Jim Kalb replies...

Who knew? I thought this was a closed conversation just between me and the other voices in my head :)

In any case, Jim Kalb has responded (graciously) to my post re: his talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism.

[Gingerman concludes] that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.

I don't think that's quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they're different but they can't get on without each other. You won't be able to make use of reason unless you take a lot on faith, while a belief that you can't understand in an orderly way isn't much of a belief.

[snip]

And then there's the old subjectivism issue: things and actions can be objectively good or bad, and that's not observable or measurable. If they couldn't then "irrational," which is an evaluative term, would be an empty term of abuse.

[snip]

As to God, it seems to me we can't make sense of our situation without Him. The world must be reasonable for us to know it rationally, and it must have an intrinsic connection to purpose for some purposes to be intrinsically good and others bad. How do we talk about such features of the world without religious categories?

Now, in my defense, I don't think I was quite so black-and-white on the point of declaring that Kalb sides with Faith and against Reason, as from my original post here:

[Kalb] doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.

Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.

In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).

There is some sloppy slippage of the term "reason" in my words above. And, it is no doubt true that when excerpting someone's words it is difficult to do so without doing some damage to the meaning when re-contextualizing it. But, given that Mr. Kalb has an entire book on the subject, I'm sure his arguments will hold up admirably :)

In any event, to re-visit my original post, the reason (if I may be so bold to use the word here) that I found Kalb's argument intriguing was on 2 points:

1) Kalb rejects (or at least deems as insufficient) the common conservative Burkean logic that traditions should be given the benefit of the doubt, since we humans have little capacity to foresee unpredicted consequences of sweeping social changes. From Kalb:

Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.

Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.

It was in the sense that Kalb sees the necessity of changing the terms of the debate (or at least pushing open their boundaries) in a manner I hadn't encountered before that intrigued me. I read him as arguing that there needs to be more of an affirmative stance in favor of holding certain traditions, and that it is insufficient (in practical terms) to rely solely on a "first do no harm" dictate of Burkean vintage in order to hold the line.

My own belief, however, is that modern political philosophy per se is not the principle driver of the "unsettling" which upends Burkean defenses of tradition, but rather economic dynamism. This is one of the internal fissures of the US Republican variant of conservatism, which is that the GOP melds the open-borders, free-trade interests of economic conservatives with the traditional social interests of cultural conservatives. And, in the long run, there is an inherent conflict with the two.

Now, obviously, there is a feedback loop between economics and culture. We fashion the tools that fashion ourselves, to paraphrase McLuhan. But, economic change tills the soil from which social and political change grows.

As an example, I went to visit my in-laws for X-mas holidays in Washington DC one year. As part of the trip, we went to a museum on the Washington Mall which, at the time, was featuring a retrospective on American life of 100 years ago. Wooden wheelbarrows, hand-wrapped straw brooms, obscure farm implements, and positively terrifying medical instruments abounded.

All of these items were in common usage at the time of the birth of my grandmother (who lived to 92). She was born into an agrarian society, lived through an industrial one, and died only recently, as we enter a new age that still seems to be finding its legs (i.e. information, bio-genetic, other...??).

The economic ground underneath modern life changes with such rapidity that it implicitly casts the wisdom of the ages into doubt. In pre-modern societies, the elders literally were the repositories of the Truth, accumulated in their own life experiences, as to how one should live successfully (read: they knew how to stay alive). And, the evident practical value of this wisdom gave them and the traditions of the society they governed a moral authority.

For example, here's Dreher quoting Patrick Deneen:

It has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture.

Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance.

My grandmother could do most of the things on this list. And by many measures, our time would regard her as uneducated or look upon her as "simple" in spite of the variety and the complexity of things she knew how to do. But if the lights went out tomorrow, she would have been the smartest person we know; she (and not our college professors) would have seen us through. She's gone now, and much of that knowledge has been laid to rest with her because, by the time of my generation, we didn't need to know those things anymore.

Now, surely the utilitarian argument alone for tradition only carries so much weight, but still, when 8-year-olds are teaching their own grandparents how to program the VCR, the natural deference to elders, and their traditions more broadly, inevitably gets more critical interrogation.

Additionally, economic progress itself allows for the "leisure activity" of exploring non-traditional social arrangements and mores. It is only a very rich society that can afford the 1960's in the sense of being able to finance the freedom of many young people to hang out in college, smoke weed, and burn their draft cards and/or bras on alternate weekends. A few generations earlier, they all would have been farming and hoping for a harvest of sufficient size to live through the coming winter.

I haven't read enough of Kalb's work to comment, but it is a common conservative trope to blame all the ills of modern social life on the liberal cultural elite. By my lights, traditionalism has far more to fear from its bankers than its college professors.

2) More interestingly, though, is the defense of *irrational* traditionalism, which is to say that Kalb seeks a reasoned way of defending traditional loyalties and cultural norms against claims of irrationality that otherwise render such conservative sensibilities illegitimate within the current forms of accepted public discourse.

From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.

In other words, only by arguing forward, via reason, from objective first principles (i.e. God) can one reach defensible conclusions for such traditions. Thus, Kalb claims the future of conservatism will require faith to effectively justify itself.

The reason this claim interests me is due to the concept of what constitutes *irrational* belief. This is to say that there is much that I may hold dear, my moral sense if you will, that I cannot justify in any purely rational sense. However, I also cannot justify it via reference to an omniscient God that establishes universal objective standards. Thus, taken from this standpoint, which belief system is actually *irrational* here?

Quite obviously, Kalb has spent much more time thinking on these points than I have. And, it probably goes without saying that I am not going to convert to Catholicism (Kalb's faith) any time real soon. But, Kalb's intellectual claim, if you will, deserves to be addressed.

Kalb extends his thoughts to his initial response here:

The identification of reason with a scientism that rejects tradition, faith and the ability to recognize what things are--which involves belief in essential natures--as irrational, and therefore oppressive. As I note in the last entry, the result is that reason can no longer deal with the most basic and obvious features of our situation. When meaning becomes personal choice or assertion, and social thought is no longer able to deal with marriage and family, you know you've got a problem with how people are thinking about things.

But of course, don't take my word for it, read it all :)

Of the 31 flavors of Conservative, Mint Choc Chip is my fav

Since I have been posting a bit about "conservatives" (and plan more in the near future), I considered that the use of term may confer some sloppy connotations at times and thereby potentially betray my actual intent, given that conservative and liberal are often used as stand-in labels for Republicans and Democrats.

But, there are many different variations of "conservative" philosophical thought (certainly Dreher and Sullivan both claim the mantle, but have very different prescriptions for what that should mean socially and politically). And, there are obvious fissures within the Republican Party itself about what being a conservative actually means and where it should place its policy priorities. [See the online kerfuffle (a blogger word if there ever was one) over Kathleen Parker's infamous Oogedy Boogedy op-ed article.]

Thus, in an effort to demonstrate that conservative does NOT definitionally equal Religious Right (or even free-market economics), here's a voter segmentation breakdown of the GOP from Tony Fabrizio's polling agency. I have seen him interviewed on C-SPAN and he seems a very fair and judicious sort, not a partisan cartoon.

[Note: percentiles below do not sum to 100%, but I am not sure if this is due to rounding or simply a small % of Repubs that could not be readily classified in one group or another.]

MORALISTS - 24%
- Laser-like focus on moral issues
- Identify as “strong” GOP and “very” conservative,-
- Only group where majorities are Born Again/Evangelical and go to church at least weekly

GOVT KNOWS BEST REPUBs - 13%
- Focused on social issues
- More likely to be life-long GOPers
- Strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems
- Skeptical of the Patriot Act, many would like to see less defense spending

DENNIS MILLER REPUBs - 14%
- Focused on social issues, esp. illegal immigration,
- Strongly oppose people gaming the system to get a “free lunch”
- They are more likely to be gun owners

FORTRESS AMERICA - 8%
- Focused on foreign policy and national security issues
- Concerned about the war, want to see an orderly end to war in Iraq
- Strong Isolationist streak runs through this group
- See government’s top job as protecting the homeland

BUSH HAWKS - 20%
- Focused on national security issues
- especially War on Terror
- want to see America using its might spreading democracy
- Support the war and are in it to win it, no timeline

HEARTLAND REPUBs - 8%
- Focused on bread & butter economic issues
- More pragmatic and less ideological
- Concerned with gas prices & economic growth
- Less frequent church goers – less focus on Moral issues

FREE MARKETEERS - 8%
- Focused on economic issues
- Skeptical of government action, they want tighter reigns on spending and lower taxes
- Less frequent church goers
- More libertarian -- counterbalance to “Moralists”

Fabrizio notes that in spite of these variations on focus, there are obviously a broad set of issues that (generally speaking) unite the GOP (otherwise they couldn't function as a coherent political party), whereas there are others that cause internal tension:

ISSUES THAT UNITE GOP
- Desire to balance the budget
– Belief that government spends too much
– Belief that taxes are too high
– Belief that federal government is too big and does too many things
– Belief that current immigrations laws should be followed and no special treatment
– War in Iraq was the right decision
– Belief that our Foreign Policy should be based on our own security and economic interests
– Support of employment non-discrimination for gays. **

** Even 60 percent of Moralists believe that private businesses should not have the right to discriminate against gay people.

ISSUES THAT DIVIDE GOP
- Top priority, cutting taxes or balancing budget?
– Whether health care coverage is a right
– Fund SS or allow private investment
– Level of military/defense spending
– Role of federal government in education
– Allowing gays to serve in the military
– Role of federal government on global warming
– Private initiative vs. government safety net
– Influence of religion on public policy
– Abortion **

** On abortion – only 28 percent want it totally banned

So, just for the record, many of my prior references to conservative inclinations were principally designating the Moralist / Gov't Knows Best components of the GOP and the modifications to public policy that they may seek to impose.

On the economic front, I am skeptical, like many a GOP Free-Marketeer, of the government's capacity to efficiently spend tax funds. A federalist approach (i.e. taxes raised locally for local needs) seems to be inherently more efficient than massive spending at the federal level.

But, I have been convinced that my money is safe (enough) with Democrats that I can vote against the heavy-hand of social intervention that some Moralists would seem to prefer the government engage in. In some senses, this makes me socially and economically liberal (in the classic economic use of the word "liberal," which of course today means conservative, only to further cloud the issue from a pure labeling standpoint).

The point, if there is one here, is that conservative, as a stand-alone word, doesn't effectively mean any one specific thing. And, as much as I may delight in the criticism of the lazy usage of language or sweeping generalizations by others, I should endeavour not to spare myself the lash if deserved, though one would hope any prior postings were still clear when taken in their own broader context.

I Rise in Praise of James Fallows

What is the value of opinion journalism, especially in the age of Internet blogging when it is so easy publish one’s own?

To me, there are two benefits to the time I spend reading blogs about current events:

1. Leveraging the experience and insight of others to be able to peer through the hazy mist of the future with some accuracy. Having the ability to reliably judge the pros/cons of alternate courses of action is the most critical aspect of decision making, because any decision of consequence is going to be taken in cases where the outcome is not definitively knowable in advance. And, one can use the insights of others as proxies for one's own if the journalist proves reliable.
2. To help hone one’s own thoughts on a given topic by writing about it in a clarifying and edifying manner. I can often better understand my own thinking once I recognize it written in the hand of another more clearly than it would be in my own muddled prose.

On both fronts I come in praise of James Fallows, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly.

Here is what he wrote 1 hour (Nostradamus, eat my dust!!) after the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate:

Let's assume that Sarah Palin is exactly as smart and disciplined as Barack Obama. But instead of the year and a half of nonstop campaigning he has behind him, and Joe Biden's even longer toughening-up process, she comes into the most intense period of the highest stakes campaign with absolutely zero warmup or preparation.

If she has ever addressed an international issue, there's no evidence of it in internet-land. The smartest person in the world could not prepare quickly enough to know the pitfalls, and to sound confident while doing so, on all the issues she will be forced to address.

So the prediction is: unavoidable gaffes. The challenge for the McCain-Palin campaign is to find some way to defuse them ahead of time, since Socrates, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz reincarnated would themselves make errors in her situation. [em: mine]

Then, once Palin falls flat in her Gibson/Couric interviews, he captures the nature of the problem that Palin's performance exposed in a manner that rises well-beyond simply heckling her as a know-nothing red-neck.

Each of us has areas we care about, and areas we don't. If we are interested in a topic, we follow its development over the years. And because we have followed its development, we're able to talk and think about it in a "rounded" way. We can say: Most people think X, but I really think Y. Or: most people used to think P, but now they think Q. Or: the point most people miss is Z. Or: the question I'd really like to hear answered is A.

Here's the most obvious example in daily life: Sports Talk radio.

Mention a name or theme -- Brett Favre, the Patriots under Belichick, Lance Armstrong's comeback, Venus and Serena -- and anyone who cares about sports can have a very sophisticated discussion about the ins and outs and myth and realities and arguments and rebuttals.

People who don't like sports can't do that. It's not so much that they can't identify the names -- they've heard of Armstrong -- but they've never bothered to follow the flow of debate. I like sports -- and politics and tech and other topics -- so I like joining these debates. On a wide range of other topics -- fashion, antique furniture, the world of restaurants and fine dining, or (blush) opera -- I have not been interested enough to learn anything I can add to the discussion. So I embarrass myself if I have to express a view.

Or, to put a finer and less charitable point on it (though I don't think gratuitously so):

After thirty years of meeting and interviewing politicians, I can think of exactly three people who sounded as uninformed and vacant as this. All are now out of office. One was a chronic drunk.

[snip]

More than that, it suggests a person whose previous two decades of adult life have not equipped her to absorb the briefings she is no doubt receiving about the big, obvious issues in the campaign: the market crash, health care proposals, tax plans. [em: mine]

And, that was really the point for me about Palin. It is not about flubbed syntax or clumsy regurgitation of campaign talking points or even her raw intelligence per se, it is about having an existing mental framework and philosophical grounding for evaluating public and international policy problems such that one can actually think in a clear and reasoned manner about them.

In the end, this is the greatest source of my own attraction to Obama. It is his obvious intelligence and capacity to deal with complex issues with a degree of suppleness of thought that let's us know there is actually a competent mind at work behind the curtain.

On the one hand, I struggle at times to condemn those who gravitate to Bush or Palin on cultural affinity issues. Since, one can dismiss the attachment to cultural signals as things that "don't matter" and should be superfluous to hard policy positions formulated by experts beavering away in political think-tanks and debated with great earnestness throughout the campaign season.

But, my own gravitation to Obama is simply the inverse of that which I might otherwise denigrate. I am simply seeking different markers of affinity of thought and perspective.

Obama appeals because he demonstrates that he thinks like me and thus I hope he will make judicious decisions about the correct course of action in my stead. Because, as we are now finding with the financial crisis and with 9/11 in the case of Bush, the actual course of a Presidency is only tangentially related to specific campaign promises or party platform statements.

And, for my money, the most troubling aspects about McCain had little (directly speaking) to do with his stated domestic or foreign policy concerns and was instead what I judged to be characteristics of his decision-making process:

1. Impulsiveness - As quintessentially summarized by the Palin selection, but also by his well-reputed outbursts of temper.
2. Reliance on black/white formulations - With McCain taking on the role of sanctimonious crusader with a willingness to hold political grudges.

And, I have had more than enough exposure to those two leadership traits over the past eight years to last me quite a loooooong while.

And, so while there is little conceivable chance I would have ended up in any different place, I can thank James Fallows for helping me understand why I believe what I do.

Mad props to a journalism OG, as the kids say.

Sarah Palin: Political Rorschach Test

In retrospect, it seems to me that Sarah Palin, as a media and political phenomenon, functioned most dynamically as an ink blot test for the left/right culture wars.

It is true that she was ill-prepared for the position and this reflected poorly on John McCain’s judgment, but there is no way to square the heat (both vitriol and adoration) that she spawned solely within the context of her as merely an inexperienced vice-presidential candidate. It isn’t as if selecting a running mate for primarily electoral motivations is an unheard of phenomenon.

It was the symbolism of her as a candidate, rather than her specific policy stances (to the extent she could even articulate them), that lead to nonsense such as the following from the left:

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women. [em: mine]

And as for religion, I'd love to know precisely how the Good Lord conveyed to her so clearly his intention to destroy the environment (global warming, she thinks, is not the work of human hands, so it must be the work of You Know Who), the lives of untold thousands of soldiers and innocent bystanders (He is apparently rooting for this, too, she says), and, incidentally, a lot of polar bears and wolves, not to mention all the people who will be shot with the guns that she thinks other people ought to have. An even wider and more sinister will to impose her religious views on other people surfaced in her determination to legislate against abortion even in cases of rape and in her attempts to ban books, including books on evolution, and to fire the librarian who stood against her.

The outrage here is that her gender identity is being used in support of political ends that are perceived to be in conflict with “real” womanhood. As if there is something logically incompatible with being both female as well as pro-life, pro-gun, and a supporter of the Iraq war. Isn’t this the ultimate in sexism? That one’s gender should ergo define one’s thoughts?

Look, you can argue against any of those political positions, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is an inherently “female” position to be taken. It is only when one passes through the portal of gender identity politics that the heresies become obvious.

By similar token, the symbolism of Palin to the right was equally nauseating:

At 44, Governor Palin is a bit young and relatively new to the political scene yet. These are no small considerations when electing someone who could assume the role of president (Democrats: Check out your nominee with that reservation . . . ). But if the youngest life she and her husband care for can wake up a nation that’s blind to the eugenics in its midst, a routine part of medicine today, she and John McCain would be offering human rights and dignity a great, honorable service. In contrast to Barack Obama, who would let the survivors of botched abortion attempts be killed, the Palins could serve as a great clarifier for voters this fall — and an education.

As much as she obviously struggled in her interviews, it mattered much less what she said, than who she was and what she represented symbolically to most partisans involved.