Control for Freaks

Apropos of, more or less, liberaltarianism, Reihan is anecdotally impressed with

the particular facts of the individual stories I kept coaxing out of people, and by how values informed life choices. That is, a taste for freedom and autonomy led to more risk-taking and thus to sharper fluctuations in economic outcomes. The quality that propelled some people forward, affluent and less-affluent, was a sense of having control over one’s life.

This is interesting because it points up how more risk-taking and a sense of more control over one´s life choices merge into a framework of managed chaos that operates interchangeably as a social ideal and an individual one. This scalable model is a liberaltarian´s dream – the Great Unity that nonetheless affords Total Liberty – and it´s also a conservative´s nightmare, but maybe for more complicated reasons than we might think.

Here´s why. As a good postmodern conservative, I share Reihan´s sympathy for what he calls the right´s ´moral intuitions´, and though I suspect my sympathy runs even deeper than Reihan´s (having lived the life I have, I will never, for example, romanticize Coachella), in proper Tocquevillian style I´m essentially convinced that cultural conservative must stand or fall on its own two legs (and is not to be propped up by political crutches). [The situation is complicated because the left politicitzed culture, leaving the right with no apparent alternative but to fight on the field of the left´s choosing.] So my concern is probably not the typical conservative concern, but I think it should be.

What´s my concern? Not that people will, if ´left to their own devices´, fall into a morass of sinful liberaltarianism. (Or rather, that´s not my political concern.) Consider what lurks at the heart of the conservative fear: that liberaltarian lifestyles are, individually and socially, actually sustainable. Because if that´s so then the whole argument changes, and conservatives suspect, not without reason, that once you go down that road then conservatism degenerates into an argument about tempo and then into an aesthetic argument. And then into a losing argument. How to escape?

Well, you escape by pointing out that liberaltarianism is sustainable socially and individually only by shifting costs onto different institutions for managing those costs. And indeed new costs are piled up. Agony goes down, anxiety goes up, to take just one example. The costs of proving that a child can be raised just as well by preschool daycare as by a mommy and daddy afford another kind of example. The conservative argument ought to be that the costs and institutional management techniques propagated by social and individual liberaltarian lifestyles are unappealing from a utilitarian perspective, unbecoming from a philosophical perspective (Nietzschean or Christian!), and incommensurable with the exercise of true liberty from a political perspective.

My concern is that people really don´t have time for these arguments or are too busy living liberaltarian lives to really care. Because if that´s so, then America´s really headed into the tank, and there´s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.