The Three Liberal Conceits

It feels like 9/11, watching the twin towers burning, thinking about "one hour buildings" and wondering what comes next.

I'm talking, of course, about the mid-term elections last November 4. We are looking at the Democratic Party as it trails a black cloud of smoke and we are wondering: could the whole thing come down in a great crash? And if it did come down would it be in that dreadful slow motion descent of the twin towers, or the sub-second dump of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis? One moment it was there, the next moment it was in the river.

Everything is collapsing on the liberals all at once. Their multidecadal war on the private sector, where they want to boss banks and corporations around to help workers get good jobs or to help minorities buy a home, is in ruins, as their confident Keynesian stimulus has failed. Their war on want is a mess as the administrative manipulations of a thousand social programs make dependents out of proud workers.  Their was on global warming is consuming itself in second rate science and third rate politics. Their war on tradition is a mess as the sexual revolution turns into a re-commodification of sex and pathetic attempts to fix it with politics -- like the "rape culture" mania.

There are, I think, Three Conceits at the heart of this liberal meltdown. Let's take them one by one.

First, there is the Economic Conceit, the idea that government can run the economy. There certainly is a need for the government to commandeer the economy in case of all-out war. But the record of the last century is that, absent war, government should keep its cotton-picking hands off. Government shouldn't muck around with monetary policy and the credit system. All it does is institutionalize inflation and play favorites with the credit system. Government shouldn't muck about with corporations vs. labor vs. the consumer. The wreck of the auto companies ought to tell us that. As George McGovern found out when he opened a resort hotel and then went bankrupt, business is incredibly difficult. Politicians shouldn't make it harder.

Secondly, there is the Social Conceit, the idea that government can spread the wealth and alleviate poverty, that government can run the education system and supervise the health care system. No it can't. The education system is dead in the water, and has been for a generation. The reason? It's been captured by the producers who don't give a damn about the consumers, children and parents. The Obamis are in the middle of bollixing up the health care system by leaning on it to serve an additional 30 million people who are reluctant to pay for their own health care. Government just can't do this efficiently and effectively.

Thirdly, there is the Moral Conceit, the idea that government can muck around by legislating morality. Oh yes, liberals believe in legislating morality all right. That's what all the fuss about abortion and gay marriage and the "rape culture" is about. Liberals decided to change, by judicial fiat, the moral rules on babies and marriage. Now everyone wants to use the government to force their moral views on the rest of the nation.

What is going on here? What do liberals not understand?

I think that we need to look at society in a new way. Think of a circle, divided into three sectors. One is the political sector, with the institutions of government at all levels. This is the sector of force. Then there is the economic sector, of businesses and consumers, producing and consuming products and services. This is the sector of stuff. Then there is the moral/cultural sector, with various non-economic institutions, churches, schools, charities, foundations, and voluntary associations. The point about these institutions is that they are not immediately economic. They have moral or social goals, not economic goals. This is the sector of faith.

The big mistake that liberals have made, as reflected in the Three Conceits, is that the political sector can supervise and co-opt the other two sectors. It can't. The political sector is the sector of force, and force is the only thing it knows. When you do force in the economic sector you get serfdom. When you do force in the moral/cultural sector you get a clash of faith, a religious war, and even a religious civil war. The three sectors need to be separate and equal in a Greater Separation of Powers. None should dominate another sector, and no two should gang up on the third.

This is all very well, but there is something missing. It is people. It one thing to understand the relationships of the institutions in society, it is another thing to figure out the people.

The people, I believe are a circle in the middle. Call it the personal sector. The personal sector is the face-to-face sector, where people deal with each other verbally. It is the sector of trust.

The whole universe of society is a question of trust, but trust is only possible between face-to-face people. Without people in the middle you have nothing but force, the mechanical interactions on inanimate objects rather than the personal relationships of trust.

So when we say that the three sectors should be separate and coequal, and kept so by a Greater Separation of Powers, we understand also that this social compact is made possible by the folks in the middle, in the personal sector. These people in the middle act in face-to-face relationship with other people and it is the trust that they develop over time that creates the delicate balance between the sectors.

It is people representing institutions in the economic sector that link with people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector and put material content into moral concern. It is people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector linking with people representing institutions in the political sector that define the boundary where moral disapproval turns into legal restraint. It is people representing institutions in the economic sector linking with people representing institutions in the political and moral/cultural sectors that define the boundaries where a bad deal turns into a fraudulent deal.

In this Christmas season, let us not forget that our liberal friends are good people. But they were tempted by vanity, and vanity turned into conceit. And now conceit is turning into humiliation.

Let's cut the political sector down to size and reanimate the spirit of trust that turns adversaries into friends.

Georg Simmel: Wrapup

Georg Simmel was a German sociologist and contemporary of Max Weber, also a German sociologist. But his work is independent of Weber and clearly not "influenced" by Weber like 20th century sociologists.

So Simmel is clearly a 19th century voice, commenting on the world that the 19th century created. But his great virtue is that he doesn't have a political ax to grind, like Marx and the Fabians. He doesn't regard social hierarchy as prima facie as scandal. Nor does he descant on the horrors of objectification as the Marxists do with "reification" and "commodification."

So let's review Simmel's ideas, as developed in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff.

Groups and Lowest Common Denominator. People are at their best as individuals, at their worst in a group. That's because a group must define itself by what the members have in common.

Sociability as Play. We tend to think of pure sociability as "superficial" and we sneer at the professional hostess. But sociability is sociation as play, and play is how humans learn things. So maybe sociability is how humans learn to be social.

18th and 19th Century Freedom. Simmel describes the 18th century idea of freedom as the idea of "freedom in general" and the 19th century idea of freedom as the freedom to be different. The thing is that freedom, any freedom, immediately permits the strong to exploit the weak and the clever to outpace the stupid.  We used to worry about aristocratic privilege; now we worry about economic inequality.

The Sociology of Small Numbers. Simmel starts with the isolated individual, then moves to the "dyad" of two people -- friends, business partners and married man and wife -- and the "triad" of three people where the question usually involves various two-against-one scenarios.

Numbers and Groups. Once you get beyond the sociation of the kindred you see numbers appearing, particularly in the notion of the "Hundred," a subdivision used in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere.

Subordination. However we may long for freedom and equality, social relations almost always means the domination of one person by another. Simmel looks at three kinds of social domination: subordination under a monarch, under a plurality, and under a principle. He makes the important point that we humans are very seldom held under complete coercive domination. It's just that, most of the time, we judge the price of freedom too high to take advantage of it.

The Secret. One of the most important qualities of social life is that we don't tell everything to the other people we know.  We hold back, and not just the guilty secrets. In fact discretion and privacy are a vital part of social life. It starts with the fact that we cannot know what another person is thinking.

Faithfulness and Gratitude. They are both pretty important as the social glue that goes beyond the mere performance of promises.

Objectivity in Modern Life. Marx makes a scandal out of "reification" and the way that production for use becomes production for exchange. But Simmel shows that objectification is inevitable as society develops from face-to-face relationships to the global exchange economy. We naturally treat objects like money and products as if they have a life of their own. We do it because it works.

The Stress of Modern Life. The "intensification of nervous stimulation" is the defining aspect of life in the city. It provokes everyone to cooperate with the rest of society yet also work hard at individuating from the mass. Modern life is a constant battle between "individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself". It is the conflict between the 18th century "general human being" and the 19th century "qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability." We want to be equal to our fellows, and we want to be special as well.

Back to the beginning: The Unknown Sociologist.

Georg Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life

Back in the old days primitive man fought like mad just to provide for his bodily existence, writes Georg Simmel in George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. But now modern man must take arm against a sea of troubles "to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The 18th century commanded each individual to take arm against the old hierarchies in state and religion and economics; the 19th century commanded us to seek "functional specialization" in our work and compare ourselves with others. Nietzsche saw life as a ruthless struggle between individuals; socialism saw the complete suppression of all competition.

[I]n all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism.

What we have, in the metropolis, is "the intensification of nervous stimulation... and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions." It requires an intellectual response to life different than the tenor of rural life "which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships."

This intellectuality is symbolized by the money economy. In the exchange economy of the metropolis everything "is reckoned with as a number."

Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and quantity to the question: How much?

 In rural affairs, producer and consumer are acquainted.

The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer's actual field of vision.

The calculating nature of metropolitan life tends "to transform the world into an arithmetic problem" even to the necessity of promptness and "the punctual integration of all activities and mutual relationships into a stable and impersonal time schedule."

These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign trains and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without.

It is precisely this that thinkers like Nietzsche and Ruskin hated.

The neverending stimulation of metropolitan life has provoked a defense mechanism, the "blasé attitude," which deals with stimulation by refusing to react to the turmoil and intensification of experience of the urban experience. Thus, to the eyes of "small town people", the city dwellers seem "cold and heartless."

Against this is the fact that the metropolis "grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions." Small-town life sets up external and internal barriers against individual independence and expression that can only be overcome in the larger stage of the metropolis, its division of labor, and its geometrical expansion of horizons.

The objectivating spirit of the metropolis has yielded up amazing advances "in things and in knowledge, in institutions and in comforts" but also a "retrogression" of the spirit. This provokes some to extremes of individuality, "summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core... to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself."

Thus the metropolis provokes both "individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself". There is a conflict between these two, the 18th century "general human being" and the 19th century "qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability."

The external and internal history of our time takes its course within the struggle and in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining the individual's role in the whole of society. It is the function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation.

Next: Wrapup. 

Georg Simmel: The Stranger

By the notion of "The Stranger" we are not talking about the person who is here in the community today and gone tomorrow. We are talking, according to George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, about "the person who comes today and stays tomorrow."

[H]is position in the group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.

We are not talking about people living on another planet; we are talking about people living in the community who are not quite of it. The stranger's relation to the community "involves both being outside it and confronting it."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The archetypal stranger is the trader, for he brings "products that originate outside the group" and probably lives outside it. Because trade sees opportunities that the local person does not, it is suitable for the stranger and suitable for a group like the European Jews, and the stranger is typically not "an owner of soil." This status alone makes him a stranger.

His activity in intermediary trade and finance also evokes mobility, one who comes in contact with many individuals and becomes less "organically connected" with "kin, locality, and occupation". This mobility and extensive contact also creates objectivity, for "the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given." This objectivity, and standing apart, is often abused by persons wishing to blame someone for an uprising or other social disaster.

We relate to the stranger through general features such as nation, occupation. But with our intimates with more specific qualities. This is notable in erotic relationships, where "lovers think that there has never been a love like theirs". But estrangement "usually comes where this uniqueness vanishes from the relationship."

The peculiar situation of the stranger is illustrated by the medieval Beede in German cities. For the Christian this tax "changed with the changes in his fortune" while for the Jew it was fixed as a head tax. Locals were treated as individuals; strangers were all alike.

The stranger is a member of the community; yet he is held at a distance. There is in the stranger a peculiar tension between "nearness and distance."

Next: The Metropolis and Mental Life.

Georg Simmel: The Negatives of Collective Behavior

When you get a big mass action, such as a revolution, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, the result is almost always destructive. The reason is quite simple. When you bring together all kinds of divergent groups, you usually get dispersing and destructive consequences.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

Simmel puts this idea into the form of a principle:

[A]s the size of a group increases, the common features that fuse its members into a social unit become ever fewer. [Thus] a smaller minimum of norms can, at least, hold together a large group more easily than a small one.

The point is that the larger the group the harder it is to control it from the center, and the more that the center "is left only with a prohibitive function... with the restriction of freedom rather than its direction." Polytheism and monotheism demonstrate this principle: the particular qualities of polytheistic gods make a large unified religious community impossible. Thus Islam, in unifying numerous polytheistic Arab tribes, became the simplest of the monotheisms.

[T]he larger the group... the less does the observance of the norm characterize the individual and the less important it is for him -- whereas its violation, on the whole, has consequences which are especially grave, which single out the individual from the group.

This applies especially to intellectual matters, being based on logic, which "cuts through the variety of world views" and creates "common ground" for all discussion. Yet logic is merely negative; "it is only a norm against which we must not sin".

The violation principle applies also to ordinary social conventions. To observe them is nothing; to violate them is a big deal.

Greeting somebody in the street proves no esteem whatever, but failure to do so, conclusively proves the opposite. The forms of courtesy fail as symbols of positive, inner attitudes, but they are most useful in documenting negative ones, since even the slightest omission can radically and definitely alter our relation to a person.

Next: The Stranger

Obama Playing in Sandbox with the Base

At the gym today I was accosted by a liberal faculty wife. She was eager for her faculty husband at the University of Washington to retire, so I asked her: "Does an earl give up his earldom?" A bit naughty of me, I admit.

And then she told me how excited she was about Obama's Cuba action and all the other things he's been doing lately.

Yum! I thought. I'm right! He's doing all this to keep the base excited.

So I told her that the president was going down the liberal laundry list. The question was whether he'd destroy the Democratic Party as an electoral force.

There's a reason why nobody else has tried this, I told her. They were afraid of the political consequences. They stayed away from Cuba not because they were timid politicians.  They did it because of Rule #1 in politics. Don't poke a stick in the eye of the opposition.

Conservatives have been confused by President Obama. We don't know whether he is a shallow fool, a shallow faculty lounge moralizer, or a shallow community organizer. His combative stance towards conservatives and Republicans has frankly put us off our balance. Because we are all Americans, right?

Honestly, I don't know Barack Obama is. I do pay attention to the guys that say: don't forget that young Barack Obama was abandoned twice. Once by his father, who went back to Kenya, and once by his mother who sent him back from Indonesia to Oahu to grow up with his grandparents. One can only begin to imagine the rage that smolders in this twice-betrayed man.

But I think we need to stop worrying about whether Barack Obama is a fool or a Marxist automaton. Let's just look at the results. The results after six years of Obama is that we have the most Republican Congress since 1929.

Yeah, think about that for a minute.

The reason that the Republicans fell from grace 75 years ago was the Great Depression. In 1929, according to usmidtermelections.com, the House was 270 Rep and 164 Dem; the Senate was 56 Rep and 39 Dem. For four long years under Herbert Hoover things got worse and by 1937 the House was 88 Rep and 334 Dem; the Senate was 16 Rep and 76 Dem.  Wipeout!

Obama started out in 2009 with the House at 178 Rep and 257 Dem and the Senate at 41 Rep and 59 Dem+Ind. In January the House will be 247 Rep and 186 Dem; the Senate will be 54 Rep and 46 Dem+Ind. Obama is the best thing for Republicans since Bill Clinton won the 1992 election as a moderate and then sicced liberal HillaryCare on us.

Nobody can predict the future, but I have a feeling that the presidency of Barack Obama will echo down the next couple of decades, if not quite with the resonance of Herbert Hoover, at least with the sour whine of Jimmy Carter.

If you want to know why the Democrats are in trouble, the man I turn to is Irving Kristol.

Kristol argued that if you want to help the poor you need to deal in the middle class. Thus to help the aged poor you need to pass Social Security and Medicare and deal in the middle class. Social Security and Medicare passed because in 1935 the average person didn't have a pension and in 1965 the average senior didn't have health insurance.

The problem with Obamacare is that the middle class already has health insurance and is fairly content with its health care. You couldn't deal in the middle class with Hillarycare or Obamacare because the middle class already had their deal. Now you know why President Obama ran around telling everyone that if they liked their doctor they could keep their doctor. Now you know why he told the middle class that their premiums would go down by $2,500 per year.  Now you know why he needed Jonathan Gruber to figure out how to game the system at the CBO. He had to lie to the middle class and pretend that Obamacare would make us all better off.

So yeah. President Obama is making liberal faculty wives really happy. He is working on their issues and they love him, they really love him.

But the rest of America is getting screwed. Low interest rates are screwing the passbook savings crowd. Green energy is screwing the car commuter and the suburban middle class. Amnesty is screwing the low-skilled and the low-paid.

How could the Democrats be so blind, you ask? How could they be screwing the white working class and the black working class and turning a blind eye to the millions of illegal immigrants working in construction and the pay for low-to-medium skilled workers goes down and down?

I will tell you why. It is because today's liberal ruling class are the children of the children of the people that created the liberal ruling class back in the Progressive Era over a century ago. They really don't know what they are doing. They are like the bratty rich kids that take over Dad's business and run it into the ground. Because they don't know any better.

I'd like to think that the Cruzes and the Rubios and the Pauls do know better. But the truth is that we don't know. The only way to find out is to give them the keys to the kingdom.

Once upon a time the American people upped and gave the keys of the kingdom to a man the ruling class said was a dangerous extremist. Or he was an amiable dunce. They couldn't quite decide which witch was which.

You know his name. His name was Ronald Reagan. The great talent of Ronald Reagan was that he enthused the base without turning off the moderates in the middle. And he played up the idea that he was a harmless lightweight to encourage the Democratic base in their notion that he was a fool.

Go ahead, President Obama. Charm the liberal ladies. Play Liberal Issues with your base in the liberal sandbox. The rest of us have work to do. We love this country and we can't bear what you are doing to it.

Georg Simmel: Faithfulness and Gratitude

Faithfulness, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, is the glue that binds society together. Not self-interest, coercion, duty, or love could keep society together without an intermixture of faithfulness. And yet you can never tell the effect of faithfulness because "its practical effect always consists in replacing some other feeling."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

But what is faithfulness? What is "faithful love?" Simmel defines it this way:

Faithfulness might be called the inertia of the soul. It keeps the soul on the path on which it started, even after the original occasion that led it onto it no longer exists.

To Simmel faithfulness is an affective factor, "a specific psychic state, which is directed towards the continuation of the relationship as such, independently of any particular affective or volitional elements that sustain the content of this relation." I understand this to mean that we are not talking about an affective quality called "faithful love." We are talking about two affective qualities: faithfulness and love. One might say, perhaps, that while the original feeling that started a relationship starts to dissipate the feeling of faithfulness towards the relationship develops.

As an example of encouraging faithfulness, Simmel cites a 19th century French program of temporary assistance to unmarried mothers that would agree to keep their babies and not give them up to orphanages. It was found that once the mother had kept the baby for any length of time she would not later give it up.

Again:

[F]aithfulness... has the significance that, by virtue of it, for once the personal, fluctuating inner life actually adopts the character of the fixed, stable form of a relation.

 Then there is gratitude, which is no less important than faithfulness, and even more hidden. Only its "external insignificance... has apparently concealed the circumstance that the life and the cohesion of society would be unforeseeably changed without this phenomenon." It is a supplement of the legal forms of exchange, giving and receiving, into a realm beyond what can be enforced by legal coercion.

This is particularly important in the modern economy because of its objectification of giving and receiving into the exchange of commodities. Simmel echoes Marx, but without the moral music:

Exchange is the objectification of human interaction... This objectification, this growth of the relationship into self-contained, movable things, becomes so complete that, in the fully developed economy, personal interaction recedes altogether into the background, while goods gain a life of their own.

Gratitude moves in the reverse direction, personalizing what is experienced as objective. It is the "moral memory of mankind"; it connects today with "what has gone before... [It] effects the return of a benefit where there is no external necessity for it." Again: "gratitude actually consists, not in the return of a gift, but in the consciousness that it cannot be returned", that a relation goes beyond any "finite return gift or other activity."  And we can understand why this is so. The first gift "has a voluntary character than no return gift can have." What indeed can be given in return but gratitude?

The obligation that colors giving explains whey many people (i.e., men) do not like to receive gifts. They understand that gifts bind people to each other, and they wish, as independent individuals, to be free of such bonds.

In Simmel's view, gratitude is even more powerful as a social glue than faithfulness. There are many relationships that can do without faithfulness, but gratitude is forever.

This atmosphere of obligation belongs among those "microscopic," but infinitely tough, threads which tie one element of society to another, and thus eventually all of them together in a stable collective life.

Next: The Negatives of Collective Behavior