Defending Classical Liberalism To A Post-Liberal: My Conversation With Benjamin Boyce

Neoliberal society is broken. Don't throw out the better liberalism alongside it.

On Wednesday, November 22nd, I appeared on Calmversations with Benjamin Boyce to discuss my new book Redefining Racism and to defend classical liberalism. Boyce leans towards a right-wing post-liberal perspective, and while I find a lot of compelling ideas in post-liberal philosophy, I also find it generally fails to understand what classical liberalism actually is. Failing to understand classical liberalism, post-liberals instead often attack a straw man. I argue to Benjamin that classical liberalism, properly understood, provides solutions for all the failings of our neoliberal era that Benjamin and other post-liberals have correctly identified.

I greatly enjoyed my conversation with Benjamin. We focused mostly on my views in this podcast, but I hope to host him here on The Black Sheep soon to have him talk more about his.

Below the embedded video, you’ll find an edited transcription of what I think were some of the most interesting sections from our conversation.

— Jake

On Gay Marriage

Benjamin:

The gay marriage issue could be construed by somebody who's more socially conservative as one of those Chesterton fence issues: that once we dismantled the contract of marriage between a man and a woman that opened up that contract to all varieties of sexual orientations and mixes and matches, up to and including polyamory or polygamy and stuff like that. So that was one that was one contract or social construct that is pre-historical or at least very historical. And we dismantled that in the name of what? Freedom of association. But what are your considerations about the downstream effects of that particular fence being rearranged?

Jake:

First, let me untangle one thing, and then I'll answer what I think you were trying to get at. We did not dismantle a “contract.” A contract is between two parties. The social contract that we often hear about allegedly explaining why we have to pay our taxes, get drafted into the military, etcetera, that's not a contract. There are two parties—or you can have more than that—but every party enters with consent and the full knowledge of the other parties. So what you’ve described is not a contract. What you're talking about is, I think, a general social arrangement. If what you're trying to get at is that two-parent households are very important, have utility, and that this convention of traditional marriage arose for good and important reasons, and if we start allowing all of these other arrangements, then we get ourselves into problem territory because we lose what we were first developing and then conserving with traditional marriage: 100% I agree with you. I have consciously come to agree more with your perspective on that. I think when I was younger, I didn't understand the value of a lot of these older traditions, and so I just wanted to reorganize things, but I was doing that from a perspective of not really trying to understand how things got to be the way that they are in the first place. And you can go dangerous places when that's the case.

In terms of gay marriage specifically, it's clear to me that there are certain people that are just gay. They're not going to be happy in a straight marriage, and they can try to force it, but it's going to be miserable for them. There’s also a large population that is bisexual or potentially bisexual, and I think that gay marriage is probably a less ideal form of marriage than traditional straight marriage for them. I think having kids is very important, and I think that both a mother and father are psychologically wired to bring different things towards child-rearing. So I think if you're bisexual or potentially bisexual, you want to encourage those people to not be gay. But I think there's a substantial population of people who are not bisexual; they truly are gay. They're going to be miserable in a traditional marriage and we should have acceptance for that. We should welcome those people and their marriages into our communities and our societies because it's cruel not to, but at the same time, I don't want to see a pendulum shift into gay marriage being a norm. Then it becomes a slippery slope, and you get into maladaptive and unsustainable situations like we're all going to marry into polycules or whatever.

Benjamin:

Sorry, I revealed my hand. I'm trying to be neutral, but thank you for allowing me to play the devil's advocate. I don't know what the audience will think about my own point of view, but I think it's interesting territory, the tensions here. Because you say there are certain people who are gay, period. And then there's a group of people who are bisexual who could go either way. If the norm is prioritizing and even idealizing the heterosexual relationship, then they'll be kept, through pressures, heterosexual. But if we swap out the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” for “monogamous,” most people are not monogamous. But we had, up until the 60s, a lot of explicit social pressure. And there have been times in the last couple hundred years where, in different pockets of society, there was a loosening—you can think of Victorian England versus “Victorian” France (I know that's a contradiction in terms)—but the French were probably more open to the erotic and having mistresses and stuff like that, whereas, at least in the meme-ified version of Victorian England, there was more of a strict social role and pressure on certain things. If we lose the ability to call out or to pressure people to be monogamous, as opposed to polyamorous, there are a bunch of downstream effects of that. In the strict libertarian framework, where everything is based on contract and consent between two parties, it doesn't seem to reach the ability to conceptualize that without arguing against or taking a stand against social pressures that make people do what they don't want to do because it's to the benefit of greater society. So how does one, as a libertarian-leaning person, square that?

Jake:

I'm so happy you asked me that question…

On Binding Communities In A Classical Liberal Society

Jake:

I remember there was a moment in your episode with Martyr Made where you and he talked about liberalism being a dissolving force in society where it becomes its own undoing. I disagree with you and him on that, but I think the concerns that you were raising are very much right.

First of all, with gay marriage, I think that it's possible to hold in your mind at once that we allow this for certain people in certain situations, but we don't hold it as an overall good. The type of society that I personally want to live in holds that, and I do think that's sustainable. Perhaps the course of the future will prove me wrong, but I don't think it will.

However, I agree with the general principle that you're laying out: you want to have communities that adhere to certain social norms that are positive, productive, and lead to eudaimonia. I think that classical liberalism, as I understand it, is the absolute best way to get there.

When you had Jeremy Kauffman on, one of the things that he mentioned is that he's a libertarian, but doesn't like classical liberals. That is, with all respect to Jeremy, a confused understanding. Libertarianism is nothing but a particular strand of classical liberalism.

Classical liberalism is kind of a vague term. But when I think of classical liberalism, I think of John Locke: life, liberty, and property. A system of respect for individual rights. What I don't necessarily think of, and what I think I hear from your post-liberal perspective, sounds almost like multiculturalism. In my understanding, to you, liberalism just means tolerance and acceptance of everything. But someone that I think is in the classical liberal tradition is Hans-Hermann Hoppe. If you're familiar with Hoppe's work at all, one of the ideas that you might be familiar with is “covenant communities,” which would be these communities, relatively small, that would self-govern and be self-segregating. People who are not aligned with the community standards, the phrase that he famously uses and many memes have been made about, would be “physically removed,” by which he means not that violence should be used against these people, but that they will have to live in a different place. They will live in a different society because the contract law governing this one will not allow them to be part of it.

I really believe, also, in the idea of federalism in the American founding and its idea that we were going to have a bunch of different states. I think states are actually much too large, but that we were going to have different systems and that they were going to govern themselves in their own way, and we would have a bunch of different experiments. So I think it's very important that people have individual rights and the ability to contract into a society that might potentially live in some horribly hedonistic way that you and I totally disagree with, but they should be over there, and we should be over here. We don't have to tolerate that in our spaces. And, in fact, I think it's liberalism, that idea of individual rights and property, which is what protects and allows that. What you have otherwise is either democracy, where you have the 51% of people that you don't want in your society controlling the whole thing, or you have a monarch or whoever who is making determinations for you and your community, and, like we've seen at many points in history, may oppress your religion or whatever it may be. That's why I believe liberalism is absolutely the best way to achieve the society that I think you're looking for.

On Economics

Benjamin:

This is great stuff. It's interesting. I'm trying to float ideas without necessarily saying that these are ideas that I think, but these are ideas that attract me because there's some sort of tension that I want to unravel.

If you have a bunch of different communities, let's say in the state of Michigan, and let's try to ignore the racial component of that, but there are just different people who have different traditions and different values, and they self-segregate. And yet they're all in an economic relationship because they all use the same currency, and there is a need to trade with each other. They're not just localized. If you speed up that story in Michigan—or this city-state or covenant community—in 20 years, you're going to have an economic disparity that begins. You'll also have creative disparities. Maybe the urban centers draw and attract more creative people because there's more ability to play around with certain ideas, whereas in more conservative communities, they push people out or reject people in one way or another from playing around with ideas. So they lose creative capital, but keep on marching along because they're more conservative and more dedicated to living a certain way that gives dividends to the people who maintain it.

But you're going to have these economic disparities. That's what we see. So you have people living in extreme poverty over here, and also people living in this middle-class, repetitive lifestyle, but it's very stable. And then you have people that are kind of coming up with new technologies and innovations, making tons of money. Isn't there going to be some sort of organization that's going to try to help the people who are, over time, due to their lifestyles, spending their human capital and wasting themselves away? And where are they going to get that capital but from the innovators and from the conservative people—the middle class and the upper class—and somebody is going to figure out a system, and they're going to call it government, and they're going to create government programs to go around and solve these problems because they're going to see these problems that need to be solved. I can see a story where inevitably in the state of Michigan there's going to be this disparity that's going to cause this pustule of depravity and somebody is going to have to clean it up. So isn't there going to be a call for some sort of paternalism to fix or keep people below a certain level of depravity, whether economic depravity or even social depravity?

Jake:

In a statist world, yes, but that's what we need to move away from. You talked about economics being the solvent because of how economics forces you to interact with other people. There's some truth to that, but I don't know what you're going to do to deal with it if you still want the gains of markets and trade. There's no other way to create wealth at any comparable level. You're dooming yourself to poverty if you don’t trade with people who are different than you. Even if you controlled the whole country, you still have to trade with other countries, or else you're economically isolationist and you’ll have the same economic situation as any country that we've put tons of sanctions on. You’ll have the economy of Cuba or Iran, you'll just have done it to yourself. Unless I’m going to full-blown conquer the world, which is a very costly and deadly thing to do, I have to be okay with other people living their way. When I go to interact and trade with them, that's what I do, but when I go back to my community we can keep up strong psychological, physical, and social barriers. You might choose to not use a lot of the internet or something like that. It's very hard. We're in this modernist world, and we do have to figure out how to solve it. That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Benjamin:

Are the Amish a good example?

Jake:

The Amish might be one example. I don't think I'd want to live like the Amish, so that's not the answer for me or the community that I would want to build and live in. But it's an answer. It's a very extreme answer, but they have protected their community by doing that. So I wonder if there are, and I think that there are, more mild ways to get to a place where you can control your environment a little bit more without totally shunning all of modern technology. But we’ll have to work to develop them, and that's going to take time, effort, and thinking.

Back to economics, as I said, I don't think there's too much we can do to avoid economic contact with other types of people without just punching ourselves in the face and making our own lives worse off. But I think the biggest solvent isn’t economics anyway, it's the state. We used to have much better community ties in this country, as I'm sure you know well, and it was the progressive era that dissolved that. It was this force that you talked about of people trying to loot others—Frederick Bastiat, the French economist, would call this legal plunder—of unproductive people taking from productive people by using the state to steal their wealth. We saw that happen in the progressive era, and it's only gotten worse since. We saw, as people started going to the state for these things, the disillusion of a lot of the things that tied communities together. Schools became public schools, which threw everybody into one basket. Mutual aid societies, which are where people within a community would contribute financially to help each other in times of need, got destroyed and replaced by Social Security, Medicare, and other government entitlement programs.

Given how many of these issues have come from the state, it seems to me that the need is to roll back the state. Or given the difficulty of rolling back the state, to be able to secede from the state to remove yourself from this system. These socialists who plunder one group to benefit their own do so by capturing the state apparatus that everybody is in. Apart from pre-history, they generally don't do it by conquering neighboring territories. There are, of course, wars for resources, but in our information economy, there are not generally wars to capture the productive capacity of other people's minds. If you look at Communist revolutions, they took over the existing state apparatus. They largely maintained the borders that those countries had before, and then some of them merged or joined alliances with each other like the Soviet Union. If we can reclaim and protect the right to secession, the right to exit, which I think is a core function of liberalism as it’s an instantiation of our right to property, then that will ameliorate the greatest cause of the concerns that you have.

On Voluntary Self-Segregation

Benjamin:

How do we get to a place where your ideal world is possible in America? Where people can self-segregate? Even that word “segregation” is a legal term and it's illegal to to behave in that way. It's illegal to segregate.

Jake:

I see this pattern so many times throughout history, and it's part of what we're we're trying to talk about at The Black Sheep. People notice one problem, and then they totally pendulum swing the other way and forget that while the original situation was indeed a problem, there was something valid in it that you didn't want to lose.

Very controversially, let's talk about racial segregation. Racial segregation is absolutely evil. In my book, Redefining Racism, the whole argument of the book is in favor of treating everybody equally and restoring the concept of colorblindness. I really believe in that. I believe in civil rights; I would have been there fighting for it. But what we forgot is that not all segregation is racial segregation. So we took this correct idea that we weren’t treating people right, that we were forcing them out of our society and making them live in separate spaces, and forgot that there might be certain groups that believe in certain ideas that are toxic to you and your group and that you don't want to have these people around. That sort of segregation isn’t racist, it’s not bigoted, and it’s not based on somebody's immutable identity. It's based on the choices that other people have made and the ideas that they hold. In the name of the 100% positive good of ending the bigoted segregation of the past, we've thrown out the idea of any kind of segregation at all as being immoral. We forgot what the baby in that bathwater was. We do have to restore that a little bit, but in a much, much better way that does not look anything like its past form.

Benjamin:

Even up to and including allowing racists to self-segregate?

Jake:

As a classical liberal, you have to allow that legally. When picking what communities I’m going to live in in our happy covenant community society, I would never live in one that engages in racism. I would have major issues with that. I would not want the ideology from a racist community to reach my children when they're too young to understand it. I do believe in free speech and countering bad ideas; I believe in rational inquiry, so I think I would want my community to engage with racist ideas, but only in a certain context where it's not going to influence kids before they're too young to think about it clearly.

For some reason, Idaho always gets brought up as the place where all the white supremacists should go. I don't know why that is, but I guess there are a lot of them there or something. I'm sorry to all the wonderful Idahoans. But the racists should go form their community in Idaho where there are no black people around and peacefully be racist white supremacists. And in doing so, they should remove themselves from the rest of our society. To me, that is a peaceful and positive solution.

Benjamin:

Would you have economic relations with them?

Jake:

I think I would. Southern racists, I'm sure, have some of the best barbeque there is.

Benjamin:

They’re probably not as racist as we northerners perceive them as.

Jake:

Yes, this is 100% true.

If racists somehow got access to open up a racist barbeque that did not seat black people in my community, I would boycott that business. I would not want that racism around me. But if the racists are living peacefully, having self-segregated themselves away from the people they’re racist against, not trying to push their segregation into other people's communities, and if they’re shipping their farmed brisket out, then buying it is a peaceful economic interaction. Yes, they have really terrible ideas, but lots of people have lots of different really terrible ideas. So long as they're not actively harming others with their terrible ideas, I will still interact with them. I don't feel that my importing of their brisket is doing any harm to anyone because they've already taken themselves out of the place where they can cause harm.

On Solving The Paradox of Tolerance

Benjamin:

The paradox of tolerance dogs liberalism. Because on one level, it's supposed to be as hands-off as possible, but on another level, liberalism can't function without certain values of self-governance. Right? Self-responsibility, self-restraint. So you have to teach those principles and enforce those principles in order for liberalism to actually flourish.

With a polity of these covenant communities, these different kinds of experiments in social living, at some point there has to be unity. A unity that comes over and tells them to do something or organizes them so that they can either defend themselves or conquer and expand. So with all these different communities, there's some sort of fascia or aporia, some sort of gap between them, where the state or the empire continually exerts itself. There's a power vacuum, it seems like. So there has to be a liberal superstructure that checks power, but that is itself the power that can check any greater power.

Jake:

You are correct that liberalism is an idea, and for it to be practiced people have to understand and want to hold to that idea. You have to have institutions that do that. I don't think those institutions have to be run by the state. Historically, they were not run by the state.

Benjamin:

Are you talking about educational institutions?

Jake:

I'm talking about education. Education is the big one, but it's also churches or wherever in society people get their values from. It can be entertainment. It could be whatever it may be.

Defense is also a very important part of protecting liberal society. We have to have a military. How that military should be run and who has it exactly are interesting questions in anarcho-capitalist theory. The Second Amendment is very important; the right to own arms and defend yourself, and for local communities to defend themselves.

I also believe in defense compacts where they're rational. There are defense compacts that the United States is in right now, namely NATO, that I don't think are actually in the U.S.’s geostrategic interests, but in principle, I'm okay with defensive alliances. If you have a bunch of neighboring classical liberal societies that share a continent, they're all close by, and they truly share the same threats, then they should enter a defense compact together to defend against the places where these ideas are not being taught.

I think that military defense can be built voluntarily, although that is one of the most challenging parts of anarcho-capitalist theory, but let's say you're a minarchist, which in libertarianism means that you support the ultra-minimal state rather than no state. Then you’d tax and fund the military that way, but this doesn't mean that you’d have to grow other parts of the state with it. It doesn't mean that all of these communities have to delegate all their authority upwards. I don't think there's anything that requires that. You haven't seen that desire from the Amish. You haven't seen that desire from the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. These are not communities that at all resemble the ones that I would want to live in, but they are first movers in trying to keep things as local and self-controlled as possible. And they have been harmed in their rights by the surrounding groups that tax them and pass regulations and laws about what they can do. So if we can join with them and get enough of us together that really believe in the idea of self-rule, then we can form a compact together to protect ourselves within a liberal superstructure.

It all starts with philosophy and ideas. We have to talk to people. We have to teach people and help them understand that this is what classical liberalism properly believed and practiced can look like.

On Classical Liberal Atheism

Benjamin:

Regarding our first conversation about being an atheist on the Right, has your idea about the usefulness of religion in fostering these communities and creating thicker communities changed it all? Can atheism itself scale to unify a population in a thicker cultural soup? Or is religion still, from your point of view, not necessarily ideal?

Jake:

I don't think my views have changed on this at all. In fact, I had the wonderful opportunity to open on stage at a Richard Dawkins speaking event about two months ago, and I recycled many of the ideas that I was talking about back then. But if you'll recall, my take that makes me different from a lot of atheists was that I think that there's a lot from religion that needs to be conserved. There has definitely been a pendulum swing in the rejection of what's bad about religion that has led to people not seeking to understand religion anymore and throwing out everything. I do think there's a community of atheists that understands that problem; I'm part of a group called Atheists for Liberty that I think understands it.

However, we have seen atheist philosophies bind society very successfully. They're the ones that we would both criticize. Communism, for example. But there's there's nothing about a totalitarian or socially redistributive economy that inherently comes out of atheism. Ayn Rand, who I'm a big fan of, was a maximally free market atheist. Murray Rothbard, who’s one of my biggest ideological influences, was also an atheist. I think it's a matter of education and psychological persuasion. The way that we have our current social buckets, cultural conservatism accompanies psychological conservatism, and so you're going to see religion bunched together with other culturally conservative ideas. Meanwhile, progressive ideas are going to accompany a psychological willingness to change from the way things have historically been. Atheism is a big cultural change. But this is correlation, not causation, and I think I have strong evidence for that based on all the atheists you can find who are right-wing. This psychological pattern won’t necessarily remain true as atheism becomes more demographically dominant and entrenched.

Having said that, I’m a strong believer in religious liberty for atheists and for religious believers of every kind. And I do think a lot of the communities that will arise in the type of community-heavy classical liberal society that I'm talking about would be traditionally religious. Religious communities will probably have an easier time, at least at the start, instantiating the type of values that we’re talking about because they've continued to hold on to them. But in the long run, I think that they're going to have problems sustaining themselves because of what we've seen over the last 100 or 200 years. Atheists come not from being born to atheists but from religious families. They leave their parents’ faiths because, in the scientific era, they are unable to believe in the fact-claims that their religions are making; this then leads them to drop all the other values from religion too. I want to provide a better avenue for atheists leaving religious backgrounds so they don't do that total pendulum swing and can retain the elements from their communities that were good.

There's a different story that we can tell that can carry such ideas forward while dropping the parts that are making people question why their families and communities believe in stuff that they know to be untrue.

Benjamin:

What's that package then? What's that story?

Jake:

It's going to be a lot of work to find it, but that’s in line with the way that religious stories have formed historically. They arise through a gradual process. I don't think there's much of a distinction between the creation process and social purpose of religions versus any other kind of ideological worldview. The last time we spoke, I called them “meaning-making systems.” That's ultimately what we're really looking at.

If you look at the communist narrative that bound their society, it was the idea of the bourgeoisie exploiting the proletariat through the concept of “surplus value.” It was a populist narrative that united people into revolting. That story came about through a slow process. First, there was genuine exploitation within workplaces, including feudalism looking back far enough. Then you have a guy, Marx, who provided answers about why people felt exploited in a way that was very convincing, albeit totally wrong. Then you have multiple rounds of people on top of that; if we were talking in religious language, we could call them “prophets,” and in modern secular language we could call them “philosophers.” Such people, including Lenin, continued to develop upon Marx’s story until you got to the Marxism-Leninism that became, effectively, the state religion of the Soviet Union. Marx didn’t create it alone, nor did Jesus or Paul create Christianity alone, so I don't think any one person such as me can just completely create this thing.

But what we can do is start telling different stories. One of them, I believe, will be the convincing one. It's clear to me how a lot of the values and lifestyle choices that were encoded in traditional religions are valuable. It's also clear to me that the story that they tell is failing to persuade people in sufficient numbers in the current day. I think if you have these great values, there's got to be a story that can wrap around them more successfully for contemporary times. Maybe the story is the tale of Western civilization. This tale of how through centuries, through millennia, humanity has built things. I'm cautious about saying that society is purely just a march towards progress because it's not, but there have been certain things that have brought us to the next stages. We don't always know when they'll come and we don't always know what they’ll be, but some of those things were in religions. Some of these things were in prehistoric times. Some of these things were in the scientific revolution. There's a motivating spirit in that which people can be a part of continuing, in a way that brings them the deeper meaning that a meaning-making system has to to bind people.