We like to think that scientists are intrepid seekers of truth. And we like to think that scientific knowledge will spur the medical research that will cure us of what ails us.
Surely, it is true of cancer and heart disease. But, is it also true of mental illness?
Are we just a pill away from curing all forms of emotional suffering? And that presupposes that all forms of emotional suffering are bad.
By now, most of us know that therapy does not have a very good track record. All things considered, it seems perfectly rational to think that psychopharmacology is our last best hope.
Freud himself reached this conclusion after a long and distinguished career practicing psychoanalysis. Who are we to argue the point?
Of course, manufacturers are not just in the business of curing what ails us. They are in the business of selling their product. To sell pills, you must market them. When it comes to psychotropic medication, one easy way to increase your market is to pathologize normal behavior.
True enough, some people are clinically depressed. But, if you can make loneliness, rejection, and anomie into forms of depression, you can vastly increase your market.
So I’ve suggested from time to time, and so suggests Susan Cain in an excellent article from yesterday’s New York Times.
Cain argues that the pharmaceutical industry has launched an assault on shyness and an assault on introverted contemplation.
More than that, it is attacking modesty and even femininity, happily taking what used to be considered positive character traits and magically transforming them into diseases.
Once it convinces you that you are not just maladjusted, but sick, it is more than happy to offer a cure.
Cain opens with a compelling image: “A beautiful woman lowers her eyes demurely beneath a hat. In an earlier era, her gaze might have signaled a mysterious allure. But this is a 2003 advertisement for Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (S.S.R.I.) approved by the F.D.A. to treat social anxiety disorder. ‘Is she just shy? Or is it Social Anxiety Disorder?' reads the caption, suggesting that the young woman is not alluring at all. She is sick.”
Cain shows us one the many faces of shyness. The woman is acting modestly; she is demure and alluring. In another time she would have been considered to be feminine.
According to the makers of Zoloft, she is sick.
For all of its obvious demerits, the ad also assaults femininity. Cain does not say so, but she certainly implies it. It is worth adding, in passing, that modesty and shyness look different in men and women.
As author of a forthcoming book on introversion, Cain has done her research. She admits that some people suffer from severe forms of social anxiety-- think agoraphobia-- and that these people are sometimes incapable of normal functioning. She accepts, as I do, that Zoloft can be a godsend for people who are too terrified to venture outside of their own homes.
She also notes that Zoloft is not an unalloyed good. It might also bring on: “nausea, loss of sex drive, seizures.”
In days of yore shyness and modesty were positive social values. They were signs of good character.
I am not just talking about modest attire. A person of character is so tactful and considerate that he does not blurt out every thought that passes through his mind. Nor does he send photos of his private parts to strangers.
Call him introverted or shy or modest, our culture might see him as suffering from a mental illness.
We seem clearly to value extroversion. We value people who are outgoing and gregarious, even in excess.
In many ways, that is the important point. Our culture is awash with people who let far too much hang out, who act too quickly and too impulsively, who take unnecessary risks because they have not thought through the consequences.
In this cultural whirl a person who does not form friendships quickly or easily or does not offer intimate contact on the spur of the moment risks being labeled repressed, inhibited, shy, or sick.
But, are we really confident that the person who makes friends slowly, but who keeps the friends he makes, should be seen as suffering from social anxiety?
Why not say that the person who makes friends too quickly, who flits from one friend to another without much thought, and who acts impulsively and thoughtlessly, is really the one who has the problem?
We all know that there are times when it is best to keep your powder dry. There are times when it is best not to jump to conclusions or to take action prior to reflection. And there are also social situations where reticence and shyness are the right thing to do.
If your social world is filled with criminal gangs, you do best to show a high level of shyness and introversion, an unwillingness to get involved with people who are up to no good.
If you arrive in a new social world and are unfamiliar with the rules or the players, you do best to sit back and observe the situation before getting involved.
At some point, of course, you will need to join in, but feeling that you must throw yourself into a game whose rules are unfamiliar to you is not going to contribute to your emotional serenity.
Good decision making exists between the extremes of making a precipitous decision before you have considered all the facts and being so terrified of making a mistake that you cannot make a decision at all.
Once the decision is made, you need to take action, but taking action just for the sake of looking active is almost as bad as doing nothing because you are too afraid.
There is more to shyness than feminine allure. Cain notes that introverts, if they do not get too caught up in their own thoughts, tend to take the time to examine all sides of an issue.
This capacity for reflection, and for hard work, is essential for good leadership.
If a leader has examined all of the relevant information and has weighed all the relevant opinions, then each member of his team will feel that his contribution has been respected. The result will be that he will be more likely to work hard.
Introversion, as Cain is using the term, is not the same as introspection. Looking into your mind to try to figure out how it is malfunctioning is not the same as taking the time to reflect on all the possible real outcomes to a decision.
Cain concludes: “But even non-medical treatments emphasize what is wrong with the people who use them. They don’t focus on what is right. Perhaps we need to rethink our approach to social anxiety: to address the pain, but to respect the temperament that underlies it. The act of treating shyness as an illness obscures the value of that temperament. Ridding people of social unease need not involve pathologizing their fundamental nature, but rather urging them to use its gifts.
“It’s time for the young woman in the Zoloft ad to rediscover her allure.”
Exactly.
It’s not really about science; it’s about culture. And it’s about the way that culture communicates values.
In the case of shyness, the culture is hiding its true intentions behind the mask of science. It wants to transform values, to make extroversion a sign of health and introversion a sign of illness.
Thus, people are no longer shy or modest or reticent. If they exhibit these qualities, they are suffering from repression.
As you probably know, the notion that repression is bad while expression is good comes down to us from our old friend Sigmund Freud.
It is not a scientific fact. It is a dogmatic belief, enforced through the mechanisms of mind control.
It is also the basis for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic treatment is based on the strict injunction to censor nothing, to say whatever comes to mind, regardless of how painful or trivial it seems.
Psychoanalysis has always tried to break down thoughtfulness and consideration.
The psychoanalytic patient is trained to free associate, and is told that anything less is a sign of repression and censorship.
Strangely enough, and dialectically enough, the psychoanalyst himself occupied the other extreme. He hid behind the couch and practiced an extreme, even pathological reticence.
Nothing is more characteristic of classical analysis than the analyst’s refusal to engage with the other person qua person.
Now, if you can find a sufficiently naive psychoanalyst, he or she will tell you that free association is only practiced in session. Nowhere does psychoanalysis suggest that people take this practice with them when they leave the analyst’s office.
Yet, if you train people, over a period of years, to say whatever comes to mind, why would you think that they will simply shut down the habit once they leave the analytic setting.
Thomas Ball was a father, a husband, a Vietnam vet, and, apparently, a Men’s Rights activist..
Having once slapped his two year old daughter, drawing blood, he was arrested and jailed. He then attempted to recover his good name and to have the right to see his children. His fought “City Hall” until Wednesday June 15 in Keene New Hampshire when he walked up the steps of the local courthouse, doused himself with gasoline and lit a match.
Unemployed and destitute, he was about to be jailed for failing to pay child support. A proud man, he preferred martyrdom to imprisonment. He wanted his death to highlight what he saw as the marked bias of the family court system toward men.
If he had killed himself to protest capitalist oppression, he would have been hailed as a heroic martyr. Since he died to protest the anti-male bias in our court system, more than a few people are dismissing him as a deranged crank.
Ball offered a long, detailed manifesto about the problems he had faced trying to see his children. The tract is 10,000 words long. I have read it and I agree with Dr. Helen Smith, who has more professional experience in such matters than I do. It does not read like the ravings of a maniac or a madman.
As she put it: “His statement is not the ramblings of a madman, it is the mission of a warrior in some sense.“
In a way, that is part of the problem. Ball was clear and rational, but he was also calling for an insurrection against the family court system. He included instructions for making Molotov Cocktails in his treatise, and, for many people, that makes him sound like he has passed a line.
Of course, it is fair to mention that during the Vietnam War the New York Review of Books offered instructions for the manufacture of Molotov Cocktails. Naturally, it was vigorously defended for practicing freedom of the press-- if we don't allow the press to promote insurrection, the terrorists win. At the time, no one accused the editors of that august publication with being deranged maniacs.
As some of the commenters on Dr. Helen’s site point out, Ball just left his children fatherless. He has failed in the task of providing for them, and always will. It is not a trivial point.
I will mention here that we do not know whether Ball had life insurance,and I do not know whether or not it will pay a suicide.
But, is the system as bad as Ball says it is? Is it so infected with anti-male bias that a man cannot get a fair shake? Are the laws and regulations set up so that no judge or administrator has the discretion to rule one way or the other? Is every aggressive action committed by a male against a woman or child grounds for severe sanction? Does the system distinguish between those men who are chronic batterers and those men who lose control once?
Here there is a difference of opinion.
Blogger Assistant Village Idiot wrote to Instapundit to defend the family court system. He explains that he has had dealings with the agency, but not with the children’s welfare section, and insists that it goes out of its way to be fair and judicious. He does not see it shackled by legalistic interpretations of bureaucratic regulations..
Since he sees courts accommodate difficult parents all the time, he concludes that Ball brought it all on himself for failing to cooperate.
In reply, Dr. Helen reports her experience: “I have seen men denied custody, charged for domestic violence for the ‘crime’ of spanking or slapping a child, and denied child support enforcement. “
To her mind the political implications of Ball’s act supersede the person, psychological aspects. She is not inclined to diagnose him or to accept Assistant Village Idiot’s dismissal of him as “prissy.”
The best we can say is that what Ball denounces does happen. I cannot ascertain how often or how consistently it happens.
Surely, we can agree that the court system, with its adversarial bent, is no place to be resolving intrafamilial disputes.
I also think it fair to say that the Violence Against Women Act does presupposes that women need to be protected from violent men, and that the best way to do it is through the criminal justice system.
I find it strange that so many people are so willing to dismiss Thomas Ball as deranged or crazy. They assert that someone who would self-immolate to bring awareness to a political cause must be completely out of his mind.
And yet, one savvy commenter on Dr. Helen’s blog, named Golddigger, offers the following important perspective: “... but given the tone and content of Ball's Statement and the fact that self-immolation is traditionally practiced as an extreme form of political protest, I'm not so sure. After all, he's not getting much media coverage, but the internet sure is paying attention - even people who've never considered the case for men's rights in family court. His martyrdom for the cause will live forever on the internet, if nowhere else, as he knew it would. Even though he fought the System in Keene NH with substantial success, he's made himself a symbol of justice denied. A heroic figure.
“Ball would have been about 58 when he died. That means one of his formative memories is the famous image of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc's 1963 self-immolation in protest of the Diem regime's persecution of Buddhists. Photos of the monk's martyrdom ran on front pages everywhere and shocked the conscience of the world. The photographer won the Pulitzer Prize. Duc's act undermined US support for the regime and precipitated its collapse. And it's still famous today - I studied it in school. Kennedy later said that ‘no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.’
“And then there's the Tunisian vegetable seller whose self-immolation in protest of unemployment and the regime's confiscation of his vegetables sparked the revolution that brought down the government and provided the catalyst for the Arab Spring. Nobody thought he was crazy.
“So if you view it in that light, don't you think Ball's self-immolation could have been the act of a rational man searching for immortality?”
It doesn’t show up in the statistics, but the human cost of extended joblessness, especially among recent college graduates, is one of the most important stories of our time.
Take the case of Roger Fierro, reported by Hannah Seligson in today’s New York Times: “Mr. Fierro, who is 26, has four jobs: working as a bilingual-curriculum specialist for the textbook publisher Pearson; handling estate sales and online marketing for a store that sells vintage items; setting up an online store for a custom piñata maker; and developing reality-show ideas for a production company. So far this month, he’s made about $1,800.”
What kind of life do you have when you are juggling four different jobs and barely making ends meet? You are not on a career track; you are not planning for a brighter future; you are not developing skills that will be more valued in the marketplace; your work life is unstructured.
For those who proudly proclaim the virtues of living in the present, in the here and now, well, meet Roger Fierro and his growing cohort.
It’s a portrait of social anomie.
Fierro is certainly well-educated. He studied at one of the nation’s best universities, the University of Chicago. It sounds good that he majored in International Studies, but he also studied Latin American Studies, the kind of trendy, politically correct field that tends to make you barely employable.
Seligson points out that Fierro’s lifestyle used to be the province of aspiring artists, people who had been lulled into thinking that they had sufficient artistic talent to succeed in the art world.
In her words: “Some portions of the population — especially young, creative types like actors, artists and musicians — have always held multiple jobs to pay the bills. But people from all kinds of fields are now drawing income from several streams.”
When it comes to developing a career, the art world is among the worst. Aspirations are stratospheric; chances of success are minuscule.
Regrettably, some of those who are in Fierro’s cohort are choosing to juggle multiple menial jobs: “Some of these workers are patching together jobs out of choice. They may find full-time office work unfulfilling and are testing to see whether they can be their own boss.”
Here our culture does young people a great disservice. For having failed to teach them how to respect authority, how to take advice, and how to follow instructions, it has prepared them for endlessl job juggling.
When you are young and just out of college, you should not be thinking about being your own boss. You should seek out mentors and mangers, not creative self-fulfillment. It's time to learn, not to express your soulfulness.
While Seligson is certainly right to say that the problem can only be solved by a robust economic recovery, we also have to ask ourselves whether this generation-- chock full of high self-esteem and creativity-- would be able to do the new jobs.
Take the case of Louise Gassman. Seligson reports: “But full-time jobs don’t suit everyone. Ms. Gassman, for example, has been offered a full-time job at SoulCycle, complete with full benefits, but she doesn’t want it. ‘I wouldn’t be able to go on auditions in the middle of the day,’ she explained. ‘Of course, it stresses me out not to have health insurance, but what is my choice? Work in an office and be unhappy? Being happy is a superhigh value to me.’”
OK, SoulCycle is a company that offers spinning classes. Since Gassman gives these classes now, I assume that she is now being offered a more managerial job. It would give her health insurance and benefits.
I’m glad that Gassman is pursuing happiness. I’m as much for happiness as anyone else, but I would point out that happiness is not a value. It’s a goal, an aspiration.
To imagine that you can only be happy pursuing creative activity is one of the great illusions of our time. Far too many young people have bought it.
Perhaps Louise Gassman can never be happy working in an office. But, one wonders whether she is really happy going to auditions and being repeatedly rejected. Because that is what the life of most aspiring actors looks like.
Last week Robert Samuelson wrote that there is currently a jobs mismatch. Jobs in engineering and science are going unfilled. Employers cannot find people who are qualified even for entry level jobs in these fields.
It is, or it should be, the disgrace of the American educational establishment. By feeding young people a diet of self-esteem, creativity, and political correctness, all the while degrading the hard disciplines of science, technology, and engineering, educators have ill prepared them for the real world.
Not to put too fine a point on it, education has overemphasized ideas and underemphasized numbers.
And the educational establishment has not taught young people the values and the work ethic that would help them to function, even to thrive, in a business environment.
Some job jugglers believe that they are learning to multitask, but, in truth, they end up unfocused and disorganized, not possessing even the elementary skills that would make them good employees.
And since young people who do have jobs do not have enough of a sense of loyalty to stick with them over time-- they prefer to jump from one job to another every time a new opportunity presents-- their employers have no vested interested in spending the time and money necessary to train them.
My title is not my title. It comes to us from Alice Walton. In a Forbes article on yoga, the second in a series, Walton explains the mental health benefits that befall those who undertake yoga.
In her words: “After all, many people say that after starting yoga they feel mentally stronger, more relaxed, less depressed and more level-headed than before. Heck, I’m the first to admit it’s the best therapy I’ve ever had.”
Some might say that this does not speak very well for therapy. They would be right to say so. Beyond the benefits she gains from yoga, Walton is also saying that therapy, in her experience, has not lived up to its billing.
Given the current American and international mania about solving emotional distress through psychopharmacology, it is worth emphasizing the benefits that yoga, among other forms of exercise, can and does confer.
I am not anti-medication, not at all. Yet, I have seen far too many people do better on a regimen of aerobic exercise than on medication. And I have seen many people profit enormously from yoga and meditation.
Everyone knows that these forms of exercise are incontestably beneficial. More people should practice them. If they don’t, one reason must be that the culture has persuaded us all that our problems are biochemical and that salvation and cure will come to us as soon as we pop the right pill. .
But it isn’t just the culture; it’s also our willingness to indulge our tendencies toward sloth. Whether it’s the Stairmaster or the yoga class, both require sustained effort.
Of course, many people who do not believe in pills believe that they can solve all their problems by lying down on a couch. What better symbol of terminal sloth could there by than the psychotherapist’s couch.
On the one side you have to contort your body into any number of ridiculous postures. On the other you lounge around on a couch and indulge your tendency to run off at the mouth.
Better yet, the average couch dweller comes to imagine that if he spends enough time in this singularly flaccid posture he will be rewarded with an epiphany that will solve all of his problems.
As the old song says: Dream on!
You can immediately understand why many people prefer couch therapy to yoga and aerobic exercise, and why they persist even when they can see that therapy is ineffective.
Since therapy assumes that all your problems stem from your mind, it tells you that you need not concern yourself with your body or your physical stress. Mental gymnastics will ultimately render it all unnecessary.
But what does yoga do for your mind? Walton has spoken to some experts in the field and she summarizes their observations: “In other words, yoga teaches a new kind of attention. People who practice yoga learn how to accept all the stress-inducing thoughts that flit around in one’s head – negative self-talk, worries, snap judgments – as just that: thoughts, and nothing more.”
To me this is not entirely clear. Calling the new attitude non-judgmental does not help very much either. The term “judgmental” is too loaded to serve much of a purpose here.
Yet, the basic insight is correct. It is also diirectly at odds with the attitude fostered by psychotherapy.
Allow me to explain it differently. Let’s imagine that you have thoughts that are flitting around in your head. They may be positive or negative, they may be worries and they may be impulsive judgments. We all have them.
The real issue and the real point of contention is that yogic mindfulness seems to teach you that those thoughts are not your own, and that you need not own them.
Psychotherapy, on the contrary, wants you to own the contents of your mind. Introspect, the therapist orders, because they you will be able to catch more and more of your mental productions, the better to weave them into a new narrative. This narrative will supposedly tell you the meaning of your life.
Let’s say that you are thinking about being abused. It may be that someone told you about his experience of being abused. It may be that you saw a story on television about abuse. It may be that you felt sympathy or empathy for the victims. You were trying to understand abuse and you projected yourself into an abusive situation.
Now, fast forward. One day you suffer abuse yourself. The experience traumatizes you and you are having difficulty coming to terms with it.
Therapists who owe their theoretical basis to Freud would say that your problem stems from your failure to accept that the abuse is really fulfilling one of your old wishes.
Which wish? Well, the one that exists in your fantasies of being abused. If the fantasies once crossed your mind, that means, to the therapist, that they are inalienably yours, that they represent your deepest personal wishes. If you explain to your therapist that these thoughts were only your mind’s sympathizing with an abuse victim, you will be accused of being in denial.
If this is the way most therapists have seen the human mind, it is surely a step in the right direction to learn to take a step back from the thoughts and fantasies that course through the mind, and to accept that just because I thought it, that does not make it mine.
I do not want to leave anyone with the impression that I consider yoga or even aerobic exercise to be a panacea. Exercise should be part of your daily routine, but it does not, in and of itself, tell you how to deal with the everyday dilemmas that might be causing stress, distress, or demoralization.
Yoga is positive and beneficial, but it is not all there is. Even mindful distancing from your own mental static is not an end in itself.
It does not spare you from the necessity to be involved in your life, to manage your relationships effectively, and to pursue your goals and aspirations.
There they were on stage, in concert at Glastonbury, England.
And then, all of a sudden, U2’s performance was disrupted by a protest group called Art Uncut.
The Sydney Morning Herald described the scene: “The anti-capitalist group Art Uncut inflated a 6-metre balloon emblazoned with the message "U Pay Your Tax 2." Security guards wrestled them to the ground before deflating the balloon and taking it away. About 30 people were involved in the angry clash.” Via Instapundit.
So, rich sanctimonious liberals, even noted anti-poverty crusaders like Bono and his band do whatever they can to avoid paying taxes.
Somehow or other, the liberal voices who rail against hypocrisy when some conservative is caught in flagrante delicto are silent when it comes to the hypocrisy of anti-poverty advocates not paying their fair share of taxes.
In Ireland, from whence they hail, U2 are folk heroes. At least they were until recently. As you know, Ireland has recently run into a serious spot of financial trouble, which has involved severe economic austerity.
People then noticed that the greatest Irish rock band, whose members count among the wealthiest Irishman on the planet, had been dodging its taxes.
Not that they did anything illegal. U2 moved its corporate base from Ireland to the Netherlands, where taxes on royalties are next to nill.
Of course, U2 is hardly alone. President Obama’s favorite corporation, General Electric, paid no taxes last year either.
And then we see the great humanitarian billionaires, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who are, legally, sheltering their vast fortunes from taxes by giving it away to the Gates foundation.
One might ask how much of the foundation’s massive philanthropic activity takes place in America and how much of it takes place around the world.
And one might ask whether all that money would not be put to better use if it was invested in new business. As Carlos Slim famously noted: “Charity never solved anything.”
Unless you want to count charity’s ability to salve the guilt of the liberal conscience.
So, we are treated to the spectacle of watching sanctimonious liberals like Buffett rail against the inequities of the tax code while sheltering their fortunes from taxes.
It brings to mind the great statement from billionaire Leona Helmsley: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
Judging by the reaction it provoked, Stephen Metcalf’s hit piece on libertarianism has achieved some of its goal.
After the financial crisis of 2008 the media were filled with denunciations of free market capitalism. Led by Paul Krugman the intelligentsia suggested that the crisis showed that free markets did not work, but that we really needed more government regulation, more government spending, and more labor unions.
The nation bought it, and empowered Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats. They enacted a goodly part of their progressive agenda and, lo and behold, the economy fell into a state of stagnation.
Politically, this incited the popular movement known as the Tea Party, an anti-government, anti-tax, pro-competition, pro-free markets movement. I think it fair to say that libertarian beliefs constitute a core of the Tea Party movement.
Clearly, those who aspire to statist solutions were not happy about this development. They feel compelled to discredit those who disagree with by using slander.
If David and Charles Koch were funding some parts of the Tea Party movement, they needed to be brought down. So, Jane Mayer wrote a hit piece in the New Yorker, after which it became de rigueur in polite New York society to pronounce the name Koch with a snarl.
Now, Slate magazine has chosen an itinerant journalist named Stephen Metcalf to ridicule, mock, and slander libertarian philosophy.
How does he do it?
Metcalf has chosen late Harvard professor Robert Nozick as the father of modern libertarian philosophy. In 1974 Nozick wrote a book called Anarchy, State, and Utopia
, which offered something of a philosophical defense of libertarian values.
But then, Metcalf explains, Nozick seems to have changed his mind, renouncing his earlier libertarianism in a later book called The Examined Life. 
He quotes Nozick: "The libertarian position I once propounded in the late '80s … now seems to me seriously inadequate."
Given that Metcalf is practicing slander, he does not care or does not know, that Nozick explained his position more clearly in a 2002 interview: “What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated.” Link here.
In the great scheme of things Metcalf is offering a very weak argument. Even if his assertion is correct, it merely shows that Nozick once defended libertarian principles, and later seemed to have qualified his defense.
As anyone with a minimal amount of learning would know, this does not tell us whether Nozick was right or wrong in either case. It tells us that Nozick believed one thing at one time and another thing at another time.
It doesn’t tell us anything more or less.
As though this is not bad enough, Metcalf has an unfortunate tendency to fall back on ad hominem arguments. He argues that Mises and Hayek, to say nothing of Milton Friedman and the Chicago economists, were nothing more than corporate shills.
Claiming that all of these distinguished economists, most of whom were professors, were on the corporate take, Metcalf then dismisses their views as a necessary product of their corruption..
Yet, as the Economist points out, in a stinging rebuttal, Metcalf has gotten most of his facts wrong. Intent on slander he did not bother to check reality. Link here.
One might also point out that the liberal economic policies that Metcalf finds so offensive have a long and distinguished intellectual history, one that goes back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Trying to dismiss a great intellectual tradition because someone once seems to have received some corporate money makes no sense. Wasn’t Paul Krugman once a paid adviser to Enron?
Apparently, Metcalf belongs to the great minds school of historical agency, the notion that ideas construct reality and that great ideas, concocted by great philosophers, move history. In his view the ideas of Nozick, as opposed, say, to Adam Smith, have been running a goodly part of modern economic policy.
Free market principles are not based on the authority of great minds. Germanic idealism is. So is totalitarian socialism.
Free market principles are based on the fact that the interactions of a large number of free minds produces a more effective economic system than do the great thoughts of a small group of central planners.
Metcalf seems to believe that the purpose of free markets is to produce his or John Rawls’ idea of a just outcome.
Yet, as the venerated Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, his work is not about justice, it’s about playing by the rules.
A government that is hellbent on forcing reality to conform to someone’s idea of justice is not the same as a government that makes it possible for everyone freely to play by the same rules.
Keep in mind that Justice Holmes was a notorious pragmatist. And that he was a great champion of first amendment freedoms.
There is no contradiction. Free market principles are based on what works. Libertarians believe that free markets produce a more equitable distribution of goods and services than a state-controlled economy does. Free markets feed people in ways that socialists can only dream of.
However much credit we want to give to the mind of Robert Nozick, we should also remember that his book appeared in 1974, which was also the year that a bunch of University of Chicago trained economists set the economic course of the post-Allende government of Chile.
Many people dismiss this because of the way that Salvador Allende was removed from power, but Chile represented a real example of free market economics in action. It was a laboratory for libertarian principles.
Metcalf is so convinced that Robert Nozick was the genie who was pulling Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s strings, that he ignores all free market practices that existed in the world at that time.
Strangely enough, Metcalf does not seem to care about the Cold War and about the great competition between capitalism and communism.
Chile certainly had its ups and downs in the aftermath of the overthrow of Allende. Yet, it has for quite some time been one of the most prosperous and stable South American countries.
If you would rather not split philosophical hairs, you need but note the difference between Mao’s China and Deng’s China. Like it or not, the free market reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s were considerably more important and influential than the thought of Robert Nozick.
Free markets are not to be judged by the philosophical beliefs of this or that Harvard professor. They are to be judged by the results they produce.
Metcalf’s argument involves a reading of cultural history. In his view World War II killed libertarianism.
He writes: “Once the creed of smart set rogues, H.L. Mencken among them, libertarianism all but disappeared after the Second World War. What happened? The single most comprehensive, centrally planned, coordinated governmental action in history—that's what happened.”
Of course, no serious libertarian has ever suggested that armies be organized by free market principles or that government should do nothing.
And no serious thinker can imagine that the success of a military organization is a justification for socialism. If liberals were so enamoured of the benefits of military mobilization they would be out there beating the drums for more and larger wars.
The fact that they have largely been an anti-war party since the 1960s belies the assertion.
In the post World War II era, the military ethos was applied to American corporate culture. At that time, liberal intellectuals attacked it mercilessly for being unjust and for stifling creativity.
Besides, if the 1950s were a time to emulate, as Metcalf seems to suggest, then why were we saddled with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Wasn’t the Great Society portrayed as the necessary antidote to the ravages that had supposedly been caused by rampant capitalism?
And then there was Vietnam. If World War II showed that government could get something right, then Vietnam seemed to suggest that it could get things wrong too.
The nation reacted to Vietnam by creating a counterculture that attacked the value system that is the basis for capitalism. It rejected the values of hard work, competition, strict organization, rule following, self-sacrifice, honor, and dignity.
If I may offer my own analysis, it would appear that Vietnam turned us from hard-working, organized go-getters into fun-loving, creative decadents who could not take care of ourselves but who needed government to take care of us.
As Americans registered what was happening in Vietnam a goodly number of us concluded that we could not and should not involve ourselves in free, competitive enterprise. We came to reject martial values, and began to whine about how much we needed big government.
This new big government was not organized like an army; it was organized like a nursery. The Great Society did not enshrine martial values; it created the Nanny State.
In place of a government that got out of the way of business, the Nanny State did what it could to regulate and control business... the better to inhibit business’ tendencies toward free and open competition.
A Nanny State does not promote competition; it stifles competition in the name of justice.
A government that promises to care for you is not the same as a government that purposefully puts you in harm’s way. A government that feels everyone’s pain is not the same as a government that tells you to shoot or bomb other people, regardless of the pain you are inflicting on the or their families.
If we are looking for a government that encourages free and open competition, and if that is a libertarian’s favorite kind of government, then the government that mobilizes for war is far closer to the libertarian model than is the Nanny State created by the Great Society.
Why not consider Nozick’s 1974 book as a response both to the Great Society and Vietnam?
Why would we not see Nozick as attacking a government gone soft, a government so Nannified that it no longer knew how to fight and win, a government that was stifling free competition and the competitive spirit, a government that was so full of empathy that it could not even prevail against the Viet Cong.
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