::Freespace::

Mother Nature’s cruelty: From The Beak of The Finch:

The males built nests in the cactus and sang for days on end from the highest cactus top they owned. The females hopped from territory to territory, inspecting the nests and presumably the singers. Of course, the skewed sex ratio put a spin on that breeding season. Among fortis there were now six males for every female. Each female could choose among many males, but only one male in every six could win a female. The males flew after the females that visited their territories in what the finch watchers call the “sex chase.” The females hopped around and flew around to visit nest after nest, and took part in chase after chase, before one by one they each settled down with a single male…. Because of the crazy sex ratio, most of the males were left out; only a very small subsample of survivors had a chance to mate. But every single one of the eligible females was able to pair off…. [M]males all over the island languished through the wet seasons without a mate, building nests in the cactus trees on their territory and singing from the highest point and winning nothing.... [I]t was the biggest males with the biggest beaks that were winning mates…. Males with bigger territories were more likely to win males than males with smaller territories…. While the females are flying around checking out each territory the males are doing battle with all their neighbor males to establish and expand the boundaries of their piece of lava. Since a male in black [feathers, which signify his readiness to mate] gets into more fights than a male in brown, the most vigorous males are the black ones with a lot of land…. [O]ne rather battered-looking male…held on to a small territory only as long as he was still in brown; as soon as he turned black, a neighboring male drove him away.

As a battered little brown bird myself, I would just like to say that this is, like, totally unfair!

The dollar sign: People often ask why I sign my emails with a dollar sign. The fact is, I started doing it before I read Ayn Rand—it’s my initials, T and S, superimposed. But when I read Atlas Shrugged I decided I must also be psychic!

Libertarian Bookworm: This week, the Cato Institute awarded its Friedman Prize to Hernando de Soto, Peruvian economist and author. Here’s a biography of de Soto and an interview from Reason magazine. Among de Soto’s books is The Mystery of Capital, a book which combines the virtues of brevity, readability, and scholarship.

The “mystery” he writes about is, why is it that capitalism succeeds in the United States and some other places, but doesn’t in so many others. Some people conclude that “Third World peoples…lack…entrepreneurial spirit or market orientation.” And yet a visit to these countries suggests otherwise. In Mexico, for instance, you can hardly walk a block without discovering a small businessman trying to sell you something. In fact, people from foreign countries often seem to be far more entrepreneurial than Americans (who tend, I think, to be a little spoiled). So rather than laziness or cultural problems, de Soto explains that “the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital.” Although “most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism,” even in the poorest countries,

they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against investment.

The Cato biography says that de Soto’s writing “has focused on… the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries.” What Mystery of Capital makes clear is that it’s not just the property rights, but their formality which needs emphasis. Successful western economies are not just built on ownership—although that’s certainly necessary—but also on the fact that “every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories, is represented in a property document that is a visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit.” Deeds, wills, receipts, stocks, “are not ‘mere paper’: they are mediating devices that give us useful knowledge,” and enable cooperation, prediction, and knowledge which serve as the spark in the commercial engine. In short,

Formal property’s contribution to mankind is not the protection of ownership; squatters, housing organizations, mafias, and even primitive tribes manage to protect their assets quite effectively. Property’s real breakthrough is that it radically improved the flow of communications about assets and their potential. It also enhanced the status of their owners, who became economic agents able to transform assets within a broader network.

De Soto identifies six effects of formalized property which allow for the generation of capital, which make the economy move forward: 1) the formalization—writing a deed, for instance—allows a person to “concentrate on its potential…the most economically and socially useful qualities about the asset…. The moment you focus your attention on the title of a house, for example, and not on the house itself, you have automatically stepped from the material world into the conceptual universe where capital lives.” 2) formalization helps to break down the barriers which obstruct trade within an economy; it integrates the assets of a nation “into one formal representational system.” 3) it makes people accountable by clarifying ownership and therefore liability; 4) it makes assets “fungible,” by standardizing the forms of ownership; this “allows one to discriminate quickly and inexpensively between similarities and differences in assets without having to deal with each asset as if it were unique.” 5) this fungibility helps people to communicate by clarifying ownership, allowing for the creation of credit records and thereby preventing theft, and 6) building what we know as the rule of law.

The rule of law is essential to a successful economy because foreign investors need to know that they aren’t just throwing their money away. If you’re going to hand over your life savings to an entrepreneur in a foreign country, you need to be absolutely certain that your contract with him can be enforced, and that the nation’s authorities aren’t just going to seize the business’ assets. But as de Soto shows, the rule of law, while necessary, isn’t sufficient—successful economies also require the ability to aggregate capital. That’s right, it’s those supposedly evil piles of “unnecessary wealth” that you see Scrooge McDuck swimming in, that makes business and innovation possible. These two things are closely connected—when the legal process breaks down, it becomes impossible to aggregate capital, and thus impossible for a small business to become big:

To get an idea of how difficult the migrant’s life was, my research team and I opened a small garment workshop on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. Our goal was to create a new and perfectly legal business. The team then began filling out the forms, standing in the lines, and making the bus trips into central Lima to get all the certifications required to operate, according to the law, a small business in Peru. They spent six hours a dayat it and finally registered the business—289 days later. Although the garment workshop was geared to operating only one worker, the cost of legal registration was $1,231—thirty-one times the monthly minimum wage. To obtain legal authorization to build a house on state-owned land took six years and eleven months, requiring 207 administrative steps in fifty-two government offices. To obtain legal title for that piece of land took 728 steps. We also found that a private bus, jitney, or taxi-driver who wanted to obtain official recognition of his route faced twenty-six months of red tape.

Ask yourself: would you want to invest your life savings in a risky new business venture in Peru? The consequence of such bureaucratic problems is that many businesses choose to operate in the black market; which not only stifles the growth of businesses (since the owners try not to draw attention to themselves) but also makes it more difficult for the businesses to enforce contracts—which again makes it difficult to attract investment. “The result is that most people’s resources are commercially and financially invisible. Nobody really knows who owns what or where, who is accountable for the performance of obligations, who is responsible for losses and fraud, or what mechanisms are available to enforce payment for services and goods delivered. Consequently, most potential assets in thee countries have not been identified or realized; there is little accessible capital, and the exchange economy is constrained and sluggish.”

The saddest part of this failure is that it tends to encourage people to buy into the argument that capitalism won’t work for them, or that there is some secret, sinister element in American capitalism that makes it work here. This then encourages the growth of “revolutionary” movements which plunge countries which might otherwise be on the verge of success, back into turmoil and bloodshed.

De Soto does good old fashioned political economy, and does it extremely well. Anyone interested in helping the world’s poor—rather than just chanting lame slogans—must read this book.

Previous entries of the Libertarian Bookworm are here.

Funny: I read this, and then I read this.

Facing the facts: PZ Meyers of Pharyngula says “Materialism and naturalism do not deny complexity, flexibility, depth, emotion, love, sophistication, fun, morality, decision-making. I save my pity for those who think it does.” Hear, hear! It is exceedingly frustrating to me, as a person who believes very much in the political principles of natural rights as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, to see how many of my allies on that issue think that it is inconsistent with evolution through natural selection. It’s not surprising that they think this—they’ve been taught it for decades by the left. And unfortunately, by embracing things that are simply not true, like ID creationism, these people lead onlookers to believe that all people who believe in natural rights are, as Meyers puts it, “blinkered conservative nutcases of the far right.”

I thought of this when I looked over my copy of the Claremont Review of Books, which arrived yesterday. It has an article by John West of the “Discovery” Institute, and it has an article by Larry Arnhart, author of Darwinian Natural Right. Now, Arnhart is one of my very favorite political philosophers. He is, so far as I know, the only political philosopher working in natural rights (other than Objectivists) who has even tried to look evolution in the eye and see that natural rights does not depend on natural thinking. What a contrast with people like West. And how sad that it is not only enlightening, but also an immense relief to discover common sense like Arnhart’s. I am tired to death of being humiliated by my political allies.

Incidentally, if it were true that evolution was incompatible with natural rights, this would require us to abandon natural rights, not the other way around. Our theories, if we are to have any shred of intellectual integrity, must be made to fit the facts, and not the other way around.

If you have not read Arnhart, do so now.

Oops: Wait, you mean you’re not StealMyCookies4595?

Cruel?: April is National Poetry Month, you know. And although I’m quite sympathetic to this reaction, I do enjoy a bit of verse now and then. I’ve blogged many of my favorite poems already, and I thought I’d add another one. This is from The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside (1744), and I found it in one of my ten favorite books of all time, Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving The Rainbow. I love it for being a fine specimen of unity between art and science; its description of the origin of rainbows (as Dawkins explains) is strikingly accurate:

…man loves knowledge, and the beams of Truth
More welcome touch his understanding’s eye,
Than all the blandishments of sound his ear,
Than all of taste his tongue. Nor ever yet
The melting rainbow’s vernal-tinctur’d hues
To me have shone so pleasing, as when first
The hand of Science pointed out the path
In which the sun-beams gleaming from the west
Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil
Involves the orient; and that trickling shower
Piercing through every crystalline convex
Of clustering dew-drops to their flight oppos’d,
Recoil at length where concave all behind
The internal surface on each glassy orb
Repeals their forward passage into air;
That thence direct they seek the radiant goal
From which their course began; and, as they strike
In different lines the gazer’s obvious eye,
Assume a different lustre, through the brede
Of colours changing from the splendid rose
To the pale violet’s dejected hue.

Fame!: Thanks to Dispatches from The Culture Wars, Southern Appeal, and texasbestgrok for the notes about my bloggiversary.

Lynching: This post at Southern Appeal reminded me of Mark Twain’s great essay “The United States of Lyncherdom.” Yes, there are many Iraqis who have bought the propaganda so that they really do detest all Americans. But they’re still human, so I think what Twain says about American lynchings probably holds for most Iraqis too:

Why does a crowd of the same kind of people in Texas, Colorado, Indiana, stand by, smitten to the heart and miserable, and by ostentatious outward signs pretend to enjoy a lynching? Why does it lift no hand or voice in protest? Only because it would be unpopular to do it, I think; each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval—a thing which, to the general run of the race, is more dreaded than wounds and death. When there is to be a lynching the people hitch up and come miles to see it, bringing their wives and children. Really to see it? No—they come only because they are afraid to stay at home, lest it be noticed and offensively commented upon. We may believe this, for we all know how we feel about such spectacles—also, how we would act under the like pressure. We are not any better nor any braver than anybody else, and we must not try to creep out of it.

Homeowner’s associations: I hate homeowner’s associations. It escapes me how anyone would ever willingly buy into a neighborhood where there is one. Of course, they’re supposed to be private contracts—and I certainly prefer them to zoning laws—but where’s the choice?

The Friedman Prize: The Cato Institute has announced the winner of the second Friedman Prize: Hernando de Soto, economist and author of such books as The Mystery of Capital. Here’s an interview with de Soto from Reason magazine. More on Mystery of Capital in the Libertarian Bookworm this weekend.

Bloggiversary: In one year I have blogged 578,092 words; that’s 1140 single spaced pages, or 2,835,773 keystrokes. Proof that, had I put myself to it, I could have done something worthwhile.

From the commonplace book:

If we teach only the findings and products of science—no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be—without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? Both then are presented as unsupported assertion. In Russia and China, it used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities taught. The distinction between science and pseudoscience was made for you. No perplexities needed to be muddled through. But when profound political changes occurred and strictures on free thought were loosened, a host of confident or charismatic claims—especially those that told us what we wanted to hear—gained a vast following. Every notion, however improbable, became authoritative.

It is a supreme challenge for the popularier of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of Nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle in The Dark 21-22 (1996).

First Amendment news: “‘This marks the first time in California that an adult business has been paid damages for lost profits as a result of a city depriving it of its First Amendment rights to freedom of expression.’”

Simpsons and The Law: This is great. Only a legal writer could suck all the fun out of the Simpsons with such efficiency! (Thanks to Debbie for the pointer.)

You’re fired!: Looks like the Donald’s going to have some trouble trademarking “You’re Fired!”

Getting old: Tomorrow is Freespace’s one year bloggiversary.

Adam Smith’s pins: Rice discovers the division of labor. I’ve noticed the same thing as well writing for Panda’s Thumb.

April in D.C.: Countertop Chronicles has a lot of gorgeous pictures of the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C.

Ayn Rand interview: A very interesting little article here with some long-lost excerpts from the famous Playboy interview of Ayn Rand. This passage in particular I liked, as a response to those who think that evolution is compatible with religion (well, that wasn’t her point, but I think it applies):

PLAYBOY: …Isn’t there something in the very nature of philosophical system-building that leads to intolerance? Don’t world views, because they try to be all-inclusive, because they are so neat and seemingly simple, attract and encourage fanaticism?

RAND: Surely you don’t mean to say that knowledge and consistency are dangerous, but ignorance and inconsistency are safe? It is irrationality that leads to fanaticism, and inconsistency that leads to destruction. Man cannot escape the fact that he needs a philosophy. The only question is: what kind of philosophy is it? If one man believes consistently in production, and another man believes consistently in robbery, the nature and the consequences of that consistency will not be the same. The atrocities you mentioned were caused by philosophy—by the wrong kind of philosophy….

A bad review: I was extremely disappointed in this review of Dennett’s Freedom Evolves. I think Dennett is one of the half dozen genuine geniuses working today, and although I would agree that Freedom Evolves is the weakest of his major works (I agree with heir’s review on Amazon.com), I think this review overlooks some important points. For instance, it’s important to keep in mind that Dennett is not writing for Objectivists. Rand long ago saw that the free will/determinism “debate” was a false dichotomy because what most philosophers called “free will” was a straw man; she responded that free will does not require us to abandon causality. Well, of course most philosophers don’t listen to Rand, so Dennett spends a major part of his time on this issue proving just that. And I think the reviewer was misled in part by that.

But here’s my major objection:

…causality is a relationship, not between one event and another, but between an entity and its action…is a function of its nature. While it is often convenient to refer to some action as the “cause” of a subsequent action, such usage is derivative; primarily, an action’s cause is the nature of the acting entity. For example, the motions of atoms or ions are caused by their mass, electric charge, etc., which determine how the forces operating on them affect their movement. If the nature of these entities were different, then they would act differently in response to the same external forces. In the case of living things, whose actions are self-generated…entity causation becomes agent causation; the contraction of a muscle is caused by the nature of the animal’s muscular and nervous systems…. [H]uman agents, whose nature includes the ability to weigh alternative courses of action and deliberate about them, and consequently the capacity for genuine choice, act in accordance with causality, not in any way in contradiction to it.

Now, this can mean one of two things—one meaningless, and the other trivial. The meaningless thing is that by the term “nature,” Mozes might be appealing to essentialism: that the “essence” of the human being is what gives rise to this relationship of causality. The problem with this is that evolution requires us to abandon essentialism—that’s the entire thesis of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I don’t really think that’s what Mozes means, because Rand herself rejected essentialism (see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology 2 (2d ed. 1990)). So if just stopping the inquiry with the word “nature” isn’t what we’re doing here, then we must be asserting that there is some “invisible hand explanation” of that nature—that is to say, an explanation of human nature which can derive from some lower-level phenomenon. But that’s just what Dennett is attempting in this book. If this is the argument Mozes is making then to object to Dennett’s theory on the ground that he’s overlooking human nature is like saying “No, no, you can’t explain the flavor of spaghetti sauce by discussing tomatoes—you’re overlooking the spaghetti-ness!” Yes, of course human nature is such that we can choose to contract our muscles or do any number of other things. But the question is why? The question is, how can we explain that nature without appealing to any skyhooks? That question is not answered—but is only rephrased—by saying “Well, human nature includes the ability to weigh alternative courses of action…”

Mozes’ characterization of memetics is also silly. He writes that it is “incoherent” because although “Dennett takes pains to state that he…[is] not denying that people think…[but] the explanatory power of Darwinian natural selection comes precisely from the fact that it explains how traits apparently designed for a purpose can arise without a conscious, purposeful mind to design them; genetic traits that survive in the process of natural selection do so, not because a god made a conscious decision to create or accept them, but because these traits make an organism more fit for a given environment. If we recognize that people come up with ideas and accept or reject them through conscious, purposeful thought, then any analogy between ideas and genes, or between the spread of ideas and Darwinian natural selection, loses all meaning and all explanatory power….” But Dennett responds precisely to this argument when he says “a parody will expose the fallacy: ‘The people at Boeing are under the ludicrous misapprehension that they have figured out the design of their planes on sound scientific and engineering principles...when in fact memetics shows us that all these design elements are simply the memes that have survived and spread among the social groups to which those airplane manufacturers belong.’” Freedom Evolves at 187. Of course, what causes the aerospace design to survive is just the fact that it works on sound engineering principles. Of course people come up with ideas and accept or reject them through conscious, purposeful thought. But why do they accept or reject them? They can accept because those ideas are true. Or they can accept them because they are comforting or flatter their vanity. That’s the whole point. And as for the analogy breaking down, remember that natural selection is itself an analogy to the artificial selection of breeders. Just because the environment in which the variables are selected is one operated on by a consciousness would not destroy the analogy to evolution, especially when consciousness itself is the variable being selected. The analogy might be made rougher, as Dawkins and Dennett have always conceded, but it certainly would not lose all of its meaning and explanatory power; indeed, nothing but this analogy provides a strong explanation for the popularity of such memes as religion.

Finally, I’m really troubled that Mozes says that Dennett employs a “condescending and supercilious tone” and an “incessant…argument from intimidation.” This is patently absurd. Dennett is a patient, careful, meticulous, funny philosopher, who strives to be understood. He does not bully his reader in the slightest, although when he trains his eye on a target, he does blow it to smithereens. When Dennett uses the phrase “stop that crow!” in Freedom Evolves, he is most certainly not saying that nobody can have reasonable objections to his views; he is saying that we must always check our premises to ensure that our objections really are reasonable, rather than merely fear for what the world would be like if the truth were revealed. And it cannot be denied that most of Dennett’s readers will have Dumbo-style objections to what he says, (at least because most of Dennett’s readers are not Objectivists!) Dennett is responding to the very popular school of thought that says we must pretend there is a supernatural realm, or that we must take care not to tread on the toes of people who cling to old illusions, in order to keep society functioning. This is a substantial number of people, and it is to them that Dennett is addressing this phrase.

Dennett’s work is not incompatible with Objectivism, and I think Objectivists distance themselves from it only at their peril.

CDs: 1) Turns out there’s a new Simon and Garfunkel record out. Well, it’s a Paul Simon solo album, but it was recorded shortly after Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. came out. I haven’t heard it yet.

2) The new Eric Clapton album, Me And Mr. Johnson, came out today, and I rushed out and got a copy. It’s a collection of 14 Robert Johnson tunes, and it’s very good—I particularly liked “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” and “Come On In My Kitchen.” The album does not have “Crossroads” on it, but that’s not surprising—Clapton’s probably sick to death of that song by now. His performance is, of course, superb; every bit as good as From The Cradle, and he’s backed up by Billy “Fifth Beatle” Preston on the piano and Doyle Bramhall II on guitar. Bramhall is the son of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s drum player, and he’s put out a few albums of his own, including Welcome, which I think is really good. (He and his band Smokestack opened for Clapton during the tour for Reptile. If you like that swamp-rock sound of Creedence and Stevie Ray Vaughan, give Welcome a listen.) Now, I’m not as big a Johnson fan as many other blues lovers—I mean, I love it when Clapton or someone else does a Johnson song, but it escapes me how anyone could enjoy the originals. But if you’re looking for good recordings of Johnson songs, don’t miss this rather obscure one, which I got last summer. It’s really excellent—especially the versions of “Crossroads” and “If I Had Possession Over The Judgment Day.”

3) I also recently picked up Red Garland’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco and Wynton Kelly’s Kelly Blue. Garland and Kelly were piano players who played with Miles Davis—Garland does an especially masterful job on Relaxin’, and Kelly is great on Some Day My Prince Will Come. These two CDs are really excellent, relaxing but upbeat, bluesy jazz. Perfect for long quiet nights in front of the computer writing reviews of books by law professors. Or other things, too, I suppose.

Time, time, time: Alistair Cooke: None of the obituaries of Alistair Cooke mentioned Cooke’s friendship with one of my favorite writers, H.L. Mencken. Cooke not only edited The Vintage Mencken, he was also a frequent guest at Mencken’s Hollins Street house in the eight years after Mencken suffered a stroke that left him unable to read or write. Cooke often went over to read to the old man in the back yard. The Vintage Mencken was released to coincide with his Mencken’s 75th Birthday, and Cooke also published a tribute to him that month—calling him America’s Dr. Johnson—in the Saturday Review.

This, in turn, gives pause for a reflection on how short American history really is. Mencken died in 1956 (the same year my mother was born). He was born in 1880, a year before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, into a world in which Mark Twain was alive, as were Frederick Douglass and a very young Albert Einstein. (Mencken was my age in 1907, the year the vacuum cleaner was invented and Oklahoma became a state.) Cooke, who died today, was close friends with a man who had reported on the Theodore Roosevelt presidential campaign in 1904, and who once received a pair of suspenders from Rudolph Valentino. These things that seem so long ago—weren’t so long ago.

Schools to be proud of: “Two D.C. public school principals yesterday testified that incompetent security guards are not fired, but instead reassigned within the school system…” Imagine that.

I’m not ignoring you: I just have a crushing amount of reading and writing to do. I’ve been asked to review Randy Barnett’s new book, and it’s hell. Not because it’s a bad book, but because I consider everything he says to be such plain common sense that I can’t think of anything more to say!

“Creating jobs”: Herbert Meyer is absolutely right. It’s obscene that Americans write laws and bring lawsuits that drive up the cost of doing business in America—and then, when the businesses finally try to escape, they scream “oh, no! NAFTA is letting them get away! Quick, close the door!”

What you missed over the weekend: Libertarian Bookworm featured The Tyranny of History by W.J.F. Jenner. (And some followups on the theme.) And the Progressive origins of segregation.

Stuart Buck: Very distressing news about blogger Stuart Buck. I certainly wish him the best.

Hm…: “Hanging out with him virtually has been a delight…” On which side of that sentence does the “virtually” belong, exactly?

Anyhow, thanks to Erik Peterson; visit him on his own blog here.

Tchau-zau, Pessoal: I just want to thank Mr. Sandefur for letting me blog here this week. Sandefur is a genuinely classy guy, who I enjoy immensely but never get to see enough. Hanging out with him virtually has been a delight.

Hopefully, my ramblings drove a few people away from their computers and outside. Sunlight is good for you.

Again, many thanks to the gracious host. If you're still looking for somebody to float down the Mississippi river with, I'm your man.

From Hamlet: …to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; ‘tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool’d:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! ‘tis a fault to heaven…

Political definitions: First, as to the definitions of terms, and why I use a phrase like “genuine conservatism”: people are not definitive authorities on what their political views actually are. They are definitive only on what they think their opinions are. In other words, if a person believes in all of the elements of the Socialist Party platform, but calls himself a Libertarian, he is not, in fact, a Libertarian, no matter how sincerely he believes otherwise. He certainly may think that he is a Libertarian, but his belief is not, in fact, correct. There are many people who believe they are conservatives, who are, in reality, libertarians; and there are many who believe they are libertarians, who are, in fact, conservatives. The definitions of these terms will certainly be controversial. But I believe that conservatism is best defined as that political philosophy which holds that the individual belongs to society, and that the ideal society is one which does not change—in which the people who find themselves born into a certain social role do not even seek to get out of that role, but are satisfied with it, because they have inculcated into them the notion that they live for the sake of a stable, unchanging society. True conservatism seeks what Karl Popper described as “the arrested state”: the true conservative is a stasist.*

Libertarianism, by contrast, holds that the individual belongs to himself, and not to others or to society as a whole. There is no such thing as society as a distinct entity other than the people who comprise it, and society can therefore have no rights valid against the individual. The libertarian is a dynamist. He does not seek to impose an order on individuals for the benefit of “society,” but seeks that political arrangement which will best enable individuals to find their own place in society peacefully. He believes that each person has the right to pursue happiness. Libertarianism is a form of the old (18th century) liberalism, which sees its main goal as the liberation of the individual from restraints imposed by others.

Many, if not most, of those who call themselves “conservatives” today—the Barry Goldwater camp, for instance—actually belong in the latter category. Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and others, belong in the former—and, as Mrs. Postrel has demonstrated, many leftists are falling into that group as well. It is certainly true that today’s liberals are increasingly embracing the stasist views that were once the monopoly of conservatives—the anti-technology environmentalists are the best example of this. Even Peterson is a moderate libertarian, since he sees it as the primary goal of politics to free people to “control [their] own [lives] and determine [their] own future[s].” This is, I must emphasize, not a goal of genuine conservatism; indeed, quite the opposite.

Second, I agree that few political spectra are really accurate; the best I’ve seen is the “politopia” chart which plots political views in a square along axes of political freedom in personal and public realms. But this, too, has its drawbacks, since there is really no essential line between a “public” and “private” act.

Finally, what Mr. Peterson calls “the fifties I’m nostaligic for” is an absurd fiction. If the real 50s had anything in common with what he describes, I would probably also be nostalgic for it. In fact, if you re-read his description, I can think of no age that it fits better than it fits the present day.

*-Incidentally, people tend to call Plato a communist; this is misleading, I think. Marxist communism, for all of its evils, always was forward looking at least in its rhetoric. It sought advancement and progress. Plato, on the other hand, was backward-looking, fundamentally anti-progressive. I believe for this reason that Plato is better described as a fascist. Where Marxists see the application of reason as a virtue, and believe that it will lead to “scientific socialism,” the fascists exalted tradition, rejected reason and free inquiry, and sought to crush or to “harness” science.

Political Spectrums: I get frustrated over semantics, especially in political and social discussion. I sometimes feel that Sandefur and I think all of the same things, we just dress them up in different outfits when we take them out in public.

In his post, Sandefur discusses "genuine conservatism" as being what one might call "social conservatism," and, yes, this is where the roots of conservatism are found.

This view of the political spectrum is expressed in the popular "freeway" analogy. In the far left you have the fast lane. This represents the most liberal, the people who are all about progress, and vision, and forward thinking. Gradually, the lanes get slower as you move to the right, until, at the far right, you have the slow lane, where the ultra-conservatives are crawling along, or standing still, or even moving backwards, headed back to the fifties or the middle ages or even all the way back to the "prelapsarian paradise."

The analogy is viciously flawed, good only for making conservatives seem timid.

The direction issue is the first problem. The idea that we can head only one way—forward—and you're either helping us get there or holding us back. But there are a thousand directions in which a liberal could take us as he speeds headlong towards what he calls the "future." Modern liberals are, in reality, attempting to drag us back into the quagmire of socalist policies, ideas that became outmoded when the wall came down and took the iron curtain with it. So it could be argued they're the ones who are going backwards.

Even the analogy of "speed" as desire for change is incomplete, as this type of conservative can speed as quickly towards his destination as the liberal can. However, the arguement could be made that despite his present speed, this conservative's ultimate goal is to find a nice place to pull over and stop.

I also hate charts of the political spectrum that place Communism and Socialism on the far left, and Facism and Totalitarianism on the far right. Yeah, doesn't the left wing wish. This is more like the Y axis of the far left end of the chart.

So what's at the far right?

Anarchy. The government getting the heck out of everybody's way and letting them do what they want.

Personally, I find a lot more interesting discussion in how far that way we should head than in which direction up and down you should move on the left. What difference does it make if you're ruled by a king or an emporer or a dictator, or if your property is your own or not, or if you receive a dole or a salary or a bundle of goods for your wages, if you have no means to control your own life and determine your own future?

Which is why I think Sandefur and I agree, whether we know it or not.

Because this is the fifties I'm nostaligic for: A time when good fences made good neighbors, and people believed in leaving each other to do what they wanted. A time when people didn't feel the need to mess around with drugs and crime and meaningless sex—been there, done that, didn't care for it, thanks. With such "experimentation" behind them, they could take a deep breath and look to the future, on film or television or in books by men like Asimov or Bradbury, or in pulp magazines with garish covers, filled with robots and atomic energy and aliens, but above all with an incredible sense of possibility. The fifties that pointed us into space, to the moon, and beyond.

On the other hand, the middle ages sucked. Twain convinced me of that.

The Fifties: Peterson is right that the folks living in the 50s were not naïve, or the cookie-cutter Leave It To Beaver stereotypes that some of us tend to suggest. We know that is true because the 50s was such a miserable time—of polio outbreaks, racial violence, and the genuine threat of Soviet invasion. The people of the 50s did not have the luxury of being as boring as we sometimes pretend they were.

Where he’s wrong is in thinking that Pleasantville has anything to do with the 50s. Pleasantville is not about the 50s; it’s about 50s nostalgia. It is about the desire for a prelapsarian paradise; it is about the mindset of what Virginia Postrel calls the “stasist,” or what Nietzsche calls the “bound spirit.” These are people who long for a society where there is no threatening challenge to authority; who wish that things would stand still; that everyone and everything would know its place and stay in it. That is to say, it is about genuine conservatism. Nietzsche writes that for bound spirits, “first, all things having permanence are in the right; second, all things that are no burden to us are in the right; third, all things that benefit us are in the right; fourth, all things for which we have made sacrifices are in the right.” This is the finest description I can think of for the likes of Leon Kass, or Russell Kirk. These bound spirits, as Postrel writes, “desire to keep the future under control—to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise.” They hate it when someone, born into a social role says “No, I don’t like this—I want to find my own place; I want to live my own life.” The bound spirit can see in that statement only the disruption of society—only what Peterson says about “their rejection of rules and limitations, hence rock and roll and hippies and war protests and the entire decade of the seventies.” This is as clumsy and absurd a characterization of the 60s and 70s as is the nostalgia of the 50s, so far as fact is concerned. But the important thing is not the fact; it’s our personal reactions to what these eras have come to represent. Yes, there were extremes in the 60s which not only are undesirable, but which totally undermined the individualism that that decade ought to have embraced—the leftist politics of the alleged individualists, for instance, or their embrace of self-destructive, anti-intellectual pursuits like drugs and meaningless sex. But we are safer and happier in a society where people are free to experiment and even to ruin their own lives, than in a society built on conformity and authoritarianism. That’s what the nostalgia is all about—just like an older nostalgia tried to lure us into believing that the Middle Ages were somehow to be preferred to industrial society. It is just another version of the Frankenstein story, trying to scare us out of being curious.

Yes, individualism is disruptive; it can be painful and dirty and scary and very unpleasant. But as I said in the Libertarian Bookworm yesterday, that disruption is precisely what makes freedom worthwhile. The conservative bound spirits, who created 50s nostalgia, and still dress that era up as if it were somehow desirable, do so at the cost of ignoring the horrors of that time—especially the racial horrors. And this is evidence of just how empty stasis is.