Right Reason

JS Mill's Significance in an Age of Trumpism

 

 

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

 

The idea of liberty is difficult to pin down with a single system. Whenever we try, many of liberty’s salient aspects inevitably slip from our account, however well-formulated it may have been. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, liberty is large, it contains multitudes.

Liberty must therefore be appreciated and studied from many perspectives, such as a birthright that must be defended against encroachment or as the rule giving rise to the division of labor benefiting all of humanity. But none of those perspectives alone can suffice. To defend liberty, we must be catholic in how we approach the idea of liberty, fitting our perspective to the challenges we face. In the midst of Donald Trump’s ascendance in the Republican primary, inebriated on a dangerous cocktail of nativism and economic nationalism spiked with blind anger, we can advance liberty in our day best through the perspective of John Stuart Mill.

 

Unlike many other philosophers of liberty, Mill was never satisfied with characterizing liberty simply as a force for circumscribing the power of the state. In On Liberty, he emphatically argued that there was a wider role for liberty than constraining leviathan. He singled out individuality as an essential ingredient to human flourishing and reasoned that liberty must serve as a force that promotes the individuality each person in society. After all, to be able to make one’s own opinions about the good life and to act upon them was a part of a life worth living.

Liberty, Mill contended, must justify the right of each person to cultivate their own individuality and provide them with a social space for doing so. It is more than a bulwark against the political class, it is also a bulwark against prevailing opinion and the tyranny of the majority. If it is to truly contribute to human flourishing, liberty must safeguard experiments in living against whomever would aggressively interfere with them.

 

Trumpism is an explicit rejection of Mill’s philosophy of liberty. Donald Trump’s successful coup of the Republican party demonstrates why a robust defense of liberty must extend beyond ideas of limiting the political class and that it must also extend to protect people against prevailing opinion. One of the greatest advantages that Trump has had so far in that endeavor has been that his brand directly appeals to the white-identity politics with the party that most other Republicans only flirt with. Rather than validating the dignity of people at the margins of prevailing opinion, Trump belittles them in order to raise the prestige of the prevailing white identity.

A sizable fraction of his voters believe that they—the white, Christian, non-college educated portion of the American population—are the ones under threat and need protection from the government—protection that Trump is selling. The American National Election Studies’ The 2016 Pilot Study attests that independent and Republican voters who esteem their white racial identity as important are 30 points more likely to support Trump than those who do not similarly esteem it. These are the people who believe that they have been left behind as they watch both manufacturing jobs go overseas and their status in their status in society be diminished.

 

In his campaign, Trump has gleefully exploited their fears and apprehensions. His appeal transcends matters of policy and revolves around an unapologetic affirmation of his supporters white identities. Trumpism isn’t a collection of ideas, it is a force for white identity consolidated under the cult of personality of its leader: The Donald, who with his WWE appearances and his hard-constructed aura of capitalistic success, immediately appeals to disaffected whites within the Republican party.

‘Make America great again’ can be translated as ‘make the white identity prestigious again.’ Whether it’s bringing back jobs from China, negotiating with Iran or passing a new health-care plan, Trump is simply going to make his followers important again in the world. He is going to ensure that they should be respect, and feared, the world over. How is Trump going to do this? If what he has said is to be believed, he’s going to triumph because he’s the winniest winner who has ever won. Being the consummate alpha male, the strength of Trump’s will shall simply overwhelm all who oppose him.

Suiting the style of identity politics, Trump’s rhetoric has demonized those who do not neatly fit into Trumpism’s notion of whiteness. Muslim refugees are branded as terrorists. Mexican immigrants are reviled as drug-mules and rapists. Of course, when Trump was confronted with a question about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, he had to do some research before repudiating them, later rationalizing the entire incident as being caused by a faulty earpiece, even though he had repeated Duke’s name to the reporter. All in all, Trumpism seeks to retreat Americans back behind the walls of a secure white identity and to raise the drawbridge up behind them.

 

John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty is a useful, and much needed, palliative against Trumpism and its prejudiced emphasis on white identity as being the sole identity to be esteemed in society. Mill’s philosophy teaches how a drawbridge-down approach to the world is how we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us. Against Trumpism’s confidence in the superiority of a single identity, On Liberty reveals how openness to the wider world, not hostility towards it, is how we achieve virtue and flourishing. Even Pope Francis has expressed a similar opinion when said that no one who only thinks of building walls, rather than bridges, could be a Christian.

Liberty also wasn’t an academic curiosity to Mill. During his life, he championed the individuality and dignity of the people at the margins of his own society, including women, slaves and religious nonconformists. As a Member of Parliament, he advocated women’s suffrage and the legalization of contraceptives. Today, he would certainly be writing about how black lives matter, speaking out against those disparaging Mexican immigrants and advocating the cause of Muslim refugees. Against Trumpism, Mill would defend a robust drawbridge-down stance as a force that benefits and enriches the societies that adopt it.

 

Liberty flourishes in an environment in which people are free to cultivate their own individuality. Trumpism, with its unmitigated glorification of white identity at the expense of those at the margins, represents a threat to that environment. To palliate Trumpism, those who love liberty need to inject some of the themes of Mill’s On Liberty into their political discourse. We need to emphasize that theme in Mill’s On Liberty that liberty is about more than just constraining the state, that it is also about justifying those at the margins of prevailing opinion, whether they be Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees or just those who do not conform to the white identity at the heart of Trumpism.

Suiting the style of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty, all lovers of liberty, whatever political labels they may take, need to condemn those who would raise the drawbridge behind a single comfortable identity, even if it may be their own. To once again quote Walt Whitman, they must take seriously that “whoever degrades another degrades me.”

It's About Institutions, Not Rulers

 

Evonomics. Need I say more?

With its motto of "the next evolution in economics", Evonomics is proof that evolution need not always lead to improvements.  Each day there seems to be another snarky article on the website attacking one of the fundamental principles of our civilization: Liberty. There does not seem to be a floor to how base the discourse over there can be. This time it's: "Stop crying about the size of government. Start caring about who controls it."

 

The titles says it all. Since Evonomics is David Sloan Wilson's baby, I'm much less willing to believe that the title was slapped on by an editor with no contact with the author, as is so Keeping with the Evonomics' track record, the title is trolling par excellence. It is a glib attempt to sell superiority to Evonomics' readers than to actually try to understand the liberal critique of state-power on its own terms.

Ultimately, Wilson's entire attempt at 'updating' Hayek is, root and stem, an attempt to justify the policies he likes, principally his notion that his arbitrary design principles are the secret sauce for national prosperity. Despite his accomplishments in evolutionary biology, he is a demagogue who poses as a man of science.

 

Here, I can speak from personal experience. I was at the seminar at George Mason that Wilson referred to in the beginning of the article. During the Q&A of that seminar, when Wilson was addressed with the point that basic measures of property rights, à la the Frasier Index, are robustly correlated with a nation's prosperity, Wilson seemed dumbfounded. Yes, he had harped on about the need to get good 'design principles' for states, choosing for his example the curious example of the Nordic petrostate Norway, rather than, say, Sweden next-door (because as you certainly know Sweden is a rather liberal nation). However, that property rights could be that basic design principle was a queer idea to him. The thought seemed to have never crossed his mind!

To think, a man who clearly does not appreciate the clear and vivid link between liberty and prosperity thinks so highly of himself to lecture economists on his website. So much for "the next evolution of economics". 

Daron Acelmogu, who was interviewed in the article, helped to give material for the circus:

It is also the case, and this is something we emphasize a lot throughout Why Nations Fail, that most states throughout history and even today serve the interests of the political elite and are part of their economic problems, not their solution. But this is not because the state is unnecessary or evil, but because of who controls it and what capacities it has invested in and developed.

 

The question that political thinkers should consider is not who should rule but what laws should rule. As understood by David Hume and John Adams, a nation is only as good as its worst ruler. In "That politics may be reduced to a science", Hume wrote: "A constitution is only so far good, as it provides a remedy again mal-administration..." He goes on to assert that: "Is our constitution so excellent? Then a change of ministry can be no such dreadful event; since it is essential to such a constitution, in every ministry, both to preserve itself from violation, and to prevent all enormities in the administration." John Adams stated, and later help enshrine in the Massachusetts Constitution, that principle that a good government was a "government of law, not of man." 

Wilson's shtick is aimed against that sacred principle. The rule of law, after all, would not allow for a government to enact his beloved design principles. And so Wilson seeks to re-orientate the question of constitutional politics around who should rule. But that's a re-orientation that leads straight to tyranny. And that's not just my accusation. It is a microcosm for the salient thesis of Karl Popper's The Open Society and It's Enemies: 

But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any political problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question 'Who should rule?' is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato's admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently 'good' or 'wise' (we need not worry about the precise meanings of these terms), and that it is not all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problems of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage? (Popper 1966: 120-121)

That's an approach to political questions that is embraced to the fullest at George Mason University and makes it one of the best economics department on earth. 

 

All too related to this topic is Tyler Cowen's "The criticism of Trump which few will utter":

It is sad to see so many people, including those on the Left or in the Democratic Party, criticize the idea of a Trump presidency without ever uttering the phrase: “No man or woman should have so much political power over others.”  I agree with many of the moral criticisms of Trump as a leader, but don’t let them distract you from this broader truth.

...

The good news, if that is what one should call it, is that the best criticisms of Trump involve the concept of individual liberty and freedom from arbitrary legal authority and pure presidential discretion.  The bad news is that so few intellectuals have the relevant ideological vocabulary in that regard.

 

For a Free Society, The Freedom of Speech is a Sine Qua None

 

Guilt only dreads Liberty of Speech, which drags it out of its lurking Holes, and exposes its Deformity and Horrour to Day-light.

-Letter 15, Cato's Letters

 

From The Economist's "Google and the EU: On being forgotten":

The European Parliament has backed a “right to be forgotten”, though to become law it would need the approval of all the European Union’s 28 member states. Mr Mosley has won the first round of a legal battle in Germany to block the images appearing on Google searches there.

Now the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU’s highest court, has boosted this cause in a landmark case (seearticle). A Spanish lawyer, Mario Costeja González, sued Google because its search results linked his name to a newspaper article from 1998 about a now-resolved lawsuit. The court ruled that Google was a “data controller” under the 19-year-old European law on data protection, which gives individuals strong rights over data that others hold on them. It said Google could be required not to display links to information that is “inadequate, irrelevant...or excessive”, given the purpose for which they are processed, and the time elapsed. Individuals will be able to appeal to their national data watchdogs if they are turned down.

The court’s desire to protect victims of misunderstanding and malice is understandable. But a right to be forgotten would be hard to implement. Even if Google is made to censor its search results in Europe, in America the First Amendment’s free-speech provision usually trumps privacy concerns. With modest technical know-how, European internet users will be able to make American-style searches. Europe will hardly want to build a Chinese-style firewall to prevent that.

And even if it were practicable to force companies to erase the past, it would do more harm than good. It would hamper everyone interested in finding out inconvenient truths about those who would like their past covered up. 

 

The right to be forgotten is an all too familiar instance of rights creep, and one of the more troubling examples of that trend. Unlike many other examples, like the right to clean water or the right to a living income, the right to be forgotten isn't really even that desirable. Very few people actually go about their life wanting to simply fade away into the shadows.

The measure consequently a bit weird, but it is even odious once we consider that no one has any just claim to what another person says about them in a free society. The ability to speak the truth about another person is something which keeps people accountable. Yes, there are many people who are hurt by hysterical witch hunts, but that harm is apart of a free society. For instance, even though many Catholic priests have been harmed by false accusations following the Boston Globe breaking the story about how bishops often covered up cases of clerics abusing children in 2002, the Boston Globe still shouldn't have been prevented from covering that story. Here, Edmund Burke's words that men are suited for liberty insofar as they can put moral chains upon their appetites 

 

Witch hunts do occur, but reputations and people's ability to form unwanted opinions about others are important mechanisms ensuring cooperation between people. Beyond the insular microcosmos of our own friends and family, human society is largely constituted by strategic interactions with people that we generally have little information about, and yet tools like a Google search check can be used as a basic way of checking their reputation. If Google cannot remember Mr Mosley's scandal, then can Google remember the low rating someone gave to a restaurant for no good reason? The answer is not obvious to me. 

The right to be forgotten can all too quickly turn into a right to not be criticized. The Economist wisely ended its article with a quote from James Madison: "I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

 

Even though the greatest threat to the freedom of speech is its abridgment becoming mundane, there are laws throughout the world which tread over people's rights to speak freely. That is one great thing about the United States: In America, the First Amendment assures anyone the right to say whatever they like, and event to put their money where their mouth is.

No liberal civilization is possible without something like the First Amendment and yet, even across the Western world, there's legislation everywhere that limits how people can express themselves and how people can put their skin in the game once they have spoken mere words.  That one cannot fly a swastika in Germany, that Swedish law does not protect a sermon which condemns homosexuality, as in the case of Åke Green, and that the 2010 Citizens United case was even controversial make manifest just how unpopular the freedom of speech really is, and how necessary it is to enshrine its protection in law.  

 

What is the Open Society?

 

 

Ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

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, The History of Freedom in Antiquity 

 

The ‘open society’ is a term much used, but tragically little understood. Like too many terms within political philosophy, it is simply used in an emotivistic fashion to signify the author’s approval of something. Originating with Henri Bergson’s writing in the 1930s, the term was make famous by Karl Popper’s two volume project, The Open Society and Its Enemies. The books were a sustained attack on both the political ideas of Plato as well as the historicism of Hegel and Marx, and a powerful argument for the advantages of liberal democracy. The ‘open society’ has thereafter become a banner for liberals and social democrats, but its widespread use has not been beneficial for its clear meaning as a term in conversation. Which leads to the question: What exactly is the ‘open society’?  

Even though Popper ( a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society) certainly had a favorable opinion of liberal democracy, we must remember that Karl Popper’s concept of an ‘open society’ was epistemological, not political. It is very easy to simply identify the open society with a certain political regime in which democracy flourishes, and people have certain guaranteed rights, but Popper’s point did not have anything directly to do with either of those two points. The open society is a society in which people can make their own opinions about norms and policies, and can act upon those opinions. When Popper quoted Pericles as being a proponent of the open society when he quotes him as saying: “Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it”, Popper was noting that Pericles’ notion of Athenian democracy enabled the Athenian to make his own decisions about political decision making, and that was the essential condition making Athens an open society.  

 

What differentiated an open society from a closed society is thereby that, within the open society, individuals would be able to make decisions to change cultural norms. Closed societies, on the other hand, are found in a lack of a distinction between the conventional laws of human society, and the physical laws of the universe. They are constituted by taboos, norms thought to be permanent features of the world just like gravity or the movement of the stars and moon above. Thought to be the creation of gods, of forces of history, or of demigod-like leaders, and the rigidity of these taboos ensures that the society is closed to change. Popper even argued that the existence of taboos within closed societies resulted in people within those societies not being faced with decisions that could be called moral:

There are few problems in this form of life, and nothing equivalent to moral problems. I do not mean to say that a member of a tribe does not sometimes need much heroism and endurance in order to act in accordance with the taboos. What I mean is that he will rarely find himself in the position of doubting how he ought to act. The right way is always determined, though difficulties must be overcome in following it. It is determined by taboos, by magical tribal institutions which can never become objects of critical consideration (Popper 1945, 172). 

Kierkegaard’s assertion that philosophy begins with doubt is quite germane here. Popper writes on what differentiates the open society from that of taboos:

Political decisions may lead to the alteration of taboos, and even of political laws which are no longer taboos. The great difference is the possibility of rational reflection of these matters… And in our own time, many of us make rational decisions concerning the desirability or otherwise of new legislation, and of other institutional changes; that is to say, decisions based upon an estimate of possible consequences, and upon a conscious preference for some of them. We recognize rational personal responsibility.

In what follows, the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society (Ibid, 173).

The open society comes to fruition when people can philosophize, in however a crude fashion, and come to make decisions which can have impact upon the conventions of society. Unlike the closed society, the open society can be changed by the opinions of those within it.

 

What defines the open society is therefore an answer to a question which Darwin never broached in On the Origin of Species: What types of systems can evolve? It’s important here to note that Charles Darwin never used the word ‘evolution.’ Instead, he used the phrase ‘descent with modification.’ At the beginning of the final chapter of On the Origin of Species, Darwin described his argument as being “the theory of descent with modification; through variation and Natural Selection.” Questions of evolution are best thought of in terms of ‘descent with modification’ because the term constantly reminds us what we should be thinking about when we think about evolution: The mutability of objects across time because of some source of variation.  

‘Evolution’ is a term used so often and so widely that it loses its ability to really address what we are thinking about when we talk about what it addresses. From being used to refer to the ”theory of descent with modification; through variation and Natural Selection” (e.g. “We should teach evolution, not creationism in schools”) to the notion that certain types of systems in the world which can adapt to change through time (e.g. “Societies evolve throughout history”), ‘evolution’ does little good to exactly specify what we are trying to talk about when we it. ‘Descent with modification’, on the other hand, focuses our attention on what matters: that there are certain systems which can change through succeeding iterations. 

 

 

The closed society is a closed system with no  source of change which can introduce variation into it. The way that societies change is with alterations to norms and institutions. If those norms and institutions are taboos, assumed as permanent features of the world and thereby insulated from criticism, then that society does not have a effective way of adapting to the changing demands of its populations. Within the closed society, there is therefore an identity between the taboos of the present generation with that of the previous generation. However, when people are left to make their own judgments of the desirability of norms and institutions, then there is a source of variation which can then change the society. With a variation in judgements about the desirability of norms and institutions, society can change over time, and descent with variation - that is, evolution - is therefore possible.

The open society is the a society which enables the accumulation of useful social variation which can encourage the flourishing of those within it. What a ‘useful’ variation is must be kept empty here. To think that the human mind can define what social variation is useful from the point of view of society as a whole is to fall victim of the fatal conceit. There is a knowledge problem in recognizing the useful from the harmful since only those who are familiar with the variation in question will by and large have any chance in properly making that call. Even then, many may still make mistakes. And so there must be feedback mechanisms in place whose soundness can be relied upon with no reference to the specific people involved with them. The project of the open society is thus, in short, about figuring out the legal institutions, the formal rules of the game for society at large, which enable the accumulation of useful social variation. 

 

 

 

That Popper harshly criticized the idea of national destiny within The Open Society and Its Enemies fits with all that I have said above. Societies do not follow predetermined courses through history, and the traits that they have at any moment in time cannot be attributed to destiny. Instead, those traits are a consequence of a historically continent series of events, and unique outcomes which resulted in certain variations manifesting themselves within society at large. The open society is simply no guarantee of optimal outcomes. Speaking technically, evolution can get stuck within local maxima within its fitness landscape, and those local maxima can prevent its fitness walk from finding the global maximum; evolution, does not necessarily yield the optimal outcome. Instead, all that the open society can  guarantee us is a fighting chance for that optimal outcome. 

Those institutions and habits which we identify with the optimal outcome cannot simply be assumed as an outcome of history -  along the great forward march of progress - but must be understood as perishable. I thus like to modify the term ‘open society’ with the adjective ‘free’ to identify that society, one protecting the dignity of the individual human person’s free will, as the optimal outcome. Not only is it open, but it is also free; to get there, we must not only insist on having an open society, a society which can accumulate useful variation, but also a society which conforms to classically liberal notions of political ethics. 

 

 

Bibliography

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

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.  

 

Liberty and the Anglosphere: Reflections on Hannan's _Inventing Liberty_

 

 

The nations, not so blest as thee,

Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

 

In his recent book, Inventing Liberty: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, MEP Daniel Hannan discusses how the ideas of a liberal society emerged within the British isles over a course of hundreds of years, and how their proliferation across the world happened within a distinctly English-speaking context. Hannan argues that it has been the ascendency of the Anglosphere in the past three hundred years, including nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, which has made possible the similar ascendency of liberal values over that same time period. Hannan argues that it was the culture of common law, of Magna Carta, and of representative government, not intellectual arguments, which made the free and open society possible. As intellectuals discussed (and eventually en masse rejected) the values which cultivated such a society, they were transported to and flowered in British colonies the world over,  even amongst the prisoners shipped to Australia.  

 

The main question, at least for me, which Inventing Liberty brings up is the question of how culture has made liberalism possible. A constant problem facing any order at the level of society at large is: How do people participate within them? As every angsty teenager has recognized, sometimes society can be an impersonal machine in which people can be but cogs, used as means rather than as ends in and of themselves. As Shakespeare wrote: All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players. What guides those players, and forms their collective patterns of behavior into what we know as as society are the institutions and norms of the societies which people find themselves surrounded by. The way that people participate in the social orders they live in is thus often merely a product of the culture they are surrounded by. 

Of course, we all know (and for the most part appreciate) that institutions matter. But there is something quite different between the argument which Hannan is making, and the arguments which many institution-matter theorists make is that Hannan argues, implicitly though, that we cannot simply replicate the institutions of the Anglosphere to non-Anglosphere countries. The necessary jump between Hannan’s main point in Inventing Liberty and an institutions-matter theorist like James Buchanan’s throughout his corpus is that Hannan’s vision is very much historically fatalistic whereas Buchahan looks at the problem from the point of view of social contract theory. For Buchahan, the question what can be done is a very real one, though in Hannan, what can be done is largely just a matter of preserving what is already there. In Hannan's history, institutions are determined by culture, and if a nation does not have the culture to support good institutions, then it is by and large doomed to go without them.

The British character of liberalism and of the commercial society it animates is corroborated by common language. When people are speaking about the core tenet of a liberal market, competition, people, especially in Continental Europe, often speak of “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” The view that it is that British variety which encourages “dog-eat-dog” competition whereas their more “cooperative” approach cultivated more moral outcomes. The use of such language is so wide that it has gotten its own page of Wikipedia: “The Anglo-Saxon Model.” The culturally English-speaking nature of the modern commercial society is thereby displayed by its identification with a certain cultural group, that of Great Britiain.

 

The question which I am naturally lead to is then: Why Britain? Why did the English-speaking population become the cradle of liberal ideas rather than, say the populations of Holland or Italy? The Dutch certainly went a long way towards the development of liberal ideas, and during the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam was a shining light in the world. There, the first modern stock market was established there by the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Levels of religious toleration were high compared to the rest of Europe, especially towards the Jews (though the Catholics suffered due to perceived political loyalties to the Habsburg empire that the Dutch Republic had succeeded from). Daniel Hannan even celebrates Dutch society in “I realised why I like the Dutch so much,” and claims that what he loves about Dutch society is found in the bourgeois values that the Dutch and British both share: “Only recently, though, was I able to put my finger on what I liked so much. It’s this: for centuries, the Dutch made the honest pursuit of self-betterment a supreme virtue.” The bourgeois virtues which Deirdre McCloskey celebrates in her aptly named book, The Bourgeois Virtues, were quickly coming to fruition within Amsterdam, and the Dutch Republic could therefore have seemed to be a viable candidate to be the cradle of liberalism for the Western world. 

That was not to be, though. One of the main reasons was that the Dutch Republic did not have Great Britain’s fortunate geography. Unlike Great Britain, which is an island separated from the Continent, the Netherlands is a low-lying plain, much of it reclaimed from the sea, close to the center of Europe. As such, the influenced of the bourgeois virtues in the Netherlands was vulnerable of being snuffed out by conquest, and that is one of the events which happened following the Dutch Golden Age. Whereas the British were able to survive and compete against the Continental powers by outdoing them on the seas, the Dutch Republic never had such an option, and like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was unable to assert its independence forever against the encroachments of illberal states very adept at waging war. Unlike those two, Great Britain was in the fateful position of being separated by the sea from the many wars which were waged on the Continent in the early modern period, and was thereby separated from the need of winning those wars, at the cost of its liberal values, in order to ensure its survival.

 

In the end, liberalism wasn’t discovered by the great powers of human reason; rather, it was cultivated in culture until finally being recognized by the mind. It is not a necessary outcome of progress. Rather, it is a historical accident. The ascendency of liberalism is thus not a matter, as it often is depicted to be, of the triumph of human reason over bigotry and superstition. Instead, the ascendency of liberalism is a matter of a historically contingent sequence of unique events in unique places; of infectous habits rather than explicit ideas. The lesson to be appreciated from Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Liberty is that the free and open society is a consequence not of human ideas, but of human history. 

 

Constitutional Orders as Evolutionarily Stable Strategies

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor [condemn him], but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

-Magna Carta, Section XXIX

 

Within the Occident and beyond, constitutions have been one of the primary means man has had for shaping the realizations within his society. Within the liberal tradition, they have been motivated desire to create general rules that make possible the limitation of power within society by restricting its use to certain universal rules. By setting in place certain abstract rules by which the game of society, so to speak, is played, constitutions are able to lead to constitutional orders that will certain outcomes in society are made possible.

Key to the success of any constitutional order is the universality of these rules since it is by binding all within the relevant polity to certain patterns of action that a constitution is able to secure certain realizations within society. It is this attempt to ensure the universal adherence of certain patterns of action that leads to the perspective that a constitution is an attempt to create an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) of institutions in which no institution deemed undesirable can mutate and proliferate.

Tersely described, an ESS is a set of strategies that, when adopted by the population in question, can fully repel any attempt by a newly mutated strategy to survive within that population. Originally formulated by John Maynard Smith and Richard Price in the 1970’s in order to explain contests between animals, its use can be expanded to any evolutionary system when what is being analyzed is the changing frequency of objects, be they genes or institutions, within it. The ESS of a constitutional order describes a society in which the rules that form that order, by the sake of their universality (and the enforcement of their universality), are able to exclude certain patterns of actions that are conditioned by abstract rules contradictory to the relevant constitution. By understanding a constitutional order in this way, we can further and augment our understanding of the necessity of the universality of the laws within that order since it is only by their capability to fully exclude anything that contradicts those laws that a constitutional order is able to secure certain outcomes.

This brings us to another characteristic of any constitution: It is a rational constructivist technique for trying to bring about realizations within society determined desirable according to the human conception of the good life. Any constitutional thus is an attempt by its authors to bring about social outcomes that are congruent to a liberal society by establishing certain general rules that ensure the exclusion of those outcomes. An example of this would be precluding an outcome like the imprisoning of individuals outside of the authority of the government by obliging the custodian to charge the prisoner with a crime. For the writ of habeas corpus to be able to prevent practices like unlawful detention within the constitutional order, and thus ensure that it is an ESS, then it, along with the institutions that support it, must be a general rule that prescribes a pattern of action (i.e. the police must charge a person with a crime in order to hold her for longer than a given period of time). When such practices mutate within society, so to speak, its liberal nature is preserved because not only are those practices incapable of replacing habeas corpus, but they themselves are quickly extinguished by the universal enforcement of habeas corpus. Indeed, like all of the institutions associated with the Constitutional project, the writ of habeas corpus must be a general rule of action for all within society, and if it is to be a general rule then it, or one of its complementary institutions must be able to secure the extinction, of any practice that contradicts it.

 

Whether human attempts at the constitutional project have actually created ESS's is a question of history that cannot considered here, but I can certainly make certain speculative claims motivated by the ESS and the Heraclitean maxim that everything changes. Certainly the theoretical tool of the ESS provides us with a benchmark by which the efficacy of a constitutional project may be judged by. If a constitutional project is not able to establish an ESS that repels all contradictory practices within its society, then the constitutional project has simply failed to establish universal laws for human conduct across that society, and thus fails at its main goal of creating a government of universal laws, not arbitrary wills.

The greatest threat to the success of any constitution is that they are rational constructivist designs and thus their ability to ensure an ESS is only as good as their designers ability to foresee what those threats would be. Even though the constitutional project may be to establish the conditions for an open society in which the course of evolution may take a path unforeseen by anybody within that society, it itself is an attempt for human reason to man the helm of social evolution in a humble, but entirely real manner. It is an attempt to design and establish by speculative human reason institutions that will help to determine the final outcomes seen in society, and to direct those outcomes as seen fit by speculative human reason. Even while it may not try to determine what the exact outcomes in society, any constitutional project still seeks to guide the outcomes by obligating all within its society to act according to certain patterns of action.

However, social evolution will go on, and the motivators of each constitutional project have to be able to foresee what will threaten their constitution in order to guard against it. Thus the evolutionary stability of any constitutional order over time is threatened by those very same knowledge problems that threaten the realization of any planned outcomes within society. If the designers of the constitution cannot foresee threats to its integrity, then its stability against such threats cannot be guaranteed, and as history brings about more conditions unforeseen by those minds, the evolutionary stability of the order grows ever weaker. As things change within society, be they the underlying ethical ethos of what constitutes the good life or the seismic shift of institutions across history, the capability of the constitutional order to actually be a genuine ESS is weakened.

In the end, all Constitutional projects have a expiration date necessitated by the problem of knowledge. Perhaps that is what we should keep in mind when considering Thomas Jefferson's thought that every generation needs its own revolution. If Constitutional projects are to survive through history, then they must be adapted to conditions unforeseen by their original framers. However, if Constitutional projects are so easily tampered with then what is to ensure that they can survive? That, I suppose, is the catch-22.

The Freedom of Contract: A Non-Negotiable

 The freedom of contract is not just a product of a free and open society, but a perquisite for it. The reason for this is two-fold, one that correlates mostly with the latter adjective and another that correlates mostly with the former adjective. Not only is the freedom of contract necessary if we are to accept that humans have self-agency and should be able to use their agency in order to strive after whatever ends they desire as long as their conduct is in accordance with law, but it is also necessary if society is going to evolve, the ends that people strive for in their daily actions must be able to change in unforeseen directions despite the wishes of individuals within the society.

 

For one thing, the freedom of contract is necessary if we are going to treat people with dignify. The reason is simple: a dignified person is a person whose self-agency is respected and held in high regard by those around him. For this to be the case, he has to be able to make his own decisions and to have those decisions respected by his compatriots in civil society. Contracts allow this to happen. They allow individuals to give services to others only by their own free will. If someone wants another person to do something for them, they have to obtain their consent via contract. On the flip side of this coin, it allows people who do not want to associate with other people in certain ways to simply say no, to not sign their name on the contract and to go about their way. When a society does not respect the freedom of contract, then it impinges on this fundamental self-agency that is so fundamental to respecting each person with dignity. To force people to associate with those who they do not want to in manners that they do not want to is to treat people as means towards ends that they do not wish to pursue. When the freedom of contract has been violated, people are reduce to tools, mere pieces in a larger game that they have no say in. The citizen of a free society is no chess piece, but he is a dignified person and as a dignified person, his self-agency must be respected.

 

The freedom of contract is not something that can be simply cast aside for concerns of the moment. Indeed, even though there may be easily identifiable benefits to infringing upon people's freedom of contract, which is always some people inflicting their desired contracts upon other people, the costs are great yet so often unseen. Hopefully the moral consequences of infringing upon other human being's self-agency is a seen cost, but that is often swept aside and is unseen for all too many within society. Definitely unseen is the way in which constricting the set of contracts people can choose from in their negotiations with others in society restricts the possible courses social evolution can take.

When people cannot choose not to receive certain goods in their contracts, then social evolution will largely be constrained towards keeping the specific goods that are now necessary attributes of the contract in use. Essentially gone, unless people are willing to accept lower real wages by simply not using part of their wage, is the possibility of social evolution by the abandonment of the consumption of that good, or the emergence of substitutes to it. Of course, those who support the infringement upon freedom of contract will say that it is very unlikely that social evolution will proceed in that manner, but that is a statement that they have no grounding to make. Evolution is in response to unknowable conditions in the future and will categorically never be scientifically predictable in any robust manner. It is not for the politicians restricting of freedom of choice to dictate how social evolution to take place, it is for them to protect the general rules of conduct that make possible any form of social evolution.

And if society cannot evolve in undirected directions, then it is not open. Now “Open” here is being used in a sense different from the sense of translucent, but rather in the sense of an open system since the open society is an open system. The open society is a society in which the actions of individuals may direct the course of society in any direction that is within the rule of law. It is an open system in which no politician can take for himself the authority to dictate how society should evolve in the future.

 

The freedom of contract becomes even more important when we consider how important contracts are for the cooperation of human beings in modern society and thus for social evolution. Without a doubt, the most important form of cooperation for the course of society today is cooperation by prices in the market. Even though most of our cooperation on the market is based on uncontracted, spontaneous interactions with producers as consumers, the contract is of supreme importance to the continuation of cooperation in the interaction between employees and employers that underpins everyone's role as a consumer.

After all, to go to the supermarket for eggs, a person needs money in his pocket, to get money in his pocket he needs to persuade someone else to give him money, to do that he needs to provide that person with a desired service, most of us do this in the form of selling our labor, and the convention in our present day and will probably continue through time is for people to contract out their labor so that not only are the terms and conditions of the agreement clearly known, but that both can form a solid expectation of their future cooperation with the other party in the contract. As a result, contracts underpin the entire division of labor that makes market-cooperation possible and ergo the importance of contracts to social evolution cannot be underestimated. Thus what seems like only a small infringement upon the freedom of contract can have massive long-term adverse effects by restricting what courses social evolution can take.

 

However, the moral issue must once again take center stage. After all, by telling someone how they can use their self-agency and what ends they must seek in their interactions with other people by restricting what contracts can be made within the rule of law, the proponent of such measures is fundamentally treating people as animals who cannot decide for themselves how to better their own interests. If the person is an agent capable of pursuing their own ends, then why is there the need to use coercion to force them to do so? Are they not functional human beings? Are they not citizens within a free and open society? In addition, the freedom of contract also is necessary for a tolerant society for it is by tolerating that other people may desire other ends in their interactions with other people and may make other provisions in their contracts to attain those ends.

Limiting the freedom of contract, people's ability to pursue the contracts that better their desired ends, and to force them to pursue other ends is thus fundamentally intolerant. It is the presumption that other people may snuff out striving towards some ends and force other people to strive towards others simply because the people doing the restricting think they know better. It is the essence of totalitarianism and that there is so much acceptance of regulations that do so is a sign that totalitarianism did not perish in either 1945 or 1991, but still lives with us today.  

A Short Manifesto for Budgetary Government

 Any sound system of modern democracy must start with budgets if our nations are not to drown themselves in debt in order that those who are to be its stewards are to promise that which cannot be paid. As described in the book Democracy in Deficit by James Buchanan and Richard Wagner, in the 1970s, the moral restrictions upon spending and the tacit, though often unfulfilled, understanding that it is the duty of the government in power to balance the budget have been broken asunder. Since then governments have been running unparalleled deficits while promising unparalleled privileges to their citizens.

Some of this is certainly politicians promising more benefits (often while promising to simultaneously cut the deficit) to voters during election seasons in order to match their opponents own proposals, but the main cause is certainly the lack of any structural traits in government to actually keep spending in check. Year after year, politicians can continue to run government that borrow a considerable portion of their entire operating expenses without any constitutional measure that provides disincentives against such practices.

A free and open society is not a society governed by the arbitrary actions of politicians, aristocrats or emperors. King Charles II learned that the hard way in 1688 and even the British monarchs have been subservient to their parliaments in the years since then. Instead, it is ruled by general rules of conduct, laws, that apply to everyone, every where and under all circumstances. In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Part III, Chapter VI), Adam Smith writes about how the virtue of justice is one that is at all times dictated by general rules of conduct:

The rules of justice are accurate in the highest degree, and admit of no exceptions or modifications, but such as may be ascertained as accurately as the rules themselves, and which generally, indeed, flow from the very same principles with them. If I owe a man ten pounds, justice requires that I should precisely pay him ten pounds, either at the time agreed upon, or when he demands it. What I ought to perform, how much I ought to perform, when and where I ought to perform it, the whole nature and circumstances of the action prescribed, are all of them fixt and determined. Though it may be awkward and pedantic, therefore, to affect too strict an adherence to the common rules of prudence and generosity, there is no pedantry in sticking fast by the rules of justice. On the contrary, the most sacred regard is due to them; and the actions which this virtue requires are never so properly performed, as when the chief motive for performing them is reverential and religious regard to those general rules which require them.

Free people are then guided not by the will of others, but how the general rules of society obligate them to act. Tyranny consequently is the usurpation of those general rules for the discretion of individuals.

 

There is no more of a sacred obligation of the politician to the people he serves than to guard the public treasury. It is certainly true that the government does need resources to operate, but it is similarly true that the government does not ask its citizens to contribute. Taxmen do not walk door to do holding usher's baskets requesting contributions; instead, they just take the contributions that they need. Whether the tax-payer consents or not, this done with the the promise that the government will use that money in order to provide certain services for the tax-payer's benefit. The entire enterprise of proper government can then be seen as the process of turning the tax-payers' money and to transform it into desired services. Hence to take the tax-payers' money within the public purse, and to spend it negligently on expenses that do not better his interests should be regarded as treason.

Deficits, though, inflict havoc upon this process. The reason that they do so is that the government can spend more than it has in order to provide its citizens more services that they could otherwise afford therefore corrupting the connection between paying taxes and receiving services. Every dollar that the government borrows is a dollar that will have to be taken in future taxation. When the event that calls for deficit spending is a war, the accumulation of debt does not nearly have the corruption affect as it does when government's in peacetime since a war is understood by the public as a temporary event that must be financed with credit. This cannot be said of the massive amount of deficit spending that has been taking place within the United States to support both its welfare state and its military-industrial complex. Neither are temporary. When it comes to deficit spending to support both, politicians tell their voters that the government can supply services to them that Americans' contributions to the treasury can support. As a result, it forces politicians to be dishonest about the quantity of services the government can supply and it rewards those who provide the most convincing lies about how the government can continue to provide services without having to take more from the public.

 

Any system that encourages dishonesty must be reformed. Deficit-spending in peacetime is little more than politicians using the power of the financial markets to evade the great inconvenience of scarcity during their time in office. It is in ultimate juxtaposition with the ethos of a government whose officials serve as stewards of the public treasury. As such, it must be reformed and it must be reformed constitutionally for the only solution to this problem are now designed checks and balances that forces politicians to guard the integrity of the treasury. What we need is a government that forces politicians to actually grapple with scarcity in providing government services and to frankly tell tax-payers that they must reduce their expectations of government services or expect to pay more in the future.

Besides a law that obligates the sitting government to balance the budget, what we need is for the budgetary process to be the defining moment in any year in politics. Politicians need to fight over the budget, to ear-mark every cent of government spending (the entire phenomenon of “mandatory spending” is a conceit, all spending is really discretionary and can be ended if necessary), and release budgets that fit their expenditures within the contexts of a balanced budget. If politicians want to increase spending on certain programs. Fine, but they have to show either what other programs will be cut or how they will be taking more money from the people they represent. Anything less is not only a failure of accountable government, but also a failure to ensure that citizens truly know the costs of their government.