Libertarianism: Revisiting the Basics
Tibor R. Machan
Libertarianism emerged from the classical liberal tradition, as a
purified or more consistent?or radical?version of its pedigree. Figures
such as John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill of the classical
period and Ayn Rand, Murray N. Rothbard, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek,
John Hospers, and Robert Nozick from recent times spring to mind as major
influences of the position as it is now understood and discussed. Others,
such as Douglas B. Rasmussen, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Anthony De Jasay, Jan
Narveson, Loren Lomasky, Eric Mack, Aeon Skoble, Roderick Long and myself
have been closely associated with discussions and defenses of this
political outlook.
The focus of libertarianism is on the political priority of individual
(negative) liberty (i.e., being free from others? intrusiveness,
invasiveness, aggression, trespass, and so forth). In the libertarian
view the basic rights of every (adult) individual to life, liberty and
property are the central normative claims underlying the political, legal,
economic and social system most suitable for human community life.
Libertarianism stresses the legal fundamentality of the right to private
property (where property includes land, inventions, poems, factories, or
herds of cattle) since it is by reference to what can be owned that
concrete borders?and thus spheres of authority or sovereignty?between
individuals can be clearly enough identified. Everyone has the right to
seek to obtain and hold, if obtained without rights violations, whatever
can be owned.
There are several strains of libertarianism but the differences concern
mainly the supporting philosophical argument. Two major versions have
emerged as prominent: a more or less positivist (or social scientific)
line of argument and one that involves mainly normative (or moral)
considerations.
Positivists focus on the common human objective of prosperity or wealth,
something preeminently likely in a society wherein private property rights
are respected and protected. Prosperity, along these lines, is identified
subjectively?that is, by reference to how citizens perceive themselves to
be satisfied, enriched, fulfilled, successful, etc.
The normative libertarian takes value judgments to be objective, albeit
most often agent-relative (i.e., depending upon many individual, social,
and other aspects of the individuals involved). Among these is the
central condition?to be secured for everyone within a community?of
individual self-determination, personal sovereignty or autonomy. This
value, as others, is established by reference to what and who an
individual is?in this case by reference to everyone?s essential moral
self-directedness.
Because the morally successful individual must take the initiative to do
the right thing?to act ethically?the condition of liberty (spelled out by
the set of basic individual rights) is indispensable for everyone?s moral
development. Private property is the concrete condition of moral autonomy
and political sovereignty making individual choice possible, for better or
worse.
Individualism?or either psychological or ethical egoism?is crucial in
libertarianism, as a step in the argument for it. Some version? not
necessarily that referred to (by critics) as atomistic?is closely linked
to libertarianism. Personal determination of and responsibility for one?s
own action?so that the individual person is decisively (though not
exclusively) involved in initiating judgment and shaping conduct?is vital.
Yet sociability as an essential component of human life?provided it is
not coercively imposed?is also compatible with the libertarian vision.
Whether arising from positivism or a normative approach, the concrete
socio-economic result in libertarianism is a polity stressing the supreme
significance of the right to individual liberty. Such notions as
?justice,? ?equality,? ?order,? ?welfare,? etc. also have a role in the
development of the libertarian?s basic legal framework or constitution,
albeit never superseding the right to individual liberty. Government is
thus limited, if it is admitted as proper at all.
Libertarian justice consists of a legal system?s primary focus upon the
standards of due process that bans involuntary servitude, regardless how
worthy the objective might be (e.g., fighting crime or terrorism,
defending the country, fostering the arts, sciences, health care,
education, recreation, etc.). Such objectives needn?t lack widespread
acceptance or even objective value. Yet, having to reach them without the
violation of individual rights (for example, without taxation, universal
conscription, state transfer or redistribution of wealth) is the central
prerequisite of justice. In a system of libertarian justice democracy has
limited scope, mainly involving the election of officers of the law,
legislators and such whose task is to administer the system in line with
the basic libertarian constitution.
Equality, too, is understood by reference to the mutual condition of
liberty that every citizen must enjoy?that is, everyone is equal in
respect of having the right to life, liberty and property, regardless of
whether equality prevails in natural assets, good fortune, health,
well-being, sexual appeal, etc. Thus libertarianism tolerates various
types of so called ?social? injustice?for example, personal betrayal,
economic exploitation, and racial discrimination?so long as no coercive
force or fraud is involved. Furthermore, while it is egalitarian at the
political and legal levels of community life, there is no insistence here
upon the political priority of equality in economic, educational,
athletic, or similar opportunities, let alone equality of conditions or
results, level playing fields, etc.
Libertarianism is concerned with political?not social or economic or
racial or ethnic?justice and equality. While the latter are not, by at
least some libertarian lights, incapable of being identified and sought
out, they must be pursued without recourse to the violation of individual
rights to life, liberty and property. Order, progress, cultural
diversity, ethnic, racial and gender harmony are similarly regarded as
possibly valid but never primary values for a good political community. As
F. A. Hayek put the point,
That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values?indeed
not merely one value among many but the source of all values?is almost
self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its
inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values,
to contribute to their further growth, and they earn moral merit.
There is no room here to consider the innumerable theoretical objections,
let alone aversions, expressed against libertarianism. Put simply,
libertarians take most of them to stem from utopian or idealistic
thinking?the hope that all the ills of human life can be dealt with via
politics, by government policies. Libertarians have address this on
innumerable fronts, including with theories of public choice, the
socialist calculation problem, the tragedy of the commons and similar
ideas showing the impotence of aggressive government policies for purposes
of rectifying personal and social problems.
Indeed, at the level of comparative political thinking the libertarian
may be distinguished by a lack of utopianism. (This is especially true of
the normative libertarian, who does not see human nature conducive to
perfectibility via politics or to any institutional guarantee against
immoral conduct?imprudence, dishonesty, stinginess, greed, sloth.)
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Column on Commerce and Society
Commerce is Human
Tibor R. Machan
Sure, you say, what?s with this idea?doesn?t everyone know it already?
Well, actually in many academic institutions you will find professors of
this and that proclaiming just the opposite. They claim commerce is a
dehumanizing institution. It makes people treat one another as objects or,
at most, as means to various ends, not as full persons.
The doctrine is called ?commodification??making people into commodities,
things for nothing other than to be purchased. The charge is that in a
fully capitalist, free market society, the system would encourage everyone
to treat all others as a mere useful product, like one?s chair or
automotive tires. For this reason, the argument goes?and it had got its
biggest boost from Karl Marx, in the 19th Century when he took capitalism
to task very influentially for doing all kinds of nasty things to
people?the free market, with its capitalist economic system, is not really
good for human beings at all.
At first sight this may sound like a credible point to make against
capitalism. When you go to the grocery store, for example, you tend to
treat the cashier or the manager as no more than means to your ends of
walking out of the place with what you need at home. You don?t much
socialize with these people, not at least initially. They are just
functionaries to you. If they were machines and could do what you need
from them, that would be perfectly fine. Or so it can seem, from a
superficial examination of what happens in markets. Your broker, doctor,
auto-mechanic, shoe repairer and the rest, they aren?t your personal
friends. They are instruments used to satisfy important needs of yours but
they could easily be replaced with someone else or some tool. (Nowadays
you can even check out by using auto-scanners, with no need for a person
at all.)
Trouble is that to focus on this element of the market?that it is mostly
impersonal on a certain level?betrays a narrow vision. As if people would
leave it at that, except in the most unusual circumstances?for example,
when they are in a hurry and need to get done with shopping as fast as
possible. But normally that isn?t how it is at all.
As my friend and fellow philosophy professor Neera K. Badhwar argued in a
very well developed, complex paper on the topic, commerce is actually the
institution where much of our intimate social life gets its start. And
anyone can check this out easily enough.
Just consider that wherever you work, you have colleagues with whom you
have perfectly human relationships, good or bad or in between. In fact,
sometimes places of work become nearly homes away from home, where people
not only meet and talk and grow close (to enjoy or be annoyed by each
other), but get involved quite seriously in each other?s lives. Kids are
discussed, as are spouses. Close friendships, or at least palships,
develop frequently. Some colleagues become lovers, even marry in time.
(Contrast this with how it is like to go at the DMV!)
The myth that market transactions are impersonal is just that, a myth,
and it comes from shallow, superficial reflection on what goes on in
markets. It may be no accident that the idea is so popular in the academy,
where there is often a kind of isolation among faculty, with few becoming
close with one another, although there is enough exception to this that it
should raise doubts in the minds of those who spread the myth around about
the market.
Even down at the grocery store?or the pet shop or car dealer?customers
and vendors frequently depart from their initial reason for coming
together and start talking about sports, ethnic food, music or family
troubles. And from that now and then full blown, genuine friendships
emerge.
What the critics don?t appreciate is how well people can multitask in
life, that while they do business they can also do arts, sciences,
education, family affairs and the rest on the side. Karl Marx was
wrong?the free market is by no means only a cash nexus, where everyone
thinks only of the bottom line. That?s because it would be entirely
unnatural for human beings to be that way.
Tibor R. Machan
Sure, you say, what?s with this idea?doesn?t everyone know it already?
Well, actually in many academic institutions you will find professors of
this and that proclaiming just the opposite. They claim commerce is a
dehumanizing institution. It makes people treat one another as objects or,
at most, as means to various ends, not as full persons.
The doctrine is called ?commodification??making people into commodities,
things for nothing other than to be purchased. The charge is that in a
fully capitalist, free market society, the system would encourage everyone
to treat all others as a mere useful product, like one?s chair or
automotive tires. For this reason, the argument goes?and it had got its
biggest boost from Karl Marx, in the 19th Century when he took capitalism
to task very influentially for doing all kinds of nasty things to
people?the free market, with its capitalist economic system, is not really
good for human beings at all.
At first sight this may sound like a credible point to make against
capitalism. When you go to the grocery store, for example, you tend to
treat the cashier or the manager as no more than means to your ends of
walking out of the place with what you need at home. You don?t much
socialize with these people, not at least initially. They are just
functionaries to you. If they were machines and could do what you need
from them, that would be perfectly fine. Or so it can seem, from a
superficial examination of what happens in markets. Your broker, doctor,
auto-mechanic, shoe repairer and the rest, they aren?t your personal
friends. They are instruments used to satisfy important needs of yours but
they could easily be replaced with someone else or some tool. (Nowadays
you can even check out by using auto-scanners, with no need for a person
at all.)
Trouble is that to focus on this element of the market?that it is mostly
impersonal on a certain level?betrays a narrow vision. As if people would
leave it at that, except in the most unusual circumstances?for example,
when they are in a hurry and need to get done with shopping as fast as
possible. But normally that isn?t how it is at all.
As my friend and fellow philosophy professor Neera K. Badhwar argued in a
very well developed, complex paper on the topic, commerce is actually the
institution where much of our intimate social life gets its start. And
anyone can check this out easily enough.
Just consider that wherever you work, you have colleagues with whom you
have perfectly human relationships, good or bad or in between. In fact,
sometimes places of work become nearly homes away from home, where people
not only meet and talk and grow close (to enjoy or be annoyed by each
other), but get involved quite seriously in each other?s lives. Kids are
discussed, as are spouses. Close friendships, or at least palships,
develop frequently. Some colleagues become lovers, even marry in time.
(Contrast this with how it is like to go at the DMV!)
The myth that market transactions are impersonal is just that, a myth,
and it comes from shallow, superficial reflection on what goes on in
markets. It may be no accident that the idea is so popular in the academy,
where there is often a kind of isolation among faculty, with few becoming
close with one another, although there is enough exception to this that it
should raise doubts in the minds of those who spread the myth around about
the market.
Even down at the grocery store?or the pet shop or car dealer?customers
and vendors frequently depart from their initial reason for coming
together and start talking about sports, ethnic food, music or family
troubles. And from that now and then full blown, genuine friendships
emerge.
What the critics don?t appreciate is how well people can multitask in
life, that while they do business they can also do arts, sciences,
education, family affairs and the rest on the side. Karl Marx was
wrong?the free market is by no means only a cash nexus, where everyone
thinks only of the bottom line. That?s because it would be entirely
unnatural for human beings to be that way.
Column on Academic Freedom (sans typo)
Academic Freedom, True and False
Tibor R. Machan
It is nothing new?the controversy about what academic freedom amounts to.
At the University of Colorado a professor, Ward Churchill, wrote an essay
claiming the victims in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center were
little Eichmans, suggesting that WTC professionals were perpetrating
genocide?even if they didn?t overtly intend to do so?by being complicit in
activities that contribute to attacks on certain ethnic groups. I have no
idea which ethnic groups he had in mind, nor how WTC folks were supposed
to bring off this deed. The point is he made this outrageous claim.
University of Colorado officials are now reported to be bent out of shape
about what to do about this person.
In another case the University of New Mexico had to deal with Richard
Berthold, a former history professor, who had told students just after the
9/11 attacks: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote." The
university didn?t fire him as many had urged but conducted some kind of
review and in time issued a letter of reprimand after he had apologized.
We actually have different cases here. In the one involving Ward
Churchill, he wrote an essay, which clearly comes under academic
freedom?the well entrenched and officially proclaimed tradition at most
higher academic institutions in the USA of the liberty of university and
other teachers to produce works that develop and even promote various
ideas, however objectionable these may be. In the case of Richard
Berthold, however, we have someone who ?told students? his highly
contentious opinion and here something else comes to the fore: the ethics
pertaining to a teacher?s professional responsibilities.
There are gray areas, of course, in all human affairs, including academic
freedom vs. academic ethics, which is why we have faculty committees to
look into such cases now and then. One professor at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas, reportedly got into hot water with his administration
because he gave an example of a gay couple in a discussion of the
economics of savings. He observed that given that gays aren?t so likely to
have kids as heterosexuals, the probability of their saving as diligently
as heterosexuals do is significantly lower. For this observation some
student complained to the administration and he is now under
investigation, possibly getting reprimanded and docked a month of pay.
This professor was addressing his students in his professional capacity
but he wasn?t advocating anything but using an apt example to illustrate a
point in economics, one, however, that made a student uncomfortable.
Had he advocated something to his class about gays being bad people for
failing to save for the future, the matter would raise certain valid
questions: Is he abusing his position by advocating to a captive audience
that is not there to hear his own values, be these right or wrong? Is he
unqualified to judge whether not saving on the part of gays is something
objectionable? In both cases if the answer is in the affirmative, academic
freedom would not apply. However, if he published an essay promoting such
views, that would fall under academic freedom, regardless of how wrong
they may be.
Much of the problem with academic freedom is to distinguish advocacy from
coverage of the discipline?s various topics. One should be free in a
political theory course to explain the Nazi's position; however, one
should not be free to use one?s classroom as a platform for advocating
one?s own views, be it for or against Nazism. This is not a matter of
academic freedom but of professional competence and ethics.
Suppose one decided to tell jokes in class all day long?to take a bit of
an extreme case for illustrative purposes?instead of covering the topic
one is supposed to be teaching. Now if they fire such a person or issue a
reprimand, that's perfectly OK. The matter has nothing to do with academic
freedom. Now suppose one writes a book of jokes under one?s real name, one
that is quite offensive to some people. This an academician ought to be
free to do without any sanctions applied to by one?s academic employer.
That's academic freedom.
However, suppose one writes a book in the field of history and it gets
published and in it one claims that Abraham Lincoln was president of the
United States of America in 1984. This, is gross incompetence and one
should get one?s comeuppance for it?it has nothing to do with academic
freedom. And it need not be so gross, in fact?demonstrably bad historical
scholarship qualifies as incompetence in the field and isn?t protected by
academic freedom.
The biggest problem, of course, is that universities are funded with
money taken in taxes from all citizens, many of whom don?t believe in
granting academic freedom to people with what they regard as highly
objectionable viewpoints. So these victims of such taxation will agitate,
often vigorously, against defending the academic freedom of those
professors and scholars of whom they disapprove. And they are right?not
because academic freedom is a bad idea but because having them fund such
scholars against their will is a bad idea.
Tibor R. Machan
It is nothing new?the controversy about what academic freedom amounts to.
At the University of Colorado a professor, Ward Churchill, wrote an essay
claiming the victims in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center were
little Eichmans, suggesting that WTC professionals were perpetrating
genocide?even if they didn?t overtly intend to do so?by being complicit in
activities that contribute to attacks on certain ethnic groups. I have no
idea which ethnic groups he had in mind, nor how WTC folks were supposed
to bring off this deed. The point is he made this outrageous claim.
University of Colorado officials are now reported to be bent out of shape
about what to do about this person.
In another case the University of New Mexico had to deal with Richard
Berthold, a former history professor, who had told students just after the
9/11 attacks: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote." The
university didn?t fire him as many had urged but conducted some kind of
review and in time issued a letter of reprimand after he had apologized.
We actually have different cases here. In the one involving Ward
Churchill, he wrote an essay, which clearly comes under academic
freedom?the well entrenched and officially proclaimed tradition at most
higher academic institutions in the USA of the liberty of university and
other teachers to produce works that develop and even promote various
ideas, however objectionable these may be. In the case of Richard
Berthold, however, we have someone who ?told students? his highly
contentious opinion and here something else comes to the fore: the ethics
pertaining to a teacher?s professional responsibilities.
There are gray areas, of course, in all human affairs, including academic
freedom vs. academic ethics, which is why we have faculty committees to
look into such cases now and then. One professor at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas, reportedly got into hot water with his administration
because he gave an example of a gay couple in a discussion of the
economics of savings. He observed that given that gays aren?t so likely to
have kids as heterosexuals, the probability of their saving as diligently
as heterosexuals do is significantly lower. For this observation some
student complained to the administration and he is now under
investigation, possibly getting reprimanded and docked a month of pay.
This professor was addressing his students in his professional capacity
but he wasn?t advocating anything but using an apt example to illustrate a
point in economics, one, however, that made a student uncomfortable.
Had he advocated something to his class about gays being bad people for
failing to save for the future, the matter would raise certain valid
questions: Is he abusing his position by advocating to a captive audience
that is not there to hear his own values, be these right or wrong? Is he
unqualified to judge whether not saving on the part of gays is something
objectionable? In both cases if the answer is in the affirmative, academic
freedom would not apply. However, if he published an essay promoting such
views, that would fall under academic freedom, regardless of how wrong
they may be.
Much of the problem with academic freedom is to distinguish advocacy from
coverage of the discipline?s various topics. One should be free in a
political theory course to explain the Nazi's position; however, one
should not be free to use one?s classroom as a platform for advocating
one?s own views, be it for or against Nazism. This is not a matter of
academic freedom but of professional competence and ethics.
Suppose one decided to tell jokes in class all day long?to take a bit of
an extreme case for illustrative purposes?instead of covering the topic
one is supposed to be teaching. Now if they fire such a person or issue a
reprimand, that's perfectly OK. The matter has nothing to do with academic
freedom. Now suppose one writes a book of jokes under one?s real name, one
that is quite offensive to some people. This an academician ought to be
free to do without any sanctions applied to by one?s academic employer.
That's academic freedom.
However, suppose one writes a book in the field of history and it gets
published and in it one claims that Abraham Lincoln was president of the
United States of America in 1984. This, is gross incompetence and one
should get one?s comeuppance for it?it has nothing to do with academic
freedom. And it need not be so gross, in fact?demonstrably bad historical
scholarship qualifies as incompetence in the field and isn?t protected by
academic freedom.
The biggest problem, of course, is that universities are funded with
money taken in taxes from all citizens, many of whom don?t believe in
granting academic freedom to people with what they regard as highly
objectionable viewpoints. So these victims of such taxation will agitate,
often vigorously, against defending the academic freedom of those
professors and scholars of whom they disapprove. And they are right?not
because academic freedom is a bad idea but because having them fund such
scholars against their will is a bad idea.
Essay from Think on Why Liberty is needed for Morality
Why Liberty is Necessary for Morality*
Tibor R. Machan
It is often taken to be a feature of a free society that it rests on the
belief that no one can tell what is morally right or wrong. That is
supposed to be why people are not imposed upon with strictures the
government forces them to follow. If, however, we could determine what is
right and wrong, then, the idea follows, government could just proceed to
force everyone to behave right.
A sad result of so explaining the merits of a free society is that it
begins to look like liberty is the enemy of morality. And it is just this
way that a good many people have understood the Western tradition of
liberalism. They have come to believe that if you accept the Western idea
of a free society, you must not care about morality at all. Indeed,
arguably a great many enemies of the West hold such a view. Love the
West, reject morality; love morality, reject the West.
Yet this is completely wrong. In point of fact precisely the opposite is
true. The reason the Western idea of a free society makes a great deal of
sense is that unless people make their moral choices and act on them
freely, there cannot be anything morally praiseworthy in what they do.
A person who does the right thing because it is commanded, forced upon
him, isn?t acting morally. Such a person is acting from fear, not the
conviction that what he is doing is morally right. Indeed, it is only in
substantially free societies that men and women can be morally good. If
one is regimented to praise Allah or God or give to the poor or defend
one?s country, there is absolutely nothing praiseworthy about that. One
is then being a mere puppet, certainly not a morally responsible human
agent.
Of course, there have been some who have defended the individual?s right
to liberty on the ground that no one can tell what is right or wrong.
Some very famous people have done this. Yet their defense of human
liberty is a weak, ineffectual one. That?s because if one cannot tell
what is right or wrong, one cannot tell whether violating someone?s right
to liberty is right or wrong. So, a moral skeptic simply has no
consistent reason to complain if the right to liberty is violated.
Those, however, who insist that they do know right from wrong have no
justification for opposing the free society. For adult men and women to
be morally praiseworthy ? or, alternatively, blameworthy ? for something
they do, they have to do it freely, of their own initiative, not because
they are coerced to do it.
No one is morally improved by being forced to be generous, just, kind,
courageous, prudent, honest, charitable, moderate, humble or the like.
The paternalistic motivations behind many governmental measures that
ostensibly aim to make people good are hopelessly misguided.
I would even question the motivation of those who promote coercive
governmental measures aimed to reduce vice and increase virtue ? since
coercion kills personal responsibility, and does this very obviously, it
is more likely that advocates of coercively getting people to be good are
power seekers, not promoters of morality at all. They merely use morality
as an excuse to rule other people. In the name of such allegedly good
intentions, they perpetrate the most dehumanizing deed toward people;
namely, they promote robbing them of their liberty to choose.
Of course, the laws of a free society cannot guaranteed that the
citizenry will choose the right way to act. That is something in the
hands of the citizens themselves and their fellow citizens, friends,
community leaders, teachers, writers, and others who urge us all to do
what?s right, not officers of the law whose task is to keep the peace, not
to make people good! But in a free society, where no one is authorized to
dump the results of his or her misdeeds on others' lives, people are more
encouraged to do the right thing than in societies where personal
responsibility is missing because of the lack of individual liberty. So,
critics of the free society who want more emphasis on morality than on
liberty would do better if they first stood up to defend liberty. From
that the prospects for genuine, freely chosen morality are far greater
than they are wherever men and women aren?t free.
*This essay appeared in the Royal Institute of Philosophy publication
Think (Spring 2005).
Tibor R. Machan
It is often taken to be a feature of a free society that it rests on the
belief that no one can tell what is morally right or wrong. That is
supposed to be why people are not imposed upon with strictures the
government forces them to follow. If, however, we could determine what is
right and wrong, then, the idea follows, government could just proceed to
force everyone to behave right.
A sad result of so explaining the merits of a free society is that it
begins to look like liberty is the enemy of morality. And it is just this
way that a good many people have understood the Western tradition of
liberalism. They have come to believe that if you accept the Western idea
of a free society, you must not care about morality at all. Indeed,
arguably a great many enemies of the West hold such a view. Love the
West, reject morality; love morality, reject the West.
Yet this is completely wrong. In point of fact precisely the opposite is
true. The reason the Western idea of a free society makes a great deal of
sense is that unless people make their moral choices and act on them
freely, there cannot be anything morally praiseworthy in what they do.
A person who does the right thing because it is commanded, forced upon
him, isn?t acting morally. Such a person is acting from fear, not the
conviction that what he is doing is morally right. Indeed, it is only in
substantially free societies that men and women can be morally good. If
one is regimented to praise Allah or God or give to the poor or defend
one?s country, there is absolutely nothing praiseworthy about that. One
is then being a mere puppet, certainly not a morally responsible human
agent.
Of course, there have been some who have defended the individual?s right
to liberty on the ground that no one can tell what is right or wrong.
Some very famous people have done this. Yet their defense of human
liberty is a weak, ineffectual one. That?s because if one cannot tell
what is right or wrong, one cannot tell whether violating someone?s right
to liberty is right or wrong. So, a moral skeptic simply has no
consistent reason to complain if the right to liberty is violated.
Those, however, who insist that they do know right from wrong have no
justification for opposing the free society. For adult men and women to
be morally praiseworthy ? or, alternatively, blameworthy ? for something
they do, they have to do it freely, of their own initiative, not because
they are coerced to do it.
No one is morally improved by being forced to be generous, just, kind,
courageous, prudent, honest, charitable, moderate, humble or the like.
The paternalistic motivations behind many governmental measures that
ostensibly aim to make people good are hopelessly misguided.
I would even question the motivation of those who promote coercive
governmental measures aimed to reduce vice and increase virtue ? since
coercion kills personal responsibility, and does this very obviously, it
is more likely that advocates of coercively getting people to be good are
power seekers, not promoters of morality at all. They merely use morality
as an excuse to rule other people. In the name of such allegedly good
intentions, they perpetrate the most dehumanizing deed toward people;
namely, they promote robbing them of their liberty to choose.
Of course, the laws of a free society cannot guaranteed that the
citizenry will choose the right way to act. That is something in the
hands of the citizens themselves and their fellow citizens, friends,
community leaders, teachers, writers, and others who urge us all to do
what?s right, not officers of the law whose task is to keep the peace, not
to make people good! But in a free society, where no one is authorized to
dump the results of his or her misdeeds on others' lives, people are more
encouraged to do the right thing than in societies where personal
responsibility is missing because of the lack of individual liberty. So,
critics of the free society who want more emphasis on morality than on
liberty would do better if they first stood up to defend liberty. From
that the prospects for genuine, freely chosen morality are far greater
than they are wherever men and women aren?t free.
*This essay appeared in the Royal Institute of Philosophy publication
Think (Spring 2005).
Monday, February 07, 2005
Column on Newspeak
Newspeak Anyone?
Tibor R. Machan
George Orwell was a brilliant political novelists?Animal Farm and 1984
are his classics?and, both in his fictional and non-fictional writings,
made keen note of the phenomenon of language corruption. In 1984 he even
introduced the fictional dictionary of Newspeak. Among other concepts that
were tortured to death in this book, produced by the ruling totalitarian
regime, were, of course, ?liberty? and ?freedom.? In Newspeak these
concepts meant exactly their opposites, slavery. And there were many other
cases of deliberate distortion which the fictional regime perpetrated so
as to keep the population confused and conceptually disarmed.
In fact, of course, the phenomenon of such corruption of language is by
no means only fictional, of which Orwell was well aware and to which he
meant to alert us all. But neither is such distortion mostly deliberate,
as it was in 1984. In many cases?as in the recent essay by Professor of
History David Hackett Fisher of Brandeis University, penned, you might
have guessed it, for The New York Times (February 7, 2005)?the corruption
of language is carried out nearly unselfconsciously. Professor Fisher
achieves his obfuscation of the concepts of ?liberty? and ?freedom? not by
insisting that they mean their very opposite but by conflating them with a
great variety of their different senses. And his motivation seems to be
the sentiment, ?Why don?t we all just get along?? Let me explain.
Concepts, of course, evolve. They are mental tools by which human beings
identify and navigate reality. They do not spring into full awareness at
once but must be formed, often slowly and sometimes over several
generations. Take the modern scientific concept ?atom.? It took centuries
to get it formed and shaped so it now has a pretty clear, unambiguous,
comprehensive, and useful (though never final) meaning in particle
physics.
Value laden?moral, ethical, political, aesthetic?concepts are especially
troublesome. They are always being contested. Once a concept with
implications for values succeeds and gains prominence, most people with
agendas in the areas of morality and politics want to conscript it to
their own purposes.
Classical liberals, over the last several centuries, have formulated
conceptions of liberty and freedom such that they have come to mean, in
their most consistent renditions, individual independence from the
oppression of others, including the government or state. Even the family
doesn?t own a person, not once he or she has reached maturity?everyone has
the right to liberty, period.
There are some other senses in which the concepts ?liberty? and ?freedom?
are used, of course, coming from different contexts and different
traditions. Being free of a headache for someone with such pain isn?t what
being free of a master is for a slave, although there is a similarity.
Being free from governmental or criminal intrusion isn?t the same as being
free to obtain food, to fly to Paris or to purchase a Rolls Royce. But,
again, there is a similarity.
In Western political history the big breakthrough came when classical
liberals identified the human individual as having the right to liberty.
This took centuries of development but with John Locke and other such
liberals it emerged as a solid, coherent idea. Every adult is sovereign,
self-ruling, not a subject of others? will, be these others neighbors,
family, bureaucrats, a monarch, the majority, or whoever.
Professor Fisher, however, wants to assimilate all these often mutually
exclusive ideas of liberty and freedom, so that every tradition?including
those actually quite antithetical to individual liberty?in which the words
have appeared is pacified. He insists on being inclusive and
multicultural.
By attempting this, however, he perpetrates the corruption of the
coherent classical liberal idea, the one that has in fact served to
liberate millions of people from the oppression of their fellows (whether
the oppression is tyrannical or paternalistic, whether from coercive
governments or authoritarian families).
There will simply never be any value laden concepts that will yield to
this effort of happy assimilation. Some will always find your or my or
someone else?s conception of liberty, freedom, justice, goodness, or
equality displeasing. There is no escaping having to take a stand. And the
stand that succeeds is the one that provides the most comprehensive,
consistent, clear, and unambiguous version of the relevant concept.
By trying to please everyone with his idea of liberty and freedom,
Professor Fisher, most likely inadvertently, undermines the work that
these concepts are supposed to do for human beings, namely, help identify
and cope with a vital aspect of human reality.
Tibor R. Machan
George Orwell was a brilliant political novelists?Animal Farm and 1984
are his classics?and, both in his fictional and non-fictional writings,
made keen note of the phenomenon of language corruption. In 1984 he even
introduced the fictional dictionary of Newspeak. Among other concepts that
were tortured to death in this book, produced by the ruling totalitarian
regime, were, of course, ?liberty? and ?freedom.? In Newspeak these
concepts meant exactly their opposites, slavery. And there were many other
cases of deliberate distortion which the fictional regime perpetrated so
as to keep the population confused and conceptually disarmed.
In fact, of course, the phenomenon of such corruption of language is by
no means only fictional, of which Orwell was well aware and to which he
meant to alert us all. But neither is such distortion mostly deliberate,
as it was in 1984. In many cases?as in the recent essay by Professor of
History David Hackett Fisher of Brandeis University, penned, you might
have guessed it, for The New York Times (February 7, 2005)?the corruption
of language is carried out nearly unselfconsciously. Professor Fisher
achieves his obfuscation of the concepts of ?liberty? and ?freedom? not by
insisting that they mean their very opposite but by conflating them with a
great variety of their different senses. And his motivation seems to be
the sentiment, ?Why don?t we all just get along?? Let me explain.
Concepts, of course, evolve. They are mental tools by which human beings
identify and navigate reality. They do not spring into full awareness at
once but must be formed, often slowly and sometimes over several
generations. Take the modern scientific concept ?atom.? It took centuries
to get it formed and shaped so it now has a pretty clear, unambiguous,
comprehensive, and useful (though never final) meaning in particle
physics.
Value laden?moral, ethical, political, aesthetic?concepts are especially
troublesome. They are always being contested. Once a concept with
implications for values succeeds and gains prominence, most people with
agendas in the areas of morality and politics want to conscript it to
their own purposes.
Classical liberals, over the last several centuries, have formulated
conceptions of liberty and freedom such that they have come to mean, in
their most consistent renditions, individual independence from the
oppression of others, including the government or state. Even the family
doesn?t own a person, not once he or she has reached maturity?everyone has
the right to liberty, period.
There are some other senses in which the concepts ?liberty? and ?freedom?
are used, of course, coming from different contexts and different
traditions. Being free of a headache for someone with such pain isn?t what
being free of a master is for a slave, although there is a similarity.
Being free from governmental or criminal intrusion isn?t the same as being
free to obtain food, to fly to Paris or to purchase a Rolls Royce. But,
again, there is a similarity.
In Western political history the big breakthrough came when classical
liberals identified the human individual as having the right to liberty.
This took centuries of development but with John Locke and other such
liberals it emerged as a solid, coherent idea. Every adult is sovereign,
self-ruling, not a subject of others? will, be these others neighbors,
family, bureaucrats, a monarch, the majority, or whoever.
Professor Fisher, however, wants to assimilate all these often mutually
exclusive ideas of liberty and freedom, so that every tradition?including
those actually quite antithetical to individual liberty?in which the words
have appeared is pacified. He insists on being inclusive and
multicultural.
By attempting this, however, he perpetrates the corruption of the
coherent classical liberal idea, the one that has in fact served to
liberate millions of people from the oppression of their fellows (whether
the oppression is tyrannical or paternalistic, whether from coercive
governments or authoritarian families).
There will simply never be any value laden concepts that will yield to
this effort of happy assimilation. Some will always find your or my or
someone else?s conception of liberty, freedom, justice, goodness, or
equality displeasing. There is no escaping having to take a stand. And the
stand that succeeds is the one that provides the most comprehensive,
consistent, clear, and unambiguous version of the relevant concept.
By trying to please everyone with his idea of liberty and freedom,
Professor Fisher, most likely inadvertently, undermines the work that
these concepts are supposed to do for human beings, namely, help identify
and cope with a vital aspect of human reality.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Column on Why Government isn't Superior
Why Governments are not Superior
Tibor R. Machan
In my unwavering efforts to place politics in proper perspective?arguing
that it has a limited scope in human life, just as does medicine,
athletics or entertainment and shouldn?t be construed as encompassing
everything we care about?I have prompted even more unwavering efforts to
rebuff my arguments. For various reason a great many quite intelligent and
articulate people insist upon viewing government is special. Its specialty
seems to them to be nearly God-like?governments are the best solution to
everything.
Most recently I had penned a short column lamenting the reliance upon
government in cases of disasters, from the relatively minor ones like
those of the mudslides in California?s La Conchita region in Ventura
County, to the cataclysmic ones such as the late December 2004 tsunami in
Southeast Asia. I had made it the point of my column to discourage people
from considering government the solution to these natural disasters and
chided them for depending on being bailed out by government when they take
the risk to tempt such disasters by living near regions where they are
likely to hit.
At this point in human history governments are still viewed as God-like
by too many people. They have inherited this perspective from the
thousands of years in which Caesars, Pharaohs, Tsars, kings, Khans and
similar violent persons and their entourage have ruled the globe (with the
rest regarded to be their subjects and not the sovereign citizens they
really ought to be). Such habits are extremely difficult to shake,
especially when vast vested interest groups are lobbying everywhere to
keep the myth going that these sorts of folks have it over us in nearly
every aspect of human life.
I received several responses to my missive, even though I made clear that
my own expectations are moderate: no one is going to give up government
interference just yet when disasters happen. I even compared how
governments in some regions of the world have done better at coping with
them than have others?for example, the in the Pacific Rim governments have
created fairly effective warning systems, while in the Indian Ocean none
exist.
Alas, without providing a blue print for how the private sector might
cope with such matters, I was chided good and hard. For it isn?t enough
for true believers in the superiority of men and women of government to
have confidence and trust in free men and women. No, you must produce the
exact formulae for how such free men and women will address problems,
otherwise only government, with its one distinctive tool of brute force
(for what is what the police and military deliver?and should?when real
criminal conduct or aggression from abroad need to be dealt with), can be
relied on to act right.
But this is the trouble, exactly. Not all problems are known in great
enough detail to produce blue prints for coping with them. What needs to
be understood and isn?t often enough is that free men and women can think
for themselves, even in times of crises (and maybe especially then), so
they can be relied upon to cope quite well. Because they aren?t the force
wielders in society, their solutions are likely to involve forging
agreements, dealing with others peacefully, using ingenuity instead of
what governments are likely to deploy, namely forcing citizens to behave
in various ways, and taking citizens? belongings and ?redistributing? them
as the men and women in government judge best.
It will take some time, maybe centuries, before this bad habit of
trusting government to do everything will abate, if it ever will. Sadly,
people often invoke the shortcut of suing coercion to solve even their
personal problems?just think of all the spouse beating, brutalizing of
children, fist fighting, and other violence they resort to?so it is
probably utopian to hope that they will reject the government
pseudo-solutions to problems. But it is worth fighting toward that goal,
nonetheless.
Tibor R. Machan
In my unwavering efforts to place politics in proper perspective?arguing
that it has a limited scope in human life, just as does medicine,
athletics or entertainment and shouldn?t be construed as encompassing
everything we care about?I have prompted even more unwavering efforts to
rebuff my arguments. For various reason a great many quite intelligent and
articulate people insist upon viewing government is special. Its specialty
seems to them to be nearly God-like?governments are the best solution to
everything.
Most recently I had penned a short column lamenting the reliance upon
government in cases of disasters, from the relatively minor ones like
those of the mudslides in California?s La Conchita region in Ventura
County, to the cataclysmic ones such as the late December 2004 tsunami in
Southeast Asia. I had made it the point of my column to discourage people
from considering government the solution to these natural disasters and
chided them for depending on being bailed out by government when they take
the risk to tempt such disasters by living near regions where they are
likely to hit.
At this point in human history governments are still viewed as God-like
by too many people. They have inherited this perspective from the
thousands of years in which Caesars, Pharaohs, Tsars, kings, Khans and
similar violent persons and their entourage have ruled the globe (with the
rest regarded to be their subjects and not the sovereign citizens they
really ought to be). Such habits are extremely difficult to shake,
especially when vast vested interest groups are lobbying everywhere to
keep the myth going that these sorts of folks have it over us in nearly
every aspect of human life.
I received several responses to my missive, even though I made clear that
my own expectations are moderate: no one is going to give up government
interference just yet when disasters happen. I even compared how
governments in some regions of the world have done better at coping with
them than have others?for example, the in the Pacific Rim governments have
created fairly effective warning systems, while in the Indian Ocean none
exist.
Alas, without providing a blue print for how the private sector might
cope with such matters, I was chided good and hard. For it isn?t enough
for true believers in the superiority of men and women of government to
have confidence and trust in free men and women. No, you must produce the
exact formulae for how such free men and women will address problems,
otherwise only government, with its one distinctive tool of brute force
(for what is what the police and military deliver?and should?when real
criminal conduct or aggression from abroad need to be dealt with), can be
relied on to act right.
But this is the trouble, exactly. Not all problems are known in great
enough detail to produce blue prints for coping with them. What needs to
be understood and isn?t often enough is that free men and women can think
for themselves, even in times of crises (and maybe especially then), so
they can be relied upon to cope quite well. Because they aren?t the force
wielders in society, their solutions are likely to involve forging
agreements, dealing with others peacefully, using ingenuity instead of
what governments are likely to deploy, namely forcing citizens to behave
in various ways, and taking citizens? belongings and ?redistributing? them
as the men and women in government judge best.
It will take some time, maybe centuries, before this bad habit of
trusting government to do everything will abate, if it ever will. Sadly,
people often invoke the shortcut of suing coercion to solve even their
personal problems?just think of all the spouse beating, brutalizing of
children, fist fighting, and other violence they resort to?so it is
probably utopian to hope that they will reject the government
pseudo-solutions to problems. But it is worth fighting toward that goal,
nonetheless.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Column on Imperial Government
Imperial Government Foibles
Tibor R. Machan
As the Declaration of Independence points out, all human beings are
created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness (among others). This idea, it shouldn?t have to be
pointed out but often does, is held to be self-evident for purposes of the
Declaration, although it is clearly not self-evident because much ink
needs to be spilled to establish it. John Locke, for example, wrote a
famous book in 1690, Second Treatise of Civil Government, in which he does
just that and the Founders knew of this work well and good, so they had no
illusion about our rights needing no support. (It is mostly those who
scoff at the idea of basic rights who keep saying that the Founders
thought it was ?self-evident,? ripping the notion out of context so as to
proceed with their disdainful treatment of it.)
Recently some people have been putting forth the view that because every
human being has basic rights, the government of the United States of
America has no special obligation to its citizens but must extend its
services to all alike. Michael Ignatieff ?s book, The lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Penguin, 2004), includes this claim,
which is why the title expresses its author?s frustration with how
terrorism ought to be fought by the American government. (Ignatieff is a
very prominent scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University, mainly working in the discipline of human rights
studies.)
This position has some credibility, of course. If all persons have the
basic rights the American Founders made note of, that surely means that no
one may have these rights violated, never mind where they life, when they
live, or who they are. They are, as the United Nations Charter makes
clear, universal!
Yet something is amiss in this analysis. Merely because no one may
violate the rights of anyone to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, or indeed any other rights derived from these?as the US
Constitution makes clear in the Ninth Amendment?it does not follow that a
country?s government has the same obligations to all persons as it has to
the citizens of that country.
The reason for this is that properly understood a government is
instituted and maintained by the citizenry for the purpose of having the
rights protected for the citizenry, not for others. Consider a similar but
simpler way of seeing the matter. I have the right of self-defense, as you
do and does anyone else. But when I hire a body guard to carry out this
defense?when I delegate the exercise of this right to such a person?there
is no obligation for this person to defend everyone else?s right to life,
liberty, etc.
This is a pretty straightforward notion here, so why do people like
Ignatieff get it wrong? Because they have embraced a notion of rights
entirely alien to that of the American founders, namely, positive rights
or entitlements. Not violating those rights means not only not attacking
people but delivering to them various goods and services.
When you believe government must deliver to people various goods and
services, not simply the protection of individual rights?when the
government?s obligation isn?t constrained by the contract into which it
has entered with the citizenry?then government turns into the Welfare
State. It is seen, now, as a provider to the needy, to all who lack
something important in their lives. In such a picture, why should
governments be limited to protecting the rights of their citizens? After
all, other people around the globe are far more needy than American
citizens, on average, so if this kind of do-goodism is what governments
are all about, there are hundreds of millions around the world who can use
it better than American citizens.
Of course, simple economics comes in here right away, so government will
be limited by that. However, if it has this obligation to redistribute
wealth, then why confine it to ?our citizenry? instead of, say, the people
of Bangladesh or Burundi? No reason.
And while they are at regarding all those citizens as entitled to be fed,
clothed, and medically treated, why not throw in military defense
provisions as well? Out of that thinking grows the idea of the imperial
American government, obligated to protect not only its citizenry but give
welfare and defense to everyone else.
I am convinced that the Founders would find this quite absurd. Just read
the Declaration and check it out for yourself.
Tibor R. Machan
As the Declaration of Independence points out, all human beings are
created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness (among others). This idea, it shouldn?t have to be
pointed out but often does, is held to be self-evident for purposes of the
Declaration, although it is clearly not self-evident because much ink
needs to be spilled to establish it. John Locke, for example, wrote a
famous book in 1690, Second Treatise of Civil Government, in which he does
just that and the Founders knew of this work well and good, so they had no
illusion about our rights needing no support. (It is mostly those who
scoff at the idea of basic rights who keep saying that the Founders
thought it was ?self-evident,? ripping the notion out of context so as to
proceed with their disdainful treatment of it.)
Recently some people have been putting forth the view that because every
human being has basic rights, the government of the United States of
America has no special obligation to its citizens but must extend its
services to all alike. Michael Ignatieff ?s book, The lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Penguin, 2004), includes this claim,
which is why the title expresses its author?s frustration with how
terrorism ought to be fought by the American government. (Ignatieff is a
very prominent scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University, mainly working in the discipline of human rights
studies.)
This position has some credibility, of course. If all persons have the
basic rights the American Founders made note of, that surely means that no
one may have these rights violated, never mind where they life, when they
live, or who they are. They are, as the United Nations Charter makes
clear, universal!
Yet something is amiss in this analysis. Merely because no one may
violate the rights of anyone to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, or indeed any other rights derived from these?as the US
Constitution makes clear in the Ninth Amendment?it does not follow that a
country?s government has the same obligations to all persons as it has to
the citizens of that country.
The reason for this is that properly understood a government is
instituted and maintained by the citizenry for the purpose of having the
rights protected for the citizenry, not for others. Consider a similar but
simpler way of seeing the matter. I have the right of self-defense, as you
do and does anyone else. But when I hire a body guard to carry out this
defense?when I delegate the exercise of this right to such a person?there
is no obligation for this person to defend everyone else?s right to life,
liberty, etc.
This is a pretty straightforward notion here, so why do people like
Ignatieff get it wrong? Because they have embraced a notion of rights
entirely alien to that of the American founders, namely, positive rights
or entitlements. Not violating those rights means not only not attacking
people but delivering to them various goods and services.
When you believe government must deliver to people various goods and
services, not simply the protection of individual rights?when the
government?s obligation isn?t constrained by the contract into which it
has entered with the citizenry?then government turns into the Welfare
State. It is seen, now, as a provider to the needy, to all who lack
something important in their lives. In such a picture, why should
governments be limited to protecting the rights of their citizens? After
all, other people around the globe are far more needy than American
citizens, on average, so if this kind of do-goodism is what governments
are all about, there are hundreds of millions around the world who can use
it better than American citizens.
Of course, simple economics comes in here right away, so government will
be limited by that. However, if it has this obligation to redistribute
wealth, then why confine it to ?our citizenry? instead of, say, the people
of Bangladesh or Burundi? No reason.
And while they are at regarding all those citizens as entitled to be fed,
clothed, and medically treated, why not throw in military defense
provisions as well? Out of that thinking grows the idea of the imperial
American government, obligated to protect not only its citizenry but give
welfare and defense to everyone else.
I am convinced that the Founders would find this quite absurd. Just read
the Declaration and check it out for yourself.
Column on Dissenting from Dissidents
A Dissident Dissents
Tibor R. Machan
I am a proud dissident about the Iraqi war. My view has been that
America?s military has no business being there since America wasn?t
attacked or even seriously threatened by Iraq?s government.
Nonetheless I am very annoyed by how so many opponents of this war keep
harping on how the American and the new Iraqi police conduct themselves.
As if Saddam?s bunch had been a flock of angels and as if the insurgents
were fighting for a noble cause.
On Saturday morning, February 5, The New York Times reported on how the
new Iraqi police has turned the tables on terrorists by showing videos of
some of them squirming with obvious cowardice when caught, along with
other video?s showing them brazenly brutalizing kidnapped victims, ready
to behead them.
No sooner does The Times?s reporter Christine Hauser, conclude with the
essentials of her report, she inserts the following passage:
The broadcast of such videos raises questions about whether they violate
legal or treaty obligations about the way opposing fighters are
interrogate and how their confessions are made public.
But she gives not a shred of evidence that such questions are being raised
by any sane person or that they have any legal basis at all. She just
sticks in this passage on her own, groundlessly.
One is perhaps not going far out on a limb to suspect that this passage
is a way for an opinionated journalist to once again indict not the
bastards who are beheading kidnapped victims?without a trial, without a
scintilla of due process?but the new Iraqi (American supported and
trained) police. Oh, give me a break.
And then there is this righteous outcry about Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis?s
comment that ?It?s fun to shoot some people,? made about the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, as well as the broadcast of complaints from various
leaders of special ethnic interest groups belly aching about it.
Well, actually, it is ?fun? to shoot some people?and all of us who have
ever waited through an hour and a half movie, or read some 300 pages of a
thriller, to the point when the bad guys finally get their comeuppance
know this perfectly well. Some people, the ones who ruthlessly sacrifice
the lives of completely innocent children and civilians so as to express
their anger about something?terrorists and other brutalizes?need to get
creamed and it probably is fun, meaning, satisfying, to do the shooting of
such folks.
How often have we witnessed at least the eventual fictional delivery of
just deserts from good guys aimed at vicious slaver holders, murderers,
Nazis, and a sundry villains? Why did we breath sighs of relief once they
got theirs good and hard? Why was it a pleasure to walk away from a movie
or close the covers of a book once this has happened to such people?
Because it is a matter of justice?of a form of moral relief?to have such
things happen, that is why. The people who do that to those who haven?t
deserved any such brutality, mostly venting their wild anger recklessly at
innocent folks, need to be blasted away now and then, when they keep
coming and coming and that is the only way to fend them off. And then
those who get to accomplish such a worthwhile feat may well feel some joy
in their hearts because it can indeed be ?fun? to contribute to the
ridding of the world of such scum.
The outrage at Lt. Gen. Mattis?s comment is outright paradoxical, as
well. On the one hand it suggests that there are no morally bad people at
all and thus no joy may be experienced when one has helped rid the world
of some of the worst such people, especially in the face of their
relentless violent onslaught. On the other hand the outrage suggests that
the likes of Lt. Gen. Mattis are evil people, deserving of scolding and
rebuff.
Well, you cannot have it both ways. Either there are evil folks and some
so evil as to deserve killing under certain circumstances, or there are
none, in which case those who have fun killing others simply need to be
cured?they too aren?t doing anything morally wrong.
Indeed, this lopsided moralizing betrays the practically obsessive
anti-Americanism of too many people. Only Americans ever do things
wrong?the rest need to be defended at all cost no matter how vicious them
are. Balderdash.
Tibor R. Machan
I am a proud dissident about the Iraqi war. My view has been that
America?s military has no business being there since America wasn?t
attacked or even seriously threatened by Iraq?s government.
Nonetheless I am very annoyed by how so many opponents of this war keep
harping on how the American and the new Iraqi police conduct themselves.
As if Saddam?s bunch had been a flock of angels and as if the insurgents
were fighting for a noble cause.
On Saturday morning, February 5, The New York Times reported on how the
new Iraqi police has turned the tables on terrorists by showing videos of
some of them squirming with obvious cowardice when caught, along with
other video?s showing them brazenly brutalizing kidnapped victims, ready
to behead them.
No sooner does The Times?s reporter Christine Hauser, conclude with the
essentials of her report, she inserts the following passage:
The broadcast of such videos raises questions about whether they violate
legal or treaty obligations about the way opposing fighters are
interrogate and how their confessions are made public.
But she gives not a shred of evidence that such questions are being raised
by any sane person or that they have any legal basis at all. She just
sticks in this passage on her own, groundlessly.
One is perhaps not going far out on a limb to suspect that this passage
is a way for an opinionated journalist to once again indict not the
bastards who are beheading kidnapped victims?without a trial, without a
scintilla of due process?but the new Iraqi (American supported and
trained) police. Oh, give me a break.
And then there is this righteous outcry about Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis?s
comment that ?It?s fun to shoot some people,? made about the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, as well as the broadcast of complaints from various
leaders of special ethnic interest groups belly aching about it.
Well, actually, it is ?fun? to shoot some people?and all of us who have
ever waited through an hour and a half movie, or read some 300 pages of a
thriller, to the point when the bad guys finally get their comeuppance
know this perfectly well. Some people, the ones who ruthlessly sacrifice
the lives of completely innocent children and civilians so as to express
their anger about something?terrorists and other brutalizes?need to get
creamed and it probably is fun, meaning, satisfying, to do the shooting of
such folks.
How often have we witnessed at least the eventual fictional delivery of
just deserts from good guys aimed at vicious slaver holders, murderers,
Nazis, and a sundry villains? Why did we breath sighs of relief once they
got theirs good and hard? Why was it a pleasure to walk away from a movie
or close the covers of a book once this has happened to such people?
Because it is a matter of justice?of a form of moral relief?to have such
things happen, that is why. The people who do that to those who haven?t
deserved any such brutality, mostly venting their wild anger recklessly at
innocent folks, need to be blasted away now and then, when they keep
coming and coming and that is the only way to fend them off. And then
those who get to accomplish such a worthwhile feat may well feel some joy
in their hearts because it can indeed be ?fun? to contribute to the
ridding of the world of such scum.
The outrage at Lt. Gen. Mattis?s comment is outright paradoxical, as
well. On the one hand it suggests that there are no morally bad people at
all and thus no joy may be experienced when one has helped rid the world
of some of the worst such people, especially in the face of their
relentless violent onslaught. On the other hand the outrage suggests that
the likes of Lt. Gen. Mattis are evil people, deserving of scolding and
rebuff.
Well, you cannot have it both ways. Either there are evil folks and some
so evil as to deserve killing under certain circumstances, or there are
none, in which case those who have fun killing others simply need to be
cured?they too aren?t doing anything morally wrong.
Indeed, this lopsided moralizing betrays the practically obsessive
anti-Americanism of too many people. Only Americans ever do things
wrong?the rest need to be defended at all cost no matter how vicious them
are. Balderdash.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Column on American vs. simple conservatism
Conservative Relativism
Tibor R. Machan
Back in my undergraduate days our college was visited by William F.
Buckley Jr., the then rising erudite journalistic leader of the budding
post war conservative movement. His main theme on this occasion was the
importance of various fundamental truths, especially those of human
community life. He thought and argued that there really are some such
truths, among them those the American founders identified in the
Declaration of Independence.
Back then the operative word in ?American Conservatism? was ?American.?
Today it seems more and more to be ?Conservatism.? An American
conservative embraces certain truths and wishes to have these preserved in
public life, namely, politics?as well as private, namely, ethics. American
Conservatism was unique in that there wasn?t merely the imperative to look
back and learn from the past but to embrace a particularly unique past,
namely, one that laid out for us certain basic principles of community
life.
It is this American Conservatism that helped get rid of slavery by
recalling unashamedly that that institution violated America?s founding
principle, namely, that all of us are created equal, without exception.
When Abraham Lincoln wanted to find a principle on which to base his
emancipation proclamation, he didn?t have to look to Europe or Asia of
Africa?he could find it right here in America?s founding document. It was
a document of basic principles of community life and American
conservatives gladly embraced it and worked to preserve its substance.
Now things have changed. Conservatism has reverted in America to what it
used to be in pre-revolutionary times when a conservative would simply
embrace, rather incoherently, whatever had been around for a long time,
wherever it came from, and whatever substance it contained. This is the
conservatism of Europe and of old and today?s Russia, for example.
Conservatives of this stripe are those who champion only a method, never
mind substance. As their English guru Edmund Burke had taught them,
?...Men have no right to risk the very existence of their nation and their
civilization upon experiments in morals and politics; for each man's
private capital of intelligence is petty; it is only when a man draws upon
the bank and capital of the ages, the wisdom of our ancestors, that he can
act wisely.? This sentiment applies to us all, including the American
Founders, so an old fashioned, as opposed to American, conservative has no
use for the principles that those founders identified since their, like
everyone else?s, ?private capital of intelligence is petty.?
So how does this play out in our contemporary political world? George W.
Bush and his advisers may now and then make vague references for freedom
but they do not mean by it what the American Founders meant, namely,
making sure that all grown men and women get to govern their own lives,
enjoy sovereignty, with the government functioning as the protector of
this sovereignty. No, Mr. Bush?s conservatism is one in which whatever
happens to be in the past, whatever the ?bank and capital of the ages, the
wisdom of our ancestors? instructs, must be followed. And by now this
includes, mainly, the massive welfare state built for us by the likes of
Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
In this type of conservatism the wisdom of the American founders has lost
out to the far more traditional ?wisdom of our ancestors,? from a much
older history, the wisdom that trust nearly everything to the government
or ?the state,? as some political theorists call it. Your and my
?intelligence is petty,? so it must be sacrificed to those who rule, be it
the mob or some elite or a great leader, to the wisdom of those who
supposedly function rather blindly by following the ancients instead of
figuring things out for ourselves.
I must say William F. Buckley Jr.?s version of conservatism was a much
more healthy, principled one when compared to what conservatism has become
in our time?historical relativism (with each era muddling through with its
inherited, flexible ?truths?). It was informed by firm and lasting
principles that those ?arrogant? founding Americans dared to identify in
defiance of the ancient conservatism that is ruining too many countries
now and has ruined in the past.
Tibor R. Machan
Back in my undergraduate days our college was visited by William F.
Buckley Jr., the then rising erudite journalistic leader of the budding
post war conservative movement. His main theme on this occasion was the
importance of various fundamental truths, especially those of human
community life. He thought and argued that there really are some such
truths, among them those the American founders identified in the
Declaration of Independence.
Back then the operative word in ?American Conservatism? was ?American.?
Today it seems more and more to be ?Conservatism.? An American
conservative embraces certain truths and wishes to have these preserved in
public life, namely, politics?as well as private, namely, ethics. American
Conservatism was unique in that there wasn?t merely the imperative to look
back and learn from the past but to embrace a particularly unique past,
namely, one that laid out for us certain basic principles of community
life.
It is this American Conservatism that helped get rid of slavery by
recalling unashamedly that that institution violated America?s founding
principle, namely, that all of us are created equal, without exception.
When Abraham Lincoln wanted to find a principle on which to base his
emancipation proclamation, he didn?t have to look to Europe or Asia of
Africa?he could find it right here in America?s founding document. It was
a document of basic principles of community life and American
conservatives gladly embraced it and worked to preserve its substance.
Now things have changed. Conservatism has reverted in America to what it
used to be in pre-revolutionary times when a conservative would simply
embrace, rather incoherently, whatever had been around for a long time,
wherever it came from, and whatever substance it contained. This is the
conservatism of Europe and of old and today?s Russia, for example.
Conservatives of this stripe are those who champion only a method, never
mind substance. As their English guru Edmund Burke had taught them,
?...Men have no right to risk the very existence of their nation and their
civilization upon experiments in morals and politics; for each man's
private capital of intelligence is petty; it is only when a man draws upon
the bank and capital of the ages, the wisdom of our ancestors, that he can
act wisely.? This sentiment applies to us all, including the American
Founders, so an old fashioned, as opposed to American, conservative has no
use for the principles that those founders identified since their, like
everyone else?s, ?private capital of intelligence is petty.?
So how does this play out in our contemporary political world? George W.
Bush and his advisers may now and then make vague references for freedom
but they do not mean by it what the American Founders meant, namely,
making sure that all grown men and women get to govern their own lives,
enjoy sovereignty, with the government functioning as the protector of
this sovereignty. No, Mr. Bush?s conservatism is one in which whatever
happens to be in the past, whatever the ?bank and capital of the ages, the
wisdom of our ancestors? instructs, must be followed. And by now this
includes, mainly, the massive welfare state built for us by the likes of
Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
In this type of conservatism the wisdom of the American founders has lost
out to the far more traditional ?wisdom of our ancestors,? from a much
older history, the wisdom that trust nearly everything to the government
or ?the state,? as some political theorists call it. Your and my
?intelligence is petty,? so it must be sacrificed to those who rule, be it
the mob or some elite or a great leader, to the wisdom of those who
supposedly function rather blindly by following the ancients instead of
figuring things out for ourselves.
I must say William F. Buckley Jr.?s version of conservatism was a much
more healthy, principled one when compared to what conservatism has become
in our time?historical relativism (with each era muddling through with its
inherited, flexible ?truths?). It was informed by firm and lasting
principles that those ?arrogant? founding Americans dared to identify in
defiance of the ancient conservatism that is ruining too many countries
now and has ruined in the past.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Column on Iraq, democracy & the war (sans typo)
Word from an Anti-War Advocate
Tibor R. Machan
It would be cowardly, I think, not to chime in at this time for those who
opposed President George W. Bush?s war in Iraq, given the apparent success
of the Iraqi elections. So, as an opponent of this war from the outset,
let me chime away for a moment.
Why oppose the war? Because the idea that it amounted to what the
military of a free country should be doing, namely, protecting the rights
of the citizens?in other words, defending the country from
aggressors?simply wasn?t credible. As to the claim that the military of a
free country may invade countries with tyrannical governments, that is
simply not the case. The military has as its proper job to protect the
citizenry, not to embark upon rescue missions around the globe.
It isn?t that such rescue missions are in principle wrong, but they may
not be conducted by the military that already has its job specified. The
reason we have government, as the American founders made clear, is ?to
secure [our] rights,? not to answer the 911 calls of the world?s
oppressed. For that mission some other solution must be found?perhaps the
UN needs to do this job, or maybe various civilian militias need to be
established. But it is wrong to send a military to do this job which is
already employed and thus committed to do another.
Of course, one can do a wrong and yet something good can come of it.
Getting Iraq to be more democratic is undeniably some measure of progress,
even if the full impact cannot yet be evaluated. (A democratic Iraq could
yet also be a tyrannical Iraq, since the ruling majority could be pretty
nasty to the minority. It remains to be seen.)
It isn?t true, however, that this move toward democracy vindicates the
Bush administration that has sent over a thousand American soldiers to
their deaths and a lot more to become severely injured in a war that the
American government should not have undertaken. Volunteers in a free
country sign up so as to be ready to defend their fellow citizens, not to
become the police force of the globe. So these soldiers were treated
badly. (This isn?t altered by the fact that some of them were willing to
fight in Iraq.)
It is difficult to remain principled in the face of all kinds of pressure
and, especially, when one?s fellow contrarians can be a pretty unsavory
lot. Many opponents of this war have rested their opposition on grounds
that are entirely inconsistent with their very own political philosophy.
All the beef about the preemptive nature of Bush?s war from those who have
absolutely no hesitation about violating individual rights for various
?precautionary? purposes?e.g., in the area of environmental policy or
other types of government regulation?belies their supposed outrage with
how the Bush administration has acted vis-Ã -vis Iraq. Nearly everything I
read from such folks against the war in Iraq reeks of hypocrisy and
opportunism.
Never mind. The crucial issue is whether a champion of a fully free
society can back a war that does not involve national defense. And I do
not believe such a person can do so. And since I think such a person is
right?which is to say, such a person holds a reasonable, sensible view of
the proper function of government and, thus, the military?the unsavory
company he or she happens to keep in this particular instance is
irrelevant. (Consider that in defending the right to private property, one
is also defending the exercise of that right for such purposes as racial
discrimination. This does not undermine the justice of defending the right
to private property.)
Of course, the move in the direction of a free society in Iraq is to be
welcomed. That?s so even if it is the fruit of a wrongheaded foreign
policy. But it should not blind us to the fact that going to war in Iraq
was wrong. Liberty is indeed a worthy goal for the US government to
champion and pursue, but not by means that undermines that very goal,
namely, embarking on military aggression, even if it?s against a dictator
like Sadam Hussein.
Tibor R. Machan
It would be cowardly, I think, not to chime in at this time for those who
opposed President George W. Bush?s war in Iraq, given the apparent success
of the Iraqi elections. So, as an opponent of this war from the outset,
let me chime away for a moment.
Why oppose the war? Because the idea that it amounted to what the
military of a free country should be doing, namely, protecting the rights
of the citizens?in other words, defending the country from
aggressors?simply wasn?t credible. As to the claim that the military of a
free country may invade countries with tyrannical governments, that is
simply not the case. The military has as its proper job to protect the
citizenry, not to embark upon rescue missions around the globe.
It isn?t that such rescue missions are in principle wrong, but they may
not be conducted by the military that already has its job specified. The
reason we have government, as the American founders made clear, is ?to
secure [our] rights,? not to answer the 911 calls of the world?s
oppressed. For that mission some other solution must be found?perhaps the
UN needs to do this job, or maybe various civilian militias need to be
established. But it is wrong to send a military to do this job which is
already employed and thus committed to do another.
Of course, one can do a wrong and yet something good can come of it.
Getting Iraq to be more democratic is undeniably some measure of progress,
even if the full impact cannot yet be evaluated. (A democratic Iraq could
yet also be a tyrannical Iraq, since the ruling majority could be pretty
nasty to the minority. It remains to be seen.)
It isn?t true, however, that this move toward democracy vindicates the
Bush administration that has sent over a thousand American soldiers to
their deaths and a lot more to become severely injured in a war that the
American government should not have undertaken. Volunteers in a free
country sign up so as to be ready to defend their fellow citizens, not to
become the police force of the globe. So these soldiers were treated
badly. (This isn?t altered by the fact that some of them were willing to
fight in Iraq.)
It is difficult to remain principled in the face of all kinds of pressure
and, especially, when one?s fellow contrarians can be a pretty unsavory
lot. Many opponents of this war have rested their opposition on grounds
that are entirely inconsistent with their very own political philosophy.
All the beef about the preemptive nature of Bush?s war from those who have
absolutely no hesitation about violating individual rights for various
?precautionary? purposes?e.g., in the area of environmental policy or
other types of government regulation?belies their supposed outrage with
how the Bush administration has acted vis-Ã -vis Iraq. Nearly everything I
read from such folks against the war in Iraq reeks of hypocrisy and
opportunism.
Never mind. The crucial issue is whether a champion of a fully free
society can back a war that does not involve national defense. And I do
not believe such a person can do so. And since I think such a person is
right?which is to say, such a person holds a reasonable, sensible view of
the proper function of government and, thus, the military?the unsavory
company he or she happens to keep in this particular instance is
irrelevant. (Consider that in defending the right to private property, one
is also defending the exercise of that right for such purposes as racial
discrimination. This does not undermine the justice of defending the right
to private property.)
Of course, the move in the direction of a free society in Iraq is to be
welcomed. That?s so even if it is the fruit of a wrongheaded foreign
policy. But it should not blind us to the fact that going to war in Iraq
was wrong. Liberty is indeed a worthy goal for the US government to
champion and pursue, but not by means that undermines that very goal,
namely, embarking on military aggression, even if it?s against a dictator
like Sadam Hussein.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Column on Dumbing Down Dr. Rice
Rice Dumbed Down
Tibor R. Machan
Several years ago I used to attend quite a few presentations at the
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace?a Stanford University
think tank?by such famous and prominent conservative folks as Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, George P. Shultz, Martin Anderson, and Condoleezza Rice.
They were and some still are very active scholars there.
Dr. Rice, of course, was just confirmed as this country?s Secretary of
State. And what seems to be something worth contemplating is just how much
smarter Dr. Rice appeared when she gave her presentations at those Hoover
meetings than ever since she has joined the administration of George W.
Bush. Especially during her recent confirmation hearings, this scholar,
who could communicate complex ideas in excruciatingly accurate yet clear
terms, sounded like she had been deliberately coached to appear to be a
simpleton. I do not recall specifics now but it was remarkable how often
she resorted to slogans, banalities, clichés and such while she was being
questioned.
In her famous exchange with Senator Barbara Boxer, Dr. Rice spoke like a
not very smart high school student who is being scolded by a principal
instead of a serious specialist in this country?s foreign policy affairs.
And this suggests to me that there is now another trend in government that
is rather disturbing.
It seems that administration officials have an increasingly cynical view
of the citizenry. I don?t know if it is an accurate view but there is
little doubt in my mind that we are being addressed as if we all had
minimal IQs. Why would this be the case?
One hypothesis worth considering is that democracy has run completely
amuck and so everything that officials are expected to discuss and decide
on now has to be given very wide public airing. The public is in on it all
because they are doing everything for the public now, not just addressing
a special range of tasks.
Now at first inspection this may appear to be wonderful. The government
is responding to the demand that it disclose all of its deliberations with
the citizenry. No secrecy, nothing hidden. Sounds good.
But there is another possibility. Today it looks like the government is
so thoroughly involved in the lives of its citizens, there are so many
issues that it meddles in, that it needs to sooth the nerves of everyone
as it explains what it is doing and why. Government, in short, is not a
specialized institution, concerned with certain specific tasks. It is,
instead, quite literary becoming totalitarian, in the sense that the total
range of human affairs is now its concern.
In a democracy when this state affairs has been reached, nothing can be
discussed in the special vocabulary appropriate to the subject at hand.
Everything needs to be discussed in baby talk, since that is the only
common language that everyone can be expected to understand.
It looks like Dr. Rice was being told by the spin doctors in the Bush
administration to speak baby talk during her confirmation: ?Do not use big
words, do not use complex ideas, talk simple, dumb it down good. You are
talking to everyone all at once.?
In a system of government where officials have specific tasks?such as law
enforcement, dealing with foreign policy, exploring the way a constitution
ought to be applied to novel circumstances?there would, I believe, be no
fear of using the often complex language in which those matters need to be
discussed. Every specialty, after all, generates some complex
terminology?that?s one reason people go to colleges and universities, so
as to pick up that special language with which the difficult details of a
field are to be thought about and discussed.
But when everyone?s problems become the problems of government,
government officials aren?t allowed to use the special language of a given
concern but are more and more tempted to talk so as to make themselves
understood by just anyone. This, in turn, leads to the simplification of
complicated matters. But that way lies the road to obscuring issues,
resorting to language that lacks nuance and thus hides from us what really
is transpiring in various government departments.
I am not sure I like Dr. Rice dumbed down.
Tibor R. Machan
Several years ago I used to attend quite a few presentations at the
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace?a Stanford University
think tank?by such famous and prominent conservative folks as Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, George P. Shultz, Martin Anderson, and Condoleezza Rice.
They were and some still are very active scholars there.
Dr. Rice, of course, was just confirmed as this country?s Secretary of
State. And what seems to be something worth contemplating is just how much
smarter Dr. Rice appeared when she gave her presentations at those Hoover
meetings than ever since she has joined the administration of George W.
Bush. Especially during her recent confirmation hearings, this scholar,
who could communicate complex ideas in excruciatingly accurate yet clear
terms, sounded like she had been deliberately coached to appear to be a
simpleton. I do not recall specifics now but it was remarkable how often
she resorted to slogans, banalities, clichés and such while she was being
questioned.
In her famous exchange with Senator Barbara Boxer, Dr. Rice spoke like a
not very smart high school student who is being scolded by a principal
instead of a serious specialist in this country?s foreign policy affairs.
And this suggests to me that there is now another trend in government that
is rather disturbing.
It seems that administration officials have an increasingly cynical view
of the citizenry. I don?t know if it is an accurate view but there is
little doubt in my mind that we are being addressed as if we all had
minimal IQs. Why would this be the case?
One hypothesis worth considering is that democracy has run completely
amuck and so everything that officials are expected to discuss and decide
on now has to be given very wide public airing. The public is in on it all
because they are doing everything for the public now, not just addressing
a special range of tasks.
Now at first inspection this may appear to be wonderful. The government
is responding to the demand that it disclose all of its deliberations with
the citizenry. No secrecy, nothing hidden. Sounds good.
But there is another possibility. Today it looks like the government is
so thoroughly involved in the lives of its citizens, there are so many
issues that it meddles in, that it needs to sooth the nerves of everyone
as it explains what it is doing and why. Government, in short, is not a
specialized institution, concerned with certain specific tasks. It is,
instead, quite literary becoming totalitarian, in the sense that the total
range of human affairs is now its concern.
In a democracy when this state affairs has been reached, nothing can be
discussed in the special vocabulary appropriate to the subject at hand.
Everything needs to be discussed in baby talk, since that is the only
common language that everyone can be expected to understand.
It looks like Dr. Rice was being told by the spin doctors in the Bush
administration to speak baby talk during her confirmation: ?Do not use big
words, do not use complex ideas, talk simple, dumb it down good. You are
talking to everyone all at once.?
In a system of government where officials have specific tasks?such as law
enforcement, dealing with foreign policy, exploring the way a constitution
ought to be applied to novel circumstances?there would, I believe, be no
fear of using the often complex language in which those matters need to be
discussed. Every specialty, after all, generates some complex
terminology?that?s one reason people go to colleges and universities, so
as to pick up that special language with which the difficult details of a
field are to be thought about and discussed.
But when everyone?s problems become the problems of government,
government officials aren?t allowed to use the special language of a given
concern but are more and more tempted to talk so as to make themselves
understood by just anyone. This, in turn, leads to the simplification of
complicated matters. But that way lies the road to obscuring issues,
resorting to language that lacks nuance and thus hides from us what really
is transpiring in various government departments.
I am not sure I like Dr. Rice dumbed down.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Column on Johnny Carson, RIP
Johnny Carson, An American Natural
Tibor R. Machan
Johnny Carson, who died recently, was perhaps the greatest comic
craftsman in American popular entertainment. But this is not to say he was
in any way parochial. Indeed, being a master comic in America is being a
master comic of the modern world, inasmuch as American culture is host to
nearly every other culture in the world and Johnny?s genius was in part to
forge a link with so many millions of Americans.
The first time I wrote about Carson was when TV Guide published a
piece
in which he had been identified as speaking only to Americans. Having come
from Europe and yet finding Carson so able to keep me in stitches night
after night, for years on end, I wrote a letter correcting TV Guide?s
misunderstanding. Then I wrote a farewell column when Carson retired in
1992 and now I wish to focus on one remarkable element of his contribution
to popular culture. Yes, while focused directly on comedy and
entertainment, there was something about Carson that went way beyond
these, namely, his continuous display of self-awareness, of being fully
conscious of himself as he was doing his work and enjoying so much of it.
I recall one occasion when Carson was about to do one of his
stints on
The Tonight Show, one of thousands over the 30 years he dominated late
night television entertainment as the host of The Tonight Show with Johnny
Carson. He was about to use his forehead to break one of those wooden
boards, mimicking a feat of certain martial artists. About to charge
against the board that was being held firmly in front of him by two
experts who appeared as guests on his program, Johnny looked up suddenly
and said, something along the lines of, ?What am I doing?? He went on for
a few seconds in this vein??I am nuts?? ?Whatever has happened to my life
that I am doing such a thing
as this??
I have no idea whether this, as other apparently spontaneous
episodes on
his program, was something that had been scripted but it certainly
appeared to be a very natural, impromptu piece of behavior and was very
funny as well as rather educational. By stepping back for those few
seconds to reflect briefly on the moment, Johnny Carson probably managed
to bring home to millions of his viewers?on this and one many similar
occasions?the significance of something quintessentially and universally
human, namely, self-awareness or reflection, being in the position to
observe and think about oneself and place oneself and what one is doing
within a larger context, indeed, perhaps, within the known scheme of
things.
It is not that Johnny Carson gave some kind of erudite academic
lecture
about the human capacity of self-awareness, certainly not. What he did
without skipping a beat in the comic performance he was embarking upon is
to show how natural and uncomplicated it is for a normal human being to
think about what one is doing, to keep alert and not get totally lost in
the moment even as one is fully engaged in that moment.
Johnny Carson had this capacity, I believe, of carrying on with
his
artistry in a most natural, unforced fashion while also exhibiting the
value of knowing what one is doing, of taking a few steps back and making
sure it all fits. (The few interviews he gave about his work I have
witnessed show
his clear awareness of its nuances and his own interest in an almost
scholarly study of comedy.)
Millions of people who were getting belly laughs night after
night from
this man, the master of comic timing and recovery, were also reminded, in
a relaxed and uncomplicated fashion, of one of the most outstanding
aspects of being a human being: thinking about what one is doing, how it
is to be understood within the larger scheme of reality.
What I personally enjoyed so much about Johnny Carson was his
ability to
put on display an attitude of self-confidence that was never boastful, of
a natural humanity that never fussed a great deal about delivering to us
all something very comforting every night, after we had gone through the
day with its tedium and serious tasks?a solid and reliable dose of genuine
comic relief. Yet mingled with this were probably more important lessons
about our humanity than even Carson had fathomed.
Thanks Johnny!
Tibor R. Machan
Johnny Carson, who died recently, was perhaps the greatest comic
craftsman in American popular entertainment. But this is not to say he was
in any way parochial. Indeed, being a master comic in America is being a
master comic of the modern world, inasmuch as American culture is host to
nearly every other culture in the world and Johnny?s genius was in part to
forge a link with so many millions of Americans.
The first time I wrote about Carson was when TV Guide published a
piece
in which he had been identified as speaking only to Americans. Having come
from Europe and yet finding Carson so able to keep me in stitches night
after night, for years on end, I wrote a letter correcting TV Guide?s
misunderstanding. Then I wrote a farewell column when Carson retired in
1992 and now I wish to focus on one remarkable element of his contribution
to popular culture. Yes, while focused directly on comedy and
entertainment, there was something about Carson that went way beyond
these, namely, his continuous display of self-awareness, of being fully
conscious of himself as he was doing his work and enjoying so much of it.
I recall one occasion when Carson was about to do one of his
stints on
The Tonight Show, one of thousands over the 30 years he dominated late
night television entertainment as the host of The Tonight Show with Johnny
Carson. He was about to use his forehead to break one of those wooden
boards, mimicking a feat of certain martial artists. About to charge
against the board that was being held firmly in front of him by two
experts who appeared as guests on his program, Johnny looked up suddenly
and said, something along the lines of, ?What am I doing?? He went on for
a few seconds in this vein??I am nuts?? ?Whatever has happened to my life
that I am doing such a thing
as this??
I have no idea whether this, as other apparently spontaneous
episodes on
his program, was something that had been scripted but it certainly
appeared to be a very natural, impromptu piece of behavior and was very
funny as well as rather educational. By stepping back for those few
seconds to reflect briefly on the moment, Johnny Carson probably managed
to bring home to millions of his viewers?on this and one many similar
occasions?the significance of something quintessentially and universally
human, namely, self-awareness or reflection, being in the position to
observe and think about oneself and place oneself and what one is doing
within a larger context, indeed, perhaps, within the known scheme of
things.
It is not that Johnny Carson gave some kind of erudite academic
lecture
about the human capacity of self-awareness, certainly not. What he did
without skipping a beat in the comic performance he was embarking upon is
to show how natural and uncomplicated it is for a normal human being to
think about what one is doing, to keep alert and not get totally lost in
the moment even as one is fully engaged in that moment.
Johnny Carson had this capacity, I believe, of carrying on with
his
artistry in a most natural, unforced fashion while also exhibiting the
value of knowing what one is doing, of taking a few steps back and making
sure it all fits. (The few interviews he gave about his work I have
witnessed show
his clear awareness of its nuances and his own interest in an almost
scholarly study of comedy.)
Millions of people who were getting belly laughs night after
night from
this man, the master of comic timing and recovery, were also reminded, in
a relaxed and uncomplicated fashion, of one of the most outstanding
aspects of being a human being: thinking about what one is doing, how it
is to be understood within the larger scheme of reality.
What I personally enjoyed so much about Johnny Carson was his
ability to
put on display an attitude of self-confidence that was never boastful, of
a natural humanity that never fussed a great deal about delivering to us
all something very comforting every night, after we had gone through the
day with its tedium and serious tasks?a solid and reliable dose of genuine
comic relief. Yet mingled with this were probably more important lessons
about our humanity than even Carson had fathomed.
Thanks Johnny!
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Column on L. Summers' Heresy
Confusions from Feminists
Tibor R. Machan
Not very long ago an essay appeared in Professor James P. Sterba?s book,
Morality and Social Justice: Point/Counterpoint (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1995), pp. 115-46, by feminist philosopher Alison M. Jaggar,
titled "Toward a Feminist Conception of Moral Reasoning." This piece
argued with great zeal that there are serious differences between the way
women and men think?have to think??about morality. Women stress
cooperation, nurturing, and conciliatory measures in human relations,
whereas men promote competition, aggressiveness, scoring points and so
forth.
This piece was just one of numerous writings in which the differences
between men and women were laid out with firm conviction by certain
feminists scholars. Deborah Tanner, for example, had written numerous
popular and scholarly books?for example, Gender and Discourse, Framing
Discourse, Talking Voices, The Power of Talk?in which she had argued that
there are clear differences between how men and women think and talk.
When a few days ago Harvard President Lawrence Summers made reference to
?innate differences? between men and women that could account for why
women aren?t as well represented in some of the sciences as are men, all
hell broke loose. The National Association of Women called for him to
resign his presidency, while others slammed him and denounced the fact
that a man with such prejudices could be leading a top educational
institution in America.
All of this brings to mind for me how when Bill Clinton cavorted with
Monica Lewinsky, hardly a peep was heard from feminists, including NOW,
about the matter, despite the fact that his conduct represented the
starkest example of some men using their power over not just women but
young, inexperienced women in positions of subservience. The Commander in
Chief of the United States of America hitting on an office intern! It
couldn?t get worse. Yet feminists were mostly silent during the entire
episode.
They were also silent about the anti-egalitarian theories of Jaggar,
Tanner, and many others who insisted that women are, in fact, different
from men in how they think and talk and conduct themselves. But now that
Lawrence Summers repeats this kind of view, he is being singled out for
condemnation. Why so?
This appears to be an token of the type of thinking that would have it
that only Jews are allowed to make jokes about Jews, only blacks may talk
kid about blacks, and so forth and so on. If a man states that women
differ from women in this or that respect, that?s heresy. If a bunch of
women says so, it must be the result of science and analysis.
Bunk. Common sense, in its admittedly rough and ready form, has always
revealed that men and women are different in certain crucial enough
respects. The question is, ?In just what respects and why so?? It is no
good saying, ?Society made them different,? because then that needs to be
explained. And answering that ?Men have managed to conspire to keep women
different?say, in steering them away from the sciences, politics, business
and so forth??doesn?t work either because that, too, begs the question:
?How did men manage such a feat unless there is something inherently
different between the sexes, even if that is that men are meaner, women
are kinder??
When questions surrounding male and female attributes are politicized, of
course, nothing much good comes of it all. Not only do some of the most
vociferous civil libertarians forget their principles?as the feminists
forgot their because Bill Clinton was a politicians they liked?but
rational investigation of interesting issues suffers.
Summers?whose exact words on this topic are nearly impossible to find via
Google, by the way, because, presumably, he had spoken out of the
limelight?made a suggestions, not much different from what Jaggar and
Tanner and many other women and even some feminist men had made. For some
Summers? suggestion merely served as an opportunity to beat up on a
prominent male in our culture. Too bad. It will probably retard research
for some time to come.
Tibor R. Machan
Not very long ago an essay appeared in Professor James P. Sterba?s book,
Morality and Social Justice: Point/Counterpoint (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1995), pp. 115-46, by feminist philosopher Alison M. Jaggar,
titled "Toward a Feminist Conception of Moral Reasoning." This piece
argued with great zeal that there are serious differences between the way
women and men think?have to think??about morality. Women stress
cooperation, nurturing, and conciliatory measures in human relations,
whereas men promote competition, aggressiveness, scoring points and so
forth.
This piece was just one of numerous writings in which the differences
between men and women were laid out with firm conviction by certain
feminists scholars. Deborah Tanner, for example, had written numerous
popular and scholarly books?for example, Gender and Discourse, Framing
Discourse, Talking Voices, The Power of Talk?in which she had argued that
there are clear differences between how men and women think and talk.
When a few days ago Harvard President Lawrence Summers made reference to
?innate differences? between men and women that could account for why
women aren?t as well represented in some of the sciences as are men, all
hell broke loose. The National Association of Women called for him to
resign his presidency, while others slammed him and denounced the fact
that a man with such prejudices could be leading a top educational
institution in America.
All of this brings to mind for me how when Bill Clinton cavorted with
Monica Lewinsky, hardly a peep was heard from feminists, including NOW,
about the matter, despite the fact that his conduct represented the
starkest example of some men using their power over not just women but
young, inexperienced women in positions of subservience. The Commander in
Chief of the United States of America hitting on an office intern! It
couldn?t get worse. Yet feminists were mostly silent during the entire
episode.
They were also silent about the anti-egalitarian theories of Jaggar,
Tanner, and many others who insisted that women are, in fact, different
from men in how they think and talk and conduct themselves. But now that
Lawrence Summers repeats this kind of view, he is being singled out for
condemnation. Why so?
This appears to be an token of the type of thinking that would have it
that only Jews are allowed to make jokes about Jews, only blacks may talk
kid about blacks, and so forth and so on. If a man states that women
differ from women in this or that respect, that?s heresy. If a bunch of
women says so, it must be the result of science and analysis.
Bunk. Common sense, in its admittedly rough and ready form, has always
revealed that men and women are different in certain crucial enough
respects. The question is, ?In just what respects and why so?? It is no
good saying, ?Society made them different,? because then that needs to be
explained. And answering that ?Men have managed to conspire to keep women
different?say, in steering them away from the sciences, politics, business
and so forth??doesn?t work either because that, too, begs the question:
?How did men manage such a feat unless there is something inherently
different between the sexes, even if that is that men are meaner, women
are kinder??
When questions surrounding male and female attributes are politicized, of
course, nothing much good comes of it all. Not only do some of the most
vociferous civil libertarians forget their principles?as the feminists
forgot their because Bill Clinton was a politicians they liked?but
rational investigation of interesting issues suffers.
Summers?whose exact words on this topic are nearly impossible to find via
Google, by the way, because, presumably, he had spoken out of the
limelight?made a suggestions, not much different from what Jaggar and
Tanner and many other women and even some feminist men had made. For some
Summers? suggestion merely served as an opportunity to beat up on a
prominent male in our culture. Too bad. It will probably retard research
for some time to come.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Column on Creationism v. Darwinism
Schools, Government, and Creationism
Tibor R. Machan
No matter how often you point this out, those in the mainstream simply
ignore the issue even though it is central to the controversy. Ever since
the Scopes ?monkey? trial back in 1926, there has been this on-going,
unending battle between secularists and fundamentalist Christians about
whether Darwin?s evolutionary theory should be taught as established fact
in government schools. (Oddly, few talk about whether Einstein, Bohr or
Heisenberg ought to be part of the curriculum. Nor whether the Big Bang
should be included in astrophysics. Nor seems there to be much fuss about
genetics and other sciences. But with evolutionary biology I suppose
things are most directly testy, so people get more excited.)
But the real problem is that government schools exist. The delusion that
you can get religion and values out of education is part of what lulls so
many people into the misguided belief that government education is just
fine. No one would admit this about a government ministry which the US
Constitution explicitly prohibits. Yet schools are rife with lessons about
controversial matters that touch on religion and other matter about which
members of the citizenry are deeply divided. And in a free country there
ought to be no official pressure on them to conform. Yet demanding that
they agree either with the Creationists or with the Darwinists is imposing
pressure on them they cannot escape without considerable cost they ought
not to have to bear.
Suppose government/public schools teach Darwin but one objects and does
not elect to subject one?s children to such teaching. In order to escape,
one must do double jeopardy now?pay the property taxes for the government
school and then pay tuition to the private/religious school of one?s
choice. Or suppose it?s the other way?or, indeed, some way not today in
the limelight. All are surely rank injustice.
It is interesting that the major supporters of government education,
modern liberals, often complain when their taxes go to projects with which
they disagree. During the Vietnam War era they often advocated tax
resistance because their funds were being sent to support a war they found
morally objectionable. And more recently some have proposed similar
measures vis-Ã -vis Bush?s war in Iraq.
Yet, they see nothing wrong with forcing fundamentalists to pay for
government schools that teach what fundamentalists consider an
abomination. And this includes not only Darwinism but, often, sex
education and other value-laden topics to which children of parents who
object should not be subjected.
In this respect the ACLU, too, is two-faced, as are the pro-choice
people, who endorse choice when it comes to killing a fetus but will not
defend it when it comes to spending one?s wealth as one wishes or not
paying women the same as men in the same job. How come choice is such a
fine thing when the lives of fetuses are at stake but not in most other
areas in which they insist political correctness must rule?
This also points up just how inconsistent many modern liberals are when
it comes to the right to private property. For many of them?certainly some
of their most prolific proselytizers?government really owns all the wealth
in society, not individuals. (This is argued by New York University
Professors Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel in their book, The Myth of
Ownership, Oxford UP 2002.) Taxation, therefore, is not any kind of
confiscation but resource-management by government that properly owns all
the wealth in society.
Yet, folks of the same ilk take part in tax protests when they don?t like
how the government uses the taxes it takes from us. Well, why
protest?government is merely managing things as it sees fit and no one has
any say in the matter once a decision has been reached.
Well, the same can be said about protesting the teaching of either Darwin
or Creationism in government schools. The very institution implies that
there is nothing to protest?they got the power! To remedy it all, let?s
then take it from them and support teaching as we choose, in the varieties
of schools we could have if government didn?t usurp this area of social
life.
Tibor R. Machan
No matter how often you point this out, those in the mainstream simply
ignore the issue even though it is central to the controversy. Ever since
the Scopes ?monkey? trial back in 1926, there has been this on-going,
unending battle between secularists and fundamentalist Christians about
whether Darwin?s evolutionary theory should be taught as established fact
in government schools. (Oddly, few talk about whether Einstein, Bohr or
Heisenberg ought to be part of the curriculum. Nor whether the Big Bang
should be included in astrophysics. Nor seems there to be much fuss about
genetics and other sciences. But with evolutionary biology I suppose
things are most directly testy, so people get more excited.)
But the real problem is that government schools exist. The delusion that
you can get religion and values out of education is part of what lulls so
many people into the misguided belief that government education is just
fine. No one would admit this about a government ministry which the US
Constitution explicitly prohibits. Yet schools are rife with lessons about
controversial matters that touch on religion and other matter about which
members of the citizenry are deeply divided. And in a free country there
ought to be no official pressure on them to conform. Yet demanding that
they agree either with the Creationists or with the Darwinists is imposing
pressure on them they cannot escape without considerable cost they ought
not to have to bear.
Suppose government/public schools teach Darwin but one objects and does
not elect to subject one?s children to such teaching. In order to escape,
one must do double jeopardy now?pay the property taxes for the government
school and then pay tuition to the private/religious school of one?s
choice. Or suppose it?s the other way?or, indeed, some way not today in
the limelight. All are surely rank injustice.
It is interesting that the major supporters of government education,
modern liberals, often complain when their taxes go to projects with which
they disagree. During the Vietnam War era they often advocated tax
resistance because their funds were being sent to support a war they found
morally objectionable. And more recently some have proposed similar
measures vis-Ã -vis Bush?s war in Iraq.
Yet, they see nothing wrong with forcing fundamentalists to pay for
government schools that teach what fundamentalists consider an
abomination. And this includes not only Darwinism but, often, sex
education and other value-laden topics to which children of parents who
object should not be subjected.
In this respect the ACLU, too, is two-faced, as are the pro-choice
people, who endorse choice when it comes to killing a fetus but will not
defend it when it comes to spending one?s wealth as one wishes or not
paying women the same as men in the same job. How come choice is such a
fine thing when the lives of fetuses are at stake but not in most other
areas in which they insist political correctness must rule?
This also points up just how inconsistent many modern liberals are when
it comes to the right to private property. For many of them?certainly some
of their most prolific proselytizers?government really owns all the wealth
in society, not individuals. (This is argued by New York University
Professors Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel in their book, The Myth of
Ownership, Oxford UP 2002.) Taxation, therefore, is not any kind of
confiscation but resource-management by government that properly owns all
the wealth in society.
Yet, folks of the same ilk take part in tax protests when they don?t like
how the government uses the taxes it takes from us. Well, why
protest?government is merely managing things as it sees fit and no one has
any say in the matter once a decision has been reached.
Well, the same can be said about protesting the teaching of either Darwin
or Creationism in government schools. The very institution implies that
there is nothing to protest?they got the power! To remedy it all, let?s
then take it from them and support teaching as we choose, in the varieties
of schools we could have if government didn?t usurp this area of social
life.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Column on Revisiting the Death Penalty
Revisiting the Death Penalty
Tibor R. Machan
California?s governor wouldn?t give in, nor would the US Supreme Court,
so Donald Beardslee, who killed two women in 1981 over a drug deal?while
supposedly suffering from brain damage?was put to death by lethal
injection on January 19th. As reported in the media, Beardslee's defense
attorney claims that he had brain injury stemming from ?several accidents
during his life,? and, furthermore, in prison ?he was diagnosed as having
schizophrenia.? A former warden reportedly has said that ?Beardslee should
have been granted clemency because he was a model inmate.? But none of
this saved the man from California?s death penalty.
For several decades I have opposed this public policy measure, mainly
because it is grossly imprudent. Of course, some people may well deserve
to die for their evil deeds, murder, rape, treason, or something else
that?s totally intolerable in a civilized society. Nor do I think it is
barbaric to kill criminals, since I do not think it is barbaric to kill in
self-defense and the death penalty may at times defend us from a vicious
murderer who may well kill again.
But there are ways to guard against this. What there is no way to guard
against is the occasional application of the death penalty to someone who
doesn?t in fact deserve it. In short, the probability of a mistake is
significant. So no one ought to risk it because it will at times
perpetrate a great wrong.
This is all about us, yes, not about the criminal. We need to be careful
not to kill people who should not be killed and since there is a chance of
doing this when the penalty is death, we should desist.
There is also the factor of cost. With all the appeals and other
administrative maneuvers associated with every death penalty
sentence?Beardslee lingered in prison for over two decades?the expense is
out of this world, far greater than what life without parole costs. Yet
this is secondary. What should matter most is that a mistake is
irreversible.
Does the death penalty deter people? The late Professor Ernest van den
Haag of the Fordham University School of Law, with whom I used to argue
about this matter, held that view for several decades until near the end
of his life he changed his mind. He still wanted those who deserve it to
be put to death but not because this would work to discourage most
prospective murderers. In the main, murderers, other than professional or
contract killers, do not kill as a result of rationally calculating the
pros and cons. They have usually given up control by the time they kill,
although this isn?t inevitable and in most cases they could have walked
away, done something else. It?s not all that different from when ordinary
folks resort to yelling or violence?they had it in them to abstain but let
go of themselves and resorted to improper ways.
So, a murderer is most likely to be beyond weighing odds, which means
that the threat of the death penalty isn?t likely to do much to dissuade
him or her from going ahead with the deed. And the studies pertaining to
this matter seem to show just that?deterrence is a mere hope and works in
but the rarest cases. So what is left? Death for the sake of retribution,
so van den Haag concluded.
OK, that?s not a bad reason but, given the risks, it cannot carry the
day. There are better options, period.
Some have argued that the death penalty is justified revenge, the
perfectly understandable collective venting of the raw emotion in the face
of a grave wronging of someone. It is a civilized revenge because it is
moderated by due process of law. It isn?t done hastily but deliberately.
Again, there is something to this but it doesn?t offset the major
objection?one can go very wrong with this and there is no remedy. Someone
mistakenly placed in prison for even most of his or her life could at
least be compensated for a mistake. Such a person could then lead a very
rewarding if short life, once the mistake has been established (for
example, via DNA testing). But if there is an execution, this option is
closed. And there need not have been such an irreversible policy?no reason
for it exists given the other options that are available.
There is a lot that?s wrong with the world and this part is really very
simple to repair, with no loss to anyone?life behind bars, with no chance
of parole, surely is almost worst for most than dying.
Tibor R. Machan
California?s governor wouldn?t give in, nor would the US Supreme Court,
so Donald Beardslee, who killed two women in 1981 over a drug deal?while
supposedly suffering from brain damage?was put to death by lethal
injection on January 19th. As reported in the media, Beardslee's defense
attorney claims that he had brain injury stemming from ?several accidents
during his life,? and, furthermore, in prison ?he was diagnosed as having
schizophrenia.? A former warden reportedly has said that ?Beardslee should
have been granted clemency because he was a model inmate.? But none of
this saved the man from California?s death penalty.
For several decades I have opposed this public policy measure, mainly
because it is grossly imprudent. Of course, some people may well deserve
to die for their evil deeds, murder, rape, treason, or something else
that?s totally intolerable in a civilized society. Nor do I think it is
barbaric to kill criminals, since I do not think it is barbaric to kill in
self-defense and the death penalty may at times defend us from a vicious
murderer who may well kill again.
But there are ways to guard against this. What there is no way to guard
against is the occasional application of the death penalty to someone who
doesn?t in fact deserve it. In short, the probability of a mistake is
significant. So no one ought to risk it because it will at times
perpetrate a great wrong.
This is all about us, yes, not about the criminal. We need to be careful
not to kill people who should not be killed and since there is a chance of
doing this when the penalty is death, we should desist.
There is also the factor of cost. With all the appeals and other
administrative maneuvers associated with every death penalty
sentence?Beardslee lingered in prison for over two decades?the expense is
out of this world, far greater than what life without parole costs. Yet
this is secondary. What should matter most is that a mistake is
irreversible.
Does the death penalty deter people? The late Professor Ernest van den
Haag of the Fordham University School of Law, with whom I used to argue
about this matter, held that view for several decades until near the end
of his life he changed his mind. He still wanted those who deserve it to
be put to death but not because this would work to discourage most
prospective murderers. In the main, murderers, other than professional or
contract killers, do not kill as a result of rationally calculating the
pros and cons. They have usually given up control by the time they kill,
although this isn?t inevitable and in most cases they could have walked
away, done something else. It?s not all that different from when ordinary
folks resort to yelling or violence?they had it in them to abstain but let
go of themselves and resorted to improper ways.
So, a murderer is most likely to be beyond weighing odds, which means
that the threat of the death penalty isn?t likely to do much to dissuade
him or her from going ahead with the deed. And the studies pertaining to
this matter seem to show just that?deterrence is a mere hope and works in
but the rarest cases. So what is left? Death for the sake of retribution,
so van den Haag concluded.
OK, that?s not a bad reason but, given the risks, it cannot carry the
day. There are better options, period.
Some have argued that the death penalty is justified revenge, the
perfectly understandable collective venting of the raw emotion in the face
of a grave wronging of someone. It is a civilized revenge because it is
moderated by due process of law. It isn?t done hastily but deliberately.
Again, there is something to this but it doesn?t offset the major
objection?one can go very wrong with this and there is no remedy. Someone
mistakenly placed in prison for even most of his or her life could at
least be compensated for a mistake. Such a person could then lead a very
rewarding if short life, once the mistake has been established (for
example, via DNA testing). But if there is an execution, this option is
closed. And there need not have been such an irreversible policy?no reason
for it exists given the other options that are available.
There is a lot that?s wrong with the world and this part is really very
simple to repair, with no loss to anyone?life behind bars, with no chance
of parole, surely is almost worst for most than dying.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Column on an American Tragedy
An American Tragedy
Tibor R. Machan
Tragedies are morality plays wherein trying to do the right thing ends
people in terrible troubleÂ?just think of Antigone by Sophocles or Romeo
and Juliet by Shakespeare.
We have an ongoing tragedy afoot in our country. It has to do with the
relationship between our political tradition and the dominant moral
viewpoint. In the political realm everyone is supposed to have the
unalienable right to, among other things, the pursuit of happiness. No,
not to happiness but to pursuing it. None can have a right to happiness
since happiness is something one needs to achieve in lifeÂ?it cannot be
given or secured by government.
Still, having the basic human individual right to the pursuit of
happiness very firmly suggests that there is something proper about such a
pursuit. It is perfectly fine for people to focus on becoming happy.
Usually, this is done by means of pursuing various worthy and fulfilling
objectives, such as finding a rewarding career, seeking a joyful family
life, engaging in pleasant hobbies, and seeking to make sure, as a
citizen, that the country remains free.
Unfortunately, there is in the moral climate of the countryÂ?in what most
priests, ministers, writers, politicians, professors, pundits and such
teach and preachÂ?a contrary message. This message says, in effect, that it
is quite wrong to seek to be happy. The morality that plays well among
those who talk about such things most often is altruism.
As the philosopher W. G. Maclagan made clear, Â?Â?AltruismÂ? [is] assuming a
duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our
fellows....Altruism is to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and
should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he
is deciding what course of action to pursue.Â? (pp. 109-110). (Â?Self and
Others: A Defense of Altruism,Â? Philosophical Quarterly 4 [1954]:
109-127.) As usually presented, by ministers or priests or in fiction,
altruism means ranking looking out for others in first place in oneÂ?s list
of moral duties and casting aside oneÂ?s own happiness as negligible. As
the novelist Graham Greene put it, Â?None of us has a right to forget
anyone. Except ourselves.Â? (Looser Takes All [Penguin, 1993, p. 51].)
Now what does this come to? A flat out denunciation of the pursuit of
happiness. To engage in such a pursuit is widely deemed to be morally
wrong. So, the American FounderÂ?s put in place an ideal of politics that
too many of AmericaÂ?s moralists consider wrong. And since they are
entrusted with working out the moral issues of how people ought to live,
what principles they ought to follow in their lives, they are clearly
perpetrating a tragic conflict between the politics and the morality of
the country.
And it shows. Just the other day a letter writer in one of the newspapers
I read every morning made a big deal of how terrible it is that people
enjoy the movie Sideways. This lighthearted fluff is about two rather
unruly young men, neither exactly admirable, touring a region of
CaliforniaÂ?s wine countryÂ?not the usual Napa Valley but the Central
CoastÂ?while one of the sows his wild oats one last time, in, as I say, a
somewhat roguish fashion. The letter writer condemned the movie for
seemingly promoting such an endeavor and mentioned that in contrast to
such a terrible movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding should be embraced as far
more admirable, morally worthy.
This struck me as odd because My Big Fat Greek Wedding embodied one of
the most despicable human tendencies and made it all look so innocent and
quaint, namely, ethnic prejudice. If you recall, in that movie the father
of the young woman is fiercely insistent that she find a Greek mate. No
one else will do. And this is treated as merely amusing.
Now that attitude is truly disgusting. As if virtue resided only within
Greeks (or whatever group one prefers). As if those who donÂ?t belong could
not be worthy, decent, lovable. Such ethnic prejudice is, in fact, morally
vicious.
But this letter writer found the mild pursuit of pleasure in Sideways
morally awful, while regarding the blind and pointless ethnic loyalties in
the other film admirable.
It is very, very sad, indeed, that too many Americans consider the desire
for a pleasant and happy life something lowly while admiring it when
people embrace loyalties that are irrational and arbitrary and, as in the
case of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, spawning unhappiness for young people.
Tibor R. Machan
Tragedies are morality plays wherein trying to do the right thing ends
people in terrible troubleÂ?just think of Antigone by Sophocles or Romeo
and Juliet by Shakespeare.
We have an ongoing tragedy afoot in our country. It has to do with the
relationship between our political tradition and the dominant moral
viewpoint. In the political realm everyone is supposed to have the
unalienable right to, among other things, the pursuit of happiness. No,
not to happiness but to pursuing it. None can have a right to happiness
since happiness is something one needs to achieve in lifeÂ?it cannot be
given or secured by government.
Still, having the basic human individual right to the pursuit of
happiness very firmly suggests that there is something proper about such a
pursuit. It is perfectly fine for people to focus on becoming happy.
Usually, this is done by means of pursuing various worthy and fulfilling
objectives, such as finding a rewarding career, seeking a joyful family
life, engaging in pleasant hobbies, and seeking to make sure, as a
citizen, that the country remains free.
Unfortunately, there is in the moral climate of the countryÂ?in what most
priests, ministers, writers, politicians, professors, pundits and such
teach and preachÂ?a contrary message. This message says, in effect, that it
is quite wrong to seek to be happy. The morality that plays well among
those who talk about such things most often is altruism.
As the philosopher W. G. Maclagan made clear, Â?Â?AltruismÂ? [is] assuming a
duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our
fellows....Altruism is to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and
should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he
is deciding what course of action to pursue.Â? (pp. 109-110). (Â?Self and
Others: A Defense of Altruism,Â? Philosophical Quarterly 4 [1954]:
109-127.) As usually presented, by ministers or priests or in fiction,
altruism means ranking looking out for others in first place in oneÂ?s list
of moral duties and casting aside oneÂ?s own happiness as negligible. As
the novelist Graham Greene put it, Â?None of us has a right to forget
anyone. Except ourselves.Â? (Looser Takes All [Penguin, 1993, p. 51].)
Now what does this come to? A flat out denunciation of the pursuit of
happiness. To engage in such a pursuit is widely deemed to be morally
wrong. So, the American FounderÂ?s put in place an ideal of politics that
too many of AmericaÂ?s moralists consider wrong. And since they are
entrusted with working out the moral issues of how people ought to live,
what principles they ought to follow in their lives, they are clearly
perpetrating a tragic conflict between the politics and the morality of
the country.
And it shows. Just the other day a letter writer in one of the newspapers
I read every morning made a big deal of how terrible it is that people
enjoy the movie Sideways. This lighthearted fluff is about two rather
unruly young men, neither exactly admirable, touring a region of
CaliforniaÂ?s wine countryÂ?not the usual Napa Valley but the Central
CoastÂ?while one of the sows his wild oats one last time, in, as I say, a
somewhat roguish fashion. The letter writer condemned the movie for
seemingly promoting such an endeavor and mentioned that in contrast to
such a terrible movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding should be embraced as far
more admirable, morally worthy.
This struck me as odd because My Big Fat Greek Wedding embodied one of
the most despicable human tendencies and made it all look so innocent and
quaint, namely, ethnic prejudice. If you recall, in that movie the father
of the young woman is fiercely insistent that she find a Greek mate. No
one else will do. And this is treated as merely amusing.
Now that attitude is truly disgusting. As if virtue resided only within
Greeks (or whatever group one prefers). As if those who donÂ?t belong could
not be worthy, decent, lovable. Such ethnic prejudice is, in fact, morally
vicious.
But this letter writer found the mild pursuit of pleasure in Sideways
morally awful, while regarding the blind and pointless ethnic loyalties in
the other film admirable.
It is very, very sad, indeed, that too many Americans consider the desire
for a pleasant and happy life something lowly while admiring it when
people embrace loyalties that are irrational and arbitrary and, as in the
case of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, spawning unhappiness for young people.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Column on Governments and Disasters
Disasters and Governments
Tibor R. Machan
I have resisted writing about tsunami because, well, it is such a
horrible catastrophe that it seemed tacky to rush in a write about it.
Now, closer to home, we have the much smaller scale but to some people no
less disastrous events of the recent heavy rains in Southern California.
One of my colleagues sent me a post this time saying, Â?You might consider
doing a column on the recent mudslides in La Conchita [Ventura County]
that appear to have taken as many as 20 lives--three children.Â? He want on
to observe that Â?Authorities pleaded with people to leave, citing the
imminent threat posed by the mountain, which had slid several times
before. They chose to stay.Â?
In light of this, my colleague asks, Â?What is the proper balance between
a paternalistic state and individual liberty? Does the State have a
responsibility to warn peopleÂ?if that?Â?as many people feel it failed to do
in Indonesia? Or should it literally remove people from their homesÂ?as
they did in Florida prior to the Hurricane and forbade them from returning
until it was Â?safe.Â? Similarly, the Coast Guard has a right to move people
from their boats if they feel the crafts are unsafe. I know where you will
come down, but I think it worthy of comment, because the theme cuts across
so many public policy areas (seat belts, smoking, motorcycle helmet
laws)Â?as you well know.Â?
Let me get to the principle at issue first. In a free society it isnÂ?t
the role of government to get involved in such matters. Governments have
as their task to secure our rights and whatever needs to be done to do
this properly. As to disaster aversion, warning or relief, there should
and probably would be private alert groups, subscribed to by businesses
and individuals, not much different from how people buy insurance even
when they do not get to use it. Or how they buy security systems for their
homes and cars. The task of government is to keep the peace, etc., not to
solve our problems with rain, earthquake and such.
Of course, this is a Â?best world scenario,Â? which isn't likely to emerge
since people are too willing to fall prey to the temptation to take short
cuts, to try to make use of governmentsÂ? strong arm methods to address
problems, even if this means dragging others in and burdening them with
the costs.
All too many folks who purchase homes in high risk areas expect to be
bailed out not by their own expensive insuranceÂ?which might then
discourage them to buy thereÂ?but by government enforced
wealth-redistribution methods. (One bloke on the Los Angeles CBS all news
radio station, KNX, a member of their staff, who lost everything in La
Conchita, admitted that he knew the risks but had hopes that he could
dodge them!)
In our world, where so many millions of people relinquish their
responsibility for their own actions and lives, leaving it to
othersÂ?bureaucrats, politicians, police, the Coast Guard, etc.Â?to bail
them out, all one can do is hope that some of these disasters, which
governments simply cannot prevent and from which governments cannot rescue
people, will teach some hard lessons that will in time be utilized.
Even the tsunami catastrophe appears to have been preventable, had the
benefits of modern technology been put to proper use. There are in the
Pacific Ocean ample preparations afoot for just such disasters but they
were not deployed in the Indian Ocean. Nor were communication networks in
place to alert people in the various coastal regions when, in fact, just a
bit of warning, once the tsunami commenced, could have prevented the death
of thousands.
Where the idea of individual responsibility more firmly ingrained in the
minds of people around the globe, and proper sanctions in place when such
responsibilities are neglectedÂ?when homes are badly built, on infirm
grounds, or resorts badly secured against impending natural
calamitiesÂ?many of the horrors we have been witnessing of late would
probably have been averted. Instead, things are left to be dealt with by
othersÂ?by people in government who are no miracle makers and whose
attention is by no means focused on othersÂ? interests.
Tibor R. Machan
I have resisted writing about tsunami because, well, it is such a
horrible catastrophe that it seemed tacky to rush in a write about it.
Now, closer to home, we have the much smaller scale but to some people no
less disastrous events of the recent heavy rains in Southern California.
One of my colleagues sent me a post this time saying, Â?You might consider
doing a column on the recent mudslides in La Conchita [Ventura County]
that appear to have taken as many as 20 lives--three children.Â? He want on
to observe that Â?Authorities pleaded with people to leave, citing the
imminent threat posed by the mountain, which had slid several times
before. They chose to stay.Â?
In light of this, my colleague asks, Â?What is the proper balance between
a paternalistic state and individual liberty? Does the State have a
responsibility to warn peopleÂ?if that?Â?as many people feel it failed to do
in Indonesia? Or should it literally remove people from their homesÂ?as
they did in Florida prior to the Hurricane and forbade them from returning
until it was Â?safe.Â? Similarly, the Coast Guard has a right to move people
from their boats if they feel the crafts are unsafe. I know where you will
come down, but I think it worthy of comment, because the theme cuts across
so many public policy areas (seat belts, smoking, motorcycle helmet
laws)Â?as you well know.Â?
Let me get to the principle at issue first. In a free society it isnÂ?t
the role of government to get involved in such matters. Governments have
as their task to secure our rights and whatever needs to be done to do
this properly. As to disaster aversion, warning or relief, there should
and probably would be private alert groups, subscribed to by businesses
and individuals, not much different from how people buy insurance even
when they do not get to use it. Or how they buy security systems for their
homes and cars. The task of government is to keep the peace, etc., not to
solve our problems with rain, earthquake and such.
Of course, this is a Â?best world scenario,Â? which isn't likely to emerge
since people are too willing to fall prey to the temptation to take short
cuts, to try to make use of governmentsÂ? strong arm methods to address
problems, even if this means dragging others in and burdening them with
the costs.
All too many folks who purchase homes in high risk areas expect to be
bailed out not by their own expensive insuranceÂ?which might then
discourage them to buy thereÂ?but by government enforced
wealth-redistribution methods. (One bloke on the Los Angeles CBS all news
radio station, KNX, a member of their staff, who lost everything in La
Conchita, admitted that he knew the risks but had hopes that he could
dodge them!)
In our world, where so many millions of people relinquish their
responsibility for their own actions and lives, leaving it to
othersÂ?bureaucrats, politicians, police, the Coast Guard, etc.Â?to bail
them out, all one can do is hope that some of these disasters, which
governments simply cannot prevent and from which governments cannot rescue
people, will teach some hard lessons that will in time be utilized.
Even the tsunami catastrophe appears to have been preventable, had the
benefits of modern technology been put to proper use. There are in the
Pacific Ocean ample preparations afoot for just such disasters but they
were not deployed in the Indian Ocean. Nor were communication networks in
place to alert people in the various coastal regions when, in fact, just a
bit of warning, once the tsunami commenced, could have prevented the death
of thousands.
Where the idea of individual responsibility more firmly ingrained in the
minds of people around the globe, and proper sanctions in place when such
responsibilities are neglectedÂ?when homes are badly built, on infirm
grounds, or resorts badly secured against impending natural
calamitiesÂ?many of the horrors we have been witnessing of late would
probably have been averted. Instead, things are left to be dealt with by
othersÂ?by people in government who are no miracle makers and whose
attention is by no means focused on othersÂ? interests.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Column on the "danger" of too many choices
The Issue of Choice
Tibor R. Machan
Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore
College, is the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More
Is Less (2003), has once again penned an Op Ed piece for The New York
Times, his second in so many years, reiterating his theme that too much
choice is bad for people. This time he has jumped on the bandwagon of the
opponents of any measure of Social Security privatization, in part because
he thinks people are best off with fewer choices. As Schwartz puts it,
There is now accumulating evidence that choice isn't always good. Whether
people are choosing jam in a grocery store, essay topics in a college
class, or even potential partners in an evening of "speed dating," the
more options they have, the less likely they are to make a choice. In
other words, increasing options induces people to opt out of choosing
altogether, and this comes into play when people decide how to invest
their money for retirement.
When the good professor first aired this in an Op Ed in The Times, I
contacted him to explain that the plentitude of selections do not have the
purpose of providing each person with more and more of them. Rather, they
are to serve all the variety of people who would take advantage of all the
alternatives.
Consider this. You go to the supermarket which is brimming with
selections. Are they all to serve you? Surely not. Many of us patronize
two or three isles or sections, hardly ever even looking at the rest. But
the store accommodates thousands of customers and the greater the
selection, the more all these customers are accommodated.
Now consider some measure of privatization of Social SecurityÂ?an idea
that is now so watered down, by the Bush Administration itself, that the
Â?choicesÂ? involved are like those given by parents to toddlers, fiercely
Â?guided,Â? we might say. There are millions and millions of people who are
coerced to be part of the Social Security Ponzi scheme (named after 1920s
financial charlatan Charles Ponzi) and the system is not far from
bankruptcy. The returns on what one must put into it are about twice as
low than what one is likely to reap from investing in the stock market.
(Schwartz complains about this point, claiming there is no guarantee the
market will pay this; but then there is no guarantee in anything,
including any government scheme.) So, with a small percentage of what is
confiscated from us now at our disposal to investÂ?but in a great variety
of ways that the multitude of us is likely to utilizeÂ?there is a chance
that some of the money will not be wasted as it is routinely now.
VoilaÂ?bankruptcy at least postponed!
The idea of choice here is that of all the people involved, some set of
options will suit some of them, some will suit others. They need not all
cope with the task of choosing from every option thatÂ?s out there, as per
SchwartzÂ?s scenario.
The professorÂ?s evidence for the harmfulness of choiceÂ?or that people get
stymied with too many selections facing themÂ?is entirely misleading.
Anytime we choose, we do so selectively, from a small fraction of all the
alternatives that exist. But the more alternatives do exist, the more
people are being well served.
The problem, of course, is the professorÂ?s failure to appreciate human
nature. People are, as human beings, individuals, with very different
needs, objectives, goals, preferences, and wants. Sure, there are some
basic needs we all have, but those tend to be very general ones and can be
satisfied in a variety of ways. We all need food and clothing and
transportation but not the same kind by any means.
We also can use putting away for our old age, at least many of us can,
but exactly how we ought to do this will vary. Some may need to start to
do so early in life, some only later. Some, whose services are widely and
steadily wanted and who are good at keeping up the work may need not worry
about this at all, not in the systematic fashion that involves insurance
programs.
Unfortunately too many people are like Professor SchwartzÂ?they do not see
just how important individual differences are and even fail to see that
similar needs can be satisfied in a great variety of ways. So they keep
insisting on the one-size-fits all approach, which tends to support
various coercive public policies, all in the name of helping us out.
Tibor R. Machan
Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore
College, is the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More
Is Less (2003), has once again penned an Op Ed piece for The New York
Times, his second in so many years, reiterating his theme that too much
choice is bad for people. This time he has jumped on the bandwagon of the
opponents of any measure of Social Security privatization, in part because
he thinks people are best off with fewer choices. As Schwartz puts it,
There is now accumulating evidence that choice isn't always good. Whether
people are choosing jam in a grocery store, essay topics in a college
class, or even potential partners in an evening of "speed dating," the
more options they have, the less likely they are to make a choice. In
other words, increasing options induces people to opt out of choosing
altogether, and this comes into play when people decide how to invest
their money for retirement.
When the good professor first aired this in an Op Ed in The Times, I
contacted him to explain that the plentitude of selections do not have the
purpose of providing each person with more and more of them. Rather, they
are to serve all the variety of people who would take advantage of all the
alternatives.
Consider this. You go to the supermarket which is brimming with
selections. Are they all to serve you? Surely not. Many of us patronize
two or three isles or sections, hardly ever even looking at the rest. But
the store accommodates thousands of customers and the greater the
selection, the more all these customers are accommodated.
Now consider some measure of privatization of Social SecurityÂ?an idea
that is now so watered down, by the Bush Administration itself, that the
Â?choicesÂ? involved are like those given by parents to toddlers, fiercely
Â?guided,Â? we might say. There are millions and millions of people who are
coerced to be part of the Social Security Ponzi scheme (named after 1920s
financial charlatan Charles Ponzi) and the system is not far from
bankruptcy. The returns on what one must put into it are about twice as
low than what one is likely to reap from investing in the stock market.
(Schwartz complains about this point, claiming there is no guarantee the
market will pay this; but then there is no guarantee in anything,
including any government scheme.) So, with a small percentage of what is
confiscated from us now at our disposal to investÂ?but in a great variety
of ways that the multitude of us is likely to utilizeÂ?there is a chance
that some of the money will not be wasted as it is routinely now.
VoilaÂ?bankruptcy at least postponed!
The idea of choice here is that of all the people involved, some set of
options will suit some of them, some will suit others. They need not all
cope with the task of choosing from every option thatÂ?s out there, as per
SchwartzÂ?s scenario.
The professorÂ?s evidence for the harmfulness of choiceÂ?or that people get
stymied with too many selections facing themÂ?is entirely misleading.
Anytime we choose, we do so selectively, from a small fraction of all the
alternatives that exist. But the more alternatives do exist, the more
people are being well served.
The problem, of course, is the professorÂ?s failure to appreciate human
nature. People are, as human beings, individuals, with very different
needs, objectives, goals, preferences, and wants. Sure, there are some
basic needs we all have, but those tend to be very general ones and can be
satisfied in a variety of ways. We all need food and clothing and
transportation but not the same kind by any means.
We also can use putting away for our old age, at least many of us can,
but exactly how we ought to do this will vary. Some may need to start to
do so early in life, some only later. Some, whose services are widely and
steadily wanted and who are good at keeping up the work may need not worry
about this at all, not in the systematic fashion that involves insurance
programs.
Unfortunately too many people are like Professor SchwartzÂ?they do not see
just how important individual differences are and even fail to see that
similar needs can be satisfied in a great variety of ways. So they keep
insisting on the one-size-fits all approach, which tends to support
various coercive public policies, all in the name of helping us out.
Column on Pride in one's Heritage (sans typo)
What Should we be Proud of?
Tibor R. Machan
In our local paper itÂ?s big news and I donÂ?t like it. I am talking about
how Santa Ana mayor Miguel Pulido, who moved to Orange County from Mexico
City, is proud of his heritage. He tells it up front: Â?I am very proud of
my heritage and my backgroundÂ?Â? although he adds that Â?sometimes it is
misunderstood.Â?
In fact, although Pulido isnÂ?t gung ho about his hailing from Mexico, it
is noted about him that when someone in school called him Â?Mike,Â? he
insisted on being called Â?Miguel.Â? OK, you are the boss about your nameÂ?I
myself have fully manufactured the pronunciation of my last name but for
opposite reasons. I wanted to become an American as much as I could,
without wishing at all to hide where I came from. (So Â?Machan,Â? while
sounding nothing like it in Hungarian, now sounds Â?McCannÂ? in English,
whereas Â?TiborÂ? is out and out Hungarian.)
But why the fuss? Well, I am always hoping people will take language
seriously and Â?being proud of somethingÂ? very much suggests that you had
something to do with bringing it about. Like the firm you built or
painting you created or novel you wrote, provided, indeed, that they have
merit, are worthy achievements.
But what then with such expressions, Â?I am very proud of my daughterÂ?s
achievementsÂ?? Well, yes, what about them?
Here the trick is that many parents firmly believe they mold their
children into who they are, especially when they turn out to be pretty
good people. But is this really a good idea? Are our children fashioned by
us? Are they our creations, like one of our paintings or poems? Are they
sculpted by us?
I am very hesitant to sanction this kind of understanding of parenting,
including my own. Sure, parents do have an influence on their kids, good
and bad. But that goes only so far. It is a distinctive attribute of human
beings that they are substantially self-made. They have free will and
within certain limits they take over their own development pretty early in
their lives. Parents know this only too well, as they often observe their
own offspring turning out to be very different from what they had hoped
and worked for them to become. No doubt, there are all sorts of subtle
influences they do exert, probably mainly by setting an example for how to
be a human being, for good or for ill. But in time even that is largely up
to the child, whether to pay attention to the parentsÂ? way of doing things
or to, say, some rock or movie starÂ?s. Or they will become captivatedÂ?an
interesting term(!)Â?by a scientist, an accountant or drug dealer. It is
all really not very predictable and that is, indeed, what makes human
beings so interesting and scaryÂ?you never quite know what they will choose
to do and be.
So, the expression Â?I am very proud of youÂ? is a bit fishy. Perhaps it
should be rephrased to Â?I am very glad about how you turned our or who you
have chosen to become.Â? A mouthful but more to the point, I think.
So what about being proud of Â?my heritage and my backgroundÂ?? I, for
instance, was born and raised in Hungary and my background includes two
fanatical athletic parents, one of whom happened to be an avid supporter
of the Nazis and a virulent anti-Semite.
Now, I suppose if the mayor should be proud of his heritage, I ought to
be ashamed of at least part of mine. But thatÂ?s nonsenseÂ?I feel absolutely
no shame for my fatherÂ?s vices, nor for the virtues of my mother or
grandparents, whatever they were. Fact is, we can, strictly speaking, only
be proud of what we have done, of who we are not what we are. I am a male,
Caucasian, hailing from Hungary, 6Â? 2Â?, etc., and so forth. None of this
is anything I am or should be proud of. I like some of it, yesÂ?some of
what I picked up from Hungary, like their cooking, the gypsy music they
played a lot, and many more subtle things I am pleased about. But then I
Â?picked upÂ? a lot of stuff since then, the blues, jazz, the English novel,
American court room drama and you name itÂ?but none of it is anything I
achieved, so none of it makes or should make me proud. What makes me proud
has to do with whatever worthy stuff I have created, achieved, thatÂ?s all.
Same with what I feel shame for, my own failings.
I do think if we stuck to this for what we are proud and ashamed of, we
could come closer to avoiding all that ethnic and racial pride and hatred
that has wrought such hell on earth upon the human race.
Tibor R. Machan
In our local paper itÂ?s big news and I donÂ?t like it. I am talking about
how Santa Ana mayor Miguel Pulido, who moved to Orange County from Mexico
City, is proud of his heritage. He tells it up front: Â?I am very proud of
my heritage and my backgroundÂ?Â? although he adds that Â?sometimes it is
misunderstood.Â?
In fact, although Pulido isnÂ?t gung ho about his hailing from Mexico, it
is noted about him that when someone in school called him Â?Mike,Â? he
insisted on being called Â?Miguel.Â? OK, you are the boss about your nameÂ?I
myself have fully manufactured the pronunciation of my last name but for
opposite reasons. I wanted to become an American as much as I could,
without wishing at all to hide where I came from. (So Â?Machan,Â? while
sounding nothing like it in Hungarian, now sounds Â?McCannÂ? in English,
whereas Â?TiborÂ? is out and out Hungarian.)
But why the fuss? Well, I am always hoping people will take language
seriously and Â?being proud of somethingÂ? very much suggests that you had
something to do with bringing it about. Like the firm you built or
painting you created or novel you wrote, provided, indeed, that they have
merit, are worthy achievements.
But what then with such expressions, Â?I am very proud of my daughterÂ?s
achievementsÂ?? Well, yes, what about them?
Here the trick is that many parents firmly believe they mold their
children into who they are, especially when they turn out to be pretty
good people. But is this really a good idea? Are our children fashioned by
us? Are they our creations, like one of our paintings or poems? Are they
sculpted by us?
I am very hesitant to sanction this kind of understanding of parenting,
including my own. Sure, parents do have an influence on their kids, good
and bad. But that goes only so far. It is a distinctive attribute of human
beings that they are substantially self-made. They have free will and
within certain limits they take over their own development pretty early in
their lives. Parents know this only too well, as they often observe their
own offspring turning out to be very different from what they had hoped
and worked for them to become. No doubt, there are all sorts of subtle
influences they do exert, probably mainly by setting an example for how to
be a human being, for good or for ill. But in time even that is largely up
to the child, whether to pay attention to the parentsÂ? way of doing things
or to, say, some rock or movie starÂ?s. Or they will become captivatedÂ?an
interesting term(!)Â?by a scientist, an accountant or drug dealer. It is
all really not very predictable and that is, indeed, what makes human
beings so interesting and scaryÂ?you never quite know what they will choose
to do and be.
So, the expression Â?I am very proud of youÂ? is a bit fishy. Perhaps it
should be rephrased to Â?I am very glad about how you turned our or who you
have chosen to become.Â? A mouthful but more to the point, I think.
So what about being proud of Â?my heritage and my backgroundÂ?? I, for
instance, was born and raised in Hungary and my background includes two
fanatical athletic parents, one of whom happened to be an avid supporter
of the Nazis and a virulent anti-Semite.
Now, I suppose if the mayor should be proud of his heritage, I ought to
be ashamed of at least part of mine. But thatÂ?s nonsenseÂ?I feel absolutely
no shame for my fatherÂ?s vices, nor for the virtues of my mother or
grandparents, whatever they were. Fact is, we can, strictly speaking, only
be proud of what we have done, of who we are not what we are. I am a male,
Caucasian, hailing from Hungary, 6Â? 2Â?, etc., and so forth. None of this
is anything I am or should be proud of. I like some of it, yesÂ?some of
what I picked up from Hungary, like their cooking, the gypsy music they
played a lot, and many more subtle things I am pleased about. But then I
Â?picked upÂ? a lot of stuff since then, the blues, jazz, the English novel,
American court room drama and you name itÂ?but none of it is anything I
achieved, so none of it makes or should make me proud. What makes me proud
has to do with whatever worthy stuff I have created, achieved, thatÂ?s all.
Same with what I feel shame for, my own failings.
I do think if we stuck to this for what we are proud and ashamed of, we
could come closer to avoiding all that ethnic and racial pride and hatred
that has wrought such hell on earth upon the human race.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Column on Sen Boxer & Democracy
Senator Boxer and American Democracy
Tibor R. Machan
California Senator Barbara Boxer, leading the effort of the Democrats in
Congress to hold up the confirmation of the Electoral College vote on
January 6, claimed that the absolutely core principle of America is
democracy. Because, she claimed, the last two presidential elections had
threatened the democratic process, it was necessary to call attention to
this fact in both the United States House and Senate by this delay.
Leave aside for a moment that every time Democrats lose an important
vote, they complain not that people didnÂ?t vote for them but that the vote
wasnÂ?t honest. This was true in California back in early 70s when
Democrats wanted to pass a law burdening the oil companies but lost. Bill
Press, who lead the effort, claimed widespread deception which mislead
voters. In Florida, back in 2000, it was all about a bias based on a
technical feature of the voting machines.
According to journalism Professor at U. C. Berkeley and Bard College,
Mark DannerÂ?writing for the January 13, 2005, issue of The New York Review
of Books, and author of The Road to Illegitimacy: One ReporterÂ?s
Adventures in the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (Melville House, 2004)Â?the
2004 presidential election went as it did not because of the difficulties
faced by poor voters in Ohio, which was BoxerÂ?s pitch. But he, too, had an
excuse. According to this sophisticated analyst, the basic trick the
Republicans perpetrated is to put the trumped up fear of death into too
many people. The concerted effort by the Right Wing to portray Bush as a
war president and Kerry as a wimp did the trick.
But it was a trick. Danner didnÂ?t discuss that more voters in America
agreed with Mr. Bush than with Mr. Kerry. He didnÂ?t debate the substance.
He merely pointed a finger, following the DemocratsÂ? refrain, at the
subversion of democracy.
For my money, democracy is a minor political virtue. It is completely
derivativeÂ?based on the far more important principles associated with the
American political tradition of the individualÂ?s right to liberty.
Democracy follows this rightÂ?one is free, so one is free to take part in
politics. But what is far more important is what should be part of
politics. And that is where constitutionalism comes into the picture.
Based on the American political tradition, a constitution spells out the
limits of politics, of political power, of what governments are permitted
to do. This is the revolutionary part of AmericaÂ?curtailment of the scope
of politics in a community.
In most of human history prior to the American Revolution (and in too
many countries today), the scope of governmentÂ?of politicsÂ?had been
virtually unlimited. There had been efforts to limit it, for instance, via
the Magna Carta, but the philosophy that defined the principles why
government must be limited in its scope of power had to await the American
FounderÂ?s adoption of classical liberal thinking, such as that of John
Locke, and the ensuing statement of this in the Declaration of
Independence.
Senator Boxer just doesnÂ?t get it, unfortunately. It is this limitation
of the scope of government that is the centerpiece of AmericaÂ?s political
system, not democracy.
Strictly speaking, if the government is properly limited by a
constitution of individual rights, it doesnÂ?t even make all that much
practical difference whether democracy is in effect or, say, monarchy. If
the king has no power, there is no threat but if a democratically elected
Congress has unlimited power, democracy is uselessÂ?it can become a tyranny
as easily as a one party system can.
I am not one of those who thinks AmericaÂ?s experiment with individual
liberty has been a roaring success so far, quite the contrary. Slavery,
conscription, and innumerable other elements of that history have made
freedom only a dream rather than a reality for too many people. But this
had been understood by many and there had been a clear cut effort to
remedy matters. But with the likes of Boxer in the U. S. Senate any
further remedies are not very likely.
Tibor R. Machan
California Senator Barbara Boxer, leading the effort of the Democrats in
Congress to hold up the confirmation of the Electoral College vote on
January 6, claimed that the absolutely core principle of America is
democracy. Because, she claimed, the last two presidential elections had
threatened the democratic process, it was necessary to call attention to
this fact in both the United States House and Senate by this delay.
Leave aside for a moment that every time Democrats lose an important
vote, they complain not that people didnÂ?t vote for them but that the vote
wasnÂ?t honest. This was true in California back in early 70s when
Democrats wanted to pass a law burdening the oil companies but lost. Bill
Press, who lead the effort, claimed widespread deception which mislead
voters. In Florida, back in 2000, it was all about a bias based on a
technical feature of the voting machines.
According to journalism Professor at U. C. Berkeley and Bard College,
Mark DannerÂ?writing for the January 13, 2005, issue of The New York Review
of Books, and author of The Road to Illegitimacy: One ReporterÂ?s
Adventures in the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (Melville House, 2004)Â?the
2004 presidential election went as it did not because of the difficulties
faced by poor voters in Ohio, which was BoxerÂ?s pitch. But he, too, had an
excuse. According to this sophisticated analyst, the basic trick the
Republicans perpetrated is to put the trumped up fear of death into too
many people. The concerted effort by the Right Wing to portray Bush as a
war president and Kerry as a wimp did the trick.
But it was a trick. Danner didnÂ?t discuss that more voters in America
agreed with Mr. Bush than with Mr. Kerry. He didnÂ?t debate the substance.
He merely pointed a finger, following the DemocratsÂ? refrain, at the
subversion of democracy.
For my money, democracy is a minor political virtue. It is completely
derivativeÂ?based on the far more important principles associated with the
American political tradition of the individualÂ?s right to liberty.
Democracy follows this rightÂ?one is free, so one is free to take part in
politics. But what is far more important is what should be part of
politics. And that is where constitutionalism comes into the picture.
Based on the American political tradition, a constitution spells out the
limits of politics, of political power, of what governments are permitted
to do. This is the revolutionary part of AmericaÂ?curtailment of the scope
of politics in a community.
In most of human history prior to the American Revolution (and in too
many countries today), the scope of governmentÂ?of politicsÂ?had been
virtually unlimited. There had been efforts to limit it, for instance, via
the Magna Carta, but the philosophy that defined the principles why
government must be limited in its scope of power had to await the American
FounderÂ?s adoption of classical liberal thinking, such as that of John
Locke, and the ensuing statement of this in the Declaration of
Independence.
Senator Boxer just doesnÂ?t get it, unfortunately. It is this limitation
of the scope of government that is the centerpiece of AmericaÂ?s political
system, not democracy.
Strictly speaking, if the government is properly limited by a
constitution of individual rights, it doesnÂ?t even make all that much
practical difference whether democracy is in effect or, say, monarchy. If
the king has no power, there is no threat but if a democratically elected
Congress has unlimited power, democracy is uselessÂ?it can become a tyranny
as easily as a one party system can.
I am not one of those who thinks AmericaÂ?s experiment with individual
liberty has been a roaring success so far, quite the contrary. Slavery,
conscription, and innumerable other elements of that history have made
freedom only a dream rather than a reality for too many people. But this
had been understood by many and there had been a clear cut effort to
remedy matters. But with the likes of Boxer in the U. S. Senate any
further remedies are not very likely.
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