Students for Liberty has opened voting on the position of Student of the Year. I’m voting for our amazing SFL Senior Campus Coordinator and C4SS Fellow Cory Massimino, and recommend that everyone else do likewise. You can vote once a day until February 12th. Vote here.
Missing the Train to Elea
Popular culture gets Zeno’s paradox wrong again:
There’s a widespread impression that Zeno’s proposed problem is that after you reach the halfway point to your destination, you then have to go halfway to the remaining distance, and so on ad infinitum, so that you get closer and closer to your goal but never reach it.
But that’s not how the paradox goes. The problem is much worse. The paradox is that before you can get halfway to your destination, you have to get halfway to the halfway point, and so on ad infinitum, so that you can never even start moving. (Here’s Rose Wilder lane making the same mistake.)
Probably the mistake arose from someone conflating this paradox with another of Zeno’s paradox, the Achilles, in which the fastest runner gets closer and closer to catching up to the slowest runner.
Kopieren Ist Kein Diebstahl
A solemn, slow march … introduces the assembly of the priests [in The Magic Flute] in the most appropriate manner. It is said that in answer to the accusation of a friend that he had stolen this march from Gluck’s “Alceste” (Act I., sc. 3), Mozart laughingly replied that that was impossible, as it still stood there.
(Otto Jahn, Life of Mozart, vol. 3, trans. Pauline D. Townsend (London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1882), p. 323.)
Lego and the Building Blocks of Patriarchy
[cross-posted at C4SS and BHL]
The Lego corporation, popular producer of interlocking miniature toy bricks, has recently been making increased efforts to market its toys to girls. Some of these efforts have met with criticism from feminists, who worry about toys that are stereotypically “girly” in a way that reinforces traditional gender roles.
![Little pink houses for you and me](http://web.archive.org./web/20160206012700im_/https://aaeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/pink-legomania-300x225.jpg)
Little pink houses for you and me
In a recent piece titled “Un-PC Lego Making Toys Girls Like,” libertarian writer Ryan McMaken comes to Lego’s defense.
The title of Dr. McMaken’s article is somewhat misleading, since the Lego line that attracted the most feminist criticism, the “Lego Friends” range, dates from several years ago, whereas the newer line – which features female astronomers, chemists, and paleontologists – has been received more positively by feminists. Perhaps Lego is not being so “un-PC” these days after all?
With regard to the older Friends line, however, McMaken quotes feminist Dana Edell, who charged that Lego was “sending a message that girls get to play with hair dryers while boys get to build airplanes and skyscrapers.” As McMaken sees it, Edell’s complaints are misguided:
Ms. Edell … should probably aim her disappointment and disdain at seven-year-old girls rather than at Lego. After all, Lego’s success, or lack thereof, in marketing these products depends on the decisions of little girls. … The real problem the anti-Lego feminists have, then, is not with Lego but with the fact that girls like to play with the sort of toys found in the Friends line. The blame for this lies with the girls themselves. After all, Lego did not raise these girls or tell them what to like.
And McMaken draws what he takes to be a broader free-market moral about consumer sovereignty:
The activists think that Lego is responsible for deciding what girls should want because – like many people who don’t understand how markets work – they think that producers dictate to consumers what to buy. … But it doesn’t work that way. Companies make money by selling what people want.
But surely the defense of the free market doesn’t – and had better not – depend on treating consumer preferences as radically exogenous in this way. In particular, what kinds of toys young girls like to play with is not the product of innate drives free from the influence of the surrounding culture. (Though attempts have actually been made to offer sociobiological explanations for, e.g., girls’ preference for pink and boys’ for blue – in apparent ignorance of the fact that the gender associations of pink and blue are less than a century old, as well as fairly specific to our own culture.)
The inculcation of gender norms is enormously pervasive, and begins early. Many studies have shown that parents and other caregivers treat male and female infants (or those they believe to be such) differently, even when they are unconscious of doing so. For example, mothers are “more likely to repeat or imitate vocalizations from a girl baby than from a boy baby,” and also “more likely to try to distract a male infant by dangling some object in front of him.” (Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender, p. 36.) Likewise, if “observers … believed [an infant] to be a boy,” they “handed it a toy football more frequently than they did a doll.” (Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender, p. 137.) Likewise, parents “mete out more physical punishment to boys” and “stimulate gross motor behavior in male infants more often than in females.” (Fine, p. 151.)
Deborah Rhode recounts a telling anecdote: “One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep. ‘It must be hormonal,’ was the mother’s explanation. At least until someone asked who had been putting her daughter to bed.” (Rhode, Speaking of Sex, p. 19.)
To come to a full recognition of the thoroughgoingness with which gender roles are inculcated, consider the following thought-experiment developed by neuropsychologist Cordelia Fine. Imagine a world in which “parents of left-handed babies dress them in pink clothes, wrap them in pink blankets, and decorate their rooms with pink hues,” let the “hair of left-handers grow long,” and provide them with “bottle, bibs, and pacifiers – and later, cups, plates, and utensils” that are “pink or purple” with “motifs such as butterflies, flowers, and fairies.” By contrast, “right-handed babies … are never dressed in pink,” their hair is “usually kept short,” and their clothing and accessories tend to feature “vehicles, sporting equipment, and space rockets.”
Let’s further suppose that the difference is also marked in other aspects of life. Parents say “Come on, left-handers!” or “I’ve got three children altogether: one left-hander and two right-handers.” At school, children are greeted with “Good morning, left-handers and right-handers!” Most of their teachers are left-handers, while most truck drivers (e.g.) that they see are right-handers; and countless venues from “restrooms” to “sports teams” are “segregated by handedness.” In such a society, children will inevitably “come to think that there must be something fundamentally important about whether one is a right-hander or a left-hander.”
Analogously, then, in a world where “gender is continually emphasized through conventions of dress, appearance, language, color, segregation, and symbols,” it’s not surprising that children have an overwhelming tendency to internalize gender roles. (Fine, pp. 209-212.) To this we might add the tendency to treat the male version of anything as the generic, standard version of it, from phrases like “the caveman diet” (why not the cavewoman diet?) to the use of the male pronoun to cover both sexes – with the effect of privileging the male status.
Libertarian readers are familiar with dystopian novels like Ayn Rand’s Anthem or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which every aspect of society, including the very structure of the language, is engineered to promote a totalitarian ideology. The all-pervasive promotion of traditional gender roles in our own society should be recognized as similarly totalitarian and akin to brainwashing, even if it is not imposed directly by state action as the examples in the aforementioned novels were. (Both Rand and Orwell certainly had an interest in systematic but non-state or not-purely-state misuses of language to promote harmful ideologies.)
Corporations like Lego do not, of course, bear sole responsibility for brainwashing children into identifying with traditional gender norms; they are merely one part of a systematic, polycentric cultural program. But to treat such corporations as if they bore no responsibility for gender-norming – as if their production choices were entirely on the side of effect and not at all on the side of cause, or as if children formed their preferences in complete isolation from marketing – is to oversimplify a very complex process.
Admittedly, figuring out one’s moral responsibilities when one is simply one factor in a much larger constellation of causes is tricky. (For some of the issues involved, see my working paper “On Making Small Contributions to Evil.”) Still, if Dr. McMaken thinks Lego should be concerned solely about what will make the most money, and not at all about its possible contributions to sustaining sexist ideologies and practices, why doesn’t he follow that counsel in his own work? In other words, why doesn’t he write statist books and articles instead of libertarian ones?
After all, there’s clearly a bigger market for statist writing than for libertarian writing; that’s why books by Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, and Ann Coulter dominate the best-seller lists and ours don’t. So why doesn’t Dr. McMaken bow to consumer sovereignty and start writing books and articles attacking the free market? Presumably because he (rightly) thinks it important to try to change the culture, to challenge the dominance of statist ideology, and to attempt to shape consumer preferences in a more libertarian direction.
Does McMaken’s attempt to alter consumer preferences mean that he “doesn’t understand how markets work”? Not at all. As a fellow student of the Austrian School, Dr. McMaken presumably shares the Austrian view of entrepreneurs as proactive catalysts of change rather than passive price-takers. But if it’s appropriate for McMaken to try to move consumer preferences in a less statist direction, why is it so awful – or a sign of misunderstanding the market – for feminists to pressure Lego (so long as the pressure is peaceful) to try to move consumer preferences in a less sexist direction? What’s sauce for the libertarian gander should be sauce for the feminist goose, shouldn’t it?
CFP: Brave New World 2016
[cross-posted at BHL]
Libertarian philosopher Billy Christmas writes to inform me of the following call for papers:
Brave New World 2016: Call for Papers
We invite submissions for Brave New World 2016, the twentieth annual postgraduate conference organised by the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT). The conference will take place on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st of June 2016 at the University of Manchester.
We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers this year will be:
- Carmen Pavel (King’s College London): ‘Why Do We Need International Law.’
- Matt Matravers (University of York): ‘Blaming, Regulating, and Punishing.’
The Brave New World conference series is a leading international forum dedicated to the discussion of postgraduate research in political theory. Participants will have the chance to meet and talk about their work with eminent academics, including members of faculty from the University of Manchester, as well as the guest speakers who will deliver plenary addresses.
Guest speakers in previous years have included: David Archard, Richard Arneson, Brian Barry, Simon Caney, G.A. Cohen, Roger Crisp, Cecile Fabre, Jerry Gaus, Bob Goodin, Peter Jones, Chandran Kukathas, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Jeff McMahan, Susan Mendus, David Miller, Onora O’Neill, Serena Olsaretti, Michael Otsuka, Bhikhu Parekh, Carole Pateman, Anne Phillips, Thomas Pogge, Joseph Raz, Andrea Sangiovanni, Samuel Scheffler, Quentin Skinner, Hillel Steiner, Adam Swift, Philippe Van Parijs, Leif Wenar, Andrew Williams, and Jonathan Wolff.
Submission guidelines
The deadline for submissions is 22nd April 2016. If you would like to present a paper, please send an abstract of approximately 400 words in MS Word format and prepared for blind review to brave.new.world@manchester.ac.uk. Please also state your name and institutional affiliation in the email. Papers focusing on any area of political theory or political philosophy are welcome.
Notices of acceptance will be sent by 6th May 2016.
We offer a number of bursaries for presenters to cover accommodation and travel expenses. These will be allocated according to need. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please say so when submitting your abstract and state where you will be travelling from and any other sources of funding you have available to cover costs. For further details please contact us at brave.new.world@manchester.ac.uk.
Send Libertarians to Prison!
The C4SS prison abolition panel, originally scheduled for last year’s APEE but sadly cancelled, is being revived for this year. The panelists will be Dan D’Amico, Gary Chartier, Jason Byas, Nathan Goodman, and myself. Jason and Nathan need some financial assistance getting to the conference; if you’d like to help, please check out our GoFundMe page.