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Why are libertarians always angry? Because there are innumerable and incessant attacks on freedom. Fair enough, the libertarian will not rejoice in a bad state of affairs, and she shouldn't.
But what about the innumerable and incessant instances of the presence of freedom in our world. Why not smile and feel thankful and happy about them?
It would seem, many libertarians tend to overlook that freedom is not what will happen when all threats and violations of freedom are eventually eliminated. No such situation will ever arise - after all, not even libertarians could agree on the criteria of fulfilment.
Freedom is mixed into the character of the West's political order, which contains other ingredients, many not that agreeable with freedom.
Freedom can only exist as a corrective in a mixed order in which anti-individualism and collectivism have an enthusiastic natural following, too. Freedom can alert us to the detrimental potential of collectivism, it gives us criteria to perceive and understand the dangers of unfreedom, and ways to avoid them. But freedom is incapable of reaching a state cleansed of elements and currents opposite to her.
Freedom is Sisyphean in that the hard work of maintaining her never ends - good thing we have important and welcome helpers to lead and back us in the thorny endeavour. The efforts in favour of freedom are Sisyphean, but they are not without progress.
Our daily life attests to the enormous progress freedom has been and continues to be making in the face of ongoing contestation. Tip: try to figure out just how many rights of freedom are real-time operative so as to allow you to go shopping the way you do. However, many libertarians apparently need to relearn the knack of making out liberty in their ordinary lifes. Once they get better at it, they will discover:
Friends of liberty have plenty to smile about.
Matt Ridley reminds us:
The best understanding of how morality evolves comes from the work of Norbert Elias, a sociologist who had four horrible experiences of violence: a nervous breakdown in the First World War when fighting for Germany, emigration to escape Nazi persecution in 1933, internment by Britain for being a German in 1940 and the death of his mother in Auschwitz. Yet half way through this series of blows he published a book that argued the world was getting less violent. The year 1939 was not a good year to disseminate such a message, let alone in German. It was only when it was translated into English in 1969, by which time Elias had retired from Leicester University, that the book (called The Civilising Process) shot him to fame.
Elias had spent many hours delving into medieval archives, concluding that life in the Middle Ages was routinely much more violent than today. He also argued that manners and etiquette were coarser in the old days and he linked the two. The book’s revival was helped 12 years later by the compilation of a graph that showed a hundredfold decrease in homicide rates per 100,000 people in England since the 1300s: statistical evidence for Elias’s hunch. Till then, most people thought the modern world more violent than the old days; plenty still do.
The psychologist Steven Pinker, alerted by the graph and others like it from all across Europe, documented in his recent book The Better Angels of our Nature the inexorable, widespread and continuing decline in the West in virtually all forms of violence: homicide, rape, torture, corporal punishment, capital punishment, war, genocide, domestic violence, child abuse, hate crimes and more. Pinker agreed that etiquette changes were part of the same trend.
Pinker summarises the Elias argument thus: beginning in the 11th century and maturing in the 18th, “Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration”. The root of this change lay in government and commerce. As monarchs centralised power in feudal societies, being polite at court began to matter more than being good at violence. And as commerce replaced feudal obligations, people had to learn to treat strangers as potential customers rather than potential prey.
Whatever the explanation, there is no doubt that — with occasional backward lurches, and some exceptions — morality has progressed towards niceness.
The source.
Personally, I feel pleasantly warned not to boil the ocean, whenever I listen to this scholar:
Merry Christmas to RSE's readers and contributors.
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