The free market or your soul

Two conservative pundits play a game of moral Twister trying to reconcile consumerism and traditional values.

By Gavin McNett

June 29, 1999 | It might be hard for the proper readership to find Francis Fukuyama's "The Great Disruption" or James Twitchell's "Lead Us Into Temptation," since neither is destined for the New Age section. But make no mistake: these are treatises of inner striving -- subtle and powerful documents of the soul's grappling with the ineffable. Fukuyama's book is an attempt by a prominent intellectual to demonstrate that community values can flourish under market capitalism; Twitchell's is a slick-jacketed paean to consumer culture by a curmudgeonly English professor. Underneath, though, both are desperate attempts to unravel a Zen-grade contradiction at the root of modern conservatism: How is it possible to want society to go forwards and backwards at the same time?

The question isn't a practical one; it's a genuine paradox -- and the authors strain so hard in solving it that each ends up catapulted into a state of perfect, implosive no-mind. Fukuyama finds refuge in human nature, while Twitchell raises a peculiarly silent round of applause for consumerism, demonstrating the sound of one hand clapping. These are stunning books, if not exactly in the way their authors intended. What sends them over the deep end is a problem that's been plaguing conservative thought since the Reagan years: the difficulty of reconciling the forward-moving principle of free-marketism with the backward-looking principle of "traditional family values."

The right needs to accomplish this in order to shore up its fragile coalition of business elites and concerned citizens; but the task has been seen as essentially wrong-headed since the days of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke -- the fathers, respectively, of market economics and modern conservatism. Smith and Burke regarded unrestrained capitalism and traditional values as mutually hostile entities that, if you take your eye off them for even a minute, will set to work trying to kill and eat each other. Put as simply as possible, the free market offers rewards for antisocial behavior, while societies set up barriers against free trade -- which isn't a radical notion in the least. But neither Fukuyama nor Twitchell is able to acknowledge it without an incredible struggle.

Fukuyama and Twitchell are what you'd call crypto-conservatives -- fellow travelers and fig-leaf-pasters on the rightward side of the academy. Imagine Fukuyama as a moderate gone 'round the bend. After studying classics with Allan Bloom and turning out policy studies at an establishment think tank (the Rand Corporation), he published a wildly influential essay entitled "The End of History" in Irving Kristol's right-intellectual journal, the National Interest, and found himself transformed, almost overnight, into a neoconservative superstar -- his scholarship chained forever to ideology. Fukuyama is a genuine academic celebrity in a field that rewards punditry and wowserism far more handsomely than it does scholarship, but he enjoys his privileges at a cost. Fukuyama is, by all indications, a good and centered man, but he knows why the caged bird sings.

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