Nature and Palo Alto

So Palo Alto and Stanford might be as close to paradise as we will experience in this life—especially at the Stanford Park Hotel. I’m talking/discussing at a Hoover lunch today on NATURE these days, as part of a general effort to restore a natural foundation for conservatism. My opinion, as you can see below in my introductory comments, is that we’re pretty confused about both WHAT nature is and WHO we are these days. There’s nothing that new here for faithful POMOCON readers, but it’s all I got for you this week.

Conservatives these days are or should be generally for LEGISLATIVE COMPROMISE. Most of the great political disputes of our time can’t be resolved simply according to high principle or even according to the laws of nature and nature’s God. The American people are conflicted—and it’s not just the secularists versus the fundamentalists or the natural rights people versus the historical people or those devoted to the Founders versus the Progressives.

The conflicts are based on genuinely empirical or rational conflicts about who we are and what we’re supposed to do. Even if we say we taking our bearings from nature, it’s not clear who we are by nature or why nature provides authoritative guidance.

What John Locke says about who we are by nature, for example, is contradicted by the Darwinians. And it’s the Darwinians who speak with greatest scientific authority about who we are. The Lockeans say by nature we’re free, and in our freedom we use technology to move away from the nature that’s indifferent to our personal or individual existence. We’re free to pursue happiness by transforming what we’ve been given by nature with the security and significance of each of us in mind. So nature is an ambiguous standard at best.

By nature we’re free, and so we have to respect each other’s freedom. But by nature we’re miserable, and so nature, we can say, has given us almost worthless materials unless we do something with them. Our libertarians these days are our most and least natural men and women. They defend their natural freedom against government’s arbitrary impositions. But they’re also about freely or technologically imposing themselves on nature. They tend to be the least ecological or least totally organic Americans. They care as little as they can about the sustainability of nature as a whole, because they care most about the sustainability of particular personal or individual lives. They’re about the pursuit of their own happiness in what is, by nature, a pretty hostile environment.

The Darwinians, it’s seem to me, are more conservative than our Lockean libertarians. They’re much more about living according to nature—or serving the species in the ways nature intends every social animal to do. The pursuit of happiness through negating who we are according to nature culminates in miserably unnatural alienation or isolation. Studies show that people from large families are happier than people from small ones, married people happier than single ones, and people thinking of themselves in terms of parts of communities and countries usually happier than fearful or even rugged individuals standing alone. As Tocqueville says, the apathetic indifference of emotional isolation or individualism is a mistaken psychological judgment; we can’t be happy thinking that personal love is more trouble than it’s worth. (That’s why nobody can say Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David are happy!)

Nature intends members of every species to be happy by doing what nature intends. Only members of our species, for reasons the Darwians can’t really explain, can perversely make themselves unhappy by thinking of themselves too much as individuals and not as parts of social wholes greater than themselves.

Nature intends each of us to be replaced. And so nature intends, so to speak, that each of us find compensation for or meaning in our mortality in our replacements, in our children, our fellow citizens, our friends, and in our great accomplishments in thought and deed. We’re supposed to be happy enough living on the memories of others and in the fact that who we are in some ways lives beyond our biological demise. We, of course, can’t find conscious satisfaction in merely spreading our genes; we know well enough that our genes our quickly enough dispersed into insignificance. But the evolutionary point of our self-consciousness must be finding solace or significance in the inevitability of replacement.

From a Darwinian view, the real issue of sustainability today has to be do with people quite consciously not thinking of themselves as beings to be replaced. The issue of demographic sustainability is, of course, more pronounced in Western Europe and Japan and Russia and Israel than it is in our country. But the basic facts are the same everywhere: The problem is that people, on average, are living longer and longer and having fewer and fewer children. Someone might say, of course, there’s no problem for a personal view. Living longer is certainly good for particular persons, as is not being tied down by children. What’s bad from a Darwinian view, in other words, is good from a Lockean or individualistic or consistently pro-choice view.