About that conservative soul....

Road trips are great for focusing the mind and finally, after two weeks of cabin fever, I got to spend some time on the road....and do a little thinking...and as luck would have it...I came back to the computer to find that today's papers were on the same point....and so was the commentary. Let me bring you up to speed...

Hardscrabble.....that's the term that first brought this to mind, and raised a deeper issue...

According to dictionary. com, this is what hardscrabble means,

1.
yielding little by great labor; "a hardscrabble farm"; "poor soil"
2.
of a bare living gained by great labor; "the sharecropper's hardscrabble life"; "a marginal existence"

Hardscrabble speaks to a hard life; A view of life that lacks joy or any kind human compassion; a dog-eat-dog kind of existance. If you listen to any conservative politician, pundit or radio personality, they tell us over and over again that life...even in this land of plenty...even in the richest, most advanced civilization the world has ever seen, life is hard and any attempt to be compassionate or charitable to another living being "spoils them" by making them dependent as opposed to self-sufficient.

Almost all Republican rhetoric espouses the virtues of "self-sufficiency", virtuous discipline (imposed either by self or by submission to authority), and of course, "traditional values".

I've been listening to the likes of Cheney, Mitch McConnell, David Boehner and their puppets talk about these conservative "virtues" on and off all week and I hate the world they want us to live in.

And wouldn't you just know it....today...one of the neocons favorite writers, David Brooks, puts out an editorial in the New York times to define the soul of conservatism. But even better, (actually much, much better) a blogger and essayist by the name of Arthur Silber did a tremendous review and gave incredible historical context to the deep questions of what lies at the center of the conservative soul....

Note, not much is known about Silber save the exceptional nature of his writings...and the remarkable depth of his scholarship.

Here's how he starts his analysis of todays msuing by Brooks rather pompously entitled Human Nature Redux :

Just as Charles Murray unforgivably appropriates "science" to justify unapologetic racism, Brooks maintains that it is "science" that delivered the "big blow" to the idea of human goodness. According to Brooks, "science" now tells us that humans are, by nature, viciously competitive, always striving for dominance, and "deadly warriors." Brooks tells us that "there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don't understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other's throats are valuable and are altered at great peril."

Drawing on god-knows-what evidence, Brooks asserts a "scientific" justification of his position that the very nature of mankind is brutish and that life itself is ...dare I say it...HARDSCRABBLE.

Silber goes on with:

Brooks then describes how "order" and "obedience" will save us individually, and society in general, from our own depravity. He also says:
Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state.

Then, he hits intellectual and philosophical pay-dirt.

At the end of his column, Brooks lists some thinkers who, Brooks maintains, share this "Tragic Vision" of humankind. To Brooks' shame, he includes Burke, Madison and Hayek, contending, in effect, that these individuals also share Brooks' own "moral codes" and "political assumptions." I repeat: for shame, David Brooks.

I want to comment on another thinker Brooks includes in his criminally misleading list: Isaiah Berlin. This is an especially noteworthy case, for a very particular reason. Brooks' views have many roots, and one of them is a thinker whose importance to contemporary conservatism (and its critical authoritarian element) has been noted by others: Joseph de Maistre. (As but one example, John Dean briefly mentions Maistre in his book, Conservatives Without Conscience.)

"

Personally, I had forgotten Maistre.....I remember reading about the "executioner" all the way back in college political philosophy courses but always considered the works to be minor and covered only the high points (enough to pass the exams anyway). I had no idea the works of Maistre would loom so large in the United States at the turn of the millenium.

Let me talk about Maistre's concept of "the executioner". He paints the picture of the executioner as a person who leads an ordinary life as, perhaps a farmer, a family man, solitary and independent, except....when he is called upon by society to punish transgressors....and then he does so with great skill and pride in his work.....he is reviled by society...but he is feared by them also. Maistre writes:

"...Nevertheless all greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner; he is the terror of human society and the tie that holds it together. Take away this incomprehensible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears. God, who is the source of the power of the ruler, is also the source of punishment. He has suspended our world upon these two poles, 'for the Lord is the lord of the twin poles, and round them he sets the world revolving'.

Got it? The only way there can be order in society is if there is obedience to the executioner...hence authority....Maistre died in 1821 and his counter-revolutionary and pro-authoritarian views form the very core...the very basis for the conservative soul of 2007. The "hardscrabble" rhetoric of Cheney, Limbaugh, Hanninty, Snow, Feith, Wolfowitz, Pearle, Coulter and countless others grows directly from this philosophy and appeals to a certain kind of personality and Silber wrote about them in his work, The Sacred Moment, Essays on the works of Alice Miller.

One thing that stuck with me from my political philosophy classes after all these years, is Dr Robert Bledsoe's first introduction to the series of three classes. He said we would attempt to answer three questions through the eyes of political thinkers from Plato to the present. The three questions were: "What is the nature of man? What is the nature of the State? and What is the relationship between the two?"

As it turns out, how each individual citizen answers those questions will in the end determine which side of the political spectrum they will land on.

Update and edit 8:03AM.

Of course, there is much, much more to be discussed here and when I ended this post late last night I tried to tie it all together with one brief, succinct paragraph...rereading it this morning I find it was lacking in almost every regard. I'll try to expand on it in another post.