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There are opportunities to enjoy stirring victories in the unlikeliest of places. Take, for example, the continued refusal of the Vatican to relent on the ordination of women priests.
As a Jew (and a secular Jew at that) this is a matter which should be none of my concern but somehow I can’t help getting my shorts in a knot over it. Every time the Vatican issues another refusal, I let out a cheer of the kind I emit when my football team scores at home. It stirs my blood and reinforces my hope that the forces of darkness can be kept at bay.
The reasons for my taking a stand on the issue become abundantly clear once you understand that the campaign to make the Church buckle is motivated not by matters of Catholic doctrine or faith but by a quite different agenda:
“It seems a topic that just will not go away – particularly in North America, where the feminist movement has successfully promoted an end to almost all gender discrimination in commerce, government, industry, and education. Increasingly, adults in North America are viewing gender-based discrimination in the same class as racial discrimination, and are rejecting it as bigotry, profoundly immoral, and irrational. Many criticize the Roman Catholic church for its stance on male-only ordination.”
Sounds familiar? Of course it does. The handprints of the post-modern leftists are all over this campaign and the issue isn’t women at all really, the issue is revolution by stealth. The Catholic Church is in their cross-hairs as being an institution which is ripe for ‘deconstruction’.
I can say this because I have witnessed this kind of ‘deconstruction’ campaign played out to its endgame against the Church of England. Each time it was attacked, it was foolish enough to relent to avoid bad headlines and every time it appeased, its antagonists just smelled the blood in the water and it sent them wild. So it died the Death of a Thousand Cuts and now the exsanguinated giant grovels embarrassingly meak apologies for its own existance to empty pews beneath the baleful glare of an irrationally hostile press.
It didn’t help the Church of England that it was the official religion of the British State and, as that State lost its sense of destiny and moral purpose, so did the Church. But the Church of Rome has not been co-opted by any government anywhere. Membership is voluntary and, consequently, so is abiding by its rules. If you don’t like what the Church is doing then you can always leave. You can go and establish your own Church of PC Drivel and preach it to whomsoever will listen. No-one is stopping you.
It is for that reason that I hope the Vatican continues to stick to its guns on this issue. I hope the Cardinals plant their feet, set their jaws, put up their dukes and fight resolutely. No compromises, no deals, no climbdowns, no retreats, no concessions and no surrender. If they don’t they will regret it. If they do then the dawn will soon come, the sun will rise shimmering over the horizon and send the moral-relativist vampires and their hideous acolytes screeching back to their coffins with nothing to show for their infernal efforts.
Just Say No, Your Holiness.You owe it not just to Roman Catholics but to all the rest of us who live by the doctrine of reason.
I’m sorry but I cannot help myself. I am compelled to do these kinds of things and it’s all their fault really. They gave me the key to the castle and now I am running amok. It is late but I am awake and ready to wreak havoc.
Brian and I have agreed, through our interactions in the mind-numbingly prosaic two-dimensional world of reality, that we actually agree with other about what we mean. We remain, however, at loggerheads at how best to express what we mean.
I wonder if the lefties have this problem? Did they cross-swords with each other for years in the quest to find the appropriate linguistic tools with which to re-educate the bourgeoisie and dismantle the institutions of capitalism? Not ever having been a party to that party, I cannot say, but regardless of the procedures employed, they certainly managed to pick a winner in ‘multiculturalism’; a tool designed not to facilitate the voluntary interaction of free people but rather as a vehicle for spreading moral relativism.
The task of moral relativism was to abolish judgement. For it is by judgement that we conclude that a flushing toilet is absolutely better than crapping in a ditch; that veal parmesan is absolutely better than grubbing in the dirt for berries. It is judgement and the unfettered ability to use it that underpins our civilisation, not the other way around. Our culture is the collective expression of millions of private judgements; it is the canvas on which they are painted and shown off to an awestruck world.
Like all marxist tools, it has been employed with staggering success and the task of people like Brian and I is to blunt them and render them redundant. This is what we’re doing now, I hope.
The first stage of this process is to clarify exactly what the word ‘multiculturalism’ means and why it must be rejected. I hope I have gone small way towards doing this. But, secondly, we must find instruments of our own by which we spread the idea that ideas themselves are more important than ethnicity; that far from being ‘non-judgemental’ civilisation requires that we be vigourously and unreletingly judgemental and thereby continue to improve the human condition. Ethnicity cannot be altered by judgement or at all but values (and, hence, culture) can. That makes the latter important and the former just boring.
The term that both Brian and I are looking for is one that will satisfactorily encapsulate the idea that anyone can be judgemental and everyone should be. In this respect, may I respectfully suggest that the term ‘Melting Pot’ is not the term we should look to. I was a young boy in the 1970’s when I first became aware of the term and equally aware of the nature of its propagandists. They were the post-modern lefties and Gramschian marxists and ‘Melting Pot’ was their dry run; their prototype. It was a taste-it-and-see experiment from which they could calculate the likely success of their fully formulated plans that lay in wait. It was the equivalent of throwing it on the stoop to see if the cat licked it up. Well, the cat didn’t just lick it up, the cat lapped it up so it was full-steam ahead from that moment on.
The term ‘Melting Pot’ worked so well for them because it tweaked all the right guilt nodules just hard enough to bring tears to the eyes but no so hard that it caused screaming. The screaming came later. It was right for them for the same reason it is wrong for us; because it manifestly fails to distinguish between ethnicity and culture and, in fact, actively sought to blur those two things into one
It is time to give each of those concepts autonomy. My suggestion of the term ‘monoculturalism’ may come with as many Hydras as Brian suggests and maybe it should not be the settled choice. So I submit it as a place to start.
The search continues.
Postings have been a bit thin today. That means (a) that the Samizdata team mostly have lives and in particular lives at the weekend, and (b) that another Perry de Havilland blockbuster is probably due. I look forward to it. Ah, the joy of writing when you know that your editor will accept your stuff, on account of your editor being you. I know exactly the feeling. In the meantime, to keep the blog rolling, here’s another quicky from me, on the same theme as that of my exchange with David Carr about multi- and monoculturalism, melting pots, etc., that of finding or not finding the right word for what you want to say.
Some months back I gave an illustrated talk about politics – libertarian politics in particular and politics generally – in the movies. You will not be astonished to learn that one of the movies I played a bit from was Wall Street and nor will you be shocked to learn that the bit I played was that speech. However, it may surprise you that in that speech Michael Douglas does not say: “Greed is good.” What he actually says is: “Greed, for want of a better word, is good.” Maybe you knew that. I didn’t until I was preparing my talk and I strongly suspect I’m not the only one. And even if you did already know this, I hope you agree that this extra little phrase makes quite a difference.
Plain “greed is good” is a brazen, screw-you-Jack, in-your-face announcement that vice is virtue, or to put it another way, that virtue doesn’t matter. “Greed, for want of a better word, is good” is no such thing. It’s a genuine attempt at moral debate. It’s a morally sincere attempt to challenge existing moral assumptions, of the sort now bundled up in the word “greed”, which is explicitly identified as an unsatisfactory word for what is really being talked about. Which of course is why the enemies of “greed, for want of a better word” took out the “for want of a better word” bit.
The job of middlebrow propagandists like ourselves is, among many other things, to supply our ideological comrades and customers with better words, so that when they are making speeches about what they believe in, they don’t have to use phrases like “for want of a better word”.
I’m off to France shortly for a holiday. When I return I will get a fixed-price internet connection sorted. I will then include lots of interesting blue bits charging off in all directions in my postings, like a real blogger. In the meantime, assuming I can get my hands on an emailing device of some kind, there may be a few further blueless postings from me about whatever holiday excitements I encounter, and about my views on the state of France. And then again there may not.
You can sometimes overdo the business of defining your terms. Often the trick is just to get ahead and use them, and everyone can get your point clearly enough. But sometimes it is necessary to focus in on exact meanings.
Words to look out for especially are those crafted and launched into regular use by Marxists, of the ex-, sub-, gutter- or plain generic brand variety. Often the entire point of these words is to create confusion – typically to bundle together two ideas that ought to be kept separate and then to use the muddle to accuse opponents of thinking what they don’t think, of liking bad stuff and opposing good stuff.
“Exploitation” for example. Does that mean people using you in a way that is to your advantage? Or does it mean people using you nastily, against your will, for a lousy wage you haven’t agreed to? Big difference. You’re using me to spice up you dreary life right now, and you’re paying me nothing, you skinflint. But do I mind? No I do not. Exploit away.
Multiculturalism. Now there’s a word. Does it mean people from different cultures? Or does it mean people remaining in separate cultures? If from, then I’m all for it, in the sense of multicultural people coming to live and work in Britain. If remaining in, then I’m flat against it. I want the British melting pot to melt us all into a new culture – but just the one new culture please – where we can all get along contentedly, which won’t happen if we all stay stuck in ghettoes. So again: big difference.
This difference matters hugely. If you are arguing against “remaining in” multiculturalism, then you are liable, if you just carry on using the word “multiculturalism” uncritically, to come over as opposing “from” multiculturalism, in other words as a racist. But suppose, perhaps because you are determined above all else not to come over as a racist, you support “multiculturalism”. Then you risk supporting, without meaning to, the project of keeping ethnic minorities herded into ghettoes and exploited (in the bad way, nastily) by “multiculturalist” politicians like slaves exploited by plantation owners.
So, before you support or oppose “multiculturalism”, make it entirely clear which version you are talking about.
That’s it. I’ve said my bit. I love blogging. You can say in twenty minutes what it would take hours or even days to say in an “article”.
As I write, Britain’s Parliament is speechifying about the recently deceased Queen Mother. It occurs to me that her death may in time come to symbolise a change in the style of British public life, and in particular an end to the extraordinary episode of generational/emotional warfare initiated by the death of Princess Diana. This untimely event, together with the memory of the unhappy life that preceded it and with the lamentations that followed it, provoked praise of a more theatrical style of public emotional deportment. Stoicism, dignity and emotional reticence in the face of loss was held up to bitter and strident ridicule, most especially in connection with the public demeanour of the Queen.
Emotionally I am a true son of my late father, or at any rate I try to be. In his capacity as a Posh Lawyer he met the Queen Mother a few times, and, in common with most men and women of his time and type, he adored her. Like the Queen Mum, my father was a stoic. Life was a pleasure to be enjoyed, if necessary an ordeal to be endured, and a duty to be done. Pains and pleasures were both keenly felt, but both to be kept in proportion, at arm’s length so to speak.
Being my father’s son, I miss the days when footballers would score goals and then nod in modestly happy acknowledgement, instead of (as now) being mobbed like victorious streetfighters. When Halle Berry embarked upon her emotionally incontinent Oscar acceptance speech not long ago (made all the more repulsive to me by the suspicion that she may have been deliberately exaggerating the emotional incontinence of it all) I switched off my television as if killing a nasty insect. Many of Princess Diana’s performances were like that, both in their emotional revelation and in the sense you got that it was all rather calculated.
Emotional style matters. Style provokes, constrains and conditions actions. Devotees of the Emotional Incontinence school of public deportment are liable to make rasher, more impulsive decisions. My father and the Queen Mum lived to be ninety and a hundred respectively, and made themselves thoroughly useful and appreciated throughout their lives. When their contemporaries and emotional confreres died young or otherwise came to grief, they mostly did this while winning a world war. Princess Di got herself killed, pointlessly, in her thirties, in a car crash.
Don’t fry your food, don’t butter your bread
Don’t drink at work, don’t smoke in bed
Don’t try too hard, don’t fool around
Don’t hunt with guns, don’t hunt with hounds
Don’t be too fat, don’t be too lean
Don’t eat red meat, don’t eat fresh cream
Don’t drink and drive
Don’t smoke and drive
Don’t eat and drive
Don’t talk and drive
Don’t sneeze and drive
Don’t drive
Don’t mobile phone, don’t stare at screens
Don’t buy hot drinks, don’t wear tight jeans
Don’t play with knives, don’t make a fist
Don’t play with fire, don’t take a risk
Don’t have sex, don’t procreate
Don’t fantasise, don’t masturbate
Don’t stay up late, don’t exercise
Don’t innovate, don’t theorise
Don’t dare to dream, don’t raise your voice
Don’t make a fuss, don’t make a noise
Don’t climb mountains, don’t sail oceans
Don’t make sudden, jerking motions
Don’t play sports, don’t break sweat
Don’t play roulette, don’t make a bet
Don’t brave the storm, don’t ride the waves
Don’t get too cold and don’t sunbathe
Don’t ride a horse, don’t fly a plane
Don’t strain your heart, don’t use your brain
Don’t read a book, don’t get too tense
Don’t say a word, don’t cause offence
Don’t run, don’t jump, don’t stretch, don�t fly
And above all don’t do DIY
Don’t lust for life, don’t dance till dawn
Best of all, just don’t be born
The regular last Friday of the month get-together by London libertarians at Brian Micklethwait‘s place featured an interesting talk by Antoine Clarke about the reality of the introduction of the €uro, particularly how it occurred in France, and about the possible future of the EU from his well informed and rational libertarian perspective.
As usual after the formal talk was concluded, the assembled libertarian rabble had a forthright exchange of views in which hardly anyone actually got bitten…
Why is it called the “Kate Kennedy Club”? Search me. And search The Liberty Log while you’re about it and you still won’t know. But you will find a thoughtful piece posted this lunchtime about the Kate Kennedy club by St Andrews University Liberty Club‘s Alex Singleton. Apparently this evil Kate Kennedy Club is run entirely by males, and the PC meddler tendency of St Andrews U’ want something done about that. Alex ends his piece thus:
The distinction the anti-Kate Kennedy Club protesters are making between public and private is a false one. The Kate Kennedy Club is a private club, funded and organised privately. If the University decides to ban the Club, it needs to be able to explain just why it is OK for a collection of individuals to do something but not for a collection of individuals who have chosen to give themselves a name.
It’s a nice piece, but this last bit bothers me. One must be careful about telling meddlers to be more consistent. They might reply: “Singleton, you’re right. Good point. We must do something about all those damned collections of individuals.”
Don’t worry Alex. I’m being contrary pretty much for the sake of it. The way to spread ideas is to argue about them. Keep it coming. And thanks for the speaking invite.
It is a widely accepted axiom that our memory plays tricks on us. I beg to differ; it does not play tricks, it is just pitifully unreliable.
Technology is always a good indicator as to the truth of this. Many of us are rather wary of ‘new fangled things’ when they first appear on the market. But enough of us adopt them to make them viable. Then more of us adopt them and, before long, they are universal.
I bought my first mobile phone (cellphone) back in 1994 and have had one ever since. I was in the minority then. Now I am just a part of the crowd. More than that I can barely remember how I managed to cope without my mobile phone. How on earth did I ever get along without the convenience it provides? But I know that must have done.
A similar phenomenon applies to state regulatory regimes. Governments enact them to initial responses of suspicion and confusion but, applied vigourously, in a few short years they become a part of the social fabric and nobody can imagine living without them nor how we all coped beforehand.
A perfect example of this is Britain’s planning and building control regime which requires all new building (and even alteration of existing buildings) to be approved by a committee of local bureaucrats who, in turn, are answerable to central government.
Now, it will come as a surprise to nobody to learn that I think the whole mountain of legislation in this area should be scrapped; placed on a bonfire and burned to ashes while we all dance wildly around till dawn. I have good reason for wishing it so and I am not reluctant to broadcast this view.
Yet, whenever I do, I am greeted with almost uniform blank incomprehension.
Don’t be ridiculous. How could we live in a civilised society without planning laws? How would buildings be planned? Who would control land use and building quality?
My answer is, of course, nobody. The first planning laws were not enacted until 1949 amidst the post-war euphoria for sovietisation and when bureaucratic planning of every aspect of modern life was considered by all to be the wave of the future. Yet the vast majority of Britain’s towns and cities grew and prospered without the benefit of such mandates.
But how would I stop my next-door neighbour from opening an all-night discotheque? How would we stop greedy developers ruining our country with monstrosities and eyesores?
Valid concerns but long before we handed over responsibility for them to our elected officials, they were more than adequately dealt with by private treaty and mutually enforceable land covenants. Indeed, they are still in use today only now they are subordinate to the wishes of state-appointed officials who minister for our alleged good.
But what about architectural quality? How would this survive were it not for the state intervening?
In my view, it would not only survive but true architectural achievement would undergo a rebirth. Britain is fortunate to still retain so many buildings from its glorious past; the kind of buildings that inspire Hollywood movies and which tourists travel from all over the world to marvel at and photograph. All of them were built before 1949 and just about every soul-destroying eyesore and ugly edifice of urban blight in this country has been built since 1949.
It would not be right to say, though, that the dead hand of planning regulations have no effect because they do. They have the effect of suppressing innovation, reducing available housing stock and unnecessarily inflating the cost of the housing stock that does exist.
Yet, everybody believes that we would be lost without them despite that fact that we fared far better without them and within living memory.
The analogy with my mobile phone ends here because I can dispense with my mobile phone if I wish to. However, it benefits me both professionally and socially by facilitating communication at a reasonable price. Therefore it improves the quality of my life and I choose to keep paying for that.
Would that I could exercise such freedom of judgement when it comes to building a home.
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.
I mean he is begging for it… and so in order to indulge his rather interesting masochistic habits, he is walking down the virtual beach and kicking sand over all the big 250 lb guys on the beach. He wants to get bitch slapped by the liberals (by which he means American socialists), challenged to fisticuffs by the conservatives (by which he means American Republicans) and shot by the libertarians (by which he means us, I guess).
Well I don’t feel qualified to respond for the first two groups but for the last… well sorry John, I am not offended. In fact, I thought it was hilarious and not far off the mark.
But seeing as how I know John will be heartbroken if I don’t reply more ‘in character’… asking for the reason why libertarians don’t get elected is rather like asking why so few Jews are pork butchers. I am sure there probably are a few Jewish pork butchers (probably Russian ‘Jews’ living in Israel or Highland Park, New Jersey, who no doubt have a fine Slavic sense of irony) just as there are a few ‘Libertarians’ who get elected to put their hands on the levers of state oppression in order to manipulate society with the state’s proxy violence…
…perhaps you see my point. Or not.
Oh, and John, I would hazard a guess that the reason I blog a lot more than you is I probably have a lot more money. I made it via an obscure and very complex arbitrage deal that involved hiring other people’s kids to blow strangers for crack. Damn I love capitalism.
But the fact remains… John’s article is funny and contains a fair element of truth about ‘liberals’ (socialists), conservatives and libertarians.
P.S. Stay the hell off my property!
There is an interesting article about a meeting of libertarian science fiction writers over on Hollywood Investigator. The splits between libertarian thought (and libertarian ‘thought’) are made very clear by the views on parade at this dinner.
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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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