The View From 1776

Thomas Hobbes’s all-powerful collectivist state is the model for liberal-progressivism.  It stands opposed to everything intended by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Hobbes, in the 17th century, defended absolutism of the Stuart King Charles I on the theory that humanity’s greatest benefactor was the all-powerful ruler - the Leviathan - who imposed law and order upon a fractious body of citizens.  The degree of force - from laws and regulations to torture and death - was unimportant, since the people outside a forcibly controlled, autocratic society would do the same or worse to each other.

The only difference between Hobbes’s theory and that of liberal-progressives is the modification they borrow from Jean Jacques Rousseau, in whose theory humans were naturally good and benevolent in the state of nature.  Original sin that cast the earliest humans out of that paradisiacal state of nature was the invention of private property, which introduced greed, aggression, crime, and war. 

Liberal-progressive theory thus rests upon the proposition that the proper structure of government, i.e., socialist collectivism, can eliminate private property rights and recreate the benevolence of the original state of nature.  To that is added Hobbes’s Leviathan. 

Liberal-progressive political states, as experience has shown, must be powerful and ruthless enough to wrest private property from the clutches of “the rich”, whom President Franklin Roosevelt called economic royalists.  People who have worked and saved to provide for the future of their families don’t willingly hand their life’s work over to a liberal abstraction called “the people.” They must be “re-educated” as Chairman Mao did with the Chinese people and the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia.  Tens of millions lost their lives, but society was “purified” for socialism.

What liberal-progressives have continually done since 1933, and propose to continue at an accelerated pace, differs from practices of liberal-progressive dictators - from Lenin and Stalin, to Hitler, Mao and the Khmer Rouge - only in degree.  It is exactly the same attitude and process: liberal-progressives presume to know what is best for you and to force you to live in accordance with their designs.

Hence today we hear Senator Clinton proposing to compel every citizen to purchase her prescribed brand of national health insurance.  We hear Senator Obama promising to raise, even more than double, taxes upon inherited wealth, capital gains, and other forms of income.  Pharmaceutical and petroleum companies are effectively to be nationalized by the use of price controls.  At the behest of socialistic labor unions, free trade, along with cheaper imports that benefit the middle-income and poor citizenry, are to be curtailed or repealed.  Both Senators promise to add manifold layers of regulations covering individuals and businesses to the tens of millions of such regulations enacted since President Roosevelt’s New Deal.
 
The following transcript based upon an address delivered at Hillsdale College is an eloquent elaboration of the foregoing theme, as it applies to what was intended in 1776 and 1787 to be constitutional government of the United States.

IMPRIMIS
March 2008

Limited Government: Are the Good Times Really Over?
 
Charles Kesler
Editor, Claremont Review of Books

Charles R. Kesler is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books. His articles on contemporary politics have appeared in several newspapers and journals, including the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. He is editor of the Signet Classic edition of The Federalist Papers, editor of and a contributor to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding, and co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought.
 
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on January 30, 2008, during a five-day conference, “Free Markets and Politics Today,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series.

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OF ALL of the presidential contenders’ slogans this year, Barack Obama’s have been the most interesting. His campaign creed is: “Yes, we can.” To which any reasonable person would ask: “Can what?” The answer, of course, is: “Hope.” But again, a reasonable person might ask: “Hope for what?” To which the answer confidently comes back from the Obama campaign: “For change.” Indeed Obama’s signs say: “Change We Can Believe In,” as opposed, one supposes, to the unbelievable changes. But the elementary problem with this—which any student of logic might raise—is that change can be for the better or for the worse.
 
Democrats in general, I would submit, confuse change with improvement. They fail to weigh the costs and benefits of change, to consider its unintended consequences, or to worry about what we need to conserve and how we might go about doing that faithfully. They ask Americans to embrace change for its own sake, in the faith that history is governed by a law of progress, which guarantees that change is almost always an improvement. The ability to bring about historical change, then, becomes the highest mark of the liberal leader. Thus Hillary Clinton quickly joined Obama on the change bandwagon. Her initial claim of “experience” sounded in retrospect a bit too boring—indeed, almost Republican in its plainness. So “Ready on Day One” signs morphed into “Ready for Change.”
 
Republican slogans have not been much better. Mitt Romney’s was: “Washington is Broken.” This populist refrain echoed, among others, Ross Perot’s from 1992. Romney, of course, was less a populist than an expert offering his skill as a businessman-consultant. He appealed to the old Republican fantasy that if only Washington could be run as efficiently as a private business, all would be well. But government is a very different thing from business: Elected officials can’t hire or fire government employees at will, are responsible to an electorate at regular intervals, and, above all, must try to persuade people about goals that-—unlike, say, pursuing higher profits—are amorphous and disputable.
 
As for John McCain, he doesn’t really have a slogan, unless we count “Mac is Back.” McCain differentiated himself from Romney by saying that he is a leader rather than a manager. A leader, McCain argued, appeals to patriotism rather than self-interest. Certainly McCain’s leading characteristic is his personal honor, which—unlike many republican men of honor—he talks about a lot and in public. He fits the traditional category of a war hero-turned-politician, but with one important difference. Usually war heroes are victorious generals, whereas McCain is famous as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a war that ended in defeat. This fact helps to explain the somewhat prickly and self-referential quality to his sense of honor. He despises self-interest and likes to say so frequently in public, whether it’s the self-interest involved in campaign contributions (which he wants to regulate), attitudes towards illegal immigration (he imputes to its critics the most selfish motives), or even something like waterboarding (a kind of selfish act, motivated by an urgent sense of national interest). McCain stands against all considerations of low self-interest—or maybe any self-interest—in favor of doing the honorable thing, which sometimes turns out to mean simply doing the thing that John McCain wants to do.
 
Utterly missing in this election season is a serious focus on limited or constitutional government. The Democrats, generally speaking, want more government, not less, so their neglect of the issue is to be expected. But the Republican dereliction is more troubling. It represents a falling away from the standards of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism—a decline already reflected in the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush. After 9/11, many prominent conservatives—e.g., George Will, David Brooks, Fred Barnes —pronounced that small government conservatism is dead. That awful reminder of the dangerous world we live in, and of the need to defend ourselves, somehow meant that big government conservatism, as they called it, was now the only game in town. Conservatives would need to make their peace with this idea, they argued, in order to win future elections.
 
Were Will, Brooks, and Barnes wrong? For the most part, I think they were. To show how and why, I want to talk about seven propositions related to the problem of limited government in our day.
 
Limited Does Not Mean Small or Weak
 
Proposition one: Limited government can be distinguished from small government. The two concepts are easily confused because they usually overlap. We are in the habit of invoking, for example, the percentage of Gross Domestic Product that is consumed by government as a sort of criterion. If that percentage goes up, we become alarmed for our liberties. If it goes down, we breathe a sigh of relief. And there is something to this: It is illuminating, for instance, that in 1930, before the New Deal, federal spending was 3.4 percent of GDP, whereas today it’s about seven times that. But there are other instances, perhaps more instances, where that figure can be misleading. At the height of World War Two, for example, the federal government spent 43.6 percent of GDP. But was this big government in the pejorative sense? Was it a violation of our liberties? Necessary spending on the legitimate purposes of government, such as national defense, doesn’t impinge on limited government, even if the costs of these purposes may loom large in terms of a percentage of GDP. There are instances in which government can be big and expensive and yet its purposes remain limited.
 
My second proposition is that limited government can enhance our freedom—even though it costs money. Were Americans in 1944 somehow less free than if we had not spent so copiously to stop Hitler and to liberate Western Europe? Or, to change the analogy, does government spending on courts and prisons diminish our liberty?
 
From a certain point of view—let’s call it, for shorthand purposes, the libertarian point of view, or the view associated this year with Ron Paul—every dollar that government spends comes at the cost of freedom. The premise of this view is that government and freedom are opposites—that all government is oppression. By this way of thinking, limited government is simply limited oppression, differing in magnitude but not in kind from tyranny. Interestingly, this notion does not come originally from any libertarian thinker or friend of freedom. It comes from Machiavelli, the great analyst of open and hidden power, of force and fraud. From Machiavelli’s point of view, there’s no difference between just and unjust government, which are the same phenomenon called by different names. All government, whether considered to be just or unjust, is oppression. Just government is the kind we happen to agree with and profit from, and unjust is the opposite kind.
 
Against this view stand the American Founders and the greatest statesmen, who have always sharply distinguished between just and unjust—or between free and tyrannical—forms of government. What is the Declaration of Independence but a great meditation on the difference between the absolute despotism contemplated by King George III and the freedom that the Americans hoped to enjoy under their own form of self-government? The Declaration does not proclaim that just government is merely less oppressive than unjust government—as if the American republic and, say, Nazi Germany were separated only by degrees of tyranny. Our ancestors thought that republican governments like ours were good because, grounded in human nature and operating by law and consent, they affirmed human liberty. Though fundamentally devoted to the protection of our natural rights, such governments, especially at the local level, might also provide instruction in morality, because republican habits and customs are needed to shape a republican citizenry who can keep government limited, and who have the character to make liberty something good and enduring.
 
This leads to proposition three: Limited government can be compatible with energetic government. That is, limited government doesn’t mean government that does as little as possible. To fight terrorists, or even to arrest and prosecute criminals, requires an energetic government, especially in the executive branch. While our Founders were not uninterested in the question of the sum of power granted to the federal government, they were more interested in the kinds and distribution of powers that would be confirmed by the Constitution. They moved the debate from power (singular) to powers (plural); hence their profound thoughts on the separation of powers. Separation was meant both to prevent the worst and to enable the best kind of government. It was designed to prevent tyranny by not allowing one or more branches to escape the law or to encroach on the other branches. But it was also designed to allow each branch to perform its duty well—to keep the judicial power judicious, the legislative power deliberative, and the executive power energetic. So long as the objects or purposes of the federal government were kept to a few great ends—for example, diplomacy, national defense, regulating interstate commerce—the means to those ends could be construed more or less liberally and safely.
 
 
Constitutionalism vs. The State
 
Accordingly, my fourth proposition is that limited government must be constitutional government. Government must be limited to its proper ends, but its means must be capable of effecting those ends. To resolve these goals was the great achievement of the political science of the Founding Fathers, whose emblem was the Constitution; or to be more precise, the Constitution as seen in the light of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
 
Proposition five: Limited government, in the sense of constitutional government, is opposed to the political assumptions of the modern state, which arose after the New Deal. Those assumptions came largely from the political science of the Progressive era, whose proponents argued that the Founders’ limited government was an 18th century nostrum that was powerless to solve 20th century problems. From this point of view, natural rights were an immature form of genuine right, enshrining egoism and individualism that might have been necessary for frontier farmers but made no sense in an interdependent, industrial society. The Progressives believed that freedom did not come from nature or God, but instead is a product of the state and is realized only in the modern state. Far from being the people’s servant and, therefore, a possible threat to freedom—because servants can be unfaithful—the state is the full ethical expression of a people. The state is the people and the people are the state. This strange use of the term represents the Progressive attempt to translate the German concept of der Staat into American politics. America did not have a state theory of this sort until the Progressive era. Conservative and most libertarian anti-statism arose in opposition to this innovation; but too often, in recent years, hostility to der Staat has been confused with opposition to government per se.
 
To put the difference more plainly, consider Woodrow Wilson’s insistence that “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” In short, it is not the limited Constitution of the Founders, but the living Constitution, which is the ideal of Progressives and of modern liberal theory and practice. A fixed or limited Constitution would make sense if human rights are fixed and unchanging, as the Declaration affirms. But if human rights are essentially historical or evolutionary, then we should want a Constitution that is free to adapt and evolve along with them. In theory, then, no a priori limitations on government power—whether property rights, speech rights, or even religious freedom—can be allowed to impinge on government’s ability to bring about historical liberation. The old or natural rights have to be sacrificed in order to achieve the new rights of self-fulfillment. Thus for the Progressives—as for Barack Obama and many liberals today—political tyranny is no longer the ever-present threat that it was considered to be by James Madison or Alexander Hamilton. In liberal eyes, the real political threat is not tyrannical government or even the tyranny of the majority, but the well-connected capitalists, the “economic royalists” hiding behind the façade of democracy, who manipulate things to their advantage. Liberals ever since the New Deal have argued that limited government must become unlimited, in order to prevent the few from becoming tyrannical.
 
A new theory of the Constitution corresponded to this new theory of rights. FDR put it memorably in his 1932 Commonwealth Club Address: Government is a contract under which “rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights.” According to this view, we give the rulers power and the rulers give us rights. In other words, rights are no longer natural or God-given, but emerge from a bargain struck with the government. And it is up to liberal statesmen or leaders to keep the bargain current, redefining rights constantly—adding new rights and subtracting some of the old ones—in order to keep the living Constitution in tune with the times. Entitlement rights—rights created and funded by government—replace natural rights. Given this new relationship of people and government, we don’t need to keep a jealous eye on government anymore, because the more power we give it, the more rights and benefits it gives us back—Social Security, Medicare, prescription drug benefits, unemployment insurance, and on and on.
 
Still a Time for Choosing
 
My sixth proposition is that the decline of limited government in the 20th century was not inevitable. Modern liberals would have us believe that big government was necessitated by new circumstances—the Industrial Revolution, the joint-stock corporation, technological and economic developments, etc. The assertion that the growth of state power was inevitable—that it was all part of the Darwinian process that allowed democracy to survive the hostile environment of the 20th century—is part of big government’s mystique and power: You can’t think about an alternative to big government, after all, if you regard it as inevitable. The claim of inevitability, however, has been exploded by, among others, Robert Higgs, in a very good book called Crisis and Leviathan. What that book shows is that America’s state apparatus didn’t grow uniformly in response to the new conditions of the 20th century, but rather in fits and starts, usually in response to political or economic emergencies.
 
Return, for a moment, to the GDP figure as a rough indicator of the size of government: It rises dramatically in World War One, again in response to the Depression and the New Deal, again in World War Two, again in the early part of the Cold War, and then again with the Great Society in the mid-1960s. Between these sudden jumps we see almost flat lines. In fact, there is a slight decrease in government after each of these periods, but the new level is always higher than the previous one—something Higgs calls the “ratchet effect.” The importance of this fact—that growth in government has been the result of political choices in response to changing political conditions—is that it disproves the notion that big government was somehow fated. It reminds us of Aristotle’s argument that regimes change in part because of changing demographic and other circumstances, but mostly because of choices that are made by those who rule. This ought to give us confidence that the continued growth of government is not inevitable.
 
But a word of caution: Neither is big government’s demise inevitable. Sometimes conservatives and even libertarians predict that big government is doomed. Some point to modern technology as the savior: The rise of personal computers and the microchip, along with the move away from mass production toward small batch, specialized production, was supposed to mean that modern, top-down bureaucracy was obsolete. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Other conservatives suggest that the demographic wall we’re going to hit when the Baby Boomers retire will eventually require cuts in entitlements. That is possible, but it is also possible that taxes will be raised and that a larger fraction of the national economy will be socialized.
 
This leads to my seventh and concluding proposition: Limited government is not a lost cause. The subtitle for this talk, “Are the Good Times Really Over?” is inspired by a Merle Haggard country song of that title. It asked the question, “Are we rolling downhill / like a snowball headed for hell?” But after indicting the current situation—it was written late in the era of Jimmy Carter, when there was much to despair about—the song ends in a positive refrain, instructing us, among other things, to “Stand up for the flag / and let’s all ring the Liberty Bell.” That’s good advice, and it’s advice that will help. But the restoration of constitutional government will require a lot more from us. It will require searching political reconsideration as well as profound political prudence, neither of which has been on offer, so far, in the 2008 presidential campaign.

"Freedom-Centric Theory"  Of Historical Progress
By Bill Greene

The time chart on THE VIEW FROM 1776 shows all the negative forces that tended to reverse progress in economic freedom over the past 2,500 years.

I have examined this course of history and many of the attempts by scholars to explain the  reasons for the Rise of the West over the Rest, so most of the time line is familiar to me. I have used the case method to look at each of the locales where progress occurred throughout this period and found that it may be a harmful generalization to refer to it all as “Western Civilization." 

The advances were first noted in Hebraic and Greek history where the principles of individual responsibility and ethics were formulated. I include with these origins of “Western” success the Phoenician culture where free enterprise first flourished due to the open economy and somewhat democratic mechanics of government.

It is customary to trace these beginnings forward to the Roman Republic, the Basques, the Hanseatic League, the Italian city states, and then to Holland, Flanders, and eventually to England, France and finally to America.

What escapes attention by most writers is, first, that all the rest of continental Europe stagnated during the last 500 years under monarchical and totalitarian rule (think Russia, Poland, most of Spain and Italy and Eastern Europe), and two,  that each of those small enclaves that did enjoy success, did so only as long as they retained their freedom--at least the de facto economic freedom of most of their citizens.

Except for America they all finally fell (or are falling) when they were either invaded from the outside or undermined from the inside. What this means is that there was something unique that happened albeit briefly in each of those success stories that did not happen in most of the continent. Further, because the Phoenicians, Greeks and Basques are quite different from the people of Holland, Scotland and England, I suggest that the common denominator for their progress was not that they were Western but that they were at least temporarily free.

Consequently, I prefer to call it a "Freedom-centric theory"  of historical progress, rather than a Western European-centric theory.  And I suggest it was not the “West” that won, but only those who adopted the proven mechanics of free economies, recognized the inviolable dignity and rights of each individual, and limited central governments. 

This is borne out by the fact that each of those initially successful enclaves was originally undone by growing bureaucracies, new elites who promoted centralized governmental power, or a softening born of success and affluence that weakened the fiber of their citizenry.

This freedom-centric view also has the advantage of explaining why Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Arab Emirates have surpassed most European nations in economic freedom and prosperity.

Charles Murray has observed in “Human Achievement” that political freedom accomplishes little by itself--  “it is de facto economic freedom, autonomy to act, that counts."  Florence prospered under their Republic and also under the Medici Princes, because the latter, for all their autocratic ways, honored Machiavelli’s advice to leave their subject’s private property alone. The Medicis were not intellectual elites, but understood the mechanics of business and free trade.

America’s ongoing decline would be more apt to be reversed under the Medicis than under the leadership of today’s liberal Leftist’s such as Clinton, Obama and Gore. The lesson of history is that economic freedom trumps political freedom or the vote.

There are many new democracies with all the trappings of elected government that stagnate and suffer under the oppressive economic controls administered from on high by their elected officials. It is important to recognize the importance of simple economic freedom--that empowers each individual to exert his innate human initiative--because it explains what works and what doesn’t.

The freedom based theory is also important to counter the environmental-climate-geography-based explanations of history currently dominating the market because the latter deny the more important role of individual freedom at the grassroots micro-economic level. To read Jared Diamond one might conclude that if India with its vast bureacracy could just ban guns, germs, and improve garbage collection, they would rule the world!

The “Radzewicz Rule” outlined in my book, Common Genius, suggests they would be better off downsizing government, giving women full rights, getting rid of the caste system, eating their cattle instead of worshipping them, downplaying the need to live a passive life to avoid downward re-incarnation, and empowering their citizens to be active, involved, and economically literate individuals. Each of those religious-cultural traditions are negatives to individual action.

The successful European locales mentioned above were not just free of economic regulation--they also benefitted from the Judaic-Greek-Christian traditions that honored the individual. Oppression can be both physical and mental-- we have gained because Christianity, instead of burdening the mental and spiritual side of our people, freed them to take advantage of their physical safety and economic freedom.  

Earthly perfection of human nature and human society, here and now, is what Senator Obama is promising us.  This is his implicit message when tells us that he can, as President, bring us all together and move us beyond strife, aggression, and wars.

One thing we can state categorically in that regard is that what Senator Obama promises is emphatically, irreconcilably opposed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilization.  Parenthetically, the Senator’s secular and socialistic mind-set may explain in part why he saw no problem with the unchristian hatred preached by his minister, the Rev. Wright. 

Senator Obama is not necessarily painting himself as the Second Messiah who will personally effect the transformation.  Rather, as a good socialist-progressive-liberal, he expects that structural changes in the political state will do the necessary work. 

Such structural changes will include higher taxes, especially on capital gains which fuel business innovation and more efficient production, massive increases in Federal welfare-state spending programs, and crushing inflation, along with extensive increases in regulation of personal and business conduct (including stronger affirmative-action measures). 

As the German Empire’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in the 1880s, he was instituting the world’s first welfare state in order to gain total control over the German people.  Those who are dependent upon the political state for their benefits, he observed, can be herded like cattle.

In contrast, in the Old Testament, King Solomon tells us:

The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?  (Ecclesiastes 1:1-3)

I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem.  I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men!  I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.  (Ecclesiastes 1:12-14)

I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards.  I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them.  I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.  I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me.  I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired men and women singers, and a harem as well—the delights of the heart of man.  I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor.  Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.  (Ecclesiastes 2:4:11)

The operative words in these quotations are “under the sun” and “under heaven,” meaning within the earthly realm, as opposed to the spiritual worship of God the Creator of the Universe.

Transformation of human nature, obviously a necessity if earthly perfection and salvation are to become reality, is as old a fantasy as socialism itself. 

Indeed, it is the most basic element in the dogma of socialism.  If there is not the religious hope of secular salvation, a return to the Garden of Eden, why endure the loss of political and economic liberty implicit in submission to the rigors of atheistic, collectivistic tyranny?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s utopian fantasizing led him to believe that humans, in the original State of Nature, had been harmoniously benevolent, sharing freely with each other the abundance of nature.  This idyllic state was shattered, not by Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, but by the invention of private property, whence come greed, aggression, crime, and war.

Thus the liberal-progressive-socialist plan for returning to the State of Nature is to socialize, that is to confiscate, private property and employ the coercive power of the political state to redistribute property and income as equally as possible, without regard to merit or hard work. 

Needless to say, we have seen already that high taxes, inflation, rigid regulation of economic activity, affirmative action, and denigration of Judeo-Christian morality effectively make us all equally poor and make of society a squalid cesspool of immorality.

The original conceptualizers of modern socialism – Henri de Saint-Simon and his pupil-colleague Auguste Comte - in the early 1800s believed that socialism itself was so compelling a vision of earthly harmony and perfection that peoples of all nations would willingly and happily submit to their teachings.

Unfortunately, as all experience with liberal-progressive-socialism has shown since the first two decades of the 19th century, in no society do people willingly give up their hard earned savings for the benefit of an abstraction called “humanity.” Some degree of political compulsion always is necessary.

Karl Marx believed that the crucible of a bloody workers’ revolution would itself literally transform human nature.  The English Fabian socialists and their 20th and 21st century American followers, including Senator Obama, have been willing to play the role of boa constrictor: squeezing society with unremitting small changes until the life’s breath of political liberty has departed.

Read Richard John Neuhaus’s commentary on Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. Mr. Dacey is the editor of Philo, a journal of secularist philosophy.

Despite its title, Mr. Dacey’s book is a confrontation with spiritual religion.  Mr. Neuhaus writes:

On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees. I expect he would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality, but one step at a time, and The Secular Conscience is a critically important first step.

Dacey has quibbles with Pope Benedict’s analysis of moral “relativism,” but he admits that “secular liberals find it had to shake the lingering feeling that there is something to the pope’s diagnosis. Something disquieting has been happening to the Western mind over the last half century.” He writes about a philosophy professor who reports that none of his students are Holocaust deniers, but an increasing number are even worse: “They acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally.” Who are they to say that the Nazis were morally wrong? And so it is also with apartheid, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. For these students, passing moral judgment “is to be a moral ‘absolutist,’ and having been taught that there are no absolutes, they now see any judgment as arbitrary, intolerant, and authoritarian.”

...Secular liberalism “has been undone by its own ideas,” Dacey writes. “The first idea is that matters of conscience—religion, ethics, and values—are private matters. . . . By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn’t, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public.” Dacey recognizes the gravely flawed view of John Rawls that public decisions must be advanced by public reasons recognized by all reasonable parties. That is not the case with most questions requiring political decisions. He writes: “A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence..."

Several points touched upon by Mr. Neuhaus in his commentary need emphasis.

First, as he writes, “I expect [Dacey] would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality...” Liberal-progressive-socialism is itself a religion, albeit a secular and atheistic one.  In that regard, see Socialism: Our Unconstitutionally Established National Religion.

Liberal-progressives hubristically apotheosize Reason, as if it were some independent “thing” that provides all the right answers.  In reality, Reason is no more than liberal-progressives’ personal opinions, however, carefully considered.  There are demonstrable laws of science applying to tangible natural phenomena, but not in the realm of the mind, which is far more than a collection of pieces of nerve tissue.  For moral guidance we must look to God’s Holy Spirit. 

Second, a quotation from Mr. Dacey’s book offers validation from the horse’s mouth for the assertion in Liberal-Progressive Mind Control that public-education students are inculcated with a moral relativism that will not even condemn the Nazi Holocaust.

"Something disquieting has been happening to the Western mind over the last half century.” [Dacey] writes about a philosophy professor who reports that none of his students are Holocaust deniers, but an increasing number are even worse: “They acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally.”

Third, as quoted in the text above, Mr. Dacey tells us:

A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence...

That is tantamount to saying that ever-changing, superficial public opinion, gauged in the latest opinion poll, is to be our canon of morality. 

Alternatively it means, as Auguste Comte contended, that only intellectuals with superior understanding of the laws of history are qualified to pronounce upon the content of public morality.  Comte’s view easily slips into the justification for dictatorial regimes, from the Soviet Union to Hitler’s National Socialism.

In either cases, denying timeless principles of morality, what Western civilization, before the French Revolution, termed natural law, opens the door to anarchic disintegration of society.  If the independent authority of our Creator God is denied, every person’s opinion has equal validity.  We are then on the road to Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, a war of all against all, in which life becomes nasty, brutish, and short. 

We are not at the end of the road yet, but the cultural civil war started by liberal-progressives to destroy Judeo-Christian principles provides a foretaste.

The contention that public opinion is the real basis of conduct has a lengthy pedigree, documented most famously in Plato’s Republic. In that dialogue, Socrates is told by a sophist that principles of morality are fine and dandy, but in reality everybody’s conduct is shaped by desires for sensual gratification, wealth, and power.

Since the early 20th century, this sophistic view has enjoyed notable intellectual support in the United States.

Liberal-progressive philosophical and educational theoretician John Dewey taught several generations of Americans that Darwin’s speculative biological hypothesis should be applied to morality.  The import, he said, is that everything, including morality, is continually evolving.  If we accept Dewey’s thesis, moral relativism is the rational conclusion.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., our first socialist on the high court bench, wrote that truth is whatever wins out in the public square debate.  Should public opinion swing toward support for a Bolshevist government, he wrote, then the Constitution should not stand in the way.  That, of course, is an early version of the “evolving” Constitution, so dear to the hearts of the New York Times editorial board.

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Reading Anthony Daniels’s At the Forest’s Edge in the New Criterion website, one is reminded of the superficiality of the liberal-progressive philosophical foundation. 

Mr. Daniels ruminates about the analyses of modernity expressed by Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents and by Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses. Both works were published in 1930, when liberal-progressivism was becoming ascendant in the United States.

Both are products of the materialistic philosophy of the 19th century that repudiated God and spiritual religion, proclaiming that only the tangible and material elements of everyday life here on earth had any real influence upon human conduct and the course of history. 

Humans in that philosophy are merely bundles of nerves and muscle that respond positively to sensual pleasure and negatively to pain.  Intellectuals, therefore, in theory, can structure political societies that will create universal happiness and harmony, effecting paradise on earth. It was this promise that gave us the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany.

Freud looked clinically at individual cases, concluding that the discontents of modern civilization arise from the conflict between man’s sensual (primarily sexual) urges and the restrictions imposed by Judeo-Christian morality.  He came down in favor of following the sensual urges in order to have a happy life.

Ortega’s view encompassed the whole of European society in the post-World War I era.  Mr. Daniels writes:

The picture Ortega draws of the mass man is not an attractive or flattering one, but Ortega is not a snob who simply excoriates the appalling habits and tastes of those below him in the social scale. For him, mass man is the man who has no transcendent purpose in life, who lives in an eternal present moment which he wants to make pleasurable in a gross and sensual way, who thinks that ever-increasing consumption is the end of life, who goes from distraction to distraction, who is prey to absurd fashions, who never thinks deeply and who, above all, has a venomous dislike of any other way of living but his own, which he instinctively feels as a reproach. He will not recognize his betters; he is perfectly satisfied to be as he is...Life for mass man is not a biography, but a series of moments, each unconnected with the next, and all deprived of larger meaning or purpose.

Many of Freud’s ideas have been repudiated in recent decades, but Ortega’s picture remains distressingly accurate.

Both Freud and Ortega were atheists and regarded spiritual religion as ignorance to be banished by what in the United States John Dewey called progressive education.

What Freud and Ortega would not see was that the socialistic materialism spawned by the French Revolution was the true source of civilization’s discontents and the banality and crassness of mass man.

By initiating the destruction of Christianity in Europe, the French Revolutionary version of the Age of Enlightenment effectively decapitated civilization, leaving one-dimensional humans with bodies but little wisdom.

Commentary on Education for Slavery

By Kartik Ariyur

The lack of knowledge of history, combined with equating education (etymologically, bringing that which is already within--the Omniscience of the Image of God within everyman) with apprenticeship and vocational training certainly make for a populace ready for slavery. But then, the United States still has a greater proportion of its populace with a true education and a broad enough knowledge of history--somewhere between 10 and 20% would be my guess. So there is much more hope for better conditions. With most young individuals obtaining their information from the Internet through critical study rather than from a single source of propaganda, there is even greater hope.
 
Of course, modern conservatives (also socialists, albeit socialist lite) may well give the socialists the means to gut freedom of speech on the Internet for short term political expediency. This is likely given that they attacked political free speech through McCain Feingold, have opened the door to socialist bureaucratic control of organized religion through government funding of religious charities, and almost got rid of the filibuster in the Senate.

Most other parts of the world are much worse off--the prosperity of Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, or New Zealand is artificial; they haven’t paid for their defense for a long time. The United States has been paying the bills and has remained in constant war mobilization since WW-II at great cost to itself.

This is because the fall to ignorance is inevitable for any society that devalues its currency to pay for constant war mobilization. Indeed, no war can be paid for without inflation--it is just not possible to have a debate of raising taxes or borrowing under those circumstances.

Under inflation, everyone has to gamble to preserve their capital, and those with little capital end up losing what they have in the boom-bust cycles engendered by inflationary monetary policy. The middle class thus gets wiped out in this process, as has happened in Mexico, Argentina or India. And instead of a smooth gradient from the poor to the rich, you eventually have a society with a lot of extremely rich and poor individuals. Secondly, the middle class and poor have to scramble to make ends meet--they end up working much harder and longer, and then don’t have the time to raise their children. Because the cultural knowledge of dealing with different circumstances is not taught to them, the children default to the instincts of self-preservation and procreation, and this starts a vicious cycle, wherein the rate of degeneration is determined by the rate of inflation.

In the US, this cycle perhaps began during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson: the Federal Reserve, the temporary Income Tax, and complete abandonment of the noninterventionist foreign policy of the Founders all began in those eight years. From then onward, the ‘conservatives’ have over every election cycle continued to become more ‘liberal.’ Today’s conservatives want to preserve and expand the House that Johnson, Carter and Clinton built (Medicare prescription drug program, No child left behind, and nation building...), just as the conservatives of the 1950s preserved and expanded the House that FDR built (expansion of Social Security, and constant war mobilization combined with a supply of food and credit to the Soviet Union).

But all of these problems have their roots in spiritual progress failing to keep up with material progress--when individuals gain more power without concomitantly gaining more wisdom they end up making more poor choices everyday. Put in another fashion, power corrupts, and enhancement of power without enhancement of character results in the misuse of power. With greater prosperity, individuals have more power in their hands, and liberty is bound to turn into license without a greater awareness of the consequences of one’s actions.

In the political domain the course appears to have been set with the institution of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Sherman antitrust Act of 1890. Interventionist policy began with the Spanish-American war of 1898, when society welcomed the Nietzschean Will to Power of Messrs. Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt among others. The secularization of religion--with organized religion taking up political activism rather than increased efforts at character building was another indication. A reverent understanding of the unlimited possibilities of the Infinite, and the inscrutability of His Justice through merely material means was replaced with a Gnostic certainty of ‘what God wanted to get done’--’social justice’--perfecting the world (to the limited lights of human planners who believe they can play God).

There is, as I mention in the first paragraph, much greater hope for America than for most other parts of the world, but that hope does not lie in the sphere of political or social activity. It lies in the efforts of individuals striving for perfection, with a humble awareness of their own fallibility, which eventually attracts the grace of God that removes all limitations. It is only when individuals improve themselves rapidly that they are able to influence others to experiment with cultivating virtue (cognate with virility). This only happens when those around them notice their improvement within their limited attention span. When they manifest the glory that God intends everyman to manifest, they turn many toward their Maker. Tis thus that the ten men good in the eyes of God save their societies from oblivion. If a society doesn’t produce such men in every generation, it will share the destiny of Sodom and Gomorrah. If it produces many of them, there will be a significant expansion of liberty.

Historically, all great expansions of social or political liberty and consequent prosperity have been preceded by a spiritual renaissance--the Reformation in Europe, the several reformations of the Hindus in India, or that of the Greeks due to the schools of Pythagoras and Orpheus. The printing of the King James version of the Bible, the efforts of the Puritans preceded the Glorious Revolution, the Scottish Renaissance and the settlement of many True Pilgrims preceded the American Revolution, the Reformation and the efforts of the Calvinists and Puritans to practice Scriptural tenets in Holland preceded their freedom from Spain, Gandhi making himself a moral man and catalyzing an upsurge of morality enabled a free India (though with a government antithetical to his vision of a confederation of village republics with a minimal federal government conducting foreign policy and coordinating the national defense, an armed citizenry and no standing army).

In closing, there is a condition where the expansion of the money supply need not be harmful. That would happen if the government consistently follows the Hamiltonian ideal.

There are three important components to this ideal besides a very small and therefore highly accountable Federal government: the import of enough capital (individuals with knowledge and character) into itself to offset the expansion of money supply through the increase of productivity. A national debt incurred from this importation of character (into the universities, and for specific pressing needs) large enough that the banks and the established businesses they control do not destabilize the government, but serve to strengthen it in order to recover their dues. The absence of subsidies for individual irresponsibility at the Federal level.

The Founders (the Federalists--Adams and Hamilton) had this policy of importing the best artisans and mechanics from Europe, offering them funds and resources to start up in America. It has been continued to some extent in the present day through the import of scientific and engineering talent into the Universities, mostly for working on defense related science and technology. But there is a need for much greater importation given the present rate of monetary inflation.

Second, there is seldom a need for any society to import labor on a permanent basis--this need has arisen in the United States simply because of the disincentive to work of the welfare state. Moreover, it is much more difficult for labor to quickly become part of the melting pot; the truly educated can adjust easily to new conditions. Indeed, if these steps were assiduously followed without mixing Hamilton with Marx, the US could solve most of its problems quickly. The Jeffersonian ideal of continually decentralizing authority can be attained through using the 14th amendment (in a manner consistent with the rest of the constitution) to limit and decentralize jurisdiction to smaller units (perhaps eventually leading to Jefferson’s Ward Republics) rather than centralizing jurisdiction. Jurisdictions are certain to discriminate against certain individuals, and the Federal government exists so that they can shop jurisdictions. It is only when jurisdictions discriminate against groups that order comes under threat. Greater decentralization of jurisdiction reduces the probability of miscarriages of justice and therefore of violence.

Quotation:

What we often ignore is the existential significance an issue like global warming (whatever its scientific merits) has for the political class. There must be something out there that reminds them that all the car burning back in 68 wasn’t for nothing. An issue like that permits them to carry on business as usual. And here are three reasons:

* Apparently global warming explains everything; from divergent weather patterns to geopolitical events.

* It does allow one to ignore/distract from a whole array of issues enormously inconvenient to the left, the declining welfare state, divisive multiculturalism etc.

* It reinvigorates an economic agenda of command and control.

In short, superb explanatory and defensive capabilities coupled with a tremendous tax and spend potential.

It’s just too good to be true for the political class and therefore it must be an issue of paramount concern.

Maggie’s Farm has a wonderfully appropriate quotation from C. S. Lewis.

I am a democrat [believer in democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .

The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

It is noteworthy that Rousseau, while he believed people to be inherently good, also postulated the General Will.  Under Rousseau’s “democracy” the political state was to require all citizens to conform to whatever beliefs and lifestyles the General Will decreed. 

And who was to interpret the General Will?  Naturally enough, the intellectuals, as only they could understand the laws of nature, unfiltered by worship of God.