understanding of ideas and mentalities seems the way most likely to yield meaningful research. Applied to the rest of life, this view encourages a preference for those intangible goods that are starkly opposed to any hierarchy of values in which material goods are ranked first. As to whether Alan Greenspan believes that “this is not all that we are,” I cannot speak for him, but in terms of what his priorities seem to be he aligns himself with historical materialists.
I have said something more or less identical to Attarian’s comments in the past, so you will understand when I don’t accept the designation of “classic strawman.” Mr. Attarian was not claiming that “economism” teaches people to value money for its own sake, which you correctly note no one really does. He also does not claim that the adherents of “economism” are “spiritually empty” (someone has to work very hard to reach such a state), nor does he set up (at least not in this quote) the adherents of an alternative view as “land-loving volk.” That opposition can often be drawn up, but that is not what he was trying to say.
He is saying that what he calls “economism” does instruct people that the values that should take priority are those of efficiency and acquisition, and all other connections will accordingly take second place. When Wal-Mart comes to the small town, the focus is on the cheaper prices everyone gets to pay and some new employment that may come along with it, while the character of the town and the small firms Wal-Mart will inevitably change and replace are dismissed and defenders of these things written off as “nostalgic” and “sentimental.” Insofar as “noneconomic concerns” are deemed irrational by economists and noneconomic loyalties are considered expendable for the sake of “growth,” Attarian is entirely right.
On a practical level, a great many Americans act as if they held such an “economistic” view in the choices that they make about what they value. This is not a native instinct–they did not always act this way–but it is something they have learned to do from the culture around them, whose priorities are plainly materialist and acquisitive. It is those priorities that Attarian is condemning, not money or even the commodities as such, which are obviously as morally neutral in themselves as any other mechanism or tool.
If I may say so, your own remark about the “morally arbitrary fact” of the place of one’s birth certainly sounds like the remark of someone who regards national identity as at least secondary and perhaps expendable. Why be concerned about the diminution or alteration of something that I have in common with my neighbours by “accident of birth,” right?
In your comments on Michael’s blog, I got the sense (and perhaps I was mistaken here) that you do not conceive of national identity that is not intrinsically bound up with the nation-state. For my part, I think the nation-state as state is doing its best to subvert and remake the nation.
For most countries, it wouldn’t surprise me that interdependence diminished the chances of conflicts between trading partners. What I wanted to stress is that it is by no means a guarantee. When a war does come, interdependence through trade will ensure that a war is much wider and more destructive than it would otherwise be because that many more nations have a stake in the outcome. As I think Michael was saying in his post, free trading nations are not always very pacific, even with one another. It has certainly happened in the past that nations that depend overwhelmingly on another for commerce will nonetheless go to war against their major trading partern (the War of 1812 leaps to mind), perhaps imagining that they can throw off or reduce that dependence by force. If you’re not a fan of the nation-state, let’s consider a pre-modern example of where trade can sometimes lead. What became of the Byzantines as they opened up their waters to increased foreign trade?
I wouldn’t call my view of trade “animosity toward trade” and as much as I can sympathise with some “anti-commercialism” I believe that trade or the commercial exchange itself, like the money that facilitates it, is simply a mechanism. The problem arises when men begin either to ignore the Good because of commerce, or to define the Good in terms of commercial success. As with everything, it is the inclination of the human will that corrupts or ennobles, but those things that tend to tempt the will and incite the passions are those things that should at the very least be deliberately moderated. Ideally, this moderation would be entirely voluntary, but men are often not willing to embrace moderation.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Daniel Larison
MJK, thanks for the Lukacs and Attarian quotes. As you can see, they have been very stimulating.
There was one quote that you had that I liked:
“Libertarians and market worshipers have for far too long co-opted the moniker cosmopolitan implying that markets per se produce or guarantee sophistication. The current cultural barbarism fueled by an unadulterate worship of the market and supported by conspicuous consumption flies in the face of such a presumption.”
Perhaps what first got me going about Will’s comment was the term “anti-cosmopolitan” that he used to describe Michael. Whether or not Michael would agree with that label (in fact, he did not agree), I found the charge annoying at best. If we were anti-cosmopolitan, why would this be a bad thing? Cosmopolitanism has usually been the refuge of the ruling class of a multinational empire or the watchword of socialists who are striving to cooperate with one another across borders. This is not to be pejorative, but simply to highlight that cosmopolitanism has never been considered a desirable thing by republicans or subjects of a national or regional monarchy. The Stoics had many admirable things to say about virtue and endurance, but their political vision only made sense to people whose first loyalties were not to their own polis because they were ruling over thousands of cities.
At the same time, as I said to Michael before this debate really got going, there is every reason to believe that many paleoconservatives have better claim to being “cosmopolitan” in the sense of being at home in other countries and well-acquainted with other cultures and peoples. It has been my impression that many of the most adamant internationalists and interventionists (which is, I want to stress, distinct from what we are talking about with libertarians) are familiar with foreign countries the way someone who goes on bus tours with their Fodor’s travel guide is familiar with them–it is the foreign country-as-amusement park experience. By and large, except perhaps for career State Department members, internationalists are atrociously ignorant of foreign languages and the history of foreign countries, while most of the editors and contributors of Chronicles, for example, are apparently fluent in at least one modern foreign language (and usually at least one ancient) and have far more regular correspondence and relations with ordinary people in European countries than most anyone else.
I can’t be sure, but my suspicion is that the more enthusiastic someone is for internationalism or free trade or mass immigration (though these are not all necessarily linked together) the less curious he is about the distinctive qualities of the foreign peoples with whom he is so keen to have us have dealings. That may not be significant (and Will, for his part, might happen to be a world-traveling linguist), but it certainly seems significant for understanding a lot of people who either style themselves as cosmopolitans or who think that being cosmopolitan is a Good Thing. These are the people who are cosmopolitans not because they have any interest in the people overseas, but because they very much want everyone to be more or less the same (or they assume that everyone is more or less the same, and that cultural accretions are unfortunate relics to be disposed of forthwith).
February 1st, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Daniel Larison
Russell, thanks for your comments. As you may have noticed, I have a permanent link to your site under “Conservative Blogs,” even though I understood that your conservatism is a bit different. The few books of George Grant’s that I have read have been enormously influential over the past two years, so I am actually right with you with much of the Red Tory view. Grant’s decentralism is just about the only complete one that is out there that I know of–he very clearly saw that decentralising the state will avail far, far less if corporations were not also decentralised and returned to a more manageable scale. I am not Catholic, but on social and economic questions there are real points of affinity for Orthodox with Catholic social doctrine, and I am generally sympathetic to past attempts to theorise and implement Catholic corporatism. I know of Lasch by reputation, but I am only so vaguely aware of his ideas that I could not comment on whether I am in agreement with him or not. For all that, I think much Catholic corporatism and so-called “Red Toryism” are on the right, and on important questions they are further to the right than many on the American right today. Then again, I have commented favourably on the American Loyalists as the real exemplars of American conservatism, so my spectrum is a bit different from that of most.
We might be closer on the idea of the nation itself than you think, though you’re probably right that we would differ on the nation-state. The nation-state for me is a redoubt of last resort for preserving some recognisably traditional way of life now that the other castles (and barriers) have fallen. I have little problem with cultural romanticism, to which I have been inclined for most of my life, and the main difficulty I have with romantic nationalists is their intentional blindness to the richness of their own national history that they mistakenly try to fit into a paradigm of what the “real” national character is (which is usually whatever they happen to be). When romantic nationalists fall in for that sort of progressive history (which still litters many an American textbook of European and American history), I must part company with them, just as I would have to part company with the American historians who idolise the post-independence period to the detriment and virtual exclusion of the colonial. American historians do this almost unconsciously. Every American learns to think of American history in terms of the “natural” or “inevitable” drive for independence and to find the precursors for a separate American identity here and there in the colonial period, rather than trying to understand on its own terms how the colonials lived for almost 170 years. It is like the old (and thankfully dying) attitude about the middle ages giving way to the glorious Renaissance or lamenting the fall of Rome and the beginning of the “dark ages.” Whatever can be said in favour of these characterisations (and they are not completely wrong, but horribly misleading), they disparage and obscure entire periods of history. When nationalists do this to the history of their people it is simply awful.
You have hit the nail on the head with the remark about ordering desires. As the name of the post suggests, I think that there is a good order that ought to exist, both in the polity and in the soul. Yes, it’s Platonic, but it also predates him and carries on in Greek political thought into the Byzantine period and in Orthodox spirituality up till today. Controlling the passions is the path to virtue. Everything else that can be said in favour of libertarian economics cannot get around that it assumes that inciting passions and encouraging autonomous self-interest are either neutral or basically good things. Between this view and the classical and Christian conceptions of virtue there is a huge gulf, and I, for one, am not clever enough to straddle it and maintain both at the same time.