One Reason Why I am No Longer a Libertarian
I suppose I can still be mistaken for a libertarian in a dim light, and I would certainly be proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with them against the various outrageous encroachments of our now-certifiably-insane federal government (the mere fact that the political classes are not even discussing abolishing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, nor overturning the laws that forced banks at gunpoint to make bad loans to insolvent borrowers, but instead discuss sovietizing the banking, motorcar, and medical industry as a cure for state-caused economic depression, not to mention borrowing our way out of debt, shows Uncle Sam belongs in Bedlam, if not Arkham, asylum).
But on certain matters, despite my deep respect for the Libertarians, we disagree.
One reason (of a growing list of) why I am no longer a libertarian is that I noticed a blind spot in libertarian thinking: They can talk clearly about isolated individuals and their rights, and they can talk clearly about overbearing governments and their dangers, but when the talk turns to the culture, that part of human existence which is not merely John Galt defying encroachments by Franklin Roosevelt, suddenly the Libertarians cannot talk at all, or cannot stay on topic.
Suppose the talk turns to marriage. It is an institution older than the nation-state, older indeed than the Roman Catholic Church, older than the Covenant of the Jews which reaches back to the Bronze Age, older than written language. It is not an example of an isolated individual defending his personal property rights against intrusion by Clement Attlee.
Marriage is not a contractual arrangement, even if there are elements of mutuality and an exchange of oaths. There is a mystical aspect to marriage, a sacrament, that makes it different from merely hiring a courtesan for her sexual companionship, or hiring a maid to keep house, or hiring a nurse and nanny to raise your children. Even to list as if they were services for hire some of the duties and joys of a wifeis a grave insult to womanhood: the divine ire that Juno bent on Aeneas should lower as if from thunderheads on any fellow fool enough to analyze marriage as if it were contract of mutual self-serving mutual exploitation.
Libertarians should understand that people can and do get along very well with a weak central government, but only when they have a strong community bond, which means, I hate to say it, one language, one shared faith, one shared culture, extended blood relations and a distinctly non-individualistic sense of extended family and local loyalty. A strong community can tolerate a peaceful nonconformist minority, but a community cannot be comprised of nonconformity and nothing but.
I can think of times and examples in history when there was a weak central government ruling a confederacy or even an amphictyony (my word for the day!–it means a league of tribes having a common religious center, as the Greek City-States with Delphi, or the Judges of the Jews with Jerusalem). What I cannot bring to mind is a libertarian commonwealth where there was a weak central government, weak local government, where the only shared cult was an agreement each man to deal with all others according to the Universal Commercial Code, so that all contracts were strictly enforced, and no non-contractual obligation was enforced at all. I have frankly no idea how one gets fallen human beings to honor their avowed word in business dealings when there is no culture present, no imponderable (even mystical) sense that honor is sacred, that oaths are sacred, and that you owe anonymous customers the same level of respect and honesty you owe your cousins, kith and kin, brothers-in-arms and neighbors. Local loyalties are communal in nature. History gives us fine examples of local loyalties.
Whole towns and even nations were able to be ruled by relatively unobtrusive and distant sovereigns in Europe not during the rules of the Bourbon kings in France, but during the reign of Charles V. We now look back askance at multilingual and multinational sovereigns, but the system allowed communities to keep their local barons in tact even when marriage or war swapped them from Spanish the Spanish crown to the Austrian. During the Dark Age, crowns were weak, and the government was hemmed in by, of all things, an established church that controlled marriages, wills, trusts and estates, and controlled education–in other words, all the elements of the culture were out of the hands of the sovereign. It was not until the rise of national churches (in England, under Henry VIII, in Germany, under Lutheran Princes) that these elements fell into the orbit of state power, and lost their international character: the informal confederation of Christendom gave way to the principalities which developed (or devolved) into modern nation-state. Reading Protestant-hued history, these events are nowadays regarded as the hatchling egg-cracks in the shell of superstition soon to give rise to the eagle-chick of enlightenment and freedom: but a libertarian should look with suspicious eyes at this account, for it glorifies "nationalism" the concept that all tribes and communities speaking one language must and should have one sovereign and one national will. A libertarian before he rejoices that the mummy-hand of the Jesuit teachers was taken away from the schools and universities of Europe and America, should pause to remember that John Dewey and the so-called Progressive movement that gave rise to government-run and government-mandated schools was what was brought in to fill the vacuum and drive into the margins the church-run or church-founded schools from the Thirteenth Century to the mid-Nineteenth.
The American experiment was to take distinct and mutually hostile local loyalties — Catholics in Maryland, Covenanters in Georgia, Puritans in Massachusetts, Lutherans in Pennsylvania, Merchants in New York and Plantation Owners in Virginia — and to see if they could form a union on the basis of federalism, that is, leaving each community alone to seek its own happiness, gathering their forces only for certain particular and limited mutual actions, such as raising armies, floating a navy, establishing post roads, standardizing weights and measures, eliminating tariffs and trade barriers between states.
The great social contract of the Constitution was meant to allow alien elements, people of different faiths, and yes, of different races and national origins, to live in their communities in mutual toleration and respect — to ignore each other and get along with the business of life.
It was not meant as a contract to dissolve the community. It was not even meant as a contract to make Jews no longer feel mildly uncomfortable at seeing a Christmas Tree on the White House lawn, or atheists no long feel mildly uncomfortable at seeing the Ten Commandments posted on the courthouse ornaments.
John Galt, by his own admission, is a prelapsarian man, a creature like Milton’s Adam before the loss of Paradise, a man without sin or irrationality. The social rules and mores that bind him to his theoretical community of Galt’s Gulch, the Utopia of Greed, make for interesting theoretical speculation. In real life, your real neighbors are slobs and crooks and drunks and adulterers, they are rude and selfish, proud, ambitious, lazy, and greedy, and, if they are Americans, probably they are overweight possess too much body hair and read Science Fiction, and have other drawbacks. With these imperfections in mind, the task of those who would write, or protect, or amend, that unwritten social contract that informs the unspoken and general assumptions of the community — the culture, in other words — is to promote a set of virtues that allow men to live together in peace.
The genius of the American Founding Father was to construct a covenant for the general government that channeled the natural ambition and powerlust of great men into harmless and self-defeating gridlock, what we call checks and balances. The genius of the free market system is that it ties the greed and selfishness of the wealthy into finding a natural harmony of interests with the poor. The tragedy of America is that the Founders did not see and forestall the rise of ambitious men who would use real or imaginary failings in the free market as an excuse to expand the powers of the general government into all areas of life — no provision was made for the separation of Economy and State, was their was made for the separation of Church and State, precisely because the Founders did not anticipate the rise of Progressivism and the politics of anti-economics.
(I call it anti-economics because Progressivism is, after all, little more than watered down Marxism, and Marxism is not, after all, an economic theory: it is the theory that we can do without economics, and that we will live in an environment without scarcity of goods, services, and resources, provided we all clap our hands and believe in Tinkerbell).
Our American system successfully had begun to tame Greed and Pride, but not Envy. This led to the growth of government to halt the trusts and robber-barons (so called), so that the dragon of power-ambition was unfettered, in hopes it would banish the behemoth of money-greed: but all that happened was the two monsters made a deal (or a New Deal), mated, and produced a chimera of government-controlled industry and industry-controlled government. The three heads of the chimera may seem to tear at each other in public, but they have one heart. They have in common an interest in stifling competition and forcing newcomers out of business, so that old and established banks and firms "too big to fail" can be controlled by the state, can be used as cash cows to fund candidates, and can be propped up by the stupid taxpayers. It is fascism, that worst combination of socialist and capitalist features, where success is privatized while failure is socialized.
The Progressives also ushered in the Sexual Revolution, so yet another of the seven deadly sins, Lust, was freed from her restraints, and now shakes pestilence from her snaky Medusa-locks across the nation. One side effect of the Sexual Revolution was the growth of divorce, of bastardy, of single-parent families, and the rise of a generation of young neurotics whose family life consisted of their mother, their half-siblings, their mother’s latest live-in boyfriend, and perhaps any dead brothers and sister killed by their mother in her womb, either of her own will, or under pressure from the live-in boyfriend.
Human psychology, despite what you’ve heard, not being infinitely malleable, cannot adapt to an environment without a mother figure and a father figure, without maternal and paternal love, and children raised in an environment of uncertainty (not to mention the self-blame and self-doubt a broken home imprints on young minds)without growing into something warped. I note the rise of suicide among teens over the past thirty years, and I doubt the youths and maidens are destroying their infinitely precious gift of life due to fretting about the cold temperatures caused by Global Warming.
A pagan raised in modern circumstances would not worship Father Jupiter, who guards the sacredness of oaths, nor Mother Juno, who defends the hearth and home with the terror of the Furies, nor would a line of ancestors and lares, household gods, line the mantlepeice. You need a household before you have household gods. No, the proper goddess for modern pagans is Mother Nature, a hag with bloody nails and red teeth, who, by evolution and blind chance, weeds out the unfit, kills the weak, and encourages competition among sexual rivals: and, sure enough, the modern Environmentalist movement seems to fit the bill as votaries of Gaea, the Dark Mother.
Surely not by any human design, the weakness of the family both creates a need for the modern Welfare state, and is encouraged in its weakness by that same Welfare state (though perhaps by design of the potentates and principalities of Hell).
The thoughtful libertarian must see the totalitarian anarchy on the rise in every aspect of life — and I mean no paradox. Total state control of life leads to and is encouraged by total lack of personal control in life. He regards the state as the sum and source of the evils in the modern world. By and large he is right. But he is blind to one large part of human existence, namely, the informal part: the culture rules formed by one’s virtues and values and "sense of life"; the unspoken consensus opinion as to what is true and false, just and unjust, tolerable and intolerable; the unspoken expectation of what honor demands; the non-contractual and natural obligations and duties that bind us with no expectation of return, one to another. The culture.
Sons of liberty, if you wish to defeat the Chimera that is the alliance between the all-powerful state and the non-competitive industries deemed too big to fail (think of an alliance between Wesley Mouche and Orrin Boyle, the incompetent bureaucrat and the whining plutocrat) the way to begin is by strengthening the culture, not by weakening it. Those areas where the common law protects the family, the sanctity of oaths, the fidelity and chastity of man and wife, is not an area where the totalitarians seek to encroach.
The totalitarians are on the same side as the Libertarians when it comes to gay marriage, polygamous marriage, non-marriage and legalized prostitution. Are you sure it "aint nobody’s business" what you do in the privacy of your bedrooms? Because when the bedroom stops being merely an arena for sexual entertainment and returns to being the marriage bower, it becomes the nursery for an institution, the family, which is one of the institutions not under government control. The totalitarians cannot tolerate to have anything not under government control, and so they want to reduce marriage to merely a contract. Contracts are under government control, as the state establishes what clauses shall and shall not be enforced, and what shall be null and void as against public interest.
The totalitarians are tricking you, my brother libertarians. In the name of freedom and equality of marriage, they want to reduce marriage to a non-institution, a nothing, something that is no more than a pasttime, and not the foundation and building block of the community.
What you do in your bedroom is indeed a private matter: until you father a bastard who must be raised and cared-for at public expense. Join with the Conservatives, O Libertarians, to abolish the Welfare State first, and then and only then we can have a conversation about privatizing marriage.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
