Guest post by Ed Stephan
George Will wrote a Fourth-of-July column praising David McCullough’s “1776”. To introduce his paean, he set up a sort of straw man in the form of “historicism”:
What is history? The study of it — and the making of it, meaning politics — changed for the worse when, in the 19th century, history became History. When, that is, history stopped being the record of fascinating contingencies — political, intellectual, social, economic — that produced the present. History became instead a realm of necessity. The idea that History is a proper noun, denoting an autonomous process unfolding a predetermined future in accordance with laws mankind cannot amend, is called historicism.
In contrast “Using narrative history to refute historicism, McCullough’s two themes in ‘1776’ are that things could have turned out very differently and that individuals of character can change the destinies of nations.” Will illustrates this point using McCullough’s recounting of some of George Washington’s “chancy” victories during the War of Independence, suggesting that there was no “necessity” in our evolving into the nation we think we know today.
I don’t disagree with Will about the role of accidental events in history. In fact, I wish he’d remind Our President of that sometime, to counter Bush’s apparent belief that our nation’s destiny is divinely ordained through the God he personally channels.
Will’s column got me thinking about the “historicisms” of some of the major 19th century European thinkers whose work led to the formation of my field, Sociology. Most of them tried to form some kind of image of history, some identifiable process or set of “stages” which got us from where we were to where we are (usually the “industrial revolution”). I’m thinking of people like Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber. I’d love to look at today’s political world from each of these “big pictures”, but we only have room here for only one.
Briefly, Herbert Spencer was born in England in 1820, just as Parliament was beginning its decades-long discussion of whether government had any obligation to remedy the ills accompanyng the Industrial Revolution. In his first published paper, “The Proper Sphere of Government” (Economist, 1842), he came down strongly against what we in America call public education, believing such a system would give government too much power to rapidly transform society. Throughout his long publishing career he opposed governmental interference in the “Free Market”. In 1882, at the height of his world-wide fame, he made a triumphal tour of major U.S. cities, assuring bankers and manufacturers that they were the artistocracy of the future. He died in 1903, his ideological legacy (“social Darwinism”) living on in such poor imitators as Human Events and the National Review.
This granddaddy of all Conservatives viewed history as the decline of societies based on “Compulsory Relations”, mostly based on Government (fear of the living) and Religion (fear of the dead). These would be replaced, he said, by societies based on “Voluntary Relations”, human relations exemplified by contracts, the heart and soul of the new world of Business. In the former, society was bound together by sharing (as in Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer); in the newly emerging business world, highly specialized individuals are bound together by entering into contractual exchanges with one another in the Marketplace. Not “What can I do for my country (or my Church)? but rather What’s in this for me?
Oddly, Spencer’s philosophy highlights the fundamental conflict in today’s Republican Party. Business must, he says, ultimately come into conflict with both Government and Religion. For Business to triumph, Government must be reduced to its “protective functions” only — protection of life, property and contracts. He obviously opposed any scheme involving government direction of the marketplace, much less such “promotive functions” as health, education, welfare, any forms of the pursuit of happiness. And even regarding simple protection of life, he favored a drastic reduction in spending on military adventures which he regarded as nearly always harmful to Business. There should be no interference by Religion in the marketplace either. If I want to hire a prostitute, or consume tainted horse meat, or hire someone our society disapproves of … so be it; it’s no one else’s business what I do, so long as I threaten no else (pretty radical thinking for a conservative).
This is clearly the fundamental three-way contradiction in today’s GOP — laissez faire (or “Log Cabin”) Libertarians vs. neo-con (often chickenhawk) Militarists vs. parochial (and pharisaic) Theocrats. Wall Street vs. the Pentagon vs. Evangelical Fundamentalism. Greed vs. Guns vs. God. Cheney vs. Rumsfeld vs. Dobson.
Apart from offering a three-way wedge to drive these incompatible groups from each other, the framework might also give us Democrats some positive food for thought. The GOP likes to label us as socialists or communists? That bubble is easy enough to burst if we’ll get over our tendency toward disparaging the marketplace, or rather, if we’ll emphasize seeing markets as human creations (not “natural” or god-given), institutions which require information flows, and regulation and, since it’s the nature of markets to produce failures as well as successes, some concern for safety nets. I don’t really see how all that can happen without some government involvement, but certainly nothing beyond what the Democratic party has traditionally favored.
Theocracy clearly has no place in American society, in spite of occasional waves of Great Awakenings in our history. But tolerance of everyone — including people who do hold strong religious beliefs — does have a place, and such tolerance is the hallmark of the traditional Democratic party. I don’t know when we allowed the GOP to begin labeling us “anti-Christian”. My memory of Democratic Party politics, back in Phil Burton’s San Francisco in the 1960s, involved organizing every conceivable religious group, respecting their specific identity while binding even those which hated each other to our candidates’ causes.
Seems odd to be looking to a 19th century Conservative like Spencer for inspiration, but I think we should devote a couple of Democratic think tanks to working along these lines. While they’re at it, they might also want to tease Republicans with the fact that their supposed ideological grandfather was also the first to systematically organize modern ideas of ecological interdependence and analysis. Tell them that Spencer placed Science at the heart of our capacity to reason, while simultaneously insisting that Religion’s “knowledge” was directed toward the Unknown and Unknowable.
Finally, we could deliver the coup de grâce, perhaps inducing apoplexy in some of our our most mean-spirited GOP opponents (the “religious” whackos), by reminding them that this “Apostle of Laissez Faire” and “Preacher to the Robber Barons” held as his most basic organizing belief that all true knowledge, like everything else in the cosmos, is dominated by a process of (eek!) universal Evolution.