Recently the journal First Things republished an essay of mine which was originally published twenty-one years ago, called “The Illusion of Moral Neutrality.”  Neutralism is the doctrine that the law both can and should suspend substantive judgment about goods and evils, something I take to be impossible.  Since the neutralist error was then -- and still is -- especially prominent on the philosophic left, I made a point of saying that we also find it on the philosophic right, attributing to conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott the view that “the specific and limited activity of ‘governing’ has ‘nothing to do’ with natural law or morals.”

Some weeks after the essay was republished, someone wrote me to suggest that I got the quotation wrong.  When I returned to the passage and checked, I found that this is correct; though I had stated Oakeshott’s view accurately, I had garbled the quotation itself.  Oakeshott doesn’t say that governing has nothing to do with morals; he says what makes the conservative disposition in politics intelligible has nothing to do with morals.  But if we read on, we find that he thinks that according to this conservative disposition, governing should not involve substantive moral judgment either.  So perhaps I can be forgiven.

By way of reparation, allow me to quote from a book of mine published in 1988, The Nearest Coast of Darkness(we are being antiquarian today), where I more thoroughly analyzed the Oakeshottian passage from which I was quoting.  The context of the analysis was a discussion of various common meanings of conservatism.

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The third thing that conservatism may mean requires a little more attention than the first two.  In the third sense, conservatism means something very like the “neutralist” liberalism of the avant-garde, which I discussed in the previous essay – but shorn of its activism.  Conservatism of this kind has been well described by Michael Oakeshott:

"[W]hat makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about."

This is an attractive sentence, but also a complicated sentence, so rich in opportunities for the reader’s assent that we will only chase red herrings if we take no care to separate the subsidiary points from the main issue.  In the first place, Oakeshott is talking about three different things:

(1) the conservative disposition, whose emblems, according to Oakeshott, are “all activities … where what is sought is enjoyment springing not from the success of the enterprise, but from the familiarity of the engagement”;

(2) an observation, which, taken together with

(3) a belief, makes politics, in his view, an appropriate field for the exercise of this disposition.

My concern here is neither the disposition nor the observation, but the belief.  It is not the disposition because one may be conservative in temperament without exercising this temperament in politics, and one may be conservative in politics without possessing a conservative temperament.  It is not “the observation of our current manner of living,” since this is an observation one would hope that people of all dispositions and persuasions might make.  What is key is the belief.

The manner in which this belief is articulated also requires attention.  Oakeshott draws a set of concentric circles which work like a rhetorical vortex.  First he says that the conservative believes that governing is a “limited” activity.  The careless would be content to accept this as a definition of political conservatism; not Oakeshott.  For him the question is not whether governing is limited, but whether it is limited in the right way – it is a “specific” and limited activity.  Specifically what limited activity is it, then?  According to Oakeshott, it is the “provision and custody of general rules of conduct.”  But this is still too broad; one may surely agree, without being a conservative, that the business of governing is the provision and custody of general rules of conduct.  Oakeshott goes on to say that the conservative understands these rules of conduct in a particular way.  First, Oakeshott says what this understanding is not; the conservative does not understand the general rules which are the substance of governing as “plans for imposing substantive activities.”  But we have still not reached the focal point of his concentricities, for many who are not conservative may agree here too.   The sine qua non of conservatism, on Oakeshott’s account, is evidently none of these things.  It is that the rules in question are “instruments enabling people to pursue activities of their own choosing with the minimum frustration.”

What is special about the criterion of minimum frustration is that it is not supposed to be a moral criterion; in fact, rather than standing alongside moral criteria, it aims to exclude them.  Thus, in Oakeshott’s view, the distinctive belief of the conservative is that the rules of conduct can be, and ought to be, neutral; that they need not, and ought not, discriminate among activities of different kinds excerpt on nonmoral criteria.

I suggested in another post that if you already know how someone thinks of his group interests, then you can make a pretty good guess about what political views he may find tempting -- but it is a lot harder to guess how he is going to think of his group interests.

One of the reasons is that the concept of his group is ambiguous.  Everyone belongs to a variety of different groups at the same time, and these memberships may pull in different directions.  Another is that the concept of group interestsis ambiguous.  Are we thinking of wealth, of security, of prestige, of the advance of the beliefs held by the group, or what?  Yet another is that not every member of a group is equally group conscious -- not every member identifies with the group.  So how a person thinks of his group interests is not foreordained; it belongs to the realm of freedom.

I once had a discussion with a person who said he thought of himself first and foremost as a black man, thought of me first and foremost as a white man, and was sure I that I thought that way too.  When I told him that I rarely think about the color of my skin, he scoffed; he thought I was making it up just to put him in the wrong.

But it’s true.   If I am asked “what is your ethnicity,” my first thought is my Polish and Ukrainian ancestry.  If I am asked “what is your identity,” I think first of redemption.  I think a good deal about being a teacher, a husband, a father, and so on.  But I don’t think about being white unless someone else makes an issue of it.

Here is another example.  Silicon Valley executives have an eye on profit.  You would think this would be all you need to know to predict how they will see their group interests.  But it isn’t.  Some resist government regulation of the internet; others, surprisingly, want more.  Apparently the former view themselves as entrepreneurs whose profits depend mostly on competition, while the latter view themselves as firm managers whose profits depend mostly on state policy.  There is no way to forecast ahead of time with which group a given executive will identify, and which arrangement he will prefer.

This is why even though I sometimes discuss how academics view their class interests, I have never presented a deterministic class analysis a la Marx.  For example, I have not predicted how intellectuals will think of their interests; I have only taken note of how they do tend to view them, and tried to connect this observation with others.

By the way, Marx got a lot of other things wrong too.  Let me mention just one more.  Marx thought the course of events is predictable because it is foreordained.  But even if the course of events really were foreordained – which I don’t believe -- even so it couldn’t be predicted.

Why not?  Any genuinely deterministic social process could be modelled as a kind of machine.  In such a process the social theorist would not be genuinely independent of the machine; he would merely be one of its processes.  A readout.

But guess what?  According to the mathematics of computational processes, no machine – not even the most high-powered computer -- can predict its own future state.

So determinism is one thing.  Predictability is another.  And understanding is different from both.

I can see why someone who has been reading the last several posts might think so.  I’ve been talking about the motives people have to adopt the opinions they do, and I’ve connected these motives with the groups that they belong to.  Isn’t that just the Marxist theory that ideology is a reflection of class?

Well, no.  For one thing, you don’t have to be a Marxist to recognize that group self-interest may influence how people think.  But I don’t think about these groups the same way, and I don’t think about the nature of this influence the same way.

In the first place, Marx was a materialist.  By a “class,” he meant a group of people who have the same relationship to the physical means of production.  I am not a materialist, and I think people belong to all sorts of groups – in fact, to many different groups at once.  Most of them are not what Marx would call “classes.”

In the second place, Marx was a determinist.  He thought the influences of group membership on how people think is foreordained, so that it could even be predicted.  I don’t think that either.

If you already know how someone views his group interests, you can make a pretty good guess about what political views he may find tempting.  But in the first place, it is a lot harder to guess how he is going to view his group interests.  I’ve been observing, not predicting.

And in the second place, a pretty good guess is not a prediction, because people are not iron filings in a magnetic field.  People don’t always yield to temptation. 

There is such a thing as moral virtue; there is even such a thing as intellectual virtue. 

Teaching people to follow the argument, rather than simply believing what is convenient, is what liberal education used to be about.

More about this in the next post.

People who study bias in mainstream political reporting sometimes reach surprisingly different conclusions about whether there is any and what kind there is.  One obvious reason for the disparity is that in the study of human words, the instruments of measurement are human minds.  But another is that different kinds of bias may cut across each other; they may not always line up in the same direction.  Thus, it may seem that there is no systematic bias when in fact there are several different systematic biases which are at least sometimes in competition.

I suggest that at least five such biases operate among mainstream political journalists.

At the base of everything is conformity with peers.  Journalists don’t imitate other journalists per se, but they do imitate journalists in their own circles.  If this were the only bias, we would expect a pure demonstration of the Grackle Syndrome, which I have been discussing for the last several posts.  But other motives operate too, which produce patterns which are superimposed on it and which channel the chaos in particular directions.

The second bias is love of activity.  Journalists like politicians to do things.  Activity is interesting.  It makes for better stories.

The third bias is the lean to the left.  Which kinds of politicians are most likely to do things?  Obviously, those who believe in activist government.  So whether or not journalists have other reasons for liking liberals, they also like them just because they are a more reliable source of interesting stories than conservatives are.  There are, of course, exceptions:  For instance, the late Jack Kemp tended to receive favorable press in his day.  Kemp was a conservative who believed that the market solves problems better than the government does.  But he wanted the government to do a thousand things to make it easier for the market to work, so journalists found him interesting after all.

The fourth bias is the love of scandal.  Even if the fellow bleeding in the water is one of their favorites, few journalists can resist joining a feeding frenzy.  More is going on here than the urge to conform with peers.  Another motive for it is that although virtue may be more interesting to live, vice is more interesting to watch; no one wants to read stories about people who love their wives, care for their children, go to church, work hard at their jobs, and pay their bills.  Another possible motive for the love of scandal is that journalists become cynical about political corruption, and one of the ways to stave off depression is to enjoy the spectacle.  So do you want to become a special target of the Fourth Estate?  One way is to be corrupt, but another is to act as though you think virtue is important -- because cynics find that scandalous too.

The final bias is the fascination with conspicuous power.  For example, most journalists are in love with the office of the President, even if they detest the fellow who happens to inhabit it at any given moment.  No other office in the government is so made for the media as the Presidency.  It's unique, it's potent, it's glamorous, it provides a focus of attention, and it contains within it all sorts of possibilities for tragedy and triumph, agony and ecstasy, buffoonery and glory.  What more could a journalist want?

In case you are just joining in:

My post “Any of This Could Be Argued” discussed the connection between intellectual authority and intellectual progress.

My post “The Grackle Syndrome” discussed what happens when intellectual authority is rejected.  Alexis de Tocqueville got this partly right and partly wrong.  He grasped that when this happens, the motor driving movements of opinion is the urge to conform to others, and he grasped that these movements are unstable.  However, he failed to distinguish between the individual’s conformity to the majority and his conformity to people like himself.  I think that if conformity to the majority were the motor, we should expect not instability of opinion, but monolithic blocs of opinion which are resistant to change.   But if conformity to people like myself is the motor, then we should expect chaotic movements of opinion, like the kaleidoscopic shifting, dividing, rejoining, and redividing that we see in large masses of airborne grackles, in which each bird imitates its near neighbors.  And this is closer to the truth.

Obviously the Grackle Syndrome couldn’t be the whole story, because public opinion is not quite that chaotic.  Beginning with “Why Intellectuals Are So Conformist” and “Why Intellectuals Lean Left,” I’ve tried to show that the urge to conform is not the only motive in operation.  This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a Grackle Syndrome; it means that additional patterns are superimposed on it.  Intellectuals in our kind of social system are motivated to favor technocratic political arrangements which preserve and increase their own influence.  So although opinion among intellectuals is still rather chaotic and faddish, its chaotic movements are confined mostly to the left.

In Monday’s post, “The Flocking Behavior of Journalists,” I’ll offer another example of how patterns can be superimposed on the Grackle Syndrome.