However, I welcome the opportunity for further dialogue. Beyond our disagreements on the content of Locke’s theory, I think this discussion illuminates wider problems. I’m increasingly convinced that the widespread polarization about Locke—people seem to either love him or loathe him—are a key proxy for different approaches to the whole enterprise of critiquing modern American society from a metaphysical standpoint.

Being myself a former nominalist and voluntarist, I am well-equipped to appreciate the damage these approaches did to Locke. So nothing I write here should be taken to slight the importance of those issues.

But one cannot reduce Locke’s thought to nominalism and voluntarism. Locke read deeply in a staggering variety of sources and was influenced by many lines of thought, including ones that had their roots in more metaphysically sound approaches. As a result, there is a great deal in his work that is morally and even metaphysically robust. Locke is a deep cultural well from which we still can draw good water.

And it is imperative to affirm what’s good in a society, and its philosophical sources, before moving on to a critique. Starting with affirmation establishes standing to propose constructive reforms, and makes the reforms come across as more plausible. The impulse to set up an exclusive clique of metaphysically approved thinkers and then devote our energies to “policing the border,” affirming only our favorites while consigning all others to the outer darkness, is not only unsound on the merits, it will also cut off our essentially Lockean society from the sources of cultural nourishment that it is most likely to be able to draw from.

Gregg speaks casually about replacing Locke’s approach with subsidiarity, as though societies were cars and we could just pop the hood and replace the parts. As Burke pointed out, societies are not like machines but like trees. If Gregg wants to move America in his direction, he’ll have to help it grow that way, which means he’ll have to start from where it is. If all we do is emphasize that Locke has nothing morally or metaphysically significant to say, we will not only be stating a falsehood, we will be ensuring our own irrelevance.

Indeed, we will be significantly helping our enemies. The whole mythology of secular neutralism rests upon a false historical narrative that Gregg is inadvertently reinforcing. The absolutely non-moral, non-metaphysical Locke is a fairy tale invented by the apostles of secular neutralism as a key component of their foundation myth.

On the textual questions, the political theory Gregg represents Locke advocating is not only unrecognizable to any serious student of the Two Treatises, it is just obviously fantastic and incredible. Does anyone really believe—could anyone really believe—that all governments are created by conventional contractual agreements, presumably with extensive negotiations beforehand and signing ceremonies afterward? This account doesn’t even rise to the level of caricature.

Gregg misses two key distinctions in the Two Treatises: the distinction between the institutions we call “governments” and the political communities they exist to serve; and the distinction between explicit consent and tacit consent. The first of these distinctions is the central focus of the Two Treatises and is essential to all that Locke has to say, so missing it distorts everything else. The second distinction itself arises in service to the first, because government is the natural (though not exclusive) locus of explicit consent, while community is the natural (though not exclusive) locus of tacit consent.

Contra Gregg, Locke does not avoid the reality that the beginning of most governments involves a contest of arms. He himself makes this observation frequently, and devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between “conquest” and legitimacy. Governments often come into being through contests of arms because military victory establishes power, which is one necessary component of government. Conquest, however, cannot establish legitimacy, which is another necessary component. Only consent can establish legitimacy.

There are only two ways social action can occur: through force or through consent. People sometimes do things because they’re forced to; if they do things without being forced, they are doing them by consent. Since civil communities and legitimate governments can’t be made by force, they therefore must be made by consent.

Winning a war gives you power, but you must then win hearts and minds or you will not be able to govern legitimately. All governments use force against individual offenders, of course, but a government that imposes itself on the community by force—in other words, one that rules primarily through force rather than primarily through recognized moral authority—is illegitimate.

Here, the other distinction Gregg misses, the one between explicit and tacit consent, comes into play. Locke does cite a few instances in which communities were formed through a formal and explicit act of consent, but (contra Gregg again) he does not say that explicit consent is the usual way in which civil communities emerge. They may emerge by tacit rather than explicit consent, and they usually do.

So there is nothing “ahistorical” or mythological about the consent that creates and sustains communities. It is a very historical, very real consent; there is just usually no explicit or formal act that gives this consent tangible expression. It’s there in the background.

Locke seeks out ways of making this consent more tangible so he can explain it. The occasions on which consent is explicit serve as useful examples, but since these are exceptional cases, Locke conducts a thought experiment to provide a sort of imaginary tangibility to the process: What if there were no governments? We would have to create them. This is the role that the state of nature plays in his theory.

The concept of tacit consent, as everyone knows, is problematic. But so are many other concepts that we know to be true and real, even though we don’t fully comprehend them. Like the Trinity and the Incarnation, the intrinsically social nature of human beings is a mysterious thing. The concepts by which we express it are always problematic and easily subject to confusion.

For all its problems, the idea that community and legitimate government exist by consent has been central to Christian political theology and philosophy. Thomas Aquinas writes that government exists by consent. In his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (II, D.44, qu. 2), he writes that “whoever seizes power by violence does not become a true ruler”; a ruler acquires legitimacy only by “the consent of his subjects” or by being appointed to serve under an existing legitimate ruler—who presumably must rule by consent.

That is not the only point on which Locke and Aquinas agree. Contra Gregg, they agree that human beings are by nature political. Locke writes that people without a society are “quickly driven into society” by the imperatives of their nature (II.127). It was Rousseau who introduced the idea of a naturally apolitical humanity.

Contra Gregg once again, there is no contradiction between the view that community and government exist by consent and the view that human beings are naturally social and political. It is the nature of human beings to live together in community and under government by (usually tacit) consent.

In his attempt to create the appearance of a radical division between Locke and Aquinas, Gregg takes a snippet of Locke and twists it beyond all recognition:

In Locke’s view, we do not obey our rulers because a concern for human flourishing, justice, and the common good tells us that it is reasonable to do so. Instead, we obey because our rulers have a superior will. “Law’s formal definition,” Locke wrote, “is the declaration of a superior will.” How different this is from Aquinas’s understanding of law as “an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who has the care of the community.”

But what does Locke mean by calling the will that creates the law “superior”? The failure to ask this question reflects a superficial engagement with Locke.

Gregg seems to suggest that Locke thinks law is made by a will that is “superior” in terms of force. (At least I can find no other meaningful way to interpret what he wrote.) Yet this reading is absurd. Locke, the greatest tribune of righteous resistance to tyranny ever to live, thinks force is what makes someone’s will a law? How then would we explain this, which comes at a central point in the argument of the book:

A man can never be obliged in conscience to submit to any power, unless he can be satisfied who is the person who has a right to exercise that power over him. If this were not so, there would be no distinction between pirates and lawful princes, he that has force is without any more ado to be obeyed, and crowns and scepters would become the inheritance of violence and rapine. (I.81)

Not only this passage, but every single page of the Two Treatises cries out that no person’s will is a law, however he may claim the authority to rule, unless that person’s will is “superior” in exactly the way Aquinas articulates: because it is an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who (truly) has the care of the community, and which a concern for human flourishing, justice, and the common good makes it reasonable to obey. I can’t think of a better summary of Locke than those words.

Locke and Aquinas disagree on many other things, most notably (for our purposes) on the extent to which natural revelation can carry the burden of justifying government. But on the question of whether law is a moral reality or merely a function of power, there is simply no daylight between them. (Space doesn’t permit me to really justify this reading of Locke here as I would like to. Those who are interested can find the justification here.)

Locke’s elegant solution to England’s political crisis in the 1680s provided a beautiful expression of the confluence of natural human sociability, moral foundations for government, and the (tacitly) consensual nature of community. The key was to ground government in the moral consensus of society knowable through the ordinary, natural social processes of reason, history, culture, and socialization. That consensus is truly moral because those natural and historical processes are made moral by God’s continual creative activity, making them vehicles of natural revelation. Social life freely lived in accordance with this natural moral knowledge is more or less what Locke is getting at with the concept of tacit consent.

Freedom of religion emerged from Locke’s response to those who insisted, as Gregg does, that society must look outside the natural processes of reason, history, culture, and socialization for moral foundations. It was this approach that had fueled the endless war between Catholics, traditional Anglicans, and Puritans, with its two-century track record of unlimited slaughter and terror. Trans-social sources of knowledge cannot create social consensus.

I would like to close on two points. First, a key insight I have gained from this discussion is the need to drop the artificial category “social contract theory.” It obscures far more than it illuminates. The very idea of what a “contract” is was dramatically different in the more theological atmosphere of the seventeenth century. Moreover, the term “social contract” did not even really emerge until Rousseau, whose theory differs from Locke’s as night from day. We should not uncritically permit Rousseau to define our categories for us.

Second, the debate over Locke illuminates the American challenge: Can a humane civil community be sustained without coercive enforcement of religious orthodoxy? Everyone agrees that murder is wrong, but what counts as murder? How do we sustain a shared sense of what is right and fair without forcing upon people a fully developed metaphysic they don’t authentically believe in?

That, more than anything else, is the great, heroic experiment of this country—the deadly Sphinx’s riddle before which America has always played, and will continue to play, the daring Oedipus. The danger is real, yet there is great hope, and it rests in the fact that Americans of all stripes reject coercion as a solution to metaphysical fragmentation. This is why Americans are increasingly turning away from secular neutralism, as its intrinsic logic of unlimited coercion becomes increasingly clear.

It was Locke who taught them this virtue. God bless him, and them, for it.

Greg Forster is the program director for American History, Economics and Religion at the Kern Family Foundation.

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Historically, national control of education has come up as an issue about once every ten to fifteen years. In the past, it has usually produced a lot of fireworks but burned out pretty quickly. This year is very different. The nationalizers have learned from their past mistakes; they understand now that the American people don’t want the federal government to control schools. So they’ve adopted clever tactics to disguise what they’re doing and misdirect public attention, and as a result, they are already dangerously close to getting everything they want.

Today, a coalition of educational and other leaders, representing a broad diversity of viewpoints, is releasing a manifesto, “Closing the Door on Innovation,” that opposes this stealth campaign to impose a single curriculum and a single test on the nation’s schools. The over 100 signatories include numerous leaders in the education world, as well as such nationally known figures as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Shelby Steele, Richard Epstein, and Edwin Meese. You can read it and add your signature at www.k12innovation.com. I’m proud to have played a supporting role in organizing this effort.

The Department of Education is forbidden by law from developing a national curriculum. This reflects the clear judgment of the people and their congressional representatives, expressed forcefully on all the previous occasions when this issue has come up, against handing over control of education to a single national body.

In lieu of an outright establishment of a national curriculum, the Department has spent the past year pressuring states to “voluntarily” adopt the education standards promoted by the private organization Common Core. At the same time, it has hired two consortia to develop curriculum materials and tests based on Common Core’s vision. These materials are being developed behind closed doors, with no transparency or accountability to the public.

No one even knows exactly who’s working on the project. However, such information we do have indicates there are blatant financial conflicts of interest among some of those involved.

The Department’s existing leverage over education policy gives it a lot of muscle to make this happen. Even the president himself has openly warned states they may lose federal funding if they don’t adopt Common Core or something like it (and nothing else like it really exists). But the feds’ position has been greatly strengthened through close cooperation with the Gates Foundation. Most of the important educational organizations get funding from Gates, and Gates has made it clear that those who wish to continue lining up at its trough should take a serious look at supporting national education standards.

The combined influence of federal and Gates funding turned out to be especially great at a time when school budgets were experiencing their first contraction in living memory. Last year, many states—including Massachusetts, whose state standards were widely agreed to be the best in the nation—enacted commitments to drop their state standards for Common Core’s. Just the other day, the teachers at my daughter’s school were discussing how our state’s recent adoption of Common Core is requiring them to rework their whole curriculum.

This summer, the Department hopes to drive in the final nail by getting language into the federal education law which mandates—or that it can twist to de facto mandate—that states lose their federal funding unless they adopt a multi-state system of standards, curriculum, and testing. Only one such system exists. A single curriculum and test, designed behind closed doors by agents of the national government, in every school in the country, all done through the back door so there will be no public outcry to stop it.

There are plenty of reasons to be against a national curriculum. One is that the Common Core standards are inadequate—their “college-ready” standards are actually set below what you need to apply to most colleges. Another is that the educational special interest groups who fatten themselves by destroying children’s lives are more powerful at the national level than at the state level. Even if the standards were good now, we’d have every reason to expect that, over time, national control over education would become subordinate to interest-group agendas. More importantly, the very idea of a single, one-size-fits-all curriculum is a relic that needs to be discarded. The government’s school monopoly is moribund and desperately needs innovation. We should be encouraging more diversity of curricula and assessments, not less.

But all of those issues will get plenty of attention from others. What I’m anxious to add to the discussion is the question of what national control of education would do to our culture.

Suppose you were nostalgic for the culture wars of the 1990s. Most of us have been relieved over the past decade, as the level of cultural savagery has begun to recede, and Americans with different religious and moral viewpoints haven’t been quite as eager to viciously tear each other apart as they used to be. But suppose you missed the height of the culture wars, and wanted to find a way to bring it all back. You could hardly do better than to turn over control of K-12 education to the national government. If the 1990s were a culture war, the 2010s will be a culture Ragnarok.

Although the overt hostilities between conservative and progressive religious-moral cultures have subsided, the two groups are no closer than they were to having established common ground or a even a viable modus vivendi. The September 11^th attacks and other events temporarily created space for a cultural ceasefire, but no substantial progress has been made on the underlying problem—how can we live together now that we no longer share even the most basic agreements on the morals and metaphysics that allow us to interpret the meaning of our shared laws and institutions?

Ceasefires are fragile. The shooting war can restart even if neither side really wants it to. All that has to happen is some event or development that convinces one side that the other side is going to resume hostilities—or even just that the other side is likely to do so. Neither side wants to be the second one to start shooting—that’s a great way to lose a war.

National control over curriculum creates a single lever you can pull to move every school in America. Would conservatives trust progressives, and would progressives trust conservatives, not to try to seize control of that lever to inculcate their religious and moral views among the nation’s youth? And if you don’t trust the other side not to try to seize the lever, is there any reasonable alternative to trying to seize it first?

And this would not be just a single conflict that would happen and then be over. Like the Golden Apple or the One Ring, national curriculum and testing will continuously generate fresh hostility and cultural warfare as long as they exist. And once you forge this ring, there’s no Mount Doom to drop it into.

My own view is that the root of the problem is the government monopoly on schools. Governmental monopolization of the education of children guarantees that all our religious and moral differences will be constantly politicized. School choice, in addition to delivering better academic performance, seems to me to be the only way to end the scorpions-in-a-bottle cultural dynamic and create space for shared citizenship across diverse religious and moral views.

But that’s an argument for another day. At the very least, let’s not reignite the culture wars by creating the educational equivalent of One Ring to Rule Them All. We won’t be able to heal the culture until we learn the most important lesson—real tolerance for real diversity.


Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Educational Choice. 

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Is the Tea Party only protesting Keynesianism and economic planning, or is it also protesting the secularization of America’s political system? That is a false choice. If “secularization” means the rise of radical autonomy—people thinking they can decide the meaning of their lives for themselves rather than being held to an objective and transcendent standard of right behavior—then Keynesianism and economic planning are precisely the secularization of America’s political system, seen in its economic aspect.

The fundamental premise of Keynesianism is that the purpose of economic activity is to facilitate consumption. This basic commitment to consumption as the highest economic good is clearly connected to an anti-metaphysical, essentially materialistic anthropology. What is the good for man? To serve a higher purpose, or to gorge his appetites? Keynesianism assumes it’s the latter. Both its normative theory and its positive theory—its goals and its sociological expectations—make no sense except on this premise.

Of course, this doesn’t mean Keynesians are atheistic materialists. Given that American culture is simultaneously pervasively religious and pervasively Keynesian, probably most Keynesians are religious people. But it does mean Keynesian economic theory is (consciously or unconsciously) based on a radically reductive anthropology that is atheistic and materialistic in its underlying assumptions and implications.

And not only is this true of Keynesianism, it was true of much—though far from all—of the criticism of Keynesianism that came from 20^th-century economic conservatism. Some conservatives criticized Keynesianism for its reductive materialism, but others criticized it solely for failing to accomplish its goal of facilitating consumption: government stimulus, planning, and nationalization don’t actually gorge our appetites as efficiently as other policies.

But it was always the economic progressives, not the economic conservatives, who were the main source of the problem. Humanity has never invented any other fully developed economic system besides free enterprise and socialism. More primitive systems always develop in one of these two directions over time. The various supposed “third ways” always turn out upon inspection to be either socialism by another name, or else an incoherent mishmash of elements borrowed from the two real systems, with no independent vision or integration underlying it. And of the two real systems, only free enterprise can be squared with the proposition that human beings are spiritual creatures who exist to serve a higher purpose.

Thus Keynes is the great high priest of everything social conservatives are fighting against: radical autonomy, reductive anthropology, consumerism, you name it. I doubt there’s anything that reinforces our culture’s commitment to these things more than the total and unqualified dominance of Keynesian thought categories among our elites—including many of the economic conservatives who think they’ve rejected Keynes, but remain in thrall to his materialistic assumptions.

So social conservatives should be glad to see a popular revolt against Keynesian materialism and all its works. That revolt is economically conservative in form, but its success (which is, of course, not yet assured) could have long-term consequences equally beneficial for the culture. It would be, at minimum, a big new resource for social conservatives to draw upon in pointing American culture toward a renewed grounding in the invisible world.

Suppose this theory is true. What follows?

Obviously a real integration of economic and social conservatism, even if the extent of the integration were far less than total, would be a tremendously powerful force in American politics. Simply getting these two factions to “own” each other’s concerns on a few major points would change the political landscape in ways that would make the Tea Party earthquake look like a ripple.

But before that could happen, both economic conservatives and social conservatives would need to adjust their approaches. Some deeply embedded assumptions in both subcultures would have to be dug up and carefully scrutinized. That’s not the kind of thing that happens easily or without significant friction. There’s much that could be said on this topic, but here are a few places we might start.

The Economic Conservative Soul

Economic conservatives would need to confront the continuing influence of shallow anthropology, vulgar utilitarianism, and metaphysical blindness in their intellectual circles. They would need to go back and reopen the question of whether their model of human incentives and motivation is deep enough to capture the real complexity of human economic behavior. I know this is a debate we’ve had before, but we can stand to have it again.

Having done statistics-driven empirical policy research for the past eight years, I can testify to the great value economic models of behavior provide when they’re used well. But we do not, in fact, use them well unless we regularly remind ourselves of the assumptions upon which they rest – and challenge those assumptions as necessary.

Here’s an example. Almost the entire economic profession agrees in treating “hours worked” as an economic cost in all circumstances. The predominant economic model of behavior assumes that if you could draw the same paycheck without ever having to go to work at any job, you would always choose not to go.

But that’s not only inconsistent with the available data, it’s ludicrously false to common human experience. People want to work. It’s a presupposition of basic human dignity that we make a productive contribution to the common good. Just think how people feel about being unemployed; the loss of the paycheck, far from being the most distressing aspect of unemployment, usually pales in comparison with the lost sense of dignity and worth.

Perhaps most controversially, if my theory is right, it suggests economic conservatives will need to develop a credible plan for ameliorating what we may loosely call “The Mess on Wall Street.” Fairly or unfairly, it’s an albatross around the neck of free enterprise. It’s not enough for economic conservatives simply to refrain from defending Wall Street. We have to offer some kind of constructive approach to dealing with The Mess.

People can clearly see that a lot of what happens on Wall Street is not just evil, but evil in a way that harms the country. They have not therefore turned against free enterprise across the board, as the Tea Party and much other evidence indicates. But the time is coming when the Tea Party will demand some kind of cleanup operation aimed at The Mess. If economic conservative leaders don’t have a sensible, prudent plan ready to offer them, some Savonarola figure will emerge calling for a new bonfire of the vanities.

And a harmful rift over this issue is already open in another direction. Because of The Mess, key social-conservative opinion leaders and other influencers who ought to see economic conservatives as their allies actually view them with suspicion and keep them at arm’s length. At worst, they think “capitalism” primarily means Ayn Rand’s theory of ethical egoism, which in fact has had little or no real influence on the history and practice of capitalism; people have never needed fancy theories to make them greedy. At best, they think the large amounts of wealth generated by capitalism create a path to decadence and national decline—the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” thesis. Either way, many social conservatives see standing against The Mess as imperative to save America, and they think economic conservatives aren’t worried about The Mess and aren’t going to do anything about it.

In truth, as economic conservatives know well, The Mess is all of a piece with Keynesianism, economic planning, and nationalization. So economic conservatives are precisely the people who have the intellectual resources to craft an effective response to economic egoism. They need to demonstrate that by actually doing it. The amelioration of The Mess doesn’t have to be driven by government action. It can be a plan for cultural reform. But it has to be credible and we have to really mean it.

The Social Conservative Soul

My theory also implies a need for some soul-searching by social conservatives. They, too, have a mental model that needs to be reexamined. But in their case, the problem is not anthropology; it’s sociology.

Underlying much socially conservative discourse is the assumption that human life can be divided into separate categories, areas or spheres of activity, each of which has its own structure of purpose, meaning, and obligation. That kind of model can be illuminating if it’s well used, just as the model of behavior employed by economists can be illuminating if it’s well used. But, as with the economic model, it is not well used unless we constantly remind ourselves of the presuppositions we’re adopting, and challenge them as necessary.

The danger is that we will underestimate the extent to which the different “spheres” are interpenetrative, and even more importantly, constitutive of one another. There is a tendency to think of “economics” over here and “the family” or “the culture” over there. But the family is (among other things) an economic institution. More broadly, economics is cultural, and culture is economic.

Social conservatives often draw attention to the cultural preconditions of economics—for example, that the nation’s economic life depends on strong families. This is very true, but the knife cuts both ways. The survival of the family is in many ways dependent on economic policy and (even more so) economic culture. For example, unlimited welfare undermines the family by rendering husbands irrelevant and unimportant, depriving them of the natural dignity and importance of their role. The family is more than just an economic institution, but it must always be an economic institution. When you remove the economic structure of the family, as we have in our inner cities, the family simply ceases to exist.

Here’s a more challenging example. Educational entrepreneurship is our only hope for replacing the failed 19^th-century model that now reigns in both public and private schools. But social conservatives, a key political constituency of America’s school voucher programs, always oppose designing those programs in a way that would empower entrepreneurship. They want to put more kids in religious schools, but not expose those schools to the competition entrepreneurs would create. But while competition makes people uncomfortable, it is the only vital, life-giving force that can keep institutions mission-focused and drive them to be their best.

More broadly, because economics and culture are interpenetrative and constitutive of one another, the social conservative model of using “culture” to fix “economics” must fail. The presupposition is that “culture” is non-economic and “economics” is non-cultural. This is false. We can’t use family culture or church culture or school culture to fix the economic system; we need economic culture. But too many social conservative leaders don’t really embrace, or even know much about, America’s traditional economic culture of free enterprise and entrepreneurship. Until that changes, they will have little to contribute to its renewal.

First Steps toward Working Together

All these issues are far more complicated than I can do justice to here, but we have to start somewhere. Perhaps a good place to begin might be to hash out what we mean by words like “capitalism.”

Economic conservatives almost always use “capitalism” to mean America’s traditional economic system of free enterprise. But many social conservatives seem to draw a very sharp distinction between that system on the one hand, and “capitalism” on the other. By “capitalism” they seem to mean (but I’m not sure) either The Mess on Wall Street or else more generally the totality of all present economic phenomena, which of course includes not only the tradition of the free enterprise system but also the advanced state of moral and cultural decay in which our economic life currently wallows.

We need language that allows us to distinguish between America’s traditional economic system, which is rooted in the sacredness of the human person and can trace its historical origins to Christian theological debates over the nature of work, money, and exchange from the Middle Ages through the 17^th century, and the decayed and decrepit state of that system in the present. The language I’m hearing among economic conservatives makes it difficult to draw that distinction at all. The language I’m hearing from social conservatives draws the distinction in a way that I think is badly confused.

Aristotle, when he distinguished political systems, did so along two dimensions. First he distinguished three different structures of government: monarchic, aristocratic, and republican. But then he drew a completely separate and independent distinction based on whether the system in a given society was “pure” or “corrupt”—by which he meant whether the political culture retained its moral and metaphysical commitment to its underlying principles, or had decayed into a mere form or shell, under the cover of which the ruling powers were really just oppressing and exploiting their victims, and grabbing as much swag as they could get their hands on.

A similar distinction might help us now. Perhaps we need to stop talking about “capitalism” itself as the locus of these issues, and speak instead of the conflict between capitalism driven by a “producer ethic” and capitalism driven by a “consumer ethic.” But that is problematic; capitalism driven by a consumer ethic quickly ceases to be capitalism at all (as events are now showing). Aristotle’s system is difficult to appropriate because in economics there are, as far as I can see, no neutral structural distinctions analogous to the difference between monarchy, aristocracy and republicanism. Socialism is not a neutral alternative to capitalism; it is what you get when the political and business leaders of a capitalist country become pervasively immoral and materialistic (as, again, events are now showing).

The language we need, if we had it, would allow us to talk about moral and cultural reform of our economic system as a restoration, rather than implying that the economic system itself is bad and needs to be replaced, or that it is deficient until it is corrected or supplemented by something outside itself. Economic conservatives need to expel the infection of shallow materialism that they picked up from progressivism during the 20^th century. Social conservatives need to learn their way back into America’s traditional economic culture of free enterprise and entrepreneurship. Seems like we might be able to help one another—provided we all have enough humility to admit that we need each other’s help.

And that, too, is a subject about which both sides will have something important to say.

Greg Forster is Program Director for American History, Economics and Religion at the Kern Family Foundation and author of The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics. This essay is the second installment in a two-part series. You can find the first here.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Still, there are frictions. And nothing reveals them like hearing people talk about the Tea Party.

Does the Tea Party prove that economic issues are now more important than social issues, both in American politics generally and on the right in particular? Should social conservatives make peace with the fact that their issues are not the hot issues in this election? Do we need to accept that voters outside the social conservative base don’t want to hear about God, marriage and abortion, especially at a moment when government is nationalizing huge chunks of the economy, destroying basic liberties in the name of centralized economic planning, and hocking our grandchildren’s futures in order to jack up present consumption?

Or is the Tea Party really good news for social conservatives? Does it represent not only a reaction against the injustices of socialist policy, but against the secularization and de-moralization of American politics? Is the Tea Party protesting not only a government takeover of the economy, but the denial of the intrinsic sacredness of the human person and the “natural” or pre-political qualities of human relationships? Does the Tea Party prove that God, marriage and abortion are still centrally relevant to American politics, and that there’s more hope than ever for the future of social conservatism?

I answer “yes” to all of the above.

Let’s approach the whole issue from another angle. What explains the success of the Tea Party? At first glance it would appear that all the really smart critiques of social conservative movements—such as those of Maggie Gallagher, James Davison Hunter, and now Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner—also apply pretty well to the Tea Party. And the excessive populism of the Tea Party, which not only opposes elitism but often resents elites as such, is a major hindrance to the emergence of wise leadership in the movement. Yet the Tea Party has been able (at least so far) to have a larger impact on American politics, and with much less investment of time and resources, than social conservative movements centered on life and marriage. Why?

Fusionism, Old and New

Everyone would agree that the Tea Party’s primary impetus and motivation is economic conservatism; nobody thinks the Tea Party is primarily a socially conservative movement. After that, the consensus breaks down. Some see deep tensions between the “God-talking” elements of the Tea Party and more secular, socially liberal elements. Others think this narrative is overblown, and see the Tea Party as predominantly religious and socially conservative.

Jeffrey Bell and Jay Richards have recently argued that something complicated is going on. They marshal evidence that the underlying relationship between economic conservatism and social conservatism is changing. I think they’re right, and I think the Tea Party represents this on the popular level in the same way the new fusionism emerging among conservative intellectuals represents it on the elite level. And I have a theory about why this is happening, and what we can learn from it.

I expect social conservatives would generally agree that what’s most fundamentally wrong with our society is its abandonment of what might loosely be called a metaphysical view of the world. We have no sense that human life is shaped by structures of purpose, meaning and obligation that are independent of our own choices. This is the fundamental dividing line in debates over abortion, marriage, pornography, and all the other social issues. When you boil it down, the only battle that ultimately counts is between those who think you can decide the meaning of your own life, and those who think that the meaning of your life is not something you get to make up for yourself.

For most of the 20^th century, economic conservatives were predominantly on the wrong side of that divide. There were some fusionist figures, of course. But the truly leading intellectuals of economic conservatism were anti-metaphysical. Von Mises and Friedman were militantly so. Hayek was a much more problematic figure; he had a foot in both camps. And the fusionists drew a good deal of their economic thinking (though very far from all of it) from the decidedly non-fusionist Von Mises, Friedman, and Hayek. So on the right, the center of gravity on economic issues was decidedly on the anti-metaphysical side of the divide.

I say all this with the deepest respect and admiration for these men. We’re talking about people who helped to deliver almost half the world from slavery. I was honored to work for Friedman during the last few years of his life. Yet the metaphysical failure is there, and it is serious. Friedman had a shallow anthropology rooted in what can only be called a vulgar utilitarianism. And this wasn’t a casual thing for him. He had thought about it carefully, and this was what he believed.

The loss of metaphysics on the economic right in the 20^th century was a historical tragedy. All the structures of America’s traditional economic system—call it what you want, capitalism, free enterprise, free markets, entrepreneurship, the commercial society, whatever—were originally the product of profoundly metaphysical thinking. Most of the important intellectual victories were won in the Middle Ages, although it took until about the 17^th century for all the right ideas to be combined in the right ways to assemble what we know today as the free enterprise society.

The fundamental idea that originally lay behind all our economic institutions is the intrinsic sacredness of the human person. Our economic system is as much rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident truths” about the sanctity of human life as our laws against murder. That’s where we get the moral basis for laws protecting property rights, free exchange, and so forth from arbitrary interference.

Most importantly, that’s where we get the idea that economic activity—the confluence of human work and social systems governing resource transactions—doesn’t just move things around. It creates new wealth. The free enterprise society is, at heart, a society that understands this and deliberately encourages it. And the historical origin of that idea lies in Christian theology, with its doctrine of a God whose work creates things from nothing, and of human beings who bear that God’s image.

The Metaphysics of Property

At the end of his book Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver contends that the idea of property rights is our strongest remaining link to metaphysics in the modern world. Weaver is an unappealing figure—all else aside, I’d hate to live in a society governed by his agrarian economic thinking. But on this point, he’s basically right.

Property is the most promising basis for leading people back to a larger and deeper metaphysical view of the universe. As a sociologist might put it, property provides the most promising available foundation for a “plausibility structure” for metaphysics—a framework of beliefs and assumptions that makes the metaphysical proposition credible.

The assertion “this is mine” really commits you to the whole metaphysical project. After all, what is it about “this” that makes it “yours”? Writing your name on it doesn’t make it yours. Possessing it doesn’t make it yours. Using it doesn’t make it yours. You can swipe my things, write your name on them, possess them and use them, and none of that makes them yours.

There has always been a small contingent of intellectuals, from Thrasymachus to Hobbes to Cass Sunstein, who insist that property is merely a legal or political convention—nothing is really “mine” until government says it is. Because there is no ownership other than what the government dictates, government can (in principle) take away your ownership of everything you have, for any reason, and not be violating your ownership of it. This is the ultimate reductionist position, the economic face of atheistic materialism.

The 20^th-century economic conservatives did better than that, but not well enough. They argued against state control of property beyond a necessary minimum, but they did so on the basis of what was, ultimately, a set of utilitarian considerations. They argued we should respect what are traditionally called “ownership” and property “rights” because doing so makes everyone better off. On this view, property is not a political or legal convention, but it is still a social convention. “Rights” to property are civil, not natural rights.

Over against this, the human race at large, and almost all of its best intellectuals, have insisted that property is neither an arbitrary creation of the state, nor in any larger sense a useful human convention. The reality of property ownership is “just there,” whether or not we acknowledge it or find it useful. It is given in the human situation before we do anything and regardless of whatever we may think, say, or do about it.

So in the popular and traditional understanding, the statement “this is mine” commits me to believe in the existence of a whole invisible universe. Behind each visible object is an invisible reality that designates its ownership, and all these invisible realities are related to one another in a dense, intricate network of relationships. This invisible universe stands behind the visible universe and dictates its proper organization. It follows that we cannot simply rearrange the visible universe any way we like; there is a higher structure of meaning, purpose, and obligation to which our management of the visible universe must conform.

Most modern Americans are profoundly uncomfortable when confronted with metaphysical claims. But few of them feel uncomfortable looking at the house on which they’ve labored to pay the mortgage, the food they’ve labored to put on their children’s table, and the bank account they’ve labored to build up so they can pay the family’s medical bills and make charitable donations, and thinking: It’s not right for the government to just arbitrarily take this away from me. If they were taking it for a legitimate reason, like if there had been a national catastrophe, that would be one thing. But I can’t let them take it away just to reward irresponsible behavior and feather their cronies’ nests.

Far from being selfish, that is a profoundly pious thought. People do, of course, have selfish desires. But they also have desires that are not selfish. And the desire to fight back against a capricious redistribution of wealth that is transparently motivated by envy and cronyism is not a selfish desire. It is a manifestation of our invisible, intrinsic human dignity.

This, I venture to suggest, is the secret to the Tea Party’s success. For all its limitations, the Tea Party represents a popular re-moralizing and even re-metaphysicalizing (if I may put it that way) of economic conservatism in America. And since our culture is more comfortable talking metaphysically about ownership and work than it is talking metaphysically about life and marriage, the Tea Party is able to tap into the full social and cultural power of transcendent moral appeals in a way that social conservatives have never been able to do.

If this theory is true, what can conservatives of all types learn from it? I address that in a follow-up piece here.


Greg Forster is program director for American History, Economics and Religion at the Kern Family Foundation and author of The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The topic of Murray’s talk was well chosen. Whatever one thinks of its virtues, socialism on a scale that would have been unthinkable just two years ago is already the law of the land. We see government asserting de facto rights of ownership over our largest financial firms. We have seen a sizeable portion of the economy being brought under direct government control, financed by trillion-dollar borrowing. We have made steps to undermine the Fed’s independence that could bring about inflation that would make the 1970s look tame. Some are beginning to raise tentative but credible questions about the security of America’s sovereign debt. And the top two items on the legislative agenda this year will be near-irreversible first steps toward socialized medicine and a giant new energy tax disguised as environmental regulation.

America shows all the signs of entering a generational political crisis such as we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. It is now an open question whether we will continue to be a quasi-capitalist nation, in defiance of fashionable international opinion, or follow the example of our European betters and become a quasi-socialist nation.

Of course, the European welfare state is both demographically and economically unsustainable. But that isn’t news, and Murray’s contribution on the subject lies elsewhere.

Murray argues that, even aside from its demographic and economic flaws, the European welfare state undermines the aspects of civilization that make for “a life well-lived.” By a life well-lived, he means a life characterized by a lasting and justified satisfaction that one’s life was worth living. He identifies himself with the Aristotelian preference for seeing human beings fully “flourish,” and argues that this, as opposed to mere hedonism, is what Madison had in mind when he wrote that “the object of government” is “the happiness of the people.”

Only a limited number of human activities can serve as sources for this kind of deep satisfaction. Murray identifies three characteristics that all such activities must have: they must be important, they must be difficult, and they must involve individual responsibility for consequences. Activities that are trivial, effortless, or disconnected from consequences can be fun, but cannot make for a life well-lived.

Murray asserts that there are only four areas of life where such activities take place: family, community, vocation, and faith. The assertion is plausible, if only because Murray is careful to define these concepts broadly—a “community” need not be a neighborhood but can be geographically expansive, and “vocation” can include avocations or, more nebulously, “causes.”

The crux of Murray’s case is that the European-style welfare state undermines all four of these areas of life—and on a deeper level than even most conservatives now appreciate. The welfare state doesn’t just eat away at the material preconditions of these activities, but also detracts from their ability to provide a life well-lived.

“Almost everything government does in social policy,” he says, “can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things.” Sometimes that’s good; Murray notes that police take some of the trouble out of walking home safely. But the welfare state takes too much of the trouble out of meeting the needs of your family, helping the members of your community, conducting your vocation, and sustaining the visible manifestations of faith (Murray points to the heavily subsidized European churches that are empty seven days a week). If it’s too easy, it fails to meet the difficulty criterion for deep satisfaction.

Moreover, removing the difficulty criterion cultivates a hedonistic outlook that undermines the importance criterion. In other words, make a thing too easy and it soon comes to be seen as trivial. Why have children? Why pay attention to your neighbors? Why seek out meaningful work? Why worship an old-fashioned God? What’s the point of those things, anyway? Most of the time they’re not much fun.

In the lecture’s most powerful passage, Murray discusses how this deeper dynamic has been at work destroying the family in America’s poor urban communities—where something approaching a European-style welfare state already exists. Welfare makes it much harder for the family to be a source of deep satisfaction for men in these communities:

A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He is a good provider.”

If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t.

Welfare removes the difficulty from providing for the family, and therefore the importance of the husband and father.

And notice how, once family is undermined, two other areas of deep satisfaction—vocation and community—are undermined as well. The menial job loses its significance, and the now-superfluous father is no longer an important part of his community.

Murray is not saying that the welfare state removes absolutely all deep satisfaction from these areas of life. But the empirical evidence before our eyes, both in Europe and in our own poor urban neighborhoods, ought to convince us that the negative impact of the welfare state is extremely damaging.

This analysis is insightful and very much needed, as far as it goes. But an important piece of Murray’s puzzle is missing.

Take another look at his three criteria for deep satisfaction: importance, difficulty, and responsibility for consequences. Murray draws our attention to several activities that meet those criteria and provide deep satisfaction. But there are other activities that meet those criteria and don’t provide deep satisfaction. Winning an Olympic gold medal by outperforming all other athletes in your sport involves importance, difficulty, and responsibility for consequences. But so does winning by bribing the judges. Yet winning by bribery doesn’t give you the deep satisfaction you get from winning legitimately.

In short, activities don’t provide deep satisfaction if they’re morally wrong. (Aristotle, whom Murray invokes, has a thing or two to say about this subject.) Murray says the activities that provide deep satisfaction are “the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.” Activities that are morally wrong don’t pass the “look back from old age with pride” test.

It would be charitable, and plausible, to assume in Murray’s favor that he simply took moral goodness for granted when compiling his list of criteria. But the omission weakens his entire analysis.

For example, faced with Murray’s argument that the welfare state makes everything too easy, a socialist might well retort: Should everything therefore be made more difficult, so you can have the deep satisfaction of overcoming difficulty? If the welfare state is bad, why are police good? Why not abolish the police so that walking home safely requires more effort (such as arming yourself) and can thereby become a source of deep satisfaction?

We can’t ultimately answer this question without distinguishing between morally legitimate and illegitimate ways of making things easier. Policing the streets makes our civilization more conducive to deep satisfaction because it is right. Coercive redistribution of wealth makes our civilization less conducive to deep satisfaction because it is wrong. Able-bodied people who live on welfare for extended periods are cheating—just as much as an athlete who bribes the judges. That’s why the welfare state has the corrosive effects it does.

Consider an even more ominous example. Murray argues that the advance of scientific knowledge will increasingly undermine the case for the welfare state by showing that people are born with relatively fixed and stable natural endowments and predispositions. (“Science is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that males and females respond differently to babies. You heard it here first.”) In other venues, such as his recent book on education policy, Murray has gone further than I would go in elevating the importance of nature over nurture. But one doesn’t need to go as far as he does to recognize that nature does in fact impose boundaries on the efficacy of nurture, and that this is bad news for socialism.

But the same science Murray is counting on to save American individualism may well prove to be its undoing. You can’t have science without engineering. Once we know how human nature works, we will probably figure out ways to tinker with it. Eventually we may figure out how to make people as malleable as socialists wish they were. Once we have that ability, socialists will want to use it.

If Murray’s argument against socialism is that it doesn’t comport with the demands of human nature, how will he oppose the demand to change human nature? In fact, nothing can oppose that demand except a transcendent moral law. (This point will be familiar to anyone who has read C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, the clearest and most concise statement of this case that I know of.)

Murray’s lecture represents an important, difficult, consequential, and morally good achievement, and he should take deep satisfaction from it. The observation that the European-style welfare state is financially unsustainable will not by itself be sufficient to stop our elites from adopting it, and Murray deserves our thanks for broadening and deepening the case for economic freedom.

But the case Murray makes, important and insightful though it is, will not be sufficient. Those who are now building the socialist utopia around us are convinced that their way is morally superior, and increasing numbers of Americans (especially in the rising generation) are beginning to think that they’re right—especially as they come to see unbridled capitalism as morally hollow and corrosive. The moral case for economic freedom—the rightness of capitalism in the context of an ethical culture—is indispensable if the disaster Murray rightly warns us against is to be averted.

Greg Forster is program director for American History, Economics and Religion at the Kern Family Foundation and the author of The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.