Lost in the Intellectual Wilderness: Hoisted from Comments
Hoisted from comments: Slocum finds himself lost in the intellectual wilderness, with dusk approaching:
Comment on John Holbo's review of Dead Right: This paragraph alone makes [Holbo's piece] a classic:
Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner. Ergo, a dark satanic millian liberal will tend to oppose capitalism to the degree that, say, Virginia Postrel turns out to be right about capitalism ushering in a bright new age of individual liberty, in which people try new things for the sheer joy of realizing themselves, etc., etc.
The problem for libertarian types with philosophies like Postrel's is -- where do we go? The name 'dark satanic millian liberalism' is already taken -- so what do we call those Democrats who now think of those dark mills (literally in the case of John Edwards Father) as representing a kind of golden age when a good, safe, solid union job could support a family complete with a stay-at-home-mom in a company-town tract house? For whom economic change is far more a threat than an opportunity?
And are we worse off with righties who would restrict our 'pagan self-assertion' on moral grounds or by lefties who would do so on public-health grounds or 'for the children' (though, of course, the distinction between adults and children is not necessarily important--it seems we all need to be protected from ourselves, from making "bad choices")
When John & Belle's Crooked Timber features a recent thread discussing what state subsidies can best bring about equal gender roles in child rearing, what's a libertarian (who thinks the state has no more business engineering gender roles than in engineering Frum's notions of probity) to do?
