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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Mike Oliver (who blogs as ‘Mr. Integrity’… currently off-line) spotted an interesting article over on National Review that for once does not try to give Rand a kicking.
BB&T – and its open defence of rational/individualist/objectivist philosophy, a credo that runs counter to 2000 years of Judea/Christian/subjectivist/marxist ethics and deeper subjectivist planks that link those categories. Explicit defense of reason – I say!
Yes, such businessmen do exist, they are not merely the stuff of a well-known novel. As opposed to at least a large plurality of “business leaders” who seek always to cultivate government/business linkages, contracts, and of course regulations that “rationalize” their sectors (with such government rules used to ossify the industry with them – the privileged businessmen- commanding a degree of non-market control over that business sector). In history classes the U.S. trends now massively underway was how Fascism was defined.
But modern lovers of the State seem to have conveniently blanked that out. Anyway BB&T stands out from the crowd. What is most curious on a meta-level about this online article is that it comes from NationalReviewOnline.
National Review has been and until now at least was always the most outspoken and spewing opponent of Rand & Objectivism. Denouncing Rand’s rational philosophical base. NR has always been at its core, and explicity so – Buckley’s first book was titled God and Man at Yale) a subjectivist, religiously-planked political credo, arguing that God and a belief therein is the basis of capitalism and individual rights, etc. No wonder over the decades so many young potentially-bright students have mistakenly linked (as their professors would have them do) capitalism, or such that we have had in the U.S. that is labeled “capitalism.” with a religous or non-rational philosophical base.
Many of those students, not realizing the subjectivist, A-is-not-A base of Marxism, therefore sized-up the two choices – of an ethical code based on mysticism (the Buckley-type defence of “capitalism”… or Marxism… which to so many seemed a “scientific” or otherwise rational view of the world. And tended to opt for the later – either Marxism or many of its falsely-“humanist” variants.
Anyway, National Review was on the side of mysticism and held that banner high while viciously attacking Rand and her atheism – almost foaming in their attacks over the years. Well, perhaps even that changes with new blood at National Review? No, it’s probably just the failure of one of their higher editors to notice that one of their writers slipped this article onto their online site. Well, in any case it is an interesting article about the current times and the role of ideas: ideas taken from reality then applied back to issues of dealing with reality.
“There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who “starve for want of luxuries.” But it is always easy to regard another man’s things as superficial and another man’s pursuits as greedy, while one’s own belongings have sentimental value and one’s own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access.”
– Timothy Sandefur. He subjects Henry Thoreau, darling of the back-to-nature types, to a ferocious take-down. Read the whole thing.
“Even those who have never taken seriously utopias of classless societies and pure socialism have been seduced in the course of the last 100 years into falsely concluding that the critical role in society is the perogative of envious dispositions whom a single concession would supposedly placate…The time has surely come when we should stop behaving as though the envious man was the main criterion for social and economic policy.”
– Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, page 427. In the light of last week’s terrible UK budget and its levelling intent, his book repays reading. It often enrages egalitarians when they are told that much of their views are a rationalisation for envy, but that rage perhaps suggests that such a charge touches on a truth they would rather not contemplate for long.
I think this is great, from regular commenter here NickM of Counting Cats:
The tale science tells about how we got here (and got to the point where we could ask such questions) is not just truer than the bronze-age claptrap of The Bible (or Qu’ran or stories about Marduk or whatever …) but more compelling. We are DNA on the right-handed scroll and it has taken four billion years to make us. We are that amazing. Isn’t that more compelling than some old shit about talking snakes and a job done in six days? Is it not a truly grand narrative? The truth is so much more beautiful than the lie. It is also the truth and that also goes a long way on it’s own.
Ah, c’mon folks … I have heard enough from creationists about how if we’re merely risen slime we’re still slime and that in some unspecified way we are therefore still tainted by the slime. But what slime! This piece of slime can be moved to tears by the music of Palestrina, this piece of slime can be amused by the plays of William Shakespeare, this piece of slime can parse HTML and FORTRAN. This piece of slime can factorize quadratics, do integration by parts and hold an opinion on the Copenhagen Interpretation. This is one hell of a piece of slime and so, dear reader, are you.
I am proud to be slime with post-graduate qualifications. I am stardust (so are you) created in the forge of supernovae (is that not cool?). I am atoms in motion (so are you). I am victory (so are you). I am almost everything you are and you are almost everything I am. We share half of our DNA with cabbages after all.
I entirely agree with all this, but I do not stick it up here to insist that all of you do. I know that all of you do not, which is fine by me. Especially if, from what you do believe instead, you draw political conclusions with which I strongly do agree. I stick it up here because it puts a particular point (call it the “glory of slime” argument) in answer to a common objection to Darwinian atheism (the “sliminess of slime” argument) with exuberant eloquence. Even many of those who think it tosh will at least agree that it is very well written.
The Cat Counter acknowledges the sliminess of slime, but then trumps it with the grandeur. But I bet, when he wrote his bit, that he had, rattling about somewhere in his head, this, which acknowledges the grandeur but then trumps it with slime, or in this case with dust:
What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how
express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
While Hamlet emphasises also what fine and beautiful athletes we are, NickM concentrates only our mental glories. An interesting omission, maybe? There are all kinds of memes floating about now to the effect that although many of us dirt-bags are clever, we are not that beautiful, a blot on the world even, compared to many other more exotic looking animals, who now seem to us much more express and admirable in form and moving. Maybe this is something to do with how we have evolved to admire how we look only when young, yet are clever enough now to have contrived for millions upon millions of us to be shuffling on unattractively into old age instead of reverting to actual dirt at forty and being replaced by younger and prettier dirt-bags.
They still don’t get it. In what is a generally very good, readable account of the life and times so far of Andrew Sullivan and his role in driving the blog format, the author, Johann Hari, comes out with this:
Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.
Well I cannot recall what Oakeshott – a writer that I have studied a bit – said about the Road To Serfdom (both men taught at the London School of Economics, by the way), but that strikes me as a terribly confused paragraph. The whole point about Hayek’s demolition of the argument for central planning and socialism is that these ideas take no account of human ignorance, of the inability of any central planner, or group of planners, to have at their fingertips all the knowledge needed to co-ordinate supply and demand. Capitalism, and the “discovery process” of competitive markets, and risk-taking of entrepreneurs, works precisely because it does not require humans to be omniscient, but to capitalise on what they do know. Far from being a utopian, Hayek’s brand of classical liberalism – he called himself an “old Whig – is premised on the very kind of doubts and skepticisms that someone like Andrew Sullivan professes to hold. In fairness to Sullivan – to whom I have been rather unkind because of his support for a Big Government man like Mr Obama – he understands this point, or at least he used to do so.
Hari then goes on to approvingly quote a bete noire of mine, Naomi Klein:
This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”
The “real version” of free markets can be found in say, parts of 18th and 19th Century Britain, when wealth exploded by any historical precedents; in Hong Kong, a place with no natural resources other than the entrepreneurial vigour of its people, and in the US, for much of its history, etc.
The more free, the less distorted, such markets are, by such things as central banks, taxes and regulations, the better such places tend to be, although the public can be misled by the prophets of big government into thinking that further progress requires something different. As I unashamedly say over and over, the current financial snafu lies, at root, on the doorstep of central – state – banks. That is not just a quibble. It is at the heart of the issue. It is no good socialists like Ms Klein trying to compare free market critics of mixed-economies like the UK with socialists trying to claim that the Soviet Union did not work because it was not done right or was a bit oppressive. The two worldviews are coming from fundamentally different premises about the issue of how you deal with lack of complete knowledge by individuals who must still act and take decisions. The disasters of socialism are features, not bugs.
There is another point for Mr Hari and others to consider: when firms go bust, it actualy generates knowledge and encourages businesses to do something different, to adjust. When a government department fails, as the CIA failed in not stopping 9/11, or the SEC failed in not stopping Bernard Madoff, does the organisation suffer the equivalent of going bankrupt? No, of course not. Instead, there are calls for more regulations, more officials, bigger budgets. There is no negative feedback loop in government, apart from the highly unreliable process of the occasional general election.
At some point, I have to wonder whether simple ignorance can explain why such articulate writers can get it so wrong. A part of me wants to suppress the desire to say, “Because they are evil”, since that clearly is not quite right. Why do such misconceptions stick, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, so tenaciously? Perhaps such people have crafted a viewpoint for themselves that defines their very being. I guess even I might have to admit some of that.
Update: Sullivan asks some hard but fair questions about the Tea Party protesters. He’s got a point. If opposing the bailouts means letting say, AIG go down the U-bend with all that implies, the protesters should perhaps concede as much. That is why the work of economists over in the UK such as Kevin Dowd is so important. We need to chart a course to a better, less imperfect, place.
I would not recommend spending major chunks of one’s only life helping to clean up the intellectual mess inflicted by post-modernism, but occasionally keeping tabs on the mess, and on those heroic souls who are part of this noble cleansing project, can be fun. In this spirit, I recommend this.
To start with I was merely going to do a(n) SQOTD, but the list of bits I found I wanted to recycle here from this conversation soon outgrew that plan.
Bit one, from David Thompson, in connection with a response to a posting he did about art bollocks (Thompson’s italics are here emboldened):
One postmodernist commenter took exception to my criticism – first by accusing me of arguing things I clearly wasn’t arguing, then by saying I was holding “entrenched positions” in which “aesthetic values” (in scare quotes), “scientific reality/clarity” (again, in scare quotes) and my own “reliance on logical consistency” (ditto) were obstacles to comprehension. Specifically, they were obstacles to comprehending Shvarts’ alleged (but oddly unspecified) “arguments of power, control [and] dominance.” The tone was, of course, condescending and self-satisfied. I’m guessing the commenter in question didn’t pause to consider the possibility that one might find pomo bafflegab objectionable precisely because it represents the “power, control [and] dominance” of what amounts to a priestly caste.
Bit two, also from Thompson (the Windschuttle essay he refers to is here):
In the essay linked above, Keith Windschuttle names various academics and educational advisors who claim that truth and reality are “authoritarian weapons” and that disinterested scholarship is merely “an ideological position” favoured by “traditionalists and the political right.” This presents a rather handy excuse to dismiss political dissent without having to engage with inconvenient arguments. Presumably, if you prefer arguments that are comprehensible and open to scrutiny, this signals some reactionary tendency and deep moral failing. On the other hand, if you sneer at such bourgeois trifles, you’re radical, clever and very, very sexy. (Though I wonder what mathematicians and structural engineers would make of this claim. Is there such a thing as a rightwing calculation, or a rightwing bridge – I mean a bridge that’s rightwing because it doesn’t promptly collapse?)
This reminds me of a very funny bit in this book where John O’Farrell (his subtitle is: “Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, 1979-1997” – here’s hoping you ain’t seen nothing yet mate), recalled that certain leftwing university radicals of his acquaintance used to regard smiling as rightwing.
Since Stephen Hicks is the grandee being interviewed here, let Hicks have bit three:
The function of language is to express one’s thoughts. If you think truth is possible, then you work hard to understand the world clearly and completely. But if you doubt that truth is possible, that has psycho-epistemological consequences: you come to believe that the world is at best fuzzy and your mind incapable of grasping it – you come to believe deep down that all is fractured and disjointed – and your writing will tend to the fuzzy, the fractured, and the disjointed. And in consequence you will come to be suspicious of clarity in others. Clarity, from this perspective, must be an over-simplifying.
It’s tempting to dismiss postmodernism as being such obvious and such obviously self-destructive intellectual junk as not to be worth bothering with. Just hold your nose and walk on by, don’t complain about it, it only encourages them, etc. But postmodernism has had, and continues to have, a hideously destructive effect on the study of the humanities in universities (somewhat less so on anything with pretensions towards being in any way scientific), and it will only go away if the next few generations of scholars can be persuaded to treat it with the contempt that it deserves. So keep it up, Hicks, and thank you, Thompson, for talking with him so interestingly.
“‘Cant’ is a four-leter word we don’t use much now. Most people of my generation have never heard of it, never alone use it in conversation…to apply it to someone is to accuse them of sloppy thinking, if you are being kind, or, at the very worst, of a total lack of sincerity.”
Ben Wilson.
Of course, when it comes to sincerity, one should remember as Milton Friedman once put it, that sincerity is a much overpraised virtue. People can sincerely believe in all manner of utter rubbish, while others insincerely pay tribute to things that are right and true. Oh, the crooked timber of humanity.
“The idea that everyone is entitled to his opinion is one of those truisms so often repeated that it now goes without saying. Like many truisms, however, it is false. It is also usually irrelevant. Let us suppose that Jill disputes Jack’s opinion that free trade causes poverty in the Third World. Jack may defend his opinion by producing evidence connecting trade and poverty but he cannot help his case by insisting that he is entitled to his opinion. How could that show that free trade causes poverty in the Third World? The entitlement would be relevant only if it guaranteed the truth of your opinions. But it can’t do that, because it is an entitlement supposedly enjoyed by everybody. And people disagree. Jack and Jill are both entitled to their contradictory opinions about trade and poverty, but they can’t both be right. So insisting that you are entitled to your opinion cannot possibly give you any proper advantage in a debate.”
– Jamie Whyte.
Last night I heard an argument used in relation to the climate change argument and Man’s alleged role in driving it, that went along the following lines: We have a responsibility to ensuing generations, maybe even those around 1,000 years or so hence, which means we should do X or Y to curb CO2 emissions etc to ensure that these future generations’ lives are not blighted.
Now of course nothing is more likely to get your humble blogger annoyed than the “Do it for the children” line. The precautionary principle: do nothing if you cannot prove it will not cause harm – would have killed the Industrial Revolution at birth, prevented any life-saving drug from having been brought to market, been used to shut down scientific speculation, space-faring, advanced dental surgery, modern medicine, the whole 9 yards of human endeavour. And the problem with the argument that says “We have a responsibility to generations yet unborn” is that it demands a great deal. How on earth can I or others evaluate the proper limits or scope of such a responsibility? What about the Law of Unintended Consequences? For instance, if we adopt the PP, and we severely curtail the pace of industrial development, scientific advance or economic growth, will we not bring about disastrous consequences for our children, grand-children and so on? In fact, if folk want to bring up the issue of “Do it for the kids”, I tend to respond that if we are to take this sort of multi-generational responsibility, then we should go for as much freedom and growth as possible, and not the other way around.
Another way to think about this is from the position of scarcity, both in terms of time and resources. I only have so much time in my life to make the sort of adjustments that I might hope to benefit my kids, or my grandkids, or whatever. I also only have so many resources at my disposal. And with that in mind, I think that governments – which after all are only collections of persons – have only fixed resources and time at their disposal too, and that there are major tradeoffs to be considered in stifling a technology A to benefit a technology B. Simply repeating that we “owe it to our children” does not take us very far. All too often, in fact, the line about protecting future generations can easily descend into a form of argument by intimidation, a sort of moral bullying.
When it comes to bad arguments used in conversations on topics like this, Jamie Whyte’s gem of a book repays a lot of reading for avoiding pitfalls.
Of course, as a final point, the “Do it for the kids” argument frequently comes from those advocates of greater state controls who are blind to the damage that the state does, sometimes deliberately, to the institution of the family. The ironies abound.
Darwin gave us hope, not God. We have an inbuilt Pandora’s box that enables us to deceive not only others but ourselves. Deception is clearly linked to neural complexity and a positive perception of our environs is a deep-rooted drive. Without this, we cannot accomplish what we set out to do. Moreover, we have a tendency to deceive ourselves and deny the truth, since the alternative is depression and despair.
Evolutionary Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan is a great believer in hope as a evolutionary strategy.
According to Nesse, all emotions have an evolutionary basis, and for every negative emotion, there is a balancing positive one. Hope arrives on the coattails of despair, and without hope, we’d all be lost. Since everyone experiences bad stuff, and feels it deeply, our brains have adapted by also delivering hope. And without our inborn measure of hope, we fall into depression, where someone like psychiatrist Nesse has to remind us to be hopeful.
The rhetoric of hope adopted by Barack Obama and other politicians becomes more understandable as a strategy that draws upon deep seated biases within human societies. It is noteworthy that hope has formed a strong component of many religious messages: thus rendering the satirical embodiment of the Messiah in the President-elect more accurate in Darwinian terms.
Darwinian explanations add to the complex mix of our understanding of human action. They do not replace or simplify this complex cultural mosaic.
This small point does give us an insight into power: for those who truly love terror would deny hope to all. The true totalitarian states of the twentieth century tried to deny hope to all of their victims and even then, failed in their torture. Yet, the same horizons are also eroded and extinguished over the longer term by other systems, such as welfare. There is no comparison between the terror of the prison camps and the grey anomie of incapacity benefits. But both, I suspect, through different means, overturn this need for self-deception, acknowledging the primacy of politics and society over the weak orientation of our evolved psychology.
Amid all the words that will be written about the UK government’s Pre-Budget Report statement yesterday, many will no doubt focus on the utility, or otherwise, of proposed measures such as creating a new, higher 45 per cent tax band on people earning £150,000 or more. Maybe even some supply-siders will point to the destructive effects, the counter-productive consequences, and the likely exodus of entrepreneurs and wealthy citizens, if the tax hike becomes law – after the next election. And they will be right to do so, of course. Throw in the impact of cuts to tax allowances and rises in national insurance payments – a tax by any other name – and the real upper rate of tax is heading towards 50 per cent. I hope all those middle England Jeremy’s and Fionas who voted for that nice Mr Blair and who turfed out the Tories are feeling suitably chastened.
But the core of the problem with resisting such egalitarian acts of robbery is that pointing out the bad economic effects of such measures is not enough. Large swathes of the UK public do not care, or assume that they will never be very rich anyway, so why should they be worried? The current government and public sector, with state, inflation-proofed salaries, could not give a damn either. What is lacking from almost all political and media analysis of the increased steepness of the progressive tax code is a moral element.
Progressivism is a looter’s charter. There is no coherent, objective principle by which one can say that a person earning XXX should contribute say, 40 per cent of their income to the State while another person, on a higher figure, should pay 50, or 60, or even 80 per cent. It is about as scientific as plucking figures at random from a telephone directory. This is not just unwise, it is wicked.
The only reason I can think of for progressive tax is to offset the potential regressive impact of taxes on consumption such as VAT, sales taxes and the like. However, in practice the people who might benefit from any offset are not the same as those who get hit by a consumption tax in the first place. Far better, in fact, to cut through the web of complexity and introduce a flat-tax where the whole population, apart from the poor, pay the same percentage of their income, preferably at a much lower rate. Of course, the ultimate objective is not just flatter taxes, but lower, or no taxes, at all. But although this appears so much dreaming at the moment, anyone who wants to make the moral and philosophical case for lower taxes and against egalitarian thieving must do so in such moral terms and not expect that economic arguments will win the day. What Alistair Darling proposed yesterday was to clobber people for no other reasons than they happen to be well off and he knew quite well that his tax increase will garner relatively little revenue. But he does not give a brass farthing. This government is now acting out of spite.
I finish with this quote, taken from here: “The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without rudder or com pass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit.”
“I have met several people, who when explaining the extreme youth or old age of their parents, have told me, “Of course, I was an accident.” Well, if they can admit it, why can’t we all. Our existence is not due to the preference of some fabulous Being: it is just dumb luck. Why people should feel bothered by this I don’t know. They have won the lottery of life!”
Jamie Whyte, Bad Thoughts, page 128
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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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