DemocracyThe God That Failed (39 page)

Parallel to this development will be a gradual but steady surge in crime and criminal behavior. Under monopolistic auspices, law will invariably be transformed into legislation. As a result of an unending process of income and wealth redistribution in the name of racial, social, and /or gender justice, the very idea of justice as universal and immutable
principles of conduct and cooperation will be eroded and ultimately destroyed. Rather than being conceived of as something preexisting (and to be discovered), law is increasingly considered as government made law (legislation). Accordingly, not only will legal uncertainty increase, but in reaction the social rate of time preference will rise (i.e., people in general will become more present-oriented and have an increasingly shorter planning horizon). Moral relativism will also be promoted. For if there is no such thing as an ultimate right, then there is also no such thing as an absolute wrong. Indeed, what is right today may be wrong tomorrow, and
vice
versa.
Rising time preferences combined with moral relativism, then, provides the perfect breeding ground for criminals and crimes—a tendency especially evident in the big cities. It is here that the dissolution of families is most advanced, that the greatest concentration of welfare recipients exists, that the process of genetic pauperization has progressed furthest, and that tribal and racial tensions as the outcome of forced integration are most virulent. Rather than centers of civilization, cities have become centers of social disintegration and cesspools of physical and moral decay, corruption, brutishness, and crime.
²²

²¹
See on this Allan C. Carlson, "What Has Government Done to Our Families?"
Essays
in
Political
Economy
(Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1991); Bryce J. Christensen, "The Family vs. the State,"
Essays
in
Political
Economy
(Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1992).

IV

What follows from all of this? Clearly, Western civilization has been on a course of self-destruction for quite some time. Can this course be stopped, and if so, how? I wish I could be optimistic, but I am not so sure that there is sufficient reason for optimism. To be sure, history is ultimately determined by ideas, and ideas can, at least in principle, change almost instantly. But in order for ideas to change it is not sufficient for people to see that something is wrong. At least a significant number must also be intelligent enough to recognize what it is that is wrong. That is, they must understand the basic principles upon which society—human cooperation—rests—the very principles explained here. And they must have sufficient will power to act according to this insight. But it is precisely this which one must increasingly doubt. Civilization and culture do have a genetic (biological) basis. However, as the result of statism—of forced integration, egalitarianism, welfare policies, and family
destruction—the genetic quality of the population has most certainly declined.
²³
Indeed, how could it not when success is systematically punished and failure rewarded? Whether intended or not, the welfare state promotes the proliferation of intellectually and morally inferior people and the results would be even worse were it not for the fact that crime rates are particularly high among these people, and that they tend to eliminate each other more frequently.

²²
See on this Edward C. Banfield, "Present-Orientedness and Crime," in
Assess
ing
the
Criminal,
Randy E. Barnett and John Hagel, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977); David Walters, "Crime in the Welfare State," in
Criminal
Justice?
':
The
Legal
System
vs.
Individual
Responsibility,
Robert J. Bidinotto, ed. (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1994); also James Q. Wilson,
Thinking
About
Crime
(New York: Vintage Books, 1985).

However, even if all of this does not give much hope for the future, all is not lost. There still remain some pockets of civilization and culture. Not in the cities and metropolitan areas, but in the heartland (countryside). In order to preserve these, several requirements must be fulfilled: The state—a judicial—monopoly must be recognized as the source of decivilization: states do not create law and order, they destroy it. Families and households must be recognized as the source of civilization. It is essential that the heads of families and households reassert their ultimate authority as judge in all internal family affairs. (Households must be declared extraterritorial territory, like foreign embassies.) Voluntary spatial segregation, and discrimination, must be recognized as not bad but good things that facilitate peaceful cooperation between different ethnic and racial groups. Welfare must be recognized as a matter exclusively of families and voluntary charity, and state welfare as nothing but the subsidization of irresponsibility.

²³
See on this Seymour W. Itzkoff,
The
Decline
of
Intelligence
in
America
(Westport, Conn.: Pra
eger, 1994); idem,
The
Road
to
Equality:
Evolution
and
Social
Reality
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992).

10

On
Conservatism
and
Libertarianism

I

Let me begin by discussing two possible meanings of the term conservative. The first meaning is to refer to someone as conservative who generally supports the
status
quo;
that is, a person who wants to conserve whatever laws, rules, regulations, moral and behavioral codes happen to exist at any given point in time.

Because different laws, rules, and political institutions are in place at different times and/or different locations, what a conservative supports depends on and changes with place and time. To be a conservative means nothing specific at all except to like the existing order, whatever that may be.

The first meaning can be discarded, then.
¹
The term conservative must have a different meaning. What it means, and possibly only can mean, is this: Conservative refers to someone who believes in the existence of a natural order, a natural state of affairs which corresponds to the nature of things: of nature and man. This natural order is and can be disturbed by accidents and anomalies: by earthquakes and hurricanes, diseases, pests, monsters and beasts, by two-headed horses or fourlegged humans, cripples and idiots, and by war, conquest and tyranny. But it is not difficult to distinguish the normal from the anomaly, the essential from the accidental. A little bit of abstraction removes all the
clutter and enables nearly everyone to "see" what is and what is not natural and in accordance with the nature of things. Moreover, the natural is at the same time the most enduring state of affairs. The natural order is ancient and forever the same (only anomalies and accidents undergo change), hence, it can be recognized by us everywhere and at all times.

¹
To state this is not to claim that no one has ever adopted this meaning of conservatism. In fact, a prominent example of a conservative who comes very close to accepting the definition rejected here as useless is Michael Oakeshott, "On Being Conservative," in idem,
Rationalism
in
Politics
and
other
Essays
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1991). For Oakeshott, conservatism is

not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.... [It is] a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.... [It is] to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss, (pp. 407-08)

Conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the "noise" of anomalies and accidents and who defends, supports, and helps to preserve it against the temporary and anomalous. Within the realm of the humanities, including the social sciences, a conservative recognizes families (fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren) and households based on private property and in cooperation with a community of other households as the most fundamental, natural, essential, ancient, and indispensable social units. Moreover, the family household also represents the model of the social order at large. Just as a hierarchical order exists in a family, so is there a hierarchical order within a community of families—of apprentices, servants, and masters, vassals, knights, lords, overlords, and even kings—tied together by an elaborate and intricate system of kinship relations; and of children, parents, priests, bishops, cardinals, patriarchs or popes, and finally the transcendent God. Of the two layers of authority, the earthly physical power of parents, lords, and kings is naturally subordinate and subject to control by the ultimate spiritual-intellectual authority of fathers, priests, bishops, and ultimately God.

Conservatives (or more specifically, Western Greco-Christian conservatives), if they stand for anything, stand for and want to preserve the family and the social hierarchies and layers of material as well as spiritual-intellectual authority based on and growing out of family bonds and kinship relations.
²

²
See Robert Nisbet, "Conservatism," in
A
History
of
Sociological
Analysis,
Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds. (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Robert Nisbet,
Conservatism:
Dream
and
Reality
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). "Naturally," writes Nisbet, "the conservatives, in their appeal to tradition, were not endorsing each and every idea or thing handed down from the past. The philosophy of traditionalism is, like all such philosophies, selective. Asalutary tradition must come from the past but it must also be desirable in itself" (ibid., p. 26). "The two central concepts in conservative philosophy," Nisbet goes on to explain, are "property" and (voluntarily acknowledged) "authority," which in turn imply both "liberty" and "order" (pp. 34-35). "Property," in conservative philosophy, "is more than external appendage to man, mere inanimate servant of human need. It is, above anything else in civilization, the very condition of man's humanness, his superiority over the entire natural world" (p. 56).

II

Let me now come to an evaluation of contemporary conservatism, and then go on to explain why conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and, equally important, why libertarians must be conservatives.

Modern conservatism, in the United States and Europe, is confused and distorted. This confusion is largely due to democracy. Under the influence of representative democracy and with the transformation of the U.S. and Europe into mass democracies from World War I, conservatism
was transformed from an antiegalitarian, aristocratic, antistatist ideological force into a movement of culturally conservative statists: the right wing of the socialists and social democrats. Most self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives are concerned, as they should be, about the decay of families, divorce, illegitimacy, loss of authority, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, social disintegration, sex, and crime. All of these phenomena represent anomalies and scandalous deviations from the natural order. A conservative must indeed be opposed to all of these developments and try to restore normalcy. However, most contemporary conservatives (at least most of the spokesmen of the conservative establishment) either do not recognize that their goal of restoring normalcy requires the most drastic, even revolutionary, antistatist social changes, or (if they know about this) they are members of the "fifth column" engaged in destroying conservatism from inside (and hence, must be regarded as evil).

Much of the conservative veneration for the family lies in its historic affinity between family and property. It is usually the rule for any family to seek as much advantage for its children and other members as is possible There is no issue over which conservative has fought liberal and socialist as strenuously as on threats through law to loosen property from family grasp, by taxation or by any other form of redistribution, (p. 52)

Almost everything about the medieval law of family and marriage, including the stringent emphasis upon chastity of the female, the terrible penalty that could be exerted against adultery by the wife, springs from a nearly absolute reverence for property, for legitimate heritability of property, (p. 57)

Similarly, the conservative emphasis on authority and social rank orders, and the affinity to medieval—pre-Reformation—Europe as a model of social organization, is rooted in the primacy of family and property. "There is," explains Nisbet,

no principle more basic to the conservative philosophy than tha
t of the inherent and absolute incompatibility between liberty
and equality. Such incompatibility springs from the contrary ob
jectives of the two values. The abiding purpose of liberty is its protection of indi
vidual and family property— a word used in its widest sense to include the imm
aterial as well as the material in life. The inherent objective
of equality, on the other hand, is that of some kind of redistribution or leveling
of the unequally shared material and immaterial values of a com
munity. Moreover, individual strengths of mind and body being d
ifferent from birth, all efforts to compensate through law and government for this d
iversity of strengths can only cripple the liberties of those i
nvolved; especially the liberties of the strongest and the most brilliant, (p. 47)

For the conservative, then, the preservation of property and liberty requires the existence of a natural elite or aristocracy, and he is accordingly strictly opposed to democracy. Indeed, notes Nisbet, "for most conservatives socialism appeared as an almost necessary emergent of democracy and totalitarianism an almost equally necessary product of social democracy" (p. 92). On the incompatibility of liberty and equality (and democracy) see also Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn,
Liberty
or
Equality?
(Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1993); on the conservative emphasis on a
nobilitas
naturalis
as a sociological prerequisite of liberty see also Wilhelm Ropke,
Jenseits
von
Angebot
und Nachfrage
(Bern: Paul Haupt, 1979), chap. 3.3.