Technology, Libertarianism, Relationships, Religion
While examining human motivation at ConVocation, which I blogged about this weekend, I turned the microscope on my own views of the world, religious, relational, and political. The techno-progressive Dale Carrico, with whom I had what might count as my first political debate last week over the connection between technology and libertarianism, sparked some thought on broader connections.
I can talk your ear off about secularism but I'm not very political. When I'm asked in a poll or a voting booth to think about broad social policies, I just extrapolate from personal relationships. I used to be a very compliant and trusting child, a dutiful husband, and a devout follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Those arrangements were all bad and I'll never again get into relationships of parent/child, till-death-do-us-part, or worshiper/worshipee. I have no policy statistics, I've never paid much attention to laws and their outcomes, I don't claim to be an expert in society or governance, so I cannot be looked to for anything more specific on politics than a treatise of first principles. I merely have life experiences that teach me hyper-individualism, which manifests as suspicion of all authority and an aversion to entitlement. By entitlement, I mean home, family, church, government, and other communal relationships in which people basically feel like they can have free run to abuse each other and praise it as "self-sacrifice." So when I found libertarianism and technological culture, they fit like a hand in a glove. God, marriage, parents, government, nature, it's all of a piece. Technology attempts to break the wheel of nature, that we are in relationship with, and which governs us.
I wonder if left-liberals and moral-majority-conservatives have more trust, or are comfortable in interdependent relationships, whether it be with their parents or spouse or religion or children, or their DNA for that matter, which carries over to government. In the "perfect idealistic world" of my imagination there would be none of those. But I acknowledge a world of all adults, a world of artificial intelligences who can just self-modify whenever they don't like their own nature, is not where we are right now, and I have no good reason to expect it to become that way.
Comments
delosd on Feb. 24, 2005 2:43 AM
I've always had something of a suspicion in this area; that being that both the religious right and the liberal left share a penchant for belief in the possibility of perfection. In the case of the religious right, they believe in the perfection of a religious plan and that everyone would be better off if they followed it. In the case of the liberal left, they believe in the perfectibility of human planning, and that we'd all be better off if we just ran our lives according to the credo of the left wing. The commonality in both cases is that they don't really take the same two things into account: 1) that human are fallible and sometimes corrupt, and that they can't be counted on to always do the "right" thing, and 2) that they might actually be *wrong* about their idea of what's perfect, and any system based on those ideas may have to change. Basically, *any* system of governance based on the idea that humans will act according to some 'perfect ideal' will break down very quickly, and decend into either anarchy or authortarianism. (The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror being the classic example, with Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge being a more recent example.)
In my humble opinion, the great genius of the American constitution, and one of the greatest advantages of the libertarian political position, is that both recognize that people are fallible and must be constrained from being able to force their views upon other people without agreement. (In the case of a democracy this would be either majority or super-majority agreement, in the case of a pure libertarian system it would be universal agreement.) The constitution does this through three methods, the first being that certain questions are taken out of the political realm by being guaranteed to the people (the Bill of Rights is the prime example) and so one group is not ABLE to impose their will in these areas without almost universal agreement. The second method is to create a series of checks and balances in the political power structure (the three branches of government, putting budgetary power in one branch, spending in another, review in a third, etc.) so that no small group within the government can dominate easily. The third method is to have a government of enumurated powers, i.e. that the government can or must do specifically listed things only, and anything not mentioned the govenment does not have authority over. One can argue that particularly this last area has broken down in recent decades, but the intent is there.
Libertarian political thought takes this example even further, and states (speaking very generally) that the should have NO powers to enforce its will upon the citizenry, as each citizen is sovereign unto themselves. Likewise, no citizen has the right to enforce their will upon other citizens except when agreement is freely given. The function of the state is to enforce free agreements between the sovereign citizens, and to deal with those citizens that attempt to break the social contract by attempting to gain coercive power over other people. This is, of course, a very extreme (and simplistic) definition of libertarianism, but it should serve to define an philosophic endpoint. The key here is that libertarianism protects against people being wrong about how things should work by not giving them ANY power to enforce their beliefs on other people. So people can still be as wrong as they want, but no one else will be affected by it. Think of it as a universal political quarantine system. :)
matt-arnold on Feb. 24, 2005 5:02 AM
I've often thought about it that way. I wouldn't be dogmatically inflexible in my application of it, but I like it. What do you think of the potential perfectionism implicit in contractual ethics described in Trouble In Libertopia by Dale Carrico? He describes thusly:
Lately, I have begun to suspect that at the temperamental core of the strange enthusiasm of many technophiles for so-called "anarcho-capitalist" dreams of re-inventing the social order, is not finally so much a craving for liberty but for a fantasy, quite to the contrary, of TOTAL EXHAUSTIVE CONTROL. ... Behind all their talk of efficiency and non-violence there lurks this weird micromanagerial fantasy of sitting down and actually contracting explicitly the terms of every public interaction in the hopes of controlling it, getting it right, dictating the details.
The funny thing that I see happening is left-liberals, despite sharing our values on social and civil liberties, framing the bad guy as "Libertarianism" when they should be attacking "Republicanism." I guess most people attack those who are almost, but not quite, in the same camp as themselves before they will attack their polar opposites. When Paula Borsook and Dale Carrico criticize "libertarianism," I hear them talk exclusively about market policies; they never complain bitterly about how libertarian it is to legalize marijuana or gay marriage. Which it is certainly not Republican to do! To be right-conservative is to increase economic liberties and decrease social liberties; to be left-liberal is to decrease economic liberties and increase social liberties; to be libertarian means nothing more than to want to increase both. Therefore, no matter how excessively market-fundamentalist Bush is, there is nothing libertarian about a presidential administration that reduces civil/social liberties.
delosd on Feb. 24, 2005 5:37 AM
Some interesting points in your comment. First, I do (broadly) agree with Dale Carrico in his take on technophiles and their wanting total exhaustive control. The odd thing about this group of people (and frankly, the thing that saves them from my criticism) is that I don't believe this urge comes out of any desire to push a particular political agenda. It just comes out of that techie tendency to want to see all kinds of systems work *correctly*. It drives them crazy to see inefficient or broken systems. This is best illustrated (as most things are) by an old joke...
It seems that on a slow day during the French Reign of Terror, a priest, a nobleman, and an engineer have all been slated for execution. Since there was no hurry, the executioner decided to give them all a choice of whether they would be laid down in the guillotine face up or face down. The priest comes up first, and says "I'd rather be laying face up, so that I may look towards Heaven when I die." So they lay him do, do the preparations, and pull the lever. The blade comes crashing down, but stops six inches from the priest's neck.
"A miracle", the crowd says. "Let him go!" So they let him go.
The nobleman comes up next. He says "Lay me down with my face up, so that you may all tell my peers I died with my eyes open." They secure him, and then the executioner pulls the lever. Again, the blade comes crashing down but stops just inches above his neck.
"Another miracle", shouts the crowd. "Let him go too!" So they do.
Next, they bring forward the engineer. He says "Just lay me face down too, I'm curious about something." As they make the preparations for the execution, the engineer looks up at the guillotine and says to the executioner, "Hey! I think I see the problem!"
OK, its not the world's greatest joke, but it does get the point across.
I also suspect that you have a point when you say that people are first to attack those that *almost* agree with them, rather than those that are completely opposed to them. In fact, I've been fascinated as of late by the increasing cooperation between the extreme religious right and the excessively politically correct left in the area of control of freedom of expression. One area when the two groups are coordinating efforts is in attempting to regulate or ban "adult" publications and movies. On the right, it is a question of being "morally wrong and offensive to God", while on the left, it is framed as the "oppression and objectification of a minority group (women) by a patriarchal society". Who would have ever expected these two groups to make common cause. Yet in both cases, their "solution" is the same - reduce the freedom of other people to either do the things they want to do, or see the things they want to see.
(continued...)
delosd on Feb. 24, 2005 5:38 AM
(continued from previous post...)
I am a firm believer that the primary ingredient needed to construct a long-term stable society is a large number of dynamically stable power relationships. A static situation is rarely stable for the long haul, but having two or more interest groups that play off against each other in as many areas as possible makes for a dynamic stability. Right now, in the U.S. we have a situation where the government does a pretty good job of protecting citizens from each other (through the use of basic criminal law, some Civil Rights law, and the tort system), but we are starting to see an erosion of the power needed to keep the citizens protected from the *government*. One of the promising things that I see in the public arena today is the growth of non-profit advocacy groups that concentrate on *individual* rights, rather than the traditional groups (AARP, Sierra Club, business PACs) that advocate coercive government action in favor of their particular policies. A couple of these individual advocacy groups are The Institute for Justice, a non-profit legal group that protects the rights of citizens trying to earn a living against both unreasonable government regulation and against big business using government force by proxy to protect the business' interests. Another group is FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which provides both publicity and legal assistance to students and staff members in higher education whose rights to hold 'incorrect' political opinions, to exercise free speech, and to conduct free association are being violated. I think that these groups, and other, will perform a 'balancing' function on unchecked governmental power. Of course, they are really only able to do this because the American Constitution gives them legal levers to work with in the first place, as I mentioned in my previous post.
matt-arnold on Feb. 24, 2005 3:07 PM
I've been a big fan of FIRE for years because of my own experiences in a fascist totalitarian college. Because my brother is currently attending that school, I've sent them many e-mails, none of which were ever answered, asking if there is any recourse at a private institution.
On another point, I'm not sure if you know this, but my specific context of talking about tech with libertarianism is that of the transhumanism movement, since this is where they combine in their purest and most extremist forms. There is a schism over politics between American transhumanists such as the Extropy Institute, and overseas and in Canada such as the World Transhumanist Association. In both groups the membership is overwhelmingly college-educated white suburban males in their 20s, and a large contingent in their 30s. Our country's transhumanists tend to be overwhelmingly anarcho-libertarian, to the extreme that they characterize transhumanism as "the view that death and taxes are engineering problems." Technology itself is seen as the liberating force in both areas.
European/Canadian transhumanists, although they fully support the freedom to upgrade one's own biology no less than their American counterparts, support the idea of future government programs for those who cannot otherwise afford biological enhancement, so that the fruits of indefinite lifespan and the post-human condition would be available to all. Of course in our day and age this concerns existing technologies such as computers, supporting free access for the third world and ghettos.
delosd on Feb. 25, 2005 12:09 AM
Yes, FIRE does do most of its work at public schools, since they then have access to various constitutional pressures that aren't available at private schools. Also, at private schools like the one your brother is at, it could be argued that there is an implicit contractual agreement by attendees to be supervised and/or governed in more private areas of their life by the college, since there isn't any attempt to hide the basic religious philosophy and operating principles of the college. A case like that tends to turn into a "well, if you don't like it, why did you come here" situation.
I'm not surprised to hear of the particular schism in the transhumanist movement between the Americans and the Canadian/European groups. Both the Canadians and Europeans have a socialist bent, and a lack of a very strong individualist traditional, that lends itself to a greater acceptance of government action in the name of enforcing equality. Of course, I use "Canadian" and "European" *very* broadly here. If I had to split things up in a bit more detail, I would say that there are "chunks" of each region that have this philosophy. In fact, let me take a sway at it by categorizing major regions into either the "individualist" or "socialist" camps:
Individualist Socialist
------------------------ --------------------------
Midwest U.S. Northeast U.S.
Central U.S. West Coast U.S.
Southern U.S. Eastern Canada
Western / Central Canada Eastern Europe (former
Western Europe Soviet block)
I'm not quite sure where I'd put the U.K. at this point, as it seems to have tendencies in both directions.
Anyway, even this breakdown is somewhat deceptive. Basically, I think the individualist vs. socialist breakdown corresponds with the red state / blue state pattern we've seen in the last couple of U.S. Presidential elections. However, even the idea of "red states" and "blue states" is somewhat misleading. If you ever happen to take a look at a red and blue map of the U.S. that is keyed on a county by county basis, you'll see that even the "blue states" are mostly red. What makes most of the blue states blue is that they have an overwhelming blue majority (something like 80%+, or even 90%+) in the densest urban areas. This massive disparity in those small areas more than makes up for the moderate majority of "red" voters in the rest of the states. I find it interesting that the "socialist" leaning population is so densely packed.
delosd on Feb. 25, 2005 12:12 AM
Sorry, I didn't realize that the table I made wouldn't format properly. Here's the same info in a more understandable format:
Individualist
------------------------
Midwest U.S.
Central U.S.
Southern U.S.
Western / Central Canada
Eastern Europe (former Soviet block)
Socialist
--------------------------
Northeast U.S.
West Coast U.S.
Eastern Canada
Western Europe
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