iwpoe wrote:

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

You could argue that (well, I suppose it is a little bit unfair to the anarcho-capitalist, as he means something else by the term). There is the question of the role of the state in neoliberalism. It has certainly been argued, by Carson amongst others, that neoliberalism doesn't really represent a lessening of the role of the state in the economy. All it really saw was the end of a sort of consensus between the state, business, and unions in the post-war period and subordination of unions and organised labour to business and the state, making sure more profits and power go to business. Priviatisation is more a matter of who gets the profits.

iwpoe wrote:

I've always understood neo-liberalism basically in the manner you describe.

Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist thinking tries to conceive of a market that somehow floats free of non-market factors

Yes. That is a definite problem with neoliberal economics. They don't distinguish between rational and irrational forces which leads to a divinization of the market itself. Irrational production or demand is justified in that system. The State wants to intervene to stop it but this is considered some kind of sin.

iwpoe wrote:

Neo-liberal thought thinks of the market as the only legitimate social engine (or, at least, the primary one)- it's a style of governance by way of market metrics.

Agreed.

iwpoe wrote:

In this country it has been the defacto means of affecting reform since Reagan- Clinton and Obama included.

Rule by markets in this sense is the reform. Unless you are already wealthy, healthy and fit such a system results in effective slavery. People literally cannot stand such instability and insecurity. It's amazing we've lasted this long and in the USA the only reason most people have is because of their families, in my opinion, which is why the undermining of the family is so extremely dangerous. America's social security just is the family and if you assault it you have to have out-and-out socialism. I think the USA will ultimately just expand its military first, though, to stir up employment and business activity. But eventually Sanders becomes necessary.

iwpoe wrote:

This is why I'm entirely unimpressed by all of our political discourse in this country. The discussion of ideas, already made stupid by populism, is generally merely a pretense anyway since governance is actually really about who will determine what market sectors will be the most favored

I agree that it is largely about which businesses and market activity will end up being most favored. But to be sure, when you over-empower the private sector and for-profit activity, it makes sense that it becomes political.

Last edited by Timocrates (3/20/2016 2:18 pm)

Tim the only thing that confuses me about you is that you seem to think the dissolution of the family follows on the back of explicitly social policy. Marriage reform and etc. It's obvious to me, though this is perhaps because I am a millennial, that the dissolution of the family follows directly from the economic situation. I married relatively young for my generation, even though this might have been a mistake for me, but it was a luxury purchased for me on the back of a modest amount of family wealth. I was permitted the resources and was lucky enough to be able to stick it in a job that put out adequate salary to build my own security search that now I have a business that can provide for my security of itself. Most of my friends, even people in relatively lucrative sectors, can't hope for 5 years of job security. Nevermind my large cohort of friends who were in the Humanities in the education sector. They will likely spend ten or fifteen years after getting their PHDs in the hell that is being adjunct faculty. The average person is going to be hesitant to even consider marriage, let alone family, in this kind of situation. And while I'm living proof that it's possible to build for yourself Security in this economy, I think that it requires vast sacrifices that would have never been required of us in prior generations.

All the social policy follows pretty neatly from that reality- either directly in the case of Family Planning, which is necessary because nobody can be sure they're even going to be able to afford children, or indirectly in the case of marriage reform, since few understand their own marriage is to be about children anyway. For how could you if you don't even know when and if children will happen.

Last edited by iwpoe (3/20/2016 3:00 pm)

Timocrates wrote:

The economic situation actually hardens family. People fall back on family. That is why social policy has to intervene.

What do you mean? In fact? Or ideally? I hardly know a man today in or just below my class who could honestly say without delusion that he could fall back on his wife and her family in times of insecurity. Job insecurity is grounds for divorcing a man now unless you're already wealthy or from the dregs of society where unemployment is the norm. Aye, my impoverished tenants have good heterosexual relationships they stick in and have 2 - 5 children from, but they are worthless people who neither take care of their families nor even take full advantage of the social services provided for the purpose. They're also to the man unhappy and bad to each other.

I can, indeed, fall back on my parents (though it would be a disgrace for me) but I can't fall back on my in-laws. I'd rather be homeless. When a man goes unemployed, and it becomes any sort of burden for his wife, a clock begins ticking. Only an exceptionally good hearted woman does not set such a clock, and exceptionally good hearts are by definition exceptional.

Timocrates wrote:

You're right. The reason why you were "relatively young" is because of the economic situation. This is the hypocrisy latent in conservatives who advocate do-or-die economic policies. It is irresponsible to marry and start a family. Most millennials I know call it selfish - even cruel.

It's selfish because respectable education and parenting today requires behaviors which lead either to economic failure for most people (which also entails familial failure) or which require only the appearance of success plus the total neglect of the children emotionally.

Timocrates wrote:

Yes, I know iwpoe. But why do you think that the economic situation isn't itself an attack on the family? There is nothing more ideal for totalitarianism and finally out-and-out tyranny than the radical atomization of society.

Well, I agree with you, but this is a totally new focus for you. It's painfully obvious to me that this is the core problem, not a peripheral one, nor even one amongst equals. This is the Pope of issues. 

Timocrates wrote:

You can't reform marriage, iwpoe. The thing is impossible. 

I'm just looking for a convenient name. It's not meant as a true description.

Unless you specify more what you mean, I think that the idea of conservatism is a mistake in general. You are a citizen of the UK, if I recall correctly, so it makes more sense that it would be possible for you to be a conservative, since there is at least ideally the memory of some kind of tradition floating around in your state.

The United States, however, is barely more than 200 years old. I've met people in Europe that live in the houses older than this country. And our system is explicitly modernist and anglo-liberal in its construction. What are you "conserving"? The Constitution? Why? Why is some codified 18th century liberalism to be preferred to Rawlsian liberalism? I would seek to use social democracy to undermine liberalism- since, as far as I can tell, our most powerful Christian forces have simply gotten straight into bed with money and never left (as have our so-called conservatives for that matter, under the screen of a bad faith appeal to the tradition of "the American entrepreneurial spirit" as if massive subsidies breaks and other kinds of help and structural favoritism towards financial services firms and military industrial firms has anything to do with any kind of entrepreneurial spirit.)

Last edited by iwpoe (3/20/2016 9:21 pm)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I am a subject of Her Majesty.  There are no British citizens.

Well, you are in the middle of the Babylonian Captivity of the Crown, but it's at least a peaceable imprisonment. Perhaps as she's permitted merely formal powers you should be thought a merely formal subject.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

​Well, I think first and foremost you are preserving, or sometimes reviving, the permanent things as Russell Kirk (borrowing from T. S. Eliot) called them.

I am one of the few alive who prefers Pound to Eliot "seeing he had been born / In a half savage country, out of date; / Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn.." (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174181)

But since we're taking our bearings from Kirk, whom I've loved reading in the past, I'll refer to what Russello calls his six "canons" of conservatism:

1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
2. An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
5. A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

My argument is that the United States fundamentally denies 3, 5, and 6 upon its very founding, accepts 1 merely formally in its constitution, has come to socially and politically either deny or muddle 4 (most distressingly amongst so-called conservatives), and socially and politically banalizes 2 into commodified and hollow identities.

But let's speak of conservatism itself and not its impossible position in my mad house of a fatherland.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

That is, to speak broadly and to try and avoid sectarianism

I trust that you're speaking in good faith, but, especially in the political atmosphere I live in, it's very hard to see how conservatism as it lives and breaths today doesn't amount to little but a sect.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

you are preserving the decentralised intermediate associations, or Burke's little platoons, of families, communities, Churches, occupational associations, and charities and voluntary associations. You are preserving the autonomy of these organisations and their functions. You are also preserving faith, ordered liberty, the traditional virtues (C. S. Lewis's Tao), some traditional idea of craftsmanship and higher culture and art, some idea that things like faith, family, friendship and the permanent things are more important than gadgets or material progress and that man and society progress most when they pursue and embodie the permanent things than when there us great economic growth or large production of consumer goods and technological gadgets. And I would also argue that you would wish to preserve some sort of healthy relationship between man and nature, the city and countryside.

Hmm. If you wanted to identify me as a conservative of some kind you could probably classify me as a Straussian, though I believed Strauss about Plato perhaps having the truth and not Bloom about it merely being good to read Plato, so I've been able to avoid the crypto-nihilism Straussians are prone to falling into. The reason for this preface is this:

I agree with conservatives against liberals and reformers of all sorts that traditions, small associations, and all little historical accretions of civil society are not in principle irrational, invalid, or suspicious. They are, in fact, the living actuality of what the lawgiver of a state holds only in potency. Heidegger would say something like 'they are the horizon which constitutes a world'. I would say that they are the most stable and accessible foundations of a full way of life, which is the only possible route to (human) wisdom. However I agree with Plato and the whole history of platonism in saying that they are also not in principle good. They are, at best, necessary instruments to the good. In the US one might wave the bloody shirt of chattel slavery against the good of those little platoons, but I don't think this is necessary. There are many practices and associations which are not merely bad because they are old but which are discernibly foolish and in some case obviously bad for the soul. Plato in his own time identified the Homeric tradition, pederasty as usually practiced, the civil traditions and arrangements of Athens and her democracy itself as especially troubling. Insofar as we're to be wise, and not merely prudent, it seems to be that we must join him.

It also occurs to me that conservatism usually slips into a kind of rosey conventionalism the more it adheres to its respect for little platoons. Churches are good... All of them? Some of them? Why? I have a hard time viewing  polygamous mormon sectarian communes in the same light as I do Westminster Cathedral.

Indeed, if you hold this view, how is sectarianism even to be avoided? I mean, apart from how you all did politically deal with it, what's the authentically Conservative response to "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland? The texture of social life is not, especially in large societies, naturally harmonious. Some voluntary associations explicitly arise in order to combat others.

How even can, after time, conservatism really critique leftist activity anyway? Insofar as conservatism amounts to something like a normative framework about social life and not a political platform then it would have to note that, say, gay pride groups, the Industrial Workers of the World, deconstructionism, etc etc constitute genuine examples as much as the Salvation Army, the Scouts, and Rotary Club do. I don't think it's a conservative requirement that the tradition be, itself, conservative.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

This is necessarily broad and vague, but it does give some intimations of what I take to be conservatism and how it differs from other viewpoints. But I think there is an enduring  conservative vision of what is the purpose of the live, that is not necessarily sectarian (not necessarily Christian or Platonist or whatever), based on the permanent things. And I think these permanent things were not absent from America at its founding and afterwards, whatever state they are in today (I don't think we are much better off in Britain), and this is not affected by  America's constitution (which I would not call Rawlsian - it has its flaws but it does, or did have, good things about it: even as an arch-Tory monarchist I can appreciate that there was quite a lot of wisdom amongst the American Founding generation). ​Perhaps traditionalist or traditional conservative is a better term. After all, today, the true conservative must play the revivalist as much as the preserver.

A few remarks:

A Platonist and a Christian always have open to themselves to say 'we are a sect because we have the truth.'

Our founders were not as radical as the revolutionary thinkers in France, but they are very much ordinary enlightenment thinkers. I don't consider them to be particularly more respectable intellectually than John Locke. The point isn't that the constitution is Rawlsian but that I see no reason except for time and secular piety that it be treated with more regard by conservatives than something written by Mill or Rawls. Liberalism is liberalism in 1976, 1876, and 1776. It does not age into a conservative ideal with time.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

​I think this idea of the permanent things is important for thinking about economics. We don't ask what is the role of the economy and economic activity in society enough. We live in times in which the economy is often taken to be the central focus of politics. There is a tendency in modern liberals to see economic growth and development as the great goal of civilisation. In the background is a technophile and quasi-transhumanist belief in constant technology progress. Whereas, the (traditional) conservative has a quite different view of the economy.

I just don't understand why this shouldn't be called anything other than conservative- platonist, socialist, or even just philosophic. The point is that this economic focus is myopic and unfounded, and it's somewhat easy to see once one stops taking people's word on it.