Brooks, Habermas and conservatism

Lately I had been second guessing my verdict of earlier this year that New York Times writer and PBS Newshour talking head David Brooks is "my favourite pundit." He's just been too wimpy. Although he may be a conservative, his whole style screams liberal. His being molested by a US Senator wouldn't be such a headshaker if it didn't fit his personality so well. Man up, Brooksie! Some guy is violating your personal space? Tell him to lay off and if he won't then start shoving! As David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen has noted, Brooks once retracted the views he presented in a column after the White House called him and told him to get back in line. Do you think they could muscle Krauthammer like that? I think not!

But Brooks has earned his keep with his Sept 28 opinion piece about the need for "economic morality":

Over the past few years... there clearly has been an erosion in the country's financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country's cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, "Piss Christ" and the theory of evolution...

In 1960, Americans' personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans' personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income....

If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other....

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos... It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

What I find compelling about Brooks' analysis is that he criticizes what the "cultural monitors" have been obsessing over but does so from a conservative as opposed to a liberal or libertarian perspective. I am not a libertarian. Never have been. When I was a young adult and at the stage where I might have become libertarian I was exposed to Postmodern thinkers and subsequently decided to reject libertarianism as a Modern and therefore philosophically untenable ideology. But that doesn't mean that the rationalism that drives libertarianism at its purest isn't of tremendous practical value within a circumscribed sphere. I've championed communally conscious or responsible libertarianism which rejects the usual "culture war" as obsolete because with luck my fellow conservatives will be convinced that if we follow the Glenn Becks of the world down the road they are on we will just be barking louder up the wrong tree. I say "communally conscious" libertarianism because the retail politics that have been labelled libertarian in the United States have routinely been infected with the "lobbyist ethos" Brooks rightly indicts. Regular readers of this blog would note that Brooks' call for "energy taxes and spending cuts" is a prescription I've been writing out for anyone interested in which medicine I think we need to swallow.

My one reservation with Brooks' opinion piece is that he seems to suggest that "religious conservatives" should give up one battle in favour of taking up another one without really explaining what is different about the second battle aside from the implied suggestion that the second battle is currently being lost via neglect. There are, in fact, sound reasons for why the first battle is misguided beyond just questions of tactics. For this, one may turn to Jürgen Habermas' essay "Modernity versus Postmodernity" where Habermas describes conservatives who

welcome the development of modern science, as long as this only goes beyond its sphere to carry forward technical progress, capitalist growth and rational administration. Moreover, they recommend a politics of defusing the explosive content of cultural modernity.

According to one thesis, science, when properly understood, has become irrevocably meaningless for the orientation of the life-world. A further thesis is that politics must be kept as far aloof as possible from the demands of moral-practical justification.

Note that politics "must be kept as far aloof as possible" from what I would call the hot button social issues. Why? Because it's the exact opposite of "defusing": it's inflaming. It creates a take-no-prisoners show down with Modernity when Modernity ought to be encouraged to flower within its circumscribed sphere. I, for one, champion the Economist on a regular basis but that's because it addresses "technical progress, capitalist growth and rational administration." When it infects the "life world," that is when to pick a fight. I am not saying religious conservatives should not be fighting the battles that have been fought per se. I am saying that these should be battles for souls and need to be de-politicized. De-politicized means reserved for the "life world" and separate from the world of "administration." Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's means preventing abortions through private counselling not public lobbying.

But doesn't Brooks venture into the public arena when he calls for an "economic morality"? Yes, he does. But the difference here is that "the enemy" does not have to change his or her fundamental metaphysical presumptions to come around. Athiests can appreciate the need for an "economic morality" by considering the social science evidence and reasoned appeals to shared self-interests. They can't appreciate the need to ban abortion if their metaphysics doesn't recognize a notion of sanctity. They have to be won over on that issue by personal regeneration, not political lobbying. In the economic, or more precisely the instrumental, sphere, however, conservatives can go on the offensive and win with libertarian allies. Outside this sphere, one should battle privately not publicly because publicly it will be a continual defensive action (the currency of the public or political battle is language and reason and conservatives believe the efficacy of these tools is limited because our worldview was ultimately arrived at via irrational, nonverbal experience). Not only is the prospect of winning the political battle over, say, abortion more unlikely with every decade that Modernism advances, making a political fight out of it raises the stakes, putting everything at risk, because it suggests that co-existence is impossible. If we indicate that we cannot live in a world in which they do not adopt our metaphysics, they are going to resolve to eliminate the threat by eliminating us. In fact, co-existence is entirely possible if Modernism/Rationalism/Instrumentalism is contained within its appropriate field: separate "life worlds", common political worlds. Libertarians will be our allies in a circumscribed political world and will even help protect our separated "life worlds" but first we have to recognize that arguments with theistic assumptions are not going to work in the political sphere. That concession in no way implies that they do not carry the day in the private sphere of concrete personal experience.

the aggressor in the Kulturkampf

Mostly because of my interest in economic policy, and the fact law makers actually spend very little of their time developing legislation that deals with social issues like abortion, I consider myself a economic or business conservative, which overlaps, or ought to, with libertarianism.

But libertarianism is broader. While libertarians are economic conservatives (supporting, for example, free markets), they are social liberals. As my previous post may illustrate, I am frequently frustrated by the anti-intellectual demogoguery emanating from self-styled so-cons, to the point whereby I am often tempted to just state clearly that I, likely my former high school friend Colby Cosh, am a libertarian, full stop.

But while I would then have less of a need to elaborate on why I support a scientific, evidence-based, "intellectual" approach to resolving policy issues in general, fact is I am postmodern enough to NOT see Reason as the final touchstone in all realms. I see a need to circumscribe it to the instrumental realm, a project that's been described in more detail by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

It's the fact that in practice we could use more reason, not less, in our public debates that tempts me to endorse full-on libertarianism without qualification. But philosophically sophisticated arguments for social conservatism such as those described by Daniel Bell are compelling, or at least deserving of more attention.

Norms have value. People who believe some emancipatory effect will follow from the elimination of sexual norms are putting too much stock into theory (Reason, if you will) and not enough into the reality of human nature. The idea that youth, for example, will be more self-determined if traditional influences are removed is largely a fiction. What would replace it are other cultural influences. Undermine the norms generally endorsed by parents, for example, and you'll empower unreflective peer pressure, not individuals in idealized, abstracted isolation, and that peer pressure would generally serve the baser elements of social darwinism. What people are being emancipated to, in other words, is the prehistoric savannah where the contributions of potential Newtons, Einsteins, Vivaldis etc were undeveloped and unsupported. The point here can, and is, frequently taken too far. But there is a point, just as Nietzsche makes something of a counterpoint. What's missing is an intellectual curiousity about why norms like not running around in the nude arose in the first place.

The content of the norms is generally not so important as the fact they simply exist, in my view. Is one superior by virtue of being, say, white, male, and Protestant? No. But is it reasonable to consider that important? Yes. Whether it should be important may be debated, but where the social left goes most awry is on the issue of whether it is important. A religious revival might well do more to solve otherwise intractable social problems and improve human satisifcation than a new bureaucratic government spending program.

Which brings me to the uproar over Obama's invitation to Rick Warren. Rich Lowry identifies the "cultural left" as the "aggressor" in this latest flare-up in the culture war. I agree, and am futhermore reminded of why I'm not a libertarian. A libertarian might well be compelled to agree that Warren should be disinvited, which would be an extremely dogmatic stance that furthered a distorted view of the particular facts. Pastor Rick is not a hatemonger, and the efforts to paint him as such strike me as less loving, more "hateful" if you will, than what Rick Warren has been preaching and writing about his whole career. The activists here are looking to provoke a political showdown that Warren is not looking for.

I've argued elsewhere that gay marriage is not a libertarian issue anyway. I won't repeat the reasons here in detail, other than to say that the issue is unlike the decriminalization of homosexuality by going to positive "rights", namely the right to compel government action, as opposed to negative rights. Gay marriage is about normalizing deviancy, not about the right to deviate. Some readers may jump at my use of the word deviant here, saying its highly pejorative, but for what it's worth I am using the term as an entirely descriptive, sociological term.

UPDATE:
This San Francisco pundit supported same sex marriage in the past but has since turned cold on the idea because of the intolerance exhibited... by SSM supporters.

UPDATE 2:

Continuing with this theme, what I think bothers a lot of moderates is the, shall we say, lack of magnanimity shown by the left:

The Left has won the culture war, and, at least in the near-term, its victory is irreversible. In social relations, the right to choose trumps all other considerations: to fornicate, marry, breed, abort, divorce, and abandon. That a single mother with six kids should opt for another eight because she feels like it captures the distilled essence of the cultural moment that we have entered. 

Andrew J. Bacevich, Feb 9