In intellectual exile?

Published by Tom

August 5, 2012

I have been wondering if I am really a libertarian at all. Don't worry. I am not going to join the army of people who think they know better than you how to live your life. I have just been thinking about my thinking. A holiday gives a chap time for such intellectual spring cleaning. Let me share these doubts, so that you can (I hope) shoot them down.

If I try to imagine a clean slate "start up" libertarian society, it's difficult – especially as there are no virgin territories on Earth to which a group of like-minded people could migrate to found one. Unless such a group could leave behind the addicts of state dependence and the power-crazed thugs of statist politics all the vices that have led to the world's current depressing assortment of pork barrel democracies and totalitarian states would persist. Unless one was prepared (as one is emphatically not) to contemplate a libertarian version of Lenin's Red Terror. Let's just accept, based on history, that if an imagined better society needs a Terror, it's not really better.

Even if they did find another New World to colonise, our libertarian founding fathers and mothers would find those vices rising again in their offspring (or immigrating opportunistically across their open borders). They are, after all, part of what it is to be human.

A libertarian democracy would be at constant risk of degenerating into statism as the feckless banded together to vote themselves goodies at others' expense. If not a democracy, the temptation of power would be too much for the thugs amongst us. Indeed can any of us really know we are not thugs until that temptation has been presented and resisted?

History suggests even the founding idealist might find the temptation too much. Did Lenin spurn a state-funded Rolls-Royce? No more than Soviet Russian bears started to use public conveniences.

Every emergency in the new polity would lead to a call for "action" from the intellectually-challenged. "Action" that is by someone other than, and at no direct or immediate expense to, themselves. So I fear that my imagined small state would, one way or another, grow.

My imagining of a better society therefore involves not just a more free, but a more moral, population. There's the rub. Almost any political fantasy works with better people. The real test of a political philosophy is that it works with defective human material.

It seems to me that the only sets of historical circumstances that have ever led to a free (or at least free-er) society have involved communities with solid shared values of self-reliance evolved into unchallenged custom (or enshrined in canonical founding documents drawn up in reaction to the overthrow – or as in the case of Magna Carta, putting back within his bounds – of a tyrant). Typically those values have also been protected by some supernatural authority (real or imagined) capable of largely suppressing base human urges. That sounds more like a Conservative than a Libertarian society, doesn't it?

What a pity Britain doesn't have a Conservative Party any more. Or a God. Discuss.

25 responses to “In intellectual exile?”

Jobrag

August 5, 2012

I’m not sure about the shared belief in a god I’d say one of the most repressed times in English history was under the puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell, or in modern times just look at any Islamic state.

LikeLike

Reply
JMB

August 5, 2012

Perhaps you’d like to sit on the fence with me.
Intellectually challenged Libertarians? Surely an oxymoron. 🙂

LikeLike

Reply
Single Acts of Tyranny

August 5, 2012

I don’t think Libertaria could be a democracy in any sense. As to the thugs grabbing power, if the citizenry was armed*, then they (the thugs) would be at immediate, constant and serious risk of death from the self-protection of everyone else.
The Mafia can only exist because the mob know that if a citizen kills an extortionist the state will prosecute him (even if they allow him a gun in the first place).
* the mark of a free society is an armed populace, or at least the right to be an armed populace. The mark of a slave state is the sheep and his pathetic bleating for the shepherd to protect him without realising he is in fact, lunch.

LikeLike

Reply
Gorboduc

August 6, 2012

@JMB: I don’t see why libertarians can’t be “intellectually challenged” like the adherents of any other philosophical system. Bertrand Russell’s correspondents were supposed to be a pretty bright lot: but he liked to tell the story of a lady who wrote to him thus; “I have been a solipsist now for many years and I am surprised that there are not more of us.”
I used to call myself a Catholic Libertarian in the same spirit of apparent paradox which inspired JRR Tolkien to refer to himself as a Catholic Anarchist. I have met smart libertarians and stupid ones: I am not sure that I have ever met a truly wise one, for I have never met one in whose presentation of his case there was not some element of fantasy, some special pleading, or some special exception, brought in to disguise an inconsistency.
I have also encountered one or two really nasty ones, such as the late Robert Anton Wilson.
When I learned wisdom, I dropped Libertarianism.
Having studied both “Brave New World” and its lesser-known counterpart “Island”, I feel that there wasn’t much to choose between Huxley’s Dystopia and his Utopia.
To return to your main theme: your misgivings about what would happen to your ideal smallish armed libertarian state were brilliantly anticipated in GK Chesterton’s amazing novel “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”, published in 1904 and looking forward to 1984 (odd that!) by which date “people had lost faith in revolutions”.
I have attended countless political meetings over the years at which drivelling and inarticulate bores have outlined their ideal systems: the last gathering of this sort that I attended was chaired by a self-professed Libertarian the late Jonathan Bowden. From it I retired baffled and infuriated at yet another New Republic drawn up with the unacknowledged help of a much-misunderstood and plagiarised Plato, and perplexed by the way in which Libertarianism seemed to change places effortlessly with a truly repressive neo-Fascism.
GKC avided all that prosiness and nastiness and deceitfulness and seems, jestingly, to have devised an ideal system of small states (based on a folkish revival of the old London boroughs, with every man armed) and with all the right checks and balances: until … well, read it yourselves. It’s amazing.
But perhaps his Christian background (religion isn’t mentioned in the novel, however) will discourage the today’s under-educated generality – especially the ones with 2 PhD’s apiece – from opening the book. Pity, if so.
@Jobrag: I can’t see what Cromwell has got to do with a supposedly-shared religious belief: under his reign the Church of England was pretty ruthlessly repressed, the Catholics marginalised, and some of the more radical utopian cults persecuted. He can be seen as carrying on, with the Army’s help, the centralising statist policies of Henry VIII, Edward, Elisabeth
, and the Stuarts. Revisionist historian Eamonn Duffy has shown brilliantly that the vast majority of the Protestants who were burned at the stake under Mary, whose reign seems to be to represent an interlude of comparative freedom in contrast with that of the other Tudors, were able to manipulate the circumstances of their own trials and consequently seem to have committed an early form of deliberate “suicide-by-police” with the more-or-less reluctant cooperation of the State and Church.
I think that if you gave people guns to protect themselves with, you’d have to issue sentient guns that would refuse to fire in the “wrong” context: in other words, you’d be in the same state of daftness as the idiots who reproach God with not making a pain-free world, in which a knife would sharpen a pencil but not stab an enemy.
Certainly you’d have to insist on enforced training to ensure a reasonable standard of marksmanship: and Voila! there you are back in the time of James I, with the Trained Bands and the parish lads doing compulsory archery practise round at The Butts … Fall in, there!
I think a sensible understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Fall of Man would both explain clearly the natural deficiencies of any society, even (especially?) the fairest and most high-minded; and also help towards an understanding of how these deficiencies can’t ever be remedied by us, plot and devise we how ever ingeniously!

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 6, 2012

I have Kindled and read in the Mauritian sunshine “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” and, though I am wiser for it no doubt, I am not sure it addresses my question. Thank you anyway. As for the wisdom of Libertarians, the only political philosophers I have met who do not murder reality to suit their ends propose to murder men who do not fit their reality. I think us no guiltier than the former and less so than the latter.

LikeLike

Reply
Gorboduc

August 6, 2012

No, but the God bit might answer your question.
I said “Napoleon” was non-confessional: perhaps GKC thought that the Fall of Man was something perceived by all intelligent and broad-minded thinkers, the only reasonable (and historical) explanation for the unbridgeable chasm between our ideals and their realisation here, and that therefore Divine Providence and Law would have to be invoked, and then romantic notions of pure liberty – “Man the Unchained!” – would vanish like chaff before the wind.

LikeLike

Reply
Moggsy

August 8, 2012

Tom, Are not these thoughts the same ones that occupied the minds of the founding Fathers, Jefferson, Washington. The only real difference their “societal matrix” (sounds so cool) to yours. They did their best to think of and counter all the un-free stuff they imagined enemies of liberty, statists, would be rulers and tyrants might come up with.
They kept the right to arms as the final backstop the last resort and guarantee of the constitution.
Whatever. If a person wants to be and remain free they have to think, pay attention, remain clued up and interested. Remain enlightened enough and moral enough not to do unto others unless they would be happy to have it done unto them. Grant no power they are not willing to see misused. Be willing to stand up for all others in society.
When there is not a critical mass of people doing that then freedom and liberty dim and gutter.

LikeLike

Reply
Ian B

August 9, 2012

Here’s my tuppence in the old money-
I’m not so happy these days with the term “libertarian” for myself. I prefer “individualist”. This I think squares the circle for your later analysis. My view is that the shared values which gave “The West” its merit is individualism- so in a sense, the value we share is to not share too many values. This is as stable as any other value system. All the others tend towards tyranny, since keeping people “in line” with whatever shared values yuo choose to have inevitably requires ever greater coercion.
It’s worth mentioning that the “conservative” view of our own society appears to be false. They believe in a certain shared value set, which if one looks into history, one finds was a rather recent innovation of the nineteenth century, imposed by the first wave of “Progressive” reformers. Most of the institutions, social forms and behaviours that conservatives vaguely define as having existed from time immemorial date from that successful “Cultural Revolution”. Indeed, I would argue that the test of a successful cultural revolution is that it afterwards spawns a powerful conservative feeling that things have “always been this way”. Conservatives a hundred years from now will be describing the value system we currently call “PC” as the defining value set of our society, just as the Progressives already are; so we might say that the definition of a Conservative is an out-of-date Radical.
Anyway, try going with “individualist”. Libertarianism is really a rather specific, heavily economically focussed ideology which would naturally attract individualists, but it’s clear from the immense diversity of “Libertarians” that it is not, on its own, a complete value system.
Indeed, ISTM that many Libertarians are extremely collectivist. They just object to State collectivism getting in the way of their private collectivisms. Which seems a bit self-defeating to me, but that’s individualism for you.
Anyway, labels don’t much matter anyway. If you are sensible enough to dream of a society in which people leave each other alone to get on with their lives, that’s good enough.

LikeLike

Reply
Paul Marks

August 10, 2012

Does it matter if you are not a “pure” libertarian? Surely what matters is that you want government to spend less, tax less and regulate less.
As government takes up about half of civil society we are far from “anarchocapitalism” (or whatever) that we have to start from what where we are.
As for President Bush, Prime Minister Cameron (and so on) – sadly they clearly had/have no real interest in making government smaller (indeed quite the contrary).

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 10, 2012

I agree but (there’s always a but) if we are to persuade more people to join us on the road from statism we need to inspire them with a vision of where we are going. So many generations have now seen nothing else than a steadily-growing state “giving” them more and more. They can’t imagine life without it except in some dystopian BBC way. Most of our fellow-citizens really think that the only alternative to the NHS is no healthcare at all. We need to calm their hysterical fears if we are to persuade them to listen.

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 10, 2012

I don’t really think that I mean anything more by “libertarian” than people used to mean by calling themselves Liberal. I am a classical liberal whose views have been intensified by seeing a social democrat state in terrifying action. Frankly, I am puzzled why so few people seem as concerned about the enormous power of the state as I am. I really can’t get inside their heads. That’s why I invited friend Mark to contribute here. He’s the first such person who actually seemed inclined to explain his thinking, as opposed to just denouncing all opponents as X-ist.
These fellow-citizens of mine are a mystery to me, drifting inevitably toward subjection without evidencing any concern at all.

LikeLike

Reply
Paul Marks

August 10, 2012

Agreed – especially as the historical memory is so short.
For example, 80% (and rising) of industrial workers in Britain in 1911 were members of fraternal “Friendly Societies” in 1911 covering health care, old age and so on – yet every textbook (and television show and…..) assumes that the only alternative to copying Prussia was the Workhouse.
There was no real income tax in Guernsey and Jersey till World War II – but now a 20% income tax (introduced as an emergency wartime measure) is regarded (by the vile “international community”) as making these places evil “tax havens”.
As recently as the 1950s there was no real welfare state in the United States.
There was a system of govenrment old age pensions (although at the start of the 1950s a lot of people were still not covered by it), and there was some (time limited) unemployment pay – but that was about it.
No Medicare or Medicaid – no Food Stamps, none of the TRILLIONS of Dollars that are spent on the modern American Welfare State.
Yet people were not dying in the streets (in fact there were less homeless than there are now) and, contrary to the propaganda, people were not turned away from hospitals.
And all this was at a much lower level of economic development (due to a more primitive technological base) than exists today.
Yet people know nothing of this – and assume that the American Welfare State is totally vital.
They know as little of America under Ike as they know of Rome under the Emperor Nerva.
It is astonishing.
A lot of the growth of statism is fashion – it really is.
For example, why did Andorra introduce government “insurance” (for health, old age and so on) in the 1960s?
There was no need to do so – it was just fashion. Much as if someone said “Everyone else I know has got an S.T.D – so I must go and screw around till I catch one”.
Ditto with Switzerland and unemployment insurance (back in the 1970s) – no one was unemployed (before the introduced the new welfare), it was just (demented) fashion.
The work of an “educated elite” – much the same people who broke the link between the Swiss Franc and gold (the last major country to have such a link) and have now chained Switzerland to a corpse, by linking Swiss monetary policy to the Euro.
The people that ordinary folk should be able to look up to (the academics, the educators and so on) are the very people who misinform people – who distort everythihg.
The media (and the political leadership) follows the lead of the education system people.
And thus we are all dragged down.

LikeLike

Reply
Tomsmith

August 11, 2012

Tom, being an individualist is not a type politics. It is a philosophy fundamentally opposed to politics. A kind of anti-politics. This is why fantasies about the perfect libertarian state are always at least faintly ridiculous.

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 11, 2012

I am fascinated by this comment. You seem to equate politics with collectivism. Can one not practise politics to oppose collectivism?

LikeLike

Reply
Tomsmith

August 11, 2012

Politics, especially democratic politics, entails collectivism. Libertarianism as a political stance seems to me to equate to a type of collectivism promoting individualism, a contradiction in terms. I don’t find it to be logical or meaningful. As your original post says there has never been an enduring liberal state. I think this is because by accepting the idea of a state you are accepting collectivism. It is a fatal flaw in all libertarian politics.

LikeLike

Reply
David Davis

August 12, 2012

A “libertarian State” would be tautological. We in the Libertarian Alliance, or most of us, have known that for years.
I prefer, in default of Ian B’s comment about “individualists”, “classical-liberal minimal-statists”.
Anything less intrusive than a “minimal-state” probably in modern complicated times cannot be achieved in practice, ever. The model that Dr Sean Gabb and I cleave to, intellectually, is the British State before 1914, and probably a bit earlier than that, for the Fabians and the “modern liberals” had already got their teeth into our ankles by about 1874.

LikeLike

Reply
Richard Carey

August 12, 2012

I’d like to see you back that up. Under Cromwell there was a larger degree of religious liberty than before or after. One example of this is that Jews were allowed back into the country after some centuries.

LikeLike

Reply
Richard Carey

August 12, 2012

@ Tomsmith,
if you find something not to be logical or meaningful, this could be because either; it is indeed illogical and lacking in meaning, or; there is a flaw in your own understanding.
In the case in point, I suggest the latter.

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 13, 2012

You are right and wrong in unequal measure. The state is an instrument for collective action, no doubt. Libertarianism contemplates a minimal state for purposes such as national defence, the enforcement of contracts and suppression by policing of force and fraud.
Because we contemplate some collective action does not mean we countenance all. Surely the whole point of modern politics is to determine the proper boundaries of collective interference in individual affairs.
There is, pace David Davis, no inherent contradiction in either seeking a libertarian state or (in the meantime) in collective (political) action to seek less interference by the state in individual life.
Libertarians have many fellow travellers on the latter road, as even many socialists feel we have gone far too far. The late John Mortimer certainly did. Even when we start marching in the right direction, it will be a long time before our paths diverge. Until then, all this is interesting but moot.

LikeLike

Reply
tomsmith

August 14, 2012

If you accept the existence of a state and the imposed collectivism irresistible power it entails then you don’t get to choose where the proper boundaries lie- this is the nature of collectivism, it is out of your hands and the decision is no longer yours.
If it is valid to demand that I pay for an army, courts and whatever else the minimal state demands then why is it any less valid to demand I pay for what a socialist state demands? Both are claiming more or less authority and ownership over me, the individual. An individualist on the other hand believes that the self is the only legitimate authority. For this reason it is directly contradictory to promote a philosophy of individualism through enforced collective action (the so-called minimal state). If you accept any collectivism whatsoever then where do you hide when the collective decides that it wants what is yours? You have already granted it that authority

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 15, 2012

Wow. If i agree to buy you a drink, will you expect me to pay your mortgage? A properly-constituted state has limits. It cannot lawfully decide to mince you and sell you as dog food, even with the approval of a majority of voters. Britain’s problem is that those limits were never adequately defined. Our constitution was developed in reaction to absolute monarchy and successfully limited that power by tending to increase Parliament’s. It did not anticipate Parliament as a predatory monster sucking the life out of productive, decent people to bribe masses of idle voters. Because your life experience, like mine, has been of growing state power abused corruptly does not mean that is all there is. The people need to be persuaded finally to set the limits on their former guard dog. It can happen. Remember Ship Money. Remember my hero Clarence Willcock and the people who burned their ID cards in 1952 in support of his refusal to produce his.

LikeLike

Reply
tomsmith

August 15, 2012

Buying a drink is entirely voluntary. If you bought me one I might tend to be more kindly disposed towards you but you would be under no obligation to buy any more drinks for me or anything else. Our interactions would remain voluntary and we would each tend to act in terms of perceived benefits to ourselves.
The problem with enforced collectivism is that the primacy of the individual to decide what is of value to him and how to dispose of what he owns is surrendered, and once this precedent has been set there is no way to go back. Surrendering this, for whatever reason, is the process whereby the individual becomes secondary to the group. If the collective trumps the individual for some purposes then it is impossible to resist the collective will to impose themselves over the individual for others
There is no properly constituted state in the world where limits have not been ignored, removed or circumvented and where the state has not grown into a monster. This happens because people naturally want to use the power of the state to get whatever it is they want from other people. See America for a great example of how naive and even ridiculous minarchism is as a political philosophy

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 15, 2012

If this is your counsel of despair, why trouble to discuss it? If you are right, we should all be busy hiding from (or, more practically, corrupting) the political class which is our inevitable oppressor. Or joining it, if we are ethically vile enough to stomach such a life.
Are you an anarchist, building up slowly to revealing your own approach to this problem? Or a politician, building up to naming his corrupt price? Just curious.

LikeLike

Reply
tomsmith

August 15, 2012

I’m happy to stop discussing if you like. It is your site and I don’t want to annoy you because I enjoy reading what you write.
I am writing because I think what you wrote originally is correct- libertarianism as politics obviously fails in practice (and I think in theory).
This is not any reason to stop practicing individualism though. Individualism is not politics. Practice individualism. Ignore, avoid and yes corrupt and subvert politics as much as you can. This is my counsel to you.

LikeLike

Reply
Tom

August 15, 2012

You are puzzling me more than annoying me, to be honest! You are welcome to continue but really what more is to be said? I am delighted you enjoy reading what I write, but this blog is not literature. It has a political objective, which you are telling me (unless it’s to enslave my fellow man progressively*) is all folly!
* is that why they are called “progressives”?

LikeLike

Reply