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Posted November 29, 2005
re: libertarianism
Problems with libertarianism abound, but I doubt that Anthony Woodlief has found the central problem. Writing an essay entitled Bringing Back the Lower Case,
Woodlief concludes:
[T]here is libertarianism, the philosophy of governance, and there is Libertarianism, the creed. The persistence of the latter interferes, I think, with the development of the former.
There are other problems. Specifically, aside from the lack of rigor and the religious fervor, libertarianism suffers from a lack of attention to practical politics, and a growing and well-deserved association with libertinism, which is (or should be) another bag altogether.
I've heard the libertinism charge many a time; paleos made it over and over, and it was tiring the first time. It's occasionally on-target: Richard Kostelanetz has self-identified his libertarianism with libertinism. But most times the charge is hyperbole, often reflecting the inability of the critic to make distinctions that most libertarians readily and repeatedly make. What distinctions? That what may be allowed is not the same as what we recommend, and that limitations on political governance and paternalistic legal practice mean that many vices will go unpunished, except by the predictable consequences of the vice itself, and by the social stigma that citizens are free to direct towards its practitioners.
But Woodlief's main point is that libertarianism suffers from a lack of intellectual rigor, and that this is caused, at least in part, by religious fervor.
He's right, in part. But he carries this contention way beyond all measure. Surely his characterization of modern libertarianism as a flawed and failed religion posing as a philosophy of governance
is more arch than incisive. He seems to think that what he calls the religious
element in the modern libertarian movement is some unnatural perversion, a kind of usurpation on a fascinating and promising philosophy.
There's a word for this: naive.
Why? For the same reason that Ethan O. Waters
was so wrong in the early days of Liberty magazine. In his first major piece in the world's ugliest magazine, The Apostasy of Robert Nozick,
he wrote that libertarians had reacted to Nozick's rather nasty use of rent control in a religious way, not the way he would expect libertarians to react. Unlike Woodlief, Waters engaged in extravagant counterfactuals to stymie libertarians' reliance upon their emotionally laden value-judgments. But if memory serves me correctly, Waters did make the same point: libertarians who castigated the actions of Nozick were behaving more like religious zealots than rational scholars. I don't have the article in front of me (I can't find my copy of the second issue of Liberty), but I remember a question to the effect of is libertarianism a religion or a science?
My attitude at the time Waters made his argument was one of incredulity. Since I knew the pseudonymous author, I constrained my word choice, but my unspoken thought was what kind of fool thinks libertarianism is a science?
Libertarianism is a body of normative thought. At its core lies a set of principles that would (if put into action) regulate human conduct. It is advocated because people value these principles above competing principles and ideals. It is a moral theory about how the enterprises of politics and law should be run. Of course it reminds one of religion
for the simple reason that it involves, as it must, commitments to principles. Ethics, folks. And, as Spencer so astutely put it, Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.
So naturally we identify deep value commitments with religion; religions act as one major regulator of such commitments, and we analogize from that historical fact to value commitments in general. It's only natural.
What's not natural is Woodlief's tacit demand that people give up the depths and strengths of their commitments. It is absurd to expect arguments for liberty to be unaccompanied by a religious
feel. It's just the case that people who value liberty will not do so without elements of moral condemnation for those who stray from (or those who act flagrantly against) the principles. They will also form alliances with like-minded people, and, once the commitment is made, will look upon challenges as in some sense disturbing. That's just human nature. To argue against this is to expect man to be something other than he always has been and (I hazard) always will be.
It should also come as no shock to see people of other political persuasions engage in similar ways. Woodlief offers up the spectacle of Trotskyites. But I've seen the same kind of behavior — some of it nasty, some of it just silly, some of it quite noble — in conservatives, liberals, socialists, environmentalists, and others. After all, one consequence of holding a moral position is that you treat it with a sense of commitment, and that this commitment informs other behavior, too.
Why suggest anything else?
Well, for the same reason that philosophers have long challenged what Peirce called the fixation of belief
— because the unexamined belief is not (for some of us) worth having. And the so-called religious element
of normative belief is one of the sources of resistance to speculation, challenge, public testing, and debate.
So philosophers have long challenged this so-called religious
element in human nature. It might be said that the task of philosophy itself is to add a check upon the normal course of human nature vis-à-vis commitments.
In the course of my own ideological odyssey I have tried to follow this restrained course. I may be a libertarian of sorts, and I have definitely experienced the religious
elements that Woodlief writes against. But I have also subjected my beliefs to concerted bouts of criticism. I regularly seek out competing notions and perspectives. I have abandoned some libertarian notions outright (the idea that children should be treated as adults, by law, or that they should be treated as the property of their parents — two notions that have been advanced by libertarians who are committed to ideological purity above all else), and hold some other notions in something like Husserl's famous brackets.
(I have no sure opinion on the anarchist/minarchist debate, on intellectual property rights, and a whole host of questions.) Indeed, I may give up libertarianism if work on some basic property theory never meets any satisfactory elaboration among this rising generation of libertarian theorists. But until work is finished, I bracket out the problems as irrelevant to certain other commitments, such as the basic notion of liberty as a limit on human action, especially the activities of coercion and governance.
More scholarship is needed. I agree with Woodlief to that degree. I just don't think that the quasi-religious commitments to liberty are the main problem. I suspect that specialization in libertarian scholarship has hindered much of the scholarly and visionary analyses and syntheses we need. But there's probably a more important cause for the backwardness of libertarian philosophy.
Perhaps the main problem with the sorry state of libertarian scholarship is that most libertarians are just not that bright; the real breakthroughs occur in only a small minority of any population. The pool of self-conscious libertarians actively working to improve their understanding would have to grow before we overcome the ruts of scholarship and the hazards of school-formation and other hindrances to the developing of a robust and reasonable moral-political-legal philosophy.
Still, I'll go part way with Woodlief's main thesis. The religious attitude can be a problem. Unthinking commitments are a vexation to outsiders and an embarrassment to insiders with more nuanced positions. But you'll never really solve this problem. All we can do is to advance in the libertarian community (and beyond) a general respect for scientific method, responsible dialectic, and honest rhetoric. But these will always only be partial controls on the usual course of ideological speech, thought, and behavior.
So let's honor as philosophers — and not as mere ideologues — those who regularly rise above the petty aspects of pushing a normative philosophy. But never should we pretend that a philosophy must be denuded of all commitments and values and passions. Or even most. Normativity inevitably is made up of these things, and even the philosopher must give vent to their display.
Reason is a slave and a salve to the passions. But it is no replacement for them. Expecting libertarians en masse to give them up is not only futile, it's wrong-headed at base. It paints a picture of philosophy as emotionless, robotic thinkers, as Vulcan Mr. Spocks. This is a caricature of thinking man, and one we embrace at our peril.
Thankfully, the rigors of philosophy do not require this straw-man portrait of the philosopher. They only require that some of the worst elements of commitment be checked by manners as well as competing commitments to inquiry and truth.
This could happen, at least among a subset of the libertarian population . . . though never (of course) in the population as a whole.
Note: A curious element of Woodlief's criticism of modern libertarianism as religious is the apparent underlying notion that religion is reprehensible for the propensity of religious people to
in the fold;
Though these human, all-too-human foibles are by no means uncommon in religion, they are certainly not limited to religion. Philosophers, too, become committed to in-group cohesiveness and idea-fixation — and thus engage in in-group/out-group extravagances and all manners of question-avoidance and dogmatism — as Lucian of Samosata exposed in his brilliant satire, Hermotimus, or The Rival Philosophers.
Isn't it strange how a person could identify these traits as religious
when so many other aspects of life exhibit them, too? I can imagine a paleolib saying that Woodlief is religo-phobic. But I won't, seeing that I'm a secular humanist, and Woodlief is a likely one, too. Still, it's always interesting to see religion maligned, even if only by implication. (I'm sure I've done it myself. It's easier seeing one's faults in others, no?)
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