Category: Philosophy

Conserving and progressing

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Donal Blaney writes about a sort of division within the Conservative Party. In short, Mr Blaney objects to a large part of David Cameron’s repositioning of his party as progressive conservatives. The bulk of his argument is that liberalism and fascism both descend from progressivism, and so are alike. I may well pick up a copy of the “searing tome” he mentions, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg.

The idea that the descendant must be fundamentally the same as the ancestor philosophy, or other descendants, is flat wrong. Aristotle studied under Plato, but said “so good riddance to Plato and his forms, for they make no more sense than singing la la la”. The Young Hegelians were at odds with the Old Hegelians, and neither would have agreed with Marx. Even amongst followers of Marx, you have to account for the likes of Georges Sorel.

To say, then, that Tony Blair is in hock to the thinking of Lenin is about as fair as to say that all conservatives would have supported slavery.

The specific example – that liberalism and fascism descend from progressivism – is similarly a load of rot. Progressivism is an ill-defined word, but starts to come into play in the late nineteenth century. Liberalism in one sense dates from rather earlier – Locke’s Two Treatises date from 1689 – while the ‘other’ form of liberalism (in the American sense of the state supporting the unfortunate) could, after a fashion, be said to date from the 1597 Act for the Relief of the Poor. If that is too much, the Corn Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott, was able to write in the mid nineteenth century

What is a communist? One who hath yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings:
Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork out his penny, and pocket your shilling.

If that is too abstract, Thomas Paine was arguing for a welfare state and progressive taxation to prevent the creation of a hereditary aristocracy in The Rights of Man of 1791.

Fascism is a similarly piebald term, but it is, I would argue, the third to emerge as it is only possible, as I understand it, in a modern, industrial society. In short, his analysis is conceptually and factually wrong.

In any case, Progressive Conservatism is nothing new. John Diefenbaker was elected Prime Minister of Canada in 1957 as a Progressive Conservative, while Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican and then a Progressive.

Blaney continues:

Progressivism is diametrically opposed to everything that conservatives believe in

The Conservative Party has always been a coalition of interests; at the moment, it has one-nation, traditionalist and Thatcherite1 wings. This is true of the other parties (the LibDems have the Orange Bookers and social democrats, while Labour has Campaign Group, Compass and Progress). What’s interesting is the source of Blaney’s rights:

‘God-given or natural, fundamental freedoms inherent in my being a free-born Englishman’

It would be fascinating to hear an enumeration of those rights; I suspect that they would be neither natural nor fundamental, but contingent on the existence of a state. Unless the almighty gives different rights to those born English and Ethiopian, they cannot be natural; unless the creator brands at birth the slave and lets the yeoman go free, they cannot be fundamental.

In other words, the source of Donal’s rights is verbiage. The question is whether he speaks just for the Thatcherite part of his party, or the others.

Much of Donal’s paean to conservativism is then a roll call of people and quotes. I would simply answer: what of Havel, Walesa, Dubcek and Horn?

I have a quote, too:

O Liberty, liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!

– Mme Roland.

Blaney sets up a dichotomy between conservatism and progressivism and tries to say that the latter is tantamount to fascism, thus coming awfully close to an invocation of Godwin’s Law. As I hope I’ve shown, this is bunk as descent does not mean what he thinks it means and, in any case, isn’t there. From Donal’s point of view, Cameron’s positions mean he cannot be a conservative; I think it’s rather more likely that the positions advocated by Blaney are pretty far from the mainstream of conservatism. I hope so, as if I’m wrong, the zeitgeist of the British Conservative party is similar to the GOP in the US.

xD.

1 – I deliberately say ‘Thatcherite’ rather than ‘neo-liberal’ as the emphasis on liberty in neo-liberalism is at odds with the social conservatism of Thatcher.

Of scepticism, jet-packs and living to a thousand

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I’ve spent a very pleasant evening in the company of the Sceptics in the Pub London, where the speaker was Dr. Aubrey de Gray, Chief Scientific Officer with the SENS Foundation. In brief, de Gray (Wikipedia article) set out the work of the SENS foundation which, as I understand it, looks at ageing as a disease which it then sets out to cure as a problem of regenerative medicine. While that is the primary aim, it has the effect, if successful, of increasing both quality and quantity of life; that is to say, making something approaching immortality not only possible but desirable.

De Gray set out a paradigm whereby metabolism causes damage, and damage then causes pathology. In this model, gerontology attempts to intervene in the first step – problematic because of the great complexity of metabolism – and geriatrics intervenes in the first step – problematic because damage has already caused pathology and is at best palliative. He sought to reverse accumulated damage before it became pathological.

Initially, this would allow for an extension of the useful human lifespan by perhaps thirty years. Once that first step was accomplished, refinements in technique would allow, excepting being hit by cars and so on, to continue for arbitrarily long periods, through the possibility of increasingly eficacious treatments before the eficacy of repeated cycles of previous treatments lost eficacy.

You can get a flavour of his speech from this TED talk.

Broadly, I would raise three problems with de Gray’s plan.

Firstly, the scientific. I can’t assess his science, but a number of people there raised fairly substantial problems with his paradigm and with the conclusions he drew from it. That is probably one for the peer reviewed papers.

Secondly, the technological. The very long, four-figure lifespans suggested depended not just on continuing improvements in the (speculative) set of technologies, bit that those improvements happened faster than people died because of a loss of eficacy as described above. The examples de Gray cited in support of his position were the motor car and the aeroplane. Unfortunately for him, the equally plausible alternative of the jet pack was raised: theoretically possible, desirable even, and can be turned into a prototype that can fly for half a minute, but can’t be turned into a production model (because the amount of fuel that can be loaded onto a human is finite and less than what’s needed for useful flight). Another example would be power from nuclear fusion, which has been ten years away for fifty years. It is a prediction based on little more than fiat.

Thirdly, the socio-economic. In answer to a question from yours truly about the cost of the treatments, de Gray was quick to observe, thousand-year life spans would have major effects on world society, meaning that we could throw much of traditional economics out of the window. If we do that, though, we throw political economy out of the window. Thus, de Gray’s assetion that the state would pay for its citizens to have these treatments is distinctly problematic as the state, as we know it, would not necessarily sill exist. Even if we accept that the state still exists in a recognisable form and that it makes economic sense for states to pay for these treatments, it does not follow that they will pay for them. As de Gray thought equality was a major issue, it’s worth going into at slightly greater length.

The basis from which de Grey works is that regenerative medicine is medicine like any other, albeit with remarkable effects. As we know from the current debate in the US, there are plenty of people who see taking money from them to pay for the healthcare of others as morally wrong. There are also plenty of countries that would like to provide comprehensive healthcare, but cannot afford it. De Grey provided no explanation of how we would roll out this treatment when we cannot at the moment give people with economic potential very cheap drugs – say, hydration salts for diarrhea – that would have similar economic benefits to the de Grey treatments but at vastly lower costs per dose. From the point of view of the state, it doesn’t matter whether a day’s work is done by a thirty-year-old or a three hundred and thirty-year-old. Given that states do not have to provide pensions or old age healthcare now, and that the mechanism by which they will be convinced to do so is absent, it seems as reasonable to conclude that arbitrarily long lives will remain the province of the wealthy as to conclude that we will enter this brave, new world. A nightmare scenario would be lots of people having access to these treatments but not making the necessary lifestyle changes. If we kept dropping kids every twenty or thirty years over a thousand year life, we’d very quickly overpopulate the planet.

I hope that de Gray’s science is more thorough than his statecraft.

Of course, if de Gray is right, I look forward to seeing you at the February 2317 meeting of Sceptics in the Pub London – assuming someone hasn’t already booked the room.

xD.

OpenLeft: a response

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Over at the OpenLeft website, various worthies are asked the question “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?”. Various others have weighed in; I’d like to go through some of the comments people made and then have a go myself.

Polly Toynbee
Sunder Katwala
Jon Cruddas
James Purnell
Dave Cole
Continue reading “OpenLeft: a response” →

In answer to Chris Dillow

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics.

1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average unskilled worker? I mean, both got a bare subsistence living and neither had political rights. But slaves had more job security. So how bad was slavery compared to free labour?

I know the passage from Africa was horrific, and there are examples of terrible mistreatment of both slaves and workers. But I’m asking about averages. Anecdotes aren’t enough. And don’t give me any nonsensical effort to empathise from today’s perspective.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence – the pictures of beaten slaves and of (free) children pulling heavy carts through narrow mineshafts – that life for most people in the 1700s was not pleasant. That, however, doesn’t answer Chris’s question. To do that, we’d need detailed breakdowns of the socioeconomic situation of the various types and classes of people at the time. They are not, so far as I know, available.

However, slavery was not just an economic condition. It is very much tied in to race and religion; the question of whether non-whites even had souls was prevalent. While the economics of the situation are worth studying, the moral justifications that were deployed and the attempt to keep slavery out of sight and out of mind are worth studying too; after all, “one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.”1

In any case, the eighteenth century was one of great change that saw the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions and the move from the countryside to the city. I would add that, although villeinage had disappeared in England by 1700, villeins existed in Scotland until 1799.

2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?

Actually, NGS doesn’t want to do that or, at least, if they do they haven’t told anyone. I telephoned the NGS’s contact for the Sutherland purchase and they have not announced how they propose to fund it. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they want to take it out of general taxation.

Using QALYs would, in time, almost by definition suggest that the spending is justified. It is a one-off purchase of two paintings that will also secure a long-term loan on a further fourteen pieces of art. If we say that, on a scale of one to zero, one is perfect health while zero is dead, we can give a figure to the change in QALYs from the expenditure.
I quote from the entry on NICE’s website on QALYs:

Patient x has a serious, life-threatening condition.

If he continues receiving standard treatment he will live for 1 year and his quality of life will be 0.4 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If he receives the new drug he will live for 1 year 3 months (1.25 years), with a quality of life of 0.6.

The new treatment is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: 1 (year’s extra life) x 0.4 = 0.4 QALY

New treatment: 1.25 (1 year, 3 months extra life) x 0.6 = 0.75 QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to 0.35 additional QALYs (that is: 0.75 –0.4 QALY = 0.35 QALYs).

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £10,000, standard treatment costs £3000.

The difference in treatment costs (£7000) is divided by the QALYs gained (0.35) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £20,000 per QALY.

Let me substitute a little.

Person y has a serious, life-threatening condition; they are alive and therefore will die in n years.

If they continue receiving standard treatment they will live for n years and his quality of life will be m, where 0? m ? 1 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If they receive the new drug they will live for n years (assuming that art doesn’t affect length of life), with a quality of life of m + b, where b is the benefit in terms of quality of life derived from viewing the art

The new treatment, art, is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: n x m = nm QALY

New treatment: n x (m+b) = nm+nb QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to nb additional QALYs

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £50,000,000, inaction costs £0.

The difference in treatment costs (£50,000,000) is divided by the QALYs gained (nb) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £50,000,000/nb per QALY.

Let us say that a nice trip to the gallery to see the picture is equal to a positive change of one one-thousandth, or 0.001. We very quickly see that the cost, given that n is constant, per QALY is an astronomical number: 50000000000. That, however, is for one person. To bring it down to the £30,000 limit suggested by the NHS, 1,666,667 people would have to see the paintings. That’s not per year; that’s in total ever. NGS tell me that one and a half million people visit the National Galleries of Scotland per year, a million of which go to the National Gallery of Scotland where the Titian is.

It may be that my assumption of one one-thousandth of a QALY is too high. It wouldn’t matter; you’d have to wait longer to derive the benefit, but it would happen. It is also, of course, possible that it is too low. Not everyone who sees the paintings (the total is fourteen) is going to be someone off the street. Some will be schoolchildren on guided tours who may have a lifelong interest sparked in art; I’m sure you can think of other, equally unquantifiable examples.

You could also add into the calculation the benefit of the continuation of these major works of art to the local economy, including the increased publicity they will receive from the coverage of the possible purchase.

I wonder if Chris has been reading Bentham; the QALY method is the descendant of the felicific calculus and I’m sure that he would like to think he’s had an impact. The reason, I suspect, that this form of CBA is only applied to medical treatments for two reasons. Firstly, medical types tend to have a decent grasp of statistics and so are more likely to come up with ways of quantifying abstracts like ‘quality of life’. Doing the same thing for, say, Trident would be a lot harder as you have to make unprovable, untestable assumptions about the effect of having nuclear weapons. You could say that having a bell on a stick would prevent us from being nuked and it would be just as hard to prove. It is also hard to test the effect, if any, of things like prestige. I suspect, though, that the main reason is that the budgets for the NHS in general and medicines in particular are so large that they cannot be ignored and that, as the Government wanted to move responsibility away from itself, both to avoid the demands of political exigence and thereby to give a fairer result, NICE was set up and went about things in the best way it could.

3. How can academics be so quick to close down free speech? Surely, any proper teacher must know that the solution to mistaken beliefs is to correct them through discussion – that’s what teaching means. Academics must therefore support free speech, by definition. Does this episode merely corroborate my prejudice, that a close interest in the Israel-Palestine question is dangerous for one’s mental health?

Unfortunately, there are plenty of academics who don’t sign up to the scientific method; I point to many of the people involved in promoting creationism or intelligent design and, for some excellent rebuttal, Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel.

Mistaken beliefs should, in theory, be correctable by teaching so long as the belief is honestly held on a misappreciation of facts or misapplication of argument. Often, the aim is not to find any sort of ‘truth’ or answer but to ensure that your side wins; the fervour behind that aim, whether religious or secular, is such that any methods are justified leading to a lack of understanding in why what can be broadly termed the scientific method is important. That leads to lazy citation and research and quoting David Duke.

In answer to the final point, yes. I agree with much of Dave Osler’s thinking about the problems around discussing the area at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean.

4. Companies are moving their head offices to Ireland or Luxembourg to save tax. So, is there something to be said for a cut in corporation tax, financed by higher top income tax rates? The idea here is that companies’ head offices are more mobile than individual high-earners, and it doesn’t matter much anyway if a few of these leave or retire anyway. So we protect tax revenues without increasing inequality. What’s wrong with this?

In a unitary state, not much. However, in a country like the USA, where a slight rise in corporation tax could allow for a reduction in income tax in a given state, making people move to a state next to the state where they work. Indeed, it could make sense for a state to try to ride the Laffer curve if they have a nearby headquarters. Ultimately, it depends on whether the costs of moving justify the rewards of lower taxes for a given high-earner.

As to what might be wrong with this, we well know that the majority of the press will not report such subtleties other than as ‘tax rise’ or an attack on anything resembling progressive taxation.

I have wondered what would happen if we scrapped all taxes except income tax, adjusting the total take accordingly; I suspect, though, that whatever we did companies and other states would play the system to their advantage.

5. Merrill Lynch has lost a quarter of the profits it made in 36 years in just 18 months. Does this show that the profits to investment banking are a reward for taking black swan risk? You make decent profits, on average, in exchange for massive losses on rare occasions? Were Merrill’s profits (and those of other investment bankers) in good times merely a reward for taking this obscure risk? Did they – and their rivals – really fully understand what they were doing, or were they just lucky punters? What would count as persuasive evidence here?

Persuasive evidence here would be pretty hard to come by as we are only looking, for the most part, at the actions rather than the rationale. The turnover in staff may also mean that people came in without sufficient time to analyse the situation and those that did thought that the expectation of the low probability event given a short time at that company was low enough to take the risk. I would add that Merrill Lynch and others may have actually had a role in causing and worsening the crunch that has led to their losses.

Are there interesting, non-trivial answers here that are well-founded in evidence? Or is it that there’s a lot we don’t know?

Both, I’d say.

xD.

1 – cited from a judgement of 1569 by counsel for Somersett, a slave, in Somersett’s Case (R. v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett) of 1772 which “held that slavery was unlawful in England (but not other parts of the British Empire”

Nadine Dorries on abortion

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Nadine Dorries has posted another attack on an MP who supports abortion encouraging people to vote solely on that issue; this time, it is Barbara Follett.

In order to receive funding they have to support Labour party values, and be pro-abortion

This means that any potential candidate of faith, ie, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Muslim or Hindu would not qualify, which makes the list discriminatory

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that says that every person of religious faith opposes abortion. Quite apart from the insult to every religion other than the five mentioned (id est is never the same as exempli gratia; they mean ‘that is to say’ and ‘for the sake of example’ respectively), it ignores the reality of the situation. It is quite remarkable that Ms Dorries has listed only five of the top ten religions in terms of adherents. There are (according to the Christian Science Monitor) 324 million Buddhists (about the population of the EU), along with 6.1 million members of the Baha’i faith, 5.3 million followers of Confucius, 4.9 million who identify with Jainism and 2.8 million people who go for Shinto.

Let’s look at the five religions that Ms Dorries mentions.

1. Judaism

It doesn’t take long to realise that to say that being pro-abortion is incompatible with Judaism is rather foolish. The Mishnah (Oholot 7:8) says

If a woman is in hard travail, one cuts up the offspring in her womb and brings it forth member by member, because her life comes before the life of her foetus. But if the greater part has proceeded forth, one may not set aside one person for the sake of saving another

There is debate about whether the second sentence prohibits abortion after half-term or until the baby is half-delivered; there is no debate about whether abortion can be permitted under Jewish law. More specifically, the Rabinincal Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards< endorses the position of Rabbis Bokser and Abelson:

[A]n abortion is justifiable if a continuation of pregnancy might cause the mother severe physical or psychological harm, or where the fetus [sic] is judged by competent medical opinion as severely defective

The Union for Reform Judaism says that

any decision should be left up to the woman within whose body the fetus is growing

I have highlighted Judaism because it is the first on the list and it very neatly shows that within all religion and, indeed, all belief systems there is variation.

2. Christianity

Thomas Aquinas and Popes Innocent III and Gregory XIV said that until the mother could feel the baby kick and move, the baby had no soul and could be aborted; after the quickening, it could not. Current Roman Catholic teaching is mostly opposed to abortion. The Southern Baptist Convention only came out against abortion in the early eighties.

The Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ and United Methodist Church all have statements in favour of abortion.

3. Sikhism

Sikhism doesn’t directly deal with abortion – at least, the Guru Granth Sahib doesn’t – and the practice of abortion in parts of India, particularly if the foetus is female, suggest that there is no block there, either

4. Islam

The traditional Islamic view is that abortion is permitted up until 120 days, I believe; alternative views are 40 days or ‘quickening’. Depending on which date you choose, that is when the soul is given to the baby. Islam allows for abortion

5. Hinduism

I don’t know much about Hinduism, and therefore will merely provide this quote from Hinduism Today:

The Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University does not take a formal unchanging political or religious stance on the issue of abortion. They advise that each case requires unique consideration. The final decision will be based on a long series of choices made by the woman on her lifestyle, morals and values. Usually, the choices that created the unwanted pregnancy in the first place have been irrational or emotional ones, not the mature commitment motherhood needs. The Brahma Kumaris counsel those facing an abortion decision, both man and woman, to understand that by abortion they do not escape responsibility for their actions. When both the parents have fully understood the seriousness of the choice, the University would support the right to make their own decision.

I am quite sure that Ms Dorries is aware of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. If not, it pretty much ‘does what it says on the tin’. Here’s their membership list:

Rabbinical Assembly; United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism; Women’s League for Conservative Judaism; The Episcopal Church; American Ethical Union National Service Conference; Society for Humanistic Judaism; Presbyterians Affirming Reproductive Options (PARO); Women’s Ministries; Washington Office; Reconstructionist Judaism; Jewish Reconstructionist Federation; Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association; Central Conference of American Rabbis; North American Federation of Temple Youth; Union for Reform Judaism; Women of Reform Judaism, The Federation of Temple Sisterhoods; Women’s Rabbinic Network of Central Conference of American Rabbis; Justice and Witness Ministries; General Board of Church and Society; General Board of Global Ministries, Women’s Division; Unitarian Universalist Association; Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation; Young Religious Unitarian Universalists; Continental Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Network; American Jewish Committee; American Jewish Congress; Anti-Defamation League; Catholics for a Free Choice; Christian Lesbians Out (CLOUT); Church of the Brethren Women’s Caucus; Disciples for Choice; Episcopal Urban Caucus; Episcopal Women’s Caucus; Hadassah, WZOA; Jewish Women International; Lutheran Women’s Caucus; Methodist Federation for Social Action; NA’AMAT USA; National Council of Jewish Women; Women’s American ORT; YWCA of the USA

I think that shows, pretty effectively, that religious faith does not necessarily entail opposition to abortion. However, even if there was only one religious person in the entire world who honestly believed that abortion was acceptable, Ms Dorries would not be able to say that their faith was lesser or wrong. To do so would be, in her own words, discriminatory.

Moving on, Ms Dorries says of Ms Follett that

72% of her constituents want the upper limit reduced to 20 weeks

That’s interesting. On her previous post, Ms Dorries said that “as many as 72 per cent, wish to see the upper limit at which abortion takes place, reduced from 24 to 20 weeks”. Unless a survey was carried out that focused on the voters of Stevenage, it seems hard to say that 72% of Barbara Follett’s constituents want the upper limit reduced without making a statement that is statistically invalid.

Ms Dorries then asks

Will she represent their views at the next vote, or her own?

As I said on my previous post, an MP’s job is not to act as a proxy for the aggregate views of their constituents. As Edmund Burke said, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.

One last thing:

“Barbara Follett is the founder of Emily’s list”

No, she isn’t. Emily’s List was founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1984 in the United States of America. Barbara Follett founded Emily’s List UK in 1993. A small issue, but worth flagging. Congratulations to Barbara Follett.

As I have said before, I respect Ms Dorries’ position, although I do not share it. I have been branded a religious fundamentalist in the past for saying, in my SU meeting, that there were legitimate objections to abortion. I still believe that. However, I find Ms Dorries’ way of presenting the argument to be based on flawed logic, assertion and obfuscation.

xD.

Update 2045: Unity at the Ministry of Truth has noticed Nadine’s post as well – I recommend it!

Edmund Burke on Nadine Dorries

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Beds and doyenne of the anti-abortion movement in Parliament, has been pressing for further restrictions on abortion for some time. I have no doubt that she sincerely holds those beliefs. However, it does seem that the strength with which she holds those beliefs is clouding her judgement. As various bloggers, including Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads, Ben Goldacre of Bad Science and the Guardian, Book Drunk, Devil’s Kitchen and Unity from the Ministry of Truth, have pointed out, Ms Dorries has played fast and loose with facts and statistics and seems – as I am a charitable sort – to be demonstrating confirmation bias over this issue.

On her website1, Ms Dorries says something that is not just wrong-headed, but dangerous:

As a result of a number of polls, we know that the majority of the public, as many as 72 per cent, wish to see the upper limit at which abortion takes place, reduced from 24 to 20 weeks. Many MPs, however, choose to use Parliament as a place to pander to their own preference, or ideology, rather than to represent the will of the people.

What Ms Dorries is saying there is that MPs should be proxies for referenda on every issue. Quite apart from the weaseling of ‘belief’ into ‘preference’ and ‘philosophy’ into’ ideology, this notion of ‘the will of the people’ or ‘the general will’ is a dangerous one indeed. It should be easy enough to see how Ms Dorries’ stance could be parlayed into ‘preference’ or ‘ideology’, quite apart from the problems in identifying this ‘will of the people’; certainly, it is not Ms Dorries alone who may choose the will of the people. She would do well to remember Edmund Burke’s words in his Speech to the Electors of Bristol:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

MPs are elected to legislate and to scrutinise based not on the whim of the people, but based on easier access to more information, the time and will to process and use that information honestly, and to come to a reasoned decision. Equally, an MP should not encourage dog-whistle politics. No matter how important you might consider abortion to be, regardless of your position in the debate, you cannot say that it is more important than every other issue combined. That is, however, what Ms Dorries is encouraging people to do:

Each day, I am going to highlight MPs who may need to think very seriously when voting on the issue of reducing the upper limit to 20 weeks, because if they don’t, they may see their majorities wiped out at the next election.

Although the issue is serious, the manner of expression – this above and to the exclusion of all else – cheapens political discourse and will lead to ill-considered judgements if Ms Dorries’ is successful in her aim. It favours fanatic who obsesses over a single issue rather than someone who would take the broader view; it encourages people to vote with their hearts and not their heads. It is, in short, an abrogation of an elected representative’s duty to make an appeal to base instinct rather than reasoned judgement

The full text of Burke’s speech is available courtesy of the University of Chicago. It is short, at a little over six hundred words, but is well worth reading.

xD.

1 – it is not a blog. A blog allows comments; Dorries’ website, even the bit that’s updated regularly, does not allow comments. Interestingly, Burke says something about that too, after a fashion: “it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents”.

A Blogger’s Manifesto by Erik Ringmar

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Erik Ringmar, a good friend of mine from the LSE, has written what, to my knowledge is a double first with his book, A Blogger’s Manifesto. It is the first academic study of blogs and it is the first book about blogging that isn’t about how public relations people should take advantage of blogging, how you can make money from your blog or presents a collection of articles from blogs.

For me, A Blogger’s Manifesto has three themes; one, that saying that ‘blogging is good for free speech’ only fits in with one of the three interpretations of freedom of speech; secondly, that the implications of blogging range far beyond the (somewhat self-important) political blog; and that blogging can make our world better, but that it requires people to be less sensitive and a bit more in touch with reality.

Erik has, unfortunately, experience of being ‘dooced’. The story is recounted on Wikipedia and The Guardian, but I would like to say again that I think George Phillip and Howard Davies massively over-reacted, damaged the LSE’s reputation and cost its students a good lecturer and a good teacher. It colours his interpretations, but not unjustifiably so. As I have said in the past, freedom of speech, if it means anything, means having to hear things you don’t want to hear. It also means that other people have to hear what you don’t want them to hear.

1. Three promises
Erik very succinctly describes three variations on free speech justification; the republican rights of man, the liberal against restriction of freedom and the radical that emphasises access to information as much as freedom of speech. The great improvement that blogging brings is not that anybody come say what they want, but that anyone has access to unmediated information if they want it; unmediated by politicians, companies, editors or anyone else. It requires an educated citizenry, but it offers the chance for people to find about what matters to them, be it transport policy or embroidery. It is a fascinating way of looking at free speech and implicitly asks what anyone who restricts access to information and the internet has to hide.

2. Blogging beyond politics
The political bloggers tend, I think, to overstate their own importance. We are on the verge of unseating the ‘dead-tree press’ and heralding a new era of political engagement. We are not there yet, and the changes will most likely occur from the bottom-up rather than by a decapitation of existing filters.

The modal average blogger is, it would appear, a teenaged girl and people blog about everything – literally, everything. Whatever it is that someone finds interesting, someone will be blogging about it. One of the things people do most often is work and so it is not surprising that work comes up a lot in peoples’ blogs, whether it be Petite Anglaise, Dooce or, indeed, Erik Ringmar. The way companies react tell us a lot about them; they seek criticism in general and blogs in particular as a threat to be jumped on. The case of the LSE is instructive. I did my undergraduate degree at LSE and had a great time. I would recommend the LSE to anyone. That does not mean it is perfect; there are areas where it could improve. Erik highlighted some of them; the response to his speech was instructive; the fact that someone would give a warts-and-all representation of the LSE made the good more believable. Consumers, as students are increasingly treated, can see through PR but find honesty appealing. This applies to all consumers, broadly defined.

3. Hear my voice
There are risks associated to blogging. It gives a platform to anyone, not just people we are willing to be heard. Not only does this allow this allow the deeply unpleasant to express themselves, it means that the vulnerable can be targeted. The answer to both problems is education. In the case of the vulnerable, it is education about the risks of the internet and, given that people tend to ignore advice, how to remain as safe as possible. In the case of the deeply unpleasant, the most effective countervailing force is an educated citizenry with the ability to critique information presented as fact; these are skills that should be developed in school but can be developed later.

If there is more information out there, it is more likely to concern any given person or organisation; this seems to explain the paranoia among some companies and the raft of PR companies offering services for blogging and other social media. The message that comes through for me from Erik’s book is that blogging is not ‘there’… yet. It is growing and finding its voices – and it’s voices in the plural, not voice. The utilitarian justification for free speech that Mill outlines in On Liberty stands and organisations would do well to foster constructive criticism. They have much to gain.
Erik has an engaging style of writing and his breadth of knowledge and natural inquisitiveness, coupled with some sour personal experiences and the resultant support, make it a book that starts firing t. I thoroughly recommend that anyone interested in anything more than the superficie of blogging read this book. It is available for free download on Erik’s website and is published by Anthem Press and is available on Amazon.

xD.

PS – I declare a relevant interest here, as I sent information to the author for the book and was firmly ‘on his side’ during the disagreement at LSE.

The Oxford Union, a Racist and a Holocaust Denier

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The Oxford Union is a private debating society; only members can attend its proceedings. Its appeal for speakers is in being able to influence some of the top minds in the UK and the world and, of course, being recognised as worthy of such an opportunity. It does not matter a hoot whether people outside the intelligentsia have heard of it, particularly as it is frequently confused with OUSU, the Students’ Union, and that its finances are secure thanks to the formation of the Oxford Literary and Debating Union Trust.

The invitation to Nick Griffin and David Irving were not ever about free speech; they were about raising publicity for the current administration of the society. There was no facility for Messrs Griffin and Irving’s comments to be disseminated; consideration was not given to those who would speak against this pair of pukes – viz. an email from Luke Tryl of October 15th – beforehand.

Equally, Griffin and Irving are the worst people to choose to argue for freedom of speech; not because of their repulsive politics, but because they are too easily open to arguments against the person rather than the arguments they propose. Furthermore, they well know that few people at the Oxford Union will give two hoots for anything that a thug of a politician and a poor historian will say; however, the boon to the BNP and its fellow travellers will, I think, be substantial. If the Oxford Union wanted to have an informative debate for its members on freedom of speech, I would have thought that John Gray, Inayat Bunglawala and Ayaan Hirsi Ali would have been better speakers; controversy for its own sake is a poor substitute for radical thought and honest learning.

I said at the beginning of this post that the invitation was about publicity, not free speech. Perhaps that is unfair, and I should attribute it to incompetence rather than malice. Either way, I hope that Mr Tryl, who appears to have a nascent political career, takes a step back to consider the effects that the actions he and his associates have undertaken will have. The message that will be taken away from this is that a bad politician and a bad historian are people who are worth listening to.

Oxford Councillor Antonia Bance has one take on it; Skuds has a rather different one.

xD.

Thoughts on nationalism

Posted on by David Landon Cole

As I understand it, the modernist take on nationalism requires that the nation is not prior to nationalism; that is to say, nationalism may cause the nation or something causes both the nation and nationalism to come about. The nation cannot come first and therefore cannot cause the nationalism.

There are many, competing definitions of nationalism. Nationalism is a bit like a sausage – everyone knows what it is, but no-one can really describe one. Nevertheless, I like Benedict Anderson’s definition from Imagined Communities: “an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”.

To the extent of those writers with which I am familiar, the causative factor occurs exclusively in modernity. Those competing writers look for different features of modernity to explain the rise of nations and nationalism; variously print capitalism, the bureaucratic state, industrialisation in general and so on. Unfortunately, it ignores certain important facts.

Firstly, there were nations before the modern age. Two of Queen Elizabeth I’s most famous speeches, that at Tilbury and the Golden Speech, are appeals to national sentiment. The speech at Tilbury was directed to the common soldier on the ground and so must, I think, represent an upwards affiliation which precludes the common idea of the upper and priestly classes having some sort of trans-continental affiliation and the lower classes being vertically stratified by their villages.

I would say that there was also a nation at the time of the Dutch Revolt, as shown in the Oath of Abjuration, and I think (although I’m not sure) that you could say that there has been Armenian nationalism since the fifth century (or perhaps as early as the fourth with the adoption of Christianity as the world’s first state religion); certainly, the autonomy and recognition of Christianity that Armenia was granted under the Ottomans would suggest something deeper than recognition of ‘a person at the top’.

I would also contend that there was city-nationalism and pan-Hellenic nationalism (as opposed to Macedonians and/or Barbarians) in Classical Greece. All of these are imagined, political, limited and sovereign communities. City-nationalism and pan-Hellenic nationalism are not ‘stacked nationalisms’ but operate, I think, at the same level, and are co-sovereign, with one coming to the fore over the other depending on the situation at a given time.

There is a very simple riposte to the nation not possibly being prior to nationalism in the form of the Jews; there was a political desire to return to the traditional Jewish homeland since the diaspora resulting from the Jewish-Roman war of c. 70CE that formed classical Zionism. Equally, I think that Italians (by which I mean people from approximately modern Italy) in the Roman empire were a dominant nation in a multi-national empire in which some other groups formed as nations and some did not. For that reason, I disagree with Anthony D. Smith.

I do not know a huge amount about Zionism, so forgive me, fair reader, if I make some mistakes here. As I understand it, Herzl, in the late nineteenth century and partially as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, catalysed the formation of modern Zionism. What he did not do was create, ex nihilo, Zionism but build on an existing national feeling. The nationalism came, at least in a political sense, after the nation.

There is a very valid discourse to be had about the effects of the modern period and various features of industrialisation on the development of nations and nationalism; however, to say that nations are conceptually impossible before nationalism and that neither existed before the modern era is, I think, simply wrong. While it is true that nationalism grew in depth and spread across Europe at the same time as the Industrial Revolution, the two, to an extent, fed off each other. It is equally wrong to assume, as I think people do, that the rise of nationalism is a step in a teleological chain.

Given those two facts, I think it is fair to say that there is no single type of nationalism. That much, I think, is uncontroversial, as people have distinguished between civic and ethnic nationalism for some time. That simple dichotomy is, I think, grossly insufficient.

Oppressive, reactive, liberation, linguistic, cultural, state-seeking, state-having and various other adjectives can usefully be applied to nations and nationalism. I think that having more definitions, but each being more pared down, would be a lot more useful than the current catch-all definition of ‘nationalism’. After all, if I can return to an earlier metaphor, both the bratwurst and the Cumberland are sausages, but they are quite different beasts.

There is somewhere here an explanation for the failure of state-nationalism or geographically-delimited nationalism to take hold in, for instance, Africa. I would contend that the transportation of European nationalist ideals by people such as Jomo Kenyatta failed in many cases because they were trying to import a new nationalism onto somewhere that had nationalisms already operating – what might be called tribal loyalties. These nations already had members spread out across externally imposed boundary lines and so would not readily conform to something that came to replace them with a geographic definition of nationality that excluded co-nationals.

This adds into dependency theory and complex sequencing; I will not go into that at any length other than to say that the political canvas against which a nation must develop, flourish, exist or fail have changed and will continue to change.

It may be too early in the day, but I wonder if new forms of communication and collaboration may open a conceptual door to new nations. The development of print capitalism is held to be a key moment in the development of nations by Anderson and others; could the internet do the same in future? I do not mean by communication, as this is the same as before, only faster, but by collaboration – Wikipedia, for instance? It is an imagined community and has political aims (or, at least, some of its principles have political and philosophical implications) that could, conceivably, have some sort of sovereignty over how its members act.

xD.

The BNP

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Matt Sinclair echoes Norman Tebbit in saying that the BNP don’t fit on the right and by extension must be of the left.

Giving definitions such as ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ are not in and of themselves good, but only by the extent of the usefullness.

Is it useful to describe the BNP as right-wing?

I would say that people of the right are generally more attached to nationalist ideas. The left would emphasise class distinctions in its place. The main right-wing party in the UK is officially the Conservative and Unionist Party. While that is entirely probably a historical nomenclature, it is not unreasonable to say that the Conservatives are the more patriotic and more nationalist party. From Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ to Smethwick, the Conservatives have had the problem of nationalism extending to racism. If that is too far back in time, it might be worth pointing out that Lord Taylor suffered from racist campaigning against him when seeking a parliamentary nomination. One one issue-axis that is the most important to the BNP, it is fair to say that the right, as it manifests itself today, is closer to the BNP than the left. That doesn’t mean they are close to them; it means they are less far away than others. I think that’s why people say that the BNP are far-right.

That having been said, the right is generally in favour of lower taxes, less state intervention and so on. That can certainly not be said of the BNP. In short, describing them as right-wing isn’t useful; extending the positions that the right take to an extreme doesn’t effectively describe the BNP.

Is it useful to describe the BNP as left-wing?

They are more statist than the espoused ideals of the right. I do, however, question that anti-statism of the right. Certainly, there is an ideology (which I am not immune to), but the tendency to want to grow the armed forces and the police – the most coercive elements of the state – suggests that there are statist tendencies, at least among certain parts of the right. Equally, there are traditionalist points of view on the right (and I would add that the BNP are very keen on certain traditions).

Economically, they do have more in common with the left; a greater role for the state and so on. I think the question is why they favour it. I would venture that the BNP are in favour of nationalisation as a secondary means because they see potential support amongst former Labour supporters who want nationalisation. For instance, the BNP favour abolishing all taxes for farmers – a right wing position? – but I would suggest that this is either because they see farmers, in a Francoist manner, as essential to the nation, both economically and because they prefer the rural life or because they see support starting to grow in rural areas and are playing a populist card.

I’m in favour of nationalisation of certain industries because I believe that they are necessary to provide a certain minimum standard of living so that people can exercise their liberty as they see fit. I would venture that the BNP aim to create (what they consider) a perfect society and see nationalisation as a means of doing that. The Soviets sought to eliminate the private sphere; I think this is more manipulating the private sphere so people agree with you anyway. That having been said, the BNP are more in favour of people having more, smaller (farming) properties and explicitly say they are against expropriation. Taking left-wing policies to extremes does not effectively describe the BNP.

Extreme left wing and extreme right wing are, I think, terms that are more useful because of the word ‘extreme’ rather than the words ‘left’ and ‘right’. To say they are extreme-right brings allegations that all right-wingers are racists and that they are extreme-left that all left-wingers want to control society.

In Denmark, there is a party simply called Venstre, meaning Left. They would be called rightwingers, espousing free market liberalism. They are known as the left because the Danish parliament was originally split between small landowners and large landownders; the former sat on the left, and Venstre are their successors. So far as I know, the issues of small- versus large- landowners are not currently major ones in Denmark. The point is that labels often grow from history, and are not invented to suit the needs of the day. Indeed, the modern terms of left and right come from where people sat in a chamber at the time of the French Revolution. Even if we decide that we must (perhaps for reasons of simplicity) use a single axis, Left-Right as it exists at the moment is not a useful one. Two axes would be more useful (see www.politicalcompass.org) and there’s a case for using more than two.

Usefullness here is in terms of describing them in political science terms and for the use of practical politics.

‘Violent, racist, homophobic, populist Holocaust-deniers’ seems to work.

Question is: what are we doing about it?

xD.