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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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In terms of "liberalism", this post is a big old strawman akin to e.g. an orthodox Maoist claiming any slight movement towards free markets is functionally indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if it thinks the externalities are too hard to control, e.g. hard drugs. There's no reason it couldn't do the same to sports betting.

Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have.

This is a consequence of the Internet making it easier to apply for distant jobs, not of liberalism. It's happening in China too.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

I am criticizing the idea that liberalism can stand on its own. The event that prompted this post was the Lindsay hoax, in which he re-wrote a section of the Communist Mannifesto criticizing Liberalism. I'm not going to dive into that specific criticism of Marx, but I am surprised at Lindsay calling all criticisms of Liberalism "Woke Right." There is a lot to criticize and debate about liberalism as an intellectual tradition.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

Again, you're playing games with definitions here. It's like saying "capitalism is fine as long as people still have a Maoist-Communist understanding of common good that can supersede the free market".

Which might be true if capitalism is implicitly defined as "crazy anarcho capitalism", and Maoism is "anything that's not that". But those are silly definitions.

I think you should look at this comment, but I thought it was pretty clear that I meant Liberalism as the political philosophy tradition begun by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

The argument goes that they're only capable of doing so by justifying it with illiberal principles, which the society also holds.

Can you name, using Liberal reasoning only, the reason you should ban an individual from gambling? All the reasonings I can think of rely on some kind of collectivist ethos.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect", "Don't build a business around looking for suckers and taking them", and "Don't deliberately place harmful addictive products in the stream of commerce" are all very much ideas in the mainstream of the big-picture-liberal tradition despite not being consistent with Nozickian libertarianism. Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK. Conservatives and socialists favoured the brewer-and-publican interest - Churchill (while a Liberal) famously attacked the Tories as the party of, among other things, "The open door at the public house".

Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK

I'll disagree those were on the grounds that you state. Rather on "stop beating your wife", public health and religious considerations. And those were, in fact, defeated by the superior Liberal argument of personal freedom.

I'll concede that there has been a strong Liberal movement for personal empowerment including freedom from such influences in the past. But the contention here is that this has been soundly defeated with Liberals' own arguments. Much like Churchill's support for eugenics was.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect"

This is mostly a smokescreen for absolute paternalism; that is, "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make".

No, because "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make" is an overly general category that includes not only gambling, but a lot of other things that gambling opponents genuinely don't also want to restrict.

I'll take a swing at it: some people are incapable of good decision making about specific things, in this case gambling. They are effectively mentally incompetent in this narrow area but are otherwise generally mentally competent enough to be responsible for themselves. Therefore, similar to how we don't allow children or the insane to buy guns, we should ban people who have demonstrated this incompetence from gambling.

This is the mental illness or childhood or savage argument. And it is an unprincipled exception that cannot stand.

Most instructive here is the case of John Stuart Mill. Ever the archetypal liberal. Who makes this argument for India, but makes the argument that destroys this one for Women.

It is no surprise that Liberals have had to give up this, because it isn't motivated. Ultimately it is not principle that prevents the Liberal from giving children or the mentally ill dangerous weapons, but mere pragmatism. Indeed one can perfectly imagine (and scifi authors do) a world where these actions would be without lasting consequence. And in the Culture, giving children guns isn't really that big an issue, after all we can resurrect them if they splatter each other's brains. The question of whether this is reasonable is entirely evacuated, because it is an individual whim, and those are beyond question.

This entire line of reasoning is vulnerable to the Critical Theorist demand of realized freedom instead of procedural freedom. i.e.: you have constructed a society that has enslaved the mentally illl or children or gamblers, and this makes you their oppressor, your own principles demand that you create the condition where they can roam around thinking they're Napoleon/eat infinite candy/gamble their life savings without consequence.

This has been the ultimate Liberal project since Rousseau. Your pragmatic objection runs against the General Will, which means you're a counter-revolutionary that doesn't actually want to return us to the State of Nature. And these pragmatic demands are reactionary.

Or at least so says pure ideology.

If you want an ideological counter to this, you have to reach for Hobbes and become what Nick Land calls a "cold liberal" and reject the egalitarian and humanist part of the package to let markets and rationalism stand on their own. But then you are something different.

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