OK, let’s start with a brief bit of background. I was raised a religious conservative. After going to college, my beliefs began to moderate a bit as my perspective widened but I was still a religious conservative in every sense. With the advent of the Bush era, I teetered on the precipice of neoconservatism and briefly (to my eternal shame) openly espoused the use of torture and other immoral behaviors in the maintenance of the United States’ de facto empire. Then, I read Thomas Sowell’s book Basic Economics and my intellectual compass began a process of reversal. First, I realized that economic intervention was redundant and unnecessary at best, but usually destructive and impoverishing. Then, I began to wonder whether the government’s other interventions into society are necessary or, perhaps, also destructive. I began to look online and stumbled into the writings of Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe and the other Austrian luminaries. My intellectual compass swung clear round and I was briefly an almost pure anti-state Rothbardian, then briefly flirted with across-the-board anti-authoritarianism. But this is Utopian territory and I quickly outgrew this and returned to earth moving to a more mature Hoppean view.
At this point, I began to strike out on my own and I began to feel that libertarian theory unfairly singles violence out as what is wrong with the world. This road leads to Longite de facto pacifism which I find Utopian and untenable. So, I turned to law and began to look at libertarian legal theory. Here, I came across the idea of common or customary law and the distinction between justifiable violence and aggression. Things were making more sense to me but then I began to wonder how it is that our legal systems are so out of touch with the origins of law in custom and non-aggression. Blaming it on “the State” is pointless if you want to understand why it is the State has managed to get away with bringing about the state of affairs we are in today.
This brings me to my most recent revelations that law rests on an even deeper foundation of human moral sense. Laws which grossly violate the prevailing moral sense do not last long and long-standing laws attain their longevity precisely because they coincide with the prevailing moral sense. This is an obvious point but understanding how it relates to the libertarian ideal of non-aggression is not trivial. In fact, this point about human morality explains how aggressive laws such as the drug prohibition laws come to be - precisely because the power interests in drug enforcement have succeeded in striking a chord in the prevailing moral sense… the 10,000 innocent deaths per year as a result of enforcement of drug laws is justifiable because people generally agree that drug use is “bad”. There is also a psychological component of resignation to the collateral damage… if the police were trying to do what is right and, in the course of doing so, accidents happen, they cannot be held responsible as if they were acting maliciously. This is, of course, muddle-headed thinking but these are precisely the logical steps along which most human minds proceed in accepting the drug prohibition narrative. For by-standers who are not the direct victims of police action, intent is a deciding factor and since the vast majority of us are by-standers, our opinions outweigh the feelings of the direct victims.
So, this means that what people in a society believe about right and wrong is hugely important in regards to the legal and social order which can emerge. The aggressive State apparatus is only possible precisely because most people hold a certain complex of beliefs about right and wrong. Furthermore, the State itself is constrained by the moral ideas which people hold… we can see this whenever the government is forced to scale back its ambitions either in response to public outrage or a lack of sufficient popular support for its initiatives. This means that moral beliefs are not solely a function of State brainwashing and I reject the Rothbardian hypothesis that the State is primarily responsible for the moral beliefs that make its existence possible. Certainly, the State expends its resources to encourage the myths which secure its existence (e.g. the Hobbesian myth, per Hoppe) and discourage the ideas that endager it (e.g. most of classical liberal philosophy) but I think the historical evidence of the massive struggle of the State to actualize its own goals goes to show that its power to alter minds exists only within narrow confines.
What is more powerful than brainwashing is how our brains are wired to begin with and Nature - not the State - has wired our brains. Evolutionary psychologists are exploring the human moral sense and its roots in the ancestral environment and what they are finding is that our moral sense is highly rational and adaptive to that environment (>10kya) but maladaptive to the rapidly changing modern environment. And I suspect this is precisely where the State exists, in that gap between our evolved moral sense that was well suited to our primitive existence in the sweeping grasslands of Africa and the realities of the modern world. We can see this very clearly in the Europe-centered global wars of the 20th century where governments brazenly appealed to primitive tribal sentiments in their populations to drum up support for military adventurism. The actions of the European powers, the United States, Russia and Japan resulted in wanton destruction of human life and property on an unprecedented scale yet the popular support for most of these actions was high.
The level of tyranny achievable by the State is not everywhere equal and we can conclude from this that the limits to the power of the State are not limited to our hardwired morality. Moral sentiments can spread through family, community, religion and other means. Therefore, it is possible that more moral societies (societies in which tyranny is more restricted) are possible.
But what is morality? This is where my views are likely to become contentious. Morality is an expression of aesthetic taste regarding the actions of humans. To say “giving to the poor is good” means that I derive satisfaction from reading about, seeing or participating in giving to the poor and this satisfaction is a passive satisfaction, like aesthetic satisfaction. Satisfaction of a moral ideal is unlike the satisfaction of consumption because consumption is the attainment of an individual end. Satisfaction of a moral ideal is often the result of the action of others and, therefore, cannot be an end. Satisfaction of a moral ideal with respect to one’s own actions is more complicated because it is intertwined with the means an individual chooses to attain his ends but I am not concerned with this aspect of morality here. But the satisfication of a moral ideal with respect to the actions of others is more like listening to music or observing a painting. My view is that the internal preference or dispreference which is experienced in reaction to a piece of art (aesthetic taste) and the internal preference or dispreference which is experienced in reaction to the behavior of others (morality) are of the same species.
This implies that the consequences of people’s aesthetic faculty are immense… a society with bad taste and a society with bad morals suffer from the same root problem. It also implies that moral nihilism and aesthetic nihilism are more closely linked than just by analogy to one another, they are both species of the same idea. Consider this “Piano Concerto” by the modern composer John Cage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SmXNDYlNJM
You only need to listen to the first 30 seconds or so to get an idea of the how the whole piece goes. Such “music” is not merely an expression of poor taste, it is actually an expression of moral nihilism. Noise is music is noise. Wrong is right is wrong. It’s all the same. Any distinction between beauty and ugliness is purely in the mind of the observer and is, therefore, arbitrary. Any distinction between right and wrong is arbitrary for the same reason.
And this is how I’ve become an aesthetic fundamentalist. Not only is Cage’s “Piano Concerto” not music, it is pretentious, self-gratifying shit. For a human being, beauty and ugliness are not arbitrary because there is something that it means to be a human being (this idea is similar to, yet importantly different from, Rothbard’s idea of human nature), there is certain wiring in our brain that predisposes us to prefer symmetry, variation on a theme and the elements of rhythm, melody and harmony that most music exhibits. These preferences are purely subjective (this is where I differ from Rothbard) which is why pathological cases are possible… there are people who really like John Cage’s music. Morality, likewise, is not arbitrary for the same reasons our tastes in music, visual art or even food are not arbitrary. Nature wired us to recoil in disgust at certain actions of others and to react with admiration towards other actions of others. There are the sociopaths who really do not experience ordinary moral reactions and some of them slice people open for fun and others go into politics. Morality, like art, is subjective but not arbitrary.
On a related note, I think the link between the arts and morality goes to help explain why the world’s most powerful religions are so concerned about art - what is permissible, what is impermissible, what should be subsidized and what should be suppressed.
In conclusion, I think that to stop at criticizing the monopoly on force and legalized aggression is to stop far short of the root problem. Buttressing the modern State are perversions in our legal system and buttressing these are perversions in our moral sense and aesthetic sense. Hence, promotion of good morals and good taste are central to the project of tearing down the State and correcting the many ills of modern society. The Renaissance in the arts and humanities came first, classical liberalism came later. The National Endowment for the Arts, the subsidy of arts programs in public schools and universities, the preoccupation of the religious leaders in the world’s largest religious organizations with what people see on television or hear on the radio… these are all vehicles for the perversion of good taste and good morals. The attack on the arts began in earnest in the early 20th century. Its effects can be seen everywhere from the dull grey prison-like concrete architecture of the modernists to Lady Gaga. Gone are the Vermeers and the Wagners. The most powerful people in the world - the Pope, European monarchs, David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, etc. - spend a great deal of time, energy and money in the arts and influencing organizations which spend public money on the arts. Do you really think they are all just big art buffs?
Clayton -