Happy !@#$ing Columbus Day

By On October 8, 2012 · 48 Comments · In Libertarianism, Links

Take the most cartoonish, uncharitable form of libertarianism you can think of.

And then compare it to this piece, which has been making the rounds on Facebook today.

I used to think the Ayn Rand Institute’s attempts to distance itself from libertarianism were silly.

Now I just wish they would stress this distance a bit more vociferously.

 
  • djw

    Holy crap. That was considerably more appalling than I had expected, which is saying something.

  • Victoria Granda

    Please let them keep distancing themselves. Their ideas on foreign policy are atrocious.

  • Sean II

    What’s really incredible about that piece is how clearly it exposes the total stagnation of high church objectivism over the past 40 years.

    If you took everything Rand ever wrote and programmed an engine to re-combine her words as needed around certain themes and character limits, the result would sound exactly like what I just read.

    That wasn’t written by anyone with a living brain. It was cranked out by some secret mainframe at ARI headquarters. They simply type in a topic and it gives them back the precise response that would have appeared in her newsletter back in 1970.

    Probably they call it the Aynulator or the Randutron or something like that. I bet Peikoff and Yaron Brook have to turn their keys simultaneously to arm it. Liquid cooled, runs on static, rigged to blow itself up if anybody tries to force…well, you know.

  • http://whakahekeheke.tumblr.com Cal

    How is that piece in any way related to libertarianism, even of a cartoonish and uncharitable form? It seems to consist entirely of praise for a vague conception of Western civilisation via, awkwardly, the popularly overblown figure of Columbus. I’ve never read any Rand or Randians so maybe I’m missing something…

    • Brandon T.

      You’re missing something.

  • anek

    Hm, lots of outright histrionic rejection and disdain, zero attempts at engaging their arguments. This is not what this blog and its comment section *usually* looks like.

    So, would someone mind factually and calmly pointing out which of the article’s claims exactly are wrong or in some other way insupportable?

    ’cause it sounds pretty reasonable to me.

    • Brandon T.

      Looking for some factual claims in the original piece…

      Let’s see here….some unsupported claims about “intimidating” schools into celebrating “ethnic diversity days”…some lines about “glorify[ing] the primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism embodied in the tribal cultures of American Indians”…some bits about being anti-Columbus being a form of self-loathing…beginning to think this was actually written in 1992 and found in dusty filing cabinet in the ARI basement!

      Ah. Here’s the main one: “Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped.” Huh. Charles Mann and the army of anthropologists that have refuted this ad infinitum: you guys are idiots!

    • Sean II

      Well, for one thing the Randian brand of historicism is every bit as stale and crusty as yesterday’s Marx. It goes like this: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of moral and philosophic struggle. Greeks good but not Plato; Romans bad; Christians evil but not Aquinas; Renaissance awesome; Enlightenment even more so except for not including the world-historical monster Kant; Industrial Revolution totally ruled; 19th Century America = peak of existence thus far; and to the rest of you filthy savages and hippies, thanks for playing!

      Rothbard said somewhere that studying history was a good tonic for the young Randian, because it is in that discipline where awestruck students can best see how crudely she stripped everything of nuance, and pulverized whole epochs down to dust, to make the slurry for an a priori narrative that is as flat and brittle as poured concrete. Words to that effect, anyway.

      What’s wrong with this particular narrative is, just for starters: there is no one thing called “Western Civilization”, and even if there was, Columbus would not make an especially good specimen of it. (I’d nominate Hume, but just imagine how far that would get me over at ARI.)

      One very good reason not to rally around Columbus as a defining figure in history is that almost everyone has ben pre-programmed with a false view of who he was.

      Kids are taught to admire him as an intellectual rebel who proved the world was round, and then in college they’re taught to execrate him as a virus spreading genocidal racist. Both views are simple, stupid, and wrong.

      The leftish people who want to make him out a monster are just as silly as the rightish ones who want to make him out a hero. What he was, probably, was a pirate with slightly more ambition and markedly better navigation skills than the rest, whose actual compass worked a whole lot better than his moral compass, although we can hardly hold that against him since shockingly hideous behavior seems to have been something of a world-wide fad back in those days.

      As for the discovery of America, I can only fall back on the words of philosopher Jerry Seinfeld: “Oh, like they wouldn’t have found that anyway!”

  • Irfan Khawaja

    They should distance themselves more vigorously, huh? There’s some comic relief for the morning. Talk about being late to the party, the horse leaving the barn, etc. ARI has been defending Columbus every year for years. Thomas Bowden wrote his book length defense of Columbus in 2007, but I remember reading pro-Columbus arguments by George Reisman as early as the 1990s. (I wrote Reisman a long rebuttal which he never acknowledged or answered.) And in case you haven’t noticed, they’ve just installed their guy as CEO of Cato, after years of entirely successful efforts to colonize any number of libertarian organizations with the eager acquiescence of all of the relevant libertarian principals themselves (IHS, Cato, SFL, Political Theory Project, etc.). Not much distance there.

    Instead of expecting ARI to distance themselves from libertarians, wouldn’t it have been more prudent for libertarians to have distanced themselves from ARI? Given a chance, have they? No. So it’s a bit late to cry over this spilled !@#$-ing milk now–unless you’re about to start an “Occupy Cato” branch of BHL, oust John Allison by force, and run all of the ARI Objectivists out of libertarian organizations with pitchforks. Feel free to do it if you like (seriously), but I’m afraid this is a job that should have been done about 5-7 years ago when the issue first presented itself. At this point, it’s sort of “game over.” Guess who won.

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      I’m not sure that I share your pessimistic analysis, Irfan. In what way do you think that IHS, SFL, and the Political Theory Project have been “colonized” by ARI? I’m pretty familiar with all three of those organizations, and none of them strike me as having a particularly Objectivist flavor, let alone the flavor of ARI’s particular brand of Objectivism.

      • Irfan Khawaja

        Matt–

        I take it that you’re conceding my point on Cato? There, the game really is over. John Allison is CEO of Cato now, no turning back. He’s been caught making inconsistent claims about his intentions for the organization, and has refused to make public the transcript of his Q&A session at an ARI function where he discussed that matter. He’s admitted to following ARI’s line in wanting to put David Kelley’s organization out of business, and has not provided even the semblance of an explanation of how it is that a former Board Member of ARI can legitimately “traffic” with a libertarian organization, much less lead one. (By the way, the word “traffic” comes from ARI’s excommunication of David Kelley in 1989. ARI’s view then was that “trafficking” with libertarians was tantamount to supporting totalitarianism. They have never publicly rescinded that view. Puzzling, no?)
        Having raised these issues both privately and in public with libertarians–including the editor of Reason Magazine–I’ve essentially been treated as a Cassandra-like crank screaming about a matter of little or no significance. But the fact remains that the premier libertarian think tank in the country is now headed by a man connected to the outfit that published the Columbus paper you just criticized. Here are some questions: What does John Allison think about Christopher Columbus (or Michael Berliner’s or Thomas Bowden’s take on the same)? Has anyone asked him? What did he say and do as a member of ARI’s Board when they defended views like that in the name of liberty and justice? No one really knows. No one has bothered to ask. But the prospect of an ARI Objectivist at the helm of a libertarian organization makes a single essay on Christopher Columbus seem like a schoolboy’s prank by comparison. Christopher Columbus did what he did–however horrible–in the distant past. But how about “mass killing” of Muslims right now (the phrase is Peikoff’s)? How about a war with Iran right now? The three views are connected, of course. People who think that Columbus was right to do what he did back then will have no compunction demanding that equivalent things be done in the present. And they have.
        As for the other organizations, by “colonize,” I don’t mean that ARI Objectivists are dictating the policies of those organizations right now (or that they necessarily will in the future). I mean: ARI Objectivists are there, to have whatever marginal influence they think they can have over the long haul. I take it that, for any X and any Y, if X believes that Y ought for moral reasons to distance himself from X, then X ought to take steps distance himself from Y, too. X can’t expect Y to do all the distancing, esp if Y has an incentive not to do any. Well, let “X” be “concerned libertarians,” and “Y” be “ARI Objectivists.” Has that distancing happened, on either side? A: Not really. And my question is: why hasn’t it? If libertarians, and especially BHLs, are as opposed to ARI Objectivism as they claim to be (and they sure claim to be), why are ANY ARI Objectivists present in ANY organizations where BHLs have a say? Worse yet, why are they permitted to take prominent intellectual or leadership roles in them? For twenty years, I’ve heard libertarians making snide comments about Objectivism and Objectivists. “The arguments are sooooo bad! The views are sooooo reactionary! The whole thing is a cult, and they’re all crazy.” Fine. Then what the hell are all those ARI Objectivists doing in libertarian organizations? Stop complaining–and kick them out!
        It’s not a matter of how much influence the ARI Objectivists currently have or exercise. It’s a matter of principle: why are they THERE? These are people who freely affiliate themselves with an organization that, since 1989, has demonized libertarians as nihilists and totalitarians. (And I have the documentation to prove that affiliation requires endorsement of their views on moral judgment, etc.) To repeat: what the hell are they doing in libertarian organizations AT ALL?
        But there they are. Brad Thompson and Eric Daniels have lectured at IHS’s summer seminar–obviously, at the invitation of IHS. Brad Thompson is on the Board of Advisors at SFL. He didn’t just materialize there; he had to have been asked. I doubt it’s because he’s such a brilliant political theorist. Lots of universities now accept Anthem Foundation Grants, and lots of academics (Objectivist and otherwise) accept Anthem funding. Brad Thompson is affiliated with ARI but runs an Institute for Capitalism at Clemson that collaborates freely with lots of libertarian organizations and scholars (and they with him). Reason Magazine somehow feels the need to showcase an interview with Yaron Brook in their November issue on how ARI Objectivism will save capitalism. Etc. That’s off the top of my head. (I may have misspoken earlier about the Political Theory Project. I was under the impression that Yaron Brook had spoken there, but I don’t think that’s correct. He’s spoken at Brown, but not PTP, at least that I know of.)
        We might sit here and think: well, that’s not so bad, is it? “Live and let live.” “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” “Tolerance is a virtue.” But then ask yourself: how did an ARI Board Member become CEO of Cato? It would not have struck anyone a year ago that Cato might be headed by an ARI Objectivist. And yet, now it is. How did that happen?
        If BHL-ers are really serious about moral distance, it seems to me that these rather permissive affiliations with ARI Objectivists deserve to be put in question. At a bare minimum, ARI Objectivists need to be asked, point blank, where they stand on issues where ARI’s principals have taken lunatic stands. (Go out and read Thomas Bowden’s book on Christopher Columbus, by the way, if you really want a dose of ARI Objectivism in its full glory.) These people have gotten a decades-long free ride. It needs to end.

        • Irfan Khawaja

          Sorry, strike the sentence of mine that reads “I doubt it’s because he’s such a brilliant political theorist.” I had originally attached that claim to a sentence about someone else, but deleted the earlier sentence about that person, and forgot to delete the subsequent one about his lack of brilliance. I hadn’t intended to say anything about Thompson as political theorist.

      • Ross Crayon

        IHS receives money from the John Allison-led BB&T foundation to run seminars (Morality, Capitalism, and Freedom in particular) as well as hire its philosophy program officer. All of this done with “senatorial courtesy” to ARI, who has a veto on curriculum, faculty, and employees.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=563776221 Dillon Williams

    How can you allow the incorrect aspects of Objectivism to blind you to its truth? Of course this defense of Columbus is BS, and of course Ayn Rand didn’t understand Libertarianism or Austrian economics (as hinted at by her stupid comments in the margins of her copy of Human Action), but that does not mean that her epistemology is wrong. We as libertarians cannot allow further fracturing of our movement just because the past was unideal. Sure I might be some Ayn Rand fan who just “hasn’t seen the light”, although I’ve been studying Rothbard and others for years, so I don’t know when I’m supposed to see it. But I think it’s important we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. ARI sucks and even Rand herself made mistakes, but no one and no movement is perfect. We need to unite to get past differences, we can’t expect any progress the way we’re going now. Leaving Objectivists behind seems to be a big mistake. As callous as they aim to be, they truly care about liberty, enough so that they sometimes look down on libertarians. Both sides should appreciate that we are together in this fight against the progressive decline of freedom in the US and worldwide.

    • j r

      When was there more freedom in the US than there is right now?

    • Sean II

      It’s not we who shut the door. They did that the minute they declared Objectivism to be a closed system of thought.

      Look, every libertarian community has its share of Rand fans, present and former. Personally I’m a little of one and a lot of the other.

      But you can’t talk to people who work in a closed system, and you especially can’t talk to people who make it a moral imperative to have the correct opinion on every possible issue.

      But hey, I still give out copies of Atlas Shrugged as gifts. I just find it necessary to include a detailed warning with the product.

      • Irfan Khawaja

        @SeanII:disqus
        I’m having trouble following your argument. Dillon Williams was defending Objectivism while rejecting ARI (“ARI sucks”). I think it follows pretty obviously that he wasn’t defending ARI Objectivism. You respond to him that “we” did not “shut the door,” but that “they” did when “they declared Objectivism to be a closed system of thought.” Who is “they”? It can’t be ARI Objectivists, for obvious reasons. So is it non-ARI Objectivists? Well, that doesn’t make sense, either.
        There are at least three groups of Objectivists in the word: those aligned with ARI, those aligned with David Kelley, and those unaligned. Only the first group believes that Objectivism is a “closed system.” The second believes that Objectivism is an “open system,” and the third can’t necessarily be characterized in terms of the closed/open distinction. The Kelley-Objectivists’ rejection of the “closed” character of Objectivism is one of the defining features of that faction, and was the reason why they were excommunicated from the orthodox movement back in 1989. Their position on the “openness” of Objectivism has been in the public domain for 23+ years, and has remained the same over that period. So it can’t reasonably be argued that they hold the “closed” view. In fact, Kelley’s organization literally opened its doors to lots of non-Objectivists, including some people currently involved with BHL. You are the one shutting the door on them by acting as though they can be lumped in with people who believe the opposite of what they have avowed for two decades.
        But setting aside that issue, your claims flout obvious facts. You say that one can’t talk to people who work in a closed system. How does that square with the fact that plenty of people ARE talking to ARI Objectivists, and vice versa? As I’ve said a few times here, IHS, SFL, and Cato are full of ARI Objectivists who do all kinds of talking to other people (and vice versa). So is Bowling Green’s Social Philosophy & Policy Center. So is the Ayn Rand Society (the APA-aligned one). Anthem Foundation grants are going both to ARI Objectivists and to non-Objectivists, and the former are talking up a storm to the latter (and vice versa). Same with BB&T grants. Whatever your evaluation of these facts, it’s hard to deny that they are what they are. I don’t know how you formed your opinions of ARI Objectivists, but the process doesn’t seem to have involved any sustained contact with any actual people–at least as you describe it here.
        But there’s another problem here: your comment either involves a misunderstanding of what ARI means by “closed system,” or a non-sequitur from “closed system” to “can’t talk.” On their view, the supposed closure of Objectivism refers to its identity or content. They think its claims are closed by reference to what Rand said and endorsed. (That doesn’t mean that they don’t have any beliefs beyond its closed content.) Nothing about that view disenables ARI Objectivists from talking to other people. You might make explicit your inference from “closed system” to “can’t talk to them,” because on the face of it, the inference involves an obvious non-sequitur. I don’t hold the closed view, but I have no problem talking to people who hold it any more than I have difficulty talking to people who think that Islam is a closed system as defined by the claims of the Qur’an and the hadith. Try traveling in the Near East or South Asia with the view that “it’s not possible to talk to anyone who believes in a closed system.” You’d have to take a vow of silence for the duration of your trip. Plenty of Thomists believe that Thomism is a closed system. Is it not possible to talk to them? Why wouldn’t it be?
        As for “people who make it a moral imperative to have the correct opinion on every possible issue,” that could describe just about anyone who takes his or her epistemic responsibilities seriously. A person could want to hold correct opinions about everything, and be a positive dream to talk to, at least if he or she thought, a la Mill, that candid discussion was a means of having correct opinions. Certainly within the realm of possibility, I’d think.
        I’ve lurked at BHL since it first started, and it’s been pretty obvious to me for a while that people here feel free to say whatever they want about Objectivists without having met anything resembling a representative sample of them (and in some cases, without having met any at all). A piece of free advice: stop.

        • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

          I’ve lurked at BHL since it first started, and it’s been pretty obvious to me for a while that people here feel free to say whatever they want about Objectivists without having met anything resembling a representative sample of them (and in some cases, without having met any at all). A piece of free advice: stop

          Hi Irfan,

          It’s not clear whether by “people here” you mean to refer to the bloggers or the commentators. But, just for the record, I’ve met, and spent considerable time with, Objectivists from all three camps. So if I do a bit of ARI bashing, I know whereof I speak.

          • Irfan Khawaja

            Matt,
            I meant “many people over an extended period of time,” without differentiating bloggers from commentators (or guest authors from main authors, etc.). Naturally, ARI bashing isn’t going to get much of an objection from me. But a post that accuses “them” of “closing the door” on “us” is a different story, esp if its author can’t manage to differentiate between those who spent the last 23 years insisting on the “closed system” and those who spent the last 23 years insisting on the reverse of it. Who closed what door on whom? And how, exactly?

          • Sean II

            ARI does not have a monopoly on Objectivists who run around claiming to have all the answers to every question that ever mattered. It just has a particularly good supply.

            The experience of meeting an Objectivist can mean lots of different things to a libertarian. Sometimes it means “Cool! Here’s somebody who likes to talk about philosophy and freedom.” At other times it means “Shit, I’m going to be accused of moral treason in 30 seconds when I come out against the preemptive bombing of Iran.”

            The original post contained an obvious example of the latter. Perhaps you yourself are a good example of the former.

            One excellent way to remain in that category: you might concede the point that Objectivism didn’t become synonymous with closed-minded personality cultists by accident. You might forgive those who find the unpleasant memory of arguing with such people hard to shake.

            Of course I’ll match your concession with one of my own: Not only am I a Rand fan as noted above, I’m also a fan of plenty of Rand’s fans. It’s true that my favorite type of Objectivist is the kind who once was and is no longer. But that doesn’t stop me from recognizing the enormous good, hidden behind the conspicuous bad, in her and her movement.

          • Irfan Khawaja

            OK, well I can mostly roll with that answer. But two very quick responses (“quick” for me, anyway).
            First, on the experience of meeting Objectivists, isn’t the correct inference to draw that a person’s use of the “Objectivist” label tells you very little about them? A person can use that label and be a great guy (in the gender inclusive sense), or use it and be an asshole, and every gradation in between. But in that respect, “Objectivist” is no different from most other ideological labels. The same might be said of libertarians, leftists, conservatives, Muslims, and Marxists. (Not that it can be said about everything.)
            As for the “concession,” you’re asking for, I had to chuckle a bit at that one: “Objectivism didn’t become synonymous with close-minded personality cultists by accident.” If by “Objectivism” you mean the movement, then as far as I’m concerned, the claim is an obvious fact, not a difficult concession. The movement is synonymous with close-minded personality cultism because Ayn Rand made it that way, and insisted that her acolytes do the same. And the acolytes eagerly acquiesced in that role.
            But if by “Objectivism” you mean the doctrine, then the synonymy you mention is neither an obvious fact nor a concession I would make. On this point, I agree with David Kelley’s conception of Objectivism as an interconnected set of claims or principles initially articulated by Rand but not reducible to her writings or formulations or endorsements. Understood in that way, there is no reasonable way to regard Objectivism as a synonymous with a cult of personality, because its claims don’t derive from the authority (or even authorship) of any specific person, whether Ayn Rand or anyone else.

          • Sean II

            You’ve hit the key point: far too many of people I’ve encountered as “objectivists” were really just people who believed in the axiom that Ayn Rand was always right. They were devotees of an authority figure, not students in a school of thought.

            What you describe (and evidently what you embody) is something different.
            Maybe I can develop a Blade Runner style field test, to determine which kind of objectivist I’m meeting when I meet an objectivist:

            ME: “Okay, I hope you won’t mind if I make sure your not a cultist, so please name three issues about which you disagree with Ayn Rand”

            THEM: “Well, the woman president thing.”

            ME: “Yes, fine, everybody starts with that one. What else?”

            THEM: “Um…oh, the rationality of smoking! Totally ridiculous.”

            ME: “Another popular favorite. Just one more and we’re done”

            THEM: “Well, I’m not sure she ever really solved the old is-ought problem the way she claimed to, and come to think out there are other problems with her meta-ethics that seem to me…”

            ME: “Congratulations!”

          • Irfan Khawaja

            @SeanII:disqus
            I agree that too many people regard Rand as an authority figure, but I actually don’t agree with your test for differentiating independent thinkers from dogmatists or cultists. I personally could list 40 or 50 significant disagreements with Rand, but be that as it may, I don’t think that the capacity to list disagreements is either necessary or sufficient for being an independent thinker, or even generally indicative of anything all that important about a person’s epistemic character. Not necessary: a person could be an independent thinker and happen not to have any significant disagreements with Rand. That may not strike you as likely or plausible, but it is possible, and it would be dogmatic to rule it out a priori. Not sufficient: a person could fail to be an independent thinker but just recite a memorized list of disagreements in order to prove to others that he was an independent thinker. (I’ve met people who do this.) In those cases, your test would easily be passed by people who were clever cultist frauds.
            The fact is, independence is an epistemic virtue, and it’s unlikely that any single test will reveal who has it. Things are more subtle than any one test. I think Kelley’s discussion of these issues in his “Contested Legacy” book is good, and carries the endorsement of a BHL person to boot (Roderick Long).
            Without intending these as attempts to pass your test, here are some recently expressed disagreements of mine, not with Objectivism (as I see it), but with Rand herself:
            http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jeremylott/2012/09/who-would-ayn-rand-bomb/
            http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jeremylott/2012/09/catogate-update-a-qa/
            Incidentally, I accidentally voted your post “down,” but I was trying to click “Reply.”

          • Sean II

            Of course I was kidding about the test. And of course I’ve known a few people who carefully decorated themselves with little counter-intuitive opinions just to create the appearance of a richer intellectual life than they actually had.

            The joke about the replicant questionnaire was simply intended to serve as a reminder that, even when we might wish for them, there are no such tests in real life.

          • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

            Of course, you’re using quotes to describe things I didn’t actually say. In not sure how what i did say runs afoul of the reasonable general point you’re making here.

          • Irfan Khawaja

            Matt,
            I never said that what you said ran afoul of my point. As far as I can see, we’re not really disagreeing about anything.
            Most of what I was saying in both posts was directed at Sean II, and the quotation marks were direct quotations of Sean II, not you. (You might quibble that he said “they” and I quoted “them,” but that really is a quibble.) To be honest, I didn’t quite see how your experiences with ARI Objectivists was relevant to anything I had said to Sean II. I had never cast the least doubt on your experiences with ARI Objectivists, so it wasn’t clear to me why you brought that up. I made reference to “people here,” but nothing I said about “people here” made reference to you, whether explicitly or implicitly. There are literally hundreds of “people here,” and lots of them besides you fit my description. In my second sentence, I noted that you and I were agreeing on the anti-ARI point (“Naturally…”) After that, I was defending my having criticized Sean II. “But a post that accuses…” and the material following refers to him, not you.

    • purple_platypus

      …. I’m in awe. This may be the best troll I’ve ever read.

  • Pingback: Columbus Day | Economic Thought

  • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

    Matt,
    It is quite clear that you find Dr. Berliner’s essay distasteful and even repellent. However, I am left wondering precisely why. The essay contains many truth-apt statements, so I assume that you believe that they are not just false but racist and offensive in some obvious way. But, it would be helpful to me, a non-expert on this subject, to better understand your views if you provided a little explaination, along with the condemnation.

    For example, one of Berliner’s key claims is this:
    “Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused,
    and undeveloped. The inhabitants were primarily hunter/gatherers, wandering
    across the land, living from hand to mouth and from day to day. There was
    virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life
    was nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no
    division of labor, little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there
    were endless, bloody wars. Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified
    Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most
    of today’s Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive.”

    Maybe this is an entirely false statement. But this is not obvious to me. Columbus and later Europeans sailed to the New World, the Native Americans did not sail to Europe. The Europeans, it seems to me, were more technologically advanced. As I understand it (again, I do not claim to be an expert), there were long and brutal conflicts between Indian tribes, which is one reason that the Europeans conquered territory. From the Lockean perspective, because the Indians didn’t homestead land, i.e. develop it in some substantial way, is there not at least an argument that they didn’t really own it, at least from the libertarian perspective? Is this paragraph not worth at least some cursory analysis, rather than just casual dismissal?

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      What I found offensive about Berliner’s essay is largely what he doesn’t say. In a mere five words, “whatever the problems it brought,” Berliner writes off acts of murder, theft, rape, and enslavement which, it seems to me, ought to be the central focus of any account of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Especially, I would think, to a libertarian. I don’t understand why someone would think that the Native Americans did not own their land, nor do I understand the relevance of your claims that they did not sail to Europe, or were less technologically advanced than the Europeans. So what? They were clearly using their land, even if they weren’t using it as “efficiently” as later (mostly non-Spanish) Europeans would do. What exactly would it take, on your view, for them to have homesteaded it?
      And even if we grant for the sake of argument that they had no right to their land, I presume you would nevertheless think that they had a right to their bodies, a right that the Spanish grossly and repeatedly violated. I didn’t provide any argument for this in the OP, I suppose, because it struck me as pretty common sense. You don’t have to be a libertarian to think that the self-ownership rights of Native Americans were violated, but I’d like to think that libertarians would be especially sensitive to this point.
      But maybe I’m wrong.

      • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

        I didn’t endorse Berliner’s claims, but I thought they merited discussion. I thought that was what philosophy in general, and this blog in particular are about. In my view, simply “using” land by taking wild fruit or game off it does not establish ownership to the land, but only to the fruit and/or game. This I think is a pretty standard libertarian position, held by Nozick, Rothbard and indeed even Locke himself. I think it is arguable (again, a call for discussion) that Indians generally did not met the test of Lockean ownership because many tribes did not engage in sustained agriculture, and did not claim land ownership in their individual capacity. The land was literally, if “owned” at all, owned in common.

        The relevance of technology is that Berliner is claming that in the long run the Indians themselves benefitted from European advances in it. Finally, If Indians were busy enslaving and killing each other, the Western encroachment may not have been a disadvantage relative to the baseline that would exist if Columbus or other Westerners never came to the New World.

        • http://whakahekeheke.tumblr.com Cal

          “The land was literally, if “owned” at all, owned in common.”

          Well, I believe this incorrect.

          As I understand, groups can typically homestead just as readily as individuals can. So, going of popular history, some Native American groups would have homestead claims to at least some property (such as were they lived, where they grew crops, perhaps what they defended from other tribes, etc.). In any case, the civilised way to deal with conflicts between particular homesteading norms and native custom would be negotiation and purchase and so on, wouldn’t it? Largely peaceful negotiation and purchase occurred extensively in many cases in the early North American colonies. Not so much under Columbus in the Indies.

          Perhaps more importantly, many Native Americans did in fact have quite developed property rights with fee simple, individual units, absentee ownership and so on. The economist Terry Lee Anderson is a prominent specialist on this topic and consistently tries to debunk the popular myth that American Indians were all in-group egalitarian communalists who lacked private property. They were not. See e.g. http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/property-rights-among-native-americans/

          Anyway, I think the larger objection to the piece is the one that Prof. Zwolinski points out: not acknowledging the widespread violation of the most basic human rights by Columbus and Co, rights that Berliner’s conception of Western civilization trumpets. This doesn’t mean that Columbus should be made into some sort of villain, but he’s a strange figure to use to celebrate the best of Western civilisation.

          • Sergio Méndez

            “This doesn’t mean that Columbus should be made into some sort of villain (or that it was on net bad thing for Europeans to colonise the Americas), but he’s a strange figure to use to celebrate the best of Western civilisation.”

            Excuse me, how Colombus who, by all acounts (including his own) reduced to slavery, made war and brutalized indians in the caribean islands where he arrived, should not made into a villain? Under what standards?

          • http://whakahekeheke.tumblr.com Cal

            He shouldn’t be made a villain in the sense of exaggerating his historical significance or exceptional brutality relative to his contemporaries. Based on my understanding of the history, anyway. The reasonable response to silly and politically-driven aggrandizement of Columbus is not to turn him into a new uber-evil Hitler legend, but to point out the ahistoricity of such silliness.

            I’m fine with considering him personally a moral monster by libertarian standards, given he was at least directly complicit in chattel slavery and murder. I’m similarly fine with judging slave-owners like Aristotle and Jefferson to be moral monsters by my standards.

            Overall, I think this subject is vastly overblown and the only reason anyone cares about it is the government’s stupid Columbus Day.

        • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

          In my view, simply “using” land by taking wild fruit or game off it does not establish ownership to the land, but only to the fruit and/or game.

          Of course, they were doing more than just taking some fruit or game off the land. They were living on it, raising their families on it, etc. Let’s grant the point about agriculture. OK. Let’s even grant the point about lack of individual ownership, though as Cal points out this is an overly broad generalization. Even if it were true, what would follow? If a group of people is living on a piece of land, owning it “in common,” by what right does another group of people come and claim an exclusive property right in that land, by virtue of which they’re able to kick the first group off by force?

          The relevance of technology is that Berliner is claming that in the long run the Indians themselves benefitted from European advances in it.

          Presumably, this only applies to the ones who weren’t killed, right? Isn’t that an important detail?

          • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

            As noted in my original comment, Berliner makes this quite specific factual claim regarding life in pre-Columbus America: “With rare exception, life was nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no division of labor, little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there were endless, bloody wars.” As previously stated, I am not in a position to evaluate this assertion, but if true, it surely has some bearing on his claim that “Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western civilization.” In other words, European colonization produced massive welfare gains for future generations.

            With respect to your question regarding exclusive property rights, the answer goes back to Locke, who argued that land owned “in common” is not owned at all, but available for reduction to private property. His logic seems closely related to Berliner’s:
            “[H]e who appropriates land to himself by his labor, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. For the provisions serving to the support of humane life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land…are ten times more than those yielded by an acre of Land, of an equal richnesse, lyeing wast in common.” Two Treatises of Government, Chapter V, sec. 37.

            So, provided that there was sufficient other land available to the Indians, they had no right to exclude those who wished to homestead. Much more recently, your friend David Schmidtz has argued in “The Institution of Property” that those in a position to do so may not only have the right but the duty to appropriate land in order to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

            I am not here to defend Berliner or Columbus, but perhaps the situation is not as simple as you make it out to be. I have a radical suggestion: invite Berliner to particpate in a debate on your blog. Then, you can demonstrate that his views are nasty and ill-informed, rather than just assuming this to be true.

          • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

            I’m not interested in debating Berliner on this issue, Mark. And honestly, I’m not all that interested in debating you. I’m actually surprised that there’s any debate here to be had at all on this matter. I would have thought this issue would be a fairly obvious one to a libertarian, and none of the responses you’ve given me so far have given me any reason to think otherwise.
            You never responded to my point about the Indians’ ownership of their own bodies, presumably because there simply isn’t any good response to this argument. The mere fact that some Indians sometimes killed each other certainly doesn’t make it OK for a bunch of Spaniards to come and start enslaving and killing them on a much grander scale.
            And I don’t think there’s anything better with respect to their ownership rights in their land. There is a difference between a) thinking (as Locke and Schmidtz do) that one might be justified in appropriating unoccupied land and thereby preventing all other human beings from using what they otherwise would have had the opportunity to use, and b) thinking that one might be justified in taking land that other people are living on and using simply because they employ a system of collective rather than individual property rights, or because they’re not using the land as “efficiently” as you think you could.
            And there is certainly a difference between taking B’s land for oneself because one will use it more productively in a way that benefits B himself and the case in which one takes the land, kills B, but sets in motion a chain of events that benefit “other Indians” somewhere down the generational road. Both of those, I would think, should seem objectionable from a libertarian perspective. But the latter, which more closely describes reality in this case, seems especially monstrous.

          • purple_platypus

            I don’t really care about the Locke scholarship. If your theory says that individual ownership of land is necessary for you to have a moral right to not be removed from that land by force, then your theory is stupid and reprehensible, and what famous wealthy white dude first farted something vaguely similar-sounding is a red herring.

          • purple_platypus

            ” Let’s grant the point about agriculture.” Why? It’s largely wrong.

        • Sergio Méndez

          “The relevance of technology is that Berliner is claming that in the long run the Indians themselves benefitted from European advances in it. ”

          I don´t why this reminds me of Alfred Roseemberg (Nazi theorist), just before the invasion of the Soviet Union, that even if Russians will face hard times in the following years, in a century they will be “thankfull” to Germans for returning them to their “habitat”,

      • Sean II

        Don’t forget the equally bad end to that clunky sentence: “…western culture brought enormous and undreamed of benefits, without which most of today’s Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive.”

        That last point is just plain wrong, because even if we include Elizabeth Warren in today’s count and take the low estimate of pre-Columbian population, you’re looking at a shocking democide somewhere along the way. It’s kinda tough to start with one million people around 1500 and end up with only 2.5 million today.

        But again the real failure is what he didn’t say: not a word about the long history of poverty, disease, suffering, social pathology, the national disgrace of the reservation systems, etc. Where else but on this issue would an Objectivist miss such a fine chance to criticize the US government for breach of contract?

        • purple_platypus

          Most of the population loss was due to importing European diseases the “Indians” has no resistance to. While it certainly fit in with the plans of the European settlers, this was not intentional, with a few gruesome but small-scale exceptions. There are many problems with European behaviour in the Americas post-Columbus, but a genocide of that scale wasn’t one of them.

          (As an aside, I’m amazed his use of the term “Indian” is passing unremarked – even if you’re not bothered by it politically or morally, you should be intellectually, it’s about as accurate as calling an Australian aboriginal a “white guy from Norway”!)

          And yes, things like reservations (to say nothing of residental schools – did the US have those, or was their native population too small to even bother? Certainly they’re the chapter of Canadian history I’m least proud of) are problematic aspects of that history that one would think would be ESPECIALLY problematic for libertarians. But too many libertarians seem to think that only relatively affluent white people count – I’ve had people (though not the main bloggers) more or less say that to me in so many words on this very blog.

          • Sean II

            I should have clarified this before, but I have specific (and perhaps not widely shared) problems with the science there.

            Short version: even the worst pandemics are known to top out at about 30% mortality. Your (admittedly popular) version calls for a rate around 90%, driven by diseases like smallpox or measles, which elsewhere did nothing like that kind of damage.

            I have trouble accepting that. Enough trouble that I don’t accept it.

          • purple_platypus

            What mechanisms do you propose as alternatives?

          • Sean II

            I don’t know, but if I had to guess….the starting population numbers could be way off, bid up over the years by politicized scholarship.

            Let’s face it: the whole reason why this issue gets play is because there are points to be scored. Berliner is just one side of a sleazy game that has absolutely nothing to do with historical facts, and everything to do with shilling for bullshit narratives.

            High pre-Columbian population = big genocide = rich dividends of white guilt (thus popular on college campuses). Low pre-Columbian population = light genocide = “…it really was inevitable because there is no way so few people could have continued to occupy so much land forever” (thus popular at ARI).

            The figure of one million that I mentioned above is way lower than what’s fashionable now. But let’s say for a moment that is the true figure, AND at the same time let’s stipulate an initial round of plague as bad as the worst pandemics ever known.

            Our one million drops to 700,000 within a generation of European arrival, and after that good old-fashioned war and murder goes to work for a few centuries, pulling the survivor population gradually down to 300,000 or so by the year 1900. That’s a lot of killing, but hardly impossible given what we know of westward expansion,

            Whatever you think of my conjecture, it has two virtues: A) It explains why the Native American population’s low point was apparently reached in 1900 instead of 1600, and B) it does NOT require us to assume a super-pandemic that was two or three times worse than any other in recorded history.

      • Irfan Khawaja

        Matt’s comment above is entirely correct, but very understated. Berliner’s discussion of the topic is really too ignorant to merit a discussion, which is why, in my earlier comments, I didn’t bother to discuss what he says at any length. Mark Friedman’s “discussion topic”–land ownership–is a red herring, at least if the issue is criticism of Berliner’s piece. There is no need for an extensive discussion of aboriginal versus European conceptions of land ownership to see what was wrong with what Columbus did, and what is wrong with Berliner’s essay.
        Here is Columbus’s description of the purpose of his voyage: “At the moment when I undertook to discover the Indies, it was with the intention of beseeching the King and the Queen, our Sovereigns, that they might determine to spend the revenues possibly accruing to them from the Indies for the conquest of Jerusalem, and it is indeed this thing which I have asked of them” (from his Journals, Feb 2, 1498, quoted in Tzevetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, p. 11).
        In other words, he begins by pledging his fealty to the Sovereigns of Spain–i.e., the authors of the Spanish Expulsion. To help them continue their “Reconquista,” he offers to find India, which he doesn’t in fact do. (Contrary to Berlin, he didn’t precisely find “America,” either, and certainly didn’t know what he had discovered. But that’s a long topic of its own.) The purpose of going to “India,” according to Columbus, is to help Spain reconquer Palestine by force. (Pause for a second and fast-forward a few centuries: you may recall that it was Leonard Peikoff who taught us that the Zionists should enjoy an a priori free pass to do whatever they wanted in twentieth century Mandate Palestine because its Arab inhabitants were merely “nomads” of no moral significance. An instructive coincidence.)
        Then Columbus gets to “India.” What’s the first thing he does? He disembarks, then tells the natives (in a language they don’t understand) to submit to Christianity, informing them that he is “taking possession of the said island–as in fact he then took possession of it–in the name of the King, and of the Queen, his Sovereigns…” (Journal entry, 10/11/1492, Todorov, p. 28). We don’t need to have a discussion about aboriginal land rights to see that forced conversion is wrong (or better yet, forced-conversion-in-a-language- not-understood-by-the-people-being-converted is wrong). Nor do we need to have such a discussion to see that whatever the intricacies of native land rights, Columbus had no right to appropriate whole islands simply by landing on (parts of) them. But that’s the right he took himself to have, that’s the right he acted on, and that’s apparently the right that Michael Berliner is either asking us to celebrate, or asking us to ignore while we celebrate “the rest.”
        Maybe I’m overly fixating on material considerations. Are we, perhaps, supposed to celebrate Columbus’s great intellectual virtues, like his curiosity? Here’s how it manifests itself: “If it please Our Lord, at the moment of my departure I shall take from thie place six of them to Your Highnesses, so that they may learn to speak…” (Journal, Oct. 12, 1492, Todorov, p. 30). So we’re being asked to celebrate Columbus’s casual propensity for kidnapping. Notice that for Columbus, because they don’t speak a European language, they cannot “speak.” The idea of learning their language doesn’t seem to be on the table.
        As for questions of property, it’s enough to note that Columbus eventually enslaved the natives, and cheated them of their possessions in the full knowledge of having done so. “Even bits of broken cask-hoops they took in exchange for whatever they had, like beasts!” (Letter to Santangel, February-March 1493, Todorov, p. 38). And even better: “I could not learn if they possess private property…” (Todorov, 39, same time period). He couldn’t learn if they possessed it, but he quickly learned how to take it away from them. “My desire was to pass by no single island without taking possession of it” (Oct 15, 1492, Todorov, p. 45).
        Here are Columbus’s plans for the future, after less than a week in “India”: “With fifty men your Highnesses would hold them all in subjection and do with them all that you wish” (Journal, October 14, 1492, Todorov, p. 45). “All that you wish.” That certainly covers all the bases of coercion, injustice, and exploitation, I’d think. Just remember that as Columbus is writing this, the forced expulsion of the Jews has taken place just a few months earlier (the Alhambra Decree dates to March 1492). Columbus writes in full allegiance to “his Highnesses” who presided over the explusion. The same monarchs presided over the (likewise contemporaneous) Spanish Inquisition, which doesn’t bother Columbus one bit.
        In fact, we don’t need to belabor the history here. It’s Berliner who bears the burden of proof for discussing it and doesn’t bear that burden. To discuss Columbus in a spirit of celebration and NOT to discuss ANY of that history is a moral crime. Berliner doesn’t just fail to discuss it. He dismisses it as not worth discussing. What then is he celebrating? Willful ignorance? I wouldn’t discount that as a hypothesis.
        So what’s next, a day chosen to celebrate the first instance of the Atlantic Passage? We could then sit here and debate questions like: what did those Africans own back in Africa, anyway? Did they homestead their land by Lockean strictures? How much technology did they have? Weren’t they better off under modern methods of slave management and agriculture? Perhaps I shouldn’t be giving ARI any ideas, but I think we can see the pointlessness of such a discussion. If you want to discuss aboriginal land claims (which is fine), you do it at a decent remove from a context that suggests a discussion like the above.
        Maybe some of the above puts in perspective the intensity of my initial response to Matt’s post. What Matt is criticizing is not a one-off op-ed, but a policy that goes back decades. Every other ARI op-ed is just like this one by Berliner, and the ones that involve “non-Western” people are always the worst of all. If libertarians think that ARI’s views are reprehensible, and they are, it’s about time to recognize that contrary to popular belief (or at least popular belief circa 1994), ARI is NOT distancing itself from libertarianism, and it is utterly futile to expect them to do so in the future. They’re playing a double game whereby they endorse their old anti-libertarian positions AND infiltrate libertarian organizations, hoping that no one will notice the blatant contradiction and the brazen hypocrisy involved. And the sad fact is, few have noticed it. Of those who have, few seem to care.
        If an ARI Objectivist as CEO of Cato doesn’t convince you of what I’m saying here, I’m not sure what will. But I would repeat my earlier (implicit) suggestion and challenge: if libertarians really think that ARI is THAT bad, why not try boycotting or at least outing ARI Objectivists wherever they’re to be found in the libertarian milieu? Allison at Cato is a done deal (though what he does next isn’t), but what business do ARI Objectivists have at IHS and SFL? What business do libertarians have in interacting amicably with ARI-affiliated Objectivists who haven’t explicitly repudiated ARI’s position on libertarians (cf Clemson U)? What ARI-oriented strings does BB&T money come attached with? What about Anthem Foundation money? Why, as a smaller but more personal example, is John McCaskey teaching in the Poli Sci Dept at Brown? (McCaskey is not officially associated with ARI or Anthem, but he’s never repudiated the principles or policies of either institution. Then again, Allison isn’t officially on ARI’s Board, either. But neither should be treated as though his allegiance to ARI didn’t exist.)
        You might find the idea of a boycott/embargo discomfitting or uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be. (As a non-ARI Objectivist, people like me have been on the receiving end of a decades-long boycott by ARI, so rest assured that we know all about boycotts.) But rest assured that pursuing the idea of such a boycott is a more constructive enterprise than expressing horror at the latest ARI malfeasance, case by case, as it happens. The latter task accomplishes nothing and belabors the obvious. The former puts practice in better coherence with theory. Which would be a refreshing change for the better, I think.

    • good_in_theory

      “We’re violating you for the good of your descendants.” An argument any libertarian could be proud of.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=625780597 Bill Courtney

    I will wager that if you make an objective comparison, you are bound to find at least a couple of Native American tribes that are more rational and less mystical than Catholic Spain in the 15th century.