What I mean by describing myself as a Christian Deist is illuminated by the following two articles, my discovery of which online was prompted by my discovery in a bookstore yesterday of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief:

Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas

On Leo Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief

I happen to “believe,” based on my own fallible reasoning, that Jesus, inter alia, was born of the Virgin Mary and rose from the dead, but I don’t pretend to believe those things beyond a reasonable doubt, and to the contrary am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that “salvation” doesn’t depend on such things, but rather on realizing the divinity within and without. When at around age eighteen I was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church a couple weeks after being baptized, I chose Thomas, who is described in the Gospel of John as doubting that Jesus rose from the dead until seeing the risen Christ for himself, as my confirmation name. Nowadays, more than two decades later, I no longer believe in the authority of the Church, and am inclined to believe that the most “authoritative” of the gospels is the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, according to which Jesus said, among other things:

If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.

. . .

Don’t lie, and don’t do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed.

. . .

Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is. Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.

. . .

Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.

. . .

I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, because they are blind in their hearts and do not see, for they came into the world empty, and they also seek to depart from the world empty. But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will change their ways.

. . .

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.

. . .

Be passersby.

. . .

Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.

. . .

Look to the living one as long as you live, otherwise you might die and then try to see the living one, and you will be unable to see.

. . .

Those who know all, but are lacking in themselves, are utterly lacking.

. . .

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.

. . .

I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

. . .

Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father’s light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light.

. . .

When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!

. . .

How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.

. . .

Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don’t you understand that the one who made the inside is also the one who made the outside?

. . .

Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.

. . .

The heavens and the earth will roll up in your presence, and whoever is living from the living one will not see death.

. . .

[The kingdom] will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.

The first Leftists were a group of newly elected representatives to the National Constituent Assembly at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. They were labeled “Leftists” merely because they happened to sit on the left side in the French Assembly.

The legislators who sat on the right side were referred to as the Party of the Right, or Rightists. The Rightists or “reactionaries” stood for a highly centralized national government, special laws and privileges for unions and various other groups and classes, government economic monopolies in various necessities of life, and a continuation of government controls over prices, production, and distribution.

. . .

The majority of the original Party of the Left had been opposed to concentrated power regardless of who exercised it. But the violent revolutionists in their midst, led by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, were opposed to concentrated power only so long as someone else exercised it. Robespierre, who represented himself as spokesman for the people, first said that the division of the powers of government was a good thing when it diminished the authority of the king. But when Robespierre himself became the leader, he claimed that the division of the powers of government would be a bad thing now that the power belonged “to the people.”

. . .

Most of the original Leftists protested. So they too were soon repudiated in the general terror that was called liberty. But since the name Leftist had become identified with the struggle of the individual against the tyranny of government, the new tyrants continued to use that good name for their own purposes. This was a complete perversion of its former meaning.

I revere Leo Tolstoy as a great and exemplary man not only for his principled anarchism and non-dogmatic Christianity, but also for his enthusiastic endorsement later in life of the “Single Tax” advocated by Henry George, as described by Tolstoy’s personal friend and secretary Victor Lebrun:

In giving his extreme and sympathetic attention to other thinkers and writers, the great Tolstoy differed essentially from his colleagues — the geniuses of all countries and all centuries. But nothing shows the complete honesty and surprising liberty of his spirit more than his attitude towards Henry George.

It was at the beginning of 1885 that he happened to lay his hands on the books of the great American sociologist. By then the moral and social doctrine of the thinker had been solidly and definitely established. Man’s supreme and unique duty was to perfect himself morally and not to co-operate with the wrong. Thus the social problem would be automatically solved when the majority has understood the true meaning of pure Christianity and when it has learned to abstain from all crimes which are frequently and commonly committed. All reasoning about the precise nature of the citizens’ rights, about laws, about the organisation of governmental compulsion for their protection is anathema to the great thinker.

But … hardly had Tolstoy had a glance at “Social Problems” and “Progress and Poverty” and he was completely captivated by George’s outstanding exposition.

. . .

And the thinker does not hesitate any longer. From this encounter on he resolutely and enthusiastically takes George’s side, and to his last breath for a quarter of a century, he makes every effort without relaxation to make his discovery known.

Georgetown professor John Hasnas wrote in The Obviousness of Anarchy a couple things I’ve tried to say on this blog:

Anarchy refers to a society without a central political authority. But it is also
used to refer to disorder or chaos. This constitutes a textbook example of Orwellian
newspeak in which assigning the same name to two different concepts effectively
narrows the range of thought. For if lack of government is identified with the lack of
order, no one will ask whether lack of government actually results in a lack of order.
And this uninquisitive mental attitude is absolutely essential to the case for the state.
For if people were ever to seriously question whether government is really productive
of order, popular support for government would almost instantly collapse.

. . .

No one believes that we can transition from a world of states to
anarchy instantaneously. No reasonable anarchist advocates the total dissolution of
government tomorrow. Once we turn our attention to the question of how to move
incrementally from government to anarchy, it becomes apparent that national defense
would be one of the last governmental functions to be de-politicised. If my argument
for anarchy is flawed and anarchy is not a viable method of social organisation, this
will undoubtedly be revealed long before doing away with national defense becomes
an issue. On the other hand, to the extent that the gradual transition from government
to anarchy is successful, the need for national defense continually lessens.

David Gross at The Picket Line links to a good meditation on the dangers of lifestyle purity perfectionism by Claire Wolfe, who writes:

Kitty Antonik Wakfer whacks all of us who say we support WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, but who haven’t cancelled our Amazon and PayPal accounts or cut up our MasterCards and Visas.

. . .

Now, I don’t know Kitty Antonik Wakfer. She may be a terrific human being. I hope she is. Her heart’s in the right place.

But I would ask all the “more pure than thou” freedomistas of the world: Have you walked a few years in my shoes?

. . .

For 15 years, I increasingly lived according to my principles. I did those hard things. Went without numbers and ID. Became an exile in my own land. Got by with a little help from my friends (and sometimes a lot of help from them). And every one of those friends was less “pure” than I; but they should kick my ass if I ever have enough nerve to damn them for their lack of purity.

. . .

I no longer live like that. Got tired. Went broke. Became weary of being an outcast — weary of knowing I’d have to fight through every little tiny thing that others take for granted. I’m older and ready for a little calm and comfort. I don’t regret one minute of trying to live free. I’m glad I did it. But it didn’t make the world freer. And for me, that time is done.

. . .

Thing is, even in my most hardcore days, I wasn’t as “pure” as some folks. Go to the Mental Militia forums and look up the postings of suijurisfreeman if you really want to see hardcore. And I defy anybody to find me one, single freedomista on this earth who never violates a principle — never pays a sales tax for a purchase, lives on property which is neither taxed nor subsidized, totally ignores the existence of the state and all its works, drives boldly down the highway sans license and registration and doesn’t bother to stop when the red light flashes in the rear window because to stop would be to obey the unjust state. Show me the person who goes through life without a single compromise of principle. Show me.

. . .

And unless you are that perfectly pure person whose life is the epitome of principle every moment of every day, then don’t go around condemning others for failing to take a step that you consider proper and necessary — but that also doesn’t cause you any huge inconvenience.

As I mentioned yesterday, a while back I tried to flesh out a variety of political philosophy that I whimsically dubbed “topianism.”

I meant the name to highlight the distinction between it and utopian political philosophies (meaning, most all of the rest of them, including the mainstream ones that pass for conventional wisdom) — that is to say that it’s not aiming
at organizing society in some ideal way, but in understanding and navigating society as it is in the here-and-now (not in the outopos where it will never be, or the eutopos where we might ideally project it to be, but in this topos right here where we’re standing). I’m not crazy about the name “topianism,” but I need some sort of tag to attach to the idea while I look for a better one.

Topianism is almost more of an ethical code than a political philosophy, except that it has a component with profound political consequences: its claim that there is no second standard (or set of standards) by which to judge acts in the political sphere — instead, a single standard applies to everyone. . . .

Topianism bears a lot of resemblance to existentialism because of its emphasis on personal responsibility and on avoiding the temptation to deflect or deny this responsibility.

When you talk about responsibility, you sometimes end up getting into the tangle over free will. . . .

Be all that as it may, most of us feel that we inhabit a world in which we choose some actions and some things just happen to us and in which there is a big difference between the two. This is crucial to our sense of being living
participants in existence and not just spectators along for the ride.

The existentialist tradition did a lot of work identifying some of the ways we conveniently pretend to be spectators instead of participants from time to time in order to try to cheat our way out of confronting our need to decide
and our responsibility for the results of our decisionmaking.

Topianism emphasizes how this works (or rather doesn’t work) in the political sphere. It insists that you cannot displace an individual human decision onto an institution, a hierarchical order, a rule, or anything of the sort. In other words, you cannot say “I did it because it was the law,” or “I did it because it was my job,” or “I did it because it was an order,” or “I did it because it got more votes than the alternative” as a way of trying to mean “the choice I made to do it wasn’t really my choice.”

In its most uncompromising form, topianism won’t even let you foist your decisions off on rules of thumb, ethical principles, or topianism itself. You can refer to such things in the course of explaining your decisionmaking, but you can’t try to make such things bear any of the weight of your actual decisionmaking or shoulder any of the responsibility for your actions.

It is an anarchist philosophy, but not because it preaches that The State should be abolished, but because it asserts that The State, as an independent moral agent capable of making decisions and shouldering responsibility, does not exist. The attitude of a topian to The State is not like the attitude of an assassin to the Emperor but like the attitude of an athiest to God.

Read the whole thing. See also this letter by Leo Tolstoy, reproduced by David Gross, expressing a similar understanding.

Tolstoy said it better:

All men are brought up to the habit of obeying the laws of the state before everything. The whole existence of modern times is defined by laws. A man marries and is divorced, educates his children, and even (in many countries) professes his religious faith in accordance with the law. What about the law then which defines our whose existence? Do men believe in it? Do they regard it as good? Not at all. In the majority of cases people of the present time do not believe in the justice of the law, they despise it, but still they obey it. It was very well for the men of the ancient world to observe their laws. They firmly believed that their law (it was generally of a religious character) was the only just law, which everyone ought to obey. But is it so with us? we know and cannot help knowing that the law of our country is not the one eternal law; that it is only one of the many laws of different countries, which are equally imperfect, often obviously wrong and unjust, and are criticised from every point of view in the newspapers. The Jew might well obey his laws, since he had not the slightest doubt that God had written them with his finger; the Roman too might well obey the laws which he thought had been dictated by the nymph Egeria. Men might well observe the laws if they believed the Tzars who made them were God’s anointed, or even if they thought they were the work of assemblies of lawgivers who had the power and the desire to make them as good as possible. But we all know how our laws are made. We have all been behind the scenes, we know that they are the product of covetousness, trickery, and party struggles; that there is not and cannot be any real justice in them. And so modern men cannot believe that obedience to civic or political laws can satisfy the demands of the reason or of human nature. Men have long ago recognized that it is irrational to obey a law the justice of which is very doubtful, and so they cannot but suffer in obeying a law which they do not accept as judicious and binding.

(Scalia has said as much too, taking it to an absurd and self-contradictory conclusion.)

But such an understanding, although necessary, is not sufficient for a real anarchist. After all, a relatively enlightened man might recognize that the modern State is of no authority and yet still support its dominance and power as a “necessary evil.”

Anarchy, etymologically, means leaderlessness. [Thomas Knapp notes here that he understands anarchy to entail “rulerlessness,” not “leaderlessness,” and that there’s a difference. My clarification is here.] Anarchism supposes that such “leaderlessness” rather than the Hobbesian dominance of a leading power is the fundamental condition of peace and justice. It therefore entails in the political context the distribution and balance of power, as well as the rejection of authority. An “ideal” world of individuals in which power was completely distributed and balanced equally among them (i.e., a world approximating albeit more ideal than the “state of nature”) would be a world in which rights were absolutely secure, since no individual would have the power to overcome the rights of any other. But in the real world one man will have more power than another and enough to overcome his rights, or may conspire with other men to do so. To guard against this threat men may associate or contract with others to balance the threat. But if their true purpose in doing so is only to secure their own rights, and not to conspire to violate rights themselves, their associations will tend to maintain (both internally and externally) as much of the state of nature’s indigenous “leaderlessness” and equilibrium as possible. Randy Barnett has suggested one way in which this tendency might work out in the real world:

Some libertarians prefer a different legal structure, one that promises to work better than the structure provided by the Constitution. Such a structure would take the principles or strategies embodied in the Constitution farther than did the Framers. These principles are (1) reciprocity of power between the ruler and the ruled that is supposed to be accomplished by voting, (2) checks and balances on power that are supposed to result from federalism and separation of powers, and (3) the power of exit that is provided by free emigration and, formerly, the power of secession. These libertarians merely propose two itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie changes to the status quo: First, end the government’s power to put its competitors out of business by force (which violates the freedom to contract of those who wish to provide and obtain such services); second, end the government’s power to confiscate its income by force (which violates the freedom from contract of those whose property is taken without their consent). Not much really.

What these libertarians hope and expect would result from these two changes is the evolution of a polycentric constitutional order in which one would subscribe to a legal system of one’s choice as today one subscribes to cell phone service, health and auto insurance, or private security providers. The ability of buyers to withhold their patronage and payments from sellers is the most powerful form of reciprocity. Having competing separate legal systems would provide far more effective checks and balances. And simply by switching justice and law enforcement providers, individuals would be able to assert the power of exit without leaving home. Of course, there is much more to be said about all this, which I explain in far greater detail in my book, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 1998).

(John Hasnas has suggested another way.)

But how might we ever get to a point where the United States government could be taken down to a size reflecting its true nature as a merely human organization like other human organizations, and its power balanced by other powers in society, to the end that our rights might be better secured? First and foremost, by speaking, or at least not denying, the truth. To that end, there’s a lot of speech we could do without:

Flags

The Pledge of Allegiance

The National Anthem

Oaths to support the Constitution

Parades for police officers or soldiers killed in the line of duty (since we don’t have parades for private security guards killed in the line of duty)

Voting

Addressing judges as “Your Honor”

Etc.