Nik0lai Wenzel, Wallace and Marion Reemelin Chair in Free-Market Economics at Hillsdale College and Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics in the Lutgert College of Business at Florida Gulf Coast University, says it is.
Many “conservatives” will not recognize themselves completely in my critique. This is largely because there are so many “conservatisms.” I argue that each involves assertions of private preferences through public means–and that the imposition, in each case, is inimical to liberty and individual rights. Specifically, here are four reasons why conservatism is objectionable –and why libertarianism (a political philosophy that calls for limited government, and for the protection of individual rights and liberty) offers a better alternative.
1. Conservatism is confused about levels of human action and agency.
Conservatism is preoccupied with aggregates such as “community,” “moral ecology,” “society,” or “the nation”; what is more, conservatism is willing to sacrifice individual rights on a communitarian altar. As a more accurate assumption, libertarianism uses methodological individualism: individuals (and only individuals) act. The groups to which individuals adhere–families, clubs, churches, “society,” or “country”–do not really exist or enjoy agency. A family cannot act. Society cannot make choices. The state has no interests. This, however, does not imply that individuals go about their lives in isolation. Quite the contrary, human flourishing is impossible outside the associations that provide opportunities for cooperation and mutual interdependence.
While recognizing the importance of associations, methodological individualism also recognizes that only individuals act, and it recognizes that terrible mistakes can come from neglecting this very basic fact. First, reification of groups leads to falsely ascribing volition to entities that are mere mental constructs. Thus do we hear of a criminal paying a debt to “society,” about a “community” rejecting a Wal-Mart, or “the American people” wanting more government redistribution. But what constitutes a “community”? Fifty-one percent of its members? Fifty-one percent of its voters? Perhaps a two-thirds-super-majority or a unanimity of voters? Or all members? Or, perhaps, the small percentage that manages to capture the political process or the right commission?
Second, neglect of methodological individualism leads to a disastrous misapplication of rules. Surely we would not want to apply market rules to the family, lest profit disastrously replace love–nor would we want to treat our customers as we treat our children, lest we go bankrupt.
Third, neglect of methodological individualism leads to a violation of rights, as the acting individual loses status as an end (that is, worthy of rights), and becomes the means to a goal established by some putatively acting group, as aggregates offer a convenient excuse to impose private ends through public means.
This should not be taken as a blanket rejection of “the common good.” A broad institutional framework within which individuals can peacefully cooperate is surely a common good (think of the broad parameters of the U.S. Constitution; of rule of law and free markets). But it is also the only common good: anything beyond that will run amok of methodological individualism, and the problems of politics, as outlined below. Where is the “common” good in granting to conservatives the privilege of forcing everybody else to abide by their preferences?
2. Conservatism is naïve about politics, and is eager to use public means to impose private preferences.
Conservatism offers a comprehensive blueprint for a “good life” in “a good society.” These aspirations end up being political because they make a claim upon the use of the state to advance personal preferences. To understand the full implications of conservatism, it is thus crucial to start with an understanding of politics that is framed by reality rather than wishes; Public Choice Theory (“politics without romance”) provides such an analysis. Instead of traditional views, which romanticize government, Public Choice applies the laws of economics to political decision-making.
First, people are people. Period. The dichotomy of people acting selfishly in markets and for some “common good” in government is fantasy. In government, just as in markets, people consider a number of elements: pleasure, profit, service to others, leisure, satisfaction, shirking work or the satisfaction of a job well done, power, etc., in an endless list. Individuals, upon accession to public office, do not magically grow angel’s wings to serve “the common good.”
Second, information aggregation is particularly messy and imprecise when it is attempted through politics. In a market setting, information is already difficult to obtain, even though consumers must pay for what they want, so they must tell the truth about their preferences. Likewise, business faces the harsh reality of the profit test. Not so in politics, where decision-makers are shielded from the consequences of their actions. Politicians can be fired–but only after their term is completed, and only through a very inefficient voting mechanism–and bureaucrats are nearly impossible to fire. And voters don’t face incentives to make good choices or truthfully reveal their preferences.
In the market, a consumer who wants more of something will have to pay for it. One beer, $5; two beers, $10. In politics, some pay much for little and others little for much. Roughly half of Americans do not pay federal income taxes–but have a say, through the polls, on how tax revenue is spent. Likewise, the top 50 percent of taxpayers pays 97 percent of tax income: in other words, roughly 75 percent of votes go to those who contribute only 3 percent of the tax revenue. Think of the incentives to raid the wallets of others through the ballot box! Likewise, imagine a 10 percent property tax to finance public education. A bachelor living in a million-dollar house will pay $100,000 for no service. The couple down the street living in a $100,000 house with ten children will pay $10,000 for ten educations–and thus vote for higher taxes, while nobly claiming the mantle of commitment to educational excellence. Politics becomes a tool for legalized plunder; in the words of H.L. Mencken, “Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.”
Instead of approaching politics realistically, conservatism wistfully longs for the emergence of statesmen, of the “wise and the good,” to guide the ships of state and society through troubled times. But the very idea that the coercive apparatus of the state can “support” (i.e., impose) virtue without violating individual rights, that a government that can’t properly teach children how to read by the age of 18 could somehow successfully teach civics, or that a government that has consistently increased poverty through anti-poverty programs could somehow increase virtue–all this is odd and arbitrary, to say the least. In the words of public intellectual George F. Will, “conservatism seems to be saying government can’t run Amtrak, but it can run the Middle East.”
If social engineering is permitted in principle, for some policies, then why not for others? A mere election stands between a Secretary of Virtue Bennett and a Secretary Clinton. Once we have conceded the principle that government may impose private preferences through public means, public choice rears its ugly head and we are in big trouble. In sum, conservatism rightly laments the breakdown of individual responsibility, morality, civil society, aesthetics, and manners in contemporary America. But, just like the socialist who would fix a healthcare system broken by government intervention, by imposing more government intervention, conservatism wants more government interference to fix social ills.
3.Conservatism claims a monopoly on the understanding of Truth–that is, conservatism arbitrarily imposes its subjective preferences as objective Truth.
How little we know about ourselves, how much less about others and the world. At an elementary level, how is economic activity possible in a world of limited knowledge? The simplest answer comes from “I, Pencil,” Leonard Read’s clever autobiography of a pencil. A pencil, although common and cheap, is actually quite complex, as it involves inputs from multiple different countries: miners for the ore, smelters for the metal, lumberjacks for the wood, bankers to facilitate the international transactions, a merchant marine and navigational systems to bring all the elements together, etc. In sum, “not a single person on the face of the earth knows how to make” a pencil. Yet pencils are cheap and abundant, and this, without any single person being in charge. What makes this production possible, what brings together these “millions of tiny know-hows?” The price mechanism, which gives information about the relative scarcity of resources, provides incentives to cooperate, and generally coordinates activity in a manner that no central planner ever could. Soviet socialism crumbled under its own immorality–but it primarily failed for economic reasons.
Moving to more general considerations, conservatism rests on a claim of privileged access to truth, whether through revelation or some sort of “practical reason” to derive rules of personal and interpersonal conduct–which really seems to boil down to a reverse engineering to justify personal preferences. In the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment and Austrian economics, libertarianism offers an alternate solution. Instead of conservatism’s bold assertions, libertarianism trustsinstitutionsthat help generate and transmit knowledge, as we recognize our limitations and eschew our limited reason in favor of reason nestled within tradition. Admittedly, this is dissatisfying for those who claim to have a monopoly on truth and want to impose it through central planning. But humility calls for a prudent rejection of social engineering, as we simply lack the knowledge to impose better outcomes on others. Conservatism may very well be right in its assertions, but it very well might be wrong. There may very well be an eternal law–but our knowledge thereof is another question entirely. Confident claims of knowledge in the public square or the classroom are one thing, but using them as a grounding for coercive power is another entirely.
4. Ethics: Freedom and individual rights are ancillary to conservatism.
Libertarianism has a clear theory of ethics: respect the rights of others, and don’t initiate violence against them. Conservatism, on the other hand, broadens its theory of ethics to the point of muddle and self-contradiction: conservative ethics extend well beyond interpersonal relationships, and into the purely private arena of virtue. Conservatives are thus comfortable with sacrificing individual rights to advance virtue, and quite willing to subsume the individual into “community” preferences. Alas, there is great danger in determining ethics legislatively and imposing by the sword beliefs that could very well be wrong–hence libertarianism’s wariness of anybody who would capture the political process to impose private ends through public means.
Contrary to a common misunderstanding, libertarianism is not license. Quite the contrary, libertarianism recognizes the need for virtue and self-governance. With interpersonal virtue, there is at least a direct link to political problems. But intrapersonal virtue does not directly involve others–and thus lies outside the purview of politics, which is about the ordering of interpersonal human relations. Nevertheless, there are plainly benefits to conservative values. The difficulty comes with state coercion of virtue. Even if we concede that coerced virtue is still virtue, is the state really the best tool for enforcing something as difficult–when it can’t even fulfill simpler functions?
Libertarianism is skeptical. In fact, state actions have unintended consequences and the state has arguably done more harm than good in its attempts to impose virtue. Agreeing with economist F.A. Hayek’s assessment that “it is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out evil than by men intent on doing evil,” libertarianism prefers to rely on civil society for virtue. Indeed, virtue can come from surprising places. One need look only at Montesquieu’s artful phrasing of “le doux commerce,” gentle commerce, bringing people together, or Adam Smith’s timeless language: “Every individual . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By directing [an] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is . . . led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . [In sum,] it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.”
Libertarians and conservatives are often lumped together as uneasy bedfellows–whether by socialists who conflate them both as anti-progressive, or by the fusionists of the 1960s. But individual liberty is not a main concern of conservatism; instead, liberty and individual rights are welcome by the conservative only if they do not conflict with higher priorities like “social order,” “moral ecology” or “community rights.” And “supporting” virtue amounts to enforcing the observance of one particular set of private preferences. Thus, liberty is merely ancillary to conservatism–one of its goals, perhaps, but a goal that will happily be sacrificed in the name of advancing other preferences. Conservatism may very well be right, and defenders of liberty wrong. But let us speak no more of conservatives as friends of liberty.
So. Is the problem for liberty conservatism? Or is the problem with conservatism that “conservatism” is being incorrectly defined in order to create its supposed rub against liberty? How we come to define what counts as conservatism is crucial to any subsequent statements that presume to examine and critique it, and to his credit, Wetzel here offers his definitional spectrum for what he calls “conservatisms.”
But what is most interesting to me here is the suggestion that the kind of conservatism many of us grew up understanding as such — the Burkean model, say — has, largely in response to the public ideological split that occurred in the wake of 9-11, be subsumed into something that encompasses far more (or, depending on your perspective, far less).
For many of the blogs that started in response to the legacy media’s horrific, self-flagellating coverage of the 911 terror attacks, the initial shock of going public came from the critical feedback we received — which wasn’t so much critical feedback as it was a kind of definitional attack on who we thought we were. I remember being called a “conservative” and a “right winger” / “wingnut” and feeling strangely indignant: after all, I was teaching literature, interpretation theory, and argument / persuasion at a private university and working toward a PhD in English. The idea that I could be tethered to what at the time I would have dismissed as godbothering, busybody prudes was frankly, absurd.
But what we saw happening was merely an example of leftist mission creep, an attempt to control the center from the left by redefining where in fact the political center was, allowing the New Left to assume the position of traditional Democratic Party liberalism, while pushing actual centrists who did not oppose the US response to the terror attacks into the ranks of “the right” (and eventually, the “far right” or “extreme right”).
The pushback against this maneuver — which we all understood to be happening — was to branch off: we had “neoconservative,” “libertarians” (not to be confused with “Libertarians”), “liberaltarians,”and, finally, in my case, classical liberals.
I long tried to make careful distinctions between these groups, but the nature of blogging — it requires a kind of shorthand, lest you get caught up in constant conditionalism — made such attempts painful to read. And so ultimately I’ve settled on equating classical liberalism to what I’ve called legal conservatism and constitutionalism. Still, as time passed, I came to see the social conservatism of someone like a Rick Santorum, eg., as quite useful in its attempt to beat back the creeping secular religiosity of a society that pretends that secularism is somehow equated to liberty — and in so doing, helps the Left drive its agenda, which seeks to remove any competition to government from religious groups or other quite voluntary associations, even though the support for such a reformulation of the civil society often comes, in its most vocal form, from the self-styled “libertarian” right.
All of which is a longish introduction to the question up for discussion: who is right? Is Wetzel correct that conservatism, in its modern mishmash form — “conservatisms” — inimical to liberty? And what do we make of libertarianism stripped from conservative moorings?
Discuss.
Who is right? The human problem underlaying the whole enterprise is something like “What is right?”, or what is just, what is the best human life? Our “whos” consist of multiple claims to justice, to knowledge of the good, of the truth of these matters — multiple simply because we see these various claims from various quarters (cities, peoples, nations, cultures, religions and so on) differ with one another, yet each with pretentions to finality.
pretensions, sorry.
I see articulated in Wetzel’s piece the misgivings that I have been working through with regards to supporting Santorum. I remain swayed by the notion that libertarians/classical liberals and social conservatives have a common enemy in THE CURRENT FORM OUR GOVT TAKES (which may or may not change with someone like Romney as president).
But it is telling, to me, that the only people I see articulating this alliance and its foundations are on the classical liberal/libertarian side of things, like Jeff. Santorum and other social cons enjoy drawing a huge distinction between themselves and libertarians, and in so doing I think what’s really happening is that they’re maligning Wetzel’s “methodological individualism.” They’re saying, loud and proud, that this is a bankrupt way of looking at the world. So I’m inclined to see rejection of “methodological individualism” as a fundamental hostility to liberty.
But is it possible that despite conservatisms’ rejection of this framework at the level of political science, that there is a deeper philosophical bind that ties together classical liberalism and conservatisms? On the other hand, I wonder how this fits into Sowell/Haidt “conflict of visions” view. I have often felt that, politics aside, I have a kinship with social conservatives in seeing starkly the fundamentally flawed and imperfectable nature of humanity, and in basing my worldview on this unshakable view of mankind. Definitely something to think about.
For the purposes of this essay, I define “conservatism writ large” as a philosophy that asserts a particular knowledge of human nature, specifically the individual’s place in society and the importance of virtue—and seeks to impose that vision through government.
By this formulation, it sounds as though Wenzel is focused on the social cons who believe that godly living can be legislated. To the extent that we accept this definition, it follows that those on the Right who would prohibit the goods and services and behaviors that they feel would be bad for us are little different from those on the Left who would do the same. The primary difference, in this formulation, is that the Right would take away our booze and gambling and fornication, while the Left would take away our trans-fats and freedom to hurt somebody’s feelings.
In such an environment, classical liberals and social cons can form a marriage of convenience, where each fights against the excesses brought about by 50 years of Leftist dominion over the culture and government. To the extent that social cons wish to be left alone to live their lives and raise their families as they see fit, this alliance will remain strong. At the point where the social cons seek to force others to submit to that vision, friction and resistance will heat up, and the alliance will be broken.
As to the link at the end, Schlueter proves himself far lazier and less convincing than Wenzel. That piece is fraught with strawman arguments; where it deals with libertarianism fairly at all, it insists on the most anarchist element of the movement. For all the complaints I have about Wenzel’s shortcuts and convenient definitions, he is a paragon of rhetoric by comparison.
Emphases added to point out the one with the problem is Dr. Wenzel, whose ideation of individual liberty fails to grapple with the essentially tragic nature of the human condition.
At a first glance, at any rate. Looks to be a serious piece requiring serious attention, consideration, and reflection.
“But what we saw happening was merely an example of leftist mission creep, an attempt to control the center from the left by redefining where in fact the political center was, allowing the New Left to assume the position of traditional Democratic Party liberalism, while pushing actual centrists who did not oppose the US response to the terror attacks into the ranks of “the right” (and eventually, the “far right” or “extreme right”).”
Hence how guys like John Cole and Charles Johnson went “right”…and then, very, very wrong.
“. . . the laws of economics . . . ”
Laws. Are these akin to laws of human behavior? Of human nature? Or are they akin to Newtonian laws of physics, as to the effects of gravity, say? Are these laws written? Revealed? Discovered? Undiscovered in some instances? Why is economics the governing field of politics, as opposed to say, warfare?
conservatism rests on a claim of privileged access to truth
Conservatism claims that there is truth. Those things that American Conservatism seeks to conserve are the individual rights and social contract embodied in the Constitution, itself a product of what today we would describe as a classical liberal process: reasoned debate in a free marketplace of ideas among participants of good faith. Conservatives assert what we believe to be true and then defend the assertion, in what we know to be a non-free marketplace of ideas that is tilted against us. How then is conservatism claiming privileged access to truth?
Here’s the real claims of privileged access to truth.
why, because they offer the most powerful explanatory framework in trying to understand and predict the various areas of human endeavor, including war.
Yet pencils are cheap and abundant, and this, without any single person being in charge
The capitalist that financed, designed, built, staffed, and now operates the pencil manufacturing plant could not be reached for comment. Tax season.
“And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good — Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” I don’t get many chances to use this, but it does seem like a good starting point.
Oh that the laws of economics were even as useful approximations of Newtonian mechanics.
Martin Niemöller’s somewhat overused statement comes to mind as well when it comes to social cons, neocons, libertarians, liberaltarians, etc.
(which may or may not change with someone like Romney as president).
Bzzzzzzzzzzztttttttttt
No chance Romney would change the current form. None. It will still go off the cliff, just slower, and more efficiently.
Sorry, in answer to the question, “Is conservatism inimical to liberty?”, the answer is no. Can conservatives act inimically to liberty from time to time? Of course.
I’m just suggesting that the assumption that Santorum is going to reverse direction because by all rights he should isn’t one I’m comfortable with. And Wenzel has helped to give articulate voice to this anxiety I feel.
I maintain that my discomfort level with Santorum, for all that I disagree with his social policy preferences, is hugely reduced by the fact that these policy changes would be up against a giant bureaucracy and a populace that has been thoroughly inoculated against any such changes. In other words, Santorum stands little chance of getting adulterers branded with a scarlet A, while Romney stands every chance of making private medicine and fossil fuels a thing of the past.
The most important thing remains swatting the GOP with a rolled-up newspaper until they quit shitting on the carpet. Santorum is the only newspaper we have left.
Slap them silly. But know that the carpet’s going to get soiled regardless.
If it’s all subjective, and there’s no reason to prefer one set of values over another in any hierarchy of values (and “hierarchy” in this egalitarian age?), then we really don’t have anything to talk about.
Game. Over.
If the dog can’t stop soiling the carpet, then it’s time to put the dog down.
Santorum and other social cons enjoy drawing a huge distinction between themselves and libertarians, and in so doing I think what’s really happening is that they’re maligning Wetzel’s “methodological individualism.” They’re saying, loud and proud, that this is a bankrupt way of looking at the world. So I’m inclined to see rejection of “methodological individualism” as a fundamental hostility to liberty.
Speaking as a SoCon, let me get all nuanced on you in my response–Weeeelllll…yes and no. I really think you owe it to yourself to read “It Takes A Family,” which will go a long way toward allaying your concerns about the compatability of social conservatism with individual rights. To be sure, Santorum is an unapologetic scold, as our host has noted. But the thumping of the bully pulpit is different from, say, ordering you to buy insurance, a level of moralizing that makes your average so-con look positively quaint.
I think the main problem is the difference in emphasis: social conservatives place a great deal of stock in associational freedom–membership in churches, civic groups, private schools or home-schooling co-ops, and so forth. The actions of the individual are extremely important, but we put considerably more emphasis on responsibility and the potential consequences of free actions, and we greatly, greatly worry about the potential decay of unmoored individual liberty into “license.” See, e.g., your local public university. It can hardly be expected to be otherwise, given that almost all social conservatives are religious, and adhere to the Judeo-Christian moral code in some form or another. “Do what thou wilt isn’t any part of the Law,” to paraphrase Crowley (and make his remains spin like a dynamo).
That’s the weakness of Wetzel’s analysis–she really does not see how her definitions don’t quite jibe with a robust associational freedom. Which, for our money, is the best hope for a long-term institutional counterweight against the Left, and indeed, against an ever-encroaching State. The “mediating institutions,” to borrow Santorum’s language.
None of which means that, in general, we want to abolish the female orgasm or even ban contraception. We have, as a general rule, a rather large disdain for the leviathan state, which is manifestly not our friend and has consistently proven to be hostile to associational liberty. But we definitely come at the liberty question from a different angle.
I hope this made some degree of sense.
charlesaustin, I’m curious how the Phaedrus quote fits for you (I’m not claiming that it doesn’t, mind. Just that the details are unclear to me)? Partly, the reason I’m puzzled is due to the context of writing in particular [Soc: ” Tis oun ho tropos tou kalos te kai me graphei?” Fowler trans. : “What, then, is the method of writing well or badly?”]
And if that doesn’t work for you, maybe we need to redefine the boundaries ofour relationship with the dog.
The dog can’t shit on the carpet if its not allowed in the house.
If we take the professors assertions and definition of conservatism at face value then he is on to something. But I have a very hard time accepting his definition as, well, definitive. Frankly, it strikes me as far too convenient to his entire argument.
Overall it seems a lazy method of solving the problem of anti-modernism that runs through most (if not all ) strains of conservatism. Anti-modernism, to one degree or another, lumps pretty much everything since the enlightenment (or even since Machiavelli) into the ‘modern’ camp and sees all of it inexorably leading to the kinds of disasters embodied by national and international socialism.
The problem for many conservatives (and some libertarians), is that they want to peel off the American experiment from all the rest of modernism and treat it somehow as not of the same virulence as all the rest.
While I admire, and support the goal, I find this particular effort, like most ‘libertarianism, ‘ to be weak and unproductive.
What are we taking as modernism ThomasD? Against which I reckon we can then pin down anti-modernism (or maybe not?)? How does E. Burke stand with regard to these camps?
This idea, that libertarianism is license, is dealt with in Wenzel’s analysis. I find it convincing, but then I lean heavily libertarian. This sounds just like the communitarianism that Wenzel warns is fundamentally hostile to “methodological individualism.”
Again, this is the right communitarianism of which Wenzel speaks. I am curious, though, why you would think that “methodological individualism” doesn’t jibe with robust associational freedom. I mean, it doesn’t call for it, but why does it pose a risk to it?
And this is at the heart of this particular community’s support for Santorum–this version of the leviathan is obviously hostile to liberty and to the robust associational freedom that you prize. But what about a vision of a very different leviathan, less inclined towards aggressive secularism?
How many angles can one come at liberty and still be directed towards the same thing? That’s the question Wenzel asks and answers to his (and, increasingly, my) satisfaction. You’ve fleshed out the question quite a bit, and given a personal take on it. But what you write, especially the conclusion, does not dissuade that this is probably a situation of classical liberals and social cons having a common enemy in this leviathan. I think there’s probably something deeper there, based in recognition of the tragic condition of humankind. But maybe not.
By what mechanism would a plurality of “conservatisms” be, per se, inimical to liberty? In terms of the ideas promoted, some will be more aligned with liberty than others — but in point of fact a nation of free persons will have as many “-isms” as individuals. We don’t all automatically subscribe to a duality of -isms, nor to any short list of them.
The only way I can see a variety of “conservatisms” having an inimical effect on liberty is to the extent they discourage people from making tactical alliances for the purpose of winning elections — or that they encourage people to make such alliances that promote statist or collectivist approaches to everything under the sun.
But at that point the majority of “conservatisms” become a lie.
The question, then, is how is the proliferation of “conservatisms” any more inimical to liberty than the proliferation of, say illiberal “liberalisms” that occurred in the middle of the last century?
Ok, and I’m hesitant to wander into these deep waters, but I started with your first comment above. I’ve always taken the quoted excerpt as a starting point to mean that we each have to figure it all out ourselves. Of course we seek guidance and instruction wherever and whenver we can and some things will always be beyond our individual grasps, but abdication of decision making to experts is only a last resort. I believe that the question, “What is right?”, is no less a value judgement than the question, “What is good?”, and that they may in fact be completely interchangeable. My search for “what is good” does not require any sacrifice from anyone else and puts me pretty firmly into the libertarian camp for better or worse. The other pigeonholed categories mentioned above all require varying degrees of sacrifice from others in their respective searches for “what is good”, ranging from annoying to authoritarian, and I find that somewhat problematic. And then there’s the problem of determining for whom all this good is to be done. Typically, third party agency really sucks on this front.
As an aside, I think I’ve tried to adopt something of a Socratic approach in believing that the wisest men tend to realize just how much they don’t know, which I think is a profoundly conservative sentiment.
Nicely put charlesaustin and thanks for the clarifications.
I wonder how you think of your statement “My search for ‘what is good’ does not require any sacrifice from anyone else and puts me pretty firmly into the libertarian camp for better or worse” over against what you know of Athens’ reaction to Socrates own search? Obvious to us is that Soc. didn’t live in a liberal society: far from it. That is, certain penetrating skepticisms along that path of the search for the good appeared to have the capacity to induce an outrage sufficient to warrant his death at the hands of the city. Or, yikes!
But our polity seems to have learned from the example — or maybe that should be: “seemed to have learned” since our society has changed somewhat in the intervening years — to make that skepticism itself a component of the basis of its principle.
Thanks. Athens was a democracy (except when it wasn’t) with all the good and bad that entails, and our forefathers chose to implement a republic to put some constraints on pure democracy which aren’t all that fashionable in the better circles these days. I believe the Unites States taken as a whole used to value skepticism in public affairs. Now I believe we value experts more.
FWIW, my socratic approach is not especially popular or well understood in family gatherings.
The trouble with the term “conservative” is that it’s contingent on the existing condition that you’re trying to conserve.
In 18th-century Europe, the conservatives were trying to preserve the class system and the authority of the Church and nobility. In 21st-century America, conservatives are trying to preserve the theory of governance embodied in the Constitution, which at the time upended the “conservatism” of Europe.
Likewise, the term “conservative” is applied to those who want to conserve older social values and structures AND to those who want to conserve Constitutional governance, two groups that deeply intersect, but not to those who want to conserve wilderness areas and otherwise prevent development.
Hence the need for terms that are not historically contingent. “Classical liberal” tends to work, but I’m discovering that the term “Minarchist” is pretty useful, because it expresses gubmint limitations without being contaminated by the bastardized connotations of “liberal.” (Though it is missing much of the Enlightenment substrate that “liberal” used to contain.)
In Liberal Fascism, Jonah already covered this ground regarding “conservatism” as inimical to liberty when he mentioned that any conservative or Republican who wants to use the levers of state power to impose “family values” or “compassionate conservatism” is just as bad as the Left in this wise.
This.
Let me take it in no particular order:
And this is at the heart of this particular community’s support for Santorum–this version of the leviathan is obviously hostile to liberty and to the robust associational freedom that you prize. But what about a vision of a very different leviathan, less inclined towards aggressive secularism?
Can you give me an example from American history? Frankly, I don’t see this being an issue, as there’s another part of the nature of social conservatism that I alluded to, but didn’t spell out: namely, that American social conservatives themselves are a coalition. Social conservatives have fanged each other in American history, as the Blaine Amendments and late 19th-early 20th Century hostility to Catholicism made clear (to which American Catholics responded by forming their own schools and civic organizations). We’re allies, but we don’t want each other’s distinctives imposed on each other, either.
This idea, that libertarianism is license, is dealt with in Wenzel’s analysis. I find it convincing, but then I lean heavily libertarian. This sounds just like the communitarianism that Wenzel warns is fundamentally hostile to “methodological individualism.”
Except that I didn’t say libertarianism is license. I said unmoored individual freedom tends to decay into license. I’ll also add that license is antithetical to liberty, which is something envisioned by the Founders, and demonstrated by the Administration’s ability to deftly distract people by reference to sexual issues.
Again, this is the right communitarianism of which Wenzel speaks. I am curious, though, why you would think that “methodological individualism” doesn’t jibe with robust associational freedom. I mean, it doesn’t call for it, but why does it pose a risk to it?
Ultimately, because I don’t find that part of Wenzel’s argument all that compelling. It comes across as a floating abstraction, untethered to the American experience, either at the Founding or now. Yes, properly understood, libertarianism requires virtue, but he tries to turn it into a tidy syllogism at the beginning : “Libertarianism has a clear theory of ethics: respect the rights of others, and don’t initiate violence against them.”
Fine as far as it goes. But that is a rather pregnant statement requiring considerable unpacking, and is much more interpersonal than he wants to admit. Ethics and virtue as defined by…? These are questions which are a good deal more broadly social, and less susceptible of definition by the individual. There has to be some degree of social consensus for this to work. That does not mandate that the state be the inculcator of virtue (far from it, and the growth of homeschooling demonstrates that social conservatives agree on that point). But there has to be some agreement on what constitutes virtue in the first place. At a minimum, the State cannot be hostile to the inculcation of virtue. However, I’m afraid it has become so, and is bidding fair to do even worse.
How many angles can one come at liberty and still be directed towards the same thing? That’s the question Wenzel asks and answers to his (and, increasingly, my) satisfaction. You’ve fleshed out the question quite a bit, and given a personal take on it. But what you write, especially the conclusion, does not dissuade that this is probably a situation of classical liberals and social cons having a common enemy in this leviathan. I think there’s probably something deeper there, based in recognition of the tragic condition of humankind. But maybe not.
I do think there is something deeper which can be built on, to the extent we can agree on human beings as flawed, or, to use the so-con parlance, “fallen.” We are not perfectible in this life, and efforts to build Heaven on earth invariably raise Hell instead. We also tend to be acutely aware of the negative experiences of our co-religionists across the globe at the hands of government, be it the jailing of homeschoolers, persecution by Islamists or even flat-out attempts at genocide in places like the Sudan. I think the cause of liberty is well-served by having advocates who emphasize associational liberties as well as those who correctly note the rights that are inherent to us as individual citizens.
Again, apologies for the verbosity. I am starting to ramble.
Just an aside, but is Wenzel adopting a variant of the progressive position against corporate personhood early in the argument?
Precisely.
I’ve been saying that Santorum’s problem is not necessarily with libertarianism, though he thinks it is. It is with Objectivism. And that’s because our social contract is, in fact, social. It guards the individual’s sovereignty, but it does so as a function of the agreed-upon social order. That is, certain rights are unalienable. The way to protect those rights is social, and must be conceived of as such for the purposes of government.
I think far more people have been far too quick to scold Santorum for being a scold. Who was actually telling who how to behave more ? Who was angrier and more obnoxious about it?
And were they even really all that fixated on Santorum in the first place?
About the same people scolded us when Newt was ahead and Santorum was invisible. NEWT was an ego case and no one liked him? They started in on Perry with his “heartless” comment and from then on every stutter was evidence that he was an air head. Michelle Bachmann was described a wild eyed corndog blowing crazy and a fundy hate lord weirdo who thinks vaccine causes mental retardation. Hermain Cain was a shifty corny old corporate con-man and the public believed Gloria Allred over him. Hunstman was a robot and he worked for Obama and he wanted people to applaud when he spoke a bit from ‘Mandarin for ten year olds’.
I don’t think this is a philosophical issue.
The GOP wants maintenance of the status quo even at the expense of their own success in the political arena, and are playing divide and conquer with their OWN to keep hold on what little power they have left. This is not a philosophical divide. This going to any lengths to hold on to a marked parking place even if it brings the whole company down. They failed and were in the process of being replaced for it and this is their rebellion. They want to keep the corner office. Anything is acceptable so long as they keep the corner office. Anything. Even Obama.
…going to any lengths to hold on to a marked parking place even if it brings the whole company down.
I am so totally stealing that.
Probably he thinks that everything good in libertarianism is already found in conservatism (of the American variety), so libertarianism ineluctably leads to Objectivism or anarchy or what he calls “no-fault freedom” crudely put, the idea that individuals should be allowed to do whatever they want with no regard for the costs to society.
And the idea that the good is already there so keep out the bad in turn probably originates in his Catholocism (e.g. keep the good in paganism—like Christmas trees!— and eradicate the bad —nailing the heads of human sacrificial victims to oak trees*) and that of course gets us back to Aristotle and the problem with demotic rule —that if we all behave like beasts run amok, so to speak, we’ll find ourselves kept like herd animals.
(*My crude oversimplification of Gregory the Great’s advice to Augustine (the other one) and St. Boniface’s mision to the Thuringians or somebody)
BTW anytime we have a crowd yelling at us we seem to end up back in the philosophy patch to re-think everything. I think if we had any real problems to be ashamed of that the charges would be very specific. They wouldn’t be reduced to calling us uncool, unhelpful, embarrassingly politically naive, purists, so-con, etc. They’d be telling us what when where how and why instead of labeling us with ugly sounded labels. And there’s nothing wrong with looking for clarity in the philosophy patch but unfortunately the timing takes us off the field so we aren’t seen yelling back. That makes it look like we agree with the labels and are weak and giving in. That’s bad.
Visigoth is just a label. So is Romneybot. I think each group has already settled their philosophical direction and made up their minds. It’s no fun to be losing but it’s not a sign that we need to reformulate and redefine ourselves. We are not chopped liver.
I think this is yell back time.
Tell that to the guys pushing just win baby! as the philosophic direction they want to go in.
Something about philosophizing back twice as hard, IIRC.
Tell that to the guys pushing ‘just win baby!’ as the philosophic direction they want to go in.
That’s simple will to power, Ernst, and I’m pretty sure it’s unchanging. That crowd isn’t refining their philosophy; they’re simply changing tactics.
If all they’re doing is changing tactics, they ought to just endorse Obama. And if that won’t work —too many others ahead of ’em in that line, then they should just find somebody like Obama. Perhaps lighter skinned. And with better hair.
Oh.
OOHH!
I may not be quite serious about that last bit.
But don’t let that stop you from chastizing me for my gross and inaccurate equivalenies mt_molehill.
Or my spelling.
I keep referring to social cons rather than”conservatism” because I’m not sure that non, religious, American “Burkean” conservatism falls under Wenzel’s definition of conservatisms. For one thing, I think our founding principles and social contact represent an enshrinement of methodological individualism, which in my (and wenzel’s telling necessarily includes robust associational liberty). However I do think Wenzel describes Santorum’s conservatism.
Apologies for the punctuation but at the moment I’m reduced to my “smart phone”. Maybe if this site wasn’t so outlaw it wouldn’t be blocked by the network of the large multinational I’m stuck st this afternoon.
I like it when my smartphone messes up my comments. It helps reassure me that, for now at least, I’m still the smarter one.
Good piece. Provoked a lot of consideration. I find myself trending more and more towards Libertarianism every day, to the extent I can concieve of it as a rational philosophy and not a reaction to progressivism.
Thanks, JG
the notion of a small federal gov’t needs no philosophy. the constitution of the usa defines that. intellectual pleasure seeking is moot.
I like all of the commenting on this. Lots to read. Unfortunately I am out of my depth so I can’t really give much of a response.
Interesting, though. I like dicentra’s recommendation of minarchism; that seems to resound best with how I feel about what a State should be doing.
But we do. And it wasn’t soc cons who did it. Ask yourself this if you don’t believe me:
what’s the penalty for the breach of contract we call no-fault divorce?
Philosophy doesn’t actually have much of a role in partisan politics. It can observe and comment, sure, but it’s not going to be a timely difference maker.
Partisan politics, on the other hand, only appears to be designed to make sane people sick to their stomachs: it’s actually about acquiring and keeping power, as has been remarked.
small fed gov’t means getting rid of alot of gs1-17 folks
It’s also about the Ends to which power is directed.
Serious question for those who agree with Dr. Wenzel:
How do you be an individual methodically?
You raise a good point. As far as I’m concerned, let the consequences for dissolution of the sacrament of marriage, the institution of holy marriage, or just the hallowed tradition of marriage be the undying ire of a supernatural being whose laws you have spurned. No-fault divorce laws don’t have much to say about this at all.
As far as I’m concerned, govt has no business in the marriage business. And it still stays out of the holy part of it technically, though obviously its laws have impacted the ability of certain communities to enforce their own ethics among the flock.
Current marriage and divorce law is atrocious and needs to change. The govt should be out of this business altogether. I wouldn’t see reverting to regimes in which divorce were more difficult to obtain as progress in this matter. Please don’t interpret that as my not wanting to see less divorce. I just draw a big distinction between the worldly aspects of union and the celestial ones.
How are we going bring about needed change without government involvement? [grin]
Marriage currently involves legal rights. “Taking government out of marriage” essentially means changing what marriage is called and giving the government sole power over that.
From a review of Jeffrey Bell’s The Case for Polarized Politics, also published in Public Discourse:
Bell’s observations have also been discussed by Bell himself in an interview with James Taranto:
NR,
Perhaps I misspoke. Libertarianism, like all political veins, is often ill-served by its most strident adherents. The clean lines of this argument added clarity to the views I have been developing (for awhile.)
Your assertion about the Constitution is of course correct. Per JG and “1,000 others” here, the progressives greatest victory has been defining–for short-term political purposes–the idea that a smaller Federal government is dangerous or against American interests.
You raise a good point. As far as I’m concerned, let the consequences for dissolution of the sacrament of marriage, the institution of holy marriage, or just the hallowed tradition of marriage be the undying ire of a supernatural being whose laws you have spurned. No-fault divorce laws don’t have much to say about this at all.
As far as I’m concerned, govt has no business in the marriage business. And it still stays out of the holy part of it technically, though obviously its laws have impacted the ability of certain communities to enforce their own ethics among the flock.
Except, of course, that marriage and families are additional examples of those non-governmental, mediating institutions which keep leviathan in check.
You can see the damage caused by the disintegration of marriage in the swelling dependency on government transfer payments. The left would be delighted with “government getting out of the marriage business.” Yet another institution would be co-opted and bent to its ends. There’s a reason single women have gravitate toward the candidates of the left since the maelstrom–Uncle Sam has become their surrogate husband.
I understand the separation of church and state and concur with it. What I do not understand is the mindset of some libertarians to separate liberty and culture. To quote the Chairman of the Board from another context: “You can’t have one without the other.” At least not for long.
Simple, really…
(But that’s just an aside I couldn’t pass up.)
Seriously, this is one of the best PW posts/comment threads ever.
Now, some of this discussion has been a bit over my head, but it seems to me that it borders on, or even overlaps, an idea that’s often floated here, especially whenever discussing Rick Santorum or Sarah Palin. That being the notion that there can be, or should be, a difference between one’s private views and how one governs. In Palin’s case, her record backs this up, and as far as Santorum is concerned, we have some (but not all) of his statements, an inconsistent record, and a lot of conjecture and hope.
It could be I just missed it, but I haven’t seen much discussion of this idea – somebody mentioned the bully pulpit and I think that came closest. The libertarians are right when they say that social conservatism in government is a threat to liberty, but I get the feeling that most social conservatives (today at least) are not disagreeing with that, but they would add that social conservatism in the people is necessary to sustain a society in the long term.
John Adams:
To me this is the very epitome of that private/public duality. Limited government only works when the People are sufficiently self-governing, and the argument is advanced by Adams and by today’s social cons that morality and religion (or, “social conservatism”) is one of the few, if not the only, forces capable of generating sufficient self-governance. Libertarianism in government requires “conservatism” per Wenzel in the personal sphere in order to succeed, else as Santorum warns, it devolves into license.
A modern-day expression of this is Dennis Prager’s oft-quoted-here saying “The bigger the government, the smaller the people” and that’s always resonated with me, but I wonder in light of this discussion and of Adams’ quote if Prager gets the causality wrong – if it wouldn’t be more correct to say “The smaller the people, the bigger the government.” In this argument, government only grows in order to fill the vacuum left by the people’s refusal to sufficiently govern their own impulses.
The scary part of this notion is the resulting diagnosis and prescription: that government is too big because the inoculating power of our culture/morality/religiosity/”conservatism” has degraded so over the past decades, and therefore in order to reduce the size and influence of government, we must at a minimum attack the root of the problem and begin to return to a culture of self-governance, driven in the main by religion, without legislation or coercion. This is, of course, a much more difficult task, and cannot be done overnight; rather it will require at least a generation if not two or more, and that’s time that we know we simply don’t have anymore.
In other words, we’re doomed. Republic of Texas, anyone?
Heh. Great minds, Dale…
Have you considered whether you have the causality reversed? Perhaps it wasn’t entirely or even mostly the passage of no-fault divorce laws that has swelled dependency on govt transfer payments, but rather the swelling of the entitlement state that has had a terrible impact on marriage (and even divorce) rates. People respond to incentives, even perverse ones.
I don’t believe that marriage and family life need to be incentivized by the govt in order for us to think of them as a good idea. You don’t get to where we have as a species without a natural inclination in this direction. But it would be nice if our govt stopped disincentivizing it.
Many “conservatives” will not recognize themselves completely in my critique. This is largely because there are so many “conservatisms.”
Before reading any further, I absolutely agree with that.
Probably the biggest reason I flipped to self identifying as libertarian and started avoiding conservative, is because I got sick of arguing over which conservatism is the real conservatism and who’s a squish usurper.
There are blatantly several disparate ideologies claiming that label.
And in the same way the left is fundementally illiberal, the Tea Party does not find a strong argument for it’s own ‘conservatism’ in the plain old-fashioned dictionary definition of the word, or the political history.
You get ‘conservatives’ arguing how it is so very conservative and burkean to be pro-establishment, pro-government, don’t rock the boat, don’t reform, go with the guy next in line, always politely and obediently defer to authority, etc. Fine, fuck it, I’m not that attached to the word that I want to fight over it, I’m a libertarian. A rose by any other name.
To that end, besides the entitlement state that in effect pays people not to form married families, existing divorce laws relating to financial/property and custodial rights create formidable disincentives to marriage.
mt_molehill, regarding the causality between the entitlement state and family breakdown, I’d call it a vicious circle. But not for nothing did the Communists decide to attempt to destroy America from within by attacking the three Tocquevillian pillars of our society – religion, family, and free enterprise. Appears they’ve been wildly successful at all three.
“wildly successful” is overstating things. We’re still more family oriented in terms of marriage rates and fertility, more religious in terms of church attendance and faith and in possession of a freer market than most. Not that these institutions haven’t sustained damage, but we’re still here. The commies aren’t.
Nicely stated, Yackums.
Too many libertarians of my acquaintance are openly hostile to religion, and so fall into the trap of shilling for a kind of statist leftist “morality” without realizing that they are doing so.
Though I’m not personally religious, I don’t mind that others are, and I find that the Constitution provides plenty of protection against theocratic encroachment without the kinds of readings secularists and a politicized judiciary have given it.
Maybe the Soviets aren’t. But you haven’t been paying attention the past three years if you think Communism and -ists just disappeared. Where do you think the “sustained damage” came from? The marriage rates and fertility are not happening in the same “families” anymore – witness the statistic that, what was it, more than half of births to women under 30 are out of wedlock; atheism is all the rage among under-40s; and the free market is teetering on the abyss. The “wild success” was a long time in coming, but it’s here now. Trayvon’s dad’s reelection will be the last nail in the coffin.
Laws. Are these akin to laws of human behavior? Of human nature? Or are they akin to Newtonian laws of physics, as to the effects of gravity, say? Are these laws written? Revealed? Discovered? Undiscovered in some instances? Why is economics the governing field of politics, as opposed to say, warfare?
why, because they offer the most powerful explanatory framework in trying to understand and predict the various areas of human endeavor, including war.
If you look at what economics really is, it attempts to describe a limited but tremendously wide scope of human behavior. No human being could conceivably live without arguably ‘economic’ action.
In that way, economics is like a more empirical, rational, dilligent approach to sociology.
If you look at a troop of chimpanzees, and their politics – the way they vie for power and dominance in the group. A strong male will catch some meat, he will distribute that meat amongst his male supporters, his clique that supports him in factional brawls over leadership (the meat also goes to the females in exchange for sex).
Even this animal behavior can be described using economic terms and models.
I read an article not too long ago that researchers had trained monkeys to start using washers as money in exchange for food…. and they used it to whore each other out and trade for sex. Which is the same as they were likely using food already. Even animals have economics.
So I would say to your first question yes, when you cut away the great mountain of abstract thought on the subject, at root it is a study of behavior.
Marriage currently involves legal rights
What legal rights do the married enjoy, that are not or cannot be had by the unmarried?
I wouldn’t say there are none. I may say that those things which are, are not what would be considered the key virtues which need protection.
Economics entered politics at a late date. Thought on human behavior as such as it plays out in politics, mostly from the point of view of nature though also as men relate to their deity or deities, had been going on apace for quite a long time prior to the rise of economic dominance of the political scene. In a shorthand way, economics seems to embody the urges to peace in this role; we think of peaceful commerce, initially reflected in the successes of the Netherlands and England. The erotic life of humans on the other hand, as one aspect of human drives under examination doesn’t appear to be well captured in economic analyses.
Have you considered whether you have the causality reversed? Perhaps it wasn’t entirely or even mostly the passage of no-fault divorce laws that has swelled dependency on govt transfer payments, but rather the swelling of the entitlement state that has had a terrible impact on marriage (and even divorce) rates. People respond to incentives, even perverse ones.
I’m willing to agree that that’s a possibility. At this point, however, that’s a bit academic. I agree with Yackums–N-F divorce is a part of the reinforcing cycle, regardless of initial causation. It may be impossible to demonstrate causation, given that the Great Society welfare state and the dismantling of N-F divorce are pretty close in time.
Ultimately, I really rebel against the whole “get gov’t out of marriage” argument because it sounds as bizarre to my ears as “get government out of contract disputes.” Yes, let’s dismantle the UCC while we’re at it! /sarc
Private obligations have public impact, and we have never been hesitant in the Anglo-American tradition to have some level of government standard-setting and adjudication.
You can see the damage caused by the disintegration of marriage in the swelling dependency on government transfer payments. The left would be delighted with “government getting out of the marriage business.” Yet another institution would be co-opted and bent to its ends. There’s a reason single women have gravitate toward the candidates of the left since the maelstrom–Uncle Sam has become their surrogate husband.
To illustrate my last comment: use to be (perhaps still is) there was a thing called ‘common law’ marriages. These people were not married but may as well be.
You look at the disfunction in single mother families, the issue is not so much that mamma ain’t married. It’s that daddy isn’t in the picture. If daddy was living with mommy and they had a traditional relationship, I do not think the certificate would matter a damn.
And when we go debating the “legal institution” of marriage, people drag that into it – they debate the legal institution as if marriage was a matter of daddy living with mommy. But as a legal institution it is not – the legal reality of marriage is that it is a government-issued permit/certificate and it comes with some subsidizing tax breaks and whathaveyou.
Mommy and daddy can have the certificate, it will not matter a damn if they live seperated. They can lack the certificate, and it will not matter a damn if they have a happy home life anyway, living “in sin”.
The sinfullness of it – oddly – does not in any way preclude them from having a more moral relationship than a fair bit of godly married people.
The “legal institution” does not need defending so much as burrying because that sucker is just dead. At least, all the good and wholesome things that it was meant to institutionalize are dead, hollowed, and not really related anymore to the actual legal institution as it exists. The institution still exists, but what it represents is tangential and nothing to do with what people argue promoting.
We should promote things like fidelity, commitment, whole homes, etc. These things are good. But at this point, the mutated legal monster of family planning permitting is dead weight – or at least, rapidly dying weight.
To fold this back into a sequitar direction, you cannot legislate yourself out of this pickle. We can change the laws but you can’t shove this kind of thing top-down.
You CAN coerce people into organizing themselves into the arrangement that you think best promotes the behavior you desire – but you will find that doing so does not drastically alter their actual behavior. It is not an issue that can be debated and decided on fiat by a majority, real change and improvement would require another cultural shift, and legislation follows such shifts it does not lead them around by the nose, any more than it can regulate the tide. A real change requires persuasion and individual choice.
The real payoff, if there is to be any, comes from fostering and supporting values like fidelity, applied in peoples lives. It will not come from encouraging them to get paperwork or agree to a specific legal arrangement. If that had any effect at all on their behavior, I fear it would be likely to seem like an indulgence, a certificate of virtue allowing you to be virtuous on the strength of credentials, despite wallowing in immorality in practice.
The erotic life of humans on the other hand, as one aspect of human drives under examination doesn’t appear to be well captured in economic analyses.
I think this is true, in the extent that economists don’t much focus on trying to study and describe people’s erotic activity.
But it somewhat depends on how you define economics – the latest computer model of the NASDAQ or theory on trade imbalance? Or a more broad, generic view as ‘a large swath of human activity’. Economists focus on the business side of things.
But people are people, and rules that describe our behavior in one area will often describe behavior in another.
Economists don’t focus on sex much, but certainly there models for studying human behavior and action, developed by economists, that apply and do help illuminate human behavior in some non-economic arenas.
Economics shows up in sex lives. Not because economists shove it where it shouldn’t go or something, but just because the way stuff works is the way stuff works, and these theories about how to rationalize human behavior end up describing a lot of human behavior.
As an example, go to a foreign country. When you go abroad, you are now the swarthy mysterious ‘exotic’ looking one with the sexy accent. There may not be a majority of women who want to date a cross-race foreigner, but if – as is often the case – even 15% of the population finds it appealing to nab an exciting, exclusive, rare foreign mate, and only 2% of the population is actual foreigners, those dudes are going to have options. It’s basic supply and demand. They will ‘command a higher price’ and probably nab more attractive and desirable mates then they would have normally warranted, on account of their scarcity.
Or look at how likely someone is to mate with an unattractive person. It depends, how many attractive people are available?
Ideas like ‘opportunity costs’ or ‘supply and demand’, self interest and cooperation, and other terms, as well as models like Game Economics, do wind up describing other traditionally non-economic behaviors very well anyway.
Maybe we shouldn’t rush ahead of ourselves too fast entropy. For instance, it may turn out that our erotic lives aren’t confined to the narrow realm of sexual activity.
What does economics miss? We might guess at a possibility: activity done for its own sake, without evident exchange value. What sort of activity is that? Hmmmm.
Yackums, I appreciate the Monty Python bit, but is it really possible to think, methodically. About some things sure, but about everything?
Do you need to experience the consequences of pissing on an electric fence to know you shouldn’t piss on an electric fence, or is it enough to agree with someone else that it’s a bad idea to piss on an electric fence?
My point being, I don’t think “methodological individualism” really tells us anything very useful.
What does economics miss?
Oh, a whole bunch. I wouldn’t argue for Homo Economicus. It is limited, and very very wide, but also limited.
I don’t think it explains everything. Hell, I don’t even think our economics explain everything economic. But it can be useful in describing and understanding and explain some thing, even some things non-economic.
Not the NASDAQ mind you, that has not much to do with my sex life.
But again, look at Game Economics which I think best illustrates how economics are a study of behavior. They use models like playing chicken – two guys driving at each other in cars, and use those principles to describe actions in economic activity.
Well that model of behavior used in Chicken does not just describe some economic activity – it does that. But it also describes… chicken! Two guys driving at each other in cars, for a thrill, as a pissing match. Not normally considered economic. Not economic, but the basic style of analysis can be applied with good effect in both situations, humanity and human behavior being the common element.
That is, certainly the Chicken game is certainly non-economic activity. But the same conceptual model – whether you call it an economic model or not – can be useful to study behavior in some economic situations, and also, some non-economic ones.
” . . . I don’t think “methodological individualism” really tells us anything very useful.”
It seems to tell us there isn’t a social agency with a general will of the sort evidently derived (possibly in error, I don’t know) from Rousseau. And in fact, it looks closely akin to the path we take in reasoning about intentionality in speech production, doesn’t it? Wherefrom comes the meaning, we ask? At the point of the agency in the person, we say.
We might guess at a possibility: activity done for its own sake, without evident exchange value. What sort of activity is that?
Here is I think another example. Economists generally focus on exchange, right? You need 2 people for commerce. You might think there cannot be economic activity if you’re living alone in isolation, out in a hut in the forest.
It depends on how you define ‘economic’. What I am saying is, economic concepts, and thinking that is usually applied to economics and pioneered by economists, still finds purchase even for the hermit in the shack.
Because even though he has no commerce, he still makes his decisions based on things like relative value, cost/benefit, return on investment, etc. And he can determine benefit to himself and relative value by applying such thinking. So economic thinking (or what was meant to be economic thinking) can be applied here to cast light on his own decision making process and to explain his actions.
Do you need to experience the consequences of pissing on an electric fence to know you shouldn’t piss on an electric fence, or is it enough to agree with someone else that it’s a bad idea to piss on an electric fence?
I’ve never pissed on an electric fence… I don’t know whether or not that would be liable to electrocute me. I think ‘maybe’. I saw some mythbusters episode on that. It depends on the details.
But… do you need to throw a lit cigarette into a barrel of gasoline to know what happens?
What do you think happens?
Let me say I’m well disposed toward economic reasoning playing a role in politics. The point I’d hoped to highlight by raising the question isn’t in itself to do with economic reasoning as such, but to do with our understanding of the entry of economic reasoning into politics, how political thought would have proceeded before economic thought had entered in, why political thinkers turned to economic thought as a necessity toward their political aims, what the effects of economic thought in politics in turn have on political thought (Karl Marx, anyone?) and so on. The phenomenon is something akin to the kid with a new toy. He doesn’t pause to regard what he’s left behind or failed to notice going on around him: he just plays and plays hard.
How full is the barrel? How’s the ventilation? Are we indoors or outdoors?
We’re going to have to conduct a whole series of experiments here to determine individually and with ontological certitude what’s going to happen.
Except that I didn’t say libertarianism is license. I said unmoored individual freedom tends to decay into license. I’ll also add that license is antithetical to liberty, which is something envisioned by the Founders,
I disagree. I think if you look at a lot of the rationale the founders were using, it was that license will make people responsible.
If you do what you’re told, and you’re payed what you’re payed, and you live where you live, as a matter of course – these things are all decided for you – then in your free time, what else have you got to do besides get piss drunk?
If you’re responsible for yourself, and you’re piss drunk all the time and never work, then you can’t afford food, and if you can’t afford food, well… you die. So… there goes that problem.
Need for food is an encouragement to put the bottle down and do something productive with yourself.
You cannot have license to harm others. But you should have absolute license to do harm to yourself. How else can the many people who learn that way, learn?
To illustrate my last comment: use to be (perhaps still is) there was a thing called ‘common law’ marriages. These people were not married but may as well be.
You look at the disfunction in single mother families, the issue is not so much that mamma ain’t married. It’s that daddy isn’t in the picture. If daddy was living with mommy and they had a traditional relationship, I do not think the certificate would matter a damn.
And when we go debating the “legal institution” of marriage, people drag that into it – they debate the legal institution as if marriage was a matter of daddy living with mommy. But as a legal institution it is not – the legal reality of marriage is that it is a government-issued permit/certificate and it comes with some subsidizing tax breaks and whathaveyou.
Except that it’s more from a legal perspective than that. Largely absent from your analysis is the rather important matter of the common byproduct of Mommy and Daddy living under one roof: children. The legal arrangement exists, and is designed to promote a good environment for the children that issue forth.
Sure, I know of three couples off the top of my head who did/are doing a fine job raising kids, and they were faithful to each other (with one startling exception). And plenty of people get married with no intention of having children, or prove unable to have them for various reasons. I honestly get that.
But legal institution of marriage serves the essential purpose of ensuring the responsible procreation and rearing of the next generation, and does so through the legal recognition of the private arrangement of a man and woman.
Thus, there is a reason the legal form has been favored, and it has served the Anglo-American experience quite well. To the extent it’s damaged goods (and it is), it is largely because of ill-considered reforms that we don’t have the werewithal to address.
We should promote things like fidelity, commitment, whole homes, etc.
Agreed, but effective reform usually is accompanied by some legal lever, and not merely the bully pulpit. The District of Columbia was not particularly amenable to an education-only approach when it came to Mr. Heller’s Second Amendment rights. Use of legal methods to modify social behavior is not per se illegitimate. No, it shouldn’t be coercive, but it’s not like the State is forcing anyone to get married now. If anything, it’s incentivizing the opposite decsion.
Plus, by stressing only a preaching/cultural solution, you’re basically disarming conservatives when it comes to marriage, since there are countervailing and corrosive cultural/educational forces working hard to tear down the value of fidelity, whole homes, and the like. Often from a tax-subsized pulpit. I’d rather not carry only a knife to a gunfight.
What if harming yourself harms someone else? To stick with you’re drinking the paycheck away example, it’s not just you that’s starving —it’s the wife and kids you’re not providing for.
I disagree. I think if you look at a lot of the rationale the founders were using, it was that license will make people responsible.
Maybe you’re more familiar with them than I am, because I don’t see anything resembling that from the Founders. Yes, they frequently had their vices, but I don’t see evidence that they were encouraging such things as an example, much less arguing for the toleration of such as a form of civic natural selection.
And Ernst has handled the question of when harming yourself harms your family, for example.
Largely absent from your analysis is the rather important matter of the common byproduct of Mommy and Daddy living under one roof: children. The legal arrangement exists, and is designed to promote a good environment for the children that issue forth.
That’s incorrect, I called them ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’. I did not spell out children, but it was not ‘absent’ from my argument, it was implicit.
The legal arrangement exists, and is designed to promote a good environment for the children that issue forth.
See, that’s the thing. You can SAY that. You can say that’s “why it exists”. Maybe it was why it existed. Is that what it actually does in it’s current incarnation?
I could say something like “The Catholic Church exists to occupy and protect the holy land”. Umm… not really. Once, though.
And that goes to the heart of what I am saying about the improper conflation. Encouraging and distributing certificates will not effect behavior.
You can argue that, vis-a-vis family court law (which is seriously f’d up!) that legally speaking, marriage still offers a protective legal arrangement for children. Usually only in times when the marriage is failing or is failed, though.
But I think we all recognize that is not the thrust of what we are debating, about what kind of family life is good for children. HOW does modern marriage actually promote such a thing at all? It really doesn’t much, except tangentially, so far as the legal status of it is concerned.
How does the certificate and tax status encourage and promote better homes for children? It does not.
Apart maybe from making sure parents have a few grand to actually spend on their kids of course…. but to me, that’s a tax issue.
To the extent it’s damaged goods (and it is), it is largely because of ill-considered reforms that we don’t have the werewithal to address.
Yes, sure. So again, what’s the point? If we don’t have the werewithal to reform the damage why cling to the corpse?
When talking about marraige, you say “does, does, does” but you seem to mean “did, did, did”. And if we aren’t going back, then what is the bother? Nostalgia?
What if harming yourself harms someone else? To stick with you’re drinking the paycheck away example, it’s not just you that’s starving —it’s the wife and kids you’re not providing for.
It’s 2012 dude. She can divorce you and find someone else, social services will yank the kid, etc.
If you harming yourself harms someone else then it’s harm of someone else. But I would exemplify that as a situation of criminal negligence – the patient you were operating on died because you were stoned. Or you throw yourself off a bridge… and then land on someone.
Your example seems a tiny step from rationalizing that when you hurt yourself, you’re hurting your families feelings or something. True, but that is not actionable harm.
It ought be obvious why we cannot COMPEL a man to work for the sake of his wife and children… that would be slavery.
My belief on this is, the world certainly does not owe you a living. But neither do you owe a living to the world. You don’t have to fufill some kind of obligation for existing and being born – you don’t HAVE to be productive, to increase the GDP, to serve the public good, or any other such thing.
Your existence is not predicated on your usefullness to others. A useless asshole may be a useless asshole but he has every right.
Agreed, but effective reform usually is accompanied by some legal lever, and not merely the bully pulpit.
You say “merely”, but then we are not agreed because I was not speaking of a bully pulpit.
You seem to think it must be led top-down.
I think that is hopeless and counterproductive.
Our disconnect here seems illustrative, to me, of the libertarian/conservative divide spoken of in the article. You say it is ‘disarming your side’. To oppose top-down government meddling with marriage would be to disarm all sides, and it would by it’s nature be opposition to the left’s social engineering, not disarming resistance to it.
For instance:
District of Columbia was not particularly amenable to an education-only approach when it came to Mr. Heller’s Second Amendment rights. Use of legal methods to modify social behavior is not per se illegitimate.
The court ruled the rights are individual. When that court ruled that, it was that the government may not override his individual choice. It did not mandate everyone go buy guns.
The court did not rule on ‘social behavior’, it ruled on individual behavior. The goal of Heller was NOT to modify social behavior, it was to preserve an individual right, FROM those who seek to modify society in such ways.
Yes, they frequently had their vices, but I don’t see evidence that they were encouraging such things as an example, much less arguing for the toleration of such as a form of civic natural selection.
I think alot of them espoused the view that basically, if you could manage your vices you could manage them and it wasn’t entirely their business. And if you couldn’t manage them, you should suffer the consequences of them yourself, until you shape up.
I am not saying they held up vices as virtues to be emmulated because vice causes virtue or something.
They held that self-responsibility created virtue, and that depended on liberty.
In other words, they are not to be protected from themselves.
That’s incorrect, I called them ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’. I did not spell out children, but it was not ‘absent’ from my argument, it was implicit.
Which is why I said “largely.” But the kids themselves never appeared in the analysis.
See, that’s the thing. You can SAY that. You can say that’s “why it exists”. Maybe it was why it existed. Is that what it actually does in it’s current incarnation?
I could say something like “The Catholic Church exists to occupy and protect the holy land”. Umm… not really. Once, though.
And that goes to the heart of what I am saying about the improper conflation. Encouraging and distributing certificates will not effect behavior.
You can argue that, vis-a-vis family court law (which is seriously f’d up!) that legally speaking, marriage still offers a protective legal arrangement for children. Usually only in times when the marriage is failing or is failed, though.
At the risk of being a nitnoid, the Church is still the custodian for several of the holy places. But, yeah, it’s never actually existed *for* that.
I don’t think you can escape the family law aspect of marriage, which was more implicit to my argument. It may be screwed up to a certain extent, too, but it is part and parcel of legal marriage. To the extent it’s fucked up, it’s a reflection on the impact of N-F divorce and disintegration of societal standards. Chicken, egg, I don’t know. But it is still more than “here’s your paperwork,” and reducing it to that level is something of a straw man.
But I think we all recognize that is not the thrust of what we are debating, about what kind of family life is good for children. HOW does modern marriage actually promote such a thing at all? It really doesn’t much, except tangentially, so far as the legal status of it is concerned.
How does the certificate and tax status encourage and promote better homes for children? It does not.
Apart maybe from making sure parents have a few grand to actually spend on their kids of course…. but to me, that’s a tax issue.
“How does modern enforcement of contracts in the court system promote adherence to contracts?”
See the above re: family law for the still-positive impacts. Also, legal marriage presumes the paternity of the children born during the relationship, so that streamlines (however imperfectly) the contentious paternity issues. The regulatory scheme bound up with marriage does serve valuable purposes.
Yes, sure. So again, what’s the point? If we don’t have the werewithal to reform the damage why cling to the corpse?
When talking about marraige, you say “does, does, does” but you seem to mean “did, did, did”. And if we aren’t going back, then what is the bother? Nostalgia?
I’m still a little too young for nostalgia. Look, the institution is badly wounded, and in need of reform, but that usually doesn’t come until piper walks up with the bill. If I thought reform was impossible, I’d agree with you. However, some states are experimenting with “enhanced” marriage arrangements that might point the way forward.
More to the point, if you’re going to sweep away the legal institution, you have to have some plan in hand to deal with the chaos that will invariably follow.
Yes, marriage can be derided as a mere tradition, but most traditions are solutions to forgotten problems. “Forgotten” does not mean “will never recur.” I’m not a big fan of revolutionary change.
You say “merely”, but then we are not agreed because I was not speaking of a bully pulpit.
You seem to think it must be led top-down.
I think that is hopeless and counterproductive.
Our disconnect here seems illustrative, to me, of the libertarian/conservative divide spoken of in the article. You say it is ‘disarming your side’. To oppose top-down government meddling with marriage would be to disarm all sides, and it would by it’s nature be opposition to the left’s social engineering, not disarming resistance to it.
That’s fascinating, because no one is being forced into marriage, either. Top down? Uh, no. I’m not proposing some federal solution, or Uniform Marriage Act.
Legal marriage existed long before the Constitution and even the Magna Carta. Regulation of such was one of those powers entrusted to the States without a second thought. That the States would have the responsibility to define the parameters of and regulate legal marriage was unremarkable as late as a generation ago. Yet now, the response to the problem is to abandon it altogether. I’m not sure how we leap to this step as the one most consonant with the traditions of American liberty.
And getting government out of marriage doesn’t disarm the left, not even a little. You assert this, but on what basis? Another instition its utopian fantasies would be shoved aside. Moving on to the next target…
De-recognition of marriage is social engineering on an unprecedented scale, something very new under the sun. In the absence of the impossibility of reform, the burden is on you to demonstrate how it would be better.
That’s no fault-freedom in action. Society’s intermediating institutions are weakened, government is strengthened, and the individual is left more vulnerable.
I agree there’s no good solution to the problem, but it is a problem.
“Another institution *repugnant* to its utopian fantasies…”
Grr, spelling and editing.
I think the divide comes down to how we answer the question of the most fundamental unit in any society from which all other units are constructed. Is it the individual or the family?
Dale, I still think there is a lot of conflation going on between distinct things.
How does the current legal institution of marriage, and family courts, promote whole homes?
You say ‘it’s usefull’…. well, I never really objected that it wasn’t operable.
But how does it promote whole homes? Family court is a disaster area most of the time, it’s atrocious, it’s practically anti-family.
You say you oppose radical change but I am not looking for any either on this score.
You point out that some states are looking into super-marriages or something… that would be a totally radical thing no? Surely chaos will erupt as they replace the legal institution of marriage with something else?
The existence of super-marriages (which are, legally speaking, different from marriage) is a demonstration of my point – it is easier to start off with a new legal institution than to try to turn the marriage boat around. Call it a ‘covenant marriage’ or whatever have you, it’s a different institution, legally speaking, because the original if FUBAR.
Look at it this way – marriage is so very special. Not like other contracts.
Well, thanks to NFD, marriage is ‘special’ in that it is the only contract that can’t be legally binding. What are we defending here? If we got rid of the legal institution of marriage, if the government stopped treating it special like a matter of national importance (the same government, as Wenzel points out, that cannot operate a post office competently) you could make a contract, and it would not be specially non-binding. You could actually write marriage contracts that would be enforced.
You seem to think getting government out of every detail of marriage would mean abolishing traditional nuclear families or something. But in what way does the government even use the marriage laws to promote and not attack that idea?
Really, that is my question. Tax breaks… uh, … custody laws in the event of already failed marriages… what is the government doing to actually promote stable nuclear families anyway? Just the tax breaks?
Seriously, in any given marriage, what is the government doing that is so integral to the relationship working and keeping them whole, that they must be the arbitor and issuer of marriage certificates?
Conservatives want to insist for some reason the government must handle marriage.
WHY?! Jeez, it doesn’t do anything remotely conservative with it. It does nothing but assault it. So we want it to still have it why? Conservatives are disarmed if the State doesn’t take a roll in marriage, not liberals? Huh?
What would you personally even want to do to promote marriage, if you had your way, with the government?
I think the divide comes down to how we answer the question of the most fundamental unit in any society from which all other units are constructed. Is it the individual or the family?
Well there you go. Perhaps that is it, I don’t know.
I say it is the individual. As an individual, I am all about family, and would suggest to you you should be as well. But that’s your business.
As a “most basic” atomic unit, “family” makes no damn sense to me, it can only be an individual. If a man commits a crime, you don’t throw his family in jail.
“I think the divide comes down to how we answer the question of the most fundamental unit in any society from which all other units are constructed. Is it the individual or the family?”
There we’re thrown back onto the question of our method, are we not? We want to offer a justification for the means by which we proceed with our diaeresis of the world. These questions appear to burrow deep into our findings or makings in ontology, our accounts of the world and the beings in it.
That’s no fault-freedom in action. Society’s intermediating institutions are weakened, government is strengthened, and the individual is left more vulnerable.
Ernst, and that’s where I’m coming from.
As it is – marriage fails = go see the government.
And for conservatives, this is (god knows why) essential and must be so?
Why not marriage fails, husbands a drunk, children have no food = go see the priest of the parish that married you?
Why do we expect the government to do a better job with these things than private institutions, especially, why in gods name would we bizarrly expect the government to promote nuclear families?
The only angle that I can imagine government properly having on marriage is enforcement of legally binding contract. Ironic, that government has used it’s custodianship of marriage first and foremost to declare that it’s not legally binding like any normal, ‘not-special’, not-the-foundation-of-society contract.
To the extent we revere it as something special, we fuck it up more than we fuck up irrelevant mundane things like false advertising.
We hold up, apparently, modern Family Law as being what now? Integral to the nuclear family?
If the wife divorces the husband, the husband has to pay child support. The father is not in the home still, and the government has made it easier on the mother and the children to not have the father around, very similar to how they do with unwed welfare mamas.
This is promoting nuclear families?
We agree that N-F divorce is the problem. Where we clash is on the difference between abandonment and reform. Your solution is to de-recognize marriage (which strikes me as something of a top-down solution in addition to being unprecedented).
Mine is to re-introduce fault and/or to offer the option of the “covenant” or similar enhanced versions of marriage which are not the marital equivalent of at-will contracts we have now. Making the commitment enforceable. I really don’t see how covenant options are revolutionary, certainly not as revolutionary as de-recognition. Mandatory counseling, cooling-off periods and the flat-out denial of a divorce, and maybe even monetary penalties would be in the offing. If I can have the sheriff chain up a contract breaker’s property in a commercial contract, there are surely reasonable penalties for breaking the marital contract in a fault-restored world. In my version, too, people are free to bypass the legal institution altogether.
Really, the Wenzel argument for general governmental incompetence proves too much, as that same set of incompetents operates the court system which will be construing the enforceable marital contracts in a de-recognized world.
A good example maybe, I think I read it over at Ace… the greeks are selling each other potatos in parking lots.
Conservatives generally applaud this kind of behavior. The government provides all sorts of safeguards, make sure the potatos are labelled accurately, inspected, safe to consume, etc. etc.
And conservatives see that it’s mostly all bullocks, they’re just taking cuts on the potatos.
So when we see Greeks essentially toss the whole government aside, and get government out of their potatos, and start making personal relationships to buy and sell potatos to other freely in a parking lot, willy nilly with no control and no direction and no potato planning, we applaud this.
But if you were to see families ignore the government altogether and go about their family business privately, marrying and divorcing in parking lots, it is apparently the end of civilization as we know it?
But food is not a cornerstone of society? Food is even more basic than marriage. If the government is no good for food and you turn out to be better off without them, why do we suspect marriage is different?
I’d really love to see even 1 state try that. “We enforce and arbitrate legally binding contracts, and we arbitrate custody disputes, beyond that it’s your business we don’t care who’s married to whom, and we don’t conduct marriage or certify them or officiate them.”
Your solution is to de-recognize marriage (which strikes me as something of a top-down solution in addition to being unprecedented).
Dale, please tell me how, though.
Firstly, what would the government not be doing that it was doing, that was so integral to promoting nuclear families?
Secondly, how would it somehow ‘de-recognize’ anything? It would be essentially saying “The goverment has no authority over this sphere.” It would not ban marriages or nuclear families. How is government recognition essential to nuclear families?
Third, why does the government have to offer you marriage options? Why can’t you do your own covenent?
I really don’t get this. Why do you feel as if it doesn’t count or something, unless it comes with the blessing of our tribal leaders in the city council? The world does not revolve around our self-appointed betters.
I hate to be glib, but because people aren’t potatoes? Marriage is fundamentally different than food sales?
I’d really love to see even 1 state try that. “We enforce and arbitrate legally binding contracts, and we arbitrate custody disputes, beyond that it’s your business we don’t care who’s married to whom, and we don’t conduct marriage or certify them or officiate them.”
A state is welcome to try that approach. I’d be curious to see how it turns out.
Of course, they’re going to have to be ready to rewrite insurance laws, wills/estates, disability/death benefits laws, and the like to account for all sorts of marital arrangements not recognized under current law (e.g., Muslim/breakaway Mormon polygamy) and so forth.
This is similar to a question the left never answers for me.
Why does it have to involve the PUBLIC government apparatus? Why not just start a charity to fund xyz welfare program privately?
HAS to be government to be legitimate.
[i]I hate to be glib, but because people aren’t potatoes? Marriage is fundamentally different than food sales?[/i]
I don’t mind glibness. That doesn’t really address any of my questions though, it leaves me still wondering the same things.
Stating that marriage is not a food sale does not tell me how the government promotes nuclear families, and because they are different does not tell me why the government would nececssarily be better at one than the other.
Just my opinion: The answer is the individual but the natural basic social group for the individual is the family. Both units are fundamental.
I think we’re coming at the same problem from different ends, entropy. Let’s break down your:
marriage fails = go see the government.
This is our current progressively engineered vicious cycle: Marriage breaks down or never worked right in the first place and gov’t has to intervene in all the myriad ways that gov’t intervenes where the family has broken down, making it easier for the next marriage to break down, etc. etc.
Why not marriage fails, husbands a drunk, children have no food = go see the priest of the parish that married you?
Why not indeed? But for that to happen government is going to have to give back some or much of the social space it’s usurped, i.e. stop creating conditions favorable to family disintegration.
Because Why do we expect the government to do a better job with these things than private institutions, especially, why in gods name would we bizarrly expect the government to promote nuclear families? is the question we’re both asking and both looking to see answered.
It seems to me that the best thing government can do is stop making the problem worse. And part of that will necessarily involve a public conversation about common goods. But that’s an uncomfortable conversation with our present “nobody owns me, I can do what I want” popular culture.
I really don’t get this. Why do you feel as if it doesn’t count or something, unless it comes with the blessing of our tribal leaders in the city council? The world does not revolve around our self-appointed betters.
I guess it’s a fundamental difference of worldviews: yours presupposes what appears (at least to me) as an atomistic individualism, tenuously tethered to the tradition of liberty which gave us the Constitution. Mine presupposes mediating institutions outside of the realm of individual contract, within the purview of the powers reserved to the States.
Your approach fixes nothing. It throws its hands up at it and decides it’s not important. In your proposal, the government would be saying “we’re tired of this shit. Do what you want, get it in writing and we might enforce it, otherwise don’t care.” It’s a paradigm shift, and a signal from the tribal elders. Despite what you assume, human beings will adjust their behavior accordingly. They already have responded to the signals from NF divorce.
The very act of de-recognition is a statement in itself–“It’s all the same to us. Whatever family arrangement you cobble together is fine.”
And then what? Ceteris parabus, freed from the hand of the state, the nation of rational actors acting in enlightened self-interest reforms the nuclear family? If you want to persuade me, show me with at least some degree of plausibility that it will be an improvement on what we have now, all other things being equal.
Third, why does the government have to offer you marriage options? Why can’t you do your own covenent?
So options are bad now? Am I supposed to argue “it’s no-fault or nothing”? Again, what is the problem with states experimenting in a sphere that is clearly within their constitutional purview.
I would equate the family with the atom and the individual with the subatomic particle.
It’s hard to imagine a society of individuals acting individually in a methodic fashion.
Rousseau thought of it as an idyllic natural state, but I think the Jimmy Castor Bunch captured it rather more accurately.
One thing government could do to promote families is to end no fault divorce in cases where minor children are involved.
Another glib comment: generally speaking, without families, we don’t have individuals.
More seriously, the family is the primary school for the forming of the individual. It is where he learns virtues, self-discipline, responsibility, how to care for himself and others, respect for legitimate authority, how to interact with others, the importance of citizenship and the like. By watching his father, he learns how to treat women. By watching his mother, he learns how to respect women. And, obviously, vice versa for my daughters.
In a bad family setting, these lessons will be warped, or much harder to learn. But while imperfect, the family is the best place to form responsible, free citizens. Which is why there are legitimate state interests in fostering healthy families.
Why not indeed? But for that to happen government is going to have to give back some or much of the social space it’s usurped, i.e. stop creating conditions favorable to family disintegration.
Hence, exactly, my desire to see it extricated completely from marriage and family planning except in cases of extreme abuse or neglect. That’s why I like the thought of having it be not in the governments sphere at all.
Your approach fixes nothing. It throws its hands up at it and decides it’s not important. In your proposal, the government would be saying “we’re tired of this shit. Do what you want, get it in writing and we might enforce it, otherwise don’t care.”
That is, I do think, the crux of the difference between Wenzel’s “conservatisms” and his libertarianism. The conservatives want to be social engineers too.
Which is why there are legitimate state interests in fostering healthy families.
But it doesn’t do that.
Hell everything you just said about the family: see Public Schools.
It’s like you’ve got tenses mixed up. You say ‘is’, I think you meant ‘was’. We can’t just pretend the last 2 centuries didn’t happen.
Why anyone would be so eager for such a futile fight I do not know.
I mean… you’re not winning.
I can understand at least, when the left supports interventionism, because at least it’s working for them, getting them what they want.
You’re going to argue the government has to have a role in education maybe, because it’s so important, and the government will use that role to show your children gay porn.
The government promotes marriage by recognizing it. When no fault divorce became law, it essentially stopped recognizing marriage, and started promoting something else while continuing to call it “marriage”.
Say you enter into a business contract with a partner and start a company, where your responsibilities are clear, and one of you fails to live up to your end. Say your partner never comes up with his share of the start up money, and takes more of the profit than the contract agreed to. Because of that, the business fails, but the law says no fault can be assigned, and each party is responsible equally for the resulting outstanding obligations.
The questions are, if the stipulations in the contract are non binding, is it really a contract? If there is no culpability for failing to live up to the contract, will trying to live up to the contract be more or less common, or even expected? Will people even feel entering into a contract has value? Is it better to change the law back to holding people responsible for the contract they entered into, or getting rid of business contracts altogether?
Family law will always be with us, in one form or another. There has to be some authority when it comes to insurance laws, inheritance, child welfare, division of assets at the dissolution of joint occupancy, and all the rest. Traditional marriage has historically been the standard by which the laws operated under. No fault basically removed the standard and corrupted the institution. We need to reestablish the institution by recognizing the standard, not abandon it because bad law has removed the standard.
I would equate the family with the atom and the individual with the subatomic particle.
It’s hard to imagine a society of individuals acting individually in a methodic fashion.
What are families, really? Everyone has different families. Some of our families have aunts and sisters and others have uncles and best friends. Do we all like our mother-in-laws?
Families are relationships formed by individuals, and there need not be any blood relation for that to happen.
So to some degree, we do all as individuals choose what families we belong to, even if the choice is not to choose and go with whatever family we stumbled into first.
To organize society along the lines of families I think would require we go back to Head of Household type affairs, like with voting and whatnot, where we treat the whole family as one. That ain’t happening. Would require repeal of multiple constitutional ammendments.
Plus the lines are so blurry. Many of us are part of several families. How would the government even look to interact with or organize along familial lines? Not all my relations are related to each other, unless you want to wind up considering everyone related to everyone else.
The government promotes marriage by recognizing it. When no fault divorce became law, it essentially stopped recognizing marriage, and started promoting something else while continuing to call it “marriage”.
Yes, I agree.
Well, I think I see the problem in this argument. Societies don’t need government to organize them. Governments occur because societies exist and the people in them want some kind of central institution to foster that pre-existing organization.
Calling on government to organize anything is… it’s just…
Don’t do it, okay? Ever.
I’m just saying that societies aren’t organized along the lines of individuals AS individuals. Individuals always exist in relationship (or association) with other individuals. And I think it’s telling that the worst totalitarian regimes tried to break down all those intervening associations —to turn community into collective.
that’s a job for a community organizer
Why anyone would be so eager for such a futile fight I do not know.
I mean… you’re not winning.
I can understand at least, when the left supports interventionism, because at least it’s working for them, getting them what they want.
You’re going to argue the government has to have a role in education maybe, because it’s so important, and the government will use that role to show your children gay porn.
We homeschool. And there’s always the option of private schools, so I don’t get what the comparison is supposed to mean.
It’s…odd that you call me a “social engineer” when you’re the one calling for an unprecedented change to marital (and insurance, and estate, and etc) law and I’m advocating for the end of no-fault. Claiming that the complete de-regulation of marriage is *not* social engineering is an ipse dixit.
Repealing no fault is a futile fight, but turning marital and family law into a contractual free for all isn’t? Especially when you can’t advocate how it would actually improve anything. It’s one of those shibboleths for certain corners of the right, one that supposedly demonstrates how serious you are about pushing back against leviathan, but no one plausibly demonstrates how it would work in practice.
How does it discomfit the Left again?
At least with drug decriminalization you can point to a real world example like Portugal. Point me to a real world example, and I’ll take heed.
Calling on government to organize anything is… it’s just…
Don’t do it, okay? Ever.
Well, I wasn’t though.
I’m just saying that societies aren’t organized along the lines of individuals AS individuals. Individuals always exist in relationship (or association) with other individuals.
Um, it’s probably a difference of perspective but that seems to be just what it is.
We are social creatures and do form organizations with nearly everything we do, but all these organizations (including government) are comprised of individuals. We interact with each other individually, and we interact with organizations (or, other individuals within those organizations) individually.
And we do that alot, but I wouldn’t say always. Everybody needs alone time. Everyone does plenty alone.
The only deviance I can see from that is the desire to address organizations like the government from organizations in political/identity group constructs. But that’s in theory, on paper. The jackasses speaking ‘for the group’ don’t really speak for as many as they claim.
But that is the only vein I can think of, if I try to think of organizational interactions with organizations sans any individual. Who’s in the damn thing?
Both words are kind of inescapable in the sentence. The concept behind politics is basically, how do we as individuals organize ourselves into (cooperative, I hope) organizations, no?
We homeschool.
I think that’s great. But if marriage is so important that the government has to be involved to make sure people do it right, and you have forsaken the crappy government schools in your personal life, does that mean you feel that your children’s education is unimportant?
Also, most of the jackasses speaking for “the group” are speaking for involuntary associations —e.g. blacks, hispanics, queers (we’ll leave to the side whether sexual orientation is voluntary or not) rather than voluntary associations —churchs, civic organizations, etc. Government likes involuntary associations because they make it easier to divide and conquer.
I think you and me and Dale probably agree on 85% + of the issues. The biggest of course being that the progressive vision of government by technocratic elites is a threat both to individual liberty and traditional associations (family, church).
Of the remaining 15%, 10% is going to cause heartburn and 5% fierce disagreement. Most of the time.
It’s…odd that you call me a “social engineer” when you’re the one calling for an unprecedented change to marital (and insurance, and estate, and etc) law and I’m advocating for the end of no-fault.
Because as far as I can see, you are arguing that the government needs to be involved to make sure things are done the right way.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but to my suggestion of letting people marry in parking lots where they sell potatoes if they choose to, you accuse me of not giving a shit, and having government ‘give up’ on fixing the problems of making sure people marry right.
I think they should marry as they please, and it is not the governments business or problem. Just because government has ‘an interest’ doesn’t mean it has an imperative. People have lots of ‘interests’, long walks on the beach, downhill skiing, other nations natural resources and cash reserves are very… interesting.
‘Society’ is just an abstract. It is made of individuals.
The primary problem I’ve always had with gay marriage is the social engineering component, the top-down approach.
And what I mean by that is that what the militant homo agenda people wanted was government recognition. Government sanction. Essentially they wanted to grab their 51% and use the authority of government, speaking for EVERYONE, to approve homo marriage as the ‘right thing to do’.
It sounds like you want the same thing, just different.
but no one plausibly demonstrates how it would work in practice.
Well, tell me why it wouldn’t? Specifically, plausibly demonstrate the problem? How did it work before you could get a state certificate? You don’t think government invented marriage do you?
From wiki:
For most of Western history, marriage was a private contract between two families. Until the 16th-century, Christian churches accepted the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s declarations. If two people claimed that they had exchanged marital vows—even without witnesses—the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.
Chaos!
I think you and me and Dale probably agree on 85% + of the issues.
Yeah, I think probably. Actual practical realistic things? Oh sure.
It’s one of those ‘in the ideal’ things. I just don’t see the sense in the direction.
Dale, how long have you home-schooled your tots? I have friend who is/was homeschooling all ten of hers and they are great kids. She was teacher before she had a family and I think that helps.
Lots of people around here “home-school”, if you know what I mean, and then fob their kids off on the middle school when math and harder subjects catch them short.
My friend sent her sons to high school so they could play sports and her eldest daughterso she could do ROTC.
The ideals are the hardest things, because they’re what give our lives purpose.
But in any event, you’re a good guy, and I appreciate you’re views, even where we don’t agree.
In the (extemely) unlikely event we ever meet —I’ve got my anonymous-loner-hard-at-work-on-his-MANIFESTO rep to think about— you’re welcome to my scotch.
Not sure about my cigars, though.
your views
That’ll learn me to buy the export strength Canadian Club just because it’s on sale!
“The idea that I could be tethered to what at the time I would have dismissed as godbothering, busybody prudes was frankly, absurd.”
Jeff,
Hope you were not suprised that we grew on ya cus it’s one of the godbothering super-powers we acquire at baptism;-).
And if it’s not that, it’s the fact that one’s views change as one’s experience of life changes.
I don’t think I’ve become more of a social con as a change in circumstance but I think I’ve come to better understand what it means to take a cautious approach to optional changes I can’t predict because I’ve noticed how poorly I — and others — do with such predictions and I can’t help but still consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent man.
By that, I guess I mean it’s not ideological for me. I don’t really have a sense of “better ideas in a whole scheme” with this class of things we call “social” but I do have a sense of degradation and loss from the previous state.
Some would say that’s life experience in action too.
I’m fond of Limbaugh’s “conservatism just IS” argument. The facts of life are conservative, and it takes a lot of education, money and privilege to shelter yourself from them.
That’s a very mature outlook, bh.
Can’t imagine our superiors on the left would ever dream of such a possibility.
Let me put that a different way. I’m not libertarian in this sense: I don’t think we just use pure reason to figure out a system humans can achieve a happy equilibrium in. To believe this — to my mind — is folly. It’s on par with a progressive sketching out how to best change human behavior according to their rules.
Far better to reform things. Far better to not take flights of fancy based on pure reason.
Revolutions are like mutations. I might appreciate the stories about how this or that will make things just and proper but if humans have never done it before I’m pretty sure it’s equally likely it will end with sport-killing and baby-eating.*
*Yeah, I pitched it rather hard with the baby-eating. But, to my ear, that’s the inverse of the vaguely utopian changes being promised. I don’t know, you don’t know, so why the hell should we be so vain as to pretend we can make societal changes in this manner in such a short untested period of time?
Attachment to conservatism as an identifier is fraught with troubles and always will be, seems to me, due to the relativity of the thing. Dicentra has pointed to the bulk of those. Conserve what, is the problem. Of course too, it’s not a name we’ve chosen in the sense of originating it, but inherit it from a long and absurdly complex tradition of political doings.
You guys, Ernst and Danger, are simpatico with my argument.
Just wanted to flesh it out a bit further.
“it takes a lot of education, money and privilege to shelter yourself from them.”
Except the shelter is only a facade. All the money in the world can’t protect you from yourself.
“I’m pretty sure it’s equally likely it will end with sport-killing and baby-eating.*”
Well we already have baby-killing and sport-eating so it’s probably not too much of a stretch.
All those permutations of baby/sport/eating/killing will be different reality shows in a few years.
And we’ll wonder why everyone is taking so much damn soma and afraid to go outside.
Wow, and I thought the thread was winding down when I finally managed to weigh in. (That’s usually what happens due to the time difference, which is the main reason I don’t comment much, as much as I’d love to…)
Anyway, just a few notes…
Ernst, I must have misunderstood your question in response to which I brought the Python clip. I assumed it was a rhetorical question, brought to point out the apparent irony in methodological individualism in that “methodological” could have implied “conformity,” and I latched on to that.
bh, I’m very sympathetic to your expression of caution in the face of change. I do consider myself more ideological in that sense, but that’s probably partially due to the fact that I grew up and remain religious to start with, and in any case I think that to the extent that conservatism (of any kind) can be considered an ideology, one of its core attributes is a kind of humility, a recognition that, as an old rabbi of my father’s put it long before anyone had heard of Donald Rumsfeld, (imagine a thick Yiddish accent) “you have to know vhat you know, but more important, you have to know vhat you don’t know.”
entropy/Ernst/Dale/etc. on the topic of the individual vs. the family as the building block of a society – I’m not sure I like the atom/subatomic particle analogy, except maybe for minor children. Maybe that’s what you had in mind. I think ultimately the individual is the “atomic” unit, but the family’s role is to be the microcosm of society vis-a-vis the individual (the molecular superstructure?). Meaning, the family is both the first governing body and the first central support system encountered by an individual, in infancy. In childhood, the family remains the primary governing body and the primary support system. And even in adulthood, one’s family (if intact) can remain one’s backup (if not governing body, than certainly) support system. And in strong, functional families, elderly individuals rely on their adult children to help support them and make medical and end-of-life (and after-death) decisions on their behalf.
In writing this I’m reinforced in understanding why (e.g.) Rick Santorum advocates so strongly for strong families and the strengthening of families. Simply put, strong and properly-functioning families (two parents, for starters) relieve Big Government of so much of its current burden, which it shoulders mainly because of unaddressed family breakdown. It doesn’t have to be a religious issue per se, except in that its obvious truth and effectiveness ought to move people who might otherwise dismiss anything uttered by a religious person as hocus-pocus to reexamine their hostility and to realize that you don’t have to be religious to appreciate the wealth of sociological insights and prescriptions borne by our religious traditions, and the evolution from there of our (secular) ideals.
When the discussion is about how the law will bear on the relationship between the government and the “fundamental unit of society,” the issue always comes down to trying to organize society mechanically through government vs. society organizing government organically.
One of the flaws of libertarianism is that it refuses to accept that an organically organized society can and does function with the recognition of more than one kind of “fundamental unit.” The only way to prevent society from functioning that way is to impose, mechanically, through law, a deefinition that recognizes only one kind of fundamental unit.
Social planners get it wrong because they see that society doesn’t operate like a well-oiled machine and they say, “If only we could draw up a blueprint that would eliminate all the messy bits and make everything run smoothly, we could have the perfect society.”
The truth is, society doesn’t operate like a well-oiled machine because it isn’t a machine. It also isn’t a system. It is exactly what it is: a society. It consists of individuals who live their lives in a variety of relationships that run through life cycles of their own. Interactions are messy because mess is a by-product of life.
Over time, if friction is intolerable for some, they make accommodations to try to alleviate the friction and if it works, there is what sociologists call a new paradigm — but which is, in fact, nothing but an accommodation. A tactic.
And that is as complex as society gets: it doesn’t “do” strategy. There is no hive mind that constitutes a higher consciousness than any one individual. It makes itself better entirely by accident.
Getting worse? That’s always a deliberate choice.
One of the flaws of libertarianism is that it refuses to accept that an organically organized society can and does function with the recognition of more than one kind of “fundamental unit.”
You seem to be totally misreading me.
I was responding to what someone else brought up, about if the family is the basic organizational unit in society. To the extent I was talking about it at all, I was actually skeptical of it and arguing against it. I certainly never called for action.
I don’t see how you can say libertarians ignore natural (rather than planned) social organization.
I was both in the family/individual thing and on account of marriage arguing for exactly the kind of ‘organic’ invisible-handed organization you’re advocating.
“If only we could draw up a blueprint that would eliminate all the messy bits and make everything run smoothly, we could have the perfect society.”
McGehee, to really draw you into this thing, how does effect the marriage debate?
Do we have to have a tidy blueprint for what an ideal married couple looks like to ensure the future of civilization itself?
I like Yackums’s analogy better myself.
But I still think the only way you can be an individual “methodologically” is to go live alone on a mountain somewhere.
I originally bought up marriage as an example of contract i.e. getting some of that messy “market rules” on one of those “reified groups” that we conservatives (social or otherwise) are supposed to be confused about.
Frankly, speaking as a historian, the Western idea of romantic love is more mentally constructed than the profit motivve that may (or may not) be paramount in arranged marriages.
So Wenzel, being an individual, cannot use his methodological individualism, as he terms it, as a method of analysis of the human condition if he doesn’t live alone on a mountain? That seems odd.
My question sdferr was, How do you be an individual methodically?
Reason is only part of human being.
And it seems to me that if all there is to “methodological individualism” is method for the purpose of analyzing the human condition, then it’s just more mental masturbation.
Is that tantamount to what Wenzel is claiming Ernst? That it is necessary to be a certain way and not another? I.e., to be a social being or to be an anti-social being?
If what we’re to call mental masturbation for the rhetorical purposes of merely dismissing a claim about mental processes, then I suppose that’s a fine way to proceed. If on the other hand, we desire to get to the question whether families “think”, “feel” or “will” as individuals do, or whether we ought to say the same sorts of things about societies, that societies “think”, “feel” and “will” as individuals do, then Wenzel may have a point to which we should attend as he intends it.
“We the People…do ordain and establish this Constitution[.]”
You want to try to tell me that that wasn’t a constitutive act?
’cause I don’t see us calling for a fresh ratification every generation so as to avoid the dead getting their agency all over us.
Wenzel is a rejection of Burke (and via Burke, Cicero if I remember correctly), and I refuse to reject Burke.
It seems to me that a weakness (and I think this has more to do with our present cultural condition) in natural rights theory is that, to use Wenzel’s words, liberals (of all stripes) are pre-occupied with rights and are prepared to sacrifice concepts of duty and obligation on the altar of individual freedom.
I see precisely the call for a fresh ratification today, but first we demand the intentions underlying the concerted act of the men and women of the framing generation be understood by the individuals of living generation today, and to that end we assert those framing intentions be taught. We complain of the lack of understanding of the meaning of that “act” in our contemporary individual’s level of understanding of those intentions every day we’re here. The aggregated ignorance of our fellows, and of the fellows of the handful of preceding generations to our time has resulted in the misuse of the political framing we hope to depend on for the protections of our freedoms as individuals, to such an extent that we find our government raining injustices down upon our heads in the name of “securing the blessings of liberty”, as spoken by the Obama Solicitor General in the Supreme Court just yesterday.
Do we have to shred the extremely messy blurprint that has served our society for thousands of years to satisfy people who can’t wait for society to evolve at its own pace? (And the typo “blurprint” was a happy accident, so I’m leaving it that way.)
I agree with that, so let me turn your question back on you: Does Wenzel’s “methodologica individualism” make things clearer, or more confused and obscure?
I think it’s the latter.
I don’t.
fair enough.
water pistols at dawn then.
Indubitably.
Can we fill them with Scotch and attempt to drink our air-cast fill?
Bully!
Squirter refills allowed, of course (and since we can expect some significant volume to end up on the ground or dousing clothing, may I suggest bar Scotch so as not to waste the good stuff). First one to pass out loses, since that indicates the other fellow’s better aim!
Life’s too short to drink cheap scotch
even out of a squirt gun.
Maybe better to call the whole thing off.
Heh, clink glasses then.
To a progg, the concept of liberty is understood in the same way the concept of tolerance is. Tolerance is understood as removing differences, rather than accepting them. Liberty is understood as removing consequences for actions, rather than being responsible for them.
I’ve been trying to get into the main topic itself, but I’m having a hard time because I feel compelled to reject out of hand the concept of what an American conservative is to this Wenzel person.
There are not “many conservatisms”. There is conservatism, and people that fraudulently call themselves conservative. Reagan has been the only conservative president in my life time, regardless any claims of the “compassionate” conservatives.
Simply put, an American conservative is someone that believes in rule of law and the bottom up government of the people, as established by the constitution. A clearly limited federal government, meant only to handle international affairs and guarantee the individual citizen their basic human rights throughout the nation, with all other matters to be settled at the state(local) level.
That’s it. And while conservatism has been broken down in some peoples mind to economic cons and social cons, the distinction is usually made by misunderstanding, particularly in regards to what social cons want to do as a solution to their concerns. The true distinction I think is social cons are concerned about an overarching tyrannical government in all matters of life, economic and cultural, while economic cons disregard the cultural dangers an invasive government is implementing.
This stuff is hard. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t have so much political argument to go through in the first place, I think.
So rather than understand conservative as a term conceived relative to the principles a particular person or group of persons adopt to conserve, LBascom, and relative as well in opposition to another party (the “liberal” party adopting other principles entirely) we’re going to absolutize the term, to fix it on some one principle or set of principles for all purposes hereafter (and must we suppose as well that if a set of principles, that the members of the set do not in any way conflict with one another)? In a sense, what we’d aim to do is to reduce the definitional principles to such as could be adopted by everyone and anyone consenting to self-identify as conservative?
Well, do you think Conservatism is confused about levels of human action and agency? Is eager to use public means to impose private preferences? Arbitrarily imposes its subjective preferences as objective Truth? Believes freedom and individual rights are ancillary to conservatism?
If you do, I suggest we have radically different ideas about what it is to be a conservative in America today.
“. . . Conservatism is confused . . .”
That alone looks like the kind of reification Wenzel is speaking of.
Do we have to shred the extremely messy blurprint that has served our society for thousands of years to satisfy people who can’t wait for society to evolve at its own pace?
I would say certainly not. I am not all about the homosex marriages.
But… our institution has not served thousands of years. If you want to invoke that in the debate over mano-a-mano marriage, OK. But in the context of the legal institution… in the US and UK government jumped into marriage in the 19th century. 20th century Christian Progs had a lot of fun with it too. According to Wiki, marriage throughout Western society was non-governmental until the 16th century.
I didn’t say the government was involved for thousands of years. You asked about a blueprint for an ideal married couple. Are you trying to say that this blueprint was created by the government?
You really didn’t read my post at 6:52 am very closely, did you?
Can I suggest another possible inroad into the decision Wenzel makes to emphasize the individual as the building block, the primary phenomenon upon which society is established?
What if we were to look to our principles themselves to see where we (or they, the principles as we define them) begin? What’s the first principle? What, in other words, is the foundation upon which all else in our politics depends?
Here, I’d suggest, we look to our rights, and the establishment of those rights as the primary characteristic separating American political thought from the political thought of the greatest part of the rest of the world. Our rights are what distinguish us from most other folk, to put that as simply as I know how.
And the first right? The right to life. And where, and in what sense, does this right arise to our vision as the foundation upon which all else will proceed? In Hobbes. And Hobbes makes this right appear in the radicalized necessity of the individual to preserve himself when under attack. What do all men have in common? The fear of violent death. So our politics can be built upon a universal basis. (Here I think we can see how equality is built in from the start, as part and parcel of the order sought.)
Indeed, Hobbes makes the claim that men in the state of nature prior to establishing society are anything but social beings by nature: they are anti-social beings who become social by means of a contract (freedom to choose!). So by nature, says Hobbes. (And we Americans disagree with him about that anti-social business, I believe, but this disagreement is contingent on another matter, another principle blended in after Hobbes, though certainly one to note and consider in its place.)
I agree with that, so let me turn your question back on you: Does Wenzel’s “methodologica individualism” make things clearer, or more confused and obscure?
I think ‘methodological individualism’ means focusing on issues from the individual angle, methodologically.
Meaning when we look at government action or any sort of issue, we would look at it from the perspective of how it would effect any individual, not how it would effect ‘society’ or ‘the economy’ or ‘hispanic lesbians’.
Methodological individualism does not except broken eggs in the name of omlettes.
Whereas one guy may think we are passing stimulus to help “the economy”, individualists would look and see, at an individual level, that you are taking from many and kicking back to a privledged few individuals. Actions should be taken and evaluations made not about vagueries and ‘general good’ abstracts like ‘the economy’ but on effects to real tangible individual people.
McGehee, I was talking about it from the perspective of government involvement. I haven’t really been thinking much about the homomarriage aspect.
If you do, I suggest we have radically different ideas about what it is to be a conservative in America today.
That was Wenzel’s point about “conservatisms”. Some people have radically different ideas about what it is to be conservative in America today.
Right. You didn’t read it. You assumed it was about one thing in particular and has no bearing on anything else.
Fine. When I get back to a real keyboard I’ll see if I can repeat myself in such a way that the generality of the point is unmistakable.
I think you seem to think I disagree with you where I don’t. I read that post again and I still see nothing to disagree with in it.
I think maybe a good example of the difference in libertarians and conservatives was that thing where Santorum was asked if a state could ban contraceptives. A libertarian might say of course not, it violates my individual rights, a conservative says it could conceivably be done within constitutional means, so sure, but it would be stupid.
The Declaration tells us what our inalienable rights are, but we have a representative republic under the constitution, not a democracy.
Yet you seemed to think it appropriate to ask me,
If you read the 6:52 am comment, why would you phrase a question to me like that?
Conn Carroll concludes:
The more important question is, why isn’t Breyer?
Got my tabs mixed up, sorry.
Anyway, government involvement in marriage happens to be how our society has evolved in the last 400 years. There are legal rights bound up in the institution now, largely because our society has become more indistrial and urbanized. I mentioned this before as well. Note my conclusion there.
A society that evolves organically doesn’t benefit from anyone — statist or libertarian — trying to make it evolve in their preferred direction. It always involves the use of government, especially when the perfecters claim it won’t.
Got my tabs mixed up, sorry
we’ll put it on your tab
A society of individuals as individuals isn’t much of a society. It’s unlikely to be civil certainly no more so than is the strongest individual, as, you rightly note, Hobbes realized.
So if we’re going to find the origins of civil society anywhere, it makes more sense (to me at least) to locate that origin not in fear of death, but in love for spouse.
That’s me just speculatin’ ona hypot’esis. No idea if anyone in the Western canon has written along those lines or not (although I suspect so).
Another good one is drug laws. As a conservative I say sure California should be able to decriminalize recreational drug use, if it’s done through constitutional means. At least I don’t know where in the constitution it says they can’t.
It’d be stupid though…
I would have said love of innocence.
Being a boor is easy, but stripping another of their innocence is doing no favors.
Remember when Jeff talked to those girls at last years blogcon thing, and one of them acted appalled at him talking that way to a young girl? It was hilarious that she claimed innocence that she clearly didn’t possess, but it was instructive in that it was an appeal to Jeffs civility.
The society is made, I think, Ernst in the contract, the civility undertaken when men choose to become citizens, at least if I’m not reading tendentiously into what Hobbes is getting at. Otherwise, I’m not sure what the point of his stress on the atomized conflict of the state of nature means in his scheme, the war of all against all as he puts it. (This isn’t my endorsement of his scheme, by the way, just my feeble attempt to describe his intentions.)
My quibble with that is that requires the individual (you or me) to look on the problem in a disinterested way. (Which we should, stick with me here).
To go back to my complaint about Kagan’s it’s a boatload of free money, not a gun to the head! argument:
My objection in the context of your comment is that, while clearly it’s not in society’s interest to hand out “free” money (because that money comes in large part from the yet to be born), it may very well be in the interest of a majority of individuals (hey! free money!) to take the handout. This is what we’re seeing happen with those who believe in Obama’s mythic stash of tasty unicorn scat. And that, I think, is a problem that comes with thinking exclusively in terms of the individual.
Thus, while I agree with you that we need to think about concrete things like humpty-dumpty’s right not to wind up in an omelette, instead of abstracts like “the hungry,” what we’re really doing is thinking about the goods we have in common; goods we should respect, because when we deprive another person arbitrarily or whimsically, we wind up depriving ourselves of those same goods.
The family is a concrete thing. The aggregate may be held together with cheap cement, but it’s more concrete than “wise latinas.” I also recognize that the larger the group gets, the crumblier the concrete.
As I said, I’m quibbling, but that’s because I see what you’re calling for as individuals thinking about other individuals as components of a greater whole —citizens of a commonwealth. And that’s not what I understand Wenzel to be saying. Maybe I’m confused, though (double-entendre intended).
I hope that makes sense.
I see what you’re saying about Hobbes, sdferr, but I find myself agreeing with Bloom that Rousseau blew the Hobbesian state of nature out of the water.
If life is dull nasty brutish and short, why should Man fear death?
Unfortunately, I’ll be out of pocket for a while now.
I’m contrasting civil with uncivil, not impolite.
A prison gang is a form of society, but it’s neither civil nor polite.
Except for Sparta, I suppose.
[i]A society that evolves organically doesn’t benefit from anyone — statist or libertarian — trying to make it evolve in their preferred direction.[/i]
Just as a point of order, my purpose is not to guide society so it evolves in the direction I want. My goal here would be to take away the positions that could do that. To take the reigns off society, and then it does whatever it does.
[i] It always involves the use of government, especially when the perfecters claim it won’t.[/i]
Probably. I admit that it is kind of an ‘ideal’ argument. Marriage would be a long shot. But toward the issue of us getting government out of every sphere of our life, I think it is good to question these things.
I’ve seen conservatives call out the idea of privatizing currency as just looney tunes, deranged, oxymoronic. Of course the government just has to print all the money.
But a great many brilliant austrian economists get called crazy that way. The government didn’t use to have a monopoly, the people then didn’t want one, and protested when government took over anyway. It’s not the only way it can be done.
In the same way, I think there is kind of a reflexive view that of course Government produces marriage, they are the ones who create it, you go to them to get it, they issue it, it’s from Government.
But that’s not really an ‘ancient institution’, that’s a few hundred year political trend. A combination of Family, Church and Contract use to handle that stuff just damn fine privately.
Although now that I say it, I do wonder that those institutions, when they use matter for shit, were not quite so liberal and irrelevant and voluntary and unobstrusive as they are in today’s society.
Perhaps part of the problem with the idea of that today is all those institutions lack credible authority. Just a piece of paper that the office secretary prints off the laserjet at the church? What kind of cockamamie unofficial sham marriage is this?
So yeah, maybe it is a bit idealistic and slightly utopian to think in some way, government can’t be involved somehow.
I’m not convinced that a prison gang isn’t civil in the political sense as over against the politesse sense, at least insofar as a prison gang, even a prison gang — and for the purposes of pointing to the inherent social nature of man, perhaps especially a prison gang (since there is honor among thieves, which is why we fault criminals for wrongdoing against the wider society in the first place: they don’t like having their stuff stolen either, but make for themselves unwarranted exceptions when stealing other people’s stuff) — is civil and civilly organized, just as an hereditary monarchy is civilly organized, or a traditional oligarchy or other mixed political arrangement is civilly organized. Not optimally, we might say, but certainly not in a state of anarchic war of all against all at all times and in all respects.
Yet at the same time, you look at it now, and it seems to be itself shrinking to fit the diminished role.
To fit down to a piece of paper on a laserjet.
anarchic war of all against all at all times and in all respects.
That should be a metal album.
You’re kidding right? ‘Might makes right’ is in no way a civil society. Unless you mean “conform or die” is a civil basis for society.
Sorry, the ‘consent of the governed’ aspect that makes a society civil is missing…
Yeah, I don’t define civil down quite so far LBascom. I still have the quaint notion that Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, Sparta, Alexandria and other such places in the ancient world were civil societies, albeit of a different political sort than we are used to.
As I said, I’m quibbling, but that’s because I see what you’re calling for as individuals thinking about other individuals as components of a greater whole —citizens of a commonwealth. And that’s not what I understand Wenzel to be saying.
Well, I read it that way, and I do see in the “conservatisms”, and it is very emphasized for example in Santorum’s speeches, but also just all over place, we do emphasize these abstract groupings of people, but not just in leftist identity groups, but similar constructs with arguable definitions and hypothetical members. Society, the Economy, Wall Street, the hungry and the poor and the uninsured.
Well Conservatism is preoccupied with aggregates such as “community,” “moral ecology,” “society,” or “the nation”; what is more, conservatism is willing to sacrifice individual rights on a communitarian altar.
I don’t know. But I wonder, look at what Republicans are liable to do. They keep getting elected. Is the GOP base conservative? Would they ever jeopardize “national security” and get rid of TSA scanners? Damn “the children” and end the drug war and coming war against food? And everything else.
This very socialist and trending toward police state country polls plurality “conservative”.
I’m sure you do sdferr, and I’d even agree to the quaint notion. I stop short of equating Rome to a prison gang though.
The country is plurality conservative. The ruling class isn’t.
Ironically, the stuff they’re conservative about is the stuff Wenzel doesn’t like about conservatism.
Which leaves libertarians in a real pickle, doesn’t it?
I’ll say this for Wenzel though. At least, according to his lights, I’m only confused.
I’m used to be thought of as racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic and bitterly clinging to my guns and religion because I’m too fucking stupid to get right with the Age of Aquarius.
beING thought of
I gotta stop hitting the post button before I ought to.
One more opinion:
TSA scanners aren’t about security, they’re about political correctness. The food war is identity politics of the upper-middle class health nazi variety (I should what Christopher Lasch had to say about that —twenty years ago almost). Both of them are liberal abstractions, not conservative ones.
The drug war is something I find more problematic, personally and in all honesty. I’m not in favor of either legalization or decriminalization —but that doesn’t mean the arming up the constabulary to fight the “war” as a war is a good thing.
I don’t think I’m equating a prison gang to Rome in any broad sense, but am content to claim that they both share some fundamental element of human sociability, ineradicable for all intents and purposes (see Aristotle Politics 1253a 2-6).
You CAN equate Sparta to a prison gang though. What’s the Agoge if not a drawn-out “jumping in” as education?
I’ll say this for Wenzel though. At least, according to his lights, I’m only confused.
I don’t know if his lights manage to hit you. He says at the start ‘many will not recognize themselves in this’, because he’s talking of it all together, as one, the Conservatisms.
To the extent I would define conservative, I would probably define it as Goldwater and Reagan’s libertarianism. Just like Bascom is doing. But I think in reality that’s just one ism and there are others.
I’m going to have to let that go for now. Although I suspect it’s water pistols at dawn for you too.
Maybe you, me and sdferr can get it all over with at once.
Wanna split the cost of a mariachi band?
[i]The drug war is something I find more problematic, personally and in all honesty.[/i]
It’s not any one thing specific. But when you put them all together and twist the knob and let ’em go, someone’s got an objection to everything, so nothing is cut.
It’s a coalition of “cut government”, but as much also a coalition of cut-goverment “but not [i]that[/i]!”
Gah. Damn Ace’s broken blog screwing me up even when I’m not posting on it.
Wanna split the cost of a mariachi band?
Heh, ok see you later. But I’ll toss out one more prevarication if you check back later.
The food war is identity politics of the upper-middle class health nazi variety
Maybe, I haven’t read him, but it’s also the logical extension of the drug war.
The definition of “drug” is actually very sketchy. Also a great many – especially the burkean, traditional – intoxicating drugs are eaten as foods and frankly it seems much more plausible than most of what the Japanese eat.
The DEA knocks down your door but it is the FDA that writes the regulations which are now laws. Don’t forget the F.
That’s a fair cop. Wenzel is saying conservatism is confused and I’m saying he’s calling conservatives confused. You’ve rightly called me on that.
My defense, such as it is, is that life is confused. We’re individuals, but we’re also part of larger social groupings (to use an inelegant expression). I’m an individual, but I experience my individuality, and others encounter my individuality, in myriad and malleable forms. I’m a husband, father, son, son-in-law, neighbor, to name just a few relationships off the immediate top of my head, as well as an irrascible pseudonymous commenter on Jeff’s blog. And I think it’s these mixed-up, changeable relationships, some more voluntary than others, that give our individuality meaning and purpose.
Wenzel, I agree, acknowledges this, but it seems to me that in trying to separate out things that aren’t or shouldn’t be readily seperable, he’s limiting the fullness of human nature. Sure, we act individually, but we can act individually for common purpose, and I don’t really see the point in having to renegotiate our individual relationships consciously and with deliberation from moment to moment (and how else are you going to be methodical in your individualism?).
I’ll concede Goldwater’s conservatism was decidedly more libertarian(ish?). I really don’t know, since Reagan is my political lodestar.
As for Reagan, the libertarian wing of the GOP has been fond of Reagan’s ” I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism[,] ” particularly when they want to beat Santorum with Reagan’s corpse. It’s worth noting here that Libertarians themselves don’t necessarily agree. More important, however, is the full context of that quote:
I agree that conservatives (of all stripes) and libertarians are traveling on the same path, even if on different sides of it, and with the intention of stopping at different points along the way. And I think which side of the path we’re on, and with whom we think (or think we want) to travel with changes as our life experiences change. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but as someone who came of age in the 80s, I think of myself first and foremost as a Reagan conservative (prior to 08-10, I would have said Reagan Republican). But I’ve evolved from what I would describe as a libertarian-leaning conservative sympathetic to social conservative concerns to a social-conservative-leaning conservative sympathetic to libertarian-conservative concerns. And that’s largely because of the obligations and duties that I’ve chosen to take on, namely a wife, kids and mortgage.
Sorry if that’s too long, too personal or both.
Forgot the link to the Reason interview.
Since you asked, and since I have nothing better to do than transcribe, here’s the quote I was thinking of, which was more anticipatory than predictive:
Ernst, maybe the point of disagreement is that you seem to be, like Bascom was doing, arguing about conservative, with some sort of cohesive definition in mind, if you label yourself that way it’s unsuprising you see sense in the label. Whereas he is talking about conservatisms, and part of the argument is whether such a thing exists. It’s probably much easier for him to paint it as incohesive since he’s excluding himself.
But what I think becomes the issue is, whatever we might argue “conservative” means, there are lots of people out there with equal credibility who will argue “conservative” means something incompatable.
2 examples might be the paleocons and the neocons. One says it is an essential part of conservatism that we not get entangled in foreign affairs without immediate and excellent reasons, and we should avoid Public action abroad reflexively. The other, that conservatism demands a strong engauged national defense that seaks to promote American ideals and interests abroad, everywhere all the time, as an active player in global politics.
Then they will argue about what conservative means and who is right and who is RINO/squish/MOBY/reconstructed crypto-communist.
Wenzel is talking about both of them, taken together, as a cohesive group of ‘conservatives’ within the larger polity.
I may be expanding a bit more than he actually said, but I think in that vein.
And while either may make sense and not be confused individually, take them together at once – we must be active abroad and yet avoid being active abroad – we have a duty to stand up for democratic reformers in Egypt and we have no business interferring in Egypt because it’s a disaster we should leave it alone – the whole becomes a confusing thing.
And that whole – the conservatisms – when assembled becomes confused in it’s operating principles. That the points of agreement, the compromises, not just between you and I or libertarians and socons but the net product of all the ‘isms, is something that winds up operating on imperatives that will wind up neglecting individual rights in the name of a group (the Poor, National Security, Communities, etc), and in Wenzel’s mind, ends up inimical to liberty.
Maybe not so much as an ideology even (because it isn’t), but as an operative alliance of ideologies.
So a Santorum can say “How will this effect families?”, but there are no “families” except groups of individuals. It will not have an effect on “families”. It will have an effect on individuals, who organize themselves into groupings called “families”. But the Family cannot be poked in the eye. It’s members can be all poked in the eye on account of their membership in the family, but the family – an abstract grouping – has no eyes.
I don’t think Wenzel is holding up his libertarian ‘methodological individualism’ as a life philosophy, but as a political one. I don’t think he thinks anyone should act ‘methodologically individual’ with regard to their wife, but in politics, methodological individualism would mean it was SOP and our standard mode of operation, to look at things from the individual framework.
So, whereas special tax breaks for “families” will help “families”, but another way to look at it – special tax breaks for “families” will help some people and not help others, and this helpful help is offered depending on whether or not the individual in question is participating in a ‘family’ orginzation – as ‘family’ is defined by Santorum – in the way he thinks people should, and encourages with the law. Thus, rightwing social engineering.
Which begs the question, why should Jerry the Catholic get to keep more of his own money than Susy the Spinster? Why is Susy less entitled to the product of her own labors because she didn’t get knocked up?
Wenzel’s Libertarianism, acting methodologically individual, would say BS to that, everyone should pay the same rate, perhaps advocate a flat tax.
But within the isms, some would think like that, some wouldn’t, but taken together they will end up putting the group constructs because the whole lacks the clarity of focus that Wenzel’s individualism pursues liberty with, confusing it with ‘good stuff’/public good abstracts.
Once you start giving stuff to ‘the group’, if the group is Hispanic Lesbians and even if the group is Families, the name of the game is now fighting to define membership and representation of the group. The leftwingers will say ‘homosexual spinsters are families too!’ The libertarian individualists will say ‘for the love of aquabudha, both of you cut it out already and let people be.’
I do think at a national level Wenzel is right without question.
At a more local level, meh. Too much arguing. Amish gotta be Amish, and Amish are statist bastards, there’s no seperation there. If people are to be free to be Amish, they must be free to be not-free.
But in my mind, at the federal level there is no doubt. Short of this type of methodological individualism and/or just not doing anything at all, there is no hope for us, it’s every faction for itself at the trough.
The more honest ones admit: the money is going somewhere, better me than them. Just looking for a piece however I can get it.
The rest will insist it’s different for them because they’re actually right.
Maybe ‘honest’ is the wrong word. I don’t think they’re all lying. Some, but most are probably sincere.
The more “self-aware” groups maybe.
Just to clarify (if anybody cared): I didn’t leave the thread in a snit, life intruded. Having reviewed it since I left, I don’t think I have anything to add that others haven’t already stated, and more succinctly than I can. Two last points:
First, entropy, apologies for saying you don’t give a shit. I regret that, as it was wrong and unfair.
Second, Ok, so there was no governmental regulation of marriages–sorta, kinda–before the 16th century–that is interesting, and I concede my ignorance of that. But I do have some grip on Catholic canon law on marriage, and the Church would enforce consanguinity restrictions before granting a Church marriage–no screwing the first cousin/niece, etc., unless you got a dispensation, and even then, watch out, because you could end up with a mutant freak like Charles II of Spain. Would the courts have to recognize relatives’ marriage contracts if they were within a certain degree of relationship? Or would there be a statute specifying which marital contracts would be void as to public policy–e.g., no incest or polygamy or similarly problematic stuff? I don’t see a way around it–either there would be a statute, or the common law voiding of certain contracts would kick in.
I mean, there’s going to have to be some governmental involvement by virtue of judicial scrutiny, and I don’t know that in the final analysis you’re really getting government out of the business. Maybe reducing its footprint, but not out entirely. And you’re still stuck with the family law system in some way or another. Again, maybe a reduced footprint, but maybe not.
Thanks for one of the most truly stimulating threads I’ve ever seen on the internet. A lot of food for thought here.
Dale, how long have you home-schooled your tots? I have friend who is/was homeschooling all ten of hers and they are great kids. She was teacher before she had a family and I think that helps.
Lots of people around here “home-school”, if you know what I mean, and then fob their kids off on the middle school when math and harder subjects catch them short.
My friend sent her sons to high school so they could play sports and her eldest daughterso she could do ROTC.
Leigh, it’s been five and a half years. The local public school of choice claimed my eldest child was best suited for two years of kindergarten, allegedly based on test results. We called BS on it, and she’s now ten and reading at a 9th grade level.
My wife is a former schoolteacher, so it helps. A. Lot. Friends of ours actually got their children enrolled in the local community college early in the high school years, and the oldest had his associates by the time he turned 18. The upper level math is a concern, but the CC is a way to handle that, as it is very friendly to the home-schooled.
Sports is another issue down the road, but we keep them active in local community and church programs.
F. A. Hayek’s Why I Am Not A Conservative, just to put another baseline on the record.
The thing to remember about the Austrian Hayek is that European liberals are fairly conservative by American standards. European conservative parties are Tory-Statist.
Hayek carefully distinguishes the variants.
Fair enough. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read it.
It’s a peculiar man who would have to, having lived under so many different political orders as he. But in the main, I think, he’s qualified.
Yeah. Vienna produced an exception crop of conservative/libertarian intellectuals. If Wilson had been smart, the Allies would have united Germany and Austria and kept the Hapsburgs around as constitutional monarchs.
The Prussians probably wouldn’t a have gone for it though.
I dunno if I have the history right, but for some barnacle-like reason, I associate Wilson with the prominence of the term “self-determination” (was it something to do with the Balkans?). Anyhow, he’d a been stuck on account of that if my sense of that association is correct, I reckon. Fucking democrats.