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Deserts of vast eternitea John Stuart Mill, 1848:
“Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish.”
The Guardian, 2016:
“English man spends 11 hours trying to make cup of tea with Wi-Fi kettle.”
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The top rated comment by ‘AlabasterCodefy’ is also worthy of record:
First of all, I think the quote is misattributed – it should be John Stuart Mill, not Adam Smith.
Second, this is a common theme in leftist theory, but it is absolute BS. The washing machine and the sewing machine are arguably the two most important machines for the liberation of women, by reducing the amount of time that they spend making and cleaning clothes. Piped water and fossil fuels/electricity relieve the drudge work of carrying water and gathering fuel for cooking. Women should be overjoyed about these four technologies, but they seem to only want to complain that they don’t have staff to take care of them, instead.
And the progressives will forever resent anyone who makes any money while improving the lot of anyone. No matter how great the improvement, money will forever be evil.
The Guardian article is just silly. I think it is a part of a new trend that I have noted to denegrate tech and techhies. They were once scorned, then became rich and famous, but now the elite seem to have concluded that they need to be put back in their place.
rxc, you are right of course – Mill it is. I even linked to a page of “Principles of Political Economy” that says it’s by Mill right there at the top of the page! Thanks for the correction.
We have one of those kettles and my inamorata got it working within a matter of minutes. Just sayin’ 😆
rxc, the article is denigrating the tech in this case but I don’t think it’s denigrating the techie at all. After all Mr Rittman himself shared the saga of his determined efforts on the internet in a humorous style. It reminded me of Arthur Dent’s battles across the multiverses with several different Nutrimatic drinks dispensers to get a decent cup of tea.
Added later: but I do agree with your view that women have particular have had their burdens lightened by sewing machines, washing machines and other labour saving devices. Here’s a link from way back in which Brian Micklethwait enthuses about me enthusing about my sewing machine. Actually my overlocker, which is a sewing machine on speed. And blessings be on the head of Carl Miele.
I bring up the tech scorn because I am seeing it elsewhere. Techies are vulnerable because they get so fixated on technical aspects that they forget the overall goal. I know – I have been one for over 60 years.
“Rittman was trying to build the integration functionality himself.” This is the line that identifies Rittman as a real technie.
“@markrittman At this point, I’m desperate to avoid this future at all costs.” This is the message that is being sent to the rest of the world. It is the real purpose of the whole article.
Some of us will laugh about this episode. I can, because I can identify with Mr. Rittman, and my wife can CERTAINLY identify me with Mr. Rittman.
People like my wife are the target of this article – “Look what all those little boys are wasting their time on, instead of paying attention to you, the real person.” 40 years ago, it didn’t have to be explicitly said because the techies were so few and socially inept. They could just be ignored. Now, however, they have achieved a dominance that cannot be allowed to continue. So, the chattering elite will push them back inside the bottle.
Oh, well – we will just wait until their support infrastructure doesn’t work any more, and leave them to talk face-to-face, in small groups, about nothing.
No, I am not bitter…..
rxc, I can relate to that. Here’s another link from days of yore. Scroll down to “Carnival of flatpack”.
Quote from my husband:
Can someone explain to me what advantage a WiFi kettle has over an ordinary one? Presumably you can switch it on without having to leave your computer, or possibly turn it on with your phone while you are on your way home. That is presuming that you remembered to put some water in it after the previous time you used it and remember that you did. Or does it tell you how much water it has in it and fill up if it is too low? Anyway, it does appear to be a solution in search of a problem.
It’s all very amusing. The Guardian article is about someone who was attempting to do something novel: activate the kettle using Amazon Echo voice commands.
Of course it is all a bit pointless but this kind of playfulness is how people learn. People are not only learning the details of how to do specific things; they are learning which kinds of things turn out to be useful.
I would actually like to be able to turn on my coffee machine remotely; it takes half an hour to warm up.
@Natalie,
I have plenty of Ikea flatpak furniture and I never have problems assembling them. 😛
Voice recognition activation? I foresee PROBLEMS …
(Para)
“It is better to remain mute and be thought a fool, than to speak and
remove all doubt”
With public access to the web, I can type, cut, paste, transmit, MY learned philosophy, as well as MY “New Rules”,
toat an ASTONISHINGnumber of folks, at ASTONISHING speed.
Yet some folks are still bemused why I STILL use a nom de plume to do so.
I’d hate to be denied an ASTONISHINGLY
resetovercharged pumpkin spice latte at the local daytime kindlegarten (I made that up) for “political reasons”.(Meh, I can fix their as yet un-wi-fi dishwasher and coffee roaster, so I’m probably safe in my fool status.)
OT, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend-turn at local coffee shops. Folks seem to be CHATTING, with….EACH OTHER! “Smart” phones remain de rigueur table settings though.
I have been working on Automaic Speech Recognition (ASR) on and off since 1976. I remember something from around 1984; this was IMHO part of the usual desperation of technology push. It was suggested that a good application for ASR would be voice control of vending machines. I asked why: pointing out that one needed at least one hand to pick to the vended product; thus one would have that very hand free to press the appropriate product selection button.
On John Stuart Mill in 1848: had he missed the wheel, horse-drawn cart, pulley, windmill, watermill, sailing ship, navigational quadrant, telescope, plough, rowing boat, smelt mill, blast furnace, spinning jenny, pendulum clock, bow and arrow, rifle, steam engine, etc? He sounds like a modern lefty economist complaining about having to cut the same sized cake. Or have I misunderstood his point?
Back to Mark Rittman, does he expect this article has improved his career prospects as a data specialist – or is he looking to move into technical journalism?
Best regards
I think that the lot of the vast number of people was still pretty grim at the time that Mill was writing, so I think that the innovations that Nigel mentions, though highly significant, would really not have had a very noticeable effect upon the lives of the nineteenth century poor. The quote does suggest that things might be different in the future.
Hey, the history of the UK, the internet, and drink-making is long and storied one.
Old-timers like Your Correspondent may remember the Coffee Pot Cam at the University of East Anglia, one of the first, possibly THE first, device to have more-or-less live images on the (pre-WWW) internet.
Natalie:
In my family there is “Drinkwater’s Law” which states “You are never done with the job until you’ve used every tool in the garage.” and it’s corollary “Buying new tools makes things worse, not better.”
Last year I read most of Samuel Pepys diary. There are numerous descriptions of washday (an all-day affair), meal prep, housecleaning, sewage problems, etc.
The effort required to run a middle-class white-collar home in London c. 1660, husband and wife, no kids, is astounding.
Fred the Fourth wrote:
“In my family there is “Drinkwater’s Law” which states “You are never done with the job until you’ve used every tool in the garage.” and it’s corollary “Buying new tools makes things worse, not better.”
Not Bug.
Feature.
Or, as my boss is wont to to say, ‘Anything you buy that does not include a TBO*, isn’t really worth having.” Also expressed as Llamas’ Fourth Rule, ‘He who dies with the most tools, wins.’ Tools are what sets us apart from the lower animals, so, by extension, having more tools makes you more-evolved. I kno this are rite, ‘coz I haz 8 micrometers.
llater,
llamas
* Tool Buying Opportunity 😆
“the Coffee Pot Cam at the University of East Anglia, one of the first, possibly THE first, device to have more-or-less live images on the (pre-WWW) internet”
And for related tech in the WWW era, see the “418 I’m a teapot” error status code in https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt (“Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)”), and then the entirety of the more full-featured support in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7168 (“The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances (HTCPCP-TEA)”).
J.S. Mill’s belief in the Labour Theory of Value (developed by his father James Mill and, even more, by family friend David Ricardo) led him to this theory that industrialisation led to “fortunes for others” (not “the workers”) and his whole (false) “distribution problem”. J.S. Mill just pretended that foes of the Labour Theory of Value (even British ones such as Richard Whatley and Samuel Bailey) did not exist.
The comparison with Karl Marx is obvious – although Mill and Marx was different (worker coops for Mill, Revolution for Marx) it is like the difference between being shot and being poisoned.
The fact that J.S. Mill is the most cited 19th century British liberal shows that modern (semi collectivist) liberalism is (sadly) a natural development of a powerful faction of 19th century liberalism. Not all 19th century liberalism (certainly not), but a powerful faction.
J.S. Mill used the words “freedom” and “liberty” endlessly – but he did not mean them as we do. For example regulations on sellers were (to J.S. Mill) different from regulations on buyers. And he seems to have been just as hostile to large scale capitalists (and large scale landowners) as, say, the leftist Hollywood types are today.
Again if one wants to see the modern growth of the American Federal Government (its interests in health, education, welfare and so on) one does not have to look at Marxist plots – it is all there in Thomas Paine.
Yes Thomas Paine – all his attacks on Big Government are attacks on monarchy and aristocracy. If the government is democratically elected “Tom” Paine forgets all his own arguments and wants government to be centralised and to take over most functions of Civil Society (with taxes of up to 100% on big landowners – and X, Y, Z government benefits and public services). Even fiat money is O.K. to Thomas Paine – as a long as democratically elected government issues it.
Sadly the logical development of the liberalism of Thomas Paine and J.S. Mill does NOT go to us – it goes to the statism of Hillary Clinton and Tim Farron.
Modern libertarians are not really (if they did but know it) the heirs of this form of 19th century liberalism – Jeremy Bentham’s (the idol of J.S. Mill) 13 Departments of State controlling all aspects of economic life, and all that. Thomas Paine and his idea of a centralised government controlling the American continent.
Modern libertarians are the heirs (again if they did but know it) of the “OLD Whigs” of the 17th and 18th centuries – and into the 19th century. Edmund Burke and the other people that the “Philosophical Radicals” (the “Westminster Review” crowd and so on) DESPISED.
True conservatism – the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and so on, has the same “OLD Whig” root.
Certainly the machines Nigel mentions radically changed the domestic life of women in particular, but changed it in what way? The primary consequence of the reduction in the workload of domestic chores has been women entering the trade workplace much more. So what has happened is that they have traded one form of labor for another.
All in all though this is obviously a good thing. They (and this includes men too) probably don’t work a huge amount less, however, they do more engaging, safer, higher quality and productive work. (I don’t have stats but I believe people work 10%-20% less hours, plus have more time off, but someone with access to actual data can correct me on that.)
One other machine he didn’t mention was the Internet, something that I’d argue has changed the lives of humans almost as much as electricity. I spend probably 75% of my waking hours engaging with a machine that my grandfather didn’t even know would exist.
Automobiles also have radically changed the way we live, though when you combine privately produced automobiles with publicly produced road systems much of the time won by this innovation is eaten up in that government tax on our time called the traffic jam.
I don’t understand what the problem is with the quote there are indeed technology that does not bring advantages or worse take persons to not a very productive ways.
That said of course the Guardian that exists to make Political Proselytism, like all so called “news”papers wants to present Politics as the solution to humanity problems. The Religion of a Journalist is Politics.
Politics that have been murdering millions and what have been improving people lives is Technology.
Industry can reduce a species sense of smell. Probably not the best move.
Everything up in that cortex makes empires.
Of course, then smelling would be ignored or anamolous.
Of course, markets in perfumes and visuals would lead intellects to reflect.
Then the dead would just be running in the background, and smelling like roses. Or a pocket full of posies. You know, they used to build civilizations out of dead things. Industrial.
Neal, can I have whatever you’re on?
Now anyone know a magic bullet for Cortana on Win 10? And no. I don’t want anyone getting “Ha, ha! Should have gone Mac/Linux”.
Otherwise it’s a Samsung Galaxy 7 in the post!
llamas:
I didn’t imply in there somewhere that I thought there was such a thing as too many tools, did I? If, sorry.
Lessee: Only 2 mics, but 3 calipers, 4 wood routers, two table saws, 2 telescopes, 6 binoculars, ’bout a hundred jewelers screwdrivers and files, 3 auto battery chargers, another hundred woodworkers clamps (can never have too many!), and
[at this point the writer was seized by the back of his neck and dragged into the kitchen ‘cuz the flank steak needed to go into the oven.]
“I would actually like to be able to turn on my coffee machine remotely; it takes half an hour to warm up.”
Of course, this requires you to first clean out yesterday’s grounds, clean out the pot, refill the basket, and refill the water, all by hand and in-person.
So far, the IofT seems mostly like a solution in search of a problem.
Oh come on Bobby, haven’t you heard of capsules?
bobby b: What kind of coffee machine takes a half-hour to warm up? Are we talking about one of those industrial size espresso things from Italy?
I once worked on a disk storage system that had to be able to go from a power-off overnight cold soak at -40C to stable and operational in 10 minutes. Can’t believe there’s any kind of coffee maker that can’t beat that spec starting at room temp. (The disk system cost about $ 100K c. 1985 and only stored 280 MB. Maybe cheap coffee makers should be expected to warm up more slowly.)
@Fraser Orr. While I agree that the Internet, mains electricity and the automobile are mechanical inventions that improve the human lot (also airplanes and computers generally), I specifically did not mention them above. I was limiting myself to things that existed in 1848, that John Stuart Mill looks to be claiming contributed nothing to the lower levels of society.
It is very interesting to read Paul Marks above on this. I have certainly formed the view that Tom Paine was a mixed blessing (by modern libertarian standards at least). But that criticism surely applies to us all.
Somewhat aside, have you seen the latest from the ASI (including CAPX and the Telegraph), with their enthusiasm to move from libertarian to neoliberal (whatever those terms might mean to different people). I’m not yet sure what to make of it.
Best regards
Mill was plainly wrong. He must have overlooked the development of agriculture enabling more people to eat, the development in textiles providing more and better clothes, and a host of other things including fire and the wheel.
That people “invested” their savings in supporting more children rather than in individual comfort is likely what fooled him into thinking that the people weren’t getting richer. But given the choice at last between feeding a child and buying an extra shirt I can’t say that the people were getting it wrong
Mill was wrong about a great many things.
I make a reasonable living setting-up networks and such which involves crawling under desks and drilling holes and stuff.
My Grandad did a bit of crawling and drilling and stuff and made a reasonable living. He did under the North Sea as a pit shot-firer in filthy 18″ galleries in the pitch black bt for his head light (I have a couple of LED ones nowadays). He told stories about it and it sounded horrible – he was really happy his daughter and her kids idn’t have to go down the pit. He developed tinnitus from it as well. And a visceral hatred for Arthur Scargill.
And then there is ‘Peter’s law’, according to his wife: number of tools purchased for a job inversely proportional to amount of time taken to complete said job. This is an exponential function.
@ NickM
I googled this, yesterday and apparently there are some registry edits that you can make to get rid of it.
I haven’t tried them yet, though.
Net result?
I’ve just ordered an Energenie Pi-mote Control Starter Kit with 2 Sockets 433 MHz for my Raspberry Pi from Maplin.
Whilst this may have raised the UK’s GDP by some £22.99, I suspect that the time lost playing with it to get it working will result in a net loss…and I am just a single techie.
I wonder how many like minded people have read this and are thinking… I bet I could do that.
Net effect is that I will be able to turn on a lamp and radio in my flat in Perth, Scotland remotely from my winter lodgings in Penang, Malaysia. While this might keep thieves away it is hardly the invention of sustainable fusion energy generation.
More a form of technical self-indulgence…
So many people with so much spare time to fart around with the IoT. Why are these people not starving? 😛
Because we don’t live under a regime within the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist spectrum we are able to do more than merely subsist and can instead devote our spare time to such vainglorious pursuits as trying to control a kettle via WiFi.
All hail the marginal revolution.
John Galt,
Unless in the process you discover something that makes a major advance. Your (to be fair probably correct – but until you try it not definitely correct) assumption that you will not be producing something useful is the same form of flawed thinking as the idea that Government investment is better than letting people spend their own money – a presumption that you know the results without trying it.
If everyone plays and experiments, we find out more and get more innovation and progress (however useless it appears – I once interviewed a theoretical physicist for a publicity piece, and a colleague who was with me asked the rather evil question of what use his work was; his answer, “Ask me in fifty years” is still one of the best things I’ve heard). It is a rather negative approach to life to see this as a bad thing, rather than actually a good thing.
And yes, I’m aware that the end logic of this position is that you might find something useful by jumping off a high building. To which my reply is that people who feel this are welcome to try, as the important point is the having fun and playing around, not taking logical points to extremes (unless that is your idea of fun…).
@Watchman:
Yes, fair enough, but then again what is the purpose of life?
If your success criteria is “to make a contribution to mankind” then 99.99%++ of us are abject failures.
If your success criteria is “to create, sustain and improve the next generation” then (on an evolutionary basis at least), humans are somewhat more successful.
I personally think that while techno-tinkering may not solve any of the major problems of mankind it is at least marginally more useful than cyberloafing on Facebook or even increasing the global population through fucking.
At least in trying to figure out how to get my phone to communicate with a kettle over WiFi, I might actually learn something…however impractical.
Increasing the global population trough fucking increases the odds there is a genius. Good or Evil.
Yes Perry – J.S. Mill was wrong about a great many things.
But what I do not like about the man is that he had a habit of pretending that everyone agreed with various things – and shoving down the Memory Hole anyone who disagreed.
It was not intellectual error (we all make errors – I make lots of intellectual errors) it was intellectual dishonesty.
Much easier to defeat people in debate – if one pretends that they (and their arguments) do-not-exist.
Incidentally, why does the headline specify the man is English? Seems a wonderfully superfluous adjective.
John,
The purpose of life? Surely whatever you want it to be (for your life).
And if you want to to be learning how to make phones communicate with kettles (and if you could make my phone communicate with other phones, that would be good too – bloody thing seems to have forgotten its key function), I’d say that is a good purpose in life. As is painting minature warriors, travelling around the world or working every hour [insert diety of choice here (sorry – I’m sure I’ve been possessed by a stray social justice warrior)] sends. It seems to be rather strange to argue that other people’s actions and choices are positive or not, when we don’t know what the outcome will be.
After all, I once created an argument that allowed some archaeologists to dig up an English Heritage site whilst washing up (and they were within about ten centemetres of proving my hypothesis right or wrong (or being archaeology, establishing something totally different) when the trench got to the maximum size – such is life). But that’s another story…
How glorious to have such wealth and abundance to be able to play! And experiment, and discover, and often fail (yet with such little cost).
Akin to IoT, I am fascinated by the popular and (lately) inexpensive hobby of DIY UAVs and quadcopters (aka “drones”). Kids young enough to be my grandchildren are figuring this stuff out. I refuse to let them have all the fun.
John Galt, perhaps I will run into you in Penang. I don’t know when I’ll be there again, but with the snow falling around me here, hopefully it’ll be soon.
You’ll find me in Healy Mac’s Irish Bar in Straits Quay every Monday from 20:00 – 22:30 (Quiz Night), November through March.
Most of the Penang based expat bunch are there. Good folks. Hope to see you.
Watchman, October 13, 2016 at 4:36 pm: “why does the headline specify the man is English? Seems a wonderfully superfluous adjective.”
Au contraire, it provides explanatory context. “Man spends 11 hours trying to make cup of tea with Wi-Fi kettle” will have anyone asking “Why didn’t he give up and make coffee after 11 minutes?” “English man spends 11 hours trying to make cup of tea with Wi-Fi kettle” answers that question. 🙂
JS Mill did indeed make a lot of mistakes, and I share Paul Marks’ general disdain for him. But to be fair, 1848 was quite early in the development of the industrial revolution, and most of what had by then been developed was confined to large-scale industrial plants; it hadn’t yet had time to trickle down to the common man. And he was careful to use the qualifier “yet”. But he nonetheless overlooked the great migration from farm to factory which was even then occurring. Clearly those people saw that as a net benefit (Dickensian sweatshops though they might have been), so while it might not have “lightened the day’s toil” for them it certainly was an improvement from their perspective. And I’m not even sure his assessment is strictly correct: the common man may have worked 6 days a week in the factory, but previously he had worked 7 days a week on the farm.
As to our Mr. Rittman, I can certainly see myself doing exactly the same thing (had I his technical knowledge). It becomes an intellectual challenge; I will not be defeated by a coffee pot! And it must be noted that he didn’t spend 11 continuous hours on the task; it was little spurts of activity over the course of the day. No doubt he felt a surge of satisfaction when he achieved his victory.
It is tiny things like this which move us forward, and they shouldn’t be denigrated or trivialized. Obviously there is little of importance in connecting a coffee pot to Alexa. But societal progress is achieved through such baby steps. Throughout history most of the great scientists and mathematicians (and thinkers generally) were men of financial means who were not troubled by the need to earn a living. Today, we (collectively) have far more leisure time to devote to pursuits of our own choosing, some of which are purely intellectual (such as in Mr. Rittman’s case). This can only spur the overall rate of technological advance, from which we all benefit. So I salute his “waste” of those 11 hours. It is emblematic of the vast wealth of our society, which is worth occasionally reflecting upon as we bicker about politics.
I think Mill was being a twit.
I recall seeing a quote discussed a few years ago. It was from an early 19th century writer (Macaulay?), to the effect that any footman of his day would find life as a grandee of the 1600s intolerably uncomfortable. So “progress” would appear to have “trickled down” to even the lowest classes.
And note that Milll included all “mechanical inventions”, including the printing press and the wheel, all of which “had not lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”
One could refute him simply by pointing to the steam engine, which even in 1848 had greatly “lightened the day’s toil” of thousands of ship’s crews.
Mill’s blindness to how much invention had already accomplished for ordinary people came from elite disdain. It is an intense feeling in he PC of every age to assume the common people’s disagreement is illegitimate somehow. Usually, prejudice or selfishness is blamed, but more kindly types (and Mill was kinder and more open-minded than many) may think “the poor peasants just don’t have enough leisure time to see how right I am” (or enough education or … whatever). Mill’s future expectation was that common people would all “rise to his level” – that is the typical egalitarianism of the PC. This prejudice made it easy for him to think his day was the moment at which progress for these common people began, not just a point in an accelerating progression.
I know Mill had many shortcomings, but I think we should acknowledge that, like whichever Roman emperor it was who boasted that under his reign places that were once on the border had become the centre, Mill’s On Liberty took a level of belief in free speech that had been extreme for 1850’s Britain and made it mainstream.
Arthur Dent could not be reached for comment. 😉
Natalie Solent (Essex), October 14, 2016 at 1:25 pm: “Mill’s On Liberty took a level of belief in free speech that had been extreme for 1850’s Britain and made it mainstream.”
+1. Mill had his merits, and his willingness to study beliefs he rejected “lest any fragments of truth be lost amid the ruins of exploded error” makes a marked contrast with the “no western civ course here” attitude of modern PC. The particular quote in the OP makes him seem foolish (exaggeratedly perhaps; if challenged, he might have agreed with some of the comments’ caveats). I speculate above on how his temperament might have led him to make that flawed quote.
Laird – the point is that J.S. Mill believed in a mythical “distribution” problem (which came from his belief in the Labour Theory of Value), he did not believe “leave it for a few years and wages and conditions of work will dramatically improve” he believed that what was needed was a change in ownership – over to worker coops and so on.
We both know what happened to places that avoided both the agricultural and industrial revolution – Ireland with its (relative) lack of factories and its (in most of Ireland) peasant plot farming was an utter disaster in 1848 (the people were dying – or leaving). But Mill was not denouncing Ireland in this quotation – he was denouncing mainland Britain. Mill was saying (as Karl Marx was saying) that this wonderful new technology had come along (it had not just appeared – the “capitalists” had INVENTED it, but the quotation ignores that), but living standards had not improved (actually they had improved – but leave that aside) because the profits had gone to handful of rich capitalist factory owners.
Mill is NOT saying he supports Revolution (as Karl Marx did) – but he is producing basically the same theory of the rich capitalists taking the money and leaving the people in terrible poverty. The sums do not add up – it is nonsense, but that is what he is (in his polite way) saying.
There is a straight line from J.S. Mill (and Thomas Paine on taxing big landowners to destruction and government services for the poor and so on) to Hollywood films today. With “the rich” and “big business” as the baddies in almost every Hollywood film and television show.
In short modern liberalism did not appear from nowhere – a big faction of 19th Century liberalism was-already-there.
Paul, I agree with you about Mill. But as to Paine, while your comments are accurate I think you’re assigning him far too much importance. Paine was never known as a thinker; he was a rabble-rouser. (A “community organizer”? 😛 ) His “give me liberty or give me death” line and his pamphlet Common Sense were important rallying cries in kicking off our Revolution, but after that he was of minimal importance. He had no significant role in the War, held no important political positions during or afterward, published no philosophical treatises. In fact, some years later he returned to England where he tried (unsuccessfully) to reprise his success in America by stirring up trouble there. He died mostly ignored. So “straight line” or no, Paine is merely a largely irrelevant dot along that line, not an end point.
As to Natalie’s last comment, she might be correct that Mill succeeded in moving the “Overton Window” of his time. But it’s debatable whether he moved it in a positive direction. In large measure, I think not.
Ben Southwood at the CapX page to which Nigel links above:
Indeed. Or, at least, this is one way of sorting a certain group of people into two distinct categories.
“Libertarians believe in markets because they respect property rights;” and libertarians respect property rights because they respect persons.
That is, respect for self and others is the default attitude of the libertarian (insofar as he manages to live up to his philosophical beliefs and ideals anyway).
This sort of respect is based on the understanding that no one is born with a proper right to demand that a person give up his right of self-determination.
There is a concept that utilitarians call “respect,” but it is not respect for each individual as a human born beholden and subject to no one. At best it is a wish that no one should have to suffer; or that, if suffering is inevitable, it is sensible to “take over” Mr X to some extent in order to ease the suffering of Mr Y.
There are other, darker versions of this sort of “respect,” but the “respect” of the previous paragraph leads to the same results as these darker versions, if it is carried out with full attention to detail in the real world.
In the end, what’s at stake really is the right of self-determination. You either really do believe in that right and commit yourself to it, or else you are of the final opinion that it is not “individual individuals” that are of primary importance.
Indeed.