The Politics of Coercion

Who's Your Daddy? Authority, Asceticism, and the Spread of Liberty by Michael Acree

What liberals and conservatives have in common, I suggest, is having publicly subscribed to an ascetic code in which they are not wholeheartedly committed. They have simply focused on different aspects of Christian asceticism (an asceticism shared by most other religions) — money or sex. Morality, in the cynical view, was probably invented as a system of social control: the intellectually powerful use guilt to control the physically powerful. Happy people are hard to control noncoercively. There is a limit to what we can offer them as inducements to behave differently. Guilty people, on the other hand, offer a conspicuous lever. Do as the moralists say, and your sins will be forgiven and you will experience eternal bliss. (Some gullibility is required, but not an extraordinary amount.) The ideal moral code, from this point of view, is one that is set against human nature, that people can hardly help violating. Thus the historically successful codes, including those prevailing in Western culture, are ascetic, particularly with respect to sex and money. Tellingly, perhaps, it is rare to find prohibitions on power over other people.

...What is intolerable is to feel as if you are paying a price for adherence to an ascetic code, and seeing other people — whether capitalist pigs or queers — flouting the rules and getting away with it.

...both left-liberals and conservatives focus not so much on becoming virtuous as on forcing other people to adhere to the standard they believe they are supposed to uphold. They are quite willing to submit to coercion on issues they feel they need help with, so long as everyone else is similarly coerced.

...These ascetic codes, and the efforts at social control to which they lead, are addictive: they generate their own justification. Because of them, we acquire a view of ourselves as needing external constraints on our behavior ("I don't know if I would contribute that much to charity"), which will lead us to resist any suggestion that the constraints are not necessary. There are few psychological challenges greater than changing one's conception of the good, given a lifetime of investment in constraints that may have been unnecessary. Perhaps the most insidious and destructive legacy of our traditional reliance on external controls, whether moral or legal, is the undermining of personal responsibility. We come to believe that, if social controls were relaxed, everyone, including ourselves, would run wild, indulging every whim. That expectation feeds the demand for ever stricter controls. And we end up confusing opposition to enforcement of moral codes with immorality.

...Conservatives hold a disciplinary parent model of the state, seeing its role as policing "undesirable" behavior; liberals hold a model of the state as nurturing parent, whose role is to ensure that everyone is taken care of, and that the bigger siblings don't take advantage of the weaker ones.

[For George Lakoff, author of "Moral Politics"], the choice is a slam-dunk: empirical research in developmental psychology shows that the nurturant approach works better, hence the liberal society is the better one. To libertarians, however, the question is beside the point: we reject any model of the state that sees citizens as children, and bureaucrats and politicians as the only adults. It is remarkable that Lakoff misses entirely the possibility of noninfantilizing social arrangements.

...Enforcing public morality — nurturance by compulsion — doesn't work any better than enforcing private morality. It furthermore ceases to be experienced as nurturant either by recipients, who come to take it for granted as an impersonal entitlement, or by donors, who come to resent it as a demand.

...the wish for someone to be in charge remains nearly universal. Most often it is expressed as a need to control unruly others, but I've also heard many people say, in different contexts, that they didn't trust themselves to do what they were supposed to without the threat of external sanctions. On some level, they really didn't think of themselves as responsible adults. Naturally I think the source of most of that distrust is the unrealistic, ascetic codes by which they are judging what they are supposed to do.

"The wish for someone to be in charge remains nearly universal". So libertarianism is doomed, right?