Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Falling back on consequentialism

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In a review of a book by Dan Moller, I write,

In appealing to our moral intuition against committing armed robbery, has Moller found a philosophical trump card that libertarians can play against their opponents? I am doubtful. In fact, in the game of intellectual bridge, I would suggest that moral intuition is the wrong suit for libertarians to bid.

I find the consequentialist case for libertarianism more solid than the moral intuitionist case. And in the review I point out that Moller has to fall back on consequentialist arguments.

FYI: an event to watch

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Jonathan Rauch, Yuval Levin, and I will be speaking at the AEI Thursday morning, December 12. The topic is “healing our political culture.”

Usually I am pretty modest about these things, but in this case I am going to guarantee that this event will be worth your attention. Make a note to watch it, or at least to check out the archive video.

For some background, you can read recent essays by me and by Jonathan. But the discussion will build from there.

More from the Cato Unbound symposium

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I write,

Unfortunately, we are seeing on campus a form of reductionist progressivism that actually does take the oppressor-oppressed axis as the sole basis for framing issues. The campus justice activists are not only subject to the psychology that inclines us away from Persuasion Mode and toward Demonization Mode. Their very ideology justifies Demonization of dead (and living) white males while treating the values of free speech and open inquiry as tools of oppression.

Jonathan Rauch writes,

Pace Kling, I don’t think “centralized curation of content” and content restrictions are most of what will happen as digital media grapple with antisocial behavior, though we’ll certainly see some of those (and have, and should). More important, and more successful, will be human-machine partnerships and platform redesigns which identify toxic behavior and content and help users avoid them.

There is more at both links. But again, I don’t think that bad actors and factually incorrect posts are the core problem. The core problem is the way otherwise good people behave on social media.

More agreement with me

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Donald Downs writes,

As for most major social problems, the causes of demonization are complex, defying perfect comprehension. I bring just one more cause to our attention, a factor that complicates the analysis: the rise of what social theorist Frank Furedi labeled “emotional correctness” in his book What’s Happened to the University? Furedi maintains that a governing purpose of higher education today is to protect the emotional comfort of students and others, regardless of how subjective and unreasonable the claim for comfort might be.

Nikki Usher writes,

In 1957, sociologist Robert Merton conducted a study of how mass media functions via interpersonal influence within a small town. He juxtaposed “locals” to “cosmopolitans”; “locals” were parochial and fundamentally self-interested to the exclusion of the nation and society around them, while cosmopolitans were “ecumenical,” seeing themselves as connected to the problems in society at large, looking outward

Note that this distinction seems to have been independently rediscovered by David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere, where he speaks of “somewheres” (Merton’s “locals”) and “anywheres (Merton’s “cosmopolitans:).

Usher goes on to write,

My sense is that we are stuck in this battle between cosmopolitanism and localism/parochialism because those who identify as the most cosmopolitan are often the most likely to be narrow-minded and judgmental.

Overall, this issue of Cato Unbound might strike you as boring, because there is so little disagreement with my original essay. Perhaps they should have recruited one of the commenters here, perhaps Handle, to write one of the responses essays!

A cynical view of elites

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Troy Camplin writes,

Politics is the battle between these two views of the elites: the view that external forces are harmful, and the view that internal forces are harmful. The left will tend to blame institutions (which are external creations to help people realize certain goals); the right will tend to blame culture (which is generated internally and affects people internally). Both believe regulations and restrictions will solve the world’s problems. What they do not realize is that the non-elites (bourgeois and proletarians) tend to consider the elites the cause of the world’s problems.

. . .Elites tend to treat everyone else like pawns in their political games, and political games are exclusively the realm of the elites. Voting is an opiate for the masses, as evidenced by the fact that most elected officials are re-elected, while the institutions they are a part of are among the most unpopular (at least, in the U.S.). All governments, though, exist by and for the elites, with the elites throwing a few bones to the thugs in order to ensure their continued rule (the thugs follow whoever is throwing them the most bones, and the elites know it). The rest of the population produce the wealth the elites need so they can play their political games and otherwise participate in the gift economy. The wisest elites are those who understand this and try to ensure the economy continues to produce more and more wealth for them to be able to seize (through taxes) and use. The unwise get tired of waiting for the goose to lay those golden eggs, and instead seize the bird and cut it open to get all the gold at once.

I recommend the entire essay

An essay that agrees with me

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Jonathan Rauch shares my concern with the state of political discourse. He also agrees with Yuval Levin. Rauch writes,

we will get more traction by thinking of them as problems of social incentives and system design. In other words, it’s the institutions, stupid.

Rauch suggests:

1. direct social action, meaning creating organizations specifically devoted to improved political discourse.
2. indirect social action, meaning boosting organizations in civil society, which will have the effect of binding people together across political lines.
3. re-wiring the social network. His ideas there did not inspire me. I will see what other essayists have to say about them.

His concluding paragraph:

I am not claiming that re-socialization strategies will (or will not) work. We’ll see. What I can say is that they are collectively barking up the right tree. After years in which conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all saw society more in terms of individuals and consumers than institutions and communities, social intermediaries are coming back into focus. Just noticing and thinking about them, instead of looking right through them, is a welcome change.

A conversation about political conversation

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At Cato Unbound. I contributed the lead essay.

New analyses of polarization keep appearing, and new signs of the severity our political fault lines keep emerging. As a result, I sense that the latest edition of The Three Languages manages to be both timely and out of date. This essay will sketch some of the book’s key points, and then I will offer my current thinking, particularly concerning cultural forces that I think are behind the surge in polarization, and what we might do to try to counter those forces.

Read the whole essay before commenting. Note that some distinguished folks will be contributing essays in response. You can check out the overview page over this week and next (I’ll probably post reminders).

Libertarians, the trolley problem, and listening to others

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Raymond McCrea Jones writes,

Graham explains that the libertarian cognitive style is cerebral rather than emotional. “Libertarians are far and away the most likely to say, ‘Yeah, push the guy off.’ They just see it as a math problem,” he tells me. “They have no squeamishness about having to kill the person.” It’s coldly calculating, but also, arguably, rigorously ethical. As Graham tells me this, I can’t help but think that efforts to unpack what separates red states from blue states haven’t been careful to differentiate between conservatives and libertarians. Venn diagrams of voters generally categorize voters as Republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives. But as is becoming increasingly apparent, the cool-headed libertarian in my classroom who’s willing to sacrifice his mother for the greater good doesn’t fit neatly into any of these circles.

But the point of the article is better represented by this:

NYU psychologist Carol Gilligan, who began the Radical Listening Project in 2017, says the essential step is “replacing judgment with curiosity,” or, as put by my student Gaby Romero, who has been trained in the diplomat Hal Saunders’ Sustained Dialogue protocol, “to acknowledge that everyone is there out of a genuine desire to learn and understand.” University of Michigan professor Donna Kaplowitz, who practices an approach known as Intergroup Dialogue, simply calls it “generous listening.”

He concludes,

Imagine if, instead of requiring a swim test for college students or gym for middle-schoolers, we required students to sit in a room with a diverse group of people and listen to the stories of their life. “If I wanted to prepare children to live as citizens in a democratic society,” Gilligan says, “nothing would be more valuable than to teach them to listen.”

On college administrators and schools of education

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Musa al-Gharbi argues that the progressive left has successfully conquered university administration and schools of education.

As Sam Abrams’ research has shown, college administrators hail predominantly from the arts, humanities and social sciences. Graduates of these fields often have a distressingly limited understanding of how, concretely, many social institutions operate – and how, specifically, these institutions might be leveraged to achieve particular ends. However, those who gravitate towards administration often do understand, or come to understand, how to ‘work the (higher ed) system.’ And one of the key things they have done with this institutional knowledge is expand the size and influence of the administrative class itself.

…Perhaps the most genius aspect this approach (targeting ed schools) is the indirectness. This strategy was implemented in a very deliberate, systematic, forward-thinking way by a constellation of activists, scholars and practitioners (who were very explicit about the political goals of their pedagogical approach!). Nonetheless, when their efforts began to come to fruition, it appeared as though it was a spontaneous, organic, student-driven movement. Young people reached (elite) universities, and increasingly the workplace (in particular industries), attempting to mold these institutions in accordance with the logics that have been inculcated into them since primary school — by teachers executing the curricula designed by these activists, practitioners and scholars. Yet rather than taking up their disagreement with the people who had designed said curricula, who had laid out these modes of thought and engagement, critics were instead forced to contend with the students themselves — by then, true believers. The optics of this were not great (for the critics, that is, who came off as reactionary, out of touch, overly-judgmental, etc. for their apparent denigration of the students and their views).

Some random notes of my own.

1. I suspect that a lot of the growth in college administration serves to provide an employment safety-valve for people earning degrees, especially Ph.D’s, that are not very marketable.

2. My high school experience definitely preceded the leftist take-over of schools of education. My freshman year, the principal brought in Up With People to perform for us. They struck me as an attempt to promote social conformity, so that we wouldn’t become hippies or Vietnam War resisters. I told those around me that this was a right-wing propaganda exercise. The experience stuck with me, primarily because when I voiced my suspicions a very attractive classmate sneered at me, “Arnold, you have no soul.”

3. I don’t think that those of us on the right should try to make an issue of the political orientation of college administrators or at schools of education. Instead, I think that we should push for intellectual rigor in college courses and in education research and policy. I would rather make my stand on the cause of intellectual rigor than on the cause of political balance.

4. My father was a college administrator in the 1970s, as Dean of Arts and Sciences and later Provost at Washington University. The environment was different in those days. Continue reading →