February 7, 2004
WHAT IS THERE WORTH CONSERVING FROM THE ERA OF THE COUNTER-CULTURE?:
A New Politics (Frederick Turner, 02/06/2004, Tech Central Station)
A realignment is taking place in the politics of this country and indeed of the world at large. It is increasingly difficult to define the meanings of left and right, liberal and conservative.Democratic candidates are running on once-Republican platforms of fiscal restraint, protection of jobs from foreign competition, and the principle of leaving dictators alone; the Republican President proposes expensive prescription drug and space exploration plans, encourages legal guest workers, and sets out to make the world safe for democracy. Progress is surely the property of the "conservatives," while resistance to economic, technological and political innovation comes from the once-progressive liberals. The "culture wars" have ended in a strange standoff, even a detente. The left seems bankrupt of new ideas and cannot be a partner in any really interesting conversation. The recent collapse of the Dean campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is a case in point: his only platform, as the delegates perceived, was to be against things.
A rift is opening at right angles, so to speak, to the old borders of contestation. The rift, I will argue, is not between left and right but between libertarian and communitarian. Or perhaps we could say that in the intellectual absence of the left, an inherent rift in the right is becoming the new locus of debate, and the remnants of the left are having to choose one side or the other. [...]
Perhaps now we can define the orientation of the new emergent "parties":
Libertarian vs. Communitarian
Freedom vs. Virtue
Economic inclusiveness vs. Preservation of non-economic values
Globalist/Localist vs. Nationalist
Evolution vs. Ecology
Free market capitalism vs. "Stakeholder" capitalism
Open communication vs. Responsible gatekeeping
Privacy vs. Accountability
Gender-blindness vs. Sexual equality-in-difference
Some of these categories probably require a gloss. The libertarian party in this schema -- not necessarily identical to the actual Libertarian Party -- believes that members of a free population will be disciplined by the consequences of their free acts and the exigencies of the market, so that they will acquire virtue as a by-product of their education by experience. Cultural and moral institutions will arise spontaneously to cope with the demand, without help from the state. The "nanny" state creates a moral peon class that never has the opportunity to develop virtue and the higher fruits of human life. The nature of virtue itself is one of the issues that is to be decided by the free process of the marketplace of ideas, and nobody's traditional value system should be forced on anyone else; victimless crimes, such as drug use, are not really crimes at all. For libertarians, freedom is the prerequisite for virtue.Communitarians, on the other hand, believe that a free democracy cannot function, however excellent its constitution, without a virtuous population that is capable of judging objectively, voting responsibly, taking into account the needs of the whole community, and serving the public if called upon. Even markets depend, they say, upon accumulated cultural/moral capital. Thus a society (not necessarily the state) should preempt the free market and provide the basic security from want and illness that is the ground of virtue. It should protect the public from its own addictions. And it should encourage an education in values and civics that can counteract both the individualistic selfish tendencies of the free marketplace and the divisiveness of ethnic differences. For communitarians, virtue precedes freedom.
It can come as no surprise that seventy years of atomizing rule by the Left leaves it as the conservative force in our politics, trying to preserve what it has wrought and opposing government--which is the one force capable of reversing those "gains" in a hurry--while the Right, on the other hand, has seized upon the power of government to effect the counter-revolution. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2004 7:29 AM
Mr. Judd;
It's all about escape hatches - manual overrides. I wrote about that earlier. What concerns me about communitarism is the complete conformity aspect of it. There's a world of difference between "almost everyone" and "everyone" in this regard. What's the point of virtue if no ever gets to make a real choice? Society / government should forbid as little as possible, although it may condemn far more. If you don't have some deviants, you're locked in to a societal structure that's incapable of changing and therefore incapable of responding to the real world. That, more than anything else, is what did in the Soviets.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at February 7, 2004 12:08 PMIf you have social conformity you don't need as much government--the behavior of your neighbors is relatively predictable.
Posted by: oj at February 7, 2004 12:36 PMFreedom and social conformity are polar opposites. Each comes with its own price.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at February 7, 2004 1:30 PMLike with any pair of polar opposites, the best position to take is somewhere in between. This re-alignment will be beneficial if it results in political parties that represent the best of what their poles have to offer, and allow for a mixed government where the best aspects of libertarianism and communitarianism are acted on, and where the worst impulses of each are supressed.
Jeff:
What freedom do you have if you can have no idea how the next person you meet will behave nor he you? It is necessary in such a case to have massive government to regulate each other. That's why the more "free" we've become of the rules and traditions that bred conformity the less free we are in fact.
Posted by: oj at February 7, 2004 3:30 PMConformity is in the eye of the beholder. We are all for both, the most rabidly in-your-face rebellious individualist among us still have standards of propriety which they feel cannot be crossed.
It reminds me of the SNL news commentary about a San Francisco gay rights assembly (or some such pseudo-public function) which got out of hand when some participants got naked and sodomized each other with a glass bottle. The gag-line from the news account was "local police are investigating whether the bottle was re-cycled".
AOG:
"If you don't have some deviants, you're locked in to a societal structure that's incapable of changing and therefore incapable of responding to the real world"
All progress has been caused by deviants?
I've never seen the liberal philosophy put quite that bluntly.
Jeff -- There can be no political freedom without social conformity because in the absence of conformity, the majority will demand ever greater governmental control to repress chaos.
Posted by: David Cohen at February 7, 2004 4:35 PMAt the risk of reiteration: to avoid chaos, there needs to be a degree of control (how much control? how much chaos is acceptable?), and the essential choice is between internalized control (shared values) and external control (societal repression).
This construct is entirely consistent, incidentally, with contemporary management philosophy.
Posted by: Tonto at February 7, 2004 6:28 PMPeter;
It's almost a tautology. If a thought isn't deviant, it isn't progress because it's the same. And those who think those deviant thoughts are deviants. So all progress (which is a subset of change) is based on deviants. I don't see that as a liberal philosophy, but a basic matter of definitions.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at February 7, 2004 11:02 PMThe culture believes in progress, so to be deviant you'd have to oppose progress--which most deviance does.
Posted by: oj at February 8, 2004 12:20 AMMr. Judd;
Many Chicago Cubs fans believe fervently in a World Series win for the Cubs. That has as much to do with the Cubs winning as a general belief in progress has to do with actual progress.
As they say, "the dose makes the poison". Deviancy is one of many things that are helpful in small amounts and toxic in large ones.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at February 8, 2004 12:00 PMAOG:
They don't believe that a Cubs win would advance society, which is the precise claim of those who advocate accepting homosexuality, bestiality, incest, etc. None of the doises of those things are healthful.
Posted by: oj at February 8, 2004 12:07 PMI think you're taking far too narrow a definition of "deviant", which really means "out of the norm". For instance, the concept that government existed to secure the rights of the citizens and with the consent of the governed was (and to a large extent still is) quite a deviant viewpoint. Yet its implementation was progress, in my view.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at February 9, 2004 9:10 AMEven in the Magna Carta they're portrayed as ancient rights.
Posted by: oj at February 9, 2004 9:24 AMOld and deviant describe two different things.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at February 9, 2004 1:45 PMUnless Artie Johnson is involved.
Posted by: oj at February 9, 2004 2:16 PM