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Mar 12
2010
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Bowman: Are conservatives compassionate?Posted by: Thomas Peters in APP Blog Tagged in: conservatism , app contribution
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APP is happy to welcome back our favorite Friday columnist Joshua Bowman, who now writes (as the muses inspire him) at Prolix Patriot.
The greatest weakness of conservatism is the standard media trope that the GOP is filled with a bunch of heartless Ebenezer Scrooges. Even as mighty a conservative figure as Sir Winston Churchill conceded as much with his classic wit when he said, "If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain." As a young conservative, I have always found some difficulty with the assumption that liberals are the party of compassion. On the contrary, liberalism does great violence to compassion by substituting the state in place of human generosity.
The greatest weakness of conservatism is the standard media trope that the GOP is filled with a bunch of heartless Ebenezer Scrooges. Even as mighty a conservative figure as Sir Winston Churchill conceded as much with his classic wit when he said, "If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain." As a young conservative, I have always found some difficulty with the assumption that liberals are the party of compassion. On the contrary, liberalism does great violence to compassion by substituting the state in place of human generosity.In the health care debate, both sides have already agreed that something must be done, and that the government is the only force capable of action. While the GOP stands to benefit from voter anger at the Democrat's proposal this November, there will not be a fundamental reshaping of the political landscape. Neither party has the leadership or the political courage to vehemently denounce the assumption that government alone can solve the problems of ordinary Americans. As F.D.R. said, "No damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."
However, the welfare state is a more complete tyranny than slavery ever was. In the past, people were forced into chains and bondage through physical violence. Under the lash, a man will do anything, but he still retains his human dignity, his yearning for freedom. On the other hand, social welfare corrupts and prostitutes men's noblest and most virtuous motives--turning the benign will of the individual to do good unto others into absolute despotism when expressed as the will of the state. Whereas slavery treated men like brute animals, government welfare programs actually transform them.
Liberals have a quasi-religious belief that mankind can be perfected and that virtue is not an ideal, but an attainable thing which can be possessed. With this core assumption, it is easy to conclude that the government must intervene always and everywhere in order to improve the human condition. Every human instinct is to care for the sick and to ease the suffering of the less fortunate, but good intentions, no matter how noble, cannot survive in any recognizable form when they finally emerge from the other end of the churning and boiling machinations of the legislative sausage factory.
When the law inevitably fails to produce the desired effect upon the stubbornly unperfectable populace, there is always a new cry, not for scrapping the failed law, but for reform. Indeed, Congress has created so many laws that it cannot even keep up. Each year, budgets are delayed more and more under "continuing resolution" and past reforms are allowed to lapse even as more and more regulation is relinquished to the hands of unelected bureaucrats, accountable to no one. One of the founders' complaints was that King George had, "erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance." Plus ça change.
Mr. Bowman writes from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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written by Joshua Bowman, March 12, 2010
written by Joshua Bowman, March 12, 2010
In this context, I was thinking more of the virtue of a society than of the individual. I take it for granted that only some actions of some people will ever be virtuous--that is, motivated by good intentions but also yielding good results. Thus, unless every single person becomes a perfect saint, a completely virtuous society will never exist.
A friend of mine has labeled the liberal belief that society as a whole can be taught (that is to say, forced) to behave more virtuously as "neo-Puritanism." In this case, good results may sometimes be obtained by substituting a fear of punishment for good intentions, but overall, the destruction of moral choice ultimately leads such a society away from virtue, not towards it.
A friend of mine has labeled the liberal belief that society as a whole can be taught (that is to say, forced) to behave more virtuously as "neo-Puritanism." In this case, good results may sometimes be obtained by substituting a fear of punishment for good intentions, but overall, the destruction of moral choice ultimately leads such a society away from virtue, not towards it.
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Nice post. I do have one bone to pick.
You say "Liberals have a quasi-religious belief that mankind can be perfected and that virtue is not an ideal, but an attainable thing which can be possessed."
Certainly, liberals often ignore original sin, and as a result, have the "quasi-religious view that mankind can be perfected." Yet it seems that as a result, they often substitute an ethics of good intentions, or ideals, for one of actual practice. It is the conservative who recognizes that virtue, if it exists, must be "possessed" (though certainly, no person possesses complete virtue) through virtuous actions. The liberal perspective disregards actions and idolatrizes the purity of one's "intentions." For example, the ideal of say, redistributing income from middle class business owners to ACORN, replaces the action, or hard work, of say, serving in the soup kitchen or donating ones personal income to helping a needy neighbor.
Given the overall context of your post, I assume that you probably don't disagree, and that I just misunderstood that sentence. I'll look forward to your response.