SPURRED AND SPURIOUS:

WHO'S SMARTER, ORRIN JUDD OR ARISTOTLE? (Patrick Ruffini, 09.22.02)

The individual who is starkly at odds with a properly functioning culture is almost always in the wrong. This assumption is conservative, but in no sense is it anti-modern.

A far more interesting test would be to compare our cultural norms from twenty years ago to those of today. I know there's some debate on this point, but I would submit that we've advanced significantly in our economic, political, and even cultural ideas. Ours is a free society, and free societies take their direction not from a leader at the top but from a multitude of trial and error experiments. Through this process, we're constantly refining our methods, promoting what works and discarding what doesn't. If our culture seems too finnicky sometimes, this is why.

This process is most acute in the economic sphere, where continual re-invention is the fountainhead of economic growth. Progress and growth are the rule, rather than the exception, in our conservative economic system.

And what about the culture? Hasn't it gone downhill markedly? Well, I'd grant that I'm standing on shakier ground in making the case that it hasn't, but the same framework still applies. The 1960s were an experiment, an experiment that succeeded in some ways (civil rights, women's rights) but failed spectacularly in others (the Great Society, drugs, and illegitimacy). By the 1990s, we came to a proper understanding of why the 60's failed, from a practical as well as a moral standpoint (in true conservative fashion, it took thirty years to come full circle). Had we known in 1955 what we knew in 1995 about the effects of loosening social norms on creeping illegitimacy, welfare use, and drug abuse, the 60s probably would have played out much differently. The 1950s culture did not defend itself properly against the 60s onslaught and got slaughtered, not undeservedly. We now know that overly loose social norms take a considerable toll and individual wellbeing and happiness, and because people ultimately don't want to live like this, we should expect to see a return to a more fulfilling family and spiritual environment. Here again, we see a process of trial and error at work, with a recovery from the 30-year cultural bear market taking hold in the mid-1990s.

It must inevitably seem churlish to quarrel with someone who's just compared you favorably to Aristotle, but such is not the aim here. Rather, let us think of it as an elder gently chiding a wayward youth. For if Mr. Ruffini is justified, and I think he is, in celebrating Joseph Schumpeter's notion that the creative destruction of capitalism is a welcome thing in the economic sphere, he is, I believe, dead wrong about the efficacy of large scale social experiments being carried out on the culture. More than that though, he's underestimated the power, persistence and pertinence of the conservative critique. He's also underestimated how unpopular this critique tends to be.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 22, 2002 10:56 AM