Afghanistan links and thoughts

Except that I'm generally a supporter of monarchy, I don't have any views on internal Afghan politics. However, I have views on the West.

For the background facts on the US involvement in Afghanistan, there are some good links to primary sources here (especially here and here). What should we take from the facts?

One idea I have seen mooted is that the US defeat is a peculiarly striking indictment of the American claim to competence and expertise. We must learn from our defeat. The absolute experts in nation-building, with unlimited resources at their disposal, achieved precisely nothing. This is surely the most extraordinary embarassment. A loss of face. A loss of credibility. A lively encouragement to the rising and unfriendly powers, and a sober warning to our friends and allies. Whither US leadership?

I'm not convinced there's anything to worry about here. The best comparison is the Soviet Union. Here's how one person puts it:

"The Soviet Union was dying in 1989, when it completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. It still managed to do so in an orderly fashion, with a symbolic column of russian APCs crossing the bridge over to Uzbekistan. The leader of the war effort, one Colonel-General Gromov, symbolically rode in the very last BTR, and then proclaimed to the gathered journalists that there wasn’t a single russian soldier behind his back." 

(I recommend reading the link. In fact, I recommend all the links in this piece.)

Look, I get it. When the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan, the country was reasonably safe - safe enough for journalists to travel around, for example - and when they left, which did they did in style, their client state lingered on for a bit before it fell. But the US were never in control and ran away with their tails between their legs. It's not a good look.

But what does all that tell us? The Soviet Union was one of the two most powerful nations in the world at the time. It had a land border with Afghanistan and citizens with similar culture. It was an undemocratic and ruthless authoritarian regime. The US is roughly as powerful, but much further away (both geographically and culturally) and less ruthless. Given those constraints, the US did OK. Ruling Afghanistan is not a test of competence: it's a mega-test of extreme outlier competence, and we always knew that the US was not in that league.

Fundamentally, the fact is that the US never intended to govern Afghanistan. Afghanistan was never going to be a US colony or possession. The factoids about how few people learned Dari tell a tale. The US might have poured money in nation building and gender studies at Kabul University and all the rest of it, but it never intended to run Afghanistan. So it never did what successful conquerers have had to do to.

That was good news and it was bad news.

I'll start with the bad news.

"The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service." (That's from here. More on that sort of thing here or, if you can't get through the paywall, here.)

It's a far cry from General Napier on sati: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours". But it's another way of making my point. The British in India were prepared to follow their customs to the point of killing people. That's conquest. The US were not.  

As I say, that was the bad news here. Leaving aside boys chained to beds, there seems to be an idea that the main purpose of the US presence in Afghanistan was to promote female education. I don't know about that, but it certainly seems to have been a purpose - and now things are looking bleak on that front too. Empires are not all bad.

But there is good news to America's lack of imperial ambitions, at least if you are running a US ally. There are several countries which have US troops stationed in them. What Afghanistan tells those countries - and has told them for some time - is that the US has no intention of staying in those countries against the settled will of the most vociferous locals. If the people who are often described as 'illiterate goatherds' can kick out the US military, then so can you. That's an encouraging message. If you're a US ally, you're where you were last year or 10 years ago: you've got a powerful friend - powerful, possessed of money and drones galore, but not omnicompetent - who does not want to occupy you: that's the best kind of massively more powerful ally. 

So the US' allies have no reason to see Afghanistan as bad news. No, if Afghanistan is to mean anything for the world, it will be because it has had an effect on domestic US politics. And I'm doubtful that it will. "Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan, according to Andrew Tyndall, editor of the authoritative Tyndall Report, which has monitored and coded the networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988." (Source.) It's really not a big deal. And the fact that it's not a big deal is itself a big deal: it's a sign, to the rest of the world, of quite how rich America is. This hugely wasteful war (vehicles kept running at all times, hamburgers flown in, Viagra for rapists and bribes for everyone) would have been a big deal for any other country in the world. And for the US, it was a smaller deal than Black Lives Matter.

This guy puts my point for me: "... in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?

If however the situation involving foreign realities can be grafted onto simplistic domestic narratives, in however fantastic a fashion, then that issue becomes a curious side show to the main American stage. That’s what’s happened to Israel, which now features as a talking point in that same progressive wing of the party. And if the situation can’t be mapped, such as Afghanistan or the recent protests in Cuba, it’s utterly ignored for being just completely beyond human comprehension or concern.

This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for. If you fight demons, they’re entirely demons of your own creation, whether Cambridge Analytica or QAnon or the ‘insurrection’ or supposed electoral fraud or any of a host of bogeymen, and you get to tweet #resist while not dangling from the side of an airplane or risking your life on a raft to escape. If you’re overwhelmed by what you see, even if you work at places called ‘the Institute for the Study of War’, you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images because reality is purely optional at this stage of the game.

Jennifer Cafarella@JennyCafarella

It is a very dark day in Afghanistan Take care of yourself. It might require avoiding the news Even that can be excruciating, I know. We can & should bear witness. But it does not require self harm. Triggering PTSD symptoms or new trauma does not help Afghans My DMs are open

August 12th 2021

83 Retweets440 Likes

" (My emphasis.)

Yup, reality is optional in the US. That's how powerful it still is. 

Maybe, eventually, reality will catch up with the US. One point I try to make in this blog is that the West, rather its educated, managerial, technocratic classes - love 'em or loathe 'em! - that we hear about so often, has not really come to grips with what happened in 2008-9: the financial crisis was the proof that a certain kind of globalised, finance-driven development was not the win-win for all sections of society that it had been promised to be; and the aftermath of the financial crisis, the fact that no one was punished for such a huge disaster, there was no regime change, no course correction, no reckoning proved that the governing classes did not care. At some point - surely! - that will matter. 

Maybe. But not any time soon, and not, I think, because of Afghanistan. 

The American fantasy novel of ideas

At the risk of massive over-simplification, the English children's fantasy novel tends to come in one of three forms, to which I propose to give the pompous titles of the Fantasy Heroic, the Fantasy Comic and the Fantasy Psychological. It is my thesis that we should be grateful to America for giving us a fourth form: the Fantasy Philosophical.

I'll start with the three characteristically English versions. First, in the Fantasy Heroic, the characters have fantastic powers or circumstances which are employed in a struggle worthy of their fantastic character, often to defeat evil and save the world. The Narnia and Harry Potter books are good examples of this, and I think Peter Pan fits here too, albeit a little unhappily. Insofar as The Lord of the Rings is a book for children, it belongs here, as does The Hobbit. And of course we have The Dark is Rising and any number of lower-budget offerings in a similar vein. There is often no shortage of ideas in a story of this kind but they tend to be implicit or allegorical rather than openly stated (it is famously possible for a child to read all of the Narnia books without even thinking about Christianity), and if one character does sit down to expound an idea to another then it will tend to be a purely moral one (e.g. standing up to our enemies takes courage but standing up to our friends takes more). Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's a little different from what we are coming to a little later.

Second, we have the Fantasy Comic. The Fantasy Comic takes characters with fantastic powers or circumstances and then delights in putting them incongrously into everyday life. Five Children and It is the classic example of this: children have magical powers at their disposal, but have to navigate a grumpy fairy with a prickly ego to get to them, and generally find that using those powers gets them into scrapes. Mary Poppins is another example: infinite power is employed in making the lives of an upper-middle class family slightly more comfortable. There is something of this, in mood at least, to The Sword in the Stone and The Wind in the Willows. (There is a Max Beerbohm short story featuring authors who have written A Faun in the Cotswolds and Ariel in Mayfair: one knows just what kinds of merry havoc these creatures wrought on the ordered lives of the good people of Edwardian England.) This kind of fantasy can be charming if it 'comes off' but can perhaps exemplify the kind of English lack of seriousness that so infuriates foreigners. At any rate, to the extent that it includes ideas, they are taken to be already in the minds of the educated reader and ripe for being played with; ideas are for amusement rather than anything to worry about.

Finally, we have the Fantasy Psychological. This involves characters in a world that works, if it works at all, on something akin to dream logic, or stories where it is not clear what is really going on, but the suggestion is that it is something to do with the darker reaches of the psyche. The Alice books belong here, as do Where The Wild Things Are and perhaps also The Cat in the Hat. Lear's nonsense - an overt turning against sense and logic - is a touchstone. (Peter Pan is not really a book of this kind, but the elements of it that disturb and delight are: a dog nanny, Pan's shadow, the clock ticking, the Lost Boys, never growing up.) Again, there are ideas in these books, but they are more psychological than philosophical, and they tend not to be openly stated. Lewis Carroll was a mathematical logician and perfectly capable of addressing philosophical ideas openly in a manner suitable to children (I recall once reading a cleverly done dialogue, perhaps between Zeno and his tortoise?, which I am sure was by him about the ever-increasing premises needed to establish the validity of modus ponens), but we see very little of that in Alice. 

So, those are our English approaches to fantasy. The Americans too have plenty to contribute to those approaches. A Wizard of Earthsea is the American Fantasy Heroic in book form (Le Guin is capable of philosophical stories - see Omelas - but Earthsea is not one of them), and American comic books and films are perfectly happy with that theme as well. The Fantasy Comic is well-supported by Edward Eager, and I have already mentioned a couple of American books in setting out the Fantasy Psychological above.

But American fantasy adds a distinctive further dimension. Let us take The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth, two well-established classics known also on this side of the Atlantic, to which I will add The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban and The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, neither of which I had heard of until very recently but each of which has its own following. These are all examples of the Fantasy Philosophical, that is to say, a fantasy novel in which more or less philosophical - and not merely moral - concepts are openly discussed. 

Let's start with Oz. This features characters who want a heart, a brain and courage. That is to say, the concepts are there in plain sight; there's no hinting, no allusions, no English skirting around the themes. Big Ideas with a capital B and a capital I, sitting right there on the page, with no escape for the child reading the story. And so the story goes until we reach the Wizard himself, the great man who is a humbug, the nothing behind the curtain - an openly philosophical invention. You can derive a merely moral lesson from the revelation of the Wizard of Oz, but there is much more to think about, to do with authority and knowledge and belief and politics and so on.

Tollbooth is perhaps the clearest example of all: a much-loved children's story which is about uniting Rhyme and Reason with the help of a Dodecahedron and other such characters (such as the shortest giant and tallest dwarf), and features an exploration of phrases such as "jumping to conclusions" and "eating one's words". It is all done in a light and comic fashion, but it is straightforwardly about mathematical and linguistic concepts. 

Mouse is a little different. For those of you who don't know it, it's a 'toys come to life and have adventures' kind of story, albeit of a superior kind. In it we find political thinking (one character explains what one's "territory" is: "It's where everything smells right. It's where you know the runways and hideouts, night or day. It's what you fought for, or what your father fought for, and you feel all safe and strong there. It's the place where, when you fight, you win"), a character who deals with Pure and Applied Thought, another who has proved that everywhere is the same, and our heroes have to look beyond infinity and beyond nothingness. As with Tollbooth, albeit with a more serious tone and, paradoxically, in perhaps a more playful way, all of this is made patent to the reader. And just as with Oz, the reader can't leave the concepts behind and 'just enjoy the story': the concepts are part of the story.

Finally, Unicorn. I should explain that everything I know about this book and film comes from this careful, intelligent and only intermittently silly video essay. The story, for those of you who don't know it, is a 'set in a magical mediaeval neverland' kind of fantasy involving witches, wizards and, as the title suggests, a unicorn. The concepts that are openly explored here concern, in particular, time, immortality and death. I'll give some examples:

- We have a couple of mortal baddies who seek immortality in different ways. One is a witch who has captured two immortal creatures, the eponymous unicorn and a harpy, and says this of the harpy: "oh, she'll kill me one day or another, but she will remember forever that I caught her, that I held her prisoner - so there's my immortality". The other is an sub-Robin Hood outlaw who is intent on capturing his name in ballads that he writes about himself: "One always hopes, of course, even now - to be collected, to be verified, annotated, to have variant versions, even to have one's authenticity doubted." (Ah, there's immortality - to have variant versions of oneself!) 

- The immortal unicorn at one point becomes a mortal woman and immediately feels herself dying - our essayist (at the link) is reminded of Heidegger and the confrontation with mortality. A wizard (who has had immortality thrust upon him) opines that beauty requires death, while the unicorn feels that nothing that dies can be beautiful. 

- At one point, a skeleton says this: "When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls." What is the child reading this to think about Time? Something, at least. The Big Idea is squarely stated and openly up for grabs.

My point is not to look at the quality of this philosophical thinking - although I would say that the examples I have given are all worth a thinking child's time and attention - but rather just to marvel that it is there, in such rich volume, in classic works of American children's literature from 1900 (Oz) to 1982 (the film of Unicorn), and I am sure beyond those dates in both directions too. This is quite different from the English tradition. Terry Pratchett became confident at throwing in a Big Idea from time to time but never, I think, quite as openly as the American tradition: his treatment of themes such as Death, 'headology', glamour and tradition is intelligent but has an English kind of plausible deniability ("I was only joking!") that the American books do not. I recall a character in one of the Narnia books saying, "in our world, stars are just balls of gas", to which the response was, "no, even in your world, that is only what they are made of", but dialogue of that kind is rare. Philip Pullman's books perhaps come closest, but I think even they prioritise plot, allegory and allusion over people worrying out loud about Big Ideas in the way the Americans do, and they are keen on hammering home moral lessons rather than, say, thoughts about infinity.

Why should this be? One might suggest that the greater earnestness or seriousness of the intelligent American writer inclines him against the slightness and knowingness of the Fantasy Comic and makes him more ready to deal with big questions head on. But I wouldn't put too much weight on that idea. The British sci-fi author - at least in his incarnation as Arthur C. Clarke - has been happy to put his Big Ideas face-up on the page, and I can't see why fantasy should be so very different; and JK Rowling (for one) is not lacking in seriousness or earnestness. "Seriousness" is the wrong word anyway: all of the four American books I have mentioned are openly comic or humorous to a greater or lesser extent. 

So I don't have an explanation. But, whatever the reason, it is, I think, very much to the benefit of children everywhere that the Americans plough (or plow) this furrow (or furrough). There are many things that should be kept out of children's reach, but not, I think, the biggest questions of philosophy.  

Black Lives Matter, therefore Christianity

Some people are Christians. Some aren't. Why?

I try to answer this answer at some length below the break, with especial reference to Black Lives Matter, but also touching on Dives, Elvis, elves, Russell's teapot and an ancient child's grave. 

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.)