Back to the Stone Age II G: A Trip to Alsatia
Let us develop this point a bit. Classical liberals like to complain about federal subsidies to agriculture. They are quite right to denounce programs whose effect is to reward agribusiness while harming smaller farming operations, as if it were the government's business to pick the winners in advance. But they are equally opposed to European countries like France that protect farming as an essential part of the nation's culture. They can only defend their position by denying even the possibility of objective value.
Let us suppose we live in the country of Alsatia, whose great national product is sauerkraut made according to traditional artisanal methods of salt-curing. This sauerkraut is the basis of their great cuisine that includes pigs trotters, sausages, smoked hams, and delicacies made from every other part of the pig. The consumption of vast amounts of pig meat is facilitated and enhanced by copious drafts of Alsatian beer or white wine. No Alsatian feast or Christmas dinner would be possible without the local sauercraut, whose worldwide sales have kept Alsatian farmers in business and tended to preserve a way of life that Alsatians regard as wholesome and typical, even if they themselves work in an office.
Even Alsatia is part of the global economy in which it is cheaper to import vegetables from North Africa and pork from Eastern Europe. Traditionally, however, it has been Alsatian policy give special tax breaks to farmers, who have been able to enjoy a comfortable living while preserving the Alsatian way of life.
All was well until Alsatia entered the European Union and lost control of many national policies. Recently the dastardly Germans or Poles have been flooding the Alsatian market with industrial sauerkraut, some of it processed and packaged in China, at half the price. Alsatians as a race are thrifty, not to say cheap and many of them have turned, regretfully, to the less appetizing foreign product. The farmers—and a legion of kraut aficionados—have begged the government for relief. At the extreme, they ask for a ban on imported sauerkraut, while the moderates want only a tariff that would keep the price of sauerkraut at its current price of 2 shekels a quart. This will cost the average household perhaps 125 shekels a year, which at the current exchange rate is something like $10 per month. A majority of Alsatians favor the bill, though foreign residents and industrial workers are opposed. It is put to a referendum. How should we vote?
Many Catholic socialists defend the farmers. Classical Liberals, by contrast, denounce the measure as an immoral distortion of the market: Who has the right to dictate to me the price of sauerkraut, asks their guru Ludwig von Steinbrunnen? Foreign kraut is just as nutritious, especially when part of a delicious meal from McDonald's. If Alsatians would give up beer for coke, they would be more productive, earn more money, and be able to buy more electronic gadgets with built in obsolescence to stimulate markets to higher levels of profitability.
Only a snob or a chauvinist, he thunders, would care about the Alsatian kraut makers. Let them all move to California, where the people are notoriously suckers for organic foods and handicraft cheeses. Everyone should be allowed to make his own choice, and those who prefer gourmet kraut can spend their own money. What could seem a clear-cut choice between Liberalism, which favors unfettered markets, and socialism, which protects classes of people harmed by free trade is complicated by the fact that some Marxists (including Catholic Marxists) are just as concerned about Polish pork producers and Chinese factory workers. They join the Liberals in insisting upon global policies.
The argument, then, might seem to be between those who favor individuals and their freedom to enter into any kind of relations they wish without constraint from any level of government and those who wish to use government to protect or promote traditions and practices they happen to favor. Unfortunately, life is not so simple. Liberalism is predicated on an assumption that may or may not be true, that most people, in buying and selling and producing, make rational and free choices in their own interest and according to their own individual tastes.
I recall a Firing Line episode in which Bill Buckley argued with Mary McCarthy about America's food economy. McCarthy insisted that good bread could not be had in most parts of the USA (this was the late 1960's), while Bill held up (incredible as it seems) Pepperidge Farm bread. When McCarthy responded with shock and disdain, he told her to make her own bread. Frankly, it was a fatuous answer. Most people in European history have bought bread from a baker who has the right oven and flours to do it right, and it is silly to treat McCarthy's preference for a decent version of our fundamental food stuff as snobbery. Boiled down to its essence, Buckley's argument goes something like this: If you say tomayto and I say tomahto, why should you have to subsidize my preference for the more English pronunciation?
In my limited experience of human life, only a rather small minority of people make even semi-rational choices in deciding how to pronounce the words they use or purchase the food they eat. Still fewer are the people who actually do make this choices for themselves. American consumers buy what they are told they must have. The basic assumption of admen and PR agents is that most people are so gullible they will buy the fastfood and fast cars that are in fashion, so brainless that they will not only buy the recordings manufactured to put over Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift but even be made to adore the singers to the point that they follow their private lives with the adoration once inspired only by royalty. People, let us be honest about this, are basically chumps, and the average American is a chump and a half.
Given the right (or wrong) incentives or stimulation, many people will make harmful, even self-destructive choices. Rats will stimulate their pleasure centers, when given the chance, in preference to eating and so die of starvation. Kids exposed to drugs at an early age may destroy their minds and ultimately their lives. Easy money is an even greater temptation to many of us who might otherwise repudiate the welfare checks we depend on. Some policies have to be made by a responsible authority, national or regional or communal that transcends the right of individual idiots to choose their life-style from online catalogues.
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Given the right (or wrong) incentives or stimulation, many people will make harmful, even self-destructive choices... Easy money is an even greater temptation to many of us who might otherwise repudiate the welfare checks we depend on. Some policies have to be made by a responsible authority, national or regional or communal that transcends the right of individual idiots to choose their life-style from online catalogues.
Perhaps we could add a corollary, which derives from what you hinted at earlier with discussion of Alsace and France losing control of agricultural policy, and perhaps even from the principle of subsidiarity:
Said responsible authority must so far as it is possible be above dependance on the petty interests that would give him an incentive to enrich himself at the expense of the welfare of the people on whose behalf he makes decisions; he should however not be so distant from the various interests of the realm as to be tempted to impose draconian, sweeping standards that fail to account for particular communal character, strength and weakness.
Dr. Fleming,
I've been thinking about a way to imagine the way in which liberals, of all denominations, view government, and I think I've got one that might be illuminating in this case. I'm curious to know what you think of it. To the liberal, the government is in the position of essentially making additions to the body of natural laws which govern the cosmos. When it makes a decree, that decree goes into effect as if it were a natural feature of the world. I think this idea helps explain the classical liberal's reaction to your hypothetical situation. To him, the call for protection sounds like, "It should be an inherent feature of the world that people within an arbitrary geographical region have to pay more for sauerkraut produced in a different arbitrary geographical region." Phrased in this way, the proposal sounds absolutely absurd. However, one of the major errors in this line of thought is the idea that some people can and should play God.
It is an elegant explanation it works particularly for liberals who have some idea of or concern for the laws of nature. I added "concern for" because it is possible to accept something notionally without drawing any conclusions from it. It is important to remember that Liberals either deny the existence of God or at least tend to make him into a clockmaker who, distracted by urgent business in another Cosmos, wandered off muttering to himself that he had to do something about Original Sin and never came back.
Still, you are onto something valuable. Let me start from a different direction and meet you in the middle. Here is what we do know about liberals in general: They have a very weak view both of human nature (blank slate more or less) and the laws of nature that constrain us (minimal, mostly physical). Where a Darwinist or Christian sees men and women as big-brained monkeys or animals with rational souls acting according to laws that have either evolved over millions of years or were implanted by our Creator, liberals tend to see a Promethean creature who makes his own rules and seizes opportunities. This is something of an exaggeration and in the case of conservative liberals a grotesque exaggeration, but the tendency is very powerful.
The second tendency is to view every human thing in the abstract and to see persons and societies as pretty much interchangeable. "People are the same every way," one hears over and over from Americans (nearly all liberal to the core) who have only been to foreign countries on organized tours designed to prevent them from learning anything form the experience. If we put these two tendencies together, then the attitude you are describing is inevitable. Alsace is a region of France (or Germany or Europe) and equivalent to other parts of Europe or anywhere in the world. Since our rights and duties are universal, they should not be subject to border checks or differentiated tax structures. Laws inhibiting human development--the ability to seize opportunities--are thus a coercive addition to the very few simple laws that govern human moral existence.
Dr. Fleming ( On Bread )
I knew a group of religious from France who came to America with hadly anything but the clothes on their back. They tried to live on American store bought bread until they learned what a staple part of their diet real bread had been to them in France. They almost starved to death before finding a friend who would makely weekly purchases of hard nutritous bread for them at the Pannera bread store in the nearby City.
A similar story was told long ago by Pope St Gregory the Great about the first Benedictine monastery in which an "old crow " would deliver bread to Benedict out in his country cave about once a week.
Even my own life was much better when my wife did not work but would cook good bread to eat with raw honey from hives I learned to tend in the summer by following a master bee-keeper around for a few months. Also I milked a cow once a day according to Wendell Berry's recommendations in "the Gift of Good Land" so she could make good butter for the good bread she baked. This was all done before work when the days were long and sometimes before the earliest Mass available in town. My kids are now almost all grown, have gone to Ivy League schools my farm is almost busted, the cow is dry, my wife must now work to help pay the enormous costs of a secular and terrible education for the children she sacrificed so much for and our life is more unhappy than it was before we joined the modern world and abandoned the practice of our Holy Religion. Take heed all who enter there.
"People are the same every way," one hears over and over from Americans (nearly all liberal to the core) who have only been to foreign countries on organized tours designed to prevent them from learning anything form the experience.
A rule of thumb I heard once is it takes at least 22 more or less unorganized days to begin to "get to know" a country. But even that may not suffice when one's primary contacts are other expatriates, and not simply expatriates from one's own country. There is a significant resident World Citizen population in nearly every major city, and what it really is is a collection of hipsters with different accents. Most of them were raised by socialist parents and none of them brings anything to or learns anything from the culture they live near but not in.
But whether it's socialism or liberalism (in the classical sense of the word "liberal"), we always get back the Cartesian mentality that, as Dr. Fleming once said, "views every man, woman and child as an interchangeable algebraic entity." The differences from there are largely aesthetic. The classical or conservative-liberal is in a less advanced stage of decay and often more inclined appreciates the beautiful fruits and capital of true civilization, but for whatever reason cannot grasp that his blind insistence on monolithic blandness in every "official" economic or civic situation ultimately asphyxiates and inhibits the flowering of the intricate idiosyncrasies that make civilization worth admiring and life worth enjoying.
By the way, Dr. Fleming, I'd like to hear your take on this. I don't think my point about classical or conservative-liberals being "less decayed" and more aesthetically sensitive necessarily applies to libertarians or even conservative-libertarians. That William Buckley would consider Pepperidge Farm a worthy line of pastries (it is in reality not edible under any circumstances except the most severe hypoglycemia) is particularly telling in this regard.
Part of the demand for lower prices is to force companies to take advantage of more efficient manufacturing processes, which seems reasonable. However, when demand for lower prices is met by taking safety risks, or by ignoring pollution, or by requiring your neighbor to work for a lower wage, it starts to become questionable if not immoral. So another solution to the Alsatian dilemma regardless of whether it is in the US or Europe is to allow only a minimal market price (with stringent labelling laws) that allows the small farmer to continue in business. This, of course, would require that the Chinese supplier is paid the same price for the kraut, which is probably more moral. Then the Alsatian consumer would get to choose who and what he is going to support, and, hopefully, he would choose on the basis of quality, taste, nutritional value, and community values, etc., all of which are more important than price.
For me the meaning of the metaphor of original sin is the acceptance that the world in the mundane (i.e., daily round) is imperfect by design. 'By design' takes care of real presence because the world of bodies, i.e., mother Nature or the Earthly Mother herself is a body and partly divine. So the purely divine or [God] or Spirit / Ghost didn't leave pondering what to do about 'original sin' which in Fact is reality, by design, period; i.e., ongoing real presence. For those of us who also intuit the purely divine while Here and partially so. Then we are left to rationally also wonder why create an imperfect world or reality out of which we may, or may not, grow up into or [back] into the purely divine? What's the 'reason' for this imperfect by design world / reality, which then is self-explanatory in that we must grow-up here, and continuing up into the extra dimension or purely divine or supernatural. Which is also the underpinning of This world and what made both the world and flesh (bodies), and the sublime meat or flesh of Human beings [all of it partially divine] possible in the first place. Both Aristotle and now scientifically the laws of thermodynamics demonstrate everyday that this knowable dimensional world of the mundane had to have come out of an extra unknowable or at least yet unknown dimension since it was literally impossible based on the now known laws of Nature for it to have constellated itself. All of this [meaning] is sort of acted out in so far as it is embedded in the meaning of the metaphors via the literal 'story' / Myth and rituals of Christianity for the emotionally immature as we all pass through that stage in growing-up as Human beings. And later remains there literally in place for all, including for the more obtuse or perpetually immature, who cling to the literal meaning(s) alone of the objective or apparent buoys or markers in the external road map of the faith. As so-called adults who yet need to believe in Santa Claus in lieu of growing up and thus go visit and sit in his lap in a mall or department store (church) referring to that as 'real presence'. And that the Church, or so one could infer, instead of teaching real meaning to those ready for it seems to instead encourage this perpetual leaning on the moon as if it is made out of blue cheese literal aspects or externals of the faith (and debating them on that level), strikes me as both insufficient and sad not to mention immature. What is liberalism then but the convoluted and allegedly more sophisticated, immature need and of a more secular variety, in yet having to literally sit in Santa's lap? Spell it differently and call him Satan it's not so much of 'sin' per se as of the abject Refusal to grow-up. But also sadly now, when of the patently secular variety, it's even without the embedded meanings resident within the metaphors of the faith. In other words liberalism is even more childishly immature, and worse posing "as if" adult. Humorously put, they 'fancy' themselves as the 'realists'. Wink-wink, they know Santa's beard as they're nonetheless sitting in his lap, is fake. So if the Church is ever again through upbringing assuming it gets the chance, going to raise new small 'a' aristocrats, or actual adults regardless of class. It seems to me it's going to have to roll up its sleeves and itself get real about teaching actual meaning. Which is right there embedded anyway in what it externally professes to believe. And do so via its own demonstrable and carefully articulated / and taught world view. Right now instead it all smacks to me of wink-wink playful joking, and of the Highly adolescent variety at that. As all of our enemies empty our pockets leading us around by our noses in taking us and our failings like mindless babes to their banks. And so we go until there's no actual ground upon which to stand, any longer. Santa, sadly won't save us with either his real or fake beard. He's as immature as everyone else, including our misguided enemies, by the way. Which really is the only consolation prize. Sorry, this is my version of Christmas cheer. Nonetheless, Merry Christmas.