Totalitarians have always hated intermediate institutions, those local sources of friendship, conversation, and organization like clubs, civic groups, and churches that stand between the individual and the state. tothesource seeks to support the church and family as essential intermediary institutions.
To this end, written from a conservative point of view, Wiker gleans insight from original works, including Aristotle, Hayek, C.S. Lewis and Chesterton. |
tothesource: Why did you write 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read?
Dr. Benjamin Wiker: Well, there are several reasons. First of all, it's a follow-up to 10 Books That Screwed Up the World. The first 10 Books dealt with those books that have really caused monumental damage to our world—Machiavelli's Prince, Marx's Communist Manifesto, Darwin's Descent of Man, Hitler's Mein Kampf, to cite some examples. The world would be a lot better place if they'd never been published. But one very insistent comment by readers and interviewers was, "What about the good books?" So here they are—the 10 Books that could make the world a whole lot better.
tts: Actually, it's more than 10…
Wiker: Yes, as with the first 10 Books, readers get a bonus! In the first 10 Books, I actually treated fifteen. In 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read, I offer the reader fourteen good books, and one impostor.
tts: Who's the impostor?
Wiker: Ayn Rand's immensely popular novel, Atlas Shrugged.
tts: That's bound to create some controversy!
Wiker: Good controversy, I hope. I want to make clear, up front, that I affirm what is good in Ayn Rand, but she's also got some significant defects that can't be overlooked and simply aren't reconcilable with true conservatism. I go into quite a lot of detail in the book, not only about the philosophical foundation of her views, but about the darker aspects of her personal life that illustrate what Rand meant by championing selfishness as the greatest virtue. It should also be pointed out that Rand herself rejected both conservatism and libertarianism. Rand's is the last book I treat, so by then I think it will be very clear to the reader that she really doesn't belong among the books conservatives should heartily affirm.
tts: I see that you begin rather far back historically, all the way to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Wiker: That's important. Conservatism has very ancient roots, and I consider Aristotle's Politics to be its founding book. The Politics is a book everyone who calls himself conservative really must read.
tts: Sounds a bit daunting—especially compared to conservative books on today's bestseller list.
Wiker: Not really. Of course, I'm acting as a guide to these great works, bringing out the main points and implications for today. But Aristotle has always been known as the philosopher of common sense, a man with his two feet firmly planted on the ground. He gives us some of the most important conservative starting points: the family as the moral, social, and economic foundation of society; the centrality of moral virtue; the ways to distinguish a good government from a bad one; and many more. I use Aristotle's Politics at the beginning, along with several others—including C. S. Lewis' Abolition of Man and G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy—to help come to a good definition of "conservatism."
tts: Why is it important to define conservatism?
Wiker: They need to think about it on a deeper level. There is a significant conservative upswell now that is largely a negative reaction to the direction our government has been taking. There's a lot of zeal, but not enough attention to the deeper understanding of conservatism that could help guide a negative reaction into becoming a positive rebuilding of American society. I think that can happen if people, all across the nation, and read and discuss these great conservative classics.
tts: You've also got some obvious picks—Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, The Federalist Papers, and the Anti-Federalists.
Wiker: Right—classics on everybody's list. But even here, there's a whole lot more gold than people suspect, and a few very important surprises.
tts: Such as?
Wiker: Here's one: the importance of the Anti-Federalists. Many regard the Constitution as an essentially conservative document. But in the debates about the ratification of the Constitution, the conservatives of the time, the Anti-Federalists, considered the Constitution to be a radical document, one that gave far too much power to the federal government. They lobbied for the Bill of Rights as a protection against the powers granted to the federal government in the Constitution. The situation we've got today is not, as many conservatives argue, the result of ignoring the Constitution, but cutting it loose from the Bill of Rights.
Any conservative today reading the Anti-Federalists will feel a kindred spirit—much more so than in reading The Federalist Papers. That's because the Anti-Federalists predicted so accurately the limitless growth of federal bureaucracy, federal taxation, and the welfare state. They were really quite prophetic!
tts: Which sources provide insight into economic issues?
Wiker: One of the books I treat, Fredrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom, has been the number one selling book on Amazon.com now for about a week. That's extraordinary—a book written over fifty years ago, warning about the degradations of socialism and the welfare state is outselling vampire romances, diet books, political potboilers, and business success books! That tells you something about the mood of the country.
tts: I see that you also go beyond books specifically on politics and economics, and treat literature. Wiker: Yes, I think conservatives can tend to focus too narrowly on politics and the pressing news of the day. But true conservatism is deeply thoughtful—broad and deep—taking into account the entire richness and complexity of human beings and human life. The proper nurturing and formation of the imagination is a forgotten and essential aspect of conservatism, and this neglect of the imagination would have horrified great conservative thinkers of the past like Edmund Burke and C. S. Lewis. So I treat such great conservative literary classics as Shakespeare's The Tempest, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It should be a source of pride that three of the greatest writers in the English language were conservatives in the classic sense, and those convictions come through very clearly in their literary works. |
Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, a Bestseller—Again.
You will understand the considerable wisdom of Hayek if you get just one profound point. Human beings are not gods. We are not, and can never be, all-knowing. For our own good, we need to accept, with humility, our own human intellectual limitations.
Of course, as an agnostic, that is not quite how Hayek put it, so let’s approach it from his angle….Hayek understood what governments tend to overlook: no centralized government bureaucracy can possibly know the particular and various needs of society on the local level— particular and various needs that individuals are best left to meet in their own way using their prudence, i.e., their practical experience and a concrete understanding of their own particular situation.
Hayek argues that the “state should confine itself to establishing rules applying to general types of situations and should allow the individuals freedom in everything which depends on the circumstances of time and place, because only the individuals concerned in each instance can fully know these circumstances and adapt their actions to them.” His argument for a free market was not based upon greed, but upon a hearty recognition of the inherent limitations of human knowledge. If the general government, in humility, recognizes that it cannot possibly know and judge all these particulars, then it will take a hands-off approach.
But even more, Hayek…stressed the inherent and irreducible complexity of human nature and hence human choices—a complexity that we must humbly accept. If all human action could be boiled down to one or two simple causes—say, a merely mechanical reaction to hunger, sex, or pain—then it would be possible to come up with a general and exact science of human action, and hence, human economic activity. If such a science were possible, then human economic activity would be entirely predictable and controllable from the top down—a socialist’s dream!
Against such utopian dreams, Hayek set forth our commonsense, everyday experience of our own complexity, the recognition that our choices, economic and otherwise, arise from a multitude of sources that cannot be boiled down for the convenience of grand socialist economic planners….A multitude of real, complex human beings choosing a multitude of particular means to provide for themselves and their families economically in their particular circumstances—that is the real, natural foundation of economics. In this respect, Hayek’s affirmation of the free market was a safeguard against reductionist views of human nature that would replace the natural foundations of economics with artificial schemes imposed by force from above. It was a call for humility on the part of government, a kind of reverence and respect before the wonderful complexity of human nature.
The real indicator of a book’s success today is not the New York Times’ bestseller list, but Amazon.com, where almost all the books are really being sold. Amazon’s list will tell you what folks are really buying—vampire romances, steamy thrillers, how-to-succeed-in- business books, diet books, and fantasies. But they’re now buying a book written over a half century ago by a once obscure Austrian economist warning about the impending disaster awaiting the west as it slips into the comfortable servitude of socialism, collectivism, and the welfare state. The Road to Serfdom is currently selling more than any other book—by one estimate, about 10,000 books a day.
There is no doubt that Hayek’s sudden surge of popularity is the result of conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck spotlighting the book. But it is the content of the book, the argument of the book, that is really selling it. People believe that we today are on the road to serfdom.
Neither this worry nor Hayek’s popularity are new. When Hayek’s book originally came out in 1944, it met with immediate success, selling well over a half a million copies by the following year. Obviously, Hayek hit a nerve.
No one was more surprised than Hayek himself, especially about the reception of his book in America. Very soon after his book was published to modest success in Britain, Hayek left the shores of the UK for a lecture tour of the United States. Thanks to a review of The Road to Serfdom that appeared in the New York Times while Hayek was crossing the ocean, he was a sensation by the time he landed in the US, and commenced on a wildly successful book tour. The Road to Serfdom has now proven its worth as one of the best-selling economics books of all time, a book especially appropriate to our time.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226320618?ie=UTF8&tag=tothesource-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0226320618 |