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The Ship and the State
“Rena ship 07” by New Zealand Defence Force Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.
Imagine a ship in port, hooked up to a heavy industrial crane. As morning breaks, everyone notices that the ship and crane are heavily listing to one side. Though it’s obvious there’s a problem, it’s cause is unclear: Either something internal is causing the ship to take on water (pulling the crane with it), or the crane is off-balance and pushing the ship down. If the former is correct, disconnecting the the ship from the crane will likely exacerbate the problem and may cause the ship to sink. If the latter is right, the solution is to carefully separate the ship from the crane.
Let’s stipulate — as I think we can — that that our culture is similarly in peril, particularly regarding matters such as illegitimacy, massive incarceration, failing communities, and the loss of private and civic virtue. That’s what Rachel Lu suggested in a post earlier this week and pretty much everyone agreed we have some serious problems. From her piece for the Witherspoon Institute that her post is based on:
Small-state minimalism also promises a neat solution to the still-raging culture wars. By unlinking cultural conflict from the aggressive arm of the state, minimalists think we can dissociate ourselves from politically damaging conflicts that they mostly regard as lost. Religious conservatives are free to continue their efforts to convert the heathen at a grassroots level, but in the meanwhile, shrinking the state may open a space for conservatives to live their lives more peacefully (while also winning some elections).
There is a serious problem with this plan: It won’t work. […] Small-state minimalism may win a few battles, but it will lose the war. That’s because it misunderstands the relationship between our militant secular culture and its political counterpart, the modern administrative state. We cannot unlink them; they are the same foe. Conservative minimalists imagine that they have devised a principled and practical way of escaping the quagmire in which we find ourselves. In reality, they are laying down their arms even as the enemy’s most fearsome titans take the field.
In other words, the ship is listing because the ship itself is busted.
This analysis is premised on two mistaken assumptions and, therefore, comes to a mistaken conclusion. First, it presumes that minimalists are motivated by a desire to avoid cultural conflict. I think this is easily countered by the universal acclaim and discussion that followed Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, including from those who don’t identify with social conservatism. Second, Rachel’s argument assumes that minimalists don’t appreciate how the pernicious parts of our culture and the welfare state are linked, rather than that we come to different conclusions about the problem’s causes and the remedies necessary to fix it.
For illustration, let’s consider the matter of illegitimacy, something I think everyone on the Right — and even a handful of people on the Left — agrees is a major problem. If the source of the problem is internal to the communities where it’s most rampant, then the best solution may to provide some outside support, possibly from the government in the form of expanded child tax credits and other measures intended to strengthen families by providing better incentives.
Alternately, if the problems stem from the perverse incentives of the modern administrative state — as this minimalist alleges — these communities will largely right themselves once freed from its influence, in much the same way that a ship will right itself after being disconnected from a broken crane. This isn’t magical thinking anymore than is the belief that gravity and water displacement will do their work without prompting.
The sad fact of the matter is that our government’s interventions have so removed or ameliorated the natural consequences of bad behavior that many people cannot find their equilibrium. The reason marriage and legitimacy have persisted is that they are self-recommending and self-sustaining institutions. In contrast, broken families inevitably lead to personal and social suffering and cannot last absent help from outside. (To be clear, I’m not blaming social conservatives for this; this is clearly something the Left caused and that many SoCons have a long record of opposing.)
If that analysis is correct, society will rush in to fill the void as we remove the enabling influence of the state, just as water will flow around a ship, keeping it upright. Pro-family policies aren’t necessary so much as the removal of anti-family ones that enable bad decisions and prevent natural balance.
This, I think, is where Rachel’s argument misses the mark: minimalists don’t think removing the state is the end of the problem, just the beginning of the solution. With government out of the way, society will largely right itself as people better realize the consequences of their behavior and adjust accordingly, and as churches, mutual aid organizations, and all the other little platoons begin the work of making her seaworthy again.
Published in Domestic Policy
Boldfaced text 1: There are plenty of people on the right who are either atheists or secular. I am one. I don’t see secularism as fused to the Left and the state. You never state it in your piece, but I infer that you consider the virtue you want as solely religious virtue. You seem to be putting virtue and secularism on opposite sides a divide. Or, did I misunderstand?
Boldfaced text 2: Always discussing “virtue” and never breaking it down into the list of the virtues you mean is a useful short-hand, but the virtue I would like to see sold by our side and enshrined in the state is a radical respect for individual rights. That’s a virtue, isn’t it?
This doesn’t sound too bad.
I think Rachel means virtue in the Aristotelian sense.
Leaving people alone to make their own choices is not supremely moral?
I think we have to be careful here to avoid errors of attribution. Some people here who are not small-state ‘minimalists’ are making assumptions about what we believe.
First, there seems to be an assumption that advocates of small-state minimalism think it’s a solution to a larger problem in society, and that’s why we support it. And therefore, if you can show that it won’t solve the problem you think need to be solved, we’ll abandon it and go for whatever big-government scheme you’ve got in mind.
I won’t speak for anyone else, but for me, this is just wrong. I believe in a small state not as some scheme to solve a problem, but because the proper state of man is to to be free to live for his own ends, and not for those of others. I flatly reject that my freedoms are subject to someone else’s strategic plan to right the ship of state. I am free to live my own life, and if I’m minding my own business and you come knocking with a grand plan to restore ‘values’ in society, and all you need is for me to give up some of my rights, we are going to have a serious problem.
I simply reject that the state has the right to draft me into whatever social engineering project it has in mind, regardless of whether I agree with their desired outcome or not, and even regardless of whether or not I think the plan would work.
I also believe that people are perfectly capable of looking after their own affairs when left alone. However, I do NOT agree that the natural state of a free society is necessarily going to line up with your view of morality. Society is a complex adaptive system and will find a path to a stable, productive existence. But it will compute that path based on conditions that exist today, not what existed 100 years ago.
For example, before big government came along, the social safety net was maintained through the existence of strong families, strong communities, organizations of like-minded or culturally similar people etc. The rotary club, the Elks club, the church, various ethnic aid groups, etc.
So if we eliminated all safety nets, is this what we’d get back? Not a chance. One thing that made the old structure work was personal reputation, the reputation of the family, etc. If a farmer in a community didn’t pull his weight and help out others in times of crisis, he’d find that no one will help him either. Thus there was a strong incentive to remain on good behaviour. A handshake could seal a contract because breaking it has ramifications throughout the community, not just with the person who you lied to.
But this only worked because everyone knew each other, and tended to live near each other for life.
<cont’d>
Does this model still work in a society where the work force is mobile, and where people live in large cities and often don’t even know who their neighbors are? I doubt it. In fact, I’d say that the rise of government safety nets was a response to the old ones breaking down under the stress of the needs of modern society.
I think society will find those safety nets, because they are important. But exactly what form they will take, I have no idea. It’s not predictable. And I’m fine with that.
Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is partially a study of how a society will organically adapt to the conditions around it in the absence of state control. In this case, the situation society faced was that it grew out of a lunar penal colony which meant far more men than women. It was also is a society where even the air isn’t ‘free’, but has to be produced by someone and purchased, or you die. There are no safety nets, no police forces, no government courts of law.
One of the social adaptations to this was the creation of ‘line’ marriages – marriages that never end, that are polygamous, and essentially people are voted into the marriage if everyone in the marriage likes them and thinks they will be a good addition, then they are cared for in old age so long as they abide by the rules of the marriage and contribute to it as best they can.
This solves the safety net problem: these marriages go on for centuries, the families build their own wealth and expand their homes to care for their sick and aged members. It solves the problem of imbalance between men and women because women run the marriages but they tend to have more men than women in them. It also protects the children in the marriage. It has all the ‘conservative’ values you believe in, but is totally at odds with the religious values many believe in.
The moral code in that society adapted as well. For example, if someone was dying because they needed air, and you had air you could lend them, you were considered a scumbag if you didn’t. You would be shunned, which in a society like that was a near death sentence. What you were expected to do was to offer a loan of air at fair market value. However, once the person was safe, if they refused to pay back the loan you could chuck them out an airlock and no one would say a word. A harsh morality for a harsh world.
So yes, society will find a way. It may not be a way you particularly like, but that’s because people have free will and don’t have to live by the standards you want to set for them.
Dan,
Most of us minimalists agree with you here on principle. Some of us also happen to agree with Rachel on what the best order for society is (her emphasis on Virtues). We are simply pointing out that the only way to really achieve Rachel’s desired outcome is through emergent order. Anything else would just result in tyranny. We’re trying to speak her language while showing her that liberty is the way to achieve it.
At the end of the day you are 100% correct on the politics of the matter.
In my experience, it’s that “aren’t harming anyone else” part that is the source of the major disagreement.
If you’re Tom Hanks on his desert island with Wilson, do what you want. Otherwise, many things that you do will affect the people around you.
This includes many things that you have a perfect right to do, like your job, which obviously prevents someone else from having that particular job, or opening your own restaurant, which would be bound to draw business away from other restaurants.
I emphatically agree with everything Dan said in comments 35 & 36.
I wouldn’t go quite as far as saying it’s unlikely — monogamous marriage is a robust institution with a long history, albeit a lot of evolution — but I also wouldn’t rule it out or be horrified to find I was wrong. Regardless, I thought Heinlein’s descriptions of line marriages in TMIAHM fascinating for the same reasons you described.
Another level of disagreement between the sides here — which is an issue that probably goes deeper than the mere SoCon/libertarian thing — is that the one is more likely to describe institutions/arrangements as “correct” or “best” while the other is inclined to say that they are “good” or “adaptive.” Over the long-haul, there’s some conflict in store there, but we’re talking distant horizons.
The Amish population was about 5,000 in 1900, in 1992 the population had grown to 140,000. Currently this population is doubling every 20 years. Within the Amish community the most ascetic branches loose the least to apostasy. The Amish are not only swamped by our ever growing government but they are swimming against the tide of popular culture and technology and yet they are thriving. The Amish have held onto their beliefs much better than our society at large has been able to hold onto to its understanding of what basic rights are, let alone what moral obligations built a thriving society. I don’t think libertarian analysis is useful in understanding cultural behavior, or what make men behave the way they do. Most of the civilizations of man existed before there was a concept of property rights or limits to rulers, yet these civilizations had times when they grew and thrived and times of decay. I think it would be helpful to have analytical tools which could be used to explain how societies which once had growing levels of cooperation and commitment to their culture begin to fall apart.
B. F. Skinner, psychologist who founded operant conditioning, wrote “Walden II” created a world in which human behavior could be dramatically changed by changing the incentives, unpleasant jobs were paid the highest, the highest status jobs were paid the least. Although artistic imagination can illuminate the nature of man, actually studying how men behave is more informative.
Someone probably already said this, but emergent order is practically guaranteed to lead to better outcomes. Any government structure will practically always lead to less optimal (I would say less moral) results.
Almost all the order you see in our economy and society is emergent. In the grand scheme of things, government actually controls or directs very little.
Consider the order needed for this web site to be useful, or to exist at all. Not only did there have to be the basic internet infrastructure, but there are numerous web browser standards, payment standards, language standards, and interoperability APIs between web pages that allows it all to work. There needs to be a way to find this web site, such as Google. We need to have computers that have the ability to show the graphics and text in high enough resolution. There has to be some form of advertising that attracts users to the site. And so on ad infinitem.
The important thing to understand is that no one designed this system. There was no ‘Ricochet planner’ who sat down, invented Ricochet and then figured out the massive orchestration of all parts necessary to bring it to life. There is no grand planner of the internet. No one who forced us to use a certain browser, who forced everyone to communicate in a certain way. All of the little pieces that go into the ecosystem that enables Ricochet were built separately, for their own purposes. And those pieces depended on earlier pieces which were also built for their own reasons.
And yet, here we are. The same thing happens everywhere you look. Almost nothing we do as a society is ‘planned’. Society itself is an emergent construct that comes from the interactions of billions of people.
Another example is the English language. There is no ‘language directorate’ for English. No one ‘scientifically’ planned it or or the precursors to it. It just emerged, all on its own. Think about how amazing that is – we have gone from little symbolic representations of sounds to a written and spoken language dense enough and flexible enough that it can be used to write a sonnet or describe how a rocket engine works.
Esperanto, on the other hand, was a ‘scientifically’ designed language. It was supposed to be better and more efficient than English, and a lot of brainpower went into making it just right. And it’s been around a long time. Do you know anyone who speaks it, other than maybe a language nerd? Is it in use anywhere for commerce, science, literature, or anything else?
The unplanned, emergent language kicked the butt of the ‘scientifically designed’ language, and continues to do so.
And, to pile on: “I, Pencil”, for Heaven’s sake.
Someone should point out that when “emergent order” screws up in the private sector, you get bankrupt companies. They die off, and generally speaking we don’t know anything about them. Most of them don’t last long enough for anyone to notice.
When emergent order screws up in society you get the Huns, Collapse of the Roman Empire, the Mfecane…
Sure, Great Britain looks pretty good today. That’s because you didn’t have to live through the Civil War, the Commonwealth, or any of a thousand other societal screw-ups that they learned from before any of us were born.
I think the societies that have allowed for better and better governments are a type of emergent order, despite government influence. It’s not the Constitution itself that allows us to enjoy relative liberty. It’s people realizing over tons of trial and error that liberty is the proper way to construct society. People’s expectations changed to allow our constitution to be enforceable. The changes in expectations were emergent.
There are bad outcomes from the arrow of emergent order, just as there are drops in the stock market. Just because there are bad outcomes doesn’t necessarily mean government is something that can protect against “crashes” in order. It’s much more likely to cause crashes.
(Not that I’m suggesting you were arguing against this.)
I lost my shirt on containership stocks, so I feel the analogy.
Once upon a time there was a highly habitable planet that supported many varieties of life. One particular variety of creature was smarter then the others, though not as strong as many. Its intelligence allowed it to flourish all over the planet, however, because it found ways to cope with the environment. One of its strengths was that it highly social and teamed with other members of its type to use the resources of the planet to its advantage, and to raise its young in ways that allowed for maximum survival and behavior advantageous to the tribe. This was good because the young of these creatures were initially very, very helpless, since it needed many years and much guidance to develop its body and intelligence adequately in order to survive and flourish.
Though there were many unconnected groups of these creatures, an order emerged in the form of an institution designed to give their young the best chance in life. It was clearly a natural institution, because all groups developed it independently with a few differences on the edges. The institution brought the male and female together in a permanent union to raise the young, and the more successful this institution was, the more the young flourished. As these groups banded together in larger and larger entities, they developed other institutions that allowed the large entities to adhere, but every entity depended on the strength of the most basic order that initially emerged. Large entities that did not respect the basic order did not last very long.
In time, in some places, these creatures got too clever by half–always a danger with highly intelligent specimens–and they began to think that the order that had emerged in the very beginning of time on their planet and that had been sustained all through the memory of the creatures was unimportant and could be changed at will by activists and government. An institution that had been a great protection for the young became about the grown of the species. This was not true everywhere on the planet. Most groups understood that this was very foolish thinking and regarded those who had fomented the change as rather mad. In time this proved to be correct. The result of the change was chaos for the young and great weakness for the entity that had allowed activists and government to override what emerged at the beginning of time. After great problems and difficulties, the order that their ancestors had developed, that had worked very very well for eons, emerged again, though it had never left where the creatures were wiser. It turned out that the order had emerged initially because it was the way best suited to raise the young of such biologically and intellectually advanced creatures.
Paraphrasing Captain Kirk, what right does she need? And what right do you have to tout a do-no-harm principle?
Find me a justification for that harm principle of yours! To be precise, and to get back to Rachel Lu’s positions: Find me a justification of the do-no-harm principle which will not simultaneously justify any other practical moral principles.
Consider the do-no-harm principle in these mentors for all of us who dwell in the classical liberal tradition:
Locke: The rule against harming others is rooted in the principle of the intrinsic worth or value of the humans who should not be harmed. It is those humans and their intrinsic worth which government exists to protect. (See Sabrdance’s review here of some of the broader implications which appear in Locke’s ethics.)
Mill: The rule against harming others is rooted in the principle of the intrinsic worth of human happiness. (And in Mill this fundamental principle justifies practical sister principles to do-no-harm, like seeking the happiness of all, by reason of which the government should require and enforce education!)
The do-no-harm principle doesn’t justify itself; it has roots of its own; find those roots and see if they don’t support any other branches.
It is to be noted, though, that they have achieved this largely by detaching as much as possible from the state, not engaging it. They are exempt from the Social Security system. They do not typically run for office. They are largely apolitical.
On the other hand, certain strains of libertarians hold the Amish up as a group whose reliance on institutions other than government is something to be admired and perhaps even emulated. Anarcho-capitalists, for example, might label the Amish fairly exemplary anarchists.
And why would libertarians be wrong in pointing this out? Amish social cohesion makes independence from the government easier while at the same time Amish independence from government facilitates strong social cohesion.
The extreme (by which I mean neo-Amish) Benedict Option is not, after all, un-libertarian.
Having spent a few decades living near the Amish and other communes, and meeting them from time to time when they come into town, if the libertarians around here had to actually live among the Amish, they’d go crazy inside a week. They have a social and governmental structure no less stringent (and indeed a great deal stronger) than anything the organizations we give the name “government” do.
That stringency could be a feature, not a bug, even to a libertarian. It’s a voluntary community. Baptism into the community is a conscious, adult choice. And while the childhood is strict and may fit an Amish youth for little else, all children are molded by the circumstances they grow up in, not just the Amish.
Self-denial, turning away from the world, and humble living can be undertaken by libertarians. I have done so in the past, and still sometimes regret that I did not have the stamina to maintain it for longer. I might be effectively dependent on technology like modern air conditioning and filtration and the modern pharmacopeia in order to maintain basic functions like breathing (the one time I spent time in an Amish barn, I promptly landed in the ER), but for those who can lead the simple life, why not? Have at it!
There is worth in choosing to join an austere community.
This whole thing illustrates an important point about libertarianism: Libertarians don’t have to say that everything that causes harm needs to be stopped by the government.
Amish believe in all kinds of harms that should be stopped by the neighborhood, the church, or the family–not the government.
Accordingly, the libertarian objection that a Conservative who sees harm in this or that is opening the door to progressivism/liberalism/tyranny is a non-starter.
(An objection that a Conservative who sees harm in this or that and wants to have the government stop it is opening the door is a different matter.)
As I’ve said elsewhere, the libertarianism I know does not put a lot of weight on the nebulous, malleable ideas of harm and its prevention, but rather on the ideas of individual rights and their protection. The idea of harm seems to muddy the water terribly.