Death from Above, Death from Below

An analysis of the economic liberalism, destructive of family and community, that often masquerades as 'conservatism' in the US and Western Europe.

From The European Conservative

By Carlos Perona Calvete

The vitalistic rhetoric of market competition is always balanced against ‘small-town values’ by the American Right.

One reason both for the popularity of economic liberalism in the United States, and for it being considered a ‘conservative’ value, is that it is psychologically connected to its opposite or counterpart. However implicitly tied to the idea that individual calculation of self-interest in monetary terms will produce collective prosperity and virtue, and however much it is de facto applied (such as to endear the tax code to large corporations rather than proliferating startups, family-owned businesses, and enfranchised communities), we cannot help but notice that the aesthetic of American liberalism is often Chestertonian-distributist.

This is the cornerstone of much conservative thought. We may also think of Donoso Cortés and his emphasis on intermediate classes as bulwarks of Spain’s constitution (her literal constitution as society and body politic). And yet Western culture in general is deeply conditioned by habits of mind that militate against the cultivation and safeguarding of those kinds of property arrangements.

Death by abstraction

On the one hand, we tend (often without realizing it) to interpret the abstract or general category as invalidating the particular. The half-mocking ‘we’re all just people’ attitude is a kind of pervasive 1960s mutation of the Enlightenment philosophy that Joseph de Maistre railed against when he wrote that he had only ever met Spaniards, Frenchmen, and so on, but never the new philosophy’s abstraction: “I have never met man. If he does exist, it has escaped my notice.” 

What the counter-revolutionary meant is that the logic of the revolution drew an all too simple equation between what we might describe as universality and uniformity: If human reason is universal, why should we respect different, local institutions? Nowadays, things have gone further, and some ask why, if human reason is accessible to all, there should be such a thing as borders. Beyond this kind of modernism, we have postmodernism. If human desire is shared by all, on what basis can any normativity be awarded to some relationships over others? Love is love; pleasure is pleasure.

Death by reduction

The postmodern view quickly blends into its opposite: not the denial of particularity on the basis of a universal, from above, but on the basis of its parts, from below.

This habit of mind will fail to grasp what is unitary in a thing if that thing is composed of parts. In other words, there is no Englishman if the English have Picts, Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans, and more recently arrived populations in their lineages. There is no Spain if there is Catalonia, Basque Country, Andalusia, or Castile (albeit this last one is generally suppressed).

This goes so far that certain ‘philosophers of mind,’ like Daniel Dennet, will deny the existence of consciousness on the basis that it is composed of matter and energy, which is not itself conscious. If we accept that the components of the human brain are not themselves imbued with subjectivity, then, by the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit, neither will the human person have subjectivity. Yet, of course, we do. Even the ‘illusion of consciousness’ would have to be an illusion perceived by some consciousness. But we have arrived at extremes of reductionism that deny even this most fundamental datum of existence.

Life by participation

Culture largely consists of participation in institutions. It may be the case that, without institutions in which to participate and in which to exercise our knowledge of general principles in particular ways (avoiding death by abstraction), and without being able to see how parts come together and harmonize (avoiding death by reduction), we lose our intuitive knowledge of particularity. 

As Simone Weil argues in The Need for Roots, property is not only about economic utility. Property structures human interaction. The village commons, for example, was a locus for training the faculties of deliberation (common decision-making) and discrimination (any functional commons needed to make a clear in-group/out-group distinction, as the social scientist Elinor Ostrom documented). Even the table spread, on which parishioners lay out whatever they’ve brought after Sunday service, does the same job on a smaller scale. Today, we’ve lost not just the commons but also, to a large extent, the churches and clubs. Our discourse has become similarly impoverished—consider how the call for corporations to become cooperatives, once common even among staunch defenders of American capitalism like Napoleon Hill is no longer a meaningful part of the political imagination.

In terms of political messaging, when a party like Spain’s VOX puts forward thoroughly liberal economic policies—forgetting its intense but short-lived emphasis on enlivening rural villages and fostering a romantic, communitarian appeal—it fails to endear itself to voters, who will always see deregulating the market as dangerous for them. But in the U.S., where economic liberalism is generally popular on the Right, the vitalistic call to compete is tempered by the aesthetic of ‘mom-and-pop’ businesses, picket fences, quaint Victorian columns, and small-town solidarity. 

Those who perceive the abstraction of ‘the market’ and the reduction of ‘individuals’ competing in it are right to be wary. If the advantages of liberalism are to be reaped, it will only be so by way of participatory institutions.