NEOCONSERVATISM
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propose answers
to
social problems, and is just saying how hard the
answers are. And we know that there are problems with liberal
answers and with radical answers.
I would like to ask, and I hope that this doesn 't sound boringly
philosophical, how one decides what a problem is, and what a social
problem is, as opposed to just a fact out there that one accepts. What
are the criteria for deciding what social problems are, and presum–
ably for deciding what social problems are within the proper orbit
for the government to handle? I constructed a list of problems.
Inequal ity of income: is that a social problem or just something
that's happening out there that arises by a certain process that's
perfectly okay? Fewer than one hundred percent of the young people
go
to
universities: is that a social problem or not? Many people think
that being overweight is a social problem in the United States.
Ought one
LO
propose solutions for it or not? Or for the current
divorce rate? These are things that are addressed in social problem
text books, but do government programs cause the problems that
they 're supposed
to
cure?
But Irving Kristol has proposed that there are ties, and has
talked seriously about one apparently governmental problem,
namely censorship to preserve certain bourgeois and middle-class
virtues, virtues that one might find admirable. But is it a social
problem that there are changes taking place in some of those? Is a
difference between the average age of men and women in the United
States a social problem?
It
causes some problems about insurance
policies .... And that is a social fact. These things can be altered in
various ways. One can go either for great expenditures in raising the
average age of men, or in handicapping women in various age
groups to lower their life expectancy,
to
eliminate that inequality. Is
it a social problem that sport is a common bond that brings out more
crowds than would ever show up in a meeting like this? That only
fifty percent of the people vote in presidential elections? Or that the
weather is worse in the northeast than it is in California?
Hanna Papanek:
I think,
to
come back to an earlier point, the appeal
of the neoconservatives may be that they fail so singularly
to
put
their finger on any of the social problems of the future. I'm appalled
by the omissions both of the neoconservatives and of their critics. I
don't know what vision of the future you people have, but
to
my
mind, the world includes parts that go beyond western Europe and
the United States. What are the neoconservatives and their critics
thinking about a major issue, that is the North-South dialogue?
Another problem you seem to have conveniently overlooked has to
