The Conservative Sensibility Read online

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan thought so, too. He said: Behold California’s Imperial Valley, unchanged since “the receding of the Ice Age.”12 Only God can make an artichoke, but government—specifically, the Bureau of Reclamation—made the valley a cornucopia. The historical record is clear: Governments, federal and state, have long been involved in stimulating and steering economic growth. But this, too, is clear: America has been, from the first, primarily a market society powered by incentives for individual striving.

  This distinctively American frame of mind emerged early. In 1623, there was an episode that illustrated the toll that reality takes on ideology. It also illustrated the fecundity of individualism and enlightened self-interest. The first important book-length manuscript written in America was Of Plymouth Plantation, the journal of William Bradford, the colony’s governor for nearly thirty-six years. In a section on private versus communal farming, Bradford wrote that in 1623, because of a corn shortage, the colonists “began to think how they might raise” more of it. After much debate, they abandoned a doctrine that they had brought with them on the Mayflower, the idea that all agriculture should be a collective, community undertaking. It was decided, Bradford wrote, that “they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves.” That is, they “assigned to every family a parcel of land,” ending communal cultivation of that crop. “This,” Bradford reported, “had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means.” Indeed, “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”13 So began the American rejection of collectivism. Just three years after the settlers came ashore, they began their ascent to individualism. One hundred fifty-three years before Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the earliest of Americans understood how to harness for the general good the fact that human beings are moved, usually and powerfully, by self-interest. So began the unleashing of American energies through freedom—voluntarism rather than coercion. So began America.

  What the Pilgrims quickly understood in the seventeenth century the Russians and Chinese learned the slow and hard way with agricultural collectivization in the twentieth century. Francis Fukuyama notes: “By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity. In the former USSR, the 4 percent of land that remained privately owned accounted for almost one-quarter of total agricultural output. In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agriculture output doubled in the space of just four years.”14

  The system we praise as capitalism was named by its enemies, and especially by the German émigré who sat for so many hours in seat G7 in the reading room of the British Museum. The system that Karl Marx and other critics intended to disparage by labeling it “capitalism” is a system of private property regulated minimally by government interventions and mostly by market forces. And by the rule of law governing the making and adjudicating of voluntary contracts. Leon Trotsky once said that the problem with capitalist society is that every person thinks of himself and no one thinks of everyone. But beginning with the Soviet regime that Trotsky helped to found, the most hideous political oppressions have flowed from governments that have claimed to be able to, and to have a duty imposed by History to, think of everyone. About the basics, there is today little of the debate that raged in many countries well into the twentieth century. It is no longer controversial that the basic engine of social improvement is people using their private property to pursue personal profits through reasonably free markets.

  To an age fascinated by physics and the “laws of motion” in planets and other bodies, Adam Smith announced that men, and hence the body politic, obey “laws of motion.” He discovered orderliness beneath the turmoil of society—predictability based on the simplicity of man’s unchanging desires and self-interestedness. The uncoerced cooperation of people pursuing their private interests produces, through the mechanism of free markets, social betterment. This result is unplanned; no one aims to better society’s condition; each person aims to better only himself. It is, Smith said, as though a “hidden hand” guided the process whereby the public good, although unintended, results from the pursuit of private goals.

  Before the modern age, of which Smith was a herald, political philosophers disagreed about what constituted the public good but agreed that the public good was to be discovered by reason—by the reasoning of the wisest. Modern political philosophy holds that the public good is rooted in, and produced by, the desires of the many—including desires (for wealth, acquisition, consumption) that are often considered by the high-minded to be low. The modern assumption is that the public good (defined by Smith and other moderns as increased consumption) is produced by the unfettered pursuit of private purposes. It is because of this system that almost all of us live in a way that would have been unimaginable to our not very distant ancestors.

  Almost everyone now alive is directly descended from people who lived in grinding poverty. Until around 1800, this was the condition of almost everybody. What the economist and historian Deirdre N. McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment began in seventeenth-century Holland, gathered steam—literally—in eighteenth-century Britain and the American colonies. Although agriculture was invented about 11,000 years ago, it took 4,000 years for it to supplant hunting and gathering as mankind’s main source of food. This made possible the rise of cities, which involved transactions that led to the development of writing about 5,000 years ago and mathematics about 4,000 years ago. But modernity means velocity. It took 4,000 years for mankind to adapt harnesses to the long necks of horses. But just sixty-six years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, which covered a distance shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747, a man walked on the moon.

  Modernity also means having a hard time fathoming how extraordinary modern conditions are. An earthquake once shook the Western mind by striking Lisbon on All Saints’ Day, 1755, killing thousands in churches and thousands more who, fleeing to the seashore, were drowned by a tidal wave. It was as though nature, unamused by humanity’s expanding sense of mastery, had muttered, “Oh, really? Says who?” The quake was an exclamation point arbitrarily inserted into the Age of Reason, raising doubts about the beneficence of the universe and about God’s enthusiasm for the Enlightenment. In our increasingly secular age, when the phrase “acts of God” denotes only disasters, we still can learn from these events. One of the striking vignettes from television coverage of the aftermath of San Francisco’s 1989 quake was a policeman exhorting citizens to “go home and prepare for 72 hours without services.”15 For perhaps three days they would have no electricity, no gas, no running water. Of course, it was not until very recently in the human story that anyone had any of these things.

  Until the middle of the nineteenth century, one-fifth of the English population was too malnourished to perform regular work. Cities grew faster than did the understanding of urban public health problems, so between 1790 and 1850 life expectancy in America’s northern states declined 25 percent. In the 1830s and 1840s, life expectancy at birth in New York City and Philadelphia was twenty-four years—six years less than for a Southern slave. Even in 1900, only half of those born in the same year were alive at age forty. Today, it is not until age eighty that only half of an age cohort survives.16 In 1900, the American population spent twice as much on funerals as on medicine, fewer than 2 percent of Americans took vacations, and there were only two generally observed holidays, Christmas and Independence Day.17 Calling the Great Enrichment “the most surprising secular event in history” (she is an Episcopalian), McCloskey notes that since 1800, the goods and services available to the average Swede or Taiwanese hav
e risen “by a factor of 30 or 100. Not 100 percent, understand—a mere doubling—but in its highest estimate a factor of 100, nearly 10,000 percent, and at least a factor of 30, or 2,900 percent.” McCloskey attributes this to “the great oomph of liberty and dignity.” That is, the enrichment came about because society decided to allow ordinary people the liberty to strive, and to respect and honor them for achieving. “People in Holland and then England didn’t suddenly start alertly attending to profit. They suddenly started admiring such alertness, and stopped calling it sinful greed.”18 So the Great Enrichment is both the cause and the consequence of a revolution in thinking about morals and behavior.

  Some philosophers distinguish between virtues that are natural and those that are artificial—between, for example, a natural sense of justice and fellow feeling that is supposedly constitutive of human nature and the virtues of, say, cooperativeness and trustworthiness, which are acquired over time by habitual behaviors in conformity with social expectations. This might be, however, a distinction without a difference. The natural virtues, if such there are, can be worn away as individuals accommodate themselves to social settings where such virtues are disadvantages. And in settings where such virtues are inculcated in the socialization of children, the virtues are not natural, or not merely natural, for very long. They become compounds of natural inclinations and social reinforcements.

  CAPITALISM AS SOULCRAFT

  A third of a century ago, this author delivered Harvard University’s Godkin lectures, which subsequently became a book read by dozens, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does. The subtitle underscored the book’s theme, which is that soulcraft—shaping the morals and manners of its citizens—is not merely something that government can or should choose to do. Rather, it is something government cannot help but do. It may not be done competently or even consciously, but it is not optional. Legal regimes, and the commercial and educational systems that the laws create and sustain, have consequences on the thinking, behavior, expectations, desires, habits, and demands—cumulatively, on the souls—of the citizenry.

  Another of the book’s themes was quite wrong. It was that the American nation was “ill-founded” because too little attention was given to the explicit cultivation of the virtues requisite for the success of a republic. In fact, the nature of life in a commercial society under limited government is a daily instruction in the self-reliance and politeness—taken together, the civility—of a lightly governed open society. Capitalism requires, and therefore capitalism develops, a society in which economic dealings are lubricated by the disposition and ability to trust strangers. Walk into almost any American commercial establishment and you will receive the signature greeting of one stranger to another in a commercial society: “How may I help you?” Politeness is woven into the society’s interactions, and over time, through endless iterations, it produces a fabric of civility. Virtues are not revealed by good habits; good habits are virtues. We call a person good because he or she characteristically—habitually—acts in certain ways: honestly, bravely, empathetically, compassionately. Therefore, a commercial republic—a market society—promotes the habits (virtues) of politeness and sociability.

  It used to be said that an armed society is a polite society. The point was that if your interlocutor has a sword at his side or a Colt on his hip, you are apt to mind your manners. It might also be said that a commercial society will be sociable. Alfred Marshall, one of the founders of modern economics, wrote in 1890, “Man’s character has been molded by his every-day work, and the material resources which he thereby procures, more than by any other influence unless it be that of his religious ideals; and the two great forming agencies of the world’s history have been the religious and the economic.”19 Friedrich Hayek wrote that commerce, which requires trust, cooperation, and rules-constrained competition, “is as much a method for breeding certain types of mind as anything else.” Or as Deidre McCloskey says, “The invisible hand gently pushes people out of their solipsistic cocoons to consider what is valued in trade by other people.” Which Montesquieu knew: “Commerce polishes and sweetens barbarian ways.”20 William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century jurist so influential among America’s Founders, described the English of his era as “a nation of freemen, a polite and commercial people.”21

  There was then a theory that commercial societies would subsume dangerous energies in economic competition, thereby making wars less likely. That theory has been slain by this fact: “History’s most destructive wars have in fact occurred since the bourgeois revolution.”22 Nevertheless, commercial societies are apt to be, on balance, civilized because an economic system is an educational regime. When Oscar Wilde published in 1891 an essay titled “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” he got almost everything wrong about how the world works or can be made to work, but he was not wrong to think that the system by which we shape the material world around us, and the way we allocate its resources, shapes people’s souls.

  The phrase “elective affinity” was coined in the eighteenth century as a technical term to denote the behavior of certain chemical substances when brought together. So, when Max Weber said there was an “elective affinity” between Protestantism and capitalism he meant that aspects of each were shared by, or reinforced aspects of, the other. There is an elective affinity between capitalism and the individualism woven into the fiber of a society with a government limited by respect for pre-existing natural rights. Individualism was explicit in Adam Smith’s description of the “system of natural liberty” as one in which “every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.”23 Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments is logically as well as chronologically (by seventeen years) prior to The Wealth of Nations. The former, beginning with its first line, affirms attributes of human nature that define the context for the practice of economic liberty: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”24 John Stuart Mill, too, understood that “the creed and laws of a people act powerfully upon their economical condition; and this again, by its influence on their mental development and social relations, reacts upon their creed and laws.”25 This can be a virtuous feedback loop when people adapt to the trust and politeness of commerce and to social rewards being determined by impersonal market forces rather than by political connections.

  At the founding of the American nation, Americans agreed that an economic system is a system of soulcraft, although they disagreed, strenuously, about which system to adopt. Political scientists Jeffrey K. Tulis and Nicole Mellow argue that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, the former favoring and the latter opposing ratification of the Constitution, was so intense because both sides agreed about the most important point. Both understood that “the new Constitution represented a plan for a new way of life, not just a new arrangement of power.” The “agrarian ideal” was “implicit” in the Anti-Federalists’ arguments because the Constitution “would replace a republican ideal of smaller, homogeneous communities in which commerce was wedded to agriculture, with a regime of continental dimension, a commercial republic in which agriculture would play a supporting role.” So, “manners, mores, habits” would be “fundamentally altered” as the Constitution ushered in “a revolution in the design of the whole polity—new forms of living as well as new forms of governance.” This fact is inconvenient for the progressive critique of the Constitution, which holds that because the document was written for a vanished society, it must be radically revised in order to suit today’s unanticipated polity. Tulis and Mellow argue that today’s commercial society of constant churning was not just anticipated, it was planned by the Framers and midwifed by the Constitut
ion. As a result of what they call “our forward-looking Founding,” America’s political development from 1789 on has had “a constitutionally induced direction.” So the Constitution “would not be a ‘living document’ whose meaning needed to be changed to accommodate unknown and unanticipated economic and social developments but rather would itself set in motion a polity that would generate such economic and social change as a necessary consequence of the basic choices the Constitution represented.”26

  The Founders were Aristotelians, not because they had studied his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, although some of them had, but because they reasoned as Aristotle did about the human good. He asked what the “function” of a human being is: “[J]ust as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or any artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he naturally functionless? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these?”27

  It has been said that the United States is the only nation founded on a good idea—the pursuit of happiness. “The object of government,” wrote Madison in Federalist 62, is “the happiness of the people.”28 He and his fellow Founders conceived of happiness as Aristotle did, as a steady, durable state of worthy satisfaction with life. To be worthy, satisfaction must flow from the vigorous employment of the faculties that make us human—individual reasoning and social participation. What man does distinctively, and other animals do not, is use his intelligence through reasoning. Happiness, which is not mere pleasure, is found in man’s natural function, which is this activity on his own behalf. A restless individualism is inherent in the Founders’ Aristotelian understanding of human nature.