September 18, 2010
Many Happy Returns
Bad Conscience is now two years old.
It’s been a good two years, and the second even better than the first. Or at least, I hope so.
I’ve enjoyed extremely productive engagement with other bloggers over the past year – too many to mention individually. I’ve also unashamedly attempted to emulate the style of people like Chris Dillow and Don Paskini (in particular) – partly following explicit nudges from Sunny Hundal – in an effort to bring more concision and focus to the blog. And although I do still subject readers to lengthy treatises, I hope that they’re fewer in frequency and higher in quality than in the past.
Certainly, the blog has been a success if judged in terms of readership. On average, I receive about 4 times as many readers as a year ago.
But numbers alone are fairly irrelevant. What’s been pleasing is that overall the quality of comment and engagement on these pages has been consistently high – with a growing number of participants – over the past year. This site wouldn’t be worth it if people didn’t answer back, so thanks to all who do. But I understand that commenting isn’t for everybody, so thanks also to those who read but stay silent (even when I must obviously be in need of a good put-down).
As it happens I’ll be taking the next few days off to visit family in France. Normal service – now into its third consecutive year – will resume at some point next week.
À Bientôt
September 17, 2010
Taking Individuals Seriously
Luis Enrique alerts me to the excellent article Ideology in Economics by Robert Solow (which you can get here). This part got me thinking:
“No one can deny that advertisers advertise, and must have some effects (though one could argue about how much) on the preferences of consumers. It is certain that our preferences are far more social than biological or individual in origin. What should we conclude from these propositions? From the first, perhaps that advertising ought to be limited by taxation or regulated as to truth. From the second, what? Not, I hope, that individuals’ judgments about their own welfare should not be respected, whatever their origin. One need only ask what could be put in their place—presumably the judgments of an elite. The attack on consumer sovereignty performs the same function as the doctrine of “repressive tolerance.” If people do not want what I see so clearly they should want, it can only be that they don’t know what they “really” want.”
Solow raises an important point. Adult individuals are usually the best at identifying both their own desires, and the means of satisfying them. But even when they are bad at doing one or both of these things, it rarely follows that other agents are consistently and reliably better. History shows that whenever the right and responsibility for securing what individuals (“really”) want is taken out of their hands and placed in those of what must inevitably be political elites, disaster often follows. The Jacobin-initiated Terror of the French Revolution, or the horrors of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, serve as extreme but unignorable reminders.
Historically, the political right has been less prone to giving people what they “really” want by means of taking away individual decision-making than the left.* This, I think, is for two main reasons. Firstly, a conservative disposition against radical change coupled with a suspicion of state power as undermining private property. Secondly, a 20th century rightist preference for market capitalism which privileges individual choices in a market economy, compared (especially) with state-planned socialist (or communist) alternatives.
But I wonder if the lesson that people are the best judges of their own desires and wants may need to be (re)learned by the political right in the early 21st Century.
Consider the aggressive cuts programme of the current Coalition government. As Julian Glover has recently argued this is driven more by ideological preference for a small state than economic necessity. (Notice connectedly that Nick Clegg recently demonstrated how far rightward he has dragged the Liberal Democrats by arguing that the State must not “compensate the poor for their predicament”).
The cabal that run the ConDem Coalition are pro-market and state minimalist. They believe (rightly or wrongly) that a Britain with a smaller state will be better, and that if extreme socio-economic pain is required to get there then that is a price worth paying. Yet the correlate thought must go: individuals suffering that pain are making a mistake if they think it’s not a price worth paying – and they must come to see that what they “really” want is indeed a market-liberal, small-state Britain achieved by these means.
Like Bernard Williams I am deeply suspicious of dismissing people’s concerns – over unemployment, (lack of) healthcare and opportunity, disenfranchisement, inequality, poverty, unfairness, or whatever – by insisting that such concerns are founded on “mistakes”, and that the complainants would renounce their objections if they simply got clear in their own thinking. Chief Superintendent Derek Barnett may be a thug (or an idiot), but his warnings about riots should nonetheless be heeded. When people experience debilitating socio-economic problems, it will (at the very least) be unwise strategy to dismiss those concerns as irrational or mistaken.
Connectedly, I fear that the Coalition’s state-minimalist preference – and its desire to impose this regardless of objections from below – is based on a worrying historical ignorance. Tony Judt put it well:
“Moreover, and here the memory of war played once again an important role, the twentieth-century ‘socialist’ welfare states were constructed not as an advance guard of egalitarian revolution but to provide a barrier against the return of the past: against economic depression and its polarizing, violent political outcome in the desperate politics of Fascism and Communism alike. The welfare states were thus prophylactic states. They were designed quite consciously to meet the widespread yearning for security and stability that John Maynard Keynes and others foresaw long before the end of World War II, and they succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Thanks to a half-century of prosperity and safety, we in the West have forgotten the political and social traumas of mass insecurity. And thus we have forgotten why we have inherited those welfare states and what brought them about.”
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* The exception here may be 20th Century Fascism and Nazism. However, the stong nationalist aspects of these ideologies tends to elevate the success and glory of the fatherland as the supreme good in itself, as oppose to claiming that “The People” (or “The Workers”) will benefit most by having their decisions made by an enlightened political elite.
September 16, 2010
Rejecting The Kingdom of Fairies
From the age of 11-16, I attended a Catholic state secondary school in Merseyside. During that period I realised two things: that I didn’t believe in God, and that even if I did Catholicism would be a bad vehicle of worship.
Many things brought this about. But my contempt for Catholic teaching in particular crystallised in compulsory Religious Education class, around three specific experiences. The first is of a teacher telling my class that contraception was a sin, the rhythm method wholly reliable, and that any girl who had an abortion would definitely go to hell.
The second was the same teacher remarking that if people only had sex within marriage then “aids wouldn’t be a problem.” And then replying to my complaint that this was hardly appropriate insight regarding (say) non-Christians in Africa, that this was simply “their problem”.
The third was a different teacher telling my class that “condoms don’t work” because the AIDs virus is “smaller than the micro-holes in a condom membrane”.
But I also received a piece of genuine wisdom from a more reflective – if still very much Catholic – teacher at the school. I can’t remember what I was whining about in an attempt to disrupt the lesson, but the teacher in question stared me down and said: “Paul, you need to realise that belief in God, and the Catholic Church, are two different things”.
And she was completely right. Whilst I have many reservations about Christianity, believing in Christ as Saviour is a very different thing to following the dogmas and dictates of an institution like the Catholic Church. Because that’s what it is: an institution. And as an institution, it is capable of doing fucked up things, and drawing its members into webs of horror.
As it happens, I’m temporarily back in Merseyside this month. And it’s disappointing – though perhaps not surprising – to find Patrick Kelly, Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, defending Pope Benedict and blaming systematic paedophile abuse on anybody but the Church:
Archbishop Patrick Kelly told the BBC that the work of other organisations dealing with children should be examined.
He said that most child abuse “occurs within families”.
Archbishop Kelly said: “It’s also worth asking similar groups who worked with young people what were they doing in those same years?
“Other groups were working with young people and we’ve found that the question of child abuse, above all, occurs within families – You know that as a fact.
“According to what others were doing at the same time, I’m afraid we were so ignorant we did not know about the addictive nature [of paedophiles].”
The Archbishop said: “Nobody has been so rigorous in dealing with that terrible issue as [Pope Benedict] has. He has insisted that procedures are in place.
Given that Benedict XVI stands at the heart of a global cover up of decades-long sex abuse, and the continuing protection of abusive priests – in a week when a major paedophile scandal within the Belgian church has been hitting the headlines – Kelly’s lack of remorse speaks for itself.
So I’d like to take this day, when the Pontiff visits our aggressively atheist shores, to remind Catholics that belief in Christ is not the same as the institution of the Catholic Church. If you, as a good Christian, are disgusted by discrimination against women, denial of gay rights, paedophile-enablement and protection, and millions of avoidable deaths – there is a choice.
Or as Thomas Hobbes put it, making a point not a million miles from mine:
“To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this, that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets: so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion) consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications, upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture.”
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Fittingly, the above post (excluding this appendix) is exactly 666 words long, according to MS Word.
September 15, 2010
Virtue vs. Virtù: Machiavelli, The Pope and David Cameron
Despite his name becoming a by-word for gangster thuggery, Niccolò Machiavelli was an extremely sophisticated political theorist. One of his most important ideas was that for a ruler to be successful, he had to learn when to be bad.
According to Machiavelli, all rulers had to come to terms with fortuna; the cycle of good and back luck that could favour a prince one year but plunge him into adversity the next. And whereas Hamlet merely questioned why one should suffer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (in a play infused with Machiavellian and counter-Machiavellian themes) the Great Florentine advised rulers on how to deal with them.
Crucially, rulers must learn that “virtue” – in the sense of doing conventionally “good” acts – would not be enough to guarantee success. Whilst treating enemies with respect and being loyal to allies might work in certain circumstances, in others this might lead to military subjugation and unanticipated betrayal.
Machiavelli therefore advised rulers to acquire virtù. This was distinct from “virtue”, and encompassed whatever was required for rulers to succeed, conquer and triumph. Whilst murder, betrayal and dishonesty would not be on a list of traditional “virtues”, they might well be classed under the head of virtù if they led to success and glory.
Yet truly successful rulers also had to have guts; they had to know when the occasion demanded that they be really bad. And whilst most rulers knew how to be bad in petty, fleeting, insignificant ways, few could grasp the thorns of dangerous opportunity when the stakes were high.
A case in point was Giovanpagolo Baglioni, tyrant of Perugia. Baglioni was a vicious man who had murdered cousins and nephews to secure the throne, and even slept with his sister. Yet when Pope Julius II came to remove Baglioni from power, the latter was suddenly gifted an opportunity. Baglioni could murder the pope – who had foolishly left his guards outside the city – seizing papal power and international renown. But Baglioni floundered, and let himself be taken away by Julius II in chains. Despite being a man of vice, Baglioni did not know how to be “entirely bad”. He thus squandered his chance to secure greatness – much to Machiavelli’s disgust.
Which brings us to the 21st Century. Tomorrow Pope Benedict XVI will arrive on a state visit to Britain. The former Cardinal Ratzinger embodies the worst aspects of the Catholic Church’s discrimination against women and homosexuals, and continues to oppose measures which could save millions of lives every year. He is also at the heart of a world-wide paedophile scandal, protecting abusive priests by shielding them from legal justice.
So it’s worth asking: what would the ghost of Machiavelli urge David Cameron to do as the Pope sets foot upon these shores?
The obvious answer appears to be that whilst virtue would have the Pope arrested for his criminal paedophile-protecting activities, virtù demands respect for international power politics and cosying up to this distasteful pontiff.
But that is to think too narrowly, too unambitiously; without proper regard for glory!
If David Cameron were to withdraw the Pope’s diplomatic immunity and arrest him as a facilitator of child sex abuse, it would annoy the Vatican rather a lot. Southern European countries and Latin America would probably be a bit peeved too. But they’d get over it, and they’d hardly risk a war over the matter. The world’s 1 billion Catholics might also be annoyed for a while, but the more liberal wings – and those bishops in South America fighting for the right to OK condoms for their congregations – might actually be quite pleased.
Domestically, Cameron would swiftly shift the news agenda away from his government’s programme of insane economy-destroying cuts, and his dodgy media adviser’s phone-hacking troubles. The Pope-arrest story would run for weeks. Cameron would gain international renown as a man to be reckoned with. So as Machiavelli might have put it:
“[Cameron should] dare…to make an enterprise where everyone would have admired his courage and which would have left an eternal memory of himself…and would have done an act, the greatness of which would have overcome every infamy and every danger that could have resulted from it.”
Just a thought, Dave…
September 14, 2010
Idiot, or Thug?
As Osborne’s Axe begins to fall, pleas for exemption are coming thick and fast.
And no surprise. Andrew Rawnsley recently highlighted how the Coalition is cutting deeper and quicker than any government since the 1920s. The pressure is on for organisations to hang on to whatever funding they have – at the expense of rivals if need be.
Hot on the heels of Rawnsley’s claim that ministers fear “lynch mobs”, yesterday police Chief Superintendent Derek Barnett supplied his own eye-catching declaration:
” ‘In an environment of cuts across the wider public sector, we face a period where disaffection, social and industrial tensions may well rise,’
‘We will require a strong, confident, properly trained and equipped police service, one in which morale is high and one that believes it is valued by the government and public.’ “
Or as the Guardian headlined it: “Police: We can’t take care of cuts protests if you cut us”.
The warning is clear. In order to secure a basic minimum of stability, the coercive power of the state is needed to repress those elements so desperate and disadvantaged they’ll risk life and limb by rioting in the street. So make sure the police guarantee that basic minimum, by giving them loadsa muneh.
But I’m not a police officer. I’m a self-appointed representative for academic arts and humanities funding. So let me offer an argument on behalf of my own interest group – which comes at the expense of the rozzers (it’s a dog-eat-dog world, what can I say?)
Studying the arts and humanities brings inumerable and often incalculable benefits to individuals, as well as to wider society. But let’s consider just one practical benefit of this study, by applying two basic analytic tools.
The first is familiar to historians: a basic knowledge of, and ability to critically employ, the facts of history.
The second is familiar to trained philosophers: the argumentative dilemma (i.e. impaling your opponent on one of two argumentative horns by logically forcing them to pick between two unacceptable options).
Bringing these tools to bear, let’s examine another of Superintendent Barnett’s utterances:
“From the massacre in 1819, that took place not so many miles away from here, to the current day alcohol-related disorder, history teaches us that there will always be widespread threats to the public peace”
1819 massacre, you say? Near Cheshire? Why, Mr Barnet can only be talking about…er, the Peterloo Massacre. Here’s what Wikipedia (hardly a byzantine source available only to crusty scholars) says of that event:
The Peterloo Massacre (or Battle of Peterloo) occurred at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 gathered at a meeting to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. [...]15 people were killed and 400–700 were injured. The massacre was given the name Peterloo in ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo, which had taken place four years earlier.
So, the example a top police officer gives of “professional” policing of public protest is a massacre in which mounted officers killed innocent citizens. Lovely.
That’s the history, now the philosophy.
Two options:
Either: Mr Barnet is a thug who surreptitiously refers to public massacres for a range of possible motives. (These might include: attempting to further intimidate lawful protestors; warning the Government that the police are liable to kill if they don’t get their funding protected; or assuring the Coalition that the force has its back and will charge into the crowds, sabers-drawn if necessary).
Or: Mr Barnet is a spectacular idiot lacking the most basic grasp of history, who deserves widespread ridicule, and whose wider competence might now be called into question.
See how powerful the arts and humanities can be? They teach you to think clearly and accurately. They promote the sorts of minds we want in Britain. Clear and accurate thinkers, graduating from our universities. Minds which may one day occupy positions of power and influence.
And so that’s just one of the many reasons arts and humanities funding should be protected. Or at any rate, it’s better than giving the money to idiots/thugs (delete as applicable).
September 13, 2010
So, just how Jewish is the name Gideon?
Last Friday I wrote a blog for Liberal Conspiracy in which I used Chancellor George Osborne’s name of birth: Gideon.
Why did I do this? Because I find it useful political short hand. Gideon is a posh, unusual name – befitting of the heir to a 17th century baronetcy. It has the effect of reminding people that the man slashing an extra £4billion from benefits and destroying public sector jobs is a born to rule member of a wealthy political elite. The political right benefits from easy shorthand – “Prison Works”, “Britain’s Full”, “The economy is like a household, you can’t spend what you don’t have” – so why can’t the left?
Yet my use of the name “Gideon” caused quite a storm. Tory detractors at Liberal Conspiracy claimed that Gideon is a distinctively Jewish name. That – intentionally or otherwise – I was blowing an anti-Semitic dog whistle by using it instead of George.
It came as news to me. I’m no expert on Jewish culture or Hebrew history. But Gideon, a Jewish name? If we’d been talking about “Moses” or more especially its Hebrew form “Moshe”, I’d see the point. But Gideon?
Well I’ve been doing a little research and pondering the results.
Firstly, if Gideon is such a distinctively Jewish name, why did Osborne’s parents give it to him? They, after all, are not Jewish. Admittedly, this settles little; parents can pick a name regardless of cultural history because they just like it, and that’s fine. It’s still puzzling, however, why white ruling class parents would give their child an (allegedly) distinctively Jewish name.
Regardless, next question: why did Osborne change his first name to George and keep Gideon only as his second name when he was a teenager? According to Wikipedia (surely monitored by Osborne’s staff) and taken from The Telegraph:
“he changed his name to George when he was 13. In an interview in July 2005, Osborne said: ‘It was my small act of rebellion. I never liked it. When I finally told my mother she said, ‘Nor do I’. So I decided to be George after my grandfather, who was a war hero. Life was easier as a George; it was a straightforward name’.”
Fair enough.
Others may have different (unverified) theories. For example Gideon Rachman at the FT blog speculates that Gideon is a typically Jewish name (as well as, bizarrely, a Zulu one) and that Osborne did not want a “false ethnic flag” pinned to him. A strange claim, if you think about it, because it implies Osborne felt the need to disassociate himself from any hint of Semitism or Jewishness at the age of just 13.
But Rachman’s speculations – and the accusations of trolls accusing me of dog-whistling – turn on whether Gideon is indeed widely “regarded as a Jewish name”.
Miriam Shaviv at the Jewish Chronicle considers Rachman’s implication. She’s not convinced, thinking instead that Rachman “reads perhaps a little too much into this”. In fact:
“My colleague Martin Bright, however, tells me that Gideon is actually a very posh name, and that Osborne was probably trying to downplay his poshness – rather than his ‘Jewishness’ (or Zulu-ness, I suppose….). This is also quite clear from the context of the Telegraph article.
Sorry, Gideon R…..”
Researching a little more widely, it’s easily learned that a Gideon certainly figures in the Torah, just as he figures in the Old Testament of the Bible. The name originally means “Destroyer”, “Mighty Warrior” or “Feller [of trees]“, and the Biblical figure of Gideon was judge of the Hebrews. However Gideon is also cited approvingly as a man of faith in the New Testament, a specifically Christian text.
Of course, that Gideon was an Old Testament/Torah figure and himself a Hebrew settles nothing about the religio-cultural identity of the name now. Whereas Moses is not a common name for non-Jews, David certainly is – yet both are important Old Testament/Torah figures.
So where next? Well, one of the first things that spring to my mind when I hear the word Gideon is the Gideon Bible found in almost every hotel room in the world, distributed voluntarily by Gideons International – an evangelical Christian group. Though, again, this admittedly settles nothing about the “typical” Jewishness (or otherwise) of the name when applied to people. It does, however, cast doubt on the allegedly over-whelming Jewish connotations of the name Gideon – which is actually an anglicized version of the Hebrew Gidown.
It’s also worth noting that the Catholic Church recognises Saint Gideon on September 1st and December 16th.
But what if we research the etymology of the name Gideon? Well, we find this:
“Means ‘feller’ or ‘hewer’ in Hebrew. Gideon was a hero of the Old Testament who led the Israelites against the Midianites. In the English-speaking world, Gideon has been used as a given name since the Protestant Reformation, and it was popular among the Puritans.”
I’m prepared to trust behindthename.com until someone provides good reasons not to. And what it says is clearly that Gideon has been used as a first name since the Protestant – i.e. Christian – Reformation, amongst English speakers, whom we know from a basic grasp of history would overwhelmingly have been non-Jews.
So lets sum up: on the one hand we have Gideon Rachman at his FT blog claiming that Gideon is “typically Jewish” and then leaving open the possibility that Osborne had shady motives for junking the name. On the other, we have no evidence that Gideon is a “typically Jewish” name whatsoever – indeed quite the opposite – whilst Jewish Chronicle staff belive that its connotations are posh rather than Semitic.
How very odd, therefore, that some should thunderously pronounce that Gideon is a “typically Jewish” name whenever anybody raises our esteemed Chancellor’s name-swapping past.
Unless, of course, the claim that Gideon is a typically Jewish name is serving a very specific purpose: to defuse the use of the name Gideon – as short hand for posh, privileged and born to rule – by smearing those who use it as anti-Semitic.
Indeed this is a brutally efficient tactic. When you so smear people, you very effectively shut them down. After Friday I was almost ready to walk away from this issue forever, so disgusted was I with the accusation of anti-Semitism against me.
But I’ve walked back, for a very important reason.
Anti-Semitism is a particularly horrific form of prejudice. It has plagued Europe, in particular, for millenia. It has a long and bloody history of evil deeds annexed to it. Above all, the extreme horror of the Holocaust makes anti-Semitism an especially great evil in our shared cultural and political histories.
To sink so low as to casually use the claim of anti-Semitism to smear opponents is despicable. It trivialises real anti-Semitism. It cheapens a long and terrible history of persecution. It puts to petty partisan ends an evil legacy of hate and murder.
If you are one of those people asserting that using the name “Gideon” is anti-Jewish code (employed intentionally or otherwise) in an effort to prevent opponents highlighting that George Gideon Osborne is an over-privileged member of a long-established ruling class, then hold your head in shame.
You are despicable. You are a disgrace.
And for the record, it was the Conservative Party that ran posters with the slogan “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” to play on anti-immigration sentiment in 2005. Exactly 100 years after the Aliens Act 1905 was passed in this country, preventing Jews who were fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe from securing asylum in Britain. The Conservative Party is the party of Enoch Powell and Alan Clark. It is a party allied to far right anti-Semites and racists in Europe right now.
Supporters of the Conservative Party are in no position to dish-out accusations of anti-Semitism against others. Especially when those claims are so manifestly cynical, opportunistic and untrue.
September 12, 2010
Frankenstein Media
If you were to draw up a list of “People Most-Well Suited for Initiating Inter-Faith Dialogue and Putting Pressure on the U.S. President”, a redneck loon threatening to hold a Burn the Koran Ceremony would probably not be near the top.
Similarly, those consulted on how to deal with the results of a terrible tragedy – and empowered to bring public pressure on politicians and decision-makers – should not include victims of that tragedy.
That’s because being a victim (or the relative of one) is no qualification in itself. Indeed, just the opposite. Victims, and their friends and relatives, are often the worst people to offer advice on how to deal with a tragedy, precisely because they are emotionally involved in a way that severely distorts judgement. When my friend was murdered, I would have been the worst person to decide what happened to his killers precisely because my desire for revenge was barbaric.
Yet 9 years on from the tragedy of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we’ve seen exactly the opposite of what sanity would prefer.
Pastor Jones – leader of a congregation reported as being between 30 and 50 – has been catapulted onto the international stage by threatening to carry out an act of gross stupidity and bigotry. He is now in New York, demanding to speak to the Imam behind the “Ground Zero Mosque”. Which of course isn’t a Mosque, and isn’t at Ground Zero.* Thanks to the saturation coverage he has received, Jones has been able to put pressure on President Obama himself, and conspiracy theories of back-door deals are rife.
In turn, families of those killed on 9/11 have been quizzed relentlessly on how they feel about Pastor Jones, before naturally moving to subjects like the “Ground Zero Mosque” (WIAM,AIAGZ), Muslims in America, and the Afghanistan conflict. And whilst some of these interviewees have shown admirable restraint, reflection and forgiveness – that’s not the point.
The point is that the modern 24 hour media has this effect: it elevates people who are the least qualified and suited to offering policy advice and opinion – and in turn bring pressure to bear on politicians – precisely to positions of influence.
What’s interesting (and scary) is that for the most part this isn’t done on purpose. Whilst the Murdoch Fox News vanguard does seek to manipulate ordinary people – whether they be innocent mourners or hick loons – most news outlets don’t. They’re just reporting lazily on the “human interest” angle, going for cheap and easy stories by covering what everybody else already is, and filling schedules with handy telegenic victims. The process is self-perpetuating, and grows to be something none of its makers intended…or controls. Call it the Frankenstein Media Effect.
This weekend, the Frankenstein Media Effect will probably not result in further tragedy, at least not directly. And as far as insane and illogical responses to 9/11 go, the US-UK military adventure in Iraq is pretty hard to top.
Admittedly, sometimes the Frankenstein Media secures positive outcomes; think Joanna Lumley and the Ghurkhas, even if the Coalition has forgotten its promises already. But usually the results are more negative. Mountains of statistics on recreational drug-use may as well spontaneously combust, the minute a bereaved mother calls for a substance ban on the 6 o’clock news. Anecdotes from statistically anomalous cancer survivors power a “debate” about using scarce public resources to purchase medicine already proven not to offer justifiable value for money.
Our (global) Frankenstein Media is a fact of life. And because it’s a Frankenstein effect we’re dealing with, there’s nobody we can go to and demand that they shut it off. At least, short of abolishing the free press altogether. Which, obviously, is not recommended.
Nice world we have here, eh? Sleep tight.
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* BBC reporting on the matter prefers to call it a “Mosque and Cultural Centre”. When it’s not a Mosque. Why? Because if they report the truth, the right will accuse the BBC of left wing PC gawn maadism – so the BBC distorts the truth in the name of “balance”. Kafka would be proud.
September 10, 2010
Profile 364
Over at Normblog, I’ve the privilege of being the focus of the 364th Normblog Profile.
Gideon Osborne and the Dodo of Keynes
Last night, the heir to a multimillion pound fortune declared that it is wrong for people to get money for doing nothing.
This came as part of a special announcement that £4billion more would be cut from benefits than previously planned. This was certainly not part of a transparent and obvious ploy to get the News of the World/Met Police phone-hacking scandal off the front pages.
In turn, the irony of a party which recently appointed a big-time tax avoider to a senior role – and which has turned a blind eye to a practice costing the UK many more sums than benefit “scrounging” – was quickly lost on everybody. Most especially, it was lost on Lib Dem members of the (so-called) Coalition (but in practice, Tory) government. Politicians who, until their recent emasculation and co-option into perennial shit-can-carrying policy gimps for their Conservative Dominatrix, had seemed quite genuine about plugging that c.£25 billion-a-year tax gap.
But hey, this is politics. And there’s alotta newspaper inches available for bashing the scroungers. Because everybody hates those bastards. With their £65.45 a week. Living the life of riley. On £65.45 a week. The fuckers.
However, enough dripping sarcasm and contempt. Gideon Osborne’s announcement is interesting because it heralds – or at the very least, confirms – the death of an idea. And not just any old idea. One that had an enormous impact on the 20th century, insofar as it shaped the post-war economic and social consensus and helped guarantee that liberal capitalist democracy would be a superior state form to fascism and communism.
I’m not an economist (by any means), but I have read John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This passage gets to the heart of things:
“Obviously, however, if the classical theory is only applicable to the case of full employment, it is fallacious to apply it to the problems of involuntary unemployment — if there be such a thing (and who will deny it?). The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry. Something similar is required today in economics. We need to throw over the second postulate of the classical doctrine and to work out the behaviour of a system in which involuntary unemployment in the strict sense is possible.”
A core part of Keynes’ subsequent analysis was that unemployment is a function of aggregate demand. Which basically means: if the economy is buggered, then there won’t be enough jobs for all those willing to work. Fiddling around at the margins – say, by reducing unemployment benefit – will not make a significant difference. When there’s no jobs, there’s no jobs. Accordingly, the government should do something to sort that out, namely by stimulating demand until private enterprise benefits from the upward swing and expands to fill the vacuum.
Yet this idea is apparently as dead as a dodo. The Chancellor of the Exchequer stands up, and with a straight face says he’s going to cut benefits to force the able-bodied into work. At a time when there simply are no jobs to be had in many parts of the country. When public service cuts are destroying those that do exist.
40 years ago, policies aimed at securing full employment were a basic commitment expected of all governments. Now, Gideon says starving the poor will ensure they jump into jobs. The words “neo-liberalism” and “paradigm shift” get horribly, misleadingly and unhelpfully over used. But my golly do they have some traction today.
September 9, 2010
Plundering the Classics: How to think about the “self-interest” brigade
Long Post Warning! Available as a PDF for those who would rather print out.
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Why read the great works of philosophers past?
Lots of high-falutin’ answers present themselves: to gain self-knowledge; to avoid repeating the mistakes of history; to distinguish what is parochial in modern practices from what is timeless; to appreciate works of elegance and beauty which withstand the test of time – or to rediscover those that didn’t.
All good answers. But never forget a less glamorous yet extremely important one: to plunder old arguments in order to bash your opponents.
Matthew Taylor has some typically muddled thoughts about rational self-interest (with a big dollop of RSA propaganda), but correctly concludes that people are not simply self-interested utility maximisers but rather that altruism and disinterested benevolence are possible. Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram has some sensible thoughts up, and the comment thread has predictably descended into those who are single-mindedly and ferociously determined to reduce everything to motivation by self-interest, and those who see this as being a little too simplistic.
If you already think this isn’t a new debate – what with “selfish gene” arguments, evolutionary psychology, and the self-interested utility maximisers of microeconomic theory now all being well-established concepts – you’re even right than you think. Because the modern “oh we just do everything to maximise our self-interest, even when we think we’re being benevolent and disinterested” meme goes way, way back. To at least the 18th Century, and the systems of “self love” at whose expense David Hume had rather a bit of fun.
Indeed, the second appendix to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals provides a veritable battery of arguments that are as applicable to the “we’re all just self-interested maximisers” crowd today as they were to their systems of self-love forerunners in the 18th century. Here are some of the best moves, plundered and relayed.
Hume is keen to observe that one possible outcome of reducing all human motivation to self-love is to collapse ethical distinctions between good and bad completely. For consider, if “the most generous patriot and most niggardly miser, the bravest hero and most abject coward, have, in every action, an equal regard to their own happiness and welfare”, then really what is the end moral difference between their characters and acts? Hume does not present this as necessarily a fallacy of the systems of self-love. The point is rather: if a consequence of your philosophical system is that moral distinctions everybody ordinarily takes for granted turn out to be erroneous and hollow, well that’s a pretty amazing upshot so you better have a good explanation for how these distinctions gained such widespread currency. And your system stands in a disfavourable light as long as it produces such upshots without satisfactory explanations for such massively counter-intuitive conclusions.
Hume pursues the point: “The most obvious objection to the selfish hypothesis is, that, as it is contrary to common feeling and our most unprejudiced notions, there is required the highest stretch of philosophy to establish so extraordinary a paradox”. Indeed. For not only can we think of many examples of personally disinterested genuine concern for others – the man dying of cancer who worries how his gay lover will survive when he’s gone; the campaigners fighting service cuts that will affect the severely disabled, elderly and mentally ill – but we must observe that our very language and culture are infused with words and concepts like “altruism”, “benevolence”, “kindness”, “self-sacrifice” and so on. If the selfish-systems are correct, they need to explain how all this comes about, and why it is common-sensical that altruism and benevolence are possible to all those who haven’t already been reading too much EvPsych or Rational Choice Theory (if you don’t mind me updating the argument).
What appears to motivate the reduction of everything to self interest is indeed “that love of simplicity, which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy”. Superficially, it looks as though there will be a neat parsimony to explaining everything by reference to self-interest. The problem, however, is that when we get into concrete examples – like the gay lover who is dying of cancer but makes exhaustive plans for his partner to be financially supported once he’s gone – to reduce all these to self-love requires an elaborate story of confused motivations and desires that are not even transparent to agents themselves, all so as to eventually reduce benevolence and affection for others to a secret selfishness. Yet the simpler explanation is surely the more desirable: that (say) a dying man feels affection and concern for his partner whom he loves, and wants to ensure the best for a future he will sadly not partake in. And that that’s all there is to it:
“But a man, that grieves for a valuable friend, who needed his patronage and protection; how can we suppose, that his passionate tenderness arises from some metaphysical regards to self-interest, which has no foundation or reality? We may as well imagine, that minute wheels and springs, like those of a watch, give motion to a loaded wagon, as account for the origin of passion from such abstruse reflections”.
Pressing the point, Hume shows us just how counter-intuitive and bizarre the claims of systems of self-love are when we get them under the microscope:
“Is gratitude no affection of the human breast, or is that a word merely, without any meaning or reality? Have we no satisfaction in one man’s company above another’s, and no desire of the welfare of our friend, even though absence or death should prevent us from all participation in it? Or what is it commonly, that gives us any participation in it, even while alive and present, but our affection and regard to him?”
When we take in the vast panoply of human experience we find multiple instances of people acting in ways that can only be reduced to “self love” by paradoxical machinations and assertions about hidden motives requiring great endeavours of contorted imagination. Reducing everything to self-love thus becomes a task undertaken in order to vindicate the system of self-love itself, when the process is supposed to be the other way around. Or in other words: the selfish systems end up with the cart before the horse because instead of the system explaining everything, everything ends up being explained so as to fit the system. It would therefore be better just to take the more simple and obvious explanation as the more likely one: that as per common sense people really can exhibit those qualities we have words for and treat as given on a daily basis – like benevolence, altruism, self-sacrifice and the rest.
But there is of course a demon manoeuvre left to deal with. And we all know what it is, because it’s been repeated ad nauseam since at least the 18th century. It’s to reply: “well, if people want to be benevolent, then that’s self-interest. They get a pleasure out of being benevolent, so they do it because it makes them feel good – so you see, it is really all self-interest after all”.
To this old canard Hume has a fitting reply:
“Now where is the difficulty in conceiving, that this may likewise be the case with benevolence and friendship, and that, from the original frame of our temper, we may feel a desire of another’s happiness or good, which, by means of that affection, becomes our own good, and is afterwards pursued, from the combined motives of benevolence and self-enjoyments? Who sees not that vengeance, from the force alone of passion, may be so eagerly pursued, as to make us knowingly neglect every consideration of ease, interest, or safety; and, like some vindictive animals, infuse our very souls into the wounds we give an enemy; and what a malignant philosophy must it be, that will not allow to humanity and friendship the same privileges which are undisputably granted to the darker passions of enmity and resentment; such a philosophy is more like a satyr than a true delineation or description of human nature; and may be a good foundation for paradoxical wit and raillery, but is a very bad one for any serious argument or reasoning.”
Hume’s point is partly ad hominem, but that is all to the good; for to a large extent this entire debate revolves precisely around which perspective one chooses to take on moral questions.
As Hume implies, there’s nothing wrong with taking pleasure in helping others – indeed quite the contrary, for that is surely a sign of a healthy moral character. And it’s evident from basic human experience that helping others can go far beyond any immediate benefits one may feel even from the pleasure of doing so – as Hume says, we admit this quality to the nasty passions like the desire for revenge, so why not the nice passions too? And that’s where the justified ad hominem point comes in: how very odd those people must be who so steadfastly deny the possibility of benevolence, altruism and the rest – things so evident to ordinary people, on a daily basis.
What are these philosophers of self love telling us about themselves, when they make (usually with ferocity) these counter-intuitive claims? And when answering that question, we should surely keep another in mind: are these the sorts of people we ought really to be listening to in the settling of moral issues?
It’s best to close with Hume’s opening remarks on this subject:
“This principle is, that all benevolence is mere hypocrisy, friendship a cheat, public spirit a farce, fidelity a snare to procure trust and confidence; and that while all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises, in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations. What heart one must be possessed of who possesses such principles, and who feels no internal sentiment that belies so pernicious a theory, it is easy to imagine: and also what degree of affection and benevolence he can bear to a species whom he represents under such odious colours, and supposes so little susceptible of gratitude or any return of affection. Or if we should not ascribe these principles wholly to a corrupted heart, we must at least account for them from the most careless and precipitate examination.”
