A Good Man Talks About Grief

As this blog of old will attest, I like Eugenia Finnegan Biden's Son, even in his Frank Drebenish moments. Here he is talking to the families of fallen veterans about the loss of his own family and the service of his boy. I tried with a friend the other night to think of a remotely worthwhile Vice-president since Truman, Ford excepted, and Marcus Aurelius here was the only one who sprang to mind. I'm glad he's still on the ticket.

Avoid This Book Like the Plague

For reasons best known to myself, I like bad books. You know the sort of thing--Holy Blood and Holy Grail type parodies of independent thought, which jump from loony narcissism to mad half-proofs on the basis of fifteen different types of evidential rule in the middle of barely suppressed rants which the author doesn't know were done better before.

The problem with slumming it, however, is that sometimes you hit rock bottom, and then the memory of the hangover and the lingering taste of the vomit is enough to pledge you to abstinence and drinking only by means of Holy water on the tongue, until the next cocktail comes along. I suppose the bedroom equivalent is working out how bad your story might seem to the police and the Mrs if the girl you've just put on the morning train ever talked.

Anyway, I've just reached that moment with possibly the worst book I've ever read (and I know von Daniken and Donnelly). It's Lucien Gregoire's 'Murder in the Vatican'--a farrago of nonsense about Pope John Paul I which ought to be on every western historical syllabus on the planet as an example of what not to do. Better people than I have written of it's flaws. I have just one suggestion; do not, on any account, go near it.

Liberalism; Not Neutral, Not Natural

We live in a more or less Liberal West. Liberalism is an ideology. It proceeds from a view of human nature in which people are individuals who must maximise themselves. Some liberals believe that the way to do this is to let people compete from the beginning, and others believe that the state should make opportunities equal by advancing some or holding others back. Most liberals want to turn their views into laws and rules, and, tellingly, though they believe that race, sex, sexuality, disability, age, or creed could be the basis of discrimination, most reject class as a universal fact. Liberals find it difficult to conceive of attachments to faith, family, and motherland, and tend to view these things as impediments on the way to a cosmopolitan world of federated republics. Many of them turn out to be self-serving warmongers and crooks whose main interest is to run their immediate circle like a company and advance their children upon the world whilst preaching bourgeois morality with a passion that parodies itself.*

Liberalism's view of life is dependent on the elevation of the idea of reason, and also on the importance of a belief in a set of fictional things called 'rights', which either can be accessed through the courts or enforced through administrative rules on all in society. The creed sees everything through the prism of secular, individualist and usually capitalist lenses, often elevates science into a sort of drooling scientism, and has a tendency to pretend that economics or government can be isolated from history and culture; sometimes it even ignores human nature in favour of the idea of a perfectible person, who can reason away their flaws.

It's a revealing thing that the foe most likely to raise liberal ardour is not the faraway one--it is perfectly possible to combine a fascist worship of corporate power or a mindset in which abortion, electronic proaganda, and moral collapse are features of freedom with market liberalism. The American right and left do that. 'Modern' liberals are also more or less happy versions of social democrats. The worst foe of liberalism is the near enemy--the communitarianism which looks a lot like a version of liberal-land, or at least enough that market and modern liberals can sometimes flirt with it--but which ultimately challenges every one of liberalism's precepts. Such a challenge to Liberal ideas can be found in the Salamanca school and specifically in the works of Francisco de Vitoria, who wrote around five hundred years ago. I have been reading them. Rather tellingly, the otherwise excellent Stanford Encycopaedia of Philosophy either ignores them or mischaracterises them as 'medieval'

For the Spanish renaissance theologians, reason was not the defining quality of human beings. It was an instrument. The purpose of the instrument was to allow people to live in Society. People lived in societies as flawed but partially plastic creatures possessed of free will. In these societies, they learned how, from the family upwards, to treat people with whom they had less and less in common except their humanity. In well balanced societies, people were happy, and won freedom because of a devotion to duty as human beings. This 'Great Society' was therefore built an a good Aristotelian combination of reason and duty, as St Thomas might have filtered it.

A word to the wise; 'duty' has connotations. What the Salamanca men meant was not the duty which might in our minds be associated with an army toothbrush and a toilet, or the exported chores which certain London councils insist pensioners perform when putting out their rubbish--the tedious impositions of a tired state. Instead, for the Salamanca school, a duty existed which arose from our humanity to be accountable for ourselves and for others, and to behave ethically. Account was given to God, our conscience, and our fellow men.

What did this mean? It meant that 'privacy' was irrelevant, but courtesy and happiness were not; that conscience and the rules of natural justice were better guides than a balance of rights; and that states were not in competition but under a sort of universal law in which they should never perpetrate evils except to prevent worse ones. The tradition respected tradition, and offered a glimpse of what might have become the dominant form of European governance had the disaster of the reformation not intervened. That reformation itself, of course, followed on from the discovery of America and the imbalanced wealth and markets that the rape of the New World brought meeting with the corruption of a very human church which refused to reform until it was too late.

As Catholics, the Salamanca school also understood that human beings were flawed, and capable of being wrong, a lot. They therefore respected a tradition balanced by reason as better than the competition of egoistic individual visions. Ironically, the best example of such a thing to my mind was the old English Common Law, now almost wholly displaced by statute, in which Judges normatively applied cultural rules to identify on a case-by-case basis what was law and what was not. Common law depended on liberties, and the idea of the free man-- a creature of duty--mixed with a little, but not too much, Roman knowledge at second hand. Liberals and Marxists hated it, and have replaced it with stautes and rights which their largely bourgeois children get to control.

It's odd to think of a school from half a millennium ago as one that can offer a refreshing view to the modern West. But, when in trouble, look to oneself. Liberalism's options are exhausted. We are mired at the meeting point of several massive contractions in our economy--financial, commercial, and macroeconomic--which cannot be fully explained except by an ethical analysis of those who overborrowed and those who overlent and overgambled. We face mad and convoluted supranational issues which the international anarchy of liberalism can only meet with the model of an emergent tyrannical state because it has no real model of cooperation. The ideology of rights is ruining the capacity of the community to organise its law and disciplines; and people keep trying to regulate or enclose the internet on the basis of property or security rather than of duty and society.

We can refresh ourselves with common sense, with distributism and mutualism, with government by amateur citizens and not pseudo-professionals, with family and faith in things and a proper balance of nationality and humanity. In fact we must; we must free ourselves from the bankers and quacks, the shills and the scroungers. They'll collapse anyway, but there's no real need for them to take us with them. As I have been writing for half a decade now, it is not hard to see what needs to be done.

I fear that the crisis of faith and economics which is upon us, aided by scientism which forces the methods of politics on scientists, are otherwise on the high road to a continuing and monumental cultural disaster. I do not think that liberalism can offer a way out. I think that those who will find the way will be those who take a clue from the balance of tradition and reason, duty and liberty, and self-governing ethics mixed up in the Salamanca school and the Common Law; and I hope that people smarter than myself can see that quickly. It's never too late, except, well, when it is.

*A point, of course, which does not apply to my liberal friends on either side of the American divide. Just, you know, the others....

It's May, So It's Big Frank Time You never knew whether he was going to sing like the choir celestial or lamp someone or both. Das is der mann....

Via EUreferendum.com...

It's Easter Rebellion Week. God remember Ireland (1916-2008)

Somewhere in time--well, ninety-six years ago to be precise--the Irish rebellion happened. By some strange synchronicity, I notice that the anniversary was welcomed by headlines such as 'Ireland Meets Austerity Targets' and 'Ireland Proves Itself to Germany'. Ah well. Still, in faith I know that resurrections happen. Still...

Britain's Watergate

I wrote about the News International scandal and what it would reveal nearly two years ago. It's one of those moments, like Dallas, or Watergate, or Mary Meyer or David Kelly, when you glimpse the skull beneath the skin of the West, if you have the courage to look at it. The one thing that struck me, though, today, hearing of Rupert and James Murdoch's testimony, is oddly enough another echo from the sixties; If You Remember News International, You Weren't There....

Currency Unions After the Euro

The world is full of currency schemes. SDRs, Khalijees, East African Shillings, Ecos, ASUs, and Tasman Dollars currently follow stages of gestation and quickening which would trouble St Thomas Aquinas, for example. There;s nothing, after all, that wrong with a currency union per se. I live in one; the purchasing value of the pound in London, the North, and the various parts of Cymru-Kernow varies, both between the regional areas and with regard to the Isle of Man, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, which all technically issue their own currency. I suppose since regional inflation is a given, regional real interest rates differ, but there is no mechanism for the difference to be expressed beyond regional differences in unemployment and government spending. From a London perspective, the thing seems to work reasonably well.

You would have thought that the eurozone's ongoing crisis had poisoned the well of any less national schemes, but the world seems to have decided that the continental folly is simply a matter of the exception which proves the rule and to leave things at that. Europe, after all, should never have had a single currency, or at least not when it did; a parallel currency yes, a single currency, no.

The single currency enabled an historically underperforming Germany to lock in a low rate of Deutschmark to the euro, so that when it returned to form after digesting the East, it had a built-in trade advantage. An historically highly-rated set of Mediterranean currencies were allowed to join and to exploit the new system to fuel a credit boom, at the cost of ever devaluing externally again. They weren't forced to reform internally. A low-wage east with flexible currencies was allowed to offer cheap, skilled labour in a way that undercut the South's labour advantage when times got tough, and that built up the German-led North's surplus; and a worldbeating financial centre with a bond and exchange market big enough to make the currency a world reserve, Britain, was allowed quite rightly to stay out.

No adequate mechanism was developed for adjusting the pressures in the different parts of the zone, other than an interest-on-bond mechanism that invited shady gambling and the form of financial badness known as arbitrage. The thing was a triumph of hope over experience; Miss Havisham married off to Mr Micawber.

Now that the crockery is flying next door in so obvious a fashion, why are so many states playing with currency ideas? I think that there are three reasons, beyond the obvious one that would cut this little ramble short, that it's in their interest to do so. One is the preparation which some might think to make for the gradual decline of the United States Dollar, given the way the Americans seem determined to run their economy.

A second is the evident and unfolding fear that China is on a long-term path, gilded by gold purchases and hedged bets that mysteriously appear about two months before renmimbi bond issues occur in Hong Kong, to float its currency without buying into the IMF's Special Drawing Right. This is something that could very much destabilise the world.

My third reason is the way reviving the ghost of the Imperial pound sterling could make sense of trade between Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and help eliminate the danger that those countries become satraps of China or India in the way that the African seaboard is being invited to do. Who knows? With Singapore and Hong Kong gone, and trade routes oriented North and not West, someone has to give Perth a reason to exist whilst restraining the Aussie bubble.

But perhaps my vision is confused, or at least too limited. Fiat currency, like the British monarchy and to a lesser extent the Vatican, is often most to be suspected when it is pretending to be immutable and eternal. It's not that long ago that banks issued their own notes, which could be accepted as payment for taxes or in settlement of third party debt; nor, beyond that, is the time when Gold mattered that far away. What is far away is the nominal constraint which the existence of private or gold-based money placed on governments and banks, and many people--not just Ron Paul--crave that time back.

Once you see that, you run into an epiphany like a drunk sobering up on coke in a bar. Money schemes aren't there for the expansion of productivity or trade as such. They reflect what the philosophers would call ontologically embedded paradigms of control. States have somehow realised what critics of money muliplier theory and neoclassical economics are grasping--that banks create and destroy electronic money of any denomination as they wish without a link to an existing deposit or reserve.

The logic of that is that states and central banks cannot control the money supply. To maintain the illusion that they do would require permanent recession, or local currency integration--a thing which, in turn, would allow the oligopolies and abnormally profiting conglomerates that globalisation throws up the chance to dominate several countries whilst pretending to be competitive across a region or the world. The needs of capital and power, the old Iron cross, thereby cohere. Perhaps international bureacracies and the social science class which run most modern states then see that their empires need clothes; perhaps they are seduced by the idea that this time, things will be different.

When the history of the time in which we live comes to be written, I think that its strangeness will be seen to have preceded the beginnings of the understanding that capitalism, computers and system-thinking had changed the world just as the resources began to be severely depleted. States undermined traditional families whilst pretending to take over their duties, and life became a consumer choice whilst many drowned in debt. A single currency for the region was grasped at by many as a way of pooling power in the face of the choices that this depletion of resources, families and spirits imposed inside and outside of people's heads. As in the old Roman story, people sought to transfer their slavery from ideas to monies to the interests of capital and back again, in ever increasing revolutions.

But then, I hope, enough will say, 'stop', just as a man nailed to a tree just under nineteen hundred and seventy nine years ago in Jerusalem did. I wonder what will happen then?