Can Conservatives be Libertarians? Can Libertarians be Conservatives?

0:00Okay, there are very few jokes in this presentation, but to lighten the mood, we recently had an election in Ireland and just to show you that we haven't just laid down and die, here are some things that appeared on doors to greet canvassers as they went around. So, you need to know some indications of public attitude towards the outgoing government, Okay, and you now have to know that Fianna Fáil was in the majority party with the coalition with Greens, okay? Right. Beware of the vicious anti-Fianna Fáil dog. No canvases, please. We know who we're going to vote for. Apologies for the quality. The quality is bad. That's the way it was in the original.

0:46Canvases will be shot.

0:55I like the last bit. Green Party canvassers will have their bicycles clamped.

1:05If you're canvassing for Fianna Fáil or the Green Party, have a slice of free cheese. It was your solution to Irish people's problems a few months ago while you wasted money on bankrupt banks. Enjoy. Ringing doorbell not recommended. This is pretty good. You have to see that the poster was placed at the bottom of the door, right? So when you went down to read it, it said, Fiend of all canvassers, the position you are now adopting to look at this notice is the position you have left the country in with the IMF.

1:38Bent over, arse in the air. Apologies for the thing. Still want to knock? Thought not. And so I'm just going to show you a 50-second clip. This is a Vox Pop, which is down up in the northwest of the country. I think this will amuse you too. So here's a 50-second clip. It's either deadly serious or satirical. You decide, okay. Are you looking forward to the election? I am indeed. I'm an anarchist myself. An anarchist? Yes. And I think Pinafore have been doing a fantastic job. And I will be voting for Pinafore in the upcoming elections. And why would an anarchist be voting for Pinafore?

2:26Well, we believe in the theory of chaos, of complete destruction of society as it stands at the moment. And the only one in this country that is here as to my part is Pinafore. The country has destroyed, they have to get back in for another turn, they are totally destroyed. So you would be interested in getting a new government to play? No, I think that a new political system will emerge from the ashes. Total destruction of the system we know of and only one that is doing it at the moment is freedom of thought. Okay. Well that's actually fantastic. Okay, you probably didn't get much of that, but what he said was, the guy said, who are you going to vote for? He said, I'm going to vote for Fianna Fáil. He said, I'm an anarchist myself. He goes, really? Why are you voting for Fianna Fáil?

3:11He said, well, because they've half destroyed the country. We believe in the theory of total destruction and we want to get them back in so they can finish the job. All right, that's it. That's all the entertainment you're going to get. The rest is the paper. Okay, here we go. Actually, given what Gary North just said, I feel somewhat embarrassed about reading from a script. I feel like the woman who went to the cathedral and the new bishop gave a sermon and he read it. When she came out, a friend of hers, what did he say? And she said, I can't remember. If he can't remember, how can I? But anyway, so an overwhelming prejudice in favor of ancient and existing usages has been and probably will now continue to be one of the most prominent characteristics of humanity. No matter how totally inconsistent with the existing state of society, no matter how utterly unreasonable, both in principle and practice, no matter how eminently absurd, in every respect,

4:04such institutions or customs may be, still, if they have but the countenance of fashion or antiquity, if they have but been patronised and handed down to us by our forefathers, their glaring inconsistencies, defects and purities are so completely hidden by the radiant halo wherewith a blind veneration has invested them. God, I wish I could write like this. But it is almost impossible to open the dazzled eyes of the world to an unprejudiced view of them. Herbert Spencer. That's the guy. You better believe it. As the opening citation attests, perhaps most people have a deep-rooted predisposition to keep things the way they are. For every one person who is avid for change, there are 99 who instinctively resist it.

4:49This innate resistance to change finds expression in the political philosophy called conservatism. Now on the other hand, unlike conservatives, the attitude of libertarians towards change is not derivable from their name. While the libertarians name witnesses obviously to the high regard valuation of liberty, to be pro-liberty is as yet to adopt no particular attitude to the status quo unless the status quo limits or prevents freedom. Are these political philosophies intrinsically opposed to each other or is it possible to be both? Russell Kirk believes that apart from their common detestation of collectivism in governments that go beyond their competence, conservatives and libertarians have little or nothing in common. The problem with libertarians is their fanatical attachment to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of civil social order and indeed of human existence. Their pathological concern with freedom leads them to adopt an attitude of tolerance to all sorts of views What libertarians read most of all, according to Kirk, is obedience to the dictates of custom. They are intolerant of any authority and immoral, such intolerance can lead to

6:16and Diversity. In the end, there is no great gulf fixed between libertarianism and libertanism.

6:29And if that isn't enough, libertarians also suffer from some kind of metaphysical madness, inasmuch as despite their doctrines being repeatedly rejected both logically and practically, they still persist in putting them forward. If stupidity consists in the repetition of Are libertarians necessarily utilitarians? Does libertarianism impel human freedom? Do libertarians disparage or degrade all human values except freedom? Do they reject order in government and espouse chaos? Does libertarianism evacuate the world not only of love and friendship, but also of duty, discipline and psychology?

7:16An unsympathetic critic of conservatism might return Kirz's compliment and claim that conservatism has its own charges to answer. A crude account of conservatism might be that it amounts in effect to a settled policy of resistance to change of any kind. If this resistance to change is to be something more than the practical expression of reaction, it must be based on and a normative claim, explicit or implicit, to the effect that the way things are is good. In fact, it must be committed to the claim not just that the way things are is good, but the way things are is the best, or if not the best, why resist the change from the bad to good, the good to better, and the better to best? The self-evident absurdity of this position reveals it's fundamental and reasonable.

8:04The way things are now is manifestly not the way things were 100 years ago, and 100 years from now things will be different in ways as yet unimaginable. No change policy would commit a conservative, not just to the normative claim that the way things are now is the best, but to the absurd claim that the way things are now is the best, until tomorrow. You may remember that in Monty Python's Life of Brian, that's hence the snarky, as a member of the People's Front of Judea, not to be confused, as we all know, with the splitters of the Judeans, People's Front and the Popular Front of Judea, And as they conspire to kidnap Punch's pilot's wife, the question is asked, what have the Romans ever done for us? And the answer is nothing. Well, nothing apart from better sanitation, and medicine, and education, and irrigation, and public health.

8:50Oh, and roads, and a freshwater system, and baths, and public order. But apart from that, nothing. Okay, that'll probably be the last laugh you get on this one. The fundamentalist conservative has to believe, like Voltaire's hierarch, indeed, that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, until, of course, things improve. Tate Hondrish remarks that if conservatism were at bottom of the defense of the familiar, we should have a mystery in our hands, the mystery of how such an egregious idiocy could have become a large political tradition. Another way of capturing the essence of the conservative approach to change is given by the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton who remarks that the desire to conserve is compatible with all manners of change provided only that the change is also continuity.

9:40Continuous change according to Scruton is good, discontinuous change is bad. Once again, this criterion seems implausible. If something is really bad, its continuation is certainly no better than its termination. When for example the fundamental injustice of slavery finally penetrated the conscience of the Civilized World, there was only one thing to be done, abolish it fortwith. Such abolition was radically discontinuous with what had gone before, indeed radically discontinuous with human history from its earliest period. But who would argue that this change was not for the better? What conservative is prepared to defend the perpetuation of slavery simply to avoid the discomfort of discontinuity? In their focus on tradition, conservatives touch on something important however, but it may not have for the conservatives quite the significance they attribute to it. It is true that much of what we are is simply given to us and is not a matter of choice.

10:46The family we belong to, however much we'd like to change them, right, is given to us. The nation we conceive of as ours, the language we speak, the way we speak it, indeed many of our ideas, all these are important, perhaps constitutive parts of what we are, parts of our very identity, if you will, and yet not a matter of choice. One calls to mind the hero of the Gilbertian satire, one calls to mind the hero of the Gilbertian satire, HMS Pinnifor, who is proud to be an Englishman, although as the Bosnian Eugen proclaims he might have been a Russian, a French, a Turk, a Prussian, or perhaps an Italian, and who, in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, remains an Englishman, as if he had any choice in the matter, that's the whole point of the satire. Even if one were to change one's political allegiances and obtain a new passport, it is scarcely possible to cease to be, in some fundamental sense, a member of the nation you were born into.

11:40Now, a key point of tension between conservatives and libertarians is precisely this question of coercion, but if it's granted that one should not be coerced into observing customs and tradition, Rothbard, for one, was more than happy to go along with much of conservative thought. In a late essay, he called his fellow libertarians to order, remarking that libertarians often mistakenly assume that individuals are bound to one another only by the nexus of market exchange, forgetting that, as he said, everyone is necessarily born into a family and one or more of several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs and traditions. And yet, despite being partially constitutive of our identities, tradition can at best have a heuristic function. For however much something has been done, for however long and by however many, questions can always be asked.

12:27Is this right? Is this good? Is this the best? And these questions subvert any ultimate normative claim that tradition can make. Now, misunderstandings are rife. If it's possible to screw up and misunderstand, you're guaranteed that this will happen. I know there's some teaching as a teacher, and you will know yourself that if you were to read the students' notes of what you just said, you would be horrified. So if people can screw it up, they will screw it up. So the amazing thing is not that we misunderstand and misinterpret and get things screwed up. The mystery is we even occasionally Misunderstandings can arise from the failure to recognize the severely limited ethical scope of libertarianism. It is not intended to be, nor is it, a complete ethical theory. It is rather an overarching constraint on any such theory. This is, indeed, I take this precisely from the Ethics of Liberty.

13:25Libertarianism does not imply that all modes of conduct are equally valuable or have equal merit. There may well be those who think of themselves as libertarians who think this, but despite such a view, and despite Kirk's assertion that liberty descends into a maelstrom of license, it is not a necessary consequence of libertarianism as such, and a libertarian may choose to be a libertine, but there is nothing in libertarianism to constrain him to be one. Weaver-Mackin asks, is libertinism implicit in the advocacy of liberty as the highest political principle? Any answers? No. Libertarianism only prohibits the forcible quelching of indecent conduct, not its vigorous criticism, opposition, boycott or denunciation, in peaceful ways.

14:13Conservatives are committed to the centrality and priority of the notion of order. While, to a large extent, the principle of order is primarily manifest in little societies, works, little platoons and so on, such as families or local communities, it culminates for the conservative in the state, which, from the conservative point of view, is the guarantor of the conditions which allow its constituent communities to flourish. Libertarians, on the other hand, are sometimes portrayed as if they consider social disorder to be something desirable. Nothing could be further from the truth. While there may be some individual libertarians who bizarrely judge that a disordered, Hobbesian state of nature is a consummation devoutly to be wished, most libertarians, just as much as conservatives desire to live in an ordered society. The difference between conservative and libertarian is not whether order is desirable, it is what kind of order is desirable and where that order comes from. For the libertarian, genuine order arises intrinsically from the free interaction among individuals and among groups of individuals.

15:06It does not descend intrinsically from one high. It is clear then that conservatives and libertarians accord liberty different priorities. Nisbet claims that for libertarians, individual liberty in almost every conceivable domain is the highest of all social values and is so, he says, irrespective of what forms and levels of moral, aesthetic and spiritual debasement may prove to be the unintended consequences of such freedom. Crikey. On the contrary, I should say that for libertarians, liberty is the lowest of social values, lowest in the sense of being most fundamental, as seen across none of the human actions being susceptible of moral evaluation in any way at all. Human Freedom can be used for all sorts of actions directed to all sorts of purposes which are then susceptible to moral evaluation. Libertarians value freedom as a hard core without which morally significant human action is simply not possible. But while libertarianism as such has nothing to say beyond asserting and defending individual liberty, this is not at all the same as thinking that libertarians in living out our lives are concerned with

16:07nothing other than liberty. This would be as absurd as to think that somebody who insisted on the Absolute Necessity of Water for Survival, should be taken to assert that water was the only thing needed for a rich and interesting diet. Why would you think that? As if to contradict Nisbett, Murray Rothbard, whose credentials I may say, sorry, gone past that, that's what I just said, moving on, Rothbard says, look, only an imbecile who could ever hold that But freedom, you have to hand it to Murray, he doesn't put a tooth in it, only an imbecile could hold that freedom is the highest or indeed the only principle or end of life. He agreed with Lord Acton on the contrary that freedom is the highest political end, not the highest end of man per se.

16:58Good enough for Murray, it's good enough for me. I've been arguing so far that conservatism and libertarianism are not necessarily identical with each other, indeed many people on the left of the political spectrum believe that Conservatism and Libertarianism are in effect one and the same, and even some conservatives are inclined to think that libertarians are their natural allies, but this is not necessarily so. While on some issues there are factual overlaps between two schools of thought, notably in the trade area of trade, business and economics, in other areas conservatism and libertarianism sharply diverge. Libertarianism has one and only one basic principle, which is that all should be free to do whatever they wish to do, provided only that in so doing they do This principle is both simple and initially attractive. What is not quite so simple or attractive, at least to the Conservatives, are its consequences.

17:49When Conservatives realise what those consequences are, they tend to have second thoughts about the principle and about their association with libertarians. H. L. Mencken, one of my heroes by the way, one of the greatest writers that the USA has ever produced, thought that liberty was too strong a drink for many people and what they really wanted was security. The fact that Ireland is not now in conflagration and people are not rioting in the street and storming the parliament building is evidence of that. How much more do we need to start the revolution? What tends to divide libertarians from conservatives is the conservative's failure to realise or their unwillingness to concede that toleration is not equivalent to endorsement. It should be obvious, but apparently it is not, that to tolerate something is not the same as to approve of it.

18:38In fact, if toleration required approval, toleration would not be a virtue. What value is there in being prepared to tolerate only those things of which you approve? Anyone can do that. It's not a problem. Hey, I agree with that. I tolerate that. But if you don't like it, hey, that's where my toleration ends. It's pointless. The libertarian may adopt any of a number of moral attitudes towards various issues, prostitution, drugs and so on, but the only question for him as libertarian is not whether these modes of activity are to be commended or are a fitting mode of human activity taken in the round, but only whether in engaging in such activities a person is infringing upon the liberty of others. Of course, in a society constructed on libertarian principles, one has the right to license or to It's my house, my rules. My street, my rules. My city, my rules, if indeed you are the owner. My community, my rules, if you are the owner or the director of a community, for example, you can do that.

19:57Such a right subsists whether a property is owned by one person or by a whole community. In such a way then, could conservative principles obtain traction in a libertarian society? So is it our conservatism and libertarianism intrinsically opposed to each other or is it possible to be both? The answer to this question, like the answer to many others, is it depends. It depends primarily on the position one starts from. As we've seen, conservatism is rooted in a disposition to resist rapid and fundamental and to accept only those changes that are, as it were, reformative and organic. The conservative values order and virtue above all else while liberty is only one value among others and in no way preeminent. The libertarian, in contrast, takes liberty to be the fundamental and necessary precondition of a life that is truly human. It is not, repeat, not, not, not, not the only value.

20:45The libertarian recognizes love, friendship, altruism, courage, charity, but none of these values can come to be unless we are free. It is true that some sort of behavioural simulacra of these values can be produced by coercion, by regulation and by force, but those are ghoulish animated corpses from which the real life has departed. If one starts from a conservative position, one can adopt and adapt conservative values in a way that supplements and embodies one's commitment to freedom, provided that in so doing one does not compromise one's primary commitment to freedom. If one starts from a conservative position, one is unlikely ever to become a libertarian or to endorse libertarianism unless one undergoes a political-philosophical conversion.

21:31However, if one starts from a libertarian position, one can, without being necessarily obliged to do so, accept the heuristic value of tradition and the antecedent yet rebuttable normativity of custom and habit. I've tried to show that libertarianism is not necessarily reducible to libertarianism. But one more or less certain way to prevent the collapse of libertarianism to libertarianism is for it to adopt the cultural core values of conservatism and this libertarians are free to do. Conservatism on the other hand is always at the mercy of the question whose tradition, which customs, what habits. If it develops a principled and rational response to these questions then it has ceased to be The theory, radically conservative and has begun to move in a direction that I believe would lead it to espouse the fundamental positions of liberty as a sine qua non.

22:27A sine qua non of all the virtues and thus to transmute into a form of libertarianism. The full version of the paper, there's 18 copies of it over there. If you don't get one of them, you can email me. And it's coming out in a book on, strangely enough, entitled Conservatism and Libertarianism at some time in the future. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.