Many readers of LewRockwell.com can probably relate "war stories" of times when they presented libertarian ideas in a public forum and met with skepticism or outright hostility from the audience. Recently I had such an experience that helped to bring into sharp relief for me some of the obstacles standing in the way of a general acceptance of the libertarian vision of peaceful social cooperation.
On June 4, 2010, I presented a paper titled "Murray Rothbard and the Nonaggression Axiom as the Foundation of Justice" to a group of academics at the Christian Scholars Conference, hosted by Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN. The annual Christian Scholars Conference (CSC) is the largest academic event geared towards Church of Christ scholars, and many representatives from other groups such as Baptists, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics also take part in it. Although the Church of Christ throughout the twentieth century was known for its theological and political conservatism (see, for example, the series of animated shorts on economics produced by George Benson, who served at different times as administrators of several Church of Christ colleges), in recent years it seems to have drifted Leftwards along with the evangelical world in general. In fact, in 2008 one of the plenary speakers at the CSC was none other than Jim Wallis, whose pronouncements have received a bit of attention from LRC writers.
The audience to whom I presented my paper was Left-leaning as well. I was on a panel exploring different concepts of justice and their compatibility or lack thereof with Christianity. I had been asked to present a libertarian theory of justice, and I decided that instead of beating around the bush with Cato-style "low-tax liberalism," I would discuss the full-blown anarchocapitalist vision as laid out in For a New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty. The other main paper, delivered by an old college friend of mine, was a promotion of John Rawls's egalitarian philosophy. We had also brought in respondents to critique each of the main papers. I'm glad to say that the panel discussion and audience Q&A proceeded in a fairly courteous manner despite our disagreements. Nevertheless, there were still moments of tension stemming either from the audience's misconceptions about Rothbardianism or prior philosophical commitments that prevented them from seeing the potential of libertarian ideas to address contemporary social problems.
For a New Liberty: The...
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I devoted about half of my talk to the philosophical foundations of the nonaggression axiom in natural law and the rest to the implications for society if this principle were applied consistently to the State. I stressed Rothbard's view, later amplified by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, that a traditional, bourgeois society could best deal in a nonviolent way with social problems that the State currently addresses through aggression. So far, so good.
The first and most obvious problem that became evident during the responses and the audience Q&A was that despite the successes of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and its affiliated scholars, to say nothing of Ron Paul, in educating people about Austrian economics and libertarian politics, Murray Rothbard is still largely unknown among mainstream academics. My respondent, a political science professor who seemed knowledgeable about politics in general, apparently had had no prior contact with Rothbard's writings. At best, he was conversant with Cato-tarianism, and in his response to my paper he trotted out several criticisms that I thought were completely beside the point. (In his defense, I must point out that he only received my paper a week before the conference, and it would have been unreasonable to expect him to go out and read all my source material in that time frame. Even so, much of his response did not directly engage my paper's arguments.) The audience was even more unfamiliar with Rothbard; I received no indication that anyone had ever heard of him before, even though one audience member told me that his father was a libertarian. Keep in mind that these folks were all intensely interested in the subject matter of the panel, which was just one of about a dozen choices in that time slot at the CSC, so their ignorance of Rothbard was even more disappointing. Not surprisingly, their questions more often than not contained false premises and other misconceptions.
A second major problem I noted is that these educated and sophisticated people seemed extremely reluctant to confront the reality of the State as a perpetrator of violence. They had obviously been conditioned to view the State as a tool to accomplish any and all laudable social goals without regard for the coercive means by which it must operate. Apart from a question about settlers taking the American Indians' land, the only challenge I got about the nature of lawful property claims came from my respondent, who quite accurately pointed out that according to the Bible, God is the owner of everything, and that we are merely stewards of His creation. Fine, I answered, but unless you are a Hegelian, to move from that proposition to the assertion that the State can morally distribute the property in the society as it sees fit is a non sequitur. It seems to me that "Thou shalt not steal" is a better rule to fall back on. My respondent also said (I am paraphrasing) that libertarianism is not Christian because it's all about atomistic individualism and self-interest (an ironic criticism, given that John Rawls appeals to self-interest of individuals behind a "veil of ignorance" to establish his rules of justice). No, I said, it's all about restricting the accepted use of violence in society.
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However, members of the audience were not satisfied with this. They immediately shifted their questions away from the issue of coercion to various imaginary scenarios that would result in an unhappy outcome for a woman, a Hispanic person, etc., in a property-based, State-less society. One young man constructed such an unrealistic scenario in which a single propertyless black family was surrounded by bigoted whites in a closed society, that I jokingly asked him whether there was a magic wall around this place to prevent the family from leaving. On reflection, it probably would have been more effective to ask him to play by his own rules: What are the odds that such a hypothetical society would adopt any system of justice he would find acceptable? It's hardly fair to fault Rothbard for not providing a happy ending to extreme counter-factual cases of this sort. I did take the opportunity afforded by his question to point out to the audience the silliness of expecting to find political solutions for all social and economic problems. If they wanted to believe that, I said, they would have to blame President Obama for the persistent oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico (surprisingly, none of them wanted to do this).
This pragmatic and consequentialist approach to using the State to right all perceived naughtiness is tied to another problem libertarians face when confronting academics. There seemed to be little interest among audience members in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only in whether their application would bring about results they liked. Murray Rothbard deduced his political positions from first principles he held to be objectively true, and he had the intellectual honesty to follow his reasoning wherever his rational understanding led him. I had expected a Christian audience to have some respect for this procedure, but the only ideas that were expressed audibly were more typical of postmodern reductionism: "Naïve. . . . This is sexist. . . . Only a white property-owning male could believe this," etc. Is this what passes for critical engagement with challenging ideas among academics these days? Have even Christian scholars become so hypnotized by the race/class/gender analysis they imbibed in graduate school that deconstructing the speaker takes precedence over getting at the truth of things?
No wonder the audience seemed more receptive to Rawlsianism; Rawls famously made a point of defining his original position in such a way that he would inevitably get the egalitarian results he wanted through "reflective equilibrium." This has always seemed to me to be an illegitimate procedure, Rawls's objections to the contrary notwithstanding, but it is naturally very attractive to the legions of academics who have rejected the notion of objective truth. They are ideologically committed to State-enforced multicultural egalitarianism, come hell or high water, and will dismiss out of hand an alternative system without bothering to refute its reasoning. I don't know whether any of the audience members fell into this category, but any who did are certainly out of step with millennia of Christian teaching on the nature of truth and the use of reason. I am reminded of the debate in which the great Christian apologist Greg Bahnsen, in response to his atheist opponent's statement that the notion of God offended his sensibilities, said that this argument was on the same level as the boy who sticks his fingers in his ears and chants nonsense to avoid hearing what his mother is telling him. The point is that if a proposition is true, whether it be the existence of God, the homesteading principle, or the nonaggression axiom, it doesn't matter whether you like it or not; you have an obligation to act in accordance with that reality.
My CSC experience showed me that libertarians still have a long way to go to get a fair hearing in academia, and an even longer way to win the battle of ideas. The task is not fruitless; some audience members thanked me after the session for clearing up some of their misconceptions about libertarian theory and for suggesting further reading to them. Those are the times when the huge library of online resources at Mises.org and the wisdom of the Mises Institute's emphasis on educational efforts instead of policy bickering really loom large in my mind. Maybe someday soon we'll get to the point where the mainstream actually tries to frame on-topic rebuttals to Mises, Rothbard, and the rest instead of mischaracterizing their arguments or simply ignoring them. On that day, there will be a lot of people in Auburn to thank.
June 17, 2010
