• home
• chapters
• bio
• contact

• bibliography

TOP NAV

Home

Chapters

Bio

Contact

BOOK

Books

CHAPPIES

All

Beck/Graves

Hayek

Mises

Northrop

Novak

Paglia

Stark

Turner

Voegelin

Wilber

JV CHAPPIES

Beito

Boyd

Green

print view

All of the Above

If you think of society as a combination of different social spheres, including the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural, the question arises immediately: how shall the relations between the different spheres be regulated? One recurring solution that seems to be mere common sense is to make the political sector the first among equals. After all, before you can have justice you must have peace, and it is the monopoly of force possessed by government that guarantees the peace. But there is a problem with that approach. The peoples of the 20th century conducted an experiment in political primacy. Every major nation radically increased the scope and the power of government to supervise the other sectors of society. In the welfare-state case, the government replaced family and mutual-aid social structures with vast administrative programs to provide health, education, and welfare to the population. In the limit case of the totalitarian state, communist and fascist, the state extends its embrace to the whole of society engulfing both moral/cultural and economic sectors into the political sector and reducing all relations to political power relations.

In The Totalitarian Temptation, written in the 1970s when Soviet Communism seemed strong and western democracy weak and the prestige of big government at its apogee, Jean-Francois Revel attempted to raise the spirits of the demoralized democrats. He drew attention to a fatal flaw in the super-powerful state. It is strong and powerful, no doubt. But its carapace is brittle.

[T]he totalitarian state is fragile to the extent that it cannot satisfy the needs and desires of the society it rules. It tries to destroy the autonomy of private life, which it fears, by constant surveillance... Lacking any degree of elasticity, the state must be rigid in order to survive[.]ⁱ

But the democratic state is different, Revel asserts.

[T]he logic of the democratic state makes it evolve in exactly the opposite direction: towards the growing separation, multiplication, and diversification of centers of power and decision-making. Indeed, the free state was born out of the idea of the separation of mutually restricting powers.

Back in the 18th century, Revel observes, the state consisted of the three powers described in The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu--the executive, legislative, and judicial. But the three powers have been joined over the past two centuries by new powers, “the economic power of the firm, union power; the power to inform; the police power... the military power and the imperial (i.e. diplomatic) power.” It is telling that Revel does not think the religious power, the moral/cultural sphere, is worthy of mention.

Are these new powers the evidence of a healthy “separation, multiplication, and diversification” of powers? Or is each of them a mortal threat to the community. It is telling that each of them has the power to terrify. Liberals are terrified of corporate power, corporate media power, police power, and military power. Conservatives are terrified of union power and mainstream media power. The fear, in most cases, is the fear that the power in question, allied with the political sector, could damage the rest of society, meaning me.

It is, on the face of it, remarkable that the diversification of power should have provoked so much fear and opposition. After all, what is there to fear from a single power in the diversified social landscape of the modern era. Not much, unless that power is combined to the political power.

Yet the fears—of corporations, unions, liberal (or conservative) media, police, churches, and the military—are widespread, and people who want to protect themselves from the that fear usually want to do it with the power of government. Using Revel’s analysis we can see that such fears are really fears of the modern era and the discomfort with the untidiness of a society of brawling, diversified powers. It is a discomfort that wants to reverse the process of power multiplication and diversification, and to return to a time when authority and power were simpler and more compact, a time before the brawling and bustling cacophony of the modern commercial and democratic society. It is not, of course, just totalitarians that want to concentrate power in the political sector. Social democrats and center-leftists of all kinds labor ceaselessly to regulate the economic power with the power of the state. Conservatives want to limit the power of unions and the cultural power of professors and artists. But Revel’s idea seems to argue that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. It suggests that in so far as government acquires new powers, society and the state tend towards totalitarian rigidity and fragility. In so far as new powers arise and compete with each other, society and the state tend towards freedom, flexibility, and strength.

The problem posed by human society is the problem of reconciling the conflicting demands of living as social animals. Like all social animals, humans live in social groups for survival; in a cruel world, groups provide security for their members. But for humans as self-conscious social animals the question of survival is a mere starting point. As soon as survival for today is secured, there arises the question of the morrow. Today’s survival might have been purchased at the cost of tomorrow’s survival, or of other peoples’ survival, or of the survival of other related animal species, or in the limit case, much beloved by humans, the survival of life itself on earth.

Our task is a more limited one, the question of what to do now, afflicted as we are by the moral, cultural, and political crisis of the modern administrative state. It is to analyze the problems of the modern era and suggest a way out of the crisis.

The father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, in the crisis of his time developed an analytical framework that still resonates today. Our life, Burke wrote, is a place suspended between the ancestors and the generations yet unborn. As residual legatees of a wonderful inheritance we revere the ways of the ancestors that have come down to us while insisting that their injunctions are prescriptive rather than binding. We pause in our immediate ambitions by reflecting on our responsibility to the next generation and to generations yet unborn. As conservatives, our task comes down to this: what is the one thing we should do to repair and improve the house that has been bequeathed to us?

We live in a remarkable age, the aftermath of a transforming revolution in the means by which humans live and reproduce. We commonly explain this revolution by a Three Ages story. Once upon a time, humans lived as hunter-gatherers in small kinship groups, living by collecting fruits and tubers and meat from the occasional success of the hunt in societies not that different from the great apes to whom we are closely related. But then humans learned to domesticate and to cultivate certain grasses in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and the Age of Hunter-gatherers became the Age of Agriculture. In the agricultural age, mankind lived in larger and more organized communities, and the warriors and priests that ruled them demanded a large tribute in food and service from their subject populations. Over the last half millennium the agricultural age has declined and fallen, and a revolution in thinking in speculative thought and practical knowledge led to the birth of a new era. The result was the industrial revolution, a triple transformation in social organization, useful knowledge, and resource exploitation. In the new Industrial Age mankind has congregated in cities, learned to live under unprecedented discipline, found new ways of cooperation, and found unprecedented ways to exploit energy beyond the age-old technologies of fire.

Each transformation, from hunter-gathering to agriculture and from agriculture to industry, has provoked a revolution in the socialization of mankind. From the face-to-face kinship of the hunter-gatherer group to the patron-client relations of the agricultural age, from the aristocracy of land in the agricultural age to the aristocracy of talent in the modern age, the methods of production and the measures of wealth have changed the social correlation of forces. In particular, each revolution has extended the circle of trust taken as a given in a functioning social group.

The industrial revolution in Europe coincided with widespread social and political revolutions. At the same time that the productive relations in society were changing the social and political relations were changing as well. At the same time that artisans and inventors were revolutionizing textile production in England, middle-class intellectuals were creating a mass market in culture. Although patronized by the great and the good, the philosophes in France and the London literary intellectuals of the 18th century represented a new phenomenon in the culture: men of creative power making careers as cultural celebrities for a growing middle-class readership rather than living as appendages of powerful political patrons. Culture became a business rather than a propaganda product of the political and religious establishments. In In Praise of Commercial Culture Tyler Cowen asserts that commerce and culture belong to each other and flourish together.

But how should we live in the new age of industry? Men have disagreed strongly with each other from the beginning of the new age, and when, at the turn of the 20th century, women entered the public square as voters, the whole argument began again.

Typically there are two answers to the question. The first answer is revolutionary. It asserts that the advent of a new age has demonstrated conclusively that the old social arrangements are utterly beyond redemption and the old order must be completely abolished. The other answer is evolutionary. It asserts that the new age has changed things, so we need to adapt our social institutions in response. Either way, the social crisis created by the new age encourages people to look for answers in the past. By understanding the past, people hope to shape the future in a beneficial way.

But we cannot analyze society merely as an undifferentiated whole, as we might analyze a compact hunter-gatherer group. Instead we will follow the method of Eric Voegelin. He developed the idea of compactness vs. differentiation as a framework for studying society. On this view we do not stigmatize the past as superstitious or primitive. We merely marginalize it as compact. We say, as Michael Novak does in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, that modern society has differentiated into three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. Following Voegelin and Novak we will analyze the social question raised by the industrial revolution under three heads. First there are the interests of the men of political power, the men that made political revolutions or pushed major political reforms to completion. Then there are the people that discovered, invented or exploited the new economic technology, from finance markets to corporate structure to the division of labor and the invention of new roles and culture in the workplace. Thirdly, there is the influence of moral and cultural leaders, whose lives, ideas, and movements changed the face of society. All this is just to say that the industrial age provoked revolutions in politics, in the economy, and in religious and cultural beliefs and practices. To understand the new age we must understand how it affected humans caught up in its turbulent flow and how they responded to its irresistible wrenchings.

Yet the questions we must answer are the old questions: Should we live for honor and dying a good death? Should we live to realize the ideal Forms out of which the world is instantiated? Should be live by striving for the light, or should we live by friendship and cultivating the virtues? Can we be happy using reason to control the passions and learn to live under a rational plan? Should we live instead to relieve pain and suffering? Is life in the world explained by a providential God that takes a deep interest in His creation? What about the intuiting of the good life by revelation?

We shall answer this question with naïve simplicity: All of the above. The whole point of the modern world is that it is no longer a grim fight for survival in which every shoulder must be set to the wheel. The search for meaning is still, as it ever was, the central conundrum of the mystery of life, the universe, and everything. And as mankind rises up from indigence the possibilities for meaning multiply in proportion and the struggle for food is replaced by the struggle for meaning. This is, of course, to admit that nothing is solved by the modern era. All we can say is that, as people and wealth metastasize, the stakes are raised.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?

Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.

Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.

All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.

Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

To email the author, click here.

 TAGS

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close