On Talking Past Each Other and World Trade

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has been hosting a labor roundtable, which has emerged as a combination of spontaneity and directed planning in the way that the blogosphere especially tends to foster.  Participants have included many of my favorite bloggers: E.D. Kain, Jason Kuznicki, Kevin Carson, Mark Thompson, Freddie deBoer, and James Hanley, among others.  At stake is the entire system of American capitalism.  For anyone with a spare afternoon or so, it's worth visiting that London coffee house.

I’ve read through all the articles and comment threads in this labor roundtable thus far, and it seems to me that there are three general issues which have been largely or systematically taken for granted or underserved in the discussion.  I've brought these issues up in comments, but few people seem interested in exploring them, which (being a libertarian) I can't really fault anyone for.  These issues are: (1) libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement; (2) distortions in the ways we usually measure wealth that confuse the debate; and (3) the role of American corporations in globalization.

As for topic (1) - libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement - no one has acknowledged that libertarianism more or less grew out of the union movement in Europe as that faction which proposed a return to the principles of classical liberalism (Adam Smith) in opposition to the coercively entrenched interests of state/capital at the turn of the twentieth century.  Many libertarians shifted focus after the New Deal because the Roosevelt government seemed to represent a greater threat to liberty at that time than corporate regulatory capture; but the base of the movement remains as principally an opposition to the pernicious cartel of that two-headed monster of the wealthy and powerful.

If libertarianism has been effectively subverted to corporate interests in the United States, which is the contention of Noam Chomsky and other anarchist theorists whose intellectual roots lie in the Gilded Age milieu of thoughtful bourgeois discussion, this must be because either: (a) self-described libertarian institutions have been captured by corporate special interests; (b) echoes of the New Deal excesses of central government still seem like a more serious threat to liberty than corporate power; or (c) having strong, collective labor counterbalance strong, unitary capital is no longer considered a necessary evil (due perhaps to the existence of a strong middle class).

Click to read more ...

Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

Click to read more ...

An Uncertain deFense of deBoer

I. The Argument's Genesis

Sam Harris's February TED lecture begins with a provocative premise:

...It's generally understood that questions of morality, questions of good and evil and right and wrong, are questions about which science officially has no opinion.  It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value.  And consequently most people - I think most people probably here think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life, questions like, 'What is worth living for?', 'What is worth dying for?', 'What constitutes a good life?'; so I'm going to argue that this is an illusion, and the separation between science and human values is an illusion.  And actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.  Now, it's often said that science can not give us a foundation for morality and human values because science deals with facts.  And facts and values seem to belong to different spheres.  It's often thought that there is no description of the way the world is that can tell us the way the world ought to be.  But I think this is quite clearly untrue.  Values are a certain kind of fact.  They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.  

Andrew Sullivan recently linked to the lecture with this response from Freddie deBoer:

[I]f we are indeed a cosmic accident, the result of the directionless and random process of evolution, then it makes little sense to imagine that we are capable of ordering the world around us, beyond the limited perspective of our individual, subjective selves. This has always been to me the simplest step in the world, from the first two beliefs to the third, from the collapse of geocentrism and creationism to the collapse of objective knowing. Yet I find that it is one many people not only refuse to make, but one that they react against violently. This is the skepticism that is refused, and this refusal is the last dogma.

There's also this clarification, this clarification, and this clarification from deBoer.  Several other bloggers have weighed in on the debate.  The highlights: from Julian Sanchez:

God or whatever other transcendent sources of certainty we might posit just serve as baffles to conceal the ineradicable circularity that’s going to sit at the bottom of any system of knowledge. You’re always ultimately going to have a process of belief formation whose reliability can only be vouchsafed in terms of the internal criteria of that very process. Calling it a divinely endowed rational faculty rather than an adaptive complex of truth-tracking modules doesn’t actually change the structure of it any...I do think we can make “objective” judgments. They’re only “objective” relative to our contingently evolved nervous systems, but since that’s all objective can ever have meant, that's objective.  This is totally distinct from the question of how confident we ought to feel about most of our conclusions. I can be mistaken about an objective fact, but that doesn’t entail that it’s a mistake to think of it as objective one way or the other.  Because objectivity is a system-relative property, it’s not undermined by the fact of our cognitive limitations.

And from Will Wilson:

Contingent minds merely undermine the necessity of our being able to comprehend the world (a necessity that the faithful take quite seriously, as an old Dominican friar once explained to me), they leave open, however, the possibility of contingent minds that “just happen” to be of the sort that can make sense of the universe in which they happen to be located. Nevertheless, Freddie is right about one thing: once we eliminate necessity, we need reasons to think that our minds are of the right sort; after all, the humble Giraffe is well adapted to its environment, but will never come to understand particle physics or the workings of its own neurophysiology. How are we to know that we are not like Giraffes, only with considerably wider possible-knowledge horizons?

This discussion has occupied nearly all my time and brainpower for the last week, and it has stretched my patience and eyesight more than a few times.  Ultimately, many people have forgotten where the debate started: subsequent commentary has wandered uncontrollably from the cosmic questions first proffered by Harris to the merits of various political ideologies to the nature of science, morality, and knowledge.  Straw men pepper the electronic landscape, and there are more than a few reductio ad Hitlerum sprinkled throughout multiple sites.  So, I am going to attempt to grossly (over)simplify the terms of the debate for clarification. 

Click to read more ...

Tim Rogers vs. Freddie deBoer

Recently Gawker Media videogame columnist Tim Rogers wrote an unenlightening screed for Kotaku about the elements of Japanese culture he finds distasteful, prompting accusations of Orientalist racism from Freddie deBoer.  The internet has been aflutter with amateur anthropologists (including myself) throwing in their two cents in the form of comments.

Click to read more ...