Economics

[wizards8507]

https://mises.org/library/defense-scrooge

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[Whiskeyjack]

Joseph Bottum just published a book review titled "The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: A Model for the West today?"

At the beginning of his new book, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, Paul Rahe quotes a passage from John Stuart Mill—an 1846 passage in which Mill writes that Ancient Greek history is "unexhausted and inexhaustible," an epic poem written in action rather than words, and all subsequent history flows from that original Greek source.

It's a kind of Victorian blather, of course, a genuflection toward the classics, but Mill isn't wrong, for all that. The Greeks provide tropes of politics and art that influence us, even now—and more than influence us, Rahe insists: Classical Greece continues to shape civilization, whether we know it or not. As it happens, Mill and his fellow Victorians mostly did know it, while people today mostly do not. But since we are still living in the world the Greeks defined, we would do well to study anew their lessons—the lessons of the Spartans, in particular, Rahe thinks, and especially their clever, brutal, and brave role in the 479 B.C. defeat of Xerxes, the great king of Persia.

Rahe, a widely published historian and political theorist at Hillsdale College, is perhaps best known for his 1992 volume Republics Ancient and Modern—a magisterial 1,200-page survey of democracy from Ancient Greece to the American Founding. In such later books as the 2008 study of Machiavelli, Against Throne and Altar, and the 2009 Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, he has extended his work with serious and provocative accounts of modern political formation. And in his recent thought about Sparta, he has gone back again to inexhaustible Greece, seeking insight about war and international politics in the crisis caused for Sparta by the Persian Empire's attempts to expand out of Asia Minor and into Europe.

In looking to Sparta, Rahe may appear to be joining the recent trend of popular fascination with those laconic Greeks—a trend exemplified by such popcorn as the wildly inaccurate but fun comic book and 2006 movie 300.

But, in fact, Rahe is bucking the trend of the academic world in which he has his being. Just as, in the 19th century, studies of Ancient Greece generally came to seem deeper and more important than studies of Ancient Rome, so, in the twentieth century, studies of the art and politics of Athens came to seem more revealing about both human nature and our modern situation than studies of the military virtues of Sparta. Sparta has had its admirers down through the ages, as philosophers and political theorists tried to align the city's peculiar political and social arrangements with the ideals of government suggested by Plato in the Republic. But in modern times, Athens has generally won the intellectual battle to be the shining star, the bright center of our fascination, in the ancient world.

And deservedly so, one has to say. The Spartans were a nasty and brutish set, a tribe of invaders ruling a long valley of slaves along the Eurotas River, in the south-east of the Peloponnesus. The traditional account identifies them as part of the migration of the Dorians out of northern Greece around 1100 B.C., as the older Mycenaean culture fell into the Greek Dark Ages. "The Return of the Heracleidae," it came to be called—a claim to resumed rule as descendants of the demi-god hero Heracles—and the invaders subjugated Laconia to make it their own.

All of this very ancient history is dubious and much disputed. Were the Dorians the "sea people" who harried Egypt? Were they the cause of Mycenaean collapse? Was there really any such thing as the Dorian invasion? Even the life of Lycurgus, the ninth-century lawgiver who established many of Sparta's political institutions, remains shrouded in too much myth to be more than speculative.

Still, the First Messenian War, from 743 to 724 B.C., is well attested, and it establishes a base from which to reckon subsequent Peloponnesian history. After expansionist victories over the cities of Messenia, the territory to the west of Laconia, Sparta crystalized into the society we now think of as distinctly Spartan. Most of the captured peoples of Laconia and Messenia were reduced to Helot slaves, while other Lacedaemonians were made into non-citizen freemen called perioeci—both of them distinct from the citizen soldiers of Sparta who were called Spartiates or homoioi: the alike, the peers, the (only) equal ones.

With slaves massively outnumbering masters, it's not surprising that the Helots revolted in 685. It took the Spartans seventeen years to put down that revolt in the Second Messenian War, and they did so by becoming, in essence, a people defined by the rigors of military training. The result left Sparta the preeminent military power in Greece for the next two hundred years.

All this, despite the fact that the city never had more than 10,000 citizen soldiers—and its political institutions were a bizarre jumble of three tribes in five villages, with each village providing one of the five ephors, who oversaw the city's two kings, as advised by a council of elders known as the Gerousia, whose laws were voted on by all male citizens over eighteen and then enforced by a kind of secret police known as the Krypteia. And the Krypteia, it turns out, were trained Spartan boys sent out to terrorize and murder Helots, both to encourage the other Helots to greater servitude and to teach the boys how to kill as they grew into full citizen soldiers.

As I said, a nasty and brutish set, but hard to beat in battle, as by the end of the Messenian wars the Spartans had turned a system of unified companies of spears and shields into an unrivaled force of phalanxes—unrivaled but limited by the necessity never to let Sparta get so deeply involved in external wars that the city could not prevent rebellion in its home territories. According to Herodotus, Sparta held seven times more Helots than citizens at the time of Plataea and Mycale, the land and sea battles that brought an end to Xerxes' invasion in 479. "Spartan policy," as Thucydides would later write, "is always governed by the need to take precautions against the Helots." Or, as Rahe's Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta puts it, Sparta found "an almost perfect match" between the heroic virtues taught by the Spartan system and the military requirements for Sparta's continued existence.

By the 6th century, Sparta had realized that its limited numbers would not allow expansion of its Helot system into the Arcadian territories to the north, and it's at that point we reach the strangest part of the story. Sparta could not survive the conquest of further land, but neither could it tolerate some other power—Argos, Thebes, Corinth, even fairly distant Athens—dominating Arcadia. Dominating any significant tranche of Greece, for that matter. Sparta's system left the city too small to rule Greece, but that same system demanded that no other city be powerful enough to invade Spartan lands and set off a Helot revolt. Simply as a matter of necessity, Sparta began a policy of supporting the independence of the smaller Greek cities against their larger neighbors—and a policy of supporting popular rebellions against local tyrants who might attempt to make militaristic states out of Greek cities.

Even Athens benefited, as the Athenians expelled their tyrant ruler Hippias in 510 B.C. with the help of Cleomenes I, one of the dual kings of Sparta. Admittedly, the unscrupulous Cleomenes had plans to put his own puppet in Hippias' place, but beggars can't be choosers, and the Peloponnesian League, the group of allies organized by Sparta, halted his machinations with a refusal to join any further campaign against Athens.

It was perhaps the oddest era of Hellenic affairs, as Sparta, the most brutal slave state of Greece, became widely heralded as the great defender of liberty, the great opponent of tyranny, and the great champion of all that was considered authentically Greek culture and Greek virtue. And as a survival strategy, it worked wonderfully—until a man named Darius, great king of Persia, became annoyed with the obstreperous Greeks in the islands and coasts on the edges of his rule. In 492, Darius undertook an invasion of Greece, and Sparta was trapped by its own reputation into becoming, with Athens, a defender of Greek autonomy against the largest empire in the known world.

Darius was stymied by the improbable Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490. His son Xerxes tried again in 480, and initially found more success. Both the Greek attempts to block Xerxes—holding the Persian army at Thermopylae and the Persian navy at the Straits of Artemisium—failed, and Xerxes swept through Boeotia and Attica, capturing and burning Athens along the way. But the Greek ships, led by the Athenians, somehow managed to decimate the Persians at Salamis and the next year at Mycale, while the Greek phalanxes, led by Sparta, broke the Persian land forces at Plataea—ending the invasion of Greece.

Paul Rahe's telling of all this in The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta is masterful, as he traces the Spartan portions of the story from Darius' initial exasperation with the Ionians all the way down to Xerxes' final flight back to Persia in terror. Particularly interesting is Rahe's account of Sparta's role in the formation of the Hellenic League that would band together to fight the second Persian invasion, and he shows what close-run things all the battles of the war really were.

But in the end, what are we to make of the Spartans—those brutal, murderous enslavers who produced some of the Hellenic era's best poetry and who gave all future generations an image of noble patriotism as they prepared to die at the hot gates of Thermopylae?

It's true, as Rahe writes, that Sparta "possessed resources—moral, political, and military—that … no other Greek city could even hope to match." Even to the Ancient Greeks, Sparta appeared to have an orderliness—the eunomia of "a coherence and clear-cut orientation"—that other city-states lacked. But the Spartans had arrived at their haphazard political system by "trial and error" over many long years, as Rahe notes, and the effect of that system on the Greeks' fight against Persia was as unpredictable and unlikely as any historical circumstance could be.

Rahe wisely corrects the myth that the Spartans of the time were unaware or uninterested in what was happening outside the narrow realm of the Peloponnesus in which their defense against Helot revolt had constrained them—and for that reason alone The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta would deserve praise. But the book does much else, including forcing us, as Rahe intends, to consider how even in the modern world states manage to position themselves as international defenders of freedom and autonomy even while their own lands suffer from the lack of such things. From the Soviet Union during the Cold War to present-day Iran, these are lessons we should have taken from the Laconian city.

Still, readers might shy away from the book in part simply because of what Rahe calls the Spartans' "grand strategy." To the word grand, no who follows his story could possibly object. The stretch he makes comes instead in the word strategy. Clever diplomacy among the Greeks, bold action, great bravery, and extraordinary luck: Sparta had all that and more besides in its grand maneuvers in the Persian Wars. But to deserve the name of strategy, what Sparta undertook would need to be much more self-conscious, much more geopolitically savvy, and much more forward looking.

Athens and Sparta both came out of the war well-positioned among the Greeks—a fact that inevitably led the two states to antipathy and eventually to open battle in the Peloponnesian War that began in 431 and ended with Athens' defeat in 404. But the very fact of that war, together with the asymmetry of Sparta's land forces and Athens' navy, suggests that Sparta emerged from what Rahe terms the "existential crisis" of the Persian Wars with no grand strategy for what to do after Xerxes had been turned back.

This question of Spartan strategy is more than terminological. Rahe simply likes the Spartans too much for my taste—too much for the taste of most readers, I hope. Good as the book is, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta rarely conveys a sense of condemnation about the Spartans. In fact, it mostly praises the eunomia of the city's homoioi citizens. And perhaps their stern patriotism, stripped-down lifestyle, and laconic speech are deserving of praise. But the truth is that Sparta was populated with monsters whose martial skill and happenstantial reputation as opponents of tyranny showed them in a false light in ancient times—and continues to show them in a false light today.

If the price of Sparta's virtues is the child abuse, both sexual and pedagogic, that the Spartans practiced—if the price of those virtues is destruction of the family, induction of boys into murderous cults, and the enslaving of subject populations—then to hell with the Lacedaemonians' martial virtues. If patriotism and stable political highmindedness require the evils of Sparta, then patriotism and highmindedness be damned.

Fortunately, the civic arrangements that Lycurgus gave the Spartans may not be the only possibility to be found in the ancient world—may not be our only possibility today, however much the provocative subtext of Rahe's book is that the modern West must adopt something analogous to stern Spartan life if it hopes to survive. Portions of the history of Athens, portions of the speeches of a man named Pericles, suggest that Ancient Greece offers other lessons we might learn. Better lessons, and wiser ones.

 

[zelezo vlk]

Joseph Bottum just published a book review titled "The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: A Model for the West today?"

That's a long ass article retelling too much of what I already know to reach a conclusion I held before reading. But I'm glad to see that we agree.

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[Whiskeyjack]

ND Professor Patrick Deneen just published an article titled "Unsustainable Liberalism" at First Things:

For most people of the West, the idea of a time and way of life after liberalism is as plausible as the idea of living on Mars. Yet liberalism is a bold political and social experiment that is far from certain to succeed. Its very apparent strengths rest upon a large number of pre-, non-, and even antiliberal institutions and resources that it has not replenished, and in recent years has actively sought to undermine. This “drawing down” on its preliberal inheritance is not contingent or accidental but in fact an inherent feature of liberalism.

Thus the liberal experiment contradicts itself, and a liberal society will inevitably become “postliberal.” The postliberal condition can retain many aspects that are regarded as liberalism’s triumphs—equal dignity of persons, in particular—while envisioning an alternative understanding of the human person, human community, politics, and the relationship of the cities of Man to the city of God. Envisioning a condition after liberalism calls us not to restore something that once was but to consider something that might yet be; it is a project not of nostalgia but of vision, imagination, and construction.

Many of what are considered liberalism’s signal features—particularly political arrangements such as constitutionalism, the rule of law, rights and privileges of citizens, separation of powers, the free exchange of goods and services in markets, and federalism—are to be found in medieval thought. Inviolable human dignity, constitutional limits upon central power, and equality under law are part of a preliberal legacy.

The strictly political arrangements of modern constitutionalism do not per se constitute a liberal regime. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. These two revolutions in the understanding of human nature and society constitute “liberalism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition of “liberty.”

Liberalism introduces a particular cast to its preliberal inheritance mainly by ceasing to account for the implications of choices made by individuals upon community, society, and future generations. Liberalism did not introduce the idea of choice. It dismissed the idea that there are wrong or bad choices, and thereby rejected the accompanying social structures and institutions that were ordered to restrain the temptation toward self-centered calculation.

The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the free, unfettered, and autonomous choice of individuals. This argument was first articulated in the proto-liberal defense of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, human beings exist by nature in a state of radical independence and autonomy. Recognizing the fragility of a condition in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” they employ their rational self-interest to sacrifice most of their natural rights in order to secure the protection and security of a sovereign. Legitimacy is conferred by consent.

The state is created to restrain the external actions of individuals and legally restricts the potentially destructive activity of radically separate human beings. Law is a set of practical restraints upon self-interested individuals; there is no assumption of the existence of self-restraint born of mutual concern. As Hobbes writes in Leviathan, law is comparable to hedges that are set “not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way”; that is, law restrains people’s natural tendency to act on “impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion,” and so are always “rules authorized” as external constraints upon what is otherwise our natural liberty. “Where the law is silent,” people are free, obligated only insofar as the “authorized” rules of the state are explicit. All legitimate authority is vested in the state. It is the sole creator and enforcer of positive law and even determines legitimate and illegitimate expressions of religious belief. The state is charged with the maintenance of social stability and with preventing a return to natural anarchy; in discharging these duties, it “secures” our natural rights.

Human beings are by nature, therefore, “non-relational” creatures, separate and autonomous. Liberalism thus begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly subject to the criterion of whether or not they have been chosen, and chosen upon the basis of their service to rational self-interest.

As Hobbes’ philosophical successor John Locke understood, voluntarist logic ultimately affects all relationships, including the familial. Locke—the first philosopher of liberalism—on the one hand acknowledges in his Second Treatise on Government that the duties of parents to raise children and the corresponding duties of children to obey springs from the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother,” but further claims that every child must ultimately subject his inheritance to the logic of consent beginning in a version of the state of nature, in which we act as autonomous choosing individuals. “For every man’s children being by nature as free as himself, or any of his ancestors ever were, may, whilst they are in that freedom, choose what society they will join themselves to, what commonwealths they will put themselves under. But if they will enjoy the inheritance of their ancestors, they must take it on the same terms their ancestors had it, and submit to all the conditions annex’d to such a possession.” Even those who adopt the inheritance of their parents in every regard only do so through the logic of consent, even if theirs is only tacit consent.

Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision, particularly once the duties of child-rearing are completed. If this encompassing logic of choice applies to the most elemental and basic relationships of the family, then it applies all the more to the looser ties that bind people to other institutions and associations, in which continued membership is subject to constant monitoring and assessment of whether it benefits or unduly burdens any person’s individual rights.

This is not to suggest that a preliberal era dismissed the idea of the free choice of individuals. Among other significant ways that preliberal Christianity contributed to an expansion of human choice was to transform the idea of marriage from an institution based upon considerations of family and property to one based upon the choice and consent of individuals united in sacramental love. What it is to suggest is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships becomes dominated by considerations of individual choice based upon the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader considerations of the impact one’s choices have upon the community—present and future—and of one’s obligations to the created order and ultimately to God.

Liberalism began with the explicit assertion, and has continued to claim, that it merely describes our political, social, and private decision-making. Yet implicitly it was constituted as a constructive or normative project: What it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had to displace a very different form of human self-understanding and long-standing experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently about themselves and their relationships. Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not of any particular conception of the “Good.”

Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible and subject to constant redefinition, but so are all relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.

The second revolution, and the second anthropological assumption that constitutes liberalism, is less visibly political. Premodern political thought—ancient and medieval, particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature to be part of a comprehensive natural order. Man was understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and so humanity was required to conform both to its own nature as well as, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which human beings were a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—thus, natural law—places upon human beings, and each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits, through the practice of virtues, in order to achieve a condition of human flourishing.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences, premised on the transformation of the view of human nature and on humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—insisted that man should seek the mastery of nature by employing natural science and a transformed economic system supportive of such an undertaking. The second wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief in the idea of a fixed human nature with a belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress and transformation. While these two iterations of liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—contend today for ascendance, we would do better to understand their deep interconnection.

The “proto-liberal” thinker who ushered in the “first wave” of liberalism’s transformation was Francis Bacon. Like Hobbes (who was Bacon’s secretary), he attacked the ancient Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of nature and natural law alike and argued for the human capacity to “master” or “control” nature—even at one point comparing nature to a prisoner withholding secrets from an inquisitor and requiring the inquirer (the scientist) to subject it to torture—all with an aim to providing “relief of the human estate.”

Liberalism became closely bound up with the embrace of this new orientation of the natural sciences and also advanced an economic system—market-based free enterprise—that similarly promoted the expansion of human use, conquest, and mastery of the natural world. Early-modern liberalism held the view that human nature was unchangeable—human beings were, by nature, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be harnessed but not fundamentally altered—but could, if usefully channeled, promote an economic and scientific system that increased human freedom through the active and expanding capacity of human beings to exert their mastery over natural phenomena.

The “second wave” of this revolution began as an explicit criticism of this view of humanity. Thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx, from Mill to Dewey, and from Richard Rorty to contemporary “transhumanists” reject the idea that human nature is in any way fixed. Adopting the insight of first-wave theorists, they extend to human nature itself the idea that nature is subject to human conquest.

And so first-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives” who stress the need for the scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project fully to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating man from the biological imperatives of our own bodies. Today’s political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between liberals, first-wave and second-wave, neither of whom confront the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature that the preliberal tradition defended.

Liberalism is thus not merely a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights, as it is too often portrayed. Rather, it seeks the transformation of the entirety of human life and the world. Its two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity in the service of the fulfillment of the self. Liberalism rejects the ancient and preliberal conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to govern their base and hedonistic desires. This kind of liberty is a condition of self-governance of both city and soul, drawing closely together the individual cultivation and practice of virtue and the shared activities of self-legislation. Societies that understand liberty this way pursue the comprehensive formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of self-rule.

Liberalism instead understands liberty as the condition in which one can act freely within the sphere that is unconstrained by positive law. Liberalism effectively remakes the world in the image of its vision of the state of nature, shaping a world in which the theory of natural human individualism becomes ever more a reality, secured through the architecture of law, politics, economics, and society. Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy such as that first imagined by theorists of the state of nature, except that the anarchy that threatens to develop from that purportedly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. With man liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

Ironically, the more complete the securing of a sphere of autonomy, the more encompassing and comprehensive the state must become. Liberty, so defined, requires in the first instance liberation from all forms of associations and relationships—from the family, church, and schools to the village and neighborhood and the community broadly defined—that exerted strong control over behavior largely through informal and habituated expectations and norms.

These forms of control were largely cultural, not political—law was generally less extensive, and existed largely as a continuation of cultural norms, the informal expectations of behavior that were largely learned through family, church, and community. With the liberation of individuals from these associations and membership based upon individual choice, the need for impositions of positive law to regulate behavior grows. At the same time, as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are increasingly felt to be residual, arbitrary, and oppressive, motivating calls for the state to actively work toward their eradication through the rationalization of law and regulation.

Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state. Hobbes’s Leviathan perfectly portrayed those two realities: The state consists solely of autonomous (and non-grouped) individuals, and the individuals are “contained” by the state. No other grouping is granted ontological reality.

In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a near-universal pursuit of immediate gratification: Culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past toward the end of cultivating virtues of self-restraint and civility, instead becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting a culture of consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, seemingly self-maximizing but socially destructive behaviors begin to predominate in society.

In schools, norms of modesty, comportment, and academic honesty are replaced by widespread activities of lawlessness and cheating (along with the rise of forms of surveillance of youth), while in the fraught realm of coming-of-age, courtship norms are replaced by hookups and utilitarian sexual encounters. The norm of stable, lifelong marriage fades, replaced by various arrangements that ensure the fundamental autonomy of the individuals, whether married or not. Children are increasingly viewed as a limitation upon individual freedom, even to the point of justifying widespread infanticide under the banner of “choice,” while overall birthrates decline across the developed world. In the economic realm, get-rich-quick schemes replace investment and trusteeship. And, in our relationship to the natural world, short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty becomes our birthright, whether or not its result for our children might be shortages of life-sustaining resources such as topsoil and potable water. Restraint of any of these activities is understood to be the domain of the state’s exercise of positive law and not the result of cultivated self-governance born of cultural norms and institutions.

Premised on the idea that the basic activity of life is the inescapable pursuit of what Hobbes called the “power after power that ceaseth only in death””Alexis de Tocqueville would later describe it as “inquietude” or “restlessness””the endless quest for fewer obstacles to self-fulfillment and greater power to actuate the ceaseless cravings of the human soul requires ever-accelerating forms of economic growth and pervasive consumption. Liberal society can barely survive the slowing of such growth and would collapse if it were to stop or reverse for an extended period of time. The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis on “Right” over the “Good”—is nevertheless premised on the embrace of the liberal human as a self-fashioning individual and self-expressive consumer. This default aspiration requires that no truly hard choices be made between lifestyle options.

Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from those constitutive associations and the accompanying education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of good families, schools, and communities was assumed, though their bases were philosophically undermined. The philosophical undermining led to the undermining of these goods in reality, as the norm-shaping authoritative institutions become tenuous with liberalism’s advance. In its advanced stage, the passive depletion has become active destruction: Remnants of associations historically charged with the cultivation of norms are increasingly seen as obstacles to autonomous liberty, and the apparatus of the state is directed toward the task of liberating individuals from any such bonds.

In a similar way”in the material and economic realm”liberalism has drawn down on age-old reservoirs of resources in its endeavor to conquer nature. An extended inability to provide for seemingly endless choice would result in a systemic crisis, requiring the state to face down a populace suddenly confronted with the one unacceptable “choice” of restricted choices. Liberalism can function only by the constant increase of available and consumable material goods and satisfactions, and thus by constantly expanding humanity’s conquest and mastery of nature. No matter the political program of today’s leaders, more is the incontestable program. No person can aspire to a position of political leadership through a call for limits and self-command.

Liberalism was a wager of titanic proportions, a wager that ancient norms of behavior could be abolished in the name of a new form of liberation and that the conquest of nature would supply the fuel that would permit near-infinite choices. The twin outcomes of this effort, the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources, make inevitable an inquiry into what comes after liberalism.

Liberalism’s defenders fear that any compromise of liberal principles will result in the resurgence of religious warfare, the re-enslavement of various populations, the loss of the independence of women, and the abandonment of rights and equality under law. If I am right, however, a reconsideration of liberalism’s two main commitments will not compromise but instead be the preconditions for securing equal human dignity and ordered liberty. The conception of inviolable human dignity, of constitutional limits upon central power, of equality under law, and of the free exchange of goods and services in markets is, again, part of a preliberal legacy.

The creation of a world after liberalism would not require, as some might fear, the dismantling of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, nor the cessation of free markets. Instead, what would be required is a fundamental rethinking of how law and economics are understood and employed to undergird the liberal vision of society. Such a rethinking is by necessity taking place, in many ways. As government is able to provide fewer and fewer services to people facing challenging times (the claims of the political left notwithstanding), people will necessarily turn to the very constitutive relationships that liberalism regarded as limitations upon our autonomy: family, neighborhood, and community. Breakdowns in the market similarly call for strengthening such institutions. The economic crisis has, for example, resulted in greater understanding of the need to rely upon the help of families and communities, as shown in the growth of multigenerational homes, which were the norm for much of human history.

Contemporary “conservatism” does not offer an answer to liberalism, because it is itself a species of liberalism. While the elders on the political right continue to rail against “environmentalists,” they fail to detect how deeply conservative (conservationist) is the impulse among the young who see clearly the limits of the consumptive economy and the ravages it bequeaths to their generation. What these elders have generally lacked is a recognition that one cannot revise one of liberalism’s main commitments, today characterized as “progressivism,” while ignoring the other, particularly economic liberalism. A different paradigm is needed, one that intimately connects the cultivation of self-limitation and self-governance among constitutive associations and communities with a general ethic of thrift, frugality, saving, hard work, stewardship, and care. So long as the dominant narrative of individual choice aimed at the satisfaction of appetite and consumption dominates in the personal or economic realms, the ethic of liberalism will continue to dominate our society.

Both the left and the right effectively enact a pincer movement in which local associations and groups are engulfed by an expanding state and by the market, each moving toward singularity in each realm: one state and one market. If the left insists on the liberal interpretation of our constitutional and political institutions in an uncompromising effort to defend the ever-expanding role of the state to secure the practical liberty of individuals, the right defends the free-market system and uncompromisingly rejects any restraint on the unfettered economic choices of individuals. The right embraces a market orthodoxy that places the choosing, autonomous individual at the center of its economic theory and accepts the larger liberal frame in which the only alternative to this free-market, individualist orthodoxy is statism and collectivism. It seeks to promote family values but denies that the market undermines many of the values that undergird family life. The left commends sexual liberation as the best avenue to achieve individual autonomy, while nonsensically condemning the immorality of a marketplace in which sex is the best sales pitch. The encompassing Leviathan daily attains more reality.

A different trajectory does not require a change of institutions; it requires a change in how we understand the human person in relationship to other persons, to nature, and the source of creation. While the Constitution consolidated a number of political activities in the center, it left considerable room for local entities. The return to a more robust form of federalism would allow for greater local autonomy in establishing and cultivating local forms of culture and self-governance.

This will provide space for the nuanced discussions between what sociologist Robert Nisbet called the “laissez-faire of social groups.” Recommending federalism always meets the response that local self-rule and culture will reinstitute local prejudices. That argument is a strained effort not to defend the great and I think irreversible achievement of Christendom’s embrace of the imago Dei, but instead to defend the state’s intervention in every sphere of life, justified on the grounds that local norms and prohibitions express bigotry and lead directly to oppression.

A wide variety of local norms and beliefs should be permitted, within limits that would exclude egregious limits upon human liberty. These authoritative norm-shaping institutions and behaviors are the only credible mechanisms for advancing the substantial withering away of the state. These local norms and beliefs would afford a different experience of liberty, one about which liberalism has been silent, one that stresses self-governance and self-limitation achieved primarily through the cultivation of practices and virtues. Such a cultivation of ordered liberty would restrain the pursuit of libertine liberty, and restrain the tendency toward the expansion of state and market, which together increasingly undermine constitutive social institutions, thereby leaving the individual “free” to be shaped by popular culture and advertising mostly aimed to encourage the appetites fed by the enticements of a globalized market.

The recognition of the central and constitutive role and the necessity of the varied institutions that exist between the state and the individual has been a staple observation of thinkers from Tocqueville to contemporary thinkers on both the nominal right and nominal left, such as Bertrand de Jouvenel, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Wilson Carey McWilliams, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. As they have argued, family, citizenship, church, neighborhood, community, schools, and markets need to be drawn closer together in a more integrated whole, in every aspect ranging from the built environment to the cultivation of genuine local cultures arising from the varying circumstances of diverse places. Drawing them together requires an ethic of self-command. So long as the right tries to defend them without offering a broader ecology of a deeply integrated and formative community—something broader, for example, than the long-standing defense of “family values” that denigrates the idea that there is a relationship between the family and the village—it can offer no real alternative to liberalism.

If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory, culminating in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied even without replenishing them, then we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and likely martial imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state.

If my analysis is fundamentally accurate, liberalism’s endgame is unsustainable in every respect: It cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it continually provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back slowly but inexorably into a future in which extreme license invites extreme oppression.

The ancient claim that man is by nature a political animal and must in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. Currently we lament and attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s idea of liberty but not the deeper sources of those symptoms deriving from the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments.

While most commentators today regard our current crises—whether understood morally or economically or, as they are rarely understood, as both moral and economic—as technical problems to be solved by better policy, our most thoughtful citizens must consider whether these crises are the foreshocks of a more systemic quake that awaits us. Unlike the ancient Romans, confident in their eternal city, who could not imagine a condition “after Rome,” we should ponder the prospect that a better way awaits after liberalism.

 

[Ndaccountant]

Interesting outlook......emphasis added...

None of this is new, as others have said similar things in the past. But the more people start saying this, hopefully more people take notice.

I have said this before and will keep saying this, the whole budget issue is an immigration issue. We need more immigrants, specifically ones that offer lasting economic value to the US. Sadly, our immigration debate is limited to Syria and walls on the border......

The Romans gave their Plebian citizens a day at the Coliseum, and the French
royalty gave the Bourgeoisie a piece of figurative “cake”, so it may be true to form
that in the still prosperous developed economies of 2016, we provide Fantasy
Sports, cellphone game apps, sexting, and fast food to appease the masses.
Keep them occupied and distracted at all costs before they recognize that half of
the U.S. population doesn’t go to work in the morning and that their real wages
after conservatively calculated inflation have barely budged since the mid 1980’s.
Confuse them with demagogic and religious oriented political candidates to
believe that tomorrow will be a better day and hope that Ferguson, Missouri and
its lookalikes will fade to the second page or whatever it’s called these days in
new-age media.

Meanwhile, manipulate prices of interest rates and stocks to benefit corporations
and the wealthy while they feast on exorbitantly priced gluten-free pasta and
range-free chicken at Whole Foods, or if even more fortunate, pursue high rise
New York condos and private jets at Teterboro. It’s a wonderful life for the 1% and
a Xanax existence for the 99. But who’s looking – or counting – even at the ballot
box. November 2016 will not change a thing – 8 years of Hillary or 8 years of a
non-Hillary. Same difference. Central bankers, Superpacs, and K street lobbyists
are in control. Instead of cake, the 49.5% (males) will just have to chomp on their
Carl’s Jr. hamburger and dream of a night with 23-year-old Kate Upton lookalikes
that show them how to eat it during Super Bowl commercials. And if that’s too
sexist, then Carl’s is substituting six-pack hunks instead of full-breasted models to
appease the other 49.5% (females). It’s a Xanax society. We love it.

But I kid my readers – (that’s what comedians say on TV when they approach an edge).
Kidding aside, however, if the 99 think they’ve got it good (bad) now, just wait 10 or 20
more years until their bills really come due. Of course by then, the 1% likely won’t be doing so well either, but there’s the hope that each and every one of them (us/me) can sell before the deluge. I speak specifically though to liabilities associated with the Boomer generation: healthcare, private pensions, Social Security and the unestimable costs of global warming, but let me leave the warming of the planet out of it for now. Let me try to convince you with some hard, cold facts, many of which are U.S. oriented but which apply as well to much of the developed world, because we’re mostly all getting older together. Demography rules. Explaining this demographic countdown requires an impolitic concession that the world’s population is gradually aging, some at a faster rate than others (Japan, Italy, Taiwan!) but mostly in developed vs. undeveloped countries. And it is the elderly that require more services and expenses than newborns, although at first blush it would seem that an infant in diapers requires more attention and healthcare than a 70-year-old retiree. Not really.

To focus on some U.S. centric mathematical realities, several years ago Mary Meeker in
a 500 page, softbound edition entitled “USA Inc.” put together a series of U.S. Treasury
and other government reports that outlined just how dire America’s future demographic
is in terms of financial liabilities. It is one thing to put readers to sleep with a 2030
forecast for aging boomers, as shown in Chart 1 but another to use the government’s own
present value of these debts as of 2016. If financial market observers seem aghast at
current Greek or Puerto Rican debt traps, they would surely take a double dose of Xanax
when confronted with this: Fact – The U.S. government has current outstanding debt of
approximately $16 Trillion or close to 100% GDP. The present value, however of Medicaid
($35 trillion), Medicare ($23 trillion), and Social Security ($8 trillion) promised under
existing program totals $66 trillion or another 400% of GDP. We are broke and don’t even
know it, or to return to my opening analogy, we are having our cake, eating it at the same time and believing that a new cellphone app will be invented in the near future to magically deliver more of the same. Not gonna happen folks.

Some politicians like Paul Ryan who argue for balanced fiscal budgets are intelligent
sounding but relatively clueless. “Austerity – if not now, then when?”, he would argue in
Reaganesque twitter. “Let’s slow down or even stop the inexorable clicking of the debt
clock: 16 trillion, 17 trillion, 18 trillion”…he would add. Well yes, every little bit helps,
Mr. Ryan, but the fact of the matter is (a great political phrase, is it not?) that reducing
the growth rate of current government debt does little to help what in essence is a
demographic not a financial problem: too few Millennials to take care of too many Boomers. Social Security “lock boxes” or Medicare/Medicaid “trust funds” which in essence represent “pre-funded” liability systems, cannot correct this demographic imbalance, because financial assets represent a “call” on future production. If that production could possibly be saved like squirrels ferreting away nuts for a long winter, then Treasury bonds or purchasing corporate stocks might make some sense. But they can’t. Future healthcare for Boomer seniors can only be provided by today’s Millennials and even doctors yet to be born. We cannot store their energy today for some future rainy day. Nor can we save food, transportation or entertainment for anything more than a few years forward. Each of those must be provided by a future generation of workers for the use of retired Boomers. And as Chart 1 points out, the ratio of retirees to workers – the dependency ratio – soars from 25 retirees for every worker to 35 over the next 10 years or so.

There’s your problem, and neither privatization nor any goodly number of government
bonds deposited in the Social Security “lock box” can solve it. While these paper
assets may “pay” for goods and services, their value will be market adjusted in
future years to exactly match the quantity of things we buy, and that quantity will be
substantially a function of the available workforce and the price they command for
their services. This is another way of saying that the value of Treasury bonds and
even private pension held stocks will be marked down in price as they are sold to
pay for future goods and services, and that the price of these goods and services
will be marked up (inflation) to justify their reduced demographic supply. Productivity
gains are often advanced as a solution but productivity gains have been shrinking in
recent years, and even so, employed workers cannot be expected to hand over future
advances to retirees without a fight. Having more babies would also turn the trick, but
at the moment, making fewer seems to be the going trend.

Investment implications? Well it is true that if much of the developing world is younger
demographically (think India), then developed nations could and should transfer an
increasing percentage of their financial assets to emerging markets to help foot the
demographic bills back home. Long-term then, as opposed to currently, think about
increasing your asset allocation to the developing world. It’s also commonsensical that
if higher Millennial wages are the probable result of a shortage of healthcare workers
relative to Boomer requirements, then an investor should go long inflation and short
fixed coupons. U.S. 10-year TIPS at 80 basis points seem like a good hedge in that
regard. And of course in terms of specific equity sectors, healthcare should thrive,
while liability handcuffed financial corporations such as insurance companies as well
as the bonds of underfunded cities and states such as Chicago and Illinois, should
not. Other countries have similar burdens. The Financial Times reports that the UK
pension industry faces a 20-year wait until they might have enough cash to meet
their liabilities in 2036. Until then, they cannot. In general, it seems demographically commonsensical that Boomers have in part been responsible for asset appreciation during the heyday of their productive years and that now, drip by drip, year by year, they will need to sell those assets to someone or some country in order to pay their own bills. Asset returns will therefore be lower than historical norms, especially because interest rates are close to 0% in developed countries. Demographics may not rule absolutely, but they likely will dominate investment markets and returns for the next few decades until the Boomer phenomena fades away. The 1% – in addition to the 99 – will need extra doses of Xanax, or additional slices of cake, to cope in the next few decades. Let the games begin.

http://image.exct.net/lib/ff0212707...s+Investment+Outlook_Jan2016_exp+01.30.17.pdf

 

[Whiskeyjack]

TAC's Rod Dreher just published a blog post titled "Rome, Reformation & Right Now" which ties together a lot of points I've been trying to make recently:

I thought the Republican debate last night went better than expected, absent Donald Trump sucking all the air out of the room. It didn’t make me like any of the candidates any better, but it felt more like a real debate than these events have been. I did come away with these thoughts:

• What a shame that Rand Paul hasn’t done better in this campaign.
• Alan Keyes + Jeff Spicoli + 2 Demerols + 1 Jack & Coke = Dr. Ben Carson
• Chris Christie will make an excellent Attorney General in the next GOP administration
• Ted Cruz is cold, dark, calculating, intelligent, ideological to the fingertips — and therefore very troubling. I cannot shake the image of him trolling suffering Middle Eastern Christians for the sake of boosting his appeal to Evangelicals. I see him and an insult Churchill directed to a rival comes to mind: “He would make a drum out of the skin of his mother to sing his own praises.”
• Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have learned nothing from Iraq. Nothing. All this talk about how under the leadership, the US is going to go in and bite the heads off of ISIS and suck their brains out, etc. — all of that requires going back to war in the Middle East. Is that really what they are proposing? If so, let’s hear the rationale. And Cruz’s line about how he’s going to carpet bomb the Mideast to rid it of ISIS — really? You’re going to wipe out tens of thousands of innocent people for this cause? Cruz’s lines attempting to link ISIS’s success to the material decline of the US military was outrageous — as if ISIS succeeded because the US wasn’t spending enough money on defense. But it tells us that a Cruz administration will mean a windfall for defense contractors.
• Cruz saying that he was going to be the Second Coming of Reagan, and was going to cut taxes and get the economy moving again, so all boats can rise. It is eternally 1980 with these ideologues. They have no answer at all for our economy.
• I believe Rubio said that in his overarching plan, we would work with Sunnis in the region to construct some sort of stable, post-ISIS political entity, and we would train anti-ISIS Syrians to fight the radicals. What world has Marco Rubio been living in? Did he not see that the US spent $500 million trying to train those anti-ISIS Syrians, and we only found four of them? Has Rubio not seen how well our attempts at state-building have gone in Iraq?

Maybe Donald Trump hurt himself after all by not showing up. I guess the caucuses will tell us. What last night’s event told me, though, is that with Cruz and Rubio, we pretty much get the same old GOP stuff, just a different election cycle.

Let’s turn to David Brooks’s column today, which focuses on a speech that the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron recently gave, about the future of Britain. In it, Cameron said (or Brooks implies that he said) that the usual Left-Right solution to this kind of thing — wealth redistribution downwards, or cutting taxes to free up the market so all boats can rise — no longer work. From his column:

Cameron called for a more social approach. He believes government can play a role in rebuilding social capital and in healing some of the traumas fueled by scarcity and family breakdown.

He laid out a broad agenda: Strengthen family bonds with shared parental leave and a tax code that rewards marriage. Widen opportunities for free marital counseling. Speed up the adoption process. Create a voucher program for parenting classes. Expand the Troubled Families program by 400,000 slots. This program spends 4,000 pounds (about $5,700) per family over three years and uses family coaches to help heal the most disrupted households.

Cameron would also create “character modules” for schools, so that there are intentional programs that teach resilience, curiosity, honesty and service. He would expand the National Citizen Service so that by 2021 60 percent of the nation’s 16-year-olds are performing national service, and meeting others from across society. He wants to create a program to recruit 25,000 mentors to work with young teenagers.

To address concentrated poverty, he would replace or revamp 100 public housing projects across the country. He would invest big sums in mental health programs and create a social impact fund to unlock millions for new drug and alcohol treatment.

It’s an agenda that covers the entire life cycle, aiming to give people the strength and social resources to stand on their own. In the U.S. we could use exactly this sort of agenda. There is an epidemic of isolation, addiction and trauma.

Read the whole thing. Brooks goes on to say that the GOP desperately needs to take this “Burkean” approach to repairing the social fabric. I think he’s right, but I also think that is not remotely adequate to the problem we face. The State can help economically, but it simply cannot do the work of culture.

The State cannot make people stop having babies out of wedlock. The State cannot make people stay married. The State cannot reweave family bonds. The State cannot make people believe in God, and order their lives accordingly. And so forth. This is not to say that there is no role for the State, of course, only that its ability to help is largely at the margins. That’s not nothing — but it’s not nearly enough.

I’ve been reading this week historian Brad Gregory’s* study The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society. I had imagined it to be a somewhat polemical book that blamed the Reformation for all our modern woes. That was dumb of me. It’s a genealogy of ideas and events that led to our current condition.

It didn’t start with the Reformation. The ideas that laid the intellectual groundwork for the Reformation sprung out of Catholic theological debate two centuries earlier. The corruption of the Catholic Church, and the arrogant refusal of its leaders to heed calls to reform before it was too late, were very real and present. Luther had reason. He had the intellectual framework in place, and he had emotional cause: the utter rot within the Roman Catholic establishment.

That doesn’t make the Reformation right, of course, but one does see how it was all but inevitable. Once the break happened, it proved impossible to contain the forces unleashed. “Sola scriptura” proved an impossible standard for building a new church, because various Reformation leaders had their own ideas about what the Bible “clearly” said. The fracturing of the Reformation, and the arguments among various theological factions, were there from the beginning.

And the savagery with which Catholics and Protestants went at each other was horrifying. The Wars of Religion were catastrophic, and in Gregory’s telling, compelled exhausted Europeans to try to figure out a way to keep the peace. This required a strong state that kept religious passions in check. At the same time, the rise of science, and the blind obstinacy of the Roman church in unnecessarily holding on to Aristotelian categories for understanding the natural world, created the false belief that religion is opposed to science. And on and on, through the Enlightenment, down to the present day.

There’s a lot more to it than I’ve said here. It’s a very complex story, and certainly not one with a straight-line cause, e.g., “If not for nominalism and univocity, none of this would have happened;” “If not for the Reformation, none of this would have happened.” The point I wish to make here is that Gregory does a great job in showing how the interaction of ideas, events, and plain human folly, served to drive God out of the public square. He also makes it clear that the secular liberal narrative of uncomplicated Progress because of this is hopelessly naive. The Enlightenment tried to build a binding public ethic around Reason, but ran into the same problem that the Reformation did: who decides what counts as “reasonable”? As Gregory writes:

‘Sola ratio’ has not overcome the problem that stemmed from ‘sola scriptura,’ but rather replicated it in a secular, rationalist register. Attempts to salvage modern philosophy by claiming that it is concerned with asking questions rather than either finding or getting closer to finding answers might make sense – if one just happens to like asking questions in the same way that thirsty people just like seeking water rather than locating a drinking fountain, or indeed having any idea whether they are getting closer to one.

The point of this post — and of Gregory’s book — is certainly not to blame the Reformers. What good would that do, anyway? Nor is it to say, “The Renaissance Popes made us do it!” Again, that is pointless now. The thing to learn from this study is how ideas have consequences — and not just ideas, but ideas as they are taken up by real people in particular circumstances.

Gregory’s book makes very clear that the Reformers would have been horrified by what became of their revolution, just as the Franciscan friars Duns Scotus and William of Ockham would likely have been appalled by what their ideas — univocity and nominalism — brought about. They all meant well. One has much less sympathy for the leaders of the Roman church, who sat back enriching themselves while the faith for which they were responsible fell into radical discredit by their own corruption. Had they foreseen where all this would lead, they surely would have repented before it was too late.

Or not. As Kierkegaard says, the trouble with life is it must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

The unwinding we’re all seeing now is the cumulative effect of forces that have been gathering for a very long time. We are living through the failure of liberalism (in the classical, 19th century sense) because we have become incapable of stable self-government. We are coming apart because there is no center around which we can all rally. John Adams famously wrote

[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

It is wishful thinking to believe that Christianity can, at this point, stop the forces of disintegration and dissolution moving through American society and culture. Christianity can hardly protect itself from the same (Moralistic Therapeutic Deism with a nominally Christian face predominates). We are living through, and will continue to live through, the political consequences of Christianity’s demise as the guiding vision of our society, and its replacement with radical individualism. I point you to this 1989 essay in The Atlantic by political scientist Glenn Tinder, who wrote of the political meaning of Christianity. Excerpts:

It will be my purpose in this essay to try to connect the severed realms of the spiritual and the political. In view of the fervent secularism of many Americans today, some will assume this to be the opening salvo of a fundamentalist attack on “pluralism.” Ironically, as I will argue, many of the undoubted virtues of pluralism—respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings, to cite just two—have strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity. The question that secularists have to answer is whether these values can survive without these particular roots. In short, can we be good without God? Can we affirm the dignity and equality of individual persons—values we ordinarily regard as secular—without giving them transcendental backing? Today these values are honored more in the breach than in the observance; Manhattan Island alone, with its extremes of sybaritic wealth on the one hand and Calcuttan poverty on the other, is testimony to how little equality really counts for in contemporary America. To renew these indispensable values, I shall argue, we must rediscover their primal spiritual grounds.



… The most adamant opposition to my argument is likely to come from protagonists of secular reason—a cause represented preeminently by the Enlightenment. Locke and Jefferson, it will be asserted, not Jesus and Paul, created our moral universe. Here I cannot be as disarming as I hope I was in the paragraph above, for underlying my argument is the conviction that Enlightenment rationalism is not nearly so constructive as is often supposed. Granted, it has sometimes played a constructive role. It has translated certain Christian values into secular terms and, in an age becoming increasingly secular, has given them political force. It is doubtful, however, that it could have created those values or that it can provide them with adequate metaphysical foundations. Hence if Christianity declines and dies in coming decades, our moral universe and also the relatively humane political universe that it supports will be in peril. But I recognize that if secular rationalism is far more dependent on Christianity than its protagonists realize, the converse also is in some sense true. The Enlightenment carried into action political ideals that Christians, in contravention of their own basic faith, often shamefully neglected or denied. Further, when I acknowledged that there are respectable grounds for disagreeing with my argument, I had secular rationalism particularly in mind. The foundations of political decency are an issue I wish to raise, not settle.

More:

If the denial of the God-man has destructive logical implications, it also has dangerous emotional consequences. Dostoevsky wrote that a person “cannot live without worshipping something.” Anyone who denies God must worship an idol—which is not necessarily a wooden or metal figure. In our time we have seen ideologies, groups, and leaders receive divine honors. People proud of their critical and discerning spirit have rejected Christ and bowed down before Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or some other secular savior.

When disrespect for individuals is combined with political idolatry, the results can be atrocious. Both the logical and the emotional foundations of political decency are destroyed. Equality becomes nonsensical and breaks down under attack from one or another human god. Consider Lenin: as a Marxist, and like Marx an exponent of equality, under the pressures of revolution he denied equality in principle—except as an ultimate goal- and so systematically nullified it in practice as to become the founder of modern totalitarianism. When equality falls, universality is likely also to fall. Nationalism or some other form of collective pride becomes virulent, and war unrestrained. Liberty, too, is likely to vanish; it becomes a heavy personal and social burden when no God justifies and sanctifies the individual in spite of all personal deficiencies and failures.

The idealism of the man-god does not, of course, bring as an immediate and obvious consequence a collapse into unrestrained nihilism. We all know many people who do not believe in God and yet are decent and admirable. Western societies, as highly secularized as they are, retain many humane features. Not even tacitly has our sole governing maxim become the one Dostoevsky thought was bound to follow the denial of the God-man: “Everything is permitted.”

This may be, however, because customs and habits formed during Christian ages keep people from professing and acting on such a maxim even though it would be logical for them to do so. If that is the case, our position is precarious, for good customs and habits need spiritual grounds, and if those are lacking, they will gradually, or perhaps suddenly in some crisis, crumble.

And:

To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished? To what extent are those savings already severely depleted? Again and again we are told by advertisers, counselors, and other purveyors of popular wisdom that we have a right to buy the things we want and to live as we please. We should be prudent and farsighted, perhaps (although even those modest virtues are not greatly emphasized), but we are subject ultimately to no standard but self-interest. If nihilism is most obvious in the lives of wanton destroyers like Hitler, it is nevertheless present also in the lives of people who live purely as pleasure and convenience dictate.

And aside from intentions, there is a question concerning consequences. Even idealists whose good intentions for the human race are pure and strong are still vulnerable to fate because of the pride that causes them to act ambitiously and recklessly in history. Initiating chains of unforeseen and destructive consequences, they are often overwhelmed by results drastically at variance with their humane intentions. Modern revolutionaries have willed liberty and equality for everyone, not the terror and despotism they have actually created. Social reformers in the United States were never aiming at the great federal bureaucracy or at the pervasive dedication to entertainment and pleasure that characterizes the welfare state they brought into existence. There must always be a gap between intentions and results, but for those who forget that they are finite and morally flawed the gap may become a chasm. Not only Christians but almost everyone today feels the fear that we live under the sway of forces that we have set in motion—perhaps in the very process of industrialization, perhaps only at certain stages of that process, as in the creation of nuclear power—and that threaten our lives and are beyond our control.

There is much room for argument about these matters. But there is no greater error in the modern mind than the assumption that the God-man can be repudiated with impunity. The man-god may take his place and become the author of deeds wholly unintended and the victim of terrors starkly in contrast with the benign intentions lying at their source. The irony of sin is in this way reproduced in the irony of idealism: exalting human beings in their supposed virtues and powers, idealism undermines them. Exciting fervent expectations, it leads toward despair.

Read the whole thing.

And then read Damon Linker’s essay today about the political meaning of Donald Trump. He begins by discussing how democracies need mediating institutions to work. And those mediating institutions must have the confidence of leaders and the led. The system requires people to trust their institutions. Linker:

As this week’s events have demonstrated, the [political] gatekeeping process only works if the candidates accept Fox’s legitimacy to serve in that role [as a media gatekeeper for what is legitimate to say on the Right]. With his prodigious use of Twitter, remarkable capacity to generate publicity for himself in more traditional media outlets, and willingness to make strident demands and stick to them, Donald Trump is testing the power of this institution like no one before him. When the Republican candidate leading in every national and most state polls not only refuses to participate in a debate hosted by the most powerful media outlet on the right but actually organizes a competing event designed to undermine the legitimacy of the official debate, that’s an act of outright insubordination against the prevailing political norms and institutions of civil society.

It’s also an act that exposes how little formal power such norms and institutions ever really possess. They gain their force solely from our collective willingness to abide by them. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out in a surprisingly insightful rant on his radio show earlier this week, the system only works because when Fox says, “come take part in this debate,” the candidates respond, “Yes, please!” All it takes for the system to break down is for the frontrunner to walk away, ignore (or attack) the gatekeeper, and use other media outlets to go over its head to speak directly to the voters, circumventing (and badly undercutting) the institution in the process.

This, Linker goes on to say, is why the rise of Trump means the decay of democracy into “darker forms of government.”

He’s right about that, but with Brad Gregory’s book in mind, if Trump is a Luther figure, it’s important to keep in mind how the institutions of American life have failed, giving rise to him. Michael Brendan Dougherty says, of Trump voters:

Working-class whites are increasingly atomized and disconnected from their communities, larger networks of family, the political process, and the nation. They identify as religious, even if they are backslidden. They support the traditional family, even if they come from and create broken homes. In other words, they are people who aspire to be more like social conservatives, though they lack the material and spiritual resources to become like them.

Donald Trump’s campaign has re-exposed them, their unique problems, and their perspective to the political class. It’s been a rude experience for many in the political class. The Trump campaign has also proven, so far at least, that this class of voter will turn out for a rally for someone who truly solicits their attention. When his carnival show leaves town, there’s still plenty of work to do to rebuild this class and their communities.

This is true, but how did these people get into that miserable state? A lot of it, of course, has to do with foolish personal choices. Neither the government, nor the church, nor the school can compel a man or a woman to restrain their passions and live virtuously. But that does not get the institutions of American life off the hook.

The political class in America — notably the Republican Party, along with the Clinton Democrats — presided over the de-industrialization of America, and the financialization of the economy. The Republican Party, once the party of national security, led the nation into a ruinous Middle Eastern war, and to this day cannot admit what it did and why it was wrong. The Democratic Party and its supporters in media and academia have been on a decades-long quest to promote corrosive identity politics and to deconstruct and demonize the traditional family, as well as the core liberal idea that, as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, what really matters is not the color of your skin but the content of your character.

The mass media — news and entertainment — relentlessly promote hedonism, radical individualism, and the dissolution of any bonds not self-chosen as liberation. Where in the schools, or in colleges, or in families, or in churches, is any of this opposed? Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen wrote on Facebook last night:

My students are generally very nice, fetching, polite, good-hearted know-nothings. They are not the know-nothings of old, those ferocious if vicious defenders of a passing old order (some of whom were beat up by the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame). They simply know almost nothing, a consequence of the abysmal failure of their elders to teach them anything beyond the art of being nice, taking tests and getting ahead. To the simplest questions that I pose asking about history, myth, song, authors, great and classic books, they can offer only vacant and slightly panicked stares. They are the vanguard of the end of the Republic that we are witnessing before our eyes. They are the fruits of the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the world.

We have created a Res Idiotica – a nation devoted wholly to private things, the enforced solipsism of lives shaped without pasts and in which the future is regarded as a foreign country. If we look for whom to blame for the wreckage accumulating in our midst, we have only to look in the mirror.

Yes, that’s true. The crisis of authority and decay is by no means a top-down phenomenon. The institutions of American life — government, law, academia, religion, business, the market, the family and so forth — are in a crisis more severe than many of us have understood till now. Can they reform themselves, and regain the trust of the people? Can the people ever bring themselves to trust institutions? Well, could the Renaissance Catholic Church reform itself? Or did so many people have so much invested — literally and figuratively — in the rotting old order that they couldn’t imagine changing.

Last night, watching those Fox moderators (who mostly asked good questions) of the Republican presidential candidates, I couldn’t help thinking that the way those journalists framed the intellectual contest, and the way the politicians answered them, seemed very disconnected from what’s actually happening in America. The entire program was evidence of out-of-touch, decaying institutions. And so too was the Trump rally.

History tells us that we had better be careful with revolution, because the consequences are unpredictable. Jeffrey A. Tucker says that as disgusted as Americans are with institutions, we need to be very, very careful about the form our protest takes. Excerpt:

Some of these ideas are so extreme that, it’s true, the establishment doesn’t like them. That’s a good thing. Establishments are as Machiavelli described: stable machines that keep competitors at bay but otherwise seek to make the system work for themselves. They resist rampant populism that would lead to a pillaging of the nation that is serving them so well.

To understand Machiavelli, realize that his black beast was the cleric Savonarola, Florence’s quasi-dictator who led a mass movement of crazed pietists who pillaged and burned material possessions as a pathway to heaven. The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1487 was one result. This is exactly the kind of mania that establishments exist to keep at bay.

It is the height of political naïveté and historical ignorance to believe that anti-establishment populism and the cause of human liberty are united in the same struggle. They are not.

Savonarola, you should keep in mind, was a 15th century Dominican monk who rose to power protesting against the Church’s corruption. I visited his monastic cell in Florence, and later stood on the very site on the Piazza Signoria where he was burned at the stake. Having read his history, I understand why he was so furious. I also understand why the Florentines, having had enough of his radicalism, killed him.

We are at a particularly dangerous moment, I think. The institutions of the Establishment are in serious trouble. The family is going to pieces, the churches, generally, aren’t effective in turning this around, and the ghost of Christianity is dissipating. We don’t know our past, we aren’t thinking of our future, we don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t even know who we are. One thinks of the famous lines of Livy, writing about the dissolution of the Roman Republic and the coming of Caesarism, owing to the corruption of its people and institutions:

I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men and what the means, both in politics and war, by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded, I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch first the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.

What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings.

This is why Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, referring not to the collapse of the Roman Republic, but of Imperial Rome, guide me:

A crucial turning point in that earlier [5C] history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

This has been a discouraging post. More on the good I see emerging out of the ruins in the next post. We are not without hope!

Dreher didn't mention it above, but Brad Gregory also teaches at Notre Dame (along with Deneen and the semi-retired MacIntyre) now. Three of our best and brightest are convinced that we're currently witnessing the death throes of the American Republic.

 

[wizards8507]

https://newrepublic.com/article/128144/dark-history-liberal-reform

https://mises.org/blog/minimum-wage-and-progressive-eugenics-again

The Eugenics Plot of the Minimum Wage | Foundation for Economic Education

tl;dr: Minimum wage was an offshoot of Progressive eugenics efforts designed to make blacks, women, immigrants, and other undesirables unemployable.

 

[RDU Irish]

Pushes people into black market economies. Work for cash so you don't mess up your welfare benefits. Work for cash because you are not here legally and eVerify makes you legally unemployable. Work for cash because you are willing to work for below minimum wage. Work for cash because you don't want to lose 15% of you wages to FICA.

 

[Veritate Duce Progredi]

TAC's Rod Dreher just published a blog post titled "Rome, Reformation & Right Now" which ties together a lot of points I've been trying to make recently:



Dreher didn't mention it above, but Brad Gregory also teaches at Notre Dame (along with Deneen and the semi-retired MacIntyre) now. Three of our best and brightest are convinced that we're currently witnessing the death throes of the American Republic.

Quoting for posterity. This was a masterfully written piece that resonated deeply.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">When he is stripped of the Christian tunic and the classical toga, there is nothing left of the European but a pale-skinned barbarian.</p>— Nicolás Gómez Dávila (@DColacho) <a href="https://twitter.com/DColacho/status/695668221475741696">February 5, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[wizards8507]

Whiskey, you ever hear of this Rev. Robert Sirico at the Acton Institute? I only just discovered him this afternoon but I think he might be my intellectual spirit animal.

"Liberty is not a virtue. It's the context in which virtue is possible."

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ii7db4U9LzY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[wizards8507]

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XUDHZ5sYOZg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The Acton Institute has become to me what The American Conservative is to Whiskey.

 

[Irish#1]

Acton, Indiana is only a couple of miles from me and I can attest that the only institution in that town is the Dinner Bell market.

 

[wizards8507]

Acton, Indiana is only a couple of miles from me and I can attest that the only institution in that town is the Dinner Bell market.

The Acton Institute is in Grand Rapids and is named after Catholic historian Lord Acton.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Why are you so averse to text, wizards!? Every time we start to get to the heart of our disagreement, you offer me an hour+ long video that I have no time to watch.

While we're on the subject, I appreciate your extreme opposition to statism; in that, we're agreed. Where I think you go wrong is that you define "capitalism" as the virtuous via media between anarchism and statism, when it's really communitarianism. Virtuous self-government is only possible on a small scale. Large-scale institutions, whether corporate or governmental, are not compatible with it. Both statism and anarchism ultimately result in tyranny because of the false anthropology of liberal philosophy. But we've been over this many times before...

As you know, I'm partial to Distributism, which involves a sort of micro-capitalism. But there are socialist alternatives that work just as well, like the Mondragon collectives of Spain, or the kibbutzim of Israel. The specific form of a political economy is much less important than how that community defines the human person and the social duties he owes to his neighbors.

 

[wizards8507]

Why are you so averse to text, wizards!? Every time we start to get to the heart of our disagreement, you offer me an hour+ long video that I have no time to watch.

Pop an ear bud in and stream it while you work.

While we're on the subject, I appreciate your extreme opposition to statism; in that, we're agreed. Where I think you go wrong is that you define "capitalism" as the virtuous via media between anarchism and statism, when it's really communitarianism. Virtuous self-government is only possible on a small scale. Large-scale institutions, whether corporate or governmental, are not compatible with it. Both statism and anarchism ultimately result in tyranny because of the false anthropology of liberal philosophy. But we've been over this many times before...

I think that's a mischaracterization of my position. Capitalism is not a virtuous system, it's an amoral one. It's not even really a system per se. My economic framework begins with two principles: private property rights, and free association. When you have private property rights and free association, capitalism just sort of happens. It comes into being on its own, which is why it's uniquely positioned opposite statism. It doesn't require any central management regardless of scale. The nodes (firms and individuals) come into and out of existence spontaneously.

With the caveat that I'm not expert on any of them, distributism, Mondragon collectives, and kibbutzim all appear to be compatible with this framework because they're built on the principle of free association. Forcing any system like that on an entire population would obviously be troublesome, but as long as the scope of any individual unit is small enough that allows citizens a viable alternative outside of the system if they choose to pursue it, I have no problem with it.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Pop an ear bud in and stream it while you work.

Most attorneys are basically professional writers. I don't know anyone who can simultaneously focus on a lecture while drafting unrelated prose. Hell, I can't even listen to music with lyrics while I work. Too distracting.

I think that's a mischaracterization of my position. Capitalism is not a virtuous system, it's an amoral one. It's not even really a system per se. My economic framework begins with two principles: private property rights, and free association. When you have private property rights and free association, capitalism just sort of happens. It comes into being on its own, which is why it's uniquely positioned opposite statism. It doesn't require any central management regardless of scale. The nodes (firms and individuals) come into and out of existence spontaneously.

There's no such thing as an amoral system. The root of all economic and political activity is human behavior. Humans are creatures with specific ends, and such ends are knowable both through natural reason (and divine revelation). Thus, such systems are more or less moral to the extent they promote human flourishing. Capitalism has historically resulted in social atomization, growing inequality, and environmental degradation everywhere it has been tried. You may retort that real capitalism hasn't ever escaped the taint of statist influence; but if that's true, how can it ever be realized? As you know, I think it's fundamentally flawed because of its false anthropology, so a "capitalist" society with minimal government that regularly produces a virtuous citizenry is just as utopian as the Progressive society with a massive welfare state that finds long-term sustainability. You can only outrun human nature for so long.

With the caveat that I'm not expert on any of them, distributism, Mondragon collectives, and kibbutzim all appear to be compatible with this framework because they're built on the principle of free association. Forcing any system like that on an entire population would obviously be troublesome, but as long as the scope of any individual unit is small enough that allows citizens a viable alternative outside of the system if they choose to pursue it, I have no problem with it.

Are you familiar with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement? Your views seem to be evolving toward Christian anarchism (which I'd say is a healthy development).

 

[wizards8507]

There's no such thing as an amoral system.

Sure there is. It's like a car. I can drive my car to church. I can drive my car to a brothel. I can drive homeless people to the food bank. I can hide a dead body in the trunk. None of those things imbue an inherent morality on the car itself.

The root of all economic and political activity is human behavior. Humans are creatures with specific ends, and such ends are knowable both through natural reason (and divine revelation). Thus, such systems are more or less moral to the extent they promote human flourishing. Capitalism has historically resulted in social atomization, growing inequality, and environmental degradation everywhere it has been tried. You may retort that real capitalism hasn't ever escaped the taint of statist influence; but if that's true, how can it ever be realized?

Every once in awhile there needs to be a reset... a "market correction" if you will. The last one came in 1789, so we're probably due. America is probably the closest the world has ever seen to my ideal and we've produced the most prosperous nation in history.

As you know, I think it's fundamentally flawed because of its false anthropology, so a "capitalist" society with minimal government that regularly produces a virtuous citizenry is just as utopian as the Progressive society with a massive welfare state that finds long-term sustainability. You can only outrun human nature for so long.

On this point I think it's you with your anthropology backwards. Capitalism doesn't make people good, nor does it make them evil. Families and communities and culture do that. No matter what economic system you choose, it's obviously going to be more successful with a virtuous population.

Are you familiar with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement? Your views seem to be evolving toward Christian anarchism (which I'd say is a healthy development).

I'm uncomfortable with Christian anarchism for a few reasons, primary among them being that I see legitimate functions of courts, police, and militaries.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Sure there is. It's like a car. I can drive my car to church. I can drive my car to a brothel. I can drive homeless people to the food bank. I can hide a dead body in the trunk. None of those things imbue an inherent morality on the car itself.

That's true on a superficial level. Technology is, in one sense at least, morally neutral. But you need to look at it holistically. Has the invention of the automobile promoted human flourishing? How about the system of interestate highways built to accommodate them? Has modern civil planning (urban sprawl, suburbia, etc.) improved our quality of life, or subtracted from it? Are current methods of automobile production and levels of consumption sustainable in the long term, etc.? For such a revolutionary technology, the answer is obviously complicated. But I don't think you can look at a car and say, "This is clearly an amoral object." And given the massive impact that different economic systems have on the lives of the people living under them, that goes doubly for capitalism.

Every once in awhile there needs to be a reset... a "market correction" if you will. The last one came in 1789, so we're probably due. America is probably the closest the world has ever seen to my ideal and we've produced the most prosperous nation in history.

So where'd we go wrong? The Industrial Revolution? The New Deal? The Sexual Revolution? The seeds of all of those things were present at the founding, as evidenced by the fact that virtually every other Western nation has lapsed in the same sort of Progressive statism we have. And that's why any sort of conservatism that seeks to bring us back to some golden age in our (already liberalized) past is bound to fail. The problem is the assumption that society is made up of autonomous individuals. Unless and until we replace that pernicious lie with a more communitarian ideal, it's going to be more of the same.

On this point I think it's you with your anthropology backwards. Capitalism doesn't make people good, nor does it make them evil. Families and communities and culture do that. No matter what economic system you choose, it's obviously going to be more successful with a virtuous population.

Capitalism is based on classical liberal principles. So far as those principles enshrine the concept of the autonomous individual, they promote selfish anti-social behavior, and thereby undermine virtuous communitarian values. That's why I'm not a capitalist. The system requires a certain level of virtue from its citizenry to work, but it's first principles consistently undermine that virtue, thereby ensuring that it ends in tyranny eventually.

All forms of liberalism-- conservatism (classical), Progressive (mainstream), and radical (libertarianism)--have only "worked" because they've been able to draw down the social capital accumulated over centuries of a radically unselfish (read: Christian) Western culture. And none of them offers a viable path forward because that social capital has been mostly depleted now.

I'm uncomfortable with Christian anarchism for a few reasons, primary among them being that I see legitimate functions of courts, police, and militaries.

I don't disagree with you there. I don't identify as a Christian anarchist either. But I think it's a more coherent position than that of a classical liberal.

 

[IrishLax]

Anyone following the impending financial meltdown? Things are incredibly dire in the European socialist utopia right now...

 

[wizards8507]

Anyone following the impending financial meltdown? Things are incredibly dire in the European socialist utopia right now...

The solution will inevitably more severe European socialism. They're going to take over the banks.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Following on from the discussion about Christianity and Capitalism, here's CS Lewis in an essay titled "Good Work and Good Works":

The idea of Good Work is not quite extinct among us, though it is not, I fear, especially characteristic of religious people. I have found it among cabinet-makers, cobblers, and sailors. It is no use at all trying to impress sailors with a new liner because she is the biggest or costliest ship afloat. They look for what they call her ‘lines’: they predict how she will behave in a heavy sea. Artists also talk of Good Work; but decreasingly. They begin to prefer words like ‘significant,’ ‘important,’ ‘contemporary,’ or ‘daring.’ These are not, to my mind, good symptoms. But the great mass of men in all fully industrialized societies are the victims of a situation which almost excludes the idea of Good Work from the outset. ‘Built-in obsolescence’ becomes an economic necessity. Unless an articles is so made that it will got to pieces in a year or two and thus have to be replaced, you will not get a sufficient turnover. A hundred years ago, when a man got married, he had built for him (if he were rich enough) a carriage in which he expected to drive for the rest of his life. He now buys a car which he expects to sell again in two year. Work nowadays must not be good…

We must avoid taking a glibly moral view of this situation. It is not solely the result of original or actual sin. It has stolen upon us, unforeseen and unintended. The degraded commercialism of our minds is quite as much its result as its cause. Nor can it, in my opinion, be cured by purely moral efforts.

Originally things are made for use, or delight, or (more often) for both…Into this situation, unobtrusive as Eden’s snake and at first as innocent as that snake once was, there must sooner or later come a change. Each family no longer makes all it needs…we now have people making things (pots, swords, lays) not for their own use and delight but for the use and delight of others. And of course they must, in some way or other, be rewarded for doing it. The change is necessary unless society and arts are to remain in a state not of paradisal, but of feeble, blundering, and impoverishing simplicity. It is kept healthy by two facts. First, these specialists will do their work as well as they can. They are right up against the people who are going to use it…If you make bad swords, then at best the warriors will come back and thrash you; at worst, they won’t come back at all…And secondly, because the specialists are doing as well as they can something that is indisputably worth doing, they will delight in their work. We must not idealise. It will not all be delight…But, by and large, the specialists have a life fit for a man; usefulness, a reasonable amount of honor, and the joy of exercising a skill.

Of one sort, a man can truly say, ‘I am doing work which is worth doing. It would still be worth doing if nobody paid for it. But as I have no private means, and need to be fed and housed and clothed, I must be paid while I do it.’ The other kind of job is that in which people do work whose sole purpose is the earning of money; work which need not be, ought not to be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole world unless it were paid.

The opposite extreme may be represented by two examples. I do not necessarily equate them morally, but they are alike by our present classification. One is the work of the professional prostitute. The peculiar horror of her work—if you say we should not call it work, think again—the thing that makes it so much more horrible than ordinary fornication, is that it is an extreme example of an activity which has no possible end in view except money. You cannot go further in that direction than sexual intercourse, not only without marriage, not only without love, but even without lust. My other example is this. I often see a hoarding which bears a notice to the effect that thousands look at this space and your firm ought to hire it for an advertisement of its wares. Consider by how many stages this is separated from ‘making that which is good.’ A carpenter has made this hoarding; that, in itself, has no use. Printers and paper-makers have worked to produce the notice—worthless until someone hires the space—worthless to him until he pastes on it another notice, still worthless to him unless it persuades someone else to buy his goods; which themselves may well be ugly, useless, and pernicious luxuries that no mortal would have bought unless the advertisement, by its sexy or snobbish incantations, had conjured up in him a factitious desire for them. At every stage of the process, work is being done whose sole value lies in the money it brings. Such would seem to be the inevitable result of a society which depends predominantly on buying and selling. In a rational world, things would be made because they were wanted; in the actual world, wants have to be created in order that people may receive money for making the things. That is why the distrust or contempt of trade which we find in earlier societies should not be too hastily set down as mere snobbery. The more important trade is, the more people are condemned to—and, worse still, learn to prefer—what we have called the second kind of job. Work worth doing apart from its pay, enjoyable work, and good work become the privilege of a fortunate minority.

And here's St. Thomas Aquinas in "De regno: ad regem Cypri":

“…if the citizens themselves devote their life to matters of trade, the way will be opened to many vices. Since the foremost tendency of tradesmen is to make money, greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade. The result is that everything in the city will become venal; good faith will be destroyed and the way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit, despising the public good; the cultivation of virtue will fail since honour, virtue’s reward, will be bestowed upon the rich. Thus, in such a city, civic life will necessarily be corrupted.”

Capitalism's great vice is that is inclines everyone under its sway toward commerce, thereby promoting greed and undermining public virtue. There's a place for commerce in society, but it ought to be a secondary one. Capitalism gives it primacy, and thus upends everything else.

 

[wizards8507]

Capitalism's great vice is that is inclines everyone under its sway toward commerce, thereby promoting greed and undermining public virtue. There's a place for commerce in society, but it ought to be a secondary one. Capitalism gives it primacy, and thus upends everything else.

That's a bit of a leap. Surplus (profit) can certainly lead to greed, but it can also lead to security and charity.

In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.
-Proverbs 21:20

And let them gather all the food of those good years that are coming, and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. Then that food shall be as a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which shall be in the land of Egypt, that the land may not perish during the famine.
-Genesis 41:35-36

Then of course we have the parable of the talents. You've illustrated time and time again that capitalism can exacerbate greed, but not that capitalism creates greed. Greed is a product of the fall of man. At the very least, capitalism tends to focus greed into productive pursuits. To promote a system that denies greed is to promote a system that denies the fall of man.

 

[woolybug25]

That's a bit of a leap. Surplus (profit) can certainly lead to greed, but it can also lead to security and charity.

In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.
-Proverbs 21:20

And let them gather all the food of those good years that are coming, and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. Then that food shall be as a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which shall be in the land of Egypt, that the land may not perish during the famine.
-Genesis 41:35-36

Then of course we have the parable of the talents. You've illustrated time and time again that capitalism can exacerbate greed, but not that capitalism creates greed. Greed is a product of the fall of man. At the very least, capitalism tends to focus greed into productive pursuits. To promote a system that denies greed is to promote a system that denies the fall of man.

Surplus is not the same as profit. Saving is not the same as earning in excess.

 

[wizards8507]

Surplus is not the same as profit.

Yes it is. The classic example is the apple farmer. If the apple farmer has surplus apples, he can only store them for so long before they start to rot. If he sells them for more than it cost to harvest them, he makes a profit. Profit is surplus resources stored in the form of money.

Saving is not the same as earning in excess.

Yes it is. You save in times of excess to provide security for times of scarcity.

 

[woolybug25]

Yes it is. The classic example is the apple farmer. If the apple farmer has surplus apples, he can only store them for so long before they start to rot. If he sells them for more than it cost to harvest them, he makes a profit. Profit is surplus resources stored in the form of money.

No, it is not. The apple farmer isn't profiting if he doesn't sell the apples. He is simply, keeping his apples. But the verses you gave had nothing to do with earning in excess, it was about saving what you have. Using your resources appropriately. Not earning as much as possible.

Yes it is. You save in times of excess to provide security for times of scarcity.

Excess of need... not excess of bare minimum. Savings is part of that "excess". Quit being obtuse.

 

[wizards8507]

Let's try it this way. People often fail to realize how free exchange creates wealth because wealth is often simplified to mean money. If wealth is just money, then buying a good or service is a zero-sum game because every dollar paid by a buyer is a dollar received by a seller. However, free exchange creates surplus through the concept of utility.

A util is a hypothetical unit of utility and represents how much an item is worth to you. Your decision to buy an item is based on whether the utility of the item is greater than the utility of the money you’d spend to buy it. Importantly, people value things differently than one another.

Let’s assume that one dollar is worth fifty utils.

A farmer labors to produce a bushel of apples. His labor amounts to expending 80 utils, which is the value he places on those apples. A hungry man comes along and sees the apples. Because the hungry man doesn’t own an orchard of his own, he values the apples at 110 utils. After some negotiation, the farmer agrees to sell the bushel of apples to the hungry man for $2, the equivalent of 100 utils. In this closed system, the farmer ends up net +20 utils (the selling price minus the value of his labor) and the hungry man ends up +10 utils (perceived value of the apples minus the purchase price). In total, the system produced net +30 utils because the consumer’s value placed on the finished good is greater than what it cost the farmer to produce it. Wealth has been created ex nihilo via the free exchange of goods and services.

Capitalism is no more complicated than that.

 

[woolybug25]

Let's try it this way. People often fail to realize how free exchange creates wealth because wealth is often simplified to mean money. If wealth is just money, then buying a good or service is a zero-sum game because every dollar paid by a buyer is a dollar received by a seller. However, free exchange creates surplus through the concept of utility.

A util is a hypothetical unit of utility and represents how much an item is worth to you. Your decision to buy an item is based on whether the utility of the item is greater than the utility of the money you’d spend to buy it. Importantly, people value things differently than one another.

Let’s assume that one dollar is worth fifty utils.

A farmer labors to produce a bushel of apples. His labor amounts to expending 80 utils, which is the value he places on those apples. A hungry man comes along and sees the apples. Because the hungry man doesn’t own an orchard of his own, he values the apples at 110 utils. After some negotiation, the farmer agrees to sell the bushel of apples to the hungry man for $2, the equivalent of 100 utils. In this closed system, the farmer ends up net +20 utils (the selling price minus the value of his labor) and the hungry man ends up +10 utils (perceived value of the apples minus the purchase price). In total, the system produced net +30 utils because the consumer’s value placed on the finished good is greater than what it cost the farmer to produce it. Wealth has been created ex nihilo via the free exchange of goods and services.

Thanks for the Economics 101 class. I'm pretty sure we all know how it works.

Capitalism is no more complicated than that.

I guess you have the whole world figured out. Pretty simple... apples...

 

[Armyirish47]

Thanks for the Economics 101 class. I'm pretty sure we all know how it works.



I guess you have the whole world figured out. Pretty simple... apples...

Apples all the way down.

 

[wizards8507]

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