Ethical Labor

by Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk

Thirty years ago, Irving Babbitt wrote that the highest order of true work is an ethical working, labor of the spirit; and that no important problem of economics or politics can be solved within its own terms. "When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical, problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem." Now for almost the whole of the twentieth century, the study called ethics has been abandoned to Dr. Dryasdust, degraded to a subject abstract and often purely semantic, dully lectured upon in decaying departments of philosophy at universities dedicated to material aggrandizement. Here and there a stubborn man or an old-fashioned college stood out against this neglect of the most humane of the sciences; but by and large, the sterile "ethics" of Bentham or of Dewey, grubbing in the dust of barbarous vocabulary and arid generalization, have smothered the Aristotelian tradition. Many clergymen, even, have confounded the science of ethics with a dim creed of "service" or with moralizing. The world, taking the hereditary guardians of Ethics at their own valuation, was prompt to assume that ethics somehow was a vestige of systematized primitive conventions, or a bookish conspiracy to restrain the natural heartiness and freedom of man; and, in the absence of any convincing alternative (for every age must be saddled with Ethics, whether it knows this truth or not), the world reverted to an ethical principal still more nearly primitive than tribal convention, "That they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can." Two tremendous explosions, subsequently and consequently, have suggested to some of us that ethical studies need to be undertaken on a plane higher than this.

Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Community

by Fred Donovan Hill

Unlike Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, Robert A. Nisbet has not produced a remarkably original theory that has shaken the sociological world or revolutionized its concepts and methods of analysis. What Nisbet has done over the period of a long career in American sociology is to act as a consistent, and sometimes quite powerful and realistic, exponent of some of the major European sociologists and social philosophers. He has persistently related the ideas of such original thinkers as Tocqueville and Burke to the developing problems of the contemporary world. In this lies his chief value as a writer. It is one of the purposes of this essay to explain how and why this is so. Another purpose is to provide an evaluation of Nisbet’s ideas on community and their relevance to the problem of the isolated individual in twentieth-century society.

Although Robert Nisbet’s view of history is complex and multifaceted, its essentials are clear: the history of the Western world since at least the Renaissance has been dominated by an unceasing battle between traditionalism and modernism; the former is most often associated with such values as “community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred” and the latter with “individualism, equality, moral release, and rationalist techniques of organization and power”; and though Nisbet prizes the values of modernity, he is not so naïve as to believe that their triumph has brought only good to the lives of men and women from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Rather, he is intensely aware of the erosion of one set of values by the other: that is, he sees the desiccation of community, the decline of authority, the devaluation of hierarchy, and the avoidance of the sacred by the overemphasis, and the often distorted emphasis, on the victorious values of modernism. In Nisbet’s philosophy, all of these values should have a place; and it is only the totalist ideologies—sometimes of traditionalism, sometimes of modernism—that seek the complete suppression of one set or the other.

In The Sociological Tradition, Nisbet goes to some length to explain how the great sociologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have illuminated many of the aspects of the conflict of old and new values. Admitting that nearly none of these men could be accurately labeled “traditionalists,” Nisbet contends, nevertheless, that the major thinkers in sociology—Weber and Durkheim and Simmel and Tonnies among them—have taken the problems and conflicts arising out of the revolutions of the modern world and translated them into a powerful body of sociological typologies and concepts, and have done this in such a way as to show the attrition of one kind of values (the traditional) by the other kind (the modern) and to show the deleterious effects of this process in the life of the individual and that of the community.

Nisbet points out how Tocqueville and Weber, for example, go beneath the more sanguine attitudes of their periods to perceive in the very operations of society hailed as progressive and liberating the darker side of alienation from other men and the moral and spiritual isolation of the individual in modern society. And Nisbet argues that the “moral texture of these ideas is never wholly lost” in these analyses, despite the often elaborate sociological methodology employed. Even within the framework of scientific study, a thinker like Weber or Tocqueville is a moral philosopher concerned with the value of community for the individual and with the distressing effects of its loss. Ethical insight and even artistic intuition play roles in the great sociological theories, Nisbet maintains. “Can anyone believe that Tonnies’ typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Weber’s vision of rationalization, Simmel’s image of metropolis, and Durkheim’s perspective of anomie came from logico-empirical analysis as it is understood today? Merely to ask the question is to know the answer.”

Of all the concepts developed by these major figures of social analysis, community is the one which Nisbet has most often meditated and explored in his writings. In The Quest for Community (1953), The Sociological Tradition (1966), The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (1973), Twilight of Authority (1975), and in other works, community has been a prime concern. “By community,” Nisbet writes, “I mean something that goes far beyond mere local community. The word . . . encompasses all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time.” Community involves the whole man. It endures. It “achieves its fulfillment in a submergence of individual will that is not possible in unions of mere convenience or rational assent.” It is at the opposite pole from the ad hoc committee.

Quote of the Day: Robert Nisbet

The family, religious association, and local community––these, the  conservatives insisted, cannot be regarded as the external products of man's thought and behavior; they are essentially prior to the individual and are the indispensable supports of belief and conduct. Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demoniac fears and passions. Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals from their fellow men, and the creation of the sprawling, faceless masses.  (The Quest for Community)

The Little Platoons: The Nucleus of American Character

By Brittany Baldwin

Community continues to nuture the American people, being the very lifeblood of the American tradition.

"Young Women Interns for Reagan's Attorney General," announces the front page of Alpena's Saturday paper. As my friend heads off to Washington, practically the whole town saw her off as they watched "one of their own" travel to the D.C. metropolis. She got emails and calls and letters congradualting her on her accomplishments. Now that she's in D.C., a part of her always remains tied to that little town in northern Michigan. The town where her family settled over six generations ago. The town where most of the churches gather together on Christmas and worship together. The town where they roll up their sleves and build their own fences, raise their own cattle, and plow their own roads. Everything depends upon each member of the community--her mother is a county commissioner, her uncle is a policemen, her brother is a volunteer fire-fighter, and her grandpa is a pastor, each tirelessly working to keep the town running. Recently, a barn caught on fire in the middle of a snowy night. Her brother was on the way home from his night shift and called his friend to plow the roads as he got the fire truck and drove to the scene. The people's sense of duty and self-sufficency remains rooted in the hearts and deeds of all men and women--from the farmer to the electrician to the professor, each knows his role and works to fulfill it.

In a world that seems more global and interconnected yet paradoxically more superficial and isolating, pockets of communities remain scattered about the chaos and dissalusionment of the modern world. As Robert Nisbet refelcts, in Quest for Community, "Nearly gone is the sanguine confidence in the power of history itself to engender out of the soil of disorganization seeds of new and more successful forms of social and moral security" (6). Yet, he notes that people fear this disorder and they dred the chaos that often ensues from moral relativisms, autonomy and selfishness of the modern era.

Robert Nisbet's "Conservatism: Dream and Reality"

By Chuck Chalberg

                  Originally published in 1986, Robert Nisbet’s recently reissued study of the history and prospects of both conservative thought and political conservatism from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan is as relevant today as it would have been over the course of many yesterdays and as it will be for many tomorrows.  No doubt intended to shore up dispirited conservatives in the dying days of the Reagan years, this short book would have been even shorter had Nisbet not chosen to include and comment on the various manifestations of Reagan-era conservatism.  It should also be noted that his edition includes an introduction by Nisbet biographer Brad Stone, who briefly summarizes what has been called “Nisbetism” before taking the dreams and realities of modern conservatism into the 21^st century.

                  Just what is “Nisbetism?”  It is at once a thesis, a plea, and a lament.  At its heart is Robert Nisbet’s assertion that a decent and healthy society nourishes those intervening institutions of family, church, and voluntary organizations that simultaneously guard against an intrusive state and restrain the urges and excesses of the isolated individual.  One of Robert Nisbet’s great insights (with more than a little help from Tocqueville and others) is the unholy alliance between advocates of a powerful state and those who would be its alleged and even actual beneficiaries.

                  A society that is at once grounded in collectivism and individualism would seem to be a contradiction in terms.  Not so, Tocqueville prophesied.  And not so, Nisbet observed.

                  Not that Robert Nisbet liked what he was observing.  Far from it; hence his insistent plea for the survival, nay the shoring up and flourishing, of those crucial intervening institutions, those “little platoons” of Edmund Burke; and hence his temptation to lament their obvious decline when he wasn’t engaging in his own prophesying about their feared collapse.       

The Domestic Consequences of Foreign Wars

There is no quicker way to get the blood up than to question the integrity of our nation's war policies. Yet, on the political right, it used to be respectable, without being narrowly isolationist or pacifist, to examine and challenge the wisdom of military engagement, especially abroad. We need mention just a few names to remember that we have a wealth of tradition of healthy skepticism. Babbitt, More, Nock, Kirk, Weaver, Taft were quite eloquent with their positions, and, as Professor Carey mentioned in his post, Robert Nisbet was one of the most important voices to proffer a "scathing indictment of our interventionist policies." His criticism of warfare is of consequence largely because he foresaw as a sociologist the domestic pressures that foreign wars excite.

An active soldier in World War II, Nisbet openly recognized that warfare was an exceptionally appealing enterprise, that it was an intense force for the manifestation of those very qualities that we expect in our leadership class (valor, heroism, courage, and sacrifice), and that through shared purpose, our nation could meet one of the most basic needs of all, the need of people to come together to ensure survival. Warfare is community-building, it creates opportunity, and stimulates social, political, and economic fluidity. As he wrote in The Twilight of Authority,

"One of war's greatest functions is giving a sense of community to those on each side...At a stroke, the ordinary factionalisms, the gnawing conflicts and competitions of the marketplace, and the ideological divisions of politics become muted, even dissolved. In their place is the kind of moral and social and political community that war can bring to a population which feels it is engaged upon some kind of mission or crusade...The effect of war can be, and has been, to endow with welcome meaning or purpose activities that all too easily come in ordinary times to seem lacking in either."

But while recognizing the positive, community-building aspects of war, Nisbet increasingly feared the powerful wartime forces that would guarantee to "break the cake of custom, the net of tradition," rend the great work of time (in our case, the Republic), in favor of mass centralization of power and lead directly to the weakening of those little platoons that nurture and sustain the human spirit. As he argued in The Present Age, "Military, or at lease war-born, relationships among individuals tend to supersede relationships of family, parish, and ordinary walks of life." So omnipotent can these relationships be that Nisbet declared that our first experience with totalitarianism came during World War I under President Wilson. "The tragedy of contemporary warfare," he wrote in The Quest for Community, "is not that its efficiency has become progressively destructive, but rather that the stifling regimentation and bureaucratic centralization of military organization is becoming more and more the model of associative and leadership relationships in time of peace and in nonmilitary organizations."

So the question is not whether or not we are to engage an enemy when attacked (which seems to be clear among our readers), but, as Winston has pointed out, are we going to transform the battle of survival into a moral and political crusade, into "nation-building"? And what effect will perpetual war have on American political society? Historians, like Nisbet, have clearly pointed out the revolutionary effects WWI and WWII had on the growth of the executive branch of government, but what can we say about the effects that more recent wars, e.g., the Cold War, the wars in Korea, Vietnam , Iraq, and Afghanistan, have had on our social institutions as well? Think of the vast changes in our thinking about the kinship society, the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, the growth in instruments of national security, and our educational institutions, curricula, and policies. Some change has been for the good, some not so good. But for those of us who call ourselves conservative, it is imperative that we continue to examine and question the actions of Leviathan.

"Nisbet, War, and the American Republic" by George W. Carey

Winston does well in bringing Robert Nisbet's teaching to bear upon the basic problems we confront ("War, Crisis and Centralization of Power"). An assigned reading in my contemporary American conservative course at Georgetown is Nisbet's Present Age. While this work incorporates much of his previous thought and findings, I assign it primarily because it is a scathing indictment of our interventionist policies since the First World War. He remarks on the "prominence of war in American life since 1914, amounting to a virtual Seventy-Five years war," noting as well "the staggering size of the military establishment since World War II." He contends that there are irrepressible forces at work, namely, "the whole self-perpetuating military-industrial complex and the technological scientific elite that Eisenhower warned against" which shamefully exploits a widely accepted, but sham "American exceptionalism." I think it fair to say that Bush II's foreign policy and rhetoric embodied just about everything Nisbet loathed. He would have been disappointed, but not at all surprised, that his "Seventy-Five years war" is now almost a "Hundred years war."

What I want my students to see from Nisbet's account is that traditional conservatives are not mindless war hawks (think Max Boot) contrary to what one might glean from the talking heads on TV or the main stream media. My having to do this, however, only indicates the extent to which neoconservatism has somehow morphed into just "conservatism."

Be that as it may, Nisbet's observations, coupled what has transpired under the Bush and Obama administrations, point to a state of affairs that troubles me mightily. Specifically, as I see it, there is a gulf, separation, or disjunction (there are perhaps better words to describe this) between sensible, ordinary Americans and those who are making the decisions to commit our nation to sustain hostilities. In fact, and significantly, the separation is more extensive than this: During the run up to the Iraq invasion virtually all the "opinion leaders" -- high ranking officials, the influencial editors and columnists, the gurus from the Council of Foreign Relations, the "talking head" experts on cable TV -- tacitly seemed to assume that military intervention was necessary. For the most part, these individuals were not concerned with the questions surrounding whether we should invade Iraq; rather their concerns centered on when we should invade, what our tactics ought to be, what effects the invasion and the removal of Sadam would be on the Middle East or America's stature in the world, and so forth. While one might have imagined that launching a "preventive war" would have sparked considerable and heated debate, this issue was largely ignored by those in power and their minions. To a lesser degree, Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan illustrates the same phenomenon: His ultimate decision, much like Bush II's to invade Iraq, seemed like a forgone conclusion once the elite establishment publicly pushed the matter to the forefront as involving the security of the nation.

Perhaps better evidence of the gulf or separation to which I refer is the fact that lies and deception are seemingly necessary to gain popular support for wars. It is now well documented, for instance, that Roosevelt II told the people one thing (your sons will never fight on foreign soil) while he endeavored in various ways to involve the nation in hostilities. Likewise, lies and deception, albeit in a different form, marked our interventions in Vietnam and Iraq. While, in my opinion, this by itself is deplorable, my point is that this practice indicates at least the existence of a separation in outlook and thinking between the decision makers and ordinary citizens. What other reason would there be for the lies and deception if not to bring the people around? Moreover, as Goebbels remarked, such a transformation is not too difficult for those who control government to achieve.

"War, Crisis and Centralization of Power" by Winston Elliott III

In our recent posts regarding the future of the American Republic, and the proper balance between culture and politics, a number of important issues have been touched upon.  Bruce, Brad and Barbara have each addressed the necessity of rebuilding communities from the bottom up.  Brad, Bruce and I have discussed the proper role of government and the debate between libertarians and conservatives regarding the tension between order and liberty. In his books Robert Nisbet brilliantly examines these issues in light of modern trends towards centralization and militarization. 

I know of no principle in history more often validated than that which tells us that social health and political power are inversely related. If...social anemia is the necessary consequence of political hypertrophy, it is evident that renewal of strength in the social order demands a fundamental change in present uses of political power.--Nisbet in Twilight of Authority

In America today we have a variety of wars; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the "war" on drugs. We also live with the fallout from past "wars" on poverty, illiteracy and others.  Why is it necessary to call each of these political programs "wars"? Is this just motivational rhetoric or is it an attempt to manipulate the citizenry into supporting massive government power and spending? Would we put up with the intrusive work of the TSA and the NSA if not for the "war" on terror? Certainly the rhetoric of war and crisis is a powerful tool in the hands of those who are committed to central government power over states and local communities.  Would we allow the massive intrusion of the federal government into K-12 education if the general public were not beaten about the head and shoulders regarding the "crisis" in education?

In the excerpt below, from his preface to Twilight of Authority, Nisbet talks about the trends of centralization and militarization in light of their effects on community. Certainly when trying to understand and explain why it is necessary to greatly reduce the powers of the American central government, and empower local communities, Nisbet's works (Quest for Community and Twilight of Authority particularly) are rich resources for imaginative conservatives. Are we living in a twilight age as Nisbet (writing in 1975) claims?


Excerpt from Robert Nisbet's preface to Twilight of Authority

"Periodically in Western History twilight ages make their appearance. Processes of decline and erosion of institutions are more evident than those of genesis and development. Something like a vacuum obtains in the moral order for large numbers of people. Human loyalties, uprooted from accustomed soil, can be seen tumbling across the landscape with no scheme of larger purpose to fix them. Individualism reveals itself less as achievement and enterprise than as egoism and mere performance. Retreat from the major to the minor, from the noble to the trivial, the communal to the personal, and from the objective to the subjective is commonplace. There is a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and of corruption of culture. The sense of estrangement from community is strong.