The Grand Experiment

I have been inspired by reading and writing about Byron, Shelley, and the other Romantic revolutionaries to imagine the position of a conservative in the year 1810 or so. He says:

Preserving the old social order in its every detail is the only way to maintain civilization; as we saw in France, any change leads to either anarchy or tyranny. We must:

1) maintain the aristocracy in their wealth and privilege at the top of society, allowing only a few families to join in each generation;
2) protect property rights;
3) keep the poor poor, because only dire poverty motivates those slackers to do the work necessary to keep society going;
4) make a severe and public example of criminals;
5) keep men dominant in political society and within the family;
6) promote marriage and enforce its obligations;
7) use the church to preserve morality, encourage obedience, and assist with social cohesion.

Over the past 200 years of constant social and political experiment people have tried to live without all of these pillars of the old order. How have the experiments worked out?

It seems to me that we are doing just fine without aristocracy; representative democracy has many flaws, but it is certainly a workable system. The notion that political authority needs the automatic respect that aristocracy encourages in the lower orders has turned out to be false.

The abolition of private property, as practiced by Bolsheviks and Maoists, has been disastrous everywhere it has been tried. On the other hand the limitation of property rights by regulation and high taxes, as practiced in our mixed economies, is perfectly compatible with both economic growth and political order, and it has helped us make the poor much better off. As Lord Acton remarked, "All that has been done to improve the condition of the working man has been done since the rights of property were discovered not to be unlimited."

Raising the living standard of the poor has led to a few spotty labor shortages, as with migrant farm laborers, but on the whole it turns out that people who are well paid and decently treated are much more productive than abused peons.

Crime rates have fallen dramatically across the world as our punishment of offenders has grown more lenient.

Our experiment with ending patriarchy and improving the status of women is, it seems to me, working quite well. There are still problems with how this is going to work out, but on the whole we have raised the status of women without harming the status of men. Certainly feminism has not led to a wholesale collapse of respect for authority, as Mary Wollstonecraft's critics predicted. It may be that this has not made women as much happier as feminists hoped, but it does not seem to have made them much less happy either.

On marriage, the record is mixed. Legalizing divorce has led to a lot of divorce -- no surprise there -- and divorce creates problems for children. Marriage may have been especially critical for family stability among the poor, and the dramatic decline in marriage among the poor of both Europe and America may be contributing to serious social pathologies. On the other hand, we have freed millions of people from awful marriages, and that has to count for something. Middle class people do fine with the freedom to marry, divorce and remarry as they see fit.

The experiment under way in Europe now, in running a society without religion, is too new to say if it will really work, but the evidence so far is positive. European atheists have lower rates of crime and divorce than believing Americans, as do Japanese, who don't have much religion, either.

So taken item by item, only a few of the claims made by conservatives of the early 1800s have turned out to be true. The stability of society has proved to be a much more robust thing than they feared, and the middle class suburbs of both America and Europe have achieved a degree of order and prosperity far beyond anything imagined in the ancien regime.

It has to be said, though, that the history of the modern era has been marked by disasters on a scale never before seen. Instead of bringing us peace, as Shelley and his friends hoped, the overthrow of aristocracy gave us World War I, World War II, and the Cold War with all of its attendant proxy wars. Revolutionary governments from Lenin's to Pol Pot's have unleashed the worst slaughters humanity has ever known. I agree with Roberto Calasso that one of the causes of Stalinism, Maoism, Nazism, and world war was the abolition of the old order, which left us very much adrift and prey to all sorts of crazy dictators with crazy ideas. It may be that much of the destruction was wreaked by modern technological and economic change rather than political reform, but I think that political reform has to bear a share of the blame.

Let's hope that the disasters were just a produce of the transition from the old world to the new, and that our future will be more like the past fifty years than the fifty before that.