Beneficence

GroupBlog Coming--I hope!

The BETTER NEWS today is that I started the process to get a group blog set up over at The Philanthropic Enterprise. I think once I make it easy, Bill Schambra may join us out here. It will be fun to let some of these conversations rub up against one another in the same space. Phil should be able to bring some progressive friends, so we might be able to engage in some serious play before long!

It will feel great to migrate some of these themes over the the other space. This is destined to be my more personal space. I want to talk about the books I'm reading and how they relate to these themes and others of interest to me. And hopefully raise other themes that might not be so controversial nor even so well thought out yet. Yeah, I know, and then who would show up?!

Individualism and community--get it!!?

Ideas Have Consequences

GiftHub points me to Wealth Bondage--only link if you dare--where the Happy Tutor has been dancing paddle in hand over our recent exchanges. For my two cents, The Happy Tutor at least has the frankness to acknowledge the little dead end where the "progressive" intelligentsia wound up when they followed the Continentals. And he refers to the European continent, not the Continental Soldiers who helped America declare itself free from the travesty of European politics in the 16th-18th c. Of course, the Tutor is given to satire, and sometime one has to check to see whether there is irony at work as well.

Funny how the Tutor seems to have this image of the "Right" as some sort of strategically cunning conspiracy to overtake the "culture creating organs" of our society. It's revealing to learn that his kind feel as "left out" of the culture-making conversation as do the conservative "remnant."

In reality, it was no departure from Progressive tradition to follow the philosophers and politicians of Europe. The origins of the social sciences and indeed Progressivism itself were largely brought to American shores by those Northeastern and Midwestern Protestants who took their graduate educations in the universities of Germany, observing with admiration the Kaiser's uniformed police and those trains running on time. Oh, hail, Efficiency and a respectable job as a civil servant of the State. Returning home, they poured the flame of their Social Gospel over their newfound icy confidence in the well-ordered State and the competence of professional bureaucrats and voila! we get the Federal income tax, the explosion of the corporate welfare state, scientific philanthropy, and, probably the best of the lot, a general clean-up of local politics.

After two world wars showcasing German efficiency and nationalism, the intellectuals of Europe traipsed off into their seminars to make peace with power and its discontents. Not having learned the one-two punch of those European blend cocktails, many American liberals followed and wound up deconstructing themselves to the point of irrelevancy. It would be laughable, had they not at the same time captured so many of the institutions through which American youth take a right of passage.

So, yes, "conservatives" have been intent on reclaiming the universities, but I don't think any of us believes we've even begun to succeed. Our battle cry was hewn from that title of Richard Weaver, "Ideas have Consequences," reinforced by Hayek's little essay called "the Intellectuals and Socialism." It's interesting to consider Hayek at length, and I hope the Tutor and his pals will take the time to consider how in earnest we classical liberals--what Hayek calls "true liberals" in what follows--have been about the hope of freedom.

The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. The intellectual revival of liberalism is already under way in many parts of the world. Will it be in time?

It is truly ideas--what we as individuals believe about the way the world works--that make human action of various kinds possible. Tutored or untutored, we each have a theology, an anthropology, a sociology, an economic view that shape how we believe we can and should act in the world. I suspect progressive and conservative alike, we all have more to fear from Madison Ave and what it teaches Americans to believe than we do from one another.

Oh, just another little thought. Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen reports some recent findings about religion and economics. Among these: "For the most part religious belief (as opposed to participation) is not correlated with economic growth. Belief in hell is positively correlated with growth, however." That seems an interesting little point to ponder in relation to this conversation about ideas--and the probable influence those Continental philosophers have had on our willingness to believe in and talk about Hell. Many of the conservatives I know still treat it as a fact. I wonder whether the same can be said of such as the Happy Tutor, whose fetish with bondage seems to import a bit of Hell to earth... but that's a thought for another post.

Dark Satanic Mills

Ahh, here we go on from Milton to Blake! A fitting transition, I think, since the lines Phil cites in his comment to a previous post actually come from Blake's Milton, rather than from his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

By the way, I have a lovely videotape of my then 2 year old son Rafe reciting the first verse of one of Blake's Songs of Experience:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I'm curious why Phil reads the Songs as a social commentary, rather than what Blake states they are--"shewing the two contrary states of the human soul." (Yes, there are those poor little chimney sweeps, who strangely are actually worse off in the songs of innocence than in the songs of experience.)

I think it must be because our cultural life has never truly recovered from the impact of the romantics of the industrial age--Marx, Engels, and a few others thrown in there with the poet Blake--who believed that industrial capitalism and life in the dark, Satanic mills was contorting the human soul. Though I believe wholeheartedly that Blake's artistic critiques have more depth of reality and persistent insight in them than the entire corpus of Marx and all his followers.

Surely the industrial age was one of tremendous social change, turmoil, and dislocation that we have yet fully to understand. Historians, along with Dickens, still tell us of the bleak houses of the working poor and the predations of the greedy capitalists. We are in need of more good revisionist scholarship to balance the scales that judge capitalism so precipitously. I, for one, don't want to live as the subject of the landed aristocracy of Augustan Britain nor as a cog in the Administrative Wheel of state socialism.

I often wonder what it is that the modern progressive, who enshrines material progress and translates moral progress as the transvaluation of values, would have us undo between the industrial age and our own? Mustn't we in truth accept and strive to understand the industrial age as that which gave rise to the world which is ours, somehow, despite the tensions of human experience and art to which Phil rightly points us--

The end result of the poems taken together is a third state, existing in the dialectical tension between the first two. Blake called that state, "achieved innocence." That would be my goal. Not to applaud the small, often self-serving and hypocritical blessings of largess, charity, faith based initiatives, thousand points of light, and Bill Bennett style moralizing, nor to merely to provide an ironic or satiric counterpoint, but to include both in a single vision, in which we still affirm the small blessings and do our best to light that one candle.

I do not suggest that we have to fall in love with the industrial age and wish to return there as if to some idyllic shore, but rather to recognize what the coming of industrial capitalism called forth from the spirit of our own ancestors--the energy of innovation and enterprise that allowed for material progress, the expanded social conscience (borne on the back of both labor and leisure) that allowed us to imagine a wider scope for human dignity and liberty. As Blake called it forth, Awake! Albion, Awake!

Blake's work on Milton is indeed a work of prophecy, and his allusion to the dark Satanic Mills, turns in the next verse to the industrialism of his own zeal to bring the new Jerusalem to life on Albion's shores. The tools of this industry, however, are those of the artist and prophet waging a "mental fight," armed with a bow of burning gold, arrows of desire, a spear to unfold the clouds, and carried forth in a Chariot of Fire. The tools of the faithful prophet choosing to call upon the Lamb, not the nihilism of the social and political reformers who in seeking the Good of All would reduce all to the valence of atoms spinning in the void of some historical determinism.

Blake toys obliquely with the odd conundrum of our freedom to choose and its resultant responsibility. In Jerusalem he writes:

Let the Indefinite be explored, and let every Man be Judged

By his own Work. Let all Indefinites be thrown into Demonstrations,

To be pounded to dust & melted in the Furnaces of Affliction.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer,

For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars

And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.

And again strangely relevant to our musings here are these lines from Milton:

He [the idiot Questioner] smiles with condescension, he talks of Benevolence and Virtue,

And those who act with Benevolence and Virtue they murder time on time.

I wonder what this observation of Blake as Milton has to do with the Song of Experience he titles The Clod and the Pebble, and what these competing views of love itself have to do with our beliefs about beneficence and philanthropy and our "doings good"...

"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
but for another give its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

Friendly Debate

Philanthropoid kindly, yet with reservations, summarizes the exchange Phil and I have begun.

I hope to assure her/him?--I am not sure why there is a trend toward anonymous blogging and I couldn't find a name--that my intentions in this exchange are quite friendly and not particularly political, except as these conversation might improve life in our "polis."

Philanthropid wonders what Austrian economics is--and that's critical to understand, though I am not now nor ever have been an economist.

My own appreciation of the Austrian economists' interpretive perspective came when I read a remarkable essay by the Austrian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. The essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society , fundamentally changed the way I understood the working of the world. Perhaps some of you will take the time to read and likewise find an anchor.

It's a rich perspective and much more substantial than what can be caricatured by the merely political label "libertarian."

Rick Stroup, a friend of mine with significant interests in the issues of free markets and environmentalism summarized in an interesting and more concise way the point that I aimed to make in my replies to Gerry Gleason's earlier comments

[Liberty has a consequentialist need] for the presence of what I think of as the voluntary sector--especially in the form of Burke's "little platoons"--that promote true understanding and cooperation in place of the increasingly divisive polarized politics of factions seeking benefits through government, for themselves and their personal sacred causes. Seeking the same from the voluntary sector causes only good and noble things to happen, even though some actions are futile. Free and responsible individuals, even when ignorant, are seldom in a position to do serious evil.

Thanks, Rick, for allowing me to quote you here! Those are the themes I want to explore more here once people are willing to listen beyond their suspicion that I have little red horns and a tail or am suffering from self-delusions. And that's why we began with Milton, who asks us merely to try to persuade rather than coerce one another--and believe that other people are reasonable, can be informed, and are worth engaging in civil discourse for it's own sake.

Treason of the Clerisy?!

My friend Phil Cubeta at GiftHub wonders aloud whether I'm truly earnest in appealing to Milton as an authority for the view that true gifts are those only given freely--and consequently, that the wealth transfers of the welfare state ("environmental regulation, taxes, and welfare," as Phil extrapolates somehow from my post yesterday) are frontal assaults on human dignity.

Earnest, indeed!

I find it ironic that Phil believes that conservatives broadly come from a wealthy elite who have hired a clerisy in their own defense. If this were the case, one of the most eloquent of my colleagues, William Schambra, must be a protaganist in an upside-down episode of La Trahison des Clercs. Schambra's 1999 lecture on The Friendship Club is testimony to the "conservative" philosophy to which I would subscribe. In the Q&A at that lecture, Schambra had this to say:

One of the sources of decentralist conservative thought today is the work of the participatory-democracy left of the sixties. It's not often acknowledged, which is too bad because I think conservatives could learn a great deal from it. I've always tried to point out that there are similarities between what folks in the sixties were saying and what conservative Republicans are saying today.

Perhaps it is time that we set aside our polemics as much as possible and become less treasonous intellectuals by grappling for some common sense and common vocabulary that can evoke our converging concerns from Left and Right that we need to re-think the centralization, monopolization, and bureaucratization that accompanied the Progressivism of the 20th century and its philanthropy. I look forward to continuing these conversations with Phil and others in this space.

Step 2

Slooooow start. But I'll keep trying! Thanks to you who extended your welcomes!

I have made reservations to be in Chicago July 8-10 to participate in the upcoming GiftHub conversation. I think I'm going to be the token conservative--even though I prefer to call myself a classical liberal if push comes to shove and I need a label! A remarkable friend of mine says that it doesn't make sense to attach one word to a point of view he has been cultivating for 70 years. I say amen to that, even though my own point of view is only just past the 40 mark!

So, what's a classical liberal, anyway, one might ask?

The best I can tell from inside here where I sit is that it's a point of view that holds human freedom to be at the center of man's experience of the world, and thus the firm foundation upon which beneficent social orders should rise. In this postmodern world, alas, we have to take our liberalism as radicals, thus back to its root and call our selves classical in order to compass Liberty's twin, Responsibility, in our philosophy. The moderns and post-moderns it seems would have the one without the other, thus uncoiling the double helix of human virtue.

Though we can find the roots of freedom in the most ancient of literatures, today's classical liberal would do just fine to hearken merely back to the 17th century and the insights of John Milton in his Areopagitica:

If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?

Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?

Well, I suppose we can spend some time unpacking those sentences! Milton's "motions," by the way, are puppet shows. This site is ostensibly for musings about beneficence and the role of philanthropy in a free society. Not much better place to start than with Milton's rich verbiage.

If men are not free, what praise could be then to well-doing? (Does the happy taxpayer merit any true praise for such "philanthropy?")

Reason is but choosing. (Does denying the consequences of our choosings as a matter of our "rights" ultimately rob us of the essence of our humanity? Isn't the fundamental human right be to reap the fruits of what we sow--and hope for the grace of one who set aside his own rights to suffer on our behalf?)

We esteem not a gift which is forced. (Does the welfare state obliterate any possibility of true beneficence?)

For what it's worth, these are questions to which I hope to return in this space as I continue to read and reflect on making good.

Learning the Blog!

My new friend and fellow Areopagite Phil Cubeta is dragging me kicking and screaming, "do I have time for this?!!" onto the dance floor to learn "the Blog." It's an intriguing, if somewhat strange, dance. Apparently I have all the tools it requires--a computer, a fast internet hook-up, an account at typepad, a keyboard, and something to say. Well, we'll see whether I actually have the final ingredient on the list.

I shared with Phil a favorite quotation from Flannery O'Connor:

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

I take comfort in the fact that I can practice in relative anonymity until I'm a bit more confident about the steps. At least I'm not wasting any paper during the process!

Phil and I share an interest in philanthropy, more specifically, in better understanding, promoting, and encouraging effective philanthropy. For several years I have been working quietly with a growing interdisciplinary group of scholars, encouraging them to think more about the role of voluntary action and philanthropy. We have begun with rather big conceptual questions, re-examining the prevailing understanding of philanthropy's role in a free society from the perspective of a variety of academic disciplines. Some of our initial reflections are captured at The Philanthropic Enterprise.

Phil informs me that what our website sorely needs is a way for others to engage us in conversation. Since we welcome that and are especially interested in thinking about how digital technologies will impact voluntary action and philanthropy in the years ahead, it seemed a good time to accept Phil's gracious offer to be my Blog Tutor. Arthur Murray, watch out!