What Is Wrong with

Libertarianism?  Part III

 

Philip Vander Elst

      Philip Vander Elst is a British freelance author, journalist and lecturer. For many years he was editor of Freedom Today and has worked on the staff of the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs. This is the third article in a series of four. These articles are from the pamphlet, “Libertarianism, A Christian Critique,” published by The Christian Institute.

      There is no doubting, then, the strength of the philosophical, theological and historical arguments for liberty. Everything that is true in modern Libertarianism echoes the writings of the great classical liberal thinkers, such as von Humboldt, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, in the 19th century, and W. H. Mallock, Wilhelm Roepke and F. A. Hayek, in the 20th. Unfortunately, Libertarianism is also a deeply flawed and lopsided ideology.

      Its first great failing is that it suffers from an idolatrous tendency to make freedom and personal choice an end in itself, forgetting that freedom is only a means to other ends. Some Libertarians may deny this, but their tendency is to regard an argument as won once it is pointed out that an existing restriction or proposal represents an interference with “freedom of choice” or the operation of the “free market.” This suggests the criticism is valid, especially in the areas of sexual ethics and popular culture. The question that must be faced, however, is why should we value liberty? Why should we automatically tolerate the “drug culture,” hardcore pornography, violent films, or loud pop concerts in the countryside? Why should we tolerate teenage sex or refrain from criticising adultery and promiscuity?

      If, as the great traditional arguments for liberty insist, freedom is essential to the cultivation of goodness, the pursuit of truth and the release of creativity, it follows that freedom derives its value and significance from its anchorage in an objective moral order. But if this is the case, it also follows that it is legitimate to criticise or restrain liberty if its pursuit in any particular instance damages or endangers other important values. Is there not, after all, a conflict between unlimited freedom of expression and the desirability of preserving a civilised culture?

      The second great failing of Libertarianism is its illogical and unjustified assumption that the right to personal liberty cannot be restricted in one area without inevitably destroying it in others. Why should legal restrictions on the sale and consumption of hardcore pornography or “video-nasties” inevitably destroy freedom of thought and speech? Why should acceptance of the State’s limited right to tax for certain clearly defined purposes inevitably pave the way for a totalitarian State-controlled economy? Is it not possible to achieve a balance between conflicting but good objectives? Why will the “Tree of Liberty” be cut down just because some of its twigs and branches have been pruned?

      This tendency within Libertarianism to rhetorical exaggeration and ideological rigidity reflects a failure to appreciate that even the best and most clearly thought-out philosophy can never encapsulate and do justice to the full complexity of human life and society. It can only offer rough guidelines on which to base choices and decisions, not a foolproof blueprint which covers every eventuality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of “personal morality.”

      The Libertarian rule that personal liberty should only be limited by the obligation on all individuals to respect the equal rights of others, not only ignores the fact that there are other moral values with which a compromise may need to be struck; it also makes the mistake of thinking that there is an absolutely clear and rigid distinction between actions which only affect ourselves, and actions which affect other people. Hence the Libertarian belief that “victimless crimes” like “sexual deviancy” and drug-addiction should not be restricted or punished by law. The truth, however, is that most of our actions have some impact on other people.

      If, for instance, no proper limits are placed on the sale and consumption of video-nasties, pornography, and hard drugs and no real attempt is made to control the amount of sex, violence, and bad language allowed in films and on television, what is going to be the likely result? Obviously the creation of a cultural environment inimical to the cultivation of courtesy, self-control, marital faithfulness, and consideration for others. Will that not, in turn, undermine the family and encourage every kind of anti-social and criminal behaviour? Is it just a coincidence that the removal of censorship and the rebellion against traditional values which began in the 1960s has been followed by the harmful social trends mentioned at the beginning of this paper?

      It is worth remembering that John Stuart Mill’s famous essay, On Liberty, specifically stated that freedom was not an unmixed blessing to be enjoyed by all without limit, but a condition that could only be of real benefit to mature adults. To quote his exact words:

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine [Liberty] is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. . . . Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind has become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.

      Does this suggest that the great liberal thinkers of the past would have approved of today’s coarse and licentious culture? They would surely be angered by the way in which their high-minded arguments in defence of personal liberty are constantly misused in order to justify giving free rein to the basest human appetites. What, they would ask, is the connection between free inquiry and voyeurism? How is the pursuit of knowledge and truth assisted by the graphic depiction of sexual intercourse or scenes of torture on our film and television screens? What, they might finally ask, is this increasing exposure to a culture of licentiousness and brutality doing to our souls and the souls of our children?

      The answer to the last question is that it is not only the quality of our social life that is threatened by the prevailing climate of permissiveness and amorality, freedom itself is endangered.

      In the first place, a society whose members are too absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure to develop high standards of personal behaviour, tends to have little respect for moral and intellectual excellence, especially if its cultural leaders preach the subjectivity of all values and treat all choices of “lifestyle” as a matter of personal taste like food and clothing. This, in turn, produces a truculent and egalitarian mindset which dislikes hierarchy and authority within social institutions like the family, schools and colleges, and other “private” and non-governmental bodies. The end result is a social vacuum of growing confusion, division and lawlessness, which is filled by an increasingly intrusive and authoritarian State. The parental smack, so to speak, gives way to the policeman’s truncheon.

      The second reason why contemporary moral decay threatens liberty has to do with the logic of ideas as well as the psychology of human behaviour. If it is generally believed that individuals have the right to do anything they like in their private lives, because moral values are not absolute but a matter of “personal choice,” rulers and officials can similarly argue that they should be able to do whatever they like with power, if this advances their own interests. Moral relativism, in other words, encourages the pursuit of personal gratification and expediency within the organs of the State, and so paves the way to tyranny. Or to put it another way: if totalitarianism is thought of as “permissiveness with power,” the link between moral laxity and despotism becomes even more obvious.

      The potential threat to freedom posed by our currently “permissive” culture is becoming all the greater because the damage caused by moral relativism increases if it reinforces existing tendencies towards self-indulgence and violence. As the evidence of history demonstrates, there is a close psychological connection between unchecked lust and physical cruelty and brutality. In both cases, there is a common lack of self-control and a tendency to treat other human beings as objects. Hence the fact that cruel societies are often sexually self-indulgent ones, as ancient Rome was in the first century. To quote the great psychologist, Jung:

At a time when a large part of mankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worthwhile to understand clearly why it was originally accepted. It was accepted in order to escape at last from the brutality of antiquity. As soon as we discard it licentiousness returns, as is impressively exemplified by life in our large modern cities . . . we can hardly realize in this day the whirlwinds of the unchained libido which roared through the ancient Rome of the Caesars.

      Anyone who doubts the truth of Jung’s comments should read that great historical classic, A History of European Morals (1911), by W. H. Lecky. It not only documents the immorality and cruelty of pagan antiquity, but is also significant because it is the work of a great classical-liberal historian and thinker, who, while believing in God, was not a Christian, but a trenchant rationalist critic of the Church.

      If Libertarianism deserves criticism because its unbalanced view of liberty helps to weaken the moral and social bonds which hold a civilised society together, what should be our response to the Libertarian dogma that “taxation is theft” and that there should be no tax-funded public welfare? An equally critical one, is again the answer, for two reasons.

      Firstly, property rights ought not to be absolute. Like personal liberty they derive their justification from an ethical system which, at the same time, provides reasonable grounds for their limitation so as to achieve other equally important moral objectives. This means that taxation is not necessarily theft if it advances moral goals or produces moral benefits that would not otherwise be achieved. Taxation must not be excessive or confiscatory, for obvious moral and economic reasons, but it is nonsense to say in principle that it can never be justified to relieve poverty or safeguard public welfare in other ways.

      Secondly, helping others who are in need through no fault of their own is a moral duty. We ought to relieve undeserved suffering and increase the opportunities of the poor to live a fuller and happier life than would otherwise be possible. By doing so we help to create a better society because we increase the number of people who can share in the benefits of freedom and contribute their gifts and talents to the common good.

      Not only are Libertarians wrong to object to the principle of publicly-funded welfare services, they are also mistaken in their belief that this principle inevitably opens the door to full-blown collectivism. John Stuart Mill was a passionate opponent of State collectivism but in his Principles of Political Economy he argued that government could have a role in alleviating poverty and promoting education, so long as it was careful to avoid the suppression of private initiative and the creation of both State monopolies and a culture of welfare dependency. This view is now shared, of course, by most British and American Conservatives, and by modern classical-liberal economists like Milton Friedman.

      In a similar fashion, the great 19th century Italian liberal, Mazzini, who devoted his whole life to the cause of personal liberty and national self-determination, was a passionate advocate of altruism and the brotherhood of man while remaining firmly opposed to socialism.

      In his eloquent book, The Duties of Man, Mazzini denounced selfish individualism but made it equally clear that a State-owned and controlled economy is totally destructive of freedom. He also, interestingly enough, criticised atheism and insisted that we have duties to God as well as each other.

      This naturally throws the critical spotlight onto Libertarian atheism and theophobia. Is it really true that religious belief is irrational? Is it really the case that reverence for God is a form of self-abasing power worship which breeds intolerance and is incompatible with the spirit of liberty?

      I certainly used to think so, when I was an atheist, so I can understand the emotions of Libertarian theophobes, but I no longer share them. They are neither justified by philosophical analysis nor by the weight of historical evidence.

      To begin with, it is the rationality of atheism, rather than belief in God, which is truly questionable. To accept atheism, you have to believe that our extraordinary universe, with all its amazingly complex life-forms, structures, and scientific laws, is simply the accidental consequence of random physical and chemical processes. Is this really credible? Is it likely that whereas computers are the deliberately designed products of human intelligence, the infinitely more complex human brains which created them are the unintended by-products of the accidental collision of atoms? If there were only one improbability to account for in our universe, atheism would not seem so ridiculous, but there are thousands of them! Think of the immune system in our bodies, or the chemical factory of the human liver, or the migratory and nest-building instincts of birds, or the amazing structure and operation of the genetic code. Is it credible that the existence of these structures and processes is purely accidental? Is it not as absurd to believe this as it would be to believe that the Oxford English Dictionary was produced by an explosion in a printing works?

      Atheists commonly argue that evolutionary theory can explain the world without introducing the idea of God, but this too is nonsense, even if one ignores the growing scientific critique of evolution. As various mathematicians have pointed out, the statistical odds against the accidental emergence of complex organisms are not lessened by the suggestion that their development has taken place only very gradually over a long period. A sequence of a hundred improbable steps, however small, is just as unlikely as the emergence of a complex organ or function in one random leap. In any case, all this misses the point. The real intellectual challenge facing atheists is not to explain how life in all its complexity came into being by accident; it is to explain why this is more probable than the opposite hypothesis, that intelligent life has an intelligent supernatural cause in the form of a Divine Creator.

      Libertarian atheists are confronted by an even greater problem nearer home. They cannot explain human consciousness, and therefore their own capacity to think, choose, and discover moral values, including the desirability of liberty.

      If atheism is true, our minds are wholly dependent on our brains (we have no souls) and our brains are an accidental by-product of the physical universe. But if this is the case, it means that all our thoughts, beliefs, and choices, are simply the inevitable end result of a long chain of non-rational causes. How then can we have free will or attach any validity or importance to our reasoning processes? If we are bound to think or behave the way we do because of our internal biochemistry, how can we be free agents or know that we are in possession of objective truths about science, ethics, or politics? If our perception and use of the rules of logic are merely the inevitable end product of a long chain of random and non-rational physical and chemical events, how can we know that our examination of facts and arguments yields real knowledge? Surely, if atheism is true, our thoughts and values have no more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees, as C. S. Lewis argued in his book, Miracles (Fontana-Collins), and E. L. Mascall demonstrated in his 1956 Bampton Lectures, Christian Theology and Natural Science.

      The truth, however, is that we can think and reason validly, since to argue that we can’t, itself involves an act of reasoning and is therefore self-contradictory. We cannot “know” that we know nothing! Our belief that we have free will is similarly valid, not only because we are aware of our capacity to choose between alternatives and change our minds, but because the denial of free will also involves the use of a self-contradictory argument. If all our reasoning is solely “determined” by our physical constitution and is therefore not “free,” so too is the belief that we have no free will, so how can we know it is true? It is an argument that refutes itself.

      But if logical reasoning tells us that we genuinely possess free will and the capacity to think and discover truth, how do we explain this? Surely the best and only answer is that we are spiritual as well as material beings, and as such, are the creation of an eternal, self-existent intelligence outside ourselves and the physical universe, whom we call God.

      Our awareness of objective moral norms and values has similarly theistic implications. We cannot explain away our innate sense of right and wrong by saying that our moral perceptions are instincts, since our instincts are often in conflict with each other, and are themselves in need of moral adjudication before we can know how we ought to act. Our feeling that we ought to repress our survival instinct in order to follow our instinct to help a drowning stranger who has fallen into a freezing lake, for example, results from our awareness of a moral obligation to save life and relieve suffering. The question is, however, from where does this sense of moral obligation come? It is obviously not an expression of our desires and emotions, since our moral sense is often in conflict with them. We want to commit adultery with beautiful women but we know we ought not to break our marriage vows. We get angry with a person who challenges our political views, but we control our tempers because we know we ought to respect the freedom of thought and speech of others. Can our moral sense perhaps be justified or explained on utilitarian grounds? After all, we know that theft and murder is wrong because it is bad for society. But why should we care about the good of society? Why should we care about the rights and interests of other people if, because of our strength and cleverness, we can have a more enjoyable life by ignoring them?

      In the end, unless we are moral nihilists, we must recognise that our moral perceptions about the value of life and liberty, and the rules we must obey in order to safeguard society, are self-evident truths, or axioms. As such, they are as rational and objective as the rules of logic and mathematics, and failure to understand them is the moral equivalent of colour-blindness. But if this is the case, how can it be explained or justified if human beings are only biological machines put together by chance in an accidental universe? How can their moral “thoughts” have any inherent meaning or significance? Only, surely, if the Moral Law “written on our hearts” is somehow a reflection of an eternal, self-existent “Goodness” outside ourselves and “behind” or “beyond” the physical order of “Nature,” in other words, God.

      Libertarian atheism, then, cuts its own throat philosophically and, by doing so, deprives liberty of any firm philosophical foundation. Belief in the existence and goodness of God is far more rational than disbelief. Even the problem of evil does not really shift the balance of the debate, since it cannot be used as an argument against God’s existence if the moral standard by which we judge reality is purely subjective. If, on the other hand, our moral standard is not subjective but true and absolute, its very existence cannot be explained without reference to God, and the problem of evil therefore requires a better explanation than atheism.     Ω

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” —Abraham Lincoln