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Kerry Howley FEATURE We’re ALL CULTURAL LIBERTARIANS Freedom is about more than just the absence of government, argues Kerry Howley t was amazing to me how quickly she Cultural liberty overturned the power structure within But I am disturbed by an inverse form of state her family,’ Leslie Chang writes in worship I encounter among my fellow sceptics of Factory Girls, her 2008 book on internal government power. This is the belief that the only ‘Imigration within China. Chang is marveling liberty worth caring about is liberty reclaimed at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm from the state; that social pathologies such as to find work in a succession of factories in the patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper rapidly urbanising city of Dongguan. Had Min concerns of the individualist; that the fight for never left home, she would have been expected freedom stops where the reach of government to marry a man from a nearby village, bear his ends. It was tradition, not merely government, children, and accept her place in a tradition that threatened to limit Min’s range of possible that privileges husbands over wives. But months lives. To describe the expanded scope of her agency after Min found work in Dongguan, she was as merely ‘freedom from state interference’ is to already advising her father on financial planning, deny the extent of what capitalism has achieved in directing her younger siblings to stay in school, communist China. and changing jobs without bothering to ask her As former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus parents’ permission. Christ of Latter-Day Saints leader Warren Jeffs can Chang’s book is full of such women: once- tell you, it’s possible to be an anti-government zealot obedient daughters who make a few yuan, then with no interest whatsoever in individual liberty. If hijack the social hierarchy. Even tiny incomes cash authoritarian fundamentalist compounds are your out in revolutionary ways. With little more than bag, the words personal agency will hold no magic 1,000 yuan (about US$150) in Min’s pocket, it for you, and Min’s situation will smack of social becomes possible to plan a life independent of her chaos. But libertarians for whom individualism family’s expectations, to conceive of a world in is important cannot avoid discussions of culture, which she decides where to live, how to spend her conformism, and social structure. Not every threat time, and with whom. to liberty is backed by a government gun. I call myself a classical liberal in part because Convention creates boundaries as thick as any I believe that negative liberties, such as Min’s border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance freedom from government interference, are the state. In Min’s village, women are constrained by best means to acquire positive liberties, such as a centuries-old preference for male descendants. Min’s ability to pursue further education. I also value the kind of culture that economic freedom produces and within which it thrives: tolerance Kerry Howley is a contributing editor at for human variation, aversion to authoritarianism, Reason magazine, www.reason.com. This and what the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek article and the following response from called ‘a preparedness to let change run its course Daniel McCarthy first appeared in Reason. even if we cannot predict where it will lead.’ POLICY • Vol. 26 No. 1 • Autumn 2010 19 We’re ALL CULTURAL LIBERTARIANS (Men are also constrained by this tradition, as gays and lesbians—he is engaging in a kind of families are less likely to permit their valuable sons cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of to migrate to the city.) Most people will accept the mob while balking at that of the state. their assigned roles in the village ecosystem, of This prioritisation can be difficult to confront course, just as most Americans will quietly accept because it is most often expressed in strategic the authority of a government that bans access to silence or casual conversation. The tendency to developmental cancer drugs while raiding medical dismiss feminist complaints about social pressure marijuana dispensaries. A door is as good as a wall as ‘self-victimisation,’ for instance, is not something if we cannot imagine walking through it. one is likely to encounter in a philosophical meditation on the centrality of property rights. A door is as good as a wall if we It emerges in the choice to write about one freedom-limiting aspect of the world rather than cannot imagine walking through it. another, bubbles up in Internet chatter, and spills over into informal interactions. It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy Still, if too many people who group themselves devoted to political liberty would concern itself under the libertarian banner pursue a vision with building a freedom-friendly culture. But of liberty restricted to resisting state coercion, the state-wary social conservative flinches when libertarian intellectual history has something his libertarian friends celebrate the power of to do with that outcome. Founders of modern culture itself to liberate: the liberty of the pill, of libertarianism, giants who helped shape the self- pornography, of 600 channels where once there conscious movement’s argumentative styles and were three. The social conservative will refer to emphases, tended to focus their firepower almost these wayward anti-statists as ‘cultural libertarians,’ exclusively on the state. Murray Rothbard, the by which he means libertines. And it will always anarchist economist and philosopher who was be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua a guiding influence on nearly every existing libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture. libertarian institution, limited his vision of liberty ‘True libertarianism is not cultural to the security of private property; any depredation libertarianism,’ the philosopher Edward that couldn’t be traced to an assault on or theft of Feser wrote on the paleolibertarian website someone’s justly owned property was not, in his LewRockwell.com in December 2001. This view, the libertarian’s concern. Milton Friedman’s statement was immediately preceded by a call for popular writings about choice looked at areas where the stigmatisation of porn, adultery, divorce, and choice was being restricted by agents of the state premarital sex—in other words, an argument for a with explicit threats of force. Ayn Rand’s ethical particular kind of culture. Feser claimed that small philosophy did look beyond the state, to the forces government and an ethos of ‘personal fulfillment’ of conformity and altruistic moral suasion. But her were incompatible, and he argued for the former vision of rationality was so demanding that readers over the latter. In the guise of an attack on cultural could be forgiven for thinking that life in a welfare libertarianism, Feser demanded that libertarians state might be less restrictive than life lived as a espouse different patterns of cultural behaviour. model Randian. Libertarianism in the early 1970s still had Paternalism of the mob countercultural energy to burn, but the institutions As it turns out, all libertarians are cultural that grew to define the modern movement during libertarians. We just don’t share the same agenda. that decade and the next—Reason magazine, the Some prefer to advance their agenda by pretending Cato Institute, and the Libertarian Party—focused it doesn’t exist: that social convention is not a matter largely on areas of economic disagreement with the of concern for those who believe in individual left, such as tax levels, government spending, the liberty. But when a libertarian claims that his flexibility of labour markets, and the regulation of philosophy has no cultural content—has nothing international trade. While libertarians agreed more to say, for instance, about society’s acceptance of with a roughly defined left in a few areas, such as 20 POLICY • Vol. 26 No. 1 • Autumn 2010 We’re ALL CULTURAL LIBERTARIANS military policy and the drug war, they repeatedly further president worship, preparing the ground missed opportunities to connect their concerns for the next executive power grab. The more about authoritarianism with the left’s analysis of the state does, the broader most people think its less overt, more deeply embedded restrictions on natural scope to be. individual agency. The inconsistency of the libertarian who Feminist consciousness, for example, came to believes that smoking bans create automatons but be seen by libertarians as inseparable from statism, scoffs at the social construction of gender troubles despite the fact that it arose in response to very the Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long real social and state pressures that restricted the and the libertarian writer Charles W. Johnson. autonomy of half the population. In a different ‘Libertarians often conclude that gender roles context, libertarians might have seen that certain must not be oppressive since many women accept feminist critiques—particularly those having to them,’ they note in a 2005 essay on libertarian do with the social construction of gender—were feminism, ‘but they do not analogously treat the necessary to any serious consideration of individual fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of liberty. Thoughtless conformity has rarely been governmental compulsion as a reason to question the libertarian’s friend. But against a backdrop its oppressive character; on the contrary, they of feminist assaults on free speech and calls for see their task as one of consciousness-raising workplace regulation, social constructionism and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, seemed to many merely another justification for plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their government coercion, a denial of the very concept character as chains.’ Liberty—from government, of personal agency. from tradition, from prejudice—must be taught, In turning so definitively from the left, capacities developed.
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