Conservatives and Progressivism

Two conservative writers this past week addressed what I consider to be conservativism’s Big Problem: How to advance conservatives ideas in a progressive world.

In National Review Jonah Goldberg writes about how for the last century

conservatives have been fighting progressive assumptions about the role of the state, the nature of justice, and the relevance, if any, of the transcendent to public life. With few exceptions, this argument has been almost entirely on the opposition’s terms.

In other words, the language of the public square is the language of the progressives.

Goldberg is careful to define what he means by progressive. It does not just mean left-wing, but in a broader secular sense that: “Progressivism takes it as a given that mankind, not God, is the pilot of Spaceship Earth.”

A conservative, I think, would at least say that when it comes to the pilot of the world: We Don’t Know. Wew don’t know what our purpose is here on earth, so we cannot know if we are doing the right thing. Therefore we need the concept of God to provide us with a means of talking about ultimate ends, or what we should do in our time on earth.

In fact, of course, the progressives do have a God. They just don’t admit it. Janet Daley gets close to defining it when she writes about the problem that David Cameron is facing as he tries to make the Tory Party acceptable once more to the liberal, professional middle class in Britain.

The young (and the intellectually lively elderly) are constantly searching for ways to make sense of the world. The appeal of systems that provide inclusive accounts of the human condition, whether political, theological or sociological, is very great.

And these people want not only to make sense of the world but divine our human purpose within it. The educated middle class is attracted to progressivism because it seems to enunciate a purpose for life in the industrial age. It provides a way to move beyond pure selfishness and provides a framework of fairness in which the wealth of the fortunate can be shared out with the less fortunate.

What these educated people do not see, because of their “inadequate understanding of economics,” is that when the state is charged with this sharing out it ceases to be a moral act, but merely an act of political power. It is difficult for the educated middle class to see this because it is they who wield the political power in the welfare state, and it is difficult to experience themselves as mere power actors in the political power game. They think that they are above such things.

The welfare state is slowly demonstrating that sharing and caring run by the government is not sharing and caring at all. But meanwhile, Daley writes,

Conservatives must show that they understand the appeal of that vague dream of perfect fairness which motivates [the progressive impulse].

Because fairness moves beyond a material world of self-interest. It is a metaphysical notion. Fairness is what God wants, or history, or basic human decency wants, the basic human decency of an educated person in the professional middle class.

Conservatives generally think that the progressive world-view is a pretty small and cramped affair, utterly compromised by its self-obsession and self-indulgence.

But if we are to move America forward from progressivism we must master it, so that we can lift it up and set it aside. As Goldberg writes: “Similarly, conservatives must speak the language of progressivism in order to persuade progressives that they are wrong. The danger in this is that you can go native.” Instead of converting the progressives, conservatives could end up as progressives.

Jews' 350 Years In Britain

It was Edward I who expelled the Jews from Britain in 1290. And it was in 1656 that Oliver Cromwell permitted 300 to return. Today British academics are voting to boycott Isreali universities, as reported by Al Jazeera.

So even though British Prime Minister Tony Blair told an audience at the 300-year-old Bevis Marks Synagogue that “it was impossible to imagine the modern United Kingdom without the Jewish community,” the fact is that plenty of left-wing Labour voters can imagine such a thing vividly. They look at the world through the left-wing lens of victimization and right now that distorting lens is focused on the suffering Palestinians and not at the Jews.

Of course, Jews have made a remarkable contribution to Britain. Celebrating British Jews, Charles Moore draws up a little list.

Among the eventual consequences of this re-admission have been Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Arthur Koestler, Alan Sugar, Nigella Lawson, Lucien Freud, Tom Stoppard and Sid James.

That’s quite a list, from philosophers to prime ministers to soap opera queens. And the chap who let them in, Oliver Cromwell, let us remember, was a man who, in today’s world, would be considered a leader of the religious right.

Moore goes on to name dozens of individual British Jews to make the point that “it does seem to my gentile eyes that there is more prodigious ability and energy per Jew than per the rest of us.” It’s a point that needs to be made as a surging Muslim community seems to be upsetting the tenuous safety that Jews have enjoyed in Britain since Cromwell’s time.

Why, we must ask, have Jews been able to live in peace in Britain for 350 years while Muslims take the role of helpless victims who must be appeased?

Moore cites the ingenious differentiation between civil and divine law in the Jewish faith. As long as civil law does not conflict with religious duty Jews are enjoined to obey the civil power.

Jews are told: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for, without the fear of it, people will swallow one another alive."

That is an important lesson to remember has Britain confronts its latest immigrants.

In the past half-century, Muslims have come where the Jews came earlier, and in much larger numbers. Like such Jews, they have sometimes experienced the unhappiness that comes when one's religion is misunderstood or derided.

But the Muslims seem to think that such humiliations are insults to be avenged. Maybe they should. But then, of course, life is reduced to a question of who swallows whom alive.

Today in Radlett, the stockbroker belt village northwest of London where I was raised, the old movie theater is a synagogue, and the old Congregational church where I went to pre-school is also a synagogue. Have the Jews moved out from London’s Golders Green because they have become more prosperous, or because it is no longer safe to be Jewish in London?

Let The Palestinians Show Their Stuff

A lot of people are worried about Israel’s “retreat” from Gaza and now, presumably, from the West Bank. They think that it shows weakness and just encourages the Palestinians to be militant and put off making peace with Israel.

But that ignores the significant downside of the West Bank occupation. It allowed a disempowered Palestinian people to act like angry adolescents, blowing themselves up in militarily insignificant but publicity powerful acts of terrorism.

Israel would really benefit if it faces a united Palestinian people with an army. Sooner or later a Palestinian government would be forced into attacking Israel with actual army units, rather than terrorists embedded in the civilian population.

On that day Israel could inflict a decisive defeat on the Palestinians. And that would decisively change the situation on the ground.

It is in that sense that Richard Z. Chesnoff is right to recommend that Israel continues its retreat to defensible borders, “leaving the Palestinians to cut their own throats or make peace.”

But of course, they will not make peace, not until after the throat-cutting is finished and the winner has boldly taken the fight to the Zionist entity, as promised.

The most interesting fact to emerge in the last few months as Hamas has emerged as the chosen government of the Palestinians is the extent to which the Palestine Authority is financed by the West. We find that the EU, Canada, and the United States have been shoveling money by the truckload into the West Bank and Gaza. And during the cartoon crisis we were amazed when the Palestinians trashed the Danish agencies in the Territories. The Danes? They were in the West Bank and Gaza too?

Let the Palestinians form their government. Let it figure out how to built a political system that actually goes beyond mere welfare from the West. And then we shall see.

Why Are the Childless So Angry?

Are you worried about the epidemic of childlessness among the educated elites of Europe and North America? Do you cudgel your brain wondering why your liberal friends are so often childless, or as we might say, exhibiting advanced symptoms of Child Deficit Disorder?

Clearly, one of the accompanying syndromes is Unprovoked Liberal Outrage.

Why else would the childless respond with such rage to an advice column by Slate’s Dear Prudence, Emily Yoffe. After all, what is so exceptional about saying to a childless woman in her 30s, about to get married, and intending to remain childless,

You are about to get married, and as life's circumstances change, it is worth re-examining your goals, especially this one (and yes, I know, I am offending all happy childless people).

No! How dare she!

I expected my answer would annoy people, but I was surprised by the fury of the response. You would think my reply was the equivalent of running around the streets with a turkey baster full of sperm, impregnating happy childless women.

The point is: Why should those childless people care? It’s just a life-style choice, isn’t it? Different people have different values, right? You can choose your own life path, and you can share your ideas about life paths with other people, agreed?

When people disagree violently in this way, then they are telling you that you have threatened their world view or, dare we say, their religious beliefs. They are communicating rather clearly that childlessness is not just a life-style but something more. Or at least they are telling the world that the question of children is a very sore spot for them. Yoffe says it delicately.

What is going on when there is so much scorn for parenthood — the way a society perpetuates itself?

Because what could be more important than “the way a society perpetuates itself?”

Or to make things a bit personal, what could be more important than the way you perpetuate yourself. Some people have given a name to this business of self-perpetuation. They call it immortality.

Other people call it Beautiful Bouncing Babies. But what do they know?

After all, how many babies have you seen bouncing lately (Britney’s excepted)?

Sneaking School Choice into New Orleans

While our soldiers battle away on the frontiers of freedom in Iraq, it is easy to forget about another titanic struggle, one that is taking place here at home. It is the epochal effort to wrest the education of the nation’s children away from the clutches of the unions and the bureaucrats.

It’s an immense task because the entrenched special interests are so powerful. But every now and again a power vacuum occurs and the intrepid reformers can leap into the gap.

That is happening right now in New Orleans as educational entrepreneurs jump at the opportunity offered by hurricane Katrina and use federal grants to open charter schools in the devastated city.

As Susan Saulny admits, federal grants rolled into the hurricane relief package are

likely to cement the role of New Orleans — where the public school system is barely functional — as the nation's pre-eminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools.

As conservatives have pointed out on occasion, one of the advantages of school choice is that the entrepreneurial model can respond more quickly to the needs of children than big bureaucracies.

There are at least 45 charter schools in Louisiana, with most having opened since Hurricane Katrina. The highest concentration is in New Orleans, where the school system is now dominated by charter operators. Eighteen of the 25 schools open in New Orleans are charter schools, receiving public financing but operating independently.

You can depend on the education blob to be pouring cold water on the new experiment, and “Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a lobbying group for urban districts,” steps up to the plate.

"Nobody is quite rushing to say let's model ourselves after New Orleans," Mr. Casserly said, "because it's not clear at this early point whether this strategy is likely to work."

So the folks running the charter schools had better understand that a lot is depending on the opportunity that we, the federal taxpayers, have given them.

Let us hope that they are worthy of our trust.

The Whole Foods Guy on Business, Freedom, and Life

A couple of years ago the founder of Whole Foods gave a speech at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Now John Mackey has revised and extended his remarks in Liberty.

Mackey started out in the Sixties as the classic hippie/commune type. He “studied eastern philosophy and religion,” lived in a commune, and believed “that business and corporations were essentially evil because they selfishly sought profits.”

Then in 1978 he and his girl-friend started “a natural foods market called Safer Way” with $45,000 in startup capital. Of course, starting a business changed his life. Everything he “believed about business was proven to be wrong.” He discovered that

business is based on voluntary cooperation. No one is forced to trade with a business; customers have competitive alternatives in the market place; employees have competitive alternatives for their labor; investors have different alternatives and places to invest their capital. Investors, labor, management, suppliers — they all need to cooperate to create value for their customers.

Of course, he did find out that not everything was a bed of roses in the business world.

[O]ur customers thought our prices were too high, our employees thought they were underpaid, the vendors would not give us large discounts, the community was forever clamoring for donations, and the government was slapping us with endless fees, licenses, fines, and taxes.

Now, of course, Safer Way is Whole Foods, the most profitable food retailer in the nation.

But is Whole Foods purely about profit? Not at all, says Mackey. Business must go beyond the selfish pursuit of profit to something more. Mackey sees business

as an interdependent system of constituencies connected together in a "harmony of interests."

Freedom and prosperity must be thought of as “beginning goals.” But the freedom movement must get beyond that, and a negative emphasis of “freedom ‘from’ government coercion” must give way to

the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own lives; the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own communities and our planet.

Mackey uses Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to develop a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful in a concrete discussion of health, peace, education, environmental sustainability, globalization, and his own initiative, FLOW, or Freedom Lights Our World.

John Mackey has gone a long way from his youth in the counter-culture movement. And he raises the great question.

How can anyone believe that you can make the world good and noble through ruthless application of force—using government, the agency of coercion and compulsion?

John Mackey has found a way to build a better world based on a “harmony of interest.” But what about the rest of us?

The End of the World is Not Yet

Every religion has its story of the end times, and accommodates the human need for existential terror about the end of the world. For Christians, it’s in the Bible. For liberals and environmentalists it is provided in the fear of global warming and the end of oil. The current theological term is Peak Oil, meaning that the peak in oil production is near and from then on it will be all down hill.

Here’s a status report on the oil situation. Oil reserves are increasing in relation to oil production and consumption, writes David Deming.

One way to determine if the world is beginning to run out of oil is to look at the ratio of petroleum reserves to annual production. In the 1960s, the average ratio of world petroleum reserves to production was 35. During the energy crises of the 1970s, the ratio decreased to 32. In the 1980s, it increased to 37. During the 1990s, the ratio of reserves to annual production rose to 45. In 2005, the ratio of oil reserves to annual production was 49, nearly a record high.

So why have oil prices skyrocketed (apart from the decline in the dollar)?

From 2002 through 2004, demand for oil increased by an average 3.7 percent annually. This is more than triple the rate of increase from 1990 through 2000, which averaged an anemic 1.1 percent. Low demand during the 1990s, combined with surging reserves, caused oil prices to bottom out near $10 a barrel in December 1998.

A glance at gold and oil prices in the last month indicate that the current price peak may be behind us. It wouldn’t be the first time. After all, when you jack up the price of something then people are going to bust their butts to find more of it to sell.

Oh, oil will run out eventually. But it will still not be the end of the world. Instead we will find another way to obtain and use energy.