An
American
Manifesto:
Life After
Liberalism

by
Christopher Chantrill

© Christopher Chantrill, 2016

The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by usgovernmentspending.com, Seattle, Washington.
usgovernmentspending.com
ISBN-13: (prc)

A Note on the Author

Christopher Chantrill was born in India and raised and educated in England. He immigrated to the United States in 1968 and worked for many years designing and implementing utility control systems and software in Seattle.
You can contact Christopher Chantrill at christopherchantrill.com. Send questions, comments, and corrections to: chrischantrill@gmail.com.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Note on the Author

One:
Crisis of the Administrative State

Two:
Government and the Technology of Force

Three:
Business, Slavery and Trust

Four:
Humanity's Big Problem: Freeloaders

Five:
The Bonds of Faith

Six:
A Critique of Human Mechanics

Seven:
The Paradox of Individualism

Eight:
From Multitude to Civil Society

Nine:
The Answer is Civil Society

Ten:
The Greater Separation of Powers

Eleven:
Conservatism Three by Three

Twelve:
Imagining a Culture of Involvement

Thirteen:
The Poor Without the Welfare State

Fourteen:
The Middle Class Without the Welfare State

Fifteen:
Liberals and the Welfare State

Sixteen:
From Freeloaders to Free Givers

Seventeen:
The Real Meaning of Society

Appendix: Manifesto

Bibliography

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One:
Crisis of the Administrative State

A spectre is haunting the liberal elite — the spectre of conservatism.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Huge government debt and financial instability were supposed to be problems of South American dictatorships.  Underemployment was a problem of unregulated capitalism, of the bad old days when employers exploited the reserve army of the unemployed. Ineffective government was supposed to have died out with the end of royal sinecures or at least with the reform of the patronage system.  But in the second decade of the 21st century every developed country is bending under the weight of huge government spending and debt.  European levels of unemployment have come to America as labor force participation has declined in the aftermath of the recession of 2008-2009.  Governments at every level are failing to deliver social services competently and efficiently.  Something has gone wrong with the modern state.

The core functions of government are rather simple.  Norman Tebbit, minister in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, put it succinctly.  A state must have territory and a people.  It must defend its territory from aggressors foreign and domestic; it must have a currency and a legal system to foster agriculture, industry, and trade.  Modern governments do most of that rather well, because they involve tasks that require only bureaucratic routine.  You can write a law to fix a problem in one of these areas and expect it to work for decades.

But people do not go into politics to watch the grass grow; they go into politics because they are interested in power and doing the things that only the powerful can do.  After securing a territory from enemies foreign and domestic they look for new vistas to conquer, and venture into areas for which political power is not suited: activities requiring adaptability, flexibility, creativity, and concern for people as individual persons and intimate groups.  Thus the modern government does not just secure peace for its citizens; it goes on to direct retirement finance, health care, education, and the relief of the poor.  Unfortunately, governments go about these activities as they would a campaign of imperial conquest or of national defense.  They mobilize the people against an existential threat: they declare war on poverty, on cancer, on ignorance, on inequality.  They they vote credits and enlist recruits into a bureaucratic army of grant-awarders and regulators, and march forth to engage and defeat the enemy.  Modern governments have failed miserably in all these areas and their failures have placed their core functions at risk.

But if the modern state is failing, what shall we do?  Today the centralized administrative state has taken over much of our lives.  We just expect the government to school our children, for we know that we could never afford to pay for private school on our own.  We never knew a time when government didn’t run a universal pension scheme, and who would trust Wall Street for their retirement security rather than government?  We never knew a time when government didn’t run the health care system, and we know that a single expensive illness could us wipe out financially. We cannot imagine paying for health care without huge government subsidies.

It was not always thus.  The notion that government could, and indeed should direct the details of peoples’ education, health care, and pensions is relatively new.  It all began in the second half of the 19th century when various political movements led by the educated sons of the rising middle class looked at the work of their fathers, the creative spirits of the Industrial Revolution, and saw not creation, but destruction.  They saw poverty, oppression, superstition in the ways of their fathers, and they were determined to fight for a better world.  It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about autodidact pampleteers or the pampered sons of businessmen, the reactionary Prussian landowner Otto von Bismarck or the Fabian intellectuals trying to curb the waste of individualism and the higgling of the market.  All of them saw political power as the answer to the Social Question of the 19th century.  Every problem was now a problem of politics and the solution was more government, which now looked to benefit the working class rather than the landowners or the bourgeoisie as of old.  Government grew in Britain from 14 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1900 to 46 percent in 2010.1  In the United States government grew from 8 percent of GDP in 1900 to 40 percent in 2010.2  Today, government is the chief guarantor of pensions for the aged.  It is the principal in the organization of health care.  It is the educator of children and the reliever of the poor.  These great social responsibilities thus no longer engage the attention of the people but of the rulers. And the rulers do this work very badly.

The question that the crisis of the modern state presents is the oldest question of all: how shall humans flourish?  To what extent can we social humans flourish through our instincts for cooperation, and to what extent must we supplement the velvet glove of cooperation with the mailed fist of force?  And what about religion?  For many people God has died, and yet the early 21st century is experiencing in radical Islam and in global Christianity a strong renewal of religious faith.  In the United States, religious faith and government power are famously supposed to be separate.  Yet most of the political movements of the 20th century are best understood as secular religions, militantly combining church and state in a holy war for a new heaven on earth.

If there are problems in the world — poverty, sickness, ignorance, inequality, oppression — what can government realistically do to mitigate them or solve them and, if government action has its limitations, what can other means achieve, such as religious faith and friendly cooperation? That is to say: knowing what we know about the nature of governments and politicians and their supporters, what should we expect from a government program to, e.g., fight poverty?  Or is this the wrong question? We might ask instead what is left of a meaningful life for ordinary people when the government has appropriated the social space of education, health care, providing for the future, relieving the poor, and marked off that space as the playground of politicians and activists?

With the failure of the modern administrative state a space is created for a new philosophy of limited government.  But how to found it, how to design and build it?  Conservative and libertarian thinkers have traditionally argued for smaller government from the philosophies of the 17th century Glorious Revolution and the 18th century American Revolution.  But for over a century these arguments have not persuaded the educated elite that now constitutes the ruling class in Europe and North America. Drawing on 19th century thought the modern educated elite has developed an apology for the rule of the educated and the expert, and rejects 17th and 18th century ideas as irrelevant and outmoded, when not utterly vitiated by the racism, sexism and classism of that era.

In the second decade of the 21st century, it is time to argue for a new birth of freedom from a new point of view.  By remembering how the 19th century thinkers of the left experienced the Social Question as an indictment of the 18th century’s errors, we may perhaps gain traction by arguing that the failures of the 20th century administrative state arise out of the errors of 19th century thinking.  Could it be that ideas of thinkers from the 20th century might point the way to a new birth of freedom?  And might we conservatives even countenance ideas from sadder, wiser men of the left?

Assisted by 20th century ideas we shall argue in these pages that the problem with the modern state is that there is too much compulsion and too little cooperation, too many declarations of moral equivalents of war and not enough agreements to differ, too frequent collusion between religious and political power and between political and economic power and not enough separation of power.  We shall argue that governments and politicians are the human means for defense against existential perils and sudden emergencies.  But most of human life is working and discussing and exchanging and living and trying to divine the meaning of it all, for which we shall argue that government’s mailed fist is not the answer.  We shall try to develop a social vision that balances the imperative for a defense against the dangers of the time with the need in every human to take up the responsibility, moral and practical, of freely and gladly contributing to the welfare and the flourishing of others in order to flourish for themselves.

Humans are social animals called to cooperate and exchange for the common good in ordinary times and called to sacrifice during times of crisis.  They are not born to be serfs on a plantation or mechanical cogs in a government or corporate machine.

How is it that human social animals got to be regimented into the nursery of a nanny state?  The answer is: the secular religions that rushed to fill the hole in the human soul left by the death of God. They did it. They determined to fight the economic and social injustices they saw, and knew that they had to seize the commanding heights of the culture and the government to do it. After winning the culture and replacing the ruling class, then they began to build a world of peace and justice here on earth. But in their cramped imaginations the prophets of heaven on earth could not conceive of a way to build their perfect society except with political rage and government force.

The utopian imagination cannot understand that government force is a blunt instrument good only for cowing your enemy into submission whereas the whole point of human society is to provide for human flourishing with a minimum of force. You can’t make a flower bloom by bashing it into submission with a spade.

It cannot be emphasized enough: government is not social; it is not cooperative; it is not adaptable; it is not inspirational.  Government is force.

1Christopher Chantrill, ukpublicspending.co.uk, accessed 06-19-2014. http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1900_2016UKp_F0t

2Christopher Chantrill, usgovernmentspending.com, accessed 06-19-2014. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2016USp_F0t

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Two:
Government and the Technology of Force

The history of almost all hitherto existing society is the history of patronage and clientage.  Freeman and slave, lord and serf, administrator and beneficiary, activist and rent-a-mob, in a word, patron and client stood in magisterial or servile relationship in which unequal power predominated.

If you scratch a social reformer, he will likely bleed a plan for more government.  For the easiest way to imagine the future is one miraculously converted to your own vision: happy people living in a world designed by you.  How can you get the world to fundamentally transform itself into your ideal world?  Almost certainly you can only do it by force, because nobody gets to have their ideal world in the real world.  Ideals suggest force, and that means government, for government is force.

The narratives about governing that come down to us are mostly apologies by members of a governing elite, a ruling class, or else the visions of revolutionary activists who wish to conjure up a vision of a future government purged of the injustices of the present Old Corruption. Those revered analysts, the contract theorists, constructed openly unhistorical and hypothetical narratives, like Plato in The Republic, about the best and the most just government. All these special pleaders were careful to put a showroom shine on their plans for the rest of us.  Even the authors of The Federalist Papers, victors in a war of liberation, offered up a vision of government that was good for them and their revolution, rather than good for the inhabitants of North America in general.  They took many of their ideas from a member of the French governing elite, the baron Montesquieu.

Let us set aside, for a moment, government all gussied up for a ball by valets and ladies’ maids.  What does government look like stripped of the adornments of the special pleaders, government reduced to its essentials?  What does government look like before we have decorated it with the baubles of our dreams?  Here is the short version.  It is the work of Norman Tebbit, once a minister under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

A state must have a territory over which it is sovereign, and a people who owe it allegiance.  It must have the capacity (and the will) to defend its territorial boundaries and its people from aggressors. It must provide not only external but internal security, allowing its citizens to go about their lawful business freely, and criminal and civil justice systems as well as a currency and the regulatory and legislative infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade. Nothing else has to be provided only by the state. Health and education provision and physical infrastructure may be provided by or precipitated by the state or others, but they are not core functions of the state.1

Tebbit’s state is the night-watchman state, so reviled by the modern ruling class.  But even the sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas does not propose much more in his definition from the first sociologist, Max Weber, who flourished half a century before Tebbit.

The organizational nucleus of the state is the rational public institution, which on the basis of a centralized and permanent tax system,

1. has at its disposal a centrally commanded, standing military force,

2. has a monopoly on setting laws and legitimately using force, and

3. organizes administration bureaucratically, that is, in the form of rule by specialized officials.2

Here we see the entry of the fateful word “bureaucratically” in the German understanding of the state.  In contrast to the rational German the North African St. Augustine had a more pointed view of government than the practical politician Norman Tebbit or the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?  For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?  The band itself is made of of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon.  If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it hold places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.3

Different times, different mores: Living through the disintegration of the western Roman Empire Augustine is equating the robber band with the robber state, while Tebbit is looking at a settled society in which the question of “who rules” has already been decided. But what about the actual inflection point between the robber band and the established state?   What about guerrilla movements?  What about urban street gangs?  What about civil war?  What about conquest?  What about an army marching across Europe?  What exactly is the difference between an army and a government?  It’s important to understand this, because every state that we know of was founded by force, or was descended from a state founded by force.

In The Federalist Papers three revolutionaries, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing as “Publius,” argued frankly the case for more force in the government of the independent United States.  The experience of confederation since the approval of the Articles of Confederation in late 1777 argued clearly, Publius wrote, for a more powerful federal government with more powers of compulsion over the member states in the original federation of the United States of America.

The first twenty-one essays in The Federalist Papers are simply an enumeration of the problems the United States had experienced as a confederation with very limited powers of coercion by the central government.  The first problem was the lack of respect that foreign powers had for a loose confederation, and the danger of foreign countries exerting power over and dividing the several states.  Loosely confederated states would also be inclined to quarrel with each other, perhaps leading to actual hostilities between the bigger states or perhaps groups of states ganging up on others.  The new union must, of course, have a navy to prevent other nations from meddling with its commerce.  Publius writes about the problems of ancient confederacies in Greece and the difficulties then being experienced by the German confederation, and also Poland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.  The problem of confederacies, wrote Publius, is that no one member can be compelled in anything and, in consequence, every member cheats, particularly when it comes to contributing money and soldiers for the federation’s defense.  Summing up in Federalist 21 and 22, Hamilton writes that if there is no sanction to compel obedience to federal laws, there is no way to finance the federal government except through the essentially voluntary contribution of the states, no way to raise troops properly, no uniform regulation of commerce, no common judiciary.  It was all a question of power, and the United States under the Articles of Confederation did not have enough power to compel respect within the United States and without in the wider world.  Simply put, the United States under the Articles of Confederation did not have the minimum powers needed to perform the basic functions described by Norman Tebbit: “a territory over which it is sovereign,” a people who owing it allegiance; the capacity and will to defend its territory and people from aggression; internal security and justice system; and a currency and social infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade.  A certain amount of government force is needed to allow a free people to go about its business.

It is commonplace today to sneer at this kind of state as a night-watchman and compare it unfavorably to the luxuriant growth of the modern, caring state.  But its virtue is best appreciated when compared against the robber states imagined by St. Augustine, where power is not used merely for the spare and limited functions of the Tebbit state but for a grand project of power.  The 20th Century has seen many great power states grow from nothing, but perhaps none matches the model of St. Augustine more exactly than the state built by Mao Zedong out of the ruins of the Chinese Qing Dynasty.  Mao’s state began, literally, as a robber band.

In Mao: The Untold Story Jung Chang paints a vivid portrait of the proto-state led by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in south-central China in the 1930s.  These two revolutionaries commanded a “red base” in the province of Jiangxi, about 500 miles south-west of Shanghai, and Mao started out as a kind of bandit, supporting his Red Army troops by looting and raiding the local population.  It was Zhou that brought order and organization to the operation.  Under Zhou’s leadership Mao’s banditry evolved into semi-statehood:

The red state regarded its population as a source of four main assets: money, food, labour and soldiers, first for war, and ultimately to conquer China.4

Mao and Zhou made money from the mining of tungsten using soldiers and “slave labourers.” Peasants paid a grain tax, and were pressured to lend grain to the red state.  Drafted into the Red Army or as conscript labor in the tungsten mines, men were unable to work on their farms; pretty soon “women became the main labour force.”

[T]hey had to do most of the farm work, as well as other chores for the Red Army, like carrying loads, looking after the wounded, washing and minding clothes, and making shoes, for which they had to pay for the material themselves[.]5

There was no thought for the needs of the subject population.  There was no attempt to improve health, and secondary schools were closed down and commandeered by the party. Consequently, this regime did not win the spontaneous support of its population, the consent of the governed; it could only maintain itself with naked force.  Mao and Zhou discovered by trial and error that terror and purges were necessary to keep their red state alive.  Zhou relaxed the purges for a while in 1931, but found that when people ceased to fear killings and arrests “they started to band together to defy Communist orders.  It rapidly became clear that the regime could not survive without constant killings[.]”

In the 1930s, long before they stood above the Tienanmen gate in Beijing in 1949 as the founders of a new dynasty, Mao and Zhou ran a real government in a remote area of China. They had a territory and they defended it with an army.  They supported their government with taxes, with conscription, and by exploiting natural resources for profit.  It was, almost, the state as described by Tebbit and St. Augustine.

Conversations the author had with Guatemalan tourist guides in 2007 confirm this model. During the long civil war in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996 both government forces and guerrillas taxed whatever population they controlled, and both sides seized young men off the streets to draft into their armies.  Woe betide the tax resister and the deserter.

In conclusion, when we strip our ideas about government of narrative and apology, we are left with the following definition:

Government is an armed minority ruling over a subject people in some territory.  To maintain itself it must have the will and the power to defend its territory with armed force from enemies foreign and domestic.   Its rule is founded upon the power to requisition soldiers and resources from the people living within the territory or from the sponsorship of a foreign power.

This is similar to the thee-element description of the state developed by the Austrian Georg Jellinek.  He argued that a state must have “Staatsvolk, Staatsgebiet und Staatsgewalt” meaning state people, state territory, and state power.6  This sharpens the definition of government even more than the austere model described by Tebbit: in Jellinek’s definition the core functions of justice, money, and infrastructure are optional.  A government is still a government if it occupies a territory and merely requisitions resources to feed and supply its troops.  It can exist as St. Augustine’s great robbery and do without money, law, and justice if it uses terror.  We may suppose that a government is well advised to provide justice, money, and infrastructure to the subject population and pose as the representative of the people; no doubt the bother and expense of providing these services is returned to the governing elite in decreased chance for rebellion and increased production that can be farmed by the government to increase its power.  But the government can do without justice, money, and infrastructure so long as it has the stomach for terror.

We can abstract from the government of Mao in his red base to an even more basic form of government and find that the definition still applies.  Nicholas Wade has described this prototype human government in Before the Dawn.  Chimpanzees, researchers have found, are very like humans.  They are patrilocal, in that the males stay put and the females move to find mates in neighboring territory.  They are also fiercely territorial, and for good reason.  Chimps feed on fruit from trees scattered throughout their territory, and the bigger the territory, the shorter intervals between births.  The way to establish and defend a territory is by warfare.

Chimp warfare takes the form of bands of males who patrol the border of their territory, looking for an individual of the neighboring community who has been rash enough to feed alone... Three against one is the preferred odds: two to hold the victim down and a third to batter him to death.7

Government, for chimpanzees, is a male elite of warriors that defends and maintains the territory over which it rules.  The males rule over the females using terror.  “Every adult male demands deference from every female, resorting to immediate violence if a submissive response is not forthcoming.”

The human past, according to Wade, was equally violent.

Warfare was a routine occupation of primitive societies.  Some 65% were at war continuously... and 87% fought more than once a year.  A typical tribal society lost about 0.5% of its population in combat each year[.]8

We like to think of our modern wars as uniquely savage.  But Wade estimates that the toll of war deaths in the 20th century would have reached two billion people if the wars of the 20th century had suffered the casualty rates experienced by primitive peoples.  In fact only about 40 million people, military and civilian, were killed in the bloodiest of all wars, World War II.  Steven Pinker concurs in The Better Angels of Our Nature.   In the good old days of the Noble Savage and the hunter-gatherers 500 persons per 100,000 died violently per year. By the end of the agricultural age in 1500, the homicide rate was down to about 50 persons per 100,000 per year.  Today in Europe the homicide rate is down to about one per 100,000, and in the United States it is about five per 100,000.  We are not just talking about a decline in homicide, either.  Torture, judicial penalties, infanticide, oppression of other races, oppression of women and gays, cruelty to animals — the rate is way down.9  Approximately, we may say that homicide declined by an order of magnitude in the transition from the hunter-gatherer age to the agricultural age and it declined by another order of magnitude in the revolution from agriculture to industry, and this is a very big deal.

Modern humans are, of course, different from chimpanzees.  We are different from primitive hunter-gatherers.  We are even different from our agricultural ancestors.  We are not merely territorial animals like chimpanzees.  We are also trading animals, and have been for perhaps the last 200,000 years.10  Trade occurred before the agricultural age, but the emergence of food surpluses and the state in the agricultural age created the opportunity for trade between political units, and that set off an argument that has persisted to this day.  How should trade relate to the state?  Should it be government regulated, government owned, government controlled, or what?   Humans defend their territory, and exist by working for food and shelter. But they thrive in the reciprocal exchanges we call trade.

The question that returns again and again is the question of force within the human community.  Within the simple band of hunter-gatherers, government force does not extend much beyond the headman, “with few powers beyond personal persuasion.” Even in the mythical Iliad Generalissimo Agamemnon had no power beyond persuasion over the insulted Achilles and his Myrmidons.  But in the agricultural age, specialization and investment in irrigation required coordination, and that coordination was achieved by converting personal persuasion into institutional compulsion.  Already at the dawn of the agricultural age 5,000 years ago Michael Mann writes of the “caging” of the people on the alluvial plain of Mesopotamia.11 To defend its territory against aggression a state needed to requisition some of the surplus of food production and trade.  Yet this governmental protection became an equivocal blessing.  For what, to the peasant family, is the difference between a local magnate that collects a portion of the harvest for defense, and marauding bandits that sweep into town in a dawn raid and demand tribute?  Should a besieged city declare itself an “open city” and buy off the investing army with tribute, or should it defend itself and risk a defeat and the pillage and rapine of a “sacking?” It seemed that the best answer was a ruling class of warrior landowners that could defend the peasants from pillage and rapine even if the price was serfdom and the droit de seigneur.  After all, if things got really bad, a starving man could go and submit his head to his lord for food. Before the modern inventions of the poorhouse and the bankruptcy court a man could obtain relief for himself and his family by surrendering himself into bondage.

[I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands. No legal document was involved, and the new bondsman would be handed a bill-hook or ox-goad in token of his fresh start in servitude. It was a basic transaction – heads for food.12

It is well to remember that the alternative to the rule of the landed magnates was an undefended “slave coast” where Vikings or Barbary pirates could loot and pillage at will.

Then everything changed.  In the early modern era at the end of the agricultural age the political system built up on agricultural surplus faced a crisis, as the development of firearms made warfare much more expensive than before.  Kings and princes in Europe found that they could not obtain enough resources to maintain their armies out of the proceeds of their estates; they could no longer delegate the mustering of the feudal horde to their feudatory barons.  But money the king had to have, else the neighboring prince would overwhelm his underfunded army, and force him off his throne.  Fortunately, help was at hand.  The scientific revolution that applied instrumental reason to military engineering also applied to governing technology.  Government could be organized not as a hierarchy of feudal families, but as a rational organization of bureaucratic functionaries.

James J. Sheehan describes how the princes in the German lands converted their patrimonial estates into modern states.

Money—for whatever purpose—was the dominant force behind the construction of the modern state... To support their courts and pay their soldiers, rulers needed a steady, inexhaustible supply of income...  Taxation required that rulers penetrate their territories more deeply then ever before, and thereby cut through or circumvent the web of institutions separating them from their subjects.13

In order to tax their subjects, governments needed to know more about them.

They had to know how many men were available to service in their armies, how much grain could be levied, and how much money passed through a merchant’s hands.14

The solution was the state bureaucracy, a corps of professional information keepers and tax gatherers, and the bureaucrat became, by the end of the eighteenth century, the personification of state power.  Monarchs now ruled by gathering information about their individual subjects and taxing them with bureaucracies. They also converted their troublesome marcher lords from hero warriors – that might or might not bring their “powers” to support their sovereign in battle – into career military bureaucrats in the national military machine. Thus did the feudal era give way to the era of the absolute monarch.

James C. Scott describes all this in a parallel but more highly colored narrative.  Governments, he writes in Seeing Like a State, want to make their people “legible.”   They desire “to arrange the population in ways that simplifie[s] the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.”15  They want to create a detailed “map” of the state and obtain structured and consistent information about the land and its people to provide a “synoptic view” of it all.  Thus modern rulers have developed the modern state into an astonishing machine of compulsion and control.

Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measure, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.16

Why, for instance, would a government encourage the conversion of common lands into private freehold?  Because a single owner is easier to tax than a whole community.  The institutions that we experience as the foundation of modern freedom and sophistication are thus also understandable in another way: merely as the ruler’s bid for power and control.

Paralleling the development of the state bureaucracy, states learned how to articulate their armies on the bureaucratic principle.  The direction of an army on the battlefield had always been difficult; as armies became bigger and bigger the direction of a large feudal host became impossible.  The solution was articulation and interchangeable parts. Armed forces would now be subdivided from a single host into into uniform and repeatable types of formation.  The brigade was invented by Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War of 1628-48; the division was invented by the French in the mid 18th century, the army corps by Napoleon.  The organization of supplies became not just the responsibility of a single quartermaster but a supply organization.  The general staff was invented by the Prussians; it completed the conversion of the warrior culture into a bureaucracy of military specialists.  All governments adopted the new military organizational revolution; all understood the imperatives of power.

As the eighteenth century came to a close rulers discovered a new technology of power, the economic power of an industrial economy.   Already at the time of the British Glorious Revolution in 1688 people were beginning to appreciate that the new manufacturing offered an economy of limitless wealth that contrasted with the obvious limits of an agricultural economy. Wrote Carew Reynell in 1685: “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.”17 A century later the British government began to appreciate the power that the new textile technologies gave to the British state, and forbade the export of textile technology and the emigration of technicians with textile knowledge.  This was an action that all governments could understand.  Technology was power; it should be sequestered and hidden from dangerous foreigners.

This new economic power inspired a movement of rejection as the revolutionary political economy doctrines of the Scottish Enlightenment brought the traditional power doctrine into question.  In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith developed a new idea that the health of the state depended not upon political cunning and control but upon the free flow of ideas, goods and services.  In other words, the government that wanted to maximize its power would need to walk an uncertain line between power and freedom.  An economy freed from detailed governmental supervision would create much more wealth for a government to exploit than an economy tightly controlled by minute and detailed bureaucratic regulation.  This has been a difficult lesson for rulers to learn, from ancient times down to the present.

All these themes came together in North America in the political career of Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton was a child of divorce born and raised in the British West Indies and when orphaned at age 13 went to work in the office of an import-export merchant on the island of St. Croix.  By his mid-teens he became the manager of the office while his boss traveled on business.  He so impressed the local merchants that they sent him to college in New York — just in time for the American Revolution and for Hamilton to organize a company of artillery and quickly become chief of staff to General Washington.  By the time that Hamilton attended the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787 at age 30 as a delegate from the state of New York he had made himself an expert on the new political technology in everything from warfare to constitutions to central banking and the importance of manufacturing over agriculture.

As a brilliant young chief of staff to General Washington during the Revolutionary War Hamilton learned first hand about the agony of trying to fight a war without an effective financial system.  Britain’s power, the 21-year-old wrote in 1781 to Robert Morris, revolutionary Superintendent of Finance, depended more upon its credit than upon its ships and its soldiers.18  The solution, he determined at age 26, was that the United States needed a central bank, a national debt, and a national revenue. Hamilton was a leader in the fight to ratify the US Constitution in 1787, writing most of The Federalist, a sophisticated apology for a strong central government.  Then, implementing the ideas of his youth, he amazed the world with his extraordinary performance as the first Secretary of the Treasury.  He refunded the revolutionary debt, established a powerful central bank, and directed the US economy towards manufacturing. All these policies helped the United States federal government to become in time the preeminent economic and political power in the world.

Hamilton did not, of course, invent his political technology, the application of instrumental reason to revolution and national power.  He merely copied his system — of central bank, funded debt, stock market, bond market, and banking — from the British, and they had imported Dutch finance a century before with William III and the Glorious Revolution.  And why not?  Dutch finance had given the Dutch Republic the financial power to throw off the yoke of Spain; it gave the British the power to fight and win a second Hundred Years War against the French in Europe and build a world commercial and colonial empire at the same time.

The year 1800 was a hinge in human history.  Humans had developed new technologies of power that transformed the power of government.  Bureaucracies could penetrate through the shield of traditional social structures and control individual subjects by taxation and conscription.  Government-controlled finance and credit could influence and often control the entire universe of economic relationships by placing the government’s financial instruments at the center of the economic life of a nation.  Governments would learn to use all these technologies ruthlessly as the modern state grew to adulthood in the 19th century.  By the 20th century, government was armed against its people and the world with a triple threat: armed force; bureaucracy and finance; and a movement of political enthusiasts formed itself into a new ruling class by transforming the mundane technology of state power into an incandescent secular religion of state supremacy in which political power would dominate both economic activity and the moral universe.

But there was one small problem; it was that government can’t deliver anything more than force.  It only knows how to say “you must” or “you must not.”  It cannot conjure businesses into existence or innovations out of the creative minds of inventors.  It cannot dream dreams and persuade people to join moral movements of reform.  Armed as it is against its people with overwhelming force, the temptation of force has led governments everywhere to failure and ruin.  Humans are not mechanical contraptions but social animals.  Human societies operate not by the equal and opposite force of Newtonian mechanics but the cooperative web of social influence.  It is not administrative collective organization that creates wealth but the spontaneous collective mind.  The more that governments have relied upon force to direct and regulate their peoples in the minutiae of social and economic life the less their people have prospered and the more that government’s power project has withered.

Modern governments need to learn the lesson that capitalism learned in the 19th century.  Businessmen found that wealth and prosperity comes not from a ruthless application of top-down instrumental reason but by the delegation of powers to others.  We will now discover how modern business learned, after its early fling with plantation slavery and mass production, that prosperity and growth are the product of cooperation, trust, and lively competition, and not the mechanical application of force.

For modern business began, not with friendly shakes between invisible hands, but with the application of force upon plantation slaves organized upon the gang system.

1Norman Tebbit, Daily Telegraph January 18, 2010, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100022655/dont-blame-great-british-institutions-blame-the-shysters-who-have-infested-them/

2Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, v.1, Beacon Press, 1984, p. 158.

3St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, Google Books, p. 137.

4Jung Chang and John Halliday, Mao, The Unknown Story, p. 104.

5Ibid., p. 105.

6Georg Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre.  See: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drei-Elemente-Lehre

7Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, pp. 148-9.

8Ibid, pp. 151-2

9Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Viking, 2011, p. 64.

10Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Harper, 2010, p. 52-59.

11Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 39.

12Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, The Year 1000, Back Bay Books, 1999, p. 46.

13James J. Sheehan, German History 1770-1866, p. 33.

14Ibid., p. 35.

15James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, Yale UP, 1998, p. 2.

16Ibid., p.2.

17Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, Yale UP, 2009, p. 370.

18Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p.156.

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Three:
Business, Slavery and Trust

Capitalism is the supreme expression of human creativity and freedom, an economy of mind overcoming the constraints of material power. – George Gilder1

If you listen to what people say, you’d think that they hated business and business owners.  Women converse with their friends about the products they have had to return.  Liberals talk comfortably about reining in “corporate greed.”  People hate paying ATM fees.  Politicians rail against “price gouging” oil companies, and everyone piles on when the subject is greedy bankers.

But if you watch what people do, you read a different story.  People trust their money to the bank, they save with Fidelity and Vanguard, they fill up their cars at the gas station using a debit card from the bank and have complete confidence that the oil company will not steal their money.  People line up for a chance to work for big corporations and they loyally buy from their favorite brands.  Our liberal friends, of course, like to look different.  They put their trust in cooperatives – grocery stores, sports equipment stores,  health cooperatives, and TIAA-CREF – and look the other way as their favorite cooperatives slowly reinvent themselves into modern corporations by copying everything corporate, from marketing to employee development, except the idea of stockholder ownership.

On the one hand, people love to complain about corporations; on the other hand they love what they deliver.  What is the meaning of this?

Let us start with the facts, as presented by Deirdre McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity.

In 1800 the average human consumed and expected her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to go on consuming a mere $3 per day, give or take a dollar or two.  The figure is expressed in modern-day, American prices, corrected for the cost of living.  It is appalling.

By contrast, if you live nowadays in a thoroughly bourgeois country such as Japan or France you probably spend about $100 a day.  One hundred dollars as against three: such is the magnitude of modern economic growth.2

McCloskey argues that the difference between $3 a day and $100 a day is the spirit of innovation in the minds of people, that “economic development requires ‘a million mutinies’” against the customary ways of doing things.

An old class of town dwellers, formerly despised by the clergy, the aristocracy and the peasantry, began to acquire a more dignified standing, in the way people talked and thought about it, in European rhetoric about middle-class activities.  And along with a new dignity the bourgeoisie began to acquire a new liberty.3

With the dignity and liberty that attaches to merchants in a mercantile republic the entrepreneurs of Venice developed a startling innovation in farming.  In the 13th century they developed sugar plantations on the island of Cyprus.  These plantations were worked by “a mixed labor force of local serfs and Muslim slaves.”4   They were not ancestral estates but well-capitalized businesses growing sugar cane and exporting refined sugar to Europe; entrepreneurs were responding to a new consumer demand in Europe.  Traditionally the only sweetener in Europe had been honey, but the Crusaders had learned from their Muslim opponents how to drink coffee from Mocha and sweeten it with sugar.  They took their sweet tooth back to Europe, and pretty soon the entrepreneurs of Venice figured out how to make money off it: plantation slavery.  Fortunately for the consumers and for the profits, it was acceptable to enslave Muslims to this backbreaking work because they were not Christians.

Of course, the slave plantations weren’t the only slave game in town.  Between 1200 and 1475 Genoa and Venice competed to run a very nice trade in slaves from Black Sea ports like Kaffa (now Feodosia) — white females from Circassia northeast of the Black Sea were particularly desired for households and harems in the Middle East and males were constantly needed for the Mamluk military slave system.5  The Dutch East India Company routinely employed slaves in its Indonesian workshops.6

As the sugar business grew the plantations gradually moved west and by the middle of the 15th century the Portuguese began to establish sugar plantations on the Canaries and the Madeiras islands off the west coast of Africa.  They imported African slaves to work the plantations.  That was all right because the Africans weren’t Christians either. By the end of the 16th century the industry moved west to the West Indies; the British entered the business on Barbados in the mid 17th century.7

It is important to realize that right from the start these slave plantations were highly articulated enterprises and were plugged into the international trading system.

The large slave plantations of the Western Hemisphere required huge capital investments, not only to cover the purchase price of the slaves but also to cover the cost of the land, buildings, work animals and other livestock, irrigation works, implements, and, in the case of sugar, machinery.  Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the typical Jamaican sugar plantation operated with about 200 hands and had a capital value of about £26,400 (about... $21 million in 1985 dollars)... There were no U.S. factories of this size until the second decade of the nineteenth century.8

Sugar planters were enthusiastic innovators.  They built factories to grind, filter, boil and cure the sugar; they built railroads, and exploited steam power for their grinding mills.

Another major technological innovation proved critical to the success of sugar cultivation; it was “industrial labor discipline,” the work culture that in the late 18th century appeared in the textile factories of the Industrial Revolution.  In plantation slavery this invention was called the “gang system,” the organization of slaves into gangs of about ten workers “driven” by an overseer to perform specific, repetitive tasks as a team.  The crux of the system was

the division of the complex activities during each phase of production—planting, cultivating, and harvesting—into a series of relatively simple tasks that could be closely monitored... “A plantation might be considered as a piece of machinery,” said Bennet H. Barrow in his Highland plantation rules. “To operate successfully, all its parts should be uniform and exact, and its impelling force regular and steady.”9

A century later British businessmen recruiting labor for their new factories complained about the “bad industrial habits of their rural recruits”, the difficulty of getting any post-pubertal human to work under modern factory discipline. This was not a problem for the slave plantation owners.  The “extraordinary degree of force that planters were allowed to bring to bear on enslaved black labor” took care of bad habits.10  When industrial discipline became a scandal in England in the mid 19th century the political system responded with parliamentary inquiries and Factory Acts.  But in the sugar islands, a century earlier, the sugar magnates dominated politics and they passed legislation to grant themselves the force they needed to perfect the gang system in their slave plantations.

In the end the politicians took over the problem of preparing workers for factory discipline from the factory owners.  They passed compulsory education laws that forced every child to attend an approved school for most of its pre-pubertal years and to become habituated to a life of subordination and constant discipline.  For most children this school would be a government school, what we might call a government child-custodial facility.  By the end of the 19th century, the role of government schools in preparing children for disciplined work in factories and offices by conscripting them into government schools was not reckoned to be an injustice but a virtue.

The slave economy became big business.  In the great age of navigation “slave-produced commodities dominated the channels of world trade”, amounting in the 1770s to almost 30 percent of England’s imports.  “Much of England’s shipping was engaged in transporting either sugar to Europe, slaves from Africa to the New World, or manufactured goods from England to the slave colonies.”11  A proper restraint was observed in polite society about all this.  When Sir Thomas Bertram left his family to visit his “Antigua estate” in the West Indies readers were not introduced to the notion of slavery until, upon his return to Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s timid heroine Fanny Price ventured a question to her uncle about the slave trade.  “[B]ut there was such a dead silence” from the others, Fanny admitted, that she hardly dared to continue her topic.  The literary critics tell us we are to understand that the rigid proprieties of the Bertram world are one with Sir Thomas’s patriarchal endorsement of his elder daughter’s loveless but advantageous marriage and the unsuccessful bullying of his niece Fanny into marriage with the rich but vicious Henry Crawford: they all add up to slavery.  The Bertrams were not the only fictional family in on the slave action.  Charlotte Brontë’s orphaned Jane Eyre inherited her miraculous £20,000 from her uncle, a businessman on the sugar island of Madeira.  When the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century with either the invention of the steam engine in 1698 or the creation of the textile industry, it either picked up or reinvented the techniques of labor discipline developed for the slave plantations.  Employees were resources to be economized and consumed.

This history permits us to appreciate the startling paradox that confronted the educated elite in the mid-19th century.  On the one hand the new textile magnates had revolutionized the manufacture of textiles and transformed transportation with railroads, two inventions that improved life for everyone and improved it enormously for the lower orders.  On the other hand they had extended the mechanical metaphor of Newtonian science to the very people that worked on their plantations and factories, apparently treating them with inhuman callousness as mere labor resources.

But that is not the only paradox about modern business.  Businessmen, we know, ruthlessly compete in a war of all against all in the battle for market share, and yet business runs on trust.

The author once bought at his local supermarket some Pinata apples.  Even though he’d never previously heard of Pinatas he bought a couple for, as he told the checkout clerk, he trusted Safeway.  The clerk looked surprised.  It’s unusual to express trust in our economic system these days, and especially to express trust in big corporations.  This chasm between walk and talk is telling, for the reality is that the economic sector is drenched in trust.

Three stories illustrate why this is so.  The first story, from the late 19th century, features John D. Rockefeller’s daughter Bessie.  On an expedition in New York City shopping with college friends for a present she found herself short of cash.

At a Manhattan store they found the perfect gift: a $100 desk.  Since Bessie and her companions had only $75, they asked the merchant if he could wait a few days for the remaining $25. He agreed to do so if a New York businessman would vouch for them. “My father is in business,” Bessie offered meekly.  “He will vouch for us.”  Who is you father? Asked the man. “His name is Mr. Rockefeller,” she said. “John D. Rockefeller: he is in the oil business.”12

Fortunately the merchant knew who Bessie’s father was.  But if Bessie’s father hadn’t been John D. Rockefeller then the merchant could have checked the business directory to determine his trustworthiness as a New York businessman.

The second story is about J.P. Morgan, American financier, the man that saved the financial system after the Crash of 1907.  At the Pujo Committee hearings into the “money trust” in 1913 after the economy had safely recovered, J.P. Morgan testified before the House of Representatives.  In a famous exchange, Morgan and committee counsel Samuel Untermyer tussled over the question of money and credit.  It was Mr. Untermyer who had asked “Is There a Money Trust?” in a speech in New York in December 191113.

Mr. UNTERMYER. Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?

Mr. MORGAN. No, sir; the first thing is character.

Mr. UNTERMYER. Before money or property?

Mr. MORGAN. Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.

Mr. UNTERMYER. So that a man with character, without anything at all behind it, can get all the credit he wants, and a man with the property can not get it?

Mr. MORGAN. That is very often the case.

Mr. UNTERMYER. But that is the rule of business?

Mr. MORGAN. That is the rule of business, sir.

Mr. UNTERMYER. If that is the rule of business, Mr. Morgan, why do the banks demand, the first thing they ask, a statement of what the man has got, before they extend him credit?

Mr. MORGAN. That is what they go into; but the first thing they say is, “We want to see your record.”

Mr. UNTERMYER. Yes; and if his record is a blank, the next thing is how much has he got?

Mr. MORGAN. People do not care, then.

Mr. UNTERMYER. For instance, if he has got Government bonds or railroad bonds, and goes into get credit, he gets it, and on the security of those bonds, does he not?

Mr. MORGAN. Yes.

Mr. UNTERMYER. He does not get it on his face or his character, does he?

Mr. MORGAN. Yes; he gets it on his character.

Mr. UNTERMYER. I see; then he might as well take the bonds home, had he not?

Mr. MORGAN. Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.

Mr. UNTERMYER. That is the rule all over, the world?

Mr. MORGAN. I think that is the fundamental basis of business.14

Notice the difference between the understanding of Untermeyer and Morgan.  To the banker business is a question of trust and relationship.  To a political lawyer it is a question of conspiracy and under-the-table deals.

William Tecumseh Sherman related in his Memoirs an incident where trust, or the lack of it, was perhaps the saving of the bank of Lucas, Turner, and Co., of which the thirtysomething Sherman was a partner and the manager of its San Francisco branch in the years leading up to the Panic of 1857.  The incident, in 1854, involved H. Meiggs, City Councilman, owner of a lumber business, and prominent San Francisco citizen.

In him Nisbet [Sherman’s fellow partner] had unbounded faith, but, for some reason, I feared or mistrusted him, and remember that I cautioned Nisbet not to extend his credit but to gradually contract his loans.15

Sherman contracted Meiggs’ loan balance, secured by city warrants, from eighty thousand dollars down to twenty-five thousand dollars, but “one morning Meiggs and family were missing, and it was discovered that they had embarked in a sailing vessel for South America.”  Meiggs failed for nearly a million dollars, and it turned out that some of the city warrants used to collateralize his debt had been “fraudulently issued” by the City Councilman.  Later, when a run on the San Francisco banks occurred in February 1855, Sherman’s bank survived.  We may speculate that it survived in part because Sherman understood the importance of not loaning money to men he did not trust.

A young salesman once told the author the story of his first big contract.  He was sitting in the client’s office after the deal had been struck, and watched as his client put the contract in his desk drawer.  If he ever had to take that contract out of the drawer, his client told him, then their business relationship would have failed.  He meant, of course, that in future their business dealings would be done on the basis on mutual trust and a spirit of give and take.  The contract was there in case their mutual trust failed.

Business dealings are drenched in words of trust, words like bond, trust, equity, redeem, company, partner, credit, and grace.16  That’s the argument of Frederick Turner in Shakespeare’s Twenty-first-Century Economics.  Here he analyzes the contract for a “pound of flesh” in The Merchant of Venice.

A contract, though it contains a necessary orientation towards an eternal and unchanging perfection of clarity and justice, and implicitly stipulates the most unambiguous construction of its words at the moment of their composition and signing, is always an ongoing relationship of persons.  It can work only so long as it contains enough free play, enough lubricant of inexactness, so that it does not seize up.17

The certainties of a written contract are an illusion, for the real business relationship features contingencies never imagined in the contract.  The real business relationship enacts the age-old exchange of favors, the win-win transaction of barter, and the rough-and-ready give-and-take that renews and confirms the trust between two friends.

The importance of trust not just as a lubricant for business but as a basis for a prosperous and peaceful society is argued by Francis Fukuyama in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

Thus, economic activity represents a crucial part of social life and is knit together by a wide variety of norms, rules, moral obligations, and other habits that together shape the society... [O]ne of the most important lessons we can learn from an examination of economic life is that a nation’s well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in a society.18

Fukuyama investigates the trust question on a national and regional level; he observes the difference between “high-trust” societies like the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany versus “low-trust” societies like China, Italy, and France.  The difference lies mainly in the ability of people to extend trust beyond their families, their blood kin.  The high-trust societies include a wealth of voluntary associations in the space between the family and government, and it is the high-trust societies that led the way from agricultural to commercial and industrial society.  Trust, argues Fukuyama, is the key marker of social well-being.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born human rights activist, points up the difference between tribal life with the clan and city life with the “white infidels” in a “letter” to her dead tribal grandmother, who had taught her the tribal culture of “suspicion and distrust.”

The infidel insists on honesty and trust.  Everywhere you turn here, you must trust someone: to fly the airplane you travel in, to teach your child, to take care of you when you are sick and feed you food that is edible.  And everywhere your trust is borne out.19

The Prisoners Dilemma shines a helpful light on the question of trust.  It’s a notion developed by two analysts at the RAND Corporation in 1950 and was given its name by Albert W. Tucker.  In the classic situation, two prisoners are confined in separate cells.  The question is: should a prisoner inform on the other prisoner and get a light sentence, or what?  Generalized, the Prisoner’s Dilemma attempts to answer the question: Why or when should people trust each other?  When does it pay to be trustworthy, and when does it pay to cheat?  The short answer is that it pays to be trustworthy in a long-term relationship, and it pays to cheat another person on the last transaction with them.  The best way to avoid a cheating situation is to have a long-term relationship in which the termination of the relationship is unthinkable.  It doesn’t take too much to understand why businesses employ strategies to encourage their customers to trust them, using an array of inducements ranging from branding to “perks” and unlimited return policies.

Trust is important not just between business and consumers, but business to business as well, and the reason is that it saves money.  Here is an example of trust in the shipping business from the 1960s.  A shipowner gets a call from his ship captain late on a Friday.  His ship, in Amsterdam for repairs, is ready for sea, but for one problem.  The shipyard won’t release the ship without payment of £200,000 sterling. Unless payment can be arranged immediately the ship will be stuck in the shipyard all weekend and that will cost £20,000.  The shipowner calls his merchant banker in London and the banker calls a bank in Amsterdam to pay the shipyard so the ship can sail on Friday night.20  It is easy to see what is going on here.  The shipyard does not trust the shipowner, for once the ship sails it is gone forever and the shipyard might have to work hard to get payment.  But the merchant banker trusts the shipowner and the bank in Amsterdam trusts the merchant bankers, for each of the parties has a long-term business relationship with the other; they trust each other.

It’s all very well for rich shipowners and merchant bankers to trust each other.  It’s all very well for Wall Street titan J.P. Morgan to tell a crusading Jewish lawyer that he wouldn’t do business with a man he did not trust—even for all the bonds in Christendom.  But most people do not do business at such rarefied altitudes.  They do not have powerful friends in high places to force back the jungle and the ravenous beasts of capitalism.  What about business down in the swamp?  How does business survive in the informal sector of the Third World or in the inner city of the United States where the arm of the law doesn not seem to be wielded for you but against you?  Fortunately we know how business works in such an inhospitable climate.  From Hernando De Soto Polar, a Peruvian businessman, we know about the informal economic sector of Lima, Peru, researched by his Instituto Libertad Y Democracia and described in his book The Other Path.  From Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh and Off the Books we know how informal business works on the south side of Chicago. From James Tooley in The Beautiful Tree we know how illegal private schooling works in the slums of Third World cities.  In Portfolios of the Poor Daryl Collins and his co-authors describe the surprisingly active informal credit transactions by which the Third World poor deal with the irregular income flows they experience as farmers and street traders.  These stories tell us what capitalism looks like when it operates outside the law, when virtue loses all her loveliness.  They tell us how capitalism operates without the institutional benefit of the legislation that, the ruling class insists, is essential to prevent a world of cruelty and oppression.  We shall see that economic and social life without the law operates pretty much the same way that business operates within the law.  It operates with relationships and trust.  Unfortunately it must operate without the efficiencies of the formal economy, its access to credit, its electronic transactions, its support from the commercial code and the legal system.  And that makes life in poverty a lot less secure and a lot more risky than it needs to be.

Socialists rail about exploitation.  Progressives talk about corporate greed and corporate oligarchy.  Conservatives rail at “crony capitalism” when business gets in bed with government.  Yet, as we have seen, business is drenched in trust.  What does it all mean?

The answer is similar to the one that Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn once gave: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”  Don’t expect business to become the fount of moral inspiration.  Business is all about innovation, production, execution, exploitation, and trust between partners.  It is not about morality.  It combines resources to deliver goods and services efficiently to the market.  It uses the instrumental reason of practice and technique to exploit and to dominate Nature and other humans to the extent of efficiency, and above all it combines the efforts of millions of producers to meet the needs of the consumers.  If businessmen treat customers well it is because it pays to do so.  If a corporation showers its employees with pensions and benefits it is because it looked like a good idea at the time.

Business looks to others to define the parameters of what is permitted and what is forbidden.  That’s OK; we have religion for that.  But now let us think more about the nature of modern government and modern business and try to understand them not just individually but as joined together at the hip.

1George Gilder, “Unleash the Mind,” National Review, August  2012.  Accessed 10/6/2012: http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/312376

2Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity, University of Chicago Press, p. 1.

3Ibid, p. 10.

4Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, Norton, 1989, p. 203.

5William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How trade shaped the world, Grove Press, 2008, p. 122.

6C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800, Penguin, 1990, p.239.

7Fogel, ibid., p. 17-22.

8Ibid., p. 23.

9Ibid., p. 26.

10Ibid., p. 26.

11Ibid., p. 22.

12Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John. D. Rockefeller, Sr., p. 232.

13“Curbing the ’Money Trust’,” New York Times, December 28, 1911, Accessed 5/28/2013: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FA0F12F8395517738DDDA10A94DA415B818DF1D3

14Pujo Committee Hearings, transcript for December 19, 1912. http://c0403731.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/collection/papers/1910/1912_12_19_Morgan_at_Pujo_C_t.pdf

15William T. Sherman, Memoirs, Barnes & Noble, 2005, p. 102.

16Frederick Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-first-Century Economics, p. 11.

17Ibid., p. 73.

18Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, p. 7.

19Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad: From Islam to America, Free Press, 2010, p. 89.

20Joseph Wechsberg, The Merchant Bankers, p. 16.

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Four:
Humanity’s Big Problem: Freeloaders

Nothing is more corrosive to a group’s cohesion than free riders.1
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Humans are groupish. We live in territorial groups, and mostly we are ruled over by governments that defend us from predators and pirates. So far so good. But human groups suffer not just from enemies foreign and domestic; they also must deal with group members that don’t pull their weight, people that take advantage of group membership without contributing much to the general welfare. In the face-to-face stateless community of the village these freeloaders are encouraged to greater effort by shame or expulsion, but in the state society of the agricultural age and now the industrial age things are not so simple. In state societies the ruling class secures its power by offering rewards to its supporters; in other words, it encourages in its supporters exactly what it must deplore in the society at large.

Every society since the dawn of the agricultural age has needed a government, and every government, from a band of insurgent guerrillas to a feudal kingdom to a continental empire, needs supporters. These supporters may be soldiers; they may be the next step down in the feudal hierarchy; they may be democratic voters. These supporters want what only government can deliver: loot. The guerrilla soldiers may want ministries in the soon-to-come revolutionary state. The barons commanding their powers in the feudal host may want more lands in the gift of the king. The voters in democratic republics want free stuff: pensions, health care, education; they want relief from the risks of daily life. These government supporters are, in a word, freeloaders.

But nothing is free; the loot that government promises its supporters must come from somewhere, from wealth created by other people. No doubt the unjust old regime had it coming, and so the guerrilla leaders are justified in sharing out its ill-gotten gains among their loyal supporters who were there during the times that tried men’s souls: no summer soldiers and sunshine patriots were they. The feudal king needs his marcher lords and his great feudatories and must reward them when they show up with their powers to fight for him. And the democratic politician needs the millions of votes it takes to get elected to office in the modern welfare state. But how much is enough? All the subventions that the government makes to reward its supporters are taken from productive citizens. To the extent that the government hands out goodies, so far do its supporters ease off from making contributions to the general welfare and output through work and production. How much of this freeloading is enough, how much is just, and what principle can be advanced to put a limit on it, and say, at some point, to the regime supporters: get a job?

If we review the three ages: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and modern, we see the changes rung on the problem of the freeloader. In the hunter-gatherer band the freeloader is dealt with by shame and guilt. In the agricultural age the freeloader is dealt with by the force of the feudal hierarchy; he must pay rent, work on his lord’s demesne, or get kicked out. But in the modern age the economy apportions gains and losses. The worker connects with society through the mediating institution of the market – for skills, for ideas, for products and services. The freeloader goes to the wall unless and until he surrenders himself to the will of society, expressed through the supply and demand of the market.

In reality, things are not quite so simple, for nature does not throw away the old ways when something new comes along. So it is that shame and guilt survived the agricultural and industrial revolutions. So it is that political power survived the industrial revolution. In our modern era we see all methods of socialization competing for cultural space. Shame and guilt have been expanded from face-to-face relations to class and race shame. Time was that the Negro race was backward and shameful; now whites are racists and exploiters of the traditionally exploited and marginalized and ought to be ashamed of their microaggressions.

So also the culture of the armed band, its celebration of loot and plunder, survives in modern politics. People still look to their sovereign lord or political boss for patronage and gifts.

By some measures the modern state has extended loot-and-plunder principle about as far as it can go. The modern state maintains a military and police establishment complete with ranks and subordination and pensions, and it hands out offices and rewards to political activists it wants to co-opt and promote. But it also derives its power from the distribution of free stuff, jobs in the bureaucracy for administrators and regulators, and a vast array of “entitlements,” pensions for which people may qualify by reason of age or unemployment, poverty, disability, or race, or gender.

When F.A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom he criticized the socialists’ plans for national organization and planning. The very title of his book implied that socialism was a reactionary movement that was taking the modern world back to the old ways. The socialists’ method of implementing universal social security, he argued, would necessarily introduce a harsh regime of rigidity and subordination. It would require not just nationalizing the means of production away from private owners, but would create new powers for government that the private owners never possessed. The socialist state would create a nationalization of thought, in which the wrong sort would tend to rise to the top. He wanted to tell the western ruling class that its political plans would force the people back into a kind of neo-serfdom in which ordinary people would find themselves, willy-nilly, dragooned into a national industrial army.

Hayek viewed the socialist project from the top down, from the view of the ruling class directing traffic on the streets below, since his book was dedicated “to the socialists of all parties.” But what about the other view, from the bottom up? From this view the people are not being dragooned at all. They are willingly joining the colors. They vote for the party that proffers the most free stuff. They discuss with co-workers how to qualify for subsidized housing, for student loans, for small business loans. They learn how to qualify for Social Security Disability; they figure how to get into the local fire department. They are trying to find a berth that will assure them a lifetime income and take them out of the hurly-burly and the risk of employment-at-will in the modern global economy. Having acquired such a berth and the perquisites that go with it they quickly persuade themselves that they deserve it, and they resist all attempts to reduce or eliminate their income from the state or from their Fortune 500 employer; they may even mutiny and bite the hand that feeds them to assert their “rights.”

In seeking lifetime release from the burden of individual responsibility they are returning to the ancient attitude to work. In his essay “The Readiness to Work” longshoreman Eric Hoffer casts a peculiar light upon this question. He notes that the celebration of work is a new phenomenon in the world.

In practically all civilizations that we know of, and in the Occident for too many centuries, work was viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage, or, at best, a necessary evil.2

It turns out, Hoffer reckons, that societies have two options with respect to work. Either the government tells everyone what to do or, as in the modern Occident, the autonomous individual decides. In the old system, where the ruler or the ruling class decides what work is to be done and who is to do it, no worker has a reason to work any more than ordered, or to expend any personal effort beyond the minimum demanded. It is clear what this kind of society does to the individual subject. It makes the subject into a serf with no responsibilities, who waits for orders, and then just does what he is told to do and no more: a freeloader. In practice, of course, the ruler and his henchmen tend to lose interest in the exact details of the work they direct; they have important political business to attend to. So as time goes by, there is a tendency for the individual worker to slowly gain autonomy and control over his working life; despite his subordination he accumulates rights and privileges as his master loses interest in the work of supervision.

The new system is of course not a system. It is a cultural revolution in which the burden of figuring out the work to be done and then doing it descends upon the autonomous individual. And it is a burden.

An autonomous existence is heavily burdened and beset with fears, and can be endured only when bolstered with confidence and self-esteem.3

Moreover the average individual is not given extraordinary talent or energy that advertises his worth; he “must prove [his] worth by keeping busy.” This is the meaning of the cult of work that has taken over the Occident since the end of the feudal era and has now spread to the rest of the world. The man that is responsible for his life is a man that can never rest, never repose into indolence. He must keep busy, and for most of us that means he must voluntarily work and do things for other people.

Nor is was this cult of work invented in the Occident; it got its start in China. After the breakup of feudalism and the birth of the imperial mandarin bureaucracy 1,500 years ago the Chinese people found themselves toiling under a fearful responsibility. Land had to be divided among male heirs, so if the heirs were not to inherit diminished shares of land, a father had to work hard enough to buy up land to provide undiminished sustenance for his surviving sons. Otherwise his heirs might slide into poverty and eventually lose all their land and, after a generation or two, end up as unmarried landless laborers.

As we have seen, longshoreman Eric Hoffer explained what is going on here in his idea that there are two ways to make sure that society’s work gets done. Either the rulers take responsibility, and issue detailed orders to the common folk that sets them to work, or society can delegate that responsibility to the common folk and let them figure things out themselves. Under serfdom it is clearly the responsibility of the local lord to set his peasants to work, and this tradition is carried over into the modern socialist state of which Hayek warned. Of course the socialist state does not advertise its command economy as turning back the clock, except to nod approvingly at the concept of “rational planning.” It advertises instead the benefits that flow to its faithful servitors, the workers and peasants, the government employees, the activists that form its “base.” And it entices others to its banners with new benefits. But it is obvious that the more that the government distributes in benefits the more it must extract from the economy by taxation and other forms of coercion to satisfy its supporters. The more that it delivers the more it must approximate its national economy to a war economy where the government’s taxation, borrowing, and money creation attempt to mobilize the entire national economy towards a simple national goal, and coordinate the efforts of each individual to make him contribute to the war effort. The more the economy is transformed towards a war economy the more that the government will find itself issuing explicit orders to each individual, telling him what work to perform.

Everyone desires to continue enjoying their current prosperity without reduction, and wants to believe that their life situation ought to continue without diminution in emolument. The question is: what will a person do when his emoluments are reduced. There is, obviously, a whole continuum of responses. At one end of the continuum are people that will risk anything for the chance of improvement; at the other are people who will do nothing to prevent withdrawal of their benefits. In the middle are the rest of us, that might vote only for the party that promises continued loot or perhaps riot in the streets to demonstrate our rage.

We have seen the problem with modern government in Chapter 2. It is still, as every ancient government, mostly an armed minority occupying territory and rewarding its supporters with loot taken from the inhabitants of the territory. Of course, every modern government, as every ancient government, is on the side of the angels. It is either God’s gift to humans, or history’s favorite child. This, the postmodernists tell us, is a “narrative of power.” Every armed minority has a story to tell that justifies its ascent to power and eternal continuance in power. But we insist here that every such story is at best a Noble Lie, for a simple reason, common to every ruling class and its government. The trouble with government is that it is not social. The idea of humans as social animals is that within society the rule of force does not apply. But every government and its supporters is armed against its people, giving the lie to this conceit.

Then there is business. We saw in Chapter 3 that in the last two centuries business has increased the wealth of nations and their peoples by almost two orders of magnitude, in the process that Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment. Business has transformed the world. And yet business is a monstrous twin of government. The larger businesses are organized like armies, with charismatic CEOs leading their highly trained troops on long marches to develop new products, and concentrating their forces in pitched battles for market share.

Some people have experienced the coming of capitalism as a new birth of oppression; others have experienced it as an astonishing prodigy, the creator of untold comforts and riches.

But perhaps there is more in common between government and business than we have hitherto perceived. Perhaps both government and business are best understood as the ego journeys of their great leaders. Great egos come into the world and burst their bounds. They cannot stand still and just work in the garden; they have to form a movement; they are compelled to rally people to their colors. They must march across the world and conquer its lands, and then distribute the booty among their followers. But now the index of wealth is not land, but capital. Everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed. Land used to be capital; its control used to be the basis of human wealth and prosperity, and so the great land conquerors and the great landowners, the magnates of patrimonial estates, were the great men of history. Now it is industrial might that is the foundation of wealth and prosperity, and so the great industrial magnates should be the great men of history. Only they aren’t.

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Piketty tells us in Capital in the Twenty-first Century, people counted wealth in the perpetual rent from a landed estate. That was how you reckoned wealth and power: in the annuity, the annual income from a great agricultural estate, its ability to deliver food and grain. Today we reckon economic wealth in the opposite way from our ancestors. We reckon wealth in the capital valuations of the stock market, which is nothing more than the present value of the annual income of a capital asset from all future years brought back to the present. And what is this wealth? It is the ability to deliver products and services to millions of consumers across the world.

We ought to say that, in the old days, people lived under rentalism; today we live under capitalism.

In either case, the organization of production is not much different. At the apex of the agricultural pyramid is the great freebooter, lord of all he surveys and whatever new lands he may wish to conquer. People that know what is good for them rally to the great and powerful one and become his followers. By their loyalty and service they get to enjoy a part of the revenues and rents from the great empire. They are, of course, freeloaders. They do not achieve anything remarkable or deserving; they merely provide the support that every great lord must accumulate, they are cogs in his machine of agricultural power.

At the apex of the industrial pyramid is another great freebooter, lord of his capital empire and lord of all the productive employees he leads. Where the great agricultural freebooter lived by conquering and looting neighboring states, the capital freebooter lives by creative destruction, surprising the world with new products and services that put the mature corporations out of business. People that know what is good for them, MBAs and such, rally to the great and powerful one and become his followers. By their loyalty and service they get to enjoy a share of the enterprise’s capital valuation in the stock market. They are, of course, freeloaders. They do not achieve anything remarkable or deserving; they merely provide the support that every great capitalist must accumulate; they are cogs in his machine of industrial power.

As we have seen, a funny thing happened on the way from agricultural power to industrial power. Not just economic power but political power also transformed itself. In the agricultural era the great landed magnates possessed not just great food-producing estates but political power, and all political institutions reflected this reality. By the middle of the 19th century as the industrial revolution had clearly changed the channels of economic power many people expected and feared that the capitalists would seize the throne of political power and rule over the world as the landed warriors had done. Many people saw this and were horrified.

But they were disappointed. Instead of the capitalists bidding for political power to replace the old landed magnates, something unexpected happened when the new political elite emerged out of the social turmoil of the industrial revolution. As you might expect, the new elite recruited from sons of the bourgeoisie. But this new and emerging elite, instead of supporting the economic power of their fathers, created an over-under political coalition that declared war on the capitalists by stigmatizing and marginalizing the capitalist achievements. Instead of capitalists forming patron-client networks by attracting and cultivating the support of their natural clients as the old landed rulers had done, the new political elite, the educated sons of the capitalists, attracted support of the working class, the lower orders, and used their political power to tax the capitalists in order to reward their supporters in the working class.

We could say that the power elite of the new era split into two. In the old days political power and economic power were one and the same. Land was wealth and land was power, so the landed magnates ruled both the polity and the economy. But the industrial era is different. The industrial magnates concentrate on dominating the economy, while the political elite works to dominate the polity. In the old days the landed magnates used their own wealth to build and maintain their political power. Today it is the political magnates use the wealth of the economic sector to build and maintain their political power in opposition to the economic power.

There seems to be something missing, and it is not hard to discover what that is. The missing ingredient is human sympathy. There is no human sympathy outside the boundary of the ruling elite or the corporate suite. The political elite cannot conceive of anything beyond its power project to occupy and rule its territory and its people. It has no sympathy for people beyond its band of supporters. The corporate elite cannot conceive of anything beyond its project of economic gain. It flatters its customers because it must; it coddles its employees because it makes them more productive. What do the great politicians think of, beyond winning the next election by offering a chunk of the national income to their supporters? What do they care of dependency and idleness and family breakdown? What does the great corporate CEO think of but new ways to surprise us with new products and services, things that nobody ever thought of before, that will turn the commercial world upside down and make a fortune for him and his venture capitalist backers? What do they care about the good productive people that find themselves out of a job, as great old corporations and millions of jobs bite the dust in the creative destruction of the marketplace?

That is the challenge of the new millennium. In a world of great political, economic, and administrative systems, which objectify the world into mechanical processes, how do we restore the notion of humans as social animals, living things that do not live by mechanical or physical force and interaction and exchange, but with the social glue that Georg Simmel described: the practice of faithfulness, “the inertia of the soul,”4 and gratitude, a supplement to the legal order, a “moral memory of mankind,”5 that personalizes the relentless objectivity of the exchange culture?

The question therefore is: how can power, economic or political, be restrained? How can freebooters be kept in their home ports and freeloaders turned into productive citizens? How can politicians be restrained from simply bribing the voters with promises of loot? Can ordinary people be persuaded to take the responsibility for work upon themselves, or was the Occidental approach to work described by Eric Hoffer a mere interlude in an eternal human distaste for work?

If there is an answer that curbs the freebooters and freeloaders while still permitting human freedom and autonomy and celebrating individual human responsibility for contributing to society we know what science has to say about it. Science’s answer is one word: religion. It is religion that has provided the answer to the problem of the freeloader. It is to recent notions developed by social scientists about religion as the natural social prophylactic for the control of freebooting and freeloading that we now turn.

1Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct, Penguin Press, p. 48.

2Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change, Harper Colophon, 1964, p. 28.

3Ibid., p. 30.

4Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, 1950, p. 380.

5Ibid., p. 388.

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Five:
The Bonds of Faith

From Hesiod to Plato, when the leap in being has gained the alatheia, the truth of existence, the old myth becomes the pseudos, the falsehood or lie, the untruth of existence which the forbears lived.1

If modern humans are to escape from the depredations of freebooters and freeloaders then perhaps we should revisit the social instincts of our stateless ancestors.  For it is a simple instinct among social animals that force is a last resort. That is what hierarchy and “pecking order” are all about, to minimize the use of force within the community.

Humans share hierarchy and pecking order with the animals, but they have something else as well. What is special about humans when they associate in community?  They share values in common, for Values Matter Most, acccording to Ben Wattenberg.  There is a word for the values that humans share when grouped into community to develop and live in common.  It is called a “belief system” or, more commonly, religion.

Everyone has a religion, the shared faith that binds us back into our community.  You can even encounter religion among those that have grown beyond such superstition.  Just join the liberal folks on the cemetery tour at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, Washington.  Let us start the tour at the grave of Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino-American writer and activist.  Here’s an excerpt from his “Freedom from Want” essay in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943.

But we are not really free unless we use what we produce. So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us, so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves.

Get it?  It’s the Marxian theory of surplus value.  Over here lies an African American woman who organized the first African-American college sorority at Howard University.  Over there is a woman who was the first teacher in Seattle (at a private school, unfortunately).  In 1848 she attended the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights.

Over here are the victims of the 1916 Everett Massacre. IWW supporters took a boat from Seattle up Puget Sound to hold a rally in support of striking shingle workers.  On landing in Everett they ran into a hail of fire from the sheriff and a posse of vigilantes: just because the Wobblies wanted the bosses to share the profits.  And here are graves of typographical union workers that died from tuberculosis.

Here’s the grave of Seattle banker Rudolph Ankeny.  In 1891 he cut down a huge cedar, used by the local tribes and revered as a “signal tree,” and built a house in its place.  Here’s the founder of Hansen Baking Company.  He started out as a cleaner in a Seattle bakery, then learned the trade, worked his way up and bought the business.  Eventually he sold out to an eastern conglomerate and the business folded.

No doubt the Seattle liberals that visited the graves of their ideological saints that Saturday afternoon in June 2012 would be insulted by the idea that walking their modern Via Dolorosa is every bit as religious as the Christian’s walk of Christ’s last journey, the Stations of the Cross.  But here we walked in the shoes of liberal heroes, the local worthies that had done their bit — and even died — for civil rights, for women’s rights, for worker’s rights, and we got to renew our faith in the liberal pieties.  And as good is nothing without evil, we got to shudder at the environmental sacrilege of a greedy banker and the inhuman heedlessness of a far-away corporation.  This was religion in everything but name.

And like every religion, modern liberalism looks back with a certain disdain upon the ways of the old ones.  It regards their minds as ignorant and their faith as superstition.  This is nothing new.  Plato looked with disdain upon the representation of the gods in Hesiod, and Hesiod disapproved of the gods in Homer.  But Eric Voegelin argued that “human nature is constant in spite of its unfolding, in the history of mankind, from compact to differentiated order.”2  On Voeglin’s view we shouldn’t think of the humans of the old order as superstitious or ignorant.  Their world and their ideas were merely “compact,” when compared with our modern “differentiated” order.  We all understand how this differentiation works.  In the university, where once there were just a few departments of learning, the search for knowledge has been differentiated into dozens of departments, each with its specialists without spirit, nullities in everything save their particular specialty.  It is said that John Milton was the last man who knew everything.  But things were more compact in his day.

Many moderns, particularly on the left, are bold in their assertion that the faith of our ancestors in the Christian God was a superstition; they reprise Plato’s and Hesiod’s disapproval of Homer’s gods.  But if the gods of old are embarrassing and their believers backward and superstitious, what will save modern liberals and their gods from a similar fate?  After all, what is it about the gods of equality, or progress, or expertise, or liberation, or evolution and the dogmatic liberal faith in them that should exempt liberals from the scorn of our descendents?   For what are the modern moral movements, from Enlightenment to Romanticism to Revolution, to Socialism, to Progressivism, to Feminism to Egalitarianism to Environmentalism but secular religions from which modern people — especially modern educated people — sustain a sense of the meaning of life and the destiny of humans on this very small planet or, as Robert Bellah writes: “a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence”?3  Perhaps the modern secular religions are not religions in the classic sense.  But it is at least curious that they emerged immediately after educated people had satisfied themselves about the death of God towards the end of the 18th century.  Let us take a look at religion, as studied by modern anthropologists and publicized by modern popularizers and try to grasp its social function, if not its transcendental truth.

What was the point of religion in the old days: what did it do for society back then?  Was it merely a question of social control, of the rich oppressing the poor?  Or was there something else at work?  For according to Roy Rappaport: “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion[.]”4

If Voegelin’s policy of toleration for old beliefs has a point, that old beliefs represent a more compact version of our own differentiated beliefs, perhaps we could study with advantage the faith of our mothers and even look further back to the hunter-gatherers, as Nicholas Wade does from a safely evolutionary perspective in The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures.

But before we experience Wade’s comfortable words, let us make contact with something less comfortable, the challenging ideas of René Girard. In his view, expressed in Violence and the Sacred, religion is the human response to the eternal problem of escalating rivalry and violence between the men, and he maintains that the great myths, like the Oedipus story, display the residual explosive fragments of the ancient peril of men within a community descending into an orgy of violence and feud. The solution to the escalation of violence in the prehistorical past was the sacrificial victim; the whole community solved its divisive hatreds by combining in a paroxysm of concerted violence to expel and kill a single individual, and thus restore peace. The sacrificial ritual in all religion is an echo of the deliberately forgotten sacrifice of the First Scapegoat. In Girard’s account human conflict arises in the context of the basic human method of learning, mimesis, or learning by imitation. We learn by imitating others. But then comes a problem, for we do not just imitate what the model does, we imitate what he wants: women and possessions, and so we envy and resent the power and the competence of those we learn from. Thus, according to Girard, mimetic rivalry: the “subject” or ego competes with the “model” for possession of the “object” that the “model” had taught the “subject” to desire.

In Faith Instinct Wade does not attempt to answer the question of God’s existence.  He only attempts to analyze the effects of faith in God on human and social behavior, and investigate the ways of people that belong to religious communities.  The telling thing, on Wade’s account, is that if religion is universal, as Rappaport argues, then it is likely to be genetic, a wired-in trait that all humans share.  Normally, evolutionists argue that traits become universal because they have survival value.  On this view religion, if it is a universal human trait, must be tied in some way into human survival and flourishing.

The great question for mankind is the same as for any social animal.  How do we develop at once the aggressive ability to defend against enemies and also develop necessary cooperative qualities to assist our fellows: how to be fiercely competitive and at the same time caring and compassionate, and then to act on our beliefs.    It is one thing to talk about what’s right, but another thing to do the right thing.  It is one thing to talk about the fallen heroes; it is another thing to become one.  Religion is the answer at the center of this complex question.  It binds people together into a community.  It establishes the rules of behavior towards others.  It teaches people to sacrifice for the good of the community; it creates community events at which enmities are buried without the need for a scapegoat; it directs the instinctive moral sense with socially constructed cultural memes, just as they do it in liberal Seattle at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery.

Perhaps mankind could achieve these social goals, at a pinch, through violence.  We could force people to get with the program, and we could ferociously defend the frontiers against the enemy.  But force is expensive; it requires armies, police, and “enforcement officers,” — in a word, government — and force is dangerous, as René Girard suggests, and you never know when it may spiral out of control. So it is telling that humans have found ways to economize on the use of force.  One successful adaptation is to divide the world into the “us” of our community and the “them” of the outsiders, the foreigners.  Force against neighbors is a last resort, and even force against dangerous foreigners is mostly reduced to shows of force, though even the threat of force has its costs in fear and in feud.

In place of force, mankind has found another way of achieving beneficial social control and cooperation.  In part, this other way to social cooperation is achieved by preprogrammed social instinct, in part it is achieved by training young humans in the approved social instincts, and in part by natural selection between different social institutions.  This other way is religion: it binds people together into a culture of cooperative exchange and reduces the need for force. For lurking in the shadows is always the fear of uncontrolled violence.

One successful religious strategy for lowered conflict is the concept of divine punishment. “In small societies, the person who takes on the role of enforcer exposes himself to general resentment, not to mention retaliation from the miscreant or his relatives.” The enforcer usually tries to get everyone’s agreement on a violation of social norms and have the miscreant punished by one of his relatives. Even better, we can persuade everyone that God will punish miscreants, that God knows everything we do, and will punish misdeeds either in this life or the life to come.

A system of supernatural punishment carries enormous advantages for a primitive society. No one has to assume the thankless task of meting out punishment and risk being killed by the offender or his relatives; the gods perform this chore willingly and vigilantly.5

No legislation is needed. No police force is required. There is no danger of feuding families. And that is probably just as well.  The modern state maintains its vast apparatus of policemen, prosecutors and jailers because it can afford it. The primitive society cannot.

If religion can help with discipline and punishment, maybe it can help with another big social problem, quarrels within and between families.  In hunter-gatherer groups, ritual music and dance are the social solvents that dissolve enmity.  Anthropologist Megan Biesele argues that, among the !Kung people, the “dance is perhaps the central unifying force in Bushman life, binding people together in very deep ways which we do not fully understand.”6  An Australian aboriginal fire ceremony ritual lasting for 14 days includes a mock battle between the men and the women.  “All parties who had a serious unresolved dispute with each other were expected to engage in a symbolic duel with blazing firesticks, after which the matter was never to be referred to again.”7

Enmity is one social problem.  Freeloading is another.   It might seem that in the face-to-face hunter-gatherer group the problem of freeloading is limited.  Everyone knows how much each contributes, and the women’s gossip network keeps accounts on who gives and who doesn’t.  Everyone inside the community is obligated to contribute, and those that don’t may pay with expulsion.  But Nicholas Wade is emphatic.  Moral restraint was not enough to deter freeloading.  Something else was needed.

Religion secured a new level of social cohesion by implanting in people’s minds a stern overseer of their actions.... It was belief in these supernatural supervisors that enabled egalitarian societies to emerge from the dictatorship of the alpha male that primate societies had endured for so long.8

There’s that divine justice again.  Whether you believe that the concept of divine punishment is a confidence trick or a divine revelation, the concept is ingenious, a tribute either to man’s profound abilities or to God’s. And the idea raises a question: Is the notion of divine justice the only way to escape from the dictatorship of the alpha male?

For the modern era the problem of freeloading is much bigger than in the hunter-gatherer village. In the vast impersonal city it is more difficult than in the face-to-face village to know who can be trusted to pull their weight.  And to compound the problem, the threat of divine punishment is much lower today than in the past.  How do you identify people that can be trusted to pull their weight?  Again, religion has the answer.  To identify trustworthy people in the city you join a face-to-face community, a church, that imposes costs on its members.  There is no mystery about this: the higher the cost placed upon a member, the more he is likely to honor his obligations when the going gets tough.  This explains why it is possible for demanding religions, such as Mormonism and Orthodox Judaism, to thrive when their costs are much higher than those of the mainline Protestant churches or Reform Judaism.  As Roger Finke and Rodney Stark assert, “People tend to value religion on the basis of how costly it is to belong — the more one must sacrifice in order to be in good standing, the more valuable the religion.”9  There is a payoff from enduring the costs of membership beyond the selfish one of paying a lot in order to get a lot in salvation and the love of God; the payoff is social signaling.  When you pay the costs of belonging to a religious community you signal to the community that you are a worthy person.  Nicholas Wade:

A high price of entry also raises the level of trust among its members, because by obeying all the required rules and taboos, congregants signal to one another that they have bought into the religion’s moral code and can be relied on to behave accordingly...

Strictness reduces free riding [and] screens out members who lack commitment and stimulates participation among those who remain.10

Wade stresses that church members do not analyze their membership in this way.  Most church members if asked will emphasize the personal satisfactions they obtain from religious membership.  But the science shows that religion works because it changes behavior and turns people into better citizens and their community into a better community.

We moderns inherit the social problems of the ancients, yet must resolve them in different ways.  The absolute equality of the hunter-gatherer band is not available to the society of strangers that specializes and exchanges through the market economy.  The death of the divine enforcer has required the enlistment of a vast army of less able human law enforcers.  The differentiation of society from the compact hunter-gatherer band into a specialized society, with economic activity, political activity, and religious activity institutionalized into separate and competing social sectors creates further challenges.  Modern humans have differentiated economic activity, the acquisition of food and shelter, from political activity, the enforcement of social norms, and from religious activity, the establishment and the re-enactment of social norms.  Some people specialize in the production of food and shelter; others specialize in political enforcement, and still others specialize in moral/cultural persuasion.  In this age religion is no longer a face-to-face activity of the whole community in which moral instincts and reasoning are integrated with habits of food-sharing and instinctive sacrifice for the community in inter-tribal warfare.

Moreover many people predict that religion is on its way out.  The death of God variously reported throughout the 19th century has encouraged sociologists of religion like Steve Bruce to predict the end of religion.  “I expect the proportion of people who are largely indifferent to religious ideas to increase and the seriously religious to become a small minority.”11  Tell that to the pious liberals on the Mt. Pleasant cemetery tour.

Bruce defines religion as “beliefs, actions and institutions predicated on the existence of of entities with powers of agency (that is, gods) or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose (the Hindu notion of karma, for example), which can set the conditions of, or intervene in, human affairs.” Presumably he draws his line to exclude the modern secular faiths, beginning with the French Revolution and continuing with socialism, communism, fascism, environmentalism, modern campus “activism.” Presumably he does not regard the notion of “progress” or “evolution” as a process possessed of moral purpose that governs the conditions and the changes in human affairs.

Presumably Steve Bruce does not consider his own left-of-center political and ethical beliefs as religion.  It that, he joins most of humanity.  Most of us do not think of our own beliefs as something set aside, as a belief system or religion.  We experience them as an understanding of the way things are, a penetrating vision of the meaning of life and a practical guide for making the world a better place.  For a leftist, then, the tidal waves of secular religion that have swept the planet since the official death of God two centuries ago and that have inspired the great secular religious wars of our time are not cataclysmic events at all, but merely the water we swim in, the natural solvent of social progress as we try to evolve from old, unjust social structures to new structures that are “cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”12  Except that government is force.

Let us attempt to define religion more expansively than Bruce, and get away from the idea that, because the experience of a personal God that cares about you and me has declined amongst the educated ruling class, people have ceased to care about value and meaning.  Let us define it to include both the transcendental faiths of the past and the secular faiths of the modern era.  Given the notion advertised by Wade that religion is a universal instinct that solves the social animal’s problem of how to socialize its fellows to combine a necessary aggression and ruthlessness towards enemies with a beneficial cooperation and friendship towards members of the community, we shall assume that humans always need to bind our communities together with a religion that combines a narrative of meaning with a moral program and rituals of community that strongly motivate people to observe the social norms.

On this view, if we look at religion today we see it as strong as it ever was.  In the world of transcendental religion we see the Christianization of Africa, the spread of Pentecostalism in the favelas of Latin America.  We see the house churches of China, the resurgent Islam of the Middle East.  In the world of secular religion we see the cult of creativity, we see the religion of equality of the elite West that institutionalizes itself in the administrative and regulatory welfare state and in the universities, and we see in the environmental movement a transcendental enthusiasm for saving the planet through a new asceticism to lower the human carbon “footprint.” We see in the universities and non-governmental organizations a blazing faith in “activism” and the politics of grievance and taking offense. There is religion everywhere you turn.  The question, in a world of fiercely contesting religions, transcendental and secular, is how to reconcile the conflicting narratives of meaning.

Throughout most of human prehistory and history, religion and community were compact and identical.  The hunter-gatherer community was a church of the whole community, a politics of the whole community, and an economy of the whole community.   This changed in the agricultural age, where temple religions differentiated out from the community of the whole.  Instead of the whole community, a priestly class specialized in ritual performance to benefit the political rulers.  Ordinary people were kept at a distance.  Later, feudal monarchs privileged a specific church as an established church and obtained in return a divine legitimation of its dynastic interest.  When the Franks drove eastward into Saxony the Church was responsible for conversion and pacification of the Teutonic tribes as much as Charlemagne’s chieftains and armies.

In such a culture those that didn’t conform to the national church were viewed with suspicion not just as unreliable people that hadn’t demonstrated their social trustworthiness but as potential enemies of the regime.  The state saw itself at war with dissenting beliefs, since disagreement with the regime’s religion implied disagreement on the legitimacy of the regime.  The moral community was closely identified with the political community.  A threat to one was a threat to the other.

In European Christianity the rise of the bourgeoisie broke the coalition between secular power and spiritual power.  No longer was the condominium between the political and the religious “just the way things are.”  People began to demand the right to form groups within the larger community and define meaning for themselves rather than submit to the established meaning set forth in church orthodoxy under the protection of the state where the church is the established church sponsored by the monarch and the political sector.  Freedom, in this religious sense, means the freedom to believe as an act of will rather than as a condition of political membership.

Of course, the people foremost in the struggle were not just making a religious statement; they were also establishing the right to put a political distance between themselves and the regime under which they lived.  They wanted to create their own moral community, separate from the regime’s established moral community and un-compromised by reasons of state.  But once people had established a separate moral community, they next wanted to influence the political community and include their own moral agenda in the deliberations of high politics.

Modern states have to accommodate to numerous competing religious sects, secular and religious, and denial of full political and economic rights to dissenting sects is often experienced as a scandal.  But that raises the question of which religion and which moral tradition shall inspire the usual legislation of morality undertaken by the legislature and the courts.  Without a coalition between different faiths there is a risk of civil war.

Thus to the question: what is the point of religion?  The answer is simple.  Religion creates the social space between force and self-interest, and it does it by creating communities of meaning.  It reduces the incidence and thereby the cost of social force, the weight of policing and punishment, and it creates a community of people that have demonstrated their trustworthiness by submitting to the costs of religious membership.  It creates people who are ready to be members of society.  This truth was understood by the founding fathers of the United States.  In his farewell address, President Washington asserted that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” but cautioned against the idea that morality could be maintained without religion.

Now we must take the vital step.  If “no society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion idea of religion,” then what about our own society, whose ruling class generally experiences itself as having evolved beyond the superstitions of religion?  The answer is simple.  Our modern era is drenched in religion of a different kind: not transcendental but secular religion. We are all familiar with these new secular religions.  They are everywhere. Let us review the more notable secular religions.

The Enlightenment narrative extends the Newtonian template from the natural world to the social world, believing that the model of mechanics can be applied to the living world.  It says that human society is moving from the dark night of superstition to a new world of reason and science, so that now in the enlightened age “people started using Reason and Science, instead of Religion and Superstition”13 to explain the world.  Enlightenment is confident that human society is progressing from ignorant ways of social organization, based on tradition and spurious inherited status and social rank, towards a rational society based on science and rational analysis. This society will be led by a rational, educated elite that runs the government and sets the parameters of social discourse from above.

The Romantic narrative is a reaction against the Enlightenment narrative. It refuses to believe in the rationalist faith that applies the template of Newtonian mechanics to the living world.  It looks upon the world as more of an unfathomable mystery, working in a mysterious way. It honors the hidden secrets of nature opaque to rational analysis and it looks to sensitive, creative people to intuit the essence of the world and to replace the artificial and the superficial with an authentic human culture that is in tune with the life principle. This society will be led by a sensitive, creative elite that can develop in itself an authentic response to the experience of being thrown into the world.

The Marxian or revolutionary narrative says that the only thing that has changed is that we have entered a new phase of the age old conflict between the powerful and the people. In the old days, the contest was between the aristocrats and the peasants. Now, with the rise of the middle class, the contest is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Just as the lord exploited the serf in the agricultural age and ground the hapless peasant into dust, so the bourgeoisie exploits proletarians in the modern age and immiserates them into poverty “as the unceasing improvement of machinery... makes their livelihood more and more precarious”14. But this will lead to revolution and the salvation of humanity in a world of sharing and caring. This society will be led by a revolutionary elite that knows the meaning of history and represents the will of the oppressed. Of course the Marxian narrative has been revised and extended during the 20th century to include new oppressed groups alongside the proletarians: women, non-white races, non-Christian believers, and sexual minorities.

Charles Taylor in A Secular Age sees these three narratives — Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Marxism — combining to form a “nova effect,” an explosion of secularity that began with “an exclusive alternative to Christian faith” in the 18th century.  The initial explosion was followed by diversification in the 19th century, extending to the Nietzschean break with the humanism of freedom and mutual benefit.  Finally in the last 50 years the nova has exploded to reach beneath elites to whole societies and includes “a generalised culture of ‘authenticity’, or expressive individualism,”15 of doing your own thing.  But these visions all succumb to the temptation of the One Big Thing, encouraged by the success of Newtonian mechanics, in which everything in the universe seems to be explained by a single principle.  If the physics of the universe is explainable in one big set of equations then surely society is explainable and perfectible in similar terms.  Each of these three narratives has encouraged totalitarian nightmares: Enlightenment rationalism led to the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror; the Romantic turn led to the cult of the Volk and the rise of Hitler; and Marxism led to the two bloodiest governments in history: the Bolshevik Soviet Union and the Maoist Peoples’ Republic of China.

These three secular religions were bound to fail, according to Taylor.  Life cannot be reduced to a “quick little formula, [for] the pocket-sized card... does not acknowledge ethical dilemmas”,16 and the failures of the three major modern secular narratives prove it.

The three modern secular religions have spawned numerous less apocalyptic sects that blend aspects of the big three in less threatening combinations than the undiluted dialectic of Newtonian faith, its Romantic negation, and its Marxian synthesis.

Socialism: Considered as a periodic outburst of nostalgia for the lost paradise of hunter-gatherer equality, socialism is unexceptional.  But the 19th century eruption of socialism happened to coincide with the turbulent transformation between the agricultural age and the present modernity.  Many young thinkers of the mid 19th century proposed a return to pastoral simplicity and equality as a solution to the transvaluation of agricultural values into global commercial relations.  They experienced the messy excavations at the founding of today’s prosperity as the mere flipping from the stratified society of oppression universal in the agricultural age to a new stratification of industrial oppression; capitalists were replacing nobles, and proletarians the peasants.  The only solution was to replace, preferably through political reform, the crudity of Individualism and the higgling of the market with the rule of compassionate young intellectuals familiar with the latest developments in German philosophy and attuned to the needs of the suffering workers.

Progressivism: This 19th century movement of the educated in the United States wanted to replace the chaos of spoils politics with the rational rule of the educated. It’s not surprising that a rising educated elite should advance the idea that the only right and just government is government by the educated experts. What could be more sensible and practical?  The only trouble turned out to be that, like all political dynasties down the ages, government by expert turns out to be just as corrupt and difficult to reform as government by nobility or government by Irish fire captains.

Upper-class Asceticism: Nor it is surprising that asceticism, the idea that we should “live simply that others may simply live,” should be a recurring fashion among upper-class scions rather than among striving peasants and the suburban middle class.  Rodney Stark lists Buddhism, the Orphics and Pythagoreans, and the Essenes as notable upper-class religious movements17 of the Axial Age.  The modern upper class has gone into asceticism in a big way, in secular religions from vegetarianism to socialism to environmentalism and climate science.

The modern story of religion is not just the story of the educated class and its enthusiasms.  While the educated elite was experimenting with a variety of secular religions, the ordinary people were inventing new God-based religions.  After God died to the educated in about 1800, ordinary people in upstate New York invented Mormonism, based on the revelation of Joseph Smith, Jr.  Then in 1906 in Los Angeles William Seymour led the Azusa Street Revival and founded the Pentecostal movement.  Christianity is burgeoning in Africa and so-called “house churches” are flourishing in China.  And Islam flourishes in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Religion is not a universal good.  It is someone’s vision, and it may go horribly wrong.  The religious impulse is always ready to burst its bounds; we know that from the world-shattering outburst of Marxian communism, and now the threat of Islamic extremism.  The Taiping rebellion, a revolt in China led by a man who styled himself the Second Son of God, is another example of religion gone horribly wrong.  The leader’s name was Hong Xiuquan, and he led a millennial movement from 1845 to 1862 that took over the southern capital of China, Nanjing, challenged the ruling Qing dynasty, and cost the people of China an estimated 20 million lives out of a population of about 300 million.

Hong was a schoolteacher from the modest town of Hua outside Canton.  Failing his state examinations, he got caught up in the Western ideas, particularly Protestantism, then spreading in China through Protestant missionaries.

[T]he Christian texts he read convinced him that he was the younger brother of Jesus, imbued by the Father God with a special destiny to rid China of the conquering Manchu demon race, and to lead his chosen people to their own Earthly Paradise.18

Hong assembled the faithful into the Taiping Heavenly Army and marched from Guangxi province in southern China down the Yangzi river to conquer in 1853 Nanjing, the southern capital of China.  It took eleven years of civil war before the government in the northern capital, Beijing, defeated Hong and his Taiping heaven on earth.

Of course, Hong’s religious outburst was but the first of many in China’s recent time of troubles.  It was followed by the Righteous Harmonious Fists movement of 1898-1901, the so-called Boxer Rebellion, that opposed foreign imperialism and Christianity.  In 1911 the Double Ten uprising ended the Qing dynasty and inaugurated the Nationalist era led initially by a converted Christian, Sun Yat-sen.  In 1949 after decades of civil war and Japanese occupation Mao Zedong declared his Peoples Republic of China.  His original “red base” in Jiangxi province was two provinces over from Hong’s first base.

China’s recent history has been one religious movement after another.  In the United States we have experienced the same.  In the 18th century the Great Awakening inspired the rebellion against the British, the Second Great Awakening inspired the Civil War, the Social Gospel inspired the welfare state, expressive individualism inspired the cult of creativity and the Sixties, upper-class asceticism inspired the environmental movement and its laws and regulations to save the planet and combat global warming, and finally the progressive movement, informed by Marxists from the Frankfurt School, has enlisted government to wage religious war on racists, sexists, and homophobes that dare to question that the arc of history bends towards justice for the traditionally marginalized.

It is not government and not business that define human community and negotiate its purpose; it is religion.  You cannot negotiate meaning and purpose under the umbrella of government, for modern government is institutionalized force, not a cockpit of communication and consensus, and business is merely the utilitarian supply of the wants of the consumers under the current rules, the previously agreed-upon “always already” of the culture.  If you want to change the culture then you must form a militant religion to change the idea people have of the meaning of life, the “always already” meanings that people take for granted without even thinking.

In the American idea, religions compete to influence practical politics, but no religion gets to be established and institutionally identified with the state.  This notion arose out of the conflicts of the Reformation.  Religion is concerned with the definition of good and evil.  It is a small step from defining good and evil to doing something about it, and it stands to reason that God will smile upon those that smite the evil-doer.  It is one thing for dueling sects to anathematize each other as dupes of Satan or racist sexist bigots; it is another when a sect has armed itself with government power and turned itself into an armed doctrine.  At that point the battle of the pulpits turns into actual religious, or “holy” war.  You get the Thirty Years War of 1608-1648.  You get the French Wars of Religion of 1562-1598 with follow-on persecutions that did not completely die out until the Edict of Tolerance in 1787, just in time for the war between religion and Reason that started in 1789.

In the United States the problem of religions armed with the power of the state was resolved in the Bill of Rights in 1790 and extended to the idea of a “wall of separation between church and state” proposed by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Baptists of Danbury.  Transcendental religions in the United States, from Christianity to Buddhism to Islam, must all compete in the public square without resort to the power of the state.  But what about the modern secular religions preferred by the modern educated class?  How do they fit into the American system and its separation of church and state?

That is the problem: they don’t.  First of all, the modern secular religions don’t self-identify as religions.  The communicants do not experience their religion as religion or even as a “belief system.”  They see things as they really are; they know that reason and science, justice and history are on their side, and their nostalgia for a lost Eden encourages in them a yearning to combine the political and the moral, a revival of the condominium between church and state practiced in the agricultural era.  Since they do not experience their faith as religion they do not see that their politics amounts to legislating morality just like their hated rivals the fundamentalist Christians.  It is nothing to the modern secularist believers to roll over their opponents as religious warriors used to do.  In the secularist Enlightenment narrative, the faith in reason combines with a rational politics to govern society as a mechanical engine.  Who are the traditionalists to oppose their rational politics?  In Romanticism the Volk and the government combine in a mystical union as tribes and hunter-gatherer bands used to do.  Who are the rationalists to oppose the spirit of the Volk?  In the Marxian narrative the revolutionary vanguard with its special knowledge of history gets to direct the whole of society.  Who are the reactionaries to oppose the scientific march of history?  In Socialism there is a difference with Marxism: rather than revolutionaries, the rulers will be democratic politicians advised by an educated elite of technical experts.  Who are the rich to oppose the decisions of the majority, and who are the uneducated to question the science of the experts?

In the 21st century the problem of secular religion continues. In the environmentalist narrative dedicated scientists have developed a science that forecasts a catastrophic increase in global temperature. Who are the deniers to oppose this settled science? In the social justice narrative marginalized groups are oppressed by white male cis-gendered privilege. Who are the racists, sexists and bigots to spew their “hate speech” against the activists and peaceful protesters?

It is not surprising that the rise of secular religion set off the bloodiest religious wars in history with the protagonists representing the various secular religions competing for the moral and political power necessary to save the hearts and minds of humanity from the wickedness of the secular Satan, however defined.  The 20th century seemed to be determined to unlearn the lesson of the Reformation.  It forgot, or deliberately unlearned the lesson, that spiritual power must be separated from temporal power if we are to stop the moralists from voting the sinners off the planet.

Humans wish to know how to order their lives in harmony with the order of the cosmos.  It seems that the world has a purpose and that the way for humans to survive and to prosper is to discover its purpose and their role in serving that purpose.  Of course, it is true that some religious traditions, such as the Stoic, recommend that we humans aren’t really important and that we should just get used to it.  But humans seem to prefer to believe that each one of us is important and that the events of each life are important.  All the modern secular religions think that humans are important and that a glorious future is ahead.  But first we have to mend our ways.

But who will do the mending? Shall it be politicians? Activists? Preachers? How should we humans bring harmony to the cacophony of voices that want to save us from ourselves?

1Eric Voegelin, Order and History: the world of the polis, p. 71.

2Ibid.

3Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 359. Accessed 9/8/2012 http://www.robertbellah.com/Religious%20Evolution%20by%20Robert%20N.%20Bellah%20 — %20American%20Sociological%20Review%2029,%20no.%203,%20pp.%20358-374..pdf

4Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct, p. 4.

5Ibid., p.55.

6Ibid., p. 106.

7Ibid., p.113.

8Ibid., p. 52.

9Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776 - 1990, p.238.

10Wade, ibid, p.59.

11Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West, p.43.

12Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader: writings on disobedience and democracy, p.154.

13Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p.273.

14Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

15Ibid., p.299.

16Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues, p. 353.

17Rodney Stark, Exploring the Religious Life, John Hopkins, 2004, p. 46.

18Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son, Norton, p. xxi.

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Six:
A Critique of Human Mechanics

[Solicitude] can, as it were, take away ’care’ from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him... In such solicitude the Other can become one who is dominated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him.1

The modern administrative state may have its problems, but how bad can things be? Under the governance of the modern democratic state death from violence has declined by an order of magnitude since the Middle Ages and, under the influence of modern business, per-capita income has increased by almost two orders of magnitude in Great Enrichment of the last two centuries. Before the modern era, according to Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, society was downwardly mobile: the rich had more surviving children, and these children, when they grew up, crowded into the occupations of their social inferiors. But that all changed around 1800. Since then the poor have had more children than the rich; their children survived and each generation prospered more than its parents. There has been nothing like that, ever.

The verdict on the modern era seems to be this. People like all the peace and prosperity; in fact they take it for granted. They just don’t like their subordination to the soulless systems of the modern state and the modern corporation. Some people rail particularly against the monstrosity of big government and propose, as a solution, more free enterprise. Other people rail against big business and propose, as a solution, more government. In other words, people don’t like force when they are on the receiving end of its impersonal impetus.

Some people are more sanguine about our modern situation. Longshoreman Eric Hoffer experienced the modern age as a second, man-made, Creation that didn’t quite work right out of the box. The problem was that man was not smart enough to automate his man-made world right away at the start of the industrial revolution, so

man had to use his fellow men as a stopgap for inventiveness. He had to yoke men, women and children with iron and steam... There was no escape for the mass of people from the ravenous maws of factories and mines.2

Coal miners did not get released from the yoke until strip-mining with drag-line excavators started in the 1950s. But Hoffer is optimistic about the future. It is true, he writes, that factories used to be “agencies of dehumanization.”

But we of the present know that communion with machines does not blunt our sensibilities or stifle our individuality. We know that machines can be as temperamental and willful as any living thing. The proficient mechanic is an alert and intuitive human being. On the waterfront one can see how the ability to make a fork lift or a winch do one’s bidding with precision and finesse generates a peculiar exhilaration, so that the skilled lift driver and winch driver are as a rule of good cheer, and work as if at play.3

For Hoffer the crisis is past, and humans are migrating from the dusty industrial plains into sunny automated uplands, having learned to turn their machines into toys. And Hoffer was writing before the computer and the internet had made the computer into a hand-held toy with which any self-taught youth could become proficient in world-wide communication.

Another way to understand the history of the last two centuries is as a gigantic outpouring of nostalgia for a Garden of Eden, with one movement after another trying to privilege human values over system imperatives. This started with the idealization of the “noble savage” in reaction to the savage treatment of native Americans by the Spanish conquistadors and English colonists. There was Rousseau’s idealization of the general will, a projection of village sentiment onto nation-state power politics. For the Romantics it was the creative spirit in every one of us, for the utilitarians it was the happiness of the greatest number, for the socialists it was the idea of community, for the communists the excitement of revolution and fundamental transformation, for the fascists the instinctive ties of blood and tribe. Each new god led a revolt against the cold hard force of Reason and insisted that the truth of the human condition could still be found within the instinctive core of humans: our original human instinct, our creativity, our community, our ecstatic impulse for liberation, our love of kindred.

The most notorious nostalgic tract of all was the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These sons of the bourgeoisie experienced the rise of the bourgeoisie in the early modern period as a continuation of the hierarchical society of the agricultural age, just another episode in the eternal story of the exploitation of man by man. By the time that Marx published the first volume of his Capital, he and Engels had developed their drama of exploitation into a labor theory of value that invoked the mystery at the heart of classical economics, the dichotomy between exchange value and use value, to show how exchange value was a deformation of man’s true need for work. In pre-capitalist times, they explained, people worked as social labor, producing for use value. But under capitalism social labor was reduced to abstract labor and chained to the valuations of commodities in exchange value, “commodity fetishism.”

Thus the mutual relations of human beings as exchangers of goods take on the form of relations between objects, as though the latter had mysterious qualities which of themselves made them valuable, or as though value were a natural, physical property of things.4

Actually, according to another German, sociologist Georg Simmel, objectification is inevitable in human exchange; it’s just the way we do it.

Exchange is the objectification of human interaction... This objectification, this growth of the relationship into self-contained, movable things, becomes so complete that, in the fully developed economy, personal interaction recedes altogether into the background, while goods gain a life of their own.5

Objectification, commodification is not a scandal; it is just what people do when they exchange objects.

It was bad luck for the Marx-and-Engels big idea, built upon the contradictions between use value and exchange value, that, within ten years of the publication of Capital, a new generation of economists solved the apparent conflict between use value and exchange value with the marginal revolution of 1870 led by William Stanley Jevons in Britain and Carl Menger in Austria. Also, modern archaeology suggests that human barter and exchange go back as much as 200,000 years: early humans produced not exclusively for use but also for exchange. But Marx’s labor theory lived on, yoked to a superseded theory of value, a kind of monstrous birth that refused to die.

We know what this is all about; it is encoded in the very foundation myth of the Judeo-Christian culture. Our problem is our knowledge. It is knowledge that ejects mankind from the mindless bliss of the Garden of Eden. Each leap in knowledge, while liberating mankind from the bondage of ignorance, also raises the stakes on the human project. A few million humans hunter-gathers scattered across the globe may live like Adam and Eve in unselfconscious bliss. But billions of humans using fossil fuels and relying on highly organized systems to deliver food, products, and energy to billions crowded in huge cities live under a shadow of sin: what if all the works of man turn out to be a terrible mistake, and everything crumbles into ruin? The more we know, the more highly organized our social systems become, the more we bewail the loss of our human-ness, our mysterious essence as social animals. We know there is no way back. But still, we long to be social animals rather than systems components; we long for deep human relationship instead of superficial social-media chattering. There must be some way to redeem our humanity out of the accumulated capital of our knowledge.

Yet in our daily arguments we merely argue about systems, and system is domination. In the United States the argument often reduces to the wonder of the marketplace system versus the wonder of the governmental system. The marketplace, conservatives affirm, sets up modern humans into a beneficial social relationship, for we can only satisfy our selfish wants by serving the needs of others. Nonsense, say liberals. Without the guiding hand of experts and the prodding of activists we would descend into a death spiral of exploitation and marginalization. Conservatives swear by the two-century-old Invisible Hand narrative, and liberals swear by the 150-year-old Marxian Exploitation narrative. Is that all there is: two soulless systems?

Let us investigate the possibility of something better, something that transcends the simplistic ideas of invisible hands and eternal exploitation. But let us begin by stipulating the poverty of the two narratives.

It is true that the Invisible Hand tells an important truth about the social nature of the market economy, and we have seen how the market economy encourages and rewards trustworthiness and “character.” But the record also shows that, when moralists determined that Muslims and Africans were beyond the pale of Christendom, businessmen concluded that it was OK to enslave them to work their highly profitable sugar plantations. The businessman cannot be the judge in his own cause.

It is true that the Exploitation narrative tells an important truth about the world. There are unequal power relations; the powerful will always take advantage of their power and, as Marx taught us, the Industrial Revolution enhanced, at least initially, the opportunity for exploitation. But let the record show that the worst exploitations in history were probably the exploitations committed by totalitarian governments in the 20th century in vast political projects that promised to end exploitation altogether. Big government, it must be conceded, is not the answer to exploitation. Every government, especially every revolutionary government, learns to “see like a state” and comes to regard its people as mere subjects to be moved like pawns around the national chessboard to serve the needs of the state. Governments must let people be people.

All the critics of the modern era agree that we must get back in touch with our essential humanness in some way: for Rousseau the idea of communal will, for the Romantics our creativity, for the socialists our community, for the fascists our race, for liberals our identity. But we cannot return to the Garden of Eden, for it was our knowledge that sent us away from our innocent bliss, and we cannot cram all the evils of the world back into Pandora’s Box. We cannot undo the knowledge that the modern era has given us, the feedback loop of reason and experience. We cannot un-invent the remarkable systems we have created, not the science, not the heat engines, not the market systems, not the written constitutions, not the communications technologies. So what shall we do?

Let us get back to basics. We must begin by admitting that our modern governments and our modern corporations are both profoundly oppressive by nature for a simple reason: they deal in force. This is not surprising, for both modern government and modern business get their inspiration from the Newtonian revolution, and Newton’s Laws of Motion were all about force. The Newtonian revolution and the scientific revolution showed how technical knowledge based on reason, combined with age-old human practical ingenuity, could yield powers, forces, that made men into demi-gods. They showed the power of system and they showed the power of simplification, the Newtonian faith that the way to understand the workings of the world is to simplify the complex experience of the world into logical formulas, the dizzying movements of many interacting entities into a single principle, that all of creation reduces into a single system. Moreover, Newtonian dynamics, based on the assumption of absolute space and time, suggested an implacable determinism: you could predict the future based on the ways things changed in the past. Newtonian faith encouraged people to extend the determinist metaphor into the world of human interaction. Governments tried to organize and simplify the societies they governed on mechanical principles, and businessmen tried to organize their operations into systems and simplify their processes by trying to discover a unifying principle to optimize them. Thus we come to the view of James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State. Governments, by nature, seek to penetrate social structures and make the people they rule “legible;” they seek to simplify social structures and reduce them to a system, to make them amenable to their project of taxation and control. Rulers attempt to live the dream of Newtonian mechanics and try to replace the natural and unpredictable sociability of the humans they rule with predictable top-down hierarchical structures. They seek to reduce human organisms to machines, and not incidentally illuminate the world with the sun of their power and splendor and their superior knowledge and understanding of the world, as a Newtonian observer looks down upon a billiard table universe whose bodies’ motions can be predicted with a simple mathematical formula. Rulers seek to convert society into system, social cooperation into domination.

People made subordinate to and dependent upon the state are easier to control and to exploit. The same applies in business. Though businessmen develop a culture of trustworthiness in their relations with each other and with their customers they have shown, in their development of plantation slavery and the factory system, that they are capable of using humans as mere mechanical cogs rather than coequal members of human society. Corporate mass-production methods are also a way of simplifying the production process so that it is no longer controlled by artisans but management, with production no longer performed by skilled workers but by replaceable, interchangeable unskilled workers; the modern mass-production system in Taylorism dis-empowers skilled workers and empowers managers and scientifically trained technicians.6

It was their encounter with this mechanical hell that drove Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to despair in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. A Jewish intellectual that took over the Frankfurt School in 1930, Horkheimer fled Nazism in 1933 to Switzerland and in 1935 to the United States. With Adorno during World War II he looked at the horrors of the mid-20th century and realized, far too late, that reason and Enlightenment did it. The problem was not just capitalism, its “real abstraction” of social labor into a supposed abstract labor that got inserted into the rational capitalist machine like a cog wheel. It was also government, rational bureaucratic government, that worked as an equal and jealous partner in the commodification of the people. So these two Marxists rewound the tape and re-played the western narrative, the story so far, to learn wisdom from its knowledge. They began with Bacon’s praise of human knowledge.

The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that [Bacon] had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in compliance with the world’s rulers... Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of others’ work, and capital... What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim.7

Joel Mokyr puts it more politely. He writes that “rich nations produce more goods and services... because... their ability to control and manipulate nature and people is superior.”8

Of course, Horkheimer and Adorno realized, the dominion of mankind over nature was not invented by Bacon and the Enlightenment; it was already apparent in the “Jewish creation narrative and the religion of Olympia.” The notion of man’s God-given dominion over the world was merely intensified in the Enlightenment.

Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase in their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them.9

How then do we rescue ourselves and climb out of this dominatory gravity well?

It often happens in this world that the solution to our problems is staring us right in the face, and so it was that, even as Horkheimer and Adorno fled the apotheosis of mechanical government in Europe for sanctuary in the United States, a new scientific revolution was invalidating the metaphysics of the Newtonian universe. A new knowledge revolution declared that the billiard-ball model of Newton was wrong. In the first place, space and time are not absolute. According to Kant they are “forms of intuition;” according to Einstein they are experienced as relative. In the second place the universe is not deterministic. When Locke’s microscopical eye actually gets a look at the microscopical world, it encounters a statistical fuzz of quantum-mechanical state functions. The observer in the universe cannot tell what will happen next because the individual entities he observes do not know what they will do next. The only way to find out what will happen next is to make an observation, and an observation changes the universe forever. That is the claim at the core of the knowledge that began with Planck’s quantum and Einstein’s paper on the photoelectric effect. The new faith is illustrated in Richard Feynman’s explanation of the two-slit experiment. If you send a single photon towards a target of two slits, and you don’t know which slit the photon went through, then you will see an interference pattern on the target. But if you decide to set up the experiment so that you will know which slit the single photon went through then you will not see an interference pattern. Writer George Gilder adds modern information theory to the new experience of the world. Modern business, he argues, is based on surprise, a surprising new idea or a surprising new product that emerges from the background of noise: “entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.”10 Once we get over our shock at the latest surprise business reduces to a question of learning how to use and how to perfect that surprising new item of human knowledge.

What bothers many critics of capitalism is that a group like the 1 percent is too full of surprises...

The process of wealth creation is offensive to levelers and planners because it yields mountains of new wealth in ways that could not possibly be planned.11

Many people do not like capitalism; they fear its “creative destruction.”

Even before the new post-Newton physics and the new information theory had fully penetrated the minds of philosophers, people were already trying to rescue the human project from the despair of Horkheimer and Adorno. The modern mass-production system epitomized by Frederick Taylor had lost its prestige. Everyone came to agree that the two great sins of corporations, their resort to plantation slavery and their exploitation of workers in the factory system, were wrong. The plantation slavery system was abolished by the anti-slavery movement. The factory system was neutralized by a movement of workers. The labor unions, spontaneous organizations that arose to fight against the industrial bosses, succeeded only too well; they had the curious effect of strangling to death any organization that practiced Taylorism. Workers in big hierarchical systems hated their jobs. They turned against their employers and attempted to oppose their masters and their dominatory power over them with their own kind of power. The eventual result, in the basic steel industry and the automobile industry, was failure and bankruptcy as the power of labor was turned against capital and ended up destroying both, for the only thing that force or countervailing force is good for is to kill. Every corporation today is sadder and wiser, and knows that the one thing to avoid is an antagonistic workforce that votes for a union, for it will end up destroying the corporation. Today’s corporations attempt to create within the corporate walls a simulacrum of community, bosses that affect to care about their employees and encourage their personal development.

Then came Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, an attempt to rescue Marxism from the obsolescence of its labor theory of value and the despair of Horkheimer and Adorno. Habermas still carries forward Marx’s two-world system of abstract labor and social labor; only now he finally detaches it from the exploded labor theory of value. Habermas converts the world of abstract labor and social labor into system and lifeworld. System is not just the alienating force of big bad capitalism, but of the terrible twins, rational government and rational business, the system of force and the system of money. Lifeworld is not just social labor producing social value, but, following Husserl and Heidegger, a full face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world, for being is not just consciousness of the ego, but being-there in the world, and being-with the Other.

Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement. If the rational system of the Enlightenment and its instrumental reason is indeed strategic, a mechanical system that deals only in power and domination, it is only part of the truth. Humans also dwell in a lifeworld of shared cultural tradition. The mistake of the Enlightenment was to think of human action only as instrumental reason, limited to the calculating ego and the execution of its rational plan.

Kant and the utilitarians operated with concepts from the philosophy of consciousness. Thus they reduced the motives and aims of action as well as the interests and value orientations on which they depended to inner states or private episodes... In fact, however, motives and ends have something intersubjective about them, they are always interpreted in the light of a cultural tradition. Interests are directed to what is worthwhile, and “all the things worthwhile are shared experiences... Even when a person seems to retire into himself to live among his own ideas, he is living really with the others who have thought what he is thinking... The content is always of a social character.”12

People are not just instrumental reasoners, strategically motivated merely by the logic of power and the drive to get what they want in the world. They are not just utility maximizers, trying to get the most out of natural and human resources. They also live in a community immersed in a cultural tradition, a lifeworld that “appears as a reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretations”13 that is “always already” familiar. People are not just egos pursuing a selfish goal; they are social beings immersed in a shared lifeworld, a culture that begins with “ego” and “alter,” the self and the other, in which the discourse of language is central in defining what it is possible to think about in the shared culture. That is why Habermas contrasts the Enlightenment “philosophy of consciousness” with the 20th century “philosophy of language.” In the philosophy of consciousness we begin with the ego, the subject, the Cartesian indubitable knowledge that “I think, therefore I am.” In the philosophy of language we begin with the knowledge that we talk, therefore we can try to understand each other. There is no private language, wrote Wittgenstein; language already includes the idea and the fact of person-to-person communication, the sharing of meaning.

The despair of Horkheimer and Adorno also informs James C. Scott’s vision in Seeing Like a State. For Scott the modern state acts only with instrumental reason. It is a strategic actor that applies the world-view of Newton and Descartes to its strategic plan of power. Wanting to simplify its governing problem as much as possible into a bureaucratic system, it decides to simplify the territory it controls and the people living in it because fewer and simpler things are easier to understand and control. This is exactly the same strategy that science takes. It uses the notion of Occam’s Razor, expressed by Einstein as “Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It wants to believe that the whole of the universe can be reduced to a single Grand Unified Theory. Just as Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: “What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.” System is domination. Heidegger sees the problem as he analyzes the notion of solicitude.

[S]olicitude has two extreme possibilities. It can, as it were, take ’care’ away from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him... In such solicitude the Other can become one who is dominated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him.14

The other extreme of solicitude “leaps ahead” rather than “leaps in... not in order to take away his ’care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time.”

What then is going on in the idea of Habermas’ “communicative action” and the bigger project of the philosophy of language? It is the notion that humans do not act like utility-maximizing power-seekers all the time in a mechanical conflict of force against force. Humans are social animals; they achieve most of what they need through acts of communication, coordination, and exchange that start with a shared culture in which all things and all situations are “always already” familiar. This is better understood in the original German title of Habermas’ “Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns” rather than the English translation to “theory of communicative action.” “Handeln” encodes the idea of negotiation and bargaining as well as action. Here is Habermas filling in the details of his concept.

Like cultural traditions, the competences of socialized individuals and the solidarities of groups integrated through values and norms present resources for the background of lifeworld certainties... The background, against which interaction scenes are played out and out of which, as it were, the situation of action oriented to mutual understanding issues, consists not only of cultural certainties, but equally, as we have seen, of individual skills—the intuitive knowledge of how to deal with a situation—and of customary social practices—the intuitive knowledge of what one can count on in a situation... The “beyond all question” character of the lifeworld out of which one acts communicatively derives not only from the kind of security based on what one trivially knows, but also from the kinds of certainty based on the consciousness of knowing how to do something or of being able to count on someone.15

In this concept of a taken-for-granted culture out of which everyone in a group operates, the need for communication occurs when a problem arises that is not already included in the shared intuitive knowledge and customary practices of the group. This need for communication occurs even in the bureaucratic systems of instrumental reason of the modern government and the modern corporation. Thus a business meeting in contemporary western corporation is called to determine what to do about a situation that cannot be intuitively resolved by direct application of the bureaucratic rules. At the end of the meeting, the leader will often ask the rhetorical question: “are we all on the same page on this?” He is communicating the idea that the meeting participants have agreed to change the system, really the taken-for-granted culture of their lifeworld, and wants everyone to agree that this is so.

Of course, you could reduce Habermas’ sophisticated German philosophy of system vs. lifeworld, and philosophy of consciousness vs. philosophy of language, to the basic difference between the sexes.

The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.16

But that would be a bridge too far.

We can at least dare to investigate a more prosaic application of communicative action in the question: How does a business team actually work? We know that it has a leader, who might be a manager or an owner, with the authority and power invested in his title. We know that it is a team, with some degree of team spirit, the notion that “we are all in this together.” Then there are the quid-pro-quo aspects of team membership, the idea that people pull their weight, that there is a rough balance kept of each person’s contribution to the team. And there is the pecuniary remuneration of each team member, that his employer must usually keep fairly close to the market price for any person with similar skills. These factors, all rolled together and combined, determine how well the team performs, within its own business and in comparison to other similar teams at other businesses.

So businesses have softened themselves from mechanical system into social culture, or at least the pretense of a social culture; corporate executives now talk about “corporate culture.” Government has done the same, at least in the system that matters most to it: the military. Back during the high noon of the absolute monarch and the taxation bureaucracy the armed forces were regimented into rigid drill and subordinated into articulated formations, just like a machine. But the advent of rifled guns and field artillery made rigid drill useless, because they created the “lethal battlefield” upon which soldiers could no longer be marched and drilled. In the old battlefield under fire from smooth-bore firearms, a formation that was more than 100 yards from its enemy was relatively safe from harm and in 1781 the over-enthusiastic young Colonel Hamilton, at last promoted to a field command, could put his light-infantry battalion “through parade-ground drills in front of the flabbergasted British” at Yorktown without cost.17 In the new battlefield dominated by rifled firearms, soldiers in sight of the enemy had to be hidden in trenches and dugouts.

It took a century for the armies to solve the problem of the lethal battlefield. The Germans solved it in World War I with their “storm troops” and infiltration tactics. Small squads under the command of NCOs and supported by heavy firepower advanced by infiltrating around enemy strong points instead of advancing by walking exposed across the battlefield in waves. But this tactic meant that the army commanders could no longer easily control their formations. Not just officers but NCOs now had to be resourceful, creative leaders with the skills and the experience and will to adapt to rapidly changing tactical conditions. It now was judged worse to remain inactive waiting for orders than to do something, anything, even if it was wrong. By 1921 the commander of the German army, General Hans von Seeckt, established the goal to make

of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.18

The Germans were trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem that they had begun to solve in the Great War. How do you get junior officers and soldiers to execute the will of senior officers when the senior officers have no way of reviewing the actions of their juniors until it is too late? The answer is that you have to train the subordinates, teach them to act and deal with uncertainties and setbacks, and then trust them to do the right thing. Thus, just at the height of Taylorism in business and socialism in politics and the doctrine that maximum efficiency in mass production factories or schools or social benefits requires that tasks for workers and welfare state clients be reduced to simple repetitions requiring no discretion, the German Army, whose “Prussian drill” once trained the soldier as an automaton, abandoned the doctrine of the soldier as a cog in a system and trained him instead for character, knowledge and responsibility. The army became something more than a system if less than a society. It could only win wars by treating its soldiers as human beings, by reducing the domination of system and restoring lifeworld, the warrior culture of esprit de corps and group loyalty, and the bourgeois culture of responsibility and trust.

It’s easy to declare the Enlightenment project and the rule of the subject a failure and call for something new. That’s what everyone has been doing since the dawn of Romanticism. Here, following Jürgen Habermas, we are proposing instead a new age in which reason and system are balanced by intersubjective communication, responsibility and trust. But what would it look like, and how would it work? What does the world look like when we demote system and reason to become equal partners of culture and communication? It might look like the world of moral psychologist Alan Page Fiske. In Fiske’s world we discover a way to differentiate the ingredients that go into the lifeworld of taken-for-granted culture, the soup of intersubjective communicative action and collaboration. In his “relational models theory” he suggests that humans socialize in four different ways. The concept is simple.

People relate to each other in just four ways. Interaction can be structured with respect to (1) what people have in common, (2) ordered differences, (3) additive imbalances, or (4) ratios. When people focus on what they have in common, they are using a model we call Communal Sharing. When people construct some aspect of an interaction in terms of ordered differences, the model is Authority Ranking. When people attend to additive imbalances, they are framing the interaction in terms of the Equality Matching model. When they coordinate their actions according to proportions or rates, the model is Market Pricing.19

We can see that the instrumental reason of modern science and modern governance is a highly developed form of Authority Ranking. We can see that Communal Sharing is the mode of hunter-gatherer culture or the village communism that supposedly obtained in the Russian “mir.” Equality Matching is the friendly relation of housewives or businessmen that keep a running tally of favors given and received. And Market Pricing is the formalization of Equality Matching in complex transactions, typically involving money, that cannot be reduced to a simple give and take.

It is worth pausing a moment to review the European world in the crucial years of transition between 1800 and 1850 in the light of Page’s ideas. We have already seen that the era was characterized by extraordinary social, political and economic change. The rising bourgeoisie was contending for entry into the ruling class, and wanted to change the rules to reduce the weight of feudal patrimony and encourage the prestige of commercial exchange. Meanwhile the life of the lower orders was being utterly transformed. On the one hand the simplification projects of the new nation states were changing land ownership from a feudal/communal model to a freehold model. In Britain this was implemented in the centuries-long Enclosure movement that eliminated traditional common lands that were hard to tax and simplified the complex rights inherent in common land into freehold: private property. In this process, most observers agree, the common people got shafted and the powerful landowners got a windfall, as might be expected since since enclosures were effected through bills in Parliament where only the powerful need apply. But the Industrial Revolution just happened along at the very height of the enclosures. Impoverished villagers dispossessed of their rights to common land and “hurled” upon the labor market found themselves walking to the new cities where textile mills employed them as factory hands, out of the frying pan into the fire. In this transformation the lower classes found themselves in a double bind. They suffered as victims of the political system and its agricultural simplification project and they also suffered as factory hands in the businessmen’s project of simplifying the textile industry. The businessmen mechanized spinning and later weaving, and demolished the opaque tradition of hand-loom weaving and its “putting-out” of work to thousands of cottagers. Now they proposed to concentrate and simplify the industry into a predictable mechanical project of machine weaving in easily monitored and controlled machine factories where regimented machine operators replaced skilled weavers. The father of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was one such hand-loom weaver whose way of life was ended by the new efficient machines. In response, the Carnegies left their native Dunfermline in Scotland for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Teenager Andrew supported the family in their new home as a telegraph messenger. By a stroke of luck, he got a job sending telegrams for Thomas A. Scott, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Harsh as their new life in the city became, there was one advantage for the new urban poor over their old life in the countryside. In the new cities the once rural and now urban poor found themselves in strategic concentration, and by 1850 their plight had become elevated into an international “social problem.” For millennia poor people had starved and died on the land, known only to themselves and God. But in the city they suddenly became visible, not just as individuals that could be enlisted and taxed, but as a problem that demanded to be solved.

Viewed in the light of Fiske’s relational model theory, the negative reaction to the rise of the nation state and the rise of the bourgeoisie makes sense. In hunter-gatherer society, it is easy to see how society could have been balanced between Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking and Equality Matching, and that such a balance would satisfy the social instincts of humankind. Later, in the agricultural age, the dominant Authority Ranking headed up by the landed warrior class was mitigated by Communal Sharing at the village level so that the rapacity of the warrior aristocracy was relieved by a spirit of community among the serfs and peasants. But the nation state suddenly ratcheted up the power of Authority Ranking. States started to break up local Communal Sharing socialization and impose vast new supervisory bureaucracies to advance their “legibility” project. Their national armies become highly articulated and ruthlessly disciplined. The rising middle class ruthlessly formalized and differentiated economic relationships. Communal Sharing was transferred from villages into corporations, but the power to eject freeloaders was much more direct. In the rise of bourgeois capitalism Authority Ranking was also enhanced, as corporations grew into veritable economic armies, battling across the economic plain for market share, and the give-and-take of Equality Matching was formalized into the black and white of Market Pricing and double-entry bookkeeping. No wonder millions longed for a return to the imagined bliss and relative ease of the rural village.

But we can now begin to perceive the answer to the question posed in this book: what went wrong with the administrative state? It went wrong when it intensified Authority Ranking relationships, while pretending all along it was just enabling Communal Sharing. The national state is Authority Ranking on steroids, and seeks always to equip its rulers with Superman’s X-ray vision to let them “see like a state.” The ruling class of the modern, rationalized administrative state tried to fool its subjects and get them to believe that they could return to the comforts of Communal Sharing that people had enjoyed in their agricultural villages; it asserted that it could do a better job of Equality Matching and Market Pricing than individuals and market actors. But it was all a confidence trick, and the people most fooled were probably the rulers themselves. A hierarchical bureaucracy is a horrible way to do Communal Sharing and Equality Matching, and utterly inappropriate for Market Pricing. A hierarchical bureaucracy is Authority Ranking. Period. And so the administrative state is failing.

The model explaining human society described by Alan Page Fiske is not a mechanical world; it is not driven only by force. If Communal Sharing is to work, people must share notions of appropriate sharing, and according to Elinor Ostrom, must share a common agreement about the right way to share. If Equality Matching is to work, people must share notions of the right way to exchange favors. If Market Pricing is to work, people must agree to cooperate truthfully and faithfully. People want to live in the intersubjective lifeworld of Habermas, not in the mechanical wasteland of a Newtonian system. What is needed is a moral framework that guides people in their social actions and interactions, but stops short of systemic mechanical domination.

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind set about trying to understand just that: how people form the moral judgments that bind the participants in human social interaction. He found that people do not use reason to form moral ideas. They have moral instincts and they use their reasoning minds to rationalize their instincts. Moreover they do not use their reason to analyze their instincts; they use reason to criticize the moral judgments and behaviors of other people, and so he confirms the analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno that reason seeks to dominate.

Haidt found that people use their moral instincts to judge human action in six ways. He defined each moral instinct by identifying its moral axis: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression.

Five adaptive challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, and keeping oneself and one’s kin free from parasites and pathogens[.]20

There is also a liberty/oppression axis that operates in tension with the authority/subversion axis and is an active resistance to authority. It is clear that Haidt’s taxonomy of moral axes intersects with Page’s matrix of sociality.

But Haidt, a liberal, found himself non-plussed when he cross-plotted his moral foundations against political allegiance. It turns out that American liberals only value the moral axes of care/harm and liberty/oppression, while American conservatives more or less value all six moral axes equally. This explains for Haidt the question that has recently troubled liberals, their worry about “whatever happened to Kansas,” the fact that working-class Americans vote “against” their economic interest by voting for Republicans. Liberals fail to connect with ordinary Americans, according to Haidt, because they fail to appreciate the moral axes of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. It could also be that Haidt’s moral blinders prevented him from identifying the full range of liberal moral axes, e.g., liberal social justice movements, which are all about loyalty, liberal poles of authority in cultural and educational institutions, and liberal ideals of sanctity institutionalized in the environmental movement. But then the ruling class is usually the last to know.

Let us now examine other ways in which modern thinkers have encountered the modern dilemma, that human society reduced to social mechanics is a problem, because mechanics deals in force, and is blind to the truth that social animals, including humans, have developed evolved their social relations to benefit themselves from a reduction in the weight and the incidence and above all the cost of force.

1Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, HarperOne, 1962, p. 158.

2Eric Hoffer, “Automation, Leisure, and the Masses,” The Temper of Our Times, Harper and Row, 1967, pp. 34-35.

3Ibid., “A Time of Juveniles,” p. 13.

4Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Norton 2005, p. 226.

5Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, 1950, p. 388.

6Keven A. Carson, “Legibility & Control: Themes in the Work of James C. Scott,” Accessed 7/22/2012 http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/James-Scott.pdf

7Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum 1990, p. 4.

8Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches, Oxford UP, 1990, p. vii.

9Ibid., p. 9.

10George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The information theory of capitalism and how it is revolutionizing out world, Regnery, 2013, p. 187.

11Ibid.

12Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.2, Beacon Press, 1987, pp. 95-66.

13Ibid., p. 124.

14Heidegger, Ibid., p. 138.

15Ibid., p.221-222.

16Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, Basic Books 2004, p. 1.

17Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, Penguin Books, 2005, p. 162.

18MacGregor Knox, Williamson Murray, ed., “May 1940: Contingency and Fragility of the German RMA,” The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050, p. 160-161.

19Alan Page Fiske, “Relational Models Theory 2.0,” Relational Models Theory: A Contemporary Overview, Erlbaum, 2004, p. 3.

20Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon, 2012, p. 125.

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Seven:
The Paradox of Individualism

It is the individual in the mass who turns to work as a means of proving his worth and usefulness — Eric Hoffer1

Over the past century the word individualism has become a battleground. The two first meanings listed by the Oxford English Dictionary identify the opposing forces.  In 1835 H. Reeve described it as “a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow creatures, and to draw apart with his family and friends.” But by the 1880s the left-wing attitude appears: “Individualism regards humanity as made up of disconnected or warring atoms: Socialism regards it as an organic whole, a vital unity formed by the combination of contributory members mutually interdependent.”

Thus George Bernard Shaw, opening the first of the Fabian Essays in Socialism, describes a Creation in which Adam seizes the most fertile and favorable patch [of land] he can find.”2  So we are to believe that the first individual was an agricultural buccaneer, grabbing the best land and calling it Private Property.

The Germans have a different notion of individualism, because of Hegel and his dialectic of Master and Slave. Hegel imagines two individuals\strangers confronting each other. Either they must fight to the death, or one must surrender and become the slave of the other. Is that all there is? It is, unless and until the recognition between the two is mutual and reciprocal, a recognition of the other as a Self-Consciousness.3

In fact, as the resolution of the Hegelian dialectic implies, people that believe in individualism don’t think of individual humans as “disconnected or warring atoms.”  They experience individualism as an advanced form of socialization that builds a vital organism of social cooperation “formed by the combination of contributory members [made] mutually interdependent” by the promptings of the market system.

Clearly, humans are profoundly divided on the meaning of individualism and the meaning of society.  For some people, individualism is the acme of social cooperation, because it is voluntary; for others it is the pit of selfishness, individual atoms banging about on their own without the least sentiment for their fellow humans, because they lack solidarity. We shall show that this is because there are two kinds of believers in individualism in the modern world.

Perhaps the resolution of the quarrel is to admit that a paradox exists at the core of modern individualism. This paradox is powerfully brought to light by Eric Hoffer in an essay on “The Readiness to Work.”  Who decides in human society, he asks, what work is to be done and who is to do it?  He illuminates the question with two powerful assumptions.  For the socialist government, the problem is “how to make people work — how to induce them to plow, sow, harvest, manufacture, work in the mines, and so forth.”  But in the western capitalist countries “the chief problem is not to induce people to work but how to find enough jobs for people who want to work.”4 Hoffer proposes an astonishing thing about the modern age.  From time immemorial, work was “viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage.”  But we in the modern age look on work as a blessing.

That free men should be willing to work day after day, even after their vital needs are satisfied, and that work should be regarded as a mark of uprightness and manly worth, is not only unparalleled in history but remains more or less incomprehensible to many people outside the Occident.5

This is the great notion that divides the modern era from its predecessors. In former times, the “mark of uprightness and manly worth” was the martial virtue expressed in the calling of the aristocratic warrior. But now we measure men by their application to work and their success in soldiering to work every day.

In Hoffer’s view society has two choices.  The first choice is for the rulers to decide how the work gets done and issue the orders to the slaves.  On this system the rulers shoulder the yoke of responsibility and the slaves shoulder the yoke of work. The other choice is for the workers how to decide how to do the work themselves. The workers are now free, but at an awful price: they now must shoulder not only the yoke of responsibility but also the yoke of work as well.  They must find out what work needs to be done, and then do it.  They cannot lounge around waiting for the boss to make up his mind what has to be done; they must go out and find out themselves.  Individualism is thus a solution to the problem of getting the work done; not the rulers but individual citizens take upon their shoulders the job of figuring out what needs to be done.  And how is this possible?  It is possible because of the price system, which signals to each worker, each businessman, each consumer what the consumers want, what producers can deliver, and what human skills are worth. More exactly, it signals to each of us, in no uncertain terms, when we make a mistake about what needs to be done.

To its writers and readers Fabian Essays was the last word in enlightenment and modernity. Yet Shaw opens his argument with an agricultural foundation myth — this for a society that had just spent a century transforming itself from an agricultural society to an industrial society through market-driven manufacturing.  Nor was this century of transformation utterly surprising and unforeseen; it was already prophesied in 1685 by Carew Reynell two hundred years before the Fabian Essays. The consequence of industrial and manufacturing revolution was that the population in Britain had tripled between 1750 and 1850 from 5 million to 17 million, and then doubled to 42 million by 1900.  Who cares about spades and patches of land when Britain has become the workshop of the world?   Individualism in Britain arose not as a buccaneering land grab but in the small pleadings of feudal serfs obtaining the right to trade copyhold land in the manor court of their local squire.  It was ancient tribal man that acquired land in the way of Shaw’s myth, and he acquired it by tribal conquest and border warfare, not by individual appropriation.

So the First Individual wasn’t an agricultural buccaneer; he couldn’t have been, for farmers have always been subservient to a warrior class that “protected” them from buccaneers, and ownership in land has been a process not of individuals grabbing land in the wilderness but of landowners slowly surrendering rights in tribal or patrimonial land to their serfs and tenant farmers.  The notable exception to this rule was the appropriation of land as private property by white settlers in North America from native American tribes that owned land in common and thought that land owned them and not the other way around.

As the Fabian Essays proceed, we learn of the “outbreak” of individualism, of the “abandonment of the old Individualism,” of “Socialism as the offspring of Individualism” dedicated to the proposition that “individualism or anything whatever in the nature of laisser faire goes by the board.”

What is individualism?  Is it an “outbreak,” a disease?  Is it the breeder of Socialism, parent of a clutch of red-diaper babies?  Could it be a kind of social atomism?   Is it the “selfishness” that Ayn Rand celebrates as “concern with one’s own interest”?6  Or is it the acceptance of responsibility for others?  Or is it something else?

Could it be that individualism is the necessary and sufficient condition for human freedom, the foundation of a society of voluntary social cooperation? Eric Hoffer:

It hardly needs emphasizing that the individualist society we are talking about is not one in which every individual is unique...  All that one can claim for the individual in such a society is that he is more or less on his own; that he chooses his course through life, proves himself by his own efforts, and has to shoulder the responsibility of what he makes of his life.  It is obvious, therefore, that it is individual freedom which generates the readiness to work.

Individualism comes in a package with freedom and responsibility.  If you want freedom, then you must accept the yoke of individual responsibility.  This is the significance of Hoffer’s musings about who shall issue the orders to the workers to get the work done.  If you don’t like the boss or the village big man or the political placeman telling you what to do then you must shoulder the responsibility of doing things on your own.  That is what freedom from the tyranny of the boss system means.

We hear echoes of this in our recent arguments about the good society.  In his 2012 reelection campaign President Obama used “on your own” as a stick with which to beat Republicans.  At Osawatomie, Kansas, in December 2011, he ridiculed Republican “on your own economics” as leaving people out in the cold without help from government7, and in 2012 told businessmen that “you didn’t build that” on your own; government was there all along to help.8  On the one hand he scorns the idea of leaving people on their own; on the other he insists that everyone is supported by the government infrastructure.

Like the Fabians, President Obama equates individualism with a society that throws its people into the economic pool to sink or swim without assistance, and assistance for him means government social programs. Without government, you are on your own. For him, social democracy is social, and individualism is not. But Eric Hoffer argues, in anticipation of President Obama, that big government and individualism are merely two solutions to the eternal social problem: how shall humans contribute to society? On Hoffer’s view societies have two options to get people to work and contribute to society.  One option is the modern method of individualism that places the monkey on the back of every individual to prove, by work, that he contributes to society.  The other option is the ancient method of elite compulsion: the ruler or the lord tells people how to contribute; he makes them an offer they cannot refuse.  But if you don’t like the offer, and wish to be free of the boss’s commands then you must accept the responsibility of doing things on your own. It is telling that when the 19th century critics of individualism came to power in the 20th century they resorted immediately to force and offers that people couldn’t refuse.  The only way the revolutionary leaders inspired by Marx could think of to build their world of collective liberation for the working class as they came to political power in the 20th century was by force, using the lash of the slavedriver and the threat of the labor camp to put the people to work to build the perfect society. They would issue the commands and the people would obey, or else.

In the real world modern humans in developed societies have a range of choices between the two extremes that Hoffer offers or the false choices that President Obama tossed up to his partisan supporters.  Nobody is truly “on your own;” nor is anyone in the position of a chattel slave driven to work by the lash.  People have a choice.  They can pile risk and responsibility on their backs and start a business, they can go work for the government, keep their heads down and follow orders and get a job and a pension for life, or they can compromise with something in between.

So what is this individualism? How did it arise, and where did it come from?  In his “Religious Evolution” Robert Bellah offers an answer as he writes of a new kind of religion that emerged in the millennium before Christ.  This new “historic religion” that replaces “primitive” and “archaic” religion

leads for the first time to a clearly structured conception of the self. Devaluation of the empirical world and the empirical self highlights the conception of a responsible self, a core self or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over against itself, a reality which has a consistency belied by the fluctuations of mere sensory impressions. Primitive man can only accept the world in its manifold givenness. Archaic man can through sacrifice fulfill his religious obligations and attain peace with the gods. But the historic religions promise man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it. The opportunity is far greater than before but so is the risk of failure.9

This is the birth of the individual human, the responsible self.  Primitive man, according to Bellah, is almost animal-like, surrendering to the “givenness” of life.  Archaic man, the Homeric warrior on the plains of Ilium, sacrifices and bargains, hoping to earn the favor of his divine patron and somehow win a boon from the political mayhem of Olympian divine politics.  But the historic individual believes in a God that is no longer the boss of a divine political family, but the author of the universe.  Now the human individual has the ability and the responsibility to understand the world, the “structure of reality,” and face up to the responsibility that comes with understanding.

The Fabians, coming after Marx, knew a different kind of individualism.  For them, individualism was an atomic thing, the “on your own” experience of the peasant thrown off the land by the Agricultural Revolution of the last millennium, or the rank-and-file industrial worker hired and fired at will by the capitalist bosses.  They thought the way that Karl Marx thought when he wrote about the Agricultural Revolution in the first volume of Capital.

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” … The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay.

The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated.10

So here Marx and the conservative Disraeli are agreed: the Whigs, court favorites of Henry VIII and richly rewarded with their Marney Abbeys,11 were thieves!

From our vantage point, several economic revolutions later, it is possible to read the Agricultural Revolution in a different, more innocent way: less the deliberate spoliation of innocent peasants and more the ordeal of change from one economic way of life to another, for change of any kind creates winners and losers and transition costs.  We could say that the “free proletarians hurled on the labour market” were a consequence of the Tudors nationalizing the English armed forces. What noble needed “useless retainers” if he could no longer enlist them in his feudal army. Marx’s “useless” feudal retainers seem like ancestors of the once-prosperous hand-loom weavers of 19th century Dunfermline in Scotland, displaced by power looms, or the Main Street grocer run out of business by the supermarket.  And at the turn of the 21st century we see once-modern manufacturers and their rigid unionized workforces run out of business by newer, agile businesses and the old promises of life-time employment eroded by the rigid dominatory structure of the Taylorist system.  In the United States almost nobody works on the land; very few men work as miners in underground mines; the share of the workforce in manufacturing is declining.  Each workforce was once the salt of the earth, but found that time had passed it by, and left it “useless” and “hurled upon the labor market.”  Even presidential candidate Barack Obama could admit in 2008 how it worked, when talking confidentially to rich supporters.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”12

For Karl Marx the landowners were responsible for the plight of the peasants; for the Fabians the factory owners were responsible for the plight of the workers.  For 21st century progressives “corporate greed” or Hardt and Negri’s “Empire” is responsible for economic distress.  They all have a point, but these shallow critics miss the point and fail to ask the interesting question.

The question is: What is to be done when the world changes forever, as it did in the Agricultural Revolution, in the Industrial Revolution, in the Automobile Revolution, and now in the Information Revolution?  In the old days, before modern agriculture and modern transportation, economic change meant famine and starvation.  Today when things go wrong we can airlift food and medicines anywhere in the world.  But then what?

The response of modern government to economic change, almost universally, has been either to resist change, at the behest of the powerful, or to throw up its hands and toss a couple of mites at the sufferers, and allow them to molder their lives away in what a blind man living on Social Security Disability Insurance once described to me as “a bare existence.”  In England the government responded to the proletarians “hurled on the labour market” with the Elizabethan Poor Law, the welfare program of the late 16th century.  The 19th century governments responded to suffering in the mines with child-labor laws and Factory Acts.  The 20th century governments responded with welfare and retraining programs.  There is no sign that the 21st century politicians have any better news for the “bitter clingers.”

The birth of individualism and the emergence of the “responsible self” has introduced a new option for humans. People can still live as humans lived in the old days, as rank-and-file members of a collective, in an inevitable subordination to a lord.  It may be a village big man, a feudal lord, a political boss, a factory boss, a union boss, or the household patriarch, but he that lives in a collective waits upon the orders of a superior.  It is up to the boss to decide how to use the ability of the people under his command, and if his decisions bring failure and starvation, then too bad for the subordinates.  Then there is the other way.  Humans can pick up the challenge of responsibility, and become individuals. Now the monkey is lifted off the boss’s back and placed on the back of the individual. It is up to the individual to discover how to contribute to society and then develop the ability to do so. It is up to the individual to adapt to change.

What happens when the factors of production change, when the needs of society change, when the climate changes? In the collective model the subordinate peasant waits for his lord to decide what to do. But what if the lord is dispossessed by an invading army? What if the boss skedaddles out of town, leaving the factory and its workers to fade away?  What if the city bosses run the city into the ground and there is no money left for city-worker pensions?  We all know what happens then: the individual is left on his own; the promises of the lord or the politician revealed as rhetoric. What then is to be done? The responsible individual knows exactly what to do; he must take his losses and discover once again how to be of use to his fellow humans.  There is a name for this process: it is called adaptation.

In our definition individualism is a product of the Axial Age discovery of the “responsible self,” the responsibility in each individual human to God and to society to find an individual way to become a socialized adult and live a socialized life and become the human who has integrated the personal and the social, reconciled ego and alter, who has found a way to thrive by serving others.  We are talking about a human who has dissolved the apparent paradox between the personal and the political not by reducing the personal to the political but by balancing them, and recognizing that the first step for any socialized human is always the step to offer service, to proffer trust to another, to assess whether he has performed a service, and only then to ask “what’s in it for me?”

We define collectivism as the age-old instinctive social bonds inherited from our tribal ancestors and inherited by them from our common ape-like ancestors.  In Bellah’s framework this means either the “primitive” acceptance of the world with its “manifold givenness” and an unconscious submission to the collective or the “archaic” sacrifice of self to the will of the gods and the conscious submission to the will of the lord.

On this view we can rewrite the curiously anachronistic story-so-far in Fabian Essays with a much better one; our story does not start with the curious tale of an Adam setting boundary markers around his original patch of agricultural Private Property.  Why, after all, would the modern bourgeois individualist be an agriculturalist?  When the original Adam ate of the Tree of Knowledge, God sent him and his Eve out of the Garden of unconscious Eden and subservient obedience to his liege Lord and into the world to till the ground, not in an act of appropriation but a banishment from the life of unconscious givenness. Here is our story-so-far.

The first modern individualistic Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge that stood in a collective agricultural Eden and asked: Why?  Why am I just doing things in the old way of the ancestors? Why I am waiting upon the pleasure of my lord?  Suppose I vary the crop rotation?  What would happen?  Supposing my crop rotation produces more food, should I exchange and trade a surplus, or should I produce just enough for the needs of the collective?  What then?  Suppose I borrow money from the older guy at the other end of the village so I can buy more copyhold land?  Maybe I could pledge the land as collateral in a formal written document to reduce the risk of my default and sweeten the deal for my creditor.  This new responsible individualist is thinking, planning, creating a surplus that he trades for other peoples’ product, and expanding his new and profitable operations with the help of other peoples’ capital.

So far so good. But if individualism is a liberation from a world of manifold givenness, why is it so controversial, and why did the modern ruling class work up a crude indictment of individualism a century ago in Fabian Essays? The answer is simple: the ruling class believes in another kind of individualism from the responsible individualism we have been discussing here.  We have seen it emerge above in the rise of what Charles Taylor calls “expressive individualism.” A similar view is that of Georg Simmel, who saw in the transition from the 18th century to the 19th century a progress from quantitative individualism to qualitative individualism.

First, there had been the thorough liberation of the individual from the rusty chains of guild, birth right, and church. Now, the individual that had thus become independent also wished to distinguish himself from other individuals.13

This new expressive or qualitative individualism is a culture that celebrates uniqueness and creativity, and it is the secular religion that energizes the desire in every young person in the 21st century to become a videographer.  It is also the personal faith that moves the elite educated class to make of modern society an aesthetic project, to create a society that is pleasing to the eye of the ruling class, much as the landowners of Jane Austen’s era engaged Capability Brown to create parks and shrubberies around their great mansions to please the eye and sufficient in extent to permit their Lizzie Bennets to take a strategic walk on the day that Lady Catherine de Bourgh came calling.

We can therefore understand modern society as a class conflict, in the Marxian sense of self-conscious groups acting in history, between three major classes. First are the eternal people of the subordinate self, that seek safety as the feudal retainer of some great lord, or big corporation, or political leader. Then come the people of the responsible self, that take the yoke of responsibility on their shoulders and the freedom that comes with it and seek to work and prosper in the world as responsible individuals, following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law. Finally we have the people of the creative self, that seek to live and excel as creative individuals, finding in a life of self-expression and affect a sense of meaning in work of original creation. We shall encounter these people in the next chapter as the “multitude” of Hardt and Negri.

This creative or expressive individualism lacks the social component that defines the responsible individualism of Eric Hoffer’s mid-20th century workingman and the middle-class 21st century technical worker.  The creative individual does not want to contribute; he wants to star.  He wants to flash across the firmament like a comet, surprising everyone and filling them with wonder. The first blush of this movement of creative individualism centered on aesthetic program of the Romantics. But pretty soon the creatives branched out into new vistas of creative endeavor; many of them began to feel that that the highest and best way to ascend to individual creativity was to lead and succor those marginalized and ill-adapted to city life in an aesthetic project of social and political revolution. Pretty soon this movement led to the conception and the birth of modern expert-led government, the aesthetic project of the entire educated class to improve the human race and human society and fundamentally transform humans into educated and evolved people just like the educated class itself.  On this view the great culture wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries can be understood as a conflict between the culture of responsible individualism and expressive individualism. The culture war has exploded into a political war because many creative individuals have chosen to star and excel in projects of political innovation, and such socially creative and expressive projects necessarily diminish the scope and the freedom available to the non-creatives, the responsible individuals in society that do not aspire to create, but merely to contribute to society.

The question is how to resolve this cultural war to the satisfaction of both parties: to encourage the people of the responsible self in their project of responsibility and freedom “on their own” while according space to the people of the creative self in their projects of expressive creativity.

1Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change, Harper Colophon, 1964, p. 35.

2George Bernard Shaw, “The Basis of Socialism: 1. Economic,” Fabian Essays in Socialism, 1889, Dolphin Books, p. 17.

3Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 1969, Cornell UP, p. 10.

4Hoffer, Ibid., p. 27.

5Ibid., p. 28.

6Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, 1964, p. vii.

7Barack Obama, Speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, December 6, 2011, Accessed: 7/26/14: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/06/remarks-president-economy-osawatomie-kansas

8Barack Obama, Speech in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13, 2012.  Accessed: 7/27/14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn’t_build_that

9Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 367.

10Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Chapter 27.  Accessed: 12/30/13: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm

11Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or The Two Nations, Oxford UP, p. 9.

12Barack Obama, speech at San Franciso fundraiser, 2008, reported by ABC News. Accessed: 1/6/2014: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2008/04/obama-explains-2/

13Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, 1950, p. 78.

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Eight:
From Multitude to Civil Society

[T]here is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude which does not so much leap in for the Other as leap ahead of him... This kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care... it helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it.1

In the last chapter we made much of the responsible individualism that, following Robert Bellah, we imagined to begin with the historic religions of the Axial Age. But we also saw that the modern world is suffused with another kind of individualism, a creative or expressive individualism. Sociologist George Simmel explained that the first kind of individualism belongs to the 18th century and the second kind to the 19th century.

In their Manifesto of the Communist Party and their economic apology in Capital Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels launch their great attack on capitalism and the people that made it happen, the entrepreneurial middle class.  They nail their colors to the mast on the question of exploitation.  In the Manifesto they make it clear right away what they mean.  In the new capitalist society all the traditional communal ties, exploitative though they often were, have collapsed into pure economic calculation, and the bourgeoisie did it.

In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.2

Marx and Engels describe in detail the manifold exploitations of capitalism: turning dignified occupations into wage labor, families into “mere money relation.”  But then they surprise their readers and launch into a review of the accomplishments of capitalism and its bourgeois promoters.  The bourgeoisie “has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”.  It constantly revolutionizes business, chasing all over the world to expand its markets, sucking the whole world from rural idiocy into its cosmopolitan system in the cities.  The problem is that the success of the big capitalists immiserates those whose “diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on” and they “sink gradually into the proletariat.”  It is not that the capitalists deliberately set out to harm people. It is the system. The wonders of capitalism condemn everyone except a few to the alienation of the working class and a life of wage labor. System, to the founding Marxists, was domination.

Leaving aside the fact that the Marxian prophesies were wrong, that the Marxian labor theory of value — the notion that value inheres in the “socially necessary” labor to create a product — was exploded in the marginal revolution of 1870, and leaving aside the failed “immiseration” theory, which inflated the common-sense truth that every market revolution will hurt the current market leaders, squeeze out the small and inefficient, and condemn them to a reduced position in the world, but fails to understand that in the disappointed hopes of a few are the opportunities for a million, there is a bigger failure.  Marx and Engels fail to understand the nature of social cooperation, and fail to grasp the larger picture, that modern human society is founded upon a greatness of spirit that can tolerate, even celebrate, the success of others.

Marx makes a scandal out of the fact that the laborer does not get 100 percent of the value of his labor input returned to him in wages.  His employer aims to get more value out of the employee than he actually pays him.   The difference, for Marx, is unpaid labor that the employer appropriates because he owns the means of production: in one word, exploitation.  This is a vision of social cooperation stunning in its narrowness and viciousness.  Of course the employer makes a profit on his employees, and sells the product of their labor at a profit.  All human and social transactions must have this quality.  It is what the economists and the business consultants call “win-win” situations. The laborer would rather work and get wages at the present job rather than his previous job; the employer would rather get a worker to perform work for him than try to do the work himself. So both parties “win.” The retailer sells a product at more than he paid for it; the consumer exchanges money for a product because she values the product, in a certain time and place, more than the money.  All activity of all living things must have this quality.  It is just that, in the money economy, as Marx and Engels eloquently insist, all sentimental veils have been torn aside, revealing the bare facts of the cash nexus.  Aroused by this nakedness they determine to humiliate and hang around the neck of the provocative nymph of exchange a scarlet letter “E”.  But what is this exploitation in reality?  Liberated from the shame of nakedness, the Marxian surplus value is merely a mark-up.  The retail store marks up the price of a product over the wholesale price because it must spend money on rent, wages, advertising and a host of other costs in order to sell products.  At the end of the month, it must earn a profit, a net surplus over all costs, including interest payments, depreciation, and return of capital.  Anything less than a net surplus means that, eventually, the store will go out of business and its workers will join the reserve army of the unemployed.

So what is the point of this scandal of exploitation?  It is so obvious that it is sitting in plain sight.  The scandal is necessary to justify the violent communist revolution that Marx prophesies and that the Educated Youth yearns to practice in its religion of expressive individualism.  If the worker were only occasionally thrust into an exploitative situation that issued more from the character of an individual employer than employers in general then the argument for revolution would wither and die.  There must be exploitation, “naked, shameless, direct, brutal”, else the heavens — or in the Marxist-Leninist case, history — would not cry out for justice.  There must be gross injustice to justify the resort to force, the Marxist war on the bourgeoisie, and the glorious excitement of fighting for social justice.

Just as Marx needs his exploitation to justify his program of force, aggressive national leaders need their casus belli to enrage the people into support of aggressive conquest: otherwise no war. Committed political activists need their naked exploitation to enrage the rank and file: otherwise no revolution.  Modern American progressives need their scandal of inequality: otherwise there is no need for the government to tax and redistribute income.  There must be gross injustice; otherwise there is no need for force.

Even presidents of democratic republics need this argument to justify their redistributive agenda.  In Osawatomie, Kansas, in December 2011, President Obama used the exploitation argument to set up a case for the taxes on the rich that would fund his increases in government education and research spending.

At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide: Would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were being controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because there were people who thought massive inequality and exploitation of people was just the price you pay for progress.3

It’s lucky that President Obama was running for the nomination of the Democratic Party; the media would have made a dog’s dinner of such flagrant ignorance of 19th century history in any Republican candidate. In fact, the “new railroads and factories” were driving prices down and making it possible for farmers to grow grains in the middle of a continent and sell to a world-wide market; they were lowering the price of illuminating oil by 90 percent, and cutting the price of steel by two-thirds; they were making it possible for workers to trade work for leisure in reduced working hours.  You may not like the machinations of an undercapitalized railroad baron like Jay Gould, a jumped-up kid from rural upstate New York; you may not like the monopolistic John D. Rockefeller, a jumped-up store clerk; you may not like the union-busting of Andrew Carnegie, a jumped-up telegraph messenger.  But if you concede that their businesses actually benefited farmers and householders and consumers then you are half way to conceding that force may not really be needed to protect folks from “industrial giants.”

The same necessity pursues Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose leftist manifestos in the trilogy from Empire to Multitude to Commonwealth mean nothing if they cannot discover a need for militant political action.  But how to do it?  After all, since Marx’s day the average daily subsistence of workers in the western world has gone up from $3 per day to $100 per day or more.4  Even in developing countries like Vietnam, people are working in Nike factories and reporting their satisfaction at getting to work indoors5.  Villagers in the highlands of Thailand get to transport grain from their fields using the ubiquitous 100ml motorcycle.  How bad can things be?  Bad enough for Hardt and Negri to conjure up a monstrous “biopower” that only a new democracy, founded upon a “multitude” to replace the working class and the masses of old, can slay.

In Empire Hardt and Negri propose the idea of “Empire,” the institutional combination of nation states and global capitalism, the “biopower” that rules the world.  To maintain its legitimacy, they argue in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, this Empire must maintain a state of war to acquire the exceptional powers to maintain its hegemony and its right to dominate the subordinate nations of the world.  But a growing “multitude,” groupings of singularities in the new world of work, is changing the world.  These singularities, nodes of cultural and economic difference, are eroding the old working world of “habit” in mass-production factories and offices and transforming it into a culture of “performance” in creative occupations and productions of “affect,” thus becoming the dominant form of work.  This new articulated multitude, a work force, obviously, of creative artists inspired by Charles Taylor’s culture of expressive individualism, is clearly calling forth new forms of socialization: political, economic, and cultural.  So far, the analysis of Hardt and Negri is not so far from sociologist George Simmel and critics of modernity such as James C. Scott.

But Hardt and Negri cannot leave the multitude alone to work out its “life in common” in its own way, any more than socialists and Marxists a century ago were willing to let the working class find its own way from rural indigence in agricultural tenancy to urban competence in the new capitalist society.  The leaders of Educated Youth do not want to understand the world; they want to change it.  They need to find injustice, political, economic and moral, and they find it every time they identify a new protest movement that has arisen to fight an injustice, from feminists and gays in the western world to villagers in the developing world.  What they want out of these protest movements is a revolution in the political sector, a renewal of the corrupted forms of democratic representation, a real democracy to reflect the new life “in common” that is coming into being as the “multitude” realizes itself.  Their hearts throb to the beat of carnivalesque street protest, NGO activism, and the avenging hand of international justice, of politics, politics, politics.

If there truly is exploitation out there, naked, brutal, and direct, then force is the only remedy.  But if the scope of exploitation is only limited to temporary setbacks within a general trend that has lifted every population from $3 per day indigence to $100 per day prosperity wherever and whenever capitalism has been tried, then the problem takes on a different aspect.  Perhaps then the exploitation problem is not urgent enough, not scandalous enough to demand a political solution; perhaps force is not the answer.

Hardt and Negri almost seem to recognize that the revolution they seek does not quite require the remedy of revolutionary convulsion.  Almost.

The institutions of democracy today must coincide with the communicative and collaborative networks that constantly produce and reproduce social life.  Today, would it be possible for a revolution, aware of the violence of biopower and the structural forms of authority, to use the constitutional instruments of the republican tradition to destroy sovereignty and establish a democracy from below of free men and women?6

With “communicative and collaborative networks” Hardt and Negri almost seem to be channeling Habermas.  Could the revolution achieve its aims through constitutional means, a lifeworld of communication and collaboration?  Alas, no, for in the end they surrender to the lust for a moment of “Kairòs,” the “moment when a decision of action is made,”7 for the “extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectionary demand.”8  They lust for the old thrill of the hunter-gatherer’s dawn raid, the 19th century street barricade, and the modern gangbanger’s drive-by shooting, a longing that is human, all too human, and all too primitive, if René Girard’s notion of religion as the cure for mimetic violence is to be believed.

Most people can do without the moment of “Kairòs” because they have been socialized out of their base instincts by culture and religion. Even educated young men, the spark of insurrection from Marx to ISIS, usually grow out of their lust for insurrection.  As we have seen, the best Marxists realized back in the 1940s that there was a problem with revolution, and even with reason, for reason is a form of power and power wants to dominate.  The whole point of social animals is to flourish by minimizing the need for power, for power is force, and force kills.  It is also inefficient and expensive.  Thus center-left thinkers have tried to imagine a world in which the modern still flourishes, but without the Kairòs of the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, let alone the farce of Paris in 1968.   We have seen how the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas developed a Marxist response to this problem, by neutralizing the dominance of instrumental reason with the balm of the intersubjective lifeworld.  Now we will look at the effort of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to work out this problem.

Taylor tries to achieve a balance between the three modern secular religions, rationalism, Romanticism, and Marxism, within a framework of liberal Catholic Christianity.  In Sources of the Self he investigates the nature and the origins of the Modern Moral Order, and in A Secular Age he attempts to build a vision of a modernity that could embrace a liberal Catholicism. He brings to his task a fluency in both German and French thought, a North American appreciation of the Anglo-Saxon culture, and an earnest love of his liberal Catholic faith.

We live, according to Taylor, in an “immanent frame,” a natural world understood in its own materialist terms rather than in reference to an ultimate transcendent reality, or God.  But that leaves open the question of ultimate meaning and it deposits a feeling that something is missing.

The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other...

The uneasy sense is... that the reductive materialist account of human beings leaves no place for fullness.9

Taylor lists three objections to the materialist account implied in the immanent frame: creative spontaneity, the higher ethical/spiritual motives, and the aesthetic.  Even secular people want a space for the moral guidance of their children.

Living in an immanent frame, we all, from secularists to believers, experience “cross pressures.”  For instance, materialists that insist on facts, facts, facts, often respond to the aesthetic experience of poetry. Theists that submit themselves to divine authority also agree with the Modern Moral Order and its agenda of universal human rights and welfare. Romantics that react against the disciplined, rational ethos that seems to sacrifice something essential with regard to feelings and bodily existence still want their rights.  Taylor proposes that we resolve our differences by combining two modern currents that most can agree on.  First, we recognize the importance of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children.  Second, we recognize that we all search for something higher and fuller. To balance these goals, we must define our moral aspirations in terms that do not “crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity... [and] fully respect ordinary human flourishing.”10  He proposes to balance the ideal with the practical, to recognize that secular utopianism belongs in the same bin as religious millennarianism: Plato’s Republic, medieval monasticism and the Bolshevik “new Soviet man;” all of them crush and mutilate ordinary human flourishing.

To realize this two-fold hope, Taylor imagines a two dimensional moral space.  The horizontal dimension gives you a “point of resolution, the fair ‘award’”.11 The vertical dimension creates space to rise higher, to reestablish trust, “to overcome fear by offering oneself to it; responding with love and forgiveness, thereby tapping a source of goodness, and healing”12 and forgoing the satisfaction of moral victory in sacred violence, religious or secular.  “[P]ower lies not in suppressing the madness of violent categorization, but in transfiguring it in the name of a new kind of common world.”13

There is broad agreement in modern culture about moral standards, he writes: “the demand for universal justice and beneficence... the claims of equality... freedom and self-rule... and... the avoidance of death and suffering.”14  But there is disagreement about moral sources that support the agreement.  Taylor has argued that three moral sources compete for followers in the modern world: theism, “a naturalism of disengaged reason” extending to scientism, and Romanticism or its modernist successors.  But most people resist one or more of the three.

Beyond the disagreement on moral sources is the conflict between disengaged reason and Romanticism/modernism, that instrumental reason empties life of meaning and, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, constitutes a source of domination.  Then there is disagreement between the Romantics and the modernists on morality, whether an aesthetical life could be spontaneously moral, or whether “the highest spiritual ideals threaten to lay the most crushing burdens on mankind.”15

Taylor criticizes the critics as too narrow and blind to their own acceptance of the Modern Moral Order.  Rationalist critics of Romanticism often forget how much they “seek ‘fulfillment’ and ‘expression.’”  Opponents of technology often forget how it was disengaged reason that proposed freedom, individual rights, and the affirmation of ordinary life.  Radical opponents and repudiators of modern life nevertheless appeal to a “universal freedom from domination.”16

Against all this blindness and “partisan narrowness” Taylor sees hope “implicit in Judaeo-Christian theism... and... its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human[.]”17  So perhaps the future can be reached in a sociable compromise between ordinary material flourishing and higher spiritual goals without the convulsion of Kairòs.

Charles Taylor provides us with an answer to the question of whether it is possible to transfigure moral witness into a life “in common” without the annealing fire of mimetic rivalry, the intolerable presence of the “other” and his ill-gotten gains, and its resolution in sacred violence.  He echoes, in his liberal Catholicism, the neo-Marxist solution of Jürgen Habermas: the intersubjective lifeworld that balances and softens the hard edge of instrumental reason and its dominating systems.  This, of course, has been the project of conservatives ever since Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France at the end of the 18th century.  We conservatives even have a name for the world that is to come: civil society.

1Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, HarperOne, 1962, p. 158-159.

2Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 20.

3Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas,” December 6, 2011. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/06/remarks-president-economy-osawatomie-kansas

4Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity, University of Chicago, 2010, p. 1.

5Johan Norberg, “The Noble Feat of Nike,” The Spectator, June 7, 2003. http://www.spectator.co.uk/2003/06/the-noble-feat-of-nike/

6Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, Penguin, 2005, p.355.

7Ibid., p.357.

8Ibid., p.358.

9Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard UP, 2007, p. 595-596.

10Ibid., p. 640-641.

11Ibid., p. 706.

12Ibid., p. 708.

13Ibid., p. 710.

14Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Harvard UP, 1989, p. 495.

15Ibid., p. 495.

16Ibid., p. 504.

17Ibid., p. 521.

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Nine:
The Answer is Civil Society

It is high time that conservatives should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of conservatism with a manifesto of the conservative movement itself.

Hardt and Negri, Marxists both, ache for a life “in common” of a multitude that creates a social product in performance rather than in habit and that constantly produces and reproduces itself.  After following a tradition that divided and oppressed ordinary people with class warfare and gender warfare for over a century, these hollow men now call for love.

Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy.  There is really nothing metaphysical about the Christian and the Judaic love of God: both God’s love of humanity and humanity’s love of God are expressed in the common material project of the multitude.”1

This love will, of course, be created in that erotic moment of Kairòs, the convulsion of political violence from below.

But the Christian, Judaic love is not eros, but caritas.  It is not the oblivion of orgasm but the constant care of one companion for another.  In the social lifeworld of life “in common” it is social cooperation without the Kairòs, without the threat of armed young men in the streets, that must inspire the hearts and minds of humans.

If you want Kairòs then you are willing terror, whether the Terror of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik police state, or the multiple terrors of Mao Zedong.  Edmund Burke already understood this when he prophesied the Terror of the French Revolution in 1790.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy... laws are to be supported only by their own terrors...  In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.  Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.  On the principles of this mechanistic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied... in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.2

Already, in 1790, 150 years before Horkheimer and Adorno linked instrumental reason and domination, Burke is linking terror and mechanism.  It is not mechanism that binds humans together but affection, he argued.  Without the support from “the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion,” manners and civilization could not have supported learning through the dark ages, nor could learning have enlarged the ideas of landowners and churchmen.  But when the educated seek not just to support learning but seek to rule, then learning loses its protectors and “will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”3  Burke already seems to discern the Bolshevik disaster on the far horizon.

Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies... their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid, barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present and hoping for nothing hereafter?4

In Burke’s understanding, the communal bonds grow from the private affections between humans in everyday intimacy.  He evokes this truth in his assertion that public virtue builds upwards from the love of the near at hand.

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.  It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.5

But how do we get from the public affections of the little platoon to a love of country and mankind as a whole?  Burke makes it seem the most natural thing in the world, but the very idea of country as a nation state and mankind as a whole was pretty new at the end of the 18th century. Most people in the world at that time lived on some lord’s patrimonial estate, and knew no affection beyond the blood ties of family and clan.  Anyone outside the boundary of the kindred was outside the limit of public affection. Although the revolution of the Axial Age invented the individual responsible to society and to God, most humans in 1800 still lived as subordinates to a great lord in a culture of the kindred. Even in the early decades of the 21st century the idea of a common and reciprocal public affection is foreign to the culture of everyone from the recent immigrant to the city to the educated social justice warrior; they experience others as enemies, not as potential friends.

The little platoon is not just the germ of public spirit, it is also a refuge from the scouring tides of power.  These refuges had already begun to flourish in the benefit societies, the fraternal associations, and the Dissenting churches of Burke’s England as a trading and manufacturing people began to burst the social boundaries of village and kindred.  This new people mustered new platoons, based upon the memory of brotherhood among masons, or oddfellows, or woodmen or the fancy of brotherhood among antelope or eagles, to replace the old ties of kin and soil.  Out of sight and out of mind of the political elite the little platoons were mustering all across the Anglosphere.  They spontaneously reinvented the nature of social association — and without knowing Burke they did it on the Burkean principle of sociability and affection.

In the late 20th century the Peruvian businessman Hernando De Soto started a foundation to advertise to the people of Peru the ideas and the culture of the exchange economy. A great question for him was to understand how the United States could have become so successful in self-government while his native Peru remained so backward?  In trying to understand the causes for the evident success of the United States he stumbled across the extraordinary self-organizing abilities of North Americans. In the 19th century, he found, ordinary Americans had defied the existing laws of land-ownership, had created their own living law of homesteading and land settlement, and had lived to tell the tale.   The living law they had developed on the frontier in defiance of their betters was eventually codified in the Homestead Act of 1862.6  The California miners in the gold rush of 1849 were another race of self-governors.  They came to extract gold from a land that had just been seized from Mexico and had no mineral law.  So the miners formed mineral associations and wrote their own laws.  What did the US government do about this?  In 1872 Congress passed a mining law that essentially codified the miners’ living law as federal law.7  This self-organizing ability even extended to the unemployed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Eric Hoffer:

Once, during the Great Depression, a construction company sent down two trucks to the Los Angeles skid row, and anyone who could climb onto the trucks was hired.  When the trucks were full, the drivers put in the tailgates and drove off.  They dumped us on the side of a hill in the San Bernardino Mountains, where we found bundles of supplies and equipment.  The company had only one man on the spot.  We began to sort ourselves out: there were so many carpenters, electricians, mechanics, cooks, men who could handle bulldozers and jackhammers, and even foremen.  We put up the tents and the cook shack, fixed latrines and a shower bath, cooked supper, and next morning went out to build the road.  If we had to write a constitution we probably would have had someone who knew all the whereases and wherefores.  We were a shovelful of slime scooped off the pavement of skid row, yet we could have built America on the side of a hill in the San Bernardino Mountains.8

While Hernando de Soto and Eric Hoffer have found in American history stories of successful self-government, others have taught the opposite lesson.  By the middle of the 19th century people began to write about “plutocracy,” the rule of the wealthy, and they were not recommending it as a model of the good society. The self-government of ordinary people could not defend against the power of the new capitalist generals and their industrial armies, they believed.  The great social need was for social protection against these new men, and thinkers began to debate how that might be accomplished.  To the socialists and the educated class the solution was a powerful state.  In its revolutionary articulation this solution would be achieved in the Kairòs of political convulsion; in the Fabian Society model it would be achieved by gradual reform and “rational, factual socialist argument” of Fabian intellectuals.  In the tradition of American institutionalism as it developed after World War II it was articulated by John Kenneth Galbraith in his notion of “countervailing power” between big business, big labor, and big government.9  In the early 21st century American liberals look back to the era of the three Bigs as a golden age of good jobs at good wages. Even Jürgen Habermas, after divining a theory of communicative action to counter the power of modern business and government systems, can only imagine in his practical Between Facts and Norms a social democratic state in which rational consensus still issues from the general will of Rousseau in the bargaining of the legislature and the programmatic power of the government expert administrator to impose the will of the stronger — by virtue of communicative power or political power — on the weaker. Habermas cannot understand that his idea of communicative action, the exchange of truth values in sincere and reciprocal communication by equals, cannot involve the state, its administrators, and its fundamental basis in force. The ruling class, patriarchs of the government apparatus, are forever giving in to the temptation to declare an end to discussion and call for the vote that will be binding on both the majority and the minority. In Habermas there is not a spark from Buchanan and Tullock to divine that the only voting system that protects the minority is unanimous consent. It seems that the Left cannot understand social cooperation without force.

In To Empower People Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus assert that real social protection — meaning protection for individuals from the dominatory structures of modern life — can only be supplied by “mediating structures,” that is, “institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life.”10  They are needed because “Modernization brings about a... dichotomy between public and private life.”  There are large institutions, the “megastructures,” that dominate public life: the modern state, big business, big labor, and the administrative bureaucracies of education and the professions.  Then there is “private life,” in which people have little institutional support.  The megastructures are “alienating” in that “they are not helpful in providing meaning and identity for individual existence.”  Thus moderns are suspended in society between “hard” megastructures that are “personally unsatisfactory” and “soft” private life that cannot be relied upon for social protection.  Mediating structures help people find safety in between the megastructures and private life.

Such institutions have a private face, giving private life a measure of stability, and they have a public face, transferring meaning and value to the megastructures... Their strategic position derives from their reducing both the anomic precariousness of individual existence in isolation from society and the threat of alienation to the public order.

Our focus is on four such mediating structures—neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association... The proposal is that, if these institutions could be more imaginatively recognized in public policy, individuals would be more “at home” in society, and the political order would be more “meaningful.”11

More than that, the mediating structures act like earthquake shelters, preserving space for individuals against the possibility that collateral damage from the battle of the giant megastructures might from time to time bring ruin down upon millions.  This is not mere speculation.  When states run out of money and the checks stop coming, people must resort to other means to protect themselves and their loved ones from destitution.  It might be better for them to be practiced and successful in voluntary social cooperation rather than primed to look only to a strong leader for help.

Roger Scruton gives a more philosophical gloss to the ideas of Neuhaus and Berger.  He develops the philosophical basis of conservatism in the process of arguing for a conservative environmentalism, what should better be called “conservationism.”

Conservatism, as I understand it, means the maintenance of the social ecology.  It is true that individual freedom is a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms cannot adapt. But freedom is not the only goal of politics.  Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal.  These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs, and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free but law-governed economy.  According to this view, the purpose of politics is not to rearrange society in the interests of some overarching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity.  It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that threaten our social and ecological equilibrium.  The goal is to pass on to future generations, and meanwhile to maintain and enhance, the order of which we are the temporary trustees.12

On Scruton’s analysis, it is the need for validation of its extraordinary powers that chases big government everywhere to seek an “overarching vision” for its subjects.  To realize an ideal requires social mobilization.  It means that people must leave their normal occupations and enroll in the ranks of the soldiers dedicated to fighting for and winning the visionary ideal, and they must subject themselves to military discipline as society marches towards that goal.  Unfortunately, there is a problem.  Any such mobilization requires the rational organization of society into an army under the leadership of a military or political elite.  Such a society is necessarily organized according to the dictates of instrumental reason as it works to achieve its strategic goal.  As such, it seeks domination over other men; it must dominate its subjects in order to lead them to the Promised Land.  Already, as it mobilizes, it has become a movement; already it is clothing itself in the raiment of religion.  Yet every movement is an army; every army is a system; every system is domination.

All societies define themselves by membership: in tribes the family and in religions the faithful.  But “members of nations see each other as neighbors... [because] [f]irst and foremost the nation is a common territory, in which we are all settled, and to which we are all entitled as our home.”13  The nation is a common homeland.  Scruton calls the love of home “oikophilia” and its opposite, realized in elite “political correctness” and activist trans-national NGO activism, as “oikophobia.”  “Oikophobes define their goals and ideals against some cherished form of membership — against the home, the family, the nation.”14  Oikophilia protects and defends the home, the family, and the nation.  The worst thing is that

left-wing movements and their mobilized spokesmen should prevail.  The best thing is that ordinary people, motivated by old-fashioned oikophilia, should volunteer to localize the problem, and then try to solve it.  If they are losing the habit of doing this, it is in part because governments, responding to pressure groups and activists, have progressively confiscated the duties of the citizen, and poured them down the drain of regulation.15

But modernity is not just the love of home that resists the megastructures; it involves also the movement of self-expression that began with the Romantic movement.  On the modern view, freedom is not just the right to be free from subjection but the obligation to live a life of self-defining discovery.  Thus, for Charles Taylor, the modern era is defined by three moral sources: theism, naturalism, and Romantic modernism, in a social environment where all want justice, equality, freedom of expression, and the relief of suffering.  What moderns disagree about is the emphasis.  Is relief from domination the overarching value?  Or authentic self-expression?  Ordinary human flourishing, or higher spiritual ideals? The great question is how to negotiate or adjudicate, or exchange these conflicting goods.  In ancient times, these questions were resolved in a compact society where economic, political, and cultural questions were all mixed together in a compact lifeworld, but not today in our modern differentiated society.

All this is but to say: we live in civil society, the new socialization that modern humans have created to replace the frayed bonds of traditional community. Many people have mourned the destruction of the agricultural village, and have pointed the finger of blame at modern democratic capitalism as the author of this desecration, for wherever capitalism has intruded upon the society traditional to the agricultural age it has disrupted it forever.  They might also look to blame the agricultural revolution that even in the reign of Elizabeth in 16th century England began the enclosures that expelled peasants from their subsistence serfdom.  But whichever it was, enclosures or capitalism, it demolished the unitary culture of the traditional kin and village-based community, and mankind has had to come up with a new cultural paradigm to replace the old ways.

But how exactly shall we describe this new cultural arrangement, the new way in which modern humans cooperate as social animals?  Lawrence E. Cahoone has described it as “the joint development of the market, civil society, and nationalism.”16  The market is a maelstrom of “creative destruction,” a permanent economic revolution that is founded, paradoxically, on trust and credit.  Nationalism encases modern humans in a “linguistically-culturally homogeneous sovereignt[y]” as a compensation for the loss of the “cocoon of feudal caste, kin, and locale;”17  But civil society is the world in which modern humans actually live, day to day.  We may make our living in the challenging world of the market economy; we may thrill with patriotic pride on national holidays; but we live in civil society.

Civil society to Cahoone is not community, for its members are not bound together in a common culture or by kinship; yet civil society involves a sense of solidarity.  It is not political, although it relates to politics.  It is not an enterprise, although its members belong in the market economy.  It is a loose form of association, without the close binding of community or the contractual obligations of enterprise.  It is instead founded upon four main goods: “membership, freedom, civility, and dignity”,18  and supporting all these goods is equality, for people enter into civil society on a basis of unspoken equality.  Each is a member, although free to remain or to detach himself. Members are associated through civility, where people “countenance the private interests of their fellow citizens” and feel that their own dignity is protected.  Dignity requires the maintenance of a “decent equality,” the recognition of the other pursuing a “meaningful course of life,” whether janitor or physician, in “recognizable worthiness.”

The paradigmatic form of civil society is neighborhood, “an association of adjacent and nearby households whose fortunes are relatively independent, but who accept civility, the collective concern for the survival of the neighborhood, and the concern for the decent life of members.”19  That is why the “bad” neighbor, the one with the barking dog or the overgrown trees, is such a scandal to civility.  She fails to countenance the interests of her neighbors, and violates their dignity with her thoughtless behavior.

The relative independence of the members in civil society implies a diversity of cultural narratives.  Civil society is not a religious or a cultural association; it recognizes that members will worship at different churches.  Yet civil society implies a consensus of cultural narrative, and this means that some narratives, most likely the ones least likely to present themselves as “civil,” will be left outside.  It is this fact that exercises our liberal friends determined to protect “traditionally marginalized” groups from the oppression of the dominant narrative, and it is this fact that makes a militant Islamism, that refuses to present itself as civil, into a scandal.  But civility must draw a line, even as it requires tolerance of those outside the consensus, and allows the outsiders to try to reenter the consensus and to change the consensus.  Thus “civil society and culture engage in a kind of dance which has no end... The point is to keep dancing”20 and not to betray civility to the temptations of coercion.

Civil society does not make a grand entrance into history, but emerges below the radar through a kind of social Darwinism, an inescapable process of social variation and natural selection where forms of socialization are born, grow, combine, and decay; civil society exists because it works.  In different ages it has been differently understood.  For Aristotle, Cahoone argues, the polis was a “partnership of several villages” characterized by “reciprocal equality, by friendship or fellowship, and by justice.”21  On this view the political and civil were nearly identical.  By Roman times “civil” came to mean the association of citizens outside the army or the church.  “Civil” meant state, “but not state as government”22 and it meant civil as opposed to barbarous, i.e, civilized opposed to savage or primitive.  By the time of the France of the ancien régime it was connected with ideas of courtesy, the court behavior that tamed France’s warrior nobility and transformed it into a pacified court nobility.  In Locke, civil society represented the result of the social contract, and included government as the product of the social contract.  In parallel, the rising bourgeoisie and its town life of burghers, merchants, guilds and officials created the idea of a “public” independent of a feudal lord and the notion of the “autonomy of the social” from the cultural hegemony of Throne and Altar.  In Hegel, civil society is a way station on the evolutionary road from the family to the state, in which civil society educated the individual away from the family towards commercial society, preparing the individual for “fulsome moral association of membership in the state.”23  In Marx, civil society and capitalism tear the sentimental veil from traditional community to provoke alienation and oppression. But Tocqueville, writing a decade before Marx, noticed the development in the 19th century United States of the voluntary association that engaged the social sympathies of the isolated American: alienation, the antithesis of traditional socialization, had already found its synthesis in association.  We may say that the responsible self instinctively moves to attach his individual self to society in a self-conscious act of association.  With the rise of socialism the Hegelian notion dominated, with the left regarding civil society as an apology for capital and the right regarding it as a mystification of the rationality of market and individual rights.

Hegel was wrong.  Civil society is not a way-station to membership in the state; it is a necessary seat of culture and civility without which societal relations independent of the state and its compulsion are a nullity.  That is what Central European dissidents in the Soviet empire determined as they read Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism in samizdat.  They were seeking for a source of social capital to fill the social void left by the “democratic centralism” of their Soviet-bloc governments.  Elsewhere, proponents of civil society do not need to fill a void; they propose civil society as a buttress, a defense against the “statism” of social democracy.  What has emerged, according to Cahoone, is a notion of civil society answering three modern social needs:

1. A social organism for constructing social meanings

2. A social solidarity constructed in mediating institutions

3. A social order that eschews hegemonic foundational narratives

Critics have accused this notion of nostalgia, of avoiding the admission that capitalism needs positive political control, and of using Hegel’s term of a way-station between family and state to smuggle something quite different, the notion of an autonomous, spontaneous order.24  They should rather admit the truth, that it is not nostalgic at all, but radical.

Worked out in more detail, Cahoone finds that his notion of civil society features five institutional characteristics:

1. Social autonomy, with norms originating from the inside;

2. Free and equal citizens, with elevation of the “plebs” to respected status;

3. Spontaneous order, where social order emerges out of social interactions, not commands from above;

4. Institutional pluralism, a pluralism of different types of organizations and competition between organizations of similar type; and

5. Market economy, necessary but not sufficient, for civil society abuts the market and “the rules of civility are not the rules of the market.”25

When deployed into line, anyone can look at these five standards of a civil society and appreciate how they provide rallying points that satisfy the needs both of those trying to rebuild social structures after the murrain of totalitarianism, and those trying to erect a blocking action against the spread of statist social democracy.  In total, these institutional characteristics mount a direct challenge to the social model and the ruling class that dominate democratic capitalist nations in the early 21st century.  Taking Cahoone’s five institutional characteristics, one by one, we can enumerate the ways in which they threaten the ruling class thus:

1. The ruling educated class does not accept the idea of social autonomy: it insists on supervising the origination of norms.

2. The ruling educated class shies at the notion of free and equal citizens, preferring to act as patrons of “protected classes” of second-class citizens.

3. The ruling educated class shudders at spontaneous order, and promotes an endless parade of top-down economic and political initiatives based on the idea that society is a mechanism not an organism.

4. The ruling educated class worships at the shrine of institutional pluralism, but in practice cannot endure any dissent from the articles of faith of its secularist episcopal church in which only educated elitists get to be bishops.

5. The ruling educated class maintains an ironical distance from the market economy and its entrepreneurial practitioners, and proclaims “market failure” everywhere and admits to “government failure” nowhere.

In its truculent opposition to the five characteristics of civil society, we may enumerate five characteristics that define the educated elite’s authoritarian welfare state as follows:

1. Social oligarchy, with norms originating only from approved elite sources.

2. Marginalization of cultural and social equality, with only the elite, its community organizers and “protected classes” licensed with freedom of speech.

3. Subordinated order, with the educated elite defining and enforcing an approved social order organized from above.

4. Institutional domination, with all organizations forced to toe the “politically correct” line established by elite cultural and political cadres.

5. Crony capitalism, with the commanding heights of the economy dominated by economic interests that “pay to play” in the rent-seeking political marketplace.

The task of the conservative begins with the existential need to demoralize and de-legitimize the cultural hegemony of the educated elite and its rejection of the principles of civil society.  This task is eternal, for “men like power and will seize it if they can.”  There will always be a new generation arising to admire its reflection in the pool of Narcissus.

“But if they can’t rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them.”  It is the most natural thing in the world to renounce the Great Temptation of political power, because who wants a conceited educated ruling class lording it over them? To the people of the responsible self falls the responsibility to articulate a culture and a politics that can defend civil society and provide it the space to flourish and to develop for itself a defense in depth against power.  If civil society is cushion between the individual and the megastructures of power then society must be structured to defend the peaceful countryside from the invasion of the power snatchers. The first order of business is to advocate and establish a Greater Separation of Powers that provides a defense in depth of civil society from totalizing influences in politics, in the economy, and from militant social justice warriors in the culture.

1Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p.351-352.

2Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Collier, 1937, p. 214.

3Ibid., p. 216.

4Ibid., p. 216.

5Ibid., p. 185.

6Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 107-108

7Ibid., p. 146.

8Eric Hoffer, “The Negro Revolution,” The Temper of Our Time, Harper & Row, 1967, pp. 55-56.

9J.K. Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, Pelican, 1963, p. 125.

10Peter. L Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People, AEI, 1996, p. 158.

11Ibid., p.159.

12Roger Scruton, How to Think  Seriously About the Planet, Oxford UP, 2012, p. 9-10

13Ibid., p. 241.

14Ibid., p. 249.

15Ibid., p. 252.

16Lawrence E. Cahoone, Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics, Blackwell, 2002, p. 259.

17Ibid., p. 259.

18Ibid, p. 238.

19Ibid., p. 245.

20Ibid., p. 263.

21Ibid., p. 211.

22Ibid., p. 212.

23Ibid., p. 215

24Ibid., p. 219-220

25Ibid., p. 225-229

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Ten:
The Greater Separation of Powers

If the separation of church and state is so good, why would not the separation of economy and state prove equally beneficial and necessary?

The Founders of the United States were anxious, in constructing the institutions of their new state, to avoid what they perceived as the illegitimate monarchical powers of King George. They wanted a state that was powerful enough to defend its corner in the street fights of sovereign powers, but they wanted the people strong enough to resist a too-powerful monarch. In the Federalist Papers 47, James Madison quotes the famous dictum of Montesquieu:

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or body... there can be no liberty, because apprehensions may arise lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws to execute them in a tyrannical manner.1

It was Montesquieu’s concern about united powers that inspired the founding fathers to write a constitution in which the legislative, executive, and judicial powers were separated, as far as possible, into three separate branches of government.  Above all, of course, they wanted to perfect the partial separation of powers in the British Constitution, where the executive is appointed out of Parliament and the judiciary is half in and half out of the House of Lords.

But many Americans felt that the constitution as written did not go far enough in its separation of powers.  They wanted not just to separate the powers of government but to separate the religious power from the political power.  To mollify these opponents to ratification Madison proposed a Bill of Rights, including a clause to prohibit an establishment of religion, a government-sponsored church.  Then in 1802, in a famous letter to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, President Thomas Jefferson first introduced the idea of the separation between church and state.

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

The First Amendment and Jefferson’s letter extended the doctrine of separation of powers.  It introduced the notion that the defense against tyranny must forbid a condominium between politicians and divines, that there should be a distance between institutions of moral power and institutions of political power.  The founders wanted to deny government the strategic advantage of a combined army of religious and political troops.  Today, people express this fear about a too-close relationship between church and state when they warn against the danger of “legislating morality” or of a “theocracy.” In these catchphrases people express the universal fear of the moral traditions of others, though they also betray their ignorance of the fact that every law must be inspired by a notion of the good, and that any idea of the good must have come from some moral tradition.

In its program of power limitation, the Bill of Rights stopped at the prohibition of an establishment of religion.  But at the ratification of the US Constitution and afterward, many anti-Federalists were concerned about another potential coalition of power, that between government and commerce.  This fear was articulated by Thomas Jefferson, landowner, who believed in the virtues of agriculture and feared the power of cities and banks.

[F]or the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe... The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.2

When Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, unveiled and then implemented his financial system in the early 1790s, Jeffersonians were horrified.  They were afraid that his system would make the federal government too strong and the commercial sector too strong as well.

Hamilton’s financial system rolled out in two stages, each heralded by a report written mostly by Hamilton himself.  First, in the 3,000 word “First Report on the Public Credit” he proposed to refinance the revolutionary war debts, both the debt issued by the Continental Congress and the states, with United States bonds funded by new federal excise taxes and import tariffs.3  Second, in the “Second Report on Public Credit,” he proposed a national bank, modeled on the Bank of England, to act as the government’s banker and thereby to sit atop the credit system.  His system was not, as we have seen, an original work, but an attempt to copy the British financial system that had made Britain into the most powerful nation in the world in the century since the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  British finance, of course, was merely a copy of Dutch finance, imported into Britain from the Dutch Republic by the Dutch William Prince of Orange, later Britain’s King William III, and a 500 ship invasion force.

Hamilton’s system proved everyone right.  It made the federal government strong, and it laid the foundation for a strong economy with a vibrant financial system.  The rock-solid credit of the United States government made the government immensely powerful, and created a firm foundation for a powerful commercial and financial sector.  When Jefferson became president in 1801 he found that it was too late to change Hamilton’s work.  He encouraged his Treasury Secretary to change Hamilton’s policies, but Albert Gallatin demurred.  “I have found the most perfect system ever formed,” he said.4  System is domination.

Hamilton’s financial system created a symbiotic relationship between government and finance.  The rock-solid US Treasury bonds proved to be excellent as collateral, thus strengthening confidence in banks and the credit system; the expanding economy increased the power of the federal government, and consequently its ability to borrow and tax.  President Jefferson was an early beneficiary of this power.  His Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was was paid to Napoleonic France with $3 million in gold, with the balance of the $15 million paid from the proceeds of an issue of US Treasury bonds.  The power of the United States government ever since has been based upon its financial power, and since then it has always been there when the American people needed it, especially when it came to winning wars.

But the power of government has also been an irresistible temptation.  On the one hand countless moral activists have crowded into the political sector to legislate their morality and force the economic sector to fund their moral and political projects.  On the other hand countless economic actors have bought the power of government to enhance their economic prospects by using the language of moral and political activists.

In the United States in 2008 the governments at all levels spent approximately 7.6 percent of GDP on the basic functions of government, the defense against enemies foreign and domestic.  But they spent 21.2 percent of GDP on an array of social programs, from government pensions to government health care, government education, and government welfare.5  This is the fruit of a century and more of political activism.  The activists have asserted that the economic sector and the moral-cultural sector cannot be trusted to allocate resources towards these social priorities without compulsion, and so they have built in the political sector an administrative system to dominate the American economic sector and force upon the nation their moral and social vision.

Meanwhile countless economic interests and activists have sought to use the power of government to enact or subsidize their uneconomic pet projects, whether canals, railroads, dams, bridges, affordable housing, synthetic fuels, biofuels, or clean energy.  They justify their projects on every basis from national defense to saving the planet from global warming, arguing that the economic sector cannot be trusted to allocate properly the resources needed for these social priorities.

The record of the last century has put the lie to these claims for political competence.  The government does a pretty bad job of providing social services, as the bankruptcy of its entitlement programs and the decay of its education programs prove, and it does a pretty bad job of providing economic services, as the failure of its economic initiatives prove, from mortgage subsidy to energy.  An entire department of scholarship has grown up to explain why government necessarily must fail at social work and at economic work.

So the time has come to extend Jefferson’s thinking.  If the separation of church and state is so good, why would not the separation of economy and state prove equally beneficial and necessary?  Just as Americans have decided that religion is too powerful a force to be entrusted to politicians, so also a new generation may decide, after the experience of the last century, that the economy is too important to be the plaything of people whose devotion is to reelection and political power.  Why, after all, would political activists, whose professional skill amounts to the exploration and exploitation of the divisions between people, have anything to contribute to the world of products and services, which rewards skill in production of goods and services that other people want to buy and consume?

If the United States should decide to add to its traditional separation of church and state the startling innovation of the separation of economy and state, then Americans need first to think about what that would mean and how it would work.

We have already talked about the need to differentiate between the economic sector and the political sector.  Fortunately Michael Novak has explored what such a differentiation means.  In The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism he analyzes the modern differentiation of society from its ancient compactness.  He asserts that in the modern world, in the social and cultural space of democratic capitalism, human society is differentiated into three social sectors.

What do I mean by “democratic capitalism”?  I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.6

It is important to appreciate just how radical Novak’s notion is.  All traditional, agricultural societies, he writes, impose “a collective sense of what is good and true... [E]very decisive economic, political and moral-cultural power is exercised by one set of authorities.”7  Bureaucrats of the state and the church control the economic sector.  At the same time the clergy meddle in politics and the politicians meddle in religion.

It is a distinctive invention of democratic capitalism to have conceived a way of differentiating three major spheres of life and to have assigned to each relatively autonomous networks of institutions.8

This differentiation of the major spheres of life seems to be custom designed for the age-old problem of human socialization: the problem of the freebooters, the ambitious people with a taste for power, the men who “like power and will seize it if they can.” The differentiated world of democratic capitalism has a plan for them.

This differentiation of systems sets individuals possessed of the will-to-power on three separate tracks.  Political activists may complete for eminence in the political system, economic activists in the economic system, religious activists and intellectuals in various parts of the moral-cultural system.  But the powers of each of the three systems over the others, while in each case substantial, are firmly limited.9

Ambitious people are able to climb the greasy pole as of old, but they must specialize in the means of ascent peculiar to their chosen pole and having made their decision must forgo the opportunities for money, power, and the love of beautiful women afforded to the climbers of the other poles.  Anyway, eminent moralists usually lack the skills of the practical politician, and successful businessmen notoriously fail to succeed in politics.

There is only one problem with Novak’s vision.  It remains cloistered in his excellent book.  It is not a “meme” that has penetrated beyond Novak’s readers.  It seems clear that society has evolved into a differentiated system or organism in which there are at least three recognizable sectors: political, economic, and moral-cultural.  But very few people experience modern social arrangements in that way, or want to do something about it.

Further, many people do not experience the differentiation of human society into three co-equal sectors as a good thing at all.  They see it as a dangerous collapse of order.  Particularly in the moral-cultural elite, many people shrink from any idea that the economic sector should be a co-equal sector that shares power and prestige with the political and moral-cultural sectors.  We have seen that everyone from Marx to Hardt and Negri believe that the economic sector is a dangerous monster, threatening all the time to break its shackles and return the modern world to the law of the jungle.  They believe that the economic sector must be kept in subjection by a condominium between practical politicians in the political sector and intelligent and ethical intellectuals in the moral-cultural sector.

In many ways it is understandable that elites have reacted with fear to the sudden transformation in human life over the last two centuries.  The huge migration from the countryside to the city, the sudden emergence of giant economic institutions, the remarkable power of capital markets to direct economic life, the blind power of the price system to direct the efforts of millions of individuals, all these events are unprecedented in human history. But if we have learned one thing in the last two centuries it is that we resist the new order at our peril.  We have seen where resistance to democratic capitalism leads.  It leads to the collapse of the pluralism of the three-sector society.  It leads consistently and repeatedly, ever since the French Revolution, to totalitarianism, the atavistic attempt to collapse the differentiated three-sector society back into a unitary state where politics, economics, and the moral-cultural are reunited in their compact origin.

Perhaps we need not plumb the depths of human psychology to explain these favorable views of totalitarianism...  The desire to escape pluralism, rather than its acceptance, is the norm in man’s history...  [In a plural political system] [w]e choose, through both reason and morality, the mutual limitation under law of our desire for power.  But, following our natural inclination, what person would not choose absolute power, if he could be sure it would always be his own and never another’s?10

We must make explicit what is implicit in the daily practice of democratic capitalism and what is hinted at in terms like “free enterprise” and “market economy.” We need a new name into which we can breathe a new vision of the society we wish to build, a word that expresses the idea of three equal sectors of society, jealous and independent, but intertwined and respectful, and anchored by a Greater Separation of Powers that expresses a great social compact: the mutual limitation under law and in each heart of our desire for power.  It is a society in which not merely government is limited by the separation of powers between legislative, executive, and judicial branches, but power across society itself is limited by a separation of powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral-cultural sector.  When we say “greater separation of powers” we mean a wall of separation between the moral-cultural sector and the political sector, not just Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state.  We mean a wall of separation between the political sector and the economic sector, and an end to “crony capitalism” by which the political sector forces the economic sector to pay tribute to political power and the economic sector sucks up to political power in the hope of favors.

The separation of church and state, obliquely suggested in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, was conceived at a time when thinkers and citizens were deeply conscious of the dangers of combining the religious power with the political power.  Advanced thinkers knew that they did not want their money funding an established church and they did not want priests from an established church having the political power to “legislate morality” in their direction. Unfortunately not one person in a hundred gets that our modern secular moral movements are religions in everything but name, and so do not understand how nearly modern politics restores the old condominium between church and state. And so our modern ruling class never hesitates to trespass from the moral-cultural sector into the political sector and from the political sector into the moral-cultural sector when it serves its power interests.  The history of the last century is nothing if it does not record the non-stop efforts of moral entrepreneurs to access the power of the state in the propagation of their faith. The first breach of the wall of separation occurred in education.

The US common school movement of the 19th century was, from its inception, driven by religious and cultural power motives.  The agitation for common schools mounted in the 1830s by Horace Mann and others was a naked attempt to get political control of child education.  Apart from the fact that Mann boasted that his system would reduce the crime rate — presumably because of superior moral education — the common school movement was also an attempt by Harvard Unitarians to dilute the moral influence of the dominant Puritan churches in New England.  The Congregationalists and Presbyterians, for their part, were more worried about the moral education of the Irish Catholics.  They aimed to reform them by teaching Bible studies to Irish immigrant children in the new government schools out of the Protestant Bible.  All this took place before the appearance of the now familiar “secular” religions like communism, socialism, and progressivism in the mid 19th century.

The French Revolution was an early sign that, with the decline of belief in a personal God, modern political movements would combine the features of religious and political movements.  The French Revolutionaries were open about substituting the worship of Reason for the worship of God, and they created secular rituals and festivals to create a quasi-religious cult around their political movement for liberty, equality, and fraternity.  The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was converted, for a while, into a Temple of Reason.

But that was just the beginning.  The 19th century spawned numerous secular movements and many of them sought to collapse the religious and the political into a single unitary force.  Marxism wanted to replace the coalition of church and state with a single political elite that would dominate all sectors of society.  Auguste Comte’s Positivism and his “religion of humanity” were a big draw for the educated youth of mid century.  By the end of the 19th century non-revolutionary Socialism, with variants such as American Progressivism and British Fabianism, came to dominate the minds of educated youth.  At the turn of the century Nietzsche captivated young minds with a religion of self-worship; it developed into a radical individualism for intellectuals advertised by Jean-Paul Sartre in the mid 20th century.  Bolshevism and Fascism established a model for any charismatic political leader in the 20th century to follow: a personal messianic cult that could combine religious and political elements in a unique package of self-deification and statolatry.  And after Sartre came the New Left, the Hippie movement, the New Age movement, the environmental movement, the global warming movement, and the so-called cultural Marxism that is ready to make a movement out of any grievance related to class, sex, or race.  Ours is a great age of secular religions.

Yet secularist intellectuals such as Steve Bruce argue that religion is in a permanent decline in the sense that we experience today “fewer people... influenced by religious beliefs” and that we can expect an endpoint of “widespread indifference” to religious ideas, i.e., religious ideas predicated on supernatural powers or events.11

This kind of thinking does not occur in a vacuum.  If you define religion as a belief in the supernatural, and churches as places where religious people create a community, then the separation of church and state means the separation of state only from moral communities that worship a supernatural being.  But the issue of the separation of church and state is larger than that.  Its purpose is to dramatize the danger of any dominant moral-cultural community, whether “religious” or “secular,” from forming an alliance with the political sector and using the power of the government to repress other moral-cultural communities and world views.

All moral-cultural views, whether from a church of Christian believers or a group of secularist activists, attempt to frame a vision of the meaning of human life and create principles and precepts to guide the faithful in their lives.  This applies to a Pentecostal church of women in a Third World slum trying to be saved in Christ to build a life of discipline and decency in the city; it applies equally to an environmental group agitating for people to live simply so that others may simply live and we can all save the planet.  It is just as much the “legislating of morality” for the one group to lobby for Sunday blue laws as it is for the other to lobby for criminal penalties against a failure to recycle or for the federal government to require semi-judicial proceedings at the nations’ universities to address a pervasive “rape culture.”

There is at least a grudging agreement among elites that religion should not dominate politics — certainly not other peoples’ religions.  The idea of the separation of church and state is accepted, in principle, however much it is betrayed by the temptations of power and the naïve failure to understand modern secularism as religion.  But the separation of economy and state is a far more radical notion.  No politician feels shame in attacking banks or corporations, and no amateur hesitates before advancing proposals to reform business practices.  No intellectual hesitates to assume moral superiority over business owners and managers.  Why is this?

The fact is that people are afraid of business.  They are afraid of its power, afraid of its wealth, afraid of its dynamism, and afraid of its inscrutability. They feel that the economic sector is a raging beast that must be kept under tight control lest it get loose and ravage the land like the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar into the Mesopotamia of Gilgamish.  The writers of Fabian Essays in Socialism were also afraid.  “The Period of Anarchy,” written by Sidney Webb, painted a lurid picture of life under the knout of business at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

The result of the industrial revolution, with its dissolution of mediaevalism amid an impetuous reaction against the bureaucratic tyranny of the past, was to leave all the new elements of society in a state of unrestrained license... No sentimental regulations hindered the free employment of land and capital to the greatest possible pecuniary gain of the proprietors, however many lives of men, women and children were used up in the process...

Women working half naked in the coal mines; young children dragging trucks all day in the foul atmosphere of the underground galleries; infants bound to the loom for fifteen hours in the heated air of the cotton mill, and kept awake only by the overlooker’s lash... complete absence of the sanitary provisions necessary to a rapidly growing population: these and other nameless iniquities will be found recorded as the results of freedom of contract and complete laisser faire in the impartial pages of successive blue-book reports.12

The narrative of left-wing reformers has not changed from that day to this.  And they are unanimous that it was economic regulation, limiting of working hours, ending child labor, empowering unions, taxing industry for social benefits that saved ordinary people from their economic subjection back in the cruel days of unregulated laissez-faire.

Mr Herbert Spencer and those who agree in his worship of Individualism, apparently desire to bring back the legal position which made possible the “white slavery” of which the “sins of legislators” have deprived us; but no serious attempt has ever been made to get repealed any one of the Factory Acts.13

Of course, people are right to be afraid.  Business is a revolutionary force that continually upsets established economic relations, and never more so than the moment a country first begins to convert from an agricultural society to the culture of democratic capitalism. It can demolish the economic status of any established player, from a great public corporation down to an ordinary worker, that is slow to adapt to the new skills and techniques of the next economic “surprise.”

But then religion also is a revolutionary force.  It sets the moral agenda under which social life and politics operate.  So is politics, the endless conflict between the Ins and the Outs for the right to defend a territory from enemies foreign and domestic, and to force a living from a cruel world.  So also is science.  Without the revolution in science there would be no modern transportation and communications.  It is because business is so powerful that Michael Novak assigns it its own sector in his three-sector model of modern society.  And it is the power of the economic sector that requires its separation from the political sector so that its power of its systems may not be joined in unholy alliance with the politicians or with the moralists.

Each sector of society has its defining principle.  For the political sector it is force: people go to government for protection; they want government to use its force on their behalf.  For the moral-cultural sector it is the mystery of meaning for the human condition: what does life mean and what should we do together to give our own lives meaning?  For the economic sector it is trust in the reciprocal benefits of voluntary exchange: people may choose a business for products based upon an advertising message; they continue to patronize a supplier only upon a relationship of trust.

What would our modern society look like with a formal recognition of the Greater Separation of Powers, with an expansion of the separation of church and state into the separation of moral-cultural sector and political sector, and a formal declaration of the separation of business and state, the separation of the economic and political sectors?  It would be a society founded upon a robust and thriving Civil Society of voluntary associations.  It would be a society that resonated to the cultural message of society as a contract between the dead, the living and the generations yet unborn; it would be a society where people freely worked for others in the faith that society would reward those that meet the needs of others; it would be a society that believed in limited government and the Greater Separation of Powers.

1Hamilton, Madison, Jay, The Federalist Papers, Mentor, p. 271

2Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p.  291.

3Treasury Department, First Report on the Public Credit. http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/archive/resources/documents/ch08_02.htm

4Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 647.

5Christopher Chantrill, usgovernmentspending.com. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2008USpn

6Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,  p.14

7Ibid., p. 49.

8Ibid., p. 56.

9Ibid., p. 56.

10Jean-Francois Revel, The Totalitarian Temptation, p. 27.

11Steve Bruce, God is Dead, p. 2, p.42.

12G. Bernard Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays in Socialism, p. 40-41.

13Ibid., p. 41.

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Eleven:
Conservatism Three by Three

We do not live in the past, but the past in us. — U.B. Phillips1

The vision of a Greater Separation of Powers is the idea that the great centers of power in modern society ought to be kept separate, and forbidden to combine with each other to dominate the others.  That is what Michael Novak argues in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. There are three power sectors in modern society, political, economic, and moral/cultural, that have condensed out of the compact social order of pre-modern society.  They are the basis of our freedom and our prosperity.  But they are also dangerous and their powers need to be curbed.  But how?  The three powers need to be kept separate, just like the three branches of government, and prevented from combining to gang up on the other sector.  Novak dug out the hidden goal towards which modern conservatism has been struggling towards since its emergence in the late 18th century in the revolt of Edmund Burke against the French Revolution and its rule of Reason.  The great systematic powers of the modern world, the powers that have emancipated us from rural idiocy, but have also enslaved us with their dominations, the three power sectors of politics, economy, and moral culture: they must be kept separate.

We do not mean by conservatism, as the critics charge, an unreflecting tradition that follows without thought the “way” of the ancestors.  Nor do we countenance it as a cynical defense of the ruling class and its privilege.  Conservatism, ever since Burke, has been a self-conscious culture of tradition, that is, a culture that recognizes that, whatever we know, whatever we have learned, we still see through a glass darkly, and not face to face.  We do not know what in our traditions is essential and what is dispensable. Conservatives only want to balance tradition, the unconscious accumulation of social expertise, the lifeworld of the taken-for-granted and the always already familiar, with an evolutionary process of consciously righting wrongs and adapting to changing times. Thus, a century before Freud “discovered” the unconscious, the First Conservative inaugurated a program that balanced conscious wisdom and unconscious “always already” instinct, founding human society upon the basis of the natural social bonds between man and man.  And conservatives also experience themselves in a partnership between the past and the future: “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”2

In a profound way, Edmund Burke’s four great campaigns marked out for all of us already the program of modern conservatism.  On America, he urged the folly of trying to rule that continent from Britain; on India, he championed the end of the ages-old warrior culture of imperial pillage and plunder with his ten year campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal; on Ireland, he championed the emancipation of Catholics; on France, he drove the first stake in the ground against the hegemony of reason and system.  In homage to Burke let us take his four campaigns and rewind them into three strands of conservatism and illuminate each one.

First of all there is cultural conservatism, which finds its founding statement in Burke’s declaration that we, the generation of the living, have a contract both with our dead ancestors and with generations yet unborn.  Then there is so-called economic conservatism that begins with Adam Smith’s declaration of the Invisible Hand, that there is a natural instinct for cooperation between people that directs them into socially beneficial actions even when they are merely seeking their own self-interest.  Then there is the political conservatism that begins with Montesquieu’s doctrine of the three branches of government and the separation of powers.

To identify these three strands of conservatism is to express the irony of its name and its program: for it is not really conservative at all.  While cultural conservatism is certainly conservative it accepts that the past not fixed for all time, but merely a challenge to the living generation to honor its legacy and build a world that honors the sacrifices of the past. Economic conservatism is not really conservative all all, but a radical break with a past that took it for granted that all economic affairs required detailed top-down supervision to prevent a chaos of economic free-for-all, that the bosses needed to tell the workers what to do and when.  Instead it recognizes that economic actions begin with the radical uncertainty of divining and serving other peoples’ needs.  And political conservatism is nothing if not radical in its faith in distributed power. It honors the natural aristocracy of talent and wisdom while deprecating the oligarchy of power.

The cultural strand began with Burke and his jeremiad against the mechanical culture of the Age of Reason, its reduction of everything to Newtonian mechanics and “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” and it continued in the 19th century with people like George Eliot, who argued for the dignity and the competence of ordinary people, from Adam Bede to Maggie Tulliver to Mary Garth and to Mirah Lapidoth.  And that is to say nothing about the girl from rural Colorado, Thea Kronberg, in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark.  Today, after the convulsions of 20th century totalitarianism, we have sadder, wiser leftists like Jürgen Habermas sidling towards a mitigation of the power of system, the domination of reason, by balancing it with the intersubjectivity, the reciprocity of the communicative lifeworld.  We have Berger and Neuhaus arguing for the dignity of authentic self-governing mediating structures between the individual and the mega-structures of big government and big corporations.  We have Lawrence Cahoone and his Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics working out the way in which ordinary people can live and cooperate in dignity, equality and freedom. And there is Charles Taylor, a liberal Canadian philosopher, who makes a liberal case for a society that refines the modern moral order of freedom, equality, dignity, and expressive creativity into a blend that balances ordinary flourishing with a yearning for a higher meaning.  It is not just conservatives that have rebelled against the culture of the mechanical life.  The Romantics rebelled famously against the sterility of reason; after them the Young Hegelians developed the notion of the alienation of modern life and their rebellion thrives today in the expressionism, existentialism, and environmentalism of early 21st century culture.

The economic strand that begins with Adam Smith and his Invisible Hand was expanded with Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage.  Then in 1870 came the marginal revolution that resolved the apparent dichotomy between the idea of exchange value and intrinsic value.  Then in 1920 Mises demonstrated the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism: without a market you cannot have prices, and without prices you cannot know the cost of anything.  This, if anything, exploded the conceit of Marx that a market for labor represented an alienation of social labor.  If by getting rid of capitalism you do not know what your labor is worth to others then how can you decide whether you are alienated or not?  Finally Hayek showed the impossibility of bureaucratic centralism: the man in Washington cannot hope to out-think the millions of consumers and producers.  The idea that only a wise ruler can negotiate the conflicts of a people is shown to be impossible.  People do better negotiating with each other than through a political middle-man from the government; a Barnacle or a Stiltstocking knows only How Not to Do It.

If Adam Smith invented the Invisible Hand, Max Weber extended it with the notion of work as a calling, the Protestant Ethic that informed the spirit of capitalism; then he found that the whole urban western tradition had developed a culture that dissolved the age-old loyalty to kindred and legitimized the possibility of trusting strangers.  In the western city, he argued, Christianity taught people to live as individuals and to extend trust beyond the boundaries of kindred towards anyone that could be trusted.3  The community of neighborhood, church, association and nation replaced the community of the kindred.  You can see Weber’s theory confirmed in the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali girl born into the ageless culture of clan and tribe.  From clan daughter in Somalia she became against all odds an educated individual in Holland and an activist for women’s rights as individuals.4  Then the Frankfurt School extended Heidegger’s concern about domination into a critique of instrumental reason that looked forward in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action to a move away from system and reason and towards conversation and negotiation of truth values as a basis of community. In the 21st century we have George Gilder reformulating the workings of capitalism in terms of the communications theory of Claude Shannon, that each economic innovation is an incident of surprise in a sea of noise.

The political strand that begins with Montesquieu’s idea of the three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, was implemented with astonishing success by James Madison in the US Constitution.  It remains unequaled in its approach to the political problem: how do you give government enough power to fight enemies, foreign and domestic, but withhold the power to oppress its legitimate domestic opponents?  Today the majority politics of the founders is critiqued by modern public choice theory. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock showed in The Calculus of Consent that the only just basis of legislation is unanimous consent, for it forces the majority to pay the costs of the minority in order to get its support. The control of government power requires constant vigilance, and the 20th century ruling class betrayed the vision of the founders with the notion of a “living constitution,” a construction that broadly licensed the ruling class, through its control of the judiciary and the culture, to amend the constitution without ratification by the people.

But now comes the task to combine the three strands into an integrated social philosophy, and that is where Michael Novak comes in.  He extended the separation of powers doctrine from Montesquieu’s rule about government to a philosophy about society as a whole, thus binding together the three strands of modern conservatism into a single rope.  Differentiating society into three sectors, economic, political, and moral/cultural, he proposes what we have called here a Greater Separation of Powers.  In this view the separation of church and state, specified in the First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion, is extended to the notion of a separation of powers between each of the three sectors: not just separation of church and state — the separation of political and moral/cultural power —  but separation of economic and political power and separation of economic and moral/cultural power.  Thus politics, economy, and culture are free to develop within their own sectors without subjection to the domination of a totalitarian combination of powers.

In Status Anxiety Alain de Botton rehearses the great moral stories that have been told about status, about rich and poor.  Do the rich deserve to be rich, or are they crooks?  Are the poor deservedly so, or are they held down by the evil rich?   Let us appropriate his method of stories and deploy it here to rehearse the stories about the government and the people that reveal to us the moral framework of modern conservatism.

First Story:

Government is force and force destroys society; you must limit government if you desire to reduce force and exploitation.

How do you limit force so that people are “forced” to solve their problems without force?  You limit government with the political conservatism of Montesquieu and the founders.  You hive government away from a corrupt condominium with the economic sector and the temptations of crony capitalism; you keep government away from leaking into the moral-cultural sector following the temptation of an established religion to force its moral vision upon others.

Second Story:

Politics is violence and turns people against each other; you must limit political power if you want people to stop fighting each other and start cooperating.

Cultural conservatism teaches that it is religion and culture that teach cooperation and mutual assistance.  Modern totalitarian secular religions, on the contrary, start with a declaration of irreconcilable differences that can only be resolved by force.  Marxism must start with the notion that the workers are exploited and that nothing short of political revolution can fix it.  Modern progressivism must start with the notion that certain groups are permanently marginalized and that they must fight the rest of society to get their rights.  Modern elite liberals must find a worsening economic inequality to justify their resort to ever more government programs to redistribute income. Unfortunately, their tactics confirm their faith in force.  If you mobilize to fight a holy war against the bosses, chances are the bosses will organize to fight right back; if you organize the marginalized to fight for their rights against the racists, sexists and homophobes, you force racists, sexists, and homophobes to push back.  Modern secular religions that campaign for a collapse of the separation between the sector of force and the sector of meaning must end up by creating a totalitarianism that enforces meaning with government coercion.  Cultural conservatism teaches people to think first about what they can contribute to society and do something about it before they ask what society owes them.

Third Story:

System is domination and sets the powerful over the powerless; you must limit system to give the powerless a defense against power.

The authoritarian delusion implemented in the welfare state is that ordinary people just don’t have the information or the knowledge to manage their own health care, to educate their own children, to buy safe and reliable products.  Economic conservatism shows that they are wrong.  The unconscious organism of the price “system” automatically selects desirable health plans that most people like; it automatically prefers schools that most people want to send their children to; it penalizes producers that sell defective products.  This does not require that each individual possess encyclopedic information about all options; it merely demonstrates that the collective impact of millions of individual decisions based on partial knowledge adds up to a wealth of knowledge that a corps of policy analysts in Washington DC can never approach.

A world illuminated by this triple conservative vision is one where people can live independent and free under institutions that will protect freedom while encouraging social cooperation and punishing freeloading.  With cultural conservatism the bonds of tribal loyalty are sundered and people are socialized within moral/cultural associations such as churches and mutual-benefit associations.  With economic conservatism people are freed from the cramped limitations of the family economy and economically socialized to work that benefits the stranger.  In political conservatism people are socialized for and protected by a state with powers limited to the essential tasks for which force is required.

Now all we need is the implementation.  And that starts, after the horror of Obama, with persuading the American people to abandon the welfare state’s Battle of the Benefits, the reduction of social life to a political scramble for entitlement loot, and in that act of renunciation transform America from its current shame as a robber band of Takers into a land that is first of all a society of Makers and Givers.

1Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, quoted by Thomas Sowell in Conquests and Cultures, Basic Books, 1998, p.3.

2Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Collier, 1937, p. 232.

3Max Weber, The City, Free Press, 1958, p. 100, 103.

4Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, Free Press, 2007.

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Twelve:
Imagining a Culture of Involvement

You must suggest an alternative
—Margaret Thatcher

We have seen how the politics of the administrative state has failed, and how its failure issued from its culture of compulsion that produced a vast government administrative state that has reduced all social relations to administrative rules, and reduced society to the state and its systems of domination.  We have seen that the problem issues from the very nature of the powerful modern state.  Humans are social animals that live by cooperation, but government is force.  Humans are creatures that instinctively work to resolve their differences, but politics is a process of division that teaches people to sharpen their differences.  Humans hate to be ruled by others, but the modern governmental and corporate systems treat social humans as mechanical gadgets: system is domination.

We have analyzed the modern condition, and seen how it could, how it should found itself in the relaxed, but robust civil society of neighbors.  We have seen how the idea of civil society is almost 180 degrees opposed to the ideas of the educated elite that now dominates western society as its ruling class.  We have designed the skeleton of a political defense in depth against power in the Greater Separation of Powers.  We have shown how modern conservatism began with Burke’s revolt against the Homeric rapacity of the British pro-consul in British India and his philippic against the inhumanity of rationalism applied to human society in the French Revolution.

James Bartholomew is the author of a book on the welfare state in Britain, The Welfare State We’re In.  It is both a history and critique of the welfare state.  But when he talked about his book to Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, he got a taste of her no-nonsense character.  She announced, “You must suggest an alternative. If you say the welfare state is no good, you must suggest an alternative.”

I have agonised about this before in a previous entry on this website. I said to her that it would be a big job, requiring a lot of research and I doubted people would want to read my particular blueprint. She was having none of that, saying words to the effect: “If you can’t think of a good way of communicating it, then you must find a way of communicating it.”1

The chief bulwark of our current culture of compulsion is that nobody is seriously suggesting an alternative to the current administrative welfare state.  Nobody has gone out and constructed a visionary alternative and got it into the minds of the American people. It is inconceivable to most people in modern society that it is possible to provide equitable and just provision of social needs without a large administrative welfare state.  Until someone constructs a vision of what could be, then there cannot be a moral movement to declare the present system to be unjust and inhuman.

It is time to review the boundaries of the possible and discover whether an alternative is possible.  What is needed is a new horizon, a skillful vision of society illuminated by the faith that all should contribute to the welfare of others, not just through taxes and by subordination to government officials, but by active daily involvement in a friendly cooperation between equal citizens towards shared goals of sociability.  We must respond to the command of Margaret Thatcher and suggest an alternative to the culture of compulsion.

Let us then call this alternative the “culture of involvement,” a culture opposed to the culture of compulsion of the administrative state and its regulatory systems. The culture of involvement opposes the culture that takes power and social influence away from individuals and civic groups and isolates them all in the iron cage of Max Weber — as inmates of institutions or exotic pets of a clique of politicians and their cronies.

In this culture of involvement the trajectory of life will be different from today’s.  What we now take for granted will be as unthinkable to us as the life of the peasant is to the modern city dweller.  We must conjure up not just a vision but a realistic picture of the daily life in this better world, a daily life that people can measure against the present and say with confidence: this is the life I want for myself and my children.

The present trajectory of life that everyone accepts as normal goes something like this.  We are born into a loving nuclear family in the care of our mothers.  But soon enough we are socialized into professional child-care institutions, typically pre-school at three or four years.  At six we enter a government kindergarten, and from seven to 18 we attend a progression of government schools as prescribed by law.  Some children “drop out” of this process, but “we,” the articulate professional class, complete the K-12 process — kindergarten through 12th grade — fairly successfully.  We then continue to college, often a government university, for another four years of education, with maybe another couple of years of graduate school.  At some point we complete our education and join the job market.

Let us be clear about this and ponder its meaning: most children spend much of their waking lives, from pre-school to adulthood, in some kind of a government child-custodial facility, and this incarceration seems to modern parents the most natural thing in the world.

The end of schooling marks the most important transition in our lives as we change from students to workers, from children or adolescents to adults.  For the professional classes, this transition occurs in the mid twenties.  For children that “dropped out” of the education process work begins much sooner, but typically in the mid teens.

All along the way to this transition the government has prescribed detailed rules governing the life of children.  Children must attend school, typically from age seven to 16.  Children below a certain age may not work.  Children in their early teens may work, but their working hours are limited.  Children are not responsible and cannot make financial commitments.  The minimum wages and working conditions for children are prescribed by government.

Once we have abandoned or completed schooling we enter the job market.  All aspects of the workplace are tightly controlled by the government, including procedures for hiring and firing, wage rates, benefits, contributory and non-contributory pensions.  Workers cannot work unless registered with the government, and both worker and employer must pay substantial taxes to the government as a condition of employment.  The government advertises its power in the workplace with mandatory notices that employers must display for all workers to see.

If a worker is injured on the job the government is involved through its worker compensation and its worker safety laws. If an employee is discharged from employment then the worker is entitled to unemployment compensation paid for through employer taxes but controlled and disbursed by the government.

If an employee is disabled and unable to work then the employee is entitled to a pension from the government.

Although workers pay taxes to the government through their employer every time they are paid by their employer, they are also required to file a detailed declaration of income to the government every year.  This report to the government amounts to a complete account of all pecuniary transactions made by the taxpayer during the year; a balance is struck between taxes paid and taxes owed during the year.  From this balance a final tax payment is made to the government or a refund is claimed from the government.

Finally, when a worker reaches a certain age, currently 62, he or she is entitled to a pension from the government paid for by employment taxes of employers and of other workers.  All persons aged 65 or older are entitled to enroll in a health care program administered by the government and paid for by employer and worker taxes.  Even here compulsion plays its part.  You cannot collect your Social Security pension benefits unless you enroll in the government’s Medicare health care plan.

The trajectory of life in the culture of compulsion may seem a little bland, but it is not the whole story, for the characters in the story include those that “drop out” of the standard government-approved-and-regulated life trajectory.  We are not just talking about failing to complete high school or college, but any failure to thrive.  Lose your job?  Get government unemployment.  Get pregnant without a husband?  Sign up for welfare.  Get injured on the job?  Get a check from workers’ comp.

And there the story is not so bland.  That is Charles Murray’s message in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010.   In today’s White America life is pretty good for the upper 20 percent.  They have careers, they marry well, stay married, and have children.  These are the people that live in communities like Belmont in Massachusetts, a wealthy suburb of Boston.  But the lowest 30 percent live places like in Fishtown, a neighborhood of Philadelphia.  In Fishtown the women do not marry and the men do not work.  The schools are lousy and the civil society of churches and associations has withered away.

Life in Fishtown is a contrast between dependence and cunning.  Citizens become experts in plucking the low-hanging fruit of the welfare state: they may claim cash assistance, particularly single mothers of pre-school-age children.  They may claim health-care assistance through a joint program of the federal government and state governments designed to give the poor access to health care and health care professionals access to compensation for providing health care to the poor.  They may claim housing assistance and they may claim food assistance both directly and for their children at school.  This activity requires not mere passivity, but a cunning eye for the main chance, and the ability to dress yourself in the clothes of helplessness.  Meanwhile, Fishtown residents learn how to earn money “off the books” to supplement their welfare or disability payments with additional income in ways that do not get reported to the government.  In fact, however, government does not inquire too diligently into the income and resources of its dependents; the culture of compulsion only applies to those that live in the visible and legible economy.  The Fishtown folks know when to be visible and when to be invisible.

There is a simple way to understand our Belmont-Fishtown society and the government’s culture of compulsion.  It is to think of government as developed above in Chapter Two.  Government is everywhere an armed minority that commands a monopoly of force over a territory.  Its sole interest is the continuation of its power.  To do this it must extract resources from the population; it must sequester a portion of the wealth created by the people to fund itself and reward its supporters.  From the point of view of the government the amount of wealth that it sequesters and the amount that it rewards its supporters is governed by the Laffer Curve.  A government that taxes nothing and gives its supporters no rewards is not long for this earth.  But a government that appropriates all wealth for its needs and the reward of its supporters will quickly exhaust the ability of a people to support it, and can only survive with terror, as Mao and Zhou learned in their red base in 1930s China.  A wise government chooses the sweet spot that maximizes its revenue or its power.  In the early 21st century it is clear that the ruling class of the administrative welfare state has got itself in too deep.  Its programs are overwhelming the resources of the economy yet it fails to respond by aligning its promises to its means.

So let us imagine an alternative, the culture of involvement of a people devoted to the project of social cooperation, social animals involved and engaged in the social reality of life as human beings rather than mechanical cogs in a governmental administrative system or cunning freeloaders gaming the system.

When a people determines to have limited government it means that it has embarked upon a quest to limit the extent to which government can appropriate wealth to fund itself and reward its supporters.  Such a people has necessarily grown beyond the view of a “people of the marginalized self” that seeks to attach itself to a powerful leader.  It has become a “people of the responsible self” that accepts the culture of individualism, that it is the individual citizen’s responsibility to find out how to contribute to society.  Such a people rejects the government’s Laffer Curve.  It seeks not the sweet spot for government power but the sweet spot for the citizen.  A wise citizen chooses the sweet spot that maximizes the social engagement of the citizen.

The responsible citizen understands perfectly the need for government as a force to defend against enemies foreign and domestic and to administer the laws.  But the citizen maintains against the apologist of power that, beyond defense and adjudication of disputes, the need for force is and should be minimal. The citizen always asks the obvious question when a new program is proposed:  Are things really so bad that force is the only solution?  For the citizen never forgets that government is force, and if the need for force is minimal, then the need for government, the social agent of force, is limited.  The result is limited government.

What would the trajectory of life be like in a society that rejected the usual politics of the armed minority — choosing the sweet spot that maximized its power — and chose instead the sweet spot for citizens as its principle of government? Let us imagine.

There would not be, of course, “the trajectory of life.”  Absent the culture of compulsion people in different subcultures and different walks of life would live different trajectories. In the culture of involvement there would be no single trajectory enforced by government compulsion and the will of the armed minority, but there would be a unifying theme, for humans are nothing if not social animals, and like to be like others even as we strive to be different.  But let us, with the limited imagination vouchsafed to mortals, conjure up four different life trajectories that might characterize a culture of involvement: the poor, the conservative, the creative, and the elitist. We have not chosen these four paths by accident; they coincide with the idea of a society divided into people of the subordinate self, people of the responsible self, people of the creative self, and the people of the ruling class.

Born into a poor family in the culture of involvement, a child will experience the disorganization common to those who struggle to make it in the city.  Yet its mother will cunningly, through conversation with her friends, seek out opportunities for her child.  Perhaps she has a stable enough relationship that she can afford not to work, or perhaps she finds an informal occupation that allows her to share child-minding.  When her child is ready for school she will find a small neighborhood school recommended by her friends and will scrape up the fees. If she is widowed or abandoned then the school will likely provide financial aid as happens in the Third World.  At eleven, the child will start to blend education and work.  Perhaps the child will go to work with mother; perhaps the child will work at the mall.  Perhaps the child will commence an apprenticeship.  By the late teens the child will become effectively emancipated and begin to move towards sexual relationship. Upon becoming pregnant, the young adult will move in with his/her partner and get married some time before the child is born.  Life will be hard for a few years, for neither husband or wife previously acquired highly marketable skills in the workplace, but they work hard and it pays off in better jobs and higher wages. It sure helps that they belong to a fraternal association that offers them basic health insurance and neo-natal services.  Eventually the couple will earn a competence and look forward to buying a house.  Perhaps they will start a little family business.  It all seems possible when jobs are plentiful because payroll taxes and payments for government benefit programs are minimal. With growing income, the couple realize that they can afford more education for their children than they got, and as they reach retirement age they realize that they can sell the business and convert it into a tidy income.  In fact it looks like they’ll have a nice little inheritance to share among their three children.  Thus the life trajectory of the poor in the culture of involvement.

But what about when things go wrong? Where does the poor family go for relief? In the culture of 1,000 years ago, the poor man went to his lord and lady and placed “his head in their hands” and became a bondsman.2 Five hundred years ago, the poor man obtained relief from the Elizabethan Poor Law. Today the poor man goes on welfare and becomes the bondsman of liberal politicians. In the culture of involvement the poor man will belong to a fraternal association and look to his lodge brothers for relief. For those too disorganized to have provided for themselves, a new bondage will apply; people without means will subordinate themselves to institutions of non-governmental assistance that replaced the failed system of government relief, for everyone in the culture of involvement will be anxious, and socialized since childhood, to help the poor help themselves and all will agree that nobody may get free stuff in return for their vote.

Born into a responsible family in the culture of involvement a child enters a world of structure and faith. It grows up in community, the world of its parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles and the larger church family.  Life outside the home begins with school at the church, and then church-sponsored schooling, kindergarten through college.  Perhaps the child’s parents and their friends try home-schooling.  But life isn’t all schooling, for the conservative teenager is active in sports, youth groups and social service until it is time to go to college, where a practical degree, business or nursing, seems appropriate for a life aligned with Christian values. Courtship and marriage at the end of college lead to an adult life of work and child-raising. Socialized by a youth of responsibility and service, conservative adults easily take up work responsibility and church and community service opportunities.  Living modestly they earnestly acquire the income needed to tithe at church and the savings to fund their children’s education.  Of course most of their four children have traveled to other countries, sponsored by their church on student exchanges, so it’s not surprising that they adapt well to college.  Still, it’s a worry that two of their children have grown away from the church and chosen a life of business adventure rather than community service.  By the time they reach retirement they find themselves respected community leaders and prosperous enough to consider post-retirement traveling.

Children of creative families in the culture of involvement benefit all their lives from their parents’ extensive network of influence. In business or artistically creative families they are constantly exposed to a rich variety of professions, occupations, and socially competitive events. Parents send their children to all kinds of schools: scholarly, creative, college-prep, network central, homeschooling.  Of course, their children often spend a year or more away in a foreign country, guests of a professional or artistic connection, getting immersed in another culture.  It all pays off with extracurriculars, internships, leadership positions in high school and a selective college to follow.  Life as a twentysomething may involve extended graduate school or creative and entrepreneurial startups.  A “merger marriage” comes in the thirties in a like-to-like partnership with another hot-house flower and yields two designer children.  By mid life our creatives are making their mark, in business, media, or the academy, and considering a diversification into philanthropy.  In mature years, our creatives are high net-worth community leaders, sought out and venerated.  But it’s an eternal ache that one of the children never seemed to get his act together and committed suicide.

Children of elite families in the culture of involvment are raised by nannies, for their parents live lives in the public square and cannot waste time on domesticity.  But elite children go to the toniest schools and get to sample the competitive social events that their parents consume on their royal progress.  In their teenaged years elite children are lonely, with parents at the summit of their power lives, and may stage embarrassing bids for attention, despite the rewards of attending elite schools.  But there are the advantages of second-to-none connections, and prestigious intern opportunities before attendance at elite universities anxious to oblige the children of powerful people with patronage to distribute.  Then it’s on to advanced degrees, high-status opportunities in investment banking, and perhaps a career in politics or the more prestigious institutions in the not-for-profit sector. Marrying in the early thirties, elite adults determine to spend more time on their children than their driven parents, but still it’s nice to have the paid help and the parental cottages where you can entertain and mix with the right kind of people.  But life seems to trend, as the years go by, to the maintenance of the famous parents’ reputation and memory. Nevertheless, opportunities for community service are constant — even a bit too much of a good thing.

The model lives presented above to symbolize the possibility of a culture of involvement to replace the culture of compulsion are intended to make a point.  The rich won’t find life much different in the culture of involvement, but the poor will.  This is not as scandalous as it might seem.  In the culture of compulsion, most of the compelling is done by the politically powerful and the politically well-connected.  Most of the being-bossed-around happens to the lower orders.  So you would expect that a change in the culture would have the most dramatic difference to the lives of people who are presently most enmeshed in the government’s compulsory safety net and held back by the “poverty trap” of near 100% marginal taxes on people trying to graduate out of welfare benefits and today’s high taxes on labor, whether “withheld” from paychecks or extracted from employers.

But is this panorama of life in the glorious future of the culture of involvement even remotely possible?  Can the poor do without government education and government health care?  Can the middle class survive without a full menu of government benefits or without government managing their retirement income and final health care?  Let us take a look.  We would need to look at the Third World, where government has not yet reached the limit of its capabilities, to see how people live without benefit of the administrative state.  Indeed, in the Third World the people must typically suffer the universal corruption and looting of the ruling class without any compensation from the government benefits that have been legislated in the developed world.

1James Bartholomew blog, http://www.thewelfarestatewerein.com/archives/2006/05/much_to_my_surp.php

2Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, The Year 1000, Back Bay Books, 1999, p. 46.

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Thirteen:
The Poor Without the Welfare State

The first step in the emancipation of the victim class is to raise the victims out of dependency to a secure competence.  Emancipated from the liberal plantation they may then take their place in the economic life of the nation.

Suppose the administrative welfare state were to collapse tomorrow, what would happen to the poor and the traditionally marginalized that presently depend on welfare state programs for the basic necessities of life?    How would they get basic schooling for their children?  How would they obtain health care?  How would they survive a sudden loss of income from illness or accident?  Of course, we cannot know how the present dependent classes in the developed countries would fare.  But we do know, from studies of life in the Third World, how poor people in the cities live and cope with the vicissitudes of life without the benefit of a comprehensive administrative welfare state.

But first, let us rehearse the reason we have a welfare state.  There is no better witness than Helen M. Todd, a factory inspector in Chicago before World War I, and her testimony on “Why Children Work.”1  They worked, before World War I, because their fathers were dead or sick.  That is why we have a welfare state.  To us, it is wrong that a child should be forced to to go to work rather than go to school.  It is therefore disturbing to learn, from the children that Todd interviewed, that they did not regard themselves as marginalized or deprived. They mostly preferred work to going to school.  They hated school because the teachers treated them like morons, hit them and slapped them and kept them in at recess.  Instead of a regular paycheck that their families appreciated, all they got from school was lousy report cards that got them in trouble.

Perhaps things are not quite as simple as the welfare state supporter supposes.

We will begin with education.  Everybody knows that we need government for education.  But not in the Third World.  In third-world slums an extensive private education system flourishes today educating fee-paying students, with no government subsidy or assistance.  Its customers are the poor.

It was in 2000 that James Tooley encountered the thriving private education system for the poor in Hyderabad, India.  An education expert working on a project for the World Bank to evaluate private schools for rich kids in the Third World, he was traveling by autorickshaw through Hyderabad’s Old City slums and kept noticing advertisements for “English Medium” private schools.  He had just seen the visible part of an iceberg of informal schools for the poor that flourish, unknown to government education bureaucracies, in slums across the world.  These schools were informal businesses that provided schooling for the children of the poor where government schools were sub-standard.  They charged fees of $2 to $3 per week and provided financial aid for the poorest of the poor, typically the children of widowed or abandoned women.  A typical school was run as a for-profit sole proprietorship, hired teachers, and served about 200 children.  In 2003 Tooley obtained a grant to do a worldwide survey of these schools and found that they typically outperformed government schools and approached the results of formal private schools for the children of the middle class and the rich.  He published the results in his book The Beautiful Tree.

In the Third World the poor cannot rely on the safety net of the welfare state, so they must get jobs when they migrate to the city.  But the city has not usually welcomed the rural poor to its economy.  That is what medieval guilds were all about.  So the rural poor in the city often have to work outside the law — in the informal economy — to survive and thrive.  Hernando De Soto’s The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World is a story of the astonishing success of the urban poor of Lima, Peru, in forcing their way into the urban economy.  The book was the product of detailed research into the informal economy in Lima conducted originally in the late 1980s.  It focused on three areas where informality — extralegal activity — had become a significant factor in the Peruvian economy: housing, street vending, and mass transit.  In each of these areas, the poor immigrants arriving in Lima from the Andean altiplano had developed a stylized act of violence, an “invasion,” to create a social space in which they could claim and win private property rights from the state.  Resort to violence was necessary, according to De Soto’s research, because the new immigrants from the countryside could not obtain the necessaries of life from the formal economy.  Peru’s economy was mercantilist, in the sense that the political system had politicized everything.

[The] politicization of Peruvian society means that all problems are handled primarily according to the procedures established by the government, rather than according to other standards such as economic efficiency, morality, or justice.  Everything is left in the state’s hands, and society inevitably becomes bureaucratized and centralized.  Politicization, centralization, and bureaucratization can all be traced to the same source: redistributive laws.2

In the political system, of course, the “emphasis is on reconciling different special interests, favoring those which are considered appropriate and redirecting resources to them through legal channels.”3  An “appropriate” special interest inevitably means a powerful and established “redistributive combine.”

When the peasants from the altiplano, the fertile farmland in the Andes, started appearing in strength in Lima in the mid 20th century, the political system didn’t know what to do with them, for after all, they represented a new interest that, if acknowledged, would demand a share in the distribution of political spoils.  There was no place for them in the established redistributive state, not for employment, not for transportation, not for housing.  The peasants solved their problem in a profoundly impressive way.  They developed the tactic of “invasion,” a stylized act of collective violence, to create a beachhead into the city’s economy that the political system would be reluctant to challenge.

In housing, this invasion would involve a group of people invading a piece of unused state land and immediately occupying it and setting up temporary shelters of woven matting according to a prearranged street plan.  The members of the informal settlement would already have organized before the invasion a democratic government competent to govern the settlement and perform the functions of the criminal and civil law.  In street vending, the tactic was similar.  Itinerant peddlers would “invade” an area of sidewalk to set up stalls and sell prepared food, groceries, and common consumer durables.  Eventually, the street vendors would combine to build permanent markets and move off the street.  In bus transportation, drivers would “invade” bus routes and start to deliver bus service to the city.  About 90 percent of Lima’s bus service was informal.

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is another study of the informal economy in the city.  It describes the result of sociological research conducted by Venkatesh into work and life on the South Side of Chicago: the area just to the south of wealthy Hyde Park where the young Barack Obama flourished as an activist and a politician.  Unskilled workers, Venkatesh found unsurprisingly, supplemented their government benefits with income from work that paid less than minimum wage and didn’t get reported to the state welfare bureaucracies.  This was not just a question of working casually for cash.  On the contrary, informal work often means setting up a small business, defending informal ownership rights in a “pitch,” developing relationships with wholesalers, establishing credit and acquiring stock, and finding a place to store business equipment and stock. Venkatesh found that informal workers did not operate in a social vacuum.  They had to negotiate with a variety of interests to be able to trade without harassment.  They had to square with police, with formal store managers, with the people living close to their business “pitch” and had to find a way to store their business equipment safely when they were not working.

In Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day Daryl Collins and co-authors related how the poor in third-world cities, with irregular income, managed to save money: they had to, for with an irregular income from entrepreneurial activities like street trading, they needed to provide against a rainy day.  Of course, these people used elite-sponsored micro-finance when they could, and resorted to regular money-lenders when they had to.  But most of their savings was done by depositing monies on an interest-free basis with friends.  Why?  Because it was safer than keeping all their savings at home, and more convenient than a commercial bank.  Also, it set up a network of trust in the neighborhood.

In The Better Angels of our Nature Steven Pinker reminded us that, while the middle class enjoys the full benefits of the peace enforced by modern government, the poor do not.  For a number of reasons their homes and their persons are not as safe as those of the middle class.  The poor are not well served by the police, who vacillate between ignoring the poor and coming down hard on them.  But the poor observe a “no snitching” rule, partly due to the mistrust of authority and partly from a genuine fear of the local urban street gang.  There is, of course, the need to maintain a distance from law enforcement when you are engaged in “off-the-books” activity.  The consequence has been, ever since the poor started migrating to the city at the start of the industrial revolution, that a proto-state has developed in the immigrant ghetto.  The poor are governed at a distance by the legal government, its police, and its bureaucracies, and up close by the criminal gang.  When compared with the soporific routines of middle-class life, the anomalous situation of the poor demands that the modern poor must develop street smarts and adaptation skills utterly superfluous to the ordinary middle-class worker and homeowner.

The reports detailed above give the lie to the notion that the poor represent an underclass lacking in the basic skills needed to survive in the modern world unless materially assisted by a paternalistic elite or unless organized by militant cadres of “educated youth.”  It turns out that the poor are perfectly able to form their own networks of trust, just like businessmen operating in the formal sector.  So why don’t they?

They don’t because the poor in the welfare state need to operate in the shadows.  On the one hand, with their limited skills they can’t afford the costs and regulations that the government imposes on the formal economic sector, and sensibly judge that they cannot afford to operate in the formal sector.  On the other hand, since the poor usually receive government benefits they face penal marginal tax rates whenever they attempt to obtain income from the formal sector.  The practical thing to do is to work informally and hide “off-the-books” income from the government so they can continue to receive their accustomed government benefits.  That way they keep their benefits and avoid the 50 to 100 percent marginal tax rates that would result from a combination of formal employment and reduction in government benefits.  The urban poor improvise their lives without the law, with ingenuity, and often with the kind of entrepreneurial skills and determination that are celebrated in the formal business sector.

What does the informal economy look like in liberal Seattle, Washington?  Here is the story of “Hank,” a small-time contractor who, back in 2010, built fences.  Hank employed Mexicans, presumably illegal, and he didn’t have a bank account, and wasn’t a licensed contractor.  So we can assume that “Hank” paid his employees in cash, and probably ran most of his business off the books.  Why would he do that?  The answer is obvious.  If he were to employ formal construction labor in Washington State in 2010 he would have to pay FICA tax of 7.65 percent; he would have to pay unemployment tax of about six percent, and he would have to pay disability premiums to the State Department of Labor and Industries of $1.20 per hour.  If we assume that “Hank” pays his laborers $10 per hour, the disability cost alone is 12 percent of payroll.  Total on-the-books cost of taxes and premiums for his informal employees would be about 25 percent.

You can see why the tolerance extended to illegal immigrant labor in liberal “sanctuary” cities like Seattle is so beneficial to marginal employers like “Hank.”  First of all, “Hank” has limited organizational skills.  Thus a cash business is highly attractive to him.  His illegal immigrant laborers actually prefer getting cash wages since they need to keep a distance from the formal economy.  And he doesn’t have to file any of the complicated forms and reports that he is barely able to understand.  Even though “Hank’s” business is shot through with illegality, it is still built on trust.  He and his employees need each other; they all benefit from his resort to off-the-books informality.

But let us think beyond the immediate needs of a marginal contractor like “Hank” and think deeper thoughts.  The point of the 7.65 percent FICA tax is to provide for retirement income.  According to the national myth, this money is socked away by the government in a Trust Fund and paid back as retirement income.  In fact, the politicians do not sock the money away; the Social Security Trust Fund is an accounting mirage.  The monies collected in today’s FICA taxes are used to pay today’s payments to retirees.  Any money left over can be spent on existing programs: that is to buy votes at the next election.

But there is a bigger problem.  Even supposing that the fiction maintained by the government is true, that the monies paid in FICA taxes are sitting in a trust fund waiting for the taxpayer to retire we should ask: should a twenty-something’s savings be sterilized by the government like this?  And consider the unemployment tax that, for landscape workers, is 6 percent in Washington State.  Might not an enterprising construction worker prefer to tuck that money into his own savings account against a rainy day?  And as for disability, is this really the best we can do for our construction laborers? Charge their employers $1.20 per hour?  All these monies, that add up to $2.50 an hour for a $10-an-hour laborer, could be put to other uses.  The laborer could use the money to save up for a home.  He could save the money to start up a business, or for any other good reason.  Savings, capital, nest egg: money is fungible, and can be put to any good use.  Why is the savings of the modern laborer sterilized by the state into bureaucratic government programs?  It can’t be because the average low-paid laborer is unable to organize his life: the off-the-books literature sampled above shows that the poor are in fact highly inventive and capable.  Yet they are said to be the most vulnerable.  Are they?

Perhaps it is time for the ruling class to ask just how vulnerable and how marginal the poor and the low-paid really are.  If the poor are not vulnerable and incapable as assumed, then why is the power and the force of the state required to support them with welfare programs, to sequester their wages and manage their lives for them — beyond the obvious reason that most everyone, from the illegal laborer to the billionaire crony capitalist, will vote for a politician that promises him free stuff or free money?

1Helen M. Todd, McClure’s, Vol XL, “Why Children Work,” p.68 http://books.google.com/books?id=65NEAQAAIAAJ

2Hernando De Soto, The Other Path, p.191.

3Ibid., p.190.

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Fourteen:
The Middle Class Without the Welfare State

In place of the old liberal hegemony, with its groups and group antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

If the poor can thrive, as we have seen, without the supervision and the resources of the welfare state, why not the middle class?  Indeed, it is the middle class that bears the moral responsibility for the entitlement state and its promises that cannot be kept, debt that cannot be paid, and a course that cannot continue.  We middle-class people rather like the well-worn paths of the welfare state; it saves us the bother of making our own way.  All we need to do is keep up a good report card, pay our dues into the fabled entitlement “trust funds” and we can fall into the middle-class entitlements when our turn comes.  Social Security?  Better than relying on the stock market.  Medicare?  Better than the bother of making decisions about your own health care.  Education?  Who has time, with today’s two-income families, to volunteer at the neighborhood school?

Modern middle-class Americans might be excused for thinking that life is just school writ large, for our highly institutionalized childhoods teach us exactly that.  We all troop off to school, to the government’s child-custodial facility, from Kindergarten to 12th Grade, boys and girls, dutifully following the instructions of the teacher as we prepare for the working world.  We then start to work, primed to obey the instructions of our supervisor by a lifetime of subordination to a teacher. Is that not just what the slave drivers and the manufacturers of the industrial revolution wanted?  They found it difficult to break post-pubertal males to “industrial discipline;” but then modern schooling came along to break pre-pubertal immigrant children to a life of subordination.  Is that what modern schooling is all about? Modern schooling does seem to require remarkable obedience and conformity from the children; maybe the economy couldn’t work unless pre-pubertal males are all broken to the culture of conformity in a necessary preparation for work in the post-industrial work-place.  Dare we ask the uncomfortable question whether humans in general are more than bums on seats graduating from classroom to classroom in the child custodial facility of life?

If the welfare state is bad for the poor, by teaching dependency and the low cunning needed to pass through the benefit stations of the via dependencia, it must be even worse for the middle class.  At least the poor learn something on the street about how to outwit the Man.  The middle class can easily become deracinated in its institutional subordination, losing the basic culture of the middle class that has obtained since the Axial Age religions first invented the idea of the “responsible self.”  The temptation for the poor in the welfare state is to sink to a culture of low cunning; the temptation for the middle class is to live life as an obedient inmate in an institution, starting at school, the government child-custodial facility, continuing on a “career” working in big bureaucracies for the system, and then ending in a senior planned community — really, a luxury barracks — in man-made Florida or Arizona.

If welfare dependency for the poor is a kind of addictive drug, the middle-class life in the welfare state is a form of social sterilization, and the living proof is the remarkable lack of fecundity in welfare state females.  Simply stated, middle class people work too much and commune too little; we spend too much time as wage slaves at the business park and too little time socializing in the community, living a life in common with our families, our neighbors, and our communities.  It all starts with the standard middle-class welfare-state benefits.

In today’s America the average business-park salaryman does not earn a wage.  He gets take-home pay, the monies left over after he and his employer have paid taxes to pay for the government pension, the government old-age health care, the government unemployment tax, and the government work-place disability premium.  And that is before the employer’s deductions for a 401k pension plan, health insurance, dental insurance, and disability insurance.  All these taxes and deductions amount to forced savings against the common vicissitudes of life, and very worthy they are.  They also amount to kind of social and economic sterilization, because the salaryman in question does not have beneficial ownership of his forced savings, not yet.  Suppose he wants to buy a house.  Wouldn’t it be a good idea for him to access his savings and thus reduce the necessary mortgage?  Suppose he wants to start a business?  Isn’t that the whole purpose of savings?  Suppose he wants to go back to school?  It would be nice to apply the unemployment insurance part of his forced savings to his school fees and his living expenses.  But he can’t, because the government in its wisdom and the employer in his cunning have sequestered the salaryman’s savings away, they have sterilized him against an irresistable urge for economic procreation. For it seems to governments and corporations that people are better off when they follow orders, rather than head out to the territory in reckless or independent action.

You can see the government’s interest in all this.  It can take the forced savings and spend it on buying votes until the salaryman needs it decades later.  You can see the employer’s interest.  He would like the worker to work and not spend time on non-work-related activities like financial management and health-care planning.  He would also like the worker not to bother his silly little head about setting up in business — perhaps in competition with his former employer.

All of which is to say that perhaps, in spite of 200 years of political propaganda,  the yoke of the factory system has fallen hardest on the shoulders, not of the manual worker, but on the middle-class knowledge worker, disciplined, controlled, confined in his cubicle as perhaps no factory hand in the 19th century or slave on a sugar island had to be.  For let us not forget the words of the slave drivers and the factory bosses, that post-pubertal males could not be made to submit to the gang system or to factory discipline.  Our rulers need our government school system to create the submissive personality in their subjects and prepare them for work as human cogs in a large bureaucratic system. But what about the human cogs? What is best for us?

In this book, a manifesto for a future conservatism, we have appealed more than normal to writers from the left.  We have done this following the injunction of F.S.C. Northrop in his Meeting of East and West at the beginning of a chapter on German Idealism.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional modern French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.1

It is one thing for conservatives to appeal to Edmund Burke and the good old days of Locke and Hume and Montesquieu.  Conservatives are already persuaded by the conservative Enlightenment.  But arguments based on Burke and Co. do nothing to persuade the modern ruling class, which regards the culture and philosophy of the American founders to be “shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.”  Anyway, the founders were slave owners!  The modern ruling class rose in the 19th century, as we have seen, as an intellectual movement that replaced the Enlightenment agenda of freedom and limited government with the idea, from various critiques of capitalism, that a strong government was needed to right the wrongs of an unjust industrial system or at least to mitigate its harshness.

For conservatives dreaming of a better world the situation is similar to the German and Russian critics of 18th century ideas. We take it for granted that the ideas of today’s ruling class have been “shown by indubitable evidence to be inadequate.”

In response, as we have seen, new generations of critics have arisen to apply the same critique to big government.  Conservatives are familiar with the critiques from the right.  There was Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism in the 1920s to argue that socialism was impossible because it could not compute prices.  There was F.A. Hayek in the 1940s identifying the “knowledge problem” that the man from Whitehall or Washington could not know more or outperform the millions of producers and consumers.  There were James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock with The Calculus of Consent in the 1960s making the argument that government legislation by majority rule always tended towards exploitation and rent-seeking unless constrained by a rule of unanimous consent.  Peter Berger and John Neuhaus argued in To Empower People for a middle ground of mediating institutions between the megastructures of big business and big government. Finally there is Charles Murray, whose life devoted to critique of the welfare state culminated in Coming Apart, a report that described an America that worked pretty well for the top 20 percent, not so well for the middle 40 percent, and not well at all for the bottom 30 percent. Modern conservatives, following Edmund Burke, argue for a social space of civil society between the dominating systems of the modern Bigs.  But the ruling class of gentry liberals has rejected the conservative critique, by ignoring its thinkers and by demonizing its reform politicians and their policies.

Now comes a critique of the welfare state from the left.  As we have seen, the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists found that both big government and big capitalism tended to be dominating, with Jürgen Habermas contrasting the domination of system with the collaborative space of communicative action.  Left-wing radicals like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their radical Empire trilogy argued for a multitude of “singularities” living a “life in common” of creative production and “affect” that was now replacing the masses of working-class factory workers suited only for standardized and routine work.  James C. Scott has illuminated modern government as an effort to make individuals “legible” to government, and thereby taxable and controllable.  It is one thing for our ruling class to ignore the attack on the welfare state from the right; it is another thing to ignore the critique of the welfare state developed by left-wing writers.

This book is naturally friendly to the critiques of the welfare state from the right. But we argue that the real critique comes from the left, with the exposure of both modern government and modern business as empires of reason and fundamentally dominatory.  In the analysis of modern government in Chapter Two and modern business in Chapter Three we have attempted to expose the original sin of both modern government and modern business.  Both are seduced, more than they can bear to admit, by the sirens of system, of force, and domination.  The fact is that modern government is founded upon the successful effort of the absolute monarchs to penetrate the mediating structures of the early modern period, the guilds and confraternities, in order to make their subjects individually legible, taxable, and controllable.  Nothing much has changed since then on the governance front, except for the worse.  The fact is that modern business is founded upon the successful effort of slave drivers and factory owners to bend humans to the gang system and so-called “industrial discipline.”  Admittedly there has been a change in the last two centuries: the slave driver’s cowskin whip has been confiscated, although it made a surprise farewell tour in the 20th century in the lands of communism and fascism, and survives in the miserable hell-holes of the thug dictators.  The power of the factory boss has been softened.  But not by much, and often not for any noble reason but the practical one that businessmen have discovered that profits are bigger when workers are fat and happy rather than cringing under the infernal speedup of Taylorism.  They have learned, with the German generals, that the best workers are “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility” and much more productive than the shuffling squads of proletarians in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Long ago, the 20th century’s great Willa Cather posed the problem of the conformist middle class in The Professor’s House.  Professor Godfrey St. Peter was an adventurous soul in his youth.  But then came love for Lillian, and “because there was Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary.”  The only outlet for adventure was to write about it in a chilly attic, in his multi-volume “Spanish Adventurers in North America.”  Then came into his life Tom Outland, an unschooled boy without a high-school diploma looking to enroll at Hamilton College.  Tom, orphaned as a baby, actually had lived life as an adventurer, rather than merely writing about adventure, and in a year’s work cowpunching in New Mexico had discovered a priceless lost cliff city of the pueblo Indians, a fictional equivalent of the ruins in Mesa Verde National Park.  Tom gets into college after four months cramming his mathematics, and later makes a patentable discovery as a physicist that makes them all wealthy.  Everyone would have lived happily ever after except that Tom goes off to Europe with the Father Duchene that had taught him Virgil and dies in World War I. Who is the eminent Professor St. Peter? Is he an educated scholar, or really just another mere mass man leading Thoreau’s life of quiet desperation?

Ever since the coming-out of Reason in the French Revolution men have been asking whether it is possible to escape Reason’s domination.  It seems that Horkheimer and Adorno’s warning is all too true, that what men want from nature is to dominate it and other men, and then discover that the real danger is that the systems that men design so they may dominate nature turn around and end up dominating them.  So humans have sought liberation in Romanticism, in socialism, in environmentalism. It is provocative that precisely the age in which man has dominated nature woman has emerged from subservience and privacy into the public square.  Is this because Man’s domination of nature has freed women from the yoke of nature’s oppression or is it because it has freed women from the patriarchy’s oppression?  It may be that the dominatory and disciplinary culture of modern government and modern industry has pressed upon the brow of man none other than the age-old crown of thorns taken suddenly off the collective brow of womanhood.

If we desire emancipation from the culture of compulsion we must also liberate ourselves from the systems that dominate us.  We must, following Habermas, balance the power of system with the truthful and non-dominatory language of the communicative lifeworld, the German Lebenswelt that translates into the Anglo-Saxon civil society. We must leave the shelter of the enveloping custodial institutions of rational system and recover our humanness as social humans that live by our language.

But the truth is that we cannot begin to emerge from the custody of the welfare state until we have learned to stand up to the modern ruling class and send it packing.

1F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, Ox Bow Press,  1979, p. 193.

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Fifteen:
Liberals and the Welfare State

The liberal elite fight at every opportunity for the expansion of the welfare state and its political patronage and corruption.

Ever since the emergence of the first proto-state, government has been organized as an armed minority, occupying territory, taxing people and goods, holding power by rewarding its supporters. If the feudal state maintained itself by rewarding its feudatories and the absolute monarch maintained his territorial state by rewarding the great merchants whose credit financed his standing army, then the modern democratic welfare state maintains itself by buying the support of the voters.

Often enough this armed minority experienced itself as a ruling class, “uniformly conscious and organized” over an empire1, as in the Roman Empire, or a multi-state region, as the warrior aristocrats in medieval and early-modern Europe, and this ruling class developed a self-conscious ruling-class morale to sustain itself in power.

Our modern ruling class, the gentry liberals, is such a self-conscious ruling class, sustained by a class morale that celebrates itself as an educated and evolved elite called to create a just and peaceful world to replace the cruel and unjust predecessor regimes ruled by kings, bishops, landed aristocracies, and bourgeoisies.

To reward itself for its goodness our modern ruling class seeks to create a pleasing aesthetic world in the lands it rules in the way described by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State; it is a ruling strategy first conceived by absolute monarchs in the early modern period.  It seeks to simplify society and make it legible, and it deploys an administrative welfare state to regulate and control its people, in their own best interests, as 18th century British aristocrats employed Capability Brown to create, out of the profits of slave plantations, grand estates pleasing to the eye. The modern ruling ideology culminates in a spiritual and aesthetic project to save the planet from environmental and climate disaster that gives the ruling class of gentry liberals a sense of meaning and provides a satisfying scope for scions of high-born liberal gentry to obtain for themselves a meaningful life trajectory in politics, the academy, the media, the foundations, and activism.

But underneath the spiritual and aesthetic superstructure of any ruling class is its power project, the means it uses to maintain itself in power by rewarding its supporters. In pre-modern societies the ruling class offered security from the real threats to its retainers from marauding bandits in the borderlands. In the modern state the ruling class offers security from the uncertainties of life in the market economy. It sequesters up to one half of the productive labor of its people in taxes and offers in return a modicum of security with its government-administered social insurance programs. The retainers trust the government to maintain the programs and fear any modification or reform, much as feudal retainers must have feared the removal of their traditional benefit before the modern era.

Of course, the ruling class does not just bind its retainers to it with promises of security; it also attracts support with direct offers of loot. In the United States the ruling class buys the support of African Americans with welfare, affirmative action, and race politics of the kind that President Obama executed so consistently during his two terms in office. It buys the support of women with abortion politics and “affordable healthcare” and women’s liberation politics. And this is tearing the nation apart. Of course, the gentry liberal ruling class possesses not only political power but also cultural power, as its votaries set the agenda for the culture in the schools, the universities, and the media. It neutralizes opposing cultural memes with its “politically correct” power of naming and shaming cultural heretics that fail to kow-tow before its ruling-class orthodoxy.

The various ruling classes have operated for centuries in the strict Marxian meaning of a class, as a self-conscious group of humans organized in active pursuit of its class interests. But the rise of a self-conscious merchant and trading class in medieval Europe and the rise of the bourgeoisie in the early modern period has meant that class consciousness now permeates not just the ruling class but the whole of society. The French Revolution was a revolt of the middle-class Third Estate against the ancien régime led by the First and Second Estates. Following the example of the middle-class revolutions Marx sought to spark class consciousness in the workers that were thronging into the cities to work as factory hands in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, thus encouraging class conflict between the capitalists and the proletarians. In our day the ruling class of gentry liberals uses so-called identity politics to create class-consciousness in its supporters: minorities, young people, and women.  It likes to think of itself presiding over society and protecting the marginalized groups from the exploitations of the rich and white patriarchal supremacists. Its regime shock troops are taught to think of society as a class society of oppressors that dominate the oppressed. They, the shock troops of social justice warriors, are called to change this unjust system as champions of the oppressed. In fact, the gentry liberals are organized merely to pursue the class interests of the gentry liberals acting as a ruling class. The encouragement of class morale in its supporters is merely a tactic to maintain the loyalty of the regime supporters.

In this book we have proposed to explain the world with a different class system. In our model, the ruling class consists of the people of the creative self allied with the people of the subordinate self. In the middle are the people of the responsible self.

Thus the gentry liberals have created an over-under coalition, on the feudal model of the Middle Ages. The gentry liberal class moves forward on a creative project of modernization, administration, equalization, institutionalization, in which its members are to obtain satisfaction in the aesthetic project of societal improvement, a Sisyphean task made bearable by the usual ruling-class perquisites of money, power and the love of beautiful women. Part of this project administers pensions and privileges for the members of the under part of the coalition. These unders are, according to the system developed above, people of the subordinate self; they are soldiers in the army of the gentry liberal class, and as soldiers have ever wanted, they expect free stuff in return for their vote and their support for the regime. They are the clients in a patron/client relation, and as long as the free stuff continues they willingly play their part to keep the gentry liberals in power.

But we have seen that in the modern age a large section of the population has moved from living as people of the subordinate self and as clients of great patrons, and instead has aspired to individual responsibility. And we have also seen that the modern economy cannot succeed on the feudal model where the landed lord directs the traffic upon his estate and the feudal retainers touch their forelocks and wait upon the lord’s orders, expressed through his stewards. That is the point of George Eliot’s uber-responsible hero Adam Bede and the Garth family in her Middlemarch. Carpenter Adam Bede and estate manager Caleb Garth willingly seek honorable employment in early 19th century rural England not as clients to great lords but as diligent individuals sustained by their class morale as people of the responsible self.

But for many the 19th century was terrifying, particularly the sons of self-made businessmen, and so the original political program of the welfare state proposed that these self-same sons would become lordly politicians and experts, acting as social physicians, and would treat the raging fever of capitalism with social insurance programs legislated and administered by government for the benefit of subordinate and exploited workers. In the role of social physician, the gentry liberals worried about the lives of workers in the mines and the factories and rewarded these workers with state-funded benefits. But they found, once the working class started moving up into the middle class and started to live and think and vote like people of the responsible self, that there were really not enough subordinate victims of capitalistic cholera occupying beds in their fever hospital to guarantee ruling-class jobs and sinecures in the future. It was the genius of the Frankfurt School Marxists to grasp that the concept of exploited victims, that worked so well in the early years of the welfare state, could be extended from the working class to other groups. Women, racial and sexual minorities also had their grievances, could be enticed with political favors, could be indoctrinated with class consciousness in identity politics boot camp, and could be enrolled into the great army of progressive voters. And it was the practical good sense of politicians to see that the declining ranks of workers needed to be replenished with fresh recruits for the army of the people of the subordinate self: immigrants from Central and South America.

We have argued, from the first chapter, that the administrative state that has grown up following this political dispensation cannot thrive. It claims to protect the people against hardship, it claims to assist them in obtaining health care, it insists on educating their children, and it does it all very badly. This is because the welfare state turns back the clock on social cooperation; it sets humanity on a road to serfdom, in Hayek’s felicitous phrase. Humans are social animals; we minimize force and compulsion among “us” and thrive best when the cost and the cruelty of force is minimized. As human society has developed from small nomadic groups that fought every day for survival into a post-industrial society where it is routine to trust and cooperate with people on the other side of the planet, the need for force has radically declined. So we have argued that the authoritarian administrative welfare state that operates on a principle of force, where its subjects are forced to pay for security with swingeing taxes on labor, are forced to pay for childhood education and mandatory schooling with swingeing taxes on their suburban homes, must pass away into history, to be replaced by a welfare state that is not administrative, not dominatory, but social, in the sense that security will be secured by horizontal social and economic relationships rather than vertical, hierarchical relationships in pensions, in health care, in education, in the relief of the poor. Vertical, hierarchical provision of social goods just doesn’t work very well; it takes too much force.

But what about the gentry liberals, today’s ruling class? As the “over” part of the over-under coalition between the people of the creative self and the people of the subordinate self that we know in the United States as the Democratic Party, they will be out of a job in the world that is to come, because nobody will need the politics of entitlement and race/class/sex division that binds the administrative state’s supporters to the ruling class. This will be a big change for them. Where will they go? What will they do?

You know what? They will do just fine, just as Scarlett O’Hara probably did just fine after Rhett Butler finally gave up on her. And there is this: As people of the creative self the gentry liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor that are not grounded in the conceit of political power and the injustice of government force.

The question is: what will make them go? The answer, of course, is: nothing short of revolution, the revolution that will occur when the ruling class runs out of money with which to bribe the voters and reward its supporters. Meanwhile it is the duty of every responsible individual to deflate the conceit of the gentry liberal apology for power, and the conceit that things are so bad that only force can fix it.

The argument of this book is simple; it urges us merely to remember every moment that government is force. Since that is true, every argument for more government is making the argument that things are so bad that only force can fix them. The opposing argument is: Really? You mean to say that things are really so bad that only force will fix them? Are you sure? Every day in every way we people of the responsible self must ask the question: why must our rulers resort to force? They say they believe in inclusion; they say they believe in compassion; they say they believe in creativity. Why then is every problem an excuse for force?

The whole argument of this book is that when bad things happen in the modern world, a world where wealth is found in knowledge rather than in land, then almost always force is not the answer.

But we admit that this is a new thing.

For the chimpanzee, we saw, territory equals food, and the males are properly engaged upon a perpetual border war. For the human nomad upon the Asian steppe fierceness and war is the only way to guarantee access to pasture for the flocks. For the agricultural empire, the marcher lords must patrol the border and keep the nomads from looting the temple granaries. For the trading nation-state the navy must keep the oceans clear of pirates and the arteries of commerce must be kept safe for merchants and travelers. In the industrial city the police must keep young single males just off the boat from preying on ordinary people going about their business. These are, we propose, valid and necessary uses of social compulsion and necessary deployments of force against other human groups.

But in this day and age, how much force is really necessary, and how much is the conceit of people that have responded to the ancient instinct to seize power if they can? This book argues that modern society needs less government because it needs less force. It needs less force because the modern world runs not on access to land but access to knowledge. The modern individual is not like the First Individual of George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Essays myth, staking out his plot of land and its harvest of life-giving food.  Today’s imperative is the search for knowledge and, even more important, the exploitation of knowledge: the knowledge of how to serve others, how to make things for others, how to cooperate with others. Today’s typical human is the Responsible Individual. The responsible individual does not search for the shelter of a powerful patron; the responsible individual does not experience himself as a victim. The responsible individual does not experience himself as a genius in the making. The responsible individual asks only how he can be of service to the world.

What we are saying is that there will be less demand in the future for great political leaders, government experts, central banks full of economics PhDs, activists running NGOs, universities full of “studies” departments, investigative journalists, artists bashing the bourgeoisie, community organizers, activists, advocates, social justice warriors, and the rest of the left-wing culture. In other words, gentry liberals will have to go and find something else to do. People that want to live lives of “expressive individualism” will have to fulfill their creative destinies in ways other than as creatively thinking up and acting out creative uses of government power. There would be two reasons for that, both adapted from liberal philosopher Charles Taylor. First of all, government power does not contribute to human flourishing. Second, we too often find that government power tends to “crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity.” In recent times, all too often, it has been the educated class, the people of the creative self, that have acted upon the idea that the transformation of society through politics and government — compulsion and force — was the highest and best way for them to express their creative impulse and yearning. This goes against the fundamental experience of the age of knowledge that has succeeded the age of agriculture. It must change.

But if the gentry liberals are to be eased off their seat of power, we must develop a bill of indictment, a Declaration of Independence for our own time that sets forth the crimes and misdemeanors that disqualify the ruling class of gentry liberals from continuing their cruel and unjust rule. What is the crime that the gentry liberals have visited upon us? It issues from the very thing on which gentry liberals have congratulated themselves: their activism on behalf of the people of the subordinate self. The grain of truth in the left’s program since its discovery by Marx on tablets in a British Museum reading room is that the bourgeoisie, the middle class, called here people of the responsible self, are cruel and unjust towards the workers, the proletarians, called here people of the subordinate self, in ripping these marginalized groups out of their traditional collective societies and dumping them into the hell of individualism in soulless factories, mines and offices. Marx’s indictment is still the motor that drives our politics and our culture.

But we here indict the gentry liberal ruling class for a crime more premeditated and more deliberate than the almost accidental crime of the bourgeoisie. The gentry liberal ruling class, like ruling classes down the ages, has recruited people into its regime army with promises of loot and plunder. That is what recruiting sergeants have always promised to the yokels thinking of going for a soldier. But the fate of soldiers everywhere is to die, sick and wounded by the side of the route of march, used up and thrown away. The free proletarians were “hurled” off the land onto the labor market by landowners that no longer needed them. The white working class of the mid 20th century was thrown away when gentry liberals went for the votes of minorities and women instead of working stiffs. The cruelty and the injustice of the gentry liberal ruling class is that the people of the subordinate self they recruited to their power project and used as soldiers in their army of progressivism, are now cast aside and mouldering away in cultural collapse. As described by Charles Murray in Coming Apart the underclass is characterized by two pathologies: the women don’t marry and the men don’t work. For that the ruling class must be discredited and removed from power.

1Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. I, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 528.

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Sixteen:
From Freeloaders to Free Givers

Let the ruling liberal elite tremble at a conservative revolution.  Conservatives, moderates, and liberal victims have nothing to lose but their shame.  They have a world to win.

If it is true that the poor, without the help of the welfare state, have the ability and the culture to thrive as social beings, and if it is true that the middle class is diminished by its enslavement into the conformism of school and career, and if it is true that the gentry liberals have created an unjust state that uses the poor as regime supporters to maintain the gentry-liberal ruling class in political power, then what price the welfare state? The welfare state, in its present form, is based on the false choice between laissez-faire individualism and social assistance and deliberately obscures the real choice between a free and benevolent association and a compulsory government dependency.

It’s all very well to decide what would be possible for the poor and the middle class — and even a future of a genuine creative life for the gentry liberals — in a world after liberalism and the welfare state.  Anyone can do that.  The question is, would the poor and the middle class want that possibility?  Perhaps they would want to continue in the soft totalitarianism of the welfare state as Herbert Marcuse sneeringly predicted in the 1960s.  In the early 2010s, low-income Americans were advertising, through their actions, their preference for a life of government benefits in preference to a life of work.  Given that a single mother of two in Pennsylvania in 2010 could could get annual benefits worth $46,000 or so, why would she attempt to work?1  Similarly middle-class Americans were demonstrating that they preferred a life checking the boxes of the middle-class entitlement multiple choice test over a life of robust responsibility, going along with free schooling and subsidized college education and highly taxed employment and government-specified retirement benefits rather than insisting upon alternatives.  If they wanted something different they could have sought it out.  What would it take for welfare recipients to change their minds about work?  And what would it take for the middle class to lose their attachment to middle-class entitlements?  The answer is pretty simple.  The government would have to run out of money.   Only then would people start looking around for something different.  In 2012, for instance, the voters voted for President Obama to maintain the status-quo.  Why not?  The Republican nominee did not offer a compelling reason for change, a compelling reason to risk a change in the trajectory of big government.  So the voters chose their benefits.

We have seen that there are two different ways in which humans look for something different, when they respond to an existential need to change their conditions of existence.  Either they go a-freebooting, striking out into the unknown, as warrior bands have done since time immemorial, following their aggressive instincts.  Or they invent a religion, in order to cut down on the freebooting and the freeloading as they have done since time immemorial, following their natural cooperative instincts.

We have spun in Chapter Five the cords that bind a community of social humans: gathering people into a community, establishing rules of behavior, an ability to sacrifice, burying enmities, directing the moral sense with cultural memes.  We could bind everyone into community by force, of course, but force is expensive, so humans long ago developed religion as a more effective way than force to socialize each human into the right thinking, the right feeling, and the right acting for the good of the social group.  Religion even developed cunning tricks, like the concepts of divine justice and reincarnation, to persuade people that, while evildoers don’t necessarily get their deserts in this world, they will certainly get the attention of God in the next world or get relegated to a lower caste in the next life.  And, of course, a religious community also identifies potentially trustworthy people, the kind of people demonstrating daily in their actions their willingness to pay the cost of belonging to a human community.

In the last two thousand years the fundamental social problem has been the challenge of moving to the city and learning how to operate in an urban society.   We saw this as a process of moving from the tribal self of the hunter-gatherer or the servile self of the agricultural peasant to a new kind of membership in the city as one of the People of the Responsible Self.

In their initial responses to the new “ultimate conditions” of existence in the city, some well-born humans thought that salvation was obtained by withdrawing from the world, a strategy that Rodney Stark has called “upper-class asceticism.”  Perhaps that worked well back then for princelings like Gautama Siddhartha as it now works for tenured university professors in the modern era.  But in the Protestant Reformation the rising bourgeoisie determined that “salvation is not to be found in any kind of withdrawal from the world but in the midst of worldly activities.”2  In the words of revivalist preacher Barton Stone, Protestant revivalism woke people up from “the sleep of ages” to the idea that they could become responsible beings called to a life of purpose.

You can see this narrative at work in George Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, published in 1859 but set in 1799.  Its protagonists are shining examples of responsible virtue, of what Max Weber would come to call the “Protestant ethic.”  Seeking salvation in responsible worldly lives of work and mindfulness are the rising carpenter Adam Bede and the incandescent Methodist lay preacher, Dinah Morris.  But protagonists need antagonists, and so Eliot creates the heedless Arthur Donnithorne, the local squire’s son, and the foolish Hetty Sorrel to illuminate the worthiness of Bede and Morris.  At every moment in the novel Adam and Dinah are thinking about how to live and act rightly, and how to follow through on their virtuous intentions.  Needless to say, the heedless Arthur and Hetty do not heed anything but their shallow and selfish impulses.  Because Adam Bede is a novel, divine justice gets to operate in this world as well as the next, so Adam and Dinah live happily ever after, while Hetty Sorrel is transported beyond the seas for killing the baby she bore from the seed of heedless Arthur Donnithorne.

At every great moral or social crisis in American history, according to William G. McLoughlin, Americans have met the challenge with a Great Awakening, a spiritual revival that sets the stage — spiritually, politically, and culturally — for a great age of reform.  The great revival of the mid 18th century got people riled up for the American Revolution, and the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century prepared the ground for the battle against slavery.  As we have seen in Chapter Five, the modern world is a ferment of religious movements trying to conjure up and enact new symbolic forms and acts to relate themselves to the ultimate conditions of their existence.  There are movements that appeal to the educated elite and attempt to compensate for the Death of God.  There are movements that appeal to the rising middle class, living out Max Weber’s notion of the modern Puritan seeking a life that finds meaning in work as a calling.  There are movements that appeal to the urban poor, that encourage a united front to the challenges of life on the margin.

All moral movements find their energy in the eternal war between good vs. evil.  They must do, for every moral movement seeks to find the meaning of life here on Earth, and the meaningful life is necessarily the good life, and life that is not informed by the true meaning of life is necessarily evil.  Having satisfied itself to the meaning of life and the definition of the good life a moral movement then divides up the world into “us” and “them.”  “We” are the good people working to relate our lives to the ultimate conditions of existence; “we” can be trusted to act rightly and can be given the benefit of the doubt.  Within the community of “us” there is no need for force and compulsion, for trustworthy people can be trusted to do the right thing. But “they” are the evil people that cannot be trusted.  Against “them” there is probably a need for armed defense, and “they” are likely only to respond to force and compulsion.

We have seen that this is not just the way of modern humans but of historical and ancient humans.  Thus all bands of hunter-gatherers thought of the group of the kindred as “us” and the neighboring group as a dangerous “them.”  All villages of agriculturalists thought of the village as “us” and the village over the hill as “them.”  It is a striking achievement of the nation state to have extended the notion of “us” to all people that dwell within the sacred borders of the nation state and speak “our” language.  People in other lands that speak other languages are not to be trusted.

Now, it is the vision of our modern ruling class of the educated elite that it is called by the ultimate conditions of existence to gather the nations into supranational federations.  That is the goal of the leaders of the European Union: “ever closer union.”  And beyond that, the modern ruling class would like the whole world to live under one world federation: if not the United Nations, then some other global federation.  Theirs is a moral movement to unite all humankind into one “we.”  This vision prompts the modern ruling class to imagine a different kind of “us” versus “them.”  “We” are the people working for ever closer union; “they” are the people opposed to our vision.  Within the nation states the ruling class pursues a slightly different division between “us” and “them,” where “we” are the educated ruling class and its traditionally marginalized clients, the over-under ruling coalition, and “they” are the rich, the corporations, the Christian fundamentalists, the gun owners, and the rednecks.

It is the argument of this book that the moral movement of the modern ruling class has failed, and is heading to red ruin, because of a fatal flaw.  This flaw is the failure of the ruling class to lead the clients of the administrative welfare state, the people of the subordinate self, towards the life of the “responsible self.”  Every cohort of humans that has migrated to the city has embraced the notion of the “responsible self” in order to thrive in the city and adapt its conditions of life to the conditions of the city, and, up to now, each cohort has had to work out the means of adaptation on its own.  But the modern ruling class decided in the 19th century to award itself a power of attorney to act on behalf of the lower orders, and since then has rarely encouraged the clients of the welfare state to take up the life of the responsible self; instead it has encouraged in its clients the notion of the “marginalized self,” the victimized self separated by injustice from the enjoyments of its fair share of the wealth of the city.

Today’s ruling class justifies its leadership on the grounds of “economic inequality,” a revised version of the exploitation argument made by the Educated Youth of the 19th century.  It presumes that the poverty and “inequality” suffered by the poor in the city is due to injustice, social and political impediments, institutional barriers to the welfare of the poor.  Where this “inequality” can be found to obtain, and it usually can, then it follows that the ruling class should act to remove those barriers using government force.

If the marginalized folk in the city were truly barred from the opportunity to thrive in the city then the program of the ruling class would be the right one.  It would be necessary to protect the inner-city poor from unscrupulous employers and landlords, from redlining banks and racist rednecks.  And it goes without saying that a whole menu of social benefits would be necessary to preserve the poor from indigence.  But we have seen in Chapter Twelve that in the Third World the poor manage to thrive without social benefits, and even manage to find the money to get their children into illegal private schools so that they can acquire the basic skills needed to thrive in the city.  Even in South Chicago, down the street from President Obama’s liberal enclave of Hyde Park, the urban poor exhibit extraordinary skills in their struggle to thrive.  On this argument the disabilities of the poor issue less from social injustice and more from cultural disability, an unwillingness or inability to present themselves to the landlords and employers in a way calculated to inspire trust.  Liberal economist Robert William Fogel attempted in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism to convert his liberal friends away from the program of fighting material inequality towards an appreciation of the poor suffering from a “maldistribution of spiritual resources”,3 i.e. character. On his view, the problem is not material inequality but cultural deprivation.

But how does a person develop the kind of character that will help to make up their deficiencies in “spiritual resources,” and help them present themselves to landlords and employers in the right way, and enable them to thrive in the city?  The answer is religion.  It was Methodism that taught Adam Bede and Dinah Morris how to live the life of the responsible self.  It is Pentecostalism that teaches the Latin-American poor to abandon the culture of machismo for responsible work in a calling.  It is house churches that teach the deracinated urban women of China how to make sense of their conditions of existence and rebuild community out of the rubble and the injustice of Maoist communist system.

And it is religion operating outside the supervision and control of the ruling class.

1Gary Alexander, “Welfare’s Failure and the Solution,” slideshow, American Enterprise Institute.  Accessed 2/11/2013: http://www.aei.org/files/2012/07/11-alexander-presentation_10063532278.pdf

2Ibid., p. 368.

3Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 235.

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Seventeen:
The Real Meaning of Society

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.1

Humans are social animals; we live in groups. Living in groups, humans idealize group living.  We envision the happy family, the peaceful village, the bustling city.  We create myths about the Garden of Eden, the Isle of the Blessed.  In the misery of suffering we conjure up a means of salvation, a liberation from injustice.  We love cooperation; we hate conflict.  We construct a faith in a providential God, and then worry about why this God allows little children to die of starvation.

Charles Darwin wrote frankly about humans as social animals.  For him, it is the capability “of reflecting on his past actions and their motives” that really differentiates humans from the “lower animals.”2 This development of moral qualities extends social instincts such as “pleasure in one another’s company,” warning of danger, defense and aiding of those in the same community.  Language becomes a guide to aid one’s fellows, and the motive to give aid “is much influenced by the praise or blame” of others.” But man is also guided by conscience, where “habitual convictions, controlled by reason” develops into “the supreme judge and monitor.”3  As instinct or morality, social behavior is “highly beneficial to the species” and is probably “acquired through natural selection.”4

Social living isn’t all cooperation, of course.  Social living is a blend of cooperation and conflict.  Consider the chimpanzee, our closest genetic relative, exhaustively researched in Africa by celebrity researchers like Jane Goodall for the past half century.  There is no secret to our interest in the great apes: we want to know what we humans are like underneath the cultural veneer.

Jane Goodall started out thinking that “the chimpanzees at Gombe lived in one happy group.”  But she discovered that she was wrong: they did not. As Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn,

Chimps are divided into communities of up to 120 members, which occupy and aggressively defend specific territories.5

Chimps are like human hunter-gatherers.  They are patrilocal, “meaning the males stay in their home territory and females move to find mates in neighboring territories.”  In human society, women “marry out.”  There is another way in which chimps are like humans.  They conduct “murderous raids on neighbors.”6

Chimps are territorial and aggressive for a simple reason.  Chimps feed on fruit from trees, and these fruit bearing trees are typically scattered throughout a territory.  The bigger the territory the more fruit bearing trees and the shorter the interval between births for the female chimps.  Chimp survival depends on defending a territory big enough to have trees coming into fruit throughout the year.  Territory is a matter of life and death.

We modern humans have developed a myth about human conflict.  We believe that the modern era has experienced wars of unprecedented savagery, while primitive peoples live in comparative tranquility.  In fact the opposite is true.  About 30 percent of chimp males in the Gombe reserve die from aggression, about the same as males in the Yanomamo tribe in South America.7 A typical hunter-gatherer tribe loses about 0.5 percent of its population to combat each year.  That’s equivalent to about two billion combat deaths for the human population in the 20th century.8 In fact, we learned from Steven Pinker, we need to accept that human violence has declined over the centuries.  In hunter-gatherer band the entire male population is enrolled in the armed forces and conflict over territory is constant.  In late agricultural society, the entire aristocracy is enrolled in the officer corps, and conflict over territory is more periodic.  In the industrial age, wars are the professional responsibility of a small corps of experts, and the rest of the population works to produce for each other and to serve each other.

There is a practical reason for the decline in conflict from the hunter-gatherer days.  Big agricultural empires are much less vulnerable to loss of territory than small groups of hunter-gatherers.  Even if border wars are constant, they will affect only the people in the border areas of larger agricultural fiefdoms, whereas all the people in a hunter-gatherer band are immediately affected by a dawn raid from the neighboring tribe.

A similar rule applies to the decline of conflict in the industrial era.  In the transition to an industrial society that began five hundred years ago and is now perhaps past its peak the whole question of territory has lost its urgency.  Wealth and power are no longer measured in land and good rich acres.  They are measured in capital, the ability to produce goods and services.  In industrial society, therefore, the real wealth is not in land, or even in factories and farms.  In the high-income countries in 2000 the World Bank estimated total wealth at about $439,000 per capita.  Of this $10,000 was “natural capital,” $76,000 was “produced capital,” and fully $353,000 — over 80 percent — was “intangible capital.”  Intangible capital is the capital inside peoples’ minds.9

The emergence of intangible wealth has left an indelible mark on the modern world.  When hunter-gatherers won a border war, they killed all the defeated males.  In the agricultural age the Romans salted the fields of the defeated Carthaginians, so that truly, Cato’s demand of Carthago delenda est was fulfilled, and when feudal lords won a dynastic war they plundered their enemy and brought home the spoils of battle in valuables and slaves.  But at the end of World War II the victorious Allies competed to obtain the services of the best German scientists.  Then they sent food aid to their vanquished foes and lent them money to rebuild democratic capitalist prosperity out of the ruins of defeat.  Nazis may have been evil, but Germans were and are industrious workers that benefit the world with their manufacturing Mittelstand.  The Japanese army may have brutalized China, but Japanese are cooperative workers that have defined modern product quality in their work for the Japanese keiretsu.

As humans evolved culturally from hairless chimpanzees into the nomadic groups that colonized the world and then to agricultural peasants and now to modern knowledge workers, the big problem has been what to do about the aggressive instincts of the males.  How do you transform the border warrior that teamed with his brothers and cousins in murderous dawn raids on the neighboring village into today’s construction worker, who cooperates in a work team by day and joins with his buddies in the evening to root vicariously for the warriors on his city’s professional baseball team as they battle their hated rivals on TV?  How do you transform the Homeric warrior that hewed to his warrior’s honor code into today’s aggressive CEO leading his team to market-share victory?

The answer is that you change the culture.  The Greek warrior chieftains battling on the plains of Troy lived in a world of fate and quarreling Olympian gods that helped or hindered humans as the mood took them.  The span of cooperation among the Argives was limited; they only trusted their people from their polis.  The reality of their life was conflict, and to the victor the spoils.  The modern CEO lives in a world of nature’s providence, of wealth waiting to be created for humans with knowledge and initiative.  The span of cooperation is vast; trust is worldwide, a weave of informal relations and formal agreement.  Conflict is the exception, an unwelcome interruption to normal cooperative relations.

Moderns are pretty well agreed that the wide modern horizon of cooperation is a good thing, and the marginalization of conflict is a good thing too.  But moderns do not agree upon the moral/cultural, economic and political arrangements needed to support a tranquil world of cooperation, and they perceive that people that oppose their view of the good society represent a risk of future conflict.  In fact, moderns believe that conflict is only justified in the promotion of their own particular vision of the good, cooperative society.  American exceptionalists believe that conflict is unavoidable between the democratic capitalist west and dictators wielding weapons of mass destruction.  Islamists believe that conflict is unavoidable between the House of Peace and the Great Satan.  American liberals believe that conflict is inevitable between traditionally marginalized communities and reactionary racists, sexists, and homophobes.  But after the necessary conflict is won, then universal cooperation will ensue.

American conservatives are the same as the enthusiasts described above.  We believe in a necessary conflict too.  Our necessary conflict is, unfortunately, a two-front war.  Beyond the borders of the United States, conservatives are determined to fight against forces opposing the extension of democratic capitalism to the wide world.  These opponents used to be fascists and Communists; today they might be radical Islamists or thug dictators, or conceivably a rising hegemonic power like China.  Inside the United States, the enemy is the liberal administrative state: big government, the liberal social agenda, administrative regulation, government experts, crony capitalism, the mainstream media complex.  The enemy is not liberals as such; the enemy is liberal power: the political regime of liberal corruption, liberal cruelty, liberal waste, liberal injustice, willful liberal ignorance, and liberal delusion.  The way to victory is not by fighting liberals as such, but by persuading ordinary Americans to reject the corrupt vanities of liberal power, to show them how and why liberal power hurts them and their families, and to show them how the new conservatism can give them what they want, a society that meets their needs and legitimate desires without trenching on other peoples’ needs and desires.

This new conservative vision must meet the following requirements:

It must honor the founding vision of the First Conservative, Edmund Burke, to blend tradition and reason.

It must minimize the scope of force.

It must honor the space of the transcendental.

It must encourage human flourishing through voluntary social cooperation.

It must protect the vulnerable and the marginalized.

It must understand the range of normal human social diversity, from the ethnic enclave to the enthusiastic Christian to the creative artist to the communitarian to the visionary.

In other words, this new conservatism recognizes the claims of all the peoples to belong to that nation of nations, the United States of America.

Each head of this vision is connected to the others, and each is justified by the others, and each begins with the manifesto of Edmund Burke, the Cassandra that hurled a prophetic curse at the French Revolution.  In 1790 he predicted it would end in tyranny, at the hands of “sophisters, economists, and calculators,”10 and he was right: the mechanistic philosophy and practice of the French revolutionaries must have ended in horror and the gallows,11 and it did.

Burke’s insistence upon the relevance of sentiment in a scientific age has been at the core of modern conservatism ever since.  Burke is also famous for his fight against arbitrary power.  That was the point of his ten year fight to impeach and convict Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal, in the House of Commons.  And Burke, as a Protestant Irishman, but probably a crypto-Catholic, was deeply moved by the sufferings of minority communities.  He supported free trade with Ireland and a relaxation of the penal laws on the Catholics, and for his trouble lost his House of Commons seat in Bristol.  Burke defined what it meant to be a self-conscious conservative, living in the modern world but conscious of holding in his heart a sacred trust from the ancestors even while preserving that inheritance for generations yet unborn.

We minimize force because the principle and daily practice of limited government is the bulwark against tyranny.  We believe that government is force, and that the government that governs least governs best not least because it uses less force.  We believe that limited government with its separation of powers, its rights and its laws that restrict the powers of government, is a defense in depth against the powerful.  Just as a small country well supplied with defensive works and obstacles can make life very expensive for a powerful invading army, so the defensive works of law and custom can provide shelter against the hurricane of fire from the shock troops of the great powers in the land. The powerful always get to have an advantage over the weak, but we can limit the power of the powerful if we separate powers, both in government and in the wider society.

We honor the transcendental because it is through reflection on the infinite, at the horizon of the known world, that humans try to understand the meaning and purpose of their own lives and the community of humans within which they live and die.  There cannot be certain knowledge of the world, its origin, its workings, its purpose, its meaning.  Thus all the speculations that men and women have created about the ultimate things amount to declarations of faith.  All living things seem to have a purpose.  Humans, as self-conscious living things, are anxious to know their seeming purpose so that they might consciously seek it.  They must be allowed the space to do so, each in his or her own way.

We encourage human flourishing because to live is to grow and flower, to fruit and seed, and then to fade away.  All the paraphernalia of human life, whatever else they might mean, come down to life and its recurrent rhythms.  We conservatives believe that the best way to encourage flourishing is by voluntary social cooperation.  We believe this partly from language, from the understanding that the root of “social” and “society” is the Latin “socius,” meaning “companion.”  We believe this partly from experience, from the record of the voluntary social cooperation in the economy, the Great Enrichment of the last two hundred years.  We believe this partly from faith.  We believe that friendliness is a good thing, capable of infinite extension, and force is a bad thing, for use only in emergency.

We help the weak and the helpless because it’s the right thing to do.  Everybody, except perhaps Conan the Barbarian, agrees on that.  The great question is: How to help?  What is the best way to help the helpless, and what are we trying to do when we help them?  Conservatives believe that the experience of the last century is unequivocal.  Government welfare is a very bad way to help the poor, for anyone supplied with a pension, whether from his father or from the government, will respond with reduced work effort.  Today’s government welfare is, after all, merely a continuation of the  “outdoor relief” of the old Elizabethan Poor Law.  Where once the poor were bossed around, face to face, by the parish beadle, today they are bossed around by the state bureaucracy.  What the poor learn from parish beadles and government bureaucrats is a contempt for government.  Unfortunately, the poor also learn the cunning needed to scam the system, and that is anti-social. What is needed is to accept the poor as members of the community and interact with them as members of the community, to insist that the poor be integrated and socialized into society, full members of society expected to contribute to the community with that most precious resource, time, and not be set apart in an inner-city ghetto and stigmatized as beings that are less than full citizens.

We work to understand people different from ourselves because that is the beginning of wisdom. Humans have always regarded the “other” as idiotic or worse.  Back in the classical age Greeks used the word “barbarian” as onomatopoeia from the way the Greeks mimicked the speech of non-Greeks: “bar bar bar.”  In the modern era we look down on other people more politely, using developmental psychology to explain the differences between people, after Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit (or Mind).  For conservatives, the approach of Eric Voegelin is more comfortable.  He views the development of human consciousness as the move from compactness to differentiation.  Anyone can throw a ball.  But some people, called major league baseball pitchers, have developed the skill to throw a ball with extraordinary accuracy and speed.

That’s the agenda for the new conservative, an American manifesto to conjure up a vision of life after liberalism.  The question is what to do about it.  As conservatives, we do not believe in root and branch change to the United States, the “fundamental transformation” sought by President Obama.  We believe in practical, sensible change.  And that means change first of all in the moral/cultural realm of American life, a kind of Great Awakening, just as the movement against plantation slavery erupted as a moral movement in the late 18th century.  From the movement in the moral/cultural sector change will come to the other sectors as a harvest comes from a sowing, complementary changes in the politics and the economy of this nation, so that people will again say to each other in America, as Ronald Reagan once said, that “you and I have a rendezvous with destiny” in “this, the last best hope of man on earth.”12  And they will go to their rest knowing that America will always be a beacon, “a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”13

1George Eliot, Letter to Charles Bray, July 5, 1859.

2Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, American Home Library, p. 786.

3Ibid., p. 788.

4Ibid., p. 785.

5Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, p. 142.

6Ibid., p. 143.

7Ibid., p. 150.

8Ibid., p. 152.

9World Bank, Where is the Wealth of Nations?  p. 26.

10Edmund Burke, Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” p. 212-213.

11Ibid., p. 214.

12Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing.”  October 27, 1964. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/timechoosing.html

13Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Speech,” January 11, 1989. http://reagan2020.us/speeches/Farewell.asp

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Appendix: Manifesto

MANIFESTO
OF
THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT
OF
THE UNITED STATES

by Christopher Chantrill
(after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)

A spectre is haunted the liberal elite — the spectre of conservatism.  All the powers of the liberal establishment have entered into a secular alliance to exorcise this spectre: liberal left and Islamic extremists, left-wing professors and Hollywood moguls, Democratic politicians and government unions, feminists and gays.

Where is the conservative who has not been decried as “religious right” by opponents in power? Where is the Tea Party activist who has not been calumnied as “extremist” and “racist.” Where is the objective reporter that has not hurled back the branding reproach of extremism, against the more advanced conservative activists, or anyone that does not truckle to the reactionary liberal elite?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Conservatism is already acknowledged by all in the liberal elite to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that conservatives should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of conservatism with a manifesto of the conservative movement itself.

I. LIBERALS AND VICTIMS(1)

The history of almost all hitherto existing society is the history of patronage and clientage.  Freeman and slave, lord and serf, administrator and beneficiary, activist and rent-a-mob, in a word, patron and client stood in magisterial or servile relationship in which unequal power predominated.

In earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere this power relationship between patron and client.  In the village community the village “big man” accumulates women and distributes favors.  In feudal society the great lord defends his patrimonial estates from the piracy and plunder of other lords and a grateful peasantry grubs for the crumbs from his table in return for his protection.

For a moment in the nineteenth century this age-old relationship is interrupted by the rise of democratic capitalism.  It substitutes enthusiastic Christianity for religious hierarchy, family for clan, trust for power, contract for status, equity for debt, and service for plunder.

From the self-made industrialists of democratic capitalism emerged an educated, liberal youth, born to prosperity, in love with authenticity, and searching for meaning.  These liberals sneered at the patient accumulation of their fathers; they shouted down rules and roles and sought to achieve epiphany in creativity.  In the sufferings of the industrial worker, painfully journeying from the status culture of the country to the trust culture of the city, they found that meaning.

Expensively educated and segregated from ordinary life, the rising liberal elite determined to apply the wealth of its fathers to relieve those who lived below the poverty line.  They agitated for child labor laws, factory acts, government pensions, government unemployment benefits, government insurance.  They advocated for votes for women, civil rights for blacks, welfare benefits for single mothers.  Everything that offended their educated sensibilities would be reformed by legislation or mitigated by elite patronage.

Each step in the development of the liberal elite was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that elite.  Unknown before the rise of the commercial middle class, those political insurgents in the early development of modern government, the liberal elite has at last, with the establishment of the modern welfare state, conquered for itself a dominant political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole liberal elite.

The liberal elite, historically, has played a most reactionary part.

The liberal elite, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all benevolent, fraternal relations, and substituted between man and man no other nexus than naked political power, than callous “government programs.” For employment at will it has compelled employers and employees into a rigid system of labor “rights.”  For “learning by doing” it has enforced a rigid system of compulsory education and box-checking credentialism.  For mutual aid and fraternal association it has enforced a rigid system of compulsory government insurance.  For saving it has substituted a rigid system of income redistribution.  For charitable care it has substituted family destroying benefit payments.

The liberal elite has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere sexual relation.

The liberal elite cannot exist without constantly re-regulating the instruments of production and consumption, and with them the whole relations of society.  Constant tinkering with credit, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the liberal epoch from all earlier ones. All free, unhampered relations, with their record of competence and achievement, are swept away. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is ever compelled to face with sober senses his subservient relation to his liberal masters.

The need of a constantly expanding supply of victims chases the liberal elite over the entire society.  It must criticize everywhere, nestle everywhere, and dominate everywhere.  It has made victims of stalwart working men, confining them into labor unions dominated by its nominees.  It has convinced well-born women of a spurious victimhood, representing their minor frustrations in the public square as eternal oppression.  It has made victims of African-Americans, poisoning the painful liberation from bondage of the African slave with entangling bonds of patronage, and unjustly sponsoring a racism among African-Americans that it ruthlessly persecutes in white Americans.  It has made victims of vulnerable women, smashing the immigrant family with bribes and subsidies for single parents.  It has made victims of children, ripping them from their fathers, and incarcerating them throughout childhood in indifferent government schools. It has made victims of gays, truckling to every program of the left-wing gay activists to divide gays from the rest of society.

The liberal elite, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal government compulsion than have all preceding generations together.  Care of the aged has been stripped from families and burdened on taxpayers; education of children has been stripped from parents and awarded to an administrative apparatus; relief of the poor has been stripped from the charitable and awarded to box-checking bureaucrats; the proud independence of the scientist has been converted into servile dependence upon political grant distributors.  What earlier century had even a presentiment that such a deployment of political force would be tolerated by any human community?

The reactionary welfare state has overlaid democratic capitalism and reverted to the ancient power relations.  It substitutes secular paganism for enthusiastic Christianity, government schools for independent schools, administrative regulations for free enterprise, government programs for mutual aid, victims for citizens.  In the modern welfare state piratical liberal patrons collect tax plunder and government administrators distribute benefits to grateful clients and victims.

Our epoch, the epoch of the liberal welfare state, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified power relationships.  Every sinew of modern society strains to force citizens into one or other co-dependent role: liberal master or helpless victim.

We see then: the means of power and patronage, on whose foundation the liberal elite built itself up, were generated by democratic capitalism.  Its wealth and its productivity alone provided the resources by which the ruthless injustices and mechanical administrations of the liberal elite could be represented to the class of victims as caring and compassion.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the liberal elite is government power; the condition for government power is tax revenue. Tax revenue rests exclusively on the productivity of the producers. The advance of government, whose constant promoter is the liberal elite, constantly encroaches upon the productive capacity of the producers and their ability to serve the needs of the consumers. The development of the modern welfare state, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the liberal elite bases its power. What the liberal elite therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the conservatives are equally inevitable.

II. VICTIMS AND CONSERVATIVES

In what relation do the conservatives stand to the class of liberal victims as a whole? The conservatives do not desire to use the clients of the liberal welfare state as political pawns in elite power games.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the liberal victims as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the culture of the victim classes.

The conservatives are distinguished from the liberals by this only:

1) In the struggles of ordinary people everywhere to aspire to the bare middle-class life of a thriving family, a good job, and a home of one’s own, conservatives offer this radical program: the way forward is through acquisition of skills and the Protestant Ethic and not through political patronage.

2) In the deployment of government resources towards liberal victims conservatives are dedicated to the principle of a hand up not a hand out, to reinforce success not subsidize failure.

The immediate aim of the conservatives is the formation of non-liberal Americans into a governing majority, the overthrow of the liberal hegemony, and the reduction of the political power to its just position as coequal with the economic power and the moral/cultural power.

The theoretical and practical proposals of the conservatives are in no way based upon a specific program such as the comprehensive and mandatory government programs of the liberal elite.  They merely express, in general terms, the commitment of the conservatives to offer to the liberal victims a complete manumission from the slavery of the liberal plantation.

The distinguishing feature of conservatism is not the abolition of government generally but the abolition of unjust liberal government programs in particular.  Liberal government programs are the final and most complete expression of the system of exploiting and appropriating the voting power of the victims that is based on liberal hegemony, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the program of the conservatives may be summed up in a single sentence.  Abolition of liberal injustice.

We conservatives have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the benefits of health care, of education, and of welfare, which benefits are alleged to be the groundwork of all solidarity, equality, and dignity.

But does the liberal government program create benefits for the victims?  Not a bit.  It creates liberal power, i.e., that kind of political power which seduces people of limited skills and compromised independence into inter-generational dependency while begetting a new supply of victim votes for fresh exploitation.  The welfare state, in its present form, is based on the false choice between laissez-faire individualism and social assistance and deliberately obscures the real choice between a free and benevolent association and a compulsory government dependency.

We have seen above, that the first step in the emancipation of the victim class is to raise the victims out of dependency to a secure competency.  Emancipated from the liberal plantation the former victims may then take their place in the economic life of the nation.  Conservatives have no wish to lead or to exploit the emancipated victims, other than to congratulate them on their new-found freedom.

III. MODERATES AND CONSERVATIVES(2)

Section II has made clear the relation of the conservatives to the liberal victims.  They want nothing for them or from them except their emancipation from dependency.

Modern liberal hegemony has turned the economy of free enterprise into a vast sweat shop ruthlessly forced by regulation and taxation into compulsory support of the liberal patronage machine.  Masses of workers are organized like soldiers.  As privates in the liberal army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.  Not only are they slaves of the liberal elite and of the liberal State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the payroll tax, by the inspector, by the regulator, by the social-service worker and above all by the cadre of liberal activists and government managers.  The more openly this despotism proclaims equality and compassion to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it becomes.

In some Americans the petty and hateful exploitations of the liberal elite ignites a conservative fire; in others, the moderates, the same injustices provoke merely a resignation, a truckling to overweening power.  These moderates, the natural allies of the conservatives, have been set against the conservatives by the cunning propaganda of the liberal elite.

But moderates and conservatives are thrown together by the cruel hegemony and escalating injustices of the liberals.  The improved means of communication in the internet age permit moderates and conservatives to share their common grievances.  And that union, to attain which the burgers of the Middle Ages required centuries, the modern moderates and conservatives may achieve in a few years.

Thus will the exploited moderates, in partnership with the conservatives, combine to win the battle of democracy.

Moderates and conservatives will use their political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all privileges and unjust power from the liberal elite and remove all instruments of unjust compulsion from the hands of the State.

Of course, from the beginning, this will be effected without despotic inroads on the rights of employment and property or by means of measures which appear economically insufficient and untenable.

The following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of all takings of private property except for a specific public purpose and that with just compensation.

2. A moderate and flat-rate income tax to replace the current unjust and corrupt progressive income tax.

3. Abolition of the death tax.

4. Guarantee of property rights even for emigrants and rebels.

5. Decentralization of credit by the abolition of central banking and the institution of free banking subject to clear and practical risk limitation.  Abolition of the subsidy for debt.

6. Decentralization of the means of communication and transport from the hands of the State.

7. Abolition of all government sponsored enterprise and unfair competition with private enterprise.

8. Equal liability of all to labor.  Abolition of licensure and credentialism.  Abolition of racial preferences.  Abolition of academic sinecures and collective bargaining by government employees.

9. Combination of learning and working; gradual abolition of the distinction between education and training.

10. Abolition of forced adolescence.  An end to compulsory government education.  Emancipation of children by examination.

When, in the course of development, liberal-provoked antagonisms have disappeared, and all economic affairs have been distributed in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the social power will lose its exclusive political character and dissipate into the economic and moral/cultural sectors.  Overweening political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of the liberal elite for oppressing all others.

In place of the old liberal hegemony, with its tribalisms and group antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

IV. POSITION OF THE CONSERVATIVES IN RELATION TO THE LIBERAL ELITE

The conservatives fight for immediate aims; the liberal elite fight at every opportunity for the expansion of the welfare state and its political patronage and corruption.  The conservatives never cease, for a single instant, to instill into conservatives and moderates the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between liberals and the rest of America.

In short, the conservatives everywhere support the movement of freedom against the existing political order and its program of government expansion.

The conservatives disdain to conceal their views and aims.  They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the power of ideas, peaceful persuasion, and faithful cooperation.  Let the ruling liberal elite tremble at a conservative revolution.  Conservatives, moderates, and liberal victims have nothing to lose but their shame.  They have a world to win.

MEN AND WOMEN OF THE UNITED STATES, UNITE!

Footnotes:

1. By liberals is meant the progressive educated elite, the ruling class of the modern welfare state.  By victims is meant the class of welfare state beneficiaries who, deprived of savings or property by government patronage, are reduced to selling their voting power in order to live.

2. By moderates is meant persons of conservative temper shamed into silence by the cultural hegemony of the liberal elite.  By conservatives is meant persons of conservative temper that resist the cultural hegemony of the liberal elite.

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