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EXTREME LIBERTARIANISM?

by Robert Salyer

A conflict has emerged within the nascent Southern Movement, over the relationship between the Old South Conservatism, of the past, and a more modern, essentialist, libertarianism. Although disagreements within any endeavour are not uncommon, and are normally not to be feared, this cleavage is particularly virulent-and important--as it goes to fundamental issues of political identity and consensual belief.

For some, traditional Southern Conservatism already contains sufficient libertarian elements. For others, particularly those provoked in recent years by the increasing federal leviathan, a more radical form of libertarianism needs to take purchase. Despite the fact that any resolution of these differences is unlikely to arrive soon, the debate is impossible to ignore. One detects this difference in opinion on issues as diverse as the Lott Affair, wars in the Middle East, and economic globalisation, just to name a few.

In an article this past Winter, by a Mr. Dan Bowden of Alabama, called A Libertarian Reply to Dr. Hill, some of the principled points of contention were laid bare. In this short but sharp essay, Mr. Bowden grapples with a number of issues, unearthing thereby several differences in outlook amongst Southerners. He is specifically concerned with the penetration of religious sentiment in the various Southern Movement organisations. He is concerned both with the theocratic tone of their polemic, and with their end-goals. The author calls for a disavowal of traditional religious sentiment in the political movement, with a commensurate move toward more extreme libertarian principles.

With Mr. Bowden, it is hard to deny the Bible thump that does resound to some degree in the South. It is tempting to overstate the case and come to the conclusion that there is indeed a coterie of Southern activists who think that morality is subject to the positive law of government. There just may be those who think that the mere adherence to a set of specified morals will make a person moral; and therefore, likewise, if only a simple, moral, canon could be enforced in society, that society, de facto, would also be moral. One can get the feeling sometimes that one is supping with Cromwell’s army, all righteousness and simplicity. This is an ironic situation as one can trace this hidebound pietistic outlook on society to New England Puritanism, the wellspring from whence today’s agnostic socialism flows.

Radical secularists, in contrast, advocate a pure, secularised state, attempting to avoid all questions and answers of religion. “If there were ever two subjects that don't mix well, it's religion and politics--keep them far, far apart!” Mr. Bowden says.
There are many examples of how this rule would apply in terms of the necessary political judgements of the day:

Laws regarding sexual orientation (i.e. sodomy laws) would have no place, as they are mere governmental imposition, even if they are derived from normative and inherited Western morality. Likewise, for Western traditions of ordering, stemming from, or identical with, Christian doctrine, there would be no use. Equal natural rights, regardless of sex or ethnicity, mandate that government treat individuals with an eye both colour-blind and gender-blind, else the individual’s natural rights be infringed upon. No value judgements need apply, only questions of capability. In a secular world, men and women, people in general, would be differentiated only by their various abilities, a true meritocracy.

Merit in what?
Ability to do what, one may ask? What is the community to do?

CONTRA

Despite the potential for religious overreaching in the South, and its assembly-of-the-elect tenor in politics, for my part, I cannot subscribe to the extreme libertarian critique. The South would not be better off adopting such a version of libertarianism as is sometimes described by its promoters. Further, church and state cannot be separated in the manner that many libertarians advocate; such a radical ideology is fundamentally flawed.

In his article Mr. Bowden states that “"religion" is a set of spiritual doctrines.” By implication, he likely means that religion is not connected with real judgement in any significant way. I suspect that he feels that religion is really about how people animate and express their self-valuation and charity. “Christianity is about loving your neighbour,” he explains.

For the purposes of this essay, I would offer a counter-definition, at least in terms of how religion relates to the matters in dispute. With respect to how religion affects political judgement, religion is the answer to the following three questions: What are things as they really are (Truth)? Why are they this way (causality)? And, given the two previous answers, how should one respond (e.g. worship, morals, ethics, values… laws, etc…)?

Christians hold that we know something of the way things are, that the Triune God (historically identifiable in Scripture and the Traditions of the Church) made them this way, and that there is a necessary human response to all this. That such an outlook necessarily informs our political decision-making is obvious.

Politics exist to determine the Common Good of the community, and from that Common Good, thence how to pool resources, and what standards to enforce. Libertarians divine the Common Good to be a relatively small target, with a pooling of resources and an enacting of standards properly commensurate with the target. Anything greater, and therein lies tyrannical imposition.
This is a manifestly reasonable approach to governance. We can all agree here.

However, secularists seem to believe that the Common Good can be wholly separable from communal value judgement. Pooling resources for a justice system to protect citizens from violent crimes would be good for instance, but it would not be good for the system to investigate and prosecute so-called victimless crimes. These latter should not be considered crimes at all. Additionally, an educational system that taught the subjects of science and trade might be fine; however, any education in religious doctrine, or generally accepted ethical behaviour-even such small reinforcements as placing the Ten Commandments on a school wall-would be imposition.

Pushed to their logical end, it becomes apparent that radical secularists must find fault with many institutions we have all taken for granted for millennia. They may for instance consider the public and legal institution of marriage as an imposition, contending that marriage is just a social tradition masking for religious belief. Why should anyone outside the couple married, be forced to recognise it?

Furthermore, radical secularists may also consider offering no encouragement, even discouragement, to those who have offspring. It is, after all, a dog-eat-dog world with limited community resources, and why should anyone else’s quality-of-life be affected in the slightest iota by the reproductive decisions of others, particularly if cheaper labour for the future can be found in immigration or exported jobs. The notion of encouraging the current national lineage and cultural community is an argument of null weight in a scale that measures individual satisfaction only.

This is unlikely to be a regime to which a Traditional White Southerner could pledge fealty.

Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court has opined that a law enacted from any motive other than a secular one, is, per se, unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution, or any other fundamentally just law. Some others are increasingly agreeing with him. They reason that if governors cannot govern with an eye toward religion, why should voters be allowed to vote with such an eye?

SECULAR THEOLOGY

What folks like Justice Stevens fail to acknowledge is that secularism is also a religion. Indeed, it is above all a religion. It implicitly offers its own answers to the three questions posed above: What Truth? Why does it exist? How do we respond to this Truth?
To the first question, radical secularism declares that we do not know, cannot know, the nature of anything in truth. Reason fails us. Revelation is a chimera.

Neither can we divine cause. How can we divine cause without a purpose, without a point?

To the third question, how to respond in this vacuum of wisdom, secularism replies that, in default, the highest value of Humanity should be the human individual and his liberty.

This last answer is the particular problem of radical secularism. Putting ultimate value in the human individual is not a fact. It is an evaluation. It is a moral principle for a religion.

Extremist libertarians who espouse this secular theology do not want the impositions of Christianity placed upon them. I on the other hand, don’t want the imposition of their libertarian, human rights beliefs on me.

Western Man has counter-acted the natural inclination to impose himself upon his fellows, with the rational notion of rights. Rights exist to protect the liberty of the person. Liberty--being free from imposition, being able to choose--is a powerful principle in the Western tradition.

Yet, as fantastic as liberty sounds, there must be content to it. When all impositions are removed, what may one do, what may one be?

It must be admitted that much of what goes into one’s personality, formally, is imposition from the outside. People grow into who they are, with given values, given tastes, even given language, reason, and religion, not solely through choice, but also through impositions (read inculcation, immersion) in the circumstances. Indeed, it is the sum total of these impositions, which we might say characterises human society, which we call culture.

Furthermore, being able to choose is one thing, and the consequences therefrom is another. For instance, in a traditional polity, a person may decide to engage in rampant homosexuality, but he may expect to face the consequences of his actions. He may expect traditional society to reject and shun him at the very least. Traditional polity looks to hammer a canon for social virtue into shape, for the organic polity understands that the metal with which it works is a whole, living society.

[As an aside, contrast this with the modern, liberal, total state. If we could imagine the modern liberal polity disapproving of homosexuality (a laughable hypothetical I realise), we would see a different reaction to its existence. The total state would go to the length of removing the initial choice--not just the consequences--altogether. It would seek to re-educate, indoctrinate, even use extensive pre-emptive coercion to remove the possibility of homosexual perversity. Perhaps it would look to biology to remove the “sodomy gene” (abortion perhaps?). Liberal polity looks to pouring a formless, content-less, fluid for gratification, called the human individual, into a rigid mold of its own creation.]

In a starkly secular libertarian world where everyone has the same, duplicate rights as all others, and government exists not to enforce organic values, but merely to prevent imposition on rights, some very startling results become obvious. The government guided by the god of human individualism must set out to tear up all human relations and constructions that are grounded in anything other than human individualism and consent. Herein libertarianism and Critical Theory connect. At this point, extreme libertarianism joins not only with secularism, but also with feminism, the Civil Rights Revolution, and internationalism.
Furthermore, from whence do people first receive their constructed biases?

That parents are allowed to impress their religion and values on their children would be a nagging social and legal problem in an radically secularised world. Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale wrote a book in 1981 called Social Justice in the Liberal State making the same points that some extremist libertarians make. Ackerman argued that, as government exists to prevent imposition upon rights--that being the only reason for its existence--the government has a duty to step in and prevent parents from indoctrinating their children in religion, or in any moral value choice. Or at least government has the duty to expose the children to the gamut of alternative belief-systems. This is the argument that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Douglas attempted to use against the Amish in United States v. Yoder. Public schools, public health programs, the privately-held media, the range of the regime’s stereopticon, already operate on a moderated version of this.

Perhaps with Rousseau, Justice Douglas felt that “[m]an is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Perhaps this is true. Or perhaps what Rousseau describes is not a man at all, but a blank-minded animal.

RIGHTS

Libertarianism concerns itself a great deal with the subject of rights, focusing, like the Western tradition more generally, on preventing Man’s inclination to imposition. Yet, what is a right in essence?

Right is nothing more or less than the converse of duty. Saying that one has a right with respect to an object, is in truth to say that others have a duty to do, or refrain from doing, something with respect to that object. In the abortion debate, saying that a foetus has a right to life is in reality to say that there is a duty upon others-- the mother or doctor in this case-to refrain from killing the foetus. To say that one has a right to a piece of property is to say that others have a duty not to trespass upon it. Rights don’t exist in a vacuum, on a desert island, sans people. One can claim a right not to be murdered, but not against a wolf, a virus, or a natural disaster. Such a claim would simply be meaningless.

So people have rights because people have duties. The next question is, what engenders duty? That is, if a man can-is able to--violate another’s “rights,” why should he not do so? Why should government exist to prevent this violation? The problem for extreme libertarians here is that all answers to this question are religious-that is, they are derived from value judgements, not mere observable facts. They are all responses to the aforementioned three religious queries. They are moral answers. While eschewing others’ religions to bind, radical secularists would posit their own secular religious cords and demand compliance.

Now to be honest, there are those that dispute this entire line of argument, claiming that Game Theory can provide sufficient bases to care about others, to establish culture, to have society therefore, out of one’s own self-love. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice both advance this notion in one way or another. We agree to take on duty with respect to others, in order that others similarly take on duty with respect to us. It is a social contract.

Of course, applying this immediately, rather than theoretically, would be problematic to say the least. A strong man could say to a weak man, “I agree to take on the duty of not beating you; and in exchange, you agree to take on the duty of shining my boots and plowing my fields.” This is hardly what libertarians had in mind.

To prevent such lop-sidedness, John Rawls postulates that the taking on of duty must come from a position of ignorance with respect to real-world ability, and given station in life. One wonders how this move toward fairness as ignorance can fail to be a religious move; however, at any rate, it yields an extremely egalitarian result, egalitarianism being the natural correlative of libertarianism.

OLD SOUTH CONSERVATISM

Southern Conservatism openly essays at being just, not egalitarian. It finds justice in treating a man or woman as who he or she truly is-who he or she is, in reality. It finds rights, duties, liberties, and communal values, in the Common Law of the land and people, the Common Law handed down to it through time, a Common Law constructed as the framework for an organic society. It does not find these things in the application of abstract principle answering questions of how to benefit the lowest-common-denominator at any given moment.

Furthermore, the Common Law of a Christian people is necessarily a Christian Common Law. And the Common Law of a Christian people knows its own and is not ashamed of its own, neither its values nor its ethnicity.

One wonders if Mr. Bowden’s hasn’t found one core tenet of the Southern Movement, “[f]ree people have the right to associate or not associate with whomever they please.” If this be true, it is a tacit recognition that society has the fundamental right to define itself. I suspect that Southern Conservative society might tolerate much, but that it would define itself to the exclusion of many rights and liberties held dear in modern America, such as the right to an abortion, or the liberty to engage in sodomy.

Libertarianism is fundamentally sound in so far as it recognises that government has no duty, no legitimate power even, to change the nature of persons and people so as to conform to abstract principle. However, extreme interpretations of libertarianism are tempted to convert community into a mere corporation of the industrial free market, no more desirable than a theocracy. People in such a corporation would be bound to one another solely by mutual material benefit, not by much else. This seems to be one of the things against which the Southern Movement struggles, not one which the Movement invites.

Mr. Bowden may feel as much communal association with “[a] Buddhist or Hindu who supports individual liberty and independence for [his] state from the federal leviathan” as with “a Bible-thumping supporter of the status quo,” but, by definition, the Southern Movement is, well, Southern. For those in the Movement, unless extreme libertarianism can demonstrate that Hinduism or Buddhism can be just as Dixiecratic as Christianity (which of course is always possible, remembering that the last Secretary of State for the C.S.A. was a Jew after all.), then its arguments will fall on deaf ears. To those such as Mr. Bowden, it seems, such issues do not matter. But to Southerners, Southerners who want to exercise personal liberty not in a foreign land but in their native South, these issues matter very much.