We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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If anybody needs a sobering insight into the mindset of the European elites, they need look no further than this staggering decision from an Italian Court.
“The case revolves around a wealthy family in the southern city of Naples, where the father is still paying some $680 a month in maintenance to a son who is in his 30s and has a university law degree”.
Seems that this low-life’s parents have to continue supporting him until he finds a job which is ‘to his liking’ (which, of course, will be never). Hardly an incentive to family-life in a country that already has a negative population growth.
Understandably, the father is less than best pleased:
“I feel disgust for a country that I love. It wasn’t always like this”
Do you think it might occur to him to stop voting for it? No, course not. Silly me.
I’m sorry but I cannot help myself. I am compelled to do these kinds of things and it’s all their fault really. They gave me the key to the castle and now I am running amok. It is late but I am awake and ready to wreak havoc.
Brian and I have agreed, through our interactions in the mind-numbingly prosaic two-dimensional world of reality, that we actually agree with other about what we mean. We remain, however, at loggerheads at how best to express what we mean.
I wonder if the lefties have this problem? Did they cross-swords with each other for years in the quest to find the appropriate linguistic tools with which to re-educate the bourgeoisie and dismantle the institutions of capitalism? Not ever having been a party to that party, I cannot say, but regardless of the procedures employed, they certainly managed to pick a winner in ‘multiculturalism’; a tool designed not to facilitate the voluntary interaction of free people but rather as a vehicle for spreading moral relativism.
The task of moral relativism was to abolish judgement. For it is by judgement that we conclude that a flushing toilet is absolutely better than crapping in a ditch; that veal parmesan is absolutely better than grubbing in the dirt for berries. It is judgement and the unfettered ability to use it that underpins our civilisation, not the other way around. Our culture is the collective expression of millions of private judgements; it is the canvas on which they are painted and shown off to an awestruck world.
Like all marxist tools, it has been employed with staggering success and the task of people like Brian and I is to blunt them and render them redundant. This is what we’re doing now, I hope.
The first stage of this process is to clarify exactly what the word ‘multiculturalism’ means and why it must be rejected. I hope I have gone small way towards doing this. But, secondly, we must find instruments of our own by which we spread the idea that ideas themselves are more important than ethnicity; that far from being ‘non-judgemental’ civilisation requires that we be vigourously and unreletingly judgemental and thereby continue to improve the human condition. Ethnicity cannot be altered by judgement or at all but values (and, hence, culture) can. That makes the latter important and the former just boring.
The term that both Brian and I are looking for is one that will satisfactorily encapsulate the idea that anyone can be judgemental and everyone should be. In this respect, may I respectfully suggest that the term ‘Melting Pot’ is not the term we should look to. I was a young boy in the 1970’s when I first became aware of the term and equally aware of the nature of its propagandists. They were the post-modern lefties and Gramschian marxists and ‘Melting Pot’ was their dry run; their prototype. It was a taste-it-and-see experiment from which they could calculate the likely success of their fully formulated plans that lay in wait. It was the equivalent of throwing it on the stoop to see if the cat licked it up. Well, the cat didn’t just lick it up, the cat lapped it up so it was full-steam ahead from that moment on.
The term ‘Melting Pot’ worked so well for them because it tweaked all the right guilt nodules just hard enough to bring tears to the eyes but no so hard that it caused screaming. The screaming came later. It was right for them for the same reason it is wrong for us; because it manifestly fails to distinguish between ethnicity and culture and, in fact, actively sought to blur those two things into one
It is time to give each of those concepts autonomy. My suggestion of the term ‘monoculturalism’ may come with as many Hydras as Brian suggests and maybe it should not be the settled choice. So I submit it as a place to start.
The search continues.
Postings have been a bit thin today. That means (a) that the Samizdata team mostly have lives and in particular lives at the weekend, and (b) that another Perry de Havilland blockbuster is probably due. I look forward to it. Ah, the joy of writing when you know that your editor will accept your stuff, on account of your editor being you. I know exactly the feeling. In the meantime, to keep the blog rolling, here’s another quicky from me, on the same theme as that of my exchange with David Carr about multi- and monoculturalism, melting pots, etc., that of finding or not finding the right word for what you want to say.
Some months back I gave an illustrated talk about politics – libertarian politics in particular and politics generally – in the movies. You will not be astonished to learn that one of the movies I played a bit from was Wall Street and nor will you be shocked to learn that the bit I played was that speech. However, it may surprise you that in that speech Michael Douglas does not say: “Greed is good.” What he actually says is: “Greed, for want of a better word, is good.” Maybe you knew that. I didn’t until I was preparing my talk and I strongly suspect I’m not the only one. And even if you did already know this, I hope you agree that this extra little phrase makes quite a difference.
Plain “greed is good” is a brazen, screw-you-Jack, in-your-face announcement that vice is virtue, or to put it another way, that virtue doesn’t matter. “Greed, for want of a better word, is good” is no such thing. It’s a genuine attempt at moral debate. It’s a morally sincere attempt to challenge existing moral assumptions, of the sort now bundled up in the word “greed”, which is explicitly identified as an unsatisfactory word for what is really being talked about. Which of course is why the enemies of “greed, for want of a better word” took out the “for want of a better word” bit.
The job of middlebrow propagandists like ourselves is, among many other things, to supply our ideological comrades and customers with better words, so that when they are making speeches about what they believe in, they don’t have to use phrases like “for want of a better word”.
I’m off to France shortly for a holiday. When I return I will get a fixed-price internet connection sorted. I will then include lots of interesting blue bits charging off in all directions in my postings, like a real blogger. In the meantime, assuming I can get my hands on an emailing device of some kind, there may be a few further blueless postings from me about whatever holiday excitements I encounter, and about my views on the state of France. And then again there may not.
Paul Staines finds himself moved by a display of profoundly national sentiment
Have just finished listening to “The Falklands Play”. Looking out from my study, across the Thames over the House of Lords the Union flag is fluttering at half mast in an English spring breeze against a blue sky. A queue of thousands snakes from Westminster hall to pay their respects to the late Queen Mother.
Sometimes even a cynical rational Libertarian-republican-internationalist can cry.
The queue of mourners can seen backed up across Lambeth bridge and around further along the Thames Embankment
Paul Staines
I’ve just signed the petition to take back Arafat’s “Peace Prize” since we all now know he won’t settle for just a piece of Israel. He’d kill them all if the Jews hadn’t learned a hard lesson in the previous century about what happens when you don’t shoot back.
Now they can’t actually take it back, and the Nobel committee is solidly on the side of the Kamikaze killers anyway… but it’s the thought that counts.
The world is divided into those who can stop dog-fights and those who cannot.
-P.G.Wodehouse (‘Ruth in Exile’, The Man Upstairs, 1914)
Unqualified Offerings has recovered from an attack of technical problems and is once again broadcasting wild eyed libertarian wonders to the masses!
If you like intellectually challenging perspectives and rigorous arguments, then check out Jim Henley’s excellent blog.
Thanks for the response, David. Here are my corrections.
I just plain disagree that “multiculturalism” has no meaning. I said it has two meanings and I stick to that. Hence the problems I diagnose. If the word meant nothing, it wouldn’t be such a trap. To say that it does mean nothing is to surrender the verbal field to the “multicultural outcome” enemy.
I said: watch out for this word. I did not say (although it sounds as if you think I said): I will go on using this word even though it’s a dodgy word. I favour the search for different and better words, as do you.
However, your suggested alternative word is a bad one. “Monoculturalist” has similar problems to “multiculturalist”, and if anything even worse ones.
Does “monoculturalism” mean re-establishing the white, pre-coloured-immigration “monoculture” that we once had, by chucking lots of coloured people out? Does it perhaps mean keeping the “monoculture” we could now have if we kept the coloured people we’ve got, but shut out any more? Those are both reasonable guesses as to what the word might mean and they’re both racist meanings, especially the first.
Perhaps “monoculturalism” means lots more people coming into Britain, but only from the white Anglo-Saxon world – from white America and the white Commonwealth? Or maybe white folks from anywhere? Again, reasonable guesses, and again, decidedly racist meanings.
And another reasonable guess would be that it means people becoming part of a monoculture when they (from wherever) get here? This is the meaning you attach to the word.
Even more ambiguous. Even worse confusion. Even worse traps to dodge.
Just to be clear about what I want, although I favour a “monocultural” and “British” (in the sense of all this taking place in Britain) outcome, I don’t expect or want this monoculture to be white British folks plus lots of other folks behaving exactly like white British folks. I favour a genuine melting pot with the resulting combined culture containing influences and ingredients from all the new arrivals from the many different feeder cultures.
In my original posting I used the phrase “melting pot”, and this is a much better phrase for what I believe in than “monoculturalism”. “Melting pot” communicates both the extreme diversity of the cultural ingredients I want us and expect us to welcome in, and the unified nature of the combined outcome that I likewise want and expect.
To bring all this down to earth and back to life, when I started writing this last night I was also watching the small-hours-of-Friday-morning repeat of CD UK. After a two year silence, Oasis are playing their new single called, if I heard it right, “Hindu Times”. This is good hard Oasis-rock with a scrawny, bearded Gallagher brother doing high-decibel mid-Atlantic Manchester-Irish whining at the front like it was 1997, but with the backing spiced up with sitars – or maybe sitar-like guitars, I couldn’t tell – twanging and singing away in among the drums and bass. Melting. pot rock. Oasis have been listening to bhangra rock (itself a classic melting pot phenomenon) unless I’m much mistaken. It sounded good to me.
I seem to be stuck with the privacy and security topic but since it is what interests and worries me, here it is. According to an artricle in CNET New.com Is your email watching you? the spam choking your e-mail inbox may be loaded with software that lets marketers track your moves online, and you may not even be aware that you’ve been bugged.
Apparently, enhanced messages that share the look and feel of Web pages are being used to deliver the same bits of code through e-mail, in many cases without regard for safeguards that have been developed to protect consumer privacy on the Web. E-mail also seems to be the focus of the security and privacy issues on the Web at the moment. While web sites now cloak visitors’ identities and collect data anonymously, junk emailers and marketers have begun to use cookies and other techniques to link specific addresses to surfing behaviour. In some cases, spammers can link surfers with their e-mail addresses.
Lance Cottrell a privacy services expert warns:
“In many ways, email tracking is more powerful because they can correlate the email address with online history….there isn’t an opportunity to be fully informed when you receive a spam with remotely loaded graphics used to track your computer. It’s a bit of a loophole in the whole process.”
I sometimes find myself agreeing with Steven Den Beste’s articles but sorry Steven, this is one of the dumbest pieces you have written in a while.
When he is right, he is sometimes very right and when he is wrong, he does tend to descend into crude history-by-Hollywood-stereotype. The picture he displays of two Royal Marines sparing with boxing gloves and an automatic weapon toting US soldier in the background is indeed symbolic… of the fact Steven does not know the slightest thing about modern British attitudes to war, British military culture or British military history.
The symbolism isn’t fair to the two Europeans [by which the ‘Canadian’ Den Beste means British] in the picture. They are members of the Royal Marines who just arrived there, and if they were to go into real combat they’d be armed similar to how the American is. But in a larger sense, it seems to epitomize the difference now in approaches that Europe and the United States want to take to the war: Europe is trying to fight it according to Marquis of Queensbury rules (i.e. “International law”, UN resolutions, and all the rest) because honor is the most important thing; the United States, on the other hand, is fighting to win.
People would think Britain had not won a war in the last 100 years if they got their history by reading what Steven writes, let alone in 1982. The Germans, Austrians, Argentines, Malays, Indonesians, Kenyans, Irish, Italians, French, Turks, Greeks, Japanese, Afghans etc. etc. etc. probably have a rather different take on British military culture. There is a reason Britain won in Malaya during The Emergency and the US lost in Vietnam under similar conditions. Marquis of Queensbury? Get real.
Here is a picture I think rather better sums up Britain’s ‘Red and Green War Machine’
Update:
Note to Steven: Britain, an island off the European coast, may be part of the European Union at the moment, but the EU is not a military alliance in any meaningful way. Any reading of British or European newspapers should make it obvious there is considerable acceptance of the British/European distinction, even by those who lament the fact. Thus your remarks are at best misleading. To describe the British troops in the picture as ‘European’, given that they are there under British, not ‘European’ auspices, does rather suggest you think there is no difference between the military or political cultures of mainland Europe and Britain. This is not just incorrect but pretty obviously so.
Things in EU land are going to get a lot worse before they get even worse than that. Within 18 months all Europeans could be lumbered with a Green Tax on airline travel.
I don’t know how I managed to read through this article without the veins in my head exploding, especially when sentiments such as this go unchallenged:
“Of course there would be a reduction in the number of people who want to fly. Setting the level will be a political choice …”
A political choice!!?? Readers, this is the voice and mind of the EUnuch.
It is yet another thin end of yet another very thick wedge. The tax, once created, will most assuredly be ‘reviewed’ and ‘adjusted’ until it makes travelling by air impracticable for all but the wealthiest and the bureaucratic elite. Not for nothing have the EUnuchs chained themselves to enviro-mentalist ideology.
I have made a promise with myself never to succumb to the melancholy indulgence of conspiracy-theory but isn’t this the kind of thing the regimes do when they want their tax-cattle to stay put?
Sometimes, Brian, it can take a lot less than twenty minutes.
Correct me if I am wrong (and you will do so unhesitatingly, I’m sure) but you take the view that you don’t in the least mind foreigners coming to live in Britain so long as they adopt and adapt to a culture which is particularly and identifiably British.
In other words, aren’t you a monoculturalist?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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