my Inbox from last September, the reader who talked about New Orleans’ preparation for a huge homosexual festival continues his thoughts.
While skimming the article on the Palm Springs homosexual orgy/party I was struck by the fact that opponents to this thing were unable to succeed, supposedly due to the “power of the gay dollar.” Leaving aside whether that is true or not, a larger issue appeared to me; the worldview of many people is increasingly in economic terms only.
Many libertarians and more than a few neoconservatives and even liberals see the world in mostly economic terms; some libertarians see the world purely in economic terms. I’m aware of some followers of Rand who see the highest good for an individual as “maximizing lifetime happiness,” and that takes the form of them getting to make the choices that lead to their happiness no matter what, subject only to the limitation of nonagression/non-coercion of others. It is a logical conclusion for the materialist who argues that if you cannot see, measure, detect, etc. something it does not exist.
If you see the world in this way, then you won’t find much that is objectionable in the homosexual lifestyle; indeed, the economic clout of childless people devoted to pleasure is likely to be formidable if they tend to have degrees and work as high level bureaucrats/professionals/etc., and for those that reckon “voting” with the dollar, their influence cannot be ignored. Their own worldview forces them to accept such things as orgy weekends, because of the money involved.
Interestingly, except for some diehard Randian libertarians, the libertarian/neoconservative/liberal types I have known or read who fit the above category do become a bit queasy or uncertain when some details of the “gay lifestyle” enter the discussion: Jonah Goldberg doesn’t support “gay marriage,” for example. A liberal I know who is opposed to discrimination against “gays” nevertheless finds the bath-house scene to be a public health menace and strongly opposes any attempts by NAMBLA to normalize pedophilia, and so forth. Yet none of these people can see that the “lifestyle” is one big lump and it is not possible to on the one hand endorse “civil unions” but on the other hand disapprove of orgies such as Southern Decadence. I suspect, but can’t prove, that this is due to a collision of values within the people in question.
On the one hand, they’ve accepted the notion of unlimited choice for everyone and seeing the world in purely economic terms, on the other hand there is sufficient residual morality courtesy of centuries of Western civilization that they become uneasy with some of the logical results of the pure economic model. So on the one hand, they can’t give up seeing the world in terms of economics, on the other hand they get queasy at the idea of some implications of purely economic thinking.
This leads to dithering from one point of view to another; National Review writers with a few exceptions cannot bring themselves to oppose homosexual marriage, yet with no exceptions they oppose most of the excesses of the “gay community.” They cannot take a consistent position because many of them do not have a consistent philosophy! Seeing the world mainly in terms of economics, yet with various shards and fragments of traditional morality still residing in their heads, they try to square the circle by accepting homosexuals as “just like us” and yet opposing many of the things homosexuals do…things that are not “just like us” in any way, shape or form. While it would be tempting to blame this on Lowry’s editorial effect (libertarians are blind to immigration, and that’s why he’s ignored it IMO, just to pick one example), it is possibly simply an effect of the drift towards libertarianism over the last 10–20 years.
Remember that seeing the world in economic terms was a great revolutionary thing in the 1970’s; it pitted one against the whole “social-justice” establishment and gave one some solid ammo to oppose socialism and communism with. It had utility, therefore, in the political environment. It is also easy to understand, and it is attractive to young professionals with no children and healthy parents; a doctrine that teaches we all should take care of ourselves and help others when we feel like it, that has no place for anyone other than a competent adult, is a heady one to a 30-something yuppie. It is no coincidence, IMHO, that most libertarians seem to be childless people…or that more than a few of them begin drifting away from it if they do have children. (It is interesting to see some changes in Goldberg since the birth of his daughter and death of his father, for example. He is in some ways becoming a more serious person IMO.)
Unhappily by ignoring cultural issues it leads to the current situation (it is also a weak reed for opposing the Jihad, but that is for another day). Which brings me to a short critique of viewing the world in purely economic terms.
Clayton Cramer over at http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/blogger.html has pointed out a very simple problem with most versions of libertarianism, which I shall now paraphrase. Under a society of pure economic choice, there is no rational way to restrain a man from buying a basket of kittens and puppies, taking it to the local grade school, and slowly flaying each animal alive on the public sidewalk during recess. So long as he paid for the animals, they are his property. So long as he remains on a public sidewalk and does not block traffic, and cleans up the mess himself, there is no way for many libertarians to object. He’s not aggressing/coercing any human, he’s just engaging in an act that most would find reprehensible/disgusting and doing so in a way to bring a lot of emotional turmoil to children.
Cramer then pointedly notes that the laws against cruelty to animals are artifacts of the late 19th century Christians. There’s no rational reason, in a pure economic sense, for those laws to exist. The effects of such laws are many fold, but none of them are directly economic, therefore in libertopia they simply could not exist. But as I see it (and I suspect Cramer does as well) a culture that would allow such blatant and gratuitous horrible cruelty is one that would have a number of other flaws as well, and not one that many would want to live in, including many libertarians/neocons/liberals.
My argument then goes on to point out that libertarians especially are cultural “free riders”; they expect to have a culture where torturing small animals to death in front of children isn’t even thinkable, yet they are not willing to support the cultural norms and societal structures that make it possible. But that is for another time.
For now, I simply wanted to point out that many people we both know likely see the world mainly as a series of economic transactions, and thus cannot really bring themselves to condemn floating orgies so long as only “consenting adults” are involved and they pay their own way. I suspect that the same people would object to a Ku Klux Klan convention featuring cross burning, although there would be no rational, economic reason for doing so; the “Klan dollar” spends just the same as the “gay dollar,” right? So how can one dollar be accepted while the other is rejected, on economic grounds? It cannot, another reason (discrimination/multiculturalism) must be invoked, but it is NOT a purely libertarian/economic reason! A contradiction has occurred, and one that no one in the libertarian/neocon/liberal world seems to even notice.
Ironically, one could call this “moral bankruptcy,” but that’s not an economic concept, so it doesn’t matter, right?