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Reblog via Aaron Ross Powell Though now when I try to fol...

Reblog via Aaron Ross Powell

Though now when I try to follow it, I get a “Request pending” message, but can’t find anywhere in the #WordPress #ActivityPub settings to approve followers (or to disable the need for approvals).

The post first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

Reblog via Aaron Ross Powell Though now when I try to fol...

Reblog via Aaron Ross Powell

Though now when I try to follow it, I get a “Request pending” message, but can’t find anywhere in the #WordPress #ActivityPub settings to approve followers (or to disable the need for approvals).

The post first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

Liberalism, Buddhism, and the Politics of Impermanence

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I am a liberal. I’m also a Buddhist. In a recent essay at The UnPopulist, I wrote about the intersection of the two, which I see as more than compatible, and in fact mutually reinforcing. Buddhist ethics gives us not just the best way to live happy and harmless lives, but also a strong foundation for a genuinely liberal society.

While Buddhist philosophy informs much of the perspective I bring to conversations at ReImagining Liberty, I haven’t yet done an episode specifically on it, and on how it relates to the kind of liberalism this show is all about. Today I’m correcting that gap.

And rather than just monolog at you, I’m delighted to have my friend, and frequent ReImagining Liberty guest, Cory Massimino step in as host to interview me. Cory is a philosophy student and a fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society, and, through many conversations over the years, he’s played a significant role in shaping my intellectual perspective.

Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

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The post Liberalism, Buddhism, and the Politics of Impermanence first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

Hinduism and Liberalism (w/ Kat Murti)

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Years go, I put together an edited volume called Arguments for Liberty. Every chapter took a different school of moral philosophy and made the case for liberalism within it. The point wasn’t just to be an introduction to moral philosophy by way of being an introduction to liberalism, but also to show that the case for liberty isn’t limited to a single philosophical school. It’s much more universal than that.

But it’s not limited to academic philosophy, either. Religion informs the ethical worldview of most of people, and discussing the case for liberalism within religious contexts enriches liberalism and our understanding of it. That’s why I’m so happy to be joined today by my friend .

Kat is the Executive Director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and co-founder of Feminists for Liberty. But she is also a practicing Hindu. Hinduism is a fascinating faith I know too little about. So I asked Kat to join me on the show to give an introduction to Hinduism, and then to discuss how her Hindu faith informs her radical liberalism and how her liberalism informs her Hindu perspective.

Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

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ReImagining Liberty is a listener supporter show. Become a supporter to get early access to all new episodes, as well as my essays.

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The post Hinduism and Liberalism (w/ Kat Murti) first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

What is Liberalism? (w/ Chandran Kukathas)

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We talk a lot about liberalism on this show, but to date haven’t done an episode on just what liberalism is. So it is my pleasure to have Chandran Kukathas join me today to fix that. He is Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University, and the author of many books, including the classic The Liberal Archipelago, and his most recent, Immigration and Freedom.

We set out the basic principles of liberalism, explore the nuances and complicated application, and dig into critiques that have been raised by non-liberal thinkers.

Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

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ReImagining Liberty is a listener supporter show. Become a supporter to get early access to all new episodes, as well as my essays.

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The post What is Liberalism? (w/ Chandran Kukathas) first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

The Future is a Conversation (w/ Jason Kuznicki)

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The Challenge of Committing to Liberty—and Meaning It

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The Challenge of Committing to Liberty—and Meaning It

It’s easy to say you’re committed to liberty. To speak in the rhetoric of robust rights and freedoms, to celebrate free expression and free association, to talk about the benefits of free trade and private industry. It’s easy in large part because those things are clearly good, their opposite clearly bad. People don’t just want liberty, they deserve it. Liberalism isn’t preferable to authoritarianism because it works better and produces more, though it does. It’s preferable because it’s moral and authoritarianism is not. To commit to liberty is to commit to the right and the good over the unjust and the wrong.

But rhetorical commitment is not the same as principled commitment, and commitments are only as strong as our will to maintain them. It’s easy to say you’re in favor of liberty. It’s also easy to backtrack—to soften your commitment or carve out exceptions. Liberals become illiberal, often in subtle ways, and often without even being aware of the backsliding themselves.

The reason backsliding happens as often as it does—the reason why staying committed to thorough liberalism is so challenging—is that genuine and full liberty, defined as a society where each person has the maximum possible individual liberty and autonomy compatible with the same for everyone else, is inevitably unstable and destabilizing. Not at the macro level, because free societies tend to in fact be quite stable, with relatively consistent growth and a healthy cultural climate overall. Rather, liberalism’s instability comes at the micro level: To be an individual in a truly free society is to live in a world constantly changing around you. The economy grows, but that growth comes through creative destruction. Businesses succeed (or some of them do), but then fail (or most of them do), only to be replaced by new businesses that end up in the same cycle. Whole industries and technologies rise and fall, making skills and creative pursuits lucrative one day and economically valueless the next.

Our social environment isn’t free from creative destruction, either. Culture inevitably shifts, tastes go in and out of style, preferences evolve, ideas have a half life, and even personality traits might be rewarded today but viewed as undesirable tomorrow. To live in such freedom is exciting and bracing, but also scary, because the lifestyle we’ve put so much effort into building might, through the aggregate actions of everyone else simply exercising their liberty, prove more difficult than it was, bring less reward than it did, or come in for more criticism than used to be the case. It might be that your religion was at one time dominant and celebrated, but now is seen as fringe and backwards. It might be that your profession was at one time remunerative and held in high prestige, but now is seen as less necessary or lower status. It might be that you were at one time looked to as a thought leader and your opinions valued at the commanding heights of culture, but now you face criticism and social and intellectual marginalization.

All of this is baked into freedom. You can’t keep a society static without denying its people liberty. Nor is stasis desirable even if it could be achieved without violating inviolable rights. Cultural change brings cultural progress. Economic change brings economic progress. There’s no historical point we can look back on and reasonably, wisely say, “Things would be a whole lot better if that’s the best they ever got.” Not every change is good, of course. Culture can take wrong turns. Preferences can shift in directions that later look silly. The economy can inflate bubbles, go all-in on industries without much value, or abandon industries that still have value. We have moral panics and market crashes. But the people who claim to predict the good changes in advance, or have a clear eye, before the dust has even been kicked up, for whether a particular cultural shift will look bad in hindsight are wrong at least as often as they’re right, and we all suffer from status quo biases that causes us to prefer, to one degree or another, the way things are—or have “always been”—over the way they’re going, ignoring the relentless history of status quos that today we wouldn’t want to go back to, and frequently recognize as profound moral wrongs.

Progress under freedom is rarely orderly. Marginalized people agitating for the liberties and dignities the status quo has denied them don’t always agitate in ways that won’t offend or won’t make those quite comfortable within that status quo quite uncomfortable. This chaotic freedom is partly just a fact of humanity’s messiness. We aren’t all-knowing and all-wise and even when our cause is just, we can overshoot the market, or direct our ire where it isn’t due. We can punish those undeserving of it, and leave innocent victims in the wake of our march towards a better world. In retrospect, the errors of strategy and tactics might be clear, but in the messiness and chaos of the moment, it is too much to expect perfection. But there’s another reason that march can be loud and caustic and disorderly: The alternatives have failed. No one calls for civility with more vigor than those seeking to maintain the status quo. Those seeking to challenge it or change it are invariably told they should make their demands known through the proper channels, and with the proper measured tone of respect. And while civility can be a virtue, in so many cases it is instead employed—or the demand for it is employed—as a means to tell those who might be unruly to give up on finding freedom, respect, and the dignity liberalism builds its egalitarianism around, and instead to accept what the system has given them, or accept when the system, through its proper rules and procedures, denies them their due.

Again, this doesn’t mean all agitation is wise, or that all goals held by the agitators are worthy from the perspective of liberal freedom and values. Protests can be in the service of vicious ends, and incivility can be in the service of cultural and economic regression. The challenge for the committed liberal is to stay committed, however, by not letting his comfort in the status quo, and his distaste for the destabilization of his own interests and social standing, convince him, consciously or unconsciously, that in this particular instance cracking down on freedom’s dynamism isn’t because those who might destabilize are a threat to liberalism, but because they are a threat to his stability.

It is too easy to fall into the trap of concluding that any changes that make you less comfortable are the result of narrowing liberty, instead of its exercise. If we care about liberty at a fundamental and principled level, we have no choice but to accept that it means what we are used to is likely to, at some point or another, shift, evolve, or be replaced. We have no choice but to accept that our status, being relative, might in some ways drop as others’ climbs, and that dropping status isn’t the same thing as restricted liberty. To value liberty, and to really mean it, we need to give up the idea that we will always benefit personally from its exercise, and give up the urge to characterize any exercise we don’t benefit personally from as not the exercise of liberty, but a sign of its decline. Otherwise we risk becoming liberals in rhetoric only, while sliding into illiberalism in the name of our own comfort.

Three Kinds of Conservatives

We tend to use “conservative” and “the right” interchangeably. Someone who is a conservative is also on the right, and someone on the right is a conservative. Synonyms by themselves aren’t a problem, but they sometimes obfuscate distinctions that can actually be helpful in thinking through thorny political issues. This is one of those instances. It’s true many who are “on the right” are also “conservative,” but it’s not necessary that one exists alongside the other. They are not, in fact, synonyms. But our conflation of multiple concepts under these few terms gets worse. Because conservatism doesn’t mean just one thing. Instead, it’s (at least) three, and while they frequently correlate, it’s not a necessary correlation. Teasing out these concepts—the right from conservatism, and the three kinds of conservatism from each other—gives us a clearer perspective on contemporary political culture.

The first way one can be conservative is in a personal  sense. This entails holding conservative, or “traditional,” preferences regarding how you want to live your life, and seeking to realize them. You might strictly follow a religious faith, decide to buy a farm and live a simple life, only listen to classical music, or just generally frown on what the kids these days are up to. Your conservatism is about a desire, need, or commitment to live in accord with a tradition of some kind, refusing to be pulled away from it by what’s novel and innovative. Personal conservatism is about how you want to lead your life, but doesn’t make demands on others about how they lead theirs.

The second kind of conservatism is social. Social conservatism is ultimately an aversion to social and cultural dynamism. It is a distaste for change, or a longing for the culture to reflect the values of the past—sometimes an imagined past. The social conservative might also be a personal conservative, of course, but what distinguishes the two is that social conservatism is about wanting others to live a certain way, and thinking it’s wrong for them to not conform to the particular set of socially conservative preferences and values.

The third conservatism is political conservatism. Personal and social conservatism hook onto personal and social preferences. They’re about how one would prefer his life to be, or how he’d prefer the broader culture to be. But they say nothing about the role of government and how it ought to relate to conservative beliefs. Political conservatism, on the other hand is, about how the institutions of government should operate. One is a “conservative” in a political sense by emphasizing the wisdom embedded in past or existing laws and institutions, and worrying that changing them, too quickly or too dramatically, even in the name of progress, risks making things unintentionally worse. Political conservatism understood in this way isn’t necessarily an attempt to use the state to enforce a set of conservative values, but instead a philosophy of slow and deliberate change, informed by a perspective on tradition that says traditions persist for a reason, that they have embedded value we might not immediately recognize, and so “the way we’ve always done things” isn’t irrational inertia, but a rational appreciation for unarticulated knowledge and lessons from the past.

As noted above, it’s not just that these three conservatisms are conceptually distinct from each other, but that none of them necessarily mean the same thing as “the right.” Many conservatives, of all three varieties, are also on the right, but it’s possible to be conservative, in any of the three senses, while not being of the right.

To be “on the right” is to have a certain perspective about the nature of people, and the proper relationships between them. It is to believe that egalitarianism is wrong because humans aren’t equal, and that this inequality is natural, just, and ought to have consequences for the way society is structured, how power is exercised within it, and who is privileged in terms of status and control. For right-wingers, these inequalities map onto categories like gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religious faith. They result in natural hierarchies, which it is wrong to interfere with, either by transgressing the boundaries between the classifications and groups, or by seeking to use social or state pressure to flatten natural hierarchies. Instead, the role of social and state pressure is to reify “natural” hierarchies, to police boundaries, and to maintain this unequal—but intrinsic and just—order. Right ideologies thus are about a particular conception of how the world is, or at least how it would be if it weren’t for improper interference, and a reactionary response to any drifting—or pushing—away from that.

Let’s look at an example. Donald Trump is, by the definition above, on the right. He absolutely believes people are by nature unequal, and that those inequalities map onto race, gender, nationality, and so on. He’s racist, and sexist, and wildly bigoted against ethnicities and nationalities not his own. But is he conservative? Certainly not of the personal sort. There’s no tradition, no strict set of values, no deep religious faith, he holds to. He probably is socially conservative, because he believes that the culture should conform to his right-wing preferences, that social dynamism is a threat, and that coercion to make that the case is acceptable and necessary. Finally, he’s not a political conservative. He places no value on the wisdom embedded in existing institutions, and would burn the entire system to the ground if it meant getting his way. Trump’s not even politically moderate. He’s a radical, through and through, wanting to, with all haste, replace the existing political regime with an autocracy he leads. To call Trump a political conservative, but also to call someone like David French a political conservative, is to immediately recognize the incoherence of conflating the three varieties of conservatism with each other.

This doesn’t mean they’re always distinct, of course. Most people on the right are socially conservative. Most political conservatives also have at least some right-wing tendencies, and so tend to view as “wise” and worth preserving those institutions and traditions that, at least in part, reinforce right-wing social orders and hierarchies. Personal conservatism, if faced with a sufficiently dynamic culture, can drift into social conservatism, which can then manifest as political conservatism (“Let’s use the state to slow down or stop social change”) or political radicalism (“Let’s overthrow the existing order and replace it with a reactionary authoritarianism devoted to enforcing gender, racial, and religious hierarchies”). 

Even with these blurry lines and interrelations, if we’re to make sense of the contemporary political scene—and especially if we’re to understand the threats to liberalism posed by right-wing preferences or the ways individual and social conservatism can lead to illiberalism, authoritarianism, and fascism—knowing what it means to be on the right, why that’s not necessarily the same as being conservative, and how conservatism is really a bundle of overlapping but distinct ideas, can give clarity to our analysis.

The post Three Kinds of Conservatives first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

Three Kinds of Conservatives

We tend to use “conservative” and “the right” interchangeably. Someone who is a conservative is also on the right, and someone on the right is a conservative. Synonyms by themselves aren’t a problem, but they sometimes obfuscate distinctions that can actually be helpful in thinking through thorny political issues. This is one of those instances. It’s true many who are “on the right” are also “conservative,” but it’s not necessary that one exists alongside the other. They are not, in fact, synonyms. But our conflation of multiple concepts under these few terms gets worse. Because conservatism doesn’t mean just one thing. Instead, it’s (at least) three, and while they frequently correlate, it’s not a necessary correlation. Teasing out these concepts—the right from conservatism, and the three kinds of conservatism from each other—gives us a clearer perspective on contemporary political culture.

The first way one can be conservative is in a personal sense. This entails holding conservative, or “traditional,” preferences regarding how you want to live your life, and seeking to realize them. You might strictly follow a religious faith, decide to buy a farm and live a simple life, only listen to classical music, or just generally frown on what the kids these days are up to. Your conservatism is about a desire, need, or commitment to live in accord with a tradition of some kind, refusing to be pulled away from it by what’s novel and innovative. Personal conservatism is about how you want to lead your life, but doesn’t make demands on others about how they lead theirs.

The second kind of conservatism is social. Social conservatism is ultimately an aversion to social and cultural dynamism. It is a distaste for change, or a longing for the culture to reflect the values of the past—sometimes an imagined past. The social conservative might also be a personal conservative, of course, but what distinguishes the two is that social conservatism is about wanting others to live a certain way, and thinking it’s wrong for them to not conform to the particular set of socially conservative preferences and values.

The third conservatism is political conservatism. Personal and social conservatism hook onto personal and social preferences. They’re about how one would prefer his life to be, or how he’d prefer the broader culture to be. But they say nothing about the role of government and how it ought to relate to conservative beliefs. Political conservatism, on the other hand is, about how the institutions of government should operate. One is a “conservative” in a political sense by emphasizing the wisdom embedded in past or existing laws and institutions, and worrying that changing them, too quickly or too dramatically, even in the name of progress, risks making things unintentionally worse. Political conservatism understood in this way isn’t necessarily an attempt to use the state to enforce a set of conservative values, but instead a philosophy of slow and deliberate change, informed by a perspective on tradition that says traditions persist for a reason, that they have embedded value we might not immediately recognize, and so “the way we’ve always done things” isn’t irrational inertia, but a rational appreciation for unarticulated knowledge and lessons from the past.

As noted above, it’s not just that these three conservatisms are conceptually distinct from each other, but that none of them necessarily mean the same thing as “the right.” Many conservatives, of all three varieties, are also on the right, but it’s possible to be conservative, in any of the three senses, while not being of the right.

To be “on the right” is to have a certain perspective about the nature of people, and the proper relationships between them. It is to believe that egalitarianism is wrong because humans aren’t equal, and that this inequality is natural, just, and ought to have consequences for the way society is structured, how power is exercised within it, and who is privileged in terms of status and control. For right-wingers, these inequalities map onto categories like gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religious faith. They result in natural hierarchies, which it is wrong to interfere with, either by transgressing the boundaries between the classifications and groups, or by seeking to use social or state pressure to flatten natural hierarchies. Instead, the role of social and state pressure is to reify “natural” hierarchies, to police boundaries, and to maintain this unequal—but intrinsic and just—order. Right ideologies thus are about a particular conception of how the world is, or at least how it would be if it weren’t for improper interference, and a reactionary response to any drifting—or pushing—away from that.

Let’s look at an example. Donald Trump is, by the definition above, on the right. He absolutely believes people are by nature unequal, and that those inequalities map onto race, gender, nationality, and so on. He’s racist, and sexist, and wildly bigoted against ethnicities and nationalities not his own. But is he conservative? Certainly not of the personal sort. There’s no tradition, no strict set of values, no deep religious faith, he holds to. He probably is socially conservative, because he believes that the culture should conform to his right-wing preferences, that social dynamism is a threat, and that coercion to make that the case is acceptable and necessary. Finally, he’s not a political conservative. He places no value on the wisdom embedded in existing institutions, and would burn the entire system to the ground if it meant getting his way. Trump’s not even politically moderate. He’s a radical, through and through, wanting to, with all haste, replace the existing political regime with an autocracy he leads. To call Trump a political conservative, but also to call someone like David French a political conservative, is to immediately recognize the incoherence of conflating the three varieties of conservatism with each other.

This doesn’t mean they’re always distinct, of course. Most people on the right are socially conservative. Most political conservatives also have at least some right-wing tendencies, and so tend to view as “wise” and worth preserving those institutions and traditions that, at least in part, reinforce right-wing social orders and hierarchies. Personal conservatism, if faced with a sufficiently dynamic culture, can drift into social conservatism, which can then manifest as political conservatism (“Let’s use the state to slow down or stop social change”) or political radicalism (“Let’s overthrow the existing order and replace it with a reactionary authoritarianism devoted to enforcing gender, racial, and religious hierarchies”).

Even with these blurry lines and interrelations, if we’re to make sense of the contemporary political scene—and especially if we’re to understand the threats to liberalism posed by right-wing preferences or the ways individual and social conservatism can lead to illiberalism, authoritarianism, and fascism—knowing what it means to be on the right, why that’s not necessarily the same as being conservative, and how conservatism is really a bundle of overlapping but distinct ideas, can give clarity to our analysis.