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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Time for an update about British party politics. When I started Samizdating, I posted a piece about how the British media have finally started laying in to our hitherto untouchable Blair Labour – from now on: Blairbour – government, after about seven years of Blairbour being beyond criticism. However, in my earlier posting I exaggerated how easily the Conservatives might be able to exploit all this. I assumed that they could make clear and rapid strides in the entirely smart direction, and of course being the Conservative Party that’s beyond them. Plus, I keep forgetting how much Normal People hate and despise the Conservatives.
The underlying story here is of a great nationwide coalition for Blairbour between (a) Normal People who want better public services without taxes going up, and (b) Abnormal Socialists who find the Conservatives so appalling that they are prepared to tolerate any other non- or anti-socialist humiliations in order to see the Conservatives go on being humiliated by the Normals. This coalition is starting to crumble.
The Normals want “better public services” and the idea was that by booting out the Conservatives (who supposedly don’t care about public services) and having a Blairbour government that did care about public services (but who wouldn’t put taxes up), they’d get better public services. This was never true. “Public services” don’t work like that. See everything else ever written by libertarians since the dawn of time. Blairbour cannot ever do as well with public services as it has promised. Some public services have patchily improved, at great cost. Others have got worse, also at great cost. Blairbour is starting to mutter about tax increases. The patience of the Normals is wearing thin.
Insofar as it is possible to contrive any “better public services” the only methods that stand any chance – and it is only a chance – are Conservative methods. So now that “we must start actually delivering better public services”, the Abnormals are also starting to be seriously pissed off. Their own methods always fail, and everyone except them knows it. So the methods of the hated Conservatives are being obstinately persisted with by Blairbour, and if anything being beefed up (“we must now actually deliver better public services”). So the patience of the Abnormals is also wearing thin.
(The Abnormals also hate that Blairbour backs the USA against Terrorism. The Abnormals are deeply confused about Terrorism. Some Abnormals are neutral for it. Others Abnormals are neutral against it. None oppose it as keenly as Blairbour or the Americans.)
But the Conservatives remain hated and despised by both Normals and Abnormals. Blairbour is no longer the Best Government available. But Blairbour remains something almost as politically potent, the Least Worst Government. Watch for a huge surge in the polls by the Conservatives, because if that happens I’ll be proved wrong. But my best guess for the next general election is for further significant gains by the Sod-You-All Party, that is to say a further decline in the overall percentage of people eligible to vote actually bothering to vote, for anyone, with the actual number of MPs remaining much as now, except that there’ll be a few more Liberal Democrats. Far more likely than a surge of enthusiasm for the Conservatives – or for anybody else – is a general sense of depression and cynicism about politics as a whole.
Sounds good to me.
Which provokes the question: what of libertarianism? Could there be some kind of British “libertarian political party” cobbled together to fill a small but growing patch of this huge vacuum and snatch some of those idle votes? Maybe. But as usual, the Conservatives are now making just enough libertarian-ish noises (“diversity” – “importance of the market”) to keep all those “libertarians” who are fascinated by British party politics fascinated, still, by the Conservative Party. And the rest of us have better and more amusing things to do with our lives.
The blogging phenomenon is such that I am making new American friends by the hour, friends I’ve never met but who are getting to know me fast. It’s the same for David, Tom, Adriana and the rest of us. And maybe some of these new American friends can confirm or deny a feeling I’ve had ever since September 11th of last year. I get the feeling that black America has finally united with white America. The Oscars awarded last night for Best Actor to Denzel Washington, for Best Actress to Halle Berry, and for being Sidney Poitier to Sidney Poitier, nudged me into writing this, but the thought has been with me for some time.
There’s nothing like a common enemy and a common ordeal to bring people together. September 11 supplied this. The differences and gaps between black and white Americans are still big, still a problem. But these differences and gaps shrivel down into very little indeed when set beside those between both and their common Islamic fundamentalist enemy.
Not so long ago, black Americans were queuing up to change their names to something Islamic, to piss off whitey presumably. I’m guessing that there’s a lot less of this going on now, and that maybe some of these name-changes are even being reversed.
This is short posting because it’s a simple question about something rather than a complicated answer to something. Simply: Is all or any of this true? Or am I indulging in speculative sentimentality, or more plainly, in wishful thinking?
The thing about the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) is that it has just kept on keeping on.
I remember how, during the eighties, Chris Tame and I used to hammer away at ISIL conferences and gatherings about the overwhelming importance of publications, publications, publications. Typical ISIL types, especially the Europeans, preferred their endless schemes to “popularise” libertarianism by, basically, just talking about it to this or that “interest group”, which would then topple or else totally libertarianise this or that government, but which somehow never quite did. They said: why don’t you do that? To hell with that, we said, we’re already doing what we’re doing. And I remember being badgered by Americans about the “internet”, which, they said, would “cut out the middle man” and make the Libertarian Alliance publications-based strategy obsolete. You can just talk to people! Millions of people! Why don’t you do that? To hell with that also, we said. But what good, they said, are two hundred mere publications compared to immediate libertarian political triumphs and millions of new computer connected recruits? Because we actually have the two hundred publications, we said. You can buy them in the foyer. If you’re so keen on this other stuff, why don’t you …?
None of us were all wrong. None of us had it quite right. And now it’s all coming together. ISIL has an excellent new website, which contains, among other things, a small (by Libertarian Alliance standards) but growing list of, yes, publications. Two individuals, according to the latest ISIL communication that I received on Sunday, deserve special credit (two middle men, you might say): Chris Whitten, who designed the ISIL site, and Alberto Mansueti, who is translating ISIL stuff into Spanish. And I’d also like to mention Jim Elwood, for (see above) just hanging on and keeping going, like a dog who won’t let go of a bone. He was isiling away back in the early eighties, and he’s been isiling ever since.
We of the Libertarian Alliance have yet to get ourselves a website designer as good as Chris Whitten, but all the bits of an LA website as good as www.isil.org promises to be are slowly being assembled. We too have just kept on keeping on. The most interesting recent change to the LA website is the hit counter, which had been underestimating the number of hits, and has now done a guess-jump from 13,000 to 20,000 which I also reckon is about right. There’ll be more publications Real Soon Now. And we’ll also start having most of them instead of only a few of them available in html, also Real Soon Now.
And, of course, we London libbos do have ourselves a nice little blogging operation, where we, you know, kind of talk about libertarianism. Does ISIL have one of those? Jim, you’re not doing anything. Why don’t you..?
Language expresses thought. But do the unexamined everyday idioms embedded in different languages cause bad thoughts to be thinkable, and good ones to be unthinkable? Are some truths suppressed by language, and are some falsehoods inculcated by it? George Orwell thought so.
An important bad idea from which we libertarians suffer is that, believing as we do in freedom, we are also assumed to believe in social isolation, in social “atomism”. This accusation is derived from another wrong idea, that sociability only happens because powerful politicians make it happen and pay for it to happen. So if someone doesn’t believe in compulsory, tax-funded sociability, then he must be against sociability itself. It is said that libertarians believe either that (in the notoriously wrong-headed pronouncement of Margaret Thatcher) “there is no such thing as society”, or that, insofar as there is such a thing as society, that’s bad, and that “freedom” must smash it to pieces.
The truth is that we libertarians are well aware of the reality of and value of society. We merely think that, like most things of importance, society shouldn’t be bossed about by the government. Society exists, but shouldn’t be a nationalised industry.
On Saturday morning I was tidying my desk and I chanced upon a print-out of the quotations section on the St Andrews University Liberty Club website. One of these quotes is from the film actor Clint Eastwood. In a March 1997 interview, Playboy magazine asked Eastwood how he would characterize himself politically. Eastwood replied:
“Libertarian … Everyone leaves everyone else alone.”
“Leave me alone!” We’ve all said it thousands of times. Sometimes we even mean exactly that. Someone is being nasty to you. Forget about them being nicer. You just want them to go away. But often we say “Leave me alone!” to soften the blow of the whole and real truth. What we really mean is: “It’s you I don’t want to be with. I want to be with others instead.”
You can see how a movie star might equate freedom, especially in his leisure hours or when trudging through extra-curricular duties in the company of a media-hack, with simply being left alone. And you can see why libertarians, dazzled by such stellar endorsement, might be glad to reproduce this hurtful little meme-package. But as a libertarian propagandist I insist that there is a fundamental difference between different company – company that I am glad to have, company that I have consented to – and no company at all.
My friend Kristine Löwe, a Norwegian now living in London, is deep into that post-university battle to get started in Real Life, and I want to give her all the help I can. She’s just had a piece about European drugs policies published in the electronic version of the Guardian.
“Not very exciting stuff” she says modestly in her e-mail to her friends and contacts, and a ringing cry for total legalisation her piece definitely is not. The story is of a shift from treating heavy drug users as criminals to treating them as medical patients, and I don’t know which idea depresses me more. Nevertheless, this is a useful way to learn the latest about the official drugs policy mindset this side of the Atlantic, and next to Kristine’s piece you’ll find further links to other interesting drug-related stories from the Guardian’s electronic archives.
I have a friend called Don Riley, who originates from New Zealand. He is a property developer. He owns – lucky man – property next to London’s new Jubilee Line. The Jubilee Line, as everyone in the Anglosphere surely knows, is the latest addition to the tube, that is to say to the London Underground railway system.
Don is also an International Man of Mystery. He’ll tell you all kinds of stories about how he sold computers to the Russians in the seventies, and he still has numerous deeply mysterioso friends from behind the ex-Iron Curtain. He occasionally goes on “birdwatching” expeditions to places like Morocco. So if he isn’t a spook of some ex- or pensioned or maybe even current variety, he has a lot of fun pretending to be.
Last year Don wrote a book, about “public” transport and how to finance it without the government crawling all over everything. Book. You remember those? A pile of paper joined together at the side. Paper? Well, it’s flat and usually white, about the same size as the average screen but you generally point it upwards rather than sideways, and it’s very user friendly but for the time being rather hard to update … oh never mind …
Anyway the point is, unlike the usual drivel perpetrated by businessmen who fancy themselves as political stirrers without troubling to learn the trade, Don’s book is actually quite good. I haven’t read it properly, despite Don’s telephone nagging, but Patrick Crozier over at UK Transport has, and I commend his review to your attention, and the book itself.
A free market in education talked about in London and Newcastle – and being done in India
On Saturday (March 16, 2002) I attended a day-long meeting (“Private education: the poor’s best chance”) at the Institute of Economic Affairs. This was one of two meetings (the other being in Newcastle) marking the launch of the E.G.West Centre For Market Solutions in Education, the Director of which is Professor James Tooley.
 Professor James Tooley James Tooley is one of my favourite people. He has discovered a whole world of private sector educational success being achieved by the world’s poor, in places like India and South Africa, and is busily telling this story back to the world, hence the E.G.West Centre.
The final speaker in the morning was Fazalur Khurrum, President of something called the Federation of Private Schools Management, India, which is based in Hyderabad. The story he told was of a hubbub of small private schools in the Indian city of Hyderabad.
Before him was Dr Sugata Mitra, the Director of Research for the Indian free-market-education giant NIIT. He was the star performer of the day. NIIT can see the day fast approaching when it will have gone as far as it can in educating the kind of Indians who are easy to reach and can afford to pay individually serious money. What about the massed millions of India’s (and for that matter the world’s) seriously poor?
Dr Mitra talked about a fascinating project, in which he stuck an internet-connected PC in a wall, protected by see-through armour plating, in various Indian versions of the back of beyond, and awaited results.
A smart and adventurous poor kid sees the computer. He starts pushing buttons. Other kids assemble and join in. Their poor fathers and uncles watch from behind. Their poor mothers and aunts watch from a distance. (He showed some film of all this, and it was like watching a wildlife documentary, with different humans behaving in different, yet classically human ways.) Within a few days there were a cluster of computer literate children helping each other to have fun and find out about the world, and learning about computers. All this was done by the machine and by the juvenile punters. No “staff” were involved. Dr Mitra watched it all from his office in New Delhi, through a video camera, and by eavesdreopping on the computer. He calls this his “hole in the wall” project.
 Dr Sugata Mitra I could go on. On Sunday I did, at unbloggable length, partly provoked by the embarrassingly boring British people who talked after lunch. The lunch only seemed free; they were the price. What they said wasn’t even fluorescent idiocy – that would have been interesting. It was just generic brand idiocy. For that you’ll have to wait until the Libertarian Alliance (by which I mean me) gets around to toning the insults down and publishing it all as an Educational Note.
A final point. A big reason why even very poor people prefer paying for private education in India is that this way their kids get a good start learning English. In Indian government schools, teaching English to children under ten – even teaching in English – is forbidden.
It is interesting how one things leads to another. Following a totally parochial inter-Samizdata phone (i.e. telephone) conversation between Perry de Havilland and myself in which he pointed out how we must not confuse Americans, South Africans, Indians or New Zealanders with unexplained British words like “tube” (London’s underground railway system) or with unexplained British acronyms like “HSE” (which is Britain’s “Health and Safety Executive”, not a cow disease) provoked thoughts in me of a grander sort. For what Perry is urging upon us is a new “international” variant of the English language, comprehensible all over the Anglosphere.
Jim Bennett, popularised the term “Anglosphere” to describe a set of shared cultural values, a meme-stream of common references, that is not just the British Isles and North America or even the USA plus the ‘white commonwealth’. It is the totality of the English speaking world united by more than just a common language: an English speaking cosmopolitan meta-culture.
Most discussions of the “Anglosphere” that I’ve read have concentrated on the ideological affinities of the nations and cultures thus alluded to. Common law, liberal democracy, and so forth. That’s not wrong, but there is a more mundane affinity at work here.
It is no accident that the word “Anglosphere” has erupted into vigorous life at the same time as the eruption of the Internet. Language zones are strengthened by international electronic communication, and physical distance rendered relatively less important, and this would be true even if ideology counted for nothing. We can be sure, for example, that in Spain (or is it Portugal, I can never remember which, and that’s my point), there are ‘internetted’ networks devoted to every tiny detail of what’s now happening in Argentina, patronised by readers on both sides of the Atlantic who never give a single thought from one month to the next about happenings in the USA or Britain or Germany or China, and all because of language. Spanish versions of Perry link Spaniards to the dramas of Spanish South America, just as Perry himself links us all to the dramas going on in Anglo-speaking America, Britain, India, New Zealand, etc.
With the modern “knowledge” economy heading the way it is, this is bound to count economically for more and more as the years go by. Which presents us in little old Britain with a dilemma. A generation ago, in the pre-internet age, geography (“zone”) counted for relatively more than it does now. Hence, partly, our desire to hook up economically with mainland Europe. But what if the new economy is now knowledge and language dominated, and trade of this newer sort with Tasmania is now massively easier for us mostly stubbornly mono-linguistic British than trade with France or Germany or China? And what if the English-language-based culture of the internet is creating (re-creating) stubbornly unbreakable bonds of loyalty and friendship, as it surely is? You would expect a drawing back by Britain from the European political commitment, wouldn’t you? A period of Euro-revisionism. Which might be a part of why that’s what is now happening.
But now forget politics, and think of sport. A few weeks back I did a semi-triumphalist semi-jocular posting about how England now has the best international rugby team on earth. Antipodeans were complaining furiously about this post by e-mail long before France made nonsense of it by beating England in Paris on March 2nd. The Antipodeans protested, quite rightly, that England’s alleged rugby superiority over South Africa, Australia and New Zealand wasn’t based on regularly beating these guys in actual serious rugby games, but on guesswork based on England regularly annihilating the likes of Wales and Scotland, and doing okay in very occasional and not-that-vital games involving touring sides, ours and Antipodean, with home advantage going massively to whoever is playing at home. That one simple barrier, jet lag, dooms us to playing regularly only against people geographically close to us. France has the same problem.
So what do we do? Send our entire international rugby squad out to Australia for the entire season, every season? Doesn’t work. If they can’t also play locally, how do we decide who these people are to be? Yet the alternative seems to be that England will remain stuck permanently just below the very top level. Here’s a case where zone counts for more than phone, even though phone is almost the entire reason that all these geographically dispersed countries are still playing the same game by the same rules. (On the other hand, if all the teams played each other regularly anyway, the rugby World Cup wouldn’t count for nearly so much…)
I don’t have an “answer” to this phone versus zone stuff. I’m just saying that this is an interesting way of looking at the world.
For a more detailed introduction to Jim Bennett‘s fascinating Anglosphere ideas, the Anglosphere Primer can be downloaded here in rich text format.
Patrick Crozier has given two of my last-Friday-of-the-month talks, which are a regular fixture of the London Libertarian scene: last year about the general background and history of the British railway system and why the privatisation of it went so wrong (subsequently published as Libertarian Alliance Economic Notes No. 91), and, this February, on the political foreground of it – very fraught just now and likely to remain so. During these talks Patrick mentioned that in Japan there exists an interesting exception to the general rule these days that all railways are a mess and getting worse: a superbly efficient, profitable national railway network. Write it up, Patrick, everyone said. Well, now he has, not at huge length but very usefully, over at his recently launched UK Transport blog.
A point Patrick is fond of making about railway systems is that they aren’t so much a matter of seizing upon the very latest whizz-bang technology, as of simply using relatively mundane kit and making all of it work properly, all at once, all the time. I got a sharp email ticking-off (which I hope in due course to respond to more directly) from Neel Krishnaswami for being “fuzzily mystical” about “Asian values” in my earlier Japan related posting of March 06 2002. But, might not the Japanese railway system be an example of the Japanese playing from their stereotypical strength – consensual cooperation, and from their equally stereotypical “weakness” – unwillingness to fly off at an anti-consensual innovatory tangent? Patrick’s point being that this weakness may also be a strength when it comes to running a good railway.
What I flagged up as a mere possibility here on Friday, March 08, 2002 in my article ‘St. Andrews is at it again’ is now a fact. The St. Andrews Liberty Club have started their own blog, and … well don’t take my word for it, go to The Liberty Log itself, and see what they say about the dinner at Tim and Helen’s where Tim and I showed them how Libertarian Samizdata works. And see also their excellent anti-anti-smoking stuff.
No, Marie Claire is not my supermodel younger sister. She’s a British woman’s magazine, and a lady writing a piece for Marie Claire rang today asking about the libertarian line on incest (which she knew, either from the Libertarian Alliance website or via that from Sean Gabb’s Freelife website, that Sean had done a piece about, many years ago).
I told her (a) that you need to distinguish between morality and legality (legitimacy of social pressure, etc.), (b) that it ought to be legal if both parties consent, (c) that the consent principle meshes nicely with the fact that the police are powerless to catch people if no one is complaining – and thus telling them – about whatever it is, but that (d) the consent principle comes under severe strain as soon as a weaker party is on the receiving end of an inescapable power relationship, as is almost invariably the case where children are involved. It’s tricky to get things like this right, but she seemed sympathetic. Consent lead us on to the mass of consenting relationships (e.g. between the “Metric Martyrs” and their customers, all happy to trade in feet and inches) that are now being busily illegalised by our pathologically meddlesome government.
A nice illustration of how the willingness to assert libertarian principles, even (especially) when what follows from them is deeply disreputable, leads directly to mainstream media attention, and not just in the men’s pages.
She said she’d ring back if a piece does materialise in Marie Claire which refers to any of the above, and I’ll keep you posted.
Perry de Havilland, David Carr, Christian Michel and I all attended a meeting last Friday night. David Carr has a car (naturally), and drove us all back home, and the first stop was Chateau Perry where we paused for coffee. We covered a lot of conversational ground most agreeably, part of which was about what if? … some particular bit of history had gone differently, and radically changed the next bit of history?
One of the most interesting books I read during the year 2001 was called exactly this, What If?, and was about exactly that. (What if?: Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley, first published by Putnam, New York, 1999; my paperback edition, Pan, London, 2001.)
For instance, did you know that in 1931, a New York taxicab injured and might easily have killed Winston Churchill? No, nor did I. It’s the kind of event that gets left out of the regular history books, because what might have happened didn’t.
Better know to specialists (such as Perry – he finished the story for me on Friday night) is that in 1241 a Mongol army was just about to trash Vienna and probably then move south and abort the Italian Renaissance. But then, the Mongol Supreme Boss of Bosses (one of Ghenghis Khan’s sons) died and his successor had to be picked. Since the Mongol army was always deeply involved in this particular decision (a wise procedure if you think about it), it had to go back to Mongolia at once. It never returned.
Or what of the Assyrian army that was just about to obliterate Jerusalem and strangle the Jewish religion at birth, in 701 BC? It caught a plague and died. The Jews, instead of ceasing to exist as a coherent people, regarded themselves from then on as chosen ones whose God had made a particular point of saving, unlike all the other gods in the area who had proved useless against the Assyrians. Take away that plague, and western civilisation turns out just a bit different, doesn’t it?
Theodore F. Cook Jr. begins his piece about Midway thus: “There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway … but have never been able to produce an American victory.” Had Japan won Midway, America would still have beaten them in WW2, but it would have taken longer, and the consequences of that would have been …
Of all the history books I’ve ever read, this one brought the past most vividly to life for me, and connected me to it most strongly.
For us now, the next bit of history is fraught with alternatives. Is America about to attack Iraq, and if so how will that play out? What if a Muslim terrorist does manage to contrive a nuclear explosion in some American city? Or in a European city? (Which of those two would make quite a difference.) What will happen to China? Smooth ascent to superpower? Bloody break-up? Ditto India, much in the news now. A week or so ago I posted a speculation about the future of Japan, and let’s just say that not all the resulting e-mails were in agreement, with me or with each other. Speaking locally, will Britain subside into a mere EU province, or will it shake itself free of the EU and continue to make an independent difference to the world?
What If? showed me a past that was likewise fraught with portentous alternatives. To be alive in the past, just as now, was not to be looking at just the one next bit of history, the one that with hindsight we know actually happened. Then as now, they faced many futures, not just the one. Then as now, individual accidents, and also of course individual efforts could make a huge difference.
I love Grand Theories of history, and this is the grandest Grand Theory of them all: Things Could Have Turned Out Quite Differently.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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