Samizdata

Antoine totally missed my point, and bounced the point that I did make back at me as if I thought the opposite of it. Those mixed married people weren’t looking for trouble? That’s exactly my point. But trouble – this-thing-is-bigger-than-both-of-us trouble – nevertheless engulfed them. It is the nature of that trouble, and what I think is the nature of that trouble, that now seems to elude Antoine. He thinks that I hold all individual Muslims individually responsible for all the Islam-v-the-Rest grief that’s happening now. How many times do I have to say that I believe the opposite of that? He jumps to all manner of really quite insulting conclusions about what I think ought to be done about all this stuff, when I have not even reached any conclusions, still less stated any, beyond that it would probably be better to talk about this stuff than not, and that the situation is indeed serious. (Although if someone wants to tell me that even to talk about this stuff only makes things automatically more serious, I’d be fascinated to hear from them.) Is Antoine perhaps falling into the trap, in the manner of John Simpson when he interviewed Pim Fortuyn, of thinking that because I “sound like” certain other nasty people, such as the British National Party, that I automatically believe in all their vile and aggressive policy proposals?

Antoine’s ideas about how welfare exacerbates all this may be right, and they may not. Personally, I don’t think that putting an end to the British welfare state would solve this problem. There are plenty of countries where there is no welfare state to speak of, yet the grief between Muslims and the Rest is as grievous as ever. And part of the problem is that Muslims run their own private sector welfare systems, in a way that Libertarians would thoroughly approve of – except that, in among running youth clubs and keeping young men out of trouble and off drugs, they also use their resulting influence to turn a few of the same young men into suicide bombers and terrorists.

I think, to generalise, that what we may have here is an argument about whether “society” exists in a serious and sometimes seriously life-wrecking form, or not. I say that it most emphatically does. And Antoine, the way I hear him, is arguing as if that is not just wrong, but so obviously wrong as not to be worth even considering. For me, the Islam-v-the-Rest THING is a classic example of an over-arching social fact that is capable of ruining individual lives. It is, for example, capable of taking a happily married couple whose behaviour towards each other and towards everyone else is impeccable, and making them take opposite sides in some huge fight they had no part whatsoever in starting. And if that isn’t society asserting itself, I don’t know what is. But maybe I misunderstand Antoine. If so, he now knows how it feels.

Perry, please umpire this. Stop us if you think it’s getting annoying.

As for the general point of Antoine joining in with this blogging business, despite its regrettable timing last night when he was blogging fit to bust and I was blogging fit to bust about how no-one else was blogging, I’m delighted, truly delighted. That posting about the impact of the Le Pen campaign on French crime was a fine example of something that only Antoine, in London libertarian circles, would know about and bother about. Does everybody realise that Antoine is fluent in both English and French? Yes he is.

What, London libertarians may be asking, about Christian Michel (who runs the excellent Liberalia website)? Well, yes, he’s bilingual in English and French and libertarian and dead clever. But he is a quite different sort of intellectual personality, with nothing like Antoine’s enthusiasm for intriguing titbits of news, indeed for journalism in general. Antoine could feed – and I suspect would greatly enjoy feeding – a steady stream of brilliant news items from Francophonia into the Anglo-blogosphere, and I really, really hope that he will. If the price I have to pay is to have frustrating rows with him in which I say (among other things) “A” – and he says “no that’s all wrong – the situation is A!!”, well, I can live with that.

As you can probably tell, Samizdata is undergoing a phase of collective preoccupation with Other Things just now, not least the difficulties associated with the programme Perry uses to run the thing. And to adapt Groucho Marx, any enterprise that relies on me might as well give up now and save itself the bother. The point being, I’m busy too, even if it may not look it. I’ll tell you all about it in due course, but not until I’ve done it thank you. A man’s got to know his limitations, failing to stick to public promises being one of my worst.

So let guest writer P.G. Wodehouse take up the slack. I swear on a stack of Jeeves paperbacks that I picked this paragraph, which is from The Code of the Woosters, completely at random. The only qualification I looked for was that it lacked inverted commas, because I especially like Wodehouse when he alone is doing the talking. Here is the random paragraph:

The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river-bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking – and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bobs’ worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.

Now I know what you’re thinking. What is this whole situation? Well to echo Clint Eastwood just once more, this time from the closing moments of Two Mules For Sister Sarah: I haven’t got time for that.

Bloody Antoine. You spend half your life trying to get him to do things, and then he does something just when you don’t want him to (see below), and makes nonsense of everything in this post so far, which you might as well have anyway.

I know that individual Muslims can be the salt of the earth. I too regret the passing of the kebab shop in Tachbrook Street. Some of my best friends are Muslims. The trouble is that when one of these Islam-versus-the-rest horrors erupts, it swallows up individual salt-of-the-earth Muslims along with everyone else. In Yugoslavia for example, happily married city folks who hardly even realised that their marriage was “mixed” suddenly got shot to hell.

Plus, I’m not in favour of a war for heaven’s sakes. I’m just frightened there might be one.

An “individualist” approach doesn’t cut it, because individuals ain’t the problem. But I’ll supply a more thoughtful response when I’ve more time. (Damn, another public promise.)

Over at Instapundit, His Holiness Glenn is having a public think-in on the subject of, among many other subjects of course, to what degree if any the US government or bits of it is/are guilty of having failed to see 9-11 coming. Glenn Reynolds reckons that, although 9-11 was imaginable, it makes no sense to blame Bush, the FBI etc., or at any rate not that harshly. I agree, but go further.

The underlying assumption of the complaints about the pre-September 11^th US security effort is that it is a good thing for governments to spend their time preventing particular bad things, rather than doing something about them afterwards, to go around, in other words, bolting stable doors while the horses are still in residence.

I dissent. I am of the worry-about-it-when-it-happens-and-not-before school of governmental decision-making. First, and rather trivially, it may never happen. And second, if your government takes precautions against this particular pending disaster, what about all the other equally pending disasters? Free individuals can choose which disasters they will worry about beforehand and which ones they’ll only bother with if and when. But governments being governments, if you tell them to worry about disasters they’ll regard that as a reason to worry about alldisasters. This would itself be disastrous, and to some extent it already is.

This tendency to expect governments to prevent bad things rather than to react to bad things afterwards is itself a hugely bad thing.

Central to the idea of the rule of law, at any rate as my bit of the world understands it, is that the authorities are not allowed to bang you up because of what they think you might be about to do. The rule is that they have to wait until you have already done something bad, and then they try and catch you and punish you. Law court proceedings are about what the accused has or has not done, not about what he might do in the future, on account of the sort of person he might or might not be, or on account of the types of actions he was indulging in which have a remote chance of causing bad things, like being black, taking drugs, using a rather dirty kitchen, owning scary weapons, being mentally unstable without having yet committed any actual mayhem, etc. etc.

Sadly, this principle is being severely undermined, at least here in Britain. Here, there is a plague of precautionary lawmaking going on. A centrally administered law-machine, which will supposedly end up making the world as safe as it can possibly be, is (a) running amok, and (b) making nobody any safer.

By the way, I don’t blame only our rulers for this, I also blame the general public. Whenever something bad happens, it is Joe Public himself who says: Why was this not prevented? (By the government, in other words.) Because, Mr Idiot Joe Public, that is not and cannot be their job. Refraining from serious badness before the government even knows about it is where you come in.

It always bothers me when people say that the government ought to be more “creative”. That’s not what governments are for. As a tentatively anarcho- brand of libertarian I’m strongly attracted by the notion that governments are for absolutely nothing, but if they are for anything, it is certainly not “creativity”. Creativity is unpredictable. Creativity is thinking “outside the box”, i.e. not following the usual procedures. Governments should follow the usual procedures.

The usual US government procedure for dealing with terrorist outrages is, and ought to be, that if you do something seriously bad to the US, the US will do something seriously bad to you. You can’t punish successful suicide bombers themselves, but you can go out and kill as many of their friends as you can find, and you do. Damn the expense. And you do this only after they’ve committed a huge horror. Result: this horror is not prevented, but funny how the general level of horror seems to remain agreeably low.

The usual procedure for stopping me murdering people is not for the government to spy on my every move. It is for the government to punish me, or failing that hunt me for ever – damn the expense – if I ever commit a murder. I know that. This is why I and my fellow countrymen, on the whole, refrain from murder. Again: murder stays comfortingly rare. Not by thousands of individual murders being governmentally prevented beforehand (we, the citizens do that), merely by being punished (very imperfectly and incompletely, by the way) when it occurs.

The law, and government generally, is a huge, mucky, blunt instrument. When terrible things happen and you’re the government, your job is to flail about with this blunt instrument in the general direction of the people you suspect of having done the bad things. You should not delude yourself into supposing that what you really have in your hand is a scalpel. Never, never promise that “such a thing will never be allowed to happen again.” Yes it will. Inevitably.

The US government is now being praised for hiring Hollywood scriptwriters to help it foresee future terrorism disasters. But how long before the relevant committees of “creative” people start cranking out a whole new deluge of attacks of the rights of Americans to do what they want, on account of what these creatives think it might lead to?

This is one of those bits of writing which, if I had had more time to devote to it, would have been shorter and better written. As it was, it took me almost as little time for me to write it as if has just taken you to read it. Bad luck, and all that. I hope, despite the longwinded incoherence factor, that you have found it worth your attention. Have a nice weekend.