Libertarianism, Paternalism, and Pot

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

From 2003 to 2005, we lived in Craighead County, Arkansas, while I taught at Arkansas State University. Craighead was a dry county, having voted many years ago to prohibit the sale of alcohol in its borders. Despite numerous efforts by restaurant owners and others over the years, that public decision remains in place today.

As a bunch of Mormon teetotalers, this instance of prohibition didn't bother my family and I at all, not did it appear impact our social circle in any noticeable way. (At faculty get-togethers, it was common for one or another graduate student, having received prior assignment, to show up at some point during the festivities with a duffel bag full of wine and beer for those who chose to imbibe.) I'm grateful for it all the same, though. Primarily because it gave me an up-close chance to talk to people about, and think about, what it means when one segment of the general population--a population that is, despite what some may think of rural northeastern Arkansas, every bit as affected by the larger commercial and pluralistic world as any distinct group of 100,000 people (70,000 of whom live in the city of Jonesboro, where ASU is located) anywhere in the USA is likely to be--comes to a collective judgment which effects the whole population. In other words, when a local majority (in this case, a union of white and African-American conservative Baptist church-goers) democratically turn their moral and religious judgments into law.

This issue is back on my mind this week, because of a couple of recent events. One took place this past Tuesday here in Wichita, when the backers of a petition (one of whom was me) to greatly reduce the criminal penalties attached to the possession of small amounts of marijuana gathered during a meeting of our city council to urge them to put the issue on the ballot, despite having fallen a few dozen signatures short in our initiative effort, and despite concerns over state and federal authority and the wording of the resolution. The other took place online, when my old friend Damon Linker published a challenging article which argued that the success which libertarianism has enjoyed in the United States is almost entirely the result solely of a rise of non-judgmental moral "libertinism":

Americans now inhabit a world in which increasing numbers of individuals find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine submitting to rule by any authority higher than themselves on moral and religious matters. Sure, people continue to accept that one will be judged harshly and punished for violating another individual's consent (the only libertarian moral consideration). But beyond that? Don't be ridiculous. Who are you--who is anyone--to judge my behavior?

Damon used as an example in his piece the case of a young woman at Duke University who has achieved some small  fame for performing in pornographic films as a way to pay for her education, a career which she has defended in part in libertarian language. This in turn prompted a long online debate between Damon and various libertarian interlocutors, revolving around the frustration one libertarian writer felt at being put into a position of not only not judging, but in fact embracing as a positive act of liberty, something that she considered deeply unwise:

As a libertarian, I want pornography and even prostitution to be legal, if reasonably regulated. But as a survivor of hookup culture, I can’t even implicitly condone rampant, publicized promiscuity (which even on camera and for money constitutes rampant promiscuity nonetheless). Keeping your experiments in sexual growth small and private helps to limit their potential to damage both yourself and our normative socio-sexual frameworks. I want to live in a community where people understand and respect that we are all sexual creatures, enjoy their sexuality in pro-social or at least benign ways, and limit it otherwise. Such a hypothetical community does not treat the decision to perform in pornography (and then talk about it all over the internet) as just one unimpeachably empowering life choice among many.

The heart of the argument which followed was basically this: does standing for the principle of individual pluralism and freedom (which is, however you justify it, the position shared by all varieties of libertarianism) necessarily make it inconsistent to refuse to endorse, or in fact to judge negatively and wish to oppose, various choices that people make with their liberty? In other words, can supporting libertarianism as a political ideology be separated from supporting the choice to be a moral libertine?

This argument might not appear to have anything to do with our argument over the decriminalization of marijuana here in Wichita, but in my mind the two issues were connected. There are, of course, a large range of legal and political issues at play in our local debate (all of which influenced the ultimate decision of the city council--which was to instruct a member of their staff to work with the petition-gatherers to re-write the proposed ordinance and seek to obtain enough signatures to try again on a later ballot--much more than I think the should have). You have the question of state and federal jurisdictions over drug laws, the precedents established (or have they been?) by Colorado and Washington, debates over recreational vs. medicinal marijuana use, disputes over the rules which govern citizen petitions, etc. But hidden within all that is a familiar question (one which I've staked out a position on before): when you are dealing with an issue or a matter which involves consequences that would be experienced solely by the individual making the choice (and yes, despite the talk one often hears about marijuana being a "gateway drug," the real costs of decriminalization, or even legalization, are widely recognized to be simply a--possibly minimal--increase of marijuana usage, with attendant effects upon vulnerable users...but not a crime wave or social breakdown), then on what basis, if ever, should judgments be allowed to turn into prohibitions? Most libertarians allow that, of course, you ought to be able to organize and express yourself in which ever way you want--but can that organizing, and judging, turn paternal?

Something I wrote in the aforementioned discussion may be helpful here. One could say that there are at least two, overlapping but non-identical, ways in which the refusal to exercise prohibitive judgment over another person's choices could be formulated along libertarian lines, theoretically speaking. In one case, it's for Hayekian reasons: generally speaking, you should refrain from developing one's judgments in the direction of paternal action because you just don't know enough to be able to speak knowledgeably about another person's choices (particularly their moral, personal, religious, or sexual ones). That's a powerful argument, one which I've taken more and more seriously as I've worked through the pseudo-anarchic positions developed by the scholar James C. Scott. However, I don't see this as necessarily requiring that those in the libertarian camp have to support libertinism, because strictly speaking it leaves open the sort of local, contextual possibility that, in this particular case, at this particular time, some hypothetical person actually might know enough to be able to speak authoritatively about what another person is doing with their life. In the other case, though, the connection is strong, because you're thinking in Lockean terms, not ones of epistemology but of property. Here, the demand that one not act paternally towards another arises not from the fact that you don't know enough to judge another's choices, but from the belief that you have no right to do so, because they own themselves (their rights, their conscience, their sense of self), and you don't. This is a pretty reductive analysis, I know, but I think it perhaps helps explain why, given our rights-obsessed culture and Lockean intellectual inheritance here in the USA, we so often see a cross-over from a concern with personal liberty, to a refusal to countenance any negative judgments of, much less prohibitions regarding, behaviors or choices which some segment of the population (even a local majority) considers bad or wrong.

As someone who philosophically favors communitarian accounts of our actions, values, and needs much more than individualist ones, the question of prohibition comes easier for me. I don't think there are, or at least don't think their necessarily ought to be, any near-absolute philosophical roadblocks in the way of local communities democratically trying to define themselves, at least as regards matters which don't come close to broadly accepted fundamental liberties. Buying a beer or smoking a joint don't qualify in either case. So why is it that I am basically supportive of what the church-goers in Craighead County are trying to maintain, while in the case of Wichita I'm actively involved in trying to gain signatures and drum up support for a possible effort to challenge state and federal laws in regards to cannabis?

It's in part because I've learned from Hayek, as well as from Scott; I've learned that large bureaucracies and entrenched laws too often stifle the sort of exploratory action which might enable people to understand better their own needs, to say nothing of the fact that such institutional structures too often punish, at great personal and social costs, all sorts of individuals who have worked out what their own needs are, and who attempt to get around those structures. Of course, that's just a highfalutin' and theoretical way of talking about those who find themselves robbed of the ability to find a job or participate in society because of stupid choice made when they were young, or those who are convinced (rightly or wrongly) that cannabis is something they desperately need for medical reasons. In other words, I've read their stories (probably most particularly here), learned about their situations, and come to greater appreciation of how this prohibition, at this time, is doing more harm than good. As always with me, it's a context thing.

I'm still willing to defend particular paternalisms; I think any healthy community should, for the sake of preserving social norms and preventing the (I think) ultimately damaging (in both a personal and civic sense) glorification of ever-multiplying, never-judged choices. Defending one's collective moral and cultural identity, and what it can achieve, is too important to be sacrificed to the cult of individual liberty. But if my communitarian ideas have changed at all over the past several years (and they have), it is that I know understand that a defense of norms and traditions--especially prohibitory, paternal ones--has to be able to constantly respond to the changing, pluralistic flow of information all around us. In this case, well, marijuana isn't a drug I have any interest in, or would ever want any of my kids to use. But it isn't, by any means, the worst thing they could do to their bodies (plastic surgery very like would be worse!), and if there people in my community that are being unnecessarily harmed by this prohibition, then I ought to recognize that the judgment I make as parent, in this case at least, is probably as far as I ought to allow my paternalism to go.

The Most Important Vote I'll Make on November 6th

Three weeks from today, I'll be able to vote for my preferred candidate for president of the United States, for my regional congressional representative, for my local state house and senate representatives, and for various judges and city officials. All of those votes are relevant to my life--but the most important vote will be the one on whether or not Wichita should add fluoride to its drinking water. Do I think this is the most important vote I'll make on November 6th because fluoridation is a vital public health issue, and supporting it is a demonstration of good government and smart public responsibility? I do, in fact, think all those things about water fluoridation--but that's not why I think it's the most important part of my November ballot. No, I think it's more important than all those other candidates and issues I will vote on because this question, unlike all other choices I'll be faced, is self-government in action. And self-government is what living in a free society is supposedly all about.

Drinking water is a public resource, and obviously a precious one. Too many people decline to worry much about public resources, whether it be drinking water or sidewalks or sewer lines. In particular, those who are tempted by libertarian ideologies (and we have a lot of that here in Wichita, unfortunately) too often feel justified in forgetting that they live in communities, as opposed to privately contracted enclaves. But however much we may feel as though we are fully independent, sovereign selves, we aren't. We live in a social order, and freedom doesn't mean untrammeled individualism; rather, it means taking it upon ourselves to collectively govern that order. Now we usually do that indirectly, through electing representatives whom we trust--ideally, anyway--to act as our delegates in making decisions and writing laws. But sometimes it is both right and good for us, in our communities, to make decisions about public resources both directly and collectively. And that is what Wichita is going to have the opportunity to do.

It is really a rather precious thing, when you think about it, to be able to take on through one's own voice, one's own words and actions, and one's own vote, the power of self-government. Too many of the people I meet, too many of my students, too often see it as a bother, an annoyance or a distraction. In truth however, it is anything but. It is the most positive kind of freedom a citizen can enjoy, far greater than hunkering down on one's property, cursing the government, and insisting on one's independent liberty. Direct democracy, through voting on public initiatives like this one, whether we love or hate the results, is a grand human accomplishment. For certain, it's not always the best way to govern. But when it comes to deciding about the water I drink and how I pay for it, I'm delighted that the city council declined simply make a decision one way or another (as just happened in Portland, OR, another long-time fluoridation hold-out), and instead gave me, and all my fellow Wichitans, a chance to directly govern ourselves.

Do I hope water fluoridation passes? Absolutely. Why? Because I trust the dentists and health professionals who defend it, I concur with the observations of those who have seen its effects, because the science against fluoridation strikes me as paranoid and slightly nuts, and because I don't see anything wrong with democratically deciding upon communitarian responses to public health issues, especially when their result will be to address social inequities. Some may call it "mass medication" or "paternalism"; I say that if it was paternalism--namely, required immunizations--that has all but completely wiped out certain once-devastating childhood diseases in the United States, then its track record is worth taking seriously. The scholar Sigal Ben-Porath commented that "paternalism offers an opportunity to share the responsibility for one's actions with the state" (Tough Choices: Structured Paternalism and the Landscape of Choice [Princeton, 2010], 41); if the state in question is a democratically governed one--and in regard to this issue in Wichita at this time, it is--then sharing responsibility seems to me exactly what votes like this are all about. But the larger point is simply this--that by voting on this issue, you're helping to govern. Whether we here in Wichita wish to share responsibility for public health through our public resources or not, this vote will allow us to directly, democratically, decide. That's why it, and not my vote for president, is the most important thing I'm going to be doing, three weeks from today.

Defining Red Toryism (Again)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

A month ago, Cato Unbound put up a mini-sympoisum on "the Red Toryism of Phillip Blond." It featured essays by Patrick Deneen and Jacob Levy, both responding in part to Blond's essay "Shattered Society", a version of which Blond gave as a speech when he visited Georgetown University earlier this year. An additional contribution by Reihan Salam and a further response by Blond himself were also promised, but never materialized, and now CU's gone on to another topic. (Though Jacob has posted his response to Patrick here.) I feel bad for not having written up some thoughts and sent them in sooner; Blond's Red Tory ideas fascinate me (as my many comments on them demonstrate), and wanted to throw my two cents in, discussing (again) what I think Red Toryism does, or at least could, mean. But hey, better late than never.

I don't have much to say about Blond's essay itself; his claims are essentially the same as those he advanced when he spoke at Villanova, and while I wasn't there, what I heard in the recording of his lecture was enough to give me serious pause, as my comments in this Front Porch Republic thread indicate. Very simply, Blond struck me as much more willing to engage in a foolish bit of caricature, to lump together all the things which he dislikes both philosophically and politically (the writings of Rousseau and the progressive leftism which in some ways counts Rousseau as an intellectual ancestor on the one hand, the liberal individualism of the modern capitalist marketplace on the other) however distinct they actually be, than he had been when he wrote his earlier "Rise of the Red Tories" essay, which is part of what sparked the fascination with him in the first place. I've finally gotten a hold of a copy of Blond's book, so perhaps will have something more to say about Blond's own arguments once I've finished it. But the caricaturing which Blond employed in his essay leads me directly to Jacob's contribution, since that is what he most immediately focuses on. Jacob's response to Blond (and, by extension, to Patrick as well) came in for some comment and criticism on FPR; let me see if I can build on that, clarifying (if only for myself) where I think Jacob's right and where I think he's wrong, and see if I can make a case for Red Toryism (which may not, it should be noted, be the same as Blond argument at all).

Let me begin with the phrase Red Toryism itself. The use of the "ism" implies a degree of ideological coherence: a package of theories, organized around and/or grounded by a shared set of philosophical or religious beliefs, that together present a normative argument for, and an idea of how to politically or socially advance, the conclusions, priorities and aims of those theories. This isn't the only way to think about "ideologies," of course, but it is mine, one that I've used a few times in the past. Jacob, however, wants to eschew ideological talk--he considers it a distraction, each and every one of them weighted down with too much "specific baggage." This is a reasonable point, but it is also an effective rhetorical move by which to begin his response, because it means that he wants to move away an intellectual consideration of the from the different ways in which people might plausibly organize and package together the various theories of politics and society which their foundational beliefs potentially support. In place of such (arguably ahistorical) intellectual considerations, he proposes that we look solely at different "isms" as "party-ideas"--and that, of course, means that we must ask first of all what parties are advancing those ideas. Looked at in such a way, he is able to more firmly associate Red Toryism with "Toryism simpliciter" the "red" part of the label being a mere "retro-fit (like 'pocketwatch') that only has to be invented after some other version has come around." Red Toryism is, therefore, just another iteration of the party-idea of Toryism, meaning conservatism more generally. And who are the conservatives? Jacob answers:

Conservatism is the party-idea of slowing the pace of change, of preserving order and returning to real or imagined lost virtues and communal ways of life. One part of conservatism’s base has traditionally been the armed agents of the state--the military and police. But the rest of its social base has an odd character. It is the alliance of the rural landlord and the rural peasant, of the established-church priest and his relatively poor flock. It is the party idea of resisting the changes associated with the urban middle class and working class alike, of protecting traditional ways of life (including, importantly, traditional hierarchies) against the disruptions associated with both markets and politics....

[C]onservatism is bitterly anticapitalist, much as it is anti-urban and for much the same reasons. The traditional rural elite finds that the creative destruction of the market threatens his status; the traditional rural poor resent that the city draws away their young to a godless and promiscuous life while also disrupting their stable economy. A local economy based on primary goods (farming, fishing) could be stable for generations, and then suddenly become uncompetitive for mysterious reasons of finance or long-distance trade, apparently decided far away by other people. Conservatism as a party-idea is in large part the attempt to defend against those disruptions — or to express resentment after they take place.

By setting up the argument along these terms, Jacob makes it plain that in arguing against Blond--and really, arguing against the very notion of Red Toryism in general--he is in fact arguing against "the party of the traditional elite," one which gains the support "of those they have traditionally dominated" by offering them an "alliance...against the tacky, educated, often-Jewish new money city slicker." And moreover, since "the aristocrat sets the terms of the alliance," it is a given that the avocations of the rural, the local, and the traditional, are really negligible in the debate: this is a debate between those who support the spread of personal liberty (the party of "liberalism") and those elites who benefit from the wealth it creates, but who also have no wish to see its opportunities shared by any who is not already part of their class.

Let me admit to the obvious: there is much truth to be uncovered by looking at Red Toryism solely through this frame. It is, of course, true that anyone sympathetic to preserving small communities and front porches, who praises the virtues of farming villages and local economies, is going to have to, one way or another, confront the fact that they are talking in terms of limits, restrictions, and boundaries, and obviously those who are already on the inside of those lines (whether cultural, moral, economic, or political) are in a position to benefit to the exclusion of others. There may, of course, be a host of reasonable arguments to support any number of such arrangements, but one cannot pretend that it doesn't at least potentially involve a certain level of self-righteousness, of territoriality, of close-mindedness and defensive superiority...all of which are exactly the faults so stereotypically--yet also, to be sure, often accurately--attributed to the aristocrats, elites, and upper-classes that make up the pantheon of reviled Fat Cats throughout history. So does this mean that the jig is up: that people sympathetic to Red Toryism have to recognize that their talk of "paternalism and protectionism, [and] the insulation of the poor from market forces" is really just all about protecting the privileges of aristocracy?

I don't think so, and the reason why begins with the limits of Jacob's framing of his analysis. For he leaves another party-idea out almost entirely: socialism. Jacob does acknowledge the fact of this constellation of views, but as it "quintessentially represented the interests of the organized industrial working class, and disproportionately represented the ideas of professional intellectuals and urban artists," he simply does not take it seriously as an element of the Red Tory package. In this Jacob is, surprisingly, voices a perspective on the possibility of a Red Tory ideology that is actually a kind of simplistic mirror image of that which Peter Lawler has regularly advanced on the Postmodern Conservative blog: that Red Toryism is just a weird, incoherent longing by socialists or Marxists or various wanna-bes to see "Tory values" protected or promoted, all of whom fail to understand that putting socialist alongside anything conservative is simply oxymoronic. So for for both Jacob and Peter, Red Toryism is just a confused conservatism, only for Peter it is redeemable (because it is, after all, "Tory"), and for Jacob it isn't (because it isn't liberal). Both of these perspectives are, I think, wrong for essentially the same reason: they fail to appreciate that the Red Tory idea, properly understood, is a left or socialist conservatism, not a traditionalism that happened to oddly pick up a few egalitarian rhetorical tropes along the way.

No doubt Jacob could develop a strong argument against this reading of Red Toryism; after all, if we want to think about "party ideas," then the Red Tory idea was born in Canada, where Jacob now resides. The party which advanced it was a gang of various intellectuals and patriots who sought, in different ways, from the late 19th up through the mid-20th centuries, to borrow the progressive elements of Benjamin Disraeli's "one nation conservatism" and apply them to continent-spanning, mostly classless, and (at the time, anyway) primarily rural modern state. It grew out of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Progressive Conservative party; it recognized the necessity of collective action in order to develop egalitarian policies which would benefit and empower diverse localities across the nation, and it assumed the continuity of a common cultural and religious base in order to articulate and harness the democratic support which such collective actions would need to maintain legitimacy. That ideal, quite plainly, never found a strong political basis as Canada became increasingly pluralistic (not to mention constitutionally torn over the place of Quebec in the federation), but its basic communitarian sensibility--a conjoining of egalitarian priorities with a determination to conserve the shared identity (and the various traditional supports that such depends upon) which makes them politically possible--endured in isolated instances throughout Canada, up to the present day. Is it "conservatism"? It is when you look at its professed cultural concerns, but not when you consider who was articulating that ideology, and why, in the first place. Is it "socialism"? Gerry Neal, determined to save Red Toryism from the wanna-bes which Peter mocked in his post, insists it is not:

Toryism...maintains that most basic social unit, the family, is itself prior to the individual, and that society is not a contractual construction of individuals, but a natural outgrowth of the social life that begins in the family. Families live together in neighborhoods, worship together in churches, and out of their cooperation form communities, which generate the customs, traditions, and prescription that form the cultural and social foundation upon which the political and economic edifice which is the country is built. Society is organic, because the institutions which comprise it, have their distinct functions which cooperate together to make the whole work, the way a body’s organs and systems work together....

Society, we are told by progressives and "Red Tories," has a responsibility to the widow and the orphan, to the poor, the sick and the infirm, and to the needy in general. They are correct in principle but err in their application....The welfare-state is not an “organic society”. It is an attempt to re-create by government the organic society which liberalism had sought to destroy. Organic society, however, cannot be created by government fiat. It must grow naturally, out of the everyday communal life that is generated by the cooperative efforts of families, churches, and neighborhoods.

This, then, is the proper argument to have about Red Toryism: not to sideline it by reducing it to conservatism or traditionalism in a simplistic sense, but to ask how, and if, it can propose socialist-egalitarian and culture-respecting policies simultaneously; how and if, that is, it can present a persuasive alternative to straightforward progressivism. Many people doubt that--and one of the reasons why is apparent in the failure of Blond's argument, at least as Jacob presents it, to actually explain what it really is that such culture-conserving policies could theoretically accomplish which progressive liberalism isn't doing already. After all, even if we grant (as I do, at least) that there is something intellectually appealing about the mix of vaguely localist, populist, and socialist values and concerns articulated by Canada's Red Tories and progressive conservatives a half-century ago, something that isn't by definition fatally compromised by the historic taint of the aristocratic landowner and the rich clergyman of yore (a possibility that, as I said above, shouldn't be denied, but has to be confronted and struggled with), there remains the fact that, in the 50 years since, Canada and Great Britain (which is where Blond's ideas arguably may now enjoy a political window of opportunity, though I personally doubt it) and the United States and, really, pretty much the whole of the Western world have become immensely more rich, diverse, complex, interdependent, secular, and individualistic--all of which suggests that Red Toryism, whatever its internal coherence, is less workable and less politically appealing that ever. The usual conservative response is to emphasize the variety of harms which all that liberal progress has visited upon Western states, and thus make cultural conservatism seem more necessary than ever. Blond does exactly that in his essay--and Jacob, mostly, and mostly rightly, makes mincemeat of him:

It is undoubtedly true that there has been a long-term decline in some of those organizations [meaning local governments, trade unions, cooperative societies, civic organizations, etc.]. But, again, there have been variations and cycles, and there is considerable reason to think that the last generation has been better than the one before. At least in the United States...church attendance has shown no measurable decline, and the density of counter-establishment civil society institutions (schools, media outlets, churches, and more) created by fundamentalist Protestants over that time has been stunning. This does nothing for my social capital, but it’s simply false to think that the last generation has seen some new collapse of the intermediate institutions of civil society. It seems to me that Blond is uninterested in such historical niceties, and that he is pronouncing the conservative’s eternal complaint.

For my part, I believe there are plenty of reasons for cultural pessimism, and consequently some room to speak of broad social disorder and decline. But Blond does not, at least not in the aforementioned article, put the emphasis on the proper set of causes--that is, the socio-economic ones, the (let's be blunt) Marxist ones, of social power and inequality. Both he and Deneen are eloquent about the "conspiracy between the state and the market," but neither explain, I think, very clearly exactly why the concentration of power which contemporary government bureaucracies and business corporations enjoy is so resist to the sort of freedom enabled through the application of liberal policies as to necessitate the development of a different, new (or old?) ideological approach. After all, as Jacob ably documents (and reiterates in his response to Patrick), individual freedom enables persons to "create and inhabit and maintain and perpetuate [civic] organizations and institutions"; so why isn't the answer just more liberal freedom?

As I have argued before when speaking of the place of Marxian categories when thinking through the question of localism and traditionalism, Marxism, and socialist thought more generally, concentrates our attention upon basic Rousseauian insights into the production of dependency and alienation in and through individualistic modern life. That's not the only place to find those arguments, of course, and just as surely one may not find them persuasive, but at least that way of thinking puts the proper questions on the table, ones that a liberal like Jacob and a communitarian like Blond (whether he would accept the label or not) can argue over, rather than making it a slam-dunk for those who would paint Red Toryism as a media stunt. As I put it then:

Marx...recognized the truth of the Burkean (though for him it was really more Hegelian, and therefore Rousseauian) insight into the connection between consciousness and communal, historical, material reality. Repairing the human consciousness did not mean a continuing project of subjective liberation, with the aim of making the burdens of modernity privately manageable, but rather addressing issues of power and and place and production that make the transformations of modernity--and most particularly the spaital ones, with solid traditions and properties and roles and locales evaporating into the thin air of free trade and the cash economy--into alienating burdens in the first place....The Rousseauian perspective says, okay, our original, grounded nature has been lost, we're in chains....Rousseau's response (to this problem, and thus Marx's too) preserves true conservative seriousness...it respects the need for embeddedness and connection by suggesting that we remake our chains--that we remake modernity, and resist those who would portray our restless condition as a fait accompli, the emergence of which was inherent to our natures. Why can we do that? Because within and through modernity the deep structure abides; we're just having difficulties actualizing it, because we've been so intent in fighting internecine battles within liberalism that we've ignored all the other ways in which we could be responding to the world.

Of course my language in that final sentence anticipates a reference to the old liberal-communitarian argument, which Jacob also notes:

[Blond's argument] is much the same [as the] complaint that surfaced in Anglo-American political theory in the 1980s and came to be labeled "communitarianism"...One of the most important pieces of writing from that era’s denouement was Michael Walzer’s "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism"...and [in that article] Walzer saw, as Blond does not, that communitarianism is a permanent feature of and within the life of modern liberal societies, not a root-and-branch critique of them. Its value is corrective--to round sharp corners, soften rough edges, and slow rather than reverse changes.

I've used that very article multiple times before, and Jacob and I can continue to argue over what it conclusively demonstrates and what it doesn't (for what it's worth, I interpret Walzer's argument as foregrounding the question of substantial--meaning moral or cultural or metaphysical--commitments; liberalism can provide a substantive politics, but it can also be a way of involving oneself in a politics with a different, non-liberal substantive grounding). Either way, the point for this post is that Blond, in simply writing off Rousseau (as Jacob smartly puts it, "Blond’s depiction Rousseau has just enough truth in it to be wildly misleading"), Blond empties his attempted articulation of a Red Tory position of exactly that kind of substantively socio-economic critique that someone who truly wants to talk about how the alienating and undemocratic concentrations of political and economic power needs to be countered by promoting and equalizing communities simply must have.

As I said before, I still need to read Blond's book; what I'm dealing with here, and what I am using to frame my response to Jacob's trenchant criticism, is something less than Blond's complete Red Tory argument. Perhaps he has developed, or at least points the way towards developing, a persuasive "party idea" that democratically partakes of both conservatism and socialism equally, and does so without the help of Rousseau, Marx, or anything drawn from the actual egalitarian tradition that animated those who first articulated the Red Tory label a half-century ago. Perhaps--but I am doubtful. In the meantime, Jacob has obliged me to raise the philosophical bar for Blond's arguments even higher...but he hasn't convinced me that, whatever the limitations of his own articulation of this particular ideological vision, the vision itself isn't worth continuing to pursue.

Defending (Local) Prohibition(s)

Jacob Weisberg has taken on a difficult target in an essay in Slate: the Prohibition. "When the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920, it was a radical social experiment challenging a custom as old as civilization....Today prohibition is a byword for futile attempts to legislate morality and remake human nature." Pretty bravely contrarian there, Jacob! So the Prohibition was a "gross insult to individual rights" and a "predictable failure," huh? Well, that's too big a target for a communitarian like myself to pass up.

Of course, Weisberg isn't really attacking the Prohibition, and I'm not really going to defend it. (Though--as one who thought highly of the years we lived in a dry county in Arkansas--I would argue that he passes over the actual historical record of the Prohibition much too casually; see here for some links to discussions over the larger and multifaceted questions of to what degree and in what way Prohibition really did "work.") What he's attacking is the notion of prohibition--technically, I suppose, the idea of prohibiting anything, really, when said prohibitions "fail to keep pace with a liberalizing society"--and what I'm defending is the opposite. Or, at least, I would claim that certain kinds of prohibitions--including but not limited to sumptuary laws of various kinds--are a lot less easy to discredit than Weisberg apparently believes.

His chosen targets are "laws that prevent gay marriage, restrict cannabis as a Schedule I Controlled Substance, and ban travel to Cuba." But he doesn't actually attack the substance of any of those laws; rather, he sees them all as fading into irrelevance in the face of "the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness." In issue after issue, Weisberg claims, "popular demand for an individual right"--to marry whomever you love, regardless of gender; to smoke a mostly harmless and sometimes medically beneficial recreational drug; to travel and do business in an island 90 miles from Florida--"is simply too powerful to overcome." He does allow that there may likely be some qualifications and variability in marginal cases, but overall is message is that prohibition, as an idea, is over, and that Democrats and Republicans alike (with their concerns about guns and abortion, for example) need to get out of the way.

Since he's not attacking these laws, I don't see a need to defend them. (For the record, though: marijuana doesn't strike me as any more dangerously addictive and potentially harmful than such legal-yet-restricted products as, say, alcohol and tobacco; the embargo on Cuba has been pretty pointless from the start; and my complicated feelings about same-sex marriage are something I've talked about more than enough already.) But his overall argument against prohibition in general has a couple of huge holes in it, and I might as well point them out.

Towards the end of his piece, Weisberg confidently places technology on the side of the liberationists: "In a world where everyone has his own printing press, restrictions on private behavior become increasingly untenable." But that is simply false--or at least, simplistic to the point of meaninglessness. One can just as easily argue the reverse: that in the age of the internet, we have become increasing obsessed with what our neighbors are doing, with who is moving in next door to us, with who said what about who; cyberbullying, Megan's Law, hate crime's legislation and more are all expressions of at least partially internet-empowered popular demands for our individual "private behavior" to be subject to public scrutiny and possible sanction. Apples and oranges, you say? Perhaps. Weisberg's examples of information running free and, by being so available, consequently affecting how people judge what is "normal," what they can co-exist alongside with without finding their own choices and ways of life threatened, make sense. But they aren't the whole story, of course; as my above examples suggest, the proliferation of information can just as easily generate paranoia, suspicion, and overreactions in the form of laws which erect prohibitions, rather than tear them down. All of which leads to a deeper point which Weisberg doesn't reckon with (but should).

Exactly how does our "definition of the pursuit of happiness" evolve, anyhow? It doesn't happen on one's own. It happens through time and space, through communities and history, through one's awareness of and involvement with others, past and present and future. Weisberg would obviously agree with this; otherwise, his claim that the internet alone--the raw force of all these options and lifestyles and possibilities, displayed at the touch of a button--contributes to making prohibitions laughable wouldn't make sense. But if so, doesn't it make just as much sense that communities can take control of their own development, emphasize certain portions of the past and project intentions into the future, and by so doing contribute to how the members of said communities define the pursuit of happiness? Of course it does--that's called "culture" (or "popular sovereignty," or "participatory democracy"; take your pick), and I find it hard to believe that Weisberg would dispute that either. Which means that the "popular demand for an individual right" isn't necessarily the death-knell for the prohibitionary or sumptuary mindset. He calls prohibition today more about "omission than commission"--meaning, I suppose, that he sees certain policies today (regarding gay marriage, or marijuana, or Cuba) as showing a misguided reluctance to admit the inevitable. But to call the failure of any individual prohibition inevitable is to assume that the individual is the only and the sovereign actor in each and every case, and that's not true. Individuals are in part made from their environments, and collective environments can be controlled. Any such control will be, of course, either welcomed or resisted by particular individuals, and off we go to the complicated realities of political life. But those complications won't ever wither away, I think. There's a tension between the individual and the community, between choice and culture, that's as old as modernity, if not much older. Weisberg's "big idea," by contrast, is just a quick and superficial political judgment about the current state of play in the United States about something much bigger than the country itself.

Of course, Weisberg may well be right about the three specific prohibitions he mentions. As I said above, I won't waste any pixels defending any of them in particular. But I do defend prohibition. Not all or any prohibitions, but some. America's experiment with a federal prohibition on alcohol--expressed through various laws and, ultimately, the 18th amendment--was ultimately flawed, I suspect, because it was too big: it allowed the passions of some parts of the population (including such strange bedfellows as Methodists, Southern Baptists, Progressives, feminists, and radicals from the South and Great Plains) to claim a moral consensus over everyone else (Roman Catholics, German Lutherans, immigrants from all parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, ordinary folk from big cities across the nation), and enforce that consensus accordingly. The harms that came from such a huge operation, whatever its arguable benefits, were many. By contrast, as I mentioned above, our old residence of Craighead County, Arkansas, had its own alcohol prohibition in place, and while the controversies continue--and why wouldn't they? it's a free country, after all--it seems that the community has survived it's collective decision to ban alcohol relatively well. At least, the folks who live there continue to value that kind of popular sovereignty, and it hasn't exactly led to a rush of political unrest, violence, and organized crime. So maybe it just depends on how any given prohibition is set up, and how many people, with all personal desires as well as their identification with and their aspirations for the community in which they live, can be fairly said such a prohibition might include.

Which is all just a long-winded way of saying that any democratic decisions, whether prohibitionary or otherwise, really must begin with figuring out what the borders of the relevant community are, so as to enable the people--the demos--so included to speak. Figuring out which prohibitions and which rights really are the business of the national government (and, despite my occasional localist sympathies, I acknowledge that many are), and which are best handled by the states, or counties, or cities, all the way down, is complex matter, for which there probably can never be any simple solution. But knocking aside the whole matter of prohibition as something on its way out, Weisberg does, because "the pursuit of happiness" has spoken, doesn't respect that complexity at all.

Plastic Surgery, or Pot?

As hypothetical questions go, that one is admittedly pretty bizarre. But let me explain:

About a week ago, a friend of mine--a fellow co-blogger at Times and Seasons--called his readers' attention to a couple of, shall we say, unusual children's books. The first, It's Just a Plant, is the story of a young girl learning all about the growth and use of marijuana from her parents (with help from Farmer Bob and Dr. Eden); the second, My Beautiful Mommy, is the story of a young girl learning all about why her mother is going in for a tummy tuck, a nose job, and breast implants (through the efforts of the musclebound and vaguely superheroic Dr. Michael). The upshot of the first book is that marijuana can and is responsibly used by many people to make them feel "happy"; the upshot of the second is that mommy, who really hasn't been entirely happy with her body since she had children, will soon be even "prettier" than before. My friend and I are both generally progressive/liberal/call-it-what-you-will when it comes to everyday politics, but we both have conservative/religious/again-call-it-what-you-will streaks as well...and we both thought--only partly ironically--that the existence of children's books like this is clearly further evidence that the End Times will be upon us soon.

But here's the thing: when you get right down to it, I find the second book, the plastic surgery one, in its content and execution, to be scandalous, insulting and perverse; whereas the first one mainly strikes me as ridiculous, as such an earnestly hippie book as to primarily be an occasion for light-hearted mockery rather than outrage. I figured that the vehemence I felt towards the second book--towards its casual and commercialized assumptions about human nature, notions of beauty, and more--would be shared by numerous crunchy-con-types, and so I sent a link to it over to Rod Dreher, who then put up a post about it, filled with righteous indignation:

What kind of message is this sending to little girls? That if they don't like their bodies, that if their physical appearance doesn't conform to current physical ideals, that they should be willing to go under the knife to make themselves "prettier"? Sick....What this book really does is put even more pressure on girls in this culture to learn to hate themselves for not measuring up to a Barbie doll ideal. If they're being taught to absorb this toxic idea from childhood, what kind of neurotic wrecks are they doing to be as teenagers? And boys too will learn that if females fall short of the physical ideal, well, they ought to go to the medical profession and fix their imperfections via surgery.

I couldn't have summarized my own thoughts better myself, though I never got the chance...because rather than engaging in the long and contentious thread which erupted at Dreher's blog over issues of plastic surgery, standards of beauty, sexism, and raising kids, I was distracted when a friend of mine (from Dallas, coincidentally) challenged me: why are you so much more upset by idea of cosmetic surgery than by the idea of marijuana use? Would I really rather one of my daughters become a pothead than get a nose job? The resulting e-mail discussion ate up much of the weekend, and I'm only getting around now to putting my thoughts down here.

First things first: I'm no crusader for the legalization of marijuana. There are plenty of people who know a great deal more about its use, sale, and effects than I do, and from what I can tell the majority of them seem to acknowledge that, at the very least, it is often a gateway drug to more harmful substances. Hell, I'm a Mormon, and a bit of a health snob too--I don't use and would rather than no one else use any kind of primarily intoxicating, hallucinogenic or addictive substances at all. But then perhaps that's the point; I suppose I would probably see some hypothetical experimentation with pot by one of my children about the same way I would see similar experimentation with cigarettes or snuff or whiskey or wine: as something foolish, possibly dangerous, but mostly just irresponsible and unwise (though of course, under current laws, experimentation with pot could get her a criminal record as well, and that's an additional concern). But I don't think I'd find it especially scandalous, at least not in any fundamental way.

So why do I feel that way about plastic surgery...or at least, the type of surgery, and the mentality behind it, being sold as a positive thing to young children by the book in question? I think primarily because it involves selling something based on images, images which have been shaped by who knows how many years of sexism and male presumption, images which have been manipulated by who knows how many Hollywood agents, Madison Avenue hacks, toy manufacturers, pornographers, fashion designers, and dozens of others that I--as a religious person, as a husband and father, as a communitarian and democrat--instinctively distrust. The fact that a certain body image--the nose job, the boob job, the tummy tuck, all done to "fit into my clothes" and to "feel good about myself"--is being presented to children as an ordinary and, indeed, empowering choice which mothers can (should?) make I find simply disgusting.

Does this mean that I think books like this should be illegal? No (but mocked: yes). More importantly, does it mean I think plastic surgery itself should be illegal, or even something that in principle ought to be condemned outright? Again, definitely not: there are too many fine lines that would have to be worked out and defended in advance to be worth it. But that doesn't change the fact that perhaps 90% of all cosmetic and optional (that is, not called for by burns or other medical needs) plastic surgery is, in my judgment, wasteful, depressingly shaped by social forces which ought not have the power they do over the thinking of too many women, and ultimately wrong. That leaves a gray area, sure; and to be fair, that gray area exists on both sides of the hypothetical question: I suppose I would rather Megan (our oldest daughter; she'll be twelve this year) get a nose job then become a marijuana addict and junkie. But would I rather her get a nose job than be an occasional user of marijuana? Of course my preference would be neither, but given this stark and crazy choice...I don’t think so; I think I would rather learn she's smoked a joint or two than see her shell out her own money to get a new nose (or tummy, or breasts). Why? Because her marijuana use at least wouldn't necessarily indicate that she's likely been convinced by the media machines or her peer groups or her own (no doubt socially manipulated!) insecurities that she needs to improve herself to be more "beautiful"--and defending her against such machines, peers, and insecurities I see as one of my primary responsibilities as a parent.

My friend picked up on the idea of "improving oneself," and asked: why are you presumably comfortable with all sorts of (sometimes expensive, sometimes fairly time-consuming) cosmetic acts that my daughter's may engage in at the appropriate age--anything from dieting to shaving their legs--but I draw such a firm line at plastic surgery? Well, I'm not comfortable with all of them--though my wife and I are more comfortable with more of them than is perhaps typical of most white American Mormons like ourselves; decorating one's body through ear or nose piercings, for example, if done in moderation, don't seem to us to be problematic. We do have some difficulty with tattoos, though--basically because of the long-term effects (and consequently the long-term "investment" they demand up front) they have on one's body...and again, I'm operating under the firm belief that, at least in a great majority of these cases, the bodily "improvements" which so many women and girls so often feel pressured to embrace begin with corporate profit calculations, not authentically cultural decisions.

Perhaps we can put these things on a continuum: some methods of making oneself over to fit a pleasing image (hopefully pleasing to oneself or to some community one is a member of, one with its own organic, aesthetic sense, as opposed to one which simply reflects and amplifies whatever Cosmopolitan magazine tells it to value) are invasive and essentially permanent, whereas others are not. Some involve major investments of one's "self" in the broadest sense, and others do not. Some are somewhere in the middle, perhaps easing in one direction or another. These are not the sort of hard-and-fast distinctions that would make me comfortable with getting the law involved, but yes: I believe I can reasonably say that it is unnatural, unusual, and often a little disgusting to allow one’s looks and, to a not-insignificant degree, one's bodily "self" to be guided in an invasive and permanent way by a thinking that is not your own, whereas allowing it to be guided in a merely superficial, experimental, temporary way would be, to my mind, at worst something foolish. Moreover, some image-driven manipulations and improvements, like dieting and exercise, can sometimes have pretty significant positive benefits in terms of health and well-being, while others, like the great majority of plastic surgery operations (i.e., those alternations that do not involve addressing deformities or serious or at least legitimate health and functionality concerns), are not. Some manipulations, like make-up or dying your hair, are (probably) temporary and changeable; others, like plastic surgery, are not. In the end, when all is said and done, I think you can (and should) make distinctions about those ways of aspiring to conform oneself to an ideal which are responsible and reasonable, and those which are not.

My friend wasn't convinced, and he made a few thoughtful challenges to my position. Primarily, he wondered about my distinction between temporary alterations and permanent, invasive ones--does the distinction hole water? I think it does. The body isn't fundamentally altered by something that you can wipe off or take off. Permanent alternations are more than decoration, which is all wearing an earing; rather it's essentially making the claim that something you have, something you are, some age you are, just doesn't fit--that you need to draw upon some other resource, some other image, to accomplish whatever it is you desire, and that means handing your own conception of yourself over to someone or something else. And since the types of plastic surgery I'm actually concerned with, the types sold as ordinary and worthy of celebration by the aforementioned book, are the types which I believe are mostly introduced to the thinking of the women of America as "needed" primarily by men engaged in sexual objectification, by chatty and judgmental and competitive peers, by fashion magazines, by pornographic videos, by repellent talk-show hosts and insufferable aerobic instructors, I'm consequently deeply bothered by such practices, because I don't think anyone should--"freely" or otherwise--hand over the shape of their bodies and lives so willingly to such a pack of self-gratifying vultures and reprobates. And no, I don't think I'm being overly simplistic here: for the record, I don't think human agency is a slave to the environmental or cultural influences which surround all of us. But I think such influences are a huge factor in shaping the people we are and the choices we make, nonetheless. The media is what selectively reinforces upon all of us certain assumptions and preferences that are probably there in our community anyway, but without the benefit of a whole contradictory world of influences to moderate and/or contextualize them. The media can warp our thinking, in other words. As such, I worry about it, even if it isn't the ultimate causal factor in our actions, and I especially worry about it when it seems to me that people are internalizing some of that warping into their bodies in expensive, invasive, permanent ways.

My friend also wondered (and out of our e-mail audiences, he wasn't alone) what the real cause of my vehemence was, and whether one could describe it a "chivalrous" or "condescending" towards women. He has a point, of course: at what point would my condemnation of my daughter's hypothetic choice to get a boob job so she'd have a better chance at landing a contract with Girls Gone Wild be essentially a claim that she's been duped, that she doesn't know what she wants, that she doesn't know what's best for her? My only response, I suppose, would be to fall back on my basic motivations here: my huge distrust of modern commercial and consumer norms. My wife Melissa has greatly influenced me here; her particular kind of Mormon feminism has merged with my own weird traditionalist-Marxist perspective on things over the years, with one result being that one of the few things we fully agree on--and in fact can make each other more and more impassioned and extreme about, just by talking with each other--is the commodification and corporatizing and selling and sexualizing of our sense of self, particularly women and girls' senses of themselves as individuals and as children of God. Plastic surgery, or at least many types of and justifications for it, is just a symptom of a deeper problem. (There are many teachings and influences I could cite here--Neil Postman, Juliet Schor, Catherine MacKinnon, etc.--but the ur-text for Melissa at least was probably Jean Kilbourne's terrific, challenging broadside against sexualized advertising, Deadly Persuasion.)

Let me finish this rant with an e-mail from another friend, who observed this back-and-forth and then had this story to tell:

I love my daughter (who is 8, by the way) for many reasons. I love many aspects of who she is. But one of the things I appreciate most about her is her sense of self. She is who she is; she knows who she is. She has enough self confidence to not care what most other people think of her. She also happens to be beautiful, intelligent, and athletic (although maybe I just think that because I'm her daddy).

Then I think about her, at some point in her life, having a nose job. And I try to work my way back through the state of mind she would have to have to make that decision. The conclusion that I come to is that she would have to start paying attention to what other people think of her--and not just that, but people who would think differently of her if she had a different nose. Not how she treats other people, or her sense of humor or her problem solving ability, but her nose. In other words, she wouldn't be herself anymore. She would have to have become a different, less wonderful person. This is especially personal to me because my daughter is starting to make comments about being fat (which she isn't). But I can tell the social pressure has started, and I worry about her.

I should say that my wife actually has had a nose job. She broke her nose riding a horse when she was 15, and it wasn't set correctly, and healed quite crooked. She had it straightened because she was starting to have trouble breathing. Obviously I have no problem with that. And if someone in general isn't satisfied with their body and wants to have it surgically changed, I don't have any problem with that in a generic sense either. The difficulty I have with this is very personal. I hate the fact that our society places has such strong social pressures about how a woman should look to be accepted that a beautiful, strong eight-year-old-girl would even be exposed to the idea that she is fat.

Amen.