Golden age of liberty?

I was fascinated by this piece by Rafael Behr in the Observer today; he argues that we are freer now than we have ever been, because taboos about personal behaviour have disappeared.  Behr regards this as much more significant than the fact that, in Britain at least, the level of surveillance has in the past few years increased hugely and the right to dissent has been curtailed.

I think what angered me about the place was its complacency; it’s very much the sort of thing that a relatively affluent media worker, engaged with the popular cultural zeitgeist, might write – a Pangloss for the twenty-first century.

So what’s the problem?

Behr’s analysis is entirely self-regarding and individualist; there’s no sense of the collective.  It’s a very market-driven, post-modern view of freedom; in the end he reduces the liberal critique to a fear of being ignored, the mentality of the toddler crying me, me, me.  And it comes dangerously close to the old policeman’s adage,”the innocent have nothing to fear.”  Try that one on the Guildford Four.

In many ways, Behr needs to get out more.  To Kingsnorth, perhaps,  where police used anti-stalking legislation to confiscate soap and clown costumes from peaceful environmental protestors, while making totally fraudulent claims about being victims of violence themselves.  Or to Britain’s borders, where it seems that increasingly intrusive checks are about to be introduced for travellers.

The inconsistencies in Behr’s analysis are made startlingly clear in this paragraph:

How much more freedom could we possibly have? Or, for that matter, how much more privacy? Our neighbours don’t grass on us, they don’t even know our names. You may feature somewhere as a number in a government database; you used to appear on carbon-paper duplicates in government filing cabinets. Before that, your ancestors were scratchily transcribed entries in leather-bound ledgers. So what? No one in government gives a monkey’s who you are or what you’re thinking. Whitehall knows less about you than Tesco. The Home Office holds the same data on you as you gave to Ryanair last time you booked a flight.

If it’s gathered by commercial organisations, Behr hints, it’s OK.  But what gets done with this information?  At what point, crucially, do the commercial interests of business and the political interests of Governments coincide?  And if Behr really understood the debate about personal data, he’d know that the real question is less that of what information is held by individual organisations, but what happens when that data is merged and mined.  Much of this information is held by private companies because legislation requires it.

Behr needs to understand that information is power; and that in an age when political dissent is bound up with the collapse of the economic and social assumptions that underpin the diminishing political space in which mainstream debate is undertaken in Western democracies, the risk that the information will be abused is growing.  The abuse is particularly clear when we see how legislation created for one purposeis  being used for another; legislation about stalking is used to stop peaceful protests.

And, above all, Behr fails to understand that one of the reasons why the personal taboos he mentions have gone in some societies – in secular Western democracies – is because they are no longer relevant to the maintenance of power.  Look at the culture wars in the US; the debates about gay marriage and abortion are still alive, and are about who wields power over whom.   In a week when an Afghan student journalist is imprisoned  for twenty years for downloading feminist literature from the internet, Behr’s view of this as a golden age of liberty looks particularly sick.

It’s an old truism that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  Perhaps the lesson of this piece is that it’s too precious to be entrusted to zeitgeist-toting journalists.

The resistible return of Ayn Rand

It’s been fascinating to read that the writings of Ayn Rand - in particular her dystopic novel Atlas Shrugged - are gaining currency again.  Celebrities queue up to be numbered among her admirers.   In many ways, of course, she’s never been away; she’s one of the great influences on neocon ideology, and it’s well known that Alan Greenspan was among her most influential cheerleaders, although no academic philosopher takes her work remotely seriously. But it’s widely reported that as the world sinks into economic depression, sales of her books are booming.

Atlas Shrugged is about individualism, and sets out the Rand philosophy most fully.  It describes a society in which the “men of the mind” – really a euphemism for entrepreneurs – withdraw from a society which is intent on bleeding them dry with regulations and taxes into their own mountain fastness.  The world descends into a mire of war and bureaucracy, until those same bureaucrats beg the entrepreneurs’ leader to bring them back out of exile.

So, what’s the appeal?

One explanation is that there is a similarity to what is happening today, with vast handouts to failed bankers at the expense of the prudent.  And there’s always been a tendency for the Right in the United States to hitch itself to any ideology which legitimises the refusal to pay taxes and condemns public altruism.   This is a body of work which is uniquely useful to anyone who wants to legitimise private greed and avoid any guilt about those whom society leaves behind.

But I think the issue goes a bit deeper than that.  One of the really interesting things about this work becoming more popular now is that what is happened in the real world is the complete antithesis of what Rand predicted.  The current crisis is above all the creation of the “men of the mind” who have increasingly been let of the leash; who have pursued their version of entrepreneurship without the petty burden of regulation, in an environment in which the ruling ideology has been that their enrichment of themselves has been beneficial to society.  Rational self-interest on Rand’s model has proved to be irrational and destructive.

So where does this leave us?  I think Atlas Shrugged is the security blanket of the neocons, a desperate attempt to find some vestige of legitimacy amid the chaos they have created.  The renaissance of Ayn Rand is a spasm of deluded resistance.

Privatisation and death rates

Here’s an interesting piece from The Times that reports on some fascinating research about the impact of mass privatisation in Russia following the collapse of Communism.

A recent piece in the Lancet by David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee suggests that the rapid privatisation in a number of former Soviet and Eastern European states coincides with a spike in the death-rate of 18%. They suggest that the link between the two is unemployment, whose link to both stress and ill-health in a general sense and self-destructive behaviours like binge drinking is well-chronicled.

The report has caused a real storm, it appears.  In particular, it has brought forth a robust response from Jeffrey Sachs, the principal proponent of “shock therapy” to bring about irreversible capitalism in countries moving away from command economies.  But as the Times article says, the science looks pretty sound and the conclusion that key support networks risk being swept away in the name of economics is logical.

But most chilling is the fact that privatisation is only one type of economic shock. The toll of the extreme failure of market economics we are facing now could, on that basis, be a lot more than financial.