I still have quite an impressive cold. But life goes on. The next stop on my fall tour is next Friday morning at the University of Virginia, with our own Jim Ceaser.
I’m giving two talks. One, as part of a class on the American political tradition, is during the week on conservatism. I’m speaking as a conservative. The reading for the week is from Russell Kirk and Milton Friedman.
The next is as part of a class on political economy. I’m speaking on Southern agrarianism or anti-industrialism. The reading is from the poets John Crowe Ransom and Wendell Berry. Well, Berry doesn’t write in a specifically Southern voice, and he is from a border state. I don’t think I’m supposed to speak as an agrarian, but maybe as a Southerner. Ransom actually calls himself a conservative, as opposed to a (techno-) progressive. Berry doesn’t do that, I would guess, because in our time conservatism is too readily identified with industrial oligarchs.
Mr. Ceaser, in his classic article about the many hearts functioning under the one head that is American conservatism (and that has to be one big, giant head), says that traditionalists (Kirk) and libertarians (Friedman) both should be called conservatives because they opposed collectivism, or progressivism defined as bigger and better government facilitating a great national community.
Well, that’s true, although that alliance was easier to hold together when the enemy was the radical collectivism called Communism. It’s possible to argue that nobody is a collectivist in the strong sense anymore, just as nobody is a progressivist in the confident FDR sense anymore.
We can also say that that Kirk and Friedman emphasized the indispensable place of personal property in securing liberty. So they weren’t only opposed to the cruel and monstrous tyrannies of the Soviet Union and China. They were (unlike Plato?) deeply theoretical anti-Communists. For Kirk, the bottom line is the dignity of the human person (which is why he understood himself as a theoretical Catholic); for Friedman, it’s the individual freedom to choose in every respect how to cooperate with other individuals.
The difference between individual and person was a big deal for Kirk. Although he knew he was in many respects allied with libertarians, he made a point of having some contempt for them. They were, he claimed, sectarians typically deformed by “relational issues” that caused them not to be able to think clearly about who they are or should be as parents, children, creatures, friends, and (for him last and least, perhaps) citizens.
It is true that when libertarians say “collectivist” they often mean being a sucker by thinking of oneself as part of a whole greater than oneself. From that view, “citizens” are either in the thrall of collectivist illusions that turn them into country fodder or cynical rent-seekers demanding preferential treatment over non-citizens.
And a libertarian has trouble distinguishing between a citizen and a statist and between a country or nation and a state. So, as I’ve said before, libertarian economists will often admit, after a couple of drinks, that this world would be a better place if we tore down all the political walls as nothing but arbitrary constructs and allowed voluntarily cooperating individuals to interact freely or contractually in the global marketplace.
For Kirk, a person becomes who she is within the relational confines of a particular culture and tradition, the foundation of which is somewhat mysterious or religious. Ordered liberty can’t be achieved mainly through calculation but mostly relies on shared customs, common religious observances, and habitual affection.
For a libertarian (say, Tyler Cowen), a free individual uses the money earned through his her productivity to consume the products of particular cultures without actually being immersed in or enslaved by any particular culture. The free or cosmopolitan individual orbits the world of cultures — achieving multicultural diversity.
Actually, Kirk and Friedman both agree that a key goal is to minimize the place of political coercion in life. Kirk’s vision is the small community where people are clear on both their rights and their duties and know their places. Friedman’s is through deploying all means necessary to replace coercion with contract, which is why is he for legalizing drugs, same-sex marriage, school choice and then the abolition of public education altogether, an all-volunteer army, and so forth. It’s telling how many of Friedman’s ideas that were regarded as hopelessly radical at the time he expressed them now seem reasonable or even mainstream. America is drifting in an individualistic or libertarian direction. It is, as I’ve explained before, a kind of libertarian securitarianism — a somewhat oxymoronic combo that reaches its extreme form in tranhumanism (especially in the singular form of Thielism).
Kirk’s concerns about natural and social ecology, “localism,” and excessive dependence on technology have gained traction, but mostly not very effectively. There are countercultural pockets of crunchy, traditionalist conservatism. And Kirk, given his own inability to hold a job, wouldn’t regard being effectual as a vice. He was a “bohemian Tory,” which is a lot more authentic than “bourgeois bohemian.” It’s also a lot more self-indulgent, some bourgeois fella might say.
Kirk and Friedman, opposed as they were to state coercion, agreed in their opposition to American imperialism, or the garrison state. So we see a mixture of traditionalist and libertarian isolationism on the pages of The American Conservative today.
We can say that Kirk and Berry aren’t very Southern in their lack of admiration of or at least interest in the American “citizen soldier” — and in their tone deafness to country music.
The radical difference between Kirk (and, of course Berry and Ransom) is over technology. Kirk isn’t as “reactionary” or agrarian as Berry or Ransom, but he insists that economic choices be humane or attentive to properly human scale and to conserving the unbought goodness of leisurely, neighborly, natural, worshiping life. Berry refused to move beyond the pre-electric typewriter. And Kirk didn’t learn to drive the “mechanical Jacobin,” or automobile.
So the least we conservatives must learn from those traditionalists is to work hard to keep all education from being reduced to technical competencies and to preserve leisurely pursuits as humanly worthy educational activities.
When libertarians talk about techno-progress today, they begin first with the medical technology that benefits us all. Then they turn to the screen, which shows all the same wonderful stuff to billionaires and welfare recipients alike. Traditionalists begin by wondering what the virtual reality that is that screen does to divert us from the unbought goodness that is personal or relational life.
On the Founders: Kirk understands our written Constitution to be dependent on a providential constitution or our polymorphous inheritance of traditions of liberty. So he does what he can to minimize the contribution of the innovating and philosophizing Mr. Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence, from this view, has to be understood as a way of sucking up to those atheistic and “enlightened” intellectuals who dominated our potential ally France.
The libertarians (this is clear in both Hayek and Ayn Rand), by contrast, understand that the Founders, being “classical liberals,” are important resources for advancing the cause of individual liberation. So libertarian “originalism” is very theoretical, with a big role for the Court in enforcing libertarian theory against a recalcitrant democracy.
So someone might say that the traditionalists and the libertarians both distort our constitutional foundation for their own purposes. Not, maybe, that there’s anything wrong with that. They both, after all, have their hands on part of the truth.