I was thinking over some of the responses to my discussion of “sufficientarianism” below, and noticing how common is a certain type of right-wing response to facts about the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our societies. To whit:
It isn’t true.
It may be true, but it doesn’t matter.
It’s true, and it matters, but doing something about it would (a) have the perverse effect of making that thing worse, or (b) make something else worse. etc etc.
The same, of course, for global warming or any number of other issues. That these responses are difficult to hold consistently, doesn’t always prevent their proponents from either advancing them simultaneously or switching promiscuously among them. All of which put me in mind of Albert Hirschman’s marvellous essay The Rhetoric of Reaction (pdf), which appears as one of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values (and in a later version as a book ).
Hirschman identifies three reactionary theses:
The perversity thesis : the proposed action or reform “will produce, via a series of unintended consequences, the exact contrary of the objective that is being pursued.”
The futility thesis : “the attempt at change is abortive, that in one way or another any change is or was largely surface, facade, cosmetic, hence illusory, as the ‘deep’ structures of society remain wholly untouched.”
The jeopardy thesis : “a new reform, if carried out, would mortally endanger an older, highly prized one that has only recently been put into place.”
Read the whole thing (as a certain reactionary blogger might say), it is a wonderful journey through the invariance of conservative responses to reform from Burke to Murray.