Idealism As Autism?
[Heinlein's] casual fans are harmless, like people who think Atlas Shrugged is "just a novel." It's the other group I take issue with -- the libertarian fruitcakes who think they can use quotations from fictional characters as a roadmap for real life.
-- Jaffo
I just received this month's issue of Backpacker magazine, and was a little surprised to see the following featured at the top of the letters page:
It seems that any bear that offends ranchers is not long for this world. If this is "wildlife management," let's hope these folks don't ever turn their attention to hikers or sportsmen. -- Bing Olbum
These letters aren't simply written by two unrepresentative environmental cranks. They represent a certain way of thinking about the environment (and humans) that is prevalent, in the same way that libertarianism or anarchocapitalism are prevalent (more on those cases below). At the root of both of these letters -- whether the authors concede it or not -- is the notion that animals possess rights equal to humans. In the first letter, the notion that the rancher "is living on the grizzly's territory" gives it away, since property rights have traditionally been considered human, not animal rights. And the second letter suggests that animals belong somewhere higher in the "rights" hierarchy than they wind up according to the wildlife conservation bureaucracy (or ranchers). Because of this view of animal rights, the first writer can suggest, with no irony, that ranchers can "afford to lose" a certain number of cows per year to grizzlies -- and what is guiding that assertion is a form of "balancing" between the rights of grizzlies and the rights of humans.
Many of my libertarian and conservative and objectivist friends would be quick to jump all over the political philosophy of animal rights. That's not my intent here. Instead, my point is that hardcore environmentalists like these letter writers are never going to compromise on, or perhaps even fully consider, their core principles. The "compromise" of sacrificing the number of cows that ranchers can "afford to lose" isn't really a compromise, but merely an attempt to balance concern for animal rights and human rights. On the issue of animal rights, environmentalists like these letter writers are a small, but intransigent, group, and there really is no compromise within the current political climate that can accommodate their view. Because they are putting forth their argument in the current context -- rather than proposing a new "meta-context" (if I may use a popular buzzword) -- they come across to many as loony.
Michael Duff has described this phenomenon in a slightly different context with regard to Objectivists and Libertarians in one of his best essays yet. It should be read in its entirety, although this passage is directly relevant to the discussion here:
And the further the discussion gets from reality, the more comfortable they are. Watch the traffic in humanities.philosophy.objectivism, and you'll see the wheels spin -- examples become more and more abstract, until they're reduced to simplistic parables and Eskimo examples.
I spent most of my time trying to flesh out the examples and bring the context back in. These people are fundamentally anti-context. The momentum is always towards reduction. Stripping away the variables until even human behavior becomes a chemical process, at the mercy of evolution and carbohydrates.
I realize it's not accurate to describe all libertarians and anarchocapitalists and objectivists and Heinlein fans this way, but I couldn't help but laugh. I've observed all of the almost autistic behavior Jaffo describes so humorously. And he's right in assessing the nature of the problem: a fundamental disregard for context.
To give an example of my own, when I see really hardcore Libertarians predicting the next electoral realignment that will make their party the majority, I can't help but think they are also missing context (at least some are honest enough to admit they advocate a new context, or "meta-context), that context being the history of the American political system and a serious literature on what constitutes realignment (beginning with the master, Walter Dean Burnham). In the Burnham sense, a realignment isn't forthcoming any time soon (and, as I've noted previously, the sources of the next potential realignment are not broadly ideological, but ethnographic). For a Libertarian realignment to take place, truly the context must be changed, which is something that does not happen overnight (ask Leonard Peikoff, who is said by someone -- one of the Brandens I think -- to have exclaimed he thought Atlas Shrugged would usher in a truly capitalist system shortly after publication; whether or not you trust the source of that statement, it also illustrates a disregard for context).
It's a little tricky writing this, because I don't mean to criticize some of the people I've described. In general, I hope those who advocate a pro-liberty context are successful at moving the prevailing political philosophy in that direction (just as I hope the animal rights crowd is not successful with their efforts), and I'll even be one of those people at times. But there's also a political universe that exists here and now, and even though Libertarians and Objectivists are often correct in suggesting there's little difference between Republicans and Democrats, that observation doesn't provide much guidance in determining whether one should support or work to defeat a certain mayor, for another example.
I probably operate a bit more in the contextual world of politics and political philosophy than the meta-contextual. But there is a need for pro-liberty activism at both levels. Sometimes, as Jaffo and a couple of letter-writers in Backpacker remind me, it's important to keep those distinctions and that need in mind.
[Posted at 15:43 CST on 01/27/02] [Link]
