The title is quoted from a Quillette article (h/t instapundit) inspired by the following letter to author James Flynn from Tony Roche, publishing director of Emerald, explaining their decision to drop his book:
“I am contacting you in regard to your manuscript ‘In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor’. Emerald believes that its publication, in particular in the United Kingdom, would raise serious concerns. … the work could be seen to incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law. Clearly you have no intention of promoting racism but intent can be irrelevant. …”
In the 1930s, J.R.R.Tolkien’s publisher contacted him regarding publishing ‘The Hobbit’ in Germany. To do so, they were legally obliged to provide an assurance that Tolkien had no Jewish ancestry. Tolkien gave them two courteous letters, saying he would rather they sent the first but he acknowledged it was up to them. The first politely withheld the information. The second expressed Tolkien’s “regret” that he had “no ancestors of the gifted Jewish race”, adding that his pride in his German ancestry would be sensibly diminished if enquiries of this kind pointed to Germany’s future. (Alas, back then, all too clearly they did.) Because it is this second letter that was found in the publisher’s files, it is thought they acted on Tolkien’s request to send the first.
My pride in being British will be sensibly diminished if Emerald’s letter points to our future. My Brexit enthusiasm owes much to my knowledge that one side would let Britain become a place where Emerald could feel less concerned, while the other are determined to give them cause to feel yet more.
Emerald Publishing was founded in 1967 “to champion new ideas”, according to its website. I guess you could say free speech is an old idea and banning it is the new idea – though also a very old one. Or maybe ‘champion’ doesn’t mean what I thought it did. Such pride as I ever felt in British publishers was sensibly diminished as I read that letter – and it did not cheer me to think that while the decision may reflect some cowardice or even complicity in Emerald, shocked to find an un-PC book had somehow crept into their planned list, the letter may also be factual and more honest than the activists who would prosecute.
From the Article: “Emerald would need to accept a high level of risk both reputational and legal. The practical costs and difficulty of managing any reputational or legal problems that did arise are of further concern to Emerald.”
Big problem for publisher Emerald; no big deal for author Flynn. He can self-publish his book, as so many novelists and others are doing these days. That way, he takes any legal risk.
Niall K: “… my knowledge that one side would let Britain become a place where Emerald could feel less concerned, while the other are determined to give them cause to feel yet more.”
That is rather optimistic. That the side which goes around insulting fellow citizens as “Remoaners” and essentially telling them to shut up will turn out to be die-hard defenders of other people’s Free Speech? That does not sound like a sure bet!
From the Article: “The good university is one that teaches students the intellectual skills they need to be intelligently critical — of their own beliefs …”
Gavin, I am one who does that. If your comment made any sense, it would mean I was an enemy of free speech.
The difference between remoaners and remainers, the fact that people in the UK do not call people who voted for remain ‘remoaners’, has been explained to you many times, but you seem determinedly obtuse on this subject (and very repetitive). Perhaps you should consider the possibility that those of us who live here might have more insight into which faction has more liking for the hate speech laws and which has less.
Meanwhile, since you have defined me as an enemy of free speech then I’m not sure where you think it’s friends could be found in the UK today. Or do you prefer the easy cynicism of assuming there are none?
Of course not, Britain does not have free speech. There have been significant number of cases recently.
Oddly, Americans know you have the right to free speech (1st), the right to bear arms (2nd), the right to privacy (4th), and the right to refuse to self incriminate (5th). And all the others.
The government doesn’t give you those rights, you have them when you are born, as surely as a tribesman in the deepest part of Africa has them.
The fact that you let your government take them from you is on you.
-XC
Longmuir–calling treacherous remainaic scum as what they are is free speech. And since you obviously can’t defend free speech why don’t you find some American leftist weasel site more suited to your views.
As for what we “let” the bastards take–yeah obv we should have been able to stop a rigged establishment of shithouses from following plans laid down by the globo elite. The few of us .All by ourselves. You have Trump–for all his failings–by sheer luck. So don’t any Yanks be getting on their high horses.
The quick answer is no, the UK doesn’t have free speech, as numerous visits from the police have proved.
The longer answer is that the UK doesn’t actually understand freedom. Recent case in point is the Labour Party’s push to ban private schools. The pushback to this has mostly been an argument for the benefits of private schooling, not an argument for the freedom of the individual to choose.
The argument for individual liberty as a good in itself has disappeared from British life, replaced by an acceptance of state control over health, speech and much else. This acceptance is so deeply rooted that half the country is now yearning to transfer this control to an even more remote and unrepresentative state – the EU.
We discovered way back in high school that if you get a horse high, you don’t want to try to get on him for at least a few days. They get skittish.
😆
Wish we had a “thumbs-up” smilie.
Niall K: “… since you have defined me as an enemy of free speech …”
No, I have not defined you as an enemy of free speech, Niall. That is your interpretation. Please don’t take discussions so personally.
In a democracy, each person gets one vote. Clearly, things have happened in the UK which Niall K personally did not vote for — but they happened because other people voted for them. Looking in from the outside, it is not obvious that — en democratic mass — No Dealers have a higher level of commitment to the kinds of free speech they find distasteful than the Every Closer Union people. It would be good if they do. We are all on this Earth to learn, and if there is evidence showing that stronger commitment, please do not hesitate to share.
Since Perry de H took the time to set up The Great Realignment site specifically for Brexit-related discussions, it might be better for posters to avoid bringing up their hopes or fears for Brexit on Samizdata.
I tell my 5 year old daughter to quit whinging at times: does that mean I don’t support free speech?
… and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law
I wish people would be more honest, there is probably only one religion at stake here, and it also raises not only the issue of free speech but equality before the law, something that religious extremists of all kinds have been against for decades to further their own cause, and has been steadfastly resisted, but for some strange reason this has suddenly been all forgotten and capitulation is the order of the day, even by those calling themselves “progressive”.
Our own dear PM got lambasted for an article that, quite ironically, supported free speech and freedom to wear whatever you like, by no less than an a man whose own religion has already got legal exemptions, and its supporters think they should have more.
It is rather you, Gavin, who should cease posting this inane comment as you have done over and over for (literally) years whenever Brexit gets mentioned. If you cannot see that Boris Johnson (“Women should be free to wear burkas – and I should be free to say they look like letterboxes in them.”) is a better bet for lessened speech restraints than either Corbyn or Swinson then that is on you. Here in the UK, it would be very hard to get confused about that.
Niall — You are a decent person, and you have strong beliefs about certain subjects. That is great! But it was unnecessary for you to bring those beliefs into a discussion on Samizdata about free speech — especially when the Samizdata leader has set up a parallel site specifically for discussion of That Which Shall Not Be Named.
Yes, Boris J. is definitely saying the right things about free speech. However, the UK is a Parliamentary democracy, where the Prime Minister is not directly elected by the people and legislation comes from majorities among the elected MPs, not from one man. Do a majority of the MPs subscribe to Boris J.’s views?
The UK has had Conservative governments in the past as well as in the present. Consequently, Conservative MPs bear a lot of responsibility for creating (or allowing the continuation of) the legal and regulatory environment which gave Emerald cold feet about publishing the book in question. If Conservative MPs in the future become much less authoritarian and more pro-free speech, that will be a good thing. Let’s hope that happens.
I haven’t read the book, so a lot involves conjecture, but I decided to take a look into the law to see what standards might be applied to any publication. There are two relevant statutes, the first applicable to print publications and the second to an eBook:
1. The Public Order Act 1986 (as amended by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008)
The relevant portions are Parts 3 and 3A, which are essentially identical except that Part 3 deals with race and Part 3A with religion and sexual orientation. The Act itself is tediously repetitive, but it covers speech, behaviour, performances of plays and the possession, publication or distribution of written or recorded materials. A person or corporate body can be liable to prosecution, and if a corporate body then also the director(s)/member(s) can be held personally liable.
The elements of the criminal offence are that (a) the material must be
and (b) the person or corporate body
The latter part seems to be the basis for Emerald’s refusal to publish. They point out that the crime requires no element (which is kinda true, though not really in practice), but it ignores the fact that the material must first be “threatening, abusive or insulting”. I’m being presumptuous, but I rather doubt this is the case with Prof. Flynn. Even if he’s quoting insulting or abusive material, context definitely matters.
2. The Communications Act 2003 s.127
This is such a ridiculous law, and so typical of the Blair government which liked to enact legislation giving the CPS and police broad discretionary powers to prosecute normal conduct. It reminds me a little of the Sexual Offences Act 2006 which made it illegal for two fifteen-year-olds to consensually kiss. They did that in order to catch pædophiles, but they were just too lazy to exclude behaviour that probably the vast majority of children freely engage in.
The standard under the Communications Act is that it is a crime to send over any public electronic network any material that is
They don’t bother to define their terms, so it’s left to magistrates (no jury trial) to decide what is “grossly offensive”. Intent is not explicitly an element of the crime (though it’s kinda read into it), so for instance amongst a number of well-known prosecutions a woman was convicted of posting without malicious intent the lyrics of a rap song on Instagram which included repeated use of what is described elsewhere as “a racial term”. A black police officer took offence. The offender in this case was simply reckless.
However, for a publication of the sort under consideration, the defence against a prosecution under the 2003 Act would be Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the judgement in Handyside v. UK (1976), in which it was found that it is lawful to publish material that may
Context matters, and it would be very difficult to get from merely “offensive” to the “gross offence” that is an element of the crime. I note in connection to the question of “context” that, contrary to reports in the media, the Sheriff in the case against Mark Meechan a.k.a. Count Dankula did consider context, and there has never been any doubt about that in other cases or in (e.g.) the Law Commission’s scoping report on this subject. The question of what constitutes “gross” offence would (I guess, in this case) revolve around questions like whether the material was posted in an unrestricted manner, open to all (not true if being sold on Amazon, for example); whether it involved a good faith discussion of matters of public interest; whether it’s a sober discussion, and specifically whether it addressed the subject of freedom of speech.
In the two cases I’ve referred to here, the casual disregard for who saw the material (Nazi pugs or rap lyrics) was an unstated but obvious factor in what constituted causing “gross” offence. Academic discussion of racial terms or phrases such as “gas the Jews” is not the same. I’ve had a look at some of the past cases brought under the 2003 Act, and none of them make me think a case against Flynn or Emerald Publishing would be at all likely, though as I say I haven’t seen the book.
I should note just in passing that Emerald’s claim to be at “material legal risk” were others to post passages of the book is utter bollocks.
FYI, today in 1789 we amended the constitution to include the Bill of Rights.
Ya’ll are welcome to plagiarize.
-XC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
XC, what a simple world you live in.
The Quillette article popped into my Google feed this morning.
From the article:
And, later:
Sounds like the author is a terrible person, what with his desire to rebut the views of “race realists”. 🙄
I really want to read the book now.
@XC
the right to privacy (4th)
Just to be clear, the 4th guarantees you due process before the government can force you to reveal information you kept private. It is not a general right to privacy, notwithstanding some of the ridiculously argued cases based on this supposed general right to privacy. It certainly does not guarantee you the right to have you face blanked out in google streets photos of public places, for example, or some of the more ridiculous extension of this idea involving condoms and babies.
The government doesn’t give you those rights, you have them when you are born, as surely as a tribesman in the deepest part of Africa has them.
What possible basis do you have to make this claim? What is it written in some great book in the sky that you have a right to those things? You might claim that people should have these rights (if you can argue that case) but insofar as we have a “right” to anything we only have it insofar as we are able to defend that right. You might claim it is stolen if the government doesn’t defend it, but that presumes some underlying philosophical agreement that doesn’t exist.
Or TL;DR, what Perry said.
I wonder if the author of this book is aware of the little community here? The censorship issue has generated a modest amount of publicity for it. It would be good if he were to self publish it and at least sold enough copies to cover his costs. Better still if it went viral and sold millions.
Neonsnake quoted: “… a plausible case that genetic differences between the major races are unlikely to confer an advantage or a handicap for desirable personal traits; …”
Yes, I noticed that in the article, and wondered if this New Zealand prof had ever watched an NBA game, or an NFL game, or even some European soccer games. If so, would he have wondered if the ethnic backgrounds of the players reflected the statistical distribution of ethnicities in the population at large?
It is praiseworthy to not be racist and to judge people as individuals — but it is not praiseworthy deliberately to close one’s eyes to self-evident facts.
Not true all the way through. The US government indeed does not give US citizens those rights because, as the founding fathers put it,
In a pre-political “state of nature”, you theoretically have all your natural rights – there is no state or law asserting the power to violate them – but minimal practical means for securing any of them. The state is an attempt to provide the means.
To exist, a state violates your ‘natural’ rights: for example, it is a basic ‘natural’ right not just to defend yourself but to avenge yourself, to vindicate your own cause, to find and punish whoever wronged you. Almost every society replaces that basic natural right with trial by jury or some similar demand that you get other people – people who cannot know the truth of your claim with your certainty – to judge your cause, and you must submit to their decision even if you know they are wrong.
A constitution (ideally) is a design for which state-of-nature rights will be violated, the better to enforce others. (All this from – my understanding of – Burke.)
@Niall Kilmartin
In a pre-political “state of nature”, you theoretically have all your natural rights
But on what basis do you make the claim that you, even theoretically, have all your natural rights? What exactly even is a “right”? To my understanding a “right” is a claim that using violence in defense of this “right” is considered right and proper. So you have a right to to free speech, and consequently if you use force to ensure that you are not censored that that force is right an proper. And, from a different perspective, the use of force to prevent you from doing so (by for example shutting down your newspaper) is not right and proper. If you have a “right to keep and bear arms”, then the use of force to stop someone taking your guns is right and proper and using force to take someone’s weapon is not.
But, and here is the fundamental point, what is right and proper is founded on a moral code that is evolved within a society, unless you believe that Moses came down with those tablets. And, evidently, how that moral code has evolved, which is to say what is considered “right and proper” is very, very different in different times, places and with different groups. To take two extremes, adherents to the Muslim faith often believe that apostates should be executed, whereas adherents to Jainism walk about looking at their feet lest they should accidentally squish a bug.
And this is true over time two. To take Christianity… if you went into a church in Virginia three hundred years ago and asked how many though slavery was right, you’d pretty much get everyone to agree. Two hundred years ago their unanimity may have been less complete, but ask them about equality of women and even the women would agree that they were not to be trusted with full rights, and ask them fifty years ago if homosexuals should be thrown in jail you’d get a full on round of applause. Of course ask today and there’d be shuffling of feet and “love the sinner not the sin”. But the point is that the Bible changes, but even within adherents to the literaltruth of the Bible, the moral code has, and continues to evolve.
So I find this idea that I have often heard asserted that we have a “natural right” to such and such, very unconvincing. It seems to be founded on a flawed premise that what is right and wrong is universally so, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. There are surprisingly few things that everyone agrees are right or are wrong.
And I think, actually, this is at the root cause of the bifurcation of society that is so evident in the USA and in Europe (and, I suppose I should say in UK since one might not include it in “Europe”.) Many disagreements about specific policies are arguing over a detail where resolution is not possible since the fundamental moral code underlying the two interlocutors is irreconcilably different. In the USA some people thing that it is a fundamental right to own the means of self defense, and that is a right, others think that no such right exists, in fact that such a right is dangerous. When two people from these two camps start arguing about the merits of an “assault weapon” ban they are arguing over something that is utterly disconnected from the actual disagreement, which is a fundamental one of what is considered right, and therefore a “right” that can legitimately be defended, and what another denies is either right, or a right.
The framers of the US constitution stated explicitly such rights were “endowed by their creator”. I don’t see how a secular basis for inalienable rights can exist across populations with different cultural backgrounds.
I’d say there was quite a lot of basic agreement. Natural right theory tends to be very general: you can do what does not harm others, you may defend yourself from being harmed by others, that kind of thing. But it’s a centuries-old subject with a vast existing literature. I was just putting Burke’s theory of constitutional rights into the mix as information.
@Niall Kilmartin
I’d say there was quite a lot of basic agreement.
We can argue at length about whether that is true or not. But one thing is true, when people are thinking of “rights” in the context of the US Constitution (which is kind of the genesis of this particular sub thread) they deal with things about which there really is little agreement, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, right to keep and bear arms, the need for a warrant before search, limitations on the power of government to punish and so forth.
In a sense that is to be expected, you don’t need to list things people agree about, you have to assert your position on matters that are disputed. But, in a sense, that is the whole point. To argue that we have a right be keep and bear arms, or to a free press by saying they are “natural rights” is really a jejune argument, in fact, in a sense it is a circular argument.
All I am saying is that we should come to a consensus on what “rights” we think are legitimate, document them, and then allow them to change, but make it hard to change. This is what the framers of the constitution did, that is what the barons did in Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, however, the underestimated the mendacity of there future descendants in the political classes.
BTW, I have been listening recently to some lectures by the ever controversial David Starkey on the subject of Magna Carta. I highly recommend. Youtube will be your guide.
Fraser O: “… we should come to a consensus on what “rights” we think are legitimate …”
One man’s right is another man’s responsibility. There is a hypothesis that the Framers of the US Constitution talked about rights but not responsibilities because, in the more strained economic conditions of the 18th Century, it was screamingly obvious to them that they each had great & unavoidable responsibilities. Rather in the way that if we are giving road directions to someone today, we will not mention which side of the road to drive on — it is just too obvious to be worth stating.
Perhaps the statement should be expanded to read — ‘we should come to a consensus on what rights and corresponding responsibilities we think are legitimate’.
Agnostic that I am, I’ve always read this as “endowed at our creation.” Everybody had a creation, even if there’s no god. Simple basic fact as opposed to numinous-conferred privilege. I don’t care who gave it to me – I’m convinced that I do possess it, and that, if you attempt to take it away. I can justify most any reaction.
Why do I think these right exist? Because I want them, and because life would be impossible without them. So, not fully logical, but I’m claiming them anyway.
True. The Framers – the thinkers – were stating aspirational things. They were describing the society in which they wished to live, which didn’t exist anywhere else, until they made it so.
They weren’t so much describing what they saw as asserting what they wanted – and they managed to craft society-defining documents and theses that made it so.
Our country looked at those aspirations and signed on to them, and we still do so today. (Well, some of us.) No, we’re really not born with some goddess on high watching our warrant requirements – there’s no natural right to these things existing as an idealistic principle somewhere – but those requirements are central to how we wish to conduct our relationship with “government.” After all, “government” just means “all of you.” The Framers said that we have the natural right to say FO to “all of you” unless we’re hurting all of you, in which case all of you have just cause to stop us. Failing that, FO. That’s what the Framers wanted to instill. The Framers were the ultimate effective libertarians.
If people are somewhere claiming that some god announced that we should have weapons, well, ha. Didn’t happen, there are no, etc., etc. I’m not willing to live without weapons, because some of you suck. Have a problem with that? Get rid of the people who suck. Then I’ll get rid of my weapons. That’s just basic, nonnegotiable life to me.
bobby,
Shame on you! And you a lawyer, therefore an adept when it comes to logic! *g*
/Teasing bobby 😉 😀
Everyone: If life is not possible without X, then without X there is no living entity, not even the stupidest chicken.
I don’t feel up to the whole Randian lecture tonight, and I think most of here have the gist, so fear not — I shall desist.
Except to note that while the basic principle [Force, fraud, and extortion are immoral and not permitted except in defense of oneself or innocent others] is both simple and logical, just as in applied physics there are realities that are going to require riders or explications in order to approach the ideal in the real world. Reality is a messy business.
Chief among which are the existence of human insufficiencies, as of the child, the demented, the retarded, the infirm; and the corollary to the libertarian Principle that requires everybody to keep his hands off everybody else. (This is easy logic. Given that A iff B, then not-B implies not-A, and vice-versa, for all objects A,B in the set under discussion, namely the human race.)
Also, every non-trivial logical system rests on postulates, i.e. assumptions that must be accepted without proof. Political philosophy is a subset of moral philosophy, and philosophy in general must aspire to strict logicality. That’s why philosophers have so much trouble with it, and if they really don’t get the necessity for postulates, for unproven assumptions, they will end up chasing their tails.
But ethical and political philosophy are applied moral philosophy, so we who think about these things have to try to make assumptions which, though unprovable, nevertheless seem (to each of us, as individuals) to be in line with the way reality works. So we have to consider the nature of humans and what is required if they are to live, or to live well, or to live in society.
To this extent, then, ethical and political philosophy are empirical in that they have have to take into account what has happened to other people and peoples who live according to various rules of behaviour.
Frankly, to some of us it seems blindingly obvious that absolute slavery, chattel slavery, is morally wrong, even if there are cases where the enslaved are better off than they would be otherwise. From this, the libertarian Principle in itself, as the ideal, is a no-brainer.
@Eric
The framers of the US constitution stated explicitly such rights were “endowed by their creator”. I don’t see how a secular basis for inalienable rights can exist across populations with different cultural backgrounds.
A “right” is essentially a moral claim, as I argue above. So your question in a sense translates into “I don’t see how a secular basis for morality exists”. And this is a common claim in favor of religion. But it is a bogus claim. Morality, all morality including those of the religious, derives by an evolutionary process as ideas are refined, manipulations made, stupidity tossed out (and occasionally stupidity tossed in) to form a set of moral principles that society agrees to. Or somewhat agrees to. What that set of principles is is constantly changing as I described above.
Moral principles don’t come down from on high, they are decided and agreed upon by common consent and refined by an evolutionary process. and so “rights” are similarly just what we agree upon by common consent. A bill or rights is a codification of core principles that is designed in such a way to change slowly so that the immediate issues of the day do not overwhelm the bigger underlying principles we all agree to.
Fraser Orr
This. The easiest way to test if something fits the category of right or just a privilege of a modern society is to ask “Are there circumstances which you would be prepared to kill or die defending this?”. So when someone says free healthcare is a right, ask “If a doctor refused to help you without recompense, would it be reasonable to put a gun to his head and force him?” Of course the answer is no, therefore not a right.
I notice that the title of the Quillette piece has now been changed to “My Book Defending Free Speech Has Been Pulled”.
As you note, this is what the US founders did. It chimes perfectly with Burke’s analysis. From a larger set of ‘natural’ rights (some potentially controversial), a subset is selected, formalised and documented as matters to be enforced as explicit rights of civil society. What sort of happened indirectly over a long time in e.g. the UK’s precedent constitution (‘le plebiscite de tous les jours’ as one theorist put it – ‘the referendum of our nation’s past’ as one might translate it) happened as a wholly conscious act in the full light of historical time in the US.
Burke pointed out that the act of selecting some natural rights to become rights of civil society necessarily rejects others. Gavin’s point abut rights entailing responsibilities is relevant (Gavin Longmuir, September 26, 2019 at 2:07 am). For example, my right to trial by jury is my responsibility to endure wrongful conviction by jury. I can appeal, investigate bias or bribery, etc., but if at the end of the day the judge, jury and prosecutor simply got it honestly wrong then I have no civil right to imitate Russel Crowe in “The Next Three Days” when he breaks his innocent wife out of the prison to which the honestly-mistaken system has sent her, though that would be my natural right in state-of-nature theory.
This relates to the discussion between Eric and Fraser Orr above. When Robespierre inaugurated the ‘cult of the supreme being’ (on the day when “the god of the philosophers decided to disclose himself in the guise of a circus clown”), the reason he endured the silent ridicule was not just his notorious lack of a sense of humour but his desperate need, not for a god, but for a ‘divine legislator’ who would justify his postulates. This need did not come from politics – he could just guillotine objectors – but from his movement’s philosophical logic.
I am divinely inspired to predict that however firmly Fraser, Eric or anyone asserts this is a solved problem, debate will continue – though maybe not for long in this thread, to which it is somewhat tangential. 🙂
I think this discussion is missing the real point – Emerald did this to ensure their heads remained attached to the rest of their body.
That is the problem, it is not free speech or equality before the law, per se, it is a simple reluctance of government and social organisations to protect free speech and enforce laws, even to the point they purposely refrain from doing this in order to keep their own heads attached as well.
The lamb has yet to acquire it’s machine gun in the lunch debate.
Fraser Orr, we are in agreement. The point wasn’t that you can’t have morality without God. It’s that you can’t have inalienable rights across cultures without God. Or even fixed throughout time. Without a holy book to anchor morality, it is whatever the local society says it is at the time.
The disagreement was with XC’s contention tribesmen in the deepest parts of Africa had the same rights as people in the US by virtue of being human. It’s only true if you believe, as the framers of the US constitution believed, rights are endowed by your creator.
“The point wasn’t that you can’t have morality without God. It’s that you can’t have inalienable rights across cultures without God.”
Which God?
You can’t ‘have God’ across different cultures. One culture believes in one God, granting one set of inalienable rights. Another culture has a different God, granting different rights. Each culture grants its own set of inalienable rights (or not) to all other cultures. There’s no problem at all in any culture, with or without a God, granting inalienable rights to all. But the problem with cultures disagreeing over which rights is the same problem as cultures disagreeing over which God. Introducing God into the picture doesn’t make the rights question any easier – it just doubles the number of things we can disagree on.
Tribesmen in the deepest part of Africa have the same rights as people in the US because we choose to grant them, to say so. But they have those rights only according to us. According to their own tribal elders, and their own tribal religion, they have different rights. Each tribe considers themselves and their own view to be right and all the others to be wrong, as much on God as on rights. There is nothing universal about God or religion. But that doesn’t contradict one of those many non-universal beliefs being a belief in a universal God. Universal rights with no God work the same way.
Niall Kilmartin
For example, my right to trial by jury is my responsibility to endure wrongful conviction by jury.
So I think it is important to distinguish something like the right to trial by jury from something like the right to free speech. The later is a restriction on what the government may do, and the former an obligation on what the government must do (before they take some sort of punitive action against you.) To me, these two things are so different I think it is misleading to use the word “right” to refer to both.
In a sense, rights like “trial by jury” are most strictly a part of a Constitution – that is to say a document describing how the country works, how the government interacts with its citizens, how the government imposes some degree of order on anarchy. So “trial by jury” is part of a judicial process whereby the government can impose its will on you. A true “bill of rights” is rather different in that it is what the government cannot do.
Of course they all share some features, namely that they are a moral claim, and in that sense they are different than mechanistic parts of a Constitution, like the number of senators, or how impeachment works. But I do think it is an important difference. And it is why, BTW that I reject Bobby B’s assertion that the government is the people. Much as that sounds very nice, it isn’t. It is a small group who have have a moral claim to enforce their will on the rest of us to some limited extent.
I am divinely inspired to predict that however firmly Fraser, Eric or anyone asserts this is a solved problem
FWIW, I most certainly don’t think it is a solved problem. On the contrary, as I have said several times, morality and claims of moral right, are absolutely an evolutionary process. That which we think perfectly legitimate today may be as abhorrent as slavery to future generations. (The treatment of animals being a very obvious candidate for such a thing, even though I am not an adherent to that point of view.)
@Eric
Fraser Orr, we are in agreement. The point wasn’t that you can’t have morality without God. It’s that you can’t have inalienable rights across cultures without God. Or even fixed throughout time. Without a holy book to anchor morality, it is whatever the local society says it is at the time.
But I think that is just plain wrong. Much as our religious friends might claim that morality comes from their holy book that is self evidently not true. The morality in that holy book is always shaped and filtered by the evolved secular moral principles of the day. The ancients may well have thought that a daughter found not “virgo intacta” on her wedding night was deserving of stoning on her father’s door step, but most likely in more recent centuries this situation evolved so that instead she was just divorced, and later she was just considered a bad person wearing a scarlet letter, then later just a bad person unwelcome in polite company and so forth until today, even within the church, she is seen more as an empowered modern woman who always has the option to revirginize.
The Biblical views on this are simply reinterpreted based on the prevailing secular views of the time. And I suppose even the gross unfairness that these laws only applied to women has thankfully also been equalized by this ongoing evolved secular moral code which forced many of the gross unfairness of the raw unfiltered Bible to be cleaned up with a modern patina of respectability.
And of course I don’t mean to pick just on the Christian Bible, the same is true of pretty much all moral codes that have survived from ancient times to be taken seriously today.
OK, there you go, I have successfully disagreed with everyone…. Except Julie of course. I always agree with Julie…. 🙂
Fraser … *giggle*
Me too!
I do not at first glance see so great a difference. Both are restrictions on government: that they may not punish my speech without first showing that it was a “clear and present danger” or “fighting words” (maybe in the US Supreme Court, without a jury); that they may not punish me for other offences without first trying me in an appropriate fashion.
It was precisely that claim that I was ‘divinely inspired to predict’ will continue to be a point of dissent. 🙂
Oh, lordy. No, I didn’t think it was “nice.”
Communism doesn’t work because people – humans – aren’t nice. Free markets work because they set us off against each other in pursuit of our own self-satisfactions. We’re essentially self-absorbed and selfish beings.
I do think that we are our government, but that isn’t a joyful ode to us. We get the government that we deserve, and, woe to us, that government is . . . us.
And I, personally, individually, can get into government and change it. It’s not sealed off to me, it isn’t inhabited by higher beings or more privileged people.
But, by the very nature of both government and humans, it’s easiest and most natural, once I’m in government, to make changes that make life better for ME.
So, maybe instead of saying that “government is the people”, I ought to be saying “sadly, government is the people.”
I’m calling bullshit on you here, brother.
😉
You’re not a selfish and self absorbed being for wanting the best for your son.
You Yanks, you have this thing – the pursuit of happiness.
What a pure thing! It shortcuts discussions of equality (Julie – jump in here 😉 )
It’s admirable, to me, as a Brit.
Equality: Bingo, neon! 😀
Sure I am.
MY son. Not “his son”, or “your son.” Mine.
Heck, Ayn Rand does a whole chapter on this. When the day arrives when I sacrifice MY son’s welfare for someone else’s son, I will no longer be selfish. Which would be bad, because selfishness is a virtue.
Selfishness is what drives us to attain, to accomplish. We can also act for others’ benefit, but we must retain that essential nugget of selfishness, or we die.
(P.S. – “You Yanks, you have this thing – the pursuit of happiness. . . It’s admirable, to me, as a Brit.” – Note that the P. of H. was derived from the Magna Carta.)
I’ve been feeling a bit smug as an American with you Brits with your hate speech laws and restrictions on books and so forth. See, I thought, at least in one respect the USA is better than the UK. Then I read this:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-york-city-250g-illegal-alien-immigration
New York City has indicated that you can be fined up to quarter of a million dollars for calling someone an “illegal alien” or “threatening to call ICE”. I find it impossible to believe that that would actually pass a court challenge, but who knows today? One more reason to never go to New York City.
Since the term “illegal alien” is actually the term of art in the federal statutes, I am wondering how exactly the courts are going to work if quoting statute law is a “hate crime”.
Fraser: The Great Frog knows…. *ominous laughter*
.
P.S. A bunch of the old The Shadow radio shows are still available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUK7vo92qUU&list=PLPuoJYDB2zqHvxCRKrEYE_53Nle9okozN
The issue I have with the word “selfishness” is the standard and obvious one – “everyone else” uses it in a different way to “us”. It’s my PR thing again.
I know that when you say you want the best for your son, you don’t mean “at the expense of someone else’s son”. Even if there’s a particular instance where it might be argued to be at someone else’s expense (if he outbids me on a house, he gets something that I now can’t have), we are fine because “there is enough, and as good, left in common for others” (a proviso that is hardly ever mentioned, but I think should be more often).
What I think you believe in, and have presumably taught your son, isn’t selfishness (as others would use the word), but self-respect, and yes, pride in oneself. I’m sure enough people have made the argument that a person who doesn’t respect their own self cannot be expected to have the capacity to respect others that I won’t go into detail myself.
There’s an enormous emotive difference between this phrase:
“I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” (Christopher Hitchens, talking of libertarians)
and
“I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans should have more respect for their self”
In the first, we’re immediately into “No. Well, yes, kinda. Depends on your definition; look, let me explain”.
Our “selfishness” is not the grasping, thieving “I want it, so I will take it from you” selfishness that is common. It’s the “I want this, or I want to do this.
“And as it happens, the method by which I intend to get or do it – spending my hard-earned money on it, or exercising my freedom to do it – should also be available to you, and also it should ensure that there is enough for us both.”
Partially, yes, but not completely. Part of it does in fact stem directly from “I’m going to do what is best for me and mine.” To that extent, it is the common conception of “selfishness.”
Look to what Adam Smith said in his “Wealth Of Nations”:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
The butcher doesn’t carve and sell nice steaks because he wants the rest of us to experience good food. He does it for his own financial gain. Happily for us, a byproduct of his selfishness is that we get to experience good food. But that wasn’t his motivation. His motivation was his own self-interest.
And the result of lots of selfish people acting in honest and nonviolent ways is . . . trade and prosperity.
Neonsnake: “… and also it should ensure that there is enough for us both.”
I am with you up until that last statement. What realistic mechanism could ever ensure that there would necessarily be enough for us both?
In the dusty corners of You Tube, there is a 1960s song by Marcie Blane, where she sings “I want to be Bobby’s girl …”
But there is only one Bobby. If Marcie gets Bobby, other girls have to do without.
This seems to bring us back to the old debate about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Every girl should have the opportunity to capture Bobby’s heart — but ‘There can only be One’, as the movie said. 🙂
Well, I think I’ll just lift in toto a comment from thenewneo.com.
I know that bobby will locate the origin of the second paragraph in the same place I do, and I think neon also, as he obviously gets the point about the conventional meaning of “selfish” as “thoughtless of others,” “looking out for #1,” and Miss R.’s “selfish” as meaning “concerned centrally with living as neither prey nor predator, [so as to maximize one’s well-being in the most important sense].” (With apologies to Miss R. if she wouldn’t go along with that. — I think maybe below this, I’ll send along my comment that I left in response to commenter Les’s comment.)
The whole comment is beneath the ***s. The quote is from the article “Leninthink” by Gary Morson, at
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink .
You can find the quote in Mr. Morson’s piece by searching for the string my detractors claim [no period].
The part the commenter quotes is in blockquotes here.
*********
Les on September 28, 2019 at 8:39 pm said:
I disagree with this one piece.
[But] morality stems from man’s nature. Man’s nature is in essence that of a rational being. His rationality is the weapon which enables him to survive. It enables him to create tools, to build, and to cooperate with others to build even larger or to exchange for something he needs or wants. In order for this to occur he must recognize that what he builds is his property and not something that should be taken by others. If one does not have the right to his own property then one is a slave. Thus this is the basis of morality. To say morality begins with 2 is then immoral.
. . . .
Now I see Gavin’s comment, with which I agree, as do quite a few other notable libertarians, such as Profs. Epstein and (I think) Barnett.
It’s a matter of manners, not morality, not to take the last shrimp in the serving bowl until the others there have told you to go ahead. Boorishness, not unethicality. On the other hand, I think bobby’s wife isn’t at all boorish if she fails to ask the other girls if they want bobby before saying “I do.” :>)
Yes, neon & Gavin, we’ll have to get to equality…..
*gets round in*
Agreed.
(I’m just throwing ideas around)
I’m that butcher. I work bloody hard as a Trading Manager to earn as much money for “me and mine” as possible.
*Shakes pack of ciggies*
Fag?
(*Smirk*)
That sentence there. That’s why I don’t think we’re selfish, in the common sense.
It’s because we know that. We know that if you “lawyer” as hard as you can, and I “buy” or “trade” as hard as I can, then we’re not just benefitting ourselves. We’re benefitting everyone.
We enable trade and prosperity.
I’ve been putting some thought into what you said the other day – that we can just remove ourselves from the argument if we wanted, because of our stage of life. Why don’t we?
We could be selfish assholes. We could take from others for our own benefit, and yet we don’t. We continue to argue for liberty, for the benefit of others. Sure, I don’t have kids, and probably never will now, but I have nieces and nephews.
I spend a lot of time trying to work out how to show people that we’re not the bad guys.
In the US, you’ve said that Libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke pot, right?
Here, Libertarians are guys (and gals) who are more heartless than the Conservative government.
To the extent that I’ve seen Conservatives say “I’m Conservative, not Libertarian”, meaning or implying that they’re not totally heartless (like us!)
FFS, right?
Are we the bad guys?
Obviously (!) not.
I spend a lot of time trying to convert yer “left” to our cause. I have an amount of success, since we have the same goals. Just not the same method.
We have to be better at arguing our cause, because we’re losing. We must (must!) stop with arguing for free speech without making it clear that we “despise” what they’re saying. We must stop with bashing the woke. Immediately, or we lose in the marketplace of ideas.
We’re shooting ourselves in the foot, very badly indeed.
*Pours beer*
Not easy. But necessary.
Now from me in response to Les, at
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/09/28/leninthink/#comment-2457273 .
I don’t claim that this is entirely thought out and completely bug-free, but it’s my working idea all the same, and has been for a long time. My idea is that any organism has an impulse for life according to its kind, including the human being, and that the healthy organism is best suited to maximize its kind of life. So that in the last analysis, (human) morality exists in service of the individual’s human health, physical and also mental/emotional/psychological.
In this observation, I give extra attention to the need for other humans. Reason, in the fullest sense, demands that we pay attention to this need, as it is an important fact of life.
******
My own conception of the foundation of morality is that it is health, the ideal health of each individual, which demands that he acknowledge and act upon reason in order to further his own health, and which also demands that he acknowledge and act in concordance with the point that [commenter] sdferr makes [just after Les, as above]:
We need each other not only as partners in achieving goals and in trade, but simply as other human beings. (Of course this need is stronger in some, less strong in others, and when it’s lacking or nearly lacking in someone he is a sociopath, not in good health.) Even those of us who are to some extent loners need companionship, or at least the hope for it and the promise of it, to live life at its fullest, unless experience has taught us that other humans are utterly untrustworthy and best avoided. We are indeed social animals, in that sense.
So in a nutshell, what is moral is what is most healthy for the individual, given his individual nature and his circumstances. But this concept of health is of ideal health, not the unhealthy taking from others by force what one sees as the route to the advancement of his own health. That route requires him to be untrue to his own nature as a human, and so in fact it undermines his own health and thus his own ability to function and to take care of himself by himself at need.
[There are indeed situations where the most moral thing to do is to hang it up, in the last analysis because the pain of continued life would be more than the person can bear. The famous example: John Galt was prepared to die rather than live at the expense of Dagny’s life, and many come to prefer death to continuing to live in neverending excruciating pain.]
Perhaps it’s overkill, but while “no man is an island” in some respects, in others every man is an island, and needs the experience of not being alone.
Each of us needs to know he is not an individual freak of nature but rather that there are others out there who are “just like him” in the important sense that there are others who are human, just like him in their basic nature — even if we rarely associate with them.
Please can we.
It’s really important.
(I came to Ayn Rand late. By the time I knew who she was, she wasn’t saying anything new to me, from my Daoism. I’ve listened to Atlas Shrugged on Audible and read a few bits here and there. I don’t consider myself a scholar of Rand, at all)
Gavin – I’m probably ridiculously strict about equality of opportunity. To the point of silliness, maybe, and this what I want the opportunity to put out there and test.
Equality of outcome?
Let me say this: “It’s a bug, not a feature.”
And let’s all see how people react to that statement.
😉
Julie, you said this.
That is the “selfishness” that others talk about.
We know – and we do! -that that’s not what bobby means. But we have to recognise, if we want to persuade people, that thats what they mean.
Because we are not the bad guys.
Julie, I read Morson’s essay, and it baffles me that people don’t seem to perceive the parallels between today’s progressivism and Leninism.
It was a depressing read. But very good.
We need to understand that, definitely, or we’re screwed.
Question (straight) – what’s your thoughts on that?
Well, I wish one of the posters would write something on the topic so we wouldn’t have to go O/T. But speaking strictly and only of “equality of financial outcome,” at every income level many guys have had it, except perhaps for Mr. Bezos or Mr. Gates or Mr. Slim (I lose track), but there’s always at least some sense of “equality of opportunity” which mostly didn’t exist among them.
A and B might have “equality of outcome” in some sense — equal wealth or lack of it, ~ equal state of health, ~ equal happiness or satisfaction in life, equally lovely or shrewish wives or handsome or brutish husbands, equally wonderful or horrible children … and enjoy completely unequal outcomes in one of these or many other senses.
And the same for “equality of opportunity,” except that the variables are even messier to deal with there.
There are an awful lot of senses of “equality,” and my gripe is precisely that people throw this term around without considering, or without explaining, in exactly what sense they mean it.
Anyway, when we say “equal” in a political discussion, we ought to mean equality before the law, in that one’s status or finances or race ought to have nothing to do with one’s treatment under the law.
Rest of the last hour’s writing deleted … for now.
Re: Gary Saul Morson’s article “Leninthink” in the New Criterion —
Surely the non-depressing aspect of this article is that Lenin and his acolytes failed? They had their day in the sun, made themselves happy while making a lot of other people miserable, and now they are gone and what they tried to build has collapsed. Outside of the usual suspects in academia with their snouts firmly stuck in the taxpayer’s trough, the mere mention of the name ‘Lenin’ is an eye-rolling conversation killer.
This is what can make us be optimistic about the long term — no matter how rocky the road will be in the near-term. Bad ideas, like Leninthink, are like bad mutations — Darwin takes care of them. Certainly, the Authoritarianism of which Leninism was merely one expression has recurred again and again, from pre-history to the present day. But in the long run, that Authoritarianism always fails, and the human race moves forwards.
The old saying … “This too shall pass.”
True, Gavin, and cause for hope. 🙂
I just hope it will pass before I check out, so I won’t have to worry about the Young Miss (or the state of my IRA!).
Julie: “Anyway, when we say “equal” in a political discussion, we ought to mean equality before the law, in that one’s status or finances or race ought to have nothing to do with one’s treatment under the law.”
Alas! It seems we can never get away from the topic of Hillary Clinton! 😛
😆
When I was 13, I inexplicably became absorbed in old Russian writers – Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, et. al – and moved to younger ones – early Rand, etc. – and into the 60’s Solzhenitsyn genre. I didn’t go there for the politics – it was simply for the read, the story. Those people could develop characters like nobody’s business.
But you can’t read those works and not get a sense of the Revolutions, and of the forces behind and against them. From that reading, I developed an abiding hatred for the brutalism that informed the 1916 Reds.
And that same brutalism – that belief that, if millions of people stand in your way, you should wipe them out for the sake of humanity – became the driving force for each and every advancement of Communism in history. We got Mao, we got Pol Pot, we got many smaller efforts that were just as brutal . . .
And the progressives of today strike me – in attitude and beliefs – as mirrors of the cliques of young Party enthusiasts who fill the pages of the books set in early 1900’s Russia. They have the cold, implacable, inhuman devotion to the cause that leaves them amoral but for the morality of winning. They look like Pol Pot’s early supporters. They act like Mao’s Red Guards. So far, they’ve reached the “destroy them” stage. The “kill them” stage can’t be far behind.
And I see the same types of people now as then who insist on fighting them half-assedly, preserving their own “honor” by being nice and polite and “moral”, on repeating the strategy and tactics of those in the past who all lost and were killed, and they seem to me to be losing again now.
And I’m committed to not making their mistakes, which is why I say we ought to be imposing their idiotic rules against them until they stop imposing them on us. All of the Russian Whites who fought back “with honor, not sinking to their level”, now lie in mass graves. All of the Cambodians who argued politely with Pol Pot’s spokespeople now make up huge mounds of skulls. The targets of the Red Guards – too polite and sophisticated to fight when the Guards showed up at their doors – well, they’re not even named in history anymore, so complete was their annihilation.
It’s not worth my sense of propriety to let them win again. “Honor” isn’t the same as “propriety.” Think of the hundreds of millions of people who wouldn’t have been murdered had someone simply killed Lenin or his base at an early point. I think that you could find honor in such a move, and so there’s no question for me that there’s honor in punishing Trudeau for wearing blackface.
Didn’t I read somewhere that Corbyn has an actual shot at running England? That Warren has a shot at running the US? Heck, the only place where Communists aren’t in the running seems to be Russia.
But then, they know better.
There is a long-time commenter on thenewneo.com, of Latvian extraction, who is convinced that we misunderstand Lenin, the Communists, and our own present political situation; and that we have been wildly misinformed on WW II and on the Bolsheviks and the U.S.S.R.
He’s autistic and maybe has Asperger’s (not sure about that), and is also talented in math and physics and works mostly on software. –All this he has said himself. He’s hard to read and can be quite long-winded (while being cryptic, at least to me), as in the present case. But he’s often very, very interesting and at least seems knowledgeable — as in the present case.
He has a lot to say about Lenin and the Social Democrats then and now, and he starts by saying,
and proceeds through several comments to discuss Lenin and the S.D.s. If people can get past the writing style (such as it is), we might find it interesting. I haven’t read it carefully yet, but he does quote a pamphlet from marxism.org — link in the comment.
Personally, I think it’s worth checking out.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/09/28/leninthink/#comment-2457301
Bobby: “But then, they [Russians] know better [about Communism].”
Struggles are multi-generational. Communism in the USSR lasted for ~70 years — 3 generations. And now it is gone.
In the West, we have our own multi-generational struggle ahead. As you noted before, our problem starts in grade school. It will take a long time to correct the evil situations we have allowed to develop. You and I will probably not live long enough to see the dawn. But we should take heart knowing that the dawn will eventually come, and Authoritarianism will ultimately collapse from its own internal contradictions.
It would be nice to win some battles — but smile knowing that your descendants will win the war.
The free market.
In the example of the house, the market notes that bobby b Jr outbid me on house a, realises that I am also in need of a house (because two people bidding pushed the price up), and promptly builds another house.
Assuming of course, that they aren’t regulated out of doing so.
Apologies for a late reply, but I needed a couple of days to think this through.
My initial reaction was “I agree with all of that.”
A few days later, I still agree with all of it. I’ve tried to test it from different angles, and I still feel the same 🙂
The fact that we’re 60-40 in opposite directions (right vs left), I don’t think it’s important. I’m 40% with you, you’re 40% with me. We’re both against bullies and authoritarians. Maybe it would be different if we were 10/90, but we’re not. We’re 40/60.
Whatever tactics you’re prepared to use, I think I’m prepared the same.
I hate to even bring this up, especially as I have long considered myself pretty hard-core when it comes to libertarianism. But …
IMO there are no Silver Bullets. Not in systems of governance and not in economic systems.
The genuinely free market has at least some of the same failings as democracy, whether direct or representative.
Each of us votes with his dollars (or £, heh-heh) for what he wants. If there aren’t enough of these flowing into the bowl marked “thin-walled juice tomatoes,” then those of us who aren’t in a position to grow our own will just have to do without. (Unless bobby’s Hutterites grow them, of course.)
And if there’s nobody around to build neon a house where he wants it, willing and able to do the job to his satisfaction, at a price he can afford or at any rate is willing to pay, then the free market is specifically not providing it.
There may or may not be enough profit in producing medicine or medical device X for anyone to be interested in doing so. Or in doing so at the present time, for any given “present time.”
The free market is a wonderful thing, in that it can provide so much that is beneficial or just plain fun in the eyes of most people, at a price they can manage to pay.
But never in the eyes of everyone. So much for Pareto’s “If no one is worse off and at least one person is better off.”
The ultimate argument for the free market is thus moral, so that individuals and groups are free to trade or not subject only to normal illegality of force and fraud in trading, and to what the individuals or groups believe is in their own best interest. But that is not always going to serve everyone’s survival needs, let alone everyone’s wants, and not even his more important (to him) wants.
It does help that in a free society humans are free to be charitable when so moved, and that in the UK and US and Europe and, I think, elsewhere as well, real, unforced (private) charity has done a lot to take care of needs and also, to some extent, wants.
It is certainly true that a free market can potentially do a whole lot better than our current somewhat-free economies do. If we didn’t have to burn food for fuel, or subsidize wind farms, etc., ad infinitum.
I’ve always been dead against anti-drug laws. But there’s no denying that in the U.S. at least, drug abuse has a terrible downside for many people who would never use nor sell “recreational” drugs including, sometimes, alcohol. I always thought that most of the negative externalities would disappear if all drugs were decriminalized, and perhaps they would — but I’m no longer so sure. Yet prohibiting sale of certain drugs is certainly an infringement on the free market.
. . .
More than ever … Life is a balancing act, and the thing requires judgment. Everything Has a Downside™. The best we can do is try to minimize those.
Now I think I will go to my lonely room 😥 and sulk, accompanied by about six bottles of hi-test brandy or Jim Beam.
Not by me.
That may be worth nothing to you 🙂
It may be worth something.
I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.
But I’d rather hear the stuff you’re not sure of, and need to discuss.
*Shrugs*
Meanwhile, find yourself in the UK, hit me up and we’ll go out for a gig and a drink.
🙂
neon, I’d love to. :>))
But the stores are currently pushing overcoats, not bikinis, so the swim will have to wait till next summer. 😆 😆 😆
.
As for the Free Market, I’m definitely in favor of it. First and foremost, on the moral argument. (Men s/b free, insofar as that is logically possible — “A keeps his hands off B and his stuff, for all A and B.”)
But I cannot possibly imagine an economic system that works as well as the free market to serve individuals’ needs and wants. At least, not in a society in which most people are equipped to make their own decisions about what they need and want and what they’re prepared to trade in order to satisfy these. And, of course, fraud, force and coercion must be outlawed (as best we can) in the free market just as in the rest of the free society.
It’s just that I feel the need to remember that the Free Market will never provide everyone with everything he needs or desires, and make everyone’s children (and other circumstances) well above average. For the same reasons that not even a true Republic in the classical sense is going to satisfy everyone’s wishes.
The vote and the money both go where people are willing to put them. And the Market, like politics, does put a lot of junk out there. Caveat emptor, of course, but the seller does have a responsibility not to make — or imply ??? but that is a very tricky thing to try to define — false claims.
[‘With our wonderful new invention, which we call the “umbrella,” you can walk in the rain without getting wet.’ –And so you can, sometimes. The ad doesn’t say “always walk….” But does it imply “always”?]
So I took a break from cheerleading in order to remind us all that there’s no such thing as a silver stake.
.
But now, I’ll return to my regular programming. Yes, the free market is (insofar as it exists) a marvellous thing, not only for the obvious reasons (“win-win,” but with some deeper considerations about that in order; and more!), but for the sheer sense of freedom appropriate to and actually, I think, psychologically needed by human beings.
In the Free Market, there’s no absolute requirement that anybody do anything just because some yay-hoo claims mastery over other people’s self-determination. The Free Market is absolutely anti-slavery in the serious sense of “slavery.” And that’s the moral argument.
Here endeth. 😀
.
P.S. BUT … For another time.
Julie: “… there’s no such thing as a silver stake.”
Since we are talking about the free market and bureaucracy, can I tell you my “silver bullet” story? Can you stop me? 🙂
Thanks to the free market, it is possible to buy silver bullets. An entrepreneur casts 1 oz of solid silver into the shape of a bullet & cartridge, and sells them for a premium over the price of silver. Neat! As it happened, I was working on a project where the team was desperately searching for a “silver bullet” to solve a complex problem. So naturally, I bought a handful of the entrepreneur’s solid silver bullets with the intent of handing them out to team members when they came up with bright ideas. Anything to boost morale! I put these in my computer bag and headed to the airport.
Free market good! Now for the bureaucracy part of the tale.
As expected, the X-ray machine at the airport caught the fact that I was carrying bullet-shaped metallic objects, bringing down the close scrutiny of the Thousands Standing Around. When I showed the silver bullets to the young male TSA agent, he got really excited. “Wow! These are great! My girlfriend would love these! Where did you get them?”. We chatted for a while, and almost became buddies.
Eventually, I pointed out to the TSA agent that, as he could see, the silver “bullets” were non-explosive, no different from a silver coin, and totally non-threatening. I asked if I could take them on to the plane. The bureaucrat said “No!”.
Gavin,
1. Thank heavens I changed my metaphor from the silver bullet to the silver stake! 😆
2. Your story leaves my Inner Critic snoozing peacefully in Dreamland, where no one ever makes a mistake (wish it would take me with it sometime!) but wakens my Inner (and sometimes Outer) Toddler: “More story! More story!” :>))
3. That is indeed a great story, almost all of it. Most of it has me smiling, cheering, and happy. Even the ending isn’t entirely a Downer, in that I can’t help wondering if the poor guy had for work-related reasons to display his Outer Bureaucrat instead of his preferred Inner Fun, Good-natured, Downright Sensible young lad.
Maybe your company could hire him to work on your team.
Thanks! 😀
Julie near Chicago (October 2, 2019 at 1:53 am), your comment no more tells against your claim to be a hardcore libertarian than it would Hayek’s. From memory (probably not word perfect):
All statist arrangements against the free market do make the (inevitably overall yet more unjust) distribution the result of conscious intent – and therefore are unjust.
Analogously, C.S.Lewis was no enemy of democracy when he warned against claiming that the public were competent to run public affairs. (Again, quoting from memory):
adding that he realised the incompetence of voters not by looking at others but merely by examining his own character and abilities. His reasons for favouring democracy resemble his reasons for condemning slavery. He quotes Aristotle’s belief that some men are fit only to be slaves (“Some men have slave-like souls”) and explains that he does not disagree, yet differs from Aristotle’s conclusion because his Christian faith tells him that no men are fit to be masters – that Aristotle’s gravest error was about himself more than his servants.
Likewise, today’s PC ‘elite’ use such wild propaganda (e.g. project fear, every single Leave voter being ‘deep down’ a racist, etc.) that they are often wrong about us and about things in general, but their most serious error is about themselves.
““If the free market’s distribution of wealth were the result of conscious intent then it would have to be seen as in many cases unjust.””
I think Hayek’s idea was that the free market’s distribution of wealth simply reflects nature’s distribution of talent. Is it “just” that some people are cleverer than others. Certainly if you deliberately caused someone a brain injury to make them less intelligent, that would be seen as severely morally wrong. But if someone is less intelligent by accident of nature, is that ‘unjust’? Hayek’s argument was that the market was more like a force of nature. Nobody is making decisions to deliberately deal out such damage. The damage is pre-existing, in people’s different productive abilities, and the market doesn’t (and can’t) change that.
Justice says that you should get what you earn. If one person does all the work, but ten people share the fruits of that work equally, that’s not fair. If you want equality of outcome to be just, then you need equality of production too. But the counter-argument goes that the nine people who do no work do so not out of their own choice or their own actions, but because they are by birth or environment rendered incapable of production. They have done nothing wrong to deserve this lack of talent, so it would be unjust to make them pay a penalty for it.
However, redistribution of wealth does nothing to remove this injustice from society, it simply redistributes it. The total amount of injustice is the same. We have just transferred it to the people who can produce, and are now made to do so without recompense. The free market makes no new injustice – but it refuses to simply redistribute it upon the shoulders of other people who have done nothing to deserve it either.
By contrast, I would argue that the free market is (within its own domain) just, but it is not merciful. These are different virtues. And I’m not going to say the virtue of mercy doesn’t have any value – it has clearly always been one of the classics of human morality. But it confuses the debate to mix up the two. Justice means you get what you done something to deserve. Mercy means you get what you have done nothing to deserve but which you desperately need. Welfare and wealth redistribution are motivated primarily by mercy. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But it does mean it’s a different debate.
Chuang-Tzu came to the same conclusion re. Nature and free markets. Nature is not merciful, but it works – on the whole.
To return to the example of the house that I want to buy, but the market isn’t providing: I have some choices, still.
I downsize my wants to, say, a tent. As an occasional devotee of Transcendentalism, I’m okay with that.
I build my own house.
I take a house, provided by the state.
I’m actually prevented from doing the first two, easily, by various regulations. Not impossible, but it’s difficult.
We can disagree here, but I think the idea that I’m prevented from the first two, and forced into the third, is outrageous.
I believe Nozick says similar?
I’ve read about Nozick, but never properly read him, so am open to a counter argument of “yes, but” that provides more context than I have at present.
Currently, I believe that everything I have supports a (limited) amount of welfare state.
No, he’s making a stronger statement than that, I think. Nature’s distribution of talent may bring wealth but so may nature’s distribution of blind luck – a chance meeting, a lottery win, being born here, not there, etc. Hayek is no social darwinist to think that those who prosper are society’s fittest in any but a statistical sense.
In modern Britain J.R.R. Tolkien would be excluded from mainstream publishers and so on – and certainly from academic life.
Tolkien was a traditional Christian – his opinions on sexuality and (even more) on abortion, would make him unacceptable in modern Britain. He certainly would not have a position in Oxford – other than as cleaner or a security guard.
Ironically Islam has the same opinions on sexuality and abortion – but Islam gets a pass.
This is because the “liberal” elite who control modern Britain (and just about every other Western nation – including much of the institutions of the United States) are total hypocrites.
If a Christian says, for example, that homosexual acts are morally wrong – they will be shouted down and dismissed from any position of importance that they hold. But if Islam says (and it does say) “kill the one who does it and the one to whom it is done” (Muhammed – claiming to speak the orders of God) then it gets a total pass – indeed no one is allowed to condemn Islam.
Ditto on the rights of women and-so-on.
The hypocrisy of the “liberal” establishment is total and absolute – but they avoid having this hypocrisy exposed by using CENSORSHIP.
Tolkien based his “Dwarves”, in part, on his perception of Jews – even the language of the Dwarves is taken from Hebrew.
Dwarves are not presented as angels – some are “tricksy and pretty bad lots” and some “are not”, generally Dwarves are “calculating folk – with a great idea of the value of money”, but they are also great craftsmen and profound thinkers.
Dwarves may be physically unlovely – but they are sincere lovers of beauty, and feel almost uncontrollable sadness when they know that something (or someone) beautiful is going to be destroyed, or has been destroyed. For Dwarves (unlike Elves) do not think that memory or dreams are the same as the real world, for the Dwarves what is REAL (what actually exists) is what matters – and memory that it used to exist (but is now destroyed) is no real comfort for the Dwarves. On the contrary – the memory of what was once wonderful, but is now destroyed, burns like a fire in the hearts of the Dwarves.
And to insult a friend (especially a friend who is NOT a Dwarf) is, to the Dwarves, far worse than a personal insult directed against themselves – if a friend is not present and is insulted, they must rebuke the insult (regardless of odds or consequences).
For good or ill, the desire to take revenge (or do justice) for past wrongs, and to take back (at whatever cost) the sacred places that were stolen from them, is strong in the Dwarves – even at the cost of their own lives. For they will fight to the bitter end – if bitter it must be. For things far more important to them than money.
In many dark places in the world the Dwarves have brought the sudden light of shining steel and the cry of “Axes of the Dwarves! – The Dwarves are upon you!” regardless of the odds against them.