Richard Posner on Posnerism
As a Posnerist, I am very sympathetic to the following:
For myself, I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene—provided it takes liberalism with it. I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations rather than on conformity to a set of preconceptions rooted in a rapidly vanishing past. We have accumulated a substantial history of liberal and conservative failures.
And:
But there is a difference between rational preconceptions, based on theory and experience, and rigid emotional preconceptions, such as dogmatic libertarianism or egalitarianism or ungrounded hopeful beliefs such as that everybody in the world is yearning for and ready for democracy, that tell one more about the thinker’s personality than about the quality of his thought and that may be impervious to reconsideration in the light of new evidence. We should be skeptical of world views rooted in emotion that insulate people against inquiry into the foundations of their beliefs. Concretely, there is a range of perfectly respectable economic theorizing, at one end (the interventionist) typified by Paul Samuelson and at the other end (the libertarian) by Milton Friedman, but it would be a mistake to commit to one or the other end since neither can be proved to be correct.
At its best, I think conservatism is Posnerism — a skeptical but mildly meliorist approach that draws on insights from market liberalism, inherited tradition, etc. As the gap between conservatism and Posnerism has grown, conservatism has been the worse for it.
Frankly, when I read that sort of stuff, I have to shake my head. I share your admiration for Posner (how could I not?) and even his general outlook.
But this is the most oft-repeated line of quackery in political discourse. Of course everyone wants to rid “ideology” from the political debate and focus on dispassionate, pragmatic analysis — and oh! How coincidental that my dispassionate pragmatic analysis conforms so well with my cultural and moral values! I’m the only sane man in the room, and the way I know the other guys are insane is they think they’re sane, and yet they disagree with me.
Nevermind the fact that the “get us rid of ideology, let’s all be cool and rational” argument stinks pretty badly, because it’s been used to justify some pretty awful stuff in the past, and that it is iffy from a democratic perspective, since the best way to “get rid of” ideology and replace it with cool-headed pragmatism is to replace voters with an aristocracy of PhD technocrats, something we know all conservatives are clamouring for. Nevermind that this line is most often used as a punt to wave away defense against a particular ideology (I’m thinking of life issues here). Nevermind the fact that even if it were a good thing to get rid of ideology in the debate it would not be, je ne sais pas how do you say, possible (kind of a bummer for a pragmatist, to propose not-feasible things). Nevermind the fact that even the most “pragmatic” considerations often have powerful ideological underpinnings and that it is self-delusion at best to think you can separate the two (think congestion pricing turning into a debate about car culture, individualism, etc.).
Most importantly, it is a cop out. What is public debate, what is politics, if not a discussion about values, about what we hold dearest? Isn’t that what makes it (when at its best) such a noble art? Isn’t it what democracy is all about? That a people decide what shared values they choose to live by?
Think about my congestion pricing example: the self-righteous pragmatist would see these considerations about car culture, postgrad hippies on bikes vs. the common man in his car, as “polluting” (pun not intended) a debate that should only be about the granular details of transportation policy. But it’s the other way around: of course your decisions about transportation policy are a reflection of the values you believe in. They change the texture, the atmosphere of a city. God knows here in Paris the mayor’s transportation plans is a reflection of the values he believes in, of a bobo-museum town with nice cafés and museums but no economic life. How in the hell should we not have that debate? About what city we want, what we want its reflection to say about us who vote and live and pay taxes in it? So to the car-culture people the congestion pricing advocates shouldn’t say “we’re pragmatists, you’re ideologues, shut up” (and not just because that’s terrible politics). They should say “We believe in the same values of individualism as you do, and it’s precisely why we want congestion pricing. Individualism means individual responsibility, it means paying for the negative externalities you create such as increased pollution, etc. etc.” They should engage, they should debate, and they should debate values, instead of haughtily dismissing others (which is a pretty ideological thing to do, by the way).
This is a despairingly common fallacy, a pitfall of intellectualism, of people who live inside their heads and think that if everybody lived inside their heads like them (a) the world would be a better place and (b) everybody would agree with them.
By all means let’s have a civil public debate. By all means let’s rely on evidence, let’s be pragmatic, by all means let’s be mindful of the weight of tradition and certainly by all means let us be humble about what government and politics can and cannot do. But the first step of jettisoning humility is to think that the world would be oh so much better off if it were ran by intellectuals like you.
— PEG · Dec 2, 09:29 AM · #
P.S. When I say “intellectuals like you” I don’t mean you Reihan Salam, or even Richard Posner, I mean my intellectual straw-man (Larry Summers, mayhaps?). Also you’ll notice that I chose the congestion pricing example because I read that pretty awesome article about Janette Sadik-Khan you linked to earlier.
— PEG · Dec 2, 09:49 AM · #