The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (7 page)

Make no mistake, Sullivan’s approach is more moralistic than empirical, more preachy than skeptical. While he’s not a complete stranger to facts and data, his real aim is to elevate the conscience—specifically, his own—above any external source of authority. To make his case, he invokes a famous ancient Chinese tale from a footnote in Oakeshott’s essay “Rationalism in Politics”:

Duke Huan of Ch’i was reading a book at the upper end of the hall; the wheelwright was making a wheel at the lower end. Putting aside his mallet and chisel, he called to the Duke and asked him what book he was reading. “One that records the words of the Sages,” answered the Duke. “Are those Sages alive?” asked the wheelwright. “Oh, no,” said the Duke, “they are dead.” “In that case,” said the wheelwright, “what you are reading can be nothing but the lees and scum of bygone men.” “How dare you, a wheelwright, find fault with the book I am reading. If you can explain your statement, I will let it pass. If not, you shall die.” “Speaking as a wheelwright,” he replied, “I look at the matter in this way; when I am making a wheel, if my stroke is too slow,
then it bites deep but is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but it does not go deep. The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into words [rules]; there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son. That is why it is impossible for me to let him take over my work, and here I am at the age of seventy, still making wheels. In my opinion it must have been the same with the men of old. All that was worth handing on, died with them; the rest, they put into their books. That is why I said that what you were reading was the lees and scum of bygone men.”

The lesson here, according to Sullivan, is one that “fundamentalists” of all sorts fail to understand. We learn by doing. And, he adds, what is true of wheel making is true of all practical activity, and what is true of all practical activity must also be “true of moral life, because moral life is about the way we act, not the way we think.”
¹⁷

Think about it for a moment. Here we have a book by Andrew Sullivan, in which he cites a book by Michael Oakeshott, written before Sullivan was born, in which Oakeshott recounts a tale written down in a book—a scroll, actually—some six hundred years before Jesus was born, and according to Sullivan, the moral of the story is that books are essentially worthless!

Imagine you are a young intellectual on the make. Like the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Progressives, and National Socialists before you, you have really exciting ideas about how to start the world over from scratch. Ensconced in your basement apartment, Diet Coke cans and pizza boxes littering the floor, you’re convinced that if only the world would accept the oracular wisdom of your blog posts, everything would be so much better. Then one day you pick up a copy of
Rationalism in Politics
at a used-book store. “This ought to be fun to mock,” you say to yourself. But then you read it. And, slowly at first, you discover that Oakeshott is right. Social planners cannot straighten the crooked timber of humanity simply by applying some algorithms or imposing really clever taxes. It is folly to think you know all you need to know about life as long as you have a computer with a good Wi-Fi connection. You truly take to heart
Oakeshott’s lovely epigram, “The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.”
¹⁸

But wait a second; that’d be impossible because—at least according to Sullivan—you can’t learn such important lessons from a book. So let the Revolution Commence!

We learn an enormous number of important things from books, and not just the “technical knowledge” Oakeshott concedes is valuable. To believe the wheelwright’s indictment of book learning (and who wouldn’t look to the seventy-year-old manual laborer as the genius here?), everything worth knowing dies with the person who knew it. That’s crazy talk. It is surely not true of great novels that can connect us to the fabric and mystery of the human condition. But it’s also not true of nonfiction books. When Edmund Burke says the “example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other,”
¹⁹
he does not mean literally that each person must make each mistake in order to learn from it. If I see a kid fuse his tongue to a frozen flagpole, I don’t need to replicate the error myself to learn from the example. Similarly, we don’t all need to fight a land war in Asia or go against a Sicilian when death is on the line to avoid someone else’s blunder.

In other words, if someone recounts these blunders in a book or captures them on film, we can learn from such examples without personally experiencing them. Over time these lessons are incorporated into other books, including textbooks. Knowledge is cumulative. It’s an imperfect process, to be sure, and forgetting history can lead to repeating it (as the roughly accurate cliché goes). But over time smart people gather all of these important ideas and boil them down into general principles. The result: an ideology. What on earth is so scary about that?

It’s true that sometimes words get hijacked by events and it’s not worth trying to salvage them. For example, almost everyone believes in censorship at some extreme (snuff films? hard-core porn on Nickelodeon?). But we’ve come to call the censorship we don’t like censorship and the censorship we do like reasonable regulations. The term “ideology” may have a bad odor in some quarters, but I don’t think its reputation is irretrievably tarnished, either. But let’s say it were for a moment. We would still need a word to describe the systemic way we order and prioritize our core values. If you want to use creed or value system or even just priorities,
that’s fine. But you can be sure that if conservatives switched to “creed,” it would take at most months before columnists on the
New York Times
op-ed page were caterwauling about the dangers posed by right-wing creedism.

It’s a bad idea to run away from labels. Liberals bristle at being called liberals because, well, for a lot of reasons, I think. But they say they don’t like to be labeled because it’s too confining and simplistic. We’ll tackle the “substance” of those claims later. But for now, as a tactical matter, all this does is give the impression that you’re embarrassed to admit what you are. That might be why, despite a half century of slander from the news media, academia, and Hollywood, Americans continue to define themselves as conservative over liberal by more than a 2 to 1 margin.

Regardless, whatever word you choose, humans need limiting principles, bright lines, ideals, dogma. Bundle them together and you’ve got a field guide to life that helps you sift your way through new facts and data. The opponents will tell you that such field guides are a burden as we hew our way through the wilderness of life, causing us to underappreciate nature in all her glory. Maybe there’s some truth to that. But field guides also help the traveler distinguish the edible from the inedible, make-do toilet paper from poison ivy, and grizzly bear scat from vegan granola. Some might even say that having such a field guide allows one to get through life more easily, by allowing the traveler to more immediately recognize what is important; to appreciate what is valuable; and simply, to survive.

2

PRAGMATISM

How We Got Here: From
Ideologie
to “Pragmatism”

W
e are indebted to Napoleon for many things. My personal favorite is canned goods. Among Napoleon’s less appreciated accomplishments is our modern understanding of the word “ideology.” Napoleon’s success at turning the word into a term of abuse in certain respects spells the end of the Enlightenment and the dawn of the Pragmatic Age.

Now when it comes to enlightenments I’ve long followed the rule of the dad in
So I Married an Axe Murderer
: “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap.” By this I mean that a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition tends to revere folks like Adam Smith and John Locke and, of course, Edmund Burke (only one of whom was in fact Scottish) while looking askance at events on the continent because of the whole French Revolution, the birth of totalitarianism, the debut of socialism, the Terror, and all of that unpleasantness.

But this is not really fair. The French Enlightenment was a lot like the
Star Wars
franchise: It started great; it just evolved into disaster over time, as the characters became more and more unbelievable. Montesquieu, after all, influenced the Founding Fathers as much as anyone, and was the author of the whole idea of the separation of powers. Before the Reign of Terror kicked in, many of the French
philosophes
had done a great deal of the legwork on free-market economics, the benefits of limited, democratic, and representative government, the rule of law. Jean-Baptiste Say—known for the often misunderstood Say’s Law and as the inventor of the word “entrepreneur”—was Adam Smith’s greatest popularizer and champion in Europe.

In 1794, Say became the founding editor of
La Décade philosophique, littéraire, et politique
, a hugely influential journal that championed laissez-faire economics, the rights of man, limited government, and what we would today call either libertarianism or classical liberalism. The intellectuals around this journal and their allies came to be called the
Idéologistes
, chiefly because of their association with another guy with an absurdly French name, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy—the man credited with coining the word “ideology” (or
idéologie
, in the French) in 1796.

Tracy, a man of noble birth and privilege, nonetheless himself favored American-style government and opposed both monarchy and the totalitarianism of the terrorist faction of the French Revolution (the Robespierrists threw Tracy in prison for about a year). While more secular than most American Founders (much like his friend Thomas Jefferson), he was in every way a classical liberal, passionately supporting property rights (“We have seen that
property
exists in nature: for it is impossible that every one should not be the proprietor of his individuality and of his faculties”) and laissez-faire economics:

For it is very certain that in general the most powerful encouragement that can be given to industry of every kind, is to let it alone, and not to meddle with it. The human mind would advance very rapidly if only not restrained; and it would be led, by the force of things to do always what is most essential on every occurrence. To direct it artificially on one side rather than on another, is commonly to lead it astray instead of guiding it.
²

Tracy wasn’t as influential as Say or Smith, but he was recognized as one of the major intellectuals of his day. He was, for instance, one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite thinkers. Jefferson paid for one of the translations of Tracy’s work into English and its publication in the United States, because it was Jefferson’s “hearty prayers” that Tracy’s
Treatise on Political Economy
would become the standard economic text in America.
³
Former president John Adams—an ally of Jefferson’s—said it was the best book yet written on economics, and that Tracy’s chapter on money expressed “the sentiments that I have entertained all my lifetime.”
⁴

Originally, Tracy conceived of
idéologie
as the science of ideas. Just as biology means the science of life, and geology the science of the earth, ideology was dedicated to understanding ideas and how we come to them. Today we would understand Tracy’s work as a branch of psychology, but he preferred to place it under the rubric of zoology. Tracy, released from prison with the overthrow of Robespierre in 1795, found a home at the Institut National (the successor to the royal academies overthrown by the revolutionaries), where he and his fellow
idéologistes
became tightly linked to the principles of republicanism (i.e., limited, representative government bound by the rule of law; you know, the good stuff). They also had some metaphysical ideas that I’m not particularly enamored with, but that’s not relevant to the story here.

In 1799 Napoleon returned from Egypt and launched a successful coup d’état, making himself dicta–, er, first consul. At first the new regime seemed like great news for the
idéologistes
, as Napoleon assiduously cultivated their support. Jean-Bapiste Say even left his job at
La Décade
and took a position in Napoleon’s consular government. The
idéologistes
contributed to the creation of the new constitution under Napoleon.

But there’s a funny thing about authoritarian tyrants. They can tolerate
(sometimes) free-market intellectuals, small-d democrats, and liberal reformers for as long as they don’t get in the way. So while Napoleon—once known, and not without justification, as the Great Liberator—was sympathetic to the
idéologistes
and their cause, he quickly turned on them when he wanted to seize and solidify power, and their principles proved inconvenient. Napoleon wished to be a true emperor, not a mere republican administrator answerable to men and their laws.