from the site:
Talking Philosophy
The real reason why libertarians become climate-deniers
Posted by _Rupert Read_ (http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?author=26) on
May 24, 2014
We live at a point in history at which the demand for individual freedom
has never been stronger — or more potentially dangerous. For this demand —
the product of good things, such as the refusal to submit to arbitrary
tyranny characteristic of ‘the Enlightenment’, and of bad things, such as the
rise of consumerism at the expense of solidarity and sociability —
threatens to make it impossible to organise a sane, collective democratic
response
to the immense challenges now facing us as peoples and as a species. ”How
dare you interfere with my ‘right’ to burn coal / to drive / to fly; how
dare you interfere with my business’s ‘right’ to pollute?” The form of such
sentiments would have seemed plain bizarre, almost everywhere in the world,
until a few centuries ago; and to uncaptive minds (and un-neo-liberalised
societies) still does. …But it is a sentiment that can seem close to ‘
common sense’ in more and more of the world: even though it threatens to cut
off at the knees action to prevent existential threats to our collective
survival, let alone our flourishing.
Such alleged rights to complete (sic.) individual liberty are expressed
most strongly by ‘libertarians’.
Now, before I go any further (because you already know from my title that
this article is going to be tough on libertarians), I should like to say for
the record that some of my best friends (and some of those I most
intellectually admire) are libertarians. Honestly: I mean it. Being of a
libertarian cast of mind can be a sign of intellectual strength, of fibre; of
a
healthy iconoclasm. It can entail intellectual autonomy in its true sense. A
libertarian of one kind or another can be a joy to be around.
But too often, far too often, ‘libertarianism’ nowadays involves a fantasy
of atomism; and an unhealthy dogmatic contrarianism. Too often,
ironically, it involves precisely the dreary conformism so wonderfully
satirized at
the key moment in The life of Brian, where the crowd repeats, altogether,
like automata, the refrain “We are all individuals”. Too often, libertarians
to a man (and, tellingly, virtually all rank-and-file libertarians are
males) think that they are being radical and different: by all being exactly
the same as each other. Dogmatic, boringly-contrarian hyper-‘individualists’
with a fixed set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion. Adherents
of an ‘ism’, in the worst sense.
Such ‘libertarianism’ is an ideology that seems to have found its moment,
or at least its niche, in a consumerist economistic world that is fixated
on the alleged specialness and uniqueness of the individual (albeit that, as
already made plain, it is hard to square the notion that this is or could
be libertarianism’s ‘moment’ with the most basic acquaintance with the
social and ecological limits to growth as our societies are starting literally
to encounter them). ‘Libertarianism’ is evergreen in the USA, but,
bizarrely, became even more popular in the immediate wake of the financial
crisis
(A crisis caused, one might innocently have supposed, by too much license
being granted to many powerless and powerful economic actors: in the latter
category, most notably the banks and cognate dubious financial institutions
…). In the UK, it is a striking element in the rise to popularity of UKIP:
for, while UKIP is socially-regressive/reactionary, it is very much a
would-be libertarian party, the rich man’s friend, in terms of its economic
ambitions: it is for a flat tax, for ‘free-trade’-deals the world over, for a
bonfire of regulations, for the selling-off of our public services, and so
on. (Incidentally, this makes the apparent rise in working-class (or
indeed middle-class) support for UKIP at the present time an exemplary case of
turkeys voting for Christmas. Someone who isn’t one of the richest 1% who
votes UKIP is acting as a brilliant ally of their own gravediggers.)
This article concerns a contradiction at the heart of the contemporary
strangely-widespread ‘ism’ that is libertarianism. A contradiction that, once
it is understood, essentially destroys whatever apparent attractions it may
have. And, surprisingly, shows libertarianism now to be a closer ally to
cod-‘Post-Modernism’ or to the most problematic elements of ‘New Age’
thinking than to that of the Enlightenment…
Libertarianism likes to present itself as a philosophy or ideology that is
rigorously objective. Wedded to the truth, and rationality. Ayn Rand called
her cod-philosophy ‘Objectivism’. Tibor Machan and other well-known
libertarian philosophers today place a central emphasis on reason as their
guide. Libertarians like to think that they are honest, where others aren’t,
about ‘human nature’ (it’s thoroughly selfish), and like to claim that there
is something self-deceptive or propagandistically dishonest about
socialism, ecologism and other rival philosophies. Without its central claim
to
hard-nosed objectivity, truth and rationality, libertarianism would be
nothing.
But this central commitment is in profound tension with the libertarian
commitment, equally absolute, to ‘liberty’. For truth, truths, truthfulness,
rationality, objectivity, impose a ‘constraint’. A massive utterly
implacable constraint, on one’s license to do and believe and think whatever
one
wants. One cannot be Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty in a world of truth and reason.
One cannot intelligibly think that freedom of thought requires complete
license, or that moral freedom requires complete individual license, in such
a world.
The dilemma of the libertarian was already laid bare in the progress of the
thinking of a hero of some libertarians, Friedrich Nietzsche, in the great
third and final essay of his masterpiece THE GENEALOGY OF MORALITY.
Nietzsche can appear on a superficial reading of that essay to be endorsing a
kind of artistic disregard for truth; it turns out, as the essay follows its
remarkable course, that this is far from so; in fact, it is the opposite of
the truth. In the end, taking further a line of thought that he began in
the great fifth book of THE GAY SCIENCE, Nietzsche lines up as a fanatical
advocate of truth: he speaks of drawing the hard consequences of being no
longer willing to accept the lie of theism, and of “we godless metaphysicians”
as the true heirs of Plato: “Even we seekers after knowledge today”,
Nietzsche writes, “we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too,
from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian
faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth
is divine.”
He contrasts his stance with that of the legendary Assassins, who held that
“Nothing is true, [and therefore] everything is permitted”. He admires
their ambition, but absolutely cannot find himself able to simply agree with
what they said.
Contemporary libertarianism is stuck in a completely cleft stick: stuck
wanting to agree with Nietzsche’s considered position and yet wanting to
endorse something like the Assassins’ creed too. Libertarianism, centred as
its
name makes plain on the notion of ‘complete’ individual freedom,
inevitably runs up, sooner or later, against ‘shackles’: the limits imposed on
one’
s thought and action by adherence to truth. (Acknowledging the truth of
human-induced dangerous climate change is only the most obvious case of this;
there are many many others. )
This explains the extraordinary and pitiful sight of so many libertarians
finding themselves attracted to climate-denial and similarly pathetic
evasions of the absolute ‘constraint’ that truth and rationality force upon
anyone and everyone who is prepared to face the truth, at the present time.
Such denial is over-determined. Libertarians have various strong motivations
for not wanting to believe in the ecological limits to growth: such limits
often recommend state-action / undermine the profitability of some
out-of-date businesses (e.g. coal and fracking companies) that fund some
libertarian-leaning thinktank-work. Limits undermine the case for
deregulation. The
limits to growth evince a powerful case in point of the need for a
fundamentally precautious outlook: anathema to the reckless Promethean
fantasies that
animate much libertarianism. Furthermore: Libertarianism depends for its
credibility on our being able to determine what individuals’ rights are, and
to separate out individuals completely from one another. Our massive
inter-dependence as social animals in a world of ecology (even more so,
actually, in an internationalised and networked world, of course) undermines
this,
by making for example our responsibility for pollution a profoundly complex
matter of inter-dependence that flies in the face of silly notions of
being able to have property-rights in everything (Are we supposed to be able
to
buy and sell quotas in cigarette-smoke?: Much easier to deny that passive
smoking causes cancer.). Above all though: libertarians can’t stand to be
told that they don’t have as much epistemic right as anyone else on any
topic that they like to think they understand or have some ‘rights’ in
relation to: “Who are you to tell me that I have to defer to some scientist?”
This then reaches the nub of the issue, and explains the truly-tragic
spectacle of someone like Jamie Whyte — a critical thinking guru who made his
name as a hardline advocate of truth, objectivity and rationality arguing
(quite rightly, and against the current of our time, insofar as that current
is consumeristic, individualistic, and (therefore)
relativistic/subjectivistic) that no-one has an automatic right to their own
opinion (You have to
earn that right, through knowledge or evidence or good reasoning or the like)
— becoming a climate-denier. His libertarian love for truth and reason has
finally careened — crashed — right into and up against a limit: his
libertarian love for (big business / the unfettered pursuit of Mammon and,
more
important still) having the right to — the freedom to — his own opinion,
no matter what. A lover of truth and reason, driven to deny the most crucial
truth about the world today (that pollution is on the verge of collapsing
our civilisation); his subjectivising of everything important turning
finally to destroying his love for truth itself. . . Truly a tragic spectacle.
Or perhaps we should say: truly farcical.
The remarkable irony here is that libertarianism, allegedly congenitally
against ‘political correctness’ and other post-modern fads, allegedly a
staunch defender of the Enlightenment against the forces of unreason, has
itself become the most ‘Post-Modern’ of doctrines. A new, extreme form of
individualised relativism; an unthinking product of (the worst element of)
its/our time (insofar as this is a time of ‘self-realization’, and ultimately
of license). Libertarianism, including the perverse and deadly denial of
ecological constraints, is, far from being a crusty enemy of the ‘New Age’,
in this sense the ultimate bastard child of the 1960s.
To sum up. Libertarianism was founded on the love for truth and reason; but
it is founded also, of course, on the inviolability of the individual.
Taken to its ‘logical’ conclusion, truth itself is (felt as) an ‘imposition’
on the individual. The sovereign liberty of the self, in libertarianism,
is at ineradicable odds with the willingness to accept ‘others” truths. And
it is the former, sadly, which tends to win out. For, as we have seen, the
denial, by libertarians, of elementary contemporary scientific truths such
as that of the theory of greenhouse-gas-heat-build-up, is over-determined.
When truth clashes with a dogmatic insistence on one’s own complete’
freedom of mental and physical manouevre, and with profit; when the truth is
that we are going to have to rein in some of our appetites if we are to
bequeath a habitable world to our children’s children…then the truth is: that
truth itself is an obstacle easily overcome, by the will of weak
only-too-human libertarians.
The obsession of libertarians with individual liberty crowds out the value
of truth. In the end, their thinking becomes voluntaristic and contrarian
for the sake of it. They end up believing simply what they WANT to believe.
And, as explained above, they don’t WANT to accept the truths of ecology,
of climate science, etc. . And so they deny them.
As Wittgenstein famously remarked: the real difficulty in philosophy is one
of the will, more even than of the intellect. What is hard is to will
oneself to accept things that are true that one doesn’t want to believe, and
moreover that (in the case of some on the ‘hard’ Right) one’s salary or one’
s stock-options or one’s ability to live with oneself depend on one not
believing.
It takes strength, fibre, it takes a truly philosophical sensibility — it
takes a willingness to understand that intellectual autonomy in its true
sense essentially requires submission to reality — to be able to acknowledge
the truth; rather than to deny it.
=====================
Selected Reader Comments
The one virtue of the popular climate debate is that it is easy to spot the
difference between people dealing with arguments based on facts and people
spitting tribal hate speech. The terms are clear: denier, alarmist, scam,
hoax, conspiracy, shill. As soon as we see these, we know we are not in a
discussion about atmospheric physics, but listening in on what passes for
debate between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Nevertheless, It seems to me that the premise that in general left-ish,
collective-ish, green-ish people tend to focus on the most alarming range of
possibilities, while in general right-ish, individual-ish, free-market-ish
people tend to focus on the most reassuring range of possibilities, does
have some basis.
---
I think that you’ve outlined the best case for where this discussion should
head.
This is a philosophy blog, and as such, as you point out above, we should
be discussing ideas, not speculating on whether others are in the pay of the
coal lobby, the CIA, Mossad or the Kremlin.
We are all supposed to be rational adults, capable of judging the merits of
each others’ arguments, not swayed by the fact that someone may have
received a paycheck from the Vatican or the ghost of Hugo Chavez and even
though
we may not be as rational as we often imagine that we are, playing that we
are is how we play the game by the rules and it’s marvellous, literally
marvellous, that we manage to play our game by the rules in this world where
the rules matter so little.
---
an exchange-
1. _John Morgan_ (http://www.arktos.com/) _May 25, 2014 at 11:19 pm_
(http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7957#comment-426726)
2. Dear Prof. Read,
3. Thank you for this excellent article, your critique of the ideals
behind libertarianism are spot-on. The one thing I object to is that you
make it sound as if those who oppose the notion of
greenhouse-gas-heat-build-up do so on an irrational basis, in denial of a
truth which you and those
of like mind possess. This is not the case, since, as you say, it is a
theory, not a fact. It is a very good theory, but a theory nonetheless.
Certainly there are scientists who have arrived at the conclusion that this
interpretation of the data is incorrect, even if they are in the minority. So
I
think, in this instance, it is a mistake to frame it as a case of “truth”
versus “denial.”
4.
5.
Kyle Towers _May 25, 2014 at 11:43 pm_
(http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7957#comment-426771)
John, there is no rational basis for denying the truth of
greenhouse-gas-heat-build-up. You make the same mistake as creationists with
the “it’s
only a theory” error.
A scientific theory is not equivalent to the colloquial use of theory,
which ranges from meaning hypothesis to wild-ass guess. In science, a theory
is the highest level of knowledge; far above mere facts. It’s an explanation
that is consistent with the evidence, has withstood attempts to disprove
it, is consistent with all physical principles, and possesses both
explanatory and predictive powers. Unlike the denial propaganda, AGW fits this
description in its entirety. It has for a very long time.
There isn’t just a minority of dissenting conclusions. Among those actually
trained in related fields and researching climate, the number is
vanishingly small. Most quibble on a point or two. The handful that actually
deny
the core conclusions are – every one – ideologues and paid shills that have
long histories of dealing with facts and criticisms in ways that no
truth-seeking scientist would ever do. Every field has cranks. The majority of
denier “scientists” are like creationist biologists – engineers, lawyers, PR
specialists, weather men, at best, scientists working outside their field
and not actually working; not doing science.
--------------
I don’t know your location. Here in the US, denier has the recognized
meaning appropriate for “climatards”. How’s that for a politically incorrect
term?!
We don’t refer to holocaust denialists or science denialists. Denier is,
and long has been, the proper operative term here. In fact, I can’t recall
ever seeing or hearing the term applied to those who reject the findings of
climatology.
----
“In the UK, it is a striking element in the rise to popularity of UKIP:
for, while UKIP is socially-regressive/reactionary, it is very much a would-be
libertarian party, the rich man’s friend, in terms of its economic
ambitions: it is for a flat tax, for ‘free-trade’-deals the world over, for a
bonfire of regulations, for the selling-off of our public services, and so on.”
I can explain all this……hopefully, I can explain all this.
Now, I don’t know what the term for this is, but sometimes the words can
have completely different meanings for different people. In languages these
are false cognates. A word in German that looks similar to, or is spelled
the same as a word in English, may be the same word, and have the same
meaning. Or, it may not, and have a completely different meaning. Gift is an
example, it means poison in German. “Happy Christmas…I brought a poison for
you, your husband and children”…
The false cognates exist within languages. Freedom is one of those words.
It cannot be misunderestimated the diversity of interpretation of the word –
to the point the interpretations are in direct conflict. Naïve liberal
intellectuals often assume their interpretation of the word, with its’ implied
reciprocity is the universal interpretation. It is not. The right-wing
interpretation is the freedom from reciprocity itself. It’s the freedom to be
a racist. It’s the freedom treat your children as you please. It’s the
freedom to control who the woman who lives down the street sleeps with. The
freedom to exclude those who do not conform.
I’ll try to illustrate this further through explaining UKIP policies (they
do have policies). I’ll explain the ‘free trade’ policy – this goes over
so many heads, because it is just too loopy to believe someone is saying
it, but Nigel Farage is. Nigel wants the countries of the world to have free
trade policy for British goods and services…but he wants to institute
protectionist policies for British industries so they don’t have to compete
with
foreign goods and services. This is one reason he wants to take Britain
out of the EU. He wants access to the EU open market, but to close the
British market to the EU. It doesn’t make sense because it’s like a greedy
child
suggesting to another child, that they must share their sweets with them,
but that the greedy child gets to keep all their sweets and not share. In
the old days, Britain could enforce lopsided trade policy with gun boats –
it goes without saying, the world has changed, but some still dream.
Now, to explain American, or Tea Party freedom. What does all this ‘states
rights’ you keep hearing about actually mean. It means what it did in the
civil rights era.
Ecological concerns. Again it’s something similar. The CEO of Exxon is
suing to stop fracking near his home. He’s very concerned about the
environment…
.near his home.
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