Last week, the philosophy department here at Kent State held a POW,
short for Philosophy on Wednesday, that was a round-table discussion
of philosophical issues that might be relevant to tommorrow’s
election. Prof. Norman Fischer had recruited two members of his
political philosophy class to present on each side. The student
prepresenting for the Democrats was a true representative of the
wonkish wing of the party, all policies and numbers. While I think we
need more of this attitude, the conservative did make a more
interesting subject of study.
He was interesting mostly because I had to work to understand what he
was getting at and how his positions could be interpreted as a
coherent position. So I reconstructed a Conservative from the signs
and clues that I could find in his speech. This was a lot like
reconstructing the achievements of a lost civilization from bits or
pottery. Hence, I won’t name my subject, since this reflection isn’t
really about, its a reconstruction of sorts.
He was obviously preplexed by the world and the state in which he had
found it. Some of his confusions could have been easily corrected,
perhaps they were even affected for the sake of sharpening his
message. For instance, he expressed great surprise that a blue collar
region shouldn’t be conservative in nature. Of course, the reasons why
blue collar workers don’t flock to conservativism are pretty clear.
Among other reasons, American industrial workers have benefitted
greatly from union membership and American conservatism has not
enthusiatically embraced the unions. The coolness of that relationship
isn’t mysterious either. The unions have often been of as the leading
edge of socialism, which still haunts the sleepless nighttime hours of
many on the right.
My conservative subject had a deeper confusion. Most of his arguments
were supported by constrasting either the current situation or a
Democratic proposal with a well-developed sense of “the way things
should be”, as if the justification for his vision should have been
entirely obvious. I think he was confused that others couldn’t see
that his imagined America was the true America.
He had difficulty providing other principle on which either this
vision or the road to could be justified. When an audience member
suggested that conservatives tend to utilize principles of individual
autonomy and responsibility, he jumped on this as an important
principle, but I don’t think that he would have come up with it
himself. “The ways things should be” didn’t seem to have much room for
a robust sort of individual freedom.
He’s going to need some decent principles to develop his position so
that others could see it as well as he could. Even accepting the
explicitly stated principles of “the way thing should be” would not
work to bridging the gap. (Unless of course, one were to accept the
reliance on traditional religion in just the manner that he meant it.)
The typical liberal isn’t a fan of huge, monolithic, or overbearing
goverment or really of any significant weakening on limits on the
application of power. Most liberals I know place a pretty heavy on the
limited and deliberate use of power.
Since they’ve already come up, unions act to insure that the power of
corporations (or other employers) is appropriately limited, and unions
do it while minimizing government exercise of power. The government
could fill the same role, but no one really wants that. Of course, a
conservative could argue that the market is the appropriate regulatory
mechanism for wages. This would, however, be evidence that they simply
weren’t paying attention. Assuming labor is a resources just like any
other, which it isn’t, aggregation leads to effeciency, and is
unavoidable in any but a tightly controlled market. Unions are a
market-driven solution.
How “things should be” without large-scale goverment or strong
unions. One could imagine it to mean power concentrated in large
corporate interests acting without significant limits or balance. I’m
not so sure that my conjectured conservative subject would agree that
that was his vision of “the way things should be”. There were definite
signs that family and religion should provide the structures within
which people would be able to lead orderly and meaningful live. This
idyll constrasts sharply with a socialist idyll in which comradeship
and goodwill would cement and energize the bounds of community at a
much more abstract level than that of family or parish. They are both
similar however, in that bonds of affection and loyalty are considered
the skeleton on which a culture is constructed.
The democracy envisioned by the framers did not involve a government
of the scope of the current American government. They also didn’t
envision the telegraph, let alone the airplane, superhighway,
computer, etc. These larger scales of organization are not things from which
we can effectively back away.
Marx was on to something when he observed that the the means of
production determine patterns of social organization. One thing he
did not foresee was that the means of production would not remain
static at the stage of the early industrial revolution, they would
change and change and change again. The socialist state becomes just
as irrelevant as a Jeffersonian Democracy because they have been left
behind by the increasing scale, complexity and plasticity of human
organization.
In the case of “how things should be”, the idyll would require finding
our way to a world in which there were no large scale organizations
that were not firmly entrenched in smaller, more local, stable
structures. Family and church, without union, government or
multi-national, clearly with no organization coordinating human social
interaction somehow higher than the nation-state, seems the core of
the conservative vision. However, it doesn’t seem any more attainable,
or even approachable than the socialist one.
How should things be? Well, I haven’t a clue, which is part of why I
had to try to get into the mindset of my conservative subject. What
does seem clear is that the balanced and deliberative limitation of
power allows for human thriving. The large the scale on which power
can be exercised, the large the scale at which the limits and balances
must be pursued.
