TGIF: Culture without Romance

"The entire history of the human race, the rise of man from the caves, has been marked by transfers of cultural advances from one group to another and from one civilization to another."

So said economist, social philosopher, and historian Thomas Sowell in a 1990 speech titled "Cultural Diversity." (Watch it here. I also recommend this lecture by Nigel Biggar.) By cultural diversity Sowell did not mean the still-fashionable sense of that term. He has in mind what might be called culture without romance, echoing James Buchanan and the Public Choice school's economics without romance. What does Sowell mean?

Paper and printing, for example, are today vital parts of Western civilization–but they originated in China, centuries before they made their way to Europe. So did the magnetic compass, which made possible the great ages of exploration that put the Western Hemisphere in touch with the rest of mankind. Mathematical concepts likewise migrated from one culture to another: Trigonometry from ancient Egypt and the whole numbering system now used throughout the world originated among the Hindus of India, though Europeans called this system Arabic numerals because it was the Arabs who were the intermediaries through which these numbers reached medieval Europe. Indeed, much of the philosophy of ancient Greece first reached Western Europe in Arabic translations, which were then re-translated into Latin or into the vernacular languages of the West Europeans.

That shines a different light on how many people think of Western culture. It is something that the cultural anti-immigrationists seem completely ignorant of. Setting out to protect from change a culture that is a product of centuries of unplanned and spontaneous cultural imports seems strange indeed.

Sowell's point is also a blow to the woke warriors. In light of what he's saying, we have no choice but to pronounce the purported crime of cultural appropriation pernicious nonsense. As someone said, the history of man is a history not of cultural appropriation but rather of cultural appreciation. Thank goodness for that.

"Much that became part of the culture of Western civilization," Sowell continued, "originated outside that civilization, often in the Middle East or Asia." (Emphasis added.) Imagine that!

The game of chess came from India, gunpowder from China, and various mathematical concepts from the Islamic world, for example. The conquest of Spain by Moslems in the eighth century, A.D., made Spain a center for the diffusion into Western Europe of the more advanced knowledge of the Mediterranean world and of the Orient in astronomy, medicine, optics, and geometry. The later rise of Western Europe to world pre-eminence in science and technology built upon these foundations, and then the science and technology of European civilization began to spread around the world, not only to European offshoot societies such as the United States or Australia, but also to non-European cultures, of which Japan is perhaps the most striking example.

Sowell then drew an inference that today gets him in trouble with some people: "The historic sharing of cultural advances, until they became the common inheritance of the human race, implied much more than cultural diversity. It implied that some cultural features were not only different from others but better than others." (Emphasis in original.)

Better? Oh my! Are you allowed to say that? Won't that hurt some people's feelings, especially those of some prominent well-paid Western intellectuals? Sowell then showed what a good praxeologist he is by employing the tools of purposeful human action:

The very fact that people—all people, whether Europeans, Africans, Asians, or others—have repeatedly chosen to abandon some feature of their own culture, in order to replace it with something from another culture, implies that the replacement served their purposes more effectively...."

Example: "Arabic numerals are not simply different from Roman numerals; they are better than Roman numerals." How can we know this?

This is shown by their replacing Roman numerals in many countries whose own cultures derived from Rome, as well as in other countries whose respective numbering systems were likewise superseded by so-called Arabic numerals.

It is virtually inconceivable today that the distances in astronomy or the complexities of higher mathematics should be expressed in Roman numerals. Merely to express the year of American independence–MDCCLXXVI–requires more than twice as many Roman numerals as Arabic numerals. Moreover, Roman numerals offer more opportunities for errors, as the same digit may be either added or subtracted, depending on its place in the sequence. Roman numerals are good for numbering kings or Super Bowls but they cannot match the efficiency of Arabic numerals in most mathematical operations—and that is, after all, why we have numbers at all.

But doesn't "our" culture—out of respect for our ancestors—deserve preservation by the state? Tradition! Sowell isn't buying it.

Cultural features do not exist merely as badges of “identity,” to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life. When they are surpassed by features of other cultures, they tend to fall by the wayside, or to survive only as marginal curiosities, like Roman numerals today. [Emphasis added.]

He elaborates:

Cultures exist so that people can know how to get food and put a roof over their head, how to cure the sick, how to cope with the death of loved ones, and how to get along with the living. Cultures are not bumper stickers. They are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life. [Emphasis added.]

It's common sense: "Every culture discards over time the things which no longer do the job or which don’t do the job as well as things borrowed from other cultures. Each individual does this, consciously or not, on a day to day basis." (Emphasis added.)

Languages take words from other languages, so that Spanish as spoken in Spain includes words taken from Arabic, and Spanish as spoken in Argentina has Italian words taken from the large Italian immigrant population there. People eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in Singapore and stay in Hilton hotels in Cairo.

But in 1990, like today, "This is not what some of the advocates of 'diversity' have in mind."

They seem to want to preserve cultures in their purity, almost like butterflies preserved in amber. Decisions about change, if any, seem to be regarded as collective decisions, political decisions. But that is not how any cultures have arrived where they are. Individuals have decided for themselves how much of the old they wished to retain, how much of the new they found useful in their own lives. In this way, cultures have enriched each other in all the great civilizations of the worlds.

De-romanticizing culture could be a big step toward junking illiberal and demoralizing identity politics and so-called social justice.

TGIF: Don't Blame Wokeism on the Unfinished Liberal Revolution

The National Conservatives are not only wrong about genuine liberalism -- that is, libertarianism -- they also apparently haven't bothered to read up on what they think they're attacking. Take Yoram Hazony, author of Conservatism: A Rediscovery, who recently appeared on the YouTube show Triggernometry. As Hazony makes clear, for him it's straw men all the way down.

Throughout the interview he uses the word liberalism for the philosophy he blames for saddling the West with wokeism. That's unfortunate because people use that term in many ways. What definition does he have in mind? I think we can infer that he means something like libertarianism (and not, say, Nancy Pelosi's "liberalism") since he faults the philosophy for its powerful commitment to free markets. Although he's not thoroughly opposed to free enterprise, he favors a government strong enough to step in when the "national interest" (ascertained by whom?) requires it. National conservatism without a commitment to government power to override the free market would be like a square circle.

Like other right-wing critics of libertarianism, Hazony believes that Western societies are in the woke soup because Enlightenment liberalism is intrinsically prostrate before its leftist adversaries. Why would that be? In his eyes, it's because liberalism's only message is this: do your own thing. He told Frances Foster and Konstantin Kisin:

If you [liberals, presumably] raise children and you tell them, "Look, do whatever you want. Do whatever feels good. Use your own reason, exercise your own thinking, and come to your own conclusions, and you don't give them anything else, a great many people, maybe the majority, end up stuck and unable to make the decisions among, you know, what exactly is it I'm supposed to do and what is it I'm supposed to believe.

I have no idea why Hazony thinks that liberalism teaches people to do whatever feels good, or that, as he says elsewhere, that freedom is "all they need." One of the first things liberal parents would teach their children is to respect other people's rights: specifically, don't hit other kids and don't take their stuff without asking.

By the way, "do whatever feels good" is hardly the same as "use your own reason, exercise your own thinking, and come to your own conclusions." How does Hazony not see that?

Further, using your own reason does not mean: don't read history, don't learn from others' experiences, don't absorb the moral and political lessons of those who came before. Liberalism is not about the individual's starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel. Rather, it means that you shouldn't blindly accept what others tell you. Use your head. We have much to learn from other people and other ages. So what's Hazony's real beef with liberalism?

As this makes clear, he clearly doesn't know what liberalism is, but he's certain he knows what it has wrought:

Liberalism is what brought woke neo-Marxism. Every single institution that the woke neo-Marxists are running now was a liberal institution 15 years ago. So if liberalism had the antibodies, if it was enough to say let's just be free, if that was strong enough to be able to defeat woke neo-Marxism we wouldn't be where we are today....

Liberalism brought Marxism.

Have you noticed how everything the woke left favors these days -- to be sure, genuinely abhorrent stuff -- is reflexively condemned by the right as "neo-Marxist" -- even when the idea in question has nothing to do with the material forces of history and economic classes? You'd think Marxism was the only evil in the world. Actually, It's not.

Sometimes, when Hazony thinks he's scored points on liberalism, he sounds a bit like a liberal, such as when he reminds us that each individual is born into a culture, which ought not to be automatically rejected. The reason he doesn't realize that liberals can agree with this is that he thinks -- wrongly -- that liberals are Jacobins, who aspire to wipe the social slate clean and start over. Some liberals have occasionally sounded like they're saying something like that, but to suggest that Jacobinism or utopianism is intrinsic to liberalism is to do a disservice to an honorable and valuable -- yes -- heritage.

While Hazony concedes that it might be okay to reject some inherited traditions, he seems uncomfortable with that prospect. As he puts it, your forebears "hand[ed] down things [and] you have a responsibility to fight for those things." Why? Because they were handed down?

I prefer Thomas Sowell's take: another culture may well have features that are better than one's own -- superior at dealing with an aspect of life.

The entire history of the human race, the rise of man from the caves, has been marked by transfers of cultural advances from one group to another and from one civilization to another....

Cultures exist to serve the vital practical requirements of human life -- to structure a society so as to perpetuate the species, to pass on the hard-earned knowledge and experience of generations past and centuries past to the young and inexperienced, in order to spare the next generation the costly and dangerous process of learning everything all over again from scratch through trial and error -- including fatal errors.

Cultures exist so that people can know how to get food and put a roof over their head, how to cure the sick, how to cope with the death of loved ones, and how to get along with the living. Cultures are not bumper stickers. They are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life. [Emphasis added.]

Every culture discards over time the things which no longer do the job or which don’t do the job as well as things borrowed from other cultures. Each individual does this, consciously or not, on a day-to-day basis. [Watch the video; read the text.]

Problems with change occur not when people are free to adopt "the stranger's ways" (the supposedly scary phrase is from Fiddler on the Roof); they occur when those who favor change have access to state power -- especially when government controls or strongly influences education, the media, and other commanding heights. Then some people, however well-meaning, can potentially impose their preferences on the rest.

Without access to power, people are free to adopt changes for themselves and try to persuade others, but then they would have to wait to see if the new ways catch on. Change, under those circumstances, tends to happen at the margin, although exceptions can't be ruled out. (Social contagion is possible.) But even then, free people would have peaceful consensual ways to protect themselves and their children from unwanted change. This is where freedom of association kicks in.

In general it seems reasonable for individuals to provisionally defer to tried-and-true ways because they have apparently passed the cultural natural selection test. Yet one also ought to remain open to demonstrations of better alternatives. Liberalism delivers the best of both: stability without stagnation and dynamism without chaos. But individual rights must be respected.

As a national conservative, Hazony of course favors nationalism. If all he means is that a world of many nation-states is preferable to a global empire, then libertarians stand with him. If we can't get rid of power, at least let's disperse it among small competitive jurisdictions. But he means much more than that since he and his fellow National Conservatives favor trade restrictions and other forms of welfare-state industrial policy. And I presume he would oppose secession, at least from nation-states he approves of. (He is an Israeli.)

Hazony commits a major blunder when he says that liberalism is inherently imperialist and that nationalism is inherently anti-imperialist. How does he figure that? Since liberals believe they have identified universal principles, he says, it is committed to imposing those principles on everyone. If you fail to see his logic, I imagine you're not alone.

Contrary to Hazony, liberalism doesn't says it has the one true way for everyone to live. Rather, it says all people ought to be free to decide how to live. Liberalism, which seeks to limit state power, doesn't entail imperialism because that would expand state aggression both domestically and abroad. Thus "liberal imperialism" is a contradiction in terms. Nationalist imperialism, however, is not.

While I wouldn't expect Hazony to be persuaded by what I'm about to say, I will point out that the alarming and long-standing decline of liberalism can be plausibly explained by its initial incompleteness politically, economically, legally, and even morally. Twentieth-century liberal writers, scholarly and popular, pointed this out repeatedly and tried to do something about it. That's why they wrote so much. These included Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Leonard Read, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, and most fundamentally, Ayn Rand, who argued persuasively (to me at least) that as long as a secular or religious ethics of self-sacrifice predominated in a culture, the political-economic-legal system rooted in individualism and private property would never be whole-heartedly embraced because it would be tainted by the alleged sin of "selfishness."

Even the doctrine of limited government kept liberalism from fully blossoming because, as we've learned so often the hard way, limited governments don't stay limited. (See my article "Anthony de Jasay on Limiting Power.")

Thus liberalism didn't yield because it was inherently weak. It yielded because it was fatally compromised from the start. That's my answer to Hazony's question of why wokeism has succeeded. We don't need illiberal national conservatism to win back our freedom.

TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal

In online interviews and conversations I'm hearing intellectuals in the national conservative movement say that the liberal Enlightenment "project" has mostly failed because people need more in their lives than freedom. I've also heard this from a few people who have lately become disillusioned with leftism but yet are uneasy about libertarianism.

My first response is to wonder whom these critics of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, its modern-day form, have in mind. Which important and widely influential liberal political, economic, or, social thinker even implied that freedom is the only thing worth valuing? Let's name names, please. I can't think of one, but perhaps I'm overlooking someone.

Those conservatives will also insist that freedom without virtue is not just worthless but a clear and present danger. But again, which past and present of genuine liberal stalwarts would disagree? I've always understood liberalism to be distinct from libertinism. I see no grounds for confusing the two.

Classical liberalism, in its consequentialist, deontological, and eudaemonist forms, has been concerned with what makes for a proper society by some articulated standard or other, starting with the most fundamental unit of analysis, the individual. The literature is saturated with positive observations about society, the division of labor, association, and rich communities -- in a word, cooperation.

One way or another, all of that is related to values in addition to freedom; it all is related to virtue. Far from embodying an atomistic, licentious, to-hell-with-everyone-else (pseudo)individualism, libertarianism extols what I call Adamistic (Smith, that is) individualism, in which human beings "selfishly" flourish through mutually rewarding relationships of all kinds. I've also dubbed this "molecular individualism. Of course, some people will engage in vice and aggression (those aren't the same things), but as long as the state is unavailable for social engineering, free individuals using private property in association with others can peacefully protect themselves and their children from what they find abhorrent. Live and let live is the rule.

For liberals, freedom was never just an end in itself. Freedom means freedom from aggression, whatever the source, but at least implicit in the liberal vision -- and indispensable to truly understanding it -- is the freedom to produce material and nonmaterial values in a social context. We want freedom so we may live fully as human beings and enjoy fruitful lives among other people. Successful long-term participation in the market and society more widely encourages honesty, justice, and conscientiousness -- virtues by any reckoning. To understand the value of society is to understand the need for -- yes -- order, but it is specifically the bottom-up, emergent, spontaneous order that F. A. Hayek and other liberals have emphasized. (You find this in Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and countless others.)

The critics of liberalism are right of course when they say that freedom is not enough to properly address the social problems we observe today. But again, which libertarian ever said it was? The libertarian point is that freedom is the condition in which people have the best chance of dealing with problems. Liberalism doesn't promise a rose garden; it's not utopian. In fact, freedom is not the answer to any problem. Rather, it -- along with the resulting decentralization and competition -- is essential to the discovery process that enables people to deal with problems as best they can. Since no one is omniscient, that discovery process is indispensable both for the good life and the good society.

Freedom is not some magic ingredient that when sprinkled on a problem miraculously produces a solution. It's the political, legal, and social environment in which people can act to make their lives better. In the process of virtuously pursuing their rational self-interest, they make others better off too. No central coercive authority, conservative or progressive, can hope to deliver the equivalent, no matter what theory of virtue it seeks to impose. For one thing, they could never know enough.

Thus those who reject libertarianism as unequal to modern challenges show themselves to be boxing with a strawman. But worse, they deceptively pose as the guardians of virtue when they are not.

When conservatives say politics is downstream from culture, they mean that for freedom to be a good thing, people must first be virtuous. But that suggests the conservative program is to change things around and put culture downstream from politics. It's a justification for limits on freedom of speech, religion, commerce, association, etc., until the state's subjects have been prepared to live freely. But who is qualified to tutor the people or to say when the people are ready for freedom? How are their overlords to be chosen?

Liberals have long asked those questions, but not because they thought virtue is unimportant. It is because they knew how important virtue is. They also asked how people can be virtuous without being free to make choices.

Albert Jay Nock, the quirky libertarian writer of the 20th century, wrote about this in his 1924 essay "On Doing the Right Thing," Nock wanted to see human beings free precisely so that they "may become as good and decent, as elevated and noble, as they might be and really wish to be.” (See my essay "Nock Revisited.") He elaborated:

The point is that any enlargement [of state authority], good or bad, reduces the scope of individual responsibility, and thus retards and cripples the education which can be a product of nothing but the free exercise of moral judgment.... The profound instinct against being "done for our own good" ... is wholly sound. Men are aware of the need of this moral experience as a condition of growth, and they are aware, too, that anything tending to ease it off from them, even for their own good, is to be profoundly distrusted. The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed. [Emphasis added.]

That's the answer to the paternalists of all parties.

In contrast, conservatism wants the government to control the culture in the name of building virtuous people. How can they overlook the perils of this program? Once political officials assert control over culture, where does it stop? And how can they be sure that the people whose values they despise won't eventually grab hold of the muscular state they've fortified?