Roderick T. Long

Archives: August 2004

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Anarchists and Terrorists

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Arthur Silber has joined the ranks of the anarchists! Welcome, Arthur! (He adds that his anarchism is only “provisional,” but we certainly don’t intend to let him leave ....)

In other news: check out this fascinating interview with internet-freedom activist and “suspected terrorist” John Gilmore.


Posted August 28th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#12

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Sand and Sun

You may have noticed a new item at the top of this page today (and again to the right here); this animated anti-draft pic comes from the Badnarik campaign. Cool, no?

(If the picture doesn’t change for you, your browser must be even more primitive than mine.)


Posted August 25th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#11

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When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, Is It Allah?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Apparently Pat Robertson is telling his followers that the God of Islam is actually a pagan moon god with no relation to the Judeo-Christian Biblical God. An internet search reveals that this silliness has become quite common on the Christian right.

Not being a Christian, Jew, or Muslim – nor a worshipper of a moon god, for that matter – I suppose I have no dog in this fight. (The one true god is of course Zeus, whom the Greek philosophers identified with reason or the logical structure of reality.) But c’mon!

The word “al-lah,” “al-ilah,” simply means “the god” in Arabic (thus mirroring the New Testament’s term for God – ho theos, “the god”). Christians and Jews writing in Arabic have always used the term “Allah” for the Judeo-Christian God; indeed, as the 6th-century Umm al-Jimal inscription in Jordan shows, Arabic Christians were using “Allah” as a term for God before Islam even arose. “Allah” means God the One and Only. Period.

Now it may well be true that the term “Allah” was also used in pre-Islamic times for a less impressive deity, a member of a polytheistic pantheon. But so what? As is well known, exactly the same is true of the Hebrew terms “Yahweh,” “El,” and “Elohim,” used in the Bible as names of God. Early Jewish tradition assigns Yahweh a wife, Asherah. The term “Yahweh” was used by the Moabites as another name for the Canaanite god Ba’al; indeed, “El,” “-ilah,” and “Ba’al” are all obvious cognates, and are recognised by Biblical scholars as having a common origin. And the word “Elohim” shows its polytheistic origins in its very structure: it is the result of adding a masculine plural ending to a feminine singular noun (thereby strangely deriving a masculine singular: “he is the goddess-men”). If Islam has pagan roots, so do Judaism and Christianity.

The fact that the Arabic term for God once referred merely to one god among many no more proves that Muslims today are worshipping a moon god than the fact that the Hebrew terms for God once referred merely to one god among many proves that Jews and Christians today are worshipping a tribal deity with many wives. Etymology is not theology. St. Paul had more sense than many of his modern followers when he accepted, as legitimate references to the Christian God, pagan Greek verses describing Zeus as an immaterial, monotheistic creator. What god one worships presumably has more to do with how one conceives of her than with what names one calls her. [For any Kripkeans who may be reading this: no, I’m not rejecting causal origin as irrelevant; I think it’s one, but only one, element in the disjunctive complex that determines a term’s meaning. But that’s a story for another day.]

So how does Islam conceive of God? Do Muslims in any interesting sense worship a “moon god”? The answer lies in the Qur’an, verses 6.75-79:

Thus did we show Abraham the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, that he might be among those possessing certainty:

When the night grew dark upon him, he beheld a star. He said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: I love not things that set.

And when he saw the moon rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: If my Lord had not guided me I should certainly be one of those who have gone astray.

And when he saw the sun rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord! This is the greatest! But when it set he cried: O my people! Behold, I am no longer deceived by your false encumbrances.

For surely I have turned my face toward him who created the heavens and the earth, as one by nature upright, and I am not of the idolaters.
In other words: moon god my ass.


Posted August 25th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#10

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Beyond the Ballot

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I have an article on Victor Hugo and democracy on LRC today.


Posted August 24th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#09

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The Second Empire Strikes Back

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The years 1848-1852 were particularly interesting times (in the Chinese sense) for France; I’m currently reading through accounts of this period by such contemporary witnesses as Tocqueville, Dunoyer, Proudhon, Molinari, Marx, and Hugo. (This was also of course the period in which the “problem of the best régime” was finally solved – in theory though alas not in practice – by Molinari in his works The Production of Security and Soirées on the Rue Saint-Lazare.) Some of these writers favoured the revolution of 1848 and some of them opposed it, but they all agreed in condemning the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852.

 Napoleon III - Now if that isn't a face you can trust .... Most recently I’ve been reading Hugo’s searing account (in Napoléon the Little and History of a Crime) of the December 1851 coup that brought Napoléon III to power, thus paving the way for the Second Empire. Hugo shared Acton’s and Rothbard’s conviction that the historian should be a hanging judge, and he levels unanswerable denunciations not only of the coup (and the mass detentions and mass murders attendant thereon), but also of the court intellectuals who whitewashed the crimes of the self-styled “Prince President” (a term I’m tempted to start using for Bush II) and glorified his oppressive and bloodthirsty modus operandi.

I was irresistibly reminded of Hugo’s account of the Empire by reading Jeff Tucker’s excellent critique of American conservatism on LRC today. As Tucker points out, today’s apologists for sanguinary statism, like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, are still “screaming for blood, exalting the imperial state, decrying the very basis of civilization (peace), and demanding the jailing of dissidents.” (Read it now.)

Hugo saw the Second Empire as an anachronism, a throwback to a less civilised era, and he felt confident that the peaceful and enlightened 20th century would see the end of such barbarism. On the contrary, of course (as Molinari among others predicted quite clearly), the 20th century mostly followed the model of the Second Empire – and the 21st so far seems to be following suit.


Unrelated P.S. - In addition to the MP3 and PDF versions of my anarchy talk to which I previously linked, there is now an HTML version.


Posted August 21st, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#08

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More Anarchy Is Upon Us!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Last week I linked to an audio file of my Mises Institute anarchism talk. There’s now a written transcript online as a PDF file here.


Posted August 18th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#07

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Anti-Gouging Idiocy

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized
discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.”
But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on
economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.


– Murray N. Rothbard


In the wake of Hurricane Charley, we’re seeing the usual governmental threats of violence against “price gougers.” This is such an insane policy that even the barest acquaintance with economic principles should be enough to expose it as the disastrous bungle it is – but economic ignorance seems to know no limits.

So let’s haul out the Econ 101 basics. Here’s how the market’s self-correction mechanism works.

When there’s a shortage of some good, what needs to happen? Obviously, production of the good needs to be increased – and in the meantime, consumption needs to be rationed. This is precisely what the price system accomplishes: the shortage of the good gives sellers an incentive to raise prices. This in turn simultaneously signals the consumers to constrain their consumption of that good and gives producers an incentive to step up their production and provision of that good. As a result, the shortage is redressed. (The same corrective process, in reverse, occurs in response to a glut.)

Now what happens when government imposes a price ceiling? The economy’s self-healing signals are suppressed. By preventing the price from rising, government causes the good to be supplied in smaller quantities than it would otherwise be. As a result, the shortage is prolonged.

Would it be nice if, in the wake of a catastrophe, sellers provided necessary goods at below the new market price, out of the goodness of their hearts? Sure; if some charitable sellers are willing and able to do that, that’s great. But anybody who’s going to do that will do it with or without the anti-gouging laws; and if they can provide sufficient quantities to address the shortage, would-be “gougers” aren’t going to make any profits anyway. If “gougers” are making profits, that shows that there are too few charitable sellers to cure the shortage; the prospect of making profits at the new, higher market price is what draws “gougers” into the market. The sane response would be to welcome in the “gougers”; competition among them will quickly restore supply and eliminate the shortage (thus eliminating the opportunity for further “gouging” as well). Instead, government bans the “gougers” and so perpetuates the shortage. Following up a natural disaster with the artificial disaster of anti-gouging laws simply compounds the problem; first people get hit by a hurricane, which causes the shortage, and then they get hit by the government, which fights tooth and nail the market’s attempts to fix the shortage. The best analogy to anti-gouging laws would be a doctor who keeps ripping the scabs off his patients’ wounds as fast as they form.

Price controls cause and maintain shortages. Always and everywhere. This is one of the simplest and most basic economic laws there is. It’s known to anyone who knows even the rudiments of economic reasoning (a description which apparently does not apply to our elected officials). Nor do the laws of economics suddenly go into abeyance because there’s been an emergency; those are not among the laws that rulers have the power to suspend.

Is it a bad thing when hurricane victims have to pay extra-high prices for necessities? Of course (just as it’s a bad thing when you’ve got scabs forming on your body). And any (peaceful) measures that can get those goods to the people who need them at a lower price, or even for free, would be worth supporting. But anti-gouging laws do not replace high-price opportunities to buy necessities with an equal number of low-price opportunities to buy the same necessities; instead, they reduce the total number of such opportunities in the present and extend that reduction farther into the future. In the face of catastrophic shortages, no governmental response could be more criminal.


Posted August 15th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#06

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Anarchy Is Upon Us!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

At the Mises University on the evening of August 6th, I was assigned to be the “mystery speaker.” Jeff Tucker asked me to pick a controversial subject, so I picked anarchism (though I’m not sure that counts as a controversial subject before that particular audience!).

Anyway, an MP3 audio file of my talk is now online here. I talk about some of the chief objections to anarchism and I offer counter-arguments. (One issue I don’t talk about is military defense under anarchy, but for that issue see my anarchist resources page.) I find the sound of my voice somewhat annoying, and the sound of my laugh incredibly annoying (it all sounds so much better in my head than it does from the outside), but hey, it’s what I’ve got.


Posted August 12th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#05

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Prisoners of the Helix?

I’ve argued previously (see my 25 September 2002 post Slip Out of Those Genes) that sociobiological theories to the effect that certain patterns of action are genetically determined are self-defeating because inconsistent with free will.

A number of readers have asked me whether my position is consistent with the genetic determination of preferences (as opposed to actions). Well, it depends. In the case of praxeological preferences – i.e., those preferences that are embodied in action – then obviously the answer must be no, since if actions are not determined, neither are their logical constituents.

But what about psychological or thymological preferences – i.e., those desires and impulses that may or may not be acted on? Here things get more complicated.

For Wittgensteinians like me, the connection between having such desires and acting on them, while less direct and necessary than in the case of praxeological preferences (Wittgenstein would call it a “loose joint”), is still conceptual rather than merely causal. In short, the possession of a given desire is not logically compatible with any and all patterns of action, but only with some. Hence we can influence what desires we count as having, to the extent that we freely determine which patterns of action we instantiate.

It follows that habituation – the fact that “use almost can change the stamp of nature” by making actions easier through repetition – is no mere empirical datum but a logically necessary feature of all free agency. It also follows that the extent to which genetic endowments constrain people’s destinies is severely limited. (For a defence of the claim that we have more control over our “innate impulses” than we might seem to, see Sartre’s classic monograph The Emotions: Outline of a Theory.)

But what about cases where identical twins, separated at birth, meet up years later and discover that they dress alike, have similar tastes, have chosen similar careers, etc.? Doesn’t this show that people’s preferences are genetically determined? (Of course no empirical data can literally disprove an a priori praxeological theorem – but such data can always legitimately prompt us to check whether we have reasoned correctly.)

In fact it’s no surprise that such cases occur. I’ve previously granted that our genes can determine what pattern of activity we’re likely to start with; if genetically similar agents often end up pursuing similar patterns of activity, all that shows is that most people follow the path of least resistance. And we already knew that! Genetic influences, like environmental influences, are just as powerful as we allow them to be – and most people are too lazy to resist. (By laziness I mean, of course, a chosen pattern of activity, not a genetic predisposition.)

I’ve been talking about preferences, not abilities. Nothing I’ve said rules out the possibility of a role for genetics in determining innate abilities. Even here, though, we must be careful, for many things that look like abilities have preference-based components. For example, much (though admittedly not all) of what we call “intelligence” is a matter of what we pay attention to, which in turn is partly a matter of ability but partly also a matter of desire and will.


Posted August 12th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#04

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Molinari Society Update

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The first Molinari Symposium has been scheduled! The venue is the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Boston, December 28th. The topic is “Libertarianism and Feminism.” The participants include Elizabeth Brake, Charles Johnson, Jennifer McKitrick, Aeon Skoble, and your humble correspondent. More details here.


Posted August 11th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#03

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News from the Front

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Q: How many Austrian economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We don’t make quantitative predictions.

I’ve just finished a week of Mises University, lecturing on apriorism, abstraction, and anarchy. It’s encouraging to see the hordes of bright, committed, hardcore Austro-libertarian students that come to these conferences; the ruling class has no idea what’s about to hit it in a few years.

My JLS article Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism is now online. (And for an earlier but longer draft see here.) I argue that despite the Taoists’ good press among libertarians, it was actually the Confucians who were the truest forerunners of libertarianism in ancient China.

I’ve been reading Tocqueville’s and Hugo’s memoirs about the 1848 revolution. Their ability to delineate, with a few brief anecdotes and descriptions, the character of the principals on the various sides is devastatingly effective.

I see in the news that the U.S. puppet régime in Iraq has temporarily (?) banned the al-Jazeera network. Apparently those pesky al-Jazeera reporters “have been showing a lot of crimes and criminals on TV,” which “transfer[s] a bad picture about Iraq.” So this paternal time-out is intended to give those nattering nabobs of negativism “a chance to re-adjust their policy against Iraq.”

Um ... Operation Iraqi what again?


Posted August 8th, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#02

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To Serve Man

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Two weeks ago I discussed what I called the “paradox of religious conservatism” – namely, the fact that those who are allegedly dedicated to the supremacy of spirit over matter are in practice committed to subordinating the spiritual aspects of human life to the merely biological aspects. The latest confirmation of this comes in the form of an anti-feminist screed from the Vatican titled On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World.

While the insulting phrase “a woman is not a copy of a man” (insulting in its implication that feminists do regard woman as a “copy of a man”), which news reports have most often quoted from the document, does not in fact appear to occur in it, the rambling diatribe certainly does condemn the “human attempt to be freed from one’s biological conditioning,” and complains that among feminists “physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary.”

For the Vatican, by contrast, women’s biological role as mothers determines their spiritual destiny, which is – you guessed it – a “capacity for the other.” As I’ve noted before (see here and here), one of the strategies of patriarchy is to define the function of women as fundamentally other-directed. Of course the Vatican document is quick to assure us that “in the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be ‘for the other’” (as if such a celebration of servility would be any more palatable if the servility were reciprocal) – but women, we are told, are “more immediately attuned to these values,” and it is their task to “live them with particular intensity and naturalness.” One of the chief function of women, the Vatican opines, is to serve as a “sign” of this doctrine of universal servility by exemplifying the distinctively feminine virtues of “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting,” and thereby “recalling these dispositions to all the baptized.”

In short, although every human being is called to self-immolation, women are supposed to specialise in it – and all because of the reproductive role that nature happens to have assigned them. Isn’t this precisely the biology-worship I’ve been complaining of? (Needless to say, these men in dresses also have no patience for those who “call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father” and “make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent.” Here too, the spiritual must be subordinated to the biological rather than vice versa.)

The Vatican anticipates the charge of biology-worship and seeks to rebut it. Although “motherhood is a key element of women’s identity,” this “does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation”; on the contrary, the “Christian vocation of virginity” contradicts “any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny.” (Of course, for a religion that condemns birth control, virginity is the only alternative to motherhood on offer.) Still, virginity is described as a kind of metaphorical extension of biological motherhood:

Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.
In short, even women who are not mothers in the literal sense are still expected to model their human interactions on motherhood in a way that goes beyond what is asked of men. The Vatican, more subtle than its Baptist brethren (no surprise there!), insists that woman’s role as a “helpmate” marks her not as an “inferior,” but rather as a “vital helper” on a man’s “own level” – but all the same it is woman, not man, whose essence is defined in this other-regarding way. It is femininity, not masculinity, that is defined as “the fundamental human capacity to live for the other and because of the other.” (From an individualist perspective, what greater insult to women can be imagined?)

The Vatican seeks to evade the charge of biology-worship by insisting that male and female are not purely biological categories. (Though when feminists say precisely this, the Vatican attacks them for emphasising gender over sex!) Although the “temporal and earthly expression of sexuality” is “transient and ordered to a phase of life marked by procreation and death,” the distinction between male and female is described as “belonging ontologically to creation” and therefore as “destined … to outlast the present time,” albeit “in a transfigured form.” Those who in the present life take vows of celibacy “for the sake of the Kingdom” are prefiguring “this form of future existence of male and female.” But far from being the negation of biology-worship, this point of view elevates women’s biological role in reproduction to a metaphysical principle entailing special duties of feminine servility from which even the grave will apparently offer no escape. (Though insofar as feminine self-immolation is supposed to be an inspiring model for men to imitate, this conception is no picnic for either sex. Thus patriarchy and altruism are complementary parts of an interlocking system that oppresses both men and women – albeit not equally.)

The Vatican throws a sop to the feminists by acknowledging that “women should be present in the world of work and in the organization of society,” and “should have access to positions of responsibility.” But can women really be expected to compete on equal terms when they must also shoulder the special burden of serving as a visible “sign” of the servile virtues?

The Vatican also pays women the old false compliment of a special feminine “sense and … respect for what is concrete,” as “opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society.” That sounds very nice; but propagating such a view of women is hardly likely to enhance their success in intellectual careers. (Admittedly some feminists have made precisely the same mistake, trumpeting hostility to abstraction as some sort of liberating “feminine voice” and “ethics of care,” when in fact such stereotypes are more plausibly regarded as artefacts of women’s subjection.)

The document’s tepid support for women’s “access to positions of responsibility” is vitiated by its condemnation of feminists who “emphasize strongly conditions of subordination” and urge women to “make themselves the adversaries of men.” Should feminists ignore the existing conditions of subordination? It is such conditions, and not those who point them out, that are responsible for adversarial relations between men and women. The goal of feminists is to abolish these adversarial relations by abolishing the conditions of subordination that maintain them.

The Vatican’s insistence that men and women are equal partners is likewise belied by the document’s stress on the “importance and relevance” of the fact that in incarnating himself as Jesus Christ, God “assumed human nature in its male form.” Even for those who accept the (to my mind blasphemous and un-Biblical) notion that God once became a human being, one might have thought that he picked a male form for the simple reason that a female preacher in first-century Palestine would have had even more trouble gaining a hearing than Jesus did. But the Vatican apparently sees it as signifying that divinity is more appropriately expressed in male rather than female form. Thus patriarchy is undergirded by patriolatry.

In one of his better moments, St. Paul wrote that in Christ “there is neither male nor female.” (Galatians 3:28.) In short, our physical biology does not determine our spiritual vocation. The Vatican document ingeniously interprets this passage in precisely the opposite sense, to mean that “the distinction between man and woman is reaffirmed more than ever,” in that the “rivalry” which has “disfigured the relationship between men and women” will be replaced with harmony once the sexes reconcile themselves to their Church-assigned roles. In short, the ideal held out to women is: peace through surrender.

To this, the only proper answer can be: no peace without justice!

Écrasez l’infâme!


Posted August 1st, 2004

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog08-04.htm#01

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