Ex Libris

There is none. Jean-François Revel, writing in Without Marx or Jesus:

Jean-François Revel

When the state becomes no more than a device for preserving the state, then it matters little what its origins were.  It is, in any case, totalitarian, and therefore reactionary.  It is a mistake to think that Stalinism is a betrayal of Leninism.  Neither Lenin, if he had lived, nor Trotsky, if he had remained in power, would have acted any differently from Stalin.  All of their writings, all of their actions, and all of their speeches between 1917 and 1924, reflect the practice and the theory of a thoroughly Stalin-style dictatorship.  They began in January 1918 by dissolving, with the help of the army, the Constituent Assembly set up by elections – elections in which the Bolsheviks had received only one quarter of the votes.  From that moment, as Rosa Luxemburg has pointed out so well in The Russian Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky began from the principle that they knew the minds of the people better than did the people themselves.  As Lenin remarked at the Tenth Party Congress, held in March 1921, the Party “alone is capable of grouping, educating, and organizing the avant-garde of the proletariat and of all the working classes – that avant-garde being the only force able to offer opposition to the inevitable oscillations of the petit-bourgeoisie.”  And Trotsky, on the same occasion, added that “the Party is compelled to maintain the dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering, and even regardless of the transitory hesitations of the working class”

U·to·pi·a [yoo-toh-pee-uh]- noun - an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. The opposite of dystopia.
ORIGIN based on Greek ou not + tóp(os) a place

Last Exit to Utopia by Jean-François Revel

Note, dear reader, the origin of the term “utopia”: the Greek root indicates that utopia is, literally, nowhere.  It is not a place.  It does not exist.  Sir Thomas More, who first used the term, certainly never considered such a place to be realistically possible.  And the truth of the matter is that anyone remotely acquainted with the reality of human nature and history must admit that we do not live in a perfect world, and that such a place is impossible to create.

Anyone, that is, besides leftist intellectuals and politicians, who continue to insist – against the overwhelming evidence of history – that socialism can work, that indeed it must work!  They argue, in spite of all the plain evidence against them, that socialist solutions are more efficient and equitable than market solutions, and that the classical liberal system that has created the most vibrant societies and powerful economies in world history should be at least reined in and subjected to strict scrutiny, and at most outright replaced by a “more humane” socialist system.

Jean-François Revel was a French intellectual, a member of the Académie française, and one of the greatest French political philosophers of the 20th century, at least in the seemingly small branch of 20th century French political philosophy that wasn’t completely enamored of totalitarian schemes.  Prior to his death in 2006, he penned a book called Le Grande Parade, which has now been translated into English and re-titled Last Exit to Utopia, in which he exposes the intellectual and moral failure of leftist intellectuals who have served as apologists for the brutal communist regimes that brought misery and death to millions in the last century, and examines the project that was undertaken by the left after the fall of communism to rehabilitate Marxist and socialist ideas.

Anthony Daniels – AKA Theodore Dalrymple – contributes a fantastic preface to the English edition of the work.  An excerpt:

As Jean-François Revel establishes very clearly in this book, the left-leaning intelligentsia’s long infatuation with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries was not merely an intellectual error but, if not quite a criem itself, at the very least complicity with crime; and moreover crime on a scale virtually unparalleled in human history before the Nazis came on the scene.  With very few honorable exceptions, the whole of the left-leaning intelligentsia devoted a great deal of its formidable powers of sophistry to denying or exculpating the crimes of Communism, thus siding with the mass executioners rather than with the victims in the mass graves.

When the moral, economic, social and philosophical failure of Communism was admitted in the land of its birth, the Western left-leaning intelligentsia found itself with a serious and embarrassing problem.  It stood revealed for all to see as having, for many years, been morally not very different from, and not any better than, M. Le Pen of the French National Front, who once famously (or infamously) declared that the Holocaust was nothing but a detail of history.  While it is relatively easy, especially as one grows older, to admit to having been in error, even in gross error, it is very difficult to admit to having been a willing accomplice to evil, and evil of the most obvious and evident kind.  As M. Ravel convincingly explains, this accounts for the difference in the reception in France of two magisterial books about Communism by French scholars, François Furet’s Le passé d’une illusion, and Stephane Courtois’s Le Livre noir du communisme.

The first deals with what might be called the fashion for Communism as an intellectual error.  Anyone can be mistaken in his philosophy, and few people never change their philosophy in the light of experience and further reflection.  (An unchanging person would be suffering from what a medical friend of mine once called “a hardening of the concepts.”)  Therefore, however preposterous Marxism-Leninism might be as an intellectual system – “a farrago of nonsense,” as Professor Acton once called it – those who adhered to it do not stand convicted of wickedness or defect of character.  Hence Furet’s book, whose exposure of the errors of Communist doctrine could hardly be denied, was received respectfully and even with acclimation.

It was quite otherwise with Livre noir.  This book showed implacably that evil was implicit in both the theory and the practice of Communism, and that everywhere and anywhere it was tried, it resulted in the same appalling conduct of affairs, differing only as to scale.  Evil was in Communism’s DNA, as it were; and the crimes of Communist polities were not the result of a perversion of noble ideals, but were caused by the adoption of evil ideals.

Thus, those who espoused or sympathized with Communist ideals were convicted of harboring evil within themselves; and this is not an easy thing for people, especially those without a belief in original sin, to accept.  Courtois’s book was roundly condemned, therefore, by France’s left-leaning intelligentsia; and since it could not actually point to any serious factual errors contained in this massive work of scholarship, it resorted to defamation and the raising of smokescreens, such as that the book would bring relief and confort to the Front National.

Revel’s perspective seems to me a necessary antidote to the statist surge currently underway here in the United States.  Goodness knows this book is (unfortunately) on very few shelves among the current cadre of Washington “leaders.”  One can only hope the an electoral corrective is on the way, and that those who assume positions of power after the coming vote will take Ravel’s message to heart.

I was made aware of this book via a book review in the Wall Street Journal.  You can read it here.

The Road to Serfdom, page 174:

…wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.

In honor of the most important by-election in the history of the Unites States of America, I picked up Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom once again.  As usual with this book, I almost immediately ran across a passage worth quoting:

The Road To Serfdom

No doubt an American or English “Fascist” system would greatly differ from the Italian or German models; no doubt, if the transition were effected without violence, we might expect to get a better type of leader.  And, if I had to live under a Fascist system, I have no doubt that I would rather live under one run by Englishmen or Americans than under one run by anybody else.  Yet all this does not mean that, judged on our present standards, our Fascist system would in the end prove so very different or much less intolerable than its prototypes. There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental by-products but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.  Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from a liberal regime, the utter difference between the whole moral atmosphere under collectivism and the essentially individualist Western civilization.

Emphasis mine.  We are currently ruled by a collection of miniature tyrants who believe that they can plan our economic life and have little concern for individual liberty.  Today’s election in Massachusetts is an opportunity to discipline said tyrants and send the message that the citizens may be ready to reassume control over their own lives.  I’m hoping and praying for a Scott Brown win, and ultimately a resurgence of individual liberty in the country that did more to bring that concept to the world than any other.

One of the best – and creepiest – books I’ve read in the last year and a half was Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. I recall being very unnerved, perhaps surprisingly, by the chapter on economics.  A taste:

In Nazi Germany, businesses proved their loyalty to the state by being good “corporate citizens,” just as they do today.  the means of demonstrating this loyalty differed significantly, and the moral content of the different agendas was categorical.  Indeed, for the sake of argument, let us concede that what the Nazi regime expected of “good German businesses” and what America expects of its corporate leaders differed enormously.  That doesn’t change some important fundamental similarities.

Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

Consider, for example, the largely bipartisan and entirely well-intentioned Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, celebrated everywhere as a triumph of “nice” government.  The law mandated that businesses take a number of measures, large and small, to accommodate customers and employees with various handicaps.  Offices had to be retrofitted to be wheelchair compliant.  Various public signs had to be written in Braille.  Devices to aid the hearing impaired had to be made available.  And so on.

Now imagine you are the CEO of Coca-Cola.  Your chief objection to this law is that it will cost you a lot of money, right?  Well, not really.  If you know that the CEO of Pepsi is going to have to make the same adjustments, there’s really no problem for you.  All you have to do is add a penny – or really a fraction of a penny – to the cost of a can of Coke.  Your customers will carry the freight, just as Pepsi’s customers will.  The increase won’t cost you market share, because your price compared with your competitor’s has stayed pretty much the same.  Your customers probably won’t even notice the price hike.

Now imagine that you own a small, regional soft drink company.  You’ve worked tirelessly toward your dream of one day going eyeball-to-eyeball with Coke or Pepsi.  Proportionally speaking, making your factories and offices handicapped-friendly will cost you vastly more money, not just in terms of infrastructure, but in terms of the bureaucratic legal compliance costs (Coke and Pepsi have enormous legal departments; you don’t).  Plans to expand or innovate will have to be delayed because there’s no way you can pass on the costs to your customers.  Or imagine you’re the owner of an even smaller firm hoping to make a play at your regional competitors.  But you have 499 employees, and for the sake of argument, the ADA fully kicks in at 500 employees.  If you hire just one more, you will fall under the ADA.  In other words, hiring just one thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year employee will cost you millions.

The ADA surely has admirable intent and legitimate merits.  But the very nature of such do-gooding legislation empowers large firms, entwines them with political elites, and serves as a barrier to entry for smaller firms.  Indeed, the penalties and bureaucracy involved in even trying to fire someone can amount to guaranteed lifetime employment.  Smaller firms can’t take the risk of being forced to provide a salary in perpetuity, while big companies understand that they’ve in effect become “too big to fail” because they are de facto arms of the state itself.

Remember, this was all written well before stimulus- and bailout-mania, or the effective nationalization of GM and Chrysler.  There are certainly lessons in this passage for those on the right and the left – Republicans have a nasty habit of using the state to advance their interests, too.  But examining the current political philosophies popular across the spectrum, one has to note that when those on the right try to utilize the government to advance their agenda, they are usually acting hypocritically, because at least in theory, they believe in limited government and checks and balances.  In contrast, when leftists use the power of the state to push their agenda, they are actually following their principles. And that’s really what we’re seeing right now – the left has control of the levers of power in Washington DC, and is using the mechanisms of government to entrench and empower themselves, often at the expense of our individual liberty and well-being (as in the health care debate).

Lord Acton reminded us that power tends to corrupt; as responsible citizens, we need to remember that axiom when we vote, and must guard against the tendency to leave things we could – or should – do ourselves to people in Washington, or the state capitol, or anywhere else.

This reminds me – I need to dig back into Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and pull some quotes from him about the dangers of economic planning…

From The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 9 – Security and Freedom:

F.A. Hayek (1899-1992)

There can be no question that adequate security against severe privation, and the reduction of the avoidable causes of misdirected effort and consequent disappointment, will have to be one of the main goals of policy. But if these endeavors are to be successful and are not to destroy individual freedom, security must be provided outside the market and competition be left to function unobstructed. Some security is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because most men are willing to bear the risk which freedom inevitably involves only so long as that risk is not too great. But while this is a truth of which we must never lose sight, nothing is more fatal than the present fashion among intellectual leaders of extolling security at the expense of freedom. It is essential that we should re-learn frankly to face the fact that freedom can be had only at a price and that as individuals we must be prepared to make severe material sacrifices to preserve our liberty. If we want to retain this, we must regain the conviction on which the rule of liberty in the Anglo-Saxon countries has been based and which Benjamin Franklin expressed in a phrase applicable to us in our lives as individuals no less than as nations: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

My emphasis there. Think of our current situation: bailouts for companies “too big to fail,” government ownership of failing automakers, the desire for state-provided universal healthcare, demands for more and more regulation of businesses and executive salaries, “windfall” profits condemned and threatened with confiscation, the demonization of productive classes, etc. Are we really better off after massive government intervention to protect our economic security – much of which has since proven to be wasteful and ineffective anyway? What have we given away in exchange? Was it worth it?

Lester DeKoster & Gerard Berghoef, from Liberation Theology: The Church’s Future Shock:

…[Liberation Theology] exposes itself to the same fate already befallen Marxism wherever it takes historical form as Communism. Though born of great genius and immense self-denial, though inspired by a vision of a new humanity born with a boundlessly progressive future, Marxism in practice always gives rise to the dull, gray brutalism of the totalitarian state. Why?

Lester DeKoster (1916-2009)

Well, when the “old” man, inheritor of the depravity visited upon humankind by Adam’s transgression, seizes dictatorial power for the purpose of making others “new,” (deluding himself that he is “new” already!), the fact of his unredeemed depravity is soon writ large in the horrors of Gulag, murder and unrelieved oppression. Whatever may have been the chains and slavery of pre-Marxist societies – in Russia, in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, everywhere – the shackles forged by communism are more binding, more absolute, more pervasive and more deadly than the revolution swept away. The more loudly Marxism denies human depravity in words, the more resolutely Marxism-in-action demonstrates its own depravity in deeds. It will not be otherwise wherever LT engineers the rebellions it schemes for.

This seems like as good a place as any to start keeping a list of books I’d like to add to my library, so let’s rock and roll.

• Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1-4 by Herman Bavinck: I have no objections to getting these one by one – the full set is $100. I’m currently reading Volume 1 courtesy of a friend at work.
• Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin: This country is freaky and I’d love to read this book.
• New Testament Commentary, 12 Volumes by William Hendriksen & Simon J. Kistemaker: 12 VOLUMES FOR 100 BUCKS. Oh, this is a treasure trove. I already have Acts, but I’d be happy to double up. Or just one of the volumes if you prefer.
• The Fatal Conceit by F.A. Hayek: This one has to be in my library. Preferably the hardcover. It’s a keeper.
• Contra Keynes and Cambridge by F.A. Hayek: Seems like a very timely book for our current economic situation. Another keeper.

A rather ambitious start, wouldn’t you say?

Human Action is Ludwig von Mises’ Magnum Opus, and sometimes described as the free-market’s counterpoint to Marx’s Das Kapital.  From the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

Human Action - Ludwig von Mises

Mises’s most monumental achievement was his Human Action (1949), the first comprehensive treatise on economic theory written since the first World War. Here Mises took up the challenge of his own methodology and research program and elaborated an integrated and massive structure of economic theory on his own deductive, “praxeological” principles. Published in an era when economists and governments generally were totally dedicated to statism and Keynesian inflation, Human Action was unread by the economics profession.

Heady stuff, eh?  I picked up a copy of the paperback in June or thereabouts, and I could tell immediately that this one was not going to be something that I could read from cover to cover; it was going to require a LOT of time and a lot of concentration.  And even with concentration, I’d probably miss half of it anyway, because it’s much more scholarly than my normal fare.

I was correct: as of the present day, I’ve made it to page 35.  An excerpt:

…all were fully convinced that there was in the course of social events no such regularity and invariance of phenomena as had already been found in the operation of human reasoning and in the sequence of natural phenomena.  They did not search or the laws of social cooperation because they thought that man could organize society as he pleased.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)

If social conditions did not fulfill the wishes of the reformers, if their utopias proved unrealizable, the fault was seen in the moral failures of man.  Social problems were considered ethical problems.  What was needed in order to construct the ideal society, they thought, were good princes and virtuous citizens.  With righteous men any utopia might be realized.

The discovery of the inescapable interdependence of market phenomena overthrew this opinion. Bewildered, people had to face a new view of society.  They learned with stupefaction that there is another aspect from which human action might be viewed than that of good and bad, of fair and unfair, of just and unjust.  In the course of social events there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his actions if he wishes to succeed. It is futile to approach social facts with the attitude of a censor who approves or disapproves from the point of view of quite arbitrary standards and subjective judgments of value.  One must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as the physicist studies the laws of nature.  Human action and social cooperation seen as the object of a science of given relations, no longer as a normative discipline of things that ought to be — this was a revolution of tremendous consequences for knowledge and philosophy as well as for social action.

Some good stuff in there.  While I don’t have a firm handle on his religious beliefs (he was born into a “recently ennobled Jewish family” according to Wikipedia), there are some ideas expressed that mesh very nicely with my Christian and Calvinist worldview, although perhaps in a roundabout way.  Mises is also tapping into the same rich vein of thought on the ability of humans to plan for a more perfect society that F.A. Hayek used to produce his classic work, The Road to Serfdom. And of course, this is a direct attack on John Maynard Keynes and the sort of interventionist economic policies called for by Keynes’ theories and promoted by the governments of that day – and sadly, our day as well.

“What was needed in order to construct the ideal society, they thought, were good princes and virtuous citizens.  With righteous men any utopia might be realized.” This is, of course, why utopia will never be realized – at least from a Christian standpoint – because there is no such thing as a “good person.” In a theological sense I refer, of course, to the first of the five points of Calvinism: total depravity.  (See Romans 3:9-19, Westminster Confession Ch. 6, etc.  I’m about 99% sure that Mises didn’t intend to bring Romans and a Reformed confession to mind when he wrote those words, but c’est la vie.)  Mankind is not perfect, and as such we cannot plan perfectly.  A thought occurs to me:  even if we were perfect, would we be able to do so?  It seems obvious that an individual corrupted by sin could not lay out and execute a perfect plan for himself, much less an entire society, for the simple fact that the plan produced by the imperfect person would itself be imperfect, and an imperfect person could not be expected to execute a plan perfectly.  But even if we were not corrupted by nature, would it be possible to create a system that could anticipate the needs of an entire society or civilization?  Does perfection imply omniscience?  I doubt it.  Did Adam and Eve have perfect and full knowledge of God and His creation before the fall?  I don’t think so – and without that, I doubt it would be possible to effectively plan an entire society’s economic life, or anything else for that matter.

Mises notes that the problem the planners ran into was that their plans often went off track or failed altogether, and that problem was compounded by the fact that the planners themselves never considered that the problem was that they were trying to plan an ideal society in the first place.  But in order to plan, you have to be reasonably sure that the people involved in your plan are going to understand the plan and then do what you want them to do.  In an imperfect world, you can’t be sure of that – some people aren’t going to understand the plan, some people aren’t going to do what you want them to do, and some people are going to try to game the system you’ve set up for their benefit.  The planners can’t see all and know all, and the people who they’re planning for might not share the planner’s interests.  As a result, pretty much any Utopian scheme is destined to fail because Utopian schemes ignore the inescapable fact of human corruption.

“In the course of social events there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his actions
if he wishes to succeed.” This is why markets work – markets organize themselves and provide natural checks and balances on people’s behavior.  Markets automatically adjust themselves to accommodate the quirks of millions upon millions of individual humans, each with their good and bad points, each with their own agendas, and somehow – without planning – manage to provide the most for the most people… as long as they are free.

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You can see that I’m just starting to work my way through actually integrating these ideas.  This feels like sort of a mishmash.  But hey, I’m nothing if not ambitious.