As I’ve mentioned before, the Washington, D.C. personality type I most loathe are the Earnest people. These tend to be conservatives (though there are some in the public health crowd, too) who speak with an air of smug superiority about how other people should be living their lives. They speak with quiet voices, almost a whisper, and reek of moral rectitude. They tend not to back up what they say. Rather, they simply assert things, as if anyone with any moral standing at all couldn’t possibly disagree with them. They use phrases like “permanent things,” “what really matters,” and “grown-ups.”

The king of earnest is Michael Gerson, formerly President Bush’s top speech writer, now a columnist with the Washington Post. Gerson’s latest belch onto the WaPo op-ed page says the interactive game Second Life is nothing more than the freak show Gomorrah we’d get if libertarians ran the country:

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.

And what do people choose? Well, there is some good live music, philanthropic fundraising, even a few virtual churches and synagogues. But the main result is the breakdown of inhibition. Second Life, as you’d expect, is highly sexualized in ways that have little to do with respect or romance. There are frequent outbreaks of terrorism, committed by online anarchists who interrupt events, assassinate speakers (who quickly reboot from the dead) and vandalize buildings. There are strip malls everywhere, pushing a relentless consumerism. And there seems to be an inordinate number of vampires, generally not a sign of community health.

Gerson doesn’t seem to know the difference between anarchism and libertarianism. Or, for that matter, fantasy and reality. Or he does, and he’s being deliberately obtuse. I don’t know of any version of libertarianism that approves of murder, sex with minors, rape, or wanton destruction of property. Well, other than the straw-made, oversexed, evil-goateed, nipple-ringed libertarianism that apparently haunts Michael Gerson’s thoughts.

It’s always amusing how when libertarians say things like “SWAT teams shouldn’t be kicking doors down at 3am to arrest pot smokers,” or “committed gay people should be allowed to marry,” earnest conservatives like Gerson skip ahead to visions of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, where Starbucks sells handjobs like lattes, elementary schools sell heroin from vending machines, and goat-fucking goes mainstream.

Also, does Gerson not understand the difference between the Internet and reality? As seriously as some people take Second Life, there are few real life consequences for your actions in cyberspace (though this increasingly is not the case–thank Gerson for taxes on virtual commerce!). Anonymity changes the way people behave. People who leave hateful comments in Internet discussion threads, for example, do so because they can get away with it with little corresponding damage to their real-life reputations and relationships. The vast majority of them don’t talk to their friends, family, or colleagues that way. Likewise, the rapists, vandals, pillagers, and killers in Second Life don’t behave that way in their normal lives, and the reason isn’t because we have faith-based federal grants, Americorps, and school prayer here in meatspace. It’s because social norms (which arise spontaneously, and exist without laws, too) and the lack of anonymity make it difficult to be antisocial in real life without being an outcast, and losing your social standing. Yes, we also have laws that demand you respect others’ person and property, and those laws would of course still exist in a libertarian society, too. So no. Legalizing pot won’t turn America into Beyond Thunderdome.

Well, there’s all of that and the fact that no one in Second Life feels any pain. And when you kill someone–hang with me on this one, Mike–they can come back to life. Isn’t at least a little possible that immortality, not hedonist libertarianism, is what’s really at play here?

The weird thing is, Gerson also thinks libertarianism equates with nativism. Which, once again, most versions of libertarianism reject (Ron Paul notwithstanding). Nativists want laws hindering the freedom to travel, trade, and engage with other countries. They limit liberty. They don’t expand it.

All of which suggests to me that Michael Gerson really hasn’t the slightest idea what libertarianism actually is–or he does, and is deliberately misstating its basic principles. Instead, he assigns to libertarianism everything he finds tacky and distasteful, from hating Mexicans to shagging an anthropomorphic polar bear at a seedy Second Life motel.

Slight tangent: Given that Gerson was the man most responsible for crafting President Bush’s message for much of the last six years, his hunger for a meddlesome federal government isn’t terribly surprising. Still, it’s always a wake-up call to hear such a formerly high-ranking GOP official use phrases like “relentless consumerism.” I remember when only leftists used that kind of language.

Also what’s wrong with relentless consumerism? Wasn’t it President Bush, ostensibly using Gerson’s words, who told us after September 11 to show up the terrorists by going out and buying lots of crap?

I guess instead of queuing up for the iPhone, in Gerson’s Earnest Second Life, you’d get points for staying home to memorize the New Testament, getting the neighborhood community club together to scrub graffiti off the town bridge, then, when boredom sets in, engaging in some robust calisthenics to stave off erections.

So yeah. Earnest people annoy me.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 3:56 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.