Flying with Libertarian Hawks

Fri Sep 10 04:53:39 PDT 2004

<http://www.techcentralstation.com/090904A.html>

Tech Central Station Flying with Libertarian Hawks

By Max Borders
 Published 
 09/09/2004 

And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to
secure a man at all.

-- Thomas Hobbes

Is it possible for one to be libertarian about policies at home and
neo-conservative about policies abroad? After all, isn't the principle of
non-coercion incompatible with the interventionist policies of the current
Administration? Simply put: is there such an animal as a libertarian hawk
and if he exists, why do we so seldom hear from him?

There is a reticence among many libertarians to speak out about their
bellicosity. You might say they're doves at the dinner table, perhaps
worried they'll be shunned by their peers. But I think it's time we give
some substance to what, at the moment, may be little more than an
intuition, and speak up about our support for foreign policies that require
armed conflicts -- even preemptive ones.

Most libertarians fall in line behind the superficial notion that domestic
and foreign policies should be mirror images of each other, each reflecting
classical liberal principles where self-defense is applied universally like
some scriptural edict. Alas, were the threats of the twenty first century
so simple to counter, the complexities of world so easily distilled.

The libertarian hawk takes her cues from Hobbes, not Locke, as the spaces
mostly untouched by globalization are, in her view, like a state-of-nature.
She sees threats that organize themselves in the shadows beyond
civilization; operating, no less, in an age of deadly weapons
proliferation. She fears the world's great, but nimble powers coalescing
into a slothful and ineffectual global body -- where the toughest decisions
of life and limb must be made in committee. She understands that freedom
does not drop like manna from heaven, but is earned drop-for-drop and
coin-for-coin by the sacrifices of blood and treasure.

And this is the crux of the libertarian hawk's position: "rights" as such,
are not some Cartesian substance that animates the body in the manner of a
soul. Rights are a human construct, just like money. The more we believe in
them, the better they work. But there are situations in which the currency
becomes, uh, devalued. Better said: there are limits to those on whom we
can ascribe rights.

We get rights by virtue of some sort of social contract, not from our
Creator. In this way, social contract theory splits the difference in many
respects between libertarianism and conservatism. The social contract is an
idea that people would rationally choose certain constraints on their
behavior, constraints which culminate in certain reciprocal rules under
which to live. I won't harm you if you won't harm me. We benefit through
cooperation. And so forth. Those who would choose the rules enjoy the full
benefits they confer.

Criteria of mutual benefit are embedded in the social contract condition --
which is devoid of: "natural rights" notions that have failed in the
libertarian tradition on metaphysical grounds; the totalitarian-leaning
"social" aspects which can creep into utilitarian theories (requiring
individuals to be sacrificial lambs to the "many"); and of the stodgy
moralizing that tends to weigh on domestic conservatism.

The overall beauty of social contract theory is that it offers us a
justification for political liberalism and pluralism that rests neither on
the foundational axioms associated with traditional moral theories, nor on
the nihilism and disorderly assertions of the so-called Postmoderns. In
short, social contract theory is a constructivist enterprise. And if you
stand outside the covenants of Man, you are presumed "enemy."

In light of all this, I find it sad that so many otherwise bright
libertarians seem so unreflective about war. Some of my favorite
freedom-loving publications have steered their editorial styles into the
hashish den of protest music and anti-Bush priggishness. Some of my
favorite think tanks issue press releases almost daily, calling for the
immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, calling for the US to extend
Constitutional privileges to enemy combatants, and claiming that it will be
impossible to bring democracy and the Rule of Law to the Middle East.

Which brings me to what could be the best criticism against the current
conflict in Iraq. Let's call it the Hayekian Argument. It can be summarized
in the following way: a complex order, like a country, is very difficult to
plan or impose upon a people. It emerges, pace Hayek, "spontaneously."
Under certain institutional conditions backed by years of tradition and
certain entrenched cultural mores, civil societies can form. But these
conditions simply are not in place in Iraq, so we may have gotten ourselves
into a
 (OK, here goes) 
 a quagmire.

Much of the Hayekian Argument depends on considerations in complexity
theory. That is, preference for "networks" over "hierarchies," as the
former tend to do a better job of sustaining complexity among agents in a
society. But further investigation along these lines may reveal something
like a "feed-forward network" that is formed when inputs of a certain type
allow a system is changed, in a sense, by example.

Of course, this is somewhat of a metaphor in the context of Iraq. And, of
course, nation-building isn't an exact science. But I would have always
preferred to hedge my bets that given enough of the appropriate initial
conditions, Iraqis would find that -- in the absence of a dangerous
dictator -- they would begin to form of the mutually beneficial
relationships with one another that bring about prosperity and peace. I
doubt they could've done this alone. I think the Coalition was right to
help them towards a tipping point. And if we fail, the failure will have
been a practical one, not a moral one.

My guess is that there are others who would like to see less of this
accretion of libertarians around the Dove. I am one of those who doesn't
fancy the idea of staring down the point of a chemical warhead before I
decide to act. (Even if such warheads turn out to be a chimera today, they
won't likely be tomorrow.) In the nuclear age, when the degree of certainty
that you will be attacked is at fifty percent, you are as good as done for
in terms of your ability to protect yourself. Thus, preventive action in a
world of uncertainty is, unfortunately, the only reasonable course. In the
meantime, it behooves us to try to make our enemies more like us
 and then
allow globalization to proceed apace. For the more like us they are, the
more likely they are to enter into the tenuous human covenants that are our
only means of having peace.

 The author is a TCS contributor. He is Program Director, Institute for
Humane Studies.

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'