By skepticlawyer

Well, if it isn’t an atheist bunfight, it’s a libertarian bunfight.

Last week — in an excellent piece for Reason Magazine — David Boaz argued that libertarians ought to stop looking backwards for some ‘golden age of lost liberty’, because no such age has ever existed. More to the point, no such age ever will exist:

Has there ever been a golden age of liberty? No, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others. If we look at the long term—from a past that includes despotism, feudalism, absolutism, fascism, and communism—we’re clearly better off. […] [I]n 1776 black Americans were held in chattel slavery, and married women had no legal existence except as agents of their husbands. In 1910 and even 1950, blacks still suffered under the legal bonds of Jim Crow—and we all faced confiscatory tax rates throughout the postwar period.

This rather obvious point set off a veritable orgy of argument, invective and soul searching among libertarians of all stripes. Some of it was not pretty, for the simple reason that libertarians are socially progressive. Boaz’s point — that we don’t emphasize our socially progressive credentials enough — still holds, however. It especially holds when US libertarians engage in what some of my American friends describe as ‘Founder Worship’. This ‘Founder Worship’ reveals a tendency to wallow in what astronomer and libertarian David Brin calls the ‘look back’ view:

Was there a past golden age when humans knew more and lived more natural lives, from which we fell because of unwise choices? This is the Look-Back View. Or is wisdom cumulative? The Look-Forward View holds that anything resembling a human utopia can only be achieved in the future, through incremental improvements in knowledge or merit.

As an example of classic Look-Back-ism, Boaz cited an essay by Jacob Hornberger, which ran as follows:

First of all, let’s talk about the economic system that existed in the United States from the inception of the nation to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations, licensure laws, drug laws, immigration controls, or coercive transfer programs, such as farm subsidies and education grants. There was no federal department of labor, agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, or homeland security. […] Why did early Americans consider themselves free? The answer is rooted in the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. As Thomas Jefferson observed in that document, people have been endowed by their Creator with certain fundamental and inherent rights. These include, but are certainly not limited to, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If there is such a thing as the definition of ‘Founder Worship’, this is it. As Boaz points out, ‘too many of us who extol the Founders and deplore the growth of the American state forget that that state held millions of people in chains.’ Will Wilkinson, like David Brin, is explicit about libertarian ideals as ‘Look-Forward’ ideals:

It’s just plain wrongheaded to cast the libertarian project as the project of restoring lost liberties. Most people never had the liberties backward-looking libertarians would like to restore. I know the rhetoric of restoration can be very seductive, especially in a country unusually full (for a wealthy liberal democracy) of patriotic traditionalists. But restoration is a conservative project and liberty is a fundamentally progressive cause.

As Lorenzo points out at his place, the Boaz piece generated a lot of remarkably grumpy comments in part because it forced libertarians to engage with progressives in ways that make people on both sides uncomfortable:

[G]rumpy because people were obviously quite enamoured of positive views of American history, were tired of being beaten with the stick of slavery and very much of the view that liberty had been steadily declining.

There is something in this. I am one of those people who happens to think it is not possible to apologise for wrongs and harms for which one is not responsible. I also reject the concept of collective guilt or collective responsibility, for the simple reason that seeing people as appendages of their groups opens the door not just to treating them well (as a group) but also — more frequently, especially in the light of history — to treating them like shit, enslaving them, even killing them. I have got into innumerable arguments over it, but I still maintain that notions of ‘group rights’ come from the same intellectual tradition that leads to ‘group harms’. And so I want no part of either notion.

What justified slavery and Jim Crow and the coverture laws that deprived married women of property rights is this tendency to treat people as an undifferentiated mass, as indicia only of their group, not as individuals. Slowly, however — over time — those group disabilities and impositions were peeled away, and the basket of negative rights for which John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor argued in 1859 were finally extended to all, but — as Boaz points out — not without a terrific struggle:

For the past 70 years or so conservatives have opposed the demands for equal respect and equal rights by Jews, blacks, women, and gay people. Libertarians have not opposed those appeals for freedom, but too often we (or our forebears) paid too little attention to them. And one of the ways we do that is by saying “Americans used to be free, but now we’re not”—which is a historical argument that doesn’t ring true to an awful lot of Jewish, black, female, and gay Americans.

I should point out here that Boaz isn’t talking about positive liberty, the ‘freedom to’ that Isaiah Berlin suspected could manifest in deeply totalitarian ways. He’s talking about the removal of impediments, about the state getting the Hell out of the way of the individual. Make no mistake: a law that tells a woman she is her husband’s instrument is an impediment in a way that earning a low wage is not. The existence of the first is fatal to a society’s conception of itself as free, while denial of the second is only denial of a society’s conception of itself as equal. There is a difference.

However (all that conceded) Boaz is also aware of encroachments on our liberty: the ASBO, the Patriot Act, CCTV on every street corner, identity cards, regulations that throttle business, taxes that strangle enterprise. These threats are real. Their reality is why libertarians spend so much time talking about economics and war, which in some respects is a shame. There really is a lot more to us.

That said, while ‘liberty’ has been extended to more of us, I can’t help thinking that the conception of liberty has become ‘thinner’ over time. ‘Thinness’ is a philosopher’s term of art that suggests a concept is being stretched, like butter spread over a piece of dry bread. If it is stretched too far, it is at risk of becoming meaningless.

The best analogy I can think of is the one I’ve alluded to in this post’s title: the liberty pool.

Imagine — if you will — that ‘liberty’ is a swimming pool on a hot summer’s day. In 1880, it’s a very deep swimming pool. The white, heterosexual men who have use of it are soaking in liberty up to their necks. No-one else is allowed use of the pool, however. Jews, blacks, women and gays are all forced to stand around the edge and watch while a minority of the population gets to frolic in the cooling water. Over time, more and more of the watchers are allowed to get into the pool. First Jews, then black men, then white women, then black women, finally gays.

However, as they step into the water, something weird starts to happen. Instead of accommodating the new arrivals, the liberty pool starts to get shallower. By the time everyone is included, liberty barely comes up to the swimmers’ waists. Some of the shallowness is really nasty, too. Lots of the black men, for example, are tossed out of the water and forced to return to the edge thanks to something called ‘the War on Drugs’. The result is that everyone has a bit of liberty, but that no-one can swim. And on a hot day, that’s pretty pissy.

Libertarians want the liberty pool to come back up to everyone’s necks. That is all.