Like Ross, I am well aware of my limits when it comes to writing about economics. Unlike Ross, I am not intelligent enough to shut up about economics in this crisis. I'm learning a lot from you readers who are economists, or who are economics-minded, whose comments come out when I post on things economic. It's also the case that I view the economic meltdown, or whatever this is, as primarily a moral phenomenon, not a matter best understood by experts, while the rest of us should just keep our heads down and await further instructions. We collectively got to this place through greed, folly and hubris, and now it is proposed that the only thing that can save us from judgment is Leviathan. If this isn't a moral drama, I don't know what is.
I find myself ever more detached -- not even contemptuous, not yet, just weirdly detached -- from the Republicans. To be sure, if this crisis has revealed anything, it's that there's one party in Washington, and that's the party of money. Democrats should think long and hard about the role their own party has played in bringing this calamity about, and should not lie to themselves that this was entirely engineered by Republicans -- as if the Clinton Administration and Robert Rubin had never existed. This morning, it occurred to me that I don't trust any of these people. I don't trust a single Republican or a single Democrat in Washington to do the right thing. I don't trust our financial elite. I simply don't trust, period.
But events of this past week or so, and events of the past eight years, put things in a certain perspective for conservatives, or should. It is more than a little astonishing to realize that a Republican administration -- the same one we trusted on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- has presided over the greatest intervention in the economy since FDR (see "Hank Paulson, Socialist"). It's like Larison says:
The collusion between financial interests and the government is an old story, and it is one viewed with hostility by the Country tradition, a significant part of the American political tradition, dating back before Jefferson inveighed against "the moneyed interest." Nothing can better demonstrate how antithetical this collusion is to a free market economy than the last week's events. And what does the conservative movement, supposedly so energized and dynamic now that Sarah Palin has arrived on the scene, to say about any of this? Very, very little. These are the people who will refer to prominent figures in the movement's past, will name-check their books and will talk about reducing the size of government, but they are ultimately quiescent, or even actively supportive, when an administration that they have empowered oversees one of the largest expansions of the state in U.S. history. Absurdly, their new champions, including the mighty Palin, talk about fiscal responsibility and restraining spending...while more or less signing off on some of the largest spending measures ever undertaken that will ultimately add over one trillion to the national debt. That does not even touch the merely fiscal costs that the war that they have cheered on has imposed. If the last eight years of Republican administration has not shown that the GOP is an unworthy representative of conservatives, and if conservatives cannot wean themselves from the debilitating alliance with the GOP even after the last week, the conservative movement probably should be over and done with, as it seems not to have done very much for our country in recent years.
This is true, and a judgment on people like me. But what is the alternative going forward? I see two potential ways.
1. The populist option. Depending on how hard we crash, we could see the birth of an authentically populist political movement, based on Jeffersonian principles. Russell Arben Fox, in this paper on William Jennings Bryan and Wendell Berry (PDF), suggests a possible populist future. There's a lot to be said about this, but it seems to me that the biggest objection is that you can't really separate economic behavior from cultural behavior, and our culture is too fractured to form any stable populist political coalition. Are you really going to get people who are pro-life and pro-choice, who are for affirmative action and against affirmative action, who are for gay marriage and against gay marriage, to put all that aside and unite around a populist economic agenda? I'm doubtful, but maybe I'm wrong.
Or, we might well see...
2. The Benedict Option. Which would be the truly radical of the two choices. What is the Benedict Option? It is the choice suggested by this concluding passage from Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" -- an influential cultural analysis arguing that modernity had irreparably shattered the moral consensus necessary for authentic community:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless, certain parallels there are.A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.
If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we, too, have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.
This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting ... for another - doubtless very different - St. Benedict.
Those who take the Benedict Option seriously, then, would be those who ceased to believe that there was a worthy or sustainable future in the upholding of the present order, which, in this view, has reached the end of the line. That being the case, then what? According to MacIntyre, you have to create communities of your own where the virtues can be lived out in real community, irrespective of what goes on in the chaotic outside world. Tellingly, MacIntyre is not prescriptive. I suspect we will live to see to what extent history will bring about a more radical mass politics (for better or for worse), and to what extent history will bring about the beginning of a withdrawal from common life as we've known it in this country since the founding -- you know, the sense that come what may, we are one country, after all that (notwithstanding the Late Unpleasantness of the 1860s). IOW, will we see that significant numbers of people quit believing in the full faith and credit of the current American order, and begin to withdraw to their own communities? It depends, I'm thinking, on how bad the economic crash is, and what it reveals about how the moral deterioration and loss of social cohesion of the past half century or more leaves us defenseless.
Some more thoughts on the Benedict Option:
a) Here's a CC post from a while back referring to Pope Benedict's encyclical Spe salvi, in which the Holy Father alludes to a form of monastic withdrawal as a sign of hope, not despair. Excerpt:
Benedict is saying that there are times in history when "the basic foundations of peaceful social existence" are threatened by conditions in the world. Monastics -- people who separate from the world to keep their eyes more clearly focused on the things of God -- can serve as an inspiration to all of us on how to live holy and sane lives in a world gone mad? And not just actual monasteries, but communities that separate themselves to a certain degree, not to run away from something as much as to run toward something that can't be fully grasped in the world under current conditions?
b) Here's a post I put up some months ago, discussing the Benedict Option in light of "The Black Swan" and Barton Biggs's book about managing your finances in a time of semi-apocalypse. The trick, Biggs said, is when to know when to leap. Excerpt from that post:
Waiting until the barbarians are at the gates is not good. You have to act in anticipation that some day in the future barbarians in one disguise or another will be at the gates. The difficulty is that the barbarians next time will not look or act the same as the barbarians last time -- but they will be just as confiscatory and rapacious.
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Until about 1980, very few things were fungible. Electricity produced in this town stayed in this town. Money deposited in this bank was loaned by this bank. Oil produced in this country stayed here.
And by any measure we were a helluva lot poorer than we are today.
Imaginary wealth in the form of binary code that suddenly goes *poof* when the smoke clears and the illusion is dispelled doesn't really make us richer than we were pre-1980 Simon.
Imaginary wealth in the form of binary code that suddenly goes *poof* when the smoke clears and the illusion is dispelled doesn't really make us richer than we were pre-1980 Simon.
I suppose the goal is to have a sack of gold dubloons locked up in a bedroom trunk?
Rod,
You seem to be willing to state some responsibility for the conservative/GOP collusion which included the view that the market should be 'free', that is, unregulated.
Then you declare the idea of people of different backgrounds and philosophy working together (politically) to address our common problems is 'dead on arrival'. (Do I understand you correctly?)
Seems to me that you see yourself as having no civic obligations to the nation that has blessed you rather generously -- because you choose not to work together with those who do not embrace your worldview? So you hear e pluribus unum and think "I don't wanna be unum if it means working and living with 'those people'".
On behalf of everyone, may I say "Gee, thanks for nothing!"
As someone who probably fits into the category of 'those people', I ask you to make an effort.
Seems to me that the Benedictine option is impossible without some form of populism, particularly in the practice of subsistence farming. Pray and work.
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