Dear so-called Reader (I know you think you’re reading this, but when you finish this “news”letter you should know, you didn’t read this, somebody else read this),
Well, this is a little awkward. Just last week in this very space, I made the case that nobody really does anything of consequence alone. At the same time, Barack Obama was making a seemingly similar point in a political act of cranial-posterior insertion the likes of which none of us had any right to hope for.
Here’s a bit of what I wrote, just in case you’re just tuning in or if you recently suffered short-term memory loss due to a coke bottle dropped from a small plane that smacked you in the head or perhaps a freak kiln accident:
Put it all together and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking
is not merely akin to a time capsule, it’s a memory back-up, an auto-save of a document still being written. At least 99 percent of the things we know are things other people figured out first. Our manners, morals, technology, language, culture come to us on an assembly line that stretches off into prehistory with laborers in animal skins at the front and lab coats at the end.
Even rugged-individualist survivalists living completely alone in the woods somewhere are plugged into a support network of millions of human beings who came before him. Nearly every single thing he does alone in the woods was figured out for him by someone else. He didn’t discover how to start a fire. He probably didn’t forge his own gun or knife, and even if he did, he didn’t learn the techniques for doing so all by himself.
I think the contrast between my point and Obama’s is interesting, and so therefore I am going to expand on my interest here.
Even though the two points sound similar-ish (I declare that a word), they are in fact completely opposed to one another, like my old basset hound and that grey poodle he hated so much (“I think that reference was awfully inside, even for you” – The Couch).
In Obama’s vision, the state drives social good, it is the engine of history and the imposer of meaning. No great or good thing happens without the state driving it, nudging it, influencing it, enabling it, or causing it. The state is the demiurge, the stand-in for God since God does not exist or is busy elsewhere. Indeed, all serious philosophical progressivism works from the position that the state is either God’s standard-bearer or His replacement. (Michael Potemra had a nifty post related to this on the Corner the other day. ) Here’s how liberalism thinks about the role of government: Put yourself in the position of what your best-self would do if you were God, and your will becomes what progressives call “social justice.”
This is true even if Obama’s comments have been taken “out of context” as the campaign claims. At its most banal, as Shannen notes in the Corner, the upshot is still largely the same. The state makes success possible through roads, therefore your success isn’t wholly yours. The state gets a production credit.
According to the Hegelian-progressive vision, the state manages the evolution of the society to the point where society and state are almost indistinguishable concepts. In the Hayekian-conservative vision, the state is merely one of many institutions – albeit an important one – thrown off by the churning creativity of society itself.
The state’s experts don’t – can’t – create society. At best they try to guess where it’s going next, and they usually fail. Which I think deserves its own subhead doohickey thing . . .
Experts & Angels of the God-State
“The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama declared in Roanoke. After all, “government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
Er, that’s not why the government created the Internet. It’s like Obama thinks the web was a stimulus program aimed at “mouse-ready” jobs. As convicted moperer Nick Schulz notes, the world wide web was never intended to be what it is, but in the statism-justifying logic of the Left, all of its benefits had to be intentional and those who think their taxes are too high are simply ingrates even though it was their taxes that paid for the damn thing in the first place anyway.
The notion that the state should get credit for the creativity, ingenuity, entrepreneurism, and general success of those who pay for it with their tax dollars is particularly pernicious when, as Obama does, it’s used to suggest the state intended any of it.
Dewey vs. Hayek, Again
In the Tyranny of Clichés I write that the great philosophical divide of the last century is best represented as the battle between John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek. Hayek was the great champion of spontaneous order and trial and error, while Dewey was the carnival barker for central planning and collective action.
From TOC:
Hayek explained, and not just in the realm of economics, that knowledge is communal and collective. It is bound up in, and communicated by, traditions, customs, laws, prices, even language. There’s a lot of philosophical and epistemological overlap between Hayek’s philosophy and the pragmatists’ – in terms of how we know and learn things as individuals. But on this core point the two could not be more different. Hayek understood that markets are collective, cooperative endeavors precisely because individuals are empowered to make their own decisions. Dewey believed the only way we could have a collective, cooperative system was if we took away the individual’s ability to make his own choices. Citizens needed to be forced to become the kind of citizens Dewey believed would be productive. “Social arrangements, laws, institutions . . . are means of creating individuals. . . . Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out,” Dewey wrote.
Hence, the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek’s is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey’s was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue, “We’re All Individuals!”
Quantity Time
Speaking of planning, I’m in California with my daughter (“Hence the rich stink of a phoned-in G-File, eh?” – The Couch). I have some business out here – I was on the Adam Carolla podcast the other night (I made sure to put noise-cancelling headphones on her and let her watch a movie on the iPad. She didn’t need to hear any of that dialogue), and on Dennis Prager’s show yesterday. Plus I took some meetings as they say out here. But for the most part it’s just been me and Lu, at the pool, at the Santa Monica pier, etc. We saw the The Amazing Spider-Man yesterday. She really liked it, but her take was that it had “too many stories,” by which she meant too many plotlines. And, she was absolutely right! Moreover, she beat me to realizing the problem with the movie.
On the Carolla podcast (where I felt my contribution was sub-par for the most part), I argued that the idea of “quality time” with your kids is b.s. What matters is quantity time. I’d forgotten that Fred Barnes had made this exact point in The New Republic more than 20 years ago: “Forget quality time. You can’t plan magic moments or bonding or epiphanies in dealing with kids. What matters is quantity time.” I don’t have the piece in front of me, but if memory serves, Barnes had this epiphany about unplanned epiphanies while taking his kid on a trip to a speech or a conference.
(If you need political relevance, think about how hard it is to plan things for your own kids – and for all intents and purposes your kids are chattel slaves, impressionable chattel slaves who look up to you. Now think how ludicrous it is to believe that the government should be able to fine-tune its management of hundreds of millions of adults.)
What’s particularly poignant for me is I remember reading that two decades ago and thinking how cool it’d be to have the kind of job where I could bring my kid(s) with me on gigs like that. Two decades later, I do. I’ve brought Lucy to countless speeches and events over the last few years. Heck we put her to work at the concession stand at a tea-party rally in Racine, Wis., a few years ago.
Anyway, I consider myself a very lucky man.
Various & Sundry
The Bookworm review of the Tyranny of Clichés is out.
Speaking of books, I just finished a long review of Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books for The Claremont Review of Books. It should be in the next issue – and I expect some blowback from some friends on the right. But what you need to know for now is that it is a great collection and would make an ideal gift for your chattel-slave progeny heading to college.
You can download the Carolla podcast here, where there’s a big picture of me looking large on the homepage as we speak.
Oh, and if you’re interested, here‘s my “class” at Prager University. Don’t let the haircut (or lack thereof) throw you off.
Sorry I don’t have a lot of weird links today. I haven’t been on the interwebs too much. But here are Debby’s links for today.