Heresy of the week: Individualism is not conservative

Today, the Deep End brings you an in-depth review of a major new work of near-impenetrable German philosophy. What better way to lift the spirits as summer gives way to autumn?

Our reviewer is Joshua Mostafa writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books and our German philosopher is Peter Sloterdijk, whose 1998 book Blasen has finally been published in English translation. The English title is ‘Bubbles’, which makes its sounds like the biography of some frivolous socialite – but there’s nothing lightweight about this 600 page volume (itself just the first part of Sloterdijk’s monumental ‘Spheres’ trilogy).

The author is a leading public intellectual in Germany and a controversial one too, as Mostafa explains:

• “…recently, his attack on the welfare state as “state kleptocracy” — which may seem an unremarkable piece of right-wing capitalo-libertarian rhetoric in the ears of post-Reagan America or post-Thatcher Britain — stirred up controversy in Germany, where a broadly social-democratic consensus encompasses the center-right as well as the left. Sloterdijk called for the abolition of income tax in favor of voluntary contributions.”

From the above, you might conclude that Sloterdijk is an advocate of “rugged individualism”, a sort of Teutonic Ayn Rand. Not a bit of it:

• “Sloterdijk begins Bubbles with an explicit rejection of individualism. Before considering the startling ideas he posits in its place, it’s worth briefly considering the radicalism of this move, and why anyone might think it necessary to make…
• “The conception of the human subject as an individual whose fundamental and essential state is solitude, who is born alone and dies alone (a phrase attributed both to Orson Welles and to Hunter S. Thompson), is pervasive in contemporary thought… Contemporary ideology has such a strongly individualist outlook that the word ‘individual’ has come to be used almost interchangeably with ‘person.’ This conflation posits our separation from others as an essential quality of being human; it precludes other notions of personhood, in which togetherness, not individuation, are foundational to our humanity. It is therefore difficult to contemplate individualism, as such, when our thinking is so thoroughly steeped in it.”

Sloterdijk is not, one presumes, a conservative. Many of his musings are decidedly un-conservative – as one might expect from someone so steeped in contemporary academic philosophy. And yet, his “rejection of the idea of essential loneliness… [as] an inherent characteristic of the human condition” must surely lead one in a conservative direction.

While the concept of personhood is central to philosophical conservatism, so is the connectedness of each person to other people within the organic institutions of family, community and nation, each of which of which stretch out beyond ourselves not only in space, but also in time through the traditions that sustain a living culture. 

It is fascinating to see what had happens when philosophy slips the constraints of modernism and post-modernism and drifts, however erratically, back towards eternal truth.

Stella Creasy: Labour’s most interesting Member of Parliament

When it’s well-deserved, there’s nothing wrong in expressing admiration for a political opponent. From a Conservative perspective on the Labour Party, Frank Field obviously tops the list, followed by other decent sorts such as Kate Hoey, Tom Harris, Gisela Stuart and David Lammy. The only downside to such blue-on-red respect is that it is unlikely to do its recipients any favours with their own colleagues.

But perhaps that’s just as well.

An economically-literate and socially conservative Labour Party would be a formidable, indeed unbeatable, opponent. Tony Blair, who created the illusion of such virtues, won three elections – so just imagine what the real deal could achieve.

With this threat in mind, we ought to keep a wary eye on Stella Creasy, one of the few genuine stars in the 2010 intake of Labour MPs. Interviewed by Patrick Wintour in the Guardian, she speaks no end of good sense: 

• "In the next spending review absolutely everything should be on the table and the onus should be not just in the government, but the public, the private sector and the third sector to say where could we work together. We don't need just to switch spending, we need to pool spending.
• "Wasting money is not progressive. When the poorest people in our country pay the most tax, the value for money agenda is a progressive agenda."  

Well known for her campaigns against loan sharks (of the legal and illegal varieties) she is also concerned about another kind of debt – the national debt: 

• "The fact is this year we get a trillion pounds of public debt and if we carry on as we are we are going to hit £1bn a week debt repayments by 2014. I campaign about household debt and loan sharks, but I cannot ignore public debt, and its impact on people in my constituency."  

She also appears to understand that what really counts isn’t how much money we spend on public services, but the effectiveness with which it is spent: 

• "In a way I think the biggest challenge for the left is not going to be money. I think it is going to be control, and being willing to devolve more power to local level, but devolve again and argue: 'If we are going to resolve this you as a user need to have not just more say, but more responsibility.' But I think that is where the public are."  

Even worse, she seems to understand what the Big Society is – or should be – about: 

• "If the Olympics shows anything it shows the number of people volunteering wanting to be part of something, is huge. People feel that like their local areas and families. It's not about the government getting out the way, it's about being partners."  

Obviously, the appropriate Conservative response to all of this is to make sure that it’s our party that takes the lead on all of these issues. But until then, let’s take every opportunity to remind Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper that Stella Creasy stands for everything that they’re most afraid of.

Cameronism: The ghost of an idea

Tom Greeves is a speechwriter and actor, and also that rare beast, a rightwing stand-up comedian. Last year, with his serious hat on, he contributed a provocative article to Total Politics:

• "…I find myself increasingly exasperated at the proliferation of ideas in politics. Everywhere I turn, there is a new think tank, a new pamphlet, a new policy… It’s fiddling while Rome burns.
• "It’s not big ideas that are the problem. Big ideas are vital. Capitalism, democracy, freedom of speech, equality before the law, the nation state – these are great ideas. And they are being squeezed out of the forefront of politicians’ minds by the plethora of small ideas."

One of the small ideas he gave as an example was the Big Society. Arguably, he was wrong to do so. The Big Society is a big idea, or at least it would be if it had been properly developed, rather than being left hanging in the air as a disembodied concept, the ghost of an idea.

The problem with contemporary politics is not too many ideas, but not enough action. In the real world, turning political principles into practical policy takes a huge amount of work. You can’t just talk a reform into existence.

Of course, it’s important that Governments are able to properly communicate their intentions. But things have gone too far. The communicators – i.e. the spin doctors, brand consultants and PR wallahs – are now so central that everything appears to revolve around them and what they do. Thus, within this world, the purpose of an idea is not to provide a plan of action, but something to talk about.

These disembodied concepts – or ‘memes’ as they’re sometimes known – have a tendency to cheapen not only politics, but serious discussion of all kinds. It is a point forcefully made by Evegeny Morozov in a coruscating book review for the New Republic. He’s particularly scathing of the role played by the TED conferences – high profile international gatherings where flashy ideas compete for attention:

• "Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED "ecosystem"—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how ‘ideas worth spreading’ become ‘ideas no footnotes can support.’"

Morozov is a little hard on TED. At their very best, TED conference presentations can be jaw-droppingly brilliant – like this one from Hans Rosling. And yet he is right to condemn the "shrinkage of thought for people too busy to think":

• "Brevity may be the soul of wit, or of lingerie, but it is not the soul of analysis."

Indeed not. When it comes to serious thinking – especially that involved in serious policy making – there can be no shortcuts.

Communism – bad from the beginning

The BNP is usually described in the mainstream media as a party of ‘the extreme right’, ‘the far-right or even just ‘the right’. This annoys people like Dan Hannan who point out that much of the BNP’s policy platform is demonstrably leftwing.

However, the trouble with this is that if the mainstream right did succeed in getting the BNP re-designated as ‘far-left’, the mainstream left might start making excuses for it. After all, can you think of a single far-left intellectual, terrorist or despot that hasn’t had a faithful band of bien pensant groupies?

Of course, things aren’t quite as bad as they used to be – in particular, the inter-war years when Fabian luminaries like George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb went on fawning pilgrimages to Soviet Russia. These days there are fewer apologists for Stalin in the Labour Party. Indeed, for many on the mainstream left, Stalin has become a convenient hate figure – someone who can blamed for leading the revolution astray.

That’s why it’s good to see the record set straight in the New Statesman – the house journal of the British left – where John Gray makes it perfectly clear that the original red tyrants were Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin and Beria. He begins by quoting the semi-repentant Russian revolutionary, Victor Serge: 

• "We revolutionaries, who aimed to create a new society, ‘the broadest democracy of the workers’, had unwittingly, with our own hands, constructed the most terrifying state machine conceivable: and when, with revulsion, we realised this truth, this machine, driven by our friends and comrades, turned on us and crushed us." 

The most famous early example of this machine in an action is the Kronstadt massacre – 

• "…in which thousands of soldiers, sailors and workers were gunned down or captured and executed, following an order signed by Lenin and Trotsky threatening that the rebels would be "shot like rabbits", Serge wrote: "The truth was that emergent totalitarianism had already gone halfway to crushing us. ‘Totalitarianism’ did not yet exist as a word; as an actuality, it began to press hard on us, even without our being aware of it." Contrary to what countless western progressives have insisted, there was no shift from a fundamentally emancipatory regime to one that was essentially repressive. The totalitarian virus did not enter the Soviet state when Stalin took power. It was there right from the start, when Lenin and Trotsky were still in charge." 

The Kronstadt massacre was by no means an isolated incident: 

• "Though [Serge] acknowledges that they "knew that in European Russia alone there were at least fifty centres of peasant insurrection", he hardly mentions the less well-known but far bloodier crushing of the Tambov peasant rebellion of 1920-21, which the Red Army suppressed by torching entire villages and using poison gas to kill off peasants who fled into the forests." 

Reviewing Serge’s memoirs, Gray comes to the following conclusion: 

• "Totalitarian repression was not a regrettable departure from the high ideals of socialist philosophy – an unfortunate error of judgement on the part of the Bolshevik leaders. They had no alternative. Mass terror was a condition of their survival."  

Those phrases "no alternative" and "a condition of their survival" will, not doubt, be seized upon by some as an excuse for Lenin’s crimes (though we can be sure that John Gray does not mean them as such). Ensuring the survival of a dictatorship – of whatever political persuasion – is never an excuse, but a crime in itself.

Edmund Burke, the man

One of the great strengths of British conservatism is its fabulous cast of unlikely heroes and heroines. Examples include Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a Lincolnshire shopkeeper; Winston Churchill, the half-American and sometime-Liberal architect of the early welfare state; and Benjamin Disraeli, a Jewish and dandyish journalist with radical sympathies. But, perhaps, the most unlikely example of them all is Edmund Burke – born Éamon de Búrca – the unmistakably Irish Whig who spent his career railing against the stupidities of 18^th century Toryism.

Much is still written of Burke the writer and philosopher, but all too little about Burke the man. In a magnificent essay for the American Scholar, Brian Doyle reminds us of the extraordinary human being behind the extraordinary intellectual legacy: 

• "In June [1780] a week of riots burst out in London—the Gordon Riots, named for the virulently anti-Catholic Lord George Gordon, who led a mob 50,000 strong to the Houses of Parliament to oppose any measure that would bring relief to Catholic Ireland. The rioters broke into the House of Commons, smashed Catholic churches and chapels, looted Catholic homes, set fire to one prison and opened others to set prisoners free, and attacked the Bank of England… Some 12,000 British Army soldiers were called in, perhaps 500 people died, and the houses of leading Whig politicians were threatened…" 

 

So what did Burke do? Escape to the country? Not quite:

• "…[he] spent several nights standing guard at his friends’ houses, and then, after having their books and possessions moved from their own house, set forth ‘in the street amidst this wild assembly, into whose hands I deliverd myself, informing them who I was. Some of them were malignant and fanatical, but I think the far greater part　… were rather dissolute and unruly than very illdisposd. I even found friends and well wishers amongst [them]…’
• "…This was no mere chaotic street protest—people were roasted to death, beaten to death, shot to death, for being Catholic, or sympathetic to Catholics—and no more identifiable pro-Catholic figure existed in the epicenter of the riot than Mr. Edmund Burke. He was 51 years old that year, portly, bespectacled, unarmed, and infamous, the very man the mob wanted to injure or worse…
• "The brass of the man, the confidence that his voice and his courage, his belief in the strait line of what was right, would see him through!"

Close to the end of his life, Burke said this of himself:

• "The Storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth!"

Thankfully, this is one of the few things he was wrong about. Far from being an uprooted oak, his life and work is the soil in which true conservatism is still rooted today.

Should conservatives care about fairness?

We’ll begin today with a story, which though unverifiable and quite possibly apocryphal nevertheless makes an important point.

Many years ago, a number of senior Conservatives met to discuss the Party’s ‘narrative’ – the essential message running through everything it said. The market research people reviewed their latest findings, recommending that the narrative should focus on fairness – because no other idea spoke so powerfully to the concerns of ordinary voters.

There was much agreement in the room – until, that is, one of those present (one of the very few whose opinion actually mattered) spoke up: "The Conservative Party isn’t really about fairness." Even in those far-off days, when men were men and Tories were Tories, this intervention caused some disquiet. "So what are we about, then?" asked an exasperated official (after the meeting and at a safe distance), "unfairness?"

Whether on the right or the left, fairness has become a central theme in contemporary politics. But might the contrarians be right? Is there a fundamental flaw in the politics of fairness? Writing for the New Yorker, James Surowiecki certainly thinks so – and cites the Eurozone crisis as a prime example:

• "Rationally… this standoff should end with a compromise… But the catch is that Europe isn’t arguing just about what the most sensible economic policy is. It’s arguing about what is fair. German voters and politicians think it’s unfair to ask Germany to continue to foot the bill for countries that lived beyond their means… But Greek voters are equally certain that it’s unfair for them to suffer years of… high unemployment in order to repay foreign banks and richer northern neighbors, which have reaped outsized benefits from closer European integration." 

Surowiecki argues that "we care so much about fairness that we are often willing to sacrifice economic well-being to enforce it.":

• "Behavioral economists have shown that a sizable percentage of people are willing to pay real money to punish people who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to insure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer." 

Even worse, fairness is a notoriously subjective concept. As human beings, we tend to discount what pains other people, while exaggerating the importance of our own sensitivities – a phenomenon known as "self-serving bias".

In this respect, the 'politics of fairness' isn’t so very different from the 'politics of envy' – which should surely prompt conservatives to seek alternatives. For instance, there is the ‘politics of justice’, in which the rights and responsibilities of each participant are clearly understood – whether in the specific terms of a legal contract or the more general terms of a social contract. Then there is the ‘politics of service’, in which institutions are created and upheld so that people may freelly put the needs of others before their own.

Unfortunately, the Eurozone is about neither justice nor service – but self-service on a truly terrifying scale.

What it means to be a conservative

We live in a time of financial crisis.

Understandably, the focus is on how to get out of it, but we also need to ask how we got into it. A pretty good answer is too much debt. In fact, unsustainable borrowing provides a universal explanation for just about every aspect of our economic troubles – from the credit crunch to the Eurozone debacle.

But why did we borrow so much in the first place? The standard answer to that one is that we didn’t have enough money of our own, which provokes a further set of questions as to why this should be. Certainly, there’s a very interesting economic debate to be had here, but in a way it’s avoiding the real issue.

You see, the real explanation as to why we borrowed so much money, is not that we didn’t have enough of our own – it’s that instead of adjusting our consumption to our means we decided to make future generations pick up the bill.

There's an excellent exploration of this issue in a recent lecture given by David Willetts:

• “The classical political tradition assumes a static world without economic growth. But if there is growth you can argue that the next generation is going to be better off than us and so our obligation to help them is weakened. We can load more obligations onto future generations confident they can take the burden. I do not agree with this approach. Disraeli was right when he criticised an opponent because “He seems to think posterity is a pack-horse, always ready to be loaded.” Politics falls into disrepute when citizens think Governments are just shifting problems out into the future and never tackling them today.”

The pack-horse politics that Disraeli condemned has wormed its way into almost every aspect of policy making, not just economic policy. Furthermore it’s not just the preserve of the spendthrift left. Some on the right can be heard excusing social and environmental irresponsibility on the grounds that future generations will be in a much better position to deal with the problem than we are.

Willetts exposes the essential depravity of such thinking:

• We can hope that future generations will be richer than us but this does not excuse us from our obligation to them. We enjoy the fruits of investment by earlier generations who were poorer than us and we have a similar obligation to generations coming after us. The Victorians did not build their sewers and public buildings out of cheap plaster because we would be richer than them and could afford to do our own rebuilding. Instead they built for future generations despite hoping that future would be richer than them. As the African proverb has it, “The world was not left to us by our parents. It was lent to us by our children.”

This is what it means to be responsible. This is what it means to be a conservative.

Congressman Jeff Fortenberry: Big Society Republican

When British Conservatives look across the Atlantic for inspiration, which country do they have in mind? These days, it’s more likely to be Stephen Harper’s Canada than the USA.

The Republican Party does have some followers on this side of the pond, but for the most part they’ve greeted the GOP’s choice of Presidential candidate with relief rather than excitement. It’s not like anyone’s saying: “if only we had some of that Romney magic over here.” As for Romney’s rivals, the reaction of most British observers is one of horror.

But, for proper Burkean conservatives at least, there is an interesting, if obscure, alternative. His name is Jeff Fortenberry, a four-time congressman from Nebraska. Unlike most of his Republican colleagues, he has refused to sign a pledge never to raise taxes. But in doing so, he shows how conservatives can make a low tax message relevant to ordinary working people. Here he is in an interview with Rod Dreher of the American Conservative:

• “My responsibility is to make judgments about hard, complex issues that I believe to be right. Simply looking at the status quo and suggesting that the tax code is sacrosanct and can never change, and that decisions made in the ’80s and ’90s can never change, is absurd. The tax code is weighted toward the ultra-wealthy and ultra-wealthy corporations, and has created an offshore aristocracy of people who can afford to hire an army of accountants and lawyers. This shifts the tax burden to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and others. I don’t want to see taxes go up on any hardworking American. We need a simpler, fairer tax code. Removing special-interest loopholes could potentially increase revenues and allow for lower rates.”

Here’s the same, authentic conservatism on the banking crisis:

• “We can have systems that are small and local and efficient, or big and unaccountable. Take our financial system. We went through a horrific financial crisis because of a lack of accountability, a lack of ethics, and a lack of proper regulatory oversight. We had corporations so big nobody had any understanding of what was in the portfolio. I compare that to what happened in Nebraska. We had hardly any banks with problems, because they’re main-street banks. They’re small banks. They work with the farmer, the small retailer, the entrepreneur. They understand their business model, and they are responsible. They don’t take inordinate financial risks. When you have a system that’s so big that no one can fully understand it, you’ve got a system that’s not only too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed.”

There are obvious similarities between Fortenberry’s brand of conservatism and much of what the British Conservative Party stands for. The Congressman may not be America’s most famous politician, but anyone who can sell the Big Society to the plain-speaking folk of Nebraska is worth listening to.

The trouble with liberalism

Politics is full of slippery words, but none is harder to pin down than ‘liberal’. In America, to be a liberal is to be on the left of the political spectrum; in many parts of Europe, the opposite is the case. In Britain, it all depends on which words you use in combination with 'liberal' and whether or not you capitalise the initial letters. Most perplexing of all is Denmark, where the Liberals are the main party of the centre-right, but whose name in Danish – Venstre – literally means ‘Left’.

But if the terminology is confusing, then the ideology is even worse. Because, as Wilfred McClay explains in a brilliant essay for First Things, the philosophy of liberalism is riven with contradictions:

• "…there are two basic ways we can understand liberalism. The first, and older… is above all a doctrine upholding the independence and supreme value of the individual person as a free agent who bears fundamental rights that exist prior to and independently of government…" 

The second and newer kind of liberalism "saw the achievement of a high degree of equality as the essential precondition for the exercise of any meaningful political liberty":

• "The goal of [this kind of] liberalism… was still ultimately about the establishment of a society of free and equal citizens. But the means of achieving that goal were changing dramatically. Thus began the transformation of what had been a philosophy of limited government into a philosophy of expansive and activist government…" 

Crucially, the first kind of liberalism still survives in the form of a "fundamental commitment to the ideal of the autonomous self, boundless in its desires, and the self-legitimating creator of its own values." Thus we live in a world of "bureaucratic individualism" – a "logic-defying hybrid" composd of an anything-goes "personal realm" and an "organisational realm" dominated by the centralised state:

• "Such a bifurcation… has had a terrible effect on our common life. There is surely by now ample reason to believe that our growing culture of government entitlements supported by an ever-enlarging national state engenders not the positive sense of freedom and self-mastery that would enable active participation and republican citizenship but a culture of sullen and suspicious dependency, of bitter ingratitude and crippling moral nihilism. In the years of public austerity that likely lie ahead, this will probably only get worse…"

Anyone who thinks that the idea of the Big Society (or whatever you wish to call it) is irrelevant, should consider just where our existing model of society is heading. (Hint: handcarts may be involved).

The banal truth about the French election

British observers of the French presidential contest don’t seem overly impressed by the choice on offer. John Kay is no exception, but expresses his disillusion with more elegance than most:

• “Mr Sarkozy supports retirement at 62: Mr Hollande thinks 60 appropriate. Mr Sarkozy was elected on a programme of reform, and retirement at 62 proved its most controversial – indeed almost its only – measure.
• “France’s social democracy is not really participative and its government is not really contested. Whoever is elected, economic management and control of public services remain in the hands of a homogenous cadre. In the postwar era, senior politicians (regardless of party), civil servants and the top management of most large French businesses have been drawn from a single elite class, selected through a rigorous meritocratic process, mostly implemented through France’s grandes écoles. Mr Sarkozy was in these terms an outsider, but Mr Hollande represents reversion to type.”

Kay sums up his misgivings with the observation that…

• “…the two candidates are, first and foremost, French…”

Unavoidably so, but there is a more important issue here:

• “Although Mr Sarkozy is the candidate of the right and Mr Hollande is from the left, the views and policies of competing political candidates in each western democracy are in many respects closer to each other than they are to those of parties of the left or right in other countries… if you sat down with leading politicians of the same nationality in private you would hear similar descriptions of issues, problems and plans.”

In truth, the degree of political covergence within individual nations varies rather more than Kay’s words would suggest, but his fundamental point (that differences between nations are more important) is a good one – and especially relevant to those nations trying to run a single currency together.

In fact, the most important effect of a change of leadership in France would be to bring differences over the Eurozone out into the open:

• [Nicolas Sarkozy] is not interested in detail and Angela Merkel is interested in nothing else. This fundamental difference has permitted a convenient alliance in which the French president can declare his country’s determination to do whatever it takes and the German chancellor can implement her intention that her country should do as little as possible. Such an accommodation is unlikely to survive under a president with a longer attention span.”