Positive Liberty

I certainly have to agree with Kuznicki’s point that when the state gets into the business of policing our morals, it hands that power to mortal human beings who are themselves fallible, and who cannot resist exploiting their power at the expense of those to whom they dictate the standards of “goodness.” Ultimate power corrupts, especially when it is power over our moral choices. That was, after all, always one of the usual arguments of libertarians (before so many became swallowed up in moral relativism). That’s what John Milton, my favorite Christian libertarian, meant when he said

If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason, and not generally give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence; which never hath more scope or more indulgence then under Tyrants. Hence is it that Tyrants are not oft offended, nor stand much in doubt of bad men, as being all naturally servile; but in whom vertue and true worth most is eminent, them they feare in earnest, as by right thir Maisters, against them lies all thir hatred and suspicion. Consequentlie neither doe bad men hate Tyrants, but have been alwayes readiest with the falsifi’d names of Loyalty, and Obedience, to colour over thir base compliances.

(Emphasis added).

There’s a reason why the collectivist, paternalistic societies turn out to have the most morally corrupt and self-indulgent leadership.

But it’s somehow doubly tragic how so many conservatives think that policing our moral behavior will somehow avert tyranny by “teaching” us moral behavior! They don’t seem to realize that they have become the tyrants—like the guy in that Twilight Zone episode who goes back in time trying to undo a calamity, but discovers that he’s actually the causal agent of it. It is true that a people who will not govern themselves by reason and virtue are doomed ultimately to lose their freedom. But they are doomed to lose it precisely to those who would erect the paternalistic state—to the conservatives who promise to relieve us from our own moral responsibility. These conservatives, to again quote Milton,

are not skilfull considerers of human things, who imagin to remove sin by removing the matter of sin…. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewell left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousnesse. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis’d in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so…. Suppose we could expell sin by this means; look how much we thus expell of sin, so much we expell of vertue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike…. It would be better done to learn that the law must needs be frivolous which goes to restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good, and to evill. And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferr’d before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evill-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and compleating of one vertuous person, more then the restraint of ten vitious.

I just finished watching (at Diana Hsieh’s suggestion) Something the Lord Made, and I want to second her recommendation. It’s a marvelous and powerful movie; the story of a black carpenter named Vivien Thomas who not only managed to become a pioneering medical researcher, but helped pioneer the field of heart surgery, all in the face of segregation and his own lack of formal schooling. Alan Rickman isn’t at his best doing a southern accent, but that’s really the only flaw in this outstanding movie.

Also, bit of a personal touch: the very first scene in the movie shows Thomas working on the floor of a green Victorian house in Nashville; that house is actually the Hale House at Heritage Square in Los Angeles. I and my parents lived in that house from 1981 to 1986. (The interior shots are not the interior of that house; they were filmed on a sound stage, apparently.) It’s pleasant to have a sort of personal connection to this excellent film.

A common charge against libertarians is that in our heart of hearts, we’re nothing more than libertines: Libertarians, the argument runs, want a drastic reduction in state power — but that’s only part of the story. What we also want, we are told, is a drastic reduction in moral suasion, social stricture, and even morality itself. The state is only a first step, say many conservatives, and what libertarians really want is moral degradation. This notion has contributed powerfully to mistrust between the two camps (notoriously through the writings of Russell Kirk).

The trouble with all of this, to my mind, is that the state enforcement of private moral conduct almost inevitably produces an even greater moral evil than the conduct we aim to repress. Far from leading to a more moral society, the use of force to police the private conduct of adults achieves just the opposite; in the name of opposing libertinism, the prohibitionists run squarely into something far worse. What follows is a horrifying example.

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Commenter John left the following response to my post on Michael Novak’s response to me:

[Rowe:] They wanted our nation to be religious, and probably preferred the Christian religion dominate, but would have had no problem with the flourishing of exotic non-Judeo-Christian religions

I assume you are using “they” to refer to the “key founders”. If so this may be correct, but I doubt the validity of the “key founders” formulation. The Revoultion was fought and the Article’s and Constitution ratified by a much broader base of people than four or five people whom you select as key founders.

The State Constitutions adapted by many States explicitly singled out Christianity for protection, and made it a requirement for office in some cases.

Maryland Constitution; “That, as it is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to him; all persons, professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty,”

Delaware: “Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust, before taking his seat, or entering upon the execution of his office, shall take the following oath, or affirmation, if conscientiously scrupulous of taking an oath, to wit: ” I, A B. do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”

Pennsylvania: “And each member, before he takes his seat, shall make and subscribe the following declaration, viz: “I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration. ”

I’ll stop there rather than fill this comment section. You can certainly pick out certain individuals from the era who felt differently, but it seems pretty clear that the mass of Americans at the time were quite religious, and that they were religious in an explicitly Christian sense, not in considering Christianity one good religion among many.

As I noted in my reply, I agree there was a difference between what the “key Founders” thought and the masses. However, I dispute that this formulation is not valid. Continue Reading »

His last anti-Mormon column provoked a slew of angry reactions from Mormon readers on Townhall. This one is even harsher.

Mormonism has almost nothing in common with Christianity. Mormonism is polytheistic, it denies original sin, it teaches that both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit have physical bodies, that Jesus was conceived through sexual intercourse between God the Father and Mary, that Jesus was the spirit-brother of Lucifer, that Jesus was a polygamist, that Jesus traveled to the Americas during His three days in the tomb, and that every Mormon male will one day become a God ruling over his own planet, accompanied by multiple wives, just as the God of this Earth, named Elohim – who was once a man – has done here. Continue Reading »

This is one of my favorite Bad Company tunes and wish it would get more airplay, as opposed to the half dozen other ones that are played to death. The following is not an official video, but one of those “YouTube” creations which features the recorded album version.

And this is a live version from Bad Company in 2002 which shows that Paul Rodgers has still got it.

It’s yet another question that brought a Googler to Positive Liberty. He ended up here, at a June 2006 post by Rowe disussing the mental health profession and homosexuality. Hopefully it’s reassuring to our newfound reader, since the post shows how mental health providers formerly, but erroneously, believed that masturbation causes insanity. They’ve since changed their minds.

So much for mental illness, but does masturbation cause simple anxiety? I’m guessing that at least for the questioner, the answer is yes. Why else would he be searching? Perhaps he’s only considering masturbation, and he’s wondering if doing it will make him more anxious than he already is.

Now for something that might really cause anxiety: The software logs your IP address, so I know where you live, you pervert.

I want to thank Michael Novak for devoting an entire post to my comments at the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog. To make sure that I am not misunderstood, I need to clarify some of my assertions. Novak begins:

In his intelligent replies to Ms. Allen and me, Mr. Jonathan Rowe raises many good points. But his vision of Christianity matches up neither with the Anglican nor the evangelical tradition. Rowe holds that “the primary ‘end’ of religion is morality itself,” and that the three distinctive tenets “which distinguish Christianity from all the other world religions” are “things like the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement.”

But the Evangelical tradition rejects the understanding of Christianity as mere morality. More important are repentance, and a personal relationship with Jesus as Lord. Meanwhile, most of the American Founding Fathers would have recited the Nicene Creed with some regularity at Anglican services. The tenets of that creed include many more items than Mr. Rowe’s three. Such abstract terms as “Trinity” and “Atonement” do not appear in it.

First, I argued that the key Founders (not me personally) believed “the primary ‘end’ of religion is morality itself,…” Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, in no uncertain terms, made it clear they believed this. And while there are ambiguities in exactly what Washington and Madison believed (requiring some detective work, putting the pieces of the puzzle together), I believe Madison and Washington were likewise agreed. Continue Reading »

I’ve lately been put in charge of the law clerks at the Pacific Legal Foundation, and this includes interviewing and hiring applicants. This is the first time I’ve looked at resumes, and of course a clerkship at a public interest law foundation isn’t going to be the same as a judicial clerkship or a clerkship at a private firm, but I have some thoughts that might be helpful to law students who are looking for such positions in the future.

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Via Radley Balko, this movie review from the New York Times has me fascinated. Disturbed, but fascinated:

“Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion.

Mercifully, you don’t see this death on camera, though if you sit close enough to the screen, you will see a few fairly brief images of one sexual event, accompanied by graphic sounds. It isn’t pretty, which is why the images appear only on a small television monitor. Art-house devotees may be a tolerant lot, but it’s doubtful they want to look at a stallion’s erect penis stretched across the big screen like a sailboat boom, at least in public. Certainly such an image would work directly counter to the self-conscious poeticism of Mr. Devor’s film, to its carefully confected narrative of misunderstood barnyard love and baleful testimonial. It is, after all, difficult to sing of the bodies electric and equine amid a chorus of “yucks.”

…Not that he labels man-horse sex deviant or comic or icky or anything much at all. Instead of taking on the serious moral and political objections to bestiality, including those in Leviticus (thou shalt so not) and by animal-rights proponents who reject the instrumental use of animals, he offers haters shrieking on the radio and other opportunists. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night.

That’s too bad. After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal? Human beings subject animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than anything apparently done to the horses in “Zoo,” and on a daily basis human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile’s fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs was not a PETA-approved animal love, true. But, as Mr. Devor makes clear, again and again, these were men who truly loved their animals in sickness and in health and, at least in the case of one unfortunate soul, till death finally did part them.

This last paragraph points to inconsistencies all over the place in the way that people relate to animals. Some animals are food, and these may be done with almost however we please. Others are virtually adopted into our families: Pets are not to be eaten or ever treated with cruelty; we note their life passages with joy and grief almost as we would for human family members. Yet almost no one finds it acceptable to have sex with animals, even if these sex acts are not nearly as cruel as what we do to our food animals. This taboo holds whether or not the animal has been symbolically adopted into the family; here, the pet/non-pet distinction seems not to matter.

Conservatives can accept all of these strictures as the distilled wisdom of the ages, and it does not bother them if no pattern can be found: Being a conservative is not about finding logical patterns of thought, but about accepting the wisdom of the past with faith and humility, making changes only when dire necessities intervene, and then only gradually and as little as possible.

I’m not a conservative, and I’m wondering what general ethical principles, if any, govern our currently accepted relations to animals. We don’t systematically avoid animal pain; industrial farming clearly demonstrates otherwise. We likewise don’t use animals indiscriminately for human purposes; the bestiality taboo disproves this. Some animals are more anthropomorphized than others; some are more “food” than others. Some are simply disgusting — neither imagined as food nor as diminutive echoes of ourselves. To all of this there seems no reason at all — that, I think, is why a film like Zoo is so fascinating.

Okay, since I’m sure it’s on all of your minds, even if you don’t want to ask: No, I don’t think about animals sexually. I feel a strong personal revulsion against the idea. I also mistrust personal revulsion as a legitimate source of law or policy, and I can’t even convince myself that animal cruelty laws — let alone anti-bestiality laws — are coherent expressions of any principle at all, not when I can eat meat without feeling the least bit of guilt. Yet just as revulsion is not a proper source of law, lack of revulsion is not a reason for the law to stand aside.

So what do we do?

Here’s some applause for Glen Whitman’s response to Dinesh D’Souza’s most recent idiotic drivel.

What an awesome testament to the power of the human mind–on so many levels. The device that allows Prof. Hawking to communicate; the wheelchair that gives him movement; the technological and medical advances that have kept him alive much longer than the usual victim of ALS (half of whom die within three years of diagnosis); the airplane that can take him into the sky and give him the feeling of weightlessness…. And what more fitting than to allow a man who has overcome so much and accomplished so much? Very inspiring indeed.

Via BoingBoing, here is the complete list of “Available Emblems of Belief for Placement on Government Headstones and Markers.” There are 41, and all of them are fairly simple. The Wiccans fought for years to get their pentacle onto the list.

Meanwhile, here is the portfolio of Woodlawn Memorials, Inc. Woodlawn offers fully customized etchings, many of which are in color. There are palm trees, shamrocks, roses, the Virgin Mary, and by my count no fewer than three… lighthouses. If you don’t see something you like, ask them: As the site helpfully points out, Woodlawn’s products “can be customized with any image of your choice.”

I’m betting they’ve done quite a few pentacles. Less government, more individuality.

Brayton (at his other blog) discusses the ACLU of Indiana’s lawsuit against license plates reading “In God We Trust.”

Now I am well aware that people who object to “In God We Trust” are thought to be pedants. I am well aware that religious people find the phrase inoffensive. I know that these same religious people insist that if it’s inoffensive for them, then it must be inoffensive for all others, too. I know, finally, that many who insist strongly on the separation of church and state find other battles more pressing.

Yet I wonder… How much state-sanctioned godliness should we tolerate? If this phrase is innocuous, then where are the limits?

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So there’s this toll collector in New Jersey named Jason Glassey. And one day, when he gets off duty, he’s feeling a little stressed. So he gets in his car, still wearing his uniform, and drives along the Turnpike until he gets stuck in traffic behind a van. Like many folks, he scoots over to the right lane and passes the van. And like any good, sensible public employee, as he’s passing the van, he reaches over for his paintball gun and shoots at the van that has caused the backup.

Naturally, such absolutely inappropriate behavior would get him fired. Shooting at cars, even with a paintball gun, is not what any rational person would consider appropriate conduct, even if it’s off shift, for a person who is a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike!

But if you thought that, you would have forgotten about public employee unions, which insisted that Mr. Glassey should keep his job. An arbitrator agreed, and the employer appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that reinstating him after such conduct would contravene public policy. As in, well, duh! Nevertheless, on Monday, the state Supreme Court upheld the reinstatement order. A decision to reinstate a fired public employee, the Court said, could only be voided if it violated “public policy…embodied in legislative enactments, administrative regulations, or legal precedents, rather than…amorphous considerations of the common weal.” New Jersey Turnpike Authority v. Local 196, 2007 WL 1174206, *5 (N.J. 2007). To quote Tim Allen, “urrh?!”

“To be sure, the State has a public policy against aggressive driving,” said the Court. “Although Glassey’s conduct violated that public policy, his reinstatement to his position as a Parkway toll collector is not contrary to any embodiment of public policy…. [W]e find that the award reinstating Glassey to his position as a toll collector did not implicate any statutory, regulatory, or precedential embodiment of public policy.” Id. at *9.

Even more mind-blowing are some of the precedents the Court relied on:

[D]eference to an arbitrator’s award reinstating an employee to his former position following admittedly serious misconduct is consistent with arbitration jurisprudence across the nation. See, e.g., Boston Med. Ctr., supra, 260 F.3d 16 (ordering reinstatement of nurse charged with substandard conduct following infant’s death); Westvaco Corp., supra, 171 F.3d 971 (upholding award reinstating employee who sexually harassed coworker); Saint Mary Home, Inc. v. Serv. Employees Int’l Union, Dist. 1199, 116 F.3d 41 (2d Cir.1997) (upholding reinstatement of employee who assaulted co-worker and was found in possession of less than ounce of marijuana); United Food & Commercial Workers Int’l Union, Local 588 v. Foster Poultry Farms, 74 F.3d 169 (9th Cir.1995) (ordering reinstatement of employees who failed drug test); Chrysler Motors Corp. v. Int’l Union, Allied Indus. Workers of Am., 959 F.2d 685 (7th Cir.) (reinstating employee who sexually harassed colleague), cert. denied, 506 U.S. 908, 113 S.Ct. 304, 121 L. Ed.2d 227 (1992); Local 453, Int’l Union of Elec., Radio & Mach. Workers, supra, 314 F.2d 25 (upholding reinstatement of employee convicted of gambling in workplace). Specifically, deference to a reinstatement award comports with the comparable result in United States Postal Service v. National Ass’n of Letter Carriers, 839 F.2d 146 (3d Cir.1988). There, a postal employee confessed to firing “gun shots at his [p]ostmaster’s empty parked car, damaging the windshield, dashboard and front seat.” Id. at 147. And there, as here, the employee was discharged for his off-duty conduct and the arbitrator reinstated the grievant. Ibid. Although the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit declined to address the breadth of the public policy exception, id. at 150, Chief Judge Gibbons, writing for the court, remanded the matter for entry of an order enforcing the arbitrator’s award, id. at 150-51.

Id. at *10.

My flabber is gasted. I suppose it should have been long ago.