The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Science fiction & God

E.D. Kain — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 04:44:28 +0000

This article at First Things by Robert R. Chase is a fascinating look at religious themes in science fiction. I’ve always felt that science-fiction was far less amenable to religion than fantasy, but thinking about much of the science fiction canon I’m not so sure this is true. Chase mentions both Lewis’s Space Trilogy and the excellent post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., both excellent examples of religion’s – and specifically Christianity’s – role in science fiction.

Two science fiction books I’ve read recently have been Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin and Joe Halderman’s The Accidental Time Machine. Both these novels touch on religious themes – though not in terribly positive ways. Spin has dueling theologies, in a sense, playing the hyper-technological benevolence of an advanced robotic entity against the radicalism of a new wave of Christians obsessed with the Rapture and what they perceive to be the end times. That being said, in the rather more blatant libertarianism of science fiction, the real villains of Wilson’s story are not the religious at all but the government.

Halderman’s Time Machine is a bit more light-hearted, and contrasts future America’s against one another. In one time we are witness to an east coast in the thrall of a theocratic totalitarianism; in another we experience the vapidity of a super-prosperous and super-lazy future capitalistic society. In the theocratic future we travel to M.I.T. which has become the Massachusettes Institute of Theophony. In the prosperous suburbs of a state-spanning Los Angeles, we encounter a populace that never has to work, whose citizens gain degrees in shopping and have, for lack of a better term, become incredibly stupid.

In any case, you should read Chase’s article as he goes into much greater depth on the matter.

Blond at Georgetown, II

David Schaengold — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:25:48 +0000

Like Will, I was at Philip Blond’s Georgetown lecture on Thursday. Unlike Will, I was predisposed to agree with everything Blond said. I came away a bit disappointed, though.

I find little to argue with in the actual policies he proposes, which mostly involve empowering local bodies, public and private, and disempowering large or international bodies, public and private.

His philosophical positions, however, are a little incoherent at the margins. For instance, he fully endorsed the position that we need an account of what a good life consists in in order to make political decisions, a position familiar to critics of Liberalism from an Aristotelian point of view, but then identified himself as an “Antique Liberal” (while in the same breath condemning Locke) and declared his allegiance to the liberal premise that individuals in pluralistic societies should follow their own conceptions of the good while debating them publicly and neutrally with others. He did not try to give an account of how the state might embody so-called “thick” views about what makes for a good life while at the same time serving as a referee amongst the many competing visions of the good life put forward by its citizens.

This was shortly after saying, puzzlingly, that his work was in the MacIntyrean tradition but that he doesn’t think MacIntyre is right about the failure of public reason in liberal society, which is, after all a fairly central element of MacIntyre’s position and its derivatives.

Most confusing of all was his position on markets. He condemned neo-liberalism, but his reasons for doing so oscillated during the talk. On the one hand he seemed to suggest that the problem with neo-liberals is that they were not thorough enough, undermining the true principle of laissez faire with various state subsidies for various large businesses. On the other hand, he floated the idea that the whole idea of free markets relies on a misconstrual of human sociality, a criticism entirely at odds with his first.

I am grateful that Blond has the ear of David Cameron, and I certainly hope that his influence is decisive in determining the future course of the UK. But while I recognize the difficulty of articulating a contemporary conservative vision that isn’t in thrall to neo-liberalism, I can’t see that his views add up to a coherent political philosophy independent of the exigencies of policy.

Update: A friend of mine offers a tentative rejoinder:

Friend: Maybe he’s like [Fr. Richard] Neuhaus? That is to say, any reason can be public reason and ground public decisions, but no group should have power to translate their beliefs directly into public action. So, thin “neutrality.” And another Neuhausian notion that’s easy to misunderstand is “good liberalism,” which for him had little to do with Locke and nothing to do with Bentham and Mill. He thought proper liberalism was essentially the belief that the modern state was dangerous and so should be limited to protect what John Courtney Murray charmingly called societies various “conspiracies” (spaces where people ‘breathe together’) including churches and families. I think he was problematically vague in his understanding of how individual liberty was connected with conspiratorial liberty. He seemed to think that you could theorizeliberalism with only the two terms of “individual” and “state,” giving the former inalienable rights against the latter, but because individuals are persons, they will naturally use their liberty to form and protect their conspiracies. Of course things don’t seem to work that way. Once you establish individual rights as the dominant public idea, you erode communal integrity and ironically empower the state. But anyway, if Blond is mistaken, perhaps his mistakes are Neuhausian?

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Screwing the blue pooch

E.D. Kain — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:29:08 +0000

Jack Gillis thinks the Blue Dogs’ days are numbered:

Blue Dog Democrats are essentially doomed. There’s no place left for them to hide. [Okay, okay, I promise to reduce the cliche to total-word ratio from now on.] Their careers are over, or all but over, even if a few of them hang on this November. Their force in national politics is about to collapse. And that will be the case regardless of the outcome of the vote on Health Care Reform upcoming in the next week or so and regardless of whether the Democrats keep control of Congress in the elections in November. There are four phenomena at work destroying the Blue Dogs, and while they have for many years faced some combination of those, I don’t think they can survive all four at once. At the electoral level, they have to fight at either a tactical or strategic disadvantage, or both, and at the ideological level they have both an American problem and a philosophical problem.

I agree. Then again, where would the Blue Dogs go? Would they be red-blooded enough to avoid the RINO label if they joined the GOP? A few more pieces of big, liberal legislation (which the Blue Dogs oppose) and there won’t be any reason why voters who oppose that legislation would vote for a Democrat, any more than voters who supported the legislation would vote for a Blue Dog.

Ten Books

Jason Kuznicki — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:20:09 +0000

Following the meme, here are the ten books that changed my life the most.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. This book de-Catholicized me, or at least it began the process. It set me on the path to libertarianism, after I’d read Atlas Shrugged. It offered a sense of life, and a lifelong obsession. I still live here a lot of the time.
The Once and Future King by T. H. White. The most insightful book about government ever written for young people. It taught me that government is a nasty business, even at its best. I have never since been able to see government as noble in the way that I think most people do.
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama. Sparked another lifelong interest — the French Revolution, which was also a nasty business, but an instructive one. After years of reading in French history, I have all kinds of complaints with this book, but it’s still a great read.
Candide by Voltaire. I pick this one out of Voltaire’s many short stories both because it’s one of the longer ones — plausibly, it really is a book — and also because it’s familiar. Voltaire’s style, his absurdism, and his sense of justice have always appealed to me.
The Book of Predictions by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace and Irving Wallace. Published in 1981. Obscure but fascinating; its influence would be hard for me to overstate. Every year on New Year’s Day I revisit this book to see what various people got right and wrong about the future, which I’ve been lucky enough to live to see. Patterns have emerged over time, and these patterns have deeply influenced how I think about society.
Lesson one: psychics are never worth your time. The most accurate forecaster in the book is F. M. Esfandiary, by a landslide (yes, that guy). He got many things wrong, but it’s clear that he was in another league from all the rest.

The biggest mistake made by nearly all forecasters (though not so much by Esfandiary) is to think that the future would be controlled by a central agency or authority. No one imagined how decentralized we would be in 2010. We were blindsided by a mostly libertarian, decentralizing technological revolution. This is a tremendously good thing. Most predictors were pessimists, and they were mostly wrong.
Island by Aldous Huxley. It’s hard to read or understand this book without Brave New World, but Island is a positive statement of Huxley’s beliefs, not a negative one, so what he really thinks comes across more clearly. It’s also the only utopian society in fiction that I’d ever really want to live in. The others either leave me cold or make me want to run away as fast as I can. I’d have some problems with Huxley’s utopia, but I think I could live in it.
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Sort of a stand-in for all of his other works. Didn’t dare cite The Order of Things because that one’s so hard to understand that I’m not sure whether it’s had an influence on me. Whenever I try self-consciously to “be” a libertarian in my writing, I often end up sounding like Foucault.
Virtually Normal by Andrew Sullivan. Andrew would do better to blog less and to write more in print. He’s an extraordinary prose stylist, and maybe among the best of all time, when he slows down. When he blogs, he’s repetitive and formulaic. I learned to write by reading Virtually Normal. It was also the first book I ever read about gay politics, and it seemed just so clear, so right, and so wise.
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. This is the closest I’ve ever read to a convincing theory of everything. The book is too modestly titled, however, because while Darwin is certainly the key to the story, we also get Diderot, Hume, Leibniz, Popper, Gould, Penrose, and a host of others. It’s an intellectual tour de force, and especially remarkable for its linkage of biological evolution to a theory of mind.
Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World by Jack Goldstone. This book nearly destroyed my faith in non-quantitative historical methods. I take it as a reminder that while philosophy may be a tyrant, she is a tyrant with short, pudgy little arms.

Friday Night Jukebox

Will — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 06:28:56 +0000

Alex Chilton, RIP:

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Leaving the ‘Sphere

Will — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:25:44 +0000

Friend of the Blog Sonny Bunch hangs up his spurs at Conventional Folly. He’ll be missed.

Freedom Scam?

Dave — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:06:30 +0000

Debbie Schlussel calls Sean Hannity’s Freedom Alliance charity a scam. If a charity is only spending 12% (or less) of the money it brings in to provide the services that the charity was set up to provide when the appropriate benchmark is somewhere around 75%, then if that charity was soliciting me for money, there’s no way in hell I would give them anything.

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Brooks on Blond

Will — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:18:00 +0000

If you’re looking for a good introduction to the Red Tories, David Brooks’ column does a much better job of explaining Philip Blond’s philosophy than my muddled post. Blond is also is speaking at Villanova next week. He’s an engaging guy, and any readers in the area are encouraged to attend.

Blond at Georgetown

Will — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:56:20 +0000

Your faithful correspondent donned a collared shirt and ventured into Georgetown last night to listen to Philip Blond’s presentation on “Red Toryism” (Blond’s Wikipedia entry is here; the Porch has a good introductory post here). Blond’s ideas have attracted a murderers’ row of the League’s favorite bloggers, so I thought I’d (briefly) summarize his presentation and offer a few thoughts of my own.

As I understand it, Blond’s argument goes something like this: Both the political Left and political Right have embraced a philosophy of radical liberal individualism, which undermines civic virtue and communal solidarity by valorizing individual choice above all else. Consequently, our political system oscillates wildly between government encroachment and radical deregulation because political rights have become wholly contingent on our relationship to the state. Blond seeks to revitalize conservative politics by restoring what he terms classical liberalism, which emphasizes civic virtue, subsidiarity, and explicitly moral political goals that go beyond maximizing choice. In the realm of ec0nomics, Blond calls for breaking up “corporate oligopolies,” local competition, and encouraging poor and working class citizens to become “stakeholders” in the economy (shades of Bush’s “ownership society?”). In the realm of politics and civic life, Blond stressed the importance of civil society and spoke out in favor of radical decentralization, a concept he explicitly links to Catholic subsidiarity.

Despite my nasty libertarian streak, I found a lot to like in Blond’s talk, particularly in his enthusiasm for decentralization and local competition. My only quibble is that while Blond’s diagnoses are often compelling, his proposed solutions are sometimes less so. When talking about the importance of political subsidiarity, for example, Blond spoke of “giving democracy back to the streets,” which sounds more like a Students for a Democratic Society slogan than a concrete political program. “Driving capital to the periphery” and decentralizing our financial system sound great in theory, but I’m still left to wonder how economic subsidiarity works in practice. One important caveat: I’m new to Blond and was late to the lecture, so my first impressions may not do justice to the Red Tories’ program.

Blond’s philosophy also seems better suited to cultural renewal than, say, political or economic reform. His most compelling examples of Red Toryism in action – A Birmingham neighborhood taking back the streets from pimps and drug dealers; the persistence of Northern Italy’s artisan economy – struck me as the result of cultural factors that aren’t easily replicated or recreated through state action. When we do transmogrify a cultural agenda into a political one, the results are sometimes messier than anticipated, which may have been what Ross Douthat was getting at when he asked Blond about the parallels between his philosophy and Bush’s compassionate conservatism at the end of the presentation.

One last observation: Blond spoke movingly of the plight of poor and working class citizens stuck in low-wage service jobs with no prospects for social mobility. His economic vision stresses the importance of creating stakeholders – skilled artisans, small businesspeople, and so on - who feel more invested in their communities. This reminded me of the American experience after World War II, when millions of returning GIs received free college educations and federally-backed homeownership loans helped create the American middle class. But while these programs were largeky successful, they’re not exactly models of decentralized governance. Is Blond willing to compromise or moderate his small government sympathies to create new economic stakeholders? I ask because state efforts to create or impart social capital – from public schools to the Federal Housing Administration to Bush’s compassionate conservatism – are rarely characterized by decentralization or subsidiarity.

Exit question: Is liberal society, as Blond suggests, fundamentally dependent on older traditions, cultural practices, and civic institutions? Does radical individualism undermine these institutions? I know Blond isn’t the first to make this argument, but his prognosis was both unusually grim and surprisingly persuasive. I’d be curious to hear what the League’s commenters and contributors have to say on the subject.

Predictions about Healthcare

Jason Kuznicki — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:45:29 +0000

I’m going to make a few predictions about the future of U.S. healthcare, provided that the bill under consideration passes.

First, the bill will prove substantially more expensive than projected. Ezra Klein is naive to take the CBO numbers at face value, and Peter Suderman is right to dig deeper, but I strongly suspect that that’s not the half of it.

Significant upward revisions are on the way, but only after passage. Everyone will profess to be surprised. Everyone will be lying, because large new federal programs usually cost more than expected. There will be fights about whether a very large sum of money — the difference between today’s estimate and the future’s — is really all that large. These fights will be of little consequence.

Second, I predict that Obamacare will trundle along despite all of the above. I hope I’m wrong on this, but I don’t see a serious repeal effort in the near term. Once something’s done in Washington, it’s very hard to undo, even if everyone agrees that it’s a bad policy.

Third, even if the bill is implemented more or less as we see it now, I predict that U.S. health outcomes will not substantially improve relative to other countries. I predict this because U.S. health outcomes are already fairly good. There’s not a lot of room for relative improvement, even if we do spend more money. We’re in the middle of the pack of industrialized nations today, and I expect that we’ll still be in the middle of the pack ten years from now, barring any major localized catastrophes (civil war, plague, nuclear attack, a major dollar crisis, or the like).

A substantial part of the difference in health outcomes between the United States and the world’s very healthiest countries stems not from lack of health insurance, but from the American lifestyle. Americans eat more, drive more, and exercise less than most other wealthy nations. We have more accidents, more heart disease, more diabetes, and more cancer owing to things that aren’t addressed here at all. These are things we will presumably keep right on doing to ourselves.

Giving many more people free or subsidized insurance will certainly improve some people’s particular health outcomes, but it won’t have a large effect on health outcomes across the board. Many of the newly covered people will be poor but young and healthy. They won’t especially need the insurance, and it won’t help their health in the least. Policies like these buy a small amount of health with a large amount of cash. The rest becomes a corporate subsidy.

Now, the corporations may need this subsidy to pay for the new requirement that they cover people with preexisting conditions and the other various restrictions they will face. But this just brings me back to my biggest problem with the bill as it’s finally being voted on: What is “state-subsidized mandatory insurance for anyone with a preexisting condition,” if it’s not a farmed-out corporatist version of socialized medicine? I’ve wondered about this for a long time but never found a satisfying answer.

If I’m right in this hunch, then even single-payer could prove to be a better system than the one we’re on the verge of implementing, which seems to further marry the worst aspects of both the market and socialism, albeit in a spectacularly inefficient way. It seems also to foster more entanglements between big corporations and the government, of exactly the sort that genuine libertarians hate, and that liberals ought to hate as well.

So: Bigger deficits, no significant attempt to repeal, no big improvement in health outcomes, and more corruption in the form of state-corporate collusion. Those are my predictions. Oh, and at some point a new crop of Democrats will get fed up with it all and try to implement single-payer. By then we won’t even be able to pretend to pay for it.

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Science fiction & God

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Blond at Georgetown, II

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Screwing the blue pooch

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Ten Books

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Friday Night Jukebox

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Leaving the ‘Sphere

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Freedom Scam?

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Brooks on Blond

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Blond at Georgetown

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Predictions about Healthcare

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