The Libertarian Fallacy

                One of the consequences of a formal democracy based on individual rights derived from a social contract is the rise of libertarian philosophy.  Libertarianism is based on the assumption that individual rights are more fundamental and privileged than the democratic formation they are part of.  All of us can cite Jefferson’s “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” line in the Declaration of Independence.  Most Americans, I think it is fair to say, have a much stronger sense of their individual rights than they do of their democratic obligations.  The philosophical arguments that ensue are centered around the danger of the state dominating people’s lives, and that is a valid concern.  What I want to argue is that the problem with libertarian thought is not political or philosophical but biological.

                Libertarianism recognizes one of the biological realities of being human, namely that we are autonomous beings.  We aren’t identical to one another and we have different, sometimes radically different, ways of seeing, expressing and understanding the world we inhabit.  To someone in our culture that is more than obvious.  As a product of this culture, I value the autonomy we call individuality.  But autonomy is only half of the biological reality of being human: we are also connected.  Aristotle said we were political beings, which is another way of saying we are social beings.  We live in groups, and even when we’re alone, we envision others as the background of our actions and thoughts.  Libertarianism either ignores or devalues this connection in order to make individual choice the dominant characteristic of political action.

                Radical democracy cannot be libertarian.  Radical democracy has to balance the autonomous and the connected aspects of the human condition without making one the pretext to the other.  We are always already both.  Autonomy is always contextualized and conscribed by connection, and our connectivity is energized and manifested in our autonomy.  Human groups, of any size, that have energy and vitality also contain conflict and disagreement.  Those groups can only survive, however, if the conflict and disagreement are productive.  Productive groups both change and conserve.  They change by using language, and other tools, to create connections that are richer and more satisfactory, and they conserve by making sure that those changes enhance rather than weaken or even threaten the connection between the group and the biosphere.   Individuals that are part of a dying group can’t escape on their own.  Radical democracy is based on this tension or autopoiesis.

                Formal democracy is too rigid.  It is often based on purity, as was true in Athens.  Early American democracy had all kinds of restrictions about who was included and who wasn’t.  To its credit, it kept expanding the franchise and including more, but not all, of the people.  Even now, we argue about what ideas are truly “American,” which is a form ideological purity.  As formal democracy granted more and more groups of people ‘rights’ in the libertarian sense, it overloaded one half of the biological equation.  A democracy cannot simply expand rights without simultaneously rewriting and strengthening the connections that frame them.  A radical democracy does not promise and individual identity outside of or free from the social connection that gives it existence and connects it to the life world that sustains it.

                This is necessarily a dynamic and messy proposition, one in which our autonomy and our connection are continually in flux.  We have tried to keep it rational and clean.  We have tried to be democratic by having uniform institutions and white marble buildings (the Greeks painted theirs, you know).  The results were to create a sterile democracy that works if a benign and well-intentioned elite plays along with the democratic script.  Watch the news tonight and see if you still think that’s working.  A radical democracy is a face to face, hand to hand, idea to idea proposition that starts with primacy of our connection but recognizes the value of our autonomy.  We are smarter, safer and a lot more fun when our differences inform our solidarity.