More juvenilia (ages 11-12): “Tiri of Portugal” (a boring story about a Portuguese boy traveling to America on his own) and “Flight to Borango” (a potentially interesting but unfinished story about an American boy traveling to Kenya on his own).
Tag Archives | Personal
Of Fists, Noses, Islands, Hooks, and Eyes
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the Editor:
In his letter on June 19, Edzard van Santen quotes the saying that one person’s right to swing his fist ends where another person’s nose begins.
Well and good; but what puzzles me is that he cites this saying as though it’s meant to be a critique of libertarianism. On the contrary, that saying encapsulates the essence of libertarianism.
In the 19th century, Herbert Spencer stated the same principle less metaphorically: Each has freedom to do all that he wills provided that he infringes not the equal freedom of any other. And in the 20th century, Murray Rothbard explained it more fully: “No one may threaten or commit violence (‘aggress’) against another man’s person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.”
Van Santen also quotes the saying that no one is an island, again as though this conflicted with libertarianism. But libertarianism is the only political philosophy that actually takes seriously the idea that no one is an island.
Other ideologies assume, explicitly or implicitly, that human beings are inherently atomistic, with naturally conflictual interests, and so that society needs to have order imposed on it by top-down authority. Libertarians, by contrast, have traditionally rejected this atomistic vision of society, emphasizing that a human being is, in Emerson’s words, “all made of hooks and eyes, and links himself naturally to his brothers.”
It’s precisely because we recognize that no one is an island – that social order arises spontaneously and organically through voluntary, nonhierarchical relations among equals – that we are libertarians in the first place.
Roderick T. Long
I’m not sure why they a) waited nearly two weeks to publish it, after van Santen had already gone a round with Leland Yeager; b) removed my quotation marks on the Spencer quote, while keeping them on the Rothbard and Emerson quotes; or c) published my letter under the title “We were libertarians in the first place,” thus tearing my closing phrase out of the context that gave it sense. But hey, it’s the OA News.
Two More Visions of the Future
More juvenilia: “One Flew Through the Electrostatic Converter” and “The Life and Times of Captain Cosmos” (both age 13).
Two Robs In Peril
More juvenilia: “The Supersonic Nightingale” (retelling of Robin Hood legends, age 10) and “The Hole In the Sky” (short story, age 11).
Two Brief Visions of the Future
More juvenilia: “World In the Wings” and “Letter from the Moon” (both age 12).
Songs of Discontent
More juvenilia: “Flight to the Stars” (short story, age 10) and “Schoolsville: A Bum Scene?” (a review of my elementary school, age 12).