Another Whack at Libertarianism

There are four basic arguments against libertarianism specifically, above and beyond arguments against Leftism in general. In sum, these are the arguments from virtue, public order, social cohesion (or ethnicity), and legitimacy. They are analytically separable, but fundamentally intertwined, because they are all directed against the idolization of individual autonomy.

The essential weakness of nineteenth-century liberalism was that it could offer no principle of legitimacy and loyalty to replace the old order. The abstract "rights of man" could never be sufficient to establish a new regime, in and of themselves. The libertarians have not corrected this flaw: they have only rejected classical liberalism's crutch of "popular sovereignty," which led to mass-democracy, egalitarianism, and socialism. In the absence of any other support, they cannot provide any justification for the legitimate functions of government. Their opposition to over-government cannot logically stop short of anarchism.

Any legal-political order must rest on some moral-cultural order that transcends and justifies it, providing the fundamental consensus of norms and expectations that make social life possible. The whole notion of a value-neutral legal-political framework is delusory and pernicious. Trying to justify a political order by self-interest is preposterous: people will manipulate or circumvent the law whenever they see it in their interest to do so. Only a deep-rooted sense of identification with the political unit, and loyalty to it, will make people regard the benefit of the whole as their own benefit.

Libertarians see "moral intervention" as a matter of "imposing one's values" on someone, rather than affecting the character of society as a whole, because there supposedly is no such thing as "society as a whole." They posit a false dichotomy: either "society" is some mystical entity with a mind and will of its own, or it is nothing. In a metaphysical sense, it is true that only individual persons exist; but every person actually exists in a group of one kind or another, whose members have a distinctive character that unites them together, and sets them apart from others.

If people are not antisocial creatures in some imaginary "state of nature," their social units -- whatever they may be -- will command their primary loyalty. Either their primary loyalty is to the nation-state (or something functionally equivalent) or it is not, and their loyalty will be transferred to particular factions within society, outside the state -- the Mafia, for instance, or La Raza.

When they consider the matter at all, libertarians assert blithely that any number of "lifestyles" and communities might live together under a libertarian regime -- even those fundamentally antipathetic to libertarianism -- as long as they are willing to "live and let live." The historical record gives little if any support to this notion.

If people do take their separate loyalties seriously, no feeble legalistic framework can contain the inevitable clashes, and the result is endemic civil war: witness Northern Ireland, Lebanon, most of Africa. If they prefer peace, their particular identities fade and dissolve into a homogeneous mass, or disappear altogether: witness the fate of religion in most modern, secular states.

Given the choice between Balkanization and deracination, the libertarian will automatically prefer the latter: it is, after all, the logical culmination of his ideology. And in fact, the only way a libertarian regime could come into existence would be if the great majority of people favor such a regime: that is, if they care about nothing more than their "rational self-interest" (as defined by libertarianism). And if humanity really could be reduced to such shallow, soulless creatures, incapable of any loyalty to anything beyond themselves, it is hard to see how any kind of society could possibly survive -- much less one worth living in.

Complete uniformity is neither possible nor desirable, to be sure. Some diversity, and even a little conflict, are all very well, as long as they are contained within a basic unity of belief, custom, and loyalty; otherwise, society is torn apart, and the political order breaks down.

Public order is inseparable from personal virtue. On the one hand, a minimal level of order can only be maintained if people are habituated to self-restraint. On the other hand, a positively good order -- and especially a republican order -- requires public virtues: loyalty to the res publica (the "public thing"), participation in the political community, willingness to place the public good above private gain, and ultimately, willingness to put one's life on the line in defense of the patria. In a word, a republic needs patriotism. Republics are founded on citizen-soldiers; empires are founded on subjects and mercenaries.

Since people do not live in a social vacuum, the standards of personal virtue, even in the private sphere, must be reaffirmed and reinforced publicly. Public virtue is not a matter of "policing bedrooms," as libertarians (echoing the liberals) like to put it. Only a utopian would believe that vice can be eradicated; being utopians themselves, libertarians assume that everyone else must be, too. The real problem is to keep vice in check, and to preserve public standards of decency and decorum. Libertarians declare that virtue should be a private matter; to the contrary, it is vice that should be a private matter. Of course it would be absurd to go around raiding bedrooms to catch perverts in the act; but this is no argument against, say, turning firehoses on a "Gay Pride" rally.

Aside from the deterioration of society as a whole, cloistered virtue is problematic in and of itself. This to be seen in such closed communities as the Amish and the Hasidim. They preserve their traditions, but they are stultified and uncreative. Such living fossils are better (for those born into them) than the larger, all-too-open society of shopping malls and egalitarianism; but they are not nearly as good as a strong, healthy, creative civilization that can grow and change while preserving its unity.

It is impossible to sustain a narrowly political philosophy, arbitrarily separated from morality and culture, such as libertarianism purports to be. The culture-war takes precedence over mere political conflicts. Political victories without ideological victories are hollow (as the Republicans keep demonstrating): the battle may be won, but the war is lost. Without a moral framework transcending politics, one cannot justify liberty or anything else: it is just a personal preference, which others might or might not share. Either one violates one's self-set limits by invoking higher principles, or one loses to those who do invoke higher principles. If libertarians remain neutral on moral and cultural issues, or worse (and more likely) join the other side, then their opposition to statism is worthless.

Libertarianism is at best irrelevant to the really fundamental issue at stake today. Society is disintegrating: nearly everyone recognizes this, on some level, even if (as is usual) they do not comprehend what is happening. Manners, morals, customs, institutions, all the forces that make social life possible and worthwhile, are being steadily corrupted and destroyed. The loss of liberty is only incidental to the cultural crisis, and an excess of liberty -- or more precisely, permissiveness -- is a large part of the problem.

The most charitable interpretation of libertarianism is that it is indifferent to the problem. While the nihilist Left is deliberately trying to destroy society, the libertarian Left would let society fall apart through neglect -- when not aiding and abetting the nihilists. At best, libertarians only pay lip-service to the importance of community and culture, and that only when pressed; left to themselves, they ignore these things, or celebrate their destruction as a gain for "personal freedom." To them, it is self-evident that the "liberation" of the autonomous individual, the proliferation of "diversity," rapid social change, the rejection of traditional mores, etc., can only be Good Things.

Libertarians are right about one thing: "society" as such is an abstraction. Human beings naturally live in communities, not "society," which can only be realized as such if communities are uprooted and destroyed. This is what liberalism has done; this is its great historic achievement. The result is a formless mass of individualists with ever-dwindling attachments to old communities, and new, factitious attachments to pseudo-communities that have entered the void (e.g. street gangs, the homosexual underworld, the Internet). Libertarians, to the extent that they notice these problems, consider them inevitable, or even welcome them.

Yet these developments are disastrous, even from the libertarian point of view. By isolating people, individualism makes them weak and vulnerable to the collectivist power-grab. The autonomous individual is free to choose his own "identity" and "lifestyle," but without any tradition to draw on, he lacks the internal resources to create any. So he becomes malleable, a slave to fad and fashion and public opinion, and to those who mold fad and fashion and public opinion. Absorbed in his own small self and private concerns, he lacks the public spirit necessary for political action, except perhaps to lobby for a bigger share of government largesse.

Indeed, libertarians deny the very possibility of public-spiritedness; but they still need something more than materialism and individualism. They expect everyone to act counter to his natural self-centeredness, just long enough to co-operate in abolishing the state. Even if the unfettered market is really, ultimately, in everyone's self-interest (defining "self-interest" in narrowly material terms), this does not give any compelling reason for anyone to forego his immediate and obvious self-interest. Once again, libertarianism is parasitic on an inherited moral tradition, which it needs to compensate for its own deficiencies. Besides, who would really want to live in a world in which everyone is solely concerned with his material self-interest? Not even libertarians, maybe.

At best, libertarians are unable to oppose nihilism, or even notice it, because of their fixation on economic issues. Nihilism is a moral, cultural and intellectual problem: and, on libertarian premises, such matters are none of their concern. And at worst, the libertarians themselves, in their fixation on "personal freedom," degenerate into nihilists.

"Freedom" in the abstract is meaningless and worthless: its meaning and value are provided by answering the questions, "freedom from what?" and "freedom for what?" Since it is impossible to maintain a value-neutral social-political framework, libertarians have to smuggle in their own moral premises: materialism at best, nihilism at worst. The idolatry of the Free Market at least gives some positive and meaningful content to the vague notion of "liberty." Without materialism, "liberty" itself, in the abstract, is raised up as an idol.

Freedom, as an end in itself, is the negation of morality. If you say, for example, that chastity and promiscuity are equally valid "lifestyle options," people are generally going to prefer the one that seems more pleasant. If you say that "do your own thing" is one's only guide in life, you leave people with no real guide in life, and thereby strip life of all meaning and purpose.

We are not born with instincts to tell us what to do; neither can economic calculation and utility-maximization provide a sufficient guide to life, beyond the requirements of subsistence. Our understanding of who we are, our place in the world, and how we should live our lives, is provided by our inherited culture. It is not a bit less evil to destroy that culture in the name of "liberty" than it is to destroy it in the name of "equality."

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