Is Parental Opting for Prayer Over Medicine Criminal?
(posted by Mona)
Madeline Kara Neumann was only 11 when several weeks ago the she died of entirely treatable diabetes, even as her parents eschewed medical science for prayer. According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Madeline died due to:
. . . diabetic ketoacidosis, a treatable though serious condition of type 1 diabetes in which acid builds up in the blood.
Neumann’s parents said they didn’t know she had diabetes. They didn’t take her to a doctor. They prayed for healing.
The common course of medical treatment for the disease involves injections of insulin and intravenous fluids, said Omar Ali, assistant professor of pediatric endocrinology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa.
“A fatal outcome would be unusual these days in the United States,” Ali said.
While the parents say they did not know Madeline was as ill as she was, about their decision for prayer over doctors:
“They said it was the course of action they would take again,” [Police Chief Dan] Vergin said. “They firmly believe even if they had taken her to a doctor, if this was the time God had chosen for her to die, she would die regardless of medical interference.”
Let us assume, as I do, that the parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, are not monsters and that they are deeply bereaved over Madeline’s death. Should they nonetheless be prosecuted? The Neumanns have three other minor children. Should those children be removed from the home?
April 9th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Stupid, yes. Repulsive, yes. Criminal, no. They shouldn’t be prosecuted and the kids shouldn’t be removed from the home. The sovereignty of the family is the last line of defense against the totalitarian therapeutic state.
April 9th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Keith: Madeline the individual had inherent rights, including the right to life. Are children nothing more than parental property, possessed of no recognized rights until they reach whatever arbitrary age of majority the collectivity decides upon?
April 9th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
I don’t really believe in the idea of “rights” in the Lockean or “natrual rights of man” sense. As for the practical issue of the relationship between children, parents, the law and the state, I agree with Murray Rothbard on that issue.
http://www.mises.org/story/2568
April 9th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Rothbard claims:
That is horrendous, and is among the reasons I am not a Rothbardian. When one agrees to give birth to a child — by definition an uninformed dependent necessarily reliant on the protection and judgment of adults — one assumes obligations to that child. If one does not wish to incur such obligations, one ought not have children.
Such views are among the reasons people spit at and marginalize libertarians. I am a libertarian, but not a Rothbard devotee.
April 9th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I’m not really a Rothbardian either, I’m more of a Bakuninist. I agree with Rothbard on this question.
I know of “childrens’ rights” do-gooders who want to have the children removed from the home if the parents teach them fundamentalist religious doctrine, racist beliefs, if there are guns or “second hand smoke” in the household, if the parents engage in sexual promiscuity or homosexuality or drug use.
Once you open that door there’s no stopping point. Don’t get me wrong. I think what happened to that little girl sucks. But I also think family sovereignty and religious liberty have to be preserved at all costs.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I know of “childrens’ rights” do-gooders who want to have the children removed from the home if the parents teach them fundamentalist religious doctrine, racist beliefs, if there are guns or “second hand smoke” in the household, if the parents engage in sexual promiscuity or homosexuality or drug use.
Yes, but none of that, by any reasonable and good faith standard, constitutes direct abuse of the child. Failure to feed, does. When an 11-year-old child is desperately ill with pneumonia and has for 5 days had a fever of 105, failure to get medical help is lethal abuse. Allowing an infant to wallow for weeks in shit and pee, and unfed, while the parents party, is criminal neglect, and properly so.
Rearing children in controversial views should not constitute abuse, unless acted upon (as by, say, sexually penetrating toddlers).
Guns are a discrete and interesting issue. It is hard to own one for protection, and simultaneously keep them unaccessible to kids who might play with them and kill themselves or another in the process. (A decision I myself faced and opted against purchasing one.) But that is a separate post.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
The issue of children is one reason I’m not a libertarian, since libertarian theory is either silent or ridiculous on the status of human beings who are manifestly not free, independent, and rational. And since everyone starts out that way, that is a rather large gap in the theory. How can anyone take Rothbard seriously after reading such drivel? It really is a reductio ad absurdum of the entire libertarian methodology.
Since Rothbard reaches an absurd conclusion, we can walk back his reasoning and find the incorrect premise. Since he is, at least, a precise writer, it’s not very hard:
Rothbard’s entire framework is erected upon this impoverished notion of purely negative rights. Everybody can do what he likes as long as he stays out of everybody else’s yard. Unfortunately, humans are radically social and interdependent creatures, so this theory is spectacularly useless, at least in its pure form. Children are one illustration of this, but there are plenty of others (public health for instance).
Human beings are often not capable of taking care of themselves (at birth, when sick or injured, at the end of life) and require nurturance from others. Families often take on this role, but modern industrial society has pretty much destroyed the traditional extended family, and so the state takes on more and more of the functions of social welfare, merging it with the instruments of oppression.
If you want my advice on what this blog should be doing, it’s thinking about how to realize libertarian values (freedom, individualism, autonomy) without shortchanging the need for insitiutions of social welfare. If you don’t want the state up in your child protection and health care, then you better have an alternate scheme, because the realities of social existence don’t go away just because Rothbard says they should.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I don’t agree with Rothbard on this, either. People who have kids are implicitly assuming the responsibility for taking care of them so long as they retain custody of them. Anyone with a child they are NOT willing to feed or care for is obligated, at the very least, to publicly announce their abandonment and invite someone else to take over custody. Anyone who just quietly lets a child die of hunger or neglect because they’re not prepared to take care of it should be considered guilty of homicide under any system.
As for the parents in this story, it seems to be more a matter of stupidity than of malice. I don’t see what purpose could be served by treating it as a negligent homicide. The sort of religious nutters who are prone to this kind of thing probably aren’t going to be deterred anyway.
April 10th, 2008 at 12:22 am
Yeah, Rothbard’s wrong on this one. People ought to do whatever they want so long as they don’t harm others, and absent a special relationship the usual way of not harming others is to refrain from affirmatively infringing their rights. But a parent has affirmative duties to a child and failure to fufill those duties harms the child. That said, I don’t know what the proper response of the law is here. Probably nothing.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:18 am
Keith said:
The sovereignty of the family is the last line of defense against the totalitarian therapeutic state.
In the context of this tragic case, the above really seem very cold-blooded.
The girl is dead. Nothing more can be done for her. The parents are nuts, but they did not commit murder because they sincerely believed they were doing the best thing for their child. Society’s responsibility is now to the rest of the children. Social workers need to visit the family regularly to make sure they are not put in jeopardy by their parents. If they are in danger, they need to be yanked from their birth family, traumatic as that is, and fostered.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:36 am
The problem with nanny state bureaucracies like CPS is that, like any other kind of bureaucracy, they become entepreneurial in nature, and concerned less with the ostensible purposes behind their creation than with self-perpetuation, budgetary expansion, protection of employment, etc. This means such bureaucracies must find ever more reasons to justify their existence which, in the case of something like CPS, means defining “child abuse” in ever more vague or dubious ways. Hence, exposing children to second hand smoke, or racism, or drug use, or weird religious beliefs, becomes “child abuse”.
There’s also the matter of the politicization of these bureaucracies along ideological lines.
In the cases of extreme circumstances and the worst case scenarios others here have referred to, like crackheads letting kids go without food or toilet paper for days while there’s smoking to be done, I’d have no problem with neighbors, relatives, friends, concerned others stepping in and taking the kids to a better, safer environment. If worst came to worst, I could even see having the sheriff, constable or representative of the Peoples’ Militia come and take the kids to an orphanage or shelter.
But I am adamantly opposed to the idea of maintaining a permanent state bureaucracy for the purpose of monitoring family life. If it were up to me, funding for these bureaucracies would be shut off immediately.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Um, so it will become OK for neighbors and relatives to start kidnapping children if they think that it’s “what’s best for the kid”? And when the original parents disagree, they can have a hatfield-mccoy style shootout. And when it gets out of hand, who’s got the cell of the Peoples’ Militia…
Sorry. That just sounds dystopian.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:06 am
I don’t think it needs to be that complicated.
No, it shouldn’t be okay to take someone else’s kids for whatever reason you want. That’s more or less the prerogative the present system claims.
If the parents are acting in such a way as to pose an imminent danger to the children, others are justified in stepping in to prevent such a disaster. Just like if someone is mugging an old lady, a third party is also justified in stepping in.
If the parents think they have been treated unfairly, they can bring a complaint against those who intervened. Just like the accused mugger can bring a complaint if he thinks he was handled unjustly. I would favor a system of common law for the purpose of addressing such disputes as opposed to something like blood feuds on one end or a managerial state on the other.
I’m not arguing for a free-for-all. What I am simply arguing against is the maintenance of a permanent state bureaucracy for the ostensible purpose of managing such matters.
If you don’t think the present system is a dystopia, no offense, but I’d say you have a very naive view of how modern state systems actually work.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:26 am
If anyone is interested, this is an essay of mine addressing some of the broader questions related to what we’re discussing here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/preston1.html
What I say here is that one of the major errors of modern liberalism and leftism is its tendency to expand the state to ever more totalitarian levels in the name of curbing abuses, whether real or imaginary, by other institutions like families, communities, businesses, religions, private associateions, etc, and its tendency to substitute new pieties like Health, Safety and Equality for older pieties like Faith, Family and Fatherland, albeit with the same malevolent consequences.
April 10th, 2008 at 8:12 am
as someone with experience in the system being discussed, I’d like to add a little reality to how it currently works.
1) The social workers who opine on the worthiness of others to be parents are quite often the most neglectful parents around. I grew up next to one, and our whole neighborhood used to take the son in for dinner, or help him in other ways. As he is constantly told to this day - everyone is amazed that he has turned out well as an adult; everyone assumed he’d be in jail due to his wildness and anti-social behavior as a kid. And while working in the system, I met a few more who would leave their kids in daycare until 8 p.m. This behavior is related to my point 2.
2) Most, if not all, social workers in this system are on a mission from God. They see themselves as doing the lord’s work, even if they aren’t religious (it’s a very similar phenomenon to prosecutors and cops, but worse, cause social workers get paid crap for massive workloads with lots of difficult clients). Once a parent gets processed into the system, it is nearly impossible to get out unscathed, even if the initial referral was bullcrap. One “expert” report I dealt with opined that a father was unfit for such reasons as “burping in front of the children” and “failing to sufficiently structure the child’s play time”.
All that said, with our current atomized society, with little to no community cohesion, there really is no alternative. I was interested to learn recently that the most common social unit in history was not the family, but the tribe. I think the solution we should be aiming for is to return to close communities (small! small! small!) and have this function fulfilled by community members who know the most about the situation. Allow someone to challenge for custody of a neglected child, and allow a local, community level ‘court’ handle the claim. Kept at such a level, the litigation would not be costly (it isn’t really that costly even now, and there are a lot of extraneous requirements now).
But before we can get there, we need to re-build civil society from the ground up, so that we have communities that are vibrant social networks, capable of providing a multitude of social services voluntarily.
April 10th, 2008 at 8:37 am
“Hard cases make bad law”, and it’s late, so I’m going to bed.
April 10th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Well said, Quasibill!! You’ve saved me a job on this one.
I would add that the only way to rebuild civil society is to simply shut down the institutions that have usurped civil society. I suspect this will happen more through systemic failure than through political design.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:13 am
I’ve earlier given the okay to infanticide, so I can hardly sic the cops on these folks.
Chip Smith explains where Rothbard went wrong on children here.
April 10th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I can’t remember where I read it, but here’s the best logic I’ve seen for parental responsibility:
The creation of a new human being places a sentient being in a state of helplessness. Those responsible for this state (the parents) have a moral obligation to alleviate this helplessness or find someone else who will.
This moral framework certainly allows for the concept of child abuse (i.e. actions by the child’s guardians that perpetuate or worsen the child’s state of helplessness). This framework also makes it reasonable for others to intervene and defend the child from harm. However, by doing so, the intervening adult becomes the new guardian.
(One potential drawback of this argument is that without a clear line of distinction between post-birth and pre-birth helplessness, this argument would seem to justify the maximal pro life position on abortion.)
With regard to the specific case cited, I think it is reasonable to hold the parents responsible for the child’s death. It’s hard for them to compensate the victim, but since their actions put the other children at risk, I think having them pay to have someone else raise their remaining children is reasonable.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I believe the child has a right to accept the aid of another who wishes to offer her aid, provided nobody else is harmed in the process.
I’m assuming that during all of this the child spoke to somebody who may have asked her what HER wishes were. If she were receptive to the idea of treatment and, consequently, STAYING ALIVE, then I’d support whatever is necessary to, indeed, RESCUE her from the home (again, provided others are not harmed in the act, apart from the parents of course who’d be obstructing justice, as it were). I’d even go so far as assuming that she’d want to have her life saved, so insofar as she was unconscious or unable to speak to any outsiders I’d support the “intrusive” position in this discussion. But this has nothing to do with the broader question of the state, as this applies to anybody. I’m largely in agreement with quasibill and keith.
None of this conflicts with Rothbard’s treatment of obligations to children.
Think of it this way: What is the use of prosecuting somebody for neglect of a young child? Deterence? Probably won’t help, because I highly doubt that care for children is upheld by anything other than the evolutionary informal “law” of basic humanity. I suppose Restorative justice would be due if you believe the child had a “right” to care, but what would that mean? Buying some baby food to make up for the previous lack of it, I suppose? That’d put you out a few hundred bucks at most.
I don’t believe in “crimes against the state”.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
“(One potential drawback of this argument is that without a clear line of distinction between post-birth and pre-birth helplessness, this argument would seem to justify the maximal pro life position on abortion.)”
Yep.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Ok, after actually reading the post it appears nobody knew about her condition until it was too late.
So then the question is, what to do with the parents. No, I don’t think jailing them and taking away the kids is going to help matters. Does anyone really think anything good would come of this?
Also, this caught my eye:
“A Jehovah’s Witness can refuse life-saving blood transfusion based on their religious belief,” he said. “They’re protected. But they can’t refuse it for their child . . . the First Amendment extends to their own behavior but not their children’s.”
That backs up what I said earlier, about the right of the CHILD to accept treatment. But I remember a case, I believe in Texas, wherein a child that didn’t want chemo (and thus vulnerable to almost certain death) was forced to undergo it by the state, under the pretense of neglectful parents. So it would seem that minors’ wishes aren’t respected either, but then we already knew this…
April 10th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
What Keith and QB said. It’s about rebuilding civil society, so that parents are actually home for their kids instead of slaving in cubicle hell 50 hours a week; so that if the parents are shitty, the children have a larger community to lean on and go to if things get too bad; so that a greater dialogue between neighbors can spread knowledge about child development so that ignorant parents have resources.
The latter point is key. I was listening to an interview with a lady from an anti-child abuse non-profit org. Of course, she advocates what I’d consider intrusive laws and parades arguments like “the home is the most dangerous place for a child” (heh, and I’m also alarmed that the overwhelming majority of deaths take place on the planet Earth). But she also talked about how education was important - that a lot of parents abuse out of frustration because they don’t have a larger support network telling them, you know, babies poop their diapers, that’s normal. Children are annoying, you’re not the first parent to go through this. Most importantly, she said most abuse situations were because parents didn’t have the maturity and coping mechanisms - that they never “grew up” themselves - another (partial) symptom of an atomized society.
The typical progressive will argue that the state should be providing this information, but I don’t see how a scientific dissemination of child biological and psychological and behavioral data can possible compete with having an experienced mom in the neighborhood over for coffee. And I don’t see how a foster home can compete with even the crappy households some kids grow up in. John Taylor Gatto wrote in “The Underground History of American Education” about how it’s a mistake to think that kids must have a perfect upbringing in the first place, let alone providing that through the cold, mechanical arm of the state.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
@ Dain:
Just because my theory of parental obligation would justify an anti-abortion stance doesn’t mean it isn’t correct. It just means there are other principles that become relevant when we deal with children in the womb. (And, no, I don’t have that worked out in a nice easy formulation.)
You’ve also drawn attention to the child’s desires. Unfortunately, part of the helplessness that children face is an inability to make good choices without guidance. Children are going to tend to defer to their guardians for advice — even when that advice leads them to, say, avoid doctors because it might offend an invisible being.
What happens when the child doesn’t understand the issue at stake and/or is too young to be able to communicate their preferences? At this point their “consent” isn’t really relevant since it’s impossible to ascertain.
It seems to me that issues regarding children make libertarians uncomfortable because they deal with a genuine situations where one human being must make decisions for another (i.e. where authority undeniably should rule). Authoritarians, by contrast are always bringing up children in political debate because, for them, people never cease to need a parent figure. For authoritarians *adulthood* is the uncomfortable ethical edge condition.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
“What happens when the child doesn’t understand the issue at stake and/or is too young to be able to communicate their preferences? At this point their ‘consent’ isn’t really relevant since it’s impossible to ascertain.”
This would apply to extremely young children. Consent isn’t meaningful here because no matter what you do you can’t get their opinion on the matter. But “understand the issue at stake”? This could apply to adults, who no doubt probably don’t understand the issue at stake when they refuse to undergo some kind of painful surgery that would extend their life by years. There are countless other examples. Most voters don’t understand the issues at stake when they go to the polls.
“Unfortunately, part of the helplessness that children face is an inability to make good choices without guidance. Children are going to tend to defer to their guardians for advice — even when that advice leads them to, say, avoid doctors because it might offend an invisible being.”
Children should be free to consider the advice of those around them. This would include the consideration of ending your life for your faith. And belief in an invisible being is hardly the only example of faith.
April 10th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
The creation of a new human being places a sentient being in a state of helplessness. Those responsible for this state (the parents) have a moral obligation to alleviate this helplessness or find someone else who will.
Back when I was a more normal libertarian I wrote this on that subject, though it was more specifically about abortion.
One potential drawback of this argument is that without a clear line of distinction between post-birth and pre-birth helplessness, this argument would seem to justify the maximal pro life position on abortion
Given my radically permissive views this may sound strange, but you first need to establish that there’s something wrong with maximal pro life position before you can consider it a drawback!
John Taylor Gatto wrote in “The Underground History of American Education” about how it’s a mistake to think that kids must have a perfect upbringing in the first place, let alone providing that through the cold, mechanical arm of the state.
I haven’t read Gatto, but that reminds me of this from Judith Harris. In The Blank Slate a similar analogy is used between child abuse and spousal abuse.
I don’t believe in “crimes against the state”.
That’s the biggie. It’s all well and good to imagine ideal platonic “rights” we wished everyone had but down at the level of reality there are people and their actions. Beware of Kip’s Law, because the actual government implementation won’t be what you dreamed of.
You’ve also drawn attention to the child’s desires. Unfortunately, part of the helplessness that children face is an inability to make good choices without guidance. Children are going to tend to defer to their guardians for advice — even when that advice leads them to, say, avoid doctors because it might offend an invisible being.
Your argument is that someone might make a bad decision, so the government needs to decide for them. It is rather similar to the justification for parents making decisions for their children. The question is whether the government or the parents have authority. I don’t exactly trust the government and don’t give my approval to pretty much anything they intend to do. My approval is irrelevant to the parents and deciding to intervene for the greater good there seems somewhat analogous to foreign intervention.
What happens when the child doesn’t understand the issue at stake and/or is too young to be able to communicate their preferences? At this point their “consent” isn’t really relevant since it’s impossible to ascertain.
One could easily argue that adults never really understand the issue. A lot of malnourished adults in third world countries have the mental ages of people we might consider “children” here (though they would have been considered adults long ago and if anything are physically maturing faster due to modern diets).
April 10th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Keith,
If the parents think they have been treated unfairly, they can bring a complaint against those who intervened.
It’s good to know that you’re allowing the parents some recourse beyond a counter-kidnapping.
So you are not completely opposed to someone having authority over “family matters” after all. As long as that person is not a specialist in doing so. But in a society of our scale, not having specialists for doing things such as making sure at-risk children are OK is absolutely nonsense.
Maybe, like Quasibill, you think the problem is our atomized society and that we should all return to tribes. But that would be such a momentious change in our way of life that it is surely putting the cart before the horse to talk about dismantling the department of social services before that change happens.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Jeremy,
It’s all very well to say that the atomization of society is bad for civil society. But inevitably you have to acknowledge it is what individuals and individual families have chosen. Wax nostalgic over homo-sapien’s tribal days all you like. I suspect life is a lot less free for people with such strong family/societal bonds even if they are free from the state.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I’m not so sure it’s what individuals and families have chosen, in the sense that social atomization was driven from the bottom up. Social atomization, the reduced attachment to place and reduced social cohesion in any particular place, results from economic centralization and demographic mobility. And the state played a big role in that. I would argue that the overall form society has taken over the past hundred years resulted from a top-down corporate revolution, and individual choice has been limited largely to selecting what to eat and what to leave from what was put on our plates.
Whether to have a society dominated by giant corporations and other large organizations has never been put forward as a meaningful choice on a ballot, that I’m aware of. The basic structural changes that led to this transformation were made by political and economic elites almost totally insulated from meaningful democratic control, and those structural changes were never subject to public deliberation in the democratic process. They’re the kinds of issues that almost never show up on the radar of the press or of political debate, because the dominant establishments in “both sides” agree on them. And then the public is enculturated to view that structure as “normal” and “inevitable,” and to dismiss as “extremism” any attempt to challenge it.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:21 am
In this specific case, I’d consider that even in a fully anarchist society, at least one based on any kind of rationalism, the parents in this particular case could be found guilty of negligence. The argument that health and sickness are special and that only God has control over your life or death are basically bullshit. Anyone who believes that believes that there are no connections between material causes and effects. You might as well skip through traffic and trust to God to get you to the other side. No one lives like this.
So by all means, dance across the eight lane superhighway, but if you throw your minor children under the semi and claim their deaths were God’s will, you still killed ‘em. I think we can leave religion out and focus purely on the notion of whether others can and should intervene.
I’d agree with several of the libertarians above that an outside party can intervene, preferably after presenting some kind of evidence to an impartial judge or community jury. So I really don’t think that the process would be massively different from what it is today, except the non-state child protection organizations would doubtless be more diffuse than the state-run ones. In some ways that would be good, in some ways bad.
Here’s a thought for this discussion: any system that involves child welfare and neglectful or abusive parenting is going to be fucked up. It doesn’t matter what the system is, it doesn’t matter if it’s run by an evil dictatorship, a wondrous and happy social democracy, an anarchist federation of the tribal elders. It’s going to make mistakes on a pretty regular basis, and those mistakes are going to have pretty horrific consequences from time to time. A few years back I sat through a trial in which it was pretty clear that a young, unprepared and drug abusing father had beaten his daughter to death. When we first reported on the story, we had her age as two. It turned out later that he had apparently killed her about a week before her second birthday, buried her body in the back yard, and then tried to pretend that she’d gone back to live with her mother.
Before her murder, she’d come into the emergency room with serious bruises and signs of neglect, just a few weeks earlier. The local child protection agency was notified. Because this all took place on a Canadian First Nations Reserve, it was a native-run agency.
First Nations people in Canada are extremely reluctant to take a child away, because between 1880 and as late as 1970, tens of thousands of them were scooped up by Indian Agents and hauled away to church-run residential schools, where they were beaten for speaking native languages and regularly raped by pedophilic priests and teachers.
Which is a long way of saying that each abuse, in one direction or another, tends to push the pendulum a little to hard in the other direction.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:55 am
I think M. Claxton’s summary is as good as any.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Well, just to correct Angelica’s misrepresentation of my position - I am *not* advocating a return to tribes. I merely noted that the dominant form of social unit in human history was the tribe, not the family, and definitely not the nation. Which has important implications regarding ‘natural’ human organization, I think.
To me, the implication is that people tend to form close communities, in the absence of other interventions (such communities not *necessarily* being an outgrowth of a pre-existing family organization). And these close communities tend to provide all the wonderful social services that liberals claim they’re in favor of, in a voluntary, caring manner. I’ve never claimed that these communities have to be organized along the lines of traditional ‘tribes’. In fact, I think there is more recent and relevant historical example of this organization to be found in colonial New England.
The small community idea also has implications with respect to why those ungrateful Ay-rabs don’t fall down on their knees and pray to the altar of American capitalism - they see the atomization of our society and don’t want it. In fact, if you read what many of the non-radical muslim clerics have to say, they’ll say *exactly* that: that American culture is debased by it’s atomization, not by its ‘freedom’.
Finally, I agree with Kevin that saying the current state of atomization has anything to do with individual preferences requires ideological blinders or plain ignorance. State policies have encouraged this for over 100 years. And one need only read Orwell’s 1984 to get an understanding of why a state would follow such a policy. And I agree with Keith that many of the neo-liberal state directed systems are likely to collapse in the relatively near future - but I’m less optimistic about that process, as I can easily see it resulting in centralized fascism, akin to the fall of the Weimar Republic.
April 11th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Angelica,
“It’s good to know that you’re allowing the parents some recourse beyond a counter-kidnapping.
So you are not completely opposed to someone having authority over “family matters” after all.”
Well, if we want to get technical about it, I suppose we could argue that such a situation would be an inter-familial rather than intra-familial dispute.
“As long as that person is not a specialist in doing so. But in a society of our scale, not having specialists for doing things such as making sure at-risk children are OK is absolutely nonsense. ”
I guess you have a lot more confidence in alleged specialists than I do.
“But that would be such a momentious change in our way of life that it is surely putting the cart before the horse to talk about dismantling the department of social services before that change happens.”
Shock therapy may well have its place in some instances.
M. Claxton,
I second Kevin. Great post.
Quasibill,
“And I agree with Keith that many of the neo-liberal state directed systems are likely to collapse in the relatively near future - but I’m less optimistic about that process, as I can easily see it resulting in centralized fascism, akin to the fall of the Weimar Republic.”
You may be crediting me with more optimism than I actually possess. The US at present may well be at the Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon phase. It appears that the final nails in the coffin of the old republic are being driven and that executive dictatorship is on the horizon. I don’t think it will have the flash and style of National Socialism and it will occur incrementally enough that no one really notices all that much. It’s already been going on for several decades anyway.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Keith, regarding the death of the old republic, see this.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I checked that blog out. And of course the US President is not a monarch or fuhrer but simply a public servant with 300 million employers.
April 11th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
TGGP,
“One could easily argue that adults never really understand the issue. A lot of malnourished adults in third world countries have the mental ages of people we might consider ‘children’ here (though they would have been considered adults long ago and if anything are physically maturing faster due to modern diets).”
(I know this isn’t your argument.) This reminds me of something I read by C.L.R. James on the colonialists’ excuse for not allowing national indigenous liberation: illiteracy. If they can’t read, how can they make meaningful decisions about the direction of their society? He pointed out that they use symbols and spoken language to communicate, etc., but above all: WHY IS IT ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS, YOU BRITISH PRICK?
April 11th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
There should be no question that parents have a duty of care. The question is whether or not the actions of the parents constitute criminal negligence. That comes down to whether or not it is reasonable to expect that prayer alone was sufficient treatment in face of the circumstances (those circumstances including the medical knowledge and religious beliefs of the parents). My view is that, considering common professed “normal” views of “average Americans” it was perfectly reasonable of the parents to expect divine intervention. For the parents to be held criminally negligent, it would be necessary to show that divine intervention was an unreasonable expectation.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
@ TGGP:
I did say it was a potential drawback. Oddly, when you make a secular argument for the pro-life position, the argument is surprisingly formidable. However, locking people up for killing tiny cell clusters also strikes me as evil. Both of the consistent views on abortion seem to lead to ethical conclusions that are unpalatable.
I think it is edge conditions like these that explain the persistence of government as an institution. There are cases where our moral sense drives us to override the will of others (in this case the child’s parents) based on a belief that we know better than the parents do how to raise their child.
Only if you consider the state to be a “parent” and it’s citizens to be its “children.” That’s a major flaw in arguments for toppling tyranny abroad — the abused “children” aren’t actually children. The oppressed citizens of a tyrant need to actually ask for help and the liberator properly should have a means of liberating them that doesn’t kill a whole bunch of the oppressed in the process.
April 11th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Dain, you are offensive. But there is a short, simple and sound answer to your challenge: to stop the French from getting it.
It was usually the French, but insert Russians, Germans, Afghans, Turks, slavers, whoever, as needed. The thing is, British imperialism developed out of the experience of empire and was not a driver of it until the very end (roughly speaking, the Boer War), but the original driver was a response to the aggression of yet other outside parties. Their own imperialism, if European, had similarly developed as a response, but to events in Europe. For instance, French attitudes had developed in response to earlier English and later Spanish attacks, while the Spanish approach flowed on naturally from the Reconquista.
The logic of empire requires moving into power vacuums or someone else will, and leads to moving forward so as not to move backward. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.
I need hardly add, while current US imperialism is following these ingrained habits and patterns, it has no such lesser evil, heading off others justification.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
“Dain, you are offensive.”
Well, sorry, but if someone had said “American Prick” I wouldn’t have been offended.
“The logic of empire requires moving into power vacuums or someone else will, and leads to moving forward so as not to move backward. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”
That’s the imperialists’ problem, not the people of India, Kenya, et al. Just as I have no right to kidnap you to prevent my own beating. (Besides, the rationale for empire is scarcely so clear cut as that, typically involving many more variables and far more speculation as to potential danger, and to whom.)
“I need hardly add, while current US imperialism is following these ingrained habits and patterns, it has no such lesser evil, heading off others justification.”
I’m with you here. But again, the US interest in identifying some other rival power to fend off means next to nothting to someone suffering under the yoke of AMERICAN imperialism.
If somebody abducts me and tells me “If I don’t abduct you, I’ll be in danger, and besides, you’d rather have me than THEM!”, I’d throw my lot in with my own survival and decision making skills, thank you very much.
April 12th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Kevin already articulated the meat of my primary response to that. It’s not chosen. And I think what liberals sometimes misunderstand about libertarians is that our primary interest is for a life that *is* chosen. This can only begin to happen when “family values” is taken off the presidential talking points, first of all. Real stability comes from below, not above.
The proposed goal is a society where the economics, the politics, the values, the culture, etc. all conform as closely as possible to the individual resident’s. I can wax nostalgic about traditional social organizations, but that’s not really what I want to do. What I really want is to see if my ideas - or your ideas - have real world utility; if they make us happier or less happy, and in what ways. I want to see massive social experimentation in the area of organization, so that revolutions and political manuervering aren’t necessary to live in a world that has your own values in which you are maximally invested.
I want all of us to be right, not by winning or losing an argument, but by realizing in the material world those ideas and values we hold. I suspect many traditional forms of organization were the result of successful experiments, but I’m sure we can do better in many areas with our current consciousness and information.
April 13th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Dain, you misunderstand. It’s lifeboat ethics; if the cabin boy is going to die anyway, why not eat him? In India, for instance, it was not Britain pre-empting France, it was Britain responding to France - France already had armies taking over areas and so on, until the local British organised resistance. In fact, it made the task easier for Britain that it hardly ever came in as an invader and occupier but rather as a rescuer. But Britain practically never initiated this sort of thing until the late 19th century. Even Cecil Rhodes was unauthorised, just using resources he could get locally.
April 13th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
“It’s lifeboat ethics; if the cabin boy is going to die anyway, why not eat him?”
Am I to understand that the nation of India is the cabin boy?
April 13th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
What “nation”? As at the time in question it really was just a geographical expression (national identity is a later cultural import). Even the non-national Mogul Empire had collapsed, so there wasn’t even an abstract large unit that could suffer (that cabin boy was already dead).
No, the real cabin boy is the small unit then obtaining, from individuals through families and villages up to at most princely states. For instance, the French had already hegemonised pretty much all Bengal with the help of native allies when the British stopped them at Plassey; either way, the local peasantry was being “eaten”.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Well, ok, so then your answer to my question is yes.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Read it again.
My answer to your question is no. I then told you what the cabin boy was.
April 14th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
The British nation is not an individual that can starve, and so cannnot be confronted with a situation wherein it is tempted to eat the “cabin boy”.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
And that is precisely why “the nation of India” cannot be the cabin boy either, even today when there is a national identity people cleave to. Back then, there wasn’t even a psychological sense of violation at that level, because that ship had sailed long before - there were lots of outsiders around even before Europeans came by sea, e.g. the Moguls themselves, and there were groups from one part of India ruling in others, and so on. The general feeling then was “these new foreigners will just get assimilated like all the others”, and in fact that process took place in its early stages until better communications with Europe (among other things) stopped it.
April 15th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
State now a danger to children, sect’s mothers say
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/15/sect.mothers/?iref=hpmostpop
Here’s an article relevant to this thread of discussion
April 16th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Keith, thanks for that link. In the next several weeks or so I will be doing a lengthy post on why polygamy and polygamous religions are none of the state’s business (with certain exceptions for genuine rape and coerced — as opposed to arranged — marriage).
April 17th, 2008 at 2:01 am
Another problem is that dysfunctional parents are probably more likely to come from dysfunctional communities. For instance, the religious nutcases who let their daughter go without insulin probably do not live next door to you or me. They likely live next door to other religious nutcases who reinforce and validate their tragically misbegotten line of thinking.4
April 17th, 2008 at 5:45 am
Well, I’d engage in a long and drawn out discussion of what qualifies as dysfunctional, but that would miss the real point I want to make. You’re entitled to your opinion.
Here’s a better argument, a la Keith’s suggestion: if you think another community is so dysfunctional that it can’t be tolerated, then I’d suggest that you go and talk to them / sieze their children / kill them / whatever. I think it’s highly dangerous to pay a third party institution, which by its very nature will approach things from a bureaucratic and mechanistic perspective, to do so.
Another thing to keep in mind is that cultural changes in communities happen slowly, but they then take root and last. Changes from the top down, implemented by the state, occur quickly but can be very unstable and fleeting, with unintended consequences. There’s a lot of utility to neighbors discussing a pressing issue among themselves - contrast that with a national media that frames an issue and then shows only two sides to it for some period of time until the rulers have made up their mind.
April 17th, 2008 at 6:18 am
I don’t know how many times I’m going have to say this on this blog, but I’m just not that big a fan of the rhetorical device “if you care so much about X, go do it yourself.” The whole reason I think we need the government is to do stuff that is inappropriate/unrealistic/ineffective for people to do as individuals. Seizing other people’s children, however bad the parenting, falls into all three categories.
The rest of your post is your ideology. I’m not saying your ideology is wrong, just that you have simply restated your core beliefs without engaging with the case at hand.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:25 am
The fact that you see this as merely a rhetorical device speaks volumes.
Perhaps, however, I should clarify what my intention is in making such a statement. It’s not to say, “Oh, Angelica doesn’t have the strength of her own convictions - otherwise, she’d be working day and night to advance her agenda directly.” That is not what I mean.
Rather, what I’m saying is that, when you put a policy in terms of actual human beings - not unlike yourself - doing the tasks that you’re prescribing, it can give one a different view of the policy. It’s easy to talk about some abstract entity, full of well paid and legally entitled civil servants, accomplishing some institutionally defined goal. It’s another thing to talk about what it means for one human being to come and take another human being’s child. My goal is not to make you a hypocrite; it’s to show you the another, equally real side of what you’re proposing.
Fair enough. I’m not so oblivious as to get into an argument about libertarianism / anarchism at this point; you’re clearly annoyed.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:29 am
That’s a bit harsh / unfairly dismissive. I don’t deny the ideology on some level, but I think you overstate mine while failing to recognize your own.
April 17th, 2008 at 11:51 am
“The whole reason I think we need the government is to do stuff that is inappropriate/unrealistic/ineffective for people to do as individuals.”
The argument for this usually pertains to public goods and free rider dilemmas. I don’t think the issue discussed here falls into that category.
This argument has always been rather fallacious, because the government is only made up of individuals who strongly enough believe in the immorality of this or that pet grievance. Quite evidently there are forces wishing to direct the rescue of children, in or out of government.
April 17th, 2008 at 11:56 am
“Another problem is that dysfunctional parents are probably more likely to come from dysfunctional communities. For instance, the religious nutcases who let their daughter go without insulin probably do not live next door to you or me. They likely live next door to other religious nutcases who reinforce and validate their tragically misbegotten line of thinking.”
Remember, the root of much of this dysfunction lies in the outlaw status of many of these communities. I’m thinking, of course, of polygyny, much in the news lately. Being pushed to the margin attracts people with marginal personalities, much as the drug war attracts assholes with nothing to lose and no cooperation enhancing behavior traits.
April 17th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I believe this article, from a refreshingly anti-universalist perspective, really gets to the heart of the matter:
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/rights.html
April 17th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Mona, you should read this and factor it into your article on polygamy. I can’t think of a better argument for state intervention in reproductive freedom than this kind of travesty. Should parents have the right to produce seizure-ridden children with severe metabolic disorders and an IQ of 25?
April 18th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
mtraven: Thanks for the link. I will likely incorporate it, but almost certainly will forget to credit you.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
This is rather timely:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080419/ap_on_re_us/polygamist_retreat
So, all 400+ kids will continue to be detained by the state, and undergo genetic tests. If this were some “in” group, there’d be widespread outrage. But because they are some reclusive wierdo Mormons, so be it.
This line is telling:
The state of Texas argued it should be allowed to keep the children because the sect’s teaching encourages girls younger than 18 to enter spiritual marriages with older men and produce as many children as possible. Its attorneys argued that the culture put all the girls at risk and potentially turned the boys into future predators.
Wow. Let’s pray an alien power with the ability to round up all non-Mormon American kids will not hold them indefinitely on grounds of a generally bad culture.
April 18th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I don’t get it. There are certainly a lot of tough calls when it comes to state interventions into family life, but extracting children from a bunch of inbred, genetically-defective, child-raping polygamists is not really one of them.
Maybe a more interesting question is, if you are a libertarian of some sort, what should be your attitude to authoritarian cults? If everyone who joined did so as an adult of their own free and rational will, that would be one thing, but how can children born and raised in such an environment be said to be exercising their natural rights?
April 18th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Well, it’s collective punishment, pure and simple. Is EVERY parent to be punished, and their children, crying to be rejoined with said parent, likewise punished?
“Authoritarian” is simply a name. Conceivably millions of parents across the nation could be tagged with that. Unless there is evidence of physical abuse in the case of every parent, it’s simply illiberal and, well, AUTHORITARIAN to continue to detain these kids.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:55 am
An under-discussed aspect of the FLDS situation here.
April 20th, 2008 at 11:22 am
More evidence of the authoritarian nature of the FLDS may be found here, and in followup posts. An excerpt:
April 20th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
M.Traven,
Even as the children say “I WANT TO GO HOME”, and the parents wholeheartedly concur, the mutual desire of each to be reunited is obstructed by for-your-own-good-arguments based on a reading of “generally undesirable culture” from a mainstream perspective. As Hall and Oates said, I can’t go for that.
And that part about a lack of educational choices is a laugh. Who has that out in the “real world”?
I’m a pluralist liberal / plumb-line libertarian. Someone who has influenced me a great deal here is political philosopher Chandran Kukathas.
Interestingly, here’s a rally staged by children of polygamists, supporting the legalization of their lifestyle and an end to harrasment by the state:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/20/ap/national/mainD8JK2O600.shtml
Oh, those poor brainwashed fools…
April 20th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Dain, excellent points. And my polygamy post is now up.