Removing The Frame And Dropping The Context

In The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa wrote:

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively-- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

I was thinking about this quote in the context of "political correctness," "cancel culture," and other forms of rigtheous indignation. 

Let's take an old example. There are numerous instances of the n-word's being used throughout the books To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For this reason, both of these books have at times been subjected to bans. The n-word is considered too triggering and hurtful to be included in many libraries and school assignments in today's world. 

And yet, both of these books are not only about racism, they can indeed be considered treaties against racism. In fact, they are quite explicitly about racism against blacks, and in both books, the n-word is used to accurately depict racism while telling a story about how we all ought to overcome racism and treat blacks equally. Part of the message of both of these books is not to use the n-word. The books use the n-word in order to show how ghastly and racist it is to do so. Use of the n-word is presented as an example of people behaving badly, so that the authors can go on to show how people ought to be behaving instead.

It is only by removing The Frame from these books that we could ever consider their use of the n-word to be hurtful. We remove The Frame by interpreting the dialogue in the books as though it has been spoken today, right now, right in the same room as the reader, possibly directed at the reader. It is only by taking the books in this light that we could ever be offended by their use of the n-word. 

By maintaining The Frame, however, we maintain that these are fictional stories, we observe the behavior within those stories, we reach the end of the book, and we come away with an important moral message: to eschew racism, treat other people as equals, and not use the n-word.

In short, it's The Frame around "the picture" that enables us to do this. Without The Frame, it's just some old white people using the n-word at us. But with The Frame, they're good stories with important anti-racist messages.

There are plenty of other, more modern examples out there. Certain jokes told by comedians could be considered hurtful and "problematic," but only if we consciously remove The Frame; only if we deliberately refuse to allow the comedian to tell his or her joke as a work of art or an act of performance. If we instead allow the comedian to play his or her role and put on an act, then our sensibilities can remain intact. Jokes might be made at the expense of us and "our kind," but it's all in good fun. It's all an act. There is A Frame around the picture. It's only hurtful or problematic if we deliberately remove The Frame.

This is exactly what happens during heckling. When a comedian encounters a heckler, the heckler has decided to remove The Frame from the comedian's act. Every time the comedian tries to tell another joke, the heckler steps in with a comment that removes The Frame and forces the comedian to be a normal person again (rather than an actor). The comment might be something simple, like, "You're not funny!" Or, it might be a case of someone's taking offense at what the comedian has said, and arguing against it. It's then the comedian's task to attempt to best the heckler, reclaim the audience and The Frame, and continue his or her act.

Here's a really good example of this. Comedian Norm MacDonald tells a joke about teachers, and a teacher in the audience becomes offended. She tries to remove The Frame from MacDonald's act, but he deftly reclaims it:

What makes this so great is the fact that Norm MacDonald is an expert at using hecklers' own tactic against them. When hecklers try to be funny, or try to make a point, Norm MacDonald either refuses to acknowledge the joke or takes their statements very literally. In doing so, he removes the hecklers' own Frame, and takes back control of the situation.

In every-day interaction, human beings use humor to reach out to one another and let each other know that, despite any difficulties or miscommunications, "we're still friends." When it's properly received, that humor can mend almost any fence. But when the interlocutor refuses to acknowledge the humor - or, as the psychologists call it, the "repair attempt" - the interaction goes sour. The other person has to want to get along with you. If he or she refuses, there isn't much you can do. If they remove your Frame, you can't paint a picture. It's a power-play. They do it to gain the upper hand in the interaction. You can either give it to them, or walk away. 

Another person who wrote about this concept was Ayn Rand. She called it "context-dropping." If you "drop the context" in To Kill A Mockingbird, and instead just focus on the words printed on the page, then the n-word is the n-word, and that's despicable. If you maintain the context, then you see it as a story in which awful people said awful things, and the reader then learns an important message.

If you maintain the context of a comedy act, then you can hear all kinds of funny jokes. I've had stand-up comedians single me out in the audience before, and tell a few jokes at my expense. I could get really mad and feel insulted, and that would be dropping the context. It would be removing The Frame. Instead, I could appreciate the humor of the situation, laugh at myself a little bit, and have a good time. The choice is mine, but whatever I choose, the situation depends on The Frame, and whether it is allowed to separate the picture from the real world.

Books That Influenced Me

Tyler Cowen reminds us of a blog post he wrote seven years ago, “Books which have influenced me the most.” At the end of this earlier post, Cowen writes, “I would encourage other bloggers to offer similar lists.” It sounds like fun, and I’d like to do just that.

First, though, I need to add a caveat. Cowen’s book lists are interesting predominantly because Tyler Cowen is very secure in who he is. He clearly understands his role as a blogger. He’s a cultural critic as much as an economist, if not primarily a cultural critic. Every day we learn a little bit more about his personal tastes in books, music, food, and ideas. On his blog, he presents himself as the kind of person who can add interesting commentary to virtually any topic, the kind of person who functions as the most important guest at a party, even if not the life of the party. He’s the sort of man who can keep conversation headed down interesting and elucidating pathways, mostly by knowing how to ask the right questions. But if no one’s asking the right questions, he’ll gladly answer them himself, and then put the question back to everyone else when he’s finished.

In short, we’re interested in what books influence a man like that because a man like that is very interesting and has diverse tastes and thoughtful observations.

By contrast, who am I? I don’t mean to say that I’m unimportant or a nobody or that people shouldn’t care much about me – that’s not for me to say, anyway. I just mean to ask the question, if you happen to come across my blog for some reason, why should you care which books influenced me the most? It’s unlikely that you’re curious about that because you’re curious about how I think. I’m not the life of the party and I’m only recently learning how to ask the right questions. My observations can be controversial, but they’re unlikely to cause anyone to think and ponder for a long time.

No, you’d more likely be interested in a list like this to either get some random ideas for book suggestions, or to compare my list to the list of books you like best.

I’ll present my list in that light. This changes the contents of the list a bit, but don’t worry about that.

So here they are, in no particular order:

I. The Castle by Franz Kafka. I was already a Kafka fan when I found my copy of this book – a 2^nd English language edition – in the back of a moldy used book store somewhere in California. The thing I love most about this book is that, at the time I read it, I didn’t have a lot of experience with bureaucracy and didn’t fully understand what the book was about; yet as my life unfolded, my thoughts would return again and again to this book each time I encountered a relevant experience in my life. So the book and its themes and messages stuck with me even though I didn’t come to understand them until later.

II. Epistemological Problems of Economics by Ludwig von Mises. After Human Action, I think this is Mises’ most important work. Because of my personal interests, I learned far more from the former than I did from the latter. It is a wonderful book for learning “the economic way of thinking.” It’s also quite a bit lighter reading than Human Action, which helps its contents stick to your grey matter a little better. I think this should be required reading for undergraduate economics students.

III. The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. It’s not his most popular book, but this one was seemingly written just for guys like me. It’s a book about a young man who commits himself to loving from afar. He never endeavors to win the heart of his love so that he can continue cherishing her from afar. This decision serves to influence everything else that happens in his life. In true Eco fashion, the various events in the story all come together in a superb metaphor unlike anything I’ve ever read before. And the ending is open-ended, left up to the reader on purpose. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but Eco allows us to finish it as we please, which is of course the whole point of the story.

IV. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Screw the haters. Much has been written about what a terrible book this is. I always found the book to be a wonderful character sketch, probably because I actually knew people in real-life who had parallel characters in the story. The ideas in that book won me over from the more left-leaning political traditions, kindled my interest in economics, and served as a source of inspiration for many, many years. I’ve read this book several times and, sadly, I now feel a pang of shame whenever I pick it up, not because of what I think, but because of how badly people are excoriated for enjoying it. That’s not fair. This is a good book. It’s made big waves for valid reasons. No book is perfect. This is a good book.

V. Moby Dick by Herman Melville. This one just might get my vote for the greatest novel in the history of mankind. Surely it is the greatest novel in American history. I first read this book in junior high school, heavily abridged. We’d skip whole chapters and focus entirely on the action in the story. As a result, much of the meaning in the story was lost on me at the time. I still enjoyed the book, but not like I do when I read it now. To be honest, I am surprised the modern school systems allow this book to be taught as standard curriculum. It’s boldness in challenging sacrosanct American virtues like Christianity and Existentialism make it the kind of book that would likely be banned if more people understood what it was really about. But that’s the beauty of it, really. There are easter eggs in every paragraph of this book. The prose is directly allusive to specific works of Shakespeare, and to the Bible. Yet all the same, Melville manages to tell the tale in a merry, witty way, in a voice all his own, and to teach us something about “chasing the dragon” along the way. It’s a masterpiece.

VI. A Profile of Mathematical Logic by Howard DeLong. This is essentially a textbook of mathematical logic. As such, there is not a lot I can say about it that will interest blog readers, except to say that it is perhaps the clearest and most elucidating book on mathematical reasoning I’ve ever read. I’ve always been “just okay” at math. Reading this book helped me become “a math guy.” I’m still not a great mathematician, but at least now I can engage in mathematical thinking without fear. If you have the prerequisite math background, I can confidently say that this book can do the same for you.

VII. The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I thank my sister for introducing me to this book. It is full of sex, drug use, and fowl language, but it is one of the best books a well-read person could possibly read. Almost every major book is referenced somewhere in this novel, and usually lampooned. The story is confusing and psychedelic. It’s reflective of the hippy culture that influenced. It’s a great book for all the wrong reasons, but it still somehow manages to present a wonderful vision of libertarian possibilities and radical freedom. I don’t recommend it for kids, but I do recommend it.

VIII. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. This classic and cautionary tale about vengeance and obsession is the kind of book that every youth reads about ten years earlier than they really should. While it’s certainly accessible to the more youthful reader, the situations it describes simply don’t mean as much until after one has a few more years under his belt. Unlike Dumas’ more popular The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo’s primary source of action is its nail-biting dialogues. I think it’s superb how, over the course of the book, we gradually go from cheering for the hero to… possibly cheering against him? Hoping that someone stops him and that he learns his lesson? Again, younger readers will be dissatisfied by the fact that the hero doesn’t remain a hero all the way through, and that we’re left with a deeply flawed human being who could have been a hero. By adulthood, we can better appreciate ideas as heroes, rather than people.

IX. Better Training for Distance Runners by David Martin and Peter Coe. This is another textbook, one on exercise physiology. The technical sections can be a little dense, but if you don’t mind learning the basics, then the rest of the book will reward you with an excellent primer on how to train, really train, as a distance runner. I think a revised version of this book, with more simplified physiology sections and more compelling prose, would make an excellent book for high school coaches and athletes, and would make a lot people healthier and happier with their running.

X. Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng. This book is a personal account of what it was like to live through the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. It is important as a documented account of communist life, but it is perhaps even more important as a lesson in the universality of human reactions. The Cultural Revolution produced nation-wide witch hunts that evoke the mob mentality that envelopes any country when a mass delusion takes hold, whether it come in the form of “terrorists” or “drug lords” or “racists” or anything else. Liang Heng is a wise man who lived through a terrible set of circumstances, came out on top, and was willing to pass along his life lessons for the rest of us.

Is The Problem With PC Its Political Agenda?

At EconLog, Scott Sumner writes a blog post on what he feels is wrong with political correctness. It's not that he opposes student safety and comfort, but that the PC movement aims to prevent discomfort "for the wrong reason." What is that reason, according to Sumner?

The primary agenda is to advance a partisan political cause, not to make people feel comfy.

He continues (emphases added):

People on the left don't see the political aspect of PCism, for roughly the same reason that liberals don't see that NPR is liberal, and fish don't notice that they are wet all the time. (Disclaimer, NPR is my favorite radio station--but I do see its liberalism.)

In other words, Sumner believes the point of the PC movement is to advance left-liberalist politics. Against this narrative, I have an anecdote to offer.

When I was a young boy in elementary school, we all hit puberty at about the same age and were invited to a "maturation program" provided (officially) by the school faculty. Some students from very conservative families were excused from the program if their parents provided a formal written request that they be excluded. Instead, they stayed in their primary classroom and worked quietly on their homework.

We didn't have the language of "safe spaces" back then, but the comparison is a perfect one. Very conservative students were given a safe space to avoid being triggered by frank talk about human biology.

Long story short, I don't think it's reasonable to say that all PC demands align with the same political agenda, thus I don't think Sumner's criticism here is fair. There are some instances in which political correctness has served non-leftist political agendas, too.

So if political correctness isn't about one political agenda in particular, what is it really about?

I will speculate that people - and therefore also students - are growing increasingly hyper-sensitive to narratives that don't support their own beliefs, whatever they are. The postmodern insistence that perception is reality has unwittingly encouraged us to manage our perceptions in an effort to control our reality. If the only difference between my reality and yours is my perception that, say, minimum wage can increase the poor's quality of life without reducing their employment rate, then I can claim that this is true for me. After all, I perceive it to be so.

In such a world, facts start to become irrelevant to perceived reality. If I only allow myself to see blue light, then the whole world is blue. Your efforts to shine red light on my reality could be perceived as a threat - how dare you attempt to forcibly alter my perception?

This is only a story, of course, but it's one intended to cast light on the thinking of the politically correct. I don't believe these folks are actively trying to promote a political agenda so much as they are afraid to consider any reality beyond the one that they have carefully curated for themselves. Accusations that these folks are too sensitive are more accurate, in my opinion, than accusations that they are too politically motivated.

Long before the university years, we should have taught our children that perceptions and beliefs can be highly inaccurate, and that the proper way to live one's life is by dismantling one's own illusions and relentlessly pursuing truth, wherever that leads. But our modern-day philosophers relish opportunities to cast doubt on the existence of both truth and reality, and therefore a lot of us are simply ill-equipped to teach our children how to exist in a world in which some ideas are hotly contested, and no one group has a monopoly on reality (perceived or otherwise).

I'm relentlessly criticized for referencing Ayn Rand, but she accurately predicted and described all of this in her essay "The Comprachicos," from The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. There is much to criticize in that book and that essay, but the thrust of her ideas still rings true despite whatever discussions we might have about her tone or the details of her philosophy.

The Artistic Experience

For me, the mark of a truly great artist is the way his or her work seems to outline its own internally consistent world. Frank Zappa called this "Project/Object, and he is the only artist I am aware of who has ever attempted to put a name to this phenomenon.

Project/Object is a term I have used to describe the overall concept of my work in various mediums. Each project (in whatever realm), or interview connected to it, is part of a larger object, for which there is no 'technical name.' 

Think of the connecting material in the Project/Object this way: A novelist invents a character. If the character is a good one, he takes on a life of his own. Why should he get to go to only one party? He could pop up anytime in a future novel. 

Or: Rembrandt got his 'look' by mixing just a little brown into every other color -- he didn't do 'red' unless it had brown in it. The brown itself wasn't especially fascinating, but the result of its obsessive inclusion was that 'look.' 

In the case of the Project/Object, you may find a little poodle over here, a little blow job over there, etc., etc. I am not obsessed by poodles or blow jobs, however; these words (and others of equal insignificance), along with pictorial images and melodic themes, recur throughout the albums, interviews, films, videos (and this book) for no other reason than to unify the 'collection.'

Over the course of his career, Frank Zappa recorded and performed music with a variety of different lead singers and instrument players. Despite that fact, it is relatively easy to recognize a piece of Frank Zappa music within a few seconds of hearing it. His music exists almost as its own distinct universe.

Nor is Frank Zappa the only artist to have ever achieved this. I'm still reeling from the recent passing of another musical and personal hero of mine, Prince. Prince's music also has a distinct signature, and despite the recent appearance of online articles that highlight hit songs we supposedly "didn't know" he wrote, every Prince-penned song has a certain signature. It's a combination of the rhythm and the harmonic structure, and it's always there. His choice of dominant 7th chords to highlight emotional discord, his distinct way of alternating vocal melodies and keyboard melodies, his sparse and rhythmic bass lines, and so on. Every component of a Prince song is a testament to his distinct approach to composition.

Beyond the music, of course, there is the lyrical content and the aesthetic. Prince got a lot of grief over the years for his sexually charged aesthetic, but people far too often miss the other essential, absolutely vital aspects of his lyrics and aesthetic that made all the sex make logical sense: his spirituality, individuality, and monogamy. Prince wasn't just singing about sex, he was singing about achieving a higher plane of existence through the parallel pursuits of religion and authenticity. What so many people missed about all of this - what so many people fail to see about life in general, unfortunately - is that sex is one of the only media that connect spirituality and authenticity.

Another is music, or art more generally.

The idea that a person's art might reflect their creed isn't controversial, it's just that these days that kind of art is so rare and so hard to come by that we squirm a little bit when we see it. Not only that, we tend to deride the artists capable of producing it. Now that he's dead, we all love Prince, but three weeks ago it was only the music nerds who dared to admit that we loved Prince as much as we do. The same is true for Frank Zappa, who was panned and criticized over his whole career. The same is true for Ayn Rand, for Rush, for Dream Theater, for Freddie Mercury, and so on.

Art - great art - tends to make us embarrassed and uncomfortable. By presenting an authentic, artistic ideal, it exposes the shortcomings in our every-day commitments to morality, and love, and sex. We balk or we giggle, but our souls are laid bare by the purity of the art.

And this is true, I hasten to add, even of art that you don't personally care for. I'm not much of a Miles Davis fan, but his art works the same way. I don't like Andy Warhol, but again, when you see his work, you can't deny the presence of his aesthetic, his creed laid out for all to see.

Part of growing up is getting over our embarrassment and learning to appreciate the purity of an artistic aesthetic. Perhaps that's why artists like Prince and Zappa never really achieve the correct level of recognition until they're gone. Only then are their audiences prepared to admit that we recognize a piece of ourselves in their work.

And if you don't see yourself and your own life in this....

...then you haven't really lived at all.

Some Links

This piece on the Palestine Marathon is fascinating, no matter what your position on the "big issue" happens to be.

I went into this piece on the alt-right skeptical due to its inflammatory headline, but came away largely agreeing with it. The only contentious point is the part about miscegenation, but I have to admit that to the extent that "Roosh" and Chateau Heartiste are affiliated with the alt-right, there is definitely some evidence there. Above all, I was reminded of how much the piece sounded like it was influenced by some of the more obscure writings of Ayn Rand.

Jeffrey Tucker muses about the Libertarian Party debate. He has fair criticisms of all three candidates. I have my favorite, do you have yours?

For once, Matt Zwolinski isn't writing in defense of the welfare state, so this is worth linking to. I did not find him to be as persuasive as David Henderson, however.

This is truly astounding. 12 out of 30 patients on a 600-700 calorie-per-day diet permanently reversed their type 2 diabetes in just 8 weeks. That is, you have a 40% chance of reversing your type 2 diabetes if you can commit to just two months of eating less. Think about that.

When The Revolution Has Been Televised

Once upon a time I wrote a little blog post about how freedom is free, but we still pay for it anyway. Over the years, it turned out to be one of my most popular posts. Here's a slice:

Lucky for us, there is the valiant libertarian movement. They also offer us ways to pay for our freedom. For example, the Ludwig von Mises Institute offers us swag. The LvMI offshoot, Laissez-Faire Books, offers us... books, as well as some subscription services. Peter Schiff offers us financial services. Freedomain Radio offers us a lot of free stuff as a means by which to sell additional speaking engagements and the like. The Cato Institute sells all kinds of stuff, but if you're not in the market for any of it, they are more than happy to accept your generous donation.

Liberty for sale. I had hoped it ended there, that the "cottage industry" of libertarian products and services would keep itself mainly in the territory of swag.

Unfortunately, things have worsened.

Safety

Remember when Tom Morello got upset because one of his biggest fans was a Republican presidential candidate who also really dug Ayn Rand? I wrote about it at the time, but in hindsight, I don't appear to have had anything better to say than, "Look at that - rich guy criticizes other rich guy for being rich." I had good enough instincts to notice something amiss about all of this, but I didn't quite have my finger on the pulse.

By contrast, here's what The Last Psychiatrist wrote (emphasis added):

I don't begrudge anyone making a fortune from their art, but if you allow the system to make you rich from your art, well, there's a trade off. 

Tom Morello may want to do a bit of soul searching: did his art really bring awareness to the public, or did it serve the system's function of keeping everyone in line, i.e. a safe way to let off steam so that the kind of changes he was earnestly demanding were negated? This is the exact same question one must ask about the now safely defuncted OccupyWallSt, and even Obama himself. You know why you don't hear about Ron Paul anymore? Because you heard about him back when it was safe. Now that you have two candidates who couldn't possibly be more similar-- not in "ideology", but in action-- you are given no third option. Strike that, no second option.

And then:

And why, when Tom Morello wants to rage against Paul Ryan, he does it through the subversive, iconoclastic, angry medium of.... Rolling Stone? That'll get him. Let me be clear: I don't blame Morello for writing in Rolling Stone, I blame him for not asking himself what kind of a man is he that attracts Rolling Stone.

The hypocrisy, as identified by TLP is not that they're both rich guys, but that they've both become tools of the same system they both purport to upheave in their own way. The fact that we become aware of the Morello-Ryan spat by way of The New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine simply highlights that fact. There was never any hope of these guys changing the system so long as they were playing by its rules.

The grift, TLP says, is not that these wannabe revolutionaries aren't genuine, but that they are presented to us in a way that neutralizes their efficacy while simultaneously offering us the illusion of revolution. Sorry, that was wordy. He says it better:

[I]f there is something legitimately dangerous to the system-- and Morello and Ryan both fit this description-- rather than send in the secret police, it absorbs them by hyperpopularity [sic], edits them into TV soundbites, buries them in plain sight. Problem solved.

So safe, so costless. We post our opinions on Facebook. We vigorously write memes. We blog. And yet, the years pass, and nothing substantive ever happens. You can't change the system from the pages of the Rolling Stone, because by the time you've hit those pages, you've already been neutralized. At that point, whether or not you want it to be so, you're a product for sale; you're not a revolution anymore.

But Why Do It Willingly?

My point in writing this post was not to re-hash a bunch of stuff The Last Psychiatrist already wrote. I mention it only to reiterate that the act of commodifying your belief system and offering it up to the system as a branded product ensures that whatever change you think you want will never come to fruition.

On some level, libertarians seem to know this. They blog endlessly about "corporatism" and "consumerism" and "producerism" and the various other commercialized threats to real freedom. Sure, they believe in free markets, but like hipsters of every other kind of ideology, the deal is that the free markets also have to be cool. If they're not cool, they have to be uncool in a cool way; sort of like how it's now totally uncool-but-cool to grow a giant neck beard and watch Star Wars all day. The only requirement to live that lifestyle is that you have to click on the ads at NerdFitness.com (link deliberately suppressed) because hey you're into fitness, too, right, and that you have to buy your ironic t-shirts from Woot. 

See, the genius of those websites is that they seem to offer you the ability to embrace your inner nerd and be cool at the same time. Look, the models are pretty. Even pretty girls can laugh at the logo on the t-shirt. Pretty girls can click on the adjacent tab and buy yoga pants at a discount price. With all those pretty girls involved, how can it be uncool. But of course you know it's still uncool, that's not the point. The point is that you get to pretend otherwise.

What really gives me the creeps, though, is Liberty.me. In theory it sounds great - a social network for fellow like-minded libertarians, who want a place to discuss the nuances of their revolutionary ideas without having to engage the trolls that are seemingly everywhere, on every other social network.

So libertarians pay a fee - a pretty substantial one, actually - to segregate themselves away from the very society they seek to change, never having to engage in that society at all. Not in the slightest. They can sell each other books and swag, they can try to make a living as an icon of the "liberty community." All that is great, as far as it goes. There's just one problem...

...The threat they pose to the system has been fully neutralized, and they did it to themselves. They paid a fee to sell each other liberty in a gated virtual community the goal of which is to put them asunder from the very people whose minds would have to change in order to make the world a more libertarian place.

Freedom is free, so long as you're willing to pay for it.

"Eat It"

No, the revolution will not be televised. That also means that if you happen to see it on TV, or in a click-ad, or on YouTube, or at Liberty.me, then what you're seeing isn't really a revolution. It's a product you've been sold.

Please don't mistake me for a conspiracy theorist. Here's what I'm not saying: I'm not saying that the faceless Fingermen of the system have hatched a brilliant theory to monetize liberty, therefore keeping its threat at bay. I don't believe in Fingermen. I don't believe the system is smart enough to put forth that kind of coordinated effort against ideologies.

What I am saying is that libertarians - the people on the ground: you, me, everybody - are not really interested in a revolution. Like TLP might say, we've fetishized it: We've traded genuine revolution for the trappings of a revolution. We've glorified the object at its own expense. We want to be The Guy With The Podcast or The Girl With Blonde Hair Who Makes Liberty Sexy. We want to show up at cocktail events and trade Hayek quotations and discuss chapters of The Machinery of Freedom.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with this as a hobby, but to pretend that you're doing the work of liberty is the real problem here. The American Revolution began when the uneducated plebes started engaging in illegal acts of civil disobedience and fighting against their oppressors with deadly force. That's a revolution. Downloading epub files from the Mises Institute might be a great time (I've been doing for years - it is a good time!), but it's not a revolution.

And meanwhile, the threat liberty itself poses to the system has been neutralized. Our most outspoken spokespeople are on the same television programs, magazines, newspapers, etc. where we find the Kardashians and Justin Bieber. That's not a coincidence. It means that those libertarian spokespeople are every bit as relevant for changing the system as Kendall Jenner.

You get what you pay for.

Err On The Side Of Morality

I don't remember the quote exactly, but at some point Ayn Rand wrote that there are "sundry libertarians" who accept Objectivism's conclusions but reject either Objectivism's metaphysics or its epistemology, I forget which.

I don't want to comment on that, specifically, but the quote came to mind when I started reading this post from Robert Murphy. Reaching for a "gotcha" against open borders advocate Alex Tabarrok, he remarks that if you don't think it's okay to use guns to prevent immigration, then you must also not think it's okay to use guns to defend yourself in any other context. The gist of Bob's point is that, on some level, we all accept the use of violence as a deterrent against being attacked, so when Tabarrok claimed that doing so is morally problematic with respect to migration, Bob moved in for the "kill."

The ensuing comments made it clear that Bob's view is a common one, and that view basically boils down to, hey, if you violate the Non-Aggression Principle against me, then I will make you pay! My problem with that is that it seems to violate the spirit of the NAP. The whole point of this principle is to highlight the fact that a peaceful society requires little more than clearly defined rights coupled with a society full of broadly well-intentioned individuals.

The NAP is not, as some people seem to believe, a justification for surrounding your property with mines and hungry alligators in a moat and daring someone to trespass. That kind of attitude might be consistent with the NAP, but it is fully bereft of the kind of thoughts a non-aggressive person should probably have.

In other words, it accepts the Non-Aggression Principle, but rejects its metaphysical underpinnings.

It sometimes seems that there are a great many of us who view issues this way. That whole Civil War thing is another classic example: it's clear that, despite the rhetoric, human slavery was a major component of the Civil War. If one were to defend the Confederacy for all those technical states-rights reasons, that person might have a consistent and logical argument in his or her favor. But still: SLAVERY. You know?

If you're escaping a major moral indictment on a philosophical technicality, then you might have the better argument, but you're still immoral. Our purpose as moral agents in a society is not to push the boundaries of moral reasoning in order to get ourselves off the hook, but rather to err on the side of morality.

Utilitarianism And The Race To The Bottom

One way to troll the internet is to take the favorite moral framework of every intelligent and decent human being I know, and tear it apart. But the truth is that I myself have Utilitarian leanings, so this is as much a self-criticism as it is a criticism of others. That's what happens at Stationary Waves: Illusions are punctured and deflated, mercilessly and repeatedly, until only the truth remains.

How Much Do Warm-Fuzzies Matter?

The Washington Post published an article entitled "Traditional Charity Fosters Love. Effective Altruism Doesn't." Resorting to god-talk, the author writes in favor of the old kind of charity:

To Jews and Christians, doing good through works of mercy was how one became good, and thus worthy to stand in God’s presence. For those inspired by this theological vision, there was obviously nothing wasteful at all about such works, no matter their impact. The result of this new vision was the utter transformation of ancient society. The formerly marginalized became visible, even uniquely blessed actors in a great spiritual drama....

This kind of charity may not change the world in the most “logical” way, but it nevertheless has an important effect: It protects, preserves and grows local economies of love. Effective altruism leaves such economies wholly unaccounted for. And when followed to its logical conclusion, it is their enemy.

You already know I'm not here to defend religion, and I'm certainly not going to suggest that creating a loving, utopian community based on JuChrIslamism is a good idea. That's not the take-away from an article like this.

Instead, the take-away is that the personal perspective of the benefactor matters in a charitable transaction. This should be obvious enough, but the reason I became aware of this article in the first place is because an Effective Altruist on my Facebook feed happened to criticize the article because he felt the author was positing that "warm-fuzzies are more important than actually helping people."

At first, it seems like a fair criticism. Why be overly concerned about your internal constructs of a good society when there are people out there who need help?

But there are clearly limits to this. What if, for example, I decided that I despised my children, and so I cashed-out their college funds and put all that money into an Effective Altruism campaign just to spite them? Clearly, no one in their right mind would say that my children's "warm-fuzzies" weren't an important consideration in that case, and I'm sure almost everyone would agree that doing anything to spite someone, regardless of how many other people benefit, is a terrible source of motivation.

But Effective Altruism itself has no particular response here. As long as sufficiently many poor people benefit, my spiteful motivations or the misery of others are completely beside the point. This is not a conclusion that I think most Effective Altruists would be happy with. Thus, we are forced to acknowledge that the psychology of the giver - i.e., "warm-fuzzies" - do, in fact, matter on some level. The only question is to what extent they matter.

Spoiler alert: There is no right answer to that question. It's entirely subjective. Some of us will be happy donating to the local homeless vet, while others of us will be happier donating to something properly sanctioned as "Effective Altruism." It would be wrong to suggest that one kind of "warm-fuzzy" is more correct than the other, but unfortunately, that is precisely the claim advocates of Effective Altruism make.

Ayn Rand: Only Half Right

Ayn Rand, of all people, correctly identified that Utilitarianism was morally bankrupt. She wrote:

“The greatest good for the greatest number” is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity. 

This slogan has no concrete, specific meaning. There is no way to interpret it benevolently, but a great many ways in which it can be used to justify the most vicious actions.

What is the definition of “the good” in this slogan? None, except: whatever is good for the greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good for the greatest number? Why, the greatest number.

(Here I would add: Who gets to arrive at the final count? Including or excluding certain individuals from the accounting is the easiest way to manipulate Utilitarian's moral conclusions.) She continues:

If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

Unfortunately, Rand's taste for polemics left this final paragraph with far less impact than it should have. (To up the moral ante, she resorted to an invocation of Godwin's Law. A little more attention to detail, and she would have hit a home run.) Note that each of her absurd counterexamples rely on the set of questions outlined before it. Utilitarianism's moral failure is that the ends are determined by the horde, even if in error, and the makeup of the horde is determined by the demographics of the moment.

Begging The Question Or Brainwashing Yourself - Part II

So Rand's critique is only half-right. Her problem with Utilitarianism is that it leaves moral decision-making up to pressure groups. The real problem with Utilitarianism is that, no matter how "Effective" or "rational" we try to make it, its rationalizations can always over-compensate for flawed decision-making. It's easy to talk yourself into something when one's ethical reputation is on the line; they even have a name for it: Motivated Reasoning.

What makes Utilitarianism a uniquely egregious scourge is that it is (in its current incarnation) put forth as a remedy to Motivated Reasoning, when it is in fact an example of it.

To see this, just consider the infinitely many ways to save a human life. You could pull someone out of a burning building, or you could give them a successful cycle of chemotherapy. You could give a child in the Malaria zone a mosquito net, or you could buy a war refugee a plane ticket to an immigration-friendly nation. You could clean up a city's water supply, or teach that same town how to properly dispense of fecal matter. You could throw yourself in front of a speeding bullet, or you could talk someone down off a ledge, or you could provide an addict with clean needles.

Those are the obvious ways to save lives. Now what about the less-obvious ways? You could abstain from driving in order to lessen the odds of a fatal traffic incident. You could become more diligent about sanitizing your hands and workspaces to prevent a potentially fatal infection from afflicting an immuno-compromised person. You could stop using anti-bacterial soaps to prevent super-bugs from evolving.

The funny thing is that these less obvious things, if widely promoted, would probably save far more lives than Bill Gates' latest initiative in Africa. But most of us won't accept the concept of hand-sanitization-as-an-act-of-altruism, and in fact most people have a hard time with something far simpler, like hand-sanitization-as-a-moral-imperative. The only apparent reason for our refusal to accept these things is that using hand sanitizer doesn't feel altruistic.

Once again, "warm-fuzzies" matter after all. But wasn't Utilitarianism supposed to save us from that?

That's the first sneaky layer of psychological dishonesty in Utilitarianism, the part where we choose the most Utilitarian policy from a list of things we are already prepared to call altruism. Mosquito nets - yes; defensive driving - no. If that were the only sneaky layer of psychological dishonesty in Utilitarianism, then it would be a pretty easy fix.

But it's not. There are many more, and they are all a little sneakier. For example, some Utilitarians will concede that defensive driving is, indeed, a moral imperative, but that this is beside the point; after all, no one chooses between funding a mosquito net and driving defensively. We can do both.

Except, we can't. If you were to invest the right amount of time minimizing your epidemiological impact on the rest of society, you wouldn't have any time left over for figuring out where to spend your marginal charity dollar. Thoughts, and analysis, and cogitation take time. It's easy for the ethicist to sit back and say, "Well, yes, drive defensively, minimize the amount of time spent driving, and only give to Effectively Altruistic causes." But saying that is about as useful as saying, "Be a millionaire and an amazing lover." We all agree that it would be nice to do it. Utilitarianism is about doing what yields the highest utility of all possible courses of action, not just what, in theory would yield the highest utility.

 Real Utilitarianism dictates that if $500,000 makes me, personally, far happier than extending a year's salary to 20 or 30 sourpusses in the Third World, then we must give the money to me, not to the traditional "needy." The experienced among you will note that this is just a version of the Utility Monster problem - except my version doesn't require that I be a monster and doesn't hinge on inflating moral premises to absurd extremes in order to prove a point. There are probably many people in America who could be made happier with a $500,000 lump-sum payment than a year of income could make dozens of poor Bangladeshis happy. (And vice-versa, for that matter, but let's ignore that for the time being.) These people aren't monsters or conceptual arguments, and their existence should pose a real problem for Utilitarian altruists.

Instead, the Utilitarian's Motivated Reasoning deftly dodges the issue by stubbornly proclaiming - without any kind of theory, data, or argument to back it up - that there is no possible way $500,000 could make anyone in America happier than a year's salary could make a poor person happy. The best argument for this notion is the concept of the diminishing marginal utility of money; but that has some problems that I suppose I ought to highlight in the next section.

Personal Utility Is Not A Continuous Function

At best, it's piecewise-continuous. Here's what I mean: Suppose the only luxury good you're interested in buying is a $7 million luxury home, and the only luxury good I'm interested in buying is a $300 pair of shoes. Suppose we both play a Utilitarian Lottery that promises to pay a grand prize of $1,000.

For a $1,000 grand prize, the only person who stands to experience a significant increase in utility is me: I get my $300 pair of shoes, and $700 leftover to basically mindlessly spend because I'm not interested in anything else. If you win, you don't get your luxury home, so you mindlessly spend the full $1,000. Sure, we both get a small increase in utility from some mindless consumption, but at $1,000, I'm the only one who gets to satisfy my wildest dream.

Now flip it around. Let's suppose that the grand prize is a $7 million luxury home. If you win, you get your dream home. If I win, I get something fancy that never mattered to me until I entered some dumb lottery. 

Dedicated Utilitarians will say, "But Ryan, you could always sell the $7 million luxury home, buy the shoes, and give the remainder to me, which gets me almost to achieving my dream home." True, but I don't know anyone who would actually do this, do you? "But they should do this!" Why? Because we should always be stuck to the set of priorities we have at the outset of thought experiments? Because we should never allow a large, unexpected windfall to change the way we achieve our own happiness?

I guess you forgot to update your prior.

Meanwhile, Scott Sumner - having never read the above argument, or having found it totally unpersuasive - insists that increasing consumption taxes on wealthy people is a great idea, because

Yes, poverty in the US is a modest problem (especially compared to other countries, and other periods of history) but it is still a problem. In contrast, forcing Larry Ellison to downshift from a 500-foot yacht to a 400-foot yacht is an utterly trivial problem. If we can solve a small problem by creating another utterly trivial problem—then do it!

The fatal flaw in all this is that Larry Ellison's utility may decrease more than expected by being forced to live in a world in which he can't even choose to have a 500-foot yacht, versus a world in which he voluntarily "downshifts" for altruistic reasons (or not).

Therefore, once again, psychology matters. Giving a homeless person $100 is a nice thing to do; forcing someone else to give a homeless person $100 is, well, weird. If you want to do a good thing, then just go ahead and do it. Why do you have to chop off the port end of some billionaire's yacht in order to feel like an altruist? Seems odd, no?

(Here's an interesting sidebar: According to at least one website, the price differential between 400- and 500-foot yachts is on the order of 33%. Do you know anyone, no matter how rich, who would consider being forced out of a $15-180 million dollar investment "utterly trivial?" Sometimes just spot-checking an economist's wild assumptions puts some important perspective on what he's actually talking about.)

But here's the coup de grace: Venturing an opinion about Larry Ellison's yacht purchases costs Scott Sumner zip, zilch, zero, nada, and many more values equivalent to nothing. Scott Sumner wrote a blog post articulating which issues are important to him, and among them is the moral imperative of forcing rich people to make different choices.

"And only in America do we want the system to force us to do the right thing so we can take the credit. #behavioraleconomics"

Of course the context of that quote was a discussion of narcissism, of fetishizing the image at the expense of the object itself. Wouldn't it be totally weird if Effective Altruists were only really motivated by the trappings of charity, rather than by a genuine interest in helping others?

That Guy, From University

When Jeremy Beer, the guy who wrote that Washington Post article, wants to engage in charity, he wants to help Pete. Pete is a real, living, breathing person with whom Mr. Beer has real-world, eye-contact conversations. It's easy to say that Beer is helping Pete because Beer knows Pete, talks to him, gives him money directly, and ultimately sees where the money goes. He also offers additional help to Pete, non-monetary help.

How many Effective Altruists know the names of the people who benefit from their altruism? How many Effective Altruists know the name of one of the beneficiaries? If Effective Altruism is really about helping people, then shouldn't the Altruists know a thing or two about the people who receive their funds? A first name seems like a reasonable thing to know. How about the exact number of people (not the average, per-dollar number of people) who benefited from the contribution, and in exactly what way they benefited? This all seems reasonable enough. 

You can argue that the names don't matter as long as the people get help. You can argue that there are other websites out there dedicated to keeping charities honest and tracking the benefits of charitable contributions. You can argue all these things, but think about what it means if you do.

It means the particular individuals you help don't matter as much to you as the pure number of people you help. You're not delivering the help, you're just a donor. You're not keeping track of the charity's effectiveness, you're just reading the website. You don't want to actually do any real work here, you just want to ensure that your money is helping the most people, as measured by quantity. Names, faces, details... who cares? The important thing is that your money was spent in the way you deem most efficient.

Does that sound like charity to you? Because it sounds like signalling to me. It sounds like you don't actually care about the people you're helping, you only really care about help, in the abstract. It doesn't sound like an evaluation of whose lives you wish to improve and how you wish to improve them; instead, it sounds like you're only really interested in the bottom-line number of the total number of lives you improved. It's everyone else's job to worry about the details, you just want to find out which hole to put your wad in.

It sounds like a group of people who have come up with a rationalization scheme that maximizes the signalling value of their charity... er, kind of. In fact, all it does is maximize the signalling value of charity in the eyes of people who think stuff like utilitarian calculus and economic theory are cool, e.g. the Less Wrong crowd, and a few other weirdos like yours truly. 

So, back to the top. I'm pretty sure we agreed that giving to charity to spite somebody was not a particularly moral thing to do. Is giving to charity in order to impress your Bayesian Rationalist friends any better?

Isn't it a race to the bottom to cook up clever rationale in service of your donation strategies in hopes of being That Guy, From University, Who Is So Clever With His Economic Theory That He Even Buys Mosquito Nets For Poor People Instead Of Donating Food To The Local Shelter?

I mean, I thought we were donating for the maximum utility of others, not just to look cool. Or was I wrong about what Utilitarianism was supposed to be about? 

Privacy, Or Something Like It

In For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand wrote:

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Say what you will about Rand, she had a point. Early society - and modern "traditional" societies - are defined by the extent to which the community is involved in every person's life. We could speculate that this sort of involvement was an early precursor to modern law and order, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that, until recently, the social order of the western world had reached a point where we could go home and essentially not be bothered or "judged" by others. At home, we were mostly free to do as we pleased, without having to involve "the community."

Two things seem to have reversed our course.

One of them is the extent to which large databases facilitate the collection and analysis of data that was previously considered to be innocuous. Modern data analysis, however, has proven remarkably successful at making accurate inferences about very private matters using data that we did not previously associate with privacy. Knowledge, once acquired, is bound to be used, and this knowledge has mostly been used to advertise to us. While many people bristle at the idea that their most personal information is being collected so that products can be sold to them, I rather consider it to be a very good thing. Markets are getting progressively better at serving the consumer, and for the most part data is either fully anonymized, or so vast that no real-world individual could hone in on a particular person and invade their privacy. Exceptions will exist, of course, and they will be rare.

But there is another, more problematic, factor undermining our privacy: social media. These are media through which we voluntarily make our private lives public on an international scale. The more paranoid streak of social media skepticism will suggest that, having volunteered our private lives, governments can now use that information to monitor and/or oppress us. Consider what rock musician Stuart Hamm recently posted on his Facebook wall: "So...I don't post photos or info of my family here. We are PAYING to have big brother watch us now. Suckers" Of course, as a libertarian, I sympathize with that fear. However, I don't consider it the primary danger of social media.

This morning The Atlantic published an article by Robinson Meyer, the closing paragraphs of which read as follows:

Is living such a public life worth the trouble? Is such a life worth being constantly exposed to vitriol and rage and threats from strangers—especially when the patterns of that abuse seem so random? Is the kind of work that would be required to sustain a “good” public, online social network possible? Is asking people to perform that moderating work something we even want to do? 

We often celebrate the social change and faster communication that public, networked life has brought about. But that kind of life—a new one that we’re all still trying out—requires remarkable sacrifice. We would do well to account for that sacrifice, and, at the very least, thank those who have made it.

So the real cost to living so prominently in the social media is not, in my view, corporate intrusions, nor is it government oppression. Instead, social media threatens to invade our personal psychological space. Every status update we post is an opportunity to be judged, or misunderstood, or threatened, or lashed-out at. Now that cameras are all digital and fully integrated with social media, every picture we take seemingly exposes us to other people's opinions about what we're doing.

Here's a picture of my baby - am I a good parent, or bad one? Here's a picture of my dinner - are you jealous, or is your dinner better, or do you think I'm making myself fat? Here's a picture of my band - is that cool, or am I trying too hard? Here's a picture of me wearing workout clothes - am I sexy enough? Here's a picture of my new girlfriend - how do you rate her?

It's interesting that we take to social media for good times, to gain the approval of the people we care about, maybe even to gain the approval of people we don't care about. Meanwhile, we must also accept the downside of this - maybe the people we do and/or don't care about disapprove of our conduct.

This is just the nature of living life as part of any society. The difference, though, is that in the good old days, we could actually escape society for a little while - go home, decompress, get out of the public eye for a bit. That's still possible in theory, of course. You can turn off all your devices and get away from it all, but today the cost of doing so is higher, because so much more of our lives has gone digital. I, for one, email friends and family many times throughout the day; I "speak" to them on Facebook; I share family snapshots with them; yet I live far away from them, thus social media affords us a level of intimacy that we wouldn't be able to experience without it. When I "unplug," I sacrifice all of that. I miss out on things I really do care about.

Sure, find the right balance for yourself. Find a level of connectivity that gives you the most of what you want the least of what you don't. Go ahead, make the trade-off.

But there's a trade-off to walking down the street, too, and walking down the street is not nearly as invasive to our psychological sense of privacy than the kind of information most of us share on social media. So calling for a "balance" or "moderation" is just another easy non-solution articulated to make us feel better. The simple fact is, we've lost a level of privacy that was previously hard-won. To be sure, we've gained something for it, but figuring out how to be authentic without being an attention whore, figuring out how to maintain a sense of privacy without becoming aloof, is not going to be an easy task for any of us any longer.

How will we regain our old-fashioned sense of privacy? Will we ever?

Do Vile Views Matter?

This morning, Bryan Caplan favorably quotes H. L. Mencken at EconLog. This is hardly the first time an EconLog author has done so, so we shouldn't be too hard on Caplan in this one case. Here's an example of the late Murray Rothbard writing glowing praise of Mencken. Here is Jeffrey Tucker doing the same. Here is Donald Boudreaux calling Mencken "great." Here is Peter Boettke. Here's Thomas DiLorenzo quoting Mencken to make a case against democracy.

This is a who's-who list of notable libertarians. I could cite additional examples, but I think I've made my point. One seemingly hasn't proven one's libertarian bona fides until one has read and quoted H. L. Mencken.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia.org attributes the following H.L. Mencken quote to a work entitled Men Versus the Man: A Correspondence Between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist.

I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.

Have any libertarians out there considered the possibility that no one who is capable of such thoughts ought to be considered a libertarian if the word "libertarian" is to mean anything at all?

In refreshing contrast to the above, this laudable take-down of Stefan Molyneaux at Buzzfeed.com (of all places) uses direct quotes and first-hand accounts to make clear the fact that there are people out there who might be despicable people despite the fact that they nominally share one's policy preferences.

The question is, does it ultimately matter that key libertarian thinkers are ultimately revealed to be racists, sexists, megalomaniacs, etc.? On the one hand, we can take the position that no men are angels, including those who wrote a lot about libertarianism. On the other hand, we can define libertarianism in such a way that it excludes jerks from qualifying.

What I mean is, racism is perhaps the most un-libertarian mode of thinking I can imagine. It's tribalistic, primitive, unscientific, and cruel. It's opportunistic and tyrannical. It is a blight on the human psyche. The way I think about libertarianism is that libertarianism is the opposite of all of that; it's the solution to all of that. So what does it mean to know that many high-profile libertarians are also racist? Does it matter?

On a related note, we are told ad nauseum that Ayn Rand turned her inner circle into a cult. Assuming that claim is true, and applying equivalent reasoning to the the Buzzfeed account of Molyneaux, and observing the cultish fervor that some libertarians apply to Murray Rothbard, we start to run into problems here. Libertarians are traditionally the rebels, the individualists. What does it say about this great collection of individualist free-thinkers that they tend to be so susceptible to cults of personality?

Perhaps this is the dawn of my de-coupling with libertarianism. After all, how comfortable can a person be with an association that puts one in the same camp as a racist like Mencken or a sexist like Molyneaux? I'm tolerant of a wide array of opinions, but at a certain point, don't we have to stop and think about whose side we're on?

Eradicating bigotry would be a huge win for liberty. Writers can serve this goal by finding non-racists and non-sexists to quote when they're making their points. One needn't quote Mencken to make a good point, so why tarnish a good idea by attaching it to a vile racist? If we don't hold ourselves to this standard, no one else will. But more importantly, what is liberty to you if it does not include an unequivocal damnation of bigotry? Hollow rhetoric!

Suppose Everything You Know Is False

In a series of posts (mainly here and here) at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Jason Brennan makes an ambiguous case about Ayn Rand. His point seems to be either that Rand (despite her own claims) was not an ethical egoist, or that ethical egoism itself is an invalid ethical system. Both of those blog posts, and the less-closely-related Brennan posts leading up to them, are worth reading and understanding, so I encourage you to do so.

Regarding Brennan's claim that Ayn Rand was not truly an ethical egoist, he almost has me convinced. I do not have much objection to his reasoning. Many commentators at BHL also seem to share his view that Rand is a type of virtue ethicist. That seems consistent with my understanding of her philosophy, and explains a lot of the disparity between how I interpret Objectivism and how a lot of self-described Objectivists (and critics) seem to interpret it. That is to say, if Brennan is correct about Objectivist "egoism," then he has done a great service to Objectivism by helping to clarify their ethics.

Regarding Brennan's claim that ethical egoism is wrong because it results in unethical conclusions, I remain unconvinced. Here I shall explain why.

First, I would like to clarify that I am not really an ethical egoist. I am, perhaps, an "ethical-egoist-flavored virtue ethicisit," as Rand perhaps was. I say this only to point out that I don't really feel that I have any "skin in the game" here, other than that I find the game interesting to think about.

Second, I should qualify this discussion by pointing out that Brennan accepts the concept of "moral truth," whereas I myself do not. What this means is that, for Brennan, the statement "murder is morally wrong" is true in the same sense that "force equals mass times acceleration" is true. It is a fact of the known universe. To me, the statement "murder is morally wrong" is a conclusion based on the output of a person's ethical deliberation. It is a belief based on a person's moral code, not a "fact."

While Jason Brennan references a zap-the-homeless-people scenario created by Michael Huemer, he lays out a more concise scenario as follows:

Suppose my younger son is hurt. A genie appears and gives me two options. 1. He fixes my son’s injury. 2. He casts a spell instantly killing my son, erasing him from everyone’s memory, erasing all traces of him, and thus allowing us to go on as if he never existed at all. If I were just trying to avoid the bad feelings, I’d be indifferent between these two options. But I’m not–I’d pick option 1 over option 2, hands down. This means that I’m concerned not merely to avoid bad feelings, but to help for his sake. Again, it means I’m genuinely altruistic.

Notice that if I derive any pleasure at all from my relationship to my sons, then 1 will always be preferable to 2, and that preference will be fully consistent with ethical egoism. Thus, commentator "TracyW" adds an additional caveat:

So, specify that the genie will, in option 2, that the genie will make Jason's life in option 2 so much better that overall, Jason's own well-being will be about the same with the two options.

Taken altogether, this scenario is perfectly analogous to Huemer's. The point is to deny the egoist any ability to allow his egoism to reach the ethical position, i.e. Brennan's "moral truth." Paralyzing it in this way, Brennan and Huemer are then able to say, "Look, see? Egoism doesn't work."

It should be obvious, though, that every ethical system fails any test that was specially crafted to disqualify it. For example, I could disprove utilitarianism by crafting a scenario in which every outcome is specified to result in exactly the same net utility. I could disprove deontology by crafting a scenario in which the force that establishes the ethical rules is assumed not to exist. And so on, and so forth.

There is nothing interesting about any of these scenarios. They are paradoxes, or contradictions. Suppose everything you know is false. Then, what is true? No system of ethics can answer questions in which the ethics themselves are assumed to be impotent.

So Brennan's criticism falls flat to me. I can only imagine what actual egoists think about it. 

Who Is "We?"

Part One:
A few days ago, I alluded to a forthcoming post on use of the word "we." It's time to deliver the goods, but before I do, let's quickly recap what said about "we" in that post:

[A]ttaching negative consequences to unacceptable childhood behavior is called discipline. It is concrete, specific, and enforceable. But simply declaring something to be "not okay" and frowning furtively at a child (or an adult, please note) is synonymous with the act of declaring an action to be socially frowned-upon. The point is that those children (or adults) who engage in that behavior should be ashamed of themselves. It's shamey. But there isn't any specificreason why people who say "not okay" are saying what they're saying. The best you'll ever get from them is "we don't do that." It's an act of shaming someone by attaching social unanimity to whatever the speaker has deemed to be "not okay."

Part Two:
A friend of mine once invited several friends on vacation, myself being one of them. I knew many, but not everyone, who went. Among the attendees was a sizable group of young people, an insular group of friends who spent a lot of time together. We all got a good deal on accommodations as a result of a group rate, which was the logic in my friend's inviting so many people. Best of all, no one was "on the hook" to spend a lot of time together, so there were many small off-shoot groups that hung out as desired.

One morning, many of us met in the hotel lobby to discuss plans for the rest of the day. As I was waiting for the member of my own off-shoot group to arrive, I watched the people in the insular group discuss their plans. One young woman, Renee (all names changed to protect the innocent), had a strong desire to do something specific. I don't remember what it was exactly, but let's say it was hiking.

She made her first attempt at suggesting the hike by saying to Steve and Michelle, "I think we should go hiking!" Her friends seemed unsure. They answered, "Well... let's wait for Jane to get here before we decide."

When Jane arrived, Renee made her second attempt. She walked up to Jane and said, "We're going to go hiking. Do you want to come with us?"

Jane wasn't sure, either. She replied, "Hmm... Well, who is 'we'?"

To this, Renee responded, "Steve, Michelle, and I."

Still, Jane wasn't convinced. She said, "I'll go if Ursula is going."

So, Renee waited for Ursula to arrive, then walked up to her and made her third attempt at suggesting the hike: "We're all going hiking. Do you want to come hiking with us?"

Ursula was surprised. "We are? Is that what Jane said?" Renee confirmed, so Ursula said, uneasily, "Well, okay... if everyone else is going hiking, I'll go hiking, too."

Part Three:
Notice how self-aware Renee was as she deceived the others. She didn't begin by saying that she wanted to hiking, she began by suggesting that they should all go hiking. When she was unable to convince the others, rather than comply with their wishes that they all discuss it as a group, Renee waited for the next group member to arrive and then announced that she and the others were definitely going hiking, and did Jane want to come, too? Jane only wanted to go if Ursula also wanted to go, but Renee told Ursula that Jane had already confirmed. Thus, as far as Ursula knew, everyone had already decided to go hiking.

The group went hiking, despite the fact that Renee hadn't managed to convince anyone to go hiking. Only Renee wanted to hike. But she deceived the others into thinking that a group decision had been reached, and thus manipulated a rather large group of friends into doing what really only Renee wanted to do.

Interesting, right?

Part Four:
It happened again, not to long ago. This time, I was the purported victim; but of course these sorts of strategies have no effect on strong individualists like myself.

I found myself among a small group of friends, on our way to have some fun. As we walked, one of us decided that he would rather do X than our intended Y. After fruitlessly suggesting to the group that we all do Y instead of X, he tried a different approach. He approached me and said, "We're going to do X."

I said, "We are? Who is 'we'?"

He didn't reply, he just smiled. Another member of the group confirmed that "we" was really "he," so I made a point of acknowledging that fact: "Oh, you would rather do X than Y. Okay, that's fine with me. We don't have to do Y, if you don't want to."

This caused a mini-group melt-down because the matter had been re-framed as a group discussion rather than a group conclusion. We spent the next ten minutes discussing what to do next. In the end, we decided to do neither X nor Y, but rather Z, and everyone seemed satisfied with that decision.

Part Five:
Absent the word "we," the English language would have severe limitations. But in the wrong hands, "we" can be highly manipulative. It's okay to act on behalf of a group, if you so choose. It's okay to want to make a group of friends happy. But it's important to keep in mind that many of the people who inform you as to what "we" want to do are really just talking about their own personal desires.

Watch closely, and you will soon see that many people have a knack for using the language of collectivism to bend individuals to their own ambitions. When people talk about the horrors of collectivism, this is what they're really talking about. It's not as if Ayn Rand truly believed that it was always evil whenever human beings acted collectively. Rather, Rand recognized the important insight that much of what people talk about when they say "we" is really nothing more than using the word "we" deceptively, in order to shame people into submission or appeal to their sense of altruism to extract benefits that would not be worth doling out if the truth were otherwise known.

It's not that collectivism is bad, it's that deception is bad, and particularly pernicious when some of us choose to abuse the word "we."

More On In-Fighting

Apropos of something I must be unaware of, Steve Horwitz recently linked to this old post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. That link, in turn, discusses the essay found on page 34 of this pamphlet, available at Mises.org.

First, let me quote a few passages from the Rockwell essay. To avoid confusion, I want to begin by making clear that I object to all of the above links, and the following passages are things that I find highly problematic.

Paleo-Libertarianism
To wit, Rockwell writes:

Pornographic photography, "free"-thinking, chaotic painting, atonal music, deconstructionist literature, Bauhaus architechture, and modernist films have nothing in common with the libertarian political agenda - no matter how much individual libertarians may revel in them. In addition to their aesthetic and moral disabilities, these "art forms" are political liabilities outside Berkeley and Greenwich Village.

I wonder if Rockwell would defend this passage today, if pressed to do so. Are we really to believe that if I enjoy listening to one of Schoenberg's serial compositions, I'm against libertarianism? That's a tough pill to swallow. Could Rockwell himself swallow it? Never mind that, actually, I have a better question: Could Rockwell provide a cogent argument for why Schoenberg is a "political liability?"

Later (emphasis mine):

Too many libertarians also join liberals in using the charge of racism to bash non-conformists. It may be scientifically false to believe, for example, that Asians are more intelligent than whites, but can it really be immoral? From a libertarian perspective, the only immorality would be to seek State recognition of this belief, whether correct or incorrect.

This is truly remarkable, and would be laughable, were it not an idea that keeps popping up in the blogosphere. But on a related note, Rockwell further writes:

From a Christian viewpoint, it is certainly wrong to treat someone unjustly or uncharitably as a result of racial beliefs. It is also wrong to treat someone unjustly or uncharitably because he's bald, hairy, skinny, or fat. But can it be immoral to prefer the company of one to the other?

Good question. Is it immoral to prefer hanging out with bald people versus people who are not bald? Is it immoral to choose one's private associations based on superficial physical traits? I wonder what Rockwell would say, if I asked him.

(Of course, the clever criticism of the above passage is that it is not merely wrong to treat someone unjustly or uncharitably as a result of inherent racism. Indeed, it is universally so, regardless of whether one is a Christian or a member of some other religion. Every religion preaches racial equality, every last one of them.)

And finally:

Libertarianism is widely seen as anti-force. But force will always be necessary to defend against wrong-doers and to administer justice. Libertarianism opposes aggression against the innocent, not coercion in general.

Rockwell insists that coercion is necessary and appropriate, so long as the victim is not innocent. That's unsettling for many reasons, but to me the most compelling reason is the possibility that such a policy in practice could very easily get out of hand.

The above passages are, in my opinion, the most offensive in the Rockwell pamphlet.

Horwitzism
Having said all that, I must confess that I read Horwitz's post first, and was under the impression that Rockwell's essay would be far more offensive than it turned out to be.

Hearing an old, bearded, white man extol the virtues of conservative Christian, Anglo-Saxon culture is not exactly news. For one thing, you'll find similar expositions at iSteve, Anti-Gnostic, Chateau Heartiste, and so on. To be sure, there are a lot of praiseworthy aspects of Western culture, and there should be nothing wrong in plainly acknowledging them. But Rockwell doesn't seem to want to keep the good and toss the bad (and there is a lot of bad in every culture) when he writes that "Western civilization [is] eminently worthy of preservation and defense" (emphasis mine).

"Preservation and defense" begs the question how will we "preserve and defend" Western civilization, if not by practicing exclusion? Surely we all agree that the great works of Isaac Newton, Plato, Des Cartes, et al., ought to be preserved for as long as humans can learn from them, and defended against being destroyed. But even my friends born in Africa or Asia would agree with that. Thus, this is clearly not the kind of "preservation and defense" Rockwell has in mind.

I agree with Horwitz that far, at least. But Horwitz writes:

As Jacob [Levy] says, the attempt to court the right through appeals to the most unsavory sorts of arguments was a conscious part of the “paleolibertarian” strategy that Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard cooked up in the late 1980s. What’s happening right now is that the chickens of that effort are coming home to roost with large external costs on all of us as libertarians.

And later:

Even after the paleo strategy was abandoned, Ron was still there walking the line between “mainstream” libertarianism and the winking appeal to the hard right courted by the paleo strategy. Paul’s continued contact with the fringe groups of Truthers, racists, and the paranoid right are well documented. Even in 2008, he refused to return a campaign contribution of $500 from the white supremacist group Stormfront. You can still go to their site and see their love for Ron Paul in this campaign and you can find a picture of Ron with the owner of Stormfront’s website. Even if Ron had never intentionally courted them, isn’t it a huge problem that they think he is a good candidate? Doesn’t that say something really bad about the way Ron Paul is communicating his message?

Thus Horwitz insinuates that Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul might have deliberately courted neo-Nazis because they thought it would be good for the libertarian movement. That suggestion is more than wrong and offensive, it also defies logic. Why in the world would any libertarian think cozying up with neo-Nazis would benefit the movement. The mind reels.

Horwitz might counter: Indeed, that is the whole point - it was a terrible strategy. But first he must convince me that this was indeed the strategy, and despite the highly problematic passages I have quoted above, nothing about the Rockwell essay would lead me to believe that he intended to deliberately attract racists to increase the size of the liberty movement.

Sorting It Out
When I comment on such matters, the reader must understand that I wasn't "there" and I don't really know. Anything I say here should be understood to be speculation. However, it is speculation based on the available evidence. Those who were "there" are the only ones who can say for certain.

But us younger folks don't have the luxury of having been "there," and we'd still like to have a bit more liberty in our lives. What are we to think?

First of all, I think it's far more likely that Rockwell genuinely believes in social isolation. His website has published critiques of free immigration such as this essay by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. To discover that Lew Rockwell is a critic of cultural diversity is - once again - rather dog-bites-man. He writes in favor of "Western civilization," he denigrates the idea that Dizzy Gillespie's music compares to Bach, he finds no moral objection to believing that different races are differently intelligent, and he thinks it is perfectly fine to avoid hanging out with bald people. It is fairly safe to say that Rockwell's views coincide well with what Anti-Gnostic calls "the Dark Enlightenment."

I suppose the whole question - the one that Horwitz would like to force - is whether one can be both libertarian and ethnocentric. This is a question that likely lead to my unfortunate bromantic break-up with Sonic Charmer. It seems to be the question at the heart of the "open borders" debate. Can liberty-loving people be ethnocentric? Do those two ethics match up?

Coming at the question from the Enlightenment angle, as Horwitz does, replete as it is with tales of "all men are created equal," and women's suffrage, and civil rights, it is very difficult to conclude that ethnocentrism and libertarianism are compatible. Consider what libertarian godmother Ayn Rand wrote:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

In the Objectivist tradition, racism is collectivism, and collectivism is both anti-liberty and anti-life. But this argument will obviously have no sway with those libertarians, such as Rockwell, who believe that Rand was the leader of a cult.

Conclusion
And this is the tragic end of the libertarian movement. At the end of the day, after decades of progress, the movement unravels in full view of the public, not because liberty was tried and failed, but because libertarians themselves cannot seem to agree whether or not they are racists.

Let me briefly acknowledge the obvious critique here: I understand that the Rockwells and Steve Sailers of the world don't actually believe that they're racists, but it's hard to conclude otherwise when they insist that there is nothing morally objectionable about preferring the company of whites. Isn't it?

Like Horwitz, I believe this leaves a pockmark on the face of the liberty movement that scares people away whenever liberty starts to get favorable press. The Tea Party rises, and quickly falls, precisely because charges of racism can stick to essays like the Rockwell piece I've discussed here.

But if you think I'm not giving Rockwell a fair shake, consider this passage from the same essay:

The only way to sever libertarianism's link with libertinism is with a cleansing debate. I want to start that debate, and on the proper grounds.

In effect, Lew Rockwell never called for a declaration that his way, and only his way, was the viable form of libertarianism - at least not in the offending article. Instead, he outlined a position he called "paleo-libertarianism," and called for a debate.

To my knowledge, this debate never happened. Horwitz's blog post does not seem to advance the debate very far, either, although I readily concede that the ideas laid out on BleedingHeartLibertarians.com certainly qualify as participating in a debate about what libertarianism consists of.

Rather than lob rhetorical molotov cocktails at each other, I think the old guard should participate in the very debate Rockwell hoped to initiate. And, I think the starting point should be not the Rockwell article or the Ron Paul newsletters, or even Horwitz's blog post.

Instead, I think the debate should start at the same place that so many of these folks came to self-identify as libertarians in the first place: Ayn Rand. Let them have the debate, and let them start by articulating the extent to which they agree with Rand's views on racism, quoted above. From that starting point, let them produce their rationale and convince each other that "true" libertarianism is either anarcho-capitalistic ethnic enclaves, or enlightened, libertine, "bleeding heart" societies.