Bats aren’t bugs, II: Goldberg Variation

Jonah Goldberg wishes liberals were more interested in ideas, specifically the history of their own ideas. He wishes they were less ‘intellectually deracinated’; more like conservatives:

Read conservative publications or attend conservative conferences and there will almost always be at least some mention of our intellectual forefathers and often a spirited debate about them. The same goes for Libertarians, at least that branch which can be called a part or partner of the conservative movement.

By contrast:

Ask a liberal about his tradition and he will talk about deeds and efforts to remedy injustice, not ideas. This is in keeping with the legacy of William James’ preference for action over thought, though I doubt most liberals know or care that this is so (while I can think of no conservative who wouldn’t be jazzed to be told his idea was “Hayekian” or “Burkean”). This is a huge tactical advantage for liberals in political battles because they can disown old ideas in ways we cannot.

That was a month ago. Since then, Mark “the Decembrist” Schmitt has taken these anti-liberal allegations as the occasion for what promises to be an interesting series at TAP. Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum have been trying to help, politely but firmly. And Jonah gets letters, he gets letters. From liberals. Here he sits, scraping the bottom of the email barrel.

Liberals condemn themselves to repeating their mistakes by not knowing their history – even, it turns out, when it’s a month old.

It is a sign of the arrogance of liberals that they brag – as so many have done in their emails – that they don’t “need to know what to believe” or to know history or to have a philosophy or to, in effect, know their homework. They simply know what’s right … It is also a sign of the triumph of two strains in liberal intellectual history converging: pragmatism and intellectual radicalism (by which I mean critical legal studies and the like). Both schools of thought reject the notion that “dogma” and “tradition” are useful sources of knowledge or morality, respectively.

Thus:

Their biggest problem is they don’t have a philosophy. This causes a lack of organization. This causes a lack of popular ideas. This is why the Democratic Party defines itself in such reactionary terms – blocking Republicans, creating lockboxes, yelling “stop” and “no” a la Al Gore and so on.

Four theses to be considered:

1) Liberals don’t know their own intellectual history.
2) Liberals don’t have a philosophy.
3) Liberalism is an arrogant, intellectually flabby, feeling-based pragmatism crossed with a strain of intellectual radicalism.
4) Liberalism is strangely reactionary.

And the correct responses are:

1) Confused; maybe a grain of truth. A mistake worth making for educational purposes.
2) Weirdly false.
3) A ‘bats are bugs’ moment for the record books.
4) Oddly, a mix of 3 and 1. (Wouldn’t have thought that was possible.)

And the explanations for these correct responses:

1) Liberals don’t know their own intellectual history. Jacob Levy makes the necessary points in response much better than I would have (and just in the nick of time, before I made a botch of it.) Basically, there isn’t any natural presumption that students of Rawls, say, should be up on their Croly. Yes, two forms of ‘liberalism’, but surprisingly genealogically distinct. Lots of quite different things get called ‘liberalism’.

I would more strongly emphasize one point Jacob makes. Goldberg knows, I am sure, that ‘liberal’ is one of those terms with so many senses it’s a wonder anyone does anything with this tool except cut themselves on it. Goldberg slices himself something fierce. He uses ‘liberal’ to denote everyone to the left of the Republican party. This is ‘libruhl’, in the pejorative sense, much beloved of right-wing talk radio, not remotely analytically useful. For example, ‘critical legal studies’ – which Goldberg touches on, by way of allegedly getting in touch with one tributary of the liberal stream – is not any sort of liberalism. Critical legal studies has its intellectual roots in all that post-structural, post-modern, post-Marxist continental stuff. (See this randomly googled up page, for example. I have no idea whether it is great shakes, but a long list of the influences on critical legal studies mentions not a single liberal figure or source, which tells you the thing is maybe not paradigmatically liberal.)

If you simply can’t bear not to lump everyone to the left of the Republican party together, at least don’t be surprised when all these folks who don’t have a lot in common haven’t heard of each other. Why should they?

2) Liberals don’t have a philosophy. Wow. Knew the term was slippery. Never actually seen it leap out of anyone’s hand like that and just cut the throat. Clean. Thing of beauty, if you like that sort of thing.

The implied claim that J.S. Mill, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, so forth, don’t have ‘philosophies’ is bizarre and false. So 2) is just a weird, weird thing to say, and not even the fact that Goldberg repeatedly says he is overgeneralizing to make a point explains it, because what’s the point of saying something so bizarre and false? I guess he is thinking something like: leftism is fairly intellectually bankrupt. Well, we’ll file that under thesis 3) and get to it in a moment. Maybe he is saying that the Democratic party is not all fired up with ideas at the moment. They are reacting to conservatives. Which is sort of true, because the conservatives are a bunch of radical hotheads, so someone needs to be doing some conserving around the place. Liberals are the Burkeans of the welfare state, ironically. We’ll file this under thesis 4) and get back to it.

Yglesias interprets Goldberg as offended by the intellectually unpretentious, roll-up-the-sleeves small-p pragmatical practicality of contemporary liberalism. It isn’t bold and grand and exciting enough. Some of what Goldberg says seems to fit with this. I remember Henry posted about this strain of contemporary conservatism some time back – sort of antsy and excitable and easily bored and in need of spectacle and stimulation. Burke the man was supposedly that way. But Burkean philosophy is notably not in favor of such things. Well, I dunno whether this is Goldberg’s thing.

The point could be that there is no significant liberal overlapping philosophical consensus (as a Rawlsian might say.) I don’t really see that there is a terrible failing in this area – I mean, more than usual; folks always disagree. There is significant consensus, from the tip-tops of the ivory towers on down, that the modern, liberal-democratic welfare state is a good thing and that we don’t need a fundamentally different form of government. That’s liberal consensus.

I think Goldberg is here again seriously hampered by his tendency to call too many things ‘liberal’. Since a lot of the thinkers he thinks are ‘liberals’ aren’t, it is no surprise that there is no liberal consensus that includes them.

But moving along, the thing that is truly weird about saying ‘liberals don’t have a philosophy’ is that it calls forth the contrary thought ‘so conservatives have a philosophy,’ which is – in my private but highly considered opinion – one of the very last thoughts a sane and prudent conservative thinker should want to spur in his or her audience. There is of course such a thing as conservative political philosophy. Would not dream of denying it. Nevertheless, philosophically speaking, contemporary conservatism is a doctrinal dog’s breakfast and a very poor advertisement for conservatism as a general outlook or temperament. (I exempt libertarianism, which is highly philosophical and admirably coherent, from this complaint.)

Contemporary conservatism looks a lot less bad a couple levels up from anything you might call ‘philosophy’. And so, young man, if you wish to make a respectable mark as a conservative mind, by all means pursue policy wonkery and conceal the odd tangle that is your ideological root system in a forest of mid-level factual detail.

This will, of course, be regarded as grave slander by conservatives. Well, I’ll just link my posts on the subject. You decide. I have argued the case at inadvisable length here, taking Goldberg’s colleague, David Frum, to task when he tried to get philosophical. Then I sort of tied up the frayed ends here. (The latter link contains a handy link to a PDF version of the first, really really long post.)

I make a short, sharp point here. And got some good comments. Basically, being in favor of ‘go, go!’ dynamist capitalist creative destruction while standing athwart the train of history, yelling ‘stop’ … is silly. But this is the circle you’ve got to square.

Then there is this point that conservatives, like Goldberg, who see conservatism as a temperament are left without a justification for being conservative, because temperaments are not properly reason-giving.

Not that my posts are enough coffin nails, I admit. And not that philosophical conservatism is hopeless. Not that there isn’t something wise and essential about the conservative temperament. I follow Mill and Trilling in saying so. But I do think Trilling was right when he wrote, in 1949:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Yes, the National Review started up right after Trilling wrote that. And Russell Kirk. Yeah, so maybe Trilling’s snark stopped being true for a time. But it’s true enough today. Because Jonah Goldberg is not going to be standing athwart any trains of history, yelling ‘stop’ anytime soon. (He hates it when Democrats yell ‘stop’. He’s not about to start.) And he is not any orthodox Kirkian, and I don’t see that he’s a coherently unorthodox sort either.

Let’s move on to the next point, which will allow me to develop some of these others.

3) Liberalism is an arrogant, intellectually flabby, feeling-based pragmatism crossed with a strain of intellectual radicalism.

Okey. Now the going gets strange. Despite the fact that I’m a liberal I remember – it was a whole year ago – how Goldberg, in his wisdom, dismissed the strict need to pursue consistency in arguments about ideas. Let’s start with that comparatively recent event in intellectual history.

Here’s how it went. Radley Balko caught Goldberg out on an inconsistency. Goldberg admitted it but slipped the snare neatly: “I’m sure my position will force me into uncomfortable arguments sometimes, including alas inconsistent ones. But as I’ve written before consistency is often a red-herring.” Guess that showed Balko.

You can scroll up that page and read all the bits where Goldberg elaborated and qualified his position over the next day or so. Basically, he settled on the view that it’s OK to be inconsistent, so long as you think that – on some level – you are right. No inconsistency can be true, of course, but this “doesn’t mean conservative inconsistency makes us wrong, it just means we have to defend our inconsistency better.” Not resolve it, please note. Defend it. Even though it can’t be true. It’s a Russell Kirk thing, you see: “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence.”

But since you can’t be just go blurting ‘I have an affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence’ at the tail end of all your self-contradictions – eventually it would cause breathing problems, which would only compound the thinking problems – you need to get yourself some intellectual forefathers. Goldberg is right, I think, that conservatives are quicker with tags like ‘Burkean’ and ‘Hayekian’ than liberals are with corresponding tags. But I don’t think this is indicative of conservative intellectual rigor. The tags have legitimate intellectual employments, to be sure, but they are also suspiciously handy crutches for logically weak legs. If you are going to be asserting logical falsehoods a lot, as Goldberg freely admits he will be, you need to be able to make it sound more high-toned, like so: ‘The Burkean wisdom of P … blah, blah, blah … The compelling Hayekian insight that -P.’ The way to defend contradictions ‘better’ is to be well versed in suitable material for constructing arguments from authority. Of course, if your interlocutor has even a short term memory for intellectual history, you may be caught out in the fallacious attempt. But it’s worth a try. [Not that Burke and Hayek are exactly opposites. I’m just following up on Goldberg’s own examples. Burke and Hayek disagree about a thing or two, so it is perfectly possible for B to say P and H to say -P.]

The alternative would be to try and figure out which of the contradictory ideas was false. But this is not an option available to conservatives. Goldberg grouses that it is only liberals who enjoy this ‘tactical advantage’ of being able to ‘disown old ideas in ways we [conservatives] cannot’. (But if you think about it – and I do recommend the practice – the ability to disown old ideas, i.e. admit past errors, is actually a prerequisite for basic intellectual hygiene. I’m sure Goldberg would admit as much in a different mood.)

And this arrogant liberal trick of admitting we are fallible, illicit as it may seem, is nothing compared to the trick employed by conservatives: being able to disown any ideas whatsoever, without giving up on them, in ways we liberals cannot. For in the kingdom of ideas, you are what you imply. But conservatives, with their Goldberg-granted license to self-contradict, are free to stipulate away inconvenient implications by the Kirkian power of ‘the mystery of human existence’. But this amounts to stipulating away the ideas themselves, which cannot actually be separated from their implications. Irritable gestures, looks like to me.

What will Goldberg say to this? First, he will protest that he is not a knee-jerk irrationalist. He thinks consistency is important, but he has a rich appreciation of how life is complicated and general principles often step on each other’s toes. So inconsistency is OK. In short, he is a pragmatist. (The other possible things he might be, leading to so much flagrant self-contradiction, are: idiot, mystic, madman, liar and hypocrite. So I think I’m being quite charitable.)

But if the abiding virtue of conservatism is, at bottom, pragmatism, how can pragmatism also be the abiding vice of liberalism, as Goldberg claims? Hmm, yes?

Come to think of it, it’s a little hard to believe that “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” is anything but a feeling you feel when you feel a feeling that feels deeply right, but you can’t quite say why it isn’t a contradiction. So we should add: a feelings-based pragmatism is the abiding virtue of conservatism, according to Goldberg.

And although it is possible to devise flabbier forms of pragmatism, Goldberg’s version is pretty flabby. Any form of pragmatism that affirms contradictions, rather than attempting to resolve them rationally, is flabby in my opinion.

And Goldberg often describes himself as an elitist, and I think claiming to be elite on the basis of nothing better than flabby feelings is pretty arrogant.

I infer that the following is a fair sketch of Goldberg’s projected conservative philosophy: an arrogant, intellectually flabby, feeling-based pragmatism crossed with a strain of intellectual radicalism. In short, he is a liberal. (Except that this isn’t a very good description of liberalism, which isn’t essentially a species of pragmatism at all.)

I haven’t gotten to the bit about Goldberg’s intellectual radicalism.

4) Liberalism is strangely reactionary.

This is really the start of another post, rather than a proper conclusion for this one. Anyway, whenever anyone starts accusing liberals of being reactionaries, I am reminded of a passage from Frum’s book, Dead Right.

He talks about how in the halcyon Reagan years “we thought about policy and elections so hard that we seldom stopped to think about philosophy … we learned to limit our own speculations to what the balance of political forces at that particular moment declared feasible; we wrote articles as if they were memoranda to the president, banning the not immediately practical from our discourse.” There is a paradox in this notion of impractical, speculative conservatism, if I make no mistake.

But at some point the flip was indeed made. Liberals are more conservative than conservatives, these days. Liberals are Burkeans of the welfare state. Whereas the Burkeans have all turned Jacobins, wild-eyed radicals. Hence Goldberg’s frustration at liberal reactionaries, always standing athwart the train of history, shouting ‘stop’. I quote again:

The Democratic Party defines itself in such reactionary terms – blocking Republicans, creating lockboxes, yelling “stop” and “no” a la Al Gore and so on.

As a conservative, he can’t abide such counter-revolutionary obstructionism.

I do realize that Goldberg himself is aware of at least some of these ironies. Whole thing is very confusing.