Positive Liberty

In the Agora has recently featured a series of posts on a perennial debate: Why is the academy so liberal? Is it because of prejudice against conservatives? Or do smart people just inherently lean toward the left?

First, Howard Kurtz, who offered some powerful statistics on collegiate leftism:

“[c]ollege faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined.” 72 percent of college faculty describe themselves as “liberal,” with only 15 percent labeling themself “conservative.” 50 percent identified themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans. Disparity at so-called “elite” schools, it seems, is even more pronounced. The report offers percentage views on specific issues as well. The study was conducted by professors at the University of Toronto based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools. It was funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-leaning group.

self-congratulation from Ezra Klein, which ran in part as follows:

So in places where intelligent, informed people work, many of them turn out to be liberal. At the places the most intelligent and informed people work, even more of them turn out to be liberal. And so we scratch our heads and wonder about bias? Why?

Let’s not wonder about bias: Let’s just be content that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The smartest of all people have the leftest of all political opinions–and vice versa.

Set up so perfectly, Paul Musgrave hit one out of the park. It’s even better because it spares neither left nor right. Both get taken to task, and with good reason:

In its simplism, this statement is truly awe-inspiring. It is a Gothic cathedral of arrogance.

Klein’s argument rests upon the premise that there is some ideal vantage point from which observers can claim a hold on Truth–and that university professors just happen to be in this happy position…

But the… hypothesis that intellectuals are afraid to admit to being Republican because the administration and the House leadership are either mendacious or uninformed about major policy issues is harder to dispute, especially after the events last week in the Terri Schiavo matter. The spectacle of people arguing that just because someone’s brain is liquid doesn’t mean they’re not alive, or that just because the family had had fifteen years of appeals didn’t mean that due process had been served, was ridiculous, a Scopes Trial for our time. And if identifying with the GOP means that people assume you agree with Randall Terry clique, then it’s understandable why intellectuals would be hesitant to do so.

The one problem I have with Paul’s formulation is that the liberal tilt in the academy didn’t begin with the Schiavo case or even with the Bush administration. While they are certainly more fuel for the fire, I’m tempted to bring up Vietnam, McCarthyism, and even the Scopes Trial, to which Paul rightfully likens the Schiavo case.

I also find a lot more compelling the argument that business, the military, and churches tend to siphon off the most intelligent conservatives. Want a more right-leaning academy? End the ROTC scholarships, pay academics more, and close the seminaries.

Of course, these options are either immoral, impossible, illegal, or all three. Conservatives simply have different interests than liberals, and this I think is perfectly natural. I find it rather in bad grace for the right to accuse academics of discrimination, something that several commenters have done, but that Josh disavows. And I find it equally in bad grace for the left to pat itself on the back for its alleged academic superiority. Of course, the right likes to pat itself on the back too, because the smart, right-leaning people of business get paid far more than the smart, left-leaning people of the academy.

Economic subjectivist that I am, I do not presume to moralize about such trade-offs. I’ve been in the academy long enough to know that it’s a very agreeable life, and that not all compensation is financial.

All the same, I do think that in light of the clear conservative dominance in business, the military, and the clergy, it presumes an awful lot to complain that conservatives do not dominate in academics, too. Though I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, I do think it would impoverish both our political life and our culture if one’s ideology became too much of a passkey to success in any one field. This to me is the chief usefulness of the Kurtz article; would that its inquiry were extended further, into areas where conservatives are likely to dominate. I wonder what results we might find then, and what responses these might draw. Another wave of self-congratulation, anyone?

[Incidentally, I am not coming out of my semi-hiatus, the recent spate of posts notwithstanding. The blogging habit has proven a lot harder to kick than I imagined, but I promise I will make no new posts until either Friday or the decision in Raich vs. Ashcroft, whichever comes first. This is also contingent on Blogger, which has been failing more and more frustratingly as the week progresses.

The dissertation and the job search both continue apace; if you are desperate to read something smart and thought-provoking in the meantime, I recommend to you Obsidian Wings and Tom Palmer, the two newest additions to my blogroll.]

I received the following message today from a friend of mine, Carl Keyes. Like me, Carl is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. I can personally vouch for the details of the story.

Dear Friends,

As many of you know, my partner, Robert Bozanovic, has been attempting to get his green card for the past several years. Last week the Customs and Immigration Service informed him that his request for a green card has been denied. Accordingly, his Employment Authorization Document is being revoked so he will no longer be able to legally continue his employment as a registered nurse at Union Memorial Hospital. Deportation proceedings may be on the horizon.

On the advice of an immigration attorney, we are starting a letter writing campaign. I am hoping that you will be able to take a few moments to write on Robert’s behalf.

I am including the contact information for the elected legislators for the area where Robert and I live. If you are not a Maryland resident, you could also write to your own senators and representative if you think they would be more likely to assist you since you are one of their constituents.

Robert spoke to an immigration attorney this morning who suggested that this case has reached a point that some sort of agitation needs to take place to make these leaders aware of the situation, especially since the Customs and Immigration Service seems to have misapplied the law in his case. The best method of contacting our legislators, she suggested, is through actual letters, not emails or phone calls.

She also suggested that letters need to request a “private bill” since doing so will bump the request up to the senator’s chief of staff instead of an office staffer, making it more likely that the senator will actually become aware of the situation.

I note that Senator Mikulski has a link to “Nursing Scholarships” on her webpage, indicating that she is aware of the importance of nurses and the effects of the shortage. I will include this in my paper letter which I will be sending out later today; you may wish to as well.

All you really need to get into the letter is his full name (Robert Bozanovic) and your displeasure that a registered nurse who has been legally employed in the Cardiac Evaluation Unit at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore for the last two years has been denied a green card.

Thank you for your help! I know that several of you wrote letters on his behalf a few years ago before his situation became so dire. I continue to appreciate your support.

The Honorable Barbara A. Mikulski
Suite 503
Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC 20510
202-224-4654

Senator Paul Sarbanes
309 Hart Building
United States Senate
Washington DC 20510
202-224-4524

Congressman Elijah E. Cummings
2235 Rayburn H.O.B.
Washington DC 20515
202-225-4741

Here is the email message that I already sent to these legislators before I was informed that a paper letter is more effective.

Dear X,

I am writing to you because I do not know where to turn. Today my partner was notified that his application for a green card has been denied and that as the result of that decision his employment authorization document will be revoked in fifteen days.

My partner is a skilled registered nurse who works in a cardiac evaluation unit at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore. He apparently does well at his job since the nurses on his unit recently voted to nominate him as their representative for this year’s hospital-wide Nurse of the Year Award. As a nurse, he is obviously making a positive contribution to our community and our state.

The decision to deny him a green card seems even more of a travesty when the current nursing shortage in our country is taken into consideration. Considering the number of foreign nurses with minimal English language skills who were trained elsewhere currently being recruited to staff American hospitals, it makes no sense to me that a nurse who is fluent in English and who received his training in American colleges and hospitals is being denied a green card.

This decision is especially hurtful since we know that if we were a heterosexual couple that other options for obtaining a green card, especially marriage, would be available to us.

Several years ago, I contacted various legislators about my partner’s case so I am aware that your office receives a high volume of mail concerning immigration issues. I realize that everybody thinks that their case is the “most important,” but I hope that you agree that some aspects of my partner’s case are particularly extraordinary. I hope that you will be able to look into this decision and intervene if you think doing so would be appropriate.

If you believe that you can do anything to help, I will gladly provide any information you request. Thank you for looking into this matter. I appreciate your assistance.

Sincerely,
Carl Robert Keyes

If anyone ever tells you that gays and lesbians can use other arrangements to get all the same rights as married straight people–don’t believe them. The immigration and naturalization rights that come with marriage can be very difficult or even impossible to obtain by other means.

I have known Carl and Robert for quite some time, and they have been going through this nightmare for years now. If they were a man and a woman, they could easily get married and solve all their legal problems. This, though, the United States does not permit–for fear that recognizing their union would somehow devalue traditional marriage. I have to wonder whether Robert, as a nurse in a critical field, might save the lives of enough American heterosexuals to make it worth the trade.

I also have to wonder why we must even ask questions like these.

You don’t have to support same-sex marriage to sense that something is terribly wrong about this case. Here we are, possibly deporting a man who is fluent in English, highly skilled, professionally employed, and working in a sector that faces a shortage of qualified candidates. Even if we grant the premise that certain groups of immigrants are inherently undesirable–a premise, by the way, that I do not usually grant–still, Robert is clearly someone we ought to be keeping.

Let’s do what we can to make sure that the right decision gets made. Write letters, make phone calls, and let me know if there is anything you can do to help. I will be sure to pass the offer along.

Rumor has it that the Supreme Court will issue a ruling on Raich vs. Ashcroft early this week. Drug WarRant has a review.

For those of you who don’t recall, Raich is the medical marijuana case that has tested the limits of federalism and the commerce clause. Other links worth following come from Talk Left, Last One Speaks, and yours truly, who gives some thoughts on the origin of our commerce-clause woes. I write:

All human activity goes on in a seamless web of give and take, sometimes with money, sometimes without. Today we understand that “commerce” is not so much a separate sphere of human activity as it is a way of thinking about our actions. We now view economics as a tool for analyzing the entire interconnected web of human behavior–much as we also view anthropology, psychology, or comparative history, each of which approaches that web from a different perspective.

Indeed, we would find it absurd to ask which behaviors were not psychological or historical. To us, all action has a psychological dimension, and all action is a part of history, for all human action may properly be considered from a psychological or a historical standpoint. We would never dream of giving Congress the power to regulate all psychological activity–and yet, in giving Congress the power to regulate all economic activity, we have done precisely the same.

But in 1787, it was taken virtually for granted that economics was merely a thing to be done in the marketplace, and that “commerce” was best understood in isolation from the rest of human life. The contradictions to this worldview were piling up all around, but the new insight had not yet arrived. Conventional wisdom, from the dawn of the so-called ‘political arithmetic’ in the seventeenth century, all the way through the late Enlightenment, held that “commerce” was a limited thing.

In other words, today’s trouble with the commerce clause rests on a misunderstanding that predates the republic. Within their limited worldview, the framers intended nothing more than to give Congress a well-defined power over one branch of human life–and that only in one special instance. They never dreamed that two centuries of new social insight would turn the interstate commerce clause into the most powerful sixteen words in the entire Constitution.

Without quite realizing it, I was echoing Randy Barnett’s Restoring the Lost Constitution, which I have been reading in the meantime. The relevant pages are 278-291.

[Crossposted at Liberty & Power.]

“Steroids,” I suggested.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” replied the Cynic. “That’s so two weeks ago.”

“I’m afraid not,” I replied. “Or in any event, I pay you quite handsomely to indulge my interests.”

I had assembled both the councils this time, the Ethical and the Un-. The ordinary conference room wasn’t large enough to hold them all; we met outside and sat about the gently curving benches of an ancient coliseum.

“And why does this interest you?” asked the Empiricist. “You don’t care about sports at all.”

“I don’t. But I use steroids every day of my life. I have asthma, and a steroid inhaler helps me to breathe. I’m worried, though, since Congress seems to think I might be doing something immoral.”

“Spare me,” said the Cynic, “I have competition enough as it is.”

“You’re taking that inhaler because you are ill,” said the Humanitarian. “Baseball players take steroids even when they aren’t.”

“I don’t feel ill. I’m just able to do more when I take it: I can lift more, run faster, and work harder, all thanks to steroids. I want to know why it’s perfectly okay for me to say this–but perfectly wrong for baseball players.”

“The guy’s got a point. So people are taking drugs to get stronger,” said the Malthusian. “I can’t say I blame them. It’s a tough world out there, and you’ve got to do whatever you can to get by.”

“To get by?” said the Capitalist. “Have you seen their salaries? This is hardly a matter of mere sufficiency.”

“And think of all that fame!” said Amour-Propre. He nudged False Seeming with his elbow, feeling pleased with himself as always.

“Let’s say nothing of the other kinds of attention,” added Lust. Amour-Propre stopped smiling.

“An honorable person wouldn’t resort to steroids,” said the Stoic. “Not even if it meant getting ahead. A victory by cheating isn’t a victory at all.”

“Behold a philosophy for chumps and losers,” said Thrasymachus. “I’ve never heard such a sour grapes story in my entire life.”

“It’s a prisoner’s dilemma,” said the Capitalist. “Once one person cheats, everyone else has to cheat too–that, or they end up losing. Of course, the best outcome would be if no one cheated. But all it takes is one person, and from there on out it’s devil take the hindmost.”

“But wait just a minute,” I replied. “You’re going about this all wrong. Baseball is supposed to be entertaining, right? That’s why fans turn out for these games in the first place. So let me ask you this–How do steroids actually hurt the entertainment value of the game?”

“They shouldn’t hurt at all,” said the Epicurean. “Is seeing a really great game any less entertaining–merely because there are certain chemicals in a player’s blood? It’s not like you can see the chemicals, after all.”

“He’s got that right,” said the Stoner. “And it would be a pity, too, having to scratch this one out of the record books.”

We looked it up, chuckled, and moved on.

“I can tell you why the fans want steroids out of the game,” said the Empiricist. “It’s simple, really. Baseball is among the most statistically rigorous sports ever designed. The integrity of the statistics, year by year, depends on a more or less constant set of physical conditions. Witness how upset baseball fans get about even tiny changes in the manufacture of the balls, the bats, or the playing surface. Steroids play havoc with the numbers, and thanks to them, we might never be able to compare Hank Aaron and Mark McGuire.”

“And we could compare them before this mess?” I said.

“Exactly,” said the Academic. “Lots of people make a good living doing just that; they’re called sportswriters.”

“Not so fast,” said the Humanitarian. “Sure, steroids are new. And they’re even artificial. But what about the MRI? How many injured players have had MRIs? Didn’t they get back into the game faster, and with better care for their injuries? You can’t tell me it didn’t affect their statistics. And the same can be said of countless advances in diagnosis, surgical techniques, antibiotics, training regimes, even nutrition. In a sense, they are all artificial.”

“You mean you can never step into the same baseball game twice?” asked the Skeptic.

“Something like that,” replied the Humanitarian.

“Then baseball isn’t what we thought it was,” said the Skeptic. “The playing field is far larger than we imagined. Properly speaking, we don’t merely play baseball on a diamond with a bat and a ball. We play it all the time, in the weight room, at the breakfast table, while we sleep, and at every other moment of the day, so long as we’ll eventually get onto the literal field of play. And we are even playing the game at the very moment when we are most convinced of the contrary–in the hospitals where they patch up our injuries.”

“Nonsense,” said the Social Darwinist. “We can take pride in medical advances that produce or restore the health of the players. We can look at the statistics of baseball and see them improving, year by year. They give a measure of our culture’s superiority, and we ought to be proud of it. Steroids, though, are way too easy and way too cheap.”

There was an uncomfortable pause.

“I think you are getting at something very important when you talk about culture,” said the Academic. “Who exactly are we when we play baseball? We are members of a self-declared community, one that stretches from our great-grandfathers’ day right up to the present. Yet we can’t all be quite on the same page at the same time. It’s romantic nonsense to think otherwise.

“If you really want a test of skill between the players of old and those of today, then you have to recognize that times have changed. Once we ask ourselves, ‘Which ones are the real players?’ we will have no end of pointless debates. Maybe we should standardize absolutely everything–and let the genes be the only difference?”

“How many would pay to see that?” asked the Cynic.

“Who cares?” asked the Empiricist. “More to the point, what are we to do about the persistent feeling of corruption in baseball? It might not be well-reasoned or consistent, but it sure can be annoying.”

“Thought experiment,” said the Capitalist. Thrasymachus sniffed.

“Imagine that there were two completely independent leagues. In one, the players may use steroids however they wish, while in the other they may not–and somehow, against all odds, we are completely certain that the drug-free league has no violations. Which one would have better ticket sales?” The crowd was silent.

“And which league would be safer and more enjoyable to play in?” He didn’t need to answer.

“And which one would have the more commensurate statistics?” Again, no need to answer.

“Now what if there were no limits on the number of professional baseball leagues and teams, no limits on which teams may play whom or for what, no antitrust to muck up the works? What if there were no laws against steroids? Suppose”–a smile crossed his face–”that there were a free market in baseball?”

“You would have all kinds of leagues,” said the Academic. “And most teams wouldn’t make very much money, I imagine. In nearly all of them, using steroids would either not be worth the risk–or at the very least the risk would be kept scrupulously in proportion, since the rewards would never be so great as to encourage anything all that foolish.”

“The fans could choose the teams and leagues they wanted to favor; each could compete by offering different levels of drug testing, different standards of ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ substances–even different levels of medical care, for those who really wanted a fair comparison with Babe Ruth’s era,” I said. “If you want to compare today’s statistics to any other time period, under any other set of conditions, the numbers would not be lacking.”

“But some leagues,” said the Devil’s Advocate, “might even make a pretense of drug testing–but just for show, while the players never really get caught.”

“That would be false advertising,” said the Capitalist, “and illegal.”

“Oh yeah.”

“And it would scarcely be worse than what we have today,” said the Cynic.

Someone produced a bat and a ball. We took out our gloves, paced out a diamond in the ruined coliseum, and played the game exactly as it was meant to be played.

In which Jason participates in several current memes, sounds off on trivialities, updates his template, and makes a pitch for contributions.

First off, I’ve followed with amusement a number of bloggers who have loaded their entire music library into Winamp, hit “shuffle,” and posted the first ten results–no fibbing allowed. I have done the same, and here is my list:

Depeche Mode - In Your Room Jeep Rock Mix by Johnny Dollar w/ Portishead
The Velvet Underground - Beginning to See the Light
David Bowie - Changes
Rabbit in the Moon - OBE
Talking Heads - Life During Wartime
Butthole Surfers - Pepper
Yes - Astral Traveler
David Bowie - Up the Hill Backwards
The Microphones - Soundwaves
Dead Can Dance - The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove

David Bowie might actually be my favorite musician of all time, and the randomized list turns out to be a decent sample of my musical tastes. Well, except that there is no Underworld or Aphex Twin.

From the music to books, Jon Rowe challenges me to participate in the following blog meme:

1) You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, without a doubt. I might also add Henry Veatch’s Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics as both are fairly short.

2) Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Howard Roark, of course.

3) The last book you bought is:

A Cultural History of Masturbation by Thomas Laqueur

4) The last book you read:

Jean Paul Marat, by Clifford D. Conner.

5) What are you currently reading?

Leaving aside the several dozen books I’m perusing for my dissertation, the three I am reading from personal interest right now are Bruce Caldwell’s Hayek’s Challenge (almost done), Randy Barnett’s Restoring the Lost Constitution (just starting), and A Mencken Chrestomathy (meandering about lazily for several months). I will shortly be posting some responses to both Caldwell and Barnett, but I have to admit that I have come to enjoy taking my time at reading–It’s such a pleasant change of pace compared to what I did for general exams.

6) Five Books you would take to deserted island:

I would take as much as possible of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, and if this qualifies as fewer than five books, then I would also take, in order, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des lois, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien, and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

6) Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

If they don’t mind, I would pass it to Miriam Burstein, to Chris Sciabarra, and to Richard Chappell.

[/End meme]

On an unrelated meme, several other bloggers are commenting on the three books they are most ashamed of not having read. It’s a chance to clear the closet of ignorance, to admit that the field of readable books is far larger than we can ever hope to master, and–best of all–to lower expectations for future blogging efforts.

No longer do I have to pretend, like all the other literati, that I know these august volumes.

Ehh… I still feel pathetic to admit that I have not read…

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia: This is a book that I have skimmed, read excerpts of, and read endless analysis of. I know what it’s about; I know what its argument is. I suspect I would even enjoy reading it–and I admit I’ve got no excuse whatsoever for not having done so already.

George Orwell’s 1984: I know more about this work than any other that I have not actually read. I’m pretty confident I could give a full plot summary if I had to. Still I have not read a single word of the actual book. Now if I know this much, perhaps I don’t need to read it after all?

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: I haven’t read a word of Nabokov outside a few essays. But his prose is just so perfect.

And now I do think I’ve had enough of memes for the time being.

Attentive readers will note that I have added a few blogs to my sidebar, deleted some that were inactive, and made a few changes to maintain ideological balance. The goal of the “Notable Neighbors” section is to provide a balance of liberal, conservative, and libertarian links that are all consistently worth reading. If you see a blog there, you can be sure I read it whenever a new post comes up. I also recommend them to you.

Lastly, I have also added a button for making donations to Positive Liberty; it can be found in the “Credits” section. As of now, I am not quite sure whether the button works, and I would appreciate it if someone besides me would make a donation to my account–If nothing else, it would be a fair test of the button.

If you have found Positive Liberty interesting, stimulating, or even just amusing, I would encourage you to contribute a little toward keeping the site in operation.

Update: Thank you to the several people who have sent in contributions as a way of testing the new donation system. It seems, however, that there has been a bit of a difficulty with the button. If each of you could resend in the same contribution that you sent in just previously, I am quite confident that we could get all sorted out.

Update II: More problems with the confounded button. I do think, however, that a few new contributions, perhaps with higher decimal value, might be the thing to try. I will be sure to let you know when the problem is fixed.

Update III: Say, PayPal doesn’t actually read this stuff, do they?

This story from Knight Ridder shows just how close Florida came to a constitutional crisis in the Terri Schiavo case.

Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo wasn’t to be removed from her hospice, a team of Florida law enforcement agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted - but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge’s order, The Miami Herald has learned.

Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.

For a brief period, local police, who have officers around the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called a showdown.

In the end, the state agents and the Department of Children and Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

“We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,” said a source with the local police.

The American system works only when the other branches of government respect the judiciary, for respect is the only weapon this branch of government has. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and ask a question that will not be popular:

Even if Terri Schiavo were really alive (or at any rate if we ourselves were convinced of it), would it not be worth sacrificing her life for the sake of the continued rule of law?

It’s not a position I am eager to stand and fight upon–but I really am curious what others might think of it. Those inclined to dismiss the argument out of hand should consider that Jeb Bush seems to have taken this very position:

“My powers, they are not as expansive as people would want them to be,” Bush said at the Capitol. “I understand they are acting on their heart. I fully appreciate their sentiments and the emotions that goes with this, but I cannot go beyond what my powers are and I’m not going to do it.”

It’s not clear right now whether the agents who went to seize Schiavo were acting on the governor’s orders. If they were, it still remains to be seen just how the decision-making process played itself out between their action and Bush’s later statements. There is a fascinating story in there, though we might never know the whole of it.

All in all, it’s not been an easy moment for the Republic, yet we just may be we have done the right thing. [Links via Liberty & Power.]

A few months ago I commented on one of the reasons why libertarians don’t get respect. As I wrote back then,

It’s the Party, stupid. The Libertarian Party is a badge of shame upon an otherwise reasonable branch of political thought.

I stand by these words today. Everyone knows now that the Party is past its prime, and that even in its prime, the LP never was much to write home about.

In the 2004 election, the Party fielded a candidate who distinguished himself by claiming that use of the ZIP code is voluntary (which is true)–and that its use constitutes consent to be taxed under the Sixteenth Amendment as a “resident of a federal district of the District of Columbia.”

Now this is a fat load of conspiracy-theory mumbo-jumbo. Sadly, consent is not required, save in certain theoretical constructs of the ever-hopeful libertarian mind. But wishing and dreaming will not make it so.

Nominating a fraud and a conspiracy theorist who is an embarrassment to the libertarian movement would be bad enough all by itself. Even more damning, however, is the fact that this individual did scarcely any better or worse than certain quite reasonable candidates that the party fielded back when it still looked like a rising star in American politics.

What this should tell us is that the problem with the LP runs far deeper than one presidential candidate. Consider this fisking of the Libertarian Party Platform written by the group bloggers at The 2% Company. I don’t agree with everything it says, but its very existence should be a worrisome sign: By any objective measure, the 2% Company and their kind are exactly the voters the LP should be winning over. As proof, consider the group’s short manifesto:

The Two Percent Company is an informal group of folks who are concerned about the current direction of our country and our world. In short, we believe that people have the right to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the rights of others. Unfortunately, religious figures, politicians, and stupid or narrow-minded people are determined to impose their silly or dangerous beliefs on us.

Can I get an amen here?

But the 2%ers can’t stomach the Libertarian Party platform. And to be frank, neither can I. They write,

Taken in what we believe is its intended entirety, the Libertarian platform attempts to create something like a utopian commune existing on a political island separate from the rest of the world. This commune would have no central regulation for its monetary system, legislation or law enforcement; in fact, we’d be hard pressed to specify exactly what powers would remain with the government under the Libertarian system.

There is a reason why the 2% Company can’t figure out whether a government would or would not exist in the Libertarian utopia: The LP itself hasn’t decided yet.

This indecision between anarcho-capitalism and some vague form of a state means that whatever platform emerges will be little more than a bunch of glowing generalities. Simply choosing in either direction would be better than the betwixt-and-between approach we have seen so far.

But when the intelligent, well-connected voter reads the LP platform, they do not see a pure, principled, ideological party stance. They see a whole lot of confusion–which is, of course, a pretty fair description of the party itself.

Again, let’s look at the 2% Company’s analysis:

The Libertarians on Freedom of Religion:

[From the platform.] We condemn the attempts by parents or any others — via kidnappings or conservatorships — to force children to conform to any religious views.

…and on Families and Children:

[Again from the platform.] Families and households are private institutions, which should be free from government intrusion and interference. Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs, without interference by government — unless they are abusing the children.

So, which is it?

Indeed.

Granted, blathering unreason does have a long and illustrious history in party platforms, and neither major party could ever draft one without it. But not only is this unreason, it is lunacy of a particularly sparkling kind. It clutters the LP platform with a lot of far-flung distractions rather than focusing on the most important, near-term problems. If it is to have any success at all, the Libertarian Party should moderate its platform and focus on those problems that most likely could be solved through political action–and those that are the most pressing to the general public.

Suppose there were a party with a platform that looked more or less like the status quo–but that recommended abolishing most farm and business subsidies, ending the war on drugs, simplifying the tax code, easing the “decency” regulations, and bringing the troops home from abroad. It wouldn’t make any other drastic changes, but would merely push for these issues alone.

This hypothetical party would have very real support among smart, young, influential voters–much more at any rate than the current LP. It is just this sort of compromise that enables action in party politics: Imagine that our hypothetical party had even a tenth of the seats in Congress. Would this not be an overwhelming force for our ideals?

Unsurprisingly, the 2% Company soon comes to the conclusion that so many others have reached about our current Libertarians:

So, we could embrace the Libertarian ideal, and work toward a Libertarian world where we’ll all just wander the earth — free from borders and passports, tracking deer with the Indians through the middle of the Wal-Mart, bartering some extra ammo for a bottle of rye, allowing our six-year-old children to strike out on their own and make their precocious ways in the world, enjoying our unlimited freedom…and paying tolls. Lots and lots of tolls.

Or, we can take the good ideas from the Libertarians, and discard the rest. The same can be said of any political party, and this is exactly the method that we recommend. If you research the ideas already in existence, weigh them rationally, choose what works, and fill in the rest with your own ideas, then when it comes time to cast your vote, you will be able to decide who best matches your own platform, and not just who belongs to a given political party that really doesn’t represent your opinions at all.

What we have now in the way of political platform strikes the 2% Company–and yours truly–as a pure utopian fantasy, a plan that would be impossible to implement given our current starting conditions and that shows no effort whatsoever to connect the libertarian ideal to the world of the present.

As the 2% Company notes, “tolls” are the answer to everything. Tolls! Of all the most government-oriented, bureaucratic, statist solutions I could possibly imagine! No, I’m not really sure how roads would be financed in an ideal society. I do know that there are many worse things than what we have right now, and that staving them off might not be such a bad idea. I also know that liberty is remarkably resourceful. Perhaps in time we’ll discover a workable solution to more public-goods problems–but we won’t do it without some clear-cut libertarian successes elsewhere.

But the Libertarian Party isn’t about politics; it’s about a revolt against politics. “Well, yes!” some of you may say. I, however, find this a contradiction in terms–a political party without a politics is not a bold counter-cultural statement. It’s a pipe dream, and it’s a distraction from the real work of securing individual liberties given the conditions under which we now live.

Instead, I would advocate a platform that would move the present government–gradually and cautiously–toward a more minimal state. Focus on the most egregious and unpopular abuses. Don’t sweat the small stuff, and ignore anything that can’t plausibly be accomplished in a decade. Begin in the mainstream, and move slowly.

Anarchists: Don’t write me off just yet. There’s something in this for you, too, I promise.

Personally, I happen to be convinced that the private defense agencies of anarcho-capitalist theory would in no sense be private: Privateness ends when force is sufficiently concentrated. Second, even if I am wrong, and if anarcho-capitalism is the best social arrangement, getting from “here” to “there” will almost certainly have to be a gradual process–that is, if Libertarians don’t want to face a massive backlash against their program, one that would even further discredit libertarian thought.

Let’s suppose that the anarchists are right. Now let’s imagine that the Minarchist Party has been in power for a good fifteen or twenty years. Government is a tiny fraction of the size it used to be, and private institutions have grown in proportion. Life is far better all around, and many people have learned firsthand the benefits of free markets and individual liberties. Won’t the transition to anarchism be that much easier, with a weakened state and a libertarian-minded population? At any rate, the difference between “good government,” if such thing exists, and “bad government,” would certainly become clearer once larger numbers of people had been brought on board.

Electorally, too, a move toward the center could yield huge practical benefits. Just a few steps toward that political center–hate it though some of us might–there is a large, untapped reservoir of libertarian-minded voters who are repelled by the extremism of the LP. I’ve been using the 2% Company as an example here, but I think they are typical of a much larger segment of the population.

Even the LP’s own favorite marketing tool, the Nolan Test, suggests as much. But the party has been unable to capitalize on these voters because it’s always tried to do far too much, and far too fast. The libertarian-minded voters out there have never been more dissatisfied with both the major political parties, but until they are offered a reasonable-sounding third option, one that does not look like so much howling at the moon, they will never change their affiliations.

Never mind if howling at the moon really is the high-minded, principled thing to do. What on earth gave you the idea that party politics is about high-mindedness or principle? Conservatives and liberals move mountains in party politics, every single day. They get what they want, again and again, and we all know how few principles they can have.

Randy Barnett suggested recently that the Libertarian Party has hurt the cause of libertarianism by draining off the libertarians of both major parties and diverting their efforts into a losing battle. He’s right–and I might even add to the critique: Once these people are in the party, they stop talking sense altogether, and they are lost as effective advocates on matters of political consequence. Compare the work done by the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, the Pacific Legal Foundation, NORML, even the many Objectivist groups out there. Every last one of them, without exception, has done more for libertarianism than the Libertarian Party.

It is a standard rejoinder from the advocates of the LP, that if you do not care for the party’s tactics or approach–Hey, why not join up and try to change things?

But what nonsense this is! Have we ever heard its like from another political organization of any sort at all? And why should we not take it as a frank admission of intellectual bankruptcy? Even worse: What possible appeal can this rejoinder have to anyone at all? “You don’t like us. So join our group.” Oh please.

If libertarianism is going to be a party politics at all, it needs a clean break from the dead-end party that it has right now. It needs a new party, one that recognizes what party politics really is: In the system we have (again, love it or hate it), party politics is the art of appealing to the public. Our current party has not the slightest clue how to do this. Appealing to the public means compromising; it means making deals, it means jettisoning the radicalism–all for the purpose of doing what we can in this particular realm of human action. It’s one where we have scarcely begun to make ourselves known.

[Crossposted at Liberty & Power.]

Between this and penblogging, why keep a real blog at all?

One of the most interesting comments I’ve yet seen about Terri Schiavo comes from PZ Myers, who writes,

It’s a sad story, but everyone has to face the fact that she’s never going to recover and what’s there right now is nothing but twitching meat.

However, I disagree that she must be allowed to die. She doesn’t care anymore, and whether there was a living will or request to be allowed to die simply doesn’t matter. Just as there is nobody there to preserve, there is nobody there to protect from the right-wing ghouls who want to preserve her mind-free still-warm corpse.

So let her parents have it. It’s their decision to spend these years of their life, their savings, tending a body. It’s a shell, a cadaver with a heartbeat, nothing worth fighting for when there are all these people lined up to take care of it. So why should we care?

In a sense, both sides are being inconsistent: The right-to-death side thinks she is already dead, and so she must be allowed to die. [Insert puzzled expression here.] The right-to-life side admits she is a vegetable, not a human, but wants her to keep her human dignity anyway. And what a strange definition they have of dignity.

I am strongly tempted to agree with Mr. Myers, who in effect advises that the ghouls should be allowed to have their meat puppet. It’s an idea first suggested in much more graphic terms by RudePundit, whose post on the controversy lives up to his name. Still, I cannot quite bring myself to this point of view.

It’s true that the question of Terri Schiavo’s consent is meaningless once we admit that she is already a non-person. But two related questions are much more serious.

The first is the question of the individual’s right to dispose of their own body and estate after death, something that America has long held as a basic human right. The Florida courts have consistently held (six times!) in favor of Michael Schiavo, who maintains that Terri did not want this treatment for her body.

Just as we honor the wishes of those who want, say, a Christian funeral service–or to be cremated and shot from a cannon–so too, we ought to give Terri Schiavo the treatment that she wanted in death. A decent respect for individual autonomy demands no less. This, my dear fundamentalists, is what it means to err on the side of life: It is to err on the side of respect for individual will, not on the side of mere protoplasm.

The second reason why the case really matters is because it is about… marriage.

With one hand the religious right is “protecting” marriage by denying committed same-sex couples the legal benefits of that state. With the other hand, they are making me wonder what good a marriage would do in any event: If Congress itself can step in and declare that the guardianship that comes with marriage is null and void, then marriage really is the weak and threatened institution that the religious right says it is. The only trouble is, the religious right is the one doing all the attacking. Never mind the egregious abuse of federalism that the case represents; far more to the point, it is also an egregious abuse of the marriage bond.

The hypocrisy could not be more perfect, as Randall Terry himself has taken the lead in both these efforts, demonizing gay marriages and infringing on the rights of straight ones. What people like him want is not to protect marriage–but to subjugate all marriage, all human intimacy, to their own political will.

For the record, my wishes for the end of my own life are as follows: I trust my lifelong companion, my husband under the laws of Canada, Scott R. Starin, to make all medical decisions for me whatsoever. I do not trust anyone else with this capacity, no matter who they are.

I expect Scott’s decisions to be followed down to the very last detail when I am incapacitated. I do not want my body to be kept alive artificially in a persistent vegetative state when there is no hope of recovery, and I trust Scott to make the determination of when and how my life will end if ever this state should befall me.

Now, if only a marriage allowed us to make such decisions–but apparently it doesn’t anymore.

Longtime blog neighbor Ed Brayton writes,

This is probably going to come as a shock to my regular readers, but I’m going to agree with Pat Buchanan and the Worldnutdaily. In Pat’s most recent column, he endorses a bill in front of Congress called the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act of 2005. The bill would change the Internal Revenue Code to allow ministers and other church officials to endorse candidates and take positions on partisan political issues without risking their tax exempt status. I agree with this and think the bill should pass, for several reasons.

First, the rules as written currently are so vague that they are prone to abuse. What precisely is prohibited and what precisely is allowed for charitable organizations to do is very much a matter of interpretation…

Political candidates of all stripes give speeches at churches all the time, especially during a campaign. Is that prohibited? What if the church only allows those of one party to speak and not another? That happens all the time too.

Second, it would end the fiction that churches are not endorsing candidates. Churches and ministers do endorse candidates currently, they just do it while painstakingly holding to the letter of the law to protect themselves. Democrats typically speak in front of liberal churches, while Republicans typically speak in front of conservative churches. Is giving a forum to only one candidate an endorsement? It seems obvious that it ought to be viewed as one, but it’s generally not seen as one. So why not end this fiction? Let churches endorse candidates if they choose because everyone knows that they’re doing it anyway, just with the dishonest pretense of not doing it.

I hate to say this, because I seldom disagree with Mr. Brayton, but some of his assertions are mistaken. And they lead to what I believe is a faulty conclusion.

If a church holds a pre-election forum, it is required to invite all qualifying candidates to speak. It simply is not true that liberal churches invite only Democrats and conservative churches invite only Republicans. If they ever do, it is a violation, and they are subject to losing their tax-exempt status.

It is indeed lamentable that the IRS must read over sermons to determine whether a violation exists. The alternative, though, is much worse: Consider how both American politics and American religion would be cheapened if ministers could threaten the eternal souls of their congregations for failing to vote in the proper way. Consider the temptation that would exist under such a system, not merely to infringe upon a set of difficult and subjective rules–but to substitute politics entirely for the work of the spirit.

Centuries of European history have shown that whatever their other purposes, churches can also make remarkably adept political machines, and it is best to keep them out of the hands of those who would employ them as such. When mixed with political power, religious fanaticism is deadly. And when mixed with political power, most religions incline toward fanaticism. Without that power, though, fanaticism is little more than an embarrassing footnote in our cultural life.

Mr. Brayton asks about the compelling interest that justifies this infringement on the freedom of speech, but to me it is clear. We have these laws because they allow each citizen to pursue both their religious and their political views independently of one another–and independently of all other forces on earth. Each is an individual right, and neither one must be sacrificed to the other.

So too, these laws are narrowly tailored, satisfying the other prong of the classical strict-scrutiny test: Churches may urge their members to vote, for example; they may hold candidates’ forums, provided that all are given equal access; they may even urge their members not to vote, if such is their doctrine. Finally, if a church really wishes to go into politics, it may forego tax-exempt status entirely–and declare to its members that it aims not merely at spiritual but also at worldly ends. It would be difficult to find a more narrow tailoring than this while still achieving the end of maintaining religion and politics inviolate.

Incidentally, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has a useful set of documents on the issue. I highly recommend them for further reading.

I am pleased to announce that I have completed the first draft to the final chapter of my dissertation. It’s titled “The Chroniques Scandaleuses of the French Revolution,” and it discusses the idea of scandal in the journals and pamphlets of 1789. Jean-Paul Marat is the star of the chapter, but plenty of other revolutionary figures make an appearance too, including Brissot, Necker, and Mirabeau. Also, it wouldn’t be the French Revolution without the storming of the Bastille. It, too, makes an appearance.

Still ahead are several weeks of revisions and reconciliations, rewritings and rethinkings. The vast majority of the work is done, though, and much faster than I expected. Given my good progress, I may even allow myself to blog a bit more often than once a week, but I won’t return just yet to the pace I used to keep. Blogging actually takes a lot more of my mental energy than I’d been telling myself, and my top priority is still to finish the dissertation.

Well, that and to find a career–which may be where you come in.

I will be graduating in the next few months, and the main academic hiring season doesn’t really start until the fall. I have no intention whatsoever of sitting around in the meantime. And I have no interest at all in taking a temporary food service, data entry, or retail job merely to pass the time until September. These months of my life are precious, and I am confident I can do better.

My attitude is simple: I am looking for a genuine and stimulating career position right now–and in the Washington, DC area. I am looking for a career where I can write, and reason, and make good use of the research skills I have acquired so far. Ideally, I would like to be able to further the causes and values I believe in–and you read Positive Liberty, you know what these are. Teaching would be a nice bonus, but it’s far from required. Salary is highly negotiable; I am not looking to become rich, but only to make a living at something I find worthwhile. I will continue the search until I have found the career I want, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

When the academic hiring season comes, I will send out job applications if I feel it is worth my time. Of course, if whatever I have found in the meantime is compelling enough, then I simply won’t bother.

If you can, try making me an offer–and we’ll see how it stacks up. Act quickly, though, because the search is on…

You know you are running a hardcore academic blog when people actually ask you for a post on Michel Foucault. But they have, and here it is.

In academic history, everyone must adopt a stance of some sort toward Foucault, particularly if they work in early modern French history–and I do. What follows is my attempt toward a useful understanding of Foucault’s writings, a way to make them do work for me.

I should be clear about what this post is not, however. It isn’t a thorough treatment of all of Foucault’s ideas, nor does it pretend to be. It is only a description of how I relate to Foucault, as someone with political tendencies far removed from his and with deep skepticism toward some of his stronger claims.

Many, including Judith Butler and David Halperin, would insist precisely on those areas of Foucault that I would prefer to downplay. But Foucault’s anti-essentialist and anti-authoritarian tendencies can all be reconciled with a more libertarian politics than Foucault would likely have preferred, and this is exactly what I propose to do. We should set aside, then, his kind words for the Maoist death squads–never forgetting that he really did utter them, but recalling as well that we don’t have to accept everything the man said to find some of his ideas useful.

My reading of Foucault here is bound to be controversial; in a sense, I really will be twisting his meanings, possibly in ways that he would not have preferred. Heaven forbid that this piece should be anyone’s introduction to the subject. And don’t even try stealing it for a term paper; your profs will catch on almost immediately, because what I’m doing to Foucault here probably should not be allowed by the canons of academic interpretation.

The late social theorist Michel Foucault is often thought of as the quintessential antiliberal: Just look at his politics, for instance, wherein he was fooled not once but twice, enamored of Stalin early in life–and of Mao later on. Or consider his bitter railing against the very idea of progress, to which liberals of all varieties are at least in some sense committed. Civilization, Foucault seems to say, is but trick that we play on ourselves, and whether we are talking about progress toward greater freedom, or greater health, or greater humanity–Foucault often seems to believe in none of it.

While I have grave reservations about any effort to make a real-world politics out of Foucault’s insights, I do believe that there is something of value to be had in his work, even for old-style liberals, for libertarians, for classical liberals, and all those who work in the Enlightenment tradition. Though Foucault is often seen as a radical critic of the Enlightenment, it is an open question both how deep this radicalism runs and how far we must follow it.

From his intellectual genealogy, both avowed and inferred, Foucault can be likened to the Socratic speaker Thrasymachus, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the deconstructionist literary critic Jacques Derrida. But perhaps the best approach to Foucault, for those who mistrust all things postmodern, is through the work of Thomas Szasz, the radical psychologist who has had a surprisingly strong influence on recent libertarian thought.

In his work, Szasz has strongly critiqued the social and coercive elements of our mental health system. He argues that most of what we understand as “insanity” can be reduced to a set of practices or beliefs that we find disagreeable. He argues, at times quite forcefully, that these have nothing to do with the physiology of the patient: The “fault,” if such exists, lies at least as much with the observer.

We could easily give an example from history, too: Resurrect a reasonable individual of the seventeenth century–and we would almost certainly find him a barking madman, provided only that we did not know his extraordinary life circumstances. Send any one of us back to his time–and we would all pass for madmen just as he did. Does this mean that all present-day people are mad by seventeenth-century standards? Or that all people of the seventeenth century were mad by ours? If so, then of what did their (physiological) disease consist? Or is madness really just the failure to conform to everyone else’s expectations? As Szasz writes,

If you talk to God, you are praying;
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist;
If God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

As reviewers have noted, his stance here is actually straight out of Foucault’s playbook. Foucault did not focus so much as Szasz on the lack of physiological signifiers to madness or on their seemingly arbitrary social referents. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault instead examined the idea of madness as it developed in the early modern era, focusing above all on the institutions that created this idea, from the fools and village idiots of the Renaissance, who made madness seem domestic, unthreatening, and even banal–to the asylums of the modern era, wherein madness is confined as though it were a contagion that might infect the rest of us. Foucault’s aim was not necessarily to liberate humanity from the social and coercive elements of mental health, but merely to point out these social and coercive elements had an unquestioned existence at the heart of what we think of as civilization. In a way, the scope of the claim makes Foucault far more unsettling than even the radical Dr. Szasz.

(To my knowledge, Foucault did not consider Szasz’s work while he lived; Foucault’s Madness and Civilization does not cite Szasz in its footnotes. Perhaps someone with a deeper knowledge of these figures would be able to shed light on this question, though I cannot.)

In a more general sense, Foucault delighted in subverting our existing categories of thought, not because he believed thought itself was illegitimate (a common misreading), but because he held that vast substructures of thought existed beneath the surface assumptions of our culture, structures that often do nothing in particular for our own benefit and may even serve to limit us. Ideas like madness, civilization, representation, justice, health, and sovereignty all turn out, Foucault believed, to rest on deeper beliefs (Foucault often, though not always, referred to these as discourses) that were usually left unspoken or that were even incapable of being expressed by the culture that created them. And the structures of human institutions–clinics, prisons, asylums, schools–served primarily to perpetuate the discourses that made themselves possible. Not us.

In this way, Foucault’s discourses also resemble Richard Dawkins’s memes (an idea introduced in The Selfish Gene that has since become ubiquitous), the pseudo-genetic elements of human thought that replicate chiefly because they are good at replicating, and not because they possess any particular virtue as regards human betterment. Take Szasz on mental health, add Dawkins on the replicability of ideas–and throw in some very nasty institutional teeth to make the whole thing work. The result is Foucault, more or less.

To give an example that is somewhat more abstract than mental health, here is Foucault dissecting the discourse which up to the end of the sixteenth century gave great priority in western science to the doctrine of resemblance. He argues that, far more than we do today, thinkers of that era privileged connections between objects (and ideas) so long as they resembled or could be claimed to resemble one another in form. The exterior was often held to be an unproblematic reflection of what could be found within:

Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible [my emphasis], and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. Painting imitated space. And representation–whether in the service of pleasure or knowledge–was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech [Foucault, The Order of Things].

What Foucault claims to discern here–and what cultural historians have been arguing about ever since–is the deep-seated tendency throughout Western cultures of this era to privilege resemblance even, curiously, for those things that were invisible. The inclusion of an obviously false category–how can invisible things resemble anything at all?–is also one of the hallmarks of Foucault’s work. Unveiling paradoxes like these, Foucault believed, would also unveil the discourse he hoped to explore. They provided for him the keys to subverting institutional power.

Foucault also delighted in finding similarities between social formations that were seemingly far removed from one another: Between quarantines for the sick and prisons for the criminal; between mental hospitals and schools; between our ideas of mental illness and of “healthy” sexuality. He found western civilization a maze of mirrors, where so many things reflected one another that it became impossible ever to grasp which one was “real.” In a sense, we have never fully escaped the early modern obsession with resemblance.

Based in part on these similarities, Foucault sought to tell a disturbing story about the trajectory of progress in the West: Where we often believe that we are freer than our ancestors, in reality we are only more tightly disciplined. It is not that the space of human freedom has expanded, leaving us feeling less cramped; on the contrary, we all have shrunk, and we shy away from many of the freedoms our ancestors took for granted. They have been disciplined out of us.

As an example of how our freedoms have diminished, Foucault’s treatment of the history of sexuality argued that modern sexual science–and modern sexual identities like heterosexual and homosexual–have served chiefly to constrain human desires by tying them to a rigorous medical framework: The “homosexual” (who, Foucault famously declared, did not exist before the nineteenth century) now became a subject for medical science, a “sick” person who had to be cured.

Curiously, this shift happened at exactly the same time that “normal” people stopped entertaining even the possibility that they might someday commit sodomy–a sin which promptly vanished. In its place came the illness of homosexuality.

Modern identity politics has been sorting out the mess ever since then, but Foucault himself would likely have had none of it. He would most likely have asked a question that would deeply trouble today’s gay activists: How on earth do you expect to see liberation, when you base your struggles upon a set of categories that medical science created with the designed purpose of institutionalizing you? As philosopundit has written,

People often consider Foucault an intellectual inspiration for identity politics. But, in fact, Foucault’s thinking works to undermine such conceptions of politics. The rejection of any conception of identity or essence to human nature that is eternal or unchanging is central to Foucault’s thought (see The Order of Things)… Identity politics usually suppose just such a conception of the human subject insofar as it presumes some conception of the autonomous, self-determining individual to be the basis of politics. According to Foucault, it is not just that politics must reject self-deprecating and other-imposed forms of identity if we are to engage in projects of self-determination; we must also reject self-imposed conceptions of identity in order to avoid reinforcing our own subjugation. If identity politics is the project of rejecting other-imposed forms of identity in order to realize ones authentic or self-determined identity free from the inference of others then it retains precisely what Foucault rejects.

It sounds from this quote as though Foucault proposed a certain interior anarchism, a systematic, inward-looking rejection of the “natural” categories of human life, for these things are by no means natural. Sadly, Foucault wrote far too little on what he actually believed the good life to be. The overwhelming majority of his work was critical, and it would be interesting to read or even to recreate him, fancifully, in a different mode.

But Foucault sought mainly to shatter as many of our mirrors as possible; he believed that human freedom was not to be sought through institutions or regimes. For him, structures like these almost invariably ended up being mirrors that reflected something else–often something tyrannical and dehumanizing.

Perhaps the most interesting of Foucault’s works for the classical liberal is his essay “On Governmentality.” Were I to recommend only one of his writings, this would be it. To give a short sketch of the argument, Foucault notes how the modern era has witnessed a remarkable shift in how we understand the nature of what a government is. Formerly, we might have understood the state as a reflection — that word again — of the family. Subjects were children; nobles were adults. The king, of course, was the patriarch of the family. State business was family business — until there came that beloved moment of Foucault’s thought, the epistemic break, where one system of knowledge/power fell, and where another took its place. In the fully modern world, states are not understood as families any longer; now they are seen as the statistical regulators of populations. Rather than personal or filial loyalty, states now rest upon the logic of number. They are democracies; they organize their citizens through the census and the draft. They pride themselves on collecting taxes efficiently and uniformly, where once this was unknown.

Is the numerical state better than the patriarchal one? Foucault never answers this question, nor did he see it as his purpose to do so. At every turn, Foucault is relentlessly amoral, and it is perhaps this aspect of his writing that is the most shocking of all. As in his examinations of the interior life, his look at government offers nothing normative to grab hold of.

It is therefore tempting to throw him away as merely a fascinating dead end. As an undergraduate, I wrote a paper to just this effect: Foucault raises some interesting and counterintuitive challenges, but he arguably gives us nothing that could ever be acted upon. I still find it a reasonable take on Foucault, and if in one of my classes someone made a similar argument today, I might well give it a favorable mark. (My own paper got an A from an avowedly Foucaldean professor. Who says academic diversity is dead?) Or, as Michael Walzer has written, Foucault “stands nowhere and finds no reasons. Angrily he rattles the bars of the iron cage. But he has no plans or projects for turning the cage into something more like a human home.” (Walzer, cited without footnote in Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal, p 92. I would very much like to find the original work from which this citation is drawn.)

We may argue with Foucault’s approach on a number of other levels. First, we may say that the similarities Foucault dwelled upon were superficial or beside the point. Hospitals look like prisons due to convergent cultural evolution, not to some deep-seated fear of contamination that we must fight with paranoid texts in theoretical history. Quarantines developed because they were a good trick, one that allowed control over epidemics even in societies lacking the germ theory of disease.

Alternatively, we may argue that Foucault’s commonalities (”technologies of control,” he calls them when they really meant business and were particularly oppressive) are real–and that they exist for very good reasons. This tactic, which tends to excuse some of the recent barbarisms of the state, will not be popular with libertarians or even with many liberals. I don’t advise it myself.

Yet again, we may attack many of Foucault’s factual premises. For instance, my own reading of primary sources from the eighteenth century has convinced me that Foucault was speaking nonsense when he claimed that “the homosexual” did not exist until late in the following century. While gays may not have been medicalized until then, they certainly existed, with remarkably well-developed subcultures, codes of conduct, meeting places, and self-awareness. Intriguingly, gays and lesbians were understood through quite different filters at the time, a subject that would one day be worth my writing about, and toward which historian Jeffrey Merrick has already made great strides.

Yet this critique does not necessarily undercut Foucault’s assertions about the nature of societal power; it only points out that certain examples he used to illustrate it were poorly chosen. Others presumably would endure.

Finally, we may suggest a meta-critique of Foucault: As a social theorist, he is just as much a product of institutionalized society as anyone else, and because of this, Foucault’s own analysis shuts off all possibility of an authentic freedom. As I wrote in my undergraduate paper,

Foucault as a purveyor of knowledge intends to pull one over on us, to rope us into the system of power relations that he finds preferable: His knowledge is power, not merely in the conventional sense, but with the implication that the purpose of knowledge is the establishment of a subtle control over the one who is its subject–or even over the one who learns it. What is more, this purpose remains the same whether the knowledge be learned in a mental hospital, in a prison, or, one could easily argue, in a university.

[Foucault offers] a denial of the possibility of an honest honesty, of a truth behind the mask of power. All is power, and honesty is merely the pleasant-sounding word we use for the forced process of conforming to the wishes of those who have it. In the face of this, what can one say? Can a separate peace with Foucault’s totalizing realpolitik of ideas even be negotiated?

Undergraduate bluster aside, I think I was really onto something. But many of Foucault’s works, particularly in his later years, stressed the incompleteness inherent to all technologies of control. There is always a way out, the later Foucault seems to argue, although he could be terribly laconic about just where to find it.

All of this raises a very important question, though, one that could make or break Foucault’s entire intellectual project: If “power” is simply another name we give to a knowledge that happens to enjoy the weight of consensus–then how does Foucault really differ from social thinkers like Szasz, or even like Thomas Kuhn, who made similar claims, but who were much more modest in their pronouncements? What does the insistence on power really add, apart from a thrilling tinge of paranoia (one that may thrill anti-authoritarians of any stripe whatsoever)? After having encountered all of Foucault’s major works, plus so many more written by those who admired him, it remains my most pressing question: If Foucault is to be understood primarily as a subverter of socially exercized power, this question will require an answer that I do not yet have.

Wipe that smile off your face. This is not another post about polygamy.

I am writing to let you know that I will be embarking on an extended period of very light blogging, effective immediately.

Of late I have been disappointed with the quality of my work here, and what is worse, I have not been quite satisfied with my academic work either. Rather than doing what I consider an inferior job at both, I have opted to devote more time and energy to my first career.

In the last two months, my daily readership has more than doubled. To my delight, these new readers have been eager to write me with intelligent comments, questions, and ideas for future posts. As I said in the title, I love you all, but I can’t keep up.

I expect that this break will last at least until I have finished the final copy of my dissertation, which should be sometime this summer. Occasional new essays will still be posted here and/or at Liberty & Power, but these will be no more than 1-2 pieces a week. Hopefully someone will scold me if I post more often.

When all is said and done, I do plan to return, provided only that my work schedule allows it. Perhaps my daily readership will even go down–meaning that I will be able to interact with all of my readers to the degree that they deserve.

Until then, thanks once more for making blogging the most stimulating hobby I’ve ever known.

The debate on polygamy continues.

Most everyone seems to oppose classical polygamy; this is where one man marries perhaps dozens of women, where the women are often too young to consent, and where violence or coercion holds the family together. We all agree that this should be stopped. But there is a second kind of polygamy, wherein more than two freely consenting adults all create an intimate union together.

Tim Sandefur supports it, writing,

The right to marry is a right based on contract–—which means, based on the right of more than one person to exercise and trade their liberty as they see fit. The reason for recognition of gay marriage is that if two men wish to be married, that violates nobody else’s rights, and therefore I don’t have the right to stop them. (Well, that’s the rough version.) If that theory is correct, then the exact same thing goes for consensual adult polygamy: a person certainly should be free to marry any person he loves, who is also a willing participant.

Note that the only argument that [John] Rowe (or Jason Kuznicki) seems to be able to come up with against polygamy is to say that it isn’t really consensual. Well, that might be true, but that begs the question. The relevant proposition is: consenting adults should be free to arrange their marriages as they see fit, so long as it violates nobody else’s rights.

For the sake of argument–but, we trust, only for the sake of argument–Eve Tushnet of marriagedebate.com has likewise written in favor of this “new” polygamy. (In reality, Tushnet holds that genuine marriage is only between one man and one woman. Perhaps she will explain shortly why she believes her arguments here are mistaken.)

Several readers have written me privately as well, all asking me where I stand and suggesting that as a libertarian, I ought not to oppose the new polygamy. I’ve decided I am going to state as clearly as possible where I stand on the issue. I must stress, however, that I am not quite sure what to think about several aspects of the question.

I think it is helpful to break the issue into three distinct questions.

First: Is there anything about the new polygamy that clearly harms the participants?

Second: Is there anything about it that clearly harms others?

Third: Is it desirable–or possible–to offer government recognition for these unions?

In a sense, question one is none of my business, as I am not in a union of this type. I can say, though, from knowing some people who are, that I do not see any indication of harm. It’s not a scientific observation, of course, but I also don’t know of anyone who has done any hard research on the topic.

As to question two, Jon Rowe’s original point seems strong in some ways and weak in others. Rowe writes,

We outlaw polygamy for precisely the same policy reason why we would demand the recognition of gay marriage: the meaningful chance for any individual to marry a person they love. The gay man, like the single-unlucky male in a polygamous society cannot marry any person he loves.

Now, if consenting polygamy were overwhelmingly one-man-plus-multiple-women, this would certainly be a problem. If, however, these unions were balanced out by an equal number of one-woman-plus-multiple-men partnerships, then the objection would disappear. Likewise, it is difficult to see any danger to allowing gay-only or lesbian-only polygamous unions, as these do not upset the sex ratio that we are trying to preserve.

So far, then, I don’t have any moral objections to consenting adult polygamous unions. I have tremendous difficulties, though, when I try to answer the third question, and to understand just how these unions will be recognized by the government.

Whatever long term social effects may arise from same-sex marriages, their legal institution would be very simple to bring about. This is not the case with polygamous unions, where, if we are to avoid the possibility of exploitation by one overly-powerful partner, the web of mutual rights and obligations among the participants must grow exponentially with each addition to the union. How would a group of eight, say, make decisions about property, children’s education, and so forth? Gabriel Rosenberg makes some very good points in this area, and in general I agree with his rejection of government-sanctioned polygamy as too legally difficult and far too open to abuse.

So: To my polyamorous friends, please, do not think for a moment that I oppose your unions or that I think them improper. Please recognize, though, if you can, that where same-sex civil marriage could be accomplished easily, overnight, and with a minimal chance of abuse, the same does not seem true of civil polygamy.

Update: Kip Esquire has more. He argues that it’s not just that polygamy would be a harder sell politically. It’s also completely unworkable from a legal standpoint.

Leitmotif: The ethics of knaves consists in taking advantage of the biases of respectable people. — Anacharsis Cloots, 1791

Polygamy and same-sex marriage: Many have written on this question from a purely theoretical standpoint; for example, there is Jon Rowe, who argues that we forbid polygamy for exactly the same reason that we should allow same-sex marriage, namely that two-person gender-blind marriages offer each person in society the best chance of finding a compatible mate. Restricting marriage by gender–or allowing a few powerful individuals to eat up more than their share of potential mates–does everyone else a disservice.

I agreed entirely when I read Rowe’s essay, and here comes some supporting evidence: It’s a look at how polygamy is actually practiced in Utah. We have ample reason to be suspicious:

If one supposes, as I do, that consenting adults ought to be able to form any kind of relationship they want, polygamy seems at first to present no problem. Libertarians might say, “What right does the State have to say you cannot do this,” and leave it there, right? Not quite. The sticking points here are those two presumptive words: consenting and adult. Quite often, those involved in polygamy are neither.

Anyone who has grown up around polygamist groups recognizes certain dynamics of that culture: notably that women are fully subordinate to men, and the idea of equality between the sexes is laughable. Most girls are forced to marry young (in Utah it is legal for a 14-year-old girl to marry with permission from her parents…for boys the age limit is higher) and there are many, many cases of very young girls forced by their parents to marry older, powerful men against their will. I remember a couple of famous cases of girls rebelling against incestuous marriages (one to her Uncle and another to her own Grandfather) and being essentially beaten and tortured until they complied.

The trick to keeping women bound to polygamy is to force them to marry young and have babies. They really do have to get them while they’re young, because if they wait until a girl is 17 or so, she is much less likely to stay in the clan–she’ll simply bolt. A 19-year-old with no education and four small children can’t do that, she is fully dependent on her Sister-Wives…

For the guys, polygamy presents its own unhappy choices. Men who are not the top-dog-alpha (the Patriarch of the clan) or his sons, often find themselves simply forced out, en masse.

Phobia Watch: Via Farkleberries comes a stunning example of disproportionate response: Dennis Rader, the alleged BTK serial killer, may remain the president of his church council. But just a couple of denominations away, a lesbian may not serve as a minister. “”We are not going to cut him off,” said Rader’s pastor. “He is still a part of the body of Christ — and that is something some people will have a hard time hearing.” No kidding.

A Question: “Where can I ask a question about human existence?” asks a Yahoo searcher. Why, right here my friend, right here. Ask away, and I will answer.

Pen Blogging: It’s the next big thing. First, Tim Sandefur expounds on the perfect pen. Ed Brayton notes the post, and a flood of appreciation ensues. Sandefur can hardly keep up. See here, here, and here, for starters. Me, I’m a pen heretic. Aside from the marginalia in my books, I write virtually everything using my laptop. I haven’t owned a high-quality pen for years.

Rosenberg’s Return: I am probably the last person to note it formally, but Gabriel Rosenberg has returned to blogging. He writes primarily on same-sex marriage and is well worth the read.

And Lastly: It’s about time the web had a good beer blog. And now it does.