 I'm pleased to, we're pleased to have as our next speaker, Joan Kennedy Taylor. She is the senior editor of Libertarian Review and was chairman of the platform, chairperson of the platform, excuse me, in the 1979 convention in Los Angeles. She's a member of the platform committee this year and I know many of you will have read a number of her articles in various Libertarian publications, too numerous to mention. So without further ado, I'll ask her to come up and give her presentation. Some events that have occurred recently... You have to speak up, make me move the microphone. Okay, hello? Which is the, is this it? Ah, okay. Events that have occurred recently, some of them occurred even since I decided to give this talk, may make my subject seem to be even more pertinent than I intended. So I think I should start by informing you that this talk is going to be essentially a talk I gave at a Boston LP convention in the spring of 1979, which is long before the nominating and election campaigns of 79 and 80 have taken place. And it's worth emphasizing that I'm going to invite your attention to what happens within ideological movements. Okay. What happens within ideological movements? Movements which are in HECIACS terms, spontaneous orders, planned by no one. I'm not going to be discussing the structure of specific organizations like political parties, which are within such a movement. I want to talk about the subject that I think the libertarian movement needs to pay attention to. The tension that historically always has existed between principle and diversity in intellectual movements. Throughout history, anytime a social movement has started around ideas, or a system of ideas, it has spawned splinter groups, each of which interprets the starting principles somewhat differently, each of which therefore has different ideas about strategy, and each of which then sees the others as abandoning principle. Lutheran-Sally schoolbooks used to have one of those tree charts in the end papers, for instance, showing the growth of the church from the time it was founded by St. Peter. And then at the time of the Reformation, the true church keeps on growing straight up from the time it was founded by the church. The branch is off. This is not the room Catholic's had taught. And communists often reserve their sharpest attacks for socialists, saying the good is the enemy of the best. People end up killing each other over ideas, and they seem almost more likely to do it when they started out in agreement. The more idealistic the allegiance to principle it seems, the more important the principle is seen to be, the more strategic differences are seen as differences of principle, and the greater the possibility of splintering. Look at the history of Christianity, the history of Marxism, the history of what we might call the contemporary objectiveist libertarian movement. Let me say it once, I'm not going to reveal the truth of how this can be avoided. I wish I knew. I wish I understood better why it happens in the first place. I do think it's something we should all pay attention to, and try to analyze and understand. And the purpose of my talk here is to offer some of the preliminary thoughts that I've had, and hope that other people will take it from there. My central observation is that a true ideological movement cannot be led or controlled, as an organization within it can, at least for a time. You can name individuals and organizations that have had profound impact on the content of such movements. You can even name individuals who have started them, but even the originators of ideology cannot control indefinitely how others apply it. An ideological movement is a spontaneous order. If we recognize that, it may help us to colorate attitudes of mine that take advantage of that. It certainly helps a movement not to splinter if it doesn't have a pulp or a lemon or a rand at its center, someone who attempts the impossible task of controlling ideas and of having the final word and formulating principle and strategy. I'd like to suggest that libertarians, whose basic core value is political freedom and responsibility of each individual for his or her own life, are perhaps uniquely disposed to be open to the value of intellectual freedom and diversity, which is an inevitable accompaniment. I say that diversity is the inevitable accompaniment of putting the value of intellectual freedom into practice because of the nature of human choice. We learn ideas as well as skills through prior and error. Since we're not infallible beings, we have to make mistakes as a side effect of making choices. But also, since each of us has a unique history, each of us, even those of us who have been trained in the same school of thought, has different knowledge and different values. We may agree on principles, but they will have slightly different meanings for each one of us. Libertarians are especially aware of these facts. In any climate of freedom, a bewildering number of alternatives spring up for people to choose about. Economic freedoms leads to an enormous number of consumer goods on the market. Free speech and a free press lead to the expression and publication of a myriad number of ideas. Obviously then, we will be faced with diversity in the world of ideas if we get the world we're working toward. You cannot expect to promote freedom, and simultaneously expect the day to arrive when everyone will agree on a few simple ideas. On the contrary, the libertarian in advocating even more freedom than presently exists when, according to many things, confusing enough can expect a future in which the variety of ideas and lifestyles available has increased. It seems clear, therefore, that we're not working to bring into being a world in which sameness and universal agreement will prevail. We're working towards a world in which people will differ from each other even more than they do today. Paradoxically, the more successful the spread of the libertarian, political, and economic philosophy becomes, the more it is put into practice, the more we can expect new arguments, disagreements, variations, and oppositions to arise. And people will feel passionately, as they do now, that some, maybe most, of these arguments, disagreements, and variations, and oppositions are wrong. Perhaps we should give some thought now to the issue. How do we guard against the spread of ideas that we think are wrong? Must we choose between marbiocracy on the one hand and dictatorship on the other? Between voting on what the truth is, or suppressing what we see in the era? I think both of these seeming alternatives are to be rejected. Truth is not decided by votes, nor is it decided by fiat. It would seem that just as libertarians have rejected central economic planning, we have to reject central thought planning, however it arrives at. What we should look for and stare at is an invisible hand, a spontaneous order, by means of which the truth emerges through each person's pursuit of value and principle and clarity. The great classical liberals were on the right track. In his inaugural lecture on the study of history, Lord Acton referred to the growth of scientific knowledge as a model for the development of ideas. And he said, if men of science owe anything to us, we may learn much from them than is essential. For they can show us how to test proof, how to secure fullness and soundness in induction, how to restrain and to employ with safety, hypothesis and analogy. It is they who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. John Stuart Mill suggested that error ministers to truth by colliding with it. When he wrote, quote, the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation. Those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clear perception and lively and impressive truth produced by its collision with error. End of quote. Now how can I say that truth prevails when a look at history shows us the flourishing of destructive ideas? An advocate of the libertarian political philosophy might be tempted to say that the United States, for instance, could have been better off without the free circulation of status concepts that led directly to the heavy burdens of taxation and bureaucracy which weigh on us today. But when we look more closely, we see the part of the truth prevailed. The terrible injustice of slavery and later of state-mandated segregation created a strong reaction which in turn led to other injustices, but at least we don't have slavery anymore. Even though it was sanctioned by John Locke and practiced by some of the men whom we call our founding followers, because we choose, we make mistakes. To combat mistakes, we have to be free to choose, to learn, to refine, to change our minds. Whether it is dealing with abstract ideas or lifestyles or art, there is a psychological attitude, a state of mind that assumes the importance of freedom and of individual thought processes. Since much of the thinking about this state of mind has been done by classical liberals, I like to call it the classical liberal mind, whether some of its characteristics. It is at home with the consequences of putting the libertarian political idea into practice, which means it is at home with diversity. The classical liberal state of mind is that cast of mind that always respects the thinking processes of others and the right of others to disagree. Not only respects, but indeed welcomes disagreement, feeling helped rather than threatened by other people's freedom. In dealing with other people's ideas, the classical liberal state of mind looks primarily at the mental processes by which these ideas are arrived at, rather than at a particular conclusion. A person with such an attitude of mind feels more at home with another who cares about ideas and follows a thinking process to the conclusion it leads to, even if it leads to a conclusion that he or she happens to disagree with. Then he or she does with another who agrees with a conclusion that says, someone I admire has reached this conclusion, so it must be right, even if I don't know why. The classical liberal state of mind trusts to the efficacy of the human mind. Therefore, such a person is not afraid of seeming slow, not reluctant to say, that's an interesting argument that I haven't completely absorbed. Further, the classical liberal mind knows that people live by ideas which grow deep into their lives, explaining a new idea to a once-to-a-person cannot and should not cause them to reject all the ideas he had previously found reasonable. To echo John Stuart Milligan, we cannot ask the majority of mankind, quote, to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments as to give up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and which on the basis of much of the existing order of the world at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically resisting. End of quote. Even those who hold opinions opposite to ours must live by their own best judgment after all and should not be coerced or deceived into agreement. I would say that that what I'm calling the classical liberal state of mind is one which welcomes diversity and thoughtful disagreement, respects the fact that it takes time to grasp a new idea and to integrate it into one's life and trusts in the efficacy of the human mind. Now, does all of this result in a mind so open that the truth falls out? It's possible to have convictions and still to respect thoughtful people of different convictions. In Anarchy State in Utopia, Robert Nozick criticizes the usual manner of presenting philosophical works as though he says their authors believe them to be the absolute final word on their subject. And he goes on to say that although he thinks that what he has to say is correct and I want to underline that, at those particular points in my arguments, transitions, assumptions, and so forth where I feel the strain, I try to comment or at least draw the reader's attention to what makes me uneasy. End of quote. In other words, he's presenting his argument but he also wants to tell the reader where he thinks his argument may be open to attack. That's an example of the attitude of mine that I'm talking about. So is Lord Acton's famous dictum that in order to understand the true connection of ideas it is a source of power and an excellent school principle not to rest until we have made out for our opponents a stronger and more impressive case than they present themselves. My late husband David Dawson, who gave courses on argumentation thought that this was one of the most fundamental principles of the science and art of argument. He said once, saying here to heed this dictum, put you into a windowless box from which your opponents are invisible to you and you are invisible to them. I speak here, he said, of intellectual visibility. You waste your eloquence on each other much as people on ships in the night attempting to scream through the turbulence of a storm. You know he is talking, he knows you are talking and neither can understand the other. Why? Because what has been forgotten is that argument has two ends. It begins in your mind where of course it must be clear that the act is not complete until it passes from your mind to this. It must be clear and comprehensible there also where the argument dies in the moment of being born. The dictum is that you put your opponent's argument in terms known to him in a way natural to him. You think out his argument for him as positively and favorably as you can and then you set about refuting it in terms he can follow. You never forget that what is clear to you may never before have been heard by him. That the way you habitually define a certain term may seem so much gibberish to him. You do not forget that his knowledge may not equal your own. His motives in knowing something may not be the same as yours. His reasons for holding a position may not be as evil in his eyes as they may be in yours. You never forget that men do not take positions saying to themselves as they do I do this out of publicity because I hate men and want to be evil. They take positions because they have some reason or wish or belief or yearning or evidence which tells them that it is good. It is up to you to find out how they tell themselves that it is good. Only then can you reach the end of the quote. In other words, paying attention to the principles of communication as distinguished from the principles you were trying to communicate requires that you tie your argument to what your audience already knows and accepts. To do this is not to water down strongly held convictions. On the contrary, Lord Acton's victim is stating that strongly held convictions can coincide with the admission that one's argument may have some weaknesses and that the argument of one's opponent has some strengths. Since such admissions when valid cannot help but bring us closer to the truth they are a crucial element in the thought processes of the classical liberal mind. A partial and one-sided presentation of an idea may persuade the gullible but it will not instruct the gullible. In this respect, I'd like to offer one more example from John Stuart Mill's essay on Coldridge. He wrote that quote, antagonist modes of thought are as necessary to one another in speculation as mutually checking powers are in a political constitution. A clear insight indeed into this necessity is the only rational or enduring basis of philosophical tolerance. The only condition under which liberality in matters of opinion can be anything better than a polite synonym for indifference between one opinion and another. It's important for us to remember that tolerance is not indifference. It is a recognition of the need for us to stay mentally active in our opinions. But the classical liberal state of mind requires that one's thinking receive constant effort and attention and revision. It won't do to say, I thought this out 15 years ago so I don't have to think about it anymore. Those who seek the truth and fall victim to the temptation and can make the mistake of assuming that intellectual honesty requires the construction or adoption of a closed system. All of us need to systematize our ideas in some way in order to live by them. But it's easy to stop examining the relation of ideas to reality and to apply doctrine and tests instead. To measure new ideas by the system rather than by their degree of truth. From here, it's by the step to the attempt to keep control of an ideological movement of an organization that can be directed and led rather than in a spontaneous order. The doctrine and desire to preserve the ideological system leads to the attacking of dissenters. History shows us that this is almost all ideological movements. Christianity, Islam, Marxism, Objectivism all have attacked dissenters as traitors and all have fragmented into subsystems as a result. Even in the contemporary women's movement which is in principle hierarchical, while some feminists do welcome diversity, feminist women have been attacked as being too successful, too outspoken, media stars. Some feminists are egalitarian to the point of bullying or trashing women who become well-known. Less as a trashing, as an article in this magazine pointed out, is that what is attacked is not one's actions or one's ideas but oneself. You are isolated from your friends as they become convinced that their association with you is similarly inimical to the movement and to themselves. Any support of you will take them. The sad thing is the trashing only works on those who are not traitors but who genuinely care about the system and its group of adherents who are rejecting you. As Joreen, the author of the Ms. article on trashing goes on to say, it was my very need for feminism and feminists that may be vulnerable. I gave the movement the right to judge me because I trusted it. She quotes another feminist, Anselma Del Olio, who describes such personal attacks as rage masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism. The opposite of a classical liberal state of mind, then, is adopted in a state of mind that threatens or bullies or tries to destroy those who question or otherwise seem to threaten the accepted system of ideas. Such a state of mind has not been unnunk in objectivist and libertarian circles. Those of us who were involved with the early performance of the philosophy of objectivism when it centered in the Nathaniel Brandon Institute have witnessed this form of rage masquerading in that case not as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism as a women's movement but as an almost religious adherence to a closed system of ideas that could not be questioned and an almost religious devotion to the personalities of its major spokespeople. The ad-harmonum argument is the essence of crashing and it is an argument directed against the character of the person holding a position rather than against the position itself. It's essentially not an argument but an attitude of blame. Where the classical liberal state of mind is aware of the pitfalls of ad-harmonum arguments and intends always to avoid them, the doctrinaire state of mind considers that if you don't blame those whose position you consider wrong, you're a relativist. I remember a discussion of argumentation once in which a student of objectivism insisted that if a liberal found anything at all good to say about public schools the only proper retort was so you believe in slavery? Any milder statement or exploration of the opponent's point of view would, to such a view, abandon principle and avoid the center of issue because slavery is the essence of tax-supported institutions. The slavery of the taxpayer, that is. This attitude of blaming is what finally flowered, if that's an appropriate word, into the trash in the family of Brandon and whoever would buy his books and ejected a circle some 10 or 12 years ago. What is wrong with blaming those whose position you find erroneous? I do not suggest that there are no positions so morally repugnant when they blame the person that holds them. Erroneous psychotherapists has any conceivable obligation to enter into a serious discussion about the person advocating rape or murder or the slave rape. I do suggest that blaming someone because his thinking processes lead him to a different position from yours is a doctrine error rather than what I'm calling a classic liberal approach. If the conclusion is the result of folding data or folding mental processes it is up to you to show those faults. If you can, why blame your opponent? Could it be because if you didn't feel obliged to blame yourself for not being a snappier argument? Or might it be that you just don't want to take the time and the effort to explain all the ins and outs of your position and refer the whole that it should be obvious to any right-thinking person? I think we can add another characteristic to those of the classical liberal state of mind. It not only welcomes diversity respects the fact that it takes time to grasp a new idea and trusts in the efficacy of the mind it enjoys the effort of communication. But so far we're talking about an individual mind grasping communicative ideas. Are there any implications in this for a movement? This is where I hope the other people will be able to go further than I have in developing this idea. Could we say that there are classical liberal characteristics of a movement as differentiated from the intellectual content of a program? We don't have to follow the movement built around the philosophy to find ways to emphasize the individuality and independence and variety of its members rather than their conformity and obedience. Since the movement is a spontaneous order we can only influence it by influencing the organizations within it. If society is to be restructured in a libertarian direction individual members of society must adopt the attitude that they are responsible for the shape of their own lives and need not depend on the group or on government to tell them what to do. To persuade them of this and then recruit them into a movement don't we have to offer them something other than doctrine their organizations. It seems to me that the libertarian movement must essentially promote self-realization in all its forms because self-realization is basic to a society whose characteristics would be the free market, the free mind and self-responsibility. Now we're not egalitarian we have to have specialization in no sense saying that organizations must be non hierarchical or that there's no room for the political expert the public relations person or the full-time politician in libertarian circles. On the contrary we must cherish and support those who have the talent and the energy and the dedication to be leaders but we must expect them to persuade us not to order us or manipulate us and we should look for a willingness in our leaders to allow diversity of ideas to sanction a form for diversity of ideas as being part of the movement. I find Nozick's view of utopia very inspiring in this respect. He points out the people with very different ideas of the kind of community they want to live in may all be willing to cooperate to achieve a framework of minimal government because the ideal community is a group of different communities within some framework that keeps any one community from imposing its right pattern on the others. This idea I think takes libertarianism a step further toward freedom past democracy in this way. The believer in democracy is willing to let the majority will prevail. The believer in libertarianism is willing to let the individual will prevail in all areas to which the individual has a right. However not everyone who considers themselves to be a libertarian looks forward to such a future. It sometimes seems as if two different kinds of people have become attractive to the libertarian political and economic philosophy. One kind cherishes diversity. The other kind dislikes diversity considers differing lifestyles and opinions to be wrong and looks forward to their being disposed of by every market. I've always been at the first time when a group within objectiveism decided to start a magazine entitled Verdict. My reaction was to start a magazine called Persuasion. Because I've seen all the way for us to reach a society of freedom of diversity, of respect for individual rights and individual responsibility of confidence in human efficacy and the human-minds ability to grasp truth, except by adopting a policy of freedom of diversity, of respect for individual rights and individual responsibility of confidence in human efficacy and the human-minds ability to grasp truth. Isn't a party line libertarianism an impossible contradiction? After all, the way we deal with people in our movement will demonstrate the way we will be building the structure of society. We are hardly working for a vision of centrally planned anarchy. Except the fact that the path of freedom is neither a predictable one nor one of guaranteed safety. It's as scary as the free market. So I'd like to close with a quotation from the Previous to Anarchy State Intellectual honesty demands that occasionally at least we go out of our way to confront strong arguments opposed to our views. How else are we to protect ourselves from continuing in error? It seems only fair to remind reader that intellectual honesty has its dangers. Arguments read perhaps at first in furious fascination may come to convince and even to seem natural and intuitive. Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth. Thank you.