Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
A Constructive Fear
July 3, 2004
Morality, regardless of how it’s elaborated, is always about prescription and proscription: what one must and one must not do. As literally every political position rests, whether explicitly or implicitly, on some moral premise, when we look for explanations of how reasonable people with the same information can differ about public policy, we must inevitably look to their moralities.
When Smith points to the efficacy of a policy at bringing about a desirable result, his opponent Jones can yet condemn the methods of the policy as morally wrong. This is often the nature of debates over a behavioral stricture or a preventive war. When Jones insists on a policy that Smith can assail as having wrought poverty and destruction, Jones can nevertheless defend it as morally obligatory, and the consequences as morally irrelevant. That’s how the defenders of socialism and social-welfare statism respond to criticism of their schemes.
Between the realms of the morally obligatory and the morally forbidden lie those decisions which are strictly pragmatic. That region is constantly under pressure from moralists who seek to encroach upon it from either end. By “moralist,” your Curmudgeon means one who claims a moral warrant for his demands. Needless to say, there’s no guarantee that his claim will be accepted by others. For example, consider the demands of the Islamists for universal shari’a, which they insist is divinely mandated and therefore proof against adjustment, or even question.
In Western nations, eras of tolerance over moral differences, when politics was generally not permitted to take sides, were characterized by social peace. However, one ought not to generalize too readily from that observation, as most of those eras were also characterized by wide agreement on moral requirements. He who chose to disregard prevailing opinion had to do so furtively. If he was caught, he was expected to display shame and express contrition.
Intolerant eras are easier to understand. When some assert a right to interfere in the decisions of others with force, either creeping totalitarianism or civil disruption will follow. This appears to be independent of the scope and degree of moral divergences.
It hardly matters whether the instrument of interference is public or private, or whether the aggressors proclaim some concept of a higher good as they march. The willingness to use force is the worm in the apple.
Why is this on your Curmudgeon’s mind, on the eve of Independence Day? Well, for one thing, the holiday is about freedom, which is the antithesis of submission to political force. For another, the best way to appreciate the nature of freedom and the bounties it delivers is to contemplate the way its inverse despoils men of all that they value, including their self-respect.
A friend of your Curmudgeon’s named Bob, who married a Yugoslav girl, spent some time in her home country during the late Seventies and early Eighties. Bob was a person of several competences, but he found it curiously difficult to make his way in that Communist nation. It seems that every time he found some agreeable way to support himself and his wife, the local authorities would haul him in for a grilling about “practicing capitalism.” That was explicitly forbidden by Yugoslav law; all economic activity, without exception, had to be approved and regulated by the State.
The Communist thesis was, of course, that capitalism is unacceptable because it creates inequalities among men, by dint of their unequal abilities and inheritances. This is a moral rationale. It cannot pose as a matter of economic efficiency, as Communist and socialist nations are always poorer than capitalist ones. It must forever stand on the moral command “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.”
By subsuming the whole of economic life into the moral realm, Communism utterly destroys freedom. Bob, who’d wanted to make a life in Yugoslavia for his wife’s sake, was slow to accept this, but eventually he and she accepted the inevitable and returned to the United States.
There are places where Communism still reigns. One such is North Korea, where eight million people are slowly starving to death so that the Politburo can live in luxury and threaten their neighbors with nuclear weapons. Another is a land that was once called the Paradise of the Americas and the Playground of the Caribbean: Cuba under Fidel Castro.
Via Eleanor at CaribPundit comes >this report of the struggles of the Cuban people to survive under socialism:
Cuba—What A Dollar Will Buy…
“Poor Cuba, so far from God, so close to the United States,” is a refrain that was often heard. Visitors from America were the mainstay of the industry, and often in the mode of the “Ugly American.” That’s what Cubans remembered about American tourists.
After the revolution in 1959, tourists came from other places, Canada, Europe, the Soviet Union, and eventually Americans began to return, sometimes in the form of expatriates returning to see relatives. It doesn’t matter to Cubans which they are. What is important is the capital they bring to place in private hands. “Wan dolar, plis,” is heard all over Cuba.
One dollar for the most “basic of services,” for things that we take for granted in the West. Take my picture? One dollar. Where can I find…? One dollar. May I take your picture or the picture of your house? One dollar. Listen to a street musician. One dollar.
Begging is illegal in Cuba, but if you provide a service, it’s harder to prove. Many are the very old, or those with few other recourses. We can’t deny them a living. It’s hard to make it in Castro’s Cuba.
Thus, the fruits of a moral demand that no man have any economic advantage over any other. Does it matter that the demand issues from the mouth of a bloody-handed dictator? Or would it have created the same conditions if enforced by a saint?
Many voices are in the air about “fascism” here in America. “Fascism,” properly, is that condition in which the State asserts authority over all things: the total absence of freedom. Yet, strangely, the overwhelming majority of the fascism-shouters appear to be concerned not with freedom but with privilege: privileges for illegal immigrants, privileges for organized minorities, privileges for sexual deviants, and privileges for special interests who want to loot or control others to satisfy their own moral visions. If indulged, these persons would radically reduce Americans’ aggregate freedom, yet they’ve made slow, steady progress on several fronts—because decent Americans’ ethic of tolerance partially disarms us when faced by those who couch their demands in moral terms.
Many philosophers have declaimed on the impossibility of complete freedom. If “complete freedom” is understood to include the privilege of despoiling one another, that would indeed be the case. But if we recur to Herbert Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom—“Each shall have freedom to do all that he wills, provided he not infringe the equal freedom of any other man”—a set of simple proscriptions emerges that forbids aggressive violence, theft, and fraud, and that leaves the rest of human enterprise and intercourse unfettered.
Spencer’s vision is that which undergirds the United States of America, whose birth document was signed 228 years ago tomorrow.
In a free order such as ours, many fear that some “common good” or rule of “decency” will be sloughed out of excessive concern for individual liberty. When those fears reach a certain degree, they bring about legislative incursions on freedom. But in the aftermath, if the results of the incursion fail to satisfy the predictions for it—if the anti-drug laws fail to reduce drug use, or the welfare laws fail to reduce the number of the poor and their suffering, or the regulation of commerce fails (at great cost) to improve the quality and reliability of the goods we buy—those who called for them will still stand on them as moral necessities, a posture indistinguishable from that of the Communists who accepted universal poverty as the price for the elimination of differences among men.
This is what we should fear, now and forever.
This is why the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of expression, worship, and assembly.
This is why the Second Amendment guarantees that the citizenry will always have access to the means to overthrow the government.
This is why the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments make the right to a trial by jury absolute, so that political functionaries cannot enforce a law of which the people disapprove.
This is why the Eighth Amendment forbids excessive, cruel, and unusual punishments, so that trivial peccadilloes cannot be used to strip an opponent of the regime of all his worldly goods and therefore, of his ability to resist it.
This is why the Ninth and Tenth Amendments explicitly make ours a nation of unenumerated individual rights and enumerated political powers, such that We The People may say to the State, ”STOP! You have overstepped your legitimate bounds, and we will have you back in your kennel one way or another.”
And finally, this is why the political moralist, who’s unsatisfied with the right to express his views and clamors for the power to impose them upon us all by force, should be answered with “This is America, buddy. We can tolerate a little rap music and a few tin cups.” This should be followed, circumstances depending, by proffering either a hot dog or a punch in the nose.
Happy Independence Day.
| <<- Constructive Distraction | Contraband ->> |
