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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When economist and law professor, Marco Biagi began advising the Italian government on reforms to Italy’s ossified Labour Laws, the Italian left sprang into immediate action. Using the rationale of marxist production theory and by the rigourous employment of dialectic method, they planned to confound Biagi by convincing him of the systemic contradictions of free-market ideology.
But that didn’t work so they just shot him.
“Investigators said flatly Wednesday that they had no doubt Biagi was slain over his controversial efforts to help Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government rewrite Italian labor law in a way that would make it easier to fire workers. The unions, and the left in general, vehemently oppose any challenge to the current labor law, which effectively guarantees many workers lifetime job security.”
We have seen this in Europe before. In the late 60’s and early 70’s a number of marxist terror gangs starting springing up as the cracks in the heads of their own ‘intellectuals’ began to show. But, they were assuaged as Europe embraced the ‘Third Way’ and thus cocooned them from the chill wind of Reagan/Thatcher capitalism.
Only now, the cracks are starting to appear in the ‘Third Way’ as well and they know it. Having nothing else to offer, the die-hard disciples must resort to terror and murder. What else can they do when they have invested so much of their lives in a bankrupt philosophy that fewer and fewer people wish to buy or even browse? Like their apprentices in the anti-globo movement, they seethe within the spiritual prison cells of their own incoherent minds.
“An intelligence report to Parliament last week had warned of the risk of terror attacks in response to the conservative government’s policies.”
The article makes it clear that we are not dealing with Islamic radicals here but, in a sense, we might as well be. The same flat-earth mentality is at work; an identical impotent rage in the face of better people and better ideas. Wahabbism and marxism are merely two sides of the same psychotic coin and it is entirely predictable that they are undertaking a congruence of method.
The poor Mr.Biagi deserves better then to be a chilling portent of things to come. Tragically, though, that is exactly what he might be.
It is interesting how one things leads to another. Following a totally parochial inter-Samizdata phone (i.e. telephone) conversation between Perry de Havilland and myself in which he pointed out how we must not confuse Americans, South Africans, Indians or New Zealanders with unexplained British words like “tube” (London’s underground railway system) or with unexplained British acronyms like “HSE” (which is Britain’s “Health and Safety Executive”, not a cow disease) provoked thoughts in me of a grander sort. For what Perry is urging upon us is a new “international” variant of the English language, comprehensible all over the Anglosphere.
Jim Bennett, popularised the term “Anglosphere” to describe a set of shared cultural values, a meme-stream of common references, that is not just the British Isles and North America or even the USA plus the ‘white commonwealth’. It is the totality of the English speaking world united by more than just a common language: an English speaking cosmopolitan meta-culture.
Most discussions of the “Anglosphere” that I’ve read have concentrated on the ideological affinities of the nations and cultures thus alluded to. Common law, liberal democracy, and so forth. That’s not wrong, but there is a more mundane affinity at work here.
It is no accident that the word “Anglosphere” has erupted into vigorous life at the same time as the eruption of the Internet. Language zones are strengthened by international electronic communication, and physical distance rendered relatively less important, and this would be true even if ideology counted for nothing. We can be sure, for example, that in Spain (or is it Portugal, I can never remember which, and that’s my point), there are ‘internetted’ networks devoted to every tiny detail of what’s now happening in Argentina, patronised by readers on both sides of the Atlantic who never give a single thought from one month to the next about happenings in the USA or Britain or Germany or China, and all because of language. Spanish versions of Perry link Spaniards to the dramas of Spanish South America, just as Perry himself links us all to the dramas going on in Anglo-speaking America, Britain, India, New Zealand, etc.
With the modern “knowledge” economy heading the way it is, this is bound to count economically for more and more as the years go by. Which presents us in little old Britain with a dilemma. A generation ago, in the pre-internet age, geography (“zone”) counted for relatively more than it does now. Hence, partly, our desire to hook up economically with mainland Europe. But what if the new economy is now knowledge and language dominated, and trade of this newer sort with Tasmania is now massively easier for us mostly stubbornly mono-linguistic British than trade with France or Germany or China? And what if the English-language-based culture of the internet is creating (re-creating) stubbornly unbreakable bonds of loyalty and friendship, as it surely is? You would expect a drawing back by Britain from the European political commitment, wouldn’t you? A period of Euro-revisionism. Which might be a part of why that’s what is now happening.
But now forget politics, and think of sport. A few weeks back I did a semi-triumphalist semi-jocular posting about how England now has the best international rugby team on earth. Antipodeans were complaining furiously about this post by e-mail long before France made nonsense of it by beating England in Paris on March 2nd. The Antipodeans protested, quite rightly, that England’s alleged rugby superiority over South Africa, Australia and New Zealand wasn’t based on regularly beating these guys in actual serious rugby games, but on guesswork based on England regularly annihilating the likes of Wales and Scotland, and doing okay in very occasional and not-that-vital games involving touring sides, ours and Antipodean, with home advantage going massively to whoever is playing at home. That one simple barrier, jet lag, dooms us to playing regularly only against people geographically close to us. France has the same problem.
So what do we do? Send our entire international rugby squad out to Australia for the entire season, every season? Doesn’t work. If they can’t also play locally, how do we decide who these people are to be? Yet the alternative seems to be that England will remain stuck permanently just below the very top level. Here’s a case where zone counts for more than phone, even though phone is almost the entire reason that all these geographically dispersed countries are still playing the same game by the same rules. (On the other hand, if all the teams played each other regularly anyway, the rugby World Cup wouldn’t count for nearly so much…)
I don’t have an “answer” to this phone versus zone stuff. I’m just saying that this is an interesting way of looking at the world.
For a more detailed introduction to Jim Bennett‘s fascinating Anglosphere ideas, the Anglosphere Primer can be downloaded here in rich text format.
Neel Krishnaswami writes:
Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries.
…and…
A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.
I definitely agree with Neel in the sense that theoretical concepts ought to be supported by empirical evidence and facts. My dislike of utilitarianism is based on one of its consequences – ultimate disregard for the individual. Numerous amendments and elaborations of utilitarian ethics and political theories fail, in my eyes, to remedy this serious flaw. Neel is clearly aware of it and provides examples to this effect himself. If I understand his point correctly it is more about the workings of the human mind and its susceptibility to be convinced by ‘utilitarian arguments’ more successfully than by statements of ‘ideological bullshit’.
In my experience utilitarian arguments that focus strictly on consequences or plain facts and numbers create one of two reactions in the opposing party – either attempts to discredit the source of the information and/or desire to go forth and collect similar ‘statistics’ supporting their views.
My second reservation about utilitarian methods of a debate is that they don’t work. How else do you explain the fact that the vast regiments of lefties (apologies to Perry for using the term out of meta-context) are still polluting the media and public life with their incandescently idiotic convictions about socialism, communism and current authoritarian regimes? No statistics, facts and numbers about Stalin and other communists and the atrocities they committed on the Russian and surrounding nations managed to eliminate communism as an ideology and barely forced its metamorphosis into a ‘benign’ socialism. The facts are dismissed as inconvenient and unconvincing if they clash with fundamental beliefs. Some are happy to use utilitarian arguments to defend communism even in its original guise – I have come across people who argue that Stalin may have done some naughty things but he also turned Russia into an industrial nation. ’nuff said.
I find that the best strategy, and perhaps the most difficult, is one of exposing inconsistencies in the opponent’s ideas and hope to identify the beliefs that get in the way of a rational discourse. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change. As one of the characters in my favourite film points out:
You can’t change people’s beliefs but you can change their ideas.
If however by utilitarian we mean anything relating to the specific, concrete and non-theoretical then we are simply using the term in different ways. Let me explain what I believe, that is, what my idea of a sound theory is and why I find utilitarianism pitifully inadequate in dealing with reality’s bigger picture. My judgement of a theory depends on three elements:
1. its content, that is its premises, logical consistency and order, its relation to reality
2. the motivation of its author and propagators
3. consequences of the theory when tested or put into practice.
To me consequences are secondary elements of a theory. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the theory’s credibility and its popularity. They can also influence the motivation of its supporters and their responsibility in upholding it. However, consequences in themselves cannot change the correctness of a theory itself; they can make neither true nor false a theory that is in itself flawed.
I must confess that I don’t know much about software. I know that it is logical instruction stuff that enables me to do interesting things with my computer and that it is made up of bits, bytes, bobs, bangles, beads and a couple of egg-whites. I also know that it is fabricated by frightfully whizz-bang clever chaps who possess powers far beyond my ken.
I did not know, though, that they were the footsoldiers fighting to bring down Capitalism but, according to Mr. Soderberg, that is exactly what they are.
A word of warning before you open the linked article (if, indeed, that is what you are minded to do): it is a ponderously long and narcolepsy-inducing marxist tract of the kind that I seldom can be bothered to wade through any more but for the inclusion of this early caveat:
“The article address readers sympathetic to the Marxist project and it presumes a basic knowledge of Marxist terminology”
Clearly, it was not meant for the flinty-eyes of a Mammon-Worshipper such as me. It is a sort of shrunken-head-on-a-stick warning that all ye who venture beyond this point risk mortal peril. Well, how could I resist? That’s not a warning, it’s a challenge.
Disappointingly, though, there was no peril, mortal or otherwise and negligible challenge. The thrust of the whole piece is that there are a whole slew of software designers out there beavering away designing excellent software which they then give away for free, thus undermining the corporations who exploit their capitalist intellectual property rights to charge for their (allegedly) inferior products. According to Mr. Soderberg, this heralds the dawn of a new age when the principle of giving away one’s software products for free will be applied to all other products and thus bring about a gift-based society.
All very tedious and all very wrong. As usual when these flat-earthers pop their heads over the parapet, the article is not so much an analysis as an extensive extrapolation of wishful thinking and deeply erroneous assumptions. All Marxists tend to get throbbingly priapic at the thought of folks giving their labour and ideas away for free. For them, it is a validation of their absurd insistence that everyone must give away their labour and ideas for free whereas, truly, it is an example of the kind of voluntarism that lies at the heart of the libertarian view of capitalism.
In other words, if said designers (or collectives thereof) decide to labour for no return then that is tickety-boo by me. And if others decide to that they want a return for their labour that is also tickety-boo. They will only get that return if they produce software that pikers like me are prepared to pay for. In other words, they have to compete and whether they do so successfully is entirely a matter for them.
However the corporations that Mr.Soderberg so dislikes must be churning out some good software because if they were not, they would go bust and in quick time. But that point seems to have been lost on him. Not surprising when you see assertions like this:
“Quite to the contrary, the study supports a connection between general welfare systems and commitment to non-commercial projects”
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but there aren’t a whole lot of magnificent software programmes emerging from, say, Cuba are there?
Mistake compounds mistake as Mr. Soderberg unmasks his vision of a society changed into a gift-society by the act of giving away the software while wholly ignoring the products of capitalism that enable the volunteer designers to do what they do. Nobody is giving away computers for free, or desks or chairs or Kangol hats or pizza or Diet Coke. If Mr. Soderberg wants to excite himself over free information and ideas then let him look no further than this blog and its copious links: loads and loads of folks giving away their intellectual product for free. Does this mean we are all Marxists? Not in my reckoning.
Like all unreconstructed lefties, Mr. Soderberg believes that capitalism insists on the pursuit of profit. Capitalism neither insists nor requires any such thing. It merely requires the voluntary exchange of goods and services upon whatever terms contracting parties agree. People labouring for free is not marxism; people being forced to labour for free is marxism. It is a very easy distinction to grasp and you certainly don’t have to be a software designer to do so.
A.N. Wilson is one of that species of writers that Britain has in abundance: well educated, articulate and not excessively intelligent. He is an exemplar of a particular strain of well heeled British thought that will praise a well crafted essay that states the received wisdom with an air of wise engagement and formulaic cynicism. However such people are deeply suspicious of anything resembling a rigorous argument (for that might imply the truth is not self-evident) or any attempt to make causal links beyond the second logical tier. This species of writer’s forbearers were the people who knew that ending unemployment was good, and that The National Socialist German Workers Party had ended unemployment in the 1930’s. Thus as they looked on and saw a tidy, neat Germany arise from the social and economic chaos of the Depression Years, they would state at parties in their Eton and Oxford educated accents that that Hitler chap might be on to something.
And so we have A.N. Wilson writing about Eugenics on Sunday, 10th March 2002 in The Future lies with Eugenics. He quite interestingly and articulately describes an underclass in Britain that lives a life of state subsidised indolence, crime and childbirth, leading to generations predisposed genetically from birth to become predatory unemployed drains on the diminishing public purse that would otherwise be setting aside tax money for more worthy retirees.
And his solution? Keeping in the tradition of not so much Occam’s razor but rather Occam’s chainsaw, all problems are resolved in one causal step:
(A) The children of ‘hooligan parentage’ provide the majority of repeat offending criminals.
(B) Therefore the solution is to forcibly sterilise repeat offenders to prevent the birth of more congenital criminals.
The justification for this is that these hooligan elements not only absorb a disproportionate amount of appropriated state tax monies containing, housing and feeding them but also will have the temerity to demand an equal share of nationalised state welfare benefits in their dotage.
Now a more rigorous mind might have noted that the common thread here is not some societal line of poison genetics but rather who gets to share in the money the state has appropriated from its hapless taxpayers. The concept that perhaps it is the very structure of the predatory wealth destroying state that is the problem, rather than a genetic underclass, would appear to be a causal link too far for a writer whose primary aim is to be articulate rather than intelligent.
So house prices are skewed by state intervention in tenancy relationships, low end jobs are priced out of existence with minimum wages, undercapitalised businesses are bankrupted with taxes and regulations, tax monies are forcibly taken from the productive and given to subsidise unproductive behaviour and yet somehow the emergence of a perpetually unemployed underclass is deduced to be a genetic problem? Well perhaps it is. Maybe if a few more of A.N. Wilson’s class had contrived to get themselves slaughtered in Britain’s 20th century wars, we would not have developed a political and media elite that seems genetically predisposed to blame everyone for the miserable state of Britain except themselves.
I cannot think of a more compelling argument for the importance of the libertarian argument that no state can be trusted with such a high degree of power over civil society as states have today. The likes of A.N. Wilson would have people castrated and spayed by the state because those people have to live in the reality that the likes of A.N. Wilson helped to create.
The murderers of Daniel Pearl live in another world. It is a world in which acts of deception that result in the murder of an unarmed noncombatant is seen as somehow heroic. It is an inverted world in which showing your weakness by murdering the would-be journalistic bearer of your own message is seen as showing your enemies that you are strong. It is a world with a chain of unfathomable logic that suggests that a course of action that murders a single fine but helpless American in Pakistan will change America foreign policy more to the murderers’ liking even when killing 3,000 helpless Americans in New York did not.
Well in the last one they are at least partially correct. By killing 3,000 Americans they filled the skies of Afghanistan with thunder and caused the destruction of their patron government, which was indeed a change in American foreign policy. And by killing this good man they move America closer to another change. Pakistan must now realise that they have no choice any longer but to crush the serpent in its midst with whatever force it takes or the United States will rightly do it for them in Daniel Pearl’s name. Just as these monsters filmed their foul acts of cowardice, so too we may soon see the deaths of his murderers, if not from the forces of the Pakistani state then through the green light of night vision scopes and guided bomb cameras of a vengeful America.
A meta-context is not a philosophy or a political belief, but rather the lens through which someone sees the world. It is a tradition of thought, a vibe, set of ‘givens’, the frames of reference within which questions are posed and answers found.
A person’s prevailing meta-context has an enormous impact on the way they make decisions and evaluate evidence. Imagine a series of laws has been enacted to create programmes for alleviating poverty in London or Warsaw or Accra or Miami. Imagine also that year after year poverty remains in those places much as before, regardless of the well intentioned programmes. Many would say, most in fact, that clearly better laws are needed and better programmes. This is not a matter of ‘left versus right’. The socialist (or ‘liberal’ in the USA) might argue that the reason the worthy programmes have not succeeded is that the root causes remain, and more needs to be spent on state education/racial sensitivity training/murals on playground walls. Laws must be adjusted to serve the objectives of ‘social’ need. The conservative however might argue that what is needed is less dependency on state handouts and demand that people take whatever jobs can be found or lose all state benefits… and maybe a partnership between state and faith-based organisations to do something or other would be good. Laws must be adjusted within the bounds of some form of ‘constitution’. The state does much the same sort of thing, just a bit less of it and favouring different ‘social’ objectives (discouraging single mothers/pornography/extroverted sexuality etc.).
Both left and right see themselves as opposed, and on some levels indeed they are. Yet both are arguing with each other within a profoundly statist meta-context: if only the unitary state was organised this way with our safe pair of hands on the political tiller, things would get so much better.
An example of this mindset on the right can be found in the United States when people cannot have a discussion about economics, philosophy or even morality on the Internet, addressing a global audience, without bringing up constitutionality, in every case meaning the US Constitution, and not the constitution of Uzbekistan or Australia or Senegal. Not only is this amusingly provincial, it presupposes that all matters of morality and interaction revolve around boundaries defined by the state and its legal documents.
A leftist example however is something I heard on the BBC News just today, reporting that disgruntled university students in England are ‘forced to work part-time due to the fact they now receive student loans rather than student grants from the state’. The news reader put emphasis on the word ‘forced’. Clearly it is implicit, a meta-contextual ‘given’, that the fact a person is having to earn the means to support a service they are receiving (education) for their own benefit, is regarded as an imposition, a questionable compulsion. I wonder if the BBC feels students are ‘forced’ to pay for the food they eat, the beer they drink and the clothes they wear? Perhaps they do.
To view the world within a statist meta-context is to view the world as being entirely politicised and politics is just a euphemism for the application of force-by-proxy. No interaction between people can therefore be truly free of the state. Unregulated interaction becomes interaction not yet regulated. Most people would not care to have their neighbours provide unsolicited and mandatory input on their conduct as parents. Yet the democratically mandated state does that all the time, politicizing the act of raising your own children. Only a pervasive statist meta-context allows this to happen at the same time as people bizarrely think they live in a ‘free society’. In fact they hardly live in a ‘society’ at all, but rather a state which has nationalised private life itself.
Tom Paine would not have approved.
…and a bit of hijacked satire, but more on that bit later. Scott Rubush replies to a pair of articles by David Carr and myself. In response to my view that technologically unsophisticated societies do not produce great thinkers Scott replied:
To which I would say, show me the modern Socrates, and the 21st century Aquinas. When I turn on the television, I don’t see sages like these; I see Oprah and Jerry Springer. When I turn on the radio, I don’t hear the Beethovens and Mozarts of our generation; instead I hear Britney and the Backstreet Boys. Ultimately I think that’s what we could expect from the democratized, progressive materialist society advocated by D’Souza. Is that really progress? Certainly D’Souza’s society would be capable of genius, but his value-neutral “dynamist” regime would do nothing to steer its citizens toward it. The result would be the social equivilent of Gresham’s law, where bad culture drives out good culture.
Ask and you shall receive, for the names of the modern Socrates and the modern Aquinas are Frederick Hayek and Karl Popper. I turn on the radio and I also hear Aaron Copland and Lisa Gerard. I watch the cable television and learn of astonishing breakthroughs in genetic sciences and hear it explained for people like myself who did not study that field. I read accessible, inexpensive paperback books like David Deutsch’s ‘Fabric of Reality’, purchased not from some sanctum of gnostic wisdom but available in a bookshop inside a train station. If all you see is Oprah and Jerry Springer then you need a new remote control, Scott (and quickly!). I also see a programme about anthropology and the Leaky family in Kenya, and with the push of a button I see a superb Japanese version of Macbeth and then a remarkable show about the fusion of Irish and Senegalese music. It is all there at the touch of a button and at prices the great majority of the population can afford.
Bad culture does not drive out good, it just looks for a different market niche. The low brow, scandalous, scurrilous and bawdy Hogarth prints of one era are the ‘biting social commentary’ of the next era. Back in the good old days, ‘good culture’ was not more pervasive than now as it was never available to more than the ruling classes… and ruling classes by their nature exist not to ‘steer its citizens towards’ good culture but rather towards a culture of deference to the rulers. Mozart is thought of now as ‘good culture’ but not because of anything intrinsic to the music, for it was once regarded as subversive. Rather it is because of who listens to it. One hundred years from now patrician critics might lament the fact people turn their backs on classics like Pink Floyd.
Far from being ‘value neutral’, a dynamist society must underpin itself with objective morality as the guide to the evolving new. Only this way can we know when ‘tried-and-true’ becomes untrue, and when to leave well enough alone, for just as the ‘tried-and-true’ evolves, so to does understanding. The greatest of many errors made by Marx was highlighted by Hayek when he pointed out that to remake society entirely by revolution implies that the revolutionary can know by the application of scientific reason what will always be the best, and therefore make it so at bayonet point. Yet society is not the product of reason, but of complex evolutionary processes. Once this is understood Marx’s ‘scientific socialism’ is revealed to be nothing of the sort but rather an exercise in self-delusion, a ‘fatal conceit’. This is also why when people refer to the remarkable events which came to a head in 1776, I have always depreciated the term ‘American Revolution’ which is so popular in the USA. I prefer the term ‘American War of Independence’ used more typically in the rest of the Anglosphere: What Jefferson et al did was free the thirteen colonies from the stasis imposed by the British Crown, not to radically remake society at bayonet point as would soon happen in France in 1789 and later in Russia in 1917, but rather to allow it to evolve in a manner consistent with the very best of the underlying civil society’s values. The Constitution of the United States did not overthrow society, it enshrined its values and attempted to protect it from the encroachment of the state and the worst aspects of democratic mob rule, even if not entirely successfully. But that is also why I am not a conservative… the authors of America’s Independence and others forsaw the problem intrinsic to any democratic system, that as Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813) put it:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The situation has developed in which nation states forcibly appropriate over 50 per cent of a nations wealth and yet this is seen as legitimate due to a ‘democratic mandate’. Yet the reality is that not only is it immoral, it is unsupportable in the long run. As a libertarian I see that society must continue to evolve away from the all-consuming centralised state and towards a more spontaneous, truly capitalist and less rigid system. Just as the wealth gobbling nations of the world grow fatter by the year, the seeds of a freer future are also becoming more visible almost by the day. I suspect the difference between conservatives such as Scott and libertarians such as myself is that whilst we both abominate the statist impositions of the left, he sees a perpetual rear guard action of fighting the laws of the left with laws of the right as a viable option, whilst I see a very different future. I see the disintergration of the politicized legal edifice over which left and right fight as being a long term economic inevitability, not necessarily from catastrophic collapse (though most likely Japan and some of Europe will do just that) but from the gradual technologically driven creeping irrelevance that will see that what follows the current order is something both familiar and excitingly different. Unlike Scott, I see this as a good thing as I expect the good and enhancing aspects of culture to survive because such things are objectively good and efficacious.
Which brings me to Scott’s ire regarding David’s remarks. I suspect he took ‘And what did the Romans ever do for us?’ a tad too literally. David was using Scott’s earlier remarks to reference a well known bit of British humour in the form of an extended skit from Monty Python’s Life of Brian and thus was only indirectly addressing Scott.
And now for something completely different…
Scott Rubush write a reasonable piece on his self-named blog called Libertarianism and Marxism. I quite like the way Scott writes but I have to say he drives into several well worn potholes of misunderstanding when he mistakenly sees a confluence of views between Karl Marx and Dinesh D’Souza.
The notion that libertarians always disdain the ‘tried-and-true’ is his first misunderstanding. What libertarianism is based on is the rejection of the conservative and socialist predisposition to deference for deferences sake. Ours is the way that places civil society, and not state, at the centre of social interaction. We reject the nationalisation of private life. Yet civil society is not the product of our intellects but rather complex social evolutionary processes. Libertarians seek the solutions that emphasize free consent, binding contract and free association, all rooted in the ‘tried-and-true’ common law culture of the Anglosphere. It is only the state which can sweep away the ‘tried-and-true’ with the stroke of a pen, not libertarianism. What we reject is ‘traditions’ which have outlived their time, ‘tried-and-no-longer-true’, things like slavery, prohibiting women from owning property and legislated actions against consensual sexual practices like prostitution, homosexuality and other more unusual peccadillos.
The second misunderstanding is what D’Souza and Marx both said in the quoted passages. Whilst they both initially seem to confirm Rubush’s thesis, the last sentences in both of them illuminate why dialectical materialism is not the issue here at all because D’Souza and Marx have in fact drawn the opposite conclusions.
When Marx says in his well know remark “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself”, he is arguing that the factory system of bourgeois collectivisation of the proletariat due to the advent of technologically derived mass production, makes the merging of society and state inevitable, thereby eliminating the raison d’etre of the bourgeoisie and resulting logically in a dictatorship of the proletariat which imposes social truth on all, leading to socialist ‘New Man’.
However when D’Souza says “So technology helped to free human beings from bondage, and that is a moral gain because it extends a cherished value: freedom”, he saying the exact opposite. His thesis is not that technology will collectivise us but rather that it will make the proletariat into the bourgeoisie… in other words, we are all de-collectivised middle class now. Technology frees us from an existence of collective tribal subsistence, allowing us to develop socially towards the more several existence of an extended de-collectivised civil order.
It is this extended order that allows morality, and not just collectivised force, to govern our actions. Man is still man but the idea that changing his circumstance makes no difference to his moral development is hard to support. Where is the Hottentot Aristotle? Where is the Nung Socrates? Where is the Inuit Aquinas? It is from a level of economic development driven by technology that permits us to spend less time shooting arrows at antelope and more time becoming more than just upright animals-that-survive.
That’s why his piece is fatally flawed. Rubush fails to see that whilst mankind’s nature may be essentially unchanging, his circumstances are not… and that is a non-trivial matter when it comes to allowing people to spend more time in non-utilitarian activities and less time just surviving.
Marx felt technology would turn society into a vast state-society based on ‘scientific socialist’ principles in which truth itself in collectively derived. D’Souza feels technology frees us to think and entertain such concepts as liberty itself.
I think Tom Burroughes is far to genteel with his treatment of EU Commissioner Chris Patten‘s remarks in the Financial Times.
My answer is not that the unilateralist urge is wicked but that it is ultimately ineffective and self-defeating.
Here is the core of the crypto-socialist beliefs of purported conservatives like Chris Patten. Only the collective approach works.
The attacks of September 11, in which citizens of more than 80 countries lost their lives, brought home in a terrifying way the vulnerability of the US and the rest of us to the actions of extremists plotting from safe places in failed states such as Afghanistan.
Indeed. That is why the ‘failed state’ which harboured and succored Al Qaeda was overthrown by force of arms and replaced with one more to America’s liking.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, it seemed that the US had rediscovered its need for allies to confront this common menace. The stunning and un-expectedly rapid success of the military campaign in Afghanistan was a tribute to American capacity. But it has perhaps reinforced some dangerous instincts: that the projection of military power is the only basis of true security; that the US can rely only on itself; and that allies may be useful as an optional extra but that the US is big and strong enough to manage without them if it must.
I suspect in fact the US actions were based on the quaint notion that a dead enemy tends not to plan further attacks against you and that time was of the essence, given that attack by Al Qaeda was not just a possibility but had actually occurred. Expeditious action was unlikely to have been served by waited for the participation of Belgian, Portuguese and Greek para-commandos. How long did it take for the Europeans to acquiesce in the tepid military action against the Bosnian Serbs who had been randomly shelling civilians in Sarajevo? Is that how long Patten expected the Americans to wait after September 11th?
I hope those instincts will not prevail, because I believe them to be profoundly misguided. The lesson of September 11 is that we need both American leadership and international co-operation on an unprecedented scale. It is in the world’s interest, as it is in the interests of the world’s greatest power, that leadership should be exercised in partnership.
The US said ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’, which sounds like leadership to me. They then proceeded to blow seven shades of crap out of Afghanistan… at which point nations such as Syria, Sudan and Yemen started ‘co-operation on an unprecedented scale’ with the US. Sounds like leadership and co-operation to me. The problem lies in the Islamic world and this it is the co-operation of the relavent bits of the Islamic world that matters. If the people who flew the aircraft into the WTC were mostly French and German, no doubt there would be more of an imperitive to secure French and German co-operation. Of course partnership is pretty much the antithesis of leadership so quite what Patten means by leadership should be exercised in partnership is unclear to me.
Why is that so? Let me offer five reasons. First, every day makes us more aware of the interconnectedness of the modern world: a world in which America is at the centre of an increasingly integrated web, in which modern technology is corrosive of national boundaries and national jurisdictions. That makes it all the more important to work with those who share your values in order to protect them.
Exactly. Which is why the US worked with the UK and not Brussels. The US and the UK share values. The US and the EU do not.
Second, while globalisation – the combination of open trade, capitalism and technology – creates unparalleled opportunities, it also has a dark side. The European Union symbolises the ability of countries to come together to tackle common problems.
The ‘dark side’ of globalisation is creating global capitalist wealth generating networks which stasis based institutions like the EU and repressive regimes everywhere have great difficulty controlling. The ‘common problems’ Patten refers to are common to trade unions, subsidised farmers and protected national industries. The ‘problem’ they have is that they are trying to sunbathe and finding themselves in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Patten said a few days after September 11th that the attack was ‘due to globalization’. So presumably if we restrict trade to within national borders and subject all economic activity to state regulation, Al-Qaeda would not have attacked the USA. Here is an alternate thesis: if for the last 50 years the EU and other trading nations had not protected their markets from Third World/Middle Eastern people trying to trade with them, the Islamic world would be far more prosperous and secular and integrated into the world economy and thus much less of a stagnant swamp of repressive governments and epistemologically crippled civil societies than they are now.In short, the September 11th attacks happened because people like Christopher Patten have limited globalization by trying to only let it happen on controlled statist terms.
Third, the international institutional architecture – from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation – owes more to the genius of American statesmen than to any other source. But these institutions are under threat. Their rulings are challenged with increasing truculence and impunity. They lack democratic legitimacy, which fuels the muddled movement against globalisation. They need to be nurtured or they will lose their authority – and we shall all be the poorer for it.
The UN, IMF, World Bank and WTO are idiotic institutions. Not because they are not ‘democratic’, which is just another way of saying ‘politicized’ , but because they are statist, which is to say, they are based on the premise that trade occurs between states rather than people and free associations (companies). Legitimacy does not come from democracy, it comes from non-coercion and free choice. And so does prosperity. Left to their own devises and without layer upon layer of regulations and tariffs, would companies trade more or less? Obviously more, and as more trade means more wealth is created, the problem is not how can states facilitate companies trading but how can companies prevent states and the whole alphabet soup of state-based organisations they create, from getting in the way.
Fourth, Europe cannot hope to match US military spending – nor should it even aspire to do so. Like Lord Robertson, the secretary-general of Nato, I feel strongly that European governments should increase their national military budgets, shouldering more of the burden for their own defence. But “security” is a wider concept. The EU, with its member states, is a massive provider of development assistance. We provide about 55 per cent of total international assistance and as much as two-thirds of all grant aid. That too is a contribution to international security. No one disputes the need for tough military action to destroy the al-Qaeda network and its bases. But if we are to deny al-Qaeda, and other networks, the territory from which to plan future atrocities, we have to do all we can to bolster weak or failing states and prevent them falling into the clutches of the bin Ladens of this world.
By providing “55 per cent of total international assistance and as much as two-thirds of all grant aid”…TO STATES the EU underwrites 55% of the problem, not the solution. It takes money confiscated from EU taxpayers and gives it to kleptocratic regimes across the world, who allocate the money on socialist-statist principles. Far from adding to global security, the EU undermines it. Far better would be to take that ‘aid’ money, which only aids the very regimes which lock-in the self reinforcing doom loop of politicized economics, and leaving it with the individual EU taxpayers to whom it belongs. If the EU insists on stealing it however, they would do a hell of a lot more for global security by spending the money on aircraft carriers rather than supporting flawed third world governance.
There is a final point. I need hardly say that as well as affection and admiration for America around the world, there is also fear and resentment. As the world’s only superpower, the US carries a particular responsibility to maintain moral authority for her leadership. Do your own thing and everything seems clear and purposeful; but there is a cost in terms of legitimacy and long-term effectiveness. That cost accumulates over time.
Almost invariably when someone says “I need hardly say that as well as affection and admiration for America around the world” it means nothing could be further from the truth and they are about to say something that proves quite the contrary. Patten represents a fundamentally illegitimate organisation which even by his own standards of advocating legitimacy-by-democracy is illegitimate. Who elected EU Commissioner Chris Patten.
So where does this leave us? It leaves me, at least, uneasy. I look to America – as I have always looked to America – to engage with a complex and dangerous world. There is much that is evil in that world. But to brand a disparate group of countries as an “axis of evil” did not strike me as the finest phrase ever produced by the president’s speechwriters. Of course we must oppose what is evil. But we must also build on what is good – and on what offers hope of a better future.
And what exactly is the good that ‘we’ must build on in North Korea, Iraq and Iran?
In Iraq, for example, we must redouble our efforts to get the inspectors back in and to support the opposition to Saddam Hussein. But in Iran? When some in Washington say that European policy in Iran has failed, my immediate reaction is that we need to find new ways to support reform there, not that we should put up the shutters.
Militarily crushing the entire political and military apparatus of Iran and Iraq would be pretty much an unmatchable way of ‘supporting reform’. That is no more ‘putting up shutters’ than the manner in which the US and UK interacted with Nazi Germany. We did not remove the ‘problem’ of Auschwitz and Belsen by prevailing upon the Nazis to allow inspectors to visit. If Iran and Iraq do indeed pose a clear and present danger, then it must be made clear to them in no uncertain terms that such actions will lead the USA to pose a clear and present danger to them. Publicly calling them part of an ‘axis of evil’ seems to achieve that pretty well.
In the case of North Korea, the sunshine policy of Kim Dae-jung offers the best prospect in years of bringing real change. In the Middle East, we need dialogue, not isolation and further radicalisation of the Palestinians.
Patten ended up by quoting Henry Kissinger:
“America’s challenge is to transfer its power into moral consensus, promoting its values not by imposition but by their willing acceptance in a world that, for all its seeming resistance, desperately needs enlightening leadership.” That sentence is not mine but the final paragraph of a recent book by Henry Kissinger. Is it overly candid of this friend of America’s to say that I agree with every word?
Finally I agree with Patten… or more accurately, with Henry Kissinger. Although the US should not seek to impose them, the sooner the US realises its policy of benign neglect is a mistake the better: it does indeed needs to encourage the willing acceptance of its values… by Europe.
Recent events in Argentina have helped drag quite a few things out into the light that would rather have remained skulking in the shadows.
One of the things that is now clear is that the idea a debtor nation can be ‘too big to be allowed to fail’ is revealed to be a myth. When Ecuador defaulted on $6 billion worth of bonds in 1999, people just shrugged it off as ‘only Ecuador’. Yet now we see Argentina going the same way to the tune of $132 billion.
Another thing has become clear about the IMF. Anne Krueger, the IMF’s deputy managing director, has let it be known that the fund is very keen to get out of the ‘sovereign bailout business’. To this end the IMF has some fantastical plans for ‘harmonising’ international bankruptcy laws which will of course come to nothing. Yet the source of the impetus for restructuring the IMF’s relations with debtor nations is quite revealing and not one you might think. Much of these ‘new’ ideas being floated come in almost whole cloth from Jubilee Plus, a leading anti-globalization pressure group whose very name you would think would be anathema within the hallowed halls of an ostensibly pro-capitalist organisation like the IMF purports to be. In fact what is clear is that Jubilee Plus and the IMF are just different sides of the same pro-stasis coin, profoundly hostile to dynamic free trade networks and in favour of state centred status rather than value based economics.
It says much about the inevitable evolution of the IMF from a supposed facilitator of the global capitalist economic order to being little more than the financial arm of a network of pro-stasis organisations underpinning almost every kleptocratic state on the planet. For as long as the IMF is not just happy to prop up heavily regulated force based value destroying economies of the sort favoured by Jubilee and its ilk, there is little motivation for financial institutions to tailor their lending to the economic realities of a nation’s governance. Yet there is always the fond hope that while the IMF ponders its restructuring, a few really large international lenders will feel some serious pain.
What is really needed is for a few nice large international names to go belly up as there are few things that get the financial world’s attention better than that. I am thinking of people like Citigroup, FleetBoston, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya and Santander Central Hispano, who are all massively exposed to the mess in Argentina… sadly this is probably not going to happen but if it did, what we would have is a clear causal link established between a willingness to lend to kleptocratic governments and disaster. This in turn would impose a real cost in terms of an inability to borrow on governments which pursue anti-economic statist/stasist policies.
Just as companies with bad ideas must be allowed to go broke, so must governments. Sovereign default can be very invigorating to the cause of liberty and advocates of true non-crony capitalism should oppose any institutions which seek to ameliorate the link between government actions and the consequences of those policies. And if those governments, such as in Argentina, are democratic then all the more reason for allowing the voters of that country to reap the bitter consequences of their theft-by-proxy mandates. Let the financial tumbrils roll and lets see whose heads get cut off without the Scarlet Pimpernel of the IMF to come to the rescue.
Over on Little Green Footballs (also see link under ‘posh blogs’ section in sidebar), there is a lengthy series of entries in the comments section under an article about globalization and the people who are heading to New York to protest against it. Someone called Michele stated that she was “strongly against world trade”. This astonishing remark was something that had to be answered and so I will repeat my remarks here:
To be “strongly against world trade” is to be in favour of poverty and against free association. It is to favour force over choice. It is to favour death and famine in the third world. Anyone who actually wants for the peoples of South America, Africa and Asia to prosper should be demanding not an end to world trade but the removal of all barriers to entry to the US and EU markets. At a stroke that would result in cheaper products for common working western people as cheaper African, South American and Asian goods become available. Immediately the economies of third world nations would improve as they could sell their products without immoral grotesque discriminatory tariff barriers.
Also, as a laissez-faire capitalist libertarian, I am strongly opposed to the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF… these are institutions that support crony capitalism and big-government. They subsidise neo-national socialist stupidity like that in Argentina and despotic kleptocratic regimes across the globe.
I am in favour of true free association and therefore laissez-faire and true globalization. I reject collectivism in all its coercive left and right wing forms and the violence and poverty they always lead to. Individualism and laissez-faire capitalism without borders is the only moral option and the only option that can actually work at all in the long run.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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