Yesterday I watched Will Wilkinson and Ezra Klein on Blogging Heads. Will, as many of you will know, is a pragmatic libertarian (oh, they exist), while Ezra is a liberal. I was struck by (somewhat appalled in fact) by Ezra’s irritation and contempt for the philosophical nerdiness of many libertarians. Ezra’s emphasis on the empirical and the proximate, on a narrow sui generis fixation on a sequence of finite policies was set against a more expansive and theoretically scaffolded conception of the Good Life which Will seemed to be promoting (even a question of the nature of the Good Life). While Ezra held that what is Good and True is self-evidently Good and True, Will seemed to believe that meta-analysis, taking a step back and intellectually decomposing the presuppositions which feed one’s policy positions, is both edifying and may smoke out deeper distinctions and commonalities. As the dialogue continued I was struck by the thought that Ezra Klein was more a man of Burke and Kirk than Locke or Mill!. In other words, Ezra’s aversion to abstract analysis of political positions in a larger context, the deep philosophical structures in which they might be embedded in, to focus singularly on the nitty-gritty of specific issues which loom large contemporaneously, struck me as fundamentally a conservative sensibility.
The rejection of abstract thinking in favor of a more pragmatic orientation is certainly not alien to the populist Left, but Klein’s veritable sneering at the intellectual game which Will attempted to introduce into the discussion struck me as peculiar insofar as this pose is one often taken on the Right against “pointy headed” liberals. Libertarians, who are generally on the Right, have always been conscious of the fact that their system building and axiomatic or utilitarian way of arriving at policy decisions is fundamentally at odds with the more ad hoc or culturally rooted predispositions of the conservative Right. Will’s appeal to John Rawls was, I think, an attempt to point to this common ground in modality of thought, for Rawls is the Left liberal philosopher par excellence.
Do ideas have consequences? Over the short term I am skeptical, and even over the long term I am not convinced that deep seated historical forces which emerge from the cultural Zeitgeist are not more powerful than elucidated political philosophical systems. Lockean liberalism may simply have been a post facto justifications for the Rights of the English which developed organically out of British history. Nevertheless, I believe intellectuals do have a role to play in politics, and ideas do matter. Those on the Left have seen exactly where anti-intellectualism and a narrow proximate set of priorities have take us in regards to foreign policy. Brink Lindsey’s “liberaltarian” play might be unconvincing (I am not convinced myself), but that is no reason to discard philosophy and a striving to deeper thought. Though philosophy might not be the engine which drives politics, intellectuals can play an important justifying rule, both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan gave a nod to F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom as influencing their view of the world and political sensibilities. Political philosophy is like theology, I do not believe that it exhibits the sense of mathematics or can offer the substance of science, but if you are a believer it does play a role in securing the faith. Klein shouldn’t reject philosophy if what Will & company offer is not to his liking, he should go look for other court philosophers. Hate the sinner, not the sin.
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