Is responsibility conservative? (with a note on Kant's antinomies)
Comment published in New York Times online blog in response to opinion essay by Rob Henderson, “Why Being a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative,” May 21, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/opinion/foster-child-conservative.html?comments. (Followed by an additional remark not published with this piece):
Mr. Henderson believes that individuals can and should take responsibility for their choices and not blame oppressive social forces. This only makes one a "conservative" in the face of a certain kind of left-liberalism, or progressivism, that strikes me, for one, as rather false.
His argument that his position is "conservative" makes about as much sense as someone saying that they are conservative (or a liberal) because they believe in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The father of modern political philosophy, Machiavelli, had it right. People's lives are the result of two very contrary forces: fortuna (chance or luck) and virtù (powers and capacities).
Blaming society, or some part of it, for the difficulties you have is as pointless as blaming yourself. Forget blame. The concept of blame is not even coherent. It is thought that the blamed person or thing was the cause of something that happened but should not have, and he should be considered guilty, meaning deserving of punishment, with (more) evil directed at him and legitimated. What a silly notion. But responsibility is something else; it's an ability. it is recognizing that there is an "I can" that has some object according with some need or desire.
Left-liberalism in this country was made a moralism based on resentment by (ruling) professional-class liberals and managers. One can deny its validity and be on the left.
Then: we can also work to change things. Yes, we can.
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Addendum: When the argument for a position largely consists of an argument against its contrary, one can easily wind up in the weak position that Kant based his famous “antinomies” on.
These turn on the logical notions of reduction to the absurd and the admissible of double negation. Reduction to the absurd proves a claim by assuming its contrary, and then deducing a contradiction. It is so much unclear whether this actually can be said to work that today some logicians deny the admissibility of these kinds of arguments. Kant blew it up open by disproving both one possibility and its contrary. (His examples were about totalities and limits in cosmological metaphysics: It turns out that the world cannot have a beginning in time nor be timeless and without beginning; therefore the question is improper and “the world” if it exists at all cannot be the kind of thing that either is bounded or boundless). This meant that, without invalidating the arguments, which are cogent, he had to assume that there is some tacit assumption both arguments make and that must be false. (His solution was to make “the world” a set of appearances, to which some kinds of properties can apply, while others cannot, so that we can formulate certain “metaphysical” questions which seem like they must be answerable, yet are not).
Certainly any responsible thinking person considering any argument will want to know if a mutually exclusive opposition is not in fact mistaken. Is it true that if liberalism as we know it today is wrong, that conservativism is right? Only if that is the only other option.
This makes politics in particular a zero-sum game in a sharper way than when policy-makers are pondering the distribution of scarce resources (and generating solutions like Affirmative Action). When the zero-sum game has just two sides, then it is easy to map onto this the two sides of yes/no or affirmation/negation at the basis of standard logics: any statement is true or false. If two sides of a dispute (even though there might be some number of others, as in a multiparty parliamentary system) are debating, or differ on, some issue or more or less coherent set of issues, then it’s tempting to shortcut from what they are offering or demanding or represent that we are not doing so, to forming our own platform as the mirrored negation of the other. And this is one problem with the logical principle of double negation; it is rejected by logicians of the “intuitionist” school because it holds that truths must be known through an intuition (something like an experience of mind that involves some content, a thing or event, that is “seen” or felt or appears). And the double negation gives a positive truth only by way of negation.
Politically this can mean that an opposition party does not have to have a program of what it wants to do once in office, because it’s enough to be against what the other side is doing. Anyone who has observed American politics, especially at the national level, for very long, can see that there’s lots of political rhetoric like this, and the Democrats have been quite keen on it. The left wing of the party and the liberal center can be united by opposition, and that’s why for generations now Democratic Party activists and spokespersons have often sold themselves publicly on the proposition that they are not just the lesser of two evils (and note that that logic would also apply with multiple parties: vote for the best, or least bad), but that they are the anti-bogeyman league. Certainly one thing to note is that as long as this strategy works, many voters and activists associated with the party will tend to be frustrated in trying to get the Party to do much of anything beyond its own business as usual, whatever that happens to be. Indeed, more than that, the anti-bogeyman strategy means that the Party will remain more or less out of touch with voters and activists who want particular things. Could it be that the shift (which Ralph Nader has described) of the Democratic Party away from union support (which they are now going to lose even more of, thanks to the recent Supreme Court decision on union dues) and towards corporate and big money donors? They would have an interest in depoliticizing the Democratic Party if not (for the Republican Party has for decades now had more internal debate and division) American politics in general, though the latter has certainly also happened, and in many ways.
Some people, like Mr. Henderson in this article, say they are conservatives because of certain moral values they think are true or right. And in some cases they may have a point. Though it is surely worth recognizing that both sides are easily caricatured; there are enough silly liberals and dull conservatives to justify many repudiations; are the sins and stupidities of one side enough to warrant joining the other? In logical terms, I think Kant’s antinomies argument shows why this is a mistake.
Though from my perspective on the left, American conservatives and liberals share many beliefs and behavioral tendencies that to me seem clearly exclusive of other possibilities they have not considered. Some people fit the conservative/liberal option too neatly into a tradition/modernity one, often imagining modernity as some kind of absolute break, especially in its more left-wing forms, a notion that has been with us since the French Revolution, which did include some such tendencies, at least rhetorically (the American Revolution, to the extent that it was one, much less so). The truth is any thinking person with any sense of history draws some inspiration from some things in the past. Selectively, to be sure, but if one thinks too schematically, it may seem that in some sense everyone is a conservative, and a liberal, and ….