David McDonagh
In Sean Gabb’s latest talk to the LA he seemed to have embraced a completely bogus thesis viz. that art aids society in general, especially the morale of the ruling class.
Sean also feels that the progress of the LA has been very disappointing and he expressed the rather odd idea that this was because there is not enough libertarian art. In some of the comments above I see agreement with Sean and a similar unrealistic outlook as to expectations of progress from libertarian propaganda and even of whom the enemy is or of what progress of what I call the liberal idea amounts to.
I will begin with a short re-statement of what I take to be the main content of the 1981 purpose and strategy of the LA.
The main idea is that ideas change slowly. We cannot realistically ever expect rapid progress. We can witness instant conversion, of course, in the odd individual case but customs change way more slowly, for most people are conservative with a small “c” and so tradition is often against change, but customs do change nevertheless. It simply takes time. It takes decades, or even centuries, rather than days or weeks.
There is short run propaganda and long run propaganda that manifests in society in two forms of politics, that we might call 1) practical politics and 2) theoretical politics. Harold Wilson, a career politician, rightly said that “a week is a long time in politics” and this was and is still clearly true for his sort of politics.
Theoretical politics, or ideological politics, would haply be better off with the statement that a decade is not very long in the aim of changing society. But slow change does take place.
The LA was never thought to be a pressure group to get practical politicians to do one thing, such as the Anti-Corn Law League, or recently, the UKIP [though they decided to go into a party before their pristine aim of getting out of the slowly emerging super-state was achieved] but rather it was a long run ideology group. The aim of the LA was to muster propagandists or “intellectuals” or extraverts who habitually tend to foster or change public opinion. They may not be bright people but they are usually outspoken. It usually takes about fifty years to make noticeable headway in this quest to change fundamental ideas. Such propagandists will be few in number yet they matter way more that the general public in this quest to change fundamental customs, here to roll back the state .
The foremost violator of social liberty is the state; so our enemy is the state. Getting that rolled back, or reduced to zero, is the aim of the LA, and recruiting the propagandists is the peaceful means to that long run aim; but tax cuts are fine in the short run. But no results can be soon attained and facile pessimism and disappointment needs to be carefully dodged. Pessimism is not realism. A rise in membership to a thousand or two thousand in five to ten years would be success for the LA. That is what we thought in 1981.
How do things stand now? We had a bad upset in 1982, of course. Before then we seemed to be growing quite well.
The Internet shows support for ideological groups and below is the statistics for meet-up groups.
50 Socialism meetups: http://socialism.meetup.com/ 5,377 members 238 Feminism meetups: http://feminism.meetup.com/ 42,389 members 442 Conservative meetups: http://conservative.meetup.com/ 73,728 members 487 Libertarian meetups: http://libertarian.meetup.com/ 74,410 members
Now I will give an account of Sean’s talk then criticise it, as well as a few comments made above . Sean, more or less, said the following: that at the end of the 1980s many thought that libertarianism was doing well. We had seen off socialism. Most were optimistic but one young man was not: Sean Gabb.
What have we achieved in 25 years? One LA puts on monthly meetings. My LA collects money but apart from keeping the movement in being, it seems not much has been done.
It might be different in the USA, but I doubt it.
Since the 1980s it has been stagnation or decline for libertarianism. We are all intellectuals and that is the problem.
I always thought it was stupid to get people talking at bus-stops but nowadays we do not even seem to be doing that but only talking to ourselves. This is not the way to win debates or to influence the world.
How did the left come to dominate things? They were not concerned with mere ideas. They won because they focused on culture.
Films made by John Ford starring Henry Fonda spread leftist ideas by a narrative and a world view that rendered them acceptable. J.B. Priestley in the play, later a film An Inspector Calls (1954) with Alastair Sim delegitimises the past. We all have duties, not just rights. I read the play at school.
It is the likes of J.B. Priestley and George Orwell that count, and even G.B. Shaw, though I always thought he was a bit of a windbag, but they all three won the day, but not Laski. Laski and Marx are not all that important.
All this culture established Political Correctness [PC] but The New Statesman and The New Society, Marcuse, and the like, are not so important but art succeeds brilliantly.
The LA go on about von Mises and so not surprisingly we are ignored. We ought to produce novels and plays or ballet rather than books on economics. No one reads books by Eamonn Butler.
The left have took over as they focus on what is important. We need a counter narrative in the UK. It is a bit better in the USA, as there is more of a culture for libertarianism there. They have novels, music, film-makers there and similar are needed here.
We need libertarian poetry, ballet, novels for we need to give up going on and on about the economic calculation argument [eca] and defence problems. We have had 40 years but there are no libertarian film-makers yet.
Hayek’s Road To Serfdom (1944) had no particular influence but Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Darkness At Noon (1940) Arthur Koestler did influence have a great impact and those books destroyed communism in the UK. I was converted by 1984 but I was not much affected by The Road to Serfdom.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks won out owing to art. Eisenstein, Shostakovich and general Socialist Realism culture made the late USSR look glamorous. On recent visits, I look up at the tops of the buildings of the tower blocks and I see excellent art. It was not Marx or the theory of the Bolsheviks that maintained the USSR for so long but the art.
Do you associate art and libertarianism? I don’t.
There Sean handed it over for discussion.
I think that art plays no part at all in politics. That we have zero allows us to be exact about its actual role.
Sean has his own theories about the ruling class but my own view on class can be prefaced by what Marx said on class for he said we can classify people as we wish but objective economic interests is what matters and I would say that Marx got nowhere near discovering such objective class interests, for there never were any to be found. In fact, there are none. So, far from history being full of class struggle there are no classes like the ones Marx imagined, none at all, in history. The Marxist meme of class is pure Romance. There is a ruling class [i.e. a group in government and in the administration of the various states ]but no objective economic class interests.
Sean seems to have overlooked how bleak establishment thought was in 1944 when Hayek wrote that book. One man it did influence was Orwell, who wrote a review of it. He thought beforehand that capitalism was doomed. The Times in the 1940s was full of the over confident E.H. Carr editorials stating that the market might not last even another week. It all looks silly today and the cited book was a factor. Hayek was a way bigger factor in ending all that than Orwell or Koestler ever was.
As for ballet, has even Sean ever been to a performance of that? Girls seem to love it but I am surprised to see a man even mention it, and Sean seems to be about the only male I have known to do so, but then I do not know a female who does not claim to have wanted to be a ballet dancer and aimed at it by dancing when young. Until Sean’s talk, I thought only females ever cared about it. It clearly does not influence politics very much, if at all.
I read 1984 in 1968 but I saw it as anti- Bolshevik rather than anti-socialist. It did not affect my, then, socialism one bit.
As I said, the media is not dominated by the left. They feel it is the right that dominate the BBC, but I would agree that they is not very realistic of them and I think they are even less realistic than Sean is, in that respect. I think the BBC is more statist than market biased, as it is state owned [though it began as a private company], but they do try to be fair.
The enemy is the state. Some socialists imagine that they too are against the state. Orwell was one. I used to be another.
The liberal idea is the top idea today but few see they need to get rid of illiberal ideas to be coherent on it, at least not outside the LA. So the majority of people today do not see the state, especially democracy, as illiberal. But the LA does.
Culture itself [qua culture] never matters much, as it is too vague and nebulous anyway, but the things that do matter will be cultural; like the nation, love, justice to cite but three items out of many that are important for people.
What entertainment thrives depends on what sells, not on the rulers. Politicians often pretend they like that, but whether they do, or not, hardly matters much to the masses. When Gordon Brown pretended to like Cold Play he haply alienated more people than he successfully pandered to. In any case, the ruling class cannot determine successful entertainment.
What the LA opposes is cultural but it is also illiberal; it is the state. Liberty uses private ownership as a means but no one who thinks clearly defines liberty as mere private ownership. I do not need to own things to be free. To think so is to be confused. Of course the shorter word, liberal is more apt than libertarian but many puritans can be liberal. So statist is clearly the proper name for those who want to restrict liberty, not puritan.
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I’ll begin the comments by thanking David for an accurate and fair summary of what I said last week. Beyond that, I’ll only repeat myself that we do seem to have been barking up the wrong tree – forty years devoid of measurable success.
The Great Schism of 1982 may not have helped. On the other hand, two fairly vibrant Libertarian Alliances emerged from that. The truth is that we had no impact on British politics when we were a unified movement, and none when we were spitting venom at each other, and none when we came to our senses and became friends again.
Look at it this way. Christ was crucified in 33AD. Within thirty years, there were enough Christians to be worth blaming for the Great Fire of Rome. In 1983, Peter Tatchell lost a safe Labour seat because he was outed as a poofter. Thirty years later, we had gay marriage. In the early 1960s, South African apartheid seemed unshakeable. Thirty years later, it had fallen apart. In 1985, we were talking to each other and hardly anyone else. Today, we are talking to each other and hardly anyone else.
Oh – thirty years ago, some of us were predicting a police state. Today, we live in one.
You don’t get a paradigm shift in five years. But we’ve been in this game longer than the average life expectancy of 1900. We ought by now to have some indication of success. We are so marginal, I don’t believe we are being watched even passively by the security services.
Perhaps we should do what the FabiaNazis did, even before they integratedly-became Gramscian-type Nazis.
Instead of shunning things like jobs in the Security Services of nations, because we ideologically didn’t approve of snooping on one’s own citizens and subjects, we ought to have maybe applied for jobs as young graduates, and tried to get into these departments of State. I remember a couple of blokes at university in the early 70s who did that thing; what we sneeringly all called “MI5 and MI6 and the CIA” (we knew little of the world, you see) did have “graduate trainee schemes”. But the sorts of undergrads that applied were the unpopular, pimply-faced types who couldn’t get themselves girlfriends even by their final year, and who tended to belong to the Labour Club or even the Trots. Everybody who was “anybody” was going to be a “Merchant Banker”, or else join the “BBC”, or if those failed, become a “DHSS Administrative Heath Trainee”.
In descending order of popularity, the plum jobs were; Merchant Bank, BBC, DHSS, the Foreign Office, the “Civil Service” (that last on meant that you were beginning to border on failure.) “Law” (as in “working in an inner-city Law Centre”) came fairly high up. The Security Services rated even lower than “accountancy” or “trainee bank management”. All those who could not make any decision did a “Dip. Ed.” or a “Cert. Ed.” and probably turned into teachers of some sort.
If we’d done that – about trying to muscle in a Liberals into the State’s arms of information-storage and control, then some of us would be powerful and functionally-unsackable State professionals. Some would have very very large and untouchable pensions, and a good handle over whom to advise (whatever was at any one time) the government of the day to physically-inconvenience the lives and doings of, in stressful and unpleasant ways.
We might, just might, perhaps have seen off the takeover of the Institutions, through which Maoist and Trottist and Fabian Nazis marched, for such a long time while all our backs were turned and to such good effect for themselves. They have indeed rendered the more-or-less-lifetime arguing and writing and peaceful-persuasion-attempts by almost the entire British Libertarian Movement, more or less worthless.
Oh, and the f***k**g bastards probably did for Thatcher too, even though she was the least useless of a rather poor lot. They’re probably chiefly responsible for H M the Queen going down in (much later) history as “Elizabeth-the-Useless”.
This has been a very, very well-planned assault bu the bastards, and we must not underestimate their cunning and intelligence.
You don’t get a paradigm shift in five years. But we’ve been in this game longer than the average life expectancy of 1900. We ought by now to have some indication of success. We are so marginal, I don’t believe we are being watched even passively by the security services.
There’s an easy way to change that. But I don’t think you’re quite right about the surveillance state and the LA. Unit 8200 and its franchises at the NSA, GCHQ et al are recording as much as possible of everyone’s electronic activity, but they’re probably not devoting much time to analysing yours in detail. As long as you stick to speaking up for free speech on general principle, you’re not a threat. If you began pointing out which group was destroying it, you’d become a threat and they’d move against you.
You are beginning to get on my tits. You cower behind false names, in the belief that commenting on a blog will otherwise get you utterly destroyed by Imperial Zion. At the same time, you are demanding that those of us whose names and addresses are on the record should do all the things you say you are too scared to do for yourself. If you would at least tell us who you were, I might have a little more time for you. As it is, I am increasingly inclined to change the settings on this Blog to force commenters to supply a verified e-mail address. Either you are a simple troll, or you are an agent provocateur working with some leftist group. Since I don’t know who you really are, I choose to believe the latter.
You are beginning to get on my tits.
Whereas, by your own admission, you are not getting on the tits of the state in the slightest. The difference is that I’m saying things relevant to the problems I’m addressing and you’re not.
You cower behind false names, in the belief that commenting on a blog will otherwise get you utterly destroyed by Imperial Zion.
Saying “da Joooooz” is even more effective in refuting claims by cowerers like me. (When I say “refuting”, I mean “rhetorically evading”.)
At the same time, you are demanding
When one disagrees with the left, one is invariably “ranting”, no matter how calm and reasonable what one has said. Can you produce an example of my “demanding” that you do anything? I perfectly understand why you don’t want to stand up to the biggest enemies of free speech. You have a career and they have a well-justified reputation for destroying careers.
that those of us whose names and addresses are on the record should do all the things you say you are too scared to do for yourself. If you would at least tell us who you were, I might have a little more time for you.
You don’t appear to have much time for yourself, considering what you’ve said about how ineffective the LA has been. Would you post something by me under my real name about free speech and its biggest enemies?
As it is, I am increasingly inclined to change the settings on this Blog to force commenters to supply a verified e-mail address.
Your blog, your choice.
Either you are a simple troll, or you are an agent provocateur working with some leftist group. Since I don’t know who you really are, I choose to believe the latter.
Again, your choice, but you’re wrong if you believe that. I’m not an agent provocateur and I’m not leftist. Do I write like a leftist? I hope not.
I won’t change our commenting policy until further notice. But, unless you start posting under your own name, I shall regard you as a leftist agent provocateur, trying to fabricate evidence for a set of views we do not hold.
Would you post something by me under my real name about free speech and its biggest enemies?
No. You’ve made your case already, which is that Jews are the biggest enemies of freedom of speech. We all believe that you have the right to make your case on your own blog, or to address yourself to the readers of Counter Currents or The Occidental Observer. Indeed, we stand fully by your right to say what you please without fear of legal consequences, and we would deplore any social consequences. This doesn’t mean that we would welcome such an article here, not even if you found the courage to write under your real name.
No. You’ve made your case already, which is that Jews are the biggest enemies of freedom of speech.
You’ve condemned Tanya Cohen, who also makes that case:
As a member of Australia’s Jewish community and a descendant of Holocaust survivors, I can proudly say that Australia’s Jewish community has played the single largest role in passing and expanding hate speech legislation in Australia. […] The Jewish role in human rights activism is a source of immeasurable pride for me.
Zero Tolerance for Crime-Think
If the article is fake, where is the condemnation from “Australia’s Jewish community”?
This doesn’t mean that we would welcome such an article here, not even if you found the courage to write under your real name.
If you think I’m bluffing, there’s an easy way to find out. Of course, if you don’t believe that Imperial Zion will punish you for hosting such an article, you won’t mind hosting one. If you do, you will.
Katie Hopkins attacked me on Twitter — so I reported her to the police for inciting racial hatred
I’m a strong champion of free speech, but…
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/katie-hopkins-attacked-me-on-twitter–so-i-reported-her-to-the-police-for-inciting-racial-hatred-10144444.html
As a member of Australia’s Jewish community and a descendant of Holocaust survivors, I can proudly say that Australia’s Jewish community has played the single largest role in passing and expanding hate speech legislation in Australia. […] The Jewish role in human rights activism is a source of immeasurable pride for me.
http://theaimn.com/australia-must-have-zero-tolerance-for-online-hatred/
The BBC is not leftist?.
Last week there was a program about the first murder on the British railway system –in the 1860s. The murder was secondary to endless homilies about the Victorian poor. How the alleged murderer was a poor German migrant who earned peanuts in the tailor trade. Much was made of how little such workers were paid. An old banker was brained and thrown of the train and his gold watch and hat stolen. I wont go into more detail–the show is on BBC iPlayer. An alibi of some sorted was provided by the accused in the form of a “sweetheart” who said he was with her at the time of the murder. However she turned out to be a pro and much was then made of the awful lives of ordinary girls forced into prostitution by poverty etc. Cue a picture of the actress wearing an off white dress ( presumably to suggest dinginess) sitting on a bed with the CGI’d up background of a dingy Victorian slum room. The actress was attractive with nice blond hair and white actresses teeth. Had a Victorian prostitute looked like her she would have been able to sell her services to much higher class and better paying customers than a streetwalker. No mention was, of course, made of the fact that prostitution declined in numbers throughout Victoria’s reign–esp towards the latter part when typewriting and office work came along. No mention of the fact that there were far more prostitutes per head in Georgian London when there were almost no other ways for a women to live unsupported by a man (needlework perhaps?).
At any rate the show was pure leftist propaganda. Not too subtle but not too crass–the didn’t have subliminal cuts saying “Marx was right” or the web address of ZaNu Lab at the end of the show–but it was leftist propaganda none the less. Their entire output is the same.
Saw that, or something like it, a couple of years ago. The Beeb is a ruling class propaganda outfit.
I agree with David in as much as the word is “statist”.
However…
“What entertainment thrives depends on what sells, not on the rulers”.
This is far from the whole story. As I described in response to Sean’s initial video, the British state plays an increasingly large role in determining the kinds of films that get made in this country. Hundreds of millions of pounds are funelled into the pockets of major Hollywood studios every year. This interventionist policy enormously distorts the market for films and film-making in this country.
“What entertainment thrives depends on what sells, not on the rulers”.
ROFL. Jeremy Clarkson.
That is a good point. A victim of the new liberal religion.
Actually “The Road to Serfdom” (not a work of art as such – but David M. does mention it – and denies that it had much influence) had a great deal of influence. Both in Britain, were it was the main work of those opposed to the policies of the Atlee government, and in the United States – where many members of “do nothing Congress” (actually the Congress elected in November 1946 did a lot – but they did the opposite of what the collectivists wanted them to do) stressed the work – and it was even published in a Readers Digest version.
Indeed the left (for want of a better word) feared it would have such influence and tried to prevent its publication in the United States. W.T. Crouch (then head of the University of Chicago Press) wrote in the “Freeman” how Progressive establishment figures tried to prevent publication of “The Road to Serfdom” in the United States – for example producing a letter from Mr Miller of a leading New York publisher saying that the book would “sell very well” but that it should not be published – i.e. it should not be published because it challenged the economic ideas of Progressive opinion.
Also such things as the change in FCC regulations in the early 1960s gave a few people a stranglehold over entertainment shows on American television (no longer could outside companies have editorial control over shows they paid for – this was done under the Orwellian [now there is art that had political impact – even in language] title of protecting “creative freedom”). The power of the left in American entertainment television really dates from this period (in the 1950s “big business” was not automatically presented as evil in entertainment shows, and conservative religious people were not automatically presented as stupid and/or fanatical).
In the arts, literature, painting and so on…. a lot of work should not be forced into a political context (not everything is about politics or has a “political message”), but some things do.
For example many of the works of H.G. Wells were intended to spread a socialist message – and did so.
And the works of Ayn Rand (often sneered at round here – for no good reason) did a lot to defend the ideas of liberty. And to show that one does not have to be religious to believe in human freedom – both philosophical (i.e. the existence of personhood – agency) and political.
Actually there is an artistic element even in “The Road to Serfdom”.
F.A. Hayek uses, in “The Road to Serfdom”, language about rights and natural law and human choice which (as someone trained in the “scientific” determinist thought popular in early 20th century Vienna) he did not really believe. Why did he use this form of presentation, this form of language? Because he thought, quite correctly, that it would be the most effective style of presentation. It was an ARTISTIC (literary style) decision – and a very effective one. I would have liked it if he had really believed in the philosophical principles of liberty – but his decision to at least imply he believed in them (via the language he used) at least got people to read his economic ideas (which otherwise they would not have done).
Someone like Alderman Alfred Roberts (the liberal father of Mrs Thatcher) literally believed in the old principles – and this was reflected in his talks against “totalitarianism” (both Marxist, Fascist and National Socialist) in the 1930s.
But then Mr Roberts was an old style Wesleyian Methodist – as “out of date” in his own way as the Spitfire pilots who flew against the National Socialist war machine in 1940 were in their own way. Their aircraft were modern – but their attitudes had been mocked by the “cultural elite” (the Bloomsbury Set, the Fabians and on and on) for many decades.
As “George Orwell” (himself a socialist – but opposed to totalitarianism) said in despair at the alliance between the Marxists and National Socialists in 1939 (which most “Progressive” opinion in Britain and France – and the United States, supported) “who will now step forward to defend civilisation – only Colonel Blimp and the old school tie”.
“Colonel Blimp” (or rather young pilot Blimp) proved to be enough – but just barely. The thread of honour was indeed pulled to breaking point – but did not break.
The “Old Whig” (but Tory also – indeed just British) belief that human beings can. with effort, know moral right from wrong, and that, again with effort, we humans can choose moral right against the desire to evil – won out.
That is what old Professor Harold Prichard on air raid duty in Oxford (and Professor Sir William David Ross, once Major Ross, and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and ….), and the 20 year old pilots in the sky had in common – that is what they believed.
That human beings can, with effort, can tell moral right from moral wrong and, again with effort, choose to do moral right against the desire to do evil. The freedom of a human being – rather than the “freedom” of a beast.
That is the basic atmosphere of, for example, the work of religious people such as Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, as well as atheists such as Ayn Rand, it is philosophical libertarianism.
And if one gets that right – one can go on to political libertarianism.
Excellent post.
Thank you for your reply and criticism, Sean, and for making my reply into an independent blog article; though the references to the comment “above” how must look odd. I was going to revise it and then send it to the two LA mailing lists this morning.
I think we are barking up the right tree but we need to be way more active. However, even if we were as active as I wish we were and there had been upset in 1982, apart from a more robust LA all along, as well as a better one today, things would haply look much as they do today otherwise. It is not so easy to see the results of liberal propaganda but it is clear how silly The Times columns of E.H. Carr look today. I think Hayek was the main factor there but it is not at all easy to measure progress.
I do not think that two active LAs emerged from the 1982 upset but rather that an active base in London was cut off from the national LA network. Things never were quite the same again. Both groups were weakened compared to the pristine LA.
It never was the aim of the LA to affect British politics. We were out to capture the extraverts, or propagandists, and to bias them against politics and the state.
Christianity has a nominal success but a “Christian” is as ignorant of the creed as an Irishman of actual Irish history or a Marxist of the ideas of Karl Marx. But the main fact is that versions of the creed were going a lot longer than only a few years when Paul converted and he converted to a network that not even his energy created in the short time that you think. There never was a pristine Jesus Christ, of course, but we pitch his death just before Paul converted but I think the network was being built up a long time prior to then. G.A. Wells once said he thought it was about three hundred years prior to Paul.
Do you feel that if Peter Tatchell had a heart attack on failing to win the seat then daft David Cameron would be any the less keen on gay marriage, such that we would not have it today? You seem to be the complete Romantic, Sean!
Ever since 1962, Christianity has seemed perverse to me. It is phenomenal that it ever caught on, even with brilliant and hard-working propagandists like St Paul spreading it. But so is a Conservative Prime Minister pressing for a gay marriage law that must alienate most of his natural supporters and the fact that a Conservative party ever wants to modernise is also phenomenal. The majority are always going to be conservative. Even New Labour upset people by modernising. Those examples certainly show the power of ideas, or of fashion, or of both. But the long march of what we now call Political Correctness [PC] was going long prior to 1900. It is, basically, the perverse ideal of Equality.
South Africa did not look solid in 1960 to many, certainly not to me, but it had the USA on its side at that point for there, back then, was about as much apartheid in the cities of USA as there was in South Africa.
PC need not be statist, of course. Many liberals, maybe most liberals, have been exceedingly fond of the crass idea of equality. It has never been the top idea. Liberalism is! It was in 1800. Maybe it was very much before then too. As I said above, in the now new blog article, few people want to vie or mesh their ideas together for coherence. They simply do not see democracy, or even the state, as illiberal. But the LA is right that it clearly is such. But it is no obvious today. This is because people are not often interested in those things, just as they are not often interested in art. If the public do not look then they will not see even the clearest things.
That you were about the only one who looked up on your visits to the lands of the late USSR should have told you the little effect on others of the excellent art that you enjoyed, Sean.
Statist PC is not only illiberal but totalitarian thus the emerging police state you cite, Sean. But the ideal of PC, which is equality, the market, has served way better than the state ever can and the free market would serve even better. Adam Smith saw that fact back in 1776. He felt that the workings of supply and demand tended towards price equality and he was quite right. Now the economists have developed the theory of the price system, it is easier to see that he was right. There has been a long run societal movement towards equality beginning long before 1776 and it continues to happen to this day, off-set only by short run new inequalities by innovation, invention, amongst other things like new fashion that tends to make the whole process a levelling up. The luxuries of one generation become the everyday goods of the next very often and this the statists call “trickle down” just as they call competition “cut throat” but both are social boons. Indeed, profit is the hallmark of social service just as taxation is the sign of abuse towards others. The market is largely colour blind, indifferent to homosexuality, but it does not privilege groups, as statist PC does, but then such privilege flouts the PC ideal of equality, as politics cannot be even or just, to one and all; as it has to oppose some group as the enemy, a Romantic ideal that is anti-liberal to its core but anti-equality too. Liberalism has an institution as an enemy rather than any class of people, including the ignorant ruling class. De jure statist equality law is de facto privilege.
The fact is, Sean, that we have only just begun to talk theoretically to each other. I do hope we continue a little before we decide break off. I have no idea what your ideas of class amount to. But I am an ex-smoker so not the best chap to champion the liberal right to smoke and similarly, as an ex-Marxist, I tend to think class is sheer bosh as I tend to think that Christianity is, as an ex-Catholic.
But I ought to confess that I do not mind being marginal or unnoticed by my enemy the state. As people, I wish state employees, at any level, no harm at all. The Enlightenment outlook that I champion, against the Romantic reaction against, has no enemies and that politics gratuitously uses proactive coercion against people is the major fault of the state.
But, David, how much more active must we be?
As for the LA strategy document we all put out in 1981, I have strong doubts regarding the soundness of what was recommended. Historically, intellectuals have found the bulk of their paid employment in the various organs of state, or in religious organisations that amount to branches of the the State. The rest have attached themselves to aristocrats whose wealth was largely got via the State. Why should they, as a group, be more inclined to libertarianism than single mothers on welfare?
The only demands for greater freedom I’ve seen among intellectuals in my lifetime was their opposition to the laws against gay sex and recreational drug use. And these demands had more to do with their own inclinations or those of their friends. They plainly have no principled objection to state activism.
I think this necessarily points to my comment above,
http://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/03/26/david-mcdonagh-critique-of-sean-gabb-on-the-arts/#comment-43694
which amounts to the suggestion that libertarians 40/50-odd years ago shunned “The State”, and its opportunities for “employment”, believing instead that one should do anything else but.
That said, in 1973 I was not a “libertarian”, I had never heard the word uttered, I wouldn’t have known what it meant even if I had (although I guess I’d have worked it out rather rapidly, and “Grunwick” helped.) and I might not even have approved of it at the time. It’s difficult to remember now what I thought then.
I crossed the _/Unbridgeable Ravine/_ in late 1977, with the good help of Chris Tame and conversations with him and his Dear Wife of the time in their flat and over Chicago-Pizza-Pie-Factory Pizzas, and burgers and stuff, and with Gerald Hartup, and Tony Hollick (Are you there, Tony, still?). And Chris Held My Hand while I “passed over onto the other side”. In truth, I could say that the moment, or at least the day or week, in which I decided that what Chris said was right, was almost an epigraph of a baptism. Suddenly, I thought I believed something about the world that seemed upside-down, compared with what I thought I thought last week. And it all made sense, at last.
For those of us who are gathering data about the Life Of Chris, you might care to note that in conversations with me he also referred to it sometimes as an “unbridgeable ravine”. I invented the phrase, but he liked it and endorsed it by himself, to me.
In all honesty, and for the avoidance of doubt, I must inform all people that to become a libertarian is a very very hard thing to do, in today’s prevailing Zeitgeist. I believe that not many individuals will really be able to do it, and thus thinking of the hardness of the jump you have to do, and you must, I do not think it will be easy to prevail.
I have often been described by a very very good and old University friend who has known me for years, as “A Marxist turned upside-down”.
I think that the point is that we ought to at least have “Tried to Take The Ring, knowing it was Wrong To Do So, in order To Destroy It”. I think we could have been “strong enough”. It’s a bit late now to try though, as The Enemy Now Has It At Last.
I also think that it’s
(a) awfully British in a funny kind of way that there are two outfits called “The Libertarian Alliance”, both, er, really “English” in their outlook and substantially agreeing on most things – although we each have officers and writers from all over the British Isles (who cares where they are from anyway?),
and
(b) that we perhaps agree on “Why should there be only one Monopolies Commission”?…or “Why should there be only “one Money” allowed in one place…?
Anyway, it’s no use now saying what we ought to have done or not done. We are where we are. Sorry; I just get depressed sometimes.
I’m depressed most of the time.
Old fellow, try not to be. It’s all we have, to try to stay upright _/In The Shield Wall/_ , sort of holding each other up when a few of us bastards have had our skulls split to their nostrils, and not to falter or fail. If we all stay upright somehow, then we might prevail, sort of, for a time, and it might even be enough. I don’t think so, but it’s worth a try. We might as well.
I’m depressed most of the time.
But that’s not a bad thing. If you weren’t depressed, either you’d not be aware of what’s going on, you’d not care, or, like Blair, you’d be actively collaborating with it.
Meanwhile, at SJW* Central:
Seeing a story like that, Mark Steyn will of course attack Muslims for harming free speech. But Muslims aren’t in the UK because the white British wanted them here and Muslims did not create the laws in question. They’re a symptom, not a cause.
—
*SJW = Social Justice Warrior.
Well some Christians understand Christianity and some do not, and some Marxists understand Marxism and some do not, and some Irishmen have a good understanding of Irish history and some do not – it is a mistake to generalise on these matters.
And if there is a specifically “English” point of view (although again it is dangerous to generalise) it is that people are capable with (with effort) of telling right from wrong and (again with effort) capable of choosing moral right against the desire to do evil – as Karl B. (the German-Swiss theologian) put it “the English are hopelessly Pelagian” (in spite of the fact that Pelagius was a Briton) or as the ultimate Englishman, Dr Johnson, put it – “we know the will is free and there is an end to it” (although Ralph Cudworth objected to the division between “will” and “reason” a century before).
That is the basis of libertarianism – whether people here like it or not. And it is also what Ayn Rand had in common with her arch enemy Kant (they both understood that either we make real decisions or we do not – “compatiblism” is nonsense). If we do not make real decisions, if we can not do other than we do, then Thomas Hobbes was correct – human “freedom” has no more moral importance than the “freedom” of a wall of water after a dam had been blown up. Such “freedom” would actually be a bad thing, and thus tyranny is justified (if we accept the doctrine of Hobbes that humans are just flesh robots and that all actions are predetermined with no real choice).
As for art – a “libertarianism” that rejects the pro human liberty (capacity for real choice) view of Dr Johnson, and C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien, and (yes) Rand (and so many others), has nothing worth expressing as art.
On historical change.
I do not know whether we are more egalitarian than we were in 1776 or not – and I do not care. Whether someone has more income or wealth than someone else is a morally indifferent matter.
However the date of 1776 is interesting – coming from people who would reject “we hold these truths to be self evident” (Thomas Jefferson – but really Thomas Reid), and would reject the anti Hobbesian position of such the things as the Constitution of New Hampshire (1784), the Federal Bill of Rights (1791), the Constitution of Texas (1876) or, for that matter, the anti Hobbesian principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the British Bill of Rights. As well as Chief Justice Sir Edward Cook in the early 17th century (Dr Bonham’s case and so on), and that classic “Old Whig”, Chief Justice Sir John Holt of the post 1688 period.
As for the state – in the United Kingdom the state has been on the rise (in size and scope) since the 1870s, from the point of view of libertarianism this is a bad thing.
Whether the generally negative trend in liberty (general decline of liberty – rise of statism), in Britain and around the world, over the last 140 years or so is connected to the collectivist (“down with the rich”, “down with big business”. “down with corporations”) messages in so much art (literature, then film and television) is a difficult question – but I suspect it is.
Back in 1980 (in his book “Free To Choose” – an apt title considering the above) Milton Friedman (a limited state man rather than a hard core libertarian) rightly mocked the questions “who protects the worker” and “who protects the consumer” – pointing out (as so many had before him) that the market, freedom of choice, was a better protection for the worker than the “protection” of the state (the regulations that lead to mass unemployment – as we now see in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and so on), and that the market – the competition of business and the need of a business to maintain a good REPUTATION (again not the state) is also the best protection for the consumer – not the vast web of regulations that increase princes and reduce choice (but often do not deal with the real matters of concern).
However, in popular are (literature, films, television shows and so on) it is assumed that the state must step in to “protect the worker” and “protect the consumer” in every conceivable way. The state is St George and “big business” is the Dragon. And wrong headed efforts to convince people that the state is really under the control of “big business” just make matters worse – as people demand a new state (uncontrolled by the evil Dragon) that will do even more.
The same is true in such matters as education, health, old age provision and so pon – again it is assumed in most art (in literature, films, television shows and so on) that the alternative to state provision (now government spending has grown to about half the entire economy in most large Western nations – with the vast majority of government spending being on the Welfare States) is for people to starve to death in the streets, or die in agony from every medical problem.
What is needed, from a pro liberty point of view, is art that takes on these false opinions – and that is exactly what (for example) Ayn Rand produced.
If others think the lady did not do a good enough job – they should take up the task themselves.
It should be noted that, given its date, the Constitution of Texas of 1876 might be seen as a slap in the face for the Victorian British legal historian Maitland.
Maitland praises England for not falling to the “absolutism” of Roman Law, but then (seemingly without a blush) praises Thomas Hobbes – a worst absolutist than any Roman Lawyer.
Maitland also claims that no Act of Parliament has even been irrational or wicked ( pages 108 to 109 “A Sketch of English Legal History” Frederick Maitland and Francis Montague – G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1915, actually a reprint of earlier articles) – a position that, given his knowledge as a legal historian, can only be described as blatant lying. After all he would have known of the Statute struck down in Dr Bonham’s case (demanding that someone practicing medicine pay for a piece of paper, a “license”, to engage in trade) and there are far more wicked statutes – such as the Stature of Labourers under Edward III (trying to enforce serfdom) or the Statute of Artificers under the first Queen Elizabeth (trying to compel all poor people to follow the occupation of their parents) and many other wicked Statutes that violate basic freedom – freedom of movement, freedom to take up a trade or profession and on and on.
One can hardly write a novel, or a play, or a television script condemning (for example) the evils of serfdom (the denial of freedom of movement – whether by the Emperor Diocletian or by the Statute of Labourers) and, AT THE SAME TIME, hold with Maitland that such statutes (indeed no statute ever) were not irrational or wicked.
To write such a novel, or play, or television script – one must REJECT Maitland (and his hero Thomas Hobbes) and adopt the point of view of a “student of the Common Laws of England” such as Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke or Chief Justice Sir John Holt.
Combining both Sean and David’s points-
I think we need to be aware that most of what is produced in “the artz” is not deliberate propaganda. What occurs, let us say in a popular TV show like Eastenders, is that because the people writing it are all of a certain opinion, it is that opinion which they naturally express in the storylines they think of. They do not need to sit in a smokefree room plotting to propagandise. It is simply that such people will think up stories that express their common values and those are the ones that get produced. They certainly do see Eastenders as a way to “educate the public” but they are not as such conspiring, they just naturally assume that the “issues” they incorporate are ones which are right and proper, such as educating people to be sympathetic to people with AIDS, and that non-gays get AIDS, as with the Mark Fowler storyline at that time, or their common conviction that domestic violence is always a man against a woman, and so on.
This is why David’s point about being “in the state” is so pertinent. The reality is that you cannot change things unless you are in a position to do so. And libertarians generally do not put themselves in such a position; neither do they make the effort to hire friends of a similar political and social view, and so on.
The reality is I think that the “Get the intellectuals” strategy is a weak one and seems predicated on a flawed analysis of how the Left (whatever you want to call them) have triumphed. Success comes from being active in the culture, whether the artistic culture, political culture, social culture etc. The reason libertarians have had no success is that all we’ve got is amateur intellectuals sitting in rooms or online arguing theory with each other (and I am as guilty of this as anyone I accept). We don’t get boots on the ground.
This may be because of an idea common to libertarians- a deeply flawed one- that models humans as “reasoning beings” and thus an assumption that humans will seek the objectively correct answer to any issue (say, economic theory) and the correct answer will triumph. Meanwhile, our opponents are out there in society manipulating the expectations and beliefs of people using emotions, slogans and constructed narratives.
For instance. In 1970, 2nd Wave (radical) Feminism was a few crazy women sitting around a kitchen table in New York. Within a decade, its values were widespread and by the mid 1980s hegemonic. Because they did more than sit around that table. They recruited. They organised. They colonised the media, universities, bureaucracy. They recruited followers as activists to set up Rape Crisis Centres and take over the Domestic Violence Movement, a legion who invested vast amounts of time in these endeavours so that when the State came looking for “the experts” on rape or domestic violence, they found themselves talking to Feminists. They used the media to express feminist ideas, whether in newspapers or periodicals, or in fiction- movies, television, novels etc.
And the intellectuals? They found themselves bullied into compliance by screeching mobs with megaphones on the campuses.
The strategy based on a slow, patient intellectual conversion of “the intellectuals” has in the same time achieved virtually nothing. It seems to be deeply flawed to me.
Ian, I have to say I think there’s considerable truth in your analysis. And it’s important. In fact the whole idea is to get the Idea, and the Movement, to be self-sustaining in just the way you describe.
It is why the adults who did not stand up to the toddlers of all ages who staged those college sit-ins and whatnot — who were in fact engaging in a form of coercion — were at fault for not behaving like adults, back in that “slum of a decade,” the ’60’s.
Of course, they themselves had already been somewhat trained out of adulthood by the doctrines against prohibitions by their own intellectual leaders, but the students at those colleges and U’s had a right to a campus environment that was geared toward learning and scholarship, and protected against the predations of gangs — even when the students themselves thought they were in sympathy with the objectives and even, sometimes, the methods of the gangs.
Speaking as one who was there at the time.
I agree with Ian about the uselessness of trying to convert the “intellectuals.” It’s very hard to convince anyone to go against their paymasters. And when that paymaster is the state, it’s all but futile.
Perhaps things looked different in 1981; I don’t know. I only became aware of the existence of a liberty movement in 1988, by which time we were clearly into a damage limitation mode; it was about preserving the ideas of liberty, not proselytizing them. I do wonder, though, whether libertarians in 1981 had such a clear view of the unmitigable evilness of the state as we do now. Perhaps, if they had understood that better, the strategy might have been more radical?
Actually I’m not sure that we as a worldwide movement, or even as individuals, have achieved as little as some of you think. I’m thinking, for example, of an evening in Berlin back in 1998, when Tim Starr and I plied Matthew Elliott, then a bright but raw young student from the LSE, with much beer and libertarian conversation. A decade and a half later, he was ready to found the TaxPayers’ Alliance. And more recently, I’ve been involved as a teacher in Glenn Cripe’s Language of Liberty camps. (I’ve just come back from L’viv, Ukraine – see my report on http://www.honestcommonsense.co.uk/2015/03/lviv-liberty-english-camp-englishmans.html). When I see how those students respond to liberal ideas, I can’t be pessimistic about the long term future for liberty.
That said, perhaps the two LAs have not been as successful as they might have been. But I don’t see any point in letting ourselves become depressed over spilt milk. Better, I think, to ask: “What can we do better next time?”
It seems to be me Dr. Gabb is right on this one – I’m surprised that the role of Ayn Rand’s fiction in kicking off the modern American movement in the 50s-60s hasn’t been mentioned more, since (whether you admire her fiction or not) it seems a reasonably good illustration of Dr. Gabb’s point.
I can’t help but wonder whether some of the people criticising Dr. Gabb at the discussion were themselves converted to libertarianism by economic or philosophical arguments, and as a result were inclined to view these arguments in the context of a mass movement as more important than they probably are.
Indeed, one worrying possibility might well be that libertarianism tends to attract people themselves attracted mainly to abstract economic / philosophical arguments, and such people may generally just not be particularly good at creating art. Meaning few of those more receptive to art are recruited, so little libertarian art in turn gets made, and so forth. (I hope someone will be able to provide a good refutation of this possibility).
Another question that would be interesting to discuss: what might libertarian art look like, given there are surely only so many times one can tell the 1984 / Atlas Shrugged story of ‘the man versus the overbearing state’ without it becoming unimaginative and repetitive.
Libertarian art would look like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which doesn’t mention politics once, but spreads assumptions that cause libertarian ideas to make sense.
I hope you don’t mind me joining this fascinating discussion without introduction.
In short, I think that statists use culture to cover for an absence of reliable ideas, which is not something we should emulate.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that collectivists have indeed directed their efforts towards culture, and that their efforts have been largely successful. I suspect that this is instinctive, rather than a clever strategy on their part. Having tried to look beyond their political & cultural writing to find an underlying philosophy, all I can say is that after a few years, I’m still digging. As far as I can tell, it’s emotional appeal all the way down.
Perhaps a stick and carrot effect has pushed them to shun direct discussion of their ideas: a disposition that tends naturally to appeal to emotion, and adverse experiences when they have attempted to state their beliefs clearly & concisely. Art that attempts to hit the emotions directly without appealing to reason is generally rubbish, but can be factory-produced. At the rate of perhaps three or four episodes a week.
So if Libertarians are to sponsor culture, we should aim for quality over quantity. Fair enough. But does watching a Firefly or Ferris Buller awaken those dormant parts of a viewers brain that question authority? Maybe. I hope so. I hesitate to quote Stefan Molyneux as a source, but he makes the case that (put bluntly) “The reason you’re not a libertarian is because you have unresolved issues”. By that standard, it seems that libertarians should sponsor psychologists (like mr Molyneux’s wife).
Dave Jones-
I don’t think you need a formal introduction to join a blog discussion 🙂
The problem your post raises is this- what proportion of the population are actually looking for deep philosophy? I suspect the answer is rather small. To quote JPM-
This is generally true of the sort of people who sit in small rooms giving talks to each other. It is not generally true of most (“normal”) people. That is why any movement has to move beyond that, and appeal on simpler, and “emotional” levels, to everybody else. Take my example of Feminism, which I have studied. It has an underlying philosophy, which is internally coherent (though not in my view consistent with reality). What proportion of the women who call themselves Feminists- including those who actively promote and proselytise the movement, write in newspapers and so on- understand that philosophy? Actually, a very small proportion. But they know its slogans. They know that women are “objectified”, but if you ask them Catharine Mackinnon’s philosophical derivation of “objectify”, they don’t know it.
Most people don’t want to pore over philosophy for years. They want simple ideas that make sense to them; the same kind of simple ideas that can be promoted through the popular arts (by the way, this is one thing I agree with David McDonagh about; ballet was a very bad example by Sean. Nobody cares about ballet. Ideas spread through soap operas, popular drama, comedy, pop music, movies, comics, popular novels, etc. 50 Shades Of Grey or The Hunger Games are influential; whatever won last year’s Booker Prize isn’t. The Daily Mail is far more influential than The Economist.)
Humans are emotional creatures who primarily use reason to justify their emotionally derived goals. This is why Hume said that reason is the slave of the passions, and indeed that it should be. The desire for “liberty” is an emotional goal; we seek liberty because we yearn to be more free. Winning the argument can only be achieved if we can adjust the internal value scales of other people such that they yearn for liberty more than for other values. The proportion of the population who are going to wade through Human Action to get there is tiny. But a series of Young Adult novels about a girl called Katnip fighting the oppressive State while deciding between two attractive male suitors, made into a series of movies- that can have an effect.
Thank you for your criticism, Paul Marks. I was pleased to hear that you had made it up with Sean. Falling out is sheer folly.
This is just a reply to your first post. I see you have made many later contributions here since.
Sean brought up Hayek’s book, but I did cite it in reply saying it was more effective than was Orwell and that it even affected Orwell. I thought I had made it clear what it was that Sean said and what it was that I said, but you are not the only one to see it as unclear. So I need to admit that it was not as clear as I had supposed.
Again, I thought I had said it was good stuff but Sean said it was not as good for liberalism [by which I mean anti-statism] as Orwell’s 1984 was. I think that is false.
I like the Reader’s Digest version.
1984 affected my 1968 socialism not one iota but nor would Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944), as I too saw nothing but a verbal rather than a theoretical difference between Lenin and Hitler and I had the delusion that socialism was anti-statist back in the 1960s. Like Orwell [though I never ever admired his thought but preferred his master, Bertrand Russell, though he too was too tame for my Marxist/Morris /Kropotkin outlook back then] I tended to agree at once with Hayek’s book. But Hayek’s earlier books, with the economic calculation argument in, would have given me a headache in the 1960s, as did Mises’s Socialism (1922) when I read it in 1973.
The Fabian had an impact on politicians but not much on the masses. I doubt if H.G. Wells ever nudged anyone in a socialist direction. He is not like G.A. Wells on Christianity.
Again, the free will/determinism is not one iota germane to actual individual liberty, Paul. But I am not confident that I can ever get you to see that fact.
Why should young pilots know what the Fabians ever said?
Why do you feel it is hard for most people to sort out what is right from what is wrong?
Anyway, liberalism is about limiting, or even ending, politics rather than an engagement of some sort.
David McDonagh- ask yourself this. When people want to reference an oppressive tyranny, what do they refer to, 1984 or The Road To Serfdom? It is invariably 1984. The only people I know who are familiar with The Road To Serfdom, and indeed have heard of Hayek are political nerds, mainly Libertarians.
I think Libertarians really need to grasp that not only are the vast majority of people not interested in political philosophy, but also that they never will be. This is not because they are stupid or have been misled by dumbing down of society, but because they have more immediate practicalities and interests to think about. Any idea that doesn’t get translated into the popular culture is never going to get anywhere.
It is like religion. Hardly any Christians indulge in deep theology, and they never have. They understand it in terms of simple ideas and slogans. They know that Jesus died for our sins, or that Jesus loves them, or that when Granny died she went to Heaven. You can see this in Paul’s letters, where he is telling the people who run his local churches what to tell their flocks to answer their simple questions. No, you don’t need to follow the Jewish law, because salvation is by faith. Just believe, that’s enough. Forget the works. And so on.
Arguing the precise theory of liberty is fine for the .1% of the population who give a monkeys about it. The rest need something more digestable.
Also, it’s worth noting that the current trajectory of our society is more Brave New World than either 1984 or The Road To Serfdom.
Thanks for your reply and criticism, Sean.
We cannot be too active, Sean, but as I said, it is not going to be very easy to gauge our progress, no matter how active we are. Customs and mores change very slowly.
You seem not to have quite grasped the sense of Hayek/LA 1981 of “intellectuals” Sean. It is a bit eccentric. Note that I used also used the words extravert or propagandists to make this class of people clearer. As a class, they have no class interests, of course. The LA statement refers to opinion fosterers or makers in society; they ae not always in the colleges.
I think the LA statement is roughly right, not only on the propagandists and the role of their propaganda but also on the very slow progress and on, maybe its main idea, viz. that material interests are very over rated. Keynes understood this latter point too for he expressed it on the final page of his 1936 book but he mixed it up with silly ideas about the closed mind.
It hardly matters who pays the piper in both human belief and human values thus hardly ever in politics either. There are many reasons why this is the case.
We should all be able to see that it is the case in the 40 years of the Cold War, where the money of the rich USA seemed to alienate the youth all along and the late USSR, who had next to no money, won out all along the line with fools like Che going up on tee-shirts everywhere in the 1960s, and all too often even today. The Beatles rightly sung in the 1960s “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
It does not matter what the “intellectuals” are inclined to when we find them. They can be converted to the cause of liberty. Their material interests do not matter. Marx and Engels refuted that silly idea for Engels was a rich man and Marx might have become one, but Marx lived in poverty for the sake of mere ideas; false ones too. Engels felt bound to aid Marx and his family and that took the edge off his income.
I would not rule out a single mother on welfare as a likely pristine liberal.
Gay sex and drug use are not illiberal, of course.
Yes, it is quite true that the opinion formers have not been won over yet.
Thanks for your criticism, Ian.
I would expect them to say Hitler if I asked someone for a reference of tyranny, but they might also say Henry VIII. I would not expect anyone to say 1984.
Orwell’s books sold more than Hayek’s, of course, but Hayek did influence Orwell. He also influenced the IEA who every nearly matched the Fabian on their impact on states around the world, as well as on the UK state.
However, to repeat, the LA was not out to directly influence the UK state; nor the UK general public directly either. We are after those extraverts in society who foster public opinion. We never were much interested in what, above, I called practical politics, apart from criticising them in passing, but only in theoretical or ideological politics; or actually anti-politics. Politics crowds out liberty. Politics is intrinsically unjust.
The 1981 statement explicitly says that most people will never be interested in politics. That is why we only aim to change those who foster the ideas in society. They are not always in the colleges. A friend of mine went to the University of Cambridge to study philosophy in the 1980s and he was so odd in clearly liking books there that they called him the bookworm!
First, to repeat what I said above, it is simply silly to say the left dominate society today. If you look at what I said above about the BBC, I admitted to a statist bias there, but not to the exclusion of others. They make some effort to be fair.
The word never was made flesh and most nominal Christians know next to nothing about the creed that rejects all normal life, and all ethics too, on the 2000 year out of date idea that the end is nigh. Anyway, all accounts agree that St Paul took the sect out of Judaism to become a rival religion. It had a sizable network before Paul converted to it. You cite part of Paul’s rejection of his old creed, Ian.
No, Ian, it is not that people are ignorant of liberalism but instead that you seem to simply forget what liberalism is. We all know exactly what it is when boy meet girl. It is respect for the liberty of others. It is the top idea today and it will emerge in almost any interpersonal relations. Social liberty, as contrasted with savage natural liberty, that Hobbes realised was there in anarchy but that he imagined was bound to be a war of all against all, social liberty is concerned to respect the liberty of all others and it is of society, or all persons, rather than only the individual. Locke was right to correct Hobbes that in anarchy we would get some social liberty, and for the most part too, but he thought crime would be higher, and that Hobbes was right that the state could deter a lot of crime.
But Hobbes almost got it exactly wrong, for it is the state that is the institution that introduced the war of all against all, as politics is cold war at best but open violence all too often.
The people already know about liberty, but what the LA does that they are reluctant to do, as they want to do other things, as you rightly say, is to mesh or vie the liberal idea with all the rival ideas to see the state as anti-social. Today they think the state is all right, or that we ought to tolerate immorality from the state that would be criminal if a private person did it.
Taxation is a sign of public abuse but profit is the sign of public service.
Well, my short answer here is I do not see much of a trend towards libertarianism among intellectuals and I’m not entirely clear who these extraverts (extroverts?) are. All I can see is a society whose ideology at all Establishment levels has shifted strongly towards the Progressives (“the Left” will do) since the 1980s. So I don’t see much of the strategy working so far.
When do we start the “50 year clock” from? It looks to me like there aren’t many years left on it.
David M. – sadly the economics of Hayek (the good bit of his work, although there are other good bits – he just radically over states the “human action but not human design” point, it is not formally wrong but there is also a massive role for voluntary “human design” as well) did not influence Orwell.
Orwell clung to the economics of socialism – even as he came to understand the totalitarian end of socialism. “The trouble with competitions is that someone wins them” – the idea that “capitalism” leads to everything being a monopoly (which is just wrong – but Orwell did not see it was wrong).
You are just wrong about H.G. Wells (and so on) not nudging some people in the direction of socialism – of course it did.
And you are just wrong about the lack of influence of “The Road to Serfdom” for reasons I have already explained.
Ian.
The problem is that the methods of evil (and I use the word “evil” deliberately – for it is the correct word) will not normally (naturally) work for good.
Brainwashing (conditioning) and appealing to what is most irrational and base in human beings works well for evil (you have mentioned some of the evils) – but it will not work nearly as well for good.
For example, Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” are rules for collectivist “radicals” – there is indeed nothing in the book about rational argument or appealing to human reason.
But trying to use those same “Rules” to work to defend private property, to roll back government taxes, spending and regulations will not work nearly as well – in fact such efforts lead to disaster.
Yes we humans are weak flawed creatures – but appealing to what is most base and vile and irrational in us (as the collectivists do) will not further the cause of good – only that of evil (evil methods tend to evil results – which is fine if one wants evil results, as the late Mr Alinsky did, but not fine if one does not).
Appealing for the state to “do something” about poverty, or discrimination, or …. (whatever) is easy – appeal to the emotions, demonise “the rich” and “big business” – do all the antics and “protest” tricks that people like Saul Alinsky have taught for centuries. Scream-so-loud-that-people-can-not-think. And sneer and smear (and all the rest of the stuff one sees in television entertainment shows and modern universities).
But to show the truth to people one can not appeal to what is worst in them – their irrationality and their envy and so on.
One has to appeal to what is best in them – their reason.
“But it will not work Paul – reason will fail, the mindless emotion, the passions, will always win in the end”.
Then civilisation is indeed doomed.
But it would be a silly to just give up without a real effort.
And a real effort, over the long term, can not be made by people who do not even believe that human reason (that the “I”) even “really” exists.
After all – if humans are just mindless flesh robots (totally controlled by impersonal forces – with no real choice over what we do), our “freedom” is of no moral importance anyway.
In the end libertarianism is a struggle over the “nature of man” – what is best in us against “the beast” (the creature driven by base desires – by envy and so on). People such as your example of the “new feminists”, or Saul Alinsky, or Rousseau, appeal to the beast – and they do so quite deliberately (knowing what they are doing).
This fight has to be won (each day – indeed each minute, with personal failings being corrected as much as we can) for true progress to be made overall.
Including political progress.
Thanks for your criticism, Ian and Paul.
You have both made interesting points in your other posts above, but as I realise that I am almost as slow as the march of human reason, so I will try to confine myself to the replies to my last post for the time being.
Ian
Yes, there is only about five years to go but we did not foresee the upset of the following year. Anyway, five years is still five years. We have not failed yet. But we do seem to have a lot to do.
Yes, it is most likely extroverts rather than extraverts, my mistake I suppose.
Paul
Hayek did influence Orwell. Did you read Orwell’s book review? The book Orwell read was not on economics. I did not say that Orwell was a complete Hayekian, only that he realised his madcap idea that the market was doomed soon might well be exaggerated after reading that 1944 book; that had way more impact politically than Orwell ever had.
I guess Orwell never wanted to read the books on economics by Hayek.
Yes, that monopoly myth was embraced by Orwell and it thrives still today.
Read the first article above, Paul, and see if you can find where I said the 1944 book had no influence. You took it from where I was giving an account of what Sean said! Did you not bother to listen to Sean’s talk?
Why do you love that warmonger Burke? Why do you love the jackass Thomas Reid.
Do you know anyone ever influenced in socialism by H.G. Wells? He never even seemed like a socialist to me. Like Orwell, who wrote readable books, he wrote books that showed a good imagination but theoretically he was void.
Your head seems to be full of silly ideas, Paul. What do you think is brainwashing? It is a mere myth. Like Sean, you conflate pessimism with reality.
Evil is fine. I think politics is evil. I used to think religion was evil but I was blaming it for its evil political acts.
There is no irrationality. That is just a silly expletive referring to nothing at all.
There are no creatures, though t is a pleasant sounding word. Humans err, certainly. But no one ever wittingly wants evil results, as Plato and Socrates made quite plain; but not plain enough for the rather stupid Aristotle.
Envy is all too real but it never closes the mind to any truth. Your ideas are unrealistic, Paul.
But, if anything, Ian is worse. Emotion is reason in action. Hume was simply silly in saying that reason is the slave of the passions, as it is the maker of what we feel. The bifurcation between reason and the emotions is bogus. We all feel such and such because we believe such and such.
Given a few million years, civilization might be doomed but it is far from doomed today.
You have a lot more thinking to do on metaphysics, Paul.
It does not matter what people believe or assume; to begin with. Any assumption can get an enquiry running. That is good news for you, Paul. as you are clearly depressing yourself with all this pessimistic bosh.
No, liberalism is not about the beast in us or about human nature but about liberty for one and all.
JPM
No. Ayn Rand’s books were clearly propaganda rather than high or low art. So they refute what Sean said rather than exemplifying it. They did for her ideas what The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists did for socialism.
The LA never aimed at a mass movement. We think that winning over most of the natural propagandists is enough.
Anyway, if many will are indifferent to ideas, so just as many if not more are to art. And most artists seem to hate ideas, anyway.
As art does not matter much to liberalism getting established then your worry is misplaced but, in my experience, we soon get all types within any propaganda group, which is another reason why the Romantic meme of thinking that it is germane to find enemy types is inept.
So no refutation is really needed as you have a bogus idea as to what the problem is.
This is like a mirror of Old Left thinking in which you win the masses by declaiming Marxist theory. The Progressives and particularly their New Left form have long realised that it’s all about the culture, not lectures on the Hegelian Dialectic. Which is why they now dominate our society.
Which sort of comes back to my concern that much of Libertarianism is just an inversion of Marxism, with private instead of public ownership as the “mode of production” that will change the rest of society which is merely superstructural; and using the same beliefs about political organisation that didn’t work for the old Marxists either.
Beside the point, but the word actually is “extrAvert.” It’s always sounded wrong to me too, but it isn’t.
Ayn Rand has indeed reached a great many people, a large proportion of whom, unfortunately, have twisted her fiction beyond recognition. (The nastiest and most blatantly dishonest–or perhaps obtuse obtuse beyond all belief, but dishonest is more likely–hit-job I’ve ever seen was published at ZeroHedge.) But if her books are propaganda, then so is any story or novel that aims to illustrate the workings-out of a state of affairs assuming some moral position, if the writer has any hope that readers will find something of real-world applicability therein. Why yes, I do believe that that includes LotR.
Of course she hoped her books would help to achieve a shift in the moral and political views of the public, but her first objective was to tell a gripping story about sane characters in an insane world, how they went about surviving in that world with no help from and indeed against all the resources of the State and the machinations of the pseudo-capitalists and pseudo-industrialists, and how in the end–by implication–they succeeded.
See “The Goal of My Writing,” in her collection of essays The Romantic Manifesto.
“Does feeling follow thought, or does thought follow feeling?”
The age-old question in relatively modern dress. And the answer, of course, is “Yes.”
Emotion (or “the passions”) and thought (“reason”) are intellectually separable as concepts, but in the real world they are melded and operate in a sort of feedback loop, each influencing the other. We can verify this by introspection, if we are reasonably good at that by nature or training. In terms of the way we experience things, including ourselves, we see the same problem or issue or set of facts from somewhat different angles and in somewhat different lights on different days; when tired or when rested; when hungry or when not. Our emotional responses to the situation thus differ, and as a result our reason may take us to different conclusions about what to do.
For instance, when sufficiently tired the thought of making dinner is downright painful. Later, after a good rest, the thought of making dinner brings to mind the fun of fixing a nice roast chicken and chocolate cake, potatoes and two veg.
On the other hand, “When I am in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, ….” The thought of the loved one moves the emotions from despair to delight.
That’s not to say the emotions are infinitely malleable, or completely subject to “programmed control” by the person; they are not; but they are influenced more or less strongly by the person’s “reason” and other states of mentation as well, especially including imagination.
Regardless of what Hume himself intended to be getting at in the famous quote, its truth is better stated as “reason can be and often is the employee of the passions,” like the tour director who figures out the route the tour bus will take in getting from the Riviera to Monte Carlo (say).
But on the other hand, the emotions say, “I want chocolate ice-cream, now!, and plenty of it too!” and Reason says, “Put it out of your head, child, the nearest store is 30 miles away, it’s midnight so nothing’s open, and the horse was put to bed hours ago.”
Or, “I would like to hang that thieving, murdering louse by the nads until dead! After being smeared with honey for the ants!” But Sweet Reason says “Yes, one would, but it would be counterproductive. Why not write a highly expressive Letter to the Editor or some such, instead, and then figure out how to ruin the guy’s life–without any form of violence, deceit, or anti-libertarian coercion. You might, for instance, expose the truth.”
Will. Will is conceptually different from both Reason and Emotions, but it is a third element of the meld that determines what we do. I think of it as a Black Box in which the inputs are emotions modified by reason and reason modified by emotion, and out of the Box come the physical actions that our bodies perform as a result of those. (There are also actions that are not under the direction of Will, or only minimally so, such as breathing, or swinging your your leg in response to the tap of the reflex hammer at the knee. It’s possible to learn to control some of these, to some extent.)
This description of course is given in terms of how we as human beings experience ourselves. How the biological systems that produce our personal, inner experience do so is another examination altogether. But there are some experiments that purport to show that in fact we — sometimes at least — begin our action X before we are consciously aware that we have “decided” to do X. This research was first hailed as a breakthrough, then assaulted as flawed and meaningless, and I think (but am not sure) has now regained a measure of respectability. I will say that it seems to me sometimes that I do things without having quite decided to do them.
If all that has gone too far off-topic then I apologize, but it seems to me to follow directly from some of the comments above.
Here’s a good example of why libertarianism has been so ineffective:
The existence of a “Judge Shamin Qureshi” is a sign that the UK is a deeply sick society, but no mainstream politician will do anything but “celebrate” such sickness (as Peter Simple used to point out, “mainstream” = far left by historical standards). Libertarianism could only be successful among white heterosexual males, who are also the only group who sincerely believe in it. The UK and US are currently dedicated to removing white heterosexual males from all positions of power and influence, which is one reason libertarianism is doing so badly. And lots of current libertarianism isn’t merely ineffectual but actively harmful to its ostensible cause. The Ayn Rand strand, for example.
Just in case Sean hasn’t trawled his own archives, let me point out that Mr Eyebrow has previous on this site:
https://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/is-enochs-eyebrow-a-shill/#comment-65821
Last I looked, Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t Jews.
Last I looked, Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t Jews.
It depends what you mean by “Jehovah’s Witness”, doesn’t it? And when one then refers to them as “J.W.s”, some readers may get the point.
Ian,
I think you are deluded about both culture and also the dominance of the left. But culture is better than art, as it includes aimed propaganda that Sean foolishly set out to denounce, but your thesis remains silly enough.
What we now call Political Correctness [PC], which is basically the ideal of equality, began in the liberal tradition before 1800 but only became illiberal when it became statist.
The LA never was about winning over the masses. Only the natural propagandists matter. Art does not matter one whit, especially high art like ballet but also low art like whatever is currently on television most of the time. It is completely irrelevant.
There is a fashion for ideas, liberalism was in fashion from 1800 to 1860 and socialism from about 1870 to about 1970, but art has nothing to do with that as far as I can see.
It is Marxism and Fabianism that aped liberalism, putting old Tory ideas forward under the new label of socialism and calling pristine liberal ideas “right wing”. The left wing of the French Assembly in 1789 was for free trade and the right for protectionism. But trhe Fabian Society in particular pretended that socialism was to the left of liberalism, as Hayek explained in his 1944 book.
The Hegelian Dialectic was a mere muddle, as Karl Popper explains in “What Is Dialectic” in his 1963 book. Hegel simply erred in logic. Marx never followed him but rather he remained an Aristotelian. But he put on a show of following Hegel. He was influenced far more by David Ricardo, a liberal, so it is hardly today’s LA that inverts Marx. Marxism is a sort of liberal heresy, if we can have such a thing, as is also PC.
We are only concerned with the market or with private property as a means of serving the problems that rise from individual liberty that arises in the mass urban society. Liberty is the aim, not private property or the market. But the state is the main violator of social liberty. So the LA opposes the state as an institution.
All those theories of economic epochs or modes of production were lifted by Marx from liberal thinkers who wrote before he did and he exaggerated this sociology into a bogus theory of Revolution, an unreal Romantic myth. 1789 was more like a series of riots than what the deluded Romantics imagined to be a Revolution.
Why Marxism failed is because it missed all the facts. It was a false theory. As such, it had a hopeless task. The economic calculation argument [eca] explains why it had no chance, whatsoever, even if everyone in the world agreed with it, or even way more than the current seven milliard or US billion agreed with it. It was as bogus as the idea that the moon is made of green cheese or as bogus as Sean’s thesis that art matters to idealogy.
Ironically, it was PC that ruined Bolshevism in the UK and the backward Marcuse played a part in this ,as did Angelia Davis, his student of the1960s. The younger members of the Communist Party in the UK went over to PC in 1968 and they lacked the wit to realise it was not socialist but rather anti-socialist and they set up the magazine Marxism Today. This was statist, but it is not particularly socialist, and it is certainly not Tory though Tories, like Christopher Cattaway MP pushed it enthusiastically in parliament and on the mass media. For success the aim needs to be possible.
Anyway communism never was possible. And it never did embrace equality anyway. PC is very different from that. Marxism is theoretically against the state; not so PC in its totalitarian form.
Julie,
I think one, extravert, is US English and the other, extrovert, is UK English.
Ayn Rand was right that she was a Romantic and that is why she was forever falling out with people, seeking enemies and the rest of it.
It now seems odd to me that I read most of her books but it seems that Stephen Berry and myself mainly read them in the early 1970s owing to our friend David Ramsay Steele , who was keen on them at the time. About ten years later he had rather changed his mind and he wrote a Free Life article on her going over two issues:
http://www.la-articles.org.uk/alice.htm
Lately, he gave a talk on her in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEqVSVN2qkw
Her books were propaganda. No harm there, but most seem to hold that it crowds out art, just like most [rightly, I think] hold that politics crowds out charity. Holding a moral position is not being political though the political tend to claim to be moral. Politics is, in fact, quite immoral. It always has to abuse people. Most do not realise that today but the LA does.
They may be different concepts in the use of English but no reason then no feelings. Hume is almost right n many things, and he is quite right things too, like on belief but I would re-write what he said using more apt words to say exactly what he said in inept words. On reason being distinct enough to be the slave of the passions, he errs badly. Plato is far nearer reality in saying that we can never deliberately err. The passions are not one whit irrational and irrationality is a mere myth.
I agree that the rest of what you say is related to the earlier discussion, and very interesting, but less germane to art or to the worth of LA propaganda.
Eyebrow,
I do not agree that liberalism has been ineffective.
PC is no more left than right in content but it is anti-liberal [indeed, totalitarian] whenever it goes statist. If it is not backed up by the law then it is just free speech.
I agree that Christian street propagandists should be free to cite the Bible.
The metaphor of a sick society hardly seems useful to me. However, society could be way freer than it is.
The Ayn Rand segment in the revival of liberal anti-politics may seem dysfunctional to you but it clearly is not by its massive success. However, it does seem crass to me.
David M. – I have read your response, as it contains errors you have repeatedly made in the past. I see no point in correcting you yet again.
Your history is wrong, and your philosophy is wrong – as I have pointed out, in detail, repeatedly.
Paul, I recall no time when you have ever corrected me, which is not to say that I fail to err. I have later found many errors in what I have wrote for myself and some of my better critics have aided me too; but not yet you. You may do this in the future but you have not yet got anywhere near to it so far. Above you, repeatedly, misread what has been written; as you have done on this site in all my contributions that you have been kind enough to criticise.
Let us just choose your worst misreading here; that you should be able to see. In the middle of the first stint above, that you did not read with care [as we always should if we ever want to aid the author out by our honest criticism] there is an account of what Sean said, that Sean later agrees is fair, and this is clearly heralded beforehand and clearly closed at the end. But you took it as giving my own views rather than Sean’s! I guess you only managed to do that by hurrying too much in your skimpy reading.
To repeat, you might correct me in the future but you never got anywhere near it so far. My guess is that you have, so far with my contributions here, no proper understanding of what I have said in any of the articles you have read of mine so far. You seem to be simply too impatient to read with proper care, Paul.
I challenge you to read the first piece, at the top above, to see that what I say down here is true. We will soon test your honesty, Paul.
Let us see you openly admit that you have clearly erred.
Anyway, it is the case whether you are good enough to admit it or not.