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I have made no secret here of my admiration for Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.
I was especially struck by the pages where he describes The Enlightenment, and I have taken the liberty of scanning these pages into my personal blog. If anyone connected with the book objects, my posting will be removed, so if a brief exposition of what The Enlightenment was and how the ideas behind it all fitted together appeals, go there, soon, and read on.
Two questions naturally arise from Pinker’s summary. First, is it an accurate description? Or does Pinker impose a coherence upon Enlightenment thinking that it never quite possessed for real? (My guesses: yes, and no.) Second, if I am right that Pinker does describe the unified scientific and moral agenda of The Enlightenment accurately, then how true are these ideas? Were errors made, as well as truths declared? Did these errors do harm? (Did any of the truths do harm?)
I could go on, but prefer not to. Suffice it to say here that it’s there if you want it, for the time being anyway.
I did not write what follows. It was sent to me by my regular correspondent, Niall Kilmartin. – NS
When I first started reading Edmund Burke, it was for the political wisdom his writings contained. Only many years later did I start to benefit from noticing that the Burke we know – the man proved a prophet by events and with an impressive legacy – differed from the Burke that the man himself knew: the man who was a lifelong target of slander; the one who, on each major issue of his life, gained only rare and partial victories after years or decades of seeing events tragically unfold as he had vainly foretold. Looking back, we see the man revered by both parties as the model of a statesman and thinker in the following century, the hero of Sir Winston Churchill in the century after. But Burke lived his life looking forwards:
– On America, an initial victory (repeal of the Stamp Act) was followed by over 15 years in the political wilderness and then by the second-best of US independence. (Burke was the very first member of parliament to say that Britain must recognise US independence, but his preferred solution when the crisis first arose in the mid-1760s was to preserve – by rarely using – a prerogative power of the British parliament that could one day be useful for such things as opposing slavery.)
– He vastly improved the lot of the inhabitants of India, but in Britain the first result of trying was massive electoral defeat, and his chosen means after that – the impeachment of Warren Hastings – took him 14 years of exhausting effort and ended in acquittal. Indians were much better off, but back in England the acquittal felt like failure.
– Three decades of seeking to improve the lot of Irish Catholics, latterly with successes, ended in the sudden disaster of Earl Fitzwilliam’s recall and the approach of the 1798 rebellion which he foresaw would fail (and had to hope would fail).
– The French revolutionaries’ conquest of England never looked so likely as at the time of his death in 1797. It was the equivalent of dying in September 1940 or November 1941.
It’s not surprising that late in his life he commented that the ill success of his efforts might seem to justify changing his opinions. But he added that “Until I gain other lights than those I have”, he would have to go on being true to his understanding.
Of course, the background to these thoughts is reflecting on the US election result. Reflecting on how much worse it was for Burke is consoling. Choosing to be truthful in politics often means choosing to be justified by long-term events not short-term elections.
Two weeks before, I’d have guessed a Romney victory with some confidence, but the night before the election, I realised – rather to my surprise – that I expected Obama to win. I took myself to task over these negative thoughts, but it made no difference: I still expected Obama to win. On Wednesday morning, I was glad that being British gave me some feeling of insulation from it (not that our own government has been anything to shout about for a long time – shout at, maybe), although I fear the ill consequences will not all be confined to the far side of the pond.
Burke was several times defeated politically – sometimes as a direct result of being honest – and later (usually much later) resurged simply because his opponents, through refusing to believe his warnings, walked into water over their heads and drowned, doing a lot of irreversible damage in the process. Even when this happened, he was not quickly respected. By the time it became really hard to avoid noticing that the French revolution was as unpleasant as Burke had predicted, all the enlightened people knew he was a longstanding prejudiced enemy of it, so “he loses credit for his foresight because he acted on it”, as Harvey Mansfield put it. Similarly, when ugly effects of Obama’s second term become impossible to ignore, people like you and me will get no credit from those to whom their occurrence is unexpected because we were against him “anyway”.
Even eight years is a shorter time than any of Burke’s epochs. If the euro dies in less than another four years, maybe we should think ourselves very lucky. In our health service, the ratio of administrators to doctors and nurses passed 100% much longer ago than four years or even eight, and the NHS is still a sacred cow. Perhaps US citizens should think themselves lucky that adverse effects of ObamaCare may show soon and be noticed.
Since Burke was admired by Churchill, here’s a Churchill quote: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
And a related Burke one: “The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments – success.”
Earlier today I visited my elder brother, in the family home we shared as children in Englefield Green, up the hill from Egham in the county of Surrey. I chose today for this fraternal reunion because the weather forecast was particularly encouraging, and I wanted also to include a visit to the nearby Air Forces Memorial.
This was my first view of this Memorial:
As you can see, the weather forecast was not wrong.
What I have always liked about the Air Forces Memorial is the views from the top of the tower. Climb that, and you are above the trees and can look out over the Thames Valley. On a day like today, you can see clearly, for miles. → Continue reading: Remembrance
They say that’s what Margaret Thatcher said, the day she fell. I was in the small crowd that watched as the car brought her back from the Commons to Downing Street, a self-conscious little crowd, split about fifty-fifty between sympathisers and opponents, the sort of crowd from which occasional shouts pop out like kittens nervously venturing forth from a cardboard box. I did not shout either to jeer or console; I was only there because at the time I worked in the Treasury building in the next street and wanted to see a little history being made.
It might cheer up any American readers saddened by the result of the recent US election to recall that the first shot in the fusillade that brought the Prime Minister down was this:
On 1 November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining member of Thatcher’s original 1979 cabinet, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister over her refusal to agree to a timetable for Britain to join the European single currency.
Howe thought he was making straight the path down which the forces of modernity would march, but he didn’t know the future any more than Thatcher did, or you, or I. I’ll tell you something, though, his political delusion on 1 November 1990 regarding the desirability of currency union looks a lot more foolish now than her personal delusion that she would still have the key to No.10 Downing Street a few weeks later.
That’s the trouble with the future. It won’t stay put.
Today we are hearing much (in tones of glee or despair) about how “a permanent Democratic majority” is emerging, an oligarchy dispensing patronage to fiefdoms of class and race that will only fall when the money runs out, and then with vast misery and perhaps bloodshed. Similar predictions are made for the UK and other developed countries. I do fear that, but a tempering memory, again from my Treasury days in the early nineties, is of seeing earnest policy papers written by Conservative MPs who worried that in order to preserve democracy it might be needful for the Conservative party to split into two, because it was obvious that Labour was never getting back in.
I cannot say quite what I am aiming to do in this post, other than possibly bore some harried souls into tranquility with my recollections des élections perdues and similar political ups and downs. Just saying, it’s a funny old world.
Last week, on Wednesday October 31st, unaware that this was “Halloween Night”, and entirely for my own personal reasons, I happened to find myself at Piccadilly Circus, in the middle of London. Lots of people were dressed in funny costumes, with a definite bias towards monster masks and make-up that suggested extras in horror movies. I had my camera with me and snapped away. It was dark, but the big adverts flickering away above and beyond the scene ensured that it was quite well lit. Some at least of my snaps came out okay.
Halloween has been on the up and up in Britain for quite a while. But when I was a kid half a century ago and more, the big deal at this time of year was Guy Fawkes Night aka Bonfire Night aka Fireworks Night. Halloween was, then, even a distant American rumour.
Guy Fawkes Night is supposedly tonight. Remember remember the fifth of November, etc. I can’t remember the rest of the words of that nursery rhyme or poem or whatever it is, but the date is imprinted on my brain. But Guy Fawkes Night seems to be fading in popularity even as Halloween has risen up to challenge it. It is now, as I finish this posting before its November 5th deadline expires, nearly midnight, and had I not, in my central London home, been listening out for explosions, I would have heard hardly any. Even with maximum alertness, I heard only a tiny few. I am told that many pet dogs are driven nearly mad with fear by these bangings. If only for the sake of these suffering dogs, I now wish that the Guy Fawkes habit would cease entirely.
So, why is Halloween on the rise, and Guy Fawkes Night in decline? It can’t only be that people want to make life better for dogs. Let me now try to guess some of the ways.
Let me start with the simple impracticality of arranging a bonfire these days. As life gets ever more urban, random clutches of combustible material just don’t get accumulated, the way such stuff did in the big suburban garden of my childhood, or out in the public places of Englefield Green, the outer London suburb we lived in, which really did have and still does have a big “green” bit. Simply for that reason, I should guess that Bonfire Night retains more of its old popularity in places like Englefield Green – even more so in the proper countryside – than it now does in central London. In Englefield Green, there is somewhere sensible to do it on a proper scale.
But even that may not be enough for Englefield Green to continue Bonfire Nighting in a big way. The organising classes, the people who once would have organised public space Bonfire Night gatherings complete with a big bonfire and lots of fireworks, are now obsessed with health-and-safety, either because they really believe in it or because so many others do believe in it that the law now hovers over the slightest suggestion of un-safety. Bonfires? Fireworks? Worst than that, fireworks that children hold? Children being children, following Bonfire Nights in the olden times there were always a few stories of children burnt or even blinded by, e.g. mistaking a proper firework for a mere sparkly thing that you were supposed to hang on to. Then, the moral was: well, kids are kids, and those ones should have been more careful and have been better looked after. And: bad luck, how sad. Now, such incidents provoke nationally broadcast sermons about how We Need Tighter Regulation, and lawsuits that go on for ever.
The Organising Classes would probably now like Bonfire Night to be made illegal, to the point where, if it survives, it will do so as an act not of harmless self entertainment, but of popular defiance against officialdom.
But in truth, Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes Night, is not a satisfactory vehicle for such defiance. After all, what Guy Fawkes Night (to choose that particularly pertinent title) celebrates, is the public execution, by the government, of a Catholic terrorist who tried to blow up Parliament. Guy Fawkes night is an officially sponsored celebration of a government victory over anti-government disruption. If we want to defy the government with a Guy Fawkes themed event, we would do better to fake up a Parliamentary explosion and dance around it in Guy Fawkes masks, like the ones worn in Vendetta, and now at every other political demo anyone tries to arrange in London. The thing that gets burned should be Parliament, not a “Guy”. Having already written the previous couple of sentences I watched this clip from Vendetta, that Guido Fawkes has up today, by way of celebrating November 5th and all that. And in that clip they do blow up Parliament, and a huge crowd all wear Guy Fawkes masks. But this doesn’t mean that Guy Fawkes Night is destined to continue as it was, more that the imagery of Guy Fawkes Night is, so to speak, being asset stripped and applied to other activities, activities which are not confined to just the one day in the year.
As for the fireworks side of things, fireworks work best when resources are pooled, and when a precise time is agreed upon as the moment of celebration. I vividly recall visiting West Germany in the 1980s, over the New Year, and witnessing the night sky of Germany being lit up with ferociously Teutonic unanimity at precisely midnight, at the exact end of the old year and the exact beginning of the new. (I wish digital cameras had existed then.) And I recall thinking how much better this was as way to do fireworks than our British week of tiny little bangs and sputters and sparkles. The point was not that all these German fireworks were paid for by the government. Lots of them were impeccably freelance in their financing, as well as in their manufacture of course. The point was that everyone agreed about exactly when the fireworks would all be detonated, so that all could share the fun, and then go back indoors and carry on with their lives.
Then the same thing happened on Millenium Night in London itself, just as it did everywhere else on the planet. This was far more impressive than any “Fireworks Night” display.
Meanwhile, what of Halloween? What’s the appeal of that? Let me try to count at least some of the many reasons why Halloween, unlike Bonfire Night, is now on the rise. → Continue reading: Is Halloween supplanting Guy Fawkes Night in Britain?
David Cameron thinks it was. David Cameron thinking anything is reason to believe the opposite.
Seumas Milne thinks it wasn’t. Seumas Milne thinking anything is reason to believe etc, etc.
Up to now I’ve tended to the Cameron line: appalling war, unsatisfactory conclusion but still worth fighting. But is that true?
We can begin by throwing out some of the canards that Milne so usefully supplies. The fact that Belgium’s government had acted appallingly in Congo does not mean that Belgians had no right to self-defence. It also does not mean that Britain was wrong to aid that defence.
Incidentally, I would be curious to know, were the imperial regimes any more or less brutal than the regimes that either preceded or followed them? Was George Washington really an improvement on George the Third? If commenters plan responding to that last one I would appreciate if they come armed with some comparative facts.
Milne also seems to confuse causes with justice. It may be true that the war was the result of imperial rivalries but that does not mean there weren’t good guys and bad guys – or perhaps more accurately, bad guys and worse guys. And in a fight between bad guys and worse guys I favour the bad guys. Human progress is almost never a case of the good taking over from the bad and almost always the bad taking over from the worse. For example, Deng taking over from Mao.
Getting back to the subject in hand and talking of imperial rivalries – I really don’t think that was a major cause. Europe was going through a political revolution. The masses no longer accepted that monarchs had a god-given right to rule. Ideas such as socialism, nationalism and democracy were challenging the old order and the old orders were scared. Even in liberal, prosperous Britain, suffragists were breaking windows, trade unionists rioting and Irishmen preparing for civil war. When there’s trouble at home regimes start making trouble abroad.
Anyway, back to those canards. Germany was far more of a threat to Britain in 1914 than it was in 1939 (note to Seumas: the second world war started in 1939 not 1940). In 1914 Germany had a powerful navy and it was coming our way. Moreover, in 1939, Germany had a clear ideological commitment to expanding to the East. In 1914 it was far from clear what it was trying to do.
That Britain had a right to defend Belgium is not the same as saying it had the obligation to do so or that doing so was sensible. However, if you are going to go to war with one of the most powerful countries in Europe it is usually a good idea to do so as part of a coalition. In that regard the prospects in 1914 were much better than in 1939. Really, can anyone think of a worse decision in the 20th Century than the Soviet Union signing the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany?
So, if there ever was a time to go to war with Germany, August 1914 was that time. But that is not the same as saying it was sensible. Two Liberal cabinet ministers, John Morley and John Burns, resigned over the declaration of war. In looking into Morley’s reasons I came across this and then this. I haven’t finished reading either but they do put a rather different perspective on things. Was the Triple Entente as much to blame as the Triple Alliance?
Can one say worthwhile things about a book that one has only begun to read? I think, often: yes. One thing one can definitely report is whether one is reading this or that book with enthusiasm, eager to learn what will follow, or only because of a self-imposed, well-I’ve-started-so-I-might-as-well-finish sense of mere duty.
So far, I have only read somewhat over a hundred and fifty pages of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, but it definitely passes the above test. It is a huge book. Just before finishing this posting I happened to drop my (paperback!) copy of it on my foot, and it really hurt. The text alone runs to over eight hundred pages, and the notes take it over a thousand, yet I already know that I am going to go on reading this book until I finish it, and that when I do finally finish it (I am a very slow reader) I will almost certainly be somewhat regretful, as if coming to the end of a wonderful holiday trip or a particularly satisfying job assignment.
There are so many things I could say about this book, so many thoughts in it and provoked by it that would be blog-worthy, but let me focus on just one, which is that it is such a very, very worthy subject for an academic to be writing about. Pinker has chosen a subject that, he says, needs a long book. Well, a decent but short book could have been written about the relentless decline of violence in human affairs, but I am very happy that this one is indeed extremely long. It is not so much, for me, that this subject needs a long book, as that it so very much deserves one.
The story Pinker tells is of the relentless rise of what he is not afraid to call civilisation. Simply, we humans have become ever less nasty and sadistic towards one another as the decades and centuries and millennia have rolled by, both qualitatively and quantitatively. To make this point, he has already (as I am reading) piled on plenty of agony, about such things as medieval torture devices, and I am sure there will be plenty more such horrors to come.
Says Pinker of this process of moral improvement (on page 160 of the Penguin paperback edition), in a deeply felt parenthetical interjection …
– and if this isn’t progress, I don’t know what is –
Well said. → Continue reading: I have yet to read most of it but I already greatly admire Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature
From an auctioneers’ website:
lot details
lot no 305
description
A silver rectangular medallion, London 1977, applied with ‘WE FIX’D IT FOR JIM’ and ‘NATIONAL VALA 1977’, 4.2cm high, with a suspension loop, on a belcher link chain, the ring catch stamped ‘STER’
The National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association (National VALA) was founded by Mary Whitehouse, CBE (1910-2001) in 1965.
Provenance: From the estate of Sir Jimmy Savile. OBE, KCSG, LLD (1926-2011)
It would be ridiculous to attempt to extract some moral from the existence of a medallion apparently issued by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, 1970s campaigners against obscenity, particularly obscenity on the BBC, and the late Jimmy Savile, 1970s BBC DJ and TV host, now alleged (credibly alleged, despite the inevitable swarm of bandwagoneers) to have been a sexual predator with no regard for gender, age, vulnerability or consent. Any competent hack could whip up two think-pieces with mutually exclusive morals in one hour flat and bank his cheques from the Mail and the Guardian in the morning.
It was just an odd thing I found on the internet.
Just to add to the oddity, the auction was held in Saviles Hall. It is no longer possible to Google for the origin of that name.
The medallion went for £220, somewhat below the estimate. Wonder what it’s worth now?
Yes, I think I am avoiding talking about the Savile case. You can remedy that below. The case, as opposed to the medallion, throws up so many questions and points for discussion that I was hard put to keep the number of categories for this post under half a dozen. Please bear the laws of libel in mind if referring to living persons.
Romney’s line about trickle-down government in Debate One was clever. It means that every time a Democrat derides Romney for believing in trickle-down economics, listeners will hear that line about trickle-down government in their heads, again. Which means that Democrats will be dissuaded from using such phrases. As a piece of campaign meme-blocking, so to speak, trickle-down government was and is, as Mark Steyn says in this, and as many other have surely said also, excellent. Plus, it enables Romney to come across as moderate rather than manic in his objections to too much government.
But for me this phrase is far too moderate. As a description of current reality “trickle-down government” is ludicrous, never mind the kind of government that President Obama believes in. Trickle-down government is what the luckier parts of the Western World had in about 1912. Calling what we endure now, a century later, trickle-down government is like standing under the Niagara Falls and calling it a trickle-down waterfall.
Here are some interesting thoughts via Prof. Stephen Hicks about the death of one of the Mongols and what it meant for Europe back in the time of the invasions.
Thus spake the prophet Micklethwait on September 27, a week before the US presidential debate that has just taken place:
Romney is not nearly as big a jerk as a lot of disappointed Libbos and Conservatives seem to think, or as Dems hope. He keeps on winning. I think he will do much better in the debates than most others seem to, because he has a story to tell, to and about an opponent who does not. Romney is indeed not a genius debater, but he knows it, and knowing also that he is winning, he will prepare hard and go in with exactly the right amount of and kind of confidence, like a winning sportsman. He will surprise many by how well he does.
Meanwhile Obama, surrounded by yes men, and fatally arrogant, and tired, a fed-up and probably knowing he is going to lose, and having nothing to say, will not prepare well enough for the debates. He faces a near-impossible task, and will not be up to it.
Correct in every detail bar two. I do not think Mitt Romney knew he was going to win the debate and I do not think Barack Obama knew he was going to lose.
Romney was a Mormon missionary in France for two and a half years. Apparently he met with a slightly less overwhelming proportion of rejection than most, and was promoted. Whatever your opinion of Mormonism, no one can emerge after thirty months of knocking on doors and trying to proselytise the French, in French, and not have developed some debating skills and also seen the limit of what any such skills can do. No one can do this and not learn, ineradicably, that the world contains people who do not think like them at all. Romney lives among the heathen. Obama lives among those who defend him from the heathen.
Unlike some on this blog, Paul Marks, for instance, I do not see Obama as a hard core Marxist. Real Marxists live among the heathen, even on university campuses. I do not see Obama as having a hard core at all; he flows into the shape of whatever vessel he finds himself inside. His current vessel is fine and comfortable. I think he could not quite make himself believe that Romney would dare intrude.
Elections are mostly mere show, but what a splendid show a hard-fought one can be. I caught myself the other day being resentful because I could not turn to the back of the book or look up the episode guide on Wikipedia to see how it will all turn out. Aesop would have sold more fables if he had thought to have the moral (better yet, a hundred competing morals) in the middle but leave the tortoise and the hare still running right until the last page.
In 1992 I turned down a bet that would have obliged me to pay ten pounds for every parliamentary seat of Neil Kinnock’s majority, or gained me ten pounds for every seat short of it. I only turned down the bet because I’m a wimp who has never so much as been inside a bookmakers*; I knew that John Major was going to win because I eavesdropped on my fellow commuters on the Victoria Line. The UK media then were almost as domineering as the US media now; whenever obliged to interview someone willing to admit to the intention of voting Conservative the interviewer would visibly stand back to avoid contamination. I wanted Labour to win – I had stopped being a socialist but I was tired of the Tories – but I could tell, I could just tell that the media and the Cool People were talking each other up while the troglodytes on the Victoria Line were bullied into whispers but not into voting for the Cool Party just because the Cool People said that everyone who was anyone would.
Splendid as I am and nearly always right about everything, I have also been known to make wrong predictions. In the next UK election I thought the Shy Tory effect would still be present. If it was it was washed away in a flood of voters not shy in the least about finally having had enough of the Conservative party in power.
All this talk about bubbles has also reminded me of two occasions on which I specifically took note of obvious signs that the other sort of newsworthy bubble, a house price / stock market / tulip bubble, was expanding serenely away – noted these signs, cogitated upon their meaning, and ignominiously got it wrong. Or at best totally missed their major meaning because I was so keen to lecture the world about a minor sub-meaning. One such sign was seen in Ireland about six or seven years ago. My family is from Ireland and I always listen a little harder to news from there, so I was interested to learn from several different recent visitors to Ireland that everywhere you looked, on every little hillock and crammed into every little gap among the drystone walls, a new holiday cottage was going up, spoiling the austere beauty of the landscape somewhat but nice to see so many people doing well. I knew what that meant. It meant I could write a post for Samizdata about planning laws. Good thing I never got round to that one.
The other sign was from the United States. I, I will have you know, knew what “redlining” was, and knew of the laws and government pressure put upon banks to foribid this practice, and could speak knowledgeably of the Community Reinvestment Act long before the Crash of 2008. I knew what the CRA meant. It meant I could write a post for Samizdata about how the suppression of incentives for poor and marginalised people to act in ways that would help them get out of poverty (such as saving for a deposit on a house, or getting a steady job in order to qualify for a mortgage) would do them no good in the long run, not to mention encouraging them to take on debt they could not afford. There might still be a post in that, but the great floating balloon marked WORLDWIDE FINANCIAL CRISIS COMING TO YOUR TOWN SOON floated straight past me.
Blow me your bubbles, tell me about your predictions, especially the ones you got wrong.
*and also because the person offering it had endowed me with all his worldly goods anyway.
“Hobsbawm’s implacable refusal to recant his views when faced with their grotesque consequences tells us something about the belligerent mindset of the wider British Left. But the eminence that he and his fellow travellers have enjoyed also speaks to the bovine complacency with which, since Mrs Thatcher, the Conservatives have allowed such dubious figures licence to dominate the soft culture of the BBC and our universities.”
– Michael Burleigh
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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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