Alan Jacobs over at the American Scene has asked whether it’s really true that all libertarians believe human nature is fundamentally good. He seems to think one can pull off being a libertarian who believes in original sin—"you just have to believe that our inevitable corruption has less dire consequences when personal freedom is maximized than when the rule of law has a far greater scope." I disagree both with Jacobs and with Joe Carter, whose post "Virtue Ethics and Broken Windows: Why I am not a Libertarian" prompted the thread, but I can’t explain why without asking the question "Human nature is flawed compared to what ?"
At this point, I could be gearing up for a proof-of-God post, but, since I’d much rather prove that eros is the basis of education , I’ll write that one and leave the natural law question alone.
People who don’t care for conservatives criticize them for accepting arbitrary authority, trusting priests to govern their consciences and traditional norms to govern their lives. Carter defends these controlling institutions here:
Contrary to what libertarians might believe, order does not arise spontaneously. It is either cultivated from within, through self-disciple, or is forced upon an individual from forces outside themselves (i.e., by the laws or mores of the community) if they lack the requisite character. Once established, this order has to be maintained to be effective.Your conscience you must keep or it shall be kept for you, right? Sure, but, as Jacobs points out, there are plenty of reasons to suspect that the state isn’t any better at conscience-keeping than things like community, family, and religion.
But libertarians who want to acknowledge original sin are still in trouble. When Carter talks about institutions that can keep weak humans in line, he’s talking about power . There’s such a thing as arbitrary power; sometimes I’m okay with it, most of the time I’m not. But power is not the same thing as authority: the relevant question with power is "Do I have to let this thing push me around?"; with authority, it’s "Do I want to let it?" And there is no such thing as arbitrary authority.
"Authoritative" is just another word for "trustworthy," and the decision to trust an individual is neither a matter of random choice ("This guy is part of my social circle and I see him around all the time, so trusting him would be totally convenient for me") nor a matter of mathematical proof ("Based on past behavior, I estimate the chances of betrayal to be an acceptable 15%"). Neither is it a decision that a man can be intimidated into making. The closest analogy for deciding to trust is falling in love, whether one is trusting a man, an institution, or a tradition.
The problem for libertarians is that, when we trust some authority, we don’t just give it the power to tell us what to do. We give it the power to tell us who to be —to transform us into a different person, someone who, absent that authority, we might not have wanted to be. (Husbands, wives, Catholics, and anyone who’s ever had a mentor will know what I’m talking about.) Libertarianism doesn’t depend on the all-importance or even most-importance of the individual, but it needs at least to be able to talk about the integrity of the individual. I can imagine a libertarian realist accepting that his life will necessarily be subject to certain external intrusions, but can he accept that his identity will?
To put all of this in more concrete terms, let me use the canon wars as an example. There are two ways of thinking about university education: either it’s a path to self-realization by which students learn to be what they already are "but more proudly and resourcefully than before" ( DB ), or it’s a way to transform a young person into someone different. In the second model, the idea is that the student will fall in love with a worldview that seems utterly foreign but deeply appealing, and decide to sacrifice his own intuition, even his own reason, because he has decided that he wants what those guys have. You can think of it as "You complete me" versus "You make me want to be a better man," if that helps you. Both models can be found in classrooms, but only the latter deserves to be called education.
Once a man admits that these profoundly invasive experiences are the basis for the best things this life has to offer (love, trust, personal growth, inspiration), he certainly might still prefer small government, but the vocabulary of libertarianism—"autonomy," "individual conscience," and especially "voluntary"—will stop making sense.
