Pragmatism Refreshed: Freedom Pursued

Is pragmatism an adequate and indeed an essential foundation for the advocates of liberty? I have long contended that this question needs a strong "yes" answer. As I explained in my September 12 blog entry, though, I am delighted that Frank van Dun has set forth his reasons for believing that I am wrong.

This is my reply to the case he has made, which was in turn a response to an editorial I wrote years ago for a now-defunct magazine called The Pragmatist.

Preliminaries

I am an anarcho-capitalist. I am no longer active within the Libertarian Party, but I wish the LP well, and I speak not merely of the anarcho-caps therein but of the minarchists as well. The advance of their ideas is infinitely to be preferred over the continued dominance of the "liberals" and "conservatives" in public debate.

My earlier essay on "The Necessity of Pragmatism," moved as concisely as I could manage through a theory of meaning, to the nature of truth and knowledge, and then on to ethics. I also said a few words at that time about restitution as the central principle of Justice. I will leave restitution out of this essay, but otherwise I will retrace and elaborate my steps, taking account as I go of van Dun's critique.

Van Dun agrees with me largely on meaning, so I will be very brief here. Pragmatists ask "what difference would it make" were one hypothesis rather than another true. If there is no practical difference, then pragmatists write off the dispute as an idle one. There is no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere else. I will not press that point except to provide the curious with this link for the story of James' squirrel, a bit of philosophical exposition that van Dun and I both admire.

Van Dun disagrees with me about truth, but I think that this is largely because he conflates the old correspondence theory of truth with a more new-fangled thing called the disquotational (or deflationary) theory of truth. The two are not at all the same, as we can see from works in which advocates of the real correspondence view argue against deflation, and even from efforts to reconcile the two.

I think James' arguments retain their old force against the genuine correspondence theory. Jamesians can probably consent to the deflationary theory without loss of anything James wanted to save, though, because if "truth" is the uninteresting tautological property that deflationists say that it is, then the notion doesn't really do any work in epistemology or anywhere else. I'm happy to concede that the statement "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. If we say that this is a full account of truth, though, then we abstract from a lot of other considerations that show up in all of the older theories.

The gist of the older disputes remains, nonetheless. Giving up "truth" to the deflationists means that the 19th century disputes among coherentists, correspondence theorists and pragmatists will have to rage again over other labels, such as "reference," or "knowledge," or (fittest of all) "warrant." And pragmatism in particular can easily enough refit itself as what is nowadays called a theory of warrant, of when we are warranted in asserting or believing that snow is white or anything else.

I suspect that van Dun's real objection to my old essay, the heart of our quarrel, doesn't really become evident until deep into his essay, when he gets to historical questions. We come to that point when he quotes me thus: “Human history contains plenty of data from which we might draw the conclusion that liberty works and slavery fails.”

Human history

To this he takes exception on a number of grounds. He asks: “[Where] do we draw the line between ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’?" I might interject: the line is easily drawn, because I mean by slavery here what the history books mean by it -- the ownership or control of a person as a chattel. His questions continue: "What is the point of asking whether it is liberty or slavery that works? Surely, no one holds that the abolition of the institution of slavery brings a libertarian society into existence. A person can be unfree without being a slave (or a prisoner) in the common meaning of the term.”

True enough. Allow me to get this riposte properly underway, then, with two examples of unfreedom that fall far short of slavery, that also conspicuously didn't work. I take examples from my own country's history. In the early 20th century a sophisticated political movement went to a good deal of trouble to secure an amendment to the U.S. Constitution in order to allow Congress to prohibit the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. Why? The motives were perfectly understandable (it is difficult to deny that the consumption of liquor has been tied up with a good deal of heartbreak and disaster in human life), and these motives seemed to participants in that political movement to justify a constraint upon human liberty, upon individual decisions about the use of their own property and about the contracts into which they would or would not enter.

That unfreedom, imposed on us from 1919 until 1933, quite plainly did not work.
It fell because it failed.

Secondly, let us consider the sort of unfreedom typified by centralized social planning represented by the creation of a Federal Reserve Board, and ultimately by the introduction of fiat money. I think it safe to say that the headlines of the last year and a half especially make it clear that this unfreedom, too, does not work. This example is of a new sort because in each of the preceding two examples -- chattel slavery and alcohol prohibition -- we are discussing an institution that is no more. In the case of the Federal Reserve, we have to deal with an ongoing failure. Nonetheless, that it is a failure -- and that it is an instance of unfreedom -- are both very clear to me, and I hope to Mr. van Dun.

Business cycles preceded fiat money. But such money, and the central bankers whose "fiat" it is, surely worsen these destructive waves, these macrocosmic outbreaks of manic-depressive disorder. By flooding the land with the ever-cheaper legal tender, the central bankers cajole the retail and investment bankers, who in turn cajole men and women of varying degrees of prudence, industry, and business sense to accept their loans, for residences and for businesses; for the execution of good plans or bad plans or no plans at all.

Thus houses are built to be sold to families with fictitious income on the expectation that the houses will keep rising in price and will "flip" so no one will be the wiser; malls are built where there is no reasonable expectation that anyone will shop; deserts are watered and made to bloom at enormous expense in regions few wish to inhabit; dotcoms boast of "new paradigms" when their only real achievement is cluttering up cyberspace with yet more harebrainedness.

We know what comes next. What else can come next? Mises put it well: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." Either way, it is nasty, and the victims of the collapse are, insofar as they are victims thereof, unfree.

Slavery Fails

So why, if I acknowledge that not all unfreedom involves slavery, is it the case that when I say that freedom works, do I immediately couple that with "slavery fails"? The answer is simple: Slavery provides a neat textbook case, if you will, of the failures of unfreedom. It shows us for example that one important mark of the failure of unfree institutions is that they constrain the possibilities and deform the hopes even of those whom they seem to privilege.

Let us return to the issue of slavery, then. By the 1850s in the southern United states, it was clearly a dysfunctional pillar of a dysfunctional society. What did slavery do for the free laborers of the slave states? Hinton Helper was right about this, in his book on The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). Helper was wrong on much, but he was on firm ground in arguing that slavery undermined the economic development of the south. The great plantations that employed large numbers of slaves to tend usually just one out of just three agricultural staples suited to this arrangement also soaked up the risk capital than might otherwise have gone to entrepreneurs, manufacturers, or even more mixed-use varieties of farmer, thereby making a diversified and balanced economny impossible.

The LONDON DAILY NEWS, in its review of Hinton's book, described it as advocating "a thorough reform in the labor system and renovation of the capitalists." Alas, it was too late for the old South to renovate itself in this way. The region was straped into a kamikaze plane, about to dive bomb the aircraft carrier of the North.

Slavery, in short, fell not because of accidents of history, and not because it was inhumane toward its intended victims (though it surely was). It fell because it failed, even on its own terms.

Hinton's arguments against the slave system may be taken, then, as a paradigm of pragmatic arguments for liberty in general. Liberty works in directing capital toward a variety of fruitful products, and co-ordinating the activities of innumerable individuals pursuing innumerable courses of life. The slave system confused the movement of capital, and made such co-ordination impossible.

An Industrial Society

The economics of antebellum slavery in the US is a huge subject, but I will take it as established for my purposes here that slavery, as represented specifically by the slave states within the United States in the 1850s, did not work. This leaves us with another important question of van Dun: Where is the evidence that the experience of an industrial society with rapidly changing technologies, extended markets and a highly developed division of labour can be extrapolated to other types of societies?

First, I do happen to live in an industrial society with rapidly changing technologies, so I think it worth remarking that slavery failed here, and that other forms of unfreedom regularly fail to an extent that suggests the obvious generalization. They represent the problems that freedom does and will solve.

But, second: are there really any other types of "society" on this planet now? There is only the one, so far as I know. There are different governments, who strive to keep up the illusion that sovereignty is a valuable thing, and so pretend to represent not just arbitrary chunks of land and the people there but so many distinct "societies" or "nations." I don't buy it. Still, it all seems to be just the one, this industrial one with its rapidly changing technologies, where slavery as a central part of a society's structure is a thing of the past. And that one emphatically does not need an earthly sovereign.

Globalization is nothing new. It was well-established when Leonard Read wrote his classic exposition of the information value of prices, "I, Pencil." What did the pencil have to say for itself? My core, it said, comes from graphite mined in Ceylon mixed with clay from Mississippi to produce the mixture inaccurately called "lead." This lead is then treated with a hot mixture that includes candle wax from Mexico.
The rubber-like product that tops off the pencil so we users thereof can correct our mistakes is made by combining rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies (this was published in 1958) with sulfur chloride. And so forth.

I submit that all these contributions to the existence of that single pencil are themselves drawn from a single society incorporating both Indonesia and the US State of Mississippi. What has changed since 1958 is not this singleness but our awareness thereof.

A couple of digressions

By way of digression, let us acknowledge the final point of Read's essay. His point was not so much geographic spread as overwhelming complexity. No person, no central planning commission -- and we might easily add on his behalf, no bank of computers -- could anticipate or ordain everything that goes into putting together a pencil, which on its face seems such a simple implement. Only the whole of society consisting of innumerable individuals whose activities are co-ordinated by prices can accomplish this in the efficient way that pencil users take for granted.

There is only one society and within this one, slavery is wrong. Does slavery no longer exist, then? Alas, we can not say that. A second and much more solemn digression is appropriate here. According to a study by the U.S. State Department, 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked across international borders each year. Eighty percent of these are women, and about half are minors. Although most of the traffic is commercial sexual exploitation, manual labor is exacted from some such objects of traffic, too. There are likely millions of other victims who are trafficked within the borders of a single nation and thus don't show up in such statistics.

Everybody except the immediate beneficiaries (and they remain silent on their practices) has little trouble recognizing this as an evil and an atavistic practice. It is not something that works, nor anything that promises to work. It is simply on a continuum with the acts of battery and abduction with which it generally begins -- violent crime surviving because of the darker traits of human nature. Note indeed, that trafficking in human beings takes place largely for the benefit of a market, prostitution, that itself has been driven underground by misguided criminalization. Despite that, we have shaking ourselves into a better equilibrium than that in which such bondage was any essential part.

James' Moral Vision

Allow me now to move on to the most daunting portion of my exposition. I will try to convey the essence of William James' (and incidentally my own) moral vision. Not all value is moral value but moral value is the type on which van Dun and I seem to occupy distinct stands. I would ask him to try to grasp the Jamesian vision, and to note in doing so that it has both a conservative and a rebellious side -- the conservative respects and defends the social equilibrium that has developed, against the savage or the fraudulent and the threats each presents. But the rebellious side tells us that no equilibrium is final, and pushes forward toward something more inclusive, more tolerant...higher.

A thoroughly secular view can grasp both halves of this vision, as a logical matter. But depth in contemplation of the human predicament, James says, will lead an ethical philosopher to wonder what motivates and what sustains the rebels who challenge the existing order and upon whose efforts the pattern of moral progress depends. In one passage in The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, (MPML) James said that every one of "hundreds of ideals has its special champion already provided in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it, and to fight to death in its behalf".

Expressly born? A champion already provided? Provided by whom? The most natural hypothesis is that champions -- saints, we may call them, to recall the lectures on sainthood and its uses in Varieties of Religious Experience -- they come to us and are sustained by what James near the end of MPML calls "a divine thinker with all-enveloping demands."

There are innumerable situations in which both sides are right. The conservative is right, as is the rebel. Mr. van Dun glances at this situation when he asks, "Does the fact that my liberty stands in the way of another's plans or hopes, provide him or any other with a sufficient reason to disregard it?" That is indeed a very good question. Given the adjective "sufficient" before the word "reason" in that question I can confidently offer an unequivocal answer: No. But this requires some explanation, and that in turn requires that we make the question a bit more concrete.

It is quite commonly the case that one person's liberty is in accord with the established systems of his day (in the 1850s, an Alabama white man may well have had plans or hopes that involved ownership of a slave) and the sort of conflict the question suggests comes about because other person's liberty will involve defiance of that order. A slave may plan his escape just as an aspiring owner approaches the site of the auction. With whose hopes and plans should the pragmatist side?

Victory and Defeat There Must Be

So we meet the conservative and the rebel in a rather stark form. There are reasons to lock out some interests and disdain some passions. The reasons always come down to this: those interests and passions are (a) inconsistent with the existing social equilibrium, and (b) we can not now see our way clear to a better one. But each passion has its champion, and the collective pressure of them helps make way (whether they as individuals wanted this or not is irrelevant) to a broader, more tolerant, equilibrium later. Here I quote James's MPML again. "Since victory and defeat there must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the more inclusive side -- of the side which even in the hour of triumph will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished party's interests lay."

Later, and adopting I would say a somewhat more Olympian tone, James writes, "The pure philosopher can only follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the kingdom of heaven is incessantly made."

James epistemology, then, leads to an ethic that has to unfold in history, and it conceives of history as progressive.

Let us move a bit further back to get a sense of how messy a process history is, even if conceived of as a moral progress. Consider the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay colony. They certainly felt locked out by the High Churchmen running the established religion in the mother country in the early 17th century. Some of their colleagues would in time rebel and help put a king to death. But the Puritans who show up in US history books are the ones who braved the ocean to create a "shining city on a hill."

Did their own rebelliousness entail tolerant attitudes on their part. Heck no! Neither Anne Hutchison nor Roger Williams thought so, at any rate. But the rebellions of the Puritans -- both the at-home King-killing ones and the emigrants -- helped contribute over time to greater tolerance in the English-speaking world. This business of rebellion and the emergence of ever more inclusive equilibria is a costly one, to be sure.

Every equilibrium has discontents, out of whose ranks come rebels. Every equilibrium also has its defenders, some of whom think that the status quo is wonderful; others of whom simply think that it is better than any of the other options on the table. So with this backdrop, we can confidently answer van Dun's question.

"Does the fact that my liberty stands in the way of another's plans or hopes, provide him or any other with a sufficient reason to disregard it?"

Remember that I said that "sufficient" is the crucial word there. If the question were whether it provides the "other" with a genuine reason to disregard it, I would have had to say "Yes." But that genuine reason is not a sufficient reason. There is history to consider. There is the question of which of our freedoms represents the more inclusive order. If he is the one proposing to break with an established equilibrium, there is the question whether his actions will help replace it with a better. The answer, then, is "No."

Infinite Regression

One of the classical arguments against pragmatism, either epistemological or ethical, is the claim of an infinite regression.

Truth, (or knowledge, or warrant, or successful reference) is understood by pragmatists to be that which works.

Works toward what end or by what standard? ask the critics. And if any end or standard is specified, they pounce. Does that end or standard work? If not, it is neither true nor good, according to pragmatism itself. Yet if the end or standard does work, it must do so according to some yet further end or standard, and so on forever. Surely nothing that requires such an endless loop can be an accurate account of how we do or should make our here and now decisions. So pragmatism stands defeated!

Although Van Dun makes no such argument explicit, I believe that some such notion operates between the lines of his essay, so I give it answer here.

The regression is not infinite because one can in principle imagine a world in which all desires are harmonized each with the others. That is not the world in which we live, but we may well see both history and ethics as a process of working toward that summit, and we may see freedom as the crucial means to that end -- the metabolism by which we can keep putting one foot in front of the other toward that eschatology.

Physics

But then there is the argument from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or from contemporary cosmological theory, that the world will not end happily -- that it will all end in a heat death, as detached particles move endlessly far away from each other and all meaning is lost. Won't that make a mockery out of the goals humans had pursued so assiduously during our span in this cosmos?

Not at all. All such scientific premises represent the latest word, hardly the last word. A century from now, some revived form of the old Steady State cosmology may be regnant and the second law may itself have been defeated by some real-life version of Maxwell's demon, brought us by nanotechnology. Indeed, who knows but that in some Big Picture the destiny of the human race is to reverse the flow of energy into heat and save the cosmos from the contemplated death? All the better, then, do we have a good reason to set each other free from one another's tampering.

And with that stunningly speculative flourish I had better conclude, for fear that anything else I might say in this post will be an anti-climax.