Author: Lee M.

I should also note as an addendum to the post below, that Borders makes a move in his article that I’ve seen a lot of libertarians make, irrespective of their views on foreign policy. Oftentimes it is held (or implied) that since rights must be protected by concrete social and political institutions, rights are nothing but the constructs of social and political institutions. The first claim is true – there will be no rights protection without institutions to protect them, such as the rule of law, fair and impartial courts, due process, etc. But it by no means follows that rights don’t exist apart from those institutional protections.

Tech Central Station has an article this morning by a certain Max Borders on whether it is possible to be a libertarian on domestic issues and a “neo-conservative” (his term) on foreign policy. In short: can a libertarian be a hawk? Borders answers in the affirmative:

The libertarian hawk takes her cues from Hobbes, not Locke, as the spaces mostly untouched by globalization are, in her view, like a state-of-nature. She sees threats that organize themselves in the shadows beyond civilization; operating, no less, in an age of deadly weapons proliferation. She fears the world’s great, but nimble powers coalescing into a slothful and ineffectual global body — where the toughest decisions of life and limb must be made in committee. She understands that freedom does not drop like manna from heaven, but is earned drop-for-drop and coin-for-coin by the sacrifices of blood and treasure.

In other words, since great swaths of the world do not recognize Western ideas about the rule of law and individual rights, they provide fertile grounds for threats to the civilized world to metastasize. This has a certain plausibility; since there is no overarching authority under which the entire world stands, disputes will inevitably be resolved in a fashion much more rough-and-ready than what we would expect in a court of law.

However, Borders goes badly astray in the next two paragraphs:

And this is the crux of the libertarian hawk’s position: “rights” as such, are not some Cartesian substance that animates the body in the manner of a soul. Rights are a human construct, just like money. The more we believe in them, the better they work. But there are situations in which the currency becomes, uh, devalued. Better said: there are limits to those on whom we can ascribe rights. (emphasis mine)

We get rights by virtue of some sort of social contract, not from our Creator. In this way, social contract theory splits the difference in many respects between libertarianism and conservatism. The social contract is an idea that people would rationally choose certain constraints on their behavior, constraints which culminate in certain reciprocal rules under which to live. I won’t harm you if you won’t harm me. We benefit through cooperation. And so forth. Those who would choose the rules enjoy the full benefits they confer.

It’s hard to see this as anything but a license to commit virtually any crime we like against those who fall outside of our “social contract.” Those who haven’t chosen to live under our rules can’t expect to be ascribed rights. What is left unsaid, but would be interesting to know, is exactly who falls outside our sphere of moral concern according to this theory? Terrorists? Foreign heads of state? Civilians in states that sponsor terrorism or pursue weapons of mass destruction? All those who exist “in the shadows beyond civilization”? Does this theory recognize any limits on what we can do to them?

What’s not hard to see is how such a theory could be used to deny rights to non-white races, mental “defectives,” and any other inconvenient persons who get in the way of our goals. Why assume that only foreigners will be presumed to lie outside the bounds of the social contract? Who decides who’s “in” and who’s “out”?

Borders doesn’t even address one of the chief libertarian arguments against foreign intervention, namely that it will inevitably result in the increased power, prestige, and influence of the State. Libertarian hawks want an all-powerful State that can preemptively crush its enemies abroad but will leave us in peace and freedom at home. The idea that foreign policy and domestic liberty can exist in hermetically sealed compartments seems willfully naïve given historical precedent.

Jim Henley offers a justification (of sorts!) for minimal government in response to anarchist critiques:

As a minarchist/constitutionalist, I’ll cop to inconsistency of principle. But while I agree with the anarcho-capitalists that All governments are gangs, I don’t think governments are the only gangs. It’s an observed fact that, wherever and whenever you go, armed groups will gather to dispossess people of the fruits of their labor, because it’s easier than working, or at least more fun.

More here.

(For earlier installments see here, here, and here.)

In addition to being a revelation of God’s love and a sacrifice that effects reconciliation between humanity and God, Christians have always seen the Atonement as the act whereby God redeems us from the powers of sin and evil. In ancient times, redemption meant literally to purchase someone’s freedom. According to Christianity, we are enslaved to the powers of sin and death, and on the cross God “purchases” our liberation.

This is perhaps the point at which Christianity departs most sharply from the view of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thought sees human beings as fundamentally rational and capable of being good on their own. At most the life of Jesus may provide a kind of supreme moral example, but this is only an accidental, not essential, condition for spurring us on to virtue.

Christianity, by contrast, sees humanity as deeply enmeshed in sins, both personal and corporate, sins from which we cannot free ourselves. Whatever else we might mean by the “principalities and powers,” the phrase at least refers to social, political, and economic systems of violence and exploitation in which we are all deeply implicated. We often benefit from unjust systems, and the structures of those systems often make it nearly impossible for us to avoid evil. For instance, a CEO may find it nearly irresistable to exploit third-world workers, not from personal greed, but because if he doesn’t take advantage of such an opportunity, his competitors will.

And within each of us, we find a nearly irresistible pull toward sin – toward taking the easy path, the path of self rather than self-giving. St. Paul himself was no stranger to this struggle:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:15-20)

Sin here is not just making the wrong decision, but something like a sickness, an alien power that infects us and creates a fundamental orientation whereby the self is “curved in on itself” in Luther’s fine phrase. In order to be good, we need a fundamental re-orientation of the self, something that’s outside of our power to secure.

Added to this is the fact that humanity and creation as a whole suffer from decay and ultimately death. Christian tradition has always seen a connection between sin and death, even though our modern ways of thinking treat death as completely “natural.” Death may be “natural,” but it is not part of God’s original intention for his creation.

The Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection are the means by which God enters human history and disables the powers of sin and death, liberating us for lives of genuine freedom, which is orientation of the self toward God.

How is this accomplished? First of all, Jesus lives a perfect life of self-giving under the conditions of sin. The “powers” are unable to defeat his intention to live in perfect obedience to the Father’s will, even unto death. Rather than lashing back and feeding the cycle of violence, Jesus takes the world’s violence onto himself, ultimately defeating the powers on the cross. The cross is a victory precisely because the powers were not able to coerce Jesus into sinning.

The Resurrection is the vindication of Jesus’ life and the sign that the period of the powers’ dominion over human life is at an end. It is also, most dramatically, the defeat of death and the demonstration that God’s love is more powerful than the forces of decay and dissolution.

Jesus’ Resurrection inaugurates a new age; his perfect self-offering elicits the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which becomes the agent that empowers the new community formed around him to live a life of resistance to the powers of sin and death. The Church becomes the first fruits and sign of the redeemed creation where sin and death no longer hold sway. The consummation of this redemption takes place only at the second coming, but in the “age between the ages” we can be taken up, if only partially, into the life of the Trinity, which is one of eternal blessedness and mutual self-giving love.

Yes, localized direct democracy is majoritarian, but the citizen unhappy with a law may appeal to her neighbors, who are often kin or lifelong friends. At the national level, however, she is just a single vote in a mass of anonymous millions—not even a brick in the wall. A Vermonter who dislikes his town’s junk-car ordinance can remonstrate with his landsmen; a Vermonter who dislikes “No Child Left Behind” or the Iraq War can shut up or get drunk, but he can’t get within a Free Speech Zone of George W. Bush.



More here.

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man. — Johnny Cash

From the Washington Post:

If Gore’s America (and presumably John Kerry’s) is reproducing at a slower pace than Bush’s America, what does this imply for the future? Well, as the comedian Dick Cavett remarked, “If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.” When secular-minded Americans decide to have few if any children, they unwittingly give a strong evolutionary advantage to the other side of the culture divide. Sure, some children who grow up in fundamentalist families will become secularists, and vice versa. But most people, particularly if they have children, wind up with pretty much the same religious and political orientations as their parents. If “Metros” don’t start having more children, America’s future is “Retro.”

(via Godspy)

Lynne Stewart is the attorney for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (convicted of instigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) who has been indicted for illegally passing information from her client to outside terrorist groups. I have no idea if this woman broke the law, but if this interview with a far-left journal is any indication, she’s not going out of her way to win sympathy from the public:

SD: It’s a little frightening that left-wing political prisoners are conflated in the government’s eyes with right-wing Moslem fundamentalists.

LS: I don’t think it’s quite fair to say right-wing, because they are basically forces of national liberation. And I think that we, as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination, and allow people who are under the heel of a corrupt and terrifying Egypt—where thousands of people are in prison, and torture and executions are, according to Amnesty International and Middle East Watch, commonplace—to do what they need to do to throw off that oppression. To denigrate them as right-wing, I don’t think is proper. My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries, such as occurs in Iran, to liberate.

Islamists: liberals in a hurry!

And then there’s this:

SD: Let’s say you were part of a government that you actually trusted and supported, and your country held political prisoners. At what point would you think monitoring and controlling these people was acceptable?

LS: I’m such a strange amalgam of old-line things and new-line things. I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution. The CIA pays a thousand people and cuts them loose, and they will undermine any revolution in the name of freedom of speech.

Remember kids: Mao and Stalin – OK; George Bush and John Ashcroft – Evil!

(link via Hit and Run)

I’ve written before about the tensions between libertarians and conservatives. As a recovering libertarian these ideological differences still interest me a great deal. It seems to me that another way of shedding light on this tension might be by considering our evolving understanding of community.

Conservatives are, in essence, defenders of community. Preserving the tribe and its ways is perhaps the fundamental conservative impulse – the preference for the familiar over the unknown, to use Oakeshott’s phrase. Now, in the early American republic, most people’s primary allegiance was to their local community – the village, the town, or perhaps the state. The idea of a “national community” probably wouldn’t have made sense to most people. The Union was precisely that – a union of discrete communities.

The first major blow to this idea of community as fundamentally local was the victory of the principle of the Union over that of states’ rights that resulted from the Civil War. Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson reinforced the idea that the nation itself was the primary community to which citizens owed allegiance. Attachment to the nation threatened to replace attachment to the local community as the chief civic virtue.* Nationalism and progressivism went hand in hand.

What emerged as “conservatism” in 30s and 40s was in large part mounted as a defense of the prerogatives of local communities against the encroachment of the national State. This is also what allowed for a united front with early libertarians (or “individualists,” “classical liberals” etc.). The individualists were concerned, logically enough, with defending the rights of the individual, while the conservatives wanted to conserve local, organic communities. But they were united in seeing the federal government as the major threat to both. This is what accounted for the presence of both extreme libertarians and Southern agrarians in the Old Right coalition.

However, eventually the idea of a national community has come to all but obliterate the preference for localism. This was probably due in large part to World War II and the Cold War – crises that required the nation to pull together with a shared sense of purpose and identity. Few people now think of themselves as Kentuckians or Pennsylvanians first and Americans second.

But as the locus of communal allegiance shifted to the nation, it was perhaps inevitable that the focus of conservatism would shift as well. The Cold War was about defending the nation from threats both internal and external. And the instrument of that defense would, inevitably, be the national government. William F. Buckley saw this as early as 1952 when he wrote of the necessity for creating a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” to combat the Soviet menace.

This understandably made libertarians nervous since their whole agenda consisted of shrinking the federal government. They never abandoned their bedrock principle of defending the rights of the individual. What difference did it make if Big Brother spoke with an American or Russian accent?

As late as the 80s Ronald Reagan talked about a “new federalism” that would return autonomy to local communities and neighborhoods, but at the same time he was a staunch nationalist, perhaps not seeing the tension. In any event, modern conservatism as represented by George W. Bush’s Republican Party and the mainstream conservative press is unabashedly nationalistic. The national community is their chief concern; and defending the national community will require more, not less, activity by the federal government. David Brooks contends that the battle for small government has been lost and should be given up by the GOP in favor of a progressive nationalism in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt.

If this trend continues, libertarians will have less and less in common with their erstwhile conservative brethren, since libertarians regard the growth of the federal government as a threat to individual rights and bad per se. September 11th and its aftermath seemed to have accelerated this trend as a new wave of nationalism has energized what can only be called big-government conservatism.

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*For a critical account of this process see Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age.

From the Acton Institute:

The principle of subsidiarity, which teaches that a community of a higher order should not interfere in the activities of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, is a first principle in genuine Catholic social teaching. It requires each of us to be responsible for those who are suffering in our midst. Families, friends, associates, churches, local charitable organizations—these should be the first to respond to the needs of their brothers and sisters. Government should only be directly involved as the organization of last resort and should implement policies designed to support rather than replace intermediary groups. In this way, people are induced to serve one another, as Christ commanded.

While this sounds fine in theory, how does it play out in real life? Pope John Paul II presents an example in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. In discussing the social problem of unemployment, the Pope outlines the roles of the players in solving it. Government should be involved, he says, both directly and indirectly. Its direct activities include defending the weakest, limiting the autonomy granted to determine working conditions, and ensuring that a minimum of support exists for those who are unemployed. Indirectly, government should create an environment conducive to the free exercise of economic activity. Entrepreneurs then have the opportunity to create and operate businesses, leading to abundant employment and myriad sources of wealth. In this way, government and private actors both have their roles to play and neither seeks to do that which the other can do more effectively.

Subsidiarity respects the proper roles of all the players. It allows government to have a role, as the final source of assistance, and as implementer of policies encouraging to the practice of subsidiarity, while, at the same time, being respectful of human freedom. It allows businesses and entrepreneurs to use their unique talents and abilities to serve the common good by, among other goals, fulfilling the responsibility to make a profit justly. It takes into account the insights offered by economics, as well as Catholic theology, and it allows everyone to take the lead in caring for those in need, instead of simply allowing a government agency to do so.



(via Mark Shea)