Ive seen so many confusions about my piece for FEE.org on Brutalism in architecture and ideology, with some people writing supposed responses that have essentially nothing to do with my point. Maybe this is my fault -- the writer is supposed to take some measure of responsibility for confusions, presuming good will and that the critic actually read it -- but it is easy to ignore these responses because they are so far off target. For example, some people said that I was claiming that libertarianism as a theory (as vs. practice) should bulk up beyond the non-aggression principle. Whether that should happen or not was not my point. My point was that it shouldnt be artificially reduced to its tiniest essence, detached from social context, and the ugliest and most anti-social implications of that reduction (the right to be a jerk, the right to malign others, the right to be a racist etc.,) held out as the only operationally important implications of the theory. The architecture analogy with brutalism here is the crucial thing to understand: to reduce and assert only one feature is to create an eyesore, not a structure people want to live in and love. The main positive point I was making is that the social implications of the idea of liberty are vast, aspirational, complex, extended, uplifting, and speak to the building of civilization itself, and are nowhere near expressed through severe reduction followed by an argument style that is repetitively assertive of only one narrow point.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 18:47:35 +0000
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