Skeptical Or Just Anti-Conservative?

As a linguist, I naturally pay a bit more attention to language than the average user. In fact, this is why linguists often aren't the most popular people at parties: we have this nasty habit of listening to exactly what people say and how they say it. Sometimes it's as innocent as noticing a particular dialect feature, or a new acronym, or the slow death in American English of the venerable adverb (which I blame primarily on sportscasters .... but that's for another post). On other occasions, however, it's noticing patterns in language. This entails things like word choice, phraseology, and how speech can be colored or twisted to convey a thought that lacks ... for lack of a better word ... clarity (such as when the grocery store receipt proudly informs you that you saved $4.27 today ... and it only cost you $97.65 to do it).

A recent blog post by Michael Shermer explaining how he became a libertarian got me thinking about what words and phrases actually mean as I read through the comments and starting reflecting upon the vitriol Shermer garnered from various readers who were, to be kind, somewhat left-of-center in their political views. It wasn't the disagreement that surprised me. What got me thinking was the fact that many of these folks identify themselves as being skeptics, yet they were not applying any skepticism at all to the political ideas they seemed so certain of.

Being a libertarian makes one think about this a lot, as no matter what the topic may be, you can almost always be assured that your views will be in the minority. It's been my observation that there really is very little truth-seeking in the average person's political thinking: it's really just a giant exercise in confirmation bias. Another way I like to put this is that people are more concerned with not being wrong than they are with being right.

Libertarians, on the other hand, are first and foremost inherently skeptical of authority. Whether it's the authority of the state or the authority of the moral guardians of society, libertarians ask the same question of demopublican or republicratic policies: By what right? The very notion of being coerced is distasteful, because at some gut level we feel that if the evidence were sufficient for a given course of action, coercion wouldn't be necessary. To my mind, this is the essence of applied skepticism.

In Shermer's essay, he attempts to lay out a picture of how various pieces of evidence led him to his conclusions. Again, applied skepticism. His book The Mind of the Market lays out even more evidence. Most of the authors he refers to - Ludwig von Mises, Fredrick Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman - have also done this ... at great length. Granted it takes time and dedication to hack through these volumes, but I know many skeptics who have waded through books about biology, physics, paleontology and other equally dry sciences in search of the evidence. The same skepticism that drives one to challenge scientific ignorance should - at least in theory - equally motivate one to shed and ultimately challenge economic ignorance as well.

This issue has troubled me for a while. When I first heard and later read Daniel Loxton's Where Do We Go From Here? essay, I found it astoundingly unskeptical in the way that it dismissed libertarian thought out of hand. The good folks who do the Skepticality podcast, especially co-host Swoopy, often show great insight when it comes to most exercises in critical thinking, yet remain amazingly credulous when the topic becomes political. The Skeptic's Guide To The Universe gang do a bit better, but I still often get the feeling that if I had the pleasure of sitting down with them for a beer or three, we'd be pretty far apart on economics (but probably equally adept at quoting Monty Python movies chapter and verse).

In fact, I'm coming to realize that when I hear the word "skeptic", it actually has different meanings to different people. I think a lot of it has to do with how you find skepticism. My background is a lot like Shermer's: once I saw through religion I pretty much decided that nothing was sacred and everything needed to be viewed with a skeptical eye. Truth - even unpleasant, disquieting, point-of-view-changing truth - was the prime objective. On the other hand, if you come to skepticism as a by-product of liberal political inclinations, you're still playing the mainstream game, you're just able to see through non-political bunk better than the average person.

After all, it's relatively easy for liberals and libertarians to agree on why conservatives are seriously misguided on many issues. For the most part, they have a genuine distain for science (especially when it encroaches upon their religion), they're believers in some sort of mystical absolute morality that gives them the last word on which forms of human behavior they'll happily forbid, and although they often talk a lot about individual freedom and free markets, when they're in power the first usually means "the freedom to be a Christian", and the second gets redefined to mean "use government to make my already rich supporters richer". The fact that they campaign as libertarians and govern quite differently certainly makes them hypocrites ... but it doesn't mean that individual liberty and free markets are inherently bad things.

And this is what I'd like to humbly ask my leftist skeptical cohorts to consider at some point. Try to divorce your mind - if only as an experiment in thought - from notions of right/left, demopublican/republicrat, and look at the actual results of various political & economic systems throughout history. Be precise in your definitions as well. What Nixon, Reagan, Bush & Bush presided over was most emphatically not capitalism. We haven't had a true free-market system in the United States for well over 150 years (in fact, the last time I checked, the union of a strong central government and big business was actually called "fascism"). Nonetheless, while no system is perfect, you have to engage in some massive mental gymnastics to avoid recognizing that von Mises was absolutely correct: capitalism - even in its various watered-down forms - has nothing to apologize for. Coercion (economic or otherwise) has never produced the peace, prosperity and individual liberty that markets have.

The old adage about avoiding politics and religion at parties isn't wholly unwise: many people are so emotionally attached to a point of view that they become completely irrational at the mere suggestion that they might be wrong. The presentation of evidence usually results in the evidence either being dismissed out of hand, or simply ignored. This is certainly the case with Shermer's critics. It may be an understandable response, but it's not a skeptical one.