A few weeks when totalitarian Political Correctness, again, has been celebrated on the mass media.
In the last few weeks we have had a superabundance of Political Correctness [PC] in the media. The idea seems to be to foster a mass, or a mob, reaction to affirm the crass ideal of equality of sexes, races, ages, of religions and of lifestyle choices that must all be respected: unless they happen to flout PC ideals. Indeed, the PC need is held to be the more direly needed if nasty bigots [nowadays meaning anyone who does not conform to PC] do not want to conform in this way. The PCers usually think that time is on their side and they tend to get a bit upset when they realise that this might not be the case. Then they usually cite the year, as if the offenders, the nasty bigots, might reform, after all, if only they could fully comprehend what year it is. Today, the PC ideologues will be saying something like, “this is still going on in 2011!”
The PC ideal is equality and that clashes with liberty. Instead of allowing men to express any opinion of women that they see fit, an elementary civil liberty which seems to have been retained for the opinions of women about men, just as it has for the minority races, whom might speak freely, or at least a little freer than the whites, the formerly dominant group can. Many may think that most of the time the PC outlook was out to have a go at whites for the supposed sins of their fathers, if not for their own sins of late, to regress the balance to compensate for the past. However, the purists amongst the PCers will be all too keen to agree with the idea that all should conform to PC mores and laws. They will wish to limit free speech even more than they have achieved so far
PC does not quite succeed, as few in the general public respond the way the politicians and the pundits on the media seem to want, but the PC drive is still unpleasantly totalitarian if not as successful with the general public as the PC ideologues would wish. . That Political Correctness has yet to be accepted displays to the PC ideologues that their sacred mission is all the more urgent.
The time was when football was thought to be a boy’s or a men’s game but those days women present it on TV and in the newspapers too, whether this is apt or not. Men have to lump it if they do not like it. But it is not just the reporting side but there are now linesmen who are female too. So the females are now even on the pitch. Why? Because PC ideology holds that it is only fair that any job is open to one and all, as we are all basically equal. That it might not be what people want to see is neither here or there, those who do not like PC are held by the ideologues to be bigots, or Neanderthal, so all the more reason that they should have to lump it. They need to catch up. Political Correctness is that no one should ever discriminate on any basis whatsoever. This daft dogma overlooks that to discriminate is to think and that to choose, on any basis whatsoever, is an elementary civil liberty.
As to think is to discriminate; even the silly PC ideologues do discriminate all the time. To act is to choose and to discriminate between options is a prerequisite of any human action whatsoever. To end discrimination would need an end to human life. But the PC ideologues plead; they only mean some forms of special types of discrimination., that they feel to have caused injustice in the past. But their crass ideal of equality has no reality outside of mathematics. It is alien to anything societal, despite the fact that the neo-religion of sociology has it as a sacred dogma, as does its ugly sister that we call psychology. PC is as rampant in those “disciplines” as rampant as the Green ideology is in ecology. The colleges themselves, despite charging ever rising fees, seek to rule the students by PC dogma rather than serve them as if they were truly on the market place. They have long since abandoned the free speech that one might think is essential to any serious enquiry. .
When it comes to dealing with the vulgar masses outside the colleges, it is enough for the PC totalitarians that football is male dominated for it to be condemned as being such, but why should it not be? It is a game played by boys and some grown men. Why should females be introduced? Apart from crass PC dogma, there is no reason at all why females should go into football.
Sky Sports have sacked Andy Gray for making suggestions to a female to aid him to adjust his dress, a clip that was released in the wake of the response to his comments on a female not being able to grasp the offside rule that was in an earlier leaked clip. Many of the PC pundits have bring up their past success against Ron Atkinson some years back now. He made a few racialist comments about black players in his team.
As some who worked for Sky leaked the clips to the media Gray may well have had many who wanted him sacked at Sky but the public import is that there should be limits on free speech and that any discrimination on sex or race is wrong. That is mere arbitrary dogma that limits civil liberty.
It is reported in the UK press that both Andy Gray and Richard Keys were unpopular with the general public as well as with some who worked at Sky. Gabby Logan, as TV sports presenter, moans in The Times that the two PC sinners are not untypical in their outlook, that she has often been told that she should not reporting on football and that when she said she was not being stretched enough by the jobs that she was given, she was told that only a baby would truly fulfil her desires. Jacuelin Maynay moaned that in Australia she was told to go home and wash the dishes by Aussie rules Rugby coach Danny Frawley. But as one in five who attend are now female this cannot be tolerated, says Robert Booth in The Guardian. He seems to overlook that four out of five remain male. It does not seem to matter to the PC fools whether their totalitarian PC outlook abuses the male majority. Indeed, PC is most ironic in always being offensive when it pretends not to be, and if any “bigot” should object to it then that only displays to the PC ideologue how very badly his crass dogmas are needed. The wider public still direly need to catch up with the modern PC mores and laws. They need to be educated they say, as if there was much to learn in the simple-minded content of the PC dogmas.
As we saw of late, Roman Catholicism can be flouted either on adoption at the Catholic Adoption Agencies, or on whom is acceptable to be admitted into a guesthouse. Rod Liddle remains largely PC, despite his occasional heresy. In The Sunday Times 26 January 2011 he said: “Congratulations to Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, who have won the right for all homosexuals to stay in bed and breakfast establishments run by pig-headed Christians”. Indeed, all too often a statement that they are basically right nearly always prefaces any doubt thrown on the PC dogmas. As Karl Marx once said, even a critical theologian remains a theologian. It needs to be realised that PC is a totalitarian tyranny that scotches liberty whenever it is reinforced by the law. In the case of the refusal to let two homosexuals stay overnight, Bristol County Court found the discriminating owners, Peter and Hazelmary Bull guilty of “direct discrimination” at their Cornwall guesthouse back in September of 2008. On the Moral Maze, radio 4, Wednesday 26 January, a few on the panel had some sympathy for the Bulls. But in the Guardian the journalists mainly, if not fully, agree with Liddle. There, Ben Summerskill said he felt it was on par with putting up a notice saying “No blacks. No Irish”. Why should the “bigots” be any more entitled to exempt themselves from equality legislation than from health and safety laws? The ruling keeps private prejudice out of a public place, he said. It thereby extends totalitarian crassness, the crass thinking behind PC and all the equality laws that need to be repealed if ever we are to have civil liberty. If liberty mattered then they should never have been passed in the first place. The PC ideologues look at the feelings or what they imagine to be the feeling of the rejected but thereby overlook the liberty of everyone to be able to reject; they oppress the dog to aid the tail of the dog. What they might do to see clearer is to look at the whole picture as they are not even living up to their ideal of equality but actually privileging those they assume to be victims.
Most of the Health and Safety laws are no better. Maybe a few of them relating to real diseases like cholera or food hygiene make sense but, clearly, most of them are not just silly but even quite insane, as are all the traditional great religions. Most people seem to see those things clearly enough but they also feel that religion needs the undue respect and they fail to see that the state and statuary law as an unmitigated menace to one and all.
Baroness Warsi, who has been promoted to be the new Conservative chairman, and given a place in the cabinet, owing to a direly felt PC need to conform to what they mistake as the modern world, by the Conservative Party and their current and recent leadership, made the news last week. She accused the broad UK native population of Islamophobia, a meme that is something of a wild joker in the PC card deck of crass dogmas, as to respect Islam is just to flout nearly all the other PC values. PC has this totalitarian need to be uniform on those things but it is most unrealistic for its ideologues to think that it ever can be so. Where common sense suggests the old idea of “live and let live”, the ideology of PC stresses, instead, a need to get us all to conform to unrealistic standards that no one actually wants instead of keeping the law out of social life and allowing people to freely adjust as they see fit. The PC Conservative chairman spoke out at the University of Leicester, putting forward her “dinner table test” for at dinner in the UK it was acceptable to hate Islam, she said. Norman Tebbit, who had his earlier “cricket test” that the chairman might have aped somewhat, replied that there was even more hatred of Christianity in the Mosques than there was in the churches about Islam. He suggested that she should shut up for a while.
Peter Oborne, writing in The Daily Telegraph, thought Tebbit went too far there and that he had got it dead wrong, as Oborne thought that what Sayeeda Warsi said “has desperately needed saying by a mainstream politician for a very long time”. Oborne feels that the Muslims he knows are all decent people with a clear-eyed appreciation of what it means to be a British citizen. Yet they are routinely reviled and not only by BNP members. Polly Toynbee openly declares that: “I am an Islamophobe and proud of it”. Had she said that she was an anti-Semite in such boastful terms, she would have been out of a job, says Oborne. Another Guardian writer, Giles Frazier, tends to agree with Oborne. He fears a slippery slope to the chief PC sin. The dinner party bigots begin on Muslim ideas and human rights but they soon slide into Islamophobia and even outright racism, he exclaims. But others in the UK press, like Minette Martin in The Sunday Times, hold that as 36% of Muslims say that converting out of Islam should be punished by the death sentence is a reasonable concern to be fearful about, not withstanding all the other illiberal aspects of Islam today. Damning the backward religion is not at one with damning the people. To fear the march of the religion is simply plain sense.
In the middle of January, the aging Miriam O’Reilly won an ageism case and she had to be reinstated by the BBC’s Countryfile programme as a result. She was on the screens again in her old place within a week. She had been dropped to be replaced by a female a bit younger and a lot better looking. The optimistic PCers saw this as a great win but the pessimists amongst them lamented that it was only one case and that what they disapprove of will continue to be the norm, even if more gingerly. That silly PC floats everyday reality is true, so the pessimists amongst the PCers are most likely right, but why should anyone have to tolerate their laws? The right to discriminate is an elementary civil liberty and Political Correctness is a tyranny.
The accommodation of one and all with diverse outlooks was always a part of common sense that had mild mores against all religious or political conversation on the idea that it might lead to conflict. The movement that was widely named Politically Correct in the late 1980s may well have got its impetus from this aspect of common sense but with common sense people always knew its limits and that to flout them would to be to go beyond common sense. This PC movement went way beyond common sense by becoming an offensive movement with its own jargon of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, Islamophobia and the like. It can only create trouble by holding that the general public is largely made up of bigots and it has no chance of ever getting rid of normal inequality any more than Christianity ever had the slightest chance of getting rid of what it called sin. Indeed, the similar aim of both Christianity & Political Correctness seems to be to put up a set of impossible standards such that they can be sure that most people will fall short of, so that they can indulge in the condemnation of the sinners or bigots respectively. This might well give the ideologues a self-righteous satisfaction. But when they get statute laws to back them up they flout liberty. It is the unacceptable face of totalitarianism. If the CON DEMS want to save money they could hardly do better than to repeal all the PC laws and to cease to fund the PC totalitarian Commissions.
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For me political correctness has nothing to do with the gender of someone who can do a job. It is used as such of course. If I think a linesman or woman does not understand the off-side rule, then it is not because of their gender it is because I think they are incompetent – as Andy Gray might well of said had a linesman did the same thing. Of course he might not like women as well, but that’s his choice, if I think someone is a pillock it is not aimed at their gender, not normally, but to be honest I prefer men to play football with men and women to play football with women, referees and linesmen ditto. The same as I do not think women should be part of the fighting force in the armed forces – not because in the former comment, they (a) cannot play football, referee etc. as good as a man, nor because they (b) cannot fire a gun, fight or understand or give tactical orders to troops as well as a man, but because they distract men from doing their best, how can any fighter be non-plus about having a female by his side, there is, I think a natural – oh I hate that word, but hey ho – instinct to protect a woman. Also there is the cost as women have to have separate quarters and other measures taken into consideration, just because they are female. So that’s my sensibility part out of the way. What if they prove they can do as good a job as the men, and I guess they must do otherwise they would not be in the armed forces fighting, or being a linesman or a referee? Well bang goes my sensibility and in comes the kicker – if they can do it then so be it. And if you want to moan about it you should be allowed to moan about it – but not stop it. Men after all had to fight hard to be considered to be nurses, not doctors or consultants, but nurses without people saying they must be more effeminate than most men – oh yeah I heard that one a few times.
see: http://ezinearticles.com/?One-Step-Forward-For-Women-In-The-Unites-States-Military-Forces&id=815515 & http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/23/women-in-armed-forces & http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250205/Amy-Fearn-woman-referee-charge-Football-League-game.html
Thanks for your reply.
I do not think that the comment that the female was ignorant was a technical one but was basically a protest that she was on the pitch. Nor was it against the particular female but against any female on the pitch, even if she knew way more about football than any male. The main point was that football is [or was!], & should be, a male domain. Thus I think Gray was expressing that he would rather that females kept off the pitch, a view that seems to be similar your outlook,
I dislike PC as an end in itself. I do not think it is basically all right or decent but rather that it crass & stupid. It looks a bit odd to see a girl on the pitch but generally I’d sooner see a girl in shorts than a male, all things being equal but nevertheless it is a silly thing to enforce. That is not the point. The point is that the PC ideal of equality is crass. So is politics in general. Both scotch liberty & liberty is way better than totalitarian rule. With liberty we can accomodate others as we see fit.
I agree that it is very odd that females should be in the fighting forces but I also think that males should think twice before maintaining them too. But for males to fight is less perverse than for females to fight.
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David McDonagh – I would hate to be part of a totalitarian rule. I shudder at the thought of it.
The integration of the sexes in any field is always at first sneered at, protested against, mocked and made fun of, normally in an insulting way. It is initially I think a ‘power’ and ‘status’ thing from those, who like Andy Gray and others, sorry to pick on him, but he was vocal in public; other men are vocal in a less media orientated public way, thus they do not get sacked or disciplined for their comments, however crass or sexist those comments might be, if that is all they can say on the matter then their views are both infantile and irrelevant to debate; at least that allows one to be rid of pent up energy.
The real problem is that we are all too busy looking at the gender, that we fail to see capability and dare I say it human ability. Sad but true.
There will always be those who just do not want to see women in a culturally evolved male role and visa versa – the anti ‘men staying at home to run the household’ rhetoric. In a free-ish society those who disagree should be allowed to disagree, but not prevent such changes just because of the gender of the people involved. Segregation of the sexes may well be a thing of the past, and those who dislike it may well have to bite the bullet. But political correctness, as a means to an end is crass, as you so rightly said, it also becomes an evil, the opposite for what was hoped, when it prevents people from speaking out or disagreeing; what you do with your dissatisfaction, be it a violent jihad or a peaceful protest, is another matter.
Very interesting blog David. Thank you for enabling me to use my little grey cells.
Thanks for your second reply.
Totalitarianism is the state being able to infer with every aspect of life. As an ideal, democracy tends to be totalitarian and we must bear in mind that a vote is always a vote against other people: a bit of gratuitous proactive illiberal coercion against others. Politics itself is intrinsically anti-social in this way. Society is freer the more limited government is but it can only be completely free if we can rid it of all government.
Edmund Burke tended to limit democracy with his idea of distinct parties and representation by specialisation as an expert career on the division of labour. The USSR, that, in theory, retained the earlier ideas of Burke’s rivals, was thereby nearer to being a pure democracy than the west ever was. In theory, it did not require parties as it has delegates. It is as Tom Paine, who protested against Burke’s innovations, might have it.
Nevertheless, Burkean democracy is a useful means to freeing up society by rolling back the state so it is useful for classical liberals to make progress by using, but it remains somewhat illiberal all the same. It is certainly not a form of liberty as so many in the mass media of the UK so often say.
There are many aspects of society that call for segregation if it is to be free. It is what people often want. Football has been a traditionally male game and there is no reason why it should not be. Similarly, some will want clubs to be segregated by race and there is no reason why many clubs should not be segregated in a free society. The idea that we should not discriminate on race, sex, age and the like is a mere dogma free of all merit, it has no merit at all. There is nothing illiberal about discrimination, on any basis whatsoever. To discriminate is a mere civil liberty. It is part of free association.
But to be free then firms need to be able to freely sack for any reason just as workers can leave a firm for any reason. That is free trade. Protectionism from the state is not free. Nor is forced integration.
Whether ability is important in free association depends on what others want. It is not the case that others need to respect our talents, if they do not want to do so. That looks more like proactively coercive illiberal meritocracy than liberty. Liberty requires free association and tolerance for free discrimination. We have to accept that others can reject us, even if we feel that we could do way better than others and we are right in that idea. Whether they err in rejecting our talent is their business just as we do not have to work with them even though it might be the way both parties could be way more productive. Liberty tends to promote progress but it is not duty bound to do so.
This normal societal freedom of association would make for a lot of diversity but the Politically Correct juggernaut, ironically in the name of diversity, makes for a dull coercive uniformity just as it gratuitously offends nearly all people in the avowedly supposed aim of dodging all offence. It fails in its pretended aims entirely.
Yes, many people do not want to see women in traditional male roles. My mother used to hate seeing them in such roles and she is not the only female who I have seen object. Anyone who liked things as they were up to the 1950s are now called “the far right” by rather thoughtless fools in the mass media. Every television programme has to have one of each sex in the UK but, in my experience, it is females who find it grating. But the silly Political Correct outlook is that this is what should be the case, whether it is wanted or not. It is a silly fetish.
Equality seems to have no merit. However, the market promotes more than any other institution does it in the long run, as Adam Smith rightly said in his 1776 book, but he also added that this is offset by short run innovation, by invention, by a lack of social mobility, by barriers to entry and the like. You may note that most of those things offset equality by making further progress by making in this long run equality a levelling up process. The state cannot, and it clearly has not, matched the market in serving the crass ideal of equality but, more importantly, the market preserves liberty too whilst the state can only flout liberty in anything that it does. Politics is negative sum but, by contrast, the market is positive sum. The market can be freed but the state is intrinsically not free.
The market might also be called institutional altruism as we all specialise to serve others for a living. Yet this is what the people on the media, and in the colleges, foolishly call selfish. They could hardly be more wrongheaded. What is immoral is the state and politics rather than the market.
Thanks again for your reply. I fear that I am too backward to see where you put your name.
I hope you do not mind a third reply David.
You stated:
“Totalitarianism is the state being able to infer with every aspect of life”.
Totalitarianism is a dictatorship and a one-party rule. May I suggest democracy can lead to a totalitarian situation, not tends to ‘be totalitarian’. I think there is such a thing however as a ‘totalitarian democratic view’, which is based on the premise of a ‘sole and exclusive truth in politics’.
“As an ideal, democracy tends to be totalitarian and we must bear in mind that a vote is always a vote against other people: a bit of gratuitous proactive illiberal coercion against others”.
That is the nature of democracy.
“Politics itself is intrinsically anti-social in this way. Society is freer the more limited government is but it can only be completely free if we can rid it of all government”.
We can not and do not become free if we get rid ourselves of all government as we try to rationalize our independence from a social group by suggesting that we can individually elect to participate and that we do so in a voluntary manner. Even in a non-state or government controlled environment, some people will impose coercion against others. That is the nature of the human species.
In economics for instance, the meaning applied to the often used saying “laissez faire”, is to mean, “to let the people do for themselves what they know how to do”, this is not an individualistic policy, but one of non-interference. It is saying that if people are allowed to behave as they wish, then a process will emerge that the collective can utilize. The “free market” isn’t intended to promote individualism. It is intended to ensure that competition among individuals produces a cooperative group of individuals. To do that collectives or societies are formed, which in turn, at some point or other, coerces individuals and or groups who differ in views or actions, which is where a form of democracy and or hierarchy comes in, be it in a form of state, government or collective control.
“Edmund Burke tended to limit democracy with his idea of distinct parties and representation by specialisation as an expert career on the division of labour. The USSR, that, in theory, retained the earlier ideas of Burke’s rivals, was thereby nearer to being a pure democracy than the west ever was. In theory, it did not require parties as it has delegates. It is as Tom Paine, who protested against Burke’s innovations, might have it.
Nevertheless, Burkean democracy is a useful means to freeing up society by rolling back the state so it is useful for classical liberals to make progress by using, but it remains somewhat illiberal all the same. It is certainly not a form of liberty as so many in the mass media of the UK so often say.
There are many aspects of society that call for segregation if it is to be free. It is what people often want”.
I agree.
“Football has been a traditionally male game and there is no reason why it should not be. Similarly, some will want clubs to be segregated by race and there is no reason why many clubs should not be segregated in a free society. The idea that we should not discriminate on race, sex, age and the like is a mere dogma free of all merit, it has no merit at all. There is nothing illiberal about discrimination, on any basis whatsoever. To discriminate is a mere civil liberty. It is part of free association”.
Is this not somehow imposing norms, codified or not, on society? Could it be said that, to ‘discriminate’ regardless, is not “a mere civil liberty”, as the liberty of the woman is abrogated. How do we balance the right to freedom of association against the right not to be discriminated against?
“But to be free then firms need to be able to freely sack for any reason just as workers can leave a firm for any reason. That is free trade”.
It’s a free market and if you don’t like it, find another job? I did not think freedom was just about or even about the opportunity to pick an employer, it is not to be have autonomy over yourself. What, to me, you have confused, is having the ability to pick an employer with freedom, and that consent equates to liberty, regardless of the objective circumstances shaping the choices being made or the nature of the social relationships such choices produce; I am thus prevented from associating or dissociating with whom, or who, I chose.
“Protectionism from the state is not free. Nor is forced integration”.
I agree that protectionism from the state is not free, but neither is protectionism by any other group, as most groups become coercive.
Do you define forced integration as in, for example, all soccer clubs must take on women players, and differently, all foreign nationals must speak English?
“Whether ability is important in free association depends on what others want. It is not the case that others need to respect our talents, if they do not want to do so. That looks more like proactively coercive illiberal meritocracy than liberty. Liberty requires free association and tolerance for free discrimination. We have to accept that others can reject us, even if we feel that we could do way better than others and we are right in that idea. Whether they err in rejecting our talent is their business just as we do not have to work with them even though it might be the way both parties could be way more productive. Liberty tends to promote progress but it is not duty bound to do so”.
Kind of a waste of a comodity and churlish, just imagine if science and technology all went down that road.
“This normal societal freedom of association would make for a lot of diversity but the Politically Correct juggernaut, ironically in the name of diversity, makes for a dull coercive uniformity just as it gratuitously offends nearly all people in the avowedly supposed aim of dodging all offence. It fails in its pretended aims entirely”.
Thank you. I understood that.
“Yes, many people do not want to see women in traditional male roles”.
Does many equal a lot or a few? Because a few preventing change, because they don’t like it, could, would, be disastrous for humanity”.
In the good old days, we made sure women had to stay at home in poverty, and send five year old children out to work. Being slightly factitious here, but traditional has nothing to do with liberty if it prevents others from doing something different, or it exploits those who cannot fight for liberty themselves.
“My mother used to hate seeing them in such roles and she is not the only female who I have seen object.
Anyone who liked things as they were up to the 1950s are now called “the far right” by rather thoughtless fools in the mass media”.
This is because the argument tends to be focused on the premise that society is not allowed to change the status qua, and of an illusion that tradition is all about a set norms and values which are a prerequisite as to the way it should be.
“Every television programme has to have one of each sex in the UK but, in my experience, it is females who find it grating. But the silly Political Correct outlook is that this is what should be the case, whether it is wanted or not. It is a silly fetish”.
Do you mean that there is a rule – written or not – that says every television programme has to contain a man and a woman; so including in this they have to contain a person from an ethnic minority or group? I find it grating when minority groups are presented in a programme for the sake of audience titillation, but I think that is why there is normally at least one man and one woman in most programmes. The audience relates to it and wants it, regardless of the talent of the actors. A bit like, “whether ability is important in free association depends on what others want. It is not the case that others need to respect our talents, if they do not want to do so”. So it is grating for some, but the majority want it, it seems. Of course this could be accelerated to have come about by the use of ‘political correctness’ coercion, or just come about as a change of preference by those who have formed applicable associations.
“Equality seems to have no merit. However, the market promotes more than any other institution does it in the long run, as Adam Smith rightly said in his 1776 book, but he also added that this is offset by short run innovation, by invention, by a lack of social mobility, by barriers to entry and the like. You may note that most of those things offset equality by making further progress by making in this long run equality a levelling up process”.
Could you help my grey cells out here and give me a practical, or abstract example, of this happening? I am not being lazy, but my brain says I agree, but I do not like agreeing unless I have some kind of tangible abstract to view.
“The state cannot, and it clearly has not, matched the market in serving the crass ideal of equality but, more importantly, the market preserves liberty too whilst the state can only flout liberty in anything that it does. Politics is negative sum but, by contrast, the market is positive sum. The market can be freed but the state is intrinsically not free”.
Actually the state can be seen to enforce equality, but not equity.
“The market might also be called institutional altruism as we all specialise to serve others for a living. Yet this is what the people on the media, and in the colleges, foolishly call selfish. They could hardly be more wrongheaded. What is immoral is the state and politics rather than the market”.
I guess it depends on one’s definition of ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’. I do not see a reason for saying that the market serves others through specialised altruism, it does not have to. So it is the same as the state?
I hope you do not mind me replying to you, and even trying to debate with you, as well as asking for clarification on some points?
This has most definitely been a help to me. Thank you.
Thank you very much for your reply of 2 February. I apologise for not checking if you had replied before.
I am very pleased that you have been good enough to reply again. I am quite addicted to discussion. Thanks.
All government can be seen as dictatorship but that is not to say that they are all equally harsh or illiberal. Some are clearly way worse than others.
It is true that a modern English usage contrasts dictatorship to democracy as if the latter was not a dictatorship at all. It is also the case that being able to vote a government out is a boon to the public in many ways. It is certainly a civil way to encourage a rolling back of the state, or a reduction of taxation, that are two classical liberal means of extending liberty. But government is dictatorship despite all that.
We can imagine a state that fully respected liberty in that it was reactively defensive only and that it did not tax but relied on donations freely given by the public. Would it still be a state? In any case, it would be quite liberal in the classical sense of that word.
As I said last time, pure democracy does not require political parties. And it is intrinsically totalitarian. So is the largely unwritten British Constitution. The classical liberals never questioned that totalitarian principle, the right of the state to interfere anywhere or in all places, but instead they accepted it and then they made out a case to, nevertheless, limit the state to a small aspect of social life.
Alexis de Tocqueville saw democracy as an anti-liberal ideal and he got J.S. Mill to see that also. They were right. To vote is to be illiberal towards others; it is cold war or normal politics. It is gratuitous coercion against other people. But it has its liberal uses in being a civil way to roll back the state.
Politics is to do with power rather than with the truth. It is in the domain of ethics rather than being any sort of science to do with the external facts, though the latter might be incidental to it. So you seem to be right to say that truth is not directly germane if not on the fact that democracy is totalitarian, a fact that you deny.
Any truth is absolute, of course. Any external fact is eternal. Not much follows from those two facts but many in the colleges imagine that a lot does.
We are usually free in any case. Liberalism is about social liberty i.e. a similar liberty for one and all, or a respect for the liberties of others, but it starts, as does any society, from natural individual freedom. The late USSR was not able to get rid if this natural freedom, though it attempted to restrict it [as all states do].
No group can fully confine many people. Nor can any state.
We can never have complete social liberty while the state exists but we can have, indeed, we usually will have, individual freedom. We, basically, are independent from the group. Nor can the state ever, realistically, hope to alter that basic fact. Social control is expensive and very ineffective.
Yes, you are right to reply that the nature of democracy is illiberal activity. But you seem to err when you say that the state cannot be got rid of completely.
It is not clear why you think that gratuitous coercion is part of human nature. Most people seem to refrain from it. Does that mean that they cease to be human?
The collective has never existed and it never will. I have been reading silly books written by sociologists since 1968 saying that we are not all atoms, and the like, but that much rejected societal atomism is way nearer to being the case than is any entity that is an actual collective has ever been. No actual collective has ever existed in human society so far and it is not likely that one will ever emerge. . Most sociology is sheer Romance. It is not easy to credit a single sociologist with basic honesty, not even Herbert Spencer.
States can never control their own domains. Karl Marx thought that was because the market prevented it, but it is not only the market that prevents it. The fact that we all have to think for ourselves prevents it. Conformity is very hard work, it is very demanding and it needs, as a prerequisite, an unrealistic amount of discipline. That is why nature is anarchic.
It hardly matters whether the market was intended to promote individualism. We cannot get rid of the fact that we are all individuals anyway. We are free to say what we like but not to believe as we like and we all, tacitly, know that the collective is a myth, that society is basically anarchic, that it is the mere inaction of individuals. Basic individualism needs no promotion. There are no means of shedding it.
It is pure Romance that collectives can consume, or even that they can act at all. We do have institutions and society is a bit more than just the individuals that make it up but society is not, and it cannot be, an extra person or an extra agent in any way. It cannot reform itself nor victimise anyone. Nor can it truly be responsible.
Most people do not think that the state is coercive, as they simply do not feel the coercive force of the state. Things are nearer to being the very opposite of what you say when you say that individuals that differ from others thereby feel coerced. They usually feel free to leave or stay whenever they differ.
Democracy and hierarchy feature in human thought but rarely in human society. Thought is often simply unrealistic, especially if language is used. Francis Bacon was right on language introducing the false idols.
Competition is usually a subset of co-operation. Any competitive game will co-operate on when to start, and the like, such that the whole hinterland will be co-operative. If this co-operation is infringed it is normally held to be cheating rather than proper competition in, say, any sport.
We can normally say whatever we like. We are free to say that it is not a civil liberty to freely discriminate if we wish, but it clearly is such. To reject others is not to negate their liberty. There can be no right not to be rejected. We all know the rules of liberal free association as they have been worked out long since for whenever boy meets girl. Either party is free to reject. No party has the right not to be rejected. No explanation is needed, but all do have a limited right to court. Literature and song has worked all this out for us over the centuries. Both parties discriminate freely. Anything else is immoral.
No, liberty is not to have autonomy over ourselves. But picking an employer or attempting to do so, i.e. courting an employer, is part of it, as is courting any member of the opposite or even the same sex. We never think as we want to but rather we all tend to retain the reality principle. What we do is not fully worked out but rather it usually emerges partly by chance. But we do think on our own, even if we do not find reality as we might wish it to be.
Yes, we have individual freedom independent of the circumstances and we have social liberty if we respect the liberty of all others with whom we meet or have dealings with. The objective circumstances can only remove freedom if they consist in gaol or a similar elaborate and expensive confinement.
Clearly, we cannot freely associate with those who want to reject us.
You say that most groups become coercive but note that reactive or defensive coercion is not one whit illiberal. It is only gratuitous coercion, or initiated proactive coercion, that is illiberal.
A club might make its own rules of membership. If one club fields an all female team it should not moan if it is expelled from the league but it might set up its own league of females, or mixed, teams as it sees fit, if it can muster enough other clubs that want to do the same.
Any laws from the state to enforce integration become thereby attempted forced integration. As such, it has to be illiberal.
Science and technology does go down the road of free association. Why do you feel it does not?
Any progress in liberty is not likely to come from fighting for it. Romantic fighting is a recipe for setting liberty back.
I think that most people like segregation of the sexes in things like soccer.
Do you think it better that a majority hold up progress than a few do? A majority will always be very conservative, as Robert Michels pointed out in Political Parties (1911).
Society is not an agent and it cannot have any rights at all. The sociologists merely err in unwittingly personifying society at every turn.
Yes, the PC mores in the UK, that the media endorse as much as they can, has it that all news broadcasts need both men and women and they need to have a few minority racial groups too. This grates on many people’s nerves, mostly on women’s in my experience.
Why does it seem to you that the majority want this PC integration of the sexes? I see no evidence that even a single person has ever wanted it. Why does it need the law if most want it anyway?
On the long run drive towards equality that Adam Smith in 1776 saw was only delayed by short run changes: there are any number of examples of this. Just look at the history of almost any household good. Note that there are more such goods in almost any household today than there was in almost any in 1776. Smith saw that there were more in 1776 than there was in 1676. Nearly all of them began as luxuries before ending up as household goods. As a result, the average worker is way better off than a tribal chief was; and even than many kings have been in the past. All households tend to accumulate wealth as they go on. The price system only regulates buying and selling rather than the total wealth that there is. Any wage worker today has access to almost anything that civilisation has mustered; from the best music to the best literature, to the Internet of late. In the 1950s, no household had the Internet but soon nearly all will have access to it and that gives better service than the kings of old had access to. Very few goods ever survive as luxuries so clearly this is a levelling up of one and all. The vast majority go on to be household goods.
We do not agree that the state can enforce equality. We might agree that it can attempt to do so.
No, we do not agree that what is moral depends on definitions.
In what way does the market ever fail to get people to specialise to serve others? We are all experts to some extent in how we earn a living and we all do so by serving others. This is institutionalised altruism. All jobs on the market are bound to be thus. Try to cite an exception to refute this idea. I do not see how anyone, successfully, can do that.
By contrast, the state always abuses people. To govern is to abuse, as it can only be attempted by not respecting the victim’s liberty.
We all thrive on criticism, so yours is most welcome. Thanks again.
What is your name, by the bye?
By the bye, I thought I had put that society was the interaction of individuals in the above reply yesterday, not the “inaction” between them, as I, today, see that I did rather foolishly put.
Hi Daivd McDonagh
Thanks for that – I did think that’s what you meant 🙂
Whist I’m looking through your reply to my reply 🙂 I’ll answer you question about my name. EFGD are the first letters of my beloved long departed parents forenames. I use them to remind me when I am doing something constructive and, hopefully in my case, intellectual.
They imparted on me the desire and the need to know about politics and what political theories mean in relation to ideologies of liberty and freedom of expression.
My father was unable to study law, though he was more than competent in the subject, as a young man in the 1930s, his parents were extremely poor and so funding for an education that might have been was out of the question. But he never lost the zeal for debate and discussion. He loved politics as did my mother. World War Two caused them, as untold others, great misery and poverty, my father having to fight in the war, he did not want to be a conscientious objector and allow someone to fight and maybe die for his or anybody else’s right to be ‘different’, was never really the same afterwards, still very able to debate but with a great sadness in his heart.
I was fortunate enough to graduate from University as a mature student, and thus take on the ‘mantle’ of my fathers desire. So it is to them that I ascribe, my pen name if you like, the initials EFGD. I am not being secretive or have a subversive agenda. Just my way of putting my parents in the ‘limelight’ if you will.
Thanks EFGD.
I agree that there is no need to tell me what your name is if you do not wish to do so.
Your parents sound good & it is good that you went through college as an adult; we have that in common. I was in my 30s by the time I went to the University. I studied philosophy.
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Hi David McDonagh
I have tried to put in another reply but the comment box does not seem to want to take it. I have the full comment reply on my blog if you want to look at it.
I was interested to learn that you studied philosophy, I studied social policy.
Do hope we can continue this, and other debates.
Thank you.
To anybody wishing to reply to my reply to David McDonagh: http://efgd3833.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/political-correctness-a-continuum/ I am happy to do so through this site. It was because my reply was too long – sorry – and to break it up lost its flow that I had to succumb to putting on my blog 🙁 Cheers.
Thank you very much.
I will go to your site so that we may go on.
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For those of you who might be interested – Hi David McDonagh 🙂
Part 3 of an ongoing debate is on my site.
Cheers.
Thanks to all who have got my brain working.
[…] http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/david-mcdonagh-on-political-correctness/ […]
[…] http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/david-mcdonagh-on-political-correctness/ […]
[…] http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/david-mcdonagh-on-political-correctness/ […]
OK I’m going nutty, thought I posted Part Three of ‘our’, David and me, debate. Hmm. Lost in ether me thinks. Any way here it is:
http://efgd3833.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/political-correctness-and-beyond-part-three/ (I hope). Must keep taking the tablets.
@David McDonagh
Hope all is well with you.
I have had to change my recent posting we were to discuss to: http://efgd3833.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/political-correctness-and-beyond-end-of-march-2011-pos/
So the link in my above comment will not work.
I see Sean Gabb in http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/race-and-libertarianism-left-and-right/
takes up one of the stances we were discussing:
“The Left-Libertarian will extend his claim by classifying the voluntary organization of individuals into racially exclusive communities as a form of authoritarianism; this is argued on the ground that their implied exclusion of those outside their race is a violation of their right to free movement. However, according to Libertarian theory, if property is privately as the basis for free association, then this includes the right to not associate. Conversely, there is no right in this tradition to not experience discrimination or to enter someone else’s property without their permission. If this applies to private property on an individual basis, then it does also on a collective basis, as the voluntary aggregation of property can be reduced to its individual constiuent parts. Therefore, the voluntary creation of a racially exclusive community is not authoritarian nor do its exclusionary policies constitute a violation of another’s freedom.”
Certainly keeps my little grey cells working – though I think some of them have taken a unilateral decision to go on holiday!
[…] The genesis of this debate can be found at: http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/david-mcdonagh-on-political-correctness/ […]