Why I Am Not a Libertarian?

Although there are several schools of libertarianism, at their core they all uphold liberty as the ultimate principle. And while liberty is necessary in a democratic capitalistic society, it is not sufficient. As the Aphorist notes, “Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.”

Ironically, Judeo-Christian values helped shape the ethos of democratic capitalism, but since that ethos forbids any religion to rule, those values are now being undermined by the secular world. Hence, we have lost of our “moral center.”

As David Brooks comments in a recent column, “A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct. We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. We made the market its own priest and confessor. Society came to be seen as an atomized collection of individual economic units pursuing self-interest. Selfishness was normalized. As Steven Pearlstein puts it in his outstanding book, “Can American Capitalism Survive?” ‘Old-fashioned norms around loyalty, cooperation, honesty, equality, fairness and compassion no longer seem to apply in the economic sphere.’ ”

On a deeper plane of Reality, we always embedded in a story and not an “atomized collection of individual economic units.” As such, we need a framework as to how this story is guided.

Michael Novak got me to see this best in his seminal book. He remarks, “Democratic capitalism is more likely to perish through its loss of its indispensable ideas and morals than through weaknesses in its political system or its economic system. In its moral-cultural system lies its weakest link.”

And so, “the system qua system will be moral if two conditions are met. First, the design must include pluralistic institutions which permit both liberty and virtue to prosper. Second, the system of moral and religious culture must instruct individuals in the ways of liberty and virtue. Such a design rests upon an exact diagnosis of human frailty on the one hand, and of the effects, intended and unintended, of institutional arrangements on the other.”

So like most libertarians, I am not arguing for some state-sponsored coercion to bring back moral norms. This would never work in any case. But unlike the libertarian, I do believe we need a culture that is supportive of a moral telos. And that may require some guidance from the state and the social fabric of institutions that can reinvigorate such an ethos.

(Ideally, the state should primarily supplement, and not substitute, for the areas where the social fabric has gone beyond repair. See here, for a good read on this.)

So while I agree with the libertarian that much needs to start from the bottom-up with the individual! — I also do believe, in our tribal and morally conflicted society, that the state (as top-down low-entropy guardian) and non-governmental institutions/associations/affiliations (as bottom-up moral subcultures) need to play roles that are mutually supportive.

While there are no easy answers, the libertarian option is overly permissive to a culture that needs to yield to moral constraints, cultivate a covenant of social trust, and bend towards an inspired telos with a common purpose.

Genuine Heterodoxy

“Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else ... A 'synthesis' of religion implies a lower quality of attention.” — Simone Weil

I do believe Weil's quote is on point more so these days than I may have in the past. Being drawn to certain syncretic approaches to Truth, I once believed you could come up with one system than hangs all Truths together (see Ken Wilber). But now I don't believe this is probably the best approach.  

That's not to say I have gone orthodox in the strict sense of the word. As Fr. Andrew Stephen notes, “Orthodox dogma never claims to expound the whole truth about anything, but only delineates the borders of the mystery.” It is where we delineate the borders that things can get interesting or very slippery. I suppose for some of us, based on personal interests and inclinations and archetype, need to expand the boundaries where our path is no longer strictly orthodox. By working from the edges of the inside, we have moved the edges out a tad.

This is tricky, and probably not a good move for most. I do find these often leads to individuals pursuing almost anything spiritual or philosophical that appears to have authenticity. When this impulse begins to happen, then it is easy for one to fall into a spiritual relativism: there is no one, universal, absolute truth, but rather, there is only what is true “for me” or “for you.”

But I suppose there is room for genuine heterodoxy, where you know that you're the sort of individual who needs to turn over other rocks to find Truth. You are still immersed in a traditional path, but willing to find other religious precepts that may affirm or create dissonance in what your path expounds. Maybe reconciliation is never the point, and as Weil notes each path has its own fragrance of ontological Truth.

This path still should be traditional, since tradition has gone through its share of trials and errors. These paths are in line with the notion of anti-fragility (in Nassim Taleb speak) that no New Thought/Age path can accommodate. And even for those who believe in the emergence of something novel, MotT makes the intriguing point that the “mission of the Buddha-Avatar to come will therefore not be the foundation of a new religion, but rather that of bringing human beings to first hand experience of the source itself of all revelation ever received from above by mankind, as also of all essential truth ever conceived of by mankind. It will not be novelty to which he will aspire, but rather the conscious certainty of eternal truth.”

Understanding one's Raccoon archetype, being committed to Truth, and humbly submitting to the spiritual authority of tradition, allows for a genuine heterodoxy.

Fritjof Schuon, as usual, expresses this best:

“A pneumatic is in a way the “incarnation” of a spiritual archetype, which means that he is born with a state of knowledge which, for other people, would actually be the goal, and not the point of departure; the pneumatic does not “go forward” towards something “other than himself”; he stays where he is in order to become fully what he himself is — namely his archetype — by ridding himself, one after the other, of veils or outer surfaces, shackles imposed by the ambience or perhaps by heredity. He becomes rid of them by means of ritual supports — “sacraments,” one might say — not forgetting meditation and prayer; but his situation is nonetheless quite other than that of ordinary men, even prodigiously gifted ones. From another point of view it must be recognized that a born gnostic is by nature more or less independent, not only as regards the “letter” but also as regards the “law”; and this does not make his relation with the ambience any simpler, either psychologically or socially (…). In any case, the pneumatic is situated, by his nature, on the vertical and timeless axis — where there is no “before” or “after” — so that the archetype which he personifies or “incarnates”, and which is his true “himself’ or “his very self’ can, at any moment, pierce through the contingent, individual envelope; it is therefore really “himself’ who is speaking. The real gnostic does not attribute any “state” to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather — through an “instinct for holding back” — to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of “cosmic play” (lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, “horizontal” beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, “humanists” that they are, below the vocation of man.”

Open Minds and Original Thinkers

There is a misnomer out there about being open-minded and an original thinker. If someone told you were none of these, you would feel a tad insulted. But truthfully, most people don't possess these traits in the way they think they do.

Let's take open-mindedness, or openness to experience. It is considered one of the big five personality traits according the five-factor model. Let's see what Mr. Wiki has to say:

Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience. Openness reflects the degree of intellectual curiosity, creativity and a preference for novelty and variety a person has. It is also described as the extent to which a person is imaginative or independent and depicts a personal preference for a variety of activities over a strict routine. High openness can be perceived as unpredictability or lack of focus, and more likely to engage in risky behaviour or drug taking. Also, individuals that have high openness tend to lean, in occupation and hobby, towards the arts, being, typically, creative and appreciative of the significance of intellectual and artistic pursuits. Moreover, individuals with high openness are said to pursue self-actualization specifically by seeking out intense, euphoric experiences. Conversely, those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven—sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret and contextualize the openness factor.

I don't necessarily agree with this entire definition, but I do like the aspect in it of being curious. I think curiosity incorporates a humility of experience and understanding. But that's not how most self-defined “open-minded” people believe themselves to be. First, they are coming from metaphysical assumptions as we all are. Generally, they see tradition as a bad-thing or just plain old and tired ideas that need to be deconstructed. 

As the counter-culture grew, it saw the “closed-minded” as the old guard and obstacles to progress who needed to step aside or die-off. As Bruce Charlton notes, “Closed minded became synonymous with irrational and wrong; then was interpreted as evidence of ignorance at best, but more often of cruel wickedness. To be closed minded (implying sealed-off from evidence, from experience, 'dogmatic') was the characteristic attributed to the bogeymen of fanatical 'fundamentalist' right-wing/ fascistic/ authoritarian - Christians; in essence, those who tyrannically restricted sexual behaviour.”

But what this notion did was to get the “open-minded” ones to trade off some vertical traditional precepts for some horizontal self-determined “freedoms”. So while some may have opened the aperture to new experiences in counter-culture, they closed themselves off to classic antiquity. As this “open-minded” postmodernism crept in further, minds became more closed off to coherent ideas around religion, morality, and logic. 

Today, as David Bentley Hart remarks, “we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find an inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperaments, capacities, and imaginations.” By refusing to accept objective standards (more closed-mindedness), we fall into an incoherent “openness” of something that is undemanding and therapeutically comforting. As Gödel believed, we would always trade off coherency for completeness.

On the matter of original thinking, we are also left with short-sightedness on this concept. Original is not necessarily new, because most ideas are not that new; nor are we strictly autonomous when it comes to the source of our ideas.  

Moreover, originality is not necessarily thinking differently from everyone else, but it consists of thinking for oneself. Or as Franklin Merrell-Wolff put it, “by ‘original’ I do not mean an idea that has never been thought before, but one which, for the individual, has been produced with a creative effort from himself.” In other words, you've made that the idea your own through reflection verses being indoctrinated into it.

(I do find it amusing Apple ran one of the biggest campaigns on the mantra “think different” when today most of Silicon Valley has been indoctrinated into a leftist “think alike” view.)

Genuine pursuits of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual curiosity can create real openings and originality. The answer is not to limit ourselves to a dogmatic rigidity, as we are only fully human when these deeper Truths are revealed and made our own. But this does require us to sort ourselves out beyond the shallow and undisciplined “openness” we have fallen under. 

All in all, this explains why open-minded and original thinkers are the most prone to closed-mindedness and unoriginality. They are unaware of their metaphysical assumptions or where and how their ideas have been assimilated. If we are ignorant of our own assumptions and where they come from, we can't delve deeper into our curiosity in a truly open manner. Instead, we are contained by our own arrogance and pride while indignantly believing we are so much better than we are.

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.” — G.K. Chesterton