crime and freedom – Page 3

Charlie Veitch

There are accusations that the police illegally detained various malcontents who were intending to carry on public demonstrations of various kinds in London on the day of the Royal Wedding.

That seems on the face of it to be a good thing. If the police can’t keep the peace for a Royal ceremony, then there really isn’t much point in having them.

Having said that, the rule of law is actually important. If the police are acting with impunity beyond their legal powers, relying instead on popular support, then they are indeed, as the malcontents claim, moving in the direction of fascism. And I am on record as being opposed to fascism, even in comparison to our crappy democracy.

While as a matter of principle I think opposition to any given regime ought not to be tolerated, because such opposition serves to encourage politics, within a democracy like ours the existence of legitimate public protest is a key part of the political formula which maintains the valuable but illusory legitimacy of the regime.

The problem with illegally suppressing protest, therefore, is that it is self-defeating: it undermines the justification for the existence of the regime itself.

There have to be limits, though. It is of little value that the rule of law is observed by the authorities, if there is violence on the streets. If the choice is between order and law, we must have order first.

Really we should have both. The inability of the authorities to lawfully keep the peace, in Stokes Croft or Soho Square, is one sign among many, that our system of law is broken, strangled, like so many things, by bureaucracy and empty ritual, most importantly in the sheer inefficiency of the legal process.

Charlie Veitch ought to have been legally arrested, tried, convicted, and fined a couple of hundred quid. It may be that there was no law that actually applied, or it may be that it was simply too much work to go through that whole process; either way, the practical alternative was to arrest him (possibly illegally), hold him for 23 hours and 45 minutes, then release him. Any attempt to act against the possibly illegal arrest is subject to the same handicap of the unusable legal system. This situation benefits nobody.

Peter Hitchens blames the Scarman Report. That may indeed be the most significant step in the hobbling of the legal system, but it is just an example of the senescence of our institutions, which mean that ultimately, even with its bullshit “democratic legitimacy”, the present system of government cannot last. And when it falls, it will probably, as Charlie Veitch has seen, decay into fascism rather than being replaced by something better.

A Clockwork Orange

Came across this quote by Anthony Burgess, on the last chapter of “A Clockwork Orange” (from his publisher’s tumblr):

…But my New York publisher [W.W. Norton] believed that my twenty-first chapter was a sellout. It was veddy veddy British, don’t you know. It was bland and showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model of unregenerable evil. The Americans, he said in effect, were tougher than the British and could face up to reality. Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam. My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life.

To me the last chapter was far from optimistic: it was a last horrific twist to the whole book. The idea that Alex had something deeply and fundamentally wrong with him to do all those things is a comforting one, and is also the justification of the extreme “corrective” methods that the establishment in the book attempt.

The last chapter tells us that both the reader and the authorities got it completely wrong; that normal people can behave like that if they are not guided through youth not to. That the guy in the pub on the next table might have tortured people to death for kicks when he was a kid, and later grown out of it.

Now I’m sure Burgess knew what he meant. But I don’t think my interpretation contradicts his quote — they are two sides of the same coin. The Christians believe that anyone can be saved because they believe that everyone is a sinner. The belief that only a few born-evil people are capable of behaving that evilly is the comforting one, but as Burgess says it contradicts all our inherited beliefs. It is also, coincidentally, wrong.

John Gray on Rights

Kalim Kassam has found a fascinating book review by John Gray in The National Interest.

The review is of Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which sounds pretty interesting.

Gray fleshes out some detail of what he wrote about in Black Mass, which I discussed here in 2008. I was put off Black Mass by what I thought was excessive generalisation, a misplaced attempt to force a grand unifying thesis on events.

Dealing with a specific, that problem does not arise, and I have little to quarrel with here.

The first point is the recency of the dominance of the idea of primary universal human rights — Moyn dates the idea to the late 1970s, and Gray blames it on John Rawls. He identifies the key flaw in Rawls’ theory, which is that it simply takes for granted a state structure that cares somehow for the well-being of its subjects in a fairly broad way, and only suggests how such a state should best define and pursue that aim. How such a historically unlikely state can come to exist and be preserved is not addressed.

(That is also, of course, the flaw that has separated me from most forms of libertarianism, which is an alternative —indeed superior— program resting on the same unwarranted assumptions*).

Best quote: But if human rights are artifacts that have been constructed in specific circumstances, as I would argue, history is all-important; and history tells us that when authoritarian regimes are suddenly swept aside, the result is often anarchy or a new form of tyranny—and quite often a mix of the two. Human rights as artifacts echoes what I and David Friedman have said; the anarchy and tyranny following revolution is just what I was talking about in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize. The neatness is slightly marred by the use of that unfortunate word “authoritarian” again — here it seems to mean “anything other than modern liberal democracy”, which is at least less mysterious than Assange’s version.

The review also serves as an example of Mencius Moldbug’s claim, that the common assumptions of today are the Harvard ideas of two generations ago.

Obviously the claim of inherent human rights is not entirely new — I vaguely recollect some mention of “all men … unalienable rights” in an old document of some kind. What is new, according to Moyn and Gray is the moral primacy of human rights; not endowed by a creator but independent, the starting point of a moral system.

Gray’s piece also contains what could be seen as a response to my criticism of Black Mass; he constrains what he calls “utopian” projects to those where it can be known in advance that its central objectives cannot be realized. The question of what can be realized and what cannot is, of course, usually the centre of political controversy to start with. “Politicians make promises they can’t keep” — there’s a shocking new idea.

*This is unfair to some libertarians, including David Friedman. Separate post to follow.

Friedman (D) on Rights

Some of you may remember my two posts on the nature of rights in 2008. If so, you can now forget them, because David Friedman has made the argument more completely and much more eloquently.

Rights in human societies, including modern ones, are based on the same pattern of behavior as territorial behavior in animals or enforcement via feud and the threat of feud, even if less obviously so. Each individual has a view of his entitlements and is willing to bear unreasonably large costs in defense of them.

Yup, that’s what rights are.

Red Toryism

Libertarian economics is sound. But libertarian politics is an oxymoron.
Individualist Libertarianism and collectivist Socialism are opposites. But they came from the same roots and the first always becomes the second.
Victimless crimes should not be prosecuted. But broken families do more damage than psychopaths.
No-one should be born into privilege. But the alternative is to compete for power.
Mencius Moldbug is a lone nutter. But opinion is shifting more and more against democracy.
Global Warming is rubbish. But it might not have been, and what would have happened then?
I have always believed that morality only makes sense in terms of the individual. But I can’t remember why.

Froude Society
Philip Blond – Red Toryism
Cato Unbound

Much more to follow, if I can find my feet again

Private Morality and Professionalism

Regular readers may have noticed that this blog went quiet for much of the early part of the year.

That was due in large part to the trouble I had trying to get to grips with a story which I considered of great importance. I just wasn’t able to put the issue into the right order to do it justice.

At length, the story ceased to be topical, I admitted to myself that I had missed my chance, and got on with writing about other things.

However, the recent Chris Grayling storm has brought some of the same issues into focus, and gives me context to return to my confused drafts of February.

The vital story I was unable to discuss topically was the decision of Wayne Bridge, the England left back, not to make himself available for selection for the 2010 World Cup.

To recap the story for those with short memories, Bridge was living with and had a son with a young lady called Vanessa or Victoria or something. At some later point the couple were no longer a couple, but coupling was taking place between Vanessa and the England captain, John Terry.

Bridge appears to have taken this badly. He refused to play for England, a decision made much more significant by a long-term injury to serial adulterer Ashley Cole, leaving Bridge an important part of the England defence alongside John Terry.

The affair reached a climax at a match between Terry’s Chelsea and Wayne Bridge’s club Manchester City, where Bridge pointedly refused to shake hands with the opposing captain, an event which had been the supject of considerable action at the bookmakers’. Once the wagers had been settled, the story began to fade away.

What interested me was the widespread idea that there was something wrong in Wayne Bridge subordinating his professional role as a footballer to his other roles as a man and a lover. There seems to have been a clear expectation that Bridge had a duty to stand alongside John Terry on the pitches of South Africa, whatever their private relationship.

I consider such an idea extremely destructive to society. Many of us spend much of our lives involved with our work. If it is accepted that our private judgement of morality has no place there, whether in the stadiums of the Premier League or the offices of the city, then morality has been eliminated from about half of our society.

Is such personal moral judgement really so important? Yes it is, and the case of the suitors of Miss Vanessa demonstrates why. Apart from the question of professionalism, many have criticised Wayne Bridge on the grounds that she had already left him before carring on with John Terry. That is a significant point, but for me to assess it fairly I would need detailed knowledge of the relationships between the three people. That would require that there be extensive coverage of the events (which, as it happens, there was), and also that that coverage be reliable and truthful (which strikes me as so unlikely that I haven’t actually bothered to ascertain the details of the story as they have been presented, though I care enough about it to write all this screed). The reality is that even in a story like this, played out (thanks to Justice Tugendhat) on the front pages, the only people in a position to make meaningful moral judgements are the participants themselves and those very close to them. The person on the spot has to make their own judgement. If they are constrained to subordinate their judgement to that of the Football Association or the News of the World, then morality is left with a busted metatarsal.

OK, so why am I bringing it all back up, now that the world has happily forgotten the most recent melodrama of footballers and their molls? It is because one of the causes of the decline of private morality has now hit the headlines. This is the story of the guest house which turned away a respectable middle-aged gay couple. Like Wayne Bridge, the proprietors of the guest house made a moral judgement that is at variance with that of most of the population. In this instance the facts are not in question, only the moral rules applied. But if we take away the right of a guest-house owner to apply their own moral rules, it does not follow that they will instead apply ours. They will, like the rest of our society, retreat into jobsworthism and deem all behaviour not actually illegal to be none of their business. (I would go further – even illegal behaviour will be tolerated unless the police can effectively prevent it, since they are the professionals and as private people it is “none of our business”)
I would like to see it accepted that making moral judgements is always our business, whether we are full-backs, B&B proprietors, or bankers. We won’t all be applying the same moral rules, but that can’t be helped. The only choice is between personal morality or no morality.

I do accept that while the discrimination at the B&B might seem harmless enough in Cookham, it would be a very different matter if gays faced “not wanted” signs at every turn.

So to see the other side, take the case of Constance McMillen, who wanted to dress in a tuxedo and take her girlfriend to a school dance. In Fulton, Mississippi. The school cancelled the prom rather than let her attend, and when a private alternative was arranged, she was deceived into going to the wrong venue.

While I would say that the immediate problem is that she wanted to socialise with people who didn’t want to socialise with her, and that’s a game she can never win, I have to admit that, dances aside, life in Fulton doesn’t look very attractive for Ms McMillen. How would she get by without protection from anti-discrimination law?

I fear she might have to leave. I don’t say that lightly; I know it’s an imposition. But after all, I’m not even talking about the hypothetical case of there not being anti-discrimination law, I’m talking about the actual case, given the US law that prevented the school holding the event without her in the first place. Such laws do not effectively protect anyone, unless they want to spend their lives fighting their neighbours on behalf of the central state. There must obviously be somewhere she can go – for the sort of laws we are talking about even to be possible, the wider population must generally support the tolerance the law mandates.

The less obvious point is that, while the existence of anti-discrimination law doesn’t much help Constance McMillen, the absence of such law wouldn’t much help Suzanne Wilkinson. If Chris Grayling were to repeal the law he voted for, thereby allowing Wilkinson to advertise “No Gays” at her B&B, I strongly suspect that none of the brochures or listings she advertises in would take her money. If she wanted to take a political stand, she could, but if she wanted to carry on a quiet business in accordance with her preferences, a lack of cooperation, and the attrition of local hostility, would mean she would probably not be able to.

I sympathise with her in just the same way as I sympathise with McMillen. There isn’t, to me, one side of this which is “pro-freedom” while the other is “anti-freedom”; rather, the cases really are symmetrical – both women want to make their own choices in an arena that is in the wide grey area between the private and the public, and they both are prevented, as a result of being culturally out of step with their communities. One community has the law behind it, and the other against it, but the practical power of the law is very limited, in both cases, compared to the day-to-day weight of the community’s standards. (John Stuart Mill made quite a point of the fact that community attitudes could be a lot more restricting than actual law).

If the presence or absence of discrimination law does not make much practical difference, either to Suzanne Wilkinson or to Constance McMillen, then what is it for
? Like so many laws, it is primarily meant to send a message, to change attitudes. In the words of the song that passed for a morning hymn when I was in primary school,

And now a child
Can understand
This is the law
Of all the land
(All the land!)

A child can understand that Suzanne’s preference is not respectable, while Constance’s is, because acting on the one is illegal, and on the other legally protected, in all the land, even Mississippi.

My knee-jerk libertarian response is that that is not a legitimate reason for passing a law. But that is dogma and would need some kind of supporting argument.

If we accept that the law is there to shape attitudes rather than to simply prevent the specific things it prohibits, that puts new moral rules on a different footing from old moral rules. Nobody decided that it is now perfectly OK for a man to sleep with his friends’ girlfriends, the way that we have generally decided that it is now perfectly OK for a man to sleep with another man. However, in order to chase those who are deemed to be behind the times, the acceptability of homosexuality, and the unacceptability of discriminating against homosexuals, have been reinforced with anti-discrimination laws. The unacceptability of taking over your friends’ women bears no such official imprimatur, and so, without our really deciding that it’s unimportant, it loses standing from the contrast.

The law is meant to send the message that integrating homosexuals into mainstream activities is good, and excluding them is bad. I don’t have any objection to that message. But is that the message that is really sinking in to our consciences? Or is the real message, instead, that our private moral judgements are to be kept to ourselves, and not acted on in public? Is the message, in fact, that Wayne Bridge has no legitimate grievance against John Terry, who, unlike Suzanne Wilkinson, has done nothing illegal, and that he should therefore shake Terry’s hand and play for England?

And is the message that Margaret Moran didn’t break any rules when she claimed for her house in Southampton? Is the message that I shouldn’t give a second thought to the role I played in the crash of 2008, since I was a professional and I followed the rules? Broken families and broken banks are just things that happen sometimes – maybe the rules need to be changed. If people followed the rules, then nothing else can be done.

That’s morality of a sort, and it works after a fashion, but I’m not convinced it’s better than what went before.

Major threat to your email

I just came across this story, from a few months ago. I’m surprised it didn’t get more play, because it’s much more serious than the run-of-the-mill software vulnerability story.

PC’s are not secure, and never have been. For most of us, that hasn’t been a big concern. We try to keep viruses and bots off our systems, either by avoiding Windows or by more iffy and difficult methods. But that’s mostly due to a desire to keep our systems running and be good network citizens. But the risk of a personal attack on your system has always been a long shot, because, despite the fact there are many people who could read your email, there’s little reason any of them would want to. The sets of people who know how, and people who would care to, are small enough that their intersection is probably zero.

That calculation has now changed. If there is someone who has a grudge against you, or some other motive to want to read your email or impersonate you, and that person knows how to buy stuff on the internet, you are now at serious risk.

I’ve talked before about how to make your email secure, but it’s difficult to do reliably, and the advice in the article is probably best. If you want to keep stuff secret, don’t put it on a computer, unless you’re an expert.

The Rights of the Mob

Previously on Anomaly UK, I have discussed Rights and the relationship between rights and Mob Violence

I am brought back to these subjects by a programme I happened to catch last night on BBC4, about the Miners’ Strike.

The point I had previously missed, but has to be taken into account, is that a mob of protesters is generally recognised to have additional rights beyond those that exist in law.

From a legalistic viewpoint, the violent clashes of 1984 were very clear. The government has the duty of keeping the roads open – that has been the case for as long as there have been governments and roads. If a group illegally blocks the road, they must be removed, without more force than necessary, but with as much force as is necessary. If that means charges of mounted police, then send in the horses. If it means tanks, send in tanks. If it means machine-guns, load them up. It is out of the question that the law can be openly defied by violence.

Clearly, that’s not the situation – nobody saw it that way. The horses were controversial, tanks and guns would have been out of the question, while giving up and allowing the strikers to block the road was a real possibility. Nor was the restraint on the government’s actions some irrational daintiness on the part of Lady Thatcher – to have employed sufficient force to make victory in the field certain would have torn the country apart. The Police and Army would have run real risk of mutiny, workers in other industries would have sided with the miners – these were real dangers which put the outcome of the overall dispute in doubt.

Any model of where real power lies in the country, such as I have been attempting to create, is incomplete unless it can explain what rights a mob is understood to have, to form and to break the law without facing any greater force than lightly-armed police.

The limitation of the power of the state is simply that it can’t shoot everybody – it requires a level of voluntary cooperation from the population in general in order to function. But that only pushes the question back – why would rolling armoured cars through picket lines have forfeited that cooperation? It breaks some unwritten rules, but where did they come from?

I wrote in the context of more recent disturbances that rights are acquired by violent precedent – that if a group has won a conflict in the past, they will be assumed to win again, so that conflict is avoided. But that does not cover the case – what is the precedent for the use of military levels of violence against mobs in England not being successful? The chief candidate that comes to mind is the Peterloo Massacre, but that was not really unsuccessful, in that a revolt was averted. 1972’s Bloody Sunday would seem more relevant, being both recent and a case where lethal force used by the government did backfire politically, but I get the feeling that at the time Northern Ireland was seen as more of a special case, being at that time a conflict between two groups in the population rather than one group against the government.

My impression is that Peterloo is the key precedent, and the reason it counts as a defeat for the government is because the British regime in its entirety – from the TUC to Margaret Thatcher herself – is descended not from the government of 1819 but from the protesters of 1819. They won in the end and the measures that the ancien regime used against them are now out of bounds.

Remember 42 days?

Really excellent point at Heresy Corner last month. After all that fuss, for weeks and weeks, about whether the counter-terrorism bill of last year would include the provision for detaining terrorist suspects for 42 days, the subject is now so forgotten that when the minister concerned talks about it, it is not newsworthy.

This is the best demonstration of my recent claim about the limits of voter influence. Because we all knew all along what Heresy Corner proves, that the argument was never about a concrete legal proposal at all. The question was a symbolic one. What was at stake was entirely feeling or impression — did the government need to show it still wanted to do more for security, or was the whole fluid inspections, photography restrictions, CCTV thing going too far? Should we trust the security services or the civil-liberties lawyers? Would the new powers affect “ordinary people” or just outsiders, and if so was that a bad thing or a good thing?

The technical questions about arrest, and evidence-gathering capabilities before and after charge, PACE, legal discovery and so on were far too complex to be part of the debate, even with the enormous coverage the issue got. The questions of what it meant for the authority of Gordon Brown, the status of members of his cabinet, the future positions to be taken by the Conservatives, and the momentum of political sentiment in the public were much more tractable. The end result was the government lost. That was what it was all about, and the details of criminal procedure being no more relevant now than they were then, there is nothing more to be said.

Hierarchy of security needs

Mencius Moldbug’s latest has a real gem where he talks about the political needs of a society as a hierarchy of needs parallel to Maslow’s psychological hierarchy of needs.

there are four levels of sovereign security. These are peace, order, law, and freedom. Once you have each one, you can work on the next. But it makes no sense to speak of order without peace, law without order, or freedom without law.

His claim is an essential tool for understand how I can whinge about ID cards and yet make allowances for brutal policing in China or Iran.To analyse the reasons behind the hierarchy, the first need is peace, and the second order. Order is valuable, but if an enemy is present, the inhabitants must use violence against the enemy. If inhabitants are using violence, you do not have order. Therefore, peace must come before order.If you have peace, you can then impose order, and stop inhabitants using violence within the realm. We also desire law, meaning that by following some published laws, I can be assured I will not be the subject of violence from or approved by the state. But if violence is not controlled between inhabitants, then safety from the state is of little value. The state has to first reduce violence between inhabitants to a low level before we can get benefit from the state following law.Once we have law, there is then value in freedom. Freedom means that the state will not restrain me from doing things I want to do, to the greatest extent practical. I cannot have any freedom if I do not know what the state will and will not punish, so law is a prerequisite to freedom.Therefore, the hierarchy is : peace, order, law, freedom.I want to live under a good government, and a good government is one which will provide freedom. But I cannot have freedom unless there is law, there cannot be law unless there is order, and there cannot be order unless there is peace.We have order where I live, and mostly we have law. I would like more freedom than we actually have, and I think it is entirely practical to allow more freedom without compromising the more basic social needs of order and law.In China, there is order and they are working on law. There is much less freedom than in Britain even under New Labour, but allowing freedom to political rivals is almost sure to wipe out law and severely reduce order. We can see that order has broken down in part of China just recently.The hierarchy of needs also explains some of my differences with Mencius. We could do with a little more order and law around here, but we have enough to support freedom. Mencius gives the impression that in his area, at least, order has broken down. Now, I don’t live in the leafy, peaceful suburb where my mother went to school, my grandfather used to play bowls, and I used to play in the park when I visited, and where the Shine My Nine gang now kills those who encroach on its women. But then, I live in Luton, which isn’t exactly cut off from the problems of the rest of Britain. And yet in my view we have at least the necessary minimum of order. I would like more, but I don’t think we have to abandon law and freedom to get it.(Is it not possible to have order without the state, some will ask? I think not, though that’s another discussion).