[…] we return to the great question: what of social order? How, without the terrors of religion, can the many be kept from murdering and plundering the more fortunate?
The answer, says Epicurus, lies in friendship and in an understanding of natural justice. This is, he says, a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.
He says also:
There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.
We do not have any full explanation of this side of Epicureanism. But it seems that Epicurus believed a stable and just social order could be sustained by the self-interest of individuals. Let each person pursue his own happiness, only refraining from the lives and property of others, and a natural order of society would emerge — rather as the collision of atoms in the void had led to the emergence of a vast self-sustaining universe.
Certainly, we know that he recommended his followers to avoid politics. This did not mean withdrawal from the world. Bearing in mind the quantity of his own writings and the missionary zeal of the school he founded, he was as active in impressing his ideas on the world as Plato or Aristotle were.
According to Diogenes Laertius, the Epicurean
will take no part in politics…. But… he will not withdraw himself from life…. And be will take a suit into court…. He will have regard to his property and to the future. He will be fond of the country. He will be armed against fortune and will never give up a friend. He will pay just so much regard to his reputation as not to be looked down upon. He will take more delight than other men in public festivals. …. And he will make money, but only by his wisdom, if he should be in poverty, and he will pay court to a king, if need be. He will be grateful to anyone when he is corrected. He will found a school, but not in such a manner as to draw the crowd after him; and will give readings in public, but only by request. He will be a dogmatist but not a mere sceptic; and he will be like himself even when asleep. And he will on occasion die for a friend.
As said, we do not have much Epicurean writing on this point. As with the Benthamites, he does not seem to have found any imperative for these ethical teachings. We may ask, for example, what reason there is against my killing someone if I can thereby take possession of his property — or just enjoy the sensation of killing — and if there is no chance of my being caught. The only answers we have are:
Do nothing in your life that will cause you to fear if it is discovered by your neighbour.
And:
The just man is most free from disturbance, while the unjust is full of the utmost disturbance.
If these are attempts at answering the question, they are feeble attempts. That the unjust are invariably unhappy is plainly false. As for the threat of discovery, the opportunities for secret crime have always been everywhere.
Nor does Epicurus take issue with the greatest injustice of ancient society. He admitted slaves to his school. He encouraged kindness to slaves. But he does not seem ever to have questioned the morality of or the need for slavery.
But, these reservations being granted, what we seem to have in the complete system of Epicurus is something remarkably similar to modern classical liberalism. While respecting the equal rights of others, we should pursue our own happiness in life. We can do so sure that we exist in a universe governed by knowable and impersonal laws that are not hostile to the pursuit of such happiness.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 4, 2018
QotD: Epicureanism and the Social Contract
March 29, 2018
QotD: The decline of Epicureanism
The philosophy seems to have continued strong into about the 3rd century AD. Thereafter, it went into decline. By the middle of the 6th century, when the Emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in Athens and dispersed the teachers, Epicureanism appears to have been already dead.
The main traditions of thought during the last few centuries of the ancient world were turned away from the everyday world. There were the neoplationists, with their settled belief in a higher reality that could be approached through a combination of mathematics and magic. There were, of course, the Christians, for whom the world is simply a preparation for the better life that is to come.
As said, relating what people think to what is happening around them is not easy. But the last few centuries of the ancient world were ages of great uncertainty. There were epidemic diseases that swept away multitudes without warning and without apparent cause. There were barbarian raids and civil wars. There was catastrophically overextended government to grind the survivors into helplessness and poverty. In this sort of world, teachings of Epicurus about seeking happiness in this life may have lost their attraction.
In one of his more sensible comments on Epicurus, Plutarch writes:
As to the vulgar sort… when they lose their children, wives, or friends, they would rather have them be somewhere and still remain, though in misery, than that they should be quite destroyed, dissolved, and reduced to nothing. And they are pleased when they hear it said of a dying person, that he goes away or departs, and such other words as intimate death to be the soul’s remove and not destruction. …. …. And they are discomposed when they hear it said of any one, he is perished, or he is gone or he is no more…. And therefore it is very plain that with the belief of immortality they [the Epicureans] take away the sweetest and greatest hopes the vulgar sort have.
In a world where life is uncertain and often unpleasant, there will tend to be an emphasis on some happier supernatural future.
There may be nothing sinister in the loss of virtually the whole body of Epicurean writings. Perhaps they were destroyed by a triumphant Church that had room for Plato and Aristotle but none for a naturalist enemy of all that Christianity proclaimed. But there is no reason to suppose any deliberate act of destruction. Papyrus rolls were by their nature delicate things. They were also far more expensive and therefore scarce in number than modern books. In any European climate, a papyrus roll would last for about a century, and then the glue that held it together would perish. Without careful recopying, a work might easily be lost.
The last centuries of the ancient world were mostly ages of depression. There was a shortage of all the means that had so far kept libraries together. Such means as remained were naturally given to recopying works for which there was an active demand. That means Christian theology, those parts of the pagan philosophies that could be reconciled to Christianity, and the greatest products of the pagan high culture. Since, with the exception of Lucretius — whose work largely survived — the works of Epicurus and his followers were in a style remarkable only for its plainness, it is unreasonable to suppose that librarians, forced to choose what to copy and what to leave to die, would take up the 37 volumes of On Nature and not the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.
So far as I can tell, whatever works of Epicurus survived were not studied in the Byzantine Empire. In the West, all but his name and whatever is said about him in Cicero vanished for a thousand years.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
March 13, 2018
From slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb discusses the role of international affairs in reducing racial inequality in the United States from 1877 to 1981:
The year 1877 is significant in America history, as this was the year in which the Federal Government ceased to interfere in the affairs of its Southern States, and these States began to construct the system of white racial supremacy known as “Jim Crow.” It is also a useful starting point for charting the rise of America to world supremacy. In the years before 1914, the Americans regarded opposition to European colonial rule as a prime foreign policy objective. They resented British/Indian control of the far East and they were strongly opposed to any division of China between the European colonial powers. They preached an ’Open Door Policy’ for China in which none of the white powers would have political control.
Again, this concern for the independence and self-determination of others was inconsistent with their own internal policies. As put by Paul Gilroy in the introduction of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “the American civil war did not end in 1865.” Until the 1960s and even later blacks remained systematically at a legal and social and economic disadvantage in America. In most of the Southern States, blacks were not allowed to vote or to sit on juries, public and most private services were racially segregated, racial intermarriage was made illegal.
[…]
In the end America did not sign the treaty of Versailles and did not join the League of Nations. American domestic affairs remained insulated from foreign affairs. Wilson himself did much to keep them so. The early twentieth century saw a grown of racial consciousness among American blacks, and a number of charismatic leaders emerged to press the case for black equality. These included intellectual activist W. E. B. Du Bois, entrepreneur C. J. Walker, National Equal Rights League founder William Monroe Trotter, and activist Wells-Barnett, and Marcus Garvey, founder of The Universal Negro Improvement Association. These men wanted to attend and address the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Wilson ensured that they were kept out.
By the 1930s, we see a growing realisation of the conflict between foreign and domestic policy. Look, for example, at chapter 26 of Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird. It is the 1930s and a teacher in the protagonists’ school denounces Nazi mistreatment of the Jews in Germany. She seems completely unaware that the Nuremburg decrees may have compared rather well with the ‘Jim Crow’ system in which she lived.
[…]
What matters about the Cold war for America is that its race relations became a serious embarrassment to its foreign policy. In order to oppose Communism the Americans had to preach their own versions of human rights which included all the usual liberal freedoms – i.e. freedom of speech, freedom of association, equality before the law, and so forth. It also needed the cooperation of an increasing number of non-white post-colonial governments. At every opportunity the Soviets tried to embarrass the Americans by drawing attention to their internal race relations.
Take, for example, the memorandum written in June 1963 by Thomas Hughes, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research at the State Department. He summarises some of the main themes of Soviet broadcasts to the Third World: Capitalism provides a natural environment for racism, which will never end so long as the American system needs cheap labour; the federal government’s policy of limited intervention in Southern conflicts is tantamount to support of Southern racism; the United States cannot claim to be the leader of the free world while hypocritically refusing to support civil rights within its own borders.
Hughes adds that, most politically damaging, Soviet broadcasters were arguing that American domestic policy toward its black citizens was ‘indicative of its policy toward peoples of color throughout the world.’ Emerging African, Asian, and South American nations, in other words, should not count on Americans to support their independence.
The journalist Walter Lippmann had noted in 1957 that
the work of the American propagandist is not at present a happy one…. [Segregation] mocks us and haunts us whenever we become eloquent and indignant in the United Nations…The caste system in this country, particularly when as in Little Rock it is maintained by troops, is an enormous, indeed an almost insuperable, obstacle to our leadership in the cause of freedom and human equality.
We can write the history of the American civil rights movement purely in terms of domestic politics. We can for example write about the Brown decision and ’Massive Resistance’ and the crisis in Little Rock. Of course this is entirely legitimate. The struggle for racial equality has deep roots in American history and may well have triumphed even had there been no other countries in the world. However it does seem reasonable to see an international dimension in the rapid progress of racial equality after the 1940s.
March 2, 2018
Sean Gabb on the ever-more-likely “hard Brexit” option
Sean Gabb hasn’t read the full text of the draft treaty of withdrawal from the European Union, but does offer some general points that do not depend on the details in that document:
I wish the Referendum had not been called. Nobody in or near power had so much as the vaguest idea of how to leave the European Union. Nearly two years on, nobody still knows what to do or how to do it. The politicians are all incompetent or dishonest, or both. The politicians in charge called an election, and were so sure of winning it that they effectively lost it. The politicians most likely to replace them are probably more incompetent, and certainly more dishonest. The other European powers and the European powers have now had time to recover from their initial shock, and are behaving like that spurned and vindictive wife. Though I repeat that I have not read it, I have no doubt their draft treaty is the modern equivalent of the Versailles Diktat. They are pushing this on us because they want to deter any other member state from trying to leave. I also suspect they are pushing it because, for the past three centuries, they have been repeatedly stuffed by us, and they now want to do some stuffing of their own.
If we accept the draft treaty, or anything like it, we shall have exchanged an equal membership of the European Union for satellite status. We shall have limited control over our internal regulations. We shall have limited control over our borders. We shall have consented to a unification of Ireland on the most humiliating terms. If, unable to negotiate better terms, our leaders tell us that we should stay in after all, that will involve still more humiliation. What little authority we ever had to negotiate opt-outs from inconvenient regulations will have evaporated. We shall be forced to join the Euro and the Schengen Agreement. Any future British “No!” will be met with pitying smiles and firm insistence. I will say nothing about the prospects for civil disorder in this country.
On the bright side, the draft treaty – if as bad as I am told it is – makes everything much simpler that it was. The Tory ultras strike me as no less corrupt and dishonest than everyone else. I think little of the people concerned. But their plan, such as it is, has become the only plan on offer.
Whether she is profoundly stupid is beside the point. Our main problem with Theresa May is that she appears to be unable to make up her mind. Well, I think it was Abba Eban who said that, when everything else has been tried and seen to fail, people will often do the right thing. Here for what they are worth, are my proposals for Mrs May:
- Reject the draft treaty without further discussion;
- Propose a free trade treaty to cover goods and services, and call for a joint committee to examine how all present and future European regulations can be imposed and verified in this country for those things alone that are exported into the European Union;
- Tell the Irish that they can avoid a hard border with Ulster by joining us outside the European Union;
- Put up whatever cash may be needed in the short term to keep Ulster from economic collapse;
- Tell the Americans that, if they want any kind of future alliance, they should give us their full backing, and be prepared to make an emergency free trade agreement;
- Tell everyone to plan for an economic shock next April, and make collective preparations for dealing with it.
By this point, it seems it’d be a major concession on the part of the EU negotiators to agree not to hold the formal signing of the agreement in that railway carriage at Compiègne.
January 20, 2018
November 17, 2017
QotD: Karl Marx and relativism
The most notable philosopher in this tradition was, of course, Karl Marx. He argued that the values of any civilisation — prior, at least, to the socialist culmination — are determined by its mode of production. He says:
In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.
This is a radically subversive claim. It allows any institution, any custom, any set of beliefs — no matter how obviously right or true they might appear — to be dismissed as “ideology” or “false consciousness”. Let this claim be accepted, and our own claims about the naturalness of market behaviour falls to the ground.
With the remaining exception of North Korea and perhaps too of Cuba, the Marxist political experiments of the twentieth century have all long since collapsed, and, bearing in mind their known record of mass-murder and impoverishment, there are few who will admit to regretting their collapse. But Marxism as a critique of the existing order and as a theory of social change, remains alive and well in the universities. In its reformulation by Gramsci, as further developed by Althusser and Foucault among others, it may be called the dominant ideology of our age. Its hold on the English-speaking world has been noted by both conservative and libertarian writers, and is subject to an increasingly lively debate.
Sean Gabb, “Market Behaviour in the Ancient World: An Overview of the Debate”, 2008-05.
October 24, 2017
The many false faces of Aleister Crowley
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reviews a new collection of essays about Aleister Crowley:
Turning to practitioners of the occult, I see no evidence of special success. They do not live longer than the rest of us. However they begin, they do not stay better looking. Any success they have with money, or in bed, is better explained by the gullibility of their followers than by their own magical powers.
So it was with Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) — the “Great Beast 666,” or “the wickedest man alive.” He quickly ran through the fortune his parents had left him. He spent his last years in poverty. Long before he died, he had begun to resemble the mug shot of a child murderer. Whether his claims were simply a fraud on others, or a fraud on himself as well, I see no essential difference between him and the beggar woman who cursed me in the street. He had advantages over her of birth and education. But he was still a parasite on the credulity of others.
Nor can I see him as a thinker or writer of any real value. The book that I am reviewing does its best to claim otherwise. Its varied essays are all interesting and well-written. Anything by Keith Preston, who wrote the fourth essay, is worth reading. Mr Southgate has done a fine job on the editing and formatting. But I found myself looking up from every essay to think what a terrible waste of ability had gone into producing the book. Was Crowley a sort of national socialist, or a sort of libertarian? Was he a sex-obsessed libertine, or did he preach absolute self-control? I suspect all these questions have the same answer. The overall theme of the book is that he was a penetrating critic of “modernity,” and each of its writers — all, in my view, men of greater ability than Crowley — has done his best to reduce a corpus of self-serving nonsense to a coherent system of thought.
The truth, I think, is that, beyond a desire to impose on everyone about him, Crowley had no fixed ideas, but he was too bad a writer for this to be apparent. Take these examples of his prose:
We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter, and delicious languor, force and fire are of us…” [quoted, p.68]
The sexual act… is the agent which dissipates the fog of self for one ecstatic moment. It is the instinctive feeling that the physical spasm is symbolic of that miracle of the Mass, by which the material wafer… is transmuted into the substance of the body. [quoted, p.151]
In the second of these, he seems to show an influence of D.H. Lawrence — or of the sources that made Lawrence into another bad writer. In the first, he has certainly been reading too much Swinburne. I confess that I have not read anything by Crowley beyond the quotations in this book. Having seen these, though, I am not curious to look further. He was a nasty piece of work in his private life, and a victim of early twentieth century fashion in everything else.
October 20, 2017
October 5, 2017
QotD: Legalizing drugs
It is not the business of the State to tell adults what to do with themselves, or how they interact with other consenting adults. Where drugs are concerned, any disadvantages in leaving people alone are greatly outweighed by the costs of the War on Drugs, which has reduced large parts of the world to violent chaos, and corrupted every law enforcement agency involved in fighting it, and been made an excuse for the destruction of due process rights in England and America.
Sean Gabb, quoted in “Wayne John Sturgeon talks to Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance”, Sean Gabb, 2013-08-26.
September 19, 2017
In praise of ancient Greece
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb explains why we owe so much today to ancient and classical Greek culture:
The Greeks gave us virtually all our philosophy, and the foundation of all our sciences. Their historians were the finest. Their poetry was second only to that of Homer – and it was they who put together all that we have of Homer, and Homer was himself an early Greek. They gave us ideals of beauty, the fading of which has always been a warning sign of decadence; and they gave us the technical means of recording that beauty. They had no examples to imitate. They did everything entirely by themselves. In a world that had always been at the midnight point of barbarism and superstition, they went off like a flashbulb; and everything good in our own world is part of their afterglow. Every renaissance and enlightenment we have had since then has begun with a rediscovery of the Ancient Greeks.
For the avoidance of doubt, I will not say that the Greeks were perfect. Though remarkable human beings – though the most remarkable human beings – they were still human beings, with all the vices and other failings that come with this. But, if you commit your life to staring into that flood of intense light that was Greece, you will not have lived in vain. And, though I do not despise translations, and would never discourage someone from approaching the Greeks only through translation, I will add that the light is most intense when seen directly, through the medium in which the Greeks themselves thought and spoke and wrote.
There are many reasons for learning Greek. A full discussion of them would amount to an advertisement for my services, and would take longer than I have available for this speech. But I will mention three.
The first is that Greek is inherently a beautiful language, and worth studying for itself alone. There is certainly a thrill to speaking it. Take this line from Homer:
τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς
To him in answer spake the ever-resourceful OdysseusFor any number of reasons, my pronunciation is corrupt, and no Greek, ancient or modern, would think me other than a barbarian. But say these words, and you are making sounds that were first made when our own ancestors were tattooing their faces and smearing butter into their hair, before perhaps the building of Stonehenge, and when even Rome was no more than a collection of huts not far removed from the stone age.
The second main reason for learning Greek is that we know far less about the Greeks than we would like. So much has been carried away by the ravages of time. For the past six hundred years, a continuous line of scholars in Western Europe, and more recently in America, has laboured to gather and understand all that can be found about the Greeks. Every surviving Greek text has been pressed harder than olives for one of the supermarket chains to give up every possible meaning. Archaeology and all the natural sciences have been put to similar uses. In every century since the fourteenth, we have been able to say at its end that we knew more than at the beginning. But our knowledge remains imperfect. We look on the Greeks as we might on a landscape covered in mist. Here and there, the mist is absent or thinner, and we can be astonished by what we see; and we can hope to extrapolate from what we see to what remains covered.
If you come to the Greeks through translations, it is as if you are looking at that misty landscape though a sheet of coloured glass. Our word translate in Latin, and by extension in French, is traduco. This can mean translate. It can also mean dishonour, degrade or betray. Most translations, whether deliberately or by accident, do all these things to their original. Until very recently, English translators of the classics would labour to conceal the sexual tastes of the Ancients. Many translators labour still, though now to conceal the ancient taste for mood-altering substances. Even otherwise, a translation will not carry over the whole of the original meaning, but will impose on a reader the translator’s view of its meaning. Compare, if you like, my translation of Thucydides with other translations. The basic idea is the same: the choice of words and the balance and even the structure of the statement are different.
This brings me to my third main reason – and here I turn to Latin. If you take individual stories from Homer and put them into translation, they can sometimes work almost as well as they do in Greek. The story of Odysseus in the Cave of Polyphemus is wonderful in itself. So too the story of how Achilles tied the dead body of Hector to his chariot and dragged it about the walls of Troy, and how Priam came out to buy back the body. These stories thrilled me as a child, or moved me to tears. So they can in in any good retelling.
If we turn, however, to Vergil, any translation seems to involve a perceptible loss of impact. Last Easter, I taught some revision courses for A Level Classical Civilisation. One of the modules I covered was Vergil’s The Aeneid in several good English translations. Except for John Dryden’s version, this was my first experience of Vergil in translation. I have said that the translations used were good. They were made by men whose Latin was far better than mine. Compared with the original, however, they were disappointingly flat. Again and again, I would skim the text, looking for the equivalent of some line or phrase that had stamped itself into my memory. Again and again, I was disappointed by the mediocrity of what I made the students read aloud to me.
August 15, 2017
QotD: Platonism versus Epicureanism
It is all this that made Epicurus and his philosophy so scandalous in the ancient world and beyond. Plato never did get to create his perfect society. But his followers did manage to establish variants of Platonism as the dominant philosophy of later antiquity. And all the other main schools of philosophy were agreed that the world should be ruled by intellectuals. These should tell the civil authorities how to govern. They should provide the moral and spiritual justification for the rule of absolute and unaccountable systems of government — systems of which the Roman imperial system was only the most developed. They should have positions of honour within these systems.
Epicureanism was a standing challenge to these pretensions. We have no precise evidence for the spread of Epicureanism in the ancient world. But it does seem to have spread very widely. Why else should Cicero, Plutarch and many of the Christian Fathers have given so much effort to sustained attacks on it? Why else, in spite of his emphatic remarks on the nature of happiness, was Epicurus, even in his own lifetime, subjected to the most outrageous accusations?
We have one statement from Cicero, that Epicureanism in his own day was one of the dominant schools of philosophy in Italy. So far, he says, Greek philosophy had been available only in the original language. But writers such as Amafinius had translated several Epicurean works — on the publishing of whose writings the people were moved, and enlisted themselves chiefly under this sect, either because the doctrine was more easily understood, or because they were invited thereto by the pleasing thoughts of amusement, or that, because there was nothing better, they laid hold of what was offered them.
There is no doubt that it influenced the classical literature of Rome. Of course, there is the great poem by Lucretius. But there is also Catullus and Horace and even Virgil. Without citing them, their works are imbued with an Epicurean outlook on life, either directly from Epicurus or indirectly from Lucretius.
Another indication of popularity is that once converted to Epicureanism, people hardly ever switched to another philosophy. The philosopher Arcesilaus testifies to this fact even as he tries to explain it:
You can turn a man into a eunuch, but you can’t turn a eunuch into a man.
Then there is the curious testimony of the Jews. During the three centuries around the birth of Christ, the main everyday language of many Jewish communities was Greek. The Gospels and Letters of Saint Paul were all directed at mainly Jewish audiences and are in Greek. One of the most important philosophers of the age, Philo of Alexandria, was a Jew. Many Jews took on Greek ways. Many, no doubt, stopped being Jews and made themselves into Greeks. The condemnation of these Hellenised Jews is Apikorsim, which may easily be taken as a Semitic version of Epicurean. The term survives in Jewish theological writing. According to one Internet source, Apikorsim are what Chasidim refer to as Jewish Goyim, or secular Jews. They seem to be the worst opposition for Hasidic Jewry.
A term of abuse so loaded with contempt is unlikely to have been taken from the doctrines of an insignificant philosophical tradition among ordinary people of the age. It is reasonable to suppose that many lapsed Jews became Epicureans. If so, Epicureanism must already have had large numbers of adherents among at least the semi-educated classes.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
June 27, 2017
Setting the wrong tone
Brendan O’Neill on the way Corbyn’s supporters seem to be harking back to Stalinist rhetoric (and belief):
I’m starting to feel a little disturbed by the Stalinist streak in the Corbynista movement. The anti-democratic sense of entitlement behind the cry of “Jeremy Corbyn is the Prime Minister”; the cult of personality growing around Corbyn, which emphasises the man and his goodness far more than his policies; the censorious branding of anyone who doesn’t have the correct Corbynista outlook as “Tory” or “far right”, which comes straight from the Stalinist handbook of denouncing everyone from Trotskyists in the Spanish Civil War to the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 as “fascists”; the culture war (cultural revolution?) against those generations that don’t share the worldview of the caring, meme-making, Jez-loving Glasto set…. the largely youthful bourgeoisie that make up the backbone of the Corbynista campaign look set to have a quite chilling, backward impact on political debate and public life, I think.
On the other hand, Dr. Sean Gabb seems to be softening in his attitude to Corbyn, if only due to rising disgust with Theresa May and her “conservative” government:
I’ve been thinking about Jeremy Corbyn. Is he really so awful as we are told? In particular, is he worse on things like immigration and political correctness than the Fake Conservatives have been in practice? They have kept the borders open. They haven’t shut down a single Cultural Marxist project.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not a socialist. However, the Conservatives have been in power for years now, and have hardly shown themselves to be friends of anything remotely describable as free enterprise. Privatisation and outsourcing have been a gigantic scam on ordinary people. Vast amounts of the taxpayers’ money are being poured into the hands of crony capitalists.
He is also against dropping bombs all over the Middle East, and is against a renewed Cold War with Russia.
Would be abolish a single civil liberty we currently enjoy? Would he be any worse than the present lot at negotiating our exit from the European Union?
If there were an election tomorrow, I’d have great trouble actually voting Labour. At the same time, I don’t feel I’d regard a Corbyn Government with the same visceral loathing I felt of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Is my brain softening with age? Or are my eyes beginning to open?
I look forward to enlightenment.
May 28, 2017
Britain’s general election – “Except for Europe, the contest is between an authoritarian hag and a Fenian scumbag”
Sean Gabb is holding his nose and voting Tory this time around, but he’s not happy about it:
For the avoidance of doubt, I still intend to vote Conservative in this dreadful election. And, if Labour seems to be catching up in the opinion polls, so, I suspect, will enough people to give the Conservatives a decent majority. The general election is a rerun of last year’s Referendum. There is no other consideration that ought to sway anyone who is looking beyond our present circumstances. We vote Conservative. We leave the European Union. We hope and work for a realignment in British politics. Except for this, however, I would be dithering between another vote for UKIP and a spoiled ballot. Except for Europe, the contest is between an authoritarian hag and a Fenian scumbag.
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have made their responses to the Manchester Bombings. According to the BBC,
Theresa May has urged world leaders to do more to combat online extremism, saying the fight against so-called Islamic State is “moving from the battlefield to the internet.”
What she has in mind is outlined in the Conservative Manifesto:
[W]e will establish a regulatory framework in law to underpin our digital charter and to ensure that digital companies, social media platforms and content providers abide by these principles. We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law. We will also create a power in law for government to introduce an industry-wide levy from social media companies and communication service providers to support awareness and preventative activity to counter internet harms, just as is already the case with the gambling industry.
If this hardly needs translating into Plain English, I will make the effort. The Conservatives are proposing to censor the Internet. Anyone who, in this country, publishes opinions or alleged facts the authorities dislike will be prosecuted. If these are published abroad, access to the relevant websites will be blocked. Internet companies will be taxed to pay for a Ministry of Propaganda to go beyond anything now provided by the BBC.
We are supposed to think the main targets of censorship will be the radical Moslems. I have no doubt some effort will be made to shut them up. The main targets, however, will be on the nationalist right. These are the ones who will be harried and prosecuted and generally threatened into silence. The only person so far to have lost a job on account of the bombings is the LBC presenter Katie Hopkins. She made a sharp comment on air about the Moslems, and was out. Other than that, we have had a continual spray of propaganda about the Religion of Peace, and how its core texts have nothing to do with suicide bombings or mass-rape or disorder.
In Britain, in Europe, in America, there are powerful interests that are itching to censor the Internet. It is the Internet that has made us cynical. It is the Internet that is giving us the probable truth. It is because of the Internet that the authorities are being held to account. Never let a good atrocity go to waste. Get the people ready for censorship while the bodies are still being reassembled.
May 1, 2017
“We can leave aside the idea of a libertarian revival. No one in or near government wants less control by the State”
Sean Gabb reflects on the coming British general election (where he’s decided to hold his nose and vote Conservative, despite his strong distaste for Theresa May’s governing style and the party itself):
… we are entering an age of rapid ideological change. Questions of whether we should have identity cards, or if the authorities should be able to censor the media, are becoming less important than the questions of who makes these decisions, and how they are made. There is not – and probably, in my lifetime, never has been – a libertarian option in British politics. The choice has always been so far which elements of a broadly leftist-authoritarian agenda should be pushed hardest. The choice now is between a Conservative Government that has no electoral interest in leftism, and limited inclination to uphold its hegemony, and various parties that will try to keep that hegemony going till it fully shrivels away. The Conservative Party is an organisation of frauds and liars. Its directors are in the pocket of any interest group with money to spend. Though split on exactly what it believes, however, Labour is a party of true believers. The Conservatives will do evil by inertia, Labour by choice. Without hope of immediate improvement, I will vote Conservative.
Give her a decent majority, and Theresa May will take us out of the European Union on acceptable terms. These terms will be available almost for the asking. The European Union is little more than the agent of twenty seven governments, all with conflicting interests. The British Government will have a fresh mandate to act on behalf of a unitary state. Mrs May is no fool, and she must understand that her hold on power and her place in the history books are both contingent on how she manages our disengagement. Her lack of principle is beside the point – or may be an advantage.
And then?
We can leave aside the idea of a libertarian revival. No one in or near government wants less control by the State. Hardly any of the electors want it. This is probably for the best. I have been an insider on the British free market movement for about forty years. Those who run it are willing to nod approvingly whenever freedom of speech is mentioned, or due process of law. The mainstream utopia, though, involves full speed ahead for the City banking casinos, and an immigration policy that will stuff the rest of us into sixty-storey tower blocks of bedsitting rooms. What we can more likely expect – and hope for – is what I will delicately call a revival of national identity. This will eventually involve some regard for historic liberties. It will also involve a degree of directed reindustrialisation, and even a pretty generous welfare system.
October 16, 2016
QotD: Epicurean physics
It would be easy to diverge from this general overview into a detailed examination of the physics. This is because Epicurus seems to have been largely right. We now believe, as he did, that the universe is made of atoms, and if we do not now talk about motion, we do talk about energy and force. His physics are an astonishing achievement.
Of course, he was often wrong. He denigrated mathematics. He seems to have believed that the sun and moon were about the same size as they appear to us. Then there is an apparent defect in his conception of the atomic movements. Does the universe exist by accident? Or are their laws of nature beyond the existence and movement of the atoms? The first is not impossible. An infinite number of atoms in an infinite void over infinite time will, every so often, come together in an apparently stable universe. They may also hold together, moving in clusters in ways that suggest regularity. But this chance combination might be dissolved at any moment — though, given every sort of infinity, some of these universes will continue for long periods.
If Epicurus had this first in view, what point in trying to explain present phenomena in terms of cause and effect? Causality only makes sense on the assumption that the future will be like the past. If he had the second in mind, it is worth asking what he thought to he nature of these laws? Might they not, for example, have had an Author? Since Newton, we have contented ourselves with trying to uncover regularities of motion and not going beyond these. But the Greeks had a much stronger teleological sense.
Perhaps these matters were not discussed. Perhaps they were discussed, but we have no record of them in the surviving discussions. Or perhaps they have survived, but I have overlooked them. But it does seem to me that Epicurean physics do not fully discuss the nature of the laws that they assume.
On the other hand, let me quote two passages from his surviving writings:
Moreover, there is an infinite number of worlds, some like this world, others unlike it. For the atoms being infinite in number… are borne ever further in their course. For the atoms out of which a world might arise, or by which a world might arise, or by which a world might be formed, have not all be expended on one world or a finite number of worlds, whether like or unlike this one. Hence there will be nothing to hinder and infinity of worlds….
And further, we must not suppose that the worlds have necessarily one and the same shape. For nobody can prove that in one sort of world there might not be contained, whereas in another sort of world there could not possibly be, the seeds out of which animals and plants arise and the rest of the things we see.
What we have here is the admission that there may, in the infinite universe, be other worlds like our own, and these may contain sentient beings like ourselves. And there may be worlds inconceivably unlike our own. And there is the claim that living beings arise and develop according to natural laws. Epicurus would not have been surprised either by modern physics or by Darwinism. […]
However, while the similarities between Epicurean physics and modern science are striking, there is one profound difference. For us, the purpose of science is to give us an understanding of the world that brings with it the ability to control the world and remake it for our own convenience. This is our desire, and this has been our achievement because we have fully developed methods of observation and experiment. The Greeks had limited means of observation — no microscopes or telescopes, nor even accurate clocks. Nor had they much conception of experiment.
Moreover, scientific progress was neither conceived by Epicurus nor regarded as desirable. He says very emphatically:
If we had never been troubled by celestial and atmospheric phenomena, nor by fears about death, nor by our ignorance of the limits of pains and desires, we should have had no need of natural science.
He says again:
…[R]emember that, like everything else, knowledge of celestial phenomena, whether taken along with other things or in isolation, has no other end in view than peace of mind and firm convictions.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Englightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
