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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Josh Chafetz over on OxBlog has an interesting post about the nature of order, touching on Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith but mostly about Fred Hayek. He also brings up a useful point about a Pejman Pundit post ridiculing the idea of an anarchy club. In a later posting Pejman insists he does understand the definition of the word ‘anarchy’ and points out his first posting was mostly in jest.
There is indeed a useful point being made here and one I have made to several Libertarian Alliance members before: we understand what we mean when we say ‘anarchy’ but when the term is used in common parlance, it is generally a synonym for ‘nihilism’. For example when a bunch of scruffy self-described anti-globalisation protestors set fire to a MacDonalds in Paris and smash up a Mercedes parked near by, those so-called ‘anarchists’ are not doing those things because they want more kosmos (spontaneous or natural order) and less taxis (imposed order), leading to a morality based anarcho-capitalist golden age… no, they are mostly just nihilists whose vision of the future is little different from that of the bikers from hell in the movie ‘Mad Max’. The few of them who actually do have a semi-coherent idea of what the future should look like are Spanish style (circa 1938) ‘anarcho-syndicalists’… which is to say they are rather like meat eating vegetarians (see the ‘related article’ link below).
It is for this reason I usually urge libertarians to stay away from the ‘A’ word because it is so widely misused. Josh Chafetz also expresses his views about anarchy as an objective that shows he more or less does understand the true nature of what real anarchists are arguing for:
That is to say, there is nothing absurd about people organizing in favor of anarchy. What they are doing is stating a preference for absolute kosmos with no taxis. Again, I think this preference is folly. I think that it is neither possible nor desirable to do away with all taxis. I am not an anarchist.
I said more or less understand because taxis does not necessarily mean state imposed order: for example most of the rules within a stock exchange are ‘taxis’ rather than ‘kosmos’ and are analogous to the rules of a private club.. a few are imposed by the state but most are imposed by the exchange itself. No one is forced to trade in a stock exchange and thus in some hypothetical anarchist future, there may well still be ‘taxis’ intensive stock exchanges.
However like Josh, I too am not an anarchist. I am a minarchist but where I depart from Josh is that whilst I agree it is probably not possible to depart from a system in which there is a state, I do think it is desirable. In essence I believe in systems involving the one word conspicuous by its absence in this interesting but utilitarian discussion: morality. I believe in objective morality, albeit imperfectly understood and conjecturally proposed. That, rather than the force of state or vox pop, is the one and only source of legitimacy in any system.
 Probably not what you had in mind
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle…
This precious stone set in the silver sea…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
– William Shakespeare
My views on the state of The State (not just Britain, any state) are well known: I am a libertarian up towards the radical end of the minarchist spectrum.
Yet whilst going out for lunch today, I walked past The Trafalgar, a popular pub on King’s Road in Chelsea, and ended up watching the match between England and Argentina which resulted in a gripping and hard won 1-Nil victory by England. The roar and fierce chants of the English supporters in the pub was utterly magnetic and I found myself pulled in almost against my will, swept up in an irresistible atavistic fervour as if the blood of my ancestors on both sides of the line on Senlac Hill was calling to me to join the shield wall, to add my strength to theirs… now does this sound like the rationalist libertarian who writes anti-state polemics on the Samizdata?
Well, a society is not a state and a nation is not a government. Some libertarians may think that a libertarian future will have evolved beyond tribal yearning as we all live in rational individually determined free associations, but they are quite incorrect… because it is those very yearnings which will lead to many of our free associations.
Many hear echoes of the Nazi Nuremburg mass rallies in the football terraces and pubs of England but they are wrong because coming together to act collectively is not the same as collectivism. Only the state could have caused the Nazi mass rallies, but only the state could prevent such freely associated mass rallies we call football matches, because they are the expression of a deep seated need that will never ever disappear, no matter how rationally centred a society is. The need to wave the tribal banner and roar the latter day war cry can be turned to evil, but what great collective assemblies like football matches show that there is indeed another way to express those feelings which do not involve invading Poland or conquering India.
Here we go again… ever-expanding government surveillance powers and reduction of privacy as part of the drive for greater security. This time it is the US government digging deeper into the Web to capture and corral more of our digital detritus in the name of fighting terrorism.
The new FBI guidelines currently examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee would give federal investigators new licence to mine publicly available databases and monitor Web use. Civil liberties advocates warn that last week’s proposal is the latest step along a worrying path back to the 1950s and ’60s – days when investigators compiled dossiers on innocent American citizens based on their religious and political practices. FBI guidelines from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller would allow field agents to gather information outside of criminal investigations, relaxing regulations set in the 1970s. Those rules, named after then-Attorney General Edward Levi, barred the FBI from attending political meetings unless they had a reasonable suspicion that a crime was being planned.
The new rules, by contrast, would authorise field agents to attend public meetings freely and request warrants with less interference from the main office. In addition, they would allow the FBI to monitor public Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology protests:
“I hate to be in a position of telling people ‘don’t go online and speak’ or ‘watch what you say,’ but you have to take from this that on an arbitrary basis, the FBI is going to be tagging people as terrorists based on what they say online,”
Well, actually, I am not sure what is wrong with that. Your mother told you (or should have told you) not to speak to strangers and be careful about what you say in public. And the Web is a public place whether because of its interconnected structure or because no communication is entirely secure and therefore private. I do want to be able to say what I want and where I want, as that is the most immediate and tangible demonstration of my individual and personal liberty. But at the same time, I also want the government that takes my money in order to ‘protect’ me to pay attention to any communication containing information about an event that could jeopardise my security, life and property.
So the same reforms can be seen as a long overdue end to restrictions that have hobbled investigators and denied them access to research tools available to anyone with an Internet connection. Intelligence failures in the FBI and CIA have come under the spotlight (and fire) amid new questions over who knew what in advance of 11 September suicide hijackings, which left more than 3,000 people dead.
I can imagine the phalanx of hard-core anti-statist libertarians bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion that I might consider any legislation that expands law enforcement’s ability to monitor communications anything but an infringement on privacy and individual liberty. Despite my sound libertarian track record on these issues (see related articles below), I would like to explore this issue further.
 It seems to me that the problem is not merely removing restrictions on investigators to monitor, gather and analyse information. Surely, amassing and making use of publicly available information with research tools available to anyone does not constitute abuse of powers …or does it? The difference between Joe Bloggs carrying out his equivalent of obsessive monitoring of other people’s communications and the FBI’s agent J.B.1984 is that whilst the former cannot do much with it (unless he is a cyber-freak villain in a Hollywood movie), the latter has access to considerable resources and monopoly on force that enable him to act on it. On the other hand, isn’t that what the US citizens are paying him to do?!
The issue here is not just what information is collected, by whom and for what purpose but the nature of the state and its authority. We don’t trust the state and its agencies to use the information for the designated purpose, i.e. our security and protection. We fear that information will instead be used for other purposes, namely, to increase the state’s hold on its citizens. There is no guarantee that after the crucial information about the terrorist plans has been extracted from the monitored data, the information about our private lives, incomes, interests etc, will be discarded. National security has always been used as a cloak for such exercise and it was mainly the US judicial system embedded firmly in the US Constitution that provided some recourse for the most flagrant breaches of individual liberty by the state.
So what is to be done, campaigned for or against, and posted on this blog? The usual stuff – discussions about the state and the legitimacy of its authority and powers, the limited or no government and most of all how the state has expanded beyond any justification. And so although I am willing to grant the state legitimate authority for the purpose of external (army) and internal (police) security in theory, I do not trust the state in its present practice. I will therefore continue writing about the issues of privacy, security and its impact on individual and civil liberties.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
Brian Micklethwait thinks that there are plenty of places in the world which don’t have welfare states but do have problems of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems. Well, funny he should say that…
I’m a fan of Charles Murray’s writings on the “underclass” which I mean to refer to a class of mostly young males who drift in and out of the labour market and depend on welfare ebenfits or crime for their livelyhoods. The unsocialized males fail to adopt the role of economic producer or father. Young women produce children as if they were paid to do so. One of Brian’s neat expressions is to say that a welfare state may not be intended to pay people to be poor, but the outcome looks a lot like it.
Looking at the Palestinian camps one might think these are devoid of welfare statism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Palestinian refugee camps are run by international government agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) in Gaza, the Gaza Strip and Amman, Jordan. The Palestinian territories are arguably the most heavily “cared for” places on Earth (the former Yugoslavia is another candidate). Oldham, Bradford and other trouble spots in the U.K. display similar characteristics: high levels of state intervention to “help” immigrant communities.
As someone who has signed-on the dole more than once and stood in hospital queues for many hours for emergency treatment, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about blowing the whole thing away with a nice heavy-calibre machine gun (bombs haven’t been the same since remote controls and timers). This had nothing to do with other people in the queue, they’re fellow sufferers, nor the people behind the bullet-proof counters (well not often), they’re mostly reasonable people asked to turn shit into gold by their superiors and their victims alike.
When there’s a riot in a town “by Moslems” it would be interesting to check exactly who is rioting, what their parents really think of it (not what a TV crew “finds”), what their source of income was before the riot, and exactly what the target was.
I’m guessing that most Moslems over 35 years old regard rioting in Britain as stupid and dangrous to all Moslems: actually it reminds me of “Rebel Without A Cause”, except these youngsters have a cause to justify themselves. Crime, especially 1) crime by those whites who see themselves at the back of the welfare queue and, 2) street drug trafficking, is main cause of Asian militancy in Britian. In the Palestinian camps, what more glamorous thing is there for an energetic young man to do?
None of this, I may be told, explains flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers. That however is so similar to the adolescent antics of the Leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe. Note that two adolescents who weren’t Moslems tried to copy the terrorists (one in Italy, one in Florida).
The solution to that problem is to make it clear that anyone who crosses the line between wishing to “blow it all away” and actually buying a heavy-calibre machine gun for the purpose is going to fail, and die, and their names will either be forgotten or misspelt. I can’t remember the names of minor players in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades: will anyone remember what-his-name the guy who organised the hijaking in twenty years time? Not Bin Laden, the one who arranged the pilot training.
The most upsetting thing for a young fundamentalist terrorist is not being taken seriously. Conversely, talking up a gang of teenage virgin boys with small willies whose parents don’t understand them into the heroic vanguard of a billion fanatics on the march is fulfilling their wildest dreams. I won’t be popular in the US for thinking this but 9-11 was basically a bigger version of a crazy joyride, albeit deliberately stirred up by some truly evil people. Rather than execute these kids it might actually be a better deterrent to set them loose, but never to allow them to wear trousers or underwear again.
The people who point these kids in the direction where they do the most damage are people we should be worrying about. Frankly their motives are no different whether ecologist, socialist or racial supremacist: hatred of global markets and capitalism. I don’t believe the leading fundamentalists believe in it any more than Stalin believed in withering away the state.
So the two reasons for not getting excited about a Moslem threat are: 1) most Moslems feel threatened by the same thing Brian does, for example Southall is very near Heathrow airport, 2) it encourages those who want to create a war between Islam and the West. I rather like the approach taken by the British courts when I.R.A. terrorists used to stand trial (before the politicians decided to take them seriously). The judge would simply consider the crime and the appropriate sentence. The convicted murderer would be refused any legal recognition for the political motivation of his actions. I could write at length on this subject, but it would monopolize this blog. Perhaps Brian and I should discuss this offline and come back with an understanting on where we disagree.
Roger Dorrington is a builder with two teenage sons, called Nick and Joseph, who have a problem with heroin. There is another man called James White who provides them with that heroin since they were 14 and 15 respectively, in return for money. As most people would correctly surmise, the British state says it is illegal to sell heroin to children like Nick and Joseph.
Now as a libertarian, I think that blanket prohibitions are not the way to deal with the problems caused by addictive drugs like heroin. But I also think that addictive drugs are a problem and that this is best dealt with via social mechanisms like families and in particular ‘robustly engaged’ fathers like Roger Dorrington. However in the here and now of Britain 2002, heroin is a Prohibited Class A drug and the state would have us believe that this makes dealing such drugs A Serious Matter which should be left to the state’s blue clad enforcers.
Now Roger Dorrington is by all accounts a fine caring father to his children and thus does not want drug dealer James White giving Nick and Joseph heroin. As a result he warned the man to stay the hell out of his family house. So when Dorrington came home unexpectedly and found White cutting up heroin in his own house, he beat the drug dealer up and ejected him from his property.
White complained to the police and Dorrington was arrested for assault. White was not arrested at all in spite of the fact he brought a class A drug into Dorrington’s house to give to Dorrington’s children. People must not ‘take the law into their own hands’ says the state and yesterday a judge ordered Roger Dorrington to pay £250 (US $360) to the injured drug dealer and do 100 hours of ‘community service’. Dorrington says he will refuse to comply with either order and will no doubt suffer more later as a result.
So what exactly is going on here? Well it is not about justice, but then nothing whatsoever any state does is in reality about justice. It is not even about The Law, which is certainly what states say they are about in their tenuous claim to be legitimate expressions of a society rather than a vast engine of criminality. No, it is about what is the true priority of nation states. It is about power. 9 times out of 10, if a person sells (highly illegal) a class A drug (possession of which is illegal) on private property from which they have been explicitly excluded (illegal trespass), this will not rouse the state to do anything at all… yet when a private individual himself uses force to prohibit three illegal acts on his own property the state arrests the enforcer of its own laws and does not arrest the violator of several of its other laws.
This is the true face of the modern British state and yet more proof of what both Frédéric Bastiat and Thomas Paine said about State and Society being two fundamentally different things. States only provide justice incidentally en-passant to enforcing their laws. It seems now even that pretence is fading. The only illegal acts that truly stirs Leviathan from its theft bloated torpor is a challenge to its own monopoly of violence backed enforcement. The state not only wants you helpless, it takes concrete measures to make you helpless. No wonder they took our guns away.
It seems the death of Dutch politician and media commentator Pim Fortuyn, which continues to reverberate in the blogosphere and elsewhere, has shed light on just how useless the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ are when it comes to making sense of the political and cultural landscape.
An article in the latest edition of the UK weekly magazine The Spectator by Melanie Phillips, makes an attempt to figure out how Fortuyn grappled with the issues of defending secular, liberal democracies against influences thought to be malign, like militant Islam. But she fluffs it.
Take this dumb paragraph:
“Above all we have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture… Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem.”
Phillips’ attacks legalisation of drugs, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marital unions, all causes Fortuyn championed, and avers that such “libertarianism” undermines liberty. Eh? Surely the common thread running through his stance on tax, public sector services, and social issues like drugs was support of arrangements arrived at by consenting adults and a general desire to stop Big Government getting in the way. His opposition to unchecked, massive immigration from largely non-Western societies was predicated on a fear that such freedoms were under threat. One can argue whether his fear was justified or not – I am not entirely convinced either way – but Fortuyn’s views struck me as entirely coherent.
As for liberalism’s roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that strikes me as only partially accurate. Unlike some atheists, I do fully appreciate the contribution of this religious tradition to liberty (such as the doctrine of Free Will) but for starters, what about the heritage of Greece and Rome? What about the Enlightenment?
Phillips’ analysis is flawed because, ultimately, she cannot see how freedom can flourish without state-imposed restraints. Nowhere is there any grasp of how order and rules can evolve spontaneously from below, rather than be imposed from above. This is a shame because Phillips does have some good things to say, particularly on how Fortuyn has forced many commentators used to thinking of politics through certain prisms to sharpen up their act.
Sometimes, you can gain amazing insight into a person’s whole mentality from merely a simple phrase, a snatch of conversation or a casual comment. A little crack in the curtain can allow you to peer through and shudder at the desolation that lies beyond.
I have had such an experience while perusing the website belonging to those purveyors of fine aluminium millinery antiwar.com. The thing that caught my eye was a headline which reads: “Latest US Menace to Okinawa: Falling Jet Parts”
For a moment I did a double-take. Was I reading that correctly? Yes, I was. I clicked on the link to find this prosaic bit of reportage concerning some bits which fell off a US military jet whilst it flew over Okinawa. This monstrous ‘war crime’ resulted in:
“…no injuries or damage and said the incidents posed no threat to the local community.”
Oh the inhumanity! Oh the oppression! How long can the poor Okinawans be expected to put up with being ‘menaced’ in this way? Weep, WEEP, for Okinawa!!
On the other hand, don’t bother. I may be no expert on aviation but even I know that bits periodically fall from all flying aircraft and I think it is safe to say that it is one of the less worrisome perils of modernity for most normal people. Not so the antiwarriors. No, for them it is a heinous act of US imperialist aggression. I suppose that it easy to do provided you have already settled in your own mind that the USA cannot but be wrongful (despite all the demonstrable evidence to the contrary).
Much of the thrust and complaint of the antiwarriors is directed at the extent to which traditional civil liberties in the USA have been traduced. In this, their complaint is meritorious and noble but I cannot help wondering if they are actually a part of the problem and not the solution. In order to win arguments about civil liberties (or anything else for that matter) the first requirement is to be taken seriously by serious people. But when your outlook is so jaundiced that you brazenly attempt to construe some minor workaday incident as murderous conspiracy then you can only be taken for a crank. Cranks do not help good causes; they pollute them by sheer dint of their crankiness.
Small wonder then that the antiwarriors are left to plough the lonely furrow of providing intellectual succour to vile thugocracies and tinpot demagogues. Like them, the antiwarriors have trapped themselves in a straightjacket of hate and crippled their own faculties with delusions of persecution.
Don’t fry your food, don’t butter your bread
Don’t drink at work, don’t smoke in bed
Don’t try too hard, don’t fool around
Don’t hunt with guns, don’t hunt with hounds
Don’t be too fat, don’t be too lean
Don’t eat red meat, don’t eat fresh cream
Don’t drink and drive
Don’t smoke and drive
Don’t eat and drive
Don’t talk and drive
Don’t sneeze and drive
Don’t drive
Don’t mobile phone, don’t stare at screens
Don’t buy hot drinks, don’t wear tight jeans
Don’t play with knives, don’t make a fist
Don’t play with fire, don’t take a risk
Don’t have sex, don’t procreate
Don’t fantasise, don’t masturbate
Don’t stay up late, don’t exercise
Don’t innovate, don’t theorise
Don’t dare to dream, don’t raise your voice
Don’t make a fuss, don’t make a noise
Don’t climb mountains, don’t sail oceans
Don’t make sudden, jerking motions
Don’t play sports, don’t break sweat
Don’t play roulette, don’t make a bet
Don’t brave the storm, don’t ride the waves
Don’t get too cold and don’t sunbathe
Don’t ride a horse, don’t fly a plane
Don’t strain your heart, don’t use your brain
Don’t read a book, don’t get too tense
Don’t say a word, don’t cause offence
Don’t run, don’t jump, don’t stretch, don�t fly
And above all don’t do DIY
Don’t lust for life, don’t dance till dawn
Best of all, just don’t be born
In his Weekly Standard article Condi Crazy, Lee Bockthorn goes straight to the heart of why I never have and never, ever will vote for a Republican:
But no matter how much these pro-choice Republicans whine, the GOP will always be a pro-life party. Why? Because the abortion issue goes to the heart of what both major parties are about. For Democrats, it’s a proxy for their entire worldview regarding sexual freedom and unfettered moral autonomy. For Republicans, being pro-life is about remaining the party of Lincoln: Just like slavery, unlimited abortion on demand threatens equality (and thus liberty) by denying a class of human beings their inalienable rights and equal dignity merely because it is convenient to do so.
It is not even the abortion issue per-se that angers me. Libertarians are split across the issue. I’m solidly pro-choice: others are not. That’s fine so long as we all agree to keep the State out of it. What is key is Mr Bockhorn sees Republicans as inherently anti-sexual. I am profoundly pro-sexual freedom and unfettered moral autonomy… within the limits consensual activity and personal responsibility for the results. Some libertarians may prefer a more “traditional” family, but they would never consider ramming it down my throat.
The quote shows how fundamentally flawed it is to ever think we as Libertarians can accomplish anything at all with the Republicans.
We just don’t have all that much in common.
This is an issue that often brings out the divisions amongst libertarians. There are two broad camps on this matter:
Most libertarians take the view that it is just a matter of free association and thus the state has no business preventing people from seeking opportunities wherever they are found. Within this group, most also hold that the new arrivals should not be given access to welfare or other transfer payments, taking the view that such redistributions of wealth are just theft in any case and should not be made to anyone, let alone immigrants.
The other camp of people with more or less libertarian views, such as Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe take the view that unrestricted immigration is actually a facet of statism, not liberty. They argue that as all property should be private, mass immigration only occurs when the state takes a hand to prevent people from excluding the new arrivals from privately owned housing and jobs in the manner they assume existing property owners would naturally choose to pursue.
The two main reasons held up to justify this opposition to open immigration is firstly that of the risk of swamping their freedom loving culture that is evolving towards libertarian understandings… and secondly that new and economically unproductive arrivals often hugely increase demand on social security and welfare systems, thereby leading to an increase in unjustified appropriation by the state of tax monies.
The first argument, to which Hans-Hermann Hoppe addresses at great length has two main strands. Firstly the risk of crime and violence posed by a large underclass of non-assimilated immigrants and secondly the moral right of ‘citizen’ peoples to naturally form communities of cultural affinity and ‘dis-affinity’ (i.e. to accept and reject certain types of people without being coerced by the state).
The argument goes that it is the state which ‘imposes’ immigrants on communities and to make it worse there is little motivation to assimilate but rather to just line up for welfare handouts. Additionally, without the coercion of the state, societies in their natural form have deep genetic, racial and ethnic elements which will militate towards evolving to a series of economically interlinked but spatially separated communities, presumably rather like ancient Greek city-states. Whilst the corrosive effects of welfare are undeniably true, the foundation of both these ideas is, I believe, quite false.
It is only due to active state efforts to prevent assimilation (called ‘multiculturalism’) that the ghettoization of sections of society are more than a passing phase in the immigration process. Unless they are uprooted forcibly (as was the case with the arrival of Africans as slaves in North America), people do not emigrate great distances to a foreign land in this modern era because they are happy with their existing way of life and culture. For an Indian or Chinese family to move to Britain, it does not mean they are completely rejecting their original culture and family ties, but it does mean they are making a value judgement that life and culture is at least in some significant measure superior in their destination of choice. Thus to argue that it is intrinsically rational to reject immigrants from different cultures if natural social forces are allowed to work seems to misunderstand why people become immigrants in the first place.
Some like Hans-Hermann Hoppe have what I believe to be quite incorrect understandings of not just the inevitably fluid nature of society in a modern extended order but have also failed to grasp the dramatic effect of capitalist trade based economics on making societies more dynamic and adaptive when they interact increasingly globally. As a result, Hoppe takes an extremely non-Anglosphere, quintessentially Germanic view of the nature of civil society when viewed separately from the state: at its core he sees a blood and soil Volk, racially, genetically as well as culturally based and therefore leading to self reinforcing communities of ‘like cultures’.
Thus he takes the view that were it not for the imposed integration of the state, whilst people may wish to trade with anyone, they would inevitably not freely wish to live and work in close physical proximity with different cultures, races and lifestyles. Different races, homosexuals, libertines, people who take siestas in the afternoon etc. etc. (i.e. anyone who was not a member of the Volk either racially or culturally) would be either excluded from the community of free property owning citizens all together or at the very least banished to enforced ghettos like medieval Jews. I do not feel I am overstating Hoppe’s position (see ch.9 ‘On Cooperation, Tribe, City, and State’ in ‘Democracy-The God that failed’ (2001, Transaction Publisher)).
Yet I look around at London and see a very different world to that of Hoppe. It is abundantly clear that when the state does not enforce distorting multiculturalism, social values will naturally evolve not to Hoppe’s hypothetical future libertarian neo-tribalism but rather to cosmopolitanism, right here and right now. The only Volk of the future is the Volkswagen. When people of different cultures and races actually interact economically, the inevitable consequence is familiarity, cultural confluence and ultimately miscegenation, not a regression to atavistic tribalism. One only has to walk down the streets of London to see the truth of that.
Sure, areas of minority racial and to a lesser extent cultural concentration can be found in Britain, yet one does not have to look far to see an expanding and entirely British black and Asian population already in the mainstream of cultural and economic life of the country… and not just flipping burgers and digging up roads. In racial flash points, such as Oldham, it is racially ghettoized low income supporters of socialist largess who exchange barrages of bricks and bottles over which community is getting the bigger handout from local government. In less radically separated and far less state dependent majority black communities like Clapham in London, for instance, economics un-mediated by the state lead to a very different and altogether better result.
Ilana Mercer makes several excellent points as to the harmful effects of the welfare state on creating an ‘acculturation’ to largess. In this as in so many things she is manifestly correct. Certainly people who see political favour rather than economic interaction as the means to support ones self are indeed the ‘wrong’ sort of immigrant (not to mention the wrong sort of domestic ‘citizen’) who are little more than muggers-by-proxy. However this is not then an argument against open immigration on economic grounds but rather a self-evident argument against the welfare state and all other forms of democratically sanctioned criminality that falls under the ‘redistribution of wealth’ category.
As far as I am concerned Hans-Hermann and Ilana are free to feel distaste at the idea of the close proximity of alien cultures, races and lifestyles (clearly the case for Hoppe) but for them to then deduce that their sentiments are in fact what would be the ‘natural’ sentiments of the majority if it were not for state enforced integration is not really born out by the evidence.
I share the view that socialist multiculturalism is in fact just an attempt to dismantle Anglosphere civil society with its dynamist adaptive nature and replace it with ‘social’ values more amenable to state centred stasis collectivism. However again this is not an argument against immigration but against state interference in the values of civil society. In reality I am probably much more of a cultural chauvinist than Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are. They fear the ‘other’ out of alarm for the fate of liberty based civil society in the face of more primitive collectivist based social values that they see as inevitably (and often incorrectly) defining Third World newcomers.
However I do not fear the cultural alien at all because it is the anti-culture of collectivism which should be afraid and not Anglosphere civil society. I am so convinced of the seductive, viral nature of the core value of our civil society (severalty, unenumerated rights, free contract, personal choice) that unless the dead hand of the state actively prevents it from spreading (i.e. by enforcing ‘multiculturalism’ legislation), the triumph of liberty’s cultural underpinnings is pretty much just a matter of time. The reason for this is that the modern dynamist technological networked extended order is so much more economically effective than every single one of the collectivist state centred stasis based alternatives… all we have to do to ‘win’ is continue to produce the things other societies want and yet are incapable of actually producing.
Just as Hoppe’s ‘Volk’ based understanding of what lies at the core of society was archaic and false even 100 years ago, it is reduced to complete nonsense by the subversive, dynamic, eclectic and market driven screech of the modem, the convenience of the mobile phone and TV screens filled with The History Channel, Australian Soap Operas, Star Trek, Monty Python and Baywatch (quite possibly dubbed in Urdu) and other irresistible bourgeois banalities. Do not fear the immigrant because freed from the baleful distortions of statism, they wish to be us, only more colourfully so. Let them get on with it and thereby enrich us all.
Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must ‘take him to task’ over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of ‘citizenship’. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:
To my mind, this isn’t a conservative view. It’s a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That’s what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.
He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes ‘citizenship’ is indeed ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call ‘democratic socialist’). The ‘political community’ Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is ‘The State’ because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a ‘political’ community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.
In a sense I suppose it’s not a very big deal. But doesn’t this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It’s sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn’t just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it’s something more than that — particularly in the context of American citizenship.
Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marxists with their disdain for ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a ‘Jet Set’ of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have ’emigrated’ yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact. → Continue reading: Citizenship: the state’s way of saying it owns you
It is a widely accepted axiom that our memory plays tricks on us. I beg to differ; it does not play tricks, it is just pitifully unreliable.
Technology is always a good indicator as to the truth of this. Many of us are rather wary of ‘new fangled things’ when they first appear on the market. But enough of us adopt them to make them viable. Then more of us adopt them and, before long, they are universal.
I bought my first mobile phone (cellphone) back in 1994 and have had one ever since. I was in the minority then. Now I am just a part of the crowd. More than that I can barely remember how I managed to cope without my mobile phone. How on earth did I ever get along without the convenience it provides? But I know that must have done.
A similar phenomenon applies to state regulatory regimes. Governments enact them to initial responses of suspicion and confusion but, applied vigourously, in a few short years they become a part of the social fabric and nobody can imagine living without them nor how we all coped beforehand.
A perfect example of this is Britain’s planning and building control regime which requires all new building (and even alteration of existing buildings) to be approved by a committee of local bureaucrats who, in turn, are answerable to central government.
Now, it will come as a surprise to nobody to learn that I think the whole mountain of legislation in this area should be scrapped; placed on a bonfire and burned to ashes while we all dance wildly around till dawn. I have good reason for wishing it so and I am not reluctant to broadcast this view.
Yet, whenever I do, I am greeted with almost uniform blank incomprehension.
Don’t be ridiculous. How could we live in a civilised society without planning laws? How would buildings be planned? Who would control land use and building quality?
My answer is, of course, nobody. The first planning laws were not enacted until 1949 amidst the post-war euphoria for sovietisation and when bureaucratic planning of every aspect of modern life was considered by all to be the wave of the future. Yet the vast majority of Britain’s towns and cities grew and prospered without the benefit of such mandates.
But how would I stop my next-door neighbour from opening an all-night discotheque? How would we stop greedy developers ruining our country with monstrosities and eyesores?
Valid concerns but long before we handed over responsibility for them to our elected officials, they were more than adequately dealt with by private treaty and mutually enforceable land covenants. Indeed, they are still in use today only now they are subordinate to the wishes of state-appointed officials who minister for our alleged good.
But what about architectural quality? How would this survive were it not for the state intervening?
In my view, it would not only survive but true architectural achievement would undergo a rebirth. Britain is fortunate to still retain so many buildings from its glorious past; the kind of buildings that inspire Hollywood movies and which tourists travel from all over the world to marvel at and photograph. All of them were built before 1949 and just about every soul-destroying eyesore and ugly edifice of urban blight in this country has been built since 1949.
It would not be right to say, though, that the dead hand of planning regulations have no effect because they do. They have the effect of suppressing innovation, reducing available housing stock and unnecessarily inflating the cost of the housing stock that does exist.
Yet, everybody believes that we would be lost without them despite that fact that we fared far better without them and within living memory.
The analogy with my mobile phone ends here because I can dispense with my mobile phone if I wish to. However, it benefits me both professionally and socially by facilitating communication at a reasonable price. Therefore it improves the quality of my life and I choose to keep paying for that.
Would that I could exercise such freedom of judgement when it comes to building a home.
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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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