George Will Lecture, Day 2: Statecraft & Soulcraft, What Government Does

good evening dean allison ladies and gentlemen it is my honor to present this evening your godkin lecturer for his third consecutive performance he calls himself a conservative but he has made a radical innovation i have attended 20 consecutive godkin lecture series and the traditional pattern is for attendance to drop off drastically after the first the audience here this evening not only testifies to mr whale's eloquence and wit but suggests that there is an intellectual response in depth to his thesis the view that politics has a moral end as well as mediating among competing groups for material advantage and that the true conservative is one who sees in the work of politics and government the highest obligation of the citizen now the two previous introductions have emphasized his substantive message which it would be hard to miss perhaps i should note the methodological aspect of his message which may be obscured by the informality and elegance of its delivery he was educated not only in the phd program at princeton as you have already heard but also in that home of lost causes and casual eloquence oxford university now since lord bryce the first godkin lecturer the english among his successors as lecturers have demonstrated how the traditions of unrehearsed parliamentary debate makes for more stimulating performance on the podium hugh gateskill and c.p snow edward heath and shirley williams have been very hard for their american competitors to match in their combination of solid substance and suave delivery now george will shows that he can deliver the best of both worlds but maybe it's the oxford tradition that makes the greater contribution even more than the parliamentary tradition to his performance there the systematic social sciences have never won out over the traditional political philosophy which in america and here harvard i am glad to say is a happy exception has nearly vanished from political science curricula on this issue his hero edmund burke was a poor prophet he has quoted almost all of burke's most sparkling lines but he missed my favorite burke's attack on the scientific dissenters who were supporting the french and american revolutions you may remember the lands the age of chivalry is gone that of sovesters economists and calculators has succeeded and the glory of europe is extinguished forever now if burke was a poor prophet it's because oxford held out successfully for more than a century against the capture of its entire curriculum by the economists and calculators and the conservative theologians and philosophers still have their role there and maybe creating a new one here if one may judge by the response to these lectures now it is it is hard to discuss this issue along the traditional conservative liberal distinction indeed mr will to my great pleasure neatly debunks those labels now that debunking job could have been done even after burke in england when that conservative whig lord melbourne the prime minister and tutor of queen victoria remarked as the legend has it things have come to a pretty past when religion presumes to interfere with a man's private life this this was the statesman whose conception of ethics and politics was summed up in his charge to the cabinet it doesn't much matter what we say as long as we all say the same thing mr wells main theme of course does not apply to conservatives alone reinhold niebuhr attacked the so-called conservatives years ago for not being real conservatives but instead believing in weak government the opposite of conservative belief he called them not aristocrats but plutocrats he was even more critical since then in his time the so-called conservatives had not come into such decisive power more critical of the delusions of those so-called liberals who combined scientism and utilitarianism into a recipe for utopia neighbor's crusade for the moral reform of politics fell short of his hopes mr will may have an easier time converting the plutocrats into aristocrats than the so-called liberals will have in making aristocrats out of our technocrats that is another missionary effort i will recommend to him when he completes his conversion of the conservatives but whether or not he wins on that one i feel deeply indebted to him as i trust his audiences have done for this stimulating series of godkin lectures i'm happy to present mr will at the end he will feel his own questions as he has done so brilliantly in the last two evenings until i rise to protect him from unduly prolonged punishment i lecture in the in the great oxford tradition of the man who got up and gave a lecture for new college and the tradition of of encompassing scholarship and periclean eloquence and it was on plato and saint paul and he came back the next week to continue the series of lectures and he said i have only one announcement to make the beginning of today's lectures whenever i said last week saint paul i meant plato and whenever i said plato i meant saint paul my lecture tonight is my text for tonight's sermon comes from a gentleman who was a who was a harvard student in the late 40s who then went to washington to work in the office of senator sultan stahl and the senator said young man what do you want to work on and eliot richardson said i want to work on legislation not politics and sultan stahl said it's all politics son it's all politics is my theme tonight i recently received a highly charged and disapproving letter from an intergalactically famous economist uh who uh who has a nobel prize in what is even grander a column in newsweek and who is of a very conservative disposition as we currently abuse the term conservative and he said george i like everything you write i said something wicked about import quotas or something free trade and he said george i like everything you write except when you write about economics i was of course too exquisitely polite to reply that i like everything he writes except when he writes about politics and he writes about nothing else because economic questions so-called are non-existent there are only political questions and it is to that thesis that i've turned tonight in 1964 a conservative citizen speaking with the zeal of a convert which he was gave a nationally televised speech in support of barry goldwater's candidacy and in it he denounced people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure in 1981 in another speech the same fellow said approximately the same thing he said the taxing power of the government must be used to provide revenues for legitimate government purposes it must not be used to regulate the economy or bring about social change now the consistency of ronald reagan's views is one of the wonders of american political life but another wonder is that anyone least of all the 40th president would talk like that because no president has ever stretched as stressed as much as ronald reagan has the possibility and importance of changing society by changing the tax code clearly he thinks the tax changes he favors are the key to his economic program which is in turn the key to his comprehensive plan for revitalizing american society and approving improving as he said in his detroit speech the moral fiber of america he clearly believes that public policy should reward and thereby nurture the attributes essential to national strength and should discourage the attributes inimical to economic vitality and he would not i presume deny that a law establishing protecting and regulating the institution of property which is a community institution is but one example of the kinds of laws we have that affect intendedly are not the shaping and spirit of society tax deductions for example and tax exemptions are not alternatives to social programs they are social programs and like many such they actually usually achieve their intended effects they alter behavior on a large scale for the advancement of chosen social goals in the 1976 campaign for the republican nomination reagan said i've always thought the best thing government can do is nothing surely i think the truth that we begin with in politics regarding any significant aspect of social life is that the one thing government can never do is nothing this is true in two senses first a decision not to alter the status quo is a decision to do something it is a decision to continue the public policies that sustain the status quo that underlie any sphere of social life second it is peculiar to speak of thorough laissez-faire policies constituting government doing nothing a free-market economic system is a system it is a public product a creation of government any important structure of freedom is a structure a complicated institutional and cultural context that government must nurture and sustain obviously i hope free speech is not free in the sense that it is free from prerequisites free speech as much as a highway system is something government must establish and maintain the government of a country that without any of the rare and fragile traditions of civility without education and communications capabilities could proclaim freedom of speech and could resolutely stand back and see what happens but the result would not be free speech it would be mayhem and the triumph of incivility similarly a capitalistic economic system with all the institutions laws regulations dispositions habits and skills that make it work is not part of the constitution of the universe it does not spring up from the soil unbidden like prairie grass it requires an educational system regulated mechanisms for raising equity banking and currency systems highly developed laws of commerce and much more conservatives are understandably impatient with the familiar liberal formulation about being for human rights not property rights but conservatives and their eagerness to put government in its place which they think is down and far away argue just as fatuously that only people produce wealth government does not government clearly produces the infrastructure of society legal physical and educational from highways through skills all that is a precondition for the production of wealth the unlovely locution human capital reflects the impulse to reduce all social categories to economic ones but it also reflects a recognition that investment must be made in people before they can be socially competent and it is obvious once you think about it that government is and ought to be a major investor very stern adherence of laissez faire doctrine object not just to the practice of redistribution of income but even to the phrase distribution of income they think it implies that income is not purely earned but is in some part just received as a result of social processes rather than individual effort but the social processes are real enough so when john d rockefeller told congress in all sincerity that the good lord gave me my money he may usefully have defined regulation as impiety but he did less than justice to the public role in the generation of private wealth i was tempted for reasons clear to those of you who were here last night to title this lecture abortionists and capitalists two perpetrators of the net of the neutrality fallacy those who work to impose by federal power the policy of abortion on demand in 50 states that didn't want it really should not turn round to their opponents now and say that they the people who impose this are somehow value-free and that what they did was not imposing values on the community and it is i think no less untenable for those who work for a more free more pure capitalism to argue that they unlike all advocates of different systems are acting neutrally by keeping economics out of politics if we are to be properly conscious of our politics we must be wide awake to this fact choosing an economic system or choosing substantially to revise significant economic policies is a political which means a moral undertaking it is the authoritative assignment of values the encouragement of some behavior and the discouragement of other behavior it is of course rare that a nation has a moment of decision when it can be said to choose an economic system but the united states had one it was a moment spread over four or five decades it was the debate between the jeffersonians and the hamiltonians which came to a kind of culmination in the jacksonian debate over the national bank it was a debate about the coming of industrial capitalism to america and it was an example i believe of politics properly moralized a rural and and federal nation was becoming an urban and industrial and consolidated nation and when americans were faced with compromising their cherished self-image as a virtuous yeoman's republic they flinched they felt themselves and were indeed confronted with an agonizing choice and against the receding vision of the yeoman's simplicity stood the prospect of a very sophisticated modern nation dedicated to applied enlightenment americans came face to face with the question of growth for what and with the related but far more ominous question what marks will this enthusiastic pursuit of growth power wealth and progress leave on the character of the nation and on the character of the citizens very early americans became aware of and uneasy about their destiny it was a destiny debated by jefferson and hamilton jefferson though commonly considered the most optimistic of the founding fathers and he may have been in some sense was actually a severe pessimist or to put the point more precisely his thinking contained the largest scope for anxiety about the future as it actually happened as richard hofstetter said the balance of jefferson's good society was a very tenuous thing indeed the working class jefferson the democrat said is corrupt the merchants are corrupt the speculators are corrupt the cities are pestilential that's jefferson's word only farmers are dependably good sunder human nature from its proper or natural nourishment and it all falls apart these are jefferson's words those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of god whose breasts he had made he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue others merchants are dependent on the caprice of customers dependence begets subservience and venality suffocates the germ of virtue let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at benchwork let our workshops remain in europe actually the dye had been cast well before the revolution of the rather well before the war of 1812 during which jefferson became a manufacturer of some scale at monticello on july 4th a resonant date in 1789 congress put customs duties on all imports in the united states two weeks later it placed a much higher tonnage duty on foreign vessels than on american vessels clearly congress like the country was determined that there were going to be lots of workshops in america in his report on public credit submitted to congress in 1790 hamilton proposed funding the entire national debt at face value plus unpaid interest in spite of the fact that most of the speculators around had bought up most of the debt from soldiers and others who had lost faith in the credit of the united states hamilton's program may have passed because of the number of congressmen who were among the speculators but his plan derived from an idea and a vision of a particular kind of america and a particular kind of american now who won the fight for america's future the author of the sentiment let our workshops remain in europe or the author of the report on manufacturers with its call for the institutions of credit to fuel industrialism it's very clear who won the federalist one woodrow wilson called hamilton a great man but not a great american and today in the federal city you will see that there's a wonderful memorial to hamilton's rival jefferson there's no hamilton memorial but if you seek his monument look around this is hamilton's america even in agriculture ironically enough which is a heavily mechanized corporate scientific intensive industry it was hamilton's country by the time the jacksonians fighting a rear guard action against history opposed what they called that monster the national bank the crucial matter to them was not the amounts of wealth people might earn jackson himself was a terribly wealthy man rather it was the methods of acquisition it was assumed that different methods produced distinguishing character trays and moral orientations it was a vigorous debate they had about the kind of people americans could plan to be and i say plan because they felt they had foresight that there were predictable consequences of the paths they would take and that they had a choice in a way they didn't have a choice when jackson jefferson was worrying about people being piled up in pestilential cities that was in 1782 boston had a population about equal to that of muskogee oklahoma today at the time in 1821 when a jeffersonian was warning rather colorfully of the ring of streaked and speckled people of our large towns and cities there were precisely 12 cities in the united states of a population over ten thousand but the 19th century was a century of railroads and hints of rail heads and since hence it was the century that gave us chicago it was also the century of those who built the railroads with the immigrants and that gave us new york city america was launched toward being hamilton's america but that era was among the liveliest to understand the connection between economic institutions and particular human types long before marx and darwin in their different ways argued that creatures act upon the world and they are then acting upon themselves jefferson was insisting on the importance of modes of production as shapers of producers he understood that history is the history of mind jefferson thought that american democracy depended on a particular character and hence american democracy required an immensity of land hence when the opportunity arose for the louisiana purchase he leapt at it kicking over all the traces of his strict construction of the constitution in an exercise of presidential power it was a clear and i believe admirable instance of sociological analysis taking precedence over constitutional and institutional analysis in guiding presidential behavior shortly after jefferson died of course that the foremost student of the social roots of character arrived in this country it was to tocqueville and after his tour of the country of trying to decide if there was a distinctive american type produced by a commercial republic the phrase packed into his concept of democracy he decided that there was indeed that america gave rise to what he called a kind of gloomy hedonism the bootless chase of a complete felicity that forever escapes american man he said and he said the following in america restless upwardly mobile going west going up constantly dissatisfied this restless commercial energy he said the very fabric of time is every instant broken and the track of generations of faced those who went before are soon forgotten of those who will come after no one has any thought the interest of man is confined to those in close proximity to himself democracy breaks that chain of community and severs every link of it thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart well it's practical matter in the 19th century america because shortly after he wrote that about breaking the chains of community abraham lincoln in the last paragraph of his first inaugural in march facing physically east from the capital and symbolically south said though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection the mystic cords of memory must unite us but the bonds strained by slavery were according to de tocqueville already made flimsy by the normal day-to-day life of lonely self-interestedness in a commercial republic lincoln i believe towers over our national experience because in the nation's moment of maximum danger he marshaled that which makes us human which is language to do battle against the notion that there is no principle of right action but self-interest but in the 19th century this republic under lincoln came close to death from within because of that notion and today i believe the republic is vulnerable to internal decay and external challenge for the same reasons the vacuum at the core of our political philosophy of modernity is provision for social cohesion which must involve a degree of nurtured and shared national mind man's natural aggressiveness which hobbes was the first to make the central fact of politics has not been denied by subsequent philosophers of the liberal democratic commercial republic rather they have arranged for the sublimation of this aggressiveness in commerce to the extent that modern philosophy postulates any sort of natural sociability of all of mankind the sociability leads not to political but to commercial relations not to the athenian forum but to the new york stock exchange political philosophy has particularly in recent years had a tendency to disappear into economics as economics has striven to become a comprehensive theory of social energy the shift in the focus of political philosophy from concern with man's inner life to concern for his behavior and material well-being coincided with the rise of the social sciences and capitalism that is it coincided with new confidence in man's ability to manipulate the natural and social world modern political thought however produces a defect in the practice of rounded politics especially in this the first new and modern nation and one way of supplying that defect is i believe with a conservative doctrine of political economy to some this will seem a contradiction in terms because today's conservatives are apt to insist that the great virtue of their economic doctrine is that it separates politics and the economy but if economic policy is not politics is not the authoritative assignment of social values what is it today's conservatives have i believe a remarkably bifurcated view of the world as a result they often seem like startled innocence alarmed at the social consequences of the economic doctrines that do service as their political philosophy and unaware that what we smilingly call today social issues and economic policy are as inseparable as facets of the political it is odd that conservatives who are custodians of the claims of continuity against the willfulness of the moment should have suppressed all other groups and present surpassed all other groups in presenting an economic doctrine as a political philosophy economics is about contemporary calculations of short-term interests it is about the immediate and the rational to the exclusion of the venerable and the sentimental economics is the science of individualism and true conservatives have a soft spot in their hearts for the organic collectivity it is a small wonder that there is no truly conservative economic doctrine true conservatives think people spend all together too much time thinking economically anyway but it is of course interesting that we have given rise today to such a rich rainbow of conservatives they're of course the neo-conservatives who in not so recent days where i gather not at all conservative and i suspect that splicing the prefix neo on as a form of flinching and they're very admirable people some of my best friends are neo-conservatives but they don't have what we true conservatives have or stained glass mines mourn the traffic passing of the 13th century and on series ranks of bishops and all that good stuff but anyway they really are in in some ways melancholy liberals if we must have liberals let them be melancholy by all means but uh the defining fact about neoconservatives is that they adore capitalism don't just like it they really like it and capitalism means it seems to me the liberation and incessant inflaming of appetites but neoconservatives wisely deplore the predictable consequences of this which includes the sort of social disintegration that should be expected when a culture celebrates instant gratification part of the charm of being in detroit at the republican convention last year was that you could watch the republican platform being formed and it had two very interesting and separately defensible halves they just didn't fit together at all one was the the social conservatism cultural conservatism and the other was this enthusiasm this gilderian celebration of capitalist dynamism i i think the only person in the world who matches ronald reagan as a celebrator of the awesome power of capitalism is the author of the first three quarters of the communist manifesto i mean marx marx genuinely understood that capitalism undermines traditional social structures and values that's why he loved it that it is a relentless engine of change a revolutionary inflamer of appetites an enlarger of expectations and a diminisher of patience with has said that the great american prayer is dear god give me patience and i want it right now and the charm of the republican party today of which i am a card-carrying member is that it sees no connection between the cultural phenomena that it deplores and the capitalist culture that it promises to intensify no connection that is between the multiplying evidence of self-indulgence and national decadence such as pornography promiscuity abortion divorce and other forms of indiscipline and the unsleeping pursuit of an ever more immediate intense and grand material gratifications republicans sense and it was apparent in their platform that manners meaning conduct in its moral aspect is determinative of a nation's life as determinant of as material preoccupations really do not seem quite the sense that the effect of such preoccupations on manners conservatives i should have thought should feel a special responsibility and urgency about providing and conserving a common character in the country the modern state is comprehensively concerned with conditions not character but the processes the processes by which conditions are changed leave and impress on the character a particular shape of those involved in the processes as i shall argue as we go along here the dynamics of a capitalist society undermine the sense of a permanent order in the world a sense that is highly useful in the transmission of subtle beliefs we have of course libertarian conservatives to complete this zoological treatise they i find that phrase libertarian conservatives have written before a bit like promiscuous celibate seems to me real conservatism by definition since conservation means to resist the dynamism of change uh involves strong government real conservatism that is about striking a balance among competing values and striking the proper balance often requires limits on liberty and always requires resistance to libertarianism which is the doctrine of maximizing freedom for private appetites because libertarianism is a recipe for the dislocation and dissolution of public authority social and religious traditions and other restraints needed to prevent license from replacing durable and structured liberty indeed i should think the truly conservative critique of contemporary american society is that there's altogether too much freedom if you listen to some conservatives talk they feel this way there's too much freedom for abortionists pornographers businessmen trading with the soviet union young men exempt from conscription to cite just four examples but having hollowed out their political philosophy to make room for economic doctrine a doctrine that recommends capitalism and its unsleeping dynamism conservatives are in a singularly weak position to perform the traditional conservative function of judging and editing the social transformation that comes with the dissolution of old forms and modes of action but traditional conservatism has not been and proper conservatism cannot be merely a defense of industrialism and individualist free-market economics conservatism is about the cultivation and conservative particular values or it is about nothing and industrialism has been a thorough solvent of those values it is surely unreasonably a priori to assume that unregulated consequences of unfettered industrialism whatever they may be are compatible with let alone identifiable with conservative aspirations conservatives rightly defend the market as a marvelous mechanism for allocating resources but when conservatives begin regarding the market less as an expedient than as an ultimate value or the ultimate arbiter of all values their conservatism degenerates into the least conservative political impulse which is populism after all the market is the judgment of the people at any moment but government especially conservative government exists not merely to serve individuals immediate preferences but to achieve collective purposes for an ongoing nation government must have a long time horizon government unlike a market has responsibilities it has a duty to look down the road and consider the interests and needs of citizens yet unborn market has a remarkable ability to satisfy the desires of the day but government has other graver purposes if conservatism is to engage itself with the way we live now it must address government's graver purposes with i believe an affirmative doctrine of the welfare state the idea of such an affirmation may but should not seem paradoxical to conservatives israeli and bismarck pioneered the welfare state and did so for impeccably conservative reasons to reconcile the masses to the vicissitudes and hazards of dynamic and hierarchical industrial economies they acted on the principle of an economy of exertion in government using government power judiciously through welfare measures to prevent less discriminating more disruptive uses of power today the conservative affirmation of the welfare state should be grounded in three additional considerations they are consideration to prudence of intellectual integrity and of equity a welfare state is probably indispensable to social cohesion and hence to national strength about which conservatives rightly care a welfare state is implied by conservative rhetoric and a welfare state is an embodiment of the wholesome ethic of common provision the doctrine underlying the political economy that we live with today and shall ever after was enunciated in 1877 in a supreme court opinion munn versus illinois the court upheld an illinois statute regulating rates on grain elevators holding that private property it said becomes clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence and affect the community at large when therefore one devotes his property to a use in which the public has an interest he is in effect granting the public an interest in that use and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good to the extent of the interest he has thus created i do not care to argue the rightness or wrongness of that doctrine but for conservatives to doubt the strength and durability of the public consensus about that doctrine is intellectually idle and politically feckless conservatives must come to terms with the public's assumption that private economic decisions often are permeated with a public interest and hence are legitimate subjects for public debate and intervention a conservative doctrine of the welfare state is required if conservatives are even to be included in the contemporary political conversation conservatives need ways to make the welfare state more compatible with conservative governmental values and to make it more affirmative of conservative social values what most conservatives know by intuition and many liberals now know by experience is this government is not efficient at providing goods and services it is terrific at writing checks and at providing incentives and disincentives that cause self-interested persons that is almost everybody to behave in various ways so a welfare state run on conservative principles will provide the poor with cash for example to buy necessities from the private sector thereby reducing the need for an enormous social service bureaucracy and a conservative welfare state will provide incentives to cause the private sector to weave much of the social safety net about which we've heard so much and about which every industrial developed society is demanding but in addition to these conservative governmental values there are social goals for a conservative welfare state and the first is to strengthen what burke called the little platoons that are he said even more meaningfully than individuals the molecular units of society conservatives should be leading the fight for a welfare system that supports rather than disintegrates families the more we learn about the radiating consequences of decomposed families the more clearly we see the social costs from unemployment to crowded prisons of neglecting the most important little platoon the family in addition a conservative welfare state will use government to combat the tendency of the modern bureaucratic state to standardize and suffocate diversity to give just one example a conservative welfare state would give to individuals tax credits a tax subsidy to be candid to offset tuition payments to private schools this incentive to private education especially at the secondary level would stimulate competition against the nation's most powerful and abusive near monopoly the public education lobby my purpose here is only to sample the range of possible uses of assertive government on behalf of conservative values my primary purpose is to summon conservatives to government for nearly half a century conservatism was or felt itself to be in the political wilderness during this period it became cranky and recriminatory therefore a question posed by the coming to power of self-conscious conservatism is can it present to the country conservatism with a kindly face another question is can conservatives come to terms with the social reality behind their slogans conservatives rightly stress equality of opportunity for example rather than equality of outcomes conservatives are therefore fond of the metaphor of the foot race all citizens should be roughly equal at the starting line of the race of life but much that we have learned and continue to learn and we are learning rather a lot about early childhood development suggests that equality of opportunity is a much more complicated matter than most conservatives can comfortably admit everything from prenatal care to infant stimulation to childhood nutrition and especially of coast course home environment influences the competence of the young runner as he or she approaches the starting line particularly the starting line for the academic hurdles that so heavily influence social outcomes in america now there is of course vast range for intelligent disagreement about what can and should be done to make equality of opportunity more than an airy abstraction but surely it is probable and conservatives must by the logic of their rhetoric be open-minded about the possibility that equality of opportunity can be enhanced by various forms of state action but the most important reason that conservatives should give for their vision of a welfare state is the most important reason for doing anything politically it is justice aquinas said that justice which is giving individuals their due with constant and perpetual will is a habit habitus justice depends therefore on a certain disposition it depends in a sense it is a state of mind a society that is organized socially and justified philosophically the way ours is however must take special care to supply itself with the rhetoric the institutions and the policies that encourage that state of mind neither the spirit of the age nor the premises of self-interestedness received from the past which have helped produce the spirit of the age will do the work the political philosophy of modernity taking its bearings from the strongest passions does not emphasize and so does not nurture the habit of thinking of our fellow citizens has united in a great common enterprise i believe that a warm citizenship approximating friendship is based on a sense of shared values and shared fate it depends to some extent on policies that generate the feeling that we are and ought to be in some corporate enterprise as a nation that stands for something the steady amelioration of physical distress by state action particularly the welfare state has produced societies in the western world in which the most important problems are problems of the spirit mankind has needs call them spiritual moral emotional what you will that can may be connected in interesting ways with material needs but cannot be reduced to physical needs and are ignored by society at their peril and i believe that a way of meeting those needs is by defining society's welfare state obligations in a particular way it was learned at hand and i believe it was at harvard when he said you cannot again set up a jeffersonian world in a separate monads each looking up to heaven for good or evil man who must have lived for a long time in groups likes too much the warm feeling of his mental and moral elbows in touch with his neighbors a conservatively run and justified welfare state would emphasize that the notion of moral neighborliness is as central to an understanding of the idea of polity as can be and hence to an understanding of politics a great politics obviously is grounded as hamilton's was and jefferson's was and lincoln's was in a clear vision of the country the centuries finest political memoirs begin all my life i have thought of france in a certain way it's the first line of the first volume of de gaulle's memoirs the american nation's finest political career derived from lincoln's refusal over the kansas act to allow his country to be seduced into thinking of itself in what he thought was an unworthy way there is a value therefore i think to ideas which although not denouncing the fundamental working arrangements of a commercial republic nevertheless cast a steady and cool eye on the long-term effect of those arrangements i am haunted as i have made clear for three nights now running by the line in federalist 51 by madison where he says you see throughout our system the process of supplying by opposite and rival interest the defect of better motives it is almost as though the founders thought they had devised a system so clever it would work well even if no one had public spirited motives but there are social roots of political behavior and there are social consequences of political behavior and there are social consequences of political expectations and a nation that announces at its outset that it can dispense with better motives than self-interest in politics does not encourage self-restraint self-denial and moderation in any sphere of life drawing upon montesquieu the founders hope that commerce the submersion of passion in the pursuit of gain was more reliable than public virtue as a basis for political stability but real conservatives have said it well and have said it often that democracy subverts itself if it subverts the habits of self-restraint self-denial and public spiritedness that is the dilemma of democracy in a commercial nation now self-interestedness can be conducive to the public interest i do not for a moment question that the obvious virtue of laissez-faire policies is the voluntary performance of many socially useful functions but its vision of a relatively frictionless mechanism of social adjustment is at once rationalistic and romantic it is hard to say which is more american romanticism or capitalism and i think in america it is wrong to distinguish them i understand the irrevocable triumph of modernity i'm even really in my better moments relatively cheerful about it this triumph of justifying social orders on the wide release of passions and appetites that is precisely why the irrevocable nature of it that i am so concerned about shaping passions and desires to counter veil by virtue i mean nothing arcane or obscure i mean good citizenship as common sense would define it in moderation social sympathy and a willingness to sacrifice private desires for agreed upon public ends there is a need to plan ahead for public spiritedness unfortunately the social sciences have with good reason lost their nerve exactly at a moment when we need a sociology of civic virtue of public spiritedness today we need an argument about the connection between the society we have and the kind of individuals we want american life to nurture this argument must involve more than the republican and democratic arguments about the most expeditious way to orient politics to the increase of material well-being the argument between ronald reagan and edward kennedy between manchester liberalism and massachusetts liberalism is not unimportant in terms of public policy but it does not reach philosophic fundamentals the question is not does capitalism or socialism or a mixed economy work of course it does as milton friedman says of socialism does it work of course it works so does a horse and buggy there is more to judging an economic arrangement than judging how far how smooth and fast they expand the gross national product it is difficult to measure what tocqueville called the slow and quiet action of society upon itself because the action is so slow and quiet but that action must be watched because it is real a prerequisite of capitalism especially in the early stages of accumulation is the suppression of spontaneous desire democracy and capitalism are compatible only so long as the habits of political and economic self-restraint deferral of gratification industriousness thrift and all the rest reinforce one another the question is what not for the public but i'm gonna hear you hear all the time about the public opinion the public is that there is no public opinion in america on almost anything the government does i think that's fairly obvious there's no public opinion on cruise missile range limits no public opinion on meet import quotas or grazing fees on public land they're ten thousand publics and they're intense they're organized they're compact and they're very skillful but there's a public opinion in any meaningful sense indeed i would wager as a journalist that the public's understanding of what government did was better in 1881 than in 1981 better that is before the proliferation of print journalism and before the invention of broadcast journalism simply because the government does so much more there was a larger comprehension of it well it's unrealistic talk we subsist on it i guess about public opinion and all but to revitalize and strengthen government we need i think to talk about talk we need a new respectful rhetoric respectful that is of the better angels of mankind's nature it must be more ciceroni and more lincolnesque less madisonian mar and marshallian talk matters because mankind is not just matter he's not just a machine with an appetite inside we are not what we eat we are to some extent what we and our leaders the emblematic figures of our society say we are a society that says in its founding philosophy clearly and often that public spiritedness is unnatural should be especially eager to nurture it hard and often would that modern man were as eliot said the hollow men the empty men hollow spaces can be creatively filled unfortunately modern man has undergone a kind of mischievous taxidermy he is stuffed to the bursting point with a dangerous idea it is the idea that self-interestedness is sufficient to keep society's clockwork mechanism ticking over and that whatever is wrought by that mechanism is by definition progressive we hope to be governed by the wisest we insist that whoever governs does so by consent and we want elites of character as well as achievement but the premises of our political order do not serve that political objective we require i believe as i have belabored you with for three nights running a more sociological and less institutional discussion of politics we we need not less attention to the separation of powers to first amendment law and other facets of the government's role as mediator of conflict but we do need more attention to the social roots of our behavior the habits and dispositions that shape society and its conflicts the spur to such discussion should be something this country this century teaches perishables of at the end of these things i refer you to the end of what i consider the greatest american novel at the end of the native middle west looks out across the water of long island sound and as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away so gradually i became aware of the old island that flowered once before dutch sailors eyes a fresh green breast of the new world its vanished trees trees that had made way for gatsby's house had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this comment compelled into an aesthetic contemplation not understood nor desired face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder well the new world is not as fresh as it once was and we should have an acute sense of how transitory moments are in this changing nation that is one reason why being an american is such an exhilarating such a breath-catching experience and one reason why the nation requires constant philosophic contemplation god itself i thank harvard and i thank you for granting me this opportunity to try to make a honest contribution to the contemplation thank you very much uh in the unlikely event i've said anything anyone disagrees with now is your chance yes that's right federalism you raised two questions that are very interesting first about decentralization obviously politics need not be centralized there's lots of politics besides what the government does as you well know the principal growth of government united states in the last 20 years has been at the state and local level the principal tax burdens it's a great irony that conservative way to fight government is to turn more resources over to the state and local level the great increase in the take of the public sector of private wealth in this country has occurred almost exclusively in the state capitals so by decentralizing power you do not get less government you get if anything a rapid multiplication of government functions may be good it may be bad but but it's an ambiguous goal at best for conservatives you're absolutely right about the fact that the welfare state like everything else i have described is dangerous politics in every form can go wrong and the welfare state to the extent that it is marquee the welfare state to the extent that it politicizes decisions that the better could be made by impersonal forces embitters politics and raises the stakes the temperature of society i take that point as well i acknowledge all the dangers you've cited clearly politics can be a divider of society as easily as a unifier all i'm saying is that as a practical politician i would say it doesn't do any good to demonstrate the people often on the welfare state they want it not everywhere throughout the western world and they're going to live with it and it is idle to demonstrate that people should not want to live the way they manifest they do want to live and therefore given that the welfare state is an accomplished fact and i think obviously a good idea it is well to look around for conservative instruments for this form of state because that's what the electoral competition is about who's going to run it uh well there's no question that that it would be easier to have the gentleness that is at the heart of the idea of civilization if we didn't need armies but we do need armies and therefore uh although you rightly say and we sometimes lose track of this in this country that the purpose of an army is to wage and win wars it is not necessarily the case that it must however be a purely brutalized experience the very gravity of what conscription involves which is the state claiming an extreme duty and obligation should compel the public officials who would institute conscription as i would to demonstrate in the gravest moral terms what the problem is what the drama of the 20th century is which is the question whether nations so constituted can endure in the face of a protracted conflict from a new form of government the 20th century's dimension of totalitarianism all i guess all i'm saying is that that granted conscription can be a brutalizing experience and granted war necessarily is nevertheless given our foreknowledge of that it should be possible to at least clothes with with as much nobility as possible of the badges that make the sacrifice necessary one government overloads its own circuits its ability to be reflective about what it does diminishes and the economy of the processes of bureaucracy takeover and you get not only not philosophic reflection you get no reflection at all you get animal spirits and empire building and all the normal stuff the problem is not big government it's weak government and on the other hand it's not the comprehensiveness of government so much as the irrational intrusiveness of it that has made the american people terrible about government if you go to iowa and say what has irritated you about government i'll give you two things you can get all right in the california defined six girl basketball as a human rights violation that annoyed him in iowa just they said it's none of your business it's trivializing the great enterprise they've made a little library in a town in iowa with no people wheelchairs build a wheelchair ramp it's this kind of easy target that an irrationally intrusive state develops it seems to me this is why i think the reagan revolution so so misnamed but but we know what they're talking about the reagan revolution is so good there is a time after a growth for pruning because california and i've joe is a good friend of mine and i've done many times the irony is that no one in the world loves government more than just california he would do he would fill the world with the american government but no one no one in a way did more to discredit government than the department of health education and welfare made a lot of academic conservatives finest achievement by the way was when when affirmative action came to ann arbor the dawn came up like thunder in the academic community it's the doctrine of unintended effects needless to say but i mean that's one of the reasons why we get so fierce about uh trying to defend califano's love against califano's unwise love of it that is government um well the new ethic is a very old one and it's common sense and common acceptance all kinds of things can bring this on the 1960s helped as i just indicated a kind of reflectiveness has taken over we've given rise to a cultural reaction to the 1960s of which i humbly there's a there's a kind of dialectic society that helps hard times there's no question that the prospect of a bad job market does concentrate the lines of undergraduates i'm told on lots of things help but basically i have to say and this may sound people re read on which to lane i really if if i were to inflict on your fourth lecture it would be about talk it'd be about rhetoric the importance of how we talk as i said last night it is not an instrument to politics it is politics how we talk and we must learn to reclaim a way of talking better now reagan's pretty good about this but in his in his first and the big speech that got the tax cut passed where he said everyone call your conservative stirring up a revolt in the country i don't know anyway he uh he said do the sacrifice for your country call and ask for a tax cut and you may remember in the great debate as we smilingly call them between carter and ford lincoln douglas carter and ford remember what henry adams said about the succession of presidents from washington's disproving the theory of evolution but anyway they had this they had this debate and a question came the first question in the first debate was what sacrifice are you going to ask of the country ford said a tax cut carter said a bigger tax cut may have been the other way around it doesn't matter in preparing for the debate with john anderson this year ronald reagan was warned that's going to be one of the first questions what sacrifice should people make and he gave that answer of his but the country loves he says i do not believe that the people have been living too well i believe the government has been coming to whatever the government should sacrifice well i mean the president i'm not mean to tell the president how to communicate with the public he's gone a long way doing that but um that's not enough that's not satisfactory and i think if you compare you know we went through a period in the 60s and the early 70s when it became better to dislike kennedy's rhetorical style and camelot and all that and stuff and that was because vietnam and the general rottenness of america was supposed to prove that given that america is inherently rotten in the government's epic phenomenon if i think i've got more language right and reflects the general rottenness of things it's generally rotten to summon people to think about the public sphere i think uh and that uh that uh it's time for to refer we had second thoughts about canada it's time for third thoughts well god according to the rumors is ailing um i don't know if he's dead or not but a lot of people think so and that's a that is a fact that a lot of people think so i am frankly rendering onto politics some functions once performed by religion social unity absolutely right they were functions however which before they were performed by the christian church were performed by the city government the classic states of rome when religion was a public works project as in rome now obviously it's dangerous we've been we've been through this couple nights ago about the inherent dangers in the idea of a civil religion that was so important not just to rousseau it was rascal but the lincoln it wasn't but cultures change and the role of politics rises or declines according to the richness of the culture it says well said in a wonderful book just reissued by the university of chicago called shakespeare's politics uh alan bloom in there argues he says we don't have a sort of core of received literature that does for us what shakespeare and bunyan and a few great books did for the english-speaking world as recently as a century ago gave us common models of virtue and values and emulatable action as the shared culture becomes thin i mean star wars and mash won't do quite as a supplement for that as that form of of unifier of a shape of common culture stands out maybe you have to look to politics meaning corporate action community actions of sorts to try and supplement that i don't know but it does seem to me that the the assignment of politics broadly construed varies with the other evidence about the common culture absolutely and i live and shall die an argent capitalist i practice it with some success the uh i am a self-employed entrepreneur the proud president of the maryland corporation gfw inc i wanted to call it inking but i was told i'd get audited just as a punishment no i mean i accept i'm a little bit like last night i said one of the reasons the founding fathers didn't talk much about virtue and public spiritedness is they had it in abundance i'm not defending capitalism because in in the autumn of 1981 that is not necessary we have lots of people around doing that i think the virtues of capitalism manifest i think precisely because i want capitalism strengthened invigorated precisely for that reason i want to take auxiliary precautions against the necessary side effects of capitalism that's all i'm saying way up that's a good question and the back page of newsweek this week has an exceptionally brilliant article on one suggested reform i'm from an item veto in part to strengthen the presidency and party discipline and other matters it is arguable i think you were hitting at this a restriction are there a link to the congressman's terms or a restriction on the number of terms you can serve three house two in the senate something like that they're arguable they certainly are are defensible mechanisms for breaking the nexus this kind of auctioning of the politics of the auction uh where in our politics takes on all the attributes of the marketplace and therefore becomes uh an unconvincing regulator of market tendencies i'm by and large against that kind of reform limiting that because what you will guarantee is you'll you'll chop off all the great careers hubert humphrey scoop jackson all the way back to calhoun great careers clay the rest were long careers and i think we would lose more by taking experience out of government than by uh allowing it to i don't have a supplementary way of achieving the aims i think better than that but it does seem to me that limiting the terms of congressman expresses a despair about their public virtue it does diminish the likelihood of great careers and it will guarantee to maximize the the power of the bureaucratic branch of government because it takes three or four terms simply to find out how the system works by that time you'd be gone everyone would be that much more mercy of of the bureaucracy that's a good question and that's a it's a grave problem if you the most interesting graph you can draw is not mr laffer's curve or anything else it is the graph of resignations from public life a lot of very good men in fact the best men and women get tired of it they get tired of it because of the very glamorousness of the 2200 interest groups they get tired of it because of the particularly in the house of the the endless campaign they're in and they get tired of it because they're radically underpaid they have to i mean it's just no way to earn a living having two fam two uh two families in some cases but that's uh two uh two homes and wrenching the children i read somewhere something between a third and a half of the congressmen elected in 1980 do not bring their family to washington they're living in the congressional hotel on places like that's an outrage you have to have shorter sessions you have to quit overlooking the circuits of government so they can go home more these are all that's a legitimate question because uh you have to also by the way roll back the the niggling intrusive insulting disclosure requirements for public life a particular reason why someone should have to economically undress for the voyeurism of journalists to serve in public life i can't give you enough priorities the rules for that that's that's that's political judgment that's what a society develops everything segregation's a closed issue 20 years ago segregation was an open question in this society honorable men and women of good will debated floor of the congress the united states the right to segregate it's unthinkable 20 years ago there was segregation in the nation's capital now that that question is open now it's closed i don't know when it got closed i don't know quite do and close 1965. it's closed in the election of 1964 really it's closed by lyndon johnson heroes of american history could someday be understood it was but i don't know quite how to say how it was closed but it was that's not a satisfactory answer it's a good question i want to write a book and because it's a it's it's a you posed it very well i wish i could do better those are voids the uh you mean has journalism of some sort filled this void well there's a there's a that's a terrifying thought the sense in which i'll come at your question by direction there's a sense in which television particularly journalism particularly television in great national traumas is a unifier tremendous unifier the first obviously the first great crisis after we became a wired nation in the mid mid-50s was the kennedy assassination i was out of the country at the time but i'm told it was really something what happened it happened when reagan was shot even happens in a minor way when sadat gets shot that can be a dignifier but i think you cannot get from david brinkley and frank reynolds and all my friends you cannot get what you got from othello you cannot get what you got from macbeth and and other things you know lincoln dreamed in shakespeare think of that he had a president who had dreams duncan's in his grave all that stuff i don't think reagan dreams in shakespeare he might but i don't think so uh that's part of the difference between the 19th century and ours yes right well i i want to disturb it to begin with but i wouldn't put it you put an interesting way i said it's an error in philosophy i don't think it was an error i think it was a decision in philosophy a choice was made when i began lectures three nights ago i juxtaposed cicero's description of man as inclined toward the best patterns of the species nobility kindness etc with john marshall mankind is grim and ugly and i said the question is not which is true but which gives you a prudent which gives a prudent spin to your politics and my argument is entirely from prudence now obviously i think science has the the hobbs and these people made a decision which was we're going to solve a different problem not how man should live we're going to solve the politicians problem how do you govern how to keep social control get power and keep it how do you get regularity how do you get uh low but steady government what's up that's a decision i think it's a it's a decision made too emphatically is all i'm saying remember i'm arguing at the margins i'm accepting the modern world sort of gritting my teeth and saying we've just got to nibble away at the margins a bit now in the next 30 or 40 years perhaps the most important thing that will happen to mankind is that we will come much more to terms even if darwin made people come to terms with the fact that we are material things we're going to learn that an awful lot of what makes us interesting to ourselves and makes us noble in our own eyes is chemistry that our moods and our affections and lots of things are chemicals and that they can be manipulated chemically and a lot of good is going to come out of this but at some cost as a lot of great achievements have to our self-esteem and to our understanding of what we're dealing with and it's all very well i mean what darwin did seems to be fairly minor compared to what's going to happen when the people you're referring to get on with their business the political consequence of this i don't know but it may make it all the more necessary to talk in the arcane language of angels like the better angels of our nature foreign hello well to come at your your question again by indirection as you know the first and i think best critics of capitalism in the 19th century when capitalism became a public issue we're on the right they were shaftesbury there were lots of people who criticized it because it was viewed rightly initially as a corrosive force in a traditional society i don't believe that in say the was it the last two godkin lectures are will and shirley williams i know surely well we differ about what's a rational way to organize resources but i don't think there's a great philosophic divide between a moderate socialist and a moderate conservative they pick different aims for the use of government the conservative agenda in the united states costs as much money if not more than the liberal agenda for government government needs more money for the conservative purposes as i understand them but i guess what i'm saying is i don't think there's an interesting phil interesting in the sense of really fundamental philosophic divide between uh someone who wants to use social the engines of society the instruments to promote equality as i would have them to promote another kind of sense of social cohesion and other senses of national purpose well it would it well i it would begin with the question of equality uh the extent to which it's possible prudent or desirable and you'd have a substantial difference i'm all for for uh if anything a more hierarchical society with a more stable inheritance of property in all of this but we could argue about that but that's how the argument would take place over first of all over equality at home and over uh the pursuit of national objectives overseas i think that the attention that this audience has given is the best tribute to our godkin lecturer from 1981 on behalf of the kennedy school in harvard university i want to express our warmest thanks to you for this very stimulating series

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 294

Rating: 3.6666667 out of 5

Keywords: Campaigns & Politics, Ethics

Id: cQmTSlwflaM

Length: 82min 44sec (4964 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021