Archives: September 2005

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There Gloom the Dark Broad Seas

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

This is the first I’ve heard of it, but apparently some archaeologists believe they’ve found the tomb of Odysseus. (Conical hat tip to LRC.)

From the information in the article it’s not clear to me what warrants their confidence that this is his tomb; but it’s a story worth keeping an eye on.

No Proof Against the Wind

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Did Hippasus Die For Nothing?

Two and a half millennia after Pythagoras, someone has finally gotten those pesky irrational numbers out of trigonometry.

Much nervousness is no doubt ensuing in the oxen community.

Floodgates of Statism

Today is the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (See my first, second, and third anniversary messages.) It arrives in the middle of a remarkably similar crisis, the New Orleans flood. Both disasters were treated by our rulers as unexpected bolts from the blue, when in fact the relevant threats were well-known and long-predicted. Indeed, in both cases government policy (military interventionism in one case, the Army Corps of Engineers in another) actually helped to create the problem in the first place. And in both cases the government’s response was initial chaotic confusion followed by massive assaults on civil liberties.

In the case of the flood the state’s response has been robbery (not just illegal looting, in which police participated, but the “legal” confiscation and “commandeering” first of supplies and vehicles, then of housing and means of self-defense) as well as kidnapping (forced evacuations and the like) directed against innocent civilians.

When I see the flood victims on tv being shoved around by authorities, stuffed into or out of superdomes and buses, pulled unwillingly out of their homes, left stranded on bridges, etc., etc., I’m reminded of Adam Smith’s description of the “man of system,” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” When I read reports of private truckloads of food, water, and fuel being turned away from New Orleans by both federal and local officials (all of whom should face criminal charges for their actions), I’m reminded of “all the presidents of the kingdom, the governors, and the princes, the counsellors, and the captains,” who

consulted together to establish a royal statute, and to make a firm decree, that whosoever shall ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days, save of thee, O king, he shall be cast into the den of lions. (Daniel 6:7.)

Failed Hurricane Response Is an Opportunity for Libertarians
Guest Blog by Phil Jacobson

The ongoing disaster to the US Gulf coast will have serious consequences for US politics. Libertarians will have a rare opportunity to exploit the policy failures of current and past regimes. But we may not be well prepared to take full advantage, by offering well-considered alternatives.

Over a span of decades, the political pendulum in the USA tends to swing back and forth between “progressive” and “conservative” forces (I put these terms in quotes because actual regimes, while always claiming to follow some variety of one or the other of these ideologies, are in fact based on opportunism – though they typically get knee-jerk support from true adherents). Whenever one side gains dominance, it quickly becomes overconfident, sloppy and corrupt. At some point an event triggers public recognition of this fact and the dominant side loses the support of the most talented “moderates.” This last group is composed of persons from a variety of backgrounds and interests, who do not truly like either “left” or “right,” but who reluctantly endorse whoever is perceived as the lesser evil – as a matter of practicality, to establish stability. If the dominant group’s corruption is sufficiently exposed, the “moderate” group shifts its support away from them. The non-dominant (yet still widely accepted) side exploits this shift until it becomes dominant and establishes a new regime (not a new system, just a relatively new variety of the old one). Then it begins to make the same mistake of overconfidence, and the cycle continues.

We are now on the verge of the beginning of a switch in dominance.

The “conservatives,” as currently represented by the Bush administration and its allies, have overplayed their hand. After 911, the Bush regime rallied the public around its “War on Terrorism” which became the organizing principle for most resources. The primary investment of an extremely high public trust (sometimes called “political capital”) was into two arenas, the Iraq War, and the Department of Homeland Security. Other, more conventionally conservative issues have been pursued, such as efforts to translate religiously based morality into law, and selected tax cuts. But much more money has been redirected to the Iraq War than to any other purpose, and the biggest domestic shift is the emphasis on internal security. Now these two are under severe criticism.

The public has lost considerable confidence in the goals and methods associated with the Iraq War. However that is well documented. I will not review it here.

Criticism of various in-country “anti-terrorist” policies of the Bush regime have been serious from the beginning. The Patriot Act and associated decisions assaulted the very liberties they were advertised to be protecting, via new powers granted to prosecutors, police, and detention facility operators – as is also well known. Less well known is are the clumsy efforts to “consolidate” government resources under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Of particular interest to the current disaster is that, in additional to purely “security” oriented decisions, there was a decision to put the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) within DHS. Now disaster relief planning and response is mixed with “anti-terrorist” efforts. As criticism of the Bush administration’s response to the recent hurricane mounts, a condition is forming where both its domestic and foreign policies are simultaneously in disrepute. Thus major public discontent can (and will) be drawn to the “Bush system” rather than just isolated “mistakes” found in parts of it. Much of the discontent will be purely emotional, but it will fuel a hunger for regime change at home.

Government reactions to Hurricane Katrina are being criticized by everyone on the political spectrum. For the most part, however, these criticisms are directed at the particular people in power, or the Bush team’s particular approach to solving problems with government power. The assumption that government could have and should have been the solution to the disaster is still rarely questioned. This assumption will be to the advantage of those jockeying for leadership of the “progressive” community, who will use it to argue for more government – under their control. Given the normal pendulum swing, they will ride this argument into positions of power which they will proceed to abuse until the public gets tired of them – a process which would normally take a couple of decades.

Frankly, it is unlikely that libertarians will be able to alter the pendulum swing this time. The “progressives” will likely get another turn at bat. But there is nevertheless an opportunity right now. Even though the pendulum tends only to favor “left” or “right” to take full power, the process of regime change is not instantaneous. For a while, perhaps measured only in months, we will experience a period where relatively “innovative” ideas are given more consideration. Critical thinking will not be required to have a clear “leftist” or “rightist” orientation to be credible. Historically, such a period functions to allow the incoming regime to juggle its internal alliance and resolve the question of which exact flavor of statism it will adopt. But it also allows for very different arguments, which will likely not be reviewed by history books, but which will nevertheless be heard and remembered by some of the “moderates.” At these times “fringe” philosophies (as libertarianism is viewed to be) have their best chance for growth – not dominance, but significant growth nevertheless.

There is some libertarian effort to take advantage of our “interesting time” and the opportunity it affords. A fairly good one was recently written by Lew Rockwell of the Von Mises Institute, entitled “The State and the Flood.” It was placed on-line at:

           http://www.mises.org/story/1902

However, while Mr. Rockwell does an excellent job of pointing to how government intervention has contributed to the disaster, actually setting the stage for it, he provides his readers with little in the way of detailed libertarian alternatives. He says:

“Mother Nature can be cruel, but even at her worst, she is no match for government. It was the glorified public sector, the one we are always told is protecting us, that is responsible for this. And though our public servants and a sycophantic media will do their darn best to present this calamity as an act of nature, it was not and is not. Katrina came and went with far less damage than anyone expected. It was the failure of the public infrastructure and the response to it that brought down civilization.”

“It is critically important that the management of the whole of the nation’s infrastructure be turned over to private management and ownership. Only in private hands can there be a possibility of a match between expenditure and performance, between risk and responsibility, between the job that needs to be done and the means to accomplish it.”

Isabel Paterson Rides Again

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’m excited to learn that Isabel Paterson’s 1933 novel Never Ask the End has recently been republished.

Paterson is one of the crucial figures in 20th-century libertarianism (see her fascinating political treatise God of the Machine, Stephen Cox’s excellent bio The Woman and the Dynamo, and various informational articles here, here, here, here, and here), but there’s nothing especially libertarian about this novel. While libertarian themes sometimes surface in her novels, Paterson wasn’t a “political novelist”; although she was Ayn Rand’s chief mentor, her novels have more in common with, say, To the Lighthouse than with Atlas Shrugged.

What’s important is that Paterson was a good novelist, one whose work deserves to be rescued from obscurity. Never Ask the End, the gracious and haunting semi-autobiographical story of the entangled fates of three American expatriates in interwar Europe, is one of her best. (How does it end? Never ask.)

Here’s hoping that more Paterson reprintings will follow!

Hurricane W

Conical hat tip to Reed Richter:

All This And Much Much Moore

Thanks to Charles Johnson (though he says I’m partly to blame), G. E. Moore’s two great works of moral philosophy – his 1903 Principia Ethica and his 1912 Ethics – are now online at Charles’ Fair Use Repository.

I have many disagreements with Moore on ethics: he’s too consequentialist; and although he’s on to something with his Open Question Test, I think he’s wrong about what. (For one thing I think he confuses the correct point that no term can have the same sense as “goodness” if it is purely descriptive rather than action-guiding, with the incorrect point that no term can have the same reference as “goodness” unless it has the same sense.) Plus, like virtually everyone, he gets into a muddle about Herbert Spencer. (Moore regards Spencer as wavering as to whether pleasure or evolutionary fitness is the more fundamental moral principle. I think Spencer is very clear on this: pleasure is fundamental. Hence Spencer’s explicit insistence that “the survival of the fittest is often not the survival of the best.” Just as, for Kant, space is the “necessary form of intellectual intuition,” so, for Spencer, pleasure is the “necessary form of moral intuition” – a way of putting it that I think makes Moore’s charge of a naturalistic fallacy rather miss its mark. The only reason that pleasure and evolutionary fitness tend to track each other, and may be expected to do so still further in the future, is that our capacities for pleasure are themselves the result of past and ongoing evolutionary adaptation. Hence Spencer would never have been tempted to define “better” as “more evolved.”)

Nevertheless Moore’s ethical works are masterpieces of careful and insightful analysis, and I highly recommend them to anyone who wants to think clearly about these issues. (The usual dismissal of Moore in introductory ethics classes as a silly intuitionist is based on a serious misunderstanding of what his “intuitionism” amounts to; in this regard he is nearly as sinned against as Spencer.)

Browncoat Alert

Serenity has a new flash site. I actually find this sort of intrusively interactive site rather annoying – I keep wanting to yell “shut up and hold still already!” – but it does have lots of new screen shots and audio clips.

By the way, if you weren’t aware that there are Serenity comic books, hey, there are Serenity comic books.

In completely unrelated news, some useful thoughts today on the tragic New Orleans flooding from Lew Rockwell, Jesse Walker, and Mark Thornton.

A Moment of Silence

And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered ....

Herbert Spencer: Big in Japan

[cross-posted on Liberty & Power]

In a comment on my recent post on Spencer, Sudha Shenoy quotes from Spencer’s 1892 correspondence with Japanese official Kaneko Kentaro (excerpted by Lafcadio Hearn in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation), advising the Japanese government to forbid foreigners to buy land, to enter certain professions, or – lest “bad hybrids” ensue – to intermarry with Japanese. Shenoy asks: “was Spencer a racist, as we now understand the term?”

Well, yes – like most of his contemporaries Spencer had some racist assumptions. But there’s less racism here than meets the eye. I have just placed Spencer’s correspondence with Kaneko, warts and all, online so that readers may judge for themselves.

Let’s take the economic prohibitions and the marriage prohibitions separately. The economic prohibitions are clearly not racially motivated; Spencer is advising Japan not to allow Europeans to buy land or enter certain professions, and he presumably has no racial prejuice against Europeans. His motivation is rather to protect Japan from Western imperialism:

Respecting the further questions you ask, let me, in the first place, answer generally that the Japanese policy should, I think, be that of keeping Americans and Europeans as much as possible at arm’s length. In presence of the more powerful races your position is one of chronic danger, and you should take every precaution to give as little foothold as possible to foreigners. ... If you wish to see what is likely to happen [otherwise], study the history of India. Once let one of the more powerful races gain a point d’appui and there will inevitably in course of time grow up an aggressive policy which will lead to collisions with the Japanese; these collisions will be represented as attacks by the Japanese which must be avenged; forces will be sent from America or Europe, as the case may be; a portion of territory will be seized and required to be made over as a foreign settlement; and from this there will grow eventually subjugation of the entire Japanese Empire. I believe that you will have great difficulty in avoiding this fate in any case, but you will make the process easy if you allow any privileges to foreigners beyond those which I have indicated.

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine [of liberty] is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.

There is indeed the excuse that to some extent among ourselves, and to a much larger extent among Continental peoples, the militant life, potential when not actual, still forms so considerable, and in many cases so great, a part of the social life as to render these traditional doctrines appropriate.

Compromise between old and new, which has perpetually to be made in practice, has to be made also in theory; for this must, on the average, conform itself to practice. It is therefore out of the question that there can be generally entertained the belief that governmental action should be subject to certain imperative restraints. The doctrine that there is a limited sphere within which only state control may rightly be exercised, is a doctrine natural to the peaceful and industrial type of society when fully developed; and is not natural either to the militant type or to types transitional between militancy and industrialism.

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