A Passion for Liberty
Tibor R. Machan @ Rational Review
Posts tagged individualism
Column on Avatar’s (and Sandel’s) Misanthropy
Feb 6th
Avatar’s (and Sandel’s) Misanthropy
Tibor R. Machan
Perhaps it isn’t all people but only Americans that Avatar presents in an unfavorable light but the movie clearly suggests that human beings are largely no good, except for just a few of them and they only barely. In contrast, the natives are all the sweetest, nicest, most loving type one can imagine. Kind of like those who inhabited Paradise before the Fall. Evil is unknown to these creatures, so that even their silliest superstitions are depicted as worthy, benign. It is an ancient myth, of course, that the ideal human being would be one who melds in seamlessly with the rest and humanity is really just this beehive type of huge community, with some benevolent dictators in the leadership driving it toward some glorious end. Every dictator, tsar, king, and the like has tried to sell us on this vision.
Even as Avatar is seducing the critics–if one can call a bunch of swooning admirers in the media “critics”–PBS, the government funded television service, is showing a program on justice that broadcasts the Harvard University lectures of Professor Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor there, who unhesitatingly takes advantage of his captive audience of adolescents by preaching to them the virtues of his version of communitarianism and never misses the opportunity to put down the idea of free consent. (Yes, here we are, taxpayers, funding what is quite a clever bit of indoctrination since no one else but Sandel is featured and he is unabashedly partisan, insisting over and over again that what he considers justice is the real McCoy. And why, when he doesn’t believe in free consent, should he be concerned that other people are coerced into funding his PBS lectures? That would be granting some credence to the idea that the consent of the citizenry is important, a notion that would undermine Professor Sandel’s political philosophy of coercive communitarianism.)
The central message Sandel is preaching is that we all have obligations to society–or government or the state–that we have never chosen, that can be enforced on us without asking for our consent. This is the beehive or the anthill notion of community, wherein you belong wether you want to or not, and those who are the leaders can make us do what they deem is in the public interest, pursue the common good, never mind pursuing our own happiness.
And the ideal community, as depicted in Avatar by how the natives live (whose land is being raped and pillaged by the terrible American looking humans) is just like that. Everyone submits, everyone is a part, everyone belongs, no one stands for his or her own agenda, no one is unique, no one has an individual, personal vision for that would distract from the common purpose everyone must pursue. The idea doesn’t even come up.
Both the most prominent Hollywood fiction and the most prominent public philosophy today are messages about how the American notion of individualism–whereby you and I and everyone has a right to his or her life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness–is misguided and in need of being purged from our midst. Yes, that is the message of both. Your consent, which is such a highly valued ingredient of justice according the Declaration of Independence, the American founding, is an obstacle to justice!
It isn’t even considered that perhaps real justice is not really like what Professor Sandel is promoting, that real justice involves everyone’s liberty to strive to realize his or her individual human good, some of which unites us all but a good deal of it includes a very large dosage of one’s purely personal agenda.
While not endorsing it outright, Professor Sandel gleefully quotes the political philosopher Montesquieu who observed that in an ideal world no one would have any friends since friendship involves a prejudice in favor of some people and in justice we owe loyalty to everyone, intimate or stranger alike. He didn’t mention how exhausting life would be with everyone on intimate terms, how we would no sooner celebrate someone’s good fortune then we would have to rush off to lament another’s loss.
Human beings aren’t fit to be close associates of everyone! It is quite right that they would have but few close friends and render to others respect for their rights or liberties, period. Neither Sandel nor Avatar gave a nod to this quintessentially American notion, the most liberating idea of human political history. Not a good omen, I’d say
Did Obama Snub Eastern European Victims?
Nov 12th
Was It Snubbing?
Tibor R. Machan
On Monday, November 9, I took part in a panel discussion of the collapse of the Soviet empire, in the company of several others who have managed to escape the system, two former Cubans and one former Russian. We discussed our own personal experience under the system–which I hesitate to call “communist” since communism has never existed; aiming to bring it about has been used as an excuse for some of the greatest horrors of human history.
For my money the greatest lesson of the Soviet debacle is that collectivism breeds the worst of human relations while individualism makes possible nearly any sort and discourages the worst. Yes, an individualist society, were it ever realized–and the bits of it evident throughout recent human history prove this–does not erase all evil in human life. Nor does it promise to do so, since in freedom men and women can certainly make bad choices, even in how they treat one another (although evil is diminished since one may not legally dump one’s malpractice on others with impunity). But individualism teaches that everyone who does not violate the rights of others is of value and even those who do must first be convicted by means of a fair trial to be treated badly (incarcerated, for example).
Individualism is often derided by the sophists among us because it runs the risk of leading to human alienation. And, true, individualism has its corrupt versions. But it need not be any means go there. Because in individualist societies men and women have their right to liberty secured, which makes it possible that they mismanage their lives, of course, and some will do just that.
But in socialist, communist and other collectivist systems people’s lives are systematically, necessarily mismanaged by those who step up to rule them against their will. For that is what collectivism comes to, even the mildest version of it, such as communitarianism or democratic socialism. Some will make the deceptive claim to be speaking and acting on behalf of all and thus gain power over all. In fact, no collectivist system is actually possible; instead what we get under them is the rule of some folks over the rest. Collectivism would only be possible if human nature were to change so that it would resemble the nature of bees or termites. (Karl Marx fully realized this so he predicted that in time, when communism arrives, humanity will develop what he called “the new man.”)
OK, all of this I mention here only because just as all these refugees from communism met to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, we learned, also, that President Barack Obama decided not to join other Western leaders in celebrating this event. Instead he delivered some rather uninspired words from his home, The White House, looking very much like he would much rather have been doing something quite different–say making another pitch to bring the Olympics to Chicago (a noble goal in support of which he did fly to Denmark not long ago). But he would not take the trip so as to commemorate one of the most pivotal international events in recent time, one that’s comparable only to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The collapse of the Soviet Union apparently has not been all that welcome by Mr. Obama’s political base, the extreme Left Wing of American liberals. These folks have always had a soft spot in their hearts and minds for experiments in collectivism. Any anti-individualist polity is for these folks a progressive undertaking since by their lights humanity makes progress when it moves toward lumping all of us into a huge mass to be guided by the likes of Stalin, Hugo Chavez, or Fidel Castro, all of whom want to impose on it a one-size-fits-all way of life.
So it is very likely that skipping the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall was a calculated decision. It was, after all, the leader of the East German state who once answered a journalist, who asked him why they were shooting at those trying to escape across the wall, by saying, “Well those people are stealing from us.” “Stealing what?” “Themselves.”
You see, in that kind of system people literally belong to the state and when they try to leave, it amounts to theft.
