The other day, commenting on Glenn Reynolds’s essay about how the  “plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today’s society . . . allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in,” I posted something about Ayn Rand and the criminalization of everyday life. This prompted a friend to send me a marvelous bit of legal history — or perhaps it is only classic comedy — from A.P. Herbert, the great British lawyer, MP, and comic novelist, author of  Uncommon Law: Being 66 Misleading Cases.

If you go into your local bookstore (always assuming you have such antiquarian emporia in your neighborhood), you will doubtless find Hebert’s book congregated under the rubric “fiction” in the subcategory “satire.”

But is it satire?  Consider the case of “Rex v. Haddock, Is it a Free Country?” As my friend reports, in this case Lord Justice Frog rejects an appeal against a fine of two pounds for disorderly conduct and associated offenses. The allegation was that the appellant, one Haddock,  jumped off the Hammersmith bridge on a bet. Haddock maintained that not only had he not committed any of the offenses of which he was convicted (a point conceded by Lord Justice Frog), but that England was a free country,  a man can do as he likes if he does nobody harm, and that he had acted “for fun.”

Oh really? Said Lord Justice Frog:

“It cannot be too clearly understood that this is not a free country, and it will be an evil day for the legal profession when it is. The citizens of London must realize that there is almost nothing they are allowed to do. Prima facie all actions are illegal, if not by Act of Parliament, by Order in Council; and if not by Order in Council, by Departmental or Police Regulations, or By-laws. They may not eat where they like, drink where they like, walk where they like, drive where they like, sing where they like, or sleep where they like. And least of all may they do unusual actions “for fun.” People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament. And if anything is said in this Court to encourage a belief that Englishmen are entitled to jump off bridges for their own amusement, the next thing to go will be the Constitution. For these reasons therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this appeal must fail. It is not for me to say what offense the appellant has committed, but I am satisfied that he has committed some offense, for which he has been most properly punished.”

As I say, you are likely to find Uncommon Law (if you can find it at all) filed under “satire” or “humor.”  Really, though, it ought to be filed in the the sociology or documentary section.  Before long, perhaps, it will be categorized as subversive literature and simply banned: we cannot, after all, have people doing things “for  fun,” or believing that “a man can do what he likes if does nobody harm.”  What an antiquated idea that has become.  More and more, it seems, we live in the society described by Lord Justice Frog: “Prima facie all actions are illegal.” The only question is, will we simply acquiesce in this increasingly-less-soft tyranny?

There seems to be near universal agreement among the economic  cognoscenti that Apple’s glory days are over. After all, its last quarter profit was “only” $13.1 billion, or $13.81 a share. Wailing and gnashing of teeth time, what? Nor is that all. Sales rose–rose!–only–only!–18% to $54.5 billion while “analysts” had projected sales of $54.9 billion. Gosh.

To my uninformed eye these earnings seem like a tremendous success story. but the savants disagree. Result? Apple shares plunge about 10% in after-hours trading. That strikes me as insane, but, hey, what do I know?

Well, there is this one thing: that if Apple shares plunge now (as they have periodically in the past), they’ll be a lot more attractive to investors willing to looking beyond this faddish panic.

A few of my friends are avid fans of Ayn Rand, especially of Atlas Shrugged. As I’ve explained in this space and elsewhere, I am not. I’ve tried the book a few times and just couldn’t get through it.  I did see the first two installments of the recent movie version and rather liked them, though I know I am not supposed to.

At bottom, I think that Whittaker Chambers was right about Rand in the devastating review he wrote of Atlas Shrugged in National Review shortly after the book appeared.

Yet Chambers was right not only about Rand’s shortcomings — that’s what people remember about his review — but also about what she got right.  “[A] great many of us,” he wrote, “dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does.” That fact disposes “us” — i.e., us conservatives who share Rand’s belief in self-reliance and who dislike big government and the nanny state just as much as she did — to endorse some of what Rand advocates. Hence, for example, widespread popularity of Rand’s character John Galt and sympathy for “going Galt,” i.e., Just Saying No to the many violations of personal liberty perpetrated by an omnivorous, socialistically inclined state.

I’ve found that as I get older I become more and more libertarian, which I suppose means in part that I am more and more sympathetic to John Galt. Why? I’m sure there are several reasons. One is the increasing bureaucratization of life in this country, the progress of what Tocqueville called “Democratic Despotism,” i.e., the insidious proliferation of rules and regulations (and their concomitant rulers and regulators) that we’re told are being put in place for the commonweal but in fact are really put in place to  squelch individual liberty and solidify state control over our lives.

Examples are too numerous to linger over: imagine a country in which legislators tell you can no longer buy incandescent light bulbs but must henceforth purchase ones that contain a toxic substance and give off a sepulchral, Eastern-European-under-Communism sort of grimy light. Imagine a country in which other legislators (or perhaps they’re the same ones) are proposing to fit all new cars with a “black box” that will record where you’ve been, how fast you got there, and perhaps even what you had to drink before you got behind the wheel.

Amazing that we put up with it, no?

And this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Leftists love to talk about “diversity.” What they prefer to practice, however, is strict intellectual and moral conformity.  That is, they are all for diversity, especially for enforcing diversity, when its a question of assuring that their agenda is being carried out. But for anyone who wishes to introduce a competing point of view, the advice is akin to that advocated by Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss  man schweigen” — “That about which we cannot speak we must remain silent.”

Wittgenstein sought to exclude the whole realm of ethics and metaphysics from the kingdom of speech; our politically correct leftists wish to exclude anything that doesn’t conform to their political agenda. Both ambitions are preposterous, but leftists never seem to recognize this. (We don’t have Wittgenstein’s opinion on political correctness, but it only took him a few years to reject the teachings of “the author of the Tractatus”). Usage note: attentive readers will register the fact that I say “leftists,” not “liberals.” Conservatives, I know, often speak about the depredations and bad behavior of “liberals.” But it has been a long time since the people whom we have called liberals were interested in freedom or liberty. What they are interested in, on the contrary, is pursuing the illiberal agenda of control.

This is a large and melancholy subject.  For the moment, I want to instance the growing attack on one of the most fecund sources of genuine diversity opinion, talk radio.  Leftists hate talk radio. Why? Because it represents an independent source of opinion, a source, moreover, that is at once extremely popular and (from the perspective of the leftists) politically heterodox.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt once observed that it was arbitrariness, not necessarily severity, that distinguished totalitarian from law-abiding states. Stalin may have had his Gulags, Hitler his concentration camps, but the key to understanding the exercise of totalitarian power there and elsewhere lay in its capricious, unpredictable application, not its harshness. The operation of law is public, regular, knowable in advance.  The eruption of the totalitarian impulse inserts a vertiginousness element of whim. That’s part of what makes it terrifying. In a free society governed by the rule of law, people know where they stand. In the normal course of affairs, most people will never directly experience the coercive power of the state. They are not subjected to harassment at the arbitrary direction of state officials. With the erosion of the habits of liberty, however, everything changes. Now the state tends to regard the people first of all not as its raison d’être but as a potential threat. The result is a sharp contraction of that latitude that free societies allow their citizens.

I thought about these melancholy truths when a friend told me the alarming story of Robin Fleming, a 70-year-old glider pilot and instructor from South Carolina. On July 26, 2012, Mr. Fleming was out for a leisurely flight when, late in the afternoon, the tranquility of the day was suddenly broken by a radio call from local enforcement officials barking orders that he land his glider immediately. “The presumed offense,” the magazine Flying reports in a story called “Pilot Arrested, Charged for Doing Nothing,” “was his briefly flying over a nuclear power plant at approximately 1,000 feet AGL [i.e., above ground level] while looking for lift.”

According to Flying, “Local law enforcement cannot, for the record, order any pilot of an airplane in flight to do anything.” What the magazine meant, alas, is that local law enforcement agencies may not so order a pilot.  That they can do was demonstrated by the unhappy case of Mr. Fleming on that otherwise pleasant summer say.

Mr. Fleming landed. His plane was instantly surrounded by 17 police vehicles. He was “detained on the spot, brought to jail, held overnight on a charge of ‘breach of peace,’ and not released until he was bailed out late the next day.” It might have been worse. According to another report from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, one officer spoke of “commandeering the airport.” “He was running around . . .saying  ‘We were going to shoot him down.’”  Yikes. In the event, the Darlington, South Carolina, sheriff’s office wouldn’t let Fleming call anyone, so members of his flying club were alarmed when he didn’t return as scheduled from his flight. Eventually, they organized a search for him.

The sheriff’s office claimed that Mr. Fleming had violated a “no fly” zone. The problem, as Flying points out, is “there is no such kind of zone, no such regulation and no such offense.”

Robin Fleming was arrested and thrown into jail on the initiative of  some hysterical local law enforcement—no, make that “law perversion”—officials.

As President Obama surrounds himself with children to further his campaign to relieve Americans of their Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, some canny observers have recalled other political figures who have resorted to using children to sentimentalize their policies.

Jim Robbins, the brilliant lead editorialist at the Washington Times, reminds us of another, more salubrious response to governmental efforts to disarm the populace: Patrick Henry at the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Convention: “Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense?”

The answer, alas: “Yes, we are.” But the Founders didn’t stand for it then. Perhaps we won’t stand for an imperial president’s effort to abrogate the Constitution by executive order. Perhaps.

Ben Shapiro’s satisfying dismantling of Piers Morgan on CNN over the issue of gun control has been getting some of the plaudits it deserves. Morgan is, as Ben says, a bully of the first water, a man whose delight in mud slinging was too much even for the bottom-feeding British tabloid the Daily Mirror, which fired him for publishing fake photos of British soldiers supposedly abusing Iraqi prisoners.  Morgan is one of those liberals whose unshakable self-infatuation compels him to treat disagreement as a sort of moral heresy. His contemptuous—and contemptible—treatment of his guests makes for intermittently entertaining, if also cringe-making, television. But as Ben demonstrates, Morgan’s habit of contempt renders him a pathetic, deeply unserious mountebank.

Others have celebrated Ben’s performance.  Here I’d like to underscore two points.

One concerns Morgan’s attitude towards the Constitution.  At one point in the interview, Ben handed Morgan a copy of the Constitution and invited him to ponder the language of the Second Amendment. A few minutes later, Morgan handed it back to him dismissively: Here’s “your little book.” The Constitution of the United States is “your little book”?

The other point concerns the point Ben made toward the end of the interview.  One of the reasons the Founders framed the Second Amendment, he pointed out, was to arm citizens against the possibility of a tyrannous government. This occasioned astonishment in Piers Morgan, who seemed incredulous that anyone could believe that the government of the United States might turn against its own citizens.”You’ve made your point crystal clear,” sneered Morgan. “People aren’t stupid.  They can make up their own mind.” It would be interesting to ask Mr. Nakoula Nakoula about that.  Of course, we can’t ask him.  He’s in jail.  He’s the chap, remember, whose video about Mohammed Barack Obama didn’t like, the fellow who then got a midnight visit from brown-shirted men from the sheriff’s office and was summarily bundled off to the police station, then decanted into jail, and then was sentenced to a year in prison, allegedly for probation violations. Or we could ask the increasingly large number of people who are arrested for the non-crime of photographing the police. Or we could simply ask ourselves about the increasingly intrusive nanny state regulations that have intruded more and more on our individual liberty.  Yes, Piers, people aren’t stupid.  They can make up their own minds. That’s why, as the illiberal-liberal establishment embarks on another another orgy of “ban the guns” rhetoric, people are rushing out in unprecedented numbers to arm themselves.  It’s not only to protect themselves against the thieves who might creep into their houses at night to steal the family silver; it’s also to protect themselves against the suit-wearing thieves who practice their trade by wielding the levers of state power.

Also See: The Top 10 Funniest ‘Right-Sided’ Political Videos of 2012.

From my friend Ron Radosh, who got an early start on his 2012 tax return:

Years ago I read an amusing piece in the London Telegraph  about an exhibition of Damien Hirst’s, er, art work at some glitzy Cork Street gallery.  The man with the formaldehyde sharks had lots of exciting new bijoux to offer his public.  One immortal opus consisted of a tray full of dirty coffee cups, overflowing ash trays, and the like.  After the opening party, a diligent janitor, who I hope has gone on to a post as an art critic, tidied up the tray.

Yep, out went the master’s work, all those carefully arranged cigarette butts and lipstick-smeared napkins, valued, reported a melancholy gallery director, at more than £100,000.

He cheered up, however, when informed that the wok could be “recreated.” What a boon for posterity.

£100,000 for Damien Hirst’s detritus.  It’s not quite as risible, perhaps, as “Artist’s Shit,” the 90 tin cans of human excrement that Piero Manzoni produced (though not, I think, in a single sitting) in 1961.  As I recall, the Tate Gallery paid £65,000 for a can or two, though it’s not clear that they are still part of the collection since they had an unpleasant tendency to burst.

I thought of these and similar episodes when my friend Michael Lewis, a professor of art history at Williams College, sent me the following memo which had been circulated by a diligent colleague:

Dear Studio Faculty,

Security came to my office this morning and said that they found a bucket with what appears to be medical waste in it in Driscoll Dining Hall.  They thought it might an art project.   It has been turned over to Health Services for testing to see if it’s real.

Does anyone know of any such art project?

When you stop chuckling, think about this: Michael’s colleague was being perfectly rational in sending around that memo. In the age of charlatans like Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, the Chapman Brothers, and, oh many more practitioners of mind-numbing psycho-pathology, who can say whether a bucket of medical waste is or is not an art project?  If Tracey Emin can win the Turner Prize for “My Bed”— “her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown”—why could a bucket of medical waste not be an art project at the “art” department of an over-priced private college in Massachusetts? (Tuition, room & board at Williams this year $56,770: what a steal!)

No, the art world, like so much of academia, is beyond satire, though not, I think, beyond ridicule. They’re both gaseous, over-inflated bubbles, straining, straining, and just about to burst.  Laugh now while you still can.

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)

Reader advisory: this is a long post . . .

‘Directionless quibble’?

‘We must never’, Bismarck is said to warned, ‘look into the origins of laws or sausages’. Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that ‘sage’)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought. Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called ‘What is Enlightenment?’, he offered ‘Sapere Aude’, ‘Dare to know!’, as a   motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who ‘gives the law to himself’. As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.

Bismarck’s observation cautions reticence about certain matters; it implies that about some things it is better not to inquire too closely. What Walter Bagehot said about the British monarchy—‘We must not let in daylight upon magic’—has, from this point of view, a more general application. The legend ‘Here be monsters’ that one sees on certain antique maps applies also to certain precincts of the map of our moral universe. En-lightened man, by contrast, is above all a creature who looks into things: he wants to ‘get to the bottom’ of controversies, to dispel mysteries, to see what makes things ‘tick’, to understand the mechanics of everything from law to sausages, from love to society. Who has the better advice, Bismarck or Kant?

Of course, it is not a simple choice. For one thing, it might be argued that Kant’s own attitude toward the imperative ‘Dare to Know!’ was complex. In a famous passage toward the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant tells us that he was setting limits to reason in order to make room for faith. Exactly what Kant meant by this  . . . what to call it? this admission? this boast? this concession? Well, whatever Kant meant by his invocation of faith, it has been an abiding matter of debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’ is itself a monument of Enlightenment thought, as much in its implied commendation of the ‘critical attitude’ as in the ‘Copernican revolution’ he sought to bring about in philosophy.

Today, we can hardly go to the toilet without being urged to cultivate ‘critical thinking’. Which does not mean, I hasten to add, that we are society of Kantians. Nevertheless, what we are dealing with here is an educational watchword, not to say a cliché, that has roots in some of the Enlightenment values that Kant espoused. It’s a voracious, quick-growing hybrid. A search for the phrase ‘critical thinking’ using the Google search engine brings up 86,100,000 references in .31 seconds. The first match, God help us, is to something called ‘The Critical Thinking Community’, whose goal is ‘to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking’. (Why is it, I wonder, that the conjunction of the phrase ‘critical thinking’ with the word ‘community’ is so reliably productive of nausea?)

Everywhere you look, in fact, you will find the virtues of ‘critical thinking’ extolled: Colleges and universities claim to be stuffed with the thing, and even high schools— even, mirabile dictu, primary schools—brag about instilling the principles of ‘critical thinking’ in their charges. There’s ‘critical thinking’ for bankers, for accountants, for cooks, gardeners, haberdashers, and even advanced toddlers. A few summers ago, my wife and I took our then-5-year-old son to an orientation meeting for parents considering sending their children to a local kindergarten. School officials enthusiastically told us about how they would bring the principles of critical thinking to Sally’s coloring book and little Johnnie’s sport. Absolutely everyone is enjoined to scrutinize his presuppositions, reject conventional thinking, and above all, to be original and/or ‘creative’. (Ponder, if your stomach is strong enough, a ‘Creative Critical Thinking Community’.)

To some extent, we owe the infestation of ‘critical thinking’ to that great twentieth-century movement to empty minds while at the same time inflating the sense of self-importance, or, to give it its usual name, Progressive Education. It was John Dewey, thank you very much, who told us that ‘education as such has no aims’, warned about ‘the vice of externally imposed ends’, urged upon his readers the notion that ‘an individual can only live in the present’. (The present, Dewey said, ‘is what life is in leaving the past behind it’, i.e., a nunc stans of perfect ignorance.) So much for the Arnoldian ideal of a liberal arts education as involving the disinterested pursuit of the ‘best that has been thought and said’.

The first thing to notice about the vogue for ‘critical thinking’ is that it tends to foster not criticism but what one wit called ‘criticismism’: the ‘ism’ or ideology of being critical, which, like most isms, turns out to be a parody or betrayal of the very thing it claims to champion. In this sense, ‘critical thinking’ is an attitude guaranteed to instill querulous dissatisfaction, which is to say ingratitude, on the one hand, and frivolousness, on the other. Its principal effect, as the philosopher David Stove observed, has been ‘to fortify millions of ignorant graduates and undergraduates in the belief, to which they are already only too firmly wedded by other causes, that the adversary posture is all, and that intellectual life consists in “directionless quibble”’.

The phrase ‘directionless quibble’ is from Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect, and a fine book it is, too, not least in its appreciation of the ways in which unanchored intellect can be ‘a life-darkening institution’. I suggest, however, that the phrase ‘directionless quibble’ is not entirely accurate, since the habit of quibble cultivated by ‘critical thinking’ does have a direction, namely against the status quo. The belief, as Stove puts it, ‘that the adversary posture is all’ is at the center of ‘critical thinking.’ Lionel Trilling spoke in this context of ‘the adversary culture’ of the intellectuals. It was not so long ago that, I received word of a long article in Teachers College Record, a journal from Indiana University which describes itself as ‘the voice of scholarship in education’. The featured article is a 30,000 word behemoth by a professor of ‘inquiry and philosophy’ called ‘Ocularcentrism, Phonocentrism and the Counter Enlightenment Problematic: Clarifying Contested Terrain in our Schools of Education’. I am too charitable to subject you to a sample of its almost comically reader-proof prose (you can see for yourself here), but it is worth pausing to note that such work is absolutely typical in the academic establishment today. It really is ‘the voice of scholarship’, or what’s become of scholarship.

Prejudice against prejudice

How we got here  makes for a long story. I’d like to dip into a few chapters of that story and then speculate briefly about what an alternative might look like.

It seems obvious that ‘critical thinking’ (I employ the quotation marks because the activity in question is neither critical nor, in any robust sense of the word, thinking) is a descendant or re-enactment of the Enlightenment imperative ‘Dare to Know!’ In this sense, it is a precursor or adjunct of that ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur invoked when discussing the intellectual and moral demolition carried out by thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. It would be hard to exaggerate the corrosive nature of these assaults. Often, indeed, what we encounter is less a hermeneutics of suspicion than a hermeneutics of contempt. The contempt expresses itself partly in a repudiation of the customary, the conventional, the habitual, partly in the cult of innovation and originality. Think, for example, of John Stuart Mill’s famous plea on behalf of moral, social, and intellectual ‘experiments in living’. Part of what makes that phrase so obnoxious is Mill’s effort to dignify his project of moral revolution with the prestige of science—as if, for example, his creepy relationship with the married Harriet Taylor was somehow equivalent to Michael Faraday’s experiments with electro-magnetisim. You see the same thing at work today when young hedonists in search of oblivion explain that they are ‘experimenting’ with drugs.

It is worth pausing over Mill’s brief on behalf of innovation. You’ve heard it a thousand times. But familiarity should not blind us to its fatuous malevolence. Throughout history, Mill argues, the authors of such innovations have been objects of ridicule, persecution, and oppression; they have been ignored, silenced, exiled, imprisoned, even killed. But (Mill continues) we owe every step of progress, intellectual as well as moral, to the daring of innovators. ‘Without them’, he writes, ‘human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist’. Ergo, innovators—‘developed human beings’ is one phrase Mill uses for such paragons—should not merely be tolerated but positively be encouraged as beacons of future improvement.

David Stove called this the ‘They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus’ argument. In a penetrating essay in his book On Enlightenment, Stove noted that ‘the Columbus argument’ (as he called it for short) ‘has swept the world’.

With every day that has passed since Mill published it, it has been more influential than it was the day before. In the intellectual and moral dissolution of the West in the twentieth century, every step has depended on conservatives being disarmed, at some critical point, by the Columbus argument; by revolutionaries claiming that any resistance made to them is only another instance of that undeserved hostility which beneficial innovators have so regularly met with in the past.

The amazing thing about the success of the Columbus argument is that it depends on premises that are so obviously faulty. Indeed, a moment’s reflection reveals that the Columbus argument is undermined by a downright glaring weakness. Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure: well, so too has every change for the worse. And surely, Stove writes, there have been at least as many proposed innovations which ‘were or would have been for the worse as ones which were or would have been for the better’. Which means that we have at least as much reason to discourage innovators as to encourage them, especially when their innovations bear on things as immensely complex as the organization of society. As Lord Falkland admonished, ‘when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not change’.