The house of the right should have many mansions, whether it’s the cathedrals of the theocons, the country clubs of the RINOs, the unadorned blocks and towers of the Randians, the revival tents of Huckabee County and… well, you get my point. There’s even a modest Arts-and-Crafts place, complete with vegetable garden, for the crunchy cons, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t read chief crunchy Rod Dreher’s encomium to that awful speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury with a sinking feeling, particularly when I saw that Rod had written this:
It’s this religious and moral dimension to the economy [apparently that’s how Rod interpreted Williams’ pious leftist bromides] that so many Republicans fail to appreciate. How can you praise the “creative destruction” of markets, as Palin does, while also praising tradition and continuity, as she also does, and as Republicans do?
Where to begin? I’m all for offering a helping hand to those who find themselves on the wrong side of creative destruction (a phrase that is sometimes used too glibly – the destruction can indeed be very destructive), but taken as a whole the process is beneficial, essential and, in a way that crunchy cons should appreciate, natural.
Some of the thoughts of the great neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall (!842-1924) on this topic can be found here. You can’t get crunchier than this extract:
But here we may read a lesson from the young trees of the forest as they struggle upwards through the benumbing shade of their older rivals. Many succumb on the way, and a few only survive; those few become stronger with every year, they get a larger share of light and air with every increase of their height, and at last in their turn they tower above their neighbours, and seem as though they would grow on for ever, and for ever become stronger as they grow. But they do not. One tree will last longer in full vigour and attain a greater size than another; but sooner or later age tells on them all. Though the taller ones have a better access to light and air than their rivals, they gradually lose vitality; and one after another they give place to others, which, though of less material strength, have on their side the vigour of youth.
The alternative, of course, is stagnation and, in all likelihood, decay. I found it rather telling that Rod’s next post was another encomium, this time to Mount Athos, a doubtless beautiful, but, from the sound of it, profoundly depressing place that appears to be stuck in the archaic customs, futile contemplations and smugly timeless rhythms of a thousand years ago. To Rod, this Greek peninsula is the “Christian Tibet,” an equally telling, and distinctly questionable, compliment given the brutal and primitive nature of life under Tibet’s former theocracy (an unpleasant reality that does not, of course, justify the fact or the nature of China’s subsequent occupation of that tragic country).
Bush’s schizophrenia seems to have opened the door for all kinds of crazies to start calling themselves “conservative”. That word gets bandied about so much these days I’m calling myself a reactionary. Sure, some people don’t know what it means, but at least I don’t have to waste time explaining that I’m not a foreign interventionist, religious fundamentalist, pro-immigration socialist.
The Austrian school is fond of saying prefixing their economics is like Chinese
physics. Also fond of saying the Econ 101 that is a given must first be unlearned.
After spending a spate of some years with my nose in non-Keynesian economics I
retook 101, then 2 and 3 in the mid-Nineties twenty some years after freshman Econ
early ‘Seventies. It was year in evening adult continuing education econ classes
at the local community college compliments corporate benefits. The econ text used
for all three quarters had no mention of a Hayek, for example, in the text,
footnotes, index, bibliography or references. Keynes and Hayek probably loom
largest, cast the longest shadows over the past century’s economic thought, their
respective stars in covariant ascendancy/descendancy throgh the decades. Keynes rising through the FDR era, Hayek’s reemerging from eclipse with Reagan/Thatcher. Bringing the stark contrast to those evening classes it was if half the body of current economic thought had been expunged, the middle-aged econ prof nearing retirement had little familiarity with the differences of econ Nobels. Rand is far from the most talented of thinkers and philosophers of that leaning but certainly the strongest strain of political DNA from it running through the failed Wilkie candidacy to the Goldwater movement, Reagan and locii like Buckley’s National Review, later the WSJ editorial page. Her stuff flailed around through the ‘Forties into the ‘Fifties before hitting upon the genius of grafting on an avenue to the higher moral ground, the altruism, the moral superiority which seems necessary for traction and appeal of an ism…green, red (or white & blue), goose-stepping or frisbytarian. A good example of Hayek’s keen, original insight of the dispersed spontaneously self organizing principle without the direction, guidance or circumscription/interference of fonctionnaires is a flat screen monitor, keyboard, mouse and connection or even the previous old grassroots Fidonet BBS at 10mhz turbo XT/1200 baud.
In my observation the only people who saw it the entire credit debacle coming, Goethe’s ‘we only see what we know’…were in the appropriate frame from which to see it, say it and say it loudly albeit obscurely. Kinda like Hackman running around the nuclear plant floor in China Syndrome like a raving maniac, trying to get attention. Having seen the moving parts, shadow banking and leverage and secretization and housing policy et al…and the ordering of dominoes that would topple when the bubble was pierced..they understandably aren’t jumping for joy at confusing disease with cure and aren’t cheerful about prospects. It almost like alternate realities, these two schools, one to the other Bizarro Worlds in which up and down, inside out and backwards are all reversed. One suffers trepidation when the one says all is contained, say pre-Lehman Oct07, while the other is saying you ain’t seen nothin’ yet and boy did we. Buddy can you s’paradigm.
Feeling stressed out late last year I put pen to paper for an outlet around the time the SuperCollider now restarting was initially started and suffered catastrophic meltdown, and mashed the two together. Schumpeter’s creative destruction becoming StumpPeter’s destructive cretinism.
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Dateline: Sept. ’08
A Quantum of Kumquats seek Mammon Particle in Large Headless SuperDuperColluder
Bloomberg: New Jersey’s `Wall Street West’ Quakes Amid Namesake’s Turmoil
As now NJ slides towards the Black-Scholes event horizon, seeing its fate sealed in CA, NY (Europe, Venus, sundry turdish financial nebulocities cum velocities) swirling around the bowl, Working Group aka TPPP (toilet paper plunger plumbers, inc.) make every contempt to clear the Crocs, er, clogs plugging the suing system.
In relatively news, fiscalists continue the frenzic work in the aftermath of the Mammon
Particle detected at the Large Headless SuperDuperColluder in ConCERNs, Swizzleland, especially the Gnomes of Zurich. With loan sharks sideswiping the now putrifying incorporate carcasses as far as the coasting Britain, the wheeling, dealing vultures and ravens, eyeing the undercurrents with low overhead, now threaten the virulent spreading academic just may go Airborne, 101st Espresso, realizing their best fear. Time is of the issuance.
Changelings in the temple, fearing not an accounting for the angels of mammons dancing on pinheads in pinstripes in priesthoods from Princetons, they fired up the colluder smashing sums unqualified incertitudes unquantified undeniably unqualified in herds beyond certified. Squared. By the cubicles of the cubicled. Searching through the haystacks of needles, in the quantums of kumquats from Princetons of priesthoods, their exhilarating pinheads grew nil an A ratings longer than shorters yet shorter forshortened the time spreading the pinstripes wider than Spyders cracking forth the mammon particle captivated by the smashing, crashing successpool.
To con firmly Higgs Bosun’s Whistle (all aboard), HitIceberg’s (the unprincipled certainty), StumpPeter’s (destructive cretinism) but most importantly ForShoreDingaling’s Copenhagen thought experiment, the fatcat box (would he be snuffed or not?) So nakedly fearless a mere child would blow the lid off for all to see. And boy did they. Half the poison Ivy League racket scientists wouldn’t be shocked at the nine fatcats boxed in paned auras whom, fur flying to the nines, left half to remain faceless in the wake of the mirrored exchange.
So there you have it, unladies and ungentlemen, 50-50 is as good as its getting, misplace bets accordingly. Spooked by entanglements, at the speed of light very far joins very near everything, so very dear, whether spinning left or right spewn by the malcontents from paned aura’s box.
For collusion in delusion joyriding to conclusion in collision & contusion, merci d’avance for your perusion, merci bien for such confusion when footing castles in the air bid adieu to the illusion.
http://brokenspines.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/nast.jpg
Creative destruction is one of our most fruitful traditions. We should revere, preserve and observe it.
For once I agree 100 percent with Dreher, and with the words he quotes from Williams. Of course none of it is new; conservatives – often self-described as such – have been saying this for two centuries. If, as one of the commenters says, this isn’t a form of conservatism, then T. S. Eliot wasn’t a conservative either. Like it or not, it’s a fact that much conservative thought has historically been even more anti-capitalist than this – and yes, that includes a major strand of American conservatism too.
To call this a recipe for stagnation is a bit over the top. Whatever you think of Williams’ view of the place of economics, the world has not been stagnant everywhere and always outside of that single two-century Western bubble of liberalism.
Obviously we can’t seriously argue in blog comments about such a deep question as Williams addressed. So let’s just note that, right or wrong, Dreher’s comment represents a deep and enduring tradition of conservative – or if you reject that word, then rightist – thought, going back to when traditional (“classical”) bourgeois liberalism was the ideology of the left. Now the spectrum has shifted and traditional liberalism (currently reincarnated as libertarianism) is itself considered part of the right. I don’t feel any more comfortable with libertarians than Andrew Stuttaford feels with Dreher, but I agree with Stuttaford on the need for a big tent. No need to push anyone out.
“Where to begin?”
This is not hard. The answer is: she is not left-thinking. In this regards, she is not a progressive, a socialist, or member of the religious left. All are quite similar psychologically. Progressives define themselves in terms of social relations and abstract classes. They live in the here-and-now, have no sense of people, transcendent being, or cultural identity to connect them beyond that. So, nothing is more intolerable for them than material risk and nothing is more needed than material equality. Socialists define themselves in terms of a ‘it takes a village’; they are the effeminate version of nationalists. They identify with the good of others, and have no sense of spirit, more than the sum of parts, or Volk to connect them beyond that. The religious left defines itself in terms of the empathy and caring. They have a dimmed sense of their existential condition, transcendence, or the temporality of being. So, nothing is more intolerable for them than misery, and nothing is more needed than compassion.
There is a simple logic to this: the more you focus on what’s at hand, the more you are sensitive to inequalities and the injustices of life. And the more you want to fix them. The more transcendent, or grounded, your perspective is, the less relevant the here and now is.
This commonality is what relates us to the religious right-thinkers. Some of us see the higher purpose in our people, some in our traditional continuation, some in the state, some in God. In all cases these are Ends. The ends are beyond the personal. (Obviously, on this level, Randian libertarians make for curious bed fellows)
So putting this together, Palin can be traditional and embrace economic creative destruction because “traditional” does not mean holding onto everything, but holding onto social norms, a norms based on a particular tradition — that is, Christian West Caucasian traditions.
This was our Societal Tradition. And these traditions formed the norms the regulated social behavior. Because people were regulated from the bottom up, with norms instead of laws and government, people could be free in other dimensions. That is, they could be capitalistic and Democratic. (Enter Libertarians). There is a simple logic in society: the more normative control (via tradition), the more deregulation. The less normative control (via liberalism,) the more more statism. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a Confucist China versus Legalism/Moaism or a Christian West versus Managerialism/Socialism
And of course, She can be religious because her religions, as interpreted in a rightist way, is less concerned about the here-and-now. The inequality caused by capitalism really is quite insignificant compared to the reality of God and Afterlife. (It’s not the religion of the left where even Cleo the Fish gets to heaven.) In this model, while charity is good and right, it’s charity not obligation — because ones obligation is to something greater and ones primary attachment, ones psychological investment, is on something higher.
Of course the religious right tends to give just as much when not more, but they have a different priority and focus. This is why traditional Christians felt justified in building massive ornate cathedrals and did not feel guilty in not just giving the money away.