We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Several readers have written in on the subject of the term ‘liberal’ and the following e-mails from Evan McElravy and Joe Clibbens also make good points
Evan McElravy writes:
It’s worth noting that the positive connotations of our ideology are so overwhelming that not only have the left stolen “liberal” from us, they are now working on “libertarian” too. Noam Chomsky, notoriously, refers to himself as a “libertarian socialist” and I was just the other day reading an article claiming much the same ground for Rosa Luxembourg, on the basis that she opposed Bolshevik centralism. The independent bookstore Book People in Austin, TX, where I just returned from, has their political books organized roughly by orientation. In the conservative shelf is Pat Buchanan along with David Boaz’s The Libertarian Reader, and a few other books of theirs and ours muddled together, while the “Liberal/Libertarian” shelf is home to Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Ralph Nader, as well as those more mainstream liberal writers you’d expect. On the other hand, the magazine section had more copies of Reason than anywhere I’d ever been, prominently displayed, and outnumbering widely The Nation and the National Review. So I’ll give them some credit, even if their history section was decidedly pedestrian.
Joe Clibbens writes:
I could not agree with you more in this campaign, and I myself have for years used the ‘liberal’ label, albeit with the necessary addition of ‘classical’ in certain company, whenever possible and never use it to refer to social democrats, but I am writing to suggest you expand it to other hijacked terminology.
The term progressive has its roots firmly in liberalism, while socialism has always been reactionary and luddite. Every time I hear a socialist referred to as ‘progressive’ I go all bug-eyed, they are in fact the very antithesis of its true meaning.
Of course ‘leftist’, traditionally speaking, would also denote minimal government, and the socialist bludgeoning of the left-right paradigm is the very reason it no longer makes any sense.
Still, all’s fair in love and propaganda, but it’s time we started fighting back.
Up the Revolution!
[Ed: I have always preferred ‘Up the Evolution!’ myself, for rational libertarians are nothing if not radical evolutionaries]
My friend Adriana Cronin has already been indirectly responsible for an interesting posting here a few weeks back (about that computer game which is having “real world” economic impact), which Perry de Havilland actually did the posting of. Adriana is ‘Something in the City’, as we in London say of mysteriously rich and powerful or heading-that-way financial folks, and was also one of the normal women featured in the blog bash photos. (Her attendance fee is, I understand, in the post.) She will be joining Team Samizdata officially Real Soon Now.
Meanwhile, Adriana has emailed me about two items of libertarian interest. One is about Reagan and can keep a day or two until she is blog-connected. The other is more topical, and concerns the fact that the Libertarian Party of Illinois have, it would appear, been spamming little old ladies with anti-gun-control propaganda.
You can take this complaint from a British media source two ways. One: the Libertarian Party of Illinois are making enemies needlessly among the normals with their bad netiquette. (This is Adriana’s take on it.) Or two: the normals are by definition idiots about gun control who deserve (a) to be mugged every day and twice on Sunday, and (b) all the anti-gun-control propaganda our side can spam at them, and that these Illinois guys are damn good! (Adriana says I am wrong even to suggest that. Spam is evil evil evil, even if you are God spamming Satan. What can I say? She knows all this 21st century stuff a lot better than I ever will.)
We received an e-mail from Kevin Connors on the issue of the term ‘liberal’
I believe David’s piece on the label “liberal” is quite ill-advised. I have a hard enough time trying to explain libertarianism to people and differentiate it from conservatism without swimming against the tide on an issue of semantics.
However I must disagree with Kevin. I think this is a useful point to raise for several reasons.
It is useful to put the evolution of the term into historical perspective, as Tom Burroughes has done, in order to understand the evolutionary process by which a term can come to mean the opposite of its original meaning, at least in the USA and to an extent the UK.
It is also useful to note that in the process of defining a word, it forces people to contrast it against opposing concepts and thus discover synonyms and antonyms. It is very helpful indeed to be able to point out that liberal is just a synonym for socialist and that it is mostly because ‘socialist’ has such negative connotations in the USA that members of the Democratic party use the term liberal. Thus a little discursive musing on the term ‘liberal’ makes that point rather hard to avoid. There is little daylight between modern ‘democratic socialists’ in Europe, Liberal Democrats in the UK and Democrats in the USA: they are just the modern faces of socialism.
Pointing this out is far from ill-advised. Many in the UK who vote for the ‘Liberal Democrats’ do so because of quaint ideas that they are the ‘middle way’, whereas the truth is that they are further to the socialist left than the Labour Party. In the USA many who would sooner use the star-spangled banner as a doormat than vote ‘Socialist’ nevertheless vote ‘Democrat’.
All we are doing is trying to introduce a little coherence into the political taxonomy!
Bravo David Carr! I must say I agree that the word liberal, often used as a term of abuse across the big ditch, needs to be rescued. To my mind, the term connotes open-mindedness, freedom, skepticism about overweening plans for the betterment of mankind, endorsement of the free market and respect for privacy. Thanks to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the “reforms” of the British Asquith government before the First World War, however, it has taken on an altogether more interventionist meaning since then, both in the U.S. and to a lesser extent, in the U.K. David is quite right to note, too, that liberal means something closer to what I hope it does mean when used in Continental Europe.
I think this issue of terminology matters because of the need by genuine liberals to distinguish themselves from conservatives, who may buy the economic side of liberalism but reject the social/cultural part, such as Britain’s Conservative Party. Vive la liberte!
Tom Burroughes (tom.burroughes@reuters.com)
Something has been bothering me for a while now and I regret to have to say that the source of my concern emanates from across the pond. Wonder what it is? Well, it’s the use of the word ‘Liberal’ when referring to someone of the leftist persuasion which is nothing less than a complete inversion of the term.
It gives me pleasure, therefore, to link to a campaign being undertaken by Bureaucrash, a group of seriously well dug-in and commited US student capitalist activists (and it feels so good to be able to type those words in earnest).
“Here in the birthplace of modern freedom, liberalism has come to identify a view that favors the use of force — force exercised by the bureaucratic state — to achieve supposedly noble ideals.”
I could not have put it better. Just what happened to the word? From 18th Century up until around the 1960’s ‘Libertarianism’ in this country was called ‘Liberalism’. It denoted support for free trade, limited government, low taxes and property rights. But these trends being what they are, Britain has been influenced by the US terminology and now the word denotes, regulation, nanny state, high taxes and hate speech laws. The latter is not ‘liberalism’ it is ‘socialism’. The very word ‘Libertarian’ was conceived as a means of distinguishing us from them.
You can test this theory if you ever go to Continental Europe where the term ‘Liberal’ has retained its original meaning. Just go up to any European socialist and tell him/her that you are a ‘liberal’. Note how their faces swifty transform from the customary rictus of hate to a rictus of seething hate shot through with horror.
I don’t know if was an underhand tactic by the left, a cruel happenstance of fate or mere sloppiness that allowed our political foes in the Anglosphere to grab our cloak and wrap it around their own bodies but it is way past time that we grabbed it back.
So I support the Bureaucrash campaign and, whilst I know it will stick in many a craw, I invoke all my fellow Capitalists, Libertarians and, yes, even you Conservatives to join in and declare; “Say it once, say it loud, I’m a Liberal and I’m proud!!”
I’ve just finished chairing one of my Friday talks. Patrick Crozier on the railways. Good. And all the better for the presence of a couple of French people, Christian Michel and Francois-Rene Rideau, who runs bastiat.org and also helps out with bastiat.net, and who made several very wise points. The reason for this blog, however, is simply that another friend wanted to know how blogging is done and I am showing him. Incidentally I had to go back and edit this, and I showed people how that was done also. David Carr helped me do the links, which is a first for me. I used to have to beg our Great Leader to do that for me. Progress.
[Ed: links now fixed by The Great Leader so that they actually work]
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.
That sound is the return of Will Wilkinson to the blogosphere. He has writen an excellent piece on the psychology of the post modern/anti globalization left called Pathologizing Dissent
In short, the rational, progressive ideology of the left came to be perceived by its adherents not so much as an ideology, but as a definition of social “health.” And as the case for socialism shattered, the conviction that the state must benevolently tend to the pathologies of its citizenry remained quite intact. Indeed, it was only too easy to substitute the rhetoric of health for arguments of reason. If you disagree with the left, you are not so much wrong as you are sick. Bring evidence against affirmative action; find yourself assigned to sensitivity training. In a brilliantly Foucauldian turn of phrase, Gottfried argues that the left undercuts disagreement by “pathologizing dissent.”
Terrific stuff.
Having verbally horse-whipped me to within an inch of my wretched life, Scott Rubush has been magnanimous enough to pen not just an apology but a generous offer.
Whilst I remain stubbornly proud of my satirical side-swipes, I must confess that I often find myself sympathising with Scott’s lament. When one contemplates, even for a moment, the sheer ubiquitousness of the egregious sewage that passes for so much of what we call ‘modern culture’, it is very easy to form the view that, despite the wealth of technology at our disposal, we are nonetheless living in a cultural and intellectual stoney-desert.
But step back, and a wider panorama can be seen. As my fellow Samizdatista, Perry de Havilland has pointed out, the cultural and intellectual worth is out there, you just have to look for it. Is that any different to the way it has always been? I suspect not. I believe that gems have always been hard to find and the only reason they seem so much rarer now is because the staggering growth in material wealth and technological development has made the desert we live in so much bigger and more diffuse. The gems are still there, you just have to dig through more dirt in order to find them.
And I believe a lot of people feel the same despair that Scott feels at the conspicious absence of anything that even passes for serious thought in our mainstream media. But, believe it or not, I take this as a good sign not a bad one; it reflects the sclerotic nature of the established orders not the debasement of the human mind. That human mind is exercising itself here, in cyberspace. This is where the great debates are happening; this is where new ideas and radical thinking are being forged. If you want to know who will be the next Socrates or the next Aquinas then keep blogging, Scott, it may be you.
And whether you keep blogging or not, I will be both happy and honoured to share that ‘pint’ with you if you ever fetch up here in the ‘Big Smoke’ (provided the EU hasn’t forced us all into drinking litres by then).
…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…
Scott Rubush write a reasonable piece on his self-named blog called Libertarianism and Marxism. I quite like the way Scott writes but I have to say he drives into several well worn potholes of misunderstanding when he mistakenly sees a confluence of views between Karl Marx and Dinesh D’Souza.
The notion that libertarians always disdain the ‘tried-and-true’ is his first misunderstanding. What libertarianism is based on is the rejection of the conservative and socialist predisposition to deference for deferences sake. Ours is the way that places civil society, and not state, at the centre of social interaction. We reject the nationalisation of private life. Yet civil society is not the product of our intellects but rather complex social evolutionary processes. Libertarians seek the solutions that emphasize free consent, binding contract and free association, all rooted in the ‘tried-and-true’ common law culture of the Anglosphere. It is only the state which can sweep away the ‘tried-and-true’ with the stroke of a pen, not libertarianism. What we reject is ‘traditions’ which have outlived their time, ‘tried-and-no-longer-true’, things like slavery, prohibiting women from owning property and legislated actions against consensual sexual practices like prostitution, homosexuality and other more unusual peccadillos.
The second misunderstanding is what D’Souza and Marx both said in the quoted passages. Whilst they both initially seem to confirm Rubush’s thesis, the last sentences in both of them illuminate why dialectical materialism is not the issue here at all because D’Souza and Marx have in fact drawn the opposite conclusions.
When Marx says in his well know remark “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself”, he is arguing that the factory system of bourgeois collectivisation of the proletariat due to the advent of technologically derived mass production, makes the merging of society and state inevitable, thereby eliminating the raison d’etre of the bourgeoisie and resulting logically in a dictatorship of the proletariat which imposes social truth on all, leading to socialist ‘New Man’.
However when D’Souza says “So technology helped to free human beings from bondage, and that is a moral gain because it extends a cherished value: freedom”, he saying the exact opposite. His thesis is not that technology will collectivise us but rather that it will make the proletariat into the bourgeoisie… in other words, we are all de-collectivised middle class now. Technology frees us from an existence of collective tribal subsistence, allowing us to develop socially towards the more several existence of an extended de-collectivised civil order.
It is this extended order that allows morality, and not just collectivised force, to govern our actions. Man is still man but the idea that changing his circumstance makes no difference to his moral development is hard to support. Where is the Hottentot Aristotle? Where is the Nung Socrates? Where is the Inuit Aquinas? It is from a level of economic development driven by technology that permits us to spend less time shooting arrows at antelope and more time becoming more than just upright animals-that-survive.
That’s why his piece is fatally flawed. Rubush fails to see that whilst mankind’s nature may be essentially unchanging, his circumstances are not… and that is a non-trivial matter when it comes to allowing people to spend more time in non-utilitarian activities and less time just surviving.
Marx felt technology would turn society into a vast state-society based on ‘scientific socialist’ principles in which truth itself in collectively derived. D’Souza feels technology frees us to think and entertain such concepts as liberty itself.
I’ve just had one of those “builders nightmare” conversations. You know the one. “We paid them X thousand pounds and the roof had a hole in it and the floor caved in, and then we waited Y months, and paid Z more thousand pounds …” This particular story ended up in the High Court of the Isle of Man, where my friend did at least get himself a semi-happy ending and isn’t too much out of pocket. But until then, it must have indeed been a nightmare. (I decided to do this blog even as I talked with him, and told him to expect this piece here, and that I would email him how to get to it, which I did. So watch out for a surge in our viewing figure from 90 million to 90 million and one, any day now.)
Why are there so many stories like this, and especially in Britain? First, is it only a British thing? Do Croatian builders do this to Croat householders? Is it like this in Belfast (which is still, just, part of the “UK and Northern Ireland” state)?
Possible answer: UK tax law bullies everyone into “buying” somewhere to live if they can possibly afford this (by going deep into debt), and into not renting as soon as they can afford to buy. If there was no tax advantage in buying rather than renting, much more building repair work would be supervised by large, specialist home-owners whose repeat business would not be something to piss on, the way it is with the wretched individual, building-ignorant UK home-owner.
In general, the relationship between owning-or-renting and freedom is surely the opposite of what it is so often said to be by British Conservatives. Renting equals freedom, not owning. Most home “owners” in Britain are about as free as a bird locked in a cage, which is why your British Conservative so loves his “property-owning democracy”. It puts him and his friends in command of British society. (Or it would, if only they could get the democracy bit right.)
Did you know that during his one lifetime Ludwig Van Beethoven moved house over fifty times? In Victorian England, it is said that people would decide to move, load all their possession onto a cart, and then go looking for a new place. In that order.
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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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