Samizdata

Looking at another country from afar is rather like viewing it through a spyglass. In the case of Britain, with its huge on-line media presence, with the wave of a mouse you see what UK media writes about in detail without seeing what lies around the issue. Then you see what the media in one’s own country says about things going on in the UK, and finally you base your emergent views within the meta-contextual references of your own culture, as we all do.

But a little learning is a dangerous thing. If I were to read the LA Times and NY Times from afar day after day without having lived in the US for many years, I might conclude I have a shrewd idea as to the undercurrents of US society and reasonably deduce that the United States was a very different place than the one it in fact is.

A great deal of wildly generalised commentary has been written about anti-Semitism and racism in ‘Europe’ recently. John Braue, who is not an unreasonable commentator much of the time, discusses Euro-racism in terms which are correct to an extent but also very misleading as he makes sweeping assumptions that tell us as much about his meta-contextual frames of reference as about the subject at hand:

It’s not contempt, it’s outright racism.  Europe is the home of the Tribal State; if you are not a member of the Tribe, you can never be a member of Tribe, not even if you are a tenth-generation immigrant.  You are at best a Gastarbeiter, to be given the scut work to do so that the Volk can collect their government benefits in peace; at worse, a nuisance to be run out of town if, inexplicably, one of the Volk wants your job instead of just cashing his monthly check as an “occupational reservist”. That, incidentally is the reason for European anti-Semitism; the Jews not only (in their view) cannot be assimilated into the Volk, they don’t want to be; they act as if being Jewish is as good as being English, or French.

From my discussions with French friends, there is some truth to that. Likewise one only has to read the nominally libertarian Hans-Herman Hoppe‘s works to realise how different German and Anglosphere views of the nature of society are. Every nation has its intolerant elements, but to think German and French racism on one hand, and English racism on the other have a common root is to fail to understand that ‘England’ (John does not say ‘Britain’) is not Europe.

To suggest that at its core, English culture has a blood and soil volk ethos is to fundamentally misread the often repeated messages of English history. By that logic we should still have Huguenot ghettos in London. How can the enormous number of Jews who have been senior government ministers over the last 50 years be explained away? The Jews of Britain have been the masters of successful assimilation precisely because being a Jew does not make a person less British or even English, any more than being a Catholic makes me less British or English. As a splendid example, when one reads David Carr’s articles to this blog, one is struck not by his jewishness but by his effortlessly pugnacious Englishness.

I am sure John and other commentators of similar generalised views reads the on-line Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Reuters etc. and are therefore very up on current events as reported in the UK media but I wonder if John also knows that there are more members of ethnic minorities in local government in the UK than in any other single country in Europe.

To be British is much like being ‘American’. It is a meta-context to which one subscribes, rather than be born into. Britain, and in particular England, in fact is no less integrated than the United States and probably more so (and with far less heavy handed intrusions by the state to make that happen) and far, far more so than mainland Europe. Mixed marriages are endemic, which is far and away the best measure of social assimilation. The proof of the sheer extent of miscegenation in Britain can be seen walking hand in hand down the high streets of Britain in glorious and damning rebuke to those who believe free choice without the direction of state leads to social separation. Is there racism and anti-Semitism in Britain? Yes of course. In a few areas it is very serious but it is hard to escape the view that race relations in the UK overall are almost a case study in socially driven (rather than state driven) assimilation.

For another splendid example of the reality of the ‘English Volk’, I recommend you check out the site of fellow British blogger, Adil Farooq of MuslimPundit and see Islam interpreted in ways which spring from a truly British meta-context.

I love Economics classes that tell the ‘truth’ about environmentalism. The worst part of it is that the way they paint the two sides of the issue. On the one side are the conservatives who “think that money-grubbing companies will somehow fix the environmental problems”. On the other hand are the “progressives who who view government as capable of promoting an activist agenda to serve the general interest of the public”.

These quotes come from my economics teacher, who by the by I found out (through a campus Deep Throat) worked for Ralph Nader a while back. The textbook has similar viewpoints: the conservatives versus the progressives. Which one do you think most students support: those conservatives that want to go back to the old way or the progressives that want to move us to the future. Is it any wonder that environmental regulations constantly grow given the way it is taught? Is it any wonder why people my age do vote for Nader?

Hey, hey! It’s been so long since I have written with a pen,
its sharper than a razor, I don’t feel like Errol Flynn.
Got no computer, I can’t type the letter ‘M’.
You’re not responding right, I guess I better start again.
– ‘Last cigarette’ by Dramarama

At some point when I was growing up, it was impressed upon me by someone, I do not remember who or even when, that good handwriting was something that mattered. I don’t mean mattered just to them, but that it was something that was one of the multiplicity of ways a person could be judged, much in the same way a person could be judged by how they dressed or their smell or the manner in which they spoke. By this I do not mean the shop from which their clothes came, or what sort of aftershave they used or the specific meaning of what a person said. No, I mean were there clothes unkept, clean, carelessly worn, well fitted, did they smell unwashed or was aftershave used to mask rather than attend natural odors, were words carelessly and crudely strung together or well chosen and rich.

Clearly handwriting was another one of those ‘things-that-matter’. So I attended to it, studied calligraphy, adopted formal, social and casual hands, did a wicked gothic black letter and a distinctive cursive italic… and the years slid by.

Then tonight I found myself rummaging through one of several teetering piles of music CD’s I have not listened to for quite a while and popped on ‘Dramarama’, a reasonable but essentially unremarkable late 1980’s band and heard the song quoted above.

And it was true. In spite of churning out thousands of words a day for business and pleasure I have not written anything with a pen for more than two weeks by my best guess. And what I wrote then was a scrawled supermarket shopping list on the back of a page of last year’s The Far Side daily calender.

So does ones handwriting really say anything significant about you in this digital age? Well last year an old chum of mine got married again and asked me to do her invitations by hand, just like I did 12 years ago the last time she got married. I told her I was very out of practice and that she should get them printed but she insisted in that way she knows I cannot refuse. So I suppose she certainly thought it was ‘something that mattered’. Fortunately she provided a vast number of spare invitations as it seems that formal handwriting is most certainly not like riding a bike. It took me several days of concerted effort to dredge up that unused skill before I was producing hand lettered invitations to what I felt was an acceptable standard.

So what does it actually mean? Well there was a time when I would probably have thought a bit less of a person with ghastly handwriting. It was almost as if when handed a hard to read scribble that that person was being presumptuous and disrespectful, forcing me to try and decode it rather than making themselves clear. It was rather like someone who does not deign to look at you whilst addressing you.

But times do change. Although it might still irritate, I do not really accord quite so much stock to the quality of a person’s written hand. In this age of print-outs and IR networks there are people I know very well indeed and yet have probably never even seen what their handwriting looks like.

Perhaps it still is important, just not in quite the same nuanced way it once was. Still, I do hope my friends marriage proves more durable than the last one as I do not look forward to doing her invitations for a third time.

Neel Krishnaswami has some very interesting views in response to an article by Natalie Solent in Samizdata yesterday regarding the value, nature and possible future understanding of personal reputation:

I don’t think things will play out like this. Reputation is already extraordinarily important in determining whether you can get a bank loan or a credit card: it’s just that we call reputation a “credit rating”. Notice how this is different from the traditional notion of reputation: it’s highly specialized, with only the income and repayment habits of the person listed on it. It doesn’t matter whether one is a communist or libertarian, a Bible-thumping evangelical or an anal-fisting disco raver.

In the future, technology will enable people to create even more fine-grained ‘reputational’ judgements: the combination of computers and networking means that (in principle) one can look up every neighborhood someone has lived in and discover the price, or what magazines you have subscribed to since college, and which brands of shampoo you buy and when. This will increase economic efficiency, through the futuristic equivalent of targeted marketing, only the target niche is a niche of one consumer. These benefits won’t be captured by consumers, though because it enables firms to indulge in pricing behavior a bit closer to perfect price discrimination (eg, if you will only drink Coke and not Pepsi, then the price you pay for Coke might be increased — just for you!)

However, this is likely to be counterbalanced in two ways. First, ubiquitous networking means that price competition will get a lot fiercer. Second, people will also be able to use public-key cryptography to create multiple network identities, each of which has its own set of reputations associated with it. So you could create “sober citizen” and “wild-eyed radical” personas, independent of one another.

Two really good books on this subject are the collection Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct (Daniel B. Klein, ed) and Information Rules (by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian). The first is really essential reading for any libertarian who wants to see how voluntarist organizations work and also how they don’t — it has a beautiful mix of theory and case studies.

Kevin Holtsberry uses Russell Kirk‘s opus The Conservative Mind to analyse his own views. I find this approach interesting because I suspect the devil is in the details. Here is my libertarian take on Kevin’s listed summation of ‘The Conservative Mind’:

1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.

Yes: I believe that morality is something objectively derived but the understanding of which is often an evolutionary process. However it is this objectively derivable morality, which being the basis for all natural law, which transcends the custom of time and place and complex utilitarian constructs of written law, business and economy. It is the test all custom and law must in the end be subject to.

2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.

Yes, this is surely one of the keys to a libertarian or classical liberal mindset: an antipathy to conformity as a desirable objective independent of context. It is liberty and the inevitable diversity of objectives and understandings that spring from minds freed from literal coercion that is the highest objective of the classical liberal, rather than a utilitarian objective such as tractor production or discouraging single mothers. I am not so convinced “proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” is actually a true conservative value however.

3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders an classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”

Yes, but given that ‘class’ is just a moving amorphous set of social cues, it is not something that is an end in and of itself, anymore than ‘classlessness’ should be. It is only when concepts of class take on force backed statutory characteristics that ‘class’ becomes an objective ill. ‘Class’ when rationally understood is an emergent phenomena that means a whole lot less than Marxists would have people believe.

4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.

Yes. All true libertarians would regard this as axiomatic.

5) Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would restructure society upon abstract designs.

Yes. Civil society is the product not of reason and imposed models of ‘what should be’ but rather of evolutionary processes. To think otherwise is to confuse the essential difference between society and state, which is the underpinning fallacy beneath all forms of statism. Yet a willingness to let ‘nature take its course’ invariably means a willingness to accept the inevitability that as economic realities shift and readjust dynamically within any rational economic system, so too will society… and not all people who have ‘abstract visions of society’ want those visions imposed at bayonet point.

6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration rather than a torch of progress.

Yes, see above. But the libertarian/classical liberal is also a dynamist, and thus grasps that rational understanding of the gradualist evolutionary nature of societies does not preclude an enthusiasm for innovation and the changes that tend to spring from that. A society which accepts change through social evolution and development towards a less statist/stasist imposed order is not a society unmaking itself but rather one becoming deeper and denser: an adaptable society is a successful society.