Tag Archives | Ethics

Free Abortion Online!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The four published articles of mine that people most frequently request copies of are: “Abortion, Abandonment, and Positive Rights,” “Immanent Liberalism,” “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class,” and “The Irrelevance of Responsibility.” So I’ve begun putting them online. The abortion one is up now; the other three to follow soon.


JLS 21.3 and 21.4: What Lies Within? An Atlas Shrugged Symposium and More!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The two latest issues (21.3 and 21.4) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies will also be the last, at least for the immediate future as the JLS heads into hiatus. So what’s in ’em?

Journal of Libertarian Studies One major item is a symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, featuring Barbara Branden on her memories of Atlas’s initial publication; fan letters from Mises and Rothbard (the latter previously unpublished) to Rand; another Rothbard piece (likewise previously unpublished) on the literary merits of Atlas Shrugged; Geoff Plauché on Atlas, La Boétie, and science fiction; and Jennifer Baker on the relationship between virtue and success in Atlas.

What else besides the Atlas symposium? Richard Sharvy on what philosophers know and everybody else doesn’t; Anthony Gregory and Walter Block critiquing Hoppe on immigration; Anna-Karin Andersson rebutting Susan Moller Okin’s criticism of Nozick; James Garland on libertarian themes in Raymond Aron; Jeremy Shearmur on John Gray’s downhill intellectual slide; Pierre Desrochers on Alice Alexiou’s biography of urban theorist Jane Jacobs; Tom Woods on Nicholas Orme’s history of secular education in the Middle Ages; Robert Higgs on anarchy; John Brätland on Rawlsian intergenerational equity; Mark Crovelli on praxeological approaches to international relations; Frank Daumann on Hayekian social evolution; and Lou Carabini on why Bastiat was wrong about the broken window. (For the record, I think Bastiat makes precisely the point Lou thinks he fails to make, but never mind ….)

Read a fuller summary of the contents of 21.3 and 21.4 here.

Read summaries of previous issues under my editorship here.

Read back issues online here.

Buy these or other issues here.


Power Trip: Will Hobbesian War Lead to Libertarian Utopia?

What follows is a review of John Sullivan’s recent book Notes From the Aboveground. In the interests of full disclosure: the author is paying me to review his book. Conceivably, this could lead me to be too soft on the book. Equally conceivably, this could lead me instead to overcompensate for this danger and so end up being too hard on the book in order to vindicate my independence of judgment. Hopefully these two tendencies will cancel each other out.

Power and Market; or: Private Vices, Public Benefits

On the basis of a gloomy moral psychology that resembles a mix of Glaucon, Hobbes, and Stirner, John Sullivan in Notes From the Aboveground erects an optimistic libertarian theory of social change that echoes Spencer and Molinari. Hence the book’s two major theses are the moral psychology on the one hand and its sociopolitical implications on the other.

the egoist The foundation of Sullivan’s moral psychology is an egoistic theory of motivation, according to which the chief (indeed, he sometimes suggests, the sole) aim of human action is to seek power over others as a means of gratifying the ego (by which he seems to mean vanity, i.e., the desire to impress other people). Ideologies are nothing more than rationalisations of the power achieved or sought by those promoting the ideologies. Thus it is a mistake to think of ideology as influencing the manifestation of power; on the contrary, power always determines the content of ideology. And contrary to Nietzsche, altruistic moralities are developed not by resentful subjects but by the rulers, to legitimise their rule.

So what are the implications for libertarian politics? The bad news is that we won’t move the world toward libertarianism by preaching about rights and justice, because people aren’t motivated by rights and justice (and especially not by conceptions of rights and justice at odds with the ideologies promoted by the dominant power structures); nor will we move the world toward libertarianism by preaching about what benefits society, because people are motivated by their own self-interest, not by society’s interest.  Man “always seeks his ends politically rather than economically, if possible, because the former represents a less expenditure of labor than the latter.” (p. 36) Indeed, for Sullivan people never choose the economic means unless the successful resistance of others has made the political means too costly. Any ideology such as libertarianism that calls upon people to limit their own pursuit of power voluntarily flies in the face of human nature.

The good news, however, is that the very motivational factors that make the intentional establishment of libertarianism a pipe dream make its unintentional evolutionary emergence a virtual certainty in the long run. Thus, despite Sullivan’s suspicion of grand predictive theories of history (p. 144), he proceeds to offer one of his own anyway. For Sullivan, the eventual triumph of libertarianism is made inevitable by two factors:

First, those who are roughly equal in power are compelled willy-nilly to adopt broadly libertarian norms for dealing with one another (though not for dealing with those in a weaker position), because one is – by definition – not in a position to impose much in the way of forcible requirements on one’s equals. Hence the ruling class in any society tends to develop a libertarian ethic for its own internal dealings.

Second, groups who are excluded from the ruling class will struggle to get into it, and since the excluded groups usually outnumber the rulers they will tend over time to succeed – a process illustrated historically by the transition from monarchy to democracy, the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of the peasantry and of women, and so on. Hence the natural tendency is for the ruling class to grow and the ruled classes to shrink. (Note that this is the opposite of the Rousseau/Marx class theory according to which the ruling class inevitably contracts, forcing more and more of its members out and thus unwittingly strengthening its opposition.)

When these two factors are combined, the upshot is that the portion of society that is governed by a libertarian ethic must continually increase at the expense of those portions governed by non-libertarian norms. Thus “as competition in society intensifies, power tends to become more fairly divided among the competitors seeking it,” so that a libertarian political order, where “no one had power to coerce the behavior of others,” emerges as “the unintended outcome of social competition.” (p. 89) Thus Sullivan in effect transposes to the end of history Glaucon’s account of the origin of justice.

The process of competition and consequent libertarianisation initially leads, paradoxically, to a larger state: “as the masses won political power from the nobility and as wealth grew to such levels as would justify its confiscation and redistribution,” the natural result was “the leviathan state … which allows for the majority to steal from the minority.” (p. 105.) We may wonder whether Sullivan exaggerates the extent to which majorities are actually empowered in present-day so-called democracies, but it’s certainly true that they have more power than under, say, feudalism. In any case, Sullivan thinks this swelling of the state is a transitional phenomenon; societies in which power is more evenly shared tend to outcompete less libertarian societies, since – for familiar Hayekian reasons – with “fewer people making decisions” the latter “employ little knowledge in comparison to free economies.”

Statism is propped up by the collectivist ethic Sullivan calls “tribalism” or “bigotry,” but “as the competition for wealth and power intensifies,” more and more people will “succeed by their merit rather than by their belonging to tribes.” (p. 144.) Bigotry is “the language of power,” but “through competition, both power and bigotry are diffused, equalized, and diminished.” (p. 146.) And “when power is equally shared,” then “the metaphysical constructs that justify and allow for the domination of power will dwindle away.” (p. 110.) “Civilizations will become libertarian” and “merge into one integrated global order, with one language, one currency, and a rule of law based upon the individual ethic.” (p. 144.) The new power structure will shape a libertarian ideology to match it, so that the average person, despite his power-loving nature, “will shun from [sic] behavior that undermines the order.” (p. 144.)

How should we assess all this? Perhaps ironically, Sullivan’s sociopolitical superstructure turns out to be far more defensible than the moral-psychological base upon which he rests it.

Selfishness Without a Self

My principal objections to Sullivan’s theory of moral psychology are, first, that no argument or evidence is offered for accepting it, and second, that in elaborating it Sullivan appears to slide between mutually incompatible statements of the doctrine, some versions so vacuous or so protean as to be insulated from empirical refutation, while more substantive versions prove implausible at best and incoherent at worst.

As Sullivan admits, his “argument begins with the premise [emphasis added] that man historically joins groups for the purpose of expanding his social and political power.” (p. 13) In short, the book’s central claims about human motivation are mostly assumed rather than argued for. (But Sullivan will frequently assert something as an undefended premise on one page, only to refer back to it several pages later as having been “established.”) I suspect the chief case for accepting Sullivan’s moral psychology is meant to be its explanatory power; but if, as I shall argue, the theory makes no sense in its own right, its explanatory power, if any, will be beside the point. In any case, as we shall see, much of the theory’s purported explanatory power will turn out to be vacuous.

Sullivan’s version of psychological egoism takes “ego” in the modern colloquial sense, as the desire “to be recognized, liked, respected, or loved by others.” (p. 20) But Sullivan never explains why we should take the desire for recognition by others, especially in the all-pervading form that Sullivan describes, as a selfish desire. Why isn’t such a strong concern with other people’s opinions and desires the height of unselfishness? Sullivan tells us that “Man’s desire to be liked causes him to act with benevolence to others in order to stimulate the response he selfishly needs from them” (p. 59), but it’s unclear what work, if any, the word “selfishly” is doing in this statement. Is Sullivan neglecting Gauthier’s distinction (echoing an earlier idea from Butler’s Sermons) between interests of the self (i.e., interests having the self as subject) and interests in the self (i.e., interests taking the self as object)?

Aristotle and Rand Aristotle famously (and to my mind convincingly) argues, in Nicomachean Ethics I. 5, that a concern with being honoured by others cannot coherently form the core of our notion of self-interest, for two reasons. First, it places our self-interest primarily in the control of other people rather than ourselves, rendering the successful life hyper-vulnerable – yet a hyper-vulnerable life is ipso facto not successful, just as having unusually precarious health is itself a way of being unhealthy. Second, the fact that we care about who admires us, and prefer being admired by people of good judgment rather than bad, shows that we value being honoured because it enables us to think of ourselves as worthy of being honoured; and since the end is more valuable than the means, that shows that we’re committed to regarding being worthy of admiration as more important than actually receiving it. The task of moral philosophy is to determine which conceptions of the good make sense, and Aristotle shows – or so it seems to me – that no conception of the good organised primarily around recognition from others makes sense. More recently, Rand’s novel The Fountainhead is a lengthy and mostly convincing dramatisation of the idea that a life devoted to winning status and prestige, i.e. the satisfaction of others’ standards and opinions, is the antithesis of a self-interested life.

Sullivan tells us that the “passions of grief, pity and sympathy are rooted in man’s fear of death and suffering, and we feel these emotions when we connect the suffering of others to fear for our own” (p. 17), and again, that a person’s “emotion of sympathy is triggered when he associates the suffering of others to the possibility of his own.” (p. 59.) But this notion of associating others’ suffering with our own is ambiguous. On the one hand, Sullivan might intend a view like that of Hobbes, who claimed that we are alarmed by others’ suffering because we fear that what is afflicting them will next afflict us, and that we admire benevolent people because we hope they will turn their benevolence in our direction. But surely this view was soundly trounced by Hume and Smith in the 18th century, when they pointed out that we feel sympathy and admiration for fictional characters and for people long dead. The other interpretation would be the view that Hume and Smith themselves advance – that we simply have a natural (albeit defeasible) tendency to put ourselves in others’ position and see things from their point of view, and that indeed such a tendency is a precondition for even the simplest forms of mutual understanding and cooperation, even language itself. But if the latter is all that Sullivan means, then it seems better described as an explanation of other-concern rather than a debunking of it.

As for the thesis that humans naturally always seek power, Sullivan vacillates between what we might call a “hard-line” and a “soft-line” interpretation of his thesis, according as beneficence toward others is or is not excluded from the notion of power-seeking. Sullivan sounds the hard-line thesis when he announces: “Man does not relinquish his power or curb his passions until fear leaves him with no alternative.” (p. 42) Yet he also maintains, soft-line style, that “All egotistical actions [which for Sullivan apparently means all actions] are based upon man’s need for recognition by others, and there are principally two ways of doing that. One is to be better than others and the other is to help them.” (p. 31.)

Sullivan’s theory is thus an empirically elastic one. If someone acts in ways that are conventionally called selfish, he must be trying to achieve recognition via the path of competition and superiority. If someone acts in ways that are conventionally called unselfish, he must be trying to achieve recognition via the path of benefit to others. Not to sound too Popperian here, but what, if anything, would Sullivan regard as a disconfirmation of his theory?

Sometimes (though not consistently) Sullivan suggests that benevolent forms of power-seeking emerge only when malign forms become unavailable: “Nature forces each man to seek the maximum power he can attain until he is prevented by others from attaining more, and then he ceases and subconsciously redirects his desire for empowerment to the satisfaction of his ego. The word power here is meant in a comprehensive way that includes man’s ability to satisfy both his bodily and psychological needs. If he cannot gain wealth, he may settle for social recognition. Although psychological recognition is the principle [sic] motive of power, two types of power spring from it. Man competes for and shares both political and social power.” (p. 63.)

Bear in mind that for Sullivan, the desire for ego-satisfaction just is the desire for recognition. Thus what he is telling us, within the space of a few sentences, is that the desire for recognition is a) a second-best alternative to the desire for power, b) one form of the desire for power, and c) the principal motive of the desire for power. Even a trinitarian theologian might balk at endorsing the conjunction of these claims.

In support of his egoistic theory of motivation, Sullivan asks whether it is “possible to cite examples where employees explain to their bosses that they are being compensated by them for more than they are worth,” or whether manufacturers ever “tell their suppliers that, morally, they should pay higher prices to them.” Sullivan thinks the answer is obvious: “This never happens.” (p. 123.) But of course it happens all the time! It’s admittedly the exception, not the rule, but most of us, I suspect, can think of cases where we’ve personally known it to happen. I fear Sullivan’s perceptions are being distorted by his own ideological goggles. But of course if Sullivan were to grant the existence of the phenomenon, he would presumably reinterpret it as one more case of trying to gain the admiration of others through an appearance of honesty and altruism.

Sometimes, for example, we’re told that rulers concede rights to their subjects only out of fear of the subjects’ collective strength and ability to rebel; while at other times we’re told that the rulers concede rights to their subjects in order to feed their own vanity by gaining their subjects’ approval. In “real life,” Sullivan assures us (p. 7), nobody in a stronger position has ever voluntarily agreed to respect the rights of others. Not only is this an absurd statement in itself, but it contradicts his assertion elsewhere that “If you go back to the original premise that our nature is to seek power, the act of giving away one’s power would seem to contradict human nature. Yet some people could be brainwashed by an ideology to accept passivity with the belief that they will be better off.” (p. 76)

And this last comment brings us to the puzzling role of ideology in Sullivan’s theory. Doctrines of rights and morality, Sullivan holds, were invented by the ruling classes to justify their rule to the ruled; the existing distribution of power is always sanctified by the reigning ideology. But, to begin with, it simply seems false that the reigning ideology in fact always lends support to the existing power structure; in many cases it seems to undermine it instead. For example, Sullivan believes that “[w]hen slavery exists in a society, the ideology of that society supports it” (p. 119); yet the official ideology of the slaveholding American republic, as embodied in its founding document, was that “all men are created equal” and endowed with inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Did that ideology support slavery? Haven’t most reform movements invoked elements of the reigning ideology precisely to use them against the existing regime? What else, for example, were Olympe de Gouges and Elizabeth Cady Stanton doing in their respective declarations?

Sullivan himself notes that, thanks to power traditionally being more equally distributed within classes than between them, “laws were equally applied within a social class, but unequally applied to disputes between people of different social classes,” so that “despite their erratic application and content, laws pertaining to individual justice began to evolve in every society.” (p. 90.) Yes, absolutely right: the standards of interpersonal conduct within the ruling class tend to have a fair bit of libertarian content. But how, then, can Sullivan deny that these libertarian aspects of the dominant ideology could serve to de-legitimise the unlibertarian aspects (in the eyes of both rulers and ruled)? After all, that’s what historically appears to have happened, over and over. Most ideologies, even if they contain much that sanctions the existing power structure, also contain much that conflicts with it – which suggests that the development of ideologies may be influenced by factors other than mere power-seeking. (And if, as Sullivan insists, one “cannot experience a sense of guilt for something that he was not conditioned to feel over his lifetime” (p. 42), how then can we explain the fairly common phenomenon of people suddenly coming to feel guilty for going along with the dominant values of their society?)

But even leaving aside such considerations, it’s puzzling how ideology is supposed to work given Sullivan’s assumptions about human motivation. Like some versions of Marxism (though arguably not Marx’s own), Sullivan sees a purely one-way relation between ideology and power: “ideology doesn’t determine who holds power, but rather, is determined by power.” (p. 82.) But if ideology were as inert as Sullivan suggests, it’s unclear how it could do the work to which he says the ruling classes put it. On Sullivan’s account, the function of ideology is to legitimate the power of the rulers; but why would such legitimation succeed, why would the subjects care about the ideology, if they are as hopelessly fixated on the pursuit of power and prestige as Sullivan supposes?

power struggle While power was initially “required to force the competitors to obey the rules,” Sullivan tells us, eventually “power combined itself with belief to cause voluntary observance.” (p. 40) This seems to suggest that ideology leads the ruled to restrain their own self-interest voluntarily, something Sullivan at other times suggests is impossible.

“Whether by evolution or by conquest,” Sullivan further opines, “every society that grew beyond the size of an extended family developed a social structure whereby the peasantry labored on behalf of the nobility in exchange for protection.” So far so good – but then he continues: “The order of this arrangement was secured by the customary belief that it represented justice.” (p. 36.) Whence this notion of justice? How do these self-centered, power-hungry organisms come to care about justice?

After all, Sullivan also tells us that the only reason anyone engages in “philanthropy” is that he “values his social reputation” (p. 28), and again that the only reason people present themselves as “sympathetic to certain social causes or values” is that “they hope to be highly valued, and liked by others.” (p. 21) But this is a mighty puzzle. If nobody’s endorsement of value A is sincere, then why would my endorsement of value A be a good strategy for getting admiration from you – since ex hypothesi your endorsement of value A isn’t sincere either? How could a commitment to value A arise, as a means of getting approval from others, within a community of people none of whom have any prior reason for valuing A? There seems to be a serious bootstrap problem here. People motivated in the way Sullivan describes simply could not be influenced by ideology in the way Sullivan describes.

Sullivan sometimes writes as though apparently unselfish action is motivated to win the approval not just of others but of oneself, in a manner that can lead to outright self-deception: “Each person is aware of their motives to act, although often they are afraid to divulge those motives to other, or even to admit them to themselves” (p. 15), and it is the “satisfaction of his pride” that “causes him to perform acts that have the social appearance of being unselfish.” (p. 17) But this quest for self-approval is just as puzzling as the quest for others’ approval. Just as it makes no sense for me to simulate unselfishness to win others’ approval unless those others genuinely admire unselfishness, so it makes no sense for me to simulate unselfishness to win my own approval unless I genuinely admire unselfishness. In either case, egocentric values (in Sullivan’s sense) are necessarily parasitic on non-egocentric values. Moreover, the need for self-deception is mysterious: if the value I place on benevolence is genuine, that should be enough to make it at least possible for me to be motivated to act benevolently in fact, with no need for self-deception; while on the other hand if the value I place on benevolence is insincere, then I should feel no shame at faking benevolence and so self-deception will once again be unnecessary.

As we’ve seen, Sullivan holds that we seek to be identified as “sympathetic to certain social causes or values” solely because we “hope to be highly valued, and liked by others” (p. 21), which implies that all ideological commitments are insincere. Yet Sullivan also says: “Not only is he educated to believe in an ideology, but his passions of pride, shame and guilt, among others, are made to respond to his beliefs.” (pp. 26-27) And this makes it sound as though our commitment to social values is sincere after all.

Consider, too, the following pair of sentences: “Man does not feel guilt and shame for murder, per se, but for what those in society will think of him if caught. The conditioning is so powerful that man feels the sense of shame and guilt even if his transgressions remain undiscovered by others.” (p. 42) Don’t these two claims contradict each other? The first says our only reason for caring about X is Y; the second says that our “conditioning is so powerful” that we care about X even apart from Y. Which is it? Even if one grants that our aversion to murder originated in an aversion to others’ disapproval, the fact that it survives in the absence of such disapproval would seem to indicate that the former aversion has become transformed into something more and other than the latter aversion.

Sullivan’s claims about the relation between ideology and class interest are also problematic. He tells us that “the conservative seeks to defend the existing hierarchy of power because he benefits from it,” while “[o]n the power scale, a liberal is situated beneath the conservative and advocates changes that will make him equal to the conservative.” (p. 100.) This approach will have a hard time explaining why members of the ruling class ever become champions of its overthrow (as Lafayette, Tolstoj, and Kropotkin did, for example). Asks Sullivan: “When was the last time one saw a so called homeless man petitioning for a lower capital gains tax?”  (p. 101.)  I don’t know, but I’ve certainly known plenty of libertarians one paycheck away from homelessness who supported a lower capital gains tax.  Likewise, Sullivan maintains that “In democracies, each person seeks power through their votes. They do not seek to empower those besides themselves.” (p. 64.) If that is true, why don’t people vote along class lines more reliably than they do? Such correlations are too easily counterexampled.

But things get worse: “High income earners like low taxes and low income workers like high taxes and redistribution – does it take a genius to figure this out?” Of course this last claim is completely contrary to obvious experience – and in fact Sullivan sensibly contradicts it in the very next paragraph: “Once a person has reached the pinnacle of fame and power,“ he notes, “the only thing left to satisfy their ego is the image they want others to have of them,” which explains “why so many famous people become socialists.”  (p. 101.)

In short, Sullivan’s theory is completely unfalsifiable; anything and everything confirms it. When the rich oppose higher taxes, they’re seeking power by trying to hold on to their wealth; when the rich support higher taxes, they’re seeking power by trying to look good to the poor; when the poor support higher taxes, they’re seeking power by trying to grab the wealth of others; when the poor oppose higher taxes, thet’re seeking power by trying to look good to the rich. You stunned him, just as he was waking up! Norwegian Blues stun easily.

the self as included in the object of study Finally, if all ideologies are rationalisations of power, so that nobody can without self-deception embrace a libertarian ethic that requires its adherents to refrain voluntarily from aggression (p. 110), how are we to explain Sullivan’s own endorsement of libertarianism? For clearly he doesn’t merely predict the eventual triumph of liberty; he quite evidently welcomes it. How can he explain his own commitment to libertarianism? What power structure is his own ideology intended to reinforce? Or is he an exception to his own theory?

There’s some evidence that he does indeed regard himself as an exception to his own theory. At one point he maintains that arguments for socialism are designed to impress the poor, while arguments for capitalism are designed to impress the rich. As noted above, this generalisation seems empirically false – but in any case, Sullivan goes on to add: “one will never hear opinions that don’t impress anyone – except for perhaps in this book.” (p. 60; emphasis added.) So all ideologies are rationalisations for power and ego – except Sullivan’s own? This seems like a blatant instance of the “fallacy of self-exclusion”; it’s as though Sullivan sees himself as occupying an Archimedean standpoint or God’s-eye-view outside and above the society he seeks to analyse, forgetting that he is himself part of his object of study and so cannot exempt himself from the judgments he draws concerning it. (This attitude may in fact account for the otherwise-unexplained Dostojevskian title Notes From the Aboveground; an earlier edition was indeed titled The View From Above.)

Progress: Its Law and Cause

In short, then, I think that Sullivan’s account of human motivation, to the extent that it amounts to a definite thesis at all, is indefensible (and to the extent that it resolves itself into an army of shifting and mutually incompatible theses, they are all either so specific as to be indefensible or so generic as to have no interesting implications). Yet, surprisingly, it does not follow that the sociopolitical theory he builds on it is implicated in its downfall. I don’t mean merely that his sociopolitical theory might be justified on grounds other than those he proposes; no, I mean that his sociopolitical theory gains genuine support from the very grounds he proposes, even though those grounds are false.

How can that be? Well, we have both empirical and conceptual reasons for doubting that vanity and powerlust can be as central to human motivation as Sullivan supposes; since vanity in particular is parasitic on non-vanity values, it logically cannot be our dominant motive. But the recognition of that fact is perfectly consistent with vanity and powerlust being motives that many people seek to gratify much of the time, even if they do not all seek to gratify them all the time. And so a false theory according to which these are the all-controlling motives may have decent predictive power, as an approximation to a true theory according to which these are at least widespread and influential.

Likewise, while I don’t agree with Sullivan that all ideologies are motivated solely by class interest – indeed I think one can’t coherently maintain such a thesis, since its assertion casts its own assertion in question (and Sullivan arguably entangles himself in just such an inconsistency) – there is no incoherence in holding, and it indeed seems reasonable to hold, that class interest often plays an important role in shaping the content of ideology. Thus we can recognise a fair bit of truth in Sullivan’s contention that whenever “wealth is created in portions that can alter the prevailing distribution of power in society,” then “people rise to question what they have been educated to believe,” and liberal philosophers will “advance a new utopia that includes the classes that have attained … enough wealth to be included in the power structure,” but which “will continue to rely on educational devices that thwart the ambitions of the remaining masses” (p. 61) – even if we don’t think this is the whole truth about such ideologies.

The core of Sullivan’s sociopolitical thesis, remember, is that competition among vain and power-hungry agents gradually tends to equalise power among them; that conditions of equal power are conducive to the emergence of libertarian norms of social interaction; and that such norms are likely to become internalised and so to be stable. I think Sullivan’s overall case for this analysis is not bad. My chief caveat here, however, is that Sullivan has at best identified one tendency of social evolution, and surely it is a defeasible one; the question to ask, then, is: with what other, perhaps countervailing tendencies is this tendency likely to interact, and how much can we say about the probable resultant of these various tendencies? Otherwise we run the danger of being like someone who would appeal to the law of gravity to conclude that the average height of buildings must grow shorter over the centuries, ignoring the offsetting effects of improved technology.

Parerga and Paralipomena

So, a boo for Sullivan’s psychological egoism, but a (cautiously qualified) cheer for the libertarian social analysis he builds on it. Let me finish up the review by noting various additional points, ancillary to his central aims, where I nevertheless had some sort of gripe or objection:

• Sullivan claims that, traditionally, “eastern ideologies were based on obedience to rule,” but that nowadays these are being “challenged by more liberal western ideologies such as democracy.” Taoism and Confucianism seem like fairly salient counterexamples to this claim.

• He also maintains that the function of religion is to “influence human behavior to conform to guidelines that, if observed, will grant or guarantee eternal life after death.” Yet what about Buddhism, the whole point of which is to avoid life after death?

• Sullivan describes Plato (p. 52) as a paradigmatically conservative thinker, resisting the social evolution of values because he felt more secure with the existing social order. Certainly there are strong conservative strands in Plato’s thought – but it’s hard to label as straightforwardly conservative a thinker who advocates sexual equality, calls for the abolition of the family, and favours the subordination of commercial and military pursuits to philosophical ones. (And was attacking Athenian democracy really the best way for Plato to enhance his personal security?)

• Sullivan complains (p. 7) that Nietzsche is inconsistent because his desire to “reinvent all values” implies that “existing values must have been a mistake” – but since “values are derived from human nature,” that means that Nietzsche is “blaming humans for being themselves.” But Nietzsche explains quite clearly that he is no more blaming people for having mistaken values than a doctor is blaming a patient for being sick. Moreover, for Nietzsche values are not derived from human nature per se, but rather from an evolutionary historical process.

• According to Sullivan, “Lord Acton’s famous remark that ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ aptly describes the nature of man to wield power – if he can. So, if his posturing implies otherwise, it’s because he can’t.” (p. 63.) First, this is a misquotation of Acton, who actually said only that power tends to corrupt. But second, Acton’s remark, whether in its original or revised form, is about the effect of power on those who wield it, and has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether those who decline to wield it do so willingly or not.

• We’re told: “Never has anyone, including the philosophers, ever proclaimed that the morality of their society was improving when they compared it to the generation that came before them.” (p. 87.)  Is Sullivan kidding??!? Has he never read any of the massive host of cheerleaders for progress that have issued forth over the past two centuries, from Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics to the radical youth manifestos of the 1960s?

• Sullivan claims (pp. 7-8) that Rand’s egoism is inconsistent because she asks people to limit their pursuit of self-interest in order to respect others’ libertarian rights. But of course Rand’s position is that human beings best serve their own self-interest by adopting a commitment to respecting others’ rights. Now she might be right or she might be wrong about that, but that’s her position; she never describes respect for rights as a sacrifice of the rights-respecter’s self-interest.

• Mises is likewise accused of inconsistency (p. 8) because on the one hand he recognises that people necessarily act for the sake of their own individual values, yet on the other hand he asks people to act for the benefit of society as a whole. But Mises, too, thinks people will best serve their individual values by promoting a liberal order. To be sure, he might be wrong about this too; but if so, that would be a factual mistake, not an inconsistency.

• Sullivan treats the concept of “social justice” as inherently anti-libertarian. (pp. 93-94, 141-2.) But as I’ve argued previously, to whatever extent libertarians are concerned to combat systematic patterns of exploitation and oppression in society, they are precisely concerned with social justice.

• “Did you ever stop to wonder,” Sullivan asks, “why greed and ambition are considered vices? Who gets hurt? Those holding power fear challenges from ambitious people ….” (p. 94.) The notion that only the powerful have reason to fear the greedy and ambitious is an odd one for a libertarian to embrace. After all, greed and ambition are precisely what lead the already-powerful to seek to extend their power – which is certainly something the powerless have reason to fear.

• Sullivan notes that the question of whether values are objective or relative is “one of philosophy’s age old debates,” and that “the objective value side makes the argument that if values were relative, no moral certainty would exist, and the moral glue that binds and secures order in a society would be jeopardized.” In fact it is usually preachers and politicians, not philosophers, who stress this particular argument against relativism. (It’s a bad argument, because to show that a view would have unpleasant consequences if generally believed is not to show that the view is false.) Philosophers generally give better arguments against relativism than this, but Sullivan doesn’t address any of the standard philosophical arguments against relativism.

The closest that Sullivan comes to an actual argument on behalf of relativism is this: “Moral relativism doesn’t posit that murder is okay, or that theft is just a minor societal inconvenience. Instead, it is an awareness of the fact that many tenets of yesterday’s immorality [does immorality have tenets?] are acceptable today, which is an observation of history.” But this statement appears to confuse two different meanings of “value” – what people in fact pursue, or regard as worthwhile, and what is actually worth pursuing, or genuinely worthwhile. It’s easy enough to show – by appeal to the “observation of history” – that value in the former sense is culturally relative; but no moral objectivist ever denied it. What moral relativism claims is that value in the latter sense is likewise relative, and no mere “observation of history” is competent to establish that claim. By analogy: what shape the earth is believed to be is culturally relative, but that doesn’t show that what shape the earth actually is must thereby be culturally relative too. (This is a distinction explained in the first few pages of most introductory ethics textbooks.)

Plato and Aristotle • Sullivan doesn’t say precisely what he means by the terms “metaphysics” and “metaphysical,” but he evidently attaches a pejorative meaning to them. (See, e.g., pp. 15, 19, 22, 23, 69, 75, 85, 87, 96, and 110.) As best as I can tell, he seems to think that metaphysics and science are attempts to explain the same phenomena, only science does so by appealing to evidence and real causes, and metaphysics does so by appealing to faith and imaginary causes.

But in fact science and metaphysics do not address the same topics; for metaphysics is a branch of philosophy. Just as the task of ethics is to determine which conceptions of the good make sense and which don’t, so the task of metaphysics is to determine – antecedent to empirical investigation – which conceptions of the nature of reality make sense and which don’t – while the task of the sciences is to determine which of the possibilities left standing by metaphysics is actually best supported by empirical evidence. (After all, there’s no sense in sending scientists out to test for round squares if we already know a priori that they aren’t going to find any.)

To be sure, metaphysicians are sometimes wrong about what makes sense and what doesn’t – just as scientists are sometimes wrong about what the evidence supports. Likewise, metaphysicians sometimes attempt to pronounce on issues which properly lie within the sphere of the sciences – just as scientists sometimes attempt to pronounce on issues which properly lie within the sphere of metaphysics. Nevertheless, the two disciplines deal with different questions, and both are indispensable.

• There is a balance, Sullivan tells us, between liberty and (economic) equality: as economic inequality increases, the poorer majorities are prompted to combine forces to achieve redistribution; as economic equality increases, some members of the majority will begin to lose out and will switch to the side of the richer, pro-liberty minority. (p. 83.) This is an odd description of political reality; in the real world, we see wealthy interests pursuing inequality not by means of liberty but by means of state power – though often in a manner cloaked in pro-economic-equality rhetoric. It’s also unclear how Sullivan’s thesis of a perpetual oscillation between liberty and economic equality is to be reconciled with his thesis of an eventual triumph of liberty – and likewise how his association of liberty with economic inequality is to be squared with his identification of liberty with equality in power. (Economic equality and equality in power are not the same thing, of course; but one would not expect them to be inversely correlated.)

• “In order to found a libertarian society on purpose,” Sullivan proclaims, “some form of social power to do that would have to exist first,” and such a power “would not choose to relinquish their power in order to create conditions of equal power for everyone else.” (p. 110.) Leaving aside the unjustified determinism of this last, I note that elsewhere Sullivan has already acknowledged the existence of a power by which a libertarian society could be deliberately established: “his first step is to stand on his own two feet. At that point, he is free. If others do the same, they will not enslave each other. … But to succeed at this, one first has to rid their conscience of the old ideology, which has brainwashed them.” (p. 88.) Well, yes, that’s the agorist strategy for libertarian revolution in a nutshell; but why is this not precisely a way of “found[ing] a libertarian society on purpose”?

• Sullivan believes that anarchy is workable, but declines to call it “anarchy,” since that word is also used to mean chaos, and “[a] word cannot have two different meanings that are opposite one another.” (p. 107.) I hope he doesn’t intend to sanction, or cleave to, this oversight. (In any case, he calls his preferred legal system “world government” (p. 144), which is surely open to the same objection.)

• “Today,” we’re told, “the civilized west struggles against a muslim despotism that suffers very little feeling of guilt for their savage and barbarian actions. The west’s ultimate victory will be delayed only because they feel guilt.” (p. 111.) It’s startling to see such a “free-spirited” book suddenly mouthing the neocon party line – a bit like Nietzsche sporting a flag pin.

• Sullivan’s claim (p. 121) that slavery contracts would exist in a libertarian society seems contradictory, given that he has defined a libertarian society as one characterised by equality of power, while slavery by definition involves inequality of power (regardless of how it comes about).

• Sullivan asserts: “The price of a product has nothing to do with the cost of making it. Many products can’t be sold anywhere near what they cost to produce, so they simply aren’t made.” (p. 132.) I’m no adherent of the cost-of-production theory of price determination; but if Sullivan thinks that argument disproves it, he needs to read those good buddies George Reisman and Kevin Carson.

• Finally, Sullivan claims: “There is no such event in history as a peaceful withdrawal from a state by a minority power.” (p. 102.) Um … Belgium, 1830? Norway, 1905? Iceland, 1945? Singapore, 1965? Most of the Soviet states, 1991? Slovakia, 1993?


An Agorist in the Agora

I’m back from what I realise is my tenth trip to Europe. The previous nine:

1990: London (job interview at King’s College London)

1997: Rome/Vatican City/Naples/Pompeii/Capri/Amalfi Coast (ISIL conference)

2003: Paris (vacation)

2004: Copenhagen (Copenhagen Polis Centre conference)

2004: London (vacation)

2005: Paris (vacation)

2006: Prague [with connection in Zurich] (PCPE conference)

2006: Edinburgh/Kirkcaldy/Highlands/Loch Ness (vacation)

2007: Kraków [with connection in Munich] (IVR conference)

May 30-31:

the Peloponnese as a dragon's claw The plane took me over Corsica (second time I’ve seen its spiky surface from the air, the first being on my return flight from Rome in ’97), the boot-tip of Italy, and the dragon-claw talons of the Peloponnese. (Anaxagoras had theorised that the sun was a burning rock about the size of the Peloponnese; this was widely regarded at the time as an absurd overestimate (as well as theologically impertinent), though I believe it is now thought to fall somewhat short of the sun’s actual dimensions.) Delta’s in-flight magazine had an article about the Sloss Refinery, which I visited in Birmingham AL in ’99 or so. After we landed (I knew I wasn’t in the U.S. when I saw people smoking in the airport; also Greek escalators are much faster than their American counterparts) I took the metro into Athens; my hotel, the Fivos (which is what modern Greek has done to “Phoebus”), was almost next door to the Monastiraki metro stop.

Hotel Fivos The Fivos was a bit of a dump, but cheap, and the location was unbeatable – right on the edge of the Plaka, with the Acropolis in the background. (The official conference hotel, the Dorian Inn, was nicer than the Fivos but in a seedier location, by Omonoia Square – okay by day, but dodgy at night; I saw at least one fight.) My room was on what Europeans call the fifth floor and Americans the sixth; I didn’t relish hauling my bulk up six flights every day. Still, at the beginning of the week I had to rest on each floor, while by the end of the week I only had to rest once, halfway; so if I had stayed longer it might have done me a world of good. Either that or killed me. (I haven’t been in the Hotel Attalos, but perhaps for future reference it would be the best compromise – next to the Fivos, but with an elevator!)

One guest told me that a year or two earlier a woman had gotten locked into her room at the Fivos and so had tied bedsheets together and tried to climb out the window, but had fallen. (I did not learn her fate.) The kicker is: there was a phone in the room, but she hadn’t thought to try it.

[Touristic informations: Here are some of the negative sides of Greece:

Greek plumbing pipes are for some reason too narrow to accommodate toilet paper without clogging, so instead of flushing your used paper down the toilet you have to put it in the wastebin next to the toilet. Yuck. (In related news, the smell of sewage often pervades the streets.)

In addition to the unofficial thieves on the metro (one conference participant told me that his money belt was cut off him during his ride in from the airport) there are also official thieves: those who forget to validate their ticket in addition to buying it must, if caught, pay a fine of up to sixty times the price of the ticket. (For the 6-euro ride from the airport to central Athens that would amount to €360, or about $570. This rather disproportionate penalty seems like a clever way to exploit clueless tourists who think having paid for their ticket is enough. (Fortunately I was a clueful tourist.)

The process of changing currency is for some reason more labourious and time-consuming in Greece than in any other European country I’ve visited; if you’re in a hurry you’re out of luck.

Beggars (or, what comes to the same thing, people trying to sell you worthless junk) are more numerous and more insistent than in any other country I’ve visited.

As in most European countries, hotels in Greece do not provide washcloths; instead they give you a big towel and a little one. I assume that the smaller towel is meant to be used as a washcloth, but it’s rather cumbersome. Hence you may prefer to bring your own washcloth as I did. (Of course, again as in most of Europe, the showers have no shower curtain. With practice you will get slowly better at not flooding the bathroom.)]

On arrival I was mightily jet-lagged, but I knew that if I let myself go to bed straightaway, I’d be off-clock henceforth, so I forced myself to go out in search of the site of Plato’s Academy, since it’s a bit off the beaten path and so probably wouldn’t be convenient to visit later,.

[Touristic informations: How to find Plato’s Academy. Most guidebooks don’t mention it, and most maps of Athens stop just short of it, but take a look at the northwest corner of your map. You may see something labeled “Akadimias Platonos,” but most likely this is not what you want. (“Akadimias Platonos” is the name of a square by St. George’s church, southeast of the Academy proper, as well as the name of the neighbourhood as a whole.) But you should see streets named Alexandreias and Monastiriou; your map will probably stop just short of where they intersect, but that’s where the Academy archeological site is. (Note that it goes back farther than initially appears, continuing on the far side of Kratylou Street.) Although the archeological site is called “Akadimias Platonos,” strictly speaking it’s the entire Grove of Academe, and I don’t think they have any clear idea of where Plato’s school in particular was located within it.]

It was, incidentally, fairly simple to find my way around. With a knowledge of classical Greek it’s pretty easy to read signs in modern Greek; the language seems to have changed less in the last 3000 years than English has in the last 500. (The modern word for “thank you,” by the way, is “eucharisto”! – though it’s pronounced “efharisto.”) In any case, most signs are in both Greek and English.

After seeing the Academy I headed back to my hotel and hit the sack. (I suppose I must have gotten some dinner first, but I don’t recall.)

June 1:

Parthenon I’d arranged to meet up with my friend Jon Mahoney (also in town for the AtInER conference) first thing Sunday morning to get up to the Acropolis before the crowds hit. In this we succeeded, seeing the Parthenon, the Theatre of Dionysos (where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were first performed, and where Socrates rose in the audience to let visitors to Athens compare his phiz with the Socrates mask in The Clouds), and the Erechtheion. (The first waves of coach tours were starting to arrive just as we left.) Alas, we didn’t make it over to the Pnyx (site of the old democratic assembly), the Areopagus (where St. Paul and Athena once stood, presumably not at the same time), or the Philopappou Hill (site of a largely conjectural “Socrates’ prison”) – hopefully next time!

Then we walked through the Agora, where Socrates once practised his irony (which was kind of like a gadfly in your chardonnay) (sorry), and saw the Hephaestion and a small museum in the reconstructed Stoa of Attalos. After a rest and some iced coffee in a café beside the Agora, we visited the Kerameikos, an ancient Athenian graveyard with some remnants of the old wall.

I was reminded of Thucydides’ remark that future generations, seeing the ruins of Athens and Sparta, would tend to overestimate the prominence of the former and underestimate that of the latter, given the disparity in public monuments between the two cities.

When tourists visit ruins they often suppose that they have been worn slowly away over time by the elements. Actually, in the vast majority of cases the bulk of the damage occurred at specific times as the result of specific human decisions. In most cases the buildings were simply mined for raw materials to build new buildings (it’s a lot easier to haul marble from the building down the street than to haul it all the way from the quarry, and likewise to start with marble that’s already been worked up); temples of one religion were particularly likely to be looted to build temples of a rival religion. In the case of the Parthenon, most of the damage occurred in one instant in 1687, not in this case to build anything new but because the Turks were using it as an ammunition depot which the Venetians consequently shelled. (The Parthenon was originally built “by Pericles” – i.e., by people to whom Pericles gave orders – in order to replace an earlier temple that had been destroyed during the Persian occupation of Athens.)

That afternoon we took a coach tour ourselves, along the coast past topless beaches and through Halimous/Alimos/Kalamaki (birthplace of Thucydides) to the Sounion Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, where King Aegeus of legend died from confusing the signifier with the signified. Byron supposedly carved his name into the temple somewhere, but I didn’t see it. In addition to being the southernmost point of Attika, Sounion now replaces Kraków as my own easternmost point reached (my southernmost, westernmost, and northernmost points are Key West, Vancouver, and Inverness, respectively – at least on land, since I’ve also flown over Iceland). The view from here is, famously, breathtaking.

That evening we had dinner at Thanasis, a small restaurant in the Plaka, because Jon had been told by an Athenian native that they had the best chicken skewers. On this more anon.

June 2:

The AtInER conference started at the unkind hour of 7:30 a.m., at a small business association on Aristotle street; my Thrasymachus paper was part of the first panel.

The conference was supposed to be at the University of Athens, but this had to be changed at the last minute because of student riots – about what I have trouble determining – with the result that we had only one room, so we couldn’t have concurrent sessions. The consequence was that sessions were greatly compressed and there was little time for discussion. But aside from that (and also aside from constant rewriting of the program throughout the conference, and a general all-pervading disorganisation) it was a good conference. (One participant knew me from my Aquinas-as-tabloid-journalist parody from grad school, and another from my 2002 debate at Hamilton College.)

Zeus or Poseidon After lunch, Jon and I visited the National Archeological Museum, where I saw, inter alia, the so-called “death mask of Agamemnon” (which is neither a death mask nor of Agamemenon) and the original statue of Zeus-or-Poseidon whose image graces my home page. (After leaving the museum I learned, frustratingly, that the Antikythera Mechanism (whose image graces my former blog’s archive page) was also on display at the museum and I’d somehow missed it – argh!)

Back at the conference I was conscripted to chair the last two sessions (or sort-of chair, since my chairing determinations were regularly overridden by one of the conference organisers in the audience). Then off to Stamatopoulos Tavern in the Plaka for “Greek Night” (dinner and Greek dancing entertainment).

June 3:

Olympeion In the morning Jon and I visited the remains of the Olympeion (an enormous temple of Zeus next to the Acropolis – culprits behind its ruined condition include Romans, Germanic invaders, Christians looting it to build churches, Turks looting it to build mosques, and finally an actual act of nature, a storm in 1852 that knocked over one of the 60-foot columns, breaking it into neat segments); then back to the conference. There inter alia I met Nicole Hassoun, who’ll be one of the commentators at next December’s Molinari Society symposium. Readers of this blog will be interested in her argument that libertarianism entails the welfare state. (My chief criticism: an institution cannot satisfy a precondition for its legitimacy by working to bring about that condition, since a precondition is by definition something that must already be satisfied before the institution can legitimately do anything at all.)

One paper from the afternoon that might interest my blog’s readership: Jeremy Wisnewski argued that the “ticking time-bomb” scenario often used to justify torture ignores the fact, familiar to anyone who reads government torture manuals, that torture, to be successful, usually requires an open-ended time period to break down the victim’s psychological resistance, and that people can almost always resist torture if there’s a known short-term period for which they have to hold out – so that the one scenario in which torture is thought to be most justified is the one scenario in which torture is actually least likely to work. (I’m not sure this counts as a philosophical argument – and I’m not all that confident that I would be particularly good at holding out in even a fixed-time scenario; but it was interesting.)

Then the conference wound up with dinner at the Hellenic American Union halfway up Mount Lykavittos (long walk but great view!).

dog in Athens A note I’ll stick in here for lack of any better place: Some years back Athens solved its stray dog problem by declaring all the stray dogs to be city property. The city gives them all collars and tags, and takes responsibility for vaccinating them, and feeding any who need it. The result is that Athenian dogs behave differently from dogs I’ve seen anywhere else; their behaviour is neither “domesticated,” nor “stray,” nor “wild.” They move about the city, not in packs, but singly or in pairs; or they sleep on the sidewalk, unperturbed at people walking past or over them. They show no fear or hostility toward humans (apart from one incident I witnessed when a dog suddenly took a dislike to one of the passers-by and chased him down the street), but they also don’t fawn on them for food or affection. (Very different from the ingratiating packs of stray dogs I met in Italy.) They may join a group of human pedestrians for a while, but if so they do it with an aloof air of pretended indifference that seems more feline than canine. They stroll with assured self-confidence, like independent citizens, and are more competent at crossing busy streets than any dogs I’ve ever seen.

June 4:

The next day Jon headed out on a bus tour to Delphi (he’d done the conference tour the previous year) while I went on the tour included in the conference. First we went by bus to Plato’s Academy; if I’d known this was on the itinerary I probably wouldn’t have gone the first day, but it was just as well that I did, since this time a) we only stayed briefly, and b) the guide didn’t know how to find the site so I had to guide the bus!

tomb at Marathon Then we drove to Marathon, site of a major victory of the Athenians over the Persians back in the day. I’m not sure how far up the coast of Marathon we went, so judging from the map I might have gone farther east than Sounion, but I don’t think so.

First we tried to get in to see the tomb of the Athenian hoplites, but the guide had forgotten to bring the certificate that would get us in free, so we left. Then we were each given a choice between going to the beach and going to the Marathon Archeological Museum; I chose the latter, but the driver had mistakenly thought we were going to the Museum of the Marathon Run and took us in the wrong direction, so by the time the guide and the driver had gotten this sorted out between them we only had half an hour at the right museum (in beautiful countryside). But on the bright side, the guide knew the people at the museum and had them call the people at the tomb of the hoplites, so we were finally able to get into that on the way back.

Then we had an enormous lunch at a restaurant up in the hills. On the way back into Athens, we stopped at the site of Aristotle’s Lyceum, next to the Byzantine Museum; officially it’s not open to the public yet, but in typical Athenian fashion it was standing open and unguarded, so we trooped in, took our pics, and trooped out again before anybody could stop us. Then I met Jon for dinner in the Plaka; the next day he left for a week in Crete.

June 5:

Now came the second portion of the conference tour, a one-day cruise in the Saronic Gulf. A bus took us down to the Peiraieus (and I now have a new appreciation of the magnitude of Socrates’ “stroll” from the Agora down to the Peiraieus at the beginning of the Republic) where we embarked on a boat. The boat had about a half-hour tape of Greek music on continuous loop throughout the day; it was quite nice – the first two or three times through.

Poros The Aegean is absolutely littered with islands, one peeking out from behind another in every direction; it must have made things easy on the early Greek mariners, never being too far out of sight of a landmark. First we sailed past Aegina (“the eyesore of the Peiraieus,” Pericles called it, but he was speaking politically, not aesthetically) to Poros. The word poros means an opening, a way out or through (as in pores; and Aristotle’s term for philosophical puzzlement is aporia, being unable to find a poros), and it’s obvious why Poros is so named, because the apparent harbour into which you sail turns out to be not a harbour after all but instead a narrow strait. Poros was quite pretty but we only had about half an hour there.

Hydra Next we stopped at Hydra/Idra, where Leonard Cohen wrote Bird on the Wire. This was my favourite of the three islands we visited; indeed I would rather have skipped Poros and spent more time here, exploring the beautiful path that runs along the coast. We had about an hour and a half on Hydra, which had the greatest scenic views of anywhere in the whole trip.

Finally we sailed back to Aegina, legendary home of the Myrmidons (not those ones, these ones) and current home to Europe’s foremost pistachio farms. We had about two hours here, and I took a Panoramic Tour by bus around the island, seeing a Byzantine church (why do nearly all Byzantine churches look so much alike? it makes them treacherous as landmarks) and Palaiochora, AeginaNikos Kazantzakis’s house, as well as a famous hill in the village of Palaiokhora/Paleohora (“old place” – some imaginative naming there) where the locals built 365 chapels to protect them from pirates (unfortunately only about 30 still remain; perhaps the pirates got the rest?). From the hills we got a great view of Salamis (site of another Athenian victory over the Persians) and, beyond it, of the Peiraieus (I wonder whether the ancient inhabitants considered it the eyesore of Aegina?). We were also plied with ouzo and “specialities”; the latter turned out to be some especially nasty and intractable seafood. (The ouzo was in fact desperately needed in order to wash down the “specialities.”) In retrospect I think I should have instead taken the Classical Tour, which substituted an archeological site (the Temple of Aphaia) for the meal.

On our way back from Aegina, seagulls followed our boat, hanging as though in slow motion before us; a few were brave enough to take bread crusts from passengers’ hands. The Parthenon is still visible in the distance as one sails into the Peiraieus.

June 6:

On Friday I headed to the top of Mount Lukabettos/Lykavittos/Likavitos (“where view from Lykavittoswolves walk” – the name beats Palaiochora!), which, being the highest point in Athens, has the best views of the city.

[Touristic informations: Lykavittos is a steep and daunting climb – unless you do it the easy way. How to get up Lykavittos the easy way: first, take bus #060 from the left/north side of the National Archeological Museum (they leave on the hour, perhaps on the half-hour as well) up to the base of the funicular. It’s not obvious near the top which stop is the right one for the funicular, but point to the funicular on your map and the bus driver will tell you where get off (in one sense or another of that phrase). Then climb a flight of about 70 steps (I didn’t promise it would be completely easy) to the funicular and take it the rest of the way to the top (at which there are, sorry, a few more stairs – but the view is worth it).]

On the walk back down I was prompted to wonder why we can walk a foot away from dog poop without any fear of stepping in it, but can’t walk a foot away from a cliff edge without fear of stepping off it. I suppose it’s because fear is determined not just by the likelihood but also by the severity of the undesired outcome; but from the inside it certainly feels like a judgment of greater likelihood.

I then walked through Exarkheia/Exarhia, which is supposed to be the “anarchist” neighbourhood of Athens; I don’t know much about Greek anarchism (at least subsequent to Diogenes of Oinoanda), but the shops did seem marginally more bohemian and the appearance of the residents exhibited a mild hippie or punk or goth sensibility (though far less so than in, say, the Little Five Points area of Atlanta). Surely there’s more to it than this?

After a walk through Areos Park, I headed down to Syntagma Square, where – judging from the increased security around Parliament and the neighbouring Hotel Grande Bretagne (no, I don’t know why an Athenian hotel has a British name in French), as well as the flurry of French flags around Parliament – I guessed, correctly, that Sarko was favouring the Hellenic Republic with a visit.

At a kiosk I saw a fridge magnet with a quote from Aristotle on it: “One shallow [sic] does not make a spring.” I was tempted to get it, but not quite tempted enough.

silly soldier honouring Unknown Soldier I watched the changing of the guard in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This turned out to be the most idiotic statist ritual I have ever witnessed; it makes its British counterpart look like an entirely reasonable enterprise in comparison. All I could think of was John Cleese and the Ministry of Silly Walks. (In a related story, I had been struck, on my trip to Poland last year, at seeing only two Polish flags on the entire trip – a pleasant contrast with America’s obsessive flagolatry. Well, the bad news is that Greece seems more like America in this respect – the Greek flag is everywhere. On the brighter side, the Greek flag is much prettier than either the American or the Polish one.)

the Plaka Then, after a stroll through the nearby National Gardens (incidentally much prettier than the Areos Park; don’t waste time in the latter if you can get to the former), it was time for dinner. Now every night that we had eaten in the Plaka (more than once at Thanasis) this John-Turturro-looking guy in charge of the restaurant next door to Thanasis (the Phagopoteion Mpaïraktaris on Mitropoleos Street; phagopoteion means eat-and-drinkery, and this one advertises itself as apo to 1879) would keep heckling us, saying “How come you never eat at my restaurant?” So this night I finally decided to eat at Mpaïraktaris, much to the Turturroid’s gratification; turns out they have a better menu selection than Thanasis, their chicken skewers are at least as good as those at Thanasis, and you can order ouzo by the glass and not just by the bottle.

June 7:

On Saturday I headed back to the U.S., having shot 30 rolls of film. (Yes, I really need to get a digital camera.) Next time in Greece I hope to get to Delphi or Eleusis, or maybe take this tour.

Starbuck I ran into Walter Block on the shuttle from Atlanta to Auburn. (Turns out he’s also a Ruwart fan.)

I see that southern Greece has since suffered a serious earthquake. This reminds me that one night on the trip I woke up in my room thinking I’d felt an earthquake, but I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t dreamed it.

In my absence I successfully taped the May 30th epiode of Galactica, but was unsuccessful in taping the June 6th episode – which the Sci-fi Channel, according to its online schedule, is apparently not going to re-air any time in the next couple of months. Aaaarrgghhhhh!!!!! Aaaarrgghhhhh!!!!! Aaaarrgghhhhh!!!!!


Agorist Education versus Partyarchist Education

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

An old joke has an alcoholic asking a priest, “Is it okay for me to drink while I’m praying?”

“Certainly not!” says the priest.

“Well, is it okay for me to pray while I’m drinking?” the alcoholic inquires.

The priest responds: “Absolutely!”

I’m reminded of this joke by the disagreement among libertarians over the role of the LP. (See, for example, the exchange between Brad Spangler and Less Antman in the comments section of this post. In fact the present post started as a contribution to that discussion until I decided it merited a post unto itself.) Just as it’s good to pray while you’re drinking, but bad to drink while you’re praying, so it’s good for the libertarian movement that radicals leave the LP, but also good for the movement that the LP have radicals in it.

DON'T VOTE - Direct Action, Not Politics! Let me explain both sides of the paradox. Why is it good for the movement that radicals leave the LP? Because if the best way to achieve a libertarian society is to encourage the populace (via education and counter-economics) to withdraw consent and render themselves ungovernable, thus leaving the state apparatus to collapse – as opposed to seeking liberation through the state apparatus – then electoral politics is a counter-productive form of education, since it instead encourages people to continue looking to electoral politics as the natural venue for political change.

Why is it good for the movement that the LP have radicals in it? Because although electoral politics should never be the primary focus of libertarian education, so long as there is a self-proclaimed libertarian political party, whatever it says or does is going to have an impact on people’s perception of libertarianism, thus making the job of education easier or harder as the case may be. A libertarian party that puts forward relatively radical/leftish candidates like Ruwart thus helps the cause of radical libertarian education more (or, if you prefer, hinders it less) – in that respect, at least – than a libertarian party that puts forward relatively moderate/conservative/statist candidates like Barr. (No, I don’t think the adjectives “moderate,” “conservative,” and “statist” are interchangeable, exactly, but that’s another story. They’re all bad anyway.)

The paradox isn’t a contradiction. There is a respect in which radicals help the cause of agorist education by participating in the LP. There is a different respect in which radicals help the cause of agorist education by repudiating the LP. The question is how to weigh these two respects against each other. Most participants in the dispute seem to think it’s obvious how to weigh them (though their answers differ), but I don’t find it nearly so obvious.

To most people, the word “libertarian” means the Libertarian Party. One might react to this fact by feeling that it is vitally important for radicals to steer the LP in a radical direction so as to project the right image. One might instead react by feeling that it is vitally important for radicals to repudiate the LP loudly and forcefully so as to undermine the mistaken identification. I myself feel the pull of both considerations fairly strongly.

A repudiationist will argue that even if what the LP says does influence the success of agorist education, the solution is simply to abolish the LP. Maybe so, but there’s no magic button that will abolish it. In any case, there are also some strategic reasons for wanting such a party around come the revolution, for reasons I’ve discussed before. So I don’t think the case for repudiation is ironclad.

On the other hand, I certainly don’t think the case for participation is ironclad either. For one thing, there’s a strong case to be made for its being impossible – or at least bloody difficult – for radicals to work effectively in the party. Whatever we do in the party will either succeed or fail in making the LP more popular. If it fails, then obviously whatever we’re doing is not effective. If it succeeds, then more people will join the party, but the likely result of that is watering down the party and moving it in a moderate direction. Arguably this is already happening.

Less sees reason for optimism in the fact that “after 6 ballots 45% of the delegates still wanted an openly anarchist candidate.” Yes, that is some reason for optimism. But is the party likely to get more radical or less radical after the Barr-Root campaign? What kind of people is that campaign likely to bring into the party – people more likely to swell that 45% or more likely to diminish it? Surely the latter. Are there enough radicals to offset that trend if they got involved in droves? It’s not obvious.

I’m not arguing for any particular conclusion here. I’m through with the LP for this election (it’ll be the first since ’88 that I haven’t supported the presidential nominee), but I’m not committed to abandoning it forever. Though I’m not committed to going back either. (I let my membership lapse years ago, so I can’t have the satisfaction of formally quitting to protest the Barr-Root nomination.)

The good news is that in the end I don’t think that much turns on this issue. I think the pro-LP side tends to exaggerate the benefits of a libertarian political party, but I also think the agorist side tends to exaggerate the extent of harm that it does. Electoral politics is in the end peripheral to the central tasks of libertarian education and building alternative institutions.

Agorist Demerit Count: 4.5


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