Why I'm not a conservative, again

Every so often I come across something that reminds me why, and here's the latest, a post on the ironically(?) titled Postmodern Conservative blog by Johnathan Jones, called "The Quest for Community". It's a review of a book with the same title by Robert Nisbet first published in 1953 -- a date that, in itself, tells you something about it -- and now re-issued. Back when I was myself a lefty, this was just the sort of thing I abhorred, confirming my fervent anti-conservative, left-wing beliefs:

Humans are, intractably, social creatures built for communion. So prevalent is the belief that an equal satisfaction of preferences is a high social good, and that the purpose of politics and morality is the working toward that supposed good, that Nisbet can be a bit of a shock. As this blog argues, liberalism is very insufficient to maintain social order. Freedom and equality as high principles can harm other realities necessary for social harmony.

And it still bothers me. What, prey tell, is "equal satisfaction of preferences" supposed to mean? If human creatures are "built for communion", then wouldn't communion/community also be a preference? Is "social harmony" really supposed to trump everything else -- freedom, equality (of status), and even justice?  In other words, this seems like vague, abstract, confused, and even somewhat menacing mush.

But, being wiser at least than I was, I can now pick out some threads that do make some sense, even if incomplete and poorly grounded. Here, for example, he brings up a theme I've called "hubristic Reason", originating in the Continental (as distinct from the British/Scottish) Enlightenment, and that is a serious flaw in contemporary collectivist/liberal statist schemes:

... the aspirations that inspired the founders of modern thought – the conquest of nature through science, perhaps even the conquest of human nature, and the emancipation of power from moral restraint – could be “achieved” at a great and unpredictable cost. [my emphasis]

And the emphasis on family and association generally is a good theme, however simple, and a welcome contrast to the sort of politicized "solidarity" that characterizes the left. This I think, as another example, makes a good point about the need to bring together things that contemporary liberal orthodoxies tend always to oppose:

Far too many lifestyle choices and social, political structures shatter what the authentically familial would hold together – consumption and production, sensuality and fertility, freedom and virtue.

So fine, but where does that leave us? If Jones' answer is that it leaves us stuck in a 50's style time warp, then he's no help, and this perverse mock rallying cry -- "Down with the statist-individualist symbiosis!" -- just underlines his confusion and haplessness. It also points to his crucial mistake -- to accept, uncritically, the left-wing denigration of the individual, leaving him with the only apparent alternatives of leftist collectivism or an antique conservatism. But the modern individual is a much more complex, and still evolving, phenomenon, that is at the heart of new and potentially richer sorts of community. Like any emergence, this process is not without its tribulations, but the true progressives are those who support the individual and the freedom that defines him -- and resist the reactionaries on both the left and the right that would try to re-submerge her in collectives either traditional or statist (or both).

Anarchism vs. classical liberalism

This stems from a review of an interesting new book by the always interesting James Scott: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. As the reviewer, Daniel Little, states,

The book takes up the argument that Scott began in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed: that a central task of the state it to render its territory and population "legible". The state needs to be able to regiment and identify its subjects, if it is to collect taxes and raise armies; so sedentary, mobile, peripheral peoples are antithetical to the needs of the state. This argument begins in Seeing Like a State; and it gains substantial elaboration here.

What's significant about that argument is the way in which it provides us with quite a different view of the state as an institution than we're used to -- here the state starts to appear as a kind of predatory social entity, benefiting its own political class at the expense of the mass of people whom it must make "legible" in order to prey upon. Somewhere, I think, Scott refers to himself as a kind of Marxist-lite, and this view of the state is certainly in keeping with Marxist notions of the state as an instrument of class oppression. But, if you adjust the notion of "class" -- throwing out the outmoded Marxist categories based upon economic role, and substituting a simpler and clearer classification based upon proximity to state power -- then this view is also quite familiar to modern conservative and libertarian critiques of our current political systems. 

What's also interesting, then, is the portrayal of resistance to state predation, something that people seem to do when- and wherever they can, which is typically in mountainous as opposed to lowland regions*. Contrary to Hobbes' famous summary of the life of man in the state of nature -- his notion of what "not being governed" meant -- their lives may be harsh but seem quite sustainable, and they've adapted their cultures in a number of ways to make them illegible to the state; in contemporary terms, they've opted to live "off the grid".  Their very persistence is a testament to the fact that not being governed is not only possible but, in many ways, preferable.

Perhaps not in all ways, however. The cultures being examined here are not complex in comparison with the modern world and not what we would call "advanced" in terms of wealth and individual opportunity. And were it not for the surrounding modern world, from which they can borrow, their conditions of life would no doubt be worse than they are. There is, in other words, a limit to what can be achieved by anarchic societies. To get beyond those limits, we need to add more complex forms of property than simple anarchy can manage -- we need, in other words, as Hernando de Soto has argued, codified and legible property rights, and a justice system to enforce them. Which gets us back to the state, true, but a state restricted in its predatory inclinations by its limited mandate -- it gets us, in fact, to the state of classical liberalism.

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*See also a comment to this effect referring to a passage in Braudel's The Mediterranean.