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OPAQUE PHILOSOPHY – IN HUMBLING COMPANY

I’ve been extremely self critical about the opacity of my writing, and struggling to make it digestible. It’s brutally difficult to follow Spinoza’s advice: “Speak in a manner comprehensible to the common people.” And, while I’ll never be able to address common people, I think I’ve finally reduced propertarianism to something that’s at least reasonably accessible, and analytically clear, regardless of one’s political preferences and moral codes. Perhaps I can get it down to twenty pages if I can figure out how to elegantly and succinctly tie the biology of moral codes, to the necessity of property, to the institutions necessary for property. Maybe thirty pages. My first draft was almost three hundred. So obviously i’m making progress.

I still have years worth of work ahead of me. I’ve used Rothbard’s ideas to reframe classical liberalism and conservatism, and then social democracy, into Propertarian language. But the excruciating work of defending these ideas against the legion of very smart people both past and present is so daunting I become easily overwhelmed every time I pull my head out of one little problem or the other.

And I don’t really find those defensive problems interesting. This is where my lack of academic training fails me. It is one thing to solve a conceptual problem. It is quite another to create an edifice with which to defend it against crushingly great minds. It is either the mark of an incredible fool, unconscionable hubris, or accidental ignorance, to take on this category of problem, and to even mention one’s feeble efforts in the same sentence with minds like this.

Spinoza spent his entire life on two hundred pages. How did Murray work on one book for seven years full time? Rawls? And Rawls clearly needed to do a lot more work than he did. You have to be amazed by someone like Rothbard, who I’m honestly in awe of. If you look at his writing, while he oversimplifies the problem of political theory almost absurdly, he’s at least accessible and his breadth just daunting, even if you disagree with his premise.

On the other hand, after re-reading those who don’t oversimplify the problem, namely Rawls and Nozick, I feel like the bar isn’t all that high. I mean, those works are highly influential despite being painfully inaccessible. Which is a small comfort. A very small comfort. But a comfort none the less.

One cannot distill complex ideas to first principles expressed in analytical language unless one understands the problem thoroughly. The genius of Rothbard’s insight is a barrier to adoption because of his passion for his particular ethics of anarchism. But his Propertarianism is applicable to all political philosophy and ideology. In fact, it’s the only thing that makes them commensurable.

Shoulders of giants and all that. Humbling. Witheringly humbling.