MG: What deleterious consequences result from the "free market ideology" you mention? Are there particular economic arrangements that conservatives ought to prefer?Scruton: The free market is a necessary part of any stable community, and the arguments for maintaining it as the core of economic life were unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. Hayek developed the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence of "spontaneous order", as the means to produce and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality.
The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.)
Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.)
I don't buy this, so I must be wrong (diagreeing with Roger Scruton is a dangerous game). But on this topic I think he has a warped view of America due to his British background. To my mind, America has failed on these issues simply because we are not one people, like Europe generally is (minus the last decade; England is finding out what multiculturalism is like as of late). Given our starting conditions, I think Europe/Canada/Oz are in worse cultural shape than America.
The fact that we are a divided people makes for tough governance. Just as it frightens liberals to imagine themselves operating under sexual rules structured by conservatives, it really scares me to think about living in an area where liberals do the urban planning (that is, where poor people are driven out via restrictive zoning and enviornmental laws).
When you have a unified culture, it's easy to have nice zoning and sexual mores. When you are multicultural, though, you can't even agree on what seems obvious. Trying to get something done is like yelling fire in a crowed theater.
"Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure -- but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.)
"To my mind, America has failed on these issues simply because we are not one people, like Europe generally is (minus the last decade; England is finding out what multiculturalism is like as of late). Given our starting conditions, I think Europe/Canada/Oz are in worse cultural shape than America."
mdavid: You do have a point, but one can drive a carriage through these examples. Very few European countries were ever "one people", in anything other than a 19th-century liberal-nationalist ideological sense - just for a start, do you mean England or the UK? Northern Italians contemptuously call southerners "Africans", and many southerners look back with nostalgia on the pre-risorgimento Bourbon regime.
The problem in England, worse in some other countries, is not really multiculturalism, whatever that means, but Islam (where are the Hindu rioters?)
Its also odd that you lump Australia and Canada in with Europe, as they are immigrant, multicultural countries that have more in common with the USA.
"...the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved."
Many cases that conservatives today think are, or should be, free-market situations actually have to do with "goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest." Non-renewable natural resources, for instance. In fact, the more I think about it, the harder it is to find an example of goods that the dead and the unborn do *not* have an interest in.
Thanks Rod. This was interesting. You're good.
Valid points on Liberalism. But there are holes I see prima facie in Scruton. [Conservatism is founded in the Love of existing things?] But I'm going to keep reading through. This thread'll probably be gone when I finish.
Whenever I delve into philosophy, the theological answers to their arguments seem so obvious, that the power of the arguments fade. The Seven Signs of Ambiguity by Empson could help maybe? But the limitations of semantics tend to lead to obscurity and houses of sand and fog. Philosophies can point to the outlines of truth but they can't capture it. Or satisfy all questions.
A good friend who started in Philosophy and ended in Theology summed it up thus 'All real answers tend to end in God anyways. So why not just go there?' :)
Answer: I don't know. Maybe just because it's fun.
pax
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.