Samizdata

What follows was not written by me but by a friend of mine, Niall Kilmartin. As will be apparent, he has known me since university. – NS

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At the end of a recent post about lefties making laws for us because they think we’re like them, Brian Micklethwait asks what similar errors we make. I think I can answer with examples from his own post.

First, he talks of gun control freaks – people so violent that if they had guns to hand during temper tantrums, they’d murder – and suggests that these people want guns banned because they think we’re the same as them. Here he does have a specific, documented, public-domain example of a gun-control advocate with a domestic violence history. But let me offer a rival example.

In the week I first met Natalie Solent, she was sitting in the Oxford University D&D club chatting to two friends of mine whom she’d just met. An accident occurred outside and my friends went to help – thus incidentally establishing their bona fides as caring people to her. That situation resolved, they sat down again and – as my friends have a tendency to do, for some reason – began talking about guns. Natalie then was in some ways not Natalie as we now know her. As she told me later, if that accident hadn’t happened, she would have written them off in the unthinking way of many British people: “They like guns, guns are for killing people, so they must like the idea of killing people; I’ll not pursue their acquaintance.”

Natalie, as she then was, is far more representative of how left-wingers think than Brian’s example. No doubt Brian’s example is useful in debate: “We’re not the only violent ones. In fact, we’re not specially violent. In fact, if we can look at some among our opponents for a moment… “. But as regards political fundamentals, that argument is so like the left’s tactics, that it’s fair to use it only when debating with them. My friends’ reaction to the accident persuaded Natalie to change her mind a little. You would have got nowhere with her by saying, “You only think that because you’re so violent yourself”. It would be very like some accusations against the Tea Party: propaganda failures because it is so obvious to Tea Partiers and their friends that they are not true.

Brian’s next illustration is even worse, because he has no public domain example, just speculation about some guy who thinks homosexuality will destroy civilization if tolerated because it would destroy his mental equilibrium if he tolerated it. In a world of seven thousand million (is it?) human beings, this guy may well exist. But in my (far from complete) knowledge of the Anglosphere public domain, past and present, I cannot offhand come up with an example. I can however think of counter-examples.

Before we meet them, however, let’s meet a counter-argument. Turn the argument about homophobes being repressed homosexuals around and assert that homosexuals are really repressed gynophobes or androphobes. Here I can think of public domain examples. Women staff at Bletchley Park said that if a woman so much as spoke to Alan Turing when he was not expecting it, he would visibly shrink into himself in alarm. When the gynophobia is in itself so clear, it’s a fair diagnosis that the homoerotic symptoms are mere side-effects.

Now look instead at, for example, Noel Coward. If I were willing to argue like a leftie, I could diagnose gynophobia. Think of his joke about the queen of Tonga at the coronation. As the enormous queen and diminutive ambassador from Pakistan passed in their shared carriage, someone asked him who that was with Queen Salote: “Oh, I think that’s her lunch.” Think of the plot of Blythe Spirit: the two women make the man’s life hell quarrelling over him and eventually kill him. A clear diagnosis of gynophobia? Or a clear diagnosis of comic genius? Certainly, if Noel Coward was terrified of women, he handled it very much better than Alan Turing – unless you claim his homosexuality shows his bad handling of it, but then we’re into circular reasoning.

In short, a hand-count of examples of people who are or may be assuming that laws should be written to deal with people like themselves does not a true-for-all-cases proof make. Arguing with some supporter of Canada’s current laws against hate speech, I’d think it very fair to push Brian’s argument. But with anyone more reasonable, I would not pretend to know things I don’t know.

But as I said, I can offer counter-examples as well as counter-arguments. Many decades ago, my mother was raised, in humble circumstances, in a very straitlaced small Scottish town, attending the local school, but when she was 13 years old, she knew plenty about homosexuality – because she had a classical education. And there was nothing unusual about this level of classical knowledge even among ordinary people: many of you will know the In Parenthesis anecdote about the WWI Welsh private assigned to latrine duty who defended the utility of his task with the words “Don’t you know the army of Artaxerxes was utterly destroyed for lack of sanitation?” (I love this anecdote because it’s so easy to say “for lack of sanitation” in an appropriately-Welsh accent.)

My mother, aged 13, imagined that homosexuality was one of those things, like polytheism, human sacrifice and slavery, that had been common in the past but had died out under the beneficent influence of Christianity. Not that anyone told her that – it was a 13-year old’s way of understanding what she was taught in the light of where and when she lived. (My mother aged 16 had become aware that “died out” was putting it too strongly.) Until half a century ago there were many people like her – people who were not taught to respect Socrates because he was homosexual, any more than they were taught to respect him because he owned slaves, or worshipped Zeus and Athena. Although they saw homosexuality as a perversion, they were taught to respect Socrates, and to see Athens killing him as a tragedy – not as good riddance to a nasty pervert. They knew exactly what they believed, but they were also taught to know intimately and respect a culture, and people in that culture, who had very different values from theirs.

Now imagine presenting to these past people – who would certainly fail the Haringey council “anti-homophobia” test or similar – the idea that they believed what they did because they thought tolerated homosexuality would destroy civilization. They would have thought of two responses.

– They would have thought of Sparta, where the idea that homosexuality destroyed a civilization is a possible thesis. The Spartans made homosexuality obligatory for their military training, and (uniquely amongst Greeks), had a positive, rather than just contemptuously tolerant, view of female homosexuality. The Spartans suffered a 90% decline in their citizen body during the classical period; eventually it destroyed the old Sparta. The Spartans had customs – marriage-by-capture, willingness to let visiting nobles sleep with their wives – which it’s easy to explain by saying that their homosexuality was easier to learn in their teens than unlearn when it was time to procreate. So yes, if it is promoted enough, our ancestors would have argued, homosexuality can indeed destroy a civilization.

– But they would have set this level high, because they would also have thought of Athens. In Athens, philosophers taught that men who desired other men showed better taste than men who desired those inferior creatures, women. (And so women who desired women showed bad taste, but then women were inferior, so they would sometimes show bad taste – no need to get in a tiz about it.) Athens did not suffer a decline in its citizen body. If Athens destroyed itself – as one can argue it did – it was for other reasons. Just as with teenage-Natalie and guns above, so for our ancestors – and, today, for those who reject political correctness – Brian’s explanation is simply an irrelevance.

These I think show ways in which we can avoid the vulgarities of left-wing argumentative methods. When you’re forced to debate with such people, it may be fair to use their own tactics of pick the (unrepresentative) example or even invent the hypothetical (irrelevant) example. With anyone fairer, understand what they believe and the reasons why they do.

So much for Brian’s post. One last reflection: writing this raised a question for me – and gave me my answer. People who defend Canada’s anti-free-speech laws say they must because the alternative is the laws of the past. I’m sure that’s just another of the lies the left uses to keep us in line. But suppose (God forbid!) they forced me to believe it? Suppose I had to choose between evils: between Canada’s laws today and the laws of my mother’s youth? Actual sex acts are by their nature private. Free speech is by its nature public – more effectively subject to law. In his first letter on the French revolution, Burke lists requirements for liberty: “… a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs … even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion…”. So I have my answer.

Instapundit linked a while back to a very short blog posting entitled Why are anti-gun activists so violent? This being in connection with a news story about a politician accused of abusing his wife.

The question seems to be rhetorical, but I can think of at least one possible real answer, which you arrive at by reversing the question. Why are violent people inclined to be anti-gun activists?

If you are yourself of an unusually violent disposition, and if you yourself sometimes believe that, had a gun been handy for you, you might have been tempted to kill your wife with it during a domestic disagreement, and you simply add in that one crucial extra assumption so often added, so wrongly, in so many situations, to the effect that most others are just like you, then it would make sense to say that you and your fellow men-on-the-verge-of-a-murderous-tantrum ought to be denied the means of committing murder. Arming the majority, in your eyes, is no answer, because the majority shares your own tendencies. That would only make things far worse.

In my opinion, an amazing number of mysteriously vehement, evidence-defying opinions can be better understood once you understand that the expresser of such opinions is unthinkingly assuming that most others are, in some particular respect, just like him.

Consider another quite common figure in our world: the repressed homosexual, who assumes that most “heterosexuals” are, like him, homosexuals who manage to suppress their natural homosexual urges. Such a person quite logically believes that homosexuality constantly threatens to overwhelm society (merely because it actually only threatens to overwhelm him) and to bring child-rearing and with it civilisation itself to an abrupt end.

Another consequence of the unexamined assumption that everyone is like me is that society becomes quite easy to plan from the top, because we all have the same tastes, preferences, ambitions, beliefs, and ways of going about things, don’t we? Us deciding about how to satisfy other people’s wishes does no great harm, because we effortlessly know what these wishes are. They are just like ours!

I first collided heavily with this everyone’s-like-me notion not in political discourse, but in the course of doing, of all things, career counselling. A client who thinks that everyone else wants what he wants is caste down into unnecessary pessimism about his own chances of a happy life. He desperately wants to be a hotel manager. But so does everyone else! Brain surgeons, motor mechanics, professional sportsmen, hairdressers, estate agents, popular novelists – all these unfortunates are merely frustrated hotel managers. So what chance can he possibly have to buck this universal trend? The same inevitable fate awaits him. He is doomed to eke out his living by becoming a movie star (who occasionally gets to play a hotel manager), or some such hideous and soul-destroying compromise. Shining a torch on such everyone’s-like-me assumptions can provoke lasting happiness. Hey, I might get what I want after all! There are far fewer people in the race I’m trying to do well in than I thought!

In what way does my sometimes vehement libertarianism result from assumptions that I make about others mostly being like me? What do libertarians generally assume to be true of people generally, which actually isn’t?