Peter Matthews, an Urban Studies lecturer with an interest in “urban inequalities,” questions the “rosy image of mixed communities.” And yet he wants to ensure more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.”
When trying to create a better social mix, the focus is almost always on deprived areas. Aren’t the posh bits a problem too?
You see, in his mind,
Poverty and affluence are two sides of the same coin. One would not exist without the other.
He therefore entertains a “physically radical intervention.” Specifically,
The idea that we must demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing is still way off the agenda. Maybe it is time this changed.
He’s so daring, our academic. And hey, what a headline.
If we really do want to mix communities, where better to start than in west London, in the decidedly unmixed Belgravia (average house price £4.4m)? Of course, such a move is unlikely to happen any time soon. The powers that be tend to live in such areas, after all,
Unlike Guardian columnists and editors, or leftwing academics, who invariably seek out only the most humble accommodation.
and are unlikely to appreciate the deliberate urban degeneration.
Imagine those three words, in bold, on the policy document. Followed by, “It’s what you people need, good and hard.”
As someone who grew up in what would now be considered a “deprived area,” amid lots of “social” housing and all manner of inventively antisocial behaviour, and then escaped, I’m not sure I’d appreciate a second taste of what it was I was hoping to get the hell away from. It’s hard to feel nostalgic for casual vandalism, routine burglary and bus stops and phone boxes that stank reliably of piss.
Our postcode class warrior also thinks that “deprived” and “marginalised” communities can be elevated, made less dysfunctional, by “the provision of services… such as… street cleaners.” Meaning more street cleaners, cleaning more frequently. He links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to,
Achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.
But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.
The report that Mr Matthews cites, supposedly as evidence of unfairness, actually states that council cleaning resources are “skewed towards deprived neighbourhoods” – with councils spending up to five times more on those areas than they spend on cleaning more respectable neighbourhoods. And yet even this is insufficient to overcome the locals’ antisocial behaviour. A regular visit by a council cleaning team, even one equipped with military hardware, won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering among both children and their parents. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”
Despite such omissions, Mr Matthews tells us that,
Neighbourhoods of concentrated deprivation only exist because we allow neighbourhoods of concentrated affluence to also exist.
That word, allow. Damn the tendency of people to prefer neighbourhoods, and neighbours, that match their own self-image and standards of behaviour. Why won’t we just do as our betters tell us? Inevitably, Mr Matthews’ boldly punitive tone and the prospect of some “physically radical intervention” draws out the most pious of Guardian readers, the kind whose high-minded humanity just gushes forth:
I would love to see that [bulldozing] happen.
And,
The rich have become a luxury WE can no longer afford.
And,
No need for rich parasites.
And so on, and so forth.
Update:
As so often, it’s interesting to contrast Mr Matthews’ assumptions with one’s own experience of growing up in the rougher parts of town. Our fretful Guardianista doesn’t seem to understand antisocial behaviour, why it tends to be concentrated in those areas, and why people spend so much time and effort trying to get away from it. When I was a child, a nearby garden, one that was clearly looked after, was targeted for littering and abuse. Trash would be thrown at the flowers, decapitating them, and thrown across the lawn, over and over again. When empty pop cans failed to decapitate their targets, flower heads were simply kicked off by spiteful laughing morons.
The morons in question, the gleeful garden wreckers, didn’t appear to desire their own presentable gardens. I think it’s fair to say they had zero interest in horticulture, or the effort it entails. They just didn’t want anyone else to have one, and eagerly directed their efforts to that end. The fact that the garden was attractive and orderly, and a labour of love, was precisely the reason for it being targeted in this way.
The people doing this, some of whom I went to school with, weren’t “marginalised” or somehow oppressed by a lack of “services.” In fact they seemed to suffer much less than the elderly gent whose garden was being destroyed – by people whose attitude wasn’t too dissimilar to that of Mr Matthews. And this vandalism wasn’t happening because somewhere, across town, bigger houses existed. It wasn’t a function of not living next to a big house, or in a big house, or of not being given more of other people’s earnings. And the garden being targeted was in front of a house no more grand than the houses of the people trashing it.
And yet Mr Matthews seems to imagine that if only we didn’t “allow neighbourhoods of concentrated affluence to… exist,” then people in rough parts of town would suddenly not behave as people in rough parts of town often do. And therefore other people, better people, wouldn’t want to get the hell away from them. It’s a bold view of the world, if foolish and hopelessly unrealistic. And this fool, our Mr Matthews, the Urban Studies lecturer, is educating teenagers. Telling them how it is.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain is located here: 38.5150772, -112.2672046
The Google satellite overexposes the rock so you can’t tell that it’s a lovely
sulfurcandy yellow.As I learned from sad experience, the rock tastes exactly like rock, not lemon, which means the whole vacation was a gyp!
Although it’s understandable why Harry McClintock never recorded the final verse of Big Rock Candy Mountain way back when, seeing that it’s rude, but it’s the punchline fools like Emma Goldman need to hear.
The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, “Sandy,
I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain’t seen any candy.
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I’ll be damned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”
He sounds a bit confused.
Mr Matthews also thinks that “deprived” and “marginalised” communities can be elevated, made less dysfunctional, by “the provision of services… such as… street cleaners.” He links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.” Well, clean streets are a good thing and stepping through garbage can be depressing; but I think he, like the report he links to, is missing an obvious factor. A quarterly visit by a council cleaning wagon won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering. Fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place.
A while ago, I made two visits to an unglamorous “social” housing estate, where the amount of litter was striking. On the street, in gardens, in lifts and walkways, pretty much everywhere. Apparently, many residents considered it someone else’s job to pick up trash (including, presumably, their own), even when it was practically on their own doorsteps.
But if you walk around leafier, more respectable neighbourhoods, you tend to find much less litter. This isn’t because the council cleaning wagon rolls by whenever someone uses the Big Red Batman Phone – it doesn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one on my street. But then the neighbours are highly unlikely to drop litter in the first place and should anything blow out of someone’s bin, it’s picked up pretty sharpish, either by the resident or one of their neighbours. Once a year we do, though, get a small truck that takes away the fallen leaves that have been dutifully gathered and bagged by local residents.
The primary difference in terms of residential neighbourhoods and littering seems to be one of attitude. Of being, dare I say it, a little bit bourgeois. And yet this isn’t mentioned.
Fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place.
Heh.
Dalrymple has an interesting commentary on this subject in Litter: the remains of our culture:
I observed with a certain horrified fascination the conduct of young people who approached the bus stop, snack in hand. They would pause near the bin, as if for thought. Then, after this pause, they would take the wrapping from the snack and drop it not in, but on to the ground very near the bin.
I lived abroad from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s and when I finally returned I saw very clearly just how worse things had become as regards this kind of antiSocialist praxis, saw many examples of just such a casual indifference but also sometimes mixed up with a fierce defiance (that look that says ‘Go on – make me pick it up, bitch!’).
Spiny Norman,
Had no idea that was how Big Rock Candy Mountains was supposed to end!
Nikw211 – My God. Emma Goldman is the anti-Ayn Rand.
Now, I happen to believe Ayn Rand was a bit of a monster to people around her, sort of like Steve Jobs. We probably wouldn’t have gotten along. And I disagree with her about charity. But… the lady was brilliant, and fearless, and admirable. Even when in my opinion she went too far, her logic was impeccable.
Emma Goldman obviously felt that logic was a catspaw of the top-hatted capitalist running dog saboteurs, or something.
Dicentra – I often think the problem non-sociopathic lefties have with economics is that they just can’t get their heads around how markets work, and they lack confidence in themselves or their fellow men to thrive in a free society without endless government tinkering.
Take our urbane professor – he commits a profound error in his very first sentence, by assuming poverty can’t exist without affluence or vice versa.
Human beings aren’t wired to understand economics. For most of our history and prehistory, wealth really was a zero sum game where the tribal chief or feudal lord being enriched meant less for everyone else.
So in the modern world, many educated people just can’t grok that if millionaires exist, it doesn’t mean everyone else is poorer. Or that Chinese workers getting richer and more skilled doesn’t mean our workers will end up thrown on the scrapheap with no jobs to do as a result.
Sure, they’ve heard the arguments for free trade and they like the benefits of capitalism, but they still feel like it’s all a trick, somehow. They still have part of the mentality of primitive hunter gatherers or medieval serfs, but with lots of fancy modern lingo overlaid to disguise their insecurities as critique.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by fear. The average university educated lefty seems to be governed by fear – I think far more of them than it might seem feel like frauds and worry that their iPads and their cosy jobs could all be snatched away from them at any moment.
The “social justice” business is a comfort blanket for people who perceive themselves as too weak to compete with the big boys on a level playing field. It explains why intellectual leftism attracts so many people who look like they could easily be mugged. You don’t see many guys like George Monbiot on the rugby pitch.
This will not surprise.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/6/23/inhumanity-again.html
AC1
It did surprise … That Dutch guy … really?
Nikw211,
Had no idea that was how Big Rock Candy Mountains was supposed to end!
When I was a kid and heard Burl Ives singing it, I had no idea how cynical it really was.
“Can the Left micromanage the free market? By definition, no. No it can’t. And that right there explains all — and I mean ALL — of their antipathy for the free market and its implications”
The ‘free market’ does not and cannot exist. It is a useful abstraction for theoreticians, that’s all. You have mistaken the exasperation of people who understand this when faced by the the spinny eyed cultists who don’t as antipathy. But it isn’t. It is just realism vs fantasy. Creationists think that Dawkins is full of ‘antipathy’ towards the creator, but he isn’t, he is just noticing that there isn’t one.
The “social justice” business is a comfort blanket for people who perceive themselves as too weak to compete with the big boys on a level playing field
But it isn’t just perception. Some people are too weak to compete with the ‘big boys’. Some people are even to weak to complete with the big girls (imagine!). The question is whether we have any moral responsibilities towards those people or if we think weakness (for those who do not happen to be born into wealth) should damn them to lives of poverty and suffering. In part this is just where we draw our personal compassion lines. Most people think that a weak child of their own should be protected, that it would be unjust to throw her to the dogs and they extend that compassion out to immediate family, sometimes neighbours and so on. Even people who consider themselves very much on the right (even Randian libertarians sometimes) will defend social justice for the very weak, the sick and disabled for example (although I don’t think Ayn herself would have much truck with that,) and they will usually want socially just outcomes for their own children strong or weak, but that is, I think, because they often think of their children as some sort of personal property. Other people, sometimes on the ‘left’, think that there is no good reason to limit our compassion to those we know or to base it on the degree to which other people are like us or proximate to us.
The ‘free market’ does not and cannot exist.
You’re doing that thing again, the one where you seize on some minor imprecision in language, in this case the obvious fact that no market can ever be totally free but that everyone knows what is meant by the term and that attempts to direct markets never work. As for Dawkins, of course he is full of antipathy towards a creator, he hates the very notion of such a thing and his lack of belief in it makes no difference to that or to his antipathy towards anyone who does believe it. One doesn’t have to be a creationist to understand that, indeed it’s what many atheists admire about him, his absolute refusal to have any truck with deities or those who follow them, you’re just playing with words again here.
“You’re doing that thing again, the one where you seize on some minor imprecision in language”
It is hardly a minor imprecision. If you don’t mean ‘free’ market when you say ‘free market’ you are being majorly imprecise.
“As for Dawkins, of course he is full of antipathy towards a creator”
No he isn’t. He just doesn’t think a creator exists and keeps saying so. Seeing this as antipathy is a purely ideological deformation, which was my point. Just as I don’t believe in fairies and say so every time I am asked (which is more often than you might think – life with little children) but I have no ‘antipathy’ towards fairies. How could I, they don’t exist. Nobody thinks I show any antipathy towrds fairies because nobody (I meet) has an ideological commitment to fairies.
Minnow
I take it if you did meet believers in the good people ( one should never refer to them directly they don’t like it ) you wouldn’t take them on in print and public debate, you wouldn’t have a website devoted to opposition to all things Fae and you wouldn’t be passionately opposed to all manifestations of belief in such entities ? In other words you don’t think it matters. Dawkins and other outspoken atheists definitely do think it matters and it beggars belief to claim that his approach doesn’t arise from antipathy to theistic beliefs. I’m really struggling to understand your point here.
If you don’t mean ‘free’ market when you say ‘free market’ you are being majorly imprecise.
No we aren’t it’s the Marxist left and their insistence that there can never be any sort of freedom in the economic choices of humans who are skewing the meaning of the term in order to frame the debate the way they want it who are at fault here.
In other words you don’t think it matters.
But I would think it mattered if, say, the school was teaching my children that faeries were real and that they must consequently modify their behaviour in certain ways. Then I would get up and argue it. But I would still feel no antipathy towards fairies. How could I? They don’t exist.
No we aren’t
Yes you are, you say ‘free market’ when you mean something else. If it’s just words, stop saying you believe in ‘free markets’ and the problem goes away. Say what you mean. You believe in markets that are regulated to produce certain outcomes and these favour some groups of people and disfavour others. But there is a reason people insist on ‘free markets’ because it serves an ideological function of assocoiating their preferred social market with freedom and natural law and obscures the truth which, I think, you and I agree on: all markets are social constructs based on ideological assumptions.
Arguing with Minnow is a waste of time. It’s just one bald assertion built on fallacy wrapped in context switching after another. And each expressed in words from the English language but lacking their traditional and/or dictionary defined meanings. How else can someone claim that Marx and Smith held the same understanding of Labor Value Theory. It’s like claiming that when Johann Cruyff and Joe Gibbs talk about football they are discussing the same subject. Yet both have a better understanding of football, including each others and most likely economics as well, than Marx.
WTP, you may be right but you could at least attempt to argue instead of simply waving your hands around. In fact I am using words in their traditionally accepted way, Thornvaris is arguing that that is naive, that ‘free market” does not imply markets that are free.
I think it is considered poor form to bring up arguments from other threads on new ones, but it is simply true, that Marx took the labour theory of value from Smith. Of course he took it further and in new directions but fundamentally they both believed that economic value came from the amount of labour that was internalised in the commodity. It is silly to get cross because I say something provably true that you would prefer to be otherwise. And it is is a bit rude to talk about someone when they are in the room. If you object to what I say, tell me. I will be gentle with you. You needn’t be afraid.
I think you’ve rather conceded my point about Dawkins there although I still think you are mistaken to insist that there is some hard distinction between antipathy to the idea of a thing and antipathy to the thing itself.
But there is a reason people insist on ‘free markets’ because it serves an ideological function of assocoiating their preferred social market with freedom and natural law and obscures the truth which, I think, you and I agree on: all markets are social constructs based on ideological assumptions.
You’ve got horse and cart the wrong way round there. All political positions are social constructs based on ideological assumptions, or rather preferences I would say. Markets are simply the working out of the sum total of all human interactions, be they economic, social or political, consequently it is perfectly OK to say that there are or should be such a thing as free markets. Just as it’s perfectly OK to say that one believes that free markets could never deliver the best options for the largest number of people. Pretending that free markets can’t exist is bad faith as it disguises the true intent behind that statement which is to limit or remove the freedom of others.
I’d also add that freedom and natural law are the pre-existing conditions that make free markets possible.
As I said, a waste of time. For the very reasons stated above demonstrated once again.
I don’t think I have conceded your point re Dawkins, in fact I think I just showed why you were wrong, but it is a bit beside the point.
You seem to be flip-flopping on the idea of markets now though, suggesting that they can be ‘free’ which a minute ago you said was obviously false. It would be OK to say there were ‘free markets’ if they operated the way you describe but they don’t and can’t because they must all be governed and governments are ideological (or ‘preference driven, if you prefer). ‘Natural law’ isn’t natural, it is a human idea and institution.
As I said, a waste of time. For the very reasons stated above demonstrated once again.
Well, OK, if you like. I know you don’t like what I say, but this sort of comment is just more hand waving.
You seem to be flip-flopping on the idea of markets now though, suggesting that they can be ‘free’ which a minute ago you said was obviously false.
I didn’t say it was false I said they could never be totally free, a different thing, by which I meant that they could never be perfect. Just as you and I can never be totally free but can most definitely be free, as in not in chains or severely limited in our choices of action. Try telling a slave it’s no use striking his shackles because it’s a hard world out there and liberty no rose garden. Free markets means markets that are as free as possible not markets that exist in some ideal platonic state.
‘Natural law’ isn’t natural, it is a human idea and institution.
Humans are a natural phenomena are they not ? If so then it is quite possible for them to understand their own nature and to apprehend the concept of natural law as something innate to the human condition which can then take an institutional form. We have laws against incest because we naturally understand that it isn’t a good thing, the precise form of those laws will vary with culture. We also understand the idea of freedom, it is natural to us and the notion of free markets is an expression of this.
Btw you’re doing that other thing that you do, the one that Nikw I think it was complained about, where you put words into people’s mouths and ascribe to them positions they don’t hold. Stop doing that, it’s dishonest.
Btw you’re doing that other thing that you do, the one that Nikw I think it was complained about, where you put words into people’s mouths and ascribe to them positions they don’t hold. Stop doing that, it’s dishonest.
Yes, Minnow. That.
I think Minnow has a point on atheism. There is a difference between antipathy towards a non-existent being, and antipathy towards people worshipping a non-existent being, and towards powerful institutions set up to worship a non-existent being. Dawkins, and people like him, are certainly antipathetic towards religion, but you would need to believe in the existence of God to be antipathetic towards God.
He also, perhaps unusually, has a point about free markets. All markets are subject to laws and other forms of regulation, as well as cultural biases. We used to consider captive human beings an acceptable market commodity, now we don’t. We used to think money lent at interest was an unacceptable market commodity, now we don’t.
I’m not a socialist like Minnow, but neither am I a free-market absolutist. The state and the market depend on each other. State provides stability, market provides prosperity. When markets go wrong – a famine, a bubble, a crash – the state can step in and take action to allow the market to continue to function. If governments hadn’t bailed out the banks after the credit crunch, the financial markets would have crashed, taking most of the value in the economy with them, and we’d all have ended up much poorer. Instead, the state intervened to keep the plates spinning, so all the money in circulation kept most of its value and belt-tightening has been minor. Oddly, the socialists think the free market should have taken its course and the banks should have been allowed to fail, but that’s because they don’t understand that money doesn’t grow on trees (and they’re spiteful). Meanwhile the free-marketeers blithely ignore the fact that the free market caused the crash and if it wasn’t for state interventon they’d be screwed.
When markets go wrong – a famine, a bubble, a crash – the state can step in and take action to allow the market to continue to function. If governments hadn’t bailed out the banks after the credit crunch, the financial markets would have crashed, taking most of the value in the economy with them, and we’d all have ended up much poorer.
Agree in principle. I would not, for instance, do away with the (US) Fed. The problem with the central bank, however is two fold. One, in the case of a panic, it is a legitimate purpose of the Fed to step in and guarantee the (bad) loans of the failed bank. However, said bank ultimately should be shut down. And Paulson’s forcing the solvent banks to take bail out money they never wanted nor needed was simply socializing the risk AND the shame/guilt. The second problem with central banks is when they are seen either by themselves or by outside political pressure to be creators of wealth via “stimulus” and such. As the latter they are potentially quite dangerous.
As for the free market causing the crash, I would disagree. Though not to the full extent. Yes, it is the nature of markets to boom and bust as no one really knows the value of damn near anything until someone is willing to pay for it. The problem with the recent crash was with the latter problem described above where, since loans were ultimately guaranteed by the Fed, the banks were not sufficiently discriminating in who they loaned money to. Now of course we can blame the politicians for pressuring the banks to make bad loans but some such banks were begging to be pressured since the Fed (and ultimately the overall US economy) was the one absorbing the excess risk. And the real estate lobbyists were playing the game as well.
but you would need to believe in the existence of God to be antipathetic towards God.
No you really wouldn’t. Many atheists, and I think Dawkins is one, dislike the very idea of God because they believe it to be utterly irrational and that unreason has negative effects on the world. They do not distinguish between the reality or otherwise of belief and the effects of that belief. Something which is not difficult to understand when applied to other beliefs, such as say Marxism.
Meanwhile the free-marketeers blithely ignore the fact that the free market caused the crash and if it wasn’t for state interventon they’d be screwed.
There’s a very good video up at the Adam Smith Institute which I would recommend viewing which gives a convincing account of the real, monetary, roots of the crash and answers your pro state interventionist points well I think.
but you would need to believe in the existence of God to be antipathetic towards God.
No you really wouldn’t.
To quote from popular religious liturgy; Bingo.
In Buddhism—err, sometimes better known as the practice of the Buddha-Dharma—there is no faith, there is no belief, and that certainly includes any variety of faith that proclaims that there is no such thing as a or any god . . .
The practice is to seek and achieve enlightenment—and at that point the really interesting discussions do start to occur, but that is the practice.
In the meantime, if one should actually, genuinely encounter a or any god, cool! . . . say hullo or something. In the meantime, a recurring observation is that the gods also seek enlightenment, so whether one ever actually encounters a god or does not, the practice thus continues.
Yes, btw, there are rather a few declarations all over the place that amount to a worship of a or the Buddha . . . that’s lovely for ’em I’m sure, I tend to refer to that as Buddhianity, not Buddhism—From What I’ve Seen, all that worship of Buddhas rather interestingly starts to turn up right about the time that Eastern drifting Christianity would have reached the geographical area of the Buddhist practice, and then from there you start getting that hedging of religious bets that humams do rather tend to practice . . . .
Meanwhile the free-marketeers blithely ignore the fact that the free market caused the crash and if it wasn’t for state interventon they’d be screwed.
No, not at all. Only someone who knows nothing of the government-directed alterations of the mortgage finance market in the US for over a decade beginning in 1996 would make such a claim. It was the Minnows in Washington who were primarily responsible, not the market itself: ham-fisted government manipulation of the financial sector blew up in everyone’s faces.
I see WTP already made the same point.
Ah, well. Carry on…
Creationists think that Dawkins is full of ‘antipathy’ towards the creator, but he isn’t, he is just noticing that there isn’t one
Well my take on this is that Dawkins does like bashing religion. He rather enjoys setting science and religion up as rivals – as though he’s battling for people’s minds (rather than souls) – saving us all from unreason!
(he really does have a lot in common with religious types, if you see him that way)
Religion did a lot of different things for a long time: it gave people a way to live their lives morally, it gave people a sacred book of stories – important if you believe in the power of stories – as I do.
It also – incidentally – tried to explain the world – and science has made everyone else who tried to do that appear a charlatan*. In that small sense religion and science did come into conflict, but otherwise they are not doing the same things.
If Dawkins thinks they are then I think he’s wrong, and ought to know better. I know a few people who read Dawkins and fall into the lazy assumption that religion is only a source of superstition – if only we all lived without it, we’d be fine. Life is rarely so simple.
* because science explains and predicts the world incredibly well. Miles better than any other model.
I didn’t say it was false I said they could never be totally free, a different thing, by which I meant that they could never be perfect.
But perfect and totally free are not the same thing, so I you still seem muddled. But I think you are saying that when you say ‘free market’ you mean ‘as free as possible’ which means we are agreeing that the ‘free market’ in the sense you (and I think many others) use the phrase has never existed (and so we do not have it to thank for the enrichment of the west). You think something close to an ‘ideally free’ market is achievable which I also think is nonsense, but it is hard to argue about unless you are specific about what you mean. I expect it is something like a market where all regulation is removed except for taxation sufficient to fund an army a police force and a court system that will enforce contracts. Is that right? If so I think it is a pretty obviously doomed project and I am right to say that the free market in the sense you mean it has never and will never exist and so we should stop using a silly and misleading term.
Humans are a natural phenomena are they not ? If so then it is quite possible for them to understand their own nature and to apprehend the concept of natural law as something innate to the human condition which can then take an institutional form.
None of this follows. We may be natural but entirely unable to understand our own nature, a bit like aubergines. Equally it does not follow from the fact that we are part of nature that our laws are ‘natural law’ unless we extend the meaning of ‘natural’ as to be so all-encompassing that it is functionally useless.
We have laws against incest because we naturally understand that it isn’t a good thing
No we don’t. We have laws against incest because we have made laws against incest and we have good reasons for them. But they are not natural and can be amended or abolished. Many other things have seemed ‘natural’ only very recently which turned out not to be, the laws against homosexuality being an obvious example.
the precise form of those laws will vary with culture
So it isn’t ‘nature’ then.
We also understand the idea of freedom, it is natural to us and the notion of free markets is an expression of this.
Which is precisely the sleight of hand I accused you of earlier. Yes we understand the idea of freedom, but we don’t see those ideas anywhere in what is described as the ‘free market’ which is closely regulated and serves ideological purposes. It is called ‘free’ by its boosters in order to give the idea that it is in some sense a natural phenomenon, the natural state of free men, but it isn’t.
No you really wouldn’t. Many atheists, and I think Dawkins is one, dislike the very idea of God because they believe it to be utterly irrational and that unreason has negative effects on the world.
I can’t speak for the ‘many atheists’ but this is quite wrong about Dawkins. He simply doesn’t think god exists. He starts off as a believer and reason led him to disbelief , not any antipathy towards ‘the idea of god’. And he has written in praise of pre-Darwinian belief and been fairly scathing of atheism before Darwin. What he doesn’t like are the anti-science activism by some people who claim the authority of the supernatural to press their claims.
Spiny Norman: “It was the Minnows in Washington who were primarily responsible” (for the crash)
I don’t agree. The people primarily responsible were the people who insisted on buying property at overinflated prices in the belief that prices would rise indefinitely and it would pay for itself, paying no attention to the law of supply and demand which says that if prices go so high nobody can afford them, they’ll have to fall or they won’t sell. The banks lent them money in the same belief, but the banks are not the market.
Thornavis: “Many atheists, and I think Dawkins is one, dislike the very idea of God because they believe it to be utterly irrational and that unreason has negative effects on the world.”
I agree that Dawkins dislikes the idea of God. But disliking the idea of God is not the same thing as disliking God.
Henry: “In that small sense religion and science did come into conflict, but otherwise they are not doing the same things.”
I agree. Dawkins’ problem is that he thinks everybody approaches the world from the same direction he does. He’s a scientist, he’s trying to understand the world and its origins by theorising on the basis of the evidence. He thinks religious people are trying to do the same thing and failing. But people are attracted to religion for other reasons: wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves, wanting to believe they matter in he grand scheme of things, looking for a moral framework or a ritual routine, or just wanting to conform and not be an outcast in their community. I’m sure you can think of others. The creation stories may come with the package but are rarely the reason people are attracted to the religion in the first place.
The banks lent them money in the same belief, but the banks are not the market.
The banks lent them money that they did not have because they were confident that their losses, if they should occur would be paid off by the public sector. They were right. But it was still a scam and would result in jail for poorer people.
I agree that Dawkins dislikes the idea of God. But disliking the idea of God is not the same thing as disliking God.
I think it follows logically, if one dislikes the idea of something one must necessarily dislike the thing itself. If you know for certain that the thing in question doesn’t exist then it is logical to say that you can’t dislike it, however if you don’t know that, and no one does in the case of God, then you can’t make that claim and disliking the idea of God is tantamount to saying you don’t like him. This might sound like the sort of word play that I accused minnow of but since minnow also insists on absolute precision of language I feel justified in doing the same thing.
In the case in question atheists tend to fall broadly in to two types, one doesn’t or can’t believe in God but does not hate the concept itself, the other regards such belief as both incorrect and harmful and often opposes religion strongly. Dawkins belongs to the second group of course but I also think he belongs to a sub set of that group which would be anti God even if they thought he existed. They have, in effect, a theodicy which regards him as evil.
MInnow
It’s perfectly possible to reason yourself out of a belief in something and then move to a position of real antipathy to it, it sometimes happens even with Marxists, not to mention Trots who become neo cons.
I’m not entirely convinced that Dawkins would have just followed reason to reject the idea of a deity, what’s that phrase, you can’t reason yourself out of a position you didn’t arrive at through reason in the first place. I don’t think any believer ever relies entirely on reason to support their belief and, although I obviously don’t know for certain, I don’t think anyone leaves religion behind entirely as a result of re-thinking their faith. We aren’t quite the creatures of reason we like to imagine ourselves. To get anecdotal for a second I used to be a Christian, and I neither came to it nor left it entirely through a process of reasoned analysis, so I do feel I’ve some understanding of this.
Minnow, again.
I would respond to your points at but you don’t seem to have understood what I was saying, either about free markets or natural law, which may be my fault but I don’t think we’d achieve anything by pursuing it further as our views on this are obviously so far apart that we are probably talking past each other.
However I will just say that I used to be broadly leftist of a social democratic type, apart from a very youthful dalliance with communism back in the whacky sixties, and I left that behind largely through reading the writings of various conservative and libertarian thinkers not least on economic blogs and more general ones such as this, thanks for that David and something will be going in the tip jar later.
Oh dear more of minnows brain-farts.
He’s an economic creationist so you would be best to ignore his theist rantings when trying to look scientifically at economics.
Minnow: “The banks lent them money that they did not have because they were confident that their losses, if they should occur would be paid off by the public sector.”
That’s hindsight. One of the biggest flaws of socialism is the adversarial “class war” angle, where there has to be a bad guy to blame. Life’s rarely like that.
Thornavis: “disliking the idea of God is tantamount to saying you don’t like him”
Rubbish. As an analogy, one might dislike the idea of monarchy but find the occupant of the office a perfectly charming and personable individual.
Rubbish. As an analogy, one might dislike the idea of monarchy but find the occupant of the office a perfectly charming and personable individual.
Whoa hold on there, you really can’t compare the monarchy to God, that’s not even apples and oranges. God, if he exists, is not an individual who happens to be occupying a position you don’t approve of at a given moment. That was my point about theodicy, having examined the evidence Dawkins has come to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist, he has also pointed out in debate with theists that the evidence also shows that the universe is a place that is indifferent to pain and suffering. If it turns out that in fact God does exist then the problem of evil is a real one and theists themselves understand this. Having rejected the idea that the universe is the creation of a benevolent deity then the implication must be that a real God would likely be evil, by human standards at least.
Some years back, Memphis, Tennessee demolished its public housing projects. The former residents were given Federally subsidized “Section 8” rent vouchers. A few years later, two social scientists compared notes. One was examining new crime “hot spots”. The other was reviewing the relocation program. They were rather horrified to discover that a map of the “hot spots” looked very much like a map of the relocated.
Here in Chicago, one occasionally sees claims that the city is “segregated”. This is because there are large areas that are exclusively black. Whites are not prohibited from living in these areas, nor are blacks prohibited from living elsewhere (and many do).
Why then do these areas exist? The obvious answer is voluntary cholces, by whites and blacks. Whites avoid these areas, regardless of cost or convenience, because they find the conditions there intolerable (mainly the very high crime rates and continual street-gang violence). Some blacks put up with the conditions and don’t leave – in part because wherever they move the conditions become the same.
Rich,
They were rather horrified to discover that a map of the [crime] “hot spots” looked very much like a map of the relocated.
Indeed. But as the litter report linked above suggests, we have quite a few people who don’t wish to acknowledge certain, quite common differences in behaviour. To the extent that a report on, as it were, litter inequality somehow fails to investigate any agency on the part of the local population. And so one might imagine that nobody is dropping the litter, no-one is responsible. It just appears, mysteriously, like overnight snow.
American banks lent money to people they would rationally have judge poorly or actually incapable of repaying it is because a variety of laws outlawed discrimination in mortgage lending. And the banking regulators, state and Federal, were very keen on you demonstrating how you had changed your lending policies to comply with the law. And the thing that really scares senior bank management is losing their banking licence.
There were a number of mistakes that compounded. Securitisation and “mark to market” were, on the face of it, good ideas. The first freed up capital, the second meant that asset pools were more correctly valued (and meant that bigger bonuses could be paid sooner, but they’re not going to see that as a disadvantage, are they? Incentives matter.) But the big mistake the banks made was to assume that the profits from their normal mortgage lending would subsidise the dodgy lending. And it would have. Except, once you’ve securitised it, you can now longer cross-subsidise between functional and disfunctional tranches. And with mark to market, if there is liquidity in the market, then there is no effective value to mark to.
Other banks either invested in American banks, or in their securitised mortgage products or, Northern Rock, copied their practices for risk enthusiasm or ideological, or both, reasons. Or were simply caught up in what became a general market collapse.
Minnow will disagree from their usual position of malicious ignorance but, hey, that’s what happened.