Update: I have removed the names. Maybe I should remove the second half of the post.
Yeah. Sorry for those who came late. There's no anecdote anymore.
Liberty has an excellent track record in terms of economic prosperity. It's one of the things that conservatives and libertarians can point to many example of, right off the top of their heads, of times and places where market freedom worked well, while the various attempts of powerful people, some well-meaning and others not, impeded or even destroyed prosperity. It is more difficult to measure happiness, but there seems to be some connection with liberty there as well. That no tribe likes to be ruled by another tribe confuses that issue, as "freedom" has slippery meanings when an empire might grant you and your family more personal freedom than your own tribal leaders do. Still, people seek freedom so often, and submit to being ruled so reluctantly that we have to interpret this as on-the-ground evidence that liberty improves emotional well-being.
From this we conservatives are prone to conclude that everything is better with liberty. Currently, there is a good deal of assertion that people can assess their own risk better than any top-down method can do it for them. Arguing from the economic model, we might take the default position that control from above is clumsy, missing the hundred details of each individual situation that make it different, and thus less safe.
But we don't actually know that it is more safe, from what I can see, casting about in my mind over various times of history and places of geography. Perhaps we just like it better for other reasons, and so assume that safety must be just one more thing that just must be better when left to the individual. I do hear the immediate objection that there are different kinds of safety, and that prosperity increases some of them all by itself.
I have pretty well given up arguing with people. "You are just stupid", is where I go right away these days. ;)
ReplyDeleteYou might enjoy West Hunter, then. Cochran is very good at that.
ReplyDeleteThere’s a long running debate in the motorcycle community about helmet laws. Many of us come to the conclusion that we would rather be killed than crippled, enough so that most states have decided to take the decision out of our hands by passing mandates. However, just over the border in South Carolina there’s no mandate, and when I lived in Florida while at CENTCOM there wasn’t. Pennsylvania also doesn’t have a law. You’ll see plenty of guys in those states choosing to run the hazard.
ReplyDeleteI suppose my own tolerance for risk is dangerously high; hopefully I’m better at recognition of risk. Perhaps not.
The other side, though, is Aristotle’s point that virtue is cultivated by habituation. In regularly encountering danger while engaging your rational mind, you develop the capacity to perform rationally under threats. This virtue, courage, wins wars and keeps us all free. It is the root of whatever goods liberty provides.
It is true that courage is a virtue even though (as Aristotle himself points out right at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics) courage is sometimes just what gets you killed. The world contains many uncertainties, but on balance courage provides benefits. You can only develop it by running risks to practice the habits.
There’s an acceptable synthesis: the hazards are meant to be encountered in a manner that engages the rational part of the soul. So wear your seatbelt; become skillful at the dangerous things; do the things, but be smart about it.
Perhaps you should return the story without the names, or with fake names. It was a good point. My wife said something similar to me once, about riding our son on the back of the bike, and I didn’t listen. Fortunately it worked out and good memories were the result instead of tragedy, but it could have gone the other way.
ReplyDeleteThe great attraction of Christianity is our increasing awareness of how much we need to be forgiven. Whether or not the whole thing is true, that much is true; as Chesterton says, it’s the one part of the orthodoxy that’s really proven. You can see it in the street.