2 posts tagged “language”

Even though he was not an "anarchist" or a philosophical libertarian, the great Robert Nisbet's central insight is that Civil Society, made up of the so-called intermediate institutions which persons are naturally born into and are a part of (viz., family, locality, church, etc.), and the State are inversely related to each other in terms of strength and the role they play in society.

It is consequently when the state is small and weak that social authority is vibrant. The more functions and roles the state takes on, the less civil society has to take on. A powerful managerial state always results in imposing a top-down, monolithic-coercive control, breaking down pluralistic authorities, autonomies, communities, institutions, traditional norms, and ultimately thereby isolating and detaching the individual from civil society. All that is left after this process is Leviathan and atomistic, detached, and "loose" individuals. Once this has happened the state has what it wants, i.e., control over isolated and weak individuals.

Extending and furthering this analysis, we can understand how increased democratization and centralization of state power directs man's activities increasingly at using this apparatus. This not only must be done at the expense of civil society, since the state's relationship with civil society is parasitic, but also cause conflict between those trying to use power, which is monopolistic, for their own purposes. These men will be constantly fighting to control this coercive power for their own ends and at the expense of other men. Politicalization in increased areas of life will only result in a greater amount of people joining in this infighting (with the upshot of man investing and producing less in civil society). It actually becomes a necessity, if only as a means of (pseudo) "self-defense." All of this further feeds the growth of politics. And the distinction between civil society and state will fade away. In addition, they will blend together as many former civil society institutions attach themselves or ally themselves with statism. States ultimately consume civil society.

(This will even have a major change on the culture regarding the individual character development of men. The character characteristics that man will develop will tend to be those that define a politician rather than a gentleman.)

Indeed, today every nook and cranny Leviathan has its hand in. No wonder, as Robert Nisbet says, we have moved "from a highly traditionalist, hierarchical, decentralized, and inegalitarian society to one that in our time approaches the diametrical opposite of these qualities." [Quote from The Present Age.]

Now the objective of this Paleo Blog entry is to attempt to show, using insights from Nisbet, Murray Rothbard, Russell Kirk and Robert Murphy and also going through some economic analysis (which has been greatly influenced by Hans-Hermann Hoppe), how power destroys civil society. The topics covered may be loosely organized and assumes the reader has some knowledge about the possibility and logic of a private law society, but it is my hope that it provides some insights into this important subject.

Authority versus Power

"[L]ibertarians," writes Murray N. Rothbard in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature (p 152, n 1),

accept the authority of sound values, civilization, and especially reason; it is those who refuse to accept such authority who turn instead to outside coercion and violence. On the confusion between authority and power, see the brilliant article by Robert A. Nisbet, "The Nemesis of Authority," The Intercollegiate Review (Winter-Spring, 1972): 3-13.

Happily the 1972 article is available online here [pdf].

In the article Robert Nisbet removes, as Rothbard explained, the common misperception between authority and power. Power, not authority, amounts to the usage (or threat) of physical force or coercion. It is civil society, he goes on to say, that you find a multiplicity of authorities:

Civil society, in whatever degree it may be said to exist at all, is a tissue of authorities, however loosely knit these may be in times of stress. Authority, unlike power or coercion, is not rooted in force, or threat of force. It is built into the very fabric of human association. Authority exists in the very roles and statuses of the social order. It is no more than an aspect, though a vital aspect, of the social order. . . . Freedom, in any positive, creative sense, is inseparable from a structure of authority ---- of rules, norms, roles, and statues ---- which can alone give the stamp of character to the free mind. No mistake could be greater than that of counterpoising freedom and authority. Freedom and power, freedom and coercion, yes. But not freedom and authority.

(There will be more on this specific article later.)

Children and the Family

Out of all the intermediate institutions, obviously the most essential and basic building block in society is the family institution. Individuals do not exist apart from family, which, by the way, includes even Robinson Crusoe. The atomistic individual is just a myth. And, incidentally, the reason for Rothbard's footnote was to defend parental authority, as long as it does not contravene the foundation of self-ownership and private property rights, over those who say it is (somehow) "un-libertarian."  After all, a child is under the private household rules of the father, who is the owner of the household and accordingly has patriarchal authority and control over it. Private property (which is inegalitarian, hierarchical, exclusive, undemocratic, etc.), outside of our physical body, is not a "given" to us as we are born into the world. We must earn it and therefore must work within the framework of families and authorities in civil society.

This framework is essential to society as a whole. The family, that is. As Robert Nisbet says:

[A] well-attested fact [is] that whenever there is private property there will be a strong family system. After all, the origins of private property lie in clan and kindred; and even after the conjugal family, the household, became the chief element of kinship, its relationship to property remained very close. As Joseph Schumpeter noted in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy*, it was not the isolated individual . . . but the household that was the main engine of modern capitalist development. Not economic man but, quite literally, the head of the household working for the present and future of the members of his family, and hence saving and investment. [Twilight of Authority.]

Traditional family households hence promote a low time preference. Their success and longevity depends on this fact. It brings stability to society and capital growth, which advances the capitalistic process. This is what makes genuine capitalism and family mutually reinforcing. It was what, in the past, allowed only the father to enter the job market.

However, it becomes almost unavoidable, in modern society, that both father and mother have to enter the workforce due to the taxation, regulations, and inflation that eats away at persons' wealth. Procurement of wealth has been made comparatively more costly because income used in production has been made less, as it is expropriated by way of taxation, and the opportunity cost for non-production has been lowered. The destruction and blockage of contractual relationships between parties, due to thousands of pages of regulations, lowers market transactions, and thus investments and wealth. And inflation, in particular, is a direct assault against the family institution because, by continually lowering the value of the dollar, savings and long-term planning is discouraged. Consumption, leisure, short-term thinking and planning are encouraged. All of which are to the damage of capitalism and family.

Soon a major social and cultural transformation took place with the increased socialization in society. The belief and value in the father working towards a family wage to provide for the family vanished. Home mothers became stigmatized by ideological feminism, the sexual revolution, and Cultural Marxism. The ideas in the minds of men changed and the course of history assimilated those new values. Entering the workforce became more important than becoming a wife and mother. Womens' investment in the latter areas declined. Job advertisements took on a shift as this transformation took place, and was given additional thrust by today's sacrosanctity of civil "rights"** laws. Old advertisements, with an ethos of strong family values, labeled "Men Wanted" and "Women Wanted" was deemed illegal because it was discriminatory.

Statism has alleviated, to a high degree, father and mother their function and role to raise, care for, and teach their own children. In replace of these functions and roles, that naturally reside in the family institution, has come the state. Put in another way, these functions and roles have become socialized. Children are thrown into the statist education system, where they are fed anti-family, anti-market ideas. Parents can no longer raise their children in a manner they want to and instead must accept school teachers and social workers as the ultimate judge and authority. There is thus less parental investment in children, the family structure, and the next generation and their development. Under statist conditions the internally weak family is promoted and encouraged vis-à-vis the strong family for the reason that investment is made more costly. Natural authority is zapped-away and parental irresponsibility, neglect, and abuse is encouraged because it is made less costly. The natural bond and attachment between parents and children falls. A decline and degeneration must follow.

The externalized value and cost of children also decreases the attachment and bond between mother and father. This encourages an increase in divorce rates. At the same time, divorce courts have become one-size-fits-all and "no-fault." Marriage contract and covenant has been taken away and placed into the control of the state. Mothers, moreover, have a court that is biased to them and, by default, negative to fathers. Added with numerous interventionisms into civil society, there is subsidization of single mothers at the expense of non-single mothers. This is nothing but the collective reinforcement of such lifestyles, illegitimacy, irresponsibility, divorce, and so on.

By socializing the costs of children, the incentive to act with sexual restraint declines. Continuing this socialization will push man to an animal looking to fulfill his appetite through his next "free love" conquest. The animal side and sensationalist side of man replaces the rational side.

Children, in the governmental schools, lose attachment to family, their heritage, and family values. These schools elevate and promote collectivism, uniformity, egalitarianism, "political correctness," and anti-moral values. Schools, in their raised position relative to the family, create dependency between children and the state. Permissiveness is promoted from the diminishment of parental authority. Children, who are under a collectivistic rule, are set "free" and an increase in crime, drug use, and all-around juvenility occurs. They become a lone grown-up drone in the masses attached and dependent on the government, in view of the fact that their early development was deformed (to some degree) to the state's image and its wants.

In addition, as children are forced into the educational system, child labor laws further decrease children's attachment to civil society. Their value to the family household is lowered, as they cannot contribute to it financially. Because their prospects of entering the workforce at a young age has decreased, they will be less likely to develop good work ethics, the skills of being independent or responsible, or have a respect for (non-statist) authority.

Far from being any kind of supporter and up-lifting institution, the State is the enemy of the family. A weaker family is one less bulwark the state has to confront in its desire to enlarge its power vis-à-vis the individual. It is those who want to give the state more power, for whatever reason (even in the name of "saving" or "protecting" the family), that are ultimately empowering an institution that is the enemy of the family.

Sub-Notes:

*Schumpeter believes that, paradoxically, while the family is a backbone to capitalism, capitalism will ultimately hurt this backbone leading to an anti-capitalist mentality. With the analysis in this blog entry, this seems to be un-true. As Jeffrey Tucker says: "Where Schumpeter went wrong was in believing that advanced capitalism itself contributed to undermining the family (thus his pessimism regarding the future of free economies). In fact, if we look at the case of the United States, it is easy to see that it is not the market, but government policy that penalizes marriages by directly and indirectly discouraging their formation."

**Statist and managerial elite, by programs such as affirmative action, have managed to push this process via social engineering. Collective women rights were deemed to exist in which the central state has to enforce and impose on all, contra to private persons and their properties. And those critical of this are labeled as mentally ill and persons of "hate," needing therapeutic help from the establishment. Helping along feminism, of course, has been the neoconservative right; claming that it is only the new "radical" feminism that has corrupted this ideology. (This is no different than their view on civil rights. Paul Gottfried has thus said that "On almost all social issues, starting with Third World immigration, feminism, and civil rights, neoconservatives are far closer to the Left than they are to the Old Right.")

War, Culture, and Community

Centralization is always the stamping out of community and locality. Returning to Nisbet, he saw that the reason modern man has become preoccupied with community is for the very fact that community has waned. Unfortunately, this desire to restore community has not resulted in man endeavoring to reestablish genuine community, which has nothing to do with political power, but the seeking of community by the use of the central state. Yet all this has done is further the erosion of community. According to Nisbet, there is nothing more fraudulent or dangerous than a "phrase as 'national community.'"

This "quest for community" can be seen in times of war. There is probably nothing greater than war that brings out the mass mobs in modern democracy, especially today's Limbaugh-type conservatives or kiddy-con conservatives, with their nationalistic and patriotic spirit banging on the drums and labeling war skeptics as "unpatriotic" (or worse).

Ironically, this patriotic or nationalistic spirit, having everything to do with glorifying Leviathan than anything else, is in all probability the result from the loss of any genuine conservative community. This is why states like a community void. Man has become increasingly detached and atomized from others. This makes, at least at first, the masses gung-ho about war. Just remember back to the first days of the Iraq War. War for a moment brings a sense of community and connection. Certainly those in actual combat feel a sense of community with their fellow soldiers. Those at home feel a bit of that as well. A little later, nonetheless, it dries up because it is a shallow and false collectivist and statist community.

In response to those that judge military life as beneficial to the development of a young man, conservative Russell Kirk said that "there is no tyranny more onerous than that of military life." Military life does not build character, strength, or independence of mind. It does not make a man "a real one." That kind of life, due to its socialistic nature, is antagonistic towards these characters. It is "military discipline," says Kirk, that is "crushing to self-reliance."

"In military life, distant from home and most of the forces of social opinion, there is every inducement for an average young man to sink into indolence and indulgence and every reason for him to rely increasingly upon the state for very existence."

So life in the military does not resemble community at all. Not only does it distort the development of young men, life in war and military tears families apart. It discourages old taboos on morality, including sexual relationships. War encourages promiscuity. And this has been multiplied many times over by unnaturally allowing women in combat.

"War and the military are," writes Robert Nisbet,

without question, among the very worst of the earth's afflictions, responsible for the majority of the torments, oppressions, tyrannies, and suffocations of thought the West has for long been exposed to. In military or war society anything resembling true freedom of thought, true individual initiative in the intellectual and cultural and economic areas, is made impossible---not only cut off when they threaten to appear but, worse, extinguished more or less at root. ... Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind. [Twilight of Authority.]

And it is in times of war, Nisbet says, that the welfare state proliferates. Around "75 percent of all national programs which have been instituted in Western countries during the past two centuries to equalize income, property, education, working conditions, and other aspects of life have been in the first instance adjuncts of the war state and of the war economy." [Twilight of Authority.] War, socialism, and "progressive" movements are bound at the hip.

The Natural Community

Natural authority is not only found in the family and its extended outgrowths. It is found in businesses, churches, firms, associations, schools, and other places. In communities you generally find natural leaders (or, if you will, aristocrats). These are families who are good at organizing community functions and resolving quarrels. The majority of the town respects their position and abilities. In community you find differentiation and distinction between individual persons who possess different levels of authority and who play different roles (occupations) in the community.

One aspect in the development of community or neighborhood is the stabilizing effect that businessmen (working within the community) have on it. For instance, Robert Murphy's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism points to how

public safety is best ensured when people voluntarily look after their own streets, and where stores, bars, and restaurants (open night and day) and public spaces are all jostled together, because it gives residents, business owners, and customers a mutual interest in ensuring safety, a complex interaction of unexpected "neighborhood watch" mutual support.

What takes this away, Dr. Murphy says, is forced and top-down planning by the government. It "breaks up this mutual support." All of this has led to is increased crime rates and the annihilation of natural community development. It cuts off the bonds between men in community.

Again, this is exactly what the state wants. Any private functions and roles communities takes on, power in the state is less. Any kind of private authority is a threat to the state. Thus to gain power, the state must crush community development. Community functions and roles the state must take over. And when this happens man increasingly turns to the state for the answers to all problems. (The more centralized this state, the worse.) It becomes the center of society and existence. Instead of seeking private solutions, state solutions are almost always sought. This unties the structure of civil society. The atomization of individuals from all cultural and social restraints takes place. Hierarchical outgrowths of pressures and competing authorities atrophy. There has been hence the development of the ferine and democratically "equal" mass of individuals with "equal" authority in relation to each other. And hence the increase in immoral, "alternative," and destructive lifestyles.

Socializing personal morality and conduct to the state can only result in a decrease in the importance of civil society's role to "regulate" these matters. It is then that the family loses authority. Churches, in the realm of personal or individual morality and conduct, get hurt as a source of authority in society. Social pressures lose their value. So it is the socialization that lowers investment of civil society's institutional and associational presence in these matters. As a consequence, statism will actually tend to increase destructive behavior all-around on net. What is defined as "good" and "bad" will be state defined. Man will increasingly depend on the state for the guide to what morality means. Morality will enter in a state of flux, ever changing, and ever relative.

Under a free society, on the other hand, and implied in the above analysis, social and cultural restraints would be restored. Families, in both the nuclear and extended sense, would regain their natural authority. Churches can gain functions and roles in communities. Without a central power, communities can be restored in vigor. A person's membership in various intermediate institutions would be reestablished (or created anew) to his natural position in its hierarchical structure. A pluralistic society would develop. There would not be any collective, systematic subsidization of harmful lifestyles or activities with the welfare state gone. Property owners would regain the right to discriminate, and implied in that would produce an increase in civil behavior by the joining increase of the ability to discriminate against uncivil behavior. And so on.

Moreover, instead of public laws there would be private laws. Laws that would arrive out of civil society; not the state.

Murray Rothbard writes that "Under total privatization, many local conflicts and 'externality' problems ... would be neatly settled.

With every locale and neighborhood owned by private firms, corporations, or contractual communities, true diversity would reign, in accordance with the preferences of each community. Some neighborhoods would be ethnically or economically diverse, while others would be ethnically or economically homogeneous. Some localities would permit pornography or prostitution or drugs or abortion, others would prohibit any or all of them. The prohibitions would not be state imposed, but would simply be requirements for residence or use of some person's or community's land area. ["Nations By Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State"]

"In a country, or a world, or totally private property,

including streets, and private contractual neighborhoods consisting of property-owners, these owners can make any sort of neighborhood-contracts they wish. In practice, then, the country would be a truly "gorgeous mosaic," ... ranging from rowdy Greenwich Village-type contractual neighborhoods, to socially conservative homogeneous WASP neighborhoods. Remember that all deeds and covenants would once again be totally legal and enforceable, with no meddling government restrictions upon them. So that considering the drug question, if a proprietary neighborhood contracted that no one would use drugs, and Jones violated the contract and used them, he fellow community-contractors could simply enforce the contract and kick him out. Or, since no advance contract can allow for all conceivable circumstances, suppose that Smith became so personally obnoxious that his fellow neighborhood-owners wanted him ejected. They would then have to buy him out----probably on terms set contractually in advance in accordance with some "obnoxious" clause. ["The 'New Fusionism': A Movement For Our Time"]

Sub-Notes:
 
1. A free libertarian society would therefore not only consist of a horizontal "convivial order" made up of natural law. Vertically on top of this would be the development of the "social order's" voluntary positive law. For more on the difference between the "convivial order" and the "social order," see these notes from the PFS.

2. The communities that would develop would be diverse and this would allow people to live by those of like-values. Interventionists, as Rothbard said, would have no place in a libertarian society however. This would remove a major source of conflict in society. If communists want to a have voluntary communist community, then it does no harm to me (but only them).

3. Nonetheless, communities would tend to develop homogeneously. Today, even in a statist world, neighborhoods and towns that are wealthier and that have a stronger level of trust between neighbors are homogeneous versus heterogeneous. A free society would amplify that tendency. In particular, argues the great libertarian Hans-Hermann Hoppe, insurance companies would encourage this development:

"Heterogeneous" risks either cannot be insured or must be insured separately (in different pools, jointly with other homogeneous risks, and at different prices). Ethno-cultural homogeneity of neighborhoods, then, is simply a device for making insurance against external threats and interferences possible and thus lowering the cost of residential property protection. Homogeneity facilitates mutual property insurance. Capital-based insurers will charge lower premiums for clusters of homogeneous territories (while at the same time revealing the different ranks in cultural development of various ethno-cultures, as reflected in the price-spread of the premium charged at different locations.)

The process to a free society via secession, says Hoppe, "Rather than promoting a downward leveling of culture as under forced integration, ... stimulates a cooperative process of cultural selection and advancement."

The Authority of Culture, Language, and Reason

To loop back, in the first article linked-to above, the "authority of language," especially, is shown to be of great concern to Robert Nisbet, for it is language that is the most basic social and cultural bond between men. This is not only limited to verbal language but also the "silent language" of physical expressions. Language as well, as a means of communication, expresses itself in mathematics, music, paintings, et cetera. It is the essential foundation to any civilization, and therefore encompasses "nearly the whole of experience and reality."

With that in mind, there is a direct correlation, Nisbet believes, between the loss of authority in language and the increase of power and the decline of culture. Specifically, he points to George Orwell's work. Orwell said that in politics you locate "phrases tackled together" made up of meaningless abstractions and generic terms. In political discussion, for example, you find interminable phraseology that is vacuous: "human rights," "democracy," "social justice,"* "civil rights," "diversity," and so on. (With pro-empire Sen. Obama we can add the word "change," which is a political word that is as empty and lifeless as them come--------no wonder he is so liked.)

*(On "social justice," Irving Babbitt wrote: "Every form of social justice ... tends toward confiscation, and confiscation, when practiced on a large scale, undermines moral standards, and, in so far, substitutes for real justice the law of cunning and the law of force.")

"A generation," writes Nisbet, "that has formed itself linguistically around the primitivism of 'like,' 'cool,' 'man,' 'feel,' and, above all, 'you know' will not be a difficult generation to enslave politically, socially, and culturally." As a matter of fact, in the article he points to a study that reports the average Englishman and American recycles on a daily basis only "thirty-four basic words."

One author Nisbet finds loathsome is Richard Poirier and his book The Performing Self. Poirier disapproves of the "waste" of language and believes it must be personalized to the "performing self." All constraints and authority must be removed. Nisbet replies that this is not how genuine culture works. It is not how the genius develops or how the genius flourishes.

Creativity in high culture

is never the consequence of nihilistic rejection of the forms and structures which the creative mind finds around him. It is invariably a working from, and generally through, these to new forms and structures: forms and structures that may be so original indeed as to make their relation to past seem highly tenuous. That creative minds do indeed reveal capacity for liberating themselves in some degree from accepted modes of intellectual order, as a means of quickening the search for other modes, in no ways means that passion for disorder for "waste" is overriding. Least of all does it mean passion for "self-watching."

"The basis of any culture," says Nisbet, "is the presence of values which have external force in the individual's life, which reflect a power greater than anything that lies in the [single] individual alone." [Emphasis mine. This, separate quote, from Twilight of Authority. The above one, of course, is from Nisbet's essay on authority.]

Robust culture in literature rides the tides from the point of the Greeks. That is, of their techniques, forms, styles, and structures. Developing culture is the outgrowth from them. Not only is today's language untidiness caused by the denunciation of authority, the authority of reason has been waning.

In the West man finds the "acceptance of objectivity as at least a worthy goal." Our philosophical literature, says Nisbet, has looked for the objective in the order of existence, rather than the subjective or the "cult of individuality" of one's feelings. And it is this objective search that "declare[s] something of superlative nobility."

Without the authority of reason comes irrationality. It has thus been at the university where you find "feeling, through sensitivity and encounter sessions, ... exalted, in those wide spheres of the arts ... where preoccupation with self, with display or exhibition of self, takes the almost invariable form of display of the least rational, the least reason-oriented..."

In regards to the decline of the arts, for example, Murray Rothbard agreed. Rothbard saw nihilism forming in the arts:

The art-for-art's sake scam that permeates the modern liberal world-view, was launched by nineteenth-century aesthetes as a camouflage of their own morbid, nihilistic, pessimistic, and violently anti-traditional outlook: the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the Impressionists, Dadaists, and later the Bloomsbury Set and the literary and art critic Roger Fry. Since they could not get anywhere at the time by openly advocating their nihilistic values and epistemology, or their "alternative life-styles," they pushed – unfortunately with great success – the "art has its own reasons" rationale.

First, the left-liberals preached l' art pour l' art in aesthetics, and as a corollary, in ethics, trumpeted the new view that there is no such thing as revealed or objective ethics, that all ethics are "subjective," that all of life's choices are only personal, emotive "preferences." ["KULTURKAMPF!"]

This, according to Robert Nisbet, makes our age a "critical" one. Saint-Simon said that there are two types of ages: "organic" and "critical." It is in organic ages that the authority of culture, reason, and language is dominant. The age of our time is critical because these intellectual and abstract authorities are weak. We are in a "twilight of authority." And it is no quirk that with this comes the rise of Power.

Life's Requisite of Prejudice

"It has a scary sound," wrote Richard Weaver, "and it has been employed by the illiberal to terrify the liberal."

Despite the fact that in today's society the word is exclusively used to attack another's character or views, how can any man really live a life with no prejudice? As Weaver wrote, in earlier days its meaning was well known and understood. Prejudice simply meant "prejudgment."

From a more praxeological perspective, a man who acts----i.e., a man who acts in the attempt to accomplish some goal----does so with the help of past experiences to guide his choices. He prejudges. A man who acts towards a goal is prejudging. He is and must be a prejudiced man. It is a perfectly rational thing. Man, being human, can fail in this task no doubt. A man as an individual can have bad prejudices or good ones about different things. The man with bad prejudices is a man with bad prejudices. Nothing more. It does not prove or suggest that man should not have prejudices or that prejudices are bad.

Leftist inimicalness on prejudice, according to Weaver, comes from the angle that prejudices are completely based in irrational thought. Putting a stop to them requires statist interventions because, as said by them, they give rise to a society of heterogeneous and inegalitarian distinctions. Meaning that these distinctions are the result of prejudice as opposed to "rational" thought.

This is the specific area of discussion Weaver wrote on. That man acts by things or for things that cannot always be deduced into some sort of Euclidean proof. We act on these "prejudices" because not everything we do can be logically deduced. While he does not say this, I think it can be gathered that just like there is a proper balance between rhetoric and dialectic in society, we can say the same general thing about rationality and "prejudice" in society. (Actually, we can say that the two sets of terms are basically synonymous, as Weaver defined them all.)

You cannot, for instance, place a "rational" value on love. It would make no sense. Do you love your spouse 3.24 or 4.01 units? As the Austrian School of economics teaches, value is subjective. They are subjectively determined in the minds of individual actors rather than objectively through some formula by a scientist. (One cannot measure value cardinally and subject it to algebra. One can only observe and rank a given man's subjective value judgments with ordinal numbers.) Even if there were some device that somehow measured certain signals in brain-waves, it would be of no use. Different men value different things in different ways. Even an individual person values the same thing differently at different times. No use could be made of it in the study of economic theory, anyhow. There are thus real limits to rationalism and, of course, the same is true with "prejudice."

But this fact of subjectivity does tell us something rational. That is, that values are subjective.

Economics (something that is rationalistic) deals with the general question of human action. It deals with the implication of action. But the history of the actions of men is determined, for good and evil, by ideas. Economics, strictly speaking, cannot answer why this idea versus that. History, psychology, sociology, etc. help deal with that. All economics can do is say the results if ideas were shifted towards X, Y, and Z governmental policies.

(Unless I am mistaken, it is true that Weaver went a little too far in pushing aside rationalism in favor of "prejudice," but at the same time, however, he was not completely adverse to it. Anyone reading his texts could see that he was a gentleman of very logical mind. He just saw the limitations of rationalism. I would further note that the primary essay by Weaver on this subject I do have a few problems and nitpicks with, but I will not allow that to overshadow what I like and agree with---and I hope to show that here.)

To go back to prejudice, here is what Richard Weaver wrote:

[T]he man of frank and strong prejudices, far from being a political and social menace and an obstacle in the path of progress, is often a benign character and a helpful citizen. The chance is far greater, furthermore, that he will be more creative than the man who can never come to more than a few gingerly held conclusions, or who thinks that all ideas should be received with equal hospitality. There is no such a thing as being so broad you are flat.

Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle. For prejudices ... are often built-in principles. They are the extract which the mind has made of experience. Try to imagine a man setting out for the day without a single prejudice. Let us suppose that he has "confessed" his prejudices in the manner of confessing sins and has decided to start next morning with a fresh mind as the sinner would start a new soul. The analogy is false. Inevitably he would be in a state of paralysis. He could not get up in the morning, or choose his necktie, or make his way to the office, or conduct his business affairs, or, to come right down to the essence of the thing, even maintain his identity.

The Classes of Non-Rationalist Prejudice

As Weaver described it, there are three basic classes of this view of prejudice. These judgments might be considered prejudices, or prejudgments, but they are not of necessity unfounded or irrational.

The first class of prejudice deals with, wrote Weaver, "judgments whose verification has simply dropped out of memory." We might have originally reached the given judgments by logical analysis, but have simply forgotten about it for the straightforward fact that if we act on these judgments daily the logical foundation behind these judgments fades away. That is to say, we do not think about the logical foundation every time we act on or by the given prejudice. We have forgotten about it in our memory to make room for something else, so to speak. The success of the prejudice and, for us, the truth of it is based on the fact that it turns out successful day-after-day.

The next class deals with "the opinions we adopt from others." Obviously, the vast sum of our knowledge is based on this. It has been derived by learning from others. As Weaver said, if this were not the case, then "books and institutions of learning would lose their utility." An individual man can only prove a very small amount of all knowledge he holds in his head. And as society becomes increasingly complex and knowledge does likewise the greater this will be true for the man who wishes to attain broad knowledge. A man that had to prove every single thing in his head would not get that far in overall knowledge. Society would be doomed to live a hand-to-mouth existence if men adopted a view that all knowledge in the mind of a person had to be deduced in a way where everything had to be proved bottom-up. Today's generation, or any generation in whatever temporal location, in society could not build on top of the previous generations.

The second class also suggests the importance of authority figures in fields of knowledge. We all depend on them. But, as Weaver wrote, we must also keep in mind that man should always develop his ability to understand "the methods of verification." "[B]ut this," Weaver went on, "indeed differs from having to verify all over again the hard-won and accumulated wisdom of our society." Blind trust to authority is a bad, but so is out rightly rejecting sources of authority.

Finally the last class deals with "judgments ... which have subconscious origin." When we meet a new person, for example, we often have prejudgments on his character. As Weaver said: "The intuitions, innuendoes, and the shadowy suggestions which combine to form our opinion about, say, a character, could never be made public and formal in a convincing way." Very few people would deny that these prejudices are useful and many times true. (See "Stereotyping Defended" by Ninos Malek.)

And as Brad Lowell Stone explained in his book about Robert Nisbet, "[p]rerational, emotional attachment to certain habits, beliefs, and practices contributes to an understanding of the world." The prejudices of a people help shape society and the various societal institutions. It is true when men, like Edmund Burke, say that the species is wise but the individual is dumb.

Conformity, Leveling, and De-Individualization

The assault against this prejudice, noted Weaver, is coupled with an attack on society for the purpose of bringing about "conformity, leveling, and de-individualization." At the root of this, as said above, is the socialist hatred of distinctions. But distinctions are what make up society.

To once again quote Weaver:

However paradoxical it may appear at first sight, we find when we examine actual cases that communities create a shared sentiment, a oneness, and a loyalty through selective differentiation of the person who make them up. A society is a structure with many levels, offices, and roles, and the reason we feel grateful to the idea of society is that one man's filling his role makes it possible for another to fill his role, and so on. ... This is a truistic observation, no doubt, but too little attention is given to the fact that society exists in and through its variegation and multiplicity, and when we speak of a society's "breaking down," we mean exactly a confusion of these roles, a loss of differentiation, and a consequent waning of the feeling of loyalty. Society makes possible the idea of vocation, which is the primary source of distinctions.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, paralleling this overall discussion, has linked the connection between these natural heterogeneous distinctions as the "concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract." It is thus, he said, "[f]amilies, authorities, communities, and social ranks" that are the "empirical-sociological" result of a natural order based on private property and that "[p]roperty and property relationships do not exist apart from families and kinship relationships."

But it is socialists who wish to turn society into a homogeneous mass of no distinctions; something quite different and apart from a natural order based on the private property ethic. I would also argue that democracy wishes to do the same with the idea of one-man and one-vote. It pretends that men are equal and identical to each other. To ever get to a society like that, however, would require a "Brave New World."

(In actual practice their desire to bring about "utopia" will only substitute one form of hierarchy and distinctions with another.)

As Weaver brilliantly argued in the book Visions of Order, this idea fundamentally changes how war is conducted. State and society become blended together, distinctions are lost, and then war becomes war against all. With no distinctions and a democratic ideology there can be no distinctions made in war between combatants and noncombatants. There can be no distinctions between women and men. Chivalry in war gets abandoned.

What kind of nation sends women into combat? Should that not be a common sense question to ask? (One time, by a self-described "conservative," I was called a "sexist" because I asked this very question! If that makes me a "sexist," then a sexist be I.) (See, for example, "Mothers Wearing Army Boots" by Larry L. Beane II.)

It is "leftist rhetoric," says Llewellyn Rockwell, that attacks a major "bulwark against State power." This bulwark includes "the habits, prejudices, traditions, and institutions that form the basis of settled, middle-class community life." What needs to be protected and fought against, for the conservative-libertarian, is quite clear.

Relativism and Language

The march towards leftism and statism has leaked out and polluted man's understanding of himself, society, culture, and state. Because leaving behind distinctions brings a man to believe standards or ideals do not exist. That everything exists relative to everything else. That "middle of the roadism" in politics is the safe way to go because "extremes" lead to consistent and non-relativistic positions. It leads to the notion that all values and ideas can sit side-by-side without having logical problems of incompatibility. And it ultimately leads to the idea that language itself is purely a relativistic concept.

Such would be a world where "the application of a word" could not be "judged 'right' or 'wrong,'" wrote Weaver (in another essay of his).

Without getting too deep into this large topic, what is language, interestingly enough, based on? Language is based on symbols, stereotypes, generalizations.* It is something that allows us to discern reality. Now clearly this is antagonistic towards the extreme relativists.

Moreover, as Dr. Hoppe reasons, there are things we can know about language a priori. This, as well, hurts the relativist. To repeat what I typed in the linked-to studyblog: Connecting words to objects works in a conventional system that is implicitly established a priori. Using this convention presupposes man knows what it is. One can only define something with language when the convention system to do such is known beforehand. Man cannot just define "define" without this a priori foundation. Defining any word requires this.

Weaver described language as a "medium of exchange." Because of this it has (and needs) some kind of basic identity to it. True, language does change through time. (As Weaver described it, there are two kinds of natural and good changes: a "linguistic drift" and a "semantic shift.") On the other hand, not all changes are good (a "rhetorical substitution" or a "rhetorical prevarication"). Weaver gave the example of the word "liberalism." It changed into meaning something entirely different than its actual, original definition.

*(Left-libertarians would similarly have to hate this fact about language, it would seem to me. It reveals some of the defectiveness of their hate of any notion or concept of "group." Almost always they look at generalizations and stereotypes with antipathy. But it is the foundation to language itself. Additionally, when one compares a lot of what Weaver has to say on modernity----much of it I believe is quite true and actually quite deductive in an almost "Austrian"-sense----it seems that the "left" version of libertarianism has many problems in their views on personal morality, culture, nation, tradition, etc. Some of it is due to misunderstanding [for example, how someone like me would define "tradition"], but be this as it may. Libertarianism is for liberty, period. But I want to see a free, economically healthy, and moral society. They go hand-in-hand for me, and I judge they all ultimately bond together, more-or-less.)

Some Concluding Thoughts

"Ideas Have Consequences." The deformation of Western Civilization, for Richard Weaver, resulted from man moving away from an ethos of transcendental values. Thus the solution is to attempt to move people back to upholding those ideas and values. As for the restoration of prejudice in society, Weaver thought that its "relation to society and conduct" ought to be "reexamined and revalued." Once that is done the term prejudice would return to its proper meaning and no longer would it be viewed pejoratively.

This topic, I believe, also connects with today's modern idea to hate the word "discriminate" or "discrimination." But how can any man have a developed and mature personality without having a "discriminating mind?" Is that not the mark of such a man? Is that not a requisite?

How can we make wise choices in our life if we do not discriminate wisely? Indeed, how can we even act without discriminating against alternative choices?

When a man discriminates distastefully it says nothing against discrimination. It only says that the given man does not have a discriminating mind. As the great Butler Shaffer argues (see "Bring Back Discrimination!"), a main defect in today's modern culture is that man has lost the ability to discriminate. So, echoing Dr. Shaffer: Bring Back Discrimination! And, while we are at it, Bring Back Prejudice!