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Comment on the extent to which you agree that the services he touts are effective and liberty-promoting.
Could you do a post comparing and contrasting your three-axis model with Haidt’s five-or-six parts of mortality? (Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, etc.)
The main contrast is in terms of purpose. With the three-axis model, I do not propose to explain why people differ in their political views. I think of someone’s preferred axis as the easiest way to communicate with them about an issue. When you hear an issue described in terms of your preferred axis, it resonates with you. When you hear it described on someone else’s axis, it does not resonate with you so well.
Haidt’s moral foundations are supposed to explain political views. He describes them as six dials that are set to different levels. The idea is that if you measure each person’s moral dial settings, you can predict their political leanings. There is an implication that there is a causal relationship between the dial settings and political views.
I do not think of the causality as running from the three axes to political views. It might very well be the other way around–once you choose your political tribe, your preferred axis follows from that. I am agnostic about causality.
From a Handle comment on problems with contemporary libertarian thought.
A steady slouching towards progressivism. (e.g. The Niskanen Center). Of course it is hardly alone in his regard, and one may just as easily point to trends in mainstream conservatism or Christianity.
My remarks.
1. I believe that Robert Conquest’s second law says that any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
2. I think that progressives are more prone to using the threat of scorn or excommunication, and it is hard not to respond to that. As a thought experiment, I believe that if I were to say, “I think gay marriage is ok” in a room full of conservatives, they would not hold that against me. However, if I you were to say, “I think gay marriage is wrong” in a roomful of progressives, they would give me what-for and never let me forget it.
3. Handle also says that liberatiranism tends toward
An overoptimistic – to put it charitably – account of human nature, psychology, and the decision-making capacity of most adult human beings. Specifically, there are hard questions about the nature of utility or happiness and the origin of our wants that are often overlooked.
More specifically, I think that whether libertarians break left or right depends on their outlook on human nature. The libertarians I know who break right all seem to share with conservatives a concern with the more competitive and violent propensities in human nature. The libertarians I know who break left tend to see such tendencies only in politicians.
It has seemed to me that a vast double standard regarding what constitutes prejudice exists on American college campuses. There is hypersensitivity to prejudice against most minority groups but what might be called hyper-insensitivity to anti-Semitism.
The progressives own the sensitivity issue, which means that it is aligned with the oppressor-oppressed axis. Nowadays, Jews do not qualify as oppressed. End of story.
Passover is coming up in a few weeks. The Passover story is an oppressor-oppressed narrative with the Hebrews as the oppressed group that is redeemed from slavery. I believe that the power that this story holds for Jews is one of the factors accounting for the tendency of Jews to lean left. However, I see a lot of Jews my age experiencing cognitive dissonance between their left-leaning historical inclinations and the fact that nowadays the oppressor-oppressed axis is often invoked against Israel.
Note that Larry Summers has another reason for experiencing cognitive dissonance relative to left-wing college students and their oppressor-oppressed axis. Recall that he lost his Harvard Presidency over his alleged insensitivity to women.
Scott Alexander has an essay post on tribalism. Read the whole thing. An excerpt:
in order to talk about tribes coherently, we need to talk about rallying flags. And that involves admitting that a lot of rallying flags are based on ideologies (which are sometimes wrong), holy books (which are always wrong), nationality (which we can’t define), race (which is racist), and works of art (which some people inconveniently want to enjoy just as normal art without any connotations).
What I call three axes are three rallying flags. Progressives rally around oppressor-oppressed, conservatives rally around civilization-barbarism, and libertarians rally around freedom-coercion. It is important to recognize that the actual belief systems are much more complex than that.
The error at the heart of all libertarian thought is that the individual is the smallest and primary unit of society. The libertarian consistently frames social and moral imperatives in terms of individual needs and desires and freedoms. He posits that society is the sum total of individuals pursuing self-interest.
This is not true. The smallest unit of society is the relationship between two individuals. One, two, or a thousand individuals do not comprise a society until there are relationships connecting them to each other–agreements, customs, laws, values. The connecting relationship, not the individual, is the atom of human society. It is impossible to have a society of one man.
A commenter supplied this quote, with vague attribution. If you put the whole thing into Google, it will provide a couple of forum posts by “Pleasureman.”
I believe that there is a weakness in libertarian thought, but I am not sure that methodological individualism is the culprit. Consider an analogy. Chemists want to talk about atoms as being fundamental. But in the spirit of the quote above, one could argue that we do not have a substance until we have many atoms bound together. The relationships binding the atoms are what is really fundamental in chemistry. It is impossible to have a substance with just one atom.
I would say that it is useful for chemists to think in terms of atoms, and by the same token it is useful for social theorists to think in terms of individuals. But it is important for chemists to understand the various bonding mechanisms among atoms, and it is important for social theorists to understand the various bonding mechanisms among humans.
I think that what makes conservative social theory of the Burke/Tocqueville/Yuval-Levin sort distinctive is its emphasis on multiple modes of human interaction and bonding mechanisms, including families, organized religion, civic associations, and business enterprises. Libertarians tend to focus almost entirely on free trade as a mode of interaction, and progressives tend to focus almost entirely on the central government as a bonding mechanism.
The book will not be available for another month. My review is here. An excerpt:
His diagnosis blames both the left and the right for promulgating an untenable vision of an individualistic society under the umbrella of the central government. The result has been to demean and weaken mid-level social institutions, including local government, organized religion, and the charitable sector. He argues that such institutions are the best hope for addressing challenges that require collective action but for which the federal government is poorly equipped.
The comments on my Three Axes to Explain Terrorism post inspired what I am going to say here.
1. I believe that human population includes both B’s and C’s. B’s are inclined temperamentally or ideologically to use violence to control others. C’s are not so inclined, and they seek ways for people to interact peacefully.
2. If there were no B’s in the world, C’s could adopt a simple rule of never engaging in violence. However, such a rule when followed by C’s produces a very bad equilibrium if there are B’s in the world, because it leaves the B’s unchecked.
3. To check B’s, C’s must be willing to commit violence against B’s. This makes C’s a bit like B’s, but I do not believe that this implies total moral equivalence. As one commenter put it,
The distinguishing factor is intention. The civilized nation should be motivated towards living peacefully so long as that is a live option. It does not intend harm to non-combatants and does as much as it can to avoid civilian casualties – the barbarian groups murder non-combatants in gruesome ways for shock value.
4. One of the mechanisms that C’s will use is a state and its government. When C’s organize a state and its government, they create institutions that seek to constrain the government’s ability to use violence, so that it is only used to protect against B’s. These institutions are necessarily imperfect, but this does produce a more civilized (and libertarian) outcome than (2).
5. The apparatus of a state can be taken over by B’s. See the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. That is a major risk of (4).
6. In his comment, Handle writes,
progressive politicians and the leaders of majority Islamic countries are trying to convince [both Islamophobes and radical Islamists] that there is no link between Islam and political violence, and, at least tacitly, if we can all just get people on all sides to shut up and quit insisting there is such a link, then it will quickly cease to exist and we can reify the claim and bootstrap a decoupling into existence.
In other words, if you deny that Islam is connected to B’s, then that will be self-fulfilling. Conversely, if you insist that Islam is connected to B’s, then that will be self-fulfilling.
Unfortunately, I do not think it’s that simple. In the story about the Belgian prison, the WaPo reporter wrote
Proselytizing prisoners used exercise hours and small windows in their cells to swap news, copies of the Koran and small favors such as illicit cellphones. Gradually, they won over impressionable youths
[my emphasis]. If the prisoners had become C’s as a result, that would be fine. But instead they turned into worse B’s.
7. I do not believe that we can rely solely on the Koran to turn Muslims into C’s. I do not believe that we can rely solely on the Bible to turn Jews or Christians into C’s.
8. I think that C inclinations must be reinforced by a web of institutions, including families, the state, and civic associations of all kinds. My concern with Islam is that it privileges religion ahead of everything else, which reduces the ability of other institutions to play their civilizing role.
9. I have a similar concern about progressivism, in that it privileges the state ahead of everything else. As Yuval Levin points out in his forthcoming book, The Fractured Republic, progressives seem to extol the individual and the state, while opposing churches, corporations, and every other intermediate institution.
The front page of today’s WaPo has me thinking about this.
First, there is the story of the massacre of Christians on Easter in Pakistan.Along the libertarian freedom-vs.-coercion axis, the preferred explanation is blowback. That is intervention by western governments in foreign countries produces terrorism. However, it is difficult to see how this story applies here.
Next, there is a story of how terrorists met in prison in Belgium. You can see that the reporter has an urge to tell an oppressor-vs.-oppressed story of how prisoners from the oppressed class of Muslims turned into terrorists. But if you read all the way through, you see that the attempt does not really work. Still, seeing the headline, many progressives will jump to the conclusion that better treatment of prisoners is the solution to terrorism.
For me, the best explanation of terrorism lies along the conservative civilization-vs-barbarism axis. And I think that President Obama’s steadfast refusal to see Islamic terrorism along those lines is something that many Americans find frustrating and demoralizing.
government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
See, for example, the housing finance collapse in 2008.