My review of The Servile Mind is available. I do not think liberaltarians or bleeding-heart libertarians will be comfortable with Minogue’s swipes at cultural decadence. My conclusion:
Overall, I would say that for libertarians Minogue’s book provides a litmus test. If you find yourself in vigorous agreement with everything he says, then you probably see no value in efforts to work with progressives to promote libertarian causes. The left is simply too dedicated to projects that Minogue argues undermine individual moral responsibility, and thus they are antithetical to liberty. On the other hand, if you believe that Minogue is too pessimistic about the outlook for freedom in today’s society and too traditional in his outlook on moral responsibility, then you would feel even more uneasy about an alliance with conservatives than about an alliance with progressives.
I see this sort of thing as a demonstration of the right-wing sort of choice reductionism: namely, reduction of the factors shaping choices to “the moral will” or lack thereof. This is the right-wing counterpart to the left-wing view of outcomes as being determined more or less entirely by structural circumstances, and they’re both irritating exercises in mental masturbation. When I see a left-wing profile of someone in desperate straits, I usually want to say: well, yes, this person got a lot of bad breaks, but surely you can see that some of their own choices (e.g. to have many children without a clear plan for supporting them) have made their situation worse, and that even in their circumstances one might expect them to make different ones? And likewise when I see Minogue talk about the moral will and the “irresponsibles”, I want to say: do you really think that one’s degree of responsibility and willpower are not significantly shaped by life circumstances like growing up in poverty? Can you, who started with so many advantages, really be so confident that you’d have done so much better in their place? The world of human choice and will is too complicated for these single-minded lenses to be useful.
Or even how much really in our control at all, that is, subject to our psychological makeup, and that some can do it by no means, means everyone can.
“do you really think that one’s degree of responsibility and willpower are not significantly shaped by life circumstances like growing up in poverty?”
Well, you can’t exactly buy either responsibility or willpower, so I would surmise that the answer is more yes than no.
I thought the definition you quoted of “the servile mind” echoed some parts of Dan Klein’s notion of “the people’s romance.”
As one who saves your monthly articles into the hard drives, your review was surprising in its omission of the function designated by its subtitle: “How Democracy Erodes Moral Life.”
Minogue confirms a view that many, if not most, libertarians share:
“Democracy is a process not a condition.”
True, the label may be applied to the conditions necessary and sufficient for the process to occur.
Democracy occurs where individual purposes (objectives) of cooperation and resolution of conflicts, are freely sought by means freely selected by those individuals, as determined by individual “moral sense” and motivations. That moral sense (the ought and ought not, which form the base of obligations) being determined internally in individuals, and not directed externally. Individual purposes shape the process of Democracy.
One can understand from Minogue, that in the process Of Democracy, individuals select managers whom he designates “Rulers,” of relations conducted through the facilities of governments. That those “Rulers” conceive that there should be purposes (objectives) to the process rather than the process existing for the purposes of individuals. Further, as “Rulers,” they come to consider their functions to include, or to be primarily, the selections of purposes for the process of Democracy, rather than restrained to their delegated duties as managers of a process that requires individual moral choices.
Selecting purposes (objectives) for the process of Democracy, requires the establishment of a moral base that replaces the moral choices of individuals in determining purposes and the means of attaining them.
The great error, the great damage comes from the concept of imputing purpose to process. The error and damage occur when the characteristics of the citizenry delegate that power of imputation to managers, who in the guise of relieving moral choices, become “Rulers” and dictate choices which remove individual morality. “There can be no morality without choice.”