The Classic Liberal Blog

The following Star Trek video teaches the individual versus the collective.

H/T - Once in a Great While, the Boob Tube Gets It Right, and also a shout-out to blogger extraordinaire, Jamie Jeffords!

The Selfish Selfishness of the Individual

A popular attack on individualism from both the left and the right, is that individualism equals selfishness. Rev. Robert Sirico does an excellent job of dispelling this myth in "Economics and the Reality of Things":

FMM: Capitalism requires a large degree of selfishness. Though there is certainly room for charity in a free-market system, individuals and firms must pursue their own selfish interests in order for an economy to thrive (or even succeed). How does a Christian love his neighbor as himself and still function as a capitalist?

Father Sirico: I do not share the use of the word selfishness in the way that it is employed in this question. A proper self regard is based on the belief in my own inherent dignity and this requires “self love” but not an inordinate self-love or self-preoccupation which is willing to subordinate others to my own ends, either coercively or in a manipulative manner which disregards the same dignity of others. The word selfishness as it is used in common parlance does not reference rational self-interest but rather a self preoccupation and disordered priority.

From a Christian anthropological point of view the human person (who is much more than “the individual”) is a combination of his individuality and his sociality, his autonomy and relationships. From the first moment of our existence we are simultaneously autonomous (in that we are genetically distinct from our mothers), yet in relation to her while in the womb. The whole of our existence following is a working out of this interplay of our autonomy and our social nature. A Christian’s love for his neighbor is rooted in solidarity which is the recognition of a profound connection between human beings. It is, in a sense, a recognition of myself in the other. Because all human beings share an intrinsic dignity we ‘love our neighbors as we love ourselves’. Capitalism, which is only the economic extension of this anthropological truth, can be lived out from this perspective, but in order to be secure, just, and enduring, it needs to rooted in the historical development of such an anthropology.

I argued the same point in "Individualism."

"Mr. Libertarian" Murray N. Rothbard, argued this as well in "Six Myths About Libertarianism":

Myth #1 Libertarians believe that each individual is an isolated, hermetically sealed atom, acting in a vacuum without influencing each other.

This is a common charge, but a highly puzzling one. In a lifetime of reading libertarian and classical liberal literature, I have not come across a single theorist or writer who holds anything like this position. The only possible exception is the fanatical Max Stirner, a mid-19th century German individualist who, however, has had minimal influence upon libertarianism in his time and since. Moreover, Stirner’s explicit "Might Makes Right" philosophy and his repudiation of all moral principles including individual rights as "spooks in the head," scarcely qualifies him as a libertarian in any sense. Apart from Stirner, however, there is no body of opinion even remotely resembling this common indictment.

Libertarians are methodological and political individualists, to be sure. They believe that only individuals think, value, act, and choose. They believe that each individual has the right to own his own body, free of coercive interference. But no individualist denies that people are influencing each other all the time in their goals, values, pursuits and occupations. As F.A. Hayek pointed out in his notable article, "The Non-Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,’" John Kenneth Galbraith’s assault upon free-market economics in his best-selling The Affluent Society rested on this proposition: economics assumes that every individual arrives at his scale of values totally on his own, without being subject to influence by anyone else. On the contrary, as Hayek replied, everyone knows that most people do not originate their own values, but are influenced to adopt them by other people. No individualist or libertarian denies that people influence each other all the time, and surely there is nothing wrong with this inevitable process. What libertarians are opposed to is not voluntary persuasion, but the coercive imposition of values by the use of force and police power. Libertarians are in no way opposed to the voluntary cooperation and collaboration between individuals: only to the compulsory pseudo-"cooperation" imposed by the State.

In "What Libertarianism Isn’t," Edward Feser makes a related argument:

If I had to sum up the common moral vision of libertarians and conservatives, I would say it is a commitment to the idea of the dignity of man. On this vision, a human being is not a mere animal, but a rational being with the power of free moral choice, a person – a creature made, as religious conservatives would put it, in the image of God. And because he is this, he (a) cannot legitimately be used as a resource for others, a source of labor and property which may be appropriated by the state for its purposes without his consent, and (b) is subject to the demands of a moral law which require him to live in a way which accords with his unique dignity, rather than in thrall to his every fleeting inclination. Libertarians stress (a) and conservatives (b), but both are united in their insistence that a man ought not to be a slave, either to another’s desires or to his own. And it is this insistence that separates them from the Left, which in its various factions tends to portray human beings in dehumanizing terms, as little more than clever animals, or as cogs in a vast social machine, helpless victims of forces beyond their control – and thus neither fit to rule themselves nor capable of living up to any morality that would require putting chains on their appetites.

Straw Men and Fake Arguments

Almost all attacks on individualism are forms of the Straw Man Fallacy:

[T]he attacker of a straw man argument is refuting a position of his own creation, not the position of someone else. The refutation may appear to be a good one to someone unfamiliar with the original argument.

Today, anyone who advocates liberty, freedom, economic and fiscal austerity, and that "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," is attacked as a selfish, hermetically sealed hate monger.

The left is convinced that private ownership of capital goods is a social and moral evil, but they can't make the argument without resorting to the straw man fallacy of individualism being selfish. Many conservatives "blame the Libertarians" (for what, I don't know) based on the same selfishness straw man as the left uses.

But this is what politics has become today. A game of straw man arguments against the individual and in defense of nothing. It's tiresome.