WHEN CONSERVATIVE MEANS LIBERAL

Despite polarization, one movement gathers bi-partisan support: “food freedom,” (loosening  regulations when sales are between local producers/ buyers.)    “Conservatives” resist regulatory overload, so they are on board.  “Liberals” support local farmers, so they are in.  

It could go otherwise. “Conservatives” tend to favor free markets, which, in practice, privilege big companies.  “Liberals” think kindly of regulations. Yet, when it comes to food freedom, conservatives side with the little guy and liberals willingly waive regulations.

Strange, especially if we only attend to journalistic shorthand. There, “conservative” and “liberal” become purified incompatibles.  Historically/philosophically, the labels are mongrels. 

One attempt to sort things out:

LIBERAL. The archetypes are the  “classical liberals¨ from 17th/18th centuries (prototypical: John Locke 1632-1704). They were (a) reformers; (b) their aim was emancipatory; (c) their notion of human nature was

individualistic; (d) they invented a story of an aboriginal condition (“state of nature”) in which humans were freedom-possessing individuals; (e) some of these freedoms had to be willingly given up because of life with others; (f)  rights were only given up within contracts entered into by rational, informed individuals. Outside of contracts there were no obligations. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) said it clearly: any obligation upon an individual arises, solely, “from some act of his own.” 

The major freedom-constricting agents in the 17th

century  were aristocrats. Liberal reform sought removal of artificial aristocratic constraints. That way, with a resultant minimal state, the  bourgeois (urban, business-oriented) class, could flourish. By the 19th century, classical liberalism (aka “free market capitalism”) had (1) been adopted by the commercial class; (2) this class was now on the ascendance; (3) it was creating a new underclass of

impoverished, overworked laborers; (4) publicly elected officials could not intervene in the economic sphere, a sphere that was part of liberalism’s pre-political realm outside the purview of legitimate state intervention 

At this point, the reformist  dimension of “liberalism” parted ways with its 18th century programmatic dimension. Emancipation remained the aim. The enemies of freedom had changed. “Liberal” still meant “reformer,” but now reform challenged the “laissez-faire” status quo the older liberalism had championed. The minimal state, once a liberal ideal, came to be seen as a  limit on the freedom of laborers.

The result is what we have today: “liberals” with roots in classical liberalism, but supporting policies at odds with the program of classical liberalism.

CONSERVATIVE.  20th century “liberal” reformers faced opposition.  Defenders of the status quo were “conservatives.” Ironically, what they sought to

conserve was classical liberalism. The result was a linguistic jumble:  those seeking to preserve liberalism were called “conservatives.” “Liberals," by contrast wished to overturn liberalism. It’s a lot less complicated in some European countries where “liberal” still means supporter of free market capitalism.

Things get even more convoluted.  “Conservatism" did not always mean “defender of free enterprise.”  Capitalism is a great engine of change. Preserving the ancient ways is not high on its priority list. It dismisses traditional virtues and imposes a single value: profit.  

A more old-fashioned conservatism predates classical liberalism. Some contrasts: (a) For liberals, humans are essentially individuals. For traditionalist conservatives, humans, as Aristotle long ago insisted, are social

animals. (b) Liberals tend to be rationalists. Conservatives  don’t dismiss intelligence, but rather insist on exercising it in conjunction with experience and tradition. (c) Liberals are reluctant to embrace substantive values, arguing that people should be free to live the lives they wish. Conservatives accept that some modes of living are simply more conducive to a fulfilling human life than others.  (d) Liberals, in their reformist zeal, consider human nature as infinitely malleable. Conservatives worry about “utopian” plans

conceived without concern for experience, customs, cultural practices, realities of the human condition. (e) Liberals only accept obligations that issue from contracts. Conservatives believe that our naturally embedded situatedness occasions responsibilities and obligations.   Infants, for example, cannot, by definition, be parties to a contract. Yet parents, without such a contract, can be said to have obligations to their children. The same can be said for animals and the natural world.   

America, born in the 18th century, was imprinted by classical liberal ideas.  That is why economic conservatism converges with the older liberalism. The philosophical challenge for the 21st century is that of articulating a more biologically and historically defensible understanding of the human condition. What would this mean? Moving beyond notions that became sedimented in the 19th century:  individualism, the state of nature fantasy, the notion that humans are, by nature, only selfish, that life is a struggle for existence. Within the new context, liberalism and conservatism would continue, but be redefined. What would not change, as we shall see in the next post--the constant temptation toward angelism.

"ASCETIC FEASTING"

Eid al Fitr is a feast, a communal celebration to mark the end of  Ramadan. Mardi Gras is a feast, a communal celebration. It precedes 40 days of restrained eating.  Feasting is religious because it celebrates a great yea-saying to creation. Fasting is religious  because it acknowledges how the great yea-and-amen saying includes an important ethical dimension: a yea-saying to responsibility. Responsibility means, as the ancient Greeks recognized, responding in a way that finds the right path, a path that typically avoids extremes and seeks balance.  Embodying the right balance in behavior means developing appropriate habits. Developing appropriate habits involves training, exercise and effort. Here is where fasting fits in. Fasting offers a ritualized opportunity to engage in such training.  

Philosophers, sadly, have missed the significance of feasting and fasting. Mind-fixated, they have tended to downplay feasting since it is associated with bodily appetites.  At the same time, they have tended to distort the importance of fasting, describing it in terms of self-discipline as a way to promote the renunciation of bodily desires. The exaggerated positions that result: On one side, all feasting considered as gluttony;  on the other, a need to suppress appetites.

In all of this, a perfectly good word was ruined.  The term

“ascetic” originally meant someone well trained or skilled.  A good athlete would serve as a typical example. So would an accomplished musician. Askein meant to train, i.e. to take natural dispositions and bring them to their proper fruition.  

With regard to virtuous behavior, “asceticism” did not initially mean suppressing or eliminating naturally occurring desires and dispositions. Vice, as excess with regard to desires and appetites, did represent a problem.  The virtuous way to avoid excess was not to suppress the appetite. Rather excesses were avoided by shaping habits, by training, by undertaking an ascesis. Such a training encouraged the development of habits that did not dismiss but rather properly channeled appetites, desires, dispositions. 

For the older, original, meaning of “ascetic” to remain, a particular philosophical position had to be dominant.  Humans had to be understood as continuous wholes, not as bifurcated entities. Once the bifurcation (mind vs body) took hold, once ex-carnation rather than in-carnation became the default understanding, then “ascetic” began to change its meaning.  Ultimately, it became the term we know today, the one that connotes self-deprivation, self-abnegation, self-denial. It is hard for us even to imagine how it once meant something quite different, how it emphasized the need for practices that would help us carry out activities which  brought dispositions to their proper culminations, how athletes and musicians would be good examples of “ascetics.”. 

The shift began with the ancient Stoics as the center of gravity moved from Athens to Rome. For the Stoics, ascesis began its movement toward a particular kind of exercise, one that aimed, not to refine, but to expunge, appetites.  The Stoic understanding, first absorbed and then spread by the Roman empire, eventually became the default position in Europe. 

Swept aside by all this was the pre-Stoic, Aristotelian understanding that emphasized not free exercise vs suppression, but rather behavior that, depending on which habits were cultivated, would become  virtuous or vicious. Virtue and vice did not map simplistically onto suppression or free reign or appetite. Rather virtuous behavior was associated with the proper channelling of appetites, desires, dispositions.   Vice, on the other hand, arose when the proper target has been missed, either by excess or privation. 

To articulate, as best as he could, what it meant to achieve the right target, , Aristotle famously spoke of the “mean.”   We

might translate the “mean” as the right blend at the right time in the right way. Appetites, desires, dispositions are multiple

and a hodge podge of good and bad.  Virtue dominates vice when the better dispositions are cultivated and, via the proper ascesis, well-educated (in the literal sense of drawing out what is already there, making real what initially is present only in the status of possibility).

Food offers a good and prevalent example. Gluttony (nothing but feasting) and anorexia (nothing but fasting) stand as excesses to be avoided.  Eating can be unbounded, careless, sloppy, enslaved by immediate gratification. Overreaction to such excesses can lead to rigid, narrow, schemes of suppression. 

Missing in this wild pendulum swing is the understanding of virtue as the bringing of appetites to their proper consummations. The path of responsibility, of ascesis, of virtue, of getting blends and culminations right in actual practice, is not easy.  But constantly working at getting that blend right is a way to live out the yea-and-amen attitude to the world in which we find ourselves.

ISOLATOES

A recent news story has provided fodder for comedians.  It’s about a practice for which new words had to be invented:  “Solomoon” was one, “Unimoon” another. Despite the suffix, the practice has nothing to do with celestial bodies. It’s about changes in what used to be called “honeymoon.”

What’s indicated by “uni” and “solo”?  Getting married and taking separate holidays. A New York Times story got  the buzz going.

Sociologically, the trend is understandable.  Many couples, at the time of their wedding, have already got years of shared living behind them.  The post-wedding trip is just another vacation. Some vacations work best together, some apart.

Philosophically, the move is also understandable. It’s part and parcel of an important, post-medieval, shift in self-definition.  The ancient world had been overly focused on community. Community, in turn, meant rigid and oppressive social roles. Modern European thought offered an alternative: individualism.

As is often the case, a pendulum swing from one extreme can, after many centuries, move far in the opposite direction.  A dominating strand now thinks of humans as fundamentally, essentially, basically, individuated units. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick coined an appropriate term: “isolatoes.”

For an ancient thinker like Aristotle, this simply falsified our experience. Humans were “political animals.” By this Aristotle

did not mean that we all aspire to political office.  He meant that humans were, by nature, social entities. “Isolatoes” were either gods or beasts. Humans, after all, come into existence only after the conjunction of sperm and egg, gestate in a female, live in communities, speak a language, and are not totipotent (i.e. need others). Those who think of themselves as fundamentally isolated and autonomous can be described as idiotic, using a word whose Greek root means “personal,”  “peculiar,” “private.”

Because our mode of being is social, one great good for humans is friendship. “Even a rich man,” Aristotle said, “needs friends.” Friendship, as Aristotle described it,  exists on a continuum. There is (a) the optimal sense of friendship in which people wish the best for each other and occasion mutual transformation toward the better.  Other friendships are (b) those of “enjoyment,” when the companionship is based on the pleasant company of others; and (c) companionship built around services that people provide for one another. Optimal friendship is rare, but, like 20-20 vision, remains the aspirational norm.  

Where there is friendship, Aristotle also claimed, there is no need for justice. Aristotle does not mean that friends will be unfair to each other. He is saying that, in friendship, disagreements can be resolved without fixed, antecedent codes of law.  Such codifications, i.e. contracts, are needed when the relationship is less than that of friendship in the fullest sense.

Key strands in Modern philosophy altered this Aristotelian landscape.  Humans are not inherently social, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau (1712-1778) and John Locke (1632-1704) will argue.  Humans are basically separate units, wholly independent in the state of nature. As inheritors of this tradition, it makes sense that our practices would include honeymoons alone.  This trend follows a pattern traced by the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. It also helps explain the growing phenomenon of eating alone.

Within such a setting, contractualism, rather than being a second-best arrangement, now becomes primary. Pan-contractualism becomes the order of the day.  All relations are envisioned through the lens of contract.

This means that even for friendship, the older Aristotelian continuum fades away. What Aristotle considered second-best now becomes the general default.

The special friendship called marriage has to make its way in this new semantic landscape. As a result, the two individuals will (1) think of  themselves as primarily autonomous units; (2) consider their partnership on the model of a contract; (3) assume the relationship has been entered into for some combination of Aristotle’s two lesser forms of friendship, pleasant companionship and mutual usefulness; (4) marginalize, if not ignore entirely, the Aristotelian outcome of mutual transformation.

At the time of the wedding, if no contractual clause precludes separate post-wedding trips, then why not, especially if such honeymoon-alone arrangements serve to foster greater enjoyment or utility.

Honeymoon alone, bowling alone, eating alone.  There is a trend here. It’s not a trend that comes from nowhere.  It has been prepared by a paradigm shift in philosophical anthropology. The main ingredients of that shift: humans as primarily isolatoes, pan-contractualism, understandings of friendship that overlook Aristotle’s optimal type, concentrating on enjoyment and utility. Given the new climate of opinion it’s kind of surprising that it took so long for the monomoon trend to emerge.

Virtues: A Lesson from the kitchen

Maya Angelou’s poem satirizing health food
purists starts this way:   

No sprouted wheat and soya shoots

And Brussels in a cake,

Carrot straw and spinach raw,

(Today, I need a steak).

A later stanza addresses the main theme:

Health-food folks around the world

Are thinned by anxious zeal,

They look for help in seafood kelp

(I count on breaded veal).

“Anxious zeal” carries an important
warning. Avoid monolithic fixation.
The ancient Greek temple at Delphi offered
a similar maxim:  “nothing in excess.”

Socrates and Aristotle approached the
issue from a different perspective. They
insisted on the “unity of the virtues.”  In
one way the “unity” was definitional. All
virtuous behavior ashared one trait:
knowledge. People who acted virtuously
knew what do do in challenging situations.
In another way the unity was practical.
They believed that living a good life, in the
fullest sense, required the conjunction of
virtues, ideally a unity that included all the
virtues. Being brave, for example, or loyal
did not, by itself, qualify an individual to be
recognized as admirable.  Isolating any
single factor, even if initially benign, would
lead to its metastasizing. In the end, the aim
of living a good life would be frustrated
rather than served. Without the unity of
virtues, a life could not be described, on
the whole, and unqualifiedly, as
praiseworthy.

Still, the word “unity” in “unity of virtues”
is problematic. It’s not possible to combine
all virtues in a single unified synthesis. This
is especially so since some virtues clash
with each other. Loyalty is good. So is
honesty. Sometimes, loyalty and honesty
clash.  This is even more the case with the
mercy/justice pair. Maximize one and, by
necessity, the other is minimized. Bottom
line: the phrase “unity of virtues” is getting
at something important, but the exact
phrasing is problematic.

Here is where Angelou’s warning about
“anxious zeal” in the context of food
can help. Blends and combinations
underpin good cooking. When we think of
food, we are set in a context where
multiplicity is the rule. (1) There is
multiplicity in terms of ingredients: many
vegetables,,fruits, spices, herbs, meats.
 (2) The sought-after dish is also typically
multiple: taste is important, so is
presentation, and, of course so is health.
(3) Some combinations work better than
others. Some blends just work against
good taste.

Since multiplicity is pervasive with regard to

food, a term like “unity” is problematic.  It
can be understood as encouraging the

focus on a single factor, e.g. health isolated
from taste.  It can also be understood as
encouraging an all-encompassing
combination which forces them into a
unity of all possible factors. Such a unity,
as with “unity of the virtues” is impossible
in practice, if only because some of the
elements are incompatible. Neither unity as
isolation of a single factor, nor unity as the
conjunction of factors, offers a helpful
approach. Instead of unity, it is better to
speak of “harmony.”  Besides allowing
more flexibility as regards blends, harmony
allows for a more graduated scale than the
all-or-nothing connotation that accompanies
“unity.”

“Anxious zeal” revolves in the intellectual
solar system whose sun is “unity.”  It
isolates a single factor at the expense of
others. Thinking in more ancient terms, it
also violates the the Delphic advice to do
“Nothing in excess.” How to avoid “anxious
zeal,” and respect “nothing in excess”?
Update the philosophical advice about the
“unity of the virtues.” In particular,
substitute “harmony” for “unity.”

Harmony’s advantages: (a) It takes account
of what is inevitable, the tug of multiple
virtues. (b) It says “do not isolate one
element,” especially “do not isolate one
element to the degree that the others are
occluded.” (c) It recognizes natural and
inevitable incompatibilities. (d) It replaces
an absolutist scale for one which makes
room for more-or-less, better-and-worse.  

In a sense, going back to Angelou,  it’s like
better-and-worse as regards a meal.  If the
food is healthy, that is a good thing. If it is
healthy, but tastes bad, that is not good.  
Healthy and tasty, is better. If it is healthy,
tasty, and shared with good company, that
is better still.  The food/virtue overlap
allows for important updating of “anxious
zeal,” “nothing in excess,” and the “unity
of the virtues.”  Rephrased, these would
read: either “zeal for harmony,” “everything
in balance,” or “optimal combinations.”

ANOREXIA INTELLECTUALIS

The Righteous Brothers had a hit song with a line that highlighted an important stomach-related word.  “I’ve hungered” it went, then, repeating the word, “hungered for your touch”.  It’s a lovely song, but it has nothing do do with eating. Still, that doesn’t matter.  Listeners know that “hunger” and “hungered,” when the context is human beings, can mean more than filling an empty stomach.

Take Aristotle. One of his most cited

lines reads like this: “all men, by nature, desire to know.”

What he says is that we have an "orexis" for knowledge. The term translated “desire” can mean reach for, yearn for, or hunger for. But why can “hunger” a biologically-derived term, apply in contexts of affection and intelligence?  Humans are biological creatures and they are more than that. The metaphorical use of “hunger”  offers one level of support for such continuity with difference.   Aristotle’s entire philosophy was friendly to biology. This did not mean he reduced "human" to the merely biological.  There are continuities and differences. He insisted that all ideals had a natural basis and all natural tendencies had an ideal culmination (to paraphrase George Santayana).

Philosophers are often accused of playing with words. Sometimes this is true.  Sometimes, recognizing distinctions is meaningful. In his book.

Hunger, Raymond Tallis suggests that “hunger” and “appetite” should be distinguished.  The former, along with the non food-centered term, “desire,” is more indicative of all-embracing humanity than is “appetite.”  The difference? Narrative time. “A desire is an appetite that has a story--albeit unfolding, evolving, fragmented, at its heart.”  It is a hunger that narrates itself and tries to make sense of itself.”

Appetites are raw, instinctual, sated in a stimulus-response  way. Desires/hungers are multi-layered. They are often occasioned, not by an object but by a relationship. That’s certainly the case in both the Unchained Melody of the Righteous Brothers and in Aristotle’s claim about human hunger for knowledge. What is yearned for is ongoing (time-factored) actualizing: making love real in one case and satisfying curiosity in the other.

The culminations of such hungers occur only within spans of time. Unfolding within spans of time means not only that they are ongoing, but that they require effort, and, instead of unimprovable perfection, often result in culminations with loose ends.  They are thus precarious, subject to contingency, require that we make ourselves vulnerable, and can be frustrating.

For those reasons, there is a general tendency to an-orexia, the suppression of hunger. This is not just the pathology associated with physiological appetite.

 There is also intellectual an-orexia: the longing for absolutely secure, contingency-free, doubt-free existence. One impediment to such security: thinking. After all, thinking is bothersome, annoying, discomforting.  If only the yearning, the hunger for knowing could be suppressed, if only intellectual anorexia could become the rule, then a sense of comfort, and security could be established. The paths to intellectual anorexia are well-paved and multiple.  Two came to special prominence during the Modern (roughly 1600-1900) era: logical deduction and calculative rationality. Using formal logic to deduce conclusions that are certain has little to do with thinking. The latter always engages complicated situations and arrives at resolutions that are only secure within varying degrees of probability.  Instrumental rationality, which starts with a pre-ordained end and then calculates the most efficient means of getting there, offers a poor substitute for thinking which puts ends themselves into play. Other strategies have been around forever: absolutism and skepticism.

But wait, readers may be thinking, aren’t these opposed to one another.  Well, yes, they are. One says, “the answers pre-exist, all you have to do is accept them.” The other says “there are no answers.”

Despite their differences, and like logic and instrumental rationality, both offer a particular and attractive invitation: stop thinking. It might be “stop thinking because the answers are already at hand.”  It could be “stop thinking because there are no answers anyway.” In each case, the result is the same: peace of mind occasioned by sidestepping the annoying practice of thinking.

For the physiological anorexic, the body’s constant demands for edibles is felt as an oppressive demand. For the philosophical anorexic it is the demands of the mind that are annoying. Thinking involves “trials,” literally the processes of sifting out, of trying one path and then another. Such processes are  are also “trying” in the sense of being annoying, bothersome. Like hunger, thinking never leads to stasis. The practice is unending. How to eliminate such discomfort? Go intellectually an-orexic. Hide behind pure logic. Transform thinking into calculating. Pretend the answers are already obvious. Insist that finding answers is not possible. In other words, suppress a basic human orexis, stop thinking.