Libertarianism and Culture

Posted in Uncategorized by Mike on October 27, 2009

Libertarian Kerry Howley has a fascinating piece at Reason: “Are Property Rights Enough? Should libertarians care about cultural values? A reason debate”, with two reactions. She writes:

I call myself a classical liberal in part because I believe that negative liberties, such as Min’s freedom from government interference, are the best means to acquire positive liberties, such as Min’s ability to pursue further education. I also value the kind of culture that economic freedom produces and within which it thrives: tolerance for human variation, aversion to authoritarianism, and what the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek called “a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead.”

But I am disturbed by an inverse form of state worship I encounter among my fellow skeptics of government power. This is the belief that the only liberty worth caring about is liberty reclaimed from the state; that social pathologies such as patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the individualist; that the fight for freedom stops where the reach of government ends.

Tim B Lee has follow-up comments, noting:

“Libertarianism is commonly described as a political philosophy that favors eliminating “force” from human relationships. Unfortunately, I think the libertarian movement has inherited from Rand and Rothbard an allergy to giving deep thought to the question of what force is and why it’s bad. Rather, the definition and wrongness of “force” is taken as a self-evident “non-aggression axiom.” And all libertarian conclusions are said to follow from the axiom: just figure out who is forcing whom (almost always the state is doing the coercing), and make them stop.”

I have a few pretty intense Rothbardian friends, and when I’ve discussed with them how they envision a better world (warning: most of it involves bringing the banking sector to around 1840), even a made up world as a thought exercise, I ask them why gender isn’t tossed out the window along with fractional reserve banking in their minds. But they really don’t like that idea. It’s not even on the radar. I’m not a libertarian, but, if I was, I couldn’t imagine not having J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women on the front bench.

via rortybomb.wordpress.com

Derrida, an Egyptian, by Peter Sloterdijk.  I'm spending some of next summer in Berlin so I've been trying to catch up on what they're reading over there.  (Any recommendations?)  On every page it feels as if Sloterdijk is intelligent, yet I came away empty-handed and feeling like a frustrated Robin Hanson ("why doesn't he just come right out and say what he means?).  No way should you buy the hardcover for $45.00, in return for 73 pp. of actual text.  Ultimately he's writing about the boxes, not writing about the world.  Yet at least three Germans loved it.

Napoleon's Eye

By Peter Brooks

BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ARTICLE

Dominique-Vivant Denon: L'oeil de Napoléon

an exhibition at the Louvre, Paris, October 20, 1999–January 17, 2000

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pierre Rosenberg.
Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 539 pp., e68.60 (paper)

No Tomorrow

by Vivant Denon, translated from the French by Lydia Davis, and with an introduction by Peter Brooks

New York Review Books, 63 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris

by Andrew McClellan

University of California Press, 302 pp., $26.95 (paper)

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, pried off just under one half of the Parthenon frieze (some 247 feet) and added to it fifteen metopes and seventeen of the great sculptures from the east and west pediments, then shipped them to England, eventually to repose in the British Museum, where they remain as the clamor from the Greek government to return them to Athens grows ever more intense. Lord Elgin acquired a vast store of antiquities during his ambassadorship to the Sublime Porte—the Ottoman court in Constantinople—from 1799 to 1803, and after. He seems to have had some sort of a sales contract (now lost) with the Ottoman rulers of Greece (who had no interest in pagan monuments) that conferred some legitimacy on his removing sculptures from the world's most famous temple (then a storehouse) and giving them refuge in London, where they were certainly better preserved.

But Elgin appears something of an amateur in the matter of the transshipment of artifacts from one country to another when you compare him to his French counterpart, Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon, who assumed the directorship of the Louvre—soon to be known as the Musée Napoléon—in 1802. The Louvre, as imagined by the French Revolution—it opened during the Reign of Terror—and then as realized by Denon under Napoleon, was the first encyclopedic public museum, dedicated to providing a new setting for art objects taken from their original location. They would be displayed in a way that would be instructive to a large public, as well as protective of the objects themselves.

Spread of psychological phenomena in social networks

Here is a link to the abstract of an interesting article by Fowler & Christakis, published in the British Medical Journal in December 2008:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19056788

I think it is a delightful statistical analysis of social networks, based on a cohort of about 5000 people from the Framingham Heart Study, followed over 20 years. This article should really be read in its entirety, in order to appreciate the sophistication of the techniques.

They showed that happiness "spreads" in a manner analogous to contagion. Having happy same-sex friends or neighbours who live nearby, increases one's likelihood of being, or becoming, happy. Interestingly, spouses and coworkers did not have a pronounced effect.

Also, the findings show that having "unhappy" friends does not cause a similar increase in likelihood of being or becoming "unhappy" -- it is happiness, not unhappiness, in the social network, which appears to "spread."

True, culture has in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of far more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offer extreme and immediate access to information.

Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us are growing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it’s just another cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are better off for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.

Or if you’d like the shorter version to post to your Twitter account (140 characters or less): “Smart people are doing wonderful things.”