Life, Liberty, Abstract Ideas (long, mostly for Princess Posterity)
jhmcclo...@my-deja.com
20 August 1999
Here are some rather cheering thoughts about our Yankee national
character from Western Scaifesylvania's
<< http://www.triblive.com/frames/opinfram.html >>
Guru of the Week:
"To be sure, most Americans express agreement with the abstract idea
that government is now too big and too intrusive," The Independent
Review's Higgs says. "(B)ut ask them about a specific government
program, and they overwhelmingly support it and even its expansion."
Hence, Higgs sees "the pressures eventuating in the growth of
government" as having "manifestly overwhelmed all countervailing forces.
Though the future may be different,
currently observable trends give us little reason for optimism."
For the sake of liberty, if not our very lives, Higgs needs to be
proven wrong.
---
I shall try to find the original, because it is not impossible that
RMS's tame editorialist may have reproduced Swami Higgs's
anticivilizational wisdom out of context. Taking the observation as it
stands, though, notice that we Americans are here accused--accused
probably more or less correctly, for this is an old and familiar
song--of supporting almost ANY "specific government program" a pollster
cares to mention, not those specific programs we benefit from
personally. Our alleged flaw is not moral selfishness, then, but
intellectual unprincipledness. Higgs will be proven wrong in the sense
desired only if we all become rigid doctrinaires and systematically live
down to our "principles."
Happily, the danger of that is very slight indeed. These gentry are,
after all, asking us to stop muddling through intellectually like
Anglo-Saxons and take to clarity and Cartesian frenchification. The
cultural inertia that makes a sudden turn in that direction unlikely is
immense indeed. For the next few decades and maybe even centuries,
empiricism will probably continue to be us.
This is good, though very stale, news for Clintonistas and other
democrats, but not particularly bad news for the core GOP either. The
real losers (or non-winners, since they have never yet gained anything
much to lose hereafter) will probably be the sort of exotic think-tank
fishes RMS likes best to fund, "conservative" "intellectuals." The
Higgs types, one might call them, if these small extracts reflect the
General Theory of a vrook deepthinker I never heard of till about thirty
minutes ago.
Rebuttal of today's McC. snidenesses should, I suppose, point out that
there are left-wing "intellectuals" also. As indeed there are. Scads
of them. However, since we good guys have been in the thinking business
longer than the competition, we have achieved a _modus vivendi_ with our
own "intellectuals" long since. They are free to make up as many
ivy-tower theories as they like about Democracy in America, and we laity
are free to pay no attention at all to their clerkish theorizings.
Since we know from experience that democracy, like the anecdotal
bumblebee, can actually fly, a formal proof of the possibility of our
flight is, though not unwelcome, yet not a commodity very urgently in
demand.
Left off the edge of the political earth, my remarks also, as I think,
go some distance towards answering the notorious question "Why is there
no socialism in the United States?" Sombart thought the answer to his
question was The Frontier, but after nearly a century that explanation
really does look implausible. I'd blame Anglo-Saxon empiricism, myself.
Or perhaps I should say plain "empiricism," because the history of
relations between German Social Democracy (as a political party in the
real world) and its intellectuals is likely to be farcically
recapitulated by that between the VRWC and its "intellectuals." The
damn rank-and-file simply WILL NOT be as bigoted and impractical as
their theorists would like them to be. St. George Orwell is very good
on this topic in his Wigan Pier book.
Back in Western Scaifesylvania, the application of this sermonizing is
obvious enough. Mr. Editorialist will carry on about how "For the sake
of liberty, if not our very lives, Higgs needs to be proven wrong." But
he will utterly fail to communicate his tea-cup temper tantrum even to
people who in principle (in the "principles" they don't live down to)
agree with him. They will find his editorial tripe edifying and nod and
in some Pickwickian sense "agree," but still they will never even dream
of taking any practical steps in the real world to secure Life and
Liberty against the latest menace detected on the scopes of their
faction's "intellectuals."
People who don't agree will just yawn and mutter something about
right-wing *!@$. And as the crowning indignity, Mr. Editorialist will
find himself and his Higgs taken at all seriously only by the utterly
ridiculous, utterly impotent and utterly hostile McCloskey.
Serves him right.
---
Swami [Robert] Higgs and _The Independent Review_ seem, from
<< http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/tir_manu.html >>
to be more or less interchangable expressions. Swami Higgs's self-image
goes like this:
"Edited by the renowned scholar in economics, history and politics,
Independent Institute research director, Dr. Robert Higgs, The
INDEPENDENT REVIEW features new, pathbreaking, and non-politicized
articles and reviews by the world's finest scholars and policy experts
in economics, law, history, political science, philosophy, sociology,
and other fields. Probing the most difficult and pressing of social and
economic questions, TIR uniquely features in-depth examinations of
current policy issues viewed in comprehensive historical, ethical and
economic perspectives.
"The INDEPENDENT REVIEW's contents are interesting, informative,
wide-ranging, and based on solid scholarship. TIR authors represent a
variety of disciplines, intellectual traditions, and ideological
perspectives, and articles and reviews that range across economics,
political science, law, history, philosophy, sociology, and related
fields. Undaunted and uncompromising, this is the journal that will
pioneer future debate."
But St. George Orwell and you and I see the problem with THAT, do we
not, O Americans? "Undaunted and uncompromising" makes for great
entertainment, but who on earth would seriously want to LIVE that way
all the time?
Though it goes without saying, I shall nevertheless say that Swami
Higgs's editorial choice of "non-politicized articles and reviews" seems
(on the basis of a quick sampling of tables of contents from several
issues that include hints about the articles) to amount to ... to
exactly what you'd expect. I can't off-hand locate the passage Mr.
Scaifitorialist quoted in today's _Tribune-Review_; perhaps it lies in a
current issue not yet made available on the web. But I easily found
Swami Higgs in person being quite as "in-depth" and "comprehensive" and
"scholarly" about a book he reviewed as, say, Mr. James Carville or Ms.
Phyllis Schlaffly.
Further research (by me on the web since I wrote the last paragraph)
reveals that this particular "non-politicized" sort of "in-depth" and
"comprehensive" and "scholarly" is not a private Higgsian eccentricity
but a settled institutional or conspiratorial resolve. The publisher of
the e-rag says "Of course, in this new era of rethinking, bouts of
confusion, apprehension, and conflict must be expected. Those who have
benefited from existing policies, and the discredited ideas on which
they have been based, will no doubt disparage the independent thinkers
who now challenge the modern Leviathan state and seek to restore the
vitality of civil society."
Well, there just ain't no doubt about it, Mr. Theroux: I disparage.
However I must retract the impression I gave above, and labored under
myself, that our Scaifitorialist had found a NEW guru. He's still
dancing on the head of the same old Catonic pin, for here is Mr.
Theroux's institute on Mr. Theroux himself:
"David J. Theroux is Founder and President of the Independent
Institute and Publisher of The Independent Review. He received his
B.S., A.B., and M.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, and
his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. Mr. Theroux is the recipient
of two Mencken Awards for Best Book, four Sir Antony Fisher
International Memorial Awards for Best Book, and two Choice Magazine
Awards for Outstanding Book. He was founding vice president and
director of academic affairs for the Cato Institute and founding
president of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. Having
directed and published ((NB -- not "written")) over seventy scholarly
books, Mr. Theroux is the author of the forthcoming book, _Freedom on
Film_, and editor of ((&c. &c.)) Having been a director of seven
corporations and four foundations, he has been a member of the Koch
Crime Commission, the Prison Advisory Board for the California Little
Hoover Commission, and the Executive Committee for the Templeton
Collegiate Honor Rolls for Education in a Free Society."
Gee whiz, look at all that eminently disparagable vrook gunk! Not
exactly a "conservative" "intellectual" himself, apparently, but
obviously a sort of impresario of the whole doubly shudder-quoted CI
tribe of underappreciated performing animals.
What I'd ideally like to know, of course, is exactly how The
Independent Institute pays its bills, hoping always that Citizen Scaife
or somebody similar will be found lurking in back of their "undaunted
and uncompromising" financial independence. Theroux, Higgs & Co. are
not such complete fools as to allow *that* sort of information to stray
into HTML-land. Even if they are, I am not really empiricalist and
American enough to persist in trying to dig it up.
I'd much rather refute their silly anti-civilization "principles"
head-on, even though part of my refutation would involve putting
principles in their rather lowly place once and for all. But there is a
trap for us good guys hereabouts, and it is the "scholarly" part of
Swami Higgs's partisan editorial insincerities. "Scholarship" fallen
into vicious and corrupt VRWC minds like these may pretend to be a sort
of vicarious empiricism. They'll try to vote forged (forged by
themselves) cultural and intellectual proxies for the dead, is what it
comes to.
Direct Cartesian appeal to unexperienced First Principles won't work
very well in muddle-headed Lockean America, and appeal to the actual
experience of real Clinton-backing Americans in 1999 won't work much
better. That is what Mr. Editorialist followed Swami Higgs in
identifying as the VRWC problem. Mr. Editorialist, being but an
epigonal and salaried dumb-dumb, had no solution to offer but sudden
national conversion to Frenchthink.
But Theroux, Higgs & Co. and their financial backers are not
dumb-dumbs at all, and a corrupt and vicious "scholarship" along their
lines can perhaps work wonders that Scaifesylvania's Mr. Editorialist
never imagined. There is nothing our radical vrooks need more than a
really solid alliance with the rank-and-file GOP against democracy and
progress and government and civilization and all those bad Clintonist
things. Impeachmentgate reveals that pure old-fashioned American Whig
appeals to "principle" don't take enough political tricks. Cartesianism
doesn't work in the USA. The appeal must, in the Holmesian end, be to
experience rather than to logic.
But there, in "experience," is the gap the VRWC hordes may yet pour
through to rebarbarize us all: we Americans are not nit-pickers when it
comes to "experience." We don't insist narrow-mindedly on having
actually experienced "experience" for ourselves, we are willing to take
other people's word for other people's experiencings. That is the
problem (for his anti-experiential vrook faction) that Mr. Editorialist
started from, the fact that we approve of specific government programs
even if they don't benefit precisely ourselves, because we very easily
imagine the experience of somebody they WOULD benefit, of the Americans
who DO benefit. (I think the proper word here is "imagination," not His
Texcellency's "compassion," but that is a minor verbal detail. As I
said far back above, empiricism is no threat to the core GOP. Bush
Minor is so like St. Bill Clinton, verbally at least, that no
Clintonista can altogether disapprove of him--supposing his
verbalizations sincere.)
But if we'll take "experience" at second hand, why not at
twenty-second hand? There's the insidious gap VRWC "scholarship" of
Swami Higgs's type might potentially use to overwhelm civilization and
government. They will, as I said, pretend on the basis of "scholarship"
to speak for the experience of the dead. They will counterfeit us a
"tradition." Not the old-fashioned kind of tradition genuinely
traditional people learned about casually and unconsciously, but a
neoteric mechanical monstrosity explicitly concocted in think-tanks and
lectured on in certain outlets of tertiary education and written up in
independent WWWonderland reviews that profess to aim to be
"non-politicized."
Eternal vigilance is, as always, highly to be recommended. But
exactly what we good guys are to be watching out for varies from age to
age. I'd suggest that at the moment the enemies who go on about
"principles" are comparatively harmless and unimportant, whereas our
"scholarship" enemies need very, very careful watching. The
temporary(?) Great American Dumbing Down, combined with the perennial
Basic American Niceness, makes it very hard to be properly vigilant
against vile ideological creatures that call themselves "scientists" or
"scholars," but nevertheless we really do gotta make the effort.
If we Americans really care about experience more than about
"principles" or "logic," we ought, by our own steady empiricalizing
tendency of the last two or three centuries, to become worried about
whether the experience we very properly care about is the real thing, or
only a sham designed to take us in. The more we care about authentic
experience, the more contemptuous we ought to be of unexperienced and
would-be-manipulative imitations of the real thing.
== Yours, J. H. McDemoncrat == ... sobie spiewam a Muzom ... ==
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