The Twilight Of The Educated Gods

IT SEEMS only yesterday that we saw our liberal masters, the educated gods, crossing their rainbow bridge into liberal Valhalla in part one of The Ring of the Obamalung. And very stirring it was. It’s a little shocking to wake up now and realize that we’ve run lickety split right through Die Wälkure and Siegried, with all the fun of incest, girls on horses, and dragon-slayers. Here we are already with the Three Norns on stage prophesying the end of the gods. To think that 20 hours of Wagner opera could go by so fast!

Look out, wails First Norn Paul Krugman, looking in horror at the thread of Fate. We are in danger of repeating the mistake of 1937, when the Fed put on the brakes and pitched us into the recession-within-a-depression of 1937-38. Don’t slow the printing press: not yet!

What the singing prophetess cannot bear to admit is that in 2011, just like in 1937, we are seeing the bankruptcy of Keynesian economics and inflationism. In 1933 to 1936 the New Dealers cartelized business, devalued the dollar, bailed out banks and homeowners, passed the Wagner Act that caused union wages to skyrocket, passed Social Security with its payroll tax, increased federal spending from $4.27 in 1932 to $9.17 billion in 1936. Golly, fellahs. If all that stuff won’t fix a Depression, I wonder what will?

And even if we knew, how could we get liberals to listen?

That’s why I believe that conservatives must master the liberal canon. We must argue against liberals using their own thinkers. The fatal flaw in the New Deal, ending in the misery of 1937-38, was the same as the Obamanomics of 2009-11. It is the idea that you can plan the future with a rational plan, treating people like mechanical wind-up dolls. And liberals were arguing against that in the 1940s.

I am talking about lefties Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their 1944 book The Dialectics of Enlightenment. All rational bourgeois business ends up as bourgeois domination, and this is already encoded in the very idea of Enlightenment, they wrote. “Enlightenment behaves toward things as dictators toward men.” The Enlightenment was a celebration of “instrumental reason,” using science and reason to do things in the world. That means treating everything as an instrument, a means to an end. When you get to using humans purely as a means you start moving down the road to slavery, for a slave is a person that has a status merely of a factor of production in, say, the business of producing cotton.

Horkheimer and Adorno are right about capitalism and domination. It was entrepreneurs from the Serene Republic of Venice that started up the first sugar plantations on Cyprus in the 13th century using serfs and Muslim slaves, according to Robert William Fogel in Without Consent or Contract. By the end of the 18th century the slave plantation had moved across the Atlantic and slave-produced goods constituted 30 percent of world trade. That’s what happens when businessmen get the power to treat “other” people purely as a means to an end with no checks and balances.

The slave planters ran into the anti-slavery movement and the factors owners into the Communist Manifesto. There were plenty of people who understood the danger of unchecked capitalist power. Immediately remedies were applied and capitalist domination was brought to heel.

But what about protection from governmental domination? Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the domination of fascism was a logical consequence of their beloved Enlightenment and its instrumental reason. But it is pretty obvious that their analysis applies in spades to post World War II communism and socialism—and even social democracy. Social democrats experience their programs as practical applications of settled social science—instrumental reason—so their government programs are just as problematical and just as likely to lead to domination as the notorious factories of the early industrial revolution and the infernal speed-up of Taylorism. That includes the power politics of Obamism and the 2,000 page bills of the center-left policy analysts. It does no good for liberals to insist that they are different because they are evolved and educated and they care. Domination is domination.

We have had legislation to curb the power of instrumental reason in business for over a century. How long must we wait to curb the power of instrumental reason in government?

But let’s get back to Obamadämmerung. After all the grand plans and heroics, the tricks and betrayals, and endless TelePrompTing, all the educated gods are swallowed up in the collapse of their citadel, Valhalla, and the Eternal Female, Brünnhilde, the proverbial Fat Lady, is left alone with her love and her grief.

Like they say. It ain’t over till the Fat Lady sings. But I wonder who will get to play the Fat Lady when the liberal Valhalla collapses on the heads of the educated gods.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

mysql close