Some years ago, Dr Gabb was far too indulgent of a spiteful troll who had been put up by others to using our open house policy to wreck this blog. I do not think the present dispute over the Reform Party is of the same nature. However, Dr Gabb is no longer in charge, and my approach to moderation is more active than his was.
Here is the present dispute as I see it. On the one side is the acceptance that, whether or not it is good overall, we live in a multiracial country; that the newcomers are often just as much victims of this development as the traditional peoples of this country; that we should accept into our movement those newcomers who give reasonable grounds for believing that they are genuine allies. On the other side is a rejection of multiracialism in general, and a rejection in particular of any cooperation with the newcomers.
Both sides have valid points to make. My moderation policy is to let each side put its case. What I do not want is personal attacks. Civilised men should be able to disagree without accusing each other of base motives or stupidity. There is the further consideration that we no longer live in a free country. The last Government passed the Online Safety Act. The new Government may use this law for overt censorship of debate.
Therefore, I welcome disagreement. I do not welcome disagreeability. I hope I shall not need to explain myself at greater length.
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I agree with what you say and I will tone down my own evaluation of prominent politicians – especially as I’ve heard that Nigel intends to send ‘the boys from Clacton’ after me. But I must add that I have not seen anything on here in the last few days between fellow posters that looks anything like more than mild disagreeableness. If somebody wants to tell Neil Lock that he belongs in the Socialist Workers Party, I’m sure he can take that in his stride. (I realise it could be that comments have been deleted or edited before I have seen them).
David Webb did make a powerful point that goes to the root of what this is really about:
[quote]”I lived in China for 4 years, but I didn’t spend it complaining that there were too many Chinese people there.”[unquote]
Without knowing his circumstances, I can confidently state that when Mr Webb lived in China, he wasn’t generally resentful of Han people. He accepted – indeed relished – that he was in China, amongst the Chinese peoples. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way because without the Chinese, it’s not China. He wasn’t participating, wittingly or otherwise, in some functional conspiracy to gradually marginalise and then remove the Han from their indigenous lands one district at a time.
Can the same generally be said of the non-white peoples who arrive and settle here?
Admittedly, neo-liberal capitalism has the effect of neutralising parochial cultures at its metropolitan junctions. The white Europeans who arrive and settle in China for work and business reasons are contributing to a watering down of Chineseness, if only in very tiny ways.
Yet, despite everything, China remains both racially pure and prosperous, with the world’s second largest economy, and this prosperity goes hand in hand with a strong sense of national identity and national sovereignty How? It is because its governments pursue racial purity as a matter of policy.
Currently, foreign-born people cannot attain Chinese citizenship unless they are children of Chinese nationals. Also, foreigners are only allowed to purchase one piece of property in China, and it must be their residence. In consequence of these and other measures, the foreign-born element of the Chinese population is officially 0.07%.
In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping told Donald Trump, then America’s president: “We people are the original people, black hair, yellow skin, inherited onwards. We call ourselves the descendants of the dragon.”
Are the Chinese “racist”? Are they evil bigots? Why aren’t we sending NATO forces to attack China? Where is the UN resolution calling on action against this evil in our midst?
Neil did provoke the lively discussion by proposing that we are all human (true) and that our political values and ideals should be grounded in humanness (debatable). I think this debate goes to the essence of what we are. I don’t pretend that I know the answer or that my answer can get us anywhere near a real answer, but here I will attempt to summarise the debate between myself and Neil Lock (which has been going on now on this blog in different forms for some nine years, I think).
As I see it, myself and Neil are espousing two opposing general positions that could be described thus:
Neil takes the position of Human Unity, entailing individualism, local diversity, and universal moral equality.
I take the position of Human Disunity, entailing dividualism, global diversity, and the minimisation of moral inequality.
These descriptive terms are imperfect reflections of the respective ideas under discussion, involving complex, relativistic concepts, and should treated more as points of emphasis. Clearly, Neil acknowledges the permanent reality of human disunity (and discord) and obviously I acknowledge the desirability of human unity, where this is practicable and desirable.
Neil‘s views are premised on the individual as a sovereign rights-bearer and he rejects all forms of collective sovereignty (thus, an individualist position). He accommodates differences and conflict by proposing unity: positing a common way of dealing for all human beings who get together and agree on this common way as individuals (by adopting the Convivial Code, for instance). Thus, as I interpret it, his credo is Human Unity.
My views are premised on a recognition of the reality and desirability of collective formations in society. I see the individual as defined by his relationships to these collectives and other individuals (thus a dividualist position). That is not to say I am against individual rights and liberties, far from it, but I do question whether the individual should or can be the base concept for a complex society. I accommodate differences and conflict by proposing disunity: positing that groups of people will form their own common ways of dealing with each other that are distinct and differ from other groups, and that each group should have freedom of association to go their separate way as a group, though without precluding the possibility of association between groups and even amongst all groups as appropriate – thus, my credo is Human Disunity.
Neil, too, believes that groups and associations should be free to pursue their own destiny, but he views this from the point of view of the individual, arguing that all human association should be by consent. In reply, I argue that, while Neil’s idealism is laudable, it is not entirely practicable since a large part of human association arises organically rather than by consent as such. What Neil is really positing is designed societies – a meta-utopianism, if you like – where people can shop around and decide where they would prefer to live. This would lend itself to a situation of local diversity and universal moral equality in which individuals are blank slates who can adopt local cultural norms at will and in which there is no moral privilege at work to block incomers to a community or civilisation. I don’t deny this arrangement may be workable within highly contingent conditions, but I doubt its feasibility in general. Human societies are a complex of allegiances, relationships and identities and cannot simply be reduced to simplified notions of ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’. Furthermore, there are important group-based differences between human beings, such as average intelligence, cultural norms and so on, that make a universal type of moral equality very difficult to realise in practice.
This is before we delve into the argument, which I’ve made in the past, that a non-state or stateless society is practically impossible in anything other than a very simple or primitive society, due to the ontological nature of human authority.
In the animal kingdom, off-spring are often left to fend for themselves after a rudimentary period of nurturing. In so far as these young may associate with other animals without the imposition of hierarchy, they are in a stateless society. Humans do things differently. We look after our young over more than a decade, sometimes two decades, through parenting and mentoring, and in most cases, formal schooling. We then have hierarchies in workplaces. In effect we are implementing organically something analogous to a ‘wolf pack’ with a more or less clear hierarchy. Of course, some of these social arrangements are not necessarily fundamental to us in their specifics: some people branch out on their own and become self-employed, for instance. The point is more that humans generally rely on authority for survival and my view is that for humans, the state (in whatever form it may take) is a biological reality, not just a political entity.
Socialists who hold to a stateless, worldwide commonwealth of resources can never explain to me how a democratic control of resources would not amount to a state in soft form. They just treat the word ‘democracy’ a fill-in answer to everything. I accept that democratic committees that control the distribution of goods would not be a state as long as their members do not exercise force or coercive authority over others, but it is difficult to envisage a situation in which they would not have to do so eventually and in consequence begin to operate as a state in all but name. Democracy works by outvoting a minority. This itself is not moral privilege. You can have a situation where a political body democratically acts over the wishes of a minority amongst its number and provided the minority accept this outcome, it is not statism, but what happens when the political body has to act over the wishes of a minority or individual to the detriment of that minority or individual? Socialists reply that this cannot happen because the very nature of socialism precludes it. They would have already done away with property, so the democratic control of resources would brook no inherent concept of such, but if such a concept can arise in the first place, it can arise again – and surely it must, since moral equality on any universal basis is impossible.
Neil’s vision is still more vulnerable to this problem, because he proposes to maintain a property-based society. Surely anyone can see what will quickly happen. Some sort of judicial or arbitral function will be needed to adjudicate on disputes. Gradually this function will expand and begin to exercise moral privileges in its own right (you could argue that it must do so from the start). Eventually that state could be bureaucratised and propertied and become similar to the political states we see today.
This leads me to the conclusion that, even within the same society, absolute moral inequality is inevitable, that statehood is a classic ‘necessary evil’, and the real task is to keep the state as small as possible.
You were not the cause of my earlier posting. Though usually in disagreement, you are never disagreeable. I will promote your comment to a post later
Thank you. I would certainly be interested to see what, if anything, Neil makes of my second comment above.
I suggest that recent disagreements on this site are about an issue which needs to be addressed if the right is to recover.
Were Thatcher and Blair polar opposites or two avatars of the same ideology, neoliberalism? And specifically, does the market economy require the free movement of people as well as goods and capital?
I asked this question here years ago, and Sean directed me to the writings of Ludwig von Mises. Apparently von Mises was the first economist to see that comparative advantage operates at the level of the individual as well as groups such as nation states. Von Mises thought that, this being so, comparative advantage between groups could simply be disregarded. To my mind, this is a huge hidden assumption.
Von Mises had a strong dislike of groups. He saw nations as feudal relics, and regarded historic countries such as Hungary, Bohemia and Poland as bogus constructs on a par with Subcarpathian Ruthenia. He grudgingly admitted that a language requires a group to speak it, but ignores away shared culture in any wider sense. There is a lot of George Soros to him.
Was he right or wrong? And on which side of the divide does UKIP/Brexit/Reform lie?
Mass-immigration has been enabled and even subsidised by the ruling class as a means of neutering resistance to what it has done to us.
That may be a secondary reason for their planned immigration, but I think the major reason is to increase tax receipts.