Sunday, August 14, 2011

Fault Lines. Part II

In the previous post commentator JMSmith made the following comment.
He was, as I recall from Witness, and as these passages seem to confirm, recoiling from the enervation of the West. It's like a party that starts to wind down: guests leave because other guests leave. There's no future in it.
I'n all fairness to JMSmith, he has not read Cold Friday where Chambers becomes more specific in what he felt were the Crises of the West;
..... Communism manipulated them, not in terms of Communism, but in terms of the shared historical crisis-peace and social justice being two of the most workable terms.[Ed] They were free to denounce Communism and Communists (and also anti-Communists) after whatever flourishes their intellectual innocence or arrogance might choose. Communism asked no more. It cared nothing, at this point, about motives. It cared about results.

Unlike Communism, the West held no unified solution for the crisis. In face of the crisis, part of the West reacted with inertia[Ed]-inertia, in the simple term-is of the physics primer, that is, the tendency of a body to remain at rest or in a straight line of motion. But the responsive section offered a solution for the crisis. This solution, whatever differences it assumed from place to place and time to time, whatever disguises political expediency or preference draped or phrased it in, was always the same solution. It was the socialist solution. Derived, as doctrine, from the same source-the historical insights of Karl Marx-the socialist solution differed from the Communist solution chiefly in political methods. One difference consisted in the slower rate of speed at which socialism proposed to apply its solution. Another difference concerned the kind and degree of coercion that socialism would apply to impose its solution. In practice, no socialist government had yet pushed its solution to the point where full coercion must come into play. Therefore, this difference had not yet stood the test of reality. Otherwise, between the end solution that socialism and Communism both hold in view for mankind-the matured planned economy of the future-the difference was so slight that it would be difficult to slip a razor blade between them.

It was no innate charm of socialism that made millions in the West espouse it, just as it was no innate charm of Communism that recruited its millions. It was the force of the historical crisis that made masses of men entertain the socialist solution, which, in fact, sundered the West.
(To aid the reader, Chambers thought Communism was the aggressive variant of Socialism and Fascism its bastard brother.)

Here Chambers clearly identifies the problem of War and Social Justice as two of the main societal problems of the time. The jingoism of 1914 was replaced by an abject horror and despair by 1918 at the events that had unfolded during World War 1. The world was in turmoil and a sense of failure pervaded. The traditionalists had no solution. The punitive damages imposed on Germany by the Allies lead to some of the financial idiocy of the Wiemar republic with its resultant hyperinflation and societal failure. Bill Bonner described it thus:
Otto Freidrich described the period of German hyperinflation and its effects: “… People carried wages home in huge crates; by the time they could spend even their trillion-mark notes they were practically worthless… There was not a single girl in the entire middle class who could get married without her father paying a dowry… They saved and saved so that they could get married, and so it destroyed the whole idea of remaining chaste until marriage…the girls learned that virginity didn’t matter anymore.”“Against my will,” wrote author Stefan Zweig “I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicles of history.” Zweig lived through the hyperinflation in Germany during the ’20s and sold stories to survive. Later, he moved to Brazil and blew his brains out.
Brutality triumphed because civilized life was smothered by inflation. The Treaty of Versailles condemned the Huns to pay more than 47,000 tonnes of gold in reparations. Taking that amount of real money out of the economy left the Germans with no choice. They had no money left. They had to create it. Result: hyperinflation. The size of the banknotes rose with the crisis. In 1922, the highest denomination was 50,000 Mark. By 1923, the highest denomination was 100,000,000,000,000 Mark. By December 1923 the exchange rate was 4,200,000,000,000 Marks to 1 US dollar.”The German middle class was wiped out. More importantly, the handrails and guideposts wobbled, so there was nothing to hold onto and no way to know where you were going. Businesses, banks, military, police, even the government itself – everything tottered and fell down. In the tumult, war-hardened rabble rolled towards Herr Hitler like loose nuts.
They weren't just rolling to Herr Hitler, they were rolling to the Socialists as well. Chambers, who was visiting Germany at the time, saw it first hand [Ed, shortened for brevity]:
For the inflation was on. This was something the like of which Americans were to know nothing until some seven years Iater in the Great Depression. As an American I had traveller's cheques so that the inflation struck me at first only in the preposterous exchange of a check for a massive roll of hundreds of thousands of marks, and in the necessity of eating meals early because in the matter of an hour the value of the mark had fallen again, and a meal eaten at one o'clock might cost a thousand marks more than a meal eaten at noon.  I was in a great city, one of the most orderly and organized in the world. Here, modern civilization had taken form in big solid buildings, street lights streetcars, a flawless subway, automobiles-all the externals of modern life. Behind those impressive appearances life had gone mad. I was reminded of my Grandmother Whittaker's description of an earthquake-when the underpinnings of a world give way, the walls fall out and pipes writhe up from the surface of streets like snakes That had happened in Berlin and all over Germany But the solid form of things stood firm. The earthquake was invisible or visible only in its effects on the victims.
Well-dressed people walked back and forth on the Kurfarstendamm, like any Fifth Avenue crowd. Suddenly, the tears would stream down a woman's face simply as she walked along-the face of desperation, which asked and expected neither pity nor help, for there was no pity or help because there was no hope. The commonest of sights was to see someone snatch a purse and disappear in the crowd which rushed together for a moment, attracted by the victim's cries, and then walked on again with a shrug.
Sometimes I saw another aspect of the crisis that was even more baffling. There would be little knots of furtive figures selling newspapers at some of the street corners. At the appearance of a green-clad policeman, they would break and run. I was told that they were Communists. The Communist Party was outlawed. They were selling Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). I did not know, of course, that the party was even then stockpiling rifles and machine guns for a revolution that was scheduled to break out in the autumn.
Germany was an extreme case where societal problems had become pressure cooked.  But even before the First World War, the massive migration of the tired, poor, huddled masses from the Old World to the New, when sea travel was far more precarious than plane travel is now, showed just how miserable life was for those who left the Old World. The problems of intractable wage poverty, (i.e people who worked long days yet were not able to escape poverty even with thrift), and the effects of the war in terms of the disabled and dead were felt everywhere. These were societal "fault lines" which gave modern ideologies their allure. But there were other fault lines as well. Racial issues, the role of women in society, issues with regard to contraception and so on. Traditionalism failed because the solution to the problem was to go back to the state of affairs which caused the problem in the first place, the traditional world was unable to adapt and was bypassed.

Conservatism failed because it became hidebound to traditionalism.

George Grosz and Otto Dix captured the mood of the times.

 (Could be a motto for the doctrinaire Austrian economists)

8 comments:

  1. mdavid3:44 am

    Could be a motto for the doctrinaire Austrian economist

    The declining West utterly worships this form of argumentation. Example: Should out-of-wedlock mothers experience social stigma? Never! But then we suddenly have vast quantities of them and the whole culture falls apart. Should abortion be outlawed? Never! But soon it's being used as a form of eliminating undesireables and women, and the whole culture become unbalanced and harsh. But hey, it's always worth it! Because we must never be unkind to anyone at any time, regardless of the consequences.

    I say it's a false belief. As per Ps 85, kindness and truth must meet. A "doctrinaire" Austrian economist (I'm referring to Mises/Hayek to represent Austrian school) simply acknowledge the reality that markets must remain free in order to set prices and thus function properly. The non-doctrinaire Austrian who lashes out at such "inhumnaity" usually attempts to use his broad-minded "kindness" to circumvent the truth of how the economy really works and play God. He believes he can redistribute, bailout, price control, inflate - whatever it takes - to get the level of "kindness" he deems fit. He doesn't, like for example the Christian, actually desire to help the poor himself, he merely wants to salve his conscience and make them go away for good...and is most definately willing to use the power of the state to make it so, feeling morally superior to those who will not.

    Sadly, everyone (including the poor) is far better off when the economy operates properly. Much as a doctor never lets his heart bleed when he get near the operating table, the wise economist sees the limits of his knowledge and sticks to reality.

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  2. JMSmith8:07 am

    You have driven me to pull down my copy of Witness and refresh my memory, which is hardly a chore, given that Chambers is a good writer and it's 103 degrees (fahrenheit) out of doors. Needless to say, the first thing I find is that you are correct. Men, he writes, were drawn to communism because it seemed to offer the only answer to "the problem of war or the problem of economic crises." There was a widespread belief that WW I was only the first in a series of increasingly destructive wars, and that the economic catastrophes of the twenties and thirties were, likewise, just a beginning.

    My previous comment was inspired by my memory of the long chapter in which Chambers describes his family, most especially his father. As you know, Chambers father was an illustrator who would have liked to have been an artist, and whose career went steadily downhill due to the spread of photography. He and his wife maintained their sense of social superiority through a devotion to "culture," but as Chambers writes: "the subtle spirit that informed our culture, and the only point of intellectual unity I can detect in it, was pre-Raphaelitism." In other words, it was vague, nostalgic, and incoherent. Likewise, he says of his father: "Just what his own [cultural] standards were, it is difficult to say . . . . It seemed to me he had no general view of the world at all, no coherent system of ideas . . ." Chamber's father was an ineffectual man, emotionally as well as economically, an escapist, an aesthete, a muddled thinker. Sort of J. Alfred Prufrock mixed with Nietzsche's Last Men. I think this was the source of Chamber's sense of cultural malaise, and his awareness of the crisis of war and economic dislocations came later.

    I would like to say something about the failure of traditionalism, but am told by my wife that I've already made us late for an engagement, and so must leave that until later.

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  3. mdavid

    Because we must never be unkind to anyone at any time, regardless of the consequences.

    I agree with you that sentimentality is driver of false policy, and that sentimentality can be a force for evil as much as good.

    But as the last illustration shows, there is the truth of starving naked little girl and fat avaricious businessman. How do kindness and truth interact in this circumstance? To the doctrinaire Austrian, "charity" to this little girl is a waste of resources, resources which could be put to use in employing another individual. Austrian economics is simply economic Darwinism and like Darwinism it is merciless.

    The Master also tells us to feed the poor, this puts him in opposition to Hayek who would have frowned at such "inefficient" redistribution.

    Sadly, everyone (including the poor) is far better off when the economy operates properly.

    And operating properly means operating the economy sustainably. The whole problem with the laissaz-faire economy was, that while it was spectacularly productive, it was also unleashed forces which very nearly killed it and the society in which it operated. It was an unstable system.

    The question that Conservatives need to ask is, "Is it even possible to run a maximally efficient economy over the long term?" It appears to me that it is impossible. The solutions seems to be to run the market as free as the society can bear.

    Part of reality recognition is recognising that the people around you are limited. Greed, avarice, lust, stupidity and genetic inequality are realities that will never go away.

    The choice to the policy maker is not either free market or communism, rather a lot of free market and little bit of socialism to stop the free market from imploding.

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  4. JMSmith1:31 pm

    We're back from the social function, which, since we are upstanding SWPL's, entailed a good deal of wine guzzling, so I'm ready to defend, in a sort of spineless way, traditionalism.

    You are entirely correct to say that traditionalism entirely dropped the ball in the 1920's and 30's. It proposed only a return to an earlier state of affairs that would have led to precisely the same outcome. This is a fundamental weakness in much conservative thought, and one serious conservatives must think their way around. First, I think, we must understand that tradition entails no particular content. All "tradition" means is something passed down, which is received uncritically, simply on the authority of tradition. Most of the traditions that were available in the 1930s were, for the most part, hopelessly corrupted with liberalism. The others were simply reactionary. An example is Christian fundamentalism. (I'm not a fundamentalist myself, but I have a lot of sympathy for these people.) What traditionalists need to maintain, so far as I am concerned, is that people in the past understood some thing better than we do. Not everything. Just some things. The trick is to understand which things. My instinct is that they understood what we should regard (following Al Gore) as "inconvenient truths." They actually didn't have answers to the crisis of war and economic dislocation. They only had facts that made the easy answers to these problems incredible.

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  5. JMSmith.

    What traditionalists need to maintain, so far as I am concerned, is that people in the past understood some thing better than we do. Not everything. Just some things

    Agreed. I'm building up to this with the postings.

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  6. Anonymous12:53 am

    http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/06/18/german-reparations-following-world-war-i-compared-to-todays-sovereign-debt/

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  7. You are quite wrong about the hyper inflation of Germany. It was democracy that drove the German hyper-inflation. The government sector made up about a 1/3 of the economy during this period so the government printed money to pay these workers. Government after government fucked up Germany and stole everything they could and the people lost all faith in their leaders.

    What really broke the system was when the farmers switching to barter instead of paper money for their goods. Once the steamroller got going more and more sectors of the economy stopped taking paper money thus leading to higher and higher price increases for government workers. So the government printed like crazy just to keep their workers fed.

    The same thing happened in Zimbabwe. Hyper inflation on such scales is always a vote of no confidence against the government from the producers of a nation.

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  8. You are quite wrong about the hyper inflation of Germany. It was democracy that drove the German hyper-inflation. The government sector made up about a 1/3 of the economy during this period so the government printed money to pay these workers. Government after government fucked up Germany and stole everything they could and the people lost all faith in their leaders. What really broke the system was when the farmers switching to barter instead of paper money for their goods. Once the steamroller got going more and more sectors of the economy stopped taking paper money thus leading to higher and higher price increases for government workers. So the government printed like crazy just to keep their workers fed. The same thing happened in Zimbabwe. Hyper inflation on such scales is always a vote of no confidence against the government from the producers of a nation.

    ReplyDelete