The British Empire lives! (Appropriately enough, the scandal concerns crown land.) Mind you, to think I had never heard of the place until today — what has the British so-called education so-called system come to, eh?

‘Knock knock’ I hear from my window (I live in a ground floor flat). On going to see who it is, I find a middle aged woman holding a clipboard, so I open the window and hear what she has to say. She’s trying to contact two people in the flats apparently, but the building is just too hard to get into — tried the buzzers, and they didn’t work. I say I’ll go round and let her in; as I go to do this, someone else is coming in at the same time, but the window knocker has stayed standing back outside by a couple of yards or so (a good sign?).

Anyhow, says she’s from Mori, again says about the buzzers (I say many residents probably don’t keep the batteries in), has numbers 14 and 24 on her list, will only be going to them and will be out again… Well, as number 14 is opposite me (hey, I’ve even said ‘hello’ to him once!), once she’s inside, I just go back inside my own flat.  A couple minutes later though I think to myself that I’d better see whether she’s still about; opening my door, I hear her upstairs speaking to a man, presumably the occupant of no. 24. Standing where I am, I hear her going through her spiel, upon which he says that to be truthful, he has no interest in these surveys, so doesn’t want to take part, thank you. She won’t take no for an answer though; so, feeling slightly guilty about letting her in in the first place, I go upstairs myself. To him I say that I’m from no. 15 and that sorry, but I let her in; to her, I say the guy’s said ‘no’, so please can you leave now.  She then replies that when someone says ‘no’, they typically don’t mean it; we then basically debate the point over a couple of minutes — upon me referring to her as a cold-caller and gesturing to close her clipbook, she says she’s not a cold caller because Mori is a well-respected organisation, ‘and now you’re using force!’ Eventually the guy says that if he shuts his door, there can be no question of him changing his mind; he then actually does this, which finally leads the woman to give up. Chaperoning her out of the building, she then continuallly whines about my affrontery, again emphasising how Mori is a well-respected organisation, that she’s only doing her job, and that she’s never met anyone so rude…

Well, after she finally left, I went upstairs again and found the guy waiting for me; we have a word and shake hands, upon which I head back downstairs. Only once back in my flat do I think that we didn’t even swap names…

I’m not sure why, but I find Andy Newman’s missives at Socialist Unity as necessary a read as Andrew Sullivan’s at The Daily Dish — which is to say, very necessary indeed, unless someone else has taken the keyboard (an underling in Sullivan’s case, a comrade in Newman’s). That said, this post is just weird. While Newman’s previously gone in for Trot-baiting, non-ironically hailing the ‘achievements’ of ’socialism’ under the shadow of Soviet tanks, this goes a step or three further, arguing, in sum, how dare the Daily Mail and fellow ‘anti-Americans’ attack the sainted land of the free over Gary McKinnon!

A poster recently put up at work (admittedly, I work at the county council, but still…):

Creepy, eh?

Not sure why, but I feel slightly flattered to have received a patient response to this rather off-the-cuff post…

I may be imagining it, but Lindsay German in her capacity as chief talking head from the Stop the War Coalition seems to be doing much better since Prof Callinicos and the rest sacked her from the SWP’s central committee. Back on the radio this morning, she was put alongside Colonel Tim Collins, who before the interviewer intervened, continually talked over her with loud threats that it’s ‘against the law’ for her to give a platform to antiwar soldiers. Who would have thought, an army person who likes war and has authoritarian tendencies? That said, I do find it a bit bizarre how there seems to be a convention by which one can ever mention the fact that German’s a Trot…

It’s a bit unusual for someone with hard left sympathies to complain about the ‘liberal’ advocacy of ‘positive’ rights, but the anonymous blogger at Splintered Sunrise is and does exactly that. Nonetheless, I’m not entirely sure academic liberal political philosophers of the past thirty years (thinking of, say, Joel Feinberg) have actually advocated the sorts of thing Mr Sunrise ridicules. Indeed, if one is looking for a definite intellectual forebear, ‘politics of recognition’ and/or ‘radical multiculturalist’ types in political theory would surely be better candidates, yet these have tended to style themselves as ‘left’ or at least ‘radical’ critics of ‘liberalism’.

Admittedly, as the discourse is transposed to practical left-liberal politics, the faux socialism which typically accompanies it in academia is replaced with an unflinching support for actually-existing capitalism. Thus, New Labour politicians never tire of saying their ‘project’ was (and is) all about achieving greater ‘equality’ of something or other, yet do so in a manner that is in no way anti-capitalist or even mildly unhappy about rising pay differentials under their watch – to care about such things is the ‘old’ politics of ‘envy and resentment’ they say, and thus, something that is ‘not appropriate’ to ‘modern Britain’!

Nonetheless, ‘New Labour’ and ‘politics of recognition’ discourses come together, I think, in precisely what Splintered Sunrise styles as the former’s aim of ‘legislating niceness’: the idea that the ‘rights’ of one group to be respected requires state action to counteract the ‘bigotry’ of certain individuals in society at large, even if this ‘bigotry’ has only very low-level expression that, in the grand scheme of things, makes very little (if any) practical difference to the lives of those it disrespects.

As an example, Splintered Sunrise gives that rather odd row a couple of years ago over Catholic adoptions agencies, when ‘it was written into law that the right of gay couples to adopt overrode the right of Catholic organisations to operate in accordance with Catholic social teaching’:

The funny thing is that, given the very small numbers of gay couples applying to adopt, and given the unlikely scenario of many, or even any, of them deciding to apply via the Catholic agencies, that the whole argument was unnecessary – the Catholic agencies could have perfectly well been granted the legal exemption they wanted, without infringing on the right of the gay community to take their custom elsewhere.

Another, slightly different example one might give is of the ban on smoking in public places. At least, in presenting it, the then Health Secretary John Reid exclaimed:

In a free society, men and women ultimately have the right within the law to choose their own lifestyle, even when it may damage their own health. But people do not have the right to damage the health of others, or to impose an intolerable degree of inconvenience or nuisance on others.

We thus end up with things like this, stuck to the inside of door of the small block of flats I’m currently living in:

Now, I’m a non-smoker who would much prefer to live in a smoke-free environment. Moreover, I’ve no problem with a non-smoking clause being part of the covenant signed by buyers, and by implication, tenants, even if such a clause were a common cultural norm, and thus, ‘objectively’ anti-smoker. Actually, I’d even be fine if local bylaws had been enacted banning smoking in ‘public’ places (though I admittedly find calling the hallway of a block of flats a ‘public’ place rather strained). Why on earth does it need to be a rule set by central government however, and in the name of the ‘rights’ of non-smokers ?

And yet, and yet…

An immediate point against my own example is that it is rather lame, since the smoking ban was more typically put forward for reasons of public health rather than the ‘rights’ of non-smokers. Indeed, Google for “smoking ban rights”, and what mostly comes up are libertarian-minded American sites moaning about this tyrannical attack on the rights of private property. What about the adoption agency row though? Surely that’s a clear-cut case of the idiocies of left-liberal rights talk?

On reflection, I’m not so sure, since a more charitable interpretation of the row’s genesis would see it arising not from the Blair government seeking to defend the rights of gay people over the rights of the Catholic Church, but simply from how the law effectively defines (or if you prefer, ‘constructs’) what an adoption service is: for, if the reasoning on which the current legal understanding of who is fit to adopt a child changes, then it is reasonable to think the class of people who are legally fit to adopt should change in step; and if an adoption agency is something whose role – as it currently is in the UK – is to be a sort of delegate of the state, then its internal rules are things that, prima facie, should change accordingly too. For sure, maybe it’s ‘obvious’ that an exception should have been made in the current case; but if so, where in principle should exemptions stop? Of course, believe in a free market in adoption, and this is a silly question. That, however, is a belief held by very few: for a child is not a piece of property to be bought and sold, or so common morality has it.

Because of this, I’m more inclined to think the government’s error (if there was an error) was in it not looking to create an exemption when a fuss was kicked up (assuming, as it was, that the ‘fuss’ was perfectly peaceable), not in the issue having arisen in the first place. For, it’s perhaps just inevitable that friction will occasionally arise between what the state defines as appropriate adoptees and what a sectional institution does; and in the case of adoption – unlike other things – it’s far less easy to define things in such a way that basic differences are skirted around (keeping on the gay rights theme, cf. the decision to create same-sex civil partnerships with all the legal rights involved in marriage, only without the term ‘marriage’ being used).

Commenting on the land of the occasionally not-so-free’s effective ban on under 21s buying alcohol, a recent post on Hit and Run blandly asserts:

the arbitrary age restriction is partially to blame for things like binge drinking, injury, and property destruction

Insofar as self-styled ‘Atlanticist’ verbaige about a shared British (English?)-American culture is right, I doubt that very much. Getting sloshed is just traditional, don’t you know?  I blame the Danes myself…

The online forum of the Korean Friendship Association is no more! And worse, the KFA website is showing signs of becoming less than comically amateurish! OK, using WordPress can make even the more aesthetically incompetent amongst us look like we know what we’re doing when it comes to setting up a website, any subsequent decision to customise with pictures of leaves excepted of course. Nonetheless, surely the turn to WordPress is nothing other than a craven capitulation to yankee imperialist web design, and thus, something all true adherents of the Juche idea will denounce? Typical Stalinist Newspeak though, the new blog is referred to as the new ‘forum’…

From a letter in today’s Metro:

This country will never offer its residents value for money until the government finally understands what a free market is supposed to be and ends the monopolies. It is the government’s duty to ensure that a free market is operating at all times.

No, not the Galloway/SWP lash up that is just about staggering on without Prof Callinicos and co, but the subject of a recent two-part documentary on BBC2 fronted (and I think written) by John Ware. The gist was that over several decades but in recent years especially, a culture of ‘respect’ has been on the decline in Britain, citizens adopting a fundamentally more selfish, ‘me first’ attitude towards life that has created a general air of impoliteness and indifference towards others, an air that has itself formed the conditions for anti-social behaviour of various kinds to flourish – from the displays of anger readily forthcoming from petulant car drivers, to noisy, drunken teenagers cluttering up town centres on Friday and Saturday nights, to fire fighters and paramedics having to suffer intermittent attacks from stone throwing youths, and so on.

In terms of programme structure, Were nominally expounded the problem in the first programme and the possible solutions (or at least, heartening case studies) in the second. The tone pretty much throughout turned out to be one of weary resignation though – most notably, the first positive example of what can be done turned out to be nothing of the sort, the initiative in question (involving the cajoling of off-licences in one town centre) being an abject failure.

Of course, one might well object to Ware’s basic starting point, that things have been in steady decline for forty years – and indeed, Were himself gave grist to the mill of such an opinion with a poor opening, using two very weak examples to introduce his case. Specifically, the first was an instance of road rage he had witnessed on first coming back to Britain a few years ago, Were having spent some time living abroad; without statistics of rates of road rage over time, however, the anecdote is subject to the objection that individual cases tell nothing, especially given road rage is not a purely cultural phenomenon – i.e., it is possible a certain individual can be prone to fits of rage when in a car that he or she does not suffer from generally (trust me, I can immediately think of an example…). The second case Ware appealed to was even worse, it being a short clip of a Vicky Pollard type loudly and repetitively complaining that so-and-so had ‘taken the piss’. I think this was supposed to show the terribly vulgar and self-centred way lumpenproletarian youth express themselves. As an illustration of the broader idea that contemporary Britain is quickly losing the concept of ‘respect’, however, it is subject to the obvious objection that the girl wasn’t denying the concept at all – for, an angry and defensive outburst of ‘you’re taking the piss!’ is one way to express a belief that the respect one thinks due to oneself is not being given.

Nevertheless, perhaps all the latter highlights is just how the word ‘respect’ has distinct meanings, not all of which Ware sought to use; thus, to say a person is respected can suggest the relationship between respected and respecter has an intrinsic asymmetricality about it that is not what Ware meant by the term at all (e.g., when in a footballing context one says Wayne Rooney is due respect, the respect is due because he’s a top player, not because he’s a fellow citizen or whatever). Happily though, Ware himself occasionally used the word ‘civility’ as a synonym for ‘respect’ – and that, I think, would have been a better choice of term more generally.

Anyhow, in moving to identity the main causes of respect’s (civility’s) decline, Ware seemed keen to give both ‘left’ and ‘right’-sounding tropes their due. Thus, amongst other things, the following were put into the stocks:

• Rampant consumerism and a fixation on celebrity culture.
• The collapse of British industry with nothing to replace it, widening the gap between rich and poor both monetarily and geographically and producing a legacy welfare dependency in many northern cities especially.
• Thatcherite valorisation of personal wealth and acquisitiveness.
• How the main political parties today appeal to citizens as ‘consumers’ and ‘customers’ of public services, and thus, building up a sense of self-entitlement.
• Half a century of ‘local government emasculation’, which has led to a sense of powelessness amongst people about social problems in their local area.
• A general attitude (encouraged by officialdom) of leaving things to the police when trouble flairs up. In the case of young people messing about, this leads to escalation instead of problems being nipped in the bud,.
• The valorisation of personal freedoms with the cultural revolution of 1960s that has led to a general fear of being ‘judgemental’ about the ‘private choices’ of others.
• The ‘decline in the traditional nuclear family’, and in particular, the decline in marriage in favour of mere ‘cohabitation’, the latter tending to be constituted by partners who think of ‘me and you’ rather than ‘us’. This has then had ill consequences for the raising of children, for which a stable and strong family background is essential.

In the first programme especially, the overarching causes were then identified as ‘the social liberalism of the 1960s and the economic liberalism of the 1980s’. Despite this, Ware couldn’t bring himself to actually reject ‘liberalism’ as such: quite the contrary in fact, his own politics appear to be of the moderate, centre-right kind for whom the morality embodied by ‘social and economic liberalism’ is the crux of ‘morality’ as such.

As a consequence of this, he explicitly (and very easily) allowed for Thatcher’s economic policies to have been a necessity – the negative effects on northern cities were presented as unfortunate but not immoral – and with respect to the social liberalism side of the equation, never once mentioned the mass entry of middle class women into the labour market or the decriminalisation (and increasing cultural acceptance) of homosexuality, let alone suggested either to have been negative developments. In fact, his working notion of ‘respect’ was, I think, a rather ‘liberal’ one philosophically in that he did not see ‘respect’ as due to another because of their having a certain social identity or role, with the respect-giver having another social identity or role that is conceptually related to the first (a workman or servant should be deferential to his social betters, a man should be chivalrous to a woman, etc.), but simply because the respect-giver sees the respect-receiver as another person like herself, with personhood itself being assumed as something essentially prior to social identity. Admittedly, I am beginning to get slightly more abstract here than Ware allowed himself to get. Nevertheless, that he is essentially a ‘liberal’ himself is, I think, precisely what led to the general despondency of the two programmes: i.e., for Ware, it wasn’t evil (immorality, bad intentions) that created the culture of incivility he so dislikes, but goodness when the latter turned out to have unfortunate (if perhaps inevitable) side-effects. Cf. a libertarian-minded Tory blaming some supposed cultural ills on ‘socialism’, or a socialist blaming those same ills on ‘neo-liberalism’: in both cases, the blaming is ultimately hopeful (however angrily expressed!), since it preserves the common assumption that only ill comes of vice and only good comes from virtue.

Catching up with Leiter Reports, I see an interesting (and rather lengthy) comment thread on the topic of what is and what is not ‘secular’ moral philosophy, a discussion that jumps off from a post in which Leiter himself sceptically disavows a claim that since ‘secular moral theory’ is relatively young, one should be optimistic about the possibilities for its future development.

That said, I confess I did need a bit of a double take at first, since where the commentators assume the phrase ‘secular philosophy’ means ‘a philosophy that expounds non-religious views’, I immediately thought of ‘a philosophy that advocates secularism in politics’ , and thus, a philosophy that has an historical pedigree which is expressly religious in part (thinking of Locke in particular of course). Perhaps this is an indication of slightly different connotations of the word across the pond? (I would assume most of Leiter’s commentators, like Leiter himself, is American.) Cf. how over here, using the phrase ‘secular humanist’ as an insult sounds rather weird — ‘so, you believe that the best sort of political regime a misanthropic theocracy do you…?’, as indeed does a left-liberal type immediately associating self-identifed ‘Christian’ groupings with ‘in your face’, ‘right wing’ politics, or indeed any politics whatsoever beyond the self-consciously well-meaning.

Initially via Clive Davis’ blog at the Spectator oddly enough, I read Leszek Kolakowski has died — Brian Leiter has a post here. Like many, I confess I’ve barely gone beyond the Main Currents of Marxism trilology, though Kolakowski was always good for a quip. Of course, these quips could lack real substance — the attack on Adorno in volume three of MCM is rather lame, for example, even if Adornians would do best not too complain too much — after all, Adorno himself was hardly a very symathetic commentator on occasion either!

That said, I still find Kolakowski’s personal history quite fascinating if a bit less ‘obvious’ in its moral than that assumed by the standard Cold Warrior’s understanding of it — for, the very fact that a man like Kolakowski could be a true believer in revolutionary Stalinism into his late 20s just seems more significant to me than his steady loss of the faith afterwards. At least, it puts Oakeshott’s brief flirtation in the late 30s with the ‘war may be bad, but at least it’s good for building patriotic spirit’ viewpoint into perspective, eh?

One view of bureaucracy, I guess, is that it concerns the attempted application of rational ‘technique’ to social organisation; and, in that way, a ‘bureaucratic’ mindset might be thought a distinctly unOakeshottian one. This would be wrong though I think; indeed, I would go further and suggest that a bureaucracy is one place – I don’t say the only place – where the Oakeshottian mind is truly at home.

I say this because RP’s emphasis upon ‘practical’ knowledge on the one hand and OHC’s upon ‘intelligent’ goings-on on the other as ones where ‘procedures’ are followed (or at least, where agents ‘understand’ their actions in procedural terms) is precisely the ‘intelligence’ involved in (and necessary to) a working bureaucracy.  For, a bureaucracy is a place where individual actors have distinct roles defined by distinct procedures, roles that from the role-performer’s point of view cohere with each other (or are assumed to cohere with each other) without her needing to think of a ‘plan’ for this coherence to take effect – instead, it’s usually enough to just have the attitude ‘I have my role, you have yours’. Even when problems do arise, the bureaucratic worker’s aim in trying to overcome it will be to engage other role performers in a manner that will lead to ‘something being done’, at the least inconvenience to oneself, that enables everyone to go about their business as they did before. Put another way, the possibility of radical change after a period of considering the wider picture is as alien to the bureaucratic mind as it is to RP’s anti-rationalist politician.

The parallels go further though, since what Oakeshott writes in ‘Rational Conduct’ about the way in which a person learns how to behave fits the bureaucratic worker to a tee: for, while the newbie worker could hypothetically learn her role’s demands by reading a rule book, in mature bureaucracies – which is to say, in proper bureaucracies, since a bureaucracy isn’t very ‘bureaucratic’ if it isn’t mature – what ordinarily happens is that the newbie learns ‘on the job’ from those who have occupied her role before her. The knowledge gained is then essentially non-propositional, just as Oakeshott emphasises, since working within a well-defined bureaucratic role is not being something that requires much explicit thinking. Indeed, explicit thinking is perhaps intrinsically antithetical to the proper working of a bureaucracy, since a member reflecting on her place in it will give rise to thoughts of what the various procedures she performs are for, and from this, thoughts of how some other procedure might be better than the one she is ‘supposed’ to be performing, a recipe for anarchy from the point of view of her superiors and co-workers. Note how only the very concept of purposes sets the ball rolling here – i.e., the bureaucratic worker need not go so far as to think that the purposes behind the procedures she follows are themselves wrong; rather, simply in identifying what those purpose actually are, one gives rise to a standard to judge the procedures that did not exist in one’s mind before.

Now, bureaucratic man is not unintelligent as such – as Oakeshott emphasises, it takes (or rather, it is) a matter of ‘intelligence’ to understand oneself as an agent whose actions adhere to procedure. Against Oakeshott though, I would suggest that his conception of practical intelligence is, from another point of view, a conception of stupidity – though of course, one cannot be stupid if one is not ‘intelligent’ (I think of myself as ‘stupid’ for having done such-and-so in the past because I believe myself better than that). I say this because ‘intelligence’ in its most proper sense, I think, is the thought-side of autonomy, self-directedness; and Oakeshottian man, be his home a ‘tradition’ or a bureaucracy, is only barely autonomous, since his actions are ones that his tradition predefines for him – because of this, it is not really correct to say Oakeshottian man is ‘subjugated’ by ‘tradition’ – his social world, just like it isn’t correct to say the worker bee is a ‘slave’ since it does not have the capacity to work for itself in the first place. For sure, Oakeshottian man’s actions may renew and perhaps even redefine the tradition that they spring from; but it isn’t Oakeshottian man who does the renewing and redefining here but ‘the concrete mind’, notwithstanding how the latter is a Geist that, in apparently adopting the so-called ‘British reserve’, doesn’t like to boast about itself.

OK, it was a science piece in the Mail, but what the hell, I found this vaguely notable for not really implying any of the various notions of ‘intelligence’ one might find in Oakeshott’s work. The story concerns the feats of ‘Betty’, a New Caledonian Crow:

[Betty had] managed to work out how to fashion bits of wire into tools to retrieve food from a variety of hard-to-get-to places. What was really extraordinary was that the hooks made by Betty were constructed from flexible steel wire – not a material readily available in the birds’ natural habitat, a small Pacific island … Now some animals do show a capacity to learn: but Betty had no prior training, nor had she watched another crow doing this. Instead, she had created her own complex solution to a new problem.

For this writer, then, an ability to learn is a genuine marker of intelligence; nonetheless, to be truly intelligent is to have a knack for finding (maybe even creating?) function without learning. I’m not entirely sure, but I think this broadly maps onto Collingwood’s understanding of the concept of intelligence – cf. An Autobiography’s emphasis on the concept of purpose (and in particular, purpose created or at least discovered in the moment) as the crucial difference between the ‘historical’ and ‘natural’ ways of understanding phenomena.