By Michael F. Duggan
There isn’t much in the world that give me hope these days, but I sometimes take solace in the beauty and power of ideas. Sometimes the ideas themselves give me hope as faint possibilities by which to address the world’s problems. Two people whose ideas have given me hope were Jane Jacobs and Peter Viereck. Besides being almost exact contemporaries—both were born in 1916 and died in 2006—they were brilliant thinkers of startling insight and originality with distinctive writing styles.
Jacobs is most famous for her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but I think her most important work might be Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Here she makes the case that economies are naturalistic phenomena and that the best basis for an economy is the natural production region centered on an import-shifting city. Under such an arrangement, the world order would be based on a community of nations set up on such regions. To me, this idea makes much more sense than the prescriptions of Smith, Marx, or even Kenyes.
The initial problem is how to set up such a world order. Transforming the current world order into the model of Jacobs would be impossible. The powerful would never allow it. Even if it was possible, it would likely not last long; Jacobs might have been a natural-born genius with an intuitive understanding of how cities and their economies functioned, but she might not have understood how power functions in the world (although, to be fair, she stood up to Robert Moses and defeated him on his own ground—no small task). In reality, power aggregates, and even if her prescription could be implemented, it would likely not last as the most aggressive leaders of the world would consolidate their power and take over less aggressive neighbors.
Peter Viereck was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a political thinker of the first order. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he fought with William F. Buckley for the soul of American conservatism and lost. His model of true conservatism is nothing like the reactionary radicalism that we call “conservatism” today. For him it was was a moderate and high-minded form of realism. It was political gradualism toward progress and not the strident, rollback extremism of today’s far right who erroneously call themselves conservatives.
Like liberals of then and now, Viereck believed in progress, but held that it had to be gradual in order to keep what worked while changing that which did not. In Viereck’s analysis, quick change often resulted in instability and eventually violence (e.g. the Terror of the French Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, the Russian Revolution). People were imperfect in Viereck’s estimation—flawed by nature—and thus required strong cultural traditions, strong laws, and good, but strong, republican governance. He also believed in a liberal arts education for all citizens and that intellectually every person could be raise to the level of a cultural aristocrat. One could only study other cultures, but only after achieving a fluency in one’s own. Viereck also believed that when gradualism did not work or proved insufficient to meet a crisis, a system had to adopt more sweeping approaches. He was therefore a conservative that supported the New Deal.
As with Jacobs’ ideas, it is hard to imagine imagine the gradualism of Viereck working today outside of the judiciary (and even the U.S. judicial system at the highest level has become increasingly radicalized). Domestically the country is too deeply divided and too diverse for gradual solutions to work, and at this point, the crises of the environment now require the strongest and most sweeping non-utopian approaches. And so the wonderful model of conservatism as gradual progressivism looks like a dead letter.
The question then becomes: if the prescriptive models of two of the most insightful, most sensible thinkers of the 20th century have been rendered nonstarters, then what is the basis for any hope at all?