Order and Sanity

David Brooks of the NYT is one of the few conservatives whose insights I truly appreciate and find stimulating. His column today was no exception:

When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. Burke argued that each individual’s private stock of reason is small and that political decisions should be guided by the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.

Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point. The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.

That is simply and even elegantly put, and I agree with much of it. I too became 'a liberal mugged by reality', as neo-conservatives are wont to call themselves, for about 15 years, during the 80s and 90s. I have a lot of the books of the intellectuals he points to in the third paragraph.

But I am not where Brooks is today (a Republican conservative). In the late 90s, I changed, after becoming convinced that global warming was for real. That in turn literally forced me to rethink everything.

As a result, in the following years, I not only opposed the Iraqi War for what turned out to be good reasons, but also predicted our current economic crisis years ago. Both of these I could do, one, because I paid attention and followed the evidence where it led, and two, because I wasn't blinded by ideology of either the left or right.

In his column, Brooks expresses admiration for Obama (very atypical of Republican conservatives!), yet is fearful that his liberal worldview will cause his plans to fail because they are not 'epistologically modest.' I guess where I differ with Brooks is that I think his conservatism, which has been regnant for the last 30 years, has really botched things up, revealing its fundamental weakness as a worldview. And now it is left to an intelligent, centrist pragmatist (with liberal leanings for sure) to come in and make all the drastic repairs and reforms that are needed if we were going to make it through the 21st century.

Actually, I think he knows that, which is why he seems to be really hoping Obama succeeds. But then he ends with this rather absurd statement: "If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity."

Who exactly are these conservatives? Supporters of Bush and Cheney, who have just about wrecked our country? The conservatism of which Brooks speaks doesn't seem to exist anymore, if it ever did. The 'conservatism' of the last thirty years turned out to be conservatism of, by, and for the wealthy, with little concern for stability, gradual change, or even true order. It is an ideology of plutocracy.

Order and sanity? That is what Obama has brought back to the White House, America, and, hopefully, the world.