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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In all the acres of commentary in the press and elsewhere on those cartoons (death toll at time of writing, five, which is getting beyond a joke), I have not seen anyone mention this point, so I will get it in before I get bored of the whole affair.
There are two distinct reasons given in hadith why an image of Muhammad might be forbidden.
First, there is a general ban on images of living things as an attempt to rival God’s creative power. That can not be what is at issue here, since it is generally ignored outside mosques, even in Saudi Arabia (though the Taliban appear to have gone more or less the whole hog, to use about the least appropriate possible metaphor).
Second, reinforced by the prophet’s deathbed injunction not to set up a shrine or mosque over his grave, there’s the idea that religious worship through icons of saints, in the manner of the christian churches familiar to the early Muslims, constitutes an idolatry, or worship of the saint rather than God directly. So images of the prophet are banned in Islam because they may be revered idolatrously.
So the objection to the cartoons cannot really be founded in the Islamic image-ban. They are clearly neither idolatry nor invitations to it. On the contrary, the insistance that a mocking representation amounts to a gross insult to the prophet is much more like idolatry in that sense: a demand that the man be revered as incapable of representation as God.
Is what is really happening that the ‘insult’ is actually felt by individual Muslims (either at first hand, or in reaction to hearsay)? Those who feel themselves outraged are themselves threatened by the mockery, but wrap themselves in religiosity as a defence. In effect they are setting themselves up in the prophet’s shoes, attributing to him either primitive notions of honour that his disavowal of a shrine rather suggests he had surpassed, or God-like equivalence with the religion itself.
Now, remind me, who was insulting Islam?
So if the United Kingdom is in the grip of a “Blairite Tyranny“, what is the proper response?
After all, few would question the ethics of assassinating Adolf Hitler. The main complaint about the attempt on Hitler’s life is that it took as long as it did to be set in motion.
Even today, the ‘Third World’ is full of dodgy dictators whose death by tyrannicide would not be condemned by many, least of all their own victims.
However, few would actually argue that Tony Blair’s conduct of government, while authoritarian in operation and intention, merits his actual death by murder. If merit is involved, in my opinion, Blair deserves a sound thrashing from the Headmaster’s office, and ostracism by civilised members of society, and in any case, violence should always be a last resort in political life as in everything else.
But this begs the question: at what point does a ruler’s conduct become so vile and repulsive that tyrannicide becomes a morally plausible response? Does the democratic process increase the threshold, or lower it? Tyrannicides were applauded in ancient Greece; should we applaud them in this era?
[Editors note: please read this article carefully before commenting. It is NOT suggesting or even discussing whether or not Tony Blair should be assassinated, but rather is a discussion of how to deal with lesser variety tyrants. Comments suggesting Blair et al should be done in will be deleted as both unhelpful and seditious]
There seems to be a lot of it about at the moment, as the late British comic writer and broadcaster Spike Milligan might have put it. “It” being atheism. The biologist Richard Dawkins, known in some quarters as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, takes aim at religion in a current television series on Britain’s Channel 4 station. And only a few weeks ago I watched a programme on BBC 2 with Jonathan Miller, praising the tradition of skepticsm and outright atheism.
What is going on? We live at a time when our post-Enlightenment civilisation is threatened by religious fundamentalism in the guise of radical Islam. It seemed for a while after 9/11 to be bad form to make harsh attacks on religion per se but now it appears some restraints are coming off.
Of course this may only apply to Britain. In the United States, notwithstanding the theoretical separation of religion and state, it is, as Salman Rushdie has said, all but impossible for any declared atheist to hold down a public office more senior than that of a dog-catcher. This may of course change in time. Such things sometimes move in cycles.
As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:
Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers—the latter with great emotion—were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl’s father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.
Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:
“I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?”.
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords’ views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here’s a prefiguring example:
In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence
– Benito Mussolini
Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:
Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.
All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.
[cross-posted from White Rose]
“If you’re determined to be altruistic about it, the only way you can be of any good to others is for you to be self-sufficient. The biggest burdens in a crisis are those who were so concerned about the welfare of everyone else that they never provided for themselves.”
Harry Browne, How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation, pp. 199-200, Arlington House Publishers, Westport, Connecticut. I also recommend this classic by Browne.
The great irony is that the most fundamental right to individual sovereignty—private property—is the one most highly questioned. Property rights are usually construed narrowly to cover only things that can be exchanged, given away, or abandoned. But since a property right is the right to use and dispose of something, it actually has a far broader meaning. One begins with a right to one’s own person, including one’s body and energies. Indeed, this is that basic right that gives rise to the right to appropriate unowned objects from nature and to exchange peacefully acquired property with willing traders. In fact, without property rights there are no no rights at all.
From the Independent Institute.
Mick Hume has me worried, not for the first time. If I want to be gently scared, much rather a challenging column than a horror film (generally much less alarming than, and approximately as soporific as, the Shopping Channel).
He is describing Spiked!’s political position:-
We stand on the left as it was originally named, after those who stood on that side of the National Assembly during the French Revolution to champion reason, science, liberty and the secular values of the Enlightenment. We don’t want to return to the past, but to see those gains of humanity defended and developed in the changing context of the twenty-first century.
Well that certainly sounds attractive. Except for the word “left”. I have been defining myself as right-wing, by default, for 30 years. Any adherence to policies promoting human freedom (from atheisim to legalising cannabis to banning torture) out the conventional Left have always seemed to me adventitious, adopted only as markers of difference from reactionary traditionalists, not springing from principle. The basic principle, of subordinating individual lives to wiser-than-thou ruling class—and catering to the velleity of the mob—was always repulsive. Better identify, then, with the limited, pessimistic, ambition of the Right and find both a space to live and scope for pragmatic arguments for liberty.
The truth is, of course, the Left-Right division never made sense. It ought to be politics for the simple-minded, who can think only in one dimension. But everywhere serious, bright people are mentally enslaved by it.
My guess is Mr Hume has had a mirror of my experience: he has thought of himself as opposed to repulsive “right-wing” things throughout his life, and therefore is comfortable being Left, which I could never be. An acquaintance on The Salisbury Review once described me as having gone so far right to have come out the other side and being “practically a communist”—but I don’t feel it. Red flags (red ties even, Mr Bush) make me shudder.
The truth is, of course, that the rationalists on Spiked! and the rationalists on Samizdata are both too sentimental to abandon the political labels they have had imposed on them and have grown up with. A bit of explicit redefinition of those terms, which we indulge ourselves with, will not help us.
The point of politics, and therefore of political labels, is not to explain the world, but change it. Meanwhile the utterly unsentimental are doing just that, by appeal to popular sentiment, and by changing the language implicitly. They do not worry about coherence or clarity of definition, because social reality is defined in institutional power, and in the popular stories that make up “common sense”. It is not what we call ourselves that matters. It is what other people call us—and whether they can be persuaded to notice us at all.
Wanted: A new banner.
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of comment out there in dead-tree media and the electronic versions about religion and its relation vis a vis the state at the moment. (Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Anglican Christian who read a lot of David Hume, much to the annoyance of my old vicar, no doubt). There is a bracing essay in the Spectator this week about the nonsense spouted in the usual places about “moderate” Islam.
The blog Positive Liberty, which has become a group blog like this one – has an excellent piece looking at the religious, or in some cases, decidely lukewarm religious, views of the U.S. Founding Fathers. These men, to varying degrees, were acutely conscious of the dangers of religious fundamentalism, having seen within their lifetimes the human price of it. As we think about the dangers posed by Islam in our own time, the insights of Madison, Adams, Jefferson et al are needed more than ever. The linked-to article is fairly long but worth sitting back and sipping on a coffee for a good read, I think.
It is in my view essential for the west’s future that the benefits of separating what is God’s from what is Cesear’s is made as loudly and as often as possible. Muslims must be made abundantly aware of this point for if they do not, the consequences could be dire. Maybe because of the role played by the Church of England in our post-Reformation history, we don’t have the tradition, as in the States, of keeping a beady eye on the blurring of the edges of temporal and spiritual. Cynics have of course argued that nationalising Christianity via the CoE has helped the cause of fuzzy agnosticism and atheism more than the complete works of the Englightenment. Well, maybe. It may have as much to do with the relative openness of British society, our ironical sense of humour (religious enthusiasm has often struck the Brits as slightly silly or unhinged, ripe for Monty Python treatment) and desire not to give offence.
I fear that sense of humour is going to be tested for the remainder of my lifetime.
I have been tipped off by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber that he is taking issue with this post of mine. His post has the title you see above and can be found here. He writes:
The title, btw, is not meant to be a personal dig but rather a play on the title of Jerry Cohen’s book (see the post). Still, I think there’s a real question for you guys: granted, you think it would be wrong for the state to force you to do good, so why don’t you do it anyway, unforced?
I anticipate a range of answers to that one, including that the good I’m thinking of either (a) isn’t really good at all or (b) wouldn’t be achieved by the means I’m suggesting. But I’m saving responses for a later post.
Bertram says that I was not entitled to assume that the protestors are strict egalitarians or that they necessarily believe that the Third World is poor because they are rich and that money transfer is the way to correct that situation. He continues, “They may, of course, believe the true claims that some Third-World poverty is attributable to the action of wealthy nations and that money transfer can be part of a solution to that problem.”
I cannot resist saying that I am at least as entitled to my assumption that protestors at a protest agree with the rhetoric of the protest leaders as he is entitled to his assumption that libertarians do not do good unforced.
In his next paragraph he very neatly cites protectionist regimes such as the Common Agricultural Policy as an example of the action of wealthy nations that he correctly states I believe causes poverty. A little too neatly: if the protestors’ foremost demand was the abolition of the CAP then I might head up to Edinburgh myself, but it is not. Where they do make that demand at all, it comes way down the list after a lot of actively harmful demands such as that Third World governments make their own people pay more than we do for food and fridges. (Or “Third World countries have the right to protect their farmers and infant industries” as they quaintly put it.)
→ Continue reading: “If you’re a libertarian, how come you’re so mean?”
In Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose it says:
Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong – even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.
I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?
Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite…If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there – the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field – is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.
– Richard Dawkins, from a collection of brilliant essays, “The Devil’s Chaplain”, crushing all manner of shoddy thinking.
A few weeks ago parts of the libertarian intellectual scene marked what would have been Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday. Among a number of articles reflecting on her life and novels was this surprisingly conservative article by Reason magazine regular Cathy Young. Young is determined to present both Rand’s great virtues alongside her not-so agreeable side, particularly her intolerance of anyone, who, however constructively, criticised her.
But the article contains a number of charges about Rand and her system of ideas which I think are unfair. I want to address them not as some sort of defence of Rand – a writer who had some serious faults, in my view – but because the points Young makes can be applied to classical liberal/libertarian views more broadly.
Young claims that Rand had no time for family life of any kind and that her main characters appeared to have no enjoyable family life at all. As a result, her value system is held to be seriously deficient, in that Young claims that a viable human society requires us to feel obligations towards our fellow family members even though a person has not chosen the family he or she is in. (The same sort of argument is used by conservatives to justify loyalty to a country). This surely overlooks the point that for Rand, the relationships in life that matter are the ones people choose to enter into, not those born of historical accident. I am lucky enough to have been raised by two loving and smart parents. Very lucky, in fact. But it is obviously not so great for many other people and I have no doubt that a few of my friends and acquaintances have been drawn to libertarian ideas as a way of rebelling against the sort of unpleasant experiences that many children can have. So I certainly don’t condemn Rand because her heroes and heroines did not take out time from their adventures to change the kiddies’ diapers. After all, many great works of fiction contain characters with no reference to family issues at all. Young does not address it, but for Rand, and indeed many others, there can be no such thing as unconditional love. The sense of obligation I feel towards my parents cannot, in my view, be divorced from my sense of gratitude towards them. If they had been monsters, I would feel quite differently.
Another charge that Young makes is that Rand (and presumably many libertarians) had no interest in charity and therefore a society created by rational egoists would have no base of voluntary organisations able to help others in times of distress. That seems odd. As David Kelley points out in this marvellous book, “Unrugged Individualism”, rational self interested people have a direct vested interest in cultivating a benevolent, friendly disposition towards their fellow humans. In fact many people become firefighters, nurses, paramedic rescuers and the like precisely because it is an important value to them to do such things. In short, charity is not in conflict with enlightened self interest at all. What counts is that the actions concerned are voluntary rather than something that is imposed by coercive force.
Such drawbacks aside, Young’s piece is well worth reading. I discovered, for example, that Rand did not have much interest in evolution, which seems a bit strange for a declared atheist and enthusiast for science. I would have thought that evolution is something that fits quite snugly into a pro-reason, pro-freedom political phiolosphy, as Daniel Dennett has shown.
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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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