Roger Kimball has good history and philosophical lessons for
us at American Greatness. He concludes:
For centuries, prudent political
philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of
freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist
tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a
new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the
struggling masses, but “reproductive freedom,” gay rights, the welfare state,
the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It
looks, in Marx’s famous mot, like
history repeating itself as farce. It would be a rash man, however, who made no
provision for a reprise of tragedy.
Such attitudes are all but
ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Although of relatively recent vintage,
they have spread rapidly. The triumph of this aspect of Enlightened thinking,
as [philosopher David] Stove notes, marked the moment when “the softening of human life became the
great, almost the only, moral desideratum.”
The modern welfare state is one
result of the triumph of abstract benevolence. Its chief effects are to
institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth
of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess. Both help to
explain why the welfare state has proved so difficult to dismantle. The
governments that support the welfare state, Stove points out,
are elected by universal adult
franchise; but an electorally decisive proportion of the voters—in some
countries, approaching a quarter—either is employed by government or is
dependent to a significant extent on some welfare programme. In these
circumstances it is merely childish to expect the welfare state to be reduced,
at least while there is universal suffrage. A government that did away with
free education, for example, or socialised medicine, simply could not be
re-elected. Indeed it would be lucky to see out its term of office.
Is there an alternative? Stove
quotes Thomas Malthus’ observation, from his famous “Essay
on Population,” that “we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of
human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage
state,” to “the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow
principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in
bettering his condition.”
“The apparently narrow principle
of self-interest,” mind you.
Contrast that robust, realistic
observation with Robert Owen’s blather about replacing the “individual selfish
system” with a “united social” system that, he promised, would bring forth a
“new man.”
Stove observes that Malthus’
arguments for the genuinely beneficent effects of “the apparently narrow
principle of self-interest” “cannot be too often repeated.” Indeed. Even so, a
look around at the childish pretended enthusiasm for socialism makes me think
that, for all his emphasis, Stove understated the case. Jim Carrey and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (not to mention a college student near you) would
profit by having a closer acquaintance with the clear-eyed thinking of Thomas
Malthus.
It’s the same lessons that gave America its first Thanksgiving; when collective socialism failed, the settlers
learned that freedom, incentive, and private property harnessed self-interest
to the greater good.
Read Mr. Kimball’s entire essay here.
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