Should libertarians care about cultural values?

Posted by Anon at 8:29pm Nov 5 '09
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That's the title of the Reason debate. I'd mentioned this to Four in another thread, but I quite liked it. It does seem that sometimes libertarians get a little carried away with government threats to liberty and do it to the exclusion of other menaces that are just as potent. And since there was a good article about it by one of the cuter Reason chicks I am posting it in it's entirety just so you guys can't say that I'm a one-dimensional anymore. Though it is a very good read and even if you aren't a libertarian the themes of liberty and oppression are still important.

We’re All Cultural Libertarians 

Freedom is about more than just the absence of government.

Kerry Howley

“It was amazing to me how quickly she overturned the power
structure within her family,” Leslie Chang writes in Factory
Girls, her 2008 book on internal migration within China.
Chang is marveling at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm
to find work in a succession of factories in the rapidly
urbanizing city of Dongguan. Had Min never left home, she would
have been expected to marry a man from a nearby village, to bear
his children, and to accept her place in a tradition that
privileges husbands over wives. But months after Min found work
in Dongguan, she was already advising her father on financial
planning, directing her younger siblings to stay in school, and
changing jobs without bothering to ask her parents’ permission.

Chang’s book is full of such women: once-obedient daughters who
make a few yuan, then hijack the social hierarchy. Even tiny
incomes cash out in revolutionary ways. With little more than
1,000 yuan (about $150) in Min’s pocket, it becomes possible to
plan a life independent of her family’s expectations, to conceive
of a world where she decides where to live, how to spend her
time, and with whom.

I call myself a classical liberal in part because I believe that
negative liberties, such as Min’s freedom from government
interference, are the best means to acquire positive liberties,
such as Min’s ability to pursue further education. I also value
the kind of culture that economic freedom produces and within
which it thrives: tolerance for human variation, aversion to
authoritarianism, and what the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek
called “a preparedness to let change run its course even if we
cannot predict where it will lead.”

But I am disturbed by an inverse form of state worship I
encounter among my fellow skeptics of government power. This is
the belief that the only liberty worth caring about is liberty
reclaimed from the state; that social pathologies such as
patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the
individualist; that the fight for freedom stops where the reach
of government ends. It was tradition, not merely government, that
threatened to limit Min’s range of possible lives. To describe
the expanded scope of her agency as merely “freedom from state
interference” is to deny the extent of what capitalism has
achieved in communist China. 

As former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints leader Warren Jeffs can tell you, it’s possible to be an
anti-government zealot with no interest whatsoever in individual
liberty. If authoritarian fundamentalist compounds are your bag,
the words personal agency will hold no magic for you,
and Min’s situation will smack of social chaos. But libertarians
for whom individualism is important cannot avoid discussions of
culture, conformism, and social structure. Not every threat to
liberty is backed by a government gun. 

Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and
ubiquitous as any surveillance state. In Min’s village, women are
constrained by a centuries-old preference for male descendants.
(Men are also constrained by this tradition, as families are less
likely to permit their valuable sons to migrate to the city.)
Most people will accept their assigned roles in the village
ecosystem, of course, just as most Americans will quietly accept
the authority of a government that bans access to developmental
cancer drugs while raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. A door
is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it.

It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy devoted to political
liberty would concern itself with building a freedom-friendly
culture. But the state-wary social conservative flinches when his
libertarian friends celebrate the power of culture itself to
liberate: the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600
channels where once there were three. The social conservative
will refer to these wayward anti-statists as “cultural
libertarians,” by which he means libertines. And it will always
be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua
libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture. 

“True libertarianism is not cultural libertarianism,” the
philosopher Edward Feser wrote on the paleolibertarian website
LewRockwell.com in December 2001. This statement was immediately
preceded by a call for the stigmatization of porn, adultery,
divorce, and premarital sex—in other words, an argument for a
particular kind of culture. Feser claimed that small government
and an ethos of “personal fulfillment” were incompatible, and he
argued for the former over the latter. In the guise of an attack
on cultural libertarianism, Feser demanded that libertarians
espouse different patterns of cultural behavior.

As it turns out, all libertarians are cultural libertarians. We
just don’t share the same agenda. Some prefer to advance their
agenda by pretending it doesn’t exist: that social convention is
not a matter of concern for those who believe in individual
liberty. But when a libertarian claims that his philosophy has no
cultural content—has nothing to say, for instance, about
society’s acceptance of gays and lesbians—he is engaging in a
kind of cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of the
mob while balking at that of the state. 

This prioritization can be difficult to confront because it is
most often expressed in strategic silence or casual conversation.
The tendency to dismiss feminist complaints about social pressure
as “self-victimization,” for instance, is not something one is
likely to encounter in a philosophical meditation on the
centrality of property rights. It emerges in the choice to write
about one freedom-limiting aspect of the world rather than
another, bubbles up in Internet chatter, and spills over into
informal interactions.

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