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The previous articles in the series were on the Twin Towers massacre and its aftermath:

Defense of Liberty
Defense of Liberty: The Contours of Victory
Defense of Liberty: Two Articles On Anti-Terrorist Policy by Peikoff
Defense of Liberty: Just Intervention
Defense of Liberty. Philosophy: Who Needs It?
Defense of Liberty: Attila In a Boeing
Defense of Liberty. National Self-Determination: An International Political Lie
Defense of Liberty: Foreign Policy and Natural Law
Defense of Liberty: Freedom and War

This article is a rehash of the comments I made on this thread: Year Ahead: The future of multiculturalism.

Another article of mine devoted to critique of libertarian approach to cultural issues is Pursuit of Liberty: The Culture War and Individualism.

Canaletto (1697-1768). San Marco Square.

"It is a common fallacy (advanced by both liberals and libertarians) to detect a religious underpinning in a cultural bias of a community, and reject the bias on that ground. The truth is that the dominant religion or religions dictate the community standard of offensiveness, and the standard, with all its inherent biases, rules."

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It is a common fallacy that libertarians try to detect a religious underpinning in a cultural bias of a community, and reject the bias on that ground.
-- It is, in most cases, forced on them.

The truth is that the dominant religion or religions attempt, all to often, -- to dictate the community standard of offensiveness, and the standard, with all its inherent biases, then rules. - Virtually without local appeal. -- This is not how a republican form of government works, -- or should work.

States or localities do have the power to set & regulate community standards. --- But these standards cannot violate the individuals rights to life, liberty, and property without due process.

- Thus, when an individual is charged with violating a community 'standard', or regulation to any more than a minor offense, a misdemenor, s/he must be given a trial by jury.
Such a jury must be able to judge both the law & facts of the case, and be so instructed.

This is not being done under our present system.

Another example of a cultural message that violates rights while not involving initiation of physical force. Free Republic had its (or Jim Robinson's to be more precise) rights violated by some disruptors. The nature of an Internet forum is such that one can easily defy a ban, keep re-registering and disrupt threads with inane, rude or bandwidth-heavy messages. Jim ended up suing one such character. No matter how the case ended up, you would agree that it was a reasonable lawsuit, -- Jim had no recourse of his own to protect his rights as the forum owner. Well, if it was a reasonable lawsuit, there must be a reasonable law that regulates cultural disruptions, even though no physical obstruction or use of force accompanied the disruption.

Many forms of theft entail no initiation of physical force, yet libertarians claim to oppose these on principle. The above example though perhaps involves fraud, and so we could declare it covered by our opposition to the "initiation of force or fraud". I see the above as an example of theft, and not simply one of cultural disruption. Jim's house, and he need offer no reason for excluding anyone.

Nice article. If we presume that a libertarian society has a court system, it would have a courthouse and courthouse square. The idea that everything should be private and nothing public, doesn't seem to be tenable in the end. Such a society would have to have some mechanism for protecting itself against criminals. It would probably want to have this done in a public fashion, so that a dual burden is not imposed on the victims of crime.

The idea that one could completely do without public institutions reflects a departure from the "back to the founders" idea that many identified with libertarianism. The founders don't seem to be anti-statist enough for some libertarians. The problem is that societies with no sense of the public may find it hard to defend themselves against foreign or domestic enemies. They may also find it difficult to rise above the rivalries of clans, factions, or tribes to the kind of impartial sense of rights, duties and obligations that characterize freedom and modernity.

With regard to the specific question you address, it seems to have a lot to do with the modern concept of the public square and with contemporary patterns of migration. Prior to the 1960s a public square would likely contain a war memorial or other monument. It might well have contained a temporary creche or candle display sponsored by some non-governmental institution. It would probably would not have contained individual artists' self-expressions. This is I think something new. The older idea was that such sculptures were representative of the community's ideals.

If the idea of "the community" having ideas of its own has disappeared, one reason is that affluence has made us more individualistic. Another is that totalitarianism has made us more distrustful of such singlemindedness and more determined to assert that individualism.

The third reason is that recent immigration has done away with the idea that we could have any single "culture" -- though technology, media, and economics do a lot to make us more uniform. An earlier America or an earlier West could proclaim the naked public square because it was presumed that society was Christian anyway. In a more "ethnically diverse" land, rivalries between groups do tend to become disputes over the public square.

Libertarian societies tend to be successful at attracting people from many different cultural backgrounds. The problem is that once groups reach a certain critical mass, they want society to reflect their own group norms, or at least give more weight to them. This is the downfall of libertarian polities, and one saw such developments in Britain, Austria-Hungary and elsewhere at the beginning of the last century, after decades of relatively liberal (in the classical sense of the word) economic and political policies.

BTW, William Ebenstein's classic introductory work Today's Isms has been revised and reprinted by his son with a chapter on libertarianism.

In conclusion: any cultural expression in the public square that does not require special resource from the government, causes no physical obstruction of traffic or other cultural expressions, is rightful even in absence of unanimous consent, as long as it does not violate the community standard of offensiveness and does not cancel out other messages by its content.

Good essay. And you nicely brought out the problems inherent in a public square. But your proviso about "offensiveness" opens up an almost infinite source of disputes. Which we're living with now. I dislike having government be the instrument for deciding these things. But I haven't figured out another way.

How would you use these principals to resolve this debate?
FreeRepublic thread on a prison Chaplin who is a witch.
Which prison chaplain is witch?

read later

You commented on the thread that was an impetus for this one. Bump. (Others that commented there are on my regular bump list).

oooo.... good article

I'll give it a more thorough reading later. One should also consider that when you eliminate ALL content in the public square you are making a statement, i.e. NO religious display IS a religious statement. It is not possible for the public square to be absent (or neutral) of content. No content speaks volumes.

JW

Bump!

Keep-alive bump.

I thought these little things of mine were gone forever.

keep-alive bump