Luke Ford

I think the paleo-cons have been right about most everything over the past 80 years.

Henry George writes: Paleoconservatism coheres around the “shared idea of the good society, which is organic and cohesive. All paleoconservatives are deeply suspicious of our late modern administrative state, which they view as a threat to traditional social relations and as a vehicle for unwanted social transformation.” Moreover, “what is true … for all paleoconservatives is a belief in a fixed human nature, a conviction that leads them to be skeptical of attempts to reconstruct inherited social and gender roles.”

From A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition:

* Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis have been among the most easily recognized defenders of paleoconservatism. Naturally, their critiques of the managerial state that emerged in the 1930s are similar in content and purpose. They also analyze politics, power, and ideas within the historical framework in which all of these forces function. Yet they fundamentally disagree on important issues, not least of which is the relation between elites and religion in modern liberal democracy. Francis generally adheres to the Enlightenment belief that religion has little importance apart from serving as a propaganda tool for the managerial elites within a particular regime. Religion, in short, is the passive plaything of powerful interests. Gottfried, in sharp contrast, contends that religion or religious identity actively shapes the consciousness of this elite class in ways that go well beyond mere political calculation. Whether they know it or not, the managerial class often perceives political reality through the lens of a secularized theology. This disagreement or debate invites citizens on the Right to rethink the importance of how the so-called ‘secular age’ continues to engage in the political usage of religion.

* [Sam Francis] remained committed to Burnham’s hard and fast distinction between rational secular rulers and non-rational religious multitudes.

*  In After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (1999), [Paul Gottfried] contends that most voters “have given away what they value less, the responsibility of self-government for themselves and their polity, in return for what they value more, sexual and expressive freedoms of a certain kind and the apparent guarantee of entitle- ments.”

* The belief that the desire for liberal democracy is natural to all peoples is arguably “magical” because it confuses what is universal to humanity and what is historically specific to a given civilization.

* Francis ultimately believes that the ideological beliefs driving immigration policy and inter- ventionist foreign policies are rational to the core. For this reason, he treats “equality” as an idea that only a few fanatical ideologues could truly believe. “The doctrine of equality is unimportant because no one, save perhaps Pol Pot and Ben Wattenberg, really believes in it, and no one, least of all those who profess it most loudly, is seriously motivated by it.” 82 Rather, this doctrine “serves as a political weapon, to be unsheathed whenever it is useful for cut- ting down barriers, human or institutional, to the power of those groups that wear it on their belts.”

* The progressive Left never tires of insisting that its view of human nature draws heavily from the social sciences. The logic of their argument runs roughly as follows: 1. Social science tells us that human beings are built for peaceful and selfless cooperation and that competition and conflict are functions of unhealthy, reactionary social orders. 2. Social science further informs us that all human beings are basically the same in their natural capabilities. If status hierarchy and inequalities arise, this has no relationship whatever to innate human differences. The human mind is a blank slate, receptive to whatever socialization and acculturation it undergoes, and so we can design the kind of social order we like depending entirely on how we socialize individuals and the cultural framework into which we place them. 3. For these reasons, unlimited social progress, by which is meant the promise of increasingly cooperative and egalitarian social order, is well within in our reach.

* The most basic human interests are consonant with those of other organisms: living long enough to reproduce and ensuring the viability of our offspring. Human action is therefore typically self-interested. Self-interest however extends beyond consideration for the individual alone in a number of ways that produce what is misleadingly classified as altruistic or selfless action. Care is frequently given to close kin, but much less typi- cally to others who are genetically more distant, because kin are genetically much more alike than unrelated individuals. This tendency is known as kin selection in the evolutionary literature. It still reveals the operation of self- interest, since we are inclined to extend care and favors to those who are genetically the most like us. Cooperative reciprocity can be found in human societies among individuals who are not closely genetically related if either (a) there is a reasonable expectation that such acts will be repaid by those who are helped (this is gen- erally only feasible in small-scale societies), and/or (b) in a system of moral reputations in which those who act in a seemingly altruistic fashion toward non-kin receive benefits that increase their ability to engender more offspring and to survive longer. With these two concepts, kin selection and reciprocal altruism, a biosocial science can go far in explaining moral behavior.

* Moral systems—and especially those that tie human moral action to a supernatural world, that is, religions— are highly effective mechanisms for getting human individuals to act in ways that benefit their interests in the long term, even if how this happens may not be understandable to individual actors.

* Humans live in groups. Narrowly selfish behavior might in the short run bring advantage to an individual, but over the longer haul, particularly if self- centeredness becomes general, it can make life in such groups more difficult, especially when material resources are scarce. Significant sharing of scarce resources, enforced by shaming and ostracism for those who were uncoopera- tive, was likely widespread in subsistence-level human societies. Even when resources are not scarce, narrow selfishness—without even a pretense of reciprocal services and moral concern for those who are lower in the social order—increases resentment and makes conflict more likely.

* If we look at the full range of human societies, from the hunter-gatherer period to modern industrial societies, we find that hierarchy and status inequality are omnipresent features, although the contours of inequality may change significantly over time. In the societal type in which humans have spent perhaps 95 percent of their time as a species, hunter-gatherer societies, material wealth-based hierarchy was quite rare. Instead, status was based on differential prestige accorded to individual talents and membership in differ- ent identity groups. Sex and age were then the central axes of stratification and inequality. Individuals skilled at hunting or shamanism, the political activity of resolving conflicts in the group, could attain higher prestige as well. Material inequality began to grow in human societies as soon as the inven- tion of horticulture made possible an economic surplus.

* an empirical fact of the scientific study of the distribution of attributes in the human population that this distribution is unequal. That some people are generally viewed as, for example, better looking or more intelligent, is a fact every member of every society knows intuitively.

* human variation produces different outcomes for individuals and the resulting hierarchies are stable aspects of human society. For reasons having to do with the nature of inclusive fitness, those who have achieved hierarchically superior positions due to greater beauty or intelligence will have a compelling interest in maintaining those advantages and passing them on to their descendants. Even intensive engineering efforts to prevent them from doing so are likely to produce at most limited results, since these motivations are strong and will likely bear significant long-term consequences. For these reasons, hierarchies and stratified status-systems appear to be a permanent aspect of human existence. Regarding hierarchy and stratification, we find another perfect fit between biosocial science and the paleoconservative insight into the inevitability and even the benefits of inequality.