Samizdata

A meta-context is not a philosophy or a political belief, but rather the lens through which someone sees the world. It is a tradition of thought, a vibe, set of ‘givens’, the frames of reference within which questions are posed and answers found.

A person’s prevailing meta-context has an enormous impact on the way they make decisions and evaluate evidence. Imagine a series of laws has been enacted to create programmes for alleviating poverty in London or Warsaw or Accra or Miami. Imagine also that year after year poverty remains in those places much as before, regardless of the well intentioned programmes. Many would say, most in fact, that clearly better laws are needed and better programmes. This is not a matter of ‘left versus right’. The socialist (or ‘liberal’ in the USA) might argue that the reason the worthy programmes have not succeeded is that the root causes remain, and more needs to be spent on state education/racial sensitivity training/murals on playground walls. Laws must be adjusted to serve the objectives of ‘social’ need. The conservative however might argue that what is needed is less dependency on state handouts and demand that people take whatever jobs can be found or lose all state benefits… and maybe a partnership between state and faith-based organisations to do something or other would be good. Laws must be adjusted within the bounds of some form of ‘constitution’. The state does much the same sort of thing, just a bit less of it and favouring different ‘social’ objectives (discouraging single mothers/pornography/extroverted sexuality etc.).

Both left and right see themselves as opposed, and on some levels indeed they are. Yet both are arguing with each other within a profoundly statist meta-context: if only the unitary state was organised this way with our safe pair of hands on the political tiller, things would get so much better.

An example of this mindset on the right can be found in the United States when people cannot have a discussion about economics, philosophy or even morality on the Internet, addressing a global audience, without bringing up constitutionality, in every case meaning the US Constitution, and not the constitution of Uzbekistan or Australia or Senegal. Not only is this amusingly provincial, it presupposes that all matters of morality and interaction revolve around boundaries defined by the state and its legal documents.

A leftist example however is something I heard on the BBC News just today, reporting that disgruntled university students in England are ‘forced to work part-time due to the fact they now receive student loans rather than student grants from the state’. The news reader put emphasis on the word ‘forced’. Clearly it is implicit, a meta-contextual ‘given’, that the fact a person is having to earn the means to support a service they are receiving (education) for their own benefit, is regarded as an imposition, a questionable compulsion. I wonder if the BBC feels students are ‘forced’ to pay for the food they eat, the beer they drink and the clothes they wear? Perhaps they do.

To view the world within a statist meta-context is to view the world as being entirely politicised and politics is just a euphemism for the application of force-by-proxy. No interaction between people can therefore be truly free of the state. Unregulated interaction becomes interaction not yet regulated. Most people would not care to have their neighbours provide unsolicited and mandatory input on their conduct as parents. Yet the democratically mandated state does that all the time, politicizing the act of raising your own children. Only a pervasive statist meta-context allows this to happen at the same time as people bizarrely think they live in a ‘free society’. In fact they hardly live in a ‘society’ at all, but rather a state which has nationalised private life itself.

Tom Paine would not have approved.

…and a bit of hijacked satire, but more on that bit later. Scott Rubush replies to a pair of articles by David Carr and myself. In response to my view that technologically unsophisticated societies do not produce great thinkers Scott replied:

To which I would say, show me the modern Socrates, and the 21st century Aquinas. When I turn on the television, I don’t see sages like these; I see Oprah and Jerry Springer. When I turn on the radio, I don’t hear the Beethovens and Mozarts of our generation; instead I hear Britney and the Backstreet Boys. Ultimately I think that’s what we could expect from the democratized, progressive materialist society advocated by D’Souza. Is that really progress? Certainly D’Souza’s society would be capable of genius, but his value-neutral “dynamist” regime would do nothing to steer its citizens toward it. The result would be the social equivilent of Gresham’s law, where bad culture drives out good culture.

Ask and you shall receive, for the names of the modern Socrates and the modern Aquinas are Frederick Hayek and Karl Popper. I turn on the radio and I also hear Aaron Copland and Lisa Gerard. I watch the cable television and learn of astonishing breakthroughs in genetic sciences and hear it explained for people like myself who did not study that field. I read accessible, inexpensive paperback books like David Deutsch’s ‘Fabric of Reality’, purchased not from some sanctum of gnostic wisdom but available in a bookshop inside a train station. If all you see is Oprah and Jerry Springer then you need a new remote control, Scott (and quickly!). I also see a programme about anthropology and the Leaky family in Kenya, and with the push of a button I see a superb Japanese version of Macbeth and then a remarkable show about the fusion of Irish and Senegalese music. It is all there at the touch of a button and at prices the great majority of the population can afford.

Bad culture does not drive out good, it just looks for a different market niche. The low brow, scandalous, scurrilous and bawdy Hogarth prints of one era are the ‘biting social commentary’ of the next era. Back in the good old days, ‘good culture’ was not more pervasive than now as it was never available to more than the ruling classes… and ruling classes by their nature exist not to ‘steer its citizens towards’ good culture but rather towards a culture of deference to the rulers. Mozart is thought of now as ‘good culture’ but not because of anything intrinsic to the music, for it was once regarded as subversive. Rather it is because of who listens to it. One hundred years from now patrician critics might lament the fact people turn their backs on classics like Pink Floyd.

Far from being ‘value neutral’, a dynamist society must underpin itself with objective morality as the guide to the evolving new. Only this way can we know when ‘tried-and-true’ becomes untrue, and when to leave well enough alone, for just as the ‘tried-and-true’ evolves, so to does understanding. The greatest of many errors made by Marx was highlighted by Hayek when he pointed out that to remake society entirely by revolution implies that the revolutionary can know by the application of scientific reason what will always be the best, and therefore make it so at bayonet point. Yet society is not the product of reason, but of complex evolutionary processes. Once this is understood Marx’s ‘scientific socialism’ is revealed to be nothing of the sort but rather an exercise in self-delusion, a ‘fatal conceit’. This is also why when people refer to the remarkable events which came to a head in 1776, I have always depreciated the term ‘American Revolution’ which is so popular in the USA. I prefer the term ‘American War of Independence’ used more typically in the rest of the Anglosphere: What Jefferson et al did was free the thirteen colonies from the stasis imposed by the British Crown, not to radically remake society at bayonet point as would soon happen in France in 1789 and later in Russia in 1917, but rather to allow it to evolve in a manner consistent with the very best of the underlying civil society’s values. The Constitution of the United States did not overthrow society, it enshrined its values and attempted to protect it from the encroachment of the state and the worst aspects of democratic mob rule, even if not entirely successfully. But that is also why I am not a conservative… the authors of America’s Independence and others forsaw the problem intrinsic to any democratic system, that as Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813) put it:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The situation has developed in which nation states forcibly appropriate over 50 per cent of a nations wealth and yet this is seen as legitimate due to a ‘democratic mandate’. Yet the reality is that not only is it immoral, it is unsupportable in the long run. As a libertarian I see that society must continue to evolve away from the all-consuming centralised state and towards a more spontaneous, truly capitalist and less rigid system. Just as the wealth gobbling nations of the world grow fatter by the year, the seeds of a freer future are also becoming more visible almost by the day. I suspect the difference between conservatives such as Scott and libertarians such as myself is that whilst we both abominate the statist impositions of the left, he sees a perpetual rear guard action of fighting the laws of the left with laws of the right as a viable option, whilst I see a very different future. I see the disintergration of the politicized legal edifice over which left and right fight as being a long term economic inevitability, not necessarily from catastrophic collapse (though most likely Japan and some of Europe will do just that) but from the gradual technologically driven creeping irrelevance that will see that what follows the current order is something both familiar and excitingly different. Unlike Scott, I see this as a good thing as I expect the good and enhancing aspects of culture to survive because such things are objectively good and efficacious.

Which brings me to Scott’s ire regarding David’s remarks. I suspect he took ‘And what did the Romans ever do for us?’ a tad too literally. David was using Scott’s earlier remarks to reference a well known bit of British humour in the form of an extended skit from Monty Python’s Life of Brian and thus was only indirectly addressing Scott.

And now for something completely different…