at the crossroads
LIBERTY OR TYRANNY
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror,
Antisemitism, and Identity. His editorials appear regularly
in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM and
Pajamas Media. He
speaks about his latest book, Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books), at frontpage.com.
When my kids were still very young, they used to amuse themselves
with a pair of small, wooden, humanoid counters, resembling
those effigies we see on TV commercials advertising a cure for
aching joints. One was called Snazzy Guy, the other Shabby Guy,
and they would engage in furious battles which, after immense
exertions and much thunderous pounding into one another, Snazzy
Guy would invariably win. Shabby Guy would lie prostrate on
the floor for some time before slowly reviving and preparing
to enter the lists again. The battle, it seems, never ends and
it is tempting to extrapolate. In the current milieu, the proponents
of conservatism and limited government are the snazzy guys of
the sociopolitical world. The socialist utopians and big government
Statists are the shabby guys who oppose them.
“For
the Statist,” writes Mark Levin in his bestselling Liberty
and Tyranny, “liberty is not a blessing but the enemy.
It isn’t possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are
free to go their own way.” Founded on the premise of total
control over the individual citizen whom it regards as a molecular
constituent of the larger whole, Statism is all-encompassing
and all-devouring. Thus, Levin continues, as if providing a
gloss not only on a political philosophy but on Orwell’s
1984, the individual “must become reliant on
and fearful of the state. His first duty must be to the state
— not family, community, and faith.”
The
debate involving the proper relation between the individual
and the state is a hot button issue these days, but it has an
impressively ancient lineage, going back at least to Plato’s
Republic. And indeed, the political and philosophical
argument in which we are currently embroiled, an integral part
of the so-called “culture wars,” reprises with uncanny
fidelity the discussion between Plato and his student Aristotle.
Which term of the dialectic in play is to take precedence, the
free individual or the overarching state, civil society or the
governing apparatus, Snazzy or Shabby — in short, liberty
or tyranny?
Plato
is the father of the centralist or monist political tradition,
most powerfully articulated in the works of authoritarian thinkers
like Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, and in our time primarily
by the philosopher John Rawls. The state Plato imagined is defined
by three essential features: it is ascetic, monolithic, and
mystical, a kind of organism in which the sense of oneness is
created through the political bond alone. In Book II of the
Politics, Aristotle took direct aim on the Republic,
especially on what we would today call its communism (proposed
for the Guardian class), its elitism (raising a cadre of philosopher-kings
to govern the republic) and on its underlying premise that the
state must be as little differentiated as possible. “Excessive
unification is a bad thing in a state,” writes Aristotle.
And again, “There comes a point when the effect of unification
is that the state, if it does not cease to be a state, will
certainly be a very worse one; it is as if one were to reduce
harmony to unison or rhythm to a single beat.” He concludes,
“a city must be a plurality.”
Plato
desired to see the political organism become an assemblage of
individuals devoid of individuality, a collection of monads,
atoms, or integers emancipated from all communal or associational
ties and identified exclusively with the state. There are no
buffering or in-between guilds, fellowships, or “corporations.”
Aristotle, on the other hand, saw the state as balanced by the
power of other, smaller communities within the political order,
such as kinship, religion, or locality, natural rather than
artificial unions. He regarded these prepolitical, interstitial
communities as vital to the human personality and to the health
of what we call the civil society. He would surely have approved
of Winston’s mother in 1984, who “possessed a kind
of nobility . . . because the standards that she obeyed were
private ones” rather than those of party loyalty.
Aristotle’s
notion of these more intimate, intermediary unities on which
the liberty of the person rests is the source of the pluralist
or decentralist tradition that has been defended by conservative
thinkers across the centuries, most famously by John Locke,
Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke, and in the modern period,
by Friedrich Hayek and John Kekes. “To love the whole,”
counsels Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France,
“is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality .
. . To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon
we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as
it were) of public affections.”
In
other words, the individual is understood as defined by the
agency of choice and native ability and by the inherent right
to follow his inclinations and ambitions — to choose his
friends, the groups and collegialities he wishes to belong to,
the trade or profession he decides to follow — provided
he remains within the boundaries of communal mutuality and respects
the rights of others. A corollary of this conservative principle
is that the individual is entitled, not to entitlements, but
to the right to enjoy the fruits of his labour, which is to
say, his property, diligently earned in the pursuit of his goals.
Nor is it only a question of material acquisition. “The
main issue in the new American culture war,” writes Arthur
Brooks in his just-published The Battle, is not merely
“material riches — it is human flourishing. …
People flourish when they earn their own success.” Such
rights — freedom of enterprise, personal autonomy, and
the legitimate possession of a significant portion of what has
been earned — exemplify not “just an economic alternative
but a moral imperative,” and constitute the individual
citizen’s liberty.
The
Statist, however, as has been often pointed out, most recently
by Levin, is preoccupied not with liberty but with equality.
“In his war against the individual, the free market and
ultimately the civil society,” Levin writes, the “Statist
must claim the power to make that which is unequal equal and
that which is imperfect perfect.” The problem is that
the Statist is interested not only in equality of opportunity,
to which no reasonable person could object (assuming that opportunity
is not manipulated to favour one class of persons over another,
as, for example, affirmative action), but in equality of outcome,
which sanctions the massive interventions of the state into
the private domain.
This
is what Levin’s immediate predecessor Brian Anderson in
Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents calls “egalitarian
overbidding” and the welfare state’s “tutelary
despotism.” Allowed free reign, Anderson continues, “the
passion for equality . . . undermines democracy itself,”
leading to a soft despotism “under which liberty is lost
and a bloated central power administers to the needs of an infantilized
population.” In this way liberty subsides into tyranny
as the Statist strives to “restore some mythic national
community or to forge a future radical utopia.”
The
Statist refuses to accept that imperfection is rooted in human
nature, that some people are born brighter than others just
as some people are born more beautiful or taller or more athletic
than others, that individual talents and characteristics and
dispositions cannot be legislated, and that hard work, unlike
what is claimed for virtue, brings more than its own reward.
“Whether or not we succeed,” says Arthur Brooks,
“should depend on our abilities and efforts”; conversely,
people should be allowed to “fail on their own merits.”
Brooks appropriately cites James Madison from Federalist No.
10: the “first object of government is the protection
of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.”
We
might put it this way. Economic programs should not seek to
reward someone’s failure with another’s success,
but to stimulate prosperity for all. The effort to establish
a level playing field is certainly commendable and is the sign
of a fair and compassionate society. The attempt to determine
in advance and to impose the score of whatever game may be played
on that field, or to hand the victor’s trophy to the loser,
is destructive of human liberty and is the infallible sign of
the totalitarian mindset.
The
consummation of the tyrannical dream, or rather nightmare, is
not equality in any meaningful sense of the term but an absence
of distinguishing features, a lack of personal initiative, an
attitude of submission, a renunciation of self, in short, a
drab and languid sameness, a generic shabbiness. This condition
was liltingly ridiculed by Gilbert & Sullivan in The
Gondoliers, whose protagonists wish to turn the kingdom
of Barataria into a workingman’s paradise: “The
Chancellor in his peruke,/The Earl, the Marquis, and the Dook,/
The Groom, the Butler, and the Cook,/They all shall equal be.”
The
point is, obviously, that equality cannot be imposed from above
or created by fiat. Promoting everyone “to the top of
every tree,” as the operetta’s Grand Inquisitor
sings — an ironic description of the redistributionist
ethic — means in practice that we can all be poor, live
in dismal concrete blocks, and spend our energy waiting in lines
for shoes and meat — except for whoever passes for philosopher-kings
and their favourites. The program which envisages so distorted
an intention, whether by advancing theoretical impossibilities,
entertaining romantic assumptions, applying military compulsion,
or devising economic innovations, leads inevitably to personal
and social calamity. “Measures to establish social equality,”
warns Isaiah Berlin in The Crooked Timber of Humanity,
“crush self-determination and stifle individual genius.”
And Berlin was no right-wing ideologue; fiercely anti-communist,
to be sure, and a proponent of pluralism, but also deeply suspicious
of laissez-faire capitalism.
As
the Serbian writer Milovan Djilas clearly understood, invasive
state control, ostensibly devoted to improving the human lot,
is always counter-productive, subject to an intrinsic flaw in
its theoretical analysis of the human condition. “Men
must hold both ideas and ideals,” he writes in The
Unperfect Society, “but they should not regard these
as wholly realizable.” The trouble with the radical sensibility
that wishes to construct an ideal state on the detritus of a
customary society is that it is governed by an unrealizable
utopianism. This is finally why communism was bound to fail.
“The communists were chiefly to blame for their own misfortunes,”
which were the “result of their obstinacy in pursuing
an imaginary society, the belief that they could change human
nature.” Utopia, or revolutionary despotism, always fails
“to bring itself into harmony . . . with unidealized,
natural desires.”
The
quest for perfection, for the comprehensive whole in which all
our conflicting desires and values turn out to be somehow compatible
with one another, can prove, and has proven, literally fatal.
Human nature, which is not as postmodernists believe a social,
intellectual, or linguistic construct, does not allow for eschatological
harmonies. The slightest acquaintance with contemporary history
should put us, so to speak, on red alert.
The
presentiment or conviction, as Oscar Wilde sets it out in “The
Soul of Man Under Socialism,” that Utopia is “the
one country at which Humanity is always landing” and validates
the “map of the world,” is always with us, of course,
but it needs to be rigorously monitored. We recall that even
as Tocqueville lavished praise upon the democratic experiment
in the United States, he remarked upon the disturbing American
inclination to exalt “the scope of human perfectibility,”
an imminent danger to its well-being. As Levin and others recognize,
the main battleground between the competing philosophies of
conservatism and statism is now the United States. Europe seems
already lost.
What
the Statist has not understood, is simply incapable of acknowledging,
or is prone to discounting out of an insatiable greed for power,
is that the conservative principle, when it is not subverted,
does not purport to flash-freeze the past and preserve it intact,
as if it were a museum exhibit. It does not worship a graven
image or try to resurrect a fossil. Quite the contrary. Conservatism’s
mandate is to conserve what is best in the history of a people
or a nation, to maintain the force of tradition that provides
for cultural continuity and social stability. “If a nation
does not show and teach respect for its own identity, principles,
and institutions,” Levin writes, “the nation will
ultimately cease to exist.”
The
commitment to social cohesion, a common set of values, and broadly
accepted norms of behaviour, however, by no means rules out
beneficial progress — a charge often levied against the
conservative principle by its liberal rivals and antagonists.
As Karl Popper noted in The Open Society and Its Enemies,
in which he took on Plato and Hegel, “piecemeal social
engineering” is a mainstay of the democratic polity. The
word “engineering” may have unfortunate connotations
in today’s frame of political reference, but Popper was
writing at an earlier time and the emphasis is meant to fall
on “piecemeal,” the gradual and considered amelioration
of inequities inherent in all human societies, as opposed to
the revolutionary and utopian slash-and-burn method of operation.
Snazzy
Aristotle and shabby Plato are still banging heads. But the
outcome of the conflict remains undecided although the shabby
guys, it must be admitted, appear to have the upper hand, at
least for the time being. The sorry fact is that in the actual
world, befitting sequels are reversed and Snazzy Guy finds himself
rather more often on the floor than his shabby opponent, both
in the current scrimmage and the larger historical context.
But his native resilience should not be underestimated as he
picks himself up once again for yet another round in the brawl
of ideologies.
By
David Solway:
Shunning
Our Friends
A
Culture of Losers
Political
Correctness and the Sunset of American Power
Talking
Back to Talkbackers
Letting
Iran Go Nuclear
Robespierre
& Co.
The
Reign of Mediacracy
Into
the Heart of the United Nations
The
Big Lie
As
You Like It
Confronting
Islam
Unveiling
the Terrorist Mind
