I’m glad Bruce brought up Schumpeter, for it is he, rather than Schumacher, who ought to be the patron economist of crunchy conservatism. Not only did Schumpeter argue that capitalism undermined the very social institutions which gave it birth and guarded its existence, leading to socialism, he pointed out that universal rationalization through cost accounting exposed more natural ordering structures—the classically understood “ties that bind”—to a brutal new calculus in which they did not perform well at all. Commitment to kin, community, and place entail making heavy economic sacrifices and provide benefits not easily entered on a balance sheet. For Schumpeter, the key piece of evidence for his theory was declining birth rates in industrialized nations. As a result, he argued, we have created a new species of “homo economicus” which has lost “the only sort of romance and heroism that is left”—the romance and heroism of “working for the future irrespective of whether or not one is going to harvest the crop oneself.” ~Caleb Stegall, Crunchy Cons
This is an important corrective for many a libertarian and “conservative” who will refer to “creative destruction” as if it were a good and highly desirable thing and invoke Schumpeter as if he were a proponent of the social and moral disintegration that he observed at work in such a system. What these people seem to forget, or never knew, is that prophets of “creative destruction” share more with nihilists and anarchists than with any sort of civilised human being. It was Bakunin, after all, who said, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
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February 25th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
DK
Are “anarchists” uniformly bad and not-conservative? It might be just a matter of time before Stegall drops some Illich or Kauffman. Kauffman’s entry on anarchism in the Encyclopedia of American Conservatism appears in TNP. (And Goldberg has praised the book.) I don’t know Kauffman’s stuff. Illich gets accused by Voegelinians of being an immanentist, and other anti-revolutionary cons will come to a similar conclusion, smelling the left in his writings, some more than others. I don’t think he was an immanentist, but he definitely got a following with some immanentists.
I don’t get too hung up on this stuff, because I don’t go with the cosmetic quoting that many small minds engage in. (You like Wendell Berry? Why aren’t you a farmer then? Why do you use a computer? You’re a romantic delusional!) I don’t see reading and absorbing “radicals” as implying that what may be taken from them is meaningless or somehow compromised if one doesn’t try to live like them in some terribly conscious, intentional way. They give me a mental reference point, a different logic, stuff to consider on my own way. They had their path; I have mine.
Maybe you can explain the Dorothy Day appeal to me among some crunchies. I don’t get it. OK, they did a lot of good stuff and were Chestertonians. Is that such a big deal? I’ve read a few slices of Maurin that seem like standard naive leftist ranting. What sticks in my mind about Day is a silly note she wrote Eleanor Roosevelt regarding her (Day’s) protest of atomic weapons, which got her arrested.
I don’t dig pacifism. WMDs, war, and killing are all abominable and likely damning of most participants, but laying down before barbarians is worse. There’s an important role for certain saints to live by the radicalism of the spiritual truth that it is better to suffer than to do evil, but generally these people do not have children. (Perhaps this is an unexamined argument against married priests. Aren’t priests sworn to non-violence?)
I do think violence is justifiable, but I don’t think it is ever morally pure. It is always an evil. But I don’t jump from that idea to the conclusion that we must always avoid evil, even when it is possible to do so and there are not worse consequences to be had due to the avoidance.
February 25th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Daniel Larison
Perhaps I should have qualified my “nihilists and anarchists” remark by saying “anarchists like Bakunin.” There are anarchists, such as Kauffmann, who say many very sensible things, but typically the 19th and early 20th century anarchists I had in mind were Peter Verkhovenskys, not Bill Kauffmanns. The former are the sorts of people who blew up Tsar Aleksandr II, one of the better sovereigns in all of European history, because he was supposedly an evil tyrant.
As for Dorothy Day, I assume the attraction is her charitable work, the living out of her Catholic Christianity in works of corporal mercy. I don’t assume it is a blanket endorsement of everything she did, just as you could take from Wendell Berry’s writings, for example, what seems reasonable and meaningful. Like you, I have no time for straight-up pacifism. Nor, I suspect, do most of those crunchies who admire Dorothy Day. Anyone who holds up the welfare of the community and the family as two of the priorities and chief goods in life cannot be a pacifist, as he would be required in the end to sacrifice those goods for the “greater good” of non-violence, which is obviously a very twisted sense of “greater good.” Pure pacifism is a morally indefensible position, as it assumes that it would be better to lie down for the barbarians (or whoever it is who happens to be attacking you) and allow everyone around you to be killed, harmed or endangered for the sake of being “peaceful,” in addition to the obvious practical drawbacks of being overwhelmed and subjugated by a hostile force.