How Our East Was Won

The Barbarous Years and the Conflict of Civilizations

The 1622 massacre of Virginia settlers depicted in a 1628 engraving by Matthaeus Merian.

By GENE CALLAHAN

Bernard Bailyn is one of the giants of early American historical scholarship. In recent years he has been engaged in a project “to give an account of the peopling of British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” Barbarous Years is the most recently released product of that effort. As we have come to expect from Bailyn, it is a magisterial work, which, for any reader interested in this period, more than repays the serious attention it requires. (The book is over 500 pages and dense in detail.)

Barbarous Years covers the period from the first permanent English settlements on the continent through King Phillip’s War. Besides discussing the English in the Chesapeake area and New England, this work also considers the Swedish and Dutch settlements along the Delaware and Hudson rivers. (South Carolina, founded in 1670, is left out.) Throughout this period the European toehold on the edge of the North American continent was precarious, and it was the sense of fragility, as well as the mutual incomprehension between the Europeans and Indians, that, Bailyn contends, made these years “barbarous.” Everything was uncertain in the new world being created by this clash of cultures. The constant threat felt to the very existence not just of oneself but of one’s whole community led to desperately brutal acts on the part of natives and newcomers alike.

Bailyn sets the background for his main narrative with a chapter describing the character of the native world before the arrival of the Europeans. Warfare in the world of the eastern forest Indians was frequent but often engaged in more like a sport than a life-and-death struggle. Although the Indians practiced agriculture, “cultivation of the fields did not bind one to the land” since farming was slash-and-burn rather than involving careful management of fixed plots. Thus, land ownership was not a relevant concept for the Indians, a fact that would lead to innumerable conflicts with the Europeans, as each side failed to comprehend the other’s ways of land use.

Especially fascinating is Bailyn’s description of the importance of dreams for the Indians. Rightly interpreted, dreams were guides to the best course of action: “A dream might oblige one to find sexual gratification with two married women; to sacrifice ten dogs; to burn down one’s cabin; even to cut off one’s own finger with a seashell.” But most importantly, he describes how the Indian’s world “was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient, and sensitive spirits, spirits with consciences, memories, and purposes, that surrounded them, instructed them.” These spirits demanded that things be maintained in a certain balance, a balance the arrival of Europeans would often disrupt, which the spirits might require the natives to redress.

George Orwell on the Media’s Toxic Self-Censorship

The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment

by Maria Popova

In 1937, George Orwell got the idea for his now-classic dystopian allegory exploring the ferocious dictatorship of Soviet Russia in a satirical tale eviscerating Stalin’s regime. In his 1946 essay Why I Write, Orwell remarked that this was his first conscious effort “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” But by the time he finished it six years later, in the middle of World War II and shortly before the start of the Cold War, the book’s decidedly anti-Soviet message presented an obvious challenge in politically cautious Britain. The manuscript was rejected by four major houses, including Orwell’s publisher of record, Gollancz, and T. S. Eliot himself at Faber and Faber.

Perhaps even more interesting than the story of the book, however, is the prescient essay titled “The Freedom of the Press,” which Orwell intended as a preface to the book. Included in Penguin’s 2000 edition of Animal Farm (public library) as “Orwell’s Proposed Preface to Animal Farm,” the essay — penned more than seven decades after Mark Twain bewailed that “there are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press” — tackles issues all the more timely today in the midst of global media scandals, vicious censorship, and near-ubiquitous government-level political surveillance.

Orwell begins by excerpting a letter from a publisher who had originally agreed to publish the book but later, under the Ministry of Information’s admonition, recanted:

I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

Noting the general menace of such governmental meddling in the private sector of publishing and the resulting censorship, Orwell bemoans the broader peril at play:

The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of … any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face. … The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

Is Water a Human Right?

We need another paradigm, to put self-interested individual creativity in the service of managing, delivering, and preserving our world’s precious water

By Kendra Okonski

Hundreds of millions of people around the world lack regular access to clean water and sewerage. In many parts of the globe, obtaining water for everyday use requires an enormous diversion of time and effort. And beyond thirst and reduced productivity, the lack of clean water has very serious health consequences: Dirty water can transmit parasites, bacteria, and viruses and can inhibit sanitation, resulting in millions of cases of water-borne diseases each year, many deadly. The “global crisis in water,” as a 2006 United Nations report put it, “claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.” In short, the unavailability of clean water easily ranks among the most serious problems facing humanity.

Over the past decade, clean-water scarcity has been the subject of hundreds of academic studies, improving our understanding of its causes and its scope and identifying many possible solutions. At the same time, however, the problem has also been the focus of a burgeoning activist movement that tends to be less reflective and less constructive. These activists deem access to water a human right — one that is under constant assault by corporate malefactors.

Two recent documentaries, Thirst and Flow, make the case for the water-rights movement. They are cinematically beautiful, showing vividly colorful locales; stunning footage of water dripping, trickling, splashing, and crashing about; and dozens of scholars and activists who can be admired for their energy and passionate commitment to ameliorating very real health and environmental problems. Both documentaries offer an illuminating window into the central assumptions held by this growing movement: Because water is a natural resource necessary for human survival, access to clean water is a human right. Water belongs to all; it is not a commodity that can be legitimately privately owned. Water should be provided by governments; it is immoral to profit from its sale.

These propositions raise important questions. If access to water is a human right, does every human have a right to consume as much water as he wishes, regardless of time and place? If not, to what quantity of water does each individual have a right? Does it vary by circumstance? Whose responsibility is it to provide that water to users? At whose expense? How are disputes between different users of water to be settled? How do we encourage more efficient use of water?

Unfortunately, neither Thirst nor Flow adequately addresses these practical questions arising from their core convictions. Instead, both documentaries tell us that water is part of an inviolate “global commons” that must not be owned, traded in markets, or otherwise sullied by private enterprise. Once the right-to-water premise is established, it’s not difficult to sort the Davids from the Goliaths. From Bolivia to India to small-town America, the documentaries show us how oppressed communities are rising up against profiteering multinational companies and their cronies in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which are colluding to trample on the people’s right to water.

Two cheers for nuclear

The UK government has sealed a deal for new nuclear power stations. About time, too.

By ROB LYONS

Top the corks: nuclear is back! The UK government has finally agreed a deal (subject to EU approval) for the building of two new nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point, already home to two ageing reactors. Due to be completed in 2023, Hinkley Point C should provide up to 3,200 megawatts (MW) of electricity - equivalent to seven per cent of UK electricity demand. It’s been quite a wait. The last new nuclear station to come online in the UK was Sizewell B in 1995.

After years of attacking nuclear, then offering mere permission for new nuclear build, the UK government has finally admitted that nuclear energy is needed and it requires substantial financial support. The new station will cost a cool £16 billion. However, rather than simply build the power stations itself, it has agreed to pay a high price for the electricity generated, offering the operators - EDF and its partners - at least £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh). The only way this looks good is in comparison to renewables; offshore windfarms currently receive £135 per MWh. The difference is the tie-in: Hinkley Point C will receive that inflated price for 35 years; offshore windfarms only get the guarantee for 15 years. By comparison, electricity generated from coal and gas currently costs £55 per MWh.

This could be the start of a renaissance for nuclear power in the UK. Included in the current deal is the potential for another nuclear station at Sizewell. Other groups are waiting in the wings to agree deals for new stations at Anglesey and Sellafield.

Hayek on Morality

No one can do what is morally right when this is being dictated to or coerced from another person

by Tibor R. Machan

When he was about to receive the Nobel Prize in economic science, I interviewed F. A. Hayek for Reason magazine (at his home in Salzburg, Austria). Although he didn’t believe that political economists should dwell on ethical issues per se, he was by no means “necessarily a moral relativist” as Francis Fukuyama asserts in his Sunday New York Times Book Review piece (5-8-2011) of the new edition of The Constitution of Liberty (edited by Ronald Hamowy for the University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Hayek did, of course, object to the notion, mentioned by Fukuyama, that “there is a higher perspective from which one person can dictate another’s ends.” However, the stress here needs to be on “dictate.” No one can do what is morally right when this is being dictated to or coerced from a person. That isn’t at all because ethics or morality is subjective or relative. It is because to hold someone responsible for either morally right and wrong actions, it is that person who has to be the cause of it. The criminal law recognizes this, as have most moral philosophers. And when it is denied that one has free will or can exercise free choice about what one will or will not do, morality disappears. This is why so many thinkers who embrace determinism either reject morality as bogus or transform it into a social psychological device by which desired behavior might be encouraged or prompted from people. (A good example is much of the current work by nureoscientists!)

As Hayek put it elsewhere, “It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and to earn moral merit.” (“The Moral Element in Free Enterprise,” Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967], pp. 230.) However, this view does not depend on moral relativism but on the ancient idea, held by most moral philosophers, that for conduct to be morally significant, it must be done freely, as a matter of the free choice of the moral agent.

Civilization Versus Barbarism

Two Phases of Human History

It is becoming clearer and clearer to us. Perhaps we have been drinking too much. Or maybe we have had a stroke. But we see two major phases of human history.

The first: “nasty, brutish and short,” to borrow a phrase from English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The second: a civilized world with frequent relapses into barbarity. Look what happened many thousands of years before “civilization” first appeared in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China? We don’t really know. We weren’t there. But let’s take a guess.

Everybody wants to get ahead – by getting more money, more power or more status than his neighbors. How do you do that today? You invent a killer app! Or you set up a hedge fund. Or you write a best-selling novel. You can compete by trying to achieve something important. Or you can run for Congress.

But how could you get ahead in the days before moveable type, agriculture and Facebook? What could you invent? Nothing. There was so little old technology in use that there was almost no room for new technology. No wheels. No power. No electronics or mechanics. What about success in business or investment? Forget it. Capitalism hadn’t evolved yet.

What about art? Music? From what we’ve seen on the walls of caves, art was very… well… primitive. For most of his time on earth – about 200,000 years – man lived so near the edge of survival that there was little surplus available to support the arts or an elaborate culture. Until about 5,000 years ago, there were no musical instruments, no writing of any sort, no sophisticated tools.

How then did men compete? How did they show each other who was boss? Again, we don’t know. But it seems most likely that they competed at hunting… and fighting. A primitive man could really only gain an advantage by killing something – just like other predators in the animal kingdom.

Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage was an illusion. Studies of pre-civilized tribes suggest that man gained the most status by killing another man. Tribes living on the American plains continued this custom until only about 150 years ago, taking the scalps of their slain enemies as proof of their “achievement.”
Even in the time of the Roman Empire, the highest honor a Roman general could receive was for killing an opposing general in personal combat.

With some important exceptions, there was no way to get rich in the ancient world, except by taking someone else's property. This is what people did… or tried to do.

Until the advent of capitalism, it was the only way to get ahead. You took someone else's land, his wives and his family – turning as many as possible into slaves. In North and South America, for example, until deep into the 19th century, native tribes typically killed their male enemies… and took their women and children into captivity. In supposedly civilized communities, too, slavery was popular. Owning slaves was not only acceptable, it was a mark of superiority.

The more slaves you had, the higher your social rank. Slave-holding was so much a part of life that even Christ – who preached “love thy neighbor” – made no mention of it. And the US Constitution – a blueprint for the most civilized political system yet designed – also tolerated slavery by omission.

Today, the pay-off from slavery and murder is less sure. We still put elk heads on our walls. We still award medals to particularly good soldiers. But we live in a society that is basically civilized. And in civilized life, killing other people is generally frowned upon, if not censured, proscribed and punished. Slavery has been abolished in most of the world. We still have wage slaves… and tax slaves. But chattel slavery has largely disappeared.

Today, we channel our competitive urges into many different activities. Some people drive expensive cars. Some build mega-mansions. We have team sports, including American football, in which one team acts as though it were trying to kill the other.

But it is in business, careers and investment that people find competition most rewarding. Traders on Wall Street talk about “ripping the faces off” their rivals. Entrepreneurs read about military strategists Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz for hints on how to win their next campaign.

And now, thanks to modern capitalism, you can get wealthy without taking anything away from others. Wealth is no longer a zero-sum game. The world’s wealth can be increased by hard work, saving, innovation and investment. People who succeed at capitalism gain wealth. And, in America, status too. They make themselves rich… and they enrich their neighbors in the process.

It’s not a perfect system. But it works remarkably well … if left alone. 

Regime Uncertainty in France

Getting Something for Nothing

The always slightly befuddled looking French president cultivates the image of a friendly uncle. He is in reality a cynical power-hungry bureaucrat-politician. It is not certain whether he is really as economically illiterate as he appears or if his policies are solely designed to keep his power-base happy, but probably it is a mixture of both.

by Pater Tenebrarum

A recent article by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in the Telegraph has caught our attention, because it nicely demonstrates the corroding effect regime uncertainty has on the economy as exemplified by the situation in France. The article is entitled “Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair” and is well worth reading in its entirety.

'Regime uncertainty' pertains when the main focus of businessmen and other actors in the economy turns to a single question: 'what idiocy will the government think of next?'.

In France this question has become so highly relevant that it has led to economic paralysis and a seemingly unstoppable exodus of the country's best and brightest. If this continues, only the government moochers will be left and will eventually be forced to live from hand to mouth. Ms. Moutet's article starts out by noting that even the notoriously anti-capitalistic French public currently thinks the socialist government has gone too far: 

“More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per cent believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and “inefficient”. This goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu, members of the Peugeot family or Chanel’s owners. Worse, after decades of living in one of the most redistributive systems in western Europe, 54 per cent of the French believe that taxes – of which there have been 84 new ones in the past two years, rising from 42 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 46.3 per cent this year – now widen social inequalities instead of reducing them.

This is a noteworthy departure, in a country where the much-vaunted value of “equality” has historically been tinged with envy and resentment of the more fortunate. Less than two years ago, the most toxic accusation levied at Nicolas Sarkozy was of being “le président des riches”, favouring his yacht-sailing CEO buddies with tax breaks and sweet deals. By contrast, Hollande, the bling-free candidate, was elected on a platform of increasing state spending by promising to create 60,000 teachers’ jobs, as well as 150,000 subsidised entry-level public-service jobs for the long-time unemployed and the young – without providing for significant savings elsewhere.” 

(emphasis added)

Hollande essentially promised his voters that they could get something for nothing. Now they are finding out that this isn't quite true. The government has no resources of its own and in France (and also other euro area economies) this fact is more easily seen than elsewhere as a side-effect of euro area membership. Ordinarily the government could create a temporary illusion of there being a fount of riches by means of inflation. It could also do this by increasing its indebtedness, but neither avenue is really available to Hollande's government. It cannot force the ECB to print it out of trouble, and due to the EU's 'fiscal pact' and the ever-present threat of markets throwing a fit, it cannot increase its debt willy-nilly either. Thus the government's redistributive measures require ever higher taxes. The 'free goodies' have turned out not be so free after all. 

Botched Communications and the Exodus of Wealth Creators

The government's haphazard taxation policy happens to be one of the main sources of 'regime uncertainty' in France. Many new taxes are announced, or rather leaked, long before they are implemented, leading to guessing games as to who will be next on the lengthening list of victims. 

Natural Resources and the Environment

A leading problem of our time is not environmental pollution but philosophical corruption

by George Reisman

There is a fundamental fact about the world that has profound implications for the supply of natural resources and for the relationship between production and economic activity on the one side and man’s environment on the other. This is the fact that the entire earth consists of solidly packed chemical elements. There is not a single cubic centimeter either on or within the earth that is not some chemical element or other, or some combination of chemical elements. Any scoop of earth, taken from anywhere, reveals itself upon analysis to be nothing but a mix of elements ranging from aluminum to zirconium. Measured from the upper reaches of its atmosphere 4,000 miles straight down to its center, the magnitude of the chemical elements constituting the earth is 260 billion cubic miles.This enormous quantity of chemical elements is the supply of natural resources provided by nature. It is joined by all of the energy forces within and surrounding the earth, from the sun and the heat supplied by billions of cubic miles of molten iron at the earth’s core to the movement of the tectonic plates that form its crust, and the hurricanes and tornadoes that dot its surface.

Of course, in and of itself, this supply of natural resources is largely useless. What is important from the perspective of economic activity and production is the subset of natural resources that human intelligence has identified as possessing properties capable of serving human needs and wants and over which human beings have gained the power actually to direct to the satisfaction of their needs and wants, and to do so without expending inordinate amounts of labor. This is the supply of economically useable natural resources.

The supply of economically useable natural resources is always only a small fraction of the overall supply of natural resources provided by nature. With the exception of natural gas, even now, after more than two centuries of rapid economic progress, the total of the supply of minerals mined by man each year amounts to substantially less than 25 cubic miles. This is a rate that could be sustained for the next 100 million years before it amounted to something approaching 1 percent of the supply represented by the earth. (These estimates follow from such facts as that the total annual global production of oil, iron, coal, and aluminum, can be respectively fitted into spaces of 1.15, .14, .5, and .04 cubic miles, based on the number of units produced and the quantity that fits into one cubic meter. Natural gas production amounts to more than 600 cubic miles, but reduces to 1.1 cubic miles when liquefied.) Along the same lines, the entire supply of energy produced by the human race in a year is still far less than that generated by a single hurricane.

The Most Important Veto In U.S. History

When Andrew Jackson dissolved the central bank

By Chris Rossini

President Andrew Jackson (despite his faults) did deliver the most important veto in U.S. history when he squashed the central bank at the time, the Second Bank of The United States.

For those who are new to learning about the evils of central banking, it’s important to understand that The Federal Reserve was not the first central bank in the U.S. It’s just the one that stuck and was not weeded out early enough. The Fed was able to dig its roots in at a ripest moment imaginable (i.e., the early 1900′s, when American public opinion tipped into the desire for statism).

We are now 100 years later, and the weed has grown into a full-fledged monster.The early attempts at central banking in the U.S. were stopped:

The First Bank of The United States was ended by Thomas Jefferson.

The Second Bank of The United States was ended by Andrew Jackson.

Lincoln’s National Banking System during the War to Prevent Southern Independence was also put to an end.

In this article, we’ll focus on Andrew Jackson’s veto of the charter renewal of The Second Bank.

At the time, there were hard money voices that provided opposition to the central bank. Take Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who said:

“I object to the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States because I look upon the bank as an institution too great and powerful to be tolerated in a Government of free and equal laws. Its power is that of a purse; a power more potent than the sword.”

The understanding was there amongst enough of the elites, and as can be expected, the propaganda from the Bankers was reminiscent of the garbage that we hear today.

Here is Andrew Jackson standing up to the sob stories about how closing the Second Bank would ruin the economy:

“You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

Our Brave New World of Malthusian madmen

From 'Wanting Seed' to 'Brave New World', the wacky Malthusian ideas of dystopian literature are now everyday beliefs

by Brendan O’Neill

Reading an op-ed in an American newspaper last month, which argued that gay marriage should be legalised because it will help reduce overpopulation (homosexuals don’t breed, you see), I knew I had heard a similar sentiment somewhere before.

‘Given the social hardships of our era, the benefits of homosexual marriage could be immeasurable’, the op-ed said. ‘Even America, though its population pales in comparison to that of other nations, is considered overpopulated because the amount of energy each of its citizens expends in a lifetime is enormous. Obviously homosexuals cannot, within the confines of a monogamous relationship, conceive offspring.’ So, legalising gay marriage would ‘indirectly limit population growth’.

Gays celebrated because they don’t have children… homosexual relationships culturally affirmed on the basis that their childlessness could help solve a planetary crisis… gay monogamy bigged up because it doesn’t involve conceiving offspring. Where had I heard such ideas before? Why did this promotion of homosexual relationships as a possible solution to the alleged problem of fertile, fecund heteros cramming the world with too many ankle-nippers sound familiar?

Then it struck me. It’s the storyline of Anthony Burgess’s Malthusian comedy-cum-nightmare,The Wanting Seed. In that 1962 dystopian novel, which I devoured during a Burgess phase in my teens, Burgess imagines a future England in which overpopulation is rife. There’s a Ministry of Infertility that tries desperately to keep a check on the gibbering masses squeezed into skyscraper after skyscraper, and it does so by demonising heterosexuality - it’s too fertile, too full of ‘childbearing lust’ - and actively promoting homosexuality.

It’s a world where straights are discriminated against because there’s nothing more disgusting and destructive than potential fertility, than a ‘full womanly figure’ or a man with ‘paternity lust’; straights are passed over for jobs and promotion in favour of homos, giving rise to a situation where some straights go so far as to pretend they are gay, adopting the ‘public skin of dandified epicene’, as Burgess describes it, in a desperate bid to make it in the world. There’s even a Homosex Institute, which runs night classes that turn people gay, all with the aim of reducing the ‘aura of fertility’ that hangs about society like a rank smell, as one official says. ‘It’s Sapiens to be Homo’ is the slogan of Burgess’s imagined world.

Now, nearly 50 years after Burgess’s novel outraged literary critics (one said it was ‘too offensive to finish’) as well as campaigners for the decriminalisation of homosexual sex (who were disgusted that Burgess could write of a homosexual tyranny while it was still illegal in Britain for one man to have sex with another), some of the sentiments of that weird invented world, of that fertility-demonising futuristic nightmare, are leaking into mainstream public debate - to the extent that a writer can claim, without igniting controversy, that ‘the benefits of homosexual marriage could be immeasurable’ in terms of dealing with the ‘social hardships’ of overpopulation. No, heteros are not discriminated against in favour of gays; there’s no Homosex Institute. But there is a creeping cultural validation of homosexuality in Malthusian terms, where the gay lifestyle is held up by some thinkers and activists as morally superior because it is less likely to produce offspring than the heterosexual lifestyle, in which every sexual encounter involves recklessly pointing a loaded gun of sperm at a willing and waiting target.

American Apocalypse

Eventually Nemesis overtakes Hubris

By Justin Raimondo

I don’t believe in God. However, I do believe in divine retribution. Without going into the specifics of this somewhat counterintuitive theology, suffice to say here that its central axiom is the idea that actions have consequences. One cannot go on committing evil without reaping a whirlwind or two. Eventually Nemesis overtakes Hubris, and the results aren’t pretty.

This is our future. Or, at least, one hopes it is – otherwise, there is no justice in this world, or perhaps even in the next.

This struck me as I was reading a column by Steve Chapman, a mildly conservative journalist with vaguely libertarian leanings: according to him, people on the right (of which I count myself one) are "addicted to apocalypse." He takes us through decades of conservative apocalyptic rhetoric, from Ronald Reagan predicting the end of freedom in America due to the depredations of Medicare to Ted Cruz – the liberal media’s villain of the moment – who recently said:

“The challenges facing this country are unlike any we have ever seen. … (T)his is an administration that seems bound and determined to violate every single one of our Bill of Rights. We’re nearing the edge of a cliff. … We have a couple of years to turn this country around, or we go off the cliff to oblivion.” Citing Reagan, Cruz declared: “One day we will find ourselves answering questions from our children and our children’s children, ‘What was it like when America was free?’”

According to Chapman, whose likeness accompanying his column shows him smiling the smile of the self-satisfied bourgeois, this is all so much balderdash, because, you see, Reagan was wrong: Medicare wasn’t that bad (it’s cheaper than Obamacare!), the counterculture receded (not where I live, but whatever), and the Soviet Union faded away (well, yes, just as the apocalyptic Ludwig von Mises predicted). See? Nothing to fear! Good times are ahead! The world is our oyster!

The problem with those grumpy old conservatives, says Chapman, is that "when their dire predictions fail to come true, they keep forecasting the worst possible outcome if they don’t get their way. They seem to need the perpetual excitement of impending doom."

The Selfish Gene

Social Darwinism and Human Cooperation

by Toby Baxendale

It took me until my 43rd year to read The Selfish Gene, written in 1976 by Richard Dawkins. In many respects, it is a testament to its success that I felt no compelling desire to read it. What I perceived to be its central message had been absorbed into the very fabric of our culture. I thought the message was simply put. To summarize: we are driven to survive by our genes and via competitive and selfish natural selection; we follow our own self-interest in order to survive and procreate; genes that adapt more quickly and better to the competitive world survive at the expense of the others, and so forth. The state of nature is a Hobbesian nightmare of there being “no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is survival of the fittest for most, but armed with this knowledge, we could overcome some of these rough edges of life.

This message became his new self-christened “meme” that has seeped into our own cultural way of thinking. Also, armed with this knowledge, Dawkins concludes we should restrain our biological drive and build a more cooperative world.

Needless to say, the book is rich with information on Darwinian evolution and easily communicated to the intelligent layperson. However, I think that he has at least one thing the wrong way around: we should not restrain our genes to build a more cooperative world, but embrace them and their phenotypic effects. As I will suggest, successful phenotypic effects are not as he assumes them to be when it comes to the catallactics of the market place.

The view of Dawkins — that we need to put restraint on our genes to effect a more cooperative outcome for all — would imply that if we do not, we get what is called social Darwinism which is as natural as the selfish gene itself. In the closing lines of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins urges us to rebel against this natural disposition.

“It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism,” Dawkins writes. “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth. ... We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism.”

Dawkins then concludes that this ability to force ourselves to work well with others is “something that has no place in nature.”

Being new to biology, I thought I should read some Darwin to see if it really does follow that if you accept natural selection you must move, as night moves toward day, to the whole of human society running itself as a group of individualistic selfish replicators.

Social Darwinism has nothing, seemingly, to do with Darwin himself. He never advocated a social policy of promotion of the natural tendency to the survival of the fittest. He thought that appropriation by others was the key in advancing man in society.

The Descent of Man is his book that touches most on these issues. Darwin himself imagines that primeval man was “influenced by the praise and blame of his fellows,” and that for individuals, there were many social rewards in avoiding purely selfish behavior since the “tribe would approve of conduct which appeared to them to be for the general good, and would reprobate that which appeared evil.” Primeval individuals knew that the acceptance of the group was important to survival, so, Darwin concludes, “[i]t is, therefore, hardly possible to exaggerate the importance during rude times of the love of praise and the dread of blame.”

Protecting Everyone From Themselves

Everyone claims to care deeply for everything except that which concerns him most 

by Theodore Dalrymple

Of recent years I have noticed something rather peculiar about hotels. Nowadays they treat their guests as if they were all potential suicides: that is to say, as if their first thought on arrival in their rooms was to jump out of the window. To protect against this mass suicidal mania of hotel guests, the hotels have installed windows that cannot be opened more than a few inches, which means that the rooms are stuffy and airless. 

This mania for protecting guests from themselves reaches its apogee in England, where I once stayed in a ground-floor hotel room that overlooked the parking lot. The drop from the window to the ground was about two and a half feet, so the worst injury that anyone who jumped from it would likely sustain was a twisted ankle. Moreover, just beyond the parking lot was a railway line and a canal, both handy for intending suicides. Next the window that would not open wide enough to let any air in was a notice:

For your comfort and safety, this window has been provided with a limiting catch. Please do not force it.

For my comfort? I am one of those persons who finds airless rooms uncomfortable. Unlike Dr. Chasuble, who was peculiarly susceptible to drafts, I detest a stagnant and temperature-controlled indoor atmosphere. I find such atmospheres not only uncomfortable but discomfiting. They always bring to my mind thoughts of totalitarianism, of higher authority imposing its will upon me, allegedly for my own good but mainly for the sheer pleasure of exercising an inescapable power over me. And what could be more authoritarian than not allowing me to have a little draft in my room? 

The little lie contained in the words “for your comfort” irritated me, though I admit that my propensity to irritation (not entirely unpleasurable, for it gives me a sense of moral superiority) increases with age. I see these little lies everywhere I go, for example in a rather grand hotel in which I happened to stay the day before yesterday—at someone else’s expense, of course.

The receptionist gave me my key with a leaflet that detailed instructions of what to do in case of fire. I wanted to ask, “Do you have many fires here, then?” but I didn’t. Three other questions occurred to me: Would anyone read these instructions? If anyone read them, would anyone remember them in the event of a fire? If anyone remembered them, would anyone obey them who would have behaved differently if he had not read them? If the answer to any of these questions is “No,” the corollary question is, “What is the purpose, then, of the leaflet?”

The Secular Religions of Progress

The central theme of our future civil religion should be the maintenance of human freedom

By Robert H. Nelson

Economics has never been, nor could it ever be, free of value judgments. The economy is not isolated from the rest of society, cordoned off from the lively world of competing beliefs. Rather, questions of the organization of the economy, and of the economic policies to be pursued, are interwoven with other social concerns and public policy in general. Economists often lose sight of the altogether interconnected nature of the economic and the non-economic. The illusion of neutrality is reinforced by the radical simplification that often characterizes economic methods; in striving to make economic problems tractable for mathematical representation, inherent ethical considerations are obscured.

Some of the greatest economists of earlier eras, like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, regarded themselves as moral philosophers, as analysts of the moral foundations of society. Few contemporary economists see themselves in such a light. If they do take moral considerations into account, it is typically as parameters for subsequent economic analysis.

As a result, the powerful normative elements of economics tend to be driven underground. Economists today become implicit moral philosophers, a point the University of Illinois economist Deirdre McCloskey often emphasizes. Most economists, for example, regard economic growth as a main goal of the economic system, and seek to assess the desirability of public policies by the extent to which they are efficient or inefficient toward that end. Whether growth should itself be a paramount objective, and whether efficiency should therefore play such a critical role in distinguishing between good and bad policy, typically receives little sustained attention among mainstream economists, with few exceptions (such as Herman Daly in his 1996 book Beyond Growth).

Economic growth is actually a relatively recent term for a phenomenon that was once called “progress.” The creation of the American economics profession began with the founding of the American Economic Association in 1885 and was a product of the Progressive Era. Progressives believed that scientific experts, including professional economists, should engineer society toward a better future. But moral and economic crises in the 1930s and 1940s called into question the Progressives’ basic methods and aspirations, giving reason to leave behind the morally freighted language of “progress.” By the second half of the twentieth century, historians increasingly characterized the thought of the Progressive Era in such terms as “the gospel of efficiency.” A new greater emphasis on technical economic efficiency, along with the closely related concept of growth, recast progress in more scientific and mathematical, and less emotionally and ideologically weighted, language. But the terminological substitution of “growth” for “progress” makes little difference. The case for economic growth is largely indistinguishable from the case for economic progress; both are ultimately deeply normative.

But why is progress, or growth, desirable? Progress means improvement, and so its desirability is in a sense tautological, but economic growth is thought of specifically as the increase in material outputs — the maximization of the production and consumption of goods and services. To understand why this goal is considered desirable today, we must look back over the major economic theories of modernity. Although the survey that follows will sometimes paint in very broad strokes, it will show just how strongly these economic theories draw on moral philosophy and especially on religious thought. Some theories could even be said to constitute secular religions in their own right, implying “theologies” of evil and of the human condition, of redemption, and ultimately of a final paradise, which we achieve through economic growth.

The Economist as a Moral Philosopher

Adam Smith was a pivotal figure in the transition from traditional Christianity to secular religion. In Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), there is, as University of Chicago economist Jacob Viner keenly observed, “an unqualified doctrine of a harmonious order of nature, under divine guidance, which promotes the welfare of man through the operation of his individual propensities.” In Smith’s later work The Wealth of Nations (1776), he was less forthcoming about the divine ordering of nature, but the underlying moral philosophy was fundamentally similar.

The term “natural” recurs throughout The Wealth of Nations as a normative basis for judgments on economic processes and outcomes. “Natural” means the natural order of the world, as established by God, which we fallen human beings can only imperfectly understand but to which we should strive to conform as best we can. Smith could express his conception of economic processes as a divine natural harmony largely in secular terms, drawing on the Newtonian understanding of the universe as a complex mechanism put in motion by God. Much as gravity was the force that maintained order for Newton in the physical universe, self-interest holds up both moral and economic order for Smith.

The Deadly Safety Net Illusion

Things That Make You Go Hmmm...

by Johm Mauldin

ca·tas·tro·phe

n.

1. A great, often sudden calamity.

2. A complete failure; a fiasco.

3. The concluding action of a drama, especially a classical tragedy, following the climax and containing a resolution of the plot.

In 1710, philosopher George Berkeley formulated a proposition in his work "A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," which would inspire a philosophical discussion that continues to this day — three centuries later.

Berkeley wrote:

But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park ... and nobody by to perceive them.... The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden ... no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.

Twenty years later, William Fossett took Berkeley's baton and ran with it:

Tease apart the threads [of the natural world] and the pattern vanishes. The design is in how the cloth-maker arranges the threads: this way and that, as fashion dictates.... To say something is meaningful is to say that that is how we arrange it so; how we comprehend it to be, and what is comprehended by you or I may not be by a cat, for example. If a tree falls in a park and there is no-one to hand, it is silent and invisible and nameless. And if we were to vanish, there would be no tree at all; any meaning would vanish along with us. Other than what the cats make of it all, of course.

But it wasn't until June 1883 that the magazine The Chautauquan posed the question more or less in the familiar form we know today:

If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?

The Chautauqaun answered — rather too emphatically, I thought — "No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion." But that implies a more scientific perception of the question than the philosophical one which has intrigued thinkers through the centuries.

It was from that example that the modern-day form of the question was finally settled upon:

"If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Now, rather than take the path followed by a million tortured souls and try to answer the question, I am going to pose my own question of a similar nature and see if I can stimulate a philosophical debate that will endure through the centuries, as George Berkeley did way back in the 18th century.

If "through the centuries" is reaching a little, would you all mind doing me a favour and just pretending to discuss it until I've left the room?

Much obliged.

OK... so all that remains is for you to click here for some appropriate mood music, and off we jolly well go...

"If something bad happens but nobody reacts badly to it, did nothing bad happen?"

Deep, huh? Not what you come here for, I know, but bear with me for a moment.

I recently read an article that bemoaned the level of volatility that besets the modern world, and the piece got me thinking: how volatile is the investment world, really?

Talking About Greed

Quote of the Day

Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money, only for wanting to keep your own money

                                                          - Joseph Sobran