Right Reason

Please Leave Off the Shopkeepers

 

Source.

 

Another month, another problem with police brutality in America. The flavor of the month is Freddie Gray dying a week after being arrested of a fatal spinal-cord injury. How a twenty-five year old man could have sustained such an injury in the course of an arrest boggles the mind. In a news conference, Police Commissioner Anthony Bratts admitted that "We know our police employees failed to get him medical attention in a timely manner multiple times.” You see, when the police do well in America, they’re heroes deserving a place of honor in society. When they do wrong, they’re merely employees, no different than the cashier I walked past at the grocery store today. But I digress, matters became a bit more heated in Baltimore today when rioting broke out across the city following a protest and as I am typing, the mayor has declared a curfew.  

 The riot in Baltimore is an unfortunate reminder—if we didn’t already have enough around us—that society is hard. The difficulty of getting people with widely disparate beliefs and ambitions to cooperate with each other in a social order is immense. Thankfully, the fair-weather structure of incentives in the liberal society we live in today ensures that it is expedient for people to occupy a role within that social order and to play it out in their interaction with strangers. Everyone is made better and everyone is left free to go home to pursue their own amusement. Quid pro quo reigns and it wraps itself in the glory of apathy.

 

The fair-weather incentives can only last in the face of fair-weather injustice. Usually, it's the type of injustice that, say, happens to some poor, black kid in the ghetto. Usually. However, these are the days of #BlackLivesMatter and Freddie Gray fits perfectly into that narrative.

In Baltimore today, people aren’t apathetic and they aren’t satisfied with merely going home to pursue their own individual merriment. Instead, they’re marching. Unfortunately, the very same emotion that led someone to be willing to virtuously take a stand against a corrupt society has also motivated violence. People with grievances get fed up and strike out. The problem is that they strike out against innocent people.   

The 1992 Los Angeles riots is another variation on this theme. A much larger variation, but still a variation. People recognized they live in a kleptocratic society, got indignant, felt justified in being fed up and then so proceed to strike out against innocent people. They did so all while feeling that warm glow that their wrath is just. That warm glow broke the apathy our wider society is based on. Worse, it broke that apathy while giving the rioters the feeling that they could destroy, even if innocent people were harmed. The sight of Koreatown shopkeepers keeping watch over their property after their part of the town was abandoned by the LAPD really does make one think, if just for a second, that a Hobbesian state of nature still threatens our existence today.

 

 

 

It should be a foregone conclusion that the United States has a police brutality problem. For far too long, civilian police departments have gotten away with putting the absolute safety of officers beyond serving the public interest. America slept as towns of a few thousand got SWAT teams armed to the teeth and as every officer began walking around as if he were in Iraq or Syria, with a gun at their waist and body armor around their torsos. Whatever the police may have been twenty, thirty or however long ago you wish to go back, they are certainly not civilian today. They are a paramilitary force and everyone is reminded of that every single time that they interact with the soldiers masquerading as civilians. 

Alas, the riots in Baltimore only give credence to the belief that a thin blue line is all that stands between civilization and barbarism. It only takes the spotlight away from the institutional disparity between poor blacks, most of whose ancestors were hauled to this continent as cargo, and the rest of America. At a time when the protest in wake of Freddie Gray’s death needed to be collected and civil, a few savages decided to take advantage of the situation and, in doing so, only helping to make the Baltimore police look ever more sympathetic. 

 

It feels good to be fed up. It feels good to take action against the oppressors above and to demand that the entire machine must grind to a halt if that is what justice demands. There is no denying that. But at what cost? Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus is a tempting creed, but one that ultimately undermines human flourishing. It conveniently ignores the multitudes whose worlds would suddenly end. Those people just trying to live out their lives in the situation that they find themselves in. They are the ones, much like the Koreatown shopkeepers, who are lost in the crossfire when the civic struggle for reform devolves into an egocentric orgy of violence.  

In Baltimore, there are people who will return to their shops and find them looted. They will continue on with their professions whatever happens to the Baltimore police department. They are the meek of the earth and, ultimately, the foundation of the social order that we all are enriched by. Any movement that would hurt them reveals its barbarism the first moment it lifts its fists. Rage against the machine all you want, but do respect the sacred rules of society. 

Free Speech: Grammar or Composition?

 

 

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

-Lord Acton

 

From "Schooling, sex, and segregation" in The Economist's "Erasmus" blog:

In some ways, campus politics in Britain are merely a rather tepid version of what goes on at American colleges, where battles over what can be said on campus, about matters like faith, sex and sexual orientation, have been raging harder and for much longer. What's missing from the British scene is the purist libertarian voice which protects the right of individuals and sub-groups to air all manner of controversial views, from militant atheism to religious conservatism, so long as they do not harm others (as segregation might well do) or incite people to violence. That is something Britain could learn from.    

The liberal value of free speech is not about allowing people to say what has the backing of science or what has the backing of conventional norms; instead, it is about establishing individuals’ ability to say what they believe. Free speech is not about ensuring that the truth is spoken. It is about ensuring that falsity may be spoken without threat of reprisal. Whether it is the Westboro Baptist Church or Kurt Westergaard’s controversial cartoons, people should be free to express whatever opinion they want. 

However, there are those who seek to ban certain forms of speech in order to prevent the offense that they can inflict upon others, but the problems with such schemes is that they ensure that there will be political conflicts about what should be an acceptable form of speech. B.C.’s hope that there can be a pure libertarian voice in the problem of religion on British campuses is thus a hope that there can be grammatical rules of free speech applied there so that conflicts about religion and identity can be restricted to civil society. 

 

On the issue of free speech, we can see that there is a divergence in the understanding of what is mean by the term which can largely be identified between a conflict between the classical liberal and the social democratic view. Useful here is Adam Smith’s discussion of two different types of rules: a type which is grammatical whereas another which is compositional. He defined the difference in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: 

The rules of justice may be compared to the rules of grammar; the rules of the other virtues, to the rules which critics lay down for the attainment of what is sublime and elegant in composition. The one, are precise, accurate, and indispensable. The other, are loose, vague, and indeterminate, and present us rather with a general idea of the perfection we ought to aim at, than afford us any certain and infallible directions for acquiring it. A man may learn to write grammatically by rule, with the most absolute infallibility; and so, perhaps, he may be taught to act justly. But there are no rules whose observance will infallibly lead us to the attainment of elegance or sublimity in writing; though there are some which may help us, in some measure, to correct and ascertain the vague ideas which we might otherwise have entertained of those perfections. And there are no rules by the knowledge of which we can infallibly be taught to act upon all occasions with prudence, with just magnanimity, or proper beneficence: though there are some which may enable us to correct and ascertain, in several respects, the imperfect ideas which we might otherwise have entertained of those virtues. (TMS, III.6.11)

The divergence between classical liberalism and of social democracy can be best expressed by looking at the ways that the two handle the rules of free speech. Whereas classical liberalism approaches free speech from a grammatical point of view, social democracy approaches free speech from a compositional point of view. 

 

The tension between the classical liberal view and the social democratic view, when the two doctrines had yet to fully diverge from one another and were allied against the aristocracy and absolutism, are evident in two different statements of free speech within the American Constitution, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The American Constitution’s First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen reads: "The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law."  

 

For classical liberals, what matters is that certain rules are followed: That the law should have no authority to suppress any speech, and that private citizens ought to respect other people’s speech within civil society, though the classical liberal view no doubt emphasizes the former. The American First Amendment expresses this grammatical view with the simple clause “Congress shall pass no law…” That is a rule which is grammatical in nature, and there is no vagueness within its expression which allows for Congress to act in the matter. It is a rule which simply directs Congress to act in a way which can be perfected by its no interfering in “abridging the freedom of speech.” For classical liberals, what matters is that Congress, or any other legislative body, adheres to the rule of not interfering with the freedom of speech. 

For social democrats, what matters is a environment of toleration, and there therefore must be room for speech which harms that environment to be banned. Within The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, there is room for the National Constituent Assembly to define “abuses of speech” for reasons of that body’s deliberation. Freedom of speech is therefore not grammatical, but “loose, vague, and indeterminate.” The manner in which the legislative body may constrain the freedom of speech is left undefined, and thereby provides no rules by which that body may infallibly act towards the general welfare. The government may therefore suppress certain forms of speech, “hate speech,” in order to protect the value of toleration. In order to prevent the offense that a group like the Westboro Baptist Church or a National Socialist party may inflict upon others minding their own business in society, the government may suppress certain forms of speech. Examples include Canada’s government preventing the Westboro Baptist Church from protesting within its jurisdiction, and the German government’s suppression of NSDAP in all its forms. 

Overall, the difference between the ways that the First Amendment and Article 11 define the freedom of speech displays the two different ways in which both classical liberals and social democrats think about freedom of speech. The classically liberal First Amendment simply prevents Congress from making any law regulating speech in the grammatical “Congress shall make no law…,” and thereby provides a grammatical rule which can be perfectly put into action. The socially democratic Article 11, on the other hand, allows for the National Constituent Assembly to define abuses of speech which may then be suppressed, and thus for judgement calls to be made as to what should exactly be protected by free speech. 

 

 

If freedom of speech is to be “loose, vague, and in determinant” and if there are to be judgment calls about what it exactly means, then there is going to be conflict in society about defining it. These conflicts are not simply a matter of people having heterogenous preferences. Instead, these conflicts shall be a matter, as they actually are, about conflicting identities. In the article from “Erasmus,” we see those conflicts about identity boil over in Great Britain’s universities as people try to enforce their own identities as the proper identity of society at large by trying to enforce them. There are necessarily going to be political winners and losers once the conflicts have been resolved, and it is uncertain whether society at large shall even benefit from that resolution.

B.C.’s lament that there is no “purist libertarian voice” within the conflict makes the most sense when considered through the perspective of free speech preventing the need for political winners and losers on topics of speech. The purist libertarian voice being the classical liberal view I’ve identified above of establishing freedom of speech as a matter of “precise, accurate, and indispensable” rules. “Congress shall pass no law…” on the matter of what speech is allowed in society, and so the conflict within civil society on questions of identity cannot be waged within Congress largely protecting those minding their own business from the consequences of those questions. There is therefore nothing to be fought there on the issues, and nothing to demarcate winners and losers on the issue besides what people voluntarily choose to do.

Very few people, for instance, had their lives changed by the recent scandal over free speech and “Duck Dynasty,” and there was no need to call judgment from Congress to interfere with the decision. Some may have been upset at the decision, but they were free to make their concern heard, and to cut off their own connections with those who had made the decision. Everything was contain and handled outside of Congress’ jurisdiction without any reference to political power.  

 

The "Harmony of Interests," or the Lack Thereof

 

 

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

-Geroge Santyana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

 

Conflict, in the broader sense of the world, is caused in society by divergent interests. At best, these divergent interests lead to interactions that leave at least one party at the table despondent. At worst, they will lead to opportunities for individuals to use others as means towards their own interests without the consent of those means. The worst case can lead to institutionalized patterns of subjugation and domination within society if there is no force from countervailing against the temptations to dominate as the norms of the dominators replicate themselves across other mind's across space and time.

An obvious set of statements, perhaps, but one that nevertheless needs to be continually repeated. After all, there have been naïve attempts to argue that within certain modes of social cooperation there can only be a harmony of interests. Ludwig von Mises does this in Human Action, in a section titled “The Harmony of 'Rightly Understood Interests,'” when he argues that the interests of all in society are made harmonious by a concern for the multiplication of wealth via cooperation within the division labor. For him, it is the market order that brings into harmony all of the interests of humanity. His is one of the best statement of the optimistic view of many classical economists that the progressively increasing productivity of labor made possible by the division of labor unites everyone within that division of labor with a concern for its continuation. Mises argues that within such a system of cooperation, the irreconcilable conflicts of competition in the Malthusian state of nature are replaced by the mutually-beneficial conflicts, if they can even be called that, of catallactic competition.

 

 

Mises ignores that even within human society today there are winners and losers as long as we move away from equilibrium and introduce institutional imperfections. Of course, we could simply transform the question into a Kantian discourse about whether the only way of considering whether somehow is truly benefited is when we think of those decisions as being made universal across all of society. Hence one could argue that even though a businessman benefiting from protectionism may be harmed by free trade policies, but since the policies he benefits from cannot be universalized across society, then he cannot said to be really losing from a justice point of view because he benefits from the universalize of free-trade norms. There is thus a harmony of interests because people have their “rightly understood” economic interests best pursued without any reference to their particular situation. It is an argument from beyond Rawl's veil of ignorance before Justice as Fairness.

However, during the course of this argument, it transitions from a positive question about whether human relationships are actually harmonious within the division of labor as it is into a normative one about how human beings ought to see their relationships in some Platonic heaven. The normative content is snuck into his analysis from the start right at the section title: “The Harmony of the 'Rightly Understood' Interests.” Yes, an economist may very well be right in pointing out to people that their interests are best served in general under the conditions of cooperation under the division of labor. However, there will be situations in which people have their own best interests served in that particular situation by acting with means contradictory to the maintenance of a market order. There will be opportunities for businesses to gain profit not by cutting costs or innovating, but by constructing barriers to entry, and by securing subsidies for themselves. In addition, even though in some long run those who defected from capitalist norms may be hurt by their actions, not everyone will survive to see that long run, and so the economist is left with no means of arguing that their interests are best served under the division of labor.

 

Human social interaction often takes the form of a Prisoner's Dilemma, and whether there is a genuine harmony of interests may very well influence the strategies that people play in such circumstances. Under a regime where the harmony of interests is the case, it would not be unbelievable that people would choose to cooperate, despite the costs to themselves, believing that their interests are best pursued by the overall health of the system which they know, knowing their rightly understood interests, that they will profit from in the future. Busy bees them all! Gone are the days of shirking and the principal-agent problem in this world for everyone knows that their interests are all connected by a great chain, to steal a metaphor of Andrew Ryan's, that they should all tug together on in one collective effort!

However, this is clearly not the case. Both the problems of shirking and of the principal-agent variety remain in this world. People play defect the world over. Despite what the economist may say, people believe that, at least occasionally, the best way to advance their own interests is to play defect and to harm the overall welfare of society. Human society, even though the modern extended order has harmonized the interests of its constituents to an unparalleled degree, is still an arena of conflicting interests. An obvious statement, to repeat what was said in the beginning, but one that needs repeating.