Ant Responds
To your final question in your first email - it’s probable that I’ll only send links to news outlets that reinforce my existing views so while they may be useful, they may not. My favourite writer by a distance is Theodore Dalrymple (pen name for Anthony Daniels, but not the actor that played C-3PO). He writes in, among other things, the City Journal (US publication) but you can see loads of his stuff also at the New English Review and possibly (if archive access is free to non-subscribers) the Spectator. Peter Hitchens is also entertaining - in fact you might like it right now because he’s just sounded-off against Obama and has incurred no small amount of opprobrium for doing so (search Peter Hitchens blog - he’s a journalist but both his print pieces and his blog entries are all in the same blog). For more philosophy than current affairs Roger Scruton is also good.
The differences between US and UK right / left are certainly interesting but I can’t claim to understand them fully. I think it’s funny to hear you say that the US electorate is basically centre-left - depending on what one thinks are the defining characteristics of “left” (I tend to go with a simple one, left = state control, right = individual control, this can apply more or less to the economy as well as to the freedom of individuals) then the UK is notably further to the left.
I’m too lazy to read very much left-wing material. I’d say in my defence that what I have read is generally of a poor quality and is fundamentally dishonest - and I don’t think that’s just the nut-job left, which I don’t tend to bother with, I’m talking mainstream broadsheet newspapers in the UK such as the Guardian and the Independent, and the BBC. The former is the only place the BBC advertises for jobs (or was until very recently) and is undoubtedly the preferred organ of the public sector and two of our three main parties. Interestingly, there’s a blogosphere discussion at the moment lamenting the lack of quality left-wing blogs - possibly this is just the opinion of the right-wing bloggers I read :-)
Your ‘harm’ point is interesting. I can’t comment on the US, but my own view is that this is harsh on what I’d call a right wing position. For the same reason, I hate it when my mother (former local politician, mayor of our home town, former member of the Liberal Democrats, UK’s 3rd party although it’s probably more left than it was when she was a member 15 years ago) says, “I know I’m really right wing, but I’m right wing with a social conscience”. Instead I’d argue that the ‘right’ recognises two things, 1. the inability (although not total inability) of the state to deliver sustainable, practical and effective prevention from harm to those that need it, 2. the innate tendency to broaden the definition of harm beyond what, at least I think, is reasonable, in large part for selfish reasons. In some (relatively few) cases, this is for personal material gain, but a lot of the time for personal satisfaction. Now I’m not Ayn Rand, I don’t think that kindness, charity and assistance to others is morally wrong, far from it, I think it’s an essential part of what it is to be human; but I am deeply suspicious of a great deal of “harm prevention” (defining harm as you have) as I don’t think it’s selfless. If that harm prevention was entirely, or at least mostly, beneficial, including in the long-term, then I’d live with the motive problem, but I don’t think it is.
Two examples - the massive increase in welfare assistance in this country in the last 60 years has not, in my view made people “better off”. The material wealth that all enjoy today is a huge improvement (I don’t mean material in the sense of acquisition, although that too, I mean eating, staying warm and dry, access to health and education) but I simply think that would have occurred without the benefit system we have; further, I think it’s happened despite the benefit system. On the deficit side of this system, we have a large dependent under-class (Dalrymple writes exceptionally well on this) who’s lot is truly deserving of our sympathy and response but which has been specifically created by this system. I’m not harking back to some golden age of chipper-working-class-cockneys-proud-of-a-good-honest-living-knowing-their-place-and-poor-but-happy-to-be poor, but the moral and intellectual hell to which they are condemned is unforgivable.
The second is education. One form of “harm” is that which comes from the awareness that one is not as clever as some other people and the consequent feelings of low self-esteem. In order to avoid this harm, any concept of elitism has been systematically removed from our education system. Elitism, as I don’t need to tell you but one does have to explain to too many people, is not the same as privilege but the two are taken for the same thing. That means, that streaming in class (i.e. children divided into groups based on academic ability) is no longer acceptable; schools cannot select based on academic merit; children cannot be excluded from classes or schools for bad (and I mean truly bad, armed violence towards teachers and other pupils) behaviour; universities are forced to accept children from lower income backgrounds regardless of academic performance; and most brazen of all, the national examination system has declined in quality year-on-year for the last 30 years. All of the above, by the way, is a result of governments of all persuasions. This isn’t a question of private / state education, it’s one in which the left has defined a facet of human nature as a ‘harm’ and has tried to legislate (with both a small and a big L) against it. The consequences have been shameful, and guess who has suffered most? The children of families that can afford to send them to private schools or that can afford houses in the catchment areas of good schools (this has a major impact on house prices - 30% or more variation either side of the catchment area boundaries) or the children of those that can’t and, therefore, have to slum it in the pathetic excuse for schools that are most of our state child-minding establishments?!
I don’t think caring about this and having a view that the state by definition cannot sustainably resolve this is “right with a social conscience”, I think it’s simply right wing.
(Draws breath, realises that he has a meeting in ten minutes and isn’t prepared). Right, that’ll do for now. Perhaps we should start a jointly-owned blog to discuss this publicly, thus massaging our egos and educating the world at the same time!?
