It seems like the debate over where libertarians should make their political home is evergreen, even though I’ve always thought the answer was the rather boringly obvious one: Libertarian individuals and institutions should make whatever tactical alliances on specific issues that best suit their dispositions and concerns. Still, a couple points about Ilya Somin’s response to the Reason debate linked above:
[Brink] Lindsey seems to have stepped back from his much-discussed 2006 argument for a “liberaltarian” coalition between libertarians and liberals.
I realize the original “Liberaltarian” essay does read as a proposal for a near-term political alliance, but I always took the real point to be more about opening a somewhat longer-term dialogue to see what we can learn from each other given the substantial overlap in our higher-order value commitments. That, at least, I’ve found reasonably fruitful.
To the extent that this hasn’t resulted in “an equivalent level” of cooperation with the left as that with the right on economic policy, it may be because few liberals have been willing to reciprocate. It’s striking that Lindsey’s own highly publicized efforts at forging liberaltarian cooperation met with little or no positive response among liberals.
This actually seems wrong to me. Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be much interest on the left in any kind of broad self-conscious “Liberaltarian Alliance”—but practical political coalitions don’t actually spring from New Republic essays, any more than real-world friendships arise from a formal declaration of an intent to be friends.. They’re a function of actually getting out there and doing the work, issue by issue, bill by bill, election by election. Given my own pattern of interests, I end up mostly working on issues where I agree with civil libertarians on the left. And pretty much without exception, they’re happy to work with me on those issues, and for that limited purpose indifferent to whatever disagreements we might have over optimal levels of federal taxation and spending. None of the folks I’ve written for at the Prospect or the Nation have ever expressed the least reservation about running something with a Cato byline. If anything, I think left-leaning civil libertarians are happy to be able to point to us as evidence that opposition to torture or sweeping surveillance authority isn’t some strictly partisan punch up between Democrats and Republicans. There are, to be sure, advantages to broader alliances, but one benefit to keeping both parties (and their associated movements) at arms-length is that I think (or would like to think) that it’s hard to credibly argue I’m going to take a position or write an op-ed on one of my core issues with the primary motive of rooting for or against one team or another. Membership has its privileges, but so does a measure of distance.
Update: In light of Ilya Somin’s response, I realize I’ve muddled together two distinct points here. The first is that I don’t think libertarians—and certainly not the libertarian movement as a whole—need to decide to “throw in” with one side or another in some kind of general coalition, whether traditionally fusionist or “liberaltarian.” That said, if there were going to be some kind of broader “liberaltarian” alliance or collaboration, my point is that while it would obviously entail more than the kind of ad hoc, issue-based collaboration I’m suggesting is enough, that’s how in practice it would have to start anyway. So even if you thought a “liberaltarian alliance” were ultimately the way to go, you’d still begin with more limited collaboration and go from there.
Here’s a little paradox. Suppose we propose to meet for a drink at The Passenger after work, and I tell you that it’s on 7th just above Massachusetts Ave in Northwest. Perhaps being acquainted with my spotty geographic instincts, you ask if I’m certain. And of course I am, I go there after work often, and just to humor you I’ll double check it on my phone—I’m absolutely certain. Or perhaps, out of an excess of caution, I say that at any rate I’m about as sure as I can be about anything—call it 99 percent sure. Alternatively, we can imagine it’s been a while, and I’m really only 70 percent sure—but at any rate, sure enough to assert it with some confidence while allowing that I might, of course, be mistaken.
After a few drinks at the bar—because really, when else would this happen?—you bring up that old Philosophy 101 chestnut: How can I be sure I’m not a brain in a vat, inhabiting an elaborate Matrix-style simulated world? That I haven’t always been? Even that I’m not a simulated intelligence brought into existence mere moments ago, with a suite of false memories pre-installed, including the memory of saying earlier that I was sure about the bar’s location, and all the supporting memories of having been here before?
I’d have to allow that I can’t rule out the possibility. Not only that, I can’t even meaningfully tell you how confident I am—90 percent? 50? 10?—that none of these is the case. The way the question is framed, nothing in my experience could really count as evidence either way. I don’t, in practice worry about these things—I take it pretty much for granted that I have a certain real history that’s taken place a real external world. But if you force me to focus on the question, to bring this background assumption into the foreground by framing it explicitly, I have to admit it can’t itself be justified. My attitude toward it—for the purposes of our discussion, if not in everyday life—must be one of radical uncertainty. It’s not just that I can’t be certain, it’s that I can’t meaningfully assign any particular level of confidence to the belief. It is—I might say if I wanted to be a bit Fancy Town about it—intrinsically unknowable.
Aha! you say. How can I be absolutely certain The Passenger is on 7th Street—or 99 percent sure, or even 60 percent—if I can’t even be certain I or the bar or 7th Street or my memories of them are real at all? Doesn’t that radical uncertainty affect every belief I have about the world? Mustn’t I be radically uncertain, too, about where the bar is?
It’s a cute dorm room puzzle, but the answer is that of course I need not be, because these are questions at very different levels. When I say I am confident about the bar’s location, I’m not talking metaphysics. My assignments of confidence to beliefs are, we might say, local—they’re internal to a system of reasoning and other beliefs that collectively are the grounds for asserting or denying any particular proposition. The brain-in-a-vat question, and variants where my capacity for making or identifying logically valid inferences has been manipulated, are non-local. To be sure, we can imagine things that would count as evidence that the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis is true after all. Maybe some stylish superpeople in mirrored shades and leather trenchcoats release me from my vat. But of course, the question could still be posed—perhaps with more practical urgency!—in the world into which I’d been released. Until then, at any rate, I at least have no internal reason to think I need to take this abstract possibility very seriously. So it would seem odd to declare myself “agnostic” when it comes to garden variety propositions about where bars are located or who won the latest World Cup match.
With that in mind, it should be clear what’s wrong with this Slate essay by Ron Rosenbaum clucking its tongue at the so-called New Atheists and calling for a more humble New Agnosticism:
Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)
There are a couple claims at issue here, and throughout the piece. One is just the commonplace observation that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris &c. can come across as arrogant jerks, which is fair enough, but then, who else is going to really proselytize for the absence of a belief? It’s like starting a non-chess-players club; plenty of people fit the membership requirements, but only those with an active hostility to the game are going to feel the need to make a point of joining. In any event, this is at most an observation about a particular group of people; it doesn’t have much to do with the soundness of an atheist position as such.
The real argument is a variant on the familiar point that, of course, you can’t prove with mathematical certainty that there isn’t a God, supposedly making atheism (at least) as unsupportable a position as theism. But then, are there many self-identified atheists who would really pretend to such apodictic certainty? Believers sometimes claim proudly to have access to some kind of special revelation that obliterates the possibility of error. But when I say that I think there is no God, I don’t mean anything so grandiose. I mean just that I see no good reason to think that there is, and that all the various stories told about deities appear to me equally likely to be mythical. I don’t believe in basilisks or psychic powers either—probably neither do most religious believers—but few of us, on reflection, would be so bold as to say this is a belief we are absolutely certain about. It’s possible we could be mistaken, even if the possibility seems too remote to bother much about or, indeed, take all that seriously.
Presumably, Rosenbaum gets this much. We do not declare ourselves basilisk agnostics just because we have to admit we could possibly be mistaken. We just say, without qualification, that we don’t believe in basilisks, with the implicit understanding that, of course, one might always be wrong. If that’s all “agnosticism” added, it would indeed be little more than what Rosenbaum calls “polite atheism”; an agnostic here would for practical purposes be an operational atheist who makes a point of saying “but I may be wrong” a little more frequently, or demurely refrains from asserting his secular background worldview too explicitly.
So Rosenbaum’s looking for a metaphysical skyhook that will let him elevate that mere polite atheism to the brain-in-a-vat realm of radical uncertainty. His preferred candidate is another old philosophers’ quandary, and another non-local question: Why is there something instead of nothing?
I’m inclined to say that the question is meaningless—it has the form of a meaningful, even a scientific question, but it can always be framed in a way that places it outside any system of causal explanation. It’s a kind of grammatical misfire, like “This sentence (or proposition) is false.”
To the extent that it is a meaningful question, I have no reason to expect that science either eventually will, or even in principle could answer it. But I am not sure why I am supposed to care, except insofar as it’s interesting to mull over, if you go for that sort of thing. Suppose I allow that it is a genuine mystery—radically uncertain, even. It’s outside the realm about which we can talk meaningfully or offer evidence. So what? If there were some part of the world about which we couldn’t even in principle gather information, would I have to declare myself a basilisk agnostic because, after all, they might be there?
Rosenbaum’s mistake is to suppose that atheists are committed to providing some kind of utterly comprehensive worldview that explains everything in the way religious doctrine sometimes purports to. But why? Can’t we point out that claims made on behalf of one brand of snake oil are outlandish and unsupportable without peddling an even more wondrous tonic?
I don’t know why there’s something instead of nothing, if the question is even intelligible, any more than I can prove I’m not a brain in a vat. These are interesting facts to reflect on in an epistemology seminar. They have very little to do with my ordinary assertions about how to get to The Passenger or whether the details of any particular cosmology seem persuasive, or whether praying to Mecca or confessing to a priest seems like a sensible thing to do. The question of whether there’s a God is only really interesting or a live debate in practice because its embedded in these more particular traditions. Punting to the non-local question of why there’s anything at all is, ultimately, just changing the subject—a fact that may be obscured by gesturing at the realm of mystery and calling the question mark that lives there God.
I see no good reason to think that there are basilisks, or Olympian gods, or even that rather minimalist watchmaker God more often encountered in philosophical treatises than any actual, practiced religious tradition. The existence of dark spots on the physical, metaphysical, or epistemological map is no evidence for any of them. So Rosenbaum’s challenge—explain, atheist, why there is something instead of nothing!—may well be unanswerable, but it doesn’t require an answer. There’s still no reason to treat God talk as anything more than another bit of human storytelling, and no reason to add elaborate hedges to the assertion that The Passenger is on 7th north of Mass.
Wired’s Dylan Tweney recounts his live-tweeting of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the San Francisco Opera. I cannot fathom how he escaped the opera house alive. Look, fussing with your phone constantly—even on “minimum brightness”—is kind of a dick move at any performance, but it’s borderline sacrilegious when it comes to Wagner, whose genius was in creating such an absolutely immersive experience through the fusion of music and drama. Which makes little intrusions from your neighbors that break the spell about a thousand times more grating. There’s a reason they typically don’t do late seating once the doors are closed—at Bayreuth, the doors are actually locked.
This might be a light-thrashing offense if he were putting out some kind of super-incisive commentary on this particular interpretation or the nuances of the performance, but apparently his followers were getting treated to such nuggets of insight as:
Husband is swilling beer & groping his wife while Siegmund tells his life story. It’s a long, sad story. Wed Jun 30 19:31:58 2010
Hunding says: you can stay in my house tonight, but I’ll kill you tomorrow. Wed Jun 30 19:38:49 2010
Look, dude, the plot of the opera, and the fact that it includes singing, are pretty well established. They do not require on-the-scene reporting. If, in the third act, Brünnhilde and Wotan ended up talking it out and going to a father-daughter picnic instead of the whole “imprisoned in a ring of flame” denouement, that would’ve been tweetworthy. A summary of the same storyline the opera’s had for the past 140 years of performances? A link to the libretto really would have done the job.
By way of belated congratulations to happy newlyweds Megan and Peter, I thought I’d reproduce here the short passage I read at the wedding this weekend, and which (with some reservations about “identical in opinions”) fits them to a T:
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them — so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development — I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast.
-John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women
Quondam colleague John Timmer at Ars Technicawrites up a recent study on how people cling to cherished beliefs in the face of countervailing scientific evidence. The conclusion—they fall back on the idea that the question is somehow outside the domain of science—seems plausible enough, and it’s certainly not hard to think of bogus moves along those lines made in various debates. But one specific question they chose seems like an awfully poor one, because the idea that there’s ultimately a non-scientific component to the answer is, in the instance, pretty reasonable:
To get at this issue, Munro polled a set of college students about their feelings about homosexuality, and then exposed them to a series of generic scientific abstracts that presented evidence that it was or wasn’t a mental illness (a control group read the same abstracts with nonsense terms in place of sexual identities). By chance, these either challenged or confirmed the students’ preconceptions. The subjects were then given the chance to state whether they accepted the information in the abstracts and, if not, why not.
Now, for one, this is a bad question because I’d expect many college students to come in knowing that the consensus since the early ’70s has been that it is, of course, not a mental illness. But there’s a deeper problem that emerges if you look at the history of how homosexuality was classified as a mental illness, and how that classification came to be overturned—which, if you’re not familiar with it, is the subject of a really wonderful This American Life episode. There are, of course, real empirical questions for science here. As the narrative explains, research on homosexual psychology had long been conducted on people who were already in therapy for one reason or another—and therefore missed the rather significant empirical fact that there were plenty of gay men who were perfectly happy with who they were and otherwise psychologically indistinguishable from straights. But the question of whether some particular psychological variation is in itself an “illness” or merely an atypical bit of weft in the human cloth does not, ultimately, strike me as a genuinely scientific question so much as a normative one. When do we call something a mental illness? One criterion is that it’s a subjective source of distress, but that’s of limited help, since we’re often inclined to say that it’s society’s failure to accommodate the variation that should be blamed for that distress. And, on the other hand, we’d probably continue speaking of even the happiest sociopaths in the clinical terms of disease because of the distress they tend to cause the rest of us. (Would it be different if we had a general mechanism for identifying sociopaths early and channeling them into socially sanctioned roles? Other than campaign consulting, I mean.)
Science can inform our thinking about these questions, but the core of the question is often beyond the strict scope of science. An “illness” is a kind of mismatch between an individual psychological disposition and a social norm where we are prepared to reflectively validate the norm. (It’s important to bear this in mind, because the norm itself can get an illegitimate, tautological boost from the sense that science has independently and authoritatively condemned some behavior or disposition as disordered and diseased.) A complete inventory of the scientific facts of the matter might yield agreement—as when, for instance, the mismatch is the result of other widely-held false factual beliefs. But it might not.
I’m glad, of course, that we’ve dispensed with a lot of bogus science that served to rationalize homophobia—that’s a pure scientific victory. And I’m glad that we no longer classify homosexuality as a disorder—but that’s a choice and, above all, a moral victory. It ultimately stems from the more general recognition that we shouldn’t stigmatize dispositions and behaviors that are neither intrinsically distressing to the subject nor harmful, in the Millian sense, to the rest of us. And that comes across clear as day in the This American Life account: The change in the psychiatric establishment’s bible, the DSM, was partly a function of new scientific information, but it was equally a moral and a political choice. The test, if we’re trying to keep ourselves honest, is not whether we place some questions beyond the scope of science, but whether we do so in an opportunistic, ad hoc way, depending on whether the science seems to cut for or against our preferred beliefs.
