Defending Conservatism, Part 4: The Benefits of Social Harmony and Apolitical Spaces

In Part 3, I defended the need for decentralization and a robust civil society. Building on that point is the need for apolitical spaces, so that we can work together with people of different ideological persuasions in doing good.

This is, of course, a fairly rich perspective, coming as part of an eight-part series on politics and political orientations. But there is much more to life than political views.

There is a frequent debate (often by proxy) between two perspectives on how life and politics should interact. One view states that it is best to keep politics and other parts of life separate.The other postulates that the personal is inevitably political, and that those who seek to keep politics and life separate merely oversee that their own political preferences are *implicit* in the areas they seek to “protect.”

This second view is compelling, but in a world we do not understand, the advocates of separate spheres have the stronger argument.

First is the more prosaic one: in a world we don’t understand, we are likely to be wrong, periodically. Keeping contact with and listening to people who have differing views is one way to insure ourselves against error. We can learn things, or be persuaded that our approach on a given issue is more likely to be mistaken.

But there is a deeper rationale. If we accept that life is improved by the connections that we make, it doesn’t really make sense to preclude personal attachments and socialization with people who don’t agree with us on politics. What an impoverished view of the depths of human contact! There are so many dimensions of human contact in the real world: physical chemistry, sports, hobbies, conversational styles, religion, philosophy, scientific inquiry, and musical interests, among thousands of others. Why eliminate possible gains across those dimensions because of a disaffinity on a single dimension, politics, particularly when those politics may be misguided anyway?

This is not merely about rejecting gains; it’s also about assistance in the tough times. Human societies are full of sadness, loss, hardship, and loneliness. The connections we make can help us through those difficult emotions and can allow us the ability to bond with a greater number of people. When politics produce outcomes that depress us, when we lose our loved ones, when our long-term significant other terminates our relationship, when our favorite sports team loses in crushing fashion--all of these experiences produce varying degrees of despair. Having a broad array of connections and people to share our interests and hobbies with makes those times easier.

This is an easy, consequence-free position to have as a white male. To use the academic jargon: I am privileged enough to have the opportunity to set aside politics, because it doesn’t directly affect me. But for those who do feel that politics bombards them because of their choices or their “invisible backpack,” to what end does living in a perpetually-political world lead? Does it make you happier? Does it increase the odds of politics turning out the way you want them to, of the outcomes turning in your favor? I contend, simply, that it does not. Privilege is a fact of life, and one that it makes sense to recognize in our political lives. But allowing it to consume the rest of things does not necessarily result in sustainable change. If anything, it generates a backlash from those who are accused of “privilege” but don’t feel it in their daily lives. A 45-year old white man in rural Indiana is “privileged” under the hierarchies of privilege theory, but if he’s divorced with two drug-addicted teenage kids and has been in and out of part time jobs for 15 years, he probably doesn’t see it that way. And if 2016 proved anything, it’s that backlash is toxic.

There is a third rationale that is equally important: the politicization of everyday life leads almost inexorably to the desire for government involvement in everyday life. Politics is a long-term discussion about what government should do. But government is force, first and foremost. It’s a blunt instrument that has a monopoly of violence over a given area. Any law that is passed compelling someone to do something is ultimately backed by the force of arms, and could be enforced by a man or woman in a uniform with a gun.

All of this leads to where we should be headed: a bias towards tolerance and toleration rather than uniformity and acceptance. As a society, we should encourage acceptance of difference, but the force of government should insist on a society where people of difference tolerate one another. Moving in the direction of acceptance is a rejection of this sort of difference and the liberty interest of folks who reject someone else’s choices, and it ultimately results in the politicization of non-political spheres. Resentment, not harmony, is the byproduct, and force, not persuasion, is the tool.

A final point: Part of the problem here is the cultural ubiquity of the president. He is everywhere, and anywhere the president is involved, politics (almost) inevitably follows. A president who actively shunned the spotlight, and remained in political spheres, would help depoliticize more of society.

In Part 5, I will defend the rule of law.

Defending Conservatism, Part 3: In Favor of Decentralization and Subsidiarity

For the sake of argument (see Part 2), we’re accepting that we don’t fully understand the world around us. One very straightforward implication is that we should prefer the local to the national. A single solution at the national level may well be wrong because of our knowledge problems and our issues understanding policy reality. Getting policy wrong at a national level affects us all, and often locks us into bad outcomes. Preferring local policies is better: some of those will likely work better than others, and states and localities can gravitate, over time, to models that prove more effective. Moreover, the calamities are more contained, and there are ready-made solutions to consider in response, with actual data and a track record worth evaluating.

Let’s take health care policy as an example. Three fictitious states are trying to figure out how best to provide health insurance in their states:

• Columbia: Columbia adopts a “three-legged stool” model and provides subsidies for the purchase of private insurance: all individuals must have a policy, either through their employer or via purchase on an individual market. Insurance companies cannot deny coverage for any reason, and cannot charge sicker people larger premiums or deductibles.
• New Eagle: New Eagle opts for a market-oriented “Health Savings Account” model, providing tax credits to all of its citizens for spending on routine services, and insurance coverage for more unpredictable expenses. The state sets up a “reinsurance” system for catastrophic expenses, where insurance companies can have the state government partially cover patient expenses above a certain amount.
• Cascadia: Cascadia goes for a “single-payer” model. Insurance companies exist only for their administrative expertise, but ultimately, all reimbursements come from the state government.

I have my suspicions about which state model would work best. But the reality is that we’re just guessing until we try the models out. And even if we do get data, no two states are exactly alike. If New Eagle’s program succeeds, that does not necessarily suggest that it is the best approach; there may have been confounding factors that were more relevant. It is merely a data point in favor of one position.

The alternative is that the federal government steps in, makes its decision about which model is most effective--or decides to “solve” the issue by hammering out perverse compromises through a challenging political environment--and locks us into whatever solution results. If the federal government chooses poorly, or if the political dealings result in less-than-ideal outcomes, we are stuck with a bad model, complete with the backing of well-funded, entrenched stakeholders.

Decentralization, in contrast, gives us the opportunity for policy experimentation. This is vital in complex domains, because otherwise, we are essentially hoping that the one answer to the policy question we come up with happens to be the best of all possible worlds. The odds of this are not great in a complex domain. At the government level, decentralization points towards federalism; let individual states have discretion to try new things. But more broadly, decentralization suggests that we should look towards markets for new models and new approaches to complex problems. Thousands of decentralized actors will likely create better models for the 21st century than the wisest government bureaucrats; they have many more opportunities to fail, and will recognize their failures quickly. Bureaucracy is much slower.

The only situations where we should prefer a national solution are ones where there are dramatic risks of externalities. In those situations the risk of broad errors and contagion are surpassed by the inability of a local solution to remain a local solution. This is typically a question of prudential balance: one can make an attenuated externalities argument about most issues. For example, education: if students in New Eagle are worse than students in Cascadia, then we all suffer due to the loss of potential human capital. There is certainly a claim worth considering here, but we should not compare our “bad New Eagle” example against a beau ideal; we need to compare it against the reality of what we can and cannot do.

Environmental regulations are one such area where externalities are relevant and immediate. (If New Eagle wants strict air quality standards, and Columbia doesn’t, then New Eagle will not actually be able to implement their policies because of the prevailing winds.) Likewise with climate change: New Eagle dramatically reducing its emissions is practically meaningless, in the overall scheme of things, if other states and countries do not. In other areas, though, like transportation, education, and health care policy, externalities are much less relevant, and as such we should be open to broad and bold experimentation at the local level.

Moving towards a locality-driven approach means that we should become more comfortable with regional differences in our country: they’re not necessarily failures; they’re learning experiences, and opportunities to grow.

Decentralization need not be entirely limited to the states, though. In general, subsidiarity is the way to go: drive the decision-making to as low a level of government or organization as it can go. Encourage people to get involved in their own communities, rather than focusing exclusively on the activities of the federal government. The more people are involved, the more they can take ownership of their lives and society, rather than feeling voiceless when pitted against a cold bureaucracy. Most critically, mistakes are less contagious mistakes this way.

One final point here: not all of this needs to be “the government.” Republican Senator Ben Sasse often cites “Rotary Clubs” as the foundation for American civil society. I’ve never lived in a place with an active Rotary Club that had a real visible presence in a community, but I envy that.

People tend to be more charitable when dealing with the local than with the national or international. Having nongovernmental organizations that can step in and provide stability for struggling kids, and public meals for low-income families, and toy drives, and all of the other things that benefit the less fortunate is a must. These are intrinsic goods, and they help us achieve meaning in ways that simply sending a few extra bucks a year in taxes to Washington DC will ever do. On top of that, we shouldn't reject a state-sponsored safety net, but we should steer it towards the local when and where we can.

Defending Conservatism, Part 2: The Problem of Modernity

A proposition, to begin: there is a true reality about the world around us. We may not always know it, but the truth exists. We attempt to use our cognitive faculties to ascertain what the truth is.

It is possible to disagree with that assertion, or to argue that not being able to comprehend the truth is functionally equivalent to there being no truth at all. But for the purposes of this series, I am going to assume that truth is real.

But instead of delving into this from the perspective of politics and government, a better place to start is from a seemingly-more complicated domain: particle physics.

I never quite understood even the hints at particle physics in my high school classes, and I so feared studying a STEM subject in college that I majored in history and took a class on diseases as a way to fulfill my general science request. I was probably right to avoid it, for what it’s worth; it’s incredibly complex, so much so that it took a $10 billion investment in a gigantic particle accelerator to do the necessary research on it. We’ve learned a fair bit about the way that the universe functions, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider. Among other things (courtesy of Wikipedia):

• The “Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 115–130 gigaelectronvolts.”
• There exist two previously-undiscovered subatomic particles. They are “baryons that are composed of one bottom, one down, and one strange quark.”

My friends who majored in hard sciences often expressed envy for those of us who chose the humanities, or business, as our fields of study. After all, they were doing complex math and experiments, and we were writing papers on subjects of our choice, essentially. Particle physics may be the most complicated thing we study, but students of the “hard sciences” deal with higher levels of complexity than do students of the “liberal arts.” Organic chemistry requires more esoteric knowledge than political science; microbiology requires more esoteric knowledge than economics; astrophysics requires more esoteric knowledge than history.

But we draw the wrong conclusions from this. Intuition suggests that because something is harder to study, it is actually harder to comprehend the “truth” in that subject. But this is precisely backwards. It is, in fact, the opposite: the truth underlying politics, policy, and economics is much more complex than the truth underlying physics and chemistry. But because our tools to measure the truth in those areas are so (comparatively) ineffective, there is a lot more wiggle room for debate, disagreement, and competing interpretations. You cannot build a Large Hadron Collider for studying economics. You can do some rudimentary experiments, which helps, but those experiments cannot be fully regulated, in the sense of having complete control over your dependent variables and constants. Conclusions are always tentative, and always subject to change. Paradigms are more fragile, with less consensus.

Note, too, that it’s much harder to “fake” your way through the hard sciences. In contrast, it’s very easy to fake your way through politics and policy: you can make bold assertions with selective evidence, and at best, the response will be debatable. (In a field where the truth is more opaque, “faking it” works a lot more effectively.) Try doing the same in a physics lab. They will laugh you out of the room, or, if they’re feeling polite, ask you to leave.

All of this makes sense, if we think about humans in a material sense: humans, after all, are the synthesis of billions upon billions of those very same scientific processes, acting through their own logic. What we study in economics, political science, and history is merely the effect of the outcomes of those particles, not those particles themselves and how they affect actions and decisions. It’s infinitely more complex, because we are not merely studying the particles themselves, but how the particles combine to form a consciousness, and how the consciousness interacts with its surrounding environment. Everything we study there is a mere approximation of reality, not reality itself.

This very same pathology--that we study approximations, not realities--infects all fields. But it is worse in fields that are associated with the “social sciences”--a misnomer if there ever were one--and the humanities. But this leads us to the key point: we live and breathe in the world of the liberal arts, not the world of the hard sciences; politics and economics, not physics and chemistry, are the levers we use to change the world, when discussing public policy. With apologies to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the problem of modernity is thus: we live in a world that we do not fully understand.

Unfortunately, we see the effects of this all the time when we study and review politics and policy: we treat the knowlege of those fields as if they were as solid as the knowledge that we learn in the hard sciences. A few examples:

• The “Great Moderation” of monetary policy in the 1990s and 2000s--where we thought that we had learned to control the business cycle through the wise stewardship of the Federal Reserve--was merely an exercise in hiding risk, rather than eliminating risk. Brilliant people like Alan Greenspan underestimated the risks of a calamity (though Greenspan personally gets more blame for this than he should).
• It turns out that democracies are much more prone to war than was assumed by the pervasive “Golden Arches” theory (popularized by Thomas Friedman) of the late 1990s.
• It turns out that party structures have less control over the outcomes of presidential nominating processes than was argued in the leading book on the issue, The Party Decides.

F.A. Hayek nailed this in his 1974 Nobel Prize address, and it remains correct today:

Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process... will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.

The more important piece is this: not only do we not really understand the world, we aren’t particularly likely to “understand” it anytime soon. We’ve been making mistakes for centuries, and we should expect that it will continue. The pretension that we do understand the world leads us towards grave errors.

It is both terrifying and liberating to accept that we live in a world that we cannot and do not fully understand. It’s terrifying, in that we have invented or discovered thousands of things that can kill us, from bacteria to nuclear weapons, and we don’t fully understand the space in which we interact with those doomsday devices. But it is also liberating, in that admitting that we have a problem is the first step towards figuring out an approach to solving it.

The remainder of this series is going to focus on how we deal with a world that we don’t understand. Below will follow five suggestions, each of which will get its own writeup this week. In a world we don’t understand:

1. Decentralization is better than centralization.
2. Social harmony is an intrinsic good, and apolitical spaces are an important way to foster it.
3. We should strive for a system built on predictable rules, rather than reliance on individuals.
4. Tradition and the “old ways of doing things” deserve some deference, though we should not slavishly adhere to them.
5. We should be wary of demagoguery and populism, though not reflexively dismissive.

Finally, I will attempt a synthesis, and I'll recommend some (better) writers.

Defending Conservatism, Part 1: An Introduction

Much of this was put together in a fit of excess energy after a particularly busy few weeks at work, so it’s a scattered brain dump. But I found myself writing a defense of conservatism, and it kept going on and on and on. I did some aggressive cut and paste and reorganization, and this is what emerged. I originally was just going to post to Facebook, but it makes sense to post here as well.

These are dark days for those of us with a conservative outlook on things: the so-called “conservative” party has taken power in ways almost unimaginable eight years ago, but conservatism itself is beset on multiple fronts. The principled conservatives in Congress are mostly backbenchers acting in exile, or tiptoeing around the emergent new nationalism. The president professes himself a conservative, but he has spent his whole life in a deeply liberal enclave and has no real philosophical grounding. A growing “white nationalist” movement with a keen understanding of social media is attempting to take the reins by appealing to the desire of conservatives to oppose a common enemy; an ally of theirs is the president’s chief strategist. Meanwhile, the Left has grown increasingly strident and certain of its positions; if the president’s approval rating is where it is now in three years, nominating someone on the Far Left will be awfully tempting for the Democrats. If these are victories for conservatives, I should hate to imagine what defeat would look like.

However, dark days lead to opportunities, and this is an opportunity to start fresh, and to make a public case for a different understanding of conservatism. Why here, why now?

Some context: I grew up on the east coast and currently live on the west coast, so most of my friends  and associates are quite liberal/progressive. Judging by my Facebook feed, many are rapidly becoming moreso in the age of Donald Trump. I intend this in part as a dissent, but more as an opportunity to present some ideas that don’t usually kick around in academia. Academia is deeply focused on privilege, power structures, and the role of race, class, and gender in societies. When you start from this position, your conclusions drift in a progressive direction. Indeed, as someone who has studied those areas as an undergraduate and graduate student, I agree that the evidence is clear that race, class, and gender do matter, that differences in these areas have been the foundation for oppression, that progress has been made on these issues thanks to increasing awareness and action, and that there is much work still to do. But there are other starting points for thinking about organizing a “good society,” ones that don’t usually get much traction or focus in an academic setting.

In the absence of this sort of exchange of ideas, conservatism is represented by the hucksterism of folks like Sean Hannity, or Bill O’Reilly, or Rush Limbaugh, or Joe Scarborough, or Tucker Carlson, or any of the other vapid entertainers that have claimed the mantle of conservatism over the past few decades. Bill Buckley, they are not. But they become the faces and voices of a venerable philosophy. It’s disheartening.

Thus, with Donald Trump and his allies as standard-bearers for conservatism, I’m basically a guy without a home politically. I am deeply concerned that “conservatism” and “Trumpism” will become one in the same by the end of his first term. I intend to fight that with every (available) fiber in my being that is not otherwise occupied by family, social, and professional commitments. (So, probably not with all too much effort, I guess. But I can at least put pen to paper. Or fingers to keys, as it were.) If Trump is conservative, than what I propose here is not conservative, but it’s worth saying anyway.

A couple of disclaimers, before I begin. First, I am Catholic, and much of what I believe is informed by my Catholicism. I intend for the arguments I make here to stand alone, apart from any particular faith tradition, but it would be dishonest to suggest that my political views and my religious views are unrelated; on the contrary, religion very much informs my politics. Second, I have been a self-professed conservative since I was 15 years old, and I wouldn’t have defended my views this way back then. It’s possible that this is all an elaborate post hoc rationalization. So please take everything I have to say with a grain of salt (or three or four).

Lastly, the framing I work with is my own, but the ideas are not; I am merely trying to publicize them, using my (admittedly) small platform. Any errors, of course, are mine and mine alone.

For the next seven days, I will post an article here, making the case for an alternative to progressivism and Trumpism. If you’re interested, follow along! If not, more power to you. Use your time for good.

Part 2 - The Problem of Modernity
Part 3 - In Favor of Decentralization and Subsidiarity
Part 4 - The Benefits of Social Harmony and Apolitical Spaces
Part 5 - The Imperative of Predictable Laws and Regulations
Part 6 - The Legitimacy of Tradition
Part 7 - The Virtues and Vices of Populism
Part 8 - The Way Forward and Additional (Better) Reading