The Economist will not be sad to see the back of 2016:
If you believe, as The Economist does, in open economies and open societies, where the free exchange of goods, capital, people and ideas is encouraged and where universal freedoms are protected from state abuse by the rule of law, then this has been a year of setbacks. ... As globalisation has become a slur, nationalism, and even authoritarianism, have flourished.
The Economist finds the root of the problem in "the loss of faith in progress. Liberals believe that change is welcome because, on the whole, it is for the better."
I object. In my view, the problem is not a loss in faith in progress: the problem is that progress is, in many respects, a false prophet.
We have been inundated by change in the first 16 years of this millennium. Disruption in finance and economics. Blisteringly fast changes in social norms and mores. New technologies disrupting established business. Radical new ideologies, most of which proselytize by the sword. The ever increasing dominance of a global elite that mocks traditional values and national loyalties. An aggressive secular humanism that derides religion. All this can be laid at the feet of what liberals call progress.
As a conservative, I do not deny that change is necessary. However, as Russell Kirk has written:
Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.
It is because our society has thrown over the faith in prudence for the cult of progress that a year like 2016 has befallen us. As Kirk observed:
When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise. ...
Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away.
To cite but a single example, is not the insistence upon safe spaces on college campuses an example of how the revolutionaries are carving out new conventions to replace the old rules of free speech and association they have denigrated? And are those not proving to be abuses of the rights to freedom of thought and expression?
The cult of progress is a problem not only because it fosters change that is too sudden and thoughtless, but also because it is premised on the the ascendancy of individual reason. Burke contended that individual reason could never fully comprehend the divine intent, although we grope towards it through history, myth, fable, custom, and tradition. Of these, tradition and custom are by far the most important.
Tradition often has a hard time withstanding the assaults of individual reason. Yet, tradition—even if seemingly foolish—has extraordinary value. Indeed, respect for tradition is closely linked to the virtue of prudence. Edmund Burke echoed Plato in his assertion that prudence was the chief virtue of true statesmen. If nothing else, as 2016 has proven, the law of unintended consequences must be given its due.
While prudence justifies reliance on empirical observations about the current state of the world, it also justifies consideration of the traditions of the community. The prudent legislator respects tradition precisely because the enduring truths of what Burke aptly called “original justice” are revealed slowly, with experience, over time. As John Randolph put it, providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise. We thus turn aside from ancient usage at our peril; far better to profit from the wisdom of our forbearers.
In addition, a great virtue of tradition is that it gives us a vantage point different from today’s prevailing judgment. Individual reason in today’s moral climate too often leads to mere values, which are purely matters of personal preference, lacking the moral force to bind others. In contrast, tradition emphasizes virtue, which is backed by the sanction of an enduring moral order with real teeth. The seven cardinal virtues — justice, fortitude, prudence, temperance, faith, hope and charity — thus are not questions of personal preferences. The individual can choose not to live up to those standards, but our moral heritage treats that choice as a sin having consequences.
This last observation points to what I regard as an even greater flaw in the cult of progress; namely, the implicit assumption of human perfectibility. Many liberals--especially but not exclusively of the progressive variety--believe in the perfectibility of man and the unstoppable march of human progress.
As a conservative, I know that to be a mirage. Back to Kirk:
Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
One might reasonably add the "twenty-first century" to that final claim.
My Catholic faith reinforces my belief that a quest for human perfectibility on Earth is at best doomed to failure and, perhaps, a source of mortal sin. The church regards the vices of pride, vanity, jealousy, greed, and insatiable desires as an intrinsic part of human nature since the Fall of Man. To be sure, As Aquinas taught, we are called upon to seek evangelical perfection in which we are free of mortal sin and cultivate the love of God, but as Augustine taught "because of original sin, human beings cannot now even will finite perfection. ... The only way that progress can be made toward moral perfection and salvation is by God's grace."
The cult of progress necessarily rejects this new of the human condition. Consider this helpful analysis of Christopher Lasch's work:
Lasch saw that the most viable progressive ideology—the only one to emerge intact from the rise and fall of the modern era’s revolutionary and totalitarian regimes—was the one created by the new science of political economy in the eighteenth century. Its prophets were Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith—the heroes of classical liberalism, not Marxian radicalism. For Smith et al. promised not utopia but the indefinite expansion of prosperity, a lower but seemingly much more achievable goal.
Lasch’s great contribution is to show that even this more modest project requires the dramatic alteration of traditional moral valuations. For one thing, unlike the classical, Christian, and republican traditions, “the modern conception of progress depends on a positive assessment of the proliferation of wants.” Austerity and self-denial have no place in the modern, progressive conception of the good life. For “thrift and self-denial” mean nothing less, ultimately, than “economic stagnation.” Desire and appetite, on the other hand, must now carry a positive valence. Formerly condemned as potentially insatiable and therefore subject to a panoply of private, public, and religious constraints, for there to be progress desire and appetite had now to be continually stimulated. Furthermore, this progressive ideology, by proposing a world continually improving and without end, necessarily entails the institutionalization of a sense of impermanence, the sense “that nothing is certain except the imminent obsolescence of all our certainties.”
Lasch’s book attempts to highlight the most important critics of this new idea of progress while showing that the most effective criticism can be traced to the populist tradition and its preference for a rooted life centered on family, neighborhood, and church.
And therein lies Lasch's true genius, for his work anticipated and predicted what happened in 2016:
... for Lasch the populist tradition he hoped to rejuvenate was the natural home of cultural conservatives, so long as they truly wished to be associated with “a respect for limits, localism, a work ethic as opposed to a consumerist ethic, a rejection of unlimited economic growth, and a certain skepticism about the ideology of progress.”
So unlike The Economist, I don't see 2017 as a year in which the goal should be to restore faith in progress. Instead, 2017 needs to be a year in which we grope towards a reconciliation of capitalism, cultural conservatism, and populism and the fusion from those elements of a new politics and culture that puts people first.
A postscript:
Some will say these are odd thoughts coming from someone who has spent his professional life understanding and defending corporations. Especially someone who is profoundly skeptical of corporate social responsibility.
Yet, my praise has always been directed to the form and not to the people who run specific corporations. I firmly believe that the corporation is a force for good and liberty--when it is in the right hands.
Unfortunately, we have seen an awful lot of wild pitches lately. So much so that to speak of virtue and corporations in the same breath seems hopelessly naïve. Consider the high profile corporate scandals of recent years. Not since the Levine-Boesky-Milken insider trading scandal in the mid-1980s, have so many leading corporate figure taken the “perp walk” as have those implicated in the recent wave of corporate governance scandals. Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the business news of the new millennium can rattle off the relevant names: Enron, WorldCom, ImClone, Adelphia, Tyco, and so on.
How did this happen? Here, I turn to the late Christopher Lasch. In The Revolt of the Elites, Lasch observed of the modern professional elites – from whom most corporate directors and managers are drawn – that their “attitude to religion ranges from indifference to active hostility.” Rather than faith, “[a] skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the knowledge classes.”
In other words, they embraced the cult of progressivism.
This changing mindset must bear a substantial share of the blame for the sorry state of Corporate America. Virtue is an adaptive response to the instinctive human recognition of (and need for) a transcendent moral order codified in a body of natural law. People are most likely to act virtuously when they believe in an external power, higher and more permanent than the state, who is aware of their shortcomings and will punish them in the next life even if they escape retribution in this life.
Put another way, economic actors do not function in a vacuum. To the contrary, modern corporate capitalism necessarily rests on a moral foundation. Morality's primary purpose, said Kirk, is "to order the soul and to order the human community, not to produce wealth.” As faith eroded among our corporate elites, however, the capitalists of our day lost this essential moral foundation and, with it, the instinct for honor that virtue inculcates. ...
The Church’s response to crises of corporate governance therefore should not be support for the statism of principle ethics. The nanny state is a poor substitute, at best, for the virtue inculcating power of faith and voluntary community. We may fear the faceless bureaucrat, but he does not inspire us to virtue. Conduct that rises above the lowest common moral denominator thus cannot be created by state action. But while the state cannot make its citizens virtuous, it can destroy the intermediary institutions that do inculcate virtue. Instead, the Church should concern itself with re-establishing virtue ethics in the public square. Like the social justice Prophets of the Old Testament, the Church must call our professional elites back to what Lincoln called the angels of their better nature.
My task is to think about how the law and public policy can also promote virtue ethics in the corporate square.
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