| YEAH, YEAH: To answer your many
emails, yes, I'll eventually get around to responding to Jonah
Goldberg's latest anti-libertarian outburst, even though I strongly
suspects he writes these things mostly to get a rise out of us so we'll
link to his site. (Notice: no link.) But I've got to concentrate on my
book, and besides if I wait long enough all I'll need to do is quote
other people's responses.
Best so far: Nick
Gillespie (of course); Sarah Walker on Samizdata,
who gets the important point that this attack was aimed not at all
libertarians (Randians are completely irrelevant) but at fallibilists,
who "think that whilst truth is objective, it is also conjectural,
[and who] therefore realise the foolishness of imposing by force what
can only ever be conjecture" (thanks to Andrew
Olmsted's excellent blog for pointing to this posting); Will
Wilkinson, who makes the good (and obvious but not to Jonah) points
that "If you ask whether porn or Christian books are better, you
have to ask 'better in what respect?'," "Goldberg owes us
moral arguments against porn and drugs if he wants to be taken
seriously," and "Cultural libertarianism isn't a philosophy of
child rearing." (I suspect Nick's kids could set Jonah straight on
that last one.)
Non-libertarian Charles
Murtaugh also makes the good point that Jonah doesn't actually make
a case for the validity of Western culture, only for teaching kids
"things," a prescription a radical mullah could fulfill with
his brand of theology and theocracy. In Jonah's world (to play the same
caricature game he does), there's not any testing for truth, so any
truth will do as long as you say it loudly enough, and Western culture
is just good because Jonah says so. Charlie disagrees. "When we
inculcate our way of life into our children, we are not simply
reinforcing the bonds of a leviathan culture, useful only because it
happens to be common among us," he writes, citing some real-world
tests. "We are insuring that this wonderful, and preeminently
worthy society of ours, into which we were lucky enough ourselves to be
born, continues to offer its fruits to future generations."
I would say that the goodness of that society is a great discovery,
learned through difficult trial and error over a long history. It's
possible to improve even a good society, although it should be done by
decentralized trial and error, to limit the consequences of bad
experiments, not through revolution from the top. That's what all this
fallibilist "cultural libertarianism" is about. Not murderous
nihilism, as the headline writers at NRO would like you to believe.
Unlike many of Jonah's critics, I do not believe that Christianity,
within a liberal order, is a bad thing, although I pretty obviously
believe it's untrue. (That whole conversion to Judaism thing ought to be
a clue.) On balance, Christianity seems to do a lot of social and
personal good, as long as it doesn't get to have coercive power. I
therefore don't see any reason to go around annoying good, happy
Christians by attacking their religion. But I also don't see the
evidence that pornography is a terrible thing and don't feel the need to
harass my friends who enjoy it. Is it worse to buy a Buttman tape
or Left Behind novel? Jonah is right about this one narrow point.
I have no opinion. I'm not in the market for either, but I don't see the
evidence that, on balance, either does much harm.
That view does not make me a "nihilist," which is one of
those intellectual curse words that writers use mostly to attack people
who disagree with their favorite form of absolutism. I do have
the strong, and often-stated, belief that all sorts of ideas are evil
and dangerous, among them the ones professed by John Walker (or Karl
Marx), while others (including many in National Review) are just
plain wrong. Contrary to Jonah's caricature, I am not known as a woman
who has no opinions and makes no value judgments.
Ideas are generally more dangerous than products (and porn is a
product, not a worldview). That doesn't mean it's "nihilistic"
to prefer to live a country where ideas have to compete, rather than one
in which a few big shots get to kill, or otherwise suppress, everyone
who doesn't buy the party line. That's the fallibist, or "cultural
libertarian," argument. (A good discussion of the fallibilist
approach is Jonathan Rauch's Kindly
Inquisitors. Jonathan's no nihilist either.)
Well, thanks to Steve's incredibly late return from grading hell,
I've written something that approaches a real response. It's not fully
adequate, but it will have to do for now. [Posted 12/14.]
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