The Tea Party Myth – Straw Men in Conservative Costumes
Dr. Pingle is a professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is more than a professor, in that his teaching goes beyond the classroom into the community and beyond. He is a mentor for entrepreneurial programs in the community and involved in church life, The Hayek Group, economic clubs both at the university and in the community and is well known in Nevada for his proactive business advice and support. He not only talks a good game, he lives it. The editorial Dr. Pingle is addressing follows this article.
This is an interesting editorial to me, largely because it is a good example of a straw man argument and also a good example of taking one truth and extrapolating it through leaps in logic to a conclusion that does not necessarily follow. Because this argument is so convoluted, and because the topic is important, I cannot resist commenting. Sorry for the long post here. Hope it provokes some thoughts and might be useful in one of your units.
This professor, John Terrel, seems to want to imply that people like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, along with modern day “Tea Party members” and “libertarians” assume people are not social creatures or embrace principles of government that are inconsistent with the idea that people are social creatures. This is the primary straw man Professor Terrel sets up so he can easily puff and knock it down.
John Locke, of course, did believe people would behave individualistically in his state of nature. Individualism, in the form of intentionally injuring others, is the fundamental problem Locke identified in the state of nature, where there is no government. Because of destructive individualism, a state of war will tend to exist in the state of nature. Did John Locke leave things there, with destructive individualism and a state of war persisting? No, and Professor Terrel chooses to ignore this important fact. John Locke recognized the social nature of human beings when he recognized that one important reason people band together and form a government is to address destructive individuals, to transform the state of war into a state of peace. To quote Thomas Jefferson from the Declaration of Independents, it is “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”—the INDIVIDUAL rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Paine, in his pamphlet Common Sense, notes that people often confuse government and society. It is ironic that an anthropologist, in this case Professor John Terrel, would confuse the two. Here are some words from Thomas Paine:
“SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”
If Professor Terrel were more intellectually honest than he is, then he would present the views he does not hold as those promoting them would present them. For example, he could have used Fredric Bastiat. Here are some words from Bastiat that Professor Terrel either does not know or chooses not to share:
Because we ask so little from the law — only justice — the socialists thereby assume that we reject fraternity, unity, organization, and association. The socialists brand us with the name individualist. But we assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced organization, not natural organization. We repudiate the forms of association that are forced upon us, not free association. We repudiate forced fraternity, not true fraternity. We repudiate the artificial unity that does nothing more than deprive persons of individual responsibility. We do not repudiate the natural unity of mankind under Providence.
When it comes to governance, the fundamental question is not whether people are more social or individualistic. The fundamental question is WHEN government should use its power, and FOR WHAT PURPOSES. George Washington recognized this when he said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant.” For those who do value individual freedom more, like Bastiat and Locke and Jefferson and Paine, the primary justifiable reason for applying the force government can wield is to keep people from injuring each other. Government should define and punish destructive individualism so as to prevent it, and leave people otherwise free. If Classical Republicanism is fundamentally associated with doing your duty, then the primary duty from this perspective that values individual freedom is to not injure others. In this limited sense, the natural rights philosophy is Classical Republican.
As Bastiat notes, many people and Professor John Terrel in particular, interpret not wanting to FORCE people to do something together as being anti-social. The opposite is the case. Because there is much people can accomplish together, people like Thomas Paine and Fredric Bastiat presumed people would voluntarily come together and accomplish much. Most significantly, members of families accomplish much together without government force being applied. People can and do cooperate with others outside their own families to accomplish much without being coerced to do so by government. That is, Classical Republicanism can operate without government force, meaning people within a society can come to feel obligated to others without government defining duties and using force to see that people do their duties. Historically, in America, the Christian faith has been important in this regard. Alexis De Tocqueville emphasized this in his Democracy in America.
To Fredrick Bastiat and Thomas Paine, the problem with using government force duties on people beyond not injuring others is that government tends to become the plunderer rather than being the one preventing plunder. When government prescribes a duty and enforces with its power, you must do that duty before your can live life as you choose, pursue happiness as you choose.
The elephant in the living room that Professor Terrel chooses to ignore is the practical usefulness of leaving people free and individually responsible, rather than having government force duties upon individuals and make society responsible for individual mistakes. When government keeps people from injuring each other through theft and fraud, then people who are left free can trade what they have for other things they want. The primary trade most of us make is we trade away time for a wage and use that wage to buy products we want. More than anything, the American Experiment has been an experiment with this kind of economic freedom. The lesson we should learn is that freedom works, not because selfishness works, but because free markets channel individual pursuits of happiness into doing good for others, typically more effectively than when government uses its force to require one person to help another. When the typical person seeks a high wage so they can provide for their family, they get it by working to produce a product that other people want enough that they will spend their money to buy it. When an entrepreneur seeks profit, people who write from the perspective of Professor Terrel will often point to the selfishness of the entrepreneur, but not at the same time recognize that the entrepreneur not earn a profit unless a good product is delivered to society at a good price.
Freedom (or one can say individualism) does fail at times, and government force can productively assist freedom in these instances. When one person pursues happiness, they may unintentionally injure another (a “negative externality” like pollution or congestion). Freedom tends to undersupply what economists formally label “public goods” (like parks, policing, national defense, roads, schooling), ironically because the benefits cannot be capture by a privately owned business effectively enough to make producing the good worthwhile. Freedom also naturally leads to inequality and people may prefer more equality than people delivers. Government can force people to contain pollution, to provide certain public goods before individual pursuits are pursued, and to sacrifice some individual well-being to see that more equality prevails. However, the more government force is used, the more those being forced will not like their government. People like Professor Terrel do not usually recognize this. That is, the social nature of people, which professor Terrel wants us to recognize, will lead people to not want to associate with a government that forces people to do what they do not want to do. Moreover, the government tends not to work well because it damages what freedom can accomplish. The human disasters in China and Russia are extreme examples.
In terms of a great leap of logic, Professor Terrel ultimately draws the conclusion that “The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals.” Professor Terrel should have paid more attention to Thomas Jefferson, who spoke of “The first principle of association,” which he said was “The guarantee to each a free exercise of industry and the fruits acquired by it.” Thomas Jefferson would not have doubted that people want to associate. However, he did believe even Professor Terrel would not want to associate with others who would not let John Terrel could not choose his own occupation or not let John Terrel keep the fruits of John Terrel’s labor.
Freedom, which is fundamentally individualistic, is not anti-social. Rather, it allows for a sociality that is genuine, not forced. Moreover, the fundamental philosophical difference that is important with respect to government is not whether people are more social or more individualist, but rather the extent to which government should use its power to force duties upon people beyond not injuring others.
The following article was published in the New York Times. It is this article that Dr. Pingle is responding to.
Evolution and the American Myth of the Individual
By John Edward Terrell
November 30, 2014
We will certainly hear it said many times between now and the 2016 elections that the country’s two main political parties have “fundamental philosophical differences.” But what exactly does that mean?
At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.
The basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish and self-serving individual.
Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.
This conclusion is unlikely to startle anyone who is at all religious or spiritual. When I was a boy I was taught that the Old Testament is about our relationship with God and the New Testament is about our responsibilities to one another. I now know this division of biblical wisdom is too simple. I have also learned that in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both. The irony here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings, religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence. And as Matthew D. Lieberman, a social neuroscience researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written: “we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.”
While I do not entirely accept the norms clause of Lieberman’s claim, his observation strikes me as evocatively religious. Consequently I find it more than ironic that American individualism today — which many link closely with Christian fundamentalism — is self-consciously founded on 17th- and 18th-century ideas about human beings as inherently self-interested and self-centered individuals despite the fact that what essayists like Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau wrote back then about the “natural state” of humankind at the beginning of history was arguably never meant to be taken as the gospel truth.
Case in point, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared in “The Social Contract” (1762) that each of us is born free and yet everywhere we are in chains. He did not mean physical chains. He meant social ones. We now know he was dead wrong. Human evolution has made us obligate social creatures. Even if some of us may choose sooner or later to disappear into the woods or sit on a mountaintop in deep meditation, we humans are able to do so only if before such individualistic anti-social resolve we have first been socially nurtured and socially taught survival arts by others. The distinction Rousseau and others tried to draw between “natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual” and “civil liberty, which is limited by the general will” is fanciful, not factual.
This is decidedly not what Enlightenment philosophers wanted to hear. According to Rousseau and others, our responsibilities and duties to one another as members of society do not come from nature, but instead from our social conventions. Their speculations about the origins of the latter generally asserted that the most ancient of all societies was the family. Yet in their eyes, even the family as a social unit was seen as ephemeral. As Rousseau wrote: “children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved.” When released from obedience to their father, the next generation is free to assume a life of singular freedom and independence. Should any child elect to remain united with the family of his birth, he did so “no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.”
In fairness to Rousseau it should be noted, as I observed earlier, that he may not have meant such claims to be taken literally. As he remarked in his discourse “On the Origin of Inequality,” “philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there.” Why then did Rousseau and others make up stories about human history if they didn’t really believe them? The simple answer, at least during the Enlightenment, was that they wanted people to accept their claim that civilized life is based on social conventions, or contracts, drawn up at least figuratively speaking by free, sane and equal human beings — contracts that could and should be extended to cover the moral and working relationships that ought to pertain between rulers and the ruled. In short, their aims were political, not historical, scientific or religious.
However pragmatic their motivations and goals, what Rousseau and others crafted as arguments in favor of their ideas all had the earmarks of primitive mythology. As the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued almost a century ago: “Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief, it safeguards and enforces morality, and it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man.” Myths achieve this social function, he observed, by serving as guides, or charters, for moral values, social order and magical belief. “Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.”
While as an anthropologist I largely agree with Malinowski, I would add that not all myths make good charters for faith and wisdom. The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures. The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication. This is not how we got to be the kind of species we are today. Nor is this what the world’s religions would ask us to believe. Or at any rate, so I was told as a child, and so I still believe.
John Terrell is the Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History and professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
