The Criticizing Freedom Series: Part 1 - Food First, Philosophy Later
Libertarianism has had a good run lately. The political and economic philosophy of liberalism isn’t completely synonymous with “the enlightenment” which is a notoriously difficult constellation of philosophies to define. But it isn’t a bad approximation of the hallmark underpinning principle: the elevation of individual autonomy over authoritarian exclusivity claims to knowledge. In general, liberalism is a kind of philosophical pillar which props up the roof for systems like free-market capitalism, democratic participation, and unregulated free speech which all anoint the free choice of the individual as sacred. I’m going to use terms like libertarianism and capitalism loosely and somewhat interchangeably with the whole collection of concepts. You can even toss in the trendy “classical liberal” label which has become a sort of calling card for those “free-market-curious” progressives who are still nostalgic for the “liberal” identity of their youths. Don’t worry. That sentimentality is not a permanent condition.
So, capitalism, free speech, democracy, free markets. That’s what we’re talking about here. Those things are all great, right? The reports keep pouring in from a world which has largely adopted those systems and it is yielding unfathomably good results. Oddly, those results are not celebrated widely and it has become strangely politically dangerous to even whisper about such unquestionable successes like the plunging global infant mortality rate, massive declines in violence, and expanding access to education and health care. Doing so may even get you branded as some kind of alt-right vanguard of the status quo. Just ask Steven Pinker.
The libertarian asks “Who could argue with these successes other than someone with a personal bone to pick or a nervous justice crusader convinced by a paranoid fear that highlighting any such successes will provoke complacency and we’ll all get drunk on our own hubris and forget to finish the job of lifting the bottom 12% of the world out of extreme poverty?”
Challenges to libertarianism are cast as juvenile, deluded, jealous, and even cruel. And besides what alternative systems would the critics propose? A return to treacherous feudalism or, worse, a rerun of the consistently failed experiments of socialism and communism? If a challenger emphasizes the more ephemeral notions of real happiness or true meaningful purpose discovery being stifled by a distracting atmosphere of hyper consumerism or material worship, they are mocked as comically out of touch and scoffed off with an eye roll and a snide remark about “first world problems.”
“So, you say that you can’t stop binge watching that awesome Netflix show in your climate controlled apartment and eating the freshly made health code certified pepperoni pizza delivered straight to your door when you ought to be thinking about meeting up with that old friend who is in town for a night? Well, the starving farmers in Congo dying of typhoid should be so lucky to have such problems!”
But before laughing these voices off the stage, I want to convince you that there is an urgently important conversation to have and libertarianism deserves a better critique because at the heart of libertarianism is a philosophical lie which threatens to poison the entire enterprise and I too would rather avoid boring you with the familiar “what they tried wasn’t really socialism” conversation.
Recently, an Intelligence Squared US debate failed to avoid boring me in precisely this way.
The motion of the night was “Capitalism is a Blessing”. This is a very well written motion which appeals to my philosophical heart. What is a blessing? Are blessings allowed to be dangerous? Can a blessing be a curse for some though a blessing for most? Can a blessing distract you from a worthy spiritual path? Can a blessing wear out its welcome? This is the right time to have this conversation. I grabbed a ticket and showed up on a cold night in Manhattan to get the good stuff.
The debate itself was an absolute disaster. It quickly devolved into the hackneyed “capitalism vs socialism” pissing match. Such a shame to waste the promise of such a compellingly written motion. I left dismayed and disgusted at both sides (to be fair to the organizers, this is not the debate they had hoped to deliver either).
There was another debate years back which floated the motion “Humanity’s best days are ahead of us.'' This one was from the Munk Debate series and pitted Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley against Malcolm Gladwell and Alain deBotton. This debate too disintegrated into a non-conversation where the participants’ emotions, and vendettas, got the best of them. This debate was far better than the former but the themes and failure points were similar.
There were brief moments in each debate where one could glimpse the real philosophical battlefield, though everyone seems hesitant to step onto it. In the IQ2US debate a line was used by the side in favor of the motion which seems so instinctively true that it masquerades as a knockdown argument, it sounds like this: “capitalism gives people what they want!”
And there is the lie.
We have to do the “free will is an illusion” thing here. If you are sure you know this part, skip ahead. But if you need a refresher or want to learn how to rob a bank without feeling bad about it, give it a spin.
One deep way of exposing the lie is by introducing the framework of determinism which undermines the incoherent notion of “libertarian free will.” For those unfamiliar with that philosophical debate it can get a bit technical, but the punchline is the “I-could-have-done-otherwise” feeling that we have about our choices is what is meant by “libertarian free will”. And it is an illusion.
The short version would go something like this: If our bodies and brains are physical systems which determine our actions then our actions are governed by a universe which we did not choose at any moment. If that jargon is too thorny for you, another way to understand it is that every choice is a result of some combination of nature and nature. We certainly didn’t choose our nature but we also didn’t choose our nurture. And if you protest by injecting the notion of a meta-physical soul into the equation which is untouched by these forces and somehow is the “causer” of the physical world, well that won’t get you very far because you didn’t choose your soul either. There is no coherent way out of this ultimate trap.
Compatibalists resurrect the notion of “free will” by re-defining it to parse different kinds of decisions we make and the “degrees of freedom” each of them contain. To give free-will compatibilists their fair shake, they claim that the bar that “libertarian free will” sets is so impossibly high that nothing at all matters at that point of analysis. They are right in practical terms, but even the strongest compatibilists don’t even try to defend the magical “notion of libertarian free will.”
Before you get too carried away, this won’t absolve you of all types of responsibility.
Let’s say you rob a bank. The pronoun “you” can refer to the system of blood and guts and even “soul stuff” (if someone insists) that constitute “you”. And that system produced the action of robbing a bank. And if that system is likely to produce other crimes or must be punished as a deterrent for other observant systems then I have to do something to that system. In other words, if you rob the bank, I’m going to put you in jail and you will “deserve” it, sucker.
But there is a kind of “genuine” or “cosmic” responsibility that you are, in fact, absolved from. There is no deeper level to be found where the system chooses its prior states. This difference matters and ought to challenge many of our ideas about punishment, rehabilitation, and foundational claims of many religions.
Noticing the illusory nature of libertarian-free-will can be morally destabilizing for some. If that is you, let me attempt to stabilize you by showing how deterministic truths lay the groundwork for poetic notions of boundless compassion.
Imagine a magical device like a ray-gun that would “cure” a target of all their terrible ideas and urges. Let’s set aside the obvious philosophical hurdle of deciding exactly what a cure is and what an idea in need of curing would be for a moment. Let’s just think of something that nearly everyone agrees is a “bad” idea. Like rape or murder. Imagine you had this “cure-gun” in your left hand and an old fashioned steel and bullets “kill-gun” in your right hand. You come across someone about to rob a bank, or do something even worse like attempt murder.
It becomes very difficult to justify using the kill-gun over than the cure-gun in nearly every case. If you are having trouble picturing this just try to imagine a better cure-gun. Like something that instantly turns Jack the Ripper into Gandhi.
Bad News. The cure-gun doesn’t exist. But all kinds of rehabilitation efforts, pharmaceutical interventions, and technologies might amount to a weak version of it. You can see how the incoherence of “libertarian free will” can at first seem disheartening but with some creative thinking it illuminates moral directions and constructs an imperative to increase compassionate interventions. Each day that goes by before we figure out what a cure-gun is and how to build one is a philosophical tragedy.
For most of human history we could set aside this lie and operate confidentially while pretending that humans are distinctly special animals with a kind of divinely granted sovereignty that springs from somewhere inside the soul. Somewhere sacred and impossible to manipulate from afar. We’ve never had free will of that kind but system failures that might occur by proceeding as if we did were too impossible to imagine. Or those complications were so far into a technological future that they weren’t worth bellyaching about.
Free will is an exhaustively discussed concept in philosophy which is worth an investigation if you have never ventured down that path. I’ve given you a glimpse of it here as groundwork for my larger concern which I will return to but I want to press on an even more obvious challenge to the “capitalism gives you what you want” line, no philosophical brain wringing required.
I want a chocolate frosted doughnut. Actually I love chocolate frosted doughnuts. I want 5 of them. But I also want a trim body and to not feel like a garbage can an hour from now. So, it appears that I want two things. I can not have both things. What do I really want? Let me use my phone-a-friend and give capitalism a call. “Hey capitalism, what do I really want?”
If I chose the 5 doughnuts. Did I get what I really wanted? If I reject the doughnuts altogether and sign up for a gym membership did that prove what I wanted? This process is referred to as discovering “revealed” desires. The system will reveal what I must have really wanted simply because I ended up choosing it. Ta-da.
But libertarianism can do even better than that magic trick with a little help from some more imaginary technology. Let’s imagine a company called Physical Ideal Pharmaceuticals (PIP for short). PIP invents a nanorobot-pill which polices your digestive system and allows you to eat the 5 donuts and get that trim body by taking care of all that fat and sugar for you and constructing rock hard abs out of the nutrients, no pesky gym visits needed. You now get to have both things that you wanted. No doubt, PIP pills would be pretty popular. And that would then reveal what we really really wanted all along, the doughnuts and the body.
But what if the pill starts to become a kind of psychological problem for you because you never learn to examine notions of delayed gratification and self control and you find yourself in an existential haze. Well the PIP company comes up with a solution and offers a “doughnut desire calibration” supplement which makes you want a 6th doughnut just a little bit which would overwhelm the nanorobots if you gobbled it down. You can learn how to quell that urge by conjuring some self control and still feel proud of your beach body. So you get the supplement and this reveals what you really really really wanted, the doughnuts, the body, and the pride.
But what if… Okay, you get the point. We’ll call this idea the “infinite regress of ‘revealed desires’. Isn’t philosophy fun?
So, look again at the initial claim that “capitalism gives people what they really want.'' Even before the digestive tract nanorobot future arrives, and remembering the incoherent nature of any kind of “genuine” level of free will and you will start to see this argument for what it is. Philosophical bullshit (to introduce another technical term). Nothing has been “revealed” here except for which desire won the day for the customer in that moment. I don’t want to diminish this achievement. That is tremendous data to collect, but it doesn’t solve any true philosophical moral questions for us.
I have another analogy to drive this point home and advance my deeper motive of convincing you how fun philosophy really is.
One of my favorite philosophers of all time is Charles Beaumont, a prolific science fiction writer who died way too young. He may be most remembered for his writing on 22 episodes of The Twilight Zone.
A Season 1 episode entitled “A Nice Place to Visit” introduces us to a small time crook named Henry “Rocky” Valentine in the midst of a pawn shop robbery gone wrong. The opening sequence ends as he is shot by a police officer while attempting to flee.
He wakes up to find himself apparently unharmed. He is greeted by a friendly old man in a dashing white suit named Pip. Pip explains that he has been sent to guide Rocky and give him whatever he desires. Rocky, naturally suspicious, suspects he is being swindled and threatens the old man. But he is literally and figuratively disarmed when Pip seems to know all of Rocky’s desires and tastes going back to childhood. It’s almost as if Pip had been keeping track of him his whole life.
Pip gives him 700 dollars from his pocket and promises to give him much more if that kind of thing interests Rocky. It does. He takes Rocky to a beautiful apartment decked out with luxurious furniture and closets filled with the finest clothes, perfectly sized and styled for Rocky. He then leads Rocky to a table with a gourmet meal.
Rocky, at this point clearly remembering that he shouldn’t take food from strangers, is now sure he is being conned and the food must be poisoned. He takes his gun out and shoots Pip in the head. Harsh. But to his surprise the bullet has no effect and Pip smiles all the while. Rocky concludes that he must be dead and this must be heaven. Who wouldn’t?
After the commercial break we see Rocky having a grand ol’ time at a casino. It’s jackpot after jackpot while a trio of beautiful women fawn over him. Things are going just swell for Rocky. But a few scenes later something’s amiss. The beautiful women are with him. He has all the money in the world. But he’s pretty moody. He chases the women from his penthouse and pouts. He stomps over to a newly materialized pool table and takes a haphazard shot. All the balls are struck perfectly and streamline straight into the nearest pocket. The existential crisis reaches its apex. He calls for Pip, who arrives promptly and innocently asks him “What’s up?”
Rocky explains that he’s getting a little tired of this always winning stuff. Pip offers him a solution. He suggests that he could make him miss once in a while. Perhaps one of the billiard balls would miscalculate and hit a pocket edge from time to time? At first Rocky is enticed by the proposal. But even simple-minded Rocky quickly sees the fatal flaw there. That’s no good, he would know that Pip was making him miss. The misses wouldn’t be real misses and the bad rolls at the craps table would be puppeteered by Pip.
Now at the very height of the hair-pulling deterministic torture he understands himself to be in, the trademark Twilight Zone twist is executed and Pip tells poor Rocky the truth. He is indeed dead, but this has not been heaven all along. It’s the other place. With some maniacal laughter and a haunting camera move into the air the audience is left with the horrifying question. Are we all Henry “Rocky” Valentine but we just haven’t met our Pip?
Let me pause for a second here. Because when these kinds of fanciful philosophical challenges are brought up, the libertarian retreat to “well, what alternative do you propose?” usually follows. And this is where the conversation often flies wildly off the tracks into some wrestling match between a socialist fantasy-land and the “best system available” liberalism. Is the solution a government regulation limiting how many donuts one can buy? Is it banning all donuts? Is it taxing doughnut manufacturers in order to pay for the bypass surgeries of the 5-doughnut eaters?
No.
Libertarianism body slams socialism in front of a bloodthirsty crowd clamoring for donuts and bikini bodies. But before the victory lap and coronation with a championship belt we should demand it compete with some serious opponents.
It must be possible to point to the philosophical illusion at the base of libertarianism without constructing a nanny-state totalitarianism straw man as the only alternative. Let me propose a new conversation.
A hero of mine is the late Hans Rosling who made a career out of viewing our world through data. His crowning triumph was a series of graphs which plotted the countries of the world on x-y axis’s demarcating things like life expectancy (health on the X) and GDP per capita (wealth on the Y) and giving the user a draggable timeline to animate this graph over time. I’ve spent countless hours playing with these tools.
Moving through history on this most basic chart tells a beautiful story of a world moving itself from the lower left (sick and poor) part of the graph to the upper right (healthy and wealthy) part. There are stragglers to be sure. And there are major disruptions as you slide the graph (the AIDS crisis in Africa, World War I and II) and smaller more localized hiccups (the 2008 recession). You can even watch the statistically eye popping moment when a tiny country like Qatar finds oil. Though it is remarkable how quickly the trajectory seems to “get back on track” after even a significant and tragic event. Whatever is fueling this lift sure is resilient.
But one overarching story that this data tells is of a world lifting itself out of extreme poverty.
Extreme poverty is an important concept to grasp. It is a fixed position. It is defined by biology and physics and does not shift over time. It is a line we could have theoretically drawn at the same point when Homo Sapiens blinked onto the scene and thousands of years from now. No matter what the future holds, as long as our bodies are something like biological bodies in a natural environment, a sturdy dwelling, access to reliable calories to fuel one's body, a safe place to close one's eyes will be the line. Lacking the wealth to achieve these things is extreme poverty. This line is drawn around 1 real dollar a day of income. That line may seem somewhat arbitrary, but remember that it is not. It is an attempt to draw an eternally fixed line beyond which an animal has its basest needs provided for. Without access to these things, nothing else really matters. Forget “flourishing” or pondering exquisite philosophical explorations, the biological system will not even survive very long in those conditions.
A good moral rule of thumb: food first, philosophy later. I’ll come back to this point.
There is another kind of poverty referred to as “relative poverty” which most of us in the West are more familiar with. This compares the richest to the poorest within a given group. In a society where 95% of the people have a mansion, with hot showers, and a king sized bed a relatively poor person may only have a small brick house, with cold running water, and a twin sized foam mattress. This kind of poverty and inequality matters and it matters a great deal. But it is a separate problem from the abstract extreme poverty conversation.
Hans Rosling himself points out in his final book Factfulness (finished by his son and daughter-in-law) that we have to also acknowledge that liberalism or social democracy is simply not the only way for countries to move themselves in the right direction on his graph. In fact, the last century has probably seen more people in non-democratic countries escape extreme poverty than ever before. If we are to defend democracy as a system, we need to do it on moral philosophical grounds rather than simple empirical data about poverty rates. But let me set this worthy point aside for a second and largely give credit to a world philosophy of libertarianism and free market embrace as a driving force for the bubbles on these charts to move in the right direction.
But is it possible to oversell the completeness of this philosophy and political ideology? It can clearly deliver the goods (literally) but is that all there is? Is this system something like “a blessing?”
Imagine you are very hungry and someone gives you a seed. You plant it and soon a tree starts to grow in your yard. And this tree grows tall and starts to bear fruit. That is really good news to you. You were starving and this fruit is awesome and there is plenty of it. But you notice the tree has a tendency to grow very fast and it’s roots cause some problems for the foundation of the house. It also attracts some pests and it’s branches grow into places they shouldn’t if you don’t tend to them. No great bother, the tree still provides fruit and you just have to take diligent care of the thing. Imagine this tree is something like libertarianism in practice, and while not perfect, life is better with this tree than before it was planted. A lot better. But what if the tree starts to mutate and develop resistance to the treatments you’ve been providing. What if the tree starts growing too fast or grows a new high tech branch that uses artificial intelligence and your personal data to sprout a fruit that you can not resist?I know, weird tree right? Well, is this tree a “blessing”?
You can see now the kind of conversation I am hoping to hear rather than the insultingly dull “yay tree!” versus “boo tree!” back and forths currently pervading debate stages and lecture halls of the political, academic, online, and intellectual kind.
The first line at the IQ2US debate which gave me hope came from Bhaskar Sunkara who pointed out that the motion was written in the present tense, “capitalism is a blessing” he suggested there was a way to argue that “capitalism was a blessing.” The rest of his presentation and debate is best ignored. It was a mess of socialist confusion and empty platitudes. But his first question is a good one. I told you I would get back to the “food first, philosophy later” rule.
I consider Yuval Harari to be one of the best subtle critics of libertarianism. His blockbuster books help emphasize just how new of a position we are in as a species. It is the first time in human history that more people die from overeating than starvation. That’s a big deal. Is it possible that ignoring the fundamental lie of libertarian free will and pretending that “revealed” preferences actually “deliver what people really want” and deploying libertarian economic systems was really good at getting everyone (almost) fed but won’t be great for delivering true meaning?
He summarizes this predicament with a genuinely new question for our species at the close of Sapiens. He asks “What do we want to want?” This question is new because more of us are in a position to ask it than ever before. I don’t know the answer. Trying to answer it sounds like the best use of time for animals who are lucky enough (most of us) to have their base needs taken care of. Libertarianism should be proud of itself, those base needs were a big deal. But in a philosophical sense those were the easy things, the obvious things, the things that mattered only because we need them to take on the things that really mattered. The concern is that the same system which helped us get to this asking point may now actually distract us from answering it.
But here is the thing. I don’t know if libertarianism ever promised a kind of philosophical salvation. If libertarianism could leave a comment on this essay it may read something like: “Hey, I only said I was going to put a roof over your head and get food on the table. I didn’t say I’d show you the meaning of life.” That’s true. And the roofs and food are great. Honestly, we should be super grateful. But right under that comment a few other comments appear and they are for shiny cool toys tailored just for me and look pretty darn fun. One might even be for a 6th doughnut. Maybe you’re laughing because you know what I mean and you can just ignore them.
My entire critique can nearly be distilled in a single question, it’s one I’ve asked directly to many strident libertarians. “Is there a point when advertising can be too effective?” I aim to use the word advertising broadly here beyond just products. If we pretend we have free will and are sovereign entities operating in a distinct external world, that world offers us things. It appeals to our desires and we choose things off its shelves. It has to grab our attention and make its sales pitch, no matter how subtle or direct. Often times we are grateful for this and it feels like a match made in free market heaven. And if not? The we get a divorce and pluck something new off the shelf next time. The free will lie lurks. Remember that the true picture here is of a physical system (you) making what feels like a choice based on an impossibly complex brew of nature and nurture which disappears into an infinite regress. Fun right?
But now imagine a product with tools which can get its hooks in you so effectively that its appeal is virtually impossible for you to reject. The lie of libertarianism can’t be ignored in that marketplace. Forget asking what we “want to want” we would be forever drowning in the first “want”. Is that happiness? We will certainly say it is. But I’m not so sure.
In Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy he points out an experiment where a researcher implanted mice with a kind of neurological device which implanted cravings and desires for things that mice don’t normally like to do, jump from high ledges, run through tunnels of fire. That kind of stuff. When he presented this research he was interrupted by a very upset onlooker who accused him of torturing these mice. His response was to explain that actually these mice are the happiest most fulfilled creatures on Earth! From their point of view they experience a huge desire for something to emerge from their “mouse soul”, and then the object of their desire appears and they get to do it! These mice should be thanking this scientist for the privilege! Just kidding, he didn’t go that far. But the retort is compelling. If he had been giving these mice a burning desire to jump off of 5 foot ledges onto soft pillows and then only presented them flat plains of sand… well, that would be torture. But from some third person view the situation looks terrible no matter what.
Are we those mice yet? Who would the mad scientist be? We didn’t have to worry too much about where our desires really generated from, we used to just call it God or something synonymous with “libertarian free will”. Yuval Harari uses a pretty memorable line in his trilogy that I think relates to this as well, “God is dead. It’s just taking a while to get rid of the body.”
So where am I now?
I don’t think I’ve been fair to libertarianism’s critics. Because I don’t know exactly how to end this essay either. But luckily this is just part 1. Part 2 will be an exploration of what kinds of philosophies and systems we may need to embrace in order to navigate this obstacle course.
I’m calling that essay: “We’re full. Philosophy now.”