Gillespie Gives Goldberg the Beatdown -- Nick Gillespie's crisp, smart rebuttal to Jonah Goldberg's aimless ravings about the dangers of libertarianism demonstrates by contrast the morbid condition of conservative thought and the vitality and robustness of the libertarian program.
The Libertarian Defense League v. George Will -- George Will bizarrely characterizes libertarianism as "faux conservatism." Have libertarians ever tried to pass off their ideology as conservative? Are gay marriage, legalized heroin, open markets for prostitution and so forth easily confused for conservatism? Someone please explain this to me.
In any case, the libertarian view is not "that freedom exists where government compulsion does not," as Will puts it. If my next door neighbor puts a gun to my head, dresses me in a latex body suit, and chains me to the pool table in his rec room, my freedom no longer exists, and government compulsion didn't have anything to do with it. The libertarian view is just that government compulsion is not morally special. If it's wrong for my neighbor to force me to do things I wouldn't volunteer to do, then it's wrong for the government too, and for the same reasons. After all, the government is just a bunch of folks like me and my neighbor.
Will goes on to argue that libertarians make a fetish of freedom in a way that fails to face the reality of conflicting political values, such as freedom, equality and order. Well, these don't seem to me to conflict. Freedom is about being unconstrained by others to do what you like as long as you don't use violence to keep others from doing what they like. Order is just the efficient maintenance of the peace that freedom entails. And the only kind of equality that matters morally is equality of violent power over others. We should all be as equal as is possible in having no (or as little as is really necessary) violent power over others. If everyone is equal in violent power such that no one can coerce others, then there is order, and everyone is free. Ta da!
Of course, the trick is how you keep people from coercing others by allowing some people (police) to have special powers to use pre-emptive and retaliatory violence, but without allowing this power to be abused? And how do you defend your borders against agressors without a big expensive military? And how do you pay for it if no one is allowed to just take your money, whether you like it or not? Good questions, all of which have interesting anwers!
More Goldberg Bashing -- Goldberg concludes his essay thus:
Chesterton pointed out that when a man stops believing in God, he won't believe in nothing, he'll believe in anything. God isn't necessarily the issue here. But the principle is the same. Humans, especially children, very much want to believe in things. If we don't bother to teach — or impose — certain Western values on our own people, they will embrace values that are neither open nor tolerant. Belief in "something" just isn't good enough.
First, Chesterton never pointed out any such thing, because pointing out a falsehood is like pointing out the winged horse crossing the street with the elf on its back. He asserted it, falsely. Indeed, it's necessarily false, as it's contradictory. A man who stops believing in God has, by that very action, demonstrated that he will not believe in anything.
The gist of Chesterton's falsehood is deeply anti-rational. The claim is that baseless commitment to (i.e., faith in) the existence a supernatural entity is the only possible foundation for norms governing belief. But that's bizarre. One needn't have God's assistance to arrive at the principle that you should only believe things you have evidence for (which principle is an excellent reason to stop believing in God.) With respect to value, the notion is that only God's commands can ground our judgments about value. But of course this is false. There is something that it is like to be a human being, and there are real requirements for life and happiness imposed on us not by God or our own descisions or desires, but by our naturally evolved biological and psychological constitution. Pace Chesterton's mystical skepticism, it is possible to discover what these requirements and values are using plain old human reason unaided by divine guidance.
We should certainly teach our children these values. But they aren't really "Western" in any other sense than that Westerners first discovered some of them. In any case, I certainly don't want people like Goldberg imposing them. Goldberg has just told us that he believes that you cannot discover these values by rational means, and the biggest problem in the world today is precisely that of people attempting to impose on others values that have been gained through leaps of unreason. The cultural source of the parental idiocy that allowed one stupid kid to join the Taliban simply has no significance compared to the danger posed by anti-rational religious commitment, which caused the death of thousands of Americans, and which Goldberg continues to recommend to us.
Jonah and the Libertines - In his recent NRO Column, Jonah Goldberg maintains that "cultural libertarianism" is the great threat to the American Order. Goldberg has long been grinding his anti-libertarian ax, and here he outdoes himself, putting forth Virginia Postrel and Nick Gillespie as symptoms and causes of the relativistic cultural decline that brings us John Walker.
Goldberg says that while the genuinely open cultural libertarians are less hypocritical than liberals (whose tolerance is a ruse), that openness is really just a symptom of nihilism, which is bad. According to the cultural libertarians:
There are no universal truths or even group truths (i.e., the authority of tradition, patriotism, etc.) ? only personal ones. According to cultural libertarianism, we should all start believing in absolutely nothing, until we find whichever creed or ideology fits us best. We can pick from across the vast menu of human diversity ? from all religions and cultures, real and imagined ? until we find one that fits our own personal preferences. Virginia Postrel can write triumphantly that the market allows Americans to spend $8 billion on porn and $3 billion at Christian bookstores, because she isn't willing to say that one is any better, or any worse, than the other.
This is wrong. I count myself a cultural libertarian, yet I believe that all truths are universal, in the sense that if a truth is a truth at all, it is a truth for everyone. Who says that we should ever believe in "absolutely nothing"? We should always believe what our careful thought about the available evidence indicates, and these beliefs may be quite firm. Now, I don't have any idea what a group truth is. Goldberg mentions the authority of tradition, or patriotism. It's peculiar that he picks these, since tradition and nationalist sentiments are notorious dens of dangerous untruth. But if there is are truths in either, they are grounded in facts independent of the tradition or the sentiments of the people toward their nation.
The truth of a proposition certainly isn't relative to the individual who entertains it. If it's in fact good for Bob to become a pianist, then that's just true, no matter who you are. However, the thing that makes it good for Bob to become a pianist is both something about Bob and something about everyone. Everyone should nurture their talents and pursue goals that inspire them. But Bob should become a pianist because he's good at it and really likes it. So the grounding for certain univeral truths are in part personal. There is thus no tension between picking from the menu of human diversity and the existence of universal truths.
Here is a universal moral truth: It is good to have a happy, satisfying, meaningful life.
We cultural libertarians understand that there is a great deal of variability among individuals. And the things that are likely to give rise to happy, satisfying, meaningful lives can be very different for different people. Now, if you pick a person, and consider her constitution, experience, capabilities, and so forth, there will be some objective facts about what sorts of things will lead her life to go well. These facts will overlap with the facts that will make anyone's life go well, just insofar as there are commonalities in human nature. Everyone should have friends, love their families, have meaningful productive work, enjoy aesthetic pleasures, have a good sex life, take time for leisure, etc... The way any particular individual might go about achieving such values is variable and, yes, relative to the person. But this in no way entails or suggests nihilism.
If you ask whether porn or Christian books are better, you have to ask "better in what respect?" If you want to get your rocks off (a genuine moral value!), you're best with porn. If you want to build your life around limiting, elaborate, socially constructed falsehoods, try a Christian book.
Goldberg is talented at making arbitrary assumptions about the Good in order to attack folks without his peculiar set of prejudices. Here he goes after Nick Gillespie for enjoying himself, and then makes a dumb non-sequitur:
Gillespie confesses that when he was younger, he did "pot and alcohol, mostly, but also acid, mescaline, Ecstasy, mushrooms, coke and meth... Mostly I did drugs because they were fun and I liked the way I felt when I was high." In other words, if it's good for me, it's good for everybody.
Goldberg's paraphrase has no relation to Nick's statment. Nick says that the drugs were fun, and that they made him feel good. I'm not sure what Goldberg has against fun and feeling good (he often strains in a striving geek way to project a Sinatraesque alcohol-and-cigars ethic of masculinity), but in any case, Gillespie said nothing about "everybody." Knowing Nick a little, I think he'd allow that some folks might not feel good and have fun on mescaline. And so they shouldn't do it. And that they shoudn't do it would be a universal moral truth.
Golberg owes us moral arguments against porn and drugs if he wants to be taken seriously. Preferring porn over Christian literature isn't a symptom of nihilism; it may rather be a symptom of a firm grasp on reality, and on what it means to live a really satisfying, non-deluded life on Earth.
What of Johnny Taliban? Golberg writes:
You don't turn children into responsible adults by giving them absolute freedom. You foster good character by limiting freedom, and by channeling energies into the most productive avenues. That's what all good schools, good families, and good societies do. The Boy Scouts don't throw a pocketknife to a kid and say, "Knock yourself out, kid. I'll be back in a couple hours." The cultural libertarians want to do precisely that.
If cultural libertarianism is just a synonym from egregious negligence about the well-being of people we love, then to hell with cultural libertarianism! But is Goldberg serious? Does he really think anybody thinks this? Well, if he does, he's stupid, and if he doesn't, he's dishonest. Take your pick.
Cultural libertarianism isn't a philosophy of child rearing. It is the belief that because there are a vast multiplicity of ways in which human beings might lead happy, satisfying, meaningful lives, we should keep it open to people to find the truly best way for themselves, and we should encourage a dynamic creative culture that reveals new, perhaps liberatory possibilities. But not all possibilities are equal. Some are contrary to basic aspects of human nature, and so should be avoided. Some will be contrary to aspects of a certain individual's natures. We should certainly limit our children's liberty in order to keep them safe, and yes, in order to channel their energies into endeavors we believe will lead them to have truly good lives. What about cultural libertarianism, properly understood, contradicts that?
If I had been Johnny Taliban's dad, I would have argued with Johnny about Islam, because Islam is unintelligent and harmful to a full, happy life. If he would have gone and become a muslim anyway, I would have told him that he's being stupid, and that I don't admire him for it. I might even take away the car keys!
I suppose I could characterize conservatism as the belief that one fosters good character by authoritarian suppression of independence through frequent beatings. But conservatives don't believe that, so it would be stupid to say it. Right?
Sullivan has reconsidered his suggestion that Johhny Taliban springs from the corrupt mores of those blue Gore-voting states. But he does so not because the suggestion is full-on stupid, but because Mr. Walker is in fact a right-wing extremist. In the end Sullivan holds fast, reasoning that the only authentic rebellion against liberal permissiveness is illiberal authoritarianism. He concludes:
... the link between his chosen lifestyle and the culture in which he was born is still valid, I think.
The link is what, Andrew? That the culture in which he was born didn't flat out prohibit Walker's eventual choices? As Daschle might put it, I'm disappointed in Andrew's sloppy thinking. Walker is one guy. He is not a representative sample of Marin County. I know the first rule of punditry is to make wild generalizations on the basis of your own experience, and I guess it carries over naturally to wild generalizations on the basis of some other guy's experience. But hasty generalization remains a canonical fallacy.
I know folks with permissive parents from permissive places who are conservative/liberal activists (take your pick). I know folks with strict parents from conservative places who are themselves permissive/strict (take your pick). So what! Sullivan's misplaced eagerness to use Walker as a bludgeon against "permissiveness," liberalism, and bluehood is mystifying.
I guess when you see cracks in the walls of hegemony, you beat at them with anything you can grab.
Andrew Sullivan won't rest until the last liberal is smoked out of its cave! Geesh, was he beaten as a child by hippies? Sullivan near enough gets an intellectual hernia straining to map Johnny Walker/Mike Spann onto the dubious Blue/Red electoral division. It's really just dumb. Where was Timothy McVeigh from again?
(Upstate New York, it turns out.. But you know what I'm getting at.)
I just now see that my previous points echo many made by Andrew Sullivan in his posts about Fisk's Fisted Face. Well, great minds... (though I don't have Sullivan's unstoppable urge to grab each dumb statement by someone on the left and hold it aloft as a representative example of the inner depravity of the left as such.)
But it's repulsive when Fisk calls his beating well-deserved, too, as he does here:
And – I realised – there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us – of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation" just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them "collateral damage".
So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was "beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees".
And of course, that's the point. The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us – by B-52s, not by them. And I'll say it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.
This kind of exculpatory reasoning is disturbing, as it denies people any meaningful sort of self-determination and moral responsibility. To whatever extent Fisk is right about the West having harmed the Afghans, Fisk himself has done nothing. He is not a symbol of us any more than a randomly chosen Afghan is a symbol of them. The assailants did not know who he was. They had no warrant for believing him to be a cause of their grievances. They lashed out irrationally, wrongly.
Fisk, who wishes to insulate his assailants from responsibility, manages to insult them instead, and us, by casting them as mere conduits for the West's brutal agency. Fisk says they "never should have done so," but it's not clear that he believes there was a real choice. In context, it sounds rather like "the world never should have been such that they felt they had to." It is surely a virtue to sympathize with others and to strive to know what drives them. It's no virtue, however, to sympathize so intensely that you would strip autonomy from your objects of sympathy in order to spite what they hate. If someone does something awful and wrong, at least give them the dignity of having done it of their own volition. If they are brutal, let them own their brutality. The West may be the source of some misery, but it doesn't therefore have a monopoly on causing it.
e-mail: flybottle -at- willwilkinson -dot- net
