Friday, November 17, 2006

Milton, We Hardly Knew Ye...

I got snide about Lionel Tiger for his meanness over the death of Clifford Geertz so I had better tread carefully when I try to say something about Milton Friedman. Not much real risk here, I suppose: Milton is (was) Milton and I am I and there isn’t anything that I could say that would burnish or blight his image by an atom.

Anyway it isn’t really Milton the economist that I want to talk about (a topic on which I am surpassingly unqualified to opine) but Milton the plaster Madonna in front of the Corpus Christi parade. My point is: whatever his contribution to economics, his real fame comes from his role as a dialectition in the public forum: not exactly a front man, but a rallying-point for a whole bunch of causes, some of which have nothing to do with him and some of which are (or ought to have been) beneath his dignity.

The libertarian (I will not defame him with the much-sullied label of “conservative”)—I say the libertarian “movement,” embracing the full continuum from honest and thoughtful social critics through to barking wingnuts, have well learned the lesson that to have a cause, you need a narrative, and to have a narrative, you need characters. What ever else he may have accomplished, Milton played this iconic role to perfection. His colleague Gary Becker nailed it when he spoke of Milton’s “enormous zeal to convince the heathen.” (Quoted in Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek at 267). It’s a style of debate that we haven’t really seen since the days of Peter Abelard. It adds force, not incidentally, to Dierdre McCloskey’s point that economics has as much or more to do with rhetoric than it does with cool analysis.

The right intuitied this point a generation ago when they figured out how to demonize John Maynard Keynes, transmogrifying him into a convenient hatrack for any kind of leftist absurdism. A bit of the mirror image happened to Friedman: he gets credit for all kinds of stuff that isn’t even his affair. Just yesterday I heard a commentator who should have known better somehow associating Friedman with Ronald Reagan’s winning of the Cold War.

People, let’s review the bidding here. First, Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War. He huffed and he puffed and the house fell down—but nobody was more surprised to the Reaganites, who had never in their wildest fantasies supposed that the house was actually made out of straw. Second, only in the remotest sense did Milton have anything to do with it. He certainly thought Communism A Bad Thing. In a sense he thought Capitalism A Good Thing, but if you listened closely, you came to understand that perspective was largely hypothetical—as they used to say about Christianity, the trouble with Capitalism was that it hadn’t really been tried yet. But to conflate these insights into a single obit is not sober reporting, it’s just a kind of triumphalism, or at least a consoling bedtime story for the true believers huddled around the campfire.

It’s an old habit, really. It’s the same device that makes us anoint Adam Smith as the father of science that he never even heard of. It’s what leads us to wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think of the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D, or whether Jesus would Wear a Rolex on his Television Show (Forgotten that one? Link.). Sober minds will pore over the record to try to disentangle just how much credit for originality belongs to Friedman against, say Hayek (of whom, as it happens, Friedman spoke highly)—just as they do with Adam Smith, or Jefferson or Jesus.

So now he belongs to the ages. Sartre says somewhere that one of the downsides of being dead is that you no longer get to participate in the making of your own story. Up until yesterday, Milton continued to participate in his own story. But it may have gotten away from him some time ago, and it surely will now.

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