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| Renewing the Powerful Alliance of Social and Economic Conservatives |
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| Written by Robert George |
| Thursday, 27 May 2010 09:27 |
Easy URL: http://tinyurl.com/socialeconomic Some people seem to think that the alliance of social and economic conservatives is, at best, a marriage of convenience. I couldn’t disagree more. My thesis is straightforward: Basic shared principles should lead serious social conservatives to be economic conservatives as well, and serious economic conservatives to be social conservatives, too. A sound conservatism will, as a matter of principle, honor limited government, restrained spending, honest money, and low taxes, while at the same time upholding the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and the protection of the innocence of children. Any healthy society, any decent society, will rest upon three pillars. The first is respect for the human person—the individual human being and his dignity. The formal and informal institutions of society, and the beliefs and practices of the people, need to be such that every member of the human family—irrespective of race, sex, or ethnicity, to be sure, but also and equally irrespective of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency—is treated as a person bearing profound, inherent, and equal worth and dignity. A society that does not respect the human person—beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and physically impaired and the frail elderly—will sooner or later come to regard human beings as mere cogs in the larger social wheel whose dignity and well-being may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity. In its most extreme modern forms, totalitarian regimes reduce the individual to the status of an instrument to serve the ends of the fascist state or the future communist utopia. When liberal democratic regimes go awry, it is usually because a utilitarian ethic reduces the human person to a means rather than an end to which other things including the systems and institutions of law, education, and the economy are means. The abortion license against which we struggle today is dressed up by its defenders in the language of individual rights; but it is underwritten by a utilitarian ethic that, in the end, vaporizes the very idea of individual rights, treating the idea (in Jeremy Bentham’s famously dismissive words) as “nonsense on stilts.” In cultures in which religious fanaticism has taken hold, the dignity of the individual is typically sacrificed for the sake of tragically misbegotten theological ideas and goals. By contrast, a liberal democratic ethos, where it is uncorrupted by utilitarianism or me-generation expressive individualism, supports the dignity of the human person by giving witness to basic human rights and liberties. Where a healthy religious life flourishes, faith in God provides a grounding for the dignity and inviolability of the human person by, for example, proposing an understanding of each and every member of the human family, even those of different faiths or professing no particular faith, as persons made in the image and likeness of the divine Author of our lives and liberties. The second pillar of any decent society is the institution of the family. It is indispensable. The family, based on the marital commitment of husband and wife, is the original and best department of health, education, and welfare. Although no family is perfect, no institution excels the healthy family in its capacity to transmit to each new generation the understandings and traits of character — the values and virtues — upon which the success of every other institution of society, from law and government to educational institutions and business firms, vitally depends. Where families fail to form, or too many break down, the effective transmission of the virtues of honesty, civility, self-restraint, concern for the welfare of others, justice, compassion, and personal responsibility is imperiled. Without these virtues, respect for the dignity of the human person, the first pillar of a decent society, will be undermined and sooner or later lost—for even the most laudable formal institutions cannot uphold respect for human dignity where people do not have the virtues that make that respect a reality and give it vitality in actual social practices. Respect for the dignity of the human being requires more than formally sound institutions; it requires a cultural ethos in which people act from conviction to treat each other as human beings should be treated: with respect, civility, justice, compassion. The best legal and political institutions ever devised are of little value where selfishness, contempt for others, dishonesty, injustice, and other types of immorality and irresponsibility flourish. Indeed, the effective working of governmental institutions themselves depends upon most people most of the time obeying the law out of a sense of moral obligation, and not merely out of fear of detection and punishment for law-breaking. And perhaps it goes without saying that the success of business and our market-based economic system depends on there being reasonably virtuous, trustworthy, law-abiding, promise-keeping people to serve as workers and managers, lenders, regulators, and payers of bills for goods and services. The third pillar of any decent society is a fair and effective system of law and government. This is necessary because none of us is perfectly virtuous all the time, and some people will be deterred from wrongdoing only by the threat of punishment. More importantly, contemporary philosophers of law tell us the law coordinates human behavior for the sake of achieving common goals — the common good — especially in dealing with the complexities of modern life. Even if all of us were perfectly virtuous all of the time, we would still need a system of laws (considered as a scheme of authoritatively stipulated coordination norms) to accomplish many of our common ends (safely transporting ourselves on the streets, for example). The success of business firms and the economy as a whole depends vitally on a fair and effective system and set of institutions for the administration of justice. We need judges skilled in the craft of law and free of corruption. We need to be able to rely on courts to settle disputes, including disputes between parties who are both in good faith, and to enforce contracts and other agreements and enforce them in a timely manner. Indeed, the knowledge that contracts will be enforced is usually sufficient to ensure that courts will not actually be called on to enforce them. A sociological fact of which we can be certain is this: Where there is no reliable system of the administration of justice — no confidence that the courts will hold people to their obligations under the law — business will not flourish and everyone in the society will suffer. A society can, in my opinion, be a decent one even if it is not a dynamic one, if the three pillars are healthy and functioning in a mutually supportive way (as they will do if each is healthy). Now, conservatives of a certain stripe believe that a truly decent society cannot be a dynamic one. Dynamism, they believe, causes instability that undermines the pillars of a decent society. So some conservatives opposed not only industrialism but the very idea of a commercial society, fearing that commercial economies inevitably produce consumerist and acquisitive materialist attitudes that corrode the foundations of decency. And some, such as some Amish communities, reject education for their children beyond what is necessary to master reading, writing, and arithmetic, on the ground that higher education leads to worldliness and apostasy and undermines religious faith and moral virtue. Although a decent society need not be a dynamic one (as the Amish example shows) dynamism need not erode decency. A dynamic society need not be one in which consumerism and materialism become rife and in which moral and spiritual values disappear. Indeed, dynamism can play a positive moral role and, I would venture to say, almost certainly will play such a role where what makes it possible is sufficient to sustain it over the long term. That is, I realize, a rather cryptic comment, so let me explain what I mean. To do that, I will have to offer some thoughts on what in fact makes social dynamism possible. The two pillars of social dynamism are, first, institutions of research and education in which the frontiers of knowledge across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences are pushed back, and through which knowledge is transmitted to students and disseminated to the public at large; and, second, business firms and associated institutions supporting them or managed in ways that are at least in some respects patterned on their principles, by which wealth is generated, distributed, and preserved. We can think of universities and business firms, together with respect for the dignity of the human person, the institution of the family, and the system of law and government, as the five pillars of decent and dynamic societies. The university and the business firm depend in various ways for their well-being on the well-being of the others, and they can help to support the others in turn. At the same time, of course, ideologies and practices hostile to the pillars of a decent society can manifest themselves in higher education and in business and these institutions can erode the social values on which they themselves depend not only for their own integrity, but for their long-term survival. It is all too easy to take the pillars for granted. So it is important to remember that each of them has come under attack from different angles and forces. Operating from within universities, persons and movements hostile to one or the other of these pillars, usually preaching or acting in the name of high ideals of one sort or another, have gone on the attack. Attacks on business and the very idea of the market economy and economic freedom coming from the academic world are, of course, well known. Students are sometimes taught to hold business, and especially businessmen, in contempt as heartless exploiters driven by greed. In my own days as a student, these attacks were often made explicitly in the name of Marxism. One notices less of that after the collapse of the Soviet empire, but the attacks themselves have abated little. Needless to say, where businesses behave unethically they play into the stereotypes of the enemies of the market system and facilitate their effort to smear business and the free market for the sake of transferring greater control of the economy to government. Similarly, attacks on the family, and particularly on the institution of marriage on which the family is built, are common in the academy. The line here is that the family, at least as traditionally constituted and understood, is a patriarchal and exploitative institution that oppresses women and imposes on people forms of sexual restraint that are psychologically damaging and inhibiting of the free expression of their personality. As has become clear in the past decade and a half, there is a real threat to the family here, one against which we must fight with all our energy and will. It is difficult to think of any item on the domestic agenda that is more critical today than the defense of marriage as the union of husband and wife and the effort to renew and rebuild the marriage culture. Some will counsel that economic conservatives “have no horse in this race.” They will say that it is a moral, cultural, and religious question about which business people and people concerned with economic freedom need not concern themselves. The reality is that the ideological movements that today seek to redefine marriage and abolish its normativity for romantic relations and the rearing of children are the same movements that seek to undermine the free market system and replace it with statist control of vast areas of economic life. Moreover, the rise of ideologies hostile to marriage and the family has had a measurable social impact, and its costs are counted in ruined relationships, damaged lives, and all that follows in the social sphere from these personal catastrophes. In many poorer places in our nation, families are simply failing to form and marriage is coming to be regarded as an optional “life-style choice,” as it is in much of Europe—one among various optional ways of conducting relationships and having and rearing children. Out of wedlock birthrates are very high, with the negative consequences being borne less by the affluent than by those in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan shocked Americans by reporting findings that the out-of-wedlock birth rate among African-Americans in the United States had reached nearly 25%. He warned that the phenomenon of boys and girls being raised without fathers in poorer communities would result in social pathologies that would severely harm those most in need of the supports of solid family life. His predictions were all too quickly verified. The widespread failure of family formation portended disastrous social consequences of delinquency, despair, violence, drug abuse, and crime and incarceration. A snowball effect resulted in the further growth of the out-of-wedlock birth rate. It is now over 70% among African-Americans. It is worth noting that at the time of Moynihan’s report, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for the population as a whole was almost 6%. Today, that rate is over 40%. The economic consequences of these developments are evident. Consider the need of business to have available to it a responsible and capable work force. Business cannot manufacture honest, hard working people to employ. Nor can government create them by law. Businesses and governments depend on there being many such people, but they must rely on the family, assisted by religious communities and other institutions of civil society, to produce them. So business has a stake—a massive stake—in the long-term health of the family. It should avoid doing anything to undermine the family, and it should do what it can where it can to strengthen the institution. As an advocate of dynamic societies, I believe in the market economy and the free enterprise system. I particularly value the social mobility that economic dynamism makes possible. At the same time, I am not a supporter of the laissez-faire doctrine embraced by strict libertarians. I believe that law and government do have important and, indeed, indispensable roles to play in regulating enterprises for the sake of protecting public health, safety, and morals, preventing exploitation and abuse, and promoting fair competitive circumstances of exchange. But these roles are compatible, I would insist, with the ideal of limited government and the principle of subsidiarity according to which government must respect individual initiative to the extent reasonably possible and avoid violating the autonomy and usurping the authority of families, religious communities, and other institutions of civil society that play the primary role in building character and transmitting virtues. Having said that, I would warn that limited government — considered as an ideal as vital to business as to the family — cannot be maintained where the marriage culture collapses and families fail to form or easily dissolve. Where these things happen, the health, education, and welfare functions of the family will have to be undertaken by someone, or some institution, and that will sooner or later be the government. To deal with pressing social problems, bureaucracies will grow, and with them the tax burden. Moreover, the growth of crime and other pathologies where family breakdown is rampant will result in the need for more extensive policing and incarceration and, again, increased taxes to pay for these government services. If we want limited government, and a level of taxation that is not unduly burdensome, we need healthy institutions of civil society, beginning with a flourishing marriage culture supporting family formation and preservation. Economic and social conservatives have, to be sure, common enemies in the social welfare state, the entitlement mentality, and the statist ideologies that provide their intellectual underpinnings. But the marriage of economic and social conservatives is not, and must not be regarded as, a mere marriage of convenience. The reason we have common enemies is that we have common principles. Our marriage is, and must be understood as, a marriage of principle, even if it is not always a romantic love match. The moral foundations of economic conservatism are precisely those of social conservatism, namely, respect for the human person, which grounds our commitment to individual liberty and the right to economic freedom and other essential civil liberties; belief in personal responsibility, which is a pre-condition of the possibility and moral desirability of individual liberty in any domain; recognition of subsidiarity as the basis for effective but truly limited government; respect for the rule of law; recognition of the vital role played by the family in the flourishing of any decent and dynamic society. The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy and the institution of marriage. These institutions will, in the end, stand or fall together. Contemporary statist ideologues have contempt for both of these institutions, and they fully understand the connection between them. How shocking, then, that some conservatives fail to see that vital connection. Those who do see it, however, know why social conservatives should also be economic conservatives; and why economic conservatives should be social conservatives, too. Dr. Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and the Founder of the American Principles Project. |
| Last Updated on Thursday, 27 May 2010 10:50 |
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Topics Founding Principles Renewing the Powerful Alliance of Social and Economic Conservatives
Topics Founding Principles Renewing the Powerful Alliance of Social and Economic Conservatives