A conservative argument
Sumana found, and was impressed by, an argument against arguments for gay marriage whose author claims that it isn't quite an argument against gay marriage. Some people, including Sumana, are making much of the fact that this argument was posted by a libertarian blogger. (Their reasons for making much of this are quite varied.) I wanted to point out that, although this argument may have been written by a libertarian blogger, it is a conservative argument, not a libertarian argument. (I know that it's been argued that libertarian arguments are conservative arguments.)
This is recognized enthusiastically by some of the conservative commenters on the post in question, who commend Jane Galt on, well, making a conservative argument. See this example or this example and (sort of) this example from a "moderate" skeptic of libertarianism.
Indeed, Jane Galt herself starts out by saying that this is a conservative argument against liberal and libertarian arguments.
And later on she quotes Chesterton:
But as G.K. Chesterton points out, people who don't see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
Now, of course, this can turn into a sort of precautionary principle that prevents reform from ever happening. That would be bad; all sorts of things need changing all the time, because society and our environment change. But as a matter of principle, it is probably a bad idea to let someone go mucking around with social arrangements, such as the way we treat unwed parenthood, if their idea about that institution is that "it just growed". You don't have to be a rock-ribbed conservative to recognise that there is something of an evolutionary process in society: institutional features are not necessarily the best possible arrangement, but they have been selected for a certain amount of fitness.
This argument is interesting, but it is not a libertarian argument. It is a conservative argument. Libertarian and conservative commenters on this thread are right to agree that it cuts directly against a wide variety of libertarian arguments on a wide variety of issues. If you like this argument, or this style of argument, you like a conservative argument.
There is a disagreement in libertarianism (among the many) between what I might call consequentialist and nonconsequentialist libertarianism. (I was once part of a discussion with Robin Hanson about what to call the ideas on either side of a similar disagreement.) We could also call the nonconsequentialists "radical individualist", "moralist", etc. The nonconsequentialists believe that freedom, as they understand it, is an end in itself, and, if they are honest, should not assume that freedom will necessarily lead to other good things, such as health, happiness, harmony, progress, or whatever. The consequentialists believe or argue that freedom, as they understand it, gets you somewhere, that it works, that it is a way of accomplishing goals for society.
Consequentialist libertarians might start to sympathize with social conservatives, and indeed there is a great deal of consequentialist discussion of family in Jane Galt's post. I have said for years (from since when I was a radical libertarian) that families and the status of children are one of the deepest sources of paradox and internal conflict in libertarianism, and in other kinds of political thought that aspire to radicalism.
Partly, I think this is because most people have experience being somebody's child and being in some kind of family, and they have ideas and attitudes about family that they learned from that experience, and sometimes in opposition to that experience, prior to and apart from any kind of political ideal. So you can see oddities like people who are otherwise radical advocates of free expression -- "for adults" -- simply assuming that children have no independent rights to free speech or access to information.
This is one reason that I was fascinated by George Lakoff's account of political ideas as being informed most by analogies to family life. Unfortunately, Lakoff describes only two ways of thinking about families, and his discussion of why those two ways are the only important ways seems cursory to me. (I think that, in practice, it's because those ways are the most culturally powerful, and because Lakoff, at least, believes that each of those ways is closely associated with one of the two powerful U.S. political parties. If he's right, they are the most important to understand for someone who wants to understand or influence mainstream U.S. politics. But that doesn't mean that they are the only existing or possible ideas.)
Of course, real people (though they may well subscribe to either of Lakoff's "strict father" or "nurturant parent" models) have ideas about families that are more detailed and elaborate than the two approaches Lakoff describes. And political radicals from many points of view do want to change or create alternatives to the family as we think we have known it.
I think consequentialist libertarians may come to think of families in social conservative terms (even if there are arguments that might have lead them in another direction) and may indeed be led to become social conservatives. Families -- inside and outside Lakoff's models -- do seem to be the paramount battleground and the source of paradox, conflict, and anomaly in political ideology.
