The Childless Liberal City

On the one hand liberals believe in creativity. On the other hand they don't believe in having children. Not much.

On the one hand cities are crucibles of creative innovation. On the other hand cities are not that good for children.

On the one hand women are good little girls that suck up the Zeitgeist and believe what they are told to believe. On the other hand women want to live in a leafy suburb when they raise their children.

So here comes urbanist Joel Kotkin writing about families and cities. Cities, he writes, have been all about family.

What is a city for? Ever since cities first emerged thousands of years ago, they have been places where families could congregate and flourish... As for modern European cities, the historian Philippe Ariès argued that the contemporary “concept of the family” itself originated in the urbanizing northern Europe shown in Rembrandt’s paintings of bourgeois life. Another historian, Simon Schama, described the seventeenth-century Dutch city as “the Republic of Children.”

And if you want a cheap look at that, go watch The Admiral, about the very bourgeois Admiral Michiel de Ruyter of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. The movie-makers go to a lot of trouble to show de Ruyter, who beat the Brits in several sea battles, as a man that just wants to go home and live with his wife and children in the Dutch city.

But today the city is not very family-friendly. I suppose we have urbanist Jane Jacobs and her Death and Life of American Cities to thank for that. Jacobs, who came to adulthood during World War II and whose husband bought a building at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, championed a Village kind of life with stores and sidewalks and vibrant street life. And activism. Jacobs had three children.

But most women don't want to raise children in the hurly-burly of the city. That is why women (and not eevil auto companies and oil companies) have driven the move to the suburbs. Women like fluffy nests and back yards and flowers and greenery. And 80 percent of people want to live in a detached single-family house.

But educated women are a bit different. It takes time for them to slough off their good-little-girl education and discover that they want what other women want. Also, they probably could never have afforded to buy 555 Hudson Street, even right after World War II.

Why do liberals insist on turning cities into hipster-friendly places that families don't like and can't afford? And why do they continue to make war on the suburbs?

I like to think it is because of their identity as People of the Creative Self. Liberals believe in living a creative life, but they do not think that creating children is creative. So they believe in making cities comfortable for creative people like them, people that dream in their twenties of getting into writing or activism, or "something creative."

And they believe in using political power to force other people to conform to their People of the Creative Self culture and to force them away from more traditional middle-class life style and culture.

Just like Jane Jacobs. Only she put three children on the ground as well.

Meanwhile things are going to get worse before they get better because anybody who is anybody instinctively supports the liberal densification agenda that wants to put everyone into dense cities even as people are fleeing the dense cities for the suburbs.

As even The Daily Beast recognizes.

The Paradox of Power and Not-so-Power

In the last week or so, while cudgeling my brain, like an Alger Hiss, over the newly published Bourgeois Equality by Deirdre McCloskey, I used my dissatisfaction with its 787 pages to come up with a new catchphrase.

I asserted that the notion that ties the bourgeois experience together -- its rhetoric, its innovation, its having-a-go -- is that the middle class is not that interested in power.

The "post-1848 clerisy" -- liberals and progressives and lefties --  are very interested in power, and especially political power. The Judgment of Marx in 1848 was that the economic power of the bourgeoisie, upon which rested the superstructure of its political power, could only be reduced by a countervailing political power organized by a revolutionary avant-garde of chaps like him. Liberals and progressives and lefties have not changed their opinion since.

For the left, the first and last and only way to change the world is through politics.

The counter argument, proposed down the ages, is that while political power has its moments, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- not forgetting the Key to All Mythologies -- is the limitation of political power.

Deirdre McCloskey makes this clear in her oft-repeated assertion that the last 200 years has seen a Great Enrichment in per-capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day wherever capitalism -- or innovation or "trade-tested betterment" or "having a go" -- was allowed to germinate and grow by the local political power structure. And there has been nothing like it before in history. Ever.

Her point is that the norm in human history is that the political powers-that-be have tended always to smother any signs of innovation in their cradles. That's because innovation and Schumpeter's "creative destruction" always threatens the status quo and the established interests, the regime supporters that get rewards for their support from the ruling class. And really, what is the difference between innovation and rebellion, from the point of view of the ruling class and its regime supporters?

The point is that enrichment is only possible when the political class takes its clunking fist off the brow of labor and allows it to innovate and creatively destroy the status quo. The more the ruling class believes in power the less it is likely to allow innovators and have-a-goers to innovate and have a go (and by the way, the less that the economy will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state). The opposite is also true. The more a ruling class is not that interested in power and the more that it allows innovators and have-a-goers to have a go, the more enrichment will occur (and, by the way, the more that the enrichment will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state).

Here we see the fundamental error that the "post-1848 clerisy" has been living for the last 170 years. The answer to the problem of injustice is not government power, because government is injustice. The answer to the problem of poverty is not yet another Poor Law, because the best solution to poverty is more enrichment from innovation and having-a-go.

Of course, we should not be so hard on the "post-1848 clerisy." They are not the only people that think the solution is power. Almost anyone that gets into politics ends up following the sterile road of power. Politics is about power, and it is a contradiction in terms to run for office and political power by promising to reduce the incidence of political power. Donald Trump is proposing to use the power of government to teach the Chinese and the Mexicans a lesson. His opponents in the Democratic Party are proposing the usual list of new expansions of government power to teach the One Percent a lesson.

And when we turn to the American people they always call for politicians to "do something" rather than "undo something."

It is, of course, a paradox that in order to promote enrichment the ruling class needs to lighten up on political power. It also makes complete sense.

The best way to increase the power and scope of the human experience is that you are not that interested in power.

"Make it like it was"

In the last week I have proposed the idea that the significant characteristic of the bourgeoisie, or the People of the Responsible Self, is that we are not that interested in power.

Craig Greenman, responding to my post "Yes, What is a Conservative?" takes issue with my definition.

My guess is that there are a number of conservatives, just like there are a number of folks of every strong political persuasion (including liberals and whatnot), who are interested in power. It would be difficult to convince me or any other Left-leaning person that some members of the Bush administration weren't interested in power -- or that many of the powerful folks who support them aren't interested in power.

Of course. When you are using power, you call it "helping people." When people are using power against you, you call it "injustice."

More generally, I would say that conservatives are like other people. They appeal to government when they are feeling threatened, and they are right to do so because that is what government is for: protecting its people against threats foreign and domestic. The classic line is the appeal a woman made to Ed Koch when he was running for mayor of New York City, reported by the Huffington Post.

Ed Koch, the late mayor of New York, once recalled, while campaigning on the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, an elderly woman who approached him and implored that he “make it like it was.”

Yep, we all want that. But there's a problem.

Right now, I understand, France is in the middle of a wave of strikes because the government is trying to undo various social-welfare benefits, like the 35 hour week, in order to make France more competitive and revive its faltering economy. This neatly illustrates the problem with government putting its thumb on the economic scales:  it can't ever take them off without the threat of riots in the streets, especially where the French are concerned.

It's an interesting question. According to Deirdre McCloskey the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, in which per-capita income went from $3 per day to $100 per day, occurred because of the bourgeois rhetoric to allow innovation, "trade-tested betterment," rather than throttle it in its cradle because it threatened the status quo and the established interests. Notice the chilling truth here. If you want betterment then the price of that betterment is that the government stands by without intervening while established interests, probably its supporters, decline and die off.

But what about the transgendered? That is the question that Craig Greenman proposes. Suppose you feel different. Suppose you apply for job after job and can't get hired? What do you do?

So s/he will seek help from somebody who *has* made it in society, somebody who is better placed in it: a politician or activist on the Left.

This helping person will often be a straight Left politician or a party that consists primarily of them.  And those politicians will use the power they have, that has been loaned to them by the voters -- voters like me -- to help him/her.  They might even propose a law that says discrimination on the basis of gender in the workplace is wrong.

Actually, this scenario is false on several levels. First of all, someone who is different does not know what do do about it or even imagine that there is any possibility of "doing" unless someone "raises their consciousness." So the helpless victim does not seek help, the "politician or activist on the Left" seeks them out and offers to help. That was the whole point of the Frankfurt School back in the 1920s. Its leaders recognized that the "helping the working class" had problems because in defiance of Marxist economics the workers were getting richer. What could believing Marxists do? The Frankfurt Schoolers solved the problem by extending the Marxist paradigm to other victim classes and began to raise their consciousness, just as they had with the working class.

Secondly, we are not talking about "helping." We are talking about the clunking fist of government force, something about which liberals are very sensitive when George W. Bush is president. The question is: Should the government use force to mainstream the transgendered?

Thirdly, liberals are not "propos[ing] a law" to help the transgendered. They are using top-down administrative ukase and boycott and intimidation tactics to force their views on America and you will be made to care. Politics is violence; it is not "helping;" it is not "peaceful protest." Liberals are not proposing and negotiating laws in Congress. They are using their cultural and political power as the ruling class to do a cram down. They are doing that because they know they don't have a chance of doing it the right way, with consultation and compromise and legislation.

There is, of course, a long-term cost to this sort of hegemonic culture, as I write here and here. It leads to a society where nobody trusts anyone.

And this brings us around to the place we started, an article by Rachel Lu about conservatives in academia. Was is possible for conservatives to get a job in academia? Answer: not never, but "hardly ever." As the song goes.

But should we do anything about it? Should universities be forced to appoint Vice-Provosts of Viewpoint Diversity? Should Hollywood be forced to hire conservative creatives as well as award Oscars to African Americans? Should the fashion industry diversify its workforce to include married Bible-believing Christians and their cranky ideas on female adornment? Should the news media diversify away from liberalism and create an inclusive newsroom culture where conservatives feel safe?

I don't think so.

If you are a conservative in America you know that you need to keep your head down, at work and at competitive social events. That's just the way it is, because of the hegemonic liberal culture, those nice people out there "helping" us deal with marginalization and racism, sexism, and homophobia. Would we like to teach liberals a lesson? Of course. But then we think to ourselves: No, that would be wrong.

Because you can have a wonderful life in America, even if you don't own the culture and possess the power to name and shame this week's Emmanuel Goldstein, even if you wake up one morning and find that liberals have decided that you are Emmanuel Goldstein this week.

The world is full of problems and injustice. But the question is always: is the only way to solve this problem to apply the sweet use of force?

Usually, the answer is no.

Craig Greenman: But What About Transgendered?

Yesterday I wrote a blog about defining conservatism in response to a comment on NRO by academic Craig Greenman: "Yes, What is a Conservative?" Craig kindly responded by email, and here is his full response.

Thank you for using my question in your blog!  It's always an honor when one's thoughts serve as a catalyst for another perosn to move beyond them in various ways.

I think your definition of "conservative,"  as a person not particularly interested in power, is very interesting.  It accounts for both of my suggested definitions, in a sense:  A conservative could be someone (1) who does, believes, or values, what has happened in the past because she doesn't seek to overcome the past or move beyond it, towards any personal power of her own; or a conservative might be someone (2) who believes in the idea of a "free market," because she submits herself to the judgment of the market and doesn't insist that her values are always right.

So your definition might be a neat way to tie those two definitions that I offered together; and it also fits with what one other thoughtful person said on the NRO site, connecting conservatism with the notion of "gratitude" (in this case, I take it, gratitude for the traditional arrangements, institutions, and so on in a society; or gratitude for the judgment of the market), which I guess was argued by Jonah Goldberg.

But as I read your definition, I thought, hm, this seems a bit too wide.  All conservatives are people who are not particularly interested in power?  I don't know.  My guess is that there are a number of conservatives, just like there are a number of folks of every strong political persuasion (including liberals and whatnot), who are interested in power. It would be difficult to convince me or any other Left-leaning person that some members of the Bush administration weren't interested in power -- or that many of the powerful folks who support them aren't interested in power.  So I agree with you that some people on the Left could be interested in power, but that's a shared malady, it seems to me.  I don't fully buy your definition, then (if I may use the market language, "buy," which is so at the center of the academy now, too -- recalling where my post originated).

I agree with you, in any case, that a big part of wisdom is realizing "that life, the universe, and everything is not just about Me."  As I grow older (I'm 44), this feels more and more true, if only because I am constantly reminded, by my interactions with my students, my colleagues, my neighbors, my state, my country, and nature itself (including my finite physical body!) that I am not the center of the universe.  One of the reminders of everybody else is being on National Review Online and knowing that there are millions of people in the U.S. who think differently from me.  And you and I, too, probably have very different views of many things.

But let me riff for a moment on the notion of power.  Let's take an issue that you've commented on, it looks like, on your blog (I looked around just a bit before commenting here).

Let's say I'm a young person who looks and feels strange.  I don't exactly know why, but I don't quite fit into my body, or who I feel like I am.  And people pick on how I move, act, and dress.  Maybe I've been bullied a lot, too, in school.  I grow up and I enter the workforce.  By then, I've tried to understand myself, and adjust my life accordingly; and the way I dress and act, consequently, doesn't seem to fit the gender that my genitalia and other features outwardly reflect.  I've tried my best to be myself -- to be an individual in a society that's supposed to care about individuality -- and I'm a hard worker, or at least as hard-working as most people, and an honest person, which is shown by the fact that I don't hide who I am.  I have something to contribute to the market.

Then I go to job interviews and I am rejected, again and again, because I look and act different.  I am weird to many other people, even though I'm good at what I do and I try to be nice to them.  But I don't get a good job, because, again, I'm different.

What should I do?  Should I just say, well, it's not all about Me, and if people don't want to hire me, that's okay?  It's all right to be a marginal member of this society?  It's all right to be bullied, formerly on the playground, now by the market itself, so to speak?

I'm trying to tell the story of a transgendered person.  This person will probably vote on the Left in this election.  Is the reason because s/he is particularly interested in power?  No.  More likely, s/he wants to live a productive life without harassment, and to join the workforce and make a good living.  But because s/he is different, neither (1) the traditional values nor (2) the market -- to borrow on what I said above -- will respond to him/her.  So s/he will seek help from somebody who *has* made it in society, somebody who is better placed in it: a politician or activist on the Left.

This helping person will often be a straight Left politician or a party that consists primarily of them.  And those politicians will use the power they have, that has been loaned to them by the voters -- voters like me -- to help him/her.  They might even propose a law that says discrimination on the basis of gender in the workplace is wrong. They may also go overboard sometimes, in not fully thinking through how changes to help this transgendered person might harm, in some way, some conservative people, especially conservative women who will feel unsafe as a result of new policies.

But I don't think our transgendered person, or transgendered people in general, are particularly interested in power.  And the people they look to for help, often, if they are interested in power, are interested in it, in part, anyway, from a genuine desire to help people like our friend.

My point is this:  Sometimes people don't have the option to as easily submit to traditional values or the market as you and I, as non-transgendered men, say, have.  It's one thing to not want power over other people; and I think it's noble, the way you don't want an excessive amount of that; it's another thing, though, to want enough power to be able to flourish as a hard-working person in a society, and to use power, when you have it, to help people who are left out.  Many good people want those kinds of power, and many really nice things happen as a result of it, it seems to me.  Mistakes also happen, but with every government, with every society, and with every culture and family, mistakes happen.  We do our best and hope for better.

As I've reached the higher points of my profession, it's become easier for me, personally, to say, yes, we all need to submit to the universe; it's not just about Me; and young people, for example, need to learn not to be so damned insistent that their way is the correct way.  I experience this now at middle age.  But I recognize that part of why I can say that is because that same system is treating me much better than it used to.  I don't deny that one has to make compromises with the universe and society, and that activists on the Left can be too strident in sometimes refusing at all to do that.  But we have to recognize the extent to which those systems of (1) traditional values and (2) the market, may reject people to a larger extent than they reject you or me.  And maybe that fighting back of those people, or appealing to those who will fight on their behalf, is a good way to keep *us* in check, you and I, to make sure *we* don't get too cocky -- like our submission to the universe is as easy for everybody.

This, to me, then, is also wisdom: knowing that the very gesture of submitting to the universe may not be equally possible for all of us. And that sometimes power is useful for helping people just stay in the game and have a chance.

I'm sorry I went on so long.  I hope this makes sense, as it's a very large question and I'm only making some suggestions.  I may be mistaken in various ways.

I appreciate your quoting me and I think your own piece here -- including your definition of "conservative" -- is worthwhile.  Take care.

Yes, What Is a Conservative?

In NRO today Rachel Lu has another of those articles on why conservatives can't make it anywhere in academia. A commenter, Craig Greenman, asks NRO people to define a conservative. He proposes two versions.

One way to define "conservative" seems to be to do, believe, and value what has been done in the past...

The second way to define "conservative" that I find in these pages is, "a classical liberal," that is, someone who has a vision of the world that's broadly speaking from 18th century Enlightenment values, with an interpretation of the economic thought of Adam Smith that focuses on free markets and trade, and free thought in general.

Notice that a Manifesto-believing Marxist is a conservative of the first type. No need to engage with non-Marxist ideas. Marxist economics is stuck forever in Smith and Ricardo, and cannot deal with the 1870 marginal revolution.

I would say that a conservative in the American sense is a Burkean, someone that is self-conscious about the fact of tradition. This is parodied in The Fiddler on the Roof in the song "Tradition." Eastern European Jews in the shtetl are represented as realizing that their orthodox Judaism actually is a "tradition" and not just the unconsciously accepted way of the ancestors and the truth of the Torah. Most of all, "Tradition" experiences that the young generation are breaking with tradition, and that is, almost, OK. A real traditional society just kicks out rebels like that.

In the old days, people just lived the way of the ancestors or the religion or way of life they were born into and never thought there was anything else. A peasant was a peasant, a lord was a lord. A slave was a slave.

But with the Enlightenment (at the latest) it became clear that there was a decision between something now defined as "tradition" and the innovation of the Enlightenment: principally Reason and Science. Should we stick with "what worked" or should we innovate -- or more exactly, allow innovation -- instead of stopping it as a dangerous upset of the immemorial order of things?

Notice that the idea that slavery might be a problem starts in the 18th century.

We tend to think of Edmund Burke as the "First Conservative" but Burke was a guy that supported Catholic emancipation in Ireland, that supported the independence of the British North American colonies, that ran a ten-year impeachment of Warren Hastings, the colonial governor of Bengal, for his looting and pillaging, that predicted that the French Revolution would end in the gallows. That is conservative?

If you look at the six types of conservatives proposed by Ken Blackwell, they are all self-conscious conservatives:

Social conservatives
Christian conservatives
Second Amendment conservatives
Economic conservatives
Philosophical conservatives
National Security conservatives

And then, I proposed back then in 2008, there are Palin conservatives. What do we call them? We know now. They are Trump supporters. You may ask: what is the common denominator? I will tell you. All these different kinds of conservatives are anathematized by liberals.

And how did all these conservatives become conservatives? I think the Reagan dictum applies. St. Ronnie said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. That's the point. At one time, liberalism could countenance social conservatives that believed in marriage and family. Not any more. At one point you could argue political philosophy with liberals. Not any more. Etcetera.

So what is going on? I'm glad you asked, because that is why I came up with my reductive Three Peoples theory.

All the conservatives in the list above, and Edmund Burke and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, are People of the Responsible Self. On the theory of Robert Bellah, conservatives are people that believe they are responsible for making their way in life, and that notion goes back to the birth of modern religion in the Axial Age.

Now liberals are People of the Creative Self. They believe in the religion of creativity, and the imperative of each person making a creative journey, rather than a responsible journey, out of life.

If we pick up Hegel here, as I interpret him following Alexandre Kojève in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, my Three Peoples theory can be compared to Hegel's three types of God. We start, as People of the Subordinate Self, with a real lord who is our Master (Herr), as we are his Slave (Knecht). Then, in the bourgeois era, the lord becomes an abstract lord, God. The bourgeoisie is still Slavish, but not to an actual physical Master: instead a Master who is in Heaven. Finally, man, as a person of the creative self, becomes himself a man-god, a creative artist remaking the world.

Unfortunately, our liberal friends have interpreted their role as People of the Creative Self as a warrant to gin up creative ideas about life, the universe and everything with which to rule the world, and I think that is a fundamental mistake. It is a mistake that drowned the 20th century world in blood, particularly in Russia and China.

The real culture of the creative person is the culture of the capitalist entrepreneur. He comes up with an idea, what Deirdre McCloskey calls a "betterment," that he hopes other people will want to buy. But he does not get to impose his idea on the world. He only offers it, and submits to the verdict of the trading system and the market. That is why McCloskey calls capitalism "trade-tested betterment." And it is, having bettered per capita income by 30 times over the past 200 years from $3 per day to $100-120 per day.

What is a conservative? I have an even better idea that the ideas above. He is a person who is not particularly interested in power. He is, in fact, prepared to submit his brilliant ideas to the verdict of other people. And that is the story of the last 200 years. The people that thrive are the people who can let go of the fantasy of power, the world designed and controlled by Me, people that can let go and let the world decide.

Because the first step towards wisdom is the recognition that life, the universe, and everything is not just about Me.

I emailed Craig Greenman about this blog post and he kindly responded to my post. His response is here.

Tocqueville's Other Book: Why Administrative Centralism Doesn't Work

Last week I posted an enthusiastic piece about Alexis de Tocqueville's other book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. The end of the book looks forward to Volume 2, about the Revolution itself. But Tocqueville died, at 53 from tuberculosis, before writing it.

But never mind, because his Old Regime is a masterpiece. It says that top-down centralized bureaucratic administrative government can't work. Let us rehearse the three reasons why.

The first reason is the one we know as the knowledge problem, after Hayek. In Tocqueville it is illustrated by the insanity of the central government in Paris having to OK the expenditure of funds to repair a church steeple in some tiny village. You just cannot direct the details from the center; there simply isn't enough bandwidth and the bureaucrat in the center just cannot know all the details specific to a problem in a little village way out in la France profonde.

The second reason is the natural tendency of any government to divide and conquer. The last thing the monarch or dictator wants is the squabbling groups and clans to unite against him. The French king did it by handing out privileges and tax exemptions to the nobles with one hand as he took away their powers with the other hand, and he handed out jobs in the bureaucracy to the middle class. Everybody hung on like grim death to their privileges, and everyone hated everyone else for their privileges. So when the French king needed the nation to be united, it wasn't. We can understand why US presidents all talk about "we are all Americans" right after winning a hard-fought election. They all know that the divisions and the enmities of a hard-fought election make it much harder to govern. All of them except Obama.

The third reason is that, when people are drawn into a legislature as representatives of the people, they have to compromise to get things done, and they get to know about other peoples' views and problems. So they compromise; so they buy the support of fence-sitters. That's what the social scientists tell us. When you put Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do it by trying to deal with everyone's objections and needs.

Obviously, the way not to do it is the Obama way, of passing Obamacare so we can see what is in it. Of fiddling with immigration law using executive action. Of just telling schools to come up with gender-neutral bathrooms. Never mind whether Obamacare is a good idea, or unlimited immigration, or transgender-friendly bathrooms. Edicts from the top just won't work; they make people mad. The way you do it is by slow and painstaking negotiations by representatives of the people so that, as much as possible, everyone's needs get addressed.

Obviously, if you govern a country through legislatures all the way down from nation to village there is not a lot of stuff you can do, because of the limited bandwidth of all deliberative assemblies. Maybe that is an argument for limited government, rather than an argument for replacing the inefficiency of deliberation with the efficiency of administration.

Even if administration were efficient, which it is not.

Because there is another way of doing things. It is called the market system.

Today Jonah Goldberg has a piece longing for a new constitutional conservatism. No doubt.

But the time to talk about the constitution and the meaning of conservatism is after the election. We are sitting here in the ruins of the previous constitutional conservatism, so it's going to take a while to get it going again.

And really, there was nothing wrong with the old constitutional conservatism except for one thing. We conservatives thought, after Reagan, that we had won the argument for limited government and low taxes and deregulation. But we were wrong. Barack Obama represents a strong current in the educated elite of this country, and he and it really believes in its divide-and-rule identity politics, and really thinks that the way to govern is through national edicts on everything from sexual conduct in universities to bathroom policy in schools.

Obama and the left are wrong, but we are in a mess, and it will take a generation to build a conservatism to sweep it away.

We should have realized that you never win the argument, not forever. We conservatives, we bourgeois, are people that are not that interested in power. But there is always a new generation coming up that is very interested in power.

The trouble is that it takes power to push back against the devotees of power, so it takes a while for the limited-power people to get woken from their slumber and get on the job of pushing back against the latest movement of power worship.

And you have to keep up the rhetoric for freedom, for accepting the decisions of the market, for limited government, and you have to keep it up every day, forever.

McCloskey Again: The Bourgeoisie is not That Interested In Power

I've been blogging and writing about Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality for the last week. It was a disappointment to me because it didn't take the argument beyond The Bourgeois Virtues  and Bourgeois Dignity.

McCloskey's big idea is that the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years, from $3 per day to $100 per day, did not come from capital accumulation and/or institutions but from rhetoric. People started to dignify the occupation of trader and innovator and refrain from smothering innovations in their cradles. And the result was what we see around us.

But I wanted something more, and I didn't get it. So I blogged my complaint here and then wrote about it in today's American Thinker piece: "Attention Deirdre McCloskey."

But the McCloskey dead end forced me to think. What is it about the bourgeoisie, you and me, that McCloskey is missing? And then I got it.

The bourgeoisie is just not that interested in power.

So I wrote in the AT piece:

When you are not that interested in power, you find that the whole world opens up to you. Now the way is clear to get into “virtue” and “create a rhetoric” to “dignify” innovation and “having a go,” and watch the Great Enrichment sweep across the world. Now the way is clear to free the slaves and enfranchise the working class, and even indulge upper-class women and sexual adventurers in their shallow enthusiasms and conceits. All because you are not that interested in power.

All down the ages, rulers have been obsessed with power. In Nicholas Wade's memorable words: "men like power and will seize it if they can." And so, down the ages, men have been at each others' throats, and mankind has been half throttled.

But what if a race of men arose that were not that interested in power? They would be men -- and women -- that did not feel the need to slip the stiletto in the other guy's ribs first, just to be on the safe side. They might be men that lived according to the iterated Prisoners Dilemma, and believed that you generally offer trust and reciprocity to other people, on principle. But if they show they are untrustworthy then you stop dealing with them right now. This new race might be men that thought about what they could offer to the world before they started to think about what they wanted from the world. They might be men that surrendered to the verdict of the market and did not, like union workers and crony capitalists, go running to the government for a sweet use of force whenever things went against them. They might find, to their amazement, that such behavior would result in a Great Enrichment, as per McCloskey, that increased per capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day in 200 years while also increasing human population from one billion souls to seven billion souls.

Then we get to understand the fatal mistake that our liberal and lefty friends have made. They think that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is power. Power to the people. Power to educated evolved people like us. Power to government. Power to the experts. Power to peaceful protesters. Power to traditionally marginalized groups. Power to suppressed voices. Power to silence "hate speech." And so on.

And it is not just wrong. It is folly. Worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

You can see where this faith in power comes from. It comes from Nicholas Wade's words, that men like power and will seize it if they can. It seems to be the answer to everything and maybe it was in the old hunter-gatherer days. If you want food, you better grab it before someone else gets it. If you want to eat you must defend your territory, to the last man.

But the market system changes all that. Because all of a sudden, things aren't a question of life and death, of kill or be killed. Now everything is negotiable. Now the question is what you can make that other people want to buy. Maybe it is a product, maybe it is a skill. Maybe it is just labor.

Hegel in his dialectic of Master and Slave has a parallel analysis. When two men meet in the wilderness, it is a question of kill or be killed, a Fight to the Death, unless one of the combatants surrenders and becomes a Slave. What humiliation! And yet it is the Slave that benefits from the relationship, because he learns how to master Nature in his Work for the Master, and then he begins to desire freedom. Yet that will be achieved not by another fight to the death, but by getting the Master to recognize him, the Slave, as another person, not just as a subordinate Slave.

Our lefty friends, unfortunately, cannot seem to escape from the dead end of Mastery. They must be Masters, that is all.

We are seeing, at this very moment, the problem with Mastery. Nicolás Maduro is Master of Venezuela, and a lot of good it is doing him and the Venezuelans.

Imagine what Venezuela and even the United States could become if the rulers and their supporters just weren't that interested in power.

Just like the bourgeoisie.