Positive Liberty

Will Wilkinson writes,

I had not-that-distant ancestors who spoke Norwegian, German, Lakota, et al, but I don’t really even know who they were, much less what they stood for. Maybe some natalist can convince the Taliban there is really no problem if they can just keep their birthrates up. But certain radical fundamentalist Muslims think they need to destroy liberal capitalist modernity for a very good reason. Unless they do, it really will destroy their creed and its culture.

I would only add that this disconnect from one’s ancestors is not the exception, but rather the rule for much of western history. Conservatives who set their hopes on reverence for lineage are trusting in something rather new to save something very old.

At least in the West, traditionalism came more of the slow pace of technological and cultural change than it did from a reverence for one’s lineal ancestors. Most people had no such reverence to speak of. They couldn’t, because they were illiterate, they had few possessions to pass down through the generations, and they often were the products of undocumented or illegitimate unions anyway. A typical peasant had only a vague recollection of his own birthday and year, and who his immediate living relatives were. The rest was entirely lost, except perhaps in ill-kept church records that he could not read.

The elaborate sense of connectedness to a lineage is a product of aristocratic, not popular culture. The rising bourgeoisie picked this up in the nineteenth century, like it did so many things from the old aristocracy, without realizing why they were doing so, and without realizing its comparatively low value as a cultural meme.

Now, I personally can trace my ancestry back (if I recall correctly) to 1734, and a small town outside Stuttgart, where my mother’s earliest known ancestor — a clockmaker — was born. I’ve heard family stories and seen some secondhand documentation of a remarkable character on my father’s side who marched from France with Napoleon, made it to the outskirts of Moscow, fell of exhaustion on the way back through Poland, was rescued by a Polish family, married into it, and eventually had a child who became one of my direct ancestors. Some well-founded speculation suggests that my father’s family has converso Jewish roots, and that another branch of it is in direct descent from Genghis Kahn. Not that I’m unique in this.

My (same-sex!) spouse had an ancestor who fought under George Washington’s command. A distant uncle was a congressman from New York. From what little I can tell of the uncle, he was a term-limiting ,gold-standard, classical liberal Republican who got royally screwed by a state monopoly scheme. He has a Wikipedia entry, and his resemblance to Scott’s father is uncanny.

I’d even likely have voted for the guy, but lineage in the developed world is a hobby, not a destiny. My marriage prospects into the upper nobility aren’t much enhanced by my descent from the Great Kahn, nor are they harmed by my Jewish ancestry.

The larger point is this: Before the last few generations, much of this knowledge had in fact been lost. I had a great-aunt who traveled back to Poland and Germany to learn a lot of it on my side, and who scoured death and baptismal records to source it all. Without the Internet, I’d only have had Scott’s grandmother’s verbal recollection of a “Representative John Starin.” Today, I’ve got a jpeg of a ticket to the amusement park he owned, and that’s pretty cool, if I may say so.

For most of history, only the nobility had lineages. And they, as historians can tell you, generally fibbed about them. We’re liberal now not because we’ve stopped caring about our lineage, but because lineage is just one meme among so many others competing for our attention, and because so much else is happening in the modern world.

I have had some very interesting experiences and met many interesting people. Living in the Midwest, I’ve discovered that I’ve met far more “famous people” than normal people do. I’ve been published in national publications, quoted or acknowledged in books, and heard on national radio programs.

It never gets old. And I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had.

I’ve also participated in historical events. And by historical, I mean moments someone might write about what I did years later or it was obvious lots, perhaps millions of people were affected by my efforts. For example, Continue Reading »

G. W. F. Hegel wrote famously daunting prose, but the ideas he advocates are surprisingly familiar. Once you know what Hegelian thinking looks like, you’ll see the stuff everywhere. Indeed, putting Hegel into plain language reveals a worldview that many people will recognize and claim that they had been holding all along, and if they are encouraged to read Hegel with a patient guide helping them out, they will find in him a confirmation of all sorts of beliefs that they already subscribe to.

Such are the risks we run. It is my own belief that Hegel represents nearly everything that libertarians have always fought against, and that they are right to do so. Ayn Rand thought Immanuel Kant was the most dangerous philosopher of all time, but I’d choose Hegel, myself: He stands nearly at the origin of modern collectivism, and his way of thinking seems more frequently encountered today than that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great anti-individualist of the Enlightenment.

Let’s start at the beginning, then, with the foundational concepts. Continue Reading »