Back to the Stone Age: a Primer for Palaeoconservatives 1 by Thomas Fleming September 26, 2012 Printer-friendly Chapter One:

e: Some Basic Concepts, Part One I have never been very good with dates, but it was some time in the mid 1980's. Paul Gottfried, who was teaching at Rockford College, had come to my office, and we were discussing, as was our wont, the sad state of conservatism. (I do not recall if it was before or after we began collaborating on The Conservative Movement). My view was that Reagan's victory had insured the elimination of every argument or policy based on conservative principle. Out of power, conservatives had mounted an effective, albeit limited critique of the New Deal regime that had been in place since the 1930's, but once in power they had joined the ranks of the enemy. Their defection was in part an illustration of Stan Evans' Law, that whenever one of our guys gets into a position where he can do some good, he becomes one of theirs, though Stan's law implied some measure of principled resistance, whereas all Paul and I could see was a joyful surrender, on the part of Washington conservatives, to the least little temptation. Paul's typical conversation gambit in those days was to begin every paragraph with, "I am more conservative than you are because" I occasionally played along, though, in truth, I never cared much for the subject, partly because it was never clear to me what people meant when they used the word conservative. Back in the 1930's and 1940's, "Conservative" had been used as a term of abuse for people who supported the status quo, generally regarded as the rule of the wealthy and powerful. It was also used occasionally as an insulting synonym for the timid or overcautious. Bill Buckley and his friends had cobbled together a pragmatic ideology they called "fusionism"equal parts classical liberalism and respect for order and tradition--but I have run into very few people (Donald Devine, most prominently) who believed in it. The main problem with fusionism was that it is based on a fundamental incoherence that reflects the disparate origins and sources of American (and English) conservatism. The adjective "conservative" implies an attachment to the existing status quo and an antipathy to change. That is why one could speak, in the Brezhnev years, of the conservative hard-liners in the Kremlin. Buckley and his friends were certainly conservative in this sense, opposing, as they certainly did, both revolutionary communism and democratic socialism. Buckley declared that the mission of his magazine was to stand "athwart history yelling stop." In every generation, then, conservatives have tried to slow the pace of revolutionary change without necessarily mounting a principled opposition to the Revolution itself. In the late 18th and early 19th century, English Tories were primarily eager to stop the progress of the political and social movements spawned by the French Revolution. These movements were aimed at eliminating or at least emasculating monarchy, aristocracy, and the entrenched interests of established churches.

Liberals were progressive, almost by definition, and thus they had to be "modern." It is often forgotten that the word modern, derived from Latin modus, means basically fashionable. Liberals and leftists had always be rushing to keep in fashion, while a conservative, by contrast, was defined as a defender of the old regime. He was a lover of the feudal order and antiquated cultural traditions. He was the pillar of the old social order and of all that Edmund Burke referred to as "the unbought grace of life" and what T.S. Eliot meant, a hundred years later, when he celebrated "the permanent things." In the course of the 19th century, however, another revolutionary movement, not unrelated to the French Revolution, did succeed, and that was Classical Liberalism. Classical Liberals were not necessarily opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church per se, but in their drive to liberate individuals they inevitably tended to undermine any institution that impeded an individual's progress. By the dawning of the 20th century, the old liberalism had done its work all too well: Kings were impotent, aristocrats were marginalized, the Church was reduced to window dressing, and even the heads of families were losing some of their authority over wives and children. The big winners were the business classes, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists. The reaction of the working classes had been predicted from the beginning. Liberated from their attachment to the land, the king, and the church, they demanded political equality with the rich, whom they regarded as the new aristocracy. By the end of World War I, liberalism was in a shambles, in the process of being replaced by one or another form of socialism. National Review's historical conservatism, then, was really a defense of the revolution that had transformed the world by breaking down the old order and clearing the way for socialist revolution, violent in the case of Russia, democratic and gradualist in most of Europe and the United States. By the end of World War II, socialism was so in vogue that it could now be called liberalism, which is why conservatives attack the leaders of the Democratic Party as "liberals" when they are in fact socialists. Buckley knew this very well, and many times in his career he declared that he and his friends were true liberals. Buckley was sincerely conservative in more conventional senses. He loved classical music and learned to play the music of Bach on the harpsichord. He respected, without necessarily obeying, the Catholic Church, and he often expressed his admiration of traditional literature, especially in its contemporary manifestations. He loved the novels of Evelyn Waugh, admired T.S. Eliot's social and cultural criticism, and promoted conservative novelists like James Gould Cozzens. Unfortunately, at the very center of Buckley's mind and National Review's editorial policy, the conflict raged between his conservative instincts and the revolutionary spirit of liberalism and individualism that now animates conservative talk radio. Paul was more or less a fusionist and, strange to say, an admirer of Mr. Buckley, at least in his pre-1980's incarnation: He celebrated bourgeois liberalism but, as a Germanophile, he also thought a good deal of social stability and its foundationsauthority, hierarchy, and tradition. There was nothing wrong in anything he admired, though I did rather feel it fell short of a coherent point of view.

I always enjoyed our chats about the failure of the conservative movement. Paul's bte noire one he shared with our friend Peter Stanliswas the perfidious neoconservatives. I shared his distaste for most of them, but my view came closer to contempt than hostility. Of the movement's two most prominent leaders, one was a bright man and clever operator, whose education was at best rudimentary and range of intellectual interests pedestrian if not primitive, while the other was a student of 20th century literature, a subject that is not exactly a solid intellectual formation. The lesser lights of the movement were, for the most part, not worth the effort it takes to hate someone. There were, nonetheless, sound intellectuals and writers associated with or admired by the neocons. I came to know their hero Edward Shils, a deeply learned man of sound wisdom. His friend Joseph Epstein was and is one of the best essayists in America. Irving Louis Horowitz, who published my first book, was a widely read social and political analyst who did a great deal of good for traditional conservatives. So, "neoconservative," while useful as a term of abuse for the schemers who seduced the all-too seducible conservatives, is inappropriate as an ideological label. Ed Shils, though no ideologue, was deeply conservative in many of his instincts and more or less loathed the whole gang including his students. I know that because he told me so at dinner, in a series of scathing responses to my queries about this or that leading light of the movement. Back to the Stone Age, I B by Thomas Fleming September 27, 2012 Printer-friendly That afternoon, as Paul and I were gassing on about the evil neocons, one of us said something like, ""If they are neoonservatives, what are we then, paleolithic conservatives or palaeocons?" In my recollection, I was the first to utter the word, though I believe Paul also claims credit. I won't dispute the point. It hardly matters. I do know that Chris Kopff and I in those days used to joke about the different types of conservatives who longed for different periods of history. The neocons liked the 50's while the fusionists preferred the period before the New Deal. Neoconfederates went back to the antebellum South, Russell Kirk had his heart in the 18th and 19th century England, Kopff and I looked back to classical antiquity, while Walter Burkert, the world's expert on Greek religion, had argued in his book Homo Necans, that the first great breakthrough toward human civilization came in the Paleolithic age when primitive hunters quit eating each other and developed the ritual of animal sacrifice. As Kopff and I used to joke, Burkert was, in this sense, the ultimate conservative. From the beginning, there was a fundamental divergence on the meaning of palaeoconservative. Pauland his neconservative enemiesthought we were claiming to be the authentic heirs to the postwar conservatives at The National Review. There was obviously some truth in this. Unlike the neocons, we had not signed onto any of the social revolutions that had hit America since roughly 1970feminism, homosexualism, the marriageor more properly the divorce--revolution, open immigration, globalism, global democratism, what is now known as multi-culturalism, and the civil rights revolutionto name only the most obvious.

As a student, I had not only sympathized with the civil rights movement but had openly associated with some of the leftists associated with the very red Highlander Folk School. I even took part in a few marches and sit-ins, but, while I continued to believe in a system of equal rights under the law, I was completely opposed to unmerited claims to social and economic equality. All these claims undermined the traditional authority of state and local governments and increased the powers of Washington over the lives of everyone. Nonetheless, as sympathetic as I was with the good work that NR conservatives had done in resisting the revolution, I had never found either the magazine or its ideology either interesting or satisfying. The early Bill Buckley had displayed both courage and charm, but he had never thought through what it was he believed. I was grateful for the opportunity to write for NR and thought well of many of the magazine's regular contributors and editors, such as Jeffrey Hart, Chilton Williamson, John Simon, and Florence King, but I never felt at home in its pages. When Bill, typically in an unsigned article, attacked us for agreeing with him on immigration, I was not terribly surprised or disappointed. I was more impressed with the disgruntled American liberals between the two World Wars: H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, and even John T. Flynn. The wrote better than most NR contributors, and while they claimed to be liberals, they were more reactionary, partly because they were better read. When Gottfried and I were working on the second edition of The Conservative Movement, I wrote the chapters on the Old Right and the Libertarians, though I later decided to take my name off the project, partly because I was now a character in the book and partly because I was uncomfortable with Gottfried's somewhat relaxed approach to factchecking. In those years, I was working on The Politics of Human Nature, and it seemed to me that the revolutions of my own time had gone well beyond the French and Russian revolutions and had adopted as their object the elimination of mankind both as the mammalian species that had evolved over a million years and as the creature made in the image of God. It seemed to me thenand it seems even more clear todaythat whatever practical good conservatives might hope to do in shaping a political debate, our real mission was to resist and if possible roll back the progress of what C.S. Lewis had so fittingly called The Abolition of Man. There were, in other words, far bigger fish to fry than the size of the Federal budget or the absurdities of Fritz Mondale and Michael Dukakis. What Palaeoconservatism Is Not Before attempting to say what palaeoconservatism is, I should say a little about what it is not. Palaeoconservatism is not a movement, and if it were, I should be the last person in the world to join. In this I have to confess that Russell Kirk was right in avoiding group identification, though I was disappointed when he refused to join the John Randolph Club, giving me his usual answer to such requests: "I am a lone wolf." Part of Kirk's reluctance stemmed from our inclusion of libertarians, whom he derided as "chirping sectaries," a phrase from Edmund Burke he had been applying to them for decades. I think he would have agreed with the Marquis of Halifax that a party is at best a conspiracy against the nation. I should add to Halifax's insight that a political movement is only an unsuccessful party.

The only movement I am willing to belong to is historic Christianity, and the only ideological creeds I profess are the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed. I know there are people who claim to belong to some kind of palaeoconservative movement, but when I read some of what they writethough they are generally decent enough peopleI remember Marx's rueful statement, made late in his long career of plotting and sedition, that whatever he was, it was not a Marxist. Ideological movements are almost always based on what the leaders hate: men, white people, the rich, Jews, foreigners, Catholics, the bourgeoisie. When movements join forces to collaborate, hatred is always the cement. In the 1980's American Nazis joined with various Klan groups, despite the obvious problem that the KKK had been traditionally an instrument of American nationalism. Nonetheless, both groups disliked blacks and Jews, and that was sufficient common ground on which to take a stand. At The National Review, traditionalists (who believed in tradition and the social order) made common cause with classical liberals, because both groups saw big government as an enemy of what they cherished. As a practical matter, however, free markets always trumped culture and tradition, if only because businessmen are always happy to pay people to tell them that greed is, after all, not just good but the ultimate good. Movements and their members suffer from the good old American vice of doing good. Every American reformer or political intellectual seems to have a plan or project for improving humanity, and when the plans go awry and create incredible mischief, as classical liberalism, prohibition, and feminism have done, then some new do-gooder comes along with another plan like state socialism, drug legalization, or the Men's Movement. Like Jefferson Davis, speaking for the South, palaeoconservatives can say, "All we ask is to be let alone." Sam Francis used to ridicule this attitude as unrealistic and defeatist, but what is the alternative? Perpetual war for perpetual peace? Armed revolution? Terrorism? Davis was a trained and battle-hardened military officer. He knew the men of the South would have to fight for the right to be left alone, but like most sensible people he had better things to do with his life than to join crusades. My personal motto, borrowed from Hank Williams, has been for at least three decades: "Why don't you mind your own business, 'cause if you'd mind your own business, you won't be minding mine." If palaeoconservatism is not a movement or a party, then is it an ideology? Not at all. An ideologyas opposed to a philosophyis a system of ideas adopted to protect or advance the interests of a particular class or group. Classical liberalism, as Marx knew, was an ideology to protect capitalists; feminism is an ideology that allegedly aims at equal rights for women as a subset of humanity; environmentalism protects ordinary people from the pollution caused by capitalism, socialism is supposed to empower and support the working class, and so on and so forth. Of course, in reality, socialism empowers and enriches only the leaders of Marxist parties and labor unions at the expense of everyone else, feminism helps a small set of leftist women, predominantly lesbians. One of the final stages of the revolution against human nature is the coalition of environmentalists, vegetarians, animal rights activists, and population control fanatics that seeks to gain control over all the world's resources, dictating not only what we can eat and produce but who shall live and who shall not.

Members of an ideological movement are trained and disciplined like attack dogs and required to memorize the movement's slogans and arguments, and if a rational opponent goes through their panoply, defeating one after another of their positions form A to Z, the ideologue, upon giving up Z, retorts, "Yes, but what about A." This technique was first explained to me by an Alexandrian Greek who had debated many Communists, but it applies equally well to libertarians, racialist reductionists, and Dittoheads. My late friend Russell Kirk was, thank Heaven, no intellectual, and he hated the very word ideology. Our mutual friend, Erik v. Kuehneldt-Leddihn saw this as a weakness in AngloAmerican conservatism. In fact it was a great strength. The weakness in the political thinking of Edmund Burke and his disciples was not their rejection of ideology but their aversion to philosophy (including the natural philosophy we call science) and their sentimental attachment to historical myth, like England's Glorious Revolution or the doctrine of American Exceptionalism. (More on this in later chapters.) I tried to set forth some of this in a brief article for the Spectator, in the days I could still write for English publications. An editorI don't know if it was Frank Johnson or his deputy Stuart Reidgave it the fanciful title, "Tories Back Wrong Philosopher." I thought the title was quite funny. Peter Stanlis, the author of the excellent and seminal study of Burke's thought, Edmnund Burke and the Natural Law, did not, though he was kind enough only to open up once on the subject, at least in my presence. A few years before coming to Chronicles, while I was still living in McClellanville, South Carolina, I was corresponding with Thomas Molnar about some things he had written. We later became friends, and I learned a great deal from him, but nothing more important than his insights on the fatal pattern of revolution and counterrevolution that had infected not only political thought but political action. Along the way, those who oppose the revolution, not only create in their reaction a whole new set of problems but embrace the psychology of revolution. I am not doing justice to my friend's analysis, but under Molnar's influence I concluded that counter-revolutionaries end up as revolutionaries, albeit on the other side. Another friend, Robert Nisbet, showed in his best book (The Sociological Tradition) how utopian socialism developed as a reaction to the social devastation caused by the French Revolution. If Robespierre was mad, Fourier and Comte were even madder, and Marx still more insane. What could be worse than Marxism? If you can ask that question you have not read anti-Marxist libertarians like Ayn Rand. If palaeoconservatism is neither a movement nor an ideologyboth of which are surrogate religionsthen, you may ask, is it a philosophy? Not at all. There are, of course, philosophers and political thinkers who have inspired and informed palaeoconservative thought. I might just mention, first and foremost, Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Althusius, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and, on a lower level, Fitzjames Stephen, Henry Sumner Maine. But most people who regard themselves as palaeoconservative have never read Althusius or Maine, and whatever a philosophy is or should be, it is not for must of us a means of grappling with the social and political world in which we find ourselves.

I find it more useful to think of palaeoconservatism as an approach or style of political thinking and acting. It shares many of the concerns of earlier conservative thoughta respect for order, a love of personal liberty, and a willingness to learn from tradition, but it is both more coherent and a good deal more skeptical of propaganda and political mythology. Though perfectly willing to make compromises with political realities, palaeoconservatives are not willing to surrender their principles or their loyalties or their integrity for the sake of a job in Washington or a column in The New York Times. It was probably Sam Francis who first pointed out to us what should have been obvious, that despite our pious rhetoric about the good old days of The National Review, palaeoconservatives had quickly evolved well beyond anything imagined by Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, or William F. Buckley, Jr. Back to the Stone Age IC by Thomas Fleming October 1, 2012 Printer-friendly Some Themes in Palaeoconservative Thought In subsequent chapters I will take up, one by one, some of the main principles and arguments of palaeoconservatism, but in concluding this preface I should, if only to entice readers to continue, sketch out some of the principle themes to be found in palaeoconservative writers. 1) Objective Anthropology. Any genuine palaeoconservative has a keen eye and a hard head. He is an observer of human nature, whether he has studied the subject scientifically or not. He knows that man is a bigbrained ape, and, if he is a Christian or a Platonist, he believes that man, however improbable it seems from his history, also has a soul with a knowledge of good and evil and a capacity for eternal life. He begins with the way things are and have always been, not with the way things ought to be, and when he reads Rousseau's famous sentence, "Let us begin by setting aside the facts," he is ready to throw the book awayas he ought to unless he is a student of intellectual pathology. Don't try to tell a palaeoconservative that man is by nature good or peaceful or that he lacks an appetite for power, and don't try to convince him that men and women have identical aptitudes. His response will be Sergeant Joe Friday's signature phrase on Dragnet, "Just the facts, ma'am." He may be a pious Christian or a mystical philosopher, but the palaeoconservative takes the facts of human nature as he finds them. I spent two decades at least studying genetics, anthropology, neurophysiology, and sociobiology in order to provide scientific corroboration of what everyone knew, once upon a time, if only from proverbs and fairly tales. Molnar, reading the early chapters of my first book, grew impatient. Do you really have to have all these footnotes to prove that men and women are different? Thomas did not need such evidence, but most people today require at least the veneer of scientific evidence. Some palaeoconservatives may fall occasionally into the trap of scientific materialism or the simplistic thinking that reduces every human phenomenon to some biological trait we share with baboons, but that is far rarer than the tendency to fall back on a traditional understanding of sex

roles, human society, and the fallibilities of human nature. In general then, palaeoconservatives, faced with revolutionary claims about reinventing marriage and the family or eliminating distinctions of class and wealth, will be extremely skeptical. Whether their skepticism is derived from scientific study or from religious tradition, they are not easily taken in by the ideological rhetoric of Marxists, feminists, or Jingoists. 2 The Machiavellian Approach. One of the greatest contributions to American conservative thought was James Burnham's book The Machiavellians. It had a profound influence on Burnhams's most important student, Samuel T. Francis. Machiavelli, particularly in his Commentaries on the Decades of Titus Livius, offered significant insights into the nature of power and the difficulty of acquiring or maintaining political liberty. This method of analysis was extended and deepened by Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, the German-turned-Italian Roberto Michels, and the French Syndicalist Georges Sore--among others, including Sam Francis and Burnham himself. What the Machiavellians have taught us to see is the significance of elite classes. According to Michels' "Iron Law of Oligarchy," there is only one form of government, namely, oligarchy. A monarch depends on an aristocracy to carry out his will and support his authority, while so-called democracies cannot be governed in any practical sense either by the people as a whole or by their elected representatives, unless the representative body is fairly small, coherent, and empowered for decades, in which case it forms an oligarchy. Machiavellians are not necessarily cynical power-seekers; on the contrary, they typically believe in republican government and cherish political liberty, but they refuse to be taken in by surface illusions or rhetoric about democracy, equality, and human rights. While on the surface, political debates may seem like conflicts between angels and demons or an argument between two sorts of idealists, the reality is generally more sordid. Advocates of women's rights may really want to make them sexual slaves or ill-paid laborers; champions of democracy and liberty may be scheming to acquire a totalitarian power that they will claim to be based on the will of the people. When James Henry Hammond was defending slavery in the US Senate a northern opponent boasted that in the North they had eliminated slavery. "Yes," retorted Hammond, "the name but not the thing." Hammond was, obviously, defending an economic system on which he had grown very rich, but my point is not to defend or excuse slavery but to point to a reality that my friend Eugene Genovese so brilliantly revealed in books like Roll, Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made, and in his subsequent investigations into the mind of antebellum slaveholders. Genovese was, in those days, a Machiavellian Marxist who viewed both sets of arguments, for and against slavery, as so much ideological posturing to defend two sets of regional class interests, those of Southern slaveholders and those of Northern capitalists and industrialists. Inevitably, those who have looked with jaundiced eyes at the reality of minority rights movements, as Sam Francis did, have been condemned as bigots. Perhaps some of them were or are, but that is hardly the point. What is most deeply offensive in palaeoconservative thought is not the failure to celebrate the empowerment of minorities but the refusal to admire the emperor's

new clothes and the insistence that while leftist politicians may have changed the names, political power still rests on the pursuit of power and the exploitation of the weak. They have learned from the ancients, from Herodotus and Aristotle, that it is the mark of a tyrant to elevate the poor and the weak as part of their project of disempowering their only real rivals, people of high social status, ability, or integrity. Back to the Stone Age I D by Thomas Fleming October 3, 2012 Printer-friendly 3. Reason, Sentiment, and Tradition Skeptical of propaganda and the sentimentalism of human rights and progress, palaeoconservatives might be attacked for their cold-blooded rationality. Instead, they are more typically criticized for their supposedly romantic attachment to tradition and for their rejection of the "science" of politics preached by the highly unscientific followers of Leo Strauss and other foreign-born political gurus. Following the insights of profound political thinkers from Aristotle to Michael Oakshott, we distinguish between subjects that are the proper subject of entirely rational analysis, e.g., mathematics, logic, physics, astronomy, and most of the natural sciences, and subjects that involve the complexities of the human person and the vagaries of the human will, such as art, literature, ethics, and politics. In the latter case, reason is constrained to work on material that is neither abstract nor entirely subject to rational analysis. In this vein, I have written several times of "irrational rationality," the attempt that has been made (since Descartes and the thinkers of the Enlightenment) to reduce the organic and complicated affairs of human life down to the level of universal rules and to a "moral algebra" in which all persons (P) are required to behave toward all other persons (P 1.2.3.4.5..) according to formulas x, y, and z, without any consideration of the relationship that holds between the two persons. I wish I were making this nonsense up, but the concept of moral algebra can be found in Leibniz and Locke and worked out in absurd detail in the works of the otherwise sensible Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, but the granddaddy of this style of thinking is Ren Descartes. There is nothing authentically rational about reducing the variables of human existence to simplistic formulas that are as scientific as phrenology or the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard. It is highly irrational to pretend that I owe the same duties to my wife as I owe to my children and still more irrational to pretend that what I owe to my family I owe to families in China. Families matter, and so do communities, nations, ethnicities, religions, and cultural traditions. To sort out one's duties to all these is not a simple task, and to pretend that it is only dampens our willingness to take care of our own family or defend the interests of our country. But that pretense is at the heart of all liberal political thinking, and in this important respect, there is no significant difference between classical liberalswhom we now think of as conservativeand Marxists. Human nature being what it is, not all liberals and leftists have

been completely insane. One can learn a great deal from philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, from Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smithbut it is important to keep an eye out, because liberals like Smith (especially in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) start from entirely false premises. Talking about practical things, such liberals often have useful things to say, but you should never trust them not to slip some dangerous nonsense into their argument. They are like talented cooks who like to slip in a little arsenic for flavoring. What philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment sometimes referred to as moral sentiments are part of the outfit of toolkit we use in everyday life. No one can think his way, rationally, through every conflict of duty or interest. We have to rely on natural impulses and affectionsthe desire for food and sex, a man's reaction to defend himself--and the lessons we learned at our mother's knee, from Sunday School, and from our mentors. Those who wish to change the conditions human life and launch revolutions against human nature, describe these lessons as irrational prejudices, but it is by means of such prejudices, such as not playing with a loaded gun or walking backward into the street while talking on a cell phone or sticking pins into an electrical socket, that parents teach their children to stay alive until they can begin to think rationallyif they ever do. If a tradition goes back far enough, it is generally likely to be more or less true. Steve Goldberg once wrote a good essay in Chronicles, arguing that ethnic stereotypes were statistically accurate. Speaking of his own background, he said many gentiles regard Jews as pushy, while Jews tend to think of themselves more as merely enterprising, but whichever word we prefer, the phenomenon is the same. Of course, not all Jews are enterprisingsome are as lazy and unambitious as I ambut the stereotype, which was arrived at after centuries, even millennia of experience, is a good basis for predicting future behavior. Some traditions that we accept without reflection are of fairly recent, though they are taught as revealed wisdom in school. This is, more or less, the whole body of liberal thought: Human beings are basically good; men are all the same everywhere and racial and ethnic differences are trivial, though (paradoxically) there are many cultures where marriage does not exist and female chastity is not admired much less enforced; religion encourages ignorance, bigotry, and violence; the Western traditions of male dominance, free enterprise, and personal responsibility are inherently and uniquely evil. Where it turns out such "traditional" lessons are wrong or immoral, as is the case of much of what we have been taught in school, we can, of course, correct the mistakes by turning both to higher authorities (the Bible, the great classics of our literature) and to our own observation of human life. No matter how many times Marxists might try to convince us that private property, monogamy, and the family are evil inventions of patriarchal males, we can look around the world and see that they are wrong. No matter how many times that Libertarians tell us we are all free individuals, we can look at real human beings and conclude they are more likely to be slaves. No single human being can find out everything important on his own. Even in matters of science, we take most of what we think we know on faith. We think, for example, that we know that the spheroid earth goes around the sun, but, prisoners of older traditions, we continue,

doggedly, to say that the sun rises in the East, and we often refer to the four corners of the world. This is harmless enough, because as valuable as the advances in science and mathematics have been, they affect our lives only indirectly through science and technology. When I was headmaster of a private school, I used to ask the teachers questions like this: If one and a half bottles of wine contain 38 ounces, how many ounces are in a body of wine? Left with pencil and paper for 10 minutes, they could gradually figure it out, but they had forgotten the simple formula they had been taught in sixth grade: If 3/2= 38, then 1=2/3 of 38. An Alexandrian shopkeeper 200 years ago could do the math more rapidly than most educated Americans. We are forever saying things like, "according to scientists," because in fact, rather few of us would know how to go about proving that our world is a globular planet of roughly 25,000 miles in circumference, though we are taught to laugh at the churchmen who told Columbus that he could never reach China before running out of food and water, because the earth is too big. Churchmen had to be wrong because they accepted an ancient scientific tradition (going back to Eratosthenes) as true, while Columbus had to be right because in the liberal legend, he was a bold individualist who challenged authority. We typically take things as Darwinian evolution, the Big Bang and the expanding universe, and the structureor even the existence--of DNA on faith. They are handed down by a tradition that goes back, sometimes only to a generation ago but sometimes all the way back to the ancient world, as in the case of Eratosthenes' brilliant calculation of the earth's circumference. According to some scientists, by the way, a majority of the medical studies cited in the press are bogus. It is better not to read anything than to read an AP article on a study of the dangersor benefitsof drinking coffee. But if science depends on the acceptance of tradition, then how much more do we depend on the traditions of our culture to tell us our moral and social responsibilities. A brilliant man might devote his life to moral philosophy without contributing one sound or irrefutable idea that people can use in their daily lives. The obscure terminology and improbable theories of academic philosophers do not constitute an advance in human wisdom, and if we were tempted to believe they did, we have only to look at the miserable lives led by so many academic philosophers. But even when a brilliant moral philosopher makes a break-through, he is only building on a far greater tradition of wisdom handed down by his predecessors...... Back to the Stone Age I D 2: Progressive Regression by Thomas Fleming October 8, 2012 Printer-friendly There is nothing irrational about accepting the moral, political, and cultural traditions that have been handed down to us as part of the conditions of life in the European-American world. Many of these traditionswashing before eating, respecting parents, working for a livinghave been tried and tested for thousands of years, while the oppositebad hygiene, filial disobedience, and welfare dependency--seem, after only a generation or two of experimentation, doomed to failure.

Some traditions, as Walter Burkert observed, go back to the Stone Age; others derive from our cultural ancestors, the Greeks and Romans; still others come from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Others are the gift of our mostly barbarian ancestors. Much of our culture, while hearkening back to antiquity, has more recently taken on new forms. Classical music, representational oil painting, familiar literary forms like the novel and the sonnet, and the rational enquiries of science, are among the great products of the past five or six centuries. Palaeoconservatives, while neither deaf nor blind to the possibly great art being produced in our own time, respect the art and literature handed down to us from our ancestors, partly because we have learned to recognize their greatness and partly because we know that in every generation the greatest human accomplishments are an extension of an age-old tradition. If we reject the genius of Aristotle or the wisdom of Shakespeare or the beauty of Haydn, we are showing contempt for our ancestors. These aesthetic revolutionaries who put Homer and Vergil on the same level as Mayan pictographs (or even lower) are violating the principle that underlies the commandment to honor our father and mother. "But," some progressive usually objects, "all the old precepts, forms, and styles have been rendered obsolete by" You can fill in the blank with any word used to preface "Revolution": The Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Sexual Revolution, the Computer Revolution, and now the genetic revolution." My friend George Gilder once actually opined that the computer chip had enabled humanity to transcend the limitations of human nature. Today we are just as likely to hear that the iPhone or Twitter had done even more. Nietzsche, I think in Zarathustra, saw a great deal of this before it happened, and he observed that if a lame man mounted a horse and rode to the top of a mountain, would still, once he dismounted, limp. All these liberating revolutions have the effect of enslaving us to the revolutionary state or the revolutionary technology. We think, because we can look things up on Wikipedia, that we actually know something, when in fact we do not even know how to find anything out. Just see how empowered the modern proletariat is, when the electricity fails at Best Buy or the Apple Store. You cannot buy anything, because they cannot add up the bill, much less figure tax without a computerized cash register. Knowledge consists of what you have in your head when the lights go out or you are on a desert island, in the woods, or lying at death's door in a hospital bed. When I cannot sleep, I go over irregular verbs in Italian or Serbian or ancient Greek, and, when that trick fails, I run over the Roman emperors. I sometimes recite longish poems, like Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," or Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" or the beginning of the Iliad. Entering old age, I am going back to the poets. I fear my children and grandchildren will have nothing but jingles and claptrap to alleviate the insomnia some of them will have inherited from me. Surface are always changing, almost always for the worse, but the deep structures of human nature stay the same. As big-brained apes, we still long for life in a small tribe or village, still long to be admired, loved or feared, by or fellow, still crave the material immortality of our descendants, still seek satisfaction in mastering a skill. Because there is so little outlet for our

natural impulses, we settle for the third-best alternatives offered by commercial culture. Instead of acquiring technical skill in making and throwing spears, we become a whizz at video games or spend money on watching strangers throw a football. Instead of going to the fire to hear the village story teller or singer recount the deeds of our ancestors, we the History Channel or, worse, attend the annual professional storytellers festival where people play pretend at belonging to a traditional culture. Instead of finding a mate and begetting children and grandchildren who will honor us, we try to score as many orgasms with strangers as we can, and if we go have children, we content ourselves with a trip to Disney World or Two Flags Over Fuquay. Circumstances change, but the realities of human life do not. It is Marxists, not conservatives, who believe that human nature is a function of circumstances that man is free to change. Progress is at the center of the revolutionary creed, while the very word "conservative" suggests resistance to change and skepticism of the whole idea of progress. The archconservative Metternich once said that a reactionary is reluctant to change the year of his calendar, but after several centuries of dogged conservative rejection of progress, the mystical theory of ceaseless change and infinite perfectibility is now one of the few beliefs shared by people who call themselves conservatives. Even incorrigible optimists should have understood that American conservatism had been replaced by an evil double, when every movement hack began to enthuse over Robert Pinkerton's "new paradigm," which was only the old paradigm of democratic socialism with an overlay of the even older gush about opportunity. One inevitable consequence of this is that in embracing progress and liberation, conservatives almost must adopt the progressive frame of mind in which life consists of problems crying out for solutions. Solutions always mean more government programs, and government programs inevitably mean a cancerous growth of political power that eats away at the authority of natural and legitimate institutions of kinship and community. The bitter truth is that for most so-called human problemsimmorality, unhappiness, selfishnessthe only solution is the common fate of mankind, namely death. One of James Burnham's wisest insights is that if there is no solution, there is no problem. The poor, we are assured by the highest authority, was shall always have with us, but we shall also always have adulterers and cuckolds, conmen and dupes, masters and slaves. Equip the slave with an iPad, a Facebook account, and a government make-work job teaching school or minding other people's business, and he is still a slave, only a less happy slave. In liberating humanity from the need work and in striking off the shackles of tradition, the revolutionary left has so degraded men and women that there is no community or body of traditional institutions where they can find refuge. For some number of people able and willing to make the effort, there is a long and hard (albeit enjoyable) road out of the ghetto, and that is to embrace the life of the mind, whether as a profession or as an alternative to the servile entertainments of the mass media. We need to distinguish, however, the essential food and drink of our Western traditions from the exotic fare of alien traditions.

Some palaeoconservative intellectuals are scientists; others are experts in Asian or Middle Eastern literary and intellectual traditions; but all understand the primacy that must be accorded the artistic, literary, and intellectual traditions of the European Christian West. Far from deriding or denigrating other great traditions, we salute them, as we ought to, and if we have time and curiosity we may devote our lives to studying them. We understand, however, that the basic need of a humane education, from the age of five to the age of 21, is not to acquire a lot of quaint and curious lore about other cultures, but to be instructed in the fundamentals of our own civilization. That is why we emphasize the necessity of a classical education and the study of the Christian religion. If the term "conservative" means anything, that meaning must include a sense of humility about one's own generation and a respect for the accumulated wisdom of dozens of generations. Conservatives are fond of quoting the proverb that we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. It is usually attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, who for all his genius and eccentricities, knew how much he owed to the past, but Newton was himself quoting John of Salisbury, a Medieval philosopher who explicitly claims to have got it from the twelfth century Platonist, Bernard of Chartres. Progressives, by contrast, are so myopic that, when they look down at the giants on whom they rest, see only a confused blur which they mistake for a jumbled troop of dwarfs. Back to the Stone Age I: Addendum by Thomas Fleming October 11, 2012 Printer-friendly This added section, which goes between the discussion of Machiavelli and the discussion of reason and tradition, is intended to sketch out a few operating rules for how conservatives should approach a question. 2B Coherence and Casuistry Most conservative movements and initiatives fail and fail badly... Failure is often the result of betrayal, either by the self-declared leaders or by the rank-and-file who are generally so confused and illogical that they follow corrupt leaders over the cliff. Eager for the conservative equivalent of "40 acres and a mule," conservatives pursue phantoms like a right-to-live amendment or a constitutional limitation on terms of office, without stopping to wonder if such legal and political reforms are possible or even desirable. In their confusion, conservatives often pursue contradictory dreams. The same conservatives who say they long to restore the old republic turn into statist authoritarians when they think they have a chance to turn their dreams into reality. Howie Philipps, founder of what became the Constitution Party, was once asked how, if he were elected president, he would make abortion illegal if Congress rejected his legislation. He answered that he would impose a ban on abortion by executive fiat, a statement reminiscent of the ultra-left Shirley Chisolm who had earlier made an equally Quixotic bid for the White House.

It was almost amusing to listen to conservatives defending George W. Bush's ruinous military adventures. These people had spent their lives prating about balanced budgets and fiscal restraints, but, with "one of ours" in the White House, they threw all caution to the winds. Amazingly, they blame Obama entirely for Bush's gross malfeasance, without pausing a moment to look at the voting record of their heroes, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. If you accept a principle as fundamental, you also must accept the policies it entails. "He who says A," observed Lenin, "must say B." If, to take a very minor example, you regard the Department of Education as unconstitutional and pernicious, you cannot rejoice when a neoconservative bully is put in charge or when an uneducated Republican President wants to impose some new program such as No Child Left Behind. Instead, most conservatives, when their candidate gets elected, turn out to be merely Republicans. For decades, conservatives had argued that the Congress was constitutionally empowered to take a major part in foreign policy decisions. This was a point relentlessly hammered by James Burnham, the most important conservative at NR. With the election of Ronald Reagan we learned that Congress had no authority in questions of war and peace. In the 1980's Sam Francis and I were constantly running into old-guard conservative leaders who claimed not even to remember when they advocated any level of congressional responsibility in foreign policy. It was about then that we began to hear the President referred to constantly as the "commander-inchief," as if he were a military dictator authorized to rule us all under martial law. There are more basic principles that are far more significant than Congressional powers, but here too conservatives are typically confused and illogical. They say marriage is an institution ordained by God, but then they push for governmental regulation of marriage; they say they believe that governments, like households, must balance their budgets, then in a panic vote for unlimited spending on the US war machine; they say they believe in states rights, but turn on a dime to support federal projects that deprive the states of the power to govern themselves. He who says A must say B, and if he does not, he must be prepared to be defeated, constantly, by political enemies who can see beyond the end of their noses. Let us call this the principle of coherence. Principles must be distinguished from simplifying ideologies that reduce all the complex interactions of human life to a few clichs like "power to the people" or "free markets and free minds." Ideologues, whether Marxist or libertarian, think that all the problems of our society will be solved if only the principles of Karl Marx or Ludwig von Mises are enacted into law. In fact, there is a vast and complex array of principles and assumptions that are mostly true most of the time, but reconciling conflict among these principles requires three other operating rules: hierarchy, relevance, and casuistry. For the sake of this discussion, it is not important whether we agree with any of the principles I am going to bring up. Let us suppose, as most conservatives do, that freedom of religion is a basic principle guaranteed by the Constitution. (It goes without saying that as a principle this is nonsense, though as a matter of prudence it is often useful.) What about religions that practice cannibalism, human sacrifice, or the burning alive of a dead man's wives? Well, those things are obviously illegal and disgusting. Take the offensiveness down a notch: What about polygamous

religions (Islam and traditional Judaism) or religions that require public sacrifice of animals, female circumcision, the use of psychotropic drugs, ritual prostitution, acts of terrorism. At the lowest level, what about a religion that permits cows to wander the streets without being molested? If there are aspects to most of "the world's great religions" that so offend our sensibilities that we wish to ban them, religious freedom cannot be an absolute or ultimate principle. Then, you will ask, is religious freedom a bad thing? Not necessarily, but even if it is a good thing, it is a lesser good than other principles, such as "Thou shalt do no murder." There is, thus, a hierarchy of principle. Let me take a frivolous example. I have a good Catholic friend whose car sports a bumper sticker, "Life is too short to drink bad wine." But this same lady would probably drink pretty poor wine, if the only alternative were jumping on the water wagon. My friend is rather elderly and lives on a limited budget. She is as generous as she can be to her Church and her family. If she really pushed the No Bad Wine principle to the limit, she would spend too much money at the wine store or, as I do, at Wine.com. Obviously the importance of wine comes second to Church and family, but is it so far down on the list that she is sinful if she wastes money on a drinkable bottle of Bogle cabernet? The obvious answer is no, because we do not all devote all our resources to family and the Church. We have to eat and dress ourselves, and part of being human is to like wine, music, and poetry. The Church is superior to all these lesser goods, but it cannot monopolize all our energies and money. In deciding this question, we have to consider relevance. We used to have an ex-Moonie working for us in fund-raising and public relations. When I asked him why, in describing our programs in a brochure, he put the most recent program, the Center on Religion and Society, first, he answered that religion trumps both the family and culture. Ultimately, it does, but one can get carried away. The Center, run by Richard John Neuhaus, was on the periphery of our interests and often at odds with the older, more significant programs. The oldest program and the one that absorbed the largest share of the budget was and is Chronicles. Religion may be the most important part of our lives, but it cannot teach us science or feed our family. A farmer or shopkeeper who spends his time like a monk will surely fail, and a think tank that does not properly base its priorities on its stated purposes and the bottom line of budget, will end up very confused. There is a tendency for many conservative Christians, when confronted with a problem, to ask, "What would Jesus do." Now, the Imitatio Christi is an important part of a religious life, but it is not always relevant. For example, if by pious friend ran out of wine at a party and asked the "what would Jesus do" question, the answer would be "turn the water into wine." She would face similar problems if she applied the same question to a food shortage or the need to leave a ship. We cannot all walk on water, and we cannot always go directly to God for solutions to life's petty problems. Jesus knew all this, of course, and it is easy to see in the Gospels that He was perfectly willing to rely on ordinary means when they were appropriate, such as picking grain on the Sabbath,

kicking the bankers out of the temple, and advising his disciples to self a second garment and use the money to buy a sword for self-defense. Sects and heresies have been founded on a refusal to read the Bible in toto, rather than picking out selected passages on which to base a new religion. We can turn to more serious questions. Obviously, Christians regard fornication and therefore prostitution as a bad thing, but is a Christian commonwealth therefore required to ban prostitution? In the Christian Age (from Constantine to the Renaissance), for the most part, rulers were content to restrict or regulate commercial sex. The most obvious counter-argument to moralistic rigor is that of prudence: Puritanical legislation encourages both contempt for law and the abuse of power by an ever-expanding government. But there is another principle, one that I regard as deeper, and that was summed up by St. Thomas in his principle that the commonwealth does not exist to force people to be virtuous but to foster conditions that are propitious to the cultivation of virtue. A giant state determined to crack down on erotic passion is probably the very opposite of a virtue-encouraging commonwealth. In the Christian Age (otherwise known as the Middle Ages) a routine distinction was made between the authority of the Church and the authority of secular rulers. It was deemed inappropriate for a king or emperor to have much to do with regulating morals, marriage, and family. That was the job of the Church. On the other hand, war and statecraft were the province of the ruler. So, just as the bishop and his priests presided over marriage, they routinely acknowledged the secular ruler's right to defend the kingdom and punish criminals. Even heretics, once condemned by the Inquisition, were turned over to the secular power for punishment. At the extremes, the division was clear, but there was a very fuzzy area at the center: When bishops received secular wealth and authority from the emperor, surely he should play some part in their selection and elevation? On the other side, the Pope was head of the Catholic Church but he was also the ruler of what became known as The Republic of St. Peter. Long before Popes routinely donned armor and personally led armies into battle, they were the commanders-in-chief of armies, which they sent into battle. Conflicts between the two swords, of Church and Empire, were frequent, but at lower levels we continue to face conflicts of principle. Some may be easily settled by the principles of hierarchy and relevance, but some are far more complicated. Suppose a young husband with a pregnant wife has enlisted in the army. He now owes obedience to the King or country, but what if his home is threatened. Is he justified in deserting in order to protect his wife and child? At first glance, most of us would probably agree that the circumstances justify desertion. But what if he is not only a soldier but a commander and that the fate of the kingdom rests on his shoulders. Suppose the Turks are at the gates of Constantinople or Vienna. What, then? Remember, he has embraced the career and code of ethics of the professional soldier, sworn loyalty to his king. It is not so easy, and I should never presume to make the disastrous error preached by Immanuel Kant, that there is always a higher duty that one is bound to follow.

In the older tradition, going back to St. Thomas, Cicero, and at least to Aristotle, these complications were more seriously evaluated, and it was understood that they had to be evaluated, case by case, taking account, first, of the general moral principles involved, and second, of the peculiar circumstances. Because these dilemmas are special cases, the moral reasoning is known as casuistry. While casuistry can be misused, it is an important and necessary corrective to the "terrible simplifiers" who would have us believe that a few ideals, such as liberty, equality, and fraternity, are sufficient to guide us in making moral, social, and political decisions. We seem to have gone far afield from the subject at hand, but actually not. While my friend Sam Francis would have sneered at the word casuistry, he was nothing if not a political casuist, weighing the consequences of legislation and policies in an effort to find pragmatic, least-bad alternatives. Back to the Stone Age I: Conclusion by Thomas Fleming October 15, 2012 Printer-friendly The American Tradition As Americans we owe much of what we are to the ancient, Medieval, and post-Renaissance Europeans who proceeded us. Nonetheless, we are not simply generic Europeans. We have our own peculiar traditions, some of which go back to Britain or even to the Anglo-Saxons, while others are more uniquely American. Some of our conservative tendencies are the local or national expression of more general European conservative "values." For example, we highly value the use of proper traditional English, much as a French or German conservative wants to preserve his own language in its classic form. Coinciding with our commitment to the purity of our language is a respect for proper form in dress and manners. It is no accident that men at The Rockford Institute wear jackets and ties every day or that semi-formal dress (tuxedos) is encouraged at the Randolph Club dinner. Wanting to avoid eccentricity and pretentiousness, we do not insist upon the standards of two generations ago, but where there is still some remnant of a tradition, we do our best to maintain it. Like other conservatives, we strongly believe in the study of our own historythat of England and Americaand we are well aware that the burden of this history requires us to pay special attention to the traditional Anglo-American liberties that are asserted and defended in the Constitution of the United States. Even if we are Catholic, we are not especially attracted to ultra-Catholic arguments, made by otherwise fine people who do not share our "Anglo-Saxon" traditions, that equate the American with the French Revolution and refuse to understand the historical circumstances to which the Constitution was a reasonable and effective response. One might happen to prefer some other tradition, the Dual Monarchy, for example, but such sentimental preferences belong more to the realm of poetry than to politics. Paraphrasing Popeye the Sailor, we can say, "We are what we are and that's all what we are."

Some conservative Catholics have seen the connection between the American federalism (particularly of the anti-federalist variety) and the older traditions going back to the Calvinist Althusius, St. Thomas, and Aristotle. Christopher Check's brother, now Fr. Paul Check, some years ago invited me to give a talk to the students (mostly seminarians, as I recall) at the North American College in Rome. My theme was a detailed comparison of Jefferson's thinking about ward-republics with the very similar understanding of Thomas and Aristotle. I wanted to call the talkechoing a famous piece by Ezra Pound"Jefferson and/or St. Thomas"--but Fr. Paul spotted the allusion and politely suggested a less provocative alternative. I am not suggesting that the Constitution is a perfect document drawn up by a council of demigods, quite the contrary. It was a shrewd piece of politicking that drew upon the wisdom and learning of several Americansincluding two important statesmen not present in Philadelphia (Adams and Jefferson)who had made a serious study of political history and theory. Our Constitution was not the exclusive product either of ideological dreamers or of political pragmatists, but relied on both types. Nothing human is perfect, but the Constitution is worthy of respect, not only because it is ours but also because it combines the British aspirations to political liberty that grew out of their experiences in the 17th and 18 centuries with a deeper understanding of what some Catholic theologians have termed, "subsidiarity." This "well-known principle of subsidiarity" is the elegant insight that the power to make decisions should be left to the lowest level of the people affected. I should note that I typically use the term federalism to mean not the centralizing tendencies in the Federalist Party of Hamilton but to politics based on the subsidiarity principle and more typical of the misnamed anti-federalists, who were in fact the truest American federalists. Most self-described conservatives pay lip service, at least, to the Constitution, but few take the time to study what it meant either in its historical context or as the expression of long-standing English and American traditions. Although we do not worship or even revere the Constitution, we respect it, and we try to apply its deeper principles to the conflicts and problems of America in the 21st century. We accept neither the leftist interpretation of the organic and evolving constitution nor the static theory of original intent. Whose intent should we respect? Not that of the framers, certainly, though it is interesting to know what they might have really thought. But what if Hamilton or Madison were lying in The Federalist? It would hardly matter because we know how the people in the state conventions regarded the new document. We also know why they supported or opposed it, all or in part. By studying the historical context and the debates, scholars like Forrest McDonald and Clyde Wilson have shown, from quite different perspectives, what were the real issues at stake. Americans were not interested in political theory, but they were deeply suspicious of centralized government and fearful of tyranny. This approach to the Constitution is a great deal like the Catholic and Orthodox approach to the Scriptures: The Old Testament is interpreted in light of the New, and problems in the Gospels and Epistles are evaluated in the light of the Tradition. Taken as a whole, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were enacted precisely to prevent the sort of centralized state tyranny we now take for granted. This point is easy to overlook, if instead of digging into the historical context one is content to fall back on generalizations about

the "American way of life," or, worse, the absurd fiction that America is a "propositional nation," that is, not a nation rooted in the concrete experiences of the flesh-and-blood men and women who settled the colonies and carved farms and communities out of the wilderness. In stark contrast with neoconservatives and other ideologues, who either judge America only by what it might become in the future, or, worse still, pretend that their utopian fantasies are the reality of the American founding, principled conservatives should insist on taking an honest look at the realities of the American historical experience. It was not always pretty--we do not pretend it was--but it was and is our history, and it is this experience that has made us who and what we are. The proponents of the other vision of American history, begin with abstractions and universal propositions about human equality and natural rights by which they presume to judge Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries, and they end up promoting endless crusades to impose their very un-American way of life on every other nation, culture, and religion. The Leftist version, propounded by Madeline Albright and Hilary Clinton, tells young Americans to risk their lives to liberate Muslim women and instill consumerism, hedonism, and socialism in Third World countries, while the so-called conservative version, as preached by Condaleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, and the neoconservatives who write their texts for them, would send the same Americans into harm's way in order to promote consumerism, hedonism, and what they call democratic capitalism. The proper response to democratic globalism is not isolationism or pacifism but sanity and prudence. John O'Sullivan, when he was editor of The National Review and one of our allies, staked his claim on the "national question," which was a commitment to policies that benefit the American national interest (our term at Chronicles). For O'Sullivan, the key planks in the platform were control and restriction of immigration and an end to globalist policies that eroded American sovereignty. He had considerably less enthusiasm for the two other equally necessary planks: first, the rejection of the free trade theories that were destroying American industry and exporting jobs, and, second, the termination of imperialist policies that require an American military presence in over 100 countries around the world and have sent Americans to fight three costly and indecisive wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Inevitably, palaeoconservative pragmatism on questions of foreign policy is decried as "isolationism" or even pacifism. Neither charge is remotely fair. We do not oppose all wars, and we favor a vigorous involvement in international business and commercial affairs. Many leading palaeoconservatives are polyglots who take a scholarly interest in other cultures. Many are well travelled and maintain extensive contacts with foreign political intellectuals, writers, and editors. So far from being isolationist or obscurantist, they respect other nation's cultural and religious traditions, following the principle that I have termed the "Golden Rule of Nations:" Whatever rights and respect you want for your people, culture, and religion in your own country, you should accord to others, so long as they do not attack American security or vital interests. A Very Brief Conclusion

English and American conservatives have made many excellent contributions both to political theory and to a deeper understanding of our traditions. While they share many common principles with continental conservatives and reactionaries, the Anglo-Americans have tended to emphasize the rule of law, personal dignity and responsibility, and the sturdy integrity of citizens willing to play their part in the political life of a nation. Some of this thought or emphasis derives from classical liberal thinkers and their precursors, even though many of their fundamental assumptions about human nature and political life are demonstrably wrong. The mythology of natural equality, the social contract, and even individualismas I shall explain in the next chapterhas confused conservatives and foiled most efforts to produce a coherent political philosophy. It would, nonetheless, be a great mistake to throw out the conservative baby with the liberal bathwater. The liberals' celebration of individualism and responsibility, while originating in mistaken theories, nonetheless, reflects a very important aspiration toward the good life. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson may have been misled by false philosophers, but they were expressing the ideals of their own civilization, which used to be our civilization. As an analogy, consider some of the defenders of monarchy or the Catholic Church's secular authority over Europe. The defenders typically based their arguments on myths such as the divine right of kings or Constantine's fictional donation of imperial authority to Pope Sylvester. It is easy to debunk the myths, but not so easy to debunk the historical reality of European monarchy or the Papal State. We do not live either in a monarchy or in The Republic of St. Peter. We have a different set of traditions and, if not a different moral tradition, at least a different set of emphases. We American are less inclined to praise blind faith and strict obedience to authority than we are to respect individual responsibility and political liberty. An important part of our conservative and libertarian--American traditions are borrowed from the liberals, and we should honor them as worthy if not perfect ancestors. The central problem for Anglo-American conservatives is the incoherence of this fusion of liberal ideology and conservative impulse. Confused about the nature of society or the reality of the individual and seduced by the abstract ideology of human rights, we are hard put to defend particular cultural, moral, and religious traditions. Decent conservatives who are disturbed by, for example, the push for same-sex marriage can be grudgingly persuaded that our American tradition insists on treating everyone the same, that the revolution of 1776, while it may have begun as a reaction to the abuse of monarchical power, is a continuing revolution to equalized opportunities or even outcomes for everyone in our society or even in the world. Before too long, the instinctive conservative has been talked into embracing the revolution against not just the American Constitution but against human nature. This is one very important reason why palaeoconservatives insist on digging into history and down into the foundations of human life to find the deeper principles on which all decent human societies are based. If ordinary people can once grasp what marriage isnot an invention of government or the creation of a particular religionbut a fundamental expression of our nature, they will not so easily be misled by the leftist proponents of Gay Marriage. And it hardly matters, on this question, whether we feel that nature is the product of Darwinian evolution, the

gift of our Creator, or (as I have argued) both. All of the bogus arguments being put forth by neoconservatives and other false conservatives will then be seen as not only false but silly and trivial. What is true of the marriage question is true of every other moral, social, and political issue that faces Americans today and at all times. Skeptical Palaeoconservatives are willing to sweep away the rubbish of lies and political mythology in order to clear the way for the truth. For that reason, above all others, they are hated by the ideologues of the false right and the true left who are reducing free Americans to the level of slaves. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." Back to the Stone Age I: One Last Addendum by Thomas Fleming October 18, 2012 Printer-friendly Defenders of Bill Bennett and George W. Bush had only one real counter-argument: Big government and deficit spending may be bad, but sometimes they can be put to good uses, so long as good people, i.e., "one of our guys" is making the decisions. Though conservatives of this type are fond of pretending that they believe in principles or "ideas," their most basic principle can be reduced to the cult of personality. If Ronald Reagan or George W. picked a cabinet member or pursued a policy, he must have had solid justification. To be consistent and coherent we have to go back to our basic understanding of the human male. What do most men want, once they have satisfied basic necessities? Most of us would have no trouble in listing the main desires of the males of our species: wealth, power, celebrity (admiration from one's peers and from the public), and sex. When a good man enters a profession or takes on a vocation, he wants primarily to earn a living, for himself, his wife and his children, through work that he gives him satisfaction and earns respect. (We do not respect the wage slave who does what he does only for the sake of making enough money to make him secure and comfortable.) Sometimes his vocation his inheritedall the men in his family had been carpenters for several generations; sometimes he finds he has a particular talent (playing music) or the necessary attributes to be a soldier or a priest. When, however, there is a profession where the manifest objective is wealth and power, one that requires no particular talent and whose necessary attributes are thelibido dominandi and the power to dissimulate intentions and deceive other men. In some societies, of course, there have been statesmen like Themistocles or Cicero, but we should recall that Themistocles was notorious as a bribe-taker and that Cicero did not consider it immoral for a judge to be partial to his friends. Men are men, even the saints, and it is the rare politician who gives off even the slightest whiff of sanctity. What, then, do we conclude if not that even the most upright politicians make some of their decisions on the basis of personal interest or, which comes down to the same thing, the interest of their backers. In the modern world, at least over the past 150 years, there are few politicians who are at all upright or honorable. As one friend of mine has suggested, "they" (the

unscrupulous power-seekers who control both parties) won't let anyone run for a higher office unless they have the evidence to end his career or send him to jail. This is only a slight exaggeration. This understanding is our "A" premise, and the "B" that follows is the universal question that must be put to every decision made by presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, and mayors: cui bono: "to whom for what good?" We could call this the double dative principle, since that is the Latin grammatical construction. We might also call it the Moe Howard principle after the scene in one of the Stooges' shorts where the boys are offered a large sum to do a job. Moe's response is simply, "Who do we have to kill?" Occasionally, a politician may disappoint us by doing the right thing for a disinterested motive. Treasure that moment, if it happens, but do not expect a second occasion. If I had to guess, I would say that Congressman Walter Jones is an honest man, and not simply because he reads Chronicles. After proposing to rename French Fries as Freedom Fries in the House Cafeteria, Walter discovered to his horror that his President, the leader of his party, had lied to Congress. He then became an outspoken critic of the Iraq War, targeted for elimination by the Rove-Bush White House. I also think Russ Feingold, the leftist Democrat from Wisconsin, acted largely on principles, misguided as they were. There were others, like Gene McCarthy. I was once giving a communist writer (winner of a National Book Award) a ride into Charleston, and he asked me if I admired any liberals. When I mentioned McCarthy, he told me he did not think much of the Minnesota senator. "We (the far left) funded his campaign for the presidency but he later betrayed us. I like a man who when he is bought, stays bought, like John Anderson." Ironically, John Anderson owned the house next door to the house we have lived in since 1985. The president of the World Federalist League was, predictably, a poor neighbor, but I do not know if the communist's evaluation of his political sincerity was correct. I do know that Anderson was an insufferable prig, the worst sort of person to allow into Congress. I infinitely prefer out-and-out rogues like Tip O'Neil or Strom Thurmand. This passage comes in the middle of the discussion of Coherence, after the allusion to the appointment of Bill Bennet. Back to the Stone Age II A: The Price of Freedom by Thomas Fleming October 19, 2012 Printer-friendly Classical Liberalism and its stepchildrensocialism and libertarianismare founded on error, and no error of the liberals is more manifest than their credulous faith in individual liberty. It is summed up in Rousseau's famous declaration (which begins The Social Contract) that "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Any normal person who has lived for twenty years knows that the opposite is true, that man, whatever freedom he might eventually secure, is everywhere and always born a slave, to his natural appetites, to the mother who nurses him, and to the family that attends to his every need. Advocates of infanticide have often tried to fix the period during gestation when an infant becomes viable. It is a pointless debate, since no infant or child of five can provide for his own

material needs. The best a child of twelve could hope for, if abandoned by relatives and friends, would be to be made the slaveprobably a sex slaveby some adult. In simple societies, teenaged boys might be able to fend for themselves, but in our own world, it is the rare college graduateto say nothing of all those hapless PhD's in universities-- who can take care of himself. A liberal might retort that Rousseau was not talking about people being literally born but of man's basic nature, as when Aristotle declared that all men by nature (physis, the process of being born and growing) strive to know or that man was born to live in a commonwealth. If this interpretation were true and Rousseau were correct about human nature, we should expect to find moral, social, and political liberty in the most natural, that is, the simplest and least-developed societies. It is true that some misguided anthropologists have gone in search of freedom-loving savages, and at least one tribe, the "gentle Tasaday," was invented by an enterprising minister of tourism in the Philippines, but the brute fact is that the least developed peoples, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the forest-dwelling pygmies, and the Eskimos are precisely those that are most dependent on their family and tribe and least capable of even imagining what liberty, in any sense of the word, might mean. Long before states and governments were created, men and women were "enchained" by parents, patriarchs, and tribal elders. Apes and lesser mammals are even less capable of freedom: the only freedom a male chimpanzee enjoys is when he is expelled from his band and forced into an existence so wretched he cannot endure it.[i] Although we know that the attainment of liberty and autonomy is consistent with something in our nature, there is nothing natural, much less easy about the condition of freedom. It is as artificial as haute cuisine and formal verse. Political liberty can only be achieved by people who enjoy social freedoms, such as the ability to marry, bear and rear legitimate children, and conduct business, with little interference from political authorities, and true social freedom is only possible for human beings who are morally free or at least strive to attain moral freedom. Many people are too mentally deficient, lazy, or corrupt to accept responsibility for themselves, and when they enter into marriage or a business deal, their unreliable character can lead to evil consequences that invite legal or political intervention. This abstract description can be illustrated by the sort of people who, for example, are continually bringing children into the world and expecting their neighbors or the taxpayers to support them, who work for wages but are forever calling in sick or slacking off when the boss is not looking, who make big financial deals based on false promises that bankrupt their victims. The welfare mother has more in common with Bernie Madoff than is commonly realized. But if liberty is like haute cuisine and formal poetry, that would suggest it is not entirely artificial. After all, we all like to eat, and much of what we like is determined by a natural appetite for what we need. The rhythms of poetry and music, while they are created within specific societies, appeal generally to our desire for order. In that sense, we might agree that man has a natural appetite for freedom and will even fight not to be enslaved by others, but this appetite can be expressed savagely by anarchist mobs on a looting spree or in a disciplined and

purposeful construction of the institutions, the rule of law or constitutional order, that make it possible for us to be free. It is the difference between grubbing for roots and berriesor the bugs we find in a manure pile--and the elaborate skills and rituals required of civilized cooks and diners in France or China. Liberty in the European sense is a gift of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had a fuller understanding of the concept. At the most basic level, they spoke and we continue to speak of being free from some constraining force. The slave becomes free when he no longer has to obey a master, the Greek cities of Ionia were free when the Persians were driven out. But the ancients also saw liberty in a more positive light. The truly free were not bound by material necessity to spend their time on menial tasks like digging in the dirt. If they were farmers, they owned enough property and slaves to be able to take part in the religious and political life of their community. Ideally, they would receive the education that enabled them to appreciate poetry, music, and even philosophy. These arts were called technai eleutherioi in Greek, which the Romans translated as artes liberales, the arts that a free man cultivated and in cultivating become truly free. Freedom, so they believed, was not a natural condition. The natural man was a brutish savage, like the patriarchal Cyclopes described by Homer. They are huge and powerful but also arrogant cannibals. Odysseus, an intelligent Greek, easily disposes of Polyphemus, who has hospitably promised to eat him last. Both Plato and Aristotle use these fictional savages to illustrate the condition of natural men. They were a great deal wiser than the liberal philosophers who concocted the myth of the noble savage. Montaigne's "Essay on the Cannibals" inaugurated a lie that culminated in Rousseau's Essays on Equality and still finds echoes among the more nave armchair anthropologists. Back to the Stone Age IIB by Thomas Fleming October 23, 2012 Printer-friendly The Pernicious Myth of the Individual Part and parcel of the counter-factual theory of natural liberty is the myth of the individual. If man were in fact naturally free, it would be because he is his own person, because, as some libertarians say, he owns himself. Pure and utter hogwash that only a self-blinded ideologue could possibly accept. The term individual is derived from a Medieval Latin word, meaning "undivided being," which is properly applied only to angels. Let us get technical for a moment. In logical and rhetorical (not biological) terms, the members of a group are, each of them, a species within a genus. While we human creatures, made up of body and soul, are species belonging to the human genus, angels are made up of one undivided substance, and every angel is its own genus. In conceiving of men and women as individuals, then, we are implicitly denying the significance of our material existenceour impulses and appetitesand also blinding ourselves to the reality that in being members of the same genus, we human beings are not radically separated from each other. Between a dull-witted and diminutive pygmy and a brilliant and tall

Scotsman, there is a common human element that is more significant in some ways than all the distinctions of height, color, and intelligence. Classical liberals and libertarians will immediately jump to the wrong conclusion and sniff out, from any critique of individualism, some version of collectivism or even socialism. At this point in a debate or discussion, some unwary conservative will leap in to say that when ordinary people use the term individual they mean no more than "person" or (in America) "guy," as in: "I went into the bar and I met this individual with an interesting background" In this sense, individual is only hyperurban jargon for person in the same way that "perpetrator" is police jargon for criminal. The decay of precise usage, however, may be less harmless than our unwary conservative thinks. In this case, the misuse and overuse of "individual" is used to perpetuate one of the favorite American myths, that ours is an exceptional nation, founded by "rugged individualists" who left settled communities in Britain and Europe to come to a New World, where they never stopped moving from place to place in search of opportunity and adventure. A closer look at our colonization and migration patterns reveals a different story: in many cases, towns along the Atlantic seaboard and later in the Middle West were settled by family groups and something like whole villages. Outside of Rockford there were Scottish settlements (Argyll and Caledonia) established by a group of related Lowland families who had been transported to Argyll. Going West, American frontiersmen were less often lone individualists like the mythical Daniel Boone than they were men of family and community, like the real Daniel Boone. The proper word for a human being, considered in his own right, is "person," and some conservatives such as John Lukacs have preferred to speak of persons. It is a neutral word, that does not specify the human being's relations to his society. Women, children, and slaves are all persons and possessed of human dignity, though it may be quite misleading to speak of them as individuals. Is a newborn or pre-born infant an individual? It hardly seems likely, but if not an individual than in what sense is the infant to be protected? Pro-life advocates will leap in to say that he is a "legal person with rights," but that is transparently absurd. Even a five year old child cannot vote, sit on a jury, make a contract, or sue in court. The confusing misuse of terms encourages a fatal misuse of human persons. Marxists and libertarians would like us to accept their accounts, in which collectivism and individualism are the only two choices. But, before liberals invented the individual and leftists invented the collective hive, ordinary people and philosophers understood very well that, while human persons were distinct, they inevitably existed in a familial and social context. So long as we permit Marxists and libertarians to delude us with their fantasies, we shall continue the destructive work they begun by classical liberals and continued by Marxists, namely, the dismantling of all our fundamental social institutions from the family to the Church. In fact, liberals and leftists by and large agree on the significance of the individual. It is true that Marxists place great on the state as the mechanism by which the needs of the individual are satisfied, but both see traditional institutions (marriage, parenthood, the church, etc.) as obstacles

to the individual's fulfillment. The goal is more or less the same. When the Marxist state gradually withers away, all that will be left are human individuals pursuing individual happiness. Let us then try to speak of persons, rather than of individuals. The word "person" does not imply radical independence or complete self-sufficiency. If such creatures as liberal individuals ever existed, they would be entirely powerless, incapable of banding together to resist the growing power of the despotic state. Statists and collectivists understand this reality, which is one of the reasons they make war on the family and the Church, which are independent sources of authority capable of protecting the rights of the members. The individualist fantasy grows out of the delusion of natural liberty, but it is a conservative insight to detect these sorts of errors. The atheist conservative David Hume was a great lover of political liberty and for that reason set out to refute the myth of the social contract and natural liberties. He put his argument into a nutshell with the simple statement that "man born into a family is compelled to sustain society." In the liberals' imaginary state of nature, which is only approximated in periods of great crisis, man would truly be (in the Latin proverb) wolf to man, and the strongest, most violent, and least scrupulous wolf would rule and exploit the rest, until he was displaced by an even stronger, more violent, and less scrupulous rival. In the 19th century George Fitzhugh, a political theorist combating the spread of liberalism, argued that a society based on liberty and equality would end up subjecting the weak and the moral to exploitation by the powerful and ruthless. He also realized that the response would not be the restoration of the old social order but a socialist revolution. Man is by nature a corporate being who belongs to a family, a tribe, or a religious brotherhood. It is only within a society, especially in a civilized society, that family members, kinsmen, neighbors, and co-religionists can cooperate in protecting each other from the depredations of thugs, gang-leaders and the would-be petty tyrants who administer the organs of the modern state. Why does any of this matter, someone might ask? Is this all not just a debate over the language of political theory? Let us look at an example, which can clarify the difference between the true conservative and the Liberals who call themselves conservative. Suppose a Cincinnati art gallery outraged local sentiment by installing an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs, and suppose further that the local sheriff shot down the exhibit as indecent. The leftist response would be to sue in the Federal courts for the protection of the gallery-owner's individual rights on the grounds of the First Amendment. If the leftists were more candid, they would admit that they had small use for traditional marriage or morality, which they condemned as "homophobic." Classical Liberals, Libertarians, and self-styled conservatives, while they might disapprove of the photographs, would generally defend the owner's individual right to self-expression, typically citing Voltaire's famous statement, "I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Is anyone so stupid as to believe such nonsense? Let's put a little meat on the bare bones of Voltaire's rhetoric.

I am a Jew and while I disagree with the Nazi Party's plan to exterminate my people, I will defend to the death their right to argue for genocide. Or I am a parent who wants to protect my child from evil, but while I disagree with childpornographers, I will defend to the death their right to create and advocate kiddy porn, so long as no real children are exploited. The conservative would look at the issue from two perspectives, the one moral and the other political. Understanding the natural law, he will have no sympathy for Gay Rights or its propagandists. Turning to the Constitution, he will note, first, that the First Amendment was written to limit or deny the power of the Federal Government in matters of religion and political speech. He would also note that this government is called a "federal," because it is a league of sovereign or semi-sovereign states in which each state was supposed to be able to manage its own affairs. The 10th amendment was drafted, specifically, to prevent the federal government from dictating either to the state of Ohio or to a city chartered by that state. If he is of a philosophical bent, he will recognize that the federal principles of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights go back to an understanding of local government and the principle of subsidiarity rooted both in the Old Testament and in the writings of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Althusius. Case dismissed. Then, the argument is not merely theoretical but touches on a topic of vital interest to most Americans. It concerns both questions of marriage and the family and basic morality and the rights of states, counties, and cities to manage their affairs without dictates from Washington or unfunded federal mandates. The division between the conservative and the libertarian positions opened upon in a debate we sponsored on whether one was ever justified in summoning the federal authorities to intervene in a local dispute, as in, for example, the Cincinnati case. I do not remember all the details, except that Murray Rothbard and I were on one side, and Justin Raimondo andI thinkWalter Block on the other. Many libertarians were aghast that Rothbard should take the conservative position, but that is because they failed to appreciate Rothbard's conservative instincts. As the debate progressed, and we made the argument that civil libertarians were a primary cause of the growth in state power, JustinRothbard's most loyal followerbroke down and conceded our point, "I can't help it," he confessed, "you guys are right." I date the beginning of Justin's continuous growth in sanity to that event. When in the next chapter, I take up foreign policy, I shall tell the tale of how Rothbard and I became first allies and then friends. What we formed was a running debate between serious libertarians (Ralph Raico, Ron Hamowy, Hans Hermann Hoppe, David Gordon, and Justin among others) and steadfast conservatives (Sam Francis, Clyde Wilson, Chris Kopff, Joe Sobran). The two wings of the coalition were divided on any number of issues, but they were united in their opposition to the increase of state power and in their refusal to sell out their principles to curry favor with politicians or mercenary Washington think tanks like Cato and Heritage. Naturally, this coalition only increased the contempt the Washington "professionals"

had for both groups. Ed Crane of Cato accused Rothbard and Rockwell of selling out to the moralizing right and failing to defend "sexual diversity." They responded by dubbing him, "Sexual Diversity Eddy" or just S.D. Crane. When it came to forming coalitions, front groups, and movements, Murray was an old stager, and in dealing with him I sometimes was reminded of some of the old lefties I used to know, but Murray was cautious. He had been burned once too often by weaklings. Jerome Tucille tells the story of how Rothbard managed to alienate nearly all his allies in the Libertarian Party until he finally had only himself and Tucille. With me, by contrast, he did everything to avoid a rupture to the point that he tried to avoid conversations on basic issues. We're a coalition, not a movement, he used to explain, and we can be free to disagree. Our most fundamental disagreement was on individual rights, which Rothbard made the centerpiece of his moral and political philosophy. His famous rule of non-aggression was rooted in the classical liberal notion of rights. When I told him that rights were a philosophical fantasy and the social contract a myth, he bristled. One day, over a little gin, he concluded that for him rights were a means to securing the protection of liberty, and he acknowledged that I accomplished the same object by insisting on natural duties that arise from one's position in life, what Bradley referred to in a brilliant if condescending essay on "My Station and Its Duties." A mother's duty to her children, a father's duty to his family, a neighbor's duty to his community should not be invaded by higher levels of social organization such as a state or federal government. What do we call such invasions, I was asked. The answer is simple: tyranny. It was on this understanding that Murray and I found ourselves on the same side of this and many other debates with his disciples and colleagues. The myth of the naturally free individual, while it appeals to the American love of liberty, is actually subversive of all the liberties we have enjoyed. For conservativesand morally serious libertarians--to invoke such language "in a good cause" is to begin the process of going over to the enemy. Back to the Stone Age IIC by Thomas Fleming October 29, 2012 Printer-friendly The Price of Free Markets One point on which Old Right and traditional conservatives could generally agree with Libertarians is the high value they put upon economic freedom and a deep distrust of government regulation. In our free-wheeling discussions, Rothbard and I struck a bargain. Since we agreed on eliminating about 90% of the powers of the Federal government, we would only quarrel over that disputed 10% once we had achieved our impossible dream. Murray, as an anarchist, wanted to privatize roads, bridges, and prisons, while I, though willing to entertain the possibility, thought it not unreasonable for government to have some role in providing for the common good. Since we would be lucky even to slow, much less halt the growth of government power, there was no point in arguing about the things that could never be put on the table.

I have not changed my mind or reneged on the agreement. The problem with the Libertarian position, however, is not that it is impractical or that I find parts of it morally repugnant. The problem is that it is false. They speak in abstract and universal terms about the "free market" as if it were a force of nature like the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. If it were, then we would expect to find free markets, in the classical liberal sense, flourishing everywhere, whereas in fact the varieties of human social life have engendered thousands of systems of economic exchange, but nowhere have we a record of a truly free-market economy. Advocates of capitalism write as if there were some natural or divine force known as "the market". There is no such thing. There is no MARKET, only markets, and a market is not a metaphysical principle but a place where people exchange goods and services, sometimes but not always for money. Think of the Athenian Agora or a local farmers' market. Another way to look at markets is to describe them as playing fields for exchanges. A market as place or playing field may become institutionalized, as a person or group of persons or a community or government claims ownership and the right to regulate it, just as the city or a business group may own a baseball stadium and a league of team owners agree to a set of rules. The word "free" is a little ambiguous. Pretending not to understand, I used to observe that in every market, sellers and buyers generally have to pay someone or some entity a tax or a toll or agree to use a currency (and currencies, including precious metals, always include a percentage for the sovereign). Libertarians and classical liberals will usually retort that they don't mean "free" in the sense of "gratis" but in the sense of unconstrained. But markets historically have been subject to any number of constraints: there are market officials who guard against false weights and frauds, rules excluding contraband merchandize or merchants from hostile tribes or countries. Once a market become institutionalized, they can never be entirely free, because the owners and regulators will always seek to maximize their own revenues and those of their friends, relations, allies, and fellow-citizens. There is no known society without some kind of market. Even communist countries had informal and black markets, and one may have comparatively free markets (hardly ever absolutely free) in societies where even the word capitalism is unknown. When capitalists equate the "free market" with capitalism, they are either lying or hopelessly ignorant. The free market, like other aspects of human liberty, is an ideal, not a universal reality. It is a little like what Aristotle says about natural justice. Is it, he asks, like fire, which burns the same in Greece and in Persia? Obviously not. It is more like right-handedness, a natural tendency (at least in a majority of men and women) but one that can be over-ridden, to a great extent, through disciplined training. My father was left-handed, but the sisters in his school tied his left hand behind his back and forced him to do everything with his right. I know this is supposed to cause problems, but in his case it made him so ambidexterous that he could win bets on the golf course. He played left-handed and if he got too far ahead, he would offer to use his partner's clubs and swing with his right. He was less good with the right, but good enough. So there is a human tendency to resent interference in our efforts to provide for necessities, whether by growing food or making exchanges, and there is a tradition in the Westone that goes back to the ancientsto give a great deal of social and economic liberty to citizens. Since

the Renaissance, these market freedoms have been increasingly (until the 20th century) taken for granted as desirable. But the free market is not an ultimate good; it is not even a good in se. It is a mechanism by which people provide for necessities and satisfy desires. If those desires are destructive, than a free market actually does harm. Think of the market as a tool or weapon, a hammer or a gun. They can be used for useful and necessary purposesbuilding bookshelves or shooting game, but you can also beat someone's brains out with a hammer and commit a series of murders with the gun. Free markets serve our desiresnatural and otherwiseto enhance our material life and increase our stock of things we need or want. The desire to acquire and possess is natural, and it is found in all human societies. But, like the sex drive, it can either be channeled into useful and constructive activities, or it can take a perverse turn in the direction of greed, cupidity, and the pointless and repetitive impulse to acquire more and more and more. I have known some quite rich people who made good use of their wealth and enjoyed a full life. But there are othersI know several but can point to Warren Buffetwho are never satisfied with the enormous wealth they possess but cannot enjoy. People who pass their entire lives making money never learn how to spend it.