True Liberalism Is Conservative

Posted by James Bowery on Friday, 27 January 2006 17:40.

The question has been asked, “What the hell is a right-wing liberal?”

There is an answer to that question.

In its original form from the Enlightenment, liberalism meant human experimentation (e.g.: “laboratory of the States”) but experimentation requires experimental controls. Therefore the prime cause for concern was not that there be agreement between parties but that disagreeing parties find ways to separate from one another to form experimental groups, allowing control groups to preserve older ways. The Age of Exploration was therefore consequent to the Enlightenment.

Most serious experiments, social or technological or both, that people are conducting or wish to conduct, are being subjected to world-wide jurisdiction by normative institutions. The conflict is over the experiments allowed or disallowed.

This is a legitimate concern as the globe becomes smaller due to transport and communications technologies. Preemptive controls will increasingly impose on all aspects of life for security’s sake. Liberty will dissipate just as it has been with the increase of all forms of centralized control. Soon there will be no more experiments in social forms save those dictated by the sort of individuals attracted to the centers of power, hence the only legacy of humanity will be the destruction of the planet.

The solution is to make the globe bigger and leave earth to the true control groups.

Humanity must find ways of dispersing life to lifeless environments, there to take up residence and leave the earth to the true conservatives—perhaps limited to hunting and gathering with stone-age technology. Anything else would continue the destruction of vital control groups while depriving humanity of the liberty to conduct its experiments.

The real question of legitimate use of central power isn’t over whether to allow this or that experiment but whether the central power is doing everything in its power to disperse life itself.

By this criterion there is not a single legitimate central point of power in the world, but the worst offenders of all are those nations of European diaspora who are destroying their pioneering heritage with supposed “liberal” politics by dictating the social experiments that are politically correct for those pioneering populations.

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Comments:

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 27 Jan 2006 20:02 | #

Alex, Conservatism is not something one merely bumps into while jawing with folks who, for example, like “the market”. A full-bore, bred-in-the-bone Conservative is a very High Church character indeed, with a deep and instinctual respect for tradition and the moral order garlanded, probably, by the philosophy of Plato and the music of Purcell and Bach. He is a great rarity, and has been increasingly so since Peel assumed the role of undertaker to the Party.

Really, the market-enthusiast of modern times is a lost little economic libertarian. For the moral order he has, instead, whatever principles are general abroad at the time. He has no fixed position on anything except the need to pursue power through relevancy. If it is expedient it is policy.

In other words, there is nothing he would conserve for its own sake. He is a captured creature and his captors are ambition and modernity.

It is no good peering into the moral murk of the liberal milieu. There are no true Conservatives to be found in its midst. Conservatism existed before all this degenerate horror into which we have been born. If it exists at all now it does so as a jilted bride, a slightly mad Miss Hathaway of the political past moaning about Reform and the urban poor of the Age of Steam.

Sorry to sound so grim but you might as well get the message full-strength. A revitalisation of Conservatism today would be revolutionary, for the liberal zeitgeist in its entirety must first be overthrown.

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:31 | #

Obviously, I think it goes deeper than that to the very nature of man as a technological animal. Technology cannot be divorced from morality or culture. The reason technology and morality and culture itself became part of human nature was the _rapid_ dispersion of humanity to frontier habitats. It was not enough for humans to evolve a fur coat to keep them warm, faster gate for hunting nor even better aim at throwing (although this is starting to get there since it may have increased brain mass).

The key to understanding human nature is to understand that morality is the way we pass from generation to generation the technological adaptations we use to survive outside habitats benign to our lower animal nature.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 27 Jan 2006 22:02 | #

Well, James, Conservatism is generally considered to have twitched into life with the benign kingship of Henry VII, a view with which I concurr. That dates it post-1485 - not exactly a Darwinian leap from where we stand now.

It is not morality, of course, but respect for morality, made political. The particular morality it most respects is that which is grounded in our natures, for such is unchanging. Conservatism worships at the very alter of the unchanging. It has nothing to do with freedom in a liberal sense, right or left. It is, however, convinced that freedom should attend the individual who is properly secured in a peaceful and stable polity.

This, then, simply does not mesh with the political milieu of our times, the very purpose of which is to confront whatever is stable and put an end to it if possible. Liberalism is the supposed sweeping away of limits. But its action is, in fact, to cripple Man and it is, therefore, a toxin to Conservative ways. This is why the two do not co-exist, and why in our thoroughly Liberal universe there is no Conservatism.

“The market” is just not it.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Fri, 27 Jan 2006 22:33 | #

I tend to make gurgling noizses and go down for the third time when the subject turns to philosophy, but if you look at Pitt and Liverpool’s governments they combined economic literacy and respect for the market with an understanding that the market wasn’t all there was to it. Rothschild was the richest man in Britain in Liverpool’s time, as well as the cleverest financier, but Liverpool ignored his views on both international trade (he opposed the Corn laws) and finance (he opposed the Gold Standard) because the theoretical market ideal wasn’t as important as the stability of British agriculture, the British life patterns and above all the British social system. A world in which wheat, foreign currency and everything else were controlled from trading desks was NOT what Liverpool wanted, and he made sure he didn’t get it.

Globalisation/Washington Consensus, which today is passed off as liberalism, is in fact a bastardised form of social democracy, not very democratic, in which benign bureaucrats control everything significant, and economic activity is reduced to flashing screens operated by teenage werewolves—and not controlled by anyone at all, but simply allowed to explode into random damaging bubbles.

Communism, in the sense of a system where the government controls everything and people have no choices about how they live their lives, did not die in 1991; it simply went underground and changed its terminology. It remains a MUCH more serious danger to our civilisation than Islam.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:02 | #

Guessedworker writes: Well, James, Conservatism is generally considered to have twitched into life with the benign kingship of Henry VII, a view with which I concurr… Conservatism worships at the very alter of the unchanging.

One would imagine then that Henry VII had some sort of conservationist program to preserve natural wilderness areas and the very acient relations between Britons and those wildernesses.

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:23 | #

King Henry VII is probably remembered not for wilderness conservation efforts and the rationale for such a policy would have been unfathomable to people of his era. He was, however, responsible for building up England’s naval might - a shipbuilding achievement which of course required the felling of very many trees.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:24 | #

His programme was to unite the warring factions of York and Lancaster, recover his finances, reign in the troublesome barony, avoid unnecessary foreign entanglements and allow a trading class to prosper free of fear of state extortion. As programmes went in the late middle ages, that was pretty novel. It entrenched stability and bestowed some limited freedoms upon the trading class.

As far as I know, he ate organic and was not a user of pesticides. His predecessor, Henry V, was a greater sinner in that respect, though he confined himself for the most part to killing pests in France.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:20 | #

allow a trading class to prosper free of fear of state extortion.

What was Henry VII’s tax base?

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:31 | #

Henry VII believed in high trade and low taxes, being thus 250 years ahead of his time. He also didn’t start wars, which kept expenses down. He was unpopular with the baronage because he quelled them, and extorted fines for keeping retainers etc. thus building royal revenues and reducing the baronial threat simulataneously. He also invented the Justices of the Peace, local magistrates who protected the middle class from baronial harassment.

By the standards of any government before Walpole, anywhere in the world, he was about as good for the trading classes and the middle class in general as it ever got.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 04:26 | #

When I ask “What was Henry VII’s tax base” I’m asking what kind of taxes he raised: Sales? Income? Asset? Inheritance?

A tax on retainers of barons sounds a bit like my proposal to tax wealth beyond subsistence. The consequence of such a tax would be similar in that the retainers would tend to become yeomen rather than mere retainers. Their independence from the barons would make it more difficult for the barons to run around with a standing army extorting from other yeomen.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 04:54 | #

Essentially Henry’s extractions from the baronage were a wealth beyond subsistence tax, yes. No stst then, so his Chancellor, Archbishop Morton, invented “Morton’s Fork.” If you splashed money around, that provesd you were rich. If you lived quietly, given the amonunt of land and other visible assets you had, you must have saved huge wealth. Primitive but effective—which is why henry VII’s tax collectors, Empson and Dudley, were executed by Henry VIII, to curry favor with the baronage (Henry VIII was an economic illiterate and over time abandoned most of Henry VII’s reforms.)

Trade was subject to customs duties, which is why Henry encouraged it, with trade treaties, etc. as well as lower rates and better administration. The more trade, the more duties! The other forms of tax were mostly land based, and traditional in form; Henry VII just administered them better and stamped on both extortion and corruption, which ahd been endemic

Posted by Geoff Beck (aka Leslie) on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 05:40 | #

Good point about the corn laws, that was after the war of the Roses, right?

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 06:49 | #

Damn,I love this-I make a query-“what the hell is a right-wing liberal”,and it becomes a topic for discussion by every P[illed]H[igher and]D[eeper] wannabee out there.Results-at least a 3 credit-hour course in Medival English history.Don’t get me wrong ,guys—I’m learning more here than I did in college.No wonder it hasn’t been invaded by"others”-there are some great people on this blog-Mark convinced me-I’m a right-wing liberal[and didn’t know HenryVII] LOL

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:10 | #

I pose a question-knowing tht left/right came from the seating arangements in the British Parliment—how was [and when]Conservitive/Liberal attached to the respective locations? As with everything else on this blog-I’LL GET ANOTHER 3 CREDIT HOUR COURSE. LOL

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:29 | #

Martin Hutchison-Your insights on Globalism and Communism are like seeing my worst dreams being validated.Your portrayal of these active factions in todays world need far more exposure-how do we do it??

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:40 | #

Nick, the terms liberal and conservative were first applied in the early nineteenth century. They were in currency by the 1830s if I remember correctly. However, people spoke before this in a similar way of Whigs and Tories, though the Whigs in particular are usually thought of as aristocratic.

I agree with those academics who see the roots of liberalism (the ideas, not the word itself) as arising much further back in the Renaissance humanist period (say, late 1400s) - but not everyone agrees with this.

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 08:52 | #

Mark-your mastery of evasiveness impresses me-even I wasn’t around in 1830,so it’s hard to recall what went on then. And about the Whigs being aristocrats-yes-they wore those foolish things on their heads that we call WIGS totay.As to the Tories;I know they were representative of the “working class”,but where did the moniker come from? Come on,I’m working on my PHD/BS LOL

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 09:42 | #

Martin Hutchisen wrote: henry VII’s tax collectors, Empson and Dudley, were executed by Henry VIII, to curry favor with the baronage (Henry VIII was an economic illiterate and over time abandoned most of Henry VII’s reforms.)

One must then wonder who taught Henry VIII the art of kingship?

PS: Thank you. You’ve just shed some important light on my own family history. We’re Scotch-Irish. In all likelihood Henry VIII’s disasterous economic policies led to the start of the lowland clearances via taxation of the kindly tenants (what should have become a yeoman class) on their subsistence lands.

Now I’m _really_ interested for 2 reasons:

1) Personal

2) Since I first started shopping the proposal around Washington DC think tanks in 1992, people have been challenging me to to come u with historic examples of how a tax on wealth beyond subsistence would affect the economy. My detractors are quite vicious and claim it would utterly destroy the economy. Henry the VII’s history followed by Henry the VIII’s history shows, in rapid succession, precisely the opposite.

Posted by Lurker on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:02 | #

Nick - I think the left/right terminology arose in France in the revolution - 1789 - in the French parliament due to the seating arrangements.

Posted by Effra on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:46 | #

Delighted to see the kudos for Henry VII: the second greatest sovereign England has had (after Alfred) and the most underrated because he kept his own counsel.

Henry was a true conservative in that he was a man of his own time who did not decree sweeping reforms and upheavals, but played the game hard by existing rules. His claim to the throne was tenuous before Bosworth, but he united the country in exhaustion and left it reinvigorated and prosperous with a clear line of succession that could survive even a girl inheriting. Above all Henry demonstrated that a strong monarchy rests on a firm financial footing: if you’re flush you don’t have to be loved.

Then his oafish son blew it all away. But the secretive Tudor genius remains as an example: the Great Consolidator, fit to rank with Alfred, Octavian, Bismarck and Franco as an exemplar of a leader who lets his people live in peace instead of immolating them for his own vainglory.