Face Facts: listen to Kipling

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

1919

Rudyard Kipling

---

AS I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place.
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire—

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Kipling; suffer not the Old King

The Old Issue

by Rudyard Kipling
October 9th, 1899


“Here is nothing new nor aught unproven,” say the Trumpets,
“Many feet have worn it and the road is old indeed.
“It is the King—the King we schooled aforetime !”
(Trumpets in the marshes—in the eyot at Runnymede!)

“Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,” peal the Trumpets,
“Pardon for his penitence or pity for his fall.
“It is the King!”—inexorable Trumpets—
(Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall!)
. . . . .

“He hath veiled the Crown and hid the Sceptre,” warn the Trumpets,
“He hath changed the fashion of the lies that cloak his will.
“Hard die the Kings—ah hard—dooms hard!” declare the Trumpets,
Trumpets at the gang-plank where the brawling troop-decks fill!

Ancient and Unteachable, abide—abide the Trumpets!
Once again the Trumpets, for the shuddering ground-swell brings
Clamour over ocean of the harsh, pursuing Trumpets—
Trumpets of the Vanguard that have sworn no truce with Kings!

All we have of freedom, all we use or know—
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—
Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law.

Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King.

Till our fathers 'stablished, after bloody years,
How our King is one with us, first among his peers.

So they bought us freedom—not at little cost
Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost,

Over all things certain, this is sure indeed,
Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed.

Give no ear to bondsmen bidding us endure.
Whining “He is weak and far”; crying “Time shall cure.”,

(Time himself is witness, till the battle joins,
Deeper strikes the rottenness in the people's loins.)

Give no heed to bondsmen masking war with peace.
Suffer not the old King here or overseas.

They that beg us barter—wait his yielding mood—
Pledge the years we hold in trust—pawn our brother's blood—

Howso' great their clamour, whatsoe'er their claim,
Suffer not the old King under any name!

Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn.
It is written what shall fall if the King return.

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.

He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware;
He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear.

He shall break his judges if they cross his word;
He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord.

He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring
Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King—

Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies;
Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies.

Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
These shall deal our Justice: sell—deny—delay.

We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse
For the Land we look to—for the Tongue we use.

We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,
While his hired captains jeer us in the street.

Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun,
Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run.

Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled,
Laying on a new land evil of the old—

Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain—
All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again.

Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue—
Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.

Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
Step for step and word for word—so the old Kings did!

Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read.
Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed—

All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring.
Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!

Animal Rights kills one more innocent

This poor girl ought to make SHAC, ALF and their ilk think twice. What do you think happens when we sell our children nihilistic propaganda, and refuse to tell them how our lives are not criminal but part of the greatest civilisation in human history? Look at the enormous teen suicide rate and tell me I lie.

Jack Straw tells it how it is

Bravo for Jack. I can't say I've ever cared for the man; he always seemed too weak for truth. Now he stirs up a national debate on full-face veils. When a little gerbil like Straw speaks out on this we should take note. A few interesting points. It has been suggested he is doing it to road-test a tougher government line. This cannot be right as the Cabinet have courageously failed to join him on the barricades. It has more plausibly been suggested that this is his first salvo in a campaign for deputy leader, having noticed how well John Reid is playing in the country. Well, maybe some truth in this. Still, he has long been requesting women in his constituency surgery to remove their veils. This is a persisting, sincere concern of Jack's. That, combined with the time it has taken to speak publicly in the matter, tells us volumes. Jack is worried by this not as a national figure, but in his capacity as MP of a northern constituency: he feels alienated from the area he represents. At the same time, he has not spoken out about his worries because he knows that he needed the Muslim vote to get elected and he feared the reaction to raising the issue. He may feel the prospective leadership race and a shift of national mood has given him a chance to speak, but the two key truths here are a local MP disturbed by his own constituency, and unable to speak out for fear of his job and the extreme, potentially violent response.

John Howard tells it how it is

What a speech. Now why can't Cameron do that?

Truth about DDT: ban killed 50 million

This quote, from Andrew Kenny's article in The Spectator last year records the reaction of an environmentalist when told that banning DDT in Africa would kill millions:

I have heard not one word of pity or regret from any green organisation about the vast loss of human life caused by the ban on DDT. On the contrary, they seem to regard it as a glorious triumph. The likely reason was spelled out with chilling clarity by Charles Wurster of the Environmental Defence Fund in the USA in 1971 when it was pointed out to him that DDT saved the lives of poor people in poor countries. Hc said: 'So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as anything.'

The spirit of that tells you all you need to know about the green movement's priorities. He must be delighted to think that fifty million people have died from the DDT ban. We made our own countries safe first, then banned it before the poor of Africa and Asia could benefit. How's that for social justice. Read Kenny's full article here.

But for those who really believed it was dangerous on the basis of Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' and a truthy feeling in the pit of their stomachs when they heard about dying sea-birds-- I hope you feel ashamed to read this. Even the UN can't ignore the truth that DDT is safe, effective and a life-saver on a grand scale any longer. And their press release admitting it is here. The precautionary principle can kill.

Types of truth

When we give up on truth, what do we replace it with? Well, one possibility is 'truthiness', which seems to be ahead of the pack right now. That is to say, what must the case is determined by what ought to be the case, with that'ought' determined by reference to one's feelings at any particular moment. This is simply to retreat from rationality, logic, careful observation and the rules of evidence in favour of gut intuition and Romantic authenticity. It cannot carry us far, because it will run into the brute facts of the world sooner rather than later. 'That two and two make four/ And never five nor three/ The heart of man has long been sore/ And long is like to be.' The problem is that its self-satisfied inwardness may take a very long time to appreciate the difference between the world as it is and the world as it must be, by which time it may be dangerously late.

But there are other forms of 'truth-substitute' as well. One is the post-modern notion that there is no truth at all. This goes down well in the universities and Michael Frayn's new book seems to pick up on a similar worldview. Yet make no mistake: this relativism is actually nihilism. If nothing is true, there is ultimately no right or wrong, no natural law and no scientific law either. Yet professors always seem happy to travel on the aeroplanes built by the western-hegemonic-mindset-exclusionary-of-other-forms-of-knowing to the conferences where they denounce its achievements as delusions. You don't want to choose this option: it requires a very sophisticated double-thinker to carry it off.

Some people think there is a middle position between truth and outright nihilism, which might be called 'taste imperialism', in which the traditional remit of taste makes considerable incursions in to the realm usually ascribed to judgement. That is to say, we used to imagine that Homer and Michelangelo and Shakespeare could be considered as objectively great. The truth of their aesthetic superiority was evident, could be demonstrated through rational argument and was therefore a matter of judgement not of taste-- true and false, not strawberry or chocolate ice cream. And taste imperialism also reaches out into areas of sexual conduct, personal behaviour and social norms: what is classed under 'lifestyle' these days. There are two immediate problems here. One is that it is not clear how you stop the slide to nihilism. If we are saying that there are truths, but, conveniently, just not where our judgement has always placed them, to what can we refer? If our judgement is suspect here, where is it not? Some fall back on science, and say, "you must prove scientifically that this makes a difference". Fine. That argument worked twenty years ago, but not now. The evidence is in, especially on the importance of marriage for bringing up a child. People just rely on ignoring the evidence in favour of the truthy version they are wedded to. So they skip from the decline to nihilism by declining into truthiness. The second problem is the vision of man behind taste imperialism. This holds that our nature is truly plural, open to many forms of fulfilment and there could never be one true human answer. Again, the science on this is pretty conclusive now, and it finds that this is not true. We are more alike than not. In any case, it is not clear that just because two options can in some sense both be 'made to work', there is therefore no difference between them. One can still be better than the other. When there is a spectrum of success, those who are interested in the truth are interested in what works best.

But this leads neatly to by far the most popular truth-theory today. This is truth by accretion, or multi-faceted truth. It might also be called polytheism, or paganism, for at its heart is the idea that we get closer to truth (or 'the whole truth') by seeing it from many different angles or by compiling many different approaches to it, and this seems to bear a very close relation to pagan ideas of the gods. It is because people want to believe this truth-theory that they believe that all lifestyles must work. If there are many ways to truth, some can't be better than others. Again the trouble is that it just ain't so. What does it mean to say there are many ways of looking at the truth when the truth is E=MCC? This is the most popular, and also the least convincing alternative to truth on the market. Why would people accept what makes no sense? Well, I suspect because they do not trust themselves. If there is real truth, if the traditional zones of judgement in art and life do apply and there are 'best' ways or even sole-valid ways to act, what will stop them from imposing them on everyone? The answer is of course freedom. Freedom, which from the deepest roots of the Judaeo-Christian tradition has meant the right to be wrong (and to bear the consequences). But those who run from truth run from this religious tradition also and find that they have run from the very rule they need. The right to be wrong. Today we prefer to say 'everybody is right', which is a lie, and leads either to the despair and cynical passivity of nihilism or the deluded condition of truthiness in which we drift ever further from a clear vision of how things are. I agree with their fear: truth is fearsome. But truth is wedded to liberty and together they give birth to our civilisation.

Peace, or freedom?

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

And they will get neither. The cancellation of Idomeneo in Berlin because of a scene featuring Mohammed's severed head is a sign of the times. Mohammed's head is displayed alongside that of Jesus and Buddha, but no one's about to kill nuns and torch cities over that. Self-censorship in the performance of one of the three greatest composers in human history, and in his anniversary year.

Not that anyone should be surprised. Last year in London, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine was censored over the scene in which the Koran is burned. And the Pope is still being lectured over quoting a derisive statement on the nature of Islam.

When people say the Pope shouldn't have given his lecture in Regensburg, they are making a choice. They want peace instead of freedom. This is the stance (understandable enough) of anything for a quiet life. Most people, after all, want only the peace to get on with their own life. Quietists have to ask themselves first, is there anything worth fighting for? To make peace your priority is to decide on a policy of pre-emptive surrender before any threat.

For those who value western philosophy, art and literature, the need for peace means sacrificing works by central figures. As well as Mozart and Marlowe, Dante puts Mohammed in the eighth circle of his Inferno, so the Divine Comedy must go. Along with it will go illustrations by William Blake, Gustave Dore, Sandro Botticelli, Rodin and Dali. If you doubt it, consider that a cartoon referencing the infernal scene without even depicting it was censored this year and even the supposedly fanatical Opus Dei wouldn't defend the artist.

Or how about philosophy. Here is David Hume, in 'Of The Standard of Taste', one of his most important essays.

"The admirers and followers of the ALCORAN [Koran] insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed throughout that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the ARABIC words, which correspond to the ENGLISH, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity, were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in good sense: and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals, let us attend to his narration, and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficiaal or hurtful to the true believers."

That's certainly not going to last long in future collections. And the croissant will be tossed out after it, having been created to celebrate the lifting of the Siege of Vienna in 1683 and being a deliberate insult to Islam's holy symbol, the crescent.

People imply in their arguments that this is a sensitive time and we should respect that, as if things were likely to change and we could all go back to eating pork and drinking beer whenever we liked. But why should they? Why should they when this is acknowledged as a generational struggle and when Islam is on the increase in Europe? Why should those who stir up violence give up on it when they see the success such violence -- or even the threat of it in the producer's mind -- will achieve? We will go on living with our compromises and telling ourselves we have avoided trouble and try to forget the things we are no longer allowed to want.

We have to face the awkward truth that Islam and Christendom were enemies for centuries and that the Christian heritage, which is to say western civilisation, contains plenty of reminders of that fact. It also has ideas at its heart like freedom of expression and religion. But these days, you cannot keep the treasures of your civilisation, or your liberty without a fight. People need to think very carefully before they choose. Or they will be buried in this cemetery.

True or truthy?

Cherie Blair, did she or didn't she? Lie about accusing Gordon Brown of being a liar, that is.

Well, given Tony's joke at her expense in his speech the next day, it seems reasonable to think she did.

We surely know even without her inside knowledge that Gordon was lying when he said it had been a privilege to work with Tony Blair. Never has a private grudge been so publicly displayed as in the working relationship of these two men.

But read this account in the Times and it seems clear that not only did she lie about Gordon's lying, but the whole party spin machine went into action to kill the story with lies. Like an episode of 'The Thick Of It', they tried one unconvincing lie--'oh, no: she just said 'I have to get by'--before getting her minders to lie for her--'we never heard our boss say nuffink'--before wheeling her out to lie for herself.

Where is the outrage? Am I such a foolish old donkey that I miss why this story should be an amusing moment of light relief? Here, in plain light, we see the mechanics that our government is happy to use to mislead us in order to 'impression manage' the news. When no one cares much about the truth of what happened, or people simply accept that they will be retailed a transparent falsehood, civilisation totters. For an interest in truth is a rare thing in human history, really a purely western concern. Give it up and we give up one of the pillars of our success.

Spooks: sspookily untrue

I wonder just how much damage it does to the average bear watching something like Spooks. I accept it's done well: pretty actors, fancy editing, fast plots and so on. But it's just not true. I mean, a TV show about terrorism that presents the primary threat to Britain not as Islamofascist terrorists but as the enemy within: rich powerful white men who are just itching to run their own fascist dictatorship is just silly. It's wrong. And, being wrong, it misleads. Because people watch this paranoid, chippy class hatred and think it's seeing things under the hood they don't know about. The best of western art is like Holbein's clump of grass: it looks out at the world and shows it how it is. But we forget how to do that and we forget how to look from the world to a piece of art and criticise it as unreal. Iris Murdoch said that it is one of the most damning criticisms one can make of an artwork to say that it is not true. Spooks isn't true. And all the production values in the world don't stop it from being bad.

Muslim world in 'disproportionate' shocker

Anyone notice the strange silence around the disproportion in responding to a few carefully chosen words within a tightly-reasoned lecture with threats, firebombs and the murder of a nun? But that must be because they all took the weekend off. Now it's Monday, I look forward to hearing David Cameron opining on this one in a bulletproof vest -- or anyone else from the commentariat. Or is it just the Jews and Catholics who get blamed for their behaviour these days?

David Cameron losing his election?

Is David Cameron losing the election that seems his for the taking? His criticism of Israel today sets him at outright odds with his party. More to the point, it puts him in the wrong over one of the most important issues of the day. He relies on truthiness, tellingly, speaking of how the photos at Qana made it clear because of how one felt on viewing them. Well that's no guide, David. And even if it were, and sad feelings in your tummy are to become the basis of Conservative policy in the UK, many of those photos appear to have been faked. You would hope that someone as young and cool as Cameron claims to be would know about the blogosphere by now and at least have some junior intern watching out for its discoveries.

My point is, David Cameron used the 5th anniversary of 9/11 to criticise American foreign policy and is now following it up with an attack on Israel. Both of these will indeed play well, as I'm sure his poll-monkeys have told him. But they will lose him the party. More importantly, he is playing politics with the central issues of our time. This war is the calling of our generation, as President Bush said last Monday. You can't walk away, or score points by siding against it when it is unpopular. That's not leadership. Tony Blair, slave to focus groups on so much else, saw after 9/11 that he had to make a stand and convince the country of his case. It cost him a great deal. But that is leadership. The irony is that Gordon Brown is pretty sound on foreign policy and maybe not so reforming at home (in a socialist direction) as people once thought. So has Cameron started conceding defeat to Gordon by chasing anti-American, anti-semitic votes at the expense of his core supporters and his own good sense? If this is his clause 4, he can keep the rump party he has left. Who wants to provoke outrage and seem touchy-feely if you're on the wrong side at the end of it?

Death of a Fearless Voice

Oriana Fallaci is dead. She was a fearless journalist, who believed in speaking truth to power whatever the consequences. Perhaps it is more remarkable that she was killed by cancer rather than murdered for her views, for La Fallaci spoke out against Islam and its, as she saw it, invasion of the pusillanimous Europe of our post-secular, post-modern west.

She was threatened with several prosecutions for her views, but disregarded them all as readily as she did her own disease. Oriana Fallaci shows how a life ought to be lived: courageously, passionately, unafraid of death, unafraid of loneliness; standing up for the truth your reaason forces upon you. she could not see the world another way and would not shut up because others found it upsetting.

Oriana Fallaci saw herself as Cassandra: wailing into the wind; right but unheard. We will see if she was right. We are left to our fate, and no one else will speak on this in quite the manner she managed. Yet it is a tremendous irony that even as she died, Benedict XVI should be tangled up in Islam and under threat of death for his critical comments. Oriana Fallaci had a long interview with the pontiff before her death, and she had great hopes in him, although herself an atheist. Now he has confirmed for himself just how impossible a dialogue with Islam is, will he take on her mantle. He will, at least, one hopes, say a prayer for her soul. She wouldn't have thought it necessary, but would have appreciated the honour.

Truthiness: a word whose time has come

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness

'Truthiness' hasn't come into use in the UK much but boy does it need to. Thing is, it was invented (or, actually, re-invented, as the word seems to have existed before) to critique a Republican government who seemed unconcerned with providing rational justifications for their actions. But anyone of the Left simply has to rely on it far more than Conservatives do. The facts of life turn out to be Tory. That's because Toryism is concerned with abiding truth. Socialism and so on lookss not to the reality of people and works with the grain of human nature, but says people ought to be thus and so and then squeezes us poor misshapen actual real people into the cookie cutter. Truthiness: because truth can only give you one answer. That's what's wrong with 'compassionate conservatism': Conservatism is all facts, no heart. That's its beauty. And it still leaves room (far more room) for real charity and compassion that big government and limited personal responsibility.

After the summer: truth hurts

While I have been off munching greener grass than normal, it seems the world is going to hell in a pair of fetching wicker panniers. Benedict XVI says Islam has a problem with its lack of interest in reason and its acceptance of violence as a legitimate means to its ends, then to prove him wrong (like the man said, trouble with reason as well) the Muslim world explodes into violence.

Ho-hum. No answer to that. But clearly no dialogue is possible with people - or a religion - that can't take criticism or use right reason. But bravo to Lord Carey, for a comment which has been buried in the excitement of the press at finding anti-Catholicism a useful get-out from having to condemn the Religion-o-Peace(TM). He's stood up on this one before. Would be nice to see some courage from the Anglicans who are actually in office, but there you go. Nothing like the threat of violence to close down debate.

The truth about how Iraq is getting better

Townhall.com :: Columns :: The good news by Jeff Emanuel - Jun 27, 2006

Oh, about those WMD...

"What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it’s dangerous to our forces, and it’s a concern. So obviously, to the extent we can locate these and destroy them, it is important that we do so. And they are dangerous. Anyone — I’m sure General Casey or anyone else in that country would be concerned if they got in the wrong hands. They are weapons of mass destruction . They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found. And that had not been by Saddam Hussein, as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his weapons. And they are still being found and discovered."

Donald Rumsefeld's words, L + G.

Strange how the British media haven't reported this at all...

You know, there's a blindness in the anti-warriors' complaining. They say the neo-cons should apologize for the war. Well, neo-cons have certainly repeatedly admitted to the mistakes that have been made. In fact, to be a neo-con is to be someone willing to admit you made a mistake, since their origins lie in Trotskyites who realised the moral horror of communism and had the courage to switch sides, unlike most Western intellectuals. By contrast, the not-in-my-namers are ignoring the evidence that they were wrong because their position is all about emotional indulgence, not reasoned strategic choices. So grow up, girls and boys of the press. Turn the camera on yourselves, and say "sorry, we were wrong". At least have the courage to print the truth instead of ignoring it.

The Closing Fist

The Closing Fist

“Whoo!  Look at that firework display.  Amazing!”
— “My God, the whole sky’s on fire.  What do you think it is?”
“Never mind that, sweetheart, just enjoy the moment.  Everything’s for the best.”
— “It seems to be getting closer.”
“That’s crazy talk.  What sort of sense would that ma-”
BOOOOOOOOOM
Extract from Last Words of the Dinosaurs, ‘How Curious, Tyrannosaurus’

The Economist does it again.  ‘Britain’s “Stop the War” movement […] is a curious partnership between supporters of the international Muslim Brotherhood and largely non-believing socialists,’ editorialises the magazine for those who prefer their opinion dressed as self-evident fact.  Helpfully, real facts can then be banished to the status of ‘curiosities’, which pose no challenge to a theory built on respectably received ideas. (24/6/06, p. 29)

It is time to be clear.  Civilisation is under threat, not merely from Islamism, but from a coalition of enemies that elite thought lacks the categories to group together.  They are the five apparently separate digits of a rapidly closing fist.  We need to understand their separate menace and natural connections before their collective weight crashes down upon all our conventional pieties.


The First Two Fingers

The “Stop the War” movement has shown us the first two fingers: the old Socialist Left and the new Islamism.  Mohammed and Marx are a very modern odd couple – unnatural bedfellows, one might say – but only blinkers can hide what both share: progressive ideals.  Islamism is a progressive ideology.  Who can doubt it?  Only those for whom it is an article of faith that all religion is retrograde.  Qutb is explicit: the world is disgustingly corrupt; we need to tear it down and erect an Islamic utopia disinfected from history and precedent.  Socialism may have been atheist in the USSR, but it ended up creating its own state religion of Marxist-Leninism.  Socialists are happy to climb between the sheets with a faith, just not with history.  As for Marx’s dictum about religion and opium, I heard an opinion-former on the radio last week explaining how if we saw this in the medical context of the time, Marx was just saying that religion was a modest painkiller, a sort of Ibruprofen for the poor.  Socialists will steadily accept that five prayers a day are no more threatening than Granny’s daily aspirin for her heart, certainly no threat to the health of a progressive political movement.  Far from it: as others have observed, since the Communists had to invent their own religion without the advantage of God the result was never convincing.  Working with Islamism, Socialists have the chance to co-opt a ready-made, aggressively proselytising force with millions of members who are convinced by the binding reality of Allah’s proscriptions and commands.

Those who recognise the threat of Islamism have been happy to throw the boo-word Islamofascist at its followers.  This catches the totalitarian mentality of the movement, but misses its anti-national, supra-racial nature.  A far truer insult, but one that unfortunately fails to convey as much odium or euphony, is Islamo-collectivist.  The Islamist state will take a fixed portion of your income and distribute it for you and call it ‘charity’.  The goodness of one will be held to depend upon the behaviour of many and freedom will be curtailed not by public norms but fearful laws with bloody punishments.  At the same time, universal human dignity will be replaced by hierarchies of value: man and woman; Muslim and Dhimmi.  The nomenklatura and the secret police will have returned in flowing new robes.

Islamism gains from Socialism a means to explain its goals in terms that appeal to those outside the faith.  Socialism gains from Islamism a transfusion that can save it from final collapse.  Worn down over a century by the indignity of evidence, Socialism only clung to life because our intellectuals were too often accessory to its crimes to dig over the bones, as they have with Fascism.  Having made it into the new millennium, and tasted new blood, it is clicking its heels together again.  As it does so, Islamism cracks its knuckles and prepares for government.  When Islamist bombs in Madrid put a Socialist government into power, or when Islamists and Socialists shout “Not in my name!” from the same platform it is not a curiosity; it is a natural convergence of political sympathies.


Two More Fingers

The two fingers of progressive dogma are crossed, neither quite believing what the other says, yet stronger together and happy to point in the same direction.  They are aided by two separate doctrines, one progressive, one reactionary, that are working to reject the foundations of the world we have, its wealth and human happiness.  These two movements may be characterised as Anti-Humanists (progressive) and Anti-Economists (reactionary).  Anti-Humanism is the banner of the animal rights and eco-rights groups, who are willing to commit terrorist acts on behalf of Mother Gaia and small fluffy creatures everywhere.  Anti-Economists choose to disbelieve that capitalism and free markets really work or that globalisation will actually help relieve the desperate poverty blighting Africa and elsewhere.

Anti-Humanism is terribly well-meaning.  It presents itself as extending the circle of concern from humans to, as its followers would put it, ‘non-human animals’ and the environment which we and Brother Rat ought to share fairly.  In the words of a PETA spokesperson, “a rat is a dog is a pig is a boy”.  Four legs good, two legs equal.  Yet for those who cannot see the arrant inhumanity behind their relentless logic, the argument should be spelt out.  Anti-Humanism rests on the rejection of peculiar human value.  It works not by adding guinea pigs into our scheme of things but rejecting the traditional scheme altogether.  First they come for the ugly babies with club feet and hare lips.  Then they dig up your gran for the sake of the guinea pigs.

Peter Singer, high priest of this movement, recently laid out his position with shameless clarity.  Writing in Foreign Policy magazine of his hopes for the future, Singer was frank: ‘By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct’(Sept/Oct 2005, p. 40).  Anti-Humanism rejects the inalienable value of a human life that we call ‘sanctity of life’ and replaces it with ‘quality of life,’ irrespective of whose life that is.  At the back of this revolution in our ethical code is a chilly utilitarian calculus.  Once quality trumps sanctity, quantity rules over all.  Five happy pigs are worth more than the misery of one Socrates.  Better water Gaia with a little blood than see her magnificence stripped bare.  It is a natural step from believing in ‘the quality of life’ to waging a violent terrorist campaign: if a human life has no special value, and many lives are worth more than one, why not fire-bomb a few executives to liberate a shedful of chickens?

I should be clear, Peter Singer does not support the militants of the movement.  He argues that a respectable philosopher cannot be held responsible for the violent fringe of his movement.  I tend to think that his sincerity is irrelevant.  His reduction of human value to a number in a utilitarian equation makes it easy for people to start doing sums whose answers he might not like, but which are a consequence of the arithmetic he introduced.

These are not, in any case, fringe groups.  The Socialist government of Spain elected by Al Qaeda are going to give human rights to chimps.  The FBI admits that animal rights and eco-rights groups present the number one domestic terror threat in the US today.  They managed to disrupt the New York Stock Exchange where even Islamist terror had so far failed.  In the UK they are waging pitiless campaigns, and humans are suffering and dying for the delays in research they cause.  After the Buncefield explosions, I was talking to a (non-militant) eco-enthusiast.  He casually observed that even if it wasn’t a terror attack, he knew plenty of Earth-Firsters who would have considered it an appropriate action to take.  It will only be a matter of time before the arson and intimidation spread into terror spectaculars.  Once you have concluded that humans are nothing special, it is axiomatic that you must aim for the ruin of their pride.

Anti-Economists are more familiar: we see them in demonstrations whenever the WTO meets.  Yet familiarity should not blind us to their danger.  These are people who see the problem and want to move in exactly the wrong direction to solve it.  Listening to world music and wearing hand-knitted jackets from Nepal, they imagine that they can preserve their access to amusing native folkways by hampering international trade.  Rather, they succeed in keeping their fellow human beings poor to preserve their own sense of moral superiority.  Turning the Global South into a theme park for the display of their broad minds and bleeding hearts, they never notice that the people there might prefer to be treated as people rather than the equivalent of actors in Mickey and Goofy suits.

Anti-Economists make matters worse even as they draw attention to the problem, undermining the moral standing of the West and then blaming us for our faults.  Worse still, in turning from rational debate, they lead a growing rejection of scientific advance, the glory of Western civilisation.  They are also gaining influence, especially among the Christian churches.  If the Church of England used to be the Tory Party at prayer, it now goes on its knees before the Anti-Economists.

Progressive Anti-Humanists and reactionary Anti-Economists seem unrelated.  Yet the progression of Anti-Humanism leads toward a world in which not only do we not experiment on animals, but we do not eat or interact with them in any way.  No steaks, no hunting, no pets, no leather.  Beans and soy milk all round.  It is a call to advance by retreating into primitivism.  At the same time, its prioritisation of a mythical ‘balance of nature’ over a world tailored to our wishes tends to reject capitalist economic activity in favour of torpor.  At these points, it intersects with the Anti-Economists, who worship poor, primitive lifestyles (blaming their civilisation for the poverty of such lives, they nevertheless insist that the poverty be left as it is) and reject the fruits of capitalism.  Anti-Economists love to visit with the mud-hutters.  They hope to spread such ‘wise simplicity’ as far as they can, both by ending the creation of wealth and talking up asceticism.  Both movements seek to impoverish our lives.  They are beating a path back to ninth century servitude while talking up any economic ideology that rejects capitalism.


The Thumb of the Fist

Lying across the other threats is the intellectual sickness weakening the West almost to death: Relativism.  This doctrine is neither progressive nor reactionary, but simply catatonic.  All cultures are equally valid.  There are no real virtues, only systems of values and (yawn) if you want (yawn) you can choose what you like (zzz).

Relativism is the fifth column in the war for civilisation: the bookworm eating the library from within.  Those who follow the way of non-judgement cannot stand up for anything except not standing up for anything.  Appalled at such anarchic principles and the moral chaos that is its natural consequence, people will reach for alternative ideologies.  Take John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban.  Raised as an ultra-liberal relativist, he found his spiritual home trying to kill his countrymen in Afghanistan.  The refusal to indoctrinate produces intellectual orphans, denied their identity and driven to find certainty elsewhere.  The four fingers of the closing fist are waiting to grab them.  First they doubt.  Then they question.  Then they convert.  Those who resist the temptation are too weak to fight back.


The Closing Fist

The fist is closing.  Anti-Humanists and Anti-Economists are burning off the best of the West: its ability to enrich its members and its sense of their inalienable individual value.  As these riches go up in smoke, our civilisation does indeed begin to seem bankrupt.  Neither cause can do more than destroy, but the hybrid ideology coalescing from Socialist nostalgia and resurgent Islamism is ready to restore order and solve everything via collective enslavement.  Meanwhile the cult of Relativism primes more and more souls for the call of these dangerous faiths, while weakening our capacity to repel their charges.

Five separate challenges are curling together to make a fist.  They will deliver a blow that shakes the foundations of liberty.  They are linked by a rejection of key Western values: individuality; reason; truth.  They offer instead moral titillation as an ethical strategy.  Followers of each of these challenges are suffused by a warm and righteous glow.  They believe they must be doing right because it makes them feel good.  Unfortunately, such sub-Randian rationalisation is just a sophisticated form of selfishness.  I give that beggar some money and feel just swell.  He spends it on drugs and dies of an overdose, but who cares?  I’ve already moved on.  Real virtue involves sacrifice and hard choices, not exercises from the handbook of self-esteem.  Calling all choices equally valid sounds fine right up until the moment when your lifestyle kills you, as it did Foucault.  Or someone else, as with Sidique Khan and his mates.

What can the West do?  Recognising the problem would be an excellent beginning.  Relativism has been king of the castle for decades.  Now Anti-Humanism is creeping into the general conversation.  Most attempts to discuss animal rights terror begin with a grovelling acceptance of the terrorists’ arguments before trying to refute the conclusion of violence.  A general disgust of Man and his depredations is a common theme in art and dinner party conversation.  Similarly, sending money from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor countries is Gordon Brown’s idea of how to make himself seem more cuddly.  The super-rich campaign against the systems that made them so.  Meanwhile Communism is looked back on not with revulsion, but a grudging sense that those Russkis had their hearts in the right place, and Islamism positions itself as the last bastion of moral integrity: a hands-off policing strategy, plus all the Jew-baiting you can stomach.  Seeing the collection of ideologies that are gathering against us not as a curiosity but a fact worth investigating is to reconnect the debate to reality.  Asserting the peculiar value of every human life, the existence of truth and the power of reason will do for the second round.  Ultimately, we must be prepared to champion freedom against collectivising answers that will seem so plausible and inevitable when citizens who have been taught the wickedness of self-reliance can no longer control their own actions.  Wordsworth wrote,

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.—In everything we are sprung
Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.

We need to rediscover such confidence, and reject the calls to slavery now clamouring over our heads.  The fist is closing, and the blow will fall.

America begins to wake to animal terror

The latest National Review has an article, "In the name of the animals" that notices just how serious the animal and ecoterror threat is in the US: the number one domestic terror threat, by some considerable distance. It acknowledges that SHAC overcame the New York Stock Exchange, preventing the floating of HJS in the US, where Al Qaeda failed. There is a suggestion that the problem is coming from the UK. That is certainly true for SHAC, but the arrival of PETA in the UK was a defining moment in the UK too. In the words of one of their spokeswomen, "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy". The dissolving of the value of human life threatens us all, and the cross-fertilisation of ideas, from the US to the UK and back again, does not mean the danger at home is less, but is instead growing as the momentum of this poisonous movement grows. Wake up: you cannot compromise with people who will set a rat's life above your own.

Twain on the politician's maxim re: truth

Mark Twain: "Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it."

Peter Kreeft - Featured Audio

Listen to his refutation (or "whupping") of moral relativism.

Peter Kreeft - Featured Audio

The Eternal Conversation

" Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline... Truth is not about conclusions, for they keep changing. Truth is about staying engaged in the conversation -- with passion and discipline."

-- Parker Palmer

The very idea of freedom

"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation."
-- C. S. Lewis

The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment C.S. Lewis

The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment

C.S. Lewis

Truth is spherical?

Louisa May Alcott's father used to say that truth was spherical and people saw it differently depending on where they were looking at it from. A nice alternative to relativism, which pictures us all looking outward in different directions. One truth, even if people come to it from more than one angle.

The Pope stands up for Truth where his predecessor stood against Communism

Pastoral visit in Poland - Eucharistic Celebration in Pilsudski Square (Warsaw)

What is truth?

Wikipedia article on truth

On Decadence

What else do you call it when an individual - or a society - acts against their own interests simply because it is entertaining, or it feels immediately gratifying? Newspapers trying to drive out Tony Blair because they want a new target for their columns. People indulging their personal whims, such as having babies in their fifties and sixties, because they feel an overwhelming urge to do it. It is odd, the selfishness of the Noughties. As I said in an earlier post, the selfishness of the Eighties is now anathematised, while we live currently in a Randian hell of social conduct, in which the idea that if everyone only follows their heart, we will all be happy, has conquered all. And the state chases around after the lives this ruins, desperately patching the unpatchable, trying to shore up its equally false principle that such choices make no actual difference to how our lives go. Some choices -- like bringing your children up in a marriage -- are wiser than others. And our hearts are not wise, individually or collectively, any more than our appetites, if freely indulged, will settle on a diet of celery, boiled rice and healthy living for all. We are stuck with our needs for wisdom and virtue. But these truths are too awkward to face. Decadence is the product of welfare living: the confidence that your actions have no meaningful consequences. That is an illusion that will be brutally shattered by the world eventually. Until then, we play with opinions and actions, as if who rules over us and how we choose to live were choices between flavours of ice cream and nothing more.

Tony Blair misses the point on animal terror

Tony Blair finally comes out against animal extremists now the case against the Darley Oak campaigners has been safely won. But while he is at least pointing in the right direction now, he still manages to miss the point. He said that these vicious fools were 'out of touch with public opinion', as if what they did would have been fine if more people thought that guinea pigs were people. That is to give up on truth altogether in favour of what is popular. It is utter moral insanity, and a sign of decadent thought in a civilisation far from health. He may be signing a petition, but he knows too many of his party's supporters are fond of animal rights claptrap -- Labour were elected in 1997 on a platform of ending animal experiments, after all. When people start talking about 'the tiny minority of animal rights activists' who stoop to violence, you know we are in as much trouble over this as over Islamist terror. As there, the point is not how many will act in this way, but how deep is the attachment to and justification for violence, and how wide the sea of support in which such vile people hide.

The Apprentice as a moral puzzle

Is it right to try to sell someone something? The Apprentice has in recent weeks done a lot to make people answer , 'yes'. But it isn't always so. We have a great suspicion of sellers. Why else do we want advertisement regulated? Why do we hate estate agents and used car salesmen? And yes, selling is an aggressive attempt by another to bend us to their will. It is more as well. If we step up to it, a sales conversation is a robust two-way encounter in which our understanding of how much we want a good or service negotiates with the seller's knowledge of how much he or she can afford to let it go for. Think of haggling in an Arab souk. In fact, you could argue that the absence of haggling in the West has made us go rather soft on the other side of selling. If we as buyers don't engage, prices don't reach the right level. Consider Adam Smith's famous comment about how we do not need the butcher or the baker to look to the common good but only their own to get meat and bread at a fair price. True enough, but I always think of a quote from Dickens. I think it is in David Copperfield. Dodie's lovely but scatterbrained wife is failing to learn how to keep house and he asks her if she would know how to ask for a leg of lamb or somesuch in the butchers. She giggles and tries to distract him with kisses and says, 'but he would know how to sell it to me, and isn't that enough?'. It isn't enough, because the price will be too high and not in the buyer's interest. You could say a price is always right: if someone chooses to pay it, then they are willing to accept it. But if they choose without the capacity to fully engage in the transaction, they are only half-choosing. This is the problem we have with selling, in the end. We worry that in many circumstances, the seller takes advantage of us. But it seems to me the answer is not to move further and further back: regulating the seller and conceding our lack of autonomous control. Freedom demands that we take on the responssibility to make choices for ourselves. That may mean we should not let sellers target children, but we must allow adults to engage in the game. If only because there is no other way to find a fair price than creating an army of canny consumers. In some ways we are very canny: Which? magazine buyers and so forth. But we need more emphasis on the importance of the buyer's role in any transaction. Caveat emptor is still the rule, and we need to prepare people for that task. After all, this transaction of buying and selling is a training ground for far more important transactions where the power of character is tested. Any human interaction, especially in business and in any area where someone wishes to persuade you into their corner, requires the same skills. Now eristic, combative dialogue which aims to win and persuade may not always be the best way to the truth as it is to the price, but it can do very well, as in law courts. It needs a grounding in the trivium: grammar, the exact use of language, dialectic, the ability to think and reason well, to be able to spot logical flaws, and rhetoric, the capacity to put a true, clear point over to another person. When we manage that we can go far. Where we fail, we are at the mercy of charlatans. And when we turn our back on discussion because we say that every viewpoint is the same, we weaken these abilities, just as our muscles atrophy when we give up on the gym. Engaging as a seller and buyer, of goods and services and also of ideas and values and concepts and projects, is central to the life of a free thinking individual. We retreat from it at our peril.

Norms or laws: which is worse?

In the last of his Reith lectures, Daniel Barenboim said something extraordinary, which nevertheless probably speaks to an idea deeply embedded in popular thought these days. He said there was noting worse than norms and a good society was not possible unless taboos were expunged.

Well, one can see where this comes from. A liberal democracy leaves people free to regulate their own lives, and social norms and taboos provide an informal constraint on that freedom. And yet, it seems to me a remarkable claim. Assent to norms and taboos provides group identity, for the Jews as much as anybody. At the least, one should say that norms are yet far better than social preferences being encoded into law, such that they cannot be escaped. Think of poor Abdul Rahman, sentenced to death for converting to Christianity in Afghanistan. A norm pushes one in a certain direction, but it cannot be enforced.

And if we wish to say (as Barenboim didn't), yes, norms are less bad than legal infringement on natural freedoms, but nevertheless we would be better without them altogether, do we really mean it? For one, such a policy is hard to enforce, normative emergence being natural to human groups, so that it will require extreme legal interventions in favour of re-education and the curtailment of speech and drift towards cutting back on those natural freedoms in the name of which the well-meant actions are taken. In the second place, to deny the value of norms is give up on wisdom as a useful source of human knowledge. The idea that life possesses traps for the unwary that those who have passed the same way can warn us against in advance, that this capacity can help us in situations where our own reason in insufficient, is longstanding and not lightly to be set aside. As a corollary, such a position may well drift from saying we each must try our own experiments and enjoy the consequences (which being so our family and friends would be duty bound to exercise normative pressure on us to conform to more reliable paths of action and only extreme legal penalties will prevent them) , to saying that we each must follow our impulses and yet all impulses are equal so whatever consequences follow the state must cushion us against. At that point our freedom and dignity are again eaten: what we choose makes no difference, or we feel that it does and must be treated as if it doesn't. This kind of doublethink is confusing at best, patronising and malign at worst, keeping its subjects in that childlike state which Aristotle thought no one could prefer, for all the pleasures of childhood, if the cost were the loss of the power to fashion one's own best life through reason. There is a hidden sense in such thinking of course that norms are all taboos of the most irrational kind, which is to say they bear no relation to consequences at all. This seems unlikely at the most cursory glance, considering where normative pressure is most brought to bear: in matters of sexual conduct, whose consequences can be lifelong and shattering.

Thirdly, it may be that norms are important for us to react against. After all, they are by definition not legally binding. They say, 'danger: keep off,' and as such warn away the merely curious. But this encourages the true adventurer. Going into the forbidden may be unwise, but the willingness to do so, knowing the risks and ready to bear the consequences, this is an act of true character and courage. And surely some norms are foolish, or have been kept up through mere empty tradition. We need adventurers to take on the risk of finding out for us. If they are wrong, we will see. If they are right, we can give up the norm and follow them. We find our freedom in seeing that we live in a world of guidelines, rather than rules. Better this than a world of strict law. Better this than a world of pure anarchy that offers us nothing to decide for or against, trapped in a solipsistic paradox of freedom that cuts us off from the wisdom of our fellow human beings, prisoners of the same nature but locked from us by the fear of the norm.

Finally, as in a recent post, to give up on norms is to give up on truth. It says there is no wisdom to be had, and therefore no room for debate. In a world of norms, people give me advice and I must then decide for myself: I argue my way along in life and learn to fight my own corner. Without norms, no advice is possible or permitted. No discussion is meaningful. And even retrospectively, I cannot learn from mistakes because the state has erected safety nets everywhere since it has prejudged that there can be no difference between my choices. In such an environment is it any surprise if some fools decide on a thirst for truth at any cost, and try to explode a hole in this world that so benevolently dispenses with the norm?

Doing for others

The selfishness you don't even admit to is the most deadly. People are all too ready to admit now of the Eighties' excesses. Yes, that Randian view that simply going for your own desires with full force will make everything work out is dangerous. Yet Adam Smith is still right that we do not need butchers who are saints to get food at a fair price. And as America has found, a constitution that does not require or assume goodness in its political appointees has considerably more lasting power than one that does.

It it the new selfishness that alarms me: the one that no one admits to. If the 80s shouted 'ME!' at the top of their voice, the nineties and the noughties whisper '(me me me me me)' in a far more insidious fashion. I call it 'doing for others'. Its core principle is that nothing you do that makes you feel virtuous and altruistic can be wrong, and that this emotion is what virtue is all about. Such first-person-centred, feeling-led charity has no room for unpleasant sacrifice or difficult choices: it is virtue-lite, favoured by dilettantes with no objection to using other people's lives like toys. The archetypical example is giving spare change to a beggar who then goes and dies of an ovedose purchased with your money. The more subtle example would be something like aid to an African nation that hollows out local capacity and entrenches corrupt elites so leaving it worse off than before.

What this 'moral selfishness' forgets is how hard it is to act even in our own best interests. The combination of arrogance and uncertainty in acting for others is perilous in the extreme. But no one seems to remember that old staple of conventional wisdom, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions', or the cruel recurrence of unintended consequences. Here, the feeling of virtue justifies, or renders irrelevant, the actual consequences.

It is true that where people only attend to their own interests civil society falters. It is also true that when they use the suffering of others as a means to stroke their own conscience, regardless of the result, they partake in a form of egocentrism at least equally deadly. The best thing to do for another person is not necessarily (why should it be?) what makes us feel good about ourselves. All too often it will remind us of the limits of our power. I think of Wagner's Wotan, in Die Walkure, Act II: 'dem selbst muss der Freie sich schaffen -/Knechte erknet' ich mir nur!' (for the free man has to fashion himself-/serfs are all I can shape!).

Truth and Terror

We have given up on truth. Why else are we so frightened by people who hold dangerously false positions? We simply do not know how to handle islamofacists or animal rights terrorists because they are wrong and we have stuck ourselves with the view that there is no such thing. Views, we have liked to think, are like ice cream preferences -- a matter of pure taste, with no room for judgement. This is dangerous nonsense: it was Nietzsche who first used the word 'values' in place of virtue, with all its implicit sweeping away of judgement and natural law. In fact, what is swept away is rational discourse at all. If all answers to all decisions are equally valid, why waste time arguing in favour of one answer? We had hoped to build a cosily inclusive society this way, but have weakened ourselves terribly in the process. Worse, we have in some sense bred the terrorism that now faces us. For all our claims to democracy, if we create a multicultural, norm-free, values society, there is no place for truth and no place for debate. Then those movements with horribly wrong-headed ideas come along and they claim to be right. Yet no one will debate with them. 'Yes, that's fine: you think that,' we tell them. And they scream back, 'No! It's not a matter of opinion: it is true!' And we turn away in embarrassment, so they scream louder and louder and eventually pick up a broken bottle and rush us, since they can find no other way to engage. This is not the way to run a society. It is decadent. As Allan Bloom says at the beginning of 'The Closing of the American Mind', the basis of Western civilisation is that there is truth, but that people must assent to it for themselves and have the right to be wrong. This is a very different position, but far more robust. We should rediscover it, so there is a way to debate points of fact without explosives. Having come so far down the line, the worry is that we cannot retrieve our former position without great upheaval. But upheaval is coming, one way or another, invited by a disdainful attitude to truth.

Unreasonable men: God bless them!

"All progress depends upon the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw. All progress, and all discovery of truth, too. For recovery from common error can only begin as a minority opinion, which is why there is no such thing as a science by consensus, whatever the climate change lobby say.

Logic, truth and politics

Madsen Pirie's new book, 'How to win every argument: the use and abuse of logic' is just out. A handy guide to logical fallacies, the book is faintly disturbing for being written in the style of a manual for trainee politicians out to win arguments by employing such fallacies. Saved, or hoping to be saved, by its studied air of irony with which it advises when the petitio principi can be got away with, this leaves an odd taste in the mouth. Of course we know that much of our national and parliamentary discourse is eristic and not dialectical, concerned with scoring points and winning out rather than coming to the truth. Still, it is disturbing to find a book that so cold-bloodedly plays to that audience. A Sophist's Handbook would appear to be a suitable alternative title. Still, it will find an avid audience among those aiming at the green benches or even just the comfy chairs of television studios. For those who have an interest in truth, it can also clarify their appreciation of the tricks that are being played. Pirie is rather unsavoury for playing to both audiences at once. Unfortunately, if it isn't a book you can love, it is a book both sides can use. Have a read.

Most human beings 'natural born slaves' - Britain - Times Online

Most human beings 'natural born slaves' - Britain - Times Online

See my earlier comments on positive and negative slavery in 'what does slavery mean?'. Haven't been able to get a copy of his paper, though it sounds fascinating -- not because I want to enslave mankind, but because the nature of freedom is a hard one to think about. We must follow the argument where it leads. Not back to slavery, but in thinking about how some people seem to reject their chance to grab freedom. Can we help them? How? Can the choice to reject freedom be a free choice?

A note on life expectancy

I just saw a graph of how female life expectancy has increased steadily over time, passing points at which it was predicted to stop and level out without wavering. However, it seems the truth may be more complicated. Life expectancy is generated by a mean of years lived. Part of the reason that such large increases have happened is not because we have vastly increased the maximum age of death. After all, the bible, two thousand years ago, sets our span at threee score years and ten, yet we regularly speak of mediaeval life expectancies in the forties. What we have really changed is not death in old age, but deaths associated with birth. Child mortality massively skews any mean -- obviously, if lots of children die at birth, that will pull down enormously any average of lifespan across the population. Equally, fewer women now die in childbirth, which, as an event occuring relatively early in life, especially in historical times and especially in cases where the risk factors are higher, also pulled down the statistics. So we must be very careful in seeing a rise in life expectancy as proof that we are doing a lot to extend the lifespan overall. What we have done is let more people live out their biblical span. Of course, if we wanted to be gloomy, we could also argue that given how statistics have in the past been skewed by child mortality, they ought now to include abortions and infanticide. It would be interesting to see how that would affect mean life expectancy, especially given that abortions in Russia exceed live births and female infanticide in Asia is reported to have been widespread in recent decades. The claim might have to shift from, 'we have done wonders for the lifespan,' to 'the individuals who die now do so without suffering'. Which is an achievement of sorts, but not at all the one we currently celebrate.

Transhumanism: most dangerous idea in the world?

Nick Bostrom, from Oxford University's new Future of Humanity Institute, gave a lecture at the RSA last night on the possibility of transhumanism. He puts it this way: curing all cancer and heart disease won't add even ten years to the mean human lifespan, despite taking huge research projects. Delaying or curtailing aging could make a difference on a different scale of magnitude altogether. Also, consider the relatively small tweaks that seem to have taken a chimp-like primate to a planet-conquering hominid. He asks if there are more such tweaks that can be made, and suggests we would be mad not to try. Francis Fukuyama, by contrast, (he of 'The End of History') has called this the most dangerous idea in the world, because of its potential to divide humanity, joined by an indefinable x-factor of human-ness, into tribes of superior and lesser kinds, after the manner of Brave New World, or the false scientific racism that interested the Nazis so much. Unclear that this would happen, because the danger would come from engineering sub-humans, not super-humans. If we accept that all humans now pass some threshhold, we would have to re-engineer types that we thought did not. More likely we would progress animals to some intermediate state - superchimps that we could use as servants or send to difficult locations - or robots with AI. Neither case seems worrying in Fukuyama's sense. On the other hand, consider how, while markets in many ways are very effective mechanisms for setting prices, discovering useful information and driving up standards, there are situations where mass choosing seems to arrive at a non-optimal result, precisely in the areas that transhumanism comes to play. Consider control over reproduction. The choice to have a baby or not is a new and powerful one. It has had a very good press for a long time. Now however it is becoming clear in Europe and particularly in Russia where abortions exceed live births that it has produced a continent that cannot sustain its own population. Equally, in China and probably elsewhere too in Asia, the power of parents to select gender (often crudely through infanticide in the face of the one child policy) is producing a population skew, with many more boys than girls born and reared. This seems an obvious worry. The problem is that individual choice seems the only mechanism available. It must be better than control by the state in these intimately personal areas. And outright bans do not seem possible, except as a braking manoeuvre. In fact, looking more closely at the worrying instances given, it says more about how state intervention distorts the marketplace for reproduction than the inability of parental choices to aggregate into social wisdom. Europe's welfare state has made children a bad bargain when you can assume that leaning on someone else's is a possibility. Russia's kleptocratic, anarcho-capitalist, post-commnist malaise has left family integrity battered and broken. China is suffering the law of unintended consequence for a brutally centrist policy. Perhaps the lesson of transhumanism as a foreseeable prospect is that the state needs to get out of the way if individual reproductive choices are not to accumulate, propped up by state support, into unsustainable positions.

Hazlitt on liberty

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." -- William Hazlitt

What does slavery mean?

The great British intervention to end the slave trade, and the great American war that freed its slaves are defining events in Western civilisation. They show the extent of our commitment to freedom, and highlight the power of Christianity in shaping the causes for which we will fight.

But these two great efforts also tend to impose on our thought a definition of slavery that misses some complexity of ancient thought on the subject. The action of British and American militaries was taken against the economic practice of ownership of human beings, the power to trade them and determine the conditions under which they lived. This sense of slavery is utterly horrible, and, it seems, almost endemic in human history. Legitimated by Islam; practised by African chiefs long before the arrival of Western colonisers; powering the Roman empire -- economic, or 'positive' slavery is a horror that continues to dog the world outside the West. Some estimates suggest there are more slaves now than there have ever been. Even within the officially slave-free West there are positive slaves hidden within the black economy of people-smuggling and the sex trade.

Positive slavery seems to be challenge enough for mankind. Yet there is another concept of slavery that is latterly ignored, but was common in the ancient world. This may be called, in contradistinction, 'negative' slavery. This is the idea that certain people (sometimes identified by ethnic group, sometimes by their defeat in battle) are slavekind. That is to say they are naturally slaves. Aristotle says that slaves are not fully human. To the Roman mind, to allow yourself to be beaten in war, to accept slavery, was essentially to prove that you were fit for slavery. The condition of Dhimmitude in Islam, for those outside the faith, is, while not positive slavery, a form of treatment that acknowledges some form of negative slavery inhering in the dhimmi.

Thankfully, the twentieth-century fashion for racial science has passed and no serious effort to characterise whole peoples as inevitably deserving of slavery by nature can now be made. But negative slavery as a trap in which individuals may find themselves despite having the power to escape it, that threat still remains. For what negative slavery recognises is that freedom is only half a gift, and perhaps less than that. It is in the main a prize to be won, to be seized by an individual determined to be free. 'Give me freedom or give me death,' the cry of the American patriot. Or, as it became for some slaves with a bleaker outlook, 'Death or freedom'.

We have forgotten that freedom must be fought for, and have retreated into the cosy idea that it can be handed out by the state. The state may, indeed, outlaw positive slavery. Yet there are surely many in the West who could be considered as negative slaves -- they have votes they do not use, faculties of reason they will not exercise, privileges they have not earnt and will not stand up to defend.

What is the duty of government? Less than many think today. For if government begins in the protection of its citizens from those outsiders who would enslave them positively, it must be careful not to act to enslave negatively those within its own reach. That argues for small government and self-reliance. It argues for freedom as something that must be seized and cannot only be given. Above all, it suggests that the first principle of government should be to work for the individual freedom of its citizens -- from both breeds of slavery. That may mean intervention, as Wilberforce showed. It will also mean knowing where to step aside, and knowing that where you intervene it should be in favour of removing the need to do so.

Awkward truths about war /2

“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol-- Well, okay.”
“Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I'll grant you that, but…”“Saving civilization against a horde of…”
“It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
"Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?”

- from 'Thud!' by Terry Pratchett

Awkward truths about war /1

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

- Hilaire Belloc

Crackdown on animal-rights activists | csmonitor.com

Good news from the USA
Crackdown on animal-rights activists csmonitor.com

Too tasty to firebomb

So Danish pastries are now 'Roses of the Prophet Mohammed' in Iran. Why does the croissant get such a free ride in Europe? It is, after all, the exact antithesis of the rebranded Jihad Pastries. The croissant was created to celebrate the lifting of the siege of Vienna, as the encroaching Islamic armies was turned back from Europe. The croissant is a deliberate, contemptuous insult to a religion that historically is one of Europe's great enemies. The purchaser of a croissant takes a mocking representation of the holy symbol for Religion-o'-Peace(TM) and shoves it into his or her filthy kaffir mouth. Much worse than pointing your foot at someone, you'd think. Maybe banning it or calling it pain au beurre or something anodyne and history-free would stir up to much real history in the process? Or maybe it is just far too tasty to trifle with. Nice to think that even hate-filled zealots can be won round by a good recipe.

PETA - cruel and unusual

The FBI recently declared environmental and animal rights extremism its top domestic terrorism priority. The bureau is currently investigating over 150 cases of arson, bombings, and other violent crimes related to these movements. Law enforcement authorities are rightly concerned about the fanaticism over animal “rights” used to justify violent criminal behavior.


HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE - Conservative News, Views & Books --

On my name

St Francis called his body "brother ass". Useful, sturdy, in need of the stick from time to time, always faintly absurd. And, as I would add, in touch with the realities of this world. However red the carpet, we still sit ride the same ass across it.

Why Animal Rights is like the Islamist threat

I said in my last post that there is an alarming similarity between the animal rights movement and Islamism. I went on to list how it is already affecting our lives for the worse and how its ultimate goals would undermine our civilisation in many profound ways. I want to consider five specific aspects of the threat which seem to me to be shared by the two movements.

=========================================================

FIRST, like Islamism, on which there is no room for negotiation, the terms of absolute submission being antithetical to Western civilisation, animal rights is an ideology with no room for compromise. It cannot be appeased, but is an appetite for reform that grows by what it feeds on, scenting victory and pressing any advantage it is given. The government and the police have been aiming at tactical calm by using piecemeal appeasment and a low profile. This is a disastrous strategy, allowing the movement to grow without serious attempts to destroy it in the hope that it is a civilisational phase that will vanish of its own accord. Animal rights is a worked-out philosophy, courtesy of extremely clever but dangerously misguided individuals, notably Peter Singer and a Christian apologist, Andrew Linzey. It is not a generous outward extension of the rights we find inalienable to any human person to other animals, as the Great Ape Project implies. It is a radical smashing of the special value we place upon the human person, as Peter Singer's article in Foreign Policy magazine, dreaming of an end to the sanctity of human life with thirty-five years, makes clear. This is not an additive to our moral landscape, it is an earthquake that reshapes it utterly, so that there is no protection for people from a chilly utilitarian calculus and the death of humans may be weighed against presumed harm to animals and found the ethically superior option. That position, so seductive, so full of good intentions and so swiftly leading us into hell is one that must be robustly fought against at an intellectual level. It must be understood as diametrically opposed to a view that accords special dignity to persons, that puts humanity at the centre of our moral concern, that says a single life is too valuable to be put in the scales of a revolutionary project. That is unChristian and definitely unHumanist. It is a repulsive ideology that feels cosy as you put it on - rather like wearing a fur inside out so it cossets your skin even as the world is confronted with bloody horror. You couldn't come to a compromise with Nazism's rejection of the humanity of Jews, homosexuals, Slavs and blacks. You can't with those who want a worldwide umma. You can't with this either.

=========================================================

SECOND, and even worse: like Islamism, this ideology that cannot be accommodated is also one that permits violence in its cause. As stated above, when a position destroys any special moral status of the individual human being, a utilitarian calculus may swiftly arise in which that individual may be caused to suffer or die for a larger good. For those who equate the treatment of animals with the Holocaust, as they do (including the otherwise very talented writer, J.M. Coetzee, who suggests it may be a crime of stupefying proportions), it is not surprising at all that they are willing to carry out vicious acts to stop us. This is enormously important. People think that animal rights violence is an unfortunate extreme wing of a legitimate movement, such as any group may suffer from. Peter Singer uses this argument to distance himself from their activities. But the point is that his arguments are precisely what gives their actions their ethical ground; he may make a different utilitarian calculation, but the idea that it comes down to cold-hearted sums is his -- his arguments make these actions possible, make people able to square them with their consciences. As a contrast, consider anti-abortion violence in America. Now here is a case where people again genuinely believe that a crime which they compare to the Holocaust is taking place. They do so because of Christian belief. Yet that belief also tells them that they must not murder, that they should turn the other cheek, that every human life is of special value: it does not legitimate violence as a solution. It is very hard to get from that ethical system to murder, even when you sense an appalling crime. That is why, although people have, terribly, been killed by anti-abortion terrorists, it is not so large and dangerous a movement as the animal rights terror.

=========================================================

THIRDLY, in practice, the movement has formed a very dangerous and potent alliance. We have seen the theoretical dangers: that the animal rights movement is a philosophy that is incommensurable with Western civilisation and one that permits its followers to use violence to achieve its victory; that it believes a crime equivalent to the Holocaust lies at the heart of all our lives and seeks to remake the world on its own twisted model of virtue. In actual practice, this has drawn a surprising combination of followers, both very sophisticated, wrongheaded thinkers and emotional hotheads, all bound by a constitutional bias against the status quo ante. This is an explosive mixture: revolutionary thinkers divorced from the practical life and alienated hysterics who will happily put their thoughts into practice. Islamism works through old men with a monstrous, driving idea sending young fools from the volatile Arab street or alienated, paranoid corners of the West to kill and die for them. People think of animal rights terrorists as lone nutjobs, but they are a fusion of knife-wielding zealots and prophets of blood--a lethal combination.

=========================================================

FOURTHLY, this dangerous mix of vicious action and righteous justification has learnt a very powerful tactic just as Islamism did. Both ideologies feel justified in utter ruthlessness, and are therefore able to attack those tangentially connected with those they consider their enemies. For Islamism, those in the twin towers; for animal rights terrorists, a nursery used by the children of those connected to animal experimentation. The nursery changed its policy and gave a good demonstration of just how powerful this tactic is. Firstly, it is extremely brutal, putting those who are innocent by any stretch of the imagination into the firing line. This introduces a deep sense of terror, a sense that anyone could be a target and all because of a tightly-located primary target which they then are driven to wish away to get the danger away from them. Second, by choosing peripherally-involved companies and individuals, it challenges those who are most ideologically "soft", a relatively easy target in which to sow disquiet and a sense that there must be something in their position or they wouldn't so vehement in its pursuit, and thereby to gain their acquiesence. Thirdly, it is almost impossible to protect against because it spreads the web of potential targets so wide. If one supplier is protected, they will try the local pub and so on. Islamism has profited from attacking soft targets from embassies in Africa to the Tube in London. Animal rights terror has learnt the same tactic and there is no reason to see why they should stop: they are already seeing it succeed.

=========================================================

FIFTHLY and finally, not only do animal rights extremists hold a philosophy that cannot be accommodated, that permits the killing and torment of people in its cause, not only has the movement in practice formed a dangerous coalition between the wickedly clever and the brutally direct, not only has it learnt and implemented a tactic of soft targetting that has proven highly effective for Islamism and in their own hands, but they are also, again like the Islamists, profiting from a very modern possibility: asymmetric warfare. The demonic Davids of the animal rights movement are able to topple corporate Goliaths on the side of right because they are a loosely distributed network of highly committed individuals bound by modern communication technologies, especially the internet, taking on tightly organised corporations guided by their responsibility to the health and safety of their workers and to the profits of shareholders. Only an individual can have a conscience, can take a stand not in its immediate interest for a larger principle, actually putting itself in danger to do so. As the Danish cartoons of Muhammed proved (see the link in my earlier posting, or view them here), a corporation cannot take a stand and publish the cartoons, even if it wants to, because it cannot presume to put its staff at risk. Boris Johnson admitted in a diary column that this was why the Spectator had not published them, in the same edition as the editorial pronounced high-mindedly on why it would have been the wrong thing to do on entirely other grounds. To say you will keep doing what your company does even when it puts your staff and customers at risk is extraordinarily difficult and this asymmetric power allows a few committed individuals caught in an intellectual and emotional error of terrible proportions to dictate to the New York Stock Exchange, just as those of another movement can challenge the preminent might of the US army. The only means to resist the T-shirt row would be for a large group of individuals willing to wear a T-shirt with the cartoon on to walk down the streets together. That is very hard to do, but the only way to restore symmetry to the battle. Those under siege must discover a value system for which individuals in large numbers can decide they are willing to put themselves on the line, as their opponents do. Unfortunately, political correctness and multiculturalism encourage self-censorship, which is just what we do not need at such a time, and may be part of the reason such malevolent groups are springing up: because they can do so unchallenged, until they become impossible to ignore, by which time they are also almost impossible to stop. It is why the Pro-Test march in Oxford was so important and why it came so late. It is also why it must only be the beginning. For these five reasons, you should take animal rights very seriously. The violence may only be carried out by a few, but the justification comes from the heart of the movement and the extemists swim in a supporting sea of those who share their radical goals but are held back by the folk memories of conscience that have stayed with them from their former membership of civilised and humane thought. We need to win them back.

What's wrong with animal rights.

The Pro-Test demo in Oxford was a triumph this Saturday. Yet talking to someone who has to work daily in the Psychology building there I can't see it as more than the end of the beginning. She not only has to listen to abuse being screamed from the street, but must face extremists taking her photograph as she enters (a highly aggressive tactic given what has happened and been threatened to those with even marginal connections to the place). The police advised her not to march.

What I wanted to say was that it is important to take these vicious fools very seriously. Hearing several people in the march saying, 'no one took them seriously' I am reminded how Islamist terror has crept from a fringe annoyance to a great enemy of peace and security while people looked the other way. That will seem an odd connection, extreme and faintly absurd. Consider, however, how these few terrorists are already having a serious impact. Colin Blakemore's place on the New Years Honours list was taken away because the government lacked the courage to reward work involving animal experiments even when it is of the first importance. (Labour is deeply compromised on this issue, because its base has a strong inclination toward animal rights, being fond of squashy, emotionally pleasing positions over those that require tough thinking and hard decisions and being equally drawn to revolutionary doctrines that suggest humanity has been deep in contingent wickedness for its whole long history and they know how to lift it onto a new plane of virtue. I'd like to say the resurgent Conservatives offer a vision of good sense, but David Cameron, courting the new establishment, has also sent out indications that he has sympathy with animal rights positions.) Blakemore's daughter has opened parcels sent to him from the terrorists stuffed with HIV-infected needles. The least that brave man deserved is the support of a government whose democratically-legitimated policies include tightly-controlled, welfare-driven animal research. The Darley Oaks guinea pig farm closed after a long and horrible camapign, in the hope of getting back the remains of their grandmother, though whether that happened I do not know. Valuable research is being threatened. A ridiculous and unenforceable law against hunting has been brought in, threatening large and important sectors of the rural economy. British life is being curtailed and hemmed in by thugs. Nor can it be said to be a peculiar British problem born of our over-solicitious relationship with animals. The arrival of PETA in the UK was a watershed for this country in this battle, to my mind. PETA is a peaceful campaign group, but their views are strong and uncompromising and their use of celebrities to support their message gave them powerful leverage: they are part of the acceptable face to an unacceptable goal. More recently, the New York stock exchange withdrew the listing for Huntingdon Life Sciences at the last moment because of animal rights threats. America is facing a growing problem with this movement, and related ecoterror groups just as in Britain. The threat is present and growing and has real consequences.If the campaign in Oxford succeeds, an important research lab will not be built. Not only will Britain suffer economically and as a base for research, but proposed labs everywhere will be drawn to reconsider their plans. Research to cure cancers and vaccinate against AIDS will not be done. Humanity begins to draw back from material achievement into a world of stasis and moral cowardice, too frightened of its own capacities to put them to work. And a campaign that succeeds on one front will only be emboldened, just as the hunting ban has drawn the terrorists attention to game shooting and fishing. The end they seek is nothing less than the severing of all human relationships with animals, from those raised for food, for riding, for use as guide and sniffer dogs, to pets. And as Winston Churchill said, appeasement is the process of feeding the crocodile in the hope that it will eat you last. Go to www.greatbefore.com to read about Ross Clark's vision of life in the hands of luddites and reactionary zealots.

Reform bill could 'sweep away parliamentary debate'

Write to your MP-- protest the Abolition of Parliament Bill before New Labour follow their instincts and take parliamentary debate out of the legislative process altogether.

Guardian Unlimited Politics Special Reports Reform bill could 'sweep away parliamentary debate'

Pro Test build the Oxford Animal Lab

As the animal rights extremists begin to wake people in Oxford up to where their arguments lead -- a campaign of violence against the university -- PRO TEST is drawing a line in the sand. Help them stand up for non-violence, scientific advance and a cancer cure for your mum. Go along this Saturday

Get involved

Think beyond the consensus - Care NOT Killing

Promoting palliative care, Opposing euthanasia and assisted suicide - Care NOT Killing

Care not killing is a terrific new group dedicated to evening up a debate that has become all too one sided in Britain. People need to think long and hard before they bring in euthanasia laws. The truth isn't served by a lack of debate.