Confessions of a Recovering NeoCon

Earlier this month the Washington Post released the results of a multi-year investigation into the war in Afghanistan which have been termed the Afghanistan Papers. The release begins: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The Afghanistan Papers include over 2,000 pages of tales of mismanagement and cover-up. Here’s a tidbit:

In an effort to learn from the results of the invasion and policy failures, the Pentagon embarked upon an $11 million project called “Lessons Learned”. Once completed, the Pentagon suppressed the unwelcome findings of the project. It was only after three years of legal battles with the Washington Post that the project was made public.To date, more than $133 billion has been allocated to build Afghanistan. Much of this spending has not been accounted for and has been described by those deployed to make payments as waste.Military commanders struggled to determine who they were fighting and why due to competing agendas in Washington. Corrupt Afghanistan warlords used this to their advantage to exploit American vulnerabilities and benefit from cash handouts.Administration officials under both Bush and Obama consistently misled the public in the waste and prospects of ending the war.No one has been held responsible.

As egregious as this might be, I suspect most of us have become desensitized to what will soon be two decades of tales of failures, setbacks, shortcomings, and discontent in the War on Terror. While some were critical of the wars proceeding 9/11 from the start, many Americans viewed Afghanistan as the “good war” and Iraq as the “bad war” for at least a season.

The Bad War

I had just begun college when the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 would forever change our world. That same year the Bush administration launched an attack on the Taliban government of Afghanistan in an effort to crush al-Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden. The young are often idealistic, and I was no exception. As the War on Terror began to expand beyond Afghanistan and into Iraq the prospects of the United States destroying so many foreign threats and implanting allies all over the troubled Middle East was exhilarating.

I was just a kid when then president George Bush Sr. led the war effort against Saddam’s military occupation of Kuwait. I had no informed perspective on what a war with Iraq might look like then. To me, war meant the possibility that some “bad guys” might come strolling through our neighborhood someday, shooting at hapless bystanders and causing no shortage of mayhem. I was grateful for every news story that told of how the war was going well. Partially because I was caught up in the patriotic fervor of everyone around me. And partially because each victory made the prospects of an invasion of my neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma by the Republican Guard feel more remote.

But in college things were different. I had no child-like fears about what Iraq could do to us and I had the utmost confidence in what we could do to them. Doubtless there would be costs and casualties, but it was inconceivable the US military would be turned away by Iraq’s feeble forces. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. The same patriotic fervor swelled in my heart as my country soundly defeated the regime of an evil dictator and liberated the good people of Iraq.

I became thoroughly convinced that the US had every right to invade Iraq. I believed that Saddam posed a serious threat to global and US interests and security and had to be removed from power. I was positively thrilled with the idea of Iraq becoming a flowering democracy and ultimately spreading Western-friendly values throughout the Middle East. Like any good Republican, I bought the Bush administration’s narrative on the war hook, line, and sinker.

Nearly two decades have passed, and Americans have grown increasingly weary or even hostile to these war efforts, viewing them as unnecessary, costly, unjustified, ill-conceived, and, in some cases, evil from the start. Ask an American why Bush got us involved in the wars in the first place and answers vary from idealistic (he wanted to stop the evil villain Saddam and liberate the good people of Iraq), coldly opportunistic (he just wanted to pay less for oil and found the attacks on September 11 a perfect excuse), sympathetic (he really did think Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and believed he was a threat), to the downright absurd (Bush wanted to get the man who tried to kill his daddy).

Laying my cards on the table, I continue to believe the wars—both the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq—were the right thing to do. Afghanistan because it was the most hospitable to the terrorists who had attacked us and vowed to do so again. Iraq for reasons that are more complicated, but not less justifiable. Not to plant a flowering democracy. Not because Saddam was a murderous monster who killed his own citizens by the multitudes (he was, but so were other dictators who posed no similar threat to the US or its allies). But because the continued existence and defiance of Saddam’s regime in a post-9/11 world represented a threat Western democracies could not ignore. Whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or not, the possibility he’d someday acquire them and use them was too great to ignore.

NeoCon Apostate

But this post isn’t about justifying the wars. And justification for the war in Iraq would take a far longer post than this (I’ll refer the reader to this interview with the late Christopher Hitchens on Jon Stewart’s show on a brief listing of why the invasion of Iraq was justified). This post isn’t about where I haven’t changed my mind, but where I have. It’s about shedding the ideas I held in my mind and passion buried in my heart way back in college as slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to doubt some of the tenets of the NeoCon narrative I had adopted so eagerly.

I will use the term NeoCon here to mean one who has the sort of attitude promoted by the Bush administration in the run-up to the wars—the idea that all people yearn for freedom and, as such, if only we could unshackle them of their oppressive leaders they would soon learn to live peaceably and value liberty just like we did.

If the reader will pardon a brief aside, I feel duty-bound to stress that I am in no way commenting on the ideas embodied in Neoconservatism, which I find to be complex, highly defensible, honorable, and—in a lot of cases—in line with my own views. Neoconservatism is a uniquely American brand of conservative thought that has a rich history filled with intellectuals well worth reading and studying. It is a terrible shame that the term has been reduced to a simple pejorative of one who is war hawkish (ironically, the original neoconservatives had very little to say about warfare).

With that said, back to the matter at hand. What has transpired in places like Afghanistan and Iraq over these past 18 years has brought to light how wrongheaded I was to suppose the sort of peace, stability, and liberty I had in mind was achievable, let alone inevitable. Had I been a better student of history I would have understood that people and cultures develop institutions and norms slowly over generations and that it is through this process that liberties can be cultivated and maintained.

Russell Kirk said it best: “Liberty forced on a people unfit for it is a curse, bringing anarchy.” There was a reason places like Germany and Japan developed democracies after their countries were occupied and their former governments dissolved: they had developed the sort of Western cultural norms and institutions that could hold liberty in order so that it wasn’t used for chaos. Just as there was a reason Russia returned to an oligarchy and Palestine devolved into a theocratic nightmare not long after they became “democracies”. Afghanistan and Iraq are using the newfound freedoms they were given in precisely the manner their cultural norms and institutions had done: use liberty to band together to fight off feuding tribes until a strong leader eventually emerges and puts an end to liberty.

What Should Have Been Done?

Could this have ever been otherwise? Is it possible that Afghanistan and Iraq could have developed stable democracies had we managed things better, or at least differently? Perhaps. But my suspicion is that “better” or “differently” would mean paying a price war-weary Americans are simply not willing to pay. And there’s the rub. There seems to be a wide gulf between what options were available to us that might have led to outcomes we could have been proud of, or at least lived with, and what options were politically viable.

It’s one thing to say that something should have been done after 9/11. Most Americans, so far as I can tell, agree that invading Afghanistan to “get bin Laden” was the right thing to do. Many Americans would probably say that taking out Saddam was in our national interests in some way. Very well. Then what?

Should we have just bombed these countries to smithereens? That might have crippled Saddam’s forces and harmed the Taliban, but would it really accomplish much else? Would it have killed Saddam or bin Laden (two men we couldn’t find even after invading their respective countries)? Would it have provided adequate assurance after 9/11 that such attacks couldn’t happen again? Would it have killed multitudes of innocent civilians needlessly? Would it have created a power vacuum so that regional powers such as Iran or other terrorist organizations could have moved in?

What if we had simply invaded and left after the regimes were toppled and the “bad guys” apprehended? It took quite some time after invading to locate Saddam and even longer to find bin Laden. Once we were there, we were there. Pulling up our tent stakes would have surely looked like an act of betrayal to the frail alliances we had worked so hard to build and may have bolstered the enemies that came later. And isn’t leaving these nations to sort all of this out for themselves after losing a war part of what got us in this mess in the first place?

Features and Bugs

I must confess I don't know what all we could have done differently to secure a good outcome. I don't mean that we hadn't made HUGE mistakes, and that many of them could have been avoided. Of course, things could have been less wasteful, dishonest, and embarrassing. But in some sense these missions were probably failed from the start in some way and the mistakes—endless wars, massive wastes, unclear objectives—were features not bugs. Much like hoping we can “fix things” by electing the “right people”, the problems here were embedded in the nature of what we were trying to do and focusing on the specifics would have only produced marginal improvements.

To put it bluntly, I don't know how a democratic nation fights a war that doesn't have the full and sustained support of its people, especially since "its people" seem to have radically competing and often unrealistic views on what the war aims and justifications might be. True, some of that confusion was thanks to our leaders. But what might the outcome have been had President Bush said from day one that these wars were going to last decades and cost hundreds of billions and kill more Americans than those who died on 9/11 because otherwise we couldn’t sustain the efforts needed to convert non-Western civilizations into the kinds of people needed to form a vibrant democracy?

On the flip side, what if Bush had simply said we were going to accomplish our missions and then hand the countries over to some authoritarian strongman who may be as evil as Saddam was to his own people, but at least he was happy to do what we asked so long as we looked the other way whenever he cracked down on uprisings? Would Americans have gotten on board with that idea?

I’m reminded of President Obama's opposition to strongmen like Musharraf in Pakistan during the campaign and his excitement at Morsi's demise in Egypt and Qaddafi’s demise in Libya during the Arab Spring. Though half of the country would be loathe to admit it, I suspect Obama’s general sentiments here express a nearly universal American idea: that we don’t have to be “OK” with “bad guys” around the world. That we can cheer when they’re brought down by their people because “the people” are surely capable of instituting something better than what they left behind.

But what followed? The Pakistan that deposed Musharraf was the same Pakistan that harbored bin Laden. The Egypt that jailed Morsi has teetered on the brink of falling to radical Islamists and the Libya that beat Qaddafi to death has shattered into anarchy that eventually led to the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi.

As a culture, I don’t know that we're as willing to believe in the fallen nature of man as we are willing to suppose that peace and security is possible without having to sacrifice our principles of liberty or Western values on strongmen who just happen to hate all the right people. To the extent that's true, I don't honestly know how a nation like ours sustains military and diplomatic relations successfully in the long term. Perhaps in a war against an enemy that is capable of meeting us head to head, things would be different. But these endless proxy wars and nation-building in places that are only accustom to nation-demolition is proving to be a challenge just beyond our reach.

I must confess I don't know what "ought" to have been done. Nor do I have an easy solution for where we go now, or what we do the next time a similarly vague threat is presented. I don't like the way things were handled and believe it's totally fair to blame so many on so much that's gone wrong. I held unrealistic expectations about the war's aftermath and hope I've matured since then. Because I have to believe that maturity—not just mine but the maturity of the nation as a whole—is precisely what’s necessary to set about the hard business of fighting a war and securing the sort of outcome we can be proud of.

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Episode 47 - Wonkish Optimism with Andy Smarick

As Republicans look ahead to the end of the Trump presidency (whether that’s a year away or five years out) many are beginning to ask, “what does a post-Trump GOP look like?”

For conservatives who have spent the past three years as outcasts from a party increasingly given to populist nationalism, the prospects are both exciting and worrying. Will things ‘go back to normal’? Will the Republican party once again be the home of conservatism? Or has Trump permanently changed things? And, if so, how much has changed?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by Andy Smarick who holds an optimistic view of what the future has in store for conservatives. His recent article in The Bulwark entitled The Post-Trump GOP argues that few presidents have had a lasting impact on their party, and that Trump is even less likely leave his mark as “Trumpism has failed in terms of principles, people, and popularity.”

But it’s not enough to hope for the end of populist nationalism in the GOP. Conservatives must have something better to offer as an alternative. And to that end, Andy makes his case for why conservatism has a rich and deep heritage that will long outlast the Age of Trump.

LISTEN HERE

About Andy Smarick

Andy Smarick is the Director, of Civil Society, Education and Work at R Street, a free-market think tank with a pragmatic approach to public policy challenges. We draw inspiration from such thinkers as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ronald H. Coase, James M. Buchanan and Arthur C. Pigou. Andy researches and writes about civil-society issues at R Street, including localism, governing institutions, education and social entrepreneurship.

Before joining R Street, Andy was a Morgridge Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and served as president of the Maryland State Board of Education. Prior to that, he worked at the White House as an aide in the Domestic Policy Counsel and was a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. He was also the deputy commissioner of education in New Jersey and a legislative assistant at the U.S. House of Representatives.

Andy has authored or edited four books The Urban School System of the Future: Applying the Principles and Lessons of Chartering (2012); Closing America’s High-achievement Gap: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Helping Our Most Talented Students Reach Their Full Potential (2013); Catholic School Renaissance: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Strengthening a National Asset (2015); and No Longer Forgotten: The Triumphs and Struggles of Rural Education in America (2018).

Andy earned his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude and with honors, in government and politics from the University of Maryland, and his master’s in public management from UMD’s School of Public Policy. He lives in Stevensville, Maryland with his wife and three kids.

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Belated Thanksgiving

This week’s post is going to be significantly shorter than most as work has been crazy (hey, I don’t get paid to blog and podcast!) and I’m gearing up for another blog series. But before that series begins, next week’s post will be on the dreadful topic of suffering, death, and our growing inability to cope with it all; in case you were in any danger of having a weekend of blissful ignorance.

Since Thanksgiving is little more than a week behind us, I thought it would be fitting to give a brief post about the many MANY ways in which we have it better than we could probably imagine before launching into something quite so macabre. To that end, I wanted to share the good news about how we are doing better now than in the past. By “we” I mean just about everyone on the planet, and by “in the past” I mean all generations of humans who have come before us.

I don’t mean to imply we are without problems, or that some of those problems aren’t more troubling than what people have had to deal with in the past. I don’t mean to suggest we should self-congratulate to the point we lull ourselves into complacency and inaction. I simply mean that by a vast array of measurable metrics, our world is doing far better than it ever has been. While, curiously, a lot of people seem to be of the opinion things are far worse than they ever have been.

I could literally drown you out in stats and links, but I’ll share just a few points to ponder. For those interested, Jonah Goldberg devotes the appendix to his book Suicide of the West to covering the many ways in which our lives have improved. And Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute runs the website HumanProgress.com which is replete with stats and figures on the many ways things are getting better for us all. In fact, you can listen to Jonah and Marian on this very topic in a recent Remnant podcast.

Jim Geraghty’s recent article in National Review entitled The World Is Getting Better. It’s Just That No One Tells You About It. shares how breakthroughs in health could potentially cure everything from cat allergies to Ebola, Americans are more prosperous, the environment is improving, terrorism is diminishing, to the prospects for more global stability.

Again, none of this suggests we are without problems, even problems that could potentially fester into BIG problems. But much of charting a wise and prudential course into the future requires an accurate assessment of where we currently stand.

Sadly, that’s not the case. The Cato Institute recently shared that global poverty has halved over the past two decades (HALVED!!!) despite the fact most people living in advanced economies have a far bleaker sense. More than 90% of Americans believe extreme world poverty has remained the same or even increased (as evidenced by Cato's graph at the top of this post).

How truly remarkable that right at the moment humanity has never been more prosperous the world over, so many of us are of the belief we’ve never had it so bad. Gratitude may be out of style, but it’s never been more called for.

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Episode 46 - Should Presidents be our Role Models?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis and frequent guest Bob Burch delve into questions about looking to our political leaders as role models and the tension between morality and ability when choosing who should govern us. This discussion was prompted by a listener’s email:

Hi there,

I'm a new follower and listener to your podcast, but I like that after each episode you ask for people to contact you with thoughts or ideas. Since Trump has been in office I keep hearing about how horrible of a person he is a sexist, womanizer, racist, and the list goes on and on. I personally don't believe much or any of that narrative but here's my thought regardless, do we have to elect a president that we view as a role model? And, when did we (Americans) get so consumed with thinking of our president as a "role model"? Let's let our presidents do what they were elected to do!

In every presidential election that I can remember, polls indicate that people care more about jobs and the economy overwhelmingly more than any other social issue. Trump is in office because the majority of voters thought he was better for the economy.

I think that the left and their cancel culture has made it so that if anyone has skeletons in their closet they can never be electable or even run a business!

Once again, people should be finding role models and people to look up to in other places. A teacher, pastor, mentor or even athlete and not their elected leaders; it shouldn't be criteria to be a good public servant or leader of the free world.

I would entertain any thoughts or feedback!

Thanks,

Brandon

LISTEN HERE

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Beyond Reason – Part 5 (The Tyranny of Reason)

Let us consider where we’ve come so far:

In Part 1 we talked about how many people who lived during the Age of Reason were of the opinion that mankind was entering a golden era in which the superstitious dogmas and doctrines of the past would give way to a pure pursuit of reason. Thus, humans would live in harmony as their political leaders relied upon their superior reasoning to chart a prosperous, equitable, and peaceful future.

In Part 2 we discovered how much of a killjoy Edmund Burke could be as he dared to challenge to this newfound faith in human reason. He offered instead an alternative tool: prescription, which put individual reason behind respect for authority, traditions, customs, norms, and institutions. Prescription is one of the biggest reasons conservatives are often unenthusiastic about trying bold innovations in the economy, law, family structure, or ancient institutions. They’d much prefer to take a slow, contemplative path towards progress.

But in Part 3 we saw how prescription is also concerned with where we’re going and not merely how we get there. For prescription, which helps bind us to prior generations and anchor us to the transcendent, offers us the ability to hold to permanent things of value in an ever-changing world. The conservative view of progress does not mean that yesterday’s conservatives eventually will become today’s progressives because conservatives and progressives are ultimately moving in opposite directions.

Finally, in Part 4, we explored the numerous benefits to the individual and society in following prescription. Instead of relying upon a select group of experts to direct complex things such as language, law, and morality, prescription communicates habits and norms through traditions and institutions so effectively and efficiently that even fools can become wise as society benefits from the efforts of all those who have come before.

Burke’s Critics

Burke feared an overreliance on the individual’s ability to reason their way through political problems would lead to all kinds of trouble. He insisted prescription was a safer, more trustworthy alternative because it had stood the test of time. Was he successful in persuading his Enlightenment-era contemporaries? Not exactly.

Enlightenment thinkers from England to France to America scoffed at this antiquated approach to statecraft. Of course prescription was the “safer” bet; that’s all that had ever been tried before. But the Age of Reason was all about taking humanity far beyond where it had been before, which is why everywhere the Enlightenment spread so did the rumblings of revolution. As Yuval Levin put it, “The age of revolutions understood itself as advancing the cause of reason in political life.” And those who participated in this great cause hadn’t patience for oldfangled idealists like Burke. Let’s hear what they had to say:

“Everything that bears the imprint of time must inspire distrust more than respect…[it is] only by meditation that we can arrive at any general truths in the science of man.”

~Nicolas de Condorcet

“Reason is the proper instrument, and the sufficient instrument for regulating the actions of mankind…If we employ our rational faculties, we cannot fail of thus conquering our erroneous propensities.”

~William Godwin

“The philosophers having no particular interest to defend, can only speak up in favor of reason and the public interest.”

~Voltaire

“The best and most natural arrangement [is] for the wisest to govern the multitude.”

~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The greatest happiness of a nation is realized when those who govern agree with those who instruct it.”

~Jean le Rond d'Alembert

“It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders.”

~Thomas Paine

Ouch.

The Horrors of Limitless Reason

To be fair, Burke hadn’t minced words in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France where he strongly criticized the French revolutionaries who had wholeheartedly embraced this new approach to politics. Burke accused their innovations of potentially leading to far greater evils than the abuses of power that existed in the French monarch they intended to smash.

As horrid as abuses of European monarchies were, they paled in comparison to what was to come. “Old-fashioned grievances—moved by local or national loyalties or material necessities—have their natural bounds,” wrote Levin. “Old-fashioned despotism—moved by a naked desire for power on the part of a charismatic tyrant—cannot readily mask its excesses.” In spite of the horror, these old systems possessed some limiting principle upon its leaders from maintaining good relations with local lords to operating within the confines of what was religiously expected.

“But a mob moved by a theory has no natural stopping point and cannot easily be assuaged, and leaders claiming to advance a truth obtained by philosophical speculation do not fit the familiar profile of the tyrant,” continues Levin. “The ancient tyrants could only wish to get away with what the modern speculative revolutionaries can achieve.” Twentieth century political ideologies such as fascism and communism had no such limitations. By demanding everything submit to reason, they gladly destroyed anything perceived as a challenge to the presuppositions their ideology had been built upon.

Levin concludes, “An overreliance on theory may unleash extremism and immoderation by unmooring politics from the polity. Because [radicals] pursue the vindication of a principle, they cannot stop short of total success.” As we’ve seen throughout this series, part of Burke’s objection comes from what he believed to be a misunderstanding of the purpose of politics. Politics were never intended to be the place where intellectuals could work out their (often untested) theories on a hapless population. Rather, politics was intended to provide for the common good, prosperity, and stability of the nation-state so that the population could go about the business of working out higher purposes and pursuits in their own lives.

Inevitably, when people are set free to pursue lives of purpose, some of them are going to do it all wrong. Or, at least, in a manner which you or I may strongly detest. But what happens when they pursue lives of purpose that don’t fall within the guidelines of what can be agreed upon using reason alone? This notion deeply concerned economist Friedrich Hayek:

“The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.”

In the end, a politics of pure reason rejects every thing and every one who cannot be explained or understood through the narrow lens of reason. In overvaluing reason, we undervalue so much that serves society well. Here are three brief examples:

When We Overvalue Reason, We Undervalue Experience

Yuval Levin uses the arguments of Thomas Paine—who was quoted earlier—to contrast Burke’s reliance on prescription: “[Paine] argues that every individual is capable of employing his own reason to discern the truth or falsehood of a political question, so that no reliance on the past or on collective reasoning is required. In this way, again, Paine believes that every individual has the capacity to begin from scratch, rather than beginning where others have left off.” This is the purest form of those who hold that reason alone is the means to truth. If reason is all we need, then anyone is capable of arriving at the “right” answer to a political question all by themselves.

What gets in the way of people getting to the “right” answers then isn’t some limitation on their part so much as the distortions of all those needless cultural traditions that get in the way. What’s more, those who have gained experience in politics and statecraft are the least likely to arrive at the “right” answers because they’ve been marinated in the traditions they’ve inhabited to gain this experience. If all that is required is reason, then what counts isn’t experience but sheer intelligence. For surely those who are smart enough are the most capable of reasoning well.

“Articulated youth, idealistic and trained in the latest and most advanced forms of knowledge, as knowledge is conceived in the [progressive] vision, are a great hope for the future to those with that vision. So are intellectuals,” explains Thomas Sowell, “Neither is viewed in this way in the [conservative] vision. Where knowledge is more expansively defined and consequently more widely distributed, as in the [progressive] vision, intellectuals have no commanding advantage over the common man.” Notice here how this belief can naturally slide into tyranny. If reason can get us to the “right” answers, and if the most intelligent among us are the best at using their reason, then surely the intelligent are best suited to rule everyone else.

When We Overvalue Reason, We Undervalue Tradition

As noted above, the belief that reason is the primary or only means to truth makes cultural traditions—the very thing prescription calls for to aid us in finding the truth—nothing more than cumbersome roadblocks on our journey to societal progression. “In [progressive] vision, where much of the malaise of the world is due to existing institutions and existing beliefs, those least habituated to those institutions and beliefs are readily seen as especially valuable for making needed social change,” writes Thomas Sowell.

Notice here again how the temptation for those who fancy themselves the smartest among us to rule is always lurking. But notice to what stands in the way of “needed social change”: institutions. Those modes of associations from the church to the family to the local bowling league make it difficult to institute societal change because these institutions were built on the very society that needs changing.

Even if it is acknowledged that tradition and institutions are the best means for past generations to instill the wisdom of lessons learned, of what use is that in a world where reason can better guide us than some long-dead sage or prophet? That information may have been useful at some distant point in the past, but if we hope to make much progress we have to find ways to progress past the past.

And since tradition calls us back to the past, it must be torn apart to make way for the superhighway of Reason to bring about Progress.

When We Overvalue Reason, We Undervalue Authority and Revelation

“In the matter of the earth’s circumference, nearly all of us are much better off if we simply accept the ‘traditional’ or ‘authoritative’ calculation,” wrote Russell Kirk. That does not mean that truth becomes whatever an authority says it is. Even in the case of divine revelation we don’t entirely forgo our critical thinking skills in evaluating the truth of a matter. We might ask if we correctly understood what was revealed. Or, in the case of a prophet or religious leader claiming to speak on behalf of God, we might rightly question whether we believe this to be so.

Prescription doesn’t ask us to blindly follow every authoritative answer or religious doctrine. Instead, prescription insists that authoritative answers and religious doctrines stand a far better chance at ascertaining the truth because they are not dependent on our meager ability to reason well.

Those who rely on reason alone soon find themselves turning against all competing authorities and revelations that dare to question their capacity to come by the truth for themselves. “That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science…is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in His works, and is the true theology,” wrote Thomas Paine. For Paine, no authoritative or revelatory claim had any right to assert itself over his reason. His “religion” then was reduced to his faith in what science could show him through reason, and traditional revelation was at enmity with his modern faith. “The most detestable wickedness, the most horrible cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.”

Reason without a faith that extends beyond our own capacity to reason is circular nonsense. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out long ago, “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

The Gift of Prescription

Without prescription, humanity undervalues the experience, tradition, authority, and revelation that connects us to the wisdom of generations past and points the way forward toward a better world. Russell Kirk summarized it best: “By trial and error, by revelation, by the insights of men of genius, mankind has acquired, slowly and painfully, over thousands of years, a knowledge of human nature and of the civil social order which no one individual possibly can supplant by private rationality.” Wouldn’t it be a pity if we discarded the precious gift of prescription just to follow the feebleness of our own reasoning?

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Beyond Reason – Part 4 (How Prescription Makes Us Wiser)

Years ago, a friend asked if I knew of any verses in the King James translation of the Bible that warned against gossiping. They asked me because I’d grown up in a Free Holiness church where only the King James translation was read. Yet I was surprised to learn the word gossip didn’t appear. Instead, the good King’s English used the word talebearer to signify one who engages in idle, possibly malicious talk.

Did You Hear What Happened to Gossip?

I later discovered this was because the King James Bible was written in 1611, and people did not come to use the word gossip as idle, possibly malicious talk until a few decades later. The word gossip was in use, it just had a different meaning (and spelling). Gossip comes from an Old English word: godsibb. A godsibb was a godfather or godmother who acted as a sponsor at a baptism who was close to the person being baptized and their family and friends. Since the word carried a sense of closeness to familiar acquaintances, it eventually began to be used more to describe close relations. That is, a godsibb was a close friend or neighbor.

By the 1560s, the century before the King James Bible was written, godsibb changed to gossip. By now, it was most commonly used to mean a woman’s female friends who were invited to be present at the birth of her child. Since there is much waiting involved in childbirth, a woman’s gossip would pass the time by talking about familiar matters—as women are wont to do. By the 1800s the word had more to do with the kind of talk women engage in when they gather into groups than it had to do with the reason they’d gathered in the first place. As such, gossip reached its present meaning: to talk about the affairs of others.

It’s no small wonder that the original meaning of the Old English word godsibb—that of a godfather/godmother who sponsored a person’s baptism and was close to their friends and family—fell out of use centuries ago. How likely would you need a word for that sort of thing in your vocabulary? Even those who practice faiths that call for baptismal sponsorship aren’t likely to do so in the same cultural context of someone who’s close-knit with your family, friends, and community. The nature of how we relate to one another has changed significantly since the Middle Ages.

And I suspect that if the word gossip still meant a group of women who got together and talked idly about other people it would be used with a bit more discretion—for those intending to be politically correct—and as social commentary on the characteristics of women—for those intending to be politically incorrect. In other words, gossip would be akin to a word like mansplaining—a word that’s understood to be a slander on a person’s sex and not human nature in general.

Who Assigns the Meaning of Words?

How then did we come by this modern understanding of the word gossip? How is it that the word describes common behaviors easily recognizable and understood that work in our current cultural context without carrying around the baggage of the meanings it held in the past? Was this the work of a savvy linguist? Did a group of cultural historians determine precisely when the old godfather/godmother meaning was no longer useful and opt for an upgraded meaning? Were health experts consulted on when it would no longer make sense to associate childbirth an advent attended exclusively by women? Did a central authority mandate these changes be made as we passed from one century to the next?

Of course not. The evolution of the word gossip, much like the evolution of almost all the words we know, was not directed by any one person at any one time for any one reason. It was the product of a slow, painful process that involved all English speakers in some respect, even though almost none of them were aware of the role they played. And what has resulted in this vast group effort is a language so complex, beautiful, descriptive, and fitting to the culture from which it derives that some even earn a PhD in the English language itself.

This phenomenon of spontaneous evolution is not limited to the language we speak. The laws that govern us, the family that begat us, the markets we buy and sell goods and services in, and even the traditions we inherited are all part of a vast group effort among many generations who contribute to these endeavors just as they go about their daily business, many of whom never give a thought to the matter.

Conservative thinkers have long observed how the laws of a free society can take on a life of their own. “Common law…do not, in detail, have their origin in a list that some person or persons sat down and ‘drew up’,” wrote Willmoore Kendall, “They have been hammered out in the courts of law over long centuries and reflect the accumulated experience of the English-speaking peoples with the vexed question of how to prevent miscarriages of justice.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it this way, “The development of our law has gone on for nearly a thousand years, like the development of a planet, each generation taking the next step, mind, like matter, simply obeying a law of spontaneous growth.”

Brilliant Fools

This is prescription in action. This is Burke’s notion that far more knowledge and invaluable wisdom are transmitted not by experts or sages but by the inherent value embedded in our culture, norms, and traditions. As Burke tells it, “The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts rightly.” Prescription provides a path for ordinary, even foolish, people to craft a beautiful language, enact just laws, uphold moral and auspicious traditions, and produce vibrant markets.

This allegiance to prescription does not mean the conservative denies certain people have greater knowledge, skills, experience, or innate wisdom than most. Expertise is immensely valuable. But its value is of a very narrow sort. An expert in cabinetry can tell us all kinds of important and interesting things about cabinets. But it’s doubtful they’d know the precise cabinet in terms of size, quality, color, and various other features I happened to be looking for last Tuesday, nor could they have predicted where such a cabinet should be sent or how much I’d be willing to pay for one. And yet the free market provided to me precisely what I was after at a price both I and the cabinet maker found agreeable.

The ability of the free market to produce goods and services at prices people are willing to pay has long been observed by capitalists as yet another area where we are advantaged by people indirectly making a difference by behaving in their own interests. “Practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation,” wrote Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

How Prescription Transmits Knowledge

As complexity increases, so does the need for skills, knowledge, and experience to grapple with the complexity. Thus, we recognize that an expert, or someone with experience in the subject matter, or a person who just happens to be highly intelligent, is likely to do better against some average person in matters of complexity. But some complexities are so vast, or subject to change, or lacking in obtainable data, or of a certain nature that no individual (or even computer in certain instances) could ever hope to possess the knowledge or expertise required to navigate it. But the population at large—legions upon legions of those “average people”—coupled with the wisdom of our ancestors passed down through the generations, can produce a sort of brainpower strong enough to work through the complexities. Thomas Sowell explained it best:

“Any individual’s own knowledge alone is grossly inadequate for social decision-making, and often even for his own personal decisions. A complex society and its progress are therefore possible only because of numerous social arrangements which transmit and coordinate knowledge from a tremendous range of contemporaries, as well as from the even more vast number of those from generations past. Knowledge as conceived in the [conservative] vision is predominantly experience—transmitted socially in largely inarticulate forms, from prices which indicate costs, scarcities, and preferences, to traditions which evolve from the day-to-day experiences of millions in each generation, winnowing out in Darwinian competition what works from what does not work.”

Therefore, prescription greatly enhances our ability to navigate the complexities of an advanced society via two means: 1) rather than rely upon the brainpower of the few gifted and knowledgeable experts, we can instead transmit information over a highly sophisticated web of institutions, customs, and norms that involve all of us. And 2) rather than limit our knowledge to the generation that just happens to be standing around, we can instead learn from the past successes and failures of our ancestors by staying within these traditional institutions, customs, and norms. Sowell continues by stressing that in the conservative’s view “where knowledge was a multiplicity of experience too complex for explicit articulation, it was distilled over the generations in cultural processes and traits so deeply embedded as to be virtually unconscious reflexes—widely shared. This was, in Burke’s words, ‘wisdom without reflection.’”

Any culture comes prepackaged with all sorts of embedded wisdom. Sometimes this wisdom is traceable back to some moment or great moral teacher or movement that helps explain its practical use and value. Often it is not. Or at least it may not be evident without a great deal of “reflection”. “It is not simply that individuals rationally choose what works from what does not work,” explains Sowell, “but also—and more fundamentally—that the competition of institutions and whole societies leads to a general survival of more effective collections of cultural traits, even if neither the winners nor the losers rationally understand what was better or worse about one set or the other.”

I doubt most people know the etymology of gossip. Yet that does not prevent them from adding this word to their vocabulary. Most of us came by this word—like most words—completely ignorant to the mindboggling complexities and evolutions it went through to arrive at our doorstep free of charge. Would we be better off if we only spoke a language provided to us by “experts”? I doubt it.

What’s true for language applies just as strongly to politics. “The absence of clear guidance from the past is not a reason to rely on the unaided reason of the individual alone or to look to naked theory for standards,” warns Yuval Levin, “Instead, it is a reason to desire collective deliberation and collective action in politics.” Prescription is not universally accepted, just as it was contested in Burke’s day. In the final post in this series—Part 5—we’ll turn our attention to those who insisted all this foolishness about prescription was simply getting in the way of letting the true experts get things done.

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Episode 45 - America's Greatest (and Worst) Presidents - Part 3

Who were America’s Greatest Presidents? Which Presidents had the most lasting impacts that shaped the country in ways that are clearly visible today? What about those Presidents whose blunders, incompetence, or weakness left the nation worse off?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by frequent guest Bob Burch as they work their way through the American Presidents and dissect their legacy—whether great, terrible, or somewhere in-between. Since this is an enormous topic it’s broken up into three episodes. In Part 1 covered Presidents George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. In Part 2 Josh and Bob picked things up with Andrew Johnson through Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in Part 3 Josh and Bob conclude with Harry S. Truman through Jimmy Carter (the last of the Presidents to serve before Millennials were born).

LISTEN HERE

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