Letters: Shades of Liberty

This week Thomas Eastmond and Jenny Asencio share their introductory letters…

My fellow Americans/Ad urbi et orbi/To whom it may concern:

First, thanks to Jennifer Richmond and the crew at Truth In Between for the chance to take part in their splendid and much-needed project.

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. For literally all of history until roughly the 1600s, the vast majority of humans lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short, desperately struggling to pile up enough from their dirt farms or straggling herds or hunting and gathering grounds to let them survive the next winter, famine or barbarian invasion. We got a good thing going. I’d like to keep it up.

I think many of us are forgetting what we owe our unbelievably good fortune to. We think we can divide ourselves back up into warring tribes, forget about reasoning together, and expect the astonishing trajectory of humanity’s last few centuries to continue forever. There is no “arc of history” other than how we shape it. And in the midst of our prosperity, I see us neglecting some of the critical habits of thinking and relating to each other that got us here.

Social media, in particular, is making us stupid. It’s sorting us into self-reinforcing, self-policing in-groups, and addicting us to the approval of our in-group peers. It’s more fun to TOTALLY DESTROY!! some *can you believe this idiot LOL* than to peel back the layers of a thought that challenges our conventional wisdom, and understand why the other person thought that. And — as this TL/DR letter is about to demonstrate — it’s hard to do much else in 280 characters or less.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the (classical) liberal political theorist John Stuart Mill:

He who knows his own side of the case knows little enough of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion….Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

Even among some of the most thoughtful of us, I find that we increasingly lack the ability to even accurately characterize the other side’s argument, let alone refute them. Without that, we don’t have civil society. We don’t have liberal democracy. We have, at most, a veneer of that, hiding a reality where the true game is the same “crush your enemies” dynamic as the Vikings or Mongols played more honestly and with cooler costumes. (When we respond to an opponent not by refuting him, but by trying to destroy his livelihood — that’s just a more polite 21st Century version of Harald the Ruthless burning his enemies’ farms.)

With that long-winded preamble concluded, permit me to introduce myself. I am a fortysomething former lifeguard, now litigator [“This career path is brought to you by the letter L”] and aspiring start-up founder, father of four hilariously different children and undeservedly fortunate husband to a beautiful and deep-minded woman. Further biographical detail may follow as the relevance to the thoughts below suggests itself. Politically, I could call myself a libertarian-leaning constitutional conservative, a classical liberal, or a Lockean-Burkean Whig. Under modern American political nomenclature, that easily classes me in the “conservative” camp.

How did I get that way?

We are a mix of what we inherit, and what we make of ourselves. None of us approaches the world with a truly blank mental slate. “Practical men,” as the economist J.M. Keynes noted drily, “who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The conceit that we are “pragmatic,” that we only pursue “what works,” not “ideology,” mainly serves only to keep us from acknowledging the ideological frameworks we bring to the table, whether we notice it or not. None of us can claim to have derived his political and cultural worldview from nothing more than pure, unbiased reason. “Reason is…the slave of the passions,” Hume wrote, and he wasn’t all wrong.

But the fact that we all come packaged with a bundle of baggage that influences our thinking, doesn’t mean thinking is pointless. We are shaped by our biology, our upbringing and our environment — and we shape those things in turn, and in turn alter how they shape us, by what aspects of our inheritance we cultivate. “The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes,” to quote the [nerd alert] dying Duke Leto Atreides in Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”

So what’s shaped me?

I had (and have) parents who loved each other and their children, who were well grounded in and passed on the basic mental and moral habits that tend to keep you from screwing up your life. Some of my first memories are of the observances of the American Bicentennial in 1976, as America tried to recover some civilizational self-confidence after its suicide attempt in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, race riots, oil shocks, and their aftermath. The first Halloween costume I remember, I went as Paul Revere. (“The British are coming! Can I have two Baby Ruths?”) I wore the requisite striped tube socks, corduroy OP shorts, and my brother and I won first prize in the Mariners Park Fourth of July bike parade six years in a row.

I grew up the son of a community college teacher and went to school with a lot of children of multimillionaire real estate developers. That taught me that the common “progressive” (more about the scare-quotes later) tropes about “class” and “privilege” aren’t everything, they aren’t nothing, either. And that also left me with a keen sense of how strong humanity’s hard-wired instincts (formed back when we were cousins to monkeys) are to form in-groups and out-groups, and enforce those groups’ boundaries with a range of mostly stupid but often devastatingly effective tactics. That understanding was reinforced growing up in a conservative, close-knit religious community. I emerged — “am emerging?” — from a long and heavy crisis of faith in some of its more credulity-straining aspects, with a revived and deeper appreciation of those of its virtues I recognized from the beginning, but also with still more experience in how people and institutions react when the essence of tribal cohesion feels threatened, and how habits of reason, in even some of the most intelligent people, can be turned on or off like a light switch. And then I went to law school — at the height of the Critical Theory academic fad of the 1990s — and discovered that among people for whom secular ideologies amount to a substitute religion, that dynamic is if anything even worse.

So out of that mix, comes this:

American political and ideological culture has too many wildly divergent factional threads to sort neatly into a single Great Divide, but, broadly speaking, how we answer two Big Questions tends to go a long way to account for how we sort ourselves:

First: Is “man the measure of all things”? Is there an objective transcendent standard of justice and morality that we ought to seek to find and follow — or are those things nothing more than names we have for the rules human beings, driven by practical concerns or genetic influences, decide to make for themselves? Is there a natural law that exists independent of what human beings choose to value? Are Time and the world, and what happens there, all that matters? Or is there something more?

I think there is. That makes a difference in how I view the world, and our role in it.

Second: Is the United States defined primarily by “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? Is what is most characteristic of American civilization what Samuel Huntington defined as the “American Creed” — the “principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property” — regardless of how well or thoroughly we may have lived up to the measure of that creed? Or are our defining characteristics more properly identified as conquest, slavery, and various forms of oppression?

I used to think that nobody really thought the latter — that everybody or almost everybody was really a patriot in the long run. Nope. There really are people — thoroughly mainstream, respectable people, like one of my constitutional law professors — whose basic belief that AmeriKKKa is not just a worthy project that (like anything human) needs constant reform and improvement — “May God thy gold refine,” as the never-sung “America the Beautiful” verse goes — but “fundamental transformation,” a comprehensive reboot, since nothing worthwhile can be built on a foundation so irredeemably stained by original sins as ours.

It’s probably no surprise where I come down on that one, either. I majored in history, and have read widely in it. I know the score on that score. Yes, Sand Creek and Triangle Shirtwaist and slavery — but also, context. The truth of American history isn’t Howard Zinn, any more than it’s Parson Weems and his cherry tree. Warts and all, I love this country and what it aspires to be. Not just as I love my family — not just for its virtues, but because it’s mine — but also because I recognize the major role it has played in the liberal revolution that, as set forth above, sparked the most unbelievable burst of economic and cultural progress in the history of our species. That inheritance is objectively worthy of my gratitude and honor.

The respective conclusions we draw, on retail “issues” like economic policy, the role of government, race and sex, often flow from which of those competing ideas we have as our foundation.

That’s my Introduction. I look forward to digging down into the details with others of good will. I will try my damnedest not to give nor take offense. In the end, the strengths and weaknesses of our arguments aren’t about us. They’re not even original to us, nearly all of them. They’ve invariably been articulated before, usually more eloquently than we will, so it’s not personal. Our “memes” (as Richard Dawkins branded them) — our ideas, our habits — exist independently of us. They take on lives of their own, sometimes doing good, sometimes doing harm. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,” to borrow from the apostle Paul, but against destructive memes. Those “mind-forg’d manacles” that keep us, as human beings from fully possessing what is rightly ours.

This is going to be fun.

-Tom

Dear Team Humankind,

Libertarianism and socialism. One is the philosophy of being able to do things for oneself, the other is the economy of pooling resources toward a common goal. Yet I call myself a libertarian socialist politically, and firmly believe that a national policy of libertarian socialism would benefit not only our country, but our whole world.

I used to consider libertarianism a diseased philosophy. Indeed, there are people who have taken the idea of doing everything voluntarily and for oneself to utmost extremes, insisting people who legitimately cannot do either fend for themselves. At the time I was introduced to libertarian philosophy, I was backed into an economic corner by the 2007 crash of the economy, something I was not responsible for nor did I choose. It was thrust upon me, and this negated every idea of doing things for oneself. When savings ran out and new jobs were not found, this showed me that my own locus of control only extends so far. Our environment, that is the circumstances immediately around us and progressively further out, has a lot more control over us as individuals than we do. None of us asked to be born! The libertarianism I learned about certainly spurred the exploration and settlement of untamed places like the United States of the 17th and 18th centuries, but did it have a place today?

As a result, it was simpler to embrace the socialism part. People have to work together, especially as there are more people on the planet and as the planet gets more complicated by technology and social evolution. We are outgrowing old paradigms that allow for rugged individualism and are teetering into a civilization where cooperation is key. No matter how rugged the individual, it is unlikely they will be able to finance and build an entire space program or communications network themselves. It takes teamwork and cooperation to accomplish the things humanity accomplished in the 20th century, from the atomic bomb to the Internet. No one person did this in a vacuum. Someone might have led the charge, but it was a group that charged in and accomplished the feat.

This applies to survival on all levels in today’s society. With the medical and convenience technology we have, there is no excuse not to work together. The entire world can share ideas on one big database, and anyone who can read and turn on a computer can avail themselves of this knowledge. The Library of Alexandria has been resurrected online, and this time there will be no one able to burn it down, even if we shut off the Internet. This is an unprecedented time for the human mind, if only we could find the time to learn. That time is coming with automation and fewer jobs being available to everyone, as well as more and more people. Manufacturing has trended downward and service jobs upward, even in developing countries. Professions are extremely specialized.

All of this has created a situation where it literally takes a village to not only raise the child, but help care for it through its whole life. Different professionals — educators, doctors, and other service experts — help us through our entire lives in a network that sustains each of us through mutual cooperation. Some of these are things we should all get, but these days it’s largely determined by socioeconomic factors, which are influenced by other effects. Only people with plenty of time and money can take adequate care of their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. The rest of us are too busy and too poor.

Eventually I got the little boost I needed to recover from the Great Recession, and I was introduced to the Finnish education system. This is the most literate country in the world, mainly because they don’t privilege the smart children over the ones with learning disabilities, and instead rely on the guidance of a group of teachers per class and the cooperation of the students to work together rather than compete. This has turned out some of the most educated children in the world, willing to educate themselves even after school is over. There is a lot of potential in that as a national policy — imagine if we took care of each of our citizens in this way, where teams of professionals and our peers actually helped us live. Imagine what innovations we could come up with if we were left to ourselves?

…which is the path that leads back to rugged individualism. Ideas come from individuals, not from groups. A group might provide the materials, but it is usually the individual that synthesizes them into one coherent thing. No one can live in our heads for us, no one can do our thinking or untie the knots in it for us, no one can act for us (even when acting on our behalf). Each of us has individual agency, and each of us needs to be taught to use it. What we have now, the idea that filling our heads with a bunch of stuff and then abandoning us to the “real world,” is not an effective paradigm. It creates mental and physical illness through guilt, stress, and conformity.

It might sound counter-intuitive or paradoxical, but I actually think the best way to promote individual agency is to use the Finnish education system as a model. The Finnish seem to have a lot of agency as individuals, and this seems to especially be because emphasis is placed on reading and gathering information, rather than on rote information and what information should be learned. This allows Finnish students to form their own ideas and worldviews, liberating their minds by not actually telling them what to think.

A society that was educated in this way could reach their own political conclusions. When it comes to health, individuals in such a society could inform themselves about their symptoms, seek expert care when needed (and have it provided), and maintain their health through practices and diets that are readily available to everyone. Such a society would not see a need for the zero-sum competition we put ourselves through today, and such a society would thrive because individuals could actualize, benefiting everyone. Such a society would be full of informed people who can make informed choices about their lives. This doesn’t take a fancy education or rote memorization of dates, numbers, and factoids. This just takes the ability to inform oneself and the motivation to do so.

Our environments have a lot more say in what happens to us, and we can only react to them. So much of our lives are outside of our control that I believe what we as individuals need is to be able to control as much of our lives as possible. Being able to make informed choices is one of the most libertarian things I can think of, and yet so many of us give up that agency, choosing to take the word of someone else or relying on faulty information. Yet the only way I can see to strengthen that individual agency, no matter what that agency grows into, is through social cooperation. Thus, I am a libertarian socialist.

-Jenny

Follow our blog to see the correspondences unfold. New letters and authors forthcoming.

To join in the “letters” initiative, please write to Jennifer Richmond at [email protected]. We are currently exploring conservative/progressive divides but will be adding new political topics in the future. To read more on our initiative, see Mission: Make America Great.

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