LOOKBACK: This article was first published this time last year
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There is a strain in American “conservatism” which might be fairly summarised as holding to the view that whatever is good for very wealthy people is good for America, and indeed the world.
Philosophically some find support for this in Ayn Rand’s novels about heroic urban architects and mining magnates. In practical terms, it can be used to claim that abuse of the natural or indeed created environment is justifiable if it contributes to lowering the cost of extracting oil or gas, or whatever else turns a bob for the major corporations. The same thinking informs those cowboy “waste management” entrepreneurs who dump on the side of the road.
“Eco-socialism” is likewise an oxymoron given the well-documented environmental destruction wrought by the sort of socialist “planning” which our own “eco-socialists” wish to put in place.
Communist China manages to combine the worst of both worlds. On the one hand it is the perfect totalitarian socialist state which can justify the horrors of the past, and the present, on the basis that it is all part of the inevitability of achieving “full communism” once the necessary bad stuff is gotten out of the way.
On the other it allows free rein to rapacious capital, native and foreign, to engage in wholescale environmental, cultural and social destruction in pursuit of wealth.
Capital in socialist China is as free of the shackles of workers rights or any other kind of rights as it was during the brief heyday when women and children were herded into Blake’s Satanic Mills.
What conservative could celebrate this or indeed have as a fictional hero someone whose aim in life seemingly was to destroy old buildings and to replace them with skyscrapers? I can think of one, actually, and he is a man whose own skyscraper towers not that far from the very part of New York City where Howard Roark’s Wynand Building was imagined to be.
Roark, Rand’s hero in The Fountainhead, is an architect who scorns classicism and whose crowning triumph is the erection of a large skyscraper which “rose above the spires of churches.” A metaphor perhaps?
Not unlikely given that one of her strongest critics on the right, William F. Buckley, recalled how Rand once told him that he was “too intelligent to believe in God.” She also earned the criticism of a genuine anti-Communist hero, Whittaker Chambers, who remarked on the “absence of goodness” which he found in her libertarian fantasy. She even voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 because Reagan was pro-life.
Another great conservative writer Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, took issue with Rand. He recognised that free enterprise is the “most efficient economic system,” and obviously preferable as we know to state socialism. He also, apropos his differences with Rand, stated that “one cannot sanely make the accumulation of dollars the whole aim of existence.”
Kirk concludes his classic 1953 book with a prescient warning of the potentially destructive implications of American capital as a global force. Among the values to be sacrificed to the “Mammon of the Short Run” were, and still are, the natural and lived-in environment. It was to that theme that another great conservative mind, the anniversary of whose birth we recently noted, returned in later years. I am referring, of course, to Roger Scruton who wrote a book specifically addressed to setting out reasons why “conservatism is far better suited to tackle environmental problems than either liberalism or socialism.”
The basis for Scruton’s argument in Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet is the need for each of us to take personal responsibility for that lived environment. However, he also pointed to the destructive part played by undermining local economies and “eroding national sovereignty wherever this places an obstacle to free trade”.
I give you data centres. You can also throw in the prioritising of every other interest of global capital to the detriment of social cohesion and the real basis of a free enterprise economy in what Kirk similarly defined as “property diffused and defined.” Fundamental to that, according to Kirk, was the ability to own one’s own home.
Scruton theorises this as contributing to what he terms as oikophilia, the love of the household. If you have a society based on local private ownership and a community of homeowners with a stake in preserving the stability and integrity of that society, then that acts as a powerful resistance to the forces, be they of the state or of big capital, who wish to undermine those foundations.
It is such communities who instinctively know and put into practical effect what is required to maintain all of that. Just as it has traditionally been the farmers who own and cultivate the land who are best placed to know what works best in preserving our community’s ability to fulfil one of its fundamental bases; the production of sufficient food. This is necessary to feed ourselves primarily but also – in the case of Ireland – to use any surplus to provide the basis of a strong export and processing economy.
Scruton offers no grandiose plan for balancing the preservation of freedom with the need to ensure that the resources of the world in which we live are treated in a manner that are “sustainable.” He concludes with a simple prescription that all of this begins with “creating and sustaining neighbourhoods”.
How best to do that is the stuff of practical politics. Scruton is slightly disparaging in his book and elsewhere of what he describes as the “soothing myth” of subsidiarity. He is speaking of it as it has been distorted and abused by the EU as a bizarre and almost Orwellian cover for greater and greater centralisation of power and the undermining of the very concept of local autonomy that embodies the original meaning of the concept.
I would suggest that he perhaps erred in not examining the intellectual roots and principles of subsidiarity. These can be found ultimately in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and even in some earlier classical writers. They were set out as an alternative to unbridled capitalism and later the totalitarian statism of the Communists and the Nazis by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI in particular.
That was a major influence on the mainstream of the revolutionary nationalist movement in Ireland, and a centre of the critique of the new state made during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The republican movement during that period and up to the 1970s adopted a variant of this, Comhar na gComharsan which formed the basis of Sinn Féin’s Éire Nua.
In these times when urban and rural communities are instinctively resisting the powers that would ride roughshod over them, there is a need not only to know what one is against, but what one is for. The world is not at the mercy of occult forces and cabals. Nor is there any solution to be found in craziness. History is replete with evidence of that. It also contains some pointers to sensible solutions if we know where to look within our own traditions.