Libertarianism

Ophelia Benson is confused about Libertarianism in her article “What We Owe Each Other” (FI, October/November 2021).

First, she includes three people and one organization in the Libertarian camp that don’t belong there: Sarah Palin, Lauren Boebert, and the John Birch Society are in no manner Libertarian; they are conservative. And although Ayn Rand has some Libertarian leanings, Rand explicitly disavowed the Libertarian moniker.

Second, if Benson had taken even the briefest reading of an introductory book on Libertarianism, such as Murray Rothbard’s book For a New Liberty, she would have discovered that “I can do whatever I want to and you can’t stop me” is not part of the Libertarian creed.

I wonder if Benson is purposely mischaracterizing Libertarianism or is just ignorant.

Clifford H. Crain Jr.

Syracuse, New York

American Christianism
In her column “American Christianism” (FI, October/November 2021), Shadia B. Drury claims that the Puritans who came to North America rejected Thomas Hobbes’s concept of a state church and embraced John Locke’s concept of religious freedom. Aside from the fact that the Puritans were well established in New England decades before Locke wrote anything about religious liberty, the society they created clearly looked much more to Hobbes than to Locke. Far from allowing “a thousand churches to bloom,” the Puritans established a rigid theocracy in which no creed other than their own was tolerated. The Puritans’ only problem with England was that the state church that Hobbes supported was not their own but the Anglican Church. It was Roger Williams, who had to flee Puritan Massachusetts, who embraced Locke’s concept of religious freedom in the Rhode Island colony he founded. The “non-establishment” clause of the First Amendment, which Drury apparently attributes to the Puritans, was in fact a reaction to the type of intolerant state religion that the Puritans had established a century earlier.

Dennis Middlebrooks
Brooklyn, New York

Concepts Creep

I read with interest Russell Blackford’s op-ed “As Concepts Creep, Freedoms Retreat” (FI, October/November 2021).

He is correct, especially about the impact of “harm inflation.” The results of recent history in criminal law are a perfect example. The felonizing of any repeated minor offense and the “three strikes, you’re out” concepts are often embraced by the penalty hungry masses that view them as the final touch of justice that can address any rising tide of incorrigible behavior that may be no more deserving than the previous misdemeanor action and, in many cases, less.

In Indiana, simple possession of a marijuana cigarette is a misdemeanor offense. But get caught again, and the penalty is enhanced to felony status. Of course, with that, add the piling on of additional penalties, fines, and possibly jail time. Penalty enhancement is the direct result of finding additional harm in any offense. This leads to undue and burdensome prison overcrowding, disease spreading, and other compounding and socially decaying results. The intermingling of real criminal and violent offenders with those with lesser infractions, who never had any predisposition to harm anyone, can breed resentment. The end result is a new form of belligerence that festers into eventual rebellious behaviors.

F. Edward Fisher

Chalmers, Indiana

Russell Blackford’s op-ed reminded me of a quote from Caspar Melville’s 2009 book Taking Offence: “We have been encouraged, indeed encouraged ourselves, to believe that we have the right to complain whenever we encounter something we don’t like as long as we can couch it in terms of offence.” While it may have been creeping up before, this misplaced combination of self-righteousness and victimhood has positively exploded in the age of social media.

Martin Stubbs

London, United Kingdom

Miracle Claims 

I’ve read Joe Nickell’s “Examining Miracle Claims: Philosophical and Investigative Approaches, FI, October/November 2021” and I’ve got two points.

1. He treats the question purely in strategic terms. I’m more interested in what questions are valid than what will convince.
2. I think he dismisses C. S. Lewis too easily with the approach he takes that assumes miracles are possible but very unlikely and is useless to someone with other convictions and what God (or god) is evasive in contexts. It’s got a fairly clear meaning: A being outside the universe who created it and maintains it is interested in human beings.

David Michael Sherwood

Bedford, United Kingdom

Smaller, Older Population

Valerie Tarico outlines “A Dozen Ways a Smaller, Older Population Might Be Awesome” in a commendable essay that also overreaches to become a list of talking points for a utopian manifesto (FI, October/November 2021).

Tarico acknowledges that world population will not stabilize and begin “shrinkage” until around 2100 or later. Welcome fertility decline across nations to sub-replacement levels continues to be offset by very high fertility and population momentum in Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and other regions. Indeed, any significant contraction below ten billion is unlikely to occur for a hundred years. Challenges too numerous to mention here must be addressed over a century between now and a distant future. Several are featured below.

Fertility that falls to lowest-low, say 1.5 to 1.3 children per woman, will accelerate aging and destabilize economies by incurring labor shortages and massive expenditures on medical care for the elderly—especially end-of-life care.

Ethnic Europeans, people of European descent in North America along with some ethnic nationals in Asia and elsewhere, will descend gradually onto a critical “die off” path toward extinction—a matter for sobering concern.

Prosperous nations, notably the United States, will actually grow population through massive immigration during prolonged fertility downturn to maintain global economic dominance. The United States is projected to expand by 100 million people to 434 million by 2100. Even in the face of falling birth rates, Americans will suffer worsening overpopulation.

To accomplish the final mission, the international community must forge a consensus that seeks to manage population decline (or growth); settle on an optimal range in which population stabilizes; and commit to sustaining such a population with replacement fertility. Transforming collective consciousness on a global scale to embrace the imperative of controlling human reproductive behavior will ignite wrenching, combative conflicts that will rage far beyond the foreseeable future.

Jim Valentine

Woodland Hills, California

Fair-Weather Believer

John Prittie (“Thinking Out Loud,” FI, October/November 2021) makes a strong argument against believers who cherry-pick and reinterpret the belief they claim to subscribe to satisfy themselves that they are not fanatics and are not responsible for the abuses that fanatics commit. But I don’t think “fair-weather believers” is quite the right label for them. A fair-weather believer would abandon the belief when it causes controversy and conflict. The people Prittie denounces should be called “fellow travelers.” That label has the required sinister connotation of being enablers of a totalitarian movement.
Homer Price
Sylva, North Carolina

Nihilism

Re: “Nihil Is Not Just a River in Egypt,” Steve Mendelsohn, FI,October/November 2021.

While Mr. Mendelsohn has checked the meaning of anarchy in a dictionary, such definitions reflect common usage. However, the word stem indicates only “the absence or non-recognition of authority.” That anarchy leads to disorder is a claim made by those in authority to maintain the power structure.  To examine this assertion, one must read the works of anarchists, past and present.

Fairly recent/living writers include Noam Chomsky, who points out that an anarchist system relies on the creation of order for success. It has been noted elsewhere that anarchists desire a social union of free communities that arrange their affairs by mutual agreement rather than by catering to the special interests of privileged minorities. Some years earlier (late 1800s), Peter Kropotkin indicated that “governmental” decisions should be made at the lowest possible level, i.e., local communities. Other anarchists include Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, and Bertrand Russell. They present a different view of anarchism than that found in most dictionaries.

Given that authority structures are to be questioned, possibly opposed, or rejected, it should come as no surprise to FI readers that religious hierarchies do not fare well under this analysis. In fact, most religions don’t permit any disagreement. A nonbeliever is deemed a heretic and ostracized. Authority must not be questioned, neither religious nor governmental. In his short work God and the State, Mikhail Bakunin describes the malicious union of religion and government to support each other in their quests for power.

Why do I write this letter? Because of his limited understanding of the anarchist philosophy, Mendelsohn is leading FI readers to disregard the connections between religious and political authoritarianism. We read daily about “threats to our democracy,” implying that if we just control defects such as voter suppression, limited polling sites and hours, etc., all will be well. Not so for the anarchist; democracy is necessary to be sure, but it is not enough! In the absence of a clear demonstration of need, an authoritarian structure must be challenged. Decisions made by local communities must not be overruled by the governor or state legislature. Do I need to mention that an anarchist would not approve of a Supreme Court peopled by supporters of the Christian radical Right? To combat the scourge of authoritarianism, we will benefit greatly by understanding the wisdom expressed by anarchists. In part, Mr. Mendelsohn already has. Surely he would not disagree with Rudolph Rocker: “People must take their lives and their work into their own hands … to comprehend their true nature … [which has been] suppressed by institutional structures designed to assure obedience … only in this way will people develop more humane ethical standards.”

Ken McCaffrey

Brattleboro, Vermont

Overall

Re: articles in FI, October/November 2021. In his op-ed “Religions Behaving Badly,” S. T. Joshi states that “there is quite literally nothing specifically about abortion in the text of the Bible.” Because miscarriage and abortion are both defined as the premature birth of a fetus that does not live, the four references to miscarriage would seem to address abortion (Exodus 21:22, 23:26; Numbers 5:21–27; Hosea 9:14). Also, ripping open pregnant women with swords (2 Kings 8:12, 15:16; Hosea 13:16; Amos 1:13) certainly qualifies as “the murder of unborn children,” which is the fundamentalists’ favorite definition of abortion. In these and other verses, God clearly approves of the destruction of fetuses. Hence, the biblical text undermines the false assertions by anti-abortion zealots that God loves the unborn and that there is a sanctity of life principle in the Bible.

In his article “Examining Miracle Claims,” Joe Nickell quotes Martin Gardner: “there are no known methods for giving precise ‘probability values’ to hypotheses.” Some might argue that Bayes’s theorem constitutes a partial exception to this absolute statement. Thomas Bayes was an English philosopher and clergyman who lived about 250 years ago. All agree that his insight into the calculation of conditional probabilities was far ahead of his time. His theorem involves complicated assumptions and is often misapplied. Gardner was a very capable self-educated mathematician (and fideist) and certainly knew of Bayes’s formula. It’s possible that somewhere in his voluminous writings he addressed the inapplicability of Bayesian logic to the evaluation of hypotheses. Finally, there is a nice tribute to Gardner’s amazing versatility in the American Scientist, November/December 2021 issue, pp. 343–345.

In his detailed analysis in “What Is Faith?,” Richard Packham reviewed a variety of synonyms and illustrations to suggest that there are at least three kinds of faith. However, he never mentioned confidence, which is the scientific parallel to faith. The key difference is that faith is an all-or-nothing claim, i.e., you either have it or you don’t, while the statistical concept of confidence involves a continuous variable that quantifies assurance or doubt as a probability of occurrence. I suggest that rationalists replace assertions of faith or belief with specified degrees of confidence as the more appropriate terminology.

Brian Bolton

Georgetown, Texas

More on Overpopulation

Unfortunately, the letter from Jack Pedigo that appeared in the October/November 2021 issue contained several factually inaccurate statements about ZPG/Population Connection that we’d like to correct for the record.

Immigration was never removed from our “basic formula”—our current position has been part of our Statement of Policy since 1994 (see https://populationconnection.org/reference/frequently-asked-questions/). And regarding an alleged $100 million anonymous donation to Population Connection to remove immigration from our missions, we have never received any such donation of any magnitude.

While we Americans remain unable to reach a workable agreement on how to improve our seriously flawed immigration system, we’ve seen dramatic reductions in the flow of migrants from Mexico. This is certainly related to the fact that average family size in Mexico has dropped from 6.7 children per women in 1970 to 2.1 children today. Family planning programs work extraordinarily well and can significantly reduce migration pressures. Now we have a surge of immigrants from Central America where there is a severe lack of family planning. We should invest more in programs that enable women to determine their own reproductive destinies.

Since I was appointed president in 2005, our organization has grown considerably, and our dues-paying membership ranks have remained steady. Respect is in the eye of the beholder, but we have remained a strong organization by any measure.

To quote the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

John Seager

President, Population Connection

Via email