The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America

The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America by Robert Nisbet is a five star book. After reading this book a couple of weeks ago or so, and after researching a bit about Robert Nisbet, yes, I am impressed. Please see my entry in The Paleo Blog called “Robert Nisbet (some resources)”.

While this book would benefit everyone, it especially should be read by young conservatives. They need to be exposed to these kinds of old fashion conservative thinkers, such as Nisbet. Today all they are exposed to are people like Sean Hannity. And for the longest time people like Hannity were the only ones I was exposed to. Young conservatives have no idea, sadly, of who the conservative intellectuals have been. Daniel McCarthy, of The American Conservative, wrote an article in the November 6 edition of this biweekly magazine called “GOP and Man at Yale”. I recommend it. You can read it here.

The late Robert Nisbet (1913 - 1996), a paleoconservative* sociologist, in his book The Present Age starts off by asking the question of what the Founding Fathers’ reactions might be if they could time-travel to today, “the present age.” Obviously they would see such things as our technological advances and things of this nature, but what else? What about government?, politics?, etc.?

(*I put the paleo prefix in because I think it is fitting.)

Nisbet says the first thing they would notice is the prominence of war since 1914. The second thing, Nisbet writes, would most likely be the expansion of the national government everywhere, even in cities and local towns. Third, would be how the social fabric has changed. To quote Robert Nisbet on today - “the present age”: “The number of Americans who seem only loosely attached to groups and values such as kinship, community, and property and whose lives are so governed by the cash nexus.” "What would doubtless astonish the Framers most," says Nisbet, "is that their precious republic has become an imperial power in the world, much like the Great Britain they had hated in the eighteenth century."

Robert Nisbet saw the evils of war. He understood that war, above all else, is destructive to society. The Founding Fathers knew, understood, this too. The constitution gave strict limits in the war making ability of the government. According to the constitution, the President can not declare war, only the Congress can. When we shift to “the present age,” this limit has been abandoned, as have the rest of the constitution’s restrictions on the Federal government. The limited government dream failed and now we have an unchained Leviathan. This is something that both left-liberals and modern day conservatives have accepted.

We have come to a point where, Nisbet notes, “the military and the whole armaments-defense private sector had become interlocked fatefully.” [p25] It is as Eisenhower famously warned against, i.e. the military-industrial complex. This sector of the economy has become dependent on government contracts. They are the political entrepreneurs of the worst kind.

As you can imagine, Nisbet was not a typical conservative when it came to the issue of the Cold War. He believed that the primary explanation for it was the military-industrial complex. It was largely a scam. Robert Nisbet says the size of the military growth could not be explained by the Cold War. But the military-industrial complex could. “The economy has a vested interest in the prevalence of war; that is obvious.” [p26]

The Great Myths & Propaganda

Nisbet says that the breaking point to where we are today in “the present age” started with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. Since the “Great War” we have almost been in constant-perpetual warfare involved in one war after another war. With this shift came an attitude shift in the American public. Patriotism became the spreader of myths of America’s greatness in military affairs. These are the “Can Do, Know How, and No Fault myths which abide to this minute in America and yield up such disasters as Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and Grenada.” [p19]

These myths certainly apply to this very day and our present military disasters. Take Iraq. Was there extensive planning? No. The Myths were with us and told us that we need not worry about planning because the war would be a “cake walk”. Some “cake walk” it has turned out to be!

With the expasion of government in WWI (see below), came propaganda. Woodrow Wilson knew, as Nisbet notes, that just mobilizing the industries to serve in the war effort was not enough. He would have to get the public on board. Thus, the birth of "superpatriots". (Just turn on talk radio to hear them today.)

Wilson hired George Creel to do this. The State promoted citizens to watch their neighbors and report dissent. There was also the creation of the "four-minute men," who, by government edict, had the "right" to storm in anywhere they wanted to give war propaganda. They would go to “any club, lodge, school labor union, service club, whatever, whether invited or not”. [p47] Schools, of course, were also affected. The government removed references to, for example, classic German literature. There was also the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, “making it easy to charge and often indict the most casual comment in public as seditious to nation & war effort,” said Nisbet.

Ideological War

With Wilson war has turned ideological. Under Wilson came the birth, which continues today, of the crusade to “spread democracy around the world”. The U.S. "under Democrats and Republicans alike oftentimes, has boiled down to America-on-a-Permanent-Mission; a mission to make the rest of the world a little more like America the Beautiful," [p32] to quote Robert Nisbet. Here comes the United States Empire, police man and boss of the world.

For a more recent example of this kind of mentality, take Jimmy Carter in his own words:

a nation’s domestic and foreign polices should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation. ... There is only one nation in the world which is capable of true leadership among the community of nations and that is the United States of America. [p36]

It should be plainly obvious that when the Framers wrote up the constitution, they never dreamed of a United States in the role Carter gives.

Today the government sees war through ideology. We just have to plant some democracy here or there and all will be well. Or so we are supposed to believe.

Nisbet wrote something that I found very interesting because it very much connects to how neoconservatives have viewed Saddam and bin Laden:

When, in the late 1950s, there were unmistakable signs of a growing rift between Communist China and Communist Russia, the official position of the United States, a position largely initiated by the Right, was for some time that no rift existed, that Mao’s China was a Soviet pawn.

...With Stalin and the Cold War “our right-wing moralistic ideologists in this country were seeing stereotypes, pictures in their head, of the defunct Trotskyist dream of Russia not a nation but instead a vast spiritual force leading all mankind to the Perdition.”

This kind of moralism is still a menace to our foreign policy. It is the mentality that converts every incident in the world into an enormously shrewd, calculated operation by the KGB. To sweep every North-South happening into an East-West framework is the preoccupation of the Right-----religious and secular. So was it the preoccupation of the Right when for years, all evidence notwithstanding, it insisted that because Russia and China were both officially Communist, therefore they had to be one in faith, hope, and destiny. [pp37-38]

They were thought to be joined at the hip, as it were. It is interesting how this fits so well today. History surely does repeat itself. Despite all the reason and evidence to the contrary, neoconservatives insist on the belief that Saddam and bin Laden were somehow joined at the hip.

The Total State and The Military-Industrial Complex (Fascism)

"War is the health of the state." - Randolph Bourne.

It is in times of war Leviathan gets fed...and grows. The planning of the economy; the centralization of power; the growth of the executive; the police state; and the like grow exponentially. With Woodrow Wilson and his administration came the creation of such things as the War Industries Board, the War Labor Polices Board, a Shipping Board, a Food Administration, etc. “Railroads, mines and other interstate industries were nationalized, made wards of Washington, D.C.” Robert Nisbet quotes Charles & Mary Bread, which help paints the picture:

In a series of the most remarkable laws ever enacted in Washington, the whole economic system was placed at his [Wilson] command. Under their provisions the President was authorized to requisition supplies for the army w/out stint, to fix the prices of commodities so commanded, arrange a guaranteed price for wheat, take possession of the mines, factories, packing houses, railways, steam ships, and all means of communication and operate them through public agencies and license the importation, manufacture, storage and distribution of all necessities. [p44]

“More and more centers,” said Nisbet, “think tanks, and institutes in Washington are directed to war policy and war strategy, and to war intelligence.” We moved from (relatively) laissez-fair to Leviathan. Once some people got a taste of that, they got addicted because they saw that they could use the coercion and violence inherent in the State to their advantage. “Certain figures, intellectuals and business executives included,” says Nisbet, “began to think of techniques for escape from” freedom --- the free market --- to the State. [p46] We get cooperate welfare and regulations, which in all truth come into existence to protect the well-connected from competition. And the birth of the merchants of death, which exist to this very day.

One of the quick examples that Robert Nisbet writes about in The Present Age, is the Kennedy administration’s Project Camelot. Here we have the education system (the universities) work hand-in-hand with the State and the War Machine... University Professors collaborated with the Kennedy administration and the military to work on covert operations in Chile (of all places!) that “could spark counterinsurgency operations in countries where the resident government seemed perhaps unable to cope”. [pp26-27] However, thankfully, a whistleblower came and it was reported in the first page of the Washington Star. And as you can see, every little thing in the world has become "our" concern. Someone goes ‘boo’ and it is somehow "our" concern.

A few months ago Thomas J. DiLorenzo wrote a article called "The Fatherland Protection Racket" up at LRC. It was a review of the book Homeland Security Scams by James Bennett. View the article here. It really can be amazing, though not surprising, how much pork is in Homeland Security. Political entrepreneurs see this. They have grabbed on. And government loves it. The State fails on 9-11 and it gets a bigger pay check. Government is rewarded in failure. For the government, success equals failure. In the private sector, if you fail, you go out of business. This is why the worst rise to the top in government. Whereas, the market entrepreneurs (not the political entrepreneurs ) are the bedrock of civilization --- the creators --- the inventors etc. The market is the source of civilization.

Here is DiLorenzo speaking of Homeland Security Scams:

The primary beneficiaries of all this are "politicians, lobbyists, and a flourishing homeland security industry." This would also include, in my opinion, all of the neocon "think tanks," magazines, and "scholars" who are paid to provide the intellectual cover for the scam. The "one constant" that keeps the racket going is fear. As long as our rulers can continue to frighten the public with promises of "terror" their motives and actions will not be questioned by the vast majority of the public.

War and Culture

The warfare state does not only have a very ugly impact in political manners, but it also has a very ugly impact on culture. “War, its tragedies and devastations understood here, breaks down social walls and by so doing stimulates a new individualism,” said Nisbet. [pp7-8] It corrupts culture as “Old traditions, conventions, dogmas, and taboos are opened under war conditions to a challenge”. War therefore promotes cultural leftism, as it “tends to break up the cake of custom, the net of tradition.” We go from the natural to the unnatural dehumanizing, unethical, and decivilizing state that war (governments) promote. Here is what Robert Nisbet had to say:

All was of any appreciable length have a secularizing effect upon engaged societies, a diminution of the authority of old religious and moral values and a parallel elevation of new utilitarian, hedonistic, or pragmatic values. Wars, to be successfully fought, demand a reduction in the taboos regarding life, dignity, and property, family, and religion; there must be nothing of merely moral nature left standing between fighting forces and victory, not even, or especially, taboos on sexual encounters. Wars have an individualizing effect upon their involved societies, a loosening of the accustomed social bond in favor of a tightening of the military ethic. Military, or at least war-born, relationships among individuals lend to supersede relationships of family, parish, and ordinary walks of life. Ideas of chastity, modesty, decorum, respectability change quickly in wartime. [p10]

As Nisbet said, hedonism goes from the unnorm to the norm. This includes not only materialistic hedonism, but also sexual hedonism.

War makes us more militaristic. Nisbet shows in his book how the culture has turned more militaristic. From a change in how awards are given; to a change in language; to the change in Hollywood; to a change in art; and so on.

As I have already noted, patriotism becomes ramped. "We", as a nation, look at our neighbor’s speck in his eye, but never do we look at our own speck. People then start to believe in the “Great Myths”. Nisbet says that biographer Lord Devlin coined “Wilson’s Law,” which says that “What America touches, she makes holy.” From FDR, to Clinton, to the Bush’s these Myths are everywhere.

Nisbet suggests that the only way, for example, we could be so blind to the danger of the nation’s national debt is due to the acceptance of the “Great Myths”. They have polluted the culture.

The Total State - The New Absolutism

Democratic absolutism, chiefly in the manifestation of the thick, heavy bureaucracies we build today, can be as oppressive to the creative instinct, the curiosity itch, and the drive to explore as anything that exists more blatantly in the totalitarian state. [p58]

Robert Nisbet gets it 100% correct: the move to democracy “can yield a higher degree of absolutism in its relation to the individual than is found in any of the so-called absolute, divine-right monarchies”. [p41] There use to exist strong “intermediate authorities,” which were out of the purview of the State. This limited how strong, for example, monarchies were. It is the State that has slowly destroyed these natural intermediate authorities and institutions.

Absolutism has become accepted in democracy. In fact, the neoconservatives believe democracy to be the “end of history.” But with this foolish belief in the so-called virtues of democracy, it has given risen to the giant centralization we see in government today.

The absolutism is also in how government sees wars. Today’s wars are smaller and, for lack of a better phrase to put it, less dramatic. But the State, as stupid as it naturally is, does not get this. Today's wars call for a different kind of military, but, Nisbet says

the enormous bureaucracy with its tentacles stretched out in every possible direction, tripping over one another, treating to strangle the monster they are connected with, has apparently made it impossible for the great military bureaucracy in America to develop proper forces for the late twentieth century’s kinds of war. [P60]

Here is the modern absolutism:

If the Pentagon is the most glaring, and downright dangerous, of our mammoth bureaucracies, it is far from being the only one. There isn’t an aspect of individual life, from birth to death, that doesn’t come under some kind of federal scrutiny every day, and that means of course bureaucratic scrutiny. Horror stories are legion and related to every bureaucracy from the Internal Revenue Service to Commerce, Labor, Human Services, and so forth.

In the book he also wrote that he thought that courts were becoming a play ground for political activism.

Law, especially the law of the entire nation, federal law, presents itself as the most potent force for social change now imaginable. Inevitably, therefore, the attention of the eager, impatient, and activist among humanitarians and reconstructionists is already being turned from the presidency and the Congress---and conspicuously the merely state-level political offices---to the federal judiciary with its grand prize of the Chief Justiceship of the United States. [p69]

Robert Nisbet writes that while Americans pretends, by their rhetoric, to hate all of this bureaucracy; they really love it. “‘Dammed bureaucracy’ may be one word in most conversations,” says Nisbet, “but it is said with more and more toleration, even affection."

Reagan, says Nisbet, is a good illustration of this:

Arresting----egregious, some would say----as the Reagan spectacle is, however, it not unfairly epitomizes the attitudes of a great many Americans toward bureaucracy and state centralization. They curse it, deride it, abhor it, all the while they are beckoning it to them with one hand. [p61]

Today people look to the State as the supposed solution to all the problems of the world under the sun. We think the solutions to world problems are to expand the U.S. Empire and plant democracy. We think the solution to every damn problem can somehow be solved through the State ---- through the President. Politicization, as Robert Nisbet wrote in The Present Age, has taken everything over. But the State needs help to do this. Here is where the political clerisy comes in.

The "political clersiy," are what Nisbet calls the “intellectuals” that defend and justify the State. Before the State rulers were looked as divine. In some cases they were seen as a god. Today democracy is the puppet show, used to justify Leviathan. The State needs intellectuals. It also needs the media. It needs people justifying it and justify the expansion of it.

We have moved to the attitude that “the President is never wrong!” Lies, deceptions, manipulations, and outright corruption notwithstanding. When something goes wrong, we do not blame the President! There is always a fall guy.

As the absolutism has taken over, we today treat the President like an outright “king.” He comes into town? The whole town has to stop what it is doing and bow to the despot.

The Loose Individual

As the State has grown, it has created the “loose individual.” Nisbet defines this as the loosening of the individual from the natural “intermediate authorities.” We have become cut off from them. As the State distorts the natural order and cultural liberalism takes over, we have become a society that is dying. One of the important books on this topic is Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West. It can be clearly seen how our society has adapted cultural liberalism. Our birth rates are not even high enough for replacement levels, as third world immigrants invade`. As far as I can see, a free society does not commit suicide. But this is what democracy does. It is a decivilizing institution. Real conservatives (paleoconservatives) must become the most extreme and radical anti-statist libertarian.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe said in his outstanding book, Democracy - The God That Failed:

What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and lasses-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of the left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.

We have also become a society of debt and incompetence. The nature of capitalism has also changed. “The revolving door between government and corporate America works overtime in the present age, in this late part of the age.” [p109]

Empires all bankrupt themselves. The Empire of America will be no different. Just like other Empires have fallen in debt and cultural lefitsm, so is America. Sad to say, the American Empire will keep on getting itself involved in one immoral war after another until it dies or suffers an utter defeat.

To understand the shift to the present age, I recommend also reading the two books shown in this entry: Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West and Hans Hoppe’s Democracy – The God That Failed.

“We have moved since 1914 from a highly traditionalist, hierarchical, decentralized, and inegalitarian society to one that in our time approaches the diametrical opposite of these qualities.” [p140]

Ideas are a powerful thing, be they good or bad. They have caused “the present age”. This is why websites like LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and Mises.org are so important.