Ammo For The Battle Of Ideas

DON’T get too excited about the extra congressional seats for red states, warns Jonah Goldberg. In red states like Texas, some of those new districts will end up as Democratic and Hispanic. In fact, he says, conservatives shouldn’t rely on demographics to solve their political problems. “The only way for the GOP to make real progress toward becoming a majority party is by making and winning arguments.”

Among the best arguments being made right now is Deirdre McCloskey’s is making in her mammoth Bourgeois Cycle. First she published The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, a full frontal argument for the virtues, all seven of them. We should abandon the rage for the One Good “as maximum utility, or as the categorical imperative, or as the Idea of the Good,” and especially the modern rage for Prudence Only. We should embrace, in all their complexity, the four pagan virtues: not just Prudence, but Temperance, Courage, and Justice. And then reach out to the Christian virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.

You can see the grand strategy here. You take a dirty word like “bourgeois” and unfashionable “virtue” and combine them into a fighting manifesto. Then you up the ante for volume two.

Just in time for Christmas, McCloskey has delivered the second installment of the Bourgeois Cycle. It’s called Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. In Volume Two McCloskey argues that the Great Fact of modern prosperity comes down to one thing. People stopped sneering at bourgeois merchants. (Very possibly, but bourgeois dignity, dahling?)

More or less suddenly the Dutch and British and then the Americans and French began talking about the middle class... as though it were dignified and free. The result was modern economic growth.

And just in case you weren’t paying attention, we are talking about growth from $3 per day production and consumption in 1800 to, in the US, $120 per day, or 40 times the wealth in 1800.

OK, let’s forget 1800. Let’s look at the great economic story of today. No, we are not talking about the Great Recession. Writes McCloskey.

The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth.

We are not talking about the Chinese and the Indians struggling to a modest prosperity a generation later, we are talking about explosive growth starting the very next day—the day after the ruling class lifted the Maoist totalitarian controls and the Fabian-inspired “license Raj.”

The rest of Bourgeois Dignity is devoted to refutation of other explanations for the Industrial Revolution explosion. No it wasn’t the Protestant Ethic, for Catholic businessmen are just as purposeful as Protestant businessmen; it wasn’t the exploitation of the workers, for you don’t increase prosperity by 40 times for everyone including the exploited workers by reducing the food intake of the workers from $3 per day to $2 per day. It wasn’t the profits from the slave trade, or the enclosure movement, or favorable geography, or extraordinary thriftiness, or even property rights. No, argues McCloskey, none of that can explain an explosion in wealth of 40 times. What creates the explosion in wealth was

stumbled into by the United Provinces in the seventeenth century, and then by the United Kingdom imitating the bourgeois Dutch in the eighteenth century. The external effects thus revealed were a new dignity for the bourgeoisie in its dealings and a new liberty for the bourgeoisie to innovate in economic affairs.

All of a sudden it became a Good Thing to innovate and risk creative destruction, and the ruling class got stripped of its age-old power to strangle new ideas in their cradles. The result was unimagined prosperity for everyone, from the richest to the poorest.

In the battle of ideas we depend on thinkers like Deirdre McCloskey—a libertarian progressive—and her encyclopedic knowledge of economics, history, culture, and the post-1958 school of virtue ethics. We need people with the courage to fling down a reckless challenge, as she does at the beginning of The Bourgeois Virtues:

My implied readers are... the “clerisy,” opinion makers and opinion takers... the readers of the New York Times or Le Monde... [who think] that “bourgeois virtues” is an oxymoron on the level of “military intelligence” or “academic administration.”

She wants to shock our liberal friends so they never think of “bourgeois,” or “virtue,” or “dignity” in the old way ever again.

We conservatives have a parallel agenda. We want an America where no liberal would dare to misunderestimate conservative ideas or conservative thinkers ever again. That America is not yet. But with manna from Deirdre McCloskey and a few more like her we will get to the Promised Land.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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