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]
|
Some of Samizdata’s more socially conservative readers seem to think gay marriage is a bad idea. But trying to work out why they hold that view is, at least at first, puzzling. They rail against social freedom saying that it leads to social degradation and also to lots of government spending. Well, I’m against ‘social degradation’ and ‘government spending’. So why don’t I agree with them?
The reality is that homosexual marriage would not lead to any degradation whatsoever. Homosexuals already live in a society where on the whole they are able to be open about their sexuality, and are able to have sex without the government arresting them. If the government lets two gay people marry, that if anything encourages fidelity. If you ask social conservatives to explain how this causes social degradation, the response is… BLANK.
The idea that homosexual marriage means that government spending has to go up is just plainly stupid. Homosexuals don’t have children, so they don’t impose the cost of education on the taxpayer. They generally die younger (although I suspect this will change), meaning they impose less cost in terms of pensions. If they split up, the taxpayer doesn’t have to look after the mother because both partners generally work.
The social conservative arguments are quite obviously bogus.
Could the real reason why social conservatives oppose gay marriage be much simpler? They oppose it because they hate gay people. They think it’s disgusting what these faggots do. They think the state should punish them for their depravity.
If not, could they perhaps explain themselves?
Peter Cuthbertson doesn’t like social liberalism. In a comment on The Liberty Log, he attacks free-marketeers who also favour social liberty:
So they advocate a smaller state while they also want government to promote behaviour that forces immense financial burdens onto the state? Greaaat.
I respect Cuthbertson a lot, and he writes an excellent blog, so I’m going to take the time to point out why I think he should reconsider his view.
Those who favour social freedom are not asking government to promote any behaviour at all. They are asking government to be neutral – to let people make their own choices. As for saying that it “forces immense financial burdens on the state”, this is exactly the same argument used in the early 1980s by the Left. Every time the government came up with a policy that would involve nationalised industries employing fewer people, this form argument would be brought up. Miners, they argued, were producing something and formed part of cohesive communities. Destroying the mining industry would force financial burdens on the state, destroy the family, violate rights…
Cuthbertson falls into the trap of believing that when the government doesn’t regulate people’s social affairs, society will deteriorate. Yet I suspect that many of the institutions he values – like marriage – have been in decline despite being controlled by the government. The problem of single motherhood has been an entirely government created phenomenon – not because of it being legal (it always has been) but because of government welfare.
Measures to reduce government involvement in social affairs should be welcomed. Labour’s proposal on gay unions does not encourage straight people to be gay. I think Cuthbertson would agree with me on that. But the policy will have a profoundly beneficial effect on gay culture, encouraging gay people to enter into more stable, longer-lasting relationships. Here we have a case of social freedom encouraging the sort of society that, I guess, Cuthbertson would like.
The reality is that over time society changes its attitudes. It is no longer socially acceptable to attack homosexuality. To do so is taboo. But despite developments in how people view the world, the government is often not very good at developing social institutions to cater for these progressions. In crude terms, it is often the inability of government to react to market forces that leads to social degeneration, not the market forces themselves.
Even on the drugs issue, where many people argue that legalisation or decriminalisation would lead to social degeneration, one should not ignore that degeneration is what we already have. 75% of crime is said to be drug-related, caused by the black-market price. Drugs being illegal doesn’t stop people using them.
No one wants a degenerate society. The difference in opinion is between those that think government control is that best way of society flourishing, and those who think that devolving the evolution of society to individuals and civil society works better. I, for one, go with the latter.
There really are some clots out there, nearly all of them collectivists, of one kind or another. You give them a debating point, they complain about the debating hall. You give them a nice hall, they complain about the expense of the hall. Whatever the point is, they avoid talking about this central issue, and stick to some peripheral soft target. They perhaps even convince themselves, after enough posts of gibberish, that they’ve won the debate, rather than had us laugh at them, in the very best style of Jeremy Paxman interviewing some New Labour ministerial half-wit. And then, when we do sometimes manage to press them to actually talk about the matter in hand, they start shouting, and screaming, as soon as they realise their childish threatening game is up.
But aside from these fun and games, what they’ve failed to realise, is that the reason most of us classical liberals are classical liberals, no matter what our starting position was — whether socialist, fascist, communist, Last Tory Boy, or whatever — is because we have been prepared to argue our case in a sensible calm fashion. This argumentative debate is often an internal one, too, arguing with ourselves, as well as an external one, arguing with others. → Continue reading: The unbearable lightness of clots
A leaked memo revealed that David Blunkett is pushing the Cabinet to back national identity cards for everyone aged 16 and over, carrying biometric information, such as fingerprints, to allow police to confirm the holder’s identity. Under Mr Blunkett’s scheme, the card will cost £39 for most people between the ages of 17 and 75.
An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett’s argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.
- First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office’s recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)
- The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated… The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained – or even seriously tried to explain – how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.
- Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.
- More faulty still is Mr Blunkett’s central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: “The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists.” In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word “free”. Now here is Mr Blunkett using “freedom” to mean more state control.
- Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary’s final argument in its favour: that we are “out of kilter with Europe”. Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.
The most worrying is Blunkett’s spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting – or the fact of acting – in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. (I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state.) In Blunkett’s mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.
The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole – “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.
I will not grant Blunkett’s social and political philosophy such level of ‘sophistication’. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.
Cross-posted from White Rose
Arthur Silber, whose “Light of Reason” blog I generally admire, is not very happy so it seems with our own Perry de Havilland for his recent dig at Jim Henley over the outcome of the recent Iraq war. Now, I am not going to revisit this increasingly well-flogged dead horse.
No, what I want to consider is a more general issue of principle. Arthur is a follower, in broad terms, of the ethical egoist philosophy set out by the late Ayn Rand. Rand denounced all those philosophers who enjoined Man to sacrifice his happiness and values for some other, usually mystical or collective, “good”. Instead, she set out an alternative, the “virtue of selfishness”, questioning why it is wrong for man to acquire and keep a value, including non-material ones such as respect, and freedom.
Arthur’s basic disagreement, so it appears, with those like Perry and I who have advocated toppling Saddam seems to rest on the idea that is is “altruistic” and hence wrong, to wish to liberate countries such as Iraq. No truly “selfish” libertarian could possibly endorse such regrettably altruistic behaviour, particularly if it costs blood and treasure. Force is only ever justified, on this view, if one has been directly attacked already and has the names, addresses and confessions of the attacker.
I think Arthur misses a key point. Consider the following – suppose that it is clear (and it is) that the bulk of Iraqi people hate Saddam and want rid of him (the Baathist thugs who benefitted from his rule are naturally not so keen). Suppose that the Coalition’s armed forces regard it is a great value to them that they should serve in forces which enable them to liberate folks from tyranny. This would be even clearer if they were funded like mercenary armies by consenting adults rather than through coercive taxation. Well, if these sort of considerations apply, the liberation of Iraq is a deeply “selfish” act on the terms that Rand would have seen it. It is a positive sum-game for both the liberators and the liberated.
Now of course none of the above resolves the more immediate issues of whether Bush and co exaggerated the WMD threat, whether Iraq was the most pressing issue after 9/11, or whether Saddam was clearly in direct cahoots with terror groups. My point is more fundamental. Many isolationists seem to have elevated the non-initiation of force principle to the level where it inadvertently seems to endorse the existence of particular nation states, including those run by the most brutal folk imaginable. What is so libertarian about this? Why should an Iraq, Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany’s national borders be accorded the same respect as those of a liberal democracy?
By all means let us preserve good manners in the libertarian parish. But those who argue that intervention a la Iraq is always and everywhere wrong are not, in my humble opinion, entitled to claim that those who differ are not libertarians.
And by the way, 99 percent of the stuff on Arthur’s blog is just brilliant.
In case our esteemed readership has not yet heard of FLAIR (the Far-Left Alliance of Indignant Revisionists) I have the pleasure to relay an interview taken from its case files.
The interview was conducted by Barry Fest, a long-time associate and one-time student of Brummagem Groat, who agreed to interview his erstwhile mentor on behalf of FLAIR. The occasion was the publication of Dr. Groat’s latest book, I Dunno: The Working Person’s Guide to Postmodern Relativism by the Belverton University Press. Dr. Groat is professor emeritus of Talkmatics at Belverton.
An Interview with the Relativist
FLAIR: Thank you for your time today, Dr. Groat. I’d like first to ask you about the subtitle of your new book, “The Working Person’s Guide to Postmodern Relativism.” Why does the working person need a guide such as this?
GROAT: For too long the working person has played victim foot soldier for the corporate conglomerates and their Pentagon enablers. Whenever the corpagon has wanted to go to war to protect profits, it has used absolutes – most notoriously the absolutes of “right” and “wrong” – to persuade the working persons of one nation to take up arms against the working persons of another. And whenever working persons have seemed ready to establish a government for working persons, the interested powers have eliminated the threat by appealing to the absolutes embedded, like post-hypnotic suggestions, in the subconscious of the working person. The rote inculcation of these absolutes is performed at an early age by traditional family units, which act as manufacturing plants for the corpagon’s future pawns and patsys.
The result is that by the time the working person is old enough to actually start working, he is a thrall of these absolutes and does not even know it.
I Dunno is intended to persuade the working person that he is better off without absolutes. – What we in the West consider right and wrong is not what everyone else in the world considers right and wrong. I try to make it plain that, in fact, one man’s wrong is another man’s right. Until working persons learn to accept this they will continue in their roles as ad hoc button men for their corporate bosses.
FLAIR: At what point did you realize there was a need to convince Joe – if you’ll pardon the colloquialism – Sixpack of the need to trade in his old absolutes for new ones?
GROAT: I’ve always – Wait a minute, I think you may be missing a very important point. It isn’t that this so-called Joe Sixpack needs newer or what you might even call better absolutes. He needs to discard the notion of absolutes entirely.
FLAIR: And what is the most compelling reason for him to do that?
GROAT: As I said, it will be impossible for him to find that his notions of right and wrong will be accepted by everyone. A notion of virtue produced by the Western process of reason will not be accepted in those societies that reject reason. – And how can you have a universal truth that is not endorsed universally? The Westerner, and that includes the working person, needs to take another approach: the approach I describe in I Dunno.
For the full text of the interview visit The Radical Capitalist.
Just to make sure we don’t go the whole day without anything being posted to Samizdata at all (even if it is a holiday in both the US and the UK) might I direct people to this stunning panoramic view from the top of Mt Everest. (Quicktime required). I do so simply because it is beautiful. (via James Russell).
I have not been to the top of Everest myself, but I have seen a similar view from the top of Mt Lobuje East, which is about five kilometres away in horizontal terms, and two and a half kilometres lower in elevation. This was high enough to see the same astonishing view of moutains to the horizon in all directions, although a few peaks were level with or above me, whereas from Everest everything is down. Seeing this view was one of the great experiences of my life.
In recent decades, Nepal has had a population explosion. One consequence of this has been deforestation. People need energy of some sort for cooking and heating. Traditionally, the mountain peoples of the Himalayas have chopped down trees for firewood. With relatively sparse populations, this has been sustainable, but with the denser populations of recent decades people have had to go further and further afield to find firewood, and a larger and larger proportion of their trees have been chopped down. This has led to obvious environmental problems of erosion, and it clearly isn’t sustainable if people are chopping trees down faster than the trees are growing back. Plus, a lifestle consisting of walking large distances, chopping down the vegetation, and then walking home with a large amount of firewood tied to your back is not especially pleasant.
More importantly, it is unnecessary. This is the mightiest mountain range in the world. Its energy resources, in terms of hydro-electric potential, are gigantic. → Continue reading: Panoramic view from Mt Everest
I am not sure that there’s any libertarian principle that objects to planned failure in DVDs, or that there’s any logical distinction in the comparative consumer rights between DVD rental and DVD self-destruction. For that matter I’m not sure that there’s a logical distinction between (the much maligned) software rental contracts and leasehold on real estate, not while there is Copyright protection, anyway.
I am sure, however, that a great many people of all stripes, including the most avowedly propertarian libertarians, hate the tendency in the entertainment and consumer software industries to enforce their intellectual property rights and create new, lesser rights in their products in which to sell licenses. I am also sure that Copyright is simply losing the minimal respect that is required for a law to be effective. That libertarians should be part of this too should tell us something. After all, we seem quite happy to take un-PC views on the side of big-oil, big-pharmacy, big-tobacco, big-corportate-bogeyman-of-the-week – and revel in how contrarian we seem, how opposed to the “idiotarian” received wisdom. Why not do we not support big-Hollywood too? → Continue reading: The death of copyright
Peter Cuthbertson discusses the importance of concepts and semantics to defining a political meta-context
If your arguments are irrational and unconvincing, and the consequences of people listening to them harmful and destructive, then you really need to have some other factor on your side to succeed. Sadly, those who advocate socialism, statism, lilly-livered liberalism and an ever-expanding government have just this. For almost every modern political argument is conducted in a lexicon that favours them, every debate being a competition between those who can use leftist language most convincingly – usually the left, unsurprisingly.
Daniel Hannan covered this phenomenon 18 months ago in The Spectator. It isn’t that the language prevents you arguing against the left – it’s that it prevents you doing so while still sounding as kind and as decent as your opponent.
‘Greed’ now means low taxes, while c’ompassion’ means high taxes. ‘Fairness’ means state-enforced equality, while ‘unfairness’ means an individual’s right to better himself. Any discussion of the relationship between government and citizen is perforce conducted in loaded terms. You can still make the case for greater liberty, but not without sounding rather nasty.
The column in question was far more focused on the problem than solutions, though he did note that there was hope for the future. However, the fulfillment of these hopes would require conscious effort to reclaim the political vocabulary. How can we achieve this? → Continue reading: Reclaiming the political lexicon
E.G. Ross, the author of the website Objective American, recently passed away due to complications of an aneurysm.
He had a unique ability to combine reason and optimism in a world in which those virtues are too often lacking. He was very well versed and wrote articles on a wide range of subjects, including self-help, national defense, the drug war, terrorism, economics, government, and theology. His essay, “The Terrible Swift Sword”, can be found on the site and is an absolute classic.
Needless to say, I will miss his writing tremendously.
David R. Beatty
Britain’s Channel 4 has just wound up a superb documentary series of the type that Channel 4 does consistently well. The final instalment of ‘Do you believe in magic?’ was aired yesterday evening and dealt with faith in Britain today. If the programme-makers are to be believed (and they put their case together very credibly I must say) then Britain is not quite the country even I thought it to be.
When less than 1 out of every 10 people in this country regularly attend Church and where politicians and even Church leaders shy away from mentioning God for fear of being seen as a bit soft in the head, one can reasonably infer that Britain is the most ruggedly secular country in the Western world and a place where scientific rationalism has triumphed.
Well, not true. Running underneath the dominant current of default secularism and starkly juxtaposed against dwindling interest in traditional worship, Britain is positively teeming with wiccans, pagans, shamanists, holistic spiritualists, mediums, druids, tarot readers and cultists of just about every imaginable stripe and description. This includes a peculiarly English version of enviromentalism which is much more about nature-worship than anti-everything agitprop and which is a curiously arcane echo of pre-Christian Britain. The ‘Old Gods’, it seems, have been making something of a comeback. This is not so much post-modernism as pre-modernism. → Continue reading: The Enchanted Isle
People often say that President George Herbert Walker Bush (the current President’s father) did a very wicked thing – that he called upon the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow the regime and then, when they did rebel, he betrayed them (left them to die in their tens of thousands).
Now I am no fan of the first President Bush (I am not much of a fan of the second one either) – after all this was the President Bush of “read my lips” who then shoved up taxes, and this was the President Bush of the ‘Americans with Disabilities Act’ and all sorts of other regulations.
However, many people say that Mr G.H.W. Bush was a nice man who would not have set out to call on people to rebel and then left them to die.
I do not know whether the first President Bush was a ‘nice man’ or not – but there is a way he might have been, a possibility that has president in American policy.
There is a view common in American (and other) ‘educated’ circles that dictatorships do not rest on force, but are instead based on ‘opinion’. And if ‘the people’ really want to they can overthrow tyranny. So United States government has gone around making calls for populations to rise up against tyrannical rule and when populations do rebel (as they did several times in Eastern Europe) it is found to have no plans to help – it does not need to help you see, ‘opinion’ is what matters. If the ‘the people’ want to do something they can.
Where does this idea come from? It comes from David Hume. → Continue reading: One of the problems David Hume left us
|
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.
|
