Chris Tame (1949-2006): A personal memoir

In an earlier posting here just after Christmas, I solicited compliments, to cheer me up after I’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. Commenters on that posting said nice things about my blogging here over the years, and I thanked them. But older friends and acquaintances, who had been sent an email with the same news of my probably much shortened lifespan, remembered an earlier time in my life, from about 1980 to 2000, during which I was a libertarian activist and pamphleteer. Since this was before the arrival of the Internet, the key items of technology, in addition to the then still primitive but fast developing personal computer was, rather surprisingly, the photocopier. But there was another circumstance, mentioned by many friends, which was of far greater importance to me than any personal computer or photocopier. That circumstance was an individual human being, Chris Tame:

That is a photo of Chris Tame that I recently chanced upon in the vast accumulation of more or less meaningless paper that passes for my filing system.

Three years after Chris Tame died in 2006, I did a talk about his influence and legacy, about how much of a difference Chris Tame made, to all the libertarians whom he got in touch with and whom he put in touch with each other from his 1980s nerve centre at the Alternative Bookshop and then on into the 1990s. Here and now, I want to emphasise what a difference Chris made to me personally. Had it not been for Chris I would probably not have bothered being any sort of active libertarian at all, because without him that would have been just too difficult. Now that I am asking people to praise me, I realise that I want to praise Chris, publicly and in writing and at quite some length, far more than I have yet praised him before.

Having read a book called The Machinery of Freedom, which I think I chanced upon in a bookshop in Staines, I decided that, like its author David Friedman, I was a libertarian, and I started knocking on doors in London to see how I could take that notion further. One of these doors was that of the Institute of Economic Affairs, then still presided over by the great duumvirate that was Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. The people there took one took at me and my then-as-now scruffy sociology degree attire and sent me across London to Covent Garden, to “the bookshop”. As soon as I got there, I knew I was home.

Without Chris Tame, there would have been no Alternative Bookshop. This bookshop only eked out its existence between 1979 and 1986, yet there is a whole generation of British libertarians who still remember it with fondness. But for something like a bookshop to succeed, in any sense of that word, there has to be someone eager to run it and capable of running it. Chris Tame was that someone.

My first memory of Chris was of him sitting at his desk at the front of the shop, chomping his way through something tedious and organisational, involving some sort of filing system. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought: Rather you than me.

The thing about Chris, as I soon realised at the time, was that, had he not existed, nobody would have supposed that such a person was even possible. His dress sense was strongly influenced by his idol, Elvis Presley, and America was, he knew, his spiritual home, rather than stodgy and class-ridden England. That he never managed even to visit American let alone (see comments) got to live in America was a source of deep disappointment to him. All of which meant that, unlike your typical English enthusiast for “freedom”, Chris Tame was, as Guido Fawkes put it in a comment on that earlier Chris Tame posting I did here, “cool”. He did not go to a posh school like the ones that I and Perry de Havilland went to. Other friends talked of his charisma and enthusiasm. He was a unique character who radiated a unique atmosphere, not unlike that given off by one of those “classless” British, but strongly American-influenced, pop stars. Thanks to Chris, there was a clear and visible atmospheric gap between being a libertarian and merely liking freedom in a right wing, reactionary, British Conservative sort of way. Chris Tame was not – Guido’s word again – a “fogey”.

All that, and he was a conscientious and industrious admin man. Like I say, had Chris Tame not existed, no such person would ever have been imagined.

I started to help Chris out at the bookshop, and soon became his Number Two. And I then settled down to doing the single thing that I was most determined to do, which was (see above) to be a libertarian pamphleteer, both as a writer myself and as a publisher of the writings of others. Because my products were photocopied (also see above) rather than printed, they did not need thousands of paying readers to avoid leaking money at a rate that I could not afford, so the libertarian message they carried didn’t have to be softened or diluted.

But they still had to have some readers, or else what would have been the point of them? Without Chris Tame, I could not have accomplished a fraction of whatever I did accomplish during the next two decades. Whenever anyone entered the bookshop and started making the right sort of noises, like “I thought I was the only one” and “Do you have any Hayek?”, it was Chris who ensured that this person would never from then on be lost touch with, would be invited to book signings and talks at the shop, all of them organised by Chris, and would generally be made much of. All I ever did of a bureaucratic nature was sometimes, if I was present and Chris was not, take a name and address and phone number from someone, and then immediately hand it on to Chris, just as soon as I next saw him.

So it was that my pamphlets had really quite a few readers and potential writers. But that wasn’t all. In order to reach those readers and writers, pamphlets could not then just be launched to everyone even vaguely interested in reading them, with a few touches on a computer keyboard. These were actual pamphlets, made of paper. In order to reach the many dozens who, thanks to Chris Tame, knew that they would like to read them, they had to be posted, in big envelopes, envelopes with stamps on them. All of which took some organising, and all of which cost money. It was not I who twisted the arms of libertarians or semi-libertarians to turn them into “subscribers” to this process. It was Chris Tame.

I cannot stress it enough. Had Chris Tame not been the immensely industrious libertarian that he was, from before the start of the Alternative Bookshop until the arrival of the internet, I could not have become anything remotely resembling the libertarian publisher that I became. Without me, there would definitely have been hardcore libertarian publishing in London during those years. It would probably not have been as voluminous, or as impressive when spread out over three tables at a big libertarian conference, and it would certainly have looked different. But it would have happened, one way or another. But without Chris Tame, there would have been, pretty much, nothing. London libertarianism would have been but a fond hope entertained by a few unconnected individuals, each of us worrying that maybe we were the only ones who thought like this.

And talking of big libertarian conferences (the one in these photos was one of my particular favourites), who do you think organised them, scrounged together the speakers, booked the venues, found the money to book the venues, and generally dealt with the four hundred and sixty seven details and difficulties associated with any such operation? Again, Chris Tame. Had he not done this, everyone else, insofar as there had even been an “everyone else”, would merely have agreed that it would have been nice if someone had done it, but it would none of it have happened.

The division of labour between Chris and me was pretty simple. I took care of the publishing, and Chris Tame took care of everything else. Everything else.

Chris Tame’s pivotal role as a London libertarian throughout the eighties and nineties of the last century, and actually also the seventies before I met him, are still pretty widely understood by all who have heard of him. What is perhaps less well understood is the way that he thought about libertarianism and about how to spread enthusiasm for it. To understand that thinking is to understand why he made such a difference.

It all began with Ayn Rand.

Chris was a devoted follower of Ayn Rand and remained this all his life. But his enthusiasm for this redoubtable lady, although it made him a Randian, never made him into a Randroid.

I too had read some Rand by the time I got to know Chris Tame, and was impressed by her contrarian slant on life and her many insights into such things as how collectivist regimes collapse. I too had come to love “capitalism”. But I came to loathe the Randroids. By Randroids, I mean the kind of Rand followers who parroted Rand’s exact opinions in her exact words, and who included in their parrotings that if you did not accept every word of their Randroid catechism you were not merely wrong but evil. I haven’t had many fuck-off-and-die arguments with people in my life, but I can remember two such, and both were with Randroids.

I recall one Randroid in particular, who, by way of demonstrating his supposed willingness to pay attention to what I considered to be contrary evidence, listened carefully to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, but who then, having listened, declared it to be one of the most evil sounds he had ever heard. I responded that I wanted nothing further to do with someone who held such a crazy, second-hand opinion, merely because the woman whom he worshipped uncritically had expressed the same opinion. Had Rand happened to adore rather than detest Beethoven’s music, all the Randroids would have copied that, and I found this repulsive, in fact borderline insane.

Chris had no time for such uncritical acceptance of Rand’s aesthetic whims and rationalisations. He laughed at Rand’s arbitrary praise for some artists and equally random denunciations of other artists, some of whom she considered heroically good and others of whom (such as Beethoven) she denounced as evil. Chris loved Rock ‘n’ Roll. Adored it. Especially the life and works of his beloved Elvis Presley. And if for some damn fool reason Ayn Rand and the Randroids didn’t love Elvis as much as he did, that was their loss, was his attitude. If you loved Beethoven but didn’t care for Rachmaninov (with Rand it was the other way round) well, that was fine. You loved what you loved. (Personally I love both, and also like Rock ‘n’ Roll, not least a few of the classic Elvis tracks.) Worse, with all these unanimously arbitrary aesthetic whims, the Randroids cut themselves off from normal society, a place in which aesthetic tastes are well understood to be complicated and personal.

The main Ayn Rand observation that Chris began with was that ideas, rather than mere policies, were what mattered. To use a common metaphor, culture is upstream of politics. Rand famously attended to the ideas held, not just by the politically powerful and well-connected, but by the wider public, by regular people, and by people who merely thought about things, hence her interest in and deep involvement in the movie industry. She was, you could say, and in her own very contrasting way, a Gramscian.

Chris Tame’s constantly repeated version of all this was: “We need our people everywhere.” Everywhere as in everywhere throughout society, as opposed merely to everywhere in the merely political bit of the world. In particular, we needed whatever support we could cultivate everywhere in academia, and in all the faculties, rather than just in those devoted to politics and economics.

And to get our people everywhere, it was no earthly use for Chris Tame to insist on a narrowly Randian line about how something resembling libertarianism was a good thing, or for that matter any other narrow line. If you were a Christian theologian, or a geologist, or an enthusiast for computer games, or a devout Muslim, or a fan of modern architecture (who happened to disagree with quite a lot of Ayn Rand’s architectural pronouncements (that was me)), or a fan of ancient literature, or a philosopher (who thought Randian philosophy was nonsense), or a military historian, or just anybody, who happened also to think that some at least of the libertarian agenda was good stuff and worth thinking about and arguing for, then Chris Tame would make you welcome. His attitude was: We start with people as they are, and if their starting point is that God favours libertarianism, well, even though Chris was himself (like Rand) a militant atheist, his answer was not that God was a figment of deluded imaginations. No. The response would be more like: Cards on the table, I’m not a believer in God myself, but tell me more about how your understanding of God’s will makes you a libertarian. And: Have you ever written these arguments down? And: If you have or if you do, we’d love to see them, with a view to publishing them.

Ayn Rand’s unflinching and uncompromising insistence on her particular political and philosophical principles, and her generally belligerent attitude towards those she disagreed with, appealed to Chris Tame’s own principled belligerence. By temperament Chris was a fighter rather than a mere persuader. (One of his big hobbies was martial arts.) The good-people-versus-evil-people dichotomy appealed to him a lot. Life, for him, was a melodrama. But Chris was convinced that persuasion was what he had to do, if he wanted to spread the kind of libertarian ideas that he so fervently favoured, and that was what he made himself do.

In other words, despite our serious differences of opinion about such things as Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the attitude of Chris Tame and of me towards how to be libertarian publishers and persuaders was, for all practical purposes, identical. The proof of this being that, throughout my time as the Libertarian Alliance’s pamphleteer, Chris Tame, the Director of that Libertarian Alliance, and I never once had any fights on editorial issues. His attitude to my pamphleteering was: Well, Brian’s churning out lots of pamphlets, all of which express libertarian ideas in one way or another. Is he, broadly speaking, doing a good thing? Yes he is. Do I want to nitpick? No, I do not. I’d rather spend my energy organising libertarian get-togethers where Brian’s publications can be distributed and hustling the money together to pay for their postage. Chris put his energy into the scale and reach of our joint publishing efforts, rather than into demanding that these efforts consist of only one way of thinking about broadly libertarian ideas. On the contrary, he was determined (being determined was something that he was very good at) that we should not plough just one libertarian intellectual furrow, but as many furrows as we could persuade people to think about and write about.

What Chris did was to apply the dogged and fearless determination, exemplified by Ayn Rand herself, to the wider libertarian and libertarian-ish, individualist, classical liberal revival, pro free market, pro “social” freedom movement that most of us writers and readers here at this blog, one way or another, and for all of our various and contrasting reasons, are a part of. Almost despite herself, and definitely despite many of her opinions (such as her opinion that libertarianism was evil), Ayn Rand contributed mightily to that cause herself. So, inspired by Rand, yet following a very different tactical approach, did Chris Tame.

It wasn’t that Chris didn’t have strong philosophical and political opinions. He definitely did. But he schooled himself into not regarding someone else having different opinions and tastes as a reason to stop communicating with them in a friendly yet vigorously engaged manner, provided only that they relished communicating with him in the same spirit.

Because Chris devoted so much of his life as a libertarian to the organising of libertarianism, and then because his life was cruelly cut short in his mid-fifties by a particularly nasty variety of bone cancer, he wrote nothing like as much as he had hoped to write. (His particular enthusiasm was bibliographical writing about all the libertarian-inclined books and essays written by others.) The result of which is that although his organisational achievements are still quite widely understood, the thinking behind those deeds is less remembered and celebrated. I hope I have here done my little bit, with this little bit, to correct that omission.

Chris Tame’s impact most definitely outlasted him, even if an increasing number of those impacted did not realise this.

For instance, from about 1990 until last year, with a brief respite in and around 2010, I held monthly speaker meetings at my home. Many blog commenters and emailers have said nice things about these meetings. But I would have not have known whom to invite to these meetings, had it not been for Chris Tame and the earlier time when I had got to know all the libertarians whom he had herded together so determinedly.

Samizdata itself got most of its early gang of writers because Perry de Havilland attended my meetings. Would Perry have started Samizdata, in November 2001, had he not been part of this milieu and hence acquainted with a starting line-up of opinionated potential Samizdatistas? Well, probably, yes. Would Samizdata have hit the ground running as fast as it then did without all these people? Maybe, but it would have been a far tougher battle if Perry had been fighting it on his own, or only with people he already knew. And would Samizdata then have managed to hang around for so long? Perhaps it would. But if you are looking for the longer term influence of Chris Tame’s energising of the London libertarian scene, Samizdata, together with all the other British libertarian bloggers who got started around then, and for all that Chris Tame himself rather despised blogging, would be a fine place to start.

My one major criticism of Chris Tame was that damned Libertarian Alliance split, which kicked off in and around 1982, and in which he played such a prominent and wrong-headed part. I sided with Chris, basically because he was the one doing all the work, and the other side appeared to me to be the kind of people who sat around in groups, voting about how that work should be done. Screw that. Power, I believed and still believe, should rest in the hands of those who have earned it.

But sadly, here was a case where Chris Tame’s stubborn determination became a weakness, just as it was for the leaders of the “other” Libertarian Alliance, who actually proved themselves to be a lot more industrious than I had at first judged them to be. Each of the two Libertarian Alliances hoped that the other Libertarian Alliance would drop dead, but neither did. Each Libertarian Alliance would have done better to have changed its name to something else and the sooner the better, and let the other side have the Libertarian Alliance name and brand, but neither did. As a result, in the Internet age that soon followed, when verbal confusion about who the hell you even are is fatal, and in which those same two words – “libertarian alliance” – lead internet searchers to a maelstrom of incomprehensible confusion, neither Libertarian Alliance had any long term future. In other words, neither had any future at all. Both were only as good as whatever bits and pieces of libertarian activity they managed to accomplish at that time, and the people they managed to educate and inspire.

By about the year 2000 I was well on the way to realising all this, but Chris still utterly refused to see it. The “other side” were evil, and his mission in life was to see them buried. Which was a big part of why Chris and I were by then drifting apart. All that remained for me, as an “officer” of “the” Libertarian Alliance, was to ensure that all the pamphlets I had created were turned into internet objects that could at least be individually searched for, by title and author, and that part of my life was over. As his life slipped away, Chris fretted about the future of his Libertarian Alliance, wondering who could be trusted to keep it going and thus ensure his eventual albeit posthumous triumph over those other evil bastards. I knew that the Chris Tame version of the Libertarian Alliance had no future and I wanted no further formal part in it or title within it. As the new millennium got under way, I turned my attention to blogging, which Chris regarded as irredeemably trivial and ephemeral, despite having indirectly done so much to give it a such a libertarian flavour when it began.

All of which meant that by the time Chris was diagnosed with his cancer, we were no longer collaborating, and in fact hardly communicating. Which in its turn meant that, while he was dying, I wasn’t able to summon up the decency to write to him or even of him, about all the good stuff he had done, for me and for so many other libertarians, despite having been so close to it for so long. Now that I am soliciting praise for myself before I die, also of cancer (although of a kind that now seems to be leaving me at least many months more of life and perhaps even several years), I more than ever regret that I did not praise Chris, in public, for all the good things that he did, while he was still alive and could have read it. It was the least I could have done by way of a thank you, and of a signal that I would do my bit, as I am now trying to do with this bit, to keep an understanding of his achievement alive in the way he deserved.

Similar decency would have required me to keep quieter about the Split than I have in this piece of writing, but I could have done that. For despite that horrible Split, the good stuff that Chris Tame did as a libertarian activist outweighed by some distance any harm that the Split caused. Now that we protagonists in the Split have all of us either died out or have come to see the error of our ways, and now that no “Libertarian Alliance” continues to function as more than a shambolic internetted memory, there remains a larger and far more consequential libertarian movement, thanks, to a huge degree, to Chris Tame.

I can already hear the Samizdata commentariat grumbling. In what way has libertarianism been “consequential”? Well, quite a lot of ways, I think. The Brexit campaign, to name just one consequence, which, by the way, Chris would have absolutely loved. The London end of that campaign was bossed by several very libertarian personages, even if that didn’t show in the campaign they ran. But even as we argue about whether libertarianism, in Britain or in the USA, now counts for much, or ever will count for much, my point stands. Even if you think that libertarianism, especially libertarianism in Britain, is now but a shadow of what it could and should be, I contend that without Chris Tame, it would have been but a shadow of a shadow. On the other hand, if the current organisational weakness of libertarianism later turns out to hide an underlying strength that is now hard to divine, Chris Tame, perhaps more than any other individual, should get public credit for that.

As I say, I only wish that I had publicly told Chris Tame at least some of this before he died so prematurely.

Recently, in order to include a reference to it in this posting, I compiled a list of all Chris Tame’s writings for “the” Libertarian Alliance. Sadly, this didn’t take very long. It is only a fraction of what he had hoped to write.