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As I began to discuss in the third installment in my series on “Political Fundamentalism”, “Liberty Idolatry,” the notion of individual liberty divorced from recognition of social interdependence just makes no sense. We are all aware of the most dramatic limitations on individual liberty in service to mutual responsibility: Laws against violence and predation. We are not free to act in ways which hurt others for our own benefit. Everyone understands, implicitly, that that is the limiting factor in defining individual liberty: One’s freedom ends where another’s rights begin.
We each have the right not to be assaulted, robbed, defrauded, or otherwise victimized, though there can certainly be legitimate debate over how far the law should reach to protect each from the victimization of others (few, for instance, would recommend criminalizing being a dishonest and self-serving “friend,” and the gray area between that which obviously should be legally prohibited and that which obviously should not be is bound to be contested terrain).
But, while most would agree that poisoning someone else is not an ambiguous instance of when my liberty to poison ends at the point where your right not to be poisoned begins, many can’t even contemplate the possibility that poisoning the air or water with toxic wastes might fall into a similar category, and that governmental regulations preventing it might be as necessary and appropriate as governmental enforcement of the law against poisoning less incidentally.
My point is not to argue that there is no difference between the two: Some relevant considerations are how harmful to others something is, how much an action harmful to others is also helpful to others, and how much something harmful to others is a traditionally acceptable practice embedded in our social norms and customs. But all acts that are harmful to others fall on the continuum defined by these variables, and all must be subjected to an analysis weighing them in a well-reasoned manner. And that is exactly what our regulatory agencies do, in a very well-developed procedure that explicitly considers all of these dimensions, and involves both experts and the affected public in the process.
It should be obvious that the need to balance the liberties of each against the rights of others permeates our social institutional landscape. One can argue whether it is enough to inform consumers of unhealthy or dangerous ingredients or parts in consumer goods, and that to fail to do so should be criminal in the same way that other intentional or reckless inflictions of harm are. But none can argue that that is sufficient for by-products of commercial or private activities which adversely affect others who are not willing participants (such as consumers of given products are). The demands imposed by our interdependence simply cannot be denied.
There are many gray areas to be discussed and explored: At what point does your right to smoke infringe on my right to breathe unpolluted air? At what point does your right to engage in unhealthy and dangerous activities infringe on my right not to have to bear the public costs (e.g., higher insurance premiums for those who do not engage in those activities, and higher tax burdens to pay for the emergency services sometimes involved)? Defining where one’s liberty ends and another’s rights begin is an information intensive, case-by-case requirement of good governance, and one which cannot simply be ideologized away.
This is just one of the many ways in which the Small Government Idolatry of the political fundamentalists is untenable: We need as much government as we need to address the challenges that government has to address. Doing so with complete consideration of all relevant concerns does not mean imposing one and only one imperative on government (that it be shrunk), but rather weighing all concerns in a complete c0st-benefit analysis, on a case-by-case and comprehensive basis. The concerns expressed by Tea Party fundamentalists are not irrelevant; they simply aren’t the only relevant concerns, nor the only relevant considerations. Often, ironically, they even lead to a government that is both more expensive and less functional (avoiding proactive services that both increase human welfare and reduce more crushing reactive costs).
Perhaps the best way to conceptualize how to balance all relevant considerations is captured in John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice”, since a fully-informed and rational decision about what social institutions and policies would be optimal from a position of not knowing one’s own location in the social firmament (including not knowing whether one would be alive today or in the future) would include consideration of both the value of personal liberty and the value of being protected from the harmful effects of others’ exercise of their personal liberty. It would also include considerations of economic consequences, including a balancing of efficiency, fairness, and sustainability. Public policy subjected to the tyranny of a single fixation is harmful and destructive; public policy which balances competing values and concerns is healthy and rational.
Debates over where to draw the line are necessary and useful; debates over whether to draw the line are absurd and dysfunctional. Those political fundamentalists who fight tooth and nail to impose an absolutist, unbalanced notion of “liberty” on the rest of us are not contributing to a healthy public dialogue over how best to govern ourselves, but are rather arguing outside the bounds of reason, trying to advance the cause of harmful irrationality.
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Extreme dogmatic ideology, of all varieties, is like the Hydra of Greek mythology: You can keep chopping off its heads with swift strokes of reason and evidence, but two more equally irrational ones grow in the place of each one dispatched. Most often, in fact, the heads that grow back are simply the same as the ones that had been demolished, somehow oblivious to their own demise. It is an endless struggle, with seemingly no torch-bearing Iolaus in sight to cauterize the severed stumps. And the typical answer to often virtually irrefutable presentations of sound analysis applied to reliable evidence, completely debunking positions that consist of arbitrary assertions wrapped in emphatic platitudes, is simply to insist that the platitudes prevailed under the rules of reason. The Hydra’s heads grow back so fast because they do not bother with the burden of including a brain in the bargain.
Here’s a list of a few of those heads, just off the top of my own:
1) The concept of liberty that denies interdependence. (See Liberty Idolatry).
2) The belief that the world is best understood in terms of good guys v. bad guys, with the speaker generally believing that he or she belongs to the former group, and that he or she can tell in one word who belongs to the latter (e.g., “corporations”,”socialists”, “Muslims”, etc.).
3) The belief that any call for the utilization of expert knowledge in the design and implementation of public policy is an anti-democratic insult to everyone who doesn’t possess it, and impossible to balance with the democratic need to hold government officials responsible to the people they represent.
4) The belief that programs to increase opportunities for others (particularly the poor) rob from the rich (or any disgruntled tax payer).
5) The belief that public goods production and meeting the social responsibility to address poverty and other injustices can and should be left to independent individual choices and private charities.
6) The belief that people who participate in the system as it is are necessarily doing so in order to preserve its defects.
7) The belief that politicians are greedier, more corrupt, less moral, and/or less honest than other people.
8) The belief that pettiness, viciousness, and malice are ever anything other than reprehensible behaviors.
9) The belief that all opinions deserve equal respect, and that the popularity of a belief is as sound a foundation as the degree to which it is supported by reason and evidence.
10) The belief that whatever you believe must be reasonable, and whatever arguments contradict it must be irrational, independently of actually having applied reason to the process of arriving at those beliefs.
11) Anti-intellectualism, particularly combined with assertions that the anti-intellectual alternative is more rational than the systematic application of reason to evidence.
12) The habit of engaging in obsessive virtual stalking, expression of a grudge, relentless hatred, name-calling, ridicule, and/or other similar behaviors, while simultaneously both complaining that the person who is the object of your obsession or resentment is the one engaging in it, and insisting on your own moral superiority to them while demonstrating the exact opposite.
13) Making claims that belong to a particular discipline (e.g., law, economics, etc.) without any actual knowledge of that discipline, usually with inordinate certainty, generally far removed from the actual prevailing conclusions of that discipline, often in a rancorous debate with someone actually knowledgable in that discipline.
14) Believing that personal insults, critiques of writing style, observations about alleged personality flaws, or similar forms of engagement, are clever arguments that refute the substantive content that prompted them.
The list goes on, of course. These are just a few of my favorite Hydra Heads, easy to chop off, but impossible to keep from growing rght back again, bigger, dumber, and more belligerent than before.
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(The following was originally written as a Facebook post in response to one of the typically overwrought, implacable demands for some sort of a purist rejection of our current Democratic leadership, due to its failure to satisfy the writer’s view of what they needed to be doing):
The most important principle in politics is “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” or even of the least bad. Politics is the art of the possible, and the pursuit of the best attainable arrangements, all things considered. Every decision by every individual should be measured by its effect.
The reality we are dealing with includes not only what we each identify as what should be, but also what everyone else identifies as what should be, and what can be accomplished within the context of that distribution of values, beliefs, and opinions, including to what extent they can be moved and changed.
It’s also critical to remember that, in a complex and subtle world, designing the best policies and making the best decisions on pending legislation is an information intensive activity, necessitating not only a sophisticated understanding of the complex systems involved (the articulation of human social institutional, technological, and natural systems), but also of the details of what is happening on the ground. A great piece of legislation, for instance, often becomes a Trojan Horse for a horrible rider, and a smart legislator has to weigh the benefits of the great bill against the costs of the horrible rider. A lot of the armchair quarterbacking that goes on is oblivious to this dimension of the challenge, and many such dimensions exist.
We accomplish the most, and progress the most robustly, when we gravitate toward a pragmatic realism, cultivating a calm belief that it is possible for human beings to govern themselves wisely, in service to human welfare, and keeping all involved (including the electorate) focused on how best to do so. We accomplish the least (and do the most to undermine any and all positive efforts that are being made) when we gravitate to conflicting poles, insisting that our own faction’s vision is the only acceptable one, and that nothing else will do. It fails both on pragmatic grounds (it paralyzes our ability to progress) and on realism grounds (there is more genius in the humility of the many than in the hubris of the few).
There are political goals more fundamental than advancing the policies of the moment. Those goals require cultivating, each in ourselves and all of us together, certain qualities that improve our collective ability to design and implement the best policies in any moment.
One such quality, as I’ve already suggested, is humility. We serve a truly progressive agenda best when we each strive to recognize that what we individually believe to be true may or may not be, that our own certainties may be mistaken, that our own conclusions may be incorrect. This breeds two positive behaviors: 1) It motivates us each to keep learning, to keep examining, to keep absorbing information and recognizing that we never know or understand enough; and 2) it improves our ability to work in productive concert with those who have sincere and legitimate disagreements with us. The second is most useful when the ultimate ends are less disputed than the means for achieving them, as is often (though not always) the case.
Aligning the ultimate ends is best served by striving to be people of goodwill, driven by empathy more than by mutual indifference. Not everyone is willing to agree that that is a laudable goal, but most are. Some will argue that it is a laudable goal, but not the proper purview of government, which is fine, because it provides a foundation of agreement about the ends within which to debate what the most effective means are, a foundation that works as long as we cultivate the other necessary qualities as well (humility and reason).
As I just said, the third quality is striving to be reasonable. Many believe that they are doing so, but few are. An important first step is to recognize how our minds really work, by thinking in frames and narratives which may or may not serve the cause of reason in any given instance. Being aware of this helps us to coopt the reality in service to the ideal, of guiding our frames and narratives in service to reason.
These three qualities (striving to be humble, striving to be empathetic, and striving to be reasonable), together, comprise a deeper political goal, that of creating the most robust and fertile cognitive and cultural context for social and political progress.
I think we serve ourselves best by prioritizing our commitment to this “deep structural political goal” above all of the other more ephemeral and superficial (though often critically important) goals which depend upon it. Doing so serves our long-term ability both to advance those immediate political goals most effectively, and to ensure that they are the right goals to advance before doing so.
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