It’s official. Cultural libertarians have jumped the shark. Read this Reason.com article and marvel. That’s right, the author isn’t celebrating the fact that citizens have a right to be vulgar, but rather the fact that citizens are vulgar.
James’ article on the ‘Sex Vote’ never seemed more apropos. The ongoing decline of certain portions of the libertarian movement from being defenders of political liberty to being cheerleaders for the kinds of cultural degeneration which have led to the abolition of those liberties in the past is simply horrifying.
July 28th, 2009 | 12:57 pm
[...] HT: Postmodern Conservative [...]
July 28th, 2009 | 1:04 pm
Horrifying, but inevitable.
July 28th, 2009 | 3:05 pm
Two or more wrongs certainly won’t make ‘ONE’ right or is “IT” relevant nowadays?
I’m just wondering if you guys checked with the rest of “First Things” before posting this cause I know that “IT” certainly is not reverent?
I can just here one or more of our daughters saying! Lighten UP dad, hey we’re in the twenty-first century and if “IT” is ok for First Things then what’s wrong with “IT?”
I hear ya! If it was up to me sinner vic, I would have posted all your comments! :)
July 28th, 2009 | 4:26 pm
It is necessary to have a concept of sociability and social order in any discussion of “freedom.” Many libertarians either miss this, or simply refuse.
July 28th, 2009 | 9:13 pm
I never really saw why liberty would be improved by making it well-ordered. All the arguments I’ve ever seen on the subject seem to amount to the statement that we must have social order, because without it, we wouldn’t have social order, and moreover, social order is necessary to the mechanisms that promote social order.
Basically, if your concept of “freedom” necessitates social order, well that’s just one more way in which it’s inferior to mine.
July 29th, 2009 | 9:54 am
Well, the universalizing equality, secularism, and “rationality” that tend to accompany unfettered “freedom” or “liberty” tend to not be terribly compatible with the delicate cultural and intellectual inheritance of Western civilization. The reason: people are selfish sinners. We need a world of socialibility and social order, an inheritence of the past.
A society whose members interact primarily as consumers tend to be not about satisfying needs, but “desire.” And for anyone that, particularly, has children, this wrecking ball of freedom leaves much to be desired.
July 29th, 2009 | 12:52 pm
I don’t believe that the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ apply in this debate.
What we are discussing is ‘license’ which is defined as an abuse or deviation from those ideas (like freedom & liberty) that constitute the social covenant.
July 29th, 2009 | 6:18 pm
@Jonathan: See, there you go again. If we embrace unfettered freedom, we will displace previous concepts antithetical to unfettered freedom. If we embrace desire as our lodestar, we will act to satisfy our desires. All true, all tautologies.
And it’s not that I’m starting from incompatible premises, more that to the extent that people are selfish sinners, I would see the point of worldly society, and the standard against which it should be judged, being to furnish an awesome place to selfishly sin.
@Lincoln: I don’t make that distinction. Never saw cause, never saw the point.
But again, one more way, &tc. &tc.
July 29th, 2009 | 8:22 pm
If you lack any social order than it seems possible things won’t get done, people will get angry, and some form of dictatorship can arise. Or at least things will be unstable until an order arrives.
Most social animal species I believe have some kind of social order. Although maybe I’m misunderstanding what’s meant. (And I’m not sure how “well-ordered” this order must be)
July 30th, 2009 | 11:51 am
What I find to be a more compelling aspect of this popular vulgarism is the fact that…while it has been building for very long time….. it seems to be accelerating during a period when the State is rationalizing infringements upon the civil liberties and protections of the citizen. It is not a stretch for me to see levels of vulgarity, crass obscenity and a host of other puerile behavior actually increasing as one’s real civil liberties are eroded under the rubric of security. Obscenity and libertinism are the perfect bait and switch to make the citizen believe they still retain legitimate liberties even though the covalent responsibilities of the citizen under a notion of liberty will have long been jettisoned in favor of Statism and its many excesses.
July 31st, 2009 | 5:28 am
This post gets to what Libertarians fail to understand about Culture and Liberty. Liberty cannot exist with personal responsibility. Social order comes into being as personal responsibility manifests through various groups & voluntary associations, starting with the family. “But,” libertarians are wont to say, “I take full responsibility for following my own passions and desires and will pursue them wherever they may lead, and you have no right to stop me as long as I don’t hurt you.” That’s all well and good for the individual, but what how does that reflect on the various voluntary associations that make up our communities? Is a neighborhood full of porn devotees, each pursuing their personal fetish going to foster a culture of liberty or a culture of license?
I work with an organization, The Culture Alliance, that is looking to foster a culture that values and builds respect for liberty and personal responsibility. We are looking to do this by working, not in politics, but in the Arts, Entertainment, Education and Journalism. We do not want to create a mono-culture that dictates, from the Right, what can and cannot be seen, read or listened to. That would be no different that what we have today with the Left dominating the Cultural Influence Professions with their politically correct nonsense. We know that a Culture of Liberty will, necessarily, be a messy place. However, we do not believe that it should be a place where every individual whim is indulged and, as the Reason article does, celebrated. Part of personal responsibility is knowing when, where and how to express oneself. The Reason article seems to promote the idea that there need be no limits whatsoever to self-expression. Common sense will tell you that no community lasts long under that idea of liberty.
Edmund Burke said it best, “Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. . . . Men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
When we talk about liberty and personal responsibility we are talking about the extent to which individuals recognize the necessity for putting “moral chains upon their own appetites.” Only the most obtuse could look at the world today and say that we are better off for removing those “chains” that exist within us. The result of that “expirement” has been the numerous external rules and regulations that now constrain our behavior, with the sole exception being the sexual arena. Failing to set limits in those forms of expression, however, has had a disasterous effect on the family, which is the foundation for any community.
Men have an innate need for community and communities cannot thrive without some kind of social order. It is far better that social order arise from individuals recognizing they are, first and foremost, members of a community and within that community they must exercise personal responsibility to constrain their own appetites, than it is that order come from politicians and unelected bureaucrats writing laws and enforcing them at the barrel of a gun.
July 31st, 2009 | 6:32 am
Well said, DW. Daniel, obviously your project is a laudable one, and it’s true that our large and small family disasters have had profoundly negative broader consequences. But I have to say that I hesitate to frame the problem in the old terms of the-individual-versus-the-community, which you seem in danger of pointing us toward. Honestly I still have no idea what a community is, and I certainly don’t detect an innate need for one. I’d sooner say we humans have an innate need for fellowship, and/or friendship, companionship, family, etc. Now I’m sure you mean all these things and more when you speak of community, but as smart as our smartest ‘communitarians’ are, there’s too much disagreement within their own putative camp, and community is now too much of an all-purpose feel-good buzzword (at least from where I’m watching), for the quest for community as such to make much sense (to me) as a reference point. Bottom line: I think community-talk now refers us either to (a) a mere sense of community; (b) something thicker and more formal than community; or (c) something positively communal for its own sake, which (to be honest again) holds little appeal. Note that your Burke quote gets along quite well without any mention of it!
July 31st, 2009 | 2:21 pm
James, thanks for the reply.
I do not think I posed it as “individual vs. community,” especially since I do not believe the relationship between the individual and the community as as adversarial as that formulation implies. If that is what came from what I wrote then I apologize for lack of clarity. I believe that the individual arises from community, by which I mean the human person develops and flourishes based on the groups of which one is part, beginning with the family and moving, in later years, to various voluntary associations.
August 1st, 2009 | 2:06 pm
Daniel, no error on your part. I mean to highlight that your non-adversarial vision differs of course from one in which the human person is seen to develop and flourish based on his or her involuntary institutional memberships (that’s a double contrast with voluntary associations!). I like and subscribe to a scheme in which a gap is permitted among a person’s involuntary inheritances, his institutional memberships, and his voluntary associations. But a communitarian would be inclined to contrast this view very sharply, I think, from what a communitarian means when claiming that “the individual arises from community.”
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