'The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life'
Matt Welch | January 24, 2008, 11:45pm
Now that John McCain has re-emerged as a Time coverboy and GOP frontrunner-by-acclamation (if not by actual, um, delegates), The Weekly Standard -- the magazine that has historically supplied the maverick presidential contender with hefty chunks of his ideology, historical antecedents and even staff -- has finally decided that the water's warm enough again for some full-throated 2000-style cheerleading. First came a defense of McCain's role in the "Gang of 14" business that some conservatives will never forgive him for, next came a mash note from new New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in which we are dared to love McCain for his manly ability to recite poetry from the Victorian era (ah, the jolly old days of empire!).
Then the cherry was placed on top today in a bizarre yet oddly compelling attack on libertarianism by academics Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey. Here's their two-headed strawman of a thesis:
The ire against McCain contains elements of two of the greatest fallacies of modern political thought: the notion that ideology can replace virtue as the mainstay of a decent regime, and the cynical assumption that virtue is not real but vanity in disguise.
See how that works? If you disagree with McCain's policies, and don't buy into his straight talk, why, you're an ideologue who doesn't believe in virtue!
Let's go straight into the broadside against reason:
The problem with absolute faith in any ideology, including that of the free market, becomes evident with a glance at the flagship publication of the libertarians, Reason magazine. It is no coincidence that Reason publishes hagiographies of Milton Freedman [sic] as well as pleas for drug legalization and appreciations of cartoon pornography: economic libertarianism, elevated to the status of inviolable first principle, leads to moral libertarianism.
The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life. By teaching that 'greed is good,' strict free-market ideology holds out the promise that private vices can be public virtues. Recent congressional history has laid bare the fallacy of this argument. Republicans who proclaimed from the stump that greed was good turned out to believe it when they got into office, amassing earmarks and bridges to nowhere by means of their newfound powers. Why should we be surprised? To expect them to do otherwise would be to expect that men sometimes risk their self-interest for the sake of the public good, which our economist friends tell us is impossible. Conservatives who forget that the free market is properly a piece of policy rather than an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.
Without attempting to untangle the mess of that second graf -- seriously, read it again -- my question is this: Exactly where and how has libertarianism poisoned "public life"? Certainly not in the modern, Weekly Standard-approved national GOP, which has shot federal spending through the roof, created mammoth new entitlements, rammed through panicky regulatory nightmares, got the feds deep into local education, and lived out the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Of all the many, many things to complain about the party that has run most of the federal government for the past eight years, "dogmatic libertarianism" has to rank somewhere near the proliferation of Esperanto.
It's always flattering that libertarianism -- almost uniquely among strains of modern political thought -- is constantly challenged to defend itself against its most theoretical extremes. (As a comparative thought exercise, try to take Weekly Standardism to its "logical conclusion" ... National Perfectness, maybe?) But I suspect what's really going on here is a Weekly Standard campaign, more than a decade old at this point (see Walter Olsen's reason take way back in July 1997), to purge principled libertarianism out of the GOP. This crystallized into National Greatness Conservatism, and found a willing vessel in John McCain. As David Brooks wrote, in a moment of McCain euphoria back in 2000, "the Goldwater-Reagan ideological message needs to be overhauled."
After the maverick insurrection hit the rocks, National Greatness dwindled to a movement of four or five members and flirted openly with bolting the GOP altogether, before finding a new audience in the Bush White House post-Sept. 11. By the 2004 presidential election, David Brooks was celebrating the "death of small-government conservatism" as we know it. While Storey & Storey fret that conservatives are "marginalizing anyone who does not toe the doctrinaire line of their free market ideology," four GOP presidential contenders are busy trying to out-stimulus package one another and dole out welfare to energy companies and homeowners, while a marginalized fifth guy gets the eye-rolling treatment for talking about aggressively slashing the scope of government. Thank God the culture is significantly more libertarian than the Kristol/Brooks GOP.
As for reason's particular flavor of poison, I looked in vain for an "appreciation of cartoon pornography," and the only thing that came remotely close was Tim Cavanaugh calling a graphic porn novel "flaccid" and "as subtle as a Ron Jeremy money shot." Turns out there's a pretty important difference between wishing the government out of people's free transactions, and assuming those transactions are wonderful (let alone wanting to force them upon the rest of society). There's a similar difference between preferring free markets and being some kind of libertarian People's Cultist. As Cavanaugh wrote just today, regarding a completely different matter:
I love all attempts to imply that belief in a free market is some kind of revealed religion, unmoored from any ocular proof. Sure, a member of the irrational capitalist religion might say there's actual evidence for the effectiveness of economics. Maybe by noting that, in the period after lending at interest and common-stock corporations came into regular use, human beings went from not wiping their backsides to landing people on the moon, expanded their population by orders of magnitude, abandoned slavery and serfdom, etc., all in about a third of the time it took the tale of Huckabee's savior to travel the token distance from Jerusalem to Oslo. But hey, that's just theology.
Virginia Postrel (and James Glassman) were on to National Greatness from the git-go. I've got a chapter about the curious ideology in my book. W. James Antle, III wrote about The Weekly Standard after its 10th birthday.
James Anderson Merritt | January 25, 2008, 11:03am | #
John said, "Russia is a society that doesn't value freedom or individual rights, and that has left over soviet values that basically say that it is okay to steal or use political influence to get ahead. The market is never going to produce much freedom or prosperity under those conditions."
This is not unlike many areas of the United States where I have traveled or lived in five decades.
Isn't a market a place (or a protocol) whereby a willing buyer and a willing seller can find each other and voluntarily trade value for value, each walking away better off after the transaction because he got something he valued more than the thing he gave away?
If you start putting too many restrictions on this basic scenario, you may have something you CALL a market, which may have some market-like characteristics, but will it actually BE a market? In particular, if the post-Soviet Russian "market" is somewhere that you go to be coerced into making "politically correct" trades or having your property stolen, clearly we can't pin too many hopes on it, but should we confuse things by honoring such an institution with the name of "market"? On the other hand, if you have a real market, even one that operates in the heart of a broken society (and if that is even possible), can you not expect such an establishment to help cure the society's ills? This might explain why some of those US areas I alluded to above have markets (or institutions that are close to markets, if one ignores the distortions caused by government intervention), from which they derive great benefit. In that case, maybe there is hope for Russia, too.
The big problem with the neocons (also pointed out by others, above) is that they use the vocabulary of freedom without actually believing in freedom or promoting it. They pay lip service to freedom because that is what you do in the USA as you wave the flag. But true freedom would make many of their most cherished programs impossible and many of their core goals unattainable -- they know this, so it is important for them to usurp the mantle of "freedom's champions," at the same time marginalizing and vilifying the true champions, who see through the con and who would happily blow the whistle on it at every opportunity.
Fluffy | January 25, 2008, 11:55am | #
The link is that if no one has any faith in any sense of morality or institutions, no one is going to give a shit to follow the rules.
That's the institutions' fault, baby.
THEY are the one who tells people that the reason they should be moral is because if they aren't the Flying Spaghetti Monster will be angry.
I've never met anyone connected with a church who had anything to tell me about any subject whatsoever, ESPECIALLY personal morality. When you conflate Christianity's demented sexual obsessions with the morality that tells us we shouldn't steal, it's YOUR fault when people say, "Well, the sex stuff is obvious crap, so I guess I can assume that the stuff about stealing is crap too."
When the state tells people that their March Madness bracket pool is illegal and immoral, people rightly conclude that the state has no judgment in matters of morality, and similarly discount its OTHER judgments.
Maybe if we hadn't inherited such shitty and idiotic churches and public institutions, people wouldn't lose faith in them. You ever consider that?
The first time you put up a picture of a fucking triceratops wearing a saddle you lose the authority to tell me anything about anything ever again. Forever. Luckily, my personal morality was never based on such nonsense, so the death of our institutions doesn't affect me. But if there are people out there who have been affected by the death of institutions, a strong case can be made that it was shitty institutions that let them down.
We hate the cops, We hate the courts
Produce just laws, and cops and courts that follow those just laws, and I'll love them just fine. Frankly, if the laws were just I would probably turn into fucking Javert. That's already the way I am in areas where our laws aren't absurd.
we hate the religion, we hate the fundies
Don't say stupid shit and I won't think you're stupid. Easy enough.
we hate the military
Bite me.
alan | January 25, 2008, 12:54pm | #
I figure the true purpose* of this article is to set up a meme to be acted upon with the changing of the guard that is likely to occur in November.
If Hillary Clinton becomes the POTUS, the official narrative will run like this: The Bush Administration turned America into a morally vacuous, nation of Gordon Gekko profit seekers who disregarded all claims of community and public morality in the pursuit of greed. By electing a Democratic House, Senate and Presidency, America
has atoned herself of her blemished past.
Being the courtiers that they are, the neocons are getting to the head of the line in endorsing the official narrative. They have not named names as of yet, criticism of the Administration is still relatively mild in their circle, and they still hedge their bets in case Romney McCain actually beat the Dems, but if that doesn't occur the rats will abondon ship, and suck up to the new power center.
Essentially the substance of their argument when put motivation aside, is the argument that libertarians place a strong emphasis on Economic Man. There are many ways to dispute this, but let us take the premise as a given.
There is a reason this outlook is more rational than others. Your economic interest never lies to you. It never tells you that it is a good idea to get yourself killed in a foriegn nation unless your actual well being and those you love are at stake. It never tells you that blowing yourself up and dozens of people that you have never met will get you to a sex orgy in never-never land (btw, how is THAT for Libertinism?).
* Given neocons are Straussians, taking them at their word means always questioning their motives.
James Anderson Merritt | January 25, 2008, 2:19pm | #
John asks, "How does having a voluntary military and being willing to use it not promote freedom?"
First, the voluntary military is only "voluntary" once you sign up. Then your a** belongs to Uncle Sam or whoever his "Decider" is this week. If you doubt this, ask the National Guard units, whose members primarily signed up to directly defend the territory of the US States, but who have been sent to the middle-east, some of them on multiple tours. Military suicides are up, or haven't you been keeping up with the news? Second, the "voluntary military" is supported by the INVOLUNTARILY confiscated effort and resources of scores of millions of taxpayers. Their freedom, both in terms of behavior as well as in the ability to dispose of their own property, is markedly reduced during a state of war. And finally, is the use of the military really making people in the occupied areas "more free"? No more, it seems than the use of trade, which John dismisses:
"Further, how does the libertarian commitment to trade with anyone no matter how loathsome square with their 'promotion of freedom'?"
Libertarians have no commitment to trade with anyone, no matter how loathsome. Instead, Libertarians think that every individual has the right to make that decision for him or herself. Government shouldn't be determining or enforcing which nations are our trading partners this week, and "encouraging" us to change partners next week. That kind of thing sounds so close to Ingsoc behavior in "1984" that it is giving me the creeps.
Since I mentioned "1984," I would urge John and others who think he's onto something to go back and read Orwell's explanation of the reasoning behind war. The point, says Orwell, is to dispose of the products of human labor in a way that doesn't allow the population any opportunity to question their rulers and become dissatisfied with their political lot. Trading is important because prosperity is important. Vigorous trade breeds mutual prosperity, which in turn affords people the education, the free time, and the appreciation of possibilities that inspire them to look beyond the current deal of the political cards (and to perhaps be able to recognize when their "leaders" are dealing from the bottom of the deck). China's regime may have found a way to keep people fat and happy for the moment, but if you have been keeping track of news coming out of China, you will know that signs of discontent are growing along with the prosperity of the people, and that such discontent -- historically speaking, a precursor to regime change -- might be exacerbated by peturbations in that prosperity, brought on by the global financial troubles, especially the dollar's precipitous drop in value.
We can't make people free. We can, at best provide economic or military muscle if a population wants to be free, but even that is problematic, since, to take that approach, we must often restrict our OWN freedoms. We can provide an example of how to live free. But the people in various regions of the world have to understand freedom, how to get it, and how to keep it. It's a tough trick. We ourselves haven't been so good at keeping our own freedoms, especially in the most recent decade.
And of course, John gives us all an excuse to drink a shot: "The fallacy that libertarians fall into..." DRINK! (If that's not one of the drinking game triggers, it should be!)
For someone who doesn't really seem to understand libertarianism any better than the average Neocon, John certainly isn't shy about criticizing libertarians as if he did. But what else is new?
hale | January 25, 2008, 4:48pm | #
John,
Is empathy insufficient? Because that's why I am opposed to hurting other people. Yes, some people don't possess it and we call them sociopaths, but the category of people who don't possess belief in the objective morality of old tyme relijun is a lot bigger - and
far fewer atheists than sociopaths rape, murder or steal.
Sure, some atheists do these things; some of your religious types do too. Is that an insufficient counterexample to your explanatory thesis that faith in your god is the thing, and the only thing, that keeps us from "running amok and committing every sort of crime"?
It is?
What the hell does it matter if I'm on an analytically higher moral plane, if someone is going around committing harm? Either way, if it's my obligation to prevent him from doing so as best I can, my higher moral plane won't help me
one iota of a goddamn.
Let's try a thought experiment. If you, John, were the last person alive who followed the One True Source of Morality, would that fact alone make you any better at preventing people from acting evilly toward one another?
The social fabrics Burkeans love to invoke when tradition is in the air - these are the product of generations of people acting their own moralities with nothing to guide them but their own wills, instincts and social indoctrination, often in conflict with those held by portions of their societies. Yes, many of these people
were religious, particularly in America - but then, many of them were regarded as heretics in their time. Moreover, many were explicitly
not religious. Will you claim, as
National Review recently did, that these people were stealth theists? Doesn't that sound an awful lot like "false consciousness"?
But I'm wasting my time with these arguments. I reject objective morality not because it's patently untrue in light of my own experience, doesn't add up historically and isn't necessary to explain anything; I reject it because if it were true, the outcome would be ludicrous. Who is objectively right - the sect that argues that loaning with interest is evil, or the one that believes homosexuals should be stoned to death? Between the religion with a fetish for setting widows on fire and the one where you have to wear holy long-johns, which is privy to the ordering light that sets all falsehoods to truth?
And at what point in history has mankind ever acted on perfect morality? Could divine objectivity be a work-in-progress, or something expected of us that we're never shown?
Fluffy | January 25, 2008, 5:12pm | #
What makes a law unjust? Because you don't like it? If everyone fallows that theory, then no law will ever be followed because anyone think of some reason not to follow it especially when it is in their interest not to. You are standing on air fluffy and you don't even realize it. You appeal to concepts like "justice" but then deny there is any such thing as a common morality. We do have a common morality beyond religion and it is our traditions and culture.
There are lots of things wrong with this post.
First of all, you should get the fuck out of America if you don't think that when faced with an unjust law one has no obligation to follow it and can resist it with violence at one's own option. Go back to England you tory bastard.
I did not deny that there is a common morality. I explicitly endorsed the concept of a common morality. I just don't think I need your traditions or your god to justify it. I can start with a blank piece of paper and justify mutual non-initiation of force and consensual exchange. I can't start with a blank piece of paper and justify "Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy." That's because the prior is defensible and the latter is ridiculous crap.
You can respond that I don't have any way of making everyone agree with me - but so what? You have no way to prove the existence of your god and no way to get everyone to agree with THAT, either. You are standing on less than air, because we can at least agree that the air is there. The flying spaghetti monster is a bit more dubious than the air, bub.
Our traditions and culture may contain elements that serve legitimate and true morality. And those elements deserve respect. But they may also contain elements that do not serve legitimate and true morality, and those elements deserve disdain and scorn. Will we all automatically agree about which elements are which? Nope. And so we can yell at each other about it. But the people who wrote the initial article want ME to shut up and agree with THEM, in the interest of presenting a united front to the peasantry about which morality they should obey. Well, fuck that. How about the people at the Standard shut up and agree with ME?
What? That's not so attractive? In that case - tough luck, national greatness conservatives.
What would happen if everyone resisted laws they didn't agree with? Well, I imagine that what would happen is that laws that offended a very small number of people would simply be enforced, and the dissenters jailed. Laws that offended a large number of people would be swept away. States that attempted to keep in place laws that offended a large number of persons would be replaced by new states. In short, nothing would happen that Jefferson wouldn't have been totally happy with.
You can't pick and chose which laws to obey as long as you chose to be a member of society. It may be that that the law is so unjust that you can't morally abide by it. At that point, you have an obligation to publiclly disobey the law and take whatever punishment happens as a matter of principle, like Socrates agreeing to die rather than escape.
Don't you realize how utterly absurd this is?
There can be no such thing as a moral obligation to accept an unjust punishment. Since the imposition of that punishment is immoral, subjecting oneself to it voluntarily enables immorality and makes one complicit in it. Thoreau, Emerson and Socrates were dead wrong. As a tactic, civil disobedience is often effective. But it should not be elevated into a moral principle. The victim of unjust law can employ civil disobedience as a tactic to shame the state if he thinks that doing so would serve his interest or the interest of justice - but he is under no moral obligation to do so.
Consider a slave state, for example. Is the slave morally obligated to attempt to escape, allow himself to be caught, and accept the punishment for an escaped slave? Of course not. He is absolutely entitled to escape if he can, and to kill his master if he must. He is entitled to do this outside the mechanisms of the state, and he is entitled to smash the state, as well, if the state attempts to protect his master. And if that leads to anarchy, well - stop constructing unjust states, and you won't have to worry about that.
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