"Selective altruism"

On the subject of weasel words... Martin Raymond of the 'Future Laboratory' studies twentysomethings. He has identified a new ethical framework in their heads, which he calls 'selective altruism'. This is his arbitrary term for people who are, for example, against animal testing but for euthanasia. I might call them something else, perhaps 'animal supremacists'. People who think like that would rather people suffer than animals be tested on for their lifesaving drugs, and are careless about how human life fares in the moral swamp of euthanasia.

What such views amount to is the worst yet most tempting kind of wickedness. That which will prefer to choose an option that makes the individual feel good about themselves, rather on the basis of its effect or of the broad principles which it enacts and supports. To believe in human dignity and value is a basis for thinking about how to behave. In combination with an ethic that has room for self-sacrifice, it can ground hard decisions that might take the shine off our self-image but do some serious good. Forgetting these, and just going for the warm fuzzy feeling is not how you build a civilisation. It is how you leave one to pull it down. If this is how the new generation thinks, there are savage times coming.

Thinking again about received wisdom: an example

The Welfare State We're In: It's tonight

New Year, New Truths?

I wrote earlier in 2005 about the danger of science without mystery. It is a grave danger, this certainty before all the facts are in, and it is a pit that the scientific method must lead its followers toward. Racial science and the eugenics craze is the classic historical instance of that error, and we, of course, do not know what are the contemporary examples, though judging from the smug tone to many pronouncements from the particle mill, they surely exist.

Before the New Year carries away our brain cells, here is another, subtler danger to truth to consider. We might call it progressive dogmatism. It works like this -- much progressive, socially liberal thought follows a revolutionary belief system. If the world is changed in this way, it will be better. The sister to this belief is that the revolution can never be reversed. Social change accumulates into a heap of blessings. This is bad logic. Not to speak against the belief in human progress -- I see more sign of broad melioration in human affairs than of a great wheel that will break our aspirations in the dust. Yet I also believe that such melioration is potential rather than necessary. We can sit in ignorance and want for millennia -- the Egyptians never invented dentistry, even for their god-kings. We can also regress, as the terror of the German holocaust exemplifies. People can get things wrong. This should not be controversial, especially when arguing that social norms are in error. To refuse to look back at groundbreaking social decisions is simply to privilege decisions that one feels good about having made; it is the worst kind of special pleading and blinkered thinking. Yet when this obvious error in thought goes hand in hand with science, it comes to seem respectable. Science looks like a cumulative pile of knowledge, as ideas like phlogiston and the bodily humours are thrown aside for electromagnetism and leucocytes. So progressives like to see by analogy their social agenda as a scientific discovery, a newly-revealed truth we hadn't come far enough to see yet. So animal rights is an extended awareness of animal nature, communism of history or socialism of social organisation.

The trouble is they claim this argument by analogy and not by subjecting their theses to rigorous scientific analysis. "We have done this, we have begun to think this, therefore it is an implacable advance." Science happily, is no respecter of pride or politics and is as happy to return to old ideas if they improve the picture as to bring in new ones. Two recent examples are the rehabilitation of Einstein's cosmological constant, an 'ugly fudge' which he saw as his greatest error and is now seen to be at the heart of our picture of the universe. The second is the much-derided doctrine of Lamarck, that animals can pass on attributes acquired in their lifetimes. The new science of epigenetics is finding that gene expression can indeed be affected by life experience and passed on through the generations.

Science can make these somersaults because it has an interest in truth (if too scant an acquaintance with mystery). Progressives just want to win the argument and like to give their conclusions cod-scientific weight, as if to think again or study the consequences of a social revolution were absurd. To argue for the revolution and then refuse to discuss whether the revolution has borne out your arguments, or has been brought into question by new evidence is sharp practice and argument in bad faith.

Progressive, rightly understood, is an insult. An intelligent person, interested in the truth, armed with the scientific method, must always look both ways. Not Lenin, but Janus, the god of the New Year and the old, and image of truth-seekers across the millennia.

Unpheasant truths

Two people are dead thanks to warm and fuzzy thinking. You know the advice they give on animals in the road -- it's there for a reason. People like to posture these days and say, 'how cruel', but better a dead animal than a dead person. This week, two people are dead because someone preferred their misdirected conscience be clean than they (and their passenger) remain alive. That is how it is. Animal rights sound like an extension of care, a widening of our concern. It is not true, not if you read Singer and not in practice either. You have to decide -- people first, or animals first. Someone has to end up dead. Not realising that is the cover behind which the animal rights terror campaigns get all the worse. If there is an animal in the way, slow down by all means if you can in safety, but don't swerve. Squash and be proud of your moral clear-sightedness. Better a dead animal than a dead person, which is why Christmas celebrates one who never dies over the carcase of a bird with a clear conscience. The spirit of the season means squashing a pheasant if need be -- not that the image will make it onto any cards this year...

Under The Shadow of Environmentalism

I was cutting down trees in the forest this weekend (not for fun or out of a hatred of squirrels -- forests are man-made environments and have to be maintained, the sort of fact that unthinking tree-huggers don't like to get their heads around). Watching the smoke of the oil fire drifting overhead, I remarked how it would seem a high-priority target for terrorists, and maybe that would come out in a few days as the cause.

One of my axe buddies lifted her head and added, 'Oh, yeah, when I attend Greenpeace meetings, there are people there from the fringe groups like Earth First. I wouldn't put it past them. Those guys are basically terrorists.'

Well, I eased my jaw back into place. I had, of course, meant Islamist terrorists, whose interests in bringing down Western economies and in attacking our oil supplies are well-documented. But I think it is an important truth that came out in that unguarded and strikingly uncritical remark. Extreme movements survive because of a penumbra of those who support their cause but not their methods, just as the IRA fed on support from America and Palestinian terrorists get a lot of intellectual and economic support from Europe these days. This is true for the Jihadists in Britain, though it is hard to get a politician to admit it, and it is true for the animal rights and environmentalist groups who believe in violent attacks for their cause as well.

I heard Peter Singer on the radio saying he couldn't be responsible for what lengths people went to under the intellectual cover of his animal rights philosophy. That seems to me fundamentally wrong. If there is a dark heart to your cause, you are responsible for helping to keep it beating. Such violence is a sign of ideologies that, as a whole, cannot grasp compromise. They are far from the abiding message of the West, home and guardian of liberty, toleration and balance. We say, to such groups: you can have something if you come to the table and talk, or you can have nothing. We will not give you all. In the face of such offers, a system of thought that has no subtlety must descend into violence or shatter into nothingness. Having too much pride for self-destruction, they begin to descend a ladder of cruelty that goes down into the depths of human depravity.

Well, we have begun to see what vile acts animal rights extremists will contemplate, and it is interesting that a keen environmentalist should see such a catastrophe as the oil blaze as what is to be expected from green brothers in arms in the future. Far worse is that she did nothing to condemn it out of hand. That unwillingness to be judgmental is the sign of a dark future ahead. The penumbra of environmentalism is Greenpeace meetings and smiley posh people like Zak Goldsmith; at its heart is a burning fuel depot such as peacetime Europe has not seen.

Dispelling the Myths About Iraq

Dispelling the Myths About Iraq

Awkward Questions - Intractable Differences

Where are the Female Einsteins? by Charles Murray