March 04, 2006

Before we finish the discussion of consumerism, I want to mention a great point that Rod makes in this chapter, which I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet.

Rod points out that, in judging our use of the media, the main consideration is not the content of the media we use, but the precious time that using the media at all takes away from our families and friendships, to say nothing of our relationship with God. I can confirm that this is something that even people who are otherwise quite harsh in their criticism of the media utterly fail to appreciate.

The problem is that we’re encouraged to think that we have a right to waste time, so to speak, so that if we meet minimum standards of decency and reasonableness in our use of the media, there is really nothing to worry about or criticize. This goes back to a point I made in another post about the misuse of leisure being one of the themes of CCs. Leisure isn’t “doing nothing”, but engaging in activities worthy of free men that, if necessary, require less effort than our professional work.

Christine Rosen’s New Atlantis article on video gaming is an eerie illustration of where the ethos of time-wasting leads. It’s worth asking ourselves, whenever we sit down to watch television or use the internet, whether this is really the best use of our time at that moment. Even if the answer is yes, the question was worth asking.

I think we've got a red herring on the aesthetics question; the name is just a bow tie put on a basic human impulse, to value beauty and to want to have it around. When scanning thriftshop shelves I've often been touched by the efforts ordinary people put in to beautifying (or attempting to beautify) simple household objects, sometimes in ways that made them as useless as a furlined teacup. Not everyone would agree that these improved objects are actually beautiful. But the underlying impulse is undeniable, irrepressible.

And if you look at old stuff, even simple functional old stuff, you see how frequently the original owners went to some trouble to add beauty; to carve vines on on a kitchen stool, for example. In earlier communities, people didn't just settle for crummy beer, clothing, bread, furniture, housing, and so forth. The Duff era was a bad dream. Beer is easy enough to make at home, and some guys would be known for having a good touch. Every mom might be making the family's clothes, but there would always one who stood out as creative and talented. Nobody *wants* to settle for ugly.

People just like to have beauty around, and there's nothing effete about it. A dandelion in a jelly jar qualifies.

Today's Rocky Mountain News takes on
"Crunchy Cons." 38_4513307,00.html>Writing in the "for"
corner, Your Working Boy. On the
MN_38_4513309,00.html>"against" side, RMN editorial writer Rick Henderson.

March 03, 2006

Rod, by the last line about not buying at all I meant what Frederica meant when she wrote about parachuting out of the consumerist mentality all-together and learning to make for ourselves or to work within the limits of the local economy of producers. When I said that “true beauty and joy are always rooted in the limits of what it means to be human” I am agreeing with the MacIntyre that Mitch quoted. What are the applications of this? I think Bruce put it well:

Simply put, we should try to be a part of virtuous communities involved in producing food, clothing, and shelter, as well as in our own faith, work and play, and the schooling of our children.

Economic choices informed by this sensibility ought to be rooted and committed to the limits, beauties, cultures, etc., of one’s place. A lodge-pole pine home on the Kansas prairie may be aesthetically beautiful, in a sense, but it does not have integrity; it is not “of its place.”

Now I also agree with Bruce that worrying about coffee beans while Rome burns is foolish. But we might let those who cultivate the more rooted beauties of their particular place, from hot drinks to homes and everything in between, trouble our conscience from time to time. Or as Wendell Berry put it:

I still cut my wood with a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults of an airplane, except it does not fly. It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have—a pencil, say—why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging? If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something complicated?

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to “need.” I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

But Mitch, I think Macintyre was discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or” in that passage, so I’m not sure that you’re representing Macintyre’s view or his summation of the philosophical positions presented by SK. I would agree with you (and with SK) that aestheticism is not, ultimately, a defensible philosophy of life, but I also wouldn’t say that the non-religious conservatives I’ve talked to are philosophical aesthetes. They seem to me to be more or less libertarian conservatives who happen to have a particular appreciation for beauty and its role in the good life. I don’t think you have to be metaphysically committed one way or another to say, for example, that a neighborhood of old houses is beautiful and that it ought to be the business of conservatives to preserve them.

I’d like to respond to the reader who, in response to my proposal to tax short-term stock transactions, said this: “the ability to sell the stock at what you deem is the perfect time, whether it’s a day or a decade later. That's how the stock market works, and has worked since its inception. If I'm going to accept the risk of purchasing a pure stock, even if it is speculative, then I need the escape hatch of being able to sell it, whether it's going up or down,”

Well, I’m not sure “the need for an escape hatch” is quite the right he thinks it is. The stock market didn’t arise from a state of nature. It’s an artificial construct (just as, the “personhood” of the corporation, limited liability, etc., are not “natural.”). It exists for the public good. When people like Peter Drucker, the father of management theory, and W. Edward Deming, the man behind the Japanese economic miracle, decry short-term stock speculation, you can be assured there’s a good business reason for it. I’m not sure they would have treated the need for an “escape hatch” as important to capital formation. What productive business—not investing—reason is there for such a short-term horizon?

As someone who co-founded a company who made the Inc. Magazine 500 a while back, I can assure you I’m not anti-business. On the contrary, business building is a noble calling. But I don’t know the good business reason why someone would need to get in and out of a stock in, say, a day, other than for purely speculative reasons. And if it’s speculative, I have no interest in it, and I don’t think most average Americans would have an interest in it, as it doesn’t serve a real productive business end. I realize there is a whole structure, hedge funds, etc., built around the exigencies of the financial system. I’m not saying they aren’t important. I’m not saying they’re useless. But when John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, can advocate a short-term tax (and mutual funds buying individual stocks just as individuals do), then I think the “system” can take it without falling apart. What we have here, I think, is an example of how the financial “game” has become sacrosanct—for no reason related to the public good it is supposed to serve.

By the way, as someone who sits on a board of a company, I agree that Sarbanes-Oxley is “ham-fisted regulation,” and it should be repealed. But the only reason it exists is because of the temptations created by excessive stock speculation.

There is a parody site. Though I could swear some of those comments are lifted from in here... (I kid.)

Here in Dallas, I had lunch today with David Spence down in the Bishop Arts District of Dallas. David is one of our city’s Really Good Guys. He owns and operates Good Space, a small renovation firm that buys worn-out but historically and aesthetically significant buildings, and meticulously restores them for residential and commercial space. David has been a driving force behind the revival of the Oak Cliff neighborhood south of downtown. Dave’s a simpatico liberal, and because (I’m guessing) he has to deal with city bureaucracy and various social forces that work against building back strong neighborhoods, he is pretty clear-eyed and realistic. Over tacos and quesadillas, we talked about consumerism and community, and how both the left and the right, in the main, seem to be out of good ideas on how to restore America’s lost sense of community. Dave talked about going recently to a neighborhood chamber of commerce meeting, and what a treat it was to see all the old-time small businessmen … but then to realize that the commitment to groups like the chamber of commerce was something that our parents’ generation did, not our own.

We talked about how the way folks shop today, and the way we think about shopping, makes it hard to revive neighborhoods like the one we were sitting in, where there’s a small commercial district and residential housing next to it. “People like to blame Wal-Mart,” Dave said. “But Wal-Mart is not some monster coming in and imposing something on us. Wal-Mart is us.” (A point once made on South Park ). I told David that I doubted we could expect any programmatic action from government or anybody else to address this problem – or even if it could be addressed at that level -- and that about the only thing that made sense to do is for us to join together with other little platoons and build back what we could, in our own backyards. And I don’t mean just architecturally. Once again, I go back to Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation that the cultural fragmentation is so profound now that true cultural renewal is something that will have to come from people who share the same values coming together to affirm them by figuring out new ways to live in community together.

I thought later how interesting it was – and hopeful to me – that here I was, a conservative, and my liberal friend David, both recognizing that something important has been lost amid our plenty, and how we’re both grasping in our own ways for a way to restore it by turning back to the past for lessons. David is doing this literally, by making old things new again with his sweat and his equity and his bare hands. And I’m doing it in my own way, as are many of you. After lunch, David took me over to see Good Space’s latest project, which just got approved by the city. It’s an early 1900s building originally constructed as apartments, but which Good Space bought and reworked as office space. It was so beautiful, and had been so lovingly restored. Some lucky tenants will soon be coming. I noticed that there were some down-at-the-heels houses on either side, and David remarked that the kinds of tenants he’s likely to get are designers or other creative types who can see the value in a place like the building he’s redone, and not be put off by the shabby housing elsewhere on the block. Maybe that’s it, I thought: whether you’re liberal or conservative, if you can see with the eye of a poet to the inner worth of a thing, an institution or a way of life, you can find the courage to commit to it even though it doesn’t make sense to most people.

. . correspondents who don’t care for the religion and spirituality thing, but who are serious aesthetes (as distinct from hedonists). . .

I’m curious about this distinction. I’m not sure Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, would agree that it exists. Indeed, in MacIntyre’s view the “aesthete” is a “character” of the Enlightenment. MacIntyre draws the distinction thus:

At the heart of the aesthetic way of life . . . is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present experience. The paradigm of aesthetic expression is the romantic lover who is immersed in his own passion. By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time, in which the present is bound by the past and to the future. Each of the two ways of life is informed by different concepts, incompatible attitudes, rival premises.

It seems to me that the correspondents you refer to, and some that you discuss in the book, are trying to have it both ways. But they must see (and admit) that “beauty and its enjoyment” point to the transcendent, or they can’t claim that their preferences have any objective ground. Aren’t those who “don’t care for the religion thing” just consumers or hedonists of a different kind?

Caleb writes:

I don’t know Rod, I may have to part ways with you here. I’m not so sure your enjoyment of a wide variety “of good food and attractive furnishings” is all that crunchy. Aestheticism, at least in its philosophical form, involves discipline, not just the satisfaction of appetites — even an appetite for beauty. So beauty and joy, yes! But true beauty and joy are always rooted in the limits of what it means to be human. The global marketplace is extremely efficient at satisfying appetites, and is clever enough to recognize that there is an appetite for aestheticism and satisfy it too.

You ask: “Is it crunchier to buy these great coffee beans from the little guy in NYC, or from the local not-so-little guy purveyor in my own city?” The reality is that it’s crunchier not to buy them at all.

Hmm, I don’t know what you mean by that last line, Caleb – I’m wondering if we might on this point find a difference between your Protestant sensibilities and my Catholic ones -- but it sounds like something we can start with in next week’s Food chapter discussion, which is partly about aestheticism. I have some crunchy-con friends and correspondents who don’t care for the religion and spirituality thing, but who are serious aesthetes (as distinct from hedonists) who believe that beauty and its enjoyment are key to a well-lived life. Just for now – and just to let readers know, I talk more in-depth about this topic in the Home chapter – I will say that I admire the philosophy of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement he helped pioneer. Morris and his disciples believed that simplicity was a component of beauty, and that beautiful houses and home interiors ought to be affordable to the working man too. In fact, they thought such was necessary, because the home ought to be a refuge from the world. The plain little house Julie and I live in was originally built for working-class people around the turn of the 20th century. It’s very beautiful, at least to my eye, and its plainness is part of its beauty. But I’m getting way ahead of our discussion here, so I’ll stop and wait for the right time to go down this route.

More mail:

I've been following the discussion avidly--and have just finished reading the book--but wanted to comment on Angelo's recent post, which is talkin' crazy.

I really don't mind government keeping an eagle eye on big business....from the abuses we've seen in the media, big business needs it, but there's no need to go all Eliot Spitzer and not just punish but further tax behavior that may or may not be good for Christians and "crunchies."

Short term capital gains are already taxed at a much higher rate than long term capital gains, so the tax laws already encourage a long-term perspective. If you're buying stocks, its ridiculous to suggest you should be severely punished for a basic market fundamental--the ability to sell the stock at what you deem is the perfect time, whether it’s a day or a decade later. That's how the stock market works, and has worked since its inception. If I'm going to accept the risk of purchasing a pure stock, even if it is speculative, then I need the escape hatch of being able to sell it, whether it's going up or down,

Angelo seems to be conflating stocks with mutual funds, an entirely different animal designed for different purposes. It's true that mutual funds should be long-term investments....and any time a money manager sells a stock, he passes the tax hit along to the client, so clients should seek out mutual funds that put their money where their long-term mouth is, such as Vanguard or American Funds, and look for low turnover ratios. But even the most respectable money manager will need to get rid of a stock quickly, based on his wisdom, experience and judgment, and why slap a set of one-size-fits-all regulatory handcuffs on this ability?

The greedy people who rushed into dot-com mania got the market smackdown they deserved when the market corrected itself, and hopefully they are now a little wiser. We're now seeing a "flight to quality" with money coming into reputable mutual funds companies, rather than crazy, flavor of the month tech funds driving demand. There are also a plethora of "socially responsible" funds for anyone who wants to avoid companies touting sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Unfortunately, we're also seeing the motherlode of ham-fisted regulation being enacted across the financial services industry, as regulators show up a day late and a dollar short, well after the bear market has turned back into a bull market, meting out punishments and raking companies over the coals for minor infractions because the consumers refuse to take responsibility for what is, at heart, the silly investing decision of jumping into stocks and funds at the very height of the bull market, and buying high instead of low.

I work for a moderate-sized financial services company--and work very closely with one of the huge investing giants--and it has been a fascinating few years. But it's also a good lesson in how we as Americans are taxed up, down, backwards, forwards and sideways, multiple times on the same money. I understand the need for taxes, but the deeper you get into the financial services, the more clearly you can see that the multiple layers of taxation are unfair.

One last note on the quarterly reports: one thing that WOULD help the market is reining in analysts who go into buy/sell hysterics if companies quarterly earnings are off by so much as a dime. That's where a lot of the damage comes from....but again, what are you going to do, tax them?

There's definitely a collision course between "gargantuan big-box" stores like IKEA, offering affordable quality and diversity, and "an economy where small artisans and businesses find it easier to enter the marketplace and compete for business." I don't see any way to reconcile these.

I disagree that the collision is necessary. See my earlier post on this.

The collision occurs when big producers try to squeeze out the small business, but this doesn’t have to happen if the government fulfills its role of removing obstacles (as Yves Simon might put it), that is, of keeping the market as open as possible. IKEA and Thomas Moser can both prosper if the market is free. True, most people won’t buy, say, organic meat, for whatever reason, but enough people will want it to keep small farms in business if arbitrary regulations don’t impede the flow of goods.

In the connection, I’ll mention something that struck me from the food chapter. Mr. Hutchins mentions in passing that he doesn’t ship his meat, though he implies he could, because he believes that people should buy from their local suppliers. Even as one praises the sensibility behind this decision, it is worth noting that Mr. Hutchins himself, not the free market or a big meat producer, has restricted his business in this way.

Such an integrated view of life is easy to ridicule, and impossible to put fully into practice (particularly if one believes in original sin), but perfect markets don't exist either, so what?

I think Bruce and Frederica have cut to the heart of CCs with their posts on this theme. In a sense, there are no “little things” because there is always a “who”, a “what”, a “when/how”, and a “why” involved in any choice, and these elements are open to moral evaluation.

I see CCs as a call for serious self-evaluation. Let’s take the most “mainstream” person you can imagine (who wouldn’t be any kind of conservative). It is possible, perhaps likely, that after deep reflection such a person would conclude that he was doing exactly what God wanted him to do, at least in general (we all have to work on the details all the time). Even if he didn’t change a thing about his “big picture”, wouldn’t the very act of searching his conscience and thinking about his life as a vocation renew him and help him to be even happier than he might have already been?

From the mailbag: A friend wrote this missive last year on cooperative design--communities that help each other with particular crafts, such as breadmaking. I thought this was relevant to the choice discussion, especially in light of what Frederica posted regarding the loss of the art of producing things ourselves.

Anti-Amish guy emails:

Okay, Caleb, I was going to leave this alone but you really set me off.

When I read the email from that woman who was extolling the virtues of living in squalor it drove me nuts. Now you're saying that she's a BETTER parent by virtue of the fact that she's raising 7 children in a structurally unsound house (holes in the floor and windows that won't close) that from time to time has no electricity. She's one step up from living in a tar-paper shack in the woods. This isn't better parenting. Raising children in an unsafe environment is tantamount to child abuse. Of course she home-schools her children. If they went to public school they'd be getting a visit from Children & Youth Services.

… [She] sounds like one of those weird (that's right, weird) people who keep their children home and cut off from the real world, resulting in individuals who are incapable of interacting in society. From her description it sounds like they live in some wacko wannabe-Appalachia corner of the middle of nowhere.

I think he’s wildly misinterpreting that mother’s email, but that’s not really the point. The point is to emphasize the virtue of not pretending that all the choices we make are best and of keeping front-and-center in our memory the example of those who have done better, sacrificed more, spoken more truthfully, loved more fully, and thought more deeply than we have.

As we’re moving on from consumerism, I’d like to make a pitch for policy. Last week a reader asked: What can be done to reduce the corrosive effects of the market? I propose a tax on short-term stock transactions.

This would reduce the obsession with quarterly financial results that leaves business managers little breathing room to manage for the long-term health of the ALL business stakeholders, and our culture, by “doing the right thing”—such as NOT issuing that pornographic gangsta rap video that would be a huge seller, or NOT choosing the advertising campaign that appeals to extreme selfishness, or NOT bringing a drug to market with too many outstanding questions about side-effects.

Short-term-ism has other bad effects. One of the silliest statements made by conservative pundits about Enron, Worldcom, and other corporate scandals was that it was just a matter of “bad apples.” No, the problem was a culture of easy money based on options-driven stock speculation during the Dot.com bubble. I was a consultant to several companies during this period, and witnessed many otherwise decent—even religious— people fall under the spell of a greedy, get-rich-quick mentality.

And have we forgotten the social example set by the internet mania? It was a full-scale cultural revolution, a revolt of the new against all things old, with arrogant, infantile goateed dot.com jocks out to overthrow the old, bricks-and-mortar, reality-based economy. It was business as performance art—economic Dadaism. And greed is what spawned it. Where were conservatives on this? Nowhere (or, like George Gilder, smack in the middle of it.)

A stock tax would keep “irrational exuberance” in check. If anyone thinks this is veiled Marxism, see the new book by John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, the #2 mutual fund company in the world—titled “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.” He advocates the same thing: “Mutual fund companies, Bogle charges, care more about short-term results than long-term value…. He advances in all seriousness Warren Buffett's once-joking idea for a high tax on short-term trading gains…”

Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that nothing can be done about the “creative destruction” of Casino globalization. My concern about traditional conservatism is that an aversion to “the masses” can lead to an elitist, romantic isolation from fellow citizens, and from the human messiness of politics and policy. This why a very explicit Christian perspective is necessary.

There's definitely a collision course between "gargantuan big-box" stores like IKEA, offering affordable quality and diversity, and "an economy where small artisans and businesses find it easier to enter the marketplace and compete for business." I don't see any way to reconcile these.

Your focus, Rod, is still on the perplexing power we have a consumers. I picture Scarlett O'Hara surrounded by beaux. Which retail outlet will receive our favors? We will always insist on buying the best, but what are the repercussions of where we buy it?

But if you go back before the consumer tidal wave, the assumption was that people would *make* most of what they used in daily life. Is it possible to recover that, any part of it? Should that be part of the Crunchy focus? Not just beer-making as a hobby, for example; I mean, trying as an intentional discipline to find ways to get around the need to *buy* everything, whether from a local entrepreneur or from Walmart.

The things a person touches in a day, the wrap of clothing, the bread and coffee consumed, the floorboards under bare feet--all these humble things have a kind of nobility, as intimate companions of ordinary human life. People used to be surrounded by things made by themselves, or by people they knew, even people who loved them. I keep feeling like there is something inherently dislocating about being companioned solely by things that came home in a plastic bag. Are there ways we can question the consumer imperative entirely?

The skills to make-your-own anything (not to mention the tools) are mostly lost, so the effort tends to attract those who want to co-opt this desire and sell us stuff. It falls into the category of one more consumer action, this one categorized as "hobby." The results are often more expensive than buying at the BigBox.

An intermediate suggestion is to ask before any purchase, "Is it possible to get this second hand?" Parachute out of the consumer cycle, and learn the skills of repairing and refurbishing. My Dad taught me how to refinish furniture; I'm teaching my granddaughter how to sew. It's a start.

Several people have noted how easy it is to make fun of crunchy choices, in large measure as a set of snobbish lifestyle decisions masquerading as a philosophy of life. Perhaps one of the reasons is this: liberal society emphasizes how many rights we all have, as individual people. Within the liberal mindset this presents us with two choices, extend those rights to animals, the earth, etc., or emphasize the distinction between the person and things. As with everything else, liberalism gives us only an "either-or" choice. I once jokingly asked an important philosopher (Kenneth Schmitz) whether rocks have rights. His response is, I think, important: "no, but even a rock has integrity." Every part of God's creation has an integrity--it has a natural purpose, a natural way in which its existence should be recognized and used. Using puppies for target practice is wrong, even for those of us who don't believe animals have rights, because puppies are not for target practice, but for play, or hunting, or one of a finite number of proper ends.

The same logic applies to all kinds of creatures and things that get sold and consumed. And the point is that how we use these lesser things both says something about us and affects us by influencing our attitudes and habits of life. Why not torture "mere" puppies in our spare time, if we get utility out of it ("fun" or leisure-time enjoyment)? Not just because it's creepy, but because it develops in us the character of a torturer. Merely transferring such personal moral choices to "the market" does not, or should not, empty them of moral importance.

Given all the moral enormities being committed all over the world, one should not demand perfection in lesser things; bringing up good kids comes first. But to the extent one can, consumption, it seems to me, should be seen as one of the ways in which we all use things, and should use them in a manner that shows respect for God's creation and the inherent integrity, not just of creatures and things, but of the people involved in their "processing" and the people THOSE people deal with on a regular basis.

Simply put, we should try to be a part of virtuous communities involved in producing food, clothing, and shelter, as well as in our own faith, work and play, and the schooling of our children.

Such an integrated view of life is easy to ridicule, and impossible to put fully into practice (particularly if one believes in original sin), but perfect markets don't exist either, so what?

I don’t know Rod, I may have to part ways with you here. I’m not so sure your enjoyment of a wide variety “of good food and attractive furnishings” is all that crunchy. Aestheticism, at least in its philosophical form, involves discipline, not just the satisfaction of appetites--even an appetite for beauty. So beauty and joy, yes! But true beauty and joy are always rooted in the limits of what it means to be human. The global marketplace is extremely efficient at satisfying appetites, and is clever enough to recognize that there is an appetite for aestheticism and satisfy it too.

You ask: “Is it crunchier to buy these great coffee beans from the little guy in NYC, or from the local not-so-little guy purveyor in my own city?” The reality is that it’s crunchier not to buy them at all.

That’s not to say you won’t buy them, or I won’t buy them for that matter. There are lots of parents who might send their kids to daycare (and believe me, my mailbox was stuffed with their missives), and some are genuinely crunchy. The difference is between those who justify their decision on one ground or another and those who remember the mother who kept her kids home even with a hole in her kitchen floor and know--somewhere deep down--that she is a better parent than they, and then they let that knowledge trouble their soul.

One of the main themes of Crunchy Cons is the role of aesthetic pleasure in a traditionalist conception of the good life. We’ll talk more in-depth about this next week, when we get into the Food chapter, but I was thinking this morning about how complicated the economics of all this gets. I am able to enjoy a much wider variety of good food and attractive furnishings in my house thanks to the free market and greater consumer choice. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, our consumer lives were much more monochromatic. The beer you drank was one of several brands of barley water that all tasted the same (it was all Duff). Nowadays, I can go into just about any store and choose from all kinds of beers, foreign and domestic, including microbrews from here in Texas and other regions of the country. The war against bad beer has been won in America (everybody please bow your heads and observe a moment of silent thanksgiving). When I was growing up, home furnishings with a modicum of style were something only relatively well-off people could afford. Nowadays, thanks to gargantuan big-box stores like IKEA, people on smaller incomes can afford nice-looking things for their houses. The point is, it’s all well and good to observe that the consumerism has been bad in many ways for American life, but it has also improved it in ways that mean something to crunchies. I buy my coffee not from a local seller, but via mail order from a small NYC roaster, who gives me top-quality beans at a reasonable price (and these beans really are first-rate; people who come to dinner often remark on how good the coffee is). Is it crunchier to buy these great coffee beans from the little guy in NYC, or from the local not-so-little guy purveyor in my own city?

My ideal would be an economy where small artisans and businesses found it easier to enter the marketplace and compete for business. Are there ways to reconcile the fondness we crunchies have for quality and diversity in consumer products, with the sense of obligation we feel to tradition? Or are we destined to have to pull off a balancing act, doing the best we can with what we’ve been given--which could mean buying stuff at IKEA and the mom-and-pop, depending on our circumstances, financial and otherwise?

Rod says:

I intend Crunchy Cons as a call to return to fidelity to living out the Permanent Things in every aspect of our lives.

Megadittoes to that, Caleb. I have also credited--and let me take this opportunity to do so here again--Jonah’s insight that there ought always to be a libertarian in the room when making policy decisions. I freely admit that traditionalists like me think in poetic terms, and often fail to appreciate some of the more “realistic” aspects of economic and social life. Yet I would also insist that a traddie should be in the room too when these decisions are made, because we have insight as well into the nature of reality--that reality being that man is not merely a material creature, but also a spiritual one, and that the material environment has spiritual consequences. I am still a believer in fusionism--that a vigorous and vital American conservatism will be composed of both libertarians and traditionalists, and that the creative tension between us can preserve both liberty and tradition by reinterpreting its meaning for each generation, as our political, economic and social conditions change. My view is that it’s time for the traditionalist side of the alliance to wax. This letter this morning from a reader in New England captures my view perfectly:

Firstly, thank you for writing your book, and getting this discussion going. Personally, I believe you are helping to harden and focus a debate that is cyclical, and whose time has come again for our generation. I'm not sure how frequently it goes around. There surely are permanent things, and we know them when we see them. But just as surely we don't seem to be very good at fully grasping and retaining them. That would appear to be our dilemma here on earth. And that dilemma will never be solved, so we will continue to have this discussion every so often about what the good life is, and believe that we are living it even as it is slipping away again. It doesn't matter that others may have already said these things, or have been working on them. The need to be reminded about the permanent things is, in itself, a permanent thing.

Secondly, I think it does all come down to belief in God and our duty to a moral order not of our making, and which we can only approach in small steps, through sacrifice and selflessness. I have always loved CS Lewis's simple statement that we are half animal and half spirit. This describes our nature well, and suggests some balancing of the two: If we hew more faithfully to things of the spirit, we must walk away from the physical. I love America: I chose to emigrate here, and to become a citizen, and I have been much blessed in my life here. But America is a land of great material temptation as well as spiritual depth. I am not surprised that your critique of some aspects of American life is generating accusations of anti-Americanism (you can bet that many more are thinking it than those who are more boldly saying it). I would also not be surprised if those who are most offended by your critique are those who are more secular, more physical in their Americanness. But what do I know?

You quote Kirk: "The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal". This sums it all up for me. This is the great choice of life, there is no other true choice, and the great service of your book is that it places this choice back in front of us. Anything that does this, for me, is worthy of praise and support. Anything that confuses this choice, or presents false choices, is not quite so helpful. (Rep. vs. Dem, Lib. vs Con., pro vs anti this or that). I am a "blue-state conservative", and so not to be trusted :-) , but I must confess I sometimes feel much closer to my Democrat neighbors who I know to be genuinely religious and Godly (yes, there are some still left), than I do to my Republican boss who thinks my religion is rather foolish, and must never get in the way of my work in the vineyards of the insurance business.

Finally, there is a vulnerability in your argument that can allow this choice to be skewed, and your critics seem to be doing this. For example, I believe that you see organic vegetables not as uniquely good in themselves, but good only in that they reflect a more natural way of living, and of eating, something which hews more to the spiritual and less to the physical. They are in some way sacramental. This seems simple enough on the surface. But it is easy for your critics to present this merely as a choice between two modes of consumer bias, and therefore distort your point and accuse you of elitism or consumer snobbery. Perhaps, though, this a warning of the dangers of idolatory. Intent is everything.

A reader responds thus (with minor editing to preserve the family-friendly atmosphere) to the laugh-in held in the Corner yesterday afternoon at the crunchies expense:

Over dinner, which I cooked but my wife made (along with 20 other dinners) this afternoon at Dish Delish, a real crunchy boon that isn’t too bobo, I got to thinking about why "crunchy" is a symbol that is easily tweaked as effete, pretentious and fake. Maybe this is because in the imagination of effete, pretentious, and fake people, they see the truth about themselves when they imagine how absurd they'd look if they did anything too "crunchy."

Authentic crunchy is some tough [stuff].

I had Jewish friends in high school in NJ who got sent to a kibbutz in Israel each summer. They farmed and learned how to handle an M-16. I don't think chicken coops would make them or their Israeli hosts laugh or sneer.

I remember churches in the 80s in upstate New York composed of farmers and townies who met in the old Grange building for services, knew its history, had outhouses and chickens and other livestock. That wasn't poverty; it was normal.

When I was in ROTC in college with most classmates being country boy NCOs from Ft. Bragg (Rangers, Special Forces, 82nd Airborne), I discovered military-crunchy. More like Klingon-crunchy. We always had a CSM/Command Sgt Major on the staff who oversaw the Ranger Challenge teams. A CSM is the NCO equivalent of a four-star general, except generals are often fat and have generally killed a lot fewer people with their bare hands. Imagine a guy who coolly brags about living off bugs and reptiles in Vietnam, Africa, and South America, dealing with chronic dysentery, and who at retirement age thrashes the young guys on 6 mile runs while he is smoking a cigarette. The most liberal character I met in this crowd was a "progressive populist" from NH. I think there would be uniform contempt among these guys for people who mock the quaintness of living off the land.

This is why no “crunchy” ought to dismiss what I’ll call Jonah’s Corrective. Tradition as fad is an abomination!

In the increasingly clamorous Christian marketplace rebellion is where you find it: in full-contact skateboard Bible study groups; in Christian punk, Goth and hip-hop CD's; in evangelical tattoo parlors; in sportswear brands like Extreme Christian Clothing and Fear God; in alt churches or ministries called Revolution, Scum of the Earth and Punk Girl; in a podcast called Xtreme Christianity …

The caldron for this rebellion can be grass roots or institutional: the publisher of the rebellion handbook, Thomas Nelson, is among the world's biggest producers of Bibles and inspirational books in English.

… For a demographic that is used to being marketed to as rebels, he added, the new rebellion "is really a new installment of the original rebellion." He continued: "It's hearkening back to a raw faith not encumbered by the American dream, enslavement to a career or having to have two kids and a two-car garage.

(Sorry for jumping the gun on the religion chapter, Rod.)

Another example to follow up on Caleb's point. Many people today laugh at the old fashioned idea that one's word is one's bond. But it used to be true, and it was highly efficient--it allowed people to count on their agreements, plan for the future, and build trust among businesses as well as individuals. Then the notion of "efficiency" started getting out of hand. First came the idea that the person who was wronged didn't have a right to receive what he was promised; instead he would only get what the judge assumed was a monetary equivalent (monetary damages instead of specific performance). Well, the problem with that is that it leads people to calculate whether it is worth it for them to breach; lawyers now even have a "theory of efficient breach"--sometimes it makes more economic sense to renege and pay the damages, in the short term. Over the long term people stop trusting one another, hire more lawyers to put more and more in writing, and only deal in terms of monetary values defined in market terms (forget all the intangibles, including insights into possible value that used to be the stuff of entrepreneurship). Economic relations get soggy, and we all are poorer for it.

Back in the 1980s, Nico Colchester, an editor for The Economist, wrote a very short essay called "Crunchiness" which quickly became a cult favorite. I have a vague recollection of someone at NR bringing this piece up after Rod’s original article ran. Anyway, in the piece, Colchester contrasted what he termed "crunchy" economic policies with "soggy" policies. Colchester explained:

Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became. Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. . . . Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim.

The whole centralizing/consumerizing tendency of modern economic, political, and cultural systems and institutions is predicated on the need to keep people in a "comfortable uncertainty." Thus, they are propped up by false systems of accounting; or by what Voegelin called a “second reality.” For example, Colchester pointed to the advent of floating interest rate lending as a soggy policy. Whereas fixed rate lending is crunchy (i.e., both parties know precisely where they stand), the move to floating rates has reduced the necessity of commitment, and "the result is a need for puzzlingly high rates of interest to curb consumer borrowing." Other examples abound, from the insurance industry to health care to schooling to mass media to no-fault divorce to mass mobility to the phenomena of the 3000 mile salad. Each conceals, in a comfortable way, the true cost of its operation. Each makes a person feel that he is up or rich or winning or alive, when the reality is that he may be closer to being down or poor or losing or dead.

Clearly, as Colchester recognizes, this kind of soggy system cannot continue indefinitely. It will, in the end, lead to poverty and bankruptcy of all sorts. This is because where the true cost is concealed, some kind of capital reserve account is being depleted. And this is the current situation: all of our capital reserve accounts are being depleted by the soggy machine of modernity: natural resource reserve accounts, political reserve accounts, social capital reserve accounts, and moral reserve accounts. This will continue so long as we resolve to remain soggily comfortable and sated in our second reality. So there you have it, straight from The Economist: go crunchy.

March 02, 2006

I’ve gotten a few e-mails from CC blog readers who want to know what we’re talking about when we invoke Kirk’s phrase “the permanent things.” This was Kirk’s phrase for the enduring universal moral virtues that make civilized life possible. Another term for the permanent things is the “natural law.” C.S. Lewis compiled a short list of the permanent things (he didn’t use the term, of course) in an appendix to “The Abolition of Man” (see here).

If you haven’t read them, you really should read Kirk’s Ten Principles of Conservative Thought, which end thus:

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.

I think most people who call themselves conservative would affirm this. But saying and doing are two different things, as the poor example my own life testifies every single day. I intend “Crunchy Cons” as a call to return to fidelity to living out the Permanent Things in every aspect of our lives.

What did Russell Kirk have to say about economics? John Attarian explores his thought. Here’s an excerpt: [Kirk] gave economics due consideration, and was a sturdy friend of economic freedom and a foe of statism. Moreover, because he drew on religion, morality, and a comprehensive view of human nature, Dr. Kirk achieved important insights in political economy that a purely economic approach would have missed. Kirk's starting point was belief in God and a "belief in an order that is more than human," which rules both society and individuals. A transcendent God implies that eternal truths exist, that "human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent."

This conviction that certain norms, or enduring moral standards, exist was central to Russell Kirk's world view; upholding them was his life's work. These "Permanent Things - norms of courage, duty, justice, integrity, charity, and so on - owe their existence, and authority, to a higher power than social good.

For Kirk, loyalty to the Permanent Things is the standard for judging individuals, societies, and institutions. "Real progress consists in the movement of mankind to ward the understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms. Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms.”

Attarian says Kirk was a stout defender of private property and the free market, but he was also a moralist who recognized that capitalism was a just system only for a moral people (just as the Founders, one might say, realized that our Constitutional order would only serve a moral people):

His view that people are spiritual beings led Kirk to maintain that though a prosperous economy is good in itself, "its real importance is the contribution it makes to our justice and order and freedom, our ability to live in dignity as truly human persons.... Economic production is merely the means to certain ends." Those ends are "to raise man above the savage level, to make possible the leisure which sustains civilization and to free man from the condition of being a simple drudge. " Regarding efficiency as an end in itself merely duplicates the error of Communism. Kirk realized better than many of capitalism's other defenders that economic activity does not occur in a vacuum; free markets require moral, cultural, and social foundations.

Which brings us back to the Irving Kristol essay that began the week, in which it is asserted that a free-market system that is not restrained by virtuous ends ultimately risks destroying itself.

More sympathy for Ricardo, this one from a Dallas reader:

Your Michigan reader made several points about the good quality of life of autoworkers. The same used to be said of the meat packing and farm plants in the part of rural Texas where I grew up. Those jobs are now either filled by immigrants at a lower inflation-adjusted wage and fewer benefits than a mere 20 years ago, or else the work has been moved to maquiladoras or shut down all together. Most of my classmates, including me, have moved on to cities like Dallas or Houston because there were no longer opportunities for us. My hometown’s population dropped 20% between 1990 and 2004. Surrounding towns are faring no better. Rural Texas is emptying.

Part of the problem is in some modern urban assumptions. We assume everybody has the same capacity, that they should all go to college and get good careers, and that if they don’t it’s because of laziness or lack of character. You might call it a bias against the blue-collar. We think there are “jobs Americans won’t do” because, after all, we don’t know anyone who would do them and we don’t see any Americans doing them. A few years ago while back home I ran into a 30 year old friend. He was working in a gas station. It was the only job in town and he wanted to stay. Another friend was hopelessly unemployed and planned to leave as soon as he could find a way.

The point I’m trying to make is that there are people who were living a rural, localized traditional lifestyle and they’ve been forced to give it up. Unrestricted trade and mass immigration are helping to destroy a way of life. I’m a hypocrite too. I make my living in international trade. But each day as I leave my small condo and sit in traffic in my 9 year old subcompact, I also mourn what I’ve lost.

Yesterday, I mentioned on the blog that I know middle-class couples in which both parents have to work because they couldn’t afford to get by on just one income, and acknowledging that it would be hard for my wife and me to keep up our lifestyle if my salary were cut in half. That prompted this response from a reader named Wendi, who doesn’t buy it:

I am a stay at home mom and have been since 1988. We homeschool. We eat organic when we can afford it. We grind our own wheat and make our own bread. We buy bags of oats and grain through a co-op (fifty pounds at a time). We gave seven children. The youngest is seven.

We are hardly 'comfortably middle class,' nor have we been able to do this because of my husband's wonderful salary. He's a hard working man, but for the first year of our marriage we barely kept our noses above water, selling nearly everything we owned, living without a car, without insurance, and sometimes without electricity because it mattered to us that I stay home. I owned two pairs of maternity pants that year.

Then he joined the Air Force as an enlisted man- the salaries there are no secret, so I'm sure you understand why the assumption that stay at home mothers can only afford that because they are comfortably middle class makes me raise my eyebrows. He stayed in the Air Force for twenty years, retiring almost three years ago. He now manages a discount grocery store. Our combined income from his salary, his pension, rental income and social security (two of our children are adopted and they get S.S. because their birth father died before they came to us) is about $50,000. That's the most it's ever been, and we're living a lifestyle we consider practically luxurious on that income. We have internet access, more than one car now (most of our married lives we've gotten by with only one car, and we have never, ever owned a new car. We bought new appliances when we moved here at my husband's retirement. This is the first time we've owned any new appliances, in fact).

I should perhaps add that currently we live in a 1,200 square foot house with one bathroom. It's over a hundred years old and has a hole in the kitchen floor and one window doesn't shut. We inherited it -- but before we inherited this house, we owned the house we were living in (well, the bank did; we made the payments), and that was in Colorado Springs. Even if we had not inherited this property, we would have been living in a (much nicer house) in Colorado Springs, and all on one income.

It isn't usually our economy that 'forces' people to have both parents in the workforce just to 'get by.' It's our unwillingness to make the sacrifices necessary to keep a parent at home with the kids, and our high standards of what it means 'just to get by.' You say if your income was cut in half it would be very hard for your family to keep living as you do. Maybe the way you live is more consumer oriented than you realize.

Reader Tom, a self-described paleocon, has Ricardo’s back:

I must register my support for your Michigan reader with respect to the American auto industry. My brother-in-law works for Ford, and is able to support my sister and their five Catholic (some home-schooled) children with what he makes working as a management employee at a Ford plant. As a result, my sister does not work, and many rank and file auto workers are also able to enjoy a decent standard of living with only one parent working, unlike in many other sectors of the American economy.

The notion that Toyota and other foreign companies with plants in America are making a comparable investment in our country is nonsense. As your Michigan correspondent noted, approximately $1200 per American car goes to pay for health care. As the New York Times reported last November, GM is the largest private purchaser of medical services in the US, and some 1,000,000 Americans depend on GM to pay their pensions and retiree health benefits. The Japanese carmakers aren't paying for 1,000,000 American retirees, and their profits are repatriated to Japan, where top management decisions are made and most of their engineering is still done.

If you believe that consumer purchases should reflect something more than selfishness, your second biggest consumer purchase (after your house) should be of an auto produced by an industry on which hundreds of thousands of Americans and large sections of America depend. The bankruptcy of Ford or GM would devastate the industrial Midwest, and cause large numbers of American retirees to lose their health care and pensions. There really is no offsetting consideration that would justify buying a Japanese car, if one accepts the premises of your brand of conservatism.

Did you just call me Rex Mottram, Dreher? What does that make you--Sebastian Flyte?

Fair enough, B’rer Pod, you’re free to take any attempt to analyze critically the way we Americans live today as evidence that we hate America, and therefore have nothing useful to say. I just cain’t quit you all the same. Still, I leave it to our readers to decide who has more serious things to say in this forum about American culture, Sarah Butler or the Rex Mottram of 86th Street, who believes we all live in an infallible, star-spangled paradise, only the crunchy-cons are too sinful to see it.

Actually, Rod, I mean very much what I said. The tinge of anti- Americanism in this discussion is very troubling. And Ms. Butler Nardo, forgive me the inestimable insult of taking your words seriously. Now that I know you don't mean what you write, I will be sure to pay less attention in the future.

That’s our JPod, proud to be an Okie from the Upper West Side. You cannot possibly be serious. In fact, I know you’re not, because if you were, you’d be saying that any criticism of the, ahem, “American way of life” is invalid on its face, and comes from bad motive. I don’t think you believe that. Anyway, it’s an attempt to stifle debate by calling the critic un-American. Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!

Mr. Podhoretz, breathe, please. I'm not convinced you read anything beyond the sentence that made you want to throw your fist through your computer screen. Let me try to briefly re-state my argument in a way that you will find un-offensive enough to read.

I am not making an argument about whether people love their children or are good parents. I'm not really trying to make an argument about personal virtue at all (at least not yet!). I'm trying to make an argument about the way we see ourselves and the social roles we fill because of the unique historical moment we--all of us--live in. It is simply true that the way we understand ourselves and our social roles is different today than it was 100 years ago, and that has something to do with consumerism. The next question then becomes, "Have these changes made it easier or harder to be good?" That is a question about virtue, but it's still one that doesn't imply anything about your actual ability to be virtuous or mine or anyone else's. Is this any better?

Mr. Geraghty, Rod's asked that we hold off on the religious aspect of the discussion until we get to that chapter. I certainly have lots of anecdotes (my dad is a minister), but I also promise you plenty of delicious data when we get there, k?

Autoworker Tracy from Kentucky gets all up in Ricardo’s face:

I just happened upon the post from Ricardo in Michigan regarding buying American autos. I work at Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Georgetown, KY and as far as I can tell, based on what we currently know about the nature of reality and how to determine it (apologies, I may be too Kantian for Ricardo), I think (therefore I am) an American citizen in an American auto facility with health benefits and a retirement package. Maybe Ricardo should have taken the "Blue" pill from Mr. Moore (aka Morpheus) so he would "know" what is reality and what is Matrix induced reality. Funny that he should suggest reading "Rivethead", that hagiography of the union auto worker, replete with stories of the silly flaws that they would purposely put on cars that we unsuspecting Americans would have to pay large sums of money for so that they could live rent free for the rest of their lives. They would also laugh about it, according to the book. We at TMMK make as much as a UAW worker does. Probably more since we don't have to pay dues that go to support political candidates who then enact legislation to hasten the demise of the industry we so dearly depend upon for our sustenance. I understand that I owe much to the UAW, and would join it if my fellow team members voted for us to do so. However, until the UAW changes their policies to reflect economic realities, they will remain a static entity in a dynamic reality. Ricardo needs to get out more, drink less Kool-Aid, and look in the mirror as the first step to solving his (and the Michigan auto worker's) problems.

Caleb, there would be no point consigning The Public Interest to any location, as it has already ceased publication. Now, here's where I stand--with Merle Haggard: "When you're running down my country, Hoss, you're walking on the fighting side of me." I feel that way when liberals slander America and Americans and I feel that way when conservatives do it too.

Here is what I find so fascinating about this discussion. Some, like Jonah, point out--with significant justification I would add--the dangers of “lifestyle politics” and the fact that the ideas Rod draws from have had champions within mainstream conservatism all along--that’s true in my judgment. But then others, like JPod and Geraghty, stand ready to browbeat and anathemize those same ideas. Something very interesting is going on here. Some conservatives appear to stand ready to chop off their own arms and legs. Perhaps this is a problem of the “uppity traditionalist”; ironically tolerated when his truth claims are kept safely on the lifestyle reservation, but damned dangerous if he ever gets off!

To make my point clear, I wonder if JPod will send Public Interest off to hell too for publishing this excellent discussion of parenting and consermerism which I linked to earlier. Here’s what Bosworth wrote (be sure to catch the clincher at the end):

As a last example of the insidious effects of these economically shaped identities, I want to return to parenting and balance the "rash" with a "rational" model. Let's imagine a slightly upscale, much more admirably motivated version of the family mentioned on the first page: a white, married, Midwest couple, college educated, with two preteenage children, Adam and Amy. Although both parents now work full-time, the mother gladly stayed home a full year after each child's birth and then relentlessly sought out the very best child care, regardless of price. In fact, committed to both gender equality and responsible parenthood, this couple had planned to alternate working half-time until Amy reached junior high. But when the father's company was downsized, he had to take on more work rather than less, and although the mother was still willing to sacrifice the career advantage of full-time employment, they found that, without the extra income, they couldn't afford a home in the community with the best public sch ools. So she extended her hours--as did the father, for his commute was lengthened an hour each day after the move.

Such sacrifices are, in fact, characteristic of this couple. They have no desire to take impulsive vacations free of their children's company. To the contrary, their fondest fantasy, discussed over takeout dinners or whispered above the soundtrack of the children's Friday night video, is to have a more relaxed and natural family life. But everything they read, including the President's speeches, and their own employment experiences together warn them that their children must be highly trained to survive the changes that the new economy is likely to require. So they take out a loan to buy the very best home computers, which they upgrade, then upgrade again. When Adam has trouble learning to read, they send him to a nationally franchised Sylvan Learning Center for after-school training and then to a private tutor who specializes in dyslexia. When Amy shows ability in math, it only seems fair that they offer her tutoring as well, so they send her to the local Kumon Math Center (also nationally franchised) and pay for skating lessons as well.

All of this, of course, means more expense and less time spent together, but they try to adjust by using cell phones and e-mail to stay in touch. Furthermore, Adam and Amy are guaranteed "quality time" on the weekend (there's a sign-up sheet over the microwave): four full hours when each gets to choose favorite activities and special foods, when each has the right to be "spoiled" by the intensity of their parents' total attention. The couple also attends every conference, game, and performance they can. There, too, the intensity of their attention doesn't flag; there, as their children's passionate advocates, they work "the system"--lobby teachers, network neighbors, argue with refs--whatever it takes to wrest the best for Amy and Adam.

I could go on, but the portrait is complete enough and, perhaps, painfully familiar. What I find so insidious here is the extent to which the totality of domestic life is being shaped by economic models, motives, fears, and values: how much the grimly anxious pace of the postmodern workplace has come to command the postmodern household. And, of course, for clarity's sake, I have removed all the potentially corrupting effects of contemporary consumerism, the hedonistic half of the mixed message the economy presents. Statistically speaking, this is a uniquely ascetic postmodern couple. Here, we have no divorce, infidelity, rampant careerism; no alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive shopping or gambling--none of the many forms of self-centered dysfunction that darken our day and rend family life. Here, we have nothing so rash, just a perversely rational schedule of pervasive separation, a desertion of one's own children "on their behalf."

This household has been purged of sexist inequalities, but it has also been stripped of wonder, curiosity, improvisational fun. Mother and father have merged into one cooperative, unisexual provider. The good parent has been reduced to the Good Producer whose job as parent is to supply society with a new generation of good producers--i.e., employees who are already accustomed to highly rationalized social environments and whose skills are upgraded to the ever-evolving specs of the time. The new parent doesn't teach by example; he hires tutors, coaches, experts "in the field." His role is less to cherish and chasten than to outfit and facilitate; less to shape meaning than to make money, furnishing each child with all the materialist gear and rationalist techniques the economy requires.

Even this household's happier moments have been reinvented in the economy's terms. The notion of prescheduled "quality time," for example, converts parenting to corporate standards of executive efficiency. As in the rest of the technological economy, enhanced technique is supposed to reduce the need for management "face time," leading to an implicitly absurd rationalization by which, nevertheless, many of us now run our lives. We believe that the better parents we are, the less time we actually will spend with our children. The parent as passionate advocate--the one lobbying hard on her child's behalf without broader concerns for truth, justice, or even common courtesy--is likewise a rote reenactment of workplace roles, especially as defined by the ever-expanding service domain. Such behavior accurately reflects the highly specialized code of conduct--the so-called professional ethics--of the lawyer, the therapist, the consultant, or the licensed accountant whose firm does the books for both a local church a nd an S&M supply house. Our job at home, like our job in the field, is not to reprimand but to represent. All clients are good clients. Our children have become our customers, and the customer is always right.

Yes, some days when I'm feeling a bit saucey I call myself one. But no, I'm no libertarian. I think it was Ramesh who summarized the trouble with liberarianism most succinctly. He said something to the effect of: except for the fact that it can't respond to the challenges of children and foreign policy, it's a nearly perfect political philosophy.

But, having spent 3 years reading and writing about fascism, I will say I have become more libertarian and vastly more sympathetic to the freedom side of the freedom-virtue fusionist coin (though few would have ever confused me for a virtucrat). What may sound libertarian in my response to things Crunchy is my opposition the what scholars of fascism refer to as the sacralization of politics (note: students of Voegelin (like Caleb) will understand this doesn't merely refer to theocratic enterprises, but Progressive enterprises generally).

Religion informs values and values should inform politics, but politics should never try to replace religion. Conservatism's traditional emphasis on the transcendent understands that these spheres may interact but they should never serve as substitutes for each other. As much as a guy named Goldberg can, I've become a disciple of Augustine, at least insofar as I think the City of God and City of Man dichotomy is the right way to look at life, politics and history.

From Rich Shipe:

I always read practically everything Jonah writes on NRO. He's a hilarious
and insightful conservative writer and I've especially enjoyed his past
sparring matches with libertarians (especially the crazys over at
lewrockwell.com! Go Jonah Go!). But based on today's critique of "Crunchy
Cons" I wonder if he might be coming out of the closet as a libertarian?
Jonah, don't give in to those guys! Please, you are one of our best
anti-libertarians. Ok, maybe he just has a special place in his heart for
libertarians and just dabbles from time to time?

Jonah does make some good points, particularly for me was his one about
Olasky's "Compassionate Conservatism." (Olasky would probably say that
while Bush vocalized support of the concept, the actual policy implemented
by the Bush Administration has been far from Compassionate Conservatism.)
I'd like to here Rod's answer to the Olasky point especially.

Anyway, if as a conservative you agree that greed can be a bad force on a
marketplace that doesn't make you a Marxist. Libertarians often slip into
the view that man is generally/naturally good and therefore will in a free
market always make the choice that is best for him and if everyone is
making the right choice for themselves the whole thing will be good.
Conservatives will say that man is not generally/naturally good and that
he's naturally evil. We quite frequently make decisions for ourselves that
are very bad for ourselves. (The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak)
Unlike in the animal kingdom where the carnivore eats just what he needs,
man naturally falls into gluttony and the general slavery of sin. The
libertarian doesn't acknowledge this problem or glosses over it. The
Marxist looks to the state to solve this problem. The conservative wants
the state to allow a free economic market but wants the
church/family/community to regulate the greed and selfishness of man in
the marketplace.

To me, the big theme of Rod's book is that conservatives do need to
revitalize government with conservative ideals, but that will fail if it
doesn't also happen at the family/community level. (Rod provided a great
quote from John Adams on this in chapter 1) For this to happen at the
family/community level conservatives need to shrug off the "me first"
approach of libertarianism. I'm sorry to take both barrels to libertarians
in this way but I think it is true and based on Jonah's past writings I
think he would agree. Go Jonah Go!

Whoa, whoa! Can we save the particular talk about religion until we talk about that chapter? Because it’s all about traditional modes of faith and why they’re so attractive to more and more people. N.B., just because you affiliate with a “conservative” church or denomination doesn’t mean that you are conservative in every respect. I think what Sarah might have been pointing to is that even those of us who belong to conservative churches have incorporated a consumerist mentality into the way we approach the world. Fair point. And I think, JPod, that she’s onto something by talking about how the whole consumerist ethic informs nearly all aspects of our identity.

Sorry I’m late to this. I’m going to try to keep my posts shorter, so I’m not going to answer Noah and Jeff point by point, but I do recognize that they raise important questions.

On the Amish per se, I don’t know, Jeff, you live among them, I don’t. If they truly do scorn the “English” for not being as pure as they regarding technology, then I can’t help but find fault with that. Yet I find it difficult to condemn out of hand any community, Amish or Lubavitch or whatever, that takes its worldview seriously enough to rebel against the modern world in their day-to-day doings. It seems to me that if one wants to be more or less separatist, in the Amish or Hasidic way, then one’s default position should be to look upon those who aren’t enlightened enough to conform their lives with the Truth with compassion and humility, not from a position of spiritual or moral high-handedness. I would expect to find Amish and Hasidim who do just that, and Amish and Hasidim who are nasty about it.

The kind of “apartness” that personally interests me is of the “in the world, but not of it” variety. I don’t want to hive myself and my family away from the world (though for those who want to, I’ve got no complaints), but I do believe that the moral choices we make (which entail decisions about using technology, e.g., TV) unavoidably involve making a moral judgment on others. Yes, this is elitist--but anybody who believes in standards and tries to live by them is an elitist. I think we should all be elitists about standards, but populists about human beings. That is, hold to high standards, but approach people from a place of love and respect. The homeschooling farm-family Christians I write about in the book--more on which next week, when we talk about food--live a semi-Amish existence, but I’ve never gotten the least idea from them that they look down on me and my family for staying in the city. My sense is that you might be projecting the bad feelings you have about and bad vibes you get from the Amish onto everyone who sounds like they might have sympathy for the Amish--and that’s not really fair or accurate.

Noel writes:

I think an honest crunchy should admit to being, in a substantial way, elitist. If we had laws strictly regulating against factory farming, for example, the price of meat would go up substantially, and some people at the lower end of the economic spectrum would eat less meat. Strict environmental laws raise the cost of fuel, land, etc. At the margins, someone as a consequence will not be able to afford a car, or a house. If the crunchy position is honest, the proper response is: thems the breaks. You, the marginal individual or family who doesn't have meat, a car, or a home, are paying for a better society, one that treats animals better, keeps the air clean, reduces traffic congestion, etc.

[snip]

But I'm not sure I've heard you articulate things in this way, and say, frankly, that crunchy conservatism is elitist. It knows what the higher things are, and it wants to make all of us pay for them, even if we don't appreciate them or get the opportunity to enjoy them. Am I wrong?

There is a hyperbolic sensibility at work here in some of these blog entries, a sensibility that seems to border on the hysterical. This morning, Sara Butler announced that in our "consumerist" society, "we are consumers first, and then fathers or mothers, Presbyterians or Baptists, 'crunchy' or 'mainstream' conservatives." To which the only possible response is to blow a giant raspberry as a means of suppressing the impulse to put one's fist through the computer screen. Honestly, how dare you write such a thing, Sara Butler? How dare you presume to make a blanket statement about American parents in this fashion? There are 300 million people living in the United States. "We" aren't anything "first." We contain multitudes. If this kind of nonsense is what crunchiness leads to, then I say to hell with it. Seriously.

Sara Butler writes:

Take a look at the "spiritual marketplace," for example. Church shopping abounds, the "church on the corner" is struggling — and often failing — to stay open in the face of competition from megachurches, and denominational differences (and traditional moral teachings) are muted for the sake of marketing. This is a deeply unwholesome trend because it undercuts both the authority and function of churches as vital institutions of civil society.

A study released in September 2002, indicates that the membership loss may be tied to dissatisfaction with the mainline's drift into religious liberalism. Entitled "Religious Congregations and Membership 2000," the study of 149 denominations was sponsored by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. The research showed that conservative denominations which held to traditional, orthodox doctrine, and which expected a high level of commitment from members, grew at a faster rate than liberal, mainline churches.

Ken Sanchagrin, sociology professor at Mars Hill (North Carolina) College and director of the Glenmary Research Center, which published the study, told Baptist Press, "I was astounded to see that by and large the growing churches are those that we ordinarily call conservative. And when I looked at those that were declining, most were moderate or liberal churches. And the more liberal the denomination, by most people's definition, the more they were losing."

I find Crunchy engagement difficult. You argue by anecdote, but I need statistics and data!

I’m thrilled that Sara Butler has joined our little circle. I think I do address this issue in the book, Sarah, though perhaps not as clearly as I ought to have. In After Virtue, Alasdair Macintyre zeroes in on what you’re talking about. If I recall correctly--Mitch, help me out here--he says the moment that one becomes aware of morality as a choice, a line has been crossed. That is, even if one were to affirm the rightness of a choice to live an ethical life, the fact that one approaches it as a choice in the first place concedes a great deal. We’re already far along the road to “it’s right for me” and “my truth,” and ultimately radical subjectivism.

And yet, what is the alternative in a pluralist society such as our own? There is no authority save that of the individual, unless the individual chooses to recognize a higher authority--but again, in being conscious of that choice, isn’t the individual implicitly nodding to subjectivism? Kierkegaard--who in Macintyre’s view helped get us into this dilemma--recognized that the only way to “prove” the truth of any non-scientific proposition is by the willingness of the individual to live and to act as if it were true--in other words, to radically commit oneself to the truth of the proposition. Maybe that’s what Macintyre meant when he pointed to the Benedictine communities of the fifth century, who left the shattered fragments of the Roman Empire and built new communities dedicated to Christian virtue in the countryside, as an example of the only escape from nihilism left to us today, in a culture where freedom of choice is seemingly the only ethic binding society together.

Dang, somebody talk about oatmeal or something.

Frederica raises the idea of e-mail as an aid to conviviality. That really is true--but it poses problems of its own. About 10 years ago, I moved from Washington down to south Florida for a job. I found myself adrift at sea: as a political and religious conservative, I found it very difficult to find simpatico friends. I did have great pals at my office, but talking politics, faith and culture was important to me, and that just didn’t interest them. I came to focus much of my attention, and to direct much of my intellectual and emotional energy, to a couple of online groups of friends scattered around the country. Frederica was one of them; the other was made up of a group of us conservative Catholics who’d come together in 1993 or so after we realized that discussing faith on the AOL Catholic bulletin board was impossible, because we lacked the same moral language as liberal Catholics, and were only talking past each other and exhausting ourselves.

Honestly, I don’t know how I would have made it without those e-mail groups and the fellowship they provided. And we helped each other too: when, for example, one of us lost his job and was on hard times, we took up a collection and one of us drove to his house with groceries. I’m still in touch with both groups, though they’ve morphed several times since then. I must say, though, that Frederica warned me at the time that the time and energy I was spending communing with like-minded folks in our little Internet community was not time spent actually getting to know and serving the people who lived in my actual community. That’s a very fair point--and yet, the online community was not fake either.

I'm a bit nervous about joining the conversation at this late date, but I wanted to try and raise an issue with consumerism that I don't think has been clearly addressed either here or, unfortunately, in Rod's book. In a consumerist society, we approach all arenas of life, not just the economic, as consumers; we are consumers first, and then fathers or mothers, Presbyterians or Baptists, "crunchy" or "mainstream" conservatives. This troubles me much more than whatever issues there may or may not be with capitalism as an economic system. To this non-economist, the free market seems to work well enough, but it is not at all appropriate for application to other spheres of life.

Take a look at the "spiritual marketplace," for example. Church shopping abounds, the "church on the corner" is struggling--and often failing--to stay open in the face of competition from megachurches, and denominational differences (and traditional moral teachings) are muted for the sake of marketing. This is a deeply unwholesome trend because it undercuts both the authority and function of churches as vital institutions of civil society.
When people shop around for churches that affirm their pre-existing prejudices, churches are less able to influence behavior in the way our society needs them to.

Rod does write, in the chapter on consumerism,

"A consumerist culture also tends to cede authority to the secular priesthood of scientists and other professional experts."

I just want to point out that I said it first. And in a lot fewer words. Does that mean Jonah and I agree on all the rest? And isn’t all the rest what is really important?

The DC Examiner runs a skeptical review.

You think Crunchy Cons are exaggerating the impact of technology? Then check out what the technologists themselves are saying. In today’s Fast Company magazine, Slate columnist Adam L. Penenberg gleefully describes the implications of the coming technopoly:

“…in the next 10 years, the Internet also will invade your appliances, even your clothes. And just as you wouldn't dream of being without a telephone now, the thought of being offline will be unthinkable…. More generally, though--and more important--the fluidity of information will bring about a radically democratized society where consumers enjoy unprecedented power…. Historian David Nye wrote, ‘People do not merely use electricity. Rather, the self and the electrified world have intertwined.’ The Internet, too, is being braided into our lives, and that will probably make us stronger--even if it leaves a few of us hanging. “

“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deificaiton of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's superhuman achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved.”

A reader sends a link to a Wendell Berry essay explaining "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," which, of course, is online.

Rod has got to be proud that he got Jonah thinking about his book for so many words today.

March 01, 2006

Ricardo from Michigan says yep, I’m a hypocrite:

The top plant in terms of quality is a union-run Cadillac plant here in Michigan. Of the top brands in terms of quality, as measured by JD Power, Buick and Cadillac are always in the top five. The Japanese quality thing is highly, highly overrated- so is the fuel efficiency; because import cars are EPA-tested upon import and not sale, foreign manufacturers are able to inflate their EPA ratings by making certain features of the car dealer-installed (that is, by having the dealer install standard features on the car instead of the plant, they can reduce the vehicle's weight and boost their EPA rating to a number a consumer will never reach).

American automakers pay a $1200 premium per car in terms of their sunk costs of pensions and healthcare. Japan, with its nationalized healthcare, allows its manufacturers to avoid this. Japan further limits the sale of foreign-manufactured cars in their nation to 15% of the total, while the US has no limit on the number of foreign-built cars that can be sold here.

The American auto industry is one of the few left in the world where a person can make a comfortable living doing manual labor. Unionized workers on the GM line can make up to $100,000 over time. Read "Rivethead," by Ben Hamper, a friend of Michael Moore's; he worked on the line at GM in Flint and wrote for Moore back when he was running the Flint Voice. It's a good account of that life. Is it a fun job, or a fulfilling one? No. It's a well-paying one, though. Which puts it ahead of the vast majority of jobs that aren't fun or fulfilling and pay poorly.

One in every ten jobs in America is directly or indirectly reliant on General Motors' continual existence. GM's domestic automobile production facilities are losing ventures for them. They could close all their plants in the US and move them abroad; they sell more cars internationally than here anyway, since Americans have lost their taste for things built by their countrymen.

Would I say you're a hypocrite if you espouse those principles and buy a Toyota? Yes. This is one of those few purchases where you are very directly impacting the lives of workers; the healthcare and pension premium on an American car is pretty directly traceable to an individual worker.

I don't think everything you buy needs to be American-made, but this is the single biggest one-off purchase you will make after a home. If this is the only American-made thing you ever buy, you're probably doing OK. Whether you personally buy American-raised chicken has no appreciable effect on the market; your personal choice of automobile does.

Thanks, Noah, for that post. It’s late here, and I’ve got to go to dinner, so I’ll answer you in the morning. Meanwhile, moments ago the following came in from Jeff, the Pennsylvania guy unimpressed by the Amish (and by CC-ism). Thanks Jeff – I’ll post this, and answer both you guys tomorrow. Meanwhile, the rest of you feel free to jump in. I’m blogged out today:

Here's my gripe, Rod (and I'm going to use the Amish as my example): to listen to the Amish, they are better than we "English" because they eschew all of those bad things like technology, electricity, cars, phones, and materialism in general. However, their shunning of these things ends when it infringes upon their interests. They don't seem to have a problem with manufacturing "authentic Amish quilts" in large quantities so yuppies from New Jersey can snatch them up for their cottages at the shore. Isn't that feeding the materialistic society they have such a problem with? They want to be "apart" yet still benefit from participating what say they want to be apart from.

This is the same vibe I'm getting from your blog. All of this materialism and adherence to technology is bad...except for when you decide it's not. It all seems very arbitrary and much like what YOU LIKE is "good" and what you DON'T LIKE is "bad"...and those things may change tomorrow.

If you (and the Amish) want to limit your use of technology, by all means go ahead. If you want be less material, go with God, my friend. But when you stand on the street corner and lecture those of us who don't follow this Crunchy path, you may get called out when you appear inconsistent.

Noah Millman e-mails:

Rod:

I think you're missing the key to your emailer Jeff's point. "They want to be 'apart' except for when they don't" - that's the key. Jeff's annoyed that (in his view) the Amish are saying that they have a better style of life, but that style is parasitic on the larger society that they disapprove of: the consumers who buy their products, the people who give them rides, etc. In other words, the Amish have not come up with a better way of living that we can all emulate; they have elected themselves an elite and are willing to ride on the backs of their lessers when that makes sense for them, even if it undermines their independence. You can see something of the same dynamic in the way that secular Israelis - and some religious Israelis, too - object to the ultra-Orthodox who spend their lives studying in yeshivah and living on the public dole and not serving in the army. These people have certainly dedicated themselves to a higher ideal, and sacrificed creature comforts for it. But they can't survive without the support of the larger society, and they expect the larger society that does *not* share those ideals to support them for their dedication. You can see why that would be resented.

I think an honest crunchy should admit to being, in a substantial way, elitist. If we had laws strictly regulating against factory farming, for example, the price of meat would go up substantially, and some people at the lower end of the economic spectrum would eat less meat. Strict environmental laws raise the cost of fuel, land, etc. At the margins, someone as a consequence will not be able to afford a car, or a house. If the crunchy position is honest, the proper response is: thems the breaks. You, the marginal individual or family who doesn't have meat, a car, or a home, are paying for a better society, one that treats animals better, keeps the air clean, reduces traffic congestion, etc.

In the Middle Ages, guilds strictly regulated prices and quality standards for most products. The consequence was relatively high quality (guild members could still compete on quality, though not on price) but restricted quantity. So you had high-quality linen for the elite and rough homespun for the plebes. You also had the great Gothic cathedrals, while most people lived in hovels. This, again, is not a point about technology; lots of technological innovation went on in the Middle Ages - those Gothic cathedrals were a technological marvel. It has to do with how technology was used. It was not used, primarily, to satisfy the wants and needs of most people.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with espousing an elitist philosophy that says: society should prefer that fewer people enjoy better (or higher) things rather than many people enjoying worse (or lesser) things. And classically, though not so much in the American conservative tradition, conservatism is elitist, and frankly so. I myself am frankly elitist on all sorts of matters. I'm not sure there is anyone who is truly, consistently a preference utilitarian, trying to maximize the preference satisfaction of the most people today and not worrying about tomorrow. But I'm not sure I've heard you articulate things in this way, and say, frankly, that crunchy conservatism is elitist. It knows what the higher things are, and it wants to make all of us pay for them, even if we don't appreciate them or get the opportunity to enjoy them. Am I wrong?

-Noah

I confess: Email Changed My Life. It made it possible to communicate with like-minded people, which wasn't so easy when I was restricted to people who are, literally, local. The neighbors were nice enough, but that's not the same as being able to talk with people who are really like me; who've read the same books, who have the same convictions and the same sense of humor, and who are ready for a rousing conversation. Rod was one of my earliest e-buddies, a dozen years ago when I first fired up the old 14k Hayes modem and logged onto AOL 2.0.

Shortly before that I had spent a year as Communications Director for a statewide pro-life referendum. In the course of losing that fight it was powerfully borne in on me that my type was not welcome 'round here. Virtually no media coverage was fair, much less friendly. Local was not a friendly place to be. What a relief to find that there were people like me scattered around the country, and that I wasn't alone after all.

But there's still a longing for local, and now and then one of my e-buddies floats the fantasy that it would be great to shake the dust off our feet and go someplace safe and stable, to live and raise the kids. (Walker Percy's Lost Cove, TN, for example.)

But utopia ain't all it's cracked up to be. I was searching for a post that came in very early in this blog -- I think Rod pasted it in, on the first or second day. A woman was writing about living in a Christian intentional community, all homeschoolers and good earnest types. I remember she said that the gals all wear dresses and the men make sure the gals wear dresses. And she said that there is an insular and negative mindset, paranoia about the outside world, and ceaseless ain't-it-awful self-righteousness about the culture war. But the main point she made was that the upright citizens fail to notice that their teen children are parachuting out of the biodome -- "getting pregnant, getting drunk, and joining the military" was the intriguing trio of examples she gave.

I'd like us to recognize that local isn't always easy. This is especially true if even the church we belong to is no haven, but a place where a variety of theological and moral views are on parade. Our true sense of belonging may not be local at all, but come from something very much more scattered.

And even if we voluntarily localize ourselves for the sake of our children, they too will be just as capable one day of jumping out of the local context. They too can seek their values and meaning from the outside world -- values that may be the very ones we were seeking to evade.

So, local is a good thing, Rod, but technology has helped me find many more convivial friends.

Here’s something to bring the discussion back to earth. Recently our washing machine broke down after less than a year of service. We’d bought the American-made machine from a well-known American retailer because both had a great reputation, both for quality and repair service. Well, I won’t bore you with the Kafkaesque details of getting a simple repair done, but suffice it to say that it took a solid month before it was fixed, and we suffered through abysmal customer service. In the end, the last repairman to show up indicated that this particular brand was – how to put this? – keeping him very busy these days.

“Are you telling me that [the store] is selling a piece of crap, and knows it?” Julie said.

“You said it, not me,” the repairman said.

Well, we’re going to have to buy a new dryer soon, and you can be certain we’re not going to go back to this American store, or buy this American brand. If there’s a Japanese-made washing machine, I’ll buy it. Does that make me a hypocrite? Does it make me more or less crunchy that next time I buy a car, I’m more likely to purchase a reliable Japanese model that we can drive for years without excessive repair bills? Or is it more crunchy to buy American and put up with the problems out of a sense of economic solidarity with your countrymen? (Don’t write me and say that foreign cars are made here now, and many domestic cars are now assembled with parts from abroad, so this isn’t an issue; for the sake of arguing the point, let’s just assume a clear division between foreign and domestic).

We’ve talked about making economic sacrifices to be true to our deeper principles. But it’s easier to say than to do, at least consistently.

Reader Minkoff down in the Cah’linas writes to say she’d like the bloggers here to address the phenomenon of highly educated stay-at-home moms. She points to this NYTimes article and this one from The American Prospect as an example of the new trend that’s vexing doctrinaire feminists. She says she’d like to know if the “stay-at-home” phenomenon can be claimed by any conservative subgroup, given that it’s starting to look like more of a class and generational thing than a political one.

That’s a fascinating question, and I really do hope women reading the blog will write in with their views. I can only answer anecdotally, from my own experience. Every stay-at-home mom I know is not only a political conservative, but a religious conservative. Yet I also know moms who might like to stay at home, but can’t, and not just because they want to pay for a McMansion, or have turned their luxuries into necessities. We have an economy now in which many families feel forced to have mom and dad in the workforce, just to get by. As a matter of principle, I don’t believe that is just, but at the same time I don’t have any practical ideas for changing that (please write if you do). If my income were cut in half, it would be really hard for me and my family to keep living as we do; certainly we would have to make drastic changes if we were going to keep my wife out of the workforce, and at home with the boys. I make a good salary, and we live frugally in some ways, which allows us to do what we do. But there’s no question that the kinds of traditionalist choices we’ve made are available to us thanks primarily to our comfortably middle-class status. I don’t apologize for those choices, of course, and it would be silly to forego doing what’s right for our kids because not everybody has the same financial freedom to do so. Still, there is a certain amount of class privilege involved here, it must be admitted. Is that a problem? Gang?

Returning to a thread from earlier today, I’m fascinated by a figure like Ivan Illich (though I don’t know much about him personally). E.F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry and Jane Jacobs are the same kind of figures – men and women who live by a strong moral vision, but who can’t be easily categorized. There’s a great book about people like that: “Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise. In it, Prof. Robert Inchausti traces the thought of about 20 or so diverse Christian figures – Jacques Ellul, Dostoevsky, Berry, Dorothy Day, Marshall McLuhan, and others – and explores, in a non-polemical way, how their holding fast to what they took to be Christian orthodoxy made, or makes, them actually fairly subversive figures. What this book speaks to – and this is a recurring theme on this blog, and certainly present in “Crunchy Cons” – is both the centrality of culture to our kind of conservatism, and also the religious sense.

Incidentally, I heard earlier from a reader who used to know Illich well back in the day, and who writes:

He was most certainly a traditionalist in every meaningful sense of the word and his leftism, to the extent that one can call it that, was partly a matter of Church politics [and] partly a matter of solidarity with the poor. He certainly had no sympathy for consumerism, for the gender politics of the late-1960s, or, indeed, for individualism generally. For him, community was everything---the wellspring of decency, of conviviality, and of values. He was also, of course, profoundly ascetic and as such found modernity itself horrifying and intrinsically nihilistic. Whether this made Illich a conservative in the contemporary political sense is, of course, another matter.

Again, that distinction: conservative versus traditionalist. You can see this play itself out economically in the debate, such as it is, over globalization. The conservative protectionists fear loss of sovereignty and community, and subordinating those traditions to the global marketplace. The economic conservatives believe that the material progress available through expanding free trade is more important. Who is more conservative? It depends on what you want to conserve, doesn’t it?

Jeff from Pennsylvania says he’s been trying to put his finger on what bugs him about crunchy conservatism, and it finally clicked for him when I remarked on the blog two days ago that technology itself isn’t the problem, but the misuse of it for unvirtuous ends. He writes:

[That line] is what you get from Amish apologists all the time, just substitute "Amish" for "crunchy cons" and you're there.

And before anyone starts singing the praises of the Amish community, I live in Lancaster, PA...we ARE Amish country...and there isn't much about the Amish to celebrate. They want to be "apart", except for when they don't. They don't like materialism, except for when they're selling all of their wares to tourists. They don't like technology, except for when it's convenient. (They won't drive, but they'll let other people drive them places, for example.) Home schooling, organic farming, all of it is freakin' AMISH.

Except the Amish won't let you wear Birkenstocks. That must be the difference.

By the way: is there butter in Amish hell?

I would agree with Jonah that much of the eccentric behavior Rod describes is not INTRINSICALLY conservative, or even important; much of what Rod describes is an inchoate search for meaning within pro-life parameters. But the eccentricity and, even more, attempt to make sense thereof through a sacramental approach to life, points to a deep, longstanding and important rift in the conservative movement, or at any rate Republican party.

Traditional conservatives (and in the end that's how I'd describe Rod's
vision) simply have a different conception of reality and the good from neocons, libertarians and other progressive conservatives. Kirk loved to get a rise out of people by quoting lefties, even supporting Eugene McCarthy for President. But there was a serious side to his choices--he believed and wanted to point out that character is more important than policy position.

Moreover, he reveled in the variety of life, with all its eccentricities, even in its political mode. For conservatives like Kirk the point is not to craft the most consistent ideology possible any more than it is to produce maximum economic growth, but to forge an integrated, virtuous life. We all miss the mark, of course, but some of our more saintly brethren with bad politics may come closer than some of our more ideologically consistent brethren who let politics (or economics, etc.) trump morality.

This does not, I think, make us "radical centrists" to use Angelo's phrase.
Conservatism historically has been about moral order and a government that protects the fundamental institutions and relationships that enable us to lead good lives. But it does set traditional conservatives apart from their more progressive fellows, who want to "cut to the chase" with neat categories of thought and action rooted in public policy. Cutting to the chase is about efficiency, about treating politics, like economics, as a means to certain ends (greater individual choice and material well-being, usually), rather than as important modes of conduct in and of themselves.

Well, thanks for that long post, Jonah, and I look forward to reading your piece tomorrow, but I’m not going to go over well-trod ground here. I think I could stand here and repeat every hour on the hour that the stuff I write about in Crunchy Cons is not, ultimately, about organic vegetables and sandals, but about trying to live a humanely conservative life amid the luxury of a fast, materialist age--and you would still find a way to come back and accuse me of calling neckties unconservative.

I really do want us to talk about the ideas in the book, and I honestly welcome critique. The reviews I’ve seen, while mostly positive, have offered valuable criticism of the weaknesses of my book. But most of them--I’m thinking specifically of the Wall Street Journal’s, NR’s and the NYSun’s--acknowledge that the kinds of questions I ask in Crunchy Cons are important and timely. You may hate the packaging--and yes, there is probably a better term for the revived traditionalism I’m interested in than “crunchy conservatism,” but that’s what stuck from our Corner discussions three years ago--but beneath the lifestyle gloss, there are real ideas there. You may prefer to spend your energy here saying that none of this is real, and it’s Bad For Conservatism to have this discussion, but--and I mean this with sincere respect, which doesn’t often get communicated well in e-mails and blogs--I’m just not interested in debating whether or not this sensibility exists, at least not in the few weeks this blog is going to be up on NRO. It’s amusing that you accuse me of baptizing whatever I like as “conservative,” when it’s been my impression that you do the same thing, and too often are just throwing whatever you can at the wall to see what sticks.

I think readers of this blog would be better off if we would discuss the actual ideas presented in the book and by other bloggers, instead of spending all this time quarreling over whether or not something fits the definition of whatever the Standing Committee of the First Conservative International codifies as conservative. But I could be wrong about that. In any case, I’ll withdraw from further exchanges of this sort. Today, I’m interested in discussing how economics and technology affect how traditionalist conservatives, whether they wear Birkenstocks or neckties, live. If others want to argue with Jonah about this, by all means do. Just count me out. I’m not mad about it, just bored with it.

And finally, if there’s nothing to what I talk about in the book, Jonah, it will fail. And if there is, it will succeed. We can probably agree, you and me, that the market will tell us if this is an idea whose time has come, or an idea that’s all wet. Meanwhile, the caravan moves on…

Caleb and I have had a nice exchange of emails and we are both chastened for misreading and miscommunicating. Caleb was gracious and decent, as I would expect. As I explained to him, I take all of this stuff seriously, but not personally.

Which brings me to Rod.

Since some folks -- starting with Rod -- don't understand where I am coming from let me explain (though I have a gargantuan piece going up tomorrow which will explain in more detail).

I don't believe Crunchy Conservatism exists. I think it is Rod's invention. I don't think there is any body of thought, serious or otherwise, that is "crunchy conservative." I think Rod points to things he agrees with or likes and calls it crunchy and conservative when often they are one or the other. I think Rod's taxonomy is entirely artificial. And I think the word "crunchy" and the props used to support it are not only superficial, but they smack of precisely the kind of branding and marketing outlook Rod decries. Yes, yes, yes: There are people out there worried about the ravages of the free market and modernity who are conservative. Some of them dig organic food and open-toed-shoes. Some of them do not. I do not see what is to be gained by dividing people who agree on important things by concentrating on unimportant things.

Just one small example of what I'm getting at. In his book Rod reveals that conservatism didn't begin with Barry Goldwater (not news to anyone around here). He says there's actually an older form of conservatism which predates Goldwater and his libertarian ways. What is this more ancient true faith? Well, it turns out, it doesn't stretch back to Middle Earth, but to Russell Kirk whose Conservative Mind came out little more than a decade prior to Goldwater's run for the White House, hardly a grand epoch timewise. More importantly, there is no great schism between Kirk and Goldwater. Or at least there wasn't. Kirk supported and defended Goldwater often in the pages of National Review. The split Rod asserts never existed.

Rod, you can dismiss this as mere small talk about tribalism. But, I do think somebody should defend actual existing conservatism from the fundamentally unfair and invidious assumptions in your book. Not to do so would be a form of "no enemies on the right" thinking.

Moreover, I think much of your argument is really a Trojan horse for the incorporation of leftwing and liberal sensibilities and arguments flying under the false flag of "conservatism." You people are quoting and defending Marxist perspectives to attack materialism, which is in effect like quoting various Klansmen to attack racism. You claim Russell Kirk as your "patron saint" but everywhere I look I see Jacques Rousseau.

I want every success in the world for Rod. But I really do want this whole thing to fail. I don't want to be going to conservative panel discussions for the next thirty years with people arguing about, say, the "crunchy" versus "neocon" perspective on this or that. I don't want to meet college kids who think they represent some new rebellious strain or tribe because they listen to the Grateful Dead but like reading John Dos Passos or Russell Kirk. I don't want a new generation of conservatives to don crunchy uniforms because wearing a jacket and tie is seen as the uniform of free market idolators.

That is where I am coming from. I'd be happy to debate technology and the like. I think I've written 20 columns ( starting here, I think)addressing the destabilizing effect of technology on communities and the like. My reluctance to do so here stems from the fact I don't want to grant the assumptions behind Crunchy Conservatism.

That is where I am coming from.

Funny, Ross, but I just spent my lunch break reading the same Longman article (for the second time), and on the walk back was thinking about how we could fold it into the economics discussion. Longman, who is a liberal, makes an argument for conservative, patriarchal cultural ascendancy based on evolutionary principles. He explains how patriarchy--which he takes pains to say means far more than mere male dominance--is actually an evolutionarily successful way to preserve civilization over time. He says that only religiously and culturally conservative people are having larger families these days, and assumes that those children will remain conservative. I think you’re onto something, Ross, when you say that there is a greater chance that children of today’s large families will hold on to conservative values, for a couple of reasons.

One, if you are having a large family, chances are you are doing so despite the relative poverty it will put your family into--which means you are doing so because you think of children as a positive good, and having them as a blessing under heaven. This blessing is so important to you that you are willing to make serious material sacrifices to gain it (to be obedient to divine command, whatever). That means you are probably strongly religious, and are likely to raise your kids in the same kind of environment. To put it another way, having a big Catholic family fifty or sixty years ago didn’t say much, necessarily, about the strength of your family’s religious commitment. Nowadays, though, it pretty much screams, “WE’RE THE MOST CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC TRUE BELIEVERS YOU’LL EVER MEET!”

Second, and following that point, to have a large family nowadays is such a countercultural act that chances are if you are willing to go against the culture and the spirit of the age to that degree, you will raise your kids to be more immune than most to the Zeitgeist. It doesn’t always work out this way, but lots of large families are also into homeschooling, and other practices that set them apart from the mainstream. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but looked at from a strictly evolutionary point of view, it does seem that the kinds of habits of the mind and heart inculcated by crunchies into their children are likely to help them not only survive, but multiply and grow in influence, over time.

Um ... well, to change the subject from Stalinism for a minute, I just finished reading that Philip Longman piece Rod mentioned earlier--about why the West's birth dearth means that religious conservatives with large families will outbreed decadent Blue State secularists--and wrote something about it on my own blog. . . and then realized it probably belonged in this crunchy discussion. So with apologies for the double-posting, here's what I thought of the piece: It's an argument that makes intuitive sense, and the historical analysis is quite interesting; on the other hand, Longman isn't long on actual numbers, beyond the generic observation that tradition-minded types have larger families, and so members of the society of the future "will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm." This is obviously true, but doesn't address the crucial question, which is the rate at which the children of said large, tradition-minded families are likely to be won over by the siren song of European or Blue-State-style living. After all, the Baby Boom generation was also "descended from parents who rejected . . . childlessness and small families," and they were the ones who tore down what was left of the patriarchy in the first place. The trick for social conservatives (which is indeed, as Eve Tushnet points out, a pretty unappealing term) isn't having more kids than the lifestyle liberals--it's keeping enough of those kids in the social-conservative fold to actually have a demographic and political impact.

Since I posted the above, a commenter has pointed out that the pre-Baby boom generations didn't exactly "reject childlessness and small families," since before the Pill (and the whole post-industrial way of life) the Bobo lifestyle wasn't really a serious option for most people. Which is fair enough, and you could argue that since today's traditionalists are traditionalists by choice, rather than necessity, they'll be better-equipped to raise children who also choose a crunchier way of life than were, say, pre-1960s parents. Or at least if they read Rod's book, they will . . .

But you wrote a book inventing a tribe, Rod!

Jonah, honestly, I cannot figure out where you’re coming from from hour to hour. I don’t want to get sidetracked into an endless discussion of right-wing tribal politics. I’d actually like to read what people in this circle, and our readers, have to say about technology, the economy, and how they affect the lives conservatives lead, or should be leading.

To that end, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention the The New Atlantis, a terrific journal about science, technology and morality put out by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Here, from its recent archive, is a marvelous essay by Paul J. Cella on the connection between technology, liberty and private property. Excerpt:

Free enterprise and private property were both necessary prerequisites for modern technology. I do not say that technology is by any means the greatest achievement of these principles—it would be nearer to the truth to say that liberty is. But technology is central to the life of most free people and free nations, which is why we need to explore the ways that technology can imperil the spirit of liberty. It is possible to forget that technology is an instrument and allow it to become an idol. It is possible to enslave ourselves by technology, even as we imagine that we are setting ourselves free.

Cella, an editor at Red State goes on to say that technology itself isn’t the problem; it’s the way people use it. He goes on to discuss the Biblical warnings about how wealth corrupts--a truth proclaimed by all the great religions and wisdom traditions--and points out that some shrill partisans of the left assume that all wealth has to be ill-gotten. Which is wrong.

But while this critique of capitalism is often made in the most one-sided way, it tells us something important about how prosperity comes to be perceived when it has become ubiquitous. We all come to be tainted by the vision of the spoiled son. In the technological age, this danger works itself out primarily in this way: the harvests of our labor, our technological artifacts, often weaken the human character that made technology’s rise so dramatic. We become spoiled. The danger is not in some marching tyranny of machinery; it is in a diminution or impoverishment of the human things behind technology. We risk becoming so enamored with our toys and gimmickry that we fail to cultivate the human virtues that sustain and dignify technological creativity.

Our danger is that modern men, armed with the most sophisticated techniques and technologies, will lack any real understanding of the dignity of human work. They will become perpetual middlemen. Part of this alienation lies in our remoteness from the causes of things, on the one hand, and from their consequences on the other. A man aspires to be a doctor but instead finds himself an amateur attorney and document-shuffler: filling out forms, filing reports, ensuring at every stage that he is beyond liability. Technology has made his job “easier” but it often makes his patients more distant—both because he sees them less and because they come to trust the technologies of medicine more than the man who prescribes their use. Success rates may be higher, outcomes may be better, but a certain alienation lingers in both parties as the human touch diminishes. The doctor’s vocation is transformed from personal interaction and care to impersonal liaison between the enormous technological institutions of modern medicine and the patient. The doctor discovers one day that he is less a healer than a bureaucratic middleman.

Cella goes on to say that the expansion of private property--which entails the promotion of a small business ideal over corporate gigantism--is an antidote to this alienation and dehumanization.

Sorry, "fit" was overly snarky, as you put it. And I was paying an oblique compliment to party politics (the irony of citing Stalin after JPod's joke earlier was, perhaps, lame). I wanted to indicate that I understand the role of the party, and find it good in the necessary-evil kind of way. I wanted to also point out that party discipline ought to be able to be set aside in certain times and places.

Also, small point: I wasn't indicating that I was taking my marbles and going home. Just that I can't post on this blog all day.

Fascinating. I'm obliquely called a Stalinist for being less than entirely accomodating of Marxist ideas and categorical thinking and yet I'm the one having a "fit."

We clearly have read two very different books between the same covers if you think that Rod's argument is a rejection of party thinking (as you define it). It strikes me as an effort to create a new party, a new cadre brimming with us-versus-them thinking, on the back of the conservative movement.

But, please, do not take your marbles and go home on account of my fit. I'll take my leave so everyone can get back to agreeing with each other. This is your home, not mine.

JPod is right. Dorothy Day and Ivan Illich were not conservatives. Neither were E.F. Schumacher, Marshall McLuhan, or Christopher Lasch. They were Christians. I think the same can be said for G.K. Chesterton, given his thinking on democracy and capitalism.

I believe genuine Christians are of the "radical center" and will make a provisional alliance with either the left or the right, depending on specifics. Many of us identify with the political right in this time and place because that's where people with traditional faith convictions find the most hospitable home. But because our faith comes before ideology, we seldom fit neatly within the political divisions of the moment.

Frankly, Rod, beyond party politics, I don't think you’re a “conservative,” except in that provisional sense. Your Christian bleeding heart for those denied health insurance, for animals treated like widgets, for families subject to the tidal wave of media decadence, your concern about racism, about greed, etc. reflect a sensibility that is more concerned with justice, with "the least among us," than with order and social hierarchies. I’m not saying that you’re a liberal, but your tendency to side with the underdog, to question the “rules” is not historically what can be called “conservative” (unfortunately). I would say a liberal always wants to junk the rules when he sees exceptions. A conservative almost always wants to preserve them to maintain order. I would argue that a Christian, in imitation of Jesus, knows when and when not to break the rules (or how to paradoxically transcend them). That’s why we don’t ever fit neatly into political categories.

Oh, and Caleb, I don't think that deep down you're a conservative either. For similar reasons. You published Eugene McCarraher in the first issue of The New Pantagruel, after all, who certainly is not conservative.

Last, Alasdair McIntyre, the philosopher cited by Rod in his book, is of the "Radical Center" as well, and a good example of a politically homeless Christian. He advised people to sit out the last election. See his statement here.

...just a word of advice: a few more posts like that last one and good luck, Crunchies, convincing anyone but each other that you've got something constructive to offer.

Jonah's latest fit has a lot to do with the old divide between "conservatism" understood primarily as party discipline and "conservatism" understood as a philosophy that says something true about man, God, and reality. Only a party conservative thinks something as dumb as "because I am a conservative and I think X, X must be conservative." Crack the whip and let the blood flow. This is otherwise known as Stalinism. Useful and necessary--hopefully in bloodless form--in puting together political coalitions that can actually rule. But a real hinderance to the search for truth at the intellectual level. A crunchy must still be a realist, which is why, for whatever it's worth, I have always voted straight GOP tickets. However, there are more important things than winning elections. The whole of Rod's book is in fact a refutation of the party conservative. He says, in essence, "self-described conservatives think/act X, and X is decidedly not a conservative thought/act, so they ought to be reminded of their first love."

It's too bad when every fruitful avenue of discussion is hijacked by a crack of the party whip.

Rod, Mitch, I posted that follow-up below before I saw your posts, the general gist of which I agree with. Though I don't think you can find an "eek! a communist" sensibility in anything I've written. That's an unfair caricature. But, let's not bend over backwards to be kind to Communists either. I cannot imagine Rod would ridicule someone for having a reflexive "Eek! A Nazi" attitude.

Moreover, Rod, I really think you need to practice what you preach a bit more. How you can tell me that I shouldn't dismiss Marxists out of hand when they have something useful to say, while your book serves as one long ad hominem against two dimensional, greedy, "mainstream conservatives" is really quite beyond me.

Oh an Mitch, I know you say it in jest, but I don't understand why we want to be uniters rather than dividers. One of these days someone is going to have to explain to me why "unity" is an inherently moral and desirable state of being. The cult of unity has inflicted more pain and suffering on decent people than perhaps any other fixation (I am writing a book on fascism, after all). One of the leftish sensibilities on display in Rod's book is its emphasis on organic holism -- the idea that all good things must go together and that religion, politics, economics, aesthetics must all click into a state of synchronicity. Conservatism, in my book, is a partial philosophy of life.

Jonah, for the first time, here on this blog, I’m going to reveal my tendency to the Dark Side. A couple of years ago, Rod linked to an online survey that claimed to be able to locate one on the conservative spectrum. The survey told Rod, no surprise, that he is a “traditionalist”. But when I took the survey, it told me that I am an “enterpriser”, the same result it gave Virginia Postrel when she took it.

Cue Star Wars’ “Imperial Attack” theme.

Let me add something in response to a few emails on this point. I think conservatives -- crunchy and otherwise -- use "conservative" to mean "right" or "correct." Obviously, this has a certain logic to it since people who become conservatives do so because they think conservatism is correct. But sometimes this gets spun around and we think "Because I am a conservative if I think X, X must also be conservative and correct." It doesn't necessarily work that way. A Marxist by any other name is still a Marxist.

Intellectual honesty is more important than conservatism, so if you think leftists are right about something, you should say so. But I don't think you should automatically conclude that what the leftist says is conservative. Individuals will always deviate from any orthodoxy or ideal. What we should not do is narcissitically label every deviation a new orthodoxy or a truer expression of that ideal. Conservatism needn't demand total obedience. I think Michael Oakeshott would get my back on this one.

Jonah:

On the other hand, he invokes Marxist and other leftist writers and thinkers to back up his case. Aren't these two things at odds? Did Kirk quote a lot of Marxists? Does a conservative who lays his hands upon a Marxist make the Marxist a conservative?

Go back and read Peter Kreeft’s excellent short First Things essay about “The Politics of Architecture,” and ponder why he, a self-described “traditionalist,” felt more affinity with his “radical” colleague on certain matters than he did with the conventional liberal and conservative. Kreeft says it has to do with matters of the spirit.

As my father likes to say, even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while. Even the most wrong-headed person isn’t wrong about absolutely everything. Take the deranged guy from the booksigning last night. At least he knew he was speaking to Rod Dreher, not Elizabeth II.

It seems more useful first to discuss the point being made, rather than who made it. The distinction between “convivial tools” and “industrial tools” strikes me as worth talking about. After all, we want to be uniters, not dividers, right?

My Florida law clerk guy writes:

Russell Kirk actually wrote the introduction to Ruth A. Bevin's "Marx and Burke: A Revisionist View," which argues that the two thinkers had a lot more in common than is often thought. As for Illich and technology, Kirk refused to drive a car and once discovered a small television that his daughters were using to secretly watch soap operas and threw it off the top of the house and smashed it into pieces.

For a more in depth and sympathetic view (from a conservative perspective) of Illich, his life and work, see this remembrance by Peter Berger in First Things:

It is easy to see why Illich’s ideas resonated well in the cultural climate of the time. But he disappointed, one by one, most of the groups who first believed him to be one of them. Catholics were irritated when he criticized missionaries in Latin America as cultural imperialists. The counterculture discovered that he found repugnant many if not most of their proclivities, from drugs to promiscuous sex. He upset the left when, after a visit to Cuba, he described the Castro regime as an odious tyranny. And feminists were deeply offended when he argued, some years after “Shadow–Work,” that women had been better off in traditional societies in which they devoted themselves to the life of the family. Illich was a genie who could not be kept in any bottle. Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, he was a “spirit who ever negates.”

… There are, I think, two threads that run through Illich’s opus from the beginning. There is a radical critique of all aspects of modernity, grounded in a profoundly conservative view of the human condition. And there is a deep respect for what Illich called the “vernacular”—the wisdom of ordinary people and their ways of coping with life.

John raises a perfectly legitimate point. Someone really needs to clarify how this works. On the one hand, Rod is being praised for reviving an older, truer, conservative tradition stemming from Kirk et al. On the other hand, he invokes Marxist and other leftist writers and thinkers to back up his case. Aren't these two things at odds? Did Kirk quote a lot of Marxists? Does a conservative who lays his hands upon a Marxist make the Marxist a conservative? Or, has he slipped out of the stable and wandered into another pasture? How are we supposed to know whether it's the former or the latter?

Heh heh. Thanks for that JPod. I figured that might get me bumped off the conservative reservation for good! Anyway, good natured ribbing aside (which is what I hope that was), I agree with you that a lot of Illich’s thought was not conservative. Considering the totality of Illich as a thinker he is very difficult to pin down on one side or the other of our binary political vision. So I grant the point with the caveat that a great deal of Illich’s work was profoundly conservative. And I think his work to understand the destructive metaphysics carried into our lives by much of modern technology is one of those areas.

Rod, that’s a good question, and one to which I think we ought give significant thought. I can’t do that right now, but can throw a few remarks off the cuff. I’ve already given one example: text books versus original works. I am reminded of the decision made in many Amish communities to permit hay bailers but disallow bail loaders (that’s probably the wrong term). The rationale, as I understand it, is that one of the important “convivial” contributions and responsibilities of Amish boys is to follow the bailer and load the bails in the wagons.

I’m also reminded of my chicken coop. It is quite convivial. While it utilizes all of the modern amenities--electricity, pumped water, etc.--it allows participation and responsibility between and among me, my family, and our breakfast and dinner table. A precut prepackaged boned, skinned, and frozen chicken breast at the supermarket is industrial--it imposes its meaning on the user, who consumes it. I realize it will strike a lot of ears very oddly to be talking about the meaning implicit in a chicken breast, but it’s there. Now, lest I be accused again of being a charter member of the crunchy Taliban, let me say that I’m not suggesting that everyone has to go out and build a chicken coop and swear off grocery meat.

Another example that comes to mind: the interstate highway system is industrial. State highways and byways are more convivial. Being a lifelong Kansan, I have heard the comment more often than I care to remember: “Oh Kansas. That’s that long flat straight stretch of I-70 on the way to Colorado, right?” Well, yeah, I guess. That’s the “meaning” of a region when it has been received through the values imposed by an industrial tool. On the other hand, roads actually built by natives of the region mean something more. They go to real places and serve real purposes that are convivial: that is, they invite participation and responsibility, rather than just consumption.

Caleb Stegall has just praised Ivan Illich, who was a conservative the way I am a duck. This follows his praise for Dorothy Day, Rod's praise for Jimmy Carter and somebody else's praise for Stalin. Kidding! Kidding! Nonetheless, there are limits. Limits, I tell you. And praising Ivan Illich, one of the fathers of the doctrine of "liberation theology," on the National Review site so far exceeds any known limit of good sense that Stegall must be busted for it. Stegall, you are busted.

Radley Balko chimes in. He's not sold, needless to say. I still await Virginia Postrel to lay into Rod. I was stunned that her name doesn't come up at all in the book since she represents everything Crunchy Conservatism purports to be against and has laid out the most sustained and intellectually rigorous case for what the crunchies consider to be the Dark Side. I think Postrel is brilliant and often makes very useful points, but I'm not in her camp. Still, that's where the argument should be, if you ask me.

Caleb, would you give some examples of convivial tools, versus industrial tools, and explain what the difference is in each instance?

The French understand marriage, do we? A French government commission has just announced its opposition to same-sex marriages on the most fundamental grounds:

[It] is not possible to think about marriage separately from filiation (the fact of being a child of certain parents): the two questions are closely connected, in that marriage is organized around the child. Marriage is not merely the contractual recognition of the love between a couple; it is a framework that imposes rights and duties, and that is designed to provide for the care and harmonious development of the child.

There hasn’t been a lot of direct talk about technology here, which as I gather is supposed to be one of the subjects for this week. And as I look at the book, I see Rod quoting Eric Brende as saying that the goal is not to get rid of technology, but to ask whether it “enhances a more integrated life” or whether it leads to disintegration and dislocation. Ivan Illich doesn’t show up in the book, but I think of all the critics of technology in the 20th Century, he more than anyone understood the implicit metaphysics that technology imports into our lives and did the best work thinking about and developing criteria for judging technological tools on that basis. In his Tools for Conviviality, Illich develops the concept of “convivial” tools versus “industrial” tools:

Individuals need tools to move and to dwell. They need remedies for their diseases and means to communicate with one another. People cannot make all these things for themselves. They depend on being supplied with objects and services which vary from culture to culture. Some people depend on the supply of food and others on the supply of ball bearings.

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.” They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.

I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.

Most crucial for Illich is whether a tool gives an outlet for or overrides man’s capacity for responsibility. Convivial tools create a responsibility in the user to participate in a community of meaning; in a tradition. With conviviality comes the development of real joy as opposed to mere pleasure. Industrial tools deny man’s responsibility and his deepest longings because they impose meaning and require only passive acceptance from the user. As Illich says, the user is “degraded to the status of mere consumer.”

For Catholics, Episcopalians and perhaps other Western Christians, today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the fasting season of Lent. As Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Orthodox believer for whom Lent doesn't start till next week, tells K-Lo in NRO today, "The fast is not self-punishment or payment for sin. It's an exercise like weightlifting, designed to strengthen the willpower muscle. If you can resist a slice of pizza, you can resist the urge to yell at someone in traffic." The idea is that Lent is a time to bring the body and its passions and appetites under control of the spirit. It's a time when we simplify, in the sight of God. This has, I think, obvious interest to the crunchy-con project, which both encourages people to take authentic pleasure in created things as gifts from the divine, and indeed as manifestations of God's goodness, but also encourages people not to let love of things interfere with the right ordering of our moral and spiritual lives.

One year, we gave up TV for Lent in my family, and it was a revelation to see how much we had become dependent on the constant presence of the thing. It was hard at first, but after a week or so, we came to love the silence in the house at night. Pretty soon, we didn't miss it at all. Lent is a good time for all of us, even if we're not formally observing it, to take stock of how we've let our luxuries become our necessities.

Yeah, that went well. Thanks for coming out, Mitch. Special thanks to Becky Crawford, a homeschooling, organic-meat-eating Catholic mom from Irving, who showed up with a basket of oatmeal raisin cookies--my favorite!--made with eggs from a Christian organic farm in rural east Texas. I crunched, I munched, they were delicious. Those weasels at C-SPAN called the store to say they were coming, but never showed up. No doubt they feared being called miserable worms by you, Brother Mitch, and were instead rolling in butter at some den of iniquity.

February 28, 2006

I’m just back from Rod’s booksigning at the North Dallas Borders. Not one signing in ten is so well attended, take my word for it. It was standing room only, and the store easily sold its entire stock of Crunchy Cons. Rod’s talk was very polished, and everyone who asked questions made reasonable points, even the somewhat deranged guy, though he made rather a lot of points.

Rod wore his Birkenstocks, of course. Indeed, my own father showed up in Birkenstocks--but also an Adam Smith tie.

My 14-year-old son just sent me this link to what is supposed to be a leaked video of Microsoft’s new multimedia device, something called the Origami project. (It looks pretty cool.) The 5-minute video tells a story, presents a very specific vision, about what life is all about (as does most advertising). The questions Crunchy Cons are posing are not about theocracy, or reaction, or nostalgia, but whether we can retain our humanity in this new era. We all recognize that a retrieval of traditional values for tomorrow’s world will look very different than anything that’s come before. Freedom is the new reality. But the good society will have to be fought for. We can’t passively rely on whatever technology or economics delivers to us.

Rod, congrats on the publishing of the book. It’s obvious from the spirited exchange that the marketplace demanded this book be written! And I hope it makes you filthy rich.

Kristol famously issued “two cheers” for capitalism. Maybe I’d bump it up to two-and-a-half. And Kristol himself gets three from me.

We could start a whole blog devoted to Irving Kristol’s thought (note to Nick Denton--AutoBlogography of an Idea would make a great blog!) but let me just say a few things.

Kristol asserts that “The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.” He’s correct that socialism is no longer a threat to the extent it was when he broke with the left. However, what economist Arnold Kling calls “folk Marxism” and other remnants of socialist ideology certainly plague us today. Don’t take my word for it, just visit sub-Saharan Africa, the headquarters of the DNC (or the RNC on Tuesdays and Thursdays), the cafeteria of the World Bank, or Takoma Park, MD.

Nihilism is of course the enemy of liberal capitalism. I’d also point out that nihilism is the enemy of a heckuva lot more than just liberal capitalism. It threatens about everything and has since long before Irving Kristol was breakdancing in Alcove 1. It’s nihilism after all. So I’m all in favor of worrying about nihilism.

Kristol writes: “Only liberal capitalism doesn't see nihilism as an enemy, but rather as just another splendid business opportunity.” This is classic Kristol, and it’s a funny line. But the cynicism isn’t helpful (see Michael Novak’s extraordinary Business as a Calling for the antidote to it). It’s also largely untrue; and the institutions that sustain liberal capitalism--the rule of law, property rights, etc.--stand athwart nihilism yelling… well you know the rest.

Under our system of liberal capitalism can you make a buck off vice? Absolutely. Do I defend this? No. The problem for the critics of liberal or dynamic capitalism is it’s possible to make a buck off of vice under every economic system known to man. So this particular criticism of liberal capitalism, for me anyway, doesn’t stick. In particular I’d direct attention to Ben Friedman’s new book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. Economic growth has some serious moral consequences--frequently they are pretty good ones. Economic stagnation has moral consequences, too, and a lot of times they aren’t pretty. Discerning nihilists know which they prefer.

Of course Rod is right, without God all things are permitted, so why not take what we can get? As to the journalist's point on Catholics, this point also is a good one. We live in an a la carte culture. With religion as with everything else we feel we have the right to pick and choose "what works for us"--which generally means what makes us comfortable with our lazy, self-indulgent selves. Sadly, Catholics for decades have been masters at religious consumerism, taking a bit of the Catechism here, a bit there, and not much of the rest. And this goes for the right as well as the left.

John Paul II came in for a great deal of criticism from Novak and others for daring to point out that capitalism can be a dehumanizing trap, just like socialism. Like any other ideology--that is, false reality with which we try to force people to act in accordance--capitalism, when taken as an end rather than a means (economic freedom) that is necessary for the real end of a good life, leads us to forget important parts of our real selves as we pursue false goods. This is why so many traditional conservatives feel the need to combat the false dichotomy of capitalism/socialism. But no matter how often we do, every kind of restraint we talk about on the cult of efficiency is presented as a government program to take away people's freedom. We're talking about active neighborhood groups, involved families, churches that take part in public life, towns that actually mean something and act like it. That ain't socialism. And it isn't socialistic to point out that someone who claims to be religious yet treats other people in a rotten, selfish manner, be they that person's family, employees, or strangers, is failing to live up to the standards he claims for his own.

All of us need to look in the mirror more often and ask whether we are treating other specific people as we should.

Now here's the real dilemma: don't crunchy cons have to take our culture a la carte as well? It seems to me te answer is "yes." We have to be consistent according to a higher standard, one that only sometimes approves of the habits and traditions currently fashionable. (By the way, Mitch, Burke would agree, and I wouldn't call that a recipe for stasis.)

Gentlemen! It is true that the glorious past, so much more wondrous and traditional than the horrific and porn-drenched present, featured many three-volume works. But must each entry on this blog be three volumes in length? Brevity! Brevity! Rod's book is delightfully conversational. Emulate it, or risk merciless teasing!

By the way, to respond to Ross way down below, Christopher Lasch did not write the malaise speech. Patrick Caddell, Carter's pollster and trusted advisor, helped craft it and was much influenced by Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, which seems to be how the rumor got started (and was how Lasch got invited to the White House). In fact, Lasch blasts Carter's speech in The Minimal Self for its preachy moralism; he insists that what Carter should have done was to suggest concrete ways in which economic policy could be redirected so that work could be again made more meaningful than the industrial economy had rendered it. Lasch didn't think the American people had somehow gotten more selfish: he thought they had been forced into accepting a profoundly anti-democratic set of economic and social ideas that alienated them from their work, not to mention their own children. Something like that.

Now, this one comes from a frustrated colleague here at ISI with a bad Walker Percy addiction:

The conversation is lacking a crucial element and that is the Percy existentialist factor of course. The root desire of the alienated, free-falling west to flee to the fields and be "authentic" and "placed." Reducing this discussion to materialism and economic cause and effect is buying into the Marxist dialectic. It's a lie and a damned one. From the blog: "At what point does the free market need to be reined in for the sake of the common good" or "isn't it telling and ironic that the people espousing simple living are typing away at computers and posting on a Blog. Ha Ha!" Get thee behind me Satan. These are not real questions. Here's a real question: Why does a family man with all his environmental, social, and biological needs fight suicidal thoughts and an addiction to on-line porn? Why does the same man after fleeing suburbia to the Ozarks with his family to eek out a living as a subsistence homesteader wake up early smiling and praising the Divine?

A distinguished journalist who reads this blog writes:

From the perspective of a non-conservative, from the 'other shore,' as Eugene Genovese used to call it, it does seem to me that the real issue is where religious faith enters into all this. If, for example, conservatives are to view John Paul II as one of their own, as most do, I think, then the critique of capitalism (and, indeed, of pre-emptive war) becomes unavoidable. My sense, though, is that many of today's Catholic conservatives treat their Church as if they could pick and choose from its tenets (that liberals do this is obvious, and, if anything, even more true)---i.e. pro-life yes, anti-war no, etc..

My question, again as a liberal and, of course, as an atheist, is whether you really hope to be able to counter what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world? Or do you think of your action in what terms of what might be called without hyperbole a 'saving remnant?'

I told the writer in a personal response that it might reveal nothing more than the limit of my imagination, but I can’t see most people restraining themselves, generally speaking, from what’s on offer in the current marketplace for a higher good absent the force of religious commitment--or at least a commitment to transcendental moral principles.

Geraghty accuses me of goalpost shifting. Here is the original quote, in full context (which Jim does not provide):

So if we want to talk about developing real virtue and a life nourished on more than bread alone, we need to stop and critically examine our own desire and the real meaning of economic necessity. I would suggest that moving far away from one’s kin is virtually never a true economic necessity and almost always rooted in selfish desire. Consider the purposes behind the Benedictine “vow of stability,” described this way:

The vow of stability . . . becomes the guarantee of success and permanence. It is only another example of the family idea that pervaded the entire Rule, by means of which the members of the community are bound together by a family tie, and each takes upon himself the obligation of persevering in his monastery until death, unless sent elsewhere by his superiors. It secures to the community as a whole, and to every member of it individually, a share in all the fruits that may arise from the labours of each monk, and it gives to each of them that strength and vitality which necessarily result from being one of a united family, all bound in a similar way and all pursuing the same end. Thus, whatever the monk does, he does it not as an independent individual but as part of a larger organization, and the community itself thus becomes one united whole rather than a mere agglomeration of independent members.

I am not suggesting that everyone must become Benedictine and swear to the Rule. But there is wisdom here for all.

What I am trying to articulate is the problem of endless desire; a need for constant movement and the perpetual postponement of satisfaction or end of desire due to a fear of actually living in the human condition (or in Purgatory, as Eliot puts it). Yes, I think if we make an honest analysis, we can say that this is the driving spiritual force behind most acts in our liberalized late modern society. And it simply will not do to ignore its tendency to destroy any kind of sustained social order.

All it took was the suggestion that people ought to consider their extended families, their hometowns, and the loyalty owed to their formative “little platoons” before they consider themselves and their need for upward mobility in deciding where to live to get me branded as “stunningly obnoxious” by an NR regular and accused of promoting a crunchy Taliban which was roundly dismissed.

Geraghty goes ahead and characterizes my suggestion that daycare is a bad and decidedly unconservative institution this way: "Hi there. I'm Caleb Stagell [sic], and I know what's best for you and your family." Yuk-yuk. Good one Jim. And what makes this particularly banal piece of mockery effective is the broadly accepted notion, by left-liberals and right-liberals alike, that anyone who wants to "tell me what to do" is a Puritan rogue. Conservatives are used to getting such treatment from liberals, but I wonder if it doesn't go a long way towards confirming Rod's thesis to find it here. This is a form of the soft "censorship" that Rod was talking about. Any intrusion into or critique of real life decisions people make is out of bounds as a matter of course. It used to be that taking conservatism seriously required talking and thinking about these things. But liberal-conservatives want "family" and “loyalty” and “duty” to be pious puffs of smoke. Good for a few votes in flyover country and then quick! hoist up the no-social-judgment zone around their "private lives." Can’t you hear the echoes of the gay rights and abortion lobbies in Geraghty’s remarks.

So I’ll put the question to Jim and any other “conservative” very directly: Are you willing to state that “with a few exceptions, anyone who would place an infant in daycare is a negligent parent and a negligent citizen”? Let’s put some cards on the table.

I've been a bit dilatory in posting some of the responses I've received from readers of this discussion. This one comes from a political theory prof who is one of our authors:

Dreher's conception of virtue is not extraordinary enough. He makes his life seem too easy, despite his proclamations about homeschooling requiring total devotion and his sarcrifices on behalf of the agrarian lifestyle and animals getting to live their lives as animals (which is actually not a bad point, although one that probably can't be sustained in our time). His sacrifices don't seem so great, nor does his model life seem that interesting. At the end of the day, his book is somewhat "white bread," to use an accusation he leveled. All "holistic" -- almost Buddhist, really -- accounts such as his are lacking in their understanding of manliness. He and the crunchy cons ought to take a look at Harvey Mansfield's genuinely strange, deep, and really funny book.

Greetings; have followed the good discussion here off an on. It seems to me that perhaps Jonah, like John Podhoretz, is perhaps rather surprised at seeing some of the wine of the Old Right being poured into new wineskins. (Jonah can correct me if I'm wrong at his being surprised by this.) It is not supposed to be possible to be an American traditionalist (and I think that, at its best, that is what Rod's book is trying to get at). Indeed, traditionalists like Kirk have been charged with being quite un-American in the dead-trees version of this magazine at least twice (once by Charles Kesler, more recently by David Frum).

Traditionalism, fortunately, is not reducible to or coterminous with certain odious prejudices (anti-Semitism, racism), traitorous or plain silly monarchism, or annoying Anglophilia. It actually arises, in our time, as a very human and understandable reaction to the loss of various human goods associated with community, family, and place--goods such as, say, stability, the connection of the generations with one another, the presence of orienting authoritative traditions in our lives, etc.

Its translation into a political or social program ought always to be open to debate (including debate over whether such is even desirable), but it is the special role of traditionalists to call attention to this loss and its significant consequences; progressives of either the right or left do not wish to concede that anything of true consequence can ever really be lost as liberal modernity marches on: otherwise that march wouldn't be real progress!

My own opinion is that the inchoate movement Rod describes in his book is one among several signals that we may be entering a traditionalist moment in American life (that "moment" will be given even more energy by the biotech challenges we're going to have to face); neoconservatism, on the other hand, might be headed for hard times--at least intellectually.

Hey north Texas CC blog readers, want to come hear a talk by the author of a book the New York Sun calls in today's edition "a clarion call for conservatives who have come to realize that the most important things in life cannot be found either in politics or the marketplace, and that what passes for political discourse is largely empty of meaning"? A book that the Wall Street Journal praises as "a reminder of the enduring tension on the right between those for whom the highest social good is freedom--the emancipation of the self from statist restraint and oppressive custom--and those for whom the highest social good is virtue: the formation of character, the cultivation of the soul?" One cited by Brian C. Anderson, writing in the new issue of National Review, as "a marvelous book: thoughtful, deeply personal, funny, energetically written — even un-put-downable"?

Of course you do. Come out to hear Your Faithful Servant talk and give a reading tonight at 7pm at the Borders store, corner of Preston and Royal. C-SPAN is going to be there recording the thing for Book TV, I'm told by my publisher. I'll be the funny-looking dude in the worn-out Birkenstocks. Mitch’ll be there too, shaming me with his impeccable dapperness.

Reader Jason from the Univ. of Florida writes:

I think the Weston A. Price Foundation, which you mention in your book, has a good position on technology. They believe that, “modern technology should be harnessed as a servant to the wise and nurturing traditions of our ancestors rather than used as a force destructive to the environment and human health; and that science and knowledge can validate those traditions.” They would argue that modern technology can be used to create fake foods, e.g. soy “cheese”, or it can be used to bring real foods to consumers fresher and safer than was ever possible before modern technology existed. Likewise, we can choose between using the Internet to gamble and view pornography or to share ideas and have meaningful discussions about political philosophy.

Hey, Nick Schulz is in the house! Welcome, Nick. Great that you have joined us. I’d love to know what you think of the argument made by Irving Kristol in those posts I put up earlier this morning. To refresh, he says that a capitalism that is not explicitly moral, and protective of the bourgeois virtues, is self-destructive in the long term--and that libertarianism offers no solid moral basis for denying the primacy of free choice. What’s your take on Kristol’s point?

I’m not sure where I’d be classified. Surely I exhibit some of the tropes if not full-blown sensibilities of Crunchy Conservatism: I’m typing in my Birkenstocks right now, work from home a lot, I live in Rachel Carson’s old nabe, went to the school where intellectual Southern Agrarianism has its deepest roots, and consider myself an environmentalist; but I am also (perhaps because of this?) enthusiastically pro-technology, pro-growth and pro-markets and think that Carterism is bad for the environment (see Berkeley’s Jack Hollander for more on why this is so).

I keep hearing a lot on this blog about the importance of the permanent things--a quick scan reveals about a dozen recent references. And certainly the defense of permanent things goes back a long way. I just got back from a Liberty Fund conference with readings that focused on luxury, personal responsibility and freedom; concerns over the alleged corrosive effect of commercial society predate Adam Smith.

I have a rough notion of what those permanent things are--family, faith, community, goodness, etc. Lord knows I’ve read for years the writings of conservatives and others about the importance of permanent things and their demands. And I like to think I care deeply about them and that it animates my support for technology and growth.

To that end I don’t see how technology, growth and markets are the threat to the permanent things that many here claim. They threaten all sorts of things--many of which should be threatened such as deeply dehumanizing poverty. But the threats to the permanent things have existed long before mass commercial society. After all, Christ threw the money changers out of the temple (and economic growth rates at that time, and for the next thousand years, were roughly… zero). The threats, such as they are, still exist and will always be with us. And it’s unclear that the threats posed by, say, the last 250 years of technological and economic change are in some categorical way more worrisome than the threats--most of which are found in human nature and the human heart--that have always existed.

I've got to run out for a while and I only just got back from walking with Cosmo. So very quickly: I'm kind of flummoxed by this refrain about Day vs. Kissinger. I don't want to comment on Day too much, not knowing enough. But Kissinger is hardly a hero among post-Reagan conservatives and I really don't know anybody who would defend him as such. I know WFB is friends with the guy. But Kissinger was a realist who practiced a largely amoral foreign policy. It seems to me there are more interesting pairings to be made.

From today’s New York Sun:

“Crunchy Cons has jump-started a serious conversation among young conservatives who are discovering, once again, that happiness lies not in Mammon or power but in brightening the corner where you are.”

One blogger's take:

The issue is not what any particular theorist says in defense of the free market but the practical effect an unduly positive and uncritical view of the market and its effects has on the way all Americans, but particularly conservative Americans who should know better, live. Rod's book is an account of the habits of people, habits formed in reaction to the superficiality and ugliness of the world of disposable and transient goods that modern Americans have made an unduly large part of their life. Likewise, what he is critiquing are the habits of "mainstream" conservatives. That's what has really agitated Goldberg--it's almost as if conservative ideas might mean something for how we should live, and that the "mainstream" conservatives have managed to get it, well, basically wrong. It isn't that there is only one precise lifestyle for conservatives, but that conservatives, if they took their own ideas seriously, really should live in a broadly defined way that is not at war with creation, their own nature or their natural affinities. A materialistic lifestyle, whether lived by fine, church-going folk or not, is a life lived in conflict with those three things. Stated broadly, lots of conservatives will shout their agreement. Yes, don't be at war with creation--that's a crazy, leftist thing to do! But do they follow up on that agreement in their own way of life? Many don't, and that's Rod's point. Goldberg can talk about stolen bases until the Kingdom comes, and he won't be able to evade this reality.

The conservatism of stasis, of "let's-keep-things-as-they-are," is superficially appealing to those of us with "crunchy" leanings, but ultimately leads only to the grave.

Richard Weaver made a similar criticism of Edmund Burke in The Ethics of Rhetoric, which is not as popular as, but is a more important work, if you ask me, than Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver contrasts Burke’s “arguments from circumstance” with Lincoln’s “arguments from definition” to make the case that Lincoln was the more conservative of the two. Indeed, Weaver seems to doubt that Burke should be called a conservative at all, much less be seen as the “father” of conservatism. Weaver maintains, like Ross, that a “conservatism of stasis” cannot prevail against an adversary culture, because it cedes the framing of the debate to its enemies.

Most political/economic structures do not have as their aim the death of the soul. So what we’re talking about here, the objective parameter Crunchy Cons are using to measure systems, etc., is Atheism, whether formal or material. That’s what most of us oppose. That’s our criterion for judgement.

Caleb has cited Whittaker Chambers twice. I was shocked when I actually read Witness to learn how deeply Christian Chambers was, that he was a Quaker (although he wasn’t a pacifist) and that he didn’t take on the world to defend Capitalism, but to oppose atheism, in whatever form it took. Therefore, if free market capitalism, in its actually existing form, imposes or promotes atheism, then people of faith will oppose it. It’s about the right ordering of priorities.

No, not “barred.” How many times do I have to say that I don’t think there is any active censorship of right-wing critiques of capitalism? It simply seems to me that there is a noticeable lack of interest of same among leading conservatives today. It’s not like I’ve been banging the drum; it didn’t occur to me to start thinking about any of this until I had children of my own, and was forced to think more deeply about the kind of society in which I was raising them. I too was very late to the table on this. A conservative professor e-mailed me over the weekend and said that he found it odd that during the Cold War, you could routinely find thoughtful critiques of capitalism on the Right, among supporters of the market, but now that liberal democracy and capitalism have triumphed, for some reason capitalism is something we’re all “for,” and that’s about as far as the conservative commentariat want to take it. True?

Jonah, fair enough. Here are just a few avoided questions:

Who was the truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger?

Is it stunningly obnoxious and anathema to conservatism to suggest that people ought to “look homeward” when deciding where to live?

Do you agree that the post WWII economy of creative destruction made common cause with the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movements to create the political/economic/cultural order we now inhabit? What is the appropriate conservative response?

Would you be satisfied with Rod’s critique if he substituted “mainstream Republican” for “mainstream conservative”?

Feel free to replace "censored" with "barred." My point remains the same. It's weird that you think conservative voices critical of capitalism can't find a home on the right. And that was the gist of your post.

Jonah: Also, your assumption that "Mainstream conservatism" censors anti-capitalist critiques is just plain weird.

Me: Who said “censored”? I don’t think there is at all a censoring of critiques of capitalism among the mainstream organs of conservative opinion. To clarify my statement, it’s probably true that Irving Kristol and Russell Kirk, were he still alive, wouldn’t have much trouble getting whatever they wanted to say into print somewhere, if only on the strength of their considerable reputations. But it’s worth asking how welcome those contemporary conservative thinkers who wish to take up the themes and questions engaged by writers like Kirk (and Kristol in that essay I talked about earlier) would be on the Right today.

Censorship? I don’t see that. I think rather that there is a lack of interest in critiques of capitalism among contemporary conservative essayists who have a megaphone in the public square. Disinterest is not the same thing as censorship. I’m grateful to NR for providing a forum for this discussion, and I think (or rather, I hope) that we on the Right will take up themes of culture and capitalism. David Brooks’ column a couple of weeks back in which he said that we are now discovering that culture matters to democracy more than we thought it did.

I’ve blogged before about a recent trip I took to Dubai, and about how the advent of a gazillion satellite cable channels in the Arab Muslim world is shaking those societies up. I spoke while there to an Arab Muslim media professional living in Britain, who said that she and her husband are scared of losing their children to the appeals of Islamic fundamentalists, but they are also alienated from the hypersexualized and aggressive secular culture that’s mainstream in their country (and about which Theodore Dalrymple has written so bracingly). This woman, and other moderate Arab Muslims I talked to while there, said that the masses in the Arab world see Western freedom as moral (especially sexual) anarchy, and are running straight to the arms of the radicals. Surely we on the Right, as proponents of capitalism and the open society, have to have something to say to this Muslim mother in London. I’m living in a comparatively better situation than she is, raising my kids in Dallas, Texas, USA. But I certainly understand her concern, because I share it.

Caleb - Sorry if I sounded overly snarky in response to your charity. Such was not my intent. However, I find the charge that I'm the one muddying the waters somewhat baffling. The categories and criteria established by Crunchy Conservatism are one vast enterprise in water-muddying. I see my effort as trying to clarify those waters.

I have absolutely no problem with the assertion that liberalism -- in the classical or libertarian sense -- can be corrosive to many important things. This is a point I've made in my own writing countless times (I can dig up the citations if necessary). But as Ross notes in his excellent post on conservative stasis below, that same liberalism often results in the important things being strengthened rather than weakened. In a chaotic world families become more important, not less. Some people realize this, and benefit from the realization. Others don't and suffer for it. And most of us come up with their own happy balance between the demands of modern society and the demands of permanent things.

Indeed, this truism is proved by the fact that Rod felt the need to write this book in the first place. Is it crazy to imagine that in a more European culture with all of the flab that comes with French-style bourgeois entitlements, that Rod might not have hunkered down with his family and come to appreciate community more?

Now, since everyone in here keeps feeling the need to say "I'm not a socialist" I understand that not all of the crunchies want to abandon the free market. But at some point what does all of this "capitalism sucks" talk matter if it doesn't translate itself into an agenda. And, when it comes to public policy proposals crunchy conservatism may prove to have something of a glass jaw.

Mankind will learn at the school of example and none other, says Edmund Burke. Well, where is the example of a crunchy system worth emulating?

Also, Rod's hard dichtomy between "materialist" libertarianism and earthy and soulful conservatism muddies the waters because as Angelo notes, even many of the champions of liberal economics do not ground their arguments in materialism. Even Charles Murray's What It Means To Be A Libertarian, an outstanding book, by the way, works on the assumption that it is not capitalism but anti-capitalist schemes which erode families and communities. It is simply taken as a given in here that libertarianism is not only soulless but soul-killing. It is that unproven assertion which muddies the waters most. After all, this country was created in the forge of classical liberalism and all of the nostalgia in here is aimed at a past when America still held to liberal values.

Jonah, well, I was trying to make a charitable point, and in that vein, I’ll leave questions of honesty out of it. However, I think you are blurring terms and avoiding questions in order to muddy the waters and elude the heart of the critique. If we substituted “mainstream Republican” for “mainstream conservative” would that mollify you? If so, I suppose you would have to then concede that the majority of Republicans aren’t conservatives, and maybe that concession would satisfy Rod. Moreover, the point is less the number of articles defending the free market (which, incidentally, I am not interested in replacing with socialism, as Bruce points out) as it is that conservatives can pay lip service to the permanent things all they want but when theyincreasingly fail to defend them against the encroachments of markets and other solvents of modernity (and it is a failure of imagination to imagine that every form of defense must entail action in Washington D.C.), true colors are revealed. All it took was the suggestion that people ought to consider their extended families, their hometowns, and the loyalty owed to their formative “little platoons” before they consider themselves and their need for upward mobility in deciding where to live to get me branded as “stunningly obnoxious” by an NR regular and accused of promoting a crunchy Taliban which was roundly dismissed.

Jonah--you’re right, Michael Novak is not a materialist, but many CrunchyCons agree with Prof. David Schindler’s longstanding critique of Novak, Neuhaus, etc., which says that despite good intentions, the political philosophy of Catholic ‘Neocons’ inevitably leads to materialism. The book Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny, edited by Schindler and the libertarian Doug Bandow, contains essays addressing this question from a variety of perspectives. Here is Schindler on this subject: (the selection begins with his statement about hope, since this critique can easily--and wrongly--be interpreted as anti-American):

“Grounds for hope? Americans are religiously sincere and morally generous. This country has a tremendous energy and abundance of good will. In the light of God's infinite mercy, that's always a good reason to hope.

My fear is that we don't see the subtlety of how -- as the pope says in Evangelium Vitae -- democracy can invert into totalitarianism. We have the illusion that we're free because no one tells us what to do. We have political freedom. But at the same time, a theological and philosophical set of assumptions informs our freedom, of which we're unconscious. A logic or "ontologic" of selfishness undermines our moral intention of generosity. We don't have the requisite worldview that would help us address abortion or the more general, current threat to the family.

Can we unmask the assumptions of our culture and deal with them in a way that will free the latent generosity of the culture? Or will those hidden assumptions overcome our generosity? This is the real battle, both globally and in America. It calls for a new effort of evangelization -- which consists, above all, in first getting clear about the ideas in Evangelium Vitae; understanding the logic of self-centeredness in a post-Enlightenment liberal culture. Alasdair McIntyre has a great line: that all debates in America are finally among radical liberals, liberal liberals and conservative liberals. That's how I would sum up. If we don't come to terms with liberalism.

But liberalism in what sense? Quite a few people who would describe themselves as conservative or neoconservative are, in fact, liberal . . .

That's the point: They're the conservative wing of liberalism. And in a sense, they wouldn't even deny that, insofar as their project is to show that a benign reading of American liberal tradition is harmonious with Catholicism. That's what I'm challenging. Their approach doesn't go to the roots of our [cultural and spiritual] problem, as identified in this pontificate and in the work of theologians like De Lubac and Balthasar.[Contemporary U.S. culture is rooted in] self-centeredness. A false sense of autonomy centered in the self; an incomplete conception of rights. So we need to reinstate a right relation to God on all levels -- not only at the level of intention, but at the level of the logic of our culture. Our relation to God has to inform not only our will, but how we think and how we construct our institutions.”

Rod - I agree that faith in the market is largely settled on the right. And a good thing too. However, you're still stealing bases. Faith in the market is not synonymous with faith in materialism. Nor is it synonymous with the idea that the market is the answer to every problem. The fight over embryonic stem cell research, the rejection of "organ markets" and the like is proof enough of that.

Also, your assumption that "Mainstream conservatism" censors anti-capitalist critiques is just plain weird. National Review -- which you used to work for and your book touts as the flagship journal of the right -- is hosting this blog! The piece Caleb linked to by Fred Ikle was a cover story for National Review at the dawn of the much more libertarian Gingrich "revolution." If you think Irving Kristol couldn't get published today anywhere on the right about any topic he chooses (including in the Wall Street Journal), I think you're crazy. Ditto Russell Kirk. Certainly the anti-free trade The American Conservative would have no problem with an anti-free market argument, though it wouldn't publish Kristol -- but, as we all know, their objection would't be based on a jealous defense of the free market.

I think the Crunchies are too desperate to see yourselves as rebels against a regime that does not oppress you.

Jonah, might I suggest that the reason you don’t read defenses of free-market economics in conservative journals nowadays is because there are no serious challenges to free-market economics on the world stage, save for the rock-throwing anti-globalist mobs? The market has triumphed; we are all capitalists now. I think a better measure of how the market mentality has conquered mainstream conservatism is the lack of articles from the Right critiquing capitalism and its discontents. I wonder how easy it would be for Irving Kristol to publish and updated version of “Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism” in conservative journals today, even though it ought to be a matter of concerned intellectual inquiry how we preserve conservative social values in the face of an economic order that thrives on getting people to want what they don’t need and spend what they don’t have to gratify desires that they ought prudently to delay. I wonder how easy it would be for Kirk, were he alive, to publish a serious conservative critique of free-market capitalism in a major journal of the Right today.

For the record, Russell Kirk made an appearance in Jonah's September 2000 ode to Budweiser in National Review on Dead Tree (as we affectionately call it online).

I interrupt just to remind you that you should subscribe to NRODT if you don't already. Not just because you'd have known long ago why Bud is conservative but because our subscribers make talking endlessly about crunchies and everything else we do possible.

And if you want to save trees, subscribe to the digital version of the print mag.

Excellent points Ross. The link wasn’t intended as a blanket endorsement. That econmic growth measured in dollars and housing starts, etc., is not a conservative value in and of itself is the point I wanted to emphasize. Population growth (a sterile term)--or rather, fecundity and fruitfulness (the cultivation of growing things), are.

The “risks and shocks of American life” as you put it, are very much in play as a “crunchy” value in need of recovery. As I said, difficulty is one of the primary virtues of crunchiness. I fear that just as Europe attempted to smooth out the difficulties of life through a program of government socialism, American late-liberal capitalism is in the process of trying just as hard to smooth out the difficulties of life through the creation of the therapuetic managerial market-state.

Caleb writes: "The point is simply to call conservatism back to its roots from the siren song of materialist ideology, which, if Jonah and other mainstream conservatives are honest, has to be acknowledged as the predominant direction of conservative thought today."

Caleb, I don't think I'm being "dishonest" when I say I don't think "materialism" is the predominant direction of conservative thought. I think it is the predominant fixation of the folks in this blog. There's a big difference. The pro-life movement isn't materialist, is it? Moreover, saying the free market is a materialist construct steals a base. Critics of the free market say it is materialist. But, with the exception of some Randians, defenders of the free market do not ground their case in materialism. Adam Smith didn't. Friedrich Hayek didn't. Michael Novak doesn't.

I invite readers to do a little content analysis. Go to the local Barnes & Noble or the library, and look at the current issues of every conservative intellectual magazine on the stands right now. Count how many articles are defenses of free market economics (never mind "materialist" defenses of free market economics). I have the latest Weekly Standard and National Review handy and the total count is: Zero. My guess is that if you did a similar count over, say, the last five years, looking at everything from NR to Commentary to First Things and the American Conservative, you'd find a ratio of 20 to 1, with one being reflexive defenses of the free market. Obviously, this sort of method isn't perfect. But it would work against the common conviction around here and in Rod's book that the conservative movement is consumed by its idolatry of the market.

From a reader:

Jonah, Now I see your problem with the strawmen Rod keeps setting up. Mom and Pop video stores started failing when Beta-Max went out. Many more failed when the Movie companies started marketing directly to the public, and dropped their price point so that buying a video became easy and less expensive. Not to mention Blockbuster and Movie Gallery national chains moving into every town in America with a population of over 20,000. And the technology switchover to DVDs drove even more of them out of business. But we're supposed to believe that Rod is sweating the morality of patroning Netflix? Gimme a break...

And for the record, from what I've seen over the years, the most successful small independent video rental places always deal heavily in porn.

I hope I won't be accused of signing up for a "Utopia of Perpetual Growth," Caleb, if I say that the Fred Ikle piece left me cold. This, in particular:

Rapid population growth is the paramount, the most elemental anti-conservative force. It creates irresistible pressures for far flung, and usually irreversible, government interventions, allegedly to cope with all the social changes that rapid population growth has unleashed. It thus helps the radical Left to garner political support for its social-engineering schemes. It dilutes the influence of religious institutions that seek to preserve society's moral fiber. It empowers the unprincipled and the rootless to tear down vastly more civilizing traditions and riches of culture than they will ever create.

Which is why any attempt to "crunchify" American politics needs to avoid the temptation to reject the market and reject the idea of growth; it needs instead to find ways to turn market forces to conservative ends (most of the Howard Center's suggestions are excellent on this count), while doing everything possible to reform and rebuild the mediating structures that make life under capitalism livable. In particular--taking up Angelo's point about the empty culture of marketing--our schools and our churches used to serve as a counterweight to the market's tendency to promote consumerism over all else; today, whether it's mega-churches preaching a warmed-over prosperity gospel or Ivy League schools assembly-lining kids into i-banking and consulting jobs, they've more or less been co-opted. We would be in much better shape if there were more sermons about the dangers of consumption, and less academic floor space given over to recruiting fairs . . .

PS - And regarding Caleb's point about day care: See, for instance, this new study of the Canadian experience, which found that in a system of state-sponsored day care, "children are worse off in a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness . . . Our analysis also suggests that the new childcare program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships." None of which is terribly surprising to anyone here, I imagine.

I'd endorse pretty much everything being said, here. But, before we all get tossed out of the club for good, I'd like to point out, again, that none of this is to endorse any form of socialism, or to deny the importance of economic freedom. And I'd like to add this: consumerism, or more generally materialism, is a (bad) value judgment, not an integral part of any free society. Moreover, as we've seen, it actually undermines free societies, and free economies, by destroying the relationships and common values that maintain our social order. And consumerism in particular is really a form of laziness. We waste time shopping, watching TV, and playing games because it's easier than actually producing something--be it a useful product or a well-reared child.

Government may be able to help somewhat in making things better--mostly by ending policies that punish families for making virtuous choices like raising children--but the real improvement has to take place within us. When we choose to produce culture rather than consume it, to see our jobs as vocations, worthwhile in the doing only if done well, and producing something worthwhile, then perhaps we will see real improvement, in our own lives if nothing else.

One of Rod's favorite examples of someone producing culture is Robert Morris, a nineteenth century designer, author and leftie. Morris wanted a kind of socialism, so he claimed. But what he really wanted was a return to the middle ages (just read one of the books he wrote and published at his Kelmscott Press--complete with "thees and thous" and intricate woodcuts). This is too much. But a return to pride in one's work is important, and requires employers, too, to change some attitudes.

Two more pieces worth our attention: Fred Ikle's NR article "Growth Without End, Amen” and David Bosworth’s Public Interest essay “Spirit of Capitalism 2000.”

Ikle writes:

The fabulous success of conservative economic policies has seduced many in our midst into taking economic growth as the defining attribute of conservatism. These brethren now believe that conservative policies can and must make all good things in society grow, and that this good growth can and must continue indefinitely. They act as if conservative thought were nothing but the philosophy of perpetual growth.

Thirty-five years ago, Marshall McLuhan supplied a partial answer when he observed that "everyone experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, and not understanding, that influences behavior." McLuhan was primarily concerned, of course, with the shift in communications from print to the electronic media, and the statement can be seen as a brief elaboration of his catchy aphorism, "the medium is the message." But the principle applies more broadly as well. To the extent that our daily experience is at all humanly mediated-"brought to us by" human ideas, technologies, architectures-it is necessarily suffused with implicit moral values. Churches and synagogues can tell us what we should believe, continuing to teach traditional virtues, but if the grounds and rounds of daily life are calibrated differently, our behavior will begin to shift accordingly. We can continue to "talk the talk" but won't "walk the walk" as, in Hamlet's words, "that monster, custom, who doth all sense eat," silently reconfigures our daily actions.

Rod, as someone who has worked in marketing for 25 years, and co-founded a leading marketing company, I can tell you from the inside that the nihilism Kristol described is now the official ideology of our business culture. Government has little to do with it. The ideology of Consumerism is taught in our MBA programs. It’s commerce plus relativism--the “Naked Marketplace.” And since the business of America is business (especially since 1980), Consumerism now defines mainstream American life.

While Marxism squashed human subjectivity in the name of “objectivity,” today’s business culture exploits human subjectivity to deny objective reality, to sell the experience of “choice” as the path to happiness. And as the theologian William T. Cavanaugh has said, it isn’t even about the “stuff” that we buy anymore--we don’t have time to use it all (hence TV shows like “Clean Sweep”). It’s more about shopping than about buying. It’s the logical result of Cartesianism--the mind-body split. Consumerism takes place almost solely in our minds--how else could we justify buying so much more than we could ever actually use?

The system is not run by bad people--on the contrary, they/we are the nicest people who’ve ever lived (as Flannery O’Conner said, today we feel more, but see less). Today’s business environment is a very nice, humanitarian place, staffed by what Robert Reich called “Symbolic Analysts,” experts at developing, marketing and analyzing products and services based on the soft manipulation of people’s psychic needs and desires. They operate without objective parameters for judging whether a product or an advertising message will harm the “good of the person” or the social fabric of society (other than the obvious--no racism, sexism, etc.). I know--I’m one of them.

If you want to understand consumerism, pick up the The Sims, the #1 best-selling game of all time, a computer simulation that shows consumer life at its purest.

Or consider that Anheuser-Busch is developing its own TV channel--Bud TV. It will create programming for which the underlying motivation will be to sell beer. Maybe it will have its own news channel? More and more, our creative content--movies, magazines, etc--are mere vehicles for marketing. The examples are endless.

Christians and other people of faith should be the ones to address this, but as you point out, our faith has been privatized. Aside from Alasdair McIntyre, the leading exponent of this thesis is Prof. David Schindler:

“Americans are privately very religious, but then in public we all agree to subscribe to the virtues that make us good democrats and good free marketeers, so that faith becomes essentially a fragmented, private reality. In effect, we're private theists and public atheists.”

A federal judge law clerk in Florida emails me the following:

“An entire chapter of Robert Nisbet's The Present Age contains such a critique, aptly titled ‘The Cash Nexus.’”

A helpful concept in thinking about these things is the old Marxist idea--endorsed by the likes of Gertrude Himmelfarb--of the cash nexus. The cash nexus is the weakest of all social and economic bonds and is not capable of holding things together. Wherever older and tighter ties of family, friendship, caste, and community which can also facilitate economic exchanges (albeit cashless ones) are replaced by the cash nexus, society is weakened. To take one obvious example, conservative leaders and spokesmen ought to be saying loud and often that with a few exceptions, anyone who would place an infant in daycare is a negligent parent and a negligent citizen. A few will, but most won’t for fear of offending too many constituents and of all the Jim Geraghty’s of the world calling them a killjoy.

To continue:

Kristol writes that for many decades, critics have been warning that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional morality, and when that capital was used up, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy in question.

The elites couldn't bring themselves to believe that religion was that important to the social order. Writes Kristol: "I believe it is becoming clearer every day that even those who thought they were content with a religion that was a private affair are themselves discovering that such a religion is existentially unsatisfactory."

Now, here is the key part of the essay:

While many critics predicted a dissolution of this society under certain stresses and strains, none predicted -- none could have predicted -- the blithe and mindless self-destruction of bourgeois society which we are witnessing today. The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism. Only liberal captialism doesn't see nihilism as an enemy, but rather as just another splendid business opportunity.

[Milton Friedman] further seems to assume that these dynamics cannot, in the nature of things, be self-destructive -- that "self-realization" in a free society can only lead to the creation of a self that is compatible with such a society. ...In the end, you can maintain the belief that private vices, freely exercised, will lead to public benefits only if you are further persuaded that human nature can never be utterly corrupted by these vices, but rather will always transcend them. The idea of bourgeois virtue has been eliminated from Friedman's conception of bourgeois society, and has been replaced by the idea of individual liberty. The assumption is that, in "the nature of things," the latter will certainly lead to the former. There is much hidden metaphysics here, and of a dubious kind.

Bear with me, ye miserable worms, this is long but good. It's from a 1973 Irving Kristol essay called "Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism," which originally appeared in The Public Interest, and can now be read in Kristol's collection "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea." I am grateful to Baylor's Tom Hibbs for bringing it to my attention.

In the piece, Kristol begins by praising Hayek and Friedman and their capitalist cohorts for demolishing the idea that state socialism is a workable economic model. But he then asks: why is it that socialism has been discredited, but capitalism has not been vindicated? By which he means, why are people living under capitalism still more or less discontent, despite the demonstrable superiority of their economic system? Kristol says it's easy to understand for anybody but an economist.

The answer has to do with the fact that man has a soul, and cannot live by bread alone. All men want to be happy, but economists make the mistake of thinking that happiness consists solely in material satisfaction. Expanding consumer choice is a great thing, but it cannot satisfy the spiritual longing in human nature. Kristol calls the belief that there is no ultimate, transcendent, authoritative information available about the good life or the nature of human happiness, and the view that follows, holding that happiness is therefore revealed by the choices people make in a free market, "not merely the keystone of modern economic thought; it is also the keystone of modern, liberal, secular society itself. This belief is so deeply ingrained in us that we are inclined to explain any deviation from it as perverse and pathological. Yet it is a fact that for several millenia, until the advent of modernity, people did not believe any such thing and would, indeed, have found such a belief to be itself shockingly pathological and perverse."

Kristol then says that if one believes that man's spiritual life "is infinitely more important than his trivial and transient adventures in the marketplace, then you may tolerate a free market for practical reasons, within narrow limits, but you certainly will have no compunctions about orverriding it if you think the free market is interfering with more important things."

Interestingly, Kristol was defending bourgeois capitalism from the assault from the New Left, for which he had little or no respect. But he recognized that the inadequacies of the bourgeois capitalist order were real, and had been foreseen much earlier by Catholic critics and others at the birth of modernity, who predicted that the privatization of religious faith and the secularization of society would lead to a diminution of faith and a loss of the consolations of religion in the face of suffering and death. "This unquestionably has happened," writes Kristol, "and with significant consequences." Among them: the opening up of an unfillable hole in the souls of men living under the secular materialist order, a chasm of spiritual need that material society cannot hope to fill, and the loss of a stable moral basis for political order.

When looking for ways to understand and reign in economic structures which are profoundly hostile to the permanent things, we ought not ignore the treasure trove of resources provided by Allan Carlson and The Howard Center. The archives of their Family in America and their News Research newsletters are invaluable. Here’s a snippet picked out nearly at random:

“Modernity” tore through this settled way of life. The family household ceased to be the center of productive labor. Centralized factories, warehouses, and offices displaced home workshops, gardens, and storehouses. Cash exchanges pushed aside the altruistic exchanges of the family. Mothers, fathers, and children alike were pulled out of their homes into the wage laborer ranks. Family bonds, once the source of economic strength, now stood more as obstructions to the efficient allocation of labor. The individual, unencumbered and alone, was the new ideal worker.

The status of marriage changed. In the pre-industrial order, husbands and wives had specialized in their labor according to their respective strengths and skills, so that their small family enterprises might succeed. This natural complementarity reinforced their need for each other, uniting the sexual and the economic functions and giving real strength to marriage. Industrial managers, in contrast, preferred the androgynous individual, sexless, interchangeable. In this new order, men and women needed each other less than before. As an institution, marriage weakened.

The status of children also changed. In an agrarian and artisan economy, children — even small ones — were economic assets, parts of small family enterprises. Accordingly, fertility on the family farm and in the artisan’s shop tended to be high. However, in the new order, children were either pulled away into an early — and sometimes dangerous — economic independence or the children became liabilities, left at home by working parents to fend for themselves. Fertility plummeted, as actual or potential parents avoided taking on these new little burdens. Indeed, two leading analysts of modern fertility decline, Kingsley Davis writing in 1937 and John C. Caldwell writing in 2003, have both concluded that “the family is not indefinitely adaptable to modern society, and this explains the declining birth rate.”[6] Indeed, no developed nation today can claim even replacement level fertility. In many lands, ranging from Russia to Italy to Singapore, fertility levels are perilously low, children are disappearing, threatening even national survival.

Blogging Kills.

Bruce, no dewy-eyed utopianism here. The Romantics ruined a good word. I don’t think we disagree.

February 27, 2006

Two pieces from yesterday’s New York Times Magazine speak directly to our themes of conservatism, consumer choice and the free society.

1. Christopher Caldwell writes that conservatives are all for family values--but not if the family is a more traditional, sprawling arrangement, such as those of extended Mexican families crowding into northern Virginia. Is there conservative hypocrisy here?

2. This multiple-bylined piece explores how upper middle class folks see wider choice, consumer and otherwise, as liberating, but working-class folks prefer stability. Freedom for, versus freedom from.

Jason from the University of Florida (who wants to start a book club to discuss Crunchy Cons--write me if you’re interested, and I’ll pass it along to him) asks:

I would be interested in seeing the CC blog discuss how the market could practically be reined in. Is your view that reining in the market is mostly about consumers making better decisions in how they spend their money? Or are you suggesting some other method, perhaps government intervention or incentives?

Rod neglected to mention that my version of Starkadder’s venerable homily is set to the tune of “I Am the Bread of Life”. As conservative as the music director at my parish is, however, I have yet to secure a performance of it by our choir.

Mitch: “This book is published by a company whose name modesty prevents me from mentioning.”

Me: All together now, let’s sing the Muncyco jingle…

Actually, Dallas area readers might want to come out on Tuesday night at 7 and meet Spence Publishing’s Boy Wonder and me at the Borders at Preston/Royal. Here’s info about the event. I’ll be giving a talk about Crunchy Cons, answering questions and signing books--and the whole thing will be recorded by C-SPAN for Book TV. Additionally, as we crunchy cons are a dour, humorless bunch, Mitch will warm up the crowd with his stirring rendition of stump evangelist Amos Starkadder’s stirring Sunday homily from “Cold Comfort Farm”:

Ye miserable, crawlin' worms. Are ye here again then? Have ye come like Nimshi, son of Rehoboam, secretly out of your doomed houses, to hear what's comin' to ye? Have ye come, old and young, sick and well, matrons and virgins, if there be any virgins amongst you, which is not likely, the world being in the wicked state that it is. Have ye come to hear me tell you of the great, crimson, licking flames of hell fire? Aye! You've come, dozens of ye. Like rats to the granary, like field mice when it's harvest home. And what good will it do ye? You're all damned! Damned! Do you ever stop to think what that word means? No, you don't. It means endless, horrifying torment! It means your poor, sinful bodies stretched out on red-hot gridirons, in the nethermost, fiery pit of hell and those demons mocking ye while they waves cooling jellies in front of ye. You know what it's like when you burn your hand, taking a cake out of the oven, or lighting one of them godless cigarettes? And it stings with a fearful pain, aye? And you run to clap a bit of butter on it to take the pain away, aye? Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!

A Florida reader writes:

I came across a rather depressing story from Gainesville, Florida, today that kind of speaks to Jonah's objection that no one is actually supporting the union of the capitalist market and sexual licentiousness. The story is about the struggle many small towns in the middle of Florida are having to keep sexually oriented businesses out of their very small towns. The article quotes pastors and citizens who are concerned about these businesses that want to open in their towns, while the lawyers (of course!) claim that the Constitution protects their right to open such businesses even where they aren't welcome. One small town ended up paying one of these smut-peddlers a considerable amount to keep him out of their town. Presumably the cheap land in these rural areas can add to the profit margin of the SOBs, and their customers are willing to drive hundreds of miles to get this smut. Tampa is somewhat infamous for its SOBs, an issue I would love to see change, but I hate seeing that even in a small town (one is only 800 people), the profits of the smut-peddler are given greater protection than the values of the community.

This, to me, seems to demonstrate some of the worst excesses of capitalism and its attack on conservative values.

A (lawyer) reader writes:

A good example of your point that the free market is being twisted by specific commercial interests for the sake of "efficiency" is limited liability businesses. In general, the law imposes on those who enter into business the responsibility for any injuries they might cause. When a business incorporates, however, the owners are only liable to the extent that they have invested, not the extent that their business causes injury. The general excuse for this deviation from the common law is that it creates more efficiency and productivity because more people are willing to invest (knowing that their risk only extends to the amount of their investment). Such a system, however, raises real moral concerns. If the efficiency experts are to be believed, the owners are only willing to take part in the business because they are insulated from any liabilities that the business might incur. The obvious conclusion is that the investors believe the business is too risky otherwise. But if the business is too risky, shouldn't we wonder why we want to make it more financially attractive?

Again, Bruce makes a great point, this time on friendship. Rod’s idea that consumerism, or if I may put it this way, the misuse of leisure, threatens to undermine the very society that makes that leisure possible, is dealt with very well in Love & Economics, a book by the economist Jennifer Roback Morse. This book is published by a company whose name modesty prevents me from mentioning.

Bruce’s points are excellent. As I think about this, I wonder if the problem of “corporate capitalism” is that it posits an abstract market that is not made up of any particular people. When a developer asserts that the market “wants” his project, he’s merely speculating that if he builds it, they will come. And this speculation, then, is the justification for using government to overrun the market that is actually there.

When I lit upon the word “designed” I was thinking also of a term used by John Paul II, “structure of sin”. One can’t be a member of the mob in good conscience, for instance, because it is in its essence contrary to the common good. One could say, then, that the mob was “designed” to do something evil. The free market is not like this, and so the effect of its manipulation by the unjust must be distinguished from its function and nature.

A focus of Crunchy Cons' second chapter is the difficulty of leading a life of virtue in the grip of consumerism. Perhaps it would help to be specific about just what virtue it is that's missing? Clearly its not support for some ideological vision of what the market ought to be like, how we ought to farm, etc. These may or may not be important, but the key, I think, is friendship. Caleb mentioned Aristotle some time back, who noted that political friendship keeps the city together. Well, Aristotle wrote of several kinds of friendship, among them the friendship of utility. When I was in graduate school I was taught that Aristotle disparages this form of friendship, but he doesn't. The friendship of utility, rooted in mutual need, is what you have in a marketplace you frequent. You learn to trust the people with whom you deal (or they are run out of town) and frequent interaction leads all those involved to seek to make the interaction pleasant--we go to the extra effort of getting to know one another a bit, and find that we have more in common than we thought. It's the friendship an employer ought to have with his employee, buyer with seller, clerk with customer, and so on. And it requires that we focus on something more close to home than efficient national markets.

Over on the Red State blog, Paul J. Cella hates the term, but admires the sentiment behind crunchy conservatism. Excerpt:

I’d say that, despite the profound infelicity of its moniker, crunchy-conservatism is simply an inadequate label applied to that reaction a man feels when he drives along, say, Hwy 41 in Cobb County, Georgia, with its endless sea of grungy strip-malls and warehouse stores, and realizes the unutterable ugliness of it all. If this man be a Conservative and a Christian, understanding beauty to derive from God and feeling the press of his duty, under the charter given him by God, to care for that beauty and not obliterate it, he might, in furtive moments, find himself wondering whether the love of Mammon in this country has led us down a dark and dreary path to ruin.

Does this feeling, a sentiment guided by principle, incline a man toward collectivism? I should hope not, for by now it is plain that collectivism will simply issue in more and deeper ugliness. But it is a false dilemma to insist that to oppose state collectivism means one must embrace corporate collectivism. If it is urged, that the free enterprise system is best actualized in corporate capitalism, then it is a meager system indeed, and hardly worthy of anything but the mildest endorsement: “It’s better than socialism; that’s all I can say.”

Mitch writes:

The free market is like any other human phenomenon in being open to manipulation and abuse. But I find it hard to conclude that our “very economic structure is designed to separate” us from traditional values (emphasis mine).

Now, to be honest, I don’t have a good answer for this problem. I talk in the book about how growing up in my hometown, we had lots of mom and pop merchants who were a big part of the community. Most of those folks are gone now, swept away because they couldn’t offer what Wal-Mart and others could. Would I want to go back to a time when I had to pay more money for a more limited selection, just for the sake of supporting local businesses? I can’t honestly say that I would, even if that were possible. And yet, there is something wrong with what has replaced the small merchant, and the hole in the hearts of many downtowns. One doesn’t have to have a solution, I think, to miss what we discarded for the sake of cheaper prices and greater choice. Here’s a passage from Chapter 2:

As Alan Ehrenhalt, who wrote a book about Chicago in the 1950s, said, “The residents of [a 1950s] neighborhood weren’t hard-nosed consumers in the current sense. They had a different view of what was important in life.”

They saw their commercial relationships in terms of personal relationships with the merchants, not as an impersonal set of transactions. …[The] difference between the 1950s and today, wrote Ehrenhalt, “is to a large extent the difference between a society in which market forces challenged traditional values and a society in which they have triumphed over them.”

I imagine some of you Crunchies might move to Tom Monahan town?

In general terms I agree with Mitch. Much of what is wrong with our economy comes from the capture of government by special interests.

Unfortunately, Mitch's primary example, land development, shows the inherent problem with putting the theory of freedom into practice within society. If I can buy the land I should get to do whatever I want with it, right? We seem to be moving in that direction, but this is a very radical change from the manner in which Americans once understood it. Land use affects the neighbors--a lot, and in a variety of ways.

I'm not talking just about smoke-belching factories, here. In fact, more of those are closing than opening these days. I'm talking more than anything about good old housing subdivisions (inventions, by the way, of the post-World War II era). Today in most places any developer with the cash can buy out a cash-strapped farmer a few miles out of town, throw up some houses and make a fortune. Often he won't even have to hook up to the sewer or water lines (septic tanks and well water). Towns fight them in court, sometimes, and almost always lose. The result, of course, is gridlock, smog, higher taxes and yet more strip malls and strip mall culture.

"That's the free market" you say? What market? Markets consist of people who are buying and selling, but the people in a town about to be invaded by sprawl are left out of the transaction altogether. Now, I'm not saying we should have a vote on every new subdivision. Voting is not the answer to everything. Instead, I think it important that we look to our own history to see how we used to deal with the issue of new settlements. And we dealt with them very well, thank you. From the settlement of Massachusetts Bay through the settlement of the west we knew enough to start new towns when we wanted to settle a bunch of people in one place. Everyone understood what was involved; custom and long practice served as a guide to planning a town center with neighborhoods spreading out from it. Now we've made real towns all but illegal in most of the United States. Sorry to retort to a policy prescription, but this should change. Free markets exist within communities. It seems to me we should allow communities to form before pretending land deals are "free."

In other ways, too, the emphasis on structuring society to make mass markets work has hurt us. Again, we need to rethink what we ought to be looking at in structuring our institutions--individuals, or families and communities?

That is a delicious irony, JPod. In fact, as I write in Chapter 2 (pp. 29-30), “Besides, there’s something funny about a guy tapping out a philippic against materialism on a state-of-the-art laptop computer.” I don’t think any of us here reject technology out of hand. What we--or at least I--reject is the largely uncritical view of technology that Americans have. Technology is not the root of all evil. What we have to be aware of, though, is how we use that technology, and whether or not it brings us closer to or drives us farther from the ideal of virtue. We all know the myriad ways the Internet, for example, is destructive of virtue. But it is also the case that it allows men and women of conservative sensibilities to meet each other, and form communities, even marriage bonds. The Internet is allowing more and more people to work from home, and be more available to their spouses and children. It’s allowing for home businesses too. I can foresee it leading to the repopulation of small towns by people who don’t have to be in the city or the suburbs for the things they need.

For example, one of the reasons I’ve always liked living in cities has been the availability of eclectic films, either at art cinemas or good video stores. And good bookstores too. Nowadays, thanks to Amazon and Netflix, you can live anywhere and have an incomparable film and book library available to you. On the other hand, what happens to the mom and pop bookstore and video shop? So yes, there are ambiguities, but it would be a mistake to say crunchy cons are against technology per se, as distinct from the uses to which it is put.

The free market [is] an imperfect but just and effective means to the good society. When the market harms the good society, it should be reined in.

The way Rod has stated this, one can’t really disagree. But I think some distinctions are in order. We’ve had some debate about what it means to be conservative (and about whether there should be a debate about what it means to be conservative), and I think there needs to be a similar discussion about the free market.

I’ll repeat something I said last week. What some identify as the free market run amok looks to me more like factions using government to intervene in the free market. The story of Rod’s friend on the planning board is a case in point. This fellow’s response to the developer-lawyer was apt, and I’m sure the guy had nothing to say for himself. Government regulations on meat production, which Rod addresses later, strike me in the same way. The same for the Kelo decision last year.

I’m not an economist, but I disagree that efficiency is the foundation of the free market. Competition seems a more likely candidate. If government regulations prevent an organic meat producer from getting his product for a reasonable price to those who would want it, then in what sense is the market “efficient”? It hasn’t fulfilled its function because one producer has moved to stifle competition.

Or what about this? Nothing prevents a developer who needs a parcel of land of a certain size for this project from going into a neighborhood and trying to buy out enough property holders to get what he needs. And if enough people don’t want to sell--that is, if the market doesn’t want what he has to offer--he changes his plan or moves on to the next community. This is the free market approach, it seems to me.

But respecting others’ freedom is expensive and time-consuming, so the developer uses government (as in Kelo) to intervene in the market and get him what he wants more quickly and for less than the price set by the market. Isn’t efficiency (for the faction led by the developer) the enemy of the free market in such a case?

The free market is like any other human phenomenon in being open to manipulation and abuse. But I find it hard to conclude that our “very economic structure is designed to separate” us from traditional values (emphasis mine). To go back to the obstacles to marketing organic meat, I wonder if Crunchy Conservatism wouldn’t flourish under a market even freer than the one we have. Am I naïve? Discuss.

I have decided my next book will be titled Laika and Me: How My Neurotic German Shepherd Turned Me into Cat Person. Jonah, doesn’t Cosmo need a girlfriend? Don’t you want to rescue a dog from a crunchy household, where she gets nothing to eat but organic kibble with a dollop of Bulgarian yogurt? I’m just saying.

Isn't it time someone pointed out the delicious irony that all this modernity-bashing is happening on computers connected to high-speed modems on the ultimate world-is-flat globalized expression of unalloyed progress called the Internet?

Ross, I don’t think mainstream conservatives can get off that easily. There are measures that have been proposed by mainstream figures such as the late Peter Drucker which could, by reducing the short-term “Casino” aspect of the economy, allow more space for Crunchy Con values without hurting long-term growth.

Given that Rod--rightly--emphasizes the role of orthodox religion for Crunchy Cons, and specifically critiques “cafeteria” Catholicism, I’d like to propose these selections on Consumerism from Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Centesimus Annus, as a framework for discussion. Catholic Social Teaching was essential for Day, Schumacher, Chesterton, and other Crunchy Con figures, and is considered the Church’s best kept secret. I don’t think it can be ignored, especially by Catholics.

“To call for an existence which is qualitatively more satisfying is of itself legitimate, but one cannot fail to draw attention to the new responsibilities and dangers connected with this phase of history. … It is here that the phenomenon of consumerism arises. In singling out new needs and new means to meet them, one must be guided by a comprehensive picture of the person which respects all the dimensions of his being and which subordinates his material and instinctive dimensions to his interior and spiritual ones. If, on the contrary, a direct appeal is made to human instincts--while ignoring in various ways the reality of the person as intelligent and free--then consumer attitudes and lifestyles can be created which are objectively improper and often damaging to the person's physical and spiritual health. Of itself, an economic system does not possess criteria for correctly distinguishing new and higher forms of satisfying human needs from artificial new needs which hinder the formation of a mature personality….

….It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed towards "having" rather than "being," and which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself. It is therefore necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments….

…Exploitation, at least in the forms analyzed and described by Karl Marx, has been overcome in Western society. Alienation, however, has not been overcome as it exists in various forms of exploitation, when people use one another, and when they seek an ever more refined satisfaction of their individual and secondary needs, while ignoring the principal and authentic needs which ought to regulate the manner of satisfying the other ones too. A person who is concerned solely or primarily with possessing and enjoying, who is no longer able to control his instincts and passions, or to subordinate them by obedience to the truth, cannot be free: obedience to the truth about God and humankind is the first condition of freedom, making it possible for a person to order his needs and desires and to choose the means of satisfying them according to a correct scale of values, so that the ownership of things may become an occasion of personal growth. This growth can be hindered as a result of manipulation by the means of mass communication, which impose fashions and trends of opinion through carefully orchestrated repetition, without it being possible to subject to critical scrutiny the premises on which these fashions and trends are based….

....It is the task of the State to provide for the defense and preservation of common goods such as the natural and human environments, which cannot be safeguarded simply by market forces. Just as in the time of primitive capitalism the State had the duty of defending the basic rights of workers, so now, with the new capitalism, the State and all of society have the duty of defending those collective goods which, among others, constitute the essential framework for the legitimate pursuit of personal goals on the part of each individual….”

Ross, I’ve tried in the book to say over and over again that what I call crunchy conservatism is not an ideology or a religion, but a sensibility. What that entails, I think, is a recognition that all have sinned and fallen short of our ideals, because we do live in the real world, and some of us have more freedom of choice than others. I have friends and family who have to have a two-income household whether they want to or not because they’re struggling to get by, and neither spouse can afford to quit his or her job and be home with the kids. But I know others who, it seems to me from the outside, have imagined that their luxuries are necessities, and who are in a position to make certain material sacrifices for the moral and spiritual betterment of their families. I don’t at all condemn people who are doing the best that they can with what they have. I’m struggling to do the same thing, and have been blessed to be in an economic position where my college-educated wife can stay home with the boys--even though giving up that second income means that we can’t have as big as house as we might like, or even take vacations like other families (we haven’t been on a family vacation in four or five years). I’m not complaining; we prioritize within the means we have, and we are always trying to look for ways to make our material lives fit our spiritual ideals. All I ask conservatives--all conservatives--to do is to rethink in a serious way whether the various ways we live today are consistent with what we say we value as conservatives, especially with regard to the integrity of our families.

I hesitate to embrace Caleb's use of the term "conservative romanticism,"
not out of substantive disagreement, but because of its seeming connection to the Romantic movement--of self-indulgent emotivism and dreamy-eyed utopianism. Conservatism, it seems to me, is much more concrete than that, and "crunchy" should be seen as, well, tactile.

What Rod describes in his book is not an ideology--not even an ideology of beauty, or of the land, but a way of life. His idea of sacramentality to my mind captures something very important. It is a rejection of consumerism (which can be termed simply greed, but really captures something more widespread--our willingness to compromise principles in the name of comfort) rooted in an insistence on right conduct. The call, I think, is one to a life lived rightly, through enjoyment of work, family, etc. as things-in-themselves. More than anything else, consumerism infects every aspect of our lives by turning them into mere means toward ends we still never achieve. Working overly long hours to "make it"--by having more stuff, a bigger house, nicer car, whatever it might be--simply misses the point. It leaves us strangers to one another among our many useless things, and our many fun, pretty, enjoyable things. It leaves us entertaining ourselves, distracting ourselves from the people around us and (sorry, folks) the God who will judge us when, inevitably, we die.

And a popular culture (and ideology) that insists on cheaper goods at all costs can't help but leave us mere consumers as it sucks the value out of work. We who write know the joy that can be had in crafting something with a point and, we hope, a beauty in the making. But more and more jobs (and more and more writing for that matter) are increasingly flattened, made intrinsically uninteresting as we all become cogs in a machine intended to make the most of x good at the cheapest price possible, then maximize our profit on each unit.

Sound like a caricature? Of course it is! But the point remains that the cult of efficiency, and the drive to measure success as maximum wealth and consumption take us away from the thing-in-itself--the work, the family, the relationships of local life.

I am no agrarian; I've always thought America was built in our small towns more than on the farm itself, which can be too isolating. And Kirk didn't grow crops. He grew lots and lots of fir trees. But I would think that we can disagree on such things while still recognizing the need for a return to valuing work, people, and relationships over processes and things.

I dislike the "corporatized, centralized, wage-and-hour, big is beautiful 'free economy'" as much as anyone, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment, for all those well-meaning non-crunchy conservatives out there (like the beleaguered Jonah). Leaving aside the techno-utopians and the people who only vote GOP because they want their investment portfolios to go untaxed, I suspect that most of the mainstream conservatives whom Wendell Berry (or Rod, or Caleb) castigates for their acquiescence to capitalism's excesses would agree with much of the crunchy-con critique--in theory. Sure, they would say, capitalism and big business and globalization are playing a significant role in destroying the "permanent things"--tearing apart rooted communities, pornographying the popular culture, forcing both parents into the workforce, pumping toxic chemicals into the air, etc. etc. And sure, it would be great if American conservatism had a solution to these problems. But, they might go on, you have to play with the hand you've been dealt, and there isn't some magic crunchy-con bullet out there that can, say, undo the decline of the agrarian life (a century-long process that no government program or subsidy has been able to halt), or bring back the union-created "family wage" of the 1950s (which was destroyed by foreign competition, something that simply isn't going away), or force working-class people to pay higher prices at the local hardware store when Wal-Mart has opened in a neighboring town. And while it's easy to say that the Republican Party should have priorities other than economic growth, they might point out, we live in a society where economic growth is the only thing keeping a lot of people at work (and keeping a lot of families together), and we have to live with that reality. When the economy doesn't grow at a good clip, things go very bad very quickly: Rod is right that Jimmy Carter often expressed "crunchy" themes (isn't there a rumor that Christopher Lasch wrote the "malaise speech"?), but his frugal, conservationist presidency was a pretty lousy time to be looking for work in America, and not just because we were all too consumerist to tighten our belts, throw out our tvs, and go back to the land. And this, I think, is why most "mainstream conservatives" support the "big-is-beautiful 'free economy'"--not because they like it, because they like the alternatives even less.

One of the strengths of Rod's book, I think, is that it acknowledges this reality--that at the macro level, our political and economic choices are limited--and makes the case for a "crunchy" cultural movement rather than a "crunchy" political revolution. But if such a cultural movement is going to win converts--or at least supporters--it shouldn't be too hard on those fellow-travelers who aren't up for home-schooling their kids, and don't quite have the time and energy to seek out the local organic co-op, and love Lost too much to get rid of their televisions. It's important to hold up an ideal, but it's also important not to let that ideal get in the way of making common cause with people who are, well, doing their best.

It’s interesting to read David Frum’s 1994 book, Dead Right, which was a (premature) obituary for the conservative revival of the 1980s, to see what’s changed and what hasn’t. It confirms that the Crunchy Cons critique is part of the ongoing Fusionist crack-up. Republicans keep finding new ways to forestall it (thanks to the clueless Democrats), but in the end you can’t reconcile the “pessimism” of traditional conservatism with the populist strategies necessary to win votes (and, I would argue, obtain funding from pro-free market business interests). Isn’t that what the 2004 Republican convention represented? Put the optimists on TV and keep the religious folks in the closet? The excerpt below is from the chapter entitled: “The Failure of the Reagan Gambit”.

“If there had been one thing that had distinguished the conservatism of the 1970s from earlier versions of the philosophy, it was a new faith in the goodness of ordinary people. Heavily influenced by the gloomier Roman Catholic theologians, the older generation of conservative thinkers questioned whether the ordinary man was quite all he was cracked up to be. The happy conservatism of the 1970s felt no such doubts. Were public morals and decency in decline? Don’t blame the people; blame the IRS. “A thousand people can grow up to produce opera, Broadway musicals or The Wizard of Oz.” [Jack Kemp]. This cheerful thought, as unconvincing as it would have seemed to the dominant conservative school of the 1950s and early 1960s, which stressed the need for the firm smack of authority, has an ideological pedigree of its own, traceable to a conservative theorist named Frank Meyer. Meyer argued that in a traditionalist society, libertarian means achieve conservative ends. Since the American people were God-fearing, patriotic, and morally responsible, if left alone they would form a society in which any conservative would be comfortable. It was government that was responsible for any antitraditional tendencies in American life. But over the 1980s, as every social indicator important to conservatives pointed further and further into the danger zone, an awful doubt began to spread among them: what if the American people were ceasing to be as God-fearing, patriotic, and morally responsible as they used to be? What if government were not the only—nor even the worst—subversive force?

So much of the argumentation in here is premised on the idea that to disagree with Rod is to disagree with, say, Russell Kirk or even traditional conservatism qua traditional conservatism. Sorry, but I'm not buying it.

Jonah, that’s a good and fair point. I don’t think I have premised any arguments on this idea. In fact I have disagreed substantially with Rod myself in this blog. Perhaps you want to limit discussion to Rod’s book and Rod’s book only. I would prefer to use the opportunity of Rod’s book to engage a more far ranging debate. I think that’s pretty much what you summarized as my dilemma, and you’re right.

Or, I might say even more accurately that I am a conservative because I am a romantic. To those who view this as a contradiction, I say: You don’t understand the meaning of either. It is amusing to me to encounter the same silly objections to traditionalist conservatism over and over again. “Small communities are hell!” “You want to turn back the clock!” and especially, “You romanticize the land!” To which I always want to ask, this is the same America we’re talking about isn’t it? The America from the mountains to the prairies; from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters; the America of purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain? The America that once carried on a torrid love affair with its land, its nooks and crannies, its high places and low places? Yeah, I’m a romantic all right. I don’t think I could be fully an American if I weren’t.

But then comes the description of how hard life on the land really is, as if this fact makes self-evident the folly of the romantic. In fact, it is the difficulty that is at the heart of the romantic attraction Americans once had for their land, their families, their communities, and even their country. It’s putting oneself in service to something more than one’s own desires that is at the core of every romantic impulse in man. This is what makes John Wayne a conservative hero. Let me repeat some bits I’ve quoted before, this time with special emphasis:

By deliberately choosing this life of hardship and immense satisfaction, we say in effect: The modern world has nothing better than this to give us. Its vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind, life mechanized and standardized—that is not for us. We do not believe that it makes for happiness from day to day. We fear that it means catastrophe in the end. — Whittaker Chambers

Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The only possibility of control and balance is a religious control and balance …. That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience, and discomfort: but here as hereafter, the alternative to hell is purgatory. — T.S. Eilot

Progressives of all political stripes learn early and often that to get on they better get out, move on, follow every rainbow. “Oh, the places you’ll go,” crooned Dr. Seuss, and we went and went and went until we became a rootless itinerant people. A wandering tribe of modern nomads, lost in our own backyards. Should someone dare to cherish some particular place so much that he would honor the commitment of that love through a strenuous and difficult life he is parochial, sentimental, a romantic, and worst, a loser. Here’s a simple definition of a conservative: someone who knows better.

I agree that my dilemma is that I'm being strawmanned. It's fascinating to me how people in this blog have bought into the assumption that crunchy conservatism is synonymous with good or true conservatism and therefore any objection to it must rest on trivial objections or my own misunderstanding rather than on any sound or serious objection to Rod's thesis or his analysis. So much of the argumentation in here is premised on the idea that to disagree with Rod is to disagree with, say, Russell Kirk or even traditional conservatism qua traditional conservatism. Sorry, but I'm not buying it.

Jonah said something interesting which I think is worth lingering over for a moment. Back in the Berry kerfuffle, he noted that “the position Berry takes has no spokesman on the right anywhere as far as I know. That is hardly a trivial point.” I agree, it’s not a trivial point at all. And given a conventional understanding of “the right,” it is true. But why? Leave aside for a moment the semantics of the Berry Rod quoted (which Jonah may have good cause to object to) and ask yourself why aren’t there people--pundits, thinkers, politicians--on the conventional right these days making the same basic critique Berry makes: that a right-leaning defense of the corporatized, centralized, wage-and-hour, big is beautiful “free economy” in conjunction with a left-leaning defense of bureaucratic big government entitlement and sexual liberation has made war on the permanent things.

It is truly strange when people like Wendell Berry--and others, consider the case of Dorothy Day described by Lukacs below--are ascribed to the left by our schizophrenic political taxonomers. People who are rooted by a love of the permanent things; who are loyal above all to the tradition and membership of their “little platoons;” people who are willing to defend what they love from encroaching destruction via spaghetti-interchanges, foreign entanglements, mega-corporations, technological developments, mass media, etc., all of which are designed to take their local capital--intellectual capital, social capital, fiscal capital, cultural and agricultural capital, and most especially, generational capital in the form of their children--as far away from home as fast as possible.

The gulf between Berry and Day as rooted conservatives and the progressive-liberal architects of rootless movement and centralization is as wide, one might say, as is the gulf separating the conservative Buckley and his clarion call to “Stop!” from the progressive dreamers on the right who today take up the fevered mantra of “Faster Please!”

Here. The review wonders whether Rod has ruined his conservative creds.

I too am sympathetic with what I think I will call Jonah’s Dilemma, which appears to be the flip side of what he describes as my dilemma: he dislikes being “strawmanned” by Rod’s critique yet he cannot come out and wholly endorse the critique of the alleged strawman either because to do so would necessarily be to critique something very real. Thus he’s left to hunt the edges, picking off the occasional stray or weak argument from the main--and there are some stray arguments I think, as I pointed out earlier--and then fall back to vague assertions of agreement with any talk of permanent things.

One blogger I’ve seen makes a good point:

I think one would be hard pressed to find someone who chooses not to discourage promiscuity specifically because he does not want to diminish some corporation's profits or corporate profits in general …. But the basic insight that many "conservatives" conventionally acquiesce in the debauched, passion-soaked, spiritually deformed marketing culture that feeds sexual sin and social disorder, both generally and sometimes in their own purchases, is so spot on that Goldberg is fortunate that the problem was posed that awkwardly. He would have no riposte to this, except to shrug his shoulders and mutter something about freedom of choice.

It occurred to me as I was looking over the many "should" statements in Rod's book that Rod's book is a fine assortment of prescriptions. It is a collection of rules or directions derived from experience aimed at a sane and humane life. That reminded me that Kirk took the idea of prescription very seriously. Prescription is derived from lived experience more than from theory—this is what distinguishes it from an ideology or a philosophy as such, and why it was so important for conservatism, as conservatism was "anti-ideology" for Kirk.

It then occurred to me that it is the prescriptive nature of the book that has bothered its critics. Rod has not simply written about some interesting people he met on the road, but has gone further and enjoined other people to live in similar fashion by appealing to prior philosophical claims they have already accepted. If a person believes there are permanent things, eternal goods that it behooves man to seek for his edification and increase in virtue, they naturally make certain claims on how he lives. Goldberg could evade the whole problem by denying that conservatives care about permanent things, but that is a move he could not credibly make even if he wanted to do so. What he is reduced to arguing is that we all believe in the permanent things, but that shouldn't dictate any particular way how we live. Virtue is great, as long as we don't get hung up on detail and don't necessarily take it too seriously. Rod wants conservatives to take virtue seriously, and it is hard to miss that the people who recoil at this suggestion have recourse to fairly unserious arguments. That is what makes the critics nervous—Rod's statements are making claims on what they ought to be doing in a way that calls them to a live according to a broadly defined conservative ethos, which may require them to change something about themselves.

Before I start on Consumerism, I’d like to alert readers that an excerpt from Crunchy Cons on the Environment, and a long interview with Rod, have just been published on Godspy, the online Catholic magazine I publish with a bunch of very “Crunchy” Catholics. While there is a big overlap with this blog, the interview contains additional insights into Rod’s faith, and some of his thoughts on Islam and globalization.

While he seems like an interesting fellow, I've got a full enough plate without getting into the weeds with him. So I'll close with this short response. Perhaps "neo-Marxist" would have been better than pseudo-Marxist. I entirely agree that there is quite a bit to Marx that is not claptrap, but one must walk amidst a lot of claps and avoid a lot of traps to find it.

More substantively, the reader is still largely dodging the point. By making a big gray fog about the reasons that conservatives don't attack promiscuity (again this is premised on a false assertion almost all of you have been taking as a given) he makes it seems reasonable that it might actually have to do with this great corporate consipracy Berry is asserting exists.

Also, there is a something very, very odd about using today's market economy as proof that Marx's complaint about mid-19th century industrial capitalism was true. Do we really believe that, say, pre-labor law inner-city England was better for families than today's post-industrial economy? In the world Marx saw, men fell into vats and were never heard from again. They worked 14 hour days. They were summarily fired when injured. Etc etc. It seems to me, thanks to the free market as well as the labor movement, Marx's critique is becoming ever more antique, not ever more relevant.

As for the alienating and deracinating effects of the free market and all that, I think some of the critiques -- Marxist and otherwise -- have varying degrees of value and merit. But then, I've always believed that and said as much. For you see, I'm not the strawman conservative who idolizes the free market Rod has constructed.

As the Crunchy Con blog is more or less a book discussion group, we'll start Week 2 with the second chapter, titled "Consumerism." Here are two key passages from the book:

The problem with too many of us conservatives is we think holding the politically correct (from a right-wing point of view) position, and faithfully voting Republican, is enough to guarantee our conservative bona fides. We talk the talk, but do we walk the walk? Not if we're consumerists first, and conservatives second. The two cannot be reconciled.

What do I mean by consumerism? It's an uncodified materialist philosophy that considers the acquisition of goods and services at the leas expensive price to be a fundamental social value. Consumerism fetishizes individual choice, and sees its expansion as unambiguous progress. A culture guided by consumerist values is one that welcomes technology without question, and prizes efficiency. A consumerist culture also tends to cede authority to the secular priesthood of scientists and other professional experts. Its idea of liberty involves the steady increase of the individual's sovereignty (the choice thing again). A consumerist society encourages its members both to find and express their personal indentity through the consumption of products. Its ultimate goal is the spread of happiness and well-being through the improvement of material conditions, and the creation and general increase of wealth.

And if moral and spiritual values get in the way of that, well, hey babe, you can't stop progress.

How can you be a traditional-values conservative in a society whose very economic structure is designed to separate you, your kids, and your community from those values, and each other? That is the question at the heart of this book.

And later:

The fundamental difference between crunchy conservatives and mainstream conservatives has to do with the place of the free market in society. Crunchy cons believe in the free market as an imperfect but just and effective means to the good society. When the market harms the good society, it should be reined in. Because crunchy cons, as conservatives, do not believe in the perfectibility or essential goodness of human nature, we keep squarely in front of us the truth that absent the restraints of religion, community, law, or custom, the commercial man will tend to respect no boundaries in the pursuit of personal gain. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, whether it's in the hands of big government or big business.

Irving Kristol had some pretty provocative stuff to say about all this in a 1973 essay that Tom Hibbs brought to my attention yesterday. More on this later...

February 26, 2006

Goldberg & Berry II
[Dreher  02/26 05:14 PM]

Our Princeton correspondent is not dissuaded by Jonah’s remarks, writing back:

It still seems to me that Berry has not really gotten the cause all that wrong. Whether conservatives are reluctant to criticize promiscuity because they cater to powerful corporate interests, or because they cater to powerful voting interests, or because they themselves see little wrong with promiscutity, it all comes to basically the same thing: the elevation of various material interests (in financial power, political power, or bodily pleasures) above the good of the soul.

Moreover, I would say that your and Berry's observation that conservatives do not oppose promiscuity is generally correct. They may oppose the most obscene things that are on TV, and they may make some effort to restrain the promiscuity of the young, but there is generally little enthusiasm for a critique of the prevalent culture of adult promiscuity that is presupposed as completely unproblematic in much mainstream culture.

One more point. Berry's argument is not, as Mr. Goldberg says, "pseudo-Marxist claptrap." If anything, it is genuine Marxist claptrap. After all, Marx himself said in the Communist Manifesto that while the bourgeoisie accuses communists of seeking to destroy the family, the capitalists have in fact already destroyed it. This, again, is part of Berry's broader point, his critique of a modern economy in which first fathers, and now fathers and mothers, increasingly work away from their home and family. I think we have to admit, however, that despite his general wrongness, not every observation Marx made was utter claptrap. (Pope Benedict, thought by most liberals to be the most conservative man in the world, seems to think there is something to be gained from reading Marx.) Here Marx's critique of capitalism rings somewhat true, as does his observation that capitalism tends to make previously semi-sacred vocations like law and medicine, and even sacred ones like religious ministry, into mere money-making jobs. The priest, the lawyer, and the physician are all becoming, he argues, wage slaves of their paying customers. Who can fail to see a certain amount of truth in this, manifested in Christian ministers who will not fully defend biblical morality for fear of offending parishioners, and physicians who, once having been guided by an ethic of healing, now use their skills to give healthy people more shapely noses and bigger breasts? All of this is a of piece with the general poverty of the spirit that tends to accompany modernity's emancipation of unlimited acquisition -- as you, and Solzhenitsyn, and John Paul II all rightly suggest.

This critique is annoying because it is so radical, but it useful for precisely the same reason. Crunchy-Cons seem to draw on sensibilities (perhaps based on religious convictions) that are somewhat hostile to modernity, and maybe in some cases excessively so. But such arguments are a useful counter-weight to a conservatism that often takes its bearings primarily from within modernity itself, and therefore is sometimes blind to its dangers.

Re: Big-haired Republicans
[Dreher  02/26 05:13 PM]

Jonah: As for where you refer to big-haired Republicans. See page 18, where you say how one crunchy con family "stick out like sore thumbs" in Texas "amid all the big-haired Republican types."

Fair enough. I didn't put it in quotes, but that's what the interview subject told me. Yet it's true that quite a few Republican women in Texas do have big hair. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Berry Cont'd
[Goldberg  02/26 11:40 AM]

Rod - As for your Princeton reader's point, that's quite a dodge. It is not merely "somewhat strange" to attribute conservative reluctance to challenge promiscuity to corporate greed, it's absurd. For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that conservatives don't challenge promiscuity (a charge I dispute below). Ascribing the motives of conservatives to "greed" (a constant trope in your book, by the way) when greed isn't the motive is a serious analytical blunder. Ascribing it to some conspiracy of corporate vassels and string-pullers is an even more extreme exaggeration of that blunder. If you get the causes of a problem wrong, your solution will undoubtedly be wrong too. If you get the causes of a problem disastrously wrong, your solutions will likely follow suit. As this is a point you've already conceded, at least regarding that passage, I don't see the reason to belabor it.

Re: Uh Oh
[Goldberg  02/26 11:27 AM]

Rod - I'm almost done with the book, so I'll save my more sustained response for when I can do it at length. But: I understand that you've written a polemic (and, to my surprise, I'm actually quite sympathetic to much of the interior parts of that polemic). But, I think you're simply mistaken as to the extent your categorical assumptions inform your entire view, argumentation and analysis. More on that shortly. Also, I was more directly responding to Caleb's points than yours and I probably should have been more clear.

As for where you refer to big-haired Republicans. See page 18, where you say how one crunchy con family "stick out like sore thumbs" in Texas "amid all the big-haired Republican types."

On Romanticizing Rural Life
[Dreher  02/26 11:01 AM]

Reader Vince says that writers as far back as the English Romantic poets, to conservatives like Weaver, Chambers, Tate and others, idealize agrarian life unreasonably. Vince writes:

What these writers shared was opposition to industrialization and championing of what they called rural values. And while I can share some of their concerns, such as the worship of efficiency and a fast-paced world (doubts that Marx shared), I cannot go along with their idealization of farming and rural values.

As someone who lives in a predominantly rural state, I can tell you that there is nothing romantic about farming. Most of it is agribusiness, something Crunchy Cons probably object to. Farming involves a degree of uncertainty, stress, and physical labor that few of us could stand. If you mean small farms, that is even more work and would probably require that children engage in strenuous labor. That may be why Americans in the past had large families -- they needed the labor. I should say that farming stinks. It smells bad. And growing a vegetable or flower garden, however pleasurable, does not qualify as farming. I might also mention the meanness, rumor mongering, gossip, and lack of privacy that go along with living in small communities, where everyone knows what everyone else is doing.

The truth is that none of the Agrarians (Warren, Tate, etc.) farmed. They were professors. Weaver died before retirement, which he had planned to spend farming, away from the Chicago in which he never felt at home. Chambers retreated to a farm in Maryland after a series of public ordeals. Berry continues to farm in Kentucky, but I wonder how many of his tools are the result of modern technology. Victor Davis Hanson, another professor who praises agrarian values, runs the family winery in California -- not quite what most of us in the Midwest think of as farming.

So I find the idealization of rural life unrealistic. Who can say for sure what attracts people to the lost cause of rural life? Is it fear of the modern world? Frustration with its less appealing aspects? Naive idealism? I know one thing: We should all be glad that the industrial North defeated the rural South.

Caleb, I do believe you are not only a gentleman lawyer, but a gentleman farmer. I’d love to know how you would answer Vince.

Eclecticism
[Dreher  02/26 10:59 AM]

Reader Suzanne is a wonderful example of crunchy-con eclecticism. She writes:

I remember when your article "Crunchy Cons" came out in the magazine in 2002. I think it's one of my favorite articles ever written, and I am a huge NR fan. I am a vegetarian and am really big on animal rights, so it was nice to see someone expand the conservative dialog. And it was nice to read about someone I could relate to so well. I remember being floored when I got that issue.

I realize your argument wasn't specifically about vegetarianism, but you did discuss organic food and things like that. I have even tried the raw food diet. People think I'm so liberal! Then I tell them about my Bible, my shotgun, and my.357 and well, they get another story.

RE: Good Grief
[Dreher  02/26 10:24 AM]

A reader at Princeton writes:

Regarding Jonah Goldberg's criticism of the passage from Wendell Berry as "sophomoric nonsense": Surely Berry's larger point -- that conservatives will not oppose (hetero)sexual promiscuity -- is undeniable. It is somewhat strange that Berry attributes this to a concern for the corporate bottom line, but only because a simpler explanation will do. Sexual promiscuity has been, to a considerable extent, embraced by mainstream American culture. Thus conservatives will not oppose it either because 1) most of them see nothing really wrong with it or 2) they see how popular it is and are afraid to offend majority opinion. In either case, mainstream conservatism is not of much use in addressing the problem of widespread sexual promiscuity, which represents a real and sad degradation of our culture.

On a related point (and maybe Berry makes this argument, too -- I don't know, not being familiar with his work), it is equally true that mainstream conservatism will not oppose another apparently growing and problematic phenomenon: Americans living beyond their economic means, imprudently going into debt to finance luxurious consumption. Of course, such behavior is in the short-term economic interest of some, especially the businesses that sell the products and collect the interest on the loans. Would it be mere "juvenile pseudo-Marxist claptrap" to suspect that the reticence here -- at least on the part of conservative politicians -- is due to a fear to offend business interests? Again, even if it is not that, then it is that they see no problem with such behavior, or that they are afraid of offending the debtor-voter, if not the creditor-contributor. In either case, mainstream conservatism again neglects an important social problem to which Crunchy-Conservatism helpfully directs our attention.

I do point out in the book that it is inconceivable today that a conservative politician would try to lead people back to an ethic of prudence and even frugality. Such a politician would have trouble finding a constituency. The fault lies not with the politician, but with us.

Don't Look Now!
[Dreher  02/26 10:23 AM]

J.R.R. Tolkien is a crunchy-con patron saint, for reasons we should talk about next week when we focus on consumerism and technology, and which can be divined easily in this passage from a Tolkien admirer:

Tolkien was one of the great unheralded conservatives of the 20th century. Oh don't worry, I'm not going to try to score ideological points by saying Tolkien opposed nationalized health care or anything like that (though it is hardly insignificant that one of Tolkien's dearest friends and closest colleagues was C. S. Lewis).

No, Tolkien's conservatism was deeper than even the deepest dwarf-mine in the hills of the White Mountains. Tolkien despised modernity and disliked technology. He made a concession to the existence of factories, but only because they collected all the machines in one place and kept them hidden from view in out-of-the-way buildings. A widely respected scholar of the English language who could debate in Greek and Latin and speak fluent Gothic, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (he also worked on the "W" section — one of my favorite chapters, far better than the thin gruel to be found in the "L" section — of the Oxford English Dictionary).

A man after my own heart…

Hear, hear! Which conservative writer wrote this worthy appreciation? Who indeed

Re: Uh Oh
[Dreher  02/26 10:11 AM]

Jonah:

Also, it is not a trivial point for me to say that no conservative defends promiscuity nor has any conservative I know of ever taken anything like the position Berry ascribes to conservatives in that post. …Meanwhile, it is flatly not true that conservatives do not denounce promiscuity or try to tackle it. This administration puts real dollars behind its advocacy of abstinence, here and abroad. Christian conservative Churches speak out against promiscuity. Right wing groups launch boycotts, letter writing campaigns and propose legislation for things like the V-Chip. They oppose distributing condoms in schools, precisely because they think doing so will promote promiscuity. Conservatives criticize the popular culture. And so on. Now, they may not do it enough. That's a legitimate argument to make. But it's patent nonsense to say they don't do it. That is not a trivial point.

Read what I actually wrote. Guy, I credit your assertion that Berry wildly overstates his case (though it’s also true that the argument he makes in the essay is more complex than you would guess from the very polemical passage I quoted). Don’t be a sore winner! I also pointed out that there are some conservatives--especially religious conservatives--who take on corporate interests in the name of de-pornifying the public square. And if you’ll read my actual words, I said that we conservatives are not as consistent as we need to be in this area, especially when it comes to thinking about how our economic liberties work to tear down traditional sexual morality.

Jonah:

it seems to me that Crunchy Cons have been much less involved in these fights than those Rod refers to in his book as Republican women with big hair. That is not a trivial point either.

Where do I do that? I don’t have the book at hand, but I don’t recall making that remark. Maybe somebody I quoted used the phrase, I dunno. It is mighty strange, though, to read the amusing and colorful prose stylist Jonah Goldberg, of all people, sternly objecting to an amusing (if perhaps unfair) characterization of someone else. And you think crunchy cons are supposed to be the humorless ones?

Anyway, look: Crunchy Cons is in large part a polemical work, and when you’re writing polemics, you tend to categorize and generalize. Every time you yourself make a statement in your writing about liberals, Jonah, do you feel the need to write five paragraphs of qualifiers to account for the fact that not every liberal is exactly the same? Do you get agitated e-mails from liberals saying that you couldn’t possibly have a point to make about anything because there exists somewhere under God’s heaven liberals who do not fit into the category you’ve set out? Or do you trust in the good sense of your readers, even the hostile ones, to assume that you recognize an actual diversity within broad categories that, however imprecise, still may be useful in advancing a legitimate argument.

I do hope that readers of your most recent column, when they get to this passage:

The one guy clearly sticking to his principles is CNN's Lou Dobbs. But that's because he went bonkers a long time ago. The perfectly coiffed millionaire anchor has anointed himself the defender of Joe Sixpack, opposing every manifestation of globalization (save for CNN International, of course).

…will realize that you are a polemicist making a perfectly fair general point about Lou Dobbs’ aversion to globalization, and that if they, the readers, come across an example or two of Lou Dobbs failing to oppose “every”--every!--“manifestation of globalization,” they won’t get all het up and pull down their pants to moon your entire thesis. That would be unfortunate.