Samizdata

Several blogs have also picked up on Janet Daly’s article that Brian Micklethwait mentioned at length earlier on Samizdata.net. However the section of Daly’s piece which attracted my attention was not the section that Brian quoted:

Collectivism involves giving up your autonomy and your moral responsibility to the group. In practice, in modern political economy, that means giving them up to the state. There is nothing inherently good or ethical about this. But that is a wildly unfashionable thing to say – just like saying “No” to the euro used to be.

The way I see it, writing “there is nothing inherently good or ethical about this”, whilst most certainly true, really misses the point as it looks at the question from the wrong direction. There is something inherently bad and unethical about giving up your autonomy and your moral responsibility to the group. In fact it is completely impossible to transfer moral responsibility: that is why a soldier can be tried for any war crime that they carry out regardless of the fact they were only ‘following orders’ from their duly constituted superiors. The entire concept of ‘group morality’ is an absurdity. Individual morality is the only morality.

It does not matter what anyone else does or what ‘permissions’ you are given by family, religion or state, you are morally responsible for your actions. For it to be otherwise you must be quite literally insane.

Dale’s posts certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons on the issue of racism. In the comments section, the delighfully named ‘Godless Capitalist’ from the blog Gene Expression has put forward several views that I must take issue with.

Intermarriage amongst races requires no ‘campaign’, it is a spontaneous social fact. The streets of London suggest that anyone who thinks a ‘campaign’ to encourage it is required is not just wrong but profoundly so. Miscegenation is a natural consequence of close proximity unless institutional racism prevents it.

Many years living in the USA (about 1/3^rd of my life) proved to me that significant sections of US society tend to be profoundly racist in ways that have to be experienced by an outsider to be believed. The number of times a black male acquaintance of mine who was attending University in New Jersey was insulted and even assaulted because his girlfriend was white showed me an aspect to US society not many US bloggers like to contemplate.

I do not doubt the factual veracity of the crime figures that Gene Expressions loves to bandy about: I have lived and worked in urban America enough to know the reality. But whilst crime figures prove there are serious problems in Black America, they tell us nothing whatsoever about the causes of those problem. Why look for genetic excuses for what is so obviously a man-made social problem? The historical legacy of slavery, followed by Jim Crow, followed by decades of American socialist ¹ and right-statist distortion of American society, all in ways that could not have been better crafted to produce an unassimilated underclass if they had actually set out to ruin as many people as possible, does not ‘prove’ anything at all about African or Afro-European genes.

I am sure if genetic science existed in immediate aftermath of the Imperial Roman withdrawal from Briton, Roman scientists would have shook their heads and written off the ancient Britons as just genetically inferior to the Romans at sight of social chaos, decaying roads and aqueducts falling into disrepair.

Mexico and Brazil are held up as examples of the fallacy of expecting miscegenation to improve racist attitudes, yet that actually proves nothing universal about anything. A ‘white’ ruling class clinging to the top of a social pyramid, presiding over societies structured to maximize class differences proves… that the people at the top like to stay on the top. This is not exactly a stunning revelation. That attitudes towards race, a visible characteristic, would conflate with the socioeconomic ‘markers’ of a power elite who have a vested interest in differentiation tell us even less about some imagined genetic predisposition of the have-nots.

¹= I refuse to use the term ‘liberal’ regardless of its popularity in the United States, when the actual meaning of the word indicates ‘illiberal’.

Gene Expression takes exception to my earlier posting:

Of course, I beg to disagree. Let me give you an example of how race does matter, ripped off from Steve Sailer: “You’re a 5’0″ tall female walking down the street. Coming down the street on your side are four black men loudly talking to each other. On the other side of the street you see four Chinese men, again, talking loudly to each other. What do you do?”

To which I answer: “In which year?” Just to have a bit of fun with this, I’ll posit the thoughts running through our midget blonde’s matrilineal side heads:

1930: “Don’t they know their place? If one of them touches me daddy’ll have them all lynched!”

1950: “What is this world coming to? I’ll have to tell daddy so the police can arrest them.”

1970: “They’re probably angry over white hegemony. I’d better cross the street for safety.”

1990: “The one in the middle is kind of cute.”

2010: “Didn’t I go out with him once?”

2030: “I’d swear that was cousin Lonnie!”

David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky responds briefly to my unbrief piece about John Gray.

As Brian Micklethwait suggests, John Gray is an incorrigible pessimist. That I can understand but it’s no reason to give up the fight for liberty.

First, I don’t suggest that John Gray is a pessimist, I bloody well say it in seventeen foot high flaming capital letters. There’s no suggesting about it.

And second, to repeat the point being made in those seventeen foot high letters, Gray’s pessimism applies to whatever is the dominant optimism. And that’s now us. We used to be pessimistic about Marxism and he agreed with us about that. But he never agreed with us about the wonders of liberty, because he doesn’t believe in the wonders of anything. He’s not giving up the fight for liberty, because he never fought for it in the first place. He merely fought with us, against Marxism. Now, there’s no need for that, because that fight is over. Now we are the enemy, with our absurd enthusiasm for the wonderful things that liberty might do, in a possible wonderful libertarian future. He is, I repeat, being completely consistent.

While Daniel Antal‘s poor farmers and street traders demonstrate for free trade and deregulation, here is a British business perspective on government regulation, from the letters page of yesterday’s (August 29 2002) Times:

Sir, The UK Government places a strong incentive on industry to monitor the amount of packaging it produces, by means of the Packaging Waste Regulations. Under these regulations, everyone from the producers of the packaging to those who sell it (for example, the supermarkets) has to pay a levy for each piece of packaging handled.

These regulations can be quite complex, and many members use compliance schemes to help them to meet their obligations. Valpak is the UK’s largest compliance scheme, with over 3,200 members from throughout industry. Our philosophy is not only to ensure that our members achieve compliance, but also to ensure that the money generated by meeting the obligations is used in a responsible manner, to aid and encourage recycling.

All of us, both industry and consumers, can help to increase recycling and reduce the amount of packaging produced in the UK.

Yours faithfully,
J. Cox
(Chief Executive Officer),
Valpak Ltd,
Stratford Business Park,
Banbury Road,
Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 7GW
August 23.

I’m sure we’d agree that recycling is a fine thing, if anyone can make of it a profitable business that doesn’t depend on anyone being compelled to do it. Millions in the third world do scratch a living from genuine recycling, although no doubt there are all kinds of Transnazi plans afoot to forbid such activities, based on the notion that the way to get rid of poverty is to make it illegal.

But Valpak is just the expansion of the public sector, done slightly differently to the way we’ve been used to. They’re civil servants tricked out as businessmen. Try to imagine what Mr Cox thinks about deregulation.

We cannot rely on capitalists to defend capitalism (sprinkle inverted commas to taste).

…The time to worry would be if he stopped attacking us.

John Gray used to defend freedom and free markets; now he denounces all such stuff. He used to be one of us, but now he isn’t. How come? Have we changed our minds? Has he? Is the fellow some sort of traitor?

There is nothing inconsistent or treacherous about John Gray. He was never more than a useful ally of the libertarian movement. He hasn’t changed the way he thinks. He hasn’t, in Tom Burroughes‘ words, “declined and fallen”. Nor have we. It is the times that have changed. These now place John Gray in opposition to us rather than in alliance with us.

The circumstance which enabled me to start seriously understanding what goes on inside John Gray’s head occurred about fifteen years ago.

Remember the AIDS scare of the mid-to-late eighties. Remember when we all made lists of our bed companions, and when they all did, and we thereby constructed vast but, as it later mostly turned out (provided that you were a non-drug-abusing heterosexual), entirely imaginary networks of deadly contagion. Remember when millions were going to die, and everyone and his lover besieged the Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinics demanding to be tested. Remember when AIDS was trumpetted to the world as an equal opportunities killer. Of course you do, even if, like me, you could not now put an exact date to that terrible moment of apparent doom.

Well, I happened to meet up with John Gray, with whom I was then acquainted, just when this moment was at its most scary. He it was who conveyed to me the full horrors of the sexually transmitted doom that supposedly then awaited us. He had just come back from America, he told me. And in America, he told me, they were predicting deaths by the million. Something like, if I remember his figure rightly, twenty per cent of the American population were going to die hideously, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could do about it.

There wasn’t much talk of the strength of the evidence for all this, merely the assertion that it was definitely so.

And he loved it. He wallowed in it. Just when the world was ceasing to make sense to the rest of us, it was making perfect, wonderful, glorious sense to him. Disaster is just around the corner! Yes!!!!

Now what’s going on here? The simple answer is that John Gray is, as Tom Burroughes says, a pessimist. But he is a consistent pessimist. He has always been a pessimist. He always will be a pessimist, until the moment he dies – another moment which will also make perfect sense to him. He never has and he never will betray the camp of pessimism. His coat will always be deepest black, and he will never turn it. He can be depended upon to see disaster around every corner.

Disaster, in John Gray’s world, is the result of optimism and enthusiasm, of “constructivist rationalism”, as Hayek put it, of some formula which lots of people are getting excited and happy about. All such formulae, for John Gray, will inevitably end in tears.

I don’t know why John Gray is such a pessimist. Perhaps when very young he had his one episode of manic, insane happiness and optimism, and he ran joyously around his Welsh house shouting hosannas. The world was a happy place. He had just proved it, just read a book about it. It was progressing. Every day, in every way, it was getting better and better. Hallelujah!! And then just as the graph of his joy was reaching idiotic heights, his gloomy Welsh uncle dropped by with the news that his favourite Welsh aunt – who was in fact his favourite human being in the entire world ever and who had only that morning been telling little John that the world wasn’t all misery but in fact a happy smiling place full of joy and love and good home cooking and nice clean houses with indoor plumbing such as there didn’t use to be in the bad old days – had just been killed horribly in a car smash

→ Continue reading: The consistent pessimism of John Gray