Aphorisms


There's nothing so bad, that adding government can't make it worse. -- The Immigrant

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. -- Ronald Reagan

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Read the next two together:

Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'Emergency'." -- Herbert Hoover

This is too good a crisis to waste. -- Rahm Emanuel

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Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. -- Fredric Bastiat, French Economist (30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850)

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to another. -- François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire, (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778)

The problem with socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people's money. -- Margaret Thatcher

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. -- Winston Churchill

Saturday, August 7, 2010

#75: Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” Reconsidered

After a hiatus of some five decades, I’ve been revisiting Popper’s remarkable two-volume study entitled The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). I remembered that I was impressed by the work way back then, but little else of its detailed argumentation. Reading it now, I’m fairly certain that I didn’t appreciate then just what an important work it really is. It is important not only for the light that Popper sheds on matters of older history, but for the light that Popper’s own presuppositions shed on our own very recent history.

This post will not be a review of the work in any sense, it will be focused just on making a few historical points. However, for those not familiar with the book, let me only say that it is concerned with identifying the two main intellectual sources of totalitarian ideology. Volume I is devoted to revising the then current “liberal” reading of Plato, whom Popper identifies as the “open society’s” first enemy. Volume II is devoted to Hegel and Marx, both of whom together count as its second enemy. All things considered, v. I is the more important, since seeing Marx, the main subject of v. II, as an enemy of individual freedom was scarcely ground shaking news. But calling Plato, the darling of academic leftists everywhere, a totalitarian, now that was indeed news. Because the effect of v. I was far larger than that of v. II, I will concentrate on it in this discussion.

Now, under the influence of Edmund Wilson I have generally traced modern socialism and communism back to the French revolution. On my own bat, I have extended this natural history back into the 17th c, where the Enlightenment began and evolved into the worship of science and reason. But Popper had a larger view and found the roots of modern totalitarianism in a period as early as the third century b.c., in the thinking of one of philosophy’s most revered founding fathers, Aristocles, son of Aristides, better known to you as Plato.

Popper charges that Plato, contrary to popular belief, was a totalitarian in his theory and in his practical objectives, and that he was a propagandist for the creation of a totalitarian state. So far, so good. But, as one reads Popper from a 21st c. point of view, one is constantly puzzled by his remarks. He is clearly against totalitarianism, but the contemporary reader has difficulty, I think, in identifying what he is for. The reason is this: the fact that he attacks Platonic as well has Marxist totalitarianism suggests that he must be for something like Classical Free Market Liberalism.

This guess falls afoul, however, of the fact that he also argues for social engineering (he tells us that the best statesman will approach his task like an engineer); that he is clearly hostile to religion (he considers it a primitive hold-over); and that he is committed to “social justice” (though it is admittedly unclear exactly what he means by this). All of this and more in Popper is incompatible with Free Market Liberalism. In addition, he believes in progress from less civilized societies to more, with “tribalism” specified as the low end of the continuum. Now, while tribalism usually implies loyalty to a person, rather than to codified laws, it also implies nationalism, the bogey of mid-century progressives. Thus, he is hostile to nationalism. In fact, as I’ve argued before, the post WW II progressives were united in blaming the war on Germany’s nationalism, rather than its Socialism. These are all marks of what we think of today as “Liberalism” or “Progressivism”, which is quite the opposite of Free Market Liberalism, and, finally, he explicitly identifies himself as a “Progressive”.

There is therefore a puzzle here. He likes neither Plato nor Marx, but his likes seem to exclude the only obvious alternative, namely Classical Free Market Liberalism. What is Popper for?

Popper obviously does not mean by “Progressive” what we mean by it today. Precisely what he means by “Progressive” becomes clearer when we look at the other word he uses to describe Plato and his philosophy, the word “Collectivist.”

The precise character of Plato’s philosophy that Popper objects to is that in it, the individual exists for the sake of the state, while in his “Progressivism,” the state exists for the sake of the individual!

We have become so accustomed to our current Progressivism that we assume quite automatically that any “Progressivism” will make the individual subordinate to the state, but this is clearly an unwarranted assumption. What Popper’s discussion suggests is that there is no necessary incompatibility between respecting the individual and having progressive objectives like the ones I listed earlier. It also suggests that there were actually two progressive streams in competition until at least the end of World War II, one of which accepted progressive values but rejected Collectivism, and one which accepted progressive values (ostensibly) and accepted Collectivism. Popper clearly rejected the latter stream in both its Nazi-style and its Stalinist incarnations. What Popper represented was an offshoot of Enlightenment Rationalism that is rarely seen today, an offshoot that used to be called “Humanism.” What he wanted, for the sake of a more informative name, was an “Individualist Progressivism” (or “Individualism,” for short).

This calls for a couple of critical remarks.

First, and perhaps less important, when Popper describes the difference between Collectivism and Individualist Progressivism, he invokes the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. He says that Collectivism does not respect the individual, but that Kant’s ethics does. His choice, however, is an interesting one, since Kant can equally be blamed for the later successes of collectivism. After all, there would have been no Hegel without Kant, and there would have been no Marx without Hegel.

Popper focuses exclusively on one of the versions of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Treat each man as an end in himself (not as a means to an end) as proof that Kant was an Individualist Progressive. The example often given of this principle is that of the life-boat conundrum: is it right to dump the person with the least hope of survival overboard so that the chances of those remaining be improved. The Kantian answer to this is clearly “no.” But this is really a bit of a red herring. If this is the whole meaning of this version of the Categorical Imperative, then Kant is certainly not giving the Individualist what he wants.

What the Individualist wants is that every man have his idiosyncratic needs and wants respected, regardless of how useful it might be to others to ignore them. Now, this would indeed be an Individualistic ethic. But can we derive this kind of ethic from the Categorical Imperative? I don’t know, but the answer becomes tediously uninteresting once we remember that Kant’s ethic is the ethic of a fictional individual, the “moral agent,” who does not exist and has never existed. This Kantian “moral agent” is supposedly purely rational and has no needs or wants. This creature’s ethic is supposed to be an expression of its rationality, which is its essence.

This means that emotions and physical wants and needs are not counted as “parts” of a moral agent, they are rather forces acting against the agent’s true self, they are actually enemies of his rationality. The implication of this is that if the world consisted only of Kantian moral agents, these agents would all be identical, they would be indistinguishable from each other, for one purely rational being is exactly the same as any other, just as any calculator will give identical results on identical sums. Thus, the “respect for individuality” that Popper discovers in the Categorical Imperative loses most, if not all, of its moral usefulness. For if we are really like Kant’s moral agents, then we don’t actually have any wants and needs, nor do we have an individuality to respect (other than purely numerical), and if we are not like them, then the principle applies only to beings who don’t exist.

I suppose it’s hard for Popper to admit this since he shares Kant’s and the Enlightenment’s blind confidence in the power of human reason.

Second, while there may be no necessary incompatibility between Individualism and progressive objectives, there does seem to be a powerful, if not inexorable, inclination for any Progressivism to evolve in the direction of Collectivism. The U.S., for example, seems currently to be in an ambiguous posture vis a vis Collectivism, and its ongoing health care debate illustrates the kind of drift of which I speak. While the U.S. actually incorporates respect for the individual very strongly in its constitution, the existence of a nascent government controlled health care system has already evoked arguments in which the individual’s needs and wants are subordinated to that of “the community.” As soon as the community pays for services, the community acquires a dominant voice in the setting of policy. Thus, for example, if you, the individual, want to be a fat, lazy, smoker, then either your medical benefits will have to be adjusted down or you will have to be penalized with higher payments. After all, your decisions affect the community, and the community comes first! My point is that the only way that even Individualism can move towards its progressive goals is that of social engineering, that social engineering involves state intervention, and that state intervention inevitably makes the interests of the collective trump the interests of the individual.

So, the first point I have been interested in making is that there used to exist a distinct species of Progressivism that existed side by side with Collectivism and that differed from Collectivism by its commitment to a respect for the complete individual, needs, wants, and idiosyncrasies included. Interestingly, this species seems to have lost to Collectivism in the evolutionary competition of political doctrines. The only representative I can still find of Individualistic Progressivism is the writer Christopher Hitchens, an ex-Socialist. One suspects that his rejection of Socialism might well have been based on his recognition that Collectivism does not respect the individual.

This is a form of Progressivism with which one could agree to disagree, a member, as it were, of a loyal opposition; a loyal opposition that is naïve, but well intentioned. Collectivism, on the other hand, is an attack on values that are so fundamental that its advocates can only be seen as hostile to the state, and they must be fought with any means available.

The second point involved the two criticisms that seemed to me might aid a reader in coming to terms with Popper’s text.

One can only speculate why it is that Collectivism has emerged the victor in this fatal struggle between Individualism and Collectivism, but the most obvious reason might also very well be the right one. Collectivism might be better in the survival game precisely because it does not respect the individual, for this means that there are no limits to what it can do in order to win. Respect for the individual may be something that we in Western democracies value, but in the street brawl of “isms” through the decades and centuries, it is nothing more than a handicap. As many a romantic and idealist has discovered, it is very easy to be “in the right” and yet wind up dead.

4 comments:

  1. Simplicius,

    A very thoughtful post - I did a lot of drinking last night, and reading this instantly killed whatever hangover remained! I have a few thoughts I would like to share.

    1) with respect to the ongoing battle between Individualism and Collectivism, Tocqueville put it best in Democracy in America, when he said that (paraphrasing)"people love freedom, but that they have a burning insatiable desire for Equality. They want Equality in Freedom and if they can't have it, they'll take Equality in Slavery." This is a very important observation. The vast majority of people, if you ask them, will tell you that they want to be free, in the sense of being able to live their lives as they please. But of course, they also want their material needs provided for them, and are prone to jealousy if others have more than they do. Indeed, it is the "equality in slavery" that underpins much of collectivist thought. Equality of results is the drug that makes you feel good at the time; it is the seductress. Freedom is living healthy; it is marriage and children; it inherently requires a sacrifice of comfort in order to achieve long term fulfillment. It is not the "quick fix". This is why it must always be codified in a constitution - because Equality is just oh so easy to reach for, and in the process of doing so, the people will always forget how much they treasure their freedom. I think Milton Friedman said something to the effect that, a society that puts freedom above equality will end up with a good deal of both. A society that puts equality above freedom will end up with neither.

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  2. 2) The early 20th century progressives in the United States, while not believing in equality per se, certainly believed that inequalities could be mitigated without unduly burdening freedom. I think it is difficult to paint these progressives with a single brush. From what I can tell, there were at least 3 different types. There were traditional religious types who believed that the an excess of capitalism and freedom undermined social harmony and the spiritual health of the nation (essentially old guard conservatives). There were idealists who believed that the promise of American life could be fulfilled as the Founders had intended it if certain reforms were made to the system (say, anti-trust laws). And there were the "rationalists" who were not hostile to capitalism, but who rejected the premise that our rights were "God given" and instead believed that America could construct an ultra-rational society (which would be largely based on capitalism, but which would also require a great deal of benevolent and supposedly efficient government internvention.)

    It is interesting when you think of where all three of these groups are now. Traditionalists, or what might be called "social conservatives", are, for the most part, comfortable with American capitalism. The worst excesses of the industrial age are gone and thus these social-conservatives are very much at home with the status quo and no longer have much of a desire to "repair" society (except on certain social issues). The idealists generally became neo-conservatives, and while they never lost their core belief that "anything is possible" (a democratic Iraq for example), time has taught them some hard lessons about what government can actually accomplish even with the best intentions. Finally, the "rationalists" have for the most part, been taken over by Socialists. There are of course some "capitalist rationalists" left; they are to be found teaching "Law and Economics" or advocating for a complete opening of economic borders. Their ideology is based strictly around maximizing efficiency - and of course, they believe that governments and institutions can effectively determine what the most efficient course is. They are not socialist, but one can hardly call them individualists either. They see man as a machine, but unlike the majority of materialists, they are not seduced by Socialist aims.

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  3. The point is that the Progressive movement of old is no longer really in existence, as you say. The traditionalists are now at home, the idealists have been hardened by experience and the rationalists have become Marxists. The few idealists remaining simply have no place to go. And why should they? The Messiah of their religion was supposed to come within a couple of generations. When he failed to arrive - when old liberals realized that you really COULDN'T have private property, individual liberty AND a strong government taking care of society, the religion began to die out. By the 1970's, it was very much understood by anyone who was honestly assessing the situation what programs complemented the capitalist system and which were detrimental to it. In other words, by the latter part of the 20th century, conservatives and liberals were mostly in agreement with what the capitalist system required (and thus, their empirical argument was put to rest). The only remaining outliers were those who were ideologically committed to the destruction of capitalism. No amount of experience or empirical evidence could convince them to drop their case. Thus, in the last generation, the main argument in America has switched from being a mostly empirical one to a mostly moral one. The debate is no longer "how ought government to achieve its legitimate aims?" but rather "what are the legitimate aims of government?" Naturally, the form of the debate was changing for some time (and even as early as 100 years ago, the latter question was being debated), but on the whole, until the 1970's, both the Republicans and the Democrats, conservatives and liberals 1) believed in the fundamental goodness of the United States, and 2) believed that the individual was supreme to the collective.

    By the 1970's, it had become apparent, that there really were only two directions - individualist or collectivist. The capitalist state had done most of what it could to improve on itself. Now was either the time to get off the train or stay on and proceed to Finland Station.

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  4. Excellent, A.G., you fill in very helpful detail. The only thing I would add is that the Progressivism that emerged from the Enlightenment through the French Revolution was already Collectivist.

    You and I have discussed from time to time the great difference between the American and French Revolutions. Let me add this to that discussion: arguably, the reason the American one was so successful and the French one such a catastrophic failure was that the America in which the revolution took place was committed to individual freedom, while the France in which its revolution took place was not.

    I suggest that the character of a post-revolution society reflects its pre-revolution origins, no matter how hard the efforts to erase the pre-revolutionary culture may be.

    The pre-revolution America was already committed to individual freedom, the pre-revolutionary France, like all of Europe and points East, consisted of autocratic monarchies. As a result, when Progressivism finally visited America, it evolved the country into the direction Individualistic Progressivism; in Europe, on the other hand, in keeping with its history of autocracy, it developed into Collectivism.

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