Ilya Somin posts a long, thoughtful response to Kerry’s Reason essay arguing that caring about liberty implies caring about cultural as well as political limits on liberty. I suspect Ilya may be missing Kerry’s point.
Ilya writes:
Kerry’s argument could benefit from greater precision on several key issues. First, some cultural issues might well be an appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism - which is, after all, a political ideology, not a comprehensive guide to the good life.
Where Ilya sees a lack of precision in Kerry’s argument, I see him struggling to understand Kerry’s clearly and powerfully expressed point. I have to say I was pretty baffled by the volume of what I see as largely uncomprehending responses to Kerry’s argument until I started to realize that Kerry’s argument implicitly predicts that it will be misunderstood by many of the people to which it is addressed.
As I see it, Kerry’s claim is that many libertarians fail to adequately acknowledge the fact (and it is a fact) that people are embedded in and shaped by culture, and that, as a consequence, many libertarians fail to grasp the extent to which cultural norms and social structure can limit individual liberty or work to deny some individuals the opportunity to develop the capacities needed to meaningfully exercise their liberty rights.
Sensibly enough, Kerry is careful to avoid the errors she thinks others are making. So she sees libertarians not as a cadre of uniquely penetrating intellects in communion with a set of timeless truths about the nature of a free society, but as a group of human beings who are, as we all are, historically and culturally embedded. She sees libertarianism not as a single, sharply-defined system of interrelated propositions, but as a syndrome of ideas and attitudes within and responsive to a changing culture around which a political identity and social movement has formed. This will, if she’s right about most libertarians, seem strange to most libertarians.
Kerry’s argument, at least as I read it, is that if we really care about liberty, and are serious about seeing to it that all are able to enjoy the blessings of liberty, we cannot just assume that everything we need know about cultivating a climate of liberty is already accurately and fully captured by the historically and culturally conditioned ideas and attitudes that have come to characterize most self-described libertarians. Because, again, many libertarians have tended to underestimate just how thoroughly socialized and culture-bound we all are, and have thus given far too little weight to cultural threats to liberty.
Kerry says nothing that even hints at the idea that libertarianism is “a comprehensive guide to the good life.” Her essay proceeds on the assumption that political ideologies, like people, exist in a cultural context, and that libertarianism, as it has developed in response to the exigencies of history, fails to adequately recognize the influence of cultural context on individual liberty. I think it’s pretty clear that Kerry is arguing that, insofar as a libertarian’s commitment to libertarianism is motivated by devotion to the value of liberty, then cultural constraints on liberty deserve more attention than they’ve traditionally had from libertarians.
If you think cultural products such as political ideologies evolve over time, you won’t see the content of “libertarianism” as sharply defined and fixed once and for all. To assert, as Ilya does, that “some cultural issues might well be appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism,” pretty much begs the question. The claim is that these cultural issues ought to be objects of concern to libertarians because they are matters of liberty that libertarian have overlooked. Kerry’s asking libertarians to care more about the conditions under which people develop the capacity to meaningfully exercise freedom. She’s asking libertarians to not so blithely assume that social relations of exploitation and domination enforced by state power for hundreds of years are no longer matters of liberty simply because the enforcement of longstanding racist and sexist norms was privatized a few decades ago. She’s not asking libertarians to save the whales.
Ilya’s much more to the point when he directly addresses the questions of cultural restrictions on liberty. It is nice to see him say that he considers an antagonism to nationalism, racism, and sexism to be part of the libertarian tradition. Though I find this passage somewhat odd:
The same could be said with respect to patriarchy, which libertarians such as William Lloyd Garrison and Herbert Spencer, criticized back in the 19th century long before it became common to do so, on the grounds that it causes indefensible state-sponsored restrictions on the freedom of women.
I’m not quite sure it’s helpful to tag Garrison and Spencer as “libertarians” in the contemporary sense (they were certainly great classical liberals) and I’m not familiar enough with the details of their arguments against patriarchy to gainsay Ilya, but it seems rather roundabout to criticize a set of deeply-held, nearly universal assumptions about the natural inequality of women on the grounds that the law might reflect them. Why shouldn’t it reflect them? If it were true that women are, much like children, incapable of conducting their own affairs without paternalistic guidance, if it were true that women lack the capacities necessary to act competently in commercial and public life, then it would be rather difficult too see why women ought to have equal rights under the law or to enjoy freedom equal to men’s. Patriarchal assumptions of female inferiority and natural dependence are pernicious falsehoods whether or not they are codified. And when private citizens, men and women alike, coordinate to enforce norms based on these assumptions, the liberty of women is abridged. These are manifestly illiberal norms. To locate the main issue of freedom in the fact that legislators and their armed agents might act in ways that reflect what almost everyone believes seems plausible only if one is in the grip of an ideology that makes one hesitant to admit that a near-universal belief in natural inequality can threaten liberty all by itself. If libertarianism is such an ideology, then those of us who care about liberty should consider revising or rejecting it.
Ilya does sensibly concede that “Kerry is probably right to suggest that some extremely restrictive social norms can radically reduce people’s choices and greatly diminish their freedom.” I’m glad to see that he has no principled objection to Kerry’s central claim. But I think he validates Kerry’s worries about libertarian insentivity to cultural constraint when he makes this optimistic conjecture:
However, I think that this problem is unlikely to be a serious one in a modern liberal society that has many different cultures and social institutions. People who feel dissatisfied or restricted by the social norms of their communities can seek out alternative social groups. In the modern United States, any large metropolitan area has an enormous range of subcultures to choose from. Even if you live in a relatively isolated rural area, you can still “vote with your feet” and move elsewhere, as most of the rural population has actually done over the last century. So long as people have exit rights in a liberal society, they are unlikely to be trapped in a set of restrictive social norms that radically constrict their freedom — unless of course they prefer it.
If we in the United States have arrived at a point where its people “are unlikely to be trapped in a set of restrictive norms that radically constrict their freedom” (my emphasis), should we be satisfied with that? I’d submit that one or two steps shy of radically constricted freedom isn’t free enough.
Of course, many countries have much further to go than we do here in the States. Ilya no doubt shares with Kerry the conviction that liberty is for non-Americans too, and he will have noticed that she begins and ends her essay with the example of Min, a young Chinese woman who has enjoyed a meaningful increase in her freedom due to economic and cultural ferment in what remains an authoritarian communist state. The United State isn’t like that, of course. It has been a “modern liberal society” with “many different cultures and social institutions” for a good long time now. Indeed, this description would fit fairly well the U.S. of thirty, fifty, or even one hundred years ago. I’d be interested to hear when exactly Ilya thinks it was that the U.S. finally completed the transition from a society with “extremely restrictive social norms” (which he allows “can radically reduce people’s choices and greatly diminish their freedom”) to a society where the effects of sexist, racist, nativist, etc. policies and norms have ceased to be matters of liberty.