August 18, 2006
What are we Conserving?
One of the most immediate questions that comes up when discussing conservatism is what exactly is it that we are trying to conserve? Is it individual freedom? Is it the power and influence of the "enfranchised"? Is it locking in the racial divide? Or is it a fear of change and psychological disorder as researchers at Berkeley so banally suggested? There is an obvious focus on tradition among conservatives, but why does tradition matter?
In a sense, political philosophy is no different than any other intellectual field. It is a field like any other that studies one facet of the human experience and tries to develop a common language and common principles to analyze, develop, and improve that human experience. Psychology builds upon understanding of how the mind and emotions work. Economics studies how people and groups make decisions with regards to property. Medicine studies how the human body works and how maladies can be healed. This list goes on.
Unlike psychology, economics, or medicine, political philosophy undercuts many different fields at the same time. While it is a question of government structures, organizations, and policies, it also encompasses sociology, economics, morality, and sometimes religion. However, for the purpose of this exercise, we'll deal with political philosophy as an academic field like any other.
Psychology as a field did not appear overnight. It build upon centuries of human knowledge and exploration before there even was a word "psychology". It built on ideas that were developed by the long dead. Sometimes those ideas were correct, sometimes they were wrong. Often those ideas were both, having some measure of truth yet missing something. Almost every human intellectual field is the same exact way. It is build upon centuries of experience and inquiry.
Great intellectual breakthroughs never happen in a vacuum without prior footwork. Newton didn't develop his physics from scratch. However, each breakthrough left some unanswered questions or incomplete explanations. No generation has every claimed to have achieved complete knowledge of the universe, and this generation is no different.
The next generation inherits the intellectual body of knowledge from the previous generation. The knowledge needs to be pruned and improved but very rarely are the ideas that survive in need of being discarded. In this sense, every single one of us is a conservative.
We use the same language as the previous generation, we use the same governmental structure as the previous generations, and we use many of the same conventions as the previous generation. It is simply impossible for a society to recreate its entire body of knowledge with each generation. That would leave each generation trying to recreate work that was already accomplished and leave it absolutely unable to move forward.
However, for some reason, the above idea that every serious person accepts is called into question in the very narrow case of political philosophy. The word "tradition" used in the political context stirs feelings of oppression and victimhood.
The fact is that our governmental form and social institutions have developed over centuries and withstood the test of time. As with all human endeavors there are errors and gaps that need to be dealt with, and in some very rare cases, institutions need to be dissolved (like slavery). As much as some like to say entire institutions need to be razed and modernized, those same people will keep a good deal of political philosophy conserved. For instance, not many people talk about repealing the constitution and starting over.
One of the defining differences between conservatives and others is that when faced with an inadequate institution or policy, conservatives will tend towards cautious reform while others seek to recreate to wheel. The later often falls victim to the law of unintended consequences.
An example of this is health care. In response to concerns about the quality and availability of health care during the 70s, Senator Edward Kennedy [D-MA] created legislation that led to the creation of Health Maintenance Organizations. HMOs are generally considered a large part of the problem with our health care system today; so much so, that the man who created this legislation, Sen. Kennedy, now speaks out against the organizations he helped to bring into existence.
When faced with new problems, conservatives look to conserve what has been created and is worth keeping. Very rarely is it necessary to raze where simple reform is sufficient. New problems can be dealt with by tweak existing organizations and policies, with a particular emphasis on solving problems on the lowest level possible.
It is no mistake that the United States has the strongest economy in the world and is regarded as the world's only superpower. Conservatives seek to not start fixing what isn't broken.
Posted by John Bambenek at 4:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 20, 2006
21st Century Conservatism - Guiding Principles
This article is part of the 21st Century Conservatism series for Blogcritics, this article is the first in the series of hopefully many more posts. Comments are welcome and appreciated. Personal attacks are ignored.
Current political discourse is marred by the scourge of the "sound bite". Issues are reduced to fragments of a sentence and disposed of inside 30 seconds. For each issue, people are carved out into rival camps and the left/right or liberal/conservative moniker is applied. The effects on political discourse specifically but political philosophy generally is that instead of a coherent philosophy that runs through Conservatism, the movement is made up of single-issue groups that vary wildly when it comes to matters of application. There are the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives, the metro conservatives, the religious conservatives, the fiscal conservatives, and so on. The gun rights crowd may be conservative on that issue, but they may have no opinions on the free market economy. The pro-life groups are certainly conservative on life issues but may not have a concern about foreign policy.
This has seemingly left, in the mind of this author, a gap of a common philosophy to draw these issues into a coherent ideology instead of being a disparate group of issues. This series is an attempt to carve out a solid political philosophy for Conservatism at large. This article is the first in that series.
Before such an attempt can be made to apply such a philosophy to specific issues, the principles of the philosophy need to be laid out and explained. The following six principles will serve as the core of this political philosophy so moving forward is possible. The principles are: subsidiary, solidarity, morality, the role of government, free market economics and organic growth.
Subsidiary, simply put, is the idea that what can be done on the lowest level should be done on the lowest level. For instance, regulation of parking should be done locally because it would be absurd to have the federal government based in DC deciding where people in Paducah, KY should park. The people in Paducah are best able to deal with local matters and have their values respected. As another example, military defense should be done on the national level. For one thing, the Articles of Confederation proved that having each state responsible for their own defense did not work. More importantly, if a nation is to exist as such it needs to defend its integrity.
This leads into the second principle, solidarity. Solidarity is the idea that "we're all in this together" or that people have social connection and investment in their respective societies. A society where people are only self-concerned, a Hobbesian state of nature, cannot be free and will not be stable. People need to have mutual concern for one another and be willing to make some level of sacrifice for the common good. For instance, a society cannot be defended if people are unwilling to fight and die for that defense. If being a soldier is "someone else's job", eventually there are no soldiers at all. The same is true for those members of the community that fall into need, meeting those human needs are a duty one owes to the community.
Morality closely plays a role in solidarity. There are certain moral principles anyone in a free society will agree on. People are entitled to freedom of speech, private property, and the right to life and those should not be unnecessarily infringed upon. However, morality goes farther. There needs to be a sense that people live in a just society or that society will begin to fracture. It is only possible for a moral people to be free. An immoral populace requires an expansive government to keep the order.
The role of government needs to be tightly defined in a free society. It is not that governments are bad. Regulation is necessary for a well-ordered society. This can be seen in simple things as having a common side of the road to drive on, a common currency, consistent standards for phone lines, and complex things like interstate and international commerce, and educational standards. Disputes will arise in any culture and there needs to be a fair arbiter. Society needs rules in how to operate. However, the government should not be treated as the end-all-be-all of what we should do and how we should act. The government should be restricted to those functions that cannot be adequately performed by individuals, civic groups, or communities. Government should also govern at the lowest level possible for the function involved. Not everything requires a national program. The bigger the government gets, the harder it gets to keep in check. The more involved government is in other functions, particularly economic, the more special interests and the well-connected are represented.
The free market, properly understood, entails the freedom to make economic choices for oneself. The parties to a transaction are the best ones able to determine their values. As far as possible, transactions and the terms of those transactions should be left to the "buyer" and the "seller". Information is obviously needed to make intelligent economic choices and policies should have a presumption of disclosure with reasonable exceptions (i.e. trade secrets, etc). However, the free market entails more decisions than just what to buy, it entails where to work, what methods to use, and which vendors to do business with. All parties should have the broadest possible choices in which to ask to ensure that the free market produces efficient and fair solutions. Reasonable and limited regulation is appropriate, but over regulation just leads to the dynamic where the wealthy and well-connected start to lobby for regulations that tip the scales in their favor.
Lastly, organic growth is the principle that society should be allowed to develop and grow on its own without the interference of social planners. There is a temptation in some that the best way to deal with problems in institutions is to disregard the benefits they provide, burn the institution to the ground, and hope a Phoenix rises from the ashes. Such attempts always run afoul of the law of unintended consequences. Society should not be forced down unnatural roads and when changes need to be made they should be done emphasizing discourse and debate as opposed to brute force. Very rarely is it necessary to impose significant changes on a society (slavery being a notable exception). Social institutions that stand the test of time need not be tampered with, or destroyed without good cause.
These principles form the basic crux of a work in process, namely a coherent philosophy to speak to the issues facing a new century and a new generation. It isn't an attempt to disregard those ideas of the past, but build them and use them in such a way to paint a picture of how best to have a society that can enjoy stability and allow for individuals to find fulfillment in their own personal ways.
Posted by John Bambenek at 5:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
