It’s not that I think Bacevich is wrong, but that he is himself an example of the very thing he criticizes – someone who has chosen a certain set of values, and who expects others to agree that they are what we all should choose, for the sake of social order. But why isn’t he the one who should submit to someone else’s moral sense of certitude? Osama Bin Laden would certainly suggest he’s got it all wrong. And quite a few others as well, many of them true believing Christians.

Everyone values and expects self-discipline. But if they expect others to discipline themselves according to a standard chosen for them, rather than by them, they are in for a world of hurt. And if they allow everyone to choose their own standards of self-discipline, what exactly has been accomplished here? Many criminals and terrorists have their own prized sense of responsibility and ethics, so it’s really not possible to merely say we should all discipline ourselves and be responsible, without specifying what that means, and if we refrain from using the state to impose those values, what actually changes?

Sheesh. Liberals were doing just fine until the right made a clear, public and conscious choice to sh*t all over prudent fiscal management. Clinton was excoriated by the right for destroying the economy with tax increase – until the economy took off, when the right suddenly decided that the Reagan Era was still in effect.

1. Given that Bacevich is a dissenter from and critic of much of our culture and its institutions, it’s not entirely accurate to call him a conservative. In some sense, his position is either reactionary (wanting to return to the past at least in certain respects) or radical (though perhaps the radical change he seeks is to be had less through legislation or administration than through reforming character and mores). I don’t like the word “radical” for this purpose, but I can’t think of another.

2. Although the kind of self-discpline Bacevich longs for is, in our culture, generally rooted in monotheism, other cultures (early and middle Republican Rome, China in certain eras, for instance) prized self-discipline and restraint. Stoicism and Confucianism, among other schools, sought to imbue their followers, often of the upper classes, with discipline and sacrifice.

And will a society of “doubt and skepticism” leave individual consent exempt from critical evaluation?

To state a simplification: while authoritarians have difficulty recognizing abuse of authority, anti-authoritarians have difficulty recognizing the exercise of authority.

Thus in an anti-authoritarian regime real authority is ignored or centralized out of sight.

Linker’s “culture of choice” resulted from the federal judiciary’s destruction of local authorities’ influence over their communities through morals legislation. The state also now claims the right to suppress discriminating moral codes and subjects recalcitrants to impoverishment via lawsuits.

This has resulted in Hollywood and Washington becoming the most powerful and the most negligent authorities of all.

Those who understand authority are best suited to challenge its abuse, not those who reject it only to let it in again through the back door.

You’re correct that individualism and striving have created the prosperity we enjoy. Part of the difficult choice Bacevich poses is the recognition that self-restraint requires foregoing at least some of that prosperity.

Bacevich and other, in criticizing the culture of unrestrained appetite we have created, do not contend to “impose” restraint. Rather, they seek to uphold restraint and thereby persuade. That is why Bacevich stated that such position must be made in opposition, i.e,. outside the power of the state.

So your latter questions miss the point.

But I also think it incorrect to say, as WRW does, that deference to authority requires a belief in divine authority. That authority might be civil society; as an agnostic, the implication that without a belief in God I am incapable of self-restraint rankles. As a husband, father and homeowner, however, I absolutely see the need for self-restraint, for responsible behavior. That’s the key in all of this, and it’s a multi-faceted thing. I don’t see where ending the “culture of choice” actually fosters better behavior. And who shall end the culture of choice, and what specific restrictions upon sexual behavior – to take one example – shall we impose upon the public?

It is also as though that liberals like Linker cannot conceive of liberty except as the pursuit of appetite and the absence of restraint (whether spiritual or temporal.) And they cannot conceive of such restraint except through the State. I suppose given how we have become so fully individualistic and consumerist, that the informal (that is, nonstate) forms of authority are rapidly disappearing. “Movement conservatives” have certainly aided that breakdown, which is substantially the result of their market, consumerist policies.

My conclusion, in the end, is that Linker really has no idea what Prof. Bacevich (or you as well) are even talking about when your refer to self-restraint, authority and appetite. Perhaps I’m wrong in that conclusion.