This is the second in a series. Here's a link to the first installment: Sigma 5: The Conscience of a Conservative - Part 1. I will do an "Index" post once I have posted several installments. In this series I analyze the intellectual underpinnings of the Conservative movement. I take as my reference The Conservative Intellectual movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash. If you want to know why I chose this particular book I refer your to Part 1.
For this series I am not using chapter boundaries to determine what I cover in a particular post. I am moving sequentially through the book. Each new post starts where the last post left off. I then continue until I hit what appears to me to be a convenient stopping point In Part 1 I stopped when the author introduced William F. Buckley and his book God and Man at Yale. It's also where Nash mentions National Review, a magazine that was both hugely influential in the Conservative Movement, and closely associated with Buckley, for the first time.
The appearance of God and Man at Yale and the National Review marked the "creation and sustaining of an intellectual movement". Indeed Buckley saw his role as that of safeguarding of the intellectual underpinnings of the Conservative Movement. Buckley believed that the Movement should stand for something and that the "something" should be clearly articulated then firmly adhered to. People who did not support the important concepts underpinning Conservatism by both word and deed should be summarily drummed out of the Movement. If no one else wanted to be the keeper and protector of the torch, he would. And he did.
Nash associates this particular intellectual thread (one of three he identifies - See Part 1 for details) with the term "classical liberalism". Elsewhere he uses the term "libertarianism" as another name for the same thing. To the modern ear, "libertarianism" has the advantage of being a word that is still widely used. At the time (mid '50s) this intellectual thread was far from the dominant one. One or another of the threads associated with liberalism were far more popular at the time. But this libertarian thread had only been around for about a decade.
The fact that it had come all the way from nothing to something in a short ten years was no mean feat. It was also an achievement worth celebrating. And it was not just Buckley. Nash lists several leading lights that were active at this point. Even taken together they constituted a minority. But it was a minority that was healthy and growing.
But there was some trouble in paradise. "Libertarian intellectuals" disagreed about how much government activity was permissible. There was the "pure laisses-faire" wing. Then there was the wing that believed in "rule of law" and "maintaining the 'design' of a free market". They thought that government engaging in activities of those types was permissible while the "pure" wing did not.
Frankly, this latter type of thinking is not what I associate with modern Conservativism. It will be interesting to see if we hear more from them as the book progresses. But it was not all trouble in River City.
There were also large areas of agreement. "In 1951 Senator Robert Taft could identify the choice for the nation as liberty or socialism." It wasn't just Communism that was an unalloyed evil. Conservatives tended to not differentiate between Socialism and Communism. Both were characterized as standing four square in opposition to liberty.
Either would be equally effective at denying the fruits of liberty to the people. Or so Conservatives opined. They made no serious effort to justify this stand. Generally speaking, the peaceful coexistence between democratic forms of government and socialism that characterized wide swaths of Europe both then and now was, for the most part, ignored.
This puts the rejection of socialism as a viable alternative that permits democracy and liberty firmly in the realm of Conservative dogma. Weak and flimsy arguments are put forward. A few examples are cherry picked (see below). But, for the most part, it is just taken as a given. "Our faith in Conservatism demands that we believe without proof, or in spite of proof to the contrary, that socialism is an unalloyed evil", is how I would boil down their position.
"By the early 1950s", the author opines, "it was evident to everyone that Stalinist Russia was a 'God that failed'". Actually, this is not true. There still existed a small group of dead enders that had not given up on the dream of a Communist Utopia in Russia. But by this time they were a small and powerless fringe.
The Soviet Experiment quickly gathered a lot of support from leftist factions almost from the day the Communists gained control in Russia. Support for what was going on in Russia increased substantially during the depths of the Great Depression when capitalism and market based economies looked particularly bad. But by the early '50s little support remained. That support was concentrated in parts of New York City and in a few other hot spots.
And a strong case can be made that "Soviet" Russia was not being governed according to Communist principles. What was actually going on much more accurately fits the definition of an authoritarian dictatorship. Of the "big three" leaders of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, the one who adhered most closely to Communist orthodoxy was Trotsky. But he ended up playing second fiddle to Lenin. He was later driven into exile and then assassinated by Stalin. At no time was he in control.
Russia in the period from 1919 to Stalin's death in 1952 is more accurately seen not as a "Communist" government, but instead as a dictatorship led first by Lenin and then by Stalin. Both used Communism like dictators often use religion, as just another means of control.
Stalin's "collectivization" of Russian agriculture, for instance, does not fit the Communist model. He did not bring strong management and improved organization to it, resulting in increased efficiency and better yields. But he did use the disruptions collectivization required to eliminate individuals and groups that represented potential challenges to his authority.
As another example, his many "show trials", were accurately named. He often didn't even attempt prove that defendants were corrupt or bad Communists. Instead, he had them convicted in kangaroo courts using trumped up evidence. They too proved to be an effective method, not for getting rid of crooks or bad communists, but as yet another method of getting rid of people who threatened his power.
At one point Nash brands the early British experience with Socialism as a failure. His evidence? The fact that Winston Churchill, no friend of Socialism, had just assumed the post of Prime Minister for the second time. So that's the end of that, right? But Churchill soon proved himself a failure. And Britain is still a Socialist country. The same is true of a large number of other European countries. Once, adopted, none of them have completely abandoned Socialism.
Sure, to an extent Socialism has waxed and waned over the years. But the definitely not Socialist Conservative party has held power in the Untied Kingdom several times over this period. In spite of this the country has at all times held on to a considerable amount of Socialism. The same is not true of Churchill. His second term as Prime Minister didn't last long and it represented his swan song as an influential politician.
I find this waxing and waning of the degree of Socialism a country practices to be completely normal. I am a believer in a mixed economy. Use market forces and capitalism where it works well. Use Socialism and its attendant "top down" approach where it works well.
But there are lots of areas in between where either pure approach may not work all that well. Getting the balance right is hard. Mistakes will be made. Conditions will change. That inevitably necessitates a certain amount of changing tack.
Nash touts the U.S. at this point (early '50s) as a complete success story. But he completely ignores McCarthyism, which was rampant at the time. McCarthyism is a prime example of how Conservatism can go wrong. And let's be honest. Joseph McCarthy was a drunk, a liar, and an unprincipled scoundrel.
Doesn't that mean that Conservatives have an obligation to call him out on his rank immorality? Conservatives say they hold morality to be critically important. So, if they believe what they say they do, then the answer to the question must be an unequivocal "yes". But no one in Conservative circles, not even Buckley, called him out at the time on his blatantly immoral behavior.
This is where chapter one of Nash's book ends. Except, that is, for the 180 footnotes he provides. I have to concede that the book hews to the highest standards of scholarship. Its failing lie elsewhere. But, in any case, on to chapter 2. The title is "The Revolt Against the Masses".
We now move from the libertarian thread to the "new conservative" one. (In part 1 I went over the section where Nash said he was going to talk about three intertwining threads of Conservatism.) I think this thread is now called "neoconservatism". Apparently, one starting point for the philosophy that undergirds this thread is the term "Chivalry".
Chivalry is a concept that dates back to the feudal era of European history. One much ignored tenant of chivalry is the idea that "with great power comes great responsibility". Knights are the super-soldier of their era. They get to live in castles where they are waited on hand and foot. And the perks don't end there. But in exchange for all these goodies they are expected to discharge many responsibilities. They have to defend their peasant vassals from "all enemies, foreign and domestic", and perform other services.
There are lots of stories from the feudal era of Knights living up to their responsibilities and laying down their lives in the defense of the powerless. But there are also lots of stories of Knights abusing their power by, for instance, raping peasant girls with impunity.
I tend to pay little attention to what believers in Chivalry say. Instead, I pay attention to what they do. And I specifically look for how people who claim to believe in the code of Chivalry actually follow the code when doing so would be detrimental to their own interests or those of their class. It does happen, but it happens far less often than the code demands.
The idea is that there are always rules and norms, like those of Chivalry, that govern the behavior of "good men and true". Nash investigates this idea extensively. But what I find here is that, in practice, the rules that Nash examines tend to entrench and perpetuate the ruling class. There is also no interest in, nor discussion of, rules that would result in disadvantaging, or even inconveniencing, those who are already in power. In other words, it's all rights and no responsibilities.
This kind of thinking makes sense if the idea is to maintain a stable ruling class. Historically, one of the jobs of the ruling class has been to provide officers for the military. But you can't just have everybody killing off officers willy nilly, even though this makes perfect sense from a purely military point of view. So elaborate "rules of war" were developed so that service in the officer corps was dangerous but not too dangerous.
Other rules were developed for use in other areas. These made it hard to get into the ruling class. But once you made it in, the rules now made it easy for you to stay there. The fact is that these rules often conveyed great power to the ruling class. But they rarely conveyed equivalent responsibilities. This asymmetry is not discussed at all in Nash's book.
Things changed, and for the worse in the author's opinion, with the advent of the twentieth century. As noted above, the concept of "limited war", war conducted according to accepted rules of conduct, held sway, at least in Europe, for many centuries. World War I was the first "total" war. And it was recent enough that Conservative writers and thinkers were very familiar with it.
World War I was not fought according to the traditional "limited war" rules. It featured machine guns, airplanes, tanks, poison gas, unrestricted submarine warfare, the shelling of civilians and others behind the lines. Early on everybody stopped playing by the old rules. The result was devastating for the ruling class.
The heretofore unbreakable tenet that there was one set of rules for officers and another for ordinary soldiers went out the window. And that meant that officers died at the same or higher rates as ordinary soldiers did. The War also consumed the wealth of the continent. The people who lost the most were the rich and powerful. After the war many in the upper class could no longer afford to maintain their traditional lifestyle. At the same time, the aristocracy that had run Europe for centuries was swept out of power.
World War II was, if anything, worse. Cities were carpet bombed. Factories far behind the lines were destroyed. Terror weapons like the V-1 and the V-2 were used extensively. And then there was the Atomic Bomb. None of this was good for those interested in maintaining the standing and perks of the ruling class.
The author first explores all this through the writings of Weaver. About him the author opines that, "the study of Southern history was for Weaver a road to the Right". And by "Southern history" we mean history written by and about white, male, American Southerners. But wait. There's more. He studied the history of the "losing side. And to be more specific he studied the antebellum south [i.e. the American South before the Civil War]".
He (both Nash, the author of the book, and Weaver, the author Nash is writing about) praises the antebellum South as having "an ethical claim which can be described only in terms of the mandate of civilization". This equates "civilization" with a culture that enslaved people.
He goes on to praise the South for "view[ing] with disdain the . . . urban man". "Modernity", i.e. Northern urban society is a "cataclysm". The rural, often poorly educated, agriculturally oriented, classist, slave holding, "Southern" society is the ideal.
Nash changes the subject by moving from Weaver to Heckscher. The subject is changed to another area where he judges the North to be the inferior to the South. You see, in the North there is a decline of religiosity. Heckscher, argues that there is a lack of "moral content" in our social life. He detected a conflict between the "methods of the scientist" and "truths about the everyday world". His solution to this problem is: more Plato.
This is an allusion to the "classic liberal education" popular in Ivy League colleges circa 1900. Learn Latin. Learn Greek. Read the "classical literature", the literature dating from the Ancient Roman period and the Greek period that preceded it. And read it is its original form, classical Latin or classical Greek. Reading it in translation is just not done, don't you see.
But, whatever you do, do not learn modern history or science or business or anything the least bit practical or down to earth. Anything worth knowing, the thinking goes, was known to the ancients living two thousand years ago. And, of course, the single most important component of classical literature is the Bible.
At this time there was a concept sweeping the Liberal Arts called "cultural relativism". At the beginning of the twentieth century the height of morality was believed to be that seen among the upper classes in Victorian England. Then Margaret Mead went off to the South Seas.
She found that otherwise moral and upstanding people in that culture had quite different ideas about sex. Others followed and studied other aspects of behavior. In case after case it was found that in one culture or another tenet after tenet of Victorian Morality got called into question.
After a while a large body of scholars in the Social Sciences threw up their hands and said, "when it come to Morality, everything is relative". Conservatives vigorously rejected this position. They argued that everything is not relative. I agree with them. Social Scientists got it wrong and Conservatives got it right. Now, I do object to many specific details of the absolutism that Conservatives champion. But that disagreement is for another time.
This whole discussion about things being relative got kicked off by Einstein and his theories of Special Relativity (1905) and General Relativity (1915). Things got kicked into high gear by Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle. But this is a misinterpretation of the beliefs of Physicists. Physicists never did believe that "everything is relative". They came instead to believe that "it's not this that is absolute, it's that".
As an example, in Quantum Mechanics there is a lot of randomness going on. Traditionally it was thought that in a specific situation either a thing always happened or it never happened. But numerous experiments demonstrated that things were not that straight forward. You have to factor in probability. It turned out that there was probability of something happening.
The thing might or might not happen but the probability that it would happen was always the same. It (the probability) not the event was the absolute. (Actually, Physicists did not deal in probability. Instead they dealt in the square root of probability. But, for our purposes, that's TMI.) So absolutes still existed. They just weren't where people had originally thought they were.
I contend that the same thing is true in the Social Sciences. The thing that is the absolute is not what they originally thought it was. It is some other thing. The problem is that that Social Scientists have not gone looking for that "some other thing". They just threw up their hands and said "everything is relative" without trying to figure out where the absolute had moved to. And, by doing that, they earned the ridicule that Conservatives hurl at them.
What Conservatives are doing is behaving like a modern Physicist who insists on sticking with nineteenth century Physics in spite of the fact that Physics has made vast advances since then. They are just as wrong as Social Scientists when it comes to how morality works. It's just that they are wrong in a different way than Social Scientists are.
Moving on, and quoting from Nash, "it is easy enough to criticize liberal dogmas and mass culture in the 1940s and 1950s". Nash doesn't hold back in doing so. But I find his criticism long on bombast and short on serious analysis. It is just as easy to criticize Conservatism by laying on the bombast.
It is always possible to find some liberal saying something idiotic. But it is also always possible to find some conservative saying something idiotic. Superficial approaches like that don't result in anything that deserves to be given serious consideration.
It takes more than just quoting people accurately. It takes careful analysis and an attention, not to a silly statement here or there, but to a serious engagement with the ideas presented. I find that there is little meat on the bones of his "Critique" of liberal thinking.
But Nash in general, and this book in particular, is held up by Conservatives as a reliable source of information about the intellectual underpinnings of Conservativism. I have tired to focus primarily on the core of what he has to say. But I would be remiss if I didn't allocate substantial weight to sentiments that are frequently and consistently expressed.
And this is a good time to point out the fallacy in how Nash's uses his critique of liberalism to bolster his case. The fallacy is called "the excluded middle". If there are only two possible positions then, if you succeed in proving one position to be wrong, that means that you are entitled to declare the other position to be right without having to prove it. The problem is that I frequently see this "you are wrong so I am right" argument applied in inappropriate situations. It is an inappropriate argument to use when there are three or more possibilities.
The example I am going to discuss is one that people who regularly read my posts will have seen me use several times before. So, I am going to keep it brief. Scientists debated the nature of light for hundreds of years. Is it made up of particles or waves? For a long time one scientist would demolish the "wave" argument then declare "I have now proved that it must be particles". But then another scientist would demolish the "particle" argument then declare "I have now proved that it must be waves".
If there had only been two possibilities then both scientists would have been justified in their assertion. What finally broke the impasse was Einstein saying "there is a third way". If there is a third way then neither of the earlier scientists was correct in asserting that they had proved anything. Inappropriately asserting that there are only two possibilities is how you fall into the excluded middle fallacy.
And that's what I see going on here. Nash is saying "liberalism is wrong so conservativism must be right". He is joined by many liberals who make the mirror image allegation that "conservatism is wrong so liberalism must be right". What I see is some right and some wrong on each side. And I see not two, or even three, but many possibilities.
I see an exact parallel with the argument about the nature of light. The "particle" people got some things wrong and some things right. The "wave" people got some things wrong and some things right. The correct answer incorporated some aspects of particle theory, some aspects of wave theory, and some completely new aspects. I see some right and some wrong in the liberal theory. I see some right and some wrong in the conservative theory. I also see a need for some completely new aspects.
I could critique various aspects of liberal thought. But the subject at hand is a book by Nash about Conservative thought. So I am going to stick to the matter at hand and confine my observations to what I think of what Nash has to say.
And a subject Nash later takes up is the New Yorker magazine. He calls it a "smug, self satisfied court gazette". People at the New Yorker, then and now, might take that as a compliment. But they would, however, vigorously object to his follow-on statement. He characterized them as "contemptuous of values". They would argue vigorously that there are "values" that they are the opposite of contemptuous of. They are just values that differ widely from values Nash and other Conservatives hew to.
And this is the sort of thing I am objecting to when I am characterizing Nash as "long on bombast and short on serious analysis". If Nash had listed a bunch of values which he conceded were near and dear to the New Yorker's heart and then said "I think these are the wrong values to hew to and here's why", that would be one thing. Instead, he paints with a broad brush. He accuses the New Yorker of being contemptuous of all values. How can I put this. That's unchivalrous.
Nash soon moves on to a subject that he has already returned to several times, education. One of the evils liberals have foisted on society, we are told, is "progressive education". Apparently the chief architect of progressive education is John Dewey. So much time has passed and so many battles have since been fought in the ongoing education wars that I confess to knowing nothing about John Dewey.
I don't trust Nash to fairly and accurately present Dewey's ideas. But what he writes is all I have. And, fortunately, they are not that important to the current discussion. Nash focuses of what needs to be done differently. From that we can infer that Dewey's ideas are along the lines of "not that".
And we already have a good idea of what should be differently. But Nash adds detail here. Imagine what was taught, and they way it was taught, in a Southern schoolhouse to "young gentlemen" and you have a good idea of the way Nash thinks education should be done. Interestingly, one idea was a complete surprise to me. It is, and here I am quoting Nash, "distain for the common man".
Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised me. If you are a believer in, and a supporter of, a small elite class running everything then this idea fits right in. If you believe that only the right kind of people are important and that everyone else is cannon fodder. then it is perfectly sensible to have little interest in what they think. It also makes sense to have even less concern for their welfare.
Another oft repeated idea that resurfaces at this point is a continued insistence on "the necessity for religion and religious education in the schools". There is no divorcing Conservatives from their close connection to religion. And, as I have already observed several times before, we are not taking about religion in general or any old kind of religion. We are talking about mainstream Protestantism here.
This is a good point to end. My Kindle says I am now 10% of the way through the book. As someone I like says, "we'll pick it up here on the other side".
