What I am Not a Libertarian - Part I

Introduction

One of the biggest shocks that I had coming to Grove City College (and besides the lack of social skills there is little about GCC that is shocking) was the proliferation of libertarianism on the campus. One of the first classes I took for my first semester was Foundations of Economics, which I like to refer to as “Libertarianism 101.” In it my professor taught that libertarianism was, at the very least, the logical economic/political system per Scripture. He bordered on saying that anything other than laissez faire capitalism and libertarian politics was unbiblical and for about a year I struggled with this point of view. Yet in the fall of my sophomore year I took another class, Early Modern Europe, which would equally shock my economic and political thinking. Although the professor of that class was not the most endearing teacher I have had during my college experience, I found the lectures very interesting. Often we in the twenty-first century view the past through our contemporary worldviews which leads to anachronisms in our historical knowledge. What Early Modern Europe did for me was to understand that the past was “another country.” What I mean is that their ways of thinking, pre-French Revolution, were completely antithetical to our modern sensibilities.

It also gave me a large magazine of ammunition against libertarianism. The pre-modern era was fundamentally a far more Christian era that the modern one. Being a historian, and a Christian, I was quite prepared to accept that people in the past actually had something sensible to say about the way human affairs should be ordered. One of the ironies of libertarianism is that this political philosophy that proclaims to be antithetical to Marxism in fact embraces a Marxist view of history; contempt for elites and a belief that power is the chief motivator in history. By the time I took Mirco Economics in Spring 2009, “Libertarianism 102,” I had developed a vehemently anti-libertarian political philosophy. The reason was that I understood that the chief axioms of libertarianism (hyper-free markets, individual rights, and limited government) were completely foreign to anyone living pre-1776. They were, in fact, creations of the Enlightenment, which was notoriously secular and rationalistic. Therefore, the second great irony is that while Christian libertarians preach libertarianism as a logical conclusion of Christian theology, what they are in fact preaching is a system of thought that was in actuality produced by the anti-Christian European Enlightenment. Below I was specifically record why I reject libertarianism in favor of classical conservatism.

What is Freedom?

Freedom seems to be a word that is thrown around flippantly, especially at Grove City, without any real definition given. What exactly is freedom? When I questioned my political science professor on this last semester I did not get a clear answer. Where I did get an answer was in George Wiegel’s book The Cube and the Cathedral for my political science book review. Weigel, an American Catholic theologian, argues that in Western history there have been two understandings of history. The first “freedom for excellence” had its origins in Classical Greek philosophy and was formally born in the writings of Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. “Freedom for excellence” argues that freedom is foundational to human nature and the fulfillment of the human life because it is one of the chief components of the imago dei (image of God). As human beings are made in God’s image, and God is a free Being, humans have some degree of freedom. Freedom was inherent in the Garden of Eden where God gave Man the ability to choose to serve Him willingly by not eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or to rebel against Him by eating of the fruit and indulging in the service of the self. Man, unfortunately, chose the latter. Yet freedom still important to human being because, though the imago dei was corrupted by the Fall it was not destroyed. Moreover, Christ promises us Christian freedom whereby we will be free of the slavery of sin and once again freely chose God as a result of the grace of the cross.

Therefore, freedom for excellence is freedom of conscience. Each individual should be free to pursue the “good life” – which is the excellent or righteous life. The caveat is that this freedom is not boundless. It is fenced in by morality. The individual is not free to indulge in actions that pervert society and hinder other people’s pursuit of the good life. Freedom is by necessity not simply about individual about society as well. The good life involves helping society by striving to make it better. This is because man is, according to Aristotle, “a political animal” – i.e. finding human fulfillment in human society. Society and culture are creations of God, I believe. Thus, the individual is free so long as his or her actions are for the benefit of society. I am free to do what I wish and believe what I will per my conscience as long as it is pursuing the “good life.”

The other type of freedom that Weigel identifies is “freedom of indifference.” This concept of freedom has its origins in another Christian thinker, William of Ockham. While Ockham by no means subscribed to such a concept about freedom, his philosophical movement, nominalism, would greatly influence its conception later on. Ockham outright rejected universal absolutes and claimed that only particulars of the human mind existed. Therefore, things such as the pursuit of the good, life were not universal to man by particular to each individual and his relationship to God. What this thinking did was to shift an emphasis away from God and his universal laws and toward the genius of the individual. While Ockham and his followers by no means moved away Christianity, they shifted the focus of Christianity from beginning first with God and moving down to individuals to individuals first moving up toward God. Essentially, it would emphasize the genius of the individual, an increasingly theme in Western thought from the Renaissance on. The individual would become especially important in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The culmination of this thinking would be Nietzsche, Sartre, and the post-moderns. Freidrich Nietzsche was a late nineteenth German philosophy who has been called the harbinger of both nihilism and post-modernism. He taught that the death of God brought the death of absolutes, such as truth and morality. Humans were thus radically free. The expression of humanity was thus not found in the pursuit of excellence but in human volition. Human beings find fulfillment through free action and creating their own truths and meaning. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre writing in the mid-twentieth century would also highlight radical volition as the defining characteristic of human beings. The way to human meaning lay in the exercising of human freedom. Likewise, the ultra-democratic post-moderns also teach that the chief concern of humanity is the construction of individual narratives and the deconstruction of established power narratives. If there is one unifying theme of modern philosophy, therefore, it was radical freedom. Thus we have freedom of indifference; individuals having a veritable right to pursue their own meaning, their own truth, and their own happiness regardless of what anyone (especially the damnable elites) have to say. Freedom is no longer seen as a means to an end but an end in itself.

Of the two version of freedom, libertarians undoubtedly adhere to the second. What I constantly hear is that elites, especially government, have absolutely no business in bounded human freedom, so long as the freedom of other individuals is not interfered with (say, by the taking of life or property). The chief virtue in libertarian thought is that the individual is free to find his own way in life regardless of whether it is self-destructive (say, narcotic) or culturally corruptive (say, pornographic). This is completely and utterly antithetical to the Christian believe that the chief end of man is not the exercise of volition but the enjoyment and pursuit of God.