… to be honest, ‘blood and soil’ is such a dismal, choking thing when taken in too strong a dose compared to the attractions of globalised cosmopolitanism.  The wonderful thing about modern ‘identity’ is that you can make it for yourself and rather than having it forced upon you by the people around you.  No, be[ing] a cosmopolitan is not to be less than whole, it is to be British (or American or French or Chinese) .... but not just British (or American or French or Chinese) if that is what you want.  It allows you to be you and to wrap yourself up in the bits of ‘your’ culture which work for you and to say ‘screw it’ to the rest. That is irresistible.

Freedom is not belonging… you can get that at a football match. Freedom is ... well, freedom.

These auto-intoxicating words of Samizdata illuminati and liberty-tripper, Perry de Havilland, were passed down to me from on “high” during a debate on what is now an ancient and very much pre-MR thread at his blog.  For anyone who still doesn’t know, Samizdata is a famously critical-rationalist (ie, Popperian) blog, and is right-wing Britain’s most-hit (by us!).

As was my practise at the time of that quote, I always acted with caution, giving Poppergun Perry no excuse to ban me.  Later it transpired that no excuse was necessary.  But that’s another story.

Now, following our disgracefully enjoyable examination of all these critical-rationalists’ emotional lives, organised so ably for us by Alex, I want to take a moment to reflect on the strange hatreds and glaring weaknesses of these desperately bitchy, cosmopolitan housewives.

One might expect a reasonably-minded right-liberal to agree with the idea that he is most demonstrably NOT sovereign in his own life.  Not yet … not today.  Tomorrow perhaps, if the perquisite vigour and wisdom can be found for this fabulously mysterious task.

One might, then, expect our aspirant right-liberal to be naturally cautious in his understanding of the human mind, to reserve many judgements, to be prepared to learn.  After all, the getting of freedom for the human spirit is the greatest of all quests and has attracted to itself the greatest of all saints and secular thinkers.  It must be approached in some humility and in the expectation of a long, tortuous and uncertain struggle against whatever darkness rules the day.

But all this is to misunderstand right-liberalism as she is spoke at Samizdata.  “I want it now” doesn’t begin to describe the superfice.  It is, to anyone with a grasp of 21st century social issues in the West, quite stunning.  In their company (and I exclude from this the substantial David Carr and the shaggy but wise Brian Micklethwaite) one feels like a 19th century Christian divine revealing God’s Word to a somewhat impetuous, nose-boned Mbanga big-shot and his thirteen busy wives.  Explaining the ways of the world to the N’Samizdata tribe is, indeed, missionary work.

Suspicions of mean Samizdatista IQ aside, what is one to make of their touchingly simple faith in the power of chicken bones – free will - to make life come out right?  These are people who have dined on Pops and that impossibly self-interested woman.  They have eaten the philosopher-king and queen’s flesh and, according to tradition, will now be imbued with implacable courage in fighting such dangerous if hoary old “isms” as determinism and historicism, authoritarianism and totalitarianism and, of course, at one scandalous remove, nationalism.

It is nationalism that really gets their ire up.  But from the philosophical perspective it is really Popper’s objections to the others that they throw at us.  So I will spend a sketchy moment or two thumbnailing these things - not to do them or Popper justice particularly, but just to cover that base.

The first two of these ideas are connected.  In very simple terms, determinism is a notion of causality that asserts that our outcomes are contained in us or in our past, and that we cannot do or be anything that is not granted by some or other intrinsic quality or past fact.  In absolute, determinism prescribes all events and circumscribes all human potential.  Historicism has been a widely used philosophical concept and is consequently less particularised.  It tends to operate rather quietly as a philosophical underpinning.  Thus both Spengler’s cultural pessimism and the inevitability of Marxism-Leninism are predicated upon it.  It holds that the past is an organic and therefore structured development.  It has predictive potential, and the more local or defined its path the more prescriptive that becomes.

These ideas describe Man as an involuntary agency.  Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism describe the forms of government upon which such an agency needs must rely.  Today any of us can say they are anti-human.  But Popper was formulating his philosophy as the tide of Marxism-Leninism was running across old Europe.  He was completely and properly antipathetic to its vision of hopelessness, of Man crushed beneath the great machine of state.  He published his first treatise on science in 1934 and wrote his two-volume, political magnum opus, The Open Society and Its Enemies during WW2.

In it, as we know, he championed liberal democracy.  He traced his “open society” back to Athenian democracy and its spirit to Socrates.  The Marxist-Leninist state machine he traced back to Aristotle, along with the equally despised thought of Marx’s mentor, Hegel.  Aristotle’s mentor, Plato, was blamed for the totalitarianism of the Nazi state, no less – a product of a claimed Platonic fear and rejection of liberal Athens.

The strong lines with which Popper drew look perfectly out of place today.  Totalitarianism is soft and it is liberal.  Still, in those momentous times liberalism was no bad bet.  Popper was a Jew, and rationalist thought had provided a safe and largely non-Christian theatre for secular Jewish thinkers since Spinoza (who was called both the “greatest Jew” and “greatest Atheist”).

It is interesting that Popper predicated European nationalism upon fear and rejection of “coming” liberalism, painting it as a violently irrational spasm somewhat echoed in Adorno’s completely repulsive The Authoritarian Personality.  TAP was published in 1950, four years after Popper’s “Open Society”.

Nationalism must have looked like a particularly bad option at that time, and not just to Jews.  The old, Herderesque romantic nationalism of the 19th century, which had arisen in response to 1789, was dead and buried in the mud of the Somme.  Its more radical and virulent replacement was dead, too, and demonised everywhere as the greatest and most criminal venture in human history.

But liberalism had gained a small, new outpost of analytic philosophy. 

All of which brings us to the strange and rather left-seeming mentation of our individualist-rationalist-cosmopolitans at Samizdata.

It is not easy to account for the outright and utterly unphilosophical hatred of Johnathan Pearce and Perry de Havilland, or the canon fodder that comments there.  They themselves can’t account for it satisfactorily.  Johnathan told some provocative, race-realist swine commenting as sj (and once as sr when I did a dumb typo – sorry Søren) that he can’t maintain a cool head when confronted with things he sees as evil.  This, of course, makes teasing Johnathan even more fun, a fact he never cottoned on to until I began to pick a few small holes in the Holocaust narrative and the infallibility of Pope Popper!  That brought a deletion, finally.  But I can’t complain.  It was a shot to nothing and I had a lot of fun.

My plaints about the verbal violence, though, were genuine.  One expects Jews to go all haywire when a half-dozen Nazi-Facist-Racist-Anti-Semites come flying at them out of the virtual woodwork, and no doubt some of the commenters were Jewish And Extremely Upset.  But I really wonder whether the levels of critical-rational enthusiasm are so steepling at Samizdata that simply no affront to choice can be afforded.  Unchosen Chosen-ness ist verboten, alongside sj’s Englishness and Søren‘s pet mouse’s mouseness.

Are they that fanatical?  I don’t know.  I just don’t get it.  How do these idiots get so all riled up by a little harmless ethnic particularism?  It isn’t 1946 still.

The other fun discovery was the miserable intellectual performance put up by the home side.  After the insults were distributed around all we got was “deny, deny, deny”.  No lead in the pencil at all.

There is quite a bit of movement evident in this, in fact.  Back in 2003, when I commented serially at Samizdata as a persistent race-realist and social conservative, Perry and Co made sporadic but determined efforts to disprove my annoying Rushtonianism and Proto-Genome Theory.

Perry himself, along with Irish architect and race-denier Frank McGahon, even took themselves off to GNXP to lecture Razib and gc.  They don’t do that anymore.  The ground has been ceded.  Science is now “followed” and is “of interest”.  But they still like to believe that blacks are just the same as whites, really.  After all, the evidence for difference can’t matter as much as the evils of quoting it.  We, having the agenda of saving the West from racial destruction, necessarily quote in bad faith.  Bloody good faith from where I stand.  But bad from the libertarian nutjob standpoint.

I can’t close without extending my consolations to enemy commenter

Euan

Ewan

Eawn

Yawn Gray who courageously announced on the thread his union with a damsel of West African descent.  He had been busily denying every salient feature of black sociobiology for no reason that I could discern, and getting quite upset by any advancement of our ethnic interests.  Having betrayed just how committed to cosmopolitanism he is, he upped the outrage tenfold when I told him that as a result his own ethnic interests were in conflict with ours, and nothing he said on the latter could now be taken seriously.

Was I too harsh?  Well, yyyy … no.  It’s not as if I told him he had made a horizontal mistake.  People fall in love and all that.  But in the aggregate it’s a different matter, and for us this was largely a

conversation

bitch-fight about aggregates.

The one issue I did not have the opportunity to broach was libertarian individualism: the magical and formative power of choice on identity, as explained by Perry in the lead-in to this article.  For a middle-aged man like de Havilland to still believe in this paper-thin myth of liberal self-authorship speaks of an irreparable lightness of being.  It is another gaping chink in the Popperian armour.

Alas we didn’t catch a clear sight of that, which is why I thought I would quote it here.  No, all we got to see was his hypocritical censoriousness.  Samizdata is Perry’s perfect world of freedom.  But don’t disagree with him.  Don’t disprove his favourite theories.  Don’t test the boundaries.  That old trigger digit is just too itchy.  Or is that scratchy?