Libertarianism is not traditionalism 2

I published a post a few days ago on the Cato Institute, a leading libertarian organisation. I was therefore interested to find this in my Twitter feed:

Libertarians, like other right-liberals, look to the free market to regulate society. They believe that this is the engine of human progress. Hence the following quote:

"Capitalism reduces the oppression of traditional societies that impose hierarchies of gender and caste,” writes Cudd, because embedded within market exchange itself is the idea that each individual should be free to pursue her self-interest.

So there you go. The Cato Institute approves a model of society in which there are simply individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest (in particular their economic self-interest).

To a traditionalist this is a model of society that is not only ultimately unworkable, but that also has too limited a view of individual life. Are we really just atomised individuals in pursuit of our own individual profit? Is that what defines us as humans? Are men and women simply interchangeable units within a system of production and consumption?

Capitalism, as an economic system, should not define what humans are. Nor should it define our concept of society. Nor our understanding of the roles of men and women in society.

Does anyone really believe that if we tell young men and women that the highest good is to pursue their own individual self-interest that we will arrive at successful relationships between men and women? Stable families? High levels of trust between the sexes? A commitment to raise children successfully?

Capitalism alone cannot create a good society. It's necessary to keep to those traditional values and institutions that cohere or successfully order a society and which express deeper truths about man, community, belonging and identity.

The one good thing to draw from the Cato tweet is that it reminds us of what to look out for. Perhaps it is, in fact, true that a market system encourages the idea "that each individual should be free to pursue his or her self-interest." This idea goes back a long way in Western political theory - it brings to mind the view of man and society of John Locke in the late 1600s. It is likely that men made wealthy in the market will be attracted to the idea and give patronage to those holding it. But wherever and whenever it arises it needs to be vigorously opposed.

Not a thought revolution

Clive Palmer is an Australian mining magnate who threw a lot of money into the last election and won a seat.

In his maiden speech to parliament Palmer called for a "thought revolution." Unfortunately, rather than proposing anything new, he presented yet again the ideal of an "economic man" whose first commitment is to economic matters. He said,

Australia needs a revolution in the way we think, in the way we boost our wealth and economy for all our citizens...Our main concern needs to rest with how we can grow and expand our economy and create more wealth.

This is just more of the same from right-liberals. Left-liberals too, when you get to the crux of what they believe, think that a professional career is the main prize in life.

However, in another speech Palmer did reference the concept of fidelity. He got it disastrously wrong, but it's interesting that it still has significance for him.

Fidelity, as I understand the concept, is a turning toward the relationships we are made for, and which call us to service as an expression of who we are. There are many such relationships, but one of them is to our ancestors.

Palmer had this to say:

We need to make sure we can generate more prosperity and growth for Australians so that families have a better standard of living.

We have a very lucky country and we're standing on the shoulders of our ancestors to carry our tradition forward to the next century.

Again, there's that ideal of the "economic man" - that what matters is success in the market. But nonetheless Palmer, for rhetorical effect at least, still invokes the idea of having a debt to previous generations and a responsibility to carry forward a tradition. There is still some semblance of an idea of fidelity toward one's ancestors.

But he has misunderstood the tradition he is to carry forward. Federation of the Australian states was argued for on the basis that economic considerations shouldn't outweigh ties of ancestral kinship. For instance, the following poem was recited at federation meetings by a future PM, Alfred Deakin:

From all division let our land be free,
For God has made her one: complete she lies
Within the unbroken circle of the skies,
And round her indivisible the sea
Breaks on her single shore; while only we,
Her foster children, bound with sacred ties
Of one dear blood, one storied enterprise,
Are negligent of her integrity.—
Her seamless garment, at great Mammon's nod,
With hands unfilial we have basely rent,
With petty variance our souls are spent,
And ancient kinship under foot is trod

Palmer is reversing the message of the generation that federated Australia: he wants to steer course according to "great Mammon's nod" even if this harms the ties held sacred by the federation poet.

German cardinal: we are a dying people

How's this for a coincidence. A few days ago I wrote about the decision of a former Archbishop of Cologne to build the Neviges cathedral in a modernist style.

Now it's the current Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Meisner, who is in the news. He has criticised the German Government's family and immigration policies in a courageous way.

Read on, because you don't often hear figures in positions of authority speaking out like this. It began when a journalist challenged the Cardinal on his opposition to abortion. He replied:

We are a dying people, but have a perfect legislation for abortion. Is that not the suicide of a society? People want most of all to shut women out of families so that production continues. But with money alone you can't get children.

He was then asked if he was against formal child care:

No, but it would be better for society to create a climate in which women bring more children into the world. That is to say: to bring to awareness the high worth of the family with a mother and father for the children.

He went on to talk about his experiences in communist East Germany:

I have already been part of the whole one-sided tragedy in East Germany. The women there, who stayed home for the family, were told they were demented. Because labour forces were needed childcare was brought in. A socialist educator said of this: "The creche (the "child crib") is in the Bible a temporary thing and we have made of it a permanent institution."

The interviewer then objected "But women want to self-actualise in a career." The Cardinal replied:

Not all. Where are women really publicly encouraged to stay at home and to bring three or four children into the world? One should intervene here and not - as Mrs Merkel does currently - only present immigration as the solution to our demographic problem. We cannot take the young people away from Portugal and Spain and thus rob their countries of their future just out of selfishness. We should train these unemployed people and offer them perspectives, but then allow them to return home where they are needed.

What's impressive here is that the Cardinal has recognised a need for the German people to survive into the future by being encouraged to have children of their own rather than relying on taking the youth of other nations. He wants the family as an institution to be accorded value and not just the market.

It turns out that the Cardinal has also (unsuccessfully) taken a stand on cathedral design. Back in 2007 the artist Gerhard Richter completed a new stained glass window for the historic Cologne Cathedral. Richter based his design on his trademark "random pixel" paintings (randomly computer-arranged coloured pixels).

I haven't seen the window personally, but I would have thought that art in a cathedral should attempt to be inspired rather than randomly generated:

Gerhard Richter's stained glass window in the Cologne Cathedral

Maybe it looks better when you're there, but from the photo I'd have to say that Cardinal Meisner was correct in thinking that this doesn't work as religious art (the colours fit, but it comes across as chaotic).

Liberal Rational Man versus Liberal Good Man

Here's another of those contradictions within liberalism.

When wearing his technocratic hat, liberal man likes to view the human person as being motivated by rational self-interest. And most frequently, especially among right-liberals, rational self-interest means the pursuit of money or career advancement in the market.

We saw this attitude in two of my recent articles, in which liberals envisaged their nations as being multicultural workplaces. The view of man that this assumes is the one I described above - that we are motivated as individuals to pursue a rational self-interest by seeking our best economic advantage at work.

But is this assumption justified? I don't think it is. I don't think that our work commitments are justified by rational self-interest. If I were following my own individual self-interest, then it would be irrational for me to spend 40 years working in an office from early morning to evening.

If men do commit to work it's mostly not out of self-interest, but from their larger commitments to family or country. They are motivated by particular loves which overrule individual self-interest.

That's one reason why I don't think the "nation as multicultural workplace" will succeed in the longer term - it is too dissolving of the particular commitments that motivate people to make sacrifices at work.

But if liberalism only offered the technocratic "rational self-interest" view of man, then its appeal would be more limited than it is. Liberalism also generates a different kind of view, one that commands us to identify with the other.

It seems to go like this. Liberals are pessimistic that there are objective moral standards that can be recognised by a society and they are fearful that a society which does recognise such moral standards will be authoritarian.

So liberals prefer not to recognise objective moral standards. But humans always have an idea of a moral good and of what represents a good person. So if the starting point is that there are no objective moral standards, and that we can only have our own personal, subjective moral views, then what matters is "non-interference" and "non-assertiveness". So the liberal moral goods become qualities like non-discrimination, respect, tolerance and accepting the other (which sets up a problem for liberals that over time there is a trend toward an intolerant enforcement of tolerance and a non-accepting enforcement of acceptance and an interfering enforcement of non-interference).

So if you want to prove you are a good person in a liberal society you do so by proving how much you identify with the other rather than with your own.

So there are two conflicting strands within liberalism: one strand assumes that we are Economic Man, motivated by a rational self-interest to pursue our profit in the market; the other strand assumes that the good person is the one who puts all self-identity aside to identify with the other.

What the two strands have in common is that both dissolve our particular loves and attachments - one wants us to transcend such particular attachments in favour of identifying with what is "other" to us; the other denies them in favour of a view of people as self-interested, individual actors in the market.

What Economic Man misses

I've often argued that right-liberalism ends up viewing people primarily as actors in the market. If you see society as made up of millions of atomised individuals each pursuing their own desires, then you need to explain how all these competing wills are to be harmonised. The right-liberal solution is to believe that if people rationally pursue their own self-interest in the market they end up benefiting both themselves and the larger society.

And so you get right-liberals who view people primarily as rational economic agents, i.e. as Economic Man. And here's a particularly crude example (I think made by an "objectivist" - a follower of Ayn Rand). The comment was made in the context of a discussion of Islamic vs Western morality:

A rational man neither sacrifices himself to others or others to himself; he produces and trades in the free market. 

So there you go. If you want to be moral, just get involved as a trader or producer in the market.

I don't quite know how that speaks to all the fathers out there. They're making sacrifices for others. So are the mothers. A lot of the mothers aren't even producers or traders in the market. What then does that say about them  - are we supposed to regard them as irrational?

Right liberals no doubt once saw themselves as liberating individuals from ancient ties. But their political philosophy is highly restrictive in its own way. In restricts our moral vision, for instance, to rational self-interest in the market. It denies or excludes personal character, the duties we have toward family or our larger tradition, and ideals of manhood or womanhood.

It diminishes what man is.

Tamils & national allegiance

Last week I reported on the attempt of boatloads of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to land in Australia. The refugees claimed emotionally that they had nowhere else to go. I asked why they couldn't go to their ancestral homeland, the nearby state of Tamil Nadu in India.

There have been some interesting further developments. The Sri Lankan High Commissioner to Australia has noted that the spokesmen for the Tamils speak English with a distinct American accent and have therefore probably resided recently in a Western country. He therefore doubts that there would be any problem with them returning to Sri Lanka.

One of the spokesmen, Alex, explained his accent by stating that he "worked at an American call centre in Chennai for three years where he was taught to speak with an American accent."

Where is Chennai? It is the city formerly known as Madras and is the capital city of Tamil Nadu in India!

So not only is it possible for "refugees" like Alex to live in Tamil Nadu, he admits that he has already done so. Furthermore, he was able to obtain work in Chennai, where the economy is booming (it's estimated that Chennai's economy will grow 250% over the next 16 years).

The picture to the left shows a shopping mall in Chennai. The photo below it shows one of the numerous software parks in the city.

The point is that Chennai is not an economic basket case, but has a rapidly modernising economy. Tamils like Alex have already been able to move there and work there and so there is no obvious reason why they shouldn't have patiently taken advantage of the growing economy in Chennai - rather than taking a gamble on paying smugglers to get to Australia instead.

Two journalists

In my previous post I also asked why mainstream journalists hadn't asked about the Tamil Nadu option. Well, two of them now have. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald Sun wrote:

Let’s presume (on little proof) that these educated and monied Tamils could not stay in Sri Lanka, and let’s ask where they could go instead. Well, just across a narrow strait from their island is the Tamil Nadu state of India, which is safe.

And Greg Sheridan of The Australian observed that:

Just being a Tamil does not make you a refugee. Moreover, if you are fleeing persecution as a Tamil in Sri Lanka, why wouldn't you go and live in Tamil Nadu, the giant Tamil state of India, just next door to Sri Lanka? India does not persecute people for being Tamils.

Although I give credit to Sheridan for writing openly about the issue, his piece does illustrate some of the problems with the political situation in Australia. Sheridan is amongst the most adventurous in venturing his opinions - but his views are still a long way from anything that might be considered conservative or traditionalist.

His basic argument is that continuing mass immigration is a great thing, but that the public will only accept it if the government maintains control over the process. Therefore, he thinks the Tamils should be made to go through normal channels of immigration rather than jumping the queue.

Why would he support mass immigration? Sheridan believes that most of the boat people arriving in Australia are not genuine refugees but illegal immigrants. However, he thinks the actions of the illegal immigrants are moral, even if politically unacceptable:

I make no moral criticism of the illegal immigrants. If I were living in Sri Lanka or Afghanistan and I could pay a people-smuggler $15,000 to get me to Australia, to enjoy everything from law and order and good weather to Medicare, Centrelink and good schools, I would make that effort.

But that understandable motivation does not make a person a refugee. I think Sri Lankans generally make excellent migrants to Australia. I have always favoured a larger immigration program and a larger refugee intake, but I want Australia to choose who it takes and to do so in an orderly way.

It doesn't occur to Greg Sheridan that someone might love their country enough to stay and work to improve the living conditions at home rather than simply packing their family up to move elsewhere.

Sheridan views nations as places you park yourself to enjoy the conditions of life. If the conditions of life seem better elsewhere, then, as an individual "economic man", you rationally choose to park yourself there instead.

There's no sense that nations are distinct entities with unique traditions to which we are more closely or more distantly connected. Little wonder, then, that Sheridan's understanding of the allegiance we owe to particular nations is so flimsy - or that he thinks it moral and reasonable for people to transport themselves to foreign cultures if, say, the welfare benefits or schools are better.

Our allegiance to our homeland shouldn't depend narrowly on the material conditions of life. What is more important is the love of our own enduring tradition, a sense of shared sacrifices through history and an appreciation of our own distinct culture.

And if the schools aren't as good as elsewhere? You work to improve them as part of a commitment to your own nation.

Solitary, selfish, suspicious

I've written a couple of posts already on the book Liberalism & Community by American academic Steven Kautz.

The book was written as a defence of classical liberalism, particularly that early version of liberalism set out by John Locke (late 1600s). What are we to make of this defence? I'd list the following main points:

a) Classical liberalism is openly hostile to a traditionalist conservatism.

b) Classical liberalism begins with too negative an assessment of human nature and an artificial account of the basis of human society. It radically limits the sights that we may set ourselves as individuals and as communities.

c) Classical liberalism discourages people from acting publicly in the defence of a community.

I'll illustrate these points with some excerpts from the book, beginning with this:

Since human beings are by nature solitary and selfish, querulous and untrustworthy competitors for scarce and often fragile private goods, prudent individuals will learn to attend to the mostly private acquisition of the tools necessary to provide for their mostly private welfare - above all, liberty and property ...

... even a well-ordered civil society can ... not abolish, the harsh natural conditions and the querulous traits of our human natures that make it necessary to treat our fellows with abiding suspicion ...

So it is the principal business of political community to arrange "conditions" so that the acquisition and maintenance of liberty and property is protected, as against the "Fancy or Covetousness" of incipient aggressors.(p.30)

Is this really a balanced reading of human nature? Are humans by nature solitary and selfish? Must we limit our aims to our private welfare, in particular to the accumulation of private property?

the way of life of the businessman is only the most prominent among many other private ways of life, available in a liberal community, that enable human beings substantially to retain their natural freedom to "order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit" ...(p.31)

The most prominent way of life is that of the businessman? As we'll see, there is a great emphasis on acquisitiveness in classical liberalism.

According to classical liberals, the political community is surely not natural: man is not by nature a political animal. Still, there can be no doubt that membership in a peaceful and stable political community accords with the interests of almost all individual human beings.

Thus, the liberal political community, which seeks above all to secure this peace and stability, is an artificial rational construction, established by a "social contract" among free individuals; it is not a natural organism, a whole to which the individual is related as the hand is related to the body ... The liberal believes that "each of us" is somehow independent of, or prior to, the political community. Or again: we constitute our (political) communities; they do not "constitute" us. (p.32)

This is not a persuasive account of how human communities are, in practice, formed. We are supposed to believe that naturally solitary and selfish individuals decided to make a contract with each other, in order to safeguard their property and personal security. Therefore, human community is to be understood in terms of an unnatural, but rational, political arrangement.

It's more plausible to regard humans as social creatures, who are born into social communities, in which they live and work together with others they are related to, and with whom they share a common identity. Such communities arose naturally rather than being created through a process of contract; nor are the aims of these communities limited to the protection of life and property.

There are some particular problems with the classical liberal view as set out by Kautz. First, Kautz believes that the contracted form of community is rational because it accords with individual self-interest. So Kautz connects reason here with self-interest. It would seem that if you want individuals to act rationally, as liberals do, you will then expect them to act in a self-interested way. Egoism becomes a matter of principle.

Second, the larger, natural form of community is hidden within the liberal framework. In the classical liberal view, there are "free" individuals who contract to form a political community. Where in this is the natural social community? How can we have a proper regard for this natural social community if it is made obscure?

Third, the classical liberal theory sets up a framework in which the aims of a community are severely limited: community was established for the purpose of defending property rights and a right to personal security. The higher aim of a society is too one-sided and materialistic: it is to create the conditions in which property can be safely accumulated.

It's a recipe for a materially wealthy and technologically advanced society, but one which is likely to suffer a "hollowing" process, in which the culture and institutions which once sustained it and inspired loyalty in those who belonged to it are gradually lost.

There's more to add but I'll leave it to the next post.

A policy just to plug the gaps?

As predicted the Rudd Government is introducing a scheme to bring Pacific Islanders to Australia to harvest crops.

The scheme is not without its critics. Aboriginal leaders have asked why their own youth couldn't be employed to do the work; similarly, Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson has pointed to the large numbers of local unemployed available for work:

Why is it beyond the wit of our country to be able to provide the resources and encouragement in supporting Australians who are unemployed to go to areas where they can get seasonal work?

Dr Nelson is taking the scheme at face value; he is assuming that its promoters really do believe that they are just plugging temporary gaps in the labour market. I think it's more likely that those who support the scheme do so for other reasons.

Back in 2005, as the shadow minister for foreign affairs, Kevin Rudd boasted,

Labor led the government on the East Asia Community. We're now leading the government on the creation of a Pacific Community.

As PM, Kevin Rudd has had a further go at developing the East Asia Community, but with lukewarm support from abroad. But what is the Pacific Community he is so keen to create?

In 2003, an Australian Senate committee delivered a report which (quoting the report itself):

proposes a Pacific community which will eventually have one currency, one labour market, common strong budgetary and fiscal discipline, democratic and ethical governance, shared defence and security arrangements, common laws and resolve in fighting crime, and, health, welfare, education and environmental goals.

The Senate committee proposed, in other words, something like the European Union, but made up of Australia, New Zealand, PNG and the smaller Pacific Island nations. It's important to note that the Pacific Union would effectively replace the existing nations of the region, as there would be a free movement of people, a single currency and common laws.

The current policy of bringing in Pacific Islander labour fits this larger aim of creating an integrated Pacific Union. It's a first step toward a single labour market and an integrated economy.

Steve Lewis, the national political correspondent for the Herald Sun, has written openly about this aspect of the labour scheme. In a recent article, he attacked Brendan Nelson's opposition to the policy:

... his populist stance against a Pacific guest worker scheme ... is outrageously shrill ... he panders to the lowest common denominator ... A guest worker scheme makes sense ... it should also pave the way for a pan-Pacific economic and trade pact ... Rudd's employment scheme, which will initially allow 2500 "guest workers" into Australia, is the first tranche of an eventual Pacific "common market".

Steve Lewis summons up the usual open borders platitudes, telling Dr Nelson that he is "playing the politics of fear". Oddly, Steve Lewis ends his piece by appealing to Dr Nelson's patriotism: "The nation deserves better".

Steve Lewis is trying to have it both ways. He is anti-national in backing a policy designed to create a supra-national Pacific Community. He is anti-national too in associating nationalism negatively with a politics of populism and fear. But he then appeals for support for his open borders, anti-national policy on the grounds that "The nation deserves better". Go figure.

It's interesting too to look at the reasons given by Chris Berg for supporting the guest worker scheme. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and describes himself as a libertarian or classical liberal (in other words, he is a right rather than a left liberal):

I admit to being very uncomfortable with those supposedly free market advocates who oppose immigration, for whatever reason ... The idea that we should stop an individual from searching for work beyond the national borders of their birthplace simply because we believe that their culture is somehow incompatable with ours is a deeply illiberal position to hold ...

How does the free movement of people differ in any significant way from the free movement of goods or services?

... we have a moral obligation to accept into our borders those who want to come. For individuals born in under-developed countries, simply crossing into the developed world can dramatically increase their potential salary, as well as allow them to experience the historically unprecedented living standards that we already enjoy.

The objections to expanded immigration seem nationalistic or economically illiterate at best, and immoral at worst.

This is the "atomised and materialistic individual living in an economy" view of society - one which has come down to us in the classical liberal tradition. If we are to be guided by an acquisitive individualism, in which the important thing is a lack of restriction on our solitary efforts to accumulate material goods, then Chris Berg is undoubtedly right - it would be immoral to prevent anyone from moving to whichever country most improved their material standard of living.

But what if the underlying view of man and society is wrong? What if man is not by nature solitary and selfish, but instead most fulfilled in his nature when he is living within a settled community? What if the primary form of human community is not so much an economic market, but rather a social community with a distinct culture and history? What if there are natural bonds between people giving rise to natural forms of community?

It then becomes immoral to break up these natural, settled forms of community.

So the issue goes beyond policy arguments to first concepts. If there is only the solitary, economic man working privately toward acquiring material goods - if that is the primary view of man and society - then it will be difficult to find a principled basis for defending existing forms of community.

Work or anti-work?

Can a consistent politics be derived from liberalism? Here's yet another reason to think that the answer is no.

Liberalism begins with a view of society as being made up of millions of individual wills, each competing to enact their own desires. Therefore, a key question for liberals is how you best regulate society so that these competing wills can be harmonised.

The answer given by right liberals is that the market can do the job. The idea is that individuals can act selfishly for their own profit and the market will ensure a beneficial result overall, one which creates freedom, progress and prosperity. It's no surprise, then, that right liberals focus on a certain vision of Economic Man - of man viewed in terms of his economic role within a market.

Left liberalism emerged in protest at this market-oriented politics. Left liberals decried the unequal outcomes created by the market, and they criticised the irrational, inefficient outcomes created by the free market. They preferred society to be regulated by a benevolent, neutral, reforming class of government bureaucrats. They asserted a vision of Social Man against the right liberal view of Economic Man.

But there is a contradiction in the left liberal position, one which tends to split left liberals into different camps today. If, as liberals believe, the good in life is to be autonomous, so that we are free to enact our own individual wants, then we will naturally seek the power, status and money required to achieve this.

How do we get power, status and financial independence? Through careers. In fact, it is a common feminist complaint that women have been oppressed because they have not had access to power, status and independence through careers to the same extent as men.

So you might think, then, that left liberals would strongly promote access to careers as a path to liberation - and many do. In the Scandinavian countries, for instance, left liberals have succeeded in making this an explicit government policy.

But there's a catch. Left liberals define themselves against a vision of Economic Man; how then can they promote participation in the market as the path to individual liberation and human equality?

So left-liberals are caught between a work and an anti-work position. If they take the "work" position, they are giving credit to the market, which runs against their leftism. If they take an "anti-work" position, they have to accept inequalities in what they see as the key public good, namely individual autonomy - in particular, they have to leave intact the "power structures" by which they believe some groups in society oppress others.

It's not easy for left liberals to bridge the two positions. I've recently read Catherine Deveny try to do this. Here she is putting the "anti-work" view:

I watch office workers, jolted out of their slumber by the alarm clock, who have shovelled in their breakfast, thrown on their clothes and rush to catch the train to a job they hate.

This is not a view of careers as liberation. But she still keeps to the idea that women are oppressed by a lack of autonomy provided by careers. So her solution is to suggest that women who don't choose careers should nonetheless be paid and given career titles to increase their status:

Considering there is no status in being a parent or carer, let's at least give these skilled and dedicated individuals wads of cash and a fancy name, such as 'domestic engineer' or 'early childhood development specialist'. Seriously. And let's stop discussing maternity leave and go in swinging for paid parenting, paid grandparenting and paid caring.

There is still a logical inconsistency here. She wants women to have career status and financial independence without having to participate in the market. Her solution, though, involves "commodifying" motherhood - redefining motherhood as a market type activity, rather than valuing it in non-market terms. So she is advancing a view of "Economic Woman" - of women valued in terms of market activity - which contradicts her left liberalism.

I expect that left liberalism will continue to generate two different positions. There will be the downshifting, anti-materialist, hippy type rejection of careerism and market values. Alongside this will be a more dominant and public view of careers as integral to personal liberation, social success and human equality. There won't be a stable view bridging the two positions.

Happiness

There is a new battleground between left and right liberals, namely, happiness. Their debate about what makes us happy reveals a great deal about the mindset of both the left and the right, so it’s well worth looking at.
 
I will take as a representative of the left, the Australian “think-tanker” Clive Hamilton, and on the right, another think-tanker, the Swede Johan Norberg.
 
The left: Clive Hamilton

Last year, Clive Hamilton published a discussion paper called The Disappointment of Liberalism. He began this paper by noting that liberalism had succeeded in its basic aim.

What is the basic aim of liberalism? Let me put it this way, as simply as I can. Liberals believe that we are made human by being self-created through our own individual will and reason. This means that for liberals it is important that the individual is “liberated” from anything which impedes individual choice.

What kinds of things limit individual choice? Most notably, those things which are important to our self-identity, but which we inherit or are born to (and therefore don’t get to choose). This includes our sex (whether we are man or woman), and our race and ethnicity.

For a liberal, it is important that these unchosen things be made not to matter. Therefore, someone who defends them, for instance, by accepting different social roles for men and women will be called “sexist” by a liberal. Similarly, a white European who defends his own ethnic tradition will be labelled a “racist” – because such a view conflicts with liberal first principles.

Hamilton, though, doesn’t do much name calling as he is confident that the liberal project has succeeded. Note how clearly he expresses the basic principles of liberalism in the following passage:

Now that the constraints of socially imposed roles have weakened, oppression based on gender, class and race is no longer tenable, and the daily struggle for survival has for most people disappeared, we have entered an era characterised by ‘individualisation’ where, for the first time, individuals have the opportunity to ‘write their own biographies’ rather than have the chapters foretold by the circumstances of their birth. For the first time in history, the ordinary individual in the West has the opportunity to make a true choice ...

We’ve never had more freedom to shape ourselves in the way we want ...

This liberal concept of “freedom”, though, creates a particular difficulty. It leaves you with a society made up of millions of atomised individuals, each acting according to their own individual wants. How then do you hold a society together?

This is exactly the issue Hamilton wishes to discuss. He writes,

this essay is a prelude to answering the question of how we can reconstruct the social in an individualized world. In a world where we are no longer bound together by our class, gender or race, why should we live cooperatively?

In the nineteenth century, liberals thought they had found an answer to the dilemma. If individuals sought to follow a profit motive, no matter how selfishly, the hidden hand of the market would regulate the outcome for the overall benefit of society: for growth and progress.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, a group of “new liberals” were decisively rejecting the free market solution, because it generated inequalities of outcome. They preferred the idea of a “rational” regulation of society, particularly by the central state.

Today, the nineteenth century “classical liberals” are the right-wing of politics, and the twentieth century “new liberals” are the left-wing.

You would therefore expect a left-liberal like Clive Hamilton to be critical of free market solutions. And he is. In fact, his basic argument runs as follows.

First, as we have seen, he celebrates the overthrow of a traditionalist “social” conservatism. He believes that today,

the shackles of minority oppression and social conservatism have been cast off. The traditional standards, expectations and stereotypes that were the target of the various movements, dating from the 1960s – the sexual revolution, the counter-culture and the women’s movement – ushered in an era of personal liberty.

And yet, continues Hamilton, people don’t seem to be any happier. He notes “the extraordinary proliferation of the diseases of affluence” which,

suggests that the psychological wellbeing of citizens of rich countries is in decline. These diseases include drug dependence, obesity, loneliness and a suite of psychological disorders ranging from depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviours and widespread but ill-defined anomie. Perhaps the most telling evidence is the extraordinary prevalence of depression in rich countries.

What can explain the failure of the liberal project to create happiness? Hamilton’s answer is to blame the influence of the free market. He believes that people aren’t using their new found freedom to make reasoned, considered choices, but are being manipulated by the market to follow more shallow, consumeristic impulses.

It is Hamilton’s belief that “The market itself has, in recent decades, evolved into an instrument of coercion” and that “The activities of the marketers, given unbounded licence by the free-market policies of neoliberals [he means right-liberals], reinforce daily the promise of instant gratification ... So forceful and pervasive are the messages of the marketers that they now provide the raw material from which people construct their identities.”

The right liberal: Johan Norberg

Johan Norberg has also written a paper about happiness: The Scientist’s Pursuit of Happiness.

We know from this paper that Norberg is a liberal because he expresses in it the underlying liberal principle that individuals should choose their own identity, and reject inherited ones. He writes that,

a liberal and market-oriented society allows people freedom to choose. In the absence of authoritarian leaders ... forcing us to live the way they think is best for us, we can choose the kind of identity and lifestyle that suits us ... In traditional societies, on the other hand, the individual has to adapt to pre-fabricated roles and demands.

We can also tell from Norberg’s paper that he is not only a liberal, but more specifically a right-liberal. Unlike Hamilton, he is a devotee of the free market, and tends to see man’s economic activity as central to his life.

For instance, he writes that, “If you want to meet a happy Australian, ask someone who thinks that people like themselves have a good chance of improving their standard of living.”

He believes also that happiness reached a peak after WWII, because “With economies growing rapidly, people began to think that their children would enjoy a better life than they had.”

He is even willing to place economic activity ahead of family life, by citing a survey in which people recorded more happiness while working than when spending free time with their families.

Note too his idea that “Belief in the future grows when poor countries begin to experience growth, when markets open up, when incomes increase and people’s decisions begin to affect their place in society.”

Norberg, in fact, is such a devotee of the free market, that he wants no controls at all on the movement of labour. He believes in unfettered immigration, stating that “If people were allowed to cross borders at will, they would take their ideas and their labour and skills with them. This is all part of free trade...” (The Age, 24/9/05)

Of course, left-liberals also support open borders. However, whereas left-liberals typically support multiculturalism, Norberg follows the more usual right-liberal policy of wanting high immigration plus assimilation. In his view,

It is time for our liberal societies to stop apologising, to get back our self-confidence and state that tolerance and freedom is our way, and those who are out to destroy that deserve no toleration. The idea that we shouldn’t impose our values (on immigrants) is bizarre. Of course we should.

We should force everybody to accept every other human being as a free and autonomous individual with the same rights as himself. That is the law of a liberal, open society, and that is what has created the most creative and humane societies in world history. Everybody who wants to enjoy that society must conform to it. (The Age, 24/9/05)

Note that Norberg in this quote writes as a kind of upbeat booster to his own liberal society. This is, again, typical of right-liberals. Left-liberals are more inclined to see themselves as “outsiders” (even when they are very influential) and to be negative and critical of their own societies.

The fact that left-liberals often see themselves as “dissenters” is illustrated by a recent university study which found that 20% of candidates for the left-wing Australian Labor Party declared themselves to be either not very proud, or not at all proud, to be Australian.

Finally, as you would expect of a right-liberal, Norberg is anti-statist. He believes that the free market is the solution, and so doesn’t like the idea of state interference. It is no coincidence, therefore, that he believes that the state can’t create happiness.

It is his view that “it does not seem like the growth of the welfare state has increased human happiness” and that “A government that says it wants to make us happy misses the obvious fact that a government can’t give us happiness.”

A conservative reply

How might a traditionalist conservative respond to Hamilton and Norberg? I have already written a reply to Hamilton, so I will focus here on Norberg.

One thing a traditionalist can do is to reply to Norberg within the current framework of debate. For instance, Norberg claims that,

the most happy and satisfied places on earth are the ones that are most dynamic, individualist and wealthy: North America, Northern Europe and Australia.

If so, this doesn’t say much about the human capacity for happiness. As Hamilton has already pointed out, there is an epidemic of mental ill-health in North America, Northern Europe and Australia. Hamilton notes that the incidence of depression in the US grew tenfold in the five decades after WWII, despite this being a golden age of economic growth. He also cites reports that nearly one in four French people are taking tranquillisers, anti-depressants, antipsychotics or other mood-altering drugs.

Even more remarkably, in Norway, which has reputedly become “the richest country of all time”, one in four adults seeks psychiatric treatment each year.

What is also significant is the survey result, quoted by Norberg himself, showing that 48% of Americans had “downshifted” in the last five years, by reducing their working hours, declining promotions, lowering their material expectations or moving to a quieter place.

So the idea that careerism and rising material standards of living are sufficient to produce human happiness doesn’t seem to fit the facts. The free market doesn’t provide everything we need to be happy.

However, it’s not enough for traditionalists to respond at this level. We leave too much of the liberal mentality intact if we do.

First, we need to engage at the level of underlying principles. Norberg wants us to be free to choose as long as we don’t choose traditional, “pre-fabricated” roles and identities. This might not seem too much of an imposition, but we need to remember that many traditional identities became accepted and generally applied (pre-fabricated) because they reflected significant aspects of human nature.

Women being maternal and caring for their own children is a traditional role and identity; but it is no light imposition to declare this role to be illegitimate for being “prefabricated”.

In other words, it is those things we are most likely to want to choose which Norberg’s liberalism will frown upon and want to “liberate” us from.

Second, traditionalists need to question an even more basic assumption underlying the whole debate. Is it really true that the aim of human life is the pursuit of individual happiness?

In liberal societies, this assumption is widespread. One of the inalienable rights of man listed in the US Declaration of Independence is “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. A radical right-liberal, Ayn Rand, was even bold enough to assert that her philosophy was “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

This assumption, that our life’s purpose is the pursuit of our own happiness, seems false to me and even a little degrading.

It’s not that happiness doesn’t form part of a good life, but that we are made to reach beyond this to more significant things.

It’s difficult to give a complete picture of what these significant things are, but I’ll make a start. I think, for instance, it’s important for individuals to experience certain forms of “connectedness”. This might include a love of nature, an appreciation of art, romantic or marital love, a sense of ancestry, an ethnic or national identity, and our own masculine or feminine natures and the virtues associated with these.

The importance of such forms of connectedness is not just that they make us “happy”, but that they anchor us, provide a significant moral framework, add meaning to our life efforts, and most importantly provide the deeper forms of self-identity: our enduring sense of who we are.

Liberalism doesn’t want us to be connected in the way I am trying to describe; the liberal aim is for the individual to be free-floating and self-scripting, always independent and autonomous, with multiple, fluid, negotiated identities (to use liberal jargon).

It may well be possible to find a kind of surface happiness in the liberal way, through the pursuit of a purely individual happiness (shopping, careers and so on), but much of the traditional significance of life will be left out.

At any rate, we should not fall into the trap of accepting the liberal terms of debate. If we feel uncomfortable with the idea that our life’s goal is the individual pursuit of happiness, our challenge is to step outside this view and to advance a clear alternative.

(First published at Conservative Central, 27/09/2005)

Across the political spectrum

All of the major political parties are liberal but they aren't all the same.

They are all liberal because they all follow the liberal first principle: that to be fully human we must be self-created by our own individual will and reason.

The parties are different, though, in how they try to follow through with this principle. It's useful to try to understand how the different forms of liberalism are represented across the political spectrum.

Right versus left liberalism

The major distinction is that existing between the right and left wing of politics. This division (in its modern form) has been around since at least the late nineteenth century.

Right liberals are the heirs of the classical liberal tradition, which was dominant in the English speaking countries in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

The classical liberals tried to solve the basic problem of liberalism in an ingenious way. Liberals want us to be unimpeded in following our own will and reason. But if you have millions of individuals each doing whatever they want, then how do you hold a society together?

The answer for the classical liberals was not to deny that individuals would act selfishly under the liberal principle, but to argue that this selfishness would actually benefit society through the workings of a free market. In other words, millions of competing wills could successfully be regulated by a free market and bring about economic and social advancement.

This right liberal attitude has a number of consequences. Firstly, there is a great emphasis in right liberalism on Economic Man, as it is through our economic activities that we carry out the underlying principles of liberalism. In fact, it's important to remember with right liberals that the free market doesn't just exist for purely economic outcomes: it is the bearer, for right liberals, of larger liberal ideals. That's why a right liberal like Margaret Thatcher could proclaim that "Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul."

Also, right liberals don't like the state to interfere with the workings of the free market. They have therefore tended to prefer a smaller state than other kinds of liberals.

The commitment to the free market has also led right liberals to prefer an ideal of equal opportunities rather than equal outcomes. After all, if you support the free market then you have to accept that some will do better than others, and end up with greater wealth and power.

And historically this is where classical liberalism spawned an opposition. Some liberals could not commit themselves to the inequality of condition brought about by classical liberalism.

Therefore, instead of looking to the free market to regulate the millions of competing wills, they looked to the state instead. These were the "new" liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But today they are called left liberals or social democrats.

The contrast between right and left liberals could be broadly put as follows. Whereas right liberals focus on Economic Man, left liberals instead emphasise the idea of Social Man (which is why the left wing opponents of the World Economic Forum established a rival grouping called the World Social Forum).

Whereas right liberals are anti-statist in the sense that they don't like too much state interference in the economy (and so often have policies of privatisation and deregulation), left liberals tend to be statist and have at times called for the nationalisation of industry.

Whereas right liberals are most comfortable with equality of opportunity (a level playing field) left liberals are more sympathetic to government intervention to engineer equality of outcome.

And finally, there is one more common distinction between right and left liberals. Left liberals, even when they are an influential part of the establishment, like to see themselves as "dissenters". Right liberals, on the other hand, are more inclined to see themselves as "loyalists".

(Another marker of the distinction between right and left liberals is that right liberals often identify positively with the USA, where right liberalism is strongest, whereas left liberals look to the Scandinavian countries, where social democracy is most dominant.)

Left liberalism

The distinction that people make between the right wing and left wing of politics therefore holds true, as long as it's realised that this is a broad distinction between different kinds of liberalism.

It's possible to go further than this, though, and make distinctions between different kinds of left liberals and right liberals.

For instance, within the left liberal camp there are what might be termed "mainstream left liberals" or "social democrats". These are left liberals who are committed to gradual reform through democratic politics. They include the American Democrats, the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party.

They are different from radical left liberals who prefer to take direct action to achieve their aims immediately. Some feminists, socialists and animal liberationists fall into this radical left liberal camp.

Then there are libertarian left liberals, sometimes known as anarchists. Like other left liberals, they are hostile to the idea that a free market should regulate the workings of society. But instead of looking to the state as an alternative, they want things to be determined at a local community level.

To summarise, the left liberal camp can be further divided into three parts: mainstream left liberals (social democrats), radical left liberals (socialists) and libertarian left liberals (anarchists).

Right liberalism

It's also possible to make distinctions within the right liberal camp. First, there are mainstream right liberal parties, such as the American Republicans, or the British Conservatives, or the Australian Liberals. These parties are sometimes confusingly called "conservative" parties, even though they are based on a liberal philosophy.

The more radical version of right liberalism is right libertarianism. Right libertarians are more strongly opposed to the role of the state in society than mainstream right liberals. They are also more likely to see themselves as dissenters than mainstream right liberals.

Right and left libertarians obviously agree with each other in wanting to strictly limit the sphere of the central state. However, right libertarians support the free market as an alternative, putting them at odds with left libertarians.

The mainstream

An even finer level of distinction can be made within the mainstream left and right liberal parties.

For instance, in Australia the mainstream left liberal party, the Labor Party, has a left wing and a right wing. As you would expect, the more left wing members of the party are more firmly opposed to the free market and more strongly in favour of state intervention.

It is the right wing of the Labor Party which has been dominant, though, and which has been willing to agree to free market measures such as privatisation and deregulation.

Similarly, the mainstream right liberal party, the Liberal Party, has a left wing (the wets) and a right wing (the dries). In the past, the wets were often small businessmen who weren't so keen on a free market in which the larger and more powerful economic units could clear out the weaker. (Nor were they keen on small business being at the mercy of powerful unions which dominated the Labor Party.)

It's not surprising that the wets within the Liberal Party have defected in the past to form independent left wing parties (such as the Australian Democrats).

The spectrum

The political spectrum is therefore made up different varieties of liberalism. The main division is between left and right liberals. Right liberals look to the free market to regulate competing wills, left liberals believe instead that either the central state or local communities should perform this role.

There are further distinctions within each wing of politics with the "moderates" broadly in the middle and radicals at either end.

Of course, looked at more closely the situation is more complex than this. Still, a general understanding of the political spectrum is useful to get a grasp on the way that politics currently works.

(First published at Conservative Central, 19/06/2004)

When markets aren't enough

Property developer Harry Triguboff is one of the ten richest men in Australia. He recently told a journalist that Sydney has "too many forests and parks". He thinks that national parks should be developed for housing:

You go north and we have all these reserves and you go south and you have all the reserves and they are the best part of the coast. That is crazy. We should be building on this area. If they want to see trees, they can go to Katoomba, there are plenty of trees there.

Triguboff also believes in open borders. He thinks that Australia should admit 130 million immigrants by 2050, and that Sydney's ideal population by this time would be 20 million.

He doesn't care if these immigrants speak English or not:

What's more important for me - a guy who can fix my tap or a guy who can speak English.

It's easy to see why Triguboff would think that such measures are in his economic interest. If you're making a fortune building city apartments then having ever larger quantities of both land and people would seem to be a good way to increase your profits.

So if all that we were to follow was a free market mentality, then Triguboff might appear to be a reasonable man.

I don't think, though, that anyone who follows the free market alone can accurately describe themselves as a conservative.

After all, the logic of Triguboff's position is not to conserve the natural environment, but to develop for profit even the national parks fringing Sydney.

Similarly, the logic of his position is to overwhelm the existing population with so many immigrants that the established Australian people, culture and tradition would not be conserved.

What this means is that to be a real conservative it's not enough to follow the free market alone. The slogan of freedom and the market won't do by itself.

There must be other 'goods' we seek to conserve which aren't derived from individual profit seeking within a market.

It is a hollow rendering of our nature to see the market alone as constituting the good in human experience.

Most real conservatives, for instance, will be responsive enough to nature to want to live close to it - closer, anyway, than an occasional visit to Katoomba to see a tree.

And most real conservatives will feel connected to their own tradition and want to protect it, even if this means placing some limits on profit seeking within the market.

This is not to say that conservatives must be anti-market. My own position is that an intelligently regulated market is the best option. The ideal is to harness the power of the market so that it drives economic growth and provides a ground for healthy competition, without undermining other more important goods within a society.

A sentimental victory

I found a book showcasing my home town, Melbourne, in a second-hand bookshop on the weekend.

Published in 1968 it is full of glorious photos of the Victorian era architecture of the inner suburbs, with Carlton featuring strongly.

So I was taken aback when I read the text accompanying the photos. The authors described the inner suburbs as follows,

In districts eventually destined for rebuilding the great majority of present-day residents still live in time-expired houses made habitable and, indeed, often presentable by renovation.

The argument that inner suburban areas must be rebuilt to provide residential accommodation for a much greater proportion of the population is patently true. The metropolitan sprawl cannot go on much longer ...

Central Melbourne - the city of the first hundred years is vanishing. It had much that was quaint and charming, but it was uneconomic and therefore an anachronism. Sentiment may yet preserve some of its buildings as curiosities, but they will never again much influence its atmosphere.

Such a dry economic rationalism! The love of place and heritage and gracious architecture is recognised only as sentimentality. The future belongs, it is claimed, to the more impersonal, objective requirements of scientific planning.

And initially history seemed to prove the authors right. A small part of Carlton was, indeed, demolished and replaced with modern, high-rise Housing Commission towers.

But "sentiment" was not so easily vanquished. Today, the Housing Commission area is considered a blot on the landscape, and the old Victorian terraces of the inner suburbs have soared in value. There are still many sections of the inner suburbs where the historic atmosphere has been largely preserved.

Ironically, it is the extraordinarily dry and technocratic views of the authors which now seem quaintly anachronistic rather than the Victorian terraces.

It's good to reflect that something relating more to the soul has proved stronger than an empty rationalism. I have often walked such inner suburban streets and felt connected to the historic character, and felt pride in what my own ancestors created, and enjoyed the pre-modern architectural design, with its emphasis on elegance and charm.

It seems I was not alone in valuing such things.

A leftward shift?

I have often argued that the official right-wing parties are better described as “right-liberal” parties, rather than conservative ones.

The argument runs as follows. The orthodox political philosophy in the West is liberalism. The basic liberal idea is that we are made human by our capacity to choose who we are and what we do through our own individual will and reason. However, this philosophy leaves us as atomised individuals each pursuing our own individual desires. So liberals have to provide some account of how a society made up of millions of such self-seeking individuals can hold together.

There have been many answers. Some philosophers, for instance, have argued that people are naturally good, so that if you take away distorting social constraints, the result will be a more harmonious society.

But the two most influential answers are those belonging to the left and right wing of politics. The classical (right-wing) liberals believed that society could be successfully regulated by the hidden hand of the free market. Even if people acted selfishly for their own profit, the free market would maintain a balance for the progress of society as a whole.

The “new liberals” (left-liberals), however, rejected the market solution. They believed that a society could be regulated in a more deliberately rational way by the state. Beatrice Webb explained this new approach clearly in 1928, when discussing the politics of herself and her husband, Sidney, compared to their recently deceased friend R.B. Haldane:

What bound us together was our common faith in a deliberately organised society – our belief in the application of science to human relations, with a view of betterment. Where we clashed was that he believed more than we did in the existing governing class … whilst we held by the common people, served by an elite of unassuming experts, who would appear no different in status from the common men.

So the clash of politics over the last one hundred years has not been about political fundamentals, but about different solutions to the liberal problem of “regulating individual wills”.

The so-called conservative parties, in reality right-liberal parties, have generally stood for an economic view of man, and a desire to maintain a free market (for instance, through economic deregulation and privatisation). In theory, the right-liberal parties have wanted to limit the role of the state, and so have been more sympathetic to the role of “civil” institutions like the family in providing “services”.

All of which brings us to the new leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron. He has been in the news since his ascent to the leadership because of his claim to be creating a “compassionate conservatism”.

The first thing to note about Cameron’s policy speeches is that he is happy to describe his politics, and that of his party, as being liberal. For instance, he has called for the creation of “a modern, progressive, liberal, mainstream opposition to Labour”. He has also said that “today we have a Conservative Party … which wants Britain to be a positive participant in the EU, as a champion of liberal values”.

Cameron, in describing his party as a “champion of liberal values”, is simply confirming its longstanding role as a right liberal party. He keeps to this tradition when he further declares that his party “supports open markets”; is “committed to decentralisation and localism”; and wants to strengthen “our economy by freeing the creators of wealth, especially small businesses, to create the jobs and prosperity we need.”

However, there is no doubt that Cameron has made some shifts leftward in his party’s policies. For instance, both the left and right wing parties generally support feminism, because both accept the view that we should not be “limited” in our choices by something we are born into, such as our sex. Neither the left nor the right wants to accept that gender might influence our life choices, so both assume that any disparity in the representation of the sexes must be caused by an oppressive discrimination.

So on fundamentals the left and right are united on feminist issues. However, it’s been more typical of the left to want to impose quotas to enforce “equality”. The right generally shies away from formal quotas because what’s more important in a market setting is equality of opportunity rather than outcome.

It’s significant, therefore, that Cameron has stated that his party “would aim to select women candidates for at least half the 140 target seats at the next election”. This is more in the style of left-liberal quotas, rather than a typical right-liberalism.

Cameron has also adapted to the left-liberal style in his emphasis on social justice and quality of life. The right liberal parties have typically viewed man primarily in his economic aspect, because they view the market as the mechanism by which human freedom is expressed.

Left-liberals usually don’t see life in such narrowly economic terms, with some even prepared to champion the idea of economic “downshifting”.

That Cameron wishes to reposition his party in this area is clear, not only from the fact that he has established social justice and quality of life policy groups, but also from his statements on the environment, such as the following:

“too often, we’ve allowed the impression to develop that we Conservatives are supporters of economic growth at all costs … The impression that we put the needs of big business before the future of the planet … Well as someone who regularly uses both four wheels and two … and who believes in wealth creation but also that business has vital social and environmental responsibilities ... I say … join me in my mission to put green politics at the top of the national and international agenda.”

Finally, right-liberal parties have generally sought to win office by appealing to genuinely conservative rank and file voters. Cameron has moved decisively against this usual right-wing policy, and has made it clear he is aiming for the left-wing vote, even at the cost of alienating conservatives.

This is most obvious in his willingness to put down white men, such as when he declared that “We will reflect the country we aspire to govern, and the sound of modern Britain is a complex harmony, not a male voice choir”.

Similarly, his decision to drop the worker registration scheme, which controls the number of immigrants from former Eastern Bloc countries, shows a readiness to ignore the preferences of rank and file conservatives.

Will Cameron’s leftward move work? This I don’t claim to know. But one thing it will do is to open up a space in British politics. If Cameron is no longer making an appeal to rank and file conservatives, then there is room for some other party to do so. Perhaps there will be a chance for a more genuinely conservative party to emerge in Britain.

Prostitution update

Just a brief follow up to the post below. I decided to politely query Andrew Norton's claim that prostitution is a legitimate way for female uni students to finance themselves. I made the following comment at the Catallaxy site:

I have to say I'm surprised that no-one, even at a liberal site, has raised an eyebrow at Andrew's suggestion that prostitution is a legitimate way to finance your life.

Isn't this even the least bit controversial? Aren't there at the very least some doubts about the effects of prostitution on the psychological and emotional well-being of women?

Now, to the credit of the guys at Catallaxy I got some reasoned replies. However, these replies are only further confirmation that liberalism, even of the classic variety, cannot comprehend the full nature of man.

For instance, Jason Soon's reply was that:

1) women who engage in prostitution have few other prospects [but why then are female uni students taking up the "profession"? If a woman is smart enough to be at uni, capable enough to complete academic work, and physically attractive enough to earn money as a prostitute why doesn't she have other prospects?]

2) it is not that prostitution damages women's emotions but that women with damaged emotions go into prostitution [probably true, but choosing prostitution is hardly the best way to recovery]

3) stigmatising prostitution makes things harder for the prostitutes [perhaps, but the nature of what prostitutes do is what really harms them, rather than societal disapproval. The stigma might at least discourage some women from getting involved in the first place.]

However, what really struck me about Jason's reply was his following comment:

I'd argue that students who choose to engage in prostitution to supplement their discretionary income do so at their ... discretion and see no reason to stigmatise it as such ... They offer a service as do the rest of us which has a demand and willing customers.

Jason is establishing two criteria here for what makes something morally acceptable. First, is it something which is self-chosen (something done at our own discretion) and second is it something which acts within the terms of the free market.

The problem is that this approach is ideological. It derives from the right-liberal beliefs that we are made human by being self-created through our own reason and will (and that the "good" is therefore being unimpeded in our individual choices) and that the free market is the providential means of harmonising competing wills.

It's not an approach which connects well to the true "inner life" of man - to our "moral nature" if you like - nor does it really connect to the "real world effects" of moral choices - in this case, the real effects of prostitution on women.

Finally, Andrew Norton himself replied to my comment with an "I agree with Jason". Andrew believes that student prostitution is OK because the girls involved are "matter-of-fact" about it and enjoy "massive income advantages over job alternatives".

Andrew is operating with the idea that individuals will rationally choose to pursue their economic advantage within the free market. Aside from this "rational" choice, he has no other criteria with which to judge the morality of a particular choice or action. We are left with a vision of "Economic Man" and little more.

As I've noted before, I find this a curiously limited and diminished view of man. It's an irony that a humanistic philosophy like liberalism should end up making man seem so small.

Do supermarkets make us free?

The main political debate in Western societies isn't between conservatives and liberals. It's between two different wings of liberalism.

Both wings of liberalism share the same underlying understanding that the purpose of life is to maximise individual autonomy. What all liberals want is to leave individual will and reason unimpeded, so that we can act in any direction and be whatever we want to be.

However, all liberals then have to solve a basic problem with this philosophy. How do you stop millions of individual, competing wills from conflicting with each other and causing chaos?

One group of liberals believe that they have found a solution to this problem in the free market. According to these liberals the market, if left alone, will take millions of people acting "selfishly" (according to their individual wills) and create positive outcomes of prosperity and technological advancement.

Not surprisingly, these right wing liberals focus their attention on the Economic Man. For them it is through the economic market that society is best regulated and that the liberal goals of freedom (the unimpeded individual will) and progress (economic growth and technological advances) are best realised.

Right liberalism became a very popular creed in the nineteenth century when the urban middle class, whose money often came from trade and manufacturing, sought to break down the political dominance of the landowning classes.

Today, not surprisingly, it gets its support mostly from the commercial classes (stockbrokers, corporate lawyers, managers and so on).

A major revolt against right liberalism occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century. For right liberals it was only important that each man was allowed to compete in the market without impediment. Right liberals accepted that there would be unequal outcomes: that some would succeed more than others.

For a right liberal philosopher like Herbert Spencer this meant that even large scale inequalities in life ultimately served the public good. He wrote, in 1851, that,

Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind ...

... those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many 'in shadows and in miseries,' are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence...

It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of a universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence─the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents.

Obviously, the idea that their sufferings were for the long-term good of humanity was unlikely to appeal to the mass of the working class. Furthermore, some liberals couldn't accept philosophically the idea of an unimpeded "right to compete" leading to unequal outcomes; they believed instead that individual autonomy would best be achieved when everyone was set upon equal conditions of life.

The result was the rise of the social democratic movement. This was a movement with much working class support and led by left wing liberals. Such left liberals did not believe in the "solution" of the market to the problem of regulating individual wills.

Instead, they looked to the state to create social conditions in which each individual could follow his own will and reason, and be self-created in any direction.

What this meant was that left liberals replaced a focus on Economic Man with one on Social Man. They also emphasised the idea of public goods (man acting deliberately through the state to achieve social outcomes) rather than private goods (man acting to achieve personal benefits and thereby unwittingly creating a positive social benefit).

So, by the early twentieth century Western societies were already caught in the debate that we are still having today: the debate between left and right liberalism.

It's usually easy to spot which side of the fence liberals are on. Here, for instance, is the Australian journalist Phillip Adams writing about modern childhood:

Yes, there are hundreds of millions of kids running about, but they're not meant to be children any more. This is not permitted. They are, instead, to be little economic units. Diminutive adults with fully fledged appetites for junk - junk food, junk films, junk ideas, junk toys and junk culture ...

Let them be children for a few, short years before they're turned into cannon fodder for the Great God Economy that modern societies seek to serve.

Here we obviously have a left liberal complaining about the right liberal focus on Economic Man. The same complaint pervades the following comments by a President of the Uniting Church in Australia who asks,

What about the estimation of human life where the only value applied to each individual is economic? Or, more precisely, where each individual is only valued as a consumer or as a value-adder? What does that say about life?

What about the totalitarianism of economics, seen in economic rationalism and globalisation ...

Are human beings to be measured primarily, or even solely, as consumers and value-adders?

What does it say about human life if the fundamental factors required for human existence are to be totally at the mercy of the market─the Great International Croupier?

... a society thus defined and based on the totalitarianism of economics can be described as no less than an evil empire. (Age 17/7/2000)

It's not just left liberalism which is easy to recognise. Consider the following statements by George Will, a Townhall columnist. He begins by quoting the left liberal Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson who once asked,

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purposes and inspiring way of life?

George Will can see in this a left liberal attack on his own right liberal beliefs and so hastens to defend,

a society that produces the abundance, and honors the emancipation of choice and desire, that results in supermarkets, advertising and other things that are woven inextricably into the fabric of a free society. (Town Hall, 26/10/03)

So, for the right liberal George Will, achieving liberal individualism (the emancipation of choice and desire) means accepting all the trappings of the free market. Individual freedom and supermarkets go together in this world view.

For conservatives, of course, the aim is not the "emancipation of choice and desire" at all, but rather the fulfilment of our higher, given nature as men and women.

What conservatives need to avoid, therefore, is being trapped within the confines of the debate between left and right liberalism.

At times we will agree with left wing criticisms of free market ideology, at other times we will agree with right wing criticisms of the left. What we shouldn't do is react against right wing free market ideology by identifying with the left or vice versa.

As conservatives we will be best placed when we can present ourselves clearly as an alternative to both left and right forms of liberalism.

(First published at Conservative Central 02/11/2003)

Conservatism & capitalism

I think it's a mistake to define conservatism around the idea of the free market. To illustrate why, consider the comments that President Bush recently made in an election debate on the issue of illegal immigration into America. President Bush said:

Many people are coming to this country for economic reasons. They're coming here to work. If you can make 50 cents in the heart of Mexico, for example, or make $5 here in America, $5.15, you're going to come here if you're worth your salt ...

And so in order to take pressure off the borders, in order to make the borders more secure, I believe there ought to be a temporary worker card that allows a willing worker and a willing employer to mate up, so long as there's not an American willing to do that job, to join up in order to be able to fulfill the employers' needs.

The focus of President Bush is on allowing the free market to do its thing. People are held to act according to economic self-interest, and government exists to allow them to do so. Placing restraints on such behaviour for some higher good, such as the preservation of a distinct national tradition, is not even considered.

President Bush has made the free market the ultimate end of politics, and as a consequence he believes it to be a positive thing for Mexicans who want more money, and American employers who want cheaper labour, to "mate up". He does not mind if this radically transforms the national identity of the USA.

If you are the kind of person who does mind if your own national identity is overthrown, the lesson is that the free market should not define your politics. You need to put other higher goods before the free market, and be willing to restrain the market, where necessary, to preserve those goods.