A little list of links

1. Fergus Butler-Gallie on blue plaques. Lovely.

2. Inside media coverage of Israel. Not the usual piece - much more interesting.

3. There is a feeling I have noticed online that middle-aged people think that young people are too 'square' nowadays: not enough drinking, not enough teenage pregnancy, no new annoying kinds of music and so on. I imagine that if you are young this is the very worst kind of patronising generational warfare. Anyway, that is my (horribly unfair) framing for this piece, which you should definitely read. It is all about online spaces in which students can study together. Literally that. E.g. Youtube videos of people studying for 12 hours. Dystopian, maybe (I'm old), but that's the world meritocracy has created. And it's not all bad: "While the issue of moderation in online communities and across social platforms is a heated and ongoing conversation in tech, teenagers are seemingly running friendly, inclusive, and welcoming communities that top 100,000 members with what appears to be little to no drama. Instead, members are respectful of one another and do their part in cultivating a study community where everyone succeeds." And: "“The best part about #studytwt, in my opinion, is the amount of love and encouragement that is always circulating. I don’t think I’ve seen a single negative post on my feed. It’s as if ‘study group’ met ‘sleepover’”."

4. Here's a nice little story. The University of Toledo (Ohio) offers Inclusive Excellence Awards from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion "to recognize the faculty, staff and departments on our campus who have put in the work implementing the University’s Strategic Plan for Diversity and Inclusion to make our campus a more diverse and inclusive place to study, work and grow". This year, "Professor Lee Strang received an overwhelming number of faculty nominations ... The individuals who nominated Strang for the award recognized his conservative point of view as a minority in academia and a benefit to legal debate." Strang got the 2021 Award. But it's not meant to be an award for conservatives! So they are going to change the rules in future. All at the link.

5. The New York Times has caught up with my worries about population decline. As society after society enters the death spiral from which no society has ever successfully recovered ("decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. ... the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff"), it doesn't seem unreasonable to worry a little bit. My hope is that the problem will follows the same pattern as climate change but c.50 years later: the best time to have addressed the problem was a generation ago; the second best time is now; and the third best time is in a generation's time, which is when we will do something about it. 

6. Also from the NYT, a splendid piece by Ross Douthat about Foucault and the right.

7. Dominic Cummings can't read the room. This article is quite good in its own terms, but also quite possibly the best introduction to what rationalists (and rationalist-adjacent) people are all about.

8. More on Emmanuel Todd, if my previous post whetted your appetite for such things. 

Freedom and cancellation

"Cancel culture". "You can't say anything nowadays". Amazon will not sell books that 'frame sexual identity as mental illness'. Universities to comply with free speech duties or face sanctions. You know the sort of thing.

The sensible modern liberal, feeling a little out of kilter with the times but determined to stick to principle, wants to say a couple of things about the State's role in all this, one about the law and one about society. 

First, the liberal says that the law should allow people to say things. There are some limits (shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre when there isn't a fire; libel; food-labelling laws) but there should be a very strong presumption that people can say whatever they want without the State stopping them.

But that's not all (the liberal continues). People can find themselves effectively forced to shut up, or to repeat what they believe to be untrue, not only by the power of the State but also by the innumerable penalties and incentives that Society has at its disposal, from the quiet "tut", to the full-scale cancellation: internet scandal, being sacked from one's job and suffering public disgrace. That power in Society, the liberal says, is not a good thing either. There are lots of powerful passages in On Liberty about how, even if what you believe is completely right, there are all sorts of benefits to allowing people to spout the opposite view. You can read all of them here (and some of them below).

So, the liberal concludes, the good, liberal State has reason to use its powers to encourage or protect the place of free speech in private institutions. If the universities all say you have to believe that X is right, then the State should provide some protection for those who want to go to university and yet say that X is wrong. Employers, bookshops, newspapers, social media companies: yes, I know they are private companies, the liberal says, and, yes, I know they can justifiably restrict what people who contract with them can or can't say, but the State should lean on them to keep these restrictions to a minimum. If you work for Coca-Cola, for example, it's fine for your employer to tell you that you can't post adverts for Pepsi all over your Facebook feed; but they shouldn't tell you what you can say about the filioque clause in the company of consenting adults. It's might be messy to work out the details, and we might have some hard cases at the edges, but (so the liberal says) we can at least go this far: let's have a presumption in favour of expanding the sphere in which people can speak freely and, if necessary, use the power of the State to help.

That, I think, is a fair summary of a certain strand of liberal's thought in the circumstances of today: the sort of liberal who may have no or little sympathy for the victims of 'cancellation', but is uncomfortable at seeing it happen; somone nervous at seeing Trump kicked off Twitter and Facebook; someone who knows the arguments about the difference between the private and the public sphere; someone who is, as I say, informed by the tradition epitomised in On Liberty. Someone like Scott Alexander (point 5 at that link is one of the prompts for this piece). 

It's an important premise of this way of thinking that the State can be neutral or impartial: the State does not favour any particular moral code, any particular set of religious beliefs or unbeliefs, any conception of the good life. The liberal imagines a street in which one house is occupied by evangelising Muslims, one by a Communist preaching unity among the world's workers, one by Richard Dawkins preaching atheism and one by polyamorous investment bankers shouting "Greed is Good!" - and the liberal is happy. The liberal is just in favour of 'more speech' - he doesn't care about the content of that speech. 

What the liberal wants to do is to float above the arguments of the social justice warriors versus TERFs versus conservatives. He wants to say that he's not taking sides on moral issues - he's just protecting the arena in which those issues can be debated. That is the promise of liberalism: neutral freedom, a flavourless medium to which a free people may add a thousand flavours.

I am going to argue that this way of thinking ultimately doesn't work in the real world. I will suggest that the State can't stay neutral: it has to descend into the fray - it has to take sides. That means that my view is similar to the views of those people who say things like 'silence is violence' and 'free speech is white supremacy': I don't agree with their slogans (or with much else that they say), but they're right on this point.  

That's a shame. It's a shame because people who believed in the spectre of a neutral and impartial state helped create some of the best societies the world has ever seen. Like a Christian standing in the ruins of a pagan temple as the Goths sack Rome around me - or perhaps like Richard Dawkins listening to church bells while pondering the Muslim call to prayer - I wish that we could keep more of the old ways than now seems possible. 

So why doesn't this kind of neutral liberalism work? 

There are two problems. To see the first one, let me introduce Statement A.

Statement A: "It's really quite funny to laugh at people with Down's Syndrome. Here's a good joke along those lines [insert unfunny and offensive joke here]."

The "not going to prison for saying things" bit of liberalism is actually fine. The State has many claims on its time and resources, and sending merely unpleasant people to prison comes low down the list. You can say Statement A and the police will leave you alone. The liberal can hold that line.

The problem starts with the liberal's second stage, i.e. when the notionally neutral state begins to take steps to preserve or expand the sphere of free speech. 

So, we all agree that Facebook should allow you to speak your mind, and people shouldn't be cancelled, and there should be give and take in the workplace, and etc etc etc. But ... Statement A? If someone persists in saying Statement A, and his Facebook friends disown him, and people turn them backs on him in the street, and he's "cancelled" then - tough. The keenest free-speecher in the world will only say that he shouldn't go to prison. But to have the State protect him from opprobrium? To force Twitter to host him or his publican to serve him or his colleagues to share their sandwiches with him?

Let's go to JS Mill himself and steel ourselves up for the fight for free speech to protect Statement A in the Senior Common Rooms, Senates and Saloon Bars of the Free World. What does Mill have to say?

"However positive any one’s persuasion may be, not only of the falsity but of the pernicious consequences—not only of the pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I altogether condemn) the immorality and impiety of an opinion; yet if, in pursuance of that private judgment, though backed by the public judgment of his country or his contemporaries, he prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility. And so far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes, which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity. It is among such that we find the instances memorable in history, when the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best men and the noblest doctrines; with deplorable success as to the men, though some of the doctrines have survived to be (as if in mockery) invoked, in defence of similar conduct towards those who dissent from them, or from their received interpretation.

Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates ..."

Right, got it: it could be that pouring cold water on Statement A will be to commit the most dreadful mistake. It might excite the astonishment and horror of posterity. Our chap with the bad joke could be the next Socrates ... 

No, it just doesn't work, does it? There is no way that any real-life political structure can neutrally pursue the value of unrestricted speech enough to protect people who say Statement A against the opprobrium of their neighbours. Nor, if we are honest with ourselves, should it. Cancel culture has its uses. There really are things that shouldn't be said in polite society.

So the liberal starts to retreat. OK, he says. Obviously, the State only needs to protect important speech. We're not forcing Amazon to sell 1001 Best Down's Syndrome Jokes, just books that are about really important things like trans rights and politics and religion and stuff like that.

So now I bring you the next statement.

Statement B: "Beards with no moustache are horrible. Anyone who sports that kind of facial hair should be ostracised and shunned."

Statement B is just like Statement A, right? It's a matter of taste. As it happens, we all agree with Statement B and disagree with Statement A, but that's the marketplace of ideas. If tastes change and Statement B becomes anathema to right-thinking people then it will be fair enough to "cancel" people who espouse it. We're not going to get the State involved in that sort of thing. So it seems that Statement B doesn't challenge the liberal.

But now I bring you the final statement.

Statement C: "It should be compulsory for all men to grow and wear those beards that have no moustache."

Statement C is political speech: it's about a change in the law! Of course that's protected and important speech! Amazon has to sell books that propose this position; universities can't sack or 'unplatform' people for saying it; Facebook can't censor it.

The problem is that Statement B - which, we have just agreed, enjoys none of the protection that really important points of view like Statement C enjoy - is a sort of counter-argument to Statement C. So maybe Statement B is political speech when deployed in answer to Statement C? Or maybe, with a couple of tweaks, Statement B can become the sort of political speech that the State ought to protect? 

Do you think this kind of thinking will ever get us anywhere in answering the challenges of free speech? Maybe in theory, but in practice? And do you think that this has got anything to do with Socrates? What a load of nonsense. Frankly we don't care if people who say either Statement B or Statement C get cancelled: it simply doesn't matter.

But the problem for the liberal is this. We, philosophical naives that we are, can say that it doesn't matter. We can say that these are just silly invented sentences that will never arise in reality. But the impartial State can't. If it is really standing back from the content of all of these Statements - if it is really neutral among all the different moral theories out there - it has to protect all of them equally. It can't get into saying "this is just a stupid theory and the State is not going to protect you": that is to descend into the arena and pick sides. The only basis upon which the State can say that Statement C is not worthy of the State's protection, while at the same time saying that the statement that, say, a person who changes their legal gender has (or has not) in fact changed their sex is worthy of protection, is because the State has decided that the content of the latter statement is worthwhile while the content of the former is not. That means that the State has descended into the arena - it has picked sides: it has ruled some arguments in and other arguments out. It has a theory of what counts as a good moral argument and what doesn't. It's not neutral any more. 

To be clear, exactly the same problem appears in reverse if we try the opposite approach to the problem, i.e. companies trying to keep politics out of the workplace. We find that Statement C is excluded from the workplace, but Statement B is fine. Or take the example of companies supporting the BDS movement. Surely it was ok for companies to boycott apartheid-era South Africa? Or to refuse to deal with states involved in slavery or child labour? Which is to say: some political decisions are justifiable - we are only arguing about which ones. If you are a liberal you might try to fall back on 'only in exceptional circumstances' line, but that's no answer: ok, the SJW says, I say that Israel is exceptional (after all, I'm not arguing for sanctions on Burundi or Nepal) so let's discuss that question. Either way, in the real world, you can't get away from discussing the content of political beliefs.

Maybe you can construct an armchair theory for how the neutral State can go about widening the sphere of free speech in private institutions in a way that pays no attention whatsoever to the content of that speech. But you can't do it in reality. The way it happens in reality - the way it has to happen - is that the State picks and chooses what kinds of speech are protected, and which ones are not. 

Just to see this, let's turn for a moment from my carefully-constructed easy examples to the real world. Here's an example of this kind of freedom-protecting legislation in the UK: "The Equality Act 2010 says you mustn’t be discriminated against because of your religion or belief. ... Something can be a philosophical belief if you strongly and genuinely believe in it and it concerns an important aspect of human life and behaviour. The courts have said that the belief in man-made climate change and spiritualism are philosophical beliefs. But a political belief is not a philosophical belief."  (A political belief is not a philosophical belief? Try telling that to Karl Marx. Or to the people who marked my Political Theory Finals paper.)

This strikes me as a perfectly defensible attempt to protect certain kinds of free speech in private organisations. But it's hardly neutral, is it? The State - that coercive power with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - has decided that spiritualism is one side of the line but politics is the other, although a belief in climate change is not on the political side of the line. That's picking sides. That's deciding, as the quotation says, what is an "important aspect of human life". We really are in Socrates' territory now.

That's the first problem: the State can't, as a matter of practicality, protect any area of free speech without making value judgments. We have to say goodbye to neutral liberalism and adopt a theory of what is better and what is not. The liberal can't carry on floating above the arguments - there is no "above the arguments". Allowing a social situation to exist in which certain views are capable of being comfortably advanced really is taking sides: silence is violence, if you want to put it strongly.

I don't claim that this is a new or original criticism of philosophical liberalism (which, it turns out, is not philosophy anyway, according to the law of the land), only that recent developments have made it clear that the theoretical objections to liberalism that amused the academy can no longer be waved away by practical people. 

The second problem is a more subtle one. Let's take your most pragmatic and fair-minded liberal, your Scott Alexander who knows when people are making trolling statements about beards and when they are arguing about stuff that really matters. The liberal is not really - not deep-down - neutral at all.

Let's go back to the boisterous street where Richard Dawkins argues with the Muslims and the Communists. The liberal loves it here. Eveyone can have their say! The marketplace of ideas! No shutting up Socrates here!

But there is a potential problem for our happy liberal. Some of the people in the street want to change the structure of society with the effect that certain people, or certain ideas, are shut down. Take the Communist who wants to ban religion and capitalism. The liberal is happy for this view to be expressed and for people to be persuaded that it is right. But the liberal is not happy for too many people to believe it. Let's say that lots of people take up Communism and start to "cancel" religious believers. (Remember that this is all done by free association, not the power of State.) What then?

Back to Mill:

"That mankind are not infallible; that their truths, for the most part, are only half-truths; that unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good, until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognizing all sides of the truth, are principles applicable to men’s modes of action, not less than to their opinions. As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.

...
In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?"

The liberal knows that we need these "experiments in living". That means that, once enough people become Communist, and start sneering at religious people (and at the bourgeois, rentiers, people with inherited wealth etc), and keeping them out of voluntary organisations and the media and the professions and so on, once they exercise a "hostile and dreaded censorship", there comes a point at which the liberal starts to stand up for the religious people. (Doesn't he? He certainly would if, instead of "Communist" and "religious people", I had said "evangelical Christian" and "gay people". He's neutral!) He needs to keep all potentially valuable ways of life realistically open to the discerning and free individual choosing how to live his life.

It's not that the liberal is secretly a conservative, as some radicals suggest. On the contrary, he doesn't mind vast conversions from Islam to Christianity and back again, and he would happily stand up for Communists against the capitalists if the tables were turned. (Recall the issue of 'black-listing' Communist or Un-American writers: the power of a free society to cancel can be used against anyone, and the real liberals don't like it however it is used.) He positively welcomes whatever new experiments in living you can come up with. If you think the liberal is a conservative then you don't understand either side of the debate between liberals and conservatives. 

It's just that the liberal has to stop anyone winning. Once society agrees that X is right then it will start exercising its dreaded power of censorship, it will start bowing the minds of the multitudes to the yoke of the few. The liberal doesn't mind anyone saying anything - but he minds people agreeing with them. And that means that, hard as he tries to be neutral, he is ultimately on the opposite side from all members of proselytising creeds which want to enforce a speech code. Which means that the liberal is on the other side from SJWs, just as he is from Christians and Muslims. He is no more than an insincere, fair-weather friend to anyone who wants to change society's attitude to freedom. 

So I don't think that liberalism works if it simply seeks to be on the side of 'freedom' or 'keeping politics out of it'. We can now see that the reason that this looked like a neutral position in years gone by was simply that we took for granted a great many unspoken premises about counted for 'politics'. I used some silly invented sentences above, but could Mill ever have foreseen this story: "Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull told the BBC she paid £700 to have "woman, wʊmən, noun, adult human female" put up. // But it was removed after an LGBT activist complained Ms Keen-Minshull's campaign represented a "hate group""? Or this one: "So they asked how I would define a woman, and I said that my classification of a woman is somebody who is born with a vagina and the ability to menstruate. // There was uproar. It was like putting a target on my back." Would Mill have expected the dictionary definition of a woman to be more or less controversial than any of Statements A to C? Once people started to question these unspoken premises we ended up in the position of Scott Alexander's correspondent:

Sensible, freedom-enhancing liberalism doesn't make sense in theory. But it did make sense in practice. It made sense as providing a series of workable compromises to which enough people could give assent in order to avoid social friction. That's really not a bad result.

To see what I mean, let's take one of the oldest and most intractable of free-speech issues: anti-semitism. Holocaust denial is illegal in some countries. Obviously the true liberal can have no truck with censorship on that scale (although most people can see why Israel and Germany might well have different laws on the subject from the US and UK: principle be damned, history matters). In the UK, under the old liberal order, we had a different balance: anti-semitism didn't get you sent to prison, but it could get you cancelled. You could get away with a certain number of off-colour jokes, suspiciously enthusiastic support for Palestine and the odd rant about 'Zionism', but full-scale holocaust denial would bring about the David Irving treatment. You might be hard-pressed to define exactly when Ken Livingstone crossed the line, but we somehow know that he did. It was a messy compromise. But it worked.

Where did we find strict liberal principle in that compromise? Where were the experiments in living and the potential Socrateses? Nowhere. What we had instead was something that worked, something that kept an historical affliction to, if not the minimum, at least a minimum, while at the same time maintaining a reasonably large sphere for free speech: something that founded a compromise which enjoyed the support of all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

The old compromise position on anti-semitism might be breaking down under the new rules. Certainly other compromises are breaking down. Some of these compromises, for example on gender issues, are ones which we never realised were compromises at at all. 

Some conservative thinkers, seeing that these compromises are breaking down, are staking out their own maximalist positions in the all-out war over what the perfect society looks like. At a certain point in the collapse of a liberal order, that is a rational approach: we might call it the Spanish Civil War option. Already the International Brigades are mobilising to fight in America's culture wars, and hope to bring those wars home.

But those of us who don't want a Spanish Civil Culture War need to enlist liberals to create new ceasefires, new DMZs. For the reasons I've outlined above, I don't think they can't rest on any particularly persuasive general principles to do so. They can't do what they really want to do, which is to say that there is a solution that does not involve taking sides. Instead, they will have to say that some views are right (at least a little bit) and some views are wrong (by and large). 

This can be done. I have quoted so much of Mill above because he has not been bettered at putting forward arguments for 'liberality' in the best sense, the liberalism which is itself a theory, every bit as comprehensive as that of SJWs or Integralists, as to how society ought to be ordered. Mill's is the best account of why you should want to live in a liberal society, one in which peculiarity of taste and eccentricity of conduct are not shunned equally with crimes, one where we each choose what will enable us to grow and thrive. It's an appealing vision, perhaps more chaming even than Curtisland. It is the vision that animates many people who traditionally voted for conservative parties, and those who find themselves increasingly attracted to such parties: "InCons" (= involuntary conservatives, in the same way as involuntary celibates are "incels"). And it works: it is, I believe, the vision that animated those who created the decent societies of the West. 

So forget philosophy and become practical. "What would Mill do?" is not the worst approach to the culture wars, even if "What would Mill think?" does not quite do the trick.

Political scandals by country

In Germany, the characteristic scandal is doctorate plagiarism:

"The Guttenberg plagiarism scandal refers to the German political scandal that led to the resignation of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg as Minister of Defence of Germany over the plagiarism of his doctoral dissertation. The first accusations of plagiarism in Guttenberg's dissertation were made public in February 2011."

And then: "In the 10 years since [Guttenberg], seven further German politicians, including education minister Annette Schavan in 2013, have had their doctoral titles revoked. Doubt has been cast on the qualifications of numerous others, including the PhD of the current president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. ...

... family minister Franziska Giffey last week became the third minister of a Merkel government to leave office over PhD plagiarism accusations, while the Green party’s candidate for the chancellery was forced to release her LSE degree certificate to fend off accusations she had inflated her intellectual credentials. ... Her stepping down makes plagiarism scandals the single most common cause for premature departures from Merkel’s cabinets in the past 16 years."

In the UK, our scandals are about home-decorating. I don't think you need a reference for 'duck-house' and if I say 'wallpaper' then you might think of Johnson's recent troubles, or perhaps Lord Irvine's wallpaper.

But everything is on a bigger scale in the US. This, for example, is not a scandal and hardly a news story: "Former FBI Director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a trust for two of President Biden’s grandchildren as he sought to pursue “some very good and profitable matters” with him, newly surfaced emails revealed Thursday."

London Actually; or The Political World of Richard Curtis

It says something about the age we live in that the cultural colossus who bestrides it is Richard Curtis. 

Curtis is the man responsible, in whole or in part, for Blackadder, Mr Bean and The Vicar of Dibley on the small screen and Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, Bridget Jones and Notting Hill on the big one. It was Curtis, together with Lenny Henry, who gave us Comic Relief; it was Curtis, together with Bill Nighy, who gave us Bill Nighy. 

New Zealand, where Curtis was born, has produced wonderful film-makers: Sam Neill, Sir Peter Jackson, Taika Waititi, Jane Campion. But those film-makers are an inheritance for the whole world. Curtis, by contrast, is New Zealand's special gift to us, right here in the UK. When the world looks at Britain on any kind of rectangular screen - indeed, when Britain looks at Britain - we see what Curtis shows us. That's true even when it is not Curtis himself who shows it: think of the recent Paddington films, which are clearly set in the same cinematic universe. The only other auteur I can think of who has an equally clear vision of modern Britain is Guy Ritchie, and I would be only a little surprised to find out that he is an unimaginative pseudonym for Curtis himself ("instead of Richard, how about ... Ritchie? Ritchie the Man. No, too obvious. Man Ritchie? No. ... Got it - Guy!"). Love him, actually, or loathe him, there is no getting away from Curtis.

There is plenty that can be said about Curtis' oeuvre from an artistic point of view, but I won't say it. Curtis has given a great deal of innocent enjoyment to a great number of people, and that is no small thing - it is certainly more worthy of praise than the work of a mere lawyer. His productions are funny and fun, and his heart is in the right place. But, no, I'm not here to talk about Curtis' art - I want to talk about his politics. Or rather, the politics of the place we might call Curtisland. My theory is that Curtisland presents a serious risk, and potentially a great opportunity, for the Right. (Trigger warning: this post also mentions Brexit.) 

(More below the break.)

Why the world is as it is

Why are things the way they are in the human world? 

It's a big question and we can take it for granted that any short answer to it is going to be wrong or at least incomplete. Nonetheless, we might find some manageably short and partially correct answers; or we might find answers that provide useful insights. The full answer to the question "why are animals the way they are?", to take a similarly large question, would be long, tedious and include reference to all kinds of brute facts themselves in need of explanation (genetic mutations, prevailing winds, continental drift, meteorite strikes, human activity etc etc). But once you know a few facts about how animals obtain energy, natural selection, sexual selection and genes then you have a set of tools with which to go about answering the larger question; and for many people you have provided all the answer to the larger question that they wanted in the first place.

What do I mean by "why are things the way they are"? Really, the question boils down to this: humans are all one species and yet different humans do things very differently: why? As Jared Diamond's interlocutor Yali asks him in Guns, Germs and Steel, "why is is that some people have so much cargo (i.e., the physical stuff of the modern world), while others have had so little?" But also, why is it that some believe some things and others believe other things? And is there a link between these different beliefs and all the cargo? If so, what is it?

Guns, Germs and Steel is one good attempt to answer the question. (Diamond's answer is in the title.) It looks as if he got the bit about zebras wrong, but Diamond is, I think, looking at some of the right kind of thing.

This is a review of a book about global economic history that tries to answer the question within what I suppose we might call politically correct constraints. Scott Alexander raises a number of problems with it and I think he is right to do so. Here's one: "New parts of existing countries are able to develop relatively quickly - for example, when the US took California from Mexico, it eventually converged to US (not Mexican) standards of living. If a New California were to rise out of the Pacific Ocean just west of the regular one, and Americans were to colonize it, I would expect it to also converge to normal US standards of living eventually. Why? In 2021, New California has nothing, and (eg) India has much more than nothing. How come we are more certain that New California will soon get First World living standards than that India will?" (A better attempt to answer the question, albeit on a smaller scale (US not the world), is here.)

But the point of this post is to draw your attention to this which, among other matters, provides an answer to Scott Alexander's question. It is a critical summary of Emmanuel Todd's L'invention de l'Europe, and it far, far more interesting than the constrained approaches of English-language economic history. I will not attempt to summarise what is already a summary of plainly a large body of work, but I would urge you to read it. It starts by saying things that you think you have already thought, but stick with at least as far as the explanation of the four premodern European family types and you'll see that it goes off in new directions.

Todd places a lot of weight on his analysis of family structures. Just to give you an idea of what kind of family structures he has in mind, the rest of this paragraph consists of some thoughts of my own prompted by Todd's ideas. The English family structure, since the Middle Ages, has been the nuclear family: when a child becomes an adult they have to leave the home and set up a new home. That's just the way it is in England; nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution breaking up traditional family structures - it's just being English. It's also just the way it is in our former colonies: in fact, there was an entire romantic comedy featuring major Hollywood stars called Failure to Launch based on the premise that a young man who has not left his parents' house constiutes a crisis that potentially needs professional attention. Now, in England at present we have a housing issue which might be summarised as follows: old people rattle around in expensive houses that are too big for them, while young people have to rent small flats and cannot buy family homes for themselves until the old people die and the young people inherit (and then sell) those big houses. This is often regarded as a major political issue, a potential cause of retarded family development etc etc. Potential solutions include: building lots of new houses on the countryside; rent controls (possible the single most tried-and-tested bad economic idea); Government (i.e. taxpayer) support for young people buying houses; despair; Jeremy Corbyn. But, so far, nothing has worked. In fact, the crisis is so great that in expensive parts of the country (especially London) it is almost (almost!) normal for young adults to return to their parents' homes for a year or two. I say it is almost normal, but it is nonetheless plainly undesirable to any right-thinking person. And I add that, also obviously, these young adults "return" to their parents' home, they do not "stay" there: English family structures require adults to leave home at 18, hence they must go to a university that is far away from their parents' home despite the fact that doing so is much more expensive for the whole family and not necessarily any better in academic terms than going to a nearby university. French people gonna French, but we're English and we leave home at 18. But now that I have put it that way, does it not all seem a little odd? Surely the problem is with the English family structure, not the housing market? Why don't young people live in extended households with parents, grandparents and so on? It is not, nowadays, because they don't want their parents to know they are having sex, is it? (And, anyway, they're not having sex: "66% [of men] had not had sex during their time as a student", says the BBC.) Nor is it because they don't like their parents, or vice versa. Why is it not normal for grandparents to move to a small bedroom in the attic of the house they have always lived in so that their children and grandchildren can live downstairs? (Would that help with the cost of childcare?) Why, if there is a "granny annexe" of this kind, must it be one built by the children onto their new home, rather than built by the grandparents onto their old home? Why isn't the children's income used to extend, refurbish and improve the family home rather than try to buy an entirely new one? Once you start asking these questions, you might see the world in a different way. I'm English and I like the English way. But it does seem a little odd that it seems to involve so many people living in unsuitable places. 

I have various questions about Todd's work, which I have set out below. You should probably read the link first in order to understand what the questions are about, but if you find them interesting then that will give you reason to look at the link. 

First, some thoughts from a British perspective. It seems to me that Todd's theories would predict that Jewish people would do better in nineteenth century France than in England, and yet England is where we see Disraeli becoming Prime Minister, the Rothschild barontcy created in 1847 and the peerage in 1885, while France saw the Dreyfus affair. Or am I just being romantic about the history of Anglo-Jewry? What about primogeniture for British entailed land and titles: does that affect his theory of English family structures? Also, I am not sure that the differences between the various parts of the Celtic fringe are clear enough: why was Ireland so Catholic but Scotland and Wales not? Quibbles, I think, but, as with Diamond's zebras, one wants to be sure that the factual substratum is correct.

Second, from my old-fashioned feminist perspective, I wonder whether he gives enough attention to the place of women. I don't say that to be down with the cool kids, simply for methodological reasons. Let me give an example. Todd has an interesting treatment of differing amounts of miscegenation in European imperial possessions. I suppose a fair comparison might be between South America (Latin colonialism) and Africa or Australia (Anglo colonialism), where in each case the native populations survived European diseases: in these places the Anglo settlers did not mix with the native populations but the Latin settlers did. "Anglo-segregation and Dutch Apartheid are the norm whenever these peoples [English and Dutch hyper-liberals] come into contact with non-whites". But, on the other hand, English imperialists did mix with native populations during their early Indian colonial adventures and I understand that there is a marked contrast between before and after the Mutiny/Sepoy Revolt. Surely a big factor in whether European men married or cohabited with local women is whether women from the imperial metropolis were prepared to settle abroad? My impression is that English women were (perhaps surprisingly) ready to venture abroad, even in difficult climates, either alone or with English men; my impression is not that English men were particularly keen to force women to go overseas. One might take that as an aspect of English liberty (i.e. it does not undermine the overall thesis) but it changes the explanatory mechanism for lack of miscegenation. (And was French non-white citizenship and miscegenation any different from English?)

Here's another example involving women. One point Todd makes is that a certain kind of family (the stem family) "because of strong parental guidance and transmission of cultural and economic capital over generations – correlates with high and precocious educational achievement (Scotland, Germany, Sweden, Jews, Japan, Korea…)". One sees the point: Jewish people have managed to transmit a high degee of cultural capital over a long period in difficult circumstances and have a high regard for learning, whereas the English are notoriously ill-educated, stupid, resistant to learning and, both at home and in our American former colonies, determined to undermine academic achievement wherever it can be found in the service of almost anything else, e.g. utility ("what's the point of learning Latin? we'll never need it"), fun (child-centered learning, learning through play, all those play times and long holidays, "let children be children", all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy), sport (muscular Christianity, the rounded individual, Waterloo won on the playing fields of Eton, the Boat Race and US college sports), political correctness (examples too numerous to mention, but look at the US idea of rejecting SATs for university entrance) - all of which is completely unlike, say, Germany. Ok, got it. But the transmission of cultural capital in the home - the cultural capital that is most relevant to passing on family structures, national identity, morals and values - is, surely, mostly done by women? So the question arises: are societies of high and precocious educational achievement ones in which women are typically educated to the same degree as men? That would imply a more egalitarian set-up, but the Scotland/Germany/Jewish/Japanese family is inegalitarian (in Todd's schema). Or, if cultural capital can be passed on without literacy or formal education, e.g., by learning folktales, religion and recipes at one's mother's knee, then what is the link between the educational achievements of these societies and their cultural transmission? (Note that it is easy to pass on economic capital without education, so the question only arises for cultural capital.) One might instead say that, for example for Jewish people, education was itself part of the cultural inheritance that was passed on (literacy being necessary to read the Torah) but then the need for education is merely contingent on the culture in question - a society might as easily be passing on complicated dances or something else that is historically hard to reproduce through book-learning.

Anyway, these are the sorts of question that occurred to me after reading the link, but they are no more than further encouragements to you to do the same. If you want to know why southern Spain 1900-1940 is like southern France 1700-1790, why Paris was the centre of contraception, why England and the Netherlands still have monarchies, why Germany did better than England in the Second Industrial Revolution (i.e. after 1870), why Scottish and Basque nationalisms are similar, why French socialism was so disorganised, why the FN has been such a big thing in France, why some countries (UK, US) can tolerate ghettos of citizens while other tolerate ghettos of non-citizens (Germany) and others cannot tolerate ghettos at all (France), why the UK Conservative Party stands for nothing in particular, why Germany produced Nietzsche .... well, I've given you the link.

3 bits of news from abroad (not America)

1. This is superb. It is a letter from around twenty generals, a hundred senior officers and more than a thousand other soldiers calling for a return to ... well, let's just say a return to the good old days. My browser offers me the option of translating it, but even if you take it out of French, you can't take it out of France. It begins: "L’heure est grave, la France est en péril, plusieurs dangers mortels la menacent. Nous qui, même à la retraite, restons des soldats de France, ne pouvons, dans les circonstances actuelles, demeurer indifférents au sort de notre beau pays." It tells us that "Nos drapeaux tricolores ne sont pas simplement un morceau d’étoffe"; it reminds us that the Primate of Belgium once said that "Quand la prudence est partout, le courage n’est nulle part"; and it concludes, magnificently, "On le voit, il n’est plus temps de tergiverser, sinon, demain la guerre civile mettra un terme à ce chaos croissant, et les morts, dont vous porterez la responsabilité, se compteront par milliers." One might never give such service to the old beau pays as De Gaulle, but one can try to emulate his prose. (Actually, I would recommend the translation: at one point it warns us about fearsome "surburban hordes", summoning in my mind an image of respectable families with sensible cars and a resigned attitude to softplay centres. Not the sort of people the Primate of Belgium wanted to see.)

2. On the other side of the world, New Zealand sends worrying (and apparently surprising) signals about its role in Five Eyes. This may be bigger news than the impending French civil war.

3. Also potentially huge news (and rather more cheering): "Two years on from the launch of a pilot programme, more than 1.7 million doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine have been administered in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, benefitting more than 650 000 children with additional malaria protection." More here.

Some really good links

Something for everyone here, I think.

1. This is about the shape of Rome, in both geographical and historical terms. Interesting from the start. 

2. Nicely done Wikipedia from the future.

3. Transcript of Balaji Srinivasan talking about well, so many interesting things, ranging from the Treaty of Westphalia to why should keep your expense low to cryptocurrencies to India. 

4. Why has nuclear power been a flop? 

5. Consciousness. I have to confess that this may take some re-reading.

6. Not aliens, drones. Full of fun thoughts: e.g. the fact that people are so embarrassed to say that they've seen a UFO means that you should disguise your drones as UFOs and then Americans won't report them to their bosses. (Also has a link to video of the secret US place where they experimented with recovered MiGs, if you like that sort of thing.)

7. What Wes Anderson is all about. If you are not a fan then this won't make you a convert, but I have warm feelings towards The Royal Tenenbaums, at least, and this captured much of what I liked in that. 

8. So, you remember Guns, Germs and Steel? Turns out it's wrong: you can domesticate zebras. And ride them very easily (video).

9. If you like stories about craziness in US education then here's another one.

10. Burn it all down! As Roger Scruton said. Or, rather, he said this: "I sometimes think that the greatest service to our culture was done by the person who set fire to the library at Alexandria, thereby ensuring that nothing survived of that mass of literature, other than those works considered so precious that each educated person would have a copy of his own. The communists had performed a similar service to intellectual life in Czechoslovakia, by preventing the publication of anything save those works deemed so precious that people were prepared to produce them in laborious samizdat editions. These would be passed from hand to hand and read with eager interest by people for whom knowledge, rather than career advancement, was the goal."

UPDATE - BONUS LINK 11. Of course Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's Dad.