Freedom for Man

     I've promised that I'd describe why, though I love liberty, I can't call myself a libertarian.  The question compels me to turn to a Christian view of man, one that can find corroboration in Aristotle and in certain strands of Stoicism, but that is only fulfilled in the Body of Christ. 

     This view prescinds from a Trinitarian paradox.  God has made each of us in His image and likeness; what does this mean?  I used to believe that the revelation had to do with what separated man from the lesser animals: we employ reason; we are possessed of intellect; we perform spiritual actions (as, for instance, contemplating the divine); we are endowed with immortal souls.  Yet the verse in Genesis, as has long been noted, is strangely plural: "Let us make man in our image," says God.  Some critics believe that the plural is a fly in amber, a residue of polytheism surviving in a much later text.  I find the suggestion absurd.  We have, in Genesis 1, a hymn to creation, such as we find also in God's speech to Job from the whirlwind, and in Psalm 8.  In the latter texts, God is shown as with the "sons of morning," or he has made man "a little less than the angels," so that we should expect no less here, particularly since we will find angels in the expulsion of man from Eden, and all throughout the epic of the early patriarchs.  But the Fathers saw also an intimation of the Trinity, since, after all, it is never suggested that man is made in the image of the angels -- they who rather are also made in God's image, with names that reflect the unicity of God, like Michael ("Who is like God?", implying the answer, "No one is like God").  Now if man is made in the image of the three-personed God, it is not only "not good for man to be alone," it is downright self-contradictory, since God himself is not the lonely God of Omar (Chesterton), and to contemplate Him is no "flight of the alone to the Alone" (Plotinus), but is a contemplation of a communion of Love.

     This meaning of man is intimated also, as C. S. Lewis saw, and as has been meditated upon by the last two Popes, by our having faces.  Yes, so do many of the animals, but only man will gaze with love into the face of another, seeking the heart of the one he loves.  When Dante meets Saint Benedict in the circle of Saturn in Paradise, he makes the remarkable request -- remarkable, seeing that since the circle of Mercury he has not even been able to divine the merest traces of a countenance -- that "father" Benedict show him his face.  That cannot be, says Benedict, until Dante arrives in the very presence of God, in the empyrean, wherein all the faces of the saints will be clear.  Then, after his short conversation with the pilgrim, Benedict rises again to his sphere, accompanied by his brothers in contemplation.  I think Dante here is suggesting two truths about man here.  The first is that we are only truly ourselves, and we will truly know one another, when we are made one in God.  The second is that we are made for communion; the heart of the monastic life is eucharistic.  These two truths about man illuminate one another.  They are but the twin commandment given by Jesus, that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves.

     Thus the "individual" as understood in rationalist social-contract theories is, for the Christian, already a reduction, even an abstraction.  To be, as Pope Benedict has said, is revealed to us as to be from, to be with, and to be for: it is the Trinitarian mystery of existence.  We must not think of people as, primarily, individuals, to which are superadded contingent relationships.  Every person is born into a world of relationships: is the child of a mother and a father.  In a certain sense, it is correct to remember that Jesus would have died on the cross to save even one of us: he loves all, in such a way as to love each, as if each were the only being in the world.  But each of us is not the only being in the world, and could never be, so that when Jesus saves me he saves the fellow who is the son of Anthony and Jane, the husband of Debra; and it is also those relationships of love that he has come to heal and redeem.  That is but what it means to save the individual.

     I grant that this is a great mystery.  But I think it helps us to avoid the unnecessary dichotomy between rights, which are supposed to inhere only in individuals, and responsibilities, which are supposed to be owed only to others.  In point of fact, my rights and responsibilities are incoherent if considered as separate from one another, since I am fundamentally from, with, and for others.  A family is more than an agglomeration of human isotopes; to deny that it too possesses rights is to mistake what a human being is.  If no man is an island, and if every man's death diminisheth me, then every man's evil harms me, and every man's virtue builds me up.  All these things we need to consider when we ask, "What does a just society look like?", and, what is not the same thing, "What form of government best serves the end of justice?"  We will conclude that it is not true that the "freest" society is the most just, if by freedom we mean the license to behave as if we were alone in the world, pursuing individual ends, but that a just society will be the most free -- because it will be a society of genuine liberty wherein human beings can best flourish.  I'm not original here, far from it.  More on this soon.

    

Comments

[GL]

Exactly. Libertarianism elevates the individual to the highest status in human society. That place rightfully belongs to the family and, secondarily, to the community of which it is an immediate part. Libertarianism undermines the right order of society from the bottom in the same way that statism crushes it from the top. After creating Adam, God declared that it was not good that he be alone and, so, he gave man a wife and then he blessed this pair saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." The blessing was not to merely to create more individuals like themselves, but to grow their family. Cain's punishment for murdering his brother was expulsion from the family. Later, for some sins, the punishment in Leviticus was expulsion from the community. Throughout church history, the most grave sins resulted in ex communication. Today's individualist may look at these punishment and wonder why such punishment were considered so grave. They are grave because man was not made for himself, but he was made to be part of a family and part of a community. Any social order that places individuals or the state above the family and community is harmful to man.

[R.C.]

I think Libertarianism does not elevate the individual to the highest status in human society in the sense you mean, GL.

However, I grant that a lot of libertarians do. They are, of course, mistaken. But it is not their libertarianism, but their elevation of self-interest, which is mistaken.

The libertarian argument is not "individuals are most important and all else is unimportant."

The libertarian argument is: "Some things morally justify the use of force, and other things do not, and for you to exercise force against another human being when it is not morally justified is evil, whether you do it personally as an individual or through a proxy, such as the government."

Indeed, this last observation (that waving or shooting guns at people without adequate justification remains immoral whether one does it personally or through a proxy) shows a truly balanced view of the individual and the community.

For of course a person with a swollen view of the individual (at the expense of the community) would assume that it's okay for the individual to exercise force against a person in Circumstance X, but could never be permissible for the community to exercise force against him in the same circumstances. (Thus reflecting the view that the individual is the sole moral actor and that he always acts alone.)

And a person with a swollen view of the community (at the expense of the individual) would assume that it's okay for the community to exercise force against a person in Circumstance X, but could never be permissible for the individual to exercise force under the same circumstances. (Thus reflecting the view that the community is the sole moral actor and that individuals are cogs within it lacking individual moral authority.)

But the balanced view says that just as what I do must be morally just, so too what we do must be morally just...and that this need for moral justification is especially important when it involves the use of force against one another.

Now all of this is sometimes occluded by the rights-oriented language of the (classical) liberal tradition, and of course by the personal hobbyhorses of particular persons associated with libertarianism (e.g. the atheism and elevation of selfishness of Ayn Rand).

If the amalgamation of the errors of Rand and Von Mises and Friedman and, oh, I don't know...everyone from F.A.Hayek to Lew Rockwell (!) is what one is talking about when one uses the term "libertarian" then of course that amalgamation of errors is by definition full of error, and I oppose it just as much as you do!

But if by "libertarianism" you mean "advocacy of government constrained by the twin observations that (a.) when an individual lacks sufficient moral justification to exert force against persons, he does not gain back that moral justification merely by doing the same thing in concert with others; and (b.) an employee may not justly exercise the authority of his employer unless his employer has in fact delegated that authority to him" then I do support libertarianism, simply because I believe those two observations to be morally true.

As an addendum, I would add that the government of the United States is not coterminous with the community of American citizens. Saying that would be like saying that my family life consists of no more than the rules I impose on my children and the occasions in which I spank them and the means by which I defend my house from burglars.

But since libertarianism is an observation about the just moral limits of government, it does not follow that libertarianism says anything in particular about that vast extent of the life of a community which is outside the realm of government.

If more people were clear about the fact that a community existing in a geographical area is not the same thing as the government which happens to uniquely exercise the organized use of force within that same geographical area -- that despite their geographical overlap the community is a much richer thing where voluntary associations contribute to the humanity and dignity of persons, whereas the government is a particular tool with a distinct purpose somewhere within that area, like a socket wrench stored somewhere in my house -- if people saw that distinction more clearly, then we would not suffer from this misunderstanding that a constraint on government is necessarily a constraint on community.

[GL]

RC,

I would welcome your citation to sources which you believe properly define libertarianism.

I would agree that Rand was no libertarian. Even she rejected the label, just as she rejected the label conservative. It would be unfair to libertarians to use her writings as an example of what is wrong with libertarianism and I do not do so. As a conservative, I object when her writings are used to attack conservatism and certainly believe libertarians should object when her writings are used to attack libertarianism.

As to Von Mises, Friedman and Hayek, I would consider their views as libertarian, even if they contain errors. Do you disagree that they were libertarian or merely assert that they were libertarians who made errors in applying libertarianism.

Finally, I believe the family and the community do have the moral right and obligation to defend those traditions and institutions that sustain them even against the asserted will of the individual and even through the power of the state. However, in most cases this can and should be done locally and not through the national government. That is why, though I am pro-life and oppose same-sex "marriage", I also oppose efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution to reflect my position. These are not matters for the national government, but for the state governments as they always were before the usurpations of the federal courts and, in particular, the U.S. Supreme Court as to abortion. Who decides public policy and how they decide it is just as important as what they decide. That is my position.

[R.C.]

GL,

I would call Von Mises and Friedman and Rothbard and Hayek and Lew Rockwell libertarians.

If she hadn't pretentiously adopted "Objectivist" I would begrudgingly call Rand individualist, but with the proviso that her "individualism" is of a very different variety than what is usually called individualism in the United States by those who self-identify as individualists.

The latter tend only to mean that (a.) they are not collectivists; (b.) even when a large group of people collectively make a moral error, each individual within it remains morally responsible for resisting the group and doing the right thing; and (c.) persons ought not receive unequal protection under law on account of their membership in any involuntary group or category. (I myself am an "individualist" when it is defined this way.)

But the Randian group identifies self-interest or even selfishness with virtue: "I desire X" becomes "X is morally right" as a tautology. Most of the self-described individualists in America would deny that.

I am not sure whose formulation of libertarianism I would most recommend among modern writers. Jeffrey Tucker at Mises.org doesn't write the kind of big theoretical apologias that this topic calls for, but I'd put him in the category of Christian libertarians. Natural Law is foundational, so John Locke is an important figure. Apart from that? I dunno, and I feel really sheepish not having a better answer for you.

Part of the problem is that libertarians so often focus on what they want the outcome to look like (in terms of size and scope of government) that you get little notion of what foundational principles they believe will, when followed to their logical extension, result in a government of the type they describe as desirable.

It reminds me a bit of the joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams (the book, not the execrable motion picture violation thereof) where the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything is determined by computer, after ages of complex calculation, to be "forty two." It is then determined that this answer is unhelpful unless one knows what the question is, so another even longer set of calculations is undertaken to figure out that.

The libertarians need to tell us: "If smaller government is the answer, what's the question?" Or rather, why is that the answer? What argument is to be made for it?.

A lot of libertarians make the error of making a purely consequentialist argument, saying that small government is better because it produces more wealth, more happiness, and so on. That's good, of course, and I understand the temptation to frame the argument solely in such terms, because I know, and libertarians know, that they're often at a disadvantage "selling" minarchy to the public, who after all quite like certain state-heavy things government does even if they don't like others.

But the stridency with which libertarians oppose statism is really not the tone-of-voice one uses when giving purely prudential suggestions. Libertarians don't just say that statism is a bad, because disadvantageous, idea. They say it's wrong. Well, why so?

Or to put the same thing another way: The suggestion that we are free to pick any form of government we like, so long as it produces nice economic outcomes or greater overall happiness, presupposes the principle that "enjoyable" equals "morally right." Well, I don't believe that. I believe that sometimes we ought to do things even if the outcome disadvantages us. And so I think it plausible that the "best" government (in the sense of having an outcome we'll all enjoy) may not turn out to be morally permissible, while a less-good government (in the sense of producing an outcome less like an extended vacation) might best conform to "the laws of nature and nature's God."

I am not, of course, advocating that we intentionally pick a government designed to make us miserable. But I am saying that in picking a form of government, we should constrain ourselves to only the set of all government forms defensible within the Moral Law. If there are more enjoyable forms outside that set, they must be ignored.

So, again, if we want to know what type of government we ought to have we are making a moral argument, and must begin from a set of first principles which are moral in character.

At that point I am afraid too many modern libertarians tend to mumble and trail off into silence when they aren't Christians. The reason is because moderns in general get very uncomfortable when you ask them to articulate why something is immoral. The eruption of sexual misbehavior in the 20th century is probably related to this as either a cause or a symptom, but at any rate I think that is why one mostly has to go to earlier centuries and writers like Locke to see an unabashed attempt to articulate a moral foundation for government.

(I think these foundational principles must be moral in nature; an articulation not only of what is but of what ought to be. For we are trying to arrive at a conclusion that we ought to have government with a certain balance of powers and constraints. One can never get from premises containing only statements of what is to a conclusion about what we ought to do. The original premises must contain oughts in order for the conclusion to contain them; the argument about government is therefore an argument about moral permissibility, and must begin from known norms of moral permissibility.)

So that is why, when defending the desirability of a government that would lack the power to outlaw pornography, I don't say "because a land where porn is legal maximizes everyone's fun!" Even if that were true in the long run (which it isn't), it would be beside the point. The point is: What may government do without transgressing the moral law?

Well, government is a bunch of people with guns. What may people with guns do, without transgressing the moral law?

Well, they can justifiably defend innocent persons against wrongful violation by others.

Granted. Anything else?

*crickets*

Okay, well if that's all that people with guns can morally do, why should people with guns be permitted to do more, just because we call them "government?"

*crickets*

I think that line of reasoning inevitably leads to conclusions obligating us to something more minarchist than we have now.

Sorry for the rambling answer. It's getting late, and although I ought to cut out a lot of what I said, tighten up the rest, and in general answer you more directly, I frankly need to go to bed. So I'll go ahead and submit this dog's breakfast of a post now, and let you reply as you see fit.

[A Mere Observer]

"Brevity is the soul of wit." - Hamlet

[GL]

RC:

"Well, government is a bunch of people with guns. What may people with guns do, without transgressing the moral law?

Well, they can justifiably defend innocent persons against wrongful violation by others."

"They" (this bunch of people, also known as family and the community) may use guns (or the sword, as St. Paul called it) to defend the traditions and institutions that sustain them (that is, that sustain the family and the community). The family and the community is just as subject to wrongful violation by others as the individual. Indeed, we punish crimes (or at least used to) not merely because they harm individuals, but because they are wrongs against the family and the community. Thus, at one time, and not too long ago, adultery was a crime, not merely because it harmed the innocent spouse, but because it harmed the entire family and, by extension, the entire community.

Libertarianism's focus on the individual can blind us (and, I would assert, has blinded us) to the rights of the family and the community as separate and distinct from the rights of the individuals who make up the family and the community. Of course, both major parties have libertarian strains. The Democrats are libertarians on sexual matters and the Republicans are libertarians on economic matters and much harm has been done to the family and the community by both because of it.

[Rob G]

"Libertarianism's focus on the individual can blind us (and, I would assert, has blinded us) to the rights of the family and the community as separate and distinct from the rights of the individuals who make up the family and the community."

This is what I was getting at on the other thread when I wrote that liberalism, of either the collectivist or libertarian sort, tends to see communities as secondary to the individuals who constitute them. In the conservative view, however, such communities are seen as more than just aggregates of atomized individuals that can be formed and dispersed at will. They must be viewed as greater than the sum of their parts, all the while maintaining the idea that each "part" is equally important and valuable.

"The Democrats are libertarians on sexual matters and the Republicans are libertarians on economic matters"

The Zipper Party and the Wallet Party, in other words.