Abolition + Picking Crops

Well, I’m all for the advancement of colored people, but I do not believe they should advance all the way to the front of this office.

This post is a satirical rebuttal of Bryan Caplan’s article ‘Unschooling + Math’. I want to showcase how his article reads to someone who believes uncompromisingly that children should be free. Read his first, then mine. Imagine that the following was written by someone from the early 1860s who almost, but not quite, advocates freedom for slaves, chiming in on the debate around abolition.

One popular alternative to slavery is called ‘freedom’. As with all practices, this one varies. But essentially, freedom means the slave does what he wants. He works on whatever he wants, for as long as he wants. If he asks you to teach him something, you teach him. Yet if he decides to go on long walks all day, the principled response based on freedom is: ‘Let him.’

Almost every slaveholder is horrified by the idea of freedom. Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright says that slaves only flee captivity because they are mentally ill. Even most slaves reject the idea of freedom. Advocates insist, however, that it works, and psychologists eloquently defend its merits. According to advocates of freedom, a slave is naturally curious. Once freed, a former slave won’t just learn basic skills, they argue – he’ll ultimately find a calling.

At first, freedom sounds like social-desirability bias run amok: ‘Oh sure, every slave loves to learn, it’s just slaveholders who fail them!’ And I hate social-desirability bias, so I’m tempted to reject freedom.

What I hate even more, though, is refusing to calm down and look at the facts. Fact: I’ve met and talked to dozens of adults who were born not as slaves but as free men. Overall, they appear at least as productive as typical slaves. Indeed, as psychologists predict, free men are especially likely to turn their passions into useful work. Admittedly, some of them are flaky – then again, so are a lot of free people. Upon closer inspection, there’s only one glaring issue with them.

They suck at picking crops! In my experience, even free men with strong bodies tend to be weak on the field. On the field, I say! Work anyone should be able to do. And most of them have no knowledge of more advanced crop-picking techniques.

Staunch advocates of freedom will reply: So what? Who needs crop-picking skills? In all honesty: anyone who wants to pursue a vast range of occupations. Owning a plantation requires knowledge of how to pick crops. Overseeing crop pickers requires that knowledge, too. So does being a crop-harvesting engineer or a field inspector.

Won’t free men who would greatly benefit from picking crops choose to learn how to do so on their own? I’m afraid that would rarely happen. The reasons are twofold:

First, picking crops is extremely unfun for almost everyone. Only a handful of slaves really enjoy it. I’m a strong guy, and I’ve picked acres of crops, yet I’ve never really liked it.

Second, picking crops is highly cumulative. You need to master the basics before you move on to more advanced crop-picking techniques. You need to choose the right crop, prepare the soil for it, plant the seeds, monitor the growth, use proper irrigation and fertilizer, and so on. And you need to build the requisite strength in your youth. If you are free first and then decide you want to pick crops when you are older and weaker, good luck.

What’s the best response? Given this information, mainstream critics of freedom will dismiss freedom entirely. And staunch advocates will no doubt stick to their guns. I, on the other hand, propose a keyhole solution. I call it: Abolition + Picking Crops.

The meaning of Abolition + Picking Crops is simple: impose a single mandate on free men. Whether you like it or not, you have to pick crops for 1-2 hours every single day. No matter how boring you find it, you’re too bad at picking crops to decide that you don’t want to pursue a career in crop picking. If you don’t pick crops now, you won’t be able to later.

While most people don’t end up working on the field at all, ignorance of basic crop-picking still closes too many doors. And when strong free men don’t know advanced crop-picking skills, they forfeit about half of all career opportunities.

We should have a strong presumption against slavery – even the literal slavery between a slaveholder and his slave. ‘Maybe the slave is right and the slaveholder is wrong’ is such an underrated thought. But picking crops is more important. I don’t want the government to force slaveholders to teach their slaves how to pick crops. Instead, slaveholders should require their slaves to learn how to pick crops. Guilt-free.

I hope my article shows that Caplan is a tyrant who has no idea what freedom means. He presents himself as someone who cares about freedom, as this reasonable guy who wants to strike a balance between the approach of “staunch” advocates of freedom and that of its critics. As a result, his primary concern isn’t freedom at all. Instead, he wants to grant freedom on his terms: as his child, do math for 2 hours and he will grant you freedom for the rest of the day. He wants to prescribe predefined goals and assuage parents’ guilt for using coercion. His concern for their guilt (presumably especially his own) rather than children’s freedom betrays him. Whenever someone from the 1860s showed concern for the guilt some slaveholders may have felt for whipping their slaves, rather than showing concern for the slaves who were being whipped, one immediately knew whose side that person was on, no matter how much he pretended to care about freedom. Same goes for anyone’s accidental confession in not immediately recognizing the pretense: you could tell they were on the perpetrator’s side.

The opening quote of this article, from Mad Men, illustrates this dynamic. The show is set in the 1960s, in the middle of the civil-rights movement. The partner of an advertising firm, Bertram Cooper, is on his way out of the office when he notices that a black employee now sits at the front desk. So he approaches his office manager, Joan Harris. The full scene goes:

Cooper: I just wanted to say I was on my way to the club and I noticed there’s been a change in reception.
Harris: I had to shuffle the girls.
Cooper: Well, I’m all for the national advancement of colored people, but I do not believe they should advance all the way to the front of this office. People can see her from the elevator.
Harris: I’m sorry. Do you want me to dismiss her based on the color of her skin?
Cooper: I said nothing of the kind. I’m merely suggesting a rearrangement of your rearrangement.
Harris: Suggesting?
Cooper: Requesting. Leaves.
Harris: Covers her face in disgust.

Because he wants to make exceptions, you can tell immediately that Cooper does not actually support the “national advancement of colored people”. He’s lying, whether he realizes it or not. It’s just like Caplan pretending when he says “We should have a strong presumption against paternalism […]. The value of math, however, is great enough to overcome this presumption.” (Link removed.) Caplan might as well be saying: ‘I’m all for the liberation of children, but I do not believe they should be liberated to the point they don’t have to do math!’

Yet Mad Men highlights more than that. While virtually all of the show’s viewers recognize the horror in how black people were treated back then, viewers fail to see that same horror in how our treatment of children has not meaningfully changed since. I suspect it’s not even something the creators of the show intended to convey – but they did, to some. In several ways, black people were better off even in the 60s than children are today: Harris strongly implies that what Cooper requests is illegal, but there is no law against forced education of children to this day. On the contrary, in many jurisdictions, the law demands such force. Even the UN demands it. In addition, I understand that psychological and scientific ‘findings’ justifying segregation were receding by the 60s, yet Caplan references both psychology and medical science to justify – and shift responsibility for – his desire to deny children freedom. Also, Cooper doesn’t pretend that his ‘request’ is for the black employee’s own good, whereas Caplan does just that when it comes to children.

Overriding a child’s preferences for his benefit is a contradiction in terms. If learning math is such a good idea, persuade your child. If you fail, then not learning math is his prerogative, just like it is yours not to pick crops, even though people in the 1860s considered it an extremely useful skill. Free people will naturally learn whatever math their own unique problem situation requires, when it requires it, from the basics up to more advanced skills. The scope and timing is going to be different for everyone. But the reason most people don’t do that today is that teachers ruin their relationship with math: a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a teacher leaves children no other way to assert their freedom than to reject math, then that is what they will do, and the teacher has no right to be surprised or to complain.

Caplan writes about children: “Every day, like it or not, you have to do 1-2 hours of math. No matter how boring you find the subject, you’re too young to decide that you don’t want to pursue a career that requires math.” This isn’t just offensive to children, but even to mathematicians: to Caplan, math is not a wondrous area of exploration and creativity, but necessary toil – just like picking crops back in the 19th century. He says himself that he has “never really liked” the “piles” – piles! – of math he has done. Clearly, this has been a torturous experience for him, so why should the next generation be spared this coercion? Worse, he implies that some amount of force is warranted to impose his edict on children since he won’t let them disagree. So… how much force? Does he advocate yelling at one’s child? Maybe taking away privileges and toys? Withholding love and affection? Or would he go even further? He does not specify: bad ideas hide in the unstated, as philosopher Ayn Rand explains.¹ Just like the injustice and coercion hidden in Cooper’s ‘request’.

Freedom is indivisible and absolute. It allows no compromises whatsoever. You cannot balance freedom: it’s all or nothing. There are better and worse forms of slavery, but only one type of freedom. Caplan is a good example of the Randian insight that even the smallest compromise on basic principles or moral matters is a complete surrender:

If an individual holds mixed premises, his vices undercut, hamper, defeat, and ultimately destroy his virtues. What is the moral status of an honest man who steals once in a while?

An honest man who steals once in a while is not an honest man. A free man who has to pick crops 1-2 hours a day is not a free man. A free child who has to learn math 1-2 hours a day is not a free child. The whole point of unschooling is (or should be!) freedom, not productivity, career choice, or “merits”, or that freedom “works” or whatever. After all, the reasoning behind abolition was not that free men are more productive than slaves (although usually they are). Mix freedom and forced math lessons and you end up with no freedom at all. Like abolition + picking crops, Caplan’s rotten concept “Unschooling + Math”, which he dresses up with the term “keyhole solution”, is a textbook example of mixed premises, and so his vices destroy his virtues. He derides the principled, uncompromising stance toward freedom as “staunch”. What is a “staunch” opponent of slavery but right?

In moral matters, one has to aim for nothing less than absolute purity. Those of us who have fully understood and integrated the moral truth that the universality of freedom applies to children just as much as it does to adults, recognize Caplan’s error with lightning speed – and judge accordingly.

If society progresses in the way I hope, Caplan’s article will age exceptionally poorly. As it deserves.