Of all the delightful passages in the Reason article I just linked, this stands out:
Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism." To Rockwell, the LP was a "party of the stoned," a halfway house for libertines that had to be "de-loused." To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. "State-enforced segregation," Rockwell wrote, "was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse."
Anyone who has ever observed a two-year-old knows that lying, stealing, and using force to bully those of slightly lesser strength are also natural and normal human impulses. The point is, society is supposed to encourage us to control some of our less noble desires.
"The point is, society is supposed to encourage us to control some of our less noble desires."
So says the prep school girl. Maybe if you had your hair lit on fire like my sister did at her nearly-all-black public school you'd have a different opinion about forced integration. It's only forced for those who can't afford the prep schools; elites are free to talk about noble desires in the safety of their lily-white private schools.
Why am I not surprised you don't know the moral difference between stealing and associating with whomever you desire?
Sigh. I was mugged in the girl's bathroom of my grammar school at the age of seven. I got into my first fight at the age of eight. Am I authentic enough now?
I'm not saying that integration didn't cause problems, and obviously the safety of your children is a valid reason to move schools. But that doesn't mean that the xenophobia displayed by the girls who lit your sister's hair on fire should be lauded as a "natural, normal human impulse".
"The point is, society is supposed to encourage us to control some of our less noble desires"
There is a huge difference between what behavior I think that I and others should encourage on the one hand, and what the coercive power of the state to fine and imprison should be used for on the other.
Maybe if you had your hair lit on fire like my sister did at her nearly-all-black public school you'd have a different opinion about forced integration. It's only forced for those who can't afford the prep schools; elites are free to talk about noble desires in the safety of their lily-white private schools.
Fred, I know we've had this discussion before at Yglesias's blog. But look. I went all the way through public school in an urban, majority black school district as well. I was never beaten up. The only fight I ever got into was with another white kid. I didn't get stabbed in the halls. People weren't mugging me for my lunch.
I'm sorry if you had a hellish experience growing up. But I have to point out a few facts. Many people, like me, go through largely black public school systems without being the victims of violence, or having a terrible time. It takes quite a leap to assert that because people treated you or your family badly in school, and they were black, therefore they treated you badly because they were black; therefore all black people treat all white people in public school badly. This just isn't logical. And you refuse to accept any contrary evidence; my anecdotal evidence you consider irrelevant, and yet your own anecdotal evidence is supposed to be dispositive. Or you argue through assertion, saying "everyone knows that" or "the truth you don't want to face is that"....
I'm sorry you had a hard time as a kid, I really am. But come on. You can't allow your vision of school or race to be colored by that fact. As I've asked before, maybe your assumption that black people were just itching to attack you mercilessly had something to do with the fact that you had such a hard time?
The debate about the right of free association--of which I'm pretty fond--is not the same thing as saying that deliberately choosing to only associate with members of your own race is just peachy. There are all sorts of things that should be legal, but aren't moral.
Megan @ 10:31
So in other words you don't really have a problem with what Rockwell said re: State-enforced segregation/integration, since you don't think government should impose its idea of what is peachy or not?
It depends on whether we're talking about a state provided service. Yes, I favored school integration, if that's what you're asking. I'm much more ambivalent about anti-discrimination law. But that's not the same thing as saying that discrimination is okay.
There's school integration and there's school integration. It's one thing to desegregate and send everyone to their neighborhood school regardless of their race. It's another to bus kids all over the city to achieve appropriate racial mixes at all schools regardless of the neighborhood demographic.
Which one are you favoring?
My opinion: Assuming we have state provided schools, they should enroll kids based on location and/or academic criteria, NOT based on race (or other factors not directly related to education).
I've always thought that the "diversity is good" argument is highly overrated as it usually focuses on skin color and/or where a student's ancestors were born, not the student's current culture.
Megan: That was a pretty amazing statement from somebody who calls herself a 'libertarian' -- even a half-hearted, sometimes libertarian. If I'm reading your post correctly, you are trying to put "...stealing and using force..." [i.e. the initiation of violence] on the same moral plane as the exercise of one's right to freedom of association [i.e. the right to be left alone]!
"deliberately choosing to only associate with members of your own race": my job means that I associate with members of other races all the time. But they are overwhelmingly from the
Subcontinent or the Orient. Am I guilty of failing to seek out black slum dwellers? (I take it that the slum-dwelling point is the crucial one? Associating with the occasional African doctor is no great hardship.)
Wow, the "libertarianism is applied autism" aphorism really is true.
It might be nice if everyone always and ever treated everyone else purely as individuals, but that is just not realistic. (As something of a loner, I sympathize the desire for a more individualistic society.) But most people like belonging to a community and being with people who are like themselves, and a community that includes everybody stops being a communiity. Going too hard against human nature is a recipe for disaster. Our urge to clump together with others like ourselves certainly has its dark side, but it is not entirely a bad thing and anyway it is not going away. The only way to change this is . . . massive government interferance.
Research by Harvard's Robert Putnam suggests that diversity is actually not so great in that it leads to a lower-trust society, with fewer people voting, volunteering, donating to charity, etc. (see, for example, "Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity"). So why should the government pressure parents, schools, companies, etc. into embracing it?
Research by Harvard's Robert Putnam suggests that diversity is actually not so great in that it leads to a lower-trust society, with fewer people voting, volunteering, donating to charity, etc. (see, for example, "Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity"). So why should the government pressure parents, schools, companies, etc. into embracing it?
Exactly, people clump together with people like themselves, not becauset they are eeeeeevil, but because it is easier to form trust.
"The law, in its infinite majesty, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread."
-Anatole France
Surprising how often that isn't recognized as irony. That is to say, you can whip up righteous indignation about "forced integration" or "social clumping" if you wish, but please remember that back in the day the cops cracked skulls in Jersey City when blacks ventured north of Journal Square, but never when whites ventured south.
Megan,
Why do you have to say "society?" Why deal in these euphemisms? Why not just say "the government?"
And if by society you don't mean "the government," how in the world do you disagree with Rockwell?
BTW, I have some questions for you over at my blog...
Are you really equating having friends who are "like" you with stealing? How many women have mostly male friends? How many Jews have mostly Muslim friends? How many middle class people have mostly poor friends? How many Germans have mostly English friends?
The point is, society is supposed to encourage us to control some of our less noble desires.
Either this was ghostwritten by someone else, or I think you need to return your libertarian decoder ring ASAP.
Mencius:
Why do you have to say "society?" Why deal in these euphemisms? Why not just say "the government?"
I think Megan meant "society". The government isn't the only source of norms or enforcement of norms. It's nowhere near the most efficient deliverer of worldviews.
Thursday:
Exactly, people clump together with people like themselves, not becauset they are eeeeeevil, but because it is easier to form trust.
And then they do evil things afterwards, once they are clumped, and the targets are in the other clump, toward whose members trust is impossible. But clumping is an unalloyed good, no doubt.
The best paragraph on the Ron Paul newsletters yet written:
A handful of the quotes are genuinely shocking and inappropriate, but most are simply tactless statements of unpopular facts — such as the black crime rate being (for whatever tragic historical reasons) about seven times the white crime rate — a pattern that has held for at least twenty years, since it was about that long ago that I stumbled upon this unpleasant fact myself, not while reading some deranged Klan pamphlet but while reading through lots of Department of Justice stats based on crime victims’ own reports.
http://toddseavey.com/2008/01/08/race-ron-paul-the-primaries-and-more-now-andat-lolita-26-with-john-derbyshire/
then they do evil things afterwards
Always? Only? If so, thats a pretty sweeping allegation.
A good analogy is family. You may be more inclined to do good things for your sister or brother or cousin. It doesn't necessarily mean you start doing bad things to other peoples families. It doesn't mean you hate other families. (Though bloody clan wars around the world testify to that possibility.) But people naturally clump together with people who are related to you and that on the whole is a good thing.
Another analogy is the nation. Taking care of your own fellow citizens within your own country does not necessarily imply any hatred towards other countries. Such feeling enables us to work together for a common good, but it doesn't necessarily mean going to war with other nations or exploiting them. So, I would say, national feeling too is, on average, a good thing.
Desegregation and busing was an attempt to redress the segregation of schools into "black" schools and "white" schools. It was a good idea in that an otherwise racially diverse school district should not have such divisions drawn by race. It was also a good idea in that it forced racial groups to interact, even if to a limited degree, and thereby gain at least a little insight into people of a different race. It was a bad idea in that all it did was push segregation "upstream," as entire school districts became segregated.
Segregation will not end until everyone gets over this tribal identification by race. Until then, people are going to have a natural tendency to think of themselves as "white" or "black" as part of their identity; and everyone else starts out as the distrusted "other" to a greater or lesser degree. The trend, I hope, is towards lesser.
No, but "blood is thicker than water;" any time a choice has to be made between trusting a family member and trusting an outsider, the outsider is going to lose.
But there again, when a question occurs requiring a choice between supporting your nation or supporting some other, most (or indeed all) people of strong national feeling are going to support their own country regardless of the issue. Wars seem to always be sold to the public on the basis of nationalism ("we must secure/protect/defend our national interest against this other enemy nation". In that sense, nationalism and clannishness are like loaded guns: they don't kill anyone in and of themselves, but there's always someone around willing to pull the trigger.
"Desegregation and busing was an attempt to redress the segregation of schools into "black" schools and "white" schools. It was a good idea in that an otherwise racially diverse school district should not have such divisions drawn by race. It was also a good idea in that it forced racial groups to interact, even if to a limited degree, and thereby gain at least a little insight into people of a different race."
It's such a good idea that enlightened liberals spend tens of thousand of dollars per year to keep their kids out of predominantly black schools.
Hey Fred. Sorry you were bullied by black people when you were a kid, but please don't project onto the rest of us. I went to integrated public schools growing (~30-40% black) and it was just fine. This was in Georgia, so when I started schools integration had been going on for all of four years when I started (not nearly 20 since Little Rock).
My older sister's high school experienced lots of bomb threats in those days, but by the time I was in high school no one cared about that crap any more. Except, evidently, for people like you.
I'd have no problems sending my kids there.
I agree with Rockwell to this extent - I also think state imposed integration is wrong. If racists want to only associate with people of their own race than generally they should be able to do so IMO. Which doesn't mean I don't think they should be condemned for their racism, but not everything that is rude, practically bad, unreasonable, and/or hateful is a violation of someone else's rights.
A serious argument can be made that segregation was so extensive, and the practical benefits of it so great, that it justified the wrong of government forced integration. That such forced integration was a necessary or almost necessary evil. I might accept that argument. But a necessary evil, still means your doing something wrong to someone. I find it hard to be sympathetic to the racist even when his rights are violated, but they are indeed being violated if your infringe on his freedom of association.
Hmm - I see Megan has addressed this point -
"The debate about the right of free association--of which I'm pretty fond--is not the same thing as saying that deliberately choosing to only associate with members of your own race is just peachy. There are all sorts of things that should be legal, but aren't moral."
I guess perhaps I do agree with her. At the very worst our opinions are closer than I thought.
jonathan - Re: "but please remember that back in the day the cops cracked skulls in Jersey City when blacks ventured north of Journal Square, but never when whites ventured south."
And when this head cracking happened it was an attack against someone. It was government forced segregation (either that or if it wasn't the formal or informal policy of the government, it was an individuals and groups of individuals abusing government granted power to enforce segregation). That's just wrong all the way around, and defending the right to free association does not mean defending such actions.