Coherence

Image by British Petroleum via Channel4The young, Distributist conservatives at Front Porch Republic can be respectful and wholesome even while being cynically critical of both corporate and government concentrations of power.  In the words of Gregory Wolfe at Commonweal:

...It is highly unlikely that the FPR will be adopted by Republican Party operatives and become a viable political force any time soon — so you might be tempted to write them off as descendents (sic) of Don Quixote — but these guys are, well, smart, and maybe even a little prophetic.

I may be wrong, but I happen to think that Catholics of whatever political stripe would find dialogue with the FPR crowd invigorating. I mean, if subsidiarity means anything, then Catholics ought to be wary of the path we’re heading down — wedding the Leviathan state to multinational capitalism. We should all care about the preservation of three endangered species: “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

In a recent post, Incoherence, FPR's Patrick J. Deneen praises David Brooks's assessment of the gulf oil disaster.  From Brooks:

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don’t want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.

On the other hand, they demand that the president “take control.” They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.

They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn’t control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn’t want cuts, wants change and doesn’t want change.

FPR's Deneen goes on to criticize the NYT column of Bob Herbert for being "a portrait of the very incoherence about which Brooks was writing."  Deneen's own assessment of the BP disaster is similar to that of this magazine, albeit far more acerbic:

What’s remarkable about the images of the oil spewing from the severed pipe a mile deep in the Gulf is the widespread belief that this leakage represents an environmental catastrophe, in contrast to the norm, when we control our circumstances by pumping the substance through pipes to containers to refineries to gas stations to automobiles to exhaust pipes to the atmosphere (or, to fertilizer factories to farm machinery to topsoil to erosion to rivers and back to the Gulf).  The only real difference at the moment is the concentrated visibility of the disaster, one that makes visible what is usually hidden – that our civilization exists by poisoning our world, by a concerted and organized effort to release toxic substances from confines where they are relatively sequestered for life to flourish, to a condition where we must come to mistrust the food that we eat, the air that we breath, the water that we drink. Rather than dispersed throughout the world – including the very molecular composition of our bodies– the spew allows us to see with unusual clarity the nature of our civilization. Yet we treat it as an exception, a momentary and controllable lapse, the fault of nefarious oil profiteers, rather than the rule, our “way of life.”

This analysis seems consistent with the PR slant BP is taking, that the gulf spill is a freak accident.  The company's strategy has been to film the disaster itself and broadcast images to the world via the perfect medium of (mis)information, the Internet.  By casting the events as a crisis, the oil industry can guarantee an incoherent and preoccupied public response.  Pundits are engulfed in flames, and finger-pointing and run-of-the-mill ideological battles outshine dispassionate truth in Media coverage.  

While Brooks's assessment is apt, it fails to build the necessary cranes.  There is something purer in Deneen's take, a lingering sense that our American society has become too dependent on both big business and big government, that our elected leaders do not represent us, but that we have become incapable of representing ourselves and have recourse to - in the words of Tocqueville - regard (the state) as the sole and necessary support for our individual weakness.  

I believe the two most important economic changes of the past hundred years are (1) the rapid increase of wealth as measured by purchasing power; and (2) the simultaneous systematic campaign of misinformation which has served to undermine the economic project that made us wealthy in the first place.  Obviously, there can be no anarchism, and the agrarian, Jeffersonian America advocated by Front Porch Republic seems fairly utopian; however, entrenched, unentitled interests, be they corporate - as many liberals say - or government - as many conservatives say - have either actively conspired or inadvertently served to redirect a considerable percentage of this country's wealth and power to those who do not deserve it.  

To correct this problem, we don't necessarily need more regulation, as liberal birdsong calls for, nor do we necessarily need less regulation, as conservative hacks continue to chant, but we could use some smarter regulation with less of a focus on GDP growth and more of a focus on creating a happy, healthy, society.  The word "regulate"originally meant "to keep regular".  The Media's visceral coverage of the oil spill, as Deneen advocates, should show Americans that our times and our policies are anything but regular.