December 5, 2005

A drink or two, and then type type type...

Hale Adams comments, on the previous post:

...Scruton writes: "I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved...."

I wish Scruton would be more specific here: What, precisely, is being wasted, and how? The dead no longer exist, except in memory. They do not have any rights, let alone rights to property, except to rest unmolested. The unborn also do not exist, and may never exist, and likewise have no rights. Scruton might argue that it is a grossly impoverished society that is unmindful of the inheritance passed on to them by the dead. And equally impoverished is the society that is also unmindful of what they must pass on to the now-unborn when the time comes. And he would be right. But that's a matter for religion and conscience, not economics. But Scruton doesn't give us any specifics, never tells us what needs to be removed from the realm of economics. Until he does state some specifics, his statement is only so much pious-sounding gas, a nebulous notion that can justify all sorts of needless restrictions on the living. And it's the living whom society must serve...

This is a realm where I mostly have questions, not answers, so this is just going to ramble....

Scruton mentioned city planning. I feel the corrosiveness of the marketplace in this particularly, because I'm passionately fond of the architecture and city-scapes and urban life of times gone by. I've too often seen some pleasant urban block, perhaps with shops and restaurants and bars that have been part of the city's life for decades, blasted, destroyed as easily as by a terrorist's bomb, and replaced overnight with some cold ugly marble-sheathed office tower, with a wind-blown "plaza" that has no sweetness to offer to city life. The very economic freedom I value also destroys various other things I value enormously...

However, I've pondered for decades the problem of how to run cities differently, and, other than making me dictator of the world, I don't see any answer. (And even that would probably produce disappointing results) The only thing that can over-ride the marketplace is the state. And when you set the machinery of the state to work fixing things, you immediately run into the problem of who in the government is going to make the decisions, and on what basis, what plan and how is that plan to be chosen... and how will we correct the inevitable abuses? And the answer to that is democracy, and democracy is just another damned marketplace...

And, as soon as I start thinking about preserving that old street with some funny German restaurant I used to eat in years ago, I'm thinking like an elitist, who wants to bully people, using government power, into doing what's "good for them," and what pleases my whims, rather than what they probably want, and economically need. In other words, I'm being a socialist! It's a tangle.

But even the most deep-died Libertarian or free-market ideologue has things they value, which they try to preserve from the acid bath of the market. Maybe they have children. What the market offers your kids ain't pretty. Or there are moral values. Honor, for instance. The reports from our troops tell me it's still in existence, but it's not something the market is any friend of. And yet, it is valuable. Try to win a war without it, and you'd be glad to spend a trillion dollars to get it. But it can't be bought, or commanded. But if you start pondering how to nurture it, then perhaps you will find the illogical and cranky remarks of old mustachios long dead are not so obsolete as is generally supposed.

I'm not really sure what Scruton means when he refers to "the dead and the unborn." But it has a sort of poetic logic, hinting at a great many things that are intangible and hard to pin down, things we need to care about, but hardly have the language to discuss. "National character, for instance." It's real, as real as the national debt (and probably far more important economically). It's rooted in the past, and grows its shoots towards the future. But its almost ungraspable, untouchable. I suspect we conservatives concentrate on economic questions because they are the easy ones. We have a hammer, and there's some nails, so, whack!

But consider the Anglosphere, the countries where English and the influence of England has spread. They seem to have a big advantage over other countries, in the long haul. There's something there, something you can take to the bank, something valuable. But what? It's something that can be destroyed, or so the recent progress of Great Britain would cause me to suspect. Something that it's the important duty of Conservatives to fight for protect, to defend, to cherish. How, I'm not sure. But if I'm prickly about modernisers and utopians tossing out old things because they are inefficient or boring, well, maybe I'm not just being peevish. Things are being destroyed that I think we need. Need to have in our took kit when we suddenly find ourselves dumped into the future, like Neanderthals in some SF story brought into the present.

John Adams and his cousin Sam started a revolution to protect "The Rights of Englishmen." And history seems to confirm that they were on to something. But I'd be a little embarrassed if I had to list those rights. I've never been sure precisely what they are (Like porn, I know it when I see it!) But they are probably as valuable, and worth fighting for, as the insights of Adam Smith, published at about the same time.

Suppose, as I'm vaguely saying, that many of the things we need most to cherish can't quite be grasped by logic, or reduced to syllogisms. Maybe the seemingly illogical notions of Scruton and Chesterton are an attitude, a state of mind, a stance that will help us see them and touch them. Chesterton wrote: "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead." Makes not much sense in a logical way, but perhaps it may be a vantage point to stand at and try to see lots of almost invisible things.

Posted by John Weidner at December 5, 2005 10:45 PM
Weblog by John Weidner