Daniel Bell,conservative

When he died in January 2011, Daniel Bell (b. 1919) was one of the most famous social scientists of his time. Even more remarkably he was a conservative sociologist. Conservatives are those who have a disposition to conserve. They have a respect for the past, for tradition, for continuity. ¹ Bell was a conservative in this sense. He even owned to being a conservative, though he also qualified that assertion. He was, he said, a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture. That qualification itself needs some qualification. The world of the university, where he spent much of his career, is overwhelmingly left-liberal in its beliefs. If you work in a contemporary university you are expected to be either a European-style socialist or an American-style left-liberal, and certainly not a conservative. So Bell had some reason to be cautious about his use of the term conservative. It did him no favours; doubly so as his friend, Irving Kristol, was the god-father of the influential neo-conservative political movement. ² Nothing is more likely to raise the hackles of university faculty members than the thought that one of their own might be a conservative. The post-1970s university was, and is, a place of the most stifling conformism. Bell was a sometime co-signatory of neo-conservative petitions, and Bell and Kristol were for a time the co-editors of the influential social science journal The Public Interest, established in 1965. Bell stepped down as editor in 1973, possibly because the journal had become too conservative for his taste, yet also went on to co-edit the book The Crisis in Economic Theory with Kristol in 1981 and to quote Kristol generously in his own books. Like so many of the neo-conservative movement, Bell began political life in the company of big-city Trotskyists and, with the passage of time, became deeply sceptical of left-wing pieties.

In the 1970s he held onto something of Louis Hartz’s idea that America was a liberal society – one that owed its ethos to John Locke. ³ Yet Bell could see all around him that American left-liberalism was consuming itself in its own absurdity. Bell grasped the fiscal crisis of the liberal state. Liberalism spoon-fed a revolution of rising expectations for public goods that no state could possibly afford. ⁴ It would have come as no surprise to Bell that, in 2011, the Californian city of San Jose spent half, yes that is 50 per cent, of its budget on pensions and health benefits for its retired employees! No wonder that today many more Americans describe themselves as conservative than liberal. ⁵ In the 1970s when Bell called himself a socialist and a liberal he meant by those terms something quite simple. By ‘socialism’ he meant that a society should guarantee to its citizen a social minimum that would allow everyone to lead a life of self-respect. ⁶ By ‘liberalism’ he meant that the individual, not the group, was rightfully the principal actor in politics. He believed that a person’s position in society was properly a function of achievement not ascription, and differences in skill and effort should be rewarded differently. ⁷ It is doubtful whether any contemporary centre-right conservative would seriously disagree with any of those modest propositions. Rather what distinguishes the conservative from the socialist and the liberal is the issue of culture. Conservatives do not disavow either ‘the thing called society’ or ‘the thing called individual action and achievement’. What is of interest to conservatives, however, is the way that ‘society’ and ‘the individual’ are framed by culture and how they are animated (or not) by cultural forces and pressures.

Bell defined himself as a cultural conservative. ⁸ The cultural conservative is one of a number of types of conservative. There are social, libertarian, liberal, fiscal, national security, moral, and religious conservatives – though there is also an argument to be made that all conservatives are in some sense cultural conservatives in exactly the sense that Bell was a cultural conservative. The justification for this disavows one key idea of Bell’s. He said that the domain of culture is distinguishable from politics, which is separable in turn from economics. ⁹ This is analytically true. But each of these domains also shares culture in common. Or at least they share in common the spirit of culture, which Bell rightly understood was religion by default in one form or another. It is probably more accurate to say that art, politics and economics are separate domains united by an animating culture or religion. In any case, the culture of religion was so significant for Bell that in a practical sense it over-determined politics and economics in the long run. What made socialism and liberalism, in their different ways, failures, what turned them into ideologies in the worst sense of that word, was that they failed to do the essential work of the culture of religion, which is to conserve.

Bell observed that the function of religion is simple. It provides society with a sense of the trans-temporal. ¹⁰ The trans-temporal is that which does not change and that which is sacred and cannot be changed. This is not necessarily expressed by God or by gods. It might be embodied in a Great Tradition or a Civilization. It might be embodied in literature or art, as it was in the 20th century. Many of the most popular and some of the most serious authors of last century, including Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, and Evelyn Waugh, injected deeply religious themes into their writings. In others, like David Lodge and Marshall McLuhan, the undertow of religion is obvious, not least of all in comic writing. Between them they sold untold millions of volumes. They outsold most of their overtly, and often aggressively, secular counterparts. They confounded the thesis that God is dead. Certainly, in many societies, churches were dead or dying. But as the young Hegel pointed out a long time ago, the positive institution of religion ought not to be confused with the inner spirit of religion. It may thus be that the religiously-inflected literature of the 20th century, of which there was much that was very good, has influenced many more people, young and old, than any sermon from a pulpit ever did. And for those uninterested in reading, the films of these books reached even larger audiences.

In short, we should not confuse religion with the institutions of religion. Religion has many forms, but whatever serious form religion takes it suggests something that is durable and that outlasts time. It is perfectly true that religions have their clowns and buffoons. Zealots, maniacs, and downright dangerous people love the authority that religion evokes. It rationalizes their craziness. The cult of super-men existed long before Nietzsche in religious enthusiasms, manias and exaggerated authority. But it exists equally in secular forms. What is inescapable in religion, and what allowed it to reinvent itself in the 20th century in the form of literature, is an indubitable sense – a sense that we cannot shake off – that there is a transcendental limit to human action. To be intoxicated with power, to be mad with desire or inflamed with rage is to fail to understand that here I must stop. Religion – the Roman religio – is the tie that binds us so that we do stop. But what is it that brings us to a halt? It is a bond that does not break. It is a tie that is permanent. It is a fixed point in the firmament of flux and change. It is the line that we cannot cross. It is the place that we cannot desecrate. If we do so, then we are no longer properly human. If we are deluded enough to think we are super-men or – worse still – no different from the animals, then we will cross the line and we will lose our humanity.

I realize that to a contemporary audience this may sound like an argument for social arthritis. After all, the 19th and 20th centuries were filled to over-flowing with ideas of progress, modernity, newness, vogue, fashion, improvement, evolution, up-to-date-ness, etc. How can anyone appeal to what is permanent in the face of progress? How can anyone suggest that there are fixed points in a world of corrosive contingency? To do so would make that person neither a socialist nor a left-liberal but, shockingly, a conservative. Yet this is in effect what Bell does. He does the unthinkable. He says that religion is the crux of social greatness. ¹¹ What makes this so interesting is that, at some level, Bell grasped the paradox that the dynamism of a society arises from the antithesis of that dynamism. He intimated that progress in fact is a function of stability and continuity. The most decisive motions we are capable of are anchored in a fixed point of immobility. Dynamism is joined at the hip with stillness. Bell demonstrated this most clearly in the case of art. But, as we will see shortly, what applies to art applies equally to politics and economics.

Artistically the 20th century began with a bang. In Europe in the period between 1890 and 1940, Cezanne, Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Stravinsky and others, produced works of enduring significance. The era between 1920 and 1970 in America and the United Kingdom saw a second great wave of 20th-century art. The cinema of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, the poetry of Auden, Eliot and Pound, the paintings of Ben Nicholson, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, and the sculpture of Henry Moore stand out. In the last ebbing decade of the Anglo-American wave, some great work was produced, but so were symptoms of decline. By the 1960s, the ideology of art had begun to replace the work of art. The primary characteristic of the art work as a species of work is that it is an object. ¹² Ideologies of art, as Bell noted, redefined art not as an object but as an action. Art was reconceived as a process, performance, happening, game, or event. By the 1980s, the transformation was complete. The risible age of air sculptures had arrived. As Don Thomson calculated, of the 1000 artists with major gallery shows in London and New York in the 1980s, only 20 of those artists were offered in evening auctions in Christie’s or Sotheby’s in 2007. This places us squarely in the age of the ephemeral. ¹³ Nothing lasts, not least of all its art.

Bell suggested that this was both the realization and the trivialization of the logic of the modernist era and also a portent of what was then emerging when he was writing, namely post-modernism. On this account, post-modernism was the trivial twin of modernism, its inconsequential, petty, marginal sibling. That is true enough so far as it goes, though another factor, I would suggest, was equally important. The ephemeral in art was and is the perfect aesthetic counterpart of a bureaucratic society. It sums up capitalism in its debased bureaucratic phase. Bureaucratic capitalism was the result of what happened when the ideologies of American left-liberalism and European socialism coalesced with those of modernism and capitalism in the mid-20th century. The social form that resulted was the leviathan welfare state that first appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Its signature political arm was the new class of graduates who en masse filled the bureaucratic offices of social reform that proliferated in the era of big government liberalism. ¹⁴ Every era has the art that it deserves. The aesthetic self-image of bureaucratic capitalism mirrored, understandably enough, its own existence. It produced nothing. It existed to undertake vacuous processes, actions, and flows. ¹⁵ It was a logical necessity then that its art be transient, fleeting, momentary, temporary – in a word, ephemeral. Who reads five years later the winners of the Man Booker Prize? By that time their moment has passed. How short that moment is.

Through the 20th century, some of the best art of the age was self-consciously modern. Yet a surprising amount of high-calibre work shunned the label of modernism, or later post-modernism, or any ism at all, and defied the trashy temporality of a period in love with its own transience. The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the novels of Evelyn Waugh are prime examples. This defiance of now-ness and shunning of an advertiser’s glib modernity happened with good reason. Modernism was its own un-doing. It could not sustain itself when it tried to live up to its own name. It readily dated. Whether it is a Gerhard Richter or a Bob Dylan, all great artists study and absorb the past. Twentieth-century art’s embrace of the ideology of modernism was consequently fatal. To be ‘modern’ could mean one thing only. An artist had to be an adversary of society and a disavower of the past. ¹⁶ Modernism’s inner drive was to negate. This was because at the heart of modern progress lies nothing at all. Without tradition, there is only nihil. Change can enhance and enrich tradition. But change bereft of tradition is vacuous. It is ephemera, empty posturing, mindless modern process and vacant post-modern flow. In pursuit of nothing, in their quest to negate, the acolytes of modernism for a time shocked audiences with grand-standing acts of nihilism. But the gimmick wore off. The fate of nihilism is to consume itself. It feeds off its own vomit. Thus by the 1960s much of modern art had descended into the arid zone of installation art, performance art, and aesthetic happenings. By 1970, post-modern triteness had taken the place of avant-garde posturing. Boisterous Hegelian negation was replaced by the infernal dreariness of post-structural difference. The age of the self-important endlessly looping video art installation was upon us.

One of the most important things that Bell observed is how, as art changed and this sorry tale unfolded, the imagination was up-ended. The task of the artistic imagination is to create works. The imagination transforms matter and memory into objects and things that transcend time. ¹⁷ Time is highly corrosive. It wears down the world. But works – industrial works, artisan works, and artworks in general – resist this corrosion. When they are well fashioned, they provide an intimation of eternity. They give a hint of what it means not to be born in time but to persist out of time. That is the promise of the sacred. In that sense the imagination of the human being is inherently conservative. However, what is often mistaken for imagination, and what often replaces it, is fantasy. ¹⁸ Bell suggested that the substituting of fantasy for imagination was a long-term consequence of Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge. ¹⁹ For Kant, the human mind was the source of knowledge. This loosened the grip of previously dominant theories. These theories broadly held that art was mimetic and a representation of reality, and that what we know is what we make. When the knower became all-important in place of the object of knowledge, the restraint of reality on art and thought declined. Fantasy took over. In 20th-century art, fantasies of omnipotence, violence, hedonism, apocalypse, sensation, impulse, spontaneity, and immediacy flourished.

Freed from the reality principle, the mind in the mode of fantasy turns what is difficult into what is easy. This effect is felt not just in art. Life itself begins to be thought of as a sequence of movie special-effects. When this happens the illusion is encouraged that life can be stripped of struggle, tragedy, pain, loss and effort. That is what happened to politics and economics in the late 20th century. A great illusion took hold. Take the case of the welfare state. It originated in the late 19th and early 20th century as a modest practical arrangement to alleviate the suffering of the poor and the marginal. As Bell observed, though, by the 1970s the idea of social benefits had been transformed into the idea of entitlements. All social classes began to expect the state to provide them with free or ultra-cheap education and health care. By the historic turning-point of 2008–10, the effect of this was clear for all to see. States were engulfed by debt. ²⁰ They had paid for all the free stuff by borrowing money that their fantasies told them they would never have to re-pay. This was the dead-end of European socialism and American left-liberalism.

What happened in politics happened to the economy as well. Alongside the revolution in political expectations came something equally deleterious. This was the loss of the desire to work. ²¹ Max Weber identified the Protestant work ethic as the driving force of modern capitalism. The Protestant rose early and laboured hard in a methodical, disciplined fashion. The large mass of evangelical Protestants in the coastal provinces of contemporary China can tell you that this works. In part it works because it inspires effort. And in part it works because it produces works. It is important to grasp that work is not just a process, flux, stream, or flow. More importantly it is an act of objectivation. ²² It is the making of objects and things that persist in time. The furniture of the American Shakers perfectly embodies this sense of the sacred as creation that is trans-temporal because it produces works whose beauty resists and eludes the perishing of time and the vagaries of fashion. European socialism and American left-liberalism tore this culture to shreds. Both promised instead the perverse utopia of retirement – where adults entered the work force as late as possible, retired as early as conceivable, and engaged (in between time) as much as possible in modern process or post-modern flow, that is, in acts of bureaucracy. ²³ Both promised equality. What they in fact delivered was the incessant bureaucratization of existence.

Bell combined a sentimental affection for American liberalism with the tough realism of a conservative. It was an unusual mix. In his masterpiece, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, he patiently worked through a plethora of liberal philosophies of equality. ²⁴ Advocacy of these ballooned in the 1960s. In that era there were incessant demands for equality – of condition, outcome and opportunity. Bell sympathized with these, and yet every time he almost agreed with the liberals he snapped back with an acidic observation. ²⁵ Every egalitarian scheme, he noted, produces its contrary. Equality creates bureaucracy. Who in modern life does not want talent to rise? Who wants someone to die for lack of medical care they cannot afford? No one does. But American left-liberals could only imagine bureaucracies delivering social goods. The end-result of this was a higher education sector where there were more administrators than teachers or researchers and a health care system underwritten by 20,000 pages of regulations. Regulation in the United States costs 14 per cent of national income, $1.75 trillion per annum in 2011.

Part of why Americans had arrived at this point, Bell sensed, was poor social theory. The standard left-liberal theory of society supposed that the world is divided up between the market and the state. Individuals purchase economic goods with private money while public goods are procured with government taxes. Economic goods are consumed individually while public goods are consumed in common. That is a neat dichotomy. Yet it ignores the more fundamental tripartite structure of society. A vibrant society is composed of markets, states and civics. The realm of civics is defined by autonomous institutions. Institutions of this type traditionally have included universities, colleges, churches and cities. These were situated half-way between the household or the firm and the state. ²⁶ Intermediate institutions delivered civic goods. They did so within Aristotelian-Thomist, Platonic-Augustinian or comparable frames of reference. Modern liberalism broke the connection with the cosmological great chain of being. It promoted a take-over of city, church and university by the state. Left-liberalism was especially aggressive in the pursuit of this.

The modern welfare state redefined civic goods awkwardly as public goods. Higher education and health care were once prime examples of civic goods. They were traditionally provided by lean intermediate institutions in society. Today such intermediate institutions on the whole have been either swallowed by the state or some government-directed mix of market and state, or else they have turned themselves into shadow administrative states with their own gala of bureaucratic regulations, offices, committees and procedures. Progressives congratulate themselves on this historic shift. They repeat a familiar fairy tale. In the bad old days, all manner of individuals were excluded from education or from hospitals. But, as a result of big government liberalism, those who were excluded are now included. The more pragmatically-minded, though, point out that colleges, churches and cities for centuries opened their doors to an incredibly wide range of social strata. Nonetheless, turning civic goods into public goods did have one emphatic consequence. The number of bureaucratic jobs in society proliferated. Yet, far from being an unalloyed good, this set the teeth of modern society sharply on edge.

Bell registered in astute ways how ambivalent social actors were about all of this. He observed that modern taxpayers show many signs of not wanting what is provided to them, or else they don’t wish to pay for such goods. Yet, at the same time, their sense of entitlement rises remorselessly. ²⁷ Voters demand more and more social services in the abstract; yet, in doing so, they show less and less sense of fiscal responsibility or readiness to sacrifice for them. ²⁸ They want a big public sector but they do not wish to be taxed for public goods that they often despise. The short-term political fix for this conundrum is public debt. But, in the long run, escalating debt cripples national and local finances. ²⁹ Replacing debt with taxes is not an option either. Once taxes rise above 35 per cent of income, they stifle the activity that creates the wealth that generates tax income. In spite of this, social expectations are incredibly stubborn. This causes a fraught dilemma. Modern capitalist economies are dynamic. Unlike pre-industrial economies, they grow. But entitlement expectations regularly grow faster than GDP per capita does.

How did we get to this point? Bell suggests that what went missing was the transcendental-cosmological dimension. ³⁰ He describes this dimension in both aesthetic and religious terms. ³¹ Once the state steps in, the trans-temporal aspect – the sacred – retreats sharply. The hospital, the university and the high school become deracinated. ³² They are disenchanted – consumed by the same vacuity that ended up debilitating modern art. When this happens, the signs are unmistakable. The purveyors of weasel words take over. Slovenly bureaucratic mentalities begin to dominate. ³³ Job titles inflate. ³⁴ Process consumes spirit. Banal and inane procedural language spreads everywhere. It is full of demented syntax inflected with fatuous moralizing and pompous assertions of status. Mirroring this, obscurantist theories flourish like fungal infections. The economic effect of all of this is ferocious. Costs spiral out of control. More is devoted to the production of less. Layers of pointless administration proliferate. Non-jobs escalate. The number of hands-on producers, professionals, creators, technicians, labourers, and decision-makers shrivel. ³⁵

The virtue of Bell’s social theory is that it points us away from this back to the world of works. His social theory doubles as a work ethic. Bell repeatedly endorses the culture of the diligent, sober, thrifty Protestant. ³⁶ But not necessarily or at least not only for what it meant to Protestants who are now generations removed from us. For Bell, work is not the old Protestant sign of salvation. It is not even the older Catholic condition of deliverance. Rather, what mattered to Bell is the transcendental effect of work. Work – and its works – suspend time. In the intense concentration of work, we lose track of time. ³⁷ Time for a while disappears. Similarly, when we delay gratification, we delay time. When we save rather than spend, we do the same. We eviscerate time – if only for a time. Still, even in those tiny obliterations, there is some hint of something outside of time. Capitalism is preoccupied with time. It operates via deadlines, timelines, timetables, Gantt charts, methodical plans, schedules, clocks, periods, phases and stages. Yet its power lies as much in what is not temporal. Its ability to inspire the vocation and calling of personalities who are born in time and yet can also step out of time is crucial. If time consciousness serves the necessary quantifying, calculating and economizing side of capitalism, the consciousness of timelessness endows it with the equally significant power of form and pattern from which poise and elegance, and ingenuity and invention, arise. ³⁸

Like all great social formations, capitalism succeeds when and where it embodies paradox. ³⁹ Human beings are beings who objectivate. They make things. When the settings of the culture of religion are right, human beings work very hard to make things. Like a figure in a Vermeer painting they are completely absorbed in the act of objectivation. They are quiet like angels. They produce things that others want to acquire because the materiality, the beauty and the form of things produced resist the ravages of time. Capitalism encourages acquisition. It encourages productivity. That much is obvious. But less obviously and more significantly capitalism encourages acquisitiveness via the route of asceticism – and productivity via concentration and contemplation. Capitalism thrives not just in and through the personality of the ascetic or the acquisitor but on the back of the paradox of ascetic acquisitiveness.

A parallel paradox applies in the case of the great artists of the epoch. They are almost without exception highly productive. Yet for that to occur, they live lives that remind us of medieval monks poring over their work benches, hunched in profound concentration. ⁴⁰ Bell’s achievement was to point back unapologetically to the importance of religion in capitalism and the attendant virtues of capitalism. It is not the facile bureaucracies of the welfare state that provide social prosperity or that inspire splendid art. For that we depend upon the paradoxes of the sanctified producer and the acquisitive ascetic. ⁴¹ It is their quirky fusion that generates the kind of spiralling energies that set great societies and prodigious economies in motion.