Race, Hypocrisy, and Basketball

There are various types of wrong opinions about race.  Racial prejudice consists of disliking, refusing to associate with, or disapproving of or liking, wanting to associate with, or approving of a person on the basis of his race or ethnic group. The error and the unfairness of this lie in judging a person on the basis of something irrelevant to his character, behavior, and capabilities and over which he had no choice. Racial bigotry is the practice of attributing bad or good (though usually bad) characteristics to members of a race or ethnic group indiscriminately  – such as claiming all Jews are mercenary and crooked or all  blacks are  brutal and stupid or all Englishmen are cultured and well educated. Racism is the doctrine that members of a particular race or ethnic group are necessarily and intrinsically inferior or superior to others on the basis of their membership in the race or group. 

It is not pedantic to make distinctions among the three, because the differences  matter.  Each of the second two is worse than the one(s) listed before it, being both more unreasonable and foolishly wrong and also liable to produce worse consequences. Racial prejudice alone, unless it is very pervasive within a society,  usually stops with bad, rude, and boorish individual social behavior.  Bigotry when widepread  in a society can lead to  large scale violence, systematic invidious discrimination,and  unjust laws, and even when uncommon often stimulates conflict and criminal activity. Besides all the wrongs associated the first two, racism can lead and has led to caste systems, race based  enslavement, and mass murder and even when  lacking many adherents and politically powerless inculcates brutal and inhumane attitudes and behavior. 

At present the apparently quite unpleasant owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA is being castigated for some rude things he said in private about black people. The man’s comments and opinions as reported fall into the category of boorish racial prejudice,  perhaps tinged with a touch of bigotry. A little while ago in the news,  famous rapper and associate of the president Jay Z publicly announced his affinity for people and opinions explicitly racist in the exact sense of the term.

It is useful to consider the two cases together. While assorted media and political queens of hearts are screaming for the team owner’s head or at least his property, there was scarcely a peep about the rapper’s saying something far worse by the standards espoused by those attacking the other man.  People operating fairly on the basis of thought out principles usually do not behave with that much inconsistency. Hypocrites, parroting ignoramuses, and phonies, on the other hand, do it all the time. These two cases present  another illustration that, while the Victorians may have had their hypocrisy and inconsistency on sex, our age’s treatment of race matches them and perhaps then some.  Future generations may  get the same sort of good laugh from it. 

True, But Irrelevant

The defining libertarian political principle is the idea that every person owns his own life, and others should not use coercion against him unless he has committed crimes against them.  Anarchists have argued that by the mere acts of funding their activities through extortion and asserting  authority over people who have not consented to it explicitly, all governments violate this principle.  Many libertarian thinkers have worked vigorously to try to refute  this claim – unsuccessfully and, I think, unnecessarily. The fact is the anarchists are right in their observation, but it does not matter that they are right, because the conclusions they draw from it are wrong. For it does not follow at all from the fact that all governments, even strictly limited ones, violate people’s rights to some degree that a society without a government would  produce the maximum attainable levels of liberty and respect for people’s rights.  Nor can anarchists produce examples  in history where such societies thrived or plausibly could have thrived. Rather, if anything,  the evidence of history indicates an anarchist  society would not survive long  as a free one before being subjugated by external enemies or torn apart by internal conflicts with those within it who did not accept its principles, leaving its inhabitants with less liberty than they might have enjoyed otherwise.  (Of course small anarchic communities have existed and thrived from time to time, but, as far as I can tell, only under the umbrella  of some state or in very remote and effectively unvisited places.)

In any particular context  the goal of libertarian political action should be to work for the freest society possible within that context while seeking  to alter  the context in directions making more liberty possible.  The context and understanding it are crucial for making specific decisions. For example during most of  the 19^th Century the United States faced no significant threat from foreign enemies and had no need for a large army. Friends of liberty would have been right to oppose creating one. But during the awful summer of 1940, creating huge and powerful American armed forces as quickly as possible was the least bad alternative the situation allowed, and friends of liberty would have been right and serving the cause of liberty to support doing so.

Recognizing the importance of context does not mean descending to cynicism or utilitarianism or abandoning ideals. It means only getting the facts and taking them into account before deciding what to do, something which is usually a good idea in just about any area if a person cares about the outcome of what he is setting out to do.

As to the anarchists, if they can find a large group of people reasonable, peaceful, and just enough to live freely and harmoniously with disputes between individuals or organizations solved by referring them to mutually acceptable, voluntarily chosen arbiters and a place for them never needing protection from outside enemies and free of violent, disruptive internal discord, they should go for it and  send the rest of us gloating postcards  from their new utopia.  It would nice to believe that someday and somewhere such a society might be possible, but I know of no such people or place ever having existed. So we need governments. Thomas Paine, as usual, said it very well. Government at its best is a necessary evil. The trick is to prevent its being an intolerable one.

Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise

I love reading Spinoza. He is one of my favorite philosophers. His writings are often profound and meet the basic test of being concerned mainly  with how people should live and behave in the real world, the latter being a hurdle  surprisingly few philosophers clear.  His Ethics is his most famous and influential book and contains many fine insights.  (Of course one cannot take his claim to prove his opinions with mathematical precision seriously, but it is still a very good book.) The less well known Theologico-Political Treatise is also a very important work and one useful for understanding his thoughts and interests. He gave himself a very difficult assignment – defending freedom of thought and conscience, retaining what he sees as the valid ethical imperatives of the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity while criticizing and opposing their mythological and superstitious doctrines and assertions, and being subtle and ambiguous enough to avoid persecution in an age when persecution of deviation from orthodoxy was common. His solution was to declare recognition of  an omnipresent and all powerful supreme being and leading a life of justice and benevolence toward one’s fellow human beings to be the sole content and objective of  true religion  and to label every other religious doctrine and question – including those of the nature and activities of the supreme being, the existence of an afterlife, the specific rituals and dogmas  of every sect and creed, the issue of free will in religious choice, and the authority and accuracy of the Bible – as irrelevant to the objective and hence matters on which each person can  have whatever opinions suit him without effect on his status in terms of following divine law.

He certainly succeeded in being ambiguous. One easily can make a case that by “god” he really meant the universe and its natural laws but could not say so explicitly, but there also are good reasons to think he meant instead a conscious being or some sort of amalgam of the  two.  In most ways neither this nor the other theological arguments matter except for their historical interest. What does are the pleas for tolerance, open mindedness, and acceptance of dissent even in matters people think are most important, the this-worldly focus on living well and justly in accord with reality and one’s better nature, and  the ethical, practical, and psychological insights scattered throughout the book.  As an example of the latter, there is a short passage at the start of one of the chapters in the Treatise where he argues that the wise and good person should seek  his values for themselves and not in any competition with others that is one of the finest statements on ethics I have ever read.

It is a book that is  well worth reading.  

How Law Abiding Should a Person Be?

As laws and bureaucratic rules with the force of laws have multiplied in the last dozen or so years under both Democrats and Republicans, the question of how law abiding a person should be has become more important.  A person should of course obey laws against committing actual crimes, not because of the laws but because such acts are crimes.   (He should also refrain from committing crimes  the law permits, such as forcing people who do  not want to do so to provide him with goods or services under duress.) He should obey laws that may exist enjoining sensible behavior, again not because of the laws but because the behavior is sensible. He should willingly pay taxes to an amount representing a reasonable proration of the costs of the proper functions of the government of a free society, but should have  no ethical compulsion to cough up anything more. Beyond this he should obey the rules and dictates of politicians and bureaucrats only when he wants to or in cases where and to the extent that they may send armed agents to do bad things to him if he doesn’t.  In fact he should learn to ignore them as much as he can. Homosexuals living in places where their marriages are not recognized by politician should go ahead and marry if they want and not be too concerned what the scoundrels in the legislatures think. Traditional religious peoples living in places where marriages between homosexuals are recognized by politicians should have whatever opinions of these marriages they like and not be too concerned about what the scoundrels in the legislatures think. Grasping politicians and bureaucrats matter to an honest person only to the degree he and others cannot avoid them. They and their opinions have no larger significance.

The tasks for people wanting to live in a freer society are to reduce the power and size of governments and to make it more difficult functionally for people in governments to do them harm. The second will probably be easier than the first at  least in the short run. The rules often have strong constituencies among conservatives, leftists, or both, and Obama has two more years. However it should be possible to unite libertarians and the better sorts of conservatives and leftists to take action against  the unconscionable increases in government’s snooping, spying, and surveillance  during the last few years. We have both the Constitution and simple decency and right on our side. We certainly should try. If they don’t see us, they can’t hit us.