Better Together

My post against Scottish independence is up at the Institute of Opinion blog. Have a read!

Liberal Hawks: where are they now?

Please go read my latest blog over at Institute of Opinion

I will be mainly be blogging elsewhere for the next little while…

I have been accepted as a contributor to the Institute of Opinion group blog, and so I will generally be posting stuff over there. Come join!

You can read my first piece at the new site by clicking here. It’s about commentators moving from right to left on the political spectrum.

 

Chaps, it’s worse than we thought…

My knowledge of economics could be written on the back of a 5p coin (that’s the smallest one, right?), so I always find it difficult to follow the substance of the debate about the financial crisis. One thing I have noticed though, is that those economists and pundits on the extremes of the debate both use the same rhetorical gambit. They both wearily impart to their naïve public, you just don’t know how bad it is.

On one side are the right-wing libertarians, who bewail our mounting levels of debt, believing that if only we realised the scale of the problem, we would adopt the policy prescriptions they desire. Take, for instance, the Telegraph columnist Janet Daley, who loftily dismisses the flim-flam that occupies most public debate, and instead asks what she calls the “truly fundamental” question: “is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society?” Or the Ayn Rand admiring Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, who doesn’t bother with such fripperies as asking questions, cutting straight to the quick: we are doomed – doomed! – he tells us. But leaving the EU would, one must assume, help.

Such capsizals of conventional wisdom are not confined to the right. The Guardian’s economics leader writer, Aditya Chakraborty, is forever reminding his readers that our troubles are even more fundamental than we thought. The level of debate is farcical, he lamented in a recent Guardian podcast, neither George Osbourne nor Ed Balls gets it. The left is forever saying that unless we do something about structural inequality, we fail to grasp the true problem.

Perhaps they are correct, and perhaps the right are too, or maybe they are both exaggerating the problem so that their radical solutions are adopted. Maybe we’ll just bumble through the crisis, experiencing a lost decade like Japan, but as with Japan the basic structure of society will remain the same. That’s what I’d put my money on, but, as I said, I know nothing.

Wikipedia and Ayn Rand

Wikipedia, to my mind at least, is one of the seven wonders of the internet. A vast resource of detailed information on almost every topic under the sun, each topic just one click away from its relations. One can visit the site to look up a subject like a TV show you watched as a child, only to find yourself an hour later reading about the latest development in molecular biology, having alighted upon the history of Ford Motors, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and an obscure actor who was once an extra in Corrie along the way. So easy is it to skip from subject to subject that there is a mildly fun Wikipedia version of the six degrees of separation game: try getting from one random subject to something totally unrelated in the least amount of clicks. Like I said, mildly fun.

Perhaps more importantly, Wikipedia is often more than mildly informative. As a student, I expected my tutors to regard Wikipedia with withering contempt, but in fact they often told me it was their own first port of call when researching something. As long as it’s not your last port of call, they would add. Wikipedia is often mocked for being inaccurate, but in fact, according to the scientific journal Nature, it is as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

There is more to like in its collaborative, communitarian spirit. The site is not for profit, free to use and funded by the donations of its users. Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world spend their valuable time contributing edits and articles for no monetary reward. They do it presumably just to spread information and knowledge amongst their fellow humans. All wonderful stuff, particularly to those of a leftish bent.

It makes it rather surprising then that Wikipedia’s founder and main promoter, Jimmy Wales, is a self-described Objectivist and devotee of Ayn Rand.

For those unfamiliar with this this philosophy, in its political aspect it is a sort of extreme libertarianism, regarded by most philosophers to be tendentiously derived from various metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings. Rand, its creator, maintained that the only proper purpose of a person’s life is the pursuit of their own happiness, and that the only social system consistent with this morality is laissez-faire capitalism. The philosophy is chiefly expounded in her two lengthy novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, books which have not, to say the least, been met with praise by critics. Even the oft-regarded founder of contemporary American conservatism William F. Buckley, Jr. claimed he had to “flog himself” to read them. Less Catholic than Buckley, I am not disposed to flogging myself, and so have not read them, but from reading the plot summaries – on Wikipedia, of course! – they appear to tell the story of powerful men, quite probably of Aryan extraction, whose admirable pursuit of their own self-interest is thwarted by parasitical bureaucrats and moochers. “Selfishness is the only virtue” according to Rand, which, as Gore Vidal pointed out, “is a philosophy almost perfect in its immorality”.

It is also a philosophy in apparent contradiction to the ethos of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales himself has said that some people react to him by wondering, “Gee, this is a guy who is very pro-capitalist and yet he started a non-profit foundation for sharing knowledge”. His tone suggests that there should be nothing surprising about this, but I venture that it is actually rather rare for a former options trader (for that is what Wales is) and supporter of Ayn Rand’s pro-selfishness ideology to give up his very financially rewarding career to start a website with massive money making potential, but to choose to run it as a non-profit, free to use, and ad-free site. Jimmy Wales could be a billionaire, and he isn’t.

There are at least a couple of resolutions to this apparent paradox, or pseudo-paradox as Wales would have it.

The first of which, propounded by Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and web-censorship activist, is that Jimmy Wales is playing a long game with Wikipedia, which will in the end see him earn much more money. In Finkelstein’s cynical view, Wikipedia is merely a front of house branding tool for Wales’ web-hosting service, Wikia. Other people can use the Wikia software to set up Wikipedia like sites, such as Uncyclopedia or Conservapedia, which do run ads, and so do make money.

What Finkelstein’s view fails to take into account is that Wales could just start putting ads on Wikipedia, and by doing so, make much more money. Wikipedia’s page views must outnumber all the other Wiki sites combined by a factor of ten, and is likely to continue to do so. That Wales has not monetised this traffic suggests he is motivated by something more altruistic.

Wales’s comments on Objectivism suggest his interpretation of the philosophy is a little more subtle than the pro-selfishness, damn the moochers sentiments commonly associated with Ayn Rand. When asked about Rand by the American TV interviewer Brian Lamb, Wales said that one of the “core things that is very applicable to my life today is the virtue of independence”. He elaborates:

“But I think for me one of the core things that is very applicable to my life today is the virtue of independence – is the vision, you know, if you know the idea of Howard Roark who is the architect in “The Fountainhead” who has a vision for what he wants to accomplish and, you know, there‘s some time in the book when he is frustrated in his career because people don‘t want to build the type of buildings he wants to build. And he‘s given a choice, a difficult choice, to compromise his integrity or to essentially go out of business. And he has to go and take a job working in a quarry.

And for me that model has a lot of – a lot of resonance for me. You know when I think about what I‘m doing – what I‘m doing and the way I‘m doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it‘s my artistic work.”

I have heard this kind of interpretation of Objectivism before: it is less about selfishly making money, and more about not letting other people interfere with, and thereby by compromise, the integrity of your project. In this way, painters and poets are objectivists, as well as entrepreneurs and industrialists.

In this way, it is a rather appealing philosophy, but why Wales and its other subscribers have to go to Ayn Rand for it, I don’t know. From the Romantic poets to Ricky Gervais, there are countless artists who have said similar things about not letting other people compromise the integrity of a project.

Still, if Ayn Rand, helped to give us Wikipedia, I suppose we ought to be grateful.

A Canon for Free Speech

Literary critics have expended oceans of ink debating what body of books comprises the best that has been thought and said in a particular literary tradition. Such debates range from the broader question of what constitutes the “Western Canon”, to narrower ones of what books make up a women’s canon, a black canon, or a gay canon. There is no reason why this kind of literary list-making should be confined to these increasingly hackneyed critical tussles. Why not a canon for a particular issue, such as free speech?

Well, since I asked, what body of books and other works of art does comprise the best that has been thought and said on free speech?

Clearly, because free speech is not just a literary theme addressed by creative works of fiction or poetry, the free speech canon will have to include other genres and forms, such as philosophy and polemic.

Indeed, perhaps the most vital text of all is a work of philosophy. It was once said only partly in jest that the entire European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Most would agree this is a little rough on such weighty descendants as Descartes, Hume, and Kant, but a modified version of the quip can be applied to the philosophy of free speech. For it would probably be fair to say that almost all subsequent philosophical debate about free speech consists of a series of footnotes to one book: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

Published in 1859, this book defined the outlines of the debate by defending the principle that, “there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing … any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered”. To be sure, free speech’s philosophical roots stretch back through John Locke to the classical world, but On Liberty is the great milestone. As the book expounding the philosophical foundation upon which free speech is built, it deserves the central place in any free speech canon.

Mill is more lucid than most philosophers, but his prose is still philosophy, and is therefore a little on the dry side. A lively canon will need books with a bit more life, colour and pizazz.

Fortunately this can be readily supplied by the many ripping polemics written in defence of free speech. John Milton’s Areopagita, published in 1644 and named after Ariel Pogetica, a hill in Ancient Athens for discussion and free expression, is one of the earliest, and still ranks among the finest. It was distributed as a pamphlet in defiance of the Licensing Order of 1643, an act requiring authors to obtain government approval before publishing their work. Perhaps its most famous line is Milton’s entreaty, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”.

This would surely be the most apposite riposte to any would be censor, the motto of any free speech advocate, or the tagline of any activist group, were it not for the fact that it has been bettered.

Voltaire may not have actually said “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, but it has nevertheless gained currency as not just an elegant and fitting encapsulation of his own views, but as the most perfect statement and explanation of the principle in general. As such, this quote, along with Voltaire’s wider writings on free speech, warrants a place up there with Milton in the polemical section of the free speech canon.

An honorable mention must go to Tom Paine, the Anglo-American revolutionary, activist and all-round trouble-maker, whose polemics attacking religion, monarchy, slavery, among other deserving targets, often touch on issues of free speech.

Paine no doubt took satisfaction in seeing some of what he so vigorously argued for codified in the American Constitution with the passing of the First Amendment in 1791. This emphatically states: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” A legal document is strange inclusion in a literary canon, but as free speech is a legal issue as well as a philosophical and a literary issue, space should be made for these fine words. Perhaps, if we are being a little more expansive, we might also include England’s Bill of Rights 1689 which granted “freedom of speech in parliament”, and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but if forced to pick one legal text, I would go with the US Constitution.

So much for free speech in philosophy, polemic, and law, what about the novel? Two novels stand out for inclusion in my opinion. George Orwell’s 1984 is an eerie evocation of what life would be like in a society with totalitarian levels of censorship. So eerie, in fact, that as Christopher Hitchens commented on visiting the world’s most totalitarian and censorious country, North Korea, it is almost as if Kim Il-Sung read the book and thought “Hmmm … Lets see if we can make this thing work”. The coining of terms like “newspeak” and “doublethink” alone merit the novel a place, and in any case one can hardly exclude Orwell from a free speech canon. (I am told that Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is similarly unexcludable, but as I haven’t actually read it, I’ll only grant it provisional status…)

The other book crying out for inclusion, especially and largely because of its tumultuous history, is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Taking its title from the pagan verses alleged to have been temporarily included in the Qur’an by the Prophet Muhammad, the book ostensibly tells the story of two Indian expatriates living in England, but interlaced with this narrative are a series of dream sequences alluding to the aforementioned pagan verses. Muhammad, reimagined as Mahound, a pejorative variant of the Prophet’s name, is envisioned to have renounced Allah in favour of the old polytheistic deities for political reasons, whilst his wives become the prostitutes of a brothel in Mecca.

Reading this limited summary of the novel, one can begin to see why a devotee of Muhammad might get a little ticked off. But any summary fails to convey the subtlety and irony only made comprehensible by reading the book itself. This point is moot, however, as regards to the infamous fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomenei. Iran’s Supreme Leader ordered Muslims to kill Rushdie for the blasphemous act of writing the book, without having even read it himself. Rushdie went in to hiding for a number of years, and though he was never harmed, his Japanese translator was murdered, and several of his other translators and publishers were the targets of assassination attempts.

The whole imbroglio is one in which free speech bumped up against religious notions of blasphemy, and as such it became a cause celebre for free speech advocates the world over. In so being, The Satanic Verses is one of free speech’s essential books.  

Obviously the texts I have mentioned so far do not comprise an exhaustive list of free speech’s canonical works, but any canon of free speech would be incomplete without them. I do have one further slightly more unconventional text to add, John Meredith’s fantastic ‘Essay on Comedy’, which ought to enjoy a more elevated position that it does in the estimations of free speech advocates, but as this post is already rather long, I will save it for another day.

Two good posts on capitalism

On perusing this site the other day, my Mum, one of this blog’s most existing readers, commented that I cam across as more radical than I am in real life. Well Mum – hi by the way! – apologies, but this post will do nothing to allay your fears. For I am going to endorse two recent posts on the troubles of capitalism.

First, Nick Cohen, about whom I’ve banged on endlessly since starting this blog, wrote a cracking article for the Observer about how nowadays even the right is focused on capitalism’s flaws. He cites several examples of right-wingers departing from conservative orthodoxy in the wake of the financial crisis, beginning with Chrystia Freeland’s recently published book Plutocrats, before going on to mention the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society, and Jesse Norman, an MP often tipped to be the next Tory leader.

To this list, I would add: Ferdinand Mount, a Thatcher cabinet minister and author of a recent book entitled The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy; former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, who in 2011 wondered if the left had been right all along; David Frum, former Bush speech-writer, who was dismissed from the conservative think-tank The American Enterprise Institute for his heretical views;  and the Economist newspaper, which back in the 90s endorsed  John Major over Tony Blair and Bob Dole over Bill Clinton, but in the 00s endorsed Obama over both McCain and Romney. 

My second endorsement is for Gene’s post over at Harry’s Place, which suggests that conservatives who bewail the supposed coarsening of our culture should, rather than blame a nefarious liberal agenda, look to their own free market values. He’s right, says I: because sex sells, it is advertising, an essential expression of capitalism, that has done more to sell sex than even the most ardent liberal activist.

Just so nobody gets too worried, before ending I will just briefly say that I think capitalism, broadly construed, is better than all the other systems; but, like Irving Kristol, I will restrict myself to only two cheers.

Intervention

The French intervention in Mali has provoked predictable outrage in some dovish quarters, and has led to equally predictable axe-grinding over Iraq amongst those more hawkish. I have no idea whether this intervention is wise, but I would be inclined to agree with any pundit with the following record of support for previous wars and interventions:

1) Support for the Gulf War

2) Support for the intervention in Sierra Leone

3) Support for the intervention on behalf of the Kosovans against the Serbs

4) Opposition to the Afghan War

5) Opposition to the Iraq War

6) Support for the actions taken to assist the rebels in Libya

Some slack should be cut for positions on the Afghan war, the success of which, like the French Revolution, it is perhaps too soon to determine. And of course there are plenty of other conflicts that could be taken into consideration, not to mention conflicts that might have been  entered into but weren’t, such as the genocide in Rwanda. These caveats notwithstanding, I can’t think of any pundits with the above stellar record, but I’d be very interested to learn of them…

Snow days

The other day on question time the topic that inspired the strongest feelings was not Europe or the country’s perilous finances; it was schools closing because of the snow. People were outraged – or, more accurately, OUTRAGED! – that so many schools had been closed. Teachers were lazy, headmasters couldn’t be bothered, Blighty’s gone down the pan, it wuren’t like that in ma day, we used to survive on gruel and live out of a plastic bag, and we wur grateful, GRATEFUL, I TELL THEE!

What a bunch of killjoys!

When I was at school, we used to relish snow days, so we could go out and play with our friends, making snowmen, sledging, snowball fighting, and suchlike. Missing a day’s school wasn’t the end of the world – the work would get done next week. And anyway, it was only learning Je m’appelle, or how to to add and subtract, or “take away”, as we called it, back my day.

In fact, I very much wish that we could carry the children’s ethic into the workplace…

Free Speech and Bad Ideas

There is a view common among free speech advocates that in a free marketplace of ideas, the best arguments prevail most of the time. This view has a long history dating back to Milton who averred that “in a free and open encounter” truth would prevail. Taking us much closer to the present day, in a 2006 article for Time magazine, Nick Cohen lambasted the “European judges and politicians” who “do not believe that bad arguments can be defeated by better ones in a free society”. Leaving aside that I agree with Cohen in this particular case – he’s criticising a proposed ban on genocide denial in France –  I feel more circumspect than he appears to about the best ideas winning out.

The quality or ‘rightness’ of an idea or argument are only two factors among many in determining that idea or argument’s success. Some ideas may be bad or wrong, but they nevertheless prevail because they are flattering to those that believe them. Most wealthy people believe they have earned their success, whereas grousing socialists might see luck as a more important factor. Such beliefs are manifestations of self-serving bias, which is a psychological tendency to believe ourselves responsible for our successes but to attribute our failures to external factors. This is only one of many cognitive biases, each of which subvert rationality in a way that often obstructs us in alighting upon the best idea or argument.

Sometimes an idea prevails simply because the person holding it has an especially loud voice through privileged access to certain media. Rich people can often just buy their ideas success. They could, like Silvio Berlusconi or Rupert Murdoch, buy a bunch of newspapers and TV stations and staff them with people whose ideas they find congenial. They could pay a fancy communications or PR firm to package their messages in ways that give them broader appeal than they might otherwise have. They could spend vast riches advertising their speech, or, most troublingly of all, they could donate large sums to politicians with the tacit agreement that they support a particular law. Or, as in Berlusconi’s case, they could bypass this thickety process by just being one of those politicians…

I don’t think it would be wild speculation to suggest that some of these might be reasons why so many bad ideas seem to prevail. Whilst the evidence for global warming has accumulated and strengthened, a cottage industry of spurious research and confused journalism, funded largely by people like the Koch brothers, has developed. Not one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers opposed the Iraq war, a bad idea that might not have come to fruition had, say, the editors, publishers, and writers of the New York Review of Books had a similarly loud megaphone. Perhaps also President Obama would have passed comprehensive socialised healthcare in the US had there been a fewer healthcare lobbyists in Washington. (The ratio of lobbyists to congressmen was apparently 6:1.)

This is not to make some grand point that if only the access to society’s means of communications were more egalitarian, the best ideas would always prevail and we would be living in a land of Edenic bliss – though it wouldn’t hurt – but just to make the narrow point that that, contra Milton, a free and open encounter is not a sufficient condition for the best ideas to prevail.