Partisan Free Politics

I recently came across a post at Freespace, a relatively new blog by my friend and former Positive Liberty blogger, Timothy Sandefur.  Sandefur asserts that his observation in The Myth of “Harmony” is not original, but is “one that needs to be made frequent and with fervor.”  Since I’ve found The Myth of “Harmony” to be founded on faulty ground, I felt its necessary to respond with equal fervor. 

Sandefur begins by citing a Café Hayek posting from 2 years ago by George Mason University Economics Chair Donald Boudreaux.  Boudreaux had recently visited Sea World where he was inspired by a video at the manatee exhibit to “do [his] part to make extinct the notion that modern, civilized human beings live less harmoniously with nature than did pre-Columbian Indians.”  Now I have sympathy for Boudreaux, I am often miffed by the oversimplification that corrupts almost all programming that is designed to be consumed by the general public at-large, and I certainly can recall sitting in theme parks, monuments, and zoos stupefied by the often slanted stance of their programming, but in reviewing their arguments I’ve found that both Sandefur and Boudreaux have made a vital error in the usage of their term “harmony.”

First, they both err by employing a very modernized ideal of harmony, and Sandefur compounds the problem by equating harmony with the Garden of Eden.  Harmony does not entail some sort of blissful, idle existence, nor does it stem from frappuccinos or fruit smoothies as Starbucks or Fruitopia would’ve had you believe.  Harmony comes from the Greek root for agreement or concord, and in that sense is much more commensurable with dominant eastern philosophies than modern Judeo-Christian notions, like Eden.

Boudreaux provides us a pretty tenable definition of harmony: “to understand and accept natural forces.”  In my understanding of the term, however, the first clause is complementary at best, but this is the more easily quantifiable one that an economist would focus on, and that is exactly what Boudreaux does.  Further, he perverts the second clause by making it bend to empiricism, like a good economist, and makes it almost synonymous to the first.  He might be able to convince me that irrigation in its less industrial forms, like those employed by Pre-Columbian Meso-Americans which were immensely superior to their European contemporaries, is harmonious with nature, but the administration of antibiotics fails that test completely.  Most importantly, society living in disharmony with nature is the cause of the vast majority of disease.  Of course modern antibiotics have done a tremendous job of facilitating this disharmony, and they’ve even arguably overcompensated and provided us with a higher quality of life, but to equate that to harmony is an abuse of language.  I find it hard to accept that receipt of a remedy for an absent evil would be worth allowing that evil in, just as it would be hard to suggest that a prosthetic arm, even arguably a more proficient one, is preferable to the intrinsic connection that each has to their natural limbs.  Boudreaux, again acting the economist, makes other errors, most egregiously claiming Pre-Columbian peoples were impoverished, which is another abuse of language, but since the post is more than two years old I will stop my assault there.

Our argument is now laid out as such: I have a sense that if Boudreaux were to graph humanity’s proportional harmony with nature, as any good economist would do, it would start low on the scale and move gradually up as time and the sciences have progressed.  Whereas, if Sandefur were to make the graph it would be a flat line at 0 reflected in his claim “there is no such thing as living in harmony with nature.”  However, if you extrapolate those lines they make no sense, unless you espouse an Eden-like creationism and the fall from grace (which I’ve gathered that neither of them do,) or you employ a fallacious use of the term harmony, which I have already rejected.  Most theories of evolution rely on the assumption that humanity developed out of nature, were once a part inseparable from nature, and thus by definition in harmony with it.  It seems to follow that the most plausible graph is then one that begins at perfect harmony and continues a general trend towards disharmony, allowing for some variance and without here deciding on the magnitude of the trend (though I’d suggest it would be vaguely proportional to the growth of human society.)

The First Part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality” provides a stark rebuttal to Sandefur’s claims that Pre-Columbian American Indians existence was one of a “constant fight for survival and subsistence.”  (Which is in error only by the addition of the word constant, but when that is removed remains true today.  In fact, I would indeed make the argument that their struggle was much less constant, though at times more severe, than the struggle of Americans today.)  Rousseau of course makes a few flaws, and is often rightly accused of an idyllic romanticism, but I think his treatment of this issue provides a very stark contrast to the Hobbesian state of nature that is reflected in Sandefur and Boudreaux’s conceptions of Pre-Columbian Americans, and one that is not only more optimistic, but also more commensurable with my personal experience with nature.

That being accepted, I would then suggest that our argument becomes one about whether harmony is preferable to the benefits of disharmony, and that is a moral argument that I won’t take up now.  However, I will suggest that by the progressive nature of humanity, which still seeks to attain perfection, or at least pursue it, we are either always moving to reharmonize ourselves with nature and accept the loss of some of the benefits of society, or trying to harmonize nature with human society and accept the loss of some of the benefits of nature, with the noble, yet silly-looking, sea cow being one of them.  So I would suggest that we as individuals, and as society, work to better understand nature as a whole before we decide to reject it and wholly trade it in for a filthy city like Manhattan, which Boudreaux in his follow-up posting touts as “hugely harmonious with nature,” but in reality is an epitomic example of nature being subordinated, and bent to the will of humanity.  (That being said, as cities go, it does get much worse than Manhattan.)