Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Trying To Talk Politics With Pre-Political Libertarians

It's never easy to talk about politics in fundamental terms since we are so apt to mistake custom for nature, rites for rights, contingencies for givens, but with libertarians of especially the anarcho-capitalist sort this difficulty becomes next to impossible since theirs is an essentially pre-political outlook that has come to be treated as a political one and in many respects even, disastrously and flabbergastingly enough, as political orthodoxy.

It is conventional for libertarians to identify the state with violence and to treat advocacy of government reform, even reform to address violence and abuse, as always only an advocacy of violence. It is crucial from the beginning to recognize that the mighty always may abuse and prey upon the less mighty or less lucky, and also that the beneficiaries of abuses are ever prone to rationalize might as right. But all of this inheres in the sociality of the human condition. It is not brought into existence by the state, but tyrannical governance can amplify these ills just as democratic governance can ameliorate them.

What libertarians fancy as a desirable demolition of government violence (and so, too, those Republicans who advocate the endless shrinking of government without indicating its proper function, who advocate deregulation without end, who advocate "starving the beast" through the elimination of ever more tax revenues) would neither disincline the mighty from violence nor disinvent the implements through which they engage in violence. Defensive and predatory associations would persist in their bloodymindedness, hierarchical fiefdoms presided over by brutal or charismatic leaders would persist in their misconduct all the while retro-actively rationalizing it all to themselves and to others whenever the occasion permits, mighty powers and organizations would rise and fall in a clash of muscular violence in their interminable gory pageant. It is not democracy that creates this state of affairs of course but seeks to respond to its waste and violence by creating alternative mechanisms for the comparatively nonviolent succession through regular elections of social leadership across many co-operating jurisdictional layers, just as courts create comparatively nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes but in so doing hardly bring disputation as such into existence.

It's true of course that state institutions -- legislative, judicial, administrative -- may rely in extremity on the violent potential of warden or police or army to abide in their legitimate work in the face of disruption or threat. Nevertheless, to treat the presence or absence of legitimate courts to which citizens may make equitable recourse with a reasonable expectation of justice as no different in respect to violence, or to treat the presence or absence of periodic elections of citizens to posts to which majorities are eligible to hold office by citizens majorities of whom are eligible to vote as no different in respect to violence is to treat with indifference differences that make all the difference in the world.

The issues extend deeper and wider than you might think. Public goods that are described as non-excludable (which roughly means they are accessible to all) and also non-rival (which roughly means they are not immediately consumed in use) like public utility infrastructure or a healthy, educated citizenry, and also common goods that are described as non-excludable but rival, like a stressed atmosphere or aquifer, can only be profitably privatized through the externalization of social costs in what amounts to a second order register of violence or abuse rendered visible only through the emergence of civic institutions, a register of violence and abuse that is equitably adjudicable only through their socialization. Of course, there's no reason necessarily to treat the overwhelming abundance of excludable goods as anything but private, whether as commodities for sale or products freely offered under other arrangements. But what matters here is that the private ownership of commodities will depend on the maintenance of a context of public and common goods that are not commodities and cannot properly be privatized at all, and that the socialization and public administration of these goods is still a matter of the creation of alternatives to violence and injustice (even if the connection are less intuitive, arising as they do in the context of complex civic arrangements).

So, too, I will add, do the provision of basic healthcare, education, reliable information, income, equal access to law and opportunity function to ensure that when one consents to the demands, risks, costs, terms of private enterprise, that the scene of that consent is actually informed and non-duressed, and therefore legitimate. In the absence of such guarantees (and they have never been more than partially fulfilled hitherto in history), and precisely to the extent that they are lacking, "consent" is all too prone as we well know to be an empty ritual concealing wage slavery and military conscription via poverty and precarity of a kind continuous with forms of human trafficking we pretend to be long behind us. Again, what matters here is that those who bemoan as a kind of "enslavement" the provision of welfare via a taxation that curtails their extravagance fail to grasp that this provision is indispensable to the scene of consent on which we all depend else we risk enslavement ourselves.

In other words, the provision of the sorts of public and common goods that are often denigrated as "positive" supplemental artificial extractive liberty as distinguished from "negative" neutral natural spontaneous liberty actually are continuous with one another, together delineating what is never more than a contingent artificial ritual production of a space of liberty all too easy to treat as spontaneous but all of which is a collective and historical accomplishment depending first of all on good government.

So long as many on the left glibly identify property as theft and taxes as the price of civilization, and so long as many on the right glibly identify taxes as theft and pretend the maintenance of public goods could be left to charitable generosity it will be difficult to be clear about the crucial differences that separate the categories of prices, taxes, charities, their different functions and what they differently depend on, and political discourse will remain profoundly confused and incommensurable by the pet "clarifying" analogies deployed on all sides.

Prices tend to arise in the give and take of private enterprise enabled through the public maintenance of international treaties, trade regulations, reliable banking and insurance institutions, commercial norms, material and ritual networks of transportation, information, and communication; -- taxes tend instead to reflect the arbitrary distribution of benefit from this public infrastructure in order to maintain equitable private recourse to it; -- while voluntarisms offer pleasures that are not reducible to the satisfactions conferred by the consumption of commodities available for sale at a price nor accomplished in commodity exchange but through signals of community belonging.

None of this is easy to telescope into a sentence or two, and there's plenty of reasonable dispute around the edges and on matters of detail. But "libertarian" formulations often turn on elisions or confusions on these matters in particular.

Now, to provide nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes among a diversity of stakeholders (via courts, elections, the maintenance of a scene of informed nonduressed consent) or an equitable reconciliation of the diverse aspirations of those stakeholders (via representative governance and the social administration of public and common goods) demands the investment of institutions that administer justice and welfare with clear jurisdictional authorities to which all can make equitable recourse in their diversity.

While this enables people to circumvent much strife and abuse, it also creates opportunities for strife and abuse and corruption at the level of the governance itself, in response to which political theorists and policy makers have experimented with a number of institutional arrangements. Among these are the horizontal separation of powers, meant to redirect tendencies to corruption inhering in government's necessary monopoly recourse to force instead into the competitive internal policing of corruption and abuse of force; vertical federalism, meant to facilitate the solution of shared problems at the most local level adequate to their demands; regular periodic election of representatives and officials by the people over whom they have jurisdiction, trial by jury, yoking the revenue on which governance depends to representation, all meant to ensure government remains accountable to the people in whose name it governs; and the administration of oaths connecting public office to the defense of a written Constitution circumscribing its powers and to the support of an open-ended bill of delineated human rights.

To respect these arrangements is to support good government not to abhor government as such. Liberty, after all, is a collective accomplishment enabled through the support of good government, and those who venerate liberty should surely be moved by that veneration not to smash the state, but to democratize it.

I find too many libertarians prone to declare whatever I say, however genial or persuasive in tone, to be essentially hateful, "contaminated" by its defense of a democratic governance they reduce to violence, willy-nilly, indifferent to the different forms government can assume, and all the while declaring market exchanges non-coercive by fiat whatever the real terms of inequity that may articulate them. Again in sublime indifference to realities on the ground, too often they refuse to address negative real-world impacts of arguments and policies by Republicans and conservatives that were conspicuously inspired by libertarians or often even when they are proposed by self-identified libertarians, declaring bad outcomes always the result of inadequate zeal, declaring their advocates always to be impure or phony libertarians, and yet they continue freely to use these arguments and this label even when their usage in the world includes and depends on wider applications they claim to refuse.

Politics is not engineering, it is not theology, it is not morals: it has a real, distinct content, it corresponds to real, unique experiences, and it has real problems and propositions proper only to itself. To reduce politics to the terms of another domain is to distort it, often beyond recognition, and to forget its content, experiences, problems and propositions may be to lose them, one fears beyond reclamation.

From all this, I can think of at least three key insights indispensable to the grasp of the political and to the achievement of political freedom, each of which can now be captured in a slogan, and all of which libertarianism renders unintelligible and hence impossible: First, the State Only Amplifies or Ameliorates the Violence that Precedes It. Second, Legitimate Consent Requires Public Investment in a Scene that Is Equitable and Informed. Third, Liberty Is A Collaborative Accomplishment that Depends on Democratic Government.

Libertarianism is the eclipse of the political, not a variation on the political. Privatization is a privation of the public, not an alternate provision of it. To declare as non-coercive by definition all market transactions the terms of which are beholden to incumbent elites is not to advocate non-violence, but to endorse an openness to total violence. When we treat life not as lived but as a commodity available at the price of a salary to be exchanged for the satisfaction of consuming still more commodities, we are dispossessed by our possessions, distracted by the mirage of satisfaction from the freedom of emancipation.

4 comments:

jimf said...

> It's never easy to talk about politics. . .
> but with libertarians. . . next to impossible
> since theirs is an essentially pre-political
> outlook that has come to be treated. . .even,
> disastrously and flabbergastingly enough,
> as political orthodoxy.

In Charlie Stross's recent blog post "Three arguments against the singularity"
( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html )
the comment thread, not too surprisingly, threatened to get hijacked by a debate on the legitimacy of libertarianism as a viable political project. Stross himself kind of invited it by referring in his first paragraph to "the uploading of the libertarians and the rapture of the nerds". But his frustration was manifest in his comment "I am tired of arguing with libertarians. Been doing it for decades; there's always another one just round the corner. Makes me wish Leninism was still in vogue, just so I had some variety in my diet." After a few back-and-forths, he finally had to end the discussion (on libertarianism) by administrative fiat.

;->

> What libertarians fancy as a desirable
> demolition of government violence. . .
> would neither disincline the mighty from
> violence nor disinvent the implements
> through which they engage in violence.
> Defensive and predatory associations would
> persist. . .
>
> To declare as non-coercive by definition
> all market transactions the terms of which
> are beholden to incumbent elites is not
> to advocate non-violence, but to endorse
> an openness to total violence.

Or, as Stross put it in that comment thread,

> - What libertarians think is that force
> - should only be used. . . to protect people's
> - rights, whether that's by the state or by
> - individuals. . .
>
> How charmingly naive!
>
> Tell me how you propose to use force to stop
> a corporation from imposing binding arbitration
> in an unfavourable venue upon you in a click-through
> license that you have to agree to in order to use
> their product ... which in turn you have to install
> and use in order to get at the funds you deposited
> in your bank account (because they're a bank)?
>
> Tell me how you propose to use force to prevent
> corporate lobbyists from seeking rent via tax
> concessions granted by legislative fiat?
>
> Tell me how --
>
> Ah, forget it.
>
> Bluntly: your assumption that force is the backstop
> for equitable treatment breaks when it is realized
> that we live in a complex society and some of the
> other actors within that society have much deeper
> pockets and far more resources than any normal
> individual.

Of course, some of the folks who call themselves libertarians are not naive at all, they're perfectly well aware of all this, and agitate in this direction because they themselves expect to acquire (or maintain) "much deeper pockets and far more resources than any normal individual", not by luck, but because **they're just better than you are**, and the people who don't make it to the top can go to hell. Surely the billionaires who call themselves libertarians are in this category. (Well, maybe not, the psychologist in my head just whispered -- maybe they're just rationalizing their awesome winner-take-all luck as a means, quite possibly subconscious, of keeping guilt at bay. It's easier if you can pretend that your disproportionate wealth is perfectly mirrored by your disproportionate superiority. Bless me, Ayn Rand, for I have sinned. . .)

jimf said...

> It's been observed. . .

At least on Usenet. E.g.,

From: Ulrika O'Brien
Subject: Fewmet du jour
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Date: 2002-01-23

I wonder if there's a correlation between a high score on the Asperger's test and Libertarian tendencies. Which is to say I wonder if discomfort with social discourse and non-enjoyment of civic life might not predispose one to like a political slant that is, pretty fundamentally, antisocial in its approach. Why not deny the existence and importance of the communal, if the communal makes you uncomfortable? In particular, I see both tendencies in my reverend parents. And I was wholly unsurprised to find that Mark deprecates the importance of the public aspects of architecture, and the value of beauty in buildings and cities, in favor of purely anti-social cocooning values in buildings. That which is held in common may be unpleasant, because it is unimportant and undesirable anyway.

From: Ulrika O'Brien
Subject: Re: Fewmet du jour
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Date: 2002-01-27

> *What* anti-social aspects of libertarianism?

The tendency to attract primarily social maladapts, for one. The central conception of liberty as a freedom from expectations of and obligations to other people, except for those spelled out in explicit contract (and that strikes me as a very Aspergian trope right there -- the insistence that obligations don't exist except when they are made verbally explicit and agreed to explicitly seems very much like a coping mechanism ideally suited for folks who do not otherwise easily read social signals) and the not unrelated tendency to pretend away any social evils that market forces do not naturally rectify by various species of victim-blaming.

> The ones made up by our enemies?

Enemies like me, perhaps, a libertarian of 25 years standing? "Making up" these aspects by observation of fellow libertarians? Your observations may differ, but I think it doesn't speak well of libertarians that you are assuming that this sort of criticism must necessarily be external and invented. Then again, self-criticism, or rather the lack of it, is another of my disappointments with the run-of-the-month strain of libertarian thinking.

> It's precisely because I care about other people that I'm a
> libertarian.

Caring about other people doesn't, per se, address the issue of being social or anti-social, however. It's a non-sequitur. It's perfectly possible to be a gregarious misanthrope. I sometimes suspect that I am one, myself, though it's hard to say how much of that is naturally misanthropic tendencies and how much is a social fabric that promotes alienation and misanthropy.

> I could probably thrive under almost any political
> system except for the very worst.

Again, I'm not sure that speaks to the issue I'm raising. Your being able to thrive under any system doesn't really say anything about whether the structure and approach and princilples of libertarianism are more attractive to a certain socially handicapped personality type than they are to people in the more normal ranges of socialization. I'm not suggesting that all libertarians have Aspergers, or that all persons with Apergers will end up as libertarians, but merely that the limited rule set, explicit contracts only, no-tacit-social-contract, liberty-means-people-leaving-me-the-fuck-alone-to-do-what-I-want belief set that comes with libertarianism seems likely to be particularly appealing to those with Aspergers tendencies already in place.

Dale Carrico said...

I wonder if there's a correlation between a high score on the Asperger's test and Libertarian tendencies. Which is to say I wonder if discomfort with social discourse and non-enjoyment of civic life might not predispose one to like a political slant that is, pretty fundamentally, antisocial in its approach. Why not deny the existence and importance of the communal, if the communal makes you uncomfortable?

This aspergers business comes up occasionally but regularly in discussions of market-libertarianism among the frustrated and perplexed, I have noticed. There is even a group of otherwise rather sensible economists who refuse the reductive acquisitive-selfish-maximizing assumptions of their discipline and who, very unfortunately in my view, describe their efforts at a more real world political economy as a post-autistic economics for example).

I for one am always struck by how loose and insinuative the talk really gets when the "connection" is elaborated. Also, it tends to make all sorts of generalizations about how neuro-atypical folks really feel or what they believe or how they act, that don't really stand up to actual scrutiny, and that just seem like the usual stereotypes when all is said and done.

It seems to me that market-libertarian/neoliberal assumptions are enormously simplifying ones. Ayn Rand once claimed that there are no rational conflicts among people's ends, possibly the most flabbergasting bit of denial outside of her belief that "A is A" is a useful insight and that smoking cigarettes has nothing to do with lung cancer). Such simplicity, though mostly falsifying when we are addressing political questions, is intensely compelling to many folks, especially but not only folks who aren't the brightest bulbs, especially the ones who like to win polemical arguments rather than make nuanced policies in fraught finite diverse-stakeholder contexts. Also, I daresay that these facile formulations can be very reassuring even rationalizing especially to the beneficiaries of exploitation and incumbency who, after all, are usually casting about for such rationalization.

At the risk of offering up my own loose anecdotal sort of talk, I will also say that I discern in many libertarians I have sparred with both online and face to face a quality of belligerent overcompensation in many of their assertions: a reliance on lots of assertive reductions and stipulations to compensate for empirical deficiency or lack of nuance or lack of a leg to stand on argumentatively; -- lots of aggressive circumvention of questions about anti-social consequences that always hover around the edges; -- lots of defensiveness about their own disproportionate benefit from the ideology they promote at the expense of others, and so on.

We Americans are pampered by ourr geopolitical situation and natural resources and position in history and even now remain comparatively insulated from the consequences of our bad, wasteful, exploitative, imperialist conduct, even if we are dimly aware of those consequences to others -- and I don't think it is really that hard to fathom how such people would tend to hold lazy, selfish, irresponsible, simple-minded, self-congratulatory political and economic views.

My own expectation is that it will be an emerging awareness of planetary problems and an intensifying immersion in planetary networks that will circumvent these structural inducements to libertopian rationalizations. I worry only about the pace at which this is happening in light of the urgent catastrophic literally genocidal/suicidal problems our aggressive stupidity enables.

jimf said...

This is a resubmission of a comment that apparently got swallowed yesterday morning, though a follow-up comment I made alluding to the vanished one (beginning "It's been observed. . .") made it through. The swallowed comment was actually a response to Dale's comment at the end of the recently-reactivated comment thread on an old post,

"Dispatches from Libertopia: An Anthology of Wingnut Chestnuts and Democratizing Remedies"
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/02/dispatches-from-libertopia-anthology-of.html

in which Dale remarked that there's no necessity to appeal to the science fiction literature for examples of libertarian characteristics (in this case, obsessive loyalty to explicit contracts). Almost immediately, I chanced on a recent (if trivial) example from the Web, from Dale's own blogroll, which I thought I'd mention:

A little while ago, the following post appeared on P. Z. Myers' blog "Pharyngula" (in the category "weirdness"):

"I guess I'll never get a retail job at Harrods"
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/

It was a gloss on a story that appeared in Salon

"Should a woman be forced to wear makeup?"
http://www.salon.com/life/fashion/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/07/06/harrods_retail_dress_code_makeup

about a retail saleswoman who had worked at the British department store for five years, commendably well, until she fell afoul of a rather draconian and burdensome (but apparently intermittently enforced, at least until last August) dress code spelling out in excruciating detail the makeup requirements for female employees.

OK, so one commenter on the Pharyngula thread repeatedly and annoyingly, if perfectly logically and articulately, insisted (until he was finally banned as a troll by Myers himself) that the woman had voluntarily contracted herself to the dress code by accepting the job in the first place, and had no cause to complain. Of course, in the real world, contracts may be binding or not (and some **should** not be) depending on the changing consensus of public opinion and the law courts regarding what is seen as fair. But this commenter could not acknowledge (or perhaps couldn't see) that point. Another commenter somewhat rudely labelled this fellow as a "liberturd", a term which the other commenter claimed not to be able to guess the meaning of (and which he asked for clarification on, several times). The whole exchange had a quality which strongly suggested, at least to me, an autistic-spectrum obliviousness to social context on the part of the finally-banned commenter (who also apparently insisted in later emails to the blog owner, which Myers actually posted, that he thought he had been banned because he was **gay**, a subject which had not arisen at all in the comment thread).

It's been observed many times now that libertarians often show the marks of autistic-spectrum cognition, particularly in their insistence that morality consists entirely in the adherence to formally-specified rules.