| Friday, December 17, 2004 |
17:54 - How's the grass over there, Vern?
http://www.davidbrin.com/libertarianarticle1.html
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Yesterday I delved up this David Brin speech to the Libertarian National Convention again, in support of some aimless musings about branding and consumerism. I knew it contained a couple of points that were germane to the discussion, so I threw in the link sight unseen, without a fresh re-read after the couple of years that it's been since I last ate my way through it.
I just finished it again, and I must recommend it to those who have skipped it thus far. It's hard to argue with. I'd love to pass it to that erstwhile Correspondent of mine, the so-far-Left-he-fell-off-the-Earth one, because at one point in our discussion he rather randomly tried to describe himself as a Libertarian; I suspect he doesn't really know what he was saying, and was grasping for a term that meant "Stay out of my bedroom and my bloodstream, pig". But I think even he might be turned by Brin.
There's one bit in the whole five-long-page essay that bugs me, though. Unfortunately, it's the most important part. After all the great observations and incisive questionnairing and audacious money-changer-table-overturning he does on stage before all the zealous Capital-L types, he comes to the central core of the ideology he's trying to promote: "Cheerful Libertarianism", the optimistic idea that people are fundamentally competent and rational and have accomplished so much already that our trajectory for the future is an encouraging one indeed. His central paragraphs explaining the rightness of the idea are these, on Page 4:
Marxism foresees that era coming as a natural consequence of capital accumulation and the fore-ordained group behavior of mass classes. Classical libertarians -- harking to the resentful Look-Back view -- prescribe removing government shackles that currently prevent the natural flowering of markets. Simply toppling the sin of government excess will begin the era of explicit contracts and true individual liberty.
Ah, but then there's Cheerful Libertarianism. (Or perhaps it should be called Maturationalism. Under this Look-Forward zeitgeist, the future era of freedom will come about for one simple reason.
Because if we make a future world in which all children grow up healthy and well educated and free-minded, they will naturally, and of their own free will, choose a society free of coercion. Because that is what any person in his or her own right mind would want!
Mature, knowledgeable and satiable people will tend to approach the near-ideal society of our fairy tale from nearly any starting point, since almost any unafraid adult will deem it the only decent way to live. Absence of fear is key, persuading individuals to forsake ruthless predation in favor of fair competition.
Coming hot on the heels of his impish verbal traps intended to catch the audience off guard, this statement that his beliefs are "what any person in his or her own right mind would want" seems so glib that at first I suspected he was being sarcastic. But it's not the only time he mentions it, and I can't hear the laugh-track to tell me he was making a face while saying it. I think he actually means it.
Which is worrisome. I don't really believe that a person, raised in liberty and consensus, would naturally choose a life of more liberty and consensus. Sorry, I just don't think it's objectively true.
History, which Brin asks us to treat with the deference we would a teacher, instructs us quite firmly otherwise. Plenty of despots arose out of relative comfort and freedom because they either had a vision of something yet greater that could be had, or (more often) because they saw a weak spot and went for it. That's where we got people like Saddam Hussein. They're the "cheaters" in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the guys who make a global politics based on disarmed debating societies like the UN so unworkable. Freedom is a tenuous human condition, and hardly a "default"; without ever-present vigilance, it can be stolen by someone with designs on power, all the more easily the more consensus we have.
I believe, rather, in a sort of "oscillation" of the human condition. People want what they don't have. Doesn't history tell us that? More to the point, doesn't our very conscience tell us that? If we're oppressed, we want freedom. If we're poor, we want money. If we're being cooped up under a parent's protective wing, we want responsibility over our own destinies. And if we're free adults struggling in this workaday world, trying to make it from mortgage payment to mortgage payment, with kids to feed and clothe and keep healthy, we want ease.
Where does the desire for socialized health care come from? Not from the wealthy and idle. It comes from people who don't want to have to deal with sudden unexpected medical bills. That's a demographic otherwise known as the free middle class. These are Brin's Libertarians (historically speaking), brought up in an atmosphere of freedom and consensus unknown before in history, consciously volunteering to give up some of our individual freedoms and responsibilities in favor of some more ease and convenience and peace of mind.
We all do this. Any number of less hot-button examples can be cited. Say you're a homeowner who toils in the front yard every weekend, keeping the landscaping looking nice, and then has to go inside and cook dinner every night. Say you or your spouse gets a raise. What's the first thing you do? Hire a gardener. Or a housekeeper. Or a nanny. Something to take some of the responsibility off your hands, and to free you up from some of the duties you used to think of as empowering, but now seem only like drudgery. Now you can work on your own leisure projects, instead of having to toil for subsistence, even though it means you're paying out more money and have lost personal control over the tasks over which you previously had dominion—trusting the service you've hired to do your job for you, hopefully the way you'd like it, but always with the possibility that they'll skin the bark off one of your bushes with their weed-whacker while you're not looking. You've traded freedom for ease.
I've seen the same thing happen with people who used to enjoy putting together computers from spare parts, cobbling them together into Frankenstein boxes on which to run Linux and be pleased with the ability to get more use out of an old 486. But these people eventually simply got sick of it; the magic seeped out of it and became drudgery, and they bought Alienware or Dell boxes, or Macs. They welded the hood shut, voluntarily, and paid more money, in the interest of more leisure. And they accepted the reduction in control and customizability that comes with it. Likewise, most of us surrender the work of repairing our cars, computers, plumbing, and electronic devices to paid professional services, rather than learning how and doing it ourselves. Sure, it would be more individualistic and more satisfying and more manly—but we've got better things to do, and time is money.
It's true that the leisure these people buy is itself another form of freedom. What's a better illustration of freedom than building a plane in your garage? From that perspective, these kinds of transactions could just as easily be described as what humans do when they get bored: they choose to shake things up a bit, cut loose the deadwood of their lives, and sprout some new branches.
But the rub is in when the freedom and responsibility that you consciously give up results in a net increase in power for the state, or other organs that hold dominion over you. When that happens, you've taken a step back down and away from Brin's ideal "Cheerful Libertarian" platform. And, unchecked, that will continue to happen—people will continue to sign away rights and freedoms in the name of more ease and convenience—until they find themselves being oppressed all over again. And then they have to reverse the process if they want to expand liberty back to the level their parents enjoyed.
That's what we've been doing here in this country over the past two hundred years or so: swaying from side to side, electing ourselves more freedoms, then voting them away, then voting them back into our hands again. We've been trying to find a balance between the extremes, a place where we can find equilibrium without having to waver and overcorrect and overshoot every generation or two. (And as I've said before, I believe that once a society starts voting socialistic powers to the government, with all the ease and convenience they entail for everyday people, it's really hard to get people to voluntarily give up those benefits and vote those powers out of the hands of the government. It's not totally a one-way street, but the playing field is tilted.)
So I don't know that I agree with the core of Brin's philosophy, even though I agree fully with all the supporting material he throws at us. I don't know if that's a fundamental paradox or what, or if Brin's thesis itself just needs more clarification. I rather think that if he were to address the core a little more explicitly, deconstructing his mischievous glibness and telling us what he really thinks instead of playing the merry prankster (at least for those few crucial paragraphs), this lecture would make a dandy synthesis of thought that would stand up to just about any barrage from Left or Right.
UPDATE: Um, well, and there's also the business about propaganda in the form of popular movies that extol conformity and destiny and fitting in, and how few of them there are. Brin explicitly points out one counterexample, and uses it as a major part of his thesis: The Lord of the Rings. But I got The Best anonymous e-mail:
I suppose if there was such a movie, and it turned out to be one we all
really liked but which had never really considered in this context, it would
be a little embarassing.
And if the counterexample was the single most important movie in someone's
life, like "The Lion King," that would be really bad.
Okay, yeah, wise guy. Come over here and say that...
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Brian Tiemann
