Libertopia and The Long Winter

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber continues looking at libertarian utopias, and whether 19th Century America qualifies. I commented:

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I find that Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter casts a particularly clear light on the libertarian vision of the American frontier.

There's no doubt that Laura' father thought of himself in libertarian terms. "Free and independent" is his mantra and that of the other settlers: they came west, they say, to be free and self-reliant, proud and independent, owing no man anything.

But if you pay attention to what they actually do and how they actually live, they are completely dependent on the government and the industrial society they claim to be fleeing. Laura's family stakes a claim -- on land expropriated from the Indians not in the misty past but within the past few years.

To hold the claim they have to live on the land, but they can't actually support themselves there -- the ground isn't ready for serious agriculture, even if the climate was suitable. They don't even have a place to live without materials that have to be brought in -- nothing available to them can be used to make a shelter they're willing to live in.

The women and children live on the claim to secure the legal title, but the family's income mostly comes from work on the railroad. Laura's parents talk about self-sufficiency, but at no point in her life do they actually survive on food they produce themselves -- purchased flour, meal, and meat are *always* the backbone of their diet. This food comes on the railroad from the East.

Their dependence is made clear during The Long Winter when the railroad is blocked. The frontier townspeople talk about being free and independent, but they are in fact still completely tied into the industrial economy. Without it, they begin to starve.

They only survive the winter because of collective action. Laura's future husband Almanzo and his brother are fronted money by the general store owner to make a perilous journey to buy wheat for everybody in town. They bring it back at great risk, and the storeman wants to sell it at a monopoly price -- giving the Wilder boys a fee for their efforts, of course. The Wilders, though, say *they didn't do it for money*, and they won't take money from the mouths of the starving. Laura's father tells the storeman that *of course* he's a free man who can do whatever he wants with his property -- but the townspeople will also be perfectly free to ignore him socially and economically after winter is over. It's libertarian rhetoric as a veneer over communitarian actions.

Furthermore, the more I've thought about their situation (while I read and re-read the book to my children), the more I've realized that their libertarian ideals are part of what brings the town to the edge of total disaster. Everyone in town *should* be living together, sharing warmth, food, and company -- not wasting precious fuel trying to heat individual houses. With communal living and eating arrangements, they wouldn't have nearly as much trouble getting through the winter.

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lemuel pitkin @55:

I read that New Yorker article, too, and Rose's libertarianism is one factor pushing me to think Laura really did write most of the books. The difficulty with reading the Little House books IMHO is that young!Laura, from whose POV we see the story, is an unreliable narrator. She doesn't lie to us about what she sees -- but she doesn't see everything or understand it on an adult level. Writer!Laura IMHO makes a lot of her points indirectly -- like the fact that Pa Ingalls loves the wilderness, but spends his life destroying it. Young!Laura loves and admires him, but that doesn't mean Writer!Laura shows everything he does as loveable or admirable.

mw @69:

My point is that the cooperation in The Long Winter is not truly private nor voluntary. The wealthy storeman doesn't cooperate voluntarily, but because he is threatened by the public acting together. They *are* the government of the isolated town, and Mr. Wilder later was an elected official.

It's true that this is not state-level government, but it's community-level socialism (or something): Mr. Ingalls is a leader of the community against the wealthiest individual in it.

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Gareth Rees @94:

arrgh, yes! the shame, the shame! The problem was that I was mentally translating from "Pa".

mw @95:

I wasn't clear in my retelling of the scene in The Long Winter. The citizens weren't originally "threatening to take their business elsewhere", they were getting ready to use (well-armed) mob violence. Pa Ingalls talked them down to threatening a boycott, and got the storekeeper to agree he didn't want it to come to that -- but the real alternative, not discussed explicitly, was violent robbery and/or lynching. They may not have had *state-level* coercion, but guns there were a-plenty -- courts and prisons would have been much nicer and less bluntly coercive.

Libertopia

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber asked why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia?. My comments:

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I’m surprised that no-one has yet mentioned the factor that jumps out at me.

You can’t have a functioning human society that isn’t at least 1/3 female. Unless the libertopians include a lot of women, they can’t possibly establish anything that isn’t basically a club instead of a society.

More broadly, I think it supports my personal definition: Libertarians don’t believe that humans are social animals. Trying to put together even a small human society that doesn’t take account of our social nature is of course highly problematic. If you think, as many libertarians apparently do, that the foundation of human society is private property, you’ve already turned your back on anything anthropology and the history of religion can teach you about how humans actually operate in small societies.

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Brett Bellmore:

What libertarians believe is that social animals can cooperate in non-coercive ways. Trade, and other voluntary forms of interaction.

Libertarians who try to build non-coercive societies are leftists or anarchists, and they don’t think of *trade* as the quintessential non-coercive interaction. Lefty libertopias have often been attempted (with varying degrees of success, of course), but they generally take “family” or indeed “love” as their grounding metaphor. They never (that I know of) are structured around private property as a first principle.

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John Protevi:

Your comments clarify for me that the sort of trade Brett is talking about—strictly fair, balanced, and freely-chosen—does not naturally occur inside human communities. Most basically, what I think I’m saying is that under what you might call “natural” conditions humans do not survive on their own. We live with each other because we must, because otherwise we (generally speaking) die.

So on the one hand, we are ecologically coerced to live in groups, that is our niche. On the other hand, our nature is adapted to our natural niche, so we need to live in a group to be happy. We need other people emotionally, in a way that libertarian trade and freely-chosen contracts cannot satisfy; we also ecologically/economically need other people if we are to survive. That’s what I mean by libertarians not believing that humans are social animals.

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Metamorph:

Thank you for the link, that is extremely well-put.

I think your essay clarifies what right-libertarians like Brett are looking for: market-like social relations, because they simplify cost/benefit calculations, and thus can be more easily extended over a wider range of social contexts. As you say, traditional donation and obligation are both, by comparison, vague, difficult to predict, and prone to the stress of free-riding, for both sides of the exchange.

Now, those of us who’ve read any anthropology know that the description of a culture traditionally begins with a chapter on kinship—relationships that are not freely-chosen, so in libertarian terms they must be coerced. Because Right-Libertopia wants market-like, freely-chosen social relations, I have *no idea* what their kinship system would be. Without a kinship system, is there any surprise that there is no Libertopia?

Cheney, libertarianism, rape

ugh, what a subject line.
publius wrote about The Method of Cheney's Madness. I said:

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Let me third (or fourth) the "tribalism, not idealism" explanation. *Everything* becomes a tribal marker for them, which is why they're only playing well in the white South, the most tribalistic subculture in the US (see Albion's Seed for details). There are no questions of morality (torture), or science (global warming), or common sense (Obama's citizenship) -- there is only Tribe. And the more contrary to morality/fact/sense an assertion is, the better it is as a marker for Tribe.

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[someotherdude rec'd: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States and The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America]

ooo, book recs. Thanks, someotherdude!

I really realized the tribalism angle in a discussion at Rod Dreher's, where he was horrified to find that conservative Christians were *more* likely to support torture than liberals are. A commenter there said that he was from the South, and that he thought a lot of people around him don't "really" support torture, but they would hear the pollster's question as really being about group identification, not the purported issue, and answer accordingly.

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John Holbo at Crooked Timber writes about Megan McArdle and Rationing again: For all ponies, there is some pony, such that you won’t get that pony.♥ I wrote:

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alkali:

A problem with arguing with libertarians at the level of abstraction is that libertarians have a comparative advantage in abstracting away the actual facts of the world in favor of the freshman-microeconomics models they have concocted in their heads.

Not just economic models. The working definition of libertarianism I have come up with, by observation, is “libertarians do not believe humans are social animals”.

So for instance: if you don’t have any money, you shouldn’t be entitled to any medicine is quite reasonable if the sight of people dying for want of medicine doesn’t bother you, and if you can assume it doesn’t bother anyone else (their families, for instance). If you’re a true *individualist*, the collapse of any sense of community is all to the good, because “community” is a delusion.

What most libertarians *do* seem to believe in is *corporations*. I have never been able to figure out if corporations, in their minds, are replacing communities, or if they’re kind of like individuals only cooler (that is, richer and more powerful).

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Martin James:

Libertarians view taxes or laws as the product of “gangs”—aberrations—and believe that humans are naturally self-reliant and independent. They do not seem to recognize that the natural state of a human is in a social group, and that concepts like “property” are functions of particular social relationships, not Platonic ideals.

Either way, I still don’t understand how corporations fit into the libertarian world-view. They talk a *lot* about individuals versus the Big Government, but don’t seem to notice the actions of Big Corporations.

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At TigerBeatDown, Sady and Amanda talked about who doesn't believe No means No (answer: conservative older women). I left a comment (which seems to be in moderation with everyone else for the weekend):

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I don’t know if I have the fortitude to actually click through and read the studies, but I think you young ‘uns don’t completely grasp the Old Ladies’ position.

They were taught that a Good Woman *never* says Yes, except during her wedding vows. That’s it, the one time Yes is an acceptable answer.

So they were in the position where “No” had to do duty for both “no” and “yes” — both for any gentlemen they want to communicate with, and to themselves. How do you say “Yes” when you can’t admit you want to, and when everyone will think worse of you if you do? Well, one way is to say “no” in a lot of different ways, hoping to communicate subtextually.

The other way, frankly, is to get raped a lot. But you can’t admit you were raped, because as we know that makes you practically a slut. What the younger generation thinks of as “rape” is part of these Old Ladies sexual experience, but they’ve been getting by for decades by denying it was so. Rape is something that happens to *other* women, Bad Women, what happened to me was just the way the world is, only to be expected.

So IMHO for a lot of those Old Ladies what happened to the young woman in this case had actually happened to them, and for pretty much all of the Older Ladies it had happened to someone they care deeply about (mother, sister, friend). If they accept that lack of consent is rape, it casts a pall of horror over their own past, bringing up *way* too many things they’re dealing with by not thinking about.

Medical insurance

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings posted on Why We Need Universal Health Insurance, pointing to Kate Michelman's account in The Nation of what her family has gone through. In the ensuing discussion, I wrote -- in response to one of the local libertarians:

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Brett:

What I honestly don't understand is why you're more frightened of the government than you are of the medical insurance industry. I wrangle with some government agency maybe once a year, twice if you count taxes automatically; I wrangle with a medical insurance company or their effects at least once every six to eight weeks.

I have not been personally *afraid* of what the gov't will do, even when we discovered we owed $2K for last year -- they can cope, they'll listen to reason. I have been *afraid* of insurance companies, I have had to experience direct physical pain because of their decisions -- like, for instance, not approving a medication I need before a weekend. Or the time when my coverage lapsed for a month, and I had to cut back on my meds to skirt the edge of illness. Or my husband being in constant knee pain but the company not having agreed to surgery for him, because it hasn't hurt *enough* yet.

You say the government works by coercion and the frequent threat of violence, but I honestly do not see that as realistic threat. The threat I feel from medical insurance companies is direct and personal, a matter of my daily health. What Kate Michelman is experiencing -- what Gary Farber here is, for another -- is closer to a literal life-and-death struggle.

Are you saying that this isn't familiar to you, either personally or in people close to you?

Libertarianism and philosophy: some old comments

Way back in June 06 there was a very long debate on Obsidian Wings that strongly influenced my thinking on a number of issues. I just realized I never posted my comments here, so I'm doing it now.

Back then hilzoy, a moral philosopher, was weighing in on a left blogostan debate about Libertarians: Can we offer them someonething to de-Republicanize them?

Libertarians And The Democratic Party: Part 1

I came to play:
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In my observation, libertarians are people who don't believe that humans are social animals. They do not want to care about other people and they do not want other people to care about them. This at least is more honest than conservatives, who want to be cared for without being caring.

Presumably, she believes this not because she wants poor people to have untreated illnesses; I imagine that if libertarians could cure all poor people's illnesses by waving a magic wand, they would.

It's not exactly that they want poor people to have untreated illnesses, it's that they don't believe anyone should expect something (like medicine) they haven't earned, preferably in the marketplace. They certainly don't believe in magic wands -- you can't get something for nothing, everyone's got to stand on their own two feet, and if all they have is stumps, well, libertarians never told you life is *fair*, did they? So if poor people have to die to prove that life is unfair, that's just reality, not the fault of libertarians.
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later in the thread, I wrote:
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Gary:

It's quite possible that I *am* confusing libertarians (in general) with Randroids, because all the people I knew in my formative years who called themselves "libertarian" were, in fact, Randroids.

I am basing my opinions about libertarians not on the Libertarian Party nor even the Cato Institute, but on conversations I've had with self-identified libertarians over the years. And on Heinlein.
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The discussion rolled over to a part II, to discuss libertarian ideas about justice and property.:
Libertarians And Democrats: Part 2. I wrote:
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Heaven knows how long this discussion will be by the time I get my entry typed in.

Putting on my Evolutionary Biologist Hat, I say:

The "state of nature" for Homo sapiens is social. We are social animals, so our state of nature is one where we live, forage, and raise our young with other members of our species. The philosopher's state of nature is not just a theoretical construct, but untrue: it is an attempt to describe human nature in a way that is not our nature.

When I use a word, it means just what I want it to mean, and so when I say "state of nature" I mean: small groups of hunter-gatherers, related by blood and marriage, moving around a lot and interacting with other small groups from time to time. That is the human state of nature.

I agree completely with Hilzoy that Nozick and Hayek are mistaken in postulating that their concept of property is in some way the most basic, logical, or fundamental. On the contrary, it is highly derived and specialized, dependent on a particular set of social & historical constructs.

Now you see why in the other thread I described libertarians as "people who don't believe humans are social animals".

In the human state of nature we can expect ideas about property not to be based on a simple principle (such as the "labor theory of value") but on a system in which the concept "ours" is at least as important as "mine" -- because we are social animals.

Hilzoy kills the antelope and Mona comes to take it. In the human state of nature, *everything* depends on the relationship between Hilzoy and Mona.

If they are part of the same family unit, the antelope may belong to both of them regardless of who killed it, and Hilzoy may be considered immoral or thievish if she doesn't give Mona at least half.

If Mona is Hilzoy's mother or grandmother, it may be Mona's obligation to take the antelope from Hilzoy for redistribution, and Hilzoy might be a thief if she tries to hang onto it.

Or the antelope may be thought of as belonging to a goddess, and now that it is dead Hilzoy has the right to use certain parts of it, but others must be given away or burned.

None of Nozick & Hayek's views of property are found in nature.

1. you can own pretty much anything

If you look at any basic ethnography overview (the one I grabbed first is Indians of North America by Harold Driver) you see that in most societies what can be owned by individuals is restricted: tools and ordinary clothes are the most common individual property. Houses, different kinds of land, different kinds of food, ceremonial or fancy clothes and chattels, the right to farm, hunt or gather in a particular place, even songs and other incorporeal property -- all these things are usually owned by groups, anywhere from a couple to a whole tribe of tribes.

2. you can give or sell what you own at will

This is almost never the case. Even if the chattel is one you own directly, you may not have the right to sell it, exchange it, or allow others to use it. Frequently, a group will own land and have the exclusive right to use it, but not to give it away: it's basically entailed, and *must* be inherited.

3. you are entitled to all the proceeds of any voluntary transaction you enter into.

This situation doesn't correspond to much that happens in the human state of nature, but when it does the individual who makes the transaction almost never gets to keep all the proceeds.

Here's an example of modern property that is held in a way typical of the human state of nature, but doesn't correspond at all to Nozick & Hayek's views:

"My" wedding dress was made by my grandmother's sister for my grandmother's wedding. A generation later, it was worn by my aunt, and then by my mother, at their weddings. Still later, I wore it at my wedding. It is currently in storage, waiting for my daughters to grow up.

Who does this dress belong to? I wore it most recently, so N&H might say it's mine. But if you think I or anyone else in the family can give it away or sell it "at will", you're psychotically mistaken. The dress is the collective property of all the women in my family line, both living and dead. Everyone gets to use it, but no-one gets to sell it, and delicate negotiations would be required if someone else wanted to use it, e.g. a woman who married in to the family.

This dress is property, but it is about *relationships*, and property rights are really about what sorts of human relationships you think are most likely and important.
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still later:
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My goodness, what a thinky bunch.

Jonas:

We are not merely on different pages, but seem to be reading from different books, so I'm not sure it's worth either of our times to try to understand each other better right now, especially given the stunning length of the comments here.

In general, as I think about this so very thought-provoking post and discussion, it emphasizes for me how absolutely critical it is to avoid leaping to postulates.

Nozick's postulates are deeply libertarian, so he's bound to come up with some pretty libertarian conclusions. He (and other libertarians) talk about radically individual humans, who enter only into voluntary associations, who mostly deal with strangers, for whom property is completely alienable in exchange for completely fungible money.

I'm arguing that none of these conditions are met by humans in a human state of nature (who are born into extended families, who encounter few strangers, who possess very little in the way of stuff, and who have no money at all). Because the human state of nature lasted far, far longer than our libertarian present day, thought experiments based on that state are likely to given results that fit our unconscious emotional needs, they will feel "right".

My gut reaction to Hilzoy's discussion of the "patterned view" of justice versus the "process view" is to go all Jewish-prophet-y and say, "Justice will come when you pay less attention to your damned stuff, and more to other people!"

Example: the story of Solomon and the two mothers with one baby (1 Kings 3:16-28). The evidence does not permit the King to judge which is the mother, so he says he'll do the "fair" thing and chop it in half. One mother says, "OK, that's fair", and the other says "No, give the baby to her, just don't hurt it!" By this Solomon knows that the protesting mother is the "real" one, and deserves the baby.

Solomon's threat is the threat of fairness; Solomon's justice is that he restores right human relationships. "Property justice" is not measured by a pattern -- of uniformity or otherwise -- *or* by a fair process which must logically produce fair results. "Property justice" occurs only when it supports just human relationships. It doesn't matter how fair the process, if a beggar starves while a rich man feasts *this is not justice*, because justice is about having the right human relationships.

Libertarians are extremely principled people, but my own philosophy is closer to "persons before principles" (quote from the works of Lois McMaster Bujold).

Violence, Libertarianism, Social Connection

Jim MacDonald has a deeply moving and often enraging series of posts up about Carl Drega, who went on a rampage and killed four people in their town, 11 years ago.

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The Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof gang were *certainly* leftists. I think it's significant, though, that I can't think of an example of a violent leftist movement in Europe or North America since the 70s.

Something *changed*, starting no later than the early 70s, to make violence feel intrinsically "conservative", and peace/non-violence seem "liberal". I don't think this alignment is dictated by logic: to be conservative is to want to conserve something, to support some kind of status quo, and violence *should* be a particularly poor match for stability. There *should* be a conservative peace movement -- but we observe that there isn't one.

I have my suspicions about what's driving this dynamic, but I'm going to wait to see what other people think, first.

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David Manheim @30:

Either I don't understand you or I don't agree with you, or both.

Modern political & economic conservatism are indeed conservative, because they want to keep the distribution of money & power the way it already is: with large corporations and wealthy individuals. Keeping the rich rich is *the* bedrock value of economic conservatives; keeping power in the hands of the powerful is *the* goal of political conservatives.

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Michael Turyn @19: Yes, exactly. So very well put.

IMHO libertarians are people who don't believe humans are social animals. In the cases of Drega and VS, this goes along with full-blown sociopathology: an inability to act or *feel* like a social animal.

Jorg @17: Your insight is extremely useful.

My theory, which is mine: Historically, it has been exceptionally easy for people in the US to detach themselves from networks where others know them personally, yet to be able to depend on impersonal, industrial/capitalist networks for survival. This doesn't *feel* like depending on other people, so it's easy to think you're self-reliant and independent, beholden to no man.

Speaking as an biologist, human sociality is not all that deep, evolutionarily speaking. Some sociopathology is surely a matter of a basic neuro-biological lack, a problem in the brain. But it can also be matter of upbringing or habit, so that neurologically normal people lose or never develop the mental skill of seeing things from another's POV.

It's not coicidence, IMHO, that Drega was a "summer person", whose only connection to the community was property. The connections Jim and Debra have to the town and the area are far deeper, more complex, more personal and (I do not use this word casually) natural. If things like this happen more often than they used to, more often in the US than in Europe, or more often in some parts of the US than the rest, it's IMHO these are places because sociopathic behavior is more normal, where it's within the range of what is acceptable.

I don't think this is unconnected to the well-known fact that if corporations were humans (not just legal persons), they would be sociopaths.

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Nancy @44:

You seem to be taking the point of view that libertarians are the problem and corporations are the problem.

No. I'm saying that humans become well-socialized in societies where you interact with a few hundred or thousand other people over the course of a life, so each relationship has personal context and depth. In a small-scale, "natural" society like that, sociopathic behavior will be rare, because people who can't be trusted will starve.

In a modern society, we have connections to many many more people -- not just because we see more people, but through the exchange of goods and money. Something as basic to my life as electricity requires the coordinated efforts of many thousands of people -- but my relationship to each of those people is extremely weak.

It's like -- imagine my hunter-gatherer ancestor, anchored to other people by a web of 100 ropes, each one strong and obvious. I, on the other hand, am in a web of 10 million strands, most of which are so fine as to be invisible. Collectively, my web is thicker and more gripping than hers -- she could usually make her own clothes and gather enough food for survival -- but it's harder to see. And libertarians IMHO are people who have a hard time seeing it.