Under any institutions, there are essentially only three ways that I can get another person to help me achieve my ends: love, trade, and force.

By love I mean making my end your end. Those who love me wish me to get what I want (except for those who think I am very stupid about what is good for me). So they voluntarily, ‘unselfishly’, help me. Love is too narrow a word. You might also share my end not because it is my end but because in a particular respect we perceive the good in the same way. You might volunteer to work on my political campaign, not because you love me, but because you think that it would be good if I were elected. Of course, we might share the common ends for entirely different reasons. I might think I was just what the country needed, and you, that I was just what the country deserved.

Love—more generally, the sharing of a common end—works well, but only for a limited range of problems. It is difficult to know very many people well enough to love them. Love can provide cooperation on complicated things among very small groups of people, such as families. It also works among large numbers of people for very simple ends—ends so simple that many different people can completely agree on them. But for a complicated end involving a large number of people—producing this book, for instance—love will not work. I cannot expect all the people whose cooperation I need—typesetters, editors, bookstore owners, loggers, pulpmill workers, and a thousand more—to know and love me well enough to want to publish this book for my sake. Nor can I expect them all to agree with my political views closely enough to view the publication of this book as an end in itself. Nor can I expect them all to be people who want to read the book and who therefore are willing to help produce it. I fall back on the second method: trade.

I contribute the time and effort to produce the manuscript. I get, in exchange, a chance to spread my views, a satisfying boost to my ego, and a little money. The people who want to read the book get the book. In exchange, they give money. The publishing firm and its employees, the editors, give the time, effort, and skill necessary to coordinate the rest of us; they get money and reputation. Loggers, printers, and the like give their effort and skill and get money in return. Thousands of people, perhaps millions, cooperate in a single task, each seeking his own ends. So under private property the first method, love, is used where it is workable. Where it is not, trade is used instead.

The attack on private property as selfish contrasts the second method with the first. It implies that the alternative to ‘selfish’ trade is ‘unselfish’ love. But, under private property, love already functions where it can. Nobody is prevented from doing something for free if he wants to. Many people—parents helping their children, volunteer workers in hospitals, scoutmasters—do just that. If, for those things that people are not willing to do for free, trade is replaced by anything, it must be by force. Instead of people being selfish and doing things because they want to, they will be unselfish and do them at the point of a gun.

Is this accusation unfair? The alternative offered by those who deplore selfishness is always government. It is selfish to do something for money, so the slums should be cleaned up by a ‘youth corps’ staffed via ‘universal service’. Translated, that means the job should be done by people who will be put in jail if they do not do it.

I just highlighted this because it was a beautifully phrased argument.

One of the most effective arguments against unregulated laissez faire has been that it invariably leads to monopoly. As George Orwell put it, “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.” It is thus argued that government must intervene to prevent the formation of monopolies or, once formed, to control them. This is the usual justification for antitrust laws and such regulatory agencies as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board.

The best historical refutation of this thesis is in two books by socialist historian Gabriel Kolko: The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation
. He argues that at the end of the last century businessmen believed the future was with bigness, with conglomerates and cartels, but were wrong. The organizations they formed to control markets and reduce costs were almost invariably failures, returning lower profits than their smaller competitors, unable to fix prices, and controlling a steadily shrinking share of the market.

The regulatory commissions supposedly were formed to restrain monopolistic businessmen. Actually, Kolko argues, they were formed at the request of unsuccessful monopolists to prevent the competition which had frustrated their efforts.

So many books I need to read before I can have opinions on things.

It was in 1884 that railroad men in large numbers realized the advantages to them of federal control; it took 34 years to get the government to set their rates for them. The airline industry was born in a period more friendly to regulation. In 1938 the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), initially called the Civil Aeronautics Administration, was formed. It was given the power to regulate airline fares, to allocate routes among airlines, and to control the entry of new firms into the airline business. From that day until the deregulation of the industry in the late 1970s, no new trunk line— no major, scheduled, interstate passenger carrier—was started.

The CAB had one limitation: it could only regulate interstate airlines. There was one major intrastate route in the country— between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Pacific Southwest Airlines, which operated on that route, had no interstate operations and was therefore not subject to CAB rate fixing. Prior to deregulation, the fare between San Francisco and Los Angeles on PSA was about half that of any comparable interstate trip anywhere in the country. That gives us a good measure of the effect of the CAB on prices; it maintained them at about twice their competitive level.

In this complicated world it is rare that a political argument can be proved with evidence readily accessible to everyone, but until deregulation the airline industry provided one such case. If you did not believe that the effect of government regulation of transportation was to drive prices up, you could call any reliable travel agent and ask whether all interstate airline fares were the same, how PSA’s fare between San Francisco and Los Angeles compared with the fare charged by the major airlines, and how that fare compared with the fare on other major intercity routes of comparable length. If you do not believe that the ICC and the CAB are on the side of the industries they regulate, figure out why they set minimum as well as maximum fares.

Continuing to have nothing much to say except “wow”.

Defenders of [government health spending] programs argue that the poor are so poor they cannot afford vital medical care. Lurid reports to the contrary, most poor people are not on the edge of literal starvation; evidence indicates that in this country the number of calories consumed is virtually independent of income. If the poor spent more of their own money on doctors, they would not starve to death; they would merely eat worse, wear worse clothes, and live in even worse housing than they now do. If they do not spend very much money on medical care it is because that cost, which they are in an excellent position to evaluate, is too high.

Finally something where I can say something more interesting than wholehearted agreement.

The average cost of treatment for a heart attack is about $15,000. The poverty line for a single person in the US is $11,000. On the one hand, credit cards and loans can make up some of the difference; on the other, heart attacks are by no means even close to the most expensive medical condition. So if we’re talking about actually buying health care then no, the poor literally cannot afford it.

If we’re talking about buying health insurance, I understand a very cheap policy would cost about $2000, so the poor can probably literally afford that. I mean, they don’t have a whole lot of fat to trim, but they can afford it in the sense that if they choose to give up their home and car, and live on the streets, then they can have the health insurance. At least until their job fires them because they don’t have a car and can’t get there, and so they lose the money they were using to pay for it. But they won’t starve to death!

But then, why is starving to death such a uniquely interesting endpoint? Why assume that if the poor would die without health insurance we’re morally obligated to give it to them, but if they wouldn’t, we’re not? If we’re amoral or denying all obligations to help others, why care if the poor starve to death? And if we’re not amoral and feel some responsibility to the poor, why not also be concerned about them having a minimally tolerable life?

If some libertarian doesn’t think we have any obligation to help the poor, I’d rather they just say “Well, the poor might starve to death, but that’s too bad.”

Otherwise it seems sort of misleading to me. Saying “Well, the poor won’t literally starve to death” sounds like you’re saying “Well, it’s not that bad.” But if you were actually saying that, I could respond that it is that bad. It’s just bad in a non-starvation-related way. If you don’t care how bad it is, say so instead of hedging about whether starvation is occurring or not.

The best solution to this problem would be for any state instituting a voucher system to include, as part of the initial legislation, the provision that any institution can qualify as a school on the basis of the performance of its graduates on objective examinations. In New York, for instance, the law might state that any school would be recognized if the average performance of its graduating class on the Regents exam was higher than the performance of the graduating classes of the bottom third of the state’s public schools.

The best answer I’ve ever heard to the question of how to decide who gets school vouchers.

It might be possible to reform our present universities in the direction of such free-market universities. One way would be by the introduction of a ‘tuition diversion’ plan. This arrangement would allow students, while purchasing most of their education from the university, to arrange some courses taught by instructors of their own choice. A group of students would inform the university that they wished to take a course from an instructor from outside the university during the next year. The university would multiply the number of students by the average spent from each student’s tuition for the salary of one of his instructors for one quarter. The result would be the amount of their tuition the group wished to divert from paying an instructor of the university’s choice to paying an instructor of their own choice. The university would offer him that sum to teach the course or courses proposed. If he accepted, the students would be obligated to take the course.

The university would determine what credit, if any, was given for such courses. The number each student could take for credit might at first be severely limited. If the plan proved successful, it could be expanded until any such course could serve as an elective. Departments would still decide whether a given course would satisfy specific departmental requirements.

A tuition diversion plan does not appear to be a very revolutionary proposal; it can begin on a small scale as an educational experiment of the sort dear to the heart of every liberal educator. Such plans could, in time, revolutionize the universities.

At first, tuition diversion would be used to hire famous scholars on sabbatical leave, political figures of the left or right, film directors invited by college film groups, and other such notables. But it would also offer young academics an alternative to a normal career. Capable teachers would find that, by attracting many students, they could get a much larger salary than by working for a university. The large and growing pool of skilled ‘free-lance’ teachers would encourage more schools to adopt tuition diversion plans and thus simplify their own faculty recruitment problems. Universities would have to offer substantial incentives to keep their better teachers from being drawn off into free-lancing. Such incentives might take the form of effective market structures within the university, rewarding departments and professors for attracting students. Large universities would become radically decentralized, approximating free-market universities. Many courses would be taught by free-lancers, and the departments would develop independence verging on autarchy.

Under such institutions the students, although they might have the help of advisory services, would have to take the primary responsibility for the structure of their own education. Many students enter college unready for such responsibility. A competitive educational market would evolve other institutions to serve their needs. These would probably be small colleges offering a highly structured education with close personal contact for students who wished to begin their education by submitting to a plan of study designed by those who are already educated. A student could study at such a college until he felt ready to oversee his own education and then transfer to a university.

It is time to begin the subversion of the American system of higher schooling, with the objective not destruction but renaissance.

One of the better university reform proposals I’ve heard, plus an incremental strategy for achieving it!

I have solved the problem of urban mass transit. To apply rny solution to a major city requires a private company willing to invest a million dollars or so in hardware and a few million more in advertising and organization. The cost is low because my transit system is already over 99 percent built; its essence is the more efficient use of our present multibillion dollar investment in roads and automobiles. I call it jitney transit; it can most easily be thought of as something between taxicabs and hitch-hiking. Jitney stops, like present-day bus stops, would be arranged conveniently about the city. A commuter heading into town with an empty car would stop at the first jitney stop he came to and pick up any passengers going his way. He would proceed along his normal route, dropping off passengers when he passed their stops. Each passenger would pay a fee, according to an existing schedule listing the price between any pair of stops.

Holy !@#$, I think he has solved the problem of urban mass transit. There’s an obvious Uber parallel, but this system seems even better since it’s run by people going that direction anyway and each car will be packed, making the costs probably much cheaper. This is such an obviously good idea that I can only assume that it was regulation and the taxi lobby that prevented it from coming to pass. This paragraph probably did more to raise my confidence that there are extremely good libertarian solutions to important problems that we’re missing out on than anything else in the entire book.

Urban renewal uses the power of the government to prevent slums from spreading, a process sometimes referred to as ‘preventing urban blight’. For middle-class people on the border of low-income areas, this is valuable protection. But ‘urban blight’ is precisely the process by which more housing becomes available to low-income people. The supporters of urban renewal claim that they are improving the housing of the poor. In the Hyde Park area of Chicago, where I have lived much of my life, they tore down old, low-rental apartment houses and replaced them with $30,000 and $40,000 town houses. A great improvement, for those poor with $30,000. And this is the rule, not the exception, as was shown years ago by Martin Anderson in The Federal Bulldozer

I don’t know much about urban renewal programs or whether they purport to help the poor; anyone want to weigh in here?

Most conservatives now seem to have accepted, even embraced, the space program and with it the idea that the exploration of space can only be achieved by government. That idea is false. If we had not been in such a hurry, we not only could have landed a man on the moon, we could have done it at a profit.

How? Perhaps as a television spectacular. The moon landing alone had an audience of 400 million. If pay TV were legal, that huge audience could have been charged several billion dollars for the series of shows leading up to, including, and following the landing. If the average viewer watched, altogether, twenty hours of Apollo programs, that would be about 25 cents an hour for the greatest show off earth…

A greedy capitalist could have sold the moon landing in 1969 for something over $5 billion. The government spent $24 billion to get to the moon. It costs any government at least twice as much to do anything as it costs anyone else. It would have cost something under $12 billion to produce the Apollo program privately.

But Apollo was a crash program. If we had been in less of a hurry, it would have cost far less. While we were waiting, economic growth would increase the price for which the moon landing could be sold and technological progress would cut the cost of getting there. We would have arrived, at a profit, sometime in the seventies.

This is the business model of Mars One, which may be a scam. Which makes me wonder: how come, if the business model is sound, in 25 years of us having approximately the technology necessary to go to Mars, no one has come up with a non-scam version of this?

The NFL makes $10 billion a year through TV ads and sponsorship rights. I don’t know if a Mars mission would do better or worse than that – certainly the touchdown would be more exciting, but would people tune in month after month for “Yup, we’re still in this capsule, it’s really cramped in here and outside the window it just looks black”?

Robert Zubrin says he thinks a private company could reach Mars for $5 billion, which sounds promising, but he gets that because the government estimate is $50 billion and he thinks private companies can be ten times more efficient. Come on, Robert Zubrin! Even David Friedman estimates more like twice as efficient. I also note that SpaceX is estimating $1 billion to convert their existing Dragon to a crew-ready Dragon. $1 billion for a famously efficient private company to go from existing small rocket + small capsule to slightly improved small rocket + small capsule that can go to low Earth orbit – and you’re expecting another private company, right out of the gate, to be able to create ex nihilo a Mars-worthy spacecraft and the rocket that can launch it for $5 billion? Plus the astronaut training program, the production of the TV specials, the overhead for this new giant aerospace company you’re founding, the cost of the colony itself, etc, etc? Really?

And even if it’s possible in theory, think about the risk. The risk that the spacecraft explodes on the launch pad, and either you’ve just stuck your company name on a national tragedy or else you’d invested $6 billion in a TV special that’s never going to happen. Or the risk that five years later, the Mars One people come to you and say “Okay, Robert Zubrin was way too optimistic, we spent all your money to build the spacecraft’s left navigational fin, can you give us some more?” The risk that the Chinese beat you there and televising the second manned Mars landing isn’t very exciting.

Nothing I’ve seen so far convinces me that a serious version of Mars One is anywhere on the horizon. SpaceX will probably send a man to Mars someday, but they’ll do it because Elon Musk is vision-driven instead of profit-driven and he’s making enough profits somewhere else to fund his vision. And I don’t think even that would have worked without the funding and help that NASA has given SpaceX so far.

I worry that very big high-risk projects are exactly the sort of thing our current market system is really bad at.

My own conclusion—that drug companies should be free to sell, and their customers to buy, anything, subject to liability for damages caused by misrepresentation—must seem monstrous to many people. Certainly it means accepting the near certainty of a few people a year dying from unexpected side effects of new drugs.

This probably needs its own post, but no no no no no no no no, regulating drugs by liability is not a good idea, maybe even a worse idea than regulating them with regulations. Just as a quick example, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia’s article on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program:

“In 1988, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) went into effect to compensate individuals and families of individuals who have been injured by covered childhood vaccines.[5] The VICP was adopted in response to an earlier scare over the pertussis portion of the DPT vaccine. These claims were later generally discredited, but some U.S. lawsuits against vaccine makers won substantial awards; most makers ceased production, and the last remaining major manufacturer threatened to do so. “

In other words, people kept winning so much money by suing the makers of pertussis vaccines that all of them except one just gave up and went out of business, and the only way the government saved that last one was by promising that the public purse would pay all of its losses. If the government hadn’t stepped in, we would not have vaccines right now because lawsuits would have made it unprofitable to make them. Idiotic lawsuits, I might add – pertussis vaccine doesn’t actually hurt people in any way. This is “my kid got autism after getting a vaccine” level stuff, and the courts were just like “Sure, fine, we believe you, let’s make the vaccine companies pay you so much money they all go bankrupt.”

This is not an isolated incident. The way malpractice works these days is that patients sue for things that are completely medically impossible, the malpractice insurances know that juries are too dumb to realize this, and they settle for more money than you will ever make honestly in your life. The FDA and its regulations are actually a rare force limiting this madness – if nothing else, a doctor can say “Well, that drug was approved by the FDA, so I wasn’t negligent in prescribing it to you.”

I understand that this book’s proposals include a large package of reforms which include those to the court system. But Friedman’s worries about how any “limited government” will eventually regrow into the kind of government that says you feeding your own grain to your own pigs is interstate commerce, are matched by my worries about how any “reformed court system” will eventually regrow into the kind of court system where children must be banned from sledding because if they get hurt they can sue the city for not having banned sledding, or lots of people who come to a psych hospital have to be committed lest years later somebody sue the hospital for not committing them.

If you invite more lawyers in to help control the government, you might end up like that Irish warlord who invited the English in to help control a rival warlord; you’ll find they’re even worse and they never leave.

The argument of this chapter received striking support in 1981, when the FDA published a press release confessing to mass murder. That was not, of course, the way in which the release was worded; it was simply an announcement that the FDA had approved the use of timolol, a ß-blocker, to prevent recurrences of heart attacks. At the time timolol was approved, ß-blockers had been widely used outside the U.S. for over ten years. It was estimated that the use of timolol would save from seven thousand to ten thousand lives a year in the U.S. So the FDA, by forbidding the use of ß-blockers before l981, was responsible for something close to a hundred thousand unnecessary deaths.

If examples of times when bad FDA decisions cost tens of thousands of lives made people abolish the FDA, we would probably have like negative seventeen FDAs by now.

Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one person, who is overjoyed at the unexpected windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy.

Annnnd we’re back to me just highlighting passages for rhetorical brilliance.

How much would it cost workers to purchase their firms? The total value of the shares of all stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1965 was $537 billion. The total wages and salaries of all private employees that year was $288.5 billion. State and federal income taxes totalled $75.2 billion. If the workers had chosen to live at the consumption standard of hippies, saving half their after-tax incomes, they could have gotten a majority share in every firm in two and a half years and bought the capitalists out, lock, stock, and barrel, in five. That is a substantial cost, but surely it is cheaper than organizing a revolution. Also less of a gamble. And, unlike a revolution, it does not have to be done all at once. The employees of one firm can buy it this decade, then use their profits to help fellow workers buy theirs later.

When you buy stock, you pay not only for the capital assets of the firm—buildings, machines, inventory, and the like —but also for its experience, reputation, and organization. If workers really can run firms better, these are unnecessary; all they need are the physical assets. Those assets—the net working capital of all corporations in the United States in 1965—totalled $171.7 billion. The workers could buy that much and go into business for themselves with 14 months’ worth of savings.

Compare to A Future For Socialism. In the research for that post I believe I found that the ratio of capital assets to wages had been rising pretty sharply recently, so it might take more time these days. But even if it took an entire decade, that’s a lot faster than most Communists expect the Revolution to come.

It probably says something very important about human nature and politics that the Socialist movement isn’t dominated by the project of doing exactly this.

So now I’ve got it:

I kind of want to explain, but part of me knows that no one can tell you what the Codex Seraphinianus is. You have to see it for yourself.

(the above is 50 MB high-resolution PDF file I’m hosting my old website. When that goes down under the strain, you can switch to a more manageable version here)

I was prepared to pay $500 for it, which is what it cost five years ago when I first looked into purchasing it, but to my delight there was a new version selling on Amazon for only $80. Getting the only ridiculous luxury item I’ve ever really wanted for $80 seems pretty good.

[That wasn’t originally intended to be an ad. But I realized it was stupid to accidentally advertise something without getting paid for it, so I signed up for Amazon Affiliates program. So if you thought that sounded like an advertisement, you’ve been Gettier-cased.]

Friday was the anniversary of Chesterton’s death, the religious blogosphere is eulogizing him, and I thought I’d join in. I enjoyed and recommend Chesterton’s novels, especially The Man Who Was Thursday and Napoleon of Notting Hill, his works of nonfiction like Heretics, and even his poems (all of these are links to freely available fulltext versions online).

Classical philosophy holds that evil is merely the absence of good, but for me, at least, the opposite reduction is more tempting (albeit just as wrong). Evil is extremely obvious – you can look at people involved in animal cruelty, or bullying, or whatever, and you can almost see the actively malicious force animating them onward. On the other hand, good is most easily perceived as unusual skill at avoiding evil. Vegetarians are unusually good because they take extra effort to avoid hurting animals, people who donate to charity are unusually good because they take extra effort to avoid greed.

I credit three authors with giving me a visceral understanding of active, presence-rather-than-absence Good: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Jacqueline Carey. Two of those are very religious and write quite consciously from a Christian perspective. The third writes about kinky sex. Go figure.

But actually when I think about it more closely, the moral beauty in Carey’s writing comes mostly from her constructed religion, which is suspiciously similar to Christianity. So it seems that there’s a fact to be explained here.

Can an atheist appreciate Chesterton? A better question might be whether an atheist can happily appreciate Chesterton as offering a beauty that she, too, can partake in, or whether the appreciation must be along the lines of “Yup, these are the nice things we can’t have.”

Keep The Horse Before The Cart

So I think an important point to make before going any further is that, through 90% of Christian history G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis probably would have been burnt at the stake.

Not just for denominational reasons, although that would have been enough. Promoting joy as a sign of sanctity and as a proper state for man – that’s a burning for the Epicurean heresy right there. Believing righteous non-Christians could get into Heaven – that’s a burning. A suggestion that that humor and lightness were chief attributes of God and the angels – more burning. Doubting the literal truth of some of the Old Testament? Uncertainty whether the New Testament was divinely inspired in a more-than-metaphorical all-great-art-is-divinely-inspired way? Claims that praying sincerely to false gods was praiseworthy and basically just another way of praying to God? Burning, burning, burning.

The moral qualities that shine in Lewis and Chesterton – joy, humor, a love of the natural world, humanity, compassion, tolerance, willingness to engage with reason – are all qualities they inherited from modernity which would be repugnant to many of their Christian predecessors. They are all totally within the milieu of early 20th century England and totally foreign to medieval Italy or ancient Judea.

St. Augustine could not have written The Great Divorce, because while Lewis was talking about how the blessed in Heaven suffer great hardship to meet the damned in order to radiate love and wisdom at them and help bring them to Heaven, Augustine was writing about how the greatest pleasure of the blessed was getting to watch the tortures of the damned, metaphorically munching popcorn as they delighted in sinners getting what they deserved. Tertullian didn’t even wait until after he died to start getting delighted, famously saying that:

“At that greatest of all spectacles, that last and eternal judgment how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sages and philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then ever before from applause.”

What Lewis, Augustine, and Tertullian had in common was Christianity; what set Lewis apart was modernity. What made C. S. Lewis saintly, as opposed to the horrifying sadists who actually got the “St.” in front of their names, was the perspective of a culture that had just spent a few centuries thinking about morals from a humanistic perspective.

When Pope Francis said that we need to build a “culture of life” that can protect innocent children from harm, he wasn’t taking a revelation from the Biblical angels but from the Better Angels Of Our Nature. The Biblical angels are the ones who would be tasked with enforcing God’s promise of blessing on anyone who takes Babylonian infants and smashes them against rocks (Psalm 137:9, look it up).

During the tradition from the Dark Ages to modernity, people got technologies like the printing press and the frigate and started learning more about other cultures, seeing that they were decent people and that no one religion had a monopoly on morality. The decline in infectious diseases banished death from an everyday presence to a lurking evil and made casual slaughter seem less appealing; the gradual decline in war resensitized people to violence. And all this time there were philosophers inventing things like deontology and consequentialism and freedom and equality and humanism and saying that yes, people did have inherent moral worth. And religion eventually decided that if it couldn’t beat them it might as well join them, at least to a degree, and it was this concession that allowed the moral decrepitude of people like Tertullian and Torquemada to evolve into the moral genius of people like Chesterton and Lewis.

So my thesis is that Lewis and Chesterton didn’t become brilliant moralists by revealing the truths of Christianity to a degraded modern world. They became great moralists by taking the better parts of the modern world, dressing them up in Christian clothing, and handing them back to the modern world, all while denouncing the worse parts of the modern world as “the modern world”.

And so rah humanism and all that. But the original question remains: what is it about the Christian clothing that is such a necessary ingredient?

A Cupboard Full Of Secret Ingredients

First of all, the power of myth.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three of the people I named as influences on my sense of moral beauty were writers of speculative fiction. Fiction has greater opportunity to be beautiful and to show complicated internal dynamics of humanity than abstruse philosophy or dry preaching does, and speculative fiction has a better opportunity to present superstimuli, including moral superstimuli. I think that people who write speculative fiction ordinarily tend to be kind of dismissed, but that because Lewis and Chesterton were working from within a tradition that had its own myths, they managed to get through the filter of “Oh, it’s just fantasy, ignore it”. Narnia was dignified by being a metaphor for the Bible, which earned its dignity through hoary age and civilizational influence.

Second of all, legitimacy.

I sometimes write about morality. It tends to be in a light-hearted “here’s what I think” style, first of all because I’m genuinely uncertain about a lot of stuff, second of all because I don’t want to sound preachy. Religion is really good at helping people be certain of things, and religious people get a free pass to sound preachy because preaching is what religions are supposed to do.

I don’t think there’s a niche for non-religious versions of Chesterton and Lewis. There are people like that New York Times ethics columnist who talk about ethics, but I think if they were to start getting poetic about it, people would start challenging their right, be like “Who told you what is or isn’t necessary for the integrity of the human spirit?” This is a tough question. But Lewis and Chesterton have a great answer: “God did”. They can, as the Bible puts it, “speak like one who has confidence”.

Third of all, a different perspective.

You can seem deep just by saying something different than everyone else does. I don’t think Lewis and Chesterton were too far from the modern moral mainstream, but I think they use a completely different aesthetic. Where most people talk about the bravery of defying the mainstream, a Christian writer can talk about the bravery of not defying the mainstream when everyone thinks you should. Where most people talk about the importance of high self-esteem, a Christian writer can talk about taking care to avoid pride. Both sides have valid and important insights, but if a culture is doing everything it can to saturate you with one of them, the other will be a powerful breath of fresh air.

Chesterton – I haven’t yet noticed this in Lewis – has this sort of gambit where he agrees with some modern virtue, and then says the correct way to attain the modern virtue is through doing the opposite of the modern virtue. Or maybe the opposite, where he agrees with what we should be doing, but then says the end goal is exactly the opposite of what everyone would think:

The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom.

People make fun of this, and rightly so (Steven Kaas attributes to Chesterton’s dog the quote “Arf arf arf! Not because arf arf! But exactly because arf NOT arf!”) but I think it is fundamental to his project. He gets to maintain his belief in modern virtues while getting there through an unexpected path that seems deep and profound and unexpected.

Fourth of all, a focus on the individual.

Despite everything everyone says about modern society being too individualistic, there seems to be a sense in which the opposite is true. The problems we are comfortable talking about are ones like racism, sexism, income inequality, terrorism, crime. Social problems. Problems in the community. The idea of talking about what goes on in the individual soul, of having strong opinions about it, isn’t a very modern sensibility at all. The only exception are psychologists and therapists, who really want to be scientific and so scrupulously avoid sounding poetic.

I could come up with some just-so stories about why this is – we like to think scientifically, but intrapersonal dilemmas don’t lend themselves to this kind of analysis? Focus on individuals doesn’t generalize well, which is a problem in the age of mass media? Christians were abnormally obsessed with the individual soul because of virtue ethics + the idea of damnation and salvation? I’m not sure. Anyway, religion has a head start on individualist vocabulary and thought processes which non-religion doesn’t really have good alternatives for (PSYCHODYNAMICS DOES NOT COUNT AS A GOOD ALTERNATIVE).

All of these are kind of banal and not the sort of thing that could prevent an atheist from fully appreciating Chesterton. But then there’s the big one.

What Lewis, Chesterton, and Carey have in common is this belief in Good as an active, vibrant, force, in Good being not just powerful, but so powerful that it’s kind of terrifying. As something not just real, but the most real thing.

Atheists can have Good be terrifying – utilitarianism has broken much stronger minds than my own – but it’s really hard to have it be real. I’m not saying atheists can’t believe in Good, just that atheist good is a sort of – I hate this term but I’ll use it anyway – social construct. It’s real in the same sense the US Government is real. The US Government is certainly powerful – just ask any Iraqi. But it’s not one thing, with an essence and a personality and angel wings of red-white-and-blue fire. It’s just an abstraction over a lot of ordinary people doing their thing.

And this would seem to be the death blow for atheists having something as strong and convincing as a Lewisian or Chestertonian world-view. Except that I kind of picked up a similar vibe from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I didn’t think of it when I was naming the three authors who first made me think of Good as a thing, but it is another work that portrays Good as this burning, all-powerful force, and although it has some magic in it, it doesn’t go all the way to reinventing Christianity like Carey does.

I’m not sure whether this is sleight-of-pen, whether it only works because of the magic there because even if the magic and morality aren’t explicitly linked it still triggers sort of morality-is-magic circuits. Or whether it only works if you’re literally responsible for saving the world. But it seems encouraging.

I think the truth of Lewis and Chesterton is not only appreciatable by atheists but derives from humanist ideas. The beauty of Lewis and Chesterton I’m not sure about, but I maintain some hope that it can be saved as well, even if I’m not sure how to do it.

But I can also sympathize with her. It is infuriating to read a book making one horrible argument after the other. And when it glibly concludes “…and therefore I am right about everything”, and you know you’ll never be able to contact the author, it gives a pale ghost of satisfaction to at least scrawl in the margin “YOUR ARGUMENTS ARE BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD”.

This is kind of how I felt about Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

As far as I can tell, MacIntyre’s central argument works something like this:

1. There are many theories of ethics in existence today
2. The ones that came after Aristotelianism have failed to objectively ground themselves and create a perfect society in which everyone agrees on a foundation for morality
4. Therefore, we should return to Aristotelianism

You may notice a hole where one might place a Step 3, something like “Aristotelianism, in contrast, did objectively ground itself and create a perfect society in which everyone agreed on a foundation for morality.” This is exactly the argument MacIntyre digresses into a lengthy explanation of how much he likes Greek tragedy to hope we will avoid noticing him not making.

To MacIntyre’s credit, he does a pretty good critique of modern moral philosophy. He says that since society doesn’t share any kind of moral tradition, we can debate important moral questions – like abortion, or redistributive taxation – until the cows come home, but this is in fact only the appearance of debate since we have no agreed-upon standards against which to judge these things. Because we cannot settle these by rational argument, instead we turn to outrage and attempts to shame our opponents, making the protester one of the archetypal figures of the modern world.

(“…making the [unsavory sounding figure] one of the archetypal figures of the modern world” is one of MacIntyre’s pet phrases. It starts grating after a while.)

I broadly agree with him about this problem. I discuss it pretty explicitly in sections 6.5 and 8.1 of my Consequentialism FAQ. I propose as the solution some form of utilitarianism, the only moral theory in which everything is commensurable and so there exists a single determinable standard for deciding among different moral claims.

Annnnnd MacIntyre decides to go with virtue ethics.

The interesting thing about virtue ethics is that it is uniquely bad at this problem. In the entire book, MacIntyre doesn’t give a single example of virtue ethics being used to solve a moral dilemma, as indeed it cannot be. You can attach a virtue (or several virtues) of either side of practically any moral dilemma, and virtue ethics says exactly nothing about how to balance out those conflicting duties. For example, in Kant’s famous “an axe murderer asks you where his intended victim is” case, the virtue of truthfulness conflicts with the virtue of of compassion (note, by the way, that no one has an authoritative list of the virtues and they cannot be derived from first principles, so anyone is welcome to call anything a virtue and most people do).

MacIntyre totally admits this conflict, but instead of saying it’s a problem with his theory he says it’s the tragedy of human existence, then says that the virtue of justice is knowing how to balance those two virtues.

So basically, his entire condemnation of all systems beside his own is based on the difficulty of coming to moral consensus, but his own means of coming to moral consensus is a giant black box labelled “THE VIRTUE OF BEING ABLE TO SOLVE THIS HERE PROBLEM CORRECTLY”.

I don’t like deontology. In fact, I dislike it more than almost anyone I know except maybe Federico. But I will give credit where credit is due: deontology actually comes up with solutions to moral problems. The solutions are wildly incorrect and incredibly harmful, but they get a gold star for effort.

Virtue ethics, as far as I can tell, just gives you a knowing look and says “The very fact that you interpret morality in terms of moral dilemmas is a symptom of the disease of liberal modernity.” This is useful for sounding deeply wise, but little else. If you ask “Okay, but disputes over morality are an actual feature of the real world, and the whole reason we’re doing this ethics stuff is to try to solve them, so if we admit we’re diseased and the ancient Greeks were awesome, maybe you could help us out here?” – then virtue ethics just takes another sip of wine from its table in the corner and says “Your decadent individualist mind has no idea how disappointed Aristotle would be in you for even asking that. Did you even consider just being a virtuous city-state in which everyone is a great-minded soul acting for the good of the polis? I didn’t think so.”

If You Can’t Convince ‘Em, Just Start Reciting The Entire History Of The Human Race

Beyond my distaste for After Virtue‘s philosophy, I wasn’t a huge fan of its history either.

The book claims that the reason we don’t have a working agreed-upon morality is that the ancient Greeks (and medievals) did have a working agreed-upon morality (virtue ethics), but when it collapsed we were left with all these weird phrases like “virtuous” and “should” and “ought” and “the good” and outside the context of virtue ethics had no idea what to do with them. Since we couldn’t use the correct virtue-ethics solution, we entered the age of interminably debating what the correct solution was, hence the modern age of moral dilemmas.

In fact, the beginning of the book is a fascinating and attractive metaphor (drawn from the excellent A Canticle For Leibowitz) in which all scientific knowledge is destroyed by some apocalypse. A future civilization picking over the scraps forms a sort of cargo cult in which they know there are supposed to be things called “electrons”, and that the equation “e = mc^2″ is very important for no reason, but no matter how many times they debate what shape these “electrons” were supposed to be or whether the c in e=mc^2 stands for ‘color’ or ‘correctness’, they can’t seem to produce rockets or nuclear power. Phrases like e=mc^2 only make sense as part of a tradition; a stupid debate about whether c stands for color or correctness is a symbol that we’re trying to interpret it separately from that tradition and we’re just going to end up confusing ourselves. To MacIntyre, the tradition here is virtue ethics and modern society plays the role of the postapocalyptics looking quizzically over the scraps.

(the apocalypse? The Enlightenment, of course. Just once I want to go a whole week without someone blaming everything on the Enlightenment.)

Alasdair MacIntyre is clearly an expert classical scholar. And in fact he discusses the classical world’s disputes on morality very competently in his book. So it bewilders me that he doesn’t notice that actually, modern society’s debates over the Good are no different than those of the classical world. He even cites Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes as an example of moral dilemma in the ancient world. I agree – it is a perfect moral dilemma – of exactly the sort MacIntyre is claiming only exists because our civilization is living in the postapocalyptic ruins of virtue ethics. And Philoctetes was written twenty years before Aristotle was even born. Heck, forget Sophocles, even Socrates is a perfect example of this kind of moral inquiry.

MacIntyre then waxes about the wonder of the Greek city-states, which he says were communities where everyone was united on a single view of the good – that which was the proper telos of man.

Except, once again, all the problems of the modern age appear in the Greek city-states as well. Athens went from the laws of Solon to the tyranny of Peisistratus to the dictatorship of Hippias to the democracy of Cleisthenes to the oligarchy of the Four Hundred to the Thirty Tyrants to the democracy of Thrasybulus all in about a century. The periods of democracy were as rife with hostile factions and unresolved issues as any period in modern America or Europe.

The idea that everyone back then was happily united around the Objectively Proper End of Man is slightly complicated by the fact that no one back then agreed on what the Objectively Proper End of Man was, any more than anyone today agrees on what the Proper End of Man is, least of all virtue ethicists and super-dog-double-least of all anyone who reads the book After Virtue which happily informs us that pursuing it will solve all our problems but neglects to mention what the heck it might be or give us a shred of evidence to overcome our high priors against such a thing existing.

Then there’s a short focus on the medieval period, which I am told is marked by everyone being very virtuous but otherwise not particularly worthy of remark, followed by an attack on David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who apparently both totally failed to be virtue ethicists.

The modern period is marked…okay, I understood this part even less than the other parts. The modern period is marked by the Bureaucrat, who is another one of those Archetypal Figures Of The Modern World (others include the Aesthete and the Therapist). The Bureaucrat claims to have expertise in some subject, but clearly this is a lie, because no one can ever understand human affairs infallibly and this is kind of like saying no one can ever understand human affairs at all. Since everyone loves bureaucrats, who are people who claim to be able to understand human affairs, and yet no one can really understand human affairs, something must be wrong, and for all we know that something could be that we’re not all virtue ethicists (am I strawmanning here? Read pages 79-108 and find out).

Somebody Here Is Really Confused, And I Just Hope It’s Not Me

I have never been able to appreciate Continental philosophy (well, Nietzsche was pretty cool, but I have a hard time classifying anyone who can actually write engagingly as a Continental philosopher). After Virtue, despite having been written by a verified Scotsman by all accounts closely engaged with the analytic tradition, just seemed really Continental to me. It avoided logical arguments for a particular well-defined point in favor of long historical meanderings carefully designed to make the reader vaguely worry that everything was socially constructed and that the reader’s social construction was particularly rotten, without ever coming out and explicitly saying anything that could be seized upon as a claim to evaluate.

But the thing is that MacIntyre is considered one of the greatest living philosophers, and After Virtue one of the century’s greatest works on ethics. Just on priors I’m more likely to be misunderstanding him than he is to be talking nonsense. Even people I respect – including Catholics from the Patheos community and a few rationalists from the Less Wrong community – recommend MacIntyre.

Those same people recommended Edward Feser to me. There are a lot of similarities between Feser and MacIntyre – both say that the philosophical tradition of Greece and the medieval age was much better than our own tradition, and that we’re so screwed up we can’t even realize how screwed up we were. Both have very good things to say about teleology, and both ended up Catholic as a result of their philosophical studies.

I really enjoyed Feser’s The Last Superstition (and his Aquinas, although that’s less relevant here). I thought it did a great job bridging a wide inferential gap and really illuminated why he thought the things he thought. I think his account of forms and teleology is flawed because of a few basic errors in his foundations (I started explaining why on my old blog but never really finished) but it was flawed in ways where I could understand the force of his arguments and why his premises would lead to that conclusion. Even if I ended up disagreeing with his answers, I gained a huge admiration for his ability to ask the right questions and go about investigating them in the right way.

But as his occasional enemy Chris Hallquist delights to point out, Feser is not a hugely prestigious figure in mainstream academic philosophy. MacIntyre is. I was hoping for the same fascinating ideas, but with a suave British cool instead of hilarious over-the-top rants. Instead I got…I don’t even know.

I am really sorry, virtue ethicists. But you are going to have to do better than this if you want me to understand you.