Sotomayor vs. Ricci
Tibor R. Machan
During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor should be nominated to the U. S. Supreme Court, a nomination which if approved by the committee's majority would then go to the full Senate for a vote (that the Judge is assured to win), one of the most controversial issues discussed was the Judge's signing on to a very brief ruling affirming a lower court's decision to support a city government's invalidation of a test for firefighters which the majority—all of them "white" though one of Puerto Rican background—had passed. This group who passed the test sued the city for what it did after the test had been administered.
Now I am no expert at the laws governing these kinds of cases but I do give and have given tests to students over my 40 year career as a college professor. And from my experience, which has involved applying standards of fairness in the course of grading my students, it seems clear that there was something amiss about what the city did. Here is how Emily Bazelon of Slate described the background of the case in her May 26, 2009, article:
"In 2003, the city of New Haven, Conn., decided to base future promotions in its firefighting force—there were seven for captain and eight for lieutenant—primarily on a written test. The city paid an outside consultant to design the test so that it would be job-related. Firefighters studied for months. Of the 41 applicants who took the captain exam, eight were black; of the 77 who took the lieutenant exam, 19 were black. None of the African-American candidates scored high enough to be promoted. For both positions, only two of 29 Hispanics qualified for promotion." In consequences the city through out the results of the test. And this is what the fire fighters, lead by Ricci, protested in their lawsuit.
Suppose I announce at the start of my class that there will be two papers and a final given to determine what grade a student will receive. When I receive the papers and the test from them, I notice that all the male students who took them did badly, while all the female ones did well. So I decide to scrap these results and devise a new and different method for grading my students.
Those who passed the tests would be fully justified in protesting—unless the test contained some major infelicities, such as grossly incoherent questions—and what I would have done could by no stretch of the imagination be considered sound, valid, or justified.
The Ricci case, as far as I can grasp it, is no different. Maybe a future test could warrant modification but not the one for which the firefighters prepared and which they then took in good faith, believing that the tests will be instrumental in their quest for promotion.
I am puzzled, though, why anyone would find what the city officials of New Haven, Connecticut, and the panel of judges that included Sotomayor did
kosher. If there is any place for concern about fairness, surely it is when tests are administered in cases such as that involving the New Haven firefighters. If the test that was administered was, despite all efforts, flawed and treated the minority group among the firefighters wrongly, the approach that would be required is to revise the test for its future use. This seems to me plainly true and not very complicated.
But it seems that the eagerness to apply nearly any version of affirmative action policies has blinded a lot of folks to all this. Even if one accepts the policy of government mandated affirmative action—which is a highly debatable one for sure in a country that is set on eliminating racial and ethnic criteria from its public policies—the good faith effort shown in New Haven in designing a good test should suffice to have the test results be binding.
The reason this is a key issue in Judge Sotomayor's hearings is that what she did suggests that she may indeed fail to appreciate that the law needs to be color blind or neutral about people's background, ethnicity, and so forth—about matters, in other words, that are irrelevant to a candidate's suitability for a job. The rule of law means just this, namely, what rules is an impartial law, not any judge's preference.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
The Left's Dismissal of Individual Rights
Tibor R. Machan
For those of us who have escaped Draconian tyrannies and reached America, for a long time it may be difficult to adjust to the fact that American Leftists are every bit the fascists that some claim they are. As Susan Sontag said, "Communism is successful fascism." A little inspection of modern American liberalism will also bring this to light--just consider that it was Woodrow Wilson and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who had no patience with opponents of various public policies governments forged during their time and sent those opposed to them to prison. (It was Warren Harding, that negligible right-winger, who eventually set these dissidents free!)
Today the Left's fascistic tendencies are still quite evident, although there is often a kind of sophistication about them (e. g., via the doctrine of Communitarianism). Anyone who reads The New York Review of Books can testify to this. No matter what public policy issues is being discussed in its pages, The Review always treats the wealth of the nation as collectively owned, rejecting that quintessentially American idea of the right to private property. No, everything belongs to us all and government is to allocate the resources in line with how the elite deems proper.
In a recent discussion of the Obama administration's so called reform of the health care system--a reform that's really a revolution in American terms since it involves the nationalization of the system--once again it is clear that the folks over there just think the government has the authority and power to conscript our labor and confiscate our resources in support of whatever scheme they believe we ought to swallow. This is pretty much what we get in Arnold Relman's essay, "The Health Reform We Need & Are Not Getting" (July 2, 2009).
Relman has retired from Harvard's Medical School and is very closely linked with Canada's system and I am not interested in the specifics of his recommendations. What is far more noteworthy is just how readily he treats all the problems with the system he alleges in a state-corporatist fashion. It is as if America were this huge organization and he were giving its managers advice on how to deal with health care issues. What is of no concern to him, as it is not to most of those in the Obama administration, is that the resources to be used in securing various "reforms" belong to people whose permission to use those resources are by all rights required. But never mind such trivia.
The way Relman disposes of such considerations is to say, at one point that "Many others with ideological objections to 'big government' pay lip service to reform, but will bulk at proposals that threaten private insurance...." When I read these lines, about those many others "with ideological objections to 'big government'," I thought of all those millions behind the Iron Curtain who had objections to big government, all those enslaved by The Third Reich, all those caught up in the fascists policies of war-time Italy, as well as all those throughout human history who have been used and abused by big governments and their apologists (who always have some glorious excuse for doing this). To most authors writing for The New York Review of Books, however, such objections come only from ideologues, mindless zombies who simply follow some set of banalities and whose views deserve no attention or consideration by refined folks like Mr. Relman.
No one who knows a bit about the Left's social philosophy can be surprised about the Relman position since for the Left there simply exist no human individuals with rights to their lives, liberty and property. For the Left we are all cells in the greater whole of society or humanity and we need to submit to the rule of those who have somehow managed to become the chiefs of this collective. What you might like to do with your life, with your resources, is all irrelevant since you are nothing but a limb of the society, with no genuine rights of your own any more than you fingers or ears have rights.
Matters of the citizenry's health care--or of anything else, actually--are all corporate matters, and you and the rest of the population are involuntary servants of this corporation guided by the snooty wisdom of the likes of Mr. Relman. He can just dismiss all of those who might fret about issues like big government--such as the small matter of the voiding of the consent of the governed or rights violations (perpetrated when our labor and wealth is taken from us for various glorious objectives without our permission). Because we don't matter to such folks--only society, humanity, the community and such collectives have a true reality for them.
Talk about ideology! That is the most insidious ideology that has ever been concocted by the human imagination to rationalize the rule of some people over others who have been cleverly silenced. Yes, the opposite viewpoint, one that credits individual human beings with unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness does not fit within this scheme, not at all. But it is a far more sensible one.
Tibor R. Machan
For those of us who have escaped Draconian tyrannies and reached America, for a long time it may be difficult to adjust to the fact that American Leftists are every bit the fascists that some claim they are. As Susan Sontag said, "Communism is successful fascism." A little inspection of modern American liberalism will also bring this to light--just consider that it was Woodrow Wilson and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who had no patience with opponents of various public policies governments forged during their time and sent those opposed to them to prison. (It was Warren Harding, that negligible right-winger, who eventually set these dissidents free!)
Today the Left's fascistic tendencies are still quite evident, although there is often a kind of sophistication about them (e. g., via the doctrine of Communitarianism). Anyone who reads The New York Review of Books can testify to this. No matter what public policy issues is being discussed in its pages, The Review always treats the wealth of the nation as collectively owned, rejecting that quintessentially American idea of the right to private property. No, everything belongs to us all and government is to allocate the resources in line with how the elite deems proper.
In a recent discussion of the Obama administration's so called reform of the health care system--a reform that's really a revolution in American terms since it involves the nationalization of the system--once again it is clear that the folks over there just think the government has the authority and power to conscript our labor and confiscate our resources in support of whatever scheme they believe we ought to swallow. This is pretty much what we get in Arnold Relman's essay, "The Health Reform We Need & Are Not Getting" (July 2, 2009).
Relman has retired from Harvard's Medical School and is very closely linked with Canada's system and I am not interested in the specifics of his recommendations. What is far more noteworthy is just how readily he treats all the problems with the system he alleges in a state-corporatist fashion. It is as if America were this huge organization and he were giving its managers advice on how to deal with health care issues. What is of no concern to him, as it is not to most of those in the Obama administration, is that the resources to be used in securing various "reforms" belong to people whose permission to use those resources are by all rights required. But never mind such trivia.
The way Relman disposes of such considerations is to say, at one point that "Many others with ideological objections to 'big government' pay lip service to reform, but will bulk at proposals that threaten private insurance...." When I read these lines, about those many others "with ideological objections to 'big government'," I thought of all those millions behind the Iron Curtain who had objections to big government, all those enslaved by The Third Reich, all those caught up in the fascists policies of war-time Italy, as well as all those throughout human history who have been used and abused by big governments and their apologists (who always have some glorious excuse for doing this). To most authors writing for The New York Review of Books, however, such objections come only from ideologues, mindless zombies who simply follow some set of banalities and whose views deserve no attention or consideration by refined folks like Mr. Relman.
No one who knows a bit about the Left's social philosophy can be surprised about the Relman position since for the Left there simply exist no human individuals with rights to their lives, liberty and property. For the Left we are all cells in the greater whole of society or humanity and we need to submit to the rule of those who have somehow managed to become the chiefs of this collective. What you might like to do with your life, with your resources, is all irrelevant since you are nothing but a limb of the society, with no genuine rights of your own any more than you fingers or ears have rights.
Matters of the citizenry's health care--or of anything else, actually--are all corporate matters, and you and the rest of the population are involuntary servants of this corporation guided by the snooty wisdom of the likes of Mr. Relman. He can just dismiss all of those who might fret about issues like big government--such as the small matter of the voiding of the consent of the governed or rights violations (perpetrated when our labor and wealth is taken from us for various glorious objectives without our permission). Because we don't matter to such folks--only society, humanity, the community and such collectives have a true reality for them.
Talk about ideology! That is the most insidious ideology that has ever been concocted by the human imagination to rationalize the rule of some people over others who have been cleverly silenced. Yes, the opposite viewpoint, one that credits individual human beings with unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness does not fit within this scheme, not at all. But it is a far more sensible one.
Should Americans be Humble?
Tibor R. Machan
After president Obama traveled abroad recently it became clear that he wanted to present himself and, indirectly, America as a nation, differently from how he believed President George W. Bush did this. In particular, Mr. Bush was generally seen by his critics as more of an "ugly American," following the character of the novel by that name, written half a century ago by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer (who exemplified the sort of American who tended to be insensitive to the rest of the world's population, their customs and languages, etc.). Mr. Obama seems to want to change this by appearing to be less arrogant, swagger less than Mr. Bush. Instead Mr. Obama wants to be friends with virtually everyone, even those who have no interest it being friends with America and Americans, including him. This comportment of "turn the other cheek" appears to be Mr. Obama's way of conducting America's foreign affairs. No hint that America might teach the world anything about anything--indeed, one Russian commentator on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program, "GPS, Global Public Square," when asked the difference between how Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama came across to Russians on his visit, said that while Mr. Bush gave advice to Russians about democracy, human rights, and so forth, Mr. Obama simply listened to the Russians he met.
Ordinarily, in a world of civilized regimes everywhere, this approach to foreign affairs would be quite right but sadly we are not living in such a world. From its inception the United States of America stood as a challenger to the rest of the world on certain key issues of public policy. The most radical position advanced as a country was laid out in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights (the U. S. Constitution). This was the idea that governments don't rule; they aren't the sovereigns in a country but the citizens are.
Hardly anywhere else in the world and throughout human history has this stance been embraced officially by governments and their officials. To the contrary, while the American Founders held that you and I and the rest of us own our own lives and must be left free to govern it to ends we ourselves have the right to select, around the globe the idea has been that governments set the agendas to which the lives and labors of the population are to be conscripted. While here and there this notion began to be asserted less and less confidently, so that kings and czars and the like began to lose their absolute authority over the people, the basic idea never really changed. Governments are supreme, they rule the people, more or less brutally or gently, but they do rule. (In Dubai they actually call the head "the ruler.")
Now this fact has never endeared America and Americans to the elite of the world, those who felt that they do have the rightful authority to rule, to decide what goals people in their countries should pursue. The notion that these individuals have a right to the pursuit of their own happiness just seemed wrong, self-indulgent, and yes, arrogant. You need to consider this in light of the fact that for centuries and centuries ordinary human beings everywhere were deemed to be the unwilling or at times somewhat accommodating building blocks of grand and not so grand national projects. All those fabulous ruins of the past, such as Rome's Colosseum and Egypt's pyramids, were built not by using freely sold labor but, at least to a significant extent, from the work of slaves (some of whom were taken in battle, some the children of these, some convicts, but many simply people who could not resist the powers that be). Above these folks always stood the rulers, the class of human beings who managed to convince themselves that they had a God given right to rule others, and who were willing to impose this rule throughout the realm. And this went on for a very, very long time, so that in most places it is still regarded as the political norm.
In light of this picture it is no surprise that America's declaration to the world, even in its current watered down rendition, is offensive to all those who get to talk about these matters--who come on various prestigious forums and interview programs and appear in prominent journals and get invited to visit top ranked universities--except a very few who understand that the American message is actually right on.
No doubt some Americans, including some American presidents, embrace a rather crude, unsophisticated version of the American message and project this "ugly American" image but it needs to be noted that just by being normal Americans who are loyal to the spirit of the American founding they would be offensive to many of the elite abroad anyway. (The rest nearly all wish they lived here!)
So Mr. President, please don't bend over backwards to please everyone around the globe. Certainly many are not worthy of being appeased by you. Being civil to them all does not mean accepting the idea that America must become humble. Its creed is that of proud human beings, not of paeans.
As a footnote, the other evening I checked out the David Letterman show on CBS-TV and heard the announcer saying "From New York, the greatest city of the world" or something to that effect. And I imagined President Obama, given his attitude, writing to the producers saying they need to tone this down lest they offend the rest of the world's cities. Maybe I am paranoid but maybe this is just what we have to look forward to.
Tibor R. Machan
After president Obama traveled abroad recently it became clear that he wanted to present himself and, indirectly, America as a nation, differently from how he believed President George W. Bush did this. In particular, Mr. Bush was generally seen by his critics as more of an "ugly American," following the character of the novel by that name, written half a century ago by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer (who exemplified the sort of American who tended to be insensitive to the rest of the world's population, their customs and languages, etc.). Mr. Obama seems to want to change this by appearing to be less arrogant, swagger less than Mr. Bush. Instead Mr. Obama wants to be friends with virtually everyone, even those who have no interest it being friends with America and Americans, including him. This comportment of "turn the other cheek" appears to be Mr. Obama's way of conducting America's foreign affairs. No hint that America might teach the world anything about anything--indeed, one Russian commentator on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program, "GPS, Global Public Square," when asked the difference between how Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama came across to Russians on his visit, said that while Mr. Bush gave advice to Russians about democracy, human rights, and so forth, Mr. Obama simply listened to the Russians he met.
Ordinarily, in a world of civilized regimes everywhere, this approach to foreign affairs would be quite right but sadly we are not living in such a world. From its inception the United States of America stood as a challenger to the rest of the world on certain key issues of public policy. The most radical position advanced as a country was laid out in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights (the U. S. Constitution). This was the idea that governments don't rule; they aren't the sovereigns in a country but the citizens are.
Hardly anywhere else in the world and throughout human history has this stance been embraced officially by governments and their officials. To the contrary, while the American Founders held that you and I and the rest of us own our own lives and must be left free to govern it to ends we ourselves have the right to select, around the globe the idea has been that governments set the agendas to which the lives and labors of the population are to be conscripted. While here and there this notion began to be asserted less and less confidently, so that kings and czars and the like began to lose their absolute authority over the people, the basic idea never really changed. Governments are supreme, they rule the people, more or less brutally or gently, but they do rule. (In Dubai they actually call the head "the ruler.")
Now this fact has never endeared America and Americans to the elite of the world, those who felt that they do have the rightful authority to rule, to decide what goals people in their countries should pursue. The notion that these individuals have a right to the pursuit of their own happiness just seemed wrong, self-indulgent, and yes, arrogant. You need to consider this in light of the fact that for centuries and centuries ordinary human beings everywhere were deemed to be the unwilling or at times somewhat accommodating building blocks of grand and not so grand national projects. All those fabulous ruins of the past, such as Rome's Colosseum and Egypt's pyramids, were built not by using freely sold labor but, at least to a significant extent, from the work of slaves (some of whom were taken in battle, some the children of these, some convicts, but many simply people who could not resist the powers that be). Above these folks always stood the rulers, the class of human beings who managed to convince themselves that they had a God given right to rule others, and who were willing to impose this rule throughout the realm. And this went on for a very, very long time, so that in most places it is still regarded as the political norm.
In light of this picture it is no surprise that America's declaration to the world, even in its current watered down rendition, is offensive to all those who get to talk about these matters--who come on various prestigious forums and interview programs and appear in prominent journals and get invited to visit top ranked universities--except a very few who understand that the American message is actually right on.
No doubt some Americans, including some American presidents, embrace a rather crude, unsophisticated version of the American message and project this "ugly American" image but it needs to be noted that just by being normal Americans who are loyal to the spirit of the American founding they would be offensive to many of the elite abroad anyway. (The rest nearly all wish they lived here!)
So Mr. President, please don't bend over backwards to please everyone around the globe. Certainly many are not worthy of being appeased by you. Being civil to them all does not mean accepting the idea that America must become humble. Its creed is that of proud human beings, not of paeans.
As a footnote, the other evening I checked out the David Letterman show on CBS-TV and heard the announcer saying "From New York, the greatest city of the world" or something to that effect. And I imagined President Obama, given his attitude, writing to the producers saying they need to tone this down lest they offend the rest of the world's cities. Maybe I am paranoid but maybe this is just what we have to look forward to.
Lawyers Lawyers Everywhere?
Tibor R. Machan
Compared to, say TV GUide or Reader's Digest, The New Republic is a low circulation magazine. It is, however, this country's most prestigious and maybe most astute political-cultural publication. It carries articles on a wide ranging set of topics--from daily political affairs to reviews of the most esoteric philosophical books. It has had stars such as Michael Kinsley and Fred Barnes and Andrew . Its editorial views are not easily predicted. And it is very enjoyable to read, whatever your politics happens to be. As a co-founder of what has been aspiring to be a competing publication, Reason, I must admit that The New Republic is far and away the best read for those of us who care about public and cultural affairs.
Yet narrow-mindedness is not unfamiliar to its pages. Thus it recently unhesitatingly embraced the doctrine of nudging as Obama’s wise public policy vis-à-vis the business community, even though the Obama administration has been about as intrusive in the American economy as any administration since FDR’s.
Not very long ago, in a review of several fictional and non-fictional books of on the law, the author offers this unabashedly ignorant passage:
To an imagination of any scope," [Oliver Wendell] Holmes wrote, "the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas." That now has the platitudinous ring of a commencement address to which the graduating class listens patiently, all the while believing, on the evidence of nearly everything that surrounds them, that money will always be a vastly more far-reaching form of power than the command of ideas. How else is it possible to explain the enormous growth of the legal profession in the last thirty years? In this country between 1965 and 1990, writes [Lincoln] Caplan, "the number of lawyers leaped .. from 296,000 to 800,000....
Aside from the fact that this passage supports if not confirms Holmes' observation--the belief in the power, not to mention in the corrosiveness, of money is itself a result of the command of a very ancient idea--the rhetorical question does not have the self-evident answer the reviewer believes it does. There is a very obvious alternative possibility.
Is it not just possible, indeed very likely, that the enormous growth of the legal profession is due to the enormous growth of laws, especially government regulations of the economy? We have since the 1960s increased the number of laws and regulations enormously. The federal government alone writes thousands of new laws every year. The states, counties and municipalities add their (unfair) share. And the people--all the way from the local barber to multinational corporations' CEOs--need to hire lawyers to help them navigate the resulting legal labyrinth. Just now they are all gearing up to defend themselves from the Obama administration’s highly probable meteoric increase of government regulator measures of America’s financial institutions.
The New Republic is, no doubt, a superb magazine. But it suffers from its own ideological blinders. The editors probably found this rhetorical question about lawyers perfectly sensible, given the command of the idea that money is something awful but very tempting and that the relentless manufacture of laws and regulations in this country is, well, the thing to be taken for granted. Had they but considered that maybe these laws and regulations are mostly superfluous, the product of politicians posturing as savers of humanity, they might have asked the reviewer to think again about that sentence, to consider that the entire drift of the review might need to be recast to reflect not a well entrenched prejudice about money but the reality of the enormous growth of statism in the United States of America. All they need to do to see this is to read reports such as that of former administrator of OIRA--Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs--in the Bush administration, "Lessons Learned, Challenges Ahead," in Regulation magazine, Summer 2009.
And Ms. Dudley isn't even a radical about government regulations, someone who considers all of it ultimately a violation of due process (bothering citizens, imposing burdens on them, restraining their actions, before they have been proven to deserve any such treatment. Even some of the friends of regulations can see that with their relentless proliferation, they must give rise to greater and greater demand for attorneys who might just lessen their vicious impact.
Tibor R. Machan
Compared to, say TV GUide or Reader's Digest, The New Republic is a low circulation magazine. It is, however, this country's most prestigious and maybe most astute political-cultural publication. It carries articles on a wide ranging set of topics--from daily political affairs to reviews of the most esoteric philosophical books. It has had stars such as Michael Kinsley and Fred Barnes and Andrew . Its editorial views are not easily predicted. And it is very enjoyable to read, whatever your politics happens to be. As a co-founder of what has been aspiring to be a competing publication, Reason, I must admit that The New Republic is far and away the best read for those of us who care about public and cultural affairs.
Yet narrow-mindedness is not unfamiliar to its pages. Thus it recently unhesitatingly embraced the doctrine of nudging as Obama’s wise public policy vis-à-vis the business community, even though the Obama administration has been about as intrusive in the American economy as any administration since FDR’s.
Not very long ago, in a review of several fictional and non-fictional books of on the law, the author offers this unabashedly ignorant passage:
To an imagination of any scope," [Oliver Wendell] Holmes wrote, "the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas." That now has the platitudinous ring of a commencement address to which the graduating class listens patiently, all the while believing, on the evidence of nearly everything that surrounds them, that money will always be a vastly more far-reaching form of power than the command of ideas. How else is it possible to explain the enormous growth of the legal profession in the last thirty years? In this country between 1965 and 1990, writes [Lincoln] Caplan, "the number of lawyers leaped .. from 296,000 to 800,000....
Aside from the fact that this passage supports if not confirms Holmes' observation--the belief in the power, not to mention in the corrosiveness, of money is itself a result of the command of a very ancient idea--the rhetorical question does not have the self-evident answer the reviewer believes it does. There is a very obvious alternative possibility.
Is it not just possible, indeed very likely, that the enormous growth of the legal profession is due to the enormous growth of laws, especially government regulations of the economy? We have since the 1960s increased the number of laws and regulations enormously. The federal government alone writes thousands of new laws every year. The states, counties and municipalities add their (unfair) share. And the people--all the way from the local barber to multinational corporations' CEOs--need to hire lawyers to help them navigate the resulting legal labyrinth. Just now they are all gearing up to defend themselves from the Obama administration’s highly probable meteoric increase of government regulator measures of America’s financial institutions.
The New Republic is, no doubt, a superb magazine. But it suffers from its own ideological blinders. The editors probably found this rhetorical question about lawyers perfectly sensible, given the command of the idea that money is something awful but very tempting and that the relentless manufacture of laws and regulations in this country is, well, the thing to be taken for granted. Had they but considered that maybe these laws and regulations are mostly superfluous, the product of politicians posturing as savers of humanity, they might have asked the reviewer to think again about that sentence, to consider that the entire drift of the review might need to be recast to reflect not a well entrenched prejudice about money but the reality of the enormous growth of statism in the United States of America. All they need to do to see this is to read reports such as that of former administrator of OIRA--Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs--in the Bush administration, "Lessons Learned, Challenges Ahead," in Regulation magazine, Summer 2009.
And Ms. Dudley isn't even a radical about government regulations, someone who considers all of it ultimately a violation of due process (bothering citizens, imposing burdens on them, restraining their actions, before they have been proven to deserve any such treatment. Even some of the friends of regulations can see that with their relentless proliferation, they must give rise to greater and greater demand for attorneys who might just lessen their vicious impact.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Trumping Culture
Tibor R. Machan
Several acquaintances of mine have a tendency to explain or even justify what they say and do by reference to culture. "In my culture we do this." So just hush about it already, even if by other, widely accepted standards the thinking and conduct are wrong.
For example, some people, hailing from certain parts of the globe, believe in corporeal punishment of their kids, good and hard. Even minor infractions are treated with what by certain standards would be considered brutality. But when this is protested, one often gets the response that, well, that is how things are done in the perpetrator's culture and who is to say who is right.
I can speak here from personal experience. My Hungarian father believed in beating me anytime he found what I said or did objectionable. No, it wasn't enough to try to persuade me of his stance, to defend his standards in the face of their being challenged. Nor was it sufficient to ground me or doc my allowance or something similarly mild. What he did is clench his fist and hit me in the face and wherever he thought it would hurt badly. One time he brought home a plastic rod from an industrial exhibition with the triumphant exclamation that now, finally, he has something with which to beat me without having to hurt his own fists.
There are stories like this in the histories of many families, of course, some more and some less severe. But it goes further than that. Many people today, at least in certain countries, consider various treatments of animals totally unacceptable. Bull fighting, which is so closely linked to Latin culture, is denounced as wantonly cruel, nothing less. Dog fighting, which has been in the news recently right here in America, is another case in point, or cock fighting just across the border many places in Mexico.
In my case I finally ran away, on my 18th birthday, and despite trying to force me to come home from the high school I was attending, my father was rebuffed by the authorities--I was now of age and could do as I chose in this country. And for me the abuse went so far as to make it worth embarking upon a life of my own, even in a brand new country where I was still quite a stranger. For others, however, the cost-benefit calculation is more problematic--they may not be abused so badly as to make it worth their while to simply bolt and set off on their own. It's too risky, scary, so they will often stick around and put up with the culturally justified treatment. Some battered wives know of this very well.
What elements of a culture are, as it were, optional, which are over the top, unacceptable? For animal rights activists bull fighting is over the top; for children's rights activists beating a kid just will not cut it, no way. What about vegetarianism? Is it optional? Some think so and would certainly restrain anyone who would try to force others not to kill and eat animals. Others have no tolerance for meat eating and would gladly force anyone to desist, never mind consent.
This isn't the place to try to resolve any particular cultural conflict. But it is possible to observe that the idea that something is justified by one's culture is quite problematic. Draconian measures of cruelty against women and dissidents are deployed in the name of this very dubious "justification" (or is it rationalization?). Moreover, even those who like to invoke culture to justify their own thinking and conduct often do not accept this from others whose thinking and conduct they find detestable.
The matter harks back all the way to ancient Greece where the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, were deeply concerned about what are matters that are subject to diverse treatments--maybe customs or methods of educating the young--and what cannot be left subject to such diversity--homicide, lying, slavery, and so on. Their attempted solution was to find a common standards of human conduct in an understanding of human nature, something they held to be stable and thus transcending cultures.
The basic solution these thinkers--and many others throughout human history--proposed is that from an understanding that human beings are distinctive in the world by virtue of being able to reason, their conduct must conform to this fact, must be reasonable. That leaves room for a great deal of variety but it also precludes certain ways of acting. Mostly it precludes the use of physical force among people to reach agreement or pseudo-cooperation. Being civilized means using one's reasoning ability to persuade others--or to be persuaded--of what is right. The rest is barbaric.
Tibor R. Machan
Several acquaintances of mine have a tendency to explain or even justify what they say and do by reference to culture. "In my culture we do this." So just hush about it already, even if by other, widely accepted standards the thinking and conduct are wrong.
For example, some people, hailing from certain parts of the globe, believe in corporeal punishment of their kids, good and hard. Even minor infractions are treated with what by certain standards would be considered brutality. But when this is protested, one often gets the response that, well, that is how things are done in the perpetrator's culture and who is to say who is right.
I can speak here from personal experience. My Hungarian father believed in beating me anytime he found what I said or did objectionable. No, it wasn't enough to try to persuade me of his stance, to defend his standards in the face of their being challenged. Nor was it sufficient to ground me or doc my allowance or something similarly mild. What he did is clench his fist and hit me in the face and wherever he thought it would hurt badly. One time he brought home a plastic rod from an industrial exhibition with the triumphant exclamation that now, finally, he has something with which to beat me without having to hurt his own fists.
There are stories like this in the histories of many families, of course, some more and some less severe. But it goes further than that. Many people today, at least in certain countries, consider various treatments of animals totally unacceptable. Bull fighting, which is so closely linked to Latin culture, is denounced as wantonly cruel, nothing less. Dog fighting, which has been in the news recently right here in America, is another case in point, or cock fighting just across the border many places in Mexico.
In my case I finally ran away, on my 18th birthday, and despite trying to force me to come home from the high school I was attending, my father was rebuffed by the authorities--I was now of age and could do as I chose in this country. And for me the abuse went so far as to make it worth embarking upon a life of my own, even in a brand new country where I was still quite a stranger. For others, however, the cost-benefit calculation is more problematic--they may not be abused so badly as to make it worth their while to simply bolt and set off on their own. It's too risky, scary, so they will often stick around and put up with the culturally justified treatment. Some battered wives know of this very well.
What elements of a culture are, as it were, optional, which are over the top, unacceptable? For animal rights activists bull fighting is over the top; for children's rights activists beating a kid just will not cut it, no way. What about vegetarianism? Is it optional? Some think so and would certainly restrain anyone who would try to force others not to kill and eat animals. Others have no tolerance for meat eating and would gladly force anyone to desist, never mind consent.
This isn't the place to try to resolve any particular cultural conflict. But it is possible to observe that the idea that something is justified by one's culture is quite problematic. Draconian measures of cruelty against women and dissidents are deployed in the name of this very dubious "justification" (or is it rationalization?). Moreover, even those who like to invoke culture to justify their own thinking and conduct often do not accept this from others whose thinking and conduct they find detestable.
The matter harks back all the way to ancient Greece where the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, were deeply concerned about what are matters that are subject to diverse treatments--maybe customs or methods of educating the young--and what cannot be left subject to such diversity--homicide, lying, slavery, and so on. Their attempted solution was to find a common standards of human conduct in an understanding of human nature, something they held to be stable and thus transcending cultures.
The basic solution these thinkers--and many others throughout human history--proposed is that from an understanding that human beings are distinctive in the world by virtue of being able to reason, their conduct must conform to this fact, must be reasonable. That leaves room for a great deal of variety but it also precludes certain ways of acting. Mostly it precludes the use of physical force among people to reach agreement or pseudo-cooperation. Being civilized means using one's reasoning ability to persuade others--or to be persuaded--of what is right. The rest is barbaric.
Yes, Roger Federer is Human
Tibor R. Machan
Roger Federer--who is the most successful tennis player in the recorded history of the game and who won his 15th grand slam championship on Sunday, July 5th at Wimbledon--is, contrary to suspicions voiced by Roger Cohen, of The New York Times, in a column titled "Roger Federer Unbuttoned"--is a human being. Cohen's column is mildly funny but also a bit disturbing for its hint at what seems like a serious endorsement of misanthrope.
Cohen argues that Roger Federer is such a good tennis player that, well, he couldn't be human and must be some kind of cyborg. (He adduces as one piece of evidence that Federer's shirt button never came undone throughout his match with Andy Roddick (who gave his all and still lost in this marathon match--5 sets with the final one going to 16-14). So what? Maybe his shirt was well constructed--by human beings--and so it withstood all the twists and turns it was put through in the match!
That's what bugs me about Cohen's piece; it intimates that for someone to be as good a tennis player as Roger Federer is--so excellent at the game as well as comporting himself in nearly flawlessly civilized fashion over his adult career--one cannot be human. Of course it is a joke but it does suggest a sad perspective on human beings. It seems to reflect a dominant modern misanthropic idea, given ample exemplification in the arts where the anti-hero is pretty much the norm these days, at least so far as the connoisseurs would have it.
To their chagrin, it seems, Roger Federer and many other athletes--Michael Phelps, the Olympiad swimmer, and a host of basketball players come immediately to mind--just cannot be human. And so when they turn out to be, it has to be something bizarre. (Often promoters of this misanthropic outlook would seem to be just waiting for the greats to fall in some way or another, lest they undermine their grim philosophy!)
Excellence, by its very nature, is something rare. So are heroes and geniuses. But all of it is every bit as human as are the opposites. That's because human nature is not wired either for superiority or inferiority. People are born pretty much having the capacity to excel or to fail and most will very likely hover somewhere in between. A bell shape curve captures it well. Now and then this picture is upset either by the sudden emergence of incredible and widespread excellence or its opposite. History, I think, bears me out. In fact, for my money, there is probably evidence of a slight upward incline over the long haul, although judging by the 20th century I could be way off.
However this plays, it is wonderful to have, here and there, examples of superior human performance in many spheres of life, sometimes even in all of them at once. That, I believe, is the more accurate picture of the human situation instead of the notion that excellence must be something artificial, which is what Mr. Cohen seems to have suggested with his admittedly lighthearted essay. Because it was lighthearted I maybe making too much of it for the worse. Yet, for me the suggestion that human beings couldn't possibly manage greatness, even at tennis, is upsetting. With all of the challenges they face around them, often brought about by the hopefully temporary triumph of the worst among us, they need to be reminded of just the opposite, namely, that with focus, effort, and a bit of luck they can manage well--and maybe manage at times superbly--living their human lives.
No, there is no way to engineer human beings to be excellent. This is precisely what makes them so human--however they turn out is to a large measure their own doing, following their beliefs and choices. But encouragement from their fellows is no small part of the total picture here. So discouragement could be a serious impediment, one no one needs right now (or ever). (And, by the way, cyborgs are human artifacts--human-machine systems--and follow the law of garbage in, garbage out!)
Tibor R. Machan
Roger Federer--who is the most successful tennis player in the recorded history of the game and who won his 15th grand slam championship on Sunday, July 5th at Wimbledon--is, contrary to suspicions voiced by Roger Cohen, of The New York Times, in a column titled "Roger Federer Unbuttoned"--is a human being. Cohen's column is mildly funny but also a bit disturbing for its hint at what seems like a serious endorsement of misanthrope.
Cohen argues that Roger Federer is such a good tennis player that, well, he couldn't be human and must be some kind of cyborg. (He adduces as one piece of evidence that Federer's shirt button never came undone throughout his match with Andy Roddick (who gave his all and still lost in this marathon match--5 sets with the final one going to 16-14). So what? Maybe his shirt was well constructed--by human beings--and so it withstood all the twists and turns it was put through in the match!
That's what bugs me about Cohen's piece; it intimates that for someone to be as good a tennis player as Roger Federer is--so excellent at the game as well as comporting himself in nearly flawlessly civilized fashion over his adult career--one cannot be human. Of course it is a joke but it does suggest a sad perspective on human beings. It seems to reflect a dominant modern misanthropic idea, given ample exemplification in the arts where the anti-hero is pretty much the norm these days, at least so far as the connoisseurs would have it.
To their chagrin, it seems, Roger Federer and many other athletes--Michael Phelps, the Olympiad swimmer, and a host of basketball players come immediately to mind--just cannot be human. And so when they turn out to be, it has to be something bizarre. (Often promoters of this misanthropic outlook would seem to be just waiting for the greats to fall in some way or another, lest they undermine their grim philosophy!)
Excellence, by its very nature, is something rare. So are heroes and geniuses. But all of it is every bit as human as are the opposites. That's because human nature is not wired either for superiority or inferiority. People are born pretty much having the capacity to excel or to fail and most will very likely hover somewhere in between. A bell shape curve captures it well. Now and then this picture is upset either by the sudden emergence of incredible and widespread excellence or its opposite. History, I think, bears me out. In fact, for my money, there is probably evidence of a slight upward incline over the long haul, although judging by the 20th century I could be way off.
However this plays, it is wonderful to have, here and there, examples of superior human performance in many spheres of life, sometimes even in all of them at once. That, I believe, is the more accurate picture of the human situation instead of the notion that excellence must be something artificial, which is what Mr. Cohen seems to have suggested with his admittedly lighthearted essay. Because it was lighthearted I maybe making too much of it for the worse. Yet, for me the suggestion that human beings couldn't possibly manage greatness, even at tennis, is upsetting. With all of the challenges they face around them, often brought about by the hopefully temporary triumph of the worst among us, they need to be reminded of just the opposite, namely, that with focus, effort, and a bit of luck they can manage well--and maybe manage at times superbly--living their human lives.
No, there is no way to engineer human beings to be excellent. This is precisely what makes them so human--however they turn out is to a large measure their own doing, following their beliefs and choices. But encouragement from their fellows is no small part of the total picture here. So discouragement could be a serious impediment, one no one needs right now (or ever). (And, by the way, cyborgs are human artifacts--human-machine systems--and follow the law of garbage in, garbage out!)
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Gratitude and Bailouts
Tibor R. Machan
Business Week reports--in the July 13 & 20, 2009, issue, on page 22--that Assistant Professor Randle Raggio of Louisiana State University has written, for the Harvard Business Review, a case study of "whether bailout recipients should say thanks." This kind of exercise is a puzzle.
Exactly how a case study can determine the answer to the question being posed is unclear. Perhaps expressing such "gratitude" is but a possible exercise in public relations for it has nothing to do with a genuine show of gratitude. So if by "should" is meant, "will be welcome by some taxpayers," I suppose the exercise makes some sense.
What does not make any sense at all is to consider the gesture a show of genuine gratitude since the taxpayers didn't dig into their own resources and provide the bailout of their own free will, not by a long shot. What most but not taxpayers did is to tolerate having taxes be used for this purpose. (Remember that many of them took part in "tea parties" to show their disapproval.)
Even if one were to believe the lie that taxes are something that citizens choose to pay, on the question of what ought to be done with the taxes they have very little say. At best they have a way of indicating, after the fact, whether what Congress and other political bodies do with the money they extort from citizens is spent in acceptable ways, without much protest. Sure, they can vote members of Congress out of office. But this doesn't happen a lot because those in Congress do a lot besides distribute the loot they collect from the citizenry--often they take other people's money and bring it home to their constituents. And much of what they do is far more visible than their activity of wealth redistribution tends to be. Voting for someone by no means implies agreement with how tax funds are being spent. It may mean merely that this candidate was the least offensive of those running. Or that those who found something wrong with the candidate's voting record just didn't have the time and energy to wage an effective campaign against the individual.
Even the idea that in a democracy legislators have the task to take the resources of the citizenry and spend it as they see fit is highly dubious. Yes, a lot of people think that democracy allows this but that is not a proper democracy at all. What democracy in a free society allows is to vote in those who will decide what laws need to be passed so as to advance the protection of the rights of the citizenry in novel situations--ones the framers could not anticipate. That is the proper scope of democracy in a free society. Anything else amounts to the usurpation of political power.
That said, even if one where to think that taxpayers had anything to do with the decision of how much bailout money ought to be handed out and who ought to receive it, showing them gratitude is disingenuous. Money not given by those who own it to those who want it cannot be given out of generosity. Such money is, plainly spoken, not given but taken. Thanking the taxpayer is like thanking a victim of mugging for the loot he or she taken in the mugging. No good is done that way. Those who received bailout money can only redeem themselves by returning it fast and with interest, but even that would amount not to gratitude but to an gesture of belated justice.
As to whether giving expression of "gratitude" for bailout money Congress handed out makes sense, at best members of Congress might be thanked, although that would be odd, too, since it isn't their money they gave! The bottom line is that the entire exercise of taking the citizenry's resources and handing it out at Congress' discretion ought to be illegitimate in a free society. But I guess such a message isn't going to see the light of day in the pages of the Harvard Business Review, certainly not be an assistant--very likely untenured--professor. By now such prominent publications around the country, let alone the globe, are fully in cahoots with the system that pays no attention whatsoever to the idea that other people's resources aren't Congress's to distribute but their own.
Tibor R. Machan
Business Week reports--in the July 13 & 20, 2009, issue, on page 22--that Assistant Professor Randle Raggio of Louisiana State University has written, for the Harvard Business Review, a case study of "whether bailout recipients should say thanks." This kind of exercise is a puzzle.
Exactly how a case study can determine the answer to the question being posed is unclear. Perhaps expressing such "gratitude" is but a possible exercise in public relations for it has nothing to do with a genuine show of gratitude. So if by "should" is meant, "will be welcome by some taxpayers," I suppose the exercise makes some sense.
What does not make any sense at all is to consider the gesture a show of genuine gratitude since the taxpayers didn't dig into their own resources and provide the bailout of their own free will, not by a long shot. What most but not taxpayers did is to tolerate having taxes be used for this purpose. (Remember that many of them took part in "tea parties" to show their disapproval.)
Even if one were to believe the lie that taxes are something that citizens choose to pay, on the question of what ought to be done with the taxes they have very little say. At best they have a way of indicating, after the fact, whether what Congress and other political bodies do with the money they extort from citizens is spent in acceptable ways, without much protest. Sure, they can vote members of Congress out of office. But this doesn't happen a lot because those in Congress do a lot besides distribute the loot they collect from the citizenry--often they take other people's money and bring it home to their constituents. And much of what they do is far more visible than their activity of wealth redistribution tends to be. Voting for someone by no means implies agreement with how tax funds are being spent. It may mean merely that this candidate was the least offensive of those running. Or that those who found something wrong with the candidate's voting record just didn't have the time and energy to wage an effective campaign against the individual.
Even the idea that in a democracy legislators have the task to take the resources of the citizenry and spend it as they see fit is highly dubious. Yes, a lot of people think that democracy allows this but that is not a proper democracy at all. What democracy in a free society allows is to vote in those who will decide what laws need to be passed so as to advance the protection of the rights of the citizenry in novel situations--ones the framers could not anticipate. That is the proper scope of democracy in a free society. Anything else amounts to the usurpation of political power.
That said, even if one where to think that taxpayers had anything to do with the decision of how much bailout money ought to be handed out and who ought to receive it, showing them gratitude is disingenuous. Money not given by those who own it to those who want it cannot be given out of generosity. Such money is, plainly spoken, not given but taken. Thanking the taxpayer is like thanking a victim of mugging for the loot he or she taken in the mugging. No good is done that way. Those who received bailout money can only redeem themselves by returning it fast and with interest, but even that would amount not to gratitude but to an gesture of belated justice.
As to whether giving expression of "gratitude" for bailout money Congress handed out makes sense, at best members of Congress might be thanked, although that would be odd, too, since it isn't their money they gave! The bottom line is that the entire exercise of taking the citizenry's resources and handing it out at Congress' discretion ought to be illegitimate in a free society. But I guess such a message isn't going to see the light of day in the pages of the Harvard Business Review, certainly not be an assistant--very likely untenured--professor. By now such prominent publications around the country, let alone the globe, are fully in cahoots with the system that pays no attention whatsoever to the idea that other people's resources aren't Congress's to distribute but their own.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Rights and Animals Again
Tibor R. Machan
That people have rights is an idea that has been around a while--some argue that even Aristotle, who accepted a form of slavery for some, began to reflect on them back in ancient Greece. In time the notion got cleared up a good deal and with John Locke's help, in the 17th century, a full theory of individual human rights emerged.
As someone who was smuggled out of communist Hungary where rights were deemed to be no more than bourgeois prejudices, I have always had a deep concern about whether a country's legal order rests on such rights or on something far less solid and easily manipulated for the benefit of more or less Draconian tyrants. (In time I wrote two entire books, as well as a lot of papers and essays, on the topic.)
There have always been eager critics of individual human rights, for a variety of reasons, mainly because taking them seriously implies a severe reduction of the scope of governmental authority and power. That does not sit well with many people who want to achieve various goals without having to concern themselves about gaining the consent of those whose lives and labors they wish to use to help them do this. They wish to conscript people, not gain their consent, when they want their support and acknowledging individual rights renders this very difficult.
There are however those, too, who want to expand the coverage of individual human rights to include at least the "higher" animals, so that recently, for example, the government of Spain decided to "grant" rights to great apes. There is now a sizable movement, both popular and academic, insisting that animals other than human beings have the very same rights the American Founders mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. They deploy a variety of arguments in support of this idea and I have addressed several of them (in my book Putting Humans First [2004]).
One point I did not make in that work but one that should add a major obstacle efforts to ascribe rights to non-humans is worth laying out, especially now that one of our new president's favorite legal theorist, Professor Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School, is proposing the push for laws that would empower animal rights supporters to sue in court in behalf of the rights of animals just as this is possible to do now vis-a-vis human beings.
Not that there is nothing wrong with abusing animals, with wanton cruelty toward them, and not that this couldn't use a good deal of consideration from thoughtful persons, maybe even legal theorists. But the idea that animals have the rights we human beings do is completely misguided. That's because animals are not moral agents. (There are some indications that here and there some minimal moral awareness is evident in some very few species but these are marginal cases not warranting the ascription of rights! We aren't dealing with geometry here, so borders are sometimes hazy.)
In any event, a big problem with claiming that animals have a moral nature and rights, as human beings do, is that this would wreak havoc with the way animals are treated by us in the wilds. Putting it plainly, animals are not deemed guilty of anything when they kill, maim, devour and brutalize one another, as they do routinely on the high seas, in the desert, and up in the skies. One need but be minimally familiar with how millions of animals behave to appreciate that talk of their guilt or responsibility to be humane to one another, their need to be kind and considerate is utter nonsense. And if animals did have the rights human beings do, that is what would have to be true of them all--they would have to respect one another's rights.
Consider that human rights watchdog agencies around the globe aim to bring governments and legal systems in line with the fact that everyone has basic rights to, for example, life, liberty, property, due process of law, free expression, political participation, and so forth. It matters not where the violations occur because the fact of someone's humanity makes one a rights holder and indicts anyone who violates his or her rights.
If animals had these rights, too, then all of their tormentors in the wilds would have to be indicted, too. But this is nonsense because they aren't subject to moral or legal principles and demanding that they conform to them is entirely off base. Yet if they all had rights and were moral agents that animal rights advocates insist they are--the main advocate, Tom Regan, who wrote The Case for Animal Rights back in 1984, argued that no morally significant difference can be found between people and animals--they would be (a) required to respect the rights of their fellow animals and (b) it would be mandatory to enact legislation for the protection of the rights of animals, ones being violated as a matter of course by other animals. These rights violating animals would have to be treated just like we treat violent criminals--charging them, prosecuting them, and incarcerating them once found guilty.
This is what follows form the claim that animals are just like us only a little less so--sort of like juveniles--in having a moral nature and thus possessing basic rights.
There is much else that could be pointed out that renders animal rights talk highly dubious if not out and out nonsense. But this is a major implication worth being given serious thought.
Tibor R. Machan
That people have rights is an idea that has been around a while--some argue that even Aristotle, who accepted a form of slavery for some, began to reflect on them back in ancient Greece. In time the notion got cleared up a good deal and with John Locke's help, in the 17th century, a full theory of individual human rights emerged.
As someone who was smuggled out of communist Hungary where rights were deemed to be no more than bourgeois prejudices, I have always had a deep concern about whether a country's legal order rests on such rights or on something far less solid and easily manipulated for the benefit of more or less Draconian tyrants. (In time I wrote two entire books, as well as a lot of papers and essays, on the topic.)
There have always been eager critics of individual human rights, for a variety of reasons, mainly because taking them seriously implies a severe reduction of the scope of governmental authority and power. That does not sit well with many people who want to achieve various goals without having to concern themselves about gaining the consent of those whose lives and labors they wish to use to help them do this. They wish to conscript people, not gain their consent, when they want their support and acknowledging individual rights renders this very difficult.
There are however those, too, who want to expand the coverage of individual human rights to include at least the "higher" animals, so that recently, for example, the government of Spain decided to "grant" rights to great apes. There is now a sizable movement, both popular and academic, insisting that animals other than human beings have the very same rights the American Founders mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. They deploy a variety of arguments in support of this idea and I have addressed several of them (in my book Putting Humans First [2004]).
One point I did not make in that work but one that should add a major obstacle efforts to ascribe rights to non-humans is worth laying out, especially now that one of our new president's favorite legal theorist, Professor Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School, is proposing the push for laws that would empower animal rights supporters to sue in court in behalf of the rights of animals just as this is possible to do now vis-a-vis human beings.
Not that there is nothing wrong with abusing animals, with wanton cruelty toward them, and not that this couldn't use a good deal of consideration from thoughtful persons, maybe even legal theorists. But the idea that animals have the rights we human beings do is completely misguided. That's because animals are not moral agents. (There are some indications that here and there some minimal moral awareness is evident in some very few species but these are marginal cases not warranting the ascription of rights! We aren't dealing with geometry here, so borders are sometimes hazy.)
In any event, a big problem with claiming that animals have a moral nature and rights, as human beings do, is that this would wreak havoc with the way animals are treated by us in the wilds. Putting it plainly, animals are not deemed guilty of anything when they kill, maim, devour and brutalize one another, as they do routinely on the high seas, in the desert, and up in the skies. One need but be minimally familiar with how millions of animals behave to appreciate that talk of their guilt or responsibility to be humane to one another, their need to be kind and considerate is utter nonsense. And if animals did have the rights human beings do, that is what would have to be true of them all--they would have to respect one another's rights.
Consider that human rights watchdog agencies around the globe aim to bring governments and legal systems in line with the fact that everyone has basic rights to, for example, life, liberty, property, due process of law, free expression, political participation, and so forth. It matters not where the violations occur because the fact of someone's humanity makes one a rights holder and indicts anyone who violates his or her rights.
If animals had these rights, too, then all of their tormentors in the wilds would have to be indicted, too. But this is nonsense because they aren't subject to moral or legal principles and demanding that they conform to them is entirely off base. Yet if they all had rights and were moral agents that animal rights advocates insist they are--the main advocate, Tom Regan, who wrote The Case for Animal Rights back in 1984, argued that no morally significant difference can be found between people and animals--they would be (a) required to respect the rights of their fellow animals and (b) it would be mandatory to enact legislation for the protection of the rights of animals, ones being violated as a matter of course by other animals. These rights violating animals would have to be treated just like we treat violent criminals--charging them, prosecuting them, and incarcerating them once found guilty.
This is what follows form the claim that animals are just like us only a little less so--sort of like juveniles--in having a moral nature and thus possessing basic rights.
There is much else that could be pointed out that renders animal rights talk highly dubious if not out and out nonsense. But this is a major implication worth being given serious thought.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Why Sacrifice?
Tibor R. Machan
I just don't know what exactly President Obama means when he says "We must all expect to sacrifice during these times" or something equivalent. Never mind why we must do this--does he want to enact laws that force us all to sacrifice? Is that his job? But, as I said, never mind such tiny details. What exactly does the president consider a sacrifice? Does reducing our standard of living amount to a sacrifice? Even if it brings one peace of mind or eventual greater prosperity? Or does a sacrifice mean suffering net losses, no gains at all? So we must expect to get worse and worse off from now on, as time passes? Why? Even if in the recent past the various pubic policies and some private imprudence have produced the need to cut back on most Americans' standard of living, does this cut back amount to some good in itself so we must all seek it and make it permanent? Why?
In most eras of human history the vast majority of people were dirt poor, died early, lived rather unhappy lives, carried forth mainly because of a promises that they'd get into heaven after their bum ride. It is doubtful that without this belief they would have accepted their lot and many, indeed, did not and tried to rebel against those they blamed for keeping them poor and unhappy.
In time in various places ways of organizing wealth and work were identified that promised to improve matters for nearly everyone, for some by huge margins, for others by moderate ones. Still, for the last few centuries the welfare of the large majority of human beings on earth has experienced significant improvement. That was one result of taking to heart the teachings of someone like Adam Smith whose most famous book, The Wealth of Nations--published, ironically, in 1776 when some other pearls of wisdom came our way--showed that reducing the hand of government in the economy is the best bet for improving the wealth in a country, any country! In consequence of this and similar teachings, the world took off on a vigorous pursuit of prosperity, health, education, entertainment, and a host of other good things that made life no longer merely a prelude to happiness after it.
There have always been detractors of this journey, of course. Many religions proudly advocate embracing poverty as one's way of life. Some very recent secular faiths proclaim it to be a great virtue to be self-denying, even to renounce happiness and instead pursue melancholia! In the arts misanthropy has always been a tempting theme, although with significant exceptions (especially in music and literature).
Nevertheless among the poor of the world very, very few have proclaimed poverty a preferred circumstance. Most yearn to achieve at least moderate prosperity and some are quite pleased to do even better, or at least leave their children with the prospect of flourishing economically and otherwise. But now we have a president here in the most successful economy in human history who meets the challenge of some widespread mismanagement, primarily brought about by politicians and bureaucrats, by insisting that we must expect to sacrifice. Which I take to mean to give up on our aspirations for continued prosperity.
I think this is nuts. If anything the opposite would serve the purpose of recovery much better. Most of us probably should renew our commitment to serious wealth-creating work and not lower our expectations and desist in our efforts to improve our lives on all fronts.
Politicians are generally able only to ruin a country's economy, hardly ever to improve on it--that requires the citizenry itself, not some mesmerizing leader. But politicians could perhaps serve in one useful capacity since they have the eyes and ears of the media turned on them all the time: they could teach us something about where prosperity comes from, for example. It seems like President Obama will not even take up this modest challenge. Instead he is embracing defeatism, preparing us all for a return to the bad times of centuries ago when sacrifice was in massive demand in the name of a fabulous afterlife.
Tibor R. Machan
I just don't know what exactly President Obama means when he says "We must all expect to sacrifice during these times" or something equivalent. Never mind why we must do this--does he want to enact laws that force us all to sacrifice? Is that his job? But, as I said, never mind such tiny details. What exactly does the president consider a sacrifice? Does reducing our standard of living amount to a sacrifice? Even if it brings one peace of mind or eventual greater prosperity? Or does a sacrifice mean suffering net losses, no gains at all? So we must expect to get worse and worse off from now on, as time passes? Why? Even if in the recent past the various pubic policies and some private imprudence have produced the need to cut back on most Americans' standard of living, does this cut back amount to some good in itself so we must all seek it and make it permanent? Why?
In most eras of human history the vast majority of people were dirt poor, died early, lived rather unhappy lives, carried forth mainly because of a promises that they'd get into heaven after their bum ride. It is doubtful that without this belief they would have accepted their lot and many, indeed, did not and tried to rebel against those they blamed for keeping them poor and unhappy.
In time in various places ways of organizing wealth and work were identified that promised to improve matters for nearly everyone, for some by huge margins, for others by moderate ones. Still, for the last few centuries the welfare of the large majority of human beings on earth has experienced significant improvement. That was one result of taking to heart the teachings of someone like Adam Smith whose most famous book, The Wealth of Nations--published, ironically, in 1776 when some other pearls of wisdom came our way--showed that reducing the hand of government in the economy is the best bet for improving the wealth in a country, any country! In consequence of this and similar teachings, the world took off on a vigorous pursuit of prosperity, health, education, entertainment, and a host of other good things that made life no longer merely a prelude to happiness after it.
There have always been detractors of this journey, of course. Many religions proudly advocate embracing poverty as one's way of life. Some very recent secular faiths proclaim it to be a great virtue to be self-denying, even to renounce happiness and instead pursue melancholia! In the arts misanthropy has always been a tempting theme, although with significant exceptions (especially in music and literature).
Nevertheless among the poor of the world very, very few have proclaimed poverty a preferred circumstance. Most yearn to achieve at least moderate prosperity and some are quite pleased to do even better, or at least leave their children with the prospect of flourishing economically and otherwise. But now we have a president here in the most successful economy in human history who meets the challenge of some widespread mismanagement, primarily brought about by politicians and bureaucrats, by insisting that we must expect to sacrifice. Which I take to mean to give up on our aspirations for continued prosperity.
I think this is nuts. If anything the opposite would serve the purpose of recovery much better. Most of us probably should renew our commitment to serious wealth-creating work and not lower our expectations and desist in our efforts to improve our lives on all fronts.
Politicians are generally able only to ruin a country's economy, hardly ever to improve on it--that requires the citizenry itself, not some mesmerizing leader. But politicians could perhaps serve in one useful capacity since they have the eyes and ears of the media turned on them all the time: they could teach us something about where prosperity comes from, for example. It seems like President Obama will not even take up this modest challenge. Instead he is embracing defeatism, preparing us all for a return to the bad times of centuries ago when sacrifice was in massive demand in the name of a fabulous afterlife.
Declaration of independence: Positive vs. negative rights
TIBOR R. MACHAN
After so many years of Americans aspiring to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, with much success, critics of America have changed their tune. It used to be that this country failed to be true to those principles but as that has gradually - and at times abruptly - changed, critics had to find something else to beef about.
And, sure enough, they found it, in that highly questionable doctrine of "positive rights" first laid out in 1944 in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's so-called Second Bill of Rights. The tact now is to say, yes, the founders did promote the doctrine of individual negative rights - which are prohibitions barring people from intruding on others, recognizing everyone's rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (property) - but these aren't really the rights in need of government protection. What needs to be protected, they argue, are the entitlements everyone has to material support from government, for which others must pay through taxes. In short, these new "rights" amount to nothing less than the imposition of involuntary servitude on taxpayers!
But this is a hoax. No such rights exist. Indeed, the entire point of rights talk is to set borders around each of us, borders that may only be crossed with permission. For example, someone needs to ask your permission to enter your home or drive your car. If somebody asks you to stop saying or writing certain things - you must consent or they must desist. Those are examples of the negative, or freedom, rights all humans have because of their nature as moral agents. A moral agent requires the freedom to exercise moral choice, for better or for worse.
Only if a person invades another's realm is there justification for interference (in self-defense). This is an individualist social-political outlook closely associated with the American founding but it is now being drastically undermined.
These days, no sooner does one speak up in support of individualism than one will be accused of wanting to isolate individuals, to destroy human community life. This is plain wrong and either a misunderstanding or an out-an-out attempt at distortion. Just because adults require independence of mind and a sphere of personal authority, which is secured by protecting their basic rights, it doesn't mean people do not greatly benefit from community life. There is little that's more satisfying than the associations people forge with their fellows: marriage, family, companies, teams, choruses, orchestras and myriad others.
Alas, there is one way of forming communities that is unsuited to people: coercively, when they are herded into groups they do not choose based on their own understanding and goals - that is, by violating their rights. Prisons are such involuntary communities, and the only reason they are supposed to exist is to house people who refuse to live peacefully with their fellows.
None but the crudest defense of individualism omits that when individuals come together, much of what makes their lives worth living stems from their togetherness. And, yes, as children we are involuntary members of one community, the family, at least until we grow up and have free choice. That, indeed, is what parents and guardians ought to aim for when they raise children, to prepare them all for becoming competent, loving, responsible and adventurous independent adults.
Yet forcibly grouping people immediately undermines this by depriving the young of their opportunity to hone their skills at making decisions for themselves, decisions that are usually quite unlike the decisions others need to make. That's because we all are unique in many respects, while at the same time also much alike. As one of my favorite philosophers, the comic actor Steve Martin, put it in his novel "The Pleasure of My Company": "People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety."
Of course, much of this is evident from the history of the more Draconian and brutal attempts to make us all one, from ancient Sparta to societies in the 20th century. But, sadly, too many people hold on to the vision of human associations without remembering that the "human" must be very closely heeded when one embarks on community life.
Human beings, more than anything else in the world, are individuals, with minds of their own, which, however much they learn from others, must get into operation from their own initiative. While other beings are pretty much hardwired to do the right thing by their nature, our nature is that we must learn what that right thing is and then embark on doing it of our own free will. This, mainly, is the source of individuality.
Forgive me for bringing in a bit of personal history, but I do have some experience to draw upon here, having lived under communism for much of my early years. And my father was an avid fascist, supporting the Nazis. Neither of these political systems offer a promising community life; nor do communities that try to go just a bit in those political directions.
Human communities are, indeed, marvelous but only when they do not quash the human individual. When they do, when they try to compromise the principles of individualism, look out. They will try to lie and cheat and bamboozle since only in doing so can coercive community life be made credible. They will emphasize the fabulous goals and forget about the vicious means by which they propose to reach them, like conscript armies or schools or any other collective endeavors we are forced to join.
The American founders knew that the central public good is securing for us our rights. Everything else in society is to be done by individuals and voluntary groups, not the government. This false doctrine of entitlements, of positive "rights," fundamentally undermines their project.
TIBOR R. MACHAN
After so many years of Americans aspiring to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, with much success, critics of America have changed their tune. It used to be that this country failed to be true to those principles but as that has gradually - and at times abruptly - changed, critics had to find something else to beef about.
And, sure enough, they found it, in that highly questionable doctrine of "positive rights" first laid out in 1944 in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's so-called Second Bill of Rights. The tact now is to say, yes, the founders did promote the doctrine of individual negative rights - which are prohibitions barring people from intruding on others, recognizing everyone's rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (property) - but these aren't really the rights in need of government protection. What needs to be protected, they argue, are the entitlements everyone has to material support from government, for which others must pay through taxes. In short, these new "rights" amount to nothing less than the imposition of involuntary servitude on taxpayers!
But this is a hoax. No such rights exist. Indeed, the entire point of rights talk is to set borders around each of us, borders that may only be crossed with permission. For example, someone needs to ask your permission to enter your home or drive your car. If somebody asks you to stop saying or writing certain things - you must consent or they must desist. Those are examples of the negative, or freedom, rights all humans have because of their nature as moral agents. A moral agent requires the freedom to exercise moral choice, for better or for worse.
Only if a person invades another's realm is there justification for interference (in self-defense). This is an individualist social-political outlook closely associated with the American founding but it is now being drastically undermined.
These days, no sooner does one speak up in support of individualism than one will be accused of wanting to isolate individuals, to destroy human community life. This is plain wrong and either a misunderstanding or an out-an-out attempt at distortion. Just because adults require independence of mind and a sphere of personal authority, which is secured by protecting their basic rights, it doesn't mean people do not greatly benefit from community life. There is little that's more satisfying than the associations people forge with their fellows: marriage, family, companies, teams, choruses, orchestras and myriad others.
Alas, there is one way of forming communities that is unsuited to people: coercively, when they are herded into groups they do not choose based on their own understanding and goals - that is, by violating their rights. Prisons are such involuntary communities, and the only reason they are supposed to exist is to house people who refuse to live peacefully with their fellows.
None but the crudest defense of individualism omits that when individuals come together, much of what makes their lives worth living stems from their togetherness. And, yes, as children we are involuntary members of one community, the family, at least until we grow up and have free choice. That, indeed, is what parents and guardians ought to aim for when they raise children, to prepare them all for becoming competent, loving, responsible and adventurous independent adults.
Yet forcibly grouping people immediately undermines this by depriving the young of their opportunity to hone their skills at making decisions for themselves, decisions that are usually quite unlike the decisions others need to make. That's because we all are unique in many respects, while at the same time also much alike. As one of my favorite philosophers, the comic actor Steve Martin, put it in his novel "The Pleasure of My Company": "People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety."
Of course, much of this is evident from the history of the more Draconian and brutal attempts to make us all one, from ancient Sparta to societies in the 20th century. But, sadly, too many people hold on to the vision of human associations without remembering that the "human" must be very closely heeded when one embarks on community life.
Human beings, more than anything else in the world, are individuals, with minds of their own, which, however much they learn from others, must get into operation from their own initiative. While other beings are pretty much hardwired to do the right thing by their nature, our nature is that we must learn what that right thing is and then embark on doing it of our own free will. This, mainly, is the source of individuality.
Forgive me for bringing in a bit of personal history, but I do have some experience to draw upon here, having lived under communism for much of my early years. And my father was an avid fascist, supporting the Nazis. Neither of these political systems offer a promising community life; nor do communities that try to go just a bit in those political directions.
Human communities are, indeed, marvelous but only when they do not quash the human individual. When they do, when they try to compromise the principles of individualism, look out. They will try to lie and cheat and bamboozle since only in doing so can coercive community life be made credible. They will emphasize the fabulous goals and forget about the vicious means by which they propose to reach them, like conscript armies or schools or any other collective endeavors we are forced to join.
The American founders knew that the central public good is securing for us our rights. Everything else in society is to be done by individuals and voluntary groups, not the government. This false doctrine of entitlements, of positive "rights," fundamentally undermines their project.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Truncated "Liberty"
Tibor R. Machan
Some people seem to believe that when they aren't being directly oppressed, meddled with, intruded upon, interfered with and so on, they are then free. Americans often have this conception of being free because their various governments often leave them be. Only 40 percent of their resources is being taxed! Their bars can be open until 1 AM or even later in some places. Blue laws apply only here and there, on certain days. So, hurray, we are free!
And compared to people in many regions of the globe and to most eras of human history it is understandable that such relatively irregular forms of subjugation are misunderstood as forms of liberty. And maybe one ought to count one's blessings, given all this. Yet, it is very hazardous to mistake the permissiveness of some governments--of those who hold but may not always exercise legally backed power--for genuine liberty. Such liberty is indivisible. If some slaves got half a day off to do what they felt like doing while others in the neighboring plantation received only a couple of hours from their masters, the former were by no means free individuals, not by a long shot.
Genuine liberty means being in full control of one's life not being accorded the privilege of not always suffering the intrusions of one's oppressors. But, of course, oppressors are very likely to try to fool us into thinking we are fully free by not being on our case 24/7. And by always pointing out how much worse off are those in other ages and other lands. A good case in point is when one mentions the tax burdens of Americans. Defenders of heavy taxation in America routinely roll out their statistics about the rest of the world and how much more people are taxed in, say, Germany, France, Sweden and so forth. This is just like telling the slave with more hours to himself that he shouldn't complain. After all, those other in the neighboring plantations have fewer such hours.
But the point about liberty is that everyone--apart from violent criminals (which does include Bernie Madoff)--is owed every bit of it and no one is authorized to limit it, nohow, ever. It makes no difference that our oppressors are kinder and gentler, that they only nudge instead of bully, that they steal only a half rather than three quarters of what is ours. Sure, in comparable terms most Americans, but by no means all of them throughout American history, have been less subjected to the will of their governments than have people elsewhere and in different times but this only means that they need to be reminded more often that, no, they aren't really free, that they are being lured into thinking they are by folks who want to rule them with effective enough kids gloves.
Examples of this kind of ruse are all around us. Kids in school may be more or less bullied but even those who experience it in small doses shouldn't at all. It is no excuse that others are getting it good and hard, all of the time. So what if the German or French government intrudes on the citizenry there far more extensively than does the American on American citizens? It is a dirty trick played on human beings by those who wish to run their lives with little protest from them.
In public finance there is a trick well captured by the famous Laffer Curve. Up to a certain point people will tolerate being taxed and then, after that point, they won't take it any longer. So governments do well if they identify that point (not an easy thing because our tolerance level is not the same).
The same goes with oppression. Up to a point a great many folks will just sit by while governments run rough shod over them. And government thugs are good enough at gauging that point so they are left alone while they do their dirty business. Perhaps in time folks will learn to prize their liberty to its full value!
Tibor R. Machan
Some people seem to believe that when they aren't being directly oppressed, meddled with, intruded upon, interfered with and so on, they are then free. Americans often have this conception of being free because their various governments often leave them be. Only 40 percent of their resources is being taxed! Their bars can be open until 1 AM or even later in some places. Blue laws apply only here and there, on certain days. So, hurray, we are free!
And compared to people in many regions of the globe and to most eras of human history it is understandable that such relatively irregular forms of subjugation are misunderstood as forms of liberty. And maybe one ought to count one's blessings, given all this. Yet, it is very hazardous to mistake the permissiveness of some governments--of those who hold but may not always exercise legally backed power--for genuine liberty. Such liberty is indivisible. If some slaves got half a day off to do what they felt like doing while others in the neighboring plantation received only a couple of hours from their masters, the former were by no means free individuals, not by a long shot.
Genuine liberty means being in full control of one's life not being accorded the privilege of not always suffering the intrusions of one's oppressors. But, of course, oppressors are very likely to try to fool us into thinking we are fully free by not being on our case 24/7. And by always pointing out how much worse off are those in other ages and other lands. A good case in point is when one mentions the tax burdens of Americans. Defenders of heavy taxation in America routinely roll out their statistics about the rest of the world and how much more people are taxed in, say, Germany, France, Sweden and so forth. This is just like telling the slave with more hours to himself that he shouldn't complain. After all, those other in the neighboring plantations have fewer such hours.
But the point about liberty is that everyone--apart from violent criminals (which does include Bernie Madoff)--is owed every bit of it and no one is authorized to limit it, nohow, ever. It makes no difference that our oppressors are kinder and gentler, that they only nudge instead of bully, that they steal only a half rather than three quarters of what is ours. Sure, in comparable terms most Americans, but by no means all of them throughout American history, have been less subjected to the will of their governments than have people elsewhere and in different times but this only means that they need to be reminded more often that, no, they aren't really free, that they are being lured into thinking they are by folks who want to rule them with effective enough kids gloves.
Examples of this kind of ruse are all around us. Kids in school may be more or less bullied but even those who experience it in small doses shouldn't at all. It is no excuse that others are getting it good and hard, all of the time. So what if the German or French government intrudes on the citizenry there far more extensively than does the American on American citizens? It is a dirty trick played on human beings by those who wish to run their lives with little protest from them.
In public finance there is a trick well captured by the famous Laffer Curve. Up to a certain point people will tolerate being taxed and then, after that point, they won't take it any longer. So governments do well if they identify that point (not an easy thing because our tolerance level is not the same).
The same goes with oppression. Up to a point a great many folks will just sit by while governments run rough shod over them. And government thugs are good enough at gauging that point so they are left alone while they do their dirty business. Perhaps in time folks will learn to prize their liberty to its full value!
Sunday, June 28, 2009
The Subjectivist Paradox
Tibor R. Machan
Although most people encounter philosophy primarily in college, the discipline has a way of sneaking up on them elsewhere as well. A simple and familiar example is when one says that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," meaning that when one judges something to be beautiful or ugly one is just expressing how things seem to be to oneself. Making such judgments, the idea goes, is really impossible--at best they amount to stating what one feels or believes but without the possibility of proving it true. Indeed, by this account truth and falsehood do not apply to aesthetic judgments.
Some go much further and claim that all our judgments are of this sort, subjective or mere statements of personal outlook or preference, not of anything that could be true or false. Not just beauty but the ascription of any property is merely in the eye of the beholder. Although well represented throughout the history of philosophy, most people tend to shy away from embracing such a position directly. But indirectly they often endorse it, as when someone claims that "From his (or her) point of view, something is difficult or easy or whatever." As if the property of being difficult or easy where merely some personal aspect. Is tennis easy? Well, depends on your point of view. But even this is a relatively mild version of subjectivism.
The more global variety would claim that anything you think you know is really just imputed by you about the world and doesn't actually amount to knowing things at all. In short, objective or real knowledge is impossible, it's all subjective. So that no one is really wrong or right about what he or she claims, since that is all dependent on the subject's viewpoint--shaped by culture, race, geography, gender, age, or whatever.
In a atmosphere of multiculturalism this attitude is in fact widespread. And, oddly, it is widespread among educated people, so much so that it influences the policies of colleges and universities, even governments. But there is a problem with this, big time.
After all, the claim that everything--all judgments about anything at all--is subjective is itself aspiring to be an objective judgment. The subjectivist is, in fact, pretending, for a moment at least, to have escaped subjectivity! But if it is possible for the subjectivist to escape it, then why not for the rest of us and about a lot more than about how we know the world around us? Because what the subjectivist claims is that only he or she knows how the human mind relates to the world, namely, by imposing its categories or properties instead of by perceiving and understanding how things really are. So it is one's point of view that makes reality instead of reality being apprehended by one. (Of course, even if each of us does have the capacity to know the world as it really is it doesn't follow that we are going to succeed--many people don't care enough to know, are happy in their ignorance, or like their prejudices too much to figure things out correctly.)
This is a theory about the human mind, after all. As the British psychologist Bannister once wrote, a theorist “... cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.” And that is just what a subjectivist does, presents a picture of the human mind which contradicts the behavior of correctly identifying the human mind (since correct means accurate, objectively true, the opposite of subjective).
OK, but of it? Why should anyone care about this outside of obscure philosophical discussions? Aside from the already mentioned issue of multiculturalism there is the problem of the relationship between members of different groups, religions, nations and so forth. If subjectivism is even remotely true, no mutual understanding, no tolerance, nothing that solves problems among us, either in our personal lives or more broadly, is possible. Everyone is stuck with his or her point of view which cannot be escaped. Tolerance, for example, is impossible since one cannot gain even a minimal understanding of what others believe, let alone might know.
In the end the only "solution" to the inescapable global human diversity would be power--some with a certain viewpoint will overpower the rest and impose theirs, no questioned asked. And that prospect is truly horrifying.
Tibor R. Machan
Although most people encounter philosophy primarily in college, the discipline has a way of sneaking up on them elsewhere as well. A simple and familiar example is when one says that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," meaning that when one judges something to be beautiful or ugly one is just expressing how things seem to be to oneself. Making such judgments, the idea goes, is really impossible--at best they amount to stating what one feels or believes but without the possibility of proving it true. Indeed, by this account truth and falsehood do not apply to aesthetic judgments.
Some go much further and claim that all our judgments are of this sort, subjective or mere statements of personal outlook or preference, not of anything that could be true or false. Not just beauty but the ascription of any property is merely in the eye of the beholder. Although well represented throughout the history of philosophy, most people tend to shy away from embracing such a position directly. But indirectly they often endorse it, as when someone claims that "From his (or her) point of view, something is difficult or easy or whatever." As if the property of being difficult or easy where merely some personal aspect. Is tennis easy? Well, depends on your point of view. But even this is a relatively mild version of subjectivism.
The more global variety would claim that anything you think you know is really just imputed by you about the world and doesn't actually amount to knowing things at all. In short, objective or real knowledge is impossible, it's all subjective. So that no one is really wrong or right about what he or she claims, since that is all dependent on the subject's viewpoint--shaped by culture, race, geography, gender, age, or whatever.
In a atmosphere of multiculturalism this attitude is in fact widespread. And, oddly, it is widespread among educated people, so much so that it influences the policies of colleges and universities, even governments. But there is a problem with this, big time.
After all, the claim that everything--all judgments about anything at all--is subjective is itself aspiring to be an objective judgment. The subjectivist is, in fact, pretending, for a moment at least, to have escaped subjectivity! But if it is possible for the subjectivist to escape it, then why not for the rest of us and about a lot more than about how we know the world around us? Because what the subjectivist claims is that only he or she knows how the human mind relates to the world, namely, by imposing its categories or properties instead of by perceiving and understanding how things really are. So it is one's point of view that makes reality instead of reality being apprehended by one. (Of course, even if each of us does have the capacity to know the world as it really is it doesn't follow that we are going to succeed--many people don't care enough to know, are happy in their ignorance, or like their prejudices too much to figure things out correctly.)
This is a theory about the human mind, after all. As the British psychologist Bannister once wrote, a theorist “... cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.” And that is just what a subjectivist does, presents a picture of the human mind which contradicts the behavior of correctly identifying the human mind (since correct means accurate, objectively true, the opposite of subjective).
OK, but of it? Why should anyone care about this outside of obscure philosophical discussions? Aside from the already mentioned issue of multiculturalism there is the problem of the relationship between members of different groups, religions, nations and so forth. If subjectivism is even remotely true, no mutual understanding, no tolerance, nothing that solves problems among us, either in our personal lives or more broadly, is possible. Everyone is stuck with his or her point of view which cannot be escaped. Tolerance, for example, is impossible since one cannot gain even a minimal understanding of what others believe, let alone might know.
In the end the only "solution" to the inescapable global human diversity would be power--some with a certain viewpoint will overpower the rest and impose theirs, no questioned asked. And that prospect is truly horrifying.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
The Nonsense of "A new world order"
Tibor R. Machan
Business Week reports--July 6, 2009, page 8--that Roger Altman, Deputy Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, now CEO of an investment banking boutique (Evercore Partners), has, like President Sarkozy of France, concluded that it's the end for capitalism. As Business Week tells it, Boltman wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that "The era of laissez-faire economics is over, and statism, once discredited, is making a comeback--even in the U.S. Also out of vague is globalization."
Yes, Virginia, there are still many grown up people who believe that there has been rampant laissez-faire economics around the world, especially in the United States of America and especially during the last few decades. Business Week's account of Bolton's opinions also seems to accepts, without any skepticism, that statism is something novel while the laissez-faire is old.
Sadly this is all wrong. Statism has been the norm for thousands of years, what with countries throughout history being ruled from top down and with their economies being managed as if they were firms instead of societies. It is only in the last 400 years or so that the classical liberal idea of a relatively free economy has caught on here and there, and even then mainly in the rhetoric of various, sometimes admittedly prominent academic economists, not in the public philosophies of nations. To its credit, Business Week does suggest that any move away from globalization is going to prove to be "an especially hard toll on developing nations." It might have added the plain historical fact that prior to the emergence of the halting policy of very partial laissez-faire most of the world lingered in utter poverty. Apart from the rulers and their minions, few people had any wealth to speak of. Only in the most recent and brief period of history has the limited measure of global free trade managed to bring forth prosperity for ordinary people who are constantly being badgered about it, what with all the denunciation of commercialization, greed and such in light of some degree of enthusiasm for this new development. Statism, which has retarded not only commerce but nearly every decent human endeavor way in discernibly brutal ways, has been the norm, just as one of the few--relatively speaking--prominent champions of laissez-faire, the late Milton Freidman observed. And Thomas Jefferson made it clear to that governments tend to expand in power and freedom tends to be in retreat more than not.
So, the point to get clear on, is that the current retreat from the small measure of laissez-faire around the globe and, especially, America, is quite routine. Such reactionary developments do not deserve to be designated as the dawning of "a new world order." Properly put, these developments would be a return to the miserable political economies that have dominated the world for over centuries but with a few short periods of relief here and there. And such statism has usually been promoted by those in the ruling classes, like Mr. Altman, who see in it the makings of a rightly ordered universe. It is the idea that you and I and all people ought to be in charge of their own lives and ought to pursue our various projects freely, in voluntary cooperation instead of as regimented by these rulers, that is new.
But those who insist on directing the rest of us even when no one asked them to, have no interest in getting the historical facts right. The idea of laissez-faire economics arises from the long suppressed and struggling idea, finally asserted by the American Founders, that no one may rule another or, as Abraham Lincoln put it, that “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” The rulers, of course, would not hear of this, in large part because living by that principle would deprive them of the opportunity to rule. (This, more than anything else, is the source of anti-Americanism in the midst of the world's upper classes, given that America is closely linked to the idea Lincoln gave voice to, even if in reality it hasn't followed that principles by a long shot!)
Tibor R. Machan
Business Week reports--July 6, 2009, page 8--that Roger Altman, Deputy Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, now CEO of an investment banking boutique (Evercore Partners), has, like President Sarkozy of France, concluded that it's the end for capitalism. As Business Week tells it, Boltman wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that "The era of laissez-faire economics is over, and statism, once discredited, is making a comeback--even in the U.S. Also out of vague is globalization."
Yes, Virginia, there are still many grown up people who believe that there has been rampant laissez-faire economics around the world, especially in the United States of America and especially during the last few decades. Business Week's account of Bolton's opinions also seems to accepts, without any skepticism, that statism is something novel while the laissez-faire is old.
Sadly this is all wrong. Statism has been the norm for thousands of years, what with countries throughout history being ruled from top down and with their economies being managed as if they were firms instead of societies. It is only in the last 400 years or so that the classical liberal idea of a relatively free economy has caught on here and there, and even then mainly in the rhetoric of various, sometimes admittedly prominent academic economists, not in the public philosophies of nations. To its credit, Business Week does suggest that any move away from globalization is going to prove to be "an especially hard toll on developing nations." It might have added the plain historical fact that prior to the emergence of the halting policy of very partial laissez-faire most of the world lingered in utter poverty. Apart from the rulers and their minions, few people had any wealth to speak of. Only in the most recent and brief period of history has the limited measure of global free trade managed to bring forth prosperity for ordinary people who are constantly being badgered about it, what with all the denunciation of commercialization, greed and such in light of some degree of enthusiasm for this new development. Statism, which has retarded not only commerce but nearly every decent human endeavor way in discernibly brutal ways, has been the norm, just as one of the few--relatively speaking--prominent champions of laissez-faire, the late Milton Freidman observed. And Thomas Jefferson made it clear to that governments tend to expand in power and freedom tends to be in retreat more than not.
So, the point to get clear on, is that the current retreat from the small measure of laissez-faire around the globe and, especially, America, is quite routine. Such reactionary developments do not deserve to be designated as the dawning of "a new world order." Properly put, these developments would be a return to the miserable political economies that have dominated the world for over centuries but with a few short periods of relief here and there. And such statism has usually been promoted by those in the ruling classes, like Mr. Altman, who see in it the makings of a rightly ordered universe. It is the idea that you and I and all people ought to be in charge of their own lives and ought to pursue our various projects freely, in voluntary cooperation instead of as regimented by these rulers, that is new.
But those who insist on directing the rest of us even when no one asked them to, have no interest in getting the historical facts right. The idea of laissez-faire economics arises from the long suppressed and struggling idea, finally asserted by the American Founders, that no one may rule another or, as Abraham Lincoln put it, that “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” The rulers, of course, would not hear of this, in large part because living by that principle would deprive them of the opportunity to rule. (This, more than anything else, is the source of anti-Americanism in the midst of the world's upper classes, given that America is closely linked to the idea Lincoln gave voice to, even if in reality it hasn't followed that principles by a long shot!)
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Hope versus Reality
Tibor R. Machan
In his column in The New York Times on June 25, 2009, Judge Richard Posner wrote that "The most promising reform would be to give the Federal Reserve, the National Economic Council or the president’s Council of Economic Advisers the ability to collect and analyze financial intelligence and do emergency planning. Regulators failed to prevent the financial collapse not because they lacked adequate powers but because they lacked information, a culture of inquiry and a contingency plan." But then he immediately adds that "There were abundant warnings of impending economic disaster. Had they been investigated rather than ignored, we might not be in the fix that we are in today."
The confidence shown in regulators in the first statement seems to me to be plainly undermined by the historical claim in the second, one that seems to follows from a certain plausible understanding of public choice theory, actually--ignoring rather than investigating warnings would come naturally to those who are, whether consciously or not, embarking upon vested interest dealing, in this instance working for regulations to continue instead of doing what might make them unnecessary in time. Regulators have a good job and it is no surprise that they might work not so much to fix problems they perceive in the market place but to keep working at what keeps them employed and well fed.
In free markets, to the extent that they exist, such vested interest dealings are checked by competition and budgetary constraints (to the extent these are not thwarted by government policies that often produce monopolies). A shoe repairer may be tempted to fix shoes not quite as well as they need to be fixed but just enough that they will last a while but need to be returned for further repair. Indeed, automobile repairers are often suspected of this. What, apart from conscientiousness, keeps such folks on the straight and narrow is competition, the knowledge that if they don't do the work well enough someone else will jump in to do so. One main reason that bureaucracies are generally sluggish and unenthusiastic about serving the public--as distinct from private vendors--is this element of constant competition, combined with the fact that bureaucrats gain their income from taxes which can often be raised with impunity by those who hire them.
What public choice theorists claim is that bureaucrats have a far better opportunity to yield to the temptation of malpractice than are those in the private sector. The theory does not claim that all bureaucrats are cheats and all those in the private sector are professionally responsible. But it identifies an evident tendency and shows it to exist through the study of economic and political history. Common sense supports this, as well, when most people notice that if they go to, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles (one of the more visible government outfits), they mostly get a reluctant, bored, at times even curmudgeonly treatment, whereas in the private sector the routine tends to be eagerness to serve, to generate and keep business.
There is an element about public choice theory that economists do not emphasize often enough, namely, that the objectives of regulators are often very obscure, unclear, even contradictory. For example, governments often embark on historical preservation but at the same time they are supposed to make sure that building and other facilities are properly managed, kept safe, etc. But historical preservation mostly require keeping things in their original form, while the pursuit of safety involves making use of the most up to date technology and science. One can generalize this kind of conflict within government policies all over the place--which is what accounts for vigilant propaganda against smoking while tobacco farmers keep receiving government subsidies.
As far as I can tell, entrusting to government officials anything other than the job the American Founders understood as theirs, namely, securing our basic rights, is seriously misguided. Not only is most government regulation a violation of due process, meaning it acts preemptively by restraining professionals in various fields of endeavor who have not done anyone any wrong. But it is also an ineffective devices, just as Judge Posner points out in his article.
Tibor R. Machan
In his column in The New York Times on June 25, 2009, Judge Richard Posner wrote that "The most promising reform would be to give the Federal Reserve, the National Economic Council or the president’s Council of Economic Advisers the ability to collect and analyze financial intelligence and do emergency planning. Regulators failed to prevent the financial collapse not because they lacked adequate powers but because they lacked information, a culture of inquiry and a contingency plan." But then he immediately adds that "There were abundant warnings of impending economic disaster. Had they been investigated rather than ignored, we might not be in the fix that we are in today."
The confidence shown in regulators in the first statement seems to me to be plainly undermined by the historical claim in the second, one that seems to follows from a certain plausible understanding of public choice theory, actually--ignoring rather than investigating warnings would come naturally to those who are, whether consciously or not, embarking upon vested interest dealing, in this instance working for regulations to continue instead of doing what might make them unnecessary in time. Regulators have a good job and it is no surprise that they might work not so much to fix problems they perceive in the market place but to keep working at what keeps them employed and well fed.
In free markets, to the extent that they exist, such vested interest dealings are checked by competition and budgetary constraints (to the extent these are not thwarted by government policies that often produce monopolies). A shoe repairer may be tempted to fix shoes not quite as well as they need to be fixed but just enough that they will last a while but need to be returned for further repair. Indeed, automobile repairers are often suspected of this. What, apart from conscientiousness, keeps such folks on the straight and narrow is competition, the knowledge that if they don't do the work well enough someone else will jump in to do so. One main reason that bureaucracies are generally sluggish and unenthusiastic about serving the public--as distinct from private vendors--is this element of constant competition, combined with the fact that bureaucrats gain their income from taxes which can often be raised with impunity by those who hire them.
What public choice theorists claim is that bureaucrats have a far better opportunity to yield to the temptation of malpractice than are those in the private sector. The theory does not claim that all bureaucrats are cheats and all those in the private sector are professionally responsible. But it identifies an evident tendency and shows it to exist through the study of economic and political history. Common sense supports this, as well, when most people notice that if they go to, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles (one of the more visible government outfits), they mostly get a reluctant, bored, at times even curmudgeonly treatment, whereas in the private sector the routine tends to be eagerness to serve, to generate and keep business.
There is an element about public choice theory that economists do not emphasize often enough, namely, that the objectives of regulators are often very obscure, unclear, even contradictory. For example, governments often embark on historical preservation but at the same time they are supposed to make sure that building and other facilities are properly managed, kept safe, etc. But historical preservation mostly require keeping things in their original form, while the pursuit of safety involves making use of the most up to date technology and science. One can generalize this kind of conflict within government policies all over the place--which is what accounts for vigilant propaganda against smoking while tobacco farmers keep receiving government subsidies.
As far as I can tell, entrusting to government officials anything other than the job the American Founders understood as theirs, namely, securing our basic rights, is seriously misguided. Not only is most government regulation a violation of due process, meaning it acts preemptively by restraining professionals in various fields of endeavor who have not done anyone any wrong. But it is also an ineffective devices, just as Judge Posner points out in his article.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Why We can But You or I cannot be Great
Tibor R. Machan
The evidence for this is overwhelming and out there for most to observe. Take the Academy Awards, where those receiving Oscars routinely disclaim personal credit but claim it aplenty for the team, the association, the group. Or take most team sports where any mention of one's own superb contribution is suppressed in favor of how great the team has been.
America or Germany or any other country is often praised for superior achievements while individual Americans or Germans need to show humility lest they be deemed braggarts. Even in sports such as tennis, where there's a dominance of individual performance, taking credit for doing well is rare. Either bona fide or feigned humility appear to be what's acceptable and practiced, albeit sometimes with a wink.
But why? What's wrong with laying claim to one's achievements provided one is honest about them? Yes, one can get ridiculously arrogant, such as the late great chess master Bobby Fisher was. And here and there, close up to a good shot, most tennis players exhibit pride on the court, at least with body language. Still, the idea that "we are great" is far more easily put out there than "I am great," even though it is rare that we can be great without those who make up us also being great.
My suggestion is that most folks are too intimidate by all the preachings that surround us concerning how we must be unselfish, how taking credit is vanity or conceit, while praising our fellows is nearly always deemed to be appropriate, commendable. Some of this goes hand in hand with the practice of judging people as ethical or moral only if they benefit their fellows, not when they do well for themselves. The Princeton University philosopher and famous animal liberation champion makes a great deal of how we must all be altruistic--recently he chimed in on the current economic downturn with an essay on how despite suffering setbacks, we all have the obligation to send resources to people in poor countries. That is what will make us decent people, not being prudent and attentive to our own needs and wants and those of our intimates. Which of course raises the issue of why other people are so deserving of support while those urged to provide the support are not. (Which once again brings to mind W. H. Auden's quip that "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.")
What seems to underlie much of this is that for centuries the major religions tended to denigrate people as sinners, mostly, who need to redeem themselves by serving other people (who then needed to do the same, on and on, ad infinitum.) And this probably came from comparing people to angels and God, mystical entities who certainly had it all over us "mere" humans. Even in the increasingly secular modern era, the view of the human self didn't see all that much improvement. I have in mind, for example, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes' very influential idea that people are mostly power hungry and if not restrained by a supreme authority would just as soon destroy one another than live together creatively and productively. Original sin got transformed into basic (vicious) instinct! And with that many human tendencies and activities also got besmirched. Sex, which is human as well as animal about us all, is a good case in point. Rarely has it gotten a sensible, levelheaded treatment in the major religions or philosophies. (So much if it got driven underground and lingers in back alleys or on the bizarrely labeled adult cable TV programs.)
But when you consider it without prejudice, are human beings really so bad? Sure, they can be and often are but on balance they would seem to be rather decent, hard working, conscientious, and kind, at least most of them most of the time. And they are also quite self-regarding--most of us get up in the morning thinking first of ourselves and our loved ones, not of our neighbors. So basic decency and self-regard can easily go hand in hand--indeed, it is difficult for me to imagine people loving their neighbors who lack love for themselves.
But then why make all those gestures of humility, of self-abnegation? Maybe because, in addition to some very bad teachings from various sources, there is the desire to be liked by others who might not appreciate demonstrated self-regard, pride, and self-esteem. Whatever the best explanation, though, one thing is clear enough. It is not a good thing to have a general, overall demeaning opinion of oneself. It tends to undercut what one does in one's life on many, many fronts, as a professional, friend, spouse, parent, and the rest. A little--maybe a lot--more frank admission of one's worthiness, if justified, would seem to be warranted.
And while most people are reluctant to give themselves even deserved credit, they show that some such acknowledgement is necessary for them as they do not hesitate giving credit to the group of which they are a member!
Tibor R. Machan
The evidence for this is overwhelming and out there for most to observe. Take the Academy Awards, where those receiving Oscars routinely disclaim personal credit but claim it aplenty for the team, the association, the group. Or take most team sports where any mention of one's own superb contribution is suppressed in favor of how great the team has been.
America or Germany or any other country is often praised for superior achievements while individual Americans or Germans need to show humility lest they be deemed braggarts. Even in sports such as tennis, where there's a dominance of individual performance, taking credit for doing well is rare. Either bona fide or feigned humility appear to be what's acceptable and practiced, albeit sometimes with a wink.
But why? What's wrong with laying claim to one's achievements provided one is honest about them? Yes, one can get ridiculously arrogant, such as the late great chess master Bobby Fisher was. And here and there, close up to a good shot, most tennis players exhibit pride on the court, at least with body language. Still, the idea that "we are great" is far more easily put out there than "I am great," even though it is rare that we can be great without those who make up us also being great.
My suggestion is that most folks are too intimidate by all the preachings that surround us concerning how we must be unselfish, how taking credit is vanity or conceit, while praising our fellows is nearly always deemed to be appropriate, commendable. Some of this goes hand in hand with the practice of judging people as ethical or moral only if they benefit their fellows, not when they do well for themselves. The Princeton University philosopher and famous animal liberation champion makes a great deal of how we must all be altruistic--recently he chimed in on the current economic downturn with an essay on how despite suffering setbacks, we all have the obligation to send resources to people in poor countries. That is what will make us decent people, not being prudent and attentive to our own needs and wants and those of our intimates. Which of course raises the issue of why other people are so deserving of support while those urged to provide the support are not. (Which once again brings to mind W. H. Auden's quip that "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.")
What seems to underlie much of this is that for centuries the major religions tended to denigrate people as sinners, mostly, who need to redeem themselves by serving other people (who then needed to do the same, on and on, ad infinitum.) And this probably came from comparing people to angels and God, mystical entities who certainly had it all over us "mere" humans. Even in the increasingly secular modern era, the view of the human self didn't see all that much improvement. I have in mind, for example, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes' very influential idea that people are mostly power hungry and if not restrained by a supreme authority would just as soon destroy one another than live together creatively and productively. Original sin got transformed into basic (vicious) instinct! And with that many human tendencies and activities also got besmirched. Sex, which is human as well as animal about us all, is a good case in point. Rarely has it gotten a sensible, levelheaded treatment in the major religions or philosophies. (So much if it got driven underground and lingers in back alleys or on the bizarrely labeled adult cable TV programs.)
But when you consider it without prejudice, are human beings really so bad? Sure, they can be and often are but on balance they would seem to be rather decent, hard working, conscientious, and kind, at least most of them most of the time. And they are also quite self-regarding--most of us get up in the morning thinking first of ourselves and our loved ones, not of our neighbors. So basic decency and self-regard can easily go hand in hand--indeed, it is difficult for me to imagine people loving their neighbors who lack love for themselves.
But then why make all those gestures of humility, of self-abnegation? Maybe because, in addition to some very bad teachings from various sources, there is the desire to be liked by others who might not appreciate demonstrated self-regard, pride, and self-esteem. Whatever the best explanation, though, one thing is clear enough. It is not a good thing to have a general, overall demeaning opinion of oneself. It tends to undercut what one does in one's life on many, many fronts, as a professional, friend, spouse, parent, and the rest. A little--maybe a lot--more frank admission of one's worthiness, if justified, would seem to be warranted.
And while most people are reluctant to give themselves even deserved credit, they show that some such acknowledgement is necessary for them as they do not hesitate giving credit to the group of which they are a member!
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Tricking Us Into Conscription
Tibor R. Machan
Most Americans seem to think it is so quaint to be taken to be a member of the huge American family or team or tribe. But it is a trick.
Being a member of some group immediately creates obligations other members may impose. Team members must contribute to the team’s efforts. Club members must pay dues. Family members must do chores. And so on it goes.
In most instances, however, one joins groups on one’s own initiative, without being forced into membership. Apart from the now nearly completely abolished draft, most Americans aren’t familiar with forced labor, with being conscripted. They do not look upon paying taxes, for example, as having their resources confiscated. Most take it as a kind of fee for services. And quite a few actually claim that taxation is voluntary, never mind that it isn’t.
The trick of getting burdened by innumerable obligations that certain self-appointed leaders spell out and enforce has to do with selling millions of people on the idea that their lives belong to the nation or clan or tribe, not to them. Never mind that this goes squarely against the American Founders’ idea that everyone has an unalienable right to his or her life. We are now in the era of a supposed second bill of rights which FDR concocted and which makes us all into conscripts. We are forced to serve and on terms we have but a little bit to do with. Certainly the idea of the consent of the governed, the consent of the taxed and taxed and taxed again and again, has disappeared from public discourse. Instead no one is asked for his or her consent now; just being born makes one part of a team, with all the attendant duties.
The best description of this comes from the French father of sociology, Auguste Comte, who wrote two hundred or so years ago:
"Everything we have belongs then to Humanity…Positivism never admits anything but duties, of all to all. For its social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of right, constantly based on individualism. We are born loaded with obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. Later they only grow or accumulate before we can return any service. On what human foundation then could rest the idea of right, which in reason should imply some previous efficiency? Whatever may be our efforts, the longest life well employed will never enable us to pay back but an imperceptible part of what we have received. And yet it would only be after a complete return that we should be justly authorized to require reciprocity for the new services. All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely."
This is the public philosophy now in vogue, being propagated by President Obama and Co. And it is a vicious, enslaving thing, this is, certainly foreign to the unique American political tradition.
The reason many are hoodwinked by it all is that of course any self-respecting human being realizes that joining with other people is a fine and dandy thing, indeed, provided those other people are themselves decent folks and fully respect one’s human rights to one’s life, liberty and property. In other words, if these fellows do not kill, kidnap, or rob one, they are usually swell company.
But what we are having foisted upon us now is not the idea of voluntary cooperation but of conscription. And that is a no-no.
I am not sure how these thuggish people will be resisted—there are too many of them these days, sadly. But they must be. They have no authority to bully us around. And I for one will keep agitating against their perverse agenda so long as I have the energy to do so.
Tibor R. Machan
Most Americans seem to think it is so quaint to be taken to be a member of the huge American family or team or tribe. But it is a trick.
Being a member of some group immediately creates obligations other members may impose. Team members must contribute to the team’s efforts. Club members must pay dues. Family members must do chores. And so on it goes.
In most instances, however, one joins groups on one’s own initiative, without being forced into membership. Apart from the now nearly completely abolished draft, most Americans aren’t familiar with forced labor, with being conscripted. They do not look upon paying taxes, for example, as having their resources confiscated. Most take it as a kind of fee for services. And quite a few actually claim that taxation is voluntary, never mind that it isn’t.
The trick of getting burdened by innumerable obligations that certain self-appointed leaders spell out and enforce has to do with selling millions of people on the idea that their lives belong to the nation or clan or tribe, not to them. Never mind that this goes squarely against the American Founders’ idea that everyone has an unalienable right to his or her life. We are now in the era of a supposed second bill of rights which FDR concocted and which makes us all into conscripts. We are forced to serve and on terms we have but a little bit to do with. Certainly the idea of the consent of the governed, the consent of the taxed and taxed and taxed again and again, has disappeared from public discourse. Instead no one is asked for his or her consent now; just being born makes one part of a team, with all the attendant duties.
The best description of this comes from the French father of sociology, Auguste Comte, who wrote two hundred or so years ago:
"Everything we have belongs then to Humanity…Positivism never admits anything but duties, of all to all. For its social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of right, constantly based on individualism. We are born loaded with obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. Later they only grow or accumulate before we can return any service. On what human foundation then could rest the idea of right, which in reason should imply some previous efficiency? Whatever may be our efforts, the longest life well employed will never enable us to pay back but an imperceptible part of what we have received. And yet it would only be after a complete return that we should be justly authorized to require reciprocity for the new services. All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely."
This is the public philosophy now in vogue, being propagated by President Obama and Co. And it is a vicious, enslaving thing, this is, certainly foreign to the unique American political tradition.
The reason many are hoodwinked by it all is that of course any self-respecting human being realizes that joining with other people is a fine and dandy thing, indeed, provided those other people are themselves decent folks and fully respect one’s human rights to one’s life, liberty and property. In other words, if these fellows do not kill, kidnap, or rob one, they are usually swell company.
But what we are having foisted upon us now is not the idea of voluntary cooperation but of conscription. And that is a no-no.
I am not sure how these thuggish people will be resisted—there are too many of them these days, sadly. But they must be. They have no authority to bully us around. And I for one will keep agitating against their perverse agenda so long as I have the energy to do so.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Don’t Trust Obama Climate Change Report
Tibor R. Machan
This morning I woke to a lengthy report by NASA showing alleged imminent disaster from climate changes. The report states unequivocally that some huge percentage of the change is human induced, although nothing shown demonstrates or supports this claim. The time line of many of the videos showing erosion and melting of snow is not clear and there are no comparisons to earlier changes in the earth’s climate, no indication of whether other periods of the earth’s history have had changes similar in size or frequency. But the report has one clear feature. It is scary and anyone not in the know about these matters cannot but be worried from what it contains. And I am not in the know—I am no expert, that's for sure, nor are most American citizens.
So why should it be distrusted? Well, pretty much for the reason that virtually all government reports need to be distrusted—remember those WMDs—especially when their policy implications are the accrual to government of massive powers to control the lives of the citizenry. All of the recommendations broadcast in this report would, if followed, require massive transfer of resources from the private sector to the government, in addition to the imposition of aggressive regulations and controls, i.e., violaitons of our rights.
The bottom line here is, not at all surprisingly to anyone who has focused on how governments everywhere tend to function, that governments must have more power to deal with a crisis, with no clear proof of the need for any government intervention—no one’s rights are being violated other than by some externalities (which is nothing new). But even if something needed to be addressed, there is no reason to believe that the government is competent or suited to be the agent of remedy. That is not what governments are about. When, however, they are entrusted with—or simply grab—a job unsuited to their competence and mission, the results will be highly regrettable.
One need not attribute ill will to those who propose these massive government “solutions” to problems facing us, including at the global environmental level. The conceit that "we are the government, and we are here to help" is an old one, all the way from ancient Sparta to modern Washington, D.C. Folks with power tend to imagine themselves wise, as well, but that is a grave mistake. It has gotten many societies into terrible trouble, when government is taken to be the master who will deal with all the problems. Invariable the citizens become servants of the master.
The way the report came across from NASA, by the way, fully confirms such worries. There was no mention of any skepticism about global human induced climate change—specifically, global warming—despite the fact that world wide the number of highly educated skeptics is growing. The computer models, on which predictions are made which, then, supposedly justify various coercive precautionary measures governments, are to undertake are now in considerable dispute. (Oddly, the recent economic fiasco is being blamed by some of the analysts on the flawed models used to estimate the significance of various types of risks but no one seems to be considering that this should be a warning about trusting such models in other areas.)
For me, personally, there is virtually no excuse for increasing the power governments wield over citizens, none. The most general but also persuasive reason is simple: governments are but other people and these other people have no credible authority to control the rest of us no matter what the excuse that’s invoked this time—with numerous others, equally suspect, having been invoked before.
But the governmental habit is very difficult to extinguish and people haven’t begun to work on that task until rather recently, with the American Founders having given a major but by no means necessarily lasting impetus for such extinction. If anything, the current political leadership across the U.S.A. has all be abandoned that brilliant legacy of Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Co., that began to demote government from its pretense at superiority. President Obama seems to be entirely unaware of—or resistant to—their teachings.
Tibor R. Machan
This morning I woke to a lengthy report by NASA showing alleged imminent disaster from climate changes. The report states unequivocally that some huge percentage of the change is human induced, although nothing shown demonstrates or supports this claim. The time line of many of the videos showing erosion and melting of snow is not clear and there are no comparisons to earlier changes in the earth’s climate, no indication of whether other periods of the earth’s history have had changes similar in size or frequency. But the report has one clear feature. It is scary and anyone not in the know about these matters cannot but be worried from what it contains. And I am not in the know—I am no expert, that's for sure, nor are most American citizens.
So why should it be distrusted? Well, pretty much for the reason that virtually all government reports need to be distrusted—remember those WMDs—especially when their policy implications are the accrual to government of massive powers to control the lives of the citizenry. All of the recommendations broadcast in this report would, if followed, require massive transfer of resources from the private sector to the government, in addition to the imposition of aggressive regulations and controls, i.e., violaitons of our rights.
The bottom line here is, not at all surprisingly to anyone who has focused on how governments everywhere tend to function, that governments must have more power to deal with a crisis, with no clear proof of the need for any government intervention—no one’s rights are being violated other than by some externalities (which is nothing new). But even if something needed to be addressed, there is no reason to believe that the government is competent or suited to be the agent of remedy. That is not what governments are about. When, however, they are entrusted with—or simply grab—a job unsuited to their competence and mission, the results will be highly regrettable.
One need not attribute ill will to those who propose these massive government “solutions” to problems facing us, including at the global environmental level. The conceit that "we are the government, and we are here to help" is an old one, all the way from ancient Sparta to modern Washington, D.C. Folks with power tend to imagine themselves wise, as well, but that is a grave mistake. It has gotten many societies into terrible trouble, when government is taken to be the master who will deal with all the problems. Invariable the citizens become servants of the master.
The way the report came across from NASA, by the way, fully confirms such worries. There was no mention of any skepticism about global human induced climate change—specifically, global warming—despite the fact that world wide the number of highly educated skeptics is growing. The computer models, on which predictions are made which, then, supposedly justify various coercive precautionary measures governments, are to undertake are now in considerable dispute. (Oddly, the recent economic fiasco is being blamed by some of the analysts on the flawed models used to estimate the significance of various types of risks but no one seems to be considering that this should be a warning about trusting such models in other areas.)
For me, personally, there is virtually no excuse for increasing the power governments wield over citizens, none. The most general but also persuasive reason is simple: governments are but other people and these other people have no credible authority to control the rest of us no matter what the excuse that’s invoked this time—with numerous others, equally suspect, having been invoked before.
But the governmental habit is very difficult to extinguish and people haven’t begun to work on that task until rather recently, with the American Founders having given a major but by no means necessarily lasting impetus for such extinction. If anything, the current political leadership across the U.S.A. has all be abandoned that brilliant legacy of Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Co., that began to demote government from its pretense at superiority. President Obama seems to be entirely unaware of—or resistant to—their teachings.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Taxes, Greed and Prudence
Tibor R. Machan
Never mind the attempt at intimidation by some, like the Nobel Laureate Woody Clark, claiming that if you work to reduce or let alone to abolish taxes, you are greedy. You are not. You simply have a common sense understanding that there is something basically amiss with a system that coerces you and millions of others to part with your resources for services that would appear to be either hardly needed or, where need, capable of being funded without using force. Moreover, not only are you not guilty of the vice of greed. You can take pride in your practice of the virtue of prudence. Because what this moral virtue requires of us all is that we make sure we and those we are responsible for are well taken care of.
So, for example, check ups at the doctor and regular workouts are a function of prudence, as is brushing your teeth regularly and driving the roads carefully. (That famous financial firm featuring the rock of Gibraltar as its logo isn't called Prudential by accident.) We should all, especially if we have families and other intimates to care for, be prudent, which includes taking good care of our resources. So, then, not permitting the tax collector to raid these is clearly one instance of being prudent, not being greedy. The more of your resources you can keep from the extortionists, the more praiseworthy you are!
Of course there are the apologists for this reactionary public policy, one that really belongs in the age of feudalism when the population was taken to be beholden to the royal family and its goons. The justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr., is supposed to have said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization and since he was a smart and powerful American justice, many think what he said must clearly be a pearl of wisdom. (Actually, the source of the statement is a bit obscure. Holmes is said, by Justice Felix Frankfurter, to have "rebuked a secretary’s query of 'Don’t you hate to pay taxes?' with 'No, young fellow, I like paying taxes, with them I buy civilization'.") In any case, the sentiment is way off. It is not just a ruse but a paradoxical one at that.
Civilization, if one can sum up its nature in just a few words, means relating to our fellow human beings peacefully, respectful of their dignity and sovereignty, never using them against their will. This is what distinguished civilized folks from barbarians throughout human history. But when we focus on governments it becomes evident that these agencies have routinely managed to circumvent the principles of civilization simply because a minimal partion of their work is quite useful, the portion that America's Founders so clearly pinpointed in the Declaration of Independence. This is where governments are assigned the role of securing the rights of the citizenry, the sole purpose for which the institution exists.
So what Holmes is supposed to have said is quite wrong--taxation is a major subversion of the principles of civilization, principles which are supposed to guide us all toward dealing with one another peacefully, not through extortion.
Ah, but you will not find this view widely discussed, let alone championed, among academics, even historians of ideas, let alone public officials, the majority of whom live off this extortionist device, just as the king and his minions used to with impunity, in most parts of the world and in America back before the Revolution demoted them all to mere citizen status!
So, if you have come by your resources, your wealth, honestly, have no shame when you also work hard not to let the government rip you off. Yes, of course, legal services--courts, the police, the military and such--need to be paid for but not by this means. Extortion is how organized criminals come by their "income." It isn't supposed to be the method of public finance of a genuinely free society.
The fact that in the course of emerging from centuries and centuries of oppression via a great varieties of rulers--Caesars, Pharaohs, Czars, kings, and even democratic majorities that disregard individual rights--much of the world is still sticking to taxation as its way of funding its legal systems doesn't make that right, any more than the fact that there was slavery and still is serfdom in many places makes those right. The task of civilized people with a concern for the quality of their system of government must be to discover and implement ways of funding legal systems in a bona fide civilized fashion, without taxation.
Tibor R. Machan
Never mind the attempt at intimidation by some, like the Nobel Laureate Woody Clark, claiming that if you work to reduce or let alone to abolish taxes, you are greedy. You are not. You simply have a common sense understanding that there is something basically amiss with a system that coerces you and millions of others to part with your resources for services that would appear to be either hardly needed or, where need, capable of being funded without using force. Moreover, not only are you not guilty of the vice of greed. You can take pride in your practice of the virtue of prudence. Because what this moral virtue requires of us all is that we make sure we and those we are responsible for are well taken care of.
So, for example, check ups at the doctor and regular workouts are a function of prudence, as is brushing your teeth regularly and driving the roads carefully. (That famous financial firm featuring the rock of Gibraltar as its logo isn't called Prudential by accident.) We should all, especially if we have families and other intimates to care for, be prudent, which includes taking good care of our resources. So, then, not permitting the tax collector to raid these is clearly one instance of being prudent, not being greedy. The more of your resources you can keep from the extortionists, the more praiseworthy you are!
Of course there are the apologists for this reactionary public policy, one that really belongs in the age of feudalism when the population was taken to be beholden to the royal family and its goons. The justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr., is supposed to have said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization and since he was a smart and powerful American justice, many think what he said must clearly be a pearl of wisdom. (Actually, the source of the statement is a bit obscure. Holmes is said, by Justice Felix Frankfurter, to have "rebuked a secretary’s query of 'Don’t you hate to pay taxes?' with 'No, young fellow, I like paying taxes, with them I buy civilization'.") In any case, the sentiment is way off. It is not just a ruse but a paradoxical one at that.
Civilization, if one can sum up its nature in just a few words, means relating to our fellow human beings peacefully, respectful of their dignity and sovereignty, never using them against their will. This is what distinguished civilized folks from barbarians throughout human history. But when we focus on governments it becomes evident that these agencies have routinely managed to circumvent the principles of civilization simply because a minimal partion of their work is quite useful, the portion that America's Founders so clearly pinpointed in the Declaration of Independence. This is where governments are assigned the role of securing the rights of the citizenry, the sole purpose for which the institution exists.
So what Holmes is supposed to have said is quite wrong--taxation is a major subversion of the principles of civilization, principles which are supposed to guide us all toward dealing with one another peacefully, not through extortion.
Ah, but you will not find this view widely discussed, let alone championed, among academics, even historians of ideas, let alone public officials, the majority of whom live off this extortionist device, just as the king and his minions used to with impunity, in most parts of the world and in America back before the Revolution demoted them all to mere citizen status!
So, if you have come by your resources, your wealth, honestly, have no shame when you also work hard not to let the government rip you off. Yes, of course, legal services--courts, the police, the military and such--need to be paid for but not by this means. Extortion is how organized criminals come by their "income." It isn't supposed to be the method of public finance of a genuinely free society.
The fact that in the course of emerging from centuries and centuries of oppression via a great varieties of rulers--Caesars, Pharaohs, Czars, kings, and even democratic majorities that disregard individual rights--much of the world is still sticking to taxation as its way of funding its legal systems doesn't make that right, any more than the fact that there was slavery and still is serfdom in many places makes those right. The task of civilized people with a concern for the quality of their system of government must be to discover and implement ways of funding legal systems in a bona fide civilized fashion, without taxation.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Communities for People, not Ants
Tibor R. Machan
No sooner does one speak up in support of individualism than some clever folks will accuse one with wanting to isolate individuals, to destroy human community life. But this really is bunk and is either a misunderstanding or an out an out attempt at distortion.
Just because human adults require independence of mind and a sphere of personal authority, which is secured by protecting their basic rights, it doesn't mean at all that they do not greatly benefit from community life. There is little that's more satisfying to human beings than one or another kind of association they can forge with their fellows. Think of marriage, family, company, team, chorus, orchestra, and on and on with the myriads of ways people come together and make the most of it.
Alas, there is one way of forming communities that is simply unsuited to people, namely, coercively, when they are herded into groups they do not choose based on their own understanding and goals. That is very much what prisons are, involuntary communities, and the only reason they are supposed to exist is to house those among us who refuse to live peacefully with their fellows.
No defense of individualism except the crudest sort omits the fact that when individuals come together much of what makes their lives worth living is made possible by their togetherness. And, yes, at first we are involuntary members of one community, the family, at least until we grow up and have reached the age of free choice. That, indeed, is what parents and guardians ought to aim for when they raise children, to prepare them all for becoming competent, loving, responsible and adventurous independent adults.
Yet forcibly grouping people immediately undermines this by depriving the young of their opportunity to hone their skills at making decisions for themselves, decisions that are usually quite unlike the decisions others need to make. That's because we all are unique in many respects, all the while that we are also much alike. As one of my favorite philosophers Steve Martin put it in his novel, The Pleasure of My Company, "People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety."
Of course much of this is evident from the history of the more Draconian and brutal attempts to make us all one, such as those witnessed in the twentieth century but also back in ancient Sparta. But sadly too many people keep holding on to the vision of human associations without remembering that the "human" must be very closely heeded when one embarks on these. Human beings, more than anything else in the world, are individuals, with minds of their own which however much they learn from others must get into operation from their own initiative. While other living beings are pretty much hardwired to do the right thing by their nature, our nature is that we must learn what that right thing is and then embark on doing it of our own free will. This, mainly, is the source of everyone's individuality, while, of course, our physical constitution pretty much duplicates itself in every one of us (although even there a great deal is unique to everyone).
You might forgive me for bringing in a bit of personal history here but I do have some experience to draw upon here, namely, of having lived under communism for much of my early years. And my father was an avid fascist, supporting the Nazis all his life. And neither of these recommends itself for a promising human community life. Nor do any of the communities that try to go just a bit in their direction, figuring they can somehow square the circle.
Human communities are indeed marvelous but only when they do not squash the human individual. When they do, when they try to compromise the principles of individualism, look out. They will try to lie and cheat and bamboozle since only that way can coercive community life be made credible. They will emphasize the fabulous goals and forget about the vicious means by which they propose to reach them, like conscript armies or schools or any other collective endeavors do which we aren't asked but are forced to join.
Tibor R. Machan
No sooner does one speak up in support of individualism than some clever folks will accuse one with wanting to isolate individuals, to destroy human community life. But this really is bunk and is either a misunderstanding or an out an out attempt at distortion.
Just because human adults require independence of mind and a sphere of personal authority, which is secured by protecting their basic rights, it doesn't mean at all that they do not greatly benefit from community life. There is little that's more satisfying to human beings than one or another kind of association they can forge with their fellows. Think of marriage, family, company, team, chorus, orchestra, and on and on with the myriads of ways people come together and make the most of it.
Alas, there is one way of forming communities that is simply unsuited to people, namely, coercively, when they are herded into groups they do not choose based on their own understanding and goals. That is very much what prisons are, involuntary communities, and the only reason they are supposed to exist is to house those among us who refuse to live peacefully with their fellows.
No defense of individualism except the crudest sort omits the fact that when individuals come together much of what makes their lives worth living is made possible by their togetherness. And, yes, at first we are involuntary members of one community, the family, at least until we grow up and have reached the age of free choice. That, indeed, is what parents and guardians ought to aim for when they raise children, to prepare them all for becoming competent, loving, responsible and adventurous independent adults.
Yet forcibly grouping people immediately undermines this by depriving the young of their opportunity to hone their skills at making decisions for themselves, decisions that are usually quite unlike the decisions others need to make. That's because we all are unique in many respects, all the while that we are also much alike. As one of my favorite philosophers Steve Martin put it in his novel, The Pleasure of My Company, "People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety."
Of course much of this is evident from the history of the more Draconian and brutal attempts to make us all one, such as those witnessed in the twentieth century but also back in ancient Sparta. But sadly too many people keep holding on to the vision of human associations without remembering that the "human" must be very closely heeded when one embarks on these. Human beings, more than anything else in the world, are individuals, with minds of their own which however much they learn from others must get into operation from their own initiative. While other living beings are pretty much hardwired to do the right thing by their nature, our nature is that we must learn what that right thing is and then embark on doing it of our own free will. This, mainly, is the source of everyone's individuality, while, of course, our physical constitution pretty much duplicates itself in every one of us (although even there a great deal is unique to everyone).
You might forgive me for bringing in a bit of personal history here but I do have some experience to draw upon here, namely, of having lived under communism for much of my early years. And my father was an avid fascist, supporting the Nazis all his life. And neither of these recommends itself for a promising human community life. Nor do any of the communities that try to go just a bit in their direction, figuring they can somehow square the circle.
Human communities are indeed marvelous but only when they do not squash the human individual. When they do, when they try to compromise the principles of individualism, look out. They will try to lie and cheat and bamboozle since only that way can coercive community life be made credible. They will emphasize the fabulous goals and forget about the vicious means by which they propose to reach them, like conscript armies or schools or any other collective endeavors do which we aren't asked but are forced to join.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
The Collectivist Trick
Tibor R. Machan
There is an unforgettable scene in the classic film, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), starring Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott and a host of others. At one point one of Sellers' characters, the mad scientists with the heavy German accent, is making a presentation and while doing so his right arm and hand engage in movements, as if these were not part of Sellers at all but had an independent will. The arm keeps shooting out to give the Heil Hitler sign and it needs to be restrained by the other arm. The character is clearly internally conflicted and the arm is damaged.
This scene comes to my mind a lot when I encounter not only popular politicians but also sophisticated political theorists who insist that we all belong to some collective being--the nation, state, culture, ethnic group, humanity, or the people. That's because when one thinks of human individuals in this collectivist fashion, their own conduct--the actions they take on their own independent initiative--are seen by such collectivists as out of line, just the way the Sellers character's arm was out of line. And when that happens, individuals must be put in their place as servants of the collective just as Sellers' arm had to be!
For many centuries the battle between individualism and collectivism has underpinned the more particular political controversies evident everywhere around the globe. Do you own your own life--do you have an unalienable right to to as it states in the Declaration of Independence, following the ideas of John Locke and some other classical liberals (although not all that many)? Or do you belong to the group--family, neighborhood, community, nation, etc., as for example was enthusiastically argued by the father of sociology, the French Auguste Comte and is being argued today by such communitarians as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni, among many others?
Why bring this up now? Because the dominant political thinking in America and indeed many other places has pretty much given up on the quintessentially American idea that you and I and the rest of us have an unalienable right to our lives. President Obama, for example, is an avid supporter of the ideas of his former Chicago Law School colleague, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, in championing what is known as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, in opposition to the Founders' original bill which is draw from the Declaration.
In that original bill the rights all citizens, indeed all human beings, are supposed to possess are prohibitions on other people who may wish to intrude on one's life without one's permission. That is what the right life is, a prohibition of murder. And the right to liberty, a prohibition of assault, battery, kidnapping, rape, etc. And the right to property, a prohibition of robbery, burglary, trespass, and other kinds of takings without the owners' permission.
The Second Bill of Rights, in contrast, lists rights to other people's works, time and belongings, such as, say, the right to health care or a minimum wage or a paid vacation. All these, ofter called "entitlements" (even while of course that begs the central question), would treat citizens as part of a group with unalienable obligations to the rest of the group. And since this is a fantasy if taken literally, the thesis amounts to claiming that some people, allegedly speaking for the various groups to which we are supposed to belong--which have prior claims on us, prior to ourselves--get to call the shots as to how we ought to live our lives, what and who we must work for, support, feed, etc.
Now if individualism is even remotely right, these so called entitlements or new rights turn out to be fraudulent, tricks by which to promote involuntary servitude, period. But if collectivism is correct, in any of its forms, then the claims made upon our lives, work, time, property, and so forth can all be treated as dues we owe! (Even then, of course, it doesn't follow that anyone is authorized to enforce those duties, but never mind that for now.)
And that is why the individualism versus collectivism dispute is so vital and remains the most important one, disguised only with some difficulty as being about loving one's country, humanity, family, other people, the poor, etc. No. Those are all pseudo issues. The real one is to whom does the individual human being belong?
Tibor R. Machan
There is an unforgettable scene in the classic film, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), starring Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott and a host of others. At one point one of Sellers' characters, the mad scientists with the heavy German accent, is making a presentation and while doing so his right arm and hand engage in movements, as if these were not part of Sellers at all but had an independent will. The arm keeps shooting out to give the Heil Hitler sign and it needs to be restrained by the other arm. The character is clearly internally conflicted and the arm is damaged.
This scene comes to my mind a lot when I encounter not only popular politicians but also sophisticated political theorists who insist that we all belong to some collective being--the nation, state, culture, ethnic group, humanity, or the people. That's because when one thinks of human individuals in this collectivist fashion, their own conduct--the actions they take on their own independent initiative--are seen by such collectivists as out of line, just the way the Sellers character's arm was out of line. And when that happens, individuals must be put in their place as servants of the collective just as Sellers' arm had to be!
For many centuries the battle between individualism and collectivism has underpinned the more particular political controversies evident everywhere around the globe. Do you own your own life--do you have an unalienable right to to as it states in the Declaration of Independence, following the ideas of John Locke and some other classical liberals (although not all that many)? Or do you belong to the group--family, neighborhood, community, nation, etc., as for example was enthusiastically argued by the father of sociology, the French Auguste Comte and is being argued today by such communitarians as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni, among many others?
Why bring this up now? Because the dominant political thinking in America and indeed many other places has pretty much given up on the quintessentially American idea that you and I and the rest of us have an unalienable right to our lives. President Obama, for example, is an avid supporter of the ideas of his former Chicago Law School colleague, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, in championing what is known as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, in opposition to the Founders' original bill which is draw from the Declaration.
In that original bill the rights all citizens, indeed all human beings, are supposed to possess are prohibitions on other people who may wish to intrude on one's life without one's permission. That is what the right life is, a prohibition of murder. And the right to liberty, a prohibition of assault, battery, kidnapping, rape, etc. And the right to property, a prohibition of robbery, burglary, trespass, and other kinds of takings without the owners' permission.
The Second Bill of Rights, in contrast, lists rights to other people's works, time and belongings, such as, say, the right to health care or a minimum wage or a paid vacation. All these, ofter called "entitlements" (even while of course that begs the central question), would treat citizens as part of a group with unalienable obligations to the rest of the group. And since this is a fantasy if taken literally, the thesis amounts to claiming that some people, allegedly speaking for the various groups to which we are supposed to belong--which have prior claims on us, prior to ourselves--get to call the shots as to how we ought to live our lives, what and who we must work for, support, feed, etc.
Now if individualism is even remotely right, these so called entitlements or new rights turn out to be fraudulent, tricks by which to promote involuntary servitude, period. But if collectivism is correct, in any of its forms, then the claims made upon our lives, work, time, property, and so forth can all be treated as dues we owe! (Even then, of course, it doesn't follow that anyone is authorized to enforce those duties, but never mind that for now.)
And that is why the individualism versus collectivism dispute is so vital and remains the most important one, disguised only with some difficulty as being about loving one's country, humanity, family, other people, the poor, etc. No. Those are all pseudo issues. The real one is to whom does the individual human being belong?
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