La Belle Label.

In my other blog (over here) I got into a discussion with a couple of guys and the thorny issue of labels came ups. I favoured the classic Oreos label and they prefer the modern and groovy Snickers label. Or perhaps it wasn't that sort of label. Yeah, on second thoughts maybe it was political labels. I say they have almost no usefulness, others think they serve a purpose.

The problem I have with them is complex. For starters there is the lack of flexibility. If I define myself as a realist, I am seen to think within a certain box, the way I interpret the world around me is coloured by a certain system. And this is not just the way others view me; having told the world I am a realist I begin to train myself to think like a realist. And this is all very well, except that, untrammelled, it becomes a runaway train. I know (at least online “know”) many neo-cons who feel compelled to support a Cheney style attitude that torture is ok if it protects the USA from attack. At least one of these I know to have been an active Amnesty member before 9/11, who abhors torture. Having announced loudly and often that he is a neo-con, however, he now feels that he cannot stray from the fold without somehow being treacherous.

As most people soon realise (and I worked out a few weeks after I rushed into my first-week-as-an-undergrad declaration of realism, for most people no one paradigm will cover all of their thoughts, rather they fall into the grey areas that form the borderlands of differing worldviews. The way that we combat this is to start adding prefixes and suffixes, and so certain Republicans beacame no longer conservative but neo-conservative and I become a neo-realist, adopting a very slightly different position than previously. Of course this can end with ridiculous tags as people vary the already-varied paradigms and add a new prefix.

All of this works fine if we're just sticking within a single field, one international relations geek says to another what he thinks about Iran, the reply starts with “Well I'm a neo-liberal, so...” and being a part of the clique the geek knows what the rest of the sentence is. But then the world isn't that simple I also have opinions on domestic politics , economics, philosophy, in fact all sorts, and if I want to be in with the, well I was going to say cool kids but lets face it all these interests land me squarely in the nerd camp, then I need to identify myself. Of course it could be simple, we could use the terms to mean at least roughly the same thing. We could, but we don't. I am a liberal in domestic politics, which is not the same thing as a liberal in international relations.

And right there's another problem, the labels don't even mean the same thing in the two most prominent English speaking nations (that's right the Falkland Islands and St Helena). I have received all of my education in the UK, liberalism is still the term used here to define the dominant political paradigm of the developed world, a centrist, multi-party democratic, broadly market led society with individual freedom. A more committed liberal like me might wish for more individual freedom, less state intervention and a greater use of utilitarianism, but generally western society is liberal. To get the same meaning in the USA I would have to describe myself as libertarian; the term liberal is hurled as an insult at, and increasingly chosen by, socialists. The things that the American right attributes to liberals would make any liberal foam at the mouth.

Which brings us on to the other big flaw, labels are self chosen and self described on one level; I am a liberal, I am trying to make an impression on the USA so I call myself a libertarian, I know what this means and I tell you what it means; on another level the labels are externally chosen, you oppose me and so you shout all over the US press that I am a self described liberal; if that doesn't work then you look at my small government preferences and where I say libertarian you say anarchist; suddenly I'm a lot more scary.

So Labels are both too broad and too narrow, over-flexible and not flexible enough, self-chosen an externally imposed. How can something that contradictory be useful? I would say that it can't.

But what would I know? I'm just a neo-realist-quasi-capitalist-liberal-free-market-monetarist-utilitarian-running-dog.

Almost Right

Stanley Fish has written an interesting blog on the NY Times website, concerning neo-liberalism, not so much in defence of it as in exploration, having had the tag thrown at him as a term of (albeit academic) abuse. He provides quite a neat example of the ideology in practice:

"In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions — questions of negligence law — are thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don’t you and I sit down and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory’s operations than is lost as a consequence of their effects?"

This strikes me as a good system, with one modification, or perhaps clarification. A Millsian reading of liberalism, with its strong utilitarian roots, would admit of a non-cash meaning of value. This is the tricky point where political theory proves itself not to be a science, but rather a philosophy. The pure science of economics, in which neo-liberalism is rooted, considers in this example only the economic (i.e cash) value of the fish and the factory, however our human experience tells us that there is more to both life and value than cost. The idea of solving the dispute with reference to cost-benefit analysis is sound, but we must find some way to weigh up the aesthetic and cultural value of the fish and the stream and the leisure and enjoyment they provide to individuals and society, againstnot only the financial but the social benefits of the factory.

There is a problem with any aim to create a society based on this model, and that is the gap in education, we are not teaching our young people (in pretty much any country) to think in terms of general value, and so people's idea of value rests on the arithmetic which they are taught. Until we can separate the ideas of value and cost, then we are stuck in a position of greed, where money will drive us all.