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]
Mr Grundy, an Oxford academic expresses his doubts about the value of modern education:
One wonders what these unfortunate lads are going to do for a living after they leave the University ; and one wonders, too, what the parents are going to do when they come to realize the returns on the heavy expenditure on their boys’ education. They will realize this soon, for these sons of theirs, these products of post-war ideas in education, will soon be coming back on their hands ; and then they will have to solve the question of getting employment for those whose ignorance renders them unemployable in the professions and in many forms of business.
Now as you’ve probably guessed from words and phrases like “lads”, “on their hands”, reference to parents paying for education and the fact that this post has my name at the top, this is not a recent quotation. It is, of course, from a hundred years ago and formed part of the latest episode of that YouTube channel I do.
But the sentiments are familiar enough. Which causes me a difficulty. While I am quite happy to believe that many modern degrees are worth less than the cost – and indeed may have a wholly negative value – I am reluctant to believe the same was true a hundred years ago. So how do I tell?
Did this generation fail to find gainful employment as Grundy suggests? Not that I know of. Shift forward ten years and many did awfully well… in the KGB. Which brings me on to a worrying thought: this generation was bloody awful. This was the generation that gave us the 1945 Labour government with the horrors of nationalisaton, gun control, the NHS, the welfare state, the Town and Country Planning Act, council housing and the abolition of flogging. This was a generation whose arrogance was fortified by a point blank refusal to let facts get in the way of ideology.
So, maybe Mr. Grundy was right.
By the way, Grundy’s main complaint about post-war ideas in education – as far as I can make out – is that Latin and Greek are being dropped in favour of modern languages.
In the old days, many U.S. cities were ruled by political machines. They were corrupt. But, by and large, they swept the streets and kept crime down. Because “Raise Dead” is a difficult spell to cast and there are limits to what “vote early, vote often” can do, the Machine often served as a vehicle to protect and advance minority groups in exchange for their mostly-genuine votes. Most famously this applied to the Irish but it was often also the case for African Americans – long before that term came into use, their potential votes meant that the Boss had an incentive to keep them on side too. For instance, this article about the Prendergast Machine in Kansas City says,
One of the defining aspects of “Boss” Thomas J. Pendergast’s “machine” politics was its approach to African American voters. During the early 20th century, at a time when black people were routinely excluded from the vote by Democratic regimes in most of the former slave South, Pendergast’s Democratic organization in Kansas City succeeded in part by attracting considerable black support. While such support was not unique to Kansas City—black Missourians never lost the vote in the same way or degree as their counterparts farther South—historians often point to the city as an example of early black political realignment toward a Northern Democratic Party based in urban, industrial centers and at increasing odds with its Southern wing over the issue of civil rights.
Far from beginning with “Boss Tom,” however, this approach to black voters had a long history – longer than some historians have recognized.
Boss Tom, Boss Tweed and their equivalents for other American cities of the Gilded Age were probably worse individuals than those who rule those cities now. They were more likely to have people beaten up or murdered – but less likely to allow conditions to arise in which people are regularly beaten up or murdered by crazy people in public spaces. As this New York Post article notes, killings in the New York City subway system since 2020 have skyrocketed to the highest level in 25 years, even amid plummeting ridership numbers. For the ordinary citizen, that is a change for the worse. You could stay out of the way of the Boss but the poor have no choice about using the streets or the subway.
What changed? The other day I posted about the way that the the rising number of drug addicts and mentally ill people living semi-permanently in public spaces challenges many libertarian beliefs about mental illness. I think a comment by Roué le Jour to that post nails it:
The state’s attitude to the homeless can be easily understood if you assume the state’s priority is to be a big as possible. The poor, the unemployed, the homeless and the criminal are a valuable resource for generating ever more government jobs. The last thing the state wants is for these client groups to become productive citizens.
Since the era of Machine politics, the State has expanded greatly, both in terms of the number of people employed by it and in terms of the welfare payments it gives out. I doubt that even now the numbers of vagrants street-dwellers are enough to make them a bloc worth being courted in their own right, particularly as they do not usually vote, but the number of state employees tending to them and everyone else is so large that it has burst the bonds of patronage. The days when it mattered that the Boss could give or withhold a specific post, when government jobs could be seen as an inert mass of sustenance to be carved up and distributed, are long past. The Blob has its own life now. It is no longer food. It hungers.
The first few dozen grownup books I read were an odd selection. As I sampled them almost at random from my parents’ bookshelves, I became dimly aware that my parents were different people from each other, were different from what they had once been, and read books by people with whom they disagreed. Alongside the works by G K Chesterton and C S Lewis one would expect on the shelves of liberal British Catholics of the 1970s, I found such things as a book of essays by the Stalinist physicist J D Bernal – and a copy of Ideology and Insanity by Thomas Szasz. Attracted by the strangeness to my young eyes of the name “Szasz” and the wonderful cover art of the Penguin edition that depicted two men playing chess across a Escher-like dimensional warp, I gave it a go.
Almost a decade before I heard the term “Libertarian”, I thus had my first introduction to an important strand of libertarian thought. Until the copy of that same 1970 Penguin edition I just ordered on eBay arrives, I shall have to go by memory and Szasz’s Wikipedia biography as to exactly what the book said, but I do remember being thrilled to feel my perspective suddenly widen, in a manner akin to what I had felt when I realised that the Earth was but one of an infinite number of possible vantage points in the universe.
Szasz cited drapetomania as an example of a behavior that many in society did not approve of, being labeled and widely cited as a disease. Likewise, women who did not bend to a man’s will were said to have hysteria.
He thought that psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behavior and disease in its quest to help or harm parties in conflicts. He maintained that, by calling people diseased, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents in order to better control them.
And
Szasz believed that if we accept that “mental illness” is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric “treatment” on these individuals
My spellcheck pulsates in impotent frustration, but I don’t care. An Equater is a person who equates. In this context, which I get to decide because it is my post, an Equater is a person who is not content to compare something bad done by a liberal democratic government to the very much worse things done by despotic governments in order to shame the former into better behaviour, but who insists on going from comparison all the way to equation.
Since the death of Her Late Majesty, there have been many occasions when the British police reverted from their recent tendency to exceed their legal powers while stamping down on those who say rude things about illegal aliens or the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag, in order to return to their traditional role of exceeding their legal powers while stamping down on people who say rude things about the monarchy. Or even on those who film other people saying rude things about the monarchy: in this tweet, a documentary filmmaker called Rich Felgate writes, “Yesterday I got arrested whilst filming a @JustStop_Oil supporter holding a banner on the pavement near the coronation route. I’m a filmmaker and had my @BECTU press accreditation visible around my neck. Police deemed this to be “conspiracy to commit a public nuisance”.
That is bad. Dammit, it almost looks similar to what you would expect to see in a communist country. Similar, much too similar for comfort, but no one with any respect for the millions murdered by communism would say “identical”.
I don’t know what it was like for other readers but I found yesterday’s coronation a bit of a chore – way too long, way too much God, way too much fancy dress. And I’m someone who likes fancy dress. Nevertheless I felt that I should at least make some attempt to understand it. So, here goes.
At some point human beings gained the ability to reason. And when they did they observed that life was pretty precarious. You could do your best, you could build something and yet all that could be wiped out by floods, storms, earthquakes, disease or pests. How to explain it? The star-gazers may have done some pretty clever things like work out when the next eclipse was likely to take place but they still haven’t cracked more down-to-earth problems (literally). No, you were going to have to go with God. He was a bit like you but a lot more powerful. And capricious. But if you did as he said – or what you thought he said – or what those blokes in fancy robes said he said – then maybe, just maybe, he’d spare you from disaster. Oh, and the eternity of hell.
And if God could explain natural disasters maybe he could explain man-made disasters like war. Maybe he was responsible for choosing your chief warrior – or “king”. If so, then you’d better obey the “king” as well because he was God’s chosen one. If you happened to be king this was really good. You were no longer some thug who was just a bit better at killing than your rival thugs. You had divine authority. It didn’t mean you couldn’t get offed – as Edward II and Richard II found out – but people would think twice about it. On the downside you had to believe this stuff – or at least give the impression that you believed this stuff. It was also pretty good if you were an official of the king’s favoured religion. You got to swan around in fancy robes, you literally didn’t have to get your hands dirty and the general population was forced to pay for you.
And this brings us to yesterday’s coronation. What we saw was that ancient bargain being renewed. Unfortunately for the participants over the centuries the stargazers upped their game. They explained the motion of the planets and then of apples. They explained smallpox and diphtheria. And cured them. They led us into a world where peace was the norm not war. They led us into a world which didn’t need God to explain it. And because they did yesterday’s ceremony looked ridiculous. It will look even more so when the stargazers get around to issuing an accurate weather forecast.
But when we do find ourselves cavilling at the absurdity we should pause to remember that our ancestors were not fools and that for them it was very much a matter of life and death.
— Angry People in Local Newspapers (@angrypiln) May 6, 2023
For those not following, the woman you saw bearing the sword in today’s proceedings is Penny Mordaunt MP, twice-failed candidate to be leader of the Conservative Party, whose previous peak as a search term on Google Images was when she did a belly flop in a TV diving contest. In 2019 she held the post of Secretary of State for Defence for 85 days. When Boris Johnson became prime minister and promptly fired her, she probably thought her days of exerting the traditional politician’s privilege of being photographed in close proximity to weaponry were over. But having landed the somewhat-ancient office of Lord President of the Council (“Unlike some of the other Great Officers of State, the office of Lord President is not very old”, sneers Wikipedia because it only dates from 1529), she got to carry the king’s sword and at least look capable of chopping off the heads of any enemies of the realm who might try to reach him via her.
Dennis the Peasant had a point. It’s all a bit daft. But I think history shows that when the illogical mess of tradition is stripped away from a people, what they find to replace it is rarely pure reason.
Those were reportedly the last words of General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in the American Civil War. (Wikipedia boringly says that he did complete the sentence. Just.)
General Sedgwick was a brave man to stride along the front like that. He sought to encourage his men, some of whom had been seen to flinch as the Confederate bullets landed all around.
I hope our Scottish readers will forgive me if I say that, though all the hearts that beat under Scottish skies are brave, not all of them are quite as brave as General Sedgwick. But some are:
“Deficits are nothing to be afraid of”, writes Jim Byrne for Bylines Scotland. You see, taxes don’t fund spending and a sovereign government can create new money to pay off its debts whenever it likes and so all Scotland needs to do make its deficit disappear is declare independence. This is called “Modern Monetary Theory”. Mr Byrne posts a link to a 14-page Bank of England document that, he says, shows that the Bank agrees with him. Which does make one wonder why the Bank doesn’t just declare “the deficit is nothing to be afraid of, let the rejoicing commence”. Unless it’s a case of “Gary, no”?
Self-described “Poe/history blogger and crazy cat lady” Undine @HorribleSanity has unearthed a page from an old children’s book with a moral likely to disturb most modern readers:
I wonder what this little girl is crying about ? O ! I have found out. John has taken the kittens from the old cat, and has drowned them in the pond ; and she is ready to call him a heartless creatore for doing so. Do you think he is ? O, no. It would be cruel, indeed, to torment the kittens as some children do ; but John was told to drown them for the convenience of the family ; so dry up your tears, Miss Lucy.
When I was a child my mother told me that when she was a child in the late 1930s and early 1940s it was still routine for litters of kittens to be drowned. There was a local man who probably made a living as a general odd-job man but who my mother and her sister hated because they saw him only in his role as “the kitten-drowner”. When my grandmother called him round to do the deed, my mother and her sister would hide while it was done and be upset for days afterwards.
But what else were people to do back then? If nature is allowed to take its course, a female cat can easily bear three litters a year. Let’s say three kittens per litter. Where you had one cat you now have ten, and it is not just your Tibbles doing that, but every cat in the neighbourhood, and it is not long before the kittens grow up and start mating with each other. To be sure, the geometric progression will not continue forever. That’s because in a society that has no practical means to stop them breeding, most stray cats either starve to death or are killed by the almost equally uncontrollable population of stray dogs. Unless, that is, someone spares them from this miserable life and lingering death by killing them in a relatively merciful way soon after birth.
Dogs, it is true, can usually be kept from breeding by not letting them run loose. But for most of human history the whole point of having a cat was that it would feed itself and earn its place in a human home by killing mice. It can’t do that on a lead. Commercially made cat food began to be produced in the 1930s. So it did exist when my mother was a child but only as a luxury product. Her family were far from rich. Their cats were given table scraps to supplement their main diet of mice, but the idea of paying for meat to feed a cat when humans often went without would have seemed ridiculous.
Given that she is a history blogger with a specific interest in what TV Tropes calls “Values Dissonance”, I am sure Undine knows all this, but some of her audience clearly have not thought it through. “I hope whoever wrote that is burning in hell,” says one of the replies to her tweet.
Rather than call down damnation on people for whom killing kittens was the least inhumane option, it would be better to call down blessings on those who made it no longer necessary. Those who developed anaesthetics are rightly praised for having freed humans from much suffering, both by making surgical operations pain-free and by making surgery more likely to succeed because it no longer had to be done at speed. These benefits quickly filtered down to animals, too, first to bulls and stallions, and then on to smaller animals like cats and dogs. They can do surgery on hamsters now. If you think that wasteful, remember that the benefit of being able to save a pet goes not just to the animal but to the humans who love it.
As I said, we rightly praise the pioneers of medicine who made this happy situation possible – but the biggest driver in changing possibility to fact was the capitalist system that made us so much richer than our ancestors. We can afford to buy food specially for cats. We can afford to take cats to the vets to get the snip, and to have their annual injections done and their ailments treated. Now that their offspring are greatly reduced in number, we can afford to support animal shelters that will find homes for them if the card in the newsagent’s window doesn’t work. We can afford not to drown kittens.
Far from robbing anybody of surplus value, Capitalism is like a benevolent ancestor who, instead of consuming all the port that he could get – as some ancestors did – laid down an enormous cellar of it for the use of future generations. And every one who is now alive in this country, and millions abroad likewise, are now able to help themselves to bottles of the grand old vintage then laid down and now ready for us, crusted, fruity, full of ripe flavour and rich bouquet. For none of us could have been so well off, and many of us could not have been born at all, if Capitalism had not done this deed, and done it judiciously and well.
– Hartley Withers, The Case for Capitalism, 1920 p239. Withers was editor of the Economist between 1916 and 1921. It’s a good analogy, or ought to be. It ought to make you think of science, shipping, railways, hospitals, educational institutions. Unfortunately, in my case it – especially the “rich bouquet” bit – makes me think of sewers.
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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