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Have you ever had trouble explaining to someone why libertarians are neither a funny sub-species of conservatives nor an odd sort of neo-liberal? People are so stuck in the Left/Right paradigm you can hardly get through to them about a different direction, one that is not left or right but.... up. [Apologies to Flatland!]

I have tried pointing out issues on which any libertarian will disagree with a conservative; and then of like issues on the other side. I have tried showing my "World's Smallest Political Quiz" card with the Nolan chart on it. That helps a little, but you still rarely see the light of real understanding.

A week ago, in conversation with a very liberal friend in New York, I found a parable that rewarded me with a look of sudden comprehension. I again tried it with someone on the airplane back to Belfast and was similarly rewarded. It was a parable-ized form of something which happened to me about twenty years ago in the Skibo Hall student union building at CMU:

If you put a Democrat, a Republican, and a Libertarian alone in a room together, the Republican and Democrat will eventually team up against the Libertarian. This is because both of them believe the power of government could be used for enormous good... if only they were the one controlling it.

The libertarian wants to destroy the machine.

I think this makes it clear why, in the end, both Democrats and Republicans are our 'enemies'. They like the machine, they believe in the machine... and they both will defend it to the death. Make no mistake: if we become powerful enough to be a real political threat, they will both turn on us.

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In all the acres of commentary in the press and elsewhere on those cartoons (death toll at time of writing, five, which is getting beyond a joke), I have not seen anyone mention this point, so I will get it in before I get bored of the whole affair.

There are two distinct reasons given in hadith why an image of Muhammad might be forbidden.

First, there is a general ban on images of living things as an attempt to rival God's creative power. That can not be what is at issue here, since it is generally ignored outside mosques, even in Saudi Arabia (though the Taliban appear to have gone more or less the whole hog, to use about the least appropriate possible metaphor).

Second, reinforced by the prophet's deathbed injunction not to set up a shrine or mosque over his grave, there's the idea that religious worship through icons of saints, in the manner of the christian churches familiar to the early Muslims, constitutes an idolatry, or worship of the saint rather than God directly. So images of the prophet are banned in Islam because they may be revered idolatrously.

So the objection to the cartoons cannot really be founded in the Islamic image-ban. They are clearly neither idolatry nor invitations to it. On the contrary, the insistance that a mocking representation amounts to a gross insult to the prophet is much more like idolatry in that sense: a demand that the man be revered as incapable of representation as God.

Is what is really happening that the 'insult' is actually felt by individual Muslims (either at first hand, or in reaction to hearsay)? Those who feel themselves outraged are themselves threatened by the mockery, but wrap themselves in religiosity as a defence. In effect they are setting themselves up in the prophet's shoes, attributing to him either primitive notions of honour that his disavowal of a shrine rather suggests he had surpassed, or God-like equivalence with the religion itself.

Now, remind me, who was insulting Islam?

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So if the United Kingdom is in the grip of a "Blairite Tyranny", what is the proper response?

After all, few would question the ethics of assassinating Adolf Hitler. The main complaint about the attempt on Hitler's life is that it took as long as it did to be set in motion.

Even today, the 'Third World' is full of dodgy dictators whose death by tyrannicide would not be condemned by many, least of all their own victims.

However, few would actually argue that Tony Blair's conduct of government, while authoritarian in operation and intention, merits his actual death by murder. If merit is involved, in my opinion, Blair deserves a sound thrashing from the Headmaster's office, and ostracism by civilised members of society, and in any case, violence should always be a last resort in political life as in everything else.

But this begs the question: at what point does a ruler's conduct become so vile and repulsive that tyrannicide becomes a morally plausible response? Does the democratic process increase the threshold, or lower it? Tyrannicides were applauded in ancient Greece; should we applaud them in this era?

[Editors note: please read this article carefully before commenting. It is NOT suggesting or even discussing whether or not Tony Blair should be assassinated, but rather is a discussion of how to deal with lesser variety tyrants. Comments suggesting Blair et al should be done in will be deleted as both unhelpful and seditious]

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There seems to be a lot of it about at the moment, as the late British comic writer and broadcaster Spike Milligan might have put it. "It" being atheism. The biologist Richard Dawkins, known in some quarters as "Darwin's Rottweiler", takes aim at religion in a current television series on Britain's Channel 4 station. And only a few weeks ago I watched a programme on BBC 2 with Jonathan Miller, praising the tradition of skepticsm and outright atheism.

What is going on? We live at a time when our post-Enlightenment civilisation is threatened by religious fundamentalism in the guise of radical Islam. It seemed for a while after 9/11 to be bad form to make harsh attacks on religion per se but now it appears some restraints are coming off.

Of course this may only apply to Britain. In the United States, notwithstanding the theoretical separation of religion and state, it is, as Salman Rushdie has said, all but impossible for any declared atheist to hold down a public office more senior than that of a dog-catcher. This may of course change in time. Such things sometimes move in cycles.

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As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:

Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers—the latter with great emotion—were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl's father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.

Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:

"I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?".

This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.

This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here's a prefiguring example:

In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence
- Benito Mussolini

Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:

Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.

All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.

[cross-posted from White Rose]

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"If you're determined to be altruistic about it, the only way you can be of any good to others is for you to be self-sufficient. The biggest burdens in a crisis are those who were so concerned about the welfare of everyone else that they never provided for themselves."

Harry Browne, How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation, pp. 199-200, Arlington House Publishers, Westport, Connecticut. I also recommend this classic by Browne.

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The great irony is that the most fundamental right to individual sovereignty—private property—is the one most highly questioned. Property rights are usually construed narrowly to cover only things that can be exchanged, given away, or abandoned. But since a property right is the right to use and dispose of something, it actually has a far broader meaning. One begins with a right to one’s own person, including one’s body and energies. Indeed, this is that basic right that gives rise to the right to appropriate unowned objects from nature and to exchange peacefully acquired property with willing traders. In fact, without property rights there are no no rights at all.

From the Independent Institute.

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Mick Hume has me worried, not for the first time. If I want to be gently scared, much rather a challenging column than a horror film (generally much less alarming than, and approximately as soporific as, the Shopping Channel).

He is describing Spiked!'s political position:-

We stand on the left as it was originally named, after those who stood on that side of the National Assembly during the French Revolution to champion reason, science, liberty and the secular values of the Enlightenment. We don't want to return to the past, but to see those gains of humanity defended and developed in the changing context of the twenty-first century.

Well that certainly sounds attractive. Except for the word "left". I have been defining myself as right-wing, by default, for 30 years. Any adherence to policies promoting human freedom (from atheisim to legalising cannabis to banning torture) out the conventional Left have always seemed to me adventitious, adopted only as markers of difference from reactionary traditionalists, not springing from principle. The basic principle, of subordinating individual lives to wiser-than-thou ruling class—and catering to the velleity of the mob—was always repulsive. Better identify, then, with the limited, pessimistic, ambition of the Right and find both a space to live and scope for pragmatic arguments for liberty.

The truth is, of course, the Left-Right division never made sense. It ought to be politics for the simple-minded, who can think only in one dimension. But everywhere serious, bright people are mentally enslaved by it.

My guess is Mr Hume has had a mirror of my experience: he has thought of himself as opposed to repulsive "right-wing" things throughout his life, and therefore is comfortable being Left, which I could never be. An acquaintance on The Salisbury Review once described me as having gone so far right to have come out the other side and being "practically a communist"—but I don't feel it. Red flags (red ties even, Mr Bush) make me shudder.

The truth is, of course, that the rationalists on Spiked! and the rationalists on Samizdata are both too sentimental to abandon the political labels they have had imposed on them and have grown up with. A bit of explicit redefinition of those terms, which we indulge ourselves with, will not help us.

The point of politics, and therefore of political labels, is not to explain the world, but change it. Meanwhile the utterly unsentimental are doing just that, by appeal to popular sentiment, and by changing the language implicitly. They do not worry about coherence or clarity of definition, because social reality is defined in institutional power, and in the popular stories that make up "common sense". It is not what we call ourselves that matters. It is what other people call us—and whether they can be persuaded to notice us at all.

Wanted: A new banner.

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Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of comment out there in dead-tree media and the electronic versions about religion and its relation vis a vis the state at the moment. (Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Anglican Christian who read a lot of David Hume, much to the annoyance of my old vicar, no doubt). There is a bracing essay in the Spectator this week about the nonsense spouted in the usual places about "moderate" Islam.

The blog Positive Liberty, which has become a group blog like this one - has an excellent piece looking at the religious, or in some cases, decidely lukewarm religious, views of the U.S. Founding Fathers. These men, to varying degrees, were acutely conscious of the dangers of religious fundamentalism, having seen within their lifetimes the human price of it. As we think about the dangers posed by Islam in our own time, the insights of Madison, Adams, Jefferson et al are needed more than ever. The linked-to article is fairly long but worth sitting back and sipping on a coffee for a good read, I think.

It is in my view essential for the west's future that the benefits of separating what is God's from what is Cesear's is made as loudly and as often as possible. Muslims must be made abundantly aware of this point for if they do not, the consequences could be dire. Maybe because of the role played by the Church of England in our post-Reformation history, we don't have the tradition, as in the States, of keeping a beady eye on the blurring of the edges of temporal and spiritual. Cynics have of course argued that nationalising Christianity via the CoE has helped the cause of fuzzy agnosticism and atheism more than the complete works of the Englightenment. Well, maybe. It may have as much to do with the relative openness of British society, our ironical sense of humour (religious enthusiasm has often struck the Brits as slightly silly or unhinged, ripe for Monty Python treatment) and desire not to give offence.

I fear that sense of humour is going to be tested for the remainder of my lifetime.

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I have been tipped off by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber that he is taking issue with this post of mine. His post has the title you see above and can be found here. He writes:

The title, btw, is not meant to be a personal dig but rather a play on the title of Jerry Cohen's book (see the post). Still, I think there's a real question for you guys: granted, you think it would be wrong for the state to force you to do good, so why don't you do it anyway, unforced?

I anticipate a range of answers to that one, including that the good I'm thinking of either (a) isn't really good at all or (b) wouldn't be achieved by the means I'm suggesting. But I'm saving responses for a later post.

Bertram says that I was not entitled to assume that the protestors are strict egalitarians or that they necessarily believe that the Third World is poor because they are rich and that money transfer is the way to correct that situation. He continues, "They may, of course, believe the true claims that some Third-World poverty is attributable to the action of wealthy nations and that money transfer can be part of a solution to that problem."

I cannot resist saying that I am at least as entitled to my assumption that protestors at a protest agree with the rhetoric of the protest leaders as he is entitled to his assumption that libertarians do not do good unforced.

In his next paragraph he very neatly cites protectionist regimes such as the Common Agricultural Policy as an example of the action of wealthy nations that he correctly states I believe causes poverty. A little too neatly: if the protestors' foremost demand was the abolition of the CAP then I might head up to Edinburgh myself, but it is not. Where they do make that demand at all, it comes way down the list after a lot of actively harmful demands such as that Third World governments make their own people pay more than we do for food and fridges. (Or "Third World countries have the right to protect their farmers and infant industries" as they quaintly put it.)

Bertram then gives a quick summary of Bono's view that personal contributions are irrelevant contrasted with my view, and seems to largely agree with me. "Solent’s original post, though," he adds, "seems motivated by the thought that the protestors are in some sense hypocrites , that if they are true to their principles they should give much more than they are giving. "

Yes. It costs good money to go to Edinburgh, good money to find a place to stay, good money to buy six or so meals - especially if you are boycotting MacDonalds - and many of them will have forgone a day or two's pay as well. Very few will get home without having spent a hundred quid plus in dribs and drabs. If they think that money is needed, why not send it instead? (Or "as well", but since my original question implied "instead" I will stick with that.) If all the planned million protestors each gave £100 it would be a serious contribution. It might be less than the increase in the aid budget lobbied for but it could be targeted better and would arrive sooner. As an extra bonus, the millions of pounds due to be spent on protecting the G8 leaders against protestors would also be freed up! The protestors are acting like they think the money is not urgently needed.

Another thought playing around in my mind was the extreme indirectness of what the protestors were doing. They hope to influence one group of leaders to transfer more money to another group of leaders so that the latter will use it to do good in a way distinctly unlike their usual behaviour following previous transfers. Compare that to just giving money. How likely it is that the chain of causality that the protestors think will do good will actually break at some point. This is not the same as the argument above. There I was casting doubt on the protestors' sincerity. Here I am casting doubt on the correctness of their assumptions about the way the world works.

In the next part Bertram asks how much egalitarians should give. He says with approval that an author called Liam Murphy holds that we should calculate what our share would be in the collective project of morality if everyone did an equal share, and then feel strictly obliged to do only that, while being allowed to do more if desired.

From Bertram's summary of Murphy, I do not agree with him. Point one: to call morality a "collective project" sounds nice but it begs the question. I did not sign up to any project. Point two: the thrust of his argument seems to be "we work out what we would do in an imaginary world and then do that." Why not imagine no one went hungry? Then you will not need to do anything at all!

The next part of the post asks how much it would cost to bring everyone up to a minimum standard of living. Chris Bertram himself, I deduce from this and other things he has written, is not an egalitarian, more a nobodystarvesist. (As am I.) He argues that the required contribution is surprisingly small. But I repeat: this misses the point; people are starving. If one believes that being given government money will help, then so will being given your money.

Now we cut to the chase: "My view is that the state should enforce that duty. Instead of giving my share, with no assurance that others would do theirs, I would thereby be assured that everyone was making a contribution: a collective project of preventing serious harm would not be undermined by free-riders and curmudgeons. So I’m happy both to pay, and to try to get the state to force me and others to pay."

I respond:

1) I do not see why his preference for feeling that he is not paying more than others should be deferred to.

2) I take his objection about the "project" not being undermined by free riders much more seriously, despite my dislike of the connotations of the word project. I assert that the reduction in generosity caused by the resentment of free riders (that term is being misused by my lights: he means "persons not choosing to contribute as much as you") is far less than the reduction in generosity caused by everyone assuming that the government will see to it. This assumption also decreases the initiative, status and ultimately the wealth of the recipients. And force has high transaction costs.

Bertram finishes by saying, "... that doesn’t mean that others can’t raise questions about what she does choose to do, including, of course (and again), her own question: “Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?”

Let us take my glowing description of the virtue of trade as a means of making poor people rich as already having been made. In fact, though, I do not agree with some of my more committed libertarian brethren in seeing no benefit in giving rather than trading. From what he has said Chris Bertram's actual behaviour and mine are approximately similar. I claim that the mismatch between words and actions in my case is slightly less than it is in his case and far less than in the case of those heading to the mutual admiration festival in Edinburgh. [Added later: On reflection, there is no mismatch between Bertram's words and actions, assuming he follows Murphy in both word and deed. I should have talked about the mismatch between ends and means.]

There is another contradiction as well. The reason for having a protest is that protestors do not think the government leaders are doing the right thing. In other words they think their judgement as to the best way to spend money is better than the judgement of their leaders. But if they think that, why are they keen to hand over more money to those same leaders to disburse rather than disbursing it themselves?

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In Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose it says:

Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong - even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.

I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?

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Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite...If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.

- Richard Dawkins, from a collection of brilliant essays, "The Devil's Chaplain", crushing all manner of shoddy thinking.

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A few weeks ago parts of the libertarian intellectual scene marked what would have been Ayn Rand's 100th birthday. Among a number of articles reflecting on her life and novels was this surprisingly conservative article by Reason magazine regular Cathy Young. Young is determined to present both Rand's great virtues alongside her not-so agreeable side, particularly her intolerance of anyone, who, however constructively, criticised her.

But the article contains a number of charges about Rand and her system of ideas which I think are unfair. I want to address them not as some sort of defence of Rand - a writer who had some serious faults, in my view - but because the points Young makes can be applied to classical liberal/libertarian views more broadly.

Young claims that Rand had no time for family life of any kind and that her main characters appeared to have no enjoyable family life at all. As a result, her value system is held to be seriously deficient, in that Young claims that a viable human society requires us to feel obligations towards our fellow family members even though a person has not chosen the family he or she is in. (The same sort of argument is used by conservatives to justify loyalty to a country). This surely overlooks the point that for Rand, the relationships in life that matter are the ones people choose to enter into, not those born of historical accident. I am lucky enough to have been raised by two loving and smart parents. Very lucky, in fact. But it is obviously not so great for many other people and I have no doubt that a few of my friends and acquaintances have been drawn to libertarian ideas as a way of rebelling against the sort of unpleasant experiences that many children can have. So I certainly don't condemn Rand because her heroes and heroines did not take out time from their adventures to change the kiddies' diapers. After all, many great works of fiction contain characters with no reference to family issues at all. Young does not address it, but for Rand, and indeed many others, there can be no such thing as unconditional love. The sense of obligation I feel towards my parents cannot, in my view, be divorced from my sense of gratitude towards them. If they had been monsters, I would feel quite differently.

Another charge that Young makes is that Rand (and presumably many libertarians) had no interest in charity and therefore a society created by rational egoists would have no base of voluntary organisations able to help others in times of distress. That seems odd. As David Kelley points out in this marvellous book, "Unrugged Individualism", rational self interested people have a direct vested interest in cultivating a benevolent, friendly disposition towards their fellow humans. In fact many people become firefighters, nurses, paramedic rescuers and the like precisely because it is an important value to them to do such things. In short, charity is not in conflict with enlightened self interest at all. What counts is that the actions concerned are voluntary rather than something that is imposed by coercive force.

Such drawbacks aside, Young's piece is well worth reading. I discovered, for example, that Rand did not have much interest in evolution, which seems a bit strange for a declared atheist and enthusiast for science. I would have thought that evolution is something that fits quite snugly into a pro-reason, pro-freedom political phiolosphy, as Daniel Dennett has shown.

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In one of his recent entries, Brian Micklethwait referred to that small but intruiging part of historical scholarship, the "what-if" variety, in which writers conjecture what might have happened if a particular event, such as a political assassination or piece of intelligence, had not taken place. What interested me was that one or two comments suggested that this was a pure "parlour game" of no significance and that grown-ups should not bother themselves with such playful nonsense.

Ah, play. The idea that history, philosophy or art could involve play and other frivolous activity is offensive to a certain type of person. I happen to think quite differently. Playfulness is in fact often very useful in the realm of ideas. When a good writer wants to illustrate a point or an argument, he or she can often do so highly effectively through such gambits as a "thought-experiment", or through borrowing from supposedly unrelated branches of knowledge.

A good example of this was the late libertarian author, Robert Nozick, who shamelessly borrowed from game theory, science and much else to make his arguments. He famously crushed egalitarian arguments for coercively redistributing wealth in his "Wilt Chamberlain" case by showing the injustice of taking wealth from a man who had earned it from the volutantary exchanges of people starting from a completely egalitarian starting point.

Maybe it is a product of puritanical Christianity, but our culture still revolts against the idea that ideas could, and should, be fun. I find that rather odd.

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Last week I spent an evening pubbing with Samizdata reader 'Spacer' who writes for the Wall Street Journal now and again. As you can see, he was fully prepared for the Arctic conditions of the Upper West Side.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved

At the second pub we stumbled upon a group of his friends and next thing I was deep into a Cambridge style philosophical discussion on the existence of God. I am sure most readers know I am not the least bit religious in a fundamentalist way. I usually deflect the topic by declaring myself a "nonpracticing atheist". This unusual label typically confuses the opposition sufficiently to allow me to make good my escape.

A correct explication of my beliefs requires far more explanation and odd looks than I typically care for when my pub intent is to be chillin'. In truth I am more agnostic than atheist. I do not believe I can prove one way or the other that there is a higher being. In and of itself that is not an unusual belief set. The difficulty comes when I attempt description of the God of whose existence I am unsure.

I do not believe in the supernatural God of scripture; nor in a God of the First Cause. No God created itself and the initial Universe, but the Universe may quite possibly have created a God or God's, any one of which would be utterly indistinguishable from the all powerful God of earthly religions.

You may ask yourself, "What the hell is he talking about?".

So I will tell you.

We can describe different levels of Godness:

• An entity with a command of all which physical law allows but which exists in a localized region of space and time.

• An entity which in addition is able to control space and time.

• An entity which exists at the end of space and time and can operate on any point in that continuum.
  

• God of the Simulation. If, as David Deutsch suggests in some of his writings, there is one reality (a multiverse) and untold numbers of simulated realities, then the initiator of a simulation is an all powerful God, limited only by the rules and initial conditions it chooses to follow.

• God of the Universal Mind. If Strong Nanotechnology really is possible, then any technological species will eventually gain the ability to build anything physical law allows. It will take control of its own shape, its own mind, its own destiny. Sentience may become a property of matter and the adage "God is Everywhere" become literally true.

• God of the Singularity. If we gain control of space and time, it may be possible to create an entire space-time universe bubble to specification. The creators may or may not be able to ever again interact with their creation, but they have set the parameters which define its evolution. The creator of such a bubble is a Creator, but not the Self-Creator of religious texts.
  

There are a number of different origins for these entities. Some origins do not apply to some God-types:

• The entity could be 'ourselves' from a future time, or from the 'end' of time if our space-time is closed.

• The entity could be a progenitor from pre-existing space-time.

• The entity could be an alien civilization that developed past some threshold before we did.

• The entity could be some combination of any of the above, for instance, a mass mind existing at the end of time made up of all sentient species which passed the threshold for membership.
  

• If there is a final big crunch, then the amounts of available energy per unit time and space increase exponentially as does the ability to compute. [This is from Deutsch].

• In a Freeman Dyson open universe scenario, a civilization has exponentially less available energy per unit time and space, but adjusts by exponentially slowing down the speed of its own thoughts. It has forever to play with, so why rush?

• Entities which come to a full understanding of Space-Time may simply end-run all of this and move their thoughts to a new bubble universe.
  

The only thing they are not beyond is our imagination.

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Reading several pages of interesting reports and discussion on the BBC's website about Somalia, I wonder:

Is Sudan a better country to live in than Somalia?
Do refugees travel between the two countries (probably via Ethiopia) and which is the better place to live?
How would Somalia score on a human rights questionnaire? Compared with say North Korea. I think of the official line from the worker's paradise about homosexual rights: "There is no homosexuality in the Republic of Korea, it is a bourgeois disease."
How obstructive are Somali warlords of international trade compared with say, the EU's regulatory of tariff restrictions on agriculture? Is it easier and cheaper for a Kenyan farmer to sell food to Somalia than to Sudan or Spain?

I also note that multiple currencies are operating in Somalia, with US dollars, private currencies and old banknotes being exchanged in markets. Are Somalis really so much more intelligent than Europeans who had to be protected from currency choice?

The BBC reporter makes the mistake of comparing Somalia today with Holland Park in London today (except that some types of crime are probably more frequent in Holland Park). He is appalled that guns are for sale and that the entry fees finance qat instead of state schools and state hospitals. I think it is much more interesting to compare Somalia today with neighbouring countries today. On the face of it anarchy seems a lot like Robert A Heinlein's depiction in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Ken Macleod's The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. Despite my quibbles with the BBC on this issue, full marks for going to Somalia eyes wide open, if not quite minds wide open.

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I am happy and relieved by the result of the US election. I thank those who campaigned, volunteered or just plain voted to keep the right man at the helm.

All the same, I take literally the statement that democracy is the least worst form of government.

Many here argue that we do not need any government at all. It is not going away any time soon, though. Most anarchists and minarchists will concede that modern liberal democracy is fertile ground compared to the despotic wasteland that makes up most of history, even if it is not yet a garden of libertarian delights.

I figured out as a child that the least wonderful aspect of a modern liberal democracy is that it lets the majority decide: the tyranny of the majority is to be feared. Votes are a mechanism to deal with the fact that some administrative variables affecting many people (speed limits, for instance, or surrenders) must be set at a predictable value for a recognisable group, or bad stuff happens.

I also figured out as a child that the good soul of a liberal democracy, the thing that has made us the most fortunate human beings in history, is the idea that every individual matters. None of us can be made to stop mattering because we look wrong or do wrong. That's why every individual has certain rights that cannot be...

...OK, OK, I had better stop myself before I re-hash the Declaration of Independence in much inferior prose. You know all this. You can probably cite references. Please do!

It is a pity it ever has to come to voting. Votes by definition make some people sad. Yet we go on and on about majorities and mandates and elections and other things to do with the regrettable majoritarian aspects of our system. We talk much less about how the only reason that counting people matters is that people count. And, as we on this blog know, it is a constant struggle to defend individual rights against the majority.

I just wondered, is the reason that we so exalt the rule of the majority over the more fundamental principle of equality before the law simply because we picked the wrong ruddy name for our system of government? Everybody knows that we don't mean by democracy what the Greeks meant by it. We don't have ostracism. We don't have slavery. These prohibitions are not mere differences of custom but integral to the system. The difference between our 'democracy' and theirs is precisely that we believe in inalienable rights and equality under the law. So whose bleedin' stupid idea was it to call our system the Greek word for "people-rule?" It was sure to give folk the wrong idea. If we had just called it isonomy instead we would all be a lot better off.

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This morning I was left deep in thought after a seemingly innocuous article in Scientific American about Ebola vaccines. It sent me off into a bit of internal philosophizing. I have long intended to explicate a particular set of thoughts here but have never quite found the time. I do not have it right now either, but will nonetheless dedicate an hour to it. The day it deserves will never come.

There are three worlds. Not worlds in the sense of planets or matter but of realities. The first one is the world as it is. You may subdivide it any way you wish, but no matter what you do, there is still a here and now and all of the events unfolding as we speak. Whether we can understand or agree upon the details of the objective reality of this instant makes no particular difference to my thesis.

Second is the world of dreams. The one across the dream bridge. The one of our imaginations. The place where all Utopias exist and prosper. The place where perfection is possible and things just work themselves out according to great visions.

Third and last is the world of becoming. It is the first world of tomorrow or the day after that or the century after that. It is one which will one day be an objective reality on which philosophers will debate.

I find all too many persons live entirely within one world. There are those who are so grounded in reality of the first world they cannot envision change and are continuously surprised, shocked and caught mentally flat footed by it.

There are those who live totally in the second world. They are the ideologues, the ultra religious, the dreamers without a tie down. They firmly believe the first world can be made over to exactly fit their dream and everyone can be made to see the 'rightness' of their way.

There are some small numbers who live much in the third world, or at least attempt to do so. They believe the world as it is moves deterministically into the world of the future following a linear or at least predictable track.

I have problems with all three ways of living. The first worlders may be solidly grounded, but they just react to events. Change will overwhelm them because they are unprepared for it. If you were an Eqyptian of 2000 BC, you could afford the stability assumption. As a citizen of the 21st Century AD the luxury of stasis is unavailable to you.

Third worlders are a little bit better. They at least can deal with linear change. While subconsciously stasis-minded, at least they do understand tomorrow will be somewhat different and that difference will grow from the current instant of objective reality.

The second worlders have glorious visions about worlds which are fundamentally different from what the first or third worlders see. They envisage a new world and believe it can be brought into existence if they can just convince enough people to join them. But the purity of dreams slips away as more people join in; the edges fuzz out, the concepts drift as the rhetoric inevitably mutates in the face of inconvenient facts.

One must take all three worlds into consideration. There is a real today and we must be ready to deal with it. There will be a real tomorrow that grows out of the unique decisions, creativity, actions and beliefs of 3 billion or more human beings - not to mention the odd curveball tossed by nature. Hurricanes, great earthquakes and giant tsunami's happen regularly. Really big events happen rarely and randomly but do happen: Yellowstone Park caldera could go up tomorrow and wipe out half of the USA; an unseen asteroid could send us back to day one; the Sun could burp a small flare and sterilize half the globe...

That is where the need for the World of Dreams comes in. We do not have to accept tomorrow will flow entirely out of the way things are. If one has a goal and enough people behind it one can change the course of history. If you could compute it you might have changed the way a butterfly waggled its wings in 1850 and decided the outcome of the 2004 US election. If you have a few thousands or tens of thousands of dreamers today, you can strongly influence the objective world of 2010.

Note I say 'influence'. This is where the pure dreamer falls flat. Because they have only a weak tie with reality they will begin with belief in an exact 2010. As a few years pass and reality diverges from the dream path, they will become increasingly desperate in their attempts to force the first world back onto the path to their second world. No matter how desperate, no matter how violent or how draconian their approach, when 2010 arrives it will not match their 'solipsist' dream.

The wise man knows you can never make the world over exactly as you want. You can only foresee directions and do your best to make the outcomes better. At each moment you have to recognize where you really are and start anew. You have to accept what is all the while you are trying to change what is becoming.

Most important of all, you have to stand back and take pleasure in each real moment of time. Those moments are the only ones you truly have.

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Candida Moss, writing in the Spectator, suggests that 'presumed consent' ought to apply for donating organs. On the basis that my comments my not appear in the magazine, here's what I wrote:

Presumed consent is not consent. If it were, then minors or people suffering from dementia might not enjoy the protection from sexual assault that they do at present. Sexual predators could no doubt claim "presumed consent" for their crimes.

There is a difference between medical expedience and morality. There can be no doubt that there would be enormous medical benefits from performing vivisection on human beings, instead of on animals: dosages, differences in metabolic rates etc. would be far easier to calculate.

Rightly, we abhor this and consider controvertial using the results of Nazi experiments on Jews, because it can be considered the partial condoning of horrific actions.

Is it Candida Moss's wish that the state (probably at EU level) ought to nationalize our bodies and redistribute organs according to need? At least Gordon Brown only wants my money.

I might add that the issue of designer babies giving their own consent to being used as experimental animals is another current topic. It seems pretty sick to me.

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As Mayday approaches and with it the traditional harbingers of summer, such as the sight of a freshly dug paving brick in flight, with its comet's tail of dirt particles, tracing an arc towards a McDonalds plate glass window or the contents of a looted Baby Gap whirling in the breeze, blue bibs and striped sleepsuits hanging off street lights, my thoughts turn to that strange creature who has emerged from winter hibernation, the anti-globalisation "anarchist". This creature represents a conundrum: While he professes to favour anarchy, he is more likely than not to owe his current indolent lifestyle to a most un-anarchical social welfare system. How to reconcile this contradiction?

The first thing I'd like to say is that I am not anarcho-libertarian. I do understand the arguments, I just remain unpersuaded. But my intention here is not to provide a rebuttal of anarcho-libertarianism, rather to compare it with the "anarchism" more prominent in the popular imagination, that of a Mayday protester. If you take such an anarchist at his word and grant that he will be happy to forego the benefits of a redistributive welfare state once his utopia arrives, where does his purported philosophy differ from an anarcho-libertarian or anarcho-capitalist?

It occurs to me that the principal difference lies in the respective attitudes towards private property. The anarcho-capitalist respects private property, his own and others. The "anarchist" considers all property to be theft and asserts a right to expropriate such property as he needs or wants from others. As a welfare state needs a state to sustain itself, the anarchist presumably imagines that the "needy", in lieu of state handouts, simply steal what they "need" from others. Of course if you are one of those "others" you may not be so keen on this happening. As there would be no state police force, the task of defending property devolves to the individual who may contract it out to private security services. Thus the anarchy favoured by the "anarchist" turns out strikingly similar to that proposed by anarcho-capitalists. Is this really what he wants?

I suggest that what the "anarchist" really wants is short term anarchy. An afternoon or so of mayhem, "for kicks", and then a return to an un-anarchical world where the welfare state remains to inadvertently subsidise his "alternative" lifestyle.

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In May I am heading off to Las Vegas, where I am speaking at FreedomFest, the year's big libertarian event. Booking tickets today, and looking at lots of pictures of casinos, I was reminded of an article the Liberty Club published a couple of years ago about gambling, money and morals. The author, Conyers Davis, writes:

As I fought my way through the throngs of gamblers in Atlantic City, I could understand why Martin Luther reiterated the phrase that the love of money is 'the root of all evil'. Never in my life have I seen people treat money in so desperate a manner. Gambling on unknown odds, hoping to exponentially increase their wealth as if by magic. It quickly became obvious that the gamblers in Atlantic City do not love or respect money, despite their obvious desire to have more of it. Indeed, they have fallen into a trap that allows it to dictate life's terms to them. These gamblers see money as the answer to all their problems, yet cannot escape the fact that it has become the bane of their existence. Surely, money represents more than this greed of the gamblers. Despite the fallacies that these people attribute to power of money, a positive alternative does exist. Money is one of the greatest physical tools that man has produced and should be openly regarded as such.

As a libertarian, I obviously believe that gambling should be legal. Is it moral? Is there perhaps a difference, morally, between gambling for fun and gambling because of an addiction? Discuss.

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I lunched today with our Great Leader Perry, and one of the things he mentioned was how he doesn't care for ploughing through the collected works of the Great Philosophers (something to do with preferring simply to find out "the truth"), and prefers instead to read … and I can't remember the exact phrase he used, but the one I use in such circumstances is 'Bluffers Guide'. I share Perry's tastes in this matter. However, like him, I do want to know approximately what these people did say.

I was thus particularly pleased to encounter this posting, by Friedrich Blowhard. It is number three in a series of postings he has done about Friedrich Nietzsche. (Something tells me that there may not be many more in this series of potted guides.) But since Friedrich B starts Nietzsche posting number three with a brief summary of postings number one and two, I reckon that means we can skip postings one and two and just read three.

There is a definite air of challenge in what Friedrich B says to the likes of us, especially in these paragraphs:

But by his example in putting forward the Over-man as the 'meaning of the earth' (whether you agree with him or find this ludicrous) Nietzsche makes it clear how intellectually flaccid it is to argue for or against, say, a social policy on the basis of abstractions like 'liberty,' 'justice,' and 'fairness.' I have nothing against such concepts, but clearly they are pretty vague and toothless in the absence of an explicit goal or a stated purpose. I mean, who really thinks they are here on earth to pursue perfect liberty, perfect justice or perfect fairness as ends in themselves? Aren’t liberty, justice and fairness valuable only as means to some end? But can we really be surprised that the average American ends up living a life of ‘mindless consumerism’ when he or she can’t state a social goal more profound than ‘eliminating injustice’?

But I share Nietzsche’s skepticism about how long an era that remains agnostic about any higher or supreme goal can stave off the hunger pangs of meaning. As evidence of this, I would point to the rise of movements like sociobiology, and perhaps the aesthetic theories like those of Christopher Alexander. Although Sociobiology, for example, is too shy to come right out and admit that it nurtures such an ur-goal in its bosom, I think it is clearly implied: that we should live so as to maximize the odds that our descendants will survive and thrive. And since our biological 'nature' is the only possible basis for profound human 'meaning,' we must come to terms with it, if only in order to survive long enough to accomplish our goal.

These philosophies seem to me to the first signs of what I would term the emergence of post-nihilistic 'meaning,' but I doubt they will be the last. I look forward to seeing others arise as well. Let me announce my formula: Nihilism is dead.

Heh. Nice little joke that. But after that laugh dies away, I am left with the definite feeling that I am being got at.

My problem is that I think that the Nietzsche described by Friedrich (Blowhard), who identifies the twentieth century as the time when God died and the God gap got filled by a succession of philosophical/political catastrophes, is pretty much correct. However, I am also part of the God is Dead tendency myself. In the words of Michael Caine in The Last Valley (a movie which, it so happens, Perry and I share a taste for): "There is no God! It's a legend!" My sentiments exactly. And if you combine that with "You can't get an ought from an is!", you get that pretty much all 'meanings' you get nowadays are actually meaningless, other than the ones I make for myself.

Okay, well that's something for you all to think about. If your tastes are more in the direction of cool gadgets, Perry also allowed me to take a photograph of this.

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Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco, 2001

"Wittgenstein's reputation among twentieth-century thinkers is ... unsurpassed. ... A poll of professional philosophers in 1998 put him fifth in a list of those who had made the most important contributions to the subject, after Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche and ahead of Hume and Descartes (p. 231)." Yet there is nothing in this book that is comprehensible to the layman about Wittgenstein's philosophy, or even, I have to say, much of an attempt to make it so. His eminence and influence and his credibility to other philosophers we have to take on trust.

On the other hand, Popper - the antagonist to Wittgenstein's protagonist - has two well-known and accepted achievements to his credit, his book The Open Society and Its Enemies and his "falsifiability" theory on the structure of scientific hypotheses (though I have often wondered if "vulnerability" would not be a better term). But in Britain and America, Popper is slowly being dropped from University syllabuses; his name is fading, if not yet forgotten ... a penalty of success rather than the price of failure (p. 230)." Or perhaps, being transferred from the useless category of philosopher to that of scientist? Far from turning his office there into a shrine, the LSE has had it converted into a lavatory.

The allusion in the title is, of course, to the famous incident with the poker on Friday, 25th October, 1946 about which none of the supposedly acute seekers after truth present could agree. This was the only time the two philosophers actually met, though both came from Vienna, both were of Jewish descent (though neither of religion), and both had to leave Austria when the Nazis took over. As far as I can make out, the dispute was whether philosophy, as a discipline, could or should deal with real "problems" (Popper) or merely with "puzzles" (Wittgenstein), say with language expressions. The meeting was of a discussion group at Cambridge University, called the Moral Science Club (MSC), of which Wittgenstein was actually the Chairman. He was, however, usually overbearing and difficult, tending to hog the discussions, often leaving meetings half-way through - something Popper probably didn't know.

Popper had been invited to give a paper and Wittgenstein interrupted and shouted his disagreement, making his point brandishing the poker that lay by the moribund fire, laying it down when Russell told him to, and then leaving. Smoothing matters down, someone asked Popper for an example of a moral principle. "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers," was the reply, provoking a laugh and, I imagine, relaxing the tension. Popper later claimed that Wittgenstein was still present when he made this retort, but the general agreement is that he had gone, one witness even accusing Popper of lying. The poker itself disappeared.

The book, however, is much more than an account or investigation of this episode. Tracing the lives of both personalities, both of them combative and obsessive, the authors also fill in the background they grew up in - the increasingly anti-semitic Vienna of the post-WWI war decades, despite the efforts of those of Jewish ancestry to assimilate, including many who discarded their religion and became Christians. Wittgenstein's was an extremely rich family (though his grandfather had adopted the name of his aristocratic employer, to whom he was not related) but he divested himself of his own share of its wealth. He had served with distinction in the Austrian Army in WWI, volunteering for dangerous posts, being decorated several times and during it writing his seminal work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He ended the war in an Italian POW camp. On the other hand Popper, some thirteen years younger, came from a bourgeois but impoverished family. He had difficulty in escaping from Austria; with perhaps some exaggeration he claimed that taking a Chair in New Zealand left free for another (Waismann) an opening to a temporary lectureship at Cambridge (p. 221). His "war effort", he said, was writing The Open Society (p. 71), though he tried, unsuccessfuly, to join the armed forces as well. "Popper's impact on academic life [in the University of Canterbury, New Zealand] was greater than that of any other person, before or since," judged that institution; he acted as a kind of intellectual champagne after the dry depression years (p. 172)."

Wittgenstein died in 1951, Popper in 1994. The authors do not try to give much information on the later work of either, though there is a joint chronology (pp. 245-242). They do seem, in my view, to be somewhat biased against Popper, if only because he's left more evidence against himself; presumably also they cannot help but be influenced by the poll of philosophers given above (and in which, presumably Popper comes nowhere). Neither men come across as particularly pleasant, let alone lovable, though Popper seems to have kept friends as well as making enemies, while the impression is given that Wittgenstein despised everyone - no list of friends is given for him, though mention is made of disciples and acolytes who imitated his mannerisms. Although Popper died only six or seven years before the book was written and published, there is no indication that either author ever interviewed or even met him. It is also a little disappointing that no mention is made of any relationship between him and other thinkers on the right, such as Bauer and Hayek, who, in contrast with both Popper and Wittgenstein, was noted for his courtesy towards opponents. Perhaps these don't qualify as philosophers. Isaiah Berlin is mentioned, but once only to have his philosophical pretentions pulverised by Wittgenstein (p. 24), and twice in passing.

A minor but irritating typographical blemish is the close resemblance between 3 and 5.

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An interesting post by A.E.Brain, an Aussie blogger, on contrasts between style and substance when it comes to governments:

The most reviled form of Government in recent times has been National Socialism. With Good Reason. The two most famous - or infamous - National Socialist parties have been the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - National Socialist German Workers' Party) AKA "Nazi" party, and the ANSP (Arab National Socialist Party) AKA "Ba'ath" Party.

But... a bad form of Government executed by Good People is better than a good form of Government executed by Bad People. therefore present for you a contrast in styles, of two "National Socialist" movements, though one of them didn't call itself that. Judge for yourself.

 

I do agree with A.E.Brain that there are similarities in the ways that states, regardless of their ideology, usurp a prominent place in the social interactions. It is the desire for total politicisation of the civil society that makes Communism and Nazism such intimate ideological bed-fellows. Practically too, there is not much difference between a concentration camp and a gulag, except the fact that many more millions died in gulags. As a commenter in this thread put it:

The commie shoots 'em in the head,
The facist, in the skull.
Their ideological differences
For victims, rather null.

The US posters skillfully juxtaposed with their Nazi 'counterparts' use identical imagery and the similarities in style are meant to be sinister. But it should not really come as a surprise, since propaganda toolbox was not as 'diverse' in those days and both Nazis and Communists would have used and perfected the 'marketing' techniques of the day. The more subtle reminder is the pervasive hijacking by the state of the 'positive' collective sentiments that are transformed into a collectivist norm imposed by force.

A.E.Brain concludes:

What's important is the matters of Substance, like the very real differences that existed between the Franklin&Eleanor team and Adolf.

Absolutely. There is only one small fallacy in his argument. Propaganda does not equal style, at least not in any meaningful sense. So although National Recovery Administration (NRA) was no doubt bureaucratic and authoritarian in its nature, I cannot see the implementation of its policies being even vaguely reminescent of the ways of Nazi or Communist institutions. In the end, precisely because of its authoritarian substance (and style), the NRA did not last long enough to even fully implement its policies.

What the posters demonstrate is that States have instinctive tendencies to take over the society whether by force or ideology or a threat of external/internal enemy. Toxic ideologies will turn the state into an instrument of terror. Credible or fabricated external/internal threats will enable the state to expand its powers and effective use of force will make the state a frightening tool in the hands of those who wield it.

The difference is not just what those who are in power believe but also what kind of society they face. Both Communism and Nazism have taken over the societies where the rights of individual were not paramount. It is when individual is no longer valued as the corner-stone of the society and his freedoms protected from collectivist impositions, the state is unrestrained in its natural course.

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Over at the Adam Smith Institute's Weblog, Madsen Pirie says:

There is another view which says that politics matters less these days. When the UK government provided houses and jobs for many of us, and ran the electricity, gas, oil and phone companies, together with steel, coal, ships and cars, it mattered who was in charge. With less coming from government and more from ourselves and the private sector, it is not as important. People tend to vote heavily in high tax countries such as Denmark, and less so in low tax countries such as the USA.

In other words, if politics (i.e. the scramble for the favour of the majority) becomes less important, voting goes down.

Many libertarians, notably Perry de Havilland of this blog, believe that the same idea in reverse is true - that by not voting we can reduce the politicisation of our lives. 'Let them wither away to irrelevance,' he says. I'm not so sure. It might be one of those nasty paradoxes such as the one whereby safety breeds lack of vigilance, which makes us less safe.

Perhaps the first to stop voting are those who have achieved relative independence, leaving disproportionate influence to those still at the trough. Have any studies been done on this? And does anyone know what percentage of those eligible to vote in, say, 1900 when the State was very weak, actually did so?

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I am glad to see that the august publishing house, the Oxford University Press, has recently published a monster-length encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment. For those who can stump up more than three hundred pounds, this would be a most impressive addition to any library. From David Hume to Diderot, the book is a treasure trove of facts and articles about the folk who helped shape our world and mostly for the better.

Let's hope university libraries stock this book as essential item since it is bound to be beyond the financial means of most undergraduates. And perhaps the OEP could make a gesture of sending a few copies to the nascent academies I trust will be springing up in post-Saddam Iraq.

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Here in the US, we have recently been diverted by the spectacle of a state Supreme Court judge defying the orders of a federal court in order to violate the Constitution. The state judge refused to move a gigantic copy of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, where its prominent placement and enormous size at least arguably amounted to "the [state] establishment of religion" in violation of the US Constitution. Now, this is just the sort of topic that seems to exert an irresistible compulsion on people to wander off into the tall grass of irrelevance, so I will leave aside the legalistic arguments about whether the placement of the Ten Commandments actually violated the First Amendment to the US Consitution as applied to the states via the doctrine of incorporation (and I beg the commenters to do likewise).

While there are subcultures in the US that could undoubtedly recite all ten, I daresay most US citizens could not, although they are widely held in a kind of iconic way to represent the root of law and morality. Indeed, the claim that they are an historical source of US law was made in the campaign to keep them in the courthouse. Christopher Hitchens takes a look at what the Commandments actually say, and concludes that they don't have much to do with morality or modern law at all.

The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one . . . .

There has never yet been any society, Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed, just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one has long been confusingly rendered "thou shalt not kill," leave us none the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or taxation and confiscation to be theft.

In much the same way, few if any courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience, I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it's a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot). To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife "or anything that is his" might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand "don't even think about it" is absurd and totalitarian . . . .

It just goes to show that it never hurts to periodically reexamine first principles. With a little luck, I can probably get through the week without violating more than six (and no, it is none of your business which six).

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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?

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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.

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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.

And gradually, in my case as a socialist, our previous convictions get worn down, and argued logically away, until we are left with only one position we can consider valid. That of classical liberalism. It is the only system of human societal living which can bear close examination, and which has stood the test of time, and argument. All the rest crumble under close scrutiny, into emotion, and unreason. That is why we are classical liberals. Not because we are evil, not because we are stupid, and not because we eat babies on toast, for breakfast.

We've been forced into this position by the logic of argument, the same way physics scientists were forced into believing in a spherical Earth, then a Sun at the centre of the solar system, then Newtonian physics, and then Einsteinian physics. Einstein's views will eventually be successfully challenged, and falsified, one day, and when they are, you'll witness many physicists kicking and screaming, trying to retain them. But at first, one genius will hold against them, and then every other rationalist will let them go too, to adopt the new position.

This is similar to the process many of us classical liberals go through. Some of us may not have even wanted to be here, from where we started out, I know I didn't, but if you try to rid yourself of irrationality, and emotion, when debating any topic, you end up as a classical liberal. Or you shout down your opponents, because the truth hurts too much.

If there were a better position, we would move to it. One may come along. And it is only classical liberalism that will allow it to develop, if it does. Yet another argument as to why it is the superior belief system!

But couldn't every political position claim at least some of that above? No. Because classical liberalism is a position usually arrived at, after long reflection, whereas most other political leanings are often chosen first, and then the arguments are sought to bolster it afterwards, to make it fit. For instance, I may choose to be a socialist at 14, because some other 14 year-old, richer than me, steals the girl I was after, because he can afford to take her to the cinema, and I can't. Therefore I choose to be a socialist, because of emotional reasoning based on the childish politics of envy. From then on, I apply my logical mind to locating all of the written arguments as to why it is good to be a socialist, and why it is bad to be anything else. I am a self-seeking missile, which is only capable of hitting one target; that of true socialism.

Whatever happens, whatever I read, I always remain a socialist. I am unprepared to change, possibly even become incapable of changing, because my poor teenage brain has been fixed at a young age, by an initial powerful emotion. So even if God himself comes knocking on my door, and tells me socialism is bunk, I will still cling to it. Even though it caused the Soviet Union to fail, even though the Gulag was caused by it, even though Cambodia was caused by it, even though Britain's long decline after the war was caused by it, even though Africa's modern poverty is caused by it, even though New Labour is failing because of it, whatever it is, we cannot shake it. The socialist disease of unreasoning emotion has us in its claws.

Whatever the evidence, we stick with socialism; we must make it work, it cannot be impossible, we will create a perfect socialist Utopia. The needle is stuck. It clicks forever in the same groove. And we only listen to, or accept, arguments, which leave us either comfortably where we are, or which convince us, even more, that we are already correct. So we may tend to become more, and more, extreme, in our socialism, until reason is left a long way behind, as a dim, distant memory of happy childhood. Some even go so far, of course, that they'll blow themselves up in the collectivist cause, or murder others, or both - for the good of society! Try telling that to the relatives of the murdered victims.

So socialists get stuck, whereas classical liberals are both prepared to change their views, in the face of compelling evidence, and remain capable of changing their views. Until, after a long process of Popperian experimentation with ideas, they come to a general stable resting point, of Popperian objectivity, which cannot be shaken by further past arguments. Though if new arguments come along, to challenge the cosiness of classical liberalism, they are welcomed, and if accepted after debate, the position shifts again. For instance, Murray N. Rothbard found some of the monetary theories of his life-long guru, Ludwig von Mises, needed tightening up. He did this work, and the Austrian School moved with him, too, agreeing to the changes.

Even on our own pages, we are sometimes shaken by those collectivists, with freer minds, who push our weaker ideas to the edge. Which is good, because it helps to point out which of our ideas should be strengthened.

Hence, although virtually every classical liberal does hold certain basic principles to be self-evident (people have a right to life, and a right to property, for instance), good-natured argument and debate is allowed, indeed encouraged, between each person. For example, the debates between the Rothbardians, the Hayekians, the Popperians, and so on. In fact, it is almost impossible to classify any single group of classical liberals, into a strictly defined sect (except perhaps one hard-core one, described below). Because almost every single individual holds a different position, having arrived at this individual position independently, by themselves, helped with mixtures of the acknowledged Greats (Von Mises, Hayek etc), who helped guide them to their unique position.

However, most collectivists can easily get lumped together. In fact, if some lone collectivist is in a "lump", and in some conversation says something not held by the rest to be "in line with the party", they are quickly persuaded to change their views accordingly. Indeed they are often happy to do so, to get back on the correct path to a socialist nirvana; though without the unnecessary process of their own thought, on the matter, getting in the way. So all Socialist Workers hold one party line, all Trotskyite Militants hold one party line, and all New Labour spin-doctors hold one party line.

I remember a particular meeting, at Leeds University, many years ago, when I was flirting with Trotskyism. The group I was interested in was trying to subvert the Labour Students organisation. It didn't matter what the issue was, or what we thought ourselves, we were encouraged to vote whichever way the leader of this Trotskyite cadre voted, on whatever issue, as it came up. I remember, to my eternal shame, being proud to do this bidding. This is the nature of collectivism. Blind obedience.

(This willingness to follow the herd is the major thing, which sometimes disturbs me about the Randites, and which, to me, brings them too close to collectivism. You sometimes hear whispers of debates among them, where they don't know the "Party" line, because Rand didn't write anything down about a particular topic. It is only when some Randite scholar discovers some obscure thing she might have said, in a sketchy meeting back in 1961, to clarify her position on this particular issue, that they seem to be able to relax. Because they have found out, from the one true God Rand, what to think!)

Getting back to socialism, these "party lines" are therefore always imposed upon the mind of the party-based collectivist. This is in addition to their original emotional impulse to adopt a position close to this particular line, in the first place, when their minds were still capable of change. So let's say 100 individuals decide, usually in emotional teenage, to become Trotskyites. They start reading Trotsky, and come to a point where they hold 100 different views on what Trotsky wanted. At this point, they're almost like classical liberals, in that they have independently arrived at an individual position (though a position they deliberately sought to reach, before they'd researched any evidence.) They then get serious, and decide to join a group, to further their noble aims.

Let's say there are four groups, the Trotskyite Workers, the Trotskyite Activists, the Trotskyite Spartacists, and the Trotskyite Militants, and that 25 of our original 100 socialists all join each group. It will not take very long, before each group of 25 will hold identical views to all of the others in their particular group, regardless of what slightly diverse position they came from, and regardless of how different their individual minds are. It is at this point that they become true mindless slaves to socialism, and it becomes almost impossible, for most of them, for the rest of their lives, to shake off this mind-numbing infliction. They have, in effect, stopped thinking. And it is only if they can start thinking again, that they can be saved.

And it is sites such as our very own Samizdata.net, which can kick-start this re-thinking process. We draw them on, in their hope that they can shout us down, but we hold such a strong personal positions, based upon evidence long worked over, that we can sometimes, very occasionally, shake off these layers of socialist control, which hold these once-thinking minds trapped within. From under this deep layer of unreasoning fury, aggression, and emotion, a thinking person can sometime re-emerge. Or, at least, we can rattle them sufficiently so that their own awoken thinking processes can do this job for them, internally. They may then even challenge their group-held positions, cause socialist schism within their group, or even break away from it entirely, floating back gradually towards the light of reason.

And if they can maintain this attitude of thinking, for a decent period of time, something they abandoned at, say, the age of 14, we can even save them entirely. We can bring them fully over to the light side, where they may even learn to hold an individual position of classical liberalism, given luck, fair weather, and a good wind in their sails!

But isn't collectivism strong? Isn't strength good? Isn't it right for 25 people to fight exactly the same battle, from exactly the same hymn sheet, with exactly one voice? No. It isn't. I prefer disunity.

Some see this disunited individualism within us, the classical liberals, as a weakness. I see it as our major strength. Because what it means, is that we're the only group who actually think for ourselves. And given the choice of being in another group, where we sheep are told what to think from some book, or from the inspirations of some prophet, I know which group I'd rather be in. Which is why I'm in it!

Free your mind. Vote classical liberalism!

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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.

1. 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.)

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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

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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.

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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.

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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.

At the present level of economic development, the population is not going to consume enormous amounts of electricity even if it is available, but infrastructure needs to be built. By rich world standards, the cost of building the small scale electric generators needed is not enormous, and there is actually enough potential aid from developed countries to pay for a lot of what is needed. The Austrians in particular seem keen on helping what they see as another mountain nation. (Even if this aid was not there, the climbing fees charged by the government to westerners visiting the Himalayas would be ample anyway). Once electrical infrastructure is installed, there is in any event little difficulty in getting even very poor people to pay for it, as the improvements in lifestyle due to it are enormous.

Some areas of the Himalayas have received electricity in this way. If you visit Khumjung or the nearby market town of Namche Bazar on the main route to Everest, electrical infrastructure has been installed, people are relieved of a lot of backbreaking work, lifestyles are much better, and there is a massive program of reforestation underway nearby. (People are willing to put a lot of effort into this if their other problems are solved. If on the other hand the choice is chopping down more trees or freezing to death or being unable to cook their food, people generally choose to chop down trees).

However, there has been difficulty extending electricity outside a few areas. The reason for this is not financial , but bureacratic. Nepal is ruled by a disfunctional government based in the Kathmandu valley. When climbers pay climbing fees, the money goes to the government, and is never seen in the mountains that the climbers are paying to visit. When Austrian agencies set up programs to install hydro-electric plants in the mountains, the government in Kathmandu wants a cut of any money spent, and erects enormous bureacratic obstacles to the Austrians actually doing anything, however much they want to and the people they are actually trying to help want them to do it. Here is a situation where the installation of some relatively simple technology improves people's lives dramatically, and solves environmental problems to boot. But the inertia of the country's government and the country's bureacracy just gets in the way. The government does nothing for the people of the mountains, but it retards their development quite a lot.

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I'm 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?

Libertarians are generally a pretty law-abiding bunch and, to the extent that they are not, certainly don't boast or casually recount their crimes against property in fora such as Samizdata. But admission of "intellectual property theft" somehow has no stigma. No doubt I will be answered by a clamour of Samizdatistas saying that they disapprove, but I know that many openly engage in filesharing. I am also firmly convinced that much of the support for Napster Inc. and their ilk (the "potential legal uses" defense) is in large part a rationalisation - believed to be true, insofar as it goes, but far from the main motivation for such voluble outrage in their defense.

So what does libertarian antipathy to these developments, and support for filesharing, tell us? I've been meaning to write about this for some time, so let's test a few hypotheses.

1. That when it touches their lives directly, Libertarian principles go out the window and short-term self-interest reigns.

   Not likely. DVDs, Napster/Kazaa/Gnutella and Microsoft Passport may affect libertarians directly. But so do schools, NHS services, and the London underground, as well as passive smoking, GM foods, and the family of asylum seekers moving into the B&B next door. This hypothesis doesn't give a convincing explanation of why libertarians side with the "standardised concerned citizen" on intellectual property, while opposing the stereotype on so many other issues of equal personal relevence.

2. Libertarians are luddites. Any change is seen as threatening.

   This hypothesis is laughable on the face of it. Most libertarians aren't Extropians, but most do have broad sympathy with a watered-down version of that philosophy, while smiling benignly on its kookier limits. If a news story says that scientists have grown a replacement human arm in a jar, a potato that cures hemorrhoids, or built a car that drives itself, you can expect Samizdata to be full of rejoicing, not laden with predictions of woe.

   It is true that libertarians really do believe that government only ever makes things worse, and this is reflected in their instinctive reaction to just about any government initiative: any new policy is greeted with deep scepticism at best, even when it seems obvious to a neutral observer that had incumbent policy been the new one, and the change been in the other direction, libertarians would be roundly decrying the destruction of freedom and western civilisation.

   But the entertainment and software industries are not government bodies, they're the "big business" libertarians usually revel in defending. Out goes all pretense that libertarians are just indulging their knee-jerk anti-government emotions. Something else is going on.

3. Libertarians don't like "rental" licenses, only full ownership. A variant on (2) above, but applied to specifically to business model instead of product.

   This hypothesis doesn't explain why so many support or excuse Napster/Kazaa/Gnutella, which undermine sales of "proper" DVDs and software programs and are a major impetus behind short-life business models such as "pay-per-view" and software rental (OK, the rental payments don't address filesharing specifically, but the new business model is designed to support constant updates and required real-time online access to the vendor's infrastructure, which is a response to filesharing. Trust me on this).

   Anyway, if libertarians are happy to rent their homes, their cars and their space in the traffic jam, why would they object to paying each time they want to see "Sigorney Weaver kills yet more Aliens" or play Doom XXVII?

   Something else is going on.

4. Libertarians want something for nothing.

   This hypothesis alleges that libertarians expect some other agency (the industry, government etc) to continue to provide entertainment goods without charge to the consumer. For the response read Chapter 1 in The Standard Manual of Libertarian Dogma, or check the index under TANSTAAFL.
   

So if none of the obvious hypotheses are convincing, perhaps there really is something different about what is happening in the entertainment and software industries that libertarians have intuited, but not yet fully described.

My theory is this:

Libertarians, in common with most other ordinary people, have finally decided that they don't believe in Intellectual Property Rights.

There's been an ongoing discussion about this in the more theoretical reaches of the libertarian world for many years now, and there have been adherents to both camps. But I'm not really talking about a reasoned defence: I'm talking about an emotional commitment.

Libertarians have an emotional commitment to property rights. They don't just believe in them as a reasoned, pragmatic response to certain identified problems, they - WE - feel in our gut that property is good. It is morally right that you should own stuff, and that when you own it you should be be able to do with it as you choose. If someone tries to interfere with your stuff or take it for themselves then it is not just morally justified for you to defend it, but we'll all have a sneaking admiration for you if you take the opportunity to convince the malefactor of the error of his ways while you're about it.

All the rest - the empirical knowledge of the chaos of collectivism and the horrors of big-C Communism, the deep economic analysis of the price mechanism and the profit motive, the easily digestible stories of the "invisible hand" and the division of labour, and the highly indigestible praxeology of the Austrians and the intellectually respectable homegrown IEA -- all of that, it just goes to support and reinforce and justify an emotional commitment to the concept pf Property, which we know, in our gut, to be right anyway.

Intellectual Property is qualitatively different to physical property (either land or chattels). If I take of your land or chattels then, to the extent that I have more, you have less.

True property is a zero-sum game - not in value terms (when I have 2 cabbages, I have one more than I will eat before it goes mouldy, and exchanging my second cabbage for your second chicken probably creates new value), but certainly so in terms of my possessions: if you take my second cabbage, I cannot give it to my neighbour for his dinner. Free exchange adds to the sum of human happiness, but it doesn't break the Law of the Conservation of Energy. Misunderstanding what is and what is not a zero-sum gain when dealing in property (getting it precisely the wrong way around) is at the root of many failings of socialist economics.

Intellectual Property works the other way around. If I upload my copy of The Matrix to you, it doesn't stop me then giving it to my neighbour, and his neighbour, and his neighbour, ad infinitum. Warner Bros doesn't lose anything it can sell, at least not in the same way that they do if I pinch the DVD from the counter at Woolworths.

But Warner Bros does lose something. It loses a portion of the value of its product, which lies entirely in the extent to which it has a monopoly on supply. For all the arguments (frankly, excuses) about how "I wouldn't buy it anyway" and "I buy more music when I can check if I like it by downloading the MP3 first", in terms of Kant's Categorical Imperative Warner Bros gets screwed: if everyone did the download, Warner Bros wouldn't earn a dime.

Of course, the value of blacksmiths' businesses went down when Henry Ford got going, so a loss in value to Warner Bros isn't in itself necessarily a reason not to do it, indeed to suppose it does rather begs the question. But we shouldn't pretend that they won't lose out.

So, to recap, with traditional property you might create value by moving it from one person to another, but you will reduce their possessions; but with intellectual property you will reduce the rights-holder's value and you will not reduce anyone's possessions.

There's a whole bunch of consequentialist complications with intellectual property industries (personally, I don't see any real threat to making music, which any artist can now record and publish from his bedsit - but how a future movie blockbuster could possibly be made without IP protection is beyond me) - but let's pass by all that and assume, for the sake of argument, that either human ingenuity will conquor all, or that the IP industries will go the way of Gothic cathedrals, or both, or (most likely) that something entirely unforeseeable would happen.

We're still part-way through explaining why libertarians, of all people, seem to show no respect for Intellectual Property rights. Let's look at what these rights actually are, which are under attack, how, and why:

• Trademarks
• the law of Confidence and Trade Secrets
• "moral rights"
• Patents
• Design rights
• Copyright

• Trademarks

  Nobody much seems to have a big problem with these. They may seem just as "artificial" as any other IP right, but neither libertarians nor others are complaining that it is an infringment on my free speech that I cannot describe my own cocktail of fizzy sugars as "Coke".

  Trademarks are an extension of the common law of passing off (the rule that you must not sell a thing by misrepresenting its provenence) which is in itself an expansion and clarification of rules against fraudulent dealing. Trademarks are an administrative convenience, which remove some of the defences to the common law of passing off, and create a irrebuttable presumption of guilt in certain circumstances, all with the intention of levelling the playing field in favour of the single target under attack from a swarm of fly-by-night imitators.

  The only serious complaints about trademarks I have heard recently have been complaints about Internet domain names being taken from protestors, who want to use a web site address containing the trademark to bad-mouth the company or its product (www.acmecorporationsucks.com). This is a marginal complaint about application, and does not constitute a serious attack on the principle of trademarks.

  
  

• The law of confidence and Trade Secrets

  Another potential restraint upon "free speech", this is your right to prevent your doctor telling the tabloids about your syphilis. It is also an employer's right to expect his employee to get on with keep quiet while they fix a problem instead of scaring all the customers away. It is also his right to stop his employee revealing the Colonel's Secret Recipe.

  Confidence is an extension of the law of contract: if I contract with you to keep schtum you should, and if we enter into a contractual relationship and I don't explicitly enjoin your silence, then that expectation can sometimes be implied along with the expectation that you won't spit in the soup you just served me.

  The law of confidence extends this to certain cases where the law doesn't recognise an actual contract. Doctors, when providing free treatment, are a good case in point.

  Various whistleblower laws have been nibbling at the edges of the application of this principle, while new protections for "privacy" have been extending it slightly in other cases. Fundamentally, though, it is well founded and not under attack on principle.

  
  

• Moral rights

  This is the right of an artist not to have his work altered after he's sold it in a way that makes him look a fool or an incompetant. Alternatively, it's the right of the artist to have his name taken off the work if it is so altered.

  Moral rights are not recognised in some legal jurisdictions, and in some where they are they can be contracted out of, which rather defeats the purpose.

  To the extent that they infringe on freedom of contract libertarian doctrine is opposed to moral rights. On the other hand, for a film studio to claim that Billy Writer was responsible for the absurd, sentimental mish-mash that made it through the production process is, in extremis, a serious slur on his reputation. And we do have libel laws for that sort of thing, so why not a particular legal right tailored for the particular situation but based on the same principle?

  However moral rights' patchy implementation, even lesser enforcement, and the fact that they only really impinge on real artists and authors (and their employers and direct customers) means this is not a topic of widespread interest.

  
  

• Patents

  Strictly speaking a patent is a precise description of how to build an object - and the monopoly right to build that exact widget, for a limited term.

  The American Founding Fathers said that this was for the advancement of science. Most people like the idea that James Dyson, back-bedroom inventor of colorful and powerful vacuum-cleaners, gets a decent crack at getting rich rather than losing out to copycat products from incumbent manufacturers like Hoover. Libertarians are well known for supporting drug patents in the face of criticisms that they price drugs out of the affordable range of patients who die when they don't receive them. To quote the decidedly un-libertarian TV series The West Wing:

  Toby: The pills cost them 4 cents a unit to make. Josh: You know that's not true. The second pill cost them 4 cents. The first pill cost them $400 million.

  The concept of patents is being criticised at the moment in three main areas: genome research and the like, software, and patents for business models.

  Genome research is alleged to be a discovery, not an invention: it is argued that not only does this mean it is not a "machine" legally capable of being patented, but also that while the suction-pump on a Dyson may be nifty there are other ways of getting dust of the carpet; whereas there is only one true set of bases in the 103rd gene on the 22nd chromosome, and "you can't patent a fact".

  Patents for software algorithms are attacked on the same basis. While software programs, like Microsoft Word, are protected by copyright, it is currently possible in some cases to obtain a patent from the US patent office for any conceivable implementation of a particular computation formula (algorithm). For example, compression algorithms: if you apply a particular set of calculations to a set of data, it is possible to compress that data so that it takes less disk space. GIF is an image format that describes an image on the screen containing 480,000 pixels each with any of 16million colours, for a total of 11,520,000 bits (or about 1.4Mb) compressed into a file of maybe 2,048,000 bits (or a much more faster download of 250kb). GIF depends on the LZW compression mechanism, which is an algorithm patented by Unisys. It doesn't matter in what software language you rewrite that formula, Unisys are still asking for their patent license fees. Needless to say, some people say "Algorithm = formula = maths = truth = unpatentable".

  Perhaps the most surprising patents have been for business models. Ebay has tried patenting online auctions, Amazon has patented its "One-Click" ordering, various different people have been awarded patents which, as reported to a laymen by a lay journalist, appear to grant them exclusive rights to any business mechanism characterised by my computer buying something from your computer without either of us being aware of the specific transaction. Keep checking the papers; this story will run and run.

• Design rights

  Design rights are simply a cross between trademarks and patents: they protect the individuality of the look of your product. The distinctive shape of the Coca-Cola bottle, the green and gold of anything from Harrods (even if you call yourself Harold's), the beaming furriness of a stuffed Bugs Bunny in any size or deportment, these things are all protected by design rights. And most everybody reckons it's OK for the law to protect this, because only Coca-cola is Coke (tm).

• Copyright

  Despite much aggro in the world of patents, Copyright is where the action is.

  Rights holders are extending the utility of their rights both through technology and through aggressively-lobbied legislation. Copyright term protection has increased from 18 years to 30 years to 50 years to 70 years. The software industry has avoided the most product liability and fitness for purpose regulation by imposing "contractual license terms" on customers that depend, for their applicability, on the notion that you must copy software to your PC in order to run it, and so once you've bought the program disc you still need to contract for a license. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and the similar European Copyright Directive, you can't even alter the protected item for your own use, e.g. making a DVD designed for Region 1 (USA) play in Region 2 (UK). And, of course, the music and movie and software industries are all trying to move to a pay-per use model, thereby capturing repeat payments from all those who don't need yet another new wordprocessor for their personal letters and like the Beatles, not Ms Dynamite.

  
  Rights holder organisations have Congress, Parliament, the Council of Ministers, WIPO and the 9th Circuit (on both sides of the Atlantic) in the palm of their hand. Nonetheless, the RIAA, MPAA, SPA, MCPS, BSA and the rest of the alphabet soup are all running scared. How can this be?

  It's because while companies that get even moderately successful at abusing other companies' intellectual property rights make a nice easy target for a lawsuit, it is much, much harder to get gazillions of consumers to behave themselves if they don't want to. Most of all, it's because such mis-behaviour became so easy when everyone got on the Internet. Films are still very slow and painful to share; software is much easier, and has a longer payoff for the consumer who downloads it; but music - ah, music.

  Time was, you'd go to the music store and browse through stacks of vinyl; top 10 singles sold millions and album covers were works of art in their own right. Now, people start playing one track, think of another, find it, and can have it downloaded and ready to play while the first one's still annoying the neighbours. The only thing stopping the Internet using public doing this freely is their personal belief that this is morally wrong. And, quite simply, people just don't think that.

  Filesharing programs like Napster and Kazaa depend upon people giving away their music etc., while downloading new stuff from others. They get no direct benefit from doing so, indeed it might even slow down their own downloads, and some programs provide a simple switch to stop sharing your own stuff. The system appears to be open to an enormous free-rider problem, but it doesn't actually seem to suffer at all.

  When upstanding citizens do something represensible normally they feel a twinge of guilt. If you park on a double-yellow line you don't shop with a clear conscience, and it's not just the fear of traffic wardens. Saving extreme anarchists, there's a slight twinge when you lie on your tax return, however swiftly it is assuaged by the "free beer" bought with the little less of your hard-earned that's going to Uncle Sam for division between starving indigents and middle-class holders of bureaucratic sinecures. Should an allegedly respectable citizen walk out of a shop 'accidentally' wearing the dress she tried on in the fitting room, she certainly won't chat idly about her 'bargain' with her friends. Chances are, the guilt and shame will prevent the dress ever being worn at all.

  Filesharing is different. If you watch a file upload complete, you don't feel a twinge of guilt that EMI have just lost a sale that was rightfully theirs to some unknown music-lover in Korea. You feel a sense of pride, of satisfaction that your taste in Country-Soul-Rap-Swing is not entirely without company, and you feel a sense of duty-discharged; you have done your bit to give back to the community that so kindly donated your 60Gb of wall-shaking, neighbour-deafening, environmental-health-officer taunting Mike Oldfield tracks.
  

Which brings me back to the Libertarians. Libertarians, though I love you dearly, can be some of the most self-righteous, morally censorious, dogmatic people I've ever come across. I know one who spent 10 months of unemployment steadfastly refusing to claim State benefits while her life savings drained away, and no attempt to persuade her that it was just a refund on her taxes shook her determination not to compromise her beliefs. I myself have some of these tendencies, and admit to being a little too quick to sneer at those who profess that taxation is theft from their government-grant-funded lecture halls. Yet card-carrying libertarians, myself included, just don't connect online filesharing with that basic, raw, emotional commitment to the sanctity of property.

Nor is it just in "official" libertaria, like Samizdata. Check out Slashdot, one of the oldest blogs: produced by and for computer programmers and sysadmins, Slashdot participants have very strong libertarian tendencies. "In Soviet Russia..." has moved from comment title, to cliche, to joke, to the entire comment. A major topic category, "Your Rights Online" has its own editor promoting stories on Privacy - Echelon, Crypotography regulation, and Censorship, along with other well-worn Samizdata favourites. Read one of the daily stories on the RIAA/MPAA attacks on filesharing, and you'll see many vigourous (well, loud) defenses of the right to share music, and the right to bear arms in case anyone tries to stop you. Sure, there's a lot of talk about potentially legal uses of such software. There are those who claim they only use it for legal purposes - and a few even sound credible. The overall message remains clear: "I share music and stuff. I don't apologise. Any organisation trying to prevent this is bad, and should be stopped".

Mainstream media such as youth, culture and entertainment publications all recognise that filesharing is a fact of life and, with a bare nod to the sensibilities of their advertisers and their lawyers, accept it as guilt-free. Taken as a whole, we're looking at the most widespread civil disobedience since the introduction of speed limits.

In conclusion, I believe that most people, and most libertarians, have decided in their hearts that they don't believe in Intellectual Property Rights. They are willing to accept them as a pragmatic implementation of an aspect of the moral position also protected by the law of contract (confidence), of fraudulent passing off (trademarks and design rights), and of libel (moral rights). They like the idea of the madcap inventor having some protection from Big Bad Manufacturer, and are scared that no patents equals no R&D; equally, people dislike corporate behemoth carving out large and incomprehensible monopolies, especially over things that sound like true necessities or simple facts of nature. But since patents really only feature in the world of business there is little that most individuals care or can do about them anyway. However copyright doesn't enjoy any of these defenses; there are no analogies with basic common law, and if ordinary citizens won't wear it then Copyright is doomed. To believe and choose to respect Copyright, personally, deeply, emotionally, you have to truly believe that an idea can indeed be Property.

It is in the realm of Copyright where individuals, consumers, citizens are making their moral choice heard loud and clear. We can't even be bothered to be mad as hell; we're just not going to take it any more.

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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?

Ayn Rand noted that one effective way to destroy a concept was to dilute its meaning so that the power of what was being described was lost in a mess of all sorts of other concepts and notions. The advantage of this approach is how easily it could be done - it is really no more than a case of using the left's language to describe concepts that extend far beyond leftist ideals. If one can neutralise their advantage and steal the term for one's own argument, fine. If one can associate the term with something especially bad, fine.

Take, for example, the statist use of the word 'community' to refer to groups of people with nought beyond some trivial quality in common.

"Opponents of racial preferences are lining up against the wishes of the black community."

or

"The campaign to scrap hate crimes laws has met with howls of protests from the gay community."

As a way of subverting individual rights, this is ingenius, because it both allows one to invent a community with rights of its own, and to define that community's interests in terms of its self-appointed representatives.

Discussed on the individual level, racial preferences for college admissions are almost indefensible, with every beneficiary gaining at the expense of someone more qualified, for no better reason than his skin colour. Merit, hard work and achievement are all devalued in the name of racial dogma. But once such issues are discussed at the level of a black community, which has 'historical baggage' and is 'owed a debt', the argument changes completely. People aren't seen any more as individuals with different talents and abilities, but racial proxies, whose fates can and should be determined at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen in the name of fairness and equality between communities, rather than individuals. Every argument for an advance in group rights - and so a diminution in individual rights - usually follows such reasoning.

Or take the way ideas the left opposes are gradually being turned from legitimate political beliefs into phobias. It is as if they really think people can only disagree with them because they are mentally ill. If you oppose joining a federal European superstate, you are a europhobe or a xenophobe. If you disagree with the aims of the gay lobby, you are a homophobe. If you don't believe that in every case "Islam means peace" you are an Islamophobe, and so on. So before the debate has even started, one then is faced with the challenge of avoiding these labels. "I'm not an Islamophobe, but I do think Islamic governments are seriously deficient in their respect for basic rights and democracy." This is not a very effective response, because it means acknowledging right away that your own view is edging towards a psychological condition - but you are just managing to avoid falling off the edge. Yet again, the left can trump good sense simply with unsophisticated vocabulary.

So how can these terms be diluted to lose such meanings? Simply by constant repetition in other contexts and association with other things. You can write about a 'paedophile community' or a 'mugging community'. You can describe terrorism as a 'lifestyle choice'. A whole range of new phobias can be agreed on to describe everything from support for equality of outcome to opposition to tax cuts. Instead of allowing 'choice' to remain a euphemism for abortion, we should describe ourselves as pro-choice on every issue that the left prefers a state-mandated option, whether the debate is on educational vouchers or gun ownership.

If bloggers, those who read and post on blogs and those who debate on news and politics forums, use this language every time such issues arise, at first it will all seem like a silly and perhaps offensive private joke. But if enough people do it, it will before long become second nature, and it could slowly be relied on to enter the political lexicon every bit as much as 'Fisking' and 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys' have already. The use of 'community' to disguise a removal of individual rights, or the monopoly the left claims for its support for choice, would slowly lose their effect. And if every political position is sneeringly described as a phobia, then soon such language will have no effect in making the freedom-lover appear crazy.

What we really need is an agreed glossary of words and terms to introduce into internet debates and everyday blogging. Let's all give some thought to the best language to use to dilute the left's vocabulary of emotional blackmail and Stalinist psychoanalysis. Anti-statists of the world unite, we have nothing to lose by giving it a shot, but we have a political lexicon to win.

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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

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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.

But this is not to say that Christianity has been abandoned because another observable phenomenon is the rapid spread of evangelical Christianity in Britain and which is proving increasingly popular among those who find comfort in the return to 'ecstatic' worship as opposed to the stiff-upper lip formality of the established Church of England.

In fact, it seems that the Church of England has been the big loser here. Having failed to respond adequately to the spiritual pain induced by the carnage of World War I it went on to make a 'faustian pact' with scientific progress, conceding what it viewed as the outdated and unsupportable 'myths' of Christian faith in favour of the sedate promotion of general 'niceness' which, over time, has transmuted into the amplification of left-wing 'social justice mummery.

The result is that Church has been deserted by its flock who started to look elsewhere in the search for spiritual fulfilment. And the search is prompted not by a failure of scientific rationalism but, conversely, by its triumph. The science, maths and industry which has brought us so much benefit has also unleashed atomic bombs, daisy cutters and biological weapons on the world. Everyone is aware of these dark, dangerous forces abroad in the world which they cannot control and yet could obliterate them. By a supreme twist of irony an inhabitant of the modern-day Britain may have the benefit of satellite digital TV, a microwave oven and and the internet yet still feel as awestruck and vulnerable as any medieval peasant.

And so they go looking for comfort, for succour, for a story that they can use to navigate the world and science for all its breathtaking wonder still doesn't seem to do it for them. Science can dismiss the irrational but appears to be unable to defeat the irrational. But spirituality and faith is so compelling for so many precisely because it lies beyond proof and therefore satisfies the need for mystery.

One of the historians interviewed for the programme (I did not make a note of his name) speculated that an adaptive darwinian mechanism may be at work here and I find that explanation to be quite persuasive. Perhaps, as a species, we use faith as a tool to avoid a lapse into mass depression brought on by feelings of insignificance and futility. So conjuring Gods and monsters we banish from our lives the stark probability that we are nothing more than a strip of exotic chemicals which catalyse a brief flicker of consciousness and then nothing. It seems, for the sake of our species, we need to believe that there is more to it than that.

As for me, I have no faith and I practice no religion and that is because I have come to terms with fact that some belief may be of comfort but that doesn't make it true. I do not believe that the 'Old Gods' are roaming the earth but I also realise that I am unlikely to be able to dissuade those who do.

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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.

The great Scottish philosopher was very fond of upsetting the ideas of more ordinary minds.

For example it has been disputed for thousands of years whether people choose to do certain things (i.e. have 'free will' - are moral agents responsible for their actions), or whether the actions of human beings (perhaps 'human shaped objects' would be a better way of describing them), are predetermined and no more chosen than a clock chooses to tick (i.e. that humans are not agents - are not responsible for their actions).

David Hume cut through this dispute. Moral responsibility does not require agency ('free will'), moral responsibility and determinism are quite 'compatible'.

For the last two centuries most educated people have nodded their heads at Hume's great wisdom - ah yes moral responsibility and determinism quite compatible.

I doubt whether Hume actually believed this nonsense (for nonsense it is), but I am sure it pleased him to come out with it. He could laugh (behind his hand) at the people who supported his position and he could also laugh at the people who opposed it - as they got upset by his attack on such unimportant things as human reason. Hume won both ways.

Hume also played with the notion that there is no I (just a stream of sensations with no being experiencing the sensations), and the notion that a thinking being (the being that he had just played with the notion of the nonexistence of) could not prove the existence of the exterior world.

[Both of these games being played to show the weakness of human reason - and to gain amusement both from people supporting him and people opposing him]

But Hume could also play political games. Hume was as annoyed by people getting puffed up with pride and unexamined self importance at their political freedom as he was with people getting filled with pride at the idea of themselves as moral agents.

There was little real difference between 'British liberty' and the 'tyranny' of various nations overseas. All government was, in the end, based on 'opinion'. If the people really wanted to they could overthrow any tyrant - so if they did not his rule must be basically acceptable to them. So the British had nothing really to be so full of pride about and the 'euthanasia of the British Constitution' would not be that terrible.

Hume seemed to be proved right when (a couple of decades after the death of David Hume) Louis XVI of France (the nation the British associated with tyrannical rule) was laid low by the revolution.

Poor Louis, he was a victim of another of David Hume's games. Hume argued (in his History of England) that Charles I had died because he had used violence - no war, no execution (the view of unenlightened people was, and is, that Charles died because he lost the war).

David Hume's History of England was one of the books Louis XVI liked best. So he offered no real resistance to his enemies - and found out that your enemies can kill you even if you do not resist (indeed this makes things rather less difficult for them).

Certainly if a ruler never fights - never bothers to organise his forces (army, secret police and so on) then rebels can do what they like.

However, someone who wants to be a tyrant is unlikely be much like Louis XVI.

When we talk about nations such as Iraq we are dealing with real tyrants - not kindly men who read David Hume's ideas as serious doctrines (rather than as clever attacks on the vanity of human beings).

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The following stands out among the many comments to my previous post on Iraq.

How much is an Iraqi life worth? To me personally, about zero. Here's why:
- I have no friends in Iraq (and doubt I ever will by the end of this post)
- No Iraqi signs my paycheck
- No Iraqi makes anything special that I can't buy anywhere else (oil?)
- Iraq is on the other side of the globe

"But they're being killed" you say. So are many other people. What about the North Koreans? What about the people who will effectively be killed because they cannot afford medical care due to this war? What about third world countries where parents have more children than they can afford to feed? Please make an objective, logical argument why the life of an Iraqi rates above (not just equal to) these others.

There are two issues in this comment. One is the old boring question "Why Iraqis and not North Koreans, or Chinese, or any other suffering people?" We have repeated countless times here on Samizdata.net that we do not consider lives of Iraqis above other individuals suffering elsewhere. Yes, I do want the world to be rid of North Korean, Chinese, Iranian and any other statist murderers. By yesterday, if you please. It's long overdue and given that my taxes also pay for the army (or what's left of it), I have no hesitation in supporting its use in cases when this becomes part of a government strategy.

The fact that the US and UK government policies are temporarily aligned with my view of the world does not redeem them in my eyes or make them somehow better entities. My objections to the state and my hatred of anything statist is not negated by my support of Bush and Blair in their determination to give Saddam his due. Samizdata's eye will watch over the American attempts to establish democracy in Iraq with the same vigilance as ever and hurry to point out any misdemeanour by the inherently collectivist and kleptocratic state.

More importantly, the comment touches on an issue far greater than Iraq and the international pandemonium associated with it. Why do most of us hate to see people suffer? Why should we be moved by a sight of a child corpse, a woman tortured or a man shot? Why does the world remain shocked, moved and outraged by the suffering endured by those in Nazi concentration camps and Stalinist gulags (although unfortunately too few pictures serve to fuel the horror over those)?

I do not count myself among the emotionally incontinent (public expressions of grief) and the emotionally unsatiated (reality TV). My outrage comes from the belief that an individual is more important than a lofty idealistic concept, more so since every 'utopia' has built its edifice on a large pile of human bodies. The more idealistic and utopian the vision, the longer it takes to defeat it and the larger the 'mountain of skulls' left behind.

 

Savonarola's Florence, Robespierre's France, Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Kim Jong-il's North Korea, Saddam's Iraq, note that there is an individual's name attached to every totalitarian nightmare. We are forced to 'care' about them, whether we like it or not. If we are lucky, we have not been affected directly, but they certainly had an impact on the way we live today, simply as a result of the international politics shaped by their existence.

We see people suffer on TV everyday. They suffer even more off screen. Should we mobilise the world every time this happens until there is no more pain? Sounds like utopia to me. However, there is a difference between suffering caused by natural disasters and pain inflicted on an individual by another. The first inspires compassion and assistance, the second moral outrage and a corresponding action to remove the oppression.

"But why should I care about someone else being oppressed when I am busy building my life to my specifications and according to my abilities?" I hear you say. You attach certain importance to yourself, which is natural and right. An individual Iraqi, North Korean, Chinese would feel the same, if not for some homicidal megalomaniac ruling his country. Self-awareness is the most fundamental expression of a human being as an individual and one of the greatest sources of evil is the ability of one human being to deny this to another.

Again, why should 'we', individuals living in another country, 'other side of the globe', do anything about it? The first part of the comment reads to me exactly as this (in)famous quote:

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing...[and elsewhere]...My answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia and if we had said that, we feel that we should have received no support from the people of this country...

These words were uttered by Neville Chamberlain before one of the most appalling episodes in modern European history. His 'sensible' attitude did f**k-all to prevent or restrain what followed. These words were said after:

The rights of humanitarian intervention on behalf of the rights of man, trampled upon by a state in a manner shocking the sense of mankind, has long been considered to form part of the recognized law of nations. If murder, rapine, and robbery are indictable under the ordinary municipal laws of our countries, shall those who differ from the common criminal only by the extent and systematic nature of their offenses escape accusation?

These crimes [crimes against humanity] were committed both before and after Nazi Germany had launched her series of aggressions. They were committed within Germany and in foreign countries as well. Although separated in time and space, these crimes had, of course, an inter-relationship which resulted from their having a common source in Nazi ideology; for we shall show that within Germany the conspirators had made hatred and destruction of the Jews an official philosophy and a public duty, that they had preached the concept of the master race with its corollary of slavery for others, that they had denied and destroyed the dignity and the rights of the individual human being. They had organized force, brutality, and terror into instruments of political power and had made them commonplaces of daily existence. We propose to prove that they had placed the concentration camp and a vast apparatus of force behind their racial and political myths, their laws and polices.

As every German Cabinet minister or high official knew, behind the laws and decrees in the Reichsgesetzblatt was not the agreement of the people or their representatives but the terror of the concentration camps and the police state. The conspirators had preached that war was a noble activity and that force was the appropriate means of resolving international differences; and having mobilized all aspects of German life for war, they plunged Germany and the world into war.

We say this system of hatred, savagery, and denial of individual rights, which the conspirators erected into a philosophy of government within Germany or into what we may call the Nazi constitution, followed the Nazi armies as they swept over Europe. For the Jews of the occupied countries suffered the same fate as the Jews of Germany, and foreign laborers became the serfs of the "master race," and they were deported and enslaved by the million. Many of the deported and enslaved laborers joined the victims of the concentration camps, where they were literally worked to death in the course of the Nazi program of extermination through work. We propose to show that this Nazi combination of the assembly line, the torture chamber, and the executioner's rack in a single institution has a horrible repugnance to the twentieth century mind.

You might have guessed that these are extracts from the prosecuting speeches at Nuremberg Trials. (The first paragraph was from one made by Sir Hartley Shawcross, Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom. The rest is from the speech of Mr. Thomas J. Dodd, Executive Trial Counsel for the United States.) I resorted to this historical example of tyranny, oppression, human misery caused by the Nazi state, ideology, bureaucracy and most of all individual Nazis, because it is recent, well documented and its horrors rarely denied. The consensus is that defeat of Germany had been necessary not only for strategic and military reasons but also from a human standpoint. The aftermath may have spawned international laws and institutions that deserve severe criticism in their present form. Nevertheless I would argue that the moral force of their underlying principles remains unabated.

It is an impossible and ungrateful task to try provide irrefutable grounds to those who do not already believe in the intrinsic need to defend individual freedom whenever it is seriously threatened. To insist on such a moral imperative for everyone would be foolish. Instead I insist on consistency. If you believe that it was important to fight the likes of Nazi Germany and its ideology not only as self-defense measure, then extend that reasoning to Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran. To argue that the US, UK and other governments are not worthy to be moved by such considerations and that their actions are driven by non-humanitarian, self-interested or utilitarian objectives is a non-starter. The countries fighting in the WWII were far from perfect. The Allied armies were commanded by the same kind of statists as the ones that live off our taxes and erode our civil liberties. Indeed, after the war, they all got back to doing so with greater vigor. But that is the stuff of daily posts on Samizdata.net.

If freedom of individual matters sufficiently to oppose the US and UK state, it matters more in Iraq and anywhere where such expression is suppressed and our 'libertarian' truths ring hollow, if we deny them to anyone but ourselves.

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"Jesus Christ was so little minded to give specific guidance as to politics that he didn't even deal with the issue of slavery. And these twits think that it's heresy to be in favour of the free market or against the UN."

Funny how that same topic has kept coming up recently. Just the other day, I posted the words above on my own blog. Now Christopher Pellerito's comments in the post just below this one, and the Howie Carr and Joe Bob Briggs articles he quotes, have got me thinking.

"What would Jesus do?" when first coined might have been a good phrase to prompt Christians to examine their own lives in the light of Christ's example. There is nothing logically wrong with that principle, employed with due modesty. Christians Socialists, Conservatives and Libertarians all may sincerely believe that their political beliefs either flow from their religion or are at least compatible with it. (Not all of them can be right, but that's one for another post.)

However the WWJD phrase has now become little more than a hook for anybody to make any claim they like about divine backing for their side in whatever temporary and local kerfuffle happens to be in the paper this week, secure in the knowledge that the authority they quote is scarcely going to gainsay them.

At least, not yet.

By definition every Christian believes that he or she will one day stand before Jesus. I can't help wondering whether some Christians would be so presumptuous about putting words into Jesus' mouth if the prospect of that final, consummate meeting were truly real to them.

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Boston-area conservative talk show host and syndicated columnist Howie Carr (presumably unrelated to our own David Carr) wrote a column accusing Bernard Cardinal Law, archbishop of the beleaguered Archdiocese of Boston, of hypocrisy. In Carr's words:

Until the recent unraveling of his corrupt empire, the sanctimonious prince of the church annually went to Beacon Hill to bang his tin cup on the State House steps, demanding ever more generous handouts for the shiftless, the indigent and the promiscuous. But now that it's finally Law's turn to buy a round, he's tipping over tables in his unseemly rush to get out of the room. Money for sodomized altar boys? Don't push me, pal. Ever hear of Chapter 11?

Now, this is a little off the mark. After all, bankruptcy laws don't exist to help debtors weasel out of their obligations; they exist to provide for orderly payment of creditors. The point of filing under Chapter 11 isn't to avoid paying out potentially massive liabilities; it is to ensure that you will be able to continue operating -- and paying your creditors -- under a worst-case scenario.

(For a quick refresher on US bankruptcy law, here is a nice little e-pamphlet from the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

But Mr. Carr may have tapped into a richer vein of thought here. (Even a blind squirrel finds a few acorns.) This is what I want to know: when did morality stop being about how you conduct your own affairs, and turn into a referendum on your political views?

Maybe there's some of that in Rand -- who wrote at great length about the moral superiority of capitalism and individualism, etc., and who remained a stern moralist in this arena despite a personal life marked by marital infidelity and other peccadilloes. But I think that Carr is correct in hanging this one largely on the liberal left.

Carr skewers the limousine liberals, the likes of John Kerry and the Clintons who support an expansive welfare state but who are notoriously averse to supporting actual charities. For an excellent discussion of the motivations of these types, turn to Allan Levite's Guilt, Blame and Politics (Stanyan Press, 1998.)

How many Democratic senators riffed on this theme during Clinton's impeachment saga: "Clinton may have done (fill in misdeed here) but he is a man of resolute morality because he supports (fill in liberal cause here)"? Even morality has become politicized; how can Clinton be immoral if he believes in the Brady Bill, and midnight basketball and such?

Taking this concept to absurd heights, White House correspondent Nina Burleigh famously remarked:

"I would be happy to [pleasure him] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs."

Carr is also correct in observing Cardinal Law's long history of political advocacy. In 1986, the US Catholic Bishops published a treatise called Economic Justice for All, which might just as easily have been written by a bunch of staffers in Sen. Kennedy's office. Bernard Law played a key role in the creation of that document, and frequently conducted "forums" on issues such as universal health care and housing. Cardinal Law also testified before Congress on social justice issues and the "just war" doctrine during the war against Afghanistan. All of that sort of rings hollow now, doesn't it?

People ask me frequently how I can be a Catholic and a Libertarian at the same time, as if those two are mutually exclusive. Invariably, I will play on the theme of morality being defined by one's actions and not by one's political ideology. Jesus of Nazareth lived under one of the most corrupt and brutal governments the world has known; but he cast his harshest words not on the Roman justice system but rather on the self-righteous leaders of the Jewish church.

As UPI columnist Joe Bob Briggs put it, in a recent column mocking the "what would Jesus drive" campaign:

In other words, [Jesus] wasn't a political sort of guy. He was the Son of God. If you really wanna ask what he would do, I hope you're prepared to go the whole nine yards. After all, the most important thing he did ... was die.

Well, the first time I see a "WWJVF" (Who Would Jesus Vote For) bumper sticker, that's when I'll know that morality is dead.

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One of the responses to Part II of Libertarians and war, namely the comment by Billy Beck, has puzzled me sufficiently to turn what would otherwise be a rather lengthy comment into another blog. (Part III on Strategic considerations is yet to come...)

"What you have in this is an exemplary waypoint on a logical trail which is consistently extensible toward *validly* including anyone whose productive effort in any way contributes to the efficacy of this so-called "monopoly on the use of force". And if the logic is consistently extended, then what it means is that your distinction of "civilians" (in your final paragraph, above) is no better than Al-Qaeda's was on September 11, Adriana."

It took me a while to work out how anyone could think that the logic of my argument extents to blurring the distinction between combatants and civilians. I came to the conclusion that it must be due to misunderstanding of two other concepts - "monopoly on the use of force" and "collective responsibility" - that I want to clarify.

It is precisely because the state has the monopoly on the use of force that a civilian population can never be a legitimate target. The monopoly on force means that the state usurps the use of force and prevents individuals from using it against external enemies (foreign armies and terrorists) and in many cases, e.g. such as in the UK, internal enemies (criminals). For my part, I resent the state's exclusive use of force, especially regarding the latter category.

"We were going after military targets. No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter. Of course there is a pretty thin veneer in Japan, but the veneer is still there. It was their system of dispersal of industry... I'll never forget Yokohama. That was what impressed me: drill presses. There they were, like a forest of scorched trees and stumps, growing up throughout that residential area. Flimsy construction all gone...everything burned down, or up, and drill presses standing like skeletons."

The quote above (from Memoirs of Gen. Curtis LeMay) does distinguish between military and civilian installations and makes it explicit that "the veneer was pretty thin in Japan". It also admits that civilian casualties occurred but the point is specifically made that they were aiming at military targets, never at civilians. Although civilian casualties were to be expected given the [Japanese] system of dispersal of industry...

It is for circumstances like these the double effect doctrine has something to say. The bad effect may be known beforehand but provided it is not the intention and the act itself is required for bringing about the needed good effect, the doctrine of double effect allows waging a war despite foreseeble civilian casualties. I do not see how it opens up a possibility that civilians may ever be a legitimate target just because they have their role in the functioning of the military machine. It is self-evident and blindingly obvious that an army cannot be raised, funded and function without civilian economy and infrastructure supporting it but I fail to see how it can provide a justification for turning civilians into a military target!

It is Al-Qaeda, as Billy Beck correctly points out, and not me, that cannot make the distinction between the effect civilians may have on the efficacy of the military and the moral grounds for turning them into a target for their 'war'. As I argue in my posting on just war, it is equivalent to taking defenceless hostages - civilians disarmed by the state are targeted by the enemies of that state for its actions.

Here the notion of collective responsibility becomes relevant as it is often implicit in statements of those who hold an individual responsible for actions carried out by a collective entity, such as state merely on the basis of that individual's membership of such entity. Would you say that all German civilians were equally and personally responsible for the Holocaust and WWII, by virtue of being citizens of the German state or even by virtue of working in one of the armaments factories trying to make a living?! Surely, there is a distinction to be made and one does not need a rigorous moral code to see that.

The doctrines of just war and double effect mean to provide guidance in situations where our moral instincts are torn between two 'unacceptable' options. They are meant to provide a moral template, not definitive or comforting answers, for those who want to know right from wrong even in the most difficult situations. They still leave plenty of room for formulation of policy and strategy...

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Part II of III

What would be the requirements of a libertarian just war? Libertarianism permits the killing of another if it is an act of reasonable self-defence. Nothing in libertarianism precludes the possibility of a collectively exercised right to self-defence. This has been accepted by most libertarians as one of the few valid functions of a 'night-watchman' state. As long as every individual in a society agreed to be defended by a state and the state acted against only those individuals who were actual aggressors, e.g. an invading army, on what grounds could a libertarian object?

Given that it is not practically possible to fulfil the above conditions, especially the first one, it seems to me that many of those who engage in the debate about war on Iraq for genuine and morally inspired reasons are trying to choose between two evils. Their side in the debate usually depends on which of the two evils seems more morally unacceptable to them. There are also those who find it impossible to choose, their instincts oscillating between the need for self-defence and protection, and fear of compromising their fundamental principles by condoning killing of innocent civilians. One of those is Chris Newman whose comment captures the agony of such moral choice.

The statement 'as long as harming innocents is not the objective, if a given use of force is justified then innocent bystanders are often just a regrettable consequence' is based on the acceptance of the doctrine of double effect. It is a useful rule, often used in moral dilemmas that can be summed up as "damned if you do, damned if you don't". An act with both good and bad effects is morally permissible if and only if the following conditions are all met:

1. The action itself is not forbidden by a moral rule.
2. Only the good effect is intended.
3. The bad effect is proportional to the good.
4. The bad effect is not a direct means to the good effect (e.g. bombing cities to demoralise a population and hence hasten a war’s end).
   And since Michael Walzer’s influential book Just and Unjust Wars (1971), in the context of war it is common to see added the following condition:
5. Actions are taken to minimise the foreseeable bad effects, even if this means accepting an increased risk to one’s own combatants (e.g. one’s own soldiers)

In modern warfare the principle of the double effect is frequently applicable. In waging a just war a nation may launch an air attack on an important military objective of the enemy even though a comparatively small number of non-combatants are killed. This evil effect can be compensated for by the great benefit gained through the destruction of the target. This would not be true if the number of non-combatants slain in the attack were out of proportion to the benefits gained, as is clear from the fourth condition. Furthermore, if the direct purpose of the attack were to kill a large number of non-combatants, so that the morale of the enemy would be broken down and they would sue for peace, the attack would be immoral because the third condition for the lawful use of the principle would not be fulfilled. It would be a case of the use of a bad means to obtain a good end.

Chris Newman takes a similar route but ends up with a different point and in the utilitarian camp:

"…our moral calculus has at least three variables: the importance of the objective, the efficacy of a given type of force in achieving that objective, and the cost in innocent lives of using that type of force. Presumably, for any given values of the first two variables, there will be a point at which the value of the third becomes too high, so that the action cannot be justified..."

There appears to be a conflict between a moral justification for waging a just war and a strategic aspect of it. But does exploiting the advantage of superior military capabilities amount to using incommensurate or disproportionate force? It doesn't because force is defined by effect on the enemy including the civilians, not by the amount of firepower. You can use superior fighting force and technology in order to shorten the war and ensure you destroy enemy fighting forces rather than civilians.

There are criteria for determining whether a war is conducted in a morally acceptable manner i.e. whether it is a just war. The exact number and nature of the conditions for just war varies from writer to writer although there is a great deal of overlap:

1. Just authority. Only the legitimate rulers of the state may declare war.
2. Just cause. In general, nation X may wage war on nation Y only if Y has done some injury either to X or to X's allies or friends. [It isn't clear whether Y having harmed Y's own people is also a just cause for X to wage war on it].
3. Right intentions. The intentions of the warriors taking part must be the achievement of peace and of the just cause - not revenge, the desire for plunder or the suffering or destruction of the people on the other side.
4. Proportionality. The anticipated good must not be outweighed by the bad likely to be caused along the way.
5. Probability of success. There must be a reasonable prospect that the war will succeed.
6. Last resort. Peaceful alternatives must all have been exhausted first.

1. Proportionality (again). Acts of war must not be out of proportion to the provocation or the needs of the situation.
2. Discrimination. No killing of innocent civilians or of non-combatants such as medics and camp followers.

"In fact, if we're talking about a country in which public opinion has any effect on control of the armed forces, one could logically conclude that it is legitimate to destroy the country's ability to make war through attacks directly on the civilian population that will destroy their will to make war. We thus reach the perverse result that, if you have a legitimate reason to be at war with a country, the more democratic it is the more justified you are in targeting civilians."

The crux of the argument lies in the understanding of democracy and the nature of the democratic state. If by democratic we mean an open and free society, then waging a war on another country would most certainly be an act of self-defence. This has to do more with my view of society rather than any implicit faith in democracy. I believe that a society, consisting of freely associating individuals, will not wage a war as an act of aggression, although it must be capable of effective self-defence. (For example, Nazi Germany was not democratic in the first sense, despite Hitler's legalistically 'democratic' ascent to power. In any case, by the time WWII was declared, Germany had long turned into a totalitarian and autocratic state).

If, however, democracy is taken to mean literally the rule of the people or the majority, then it is possible for a dictator to have sufficient popular support to engage in an act of aggression on behalf of that majority. This hardly merits the description of democracy in the classical liberal tradition – rule of the mob seems to be a more appropriate definition. The 'paradox' disappears.

The climax of Chris's argument ties the discussion back to the current affairs:

"Why can't they [Al-Qaeda] legitimately respond that since we practice the notion of popular sovereignty, we are all ultimately members of the command structure of the U.S. military and thus legitimate targets? Their ultimate "objective" isn't killing civilians per se—it's getting the U.S. to stop doing X, Y and Z, which they regard as acts of aggression. If this is not a legitimate position, why not exactly?… I'm groping toward a clearly articulable set of principles with which to establish beyond peradventure that we're not [morally equivalent to al-Qaeda]"

It is possible (and necessary) to have a set of principles that one can apply rigorously and objectively to one's actions as well as those of one's enemies, in order to make consistent moral judgements. The problem is that formulation, understanding and interpretation of such principles is rooted in the fundamental world-view of those who apply them. This is not moral relativism, but an epistemological one. It means that I could refute Al-Qaeda's logic of aggression by rejecting the notion of collective responsibility and so argue that civilians can not be in any sense 'members of the command structure of the U.S. military'. I could also say that targeting civilians is never justified. In western society the monopoly on force is owned by the state. Therefore, targeting civilians amounts to taking defenceless hostages, which is seen as morally unacceptable. But to argue so universally, the understanding of society and individual upon which such principles are based would have to be shared universally too. And as I understand it that is the battle…

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Libertarians differ about many things and one such area is whether so-called 'natural rights' exist or whether, to borrow the phrase of 18th century utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham, they are so much "nonsense on stilts". Just to be clear from the start, I think natural rights, where they spring from an understanding of human beings as creatures possessed of free will, who need freedom from coercion to thrive, make some sense. However, given the difficulties involved, natural rights for me must be strictly and narrowly applied otherwise the idea rapidly disintegrates.

Over the past 100 years or so, the natural rights doctrine has been progressively (sic) hijacked by collectivists of various stripes who have turned what is essentially a set of prohibitions against the initiation of force against persons and property into a series of claims, which require the use of extensive coercion for such 'rights' to be realised. As an example of how this use of 'rights' degrades an originally-useful concept, step forward the assemblage of clowns, brutes and hangers-on at the current Earth Summit in South Africa.

It ought to be obvious, but sadly is not, that providing something like the 'right' to healthcare begs the question of whether some person or persons have a corresponding duty to become doctors, nurses or hospital staff; does a 'right' to AIDS drugs mean people should be forced to become scientists and forced to invent such drugs and then supply them free of charge? Of course, put like that, the entire modern rights-talk collapses. But the contradictions of such talk are rarely remarked on. Sadly, questioning such 'rights' has become almost a taboo subject among the chattering classes.

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I hate sounding like a dried-up professor by insisting on going back to underlying concepts and definitions but in this case I will. One of the responses I received on my international 'morality play' was from Derk Lupinek and although he believes that we should attack Iraq and set up a democratic government, he didn't think that we have any "responsibility" toward the Iraqi people.

It was his understanding of rights that intrigued me sufficiently to comment on it:

Rights are nothing but wishful thinking without the power to enforce them. The power of enforcement requires an emotional commitment on the part of many individuals. Each individual agrees to help enforce the rights of others and, in return, each individual gains the right to protection under the group's power. The individual has this right because he contributes to the power that enforces the right. Individuals must contribute to the power that enforces rights or else they have no right to protection under that power. So, I think we can "call for freedom and progress for ourselves" and not feel obligated to kill ourselves helping other countries, especially when those people do not contribute to the preservation of our rights.

I detect a category fallacy in the above paragraph. The definition of a right as wishful thinking without the power to enforce it. So does it mean that where individual's rights are abused and often cannot be enforced, they do not exist? A right is not a right unless it is enforceable and/or enforced? Just because some people do not wash, should we deny the existence of soap on the grounds of its ineffectiveness with the unwashed?

Which leads me nicely to the various concepts of rights. There are actually three versions at play here. One is the natural rights theory, which assigns inalienable rights to an individual by his/her virtue of being a human being. I will not go into assumptions behind this one here as it is a well-worn and therefore lengthy topic, suffice to say it is the one I subscribe to. That is why I cannot agree with Derk Lupinek's subscription-based rights, whereby individual's rights are defined arbitrarily by and within groups of individuals, and protected by a sort of social contract enforced by mutual consent.

In my post on Western intervention in totalitarian regimes, however, I haven't used either concept of rights, natural or positivist. I was merely thinking of the individuals trapped in totalitarian regimes who never had a choice to enter in any such agreement about either definition or protection of their rights. It is that freedom of choice I feel we have some sort of moral obligation to help them obtain. Not because they contribute to the power that enforces the right or because we are somehow legally or otherwise bound to do so.

Let me put it another way. Try to explain to a child being beaten up by a bunch of thugs, that he has no right to protection since he has not contributed to the power that enforces that right. If you can manage it, you may be consistent but not very humane.

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Science is a volatile subject. Traditional science originated from observations of the physical, specific and the immediate. As it progressed to modern science, the turning point being the Newtonian framework for understanding the universe, its evolution to Einstein's theory of relativity and later quantum theory and computational science, it has increasingly concerned itself with abstract and often counter-intuitive concepts. In recent years a number of alternative scientific paradigms have sprung up and regardless of whether they end up being the next orthodoxy, they have already demolished some of the foundational theories in many scientific fields. Science, itself subject to evolution, pushes the Final Theory further as its horizons expand.

Religion is a stable and more or less fixed subject, certainly compared to science. It does make statements about physical reality and human affairs, but it does not concern itself with the temporary and the transient. I am therefore surprised that Brian can make such definite comparative statements about the two:

...the Book of Genesis makes claims about the origin of the earth and of its biological contents which, as was well understood in the late nineteenth century when these matters were first debated, are in total opposition to the theory of evolution. Either God was the maker of heaven and earth (as I was made to proclaim every Sunday morning when I recited the Creed at school) and men and beasts and plants and bugs, along the lines claimed in Genesis, or he was not.

You can't have it both ways. Only by completely overturning what Christianity has meant for the best part of two thousand years, as the Church of England seems now to be doing by turning Christianity from a religion into a political sect, can you possibly believe that there's no argument here.

I do not know whether you can have it both ways, but I am certainly not convinced by Brian's argument. It doesn't do to point out that one is 'an orthodox twentieth century boy' in one's scientific 'dogmatism' and then proceed making sweeping suggestions as to intellectual viability of religion as a whole. The underlying assumptions at work here seem to be: a) the religious texts can only be interpreted in the 19^th century fashion and b) the traditional understanding of evolution is correct and/or final. I shall not grace Brian's use of the Church of England's website with any assumptive force or category.

The book of Genesis, written many moons ago, does contain some very specific and visual claims about how the world came about. The interpretation Brian is familiar with would have been based on 18^th century 'deism', a rather mechanistic understanding of the world, gradually upgraded with the scientific knowledge as it progressed into 19^th century. It wasn't until 20^th century that several scientific disciplines have been shaken to their axioms but none of the tremors have yet been translated into a wider meta-contextual knowledge, quantum theory being a good case in point.

Brian says that 'creationism' is in total opposition to 'evolution'. Without getting bogged down in definitions, if creationism means that the world was created, word by word, according to the book of Genesis, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, then I agree with Brian. However, that neither confirms validity of evolution as currently understood nor confines Christianity to the dustbin of the unscientific and irrational.

Let's have a look at evolution. One of the foundations of the theory of evolution is natural selection. According to a modern paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. According to my favourite scientist and complexity theorist, Stephen Wolfram, you don't need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. He also discovered a mathematical error in Gould's argument and there are, in fact, only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world.

Organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms avaiable to them by the rules of cellular automata. [ed.note: Cellular automata are a set of self-reproducing mathematical rules.] Complexity is destiny - and Darwin becomes a footnote. A mollusk is essentially running a biological software programme.

Stephen Wolfram's discovery about the nature of the universe suggests that the complexity that we see in the natural world can originate from very simple rule(s). One of the implications of his work is that it creates a 'bleeding-edge' scientific theory that proposes that the entire universe - with its perplexing combination of good and evil, order and chaos, light and dark - could have been started by a First Mover using a dozen rules.

It is therefore possible that neither science nor religion are 'finished' with their understanding of the nature of reality. For science, new paradigms may change the way it views the universe(s). For religion, it may not be necessary to revise its texts as the 'creationist' interpretation becomes irrelevant in the light of new scientific knowledge. One thing is certain though, I have more sense than to start debating religion with a devout atheist and especially one whose atheism, in his more lucid (i.e. not anti-religious) moments, is entirely rational. I merely object to the very narrow interpretation of 'science' and 'religion', namely Christianity, used to make a rather glove-in-your-face point.

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Jack Heald poses some interesting questions to Brian's views on science and religion.

Brian Micklethwait is spot-on in his analysis of the conflict between the claims of orthodox Christianity and the claims of Darwinism. Any Christian Church and any Christian person that believes orthodox Christianity and Darwinism can peacefully co-exist is deluded.

But I wonder why someone who posts to a "critically rational" blog would claim to believe that "creationism is bunkum".

Is it because he is already a committed materialist and Darwinism is the only theory of origins which supports his beliefs? Is it because so many so-called "creationists" are such obvious idiots? Is it because the prevailing weight of public opinion is biased towards Darwinism? Is it because anyone who claims that creationism is a better scientific model is reviled as a bible-thumping fundamentalist, and he cannot bear to be lumped in with those folks?

Surely it's not because he has carefully weighed the evidence and decided Darwinism is a better model. I have yet to find anyone who, after carefully reviewing the data, concludes that the evidence supports the Darwinian model and contradicts the creationist model.

Are the implications of creationism a little scary? Certainly. But are scary implications any reason to avoid studying anything? Only for the uncritical and the irrational.

Jack Heald

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I just took part in a French online discussion about abortion, sale of human organs, genetic material etc. It occurs to me that a libertarian point view includes the following idea:

· The components for the manufacture of human beings are legitimately tradeble.

· The finished product is not.

What is the boundary?

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I cringe when Philosophers begin arguing Ethical Systems from First Principles. Codes of behavior built from argument based on mathematical rigour have a place in academia but are extremely dangerous when applied to the real world. People are not logical programs built from a rational base. They are a collection of hundreds of millions of years of gene based behavioral evolution and some thousands of years of mind based cultural evolution. Only the later of these is "perfectable". One who thinks otherwise carries the shadow of Gulags Yet To Come in their eyes.

More so than the practitioners of many disciplines I've delved into, philosophers seem to place Humanity on a high pedestal of Rationality. I don't. I see people as one more data point on a continuum of data points; a vector of traits which exist elsewhere but reach their highest expression (so far, and in our own biased eyes) in our species.

If you have decided by this point I am a follower of Richard Dawkins, then you are an astute observer and commendably well read. Dawkins changed our way of looking at evolution from one based on populations of individuals to one of populations of genes. Genes do not care about individuals (or anything else for that matter, so excuse my anthropomorphics). If a behavioral pattern kills 10% of a population but causes the other 90% to be fruitful and multiply, there will be more copies of the gene or genes (or memes if we are dealing with culture-based behavior) responsible for that behavior. Genes are the individuals which compete with each other and evolve. Not cells. Not tissues. Not wombats. Genes.

Altruism may be emphasized or de-emphasized by cultural traits and training but it can never be eliminated. It is a part of our hardwired animal program. Species with altruistic behavioral patterns will thrive at the expense of those which do not have them. It may be rather hard on an individual to throw themselves on a handgrenade or charge a machine gun nest, but by their action a larger number of the genes and memes expressed in them will survive and propagate than would otherwise have done so. It's purely a numbers game.

I chose altruism as an example because it is currently under discussion, but the point I wish to make is a much more encompassing one. Human beings are not empty general purpose computers to be programmed at will to whatever happens to be the Perfect Ethics of the day. They come with a very large baggage of hardwired behavioral preferences which will make a mockery of the Perfectionist's attempts to create the perfect "Your-favorite-ism" Man.

The attempt may be akin to bean-bag punching but this has never stopped Perfectionists from trying as we can see from Cambodia, Siberia, Dachau and Srbenica and Paris in the Ideological Centuries and the long line of religious pogroms stretching back into the mists of pre-history.

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Last week when I posted my response to an objectivist's objections to altruism, I knew that I was opening a can of worms. How did I know that? Because, like Brian, I am also put off by the vicious religiosity of so many Randian responses to any criticisms of their sacred texts (a few more mentions and this will be a runner-up for the most quoted phrases competition). Sacred texts may be important when it comes to discussing the underlying issues, but neither Brian nor me were doing that in our postings (see related articles below). Brian was objecting to two 'behavioural problems' often exhibited by the objectivists and I was responding to a general point about altruism. Therefore, Antoine, no amount of referencing to pages of the sacred texts is going to do justice to the issues raised.

I think it was perfectly legitimate for Brian to mention the fixed-sum economics in connection with the Randians. He acknowledges that they may not believe it explicitly and self-consciously any more than most other people do, but observes that 'everything else they say is said as if they believe in fixed sum economics'. I see the fallacy sneaking in through a backdoor in their belief system - their views on altruism and its moral inferiority to selfishness.

Unearthing the 'original' definition of altruism that sent Rand and the objectivists spitting mad just confirms Brian's point about 'definition hopping'. I defined altruism as concern for other people, or unselfish or helpful actions. Randians may base theirs on Comte's definition of altruism, which is very extreme, treating 'devotion to other people's interests as the ideal rule of morality'. It spells out an ethical system that goes directly against the fundamental trait of human nature - the survival instinct. (This is not to say that I do not consider ethical systems based on the conflict between our natural propensities and ethical requirements legitimate and I intend to deal with this in my sequel on Kant.) What I find unpalatable is the conclusion that altruism is immoral, disregarding a) other meanings of altruism and b) common sensical observations that selfless acts are beneficial both in themselves (make the altruist a better person) and in their consequences (the recipient of a selfless act is better off).

This brings me to my original point – perhaps Randians, in their advocacy of capitalism and the virtues of individualism and self-interest, feel that anything that undermines their 'campaign' must be purged. I join the campaign whole-heartedly and fervently. As Antoine points out, there still exist the sort of people who believe that profit is a dirty word, but I don't see why, in trying to defeat them, I should leave them a monopoly on altruism, compassion and generosity.

So, Antoine and Perry, I am not denying the contribution objectivists have made to the discourse about freedom, individualism and ethics of entrepreneurship. I am merely reserving the right to disagree and object to dogmatism, inconsistency and irrational conclusions whatever direction they are coming from.

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A person who derives quasi-sexual gratification from inflicting enormous pain upon helpless female victims has evil intentions, assuming we consider each human being to have certain natural rights. However, 'natural rights' are fiendishly difficult to derive from reason without swallowing unproven assumptions. John Locke had it simple: God made Adam, He gave Adam sovereignty over the world and all its contents. He said that Man shouldn't kill another man. End of story. If He exists and if belief in His Judeo-Christian form were universal, we could literally announce that the sociopath pervert was evil because God said so. We could also say that property rights exist as a natural right because 'Vox Dei'.

I regret that this sort of argument is not sustainable for all humans at this time. To announce that the depraved person is irrational, is both practically pointless (he wouldn't care) and not based on reason at all. The only basis for condemning a criminal other than natural rights is utility - which is close to arguing for a 'public good'. As I reject the notion of public goods, I can hardly claim that a public good justifies condemnation of someone's gratification of their admittedly unpleasant (to me) hobby. After all if twelve monsters agree to inflict pain on one victim in secret (so the rest of the public is unaware of the act), it can't be condemned by utilitarian principles: at some point the aggregate pleasure outweighs the aggregate pain.

It's no good recoiling in horror at the activities of sadistic monsters (an emotional response), striking out at them, and then trying to justify the action by reason, when the rationale is unsubstantiated. I happen to think that Rand's account of the identification of objective morality is as good as it gets from a libertarian natural rights point of view. N.B. Brian, who despises Randians, tries to derive morality from utilitarian principles. What he comes up with is decency, not rules for discovering 'right' and 'wrong'. Without a theory of natural rights I think libertarians are kidding themselves on the subject of 'crime', 'deviancy' and 'justice'.

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Alice Bachini enters the fray on the issue of altruism.

I don't think that we need to define doing good things for other people for no clear personal gain as altruism. It just seems the rational way to go about things sometimes. Good things cause general improvement in all sorts of ways we can't necessarily demonstrate or define, and knowing this is enough reason for doing them. If we don't want to do them, then there must be a reason for that. But if we do want to, then presumably our egotistical desire is based on some sensible understanding of how things are. Preferences aren't arbitrary things, they are based on reasoning to begin with (some of it inherited, or inexplicit, or too deep or fast for us to be consciously aware of it at the time).

On the other hand, irrational desires like the urge to murder someone or to chop off your own hands, are damaging precisely because they are irrational. So the fact that people's preferences aren't always necessarily good does not mean that they should not operate on the basis of egotism; it just means they should get more rational before doing things.

Basically, good things make sense and are morally beneficial, including me having a delicious burger for my lunch. Whereas bad things are irrational and morally detrimental. So I can't see any need for altrusim at all. However, it can be very bad, if it means acting in a way that is contrary to one's egotistical preferences, because a better thing exists. This is to reason out why we don't feel like doing what we think we ought to do. Then we can change our preferences and do good things autonomously. Individual freedom is a good thing to seek out.

Alice Bachini

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I am probably opening a can of worm or poking a hornet's nest or something with equally disturbing consequences but I cannot let John Webb's posting go without comment.

He correctly identified Paul Foot's assumptions that enable him to spew out such blatant and primitive fallacies about capitalism in particular and economic reality in general. The bit I found unpalatable was his analysis of Paul Foots 'motivation' for such statements and his sin of 'failure of morality', which is supposed to be altruism. I have encountered this 'belief' before as it seems to be a staple argument among the libertarians of the Objectivist variety and I have always been taken aback by the ferocity of their insistence on ethical and psychological egoism and the corresponding denial of altruism. I shall take this opportunity to spell out my objections to what seem to me to be an irrational strain in libertarian thought.

John Webb states that 'many people today mistakenly assume that altruism means having a regard for the well-being of others.' Actually, one of the most common definitions of altruism is 'concern for other people, or unselfish or helpful actions'. True, in evolutionary biology, it is defined as 'behaviour by an animal that decreases its chances of survival or reproduction while increasing those of another member of the same species'. Needless to say, altruism in its biological sense does not imply any conscious benevolence on the part of the performer, imposition of which is what John Webb rallies against.

Then John Webb redefines altruism as meaning:

..."in practice, having a necessary hostility to others as a consequence of adopting something other than oneself as the very standard of evaluation. Though the precise standard of altruist morality varies depending on the prevailing ideology, the People, the Race, the Proletariat, the Gender, the God, the Prophet, the Environment, the Social Organism etc., the premise which always remains constant in the altruist's world-view is the notion that there is some overriding standard, something other, something above and beyond and greater than the individual to which everyone should gratefully and enthusiastically sacrifice themselves."

This is a description of collectivism (and totalitarian at that) and not altruism. The distinction is an important one, as you can have altruism without collectivism. It seems that the collapse of altruism into collectivism and vice versa for the likes of John Webb is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what psychological egoism and self-interest mean.

If we understand psychological egoism as the theory that all human actions are motivated by self-interest, this taken as a factual claim based on observation, is obviously false: people are often motivated by emotions like anger, love, or fear, by altruism or pride, by the desire for knowledge or the hatred of injustice.

Also, it is not true that everything we can be said to 'want' or 'desire' is an enhancement or fulfillment of the self. We may want to give way to irrational rage or to wayward sexual desire, to hurt another or indeed to help another - without manifesting 'self-love' in any of these instances. My rage or aggression may in fact be self-destructive. The beginning of altruism is the realisation that not all good and bad are good-for-me and bad-for-me: that certain others - my close friends, say - have joys and sufferings distinct from mine, but for which I have a sympathetic concern - and for their sake, not my own. I may then acknowledge that others beyond the small circle of my friends are not fundamentally different - and so reach the belief that there are objective goods and bads as such. As one self among the others I cannot claim special privileges simply for being the individual that I am! If it is neither impossible nor irrational to act simply for the sake of another, the occurrence of satisfaction or 'good conscience' when we have done so is not sufficient ground for the egoist to claim that it was only for these 'rewards' that the acts were performed.

Nor on the other hand does the possibility of altruism mean that it is a constant moral necessity: an altruist can allow that in most circumstances I can act far more effectively on my own behalf than can any other person. A simple but crucial step separates a broken-backed ethical egoism from a minimally acceptable and consistent moral theory. It involves the recognition of others as more than instrumental to my fulfillment. I may promote my own interests and personal fulfillment, so long as I do not encroach upon the pursuit by others of their fulfillment. That is to recognize other persons as limits to my action: altruism may, of course, go beyond that in seeking positively to advance their good.

I have come across one more 'philosophical' misunderstanding – that of Kant's ethics - also common among some libertarians. I will comment in a later posting.

My aim today is to point out that the often-hysterical denial of altruism is rooted in a belief rather than a rational argument. Some libertarians seem to believe that it is necessary to insist that altruism is wrong or immoral in order to provide firmer grounds for conclusions that are central and essential to their world-view. This is a world-view that espouses individualism and liberty, the belief that prosperity and freedom is best achieved by pursuit of self-interest and many other conclusions that I share. It is also a world-view that often must be expounded by what amounts to an intellectual crusade, fighting the collectivist, totalitarian and socialist dark forces. I have had the 'privilege' of facing those at their darkest and at the peak of their powers in a communist regime. Nevertheless, I do not think you have to deny altruism in order to defend pursuit of individual good, happiness, free market and liberty.

To be continued: In Kant's defence

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John Webb, Chairman of the the United Kingdom Objectivist Association, understand the truth about paleo-socialist Paul Foot.

"Is capitalism sick?" asks Paul Foot, Cash for Chaos, Guardian, Wednesday June 12, 2002. "Yes," he contends, "disgustingly so. Its sickness is terminal, and it urgently needs replacing."

As evidence for this singular claim Foot relates a litany of "misdemeanours" which have recently rocked the business community and suggests that far from being an exception to the daily practise of honest commerce they serve to illustrate what he calls "the central feature of capitalism," namely, "the division of the human race into those who profit from human endeavour and those who don't."

Unfortunately for Paul Foot, all the examples he cites in support of this breathless conclusion have little or nothing to do with the free exchange of goods and services within a capitalist economy, as they are, without exception, directly attributable to governmental interference within a mixed economy.

The Enron Scandal, for example, did not occur within the context of unregulated trade or unbridled competition but within a highly charged political atmosphere so beset by graft and bogus environmentalist concerns that the caprices of an 18th century mandarin would seem enlightened by comparison.

The telecoms industry, which Foot also cites, is another unfortunate example to use as it seems to have escaped his notice that the telecom industry has the distinction of being one of the most highly regulated and licensed industries on the planet and where, in the UK, the telecom regulator OFTEL is a byword for bureaucratic incompetence.

As for the tax evasion "scandal" of Tyco - again it doesn't seem to have occurred to Foot that such a "crime" could never have happened in a capitalist society - in a capitalist society property rights are inalienable and all coercive taxes would be prohibited by law.

Perhaps some people may be tempted to overlook Foot's rather lame grasp of even the most elementary principles of politics and economics; after all, he must be so busy campaigning to clear the name convicted murderers like James Hanratty [whose guilt has recently been confirmed by new DNA evidence] that he probably has very little time to obtain an adequate grasp of current events.

And in any case, leaving the obvious factual errors aside doesn't he make a valid point that the riches of the wealthy few are obtained at the price of the poverty of the many?

Well he would be making a worthwhile point if the Labour Theory of Value on which his argument rests had not been thoroughly refuted by the Austrian School of economics through Carl Menger's theory of marginal utility more than a century ago.

No, the real problem with Paul Foot lies much deeper.

Paul Foot is not merely guilty of a failure of knowledge.

He is guilty of a failure of morality.

And the name of that failure is altruism.

Unfortunately, many people today mistakenly assume that altruism means having a regard for the well-being of others.

It doesn't.

On the contrary, altruism, in practice, means having a necessary hostility to others as a consequence of adopting something other than oneself as the very standard of evaluation.

Though the precise standard of altruist morality varies depending on the prevailing ideology, the People, the Race, the Proletariat, the Gender, the God, the Prophet, the Environment, the Social Organism etc., the premise which always remains constant in the altruist's world-view is the notion that there is some overriding standard, something other, something above and beyond and greater than the individual to which everyone should gratefully and enthusiastically sacrifice themselves.

According to altruism ANY desire, ANY benefit, ANY positive evaluation in this life or even the next, if Kant is to be believed, is immoral.

If you feed your child, or help an elderly stranger or the hapless victim of an unfortunate accident and feel even the slightest glimmer of vicarious pleasure yourself, then that pleasure counts as a benefit to yourself and whatever else you may have intended you have not committed a moral act.

By such a standard of morality any act whether beneficial to oneself or the whole of humanity is of no moral worth if it is motivated by the slightest concern for personal benefit.

That people might prosper by freely pursuing their own interests, to mutual benefit and by voluntary consent, without needing to inflict harm on others is an anathema to the likes of Foot.

Why?

Because Foot is a collectivist and for collectivists, all human endeavour, all profit, all property, all knowledge, all values, all human life, is collective.

Anyone pursuing their own interests for their own sake is necessarily at war with the "common good" - a "good" so rare and lofty that only "politically aware" people like the fabulous Foot can identify it.

In this view, company directors don't earn their bonuses - they "steal" them.

One man's "gain" is another man's "loss."

The rich grow "richer" and the poor, who have a higher standard of living than a medieval King, grow "poorer."

Property isn't created - it's "ill-gotten."

Wealth isn't something to be earned - it's something to be "shared."

Individual prosperity above the level of "equality" isn't desirable - it's "excessive."

The rich are "guilty" in virtue of their wealth.

And the living are guilty in virtue of dead murderers like James Hanratty.

So how does Foot get away it?

He relies on the reluctance of others - the very others that he would so earnestly make his victims - to abstain from making a moral judgement.

So now it is time to make a judgement.

For decades Paul Foot has sanctimoniously postured as a supporter of the underdog, a valiant champion of the outcast, defender of the weak, and a protector of the innocent.

In reality, however, his is one of their greatest enemies for all he has ever been is an altruist, his entire journalistic career amounting to nothing more than a demand for the glorification of force based on the cultivation of the vice of envy - an vice defined by Ayn Rand as "a hatred of the good for being the good."

Is Paul Foot sick?

No.

He doesn't have that excuse.

John Webb

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Neel Krishnaswami writes:

Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries.

...and...

A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.

I definitely agree with Neel in the sense that theoretical concepts ought to be supported by empirical evidence and facts. My dislike of utilitarianism is based on one of its consequences – ultimate disregard for the individual. Numerous amendments and elaborations of utilitarian ethics and political theories fail, in my eyes, to remedy this serious flaw. Neel is clearly aware of it and provides examples to this effect himself. If I understand his point correctly it is more about the workings of the human mind and its susceptibility to be convinced by 'utilitarian arguments' more successfully than by statements of 'ideological bullshit'.

In my experience utilitarian arguments that focus strictly on consequences or plain facts and numbers create one of two reactions in the opposing party - either attempts to discredit the source of the information and/or desire to go forth and collect similar 'statistics' supporting their views.

My second reservation about utilitarian methods of a debate is that they don't work. How else do you explain the fact that the vast regiments of lefties (apologies to Perry for using the term out of meta-context) are still polluting the media and public life with their incandescently idiotic convictions about socialism, communism and current authoritarian regimes? No statistics, facts and numbers about Stalin and other communists and the atrocities they committed on the Russian and surrounding nations managed to eliminate communism as an ideology and barely forced its metamorphosis into a ‘benign’ socialism. The facts are dismissed as inconvenient and unconvincing if they clash with fundamental beliefs. Some are happy to use utilitarian arguments to defend communism even in its original guise - I have come across people who argue that Stalin may have done some naughty things but he also turned Russia into an industrial nation. 'nuff said.

I find that the best strategy, and perhaps the most difficult, is one of exposing inconsistencies in the opponent’s ideas and hope to identify the beliefs that get in the way of a rational discourse. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change. As one of the characters in my favourite film points out:

You can't change people’s beliefs but you can change their ideas.

If however by utilitarian we mean anything relating to the specific, concrete and non-theoretical then we are simply using the term in different ways. Let me explain what I believe, that is, what my idea of a sound theory is and why I find utilitarianism pitifully inadequate in dealing with reality’s bigger picture. My judgement of a theory depends on three elements:

1. its content, that is its premises, logical consistency and order, its relation to reality
2. the motivation of its author and propagators
3. consequences of the theory when tested or put into practice.

To me consequences are secondary elements of a theory. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the theory’s credibility and its popularity. They can also influence the motivation of its supporters and their responsibility in upholding it. However, consequences in themselves cannot change the correctness of a theory itself; they can make neither true nor false a theory that is in itself flawed.

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Neel Krishnaswami points out that we all hate it... or do we?

It's true. Everybody hates utilitarianism. The Left hates it⁽¹⁾, The Right hates it⁽²⁾, Libertarians hate it⁽³⁾, and Adriana Cronin⁽⁴⁾ hates it.

And we all hate it for good reason, too. It sounds so reasonable --"maximize the total happiness of society". But it leads to such stupid conclusions. That small-town America is justified in banning Lady Chatterley's Lover, because it offends more Baptists than turns on smut-addicted book-lovers.⁽⁵⁾. Oops; there goes freedom of speech. That proper social policy involves enslaving 5% of the population to grow opium to keep the other 95% in a drug-induced delirium. Utility must be maximized. And finally, in a mathematical coup de grace, economists armed with the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference have shown that individual utility functions are not commensurable. This means we can't even define "total happiness" in a sensible fashion, because one individual's utility function is not on the same scale as anyone else's.

But. (You knew that a "but" was coming, didn't you?)

Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries. No libertarian rights-based argument I have ever constructed has ever convinced my social democrat (and outright socialist) friends of anything at all. Nor have I ever seen a libertarian react to a plea for social justice with anything other than tired sighs. But start wonking out with per-capita GDPs, life expectancies, crime rates, and accident figures, and suddenly bystanders start paying attention.

A concrete example. A couple of years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine about third world poverty. He complained that the government should do something about it. I pointed out that indeed the government did do something about poverty: mainly, it caused it. He regarded my objections to large-scale government intervention as the usual quixotic libertarianism until I offered the example of microcredit programs as an example of how to bootstrap a market and improve the lot of the poor⁽⁶⁾. At this point my friend got really excited, because now he had a concrete charity to try and send money to.

It wasn't a rights-based argument about why government intervention is harmful that energized him: it was a concrete, utilitarian example (and an avenue for positive action). What he cared about was people not going hungry. He also knew that in political debate, people tend to use abstractions to paper over the difficulties in their program⁽⁷⁾. Most notorious are various leftists' use of euphemism to justify things like the Cultural Revolution, but it's a universal sin. He, like anyone with healthy political antibodies, narrows his eyes when vague slogans -- whether "worker's paradise", "but it's for the children" or even "spontaneous order" -- enter the discussion. So any attempt to convince my friend had to get past his suspicion that the political jargon was just bafflegab aimed at preserving the status quo.

This is why utilitarian arguments are so useful. Focusing single-mindedly on making actual individuals better off enables one to avoid getting (correctly) killed by the "that's ideological bullshit" reaction. A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.

⁽¹⁾= Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. The best attempt ever to offer a solid theoretical grounding for the social democratic program. Amartya Sen smashed it with a brief, elegant article that identified a critical algebra error in the setup. Oops.
⁽²⁾= Kass, Leon R. The Ethics of Human Cloning. Yes, this Luddite idiot is the chair of the US Bioethics Commission. It is to weep.
⁽³⁾= Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Of course you know about this.
⁽⁴⁾= Cronin, Adriana."EU and e-commerce, or does Bad plus Good equal a greater Good?", Samizdata.net March 14, 2002
⁽⁵⁾= Sen, Amartya. "On the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal". This man is depressingly smart.
⁽⁶⁾= see http://www.villagebanking.org/home.php3
⁽⁷⁾= Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language". Yeah, he's every conservative's favorite socialist and every socialist's favorite conservative, but what can you do?

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From each as they chose, to each as they are chosen.

As one of the most influential libertarian thinkers of the 20^th century, Robert Nozick certainly deserves a tip of the hat from Libertarian Samizdata. His book Anarchy, State and Utopia is an excellent debunking of coercive statism generally and John Rawls' book Theory of Justice in particular. Although I must confess I have never been a fan of Nozick's essentially intuitive approach to rights theory, it would nevertheless be churlish not to recognize his enormous influence in stemming the intellectual tide of statism. He had a key role in widely propagating libertarian memes and adding hugely to the developing libertarian meta-context.

Robert Nozick, philosopher, born November 16 1938; died January 23 2002

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Rafe Champion puts the intellectual boot in one again in the latest round of the Interblog Popper Wars^TM

The debate between Karl Popper and his opponents has not advanced very far in seven decades and it is tempting to conclude that it is a waste of time to argue with philosophers about these things. In my view the fault lies entirely with Popper's opponents who clearly demonstrate that "true belief" theories of knowlege produce "true believers" who persist in their beliefs regardless of effective counter-arguments. Because most of the evils in the world can be attributed to the activities of fanatics (people who are not prepared to reconsider any of their "true beliefs") I am prepared to persist for a few more rounds of this debate in the hope of explaining how some ideas from Popper and his colleague Bill Bartley can help us to move on. In the meantime, I think that those "rationalists" like Will who persist in defending "true belief" theories of knowledge are in fact "selling the other guy's product" (that is, irrationalism).

Recall my previous contribution where I explained that critical rationalism is concerned with forming and testing "critical preferences" for scientific theories or social policies (or anything else) so that our preferences can change in an orderly fashion in the light of new evidence or new arguments. For this reason I do not agree with Will's insistence:

that Popperianism is at bottom a skeptical philosophy of darkness, which, despite the enthusiastic rationalist rhetoric of Popperian advocates, shares more with Rorty-like post-modern pragmatism than pro-reason philosophies of light.

He wrote (in criticism of the Popper's view that we cannot achieve certainty):

For my part, I have not been made to see what is wrong with being certain in seeing mugs on desks, nor in the problem of a proposition becoming more likely true in light of new evidence

By all means be certain (in your own mind) about mugs on desks and anything else, but bear in mind that our senses are fallible as proved by optical illusions, hallucinations and bad calls by referees and commentators in fast-moving sports. Subjective certainty proves nothing, certainly it does not prove the truth of any general scientific or moral principle. So much for that oft repeated criticism of Popper.

As for a proposition becoming "more likely true" or more probable in light of new evidence, the problem for Will and his mates is to produce the formula to indicate the supposed increase in likelihood or probability. Popperians have no argument with the proposition that there are true propositions, the problem is to know whether any particular (contested) proposition is true or false.

Will wrote:

Popper is wrong that positive instances don't raise the probability of a hypothesis. According to Popper and Champion, the probability of Newton's theory being true, even after all its success, was the same as the probability of cats giving birth to elephants. And that's absurd

There are two ways of talking about probability. One is when we say that Team A will probably beat Team B in a forthcoming football game. We usually mean that we have formed a critical preference for Team A, given what we know about the game and the two teams. We may sensibly add provisos regarding dud decisions by the referee, injuries to key players etc etc. and the possibility of an upset. That is Popperian and it has nothing to do with a formula that provides a numerical value (p) attached to the proposition "Team A will win".

Scientists use that kind of "probability" talk when they compare the relative merits of competing scientific theories. We know that Newton's theory is not true, despite its immense improvement on earlier theories, so it is doubly absurd to think in terms of the (numerical) probability of its truth. What century is Will living in?

The other type of probability is an academic industry that has been around for some hundreds of years, devoted to producing a formula that assigns a numerical value (p) to propositions (h), in the light of various bits of evidence (e). Because no usable formula has yet been obtained for that purpose, one can only conclude that this line of thought has failed, by its own standards. I know that highly learned "Bayesians" can produce formulas but equally learned critics point out that they do not work. Sorry fellas. Thanks for refraining from talk about prior probabilities. That will only land you in a regress that takes you further away from useful talk about the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories (and football teams). That is the direction of induction and attempts to justify "true beliefs". It does not help working scientists or anyone else. It is worth noting that Popper is the only philosopher of science who has been taken seriously by any considerable number of scientists who are sensitive to the philosophical dimensions of their work (instances are Einstein, Medaware, Eccles and Monod).

Rafe Champion (Australia)

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Samizdata.net wheels out another of our 'mercinary independent scholars' in the Interblog Popper Wars. Alan Forrester!

Karl Popper's epistemology is about how to solve problems and find better theories, and as such observations do not have the grossly overrated importance given to them by inductivism. The whole notion of probability in this context is irrelevant, since a theory is either true or false and no number of confirming instances allow us to distinguish between them. On Thursday, Will Wilkinson wrote:

It is daunting indeed to debate a man named "Rafe Champion", a name that evokes race car-driving secret agents, or dangerous, seething, family-wrecking hunks from a "daytime drama".

Damn straight he is. He does all that, eats broken glass for breakfast and, most excitingly of all - he's a critical rationalist!

First, I am keen to know what knowledge is, if not a kind of belief. If I know that water is H²O (a scientific proposition), don't I also believe it?

Not in the sense you mean, i.e.- the sense that it is definitely or probably correct. We tentatively accept that a theory is better than its rival on the basis of things such as whether they provide good explanations and whether the other theories have been refuted by observations.

Next, I find that I'm able to decisively justify all sorts of beliefs on the basis of experience. For instance, that there is a mug on my desk. I see the mug on my desk, and I thereby know that it is there. Science is rather more complex than looking at mugs on desks, but one surely can derive certain beliefs from the evidence of the senses. It's not clear to me what bind Popper is getting us out of.

So it's totally impossible that you are hallucinating the mug? Also, why are you so obsessed about whether there is a mug on your desk or not? It's not a very interesting question. I would sooner debate about something substantial like a meaty scientific or philosophical problem, which brings us back to the main point. Leaving quibbles like that aside, there are actually two quite different issues here. One is whether one can derive theories from observations, the other is if not what role do observations play?

It is impossible to derive theories for observations. To take but one counterexample, up until the late 19th century every observation was compatible with Newton's theory of gravity. All these observations are also compatible with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Two quite different theories were compatible with the same set of observations, therefore one cannot derive theories from observations. Next we have to ask why you made those particular observations, rather than observations of, say, the exact weight of all the dust under your bed. Before the theories come along that differ in their predictions about the motion of the planets or whatever, there is no particular reason to watch their motion so theories can hardly be derived from observations. The problem is much worse than this though. Even if one could confirm, say, an equation of motion on the basis of observations, one could not derive the explanation provided by the theory from observations. For example, one could explain the motion of the planets by saying that they are pushed round the Sun by invisible pixies that just happen to obey Einstein's equations. This explanation is rubbish on a truly epic scale compared to the explanation in terms of curved spacetime, but as the observations do not allow us to distinguish between them, the pixy theory of planetary motion must be criticised on other grounds. The role of observations is to distinguish between rival theories. Each prediction of a theory is either true or false, and each theory is either true or false, no number of confirming instances can change that, and hence they cannot prove it to be true, but if we see a refuting instance, then the theory is false.

Last, I said nothing about limiting science to collecting confirming instances. All I was saying is that Popper is wrong that positive instances don't raise the probability of a hypothesis. According to Popper and Champion, the probability of Newton's theory being true, even after all its success, was the same as the probability of cats giving birth to elephants.

Newton's theory was false, so as it turns out the probability was indeed the same :-). However, all this talk of probability ignores the real issue of why, before it was refuted, it was reasonable to hold Newton's theory, but not the theory that cats give birth to elephants, or why it is reasonable to prefer General Relativity or whatever to such a theory now. It is a good idea to prefer General Relativity to its rival because its rivals are poorer at solving problems.

It is reasonable to prefer the theory that elephants give birth to elephants rather than cats because the former solves problems and the latter does not, indeed it raises new ones. To be a bit more explicit, the theory of evolution, which is better than its rivals (although I don't think there are any really serious rivals at the moment), gives us reason to think that elephants give birth to more elephants as a way of spreading elephant genes. The theory that cats give birth to elephants not only fails to solve any problems, it ruins theories that do solve problems. It makes absolutely no sense from an evolutionary perspective why would cat genes want to propagate elephants genes? Where did the cat get the elephant genes in the first place? Furthermore, no matter how you try to solve these problems, you just raise more and worse problems, so we can reject the theory that cats give birth to elephants out of hand. To summarize, good theories solve problems better than their rivals, but raise problems themselves, which will be solved by their successors and so we don't consider that observations and so on confirm a theory.

Alan Forrester

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In response to Will Willkinson on the The Fly Bottle taking our esteemed generalissimo Perry de Havilland to task for supporting the conjectural objective epistemology of Karl Popper, the Samizdata Team decided that we should wheel up the big guns for our response. Rafe Champion a noted Australian independent scholar of Popper replies to Will.

Will Wilkinson has invoked a number of weary and worn out arguments against Popper's theory of inquiry and his theory of knowledge. First of all it is helpful to understand that Popper is concerned with understanding the way the world works, with learning by imaginative problem solving and making the best use of our critical faculties. It is also helpful to understand how Popper has emancipated us from some dead ends in philosophy, and not just the philosophy of science. Many of these dead ends arise from the theory that scientific knowledge is a form of belief, to wit, justified true belief. The source of justification in the empiricist tradition is supposed to be the evidence of our senses. In the Continental rationalist tradition the source of justification is the intuition of clear and distinct ideas. In each case the same fatal flaw arises: there is no way to decisively (certainly) justify the beliefs that are supposed to be true.

Popper has provided an alternative to the failed theories of justified true belief. The alternative is a theory of conjectural objective knowledge. This does not mean giving up on truth, or the search for it. Truth is a regulative standard for statements. A true statement corresponds to the facts. In our search for the truth we form critical preferences for the theory (or the social policy) which best solves its problems and stands up to all kinds of tests (the test of internal consistency, consistency with other well tested theories, and experimental or observational tests). Our preferences can change in a rational and controlled manner in the light of new evidence or new arguments. Our knowledge grows through our creative response to problems, including the problems that are created by effective criticism.

The Popperian scientists is like a free market entrepreneur, seeking opportunities (unsolved problems) in the marketplace. The scientist forms a conjectural solution to the problem (invests or offers a product in the marketplace) and it is then subjected to critical appraisal, including experimental tests (the product is tested by the market). All this goes on in the flux of time and is subject to radical uncertainty due to the inherently open-ended nature of theoretical knowledge (and the dynamic marketplace).

All of this is simple common sense until David Stove and the proponents of justified true beliefs confuse the picture.

Will wrote:

"Popper argues that one can only disconfirm a theory--prove that it is false".

In logic, that is the simple truth. A general or universal theory, stated in the form "All swans are white" is falsified by a single (true) report of a black swan.

"But then what do you say of a theory that has been subjected to huge numbers of potentially falsifying tests, but has passed with flying colors? Isn't not being falsified by many tests a lot like being confirmed?"

That was the case with Newton's theory which passed many tests and explained so many things that many people thought that the final truth had been found. But it was not so, even before Einstein offered a viable alternative there were known to be problems with Newton's theory. If you want to limit confirmation to repeatable observations, like sunrises and falling apples, then that is scientifically trivial and uninteresting because science is concerned with general explanatory theories, (which apply to both apples and sunrises).

"Pace Popper, induction works just fine, and it works pretty much the way people intuitively think it does (i.e., The more horses you encounter, the surer your knowledge about horses in general.)"

Not really. To learn about horses you need to approach them in a receptive, inquisitive or problem-solving way. If you merely encounter them "in passing" you may learn nothing more than to get out of their way. Learning is an active process of sifting and evaluating ideas and evidence, that is why so many people can go through school and higher education and learn next to nothing (exept about things that they really find interesting, which may be horses and not their academic studies). When you understand where Popper is coming from, David Stove is just a bore, despite his wit and his verbal pyrotechnics. Stove and his fellow inductivists apparently think there is some way to attach a numerical probablility to general theories, but it has not yet been done despite being an academic industry for about a hundred years. This renders their position absurd by their own standards.

Rafe Champion

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Recommended reading for insomniacs with enquiring minds

We have received a few e-mails asking what books we would recommend for aspiring (or even perspiring) libertarians:

Dale Amon recommends for essential reading:

David Bergland "Libertarianism in One Lesson"
Frederick Hayek "The Road to Serfdom"
Murray Rothbard "For a New Liberty"
Bob Poole "Defending a Free Society"
Carl Hess "Capitalism for Kids"
Wendy McElroy "Freedom, Feminism and the State"
Thomas Sowell "The Economics and Politics of Race"

Perry de Havilland recommends for essential reading:

Murray Rothbard "The Ethics of Liberty"
Frederick Hayek "The Fatal Conceit"
Karl Popper "Open Society and its Enemies"
Virginia Postrel "The Future and its Enemies"

Also well worth a read:
Ayn Rand "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology"
David Deutsch "The Fabric of Reality"
Murray Rothbard "Man, Economy and State"
Edmund Burke "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
Karl Marx "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (know thine enemy)
Jean Monnet "Memoirs" (know thine enemy, part deux)

However if you like tracts on political economy served up as more bite sized morsels, you would be hard pressed to find a more varied body of works than the pamphlets of the Libertarian Alliance. Browse through the huge number of works on the Libertarian Alliance website, all available for free on-line in pdf format pertaining to all manner of topics (html format coming in the not-to-distant future).

The Libertarian Alliance website is undergoing a bit of an overhaul so it might look a bit strange in some platform/browser combinations. Feel free to complain to the Libertarian Alliance webmaster there and urge them to get it fixed :-)

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PC meaning Peikoffian Crap.

Okay, I realise it is actually Boxing Day now, but 'Merry Christmas' anyway. That's Christ-mas... as in Christ. Son of God and all that stuff. It does not matter if you believe in Christ or not, because it does not change what Christmas actually is.

Although I am an extremely secular person, I do not hesitate to extend those sentiments to Samizdata's Christian readers in spite of the fact religion does not loom large in my life. Yet I think it is important to remember that Christmas is a Christian festival and thus I shall not hedge my Christian greeting with anything like 'and you have a nice holiday too for those who are Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists...'

Don't get me wrong, I actually do hope any Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists, Druids, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddists, Jews, Druse, Shinto, Pagans, etc. etc. who read the Samizdata have a really great and entirely secular couple days off... but then as that is all Christmas is to them, I do not feel any special need to be 'inclusive' if they are just hitching a perfectly reasonable cultural ride on someone else's wagon. I often partake of bhangra-and-booze excesses during Diwali but I certainly don't expect special 'Diwali greetings' from my Hindu friends because I am not Hindu. To me Diwali is just an excuse to eat good Indian food. Likewise I would hope that many atheist (or whatever) libertarians would have no problem with the idea of Christians (libertarian or otherwise) regarding Christmas as 'their' day. Yet some people do indeed seem to disagree.

Although I have been much influenced by objectivism, I do not actually call myself an objectivist as Karl Popper looms just as large in my philosophical views, probably more so in fact. I have nothing against objectivism per se, which I like to describe as a sub-set of libertarian thought because I know it will annoy certain people. However I do regard the 'organised' objectivism of Leonard Peikoff, of the Ayn Rand Institute, as essentially irrational and pathologically intolerant. Peikoff's historical error riddled article about Christmas did nothing to change my views on the fatal justificationist structural flaw in his brand of dogmatic objectivism (yeah, yeah, send hate e-mail pointing out my 'errors' to the usual address). Let Peikoff pick any day he likes to celebrate the adulation of St. Leonard, Intellectual Heir to the Blessed Ayn... but to fail to understand that Christmas without a reference to Christianity is just another Disney theme event, is culturally illiterate and needlessly insulting.

However objectivism without Leonard Peikoff...ah, now that would be something worthy of a festival of its own! For precisely that, go to The Objectivist Center for Peikoff-free objectivism that includes tolerance and ideas that survive contact with reality. Go read what they have to say.

As for me, once I have finished reading the lyrical Sufic work 'The Rose Garden', I shall be re-reading Popper's 'Open Society and it's Enemies'.