SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK 'N' ROLL

Sometime this month, Congress will vote on whether to ban cloning,
human and therapeutic. Conservatives want a total ban, liberals only
want to stop human cloning. What's mostly missing from the debate,
however, is the libertarian position. And that's a shame. A little bit
of libertarian thought would clear the political sinuses.

Libertarianism is simplicity itself. It proceeds from a single, quite
beautiful, concept of the primacy of individual liberty that, in turn,
infuses notions of free markets, limited government and the importance
of property rights. In terms of public policy, these notions translate
into free trade, free immigration, voluntary military service and user
fees instead of taxes. Sometimes these policies are argued in a
totally unforgiving way so that it's not easy to separate the lunatics
from the libertarians. But it's a snap to separate libertarians from
conservatives.

For starters, although these two groups do clasp hands on the
importance of free markets, not all their fingers touch. To
conservatives, the free market takes its force only as an economic
construct -- and even then, this is often reduced to an automatic
complaint against high taxes. To libertarians, on the other hand, the
model of a free market functions as a template for all things. Not
only does the market operate as a continuous process for sorting
through competing ideas as well as goods, it also allows each
individual to express himself or herself. The latter is simply a
consequence of the market's function in testing individual
preferences. That some ideas triumph and others fail is necessary.

But perhaps the single distinguishing feature between conservatives
and libertarians is that libertarians are concerned with individual
rights and responsibilities over government -- or community -- rights
and responsibilities. Consider how conservatives and libertarians
divide over cultural issues or social policy. Libertarians are not
comfortable with normative questions. They admit to one moral
principle from which all preferences follow; that principle is
self-ownership -- individuals have the right to control their own
bodies, in action and speech, as long as they do not infringe on the
same rights for others. The only role for government is to help people
defend themselves from force or fraud. Libertarians do not concern
themselves with questions of "best behavior" in social or cultural
matters.

By contrast, conservatives are comfortable with normative issues.
Conservative thought works within a hierarchical structure for
behavior that has, at its top, absolute and enduring values. These
values are not the result of the agnostic process of the free market;
they are ontologically inherent. Because conservatives assume that
there is a recognizable standard of excellence, they deal easily with
notions of virtue and moral behavior. For example, they argue that the
state of marriage between a man and a woman possesses great virtue.
And they can go on to distinguish lesser states of virtue in other
types of relationships. This process of distinguishing isn't an
entirely epistemological argument, however; it is based, in part, on
tradition and, in part, on sociology taken from assumptions about
"best behavior."

Libertarians believe that marriage between a man and a woman is just
one among other equally permissible relationships; they eschew the
question of whether there is inherent virtue in each possible state.
The only virtue to be inferred is a grand one -- that those involved
are freely consenting and thus expressing individual preferences in a
free market competition among these states. It is no wonder, then,
that the cultural debate between conservatives and libertarians takes
place over a great divide. Unlike debates over economic policies,
there are no liminal issues. Indeed, there cannot be any because the
strictness of the divide is a consequence of opposing matrices.
Conservative thought proceeds from absolutes, hierarchies and
exclusivity. Libertarian thought promotes relativism and inclusiveness
- -- although, admittedly, this tolerance comes from indifference to
moral questions, not from a greater inborn talent to
live-and-let-live. Conservatives favor tradition and communitarian
solutions, and resort to central authority when it serves their
purpose. Libertarians value individual creativity and are invariably
against central authority.

All this falls to the bottom line in obvious ways. Conservatives are
against gay marriage, they are often ambivalent toward immigrants, and
patronizing toward women; they view popular culture as mostly decadent
and want to censor music, movies, video games, and the Internet. They
crusade against medical marijuana. For their part, libertarians argue
for legalizing drugs ; they are in favor of abortion and against the
government prohibition of sex practices among consenting adults. They
abhor censorship. In the conservative caricature, libertarians believe
in sex, drugs and rock and roll -- but it is not far from the truth.
Unfortunately, these debates are often animated by the fact that
conservatives see libertarianism only as the face of what it defends:
transgendered persons adopting children, video games of violent sadism
and, yes, cloning. Simply put, the shocking and repellent decline of
civilization. But for libertarians, these are merely some of the many
aspects of a civilization that is advancing through vast and minute
experiments. The exercise of freedom trumps the discomforts of novelty.

To push my argument further, libertarian thought, with its fluid
cultural matrix, offers a better response to some of the knottiest
problems of society. It is, especially when contrasted with the
conservative cultural matrix, a postmodern attitude. In fact, it is
precisely this postmodernism that enrages conservatives who are
uncomfortable with a radical acceptance that, in turn, promotes change
and unfamiliarity. Yet no matter how scary (or irritating),
libertarian tolerance provides a more efficient mechanism in dealing
with those places where economics, politics and culture clash so intimately.

Although libertarians tend toward an annoying optimism, no reasonable
observer would venture a prediction on the winner of the
conservative-libertarian debate. The outcome depends crucially on
where societies ultimately fix the locus of coercion between liberty
and authority for politics, and between tolerance and conformity for
culture. One can imagine, though, how discouraged F.A. Hayek must have
felt in 1944 when he sat down to write "The Road to Serfdom." Now, few
doubt that Hayek has won and that the economic argument has been
settled in favor of free markets. What remains is the battle over
politics and culture. One down, two to go.