In this debate, see also: fl3324hr.htm,fl34argu.htm, fl34bjot.htm, fl37moan.htm
 

I have yet to sit down and do a real reply to Our Editor's attack on me carried in this issue, and sketched in Our Editor's Free Life 33 Jottings) contrasting his and my tactical inclinations. My main reaction so far is that Our Editor has described the differences between him and me pretty accurately. The test for this, I suppose, is that a Free Life reader who shares my attitude and opposes Our Editor's, would probably, if he read Our Editor's descriptions of our two positions, recognise mine as his and Our Editor's as one he disagrees with. Our Editor had a spontaneous jottings go at me following that original argument chez moi, and then a real go, and I have in mind to do something similar.

One way of describing our differences is that Our Editor is concerned ultimately with how people act, and I am content merely to influence how they think. Once I have spread a bit more libertarianism, I will let the cards of human action fall where they will.

When I sit down to write one of my Libertarian Alliance pieces, I am usually trying to put across just a few libertarian notions - often just the one. I generally suggest how the central idea I'm concerned with relates to other libertarian ideas. But, I don't insist that in order to accept my central idea, one must necessarily swallow libertarianism as a whole. Indeed, I think that the content of "libertarianism as a whole" is controversial, this being one of my favourite separate libertarian notions, from which a lot of other controversial ideas follow.

Recently I've been writing, both in these jottings and in a Libertarian Alliance pamphlet (Educational Notes No. 32), about the so-called "Kumon" system of maths teaching. My central purpose has been simply to describe this system, so that libertarians will have at their disposal another example of a voluntarily organised system of teaching which seems to work well. I have also been footnoting the writings of James Tooley, which will help libertarians to find out about other such arrangements. James Tooley is now doing for late twentieth and early twenty first century non-state education what E.G. West did for the non-state education of the nineteenth century. (See also Tooley's Educational Notes No. 31, Should The Private Sector Profit From Education? The Seven Virtues of Highly Effective Markets.) You will also be aware that another of my favourite ideas is that, as I've written before several times, good ideas need repeating.

So. Non-state education is not only a fine and decent thing in an abstract way - it is also being done around the world by millions of non-rich folks in South London and South Africa, India and Brazil. This idea sallies forth into the world, passing from head to head, and I join in. Some of the heads now containing this idea agree with it enthusiastically, and they help with the early spreading of it. Other heads find the notion abhorrent. They insist on the necessity for state education - even state monopoly education - and find all this branded freelance corner-shop and Tesco-type education repulsive, but part of the idea being spread is that millions of other folks are not nearly as repulsed as they are, so these antis find the notion hard to ignore. Other heads receive the idea, but aren't sure what to think about it. They've paid their taxes and resent paying again for their children to be educated, and regard state education as an inevitable part of the scenery. But if a few more quid a month might help their little Harry or Max or Eloise to get ahead, why not give it a go?

These last ones particularly interest me. These are the ones who absolutely must not be denounced as the tools of tyranny, merely because they aren't sure about state education, favour increased funding for the National Health Service, and oppose the right to buy rocket launchers in their local High Street hardware store and the legalisation of heroin. I am happy to tell them, if they ask, that I have contrary opinions to theirs on these other matters, but that's different from lumping them into the enemy army and opening rhetorical fire on them. "And I suppose you also think ...!" I try to make no such suppositions.
 

To switch back to abstract generalisation, I try, not to bind libertarian ideas together into larger packages ("And I suppose you also think...!"), but to separate ideas out from one another and discuss each of them separately. That way, each separate libertarian idea can roam free, and gather many more supporters than it would have if sold only as part of a package deal. This is especially important when some of the ideas routinely bound together into a libertarian bundle are just plain wrong. Consider that awful perpetration of one of Margaret Thatcher's speechwriters: "There is No Such Thing as Society." Yes there is. True, "society" is not a single entity like a small dog or an Anglican Archbishop, with a single separate consciousness and single separate demands and the means of expressing these demands to other individual members of society. "We should not be too judgemental", "I want to go walkies!", etc. But that doesn't mean that "society" doesn't exist. A vegetable doesn't have much in the way of a single separate consciousness, and any sense we might have of what it is saying about how it feels is probably anthropomorphic nonsense. Trombones don't have single separate thoughts, and can express nothing unless a trombonist is present. Depressions coming in from the Atlantic don't have deep thoughts, or have much to say for themselves. But they still exist. Society is like that. It is not a single separate thing like a statue. It has no thoughts peculiar to itself, for it expresses itself only through the voices of its members. Yet there it is, pushing us this way and that way.

Notice how people who deny the existence of something routinely confuse defining it with proving its non existence. "But 'society' is only the sum total of its individual members, who together ..." etc. Yes, exactly so. That is indeed what "society" is. Got it in one. And because that definition is so unwieldy to trot out every time we think of these things, we say "society". The TV comedian Harry Enfield does a character similar to this kind of libertarian, who confuses a reductionist definition of something with a proof that it is uninteresting: "All that is is a bunch of blokes kicking a blown-up sphere of leather around on a large grass field, seaking to place the sphere of leather into one or other of two rectangles facing one another at each end of the field. I don't think much of that."

Madame Thatcher's disastrous pronouncement about the non-existence of society has been siezed upon ever since by anti-libertarians to illustrate their claim that we libertarians are all uncaring fools, indifferent to the wider social implications of the extreme individualist polices that we all favour. All rights. No responsibilities. Hurrah for individualism. Damn the social consequences.

Personally I love being told that I think society doesn't exist, because it gives me a chance to denounce this notion as the poppycock that it is. Most certainly society exists, I reply. And the best way of getting a better society is to have more individual liberty.

The best way for people to learn to be decent and thrifty is for them to experience the horrible long and even quite short-term consequences to themselves of being vicious and wasteful, by those around them having the right to act upon their adverse judgements of such bad and stupid people. In a world where some nasty and stupid people buy huge stereo kits they can't afford and play them deafeningly at three in the morning, the rest of us should have the right to enforce our contracts with them by repossessing their toys and putting them on credit blacklists and by expelling them from our housing estates. The rest of us would, in short, have the right to discriminate against them. Barbarians would either learn to behave better, or else live miserable lives. Onlookers would observe all this, perhaps through their net curtains. Children would have these lessons drummed into them by parents and teachers who would now be able to point at some actual facts about the constrasting consequences to oneself of goodness and badness which support the case for being good. And society - a word I now refuse any longer to castrate with inverted commas - would improve.

As it is, egged on a tiny few "society does not exist" libertarians, we libertarians have allowed libertarianism to be presented by anti-libertarians as the rationalisation of the very barbarities which earlier anti-libertarian arrangements did so much to encourage and which more libertarianism would actually do so much to discourage. Society does exist. And we know better than anti-libertarians how to do it well, just as we know how to make better washing machines.
 

Last week I attended a small dinner party. Present were our host, who is a building contractor and property owner, a Shadow Ministerial Policy Adviser, a young lady from New Zealand who does personal fitness coaching, and me. The evening was, on the whole, most enjoyable. The Policy Adviser has recently become more bulbous than he likes. I'm becoming a "fat thin man", he said, and happily signed up for some Personal Fitness Coaching. (I am also becoming a fat thin man, but I don't care about my shape enough to want to do anything New Zealandish about it.) The Political Adviser also signified his strong agreement with the freedom-makes-society better theory, and quoted his political master, the Shadow Deputy Grand Panjandrum, saying similar things in what sounded like a sensible and interesting manner.

Sadly, he also gave me a lambasting to pass on to Our Editor, Our Editor having some months back sent a nasty letter to the Political Adviser's political master, the Shadow Deputy Grand Panjandrum. Why does our Editor behave so abusively? He should stick to "philosophy" and leave political tactics to those who know something about them. I promised to pass it on, but otherwise confined myself to muttering that I and Our Editor didn't see entirely eye to eye on libertarian tactics either. I began to sketch out this disagreement in a bit of detail, saying that ideas mattered to me more than taking sides in huge political confrontations. I was, for example, just as glad to see a socialist become a bit less of a socialist (by accepting one libertarian notion but continuing to reject most others), as I was to see a libertarian become even more of a libertarian. The point, for me, is to spread these ideas around.

I had in mind something like the idea that lower percentage tax rates won't necessarily mean less governmental income for the government to slosh around, but before I could say anything along these lines, the Political Adviser astounded me by saying with great vehemence that I was utterly wrong. If anything, the present Blairite régime ought to become more socialist, so that its now concealed socialism would become more obvious, and so that the country would be forced to rescue itself from the gradual but inevitable decline that the cunningly diluted socialism of the present government now condemns it to. What we need is for the present government to screw up. And what we don't need is for libertarians to attack the Conservative Party, which is now the best hope - he may even have said only hope - that libertarianism in Britain has.

I was so appalled by all this that I could think of nothing else to say except that I preferred a nicer government to a nastier one. Not that this mattered, because the Political Adviser's portable phone then exploded with late night and early next morning demands and he had to leave.

This Political Adviser and Our Editor have their differences, but they have in common that they both divide the world into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. What made them fly at each other's throats was that Our Editor puts the Political Adviser in the Bad Guys camp, and that the Political Adviser will soon, if he hasn't already done so, be reciprocating in kind, and denouncing our Editor as Objectively Pro-Labour. For the Political Adviser it's Good Conservatives against Bad Labour. For Our Editor its New World Order against all those who can see through the New World Order's schemes and are willing to denouce them. The Conservatives, who fail to denounce the New World Orderliness of Labour in all the ways he wants them to, are, in the eyes of Our Editor, objectively pro New World Order, and must accordingly be sent denunciatory letters and e-mails. These do achieve the desired purpose, by the way, if that purpose is to get under the skins of those on the receiving end of them. The Political Adviser was most upset.
 

I used to be a Good Guys Versus Bad Guys guy myself, during the Cold War. I saw a world historical melodrama that meant at least as much to me then as the spreading of libertarianism. Better yet, it was a a melodrama that might soon soon have winners and losers. I never thought that the USSR was about to conquer the world. On the contrary, I have writings from those days to prove that I thought that the USSR might soon collapse and thereby end the Cold War. The USSR did not threaten the world in any straightforward way. But it did divide the world, which was a threat to the world of another sort. I wrote savage Good Guy versus Bad Guy denunciations of, e.g., anti-anti-Communists, which apparently cheered up some of the real Cold Warriors quite considerably, as John Major would say.

Our Editor thought that the Cold War was a non-event, a mere excuse for New World Order nastiness by our side. To some extent this was surely true. Perhaps the Cold War was based on an imaginary Soviet offensive threat to the West. Maybe the West was propping up the old USSR rather than seeking its collapse. All the more reason to end the Cold War, to deny to the New World Order the excuse of the Cold War when it wanted to do nasty things.

But the Cold War was an extremely odd conflict. It had the strange property that the defining characteristic of one of the contending parties, Communism, was capable of being completely removed from the chess board of history. Much more common in such conflicts is that nothing dramatic can be done to settle the matter. It would be folly, for example, to suppose that Islamic beliefs could ever be eliminated from serious world politics. Islam is here to stay. But Soviet Communism had the bizarre property of both threatening the world in a huge way while it persisted, but of being completely smashable.

The conflict between the New World Order and its enemies is not going to go away through some magic trick similar to the collapse of Soviet Communism. The New World Order has too much momentum behind it, and is supported by too many sincerely held, honourably held, and widely dispersed beliefs for that to happen, to say nothing of trends in modern communications technology that would be even harder to reverse.

I agree with Our Editor that there are huge dangers in the drift towards a World Government that is now happening, and which so many millions now support so enthusiastically. But even if you really do believe that this is basically a Good Guys Versus Bad Guys story, little is achieved by accusing the "Bad Guys" of being that and only that. Many of these "Bad Guys", and millions of their supporters, think as they do because they prefer peace to war, and comfort to destitution for poor people in all those poor countries now riven or threatened by civil war, and because they simply don't agree that a World Government is any sort of threat, any more than they think of their national government as a threat. I think that the problem with a World Government that learns how to prevent civil wars is that it will also prevent other things that ought to be left alone, like small businesses which are rather casual about child labour laws or safety regulations, or the making of chemicals which are not nearly as dangerous as various clutches of World Governors claim and are actually very useful. A World Government may eventually prey upon the world in much the same way that the nastier national governments prey upon their nations now. And of course, with a single World Government, there'll be no contemporary comparisons to be made (like the comparison between the USSR and the West during the Cold War, or between Euroland and America now) and nowhere to run if you want to escape it.

So let's say all this. We shouldn't accuse people who want wars stopped simply of being Bad Guys. They aren't, and they'll just cast you in their melodrama as one of their Bad Guys, using the extreme implausibility of your nastier accusations as further evidence of their rightness and of your absurdity.
 

Two final thoughts occur to me. First, even when shouting at the top of my voice from the touchline during the Cold War, I still concerned myself with ideas, and with the unbundling of them. It was, for example, vital to distinguish between despising Communists and Communism and making life hell for Russians. Russians were, on the contrary, among the leading victims of Soviet Communism. Understanding that distinction was crucial to the winning of the Cold War.

And second, I am now unbundling the various ideas that swirl around the New World Order, and the argument about how to resist its rise to supremacy, in response to the more personalised and, I think, implausible denunciations launched against various New World Orderers by Our Editor. People such as Our Editor who inhabit melodramas have a sense of urgency. There is a good fight to fight. There are dragons who must be slain if act five is to turn out right. Our Editor launches his writings on the Internet on a daily basis. Much of his product is unpersuasive and over-the-top abuse of people who aren't that ghastly, but he sure does churn the stuff out. I, on the other hand, am not so inclined to see a crisis in the present state of the world, so I write less. I have trouble persuading myself that what I say makes much difference to anything that I really care about. I have only stirred myself to write this in response to Our Editor's tauntings. Which illustrates that melodrama is not the automatic enemy of scrupulous and persuasive analysis. Emotion is not only necessary in order to emote, the brain scientists now tell us; without emotion you can't even think straight. You certainly don't write anything without some emotional fuel, or get anything done. By spreading heat as well as light, the melodramatists often stirr their quieter comrades into self- justificatory eloquence.

Well, those are my first jottings in reply to Our Editor's criticisms. They need pulling together into something more coherent, an editorial complaint I often aim at the writings of others. But I hope some sort of preliminary pattern can be detected in them nevertheless.