Liberal Privacy Vs Conservative Transparency - Road to the Middle Class

WE ALL KNOW what the NSA surveillance case is about. It is about liberals living in a bubble, as Thomas Lifson has explained. Liberals think that the issue is government spying and the Bush administration’s overall hostility towards civil liberties, but they are wrong.

Anyway, everyone does it. Thanks to the conservative blogosphere we know that it isn’t just the Bush administration that commits electronics eavesdropping without a search warrant. Every president reserves the right to do it. Even sainted Democratic ones.

Why are liberals so sensitive about the government’s national security spying? Doesn’t everyone agree that the first duty of government to protect its citizens from enemies foreign and domestic? Not quite. Sometimes liberals in their idealistic youth say things and do things that were better kept private.

Were liberals dabbling in communism in the 1930s? Did some of them actually pass sensitive documents to the Soviets during the very time that millions were dying in the Great Terror? Did the occasional liberal pop over to Paris in the early 1970s to coordinate anti-war activities with the North Vietnamese? Are liberal journalists in the Noughties leaking sensitive national security information that may cost American lives? Never mind. It’s none of your business. There is a right to privacy in the constitution, remember, and the United States is a nation of laws and not of men.

Liberals have elevated the idea of the right to privacy into a grand constitutional doctrine. It applies to liberal bedrooms, liberal faculty lounges, liberal union halls, and liberal political meetings. Liberals demand the privacy to abort their babies without a whisper of social control, and they demand the privacy to form and operate without interference political groups, some of which, like International ANSWER, appear to be funded by nations in the Axis of Evil.

But don’t imagine that you have a right to privacy. You think you have the right to build a house on your property? Only if the county planning and urban design department agrees. You think that your financial transactions deserve a veil of privacy? Not at all. Your employer and your financial institution have already blabbed everything to Uncle Sam. You think that your business should be free of inspection by fire, health, safety, or environmental enforcement officers except upon probable cause? Dream on, pal.

There is an eternal principle at work here. Governments should keep out of everything that is private to liberals, but should not be restrained from investigating anything that is private to conservatives.

But hey, who needs privacy? In opposition to the liberal privacy tradition there is another notion of how Americans should live. It is the tradition represented by John Hancock, who signed his name on the Declaration of Independence good and large so that King George could read it. Hancock was a public man who wanted his acts to be public. He acted according to a tradition that says that a public man should live his life in public, and refrain from any word or act that could not be repeated honorably in public. It is the ethos of the merchant whose word is his bond, and whose currency is the trust others repose in him, and it has entered into modern discourse as the idea of “transparency.” The more transparent your life and your affairs, the more that other people can trust you.

There is a universal grandeur about the principle of transparency. It commits the conservative to the great trajectory of life, from birth to productive adulthood, to marriage, parenthood, and then in the fullness of time to decay to death. But the purpose of liberal privacy is to license liberals to veer off the trajectory of life, choosing not to serve their fellow humans but to service their personal creativity, choosing not children but childlessness, choosing not to honor the land of their birth but to “challenge” it. In this liberals demand the right to become irrelevant.

Let us not deny liberals their rights. That would be insensitive. Let us rather admit that the present living law of the United States affords liberals an unlimited right to privacy. Let us formalize the present living law of the land into written, beneficial legislation. It would guarantee liberals an absolute right to privacy, and it would confirm conservatives in the truth of transparency.

That’s as it should be. Let’s keep liberals in their holy bubble with their sacrament of privacy. The rest of us will just have to put our shoulders to the wheel in the real world, as we have to do anyway.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "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."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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