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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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In just over a week’s time I am to give a talk in Brussels, courtesy of the Centre for the New Europe, on the subject of Why Libertarians Don’t Talk About Culture – And Why They Should.
When you are extremely grand, you let things like this come and go with no comment from you other than the occasional “oh yes, that, yes, I think it’s on the fifteenth, I’m not sure” (it is on the fifteenth), or “oh that, yes, I’d forgotten all about it”. But if you are me, you make the most of these sort of invites. If I don’t tell everyone I am doing this talk, who else will?
Here is the blurb I sent to my hosts about it:
Libertarians don’t believe in either subsidising or censoring cultural activity, so for libertarians it often doesn’t matter what they personally think about any particular cultural object or enterprise. Good or bad, it should neither be encouraged nor prohibited by the political process. So long as you don’t infringe against the rights of others, you can enjoy “culture” any way you like, or in no way at all.
For collectivists on the other hand, the goodness or badness of a particular cultural enterprise is a burning issue, because the collective must decide what sort of culture to encourage or discourage. So, they talk about culture a lot.
The result is that libertarians often appear philistine, shallow and one-dimensional, while collectivists can seem far more cultured and attractive. So, we libertarians ignore culture at our peril.
I have already ruminated on this topic here, in this posting, and the blurb above owes much to those ruminations.
Maybe another reason why libertarians are a little reluctant to talk about culture is that we fear that quarrels about inessentials, like how good the Lord of the Rings really is, are liable to undermine team spirit amongst us to no purpose. That is a mistake, I think, but maybe some libertarians feel that.
I think that the claim in part one of my talk’s title, that libertarians do not talk about culture, may now be becoming obsolete. With the Internet, blogging etc., we libertarians now have a means of chatting away about movies and literature and stuff, in a very congenial and magazine-like setting, yet without all the bother of anyone having to put together an actual magazine – which is a total nightmare compared to running a blog. The reason we used not to talk about culture was simply that it was too difficult. It was all we could manage to bang away with our core agenda. Now, simply, we can do culture talk, and we do.
Well, those are my thoughts so far. Does anyone here have anything else to say about all this? I would really welcome the input.
UPDATE: This very recent comment on this posting might have something to do with why libertarians don’t discuss cultural themes. When they do, they get denounced by people saying things like this:
What does this have to do with libertarianism? I come to this blog to read libertarian views and issues, not artistic commentary.
This, to me, is a perfect example of a libertarian (if that is what Telemachus is) being boring and philistine.
Amidst all the partying I did in Brussels last weekend, I somehow managed to find the time to actually learn a thing or two.
The first thing I learned was not everyone takes the Euro terribly seriously (while fiddling around for correct change to pay for a taxi, I let the words ‘Mickey Mouse money’ slip from my mouth whereupon the taxi driver began laughing and said “oui, Monsieur, oui”).
Secondly, and rather less anecdotally, I also learned of something called the Stockholm Network. Before last weekend I had no idea that this organisation even existed and, in this case, ignorance was not bliss.
I think it fair to say that there is a widespread impression in the Anglosphere (especially the American bit) that the continent of Europe has fallen under the unbreakable spell of the Grand Wizards of Schtoopidity. Sadly, this is mostly true. But it is not completely true and the difference between ‘mostly’ and ‘completely’ can be found at the website of the Stockholm Network.
Billing themselves as ‘Europe’s only dedicated service organisation for market-oriented think tanks and thinkers’, the website is contains a treasure trove of links to well-organised, well-funded and highly active free-market and libertarian think-tanks and organisation in Britain, Ireland, Albania, Finland, Turkey, Macedonia, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Serbia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Holland, Norway, Spain, Russia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Rumania, Georgia, the Ukraine and elsewhere.
The idiots and the kleptocrats may be running the show for now but, pleasingly, there are pockets of determined guerilla resistance. Even more pleasingly, these pockets seem to be growing in number.
And that is all I am going to say on the matter. Otherwise there is a danger that I might start sounding optimistic and, as everybody knows, that is strictly against my religion.
I have lately been reading a book of essays and review articles by Richard Dawkins, and mostly I agree with him, about most things. However, in his Foreward to a book called Pyramids of Life, which he here entitles “Ecology of Genes”, he indulges in an aside on the subject of the free market (p. 266 of my Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003 paperback edition):
As Adam Smith understood long ago, an illusion of harmony and real efficiency will emerge in an economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level.
Dawkins is not here making a point about the free market. He is merely seeking to punch home a point about how ecological systems are not designed, but instead merely present the illusion of having been designed, in rather the same way that individual species also appear to be designed, but also are not. In truth, species evolve blindly, with no designing intelligence determining their shape, and ecologies are but aggregates of species. It gets a bit more complicated by the end of the piece, because actually species do somewhat resemble ecologies, in that they too are coexisting aggregates of mutually sustaining genes. I may have explained that slightly wrongly, but in any case, my point here is not what Dawkins says about what he is really writing about and really knows about.
No. I am interested in what Dawkins says in that little dig at the free market (the “economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level”). Illusion of harmony? Adam Smith said a great deal more than that. The free market does not just look harmonious and efficient, Smith said. It is harmonious and efficient. This is no mere illusion. → Continue reading: A surprising aside by Richard Dawkins about the free market
Not too long ago, David Goodhart, the editor of the left-wing magazine Prospect, had an epiphany.
Rather less romantically, he must have had one of those “oh..umm, hang on a minute” moments when he realised that his movement was not just heading off in two different directions but that those directions are mutually exclusive:
And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity (high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system) and diversity (equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life). The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left’s recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.
Mr Goodhart calls this the ‘progressives dillema’ which, in a nutshell, means that for the want of the diversity, the solidarity may be lost.
[It is worth digressing here for a moment to note how Mr. Goodhart, along with the rest of his ideological bedfellows now insist on referring to themselves as ‘progressives’, a painfully sanctimonious but revealing bit of re-branding. It is as if they no longer want to be publicly associated with the contaminated ‘S’-word. There is much satisfaction to be had here for people like me. Indeed, it is something I may have mentioned on previous occasions but I cannot be bothered to go trawling through the archives and, in any event, it is an observation that merits virtually no end of repetition.] → Continue reading: Who put that brick wall there?
Back in November 2003, I predicted that the end result of the anti-junk-food campaign would be ‘sin taxes’:
Then on to Step 5: the levying of ‘sin taxes’ on hamburgers to ‘encourage a change of behaviour’. The money raised then pays for a lot more Food Standards Agents.
I hope I will be forgiven for this brief episode of smugness because, not only has my prediction come to pass, but it has come to pass rather more rapidly than even I had anticipated:
A Downing Street-based policy unit has proposed a plan to place a “fat tax” on junk food in an attempt to tackle the rising incidence of heart disease.
According to The Times, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit raised the prospect of extra duty or VAT being imposed on some of the nation’s favourite foods after heart disease overtook cancer as Britain’s biggest killer, and more young people started developing diabetes.
That is what it was really all about. All the media-hype, all the hand-wringing, all the brow-furrowing and all the phoney ‘caring’. It was all an elaborate ploy by the public sector classes to get their hands on more of your hard-earned. It really is all about revenue.
I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.
I had been mulling over the reiteration, last week, of our dear leader’s approach to political parties. It occurs to me that while Perry’s prescription – don’t vote and have nothing to do with political parties – is tempting, it is ultimately flawed. It is possible to affect a weary disdain for politics if you are fortunate to live in a country where some liberties remain. It is, however, dangerous to assume that this situation is static.
In any election – and for the purposes of argument I refer to a two party system such as the US or the UK – one is inevitably offered what appears to be Hobson’s choice: Two sets of control freaks who share the same basic statist assumptions. That this is barely palatable to the libertarian doesn’t alter the fact that there are bound to be differing outcomes depending on whom is elected and that one of those outcomes would be worse than the other. Thus while it is true to say that one’s individual vote will not make any difference to the outcome, the libertarian should have an interest in that outcome.
There remains the question, if one chooses to engage in mainstream politics, of how to improve the choice offered to the voter. There is no prospect, under the UK’s first past the post system, of a government being formed by any party other than Labour or the Tories. It may seem, at first, like a daunting task to convert either party towards any kind of libertarianism. How does one persuade an entire party of committed statists away from statism? Surely by the time everybody was on board, the “libertarianism” would be watered down so much so as to be unrecognisable? One possible answer to this conundrum was suggested to me while reading the Observer Food Monthly.
Heston Blumenthal, chef-proprietor of the 3-Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant, takes a uniquely scientific approach to cooking. One of the concepts which informs his thinking is Flavour Encapsulation. This describes the strength of flavour imparted when elements of contrasting flavour remain whole and unblended. Blumenthal explains it thus:
Make a cup of coffee with one ground coffee bean – it will taste horribly insipid. Now take the cup and fill it with hot water; just before you drink it, pop a coffee bean into your mouth, crunch it and then drink the water. This time, the coffee flavour will be far stronger and last in the mouth a lot longer. The experiment shows that a coffee bean delivers a far greater flavour eaten whole than when ground up in a cup of hot water. Effectively, the flavour is encapsulated in the whole bean but dispersed in the water.
This is the culinary principle behind such things as marmalade, fruit cakes, spaghetti carbonara, even something as naff as sun-dried tomato ciabatta and explains why significantly more flavour is required for ‘smooth’ food such as a souffle or pureed soup than ‘chunky’ food. If your objective is to create a nutty chocolate bar there is an efficient method and an inefficient method. The reason why smooth textured praline is more expensive than a chunky ‘choc and nut’ bar is because far fewer nuts are required for the latter to achieve an equivalent flavour. To convert a party such as the Tories towards libertarianism it is not necessary to puree and blend with the mass, all you need is a few whole nuts.
Whatever happened to the phrase, which I believe was coined about a year ago by his überblogger highness, Glenn Reynolds, “A pack, not a herd” following his pointer to a Jonathan Rauch article?
If you recall, Reynolds attempted to show how the idea that there is a negative tradeoff between liberty and security is based on an error and that free societies, because they let citizens be vigilant as well as rationally self interested, are typically safer against threats than those in which folk assume the State will see to every issue.
What is so clever about Reynolds’ argument is that it means that opponents of Big Government measures to make us ‘safer’, for by example, crackdowns on various civil liberites, can instead point to positive examples of people figuring out problems without the need for endless government programmes.
I think that coming up with lots of positive examples of how individual men and women have worked voluntarily with others to fix problems normally felt to the province of the State can do more to advance the cause of liberty than a library of classical liberal tracts.
And if there is a supreme British example of voluntarism, heroism and the advantages of encouraging a “can do” philosophy in our lives, it is surely that favourite of libertarians, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).
And the depressing question which arises for me is, if the RNLI were being contemplated now rather than in its time of birth in 19th Century Britain, would the health and safety bureaucrats try to kill it at birth?
Dear readers, you are ahead of me on that one.
For a wonderful account of the BBC’s world famous dispassion and impartiality, check this out.
Some views are more welcome than others it seems.
In addition to loving skyscrapers I also have a thing about bridges, and I periodically feature a picture of a bridge at my Culture Blog. Sometimes the pictures are taken by me, of one or other of the many bridges of London. Sometimes they are acquired from the infinity of information that is the Internet.
Some while ago I featured the Coronado Bridge, which is next to San Diego. In that connection someone else drew my attention to another splendid bridge in Macao. Commenting on that posting, Phil Cohen has this to say about the Coronado Bridge:
The original design for the Coronado Bridge was a much shorter, and almost straight span to the Island (actually, peninsula). Then in order to qualify for federal funding, (whereby our government pays most of the tab), the City of San Diego curved and lengthened the bridge to meet the minimum length standard that would qualify the Coronado Bridge for Federal funding.
How about that for an unintended consequence of taxpayer funding. They help you if yours is a long bridge, so San Diego builds a long bridge instead of a short bridge!
If you want to see even more clearly what Phil Cohen is talking about, just take a look at this map!
It is very rare that government spending has such conspicuously visible results. Normally, when governments waste money – which is what they mostly do with money, after all – the waste all happens tucked away in offices and in the form of a few thousand quietly invisible salaries for suburbanites. For every Concorde or Space Shuttle or daft piece of architecture there are a hundred bits of wastage that are no more exciting to look at than evaporating water. But this Coronado Bridge story really makes the point.
Personally I prefer the highly visible kind of government wastage. First, it is often, as with this bridge, and as with Concorde, very pretty to look at. Second, it very prettily dramatises how wasteful government spending can be, and I like that even more.
Two decades ago I used to love arguing about the rights and wrongs of capitalism, socialism, social democracy, collectivism, communism, etc. Now, I don’t have the adrenalin for it. Now I prefer to offer observations, big or small, and let others fight about them while I cook up my next observations. Thank God (by which I of course mean Perry de Havilland and his editorial confreres – thank goodness might be a better way of putting it) for Samizdata.net, because here I can do just that.
But if you want a good old libertarians-versus-collectivists row to join in on, this Chris Bertram post together with all the comments it has provoked could be just your ticket.
Chris Bertram says this about the Morecambe tragedy in which nineteen Chinese cockle pickers perished:
But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals.
Bertram’s piece is a classic example of what one might term Implied Collectivism. Capitalism, says Bertram, regularly causes violent deaths. The clear implication is that therefore “capitalism” needs in some way to be severely hobbled, if not done away with altogether, and that if that happened, poverty would likewise be diminished or even done away with too. But he doesn’t dare come out flat with the claim that capitalism ought to be cut back, still less got rid of, on poverty relief grounds, because that would be too daft. He doesn’t even think this, because he does have more than a trace of intellectual efficacy and moral sanity in that befuddled head of his. Nevertheless he allows the implication to float in the air, because he wants it to be true, or seems to. Not admirable. He ends his piece thus:
But we mustn’t forget that the root cause of many such tragedies is that poor people need to risk themselves in order that they and those they love may live. Unless they cease to be poor, and cease to face such unpalatable choices, such events will happen again and again.
There is as much truth in that bit of writing as in any where the words “root” and “cause” are to be found next to each other and in that order, but so what? Why blame “capitalism” for that? This is like blaming oxygen for forest fires.
And if poor people are to cease to be poor, what they need is more capitalism, different bits of capitalism to choose between, not less of it. If those wretched cockle pickers had had more and consequently better choices, they might not have chosen the risk of drowning for the sake of £1 a day. And … oh, but I’ve said all this, argued all that. → Continue reading: An argument about the root cause of poverty
One of the most appealing aspects of a libertarian outlook is simplicity. It is often the case that when one examines, in greater depth, what initially appears to be a libertarian conundrum, it proves not to be. One such faux-dilemma, suggested to me by Alan K. Henderson’s comments to Andy’s post below, is the extent to which liberty can be threatened by non-state interests.
This can be the basis for populist political crusades against “Big Oil”, “Big Pharma”, even “Big Food”. The faux libertarian conundrum is the notion that we need a strong state as a guarantor of “real competition”: to break up monopolies in the interests of consumers. Yet surely such interference in the market is un-libertarian? In reality the conundrum evaporates when one examines how such monopolies arise. Put simply, monopolies wither in the free market and thrive under state regulation. Such monopolies, rightfully abhorrent to any free market capitalist or libertarian, are sustained by the very political system which seeks to regulate them. Just as the enforced “tolerance” of multiculturalism is a form of intolerance, so enforced competition is inimical to true free-market competition.
A similar dilemma is suggested by considering the plight of those in Northern Ireland who have fallen foul of paramilitaries. It matters little to a person tortured or exiled on threat of death whether his tormentors are acting for the state or a paramilitary group, Yet so-called human rights bodies such as Amnesty International, pay little attention to the human rights of such individuals, reserving their comments for infringements by state forces. Glenn Reynolds struck a chord when he cheered David Trimble for pointing this out. Needless to say this did not go down too well with some of the socialists and nationalists who comment at Slugger O’Toole. The conundrum is that surely a libertarian can agree with Amnesty’s justification: It is proper to be more concerned by state abuses than actions by private agents.
In examining this “conundrum” it also evaporates but leads to a surprising, counter-intuitive insight. In the segregated, working class urban ‘bantustans’ of Northern Ireland, paramilitaries are in a position to exert punishment and enforce exiles because they have been ceded a monopoly of violence. By the state. Local hostility to police forces means they are reluctant to carry out normal policing and individuals are prevented from defending themselves. This gives the paramilitaries a free run. Though they are nominal antagonists, the IRA effectively operates a monopoly of violence backed by the British state. The plight of its victims should be the proper concern of any agency which professes to uphold human rights.
Perhaps the ‘idiotarian’ opposition to the US is over the top, a bit like suggesting that Pol Pot was better than Richard Nixon because Nixon taxed more people. But I offer three honest reasons (well, one is cowardly) for opposing British military intervention and occupation of Iraq:
- The British armed forces are not properly equipped. I did say so beforehand. Let me be clear: if the cause is just, but the equipment is not ready, kit up first, then go to war.
N.B. This is not an argument against US intervention in Iraq. I note approvingly that in the Second World War, the US federal government starting arming before launching assaults on Axis-occupied territories.
- This one will really not be popular on Samizdata.net… Suppose that it is not possible to defeat Islamic fundamentalism by force of arms – at least as far as the UK is concerned. A final ‘victory’ worldwide that follows half a dozen nuclear terrorist outrages in the UK and a racial war in most of the UK’s towns is not worth it. As far as the UK is concerned, it might be safer to appease and let others do the fighting. I think of Switzerland not declaring war with Germany over the treament of the Jews in 1941.
- To be a libertarian must include at least some reservations about using other people as ends for one’s own purpose. I do not have the right to force one person (A) to do something to another (B) that I think is moral, but that (A) did not wish to do, even though (B) may deserve it. This means among other things that I do not have the right to levy money by compulsory taxes in Yorkshire, to pay for my pet social-engineering experiments in Basra. I should add that the argument against compulsory aid for the disabled is the same.
In effect a libertarian who says it is fine to use tax-funded resources to liberate Bagdad from tyranny and economic ruin, and argue that it is not alright to use a fraction of the money to liberate a paraplegic from economic disadvantage, could be said to be inconsistent.
Failing to recognise the points I list above could lead to the following sorts of problems:
- A British soldier killed because he lent his body armour to a colleague. This sort of thing happened in the Crimean War with coats, right boots, blankets etc. In Kuwait the British troops got the nickname ‘the Borrowers’ from the US troops. I imagine that the French troops in the Crimean saw their British colleagues in much the same way.
- Consider this scenario: by the end of the ‘war on terrorism’ in 2015, France has not had a single nuclear terrorist strike, the US has had 20, the UK has had six and Spain, Italy and Poland one apiece. Who’s the idiot?
- In 2010 President of the EU Blair announces a “libertarian” programme of the Peace Corps: all 18 year olds will serve in a peace-keeping unit to promote the values of freedom around the world. The move is popular as it cuts youth unemployment in the EU from 45% to 40% and crime.
I repeat: removing Saddam Hussein is great. So why worry about all the lies or mistaken intelligence? It matters because we may be asked to believe another set of pretexts. It would be nice if the next lot were a bit more coherent and plausible. Of course it will be harder to persuade many people who swallowed the “45 minute” threat line of Tony Blair’s. Refusing to support a war just because Tony Blair says it is right does not make someone an idiot.
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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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