Read Andrew, or rather one of his readers, on Second Life and the increasingly concerning (but here, mostly perceptive) Michael Gerson:
Gerson writes:
"But Second Life is more consequential than its moral failures. It is, in fact, a large-scale experiment in libertarianism. Its residents can do and be anything they wish. There are no binding forms of community, no responsibilities that aren't freely chosen and no lasting consequences of human actions. In Second Life, there is no human nature at all, just human choices."
A world without consequences? That's not libertarianism, it's liberalism.
Well, liberalism is life where the only consequence of there not being consequences is the proactive corrective of concentrated public power. Second Life -- or the convivial junkheaping of human 'nature' with human 'choices', anyway -- is, yes, cultural libertarianism. Of course, it should be of no surprise that this 'works' best of all in fake life, and it should be most distressing to speculate upon how popular the surrender of increasing portions of real life in favor of fake life will become for exactly that reason. On the other hand, such a turn might do the best and most humane job of thinning the herd, leaving real life to those who 'value' it for reasons incidental to 'choice'. Yet somehow fake life, I bet, will get realer and realer the bigger it gets, until finally it starts initiating events in the real world, not reacting to them.
Update 1: Will Wilkinson hates Gerson's "idiotic column," indicting "censorious moralizing scolds" everywhere. Another great victim of the Bush Administration has been popular confidence in the idea that a human being can both hold people in contempt -- or mere disapproval -- for their behavior while somehow mustering the incredible restraint necessary not to fight with every fiber of his or her being to ban that behavior nationwide and start making arrests.
Update 2: Matt Yglesias links to Brink Lindsey, godfather of the correct conclusion that cultural libertarianism is the "soft consensus" on top in this country and the incorrect conclusion that this is not stinging proof of the pathetic depths to which we Libertine Bourgeois have sunken. Spring break is the new free lunch, yes, but America still crawls with moralizing scolds, to varying degrees censorious or polite, and the silent soft consensus remains 'social democratic' -- populist, protectionist, instinctively arrayed against cultural libertarianism more than any other strain. No surprise Hillary, very weak here, has brought on Gephardt.
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