Horizon

Look at Tony and Cherie and the thousands like them who make up the political classes and soft-left elite that run Britain: Mandelson, Birt, fiddling lawyers, blue sky thinkers, cultural commissars, old time Trots and anti-family Feminists fringe gender politics loons decked out in beardless, business-suited carriage to fool the ordinary people etc: yuck. And every one of them filthy rich. More yuck, in fact, that the deeply yucky Thatcherites who set the game up for them- at least you knew their narrow range of interests- or as my old granny used to say: better the devil you know...

Martha, would you mind posting your comment inline? Like most haloscan comments, I'm not having any luck at all getting it to load.

Regarding the screed itself, I think it has something to do with people's political aesthetics. Every Republican visualizes himself to be a small businesman or a homesteader. There's a value placed on achievement in such a model, and in fact wealth is sometimes re-interpreted to have arisen through the kind of hard work, frugality and dogged independence that is implicit in the myth.

I have little idea what Democrats visualize themselves to be. In a very small sample set of party activists I know, they tend to visualize some Other (the Poor, etc) whom their political narrative revolves around. Rather than an idealized version of themselves, they use an idealized version of someone else, seeing their own (successful) experience as inapplicable.

Both of my generalizations are drawn from a pretty small sample, though.

If you can call up the haloscan comment sequence over there, my comment is easy to find by text search. It's the only one using the word 'solidarity.' Basically I said that while I don't mind having and getting money, I recognize this in myself as a personal weakness, not a virtue, and that left and liberal people are right to be skeptical of money because it separates people from each other. The idea of solidarity is, after all, what gives the left its claim to moral authority. Isn't it?

I finally got your comment loaded (from a different computer).

Tell me, do you practice mortification of the flesh as well?

No. It was mortification of the career in my case, and I got fed up with that. The likes of Dorothy Day can live poor and do direct service work all their lives and always maintain the sense that they can afford to share what they have. They're the heroes.

I actually wasn't reacting to your self-flagellation over doing paid work, but rather to the viewpoint behind describing payment as a weakness:

Distrust of money is a necessary aspect of left and liberal value systems because they treat empathy as a virtue. If a conservative credo is "a rising tide lifts all boats," a socialist one (liberal I'm not sure of) could be phrased as "we are all in the same boat." As anyone with some life experience can testify, fellow-feeling between people becomes more difficult to maintain with each increase in the economic differences between them. When you begin to have ten or twenty times as much money as your neighbor, you can't talk freely with your neighbor about as many subjects -- it just doesn't feel polite.

Money, in other words, is a barrier to human solidarity. That's why it bothers people who believe in human solidarity.

This seems to me to be a near-monastic ascetic ideal, which was what motivated my comment. It also seems to be wholly decoupled from the effect one would expect your politics to motivate you to work for: rather than judging yourself by your effectiveness at helping people, it seems like you're judging yoruself by your remuneration. Under such a metric, a struggling personal injury attorney is more virtuous than a partner at a large firm who spends a fifth of their time on pro bono cases.

And all this motivated by a sense of solidarity. Do you blind yourself because of a lack of sufficient solidarity with the blind? It's a shame that most people aren't paid well, and do not enjoy their jobs. But should I resign a job I love out of solidarity?

The irony is that it's entirely possible that by demanding payment for your legal work, you're actually increasing the amount of good you can do. I don't know the specifics of your situation, but from what I've observed working with non-profits, it's often as much in the client's interest as yours to charge for your time. It forces the client to take their problem much more seriously, focusing them on it and helping you help them more. When you have multiple clients competing for your help, charging often weeds out the ones who just want to talk, so that you can deal with ones that have real problems that need your help. Surely you've observed something similar.

Michael Harrington once said, "There's nothing wrong with the good things in life. The problem is the way they're distributed." Which is facile, but gets at some kind of truth.

And every one of them filthy rich.

Robbie, what would you make of the notion that leftwing politics in the UK is a form of what Veblen called "conspicuous leisure"?

Practicing law is something I do less and less personally. But the pro-pro-bono argument is one that's pretty troublesome. So, what, you spend four-fifths of your time being part of the problem and one-fifth of it trying to do good? It's like those medieval robber barons endowing cathedrals or almshouses: doesn't add up in the Big Book.

So, what, you spend four-fifths of your time being part of the problem and one-fifth of it trying to do good?

You're assuming that any practice of law that isn't pro bono is "part of the problem." There's a big difference between filing parasitical patents and just doing people's wills. At worst, the latter is a morally neutral activity — though many free marketeers would argue that a consensual exchange which both parties are satisifed with is socially beneficial wealth-creation and therefore moral — a category I'm not altogether sure some of the commenters believe in.

Perhaps you misunderstood my comparison, as I intended the struggling PI lawyer to be an example of someone doing morally neutral work all day, and the firm lawyer to be doing morally neutral work 80% of the time. It occurs to me now that that might not have come across.

'Robbie, what would you make of the notion that leftwing politics in the UK is a form of what Veblen called "conspicuous leisure"?'

Yes, if you think the MPs, the govt commissars, the civil service paper shufflers; the people that write the whirly-hat stuff in the Guardian; the quangos; the pedantic, England-hating academics; the focus groups; the spin doctors; the self-righteous and badly informed pop stars; the partial TV news editors and their mouthpieces (BBC London News should really be called BBC Ken Livingstone); yes, if you see all of those people as having the worst kind of upper middle class Che Geuvara-on-the-wall-at-uni-de haut en bas-chomsky/monbiot-under-yer-arm crusading ignorance which is industry standard in media and law in the UK and the fact that they are all paid very, very well for their parasitical 'professions', then indeed, conspicuous leisure does dandily.

Perhaps you misunderstood my comparison, as I intended the struggling PI lawyer to be an example of someone doing morally neutral work all day, and the firm lawyer to be doing morally neutral work 80% of the time. It occurs to me now that that might not have come across.

Ah. Whereas I understood the struggling PI lawyer to be doing mildly useful work all day on behalf of little people and the firm lawyer to be doing work all day on behalf of the big guys that would have a strong chance of being flatly bad.

Cliches, in other words?

Erm, was the cliché comment directed at me or Martha?

Martha, I've been thinking about this "solidarity" notion you wrote about a bit more. It strikes me that in addition to not measuring yourself on your effect or effort, it also may actually be partially counterproductive at maintaining your "fellow-feeling between people"

The reason is that if this solidarity business encourages you to spend time and effort avoiding remuneration, you're spending your time in a radically different pursuit than most poor people. Your perspective on the conditions people live in may be enhanced at the expense of your perspective on their goals and efforts. That, or you limit your sympathies to only those who both are poor and are trying to remain so, a group I suspect is tiny indeed, but which could rapidly become overrepresented in your worldview.

It seems that your political opponents do the opposite — they understand the desire for self-betterment and remunerative work and play to that without addressing people's present conditons. And that seems a more successful strategy, though I suspect that a perspective that addressed both might beat that.

As a practical personal matter I want better-paid work and I'm trying to find it. I just don't see how that's a virtue. One is supposed to give one's possessions to the poor, walk the extra mile, observe the Golden Rule, etc. etc. Consoling one's fellow beings by being an equally fallible fellow greedhead isn't an imperative glorified by any durable ethical system. And I hardly think that's an exclusively liberal or secular idea. Do these famously faith-based Republicans read their Bibles or just thump on them?

Well there's a big difference between lamenting that your career change is going to mean less time helping people — a noble sentiment that I don't doubt you feel — and lamenting that your career change will provide you with more wealth which might impair your ability to feel or express "solidarity", which is what you actually wrote.

I'm sure that different traditions interpret Jesus's advice to the rich young ruler differently, but it's hard for me to see that the not having wealth part is more important than the giving riches to the poor part, except on some ascetic spiritual plane. If I were poor, I suspect that I'd view a greedhead who fed and clothed me as a better neighbor than someone who showed solidarity with me by attempting to match my standard of living.

To get away from the entirely private personal dimension, what kind of society has legislators who never take the bus making decisions about public transportation? And as for religious imperatives, I'm not talking about one chapter in the New Testament, I'm talking about all the traditions.

When Lord Curzon got on a bus for the first time in his life he is supposed to have instructed the driver to take him home by the quickest available route.

what kind of society has legislators who never take the bus making decisions about public transportation

That's a means, not an end.

Sorry, wot's a means, not an end? (And did you mean to use i's instead of a's in the tags above?)

Do you mean it's not a worthy goal in itself to have leaders who live like normal people? Isn't the case for that moral as well as practical?

Good call on a the anchor tags.

My point is that living like the poor is socially virtuous insofar as it informs you about the needs of the poor. You've been making the argument that living like the poor is virtuous in itself, and your original comment seemed to make a pretty strong statement that such an ascetic choice was actually a superior end in itself.

I'm not talking about one chapter in the New Testament

Fair enough, but I was reacting to "One is supposed to give one's possessions to the poor". Is the important result of this the poor's improvement or your own destitution? All this "solidarity" stuff seemed to be pointing towards the latter.

Do you mean it's not a worthy goal in itself to have leaders who live like normal people?

That is precisely what I mean. All other things being equal, as a matter of aesthetics I'd prefer leaders to act like normal people. But I think we should agree that a leader's policies are far, far, far more important than their lifestyle.

If it's a worthy goal in itself, then I ought to count the folksy image that comes from driving dignitaries around your ranch in a pickup as equal to — say — working to repeal the estate tax in my overall evaluation of a leader. I'm certain that other people do — in fact I suspect that I still factor that in, like it or not.

I'm sure that my definition of "living like normal people" is different from yours, based on my background. But I hope you see my point.

Re: the pickup truck, if you mean Mr. Bush, he's a fine example of a leader not living like normal people. Prep school, Kennebunkport, Yale, Harvard Business School, influential introductions to every one of his business enterprises... If he emphasizes his sobriety it may be because it's the only thing he ever achieved entirely for himself, by himself. That pickup truck is window dressing. On the other hand, if he could appreciate the number of misfortunes that afflict people purely through accident of birth, then if you ask me he might feel more kindly toward the estate tax.

About living modestly as a goal in itself: well, I like that one of Joe Fineman's tag lines where he says that when you waste your own money you are wasting somebody else's work. Think about that in terms of, say, hotel room service, and you'll see how it makes sense.

But I have trouble figuring out what status in life *is* OK with liberal-baiters anyhow. I mean, when people who believe in social services have and keep money they get hated as callous hypocritical limousine liberals. When people who believe in social services don't have money they get hated as welfare queens or as ideologues motivated by jealousy. When people who believe in social services give up money and practice voluntary poverty, they get hated as self-regarding inauthentic slummers. What's left?

Re the buses:

Livingstone makes a big fuss of going on public transport in London and it's still sh*t. He's abolished the routemasters which were functioning perfectly well and introduced bendy buses which explode and and you can't hop on and off of. His argument is that the routemasters discriminated against the disabled- classic bit of socialistic high handedness: don't institute a number of buses comensurate with the numbers of disabled users; no, trash the whole system that worked ok for the majority and waste a fortune on things that don't work properly.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: our American lefty friends remind me of me and all my friends back when the post consensus economic Right ran England. How we wailed for the opposite and what do we find? It's no better, and is in many ways a bloody sight worse. Could Maggie have robbed the old age pensioners of five billion quid, as Comrade Brown has, and got away with it in the dominant media? No, exactly. But Comrade Brown has.
So, careful what you wish for. But getting back to the argument: the doctrinaire lefty believes we should all be poor, and while I detest the cronie-ism and old-boy network that Bush represents, I'm not stupid enough to believe that it doesn't exist everywhere, at every level. 'Everyone' being poor for the common good has been tried out a few times- we don't even need to discuss that, do we?
I think your term 'liberal-baiters' is very typical and evasive- the usual lefty trick of removing validation from objection via damning political language.
Your comments about positions on social services is interesting because it doesn't give a measure on social services and what they should be. I believe in having a welfare state: dole, national health service etc. But it has long surpassed those goals into something quite ludicrous and damaging. See for example the Muslim clerics who have lived here for many years on massive handouts (object to 'massive'? Thirty grand a year plus a car is pretty big) to which they are not entitled and spend all their days vilifying the culture and civilisation that gave them this opportunity for free housing and imflammatory leisure activities. Examples can be provided for the pedantic infracaninophiliacs.
But the above would be dismissed as a rant- because it lasts longer than a paragraph and the majority of people here would instinctively disagree with it.
The position to be in I think, if this doesn't sound too pompous, is to try and be decent, to listen and understand, and too evaulate and not ignore nature and experience in favour of one's own pet abstract theory. But even so, each person has to look to solving their own problems- nobody, I *hope* is going to start spitting the words Ayn Rand at this simple observation.
I look at my own life and think: what could the state have done to avoid me experiencing some of the troubles I've had and the answer is: not much. The education system dreamed up by the wanky left was such a broken-down mediocre system-as I experienced it anyway-and I don't for a minute believe that if they'd shut Eton and Harrow et al and diverted funds it would have got any better; no, it would be pretty much as it is now: the left wing middle classes (especially those in the Labour Party) scrabbling to get their kids into a comprehensive school that isn't a shithole, and topping up on private tuition on the quiet. Diane Abbott however, Labour Left Winger for Hackney didn't worry about that; she sent her son to private school straight off.
Conclusion: when someone gives me a CD I don't always take care of it as much as I should; when I buy one for ten quid, I make sure it goes back in the case.

That pickup truck is window dressing.

Which only underlines the point that it's not "a worthy goal in itself to have leaders who live like normal people". Among other things, it's notoriously subject to manipulation. I have no doubt that you'd be just as susceptible to fall for a candidate who rang your "ordinary people" bells — say by sleeping in a cot in his office — and to look just a bit less critically at the rest of his plaform.

About living modestly as a goal in itself

That's not what we're discussing at all. Your original comment advocated living like the poor to feel or show solidarity — a far cry from "living modestly", to which justus et dignus est . You've equivocated that position into several different more reasonable ones without ever actually defending it, abandoning it, or correcting my understanding of your point. As a result, we end up talking past each other and agreeing violently. But you still haven't sold me on "solidarity".

His argument is that the routemasters discriminated against the disabled

Robbie, you almost spurred me to launch into my rant about the plague of multiple wheelchair-accessible urinals unleashed upon American manhood by the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act by lazy and cheap builders.

and not ignore nature and experience in favour of one's own pet abstract theory

Did you ever read the First Things article on Orwell I posted about a while back? It talks about that for quite a while.

Hmm. That should have been "dignum et justum est". Oh, well.

the doctrinaire lefty believes we should all be poor

I tend to see this in mushier forms — the sort of political arguments you get into with people who read exactly four books a year.

Tell me, do you think the levelling impulse is related to the iconoclastic impulse? I remember your having a spot of that a while back.

OK, getting back to poverty as means to solidarity: I've just drafted several examples but they all go back to the basic principle that "where you stand depends on where you sit."

Maybe it helps further to note that the less you insulate yourself in a privately purchased space, the more you're stuck in public space -- and hence the more reason you have to cooperate with your neighbors to improve the common resources. And, yeah, often suffering does not ennoble and often the actual effect of poverty is to make people feel they have a right to behave selfishly. But then some rich people are jerks too. And when people do manage to stay decent while actually depending on the use of public spaces and services -- well, at least they'll know what it is that needs fixing, which is more than a rich philanthropist generally does.

An example of a poverty hero here.

'I tend to see this in mushier forms — the sort of political arguments you get into with people who read exactly four books a year.'

You can sometimes learn a lot from those sort of people around this argument. At least Martha's having the conversation--with you anyway; I mean this is central to the whole thing but where's other lefties on here talking about it?

'Maybe it helps further to note that the less you insulate yourself in a privately purchased space, the more you're stuck in public space -- and hence the more reason you have to cooperate with your neighbors to improve the common resources.'

I'm, sorry, but You really need to do some field trips outside of Jefferson Airplane's hometown...

'But then some rich people are jerks too.'

So, two wrongs make a right, even though bad behaviour in a run a down place will affect *other* poor people?
One of the things I enjoy about the doctrinaire left of today is the game played with morality. They spend all their time dancing on the grave of morality (sliding rule, mate; just a big gimmick, man, played on the po'; you break the law in one little way and bingo, you as bad a rapist- 'welcome, criminals, to criminal law' and all that crap) but the next minute, they're giving it the big one about guess what? That's right MORALITY- some morality remains, as long as they're calling the shots. The *old* morality is questionable and **cked up, but the new is absolute.
This is the new thinking: everything's dead: morality, family, religion, blah blah blah; just when one's getting used to this new hip Polly Toynbee nihilism, they suddenly launch into delivering damning verdicts straight from their own little red book of moral analects. It's laughable.

The Golden Rule is hardly a recent invention.