Matt Walsh is the Gordon Ramsey of the Conservative kitchen - but he's also a liberal.

Our kids need houses and jobs to make marriages and have kids

This week I’m responding to

Konstantin Kisin

— who has just sent another shot across the bow of the ARC-adjacent conservative community as to the perennial appeal of socialism. His point is basically that extreme inequality, and a society that offers no ladders for advancement to young people, will clearly accelerate the demographic crisis. Kids can’t become adult, can’t marry and won’t have children, if they are barred from the most basic kind of economic independence. And without such stepwise opportunities, people will always be tempted to look to a Big Brother collectivist state to sort it out. Sneering and telling the kids to ‘grow up’ isn’t likely to work.

This should be the stuff of nightmares for conservatives — not least because we are on the cusp of an A.I. technological revolution which is going to strip lower tier white collar jobs out of the economy and create mass unemployment. Suddenly, this prospect is becoming a viral discussion — with billionaire entrepreneurs admitting frankly that the prospect will be much sooner rather than later (2-10 years).

See here — these jobs ‘won’t exist in 24 months time’. And here, where Geoffrey Hinton, the father of modern AI, lays it all out. And here. I’m sure this stuff is coming up in your own feed.

In a recent post, I observed that, given the seeming inevitability of the change, perhaps we should accelerate the conversation about the nature of the regulations that we need and the kind of welfare safety net. It is here if you feel like a deeper dive

A saving grace from the A.I. Tsunami?

Everyone seems to be agreed that a basic income simply keeping people alive would be a disaster for meaning and solidarity. And the AI-experts themselves seem to think there is a non-trivial chance that if humans make themselves redundant, AI systems might simply opt to get rid of us. I think probably just as likely is that an elite super-rich, contemplating the non-utility of billions of people might opt to for a kind of global triage. Why not? Without a God, without Natural Law, there is no reason for either the AIs or their rich masters to show restraint. On the other hand I reasoned — in a Polly Anna-like attempt to find a silver lining — there might be an upside. With the right regulatory structure, perhaps we could use the enormous efficiency gains of A.I automation to recover labour intensive caring, nurturing and stewardship work in the way that we grow, process and cook food, look after each other (older people, those with disability, the sick) and steward the environment (my beloved hedges). This vision however depends not just on appropriate regulation, but also the re-emergence of a coherent repertoire of ubiquitous and unquestioned virtues rooted in a single religion and a societal commons of shared rituals demarcating the liturgical and seasonal year, and the seasons of our lives together.

If we fail to find that silver lining the future will be pockmarked by vengeful socialist catastrophes — some concatenation of Bladerunner, The Hunger Games and the Last of Us. But we can’t hope to thread the needle if we are blind to some of the most basic trade-offs and overlaps of our inherited ideological state space.

To get us off to the races, let me start by enraging the Gordon Ramsey of the conservative kitchen. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh is a liberal. He will scoff at the idea — and should he ever read this (please pass it on) perhaps I will get a spot in his ‘cancelled’ segment. Michael Knowles is perhaps more authentically Catholic. He recognizes more clearly that the American constitutional foundation of inalienable rights is not just Christian, but also very specifically protestant. He has no compunction about articulating a conservative insistence on the good, the true and the beautiful as non-negotiable — upon which basis he will countenance some idea of legitimate public discursive authority that takes precedence over first amendment free speech rights. But on the economy as a social body, Michael is like Walsh, fundamentally liberal. He defaults to a vision of deracinated, transacting individuals. Their conservatism ends with comparative advantage and a very nineteenth century Anglo-American hostility to the state. This is ironic, given that they are both ardent Catholics — because that hostility is fundamentally Anglo-protestant, rooted in Lockean vision of natural rights and at odds with the consistent vision of European catholicism — the ideas of say Luigi Taparelli. Rather than natural rights, it was the Thomist vision of natural law that flowed through Pope Leo IX’s vision of Rerum Novarum and later Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno. Natural rights posits autonomous, free floating individuals, sovereign and dependent only on God. This vision is predisposed to construe interactions between nominally separate entities E.g. transactions between parties to a market contract; obligations between the individual and the state. Natural law, by contrast, recognizes a continually nested hierarchy of interdependence and interrelation.

The political upshot of Catholic Social Teaching was that modernity involved two possible extremes, two ways for society to screw up. Capitalism and socialism represented the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary politics. Unrestrained market liberalism and socialism were for Pope Leo perversions rooted in the same soil — Enlightenment humanism. Pope Leo’s conception was rooted in the Aristotelian/Thomist recognition that the virtues can’t exist in isolation. They require a constant mutual balancing. As Chesterton quipped in Orthodoxy

The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Failure to balance justice with freedom will lead straight to the collectivist hell of the Gulag or the Nazi concentration camp. But failure to balance freedom with justice and solidarity, will lead just as quickly to the same place.

I have covered some of this ground before here in this post exploring the untapped overlap between green and conservative politics.

Right Wing and Green: Star-crossed Lovers

In this post, I have left the greens out of it. Instead, my aim is to show that all variants of market liberalism, nationalism and communism are ideological ‘brothers from the same mother’. They are modern ideologies rooted in Enlightenment humanism and share the same metaphysical anthropological vision of isolated, Cartesian billiard ball individuals. They share the faith in progress, the Babel instinct that humans can be Gods, and the utopian impulse to perfect people and societies in the here and now.

The only difference is that the collectivist variants — nationalism and socialism — aggregate the brownian motion of those billiard ball individuals through agency of the state. The precise collectivist principle varies. Citizenship in the case of civic nationalism; tribally contingent citizenship in the case of ethno-nationalisn; social class in the case of socialism and communism; and identity-based victim group in case of intersectional social liberalism. Whatever collective identity is invoked and mobilized, there has always been a prior process of dissembling — reducing and disaggregating the infinitely variable, place-bound, family rooted, biographical and generational interdependence of individuals in real communities, into identity-bearing cyphers of some larger project.

It is also true that without the communitarian texture of family, faith and community, market liberalism invariably morphs into some variety of social liberalism/social democracy with an ever more expansive and intrusive state to match. This is just the inevitable politics of social cohesion and political stability. If parents and communities are failing to socialize the kids, if communities are unable to bail out their own poor and indigent — the state will take over. The more the state does, the more it disempowers families and communities, the less they can do, and the more the state will intervene.

Reality check

All of this is not to say that there is nothing of value in nationalism, liberalism and even socialism. But what all the Enlightenment humanist ideologies share is the madness that comes from the systematic ‘isolating of virtues’ from each other.

Konstantin Kisin is absolutely right to insist that the kids need a stake in society. If we look at the rise of Islamo-socialist mayors in Western cities simply as a function of ideological indoctrination in schools and universities, we are missing the point entirely. Socialism, the vengeful equity politics of envy and utopian schemes to create heaven on earth will always appeal in a world of hyper inequality. But the AI revolution threatens something worse than absolute poverty. It is bringing into being a world of metaphysical redundancy and the collapse of all meaning. Even if we were able to bring about the Aaron Bastani’s brave new world of ‘fully automated luxury communism’ it would collapse through lethargy and indifference. The most probable scenario is that faced with truly mass unemployment western states will introduce some kind of universal basic income and rely on legalized drugs, porn and AI augmented virtual reality entertainment to pacify the impoverished masses: Brave New World meets the Matrix. Neither Hal/Skynet nor a super-rich global elite will need to eliminated useless and redundant mass of humanity. The sexual revolution, individualism, materialism, trans revolution and now A.I. are all hastening demographic collapse without precedent in human history. By acquiescing we will allow the problem to self-resolve.

Conservatives have no answers. There ARE answers. But conservatives don’t have them, mainly because they are liberals. Even grumpy uber-conservative and Catholic Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire is not a conservative. Of course he’s conservative about marriage, sex and a narrowly defined Christian morality. He’s critical and mocking of youthful activists and a bottomless well of scorn for ‘libtards’. But Walsh is not conservative in the primary and original sense which was a skepticism of capitalist modernity. Unlike GK Chesterton and Pope Leo XIV he has lost sight of the fact that capitalism as well as socialism has an extreme that, unmodified, will end in catastrophe. He has forgotten the Aristotelian insight that all virtues can become vices if applied without balance or restraint.

In the nineteenth century, conservatism was quite distinct from market liberalism. Tories were skeptical about the ‘big loaf of free trade’ of the Anti-Corn Law League and Manchester Liberals led by Richard Cobden and John Bright. Although also opposed to the corn lawsm the radical William Cobbett wanted to reverse the enclosure movement and restore the commons as the lynchpin of a golden age of civic yeomanry: a safety net and source of wealth and sustenance for the common people. Anticipating both Catholic distributism of the 20th century and the English socialism of William Morris and GDH Cole, Cobbett often cited cited monastic communities as examples of how resources could be shared and redistributed within a community, challenging the emerging capitalist model of private property. He was also profoundly patriotic and saw the generational fidelity to an unfolding national logos as a non-negotiable foundation for societal wellbeing.

In the 20th century our appreciation of the nuances and ideological imbrication of the conservative ‘ideological state-space’ was dulled down and simplified by the Cold War. Half a century of fighting communism saw all the rivulets of liberalism and conservatism flowing into a single stream. And in the process we lost sense of important distinctions and creative tensions. Now at this critical juncture, Christian and conservative thought is so impoverished that we are unable to generate new solutions. Unable to innovate, we expound old slogans over and again.

Buoyed by Trump’s election and a seemingly endless litany of executive orders and court victories, American conservatives in particular are blind to what lies ahead and to the nature of the challenge. A truly Christian, Catholic conservative policy must create conditions for everyone to be conservative, which means creating a political economy in which everyone has a stake. In effect this means re-purposing the Distributist agenda of early 20th century for the 21st century. I don’t claim to have a detailed understanding of how this might be done. But with the A.I. tsunami in mind, such a distributist-conservative political economy would surely centre on at least the following principles:

1. Small mixed family farms (~50-200 acres) should become once again the life-blood of the rural economy. Farmers are conservative. They have children. They appreciate the value of hard work. Fiscal and regulatory policy should be overwhelmingly targeted at recreating the familial rural economy. This basically means don’t tax or regulate family farms — at all. The bigger the agribusiness enterprise, the greater the scale of its operations, the greater the tax/regulatory overhead.

2. If A.I. does create mass unemployment, as seems likely — there should be a basic income. But this should be small, much less than subsistence and designed to force people to work together in teams or cooperatives. The oldest and most basic team is the family. The most stable basis for the family is Christian marriage. Any basic income should be designed to eliminate all administrative overhead (which means zero means testing) whilst fostering private enterprise and entrepreneurship.

3. Tax should be removed from all labour and most income and instead be redirected to the use of A.I. If the new technology brings massive productivity gains as anticipated, at least half of the resulting gains should be taxed in order to allow the incentivization of labour intensive activities relating to human care, craftsmanship, stewardship of our common pool resources (including the urban environment) and care of the environment (ecological stewardship). In combination with (1) and (2), this would allow the reanimation of an ecologically attractive, biodiverse pastoral landscape in which human activity augmented rather than simplified the complex beauty of creation.

4. Such a tax regime would ensure that the productivity gains of A.I. flow throughout society and do not generate the kind of hyper-inequality that otherwise seems virtually guaranteed (as acknowledged by virtually everyone on the inside track from Geoffrey Hinton and out).

5. Using such productivity gains to reanimate selectively areas of human life most generative of meaning — parenting, loving care, skilled craft work, food production and processing — it might be possible to execute the most Judo of moves which would be to use some forms of A.I. as a bulwark against transhumanism.

   I’m not convinced about this btw. ‘You can’t use the ring Boromir. Nobody can’. It’s kind of like getting friendly Goblins to fight the Orcs. I’m just trying vainly to find a silver lining.

6. A universal income guarantee based on citizenship would be linked to a non-negotiable national service in the military (or other public service) and life-long community service on a days-per-month basis.

We should build Cathedrals and Monasteries

Ok — I wrote it out, but I’m not completely convinced by any of that. Here is the thing. I think A.I. is evil. I think transhumanism is diabolical. And I think in the end we will have to choose. I don’t know when or how, but that is my sense. What we do meantime is open for question. I don’t think we will get anywhere fast until Christians — Catholics, Orthodox, Anglo-Catholics, conservative Lutherans in particular — stop thinking of themselves as liberals at all. Not just social justice leftie liberals in the American sense. But market-liberals and libertarians. Markets are fine. Individuals trading is just fine. Anything is better than a collectivist state. But some things should never be traded. And swathes of human experience and endeavour are more important than individuals and markets.

That we have lost all confidence and ambition in respect of these things is evident in the ugly churches that we build. All denominations are guilty of the short-term, actuarial modernism that ensures that shopping malls are very clearly the temples de jour in our society.

If that is true, there is only one possible response. This is a challenge to myself I suppose, but also to Catholics with money and influence like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles. We should put our money and our lives at the disposal of Christ and do what our medieval forbears did which is to build beautiful Gothic Cathedrals and monasteries. In England we should rebuild those ruins left by Henry VIII. Brick by brick, stone by stone in work spanning generations — such projects would provide an ongoing and enduring riposte to the transhumanist A.I. hell we have constructed. The global hive mind maps and connects trillions of bytes of data and experience in seconds — in a vain attempt to mimic the instantaneity of I AM WHO I AM, the ground of all being. But a Cathedral constructed slowly, over generations, by tens of thousands of hands — an iconic bridge drawing countless eyes upward — is statement of faith and confidence that the digital Baal will not prevail. What we need is a political economy and a church which can unleash a renewed medieval certainty in the goodness of creation. A new era of Cathedral and Church building led by parishioners, would be the best way to reassert the centrality of the Trinity in western civilization and to reject the otherwise all powerful digital paganism.