Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful

I’ve never considered myself an official movement conservative; “conservative for lack of a better word” is my favored description. (I’d like to have a catchy abbreviation for it, but can’t come up with any pronounceable variation of CFLOABW, the “W” being both essential and intractable.) Therefore I tend to get bored fairly quickly with debates about the definition of conservatism and which of many factions has best title to the word. Nevertheless, I’ll go out on this limb: if true conservatism can be located anywhere, it must be at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, or at least in its publishing arm, ISI Books (www.isibooks.org).

National Review may have the best claim in a common-law or de facto sort of way. But its traditional project of fusing conservatism and libertarianism was always rather a patch job, and seems to be coming apart now. It still publishes a lot of good commentary, but more and more I find that certain of its regular contributors are entirely dispensable, and not conservative in any reasonable sense. Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative and other paleo-con publications such as Chronicles seem, judging by what they put on the web, to tend toward a dispiriting crankiness (dispiriting to me, anyway; a lot of people seem to enjoy crankiness).

ISI, though, seems to manage to maintain its equanimity while keeping a firm grasp on what the term “conservative” must mean, if it’s to mean anything conceptually distinct from chunks of libertarianism and nationalism simmered in a thin broth of “traditional values.”

Case in point: Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics As If Families Mattered. This is, obviously, a revisiting of Schumacher’s classic from the 1970s—which I must confess, up front, that I have never read, mainly because I thought I knew what was in it. I don’t think I’ve mentioned here the blog devoted to the book, where I have not contributed as much as I had intended to, thanks to an onslaught of other demands on my time. The blog is worth reading, especially if you’re interested in some pretty detailed discussion of questions of property ownership and the like.

Pearce’s book—and I think this was also true of Schumacher’s—is concerned precisely with what ought to be conserved against the onslaught of big government, big business, and big science (more accurately, big technology, but the phrase “big science” has a certain resonance).

I confess I haven’t given much attention to these matters for a while. They were very much on my mind when I was was working on Caelum et Terra, and I never rejected most of the ideas, but the day-to-day demands of life—simply getting by, raising a family, trying to keep my faith alive—have pushed them aside. Nor do I now have any particular grasp of how they should affect my life, or any plan for having them do so.

Yet I’m determined to hold on to them intellectually, if in no other way. And I think conservatism must hold on to them. There are some details in Small Is Still Beautiful with which I might argue. I’m more of an agnostic on the question of global warming than is Pearce, for instance, and think it not the best foundation for an argument against Bigness. But the essentials seem sound. Don’t most of us have a sense that industrialized society must somehow tame its appetites—all of its appetites—in order to survive, both psychologically and materially? Don’t most of us agree that a globally hyper-industrialized and hyper-commercialized society on the lines of the USA is not a reasonable or desirable aspiration? Those are Pearce’s theses, in broad outline, and I don’t see how any intellectual movement that wants to describe itself as “conservative” can disagree with them.

Hilary Clinton’s book It Takes A Village was roundly attacked from the right, but not always for the right reasons (or so it seemed from observing the controversy—I haven’t read that book, either). The African proverb from which she took her title, “It takes a village to raise a child” is a beautiful piece of folk wisdom (whether or not it’s actually an African proverb), and those who shouted “It doesn’t take a village—it takes a family!” were only half-right. Mrs. Clinton was perfectly correct in intimating that individual families do not exist in a void, and require a surrounding and supporting community.

Where Mrs. Clinton goes wrong, I venture, judging by her general policy views, is in smudging “the village” into “the government,” preferably run by herself. And it’s all very well to challenge her on this subterfuge. But it does take a village, or something like it, to sustain a family, and a number of villages to make a nation. And one of the chief problems of current American politics is that, in general, neither the left nor the right, neither the Democrats or the Republicans, really gives a damn about the village at all. For both, it’s an obstacle to progress rather than a crucial part of a truly human way of life.