Your Humble Blogger has been enjoying the discussion about Tenet # 8 so much, # 9 is irresistible.
9. The duties of man-service, effort, obedience, cultivation of virtue, self-restraint-as the price of rights.
Again, this is a conception of rights with which I entirely disagree. But there is something more to this than that. I think it's at the heart of the Conservative mindset: an inherent difference between Good People and Bad People. I've seen this in American Conservatives both of the Social and the Fiscal stripe; a sense that there are the Deserving and the Undeserving, and most of the poor are Undeserving Poor.
This is crap.
1) Most people are a mix of good and bad habits, good and bad intentions, and good and bad outcomes. Obedience, self-restraint, and service come mixed with laziness, self-absorption and cupidity. Effort and service come mixed with cultivation of vice and self-indulgence. Effort comes mixed with laziness, self-restraint with self-indulgence, vice with virtue, and service with exploitation. People are complicated. That doesn't mean that people aren't good or bad; the bad in people sometimes outweighs the good, or vice versa, and each human is responsible for his own choices. But good or bad is not inherent in the person, and human rights are not dealt to some humans and not others.
B) How much obedience will buy how much right to dissent? How much cultivation of virtue will allow me to use freedom of religion to decide what virtue is? How much effort and service makes me eligible for due process? Who decides? Well, usually people with power decide, which can often mean either those who have exercised little self-restraint, obedience, and service or those who have little interest in vesting rights in people unlike themselves. After all, I'm sure that Dennis Kozlowski and A. Alfred Taubman don't think of themselves as criminals, just because they happened to break a few laws, but I suspect they think of otherwise law-abiding drug dealers as criminals by nature, who have forfeited their human rights.
iii) Are those even the duties of man in the first place? What about teaching and learning? What about creation of beauty? What about dissent? What about alleviating misery (OK, that is or ought to be part of service, but somehow "service" is a trifle too vague for me)? What about ... oh, heck, you can play this game as well as I can. I think that the duties of man, as seen by Rossiter's Conservative, are, as I might have expected, inherently conservative, and I lean toward the progressive duties, those that improve or repair the world, in addition to those that preserve or protect it.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
okay now i see the pattern here.
The Conservative Tradition
translation by David Powers, May 7, 2003
1. The mixed and immutable nature of man, in which wickedness, unreason, and the urge to violence lurk always behind the curtain of civilized behavior.
You can’t trust anybody.
2. The natural inequality of men, except in the equal possession of a precious soul and inviolable personality.
But you can trust some people more than others.
3. The superiority of liberty to equality in the hierarchy of human values and social purposes.
Nobody can figure it out for you.
4. The inevitability and necessity of social classes, and consequent folly and futility of most attempts at leveling.
However, having rich friends can’t hurt.
5. The need for a ruling and serving aristocracy.
They’re powerful and they’re nice when you get to know them.
6. The fallibility and potential tyranny of majority rule.
And they need your help to stay on top.
7. The consequent desirability of diffusing and balancing power-social, economic, cultural, and especially political.
Which pays well.
8. The rights of man as something earned rather than given.
Very, very well.
9. The duties of man-service, effort, obedience, cultivation of virtue, self-restraint-as the price of rights.
They will of course expect you to kiss their asses.
10. The prime importance of private property for liberty, order, and progress.
This will involve mowing their immense lawns…
11. The indispensability and sanctity of inherited institutions, values, symbols, and rituals.
…listening to their boring family stories…
12. The essential role of religious feeling in man and organized religion in society.
…swallowing their false piety…
13. The fallibility and limited reach of human reason.
…and ignoring their self-aggrandisement.
14. The civilizing, disciplining, conserving mission of education.
Pay attention to what they say…
15. The mystery, grandeur, and tragedy of history, man’s surest guide to wisdom and virtue.
…and what they do…
16. The existence of immutable principles of universal justice.
…because that’s why everyone lets them get away with it.
17. The primacy of the community-a wondrous, divinely ordained union of land, laws, customs, institutions, traditions, ideals, things, and people dead, living, and unborn- over the whims and rights of any individual, and consequent rejection of both individualism and collectivism as solutions to the persistent problem of reconciling liberty and authority.
Your friends who are not rich do not know shit.
18. everence, contentment, sensitivity, simplicity, patriotism, self-discipline, the performance of duty-the marks of the good man.
If they pretend they do, you know it’s going to hurt them.
19. Stability, unity, equity, continuity, security, peace, the confinement of change-the marks of the good society.
Your new rich friends don’t want to hear it.
20. Dignity, authority, legitimacy, justice, constitutionalism, the recognition of limits-the marks of good government.
Besides, there’s nothing wrong with being practical.
21. The absolute necessity of Conservatism-as temperament, mood, philosophy, and tradition-to the existence of civilization.
Do you want to drink cheap wine forever?
Brilliant and incisive. Not, perhaps, as useful or expansive as Vardibidian’s discussion, but oh! Wonderful.
it was a blast feeling out the words…
yeah it could have been more open. but i like the inferences of the last 5, and i was surprised at how floppy the first three turned out to be as a base for the rest of the logic of the “tradition.”
vardibidian had been following the language into its intended territories but after reading #8 and #9 again, i wanted to collapse the thing, to bring its proscriptive elements out.
regardless of the strength of the argument there are two things about these tenets that make me chuckle. first is, if you want, they can be dismissed as “the 21 reasons why (a) we are in charge of the guest list and (b) you are not invited, (c) harumph harumph” even if that seems facile.
second, again, how to read this document? when it was written the red scare was in full swing, so what are we supposed to do with this now that rabid anti-communism has been turned into rabid anti-welfare state? when it was written, there was still something of a social contract intact in the united states, and now, that’s been burned up and buried at sea.
i find it very hard to read it “as is.” anyway.
As it happens, Rossiter was writing Conservatism in America in reaction to the mood of Conservatives in America at that time; “the confusion of thought, excess of emotion, and irresponsibility of action” that he though typified the Red-Scare conservatism of his day. He thought of himself as an old-fashioned (frankly pre-Industrial Revolution) Conservative, and wanted to show where Conservatism had gone wrong in the US, and how to bring it back to its sensible roots.
Also, I laughed a lot at your interpretation. I suppose, since we haven’t had any Conservatives around here defending the Tradition (please! please!), I don’t need to worry too much about abusing them…
Thanks,
-V.
ah! that makes sense, about this being a rabies shot.
pre-industrial revolution, does that make this the tory tradition?
Possibly Tory, though I haven’t seen any pro-monarchy tenets. John Locke, who was a Whig, seems an important influence. Certainly Locke was big on property as a natural right.
All in all, it’s a way of thinking that makes more sense for non-industrial, non-urban culture than it does for one both industrial and urban.
i understand industrial but why urban. needing huge number of service workers to me matches up with needing huge number of field workers.
Well, to a certain extent urban is implied by industrial — you can’t have a _predomimantly_ urban culture until you can replace field workers with machines, enabling the growth of urban populations as people (a) don’t have to work the land for enough food to be grown and (b) lose the basis for their rural livelihood and so leave the land in search of work in cities.
A second point is that the significance of property changes when one moves into urban arrangements. In a rural, agricultural society, property translates fairly directly into economic independence — the basis of the Jeffersonian vision of a free society. Once property ownership ceased to be primarily about the ownership of land, it doesn’t correlate with economic independence in the same way. Put it this way, if you have even some care for a free society and you’re talking about a rural society, you have to focus on land ownership; if you’re talking about an urban society, you don’t. Indeed, with the concentration of capital, property increasingly works against the free society. Concentration of land-ownership in a rural society has a similar effect, but you can’t find alternative means to empowerment under such circumstances. Land ownership reform is fundamental. This is turning into a comment on tenet #10. Ah well.
Put it this way, if you have even some care for a free society and you’re talking about a rural society, you have to focus on land ownership; if you’re talking about an urban society, you don’t.
okay i see what you’re saying. i might disagree with this though not far enough to try to declare “land reform” as the most pressing issue facing america today.
i was thinking about this last night as i looked at yet another 30% annual increase in my health insurance costs. maybe land reform isn’t important, but that’s only because the leverage, the containment of risk, that resulted from owning your own property while still enjoying the support of a communitarian society, has been split out into so many different aspects of a broker-based model. more things to farm, more ways to work, more ways to lose your shirt.
you haven’t convinced me that rental housing and for-profit utilities are so very different from tenant farming, though.
Indeed, with the concentration of capital, property increasingly works against the free society.
eek! what do you mean?
Hasty posts lead to confusion! Let me clarify some statements from my preceding post.
First, I think that I’m on the same page with david that more broadly distributed ownership in an urban society is generally a good thing, just as in a rural one. However, in an urban society, owning the property you live on is neither a necessary nor sufficient criterion for economic independence, because your work is not linked to your home property. Thus, “land reform” will not get you as far in an urban community as in a rural one, I think, and figuring out how to get people ownership over their work and the products of their labor is much more complicated.
Second, it has seldom been the case that property rights under the law have worked to protect the property of small owners while breaking up great estates and business empires, though we’ve managed that in this country on occasion. Therefore, when I said that “indeed with the concentration of capital, property increasingly works against the free society,” I meant that when the few who own most of the property can and do use their wealth to control everyone else, in those circumstances the concept of private property and the owners’ right to have their ownership protected by law come to seem less and less beneficial to the society, as this concept and the rights of owners help to hold in place an exploitative system. Under these circumstances, one can see why the Marxists would decide private property ought to be done away with. I am not of their mind, but I see how the conditions make such a step seem like a good idea.
Does that still seem like an eek-worthy statement, david? If so, what aspects of it alarm?
Myself, I am moving in the direction of calling myself a distributist. I think ownership is good, as long as it means people having their own home and control over some of the means they need to make a living. Beyond that, I favor de-centralized socialism: collective but local ownership.
I put some ideas about property about Tenet # 10, but I’ll just add to what Chris said that I believe that some private ownership is good, but that it isn’t a Natural Right (mostly), and that therefore it should be encouraged as long as it is for the good of society and the people who comprise it.
I do like the idea of collective, local ownership (of land and the means of production) but I also like the idea of lots of movement, which makes local collectives difficult to actually administer. That’s OK, if we actually instituted the idea, we’d figure it out somehow.
Thanks,
-V.