[This is Part Two, Chapter 6, of Murphey’s book Emergent
Man:]
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Among the rising generation today it seems
archaic to speak of liberty. The word fires no enthusiasm. It is rarely used and
is not at all understood. There is a whole generation coming up that is
dangerously ignorant of the great intellectual tradition of historic
liberalism, which stressed liberty as central to all satisfactory human
relations. This generation knows that Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations,
but I daresay that the book itself is not read every often. Instead, Adam
Smith is now a symbol: a symbolic laughingstock for a quaint old,
unsophisticated point of view which can hardly be respectfully considered. And,
too, he is uncritically thought of as being perhaps the last libertarian
writer. Modern exponents of liberty are only subliminally present, if at all.
Von Mises and Ayn Rand, the two giants, despite their having written major
works that have even had a considerable circulation, have barely made a wrinkle
in my generation. If they are ever spoken of {and this becomes more and more
improbable) it is disparagingly, not in a spirit of honest disagreement over a
living question, but as though Mises and Rand had no right to be here. Such
writers "disturb the peace," so to speak. Their writings have had,
and will continue to have, an aura of obscenity, which is to say they are
pushed back into the realm of unspoken, or at least unheard, ideas. My generation
will just pretend they don't exist. And this for all practical purposes is an
act of intellectual murder.
Not long ago an odd sort of question came into
my mind. I had just spent an evening at the first Young Republican meeting
I had attended in seven years, and had
stood talking among the members. I had found that the spirit of the group had
changed drastically during the time I was gone from it. I talked with one young
man about twenty-five years old for a half-hour or more. His view was that we
must "go forward"; he made this statement over and over again, so
that the conversation consisted of his repeating this and of my trying to get
him to tell me what he meant by "going forward." He seemed to have no idea. All he knew was
that most assuredly he did not want to "go backwards" (which from the
context apparently meant toward liberty).
He did interject that perhaps the main function of government is to
"save capitalism from itself."
When I walked out into the fresh air and down
the street toward my car, an odd question entered my mind." Just
where," I thought, "did you manage to pick up the philosophy of
liberty while that fellow missed it so entirely?" Somewhere in my childhood I developed an
image of America as synonymous with liberty, while he was learning to think of
liberty as a disreputable anachronism.
The
answer came when I attended the next meeting of the Sons of the American
Revolution. For a half hour a gray-haired man spoke of the American heritage of
liberty. As he spoke I realized that I have not always been so alone with my
philosophy. I have heard all of the words he spoke so refreshingly before,
probably from other gray-haired men on similar occasions. That is probably --
through a few words here and a few words there -- where I picked up my sacred
image, which in turn led me to discover Mises and Rand and Smith and
DeTocqueville and Madison.
Liberty has had a
long tradition. Historic liberalism was an active, virile intellectual
movement. And some of its best works are being written today, while liberalism
itself is in exile, so that we could hardly say that intellectually it is
stagnant (even though
it may be largely unnoticed). Every man
who considers himself educated (and there aren't many in my generation who
consciously make this a goal in this sense) ought certainly to be well read in
the literature of this intellectual tradition, so that he understands its
spirit and its general principles. At least I will myself feel justified in
refusing to recognize the intellectual credentials of anyone who does not have
this modicum of understanding.
As justifiable as such an intolerance of this
ignorance may be, I think, however, that we must be willing to do more than
merely demand of the rising generation a certain intellectual curiosity and
responsibility. Those of us in the younger generation who are liberals in the
historic sense (as distinguished from its contemporary meaning) must be able to
restate the philosophy of liberty in the language of the present. We must
present its principles cogently and well, so that intelligent men will find
them worth extended study. I hope that in what follows I can do my part along
these lines.
The
philosophy of liberty is richly human. But to understand this a young person
today must do almost the impossible. He must make a major shift in his
emotional preoccupation and thereby begin to see things from a different
standpoint, using different criteria. The libertarian perspective is separate
and apart from that which is prevalent today as a part of our anti-capitalistic
biases. The humanism of liberty can be understood only when one looks with full
sensibility at the excellence of human creativity, at the nobility of
intelligent and virile men. If this captures his vision, so that his main
concern becomes one of stimulating these forces and of liberating them, then he
is well on his way to accepting liberty as his philosophy. To appreciate the
human potential, and to will with all ones mind and spirit the full blossoming
of this potential is to take the libertarian perspective. This causes such a
man to become convinced that the betterment of the human condition lies in
releasing this great multiplicity of energies. When he sees the men about him
he sees them in terms of their potential, he is tolerant of their peculiarities
because he knows that in the obscene soul of other men there are possibilities
far beyond his expectations. He sees the frail lawyer sitting at a table with
seventy-five law books before him as a remarkable, one might say almost a
sublime, sort of living thing who through intelligence and energy is capable of
achievements that he could hardly imagine; of course, I am using the lawyer as
symbolic in this instance of all such men, in whatever field. With this
perspective, it seems to the libertarian that all of the suggestions for human
betterment, all of the humanitarian devices contrived by men of good will, are
humbled in their significance before the greatest humanitarian device of all:
the liberty of the human being to live, to create, to think, to produce, to
struggle with problems and feel the joy of their conquest. Given this, the
possibilities of human betterment are beyond limit. With liberty and with a
healthy attitude of virile life, even the poorest man in a society will before
too long be immensely richer than the average man of today, both materially and
spiritually.
The libertarian, therefore, weighs liberty,
when he comes to make decisions about social and political matters, as a factor
of the utmost importance. To him it is not a negligible consideration. It is
not an impractical absurdity that is to be shrugged off while other facets of a
problem are to be considered. The question of "will this make men
free?" is to him the principal question, because he knows that behind it
lies the question of whether or not the immense creative forces of the human
race are to be put to beneficial use, or are instead to be suffocated and
atrophied.
All of this is in stark contrast to our
present way of seeing things. Today we tend to look at a "problem" (I
will explain the quotation marks in a minute) and to ask: "How can we most
immediately solve it?" Lacking a basic appreciation for the latent forces inherent in free human
energies, we hardly cast a glance, in our search for a solution, to free action
as the answer. And even if "free enterprise," so to speak, is
suggested as the way out, we are too impatient for this sort of unplanned,
"roundabout" amelioration. The problem is here now, we say,
and what is to be done about it? Almost without serious reflection we turn to
the most obvious agency for immediate action, the government. Here is a force
that can turn prompt attention to the problem once we have created the
political prerequisites for governmental action. To such considerations,
liberty -- when it is raised as an objection to the political solution of the
"problem" -- seems only the most remote irrelevancy. It is only a
"theoretical," not a "practical," objection. Liberty takes
the form of a nagging negativism, standing in the way of the solution we seek.
Liberty, we say, would only take us "backwards," away from the
humanitarian objects we sincerely have in view.
To this perspective, it is very difficult to
see that the philosophy of liberty is a deeply humanitarian philosophy. It
seems unconcerned with human needs when it says "Laissez Faire." Such a condemnation is so natural, so easily
arrived at, that one wonders how liberty gets any support at all. But, of
course, this seems not quite so puzzling when one considers the perspective of
the libertarian, who somehow has stumbled across a potent awareness of what
freedom means in terms of human welfare.
Without this potent awareness one can hardly
be a libertarian. And that is why a member of the rising generation hardly has
any feel for libertarian thinking at all. We are in the age of the extrovert
and of the common man. Mediocrity is implicitly accepted as a given, and excellence
is taxed and punished and envied. The soul becomes ever more obscene; its
potentialities seem ever less probable, or at least ever less apparent to a
superficial mind, and this is so even at a time when science has placed satellites around the sun and man has
for the first time seen the other side of the moon. And in addition -- and this
is of immeasurable importance -- the men of highest intellect and culture are
caught in the webbing of an orthodoxy that has in large measure blanked out
libertarian insights. Orthodoxy grips the intellectual so strongly that he
barely knows that it is doing so, not realizing that his perspective is
narrowly circumscribed, that he is deficient in his poetic sensibilities, his
aesthetic development, in his utter failure to grasp powerfully the sense of
human potential and the relation of liberty to its expression.
Unless the reader can feel almost with a
poetic urgency the truth of this libertarian perspective and allow himself to
see with complete candor the spiritual and practical deficiencies in the
prevalent conception, the most complete explanation of liberty will never
persuade him of its value. The remainder of this discussion, which will do no
more than examine dispassionately the principles of liberty, therefore has
nothing at all to do with "persuading" anyone to favor liberty. It
must be by way of explanation only, to point up the guiding principles and some
of the applications of liberty.
But first, before going on to such a
dissection, I should like to digress to explain briefly why I put the word
"problem" in quotation marks. Perhaps in doing so it will be possible
to acquaint the reader even more with the different way of looking at things
that is necessary to appreciate liberty. I have placed quotation marks around
"problem," thus casting some doubt on the propriety of its use,
because a particular condition at a given time and place, even though it may be
undesirable by certain criteria by which it is judged, is a problem in a political
sense only to someone whose principles (or lack of them) consider
governmental action appropriate. Rape and murder and larceny are problems in
this sense under the principles of all but anarchist thinking. But what about a
farmer's income if it is low? The farmer may think this is painful, and
certainly he will consider a low
income, or a loss, as a personal problem or as a business problem. It might
even be a family problem. But is it a political problem? Is it something that
ought to be considered for solution by men vested with the tax and police
powers? This is something completely
separate. The libertarian answers this question by considering that men, in
their freedom, must bear such losses as come from a failure to satisfy consumer
demand, that this taking of loss is just the other side of the right to take a
profit and of the risk inherent in the man's liberty to seek his own vocation
and pursue thereby his own productive talents. In so saying, attention is
focused -- and I believe unduly -- on the "ill-fated" aspects of
liberty, so that the position seems harsh and lacking in compassion. But if we
are to enjoy the great accompanying humanism of liberty we must be willing to
accept such vicissitudes as necessarily go with it (though of course there is
no reason to accept vicissitudes that can be avoided by measures consistent
with liberty). The coercivist, though,
answers the question by saying that government should provide price supports or
a subsidy. This solution is appealing
because it is direct and obvious.
However, as a consequence a part of liberty is lost, because taxation or
inflation (resulting from government spending without taxation) forcibly takes
from others the means by which the government makes the subsidy. The police
power, which lies behind every tax court, exacts the means for the
"solution." The farmer's
liberty is curtailed as the result of acreage allotments and the like. And,
too, the philosophy of liberty, and its outlook of independent self-reliance,
is circumscribed and takes a less vital place in the attitude of the
people. Emergence as a living creed is
sapped of some of its strength, and instead of creative effort to meet in an
honest way the needs of other men who are buying in the marketplace, some men
come to make their living by meeting legal conditions precedent and receiving
tax money in recompense. It is hard to imagine anything that is less conducive to that positive and manly frame of mind that
lies at the root of emergence and its philosophy of liberty.
We see, then, two different ways to approach a
given fact of economic life. To one, the fact is a political problem; to the
other, it is not. It is well to keep such differences in mind and not to accept
the semantics of coercivism at face value. The political usage of the word
"problem" is often the result of this one point of view, and ought to
be pegged as such in our thinking.
Of course, this is a digression. The semantics
of the word "problem" is not at the heart of the explanation of
liberty, at least analytically. My hope at this point is to paint with broad
strokes the basic conception of liberty. From this basic conception may be
derived the entire philosophy in terms of its application to the various parts
of human activity.
What is this fundamental principle?
It is no more than this: To minimize the
coercive forces in human life and to provide a setting in which the creative,
voluntary energies of men may flourish.
This statement has two sides. First, it says
"minimize coercion." Second,
it says "accentuate the voluntary."
While this may seem simple, its subtleties are barely understood. This
is so mainly because a simple analysis of "coercion," an analysis
that does not strain to make the definition meet the likes and dislikes of the
writer, has not been made. This concept bears a lot of study.
The minimization of coercion deserves the
important place I have given it here. Coercion as a genus includes most of the
many types of behavior that are destructive of a broad conciliation of
interests. Civilized society requires the mutual adjustment of interests, and
only peaceable, non-predatory interests can form the basis for such a
conciliation. The great scourge so far as the practical recognition of a man's
right to exist for his own sake is concerned has been the use by
some men of other men as implements where the use of their energies has been
obtained by force. A human being is a valuable source of intelligence and
energy. Because of its value, this energy is subject to theft, to appropriation
by those whose respect for the dignity of human self-determination is less than
their desire to enjoy the immediate benefits to be had from the stolen
energy. Coercion is the method of this
theft. If one reaps the benefits of a man's effort without coercing him, what
he is doing is reaping the benefits of cooperative association. But to coerce
him is to "place him under dominion," so to speak, and to take away a
part or all of his humanity. The discussion of liberty must make its chief
focus this misuse of one man by another. It is true enough that other sorts of
destructiveness must be inhibited by a free society, but the big problem is
solved when the individual members of the society are induced by one another to
act voluntarily, through a choice of uncontrolled alternatives. The problem of
coercion is central. Fundamentally, liberty involves the negation of coercion.
As true as this may be, the other half of the
general principle is perhaps even more important. The integrated purpose of
libertarian philosophy is to provide, as much through its ostensibly
"negative" aspect of inhibiting coercion as through its other aspects,
for the release of the building impulses. These are the peaceful, voluntary,
creative activities in which men may engage. Remove coercion and for the most
part these are what is left. They are the raw material by which civilization
may expand and flourish. They are important in and of themselves and need to be
understood. In the end, "liberty" refers to these activities and the
way of life associated with them.
Various preconditions must be established if
these positives are to have a firm setting. Libertarian philosophy consists
almost entirely of spelling out these preconditions.
The general principle "minimize coercion; accentuate the voluntary” is at the heart of liberty almost as a matter of definition. It would be hard to conceive of liberty in any other way.
In this general principle, "coercion" is central and needs careful definition. It may be defined in several ways. Problems of definition have sometimes caused trouble because once a libertarian has defined coercion he tends to take a foolish it next step and feel that anything not included within his definition is acceptable in the eye of his philosophy. In doing this the libertarian is looking more to words than to substance and easily tricks himself into difficulties because of this misdirection. I think this can be avoided if we select a definition here that expresses with philosophical precision the entire broad category of human action that is of such a sort that one man makes another an implement through means that are unsatisfactory to the other. It is this theft of energy that must be encompassed within the definition, and once we have the definition we should apply it consistently even though because of overriding considerations we may have to condone coercion of some types. The definition must not be strained or warped to meet policy considerations; and it need not be if we maintain a flexibility that keeps the policy considerations, and the reasons for them, foremost in our thinking and does not let our semantics override them.
If
no one consciously seeks to limit the alternative courses of action open to a
man, the man enjoys – within the limitations imposed by his means and his
powers of organization -- the full alternatives of thought, expression and
action that the man's presence in a world of nature and of human association
makes open to him. On the other hand,
one can imagine that another man might deliberately seek to curtail these
alternatives. This conscious design, or "mens rea," is at the heart
of coercion. In all coercion there is a deliberate, manmade limitation imposed
by one man (or men) on another (or others) as to the alternative courses of
conduct open to the man who is coerced. The coercion makes use of the fact that each man will in every case act
according to the best alternative available to him at a given time, according –
of course -- to the man's own understanding of what is the best alternative;
which is to say, the acting man will select from among the various alternatives
according to the vagaries of his own mind, values and personality. If the coercer does not want him to take his
original course, feeling instead that he would better have his own ends served
by having the acting man take some other course, the way the coercer can bring
about this change of direction is to himself act on the configuration of
alternatives available to the acting man so that the desired course of action
takes on the light -- in the mind of the acting man himself -- of being the
most desirable, or the least undesirable, alternative open. Once this change
has been effected, the acting man will act in the way the coercer desires. The
essence of coercion is to bring about this result by either eliminating the
acting man's alternatives that he considers preferable to the course of action
the coercer desires, or to reduce their relative desirability, though not
eliminating them. This can be attained by punishing those alternatives, which
amounts to attaching to them something undesirable if they are pursued. For
example, coercion is easily seen in the statement that "if you don't get
off this land, I'll beat the living daylights out of you." The original alternatives of the man being
coerced were to stay on the land or to get off, and he had evaluated the
situation so as to have some idea in his own mind of the relative desirability
of the two possible courses of action. The coercer seeks to make the
alternative of leaving the land the most desirable in the mind of the acting
man by attaching to the alternative of staying on the land the threat of
physical assault. The coercion succeeds if the acting man decides that it is
better to leave the land and avoid the assault than to stay on it according to
his original preference. All of this is quite basic and simple. There should be
little difficulty in grasping it.
Obviously this is quite opposite from the
voluntary method of inducing a change in human conduct. The voluntary method
would change the acting man's relative evaluation of his alternatives by adding
to the desired course an additional utility until it takes on the most
favorable aspect in the acting man's evaluation of his choices. Here, the
person who wishes the acting man to follow a certain course would say, to
pursue the former illustration somewhat further, "if you will leave the
land, I will pay you $10,000.00."
The total effect is a betterment of the acting man's choices, not a destruction
of them. Of course, implicit in the statement quoted is the idea that "if
you don't leave the land, I will not give you $10,000.00," but this slight
element analogous to coercion does not obscure the overriding fact that the
substantive effect has been to bring about a change in the acting man's behavior
by enhancing one alternative without limiting his others.
The upshot is that coercion tends toward
limitation, restraint and discord, while voluntarism tends toward expansion of
alternatives and mutual satisfaction.
It seems to me that coercion is neither more
nor less than the following elements:
1. A man with several alternative ways of
acting open to him.
2. A second man who wants the first man to act
in a certain way.
3. The deliberate changing of the first man's
evaluation of his alternatives by means of action upon them by the second man.
4. The bringing about of this change in a
manner that worsens the overall alternatives in the view of the first man, but
leaves the course of action desired by the second man as the most desirable in
the evaluation of the first man.
5. Action by the first man as the result of
this process in agreement with the desires of the second.
Under this broad definition, coercion includes
virtually all human conduct of a
predatory sort by which one man's action is made to serve the ends of others
rather than his own. It covers the theft of human energy in its raw form.
Needless to say, not all that is destructive and that therefore requires
inhibition in order to protect creative or non-destructive action falls within
the category "coercion." The
theft of the products of human energy, such as the theft of a coat or a piece
of silverware, is not coercive per se, since it isn't necessarily
(though it may be) for the purpose of making the victim change his conduct.
Just the same, such theft of property is anti-libertarian, because it negates
one or several of the conditions precedent to the positive aspects of liberty:
it negates the right to economic self-sufficiency through private property and
takes away the assurances that lie at the root of a man's willingness to work
and produce. These positive elements that are injured by the theft are in turn
fundamental to the whole process of reducing coercion and placing society on a
voluntary basis. There is a relation,
then, between theft and coercion in that theft damages the efforts of society
to inhibit coercion. The point I wish to make is that coercion may not include
all destructive human conduct, but, even though this is true, does include a
type of predation and destruction that is of inestimable importance. Coercion
is so vast a category that it must be said to lie in close connection with
virtually all malignant human tendencies. Its elimination (to the extent we can
eliminate it) will take us far toward the accomplishment of that tranquil human
society that, to some extent because of the tranquility and to some extent
despite it, offers the plateau for emergence. Voluntarism consists in taking
away the conscious manipulation of human alternatives by way of worsening some
so that others will appear relatively to be better, and in encouraging the
opposite form of "manipulation," which is accomplished either by
increasing the alternatives or elevating one above the others by adding to its
utility. Although other things are important, too, it is not too great an oversimplification to
say that where voluntarism reigns as the guiding principle, there is liberty.
How is coercion to be
"reduced"? It is not
quantifiable, so the answer can only be given with that conspicuous lack of
precision so common to ethics and law and politics. Coercion is to be
"minimized," and this involves more an evaluation of the effects of
different conditions on human life in a subjective, valuational sense, than an
easy mathematical determination of when the "quantity" of coercion is
at its lowest ebb. I will discuss this methodological difficulty in
"reducing" coercion later in this section after discussing some of
the problems involved.
To set about
"reducing" it in this imprecise sense, we must be sensitive to the
presence of coercion and to the form in which it takes place. An honest look at
coercion as I have defined it -- and I think I have defined it here according
to its usual connotation -- will show that it is implicit in a great many human
activities that, because they are integral to liberty itself, we do not
commonly think of as coercive. In a way, then, this is to say that the
connotation does not always lead our not-so-logical minds to a careful
awareness of coercive "denotations". It may be helpful to take an
example. When a man holds back his own services or property on the condition
that if the other man will pay him something in return he will then go ahead and
perform the service or convey the property, there is -- strictly speaking --
coercion present. We would not ordinarily say so, though. A point-by-point
application of the elements of coercion will show us that coercion is present
in the example given, despite our inclination to deny it. This inclination,
however, is in substance, though not by logical strictness, justifiable, because the element of coercion that exists in
the situation I have mentioned is
inseparable from liberty itself and from a type of conduct that goes furthest
toward the eradication of coercion. The
man's withholding of his services until he is paid for them is a part of his control over his own
energies, and in fact if he were not induced to give his services by being paid
for them, he would have to be coerced into giving them if there was to be
any concerted human effort at all. So the aspect of coercion I have brought to
light by this illustration is inseparable from his liberty.
This illustration makes it clear why we cannot
eliminate coercion, but can only reduce it. It also makes it clear that the
potential to exercise coercion exists in almost every phase of human life. It
is a great mistake to think that coercion necessarily entails “violence,” in
the sense of bodily laceration.
Violence is merely one way by which coercion may be effected. Coercion may take an infinite number of very
subtle forms, some of which become so imbedded in ordinary relationships that they
come to be accepted as a part of the relative status of the persons involved
and are not particularly thought of at all. It is rare that a man does not have
at least some power to exercise at least a slight coercive influence.
This is true even where people are acting
independently as individuals. But in our concern over how coercion might be
minimized, it is vital to recognize that the power to coerce tends greatly to
increase, in most situations, where there is a coming-together of human beings
for concerted activity. In the ordinary
run of things a group has greater potential for changing the condition of the
world than does a single individual, at least where strength of energies or
assets is involved. A regiment has more coercive potential (other things being
equal) than a squad. This is so simple that it hardly seems necessary to recite
it. But it is fundamental.
This dangerousness of concerted action so far as the amount of coercion is concerned must lie at the base of any libertarian approach to the problem of minimizing coercion. The libertarian philosophy must realize quite strongly that so far as the reduction of coercion goes, a complete atomization of society is preferable; i e., there will tend to be less coercion where individuals are made to act individually and not in concert, assuming the adoption of rules of individual conduct. Just for purposes of analysis, it might be helpful to refer to this as the "principle of atomization." To some extent this atomism is a philosophical root of liberty. But we must understand the sense in which it is intended. Atomism by itself is not the goal; it merely gives some idea of the ultimate that can be had by way of minimizing coercion. In a sense it merely expresses the lowest common denominator for the potential exercise of coercion. A sound philosophy of liberty must go from this appreciation of atomism into a process of analytically rebuilding the social complex. Liberty winds up by favoring human association and cooperation, but it does so only after layer after layer has been placed on top of this atomism with the most careful circumspection. I think this is the key to understanding the libertarian attitude about the various types of human association: business enterprise, monopoly, labor unions, churches, and so on ad infinitum. Atomism by itself is desirable in the sense that it reduces coercive potential. The various sorts of concerted activity are to be carefully considered in light of whether they increase the coercion present, and if they do increase it, the extent to which they do so as weighed against the results they bring with them in terms of the satisfaction of human wants. For example, if the group characteristically involves economic production without bringing into play appreciably more coercion than is present in individual activity by a like number of persons, the group deserves the warm support of libertarian philosophy. But if the group operates primarily through coercive devices and this coercion is not offset by very significant contributions to the reduction of coercion or enhancement of liberty along other lines, the libertarian philosophy must oppose the group's existence and the doctrine of "freedom of association" would not extend to such an entity.
"Atomism"
itself is, then, not much more than a conceptual tool. Liberty is in fact the great
champion of voluntary association. It is certainly not atomistic in outcome.
The "atomism" merely helps give some idea of the criteria by which
the merit of different types of group action may be judged. Liberty not only
considers legitimate voluntary concerted activity of a non-coercive nature, but
also helps to provide the setting within which the non-coercive groups may
flourish when it opposes those other groups that do involve coercion. Such a
setting is a vital prerequisite to the satisfactory existence of the
non-coercive groups. This careful discrimination as to group activity is not
the entire answer to the question of what is needed to minimize coercion.
Obviously it does not tell us what limitations must be placed on individual
activity or what restraints on group action may transform the otherwise
unacceptable group into one that is compatible with liberty. An individual can
himself coerce others in many ways. He can use weapons and bodily strength or
more subtle methods such as social pressure or the withholding of such economic
resources as he controls.
In
working out the limitation of coercion exercised by individuals, it is
necessary to look to the nature of the activity and to weigh the
relative importance of its coercive effects as against the values it serves.
The coercive element may be merely incidental to and inseparable from a type of
activity that is essential to liberty itself. This is not as incongruous as it
may seem at first blush. Because liberty requires a wide area of relatively
uninhibited thought and action, the man who is free is necessarily to some
extent a "man of action", so to speak. Almost unavoidably this presence in the world as an acting man will have its
coercive aspects. But all action cannot be disallowed just to remove the
coercive residual inherent in so much of it.
To the extent that the coercive aspects are inseparable from a given
type of activity, the question stands out starkly: "Which is more important: to keep the
activity or get rid of it?"
Needless to say, some coercion will, because of the way this question
must in many cases be resolved, have to be retained. Any separable coercion, of
course, would be inhibited, by law or otherwise, under libertarian principles.
But that which is inseparable may be of such a sort that its coercive
destructiveness may be minor compared to the value that the overall activity
has as a useful class of human action.
To illustrate this, let us suppose a person
shows anger when someone sneezes in his face. This show of anger is coercive.
Its unpleasantness tends to penalize the person doing the sneezing for having
done so and thereby tends to cause him to change his behavior. (It is coercive
even though we may agree that his behavior ought to be changed.) But how could we separate out this coercion
and rid ourselves of it without at the same time acting against much that is
entailed in the whole idea of liberty? The inviolability of a man's person is
one of the principles of liberty and so also is the general freedom of speech.
To say that a man cannot show anger when someone sneezes in his face is to ignore
both of these values. The issue faces us whether the coercive element is so
great that we would want to restrain the person from showing his anger in such
an instance. Plainly, even in this very simple example, there are competing
values to be weighed, and no clearcut formula by which to determine the answer.
In the case chosen, the answer would obviously be that we would allow the anger
to be shown, disregarding the fact that it is coercive. But even this easy
solution is good only to a point. The man's response may become so intemperate
that restraint may become necessary as we weigh the values involved. Surely the
act of sneezing in a man's face does not give legal provocation for homicide,
even to reduce it from murder to voluntary manslaughter. The point is that
there must be a balancing of the different values before a rule of allowance or
restraint may be laid down.
The libertarian philosophy, then, does involve
the making of many value judgments. It is not completely neutral. Such a course
is not possible, since a lack of neutrality is needed to the extent of
providing the setting for neutrality itself. In the same way, liberty is
tolerant, but to enjoy a general tolerance it is necessary to be intolerant of
a great deal that would militate against tolerance. The libertarian philosophy
must decide in given situations what categories of human action are
sufficiently important that they are to be allowed and protected. Such decision
is involved in the "weighing" I have mentioned. The philosophy cannot
avoid such a process of judgment. The upshot of this is that it is not possible
intelligently to assert that principles of liberty can always be set down as
immutable guides. And this weakens the morality to some extent. But any
principle that does not result from such an evaluation will be no better than
an arbitrary and probably shortsighted pronouncement.
The evaluations of the libertarian will be
made with a definite bias. They must be made with an eye to providing free and
easy channels for as many different types of activity as possible. The
libertarian seeks to open up categories of permissible activity and then to
protect these activities from coercion and to adjust them among themselves so
that they can all be engaged in without impeding one another.
This is quite different from the approach made by the statist. Such a man does not seek to decide the categories of allowable human action with an eye to opening up as many as possible. He rather hopes to decide what men should do at particular times and places within the categories and he uses devices to favor one type of action over another. For example, the libertarian would say "The reading of books involves no coercion and is compatible with other types of non-coercive action; therefore, it is within the broad area of freedom that is to be fostered." The statist would either say what books in particular ought or ought not to be read, or he would say "The reading of books is to be favored (or not to be favored) over the eating of steak" and would tax the sale of steak and provide a subsidy to book publishers. This difference in approach is basic. The purpose of liberty is to make available many different possibilities and then to let each person choose for himself how much or how little he wishes to pursue any one in particular.
I have spoken of the atomistic principle, as I have dubbed it, whereby the coercion necessarily present in permissible individual activity is made the standard of comparison when we come to judge the coerciveness of concerted action. This is only a basis for comparison, and does not relieve us on this level of the need for evaluating the activity in terms of its merits and its demerits. One of the demerits is that the concerted action will often have a far greater coercive potential than individual activity by as many persons. But potential isn't always the test. The question must be somewhat whether this potential will come into use in the group's activity, or whether the coercion is not in fact separable from the group's achievement of its purposes. But even if coercion is to some extent inseparable, consideration must be given to the contributions the group activity makes to the satisfaction of human wants. In other words, a pro's and con's must be weighed, even here, and the atomistic principle is no conclusive, but merely a guide.
It
is likely that many of those who still adhere to the basic conceptions of
liberty will think of all this to vbe alien in its method. They tend to
want to seize upon principles almost as revelations and to count on them for
strength. Such a desire is closely related to one of the main tenets of
liberty: the rule of law. Libertarians in addition tend to look on liberty
as a sacred quality in a man's life, and this reverence brings with it a desire
for clear and established principles. I do not think the method I have
suggested is in fact incompatible with either the rule of law or the sacredness
of the principles of liberty. We must weigh human values in arriving at our
principles, and the principles are themselves the product of the mind and of
these value judgments and so are subject legitimately to reexamination at all
times, but they must nevertheless take their place as ethical maxims, with all
this entails. Modern man must come to realize that the doubts and
reexaminations of a rationalistic mind are not to be allowed to crowd out the
force of ethical conviction. Quite often there is a sense that there is a split
between rationality and moral strength, and this division does in fact exist
unless in the mind of the thinking man it is bridged by a strong act of will.
The thinking man must say to himself "I am fully aware of the humility
with which I must approach my propositions about the world, but at the same
time morality is of such transcending importance that I must stand strongly as
a man behind the formulations my mind has given me. I must give to my ethical
principles the full support in every way that I would give to immutable
principles." The intellectual must realize that he is not only a man in an
intellectual sense but also a man in a moral sense, and he must think and act
accordingly. If we take this attitude about the principles derived by the
method I have suggested, I think we will have a stronger philosophy because of
our original awareness of our mental processes and because we will not have
avoided openly making the value judgments that must be made if the maxims of
liberty are to be worked out intelligently. With this awareness, we can then
advance the principles of liberty -- and must do so -- with all the force of
conviction that accompanies all matters of religious significance. And it ought
to be clear by now that I consider such principles of major religious
importance because they involve a man's entire relation to himself and to other
men, not to speak of the striving for emergence that is directly connected with
a man's sense of his own value.
Liberty consists of a way of life based on
certain very substantial values. It is made up of broad categories of action
that are supported by law. The principles of libertarian philosophy seek
to express this way of life. They are functional tools for its accomplishment.
Each principle consists of an answer to the question of whether a given type of
conduct enhances or detracts from the area of choice, or at least is directed
with this in view.
When in the second half of my general
principle I say “accentuate the voluntary,” I am referring to a whole class of
activity of great importance. I have mentioned various "categories of non-coercive
action." Most of civilized life
can be described in terms of these categories. They are so common to us in
America that it hardly seems necessary to list them. Among many others too
numerous to mention, they are such activities as the playing of games, the
listening to music, the act of exchange in the marketplace, the reading of
books, the exchange of ideas through assembly and conversation. This brief and
generalized list is merely suggestive. We could point to a virtual infinity of
undertakings. All together they make up a varied life full of opportunity and
possible adventure. They are undertakings that have little difficulty
coexisting with the other types of undertakings. It is true that adjustments
must be made, as when we require everyone to drive down the right side of the
street, but these adjustments do not remove the practical substance of the
category of action itself, just as everyone's driving down the right side of
the street does not really limit our physical move- ment (it merely disciplines
it, and in the discipline there is an enhancement of its value).
These many categories an have at least one thing in common: they do not involve one man's conscious manipulation of circumstances to the detriment of others for the purpose of obtaining the benefits of a particular ordering of the others' conduct. There is nothing predatory about them. Each is an "I will mind my own business" sort of thing. They culminate in
[Type in pages 80, 81.]
smoothly.
But no interference with these categories in the direction of their pursuit is
a part of it. The whole function of the government is negated by such
interference, since the function is to enable men to be free. It is vital to
see this distinction. The government of a libertarian society is active along
certain lines, but in other ways it is enjoined to be totally inactive. The key
lies in the appreciation that the philosophy of liberty considers the
mainsprings of production, well-being and progress to be non-governmental. It
is to private action that the libertarian looks for the alleviation of human
misery, poverty and ignorance (and for the highest elevation of the human
soul). Government -- which is the
center of coercive power -- is not thought
suited to such a task. Rather its task is to defend the free flow of human
energies as they set about doing the work that so badly needs doing.
And so we are back to where we started in this
general statement of the rationale for liberty. Liberty will seem sacred to one
who fully appreciates, emotionally as well as intellectually, the creative
power of private action and the spiritual and material rewards it offers. Such
a person sees in liberty the chance for emergence, although he knows that it is
up to men themselves to take advantage of this chance. He knows that coercivist
government intervention, while it has the advantage of acting symptomatically
and therefore directly on those areas of distress that attract the most
political attention, does serious damage to the underlying corpus of life,
which above all needs freedom, and impedes the emergent man himself in the
expression of the wonderful obscenity of his soul. In conversation with those who hold the coercivist faith in
government action, the libertarian will be reminded time and time again of such
human distress as exists, and the interventionist will most assuredly point to
such distress with impatience and then point in turn to laissez-faire liberty
with an accusing finger by way of indictment. But the libertarian knows, by way
of rebuttal, -- though this point is rarely grasped by those who condemn laissez-faire -- that such
areas of distress would long-since have been ancient history if the human race
had always followed voluntarism and tolerance, which is also to say
liberty. The likelihood is that even
the "poorest" persons would be wealthy compared to today's
well-to-do, just as today's middle class American lives better than kings a few
centuries ago. The libertarian is far more willing to rely on private charity
to relieve genuine poverty (and we have a tremendous volume of private charity
in America) than he is willing to risk vital injury to the corpus of human
progress by following principles in derogation of voluntarism that encourage
the growth of a powerful coercivist government. His principal concern is with
the health and vigor of the libertarian categories of action that are based on
mutuality. Once this is established, his concern turns to those religious
questions I discussed earlier here. These questions pertain to what a man does
with his liberty once he has it (and also to whether he has the virility and
moral energy that must exist in a people before they will desire and sustain
liberty).
What I have said here has stated a highly
generalized rationale for liberty. There is much more to be said. I have done
no more than state the broadest principles. It remains to examine the
particular institutions that apply those broad principles and to discuss the
application of these maxims to the specific areas of life. In no way is this
general essay a substitute for such a study. We must now look to jurisprudence
and economics and the like. Such a study is the task of succeeding sections of
this book.
[Note in 2001: This
chapter has stated my formula “minimize coercion; accentuate the voluntary” as
the central principle for a free society.
The remainder of the book applies that principle in a number of areas. It is gratifying to me to see that I
explicitly recognized that a “deductive method” must not be allowed to become a
closed system that will not allow the introduction of additional desiderata as
they become evident. When I expressed
that openness, I separated myself from much of what we have come to know as “libertarian”
thought, which often makes the deductive method unsatisfactory precisely
because the “axioms” are taken as immutable.
Over the years, I have come to believe that the coercion-voluntary formulation is itself not altogether sufficient. For thousands of years, “bourgeois” society has been criticized by sensitive, thoughtful individuals as not being sufficient in terms of several non-market values. This suggests that it would be a better formulation to ask “What does an advanced civilization with rich cultural values, centered upon a minimizing of coercion and an accentuation of the voluntary, require?” This broadens the inquiry, and leads us to something of a “systems theory” of a free society in which we look extensively at what the preconditions are for a life that is both richly fertile and free. The inquiry must also not be limited to “model-building” types of analysis; it will also need to look at the situation of particular societies, such as that in the United States, in concrete historical situations.
When in Emergent Man I stressed the value of individual liberty as a plateau for “emergence,” I assumed that most people would use their freedom for high attainment. And many people do. But the four decades since Emergent Man was written have powerfully demonstrated, especially through the counterculture and its continuing legacy, that people can just as well choose individual and cultural nihilism. Necessarily, the experience of those years has made me more “culturally conservative” than I was when I wrote this book. I don’t count nearly so strongly today on the “automatic” tendencies of people, as free agents, to choose an elevated life.
My later studies also showed me that a free society requires, as one of its vitally important ingredients, “an intellectual culture appropriate to itself.” The “alienation of the intellectual” for most of the past two hundred years has deprived American and European society (and through them, much of the rest of the world) of the “head” that needs to go with the body of the society.
Thus, there are a great many factors that go beyond the coercion-voluntary formula in a complete discussion of what a free society needs. All of my later writing can be seen as an explication, in effect, of what I have seen as necessary to that goal, which has remained a constant in my thinking. In recent years, this has led me into a discussion of a number of questions that wouldn’t have fit into the schema of this book. The post-1898 decision by American leaders to involve the United States intimately in the affairs of the world has had fateful consequences that bear directly on the survival and well-being of our free society. The various illusions, many of them grand illusions, that have long guided Americans’ thinking are not without consequences. And the technology of an age of revolutionary innovation – computers, robots, materials sciences, biotechnology, and others –, by tending more and more toward a “workerless” economy, raises vastly important questions for anyone who is seriously concerned about the theoretical and practical foundations of a free society. In recent years, I have sought to address these and other issues while remaining true to the values articulated in Emergent Man.
Just a brief note about the word “libertarian.” When I used it in Emergent Man in referring to my own views, I meant it as a term equivalent to “classical liberalism.” The word “liberal” had long-since been appropriated by the Left, and by the 1950s a new word was needed to denote the original liberalism. The word “libertarian” seemed suitable, and had not nearly so much been claimed by “anarcho-capitalists” or radically reductionist laissez-faire proponents as it has been since the 1960s. Because the word has come to refer to those points of view, I do not refer to myself today as a “libertarian.” Nor would today’s “libertarians” claim me as one of their own.
Indeed, I think of myself today as a “neo-classical liberal,” because the liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by no means arrived at a complete and “last word” explication of what a free society requires. Although I see my thought as fully within the “true tradition” of classical liberalism, I make a number of additions and changes.]