Letters: Shades of Liberty II

Thomas Eastmond and Jenny Asencio continue their conversation…

Dear Jenny,

I’m intrigued by “libertarian socialist.” That’s a term we don’t see every day, and I’d love to hear you elaborate on how you reconcile those two apparently polar opposite concepts.

One thing immediately comes to mind is this: People use the same words to mean different things. (Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)

For example, the textbook, dictionary definition of “socialism” is generally given as some variant on “public ownership of the means of economic production.” And the textbook definition of “libertarianism” is … well, the libertarians can’t seem to decide on one. Which is what you’d expect, from a bunch of persnickety rugged individualists, right? But one unifying theme is an emphasis on personal liberty. The philosopher Robert Nozick borrowed the concept of a “night-watchman state” to describe the libertarian ideal: Government’s main (or only) legitimate purpose is to provide its citizens with protection against aggression, theft, breach of contract and fraud.

So I’m going to have to sit down and grapple with your identifications of “libertarianism” and “socialism” as, respectively, “doing everything voluntarily and for oneself” vs. “people have to work together.” First, I want to focus on that last definition. Of course people have to work together. Even the basic, um, mechanics of propagating the human species requires, ahem, close cooperation. We do all sorts of things together — make friends, start book clubs, build companies, buy pencils (there’s a classic essay “I, Pencil” describing the ridiculously complex web of human cooperation that’s needed to produce a simple pencil), worship, turn a double play — the range is infinite.

None of those things is “socialism.”

As I see it, the definitive socialism/not-socialism distinction isn’t so much between “things we do ourselves” versus “things we do together,” but rather “things we choose to do” and “things somebody with a badge and a gun in his back pocket makes us do.” More precisely, socialism consists of the merger of state power and the economy. A socialist government isn’t just a “night watchman,” or a referee, making sure everybody follows the same rules: It’s on the field itself as a player, making the decisions of how much lettuce to plant, what trains go where, when, and at what cost, and how much sauerkraut should cost.

There was a saying that was popular around the time of President Obama’s first election, often attributed to Representative Barney Frank: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” Well, no, it’s not. That saying is simultaneously too broad (we do plenty together without government — the above-referenced sex, pencils and double plays) and too narrow. Because realistically, even though “we the people” are deemed to be the ultimate arbiters of public policy (and in some sense at least, we are, at least if we squint the right way and make plenty of allowance for figurative and symbolic expressions of popular consent), there is a *lot* of what government does, where “our the people’s” influence is so attenuated as to be insignificant. When a policeman shoots someone’s Dachshund (“He snapped at me! I feared for my life!”), that sure wasn’t something *I* chose to do, “together” or otherwise. And that makes me wonder: When government runs the economy, am I really “working together” cooperatively with others? Or am I a cog in a machine? Yes, “it takes a village.” But — who’s the village? Can a massive central government really act like one?

Many advocates of “socialism” seem to dismiss the economist John Maynard Keynes’ dictum that “it is a mistake to think businessmen are more immoral than politicians.” I wasn’t raised in a Calvinist church, but experience has left me with a kind of semi-quasi-Calvinist regard for human nature. All of us are at least theoretically capable of some pretty nasty stuff, and that doesn’t change when we put on the mantle of public service. Even an arch-libertarian recognizes that you can’t just leave people alone in commerce and expect them never to lie, cheat, steal, kick people, or make messes they dodge cleaning up; they just have this odd notion that politicians are people too, and will *also* lie, cheat, steal, kick or mess, if not kept on a short leash. That’s why a common lumpen critique of libertarianism: “What, you don’t like GOVERNMENT? Do you wanna live in SOMALIA?” is just eye-rollingly dopey. It does not follow from me not wanting government to run all the hospitals that I don’t want it to run the law courts.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but where I see you heading with “libertarian socialist” is that your philosophy recognizes both the importance of the individual — who has sovereign human rights, and whose creativity, intelligence and ambitions can do wonderful things when given the space they need to flourish — as well as a role for society working together (sometimes, maybe not always, through government). I agree.

This is about to get really boring if we don’t find something to call each other horrid names over.

-Tom

Dear Tom,

It was a pleasure to read your letter. One thing that has struck me in the political divide that’s been active in the US since the 2016 election is how much more often I have been able to have rational conversations with people of different political philosophies from mine. As an avowed leftist, it was rather demoralizing to watch so much of the left go crazy before, during, and after the election. I am no fan of Donald Trump (I grew up in New York and logged too many hours with him already in the news to be one!), but watching the hysteria of my former political party over his election has been a very sad but eye-opening experience that resembles the rally scene in George Orwell’s 1984. Your letter and Jennifer Richmond’s whole Letters project provides much-needed calm to counter the madness.

You said “Human beings are social animals. We relate to each other either as equals, who cooperate, compromise, and reason together, or as enemies, who dominate or are dominated depending on whatever our strength lets us take from the other. Something special started just a few hundred years ago: Enough of us started following the first path for it to make a difference on the life of our species.” I find it amusing that a Constitutional conservative and a libertarian socialist can both see this as important, yet have divergent ideas about how to handle it going forward. It is where the “socialist” part of my views comes from. The space program, the Internet, superhighway and air travel, medical technology, convenience technology (anything that streamlines life or entertains us), all of these are things that came from group funding and cooperation.

Your commentary about social media is something I have observed as well. It is as though people who post on social media don’t really think about what they’re saying. They are reacting emotionally. In a recent essay for a writing class at my university, I made this point about social media: “A lot of these observations have made from discussions on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Medium, but the effects seem to be universal regardless of education or income level. People not only cannot defend their own ideas, but they attack reasoned defenses of the ideas of others with labeling and outright censorship. Some “debaters” consider “blocking” someone on social media to be a more acceptable form of debate than defending their own ideas. The problem with that is, we can’t just “block” real life the way we do on social media.”

That they can maintain some degree of anonymity and are mostly unaccountable for their arguments doesn’t help the issue. It’s nice that Roseanne and Alex Jones can be held accountable in token actions to please the rabid masses, but groups like Anti-Fa and MeToo have to realize that they are just as accountable.

Finally, most people are more nuanced than the loudest voices on social media would have you believe. Conversations like this one and Ms. Richmond’s other Letters prove this in public, but when discussing these things among our peers, I, at least, get the impression that the only reason things look so polarized right now is because we have public figures and celebrities shouting with loud, authoritative voices that we have to be polarized. If we support even the slightest bit of the other side, we must support and agree with. the other side. Thus, the loudest voices are the only ones anyone can hear, and they’re the ones peddling all the insanity.

I loved your inclusion of that quote from John Stuart Mill. (I also loved your Hume; I tend toward Kant myself.) The quote brought to mind the Atlantic article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” This article was near and dear to me when it was first published, and now in my classes at university I’ve been delving into it in depth. It is a discussion of common cognitive distortions people engage in when they reason with emotions. Examples of a very common cognitive distortions include attractive people thinking they are ugly or intelligent people thinking they are stupid. These distortions are arrived at when subjective negative views become reinforced. Lukianoff and Haidt examine discourse on college campuses from this point of view and find that critical thinking has given way to these distortions based on emotional reasoning, the idea that if something makes us feel bad it should be avoided or censored. The authors call this “vindictive protection” because the original premise was to issue “trigger warnings” to students in the event that a class lesson would recreate a traumatic experience, such as sexual harassment or racial badgering, but students and campuses, claim the authors, have carried this so far that students cannot handle ideas which require debate or which challenge held beliefs.

As I indicated in my paragraph for class, I see this happening all over society, not just on campus. The majority of political communication today, even at the governmental level, has become a volleyball match of emotional reasoning and cognitive distortion. Free speech advocates are equated with Nazis and Alex Jones, women are required to believe themselves oppressed and that men are “toxic” by virtue of being men, and we are all expected to follow zero-sum hierarchies of oppression.

My “bag,” if you’ll pardon the term, is teamwork. We are Team Humankind in my eyes — all of us are in this together whether we get along or not! It seems to me that reasonable discourse and collaborating on solutions is urgent in a world with the environmental disaster we face if we continue on our course.We are a species headed to extinction, but we have the distinction of being the only species that hastened their own demise. If pollution doesn’t kill us, we are certainly poised to kill one another, now more than ever. This emotional reasoning that both Mill and Lukianoff and Haidt refer to is a scourge that holds us back. It’s not helping anyone, and it’s teaching us not to help ourselves.

The single criticism I had for your letter is with Sam Huntington’s American Creed (which makes it technically a beef with him and not with you!). “Principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property” sound noble but a few of these concepts lose their meaning in a contemporary environment. Equality is elusive in a world where we are taught some are beneath us, individualism used as an excuse to deny aid to the needy, representatives in our government are steeped in corruption, and the more private property there is the more our planet and its inhabitants are suffering. As a result, liberty is subject to who your parents were, where you live, and whether or not you are fortunate enough to have useful enough skills. Our world has gotten bigger even while its landmasses have not changed, and it is incumbent upon us to provide conditions that can enable liberty for everyone. I just don’t see that happening now, the way things are socially and economically.

Nevertheless, it gives me hope to be able to have so much common ground with someone who is my ideological opposite. If you and I can do it, our government should have no problem doing it. It’s the job we hired them for.

With gratitude,

Jenny

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