Frank knows that I’m reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s hefty (literally) book on rationality right now. Since I can’t claim him as a classmate anymore, I try to find other ways to involve him in my studies. A particular passage in MacIntyre caught my eye earlier this morning, and I decided to share it. (It really does have something to say about the antithesis, I promise. So it’s relevant to HPN.)
A hockey player in the closing seconds of a crucial game has an opportunity to pass to another member of his or her team better placed to score a needed goal. Necessarily, we may say, if he or she has perceived and judged the situation accurately, he or she must immediately pass. What is the force of this “necessarily” and this “must”? It exhibits the connection between the good of that person qua hockey player and member of that particular team and the action of passing, a connection such that were such a player not to pass, he or she must either have falsely denied that passing was for their good qua hockey player or have been guilty of inconsistency or have acted as one not caring for his or her good qua hockey player and member of that particular team. That is to say, we recognize the necessity and the immediacy of rational action by someone inhabiting a structured role in a context in which the goods of some systematic form of practice are unambiguously ordered. (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, pp. 140-141)
Getting here can be described as the best road trip in America! Soaring through nature’s finest show you will see Denali – the Great One – soaring under the midnight sun. Alaska has so many extremes. In the wintertime the frozen road competes with the view of the ice-fogged frigid beauty. The cold, though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And in the summertime – when temperatures are 150 degrees hotter than they were just a few months ago and than they will be just a few months from now – you will see the fireweed along the frost heaves. Merciless rivers rush and carve and remind us that Mother Nature wins. The big, wild and good life teeming along that road leads north to the future. That is what we see here. What we, and the rest of America, see in the Last Frontier is hope, opportunity and country pride, and it is our men and women in uniform that secure it.
Leaving aside all other issues for the moment, Obama’s speech to the NAACP yesterday contained some surprising (Booker Washington-esque?) moments:
That’s why if we’re serious about reclaiming that dream, we have to do more in our own lives, our own families, and our own communities. That starts with providing the guidance our children need, turning off the TV, and putting away the video games; attending those parent-teacher conferences, helping our children with their homework, and setting a good example. It starts with teaching our daughters to never allow images on television to tell them what they are worth; and teaching our sons to treat women with respect, and to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; that what makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one. It starts by being good neighbors and good citizens who are willing to volunteer in our communities – and to help our synagogues and churches and community centers feed the hungry and care for the elderly. We all have to do our part to lift up this country….
But all these innovative programs and expanded opportunities will not, in and of themselves, make a difference if each of us, as parents and as community leaders, fail to do our part by encouraging excellence in our children. Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land. We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes – because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves…
We’ve got to say to our children, Yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that someone in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. That’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands – and don’t you forget that.
No excuses. No excuses. You get that education. All those hardships will just make you stronger, better able to compete. Yes, we can.
I know some think that we’ve had enough Austen movies in the past decade to last a lifetime — that one too many troths have been pledged, that too much gingham has been weaved, that the empire waist is so 1804.
“The point of the Incarnation is to respect the world as it is, to acknowledge its limits… and to disbelieve any promises that the world is now or ever will be transformed into the City of God. If Jesus could not effect that, how shall we? …The world is not going to become—ever—a kingdom of justice and love.†— Michael Novak
After muchspeculation about its contents, the new papal encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, was released earlier today. You can read the full text here. I’m curious how orthodox capitalists like Michael Novak are going to respond to this text. My notes after a first read-through:
Benedict advances the argument that love and truth must be linked together as we pursue economic justice. In good Augustinian fashion, he writes: “All people feel the interior impulse to love authentically: love and truth never abandon them completely, because these are the vocation planted by God in the heart and mind of every human person. The search for love and truth is purified and liberated by Jesus Christ from the impoverishment that our humanity brings to it.”
Love, however, must be not emptied of truth, or it loses its power to transform: “Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.”
When applied to our concept of economic justice, caritas in veritate must not be construed as some contradictory force to justice, since “justice is inseparable from charity.” Charity both supports justice, and also extends beyond earthly justice into future grace: “It strives to build the earthly city according to law and justice. On the other hand, charity transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving.” Our labors toward charity have a real effect on the earthly city, he argues, and help to build the common good even now in a fallen world.
Benedict follows this with a warning that technology and “relationships of utility” are not sureties for the preservation of the common good. The increasing globalization of the marketplace must be answered by “the potential of love that overcomes evil with good.” Utopian visions offer false promises of autonomy — false freedom. In answer to this messianic idea of progress, the Christian vision emphasizes the human element of vocation, which must encompass “the whole man and every man, [or] it is not true development.”
In his second chapter, Benedict suggests that the recent economic crisis has offered us a chance to pause and discern a “new vision for the future.” He points out that even as overall wealth continues to grow globally, inequality has marked our monetary progress:
Among those who sometimes fail to respect the human rights of workers are large multinational companies as well as local producers. International aid has often been diverted from its proper ends, through irresponsible actions both within the chain of donors and within that of the beneficiaries…. On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care. At the same time, in some poor countries, cultural models and social norms of behaviour persist which hinder the process of development.
Benedict returns to the themes of Catholic social teaching, emphasizing the need to protect the rights of common workers, the need for greater public involvement (perhaps contra the centralized State), and the re-centering of the interests of man over mammon (“the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity”). Our concern for true human development should reveal itself in protecting basic human needs, including: access to food and water and the ability to secure a livelihood. We should guard against the moral problem of an ever increasing income disparity between the rich and the poor. In fact, Benedict argues, every economic decision is ultimately a moral decision. And as such, “justice must be applied to every phase of economic activity.”
All of this requires a “profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise.” The old order has fallen under its own weight. The prioritization of holders of capital over actual laborers has led to greed. We must work to re-center our values locally:
The so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders — namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society — in favour of the shareholders, who are not tied to a specific geographical area and who therefore enjoy extraordinary mobility.
Businesses must be held morally and socially accountable. The common collaboration of the State and big business has disengaged the laborer from his labor. Instead, “every worker should have the chance to make his contribution knowing that in some way ‘he is working for himself.’”
In the following chapters, Benedict draws out both our responsibility to consider the natural (ecological) world, and the deeper human relationships across national and economic boundaries. We do not live in a zero-sum world. And the way to restore these charitable relationships with nature and our fellow men begins with a realization of the public nature of faith. Christians as citizens are uniquely motivated to work toward justice, since they have a transcendent allegiance to the world. Public life is a life of faith.
As the world grows smaller, globalization requires a Christian response. Benedict acknowledges that globalization needs an authority structure, but prefers the traditional Catholic idea of having it “organized in a subsidiary and stratified way,” rather than in a centralized bureaucracy. And as we re-prioritize the global common good, we must remember our less fortunate brothers: “development aid for poor countries must be considered a valid means of creating wealth for all.”
In his conclusion, Benedict calls for increased engagement with the political and economic order. Love motivates God’s people to “move beyond the limited and the ephemeral,” to work toward economic justice and the common good, even if the results are always less than we had hoped.
The Skype debate between Conor Friedersdorf and Dan Riehl over the future of conservatism is still making waves in the conservative blogosphere. The debate itself developed into a no-holds-barred prize match between the old Reaganite conservatism and the emerging young conservatism (of the Brooks/Douthat/AmConMag wing). I only wish Friedersdorf had pushed back harder concerning the historical legitimacy of the emerging conservatism, which actually has a much better pedigree than Reaganism. Frankly, Riehl’s assertions about the universally-accepted tenets of conservatism were historically myopic — barely thirty years old. Conor could have pointed out the log in Riehl’s eye even while Riehl complained about the speck in Conor’s.
Follow up posts from Conor and RS McCain reminded me of just how confused contemporary conservatism is about its own roots. McCain, for one, invoked F.A. Hayek and von Mises, alleging that Conor and his ilk were ignorant of basic free market teaching (to which Conor responded by revealing his Austrian creds). But the truly ironic thing about all this is that Hayek and von Mises were not conservatives. They said so themselves in no uncertain terms.
Strangely enough, conservatism has been one of capitalism’s most uneasy co-belligerents, often working to slow down the “mechanistic” progress that Hayek promotes (perhaps conservatism has been more of a hand brake than an emergency brake, but still…). And while conservatism has been equally critical of socialism and communism, it has often employed the same critiques of absolute capitalism that were used by Marx and Christian socialists.
* * *
I continue to believe that historic conservatism falls within the Augustinian tradition, whatever its imperfections. Contemporary conservatism, on the other hand, is foundationally disordered, holding to the idea of freedom as the end of society. F.A. Hayek’s critique of conservatism is therefore also a critique of Augustine. The conservative, he argues, is not a true believer in freedom, because he cares more about the direction of freedom than for freedom itself.
That the conservative opposition to too much government control is not a matter of principle but is concerned with the particular aims of government is clearly shown in the economic sphere. Conservatives usually oppose collectivist and directivist measures in the industrial field, and here the liberals will often find allies in them. But at the same time conservatives are usually protectionists and have frequently supported socialist measures in agriculture. Indeed, though the restrictions which exist today in industry and commerce are mainly the result of socialist views, the equally important restrictions in agriculture were usually introduced by conservatives at an even earlier date. And in their efforts to discredit free enterprise many conservative leaders have vied with the socialists. [*]
Freedom is only free for the conservative if it is well-ordered toward love, as Kirk argued. Hayek disagrees and, in doing so, reveals just how un-conservative the contemporary conservative movement actually is. Today’s conservative is in reality a liberal, primarily influenced by the Lockean Enlightenment. And regardless of how one feels about reactionary anti-liberals like Burke, De Maistre, Eliot, Kirk, etc., it is intellectually irresponsible to group them with the modern right-wing of Palin, Limbaugh, The Weekly Standard, and so on. Even when the two groups share common political ground, they arrive at that ground by different paths. I’m by no means a patsy for Burke or the Continental reactionaries, but we still need to play fair with our historical definitions. Our confusion about what the “liberal” and “conservative” labels actually mean often grants a false legitimacy to the revolutionary right-wing of the 21st century.
___ For Hayek, the tenets of classical liberalism in contrast to conservatism include:
– belief in the beneficial power of progress (“I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called ‘mechanistic’ explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all.”);
– preference toward globalism over regionalism (he regards the latter as a bridge to collectivism); he also inexplicably ties conservatism to imperialism, while citing only examples of British and American progressives, and ignoring the deep isolationist trends of Old Right conservatives in the midwest and the south.
– an unwillingness to impose ethical or religious values on the rest of society, since for the liberal “spiritual and the temporal are different sphere[s] which ought not to be confused.”
