The Unmentionable

IsJordan Peterson Enabling Jew Hatred?

I won’t go into all of the neo-Nazi Hitler comparisons in this piece; you know them all because this is standard operating procedure.  Instead, this:

In an April blog post, [Peterson] attributed that alleged influence to Jewish intelligence — an old anti-Semitic dog whistle.

That’s it.  Suggesting – with some evidence – that Jews are more intelligent than average is anti-Semitic.

Yet can it be denied that Jews have an outsized influence in business, politics, entertainment, etc.?  If I am wrong about this, I am really missing the boat.  But if I am right, to what might this outsized influence be attributed, if not intelligence?  Because the other possible answers are, shall we say, less flattering.

In any case…Jews don’t need help enabling Jew hatred; they do well enough on their own.  Just today, we have this:

At Least 41 Palestinians Killed in Protests as U.S. Opens Jerusalem Embassy

At least 1,700 Palestinian demonstrators were also wounded along the border fence with Gaza, the Health Ministry reported, as the mass protests that began on March 30 and that had already left dozens dead erupted again.

The relocation of the United States Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv was set for Monday, timed to the 70th anniversary of the formation of Israel — a move that many Israelis have celebrated but that has enraged Palestinians.

I take that back.  The Jews do need some help enabling Jew hatred.  They get it from the United States government.  As to which is the puppet and which is the puppet-master, to each his own.

Tomorrow is supposed to be worse, as even larger protests are planned:

…May 15 is observed by Palestinians as the anniversary of what they call the nakba, or catastrophe. It marks the expulsion or flight from the newly formed Jewish state of hundreds of thousands of Arabs in 1948, who have been unable to return or reclaim property they left behind.

I am waiting for these who make the libertarian case for Israel to address this current issue of the murder and wounding of almost 2000 protestors (along with the hundreds of other similar issues of the past); I am further waiting for the open borders libertarians to offer their same prescription for Israel.  I know I will be waiting a lifetime.

I am waiting for Christians to actually reflect Christ when it comes to Israel and also to torture by the United States government.  I know I will be waiting a lifetime.

Conclusion

In the west we live in a world full of contradictions and hypocrisy and lies.  The most serious hypocrisies come from those who profess evil in Christ’s name; almost equally troubling to me personally is the fact that libertarians also profess evil in the name of the NAP.

Contradictions and hypocrisies cannot stand forever; they are being exposed out throughout the west, as can be seen in the political discourse over the last several years.  They will be resolved, and this resolution will include all that is happening in the Middle East.

Doing Business With Immoral People

Romans 3: 10 As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.  12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

I guess I could end this post here, as the hurdle is set impossibly high to find moral people with which to do business.

Snippets From a Dialogue

Rien: …just create a virtual libertarian paradise, ruled by NAP, where libertarians will only trade with fellow libertarians….I am assuming that doing business with people that share our morals is better than doing business with people that do not share our morals.  Why would you even want to do business with immoral people?

Nick Badalamenti: …I'll say that there are many subjective standards by which people might feel on another are "immoral".

Rien: …maybe when B.M. spends a post on it we get an opportunity to discuss it.

OK, let’s give it a go.

Before We Get Started

In Rien’s opening statement (as I have provided above) are a few items worth pulling apart and examining – this even before getting at the topic that makes for the title of this post.  Perhaps most striking: just because someone fancies himself a libertarian does not necessarily suggest he is moral in another libertarian’s eyes.

For example, libertarians have different opinions on the application of the NAP.  Begin with the minarchist / anarchist view – anarchists might suggest that the minarchist is advocating immoral behavior. 

Then there is the undefendable that is defended by libertarian law.  Many of these undefendable activities are at the same time not inconsistent with the NAP and also considered by many to be immoral practices.

More significant, perhaps: how about abortion or open borders?  There are libertarians on each side of these issues that, to a small or great degree, consider libertarians on the other side of the issue to be immoral.

What I am getting at: many libertarians have more in common morally with non-libertarians than they do with each other – libertarians are divided morally almost as much as is the general population.

Libertarianism’s Amorality

But, now, let’s take a step back and consider areas where it would seem all libertarians who consistently apply the NAP should agree.  What does the non-aggression principle suggest about doing business with immoral people?  (Hint: pretty much nothing.)

Gary Galles offers Amoral markets versus immoral coercion.  The title itself is suggestive of both the libertarian and (truly) free market reality.  Much of the post is offering cites from Leonard Read.

Summarizing Read, Galles offers:

…Read showed that liberty’s failure to gain more adherents than utopian statism can be, in part, traced to the fact that it is the ends envisioned, rather than the means involved, that often motivate people. And since unlike utopian visions, freedom, including free markets — an “amoral servant” — cannot be proven to have no objectionable results to anyone, liberty can be saddled with an inspirational deficit.

The market is amoral; it provides a mechanism for man to express his desires – moral or otherwise.  Citing Read:

[But] it is necessary to recognize the limitations of the free market. The market is a mechanism, and thus it is wholly lacking in moral and spiritual suasion…it embodies no coercive force whatsoever.

The market is but a response to — a mirror of — our desires.

And Read quoting W.H. Pitt:

“[T]he market, with its function for the economizing of time and effort, is servant alike to the good, the compassionate, and the perceptive as well as to the evil, the inconsiderate, and the oblivious.”

You get the idea.  Markets, when viewed through a libertarian lens, provide almost no moral guidance.

Community Lost

The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, by Robert Nisbet

In every age there are certain key words which by their repetitive use and redefinition mark the distinctive channels of faith and thought.

In the nineteenth century, the age of individualism and rationalism, such words as individual, change, progress, reason, and freedom were notable not merely for their wide use as linguistic tools in books, essays, and lectures but for their symbolic value in convictions of immense numbers of men.

The fruits of the Enlightenment, with its roots in the Reformation and Renaissance, were found in two revolutions: the French and the American.  The French was a disaster from the beginning; the American offered a glimpse of the theory applied in its most favorable light.

Not ignoring some noticeable deficiencies (most significantly, slavery in the United States), the west – meaning, for this purpose, primarily the United States and Great Britain – offered a few decades of life for the ideas of liberty, equality and freedom. 

The “key words” noted by Nisbet gained maximum traction and meaning in the nineteenth century, just at the peak of this experiment; that it all came crashing down so quickly thereafter – in 1861 in America and 1914 in Europe – gave testimony to the frailty of this idea of the concept of individual freedom born of the Enlightenment.

What happened?  Why?  It is these questions that Nisbet examines. 

He begins with the focus on “the discrete individual – autonomous, self-sufficing, and stable…”

Competition, individualism, dislocation of status and custom, impersonality, and moral anonymity were hailed by the rationalist…. Man was the primary and solid fact; relationships were purely derivative.

Libertarianism and the non-aggression principle demands nothing more; in application, the idea saw its peak in law and custom in around 1776, and deteriorated only slowly over roughly the next four score and seven years before it came crashing down.  If those who advocate for liberty want to see their advocacy bear fruit, time looking in a mirror is required – because the questions of what happened and why should be even more important to libertarians than they are to Nisbet. 

Reason, founded upon natural interest, would replace the wisdom Burke and his fellow conservatives had claimed to find in historical processes of use and wont, of habit and prejudice.

This underlying faith was foundational to both classical liberalism and communism:

Between philosophers as far removed as Spencer and Marx there was a common faith in the organizational power of history and in the self-sufficiency of the individual…. In man and his natural affinities lay the bases of order and freedom.

Keeping in mind that Nisbet wrote this book in the early 1950s, he notes a different set of words have come to dominate the scene: “disorganization, disintegration, decline, insecurity, breakdown, instability….”  It is difficult to suggest that the words are less applicable today in the west.

This is at the time after two crushing World Wars (or one continuous thirty-year war, as you like).  It was after a devastating economic depression.  It came after man declared his reason supreme over all, reaching its most glorious position with the progressive era.  Man was let down by his civilization on every front: moral, cultural, and economic.  It is no wonder that these new key words came to dominate.

How extraordinary when compared to the optimism of half a century ago, is the present ideology of lament.

“Half a century ago” was before the progressive era took hold.  Sociologists note the disintegration of the family and community; religious leaders note that moral decay is consuming the west.  Nisbet notes what, on the surface, appears to be a contradiction:

Despite the influence and power of the contemporary State there is a true sense in which the present age is more individualistic than any other in European history.

How does individualism have any meaning in a world of overpowering state power?  Yet we see this in an even more exaggerated form in our own time – the state has grown more powerful, and the individual is ever more celebrated (except for white males), and especially for those who cloak themselves with the newest invention of labels.

Maybe it isn’t a contradiction; maybe one requires the other, one gives birth to the other.

One Hand Washing the Other

The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, by Robert Nisbet

From the back cover:

…as the traditional ties that bind fell away, the human impulse toward community led people to turn even more to the government itself, allowing statism—even totalitarianism—to flourish.

From the time that classical liberalism reached its zenith until totalitarianism achieved the same was a matter of a few short decades – from utmost respect for the individual to utmost devastation for all individuals.  What happened?

Robert Nisbet examines this question, and I will examine Nisbet.  I will begin with the Introduction to this current edition, offered by Ross Douthat.  Recognizing, by the end of World War Two, that history could no longer be described as a long, unstoppable march from dark to light, conservative thinkers began to explore…what happened?

…the central thinkers of the emerging American Right labored to explain how “progress” and “enlightenment” had produced the gas chamber and the gulag.

Into this intellectual field stepped Nisbet; what he found was that individualism and collectivism were not enemies struggling for hegemony, but two philosophies that supported each other:

It seemed contradictory that the heroic age of nineteenth-century laissez faire, to which free men, free minds, and free markets were supposedly liberated from the chains imposed by throne and alter, had given way so easily to the tyrannies of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

But it was only so if one ignored the human desire for community.  Where man once had guilds, churches, universities, villages and family, he was now free to be a separate, autonomous individual – freed from such inhumane and patriarchal chains.  Absent any other acceptable possibilities for community and in place of separate and competing authority structures, he was left with nothing but the technocratic state:

Man is a social being, and his desire for community will not be denied.  The liberated individual is just as likely to be the alienated individual, the paranoid individual, the lonely and desperately-seeking-community individual.

No longer finding community on a personal level, he finds community in the totalizing state.

Thus liberalism can beget totalitarianism.

It “can” beget totalitarianism, but it need not be so:

…it’s possible for both liberal government and liberal economics to flourish without descending into tyranny, so long as they allow, encourage, and depend on more natural forms of community, rather than trying to tear them up root and branch.

In this statement is the crux of the matter.  Can it be so?  Is it possible? It requires more than the defense of the individual against the state – as the individual, a creature that desires community, has had his other meaningful communities stripped or neutered:

It must be the defense of the individual and his group – his family, his church, his neighborhood, his civic organization, and his trade union. (Emphasis added.)

Conclusion

In my very early, dogmatic, years, I struggled with Gary North’s assertion that people will always ask “who’s in charge around here?”  I do not struggle with this anymore.  I have come to learn that there will always be somebody or something in charge – all that is left for those who desire liberty is to consider well our most libertarian master.  I have offered culture and tradition – and the culture and tradition to be found in the best of Western Civilization seems to have best fit the bill in history.

Otherwise not choosing (or pretending that humans do not have a desire for community) is also a choice – and the fruits of not choosing are to be found in our current condition.

Rothbard on Leoni

Part two of my clarifying commentary on the topic of Murray Rothbard, customary law and Bruno Leoni.

Review of Bruno Leoni's Freedom and the Law, by Murray Rothbard.

For here at last is a political scientist with strong libertarian inclinations.

This is how Rothbard introduces Leoni.  In part one, I demonstrated – through Rothbard’s writing – that one can find in Rothbard’s examination of libertarian law much that conforms to tradition and customary law.  Unlike the impression given by Carlo Lottieri, Rothbard is both familiar with and respects much that is offered by a study of Leoni.

Professor Leoni’s major thesis is that even the staunchest free-market economists have unwisely admitted that laws must be created by governmental legislation; this concession, Leoni shows, provides an inevitable gateway for State tyranny over the individual.

In other words, a recognition of the impossibility of a minarchist state.

Leoni’s great contribution is to point out to even our staunchest laissez-faire theorists an alternative to the tyranny of legislation. Rather than accept either administrative law or legislation, Leoni calls for a return to the ancient traditions and principles of “judge-made law” as a method of limiting the State and insuring liberty.

I think of customary law as something that precedes even judge-made law, but this issue is clarified by Rothbard:

“Law” was not enacted but found or discovered; it was a body of customary rules that had, like languages or fashions, grown up spontaneously and purely voluntarily among the people.  These spontaneous rules constituted “the law”; and it was the works of experts in the law—old men of the tribe, judges, or lawyers—to determine what the law was and how the law would apply to the numerous cases in dispute that perpetually arise.

Pointing to one of the primary deficiencies of legislative law when compared to law based on custom and tradition, Rothbard offers:

If legislation is replaced by such judge-made law, says Leoni, fixity and certainty (one of the basic requirements of the “rule of law”) will replace the capriciously changing edicts of statutory legislation.

This is because custom and tradition evolve rather slowly and naturally; legislation comes with an army of thousands – if not millions – working to turn evolutionary law into revolutionary law.

The twin of the free market economy, then, is not a democratic legislature ever grinding out new diktats for society, but a proliferation of voluntary rules interpreted and applied by experts in the law.

The twin of human action in the economy is human action in the law.  In other words, just as markets – when left free – bring out the best in “goods,” (for example, specie as money), perhaps markets – when left free – bring out the best in law.  Call it spontaneous order: of human action but not human design.

Rothbard does offer some criticism of Leoni’s work:

A great defect in Leoni’s thesis is the absence of any criterion for the content of the judge-made law. It is a happy accident of history that a great deal of private law and common law is libertarian, that they elaborate the means of preserving one’s person and property against “invasion.”

I don’t believe this was an “accident.”  It seems to me that the customary law that survived was law that was conducive to man’s thriving.  It is also certainly the case that in the west, customary law of the Middle Ages was law tempered not just by the “old,” but also the “good” – with good being found in the intersection of Christian ethics and the idea of Germanic honor.  The “accident” might be that these two found each other at just the right place and time.

Leoni offers several different criteria for the content of the law, but none are very successful.

It is on this issue that Rothbard offers, perhaps, his strongest criticisms of Leoni.  Briefly, Leoni offers concepts such as unanimity, the negative Golden Rule, the absence of coercion except against those coercing (which, per Rothbard, Leoni does not properly define).  Rothbard, of course, defines the proper criteria for the content of law to be the non-aggression principle.

Conclusion

I cannot let Rothbard off scot-free:

In short, there exists another alternative for law in society, an alternative not only to administrative decree or statutory legislation, but even to judge-made law. That alternative is the libertarian law…In practice, this means taking the largely libertarian common law, and correcting it by the use of man’s reason…

There is that word again…”reason.”  How about relying on the reason of countless generations, and placing the burden of proof on the “new,” instead of dismissing the old?

There were laws in the Middle Ages that certainly cannot be described as “libertarian.”  Yet, overall, the law was infinitely more libertarian than anything that followed the establishment of so-called sovereign rulers and certainly the Enlightenment.

Perhaps it took some of these non-libertarian laws for society to function relatively peacefully and relatively supportive of life and property.  Not to suggest that such laws might not have evolved, but only to suggest that countless generations carry a wisdom that no amount of “reason” by today’s judge can overcome easily.

Rothbard and Customary Law

An email from a reader (offered here with permission):

I read with great interest your excellent essay for today on "Integrating Classical Natural Law and Libertarian Theory." I wonder, though, whether the criticisms of Rothbard given in Carlo Lottieri's essay, which you quote, are correct.

Lottieri suggests that Murray, in contrast to Leoni, neglects the contextual nature of law. Unlike Leoni, Murray sought to devise a libertarian law code that would cover all contingencies. Precisely the opposite is the case. In his essay on pollution, he emphasizes the role of custom and precedent in applying law.

Also, Murray wrote an essay praising Leoni for his emphasis on judge-made law, as opposed to legislative law. In Rothbard's view, though, judge-made law must be evaluated by the standard of natural law, interpreted in a libertarian way. Rothbard's view expresses exactly the dependence of libertarianism on cultural conditions that you have done so much in your excellent essays to emphasize.

In your essay, you ask about the meaning of "positive law." This would I think refer to law as enacted by a sovereign body, rather than to a contrast with negative laws.  [In a follow-up email (and within the context of our exchange), I was offered this link on the topic of legal realism.]

I always enjoy your essays. You are shedding much-needed light on difficult issues, and all of your readers are in your debt.

From a comment by A Texas Libertarian to this same post:

Is the author suggesting that Rothbard's "libertarian code" was not rooted in Aristotle and Aquinas? In the "Ethics of Liberty" Rothbard repeatedly draws inspiration from both.

ATL offered several other critiques of Lottieri’s piece, along with evidence as to his statements.

I offered, in reply to ATL:

ATL, I was careful to present the position as that of the author and not mine, and I appreciate that you took it this way. I think the author could have made all of the same (very valuable) arguments without the Rothbard stuff - maybe I should have done the same.

But then, I would not have received some great feedback from one of the giants in our community, pointing me to a couple of Rothbard pieces that set the record straight, if you will.

I intend to write about this in the coming days, as I feel I owe it to Murray!

Consider this “the coming days.”  Let’s first consider Rothbard’s view on custom and tradition in applying law, with a look at his essay on pollution.  I find a hint of this topic being addressed even in the second paragraph:

There are many actions against which it is not considered appropriate to use violence, individual or organized…but few think of using violence to enjoin or combat them.

There must be some standard, some precedent, some baseline, separating the “few” who would think about using violence to enjoin such things vs. those who would not.

If ethics is a normative discipline that identifies and classifies certain sets of actions as good or evil, right or wrong, then tort or criminal law is a subset of ethics identifying certain actions as appropriate for using violence against them.

My work in this blog, and the feedback from many of you, has generated significant “learning” for me.  One of the most valuable – and recent – is an understanding of the term “ethics,” as expanded here:

Ethics: The term ethics derives from Ancient Greek ἠθικός (ethikos), from ἦθος (ethos), meaning 'habit, custom'.

And, for emphasis, the Latin for “morality”:

Mōrālis: From mos ‎(“manner, custom, way; law”‎). First used by Cicero, to translate Ancient Greek ἠθικός ‎(ēthikós, “moral”‎).

Rothbard’s use of “ethics” in deriving law is inherently the use of “custom” to define law.

…the true jurist or legal philosopher has not completed his task until he sets forth what the law should be, difficult though that might be.

Begging the question – which Rothbard has seemingly already answered: through what lens, through what filter?  The lens, the filter, is ethics – which derives from custom.

Describing the jurist who abdicates his duty – by relying on “sheer fiat and arbitrary caprice,” Rothbard offers:

Thus, the Austinian jurists proclaim that the king, or sovereign, is supposed to lay down the law, and the law is purely a set of commands emanating from his will.

What is an “Austinian jurist”?

A Couple of Comments

A couple of my recent comments (with minor additions, as noted), may or may not be worth bringing to the fore…you will decide.

First:

“I would however, invert your ending statement to “Absent the NAP, community peace will not survive”.”

I am not so sure about this. Even in a condition of horrendous NAP violations, most of us live in a state of community peace. [May have something to do with a commonly accepted cultural tradition?]

Let me take this a step further: someday in the decentralized dream world of voluntarily formed covenant communities, most of these communities would not be considered "libertarian" by outsiders.

The community could live within various generally accepted traditions: no pot smoking, no sex on the front lawn, church-going families only. Now…I did not say these were contractually stipulated; it is just that this is how, for quite some time, the people here chose to live. It never would have dawned on them that they needed a contract stating “no sex on the front lawn.”

Now...an outsider would say "look at all of these NAP violations. Why can't I smoke pot? Why can’t I have sex on my front lawn?”

He decides to smoke pot WHILE having sex on his front lawn on a SUNDAY MORNING while the families are RETURNING FROM CHURCH, because he sees that it is the community that has violated HIS NAP.

Yet, who has broken the peace?

A commonly accepted culture and tradition does far more for maintaining peace than does a thin application of the NAP. It seems to me that our job, as advocates of the NAP, is to identify the best intersection of these two (tradition and the non-aggression principle) that can best achieve a relatively libertarian outcome in the real world. It strikes me that the concept of “old and good law” offers this path.

Otherwise we are just conducting mental gymnastics, writing hundreds of papers trying to explore the most hidden, theoretical corners about topics that culture and tradition have (and will) resolve without any help from any of us.

Second:

"When I explained libertarianism to people unfamiliar with the concept I found that they will 'instinctively' recoil….And the interesting question is: where did we go wrong?"

"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." (I didn't look up the verse, but I am sure that I am close enough.)

Libertarianism rightly offers that victimless (so-called) crimes are not "crimes" punishable by law, albeit we need not approve of such behavior. Jesus offers something similar with this statement, it seems to me.

Jesus does not offer that such actions are good, healthy, moral, life-sustaining, etc. [In fact, he told the woman “now go and sin no more.]  He was the greatest example in both word and deed of a just and moral life.

Where did we go wrong? Might be as simple as: the NAP without a moral compass equals hell.

And most civilized people recoil at the idea of hell.