Not only is Jay Nordlinger the best music critic going, he is also an essayist of astonishing range, companionability, and insight. His new collection, aptly titled Here, There & Everywhere (Jay seems to have been everywhere and noticed everything), ranges over everything from politics to golf. The book won’t be available in bookstores until the new year. But advance copies–signed and, if you wish, personally inscribed by the author–are available now at a special discount through National Review here. The English historian Paul Johnson has it exactly right: “Jay Nordlinger is one of America’s most versatile and pungent writers. He is at home in geopolitics and sociology, in sport and music and literature, and to all these topics he brings an inquiring mind, deep knowledge, and an engaging style. This collection shows him at his wide-ranging best.” Don’t miss it. And don’t miss the lively conversation between Jay and John J. Miller about the book.

Comments

Good news: The writer Harry Stein is embarking on a new book–and you, Dear Reader, can help him! Here’s a note he has asked several people to bring to the public’s attention:

I am the author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace). For a book on liberal intolerance, I’m seeking stories from Red State people marooned in the bluest of Blue State locales (from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to Madison and Beverly Hills) and professions (journalism, the arts, the “helping professions,” academia, etc.). I’m after war stories; survival tales, tough professional situations, ugly romantic encounters, problems with teachers (your own or your children’s). Funny is especially welcome. Send responses to harrysteinsbook@gmail.com

–Harry Stein

Comments

Robert Kaplan has published a long and thoughtful article on the perils of amnesia in the current issue of The American Interest. Entitled “On Forgetting the Obvious,” it dilates on the collusion of decadence and forgetfulness–on the corrosive effects of historical ignorance on national character. The whole thing is worth reading, and is available here (Hat tip, the indispensable Arts & Letters). Here’s a teaser:

While a good society should certainly never want to go to war, it must always be prepared to do so. But a society will not fight for what it believes, if all it believes is that it should never have to fight.

Amen.

1 Comment

“Sunday horror: Church shootings in Colorado; gunman killed by armed female church security staffer.” (Thanks to Michelle Malkin for this rubric.) As Malkin comments: “Amid the horror, a glimmer of good news: The culture of self-defense may have saved untold lives.” Glenn Reynolds remembers meeting with a student shortly after the rampage at Virginia Tech last spring:

On Monday, as the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was unfolding, I went into my advanced constitutional law seminar to find one of my students upset. My student, Tara Wyllie, has a permit to carry a gun in Tennessee, but she isn’t allowed to have a weapon on campus. That left her feeling unsafe. “Why couldn’t we meet off campus today?” she asked.

I was a little surprised by the outpouring of comment on my post the other day about liberals, gun control, and the Nebraska mall shooting. I was especially surprised by the number of expert comments about the make and capabilities of the weapon used in the shooting. I am happy to know that an SKS and an AK47 use “the same round, 7.62×39,” and I was mightily impressed by the chap who “can put 8 rounds of .45 into a 6×9 rectangle at 25 yards in 5 to 6 seconds, every single time,” not least because “it’s an exercise I do once a week.” I wonder whether I can get him to accompany me the next time I visit the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. . . .

I say that I was surprised at the size and the temperature of the comment on a brief piece that was critical of gun control. I shouldn’t have been. Doubtless gun owners, like everyone else, are motivated by many things. Ditto for those who would outlaw possession of guns. But behind the panoply of motivations there is, I suspect, this fundamental philosophical divide: On the one side are people who see that we live in a free society, understand that freedom is not free–that it can often be quite an expensive quality–and who understand further that preserving freedom requires that individuals stand up for themselves, physically as well as in other ways.

On the other side of the divide are people who see that we live in a free society, who may also understand that freedom is not free–they, too, might admit that it can often be quite an expensive quality–but who wish to cede important parts of that responsibility to the state. The former are likely to be small-government, low-tax supporters of the Second Amendment. The latter are likely to be big government, high-tax critics of the Second Amendment.

I oversimplify, of course, but I believe the distinction I’ve limned here is a real one and one, moreover, that is worth meditating on, not only with respect to the question of gun ownership but, more generally, with respect to what might be the biggest issue facing citizens in Western democratic countries: the increasing concentration of state power and its intrusion into the fabric of everyday life. The state’s near monopoly on instruments of violence is merely one token of a much broader and deeper calculus of control. Tocqueville got to the nub of the issue in his famous paragraphs, in Democracy in America, on “Democratic Despotism.” Where old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes over men, democratic despotism infantilizes them. Such despotism would, Tocqueville writes,

resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. . . . It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? . . . [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Food for thought, no?

11 Comments

Now that the Christmas season is upon us (is it still OK to say that — “Christmas,” I mean?) and we are enjoined on all sides to be joyful, generous, and think of peace and the less fortunate, it may be appropriate to pause to reflect about the nature of the human animal. I do not, I hasten to say, want to be unedifying on this flinty Sunday morning. But it is, I think, worth reflecting on the myriad emotions the Christmas season elicits and depends upon. One thing (not, I need hardly say, the only thing) that Christmas presupposes is a spirit of kindliness and generosity, a spirit, that is to say, of altruism. I’ve had occasion to write about altruism before. I thought some readers might be interested in a reprise of those thoughts.

One of the most generous people I know, a doctor, denies that there is such a thing as altruism. The absence of altruism in the world does not bother him. On the contrary, being selfish, he says, is a good thing. He thinks people renowned for altruism — Mother Teresa, say — are not personally admirable, just warped, hypocritical, or both. What should we think of these opinions?

I think that they are wrong.

But they are also very widespread — they have always been widespread — and it is interesting to ask why.

One reason, of course, is that human selfishness is both deep and ineradicable. The question — well, one question — is whether there are countervailing, non-selfish impulses.

Most people think so. From the nursery on up, most people are encouraged to “share,” to be considerate (part of which means not giving into to selfish impulses), to think of the other person: to practice, in a word, being altruistic.

But let’s step back a minute. What, after all, is “altruism”? An odd word, isn’t it?

Although it comes ultimately from the Latin “alter,” meaning “other,” altruism is a French import. It was coined by the utopian French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and was brought over into English in the 19th century. This is, I admit, a dubious patrimony. And on the sound principle that non-edible French imports should be considered guilty until proven innocent, I am perfectly happy to dispense with the word “altruism.” But what about the thing it describes? Can we do without that?

Altruism means “selfless attention to the welfare of others.” Is there an English equivalent? Yes, there are plenty. The English philosopher and clergyman Joseph Butler (1692-1752) offered one good equivalent when he described “benevolence” as “an affection to the good of our fellow creatures.” (Though it is worth noting that “benevolence,” too, can be perverted: see, e.g., here.)

I will come back to Butler in a moment. His Sermons, published in 1726, are a philosophical classic. They demolish the selfish theory of human nature, the “strange affection in many people of explaining away all particular affections, and representing the whole of life as nothing but one continued exercise in self-love.”

Butler puts selfishness in its place. He also acknowledges that selfishness, or something like it, deserves a place in the constellation of human motivations. For if human beings were utterly selfless, they would soon be utterly extinct. A “well-ordered self-love,” Thomas Aquinas observed, “whereby man desires a fitting good for himself, is right and natural.”

But self-love is not simply an instinct for self-preservation. As Aristotle noted in the Nicomachean Ethics, “self-love” is an ambiguous term. It can be either a term of reproach or a term of commendation. Self-love is a term of reproach when applied to people who “assign to themselves the larger share of money, honors, or bodily pleasures. . . . Those who take more than their share of these things are men who indulge their appetites, and generally their passions and the irrational parts of their soul.”

But, Aristotle observed, someone who was “always bent on outdoing everyone else in acting justly or temperately or in displaying any other virtues” can also be described as lover of the self. In this sense, self-love is a term of praise. The good man, Aristotle concludes, “ought to be a lover of self, since he will then both benefit himself by acting nobly and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbor.”

I mentioned that my friend who denied the existence of altruism and praised selfishness is a doctor. At first blush, that seems paradoxical. There may be selfish reasons for becoming a doctor — the money, the social prestige, etc. But doctors are conspicuously in the business of working very hard, and often risking their own health, to help others. When they get up in the middle of the night to save someone’s life, it is difficult to describe their behavior as selfish.

Why? Because when we describe someone as “selfish,” we do not mean that he exhibits the noble self-love that Aristotle commends. We mean that he exhibits a grasping disposition that is unconcerned with the fortunes or feelings of others. This accords with the dictionary definition of “selfish”: “concerned chiefly or only for oneself without regard for the well being of others.”

We are naturally taken aback when we hear someone praise selfishness as a virtue because we know it is not a good thing to be “without regard for the well being of others.” Of course, people who praise selfishness as a virtue know this.

Often, I suspect, their praise is deliberately provocative. They know as well as the rest of us that one should not be selfish — that one should not act “without regard for the well being of others.” They know, too, since they are not lunatics, that there is plenty of selfless benevolence around: just look at the behavior of most mothers towards their infants.

But they praise selfishness in order to call attention to the hypocrisy and sentimentalization that often attends the praise of selflessness and altruism. This is very much worth doing. For there can be no doubt that some people who loudly praise selflessness are concerned less with the welfare of others than in enhancing their own feelings of virtue. (Such feelings help explain the attraction of what we have come to call political correctness: see, e.g., here.)

Every good is susceptible of perversion, including the good of caring for the welfare of others. But to say that a good can be perverted is not to deny the value of the good when rightly pursued. Nevertheless, people who deny the existence of altruism and praise selfishness are not simply being provocative. Nor are they simply calling attention to the abuse, the sentimentalization, of a natural good. They are also, I believe, guilty of a logical mistake.

This mistake was first pointed out clearly by Joseph Butler in his criticism of the selfish theory of human nature. The selfish theory of human nature, like Halley’s Comet, is a recurrent phenomenon: it was popularized in Butler’s time by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes with his idea that human life is at bottom a “war of all against all.” It is popularized today above all by sociobiologists (e.g., Richard Dawkins) who tell us that our genes are irredeemably “selfish.” Of course, a gene can no more be selfish than it can be lascivious or fond of Mozart, but try telling that to a sociobiologist.

Butler saw that many people who promulgated the selfish theory confused two very different propositions, one of which was a commonplace truth, the other of which was a shocking falsehood.

One proposition is that we cannot knowingly act except from a desire or interest which is our own. Not only is this true: it is what philosophers call a necessary truth — it could not be otherwise.

The other proposition is that all of our actions are self-interested. But this proposition, far from being self-evidently true, is a scandalous falsehood.

It is a tautology that any interest we have is an interest of our own: whose else could it be? But the objects of our interest are as various as the world is wide. No doubt much of what we do we do from motives of self-interest. But we might also do things for the sake of flag and country; for the love of a good woman; for the love of God; to discover a new country; to benefit a friend; to harm an enemy; to make a fortune; to spend a fortune.

“It is not,” Butler notes, “because we love ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have particular affections towards them.”

Indeed, it often happens that in pursuit of some object — through “fancy, inquisitiveness, love, or hatred, any vagrant inclination” — we harm our self-interest. Think of the scientist who ruins his health in single-minded pursuit of the truth about some problem, or a soldier who gives his life for his country.

The fundamental logical error, as the Australian philosopher David Stove has pointed out, is in inferring real-life consequences from a tautology. “If you set out from a tautological premise,” Stove observes, “you cannot validly infer from it ANY conclusion which is not itself tautological.” It does not follow from the tautology that “No one can act intentionally except from an interest that he has” that “No one can act intentionally except from a motive that is self-interested.” As Stove observes, this is the same sort of reasoning — perennially popular, but nonetheless atrocious — that gulls people into concluding from the proposition “Whatever will be will be” that “All human effort is ineffectual.” The first is a tautology; the second is a silly falsehood. (It is, David Hume observed, as silly as inferring from the proposition “Every husband has a wife” that “Every man marries.”)

Sensible people have a low opinion of human nature. They know that human beings are often vain, selfish, calculating, and ungrateful. But to universalize cynicism is not wisdom but folly. We might all wish there were more benevolence and altruism around than there is. But to say that is not to deny the existence or the desirability of those phenomena. The temptation is to conclude that human beings are simpler than they are. All of us are plenty selfish. Almost all of us have and act on altruistic impulses, too. The important truth to keep in view is that, as Joseph Butler observed, “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”

So, when Tiny Tim said “God Bless us every one,” he really meant it. Merry Christmas.

4 Comments

Last summer, Cambridge University Press announced that it would pulp all unsold copies of its 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by Robert O. Collins, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, and J. Millard Burr, a retired employee of the State Department. Why? Becuase Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, filed a libel claim to quash the book. According to a story in The Chronicle for Higher Education , Cambridge instantly capitulated, paid “substantial damages” to Mr. Mahfouz, and even went so far as to contact university libraries worldwide to ask them to remove the book from their shelves. They seem to have been successful in their request: I have searched high and low for the book in academic libraries and public libraries and have found that, although it is listed as “not checked out,” it is nowhere to be found.

Suppressing books he doesn’t like seems to be a hobby of Mr. Mahfouz’s. His web site lists successful actions against three other books Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden and Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed–and How to Stop It. As Robert Spencer explained in The Washington Times, one notable feature of Mr. Mahfouz’s legal actions is that he has sued various American authors in Britain, where libel laws favor the plaintiff.

Britain’s libel laws have given rise to the phenomenon of wealthy “libel tourists,” who sue there on the slimmest British connection [e.g., the fact that a book may be available through Amazon.com] in order to ensure a favorable ruling. Mr. bin Mahfouz had the good fortune of having the case heard by Judge David Eady, who has a long history of strange rulings in libel cases — rulings that generally ran in favor of censorship and against free speech. In connection with another of these rulings in May 2007, British journalist Stephen Glover wrote: “Mr Justice Eady is beginning to worry me. Is he a friend of a free Press? There are good reasons to believe that he isn’t.”

In May 2005 Justice Eady ruled that Miss Ehrenfeld [Rachel Ehrenfeld is the author of the above-mention Funding Evil] must apologize to Mr. bin Mahfouz and pay over $225,000. This fine remains uncollected, and Miss Ehrenfeld sees no reason to apologize. Now she cannot travel to Britain, and her writing and research work has of course been banned there — thus preventing important information from reaching the public.

Miss Ehrenfeld countersued in New York, asking the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals for a declaration that the British judgment was contrary to the First Amendment and hence unenforceable on an American citizen. And on June 8, the appellate court handed down a landmark decision, ruling that Miss Ehrenfeld’s case was valid, and that she could appeal for relief from American courts in order to keep the British court order from being carried out in this country. Said Circuit Court Judge Wilfred Feinberg: “The issue may implicate the First Amendment rights of many New Yorkers, and thus concerns important public policy of the state.” He also declared that the case had implications for all writers — since they, like Miss Ehrenfeld, could be subjected to harassment. This decision could also have great impact on the September 11 victims lawsuits, in which Mr. bin Mahfouz is also a defendant.

Mr. bin Mahfouz is not the only player in the libel tourism game, not by a long shot. Just yesterday, I heard that a complaint (scheduled to be heard in June in British Columbia) had been filed against the Canadian magazine Macleans. “London lawyer Faisal Joseph,” reports the London Free Press, “is leading a human rights complaint against Maclean’s magazine for publishing an article he says submits Muslim Canadians to “contempt and hatred.” And what article would that be? Why, an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s brilliant and terrifying book America Alone. Kenneth Whyte, the editor of Macleans, published 27 responses to Steyn’s article, but he was quite right to reject a demand that he publish, unedited, a five-page article by Muslim students. “I told them I would rather go bankrupt than let somebody from outside our operations dictate the content of the magazine.” Let’s hope it won’t come to that.

As Stanley Kurtz wrote in “Steynophobia,” an excellent overview of the issue on National Review Online,

This is a big deal. The blogosphere has so far largely missed it, but this attack on Mark Steyn is very much our business. There may be an impulse to dismiss this assault on Steyn, on the assumption that it will fail, that Steyn is a big boy and can take care of himself, and that in any case this is crazy Canada, where political correctness rules, rather than the land of the free. That would be a mistake. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s war on Mark Steyn and Maclean’s is an attack on all of us. . . .

The tiff over the excerpt from America Alone is only the tip of the iceberg. . . .

Connect the dots and you will see that the attack on Mark Steyn in Canada is part and parcel of a world-wide assault on free speech that has already reached well into America.

Indeed. Steyn himself had this to say about the complaints:

I can defend myself if I have to. But I shouldn’t have to.

If the Canadian Islamic Congress wants to disagree with my book, fine. Join the club. But, if they want to criminalize it, nuts. That way lies madness. America Alone was a bestseller in Canada, made all the literary Top Ten hit parades, Number One at Amazon Canada, Number One on The National Post’s national bestseller list, Number One on various local sales charts from statist Quebec to cowboy Alberta, etc. I find it difficult to imagine that a Canadian “human rights” tribunal would rule that all those Canadians who bought the book were wrong and that it is beyond the bounds of acceptable (and legal) discourse in Canada.

As I say, I find it difficult to imagine. But not impossible. These “human rights” censors started with small fry – obscure websites, “homophobes” who made the mistake of writing letters to local newspapers or quoting the more robust chunks of Leviticus – and, because they got away with it, it now seems entirely reasonable for a Canadian pseudo-court to sit in judgment on the content of a mainstream magazine and put a big old “libel chill” over critical areas of public debate. The “progressive” left has grown accustomed to the regulation of speech, thinking it just a useful way of sticking it to Christian fundamentalists, right-wing columnists, and other despised groups. They don’t know they’re riding a tiger that in the end will devour them, too.

As a publisher, I’ve so far had just a little taste of libel tourism. This spring, Encounter Books is publishing Willful Blindness: a Memoir of the Jihad, by Andrew C. McCarthy, who helped prosecute the “blind sheik” Omar Abdul-Rahman and other jihadists responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Just last week I received a message from one of the entities that helps distribute our books in Canada and Britain:

Can you please let us know if there are any references to Saudis and terrorist[s] in the book. We are just concerned that this book, could potentially create libel lawsuits as it could offend Saudis living in England and this has happened with many other US publications and we do not want to be jeopardized in selling this book.

Hello? So books offensive to Saudis are verboten? I don’t think so. But stayed tuned.

While everyone is busy humming “Let’s Not Be Beastly to the Muslims,” it is worth noting the word “Islamophobia” is a misnomer. A phobia describes an irrational fear, and it is axiomatic that fearing the effects of radical Islam is not irrational, but on the contrary very well-founded indeed, so that if you want to speak of a legitimate phobia-it’s a phobia I experience frequently-we should speak instead of Islamophobia-phobia, the fear of and revulsion towards Islamophobia.

Now that fear, I submit, is very well founded, and it extends into the nooks and crannies of daily life. Libel tourism is only one face of the phenomenon. It wasn’t so long ago, for example, that I read in a London paper that “Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet” because the presence of images of our porcine friends offended Muslims. A councilor called Mahbubur Rahman told the paper that he backed the ban because it represented “tolerance of people’s beliefs.” In other words, Piglet really did meet a Heffalump, and it turns out he was wearing a kaffiyeh.

The observation that the triumph of evil requires only that good men stand by and do nothing has special relevance at a time, like now, that is inflected by terrorism. Consider the bombings in London a couple summers ago. They were, as these things go, relatively low in casualties. But they were high in indiscriminateness. The people on those buses and subway cars were as innocent as innocent can be: just folks, moms and dads and children on their way to work or school or play, as uninterested, most of them, in politics or Islam as it is possible to be. And yet those home-grown Islamicists were happy to blow them to bits.

Here is the novelty: Our new enemies are not political enemies in any traditional sense, belligerent in the service of certain interests of their own. Their belligerence is focused rather on the very existence of an alternative to their vision of beatitude, namely on Western democracy and its commitment to individual freedom and economic prosperity. Our new enemies are not simply bent on our destruction: they are pleased to compass their own destruction as a collateral benefit. This is one of those things that makes Islamofascism a particularly toxic form of totalitarianism. At least most Communists had some rudimentary attachment to the principle of self-preservation. In the face of such death-embracing fanaticism our only option is unremitting combat.

42 Comments

The estimable Gary Shapiro of The New York Sun reported a day or two ago on another stupid academic conference, this one called “In Defense of Sloth“, which the organizers describe as ” the most philosophical” of vices. Gary asked me for a comment on this latest example of academic fatuousness, which I duly provided. His report quotes me, but since I said a bit more, I thought I would post my entire comment here:

In Kingsley Amis’s classic novel Lucky Jim, the protagonist reflects sourly on his own academic hack work and “the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.” The sponsors of this conference would seem to have out Amised Amis. What is the appropriate response to such exercises in cynical pointlessness? I am torn between recommending ridicule and contemptuous neglect. It may, however, be worth noting that sloth is not “the most philosophical” but rather the most terrifying and soul-deadening of vices. It is not, despite common usage, synonymous with laziness. On the contrary, as St. Thomas noted, it is a state of “tristitia de bono spirituale”: sadness or despair in the face of the spiritual good that is creation. It is typical of the special idiocy of contemporary academia that it would frivolously pretend to celebrate something that, if pursued in earnest, would spread moral anesthesia and despair.

1 Comment

Here’s a little object lesson in journalistic ethics. The New Republic publishes incendiary reports from Iraq by Scott Thomas Beauchamp. They turn out to be a tissue of ideologically motivated fantasy and fabrication. The New Republic, or at least its editor Frnaklin Foer, stonewalls for as long as possible–no, longer than was possbile, because by the time he came out with his pathetic 10,000-word pseudo-explanation he had become a laughing stock. (See, for example, “Fog of Foer” at PowerLine.)

Contrast the behavior of Foer with that of Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review Online. W. Thomas Smith Jr., one of the contributors–now a former contributor–to NRO’s military blog, had posted some controversial pieces about, inter alia, the threat Hezbollah represented to Lebanon. The veracity of those posts was questioned. Lopez instantly launched an investigation and, after a week or so, concluded that Smith’s reporting was suspect. Today, she posts a crisply worded summary of the episode, including this apology:

I apologize to all of our readers. We should have required Smith to clearly source all of his original reporting from Lebanon. Smith let himself become susceptible to spin by those taking him around Lebanon, so his reporting from there should be read with that knowledge. (We are attaching this note to all his Lebanon reporting.) This was an editing failure as much as it was a reporting failure. We let him down, and we let you down, and we’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

What a difference. Any editor can be taken in by a rogue contributor. Lopez shows how an honest and honorable editor should respond.

Comments

OK, so another misfit wanders into a public space and opens fire with a stolen AK47. This time, eight people were killed, several wounded, when Robert Hawkins, a 19-year-old school dropout, went to a mall in Nebraska and started shooting. “He had,” a local police chief observed, “apparently been experiencing some mental health problems, ideations of suicide.” Thanks for the tip, Chief. I had actually worked that out for myself, except maybe for the bit about “ideations of suicide.”

The moral? That guns should be outlawed everywhere and always so that losers like Hawkins can’t get hold of ‘em? Wrong. When Cho-what’s-his-name started plugging students at Virgina Tech earlier this year, all the gun-control nuts came out of the woodwork to make that argument. As I said at the time,

My own feeling is that if a few responsible students and faculty had been in possession of the requisite firearms they might have made the death toll a lot lower, or even–had they been especially alert–eliminated it altogether, or at least reduced it to the gratifying number of one, that of the perpetrator.

I was happy to see that Glenn Reynolds makes a cognate observation about the Nebraska Mall Misfit: “It seems to me,” Reynolds writes today at Instapundit, “that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them.”

Now there’s a class-action suit I can get behind. Where’s the ACLU and the “equal protection” lawyers when we need them? The truth of the matter, as Mark Steyn has repeatedly pointed out, in our society a high incidence of gun ownership correlates closely with a low murder–and indeed a low crime–rate. Why? Steyn offers this thought experiment:

Let’s take a hypothetical situation: I’m up late working on a National Post column at my place in New Hampshire. I hear a noise downstairs and cautiously investigate. It’s a fellow I’ve never seen before, hunched over my stereo. What do I do? I take my gun and try to hit his shoulder, disabling his own firing arm. Unfortunately, I’m not that good a shot and I blow his head off. I instantly regret it, knowing I’m now going to have to repaint the room.

Next, I call the chief of my town’s one-man police department — his home number’s listed in the book — and invite him round to collect the body. Al’s also irked, at having his slumbers disturbed, but he takes a short statement and congratulates me on a job well done.

Flippant? Maybe. Callous? Perhaps. But all-too-true. If just a few of those holiday shoppers in Omaha, Nebraska had been packing heat, they could have put a stop to Robert Hawkins’s disgusting rampage eftsoons and right speedily. If guns are outlawed, only outlaws and assorted other weirdos will have guns. That, in a nutshell, is precisely the problem.

82 Comments

“Those who cannot remember the past,” Santayana famously wrote, “are condemned to repeat it.” What he didn’t say, but what often seems to be the case, is that we can remember the past just fine and then go on to repeat it anyway. A variation, perhaps, of Ovid’s observation that “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor”–”I see and approve the better path, but follow the worse.”

I entertained some such melancholy thoughts this morning when I saw the news that Senator Clinton had gone to Wall Street to inform the assembled multitudes that, were she President, the world could expect plenty of government intervention in the U.S. economy. As a front-page story in The New York Sun put it, “Clinton Gives Wall Street a Warning”:

Senator Clinton gave a clear indication yesterday that as president she would be happy to intervene in the management of the economy if she thought the free market was failing middle-class Americans.

Who would doubt it? “Mrs. Clinton demanded,” the story went on, “an immediate injection of $5 billion into the economy to help those facing foreclosure on their homes. And she proposed another $2 billion to be spent to help poor families in cold-weather states afford heating fuel.”

“Mrs. Clinton demanded,” indeed. We’ll be hearing that phrase a lot in the months to come. And don’t ask where that $5 billion, that $2 billion are coming from–you know the answer: your pocket. (“What’s a paltry $5 billion in an economy of $12.5 trillion?” you ask. Remember Senator Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”)

Mrs. Clinton had a few words of criticism for irresponsible borrowers, but she laid the the lion’s share of the blame for what she called “the subprime crisis” at the feet of those in Wall Street whom she accused (as The Sun put it) of “deliberately engineering a mortgage system that abandoned traditional notions of lending responsibility.” (The best, or at least the most entertaining explanation of the subprime crisis I’ve seen is available on YouTube here.)

Well, government intervention into the economy (and just about everything else, come to that: tobacco, transfats, you name it, they want to control it) seems to be back in season. Even President Bush is talking about a five-year freeze on raising the rates on all those adjustable-rate mortgages bankers were passing out a few years ago.

This is not, of course, a new idea. “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.” So thought Benito Mussolini, who did what he could to restrict the freedom of the individual.

Admittedly, Mussolini was a rank amateur compared, say, to V.I. Lenin, but when it came to curtailing individual freedom by expanding the coercive power of the state, they worked from the same songbook. Back in the heady days of 1917, Lenin boasted that when he finished building his workers’ paradise “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.” A single jail cell was more like it, but who thought that at the time?

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith noted the paradox, or seeming paradox, of capitalism: that the more individuals were left free to follow their own ends, the more their activities were “led by an invisible hand to promote” ends that aided the common good. Private pursuits conduced to public goods: that is the beneficient alchemy of capitalism. In The Road to Serfdom and other works, Friedrich Hayek expanded on Smith’s fundamental insight, pointing out that the spontaneous order created and maintained by competitive market forces leads to greater prosperity than a planned economy.

The sentimentalist cannot wrap his mind, or his heart, around that datum. He (or she) cannot understand why “society” shouldn’t favor “cooperation” (a pleasing-sounding arrangement) over “competition” (much harsher), since in any competition there are losers, which is bad, and winners, which may be even worse.

Socialism is a version of sentimentality. Even so hard-headed an observer as George Orwell was susceptible. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell argued that since the world “potentially at least, is immensely rich,” if we developed it “as it might be developed . . . we could all live like princes, supposing that we wanted to.” Never mind that part of what it means to be a prince is that others, most others, are not royalty. (Or, as that admirable logician W. S. Gilbert put it: “When every one is somebodee, / Then no one’s anybody!”)

As Hayek observed, the socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have been able to “generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts,” they cannot also consciously “design an even better and more gratifying system.” Central to Hayek’s teaching is the unyielding fact that human ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris. A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

The urgency with which Hayek condemns socialism is a function of the importance of the stakes involved. As he puts it in his last book The Fatal Conceit , the “dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival” because “to follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” We get a foretaste of what Hayek means whenever the forces of socialism triumph. There follows, as the night the day, an increase in poverty and a diminution of individual freedom.

The curious thing is that this fact has had so little effect on the attitudes of intellectuals and the politicians who appeal to them. No merely empirical development, it seems–let it be repeated innumerable times–can spoil the pleasures of socialist sentimentality. This unworldliness is tied to another common trait of intellectuals: their contempt for money and the world of commerce. The socialist intellectual eschews the “profit motive” and recommends increased government control of the economy. He feels, Hayek notes, that “to employ a hundred people is . . . exploitation but to command the same number [is] honorable.”

Not that intellectuals, as a class, do not like possessing money as much as the rest of us. But they look upon the whole machinery of commerce as something separate from, something indescribably less worthy than, their innermost hearts’ desires. Of course, there is a sense in which this is true. But many intellectuals fail to appreciate two things. First, the extent to which money, as Hayek put it, is “one of the great instruments of freedom ever invented,” opening “an astounding range of choice to the poor man–a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.”

Second, intellectuals tend to ignore the extent to which the organization of commerce affects the organization of our aspirations. As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Servile State, “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.” The really frightening question wholesale economic planning raises is not whether we are free to pursue our most important ends but who determines what those “most important ends” are to be. “Whoever,” Hayek notes, “has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower–in short, what men should believe and strive for.”

There has been a great deal of agitation over the sub-prime so-called crisis in the last few months. Probably, there is more agitation to follow. More fiscal pain is on the way as banks make further write downs and (nota bene) the market corrects itself. But let’s keep a little perspective on the matter. Yesterday, the market closed at over 13,400. In 1982, the market plunged to about 700–that’s seven hundred–thanks in large part to Jimmy Carter’s brilliant handling–and “handling” is le mot juste–of the economy and America’s political fortunes.

On economic matters, Mrs. Clinton is at heart a socialist of Keynesian disposition. We’ve been there, done that. Do we have to go through it again? There is some irony in the fact the Keynes provided a most penetrating criticism of the top-down rationalism that he himself propounded in economic matters. Writing about Bertrand Russell and his Bloomsbury friends, Keynes tartly observed that

Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally.

What prodigies of existential legerdemain lay compacted in that phrase “all we had to do”! To my ears, anyway, it is redolent of one of the most nauseating epithets in recent memory: “It takes a village.” We all know that more government intervention and control means high taxes, greater inefficiency, and economic stagnation. We’ve seen it happen dozens of times. We remember the past. Are we still condemned to repeat it?

3 Comments