There is but one essential principle of conservatism,
all our beautifully written conservative literature, notwithstanding.
Charity.
These days that ancient word is treated rather shabbily. It gets trotted out only to describe giving money to the needy.
But this is a mere shadow of the charity that Jesus had the beautiful courage to preach in a world of tribal conceits and bigotry and stupidity. In its more radical sense charity is that disposition of the heart that inclines a man towards concern for all his goods and those of all others, an inclination that moves him to consider all interests sympathetically and to do right by them so that no good is disregarded.
This profound charity was the standard Edmund Burke used when, while reflecting on the revolution in France, he rendered his judgment about the proper aim of statecraft:
"...it is better that the whole should be imperfectly and anomalously answered, than that, while some parts are provided for with great exactness, others might be totally neglected, or perhaps materially injured, by the over-care of a favourite member."
Sever the other principles of conservatism (however many you number them) from this profound charity, substitute the mere shadow of charity for the McCoy, and you get things like No Child Left Behind and expanded Medicare benefits and limp enforcement of immigration laws.
Unfortunately, as we've seen, it's very tempting for conservative politicians to abandon the essence of conservatism in favor of the mere shadow of it. The "compassionate conservatism" of the latest Bush Presidency is nothing but this meager substitution sloganized.
It's very tempting to abandon the essence of conservatism because it has many powerful enemies in the political world of democracy, all of whom derive their power from the same source -- their extremism. It takes a great deal of courage to advocate profound charity in the face of that extremism.
Burke foresaw that it would be so. He knew that democratic government's susceptibility to derangement by the extreme rights that sprang from the unwholesome loins of the Enlightenment would make it a formidable ally of conservatism's enemies. For this reason he tried to forestall the rising tide of democracy.
History records his failure -- democracy is here to stay. And thus it falls to modern conservatives to try to rein in some of the other extreme rights that are deranging our democratic republic.
"Extreme" rights?
I borrow that appellation from Burke, who used it to characterize the "rights of man" that were animating revolution on both side of the Atlantic Ocean -- seeing correctly in these extreme rights a source of injurious social disharmony.
This is uncomfortable ground for conservatives, especially American conservatives.
The language of rights we have been taught makes it hard for us to communicate at all on this ground. But if we don't figure out some way to do so the rout of conservatism is going to continue apace. So we must try.
Perhaps if we begin with the familiar language of the Federalist Papers we may gain the courage to step into our own time, and try communicating here.
In his famous Federalist #10 James Madison acknowledged candidly that men's unequal faculties in acquiring property -- from which the right of property is derived -- were the most enduring source of faction. He argued that the multiplicity of rights comprised by the wide-ranging Union, and the checks and balances set forth in the new Constitution, would be a safeguard against the right to property motivating a majority to concert and further their property interests at the unjust expense of others in society.
But unlike Burke, Madison was not prescient in this matter -- he did not see that there was another mechanism by which the extreme right to property would work to derange our politics. And the right to property as we have always enforced it in America is unquestionably in its extreme form -- having no restriction on the extent of its exercise save the dubious concept of monopoly.
Alexander Hamilton was also blind to the lurking danger. However, in his Federalist #35 he unknowingly exposed the mechanism by which the very processes of law-making in our national government -- popular election of law-makers and majority rule -- would work to derange our politics under the influence of the extreme right to property:
"The idea of an actual representation of all classes of the people, by persons of each class, is altogether visionary... Mechanics and manufacturers will always be inclined, with few exceptions, to give their votes to merchants, in preference to persons of their own professions or trades... They are sensible that their habits in life have not been such as to give them those acquired endowments, without which, in a deliberative assembly, the greatest natural abilities are for the most part useless; and that the influence and weight, and the superior acquirements of the merchants render them more equal to a contest with any spirit which might happen to infuse itself into the public councils, unfriendly to the manufacturing and trading interests... We must therefore consider merchants as the natural representatives of all these classes of the community."
But if the merchant is the "natural representative" of the mechanic with regard to the issue of taxation, who are the "natural representatives" of all the other interests that a mechanic has? And for which candidate ought the mechanic to vote when the "natural representative" of another of his interests is not one and the same person as the merchant?
Publius evaded these questions.
But our form of government forces the issue every Election Day.
It forces us to choose between a very few of our "natural representatives" to the exclusion of all the others -- after all, we only get to vote for one Representative and two Senators. And by forcing us into this choice our representative government has in our era produced the justice without charity of which Plato's Republic is the classic example. To put it bluntly, it has forced us to think small about the scope of our lives. George Santayana described this insidiously destructive process brilliantly in his masterwork The Life of Reason:
"An end is assumed, in this case an end which involves radical injustice toward every interest not included in it; and then an organism is developed or conceived that shall subserve that end, and political justice is defined as the harmonious adjustment of powers and functions within that organism. Reason and art suffice to discover the right methods for reaching the chosen end, and the polity thus established, with all its severities and sacrifices of personal will, is rationally grounded. The chosen end, however, is arbitrary, and in fact, perverse..."
Its perverseness lies in its inability to wholly unfold the potentialities of the human spirit.
Take a look at our government -- the Servile State - and you see immediately what end we chose, and continue to choose in the voting booth under the pressure of the extreme right to property. We've chosen the crudest end of all -- the circulation of money.
And the reason is simple.
Appropriating land for exclusive use -- that is, claiming control over a piece of land and excluding other men from the free use of that land -- is what the right to property in land involves. It is clearly an act of force.
In our circumstances -- no frontiers, all the world propertified or territorialized -- the exercise of the extreme right to property has excluded a great many persons from free access to material resources, making it necessary for most of us to buy access. The necessity of trade has reduced many men to servitude, and exposed them to exploitation in that servitude. Servile and exploited, the fenced-off have naturally sought ways of reducing their servitude and exploitation. Thus, when given a choice to vote for either a candidate who promises largess from the public coffers or a candidate who doesn't but who instead promises to bring the boys home from some foreign military adventure, an increasing number of voters have come to opt for the former. In short, we vote for our pocketbooks, first and foremost.
It's a matter of opposing force with force.
Which brings us into our own time. The link between the advent of the Servile State and the extreme right to property is clear and unavoidable. Conservatives are willing enough to catalog the evils of the Servile State, but we are much too tongue-tied about discussing this link. And this muteness is a mistake -- thought it's understandable, it takes a great deal of courage to talk of the extreme right to property in the language of charity. It's a great mistake because unless the destructiveness wrought by the extreme right to property through the means of the Servile State is discussed openly, the Servile State is going to continue to be a killer.
And I mean that quite literally.
The essential purposes of the Servile State are to create government jobs for the Procrusteans and to keep money circulating to those who are disabled in the eyes of our competitive economy. Unhappily for working stiffs, however, a substantial chunk of the money collected in taxes for these purposes is taxed away from working stiffs and not from the men who uncharitably exercise the extreme right to property. This added tax burden has offset the reduction in the cost of goods achieved by our industrial artistry, and then some. This "and then some" has been lethal.
For a significant stratum of wage earners this "and then some" has meant that their take-home pay has ceased to be adequate to support a family. And this significant stratum has been becoming increasingly significant. Along the road to hyper-productivity machines have taken over so many semi-skilled tasks that the low-skill labor market has been flooded. Wage competition has had its effect, and more and more men have been finding themselves unable to get work that pays enough to support a family.
This has had the effect of driving many women into the mercenary labor market and further smashing up the traditional division of labor within the family. One tentacle of the Servile State scheme -- obligatory government-controlled schooling -- having already stripped the family of much of its traditional educative function.
From this rocky soil easy divorce was just one of a passel of bad legislative ideas that sprouted and sucked away more and more opportunities for folks to find valued places and stability in our society.
And while all these changes have been taking place, other tentacles of the Servile State scheme -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. -- have been draining away the vital mutual aid functions from the neighborhood and the church, weakening folks' allegiance to these institutions.
In these circumstances, with children looking
more like a burden than a blessing to more and more folks, there
was little to prevent us from stepping into the abortion chasm.
So we did.
These evils of Servile State would be more than adequate grounds
for trying to rein in the extreme right to property, but they
aren't the only grounds. There are many others.
For example, this extreme right undermines the usefulness of our
arts in making life more propitious for our successful pursuits
of happiness.
America has achieved fabulous feats of industrial artistry. Machines, computers, ingenious production schemes now produce material abundance with relatively little human labor. Yet we are not liberated by this high-productivity for greater personal achievement through liberal occupation. We have cheapened the cost of goods. But cheapening goods under the extreme right to property has served mainly to cheapen men's labors.
The machinist is not liberated for greater achievement by the robot that now does his tasks. He is merely thrown out of his job, and into the relentless competition to hire himself into someone else's service.
And unhappily, not only is the laid-off machinist thrown into competition to sell his labor in some other job, if he is to keep his new job we must buy whatever he is now offering, in addition to all the stuff the machine that replaced him is churning out.
Thus has the extreme right to property given birth to the Consumption Society -- a society in which high-productivity has translated into nothing but urgency to buy more and more and more.
And once the extreme right to property created our Consumption Society, its skewing of our representative form of government into the Servile State became even more sinister -- adding the tax and spend money-circulation burden to the downward pressure on wages created by high-productivity, further smashing up the family.
So it's been that domination by the extreme right to property has brought death and derangement to America on a scale we've never before seen here. Death to persons. Death to institutions. Derangement to our way of life.
Rampant crime. More than a million murders a year. More than 2 million convicts behind bars. Rampant addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, video games, pornography, you name it. Social pathology on an enormous scale.
Oh yes, and a rapacious appetite for natural resources that lie beyond our territorial borders. An appalling appetite that has made us increasingly unwelcome intruders in many parts of the world. Events during the past 63 years have made it pretty obvious that our unwelcome intrusions have had a significant part in rendering our nation considerably less secure than it could be if we were less addicted to consumption.
All in all the extremisms in the American Way of Living have made our society much too lethal and ugly, no matter how cheaply you can purchase a plastic bust of Elvis at the mall these days.
Which brings us to the question the conservative movement must now answer: is there a way to rein in the extreme right to property without resorting to something worse?
State capitalism is clearly not the answer.
But perhaps there is another way. Perhaps if we add another layer to our economy the extreme right to property can be reined in through market means -- by making it compete with a gentler, more charitable form of economy.
Adding this layer might be achievable by putting into production a few of the millions of acres of land the US government glommed onto as the price for admitting the western states. If the produce of that production were introduced into our economy by techniques that distributed some of it directly to the men who labor to produce it, capitalism might be brought gently to the harness.
But whatever means we choose to tame the extreme right to property, the charitable means I have suggested or some other wiser means, we must rise to the challenge. If we have not the courage, the rout of conservatism will end in our utter defeat. No Child Left Behind will give birth to some other monstrosity.
And one day down the line folks will awaken filled with a detestation of our way of life that only drastic measures can contain -- and on that day there'll be no talk of rights at all.
THE END
Eastport, Maine
February, 2004