Charles Murray of AEI has quite an interesting argument in The American. It's remarkable in several ways. Let me start by sketching what he says.
1) The American and European models are fundamentally different in that the American model creates greater genuine human happiness.
2) This is because true happiness arises from only a few particular lines of endeavor -- he names family, vocation, religion, and community.
3) The European model weakens all of them precisely by supporting them too much with state power. This causes the older institutions to wither, as they are no longer needed as much.
4) This leaves people living lives with less meaning, as the vital experiences are weakened. All that remains is being nursed along by the state, but less and less of the real challenge that makes life worth living.
5) An aside, added in expectation of a challenge: furthermore, the state does a worse job of most of these things than the traditional institutions. Thus, before state support, the family did its job better than the state+family now does it.
What's interesting about this argument isn't so much the argument itself. It's the strategy behind the argument. This is a rather artful position.
In the America of the Founders' day, "liberal" and "conservative" meant entirely different things than they mean today. Liberals -- what we now call "classical liberals" -- believed in freedom from government interference in their lives, the ability to form local communities that would exercise a great deal of autonomy (and which were small enough that you could easily move to another one if you didn't like the changes), and strict limits on Federal power. "Conservatives" -- or, if you like, "traditional conservatives" -- argued that human nature needed to be trained by strong institutions. They named family, faith, and the state as the three key ones. These institutions should have great power in order to produce the best kind of person.
There are still a few of these folks running around, but neither now occupies the original term. The great majority of "conservatives" today have adopted something relatively close to the classical liberal tradition. These "independent conservatives" are chiefly interested in maintaining liberty from state interference, in order to maximize human happiness. The classical liberal is divided from the independent conservative in that the classical liberal is willing to use quite a bit of government power to reshape communities along the lines of liberty; but it wants localized power, to maximize individual choice in which model it prefers. The independent conservative wants minimal government power, out of a belief that government is a necessary evil that must be chained.
The traditional conservative, remember, believes that it is men who are evil and must be chained -- and the government is necessary as one of those chains! He is not close to either of these middle positions.
The liberals of today descend from FDR, but also from Europe's tradition of democratic socialism. This was not an offshoot of Marxism precisely, as is commonly believed, but an attempt to take the fire out of Marxist revolutionary sentiment by compromising with some of its demands in order to avoid riots and rebellions, always more common in Europe's 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, it was a movement that believed in using the power of the state to effect social changes.
Thus, the liberals are closer to the traditional conservatives in being willing to use the state to force things on the populace that the populace may not want. They likewise believe they are doing it for the populaces' own good. They merely differ on just what things need to be done: the traditional conservative wants to strengthen God, King, and Country, while the liberal wants to undermine just those things to strengthen Unions, minority rights, and intellectuals.
What Murray has done here is to adopt a position that appears to synthesize the claims of three of these four groups: traditional conservatives, independent conservatives, and classical liberals. In theory, such a position could build a significant coalition.
In laying out how the coalition functions, let's use TC for "traditional conservative," IC for "independent conservative," CL for "classical liberal," and L for "liberal."
Murray argues that these four institutions are the key institutions to living the good life as defined by happiness. Happiness in turn is defined as meeting challenges within these good institutions -- very close to Aristotle's definition, and very close to the way that Aristotle also put happiness as the goal of his ethics (and therefore his politics). (TC)
However, the ability of these institutions to provide happiness is sapped by the use of goverment to perform the same functions. This drains the total level of happiness available to society, and is therefore a great wrong. (TC -- because we are still strengthening these key traditional institutions -- but also IC, in that it is about limiting the size and scope of government power).
Notice that he defines "community" as one of the opposing concepts to government. ('Communities respond to neighbors' needs,' etc.) This elides purely voluntary organizations with local community governments, both of which do that in the absence of Federal authority. This would appear to synthesize the IC and CL positions: the IC will hear "church and volunteer groups" while the CL will hear communities to mean "organizations small enough where everyone knows each other, like a town council." ICs tend to have less problem with smaller governments anyway, as less powerful governments are also less dangerous (recall Newt Gingrich's push for "devolution" and block grants to the states).
Thus, you end up with a position that advocates for reinforcing traditional institutions at the expense of the state. This should be satisfying to most TCs, who may accept a weaker chain on humans from the government if they believe that the other chains will be reinforced in exchange. It is satisfying to ICs and CLs as well, both of whom are suspicious of Federal (or concentrated) power.
So, it's a highly artful argument. Now, does it hold water?
I think we can start by asserting with confidence that it is going to be mocked by liberals. They will say, "So you are telling me that you will 'strengthen' my family by letting it go bankrupt? That you will strengthen my community by denying it Federal resources? And that we should feel good about this because all this extra hardship and work will deepen our experience, and thus make us happier?"
Rephrased in those hostile terms, the argument sounds pretty silly. Yet it really isn't silly; it's just not fully satisfying. There is quite a bit of truth to what he is saying.
Just a few days before 9/11, John Derbyshire wrote a piece entitled "It's a Woman's World," which spoke to some of these issues. 9/11 showed that there was still quite a bit of the man's world out there! But it's a good piece for examining the 9/10 sentiment, which harmonized in a lot of ways with the Euro ethic that Murray is describing (in far kinder terms than Derbyshire!).
It is notorious that men misbehave much more than women: 90 per cent of U.S. jail inmates are men, as are 90 per cent of murderers and 80 per cent of drunk drivers. Men are also of declining economic importance: male participation in the civilian labor force has dropped from 86 to 75 per cent since 1950, while the female rate has risen from 34 to over 60 per cent...Mr. Derbyshire would probably revise and extend his remarks if he chose to revist them today, nearly eight years later; there has proven to be plenty more war and adventure, and I've had occasion to see a bit of it myself. The masculine virtues are still deeply necessary to our society.
The more boisterous manifestations of masculinity — physical courage, danger-seeking, the honor principle, belligerence, chivalry, endurance, small-group loyalty — which were once accessible to all men, in episodes of war or exploration if not in everyday life, have now been leached out to the extremes of our society — to small minorities of, at one extreme, super-rich sports and entertainment stars, and at the other, underclass desperadoes. There is no place now for a brilliant misfit like the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, whose love of danger and of alien cultures led him to be the first, and quite probably the only, non-Moslem ever to penetrate the holiest sanctuary of Islam, the Ka'aba in Mecca — he even had the audacity to make a surreptitious sketch of the place while he was supposed to be praying. (Burton, by the way, was a holy terror as a boy — would be a sure candidate for heavy Ritalin treatment nowadays.)
Even war, that most quintessential of masculine activities, is probably a thing of the past. For war you need a large supply of young men. With the great demographic collapse of modern times, that supply is drying up. Soft, feminized, over-civilized, under-militarized societies of the past were likely to be jolted back into vigor, or just overrun, by warriors from the wild places. Now there are no more wild places. While one should never be complacent about these things, and it is possible that a starship fleet of unwashed plunderers, cutlasses in their teeth and knives in their boots, is on its way from Alpha Centauri even as I write, the odds are good that the human race ain't gonna study war no more.
And yet he is right to say they are not adequately welcome within the society. In many respects the world of Iraq is as much home as this world; for there one still puts on armor and 'rides out,' and does the kinds of things that make you feel like you are living the kind of life a man should live. This is what Murray was talking about: vital experiences, extraordinary ones, that are the reason that men exist at all. A society that limits these experiences is indeed unsatisfying in very many respects. This too has a strong advocate in American history: Teddy Roosevelt, whose advocacy of "the strenuous life" is still highly resonant today.
I think that Murray is on weaker ground in asserting that these four categories are the only ones that exist for providing this kind of happiness. I've already noted his use of "community" apparently to cover both local government and volunteer organizations; there is no reason it could not cover government at any level. I expect that President Obama felt quite fulfilled as he pondered his new authority, and planned how he would use it to reshape the world according to his image. (I don't know if he is enjoying the power as much now that he has it! Many's the fantasy, however treasured, that may be better not acted out.) It is possible that "vocation" could also cover government action: thus, for those who make the laws, and for liberals who spend their time in advocacy for the laws, this kind of meddling is exactly the kind of satisfaction they are looking for. It only hurts the rest of us: to them, it feels like they are doing the right thing.
There is also the question of whether certain physical pleasures might not, for some people, rise to the level of deep meaning: indeed, it's dangerous to assert that they cannot. To the degree that the argument is accepted, you increase the pressure to have such pleasures 'cross the line' into one of the four categories. The obvious example here is the pressure to redefine what is meant by "family," and especially, by "marriage." You aren't reinforcing the family as an institution by increasing the pressure on people to assert that they are really 'a sort of family,' thereby bending the thing entirely out of its original shape.
These three key challenges notwithstanding, it has the potential to be an important argument. It remains to be seen how and if it spreads. There is quite a lot there, and it artfully divides the electorate in a way that could establish a new coalition with adequate popularity to govern. This it could do, I say, if it is accepted: and for that to happen, it will need to be tightened up a bit here and there.
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