[This is Chapter Fifteen of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement

[This is Chapter Fifteen of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement.]

Chapter Fifteen

THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE OF THE MODERN AGE

Now that, in the course of several chapters, we have reviewed the major forces at work in the world that will result in a simultaneous flowering of production and crisis of distribution, should we be able to go immediately to a discussion of solutions?

Many readers will assume that is the only remaining step. But think for a minute what a tangle I would step into without having prepared the way. Almost everything we can propose will be clouded over by objections.

And where will those objections come from?

From the way people see things today.

If I make suggestions that conflict with existing views without first examining those views and convincingly explaining why they need to be changed to meet the onrushing situation, few people will be ready either to see the need for changes in ideas and institutions or the value of the changes I suggest.

It may be helpful to explain this need somewhat more deeply. I suppose most people assume that the world can be understood by just looking at it directly, but that is really an impossibility. Instead, the only way the world can be understood is through a complex set of interrelated ideas. Human life and society are too complicated to be understood through direct perception, such as by reading the daily newspaper. No question there is reality to the millions of lives; but there is too much to life, and what we see as individuals is only a small part. What people actually understand about society is a "mediated reality" that is put together into a comprehensible whole by the particular social philosophy with which they identify or that forms the mental envelope within which they live. That "comprehensible whole" consists of related views on a great many things, such as economics, politics, historical events and ethics.

Chapters 16 through 18 will mainly be involved with examining classical liberalism to show what it contains that is valuable, what intellectual issues have never been fully resolved within it, just where it has been intellectually weak, and why the impending "crisis of the market" creates a challenge to classical liberals to rethink many of their ideas. In the absence of that examination, my good friends who see themselves as consistently pro-free-market will almost certainly do two things: (a) They will think it reasonable to deny that there really is going to be a problem of distribution, since they are armed with ideas that convince them that the market is automatically self-adjusting under virtually all circumstances, and (b) they will consider my proposed solutions nothing better than officious meddlings with the market as a central institution of a free society, which they think works very well as it is. If they are to be convinced why it is imperative to modify many of their ideas, we will have to go into considerable subtlety about the premises of classical liberal individualism and free-market theory. Otherwise, they will be the very people who will most likely raise the strongest objections to my proposals.

What, however, about readers who do not see themselves as market purists? They will probably see that discussion as an unnecessary digression -- more than likely, an irrelevancy. (This is an old habit of mind; the Left has long thought of the Right as not having an intellectual, but only a purely self-interested, position. It is certainly a perception that continues in the United States to this day.) Moreover, they will receive the impression that I understand nothing but classical liberalism, and that I overlook other views that are more to the point. That is why the present chapter on "the mental landscape of the modern age" is needed. It is important to show the other major streams of social thought and to place classical liberalism in context with them. We need to be able to approach the later discussion of institutional adaptation with a mental backdrop that is ample for a full consideration of its implications from a variety of points of view. My "solutions" will reach part-way toward commonality with the community-oriented and pooling-inclined non-market philosophies, but won't comport with them exactly, especially since I see it imperative to retain key classical liberal values and principles. That is why this is an "intellectual odyssey" for everybody. We are all faced with a new set of opportunities and problems, but the discussion is encumbered by the fact that we bring our present ideas to bear on them. The point is that the present ideas aren't enough, and we need to examine why.

We don't know what all the products of the rethinking will be, but in the recasting there is a real chance for a reconciliation of erstwhile enemies -- individualists, socialists, and traditional conservatives. If we consider how much their differences reverberated through the twentieth century, and how many millions of people lost their lives over them, the prospect of reconciliation is exciting. A reformulation of all social philosophy may be able to "break the mold" of the conflicts that have burned brightly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. If that happens, it will usher in what will truly be a new phase of history for reasons that go far beyond the existence of the new technology and its economic impacts. Almost certainly that new phase will have its own fissures, human beings being what they are. The likelihood is that the cleavages will, at least, be different from the ones we have known.

You will notice that I will often refer to the respective social philosophies as "ideologies." To me, that isn't a bad word; as I have said, there is no alternative to anyone's understanding society through the mediation of a comprehensive set of ideas. There are many authors who, because they are convinced that their own understanding is right, disparage the other systems of thought by calling them "ideologies." This uses the word as a pejorative. They are welcome to use it that way if they want to, but I see advantage in a certain intellectual humility that doesn't claim Truth on my side and Ideology on everybody else's. We are all in a difficult search for understanding, and all have the same imperfect tools. Many of the differences may be of the heart rather than of the head. When we recognize that the search for what is true and good is complex and that there is much room for reasonable people to differ, that is not the same thing as to say that we think all ideas are equally sound. They aren't. If we thought they were, we would never be moved to think seriously about anything. But we can, at least, respect each other as we engage in the process of thinking.

The main modern ideological divisions

"Conservatism" of one form or another will very probably play a role in the societies of the future as they seek ways to live with the new technology. If the "age of scarcity" (common to all human history even into the present) ends and most people are engaged in a far less competitive way of life, the sense of community may grow, with its concomitant love of people and place.

There is a temperamental type of conservatism that relates to personality, and is felt by individuals who are most comfortable "with things as they have been." This is the sort spoken of by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his lecture "The Conservative" in 1841. To share its emotion, you need merely to think back to something you loved that is now long gone -- a person, place, or memory. The conservatism of an entire culture is closely associated with this, but isn't the same thing, since many individuals within it won't necessarily be of that temperament. There, the love of established ways comes about more through acculturation. It is what people grow up to and accept as natural.

In the history of western civilization, there is yet another form of conservatism -- if we can refer to it in the singular despite its having taken several forms. It is the tie to the complex mix of ideas and institutions that made up the Old Regime in Europe before the Copernican, American, French and Industrial Revolutions. I mentioned in Chapter 13 how a certain combination of values had been considered ideal from the time of the founding of the Roman Republic. In fact, most ancient intellectuals preferred the closed society of Sparta to the open society of Athens. If we think back to the austere, frowning faces that we see on the busts of old Romans in our museums, we get some idea of how committed the original Romans (and the Spartans) were to what Douglas MacArthur referred to in another context as "Duty, Honor, Country." The individual's role was in the community, which was tightly-knit. Attitudes of pietas and disciplina strictly controlled individual behavior. There was reverence for ancestors, for the city, and for the accepted religion. The social and political life was led by an aristocracy (although the history of the Roman Republic is largely a story of the struggle by the plebeians for equality with the patricians); and the economy was not commercial, but instead founded on agriculture (the small farms of Cato's day and later the larger plantations, the "latifundia.") Even after the near-century of civil war during Cicero's lifetime and the assumption of military dictatorship by the emperors, Romans looked back nostalgically to the ideals and institutions of these centuries.

It is strange how much the Middle Ages replicated the same mix. To look at it, you wouldn't think so. The Christian church, first Catholicism and later a Christianity torn between Catholics and Protestants, towered over it. The Romans didn't have that. But at a more abstract level, notice that the individual was not the center of things, but was wrapped up in a cosmology that saw other things as far more central. This is similar. Also, there were the Christian and eventually the chivalric virtues that approximated those of pietas and disciplina. Individual "will and appetite," and especially individual "reason," were subordinate. The society was hierarchical, with aristocracy and eventually kings setting the tone, while the great run of humanity was close to invisible, perhaps embracing, as Samuel Johnson eventually spoke of them affectionately, "the joys of subordination." For almost a thousand years, things changed only slowly, so that the way of life known to ones parents and great-grandparents would also be the way of life known to oneself and ones children. In such a context, tradition was valued. Competition was at a low pitch, so people focused mainly on family, locality and community.

We moderns are used to thinking of those centuries as hardly matching the description I have just given. We think of the misery, oppression, and shortness of life that existed beneath its surface. This means that we can hardly understand, most of us, the love that many people had for it. The medieval culture didn't receive much philosophical formulation while it was ascendant, but when it came under heavy attack its values and institutions were stoutly defended by the likes of Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson in late eighteenth century England. Present-day Burkeans don't like the word "ideology," but in fact Burke did a marvelous job in his book Reflections on the Revolution in France of formulating a comprehensive statement of the ideals of the Old Regime. During the ensuing two hundred years, that philosophy has been one of those that have been most influential, even though European and American society has become widely separated from its ideals and institutions. Some of the most articulate authors on social and political philosophy, many of them since World War II, have been of that persuasion -- people like Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and Richard Weaver, who joined earlier generations that included Burke, Johnson, Carlyle, Coleridge, De Maistre, and many others.

When I said this conservatism has taken many forms, what I had in mind was partly that royalists on the continent of Europe long held their particular monarchy as an object of intense affection. Thus, there were "conservatives" in Austria-Hungary, in Russia, in France and elsewhere. Theirs was a much more local and particular attachment, full of the color and pageantry of a long-established way of life. Another form this conservatism took was in the German Volkish movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, which romanticized mythic ideals from a mostly-imaginary Teutonic past. This reflected the Romantic movement, which, without being cerebrally philosophical the way Burkean thought was, brought great emotion to the reverence for pre-modern ways of life and to the repudiation of modernity. (The relevance of these ideas to today can be seen in the American New Left's having harked back to the early Romantic authors just a few years ago. See especially Theodore Roszak's book Where the Wasteland Ends.)

The medieval mixture was eventually shattered by a great many things over a period of several centuries. Slowly, the closed intellectual system gave way to an expanded outlook through the revival of ancient learning, which had been kept alive among the Arabs; the Crusades' contact with the Middle East; the discovery of new continents; a variety of new technologies; the astronomical revolution of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler; and the increasing secularization of society and rise of the questioning, empirical mentality. All of these things ushered in, eventually, an across-the-board intellectual challenge to the medievalist consensus. The Enlightenment brought an attitude of questioning and inquiry, bringing the Age of Reason and the growth of empirical science. The dominance, and even continued presence, of kings and aristocracies became suspect. The growing commercial towns, the increasing trade with other countries, and finally the Industrial Revolution brought an end to the landed economic and social base. When finally Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith and the Physiocrats explained the workability and enormous productive power of a market economy, and John Locke expounded on the Rule of Law, the main building blocks of classical liberalism were in place. The leading theorists of this liberalism followed in the nineteenth century -- such figures as Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Ricardo, Senior, Say, Bastiat, and Spencer.

This was the philosophy of limited government, the Rule of Law, Constitutionalism, a republic, a market economy, individual virtue and responsibility, and of individual liberty as manifested in the vast expansion of the middle class. Since I will be going into detail about its ideas in coming chapters, it would create a redundancy to describe it more fully here.

The philosophy itself was never more than partly followed even in the United States and the main countries of Europe. It was very much the philosophy of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonians in the United States before the Civil War, but even then there was a major school of thought under the Federalists and later the Whigs that held to more Burkean values. After the Civil War, the United States was strongly protectionist, with high tariff walls as against Free Trade, until the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In France, Bastiat in the 1830s thought of himself as a cry in the wilderness; and in England John Stuart Mill felt that the acting man of business didn't care about ideas, including classical liberalism's.

Nevertheless, I think it is very accurate to say that classical liberalism has provided the "underlay" of concepts and ethical sensibilities that has been characteristic of the American people throughout much of their history. That is one reason why it has been so natural for the Free Trade, Global Economy point of view to become the predominant outlook in the late twentieth century.

Sometimes the "underlay" has been buried more or less deeply, for several reasons. Twentieth century liberalism, the intellectual component of which has been linked to socialist thought, has constantly attacked classical liberalism; practical people and politicians have found it convenient to ignore philosophy of any kind; and, what is also of real importance, the practical good sense of the American people has seen that some of its concepts haven't been adequate, an insight that has accounted for a fair portion of the willingness to go along with the several forms of governmental intervention that modern liberalism has pushed and that classical liberalism has resisted. (The tariff was one of these, as people realized in the nineteenth century that the United States couldn't achieve its industrial potential if it contented itself with being simply a supplier of agricultural products and of resources for an already well-established English manufacturing system. Anti-trust laws and various types of consumer legislation have been others, reflecting an awareness that the market doesn't infallibly take everybody's needs into account.)

The proposals I will make, centered on the idea of a "shared market economy," will be primarily classical liberal in that I want to retain the dynamic innovation and enhancement of freedom that comes from a competitive market economy and want to erect safeguards against the abuse of governmental power. And yet I see an impending "crisis of the market," as free-market theory generally won't, and call for institutionalizing a broad ownership of the economy even without people having to work to earn their share. These things fly in the face of free-market theory as it now sees itself, even though some such expedients are essential to the long-term preservation of any kind of market. It also runs contrary to the concepts of contract, property and earnings that are central to classical liberalism, and against the work-ethic that is equally basic to it. The concepts and ethic will, regrettably, have to be modified, because they don't take into consideration the revolutionary changes that are sweeping the world.

In Chapter 13 as part of explaining the threat to western civilization, I told of the rise of the world Left beginning in the early nineteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau, you recall, had launched the alienation against modernity by "standing outside the culture" in the early eighteenth century, maintaining that the essential goodness of mankind had been warped out of shape by private property and civilization itself. When the Romantic movement repudiated the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, a number of schools of socialist thought sprang up in Europe and the United States with a hostile critique of the "bourgeoisie" (commercial middle class) and of "capitalism." This was the overwhelming tone of European intellectuality during the nineteenth century (for which I referred readers to Julian Benda's The Betrayal of the Intellectuals). You will recall that the alienated intelligentsia has at virtually all times sought allies in people it could champion as against the main society. As a consequence, the ideology took the form of an explanation of how those people were exploited, and of how the State or a revolutionary movement could serve as their liberators. "Exploitation theory" (which is often called "victimology" today) was central to it. This was the essence of the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle's socialism as expressed in his "Address to the Workingmen."[1] He wanted the German State to be the instrument for the salvation of the exploited.

During the course of all this, a leveling sort of egalitarianism has been an important part of the appeal to the unassimilated, disaffected or less successful elements of society. Whether that is what the intellectual really cares about is open to question, but it has been a constant theme of the Left's ideology in its many forms.

This cold-blooded analysis of the Left is by its nature not very sympathetic, which is something I regret. I strongly feel that it is a mistake to believe that most of the people who hold to an ideology don't sincerely believe in it. If we keep this in mind, we know that a great many socialists see socialism as a true helpmate to the less fortunate and a vehicle for compassion. They see it as an offset against a philosophy that to them fails to take compassion into account.

This is why my proposal for a "shared market economy" will correspond to major aspects of the Left's program and outlook: it will make provision for people who won't otherwise be able to do so for themselves through the market economy; it will be premised on a perception that the market won't work well under coming conditions, which at least superficially seems to support the criticisms socialists have made all along; it will call upon the State as a helpmate; and it will downplay competition and the work-ethic as a way of life, just as socialism long has.

My proposals will correspond in the same way to the thinking of what has been called liberalism in the twentieth century United States. You will recall what I said about this in Chapter 13, where I told how intellectual alienation in the United States coalesced into a common ideology in the late nineteenth century when Americans did their graduate work under the German Historical School, which although not Marxist (since that mainly stressed class-struggle theory) was anti-classical liberal and anxious to use the State for socialist purposes. The Populist and Progressive movements in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, respectively, were complex phenomena, but had socialist intellectual elements. A strongly socialist intelligentsia thrived in Greenwich Village in the 'Teens (as was portrayed so well in the movie "Reds"). The New Republic and The Nation became flagship journals for "progressive thought," which was rapidly becoming known as "liberalism," taking over the name without a fight from a moribund classical liberalism. They at first combined support for English Guild Socialism (organizing society around labor unions) with a love affair with what was happening in Soviet Russia (soon to be the Soviet Union). In the 1930s, each called for "central planning." Disillusionment set in with the Soviet Union as Stalin's terror became clear, but this was largely papered over as a result of World War II, in which the USSR was allied with the United States and other allies against Nazi Germany.

The elements that made up the "New Deal coalition," which in effect constituted another form of the alliance of the intellectuals with the "have-nots," mostly wanted an active use of the federal government, but weren't committed socialists the way those in the intellectual culture were. Organized labor from the time of Samuel Gompers wanted independence to go its own way. Racial, religious and ethnic minorities mainly wanted help in themselves becoming part of the successful middle class. And the Solid South was in the coalition largely out of historical accident and an antipathy toward the commercial North. The result is that only the intellectual culture was clearly socialist within modern American liberalism.

I told in Chapter 13 how the ideology went into a period of drift after World War II. In fact, the coalition didn't entirely hold together. It wasn't long, though, before racial and ethnic equality became the rallying cry, soon to have women's equality added to it. This sort of egalitarianism has held the high moral ground and has, until objections have grown louder in recent years, been readily granted precedence over all other values.

The idea of guaranteeing every American an income by having each person own a share of the economy will probably be an easy one for present-day American liberals (and the "moderates" who follow them) to accept. The idea of a "guaranteed annual wage" has been around for a good many years within liberal circles. The question, however, will be whether these Americans will care, as I will, about the potential for statist abuse that this amount of "government intervention" can involve. I will want to separate the mechanism for economic-sharing from the other functions of the State. Most twentieth century liberals have considered such worries a chasing, in effect, after goblins. They haven't seen the State as a dangerous instrument the way classical liberals always have, and rarely even think of how to chain it down, except out of their concern to protect dissent and shield minorities from the less humane proclivities of a suspect majority. (The New Left, with its attack on the "military-industrial complex" instilled some fear and has had much influence on liberal thought, but raised the point as part of a far-reaching attack on modern liberalism itself.)

Each of the philosophies has significant points of difference with the others while sharing other points. They aren't totally contrasting views. There will be elements of each as we go into the future. To that extent, the earlier philosophies will be most helpful. Where they will not be is where their devotees cling to their ideas without realizing how differently they must be applied to the newly emerging realities.

My concern about a possible failure to adapt is primarily about my own philosophy, which is today central to the philosophy of a global market. That is why we will devote the next three chapters to classical liberalism.

ENDNOTES