“Primum nil nocere.” This is the cardinal rule of medicine, and part of the Hippocratic oath sworn to by clinicians since before the time of Christ: “First do no harm.” Carl Sagan had a great corollary: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Both are maxims in managing complex, evolutionary systems.
When I debate with liberals, I find the dissonance in their philosophy in conversations with variations like this: Me: “But I don’t approve of the use of force to solve problems.” Liberal: “Neither do I.” Me: “Sure you do, you’d have me in jail if I don’t submit to working for someone else’s benefit. You can argue it’s a good idea, you can’t argue it’s not force.” Usually that pressure point is too painful for the liberal not to resort to extraordinary logic-torturing to wriggle free. In their notion of themselves, they are advocates, humanitarians, and they cannot bear to think that they are doing harm. And it’s hard to get really mad at them because of their motives.
But the success of political evolutions across the globe has come from letting go of the notion that government is wise enough, adaptable enough, any good at, forcing people to pursue an abstract good, like eliminating class, or eliminating poverty (what is China’s modern way, if not just a massive letting go?). When state power has been used to mitigate poverty, they have all been wealthy, rights-respecting Western nations to begin with. Success came within the evolutionary framework of the rights of man.
Consider this list of the top ten performing economies in the world. There is not a command economy on the list. There is not a single nation that does not stand aside for their citizen’s rights to trade for their own improvement.
It should be an obvious moral principal that justifying violence and force should require extraordinary results above what free economies attain naturally. To ask the question is to make ridiculous any answer other than: “They can’t, they shouldn’t.” Lenin said that “you have to break some eggs to make an omelette.” Forget that no American founding father has ever given an indication that they thought of their countrymen (other than in their race blindness) as eggs to be broken to the goals of the state. The deeper point is that nobody can point to any kind of communist omelette. It should be inconceivable that a nation can be forgiven starving their people, like in the Ukrainian Homodor, to achieve class leveling without producing extraordinary progress. All of the socialist countries on the list (whatever that means nowadays – the concept is diluted to near total vagueness) have discarded state-run enterprises long ago, realizing that the force needed to make them work would be too wasteful. They are all free traders to varying degrees, albeit with high taxes (taxes are a discussion for another day).
The medical analogy would be extraordinary experimentation to achieve a breakthrough. The breakthrough is an undeniable good, if it happens. More often it will not. And what happens to the patient? What happens to the soul of the experimenter?
The myriad differences of cultures, laws and circumstances that took each nation on a different path to modernity and prosperity, reveals that having the open evolutionary framework is more important than having the correct policy
To apply a scientific observation to political ethics, look over enough time, and unremarkable, provable principals emerge: always and everywhere man thrives in a framework of democratic government and rule of law. They are the roots and trunk of our tree of prosperity. It is rare in science, much less the immensely messy world of political science, that something should be so true, and without exception: the Koreas, man’s greatest unintentional social science experiment, with the same people divided by circumstance, one a wealthy Asian tiger after they adopted democracy and rule of law, the other a nation of starving, backward, paranoid, nuclear extortionists. When the Soviet satellites broke free, the ones that let go, enshrined democracy and rule of law, shortly joined the modern world, the ones that did not remained in poverty and darkness. Venezuela has debouched her currency to the point it is more practical to use it at stool. The Bolivarian variety of socialist-misrule-de jour is all the more astounding since the nation squats on the one of the planet’s most valuable reserves of oil. They need no culture of production to pump it out, same as the Saudis. Yet, somehow, they brought financial ruin, as well as famine, while their neighbors prosper. Israel, the Middle East’s sole democratic, rule of law nation, thrives next to tyrannical socialist dictatorships and theocracies a thousand times her size.
Democracy and the rule of law have been the only bright spots in man’s great dismal swamp of political history (markets are inevitable outcomes from a rule of law). There are no political masters who have supplanted the Americans who applied the Enlightenment’s values. They are the political equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, DaVinci, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, Darwin. Heretics from the spirit of the enlightenment have brought man his greatest-ever tragedies: Marxist/Leninist schools have caused the greatest preventable loss of life in human history, and blights man’s best to this day.
The irony, for Liberals, is they would be the first to say things like bread and healthcare are more real than abstract rights, but can’t see it’s the abstract right which grows the real, the way an orchid can only grow in a garden calibrated to the orchids’ needs. It is nonsense to say that Venezuelans and Vermonters have equal rights to healthcare and bread, when the actual right cannot bring the real the same as the abstract can: a Vermonter has far less right to bread than a Venezuelan, yet vastly more to eat. Whose rights are abstract?
All reasonable, historically informed discussions on what an ethical political system must be is fine tuning within the framework of the Enlightenment values. Americans need a lot more “Primum nil nocere,” especially in our unprecedented mass incarceration, necessitated by our approach to drug addiction. That, and our incoherent, incessant wars in the Middle East. Libertarians must be cogent of the fact that just this framework is enough to bring man’s condition far up. The Enlightenment values are the clean water equivalent of public health: eighty percent of the improvement. The rest is fine tuning.
For libertarians, the argument is to have faith in continuing to argue for space to evolve, and continuing to fight against the base instinct of harming people for their own good.
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Always wanted to use that word…Epistemology.. its Greek you know..:}