A Question of Temperament :  Conservatism is not about profit but about loss.

BY ROGER SCRUTON

LONDON--Here and there in the modern world you can find countries with conservative parties. Britain is one of them. But the U.S. is the last remaining country with a genuine conservative movement.

This conservative movement is expressed in politics, in social initiatives among ordinary people, in the media and in intellectual journals with an explicitly conservative message. True, political philosophy in the American academy has been dominated by liberals, and by the project to which the late John Rawls devoted his life, of producing a theory of justice that would vindicate the welfare state. Nevertheless, even in American universities, you can come across conservatives who are prepared to defend their beliefs.

In Britain there are very few academics who will publicly confess to conservative convictions. And we have only two noteworthy conservative journals: the weekly Spectator, and the quarterly Salisbury Review, which I edited (at enormous cost to my intellectual career) for its first 18 years of life, and whose tiny circulation is maintained almost exclusively by private subscription. In the U.S., by contrast, conservative journals spring up constantly, find large and sympathetic readerships, and frequently attract funding from foundations and business. Yet another conservative journal has appeared recently, and the high profile of its editor--Patrick Buchanan--will lead to much speculation about what is really meant by the journal's name: The American Conservative. Maybe a British conservative can cast a little light on this.

It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things; the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavor is the effort to conserve a historically given community. In any conflict the conservative is the one who sides with "us" against "them"--not knowing, but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is therefore suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.

So defined, conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament; but it is, I believe, a temperament that emerges naturally from the experience of society, and which is indeed necessary if societies are to endure. The conservative strives to diminish social entropy. The second law of thermodynamics implies that, in the long run, all conservatism must fail. But the same is true of life itself, and conservatism might equally be defined as the social organism's will to live.

Of course there are people without the conservative temperament. There are the radicals and innovators, who are impatient with the debris left by the dead; and their temperament too is a necessary ingredient in any healthy social mix. There are also the instinctive rebels of the Chomsky variety, who in every conflict side with "them" against "us," who scoff at the ordinary loyalties of ordinary people, and who look primarily for what is bad in the institutions, customs and habits that define their historical community. Still, by and large, the future of any society depends upon the solid residue of conservative sentiment, which forms the ballast to every innovation, and the equilibriating process that makes innovation possible.

Sept. 11 raised the question: Who are we, that they should attack us, and what justifies our existence as a "we"? American conservatism is an answer to that question. "We the people," it says, constitute a nation, settled in a common territory under a common rule of law, bound by a single Constitution and a common language and culture. Our primary loyalty is to this nation, and to the secular and territorially based jurisdiction that makes it possible for our nation to endure. Our national loyalty is inclusive, and can be extended to newcomers, but only if they assume the duties and responsibilities, as well as the rights, of citizenship. And it is reinforced by customs and habits that have their origin in the Judeo-Christian inheritance, and which must be constantly refreshed from that source if they are to endure. In the modern context, the American conservative is an opponent of "multiculturalism," and of the liberal attempt to sever the Constitution from the religious and cultural inheritance that first created it.

American conservatism welcomes enterprise, freedom and risk, and sees the bureaucratic state as the great corrupter of these goods. But its philosophy is not founded in economic theories. If conservatives favor the free market, it is not because market solutions are the most efficient ways of distributing resources--although they are--but because they compel people to bear the costs of their own actions, and to become responsible citizens. Conservative reservations about the welfare state reflect the belief that welfare generates a dependency culture, in which responsibilities are drowned by rights.

The habit of claiming without earning is not confined only to the welfare machine. One of the most important conservative causes in America must surely be the reform of the jury system, which has allowed class actions and frivolous claims--including claims by non-nationals--to sabotage the culture of honest reward, and to ensure that wealth, however honestly and diligently acquired, can at any moment be stolen from its producer to end up in the pocket of someone who has done nothing to deserve it.

It is one of the great merits of America's conservative movement that it has seen the need to define its philosophy at the highest intellectual level. British conservatism has always been suspicious of ideas, and the only great modern conservative thinker in my country who has tried to disseminate his ideas through a journal--T.S. Eliot--was in fact an American. The title of his journal (The Criterion) was borrowed by Hilton Kramer, when he founded what is surely the only contemporary conservative journal that is devoted entirely to ideas. Under the editorship of Mr. Kramer and Roger Kimball, The New Criterion has tried to break the cultural monopoly of the liberal establishment, and is consequently read in our British universities with amazement, anger and (I like to think) self-doubt.

Eliot's influence has been spread in America by his disciple, Russell Kirk, who made clear to a whole generation that conservatism is not an economic but a cultural outlook, and that it would have no future if reduced merely to the philosophy of profit. Put bluntly, conservatism is not about profit but about loss: It survives and flourishes because people are in the habit of mourning their losses, and resolving to safeguard against them.

This does not mean that conservatives are pessimists. In America, they are the only true optimists, since they are the only ones with a clear vision of the future and a clear determination to bring that future into being.

For the conservative temperament the future is the past. Hence, like the past, it is knowable and lovable. It follows that by studying the past of America--its traditions of enterprise, risk-taking, fortitude, piety and responsible citizenship--you can derive the best case for its future: a future in which the national loyalty will endure, holding things together, and providing all of us, liberals included, with our required sources of hope. This is the message that has been put across vividly by New York's City Journal, and it is interesting to compare its optimistic articles about the American underclass with the bleak vision of our English equivalent expressed in the same journal by Theodore Dalrymple.

Sept. 11 was a wake-up call through which liberals have managed to go on dreaming. American conservatives ought to seize the opportunity to utter those difficult truths which have been censored out of recent debate: truths about national loyalty, about common culture and about the duties of citizenship. You never know, Middle America might actually recognize itself at last, when addressed in this way.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061019142656/http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110002746

IN DEFENCE OF SUVS/4WDS

An Email discussion with D. Williams:

Williams:

The basis for this is a federal study done deliberately to show 4x4 vehicles in a bad light. This is science answering to politics.

The left-wing wacko enviro-nazis have hated the 4x4s for some time now. Those nasty vehicles that go "Off Road" GAAAAK! Here is the source of the hatred for these vehicles. Nothing so enrages these nazis as people being able to explore our vast wild lands. Hence the considerable legal closings of many of our Federal wild lands to human tresspass during the Clinton administration.

But let's get back to 4x4s or SUVs if you will. I drive two, a Suburban and a Chevy sport truck. In Alaska, as in many cold climate communities across America, these vehicles represent an order of magnitude of increased safety, not to mention comfort, over ordinary vehicles. At sub-zero temperatures nothing gives confidence when traversing icy or snowy roads like a 4x4. Four wheel traction is not just an added 2 wheels, it is a driving system that balances out the power application in a way that allows these vehicles to do many things to maintain stability that a 2 wheel drive vehicle cannot achieve.

On icy roads at 50 MPH (or higher) if you want to stop quickly you simply pop the transmission into low gear and you will decelerate at a remarkable rate, under perfect steering control. This is something not even available to 2x4 automobiles. I can stop in one fourth the distance as they. Hurt the transmission? No. Not as long as the road is icy. Not everyone is aware of this "trick" but many up north are.

There are many attributes of 4x4s that I won't go into but the most important of them is safety. Artificial "scientific" studies by Federal Agencies, tasked with finding fault, will never convince me or millions of Americans that SUVs represent any safety problem at all. We drivers of them know better.

SUVs are a danger to small cars when the two meet in accidents, but Detroit wouldn't make these death traps if it weren't for Federal mandates. They are forced to make them in order to meet artificial mileage targets. Targets by the way were designed to eliminate large vehicles on our roads.

My advice to the ignorant is to take these childish claims for what they are, tantrums of the elite who can't stand Americans expressing their joie-de-vivre with large, capable off-road vehicles.


Ray

I am sure that you are right that 4WDS are better on difficult roads -- that is what they were originally made for. It is their suburban and highway use that is problematical.


Williams:

Difficult roads are just one instance and the easiest to see. However think about this too. Road control is superior with 4x4, witness it being used by the most sophisticated racing vehicles such as Formula 1 and Grand Prix types until it was banned. It increased adhesion and was safer to drive than two wheel drive. The same benefits accrue today on the interstate. There is no question that antagonism to 4 wheel drive is strictly driven by animosity to big automobiles, off-road ability and general perception of heavy fuel use. This last misconception is easy to see. Today's V-8 SUV gets better fuel mileage than any V-8 vehicle from 20 years ago and even some 6 cylinday engines. Not only that but today's SUV has only 1% of the polution of vehicles 20 years ago. The interstate is where SUVs rule. They are more comfortable, safer, no they don't roll over more often, and can actually let one carry the luggage one wants on vacation.

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Posted by John Ray

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Dangerous Bars in Fascist Italy

By Kevin Beary

December 10, 2002

Perhaps Richard Humphreys, the Sioux Falls man who for his “burning Bush” comment was sentenced recently to over three years in prison, should have tried the “drunk” defense instead of the 1st Amendment defense. It worked in fascist Italy in the 1930s.

In his book Informers (Delatori, which is unfortunately not available in English translation), the Italian historian Mimmo Franzinelli cites various instances of Italians who, when in their cups, were careless enough to criticize the Duce, Benito Mussolini. In a section of his book titled Dangerous Bars (which forms part of Chapter 2: The Spy Next Door), Franzinelli writes that the offenders' “state of drunkenness” in which they made their remarks “worked in their favor” when charges were brought against them.

For example, in 1933 a Tuscan farmer named Egisto Ceragioli met two fascists in a bar and invited them to drink with him. In the course of their carousing, Ceragioli remarked: “I survived the last war, and I'm still strong enough to go down to Rome with my pistol permit and kill that pig Mussolini!” The unfortunate Ceragioli was arrested, and his wife wrote a letter to the Duce imploring clemency, explaining her husband's conduct as a result of “excessive libations,” and protesting her family's loyalty to the fascist regime. The incautious husband was sentenced to a mere month in prison.

In 1936, another Tuscan farmer, Giocondo Rossi, was arrested for having said in a bar: “The Duce is a usurper! We've all become beggars because of him. If he were here now, I'd gouge one of his eyes out! I'd like to crack his head open!” Witnesses confirmed that Rossi had made the remarks; but in the defendant's favor was the fact that he had “a tendency to drink, and that night he was completely drunk on wine.” And so the tippler was let off lightly.

In 1935, Angelo Rosci, while under the influence, was overheard by a fascist to say: “Italy is a bully! Italy is a wreck!” This same fascist undertook a citizen's arrest. On their way to the authorities, the two men passed some fascists who were extolling the virtues of Mussolini, Empire Builder. The still-tipsy Rosci shouted out, “F*** him!” Once sober, Rosci sought to excuse him comments by ascribing them to an altered state of mind induced by too many afternoon glasses of wine. He was let out of prison after a few days but kept under surveillance till 1940.

Other offenders, however, were not so lucky. In 1933, a poverty-stricken man named Giuseppe Cernetti was arrested and imprisoned for drunkenness. He opined to his cellmate: “Mussolini is a scoundrel. He's robbed millions and millions. He's a pig, a coward.” The cellmate dutifully reported Cernetti's remarks to the warden, who after interviewing Cernetti decided that he was suffering from a “grave mental imbalance” and had him committed to a mental hospital.

In 1936, a carpenter named Angelo Gurrieri was arrested for having offended in a state of drunkenness the Duce, the king and the regime. He was sentenced to five years in an internment zone, during which time he accumulated ten more convictions for antifascist remarks. He was set at liberty in 1943, about a month after the fall of the fascist government.

Was Humphreys drunk when he made his remarks, and if so, would the drunk defense have worked in his case? Of course, had he used such a defense, the hapless Humphreys would have implicitly denied that his right to make a political joke was guaranteed him by the 1st Amendment. But in any case, the federal government seems to have unofficially repealed that amendment already.

Mussolini's fall from power, by the way, was occasioned by his failed dream of empire. Convinced that an alliance with Nazi Germany would result in the aggrandizement of Italy's empire, he pledged complete support of Germany and entered WWII at its side. As a consequence, he lost his African colonies and in 1943 was forced to step down as head of the government after the Allied invasion of Sicily. In 1945, he was captured by Italian communists and executed. His body was then strung up by the heels in a Milanese piazza.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2002/12/kevin-beary/dangerous-bars/

In Defence of the Monarchy

Sean Gabb

When with my family and friends I celebrated her Majesty's golden jubilee last June, I thought that republicanism had been crushed as other than a marginal force for another generation. Over a million people had gathered in the Mall to cheer her—many of them young people, and many from the ethnic minorities. For a few days, all the silly chatter about inclusiveness and diversity became about as real as it possibly could, but became real in a cause that the loudest and silliest of the chatterers regarded with shame and annoyance. Now, sadly, the republicans are back with their levelling agenda. I do not think we shall ever know the truth concerning the former servant of the Princess of Wales who started the present round of scandals. But the lurid claims of warnings from the Queen, of homosexual rape in the royal household, and of the general conduct of the royal family, are highly damaging regardless of their truth—and have been taken up by the republicans in the media and used to cause the greatest damage possible. Of course, the Monarchy will survive these scandals. They may be used, however, to justify a weakening of its institutional powers, and so will contribute to its decline over the long term.

I know that many of my readers live under republican forms of government, and that many of my British readers have no settled affection for our own monarchical constitution. But I am myself a committed monarchist, and will take this opportunity to explain why.

The first argument is from antiquity. Queen Elizabeth II is descended from the kings of the Germanic barbarians who invaded the Roman province of Britain after the year 410 AD. At first, these barbarians were divided among many tribes, each with its one king. As the centuries passed, however, what is now England was gradually brought under the rule of one royal family; and Alfred the Great (d. 901) is normally regarded as the first King of England.

With the exception of the rather strange period between 1649 and 1660, when the country was first a republic and then a military dictatorship, England has always been a Monarchy. And the monarchs have been members of one family. Her present Majesty is descended from the family of Alfred the Great, just as he in turn was descended from the chieftains who led their warriors and their families out of the great forests that once overspread northern Europe. There have been changes in the order of succession—in 1485, in 1603, in 1688, in 1714, and in 1936—but the crown has not passed outside that family during the past 1,500 years.

Antiquity, I grant, is not in itself a defence of anything. But antiquity does raise a presumption in its favour. Unless a particular thing can be shown to produce great and easily avoidable harm, its age does serve as a defence. The burden of proof, therefore, lies against the republicans. Before they can be allowed to have their way, they must prove beyond reasonable doubt that Monarchy is for us a harmful institution.

One claim I often hear is that we are in this country not citizens with inalienable rights, but subjects with revokable privileges. An argument consequent on this is that the Monarchy is a survival from the time before the middle-class revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a symbol of a traditional order in which status is possessed on the basis not of ability but of birth. It is even claimed that it is because of the social prestige of the Monarchy that this country lost its commercial lead at the end of the 19th century—that the first generations of capitalist factory owners were replaced by sons who had come to believe that high social status was best achieved through the professions and politics, and that industry was something for the lower classes to bother about.

The reply is simple. The language of obedience and the ceremonial that attends royal occasions may support this claim. However, in a constitution like ours, which was not made, but has evolved over many centuries, the dictionary meaning of words is far less important than the things they actually describe. During the past few hundred years, all of the European monarchies have been either abolished or remodelled out of ancient recognition. Are the "citizens" of those countries notably more free than English "subjects"? The obvious answer is no. We pay lower taxes than in most of these countries. We enjoy generally greater freedom of enterprise. In the writ of habeas corpus, and in trial by jury according to common law rules of justice, we enjoy greater protections of life, liberty and property. Unlike in most of Europe, I can take action against the authorities in the ordinary civil courts: where we have administrative tribunals, there is always appeal to the ordinary courts. Assuming I want to, I can read books and make statements that in much of Europe would get me into serious trouble. During the past century, there have been repeated floods of European immigrants into this country. They have come here to live in a country where they are not bled absolutely white in taxes, and where they do not need to fear a 3:00am knock on the door by the authorities. Except by those who want to live in a better climate, and who have the money to ignore local oppressions, I have not seen much movement in the opposite direction. Better to be a subject in England than a citizen in France. Just ask all those emigres who have settled here since 1789—and we can ask the 300,000 who currently have taken advantage of the European Union rules on labour mobility to come and work here. Having a Monarchy did not stop us from having the first and therefore the most important industrial revolution. It has not stopped London from remaining one of the great financial centres of the world—a financial centre where more people work than live in Frankfurt, whish is the next largest financial centre in the European Union.

If we are less free today than a century or even a generation ago, this is not because we have a Monarchy. It is because the representative elements of our constitution have decayed. It may have been Her Majesty last month, speaking to Parliament, who announced the planned abolition of the double jeopardy rule, and the lifting of the bar on similar fact evidence, and the limitation of the right to trial by jury. But she was reading words written for her by others - these others being a pack of unprincipled technocrats obsessed with meeting targets on the suppression of crime, regardless of due process, and regardless of whether the targets can be met by way of the means suggested. It is the people we are supposed to represent us who are making us less free, not the person whom the coins proclaim our monarch by the grace of God. If we have a problem, it is not too few elected politicians: it is too many bad ones.

Another claim is that the Monarchy is a visible symbol of inequality—a barrier to an ideal society in which everyone will be equal in status, and in which everyone will have the right, if not the ability, to rise to the highest position. It is a knife pointing at the heart of democracy. This may sound a persuasive claim. Historically, though, attempts to create such societies have usually gone far beyond abolishing a Monarchy—they have ended with attacks on anyone with a nice house and money in the bank, or on anyone with a good coat on his back. Those who hate the Queen for her jewels and palaces generally have no time either for the middle classes.

But all this is only a negative reply to the republicans. It demands proof of harm done by having a Monarchy, and then rejects all alleged proofs. The Monarchy is not simply an ancient institution that is harmless and that ought therefore to be left alone. There is a positive argument. Not only has the Monarchy done us no harm: it has done much good.

England is the only country in the world that has for the past three hundred years not had a revolution, a civil war, a military dictatorship, a foreign invasion, or any other serious breakdown of constitutional order. It has throughout this time maintained high levels of political and economic freedom. There is no other country in all history that has been so reliably free and stable for so long. This may have something to do with our geographical position—though this did not bring much stability before about 1700. It may have something to do with our racial characteristics—though the Americans who fought the War between the States were generally of the same stock, and still managed an awful bloodletting. There may be any number of other reasons, or combinations of reasons. But one highly probable contributing cause is our constitution. For the past few centuries, we have had a Monarchy with all the prestige of ancient legitimacy, combined with actual government by elected politicians. The character of the Monarch has therefore been fairly unimportant, but no politician has been able to scheme or shoot his way into that first position. We have a situation where the politicians have most of the power, but the Monarch has all the authority.

This is not a division of power that exists in the written constitutions of the other countries. Certainly, it was not noticed by foreign observers such as Montequieu and de Lolme in the 18th century. It is, even so, a division of powers that seem so far to have been more successful than the formal divisions of executive, legislature and judiciary with which constitutional lawyers are more familiar. It is not a defect of the Monarchy that the top position is closed to merit. It is one of the highest benefits. We cannot be certain that replacing the Monarchy with a presidential republic would preserve anything like this division. It might well be that to get rid of the Monarchy would take Britain into the kind of political instability that is currently unimaginable.

This brings us to the third line of defence—which is our ignorance of what would happen if we tried to replace the Monarchy.

Contrary to all the imaginings of the utopian philosophers, we are fundamentally not rational beings. We cannot be perfected. We cannot be made fit for a social order based wholly on light and reason. Certainly, the modes of thought and social organisation that developed chiefly in England, and have since spread in stages throughout the world, can usually be given a powerful abstract justification. But the success—indeed, the continued existence—of these modes owes nothing to rational deliberation, and everything to an often unconscious habit. To abolish, or even to try altering these habits is to risk our enjoyment of the benefits that proceed from them. Anyone who thinks otherwise falls into an error readily demonstrable from the history of the past two centuries. Anyone who proceeds from thought to action commits acts that range from the absurd to the catastrophically monstrous.

When, therefore, we come to an examine a functioning social order such as our own, our most proper attitude is one of curiosity mingled with reverence. We are not to seize on its apparent faults and reject it in favour of something else spun out of a single head. Nor, as has been most often done this century in those countries lucky enough to avoid a total reconstruction, are we to advocate sweeping reforms simply on the grounds of "modernisation" or of bringing something "into the twenty first century". We must instead try to understand the inner workings of society—to conjecture by what innumerable and infinitesimal stages the present order of things evolved to its present sophistication. This will require us to look even to those habits and institutions that rest on justifications manifestly absurd, asking whether they might not nevertheless serve a useful purpose. Then, and only then, shall we be ready to consider what deliberate changes may be necessary, and how these may best be combined with what already is. The best change is so cautious and incremental that only those directly affected notice its happening. Even the most radical, sudden change is best achieved so that within only a few years it becomes difficult to tell the old from the new.

According to this argument, then, it is wrong to look at the Monarchy as if it stood alone. It might be wrong to see the Monarchy as a direct guarantor of political stability. Nevertheless, it might contribute to that stability in some way that no one has yet discovered.

Some monarchists I have spoken to over the past year have expressed a strong dissatisfaction with the Queen. Disliking the present Government's European policy, they have petitioned Her Majesty for the redress of grievances, using the procedure laid down in the Magna Carta of 1215. So far, they have received no proper answer. From this, they have concluded that the Monarchy is as weak and indeed rotten a support as any other branch of the Constitution. This is a mistaken view. It proceeds from the same confusion of law and constitutional practice as the republicans usually make.

The legal powers of the Monarchy are theoretically immense. They have not been reduced by law since 1660, and then were not fundamentally touched. Formally, the Queen is the Head of State, Head of the Church of England, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In theory, she is also the owner of all the land in England and Wales —a survival of the feudal tenures introduced by William I in 1066. All legal acts are done in her name; and in theory, she is present in every courtroom in the country. Her head appears on every British postage stamp and on every British coin and banknote. We tend to despise those foreign countries where national flags or even pictures of "El Presidente" are everywhere. But images of our Queen are in every pocket and on every letter posted. If she so wished, she could dismiss Tony Blair tomorrow and set me in his place. She could dissolve Parliament to save me the trouble of facing it. She could declare war on France, and sign a treaty giving Gibraltar to Spain. In reality, she can do none of these things. Her inability to raise taxes in her own name would eventually force her to recall Parliament, just as Charles I was forced. But long before reaching this position, it would have been necessary for her to break through the web of custom that, during the past three centuries, has overlain the law. Her actions might be strictly legal: they would not be at all constitutional.

There might be circumstances in which she needed to use her full legal powers in defence of the whole Constitution, and she might then break various conventions without any loss of authority. But the arguments over the Treaty of Nice—bad as it might be—do not justify formal royal intervention. She would not have public opinion sufficiently on her side—and that, whatever the wording of constitutional documents might say—is the real source of power and authority.

This being said, I do believe that the Queen is aware of how dangerously bad this Government is, and that she is at war with it. But the weapons practically available to her are not those available to Queen Anne when she decided to rid herself of the Whigs. The weapons now are symbolism and ceremonial obstruction.

We saw these most obviously in use earlier this year. We have a government and a controlled media insisting that we are no longer what our ancestors were, and that our only future lies in the new country called Europe. This message received a flat contradiction when the Queen Mother was buried—an event acting as powerfully on the English imagination as a half-forgotten bugle call on an old soldier. The countless millions of unrepresented conservatives in this country were suddenly faced with the old music and words and ceremony, and the effect was often overpowering. It was like waking from a nightmare and looking at the familiar things around the bedroom. That is why New Labour and the BBC were so upset and even frightened by the public reaction. Unlike the amateurs and fools who run the Conservative Party, these people fully understand the power of symbolism, and they appreciated the strength of the reverse to their project of national deconstruction. They were equally upset by the success of the Jubilee celebrations. They could see what they had long regarded as the withered husk of the Monarchy taking on new life with every outpouring of popular support. This recovered strength would not be used to defeat them in open battle. Instead, it would be an inspiring force for others. The ancient Jews would carry the Ark of the Covenant into battle with them. Whether it brought the divine blessing on their arms may be doubted. Undoubtedly, though, it gave them a visible symbol of all they were fighting for. That is the real modern power of the Monarchy. And this, I suspect, is the reason why these scandals are being so emphasised in the media. They weaken the Monarchy in the place in which it needs to be strongest.

Now, what we are fighting for is obvious. We want personal freedom and national independence. Is that why Her Majesty is now at war on our side? I like to think so. But it may just be self-preservation. In the past hundred years, the Monarchy has accommodated itself to great and surprising changes. George V decided not to stand by the landed aristocracy, and so avoided its fate. George VI made no complaints about losing his imperial title. Her present Majesty managed very well in the first half of her reign as head of state in a mixed economy welfare state. But none of these changes threatened the survival of the Monarchy as an institution. The older Labour politicians—Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan—had no desire to overthrow the Constitution or even to remodel it. I am not even sure how serious were their more radical followers. The present Labour leaders, though, are republicans. They are not, of course, republicans in the tradition of Tom Paine or even of Tony Benn—who wanted what they thought a fair and rational deal for all the people of the country. Instead, they have a vision of a New World Order society in which there is no room for things like monarchy or any other pattern of habitual loyalty that they cannot themselves control. Their republic is not one of annual parliaments and village democracy: it is one in which the rulers of many countries combine to exercise absolute and unaccountable power over an atomised—and perhaps before long, a genetically modified—peasantry.

I think the Queen realises this. I believe that she takes her coronation oath seriously, and that she does regret the police state that her Minsters are building for us. But I am convinced that she sees the danger to her own position and that of her children. This puts her on our side—even if she stands on our side only "objectively", to use the old Marxist jargon.

On this last point, I would commend the Monarchy even to those of my friends who are committed republicans. Perhaps their ideal republic is a better form of government than our monarchical constitution. But this ideal republic is not presently on offer. Until it can be on offer, therefore, I would advise them to take a lesson from the Australian voters of a few years ago. Presented with a choice between a monarchy for which they had little strong affection and a republic designed wholly with the interests of the politicians in mind, they chose to keep the Monarchy.

And so, for all these reasons, and for others that I may have forgotten, I ask all my readers—monarchists and republicans, libertarians and conservatives, and even the more thoughtful socialists who want a better world than New Labour has in mind for us —to join in wishing Her Majesty a happy Christmas and a long and productive reign in the years still to come.

Source

AUSTRALIA’S PYGMY COVERUP

I received the email below from Tim Gillin about the amazing way all mention of Australia’s original pygmy (“Negrito”) race has been expunged from the textbooks:


My take on negritos is not so much that they were here first, my gut feeling is that the real story was much more complex than that and we would all be found flat footed by the truth. My main point is that we don't know who was first, and the 'standard line' "single origin view", that is now the official received wisdom, is frankly a fairytale.

The single-origin school use some largely unresearched ad hoc subsidiary hypotheses to explain away the anomalous Barrines and Tasmanians. They put it all down to genetic drift. The irony of this claim is that Jo Birdsell was arguably the foremost authority on genetic drift amongst human populations bar none. If you pick up a physical anthropology textbook from the 1990s it will still most probably use Birdsell's examples. Birdsell was a follower of Sewall Wright, one of the three founders of the neo-darwinian synthesis, still the dominant paradigm in evolutionary biology. Birdsell saw his main achievement, not as his Australian "trihybridism" hypothesis, but in providing evidence for Wright's 'shifting balance' theory of evolution. Wright in turn believed Birdsell provided the support he needed. The core of this theory is genetic drift, what used to be called 'the Sewall Wright effect'. Birdsell right up until his last book published in 1993, when he was about 85, gives his Australian archeaological and anthro colleagues a serve for conjuring up 'genetic drift' as an ad hoc theoretical escape route. He said they were arguing outside their discipline and trying to explain away Barrines and Tasmanians with genetic drift explanations devoid of any population genetics models.

Nothing has changed since Birdsell died and the mitochrondial DNA tests he advocated have still not been done. In principle mtDNA tests could be performed on human remains now, hair samples from museums that sort of thing. That is a new option that has emerged since Birdsell died. All in all his rivals just want to bury the whole thing. Their usual line is to say Birdsell's argument is "antiquated thinking" based on racial typologies. Back when Birdsell first started everyone used racial taxonomies. I'd argue that the single origin school is really a reworking of racial typology based on Howell's theory that the peoples of Australia / New Guinea are one of the five or six major races. Birdsell himself was one of the first to drop the race approach and adopt the "cline" approach. The issue of whether "races" exist or not is not quite cut and dried and physical anthropologists still debate it, so it's not "antiquated" anyhow. In any event whether anthrropologists today classify humans into "races" (as the young Birdsell did) or into a patchwork of "clines" (as the older Birdsell did) is completely irrelevant to the issue of whether multiple waves of dissimilar people migrated to Australia / New Guinea. It is a complete furphy. Basically ignorant mud slinging disguised as erudite comment.

His opponents treat an analysis of 12 N.Qld skulls done in the early 70s as the "silver bullet" that killed Birdsell's hypothesis. Both Josephine Flood and Geoff Blainey use this argument. I simply point out that craniometry is not such a decisive weapon, that's why the Out-of-africa/multi-regional origins debate is still unresolved. (also paleo-anthros working in Aust. can't decide whether there were distinct gracile&robust humans here in the early days (Thorne) or different fashions in headwear (the contra-Thornes say they must have strapped up their heads or something).

The political angle of all this is that Tindale & Birdsell (read Tinney's obit here if you want to feel inadequate as a scientist) theory was well known to the general public until the early 1970s and more or less disappears after that. Even the existence of the pygmoid people is winkled out, not just Tindale's theory of how they got here. If you want to read something quite Orwellian check out the section on RAINFOREST ABORIGINES in the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA. They use photos that originally appear in Tindale and Birdsell's original 1930s articles outlining their scientific field work amongst these people. They even paraphrase T&B's captions. But they dont mention the trihybrid theory (even in passing) and they don't reproduce any of the photos that help the casual reader scale these people's height. Orwell can happen here.

Was the decline of Birdsellism post 1972 merely the bypassing of a disproven theory? I think not as Birdsell 1993, being the good scientist he was, proposes a falsifiable test: Mitochondrial DNA of Barrines. No one has done it despite the technology being old hat now. I will be quite happy to give Birdsell's theory an honourable funeral if the tests are done. But not before.

Why the winkle out of Birdsell? Well huge amounts of public money can distort science and public debate. Nothing odd about that. Most scientists would agree. So can changing political fashions. I can even give another example of the same politicalisation effect at work: Graham Walsh's Kimberly cave art work.

What cheeses me off is the implication that discussion/ research into this aspect of ancient history is verboten: Follow the party line or shut up. It is a pretty weak argument really. If you were opposed to Aboriginal land rights you don't have to dream up negritos to help you out. In fact the single origin theory, at least when married to ideas of paleolithic and tribal societies as non-violent ecologists is hardly defensible. Do these guys really expect us to believe the Eora and the Dharruk marched into the Sydney basin 50,000 yrs ago, decided amicably who owns what and lived happily ever after, at least until 1788? Tribal territories were enforced by tribal warfare and land changed hands sometimes violently. period. Does this let white annexation off the hook? Nope. Period.

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Posted by John Ray

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NOTE: For some unknown reason, the permalinks on this site seldom seem to work. So you will need to scroll down to get to the postings on Anglospheric diversity, Australia's "One Nation" political party and the Japanese economy

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HOW AUSTRALIA HANDLES REFUGEE APPLICATIONS

REFUGEE DETERMINATION (Dept of Immigration in-house summary)

The process by which an asylum seeker applies for refugee status varies from country to country. In many developing countries, it is the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that makes the determination. In most western countries, governments have set up structures, either administrative or judicial, for examining claims.

Since 1993 Australia has had a two stage administrative determination procedure:

Primary Stage:

An asylum seeker lodges an application for refugee status with DIMIA.

The written application is then assessed by an officer of the Department to establish whether the person's claims are such as to fit the criteria for the grant of refugee status. Until recently it was the practice that applicants would be interviewed as a matter of routine. In recent months both positive and negative decisions have been made without interview. Aslyum seekers who arrived in Australia in an unauthorised manner after 20 October 1999 are only eligible to apply for Temporary Protection Visas. To be granted this visa, applicants must still be determined to be refugees.

Applications can be received from individuals or from family groups. In the case of the latter, the claims of each member of the family should be examined. It is quite possible that the male head of household may not be a refugee but the wife or any of the children may be. If one member of the family is determined to be a refugee, the whole family is granted refugee status.

There are only two possible outcomes from the primary stage:

the application is accepted and the asylum seeker is granted refugee status or a temporary protection visa; or
the application is rejected.

Review Stage:

If a claim is rejected at the primary stage, the asylum seeker then has the option to lodge an application for a review of this decision. Approximately 75% of rejected applicants take advantage of this option.

The body responsible for reviewing applications is the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT). The RRT is an independent Commonwealth statutory body whose Members are appointed by the Governor General. It is their task to review the DIMIA primary decisions, applying exactly the same criteria: ie is the person a refugee according to the United Nations definition?

Unless a Member is minded to accept an application on the papers alone, all applicants to the RRT receive an oral hearing. The hearing is formal but non-adversarial, with every effort being made to ensure that the applicant is comfortable to present all aspects of their claims.

It is considered vital that Australia retains an independent merits review in refugee status determination. Such a system guarantees equality and fairness before the law and allows asylum seekers to present their full stories confident that government policy towards their country of origin will not influence the decision makers.

There are two possible outcomes from the review stage:

* the RRT overturns the original decision and grants refugee status. This happens on average in approximately 10% of cases (though is much higher for some nationalities); or
the RRT upholds the original decision.

In the event of the claim being rejected by the RRT, it is expected that the applicant will leave the country. There are, however, two other avenues that could be explored:

Humanitarian Status:

Claims that are rejected by the RRT are sent back to the Department of Immigration where they are reviewed by the original case manager. If it is considered that there may be compelling humanitarian reasons why an applicant should not be returned to their country of origin, the case is referred to the Minister for Immigration who has non-compellable discretionary powers to grant residency on humanitarian grounds. Failed refugee status applicants can also make a direct approach to the Minister seeking his consideration of their case.

Judicial Review:

Applicants who have been rejected by the RRT can, in certain circumstances, lodge an appeal to the Federal Court. The Court is not empowered to look at the merits of the claim (ie whether or not they are refugees). It is the role of the Court to consider whether the determination was conducted in accordance with the law. If the Court finds in favour of the applicant, the case is referred back to the RRT for reconsideration. Reconsideration does not automatically mean that the applicant is granted refugee status.

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Posted by John Ray

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ANGLOSPHERIC DIVERSITY

Below I reproduce part of an email discussion with Jim Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Primer:

Jim Bennet:
Fischer, Phillips, and others have clearly demonstrated the long-term continuity of regionally-based cultural patterns from the British Isles to the North America -- what I call "cultural nations" in my book. It's clear that the dynamics of the Anglosphere civil wars (military and otherwise) from Cromwell's time to today are mostly based on these differences. It's also clear that these differences were not created by the rise of theological differences, but rather, they pre-existed the
Reformation, and influenced the success or failure of Catholic, Anglican, Calvinist, and Quaker causes in the various parts of the Isles and their overseas offspring.

At the same time it's obvious that the Anglosphere as a whole has a significant set of unifying characteristics that are shared internally and not shared outside of the Anglosphere to any great degree. So we have diversity within commonalty, which is quite distinct from the "diversity" that multiculturalists advocate. Our diversity works precisely becuase it is constrained within a larger shared commonality. The differences and similarities among Anglosphere nations are not much greater than the differences and similarities among regions in any individual Anglosphere nation.

What squares the circle on the issue of unity and diversity in the Anglosphere is the fact that because of the peculiar nature of the state structures we have created, we have never fit the Continental European definition of the nation-state very well, and there is no reason we ever should. We don't want a unified, homogonized nation that decides what project we all shall follow, and coordinates all national effort to
those ends -- Oakeshott's "enterprise state". (Which is, more or less, what continental nation-state theorists like Herder or Mazzini thought the defining characteristic of a nation-state was.) It's true that Germans, Italians, etc. have particularist tendencies, but they also have a Gleichschaltung fetish that drowns any real policy autonomy out in a heavy miasma of harmonization. Now they seek to extend this fetish to the EU at large, which is the root of so many of their
problems, and why I think the UK and Ireland will ultimately have to come out.

As for the Puritans, their heirs are influential in a large section (and one of the more prosperous and better-educated sections, at that) of the US, and we shall have to deal with them indefinitely. The Anglosphere concept and narrative has to be able to encompass them as well.

I disagree that Jamestown was the source of Middle American culture, although it certainly was one of the sources of it. Philadephia and the English Midlands/Quaker tradition and New York were important sources as well. When we discuss the English radical Protestant movement and its influence on the modern world, we have to remember that the Puritans were only one part of it. Scottish Calvinists, who particularly influenced the fourth settlement stream from Ulster to the Appalachians, and Quakers were quite different parts that were also influential in making America.

I disagree with John Ray that the Puritans are not still a major influence in America. Much of the radical political-correctness crowd and extreme environmentalists are little more than secularized Puritans, complete with drab clothing, hatred of conspicuous luxuries (furs, SUVs), days of fasting and humiliation (Earth Day), dietary strictness (moral vegetarianism), and the telltale self-assumed moral superiority over their opponents, who are not merely wrong, but evil. We do owe the
current Republican administration to the neo-Puritans, however. Ralph Nader's support in the polls mostly collapsed in the last two weeks before the 2002 election, except in New England and the New Engalnd-settled states, where they continued to support him over Gore into the voting booths. Fanaticism regardless of practical consequences has always beena Puritan hallmark.


John Ray:
When you say: “The differences and similarities among Anglosphere nations are not much greater than the differences and similarities among regions in any
individual Anglosphere nation”, you understate your case.

In fact, a Southerner in England finds an Australian accent easier to understand than a Geordie accent! And yet Australians live half a world away and the Geordies are only a few hours away by train.

And I think you would find that the Australian monoculture has values that fit in better in some parts of the USA than in others. I personally seem to get on better with Midwesterners than with people in LA or NYC. And I certainly know some Midwesterners who get on better with Australians than they do with the dreaded LA.

Jim Bennett:
My impression is that Australian immigration had a higher percentage of Londoners and Irish than North America in their respective founding periods. The broad Aussie accent always sounds a lot like an East End accent. Probably some good reason for that!

The North-North and South-South correspondences between the US and the UK are
well-known. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, and my wife's from Yorkshire, and we have found that I have a number of local dialect words and pronunciations (which I use mostly when I'm being whimsical and imitating my grandfather) that she always thought were pure North of England. There are other ones -- the Ocracoke Island-Devon match is very close; Michigan's Upper Peninsula has a big Cornish population from the Cousin Jacks who came over to work the mines. You can get great Cornish pasties at roadside stands there.

As the Anglosphere grows closer together again thanks to free communications
and cheap fast travel, I think we will see more and more discovery of these
intra-Anglosphere ties.

John Ray:
Your comparison of the Red/Green brigade to the Puritans is a tempting one and one often made but I thing you are wrong to infer causation from correlation. Australia has virtually NO Puritan history and yet we have the same very painful Red/Green brigade infesting the airwaves and getting governments do do crazy things. Note however, that Australia has not signed the Kyoto treaty either.

Jim Bennett:
I think the causation is actually fairly clear. The original centers of P.C. and ecofascism in the US were universities in Greater New England; and those areas are still the strongholds. There has always been this difference between the Left in the Anglosphere and the Left in most of the rest of the world. The Continental leftists have always been pure ideologues, and often openly amoralistic. Moral arguments were derided as "bourgeoise sentiment". Anglosphere leftism has always had a strong moral content and correlates with dissenting and Calvinist religions, both in the US and UK. Think back to the Chartists. There's a straight line from the Protestant radicals of the English Civil War, through the Chartists and the early labor movement, which was moralist, not Marxist, through much of the Labour Party. Even when they were atheists, they were evangelical atheists (in the sense of the Belfast joke about "are you a protestant atheist or a catholic atheist?") True Marxists in the Anglosphere were mostly confined to a small gang of intellectuals (Orwell's "pansy mob") and foreign immigrants. After Clause Four was abandoned, the Anglosphere Left has been going straight back to its moralist and religious-radical roots. (That's why Tony and Hillary got along so well; They're both from the same religious background.) Incidentally, there is a paranoid streak in UK politics, that is the exact parallel of the paranoid streak in US politics, and it is embedded in the "loony left" of the Labour Party, which has believed one or another set of absurd conspiracy theories for almost all of its life, like the idea that the US is in Afghanistan because it needs it for a pipeline. Remember Orwell's remark that "to believe such a stupid thing you would have to be an intellectual?" The "stupid thing" was the paranoid theory that US troops had been sent to England during WWII to prevent an English worker's revolution.

Australia was settled late enough that the religious-radical strain had already mutated into political labor radicalism before it was transplanted. So you guys got it without all the religious trappings we still have here.

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Posted by John Ray

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