I generally ignore op-ed columns by Jonah Goldberg, who
claims to be a conservative columnist but who appears actually to be an
anti-liberal columnist—whatever liberals believe, he’s agin it. I happened to
catch sight of a passage in his column in the January 8, 2014 Houston Chronicle, however, that seems
to offer an instructive commentary on economism vs. progressive/liberal
thinking.
Here’s what Goldberg has to say:
One of the wonderful things about America is that both the left and
right are champions of freedom. The difference lies in what we mean by freedom.
The left emphasizes freedom as a material good, and the right sees freedom as
primarily a right rooted in individual sovereignty.
Goldberg then goes on to attack such horrible liberal folks
as the Soviets and Franklin Roosevelt for assuming that freedom meant showering
you with all sorts of material goodies.
Well, let’s have a look. With regard to the first part of
Goldberg’s statement, I entirely agree—to the extent that I had intended to
call the book that I thought about writing, as a sequel to The Golden Calf, Visions of
Freedom. (I may yet get around to writing it but that’s another matter.) I
completely agree that at the root of the difference between economism and progressive
thought lies in alternative views of human freedom.
Predictably, however, Goldberg then immediately goes off
track. Let’s take his ideas in reverse order. He suggests that for the right
(i.e., economism), freedom is “a right rooted in individual sovereignty.” As I
have shown both in this blog and in The
Golden Calf, this is a partial truth. Economism recognizes exactly one form
of “sovereignty” and “right,” which is to be a buyer and seller in the
so-called “free” market, which does not in actuality exist anywhere. When push
comes to shove, no other “right” is important, and all other so-called rights
must give way to the all-powerful market and its high priests. So to argue that it’s the left that has
confused freedom with mere material things is at best a highly selective view
of what’s really going on.
Next we come to the claim that for the left, “freedom” means
one thing only, freedom from material want, the solution of which is a nanny
state giving each of us stuff, and so robbing us of our (real) freedom and
responsibility. Let’s look at this in two stages. First, the much-maligned FDR,
in his “four freedoms” speech that included “freedom from want,” made the point
that still seems valid—that a person who is in some theoretical sense free, and
yet is starving, or naked, or homeless, or lacks basic medical care, is in no
real sense free. This person is a slave to material deprivation. Without
some basic set of the material conditions necessary for a minimal human life—not
everything imaginable, not wealth, but a very basic minimum—a person cannot be “free”
in any meaningful sense of the term.
That’s hardly a complete philosophical theory of what
freedom might mean in a world that has broken loose from the ideology of
economism. The next stage, therefore, is to ask which thinkers have taken us
the farthest in recent years toward fleshing out what Roosevelt apparently had
in mind, in a way that represents a defensible and justifiable framework for a decent
and just society. That theory, in my view, is the capabilities approach
developed by philosopher-economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
Perhaps the most accessible account is in Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011).
On the Nussbaum-Sen account, what makes humans truly free is
having certain capabilities that are consistent with a life of human dignity.
Some of these capabilities, such as rights of political participation, require
mostly that people leave us alone and not interfere with our free exercise of our
capacities. Other capabilities require that we have at least minimal levels of
material goods provided for us—such as the capabilities that require nutrition,
shelter, health care, and education. On a capabilities approach, human dignity
is a multi-faceted idea, and it’s arbitrary to say that the only rights worthy
of the name are “negative” rights (much beloved by conservatives) merely to be
left alone, or “positive” rights (presumably, much beloved by leftists) to get
stuff given to you. Depending on the specific human capacity, both positive and
negative rights are important.
The fleshing out of such a theory requires first that we
explain what human dignity requires, and we see that material wealth, or all
sorts of material goods, are hardly included; we only need a basic minimum. The
next requirement is that we ask what a just, fair, and decent society is
obligated to do toward providing each citizen with these basic rights and needs;
and again there could be a lot of argument about what’s required, from and for
whom, and why. I don’t have space here to try to develop such an account (hence
the need for the book). But the bottom line, contra Goldberg, is that such an
account can be given; it’s intellectually rich; and it cannot be adequately
captured in caricaturish attacks on Soviet Communism or the usual bogeymen of
the right. (And yes, by the way, the right to buy and sell in the market—real markets,
not fake ones—to try to advance one’s own economic position, is included by Sen
at least as a critical human capability, but only one of many.)
I’m quite confident that if the American public could be
presented with two basic accounts of freedom—the capabilities approach suitably
worked up and fleshed out, and the economism version presented honestly—the capabilities
approach would win. If I’m wrong, so be
it. The whole purpose of my work on economism is to earn the alternative views
a fair hearing.
