A libertarian conservative speaks

Recently, I turned my attention to understanding one strain of political philosophy - Libertarianism. My friend Tim Burke is a staunch libertarian conservative.  So I had asked him to explain to me in 500 words or less what that means. 

I enjoyed reading and mulling over what he has written - I thought I would share it here

I am personally not a mature political philosophy thinker, and generally appreciate a problem solving approach to political leadership.  I like mayors, for example!

However, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that a problem solving approach might be good in the short term, but the having the right political philosophy is better for the long term.

Next up, I am going to ask one of my staunch liberal friends to explain progressive principles to me.

(I also need make me a new friend with a Tea Party type!)

Here are Tim's notes on Libertarianism.

“I’m a conservative because I’m a liberal.”

Libertarianism: A Personal Interpretation

The title of this piece is derived from Charles Murray’s quite persuasive little book, “What It Means To Be A Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation”. Like that book, this essay too is a personal interpretation.

To start with, I don’t think of myself as a libertarian, rather I use the label “libertarian conservative”. Each of those words modifies the other. ‘Libertarian” in the sense that I am not a traditionalist in the strictest sense. On the other hand, I am also not a radical libertarian in the mold of certain strains of anarchism, or the Ayn Randians, or even today’s Paulistas (Ron and Rand).

These libertarians seem to mistake that as a species we are homo economicus – i.e. rational maximizers of utility.

A historical way to put this is to say that I’m a ‘classical liberal’ with faith in limited government, free markets and free minds.  What’s missing however are two words: ‘I’m an American Conservative because I’m a Classical Liberal.’

Which is to say that I’m a strain of liberalism that dates back to the English Enlightenment and its emphasis on empiricism – a very different strain from that of the French rationalism and German idealism. The latter two, when combined, make up Continental philosophy’s contribution to dystopia – the many attempts over the last century or so at engineering utopia.

If we wanted to narrow it down a bit more, we might say that a libertarian conservative is a blend of Adam Smith (self-organization – aka, the ‘invisible hand’) and Edmund Burke (culture matters most [1].

Smith was not an economist, rather he was a moral philosopher. His major contribution in his day was to a school of moral philosophy that pretty much defines the English Enlightenment. This school was built not on the search for some sort of universal moral absolutes as Immanuel Kant proposed nor in mathematizing and systematizing moral ‘goods’ as utilitarians, Marxists and Rawls suggested.  But rather on human nature.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations simply noted how such community-level moral sentiments, along with technological advancement, led to the most amazing ‘hockey stick’ growth in human wellbeing in history. Not due to kings or philosophers or civic engineers, but due to self-organization around certain community moral values. Values that are not universal in terms of history but are not foreign to human nature.

And this community-level viewpoint is also what led to Edmund Burke’s views about what sort of social change is sustainable – evolution, not revolution.

Burke’s central point was that if you’re goal is ‘to begin the world anew’, you’ll reap the whirlwind after all those hidden laws [2] are revoked. Such an agenda would be especially tragic for us as one of America’s great advantages is our ability to be both liberal and conservative at the same time. We can engage in social trial and error experiments in individual states (‘the laboratories of democracy’) before adopting them more widely[3].

Complexity, self-organization, genetics/evolution, cognitive neuroscience all support what has to be called the greatest Enlightenment coming out of Europe – the Anglo-American Enlightenment.

And it’s because I believe deep down that I do believe in this enlightenment,  I am a libertarian conservative.


Notes:

#1:  Adam Smith, Communatarian

Smith is too often positioned as the godfather of “unfettered markets, libertarian governments, interactions solely for the purpose of satisfaction, and atomistic cosmopolitanism.” What has been lost is Smith’s “clarion call for personal relationships” as the basis for human society and his advocacy for a functioning pluralism—though Smith did not use the term—that is at the heart of Theory of Moral Sentiments.[…]

Reason and emotion are too interlinked in the human condition to be separated. This is why Smith distrusted any logical or analytical approach to human society that demoted emotion and intuition to a second or third tier of experience. Weinstein explains that for Smith, far from emotions being the antithesis of reason, they regularly “initiate, are the consequence of, and are often indistinguishable from reason.” […]

The state of nature for Smith is one of community, and the ultimate questions related to human society are questions of morality and virtue, not economics and politics. Thus, a broad, morally robust education rooted in a particular community is essential to forming sympathetic individuals.

Burke blanched at the radicalness of the French Revolution because he, like Smith, was what might be called a ‘conservative communitarian’ or a ‘soft communitarian’. Jonah Goldberg recently explained what a ‘soft communitarian’ is (The Power of Hidden Law):

#2: Hidden Law

Hidden law was a term coined by Jonathan Rauch, who basically updated a lot of ideas familiar to readers of Burke, Hayek, Oakeshott, and Albert Jay Nock. Calling himself a “soft communitarian,” Rauch put it very well so it’s worth quoting him at length:

A soft communitarian is a person who maintains a deep respect for what I call “hidden law”: the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal conflicts. Until recently, for example, hidden law regulated assisted suicide, and it did so with an almost miraculous finesse. Doctors helped people to die, and they often did so without the express consent of anybody. The decision was made by patients and doctors and families in an irregular fashion, and, crucially, everyone pretended that no decision had ever been made. No one had been murdered; no one had committed suicide; and so no one faced prosecution or perdition.

Hidden law is exceptionally resilient, until it is dragged into politics and pummeled by legalistic reformers, at which point it can give way all at once. The showboating narcissist Jack Kevorkian dragged assisted suicide into the open and insisted that it be legalized (and televised). At that point, the deal was off. No one could pretend assisted suicide wasn’t happening. Activists framed state right-to-die initiatives, senators sponsored bills banning assisted suicide, and courts began issuing an unending series of deeply confused rulings. Soon decisions about assisted suicide will be made by buzzing mobs of lawyers and courts and ethics committees, with prosecutors helpfully hovering nearby, rather than by patients and doctors and families. And the final indignity will be that the lawyers and courts and committee people will congratulate themselves on having at last created a rational process where before there were no rules at all, only chaos and darkness and barbarism. And then, having replaced an effective and intuitive and flexible social mechanism with a maladroit and mystifying and brittle one, they will march on like Sherman’s army to demolish such other institutions of hidden law as they encounter.

The enemy of hidden law is not government, as such. It is lawyers. Three years in law school teach, if they teach nothing else, that as a practical matter hidden law does not exist, or that if it does exist it is contemptibly inadequate to cope with modern conflicts. The American law school is probably the most ruthlessly anti-communitarian institution that any liberal society has ever produced. […]

#3:  JG continues:

The reason I am always harping on the glories of federalism is that America is like a giant party with a million quirky, fun, intense, rewarding conversations going on all at once. When you leave people to talk things out, they tend to do it without the help of the government. And the last thing we need is the state coming in, trying to pick winners and losers in those conversations — or simply telling people to shut up.

In a sense, Left and Right are on the wrong side of this stuff. At least by stereotype, conservatives prefer order and conformity while liberals like rebelliousness. And yet conservatives — those evil voluptuaries of states’ rights and localism — are the ones making the case for diversity.

For instance, I have nothing but sympathy for the folks who want to, say, “Keep Austin Weird.” But I have nothing but contempt for the people who have that bumpersticker on their Prius but say the exact opposite with their voting. Maybe they support policies close to home that they think will help keep Austin weird, but when they vote for Democratic governors and senators and congressmen, never mind presidents, they vote for the crowd that wants to unleash evermore armies of humorless reformers on the land. Worse, while they’re for keeping Austin weird, they support policies that would deny, say, Arizona from being its own kind of weird.