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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 concept of “liberty”, far subtler and richer than its current idolaters realize, can’t be explored in isolation from its partner, “society.” The idolatry with which the concept of liberty is now insulted, ironically, does far more to undermine it than defend or perpetuate it, because it divorces liberty from its partner, without which it cannot exist. For we have no freedom without life, without health, without opportunity, and it is only through a robust and well-functioning society that our lives and health are protected from mutual predation, and opportunity maximized through the creation of a context in which liberty is more than just “freedom from,” but is also “freedom to.”
Our Declaration of Independence refers to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (slightly modifying, in an act of historically acceptable plagiarism, John Locke’s earlier “life, liberty, and property”). There is no pursuit of happiness without health and opportunity; life is threatened and shortened by disease and destitution. There are thosewho insist that only negative, not positive, rights are guaranteed by our Constitution, “freedoms from” rather than “freedoms to.” Be that as it may, wisdom and compassion dictate something more, as does logic, for “freedom from” is intended as a means to “freedom to.” We guarantee freedoms from oppression in order to be free to pursue the goals that are available to its in its absence. “Freedom to” is always the ultimate purpose. When we have created the capacity to extend and augment it, then it is incumbent upon us to do so.
And what is it that we are free to do? To speak a language which is a product of collective genius, inherited from the many over the ages. To worship as we choose, either in discrete religions that are similarly products of our collective genius, created by the many over the ages, or in synthesis and distillations of existing religions and philosophies, which are, as well, products of our collective genius…. To think, express, believe, wonder, and act using the motifs and instruments that we have collectively produced, through media we have collectively invented and made available, to and with others, usually to some social end. Liberty is all about society.
Indeed, those liberties which don’t explicitly involve society (though they always implicitly do, in the forms of thought we utilize) require no protections, because they are invisible to others. One has always and everywhere been free to think what they please, as long as they keep it secret. It is only when it enters the public sphere, our shared universe, does liberty require protection. It is only when it involves a social act that liberty is a concept with any meaning.
Those who are advocates of social disintegration can argue, of course, that they’re not, that they only argue against “government,” which is not synonymous with “society.” They can argue that they understand that we belong to a society, and that our liberty is an expression of that fact, but that when we express the fact that we are a society with any focused intentionality, when we seek to actually act with a will as a society, when we try to empower our primary vehicle of collective decision-making, it is then that we have violated the sanctity of liberty, by infringing on it in precisely the way that our venerable forefathers so nobly opposed.
But our venerable forefathers never opposed government, per se. They opposed government that represented some and not others, that infringed upon liberties in order to extract wealth for the few at the expense of the many. Our government, whether state or federal, suffers no such defect. The franchise has never been broader, and is considerably broader than it was at the time of The American Revolution. We are more, rather than less, like the ideal our forefathers envisioned. And, while both our founding fathers and our current “patriots” share a bias in favor of the wealthy, the impulses on which our revolution was based were far more about the more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity than about the protection of privilege, an ideal which today is expressed in efforts that our pseudo-patriots most vehemently oppose.
With that endless irony that characterizes their movement, it is often those who have the most to gain from an improved distribution of opportunity that are opposing it most angrily, in a variation of Marx’s realization that the masses are opiatedby the religion of the powerful, and seduced into a false consciousness that serves the interests of the wealthy rather than of themselves or the public as a whole. (Disclaimer: I am not a Marxist, a theory which fails both politically and analytically by failing to understand the salience of individual over group or class interests. But Marx did get some things descriptively, if not analytically or prescriptively, right, to an extent that retains at least some value).
If we admit that society is an equal partner of liberty, and that even such events as our own Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution are collective acts of a society designed to express its collective will, than we admit that there is some role to having a vehicle for such collective action as a society, one through which we can express our collective will in defense of, and perhaps even to augment, our personal liberties. We are not always fighting the King of England, nor is our own democratically elected president, signing into law legislation passed by our own democratically elected Congress, a “tyrant.” He is an expression of the will of a majority of the people, and if, after the election, a majority does not support some of the choices he and our legislators make, then that is also in accord with our blueprint for representative democracy, which was never designed to be run by incessant plebiscite, to our great good fortune.
As many have noted, our founding fathers were extremely bright individuals, certainly far brighter than those who insultingly claim their mantle today. They understood the importance of establishing a strong central government (which was the purposeof the U.S. Constitution), and the importance of creating some separation of that government from the popular whims that would dominate it if it could. Liberty is not just an expression of society in the abstract; it is dependent on government in the daily reality of life. And how vibrant, robust, extensive, and egalitarian that liberty turns out to be, depends on how noble the will we chooseto exercise via that government. Alas, those who wear the tricorn hats today are mere tasseled jesters mocking those who wore them when they were first in vogue.
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