Is Living Out One’s Beliefs Ignoble or Contemptible?

I previously wrote about Jason Kuznicki’s flawed economic analysis of the refusal of bakers, decorators, photographers, etc. to participate in same-sex weddings. I feel that it is also important to address his claim that these individuals take satisfaction in the act of discriminating. I believe this reveals how out of touch Kuznicki is in this regard.

I take issue with Kuznicki’s judgment that such people are acting ignobly or contemptibly. Consider this analogy: A non-practicing individual of non-Jewish heritage desires to have a bar mitzvah ceremony. He asks an Orthodox Jewish photographer to take pictures of the ceremony. The latter would rather not participate, as he does not consider it a proper bar mitzvah and believes his participation helps to improperly legitimize what he considers an affront to Jewish tradition. By refusing to participate in the ceremony, is the Jewish photographer acting like a bigot?

I would think the reasonable answer is no, he is not. He is holding true to his faith and traditions, even if he forgoes revenue by doing so. Rather than this being a contemptible or ignoble act, I would think of it as the opposite: the photographer acts according to his conscience even though it may result in embarrassment, disapprobation, etc.

And so it is with the bakers, decorators, and others who refuse to participate in same-sex weddings. Seeing marriage as a holy covenant between a man and a woman made before God, they do not wish to participate in a ceremony that they believe desecrates the institution. They do this out of a conviction to following their faith, despite potentially facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil damages, disapprobation by the national media, losing their business, and other negative consequences. How much easier it would be to just betray their conscience! The fact that they don’t, to me, demonstrates strong integrity.

And what should be emphasized is that by doing so, they pick no one’s pocket nor break their legs. Kuznicki does a disservice to the classical liberal perspective by claiming that they do harm by imposing an externality. They do nothing of the sort.

Kuznicki’s concluding paragraph suggests the fragility of the pluralistic, cosmopolitan, liberal (PCL) order that Cato and Niskanen Center-types champion:

We are all crazy by someone else’s lights. By our own lights, we may sometimes seem exiled to a planet full of crazies. We should be careful, then, not to purchase a small amount of symbolic protest at the price of a large amount of gains from trade. We may be on the offensive today, against what we view as the absurd politics of our bigoted neighbors. But tomorrow, someone will come asking about us, and perhaps they will boycott us as well, for reasons that we cannot fathom. Barriers to market entry should not be so easily had: Much of what we do in the way of social coordination consists of strategically ignoring everyone else’s odd, indefensible, reactionary, bigoted, hair-on-fire leftist, or otherwise totally inexcusable beliefs or practices. The market is how we lunatics all get along despite ourselves.

Now, I don’t deny that markets allow people to interact in peaceful ways. But Kuznicki is not clearly distinguishing this from the political order. The PCLs tend to be against political decentralization. One can find numerous blog posts from Cato scholars against state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws and secession, as well as Niskanen Center scholars advocate against such “balkanization.” But let’s be real: most on the left do not share their commitment to not having the state punish people who do things they don’t like. Furthermore, if your intimately-held beliefs are seen as “bigoted,” “odd,” “indefensible,” “reactionary,” or “absurd,” by a sufficient number of people with whom you are forced to associate as part of a democracy, even if those beliefs violate no one’s property rights, will you be free to believe those things?

Despite the tolerance those calling themselves classical liberals like to think they embody, they are clearly not neutral on this issue. Stated in such a way, there is a conflict between classical liberalism and holding traditional beliefs, even if those beliefs hurt no one. Why, from a classical liberal perspective, should certain beliefs that hurt no one be favored over other beliefs that hurt no one? Kuznicki gives no answer.

Libertarian Angst Part I: What’s Normal?

An iconic scene from The Matrix shows Neo facing the choice between taking the Red Pill or the Blue Pill. If he chooses to take the latter, he wakes up in his bed and can believe whatever he wants to believe. If he chooses the Red Pill, he will be shown “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The Red Pill is an apt and oft-used metaphor for becoming libertarian. That is, one encounters some uncomfortable truths (though not of the Al Gore sort). This, in itself, is not so bad. The difficult thing is when your perception of reality and morality is shared by so few.

A rather stark example of this is the vastly disparate treatment of Chelsea Manning and Hillary Clinton. Justin Raimondo wrote a particularly poignant comparison of the consequences both have faced for a similar type of crime, with a major difference being that Hillary’s actually did lead to the deaths of Americans. Manning, who courageously provided a great service to the American people in showing them the war being conducted in their name, was sentenced to 35+ years  in a prison. Hillary, who continually lied about her inability to keep classified information secure and committed treason by providing arms to terrorist groups, is one of the presidential candidate frontrunners. She will likely never be prosecuted for her crimes.

Of course, this is not only the case with Hillary, but with every president in recent memory: they have made decisions to kill or torture people on a tremendous scale, acts which if committed by anyone else would lead them to be considered mass murdering villains. But they are treated like normal people, for the most part, though with a celebrity status. They appear on late night talk shows and Saturday Night Live.

Crying Wolf

From a look at the archives of this blog, one should be able to tell that I am critical of the institution of state-provided monopoly policing. I believe criticism of the police, whether they are private or state-actors, is healthy, as long as it is made coherently and with a realistic sense of alternatives.

The incident I’m about to mention, and the outrage that followed, do not belong in this category. Quillette provided a pretty good summary of it. Basically, a black male student at Columbia University entered the premises of Bernard college (the undergraduate all women’s school) late at night and ignored security’s request to show student ID. This student went to the library canteen and was asked to show ID a second time and refused. More officers were called, requested ID again, and he refused. Two officers pushed the student’s upper body into a countertop and he then handed over his ID.

In response to a video of the incident, college administrators, deans, and the president of Bernard college all sent emails to the student body about legacies of racism, etc. The tweets and chants about racist police were sent and shouted.

Responses like this just give further confirmation to supporters of police that critics of the police are just crying wolf, are juvenile, and beyond reason. The security officers (who are not actually police in the sense of government agents who carry guns and claim more rights than the rest of us) enforced a reasonable policy (that is, ensuring that people on the premises of an all-female educational institution are, in fact students by requesting ID when they enter) and did so using the minimum amount of force necessary. The actual complaints people have made about the security officers’ response are singularly unconvincing: that they are racially biased by letting white students enter without checking ID (of which they can provide zero evidence – and regarding which there would have undoubtedly been complaints prior to this incident if this were the case) or that there were too many security officers called for backup (whatever that means).

Though I don’t like to admit it, the more stupid complaints there are about non-events like this, the more Heather Mac Donald is going to be right in her depolicing thesis (which states that in response to criticism, police officers will avoid legitimate law enforcement activities to reduce their risk of being accused of racism, bias, et cetera and as a result, crime will rise). Consider the alternatives now facing these university security officers: do their job and get smeared and placed on suspension, or don’t do their job and allow for increased risk of victimization on campus. If they just let anyone in and, say, a sexual assault occurs, will they be blamed or will notions such as “rape culture” or “toxic masculinity” take the blame* (if such an occurrence even received outside media attention at all)? It’s pretty clear that the greater the costs of doing one’s job, the less willing security officers are going to be willing to do them. And the costs of not doing their job well are deferred and less likely to be born by them (though, unlike government police, the university will internalize some of the costs of having an unsafe campus, and thus it is not the case that university security will have the leeway to slack off like government police do).

*It does, strangely, seem to be the case that for all the emphasis the social justice left places on the problem of sexual assault and violence against women, the cases to which they give the most attention are the ones they are most able to weaponize politically. Downplayed are cases of grooming gangs or New Year’s Eve gropings in Europe, for example. In some cases, leftist policy becomes an unfalsifiable, self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are unable to defend themselves with guns, but are the victims of gun crimes, this is further proof that more civilian disarmament is needed. In this case, if any crimes that occur on campus that could have been prevented through the policy of checking ID, no one will blame the college administrators and Twitter mobs who criticized the security officers.