Thread: Why do Libertarians Oppose the Nation?

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/18597.html

by David Yerushalmi
Why do Libertarians Oppose the Nation?
September 28, 2006 09:00 AM EST



Why do libertarians like The Wall Street Journal editors oppose immigration reform? Why do they incessantly promote Open Borders? Why do they shutter when Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan speak about the importance of preserving the white Christian fraternity which binds this People as a nation? Because unlike what they tell themselves and the world, they oppose nation-states on principle.

Does this make libertarians unpatriotic? As libertarians, yes. That no one who loves his nation can abide libertarianism, including those who lay claim to the title libertarian, just explains why it is they are so conflicted and confused. (We see the same thing, by the way, with the Journal editors’ response to the whole question of Islam: Is it an evil religion or a peaceful religion being abused by a few rotten apples? One day they tell us the latter. Today, after the rioting over the Pope’s wholly reasonable approach to a dialogue on the pressing issues of the day, the editors suggest, hiding behind the Pontiff’s papal robes, that maybe Islam is really not so peaceful and rational after all. Let’s leave this for now and just tackle the borders.)

The libertarian begins with the post-Enlightenment view of man. Certainty and objective knowledge is resident only in the approach to the world that reduces everything to a mathematical proportion or formula. This seemingly simple step “forward” from the Greek view of Logos or Reason (what was termed “science”) is all it took to destroy the world of revelation and reason where previously nothing existed without telos or purpose. When we say that, per the Greeks, man is a priori a political being, we mean that his purpose is to seek qua man his own end or virtue and that requires ordering. Thus, political existence is a political order. (By “order” we don’t mean “law and order” as compulsion; we mean the ranking of things and existence by their respective virtues, a value in the order of the world. For example, man ranks higher than beast; beast higher than organic material; and organic life higher than inorganic.) Political order is a result of man’s divine gift to distinguish and to discriminate between things of unequal rank.

With the Enlightenment’s mathematically grounded scientific revolution -- made possible through Descartes’ “contribution” of the Cogito and all that comes with it (i.e., figurate extension, metaphysical matter, Pure Intellect, and the Instant) -- the Divine (and therefore Telos) and man’s experience of the Divine ground of Being were literally hollowed out of the World. The fuller exposition of this, the use of language to describe an experience of being no longer ontological, would itself require the enlistment of soul or Reason no longer available but to the rarest of men, and even then, only at the rarest of times. This writer is not one of them. Such exposition, however, is on its way as we have intimated here at SANE and we await its publication by the Institute of Advanced Strategic & Political Studies. But in the interim, nothing prevents us from viewing its effect in the world and on man quite clearly.

Thus, the new scientist, using a modern mathematical reasoning, took the world of man and reduced it to the symbols of mathesis universalis. Once everything in the world including man had become mere formulae, infinite proportions of relative quantities, the physical world was now manageable and malleable. The era of the Progress of science was ushered in.

But to get there, the world had lost everything of value (literally so), for it had lost its Divine ground of being. Things were now merely formulas and measurements. In the new science, speech as symbol was no longer about real things but mathematical symbols that generated yet additional abstractions. Telos and ordering had been replaced by quantities and proportions that could be mathematically manipulated by Method. Methodologies of the mathematics flourished as the great mathematical and scientific minds bounded onto center stage in the world of man’s affairs. Logos -- Reason and Speech – the experience of Telos and order as ranking was now a thing of the past.

In truth, the Reason of philosophy (meaning again Socrates-Plato-Aristotle) and even the world of religious faith – where revelation granted man a glimpse of the Divine Plan and Purpose – did not disappear. But what happened was even worse. With the advent of the new reason of science, having achieved certain knowledge through its ratiocinations and methodologies, all of Man’s existence outside of the realm of science was relegated to the trash bin of uncertainty. Philosophy, Reason, religious faith had all been reduced to the world of subjective opinion. One man’s virtue was now another man’s sin.

In the new world of the ratiocinating man, the new reason (now just method) allowed the Law of non-Contradiction – a bedrock of the ancient Reason -- to be contradicted. Mathematics allows for this. We see it today in the world of quantum physics. Moreover, one of the greatest insults to man qua man was the Infinite Regress. In a world bounded only by mathematical symbols, the Beginning was gone. The world became in theory and in effect an infinite regress with no purpose beyond its existence at any given point in time relative to some previous point in time (what Robert Loewenberg refers to as “historical ontology.”)

And, indeed, given the Progress available through the applied sciences, the Transcendent of the philosopher and of the man of faith was now replaced by the passage of Time in the immanent world. We know it as History. The Progressives worship its inverse as “progress” of course but the truth is, even the most faithful or conservative of men in our contemporary times do so. For these men, belief in G-d is personal, familial, fraternal, and even universal, but it remains subjective belief and wholly uncertain. Revelation is no longer the contrarian’s anchor within a world whose cycles of growth and decay seem so much of necessity. America, the West, the modern world must remain faithful to the objectivity of the new reason – the ratiocinator – the calculator – the methodologist.

Of course, and as I have written before here at SANE, this new man of science found democracy the perfect medicine for the loss of political order. With all of man’s certain knowledge of the world reduced to the merely physical Part, man was no longer capable of ranking, of distinguishing one thing from another as a qualitative matter since all distinctions between things were now merely quantitative. Virtue can only be understood in the context of a thing’s purpose and ranking within the Whole. The Whole, represented by the Terms of Existence as Self-Soul, Society-Nation, G-d, and World, had been reduced to the Part measured only by its physical components.

So in a world where only science pierced the certainty of objective knowledge through a method reducing man and his world to quantity, how was man to live? How was he to order his political affairs? How was man to illuminate the political world? The answer of course was right before modern man’s eyes. The men of the New Age of the Enlightenment headed toward this new light almost with abandon, less so in America, certainly so in Europe and most egregiously so in France. Method. Since all of man’s affairs outside of science were but subjective uncertainty, the method to resolve the impasse over how men ought to live in society became democracy. Since all of man’s opinions are uncertain, subject to “debate” and therefore irrelevant, permit every man a vote and add up their voices. The greater voice is the loudest one measured by votes and this becomes the “good” or “virtuous” voice. (The only other choice would have been active tyranny.)

In this new reality of course there was no longer “good” or “virtue”, but if the method were implemented “fairly” and pursuant to the Due Process of the method, the result would necessarily be good and virtuous. (The only bad vote, and we understand such caveat as an arbitrary, poorly constructed barrier to nihilism, is that the vote ought not destroy the vote. Its arbitrariness arises out of the same contradiction we have long since recognized exists in the moral relativist’s dilemma that there is no absolute good, absolutely.)

For the libertarian this new world order was indeed liberating. Unshackled from the struggle to live a virtuous life and the concomitant discrimination necessary to value things, the libertarian could claim that man as material being was simply the sum of his desires. Man as material being wants things and these things are measured not by their relative value or virtue but by how badly a man wants them. How much is he willing to pay for them? Value is now the new science of economics. Virtue has no place in this world unless, again, we speak about method. The “good” of the new world was its level of “freedom”. A truly libertarian society, which allows free drug use, sex, pornography, and all the other vices of man, is a better (i.e., “freer”) society than one whose citizens have agreed to outlaw these things.

Obviously, the freest state of affairs for man would be anarchy. A world without government. But that, even the libertarians agree, would not provide the necessary protection from the man who might arise to take his freedoms by force. So we enlist an understanding among free men to have the smallest possible government necessary to prevent such usurpation of our radical freedoms. At first, libertarians envision this world consisting of little city-states. Micro-governments with maximum freedoms. As is the case with the individual man’s quest to amass wealth, these city-states would also begin to acquire wealth and geography. As wealth and power accumulate, we might very well find ourselves in a world in which the men of the Big City have the splendor and benefits accompanying great wealth, but the men of the poor Little City suffer immeasurably.

But wait just one moment. Why are the men of the Little City bound to remain there? The border that separates them from the Big City is a mere social construct, an artificiality. Why wouldn’t the citizen of the Little City, seeking to improve his lot, simply pack up and exercise his freedom to choose to live in the Big City? If the libertarian refuses him this freedom to move from one city to another, has he not, quite destructive of his libertarian core principle, discriminated against one man based solely on his City of origin? How is this discrimination any less evil in the lexicon of the libertarian than bigotry of any sort?

And, how will the Big City stop the man from the Little City from immigrating? Will he build up a border patrol? Arrest him upon entry? But the libertarian is against these things. Freedom of movement is fundamental in a free society.

And as this Big City prospers it must acquire yet new territory and grow accordingly. Assuming it does so peacefully by acquiring the land of the Little City that has gone bankrupt, eventually if not invariably you are likely to see huge City-States taking on the characteristics of nation-states. But as men continue to seek the good life, the libertarian must allow for greater and greater numbers occupying more and more territory.

We see where this is heading, but in reality, we didn’t need the exercise. Why? Because the one world state the libertarian must per force allow by natural accretion, would have been the logical state a priori. For on what basis was the world divided into City States to begin with? What arbitrary setting of “rights” pitted one group against another? The freest state of affairs for the world would necessarily be a single world state guaranteeing all men absolute equality before one law -- not thousands, even millions of separate city-states each with its own arbitrary rules and regulations. If maximizing freedom is the fundamental goal of a libertarian world, the world state is the obvious answer.

Now, the retort to this problem by libertarians is that men should be free to associate with whomever they wish. And if that means that the men in the Big City don’t wish to allow others to join, then so be it. But their decision to prohibit by force any of the “other” men from the Little City from immigrating is a denial of a fundamental principle of libertarianism. It is state-sponsored discrimination based solely upon birth and borders.

But even assuming the men of the Big City will abide by the gross and forceful restriction of the “other” men’s freedom to immigrate, what happens if 40% of the men of the Big City wish to allow open borders? Should the Big City break up? Of course, because there is no value to the City-State in and of itself, or of the People in and of itself, except in the conscious and radically free agreement to be bound by certain laws. The libertarian therefore must oppose any war to prevent secession. Lincoln was no libertarian. (The cantonization of every city-state, every nation-state, indeed the redrawing of borders and the redefinition of peoples would be subject to the endless vote. Patriotism – viewed by the libertarian as a mindless dedication to the Whole – would itself be outlawed.)

If, however, the libertarian is to give such a high value to his desire to only associate with whom he wishes and to close his borders to others, how is that different from the same men deciding that the association is one worth maintaining only if every man wears a black tie? Has purple skin? Worships Allah? Failure to do so results in a fine, imprisonment or expulsion. How is this anti-libertarian law any different from the law that says only the men I and the majority of others in the Big City like well enough may live here?

The point of this tedious exercise was to point out that the libertarians who speak about open borders and the importance of immigration as a right of free men are just another brand of anti-nation-state One World Government advocates. But as we understood in the preceeding, even that is tentative. If they are libertarians they either support a world state government and they oppose the arbitrariness and bigotry of nation-states or they must abandon all of their libertarian principles to maintain a nation-state against the assault of the “other” men from the Little City. And, even if they could defend their nation-state against such an assault, they would then be in the position of granting even a minority the right to destroy the nation-state by secession. At the end of the day, they differ from George Soros and the Liberal Big Government Elite only in degree. They both oppose national existence.

The point of this tedious exercise was to point out that the libertarians who speak about open borders and the importance of immigration as a right of free men are just another brand of anti-nation-state One World Government advocates.

Why do they hate America?Why?