Defending the weak, the powerless and scoundrels.

I recently received a phone call from Dr. Nathaniel Branden regarding some projects he is working on. That actually compelled my curiosity about some tapes of his that I had, but which I had not previously listened to. The lecture was on “Objectivism: Past and Future” and it included an extended Q&A period.

He made a comment, well into that session, that I thought was extremely important. While he was specifically referring to Objectivism, what he said applies to libertarianism or classical liberalism as well. He said the first chore of the Objectivist is to become a decent human being.

It seems to me that is a rather radical statement. First, it is radical because so many Objectivists are just unpleasant, bitter, angry people. While that problem is not as prevalent among libertarians in general, it is still true enough. There are just too many people who seem to lack human decency.

By human decency I am not saying that one must sacrifice for the sake of others. I’m not talking about self-destruction. I simply mean being pleasant, showing common courtesy, generosity and kindness. I can’t fathom why some libertarians find that so hard.

I had some pretty awful knocks in my life, especially when I was young. Born premature it was questionable whether I would survive. One result was that I was small for my age. And lots of kids, for whatever reason, enjoy bullying kids smaller than themselves --- of course they don’t bully kids bigger than themselves. Between that, and other situations, I got knocked around a lot.

And one thing it taught me was the value of kindness and the importance of sticking up for people. A lot of people get knocked around, sometimes they deserve some of it but get far more than they should. Sometimes they deserve none of it.

Nothing infuriates me more than seeing someone who is in a “weak” position being set up by bullies or a gang. That gang might be organized interest groups, society at large or even the State -- actually often the State.

I think one reason that I find liberty important is that it is so necessary to those people who are weaker or easy targets.

The powerful always do well for themselves in a Statist society. Big government helps the powerful. At best the powerless are just the excuse for accumulating more power, but in truth that power rarely helps them -- and I don’t think it can help them. I don’t believe compulsion and coercion can help the powerless or less powerful. They are “outgunned” by definition.

I have always felt compelled to speak out and defend others who are being picked on. No doubt because I know what is like to be in their shoes. And I will be the first to admit this has sometimes caused problems. If you defend someone who is being bullied you are often asking the bullies to redirect their attention to you. I know that and still I find that I have to do what I believe to be right.

Liberty is the right thing to do. I am a libertarian because it is the only way to morally deal with other people. I don’t want to force them into meeting my expectations. At most I can try to persuade them to change. I am not opposed to using a just amount of force in self-defense, so I am not opposed to society using some force against those who violate the rights of others.

But I know that the bully syndrome is always present. When you allow the use of force against some people the bullies will be there lobbying for expanding the numbers, or kinds of people, against whom this force may be used. On the playground the bullies usually did not use this force with the moral sanction of the school. But, in modern society, government uses force with the moral sanction of society -- or at least most of society.

This makes things much worse because it means that the bullies find it much easier to justify overstepping the proper limits placed on them. HL Mencken once said that the defense of liberty often requires defending scoundrels because it is scoundrels who are first targets of government for illegitimate treatment. If governments get away with treating the scoundrels badly then they will slowly expand the numbers they treat in a similar manner.

If you haven’t defended scoundrels along the way then I suggest you haven’t defended liberty. In targeting these people the State begins the process of whittling away the liberties of all. It is often said that such victims of big government are on the “fringes”. And that is true.

Liberty is sort of like a rug with some pretty natty fringes that are hanging off the sides. If you cut off the fringes you notice that they don’t disappear. All you have done is move the fringes closer to the center. That part of the rug, which is left on the edge, is now the new fringe. If you keep cutting away at the fringes you eventually have destroyed the entire rug.

When alleged terrorists are tortured by the U.S. government it is important to speak out in opposition. But not because you love terrorists, but because you love liberty and human rights. A government that is free to torture can’t be a proper government. And if you think such torture will only be used on the guilty you are about as naive as is it possible to be.

All throughout history there have been unsavory individuals who have been treated unfairly. Defending their rights is not the same thing as defending their unsavory actions. But the bullies will do their best to confuse those issues.

Now and then, we see our society turn into something akin to a lynch mob. When you see a large mob of people, united in anger against some lone individual or small group of individuals, the chances are pretty good that the mob will be in the wrong. Members of mobs lose their moral judgement very easily and they do things in passion which are not justified when viewed in the calm light of reason.

The mob is always passionate. They thrive on their passion. But having “passion” is often just an excuse for behaving inhumanely. When passion inflicts pain on others ,it is not passion, it is sadism.

There are times when the target of hatred deserves judgement. But if we allow our passions to control our actions we often take a bad situation and make it worse. I can think of numerous cases where problems were real but the solutions were deadly. Speaking out against bad solutions is not defending the problem.

A clear example of that is the war on drugs. I think illegal drugs, that inhibit one’s ability to act rationally, are a problem. I think prohibition makes the problems worse. Drug addicts do some unpleasant things, but so do alcoholics. And in my life, it was the alcoholics who did the most harm. But banning alcohol wouldn’t make the general situation better. It would just create a new, larger set of problems. Sometimes doing less is doing more. Sometimes by pulling back you don’t inflict harm on top of harm.

Legalizing drugs doesn’t solve the problems of drug addiction. Those problems exist whether these substances are legal or illegal. But legalization does address the problems of drug prohibition. And the problems of prohibition are greater than the problems of drug use. Doing less, in this case, does more because it reduces harms and makes people better off.

I try to fulfil Dr. Branden’s suggestion and do my best to be a decent human being. I know I fail, and I fail far too often. There were times I was unthoughtful and for that I’m sorry. No doubt I’ve lost my patience too often. And I fear that there were times when I should have spoken out and I remained silent.

No doubt there were times when I spoke out and I shouldn’t have -- when I was in the wrong. But ,I would rather be faulted for defending too many of the weak, the powerless, and even the scoundrels, then to defend far too few of them.

I am one of those people who would rather see a guilty man go free than an innocent man be imprisoned. Far more injustice is done by defending too few people, than by defending too many.

For me, basic decency means respecting the rights of others, it means courtesy, kindness and fairness. But it also means defending those who most need defending, the victims of the mob mentality, the targets of the bullies of society. It means standing up for the weak and the powerless and sometimes it means defending scoundrels.

I have come to one important conclusion about this. If the weak, the powerless and the scoundrels have their rights respected then we all are safe. Each and every one of us is more secure because of it. Ours is a more humane society and a stronger one.

Why atheists, humanists and libertarians should embrace alternative schooling.

Yesterday I reported on the role of fundamentalist extremism in causing a rise in the number, and loudness, of atheists in America. This was inspired by an article in the Washington Post on the new atheists. A second article on the topic has now appeared in the Post as part of a series of article on beliefs about religion.

The growth of atheism among young people is truly astounding. I have believed, for a couple of years now, that American fundamentalists were in trouble. They have overreached for power and they were too closely identified with Bush. They were pissing off a lot of people including other Christians and they were, as the saying goes, cruising for a bruising. And they are getting it.

In the 1980s about 11% of young people, ages 18 to 25, in Pew survey identified themselves as atheists, non-believers, agnostic or as having no religion. A follow up Pew poll that would have been done toward the end of last year said that the number had risen to 20%. The Post article mentions a recent Barna survey on religious beliefs and says “one in four four adults ages 18 to 22 describes themselves as having no faith.”

If the Barna survey is correct that means the increase in self-identified atheists, among the young, is continuing at a rather astounding pace. I remember reading a New York Times piece on the social/camming network, Stickam, which is mainly occupied by young people. I read a few articles on the site and similar ones and then browsed through the site. I randomly read the “profiles” which users left for themselves. And I remember being surprised by the number of users, mostly young, who described themselves as atheists.

The article also mentioned another phenomenon based on classical liberal principles -- the rise of alternative schooling. And that is the main thrust of what I have to write about today. The Post said that “charter schools based on humanist principles have opened in New York City and Florida” in recent years along with summer camps for kids of atheists. The alternative education principle is one I have promoted here. Too many non-conservatives, mainly progressives, have seen alternative, non-state education as a means of pushing religion and other Religious Right values.

But last February, when Utah passed a state-wide voucher system (now being opposed heavily by the self-serving teacher’s unions), I wrote:

I would like to see good quality, secular, private schools teaching kids. Instead of bitching about private education mainly being run by religious groups secular liberals need to open their own schools. Consider this my friends on the Left. You can have a school where you don’t have to turn over the ID data to the military for recruitment as you do with state schools. You can have a school where you don’t have to have some fundamentalist nutter come in with his version of sex education -- as you do in the public schools. You don’t have to worry about some board of education forcing theology on you in the form of so-called Intelligent Design.

The non-believing community ought to be embracing alternative schooling. Oddly, for decades, they were the leaders in the field. Until the late 1960s alternative education in America, outside the Catholic school system, was almost entirely operated by humanists, progressives and secularists. But when racial integration became prominent thousands of “Christian” schools were created in order to continue segregation.

Unfortunately most people have notoriously short memories. They don’t remember the work of Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society. It goes much further back than that. Joseph Neef founded three humanist oriented schools in the US between the years 1809 and 1827. Montessori began her first school in 1907, and Rudolf Steiner started his first school in 1919. By the 50s, 60s and 70s the alternative education movement was dominated by people like Paul Goodman, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol and Illich.

All this was forgotten by the tsunami of “Christian” segregated schools that rose up almost overnight. And in reaction to that non-conservatives clung to the state education system. The problem for them is the problem for the Religious Right today. The state is a cumbersome leviathan that creates chaos and conflict wherever it goes. If there is a job to be done they will screw it up. To have one’s ideas associated with the perpetual destruction imposed by big government is the kiss of death.

Decent, humanist schools are possible. And with various voucher programs where funding follows the students good, secular schools can be created much more easily than ever before. And it can be done without the artificial conflict created by monopolistic education. In addition such schools can't be controlled centrally by some third-rate Texas politician and changed from above. Sex education, courses I would support in a private school, became abstinence courses across the US because of the now heavily centralized, and federally funded, nature of education. This couldn't happen nearly as easily with a decentralized network of humanist schools.

I suspect one of the great tragedies of libertarian politics in recent years has be the Quixotic political campaigns for candidates with little, or no, chance of winning. These campaigns act like black holes that suck up and destroy vast financial resources and activists leaving nothing in their wake to speak of. A campaign that consumes millions of dollars, and in a few times will end, eats up enough funding to open several alternative, libertarian-oriented, secular schools. That money would not only fund them but allow them to be tuition free for years. Of course if tuition is charged the schools would could go on a lot longer.

Bob LeFevre was closer to the mark than most modern libertarians when he founded Freedom School in 1957. But instead of only educating adults he should have expanded into all ages and opened an alternative schooling system. Considering that some of his teachers included Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, Leonard Reader, Gordon Tullock, Bruno Leoni, Ludwig von Mises, and Frank Chodorov -- what a school it would have been, even if they only gave guest lectures now and then.

Any group that wants to change a culture has to change minds. Political campaigns are short-term, sound bites. They reflect already existing views, they don’t create them. They follow trends, they don’t start them. What starts trends is the minds of people changing. And that is an educational process and politics is poor at educating anyone.

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Photo: Marie Montessori.