A lot of the discussion I’ve seen about Muslim immigration to Europe as much involves the anti-multiculturalist crowd (from reasonable voices to shrill doomsayers) as it does the problems on the ground, which are quite real. Usually, it’s the politically, economically, and socially conservative who have been the most vocal, lamenting the hold on public opinion and sentiment such a problematic set of ideas has had. Of course, Caldwell goes a little deeper than that, and of course so do the problems and conflicts that can result.
A few quotes:
“The most chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell’s book may be that the debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic”
Remember the Dutch cartoonists? Some of them were perhaps irresponsible,even inflammatory, but that was probably no less a time to offer up a reasonable and principled liberal defense of their right to publish.
Also:
“For Mr. Caldwell, the fundamental issue is also, more centrally, about irrevocable societal transformation.”
Is it irrevocable? Is the idea of democratic liberalism incompatible with Islam?
If you’ve read the book, please share your thoughts.
Theodore Dalrymple argues that France has the potential to handle Muslim immigration better because of its ideological rigidity, which can better meet the ideological rigidity of its Muslim immigrants…Theodore Dalrymple Still Attacking Multi-Culturalism In Britain
“Still, these calculations suggest that America should hesitate without additional evidence of the type I have used before jumping on the European bandwagon, and conducting radical surgery on the American health care delivery system.”
Genuine problem + politics + ideology= a solution? a compromise?
The moral idealism of the ecologically inclined (the earth must be saved at all costs, for all of our sakes) will continue to meet the political and economic realities of the developing world…
“…the world has far more immediate and scarier problems than climate change to address right now.”
Atul Gawande has a New Yorker piece, in which he suggets the Mayo Clinic might be a good model to begin addressing health-care costs and doctor incentives. The Obama administration cited the Mayo Clinic too, as a model, but the Clinic isn’t too impressed with the bill:
“In general, the proposals under discussion are not patient focused or results oriented. Lawmakers have failed to use a fundamental lever – a change in Medicare payment policy – to help drive necessary improvements in American health care.”
Ouch.
Early June summary of the bill on Keith Hennessy’s site, specifics here.
I wanted to focus a little on how Berlin discusses Kant’s influence, and how it may affect liberalism and classical liberalism, especially in the Anglo-American tradition.
Positive liberty for Berlin involves action, and what one must do to protect his/her own freedom, in part, from one’s own self and the passions. Yet, also, like the hard-hearted Stoics in ancient Rome or the Christian or Buddhist aesthetic, positive liberty can involve what one must do to withdraw from the world around one’s self, and the injustices of a tyrant or the tyranny of the many. Philosophers and deep thinkers are often doing this, building structures in the shadows which live long after them.
I should mention, however, that after Kant, it is no longer possible to prove the existence of God, so a transcendent being is replaced with what one must do to exercise the use of one’s own reason, and presumably, discover reality, or the phenomenal reality one can discover beyond Kant’s complex metaphysical framework.
Negative liberty for Berlin, on the other hand, is freedom from coercion, much like the Lockean ideas of Life and Liberty.
“I am usually said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity.”
It is what many here in the West often mean by freedom. This kind of freedom, when you think about it, is a kind of rarity, even in Europe, as this past century was a bloody one:
“Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a philosopher’s study could destroy a civilization. He spoke of Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason as the sword with which German deism had been decapitated, and described the works of Rousseau as the blood-stained weapon which, in the hands of Robespierre, had destroyed the old regime; and prophesied that the Romantic faith of Fichte and Schelling would one day be turned, with terrible effect, by their fanatical German followers, against the liberal culture of the West.“
“…The facts have not wholly belied this prediction…”
Personally, I thought Nietzsche thought he had found the solution to Kant’s statement of the problem: the uberman, or someone who will creatively, and through a supreme act of the will, make new values for mankind now that God is dead. As Berlin points out, this is strangely similar to what one imagines a tyrant might think gazing out at those over whom he rules.
It’s probably too obvious to identify Kant merely as “German,” and thus alien to a kind of liberalism we (and yes the French, the French Republic is still going strong) enjoy.
Berlin sees the potential for dangerous perfectionism in Kant perhaps, but especially what came after Kant’s thought, and identifies it largely as a form “positive” liberty, and also identifies some of the political/philosophical consequences, one obvious path being through Hegel, Schelling and Fichte:
“Let me state them (sic, the premises) once more: first, that all men have one true purpose, and one-only, that of rational self-direction; second, that the ends of all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern, which some men may be able to discern more clearly than others; third, that all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational-the immature and undeveloped elements in life, whether individual or communal…finally, that when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free.”
Such thinkers tried to implement and systematize Kant’s thought and post-Kantian thought into something that became and still becomes an eventual threat to negative liberty. Reason eventually became and becomes used like a blunt instrument for the actors in such systems. It granted license to the creation of institutions who in a sense, “know better” than individuals what is best for them. This, of course, has given way to monstrous totalitariansim, corruption, and the horrors of Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China etc. Some would argue a kind of Kantian prosthetic Christian moralism has dominated.
Yet, as for the tension between positive and negative liberty, Berlin makes an argument similar to the one which Karl Popper made (as Austria and the Continent descended into a second world war): freedom and equality are in constant tension, and not necessarily compatible with one another,which is an idea which we in America can witness in our politics daily:
“Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or justice or fairness or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If liberty of myself or my class or my nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral. but if I curtail or lose my freedom in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs.”
Out of this, Berlin thought that his defense of classical liberalism, (John Rawls was a friend of his), which has come to be called value pluralism, is his most important work:
“Pluralism, with the measure of negative liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more human ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures, the ideal of positive self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognise that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with each other.”
A Russian/Latvian…a romantic…an idealist…a Kantian…A Classical Liberal…An Historian Of ideas…coming to terms with Western liberalism? providing an effective defense of it?
Your thoughts and comments are welcome.
Update: Berlin may not really take sides on the positive/negative divide, or perhaps we should say: If you are inclined to seek a more favorable view of the negative view, as I am, that Berlin offers much to recommend it. However, he doesn’t really come down entirely in favor of the negative view. Negative liberty is being left alone (i.e. not being enslaved physically and/or economically), positive liberty is should you have/gain your freedom, the possibility of acting freely towards your purposes as an individual (those purposes just may not be the dangerous ideological/rational purposes found within much Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought and doctrine).
There is a very strong Romantic/Enlightenment tension within Berlin’s thought.
Negative liberty has tremendous advantages, and Berlin took something of a stand against some Communists at Oxford during his time there. However, there may be some problems with the moral claims to this is a good model for liberalism long-term:
‘Now, I do not regard Berlin’s value pluralism as objectionable or even as wrong, except to the extend that it is irrelevant to the MORAL issue and so proves nothing for or against liberalism. Liberalism will indeed recommend itself if one wishes to have a regime that will respect, within limits, a value pluralism. I have no doubt that respecting a considerable value pluralism in society is a good thing and that a nomocratic regime that, mostly, leaves people alone is morally superior to a teleocratic regime that specifies and engineers the kinds of values that people should have. However, the project of showing that such a regime IS a good thing and IS morally superior is precisely the kind of thing that Gray decided was a failure.
Thus, I believe Gray himself sees clearly enough that a thoroughgoing “value pluralism” would mean that the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini is just as morally justified as the regime of Thomas Jefferson. Gray prefers liberalism (or its wreckage) for the very same reason that the deconstructionist philosopher Richard Rorty prefers his leftism: it is “ours” and “we” like it better. Why Gray, or Rorty, should think that they speak for the rest of “us” is a good question. ‘
and about providing a core to liberalism:
‘Why should the state need a “sufficient rational justificaton” to impose a certain set of values? The whole project of “rational justification” is what Gray, and earlier philosophers like Hume, gave up on as hopeless. All the state need do, which it has often done, is claim that its values are favored by the majority, by the General Will, by the Blood of the Volk, or by God, and it is in business.’
And that business can quickly lead to ever-greater intrusion into our lives:
‘J.S. Mill, etc., continue to be better philosophers than Berlin or Gray because they understand that there must be an absolute moral claim in the end to fundamental rights and negative liberty, however it is thought, or not thought, to be justified. Surrendering the rational case does not even mean accepting the overall “value pluralism” thesis, since Hume himself did not do so. ‘
Are libertarians the true classical liberals? Much closer to our founding fathers?
Via a reader: A supplemental lecture as part of a course on many liberal thinkers, this lecture focuses on Berlin:
Addition: As a tool to help understand some very complex thinking and broad periods of time, it seems quite useful. It also seems pretty dualistic. another addition (not the philosophical definition).
One main argument seems to be: journalism needs to have a support structure, and as in the past, it ought to be profit-making and ad-revenue generating. This is simple economics.
Perhaps the argument even assumes something more basic: there has been and will be a pool of people pursuing their own expression of their ideas through writing (and their own self-interest). Some of these people also pursue the interests of individuals and groups individuals they belong to, as well as individuals and groups they don’t belong to. More broadly, these people can also pursue the interests of the common good.
At times, journalism can be quite inspriring, and even vital to our democracy.
Yet, do we need a professional class of information gatherers? …of journalists? Does developing technology actually provide the means to make them obsolete?
Also, when does writing become a fine art (useless but for the higher reasons) anyways? When do the journalist’s problems become the artist’s problems (who must cozy up to patrons)?
Personally, I’m not sure it follows that the current media moguls would need to be the future gatekeepers as the technology develops ahead.
Links On This Site: Malcolm Gladwell argues here that apart from the information/journalism divide, the technology still ultimately costs something as well…”Free” is a utopian vision, and I suspect Gladwell knows this pretty well: From The New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell’s “Priced To Sell”
“But we’re starting to see the risks for Democrats. Health care that raises taxes on the wealthy will galvanize opposition. That may be a small price to pay for something like universal health care, but it is a price nonetheless.”
Universal health care, or some version of it, requires a tax upon the wealthy. This redistribution of wealth will be overseen by the government.
Health-care as it stands is widely agreed to be inefficient and in need of fixing. There is also a profound moral argument involved…one of the deeper ones that affects us all.
Once fixed in place though , no matter how well or not well it’s working, this will be very hard to change. It will become part of the furniture. It will a political football, played for gain, maneuvered around in every self-interested way possible, and even surprisingly unselfishly for brief moments. It will help save lives, and there will be success stories, but there will also inevitably be corruption, trading and selling of services, abuse and fraud. It’s a generational change.
Is this the best way forward? Have the Democrats made the case that that this is the best solution to the health-care problem?
More On The “Kennedy-Dodd” Bill here, which includes a copy of the bill and some potential consequences. No thank you.
According to the post, over 1,200 people are known to have jumped in the history of the bridge, and most have died. 26 have survived the fall and cold water.
