Stick It To Your Kind
Thursday, April 30th, 2009One thing that’s come up in the Libertarian Left ends and means discussions is Keith Preston assertion that people are inherently tribal and tend to stick to their own kind. (If I’m misrepresenting, please let me know – I can’t open the long thread right now.) Preston’s statement is superficially true, but it’s packed with bullshit and smelly baggage.
1) What kind of kind are we talking about here? I do seem to get on better with people I’m interested in, but I’m not interested in forming an autarkic clique or nation of any kind. The type of exclusivity that traditional notions of “tribalism” conjure is absent. Association based on one’s “kind” seems (in my limited observation) to revolve around commonality of interests and/or commonality of experience. Those whose actions bolster ethnic enclaves appear to act by one of, or a combination of the following motives: A) seeking something familiar to compare the rest of one’s experience with and fall back on customs and food you’ve grown to like, B) a lack of interest in changing and incorporating other ideas, C) pooling resources to defend oneself when attacked for the group to which you’ve been assigned, or D) outright bigotry. A is fine. B is acceptable behavior, but very lame and doesn’t show much promise for growing a libertarian consciousness. C is fine so long as it is recognized that the enemy is authority and the ideas that enable it, and not whoever is placed in the rival ethnicity. D is backwards and should be minimized through a variety of responses depending on the individual expressing it and the circumstances.
2) Why the hell would I let someone else decide who is my “kind,” especially someone who wants to define it based on some genetic or geographical accident?
3) It’s in people’s nature to do a lot of things. Why be fatalistic and accept a bad trait (defining identity in an authoritarian manner) when it’s also in our nature to use reason and willpower to change things about ourselves? If we’re going to build a post-state world, I’m going to build one I’d prefer to live in, especially in light of my observation that the Westphalian state system is declining in importance. And if we’re going to narrowly focus on attacking the current system, then we ought to attack its enabling ideas by any means appropriate.
I’ve long been against multiculturalism because it rests on the expectation that we ought to respect cultures equally regardless of their respect for us as human beings, and because it reinforces divisions among humanity that are, at the very best, obsolete, and more often than not dangerous. Any effort to batter individual liberty through support for concepts that drop stones on healthy desires will be opposed by whatever means appropriate. The goal is liberty, the enemy is authority, the individual is everything, and the nation is nothing.