Make that Two Cheers for PC

I recommend to you Steve Horwitz’s lucid post on anti-racism and libertarianism. A choice excerpt:

What I am interested in is the claim that those who stand in opposition to racism are being accused of being susceptible to using the state to somehow enforce that set of beliefs. First, as Roderick Long argued a few years ago in his “One Cheer for Political Correctness” essay, there’s nothing inherently unlibertarian about recognizing the existence of structural racism/sexism etc. nor about standing up and loudly opposing it through non-coercive means. Will Wilkinson offers a different version of a similar theme in the context of the Paul newsletters. Second, throughout the long history of the West and the rest of the world, those who believe in the fundamental inequality of the races and/or believe that “like should stay with like” have been far more willing to use the state to enforce those views than those who have opposed them have.

[...]
Yes, legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 involved some interference with private property and the right of association, but it also did away with a great deal of state-sponsored discrimination and was, in my view, a net gain for liberty. In the longer run, it seems quite clear that classical liberalism/libertarianism has sided with the opponents of racism and that those who viewed the races as unequal were much more likely to use the state to enforce that view than were those who saw the races as equal. To suggest that anti-racism libertarians are somehow secret statists because opposition to racism must necessarily lead to state enforcement of those views is both a distortion of the actual arguments people like me have made and flies in the face of a long history of libertarians being both anti-racist and anti-state.

This is our heritage as classical liberals, and it long predates the Old Right of the early/mid 20th century, with its very mixed record on race/ethnicity issues, as a source of inspiration for not just the overall spirit of libertarianism, but its perspective on race in particular.

Right on. If you haven’t, please do read Roderick Long’s smart essay on political correctness. In my long experience among conservatives and libertarians, one very often encounters a kind of smug, thoughtless anti-PC or counter-PC of the kind Long ably describes. The thing to keep in mind here is that most PC episodes mocked and derided by the right are not state impositions. They are generally episodes of the voluntary social enforcement of relatively newly established moral/cultural norms. Sometimes this process squelches or chills honest discussion and inquiry. I feel that way about the Larry Summers flap. But such mechanisms of indignation and shaming are precisely how societies coordinate on and defend norms of civilization without resorting to force.

Counter-PC attitudes often seem to me to be really expressions of resentment that a new more egalitarian norm has displaced the old racist or sexist norm, which is why devil-may-care un-PC pronouncements about race and gender often really are just thinly veiled expressions of racism and sexism. Anti-PC types folks often cast themselves as especially “brave” for being willing to speak the truth as they see it. But this is often nothing more than the imagined boldness of behaving indecently among decent people. If you really do believe in the equal freedom and dignity of people, you tend to act like it, and if not, not.

I think the really ironic thing is that it is only when it comes to concerted opprobrium aimed against racism, sexism, etc. do many anti-PC types seem to recognize the possibility that non-coercive collective attitudes can be stifling to a sense of independence and the exercise of autonomy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Decency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Make that Two Cheers for PC”

Byrne
January 16th, 2008 16:18
1

Counter-PC attitudes often seem to me to be really expressions of resentment that a new more egalitarian norm has displaced the old racist or sexist norm, which is why devil-may-care un-PC pronouncements about race and gender often really are just thinly veiled expressions of racism and sexism.

You don’t get a better idea of what’s going on when every remark about race or gender has to be framed as part of the Norm Struggle between the Good New Norm and the Bad Old Norm. Perhaps un-PC people are just sharing what they consider un-PC truths! What does your prejudice against those statements add to the discussion?
Micha Ghertner
January 16th, 2008 16:42
2

Yup, I credit Rod’s old post on PC for being the turning point in my thinking, the first of many of his writings that have moved me in a decidedly left-libertarian direction, and made me appreciate the rich history that classical liberalism and radical individualist anarchism has on the issues of gender, race, and class.

Here’s another lengthy excerpt of a Rod Long essay that deals with both libertarians’ relationship with PC, and touches on my defense of sociology found in your other thread:

All this makes it seem, at times, that libertarians—including libertarian feminists—are suffering from a sort of willful conceptual blindness; perhaps because they are afraid to grant the existence of serious and systematic forms of political oppression that are not connected solely or mainly with the state. It’s as though, if they granted any political critique of the outcomes of voluntary association, they would thereby be granting that voluntary association as such is oppressive, and that government regulation is the solution. But such a phobic reaction only makes sense if you first accept (either tacitly or explicitly) the premise that all politics is exclusively the domain of the government, and as such (given Mises’s insights into the nature of government) all political action is essentially violent action. This is, as it were, a problem that has no name; but we might call it “the authoritarian theory of politics,” since it amounts to the premise that any political question is a question resolved by violence; many 20th century libertarians simply grant the premise and then, because they hold that no question is worth resolving by (initiatory) violence, they call for the death of politics4 in human affairs.

At least one libertarian theorist, the late Don Lavoie, makes our point when he observes that there is

much more to politics than government. Wherever human beings engage in direct discourse with one another about their mutual rights and responsibilities, there is a politics. I mean politics in the sense of the public sphere in which discourse over rights and responsibilities is carried on, much in the way Hannah Arendt discusses it. …. The force of public opinion, like that of markets, is not best conceived as a concentrated will representing the public, but as the distributed influence of political discourses throughout society. … Inside the firm, in business lunches, at street corners, interpersonal discourses are constantly going on in markets. In all those places there is a politics going on, a politics that can be more or less democratic. … Leaving a service to “the forces of supply and demand” does not remove it from human decision making, since everything will depend on exactly what it is that the suppliers and demanders are trying to achieve. … What makes a legal culture, any legal system, work is a shared system of belief in the rules of justice — a political culture. The culture is, in turn, an evolving process, a tradition which is continually being reappropriated in creative ways in the interpersonal and public discourses through which social individuals communicate. … Everything depends here on what is considered an acceptable social behavior, that is, on the constraints imposed by a particular political culture. … To say we should leave everything to be “decided by markets” does not, as [libertarians] suppose, relieve liberalism of the need to deal with the whole realms of politics. And to severely limit or even abolish government does not necessarily remove the need for democratic processes in nongovernmental institutions.5

It’s true that a libertarian could (as Karl Hess, for example, does) simply insist on a definition of politics in terms of the authoritarian theory, and stick consistently to the stipulation, while also doing work on a systemic critique of forms of oppression that aren’t (by their definition) enacted through the “political means”; they would simply have to hold that a full appreciation of oppressive conditions requires a thorough understanding of what “the economic means” or “action in the market” or “civil society” can include. But given the curious misunderstandings that many libertarians seem to have of feminist critiques, it seems likely that the issue here isn’t merely terminological—it may be that the real nature of typical feminist concerns and activism is rendered incomprehensible by sticking to stipulations about the use of “politics” and “the market” when the ordinary use of those terms won’t bear them. You could, if you insisted, look at street harassment as a matter of “psychic costs” that women face in their daily affairs, and the feminist tactic of women’s “Ogle-Ins” on Wall Street as a means of reducing the “supply” of male leering by driving up the “psychic costs” to the “producers” (using shame and awareness of what it’s like to face harassment). In this sense, the “Ogle-In” resembles, in some salient respects, a picket or a boycott. But no-one actually thinks of an Ogle-In as a “market activity,” even if you can make up some attenuated way of analyzing it under economic categories; it clearly fails to meet a number of conditions (such as the voluntary exchange of goods or services between actors) that are part of our routine, pre-analytic use of terms such as “market,” “producer,” and “economic.” Just as clearly, an “Ogle-In” has something importantly in common with legislation, court proceedings, and even market activities such as boycotts or pickets that appeals to our pre-analytic use of “political”—even though neither the “Ogle-In” nor the market protests are violent, or in any way connected with the State: they are all trying to address a question of social coordination through conscious action, and they work by calling on people to make choices with the intent of addressing the social issue—as opposed to actions in which the intent is some more narrowly economic form of satisfaction, and any effects on social coordination (for good or for ill) are unintended consequences.6

Libertarian temptations to the contrary notwithstanding, it makes no sense to regard the state as the root of all social evil, for there is at least one social evil that cannot be blamed on the state — and that is the state itself. If no social evil can arise or be sustained except by the state, how does the state arise, and how is it sustained? As libertarians from La Boétie to Rothbard have rightly insisted, since rulers are generally outnumbered by those they rule, the state itself cannot survive except through popular acceptance which the state lacks the power to compel; hence state power is always part of an interlocking system of mutually reinforcing social practices and structures, not all of which are violations of the nonaggression axiom. There is nothing un-libertarian, then, in recognizing the existence of economic and/or cultural forms of oppression which, while they may draw sustenance from the state (and vice versa), are not reducible to state power. One can see statism and patriarchy as mutually reinforcing systems (thus ruling out both the option of fighting statism while leaving patriarchy intact, and the option of fighting patriarchy by means of statism) without being thereby committed to seeing either as a mere epiphenomenon of the other (thus ruling out the option of fighting patriarchy solely indirectly by fighting statism).
Tom
January 20th, 2008 15:12
3

“(The Civil Rights Act) was, in my view, a net gain for liberty.”

It’s clear that the Civil Rights Act was a net gain for equality, and maybe even for freedom, under certain definitions of that word.

But I don’t see how it was at all a gain for liberty.
SIV
January 20th, 2008 20:21
4

You and Horwitz are advocating a cultural Marxist “libertarianism”.The collectivism of identity politics, of either a “racist” or “anti-racist” stripe, are anathema to a free society. Marxists are far more willing to use the state to enforce those views than those who have opposed them have.
Fluffy
January 20th, 2008 20:22
5

“The thing to keep in mind here is that most PC episodes mocked and derided by the right are not state impositions. They are generally episodes of the voluntary social enforcement of relatively newly established moral/cultural norms.”

The overwhelming majority of such “episodes” either occur in contexts where the distinction between public and private is ill-defined in the modern era, or occur as the result of profound institutional fear of litigation.

Utterly remove the capacity of litigants to seek large settlements for having their feelings hurt, and then we’ll see how much voluntary social enforcement of social norms there is.
boqueronman
January 21st, 2008 12:48
6

Sometimes I just cannot comprehend what this blog author is trying to say. His pointless points about the pointlessness of the Iraq conflict are, of course, only orthodox ideology overcoming real analysis. In this case, he says “PC episodes mocked and derided by the right are not state impositions. They are generally episodes of the voluntary social enforcement of relatively newly established moral/cultural norms.” Let me finish this point.

The problem is that these “newly established moral/cultural norms” are, in fact, inherently racist, sexist, and culturally biased. The difference is that the practitioners of post-modernism have changed the name of the enemy. Now, “males, whites, and the rich have their hands on the whip of power and they use it cruelly at the expense of women, racial minorities, and the poor” (Stephen Hicks).

According to them government laws and regulations (affirmative action, speech codes, “hate” crimes, etc., etc.) must be put in place to “control” white males and their racist patriarchy. If one is a “classical liberal” this new ideological/cultural tyranny must be opposed, continually and publicly. If the so-called “right” opposes post-modernism - good. But I, for one, have not heard any spokesperson for the “right” advocate governmental laws or regulations to prohibit, or in any way muzzle, the advocates of post-modernism.

Please provide references that prove your point, or leave the topic to others with greater knowledge.
Jaap Weel
January 28th, 2008 13:52
7

boqueronman,

I do not think that “these” newly established moral/cultural norms are any of the bad things you make them out to be, as long as they are not translated into legal restrictions on free speech.

Now some people propose the use of speech codes, hate crimes laws, and other questionable regulations to restrict non-PC speech. You may have principled objections against those regulations, and chances are I would sympathize with those objections.

But that does not mean that all recent changes in moral norms are bad things.

Take homophobia. It is waning. This is good, because homophobia is a very real problem. The suicide among gay youth is way higher than among straight youth, and there’s little doubt that homophobia is to blame.

Any move of popular opinion away from homophobia that does not come with speech-restricting laws in an attempt to help it along is an immensely positive thing. It is a shortcoming of a certain kind of short-sighted libertarianism (a kind that neither I nor, I suspect, Will, subscribe to) to focus so strongly on the permissible role of the state as to refuse to recognize that the values and institutions that make up civil society, even if they should all be equally allowed by law, can still be good and bad.

I support the legal right of Westboro Baptist Church (godhatesfags.com) to spout its hateful bile out into the world, and at the same time I think it is a deplorable institutions and that its members deserve all the social opprobrium that the rest of us can muster. There’s nothing weird about my position, nothing tyrannical, nothing post-modern, nothing racist, nothing sexist, nothing “left,” nothing “right.” It is based not on cultural bias but on an honest attempt to transcend cultural bias. It is squarely in the middle of the classical liberal tradition.

Make that Two Cheers for PC

7 Responses to “Make that Two Cheers for PC”

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