Conservatives & Libertarians

One of the questions of political theory bugging me a lot lately is the compatibility (or incompatibility) of conservatism and libertarianism. This is of particular interest to me because I consider myself a conservative, but conservatives and libertarians generally get lumped together in America as "the right" or "the Republican party." This classification isn't completely inaccurate, of course. For example I belong to a student group that advertises itself as "conservative/libertarian." However, this classification does tend to obscure some fundamental differences between the two groups.

So, what are these differences? Well, that's one of those big questions that gets very complicated very fast. Nevertheless, Hunter Baker, writing at First Things, has managed to put together a relatively concise, and I think quite accurate, summary of the main differences between conservatives and libertarians. In other words, follow that link and read the article for yourself!

But, if you want to cheat and get a very quick summary from me, here it is. The main difference between conservatism and libertarianism, according to Baker, is that libertarians believe that the state should exist for the limited purposes of keeping the peace and creating a legal environment in which commerce is allowed to do its thing. Conservatives, on the other hand, are essentially Aristotelian and believe that the state should enact laws that promote human flourishing in more ways than just securing peace and encouraging the economy; conservatives believe that politics has something to do with a transcendent order. This difference explains, for instance, why many (probably most) libertarians support gay "marriage": Gay "marriage" isn't a threat to peace and isn't a threat to prosperity, so why should the state forbid it? Conservatives, on the other hand, see gay "marriage" as fundamentally at odds with a broader notion of human flourishing rooted in a transcendent order, and thus can be regulated by the state.

The example of gay "marriage" also raises the question that libertarians will always ask conservatives when it comes to moral regulations: What's to stop the state from becoming a busybody poking its nose into everybody's life? Is there any line we can draw to prevent the state from becoming a moralistic tyrant? Baker doesn't raise this question, but it's worth considering for a minute.

The key distinction to make here is that the state can encourage moral behavior, but it will never be able to redeem us from sin. Any time the state crosses the line from encouraging moral behavior to attempting to redeem us from sin, it has gone beyond anything conservatives would countenance. It may not always be a clear distinction, but then again these things never are perfectly clear. The important point is that conservatives acknowledge the transcendent order, unlike libertarians, but also recognize that the transcendent order cannot be realized perfectly, unlike utopians. Or, in the immortal terminology of Eric Voegelin: Don't immanentize the eschaton!

(Finally, this essay by Russell Kirk just came to my attention. Kirk, recently discussed by Aaron, compares a coalition of conservatives and libertarians to "a union of fire and ice," and gives at least six reasons for that conclusion. Warning: Libertarians won't like it.)

Creepy Aesthetes & The Cult of Genius

The last time that I mentioned Goethe's Italian Journey, I commended Goethe for seeking to understand art as art, not by using lots of big words and abstract nouns to praise the artist's genius, but by examining the artist's hisotrical background and limitations. In other words, he actually studied the art, and so he knew how to judge the art as art. However, the following passage shows that just because an artist knows how to judge art as art or create beautiful art, he doesn't necessarily know how to judge art in relation to other things, such as morality.

The day before yesterday I visited Lord Hamilton at his villa near Posillipo. One cannot imagine a more glorious sight on God's green earth. After our meal, a dozen youths swam in the sea--that was a beautiful sight. The many groups they formed and the poses they struck while playing! He pays them to do this, so that he might have this pleasure every afternoon. (Letter from Tischbein to Goethe, Italian Journey; July 10, 1787)

Did anything there strike you as strange? How about the last line about paying boys to swim by his villa (pictured below)? I thought that was strange. Why does this strike me (and many others, I presume) as a bit, well, creepy?

There are two reasons. First, there are the obvious homoerotic and pederastic overtones here--paying for the sight of young boys wearing little or no clothing. Certainly, most fathers would not be happy when he found out some old man was enticing his son to take off his clothes for his pleasure.

However, that doesn't explain Goethe, Tischbein, and Lord Hamilton. There's no evidence that any of these men was a pederast. Indeed, Lord Hamilton kept a young, nubile woman, Emma Hart (pictured below), at his villa for "aesthetic purposes." Goethe mentions elsewhere (March 16, 1787) that Emma would dance for guests wearing only light sheets and pose for painters in very artistic poses, such as a devotee of Bacchus, or as Ariadne. However, the oddity of Lord Hamilton's relationship to Emma doesn't end there; he later actually married her, despite the unseemly difference in age between the two. But, it doesn't end there either. He later encouraged her to become Horatio Nelson's lover, and even shared his home with the couple and with Emma's mother. This behavior is certainly strange, and repulsive, but it has nothing to do with pederasty.

There must then be a second reason why this all seems a little creepy: Lord Hamilton (and perhaps Goethe and Tischbein too) treated Emma Hart and the young swimmers simply as pieces of art. They seemed to think that their aesthetic interests--enjoying the beauty of the human form--took priority over normal ethical rules, especially those concerning sex. They didn't even need to maintain the appearance of propriety, because they were above all those petty rules.

This isn't the only example of an aesthete who thinks that the normal rules of morality don't apply to him. The obvious contempoary example is Roman Polanski. Whatever the artistic merits of his films, they simply do not excuse the crime to which he pleaded guilty. Listening to his "aesthetic" friends from Hollywood and France, however, you could be forgiven for thinking that child rape is not a crime when committed by a great director.

What explains the difficulty that some artists and other aesthetic types have in recognizing what for most people are clear ethical boundaries? My only explanation is that some artists are prone to genius-worship. They think that anyone capable of creating beauty in a work of art should therefore be free to create beauty in their own lives--by their own standards. The artist as a god: that is the essence of the modern cult of genius.

This obviously is not meant as a smear on all artists. All this tells us is that being an artist does not by itself qualify someone to speak on matters of morality. Conversely, however, being a good person does not qualify someone to speak as an expert on matters of art. However, in today's world, where the cult of genius is so prevalent, there is a temptation for artists, or anyone who wants to be a genius, to construct his own moral universe. Geniuses, however, have to live by the same rules we all do.

Creating Culture

The other day I stumbled upon three interesting things all at once: a book, a blog and a reading list. Actually, the reading list came first, in the form of this bibliography. "Bibliography of what?" you ask. An excellent question. And that's where the book comes in, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, by Andy Crouch. I've never read Culture Making, but its raison d'être is thus:

For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided “culture wars.” But we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators that God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. By making chairs and omelets, languages and laws, we participate in the good work of culture making.

That sounds an awful lot like what we at the Guild Review are interested in. So if you're interested in this sort of thing too, you might give the book or the bibliography a read. And if you've read any of these titles, let us know in the comments section what you thought.

Finally, Andy Crouch and Company have a blog, which we've now added to the links on the right side of our page, so you can check back here from time to time for interesting posts on their end of things, or simply add it to your reader.

Two Words on National Security

I recently came across two interesting bits of national security information on the internet. The first was this interesting website on strategic communication. “Now what,” you rightly ask, “is that?” Well, one of the many useful things the website provides is definitions. In the case of this particular term, it refers to:

“The synchronized coordination of statecraft, public affairs, public diplomacy, military information operations, and other activities... to advance US foreign policy objectives.”

In other words, strategic communication involves making sure that your messages to foreign governments and populations are clear and consistent. All too often, American administrations from either party will forget about key components of strategic communication, or the whole thing. Messages from different governmental entities are frequently contradictory. Often they focus on traditional state-to-state diplomacy, to the neglect of public diplomacy. And they usually ignore the propaganda value of our deeds.

The Strategic Communication website is still a work in progress, and looks raggedy in sections, but there are a lot of good resources already, and I expect more to come.

The second thing I came across was this book, How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq by Matthew Alexander. I have not read it yet, but I am intrigued by the title and the reviews I have seen. Cruel and inhuman practices have caused many people to turn up their noses at the term "interrogation" - and rightfully so. But Alexander reminds us that torture is not the only means of obtaining information from captives. Indeed, smarter techniques not only avoid brutalizing the subject, but are also more likely to produce quality information. That is a lesson often lost in the polemics about interrogation.


This post first appeared on Statecraft & Security on Sunday 27 September 2009.

Theodore Dalrymple on Inflation's Moral Hazard

If you haven't already heard of Theodore Dalrymple (pictured right), it's time you did. Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a retired British psychiatrist and physician, who spent much of his time in practice in prisons in close contact with the "underclass," as he calls many of the people he has encountered who seem stuck at the bottom of society. Appropriately enough, he has gained fame as an essayist writing about societal dysfunction. His essays don't always necessarily make for sunny, upbeat reading (though they are always engagingly written), but they do call attention to crucial problems destroying the lives of a surprisingly large segment of the population. His diagnosis is uncomfortable for anyone accustomed to modern debates about human character that avoid questions of right and wrong and the freedom of the will, because his single-most important concern is individual moral responsibility. Society cannot function if individuals are too lazy to find out what is right and to do it. (For instance, he refutes the claim that drug addicts cannot choose to stop.)

All of this is by way of introduction to a recent (longish) essay of his which appeared in City Journal: "Inflation's Moral Hazard." In this piece Dalrymple discusses what appears to be a less criminal topic--the danger of inflation to the character of a people. After opening with an anecdotal reflection on the prevalence of inflation in the contemporary economy, he concludes:

But asset inflation—ultimately, the debasement of the currency—as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes imprudence, thrift becomes improvidence, sobriety becomes mean-spiritedness, modesty becomes lack of ambition, self-control becomes betrayal of the inner self, patience becomes lack of foresight, steadiness becomes inflexibility: all that was wisdom becomes foolishness. And circumstances force almost everyone to join in the dance.

The ultimate danger of inflation, though, lies in its tendency to discourage ordinary people from relying on their own efforts to lead a simple life, and instead encourage them to rely on the government for their livelihood. Inflation, in short, makes individual moral responsibility very difficult to achieve.

And what are the consequences of this lack of individual moral responsibility? Economists and social theorists (Dalrymple among them) may debate the exact consequences in this life, but at least for Dante the eternal consequence was quite clear: Circle 8, Bolgia 10 of Hell.

Photo credit: The Brussels Journal

Progress Rightly Understood

I do not consider myself a progressive. Progressivism is too often bent on changing man's nature, overcoming by pseudo-science and human effort problems which are far bigger than that. Put another way, progressivism usually involves redeeming man from the Fall through the proper application of politics. Sorry, but I don't go for that.

However, my rejection of progressivism has recently been tempered by reading Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate. He does not, of course, fall into the kind of errors I just sketched out. But he does remind us that a certain kind of progress is not merely compatible with, but integral to, Christianity. This is an important reminder for those of us - like myself - who have become jaded about "progress" and tend to ignore the term whenever we hear it.

Benedict's starting point in Caritas in Veritate is an encyclical by Pope Paul VI (pictured left), Populorum Progressio. Quoting the earlier encyclical, Benedict writes:

It is the primordial truth of God's love, grace bestowed upon us, that... makes it possible to hope for a “development of the whole man and of all men”, to hope for progress “from less human conditions to those which are more human”, obtained by overcoming the difficulties that are inevitably encountered along the way. (Section 8, quoting PP 42 & 20.)

Notice what they are talking about: "conditions", the physical circumstances, as well as the social and the spiritual, in which human beings live. However, that which gives us cause for hope with regards to these conditions is not our own willpower or technological might, but God's love. Elsewhere he writes:

Without the perspective of eternal life, human progress in this world is denied breathing-space. Enclosed within history, it runs the risk of being reduced to the mere accumulation of wealth; humanity thus loses the courage to be at the service of higher goods, at the service of the great and disinterested initiatives called forth by universal charity. Man does not develop through his own powers, nor can development simply be handed to him. (Section 11.)

Moreover, Benedict points out that this is not simply the improvement of material circumstances, building bigger, faster and stronger gizmos. There is a kind of progress to that sort of thing, but it is not quite what Benedict is interested in. He writes:

If man were merely the fruit of either chance or necessity, or if he had to lower his aspirations to the limited horizon of the world in which he lives, if all reality were merely history and culture, and man did not possess a nature destined to transcend itself in a supernatural life, then one could speak of growth, or evolution, but not development. (Section 29.)

Thus, human progress (or development, to use Benedict's preferred term) must be oriented towards our true human nature and our ultimate end. Any kind of progress which ignores the fact that we have been made in the divine image and are created for heaven is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: perhaps a nice gesture, even interesting or meaningful in its way, but woefully missing the bigger issue at stake.

How are we to bring about this kind of progress? As with most aspects of the encyclical, Benedict avoids most details, preferring to make sure we have the principles sorted out first. However, he explains:

It should be stressed that progress of a merely economic and technological kind is insufficient. Development needs above all to be true and integral. The mere fact of emerging from economic backwardness, though positive in itself, does not resolve the complex issues of human advancement.... Human knowledge is insufficient and the conclusions of science cannot indicate by themselves the path towards integral human development.... The exclusion of religion from the public square... hinders an encounter between persons and their collaboration for the progress of humanity. (Sections 23, 30 & 56.)

This is no paltry project of social engineering, conducted by technocrats and ignoring the transcendent.

Finally, Benedict, following Paul VI, explains:

Progress, in its origin and essence, is first and foremost a vocation: “in the design of God, every man is called upon to develop and fulfill himself, for every life is a vocation”.... The vocation to progress drives us to “do more, know more and have more in order to be more”. (Sections 16 & 18, quoting PP 15 & 6.)

Thus, progress is not simply about a political ideology or a philosophic arguments: it is a part of the call given by God to mankind, redeemed by Christ and now eagerly pressing on toward the fullness of glory.


Photo credits: The picture of Benedict XVI comes from a mass in Paris, courtesy of Ammar Abd Rabbo. The image of Paul VI was ganked from the Per Christum blog, which no doubt ganked it from someone else.

The Importance of Limitations

There is a certain type of empirical judgment [concerning art], which has spread due to the influence of English and French travelers. One expresses one’s spontaneous, unprepared opinion without giving any thought at all to the fact that every artist is subject to many conditions, such as his own special talent, his predecessors and teachers, his time and place, his patrons and customers. None of this—which would of course be required for a pure appreciation—comes into consideration, and so there develops a dreadful mixture of praise and censure, of affirmation and rejection; as a result, every value proper to the works in question is annulled.
—Goethe, Italian Journey, Report for December 1787

Many people, I would venture to guess, unconsciously think like Platonists, at least when it comes to art. They’ve learned from a certain caricature of art critics to talk about art using only abstract nouns starting with capital letters. They speak in grandiose terms about Beauty, as if beauty existed apart from works of art. When they do this, they think they are preserving beauty, and art for art’s sake—but they really don't know much about beauty. (This, of course, excludes the not inconsiderable group of people who think art should be about whatever they feel like, not necessarily about beauty. I won't even bother with them.)

But, as Goethe points out, these amateur art critics do not know much about the individual artist or work of art in question. They have no idea who the artist's teachers were, what his patron demanded of him, or what techniques and materials were available at the time.

This ignorance of history, according to Goethe, is so distressing because it prevents critics from coming to a “pure appreciation.” This is a striking phrase, especially in combination with his initial rejection of a certain type of empiricism. How can Goethe call for more history and reject empiricism? First of all, what he means by empiricism is not an emphasis on concrete, verifiable facts; what he means, rather, is the theory that the human mind is a tabula rasa that can judge correctly about any sense impression it receives, without anything further work required. In other words, Goethe is saying that learning to appreciate art is hard work, and part of that hard work involves learning the historical background about the art we are trying to appreciate.

Second, many people—those everyday Platonists—would argue that what leads us to a “pure appreciation” of art is abstraction from history. The work of art has a value which is independent of the “dirty” complications of history. What does it matter, they argue, what the limitations on an artist were? His work is immortal!

But, in fact, what makes that work of art immortal are the limitations on the artist. Every time an artist chooses to include one type of excellence in his work, he must exclude another type of excellence. For instance, an architect cannot choose both a pointed Gothic arch and a round Baroque arch for the same part of his building. A sculptor must decide whether he wants to use wood, marble, or some other medium for his statue. A painter must decide whether to use oil or water colors. In the end, though, what is really important is how the artist works within these limitations but transcends them. Our limitations are what make perfection possible for us. And--Goethe's point again--only a detailed knowledge and analysis of the artist's limitations will help us come to a "pure appreciation" of the artist's transcendence of his limitations.