Two recent cases Down Under show how dangerous
Twittermobs can be.
By BRENDAN O’NEILL
One of the curious things about the
twenty-first-century West is that it feels deeply censorious even though,
historically speaking, there isn’t a huge amount of state censorship. Yes, many
Western societies have anti-‘hate speech’ laws, debate-choking defamation
statutes, and a host of methods for regulating the raucous press, all of which
limit how daring or just downright offensive we can be. But we don’t exactly
live under nightmarish Orwellian regimes that pass laws explicitly designed to
silence political opinions, or to punish anti-Christ iconoclasm, or to
criminalise people found in possession of indecent novels or art. How do we
explain the existence of an almost unprecedented culture of censoriousness in
the absence of too much old-style state censorship?
It’s because censorship has been outsourced to the
mob. Censorship is alive and well; it’s just that today it is enforced, not so
much by brute law and the copper’s boot, but by mobs of self-styled guardians
of acceptable thought.
The illiberal job that was once done by the state and
its offshoots - the policing of thought and the punishment of outré speech - is
now increasingly done by informal intolerant networks. Outsourcing has been all
the rage among Western states in recent years. They’ve outsourced
responsibility for aspects of policing, for the guarding of prisoners, even for
the fighting of wars, as we saw with the use of mercenary outfits in the West’s
conquering of Iraq. Now, the moral authority to decree what can and can’t be
uttered in the public sphere has been outsourced, too, passed from the
government to moral lynch mobs, noisy cliques of non-state censors. The
relatively small amount of explicit state censorship today shouldn’t be taken
as a sign that we live in a more free society, but rather speaks to something
quite terrifying - that the state doesn’t really need to enact laws that police
our words at a time when there are so many mobs willing to do that dirty work
on its behalf.
In Australia over the past week, there have been two
striking examples of outsourced censoriousness, which reveal how this new
phenomenon works and how damaging it can be.
In the first case, a Georgian opera singer, Tamar
Iveri, was hounded out of Opera Australia (OA) after it was revealed she once
made homophobic comments on her Facebook page. Ms Iveri had been due to perform
in OA’s production ofOtello,
which opens in Sydney next month. But then someone exposed that, a year ago,
she had said on FB that she was glad Georgian protesters had spat on Gay Pride
marchers in Tbilisi, and had asked the Georgian president not to let into
Georgia what she called the ‘West’s faecal masses’ - that is, homosexuals. Oz’s
left-leaners, small-L liberals and artsworld inhabitants decided that such a
person was not fit to perform in Australia, and so they used their considerable
influence - their newspaper columns, their social-networking pages, the
financial leverage of their patronage of the arts, which they made clear could
be withdrawn - to put pressure on OA to drop Ms Iveri. They won. Ms Iveri was
cast out, dumped by OA on the basis that her views were ‘unconscionable’. And
thus was Australian opera made morally pure once more.
The idea that the charging
of interest is unethical and should be banned has a long tradition in the
history of human civilisation. It seems to have played a role at some point in
all the major religions, certainly in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and it
is today promoted most strongly by advocates of Islamic banking.
As an economist I cannot
(and should not) comment on matters of religion. Religion and economics deal
with completely different aspects of human existence. Religion is about
‘ultimate ends’ and ‘personal values’. Economics does not deal with ends but
with means. Economics does not tell anybody what his or her values should be.
Contrary to what is frequently claimed – usually by those who do not understand
economics – economics does not tell you that you should strive for more
material goods and more services at your disposal.
But it so happens that we
live in a world in which most people have personal aims or goals that involve
having at least a certain material wealth, and in which most people prefer the
possession of more material goods to less material goods; and the science of
economics – for economics is a science, and in fact an objective,wertfreie(value-free) science – can then
explain why people have a better chance of achieving these (material) aims if
they use such social institutions as the division of labor, private property,
trade, money, and many others. Additionally, the science of economics can show
how these social institutions work, demonstrate the laws and regularities
inherent in them, and can develop rules for their most appropriate use.
Economics is purely about the means of social cooperation for the attainment of
material goals. It never concerns itself with ultimate ends.
If most of the population
became Buddhist monks tomorrow and would lose any interest in accumulating
material wealth, would happily withdraw into monasteries and dedicate
themselves to meditation, none of the principles and laws of economics would
have suddenly become less true or invalid. The law of comparative advantage as
articulated by David Ricardo would be as true on that day as on any other. The
laws of economics would still apply just as the laws of gravity would. Of
course, the interest in economic studies would probably diminish rapidly but
that is all. Or, not quite all: Society would also be rapidly impoverished in
material terms – even to the point of mass starvation –, and this the economist
can ascertain with certainty, although nothing can be said about any
compensating gains in spiritual wealth, of course.
If you believe that your
God demands that if you lend money you should not charge interest, than there
is nothing that I, as an economist, can say to you – other than, maybe, give me
a call whenever you have some extra cash. The point at which I can – and should
– comment is when you were to claim in addition that the observance of this
rule would lead to a more stable and better functioning economy, that the
non-charging of interest would not diminish society’s wealth but even increase
it, or that the resulting economic structure would at least conform better to
some generally accepted notion of fairness. Here we have reached a point where
debate has become possible, not because I, as an economist, have intruded onto
the religious ground of values and ultimate ends but because the advocate of
religion has intruded onto the economists’ ground of the study of the laws for
wealth creation.
‘Positive Money’ and the fallacy of the need
for a state money producer
By Detlev Schlichter
I am usually inclined to encourage the inquiry of the fundamental aspects
of money and banking. This is because I tend to believe that only by going back
to first principles is it possible to cut through the thicket of widely
accepted but deeply flawed theories that dominate the current debate in
mainstream media, politics and the financial industry. From my own experience
in financial markets I can appreciate how convenient and tempting it is in a
business context, where quick and easy communication is of the essence, to
adopt a certain, widely shared set of paradigms, regardless of how flimsy their
theoretical foundations. Fund managers, traders and financial journalists live
in the immediate present, preoccupied as they are with what makes headlines today,
and they work in intensely collaborative enterprises. They have neither the
time nor inclination to question the body of theories – often no longer even
perceived as ‘theories’ but considered accepted common wisdom – that shapes the
way they view and talk about the outside world. Thus, erroneous concepts and
even outright fallacies often remain unquestioned and, by virtue of constant
repetition, live comfortably in the bloodstream of policy debates, economic
analysis, and financial market reportage.
This goes a long way in explaining the undeserved survival of a number of
persistent modern myths: deflation is the gravest economic danger we face;
Japan has been crippled by deflation for years and would grow again if it only
managed to create some inflation; lack of ‘aggregate demand’ explains
recessions and must be countered with easy monetary policy; and money-printing,
as long as it does not lead to higher inflation, is a free lunch, i.e. we can
only expect good from it. None of these statements stand up to scrutiny. In
fact, they are all utterly absurd. Yet, we can barely open a newspaper and not
have this nonsense stare us in the face, if not quite as bluntly as stated
above, than at least as the intellectual soil from which the analysis or
commentary presented has sprung. Deep-rooted misconceptions can only be
dismantled through dissection of their building blocs and a discussion of basic
concepts.
The dangers of going back to basics
However, going back to basics and to first principles, analyzing critically
the fundamental aspects of our financial system, is not free of danger. Here,
too, lies a minefield of potentially grave intellectual error, and when things
go wrong here, at the basic level, the results and policy recommendations
derived from such analysis are bound to be nonsensical too, if not even more
nonsensical than what the mainstream believes. In this and the following essays
I am going to address some of the erroneous notions at the fundamental level of
money and banking that seem to have gained currency in the public debate of
late.
I get periodically confronted with these confusions through readers’
comments on my website. Some of the questions and suggestions expressed there
reveal the same, or very similar, errors and misunderstandings, and these often
seem to have their origin in other publications circulating elsewhere on the
web. Among them are the following fallacies, in no particular order:
§The idea that
the charging of interest, or in particular the charging of interest on money,
is a fundamental problem in our financial system.
§The notion that
there must be a systematic shortage of money in the economy because banks,
through fractional-reserve banking, bring into circulation only amounts of
money equivalent to the principal of the loans they create but not the
necessary amount to pay the interest on these loans.
§The notion that
it is a problem that money-creation is tied to debt-creation (again, as a
consequence of fractional-reserve banking) and that it would be possible and
advantageous to have the state issue money directly (debt-free) rather than
have the banks do it.
§The idea that
schemes are feasible that allow the painless shrinkage or even disappearance of
the national debt.
All these ideas are nonsensical, based on bad economics and
fundamental logical flaws, and to the extent that they entail policy proposals,
these policies, if enacted, would not only not give us a stable and more
prosperous economy but would surely lead to new instabilities or even outright
chaos.
None of these misconceptions originate, or even resonate, as far as I can
tell, with the ‘mainstream’. The mainstream– the financial market
professionals, the central bankers, financial regulators, and the media –
remain resolutely uninterested in dealing with fundamental questions of money
and banking for the reasons given above. Here, the discussion continues to
centre on how the economy can be ‘stimulated’ more, what ‘unconventional’
policies the central banks may still have up their sleeves, and if the central
banks need new targets or better central bankers. Icebergs or no icebergs,
these deckchairs need re-arranging.
One hundred years ago today the world was shook loose of its
moorings. Every school boy knows that the assassination of the
archduke of Austria at Sarajevo was the trigger that incited the bloody,
destructive conflagration of the world’s nations known as the Great
War. But this senseless eruption of unprecedented industrial
state violence did not end with the armistice four years later.
In fact, 1914 is the fulcrum of modern history. It is
the year the Fed opened-up for business just as the carnage in northern
France closed-down the prior magnificent half-century era of liberal
internationalism and honest gold-backed money. So it was the Great War’s
terrible aftermath—–a century of drift toward statism, militarism and fiat
money—-that was actually triggered by the events at Sarajevo.
Unfortunately, modern historiography wants to keep the
Great War sequestered in a four-year span of archival curiosities about
battles, mustard gas and monuments to the fallen. But the opposite
historiography is more nearly the truth. The assassins at Sarajevo
triggered the very warp and woof of the hundred years which followed.
The Great War was self-evidently an epochal calamity,
especially for the 20 million combatants and civilians who perished for no
reason that is discernible in any fair reading of history, or even unfair one.
Yet the far greater calamity is that Europe’s senseless fratricide of 1914-1918
gave birth to all the great evils of the 20thcentury— the Great Depression,
totalitarian genocides, Keynesian economics, permanent warfare
states, rampaging central banks and the exceptionalist-rooted follies of
America’s global imperialism.
Indeed, in Old Testament fashion, one begat the next
and the next and still the next. This chain of calamity originated in the Great
War’s destruction of sound money, that is, in the post-war demise of the pound
sterling which previously had not experienced a peacetime change in its gold
content for nearly two hundred years.
Not unreasonably, the world’s financial system had
become anchored on the London money markets where the other currencies traded
at fixed exchange rates to the rock steady pound sterling—which, in turn, meant
that prices and wages throughout Europe were expressed in common money and
tended toward transparency and equilibrium.
This liberal international economic order—that is,
honest money, relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and
rapidly growing global economic integration—-resulted in a 40-year span
between 1870 and 1914 of rising living standards, stable prices, massive
capital investment and prolific technological progress that was never
equaled—either before or since.
During intervals of war, of course, 19thcentury
governments had usually suspended gold convertibility and open trade in the
heat of combat. But when the cannons fell silent, they had also endured
the trauma of post-war depression until wartime debts had been liquidated and
inflationary currency expedients had been wrung out of the circulation. This
was called “resumption” and restoring convertibility at the peacetime parities
was the great challenge of post-war normalizations.
The Great War, however, involved a scale of total
industrial mobilization and financial mayhem that was unlike any that had gone
before. In the case of Great Britain, for example, its national debt
increased 14-fold, its price level doubled, its capital stock was depleted,
most off-shore investments were liquidated and universal wartime conscription
left it with a massive overhang of human and financial liabilities.
Yet England was the least devastated. In France, the
price level inflated by 300 percent, its extensive Russian investments were
confiscated by the Bolsheviks and its debts in New York and London catapulted
to more than 100 percent of GDP.
Among the defeated powers, currencies emerged nearly
worthless with the German mark at five cents on the pre-war dollar, while
wartime debts—especially after the Carthaginian peace of Versailles—–soared to
crushing, unrepayable heights.
In short, the bow-wave of debt, currency inflation and
financial disorder from the Great War was so immense and unprecedented that the
classical project of post-war liquidation and “resumption” of convertibility
was destined to fail. In fact, the 1920s were a grinding, sometimes
inspired but eventually failed struggle to resume the international gold
standard, fixed parities, open world trade and unrestricted international
capital flows.
Only in the final demise of these efforts after 1929
did the Great Depression, which had been lurking all along in the post-war
shadows, come bounding onto the stage of history.
Read more at : http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/sarajevo-is-the-fulcrum-of-modern-history-the-great-war-and-its-terrible-aftermath/
Investors and
speculators face some profound challenges today: How to deal with politicized
markets, continuously “guided” by central bankers and regulators? To what
extent do prices reflect support from policy, in particular super-easy monetary
policy, and to what extent other, ‘fundamental’ factors? And how is all this
market manipulation going to play out in the long run?
It is obvious that
most markets would not be trading where they are trading today were it not for
the longstanding combination of ultra-low policy rates and various programs of
‘quantitative easing’ around the world, some presently diminishing (US), others
potentially increasing (Japan, eurozone). As major U.S. equity indices closed
last week at another record high and overall market volatility remains low,
some observers may say that the central banks have won. Their interventions
have now established a nirvana in which asset markets seem to rise almost
continuously but calmly, with carefully contained volatility and with their
downside apparently fully insured by central bankers who are ready to ease
again at any moment. Those who believe in Schumpeter’s model of “bureaucratic
socialism”, a system that he expected ultimately to replace capitalism
altogether, may rejoice: Increasingly the capitalist “jungle” gets replaced
with a well-ordered, centrally managed system guided by the enlightened bureaucracy.
Reading the minds of Yellen, Kuroda, Draghi and Carney is now the number one
game in town. Investors, traders and economists seem to care about little else.
“The problem is
that we’re not there [in a low volatility environment] because markets have decided
this, but because central banks have told us…” Sir Michael Hintze, founder of
hedge fund CQS, observed in conversation with the Financial Times (FT,
June 14/15 2014) [1]. “The beauty of capital markets is that they are voting systems,
people vote every day with their wallets. Now voting is finished. We’re being
told what to do by central bankers – and you lose money if you don’t follow
their lead.”
The Founding Fathers knew that you can’t have both
by Myron Magnet
With the fulminating on the
left about inequality—“Fighting inequality is the mission of our times,” as New
York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, summed up the theme of his postelection
powwow with President Barack Obama—it’s worth pausing to admire anew the very
different, and very realistic, modesty underlying Thomas Jefferson’s deathless
declaration that all men are created equal. We are equal, he went on to
explain, in having the same God-given rights that no one can legitimately take
away from us. But Jefferson well knew that one of those rights—to pursue our
own happiness in our own way—would yield wildly different outcomes for
individuals. Even this most radical of the Founding Fathers knew that the
equality of rights on which American independence rests would necessarily lead
to inequality of condition. Indeed, he believed that something like an
aristocracy would arise—springing from talent and virtue, he ardently hoped,
not from inherited wealth or status.
In the greatest of the Federalist
Papers, Number 10, James Madison explicitly pointed out the connection
between liberty and inequality, and he explained why you can’t have the first
without the second. Men formed governments, Madison believed (as did all the
Founding Fathers), to safeguard rights that come from nature, not from
government—rights to life, to liberty, and to the acquisition and ownership of
property. Before we joined forces in society and chose an official cloaked with
the authority to wield our collective power to restrain or punish violators of
our natural rights, those rights were at constant risk of being trampled by
someone stronger than we. Over time, though, those officials’ successors grew
autocratic, and their governments overturned the very rights they were supposed
to protect, creating a world as arbitrary as the inequality of the state of
nature, in which the strongest took whatever he wanted, until someone still
stronger came along.
In response,
Americans—understanding that “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of
the people,” as Jefferson snarled—fired their king and created a democratic
republic. Under its safeguard of our equal right to liberty, each of us,
Madison saw, will employ his different talents, drive, and energy, to follow
his own individual dream of happiness, with a wide variety of successes and
failures. Most notably, Federalist 10 pointed out, “From the
protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the
possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.”
That inequality would be a sign of the new nation’s success, not failure. It
would mean that people were really free.
The democratic republic that
the American Revolution brought into being, however, contained the seeds of a
new threat to natural rights, Madison fretted. Yes, the new nation will operate
by majority rule, but even democratic majorities can’t legitimately overturn
the fundamental rights that it is government’s purpose to safeguard, no matter
how overwhelming the vote. To do so would be just as grievous a tyranny as the
despotism of any sultan in his divan. It would be, in Madison’s famous phrase,
a “tyranny of the majority.” As Continental Congressman Richard Henry Lee put
it, an “elective despotism” is no less a despotism, for all its democratic trappings.
How would such a tyranny
occur? Almost certainly, Madison thought, it would center on “the apportionment
of taxes.” Levying taxes “is an act which seems to require the most exact
impartiality, yet there is perhaps no legislative act in which greater
opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the
rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number
is a shilling saved to their own pockets.” How easy for the unpropertied many
to expropriate the wealth of the propertied few by slow erosion, decreeing that
they should pay more than a proportionate share of the public expenses. How
seductive for the multitudinous farmers to levy taxes on the much smaller
number of merchants or bankers or manufacturers, while exempting themselves.
How tempting for the majority who have debts to transfer money secretly and
silently away from the minority who are their creditors by debasing the
currency, so that the real value of what they owe steadily shrinks, as Madison
well remembered from the ruinous inflation of the Revolutionary War years. And
a year before the Constitutional Convention, Madison recalled, the debt-swamped
farmers of western Massachusetts had cooked up, in Shays’s Rebellion, still
more “wicked and improper” schemes for expropriating the property of others:
trying to close the courts at gunpoint to prevent foreclosures on their
defaulted mortgages and even demanding the equal division of property.
So as chief architect of the
Constitution, designed to give the federal government sufficient power to
protect citizens’ basic rights—above all, the power to tax, whose lack under
the Articles of Confederation had made the Revolutionary War longer and grimmer
than it would have been if Congress had had sufficient means to buy arms and
pay soldiers—Madison proceeded with his heart in his mouth, fearful that such
augmented power made a tyranny of the majority all the more possible. His main
challenge at the Convention, as he saw it, was to guard against precisely that
outcome. So while four of the 18 specific powers that Article I, Section 8 of
the Constitution gives Congress concern the levying of taxes and the borrowing
and coining of money to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of
the United States”—taxes that “shall be uniform throughout the United
States”—eight of the rest deal with spending only for military and naval
purposes, while the “general welfare” powers extend only to building post
offices and post roads; establishing federal courts; protecting intellectual
property by copyrights and patents; and regulating bankruptcies,
naturalization, and interstate and foreign commerce. Not content merely to
limit and define explicitly the federal government’s power, Madison made sure
that the Constitution divided it up among several branches, limiting the power
that any single individual or official body could wield and putting each
jealously on guard against any other’s attempt to seize a disproportionate
share. Moreover, all these officials (except the judges) were elected
representatives of the people: they were the agents through whom Americans, who
had no rulers, governed themselves.
But why was the liberty that
Madison so mightily struggled to protect so precious? Americans knew how
grievous its opposite was, both from the enslaved blacks they saw all around
them as well as from their knowledge that their own forebears had fled British
persecution of non-Anglican Protestants or European persecution of all
Protestants, denied even freedom to express their own beliefs. They knew what
man could inflict on man. But of all the Founders, Treasury secretary Alexander
Hamilton gave the most positive, eloquent, and inspiring answer to that
question—though, in fact, he thought that he was answering a question about
economics. Illegitimate, orphaned, and poor, Hamilton dreamed big dreams as a
teenage clerk, sitting on his countinghouse stool on a small West Indian island
whose only business was sugar and slaves. Ambition burned within him, along
with a keen but unformed sense of his own talent. He knew he could be something
other than he was. But what or how, he didn’t foresee. Maybe a war would come,
he daydreamed, and give him his chance.
Read more at : http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_liberty-or-equality.html
The murders of cartoonists who made fun of Islam and of Jews shopping for their Sabbath meals by Islamists in Paris last week have galvanized the world. A galvanized world is always dangerous. Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do so. My job is to try to dissect the event, place it in context and try to understand what has happened and why. From that, after the rage cools, plans for action can be made. Rage has its place, but actions must be taken with discipline and thought.
I have found that in thinking about things geopolitically, I can cool my own rage and find, if not meaning, at least explanation for events such as these. As it happens, my new book will be published on Jan. 27. Titled Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, it is about the unfolding failure of the great European experiment, the European Union, and the resurgence of European nationalism. It discusses the re-emerging borderlands and flashpoints of Europe and raises the possibility that Europe's attempt to abolish conflict will fail. I mention this book because one chapter is on the Mediterranean borderland and the very old conflict between Islam and Christianity. Obviously this is a matter I have given some thought to, and I will draw on Flashpoints to begin making sense of the murderers and murdered, when I think of things in this way.
For much of the Cold War,
George Orwell’s novel 1984 eclipsed Aldous Huxley’s
earlier work Brave New World. Orwell’s book, published in
1949, seemed to many readers the more apt dystopia for understanding the
challenge of totalitarianism, since it could be said to capture the essential
character of the regimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain. With the Cold
War now long over, and with that era’s public preoccupation with space,
military technology, and the physical sciences redirected toward the biological
and behavioral sciences and their potential to reshape human beings and
society, Huxley’s dark tale has seemed “relevant” again. This is a judgment
that would not have surprised its author. Huxley’s latest biographer, Nicholas Murray, explains that when Orwell
sent Huxley an early copy of 1984,
Huxley wrote back to say “that he had enjoyed it but believed his book [Brave New World] was better
prophecy,” with its portrait of a gentler but more effective totalitarianism
than Orwell’s “boot smashing down on the face.”
Though
Huxley clearly intended his 1932 book as a dystopia, Murray reports that the
novel was “popular with American college students in the 1950s” for its
portents of sexual liberation, and that the contemporary French novelist Michel
Houellebecq, in the words of one of his characters, treats Brave New World as “exactly the
sort of world we’re trying to create, the world we want to live in.” Murray
himself, whose strong suit is Huxley’s personal life rather than his literary
production, plays up the respects in which the novel is a “critique of modern
consumerism.” To be sure, there are the planned obsolescence of consumer goods,
the conditioned desire for empty recreations, and the replacement of God with
the shade of Henry Ford. But this is superficial. A more penetrating view was
taken by Rebecca West, who in a 1932 review of the book in the Daily Telegraph called it “the
most serious religious work written for some years,” and remarked that in one
pivotal scene Huxley had “rewritten in terms of our age the chapter called ‘The
Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers
Karamazov.” (West’s comparison was discussed at length in these pages in
Caitrin Nicol’s essay “Brave New World at 75,” Spring 2007.)
But an even
more telling comparison can be made — that Brave New World is a modern counterpart to the “city in
speech” built by Socrates and his young interlocutors in Plato’s Republic. Whether Huxley saw the
similarities himself is far from clear. In neither the “Foreword” added to the
1946 edition nor his lengthy 1958 essay Brave New World Revisited, which is published together with the
novel in some editions, does he indicate any
consciousness of a parallel. Nor do his Complete Essays (published 2000 – 2002)
shed light on this. His biographer Murray mentions no such connection in
Huxley’s mind either; nor does his earlier biographer Sybille Bedford. Yet it may not be necessary
to confirm any precise authorial intention on Huxley’s part to imitate Plato.
Whereas Huxley’s other novels are largely forgotten today by the general
public, and his later visits to the themes of Brave New World are those of a crank whose imaginative
gifts have deserted him, in writing his greatest work he seems to have been in
the grip of an idea larger than himself. Plato’s Socrates tells us in the Apology that when he “went to the poets” to “ask them thoroughly what they
meant” in their greatest poems, he found to his surprise that “almost everyone
present, so to speak, would have spoken better than the poets did about the
poetry that they themselves had made.” For as Socrates said (not without some
biting irony) in Plato’s Ion, “all the good epic poets
speak all their fine poems not from art but by being inspired and possessed,
and it is the same for the good lyric poets.” Perhaps during the mere four
months it took Huxley to write Brave
New World, he was “possessed” in this way and remained forever
unconscious of his debt to Plato.
The Structure
of Huxley’s World State
From the first paragraph of the
novel, we learn the motto of the World State of Huxley’s imagination:
“Community, Identity, Stability.” This brings to mind Socrates’ question to
Glaucon in The Republic:
“Have we any greater evil for a city than what splits it and makes it many
instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it
one?” Socrates and Glaucon agree that “that city [is] best governed which is
most like a single human being.” In the same vein, the individual in the World
State is “just a cell in the social body.” As for stability, described by one
of Huxley’s chief characters as “the primal and the ultimate need,” this is
something Socrates cannot guarantee regarding his city in speech: he tells his
young friends that their city is “so composed” as to be “hard to be moved,” but
that “since for everything that has come into being there is decay,” even it
will not “remain for all time.” At the end of Brave New World, we have no reason to believe that Huxley’s
World Controllers have not conquered the problem of decay. They appear to have
achieved a perfectly static perfect justice. But then, unlike the rulers in
Socrates’ city — unlike Socrates himself — they have wholly mastered a science
that is (in Socrates’ words) “sovereign of better and worse begettings.” For
the need to conquer human nature by eugenics is only the most obvious matter
where Plato and Huxley meet on common ground. (All quotations from the Republic in this essay are drawn
from Allan Bloom’s translation.)
The
necessity of eugenics is driven by another principle the two polities have in
common: “one man, one art.” Each cell in the social body has its peculiar work
to do. As Plato’s Socrates divides his city into three classes — the golden
guardians, the silver auxiliaries, and the iron or bronze farmers and artisans
— Huxley’s World State has the five classes of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and
Epsilon. Socrates recognizes that he cannot keep his classes differentiated —
hence he cannot keep the city stable — without keeping a “careful ... watch”
over the children born to the parents in each class, transferring up and down
the social scale those children who are better fitted to be reared in another
class than the one into which they were born. Ultimately, with respect to the
gold class, Socrates opts for a concerted eugenics program that involves the
destruction of marriage and the family and the concealment of every child’s
peculiar parentage, with childrearing handed over to a common nursery.
But Huxley
does Socrates one better. The World State has completely severed sexual
intercourse from procreation. No more viviparous reproduction; instead, the
Hatchery and Conditioning Centre has taken over the whole work of producing
each generation of citizens. Babies are made there on the assembly line by
strictly selected in vitro fertilization
and gestation, and their conditioning for their role in life begun even before
they are “decanted.” Special lines of “plus” and “minus” models of each class
are manufactured, from “Alpha-Plus” to “Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.” Descending
to even more particularity, they are prepared for their precise adult jobs by
doses of chemicals, exposure to heat and cold and other stimuli, and — after
decanting — by early-childhood conditioning to like or dislike objects like
books and flowers or experiences like darkness or sunshine. But will not the
State need many workers identically made to do certain low-class jobs requiring
mass manpower? That is solved in part by Bokanovsky’s Process, a method akin to in vitro cloning that can
produce as many as ninety-six copies of a single embryo.
In Plato’s
city, the sexes are generally equal in their participation in public life and
work — but not quite. As Glaucon says to Socrates, they will assign “everything
in common” to both sexes, “except that we use the females as weaker and the
males as stronger.” Soon thereafter they agree that while there is no art
“practiced by human beings in which the class of men doesn’t excel that of
women,” yet because there is “no practice relevant to the government of a city
that is peculiar to woman,” and “the natures are scattered alike among both”
sexes, the women must be educated as the men are and assigned the same duties.
Socrates blithely leads Glaucon to neglect even the possibility that there is
an art of mothering, and to agree to the joint exercise of the sexes, naked, in
their gymnastic training. Conditioning over time, they say, will accustom the
male and female guardians to this immodesty. Somehow love of the city will be
all they think of when they see what would normally be other objects of their
affection.
So also in
Huxley’s book, the sexes are in almost entire equality with one another. If
with the banishment of viviparous reproduction the word “mother” is now an
obscenity, why not? And yet, the equality is not quite complete — we never hear
of a female World Controller or other high official. But the bad joke of
Socrates’ naked unisex gymnastics is retold in Huxley’s early conditioning of
both sexes to treat intercourse as play. Children at the Conditioning Centre,
“naked in the warm June sunshine,” engage in “ordinary erotic play.” No need to
restrain the natural sexual urges and channel them for eugenic purposes, as
Socrates had to do. With reproduction cordoned off from sex — with every woman
who is not hormonally engineered to be a sterile “freemartin” always going
about equipped with her “Malthusian belt” of contraceptives, and strategically
located Abortion Centres ready in case of accident — a wholly indiscriminate
recreational sexuality can be unleashed, indeed encouraged, in both sexes.
Paramount
for maintaining the basic structure of both Huxley’s World State and Plato’s
city are their educational regimes. Socrates has his “noble lie” — a false tale
about the creation of the city and its people that, if believed to be true, would
guarantee citizens’ loyalty to the city and at the same time contentedness
about their fixed place in it — all shored up by a strict censorship of poetry
to inculcate the most politically unifying opinions. Similarly, the World State
has its regime of “hypnopædia” (sleep teaching), in which nocturnal repetitions
of moral maxims drone into the ears of the children until their conditioned
responses to virtually every social situation are automatic. Like Socrates’
citizens who are schooled that they are “brothers and born of the earth” but
fashioned by “the god” with the different metals in their natures, Huxley’s are
taught over and over that “every one belongs to every one else,” that “all men
are physico-chemically equal,” yet steadily conditioned to be unthinkingly
content with their own station in life: “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta....
Oh no, I don’t want
to play with Delta children.”
As they grow
up, the children of the World State “learn to take dying as a matter of
course,” undergoing “death conditioning” from an early age on field trips to
the Hospital for the Dying, where men and women of sixty go to end lives that
have been productive and pleasurable to the very end — sixty apparently being
the upper limit at which all the powers of work and play can go on undimmed.
Socrates too insists that his city’s young charges must “be told things that
will make them fear death least,” so that “a decent man” will believe that for
his fallen comrade “being dead is not a terrible thing.” But Socrates’ aim is
to inculcate courage among warriors, a virtue of which there is no need in the
World State, the scene of universal peace. Where there are no enemies, there is
no need of soldiers, hence no need of physical courage in the face of violent
death. Death comes peacefully, by prearrangement at a fixed age, in the World
State. But the mystery of death is still frightening in itself, and so a kind
of moral courage is still required, in the form (as Socrates puts it) of an
“opinion produced by law through education about what — and what sort of thing
— is terrible.”
The Mastery of Eros
The ideal society needs more
than political organization and proper education toward love of the state; it
also requires that citizens’ private pleasures be rightly directed. Socrates
defines moderation as “a certain kind of order and mastery of certain kinds of
pleasures and desires.” Later in the Republic, he argues that there are three kinds of pleasures,
corresponding to “three primary classes of human beings ...: wisdom-loving,
victory-loving, gain-loving.” This describes a clear hierarchy of pleasures and
of people. In Brave New World,
this hierarchy is flattened (with the possible exception of the World
Controllers, about whom more anon). All the World State’s citizens appear to be
gain-loving, seekers of the lowest pleasures. They play Obstacle Golf (their
sports are as close as they come to being victory-loving); they go to
full-sensory movie theaters, the “feelies” (in Huxley’s day the “talkies” were
still new); they flit about in their helicopters from one empty entertainment
to another. In the case of Alphas, for whom this endless round of pleasures
might begin to pall, it is especially important that they conform to “their
duty to be infantile, even against their inclination,” that they be adults at
work and children at play. Perverse though it may be, this too is a certain
kind of mastery of desire.
“Bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos
are applauding the European Central Bank’s announcement of quantitative easing. Some said they were pleased
the ECB’s plan, to buy about €60 billion a month in government bonds, is larger
than expected. “It was positive and it was needed,” said Francisco Gonzalez,
chairman of Spain’s BBVA. “Having said that, governments have to keep with
reforms for the plan to meet its purpose,” he added.”
The ECB surprised markets today by unveiling a
slightly larger than expected “QE” program. Yesterday’s leak of the decision
referred to money printing to the tune of €50 billion per month, so the actual
announcement of a €60 billion per month program was seen as a “positive
surprise”. Just think about this for a moment. The charlatans running the
central bank announce that they will make a grandiose effort to debase their
confetti currency even further by printing a huge amount of additional money
every month, and this is greeted as a “positive surprise” and is “applauded by bankers”.
It should be glaringly obvious by now that the lunatics are running the asylum.
The Charlatans of Inflationism
We know of a number of people who will be
pleased (and will probably begin to cry for even more money printing shortly) –
among them is Martin Wolf at the Financial Times. This breeding
ground of hoary inflationism has been regaling its readers with long discredited
(but quite popular) economic balderdash for several years already. Just prior
to the ECB announcement, Mr. Wolf wrote the umpteenth editorial exhorting central
bankers to print as much money as possible. In his opening salvo, he commented
on the SNB’s wise, if belated, decision to finally stop printing unlimited
amounts of Swiss francs to shore up the failing euro. Needless to say, this
decision did not please Mr. Wolf.
“These are exciting times in European central banking. Last
Thursday the Swiss National Bank suddenly terminated its successful
peg to the euro. This week the European Central Bank is expected to
announce its program of quantitative easing. The SNB has embraced
the risk of deflation from which the ECB wishes to escape.
"In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long- term prediction of future climate states is not possible"
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Third Assessment Report (2001), section 14.2.2.2, p. 774
(emphasis added)
The above sentence went missing from subsequent IPCC reports. Apparently it was once part of the 'consensus' though. Even though it has disappeared, it nevertheless inadvertently blurted out the truth. A famous 'Climate-gate' e-mail dialog follows below:
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has, but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009:
“Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.”
Dr Kevin Trenberth – CRU emails – 2009:
“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of global warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can’t.”
Well, it has been more than 15 years of 'no warming' now. Time to get worried? You betcha. A new paper by the above mentioned Dr. Trenberth acknowledges the importance of the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation in determining relatively short term warming and cooling cycles ('short term' meaning decades in this case). But the so-called 'skeptics' have pointed to this for a very long time. More about the paper can be found here.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Keep in mind that in the mid 1970s, the 'scientific consensus' was worried about global cooling and an imminent new ice age – click to enlarge.
A recent article in 'Nature' discusses the 'case of the missing heat' and what progress is being made in explaining away the fact that none of the models predicting global warming by CO2 forcing can account for the observed reality. As a reminder, here is the difference between the model predictions and what has actually happened:
The predictions of Hansen's climate model presented to the US Congress in 1988, versus the reality (source: climatesense-norpag) – click to enlarge.
However, instead of simply admitting that the models may be wrong, the heat is held to be 'hiding out' in the oceans. It is apparently widely hoped that it will return in time to save careers and grants. From Nature:
“Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat. Some have pointed to the Sun, volcanoes and even pollution from China as potential culprits, but recent studies suggest that the oceans are key to explaining the anomaly. The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since.
“The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. According to this theory, the tropical Pacific should snap out of its prolonged cold spell in the coming years.“Eventually,” Trenberth says, “it will switch back in the other direction.”
Translation: 'please dear Lord, let it switch back as soon as possible' or: the warming check is in the mail. That is however perhaps less likely than thought (see further below why). If one looks at the chart of the PDO above, a common sense question immediately springs to mind: why was the warming trend prior to 1940 almost identical to that between 1976 and 1998, when obviously, CO2 emissions at the time cannot have been a major factor? This is not explained anywhere. Could it be that natural climate variability is actually the major factor in driving both warming and cooling phases and that CO2 emissions by humans are in fact a negligible input?
Interesting is also the following comment by another climate researcher cited in the Nature article:
…none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.”
(emphasis added)
Does that mean that if there is no warming for another century, their vaunted 'models' will still not be proved wrong? If that is so, then the science is guaranteed to only 'advance one funeral at a time' as the saying goes. By the way, the differentiation between 'skeptics' and 'scientists' is an insult to the many skeptics who are in fact scientists (and whose ranks are set to swell in our opinion).
Temperature anomaly vs. atmospheric CO2 over the past 11,000 years (data gathered by examination of ice cores)- click to enlarge.
Several 'skeptics' are naturally pointing out that their work is suddenly 'integrated' into the 'consensus' with not a word being mentioned of the ridicule and opposition they had to endure for so long. For instance, here are Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt:
“It took a while, but ocean cycles have finally been adopted by the IPCC as an important climate factor. With John Fasullo, Kevin Trenberth has written in a new paper appearing in the journal Earth’s Future that the warming pause taking place since 1998 indeed may have something to do with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Also even Trenberth’s pal Stefan Rahmstorf suddenly thinks it’s a good possibility [...]
-
In 2012 when we brought up the PDO as one of the triggers for the 1976-1998 warming in our “Die kalte Sonne” book and proposed ocean cycles as a sort of pulse generator for temperature cycles on a decadal scale, we were met with fierce resistance from the German climate science establishment. Now less than 2 years later, “Die kalte Sonne” finds itself as mainstream science.”
They also mention an interesting comment made by Julia Slingo of the Met Office at a Royal Society meeting last year. She was playing 'devil's advocate' (the 'devil' being all those who say the climate models are crap, i.e., the 'deniers') and asked a well known alarmist a question he ultimately couldn't answer:
“At a Royal Society meeting in 2013, Julia Slingo of the Met office played devil’s advocate and posed the following question to Prof. Jochen Marotzke of the German Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, see the 42:46 markroyalsociety.org/marotzke.mp3:
“…it’s a great presentation about 15 years being irrelevant, but I think, some of us might say if you look at the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and it’s timescale that it appears to work, it could be 30 years, and therefore I think, you know, we are still not out of the woods yet on this one.… If you do think it’s internal variability, and you say we do think the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a key component of this, and it’s now in it’s particular phase, but was previously in the opposite phase, could you not therefore explain the accelerated warming of the 80s and 90s as being driven by the other phase of natural variability?”
Simplifying Slingo’s incoherence: “If the current cooling is due to the negative PDO phase, then wouldn’t the warming of the 80s and 90s be a result of the positive PDO phase back then?”
Marotzke answers after much incoherence of his own:
“Um…I guess I’m not sure.”
These people make no sense at all. They are sure it’s the oceans’ cold phase gobbling up heat when temperatures fail to rise. But when temperatures increase, they just can’t be sure that the oceans are involved at all, and insist they would not bet much money on it. Of course it just can’t work only one way. Marotzke is delivering only what would call unadulterated absurd science.”
(emphasis added to Ms. Slingo's query)
What does 'we're not out of the woods' really mean? That they are scared they have exaggerated and are, as one commentator at Anthony Watts' site remarked 'in need of an exit strategy'?
The Problem of Modeling the Future of a Complex System
The big problem is that the climate models that are at the root of the 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming' forecasts are trying to do something that is literally impossible. Below is a video of a presentation by Christopher Essex, Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and former director of its Theoretical Physics program. Now, one thing we can expect Professor Essex to know a thing or two about are the mathematics behind the modeling, and this is what the presentation focuses on. It is done in a way that makes it possible even for a layperson to easily discern what the problems of these models are, and that in fact, these problems are insurmountable, at least at present.
As an aside, Professor Essex is of course both a 'skeptic' and a scientist, and he is far from alone. For instance, we would like to point readers to a 2009 paper he co-authored with eight other scholars (and which has been reviewed by 50 others) entitled 'Critical Topics in Global Warming'. The introduction tells us a little bit about the so-called 'consensus':
“The issue of global warming is the subject of two parallel debates: one scientific, focused on the analyses of complex and conflicting data; the other political, addressing what is the proper response of government to a hypothetical risk. Proponents of an immediate and sweeping regulatory response insist that the scientific debate has long been settled. But a fair reading of the science, as presented in the Fraser Institute's Independent Summary for Policymakers (ISPM), proves otherwise. The supplements to that report go deeper into some of the key topics and provide even more evidence that popularized notions about the causes and consequences of global warming are more fiction than fact.”
When looking at the presentation below, it becomes crystal clear why the science, especially with regard to climate models, simply cannot be regarded as 'settled':
“Believing 6 Impossible Things Before Breakfast and Climate Modeling”, by Christopher Essex
The 'Quiet Sun'
Now a few remarks on why the 'missing heat' may well go on missing for a good while yet. Below is an excerpt from arecent article published by the BCC regarding the activity of the sun, which has declined to its lowest in at least a century. Scientists are baffled by this behavior – something highly unusual is evidently happening:
“I've been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I've never seen anything quite like this," says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless. "If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you've got to go back about 100 years," he says.
This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity. It has reached its solar maximum, the point in its 11-year cycle where activity is at a peak. This giant ball of plasma should be peppered with sunspots, exploding with flares and spewing out huge clouds of charged particles into space in the form of coronal mass ejections.
But apart from the odd event, like some recent solar flares, it has been very quiet. And this damp squib of a maximum follows a solar minimum – the period when the Sun's activity troughs – that was longer and lower than scientists expected.
"It's completely taken me and many other solar scientists by surprise," says Dr Lucie Green, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. The drop off in activity is happening surprisingly quickly, and scientists are now watching closely to see if it will continue to plummet.
"It could mean a very, very inactive star, it would feel like the Sun is asleep… a very dormant ball of gas at the centre of our Solar System," explains Dr Green.
This, though, would certainly not be the first time this has happened. During the latter half of the 17th Century, the Sun went through an extremely quiet phase – a period called the Maunder Minimum. Historical records reveal that sunspots virtually disappeared during this time.
Dr Green says: "There is a very strong hint that the Sun is acting in the same way now as it did in the run-up to the Maunder Minimum." Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics, from the University of Reading, thinks there is a significant chance that the Sun could become increasingly quiet.
An analysis of ice-cores, which hold a long-term record of solar activity, suggests the decline in activity is the fastest that has been seen in 10,000 years. "It's an unusually rapid decline," explains Prof Lockwood."We estimate that within about 40 years or so there is a 10% to 20% – nearer 20% – probability that we'll be back in Maunder Minimum conditions."
The era of solar inactivity in the 17th Century coincided with a period of bitterly cold winters in Europe. Londoners enjoyed frost fairs on the Thames after it froze over, snow cover across the continent increased, the Baltic Sea iced over – the conditions were so harsh, some describe it as a mini-Ice Age.
(emphasis added)
The article naturally goes on to point out that according to the IPCC, the effect of CO2 emissions tops every other influence on the climate (no wonder, as CO2 emissions can be taxed. Try taxing the sun!), although the odd men out who think the sun is far more important are mentioned in passing. But not to worry! At worst we will miss the 'polar lights' henceforth. Somehow this doesn't feel very reassuring – after all, if the Maunder minimum was irrelevant to the climate, then why was there a 'little ice age'?
Admittedly, it remains an open question how important the sun's activity is to the climate – after all, if a complex system like the earth's climate cannot be successfully modeled, this holds for the past as well as for the future. It is not possible to state apodictically that the Maunder minimum 'produced' the little ice age. Intuitively though, we tend to think that the sun is indeed an important factor. On a geological time scale, the last major ice age happened only a very short time ago, and we know that there have been vast variations in average temperatures over large time scales. In fact, it is only because we live in a warming cycle on these large time scales (an 'inter-glacial period') that human civilization as we know it exists at all. Try to imagine feeding more than 7 billion people with the planet a full 8 to 10 degrees Celsius colder and with a large part of its landmass covered in ice.
Of course that is certainly not an imminent problem, but looking at the regularity with which glacial and inter-glacial periods occur, it seems obvious that it will become a problem one day. We happen to think that even a 'mini ice age' could be quite a nuisance. It would definitely make life a lot more uncomfortable in the Northern hemisphere. Currently there is no certainty what precisely the main cause of ice ages is, but cycles related to the sun (specifically the Milankovitch cycles, which describe changes in earth's orbit around the sun) are undoubtedly playing a role.
Temperatures plus CO2 and dust concentration in the atmosphere over the past 400,000 odd years via the Vostok ice core data (and yes, CO2 tends to follow temperature, it doesn't lead; presumably there are feedback loops at work though, with higher CO2 concentration and temperature reinforcing each other during the up and downswings)- click to enlarge.
What is slightly worrisome about the above chart is that the very cold periods tend to have a much longer duration than the warm periods, which seem to have a tendency to produce short-lived spike highs. In fact, the behavior of the long term temperature chart looks very similar to the price charts of a number of commodities.
Conclusion:
The backtracking has begun – as a first step, 'climate skeptics' see their work suddenly integrated into the mainstream. However, we are not yet at the point where the models are rejected or the greenhouse gas-centric AGW theory is truly abandoned. Instead we're now in the 'how can we keep saying we are right while we're obviously wrong' phase. A lot is at stake after all: scientific reputations, but most importantly, a lot of money.
Policymakers don't want to hear that there is no problem, because that would close off a major source of tax revenues as well as what is currently a major avenue for crony capitalism and pork barrel spending through the subsidization of uneconomic 'green energy' schemes. Entire vast bureaucracies depend on AGW as well, and there is no alternative promotion in sight yet that could replace this sheer inexhaustible and vast fount of tax payer funded non-activity. So now the hope is that the heat is 'hiding out' deep in the oceans and ready to return at the drop of a hat (or rather, a turn of the trade winds). That may however not happen. What then?
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