fragments of an attempted writing.

I just noted this FB page in a sidebar there.  You can see it, if you do FB, here.

For those of you who cannot see the Orthodox Christians for Libery page, the description is thus:
Orthodox Christians who are Libertarians, Localists, Conservationists, Agrarians, Old Conservatives, Constitutionalists,
 Non-Interventionists, Crunchy Cons, Front Porch Republicans, Hobbits, Chestertonian Distributists, Cultural Recusants, etc.

All are welcome, regardless of affiliation or philosophy. Please keep posts on-topic, however: regarding issues of liberty, especially from a perspective of those listed above. "Libertarian" (but not necessarily Libertarian Party) is a good general term for the approach here, i.e., preferring no coercive force to be used by the state except only in true necessity.

Nonetheless, there is no single "party line" expected, but there is certainly a strong distinction being made from establishment conservatism and liberalism, although of course both "conservative" and "liberal" have been historically used to refer to the libertarian approach.

Your moderators are Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Matthew Namee. See the "Docs" for some notes on civility in discourse.


(The group's photo is the home in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, of Col. Philip Ludwell III, the first American convert to Orthodoxy and the man who gave George Washington his commission in the army.)
 
All are welcome, regardless of affiliation or philosophy. Please keep posts on-topic, however: regarding issues of liberty, especially from a perspective of those listed above. "Libertarian" (but not necessarily Libertarian Party) is a good general term for the approach here, i.e., preferring no coercive force to be used by the state except only in true necessity.
Nonetheless, there is no single "party line" expected, but there is certainly a strong distinction being made from establishment conservatism and liberalism, although of course both "conservative" and "liberal" have been historically used to refer to the libertarian approach.
Your moderators are Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Matthew Namee. See the "Docs" for some notes on civility in discourse.

(The group's photo is the home in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, of Col. Philip Ludwell III, the first American convert to Orthodoxy and the man who gave George Washington his commission in the army.)


One might note how easily, again, distributism has been co-opted by libertarians, and that within American Orthodoxy there are very few people knowledgeable enough of distributist thought to do anything about this.  I sympathize with those distributists that fight against such associations.  

Ethereal non-movement conservatism continues its march to the imaginary shire.  

14 comments:

  1. Again, I apologize for the white background behind some of the text. I'm still working on figuring out how to make that not happen when I cut and paste.

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  2. I knew Namee was going somewhere with his weird obsession with Ludwell. Glad to see the AFR-industrial complex is involved. (Did I ever tell you, though, about the time I went to a Christian anarchism conference at Reba Place in Evanston and some of the younger Maddexes were there? The child-rearing workshop didn't fit in very well between the Psalters and the discussion of whether vandalizing freeway planning offices was acceptable for Anabaptists, but they gave it a pretty good try).

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  3. Also, the captcha is asking me to transcribe what I'm pretty sure are pictures of house numbers. Creepy.

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  4. Libertarians aren't co-opting distributism. Distributist, however, refuse to note the implications of their ideas, do not become monarchists, and spend an inordinate amount of time acting like hobbits. They want the past, but they refuse to consider how the past worked. Libertarians simply tend to point out that policies people advocate as a 'third way' are depressingly similar to what has already failed.

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    1. For some reason your comment got spammed. Sorry.

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  5. I got a comment from a certain August that I no longer see here for some reason.

    I agree that co-opt isn't really the right word. What I was grasping at was the strata of phenomena that results from libertarians interacting with and encroaching into distributist milieus. Go to a typical Chesterton Society meeting in this country, and you will encounter a sizable percentage of libertarians there, and when the question of govt comes up, they will press for a libertarian reading of distributism. As well in Catholicism and convert Orthodox circles wherein political things are discussed or acted upon, distributists and Wendell Berry type agrarians tend to get lumped into groups containing libertarians, and libertarians tend to dominate those groups (in part, no doubt, because they have a functioning theory and distributists don't). The group noted above is an example of that. Also, a number of distributists did get duped into supporting Ron Paul at some point, and this seems to have allowed for a further permeation of libertarian activity within the parameters of what we might call the distributist subculture or the distributist circles anyway. Daniel Nichols at CeT is an example of this (though as he rightly makes clear, he was never a Paulbot and only begrudgingly supported Paul, and now he regrets that).

    Distributists do not "want the past" as you state. They want an idealization of the past that has nothing to do with the past. The Distributist idealization of the medieval world, of guild economics, and the like is a desire for the past in the sense that a child wanting to go to disneyland thereby wants to go to a real medieval kingdom. A friend of mine, talking about a recent conversation he had read concerning the distributist reading of the medieval period, put it well when he responded to points made concerning the role of women during that time by saying "[the] point on women was spot on, which is obviously disconcerting to the 'medieval' paradigm some of these folks want to work with. Samwise never slapped his wife around in the Shire, so I guess they all assume that sort of thing never happened until the 1980s."

    I agree concerning the untenability of third way thought on the whole, and I tend to see it as hopelessly romantic and lacking in policy and theory sophistication, but I would also state that many third way approaches at least stem from an anthropology that is not entirely anti-human. This distinguishes it from libertarianism. There is an intellectual immaturity in thinking that Chesterbelloc have something important to say about the structuring of late modern societies. But that is a less dangerous intellectual immaturity than thinking that Hayek and/or Mises should guide us in the structuring of late modern social orders.

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  6. Hey Owen,

    Good to see your active again =)

    Am I to understand the last paragraph of your last comment to mean Hayek and Mises have anti-human anthropologies? I don't disagree, just curious.

    What do you think of Lord Acton? He seemed like a sharp guy with what I assume is a more human anthropology

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    1. Yes on your first question.

      Acton is perhaps among those figures who epitomize what seems to have been the main thesis in Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. Acton is feverishly disturbed by "centralized" power. He famously supports the Confederacy and does a great deal to bring about sympathy with the Confederacy in Britain. How does the logic of power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely really function in Acton? It seems in the same manner that Robin describes it acting in contemporary American reactionaries - they hate power and absolute power when it comes from a large govt and is (sometimes) directed at lesser tyrants like doctors or financial services executives or the always sacred "small businessmen" and the like, but they and Acton seem to have no problem with the absolute power of the local tyrant. Acton apparently could not see the ridiculousness of fearing the relatively unmitigated centralized federal state whilst defending a social order based on the patriarchal and de fact aristocracy which had relatively more unmitigated power over its slaves.

      His anthropology is one which protects lesser tyrants. Localism is not an answer to the perversions of power. The local tyrant is damn near always worse than one which is far away. And as Robin shows so well both in his book and in some of his blog posts, the idea that large concentrated federal power has more functional power to coerce than local powers is simply a false mythology. Both are often bad, but most coercion and most infringement of human freedom happens at the local level as a result of local tyrants.

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  7. Makes sense....I still have no idea what to do politically, besides an anxious apathy.

    I read First as Tragedy and Then as Farce and was most intrigued by the idea that capitalism appears to erode the moral values upon which it must be based. I still don't see how a society can exist without some sort of incentive schema similar to capitalism (the idea of material advancement proportional to effort and intelligence applied to that task), if it were to resemble anything remotely like today's society.

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    1. I agree that there has to be some sort of incentive schema. I would think that there could me multiple forms of incentive schema. But surely bright folks could develop all sorts of incentive schema that avoids most predatory activity and forms of competition which routinely crush economic opponents and economic pawns.

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    2. Anything precluding those bright folks from developing a libertarianism that protects individuals from local tyranny to an acceptable degree? I know at least Hayek wants to promote whatever helps healthy economic competition, and at least in his opinion, tremendous poverty and disparity of opportunities aren't good.

      Local tyranny seems impossible to stop completely as long as humans beings rely on other human beings, without a pretty serious apparatus for accountability/transparency in all human to human interactions.

      Besides standing still technologically and organizationally, how would one ever stop routine crushings of economic opponents? Would it have mattered whether the transition from Blacksmiths to US Steel happened under a market or command economy? My guess is there are going to be a lot of people who feel that they were treated unfairly/dealt a crappy hand of cards either way.

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  8. and at least in his opinion, tremendous poverty and disparity of opportunities aren't good - hence his support of Pinochet and desire to use Pinochet's Chile as a model.

    In terms of universal human phenomena local tyranny is no more or less impossible to stop than any other tyranny. Local power structures have changed a plenty over the course of human history, as have more centralized and larger power structures. There is a myriad of social phenomena which effects changes in local power structures. I see no reason to accept a defeatism on the local level whilst espousing that something can and should be done on other levels of power administration and organization. And all this misses the point that the libertarian notion of human freedom is highly selective, and that critique which points out that most humans in human history don't benefit, in terms of a gain in functional freedom, when a libertarian praxis is applied to their situation. Women throughout history don't gain much, not do blacks in the American South had libertarian models been even more adopted there than they were. Etc. etc.

    Technology has no determinate factor here. If anything, technology is making, and is going to make, petty tyranny even harder to maintain, as the new media and other technologies potentiate increased patterning of local subversiveness to local powers.

    Would it have mattered whether the transition from Blacksmiths to US Steel happened under a market or command economy? It depends on the command economy, of course.

    My guess is there are going to be a lot of people who feel that they were treated unfairly/dealt a crappy hand of cards either way. Who gives a flying fuck about feelings? The documentation of local tyranny and free market tyranny has nothing whatsoever to do with feelings. It can easily be (and often enough is) based on objective, empirical study of such phenomena as stagnant wages in light of increased worker productivity and other such phenomena. Such things as the critique of trickle down economics or analysis of disparate treatment of women in workplaces aren't (when done seriously) based on feelings.

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  9. "Who gives a flying fuck about feelings?"
    Not those who are ok with consistently crushing economic opponents and pawns.

    I agree technology will help relieve local tyranny, wouldn't that just increase the viability of libertarianism? I also agree that a libertarian notion of human freedom can be highly selective, but must it necessarily be so? Women and blacks might not of gained much if a libertarian praxis were applied to their situation necessarily, but it probably makes it possible but to even say that in the first place seems so vague as to be meaningless. Economic gain? Political gain? What if your libertarian praxis included Reddit and a 21st century US legal system (which obviously has many flaws, some of which I think libertarianism would help, but it is still nice that this is possible)? http://gawker.com/5855478/reddit-video-apparently-shows-texas-family-judge-beating-disabled-daughter

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  10. I also agree that a libertarian notion of human freedom can be highly selective, but must it necessarily be so?

    To the extent that it ceases to be so, it veers into anarchism or libertarian communism/Marxism - very different animals than libertarianism.

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