Her complaint was that 'I've prayed and prayed for something to happen but God doesn't listen.' I said he always does but lets us make our own choices and all she could do was move her son towards a place where he had to face a choice, which was what she'd done. And yes, all the statutory bodies are set up to assume we are free agents and can rationally decide for ourselves what our best interests are. 'But why? People can't always choose for themselves. They're not capable. My son can't.'
And of course the truth is that all of us are only rational up to a point. We don't see what our best interests are, and even when we do we often lack the ability to act in them. We often need help, perhaps a lot. We need choices that are inescapable, dramatic, black-and-white, before we know what it is that we face, and what we really want to do.
These days I get impatient with political standpoints that fetishise freedom of choice, having long recognised how constrained and limited our human ability to choose really is, and the great engines which compel us in certain directions, mostly unseen and unrecognised. Public policy makes significant leaps when a society admits that a basic need or good is universal and seeks to bring it about. I only recently heard about the very directive public health campaign in Finland which over decades (arguably in tow with other societal factors) reduced deaths from cardiovascular disease by more than 80%: avoiding early death is mostly good, most of the time, for enough people, to assume that adopting such a policy is a reasonable reduction in pure liberty.
How much easier it would be to take people's lives over for them, either as a pastor or a deity. Would such limitations, 'waving the magic wand', really produce passive and untransfigured souls and frustrate God's desires for what we should be becoming? Must we really wait for desperation to wear down those who suffer before we can act? And how many go under in that process? Is expecting people to grow towards liberty not a Western, and in some way bourgeois, prejudice? It's a hard road littered on this side and that with the fallen.
The state takes a lot of control over our lives. Your speed is limited in your car, which must have seatbelts, lights, and have all of its safety equipment tested once a year. The rules are even stricter for new cars - just watch an NCAP video. You must drive on the left. Don't drink and drive.
ReplyDeleteYou must go to school until you are 16. The quality of water is prescribed, both as supplied to your house, and as discharged into the river. The chemicals you can use in your garden, or a farmer can use, are limited. What goes into paint and food and toothpaste is limited. What goes into food has to be recorded. There are energy efficiency standards for washing machines, and lightbulbs. You can't build a large extension without permission, or a fence above 2m. New windows have to be double glazed, unless you have a heritage exemption. If they are below a certain height, they must use safety glass. Boilers must be condensing, and serviced annually if you are letting your house. You can't put up an advertising hoarding without permission.
We also have lots of nudges. 5-a-day. Anti-smoking campaigns. The Golden Mile. Don't die of ignorance. Check for signs of cancer and get help. Don't play on the tracks. Recently we have had big campaigns to de-stigmatise mental health problems. Big taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. Reductions in fixed odds betting terminal stakes were announced recently, to try to limit problem gambling.
And you can lose your liberty - which is what I think this lady wants for her son - even if you have committed no crime. The state has the right to section you, and there are 50,000 sections a year. That really isn't a small number. (Source: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/healthadvice/problemsdisorders/beingsectionedengland.aspx)
Many of these rules are new. I see little sign, for better and for worse, that we are becoming more libertarian.
You're completely right, and if I gave the impression that I doubted this was the case it was due to expressing myself in an unclear way. Some of the things you mention are regulations in the interest of the community as a whole (building regs), some are to do with greater awareness of harmful activity, some are about consumer protection, and some to do with the greater scope for individuals to cause certain sorts of harm to themselves and others in a consumer society. You're even right about sectioning (Mad Trevor was sectioned a few years ago, and he was more stable and calm during his time in the Abraham Cowley Unit than any other period I've know him). Most of these things I think are perfectly reasonable, and make the point, if anything, that rhetorical appeals to libertarian values are usually nothing more than that. I was thinking, I suppose, more generally about what we assume is reasonable for individuals. Perhaps it's merely a matter of resources: if they were unlimited, or less limited, perhaps Trevor and my interlocutor's son would be under far closer care, if that's what we want to call it.
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