Although I’ve weighed against too much professional bureaucracy, I don’t want this to be an attack on intellectuals in general. I think if we’re going to adapt to this century, we’re going to have to listen to scientists. The tension becomes even more, um, tense, when I consider that I want very much to listen to the scientists, but I don’t want them telling me what to do. One could posit a resolution of this tension in making scientists be descriptive of our problems rather than prescriptive of solutions. However, I don’t think the dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive is as clear-cut as one may think. Moreover, my penchant for the wisdom of crowds I doubt extends to science, which often has very specific knowledge. I think, somehow, that the answer may lie in education of the public, so that scientists are not magicians, waving facts they culled from who-knows-where.

Forgive me if I have been ignoring current issues. I’m trying very hard to look far into the future that it is becoming difficult to see what is right in front of me. In fact, I’m feeling myself start to withdraw from this world and enter a world of abstraction. As much as I hate abstraction, theory is useful and I’m trying to do more forest thinking, as opposed to tree thinking. I’m trying to see how liberty can survive in the “long term,” for this century, that is.

Hypothesis: With the growth of population, the modern world needed professional bureaucracies to deal with increasingly complex issues. In the postmodern world, the complexities of issues have outstripped even the abilities of a professional bureaucracy. Hence, the need for a new federalism, perhaps. We also need to figure out how to harness the wisdom of crowds.

I’m still unsure about the ways this new decentralization of power will take place. I’ve been thinking about the radical ways in which the internet can create communities that are not geographically-based. I’m not sure what implications this has.

In any case, even without our current crises, our democracy is slowly dying and the body politic is becoming corrupt. The lack of agency, the lack of participation, along with the growth of the professional bureaucracy, is a threat to the continuation of liberty.

Any thoughts?

I am toying with a concept of “neofederalism,” which is a horrible name, so maybe I should just call myself a federalist. I think that if we’re going to solve problems like health care, it cannot be done on the national level. The issue is too complex, and so we should experiment on the state level to see what works and what doesn’t. However, these are not laboraties for federal policy. If a policy spreads, it will not be top-down. It will spread from state to state because the idea works, and because each state will have the freedom to adapt good policy to the needs of the people. I think giving health care is an admirable goal, but I don’t believe it can be done on the national level. I think other similar “liberal” concerns cannot be dealt with on the national level, or will be better dealt with on the state level. Some may argue that this process is slow, and so we should use the federal government. But it’s supposed to be slow. We are dealing with complex issues, and it will take years to hammer out the kinks. We should not be so hasty. We should also not be so arrogant as to believe that our idea will most definitely work for all people. It is an inherently conservative approach.

When we look at the current state of affairs, we see a paralyzed Washington. Some think that we should jolt the parties back to the center. I think that will take a long time, and even then, it won’t be enough. We can take the initiative on the state level, and we should. Legislators and governors of mixed parties can get along just fine and have done some amazing things. Some people think, “Okay, we should go ahead and duplicate this on the national level.” I don’t think that at all. I say, “We should duplicate this in every state.” If state governments can work together and Congress can’t, then screw Congress. When they’re ready to act like adults, maybe then we’ll talk. If the grown-ups are on the state level, then we should enter a dialogue on the state level. I don’t think it’s a crisis if Congress can’t get its act together on things like health care; it’s a benefit that these guys aren’t screwing things up worse. Led Congress be in gridlock, and let the more local levels act.

In my dream world, people more readily recall the name of their state legislators than they do their Congresspersons and Senators.

I also may end up advocating a more radical localism, but this I’m even less sure of than my new embrace of federalism.

I think a similar type of approach may be taken to world affairs. We should admit that the world is too big. We cannot solve all the world’s problems. We should let regions and countries solve their own problems. We should promote democracy, but we should not be too eager. The imposition of radical equality on an unprepared state only leads to chaos. Instead of the top-down approach of Iraq and unilateralism, we can lead by example, along with the rest of the West. We can encourage values, but we cannot impose them. We should criticize when we can, but the power to criticize is not a license to force people to change their ways.

These ideas are all starting points, not finishing points. I think it’s important to enter a bigger dialogue, so that we can address the political problems of the 21st century.

Sullivan linked to this, where I found something that caught my attention: “Burke saw that, and saw habit not as something self-contained and self-justifying but as the accumulation and realization of goods that go beyond habit and consequently must somehow serve at least in concept as a more ultimate standard.”

More ultimate standard? Sounds strangely abstract…

But maybe that’s just coming from my current flirtations with Pragmatism. After all, Sullivan, in his book, fell prey to the Platonic cave story with its ultimate truth.

I believe that the notion of inherited rights is strongly against a “more ultimate standard” and more in line with practicality. So, I think Kalb is incorrect when he asserts:

Indeed, it seems to me that when you try to turn “don’t be stupid” into a general political philosophy, you are likely to end by simply dividing policies and politicians into those you like and those you don’t like and leaving it at that. Any reasoning not used opportunistically to support opinions already held would be abstract and ideological, and so non-Burkean. Your politics will tend to become at bottom a matter of asserting general personal superiority.

“Don’t be stupid” respects the idea that the stock of reason in man is so little. It’s not merely about what policies you like and don’t like. It’s about which policies are more radical and which are less radical. It’s about which policies have a chance at working and which don’t. And, it’s always about looking for unintended consequences. The point of conservatism is that these ideas need not come from some over-arching ideology.

Besides, why does Kalb assume that the point of politics is his search for a “constructive function”? I leave you with a quote from the “operatic” Burke that Kalb links to: “It has been the misfortune (not, as these gentlemen think it, the glory) of this age, that everything is to be discussed, as if the constitution of our country were to be always a subject rather of altercation, than enjoyment.”

These are my preliminary thoughts, and I’ll sharpen them later.