The Flaw in Conservatism: A Call to Service
Last semester, Dr. Mark Brouwer rocked my world with a statement so simple that I hit myself for not saying it first: “If there was a solution to the political problems of the world, then someone would have discovered it by now.” How else could there have been so many absolutely brilliant political philosophers on completely opposite sides of the spectrum?
Of course, I’d never practically held that conservatism was the one true way to heaven. Nonetheless, writing for a distinguished conservative magazine, voting mostly Republican, and generally wishing that Uncle Sam would become less involved in my paycheck, how could I hold to a single philosophy in spite of the mounting evidence that neither a conservative nor a liberal government will solve society’s problems? I’m going to leave my conclusions on liberals to your imagination and elucidate what I discovered about conservatives.
It seems that conservatives never really seem to help those that nature attacks. Is there really a “good conservative” response to the crisis in Haiti? Can we honestly hope that individuals will just voluntarily organize, mobilize, and help an impoverished nation devastated by natural disaster?
I tend to think faith in humanity is naïve at best. People, both collectively and individually, are irrationally self-interested. So when life strikes, the world expects governments to provide aid just as they would expect Red Cross to do.
And perhaps not without reason. I see this firsthand in ΑΦΩ. My freshman year, I headed up gathering gifts for 50 children. Yet mobilizing collectors, let alone actually collecting funds, proved more excruciatingly slow than Alma Mater Sing. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Student Senators decided to allocate $1,000 to our cause in a matter of minutes.
Maybe it’s logistical convenience, or maybe it’s the involuntary nature of taxpayer “donations”. If government involvement in international humanitarian efforts is simply a matter of logistical ease, then our nonprofits seriously need to step up to the plate to avoid governmental power surges.
But I believe the problem runs much deeper. Humans aren’t stupid; they know that their donation (or lack thereof) likely won’t make any real difference. It’s the classic collective action dilemma.
My first understanding of the collective action conundrum came in Professor Ethan Hollander’s Survey of Comparative Politics. The class opened with an object lesson. Every student in the class received two points automatically. We had two options: we could keep the points for ourselves or we could donate one or both of our points towards a communal fund, which, if it reached 25 points contributed, would give everyone in the class three additional points towards his quiz grade added to the points he had accumulated.
The individual incentive was to keep one’s own two points and hope that everyone else contributed enough to put him ahead with a total of five points, while the person donating one point to the pot would end up with four points. Of course, since everyone had this incentive, the problem was to get everyone to make a contribution to the class fund.
We gave pep talks, begging and guilting our peers into donating towards the fund. The professor collected our slips of paper and began to read them aloud.
In a class of 30 people, we didn’t break 20 points donated.
“Suckers!” he jeered. “People are selfish. Why else would we need government?”
Unfortunately, nonprofits can’t make you give blood or money. So service has turned to the government to fill the gap in donations.
The situation is identical to the participation crisis inherent to democracy. A good many believe that democracy will eventually degenerate into tyranny. As the populace’s apathy towards government increases, opportunities for abuses in power emerge proportionally. Ultimately, a tyrant (or savior depending on your perspective) enters, and eventually dies or angers a group enough to galvanize them into action.
Thus democracy is birthed anew from the ashes.
The goal for citizens, as I see it, should be to stave off this degeneration. For conservatives that believe a big government will inevitably and unnecessarily encroach on the rights of citizens, this means a commitment to civic engagement and keeping the government small.
From my perspective, this means individually serving—relentlessly diminishing the need for governmental action. And even when there’s not a pressing hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake, the underprivileged should be voluntarily assisted simply to maintain a flexible infrastructure of volunteers and good will.
It’s a system built on weakness, doomed to fail eventually. People are self-interested. But if enough suckers rise up to the call, then the invasion of indifference and tyranny can be warded off for that much longer.
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