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Roger Scruton Thinks Facebook will Destroy Humanity

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“Every scientific advance is welcomed by those who see a use for it, and usually deplored by those who don’t,” Roger Scruton writes to open the first chapter of his new book, The Uses of Pessimism. He then tells the story of John Ruskin, a “great critic and social philosopher” who, in the 19th century, warned against the evil of railroads, with their fast-moving, rural-tranquillity-destroying ways. “Yet how quaint does Ruskin’s cry of heartfelt protest now seem,” Scruton says.

“Quaintness” doesn’t even begin to describe what happens next.

Roger Scruton is, it should be said, a conservative. Not “conservative” in the Sean Hannity, gay-hating, immigrant-fearing, evangelical way, but “conservative” in the more respectable sense of having a deep appreciation for tradition and a wariness of change for change’s sake. That’s all fine and good but, in the case of this chapter from his new book, conservatism leads Scruton to a set of remarkably silly claims.

He quickly shifts from railroads to expressions of terror at the next wave of technological progress, the “posthuman future,” as he calls it.

The ‘posthuman’ future promises enhanced bodily and mental powers, immunity to disease and decay, even the conquest of death. And many argue that we have no choice but to embrace this condition: it will happen anyway, if only because biological science and medical technology are both moving in that direction. … A new kind of optimist has therefore emerged, advocating a transformed human being who will emerge from the million years of man’s incompetence to stuff the disasters back in Pandora’s box.

This distopic nightmare would be downright awful, Scruton tells us. Why? Well, for one, we need death in order to make us appreciate life. He references a play about an immortal woman who, after 400 years of life, realized she could no longer love or be loved. “Poetry, drama, portraiture and music show us that mortality is inextricably woven into the human scheme of things,” Scruton writes. They show us that “our virtues and our loves are the virtues and loves of dying creatures; that everything that leads us to cherish one another, to sacrifice ourselves, to make sublime and heroic gestures, is predicated on the assumption that we are vulnerable and transient.”

Of course, most humans live far longer today than they did 1000 years ago and will likely live much longer in the future than they do today. But it is not at all clear that, as a result, a contemporary of Jesus loved his wife and children more than a contemporary of Roger Scruton. Rather, it seems quite obvious that love and virtue will remain love and virtue, easily adaptable to changing circumstances. And if they don’t, if we’re all miserable when we (someday) become immortal, then that misery will lead us to give up our immortality. But I don’t think that will happen. We’ll simply find new ways to be virtuous, to make sacrifices, and to cherish each other. A parent watching his child die is reminded of his love, true, but what a terrifically shitty way for it to happen. The Christian Scruton is simply voicing his religion’s silly fetishizing of suffering–and we’ll all be better off when that sort of thinking withers away.

But that’s not the really silly stuff, no. Because who is leading the charge to this awful, unimaginable world where we all live a really, really long time? Ray Kurzweil. And Facebook. Scruton again:

In Kurzweil’s future people morph into avatars, who peer at each other from the arctic vacancy of cyber-space. This is already happening, as we know from Facebook, MySpace and Second Life. By placing a screen between ourselves and others, while retaining control over what appears on it, we avoid the real encounter–forbidding to others the power and the freedom to challenge us in our deeper nature and to call on us here and now to take responsibility for ourselves and for them.

These two sentences display an old, cranky ignorance of how social networking actually functions in the actual world. For instance, if what Scruton says is true, we’d expect that people today–who use Facebook quite a lot–would spend less time in face-to-face social contact than people in the past. They don’t. Facebook does not replace social interaction, it augments it. Facebook allows us to keep up on old friends, find out what our families are up to, and coordinate real world get togethers. Yes, teenagers spend a great deal of time surfing Facebook and MySpace, but at the expense of television and other non-social activities.

The last sentence of the above quote speaks to a deeper problem of lack of reflection in Scruton’s thinking. After all, what could be more avoiding of a “real encounter” than writing or reading a book? At least on Facebook, there’s another person immediately on the other side of the text, a person who can respond in near real time to challenges of their deeper nature. But, while reading a book, we’re interacting through dead trees with people who are, in many cases, dead themselves. And the typewriter Scuton tapped this book out on certainly did not have the “power and freedom” to challenge the turgid arguments it was forced to manifest upon the page. Books are wonderful things. Interacting through them with authors living and dead is one of life’s great pleasures. But just as books did not destroy humanity and the human condition, neither will Facebook.

Scruton is no different from John Ruskin, who he lampoons in the chapter’s initial lines. He’s faced with technology he doesn’t understand, doesn’t care to understand, and so despises as the harbinger of terrible things. Like Ruskin’s warnings, Scruton’s should not be taken seriously.

A guy like Scruton probably hates rock ‘n roll, too.

Book Review: “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley

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Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, is terrific. So terrific, in fact, that I penned a review of it for the Fall 2010 edition of the Cato Journal.

That review is now online in PDF form. I give a good summary of Ridley’s argument while raising a few concerns with its ability to withstand focused criticism. Here’s the opening paragraph.

Science writer Matt Ridley is, as the title of his new book suggests, optimistic about humanity’s future—and not just at the prospect of even better lives for those lucky enough to have excellent lives already, but at the possibility of radically transforming, for the better, the lives of those today suffering near the bottom. The key, he thinks, is economic growth, that boogeyman of naysayers and concerned citizens everywhere. “It is precisely because there is still so much further to go that those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow down in the face of looming environmental disaster may be not only factually but morally wrong,” he argues. The path to that better world 100 years from now will not be smooth. Mankind is likely to experience traumas both of a natural sort and of its own creation. Most troubling, “The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could yet snuff out future prosperity on earth.” Ridley doesn’t let this possibility get him down. Humans are too driven to trade, exchange their ideas, and imagine new ones for a few bad apples to ruin the future.

Check out the rest. And read the book, too.

Practical Political Philosophy and Will Kymlicka’s Endnote 42

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Confusions of the real and the ideal underly far too many policy debates. Libertarians, for instance, often assume perfectly functioning markets and compare them to genuinely (mis)functioning governments. Progressives do the opposite, highlighting the very real warts on the existing markets while assuming that government policies will, in practice, turn out exactly as perfect as we’d wish them to. Whenever the real is compared to the ideal, the real comes out tarnished.

Real/ideal confusion is a particular plague within political philosophy. Philosophers, using the powers of their intellect and the tools of reason, argue to perfect conceptions of justice and then assume that those conceptions (the ideal) can be made manifest if only we decide to do so. For instance, in Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer argues that, if we banish money from certain realms of human experience, then everyone, rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, blessed and cursed, will have equal access to all that is good within those spheres. He ignores and so wholly discounts the economic insight that, with money excluded, people will “pay” for those goods in other ways, with some having more of this new form of payment than others.

Likewise, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, tells us that justice permits inequalities in the distribution of goods only if those inequalities benefit the worst-off members of society. He doesn’t tell us how we are to know who the “worst-off members” are, how we are to keep track of them as they shift from worst-off to not-worst-off and from not-worst-off to worst-off, or how we are to measure equality and inequality–all of which are likely impossible tasks to accomplish with any degree of accuracy. It is merely assumed that, upon discovering just principles, we can rejigger the world to conform to them.

That’s why it was so deeply refreshing to come across endnote 42 in the “Libertarianism” chapter of Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy. Kymlicka is far from a Hayekian libertarian–the chapter is downright scathing, in fact–and has built his career discussing theories of justice. With that in mind, here’s the text of the endnote.

Consider the question of state capacity. It seems clear that liberal-egalitarian theories have operated with over-optimistic assumptions about state capacity. For example, in developing his theory of liberal equality, Bruce Ackerman explicitly appeals to the idea of a “perfect technology of justice” (Ackerman 1980: 21; for similar assumptions, see Arneson 1990: 158; Roemer 1985a: 154). Of course, Ackerman knows that this is not available in the real world. But he does not tell us which parts of the resulting theory can be implemented, given our actually existing “technology of justice.” The inherent limitations in the capacity of the state to achieve social objectives have been theorized by social scientists, both on the right (Glazer 1988) and the left (Rothstein 1998). But this literature has not yet permeated the philosophical debates. One looks in vain in the corpus of the major left-liberal political philosophers (Rawls, Dworkin, Cohen, Roemer, Arneson, Ackerman) for a discussion of the extent to which the state can or cannot fulfill the principles of justice they endorse.

(Emphasis added.) If true–and my reading in the field indicates that it is–this is a shocking admission. The project of these philosophers is telling us how society should be structured in order to fulfill obligations of justice. By nature of their role as “left-liberals,” they believe that the structuring of society should be conducted via the state. If the state cannot fulfill the goals of that structuring, then the merit of the ideas antecedent to the structuring is seriously undermined.

Imagine if a philosopher of bioethics spent years writing a book in which she concluded that the moral obligation of modern medicine is to cure cancer through the application of natural spring water. Or if a researcher in education told us that schools should be built on the assumption that children already know the sum total of all knowledge in the universe. While the goals of these scholars would remain laudable (curing cancer is good, as are highly knowledgeable children), their scholarship would have little value. Children don’t already know everything and natural spring water cannot cure cancer, no matter how much we might like otherwise.

Of course, the arguments of Rawls and Walzer are not valueless. Forcing us to think about the justice of our society and its structure and prodding us to make our world more just are crucial and worthwhile pursuits. But it remains facile to conduct those pursuits without even considering the feasibility of the proffered conceptions of justice.

There’s another problem, too. Insisting that our states be organized around perfect conceptions of justice–which demand perfect technologies of justice–might very well produce worse results for humanity than accepting a less-than-perfect justice, but one achievable by the technologies we actually possess. A chef attempting to prepare an unattainably perfect omelet will break a lot more eggs than a chef setting out to make–and actually achieving–a merely excellent one.

But admitting this and and moving forward with it in mind would mean discussing “the extent to which the state can or cannot fulfill the principles of justice” the philosophers demand–something Kymlicka (who is arguably as well-versed as anyone in the philosophical literature) tells us simply doesn’t happen.

That Kymlicka’s insight hides in an endnote is telling.

Perspectives on Coercion

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Libertarians dig the coercion leitmotif. We care about coercion, find it deeply offensive, and want to stamp it out–even if, some of us argue, this means stamping out the state along with it.

When we compare ourselves to progressives, we often do so within this coercion lens. The progressive or conservative votes for a policy to advance whatever good he desires–and then rubs his palms together gleefully at the thought of government goons forcing everyone else to comply. Or, more charitably, the progressive votes for a policy and then says, “Look, I’d love it if we didn’t have to use the power of law to make this happen, but we do live in a democracy and the people have spoken and compliance is necessary for the policy to work.” In this latter sense, he isn’t happy about coercion, but he thinks the benefits of the policy outweigh the harm to the coerced.

The libertarian response to both is to argue that coercion is bad and that we shouldn’t do it except to prevent the violation of rights. In this sense, we like to say that what separates us from progressives and conservatives is how much we care about the morality of the use of coercive force.

But this isn’t quite right. What I want to argue is that it is not the case that progressives and libertarians both see government acts as coercive and that libertarians, unlike progressives, see this as a moral wrong. Rather, progressives and libertarians have different and incompatible views on the nature of coercion itself.

Libertarians view coercion as the use of force or the threat of force to make someone do something he wouldn’t otherwise do and doesn’t want to do. Thus coercion violates the famous principle of non-aggression and is therefore a rights violation. Progressives, on the other hand, see coercion quite differently. Broadly speaking, progressives think about coercion by the state (i.e., the act of making and enforcing laws) in two categorically distinct ways. The first is best explained by analogizing to how a group of friends decide where to go for dinner. The second can be labeled, drawing upon Marx, the notion of false consciousness (which I’ll hit up in another post).

What Should We Eat?

You and five buddies have met up in the city for an evening of hanging out. One member of the group says, “Hey, I’m hungry. Let’s all go grab something to eat.” Another says, “Yeah, sounds good. But where?” Suggestions are passed around, a vote is taken, and the group decides to head to a local steakhouse. But you don’t want steak. You had steak last night, you’re tired of it, and you recently heard about this well-reviewed Thai place just one block over. You made your case to your five buddies–but failed to make it well enough, it seems.

What do you do? You could refuse to go to the steakhouse. You could tell your friends that you don’t want to eat there, that you’re going to the Thai place instead, and then just walk away. But you don’t. Few of us would. Why? Because acting that way is uncouth. You’d be seen by your friends as a spoilsport and anti-social. The six friends decided to get together as a group and go out to eat as a group–and being part of a group means you won’t always get your way.

Progressives view the state in these terms. They think of the United States, say, as a big group of friends who get together to make decisions. Votes are taken, most people get what they want, but some don’t. Refusing to go along with the group’s decision is anti-social. It’s uncouth. It’s libertarian.

The State as “Us” and the State as “Them”

This divide results from fundamentally different ways of characterizing the state. For progressives, the state is “us.” For libertarians, it’s “them.” If we get together and we decide, then it only makes sense that we go along with our decision. Doing otherwise is tactless and disrespectful. By being part of this “we,” each of us agreed to put up with its decisions. Coercion in this context means only forcing people to keep their promises (a notion libertarians are happy to get behind within the framework of contract law).

Libertarians view the state as “them.” The state is a group of people we may have some influence over (though in a nation as large as the United States, that influence is usually slight) but it is a group that more often acts to force its will upon us. Yes, some members of that group voted for the given policy, but we didn’t vote for it. And, furthermore, that group called “the state” lacks the moral (and often constitutional) authority to coercively make us do whatever it decided we should do.

Libertarians thus view the state as being fundamentally different from the group of friends deciding where to eat. Progressives may admit the same–but their attitude and common behavior suggest otherwise. If this distinction stands, then discussions of coercion between progressives and libertarians lack a common context.

Traffic Light: A Short Thriller

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This isn’t strictly speaking “new” because it’s been out for a couple of weeks, but it’s new enough–and it truly is new for my blog readers, who’ve been waiting patiently for me to get the site relaunched. Enough preamble.

I’ve got a new short story available for purchase on the Kindle store. “Traffic Light: A Short Thriller” is exactly that. It’s an explosive tale about what happens when a simple carjacking turns out to be more than it seems. Written in harsh, punchy prose, “Traffic Light” is a gritty and violent crime thriller that runs 1100 words–or about four paperback pages.

And it’s just 99¢. Go grab it from Amazon.

(And my standard review policy applies: I’m happy to send anyone a complimentary copy of the story in exchange for a review–positive or negative–on Amazon. If you’re interested, shoot me an email.)

The "Stupid and Evil" Fallacy in American Politics

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The GOP catches much flack for its “obstructionist politics” and for being the “party of no.” They vote against proposals from President Obama and congressional Democrats, proposals that the President and his party peers know are the only way to dig America out of its recession. Who wouldn’t want to end the recession and put people back to work? ask the Democrats. The GOP, of course. They think only of themselves, the next election cycle, and their corporate overlords.

Progressives parrot this line of thinking all over the Internet. Democrats in Congress articulate it explicitly when, like Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich, they say, “It is very clear that the Republicans in the Senate want this economy to fail.” But Democrats and their progressive allies are falling prey to the “stupid and evil” fallacy, one that has unfortunately become dominant in American politics. While it is certainly true that sometimes politicians are stupid and/or evil and sometimes they vote against something they know is a good solution just because doing so will net them political gain, the sad fact is that the “stupid and evil” fallacy is often the first explanation partisans jump to, not the last. We would be better off granting our opponents the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not stupid or evil.

The “stupid and evil” fallacy looks like this:

X is a problem. Y is the solution to X. Therefore, anyone who rejects Y must either be stupid (because they don’t realize that Y is the solution to X) or evil (because they want X to continue and so don’t want to solve it by employing Y).

Of course, another reason for rejecting Y is not stupidity or evil (most people aren’t stupid and most people aren’t evil). Rather, it is possible–and, in fact, likely–that rejection of Y results from the belief that Y is not a solution–or, not a good solution–to X.

Taking the specific case of the U.S. economy, congressional Democrats have identified high unemployment as a problem. And they’ve said that government spending, both on jobs creation and extended unemployment benefits, is the solution. Therefore, anyone who would vote against more government spending is either stupid (they don’t know that government spending will increase employment) or evil (they want to see unemployment remain high, either out of spite or because of other, vile interests).

Again, though, it is more likely that those who vote against government spending do so because they don’t believe government spending is the best solution to unemployment. In other words, they reject this principle of Keynesianism. Instead, they adopt one of the many alternative schools of thought that say there are better, more effective, and less costly (both in the near- and long-term) ways to solve the problem of unemployment. You are free to disagree with them and assert that Keynes was right, but that’s an empirical and methodological debate, one that necessarily draws on complex micro and macro economic principles, data, and historical experience.

In other words, showing that Keynes was right and Hayek, say, was wrong (or the other way around) isn’t easy. It’s intellectually demanding work. What is easy is demonizing those who disagree with you and fixing their disagreement not in genuine differences of opinion on complex matters of economics but in personal failings of moral character. That is easy, but it accomplishes nothing and only makes the person doing it look like a fool.

Laid-Back Productivity for the Already Rich

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What is it with rich Westerners thinking industriousness is the bane of all that’s good an pure?

Leo Babauta provides a good example in his “The Tao of Productivity,” a distillation of the broader “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy. Let me be clear that I am not arguing that those who don’t work themselves to the bone, striving every day to accomplish more and more, are failures. Far from it. Every one of us could do more, be more productive, and every one of us at some point draws the line, deciding that leisure is valuable, too, and that we want some amount of it in our lives. No, what I am objecting to is the argument that the people who do strive to such an extreme degree are somehow missing the point, that they have been duped by consumer culture or American ideals or the cult of productivity. Here’s Babauta:

Think of our culture’s obsession with productivity: with the need for “hard work” and working long hours to get things done, with the need to be busy busy busy all the time, with the need to make lists and check them off, with the need to juggle countless projects and make more revenue and accomplish more and more. But for what? What’s the point of all this obsession?

Babauta obviously thinks there is no point and, being thus pointless, we should all grow up and abandon “hard work.” But this is a profoundly myopic–and, in fact, ignorant–position to take. What is the point of hard work? Why, the things that come from hard work. And what are those things? They’re very nearly everything that makes Babauta’s life enjoyable enough that he doesn’t feel hard work is necessary.

The computer he writes his blog on is the product of people working very hard for very long hours. The medicine that keeps his six children healthy comes not from enlightened folks following the Tao of Productivity, but from driven researchers burning every bit of midnight oil they have to save lives (and perhaps turn a profit while doing so). A world where everyone gave up hard work and embraced Babauta’s philosophy would be a harsh and impoverished place, with high infant mortality, little entertainment, and life expectancies well below what any of us would find acceptable.

Keep the notion of an acceptable standard of living in mind when reading further in Babauta’s manifesto. He writes,

The old version of productivity was founded in the desire for more, to be greater, to accomplish more. But instead, let go of this desire, and realize you already have enough.

Already enough? What’s our baseline? Babauta is a bestselling author and runs several successful blogs. I don’t have specific data on his financial status, but I imagine it is a good deal better than the bulk of people he shares the planet with. Should the impoverished citizens of North Korea realize they “already have enough?” What would Babauta say to this North Korean teacher, who’s

monthly salary scarcely bought two pounds of rice. A university graduate, she pulled her own child out of the third grade in 1998, instead sending her to a neighbor to learn to sew.

Why doesn’t she realize two pounds of rice is plenty? Hasn’t she been reading her Lao Tzu?

This is deeply silly stuff. Someone who already has enough–whatever that means–is, of course, might be advised to stop striving for more if (and it’s a crucial if) doing so would levy on him more costs than it would create benefits. But Babauta tells us that all of us should abandon hard work for what really matters, which is recognizing that we already have it good and that trying to make things better is a fool’s game.

What he offers is a fun house mirror version of Rhonda Byrne’s execrable The Secret. Byrne tells us that the path to riches is to just imagine that we’re already rich and act accordingly. The universe will then take the necessary steps to assure that our delusions become reality. Babauta wants us to believe that we are already rich, so we needn’t even bother with the imagination step.

My point is this: Babauta’s Tao of Productivity isn’t a philosophy for living. It isn’t a method for approaching the world applicable to all. Rather it is a way for those who have taken advantage of the hard work of others to feel good about not putting in hard work themselves. It is productivity for people fortunate enough to already be rich.

To everyone else, to the billions toiling to improve their own lives and the billions toiling to improve the lives of others, it is an insult, and nothing more.

The Frightening Permissiveness of Rosenkranz's "The Subjects of the Constitution"

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Professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz’s “The Subjects of the Constitution” is a hot, new law review article making the rounds and garnering some well-deserved attention. For those who haven’t read it, and who have even a passing interest in the United States Constitution and judicial review, I heartedly recommend it. Rosenkranz’s article is long, but, as these things go, it’s an easy read. His theory is intriguing and clear and powerful–but it’s also troubling in its permissiveness of broad government action, especially into areas we all agree the government should play no role. Most troubling, his proposed doctrine appears to grant the state the ability to eviscerate the First Amendment, provided Congress is crafty when drafting laws to do so.

Who violates the Constitution?

Rosenkranz’s argument is actually rather simple–and, he claims, simplifying. He sets it out in the paper’s abstract.

Two centuries after Marbury v. Madison, there remains a deep confusion about quite what a court is reviewing when it engages in judicial review. Conventional wisdom has it that judicial review is the review of certain legal objects: statutes, regulations. But strictly speaking, this is not quite right. The Constitution prohibits not objects but actions. Judicial review is the review of such actions. And actions require actors: verbs require subjects. So before judicial review focuses on verbs, let alone objects, it should begin at the beginning, with subjects. Every constitutional inquiry should begin with a basic question that has been almost universally overlooked. The fundamental question, from which all else follows, is the who question: who has violated the Constitution?

The First Amendment begins with “Congress shall make no law…” For Rosenkranz, this means that any First Amendment violation must happen when Congress makes a law. And, given that Congress makes laws before they are enforced, the constitutional violation must occur at the moment of enactment. The First Amendment does not prohibit the President from abridging speech. It is only a prohibition on lawmaking behavior by Congress (hence the active voice construction).

What this means (and Rosenkranz is happy to admit it means) is that the only laws that can violate the First Amendment are those that do so facially. In other words, they are laws that, when the text of them is placed next to the text of the Constitution, a clear violation is apparent. A law that does not abridge freedom of speech on its face, but later does when applied by the President, is not in violation of the First Amendment.

The end of the First Amendment?

This ought to be immediately concerning for those of us to think the courts have done too little to limit the powers of the state within the framework of the Constitution. Under the Rosenkranz doctrine, if Congress enacted a law saying, “Citizens are prohibited from engaging in the act of Holy Communion,” that law would be facially invalid as the text of the law at the time of enactment clearly abridges the free exercise of (the Catholic) religion.

But what if Congress were more subtle? What if it wrote a law that instead read, “Citizens are prohibited from ingesting wine on Sunday mornings, when gathered in groups of more than five and when the wine is ingested in one ounce or smaller amounts as provided by a leader within the group?” Because the law does not facially violate the constitution–it doesn’t mention free exercise of religion, or religion at all–a Catholic could not succeed in a challenge. If the court asking him Rosenkranz’s “who” question, he couldn’t say Congress (the law didn’t violate the constitution at the moment of enactment) and he couldn’t say the President (the First Amendment only prohibits Congress from acting).

Congress employs a lot of smart lawyers to draft its legislation. Should the Supreme Court adopt Rosenkranz’s new doctrine for judicial review, I see no reason why those smart lawyers couldn’t intentionally structure the language of bills to always make them immune to First Amendment challenge. And the problem doesn’t stop with the First Amendment. It cascades through the rest of the Constitution.

Who has rights?

In his refactoring of judicial review, Rosenkranz risks doing away with the very rights the Constitution was created to protect. If it is true that, by nature of being human, we have a right to free expression, then it shouldn’t matter how the government violates that right. Rather, what matters is that a violation occurred and that the violation was at the hands of the government. It seems absurd to think that religious freedom could be trampled and the state could respond with, “Well, sorry, but your right to free exercise only protects you from Congress, not the President’s goon squads.”

These problems exist for the current judicial review doctrine, true. But Rosenkranz’s theory, while potentially clarifying, makes these problems worse. What he has done is grant Congress philosophical grounding for making the type of argument a thug might make when charged with killing a rival. “Don’t look at me,” the thug says. “I didn’t kill that guy–the bullet did.”

Making Fun of Religion is Not a Human Rights Violation

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Every time I criticize religious beliefs, I’m a human rights violator. “Defamation of religious is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence,” says the United Nations in an absurd and illiberal resolution passed by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The resolution was “proposed by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions.” This travesty of religious stupidity raises many concerns. Most obviously, it exposes the silliness of thinking we can have a governing body that includes liberal societies embracing legitimate human rights such as freedom of speech and juvenile societies that haven’t yet figured out how to deal with getting their feelings hurt. The Human Rights Council demands–though non-bindingly–that member nations ”take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and beliefs.” This gets it exactly backwards. It is up to the faithful to show why their views deserve tolerance and respect. From where I sit, it’s clear that religion should be tolerated where it does no harm, but that religious beliefs–like any other beliefs asserted without evidence–do not warrant prima facie respect. A religion that demands I cease pointing out this lack of evidence so as to protect its believers from feeling like fools is a religion that deserves anything but “tolerance and respect.”

But more profoundly, the resolution demonstrates the debasement of the very concept of rights that comes from thinking everything that’s desirable must be a fundamental human right. Keep in mind, for instance, this is the same United Nations that deemed paid vacation time to carry as much moral weight–the absolute weight that attaches to those things we call “rights”–as the right to own property and to not be raped. Rights, if they are to mean anything, must be circumscribed. If everything is a right, then nothing is. For, as this new resolution so aptly demonstrates, the infinite proliferation of “rights” leads inevitably to conflict. There is simply no way to embrace both the right to freedom of speech and the right to not have your shitty religion made fun of.

We need to take rights seriously. The United Nations clearly does not.

Paul Krugman's Corrupt Confusion

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Paul Krugman has a slam dunk argument for why libertarianism doesn’t work–provided his readers don’t know a thing about libertarianism and aren’t inclined to think critically about Krugman’s argument. It begins by quoting Milton Friedman, who tells us, as Krugman puts it, “that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.” But, ah ha! say Paul. Friedman’s an idiot because of, well, this:

In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion.

Krugman thinks he has a cute syllogism here. 1) Milton Friedman says A. 2) The world is actually like B. 3) Therefore libertarianism is wrong.

“And don’t say that we just need better politicians,” Krugman says, cutting off what he sees as the libertarian’s only out. “If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.”

Did you catch the problems? First, a libertarian could respond, “Yeah, Paul, that’s why we shouldn’t grant members of the legislature the power to set arbitrary limits on tort damages.” The solution isn’t incorruptible politicians. Rather, it’s to have perfectly corruptible ones without the authority to exercise their corruption.

Second, and more troubling for Krugman, is his admission that all politicians are corruptible. If that’s true (and it almost certainly is), then what does it say about Krugman’s constant calls for granting those same corruptible folks more power over our lives? Surely if Murkowski is corrupt enough to protect BP from tort damages, she’s corrupt enough to rig safety regulations in BP’s favor.

Krugman can’t have it both ways. If politicians are corrupt, then they’ll screw up both libertarian and progressive policies. The progressives have no solution but to hope for incorruptible politicians. Libertarians, on the other hand, have a very simple solution: take away the corrupt politicians’ power to do harm.