Don’t let fascists steal free speech from us

Two “alt-right” speakers from Canada, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, have decided they will, after all, go ahead with their visit to New Zealand (temporarily cancelled) where they will espouse their views. The venue is, as I write, being kept secret. Previously, they wanted to speak in an Auckland venue called the Bruce Mason Centre, but were denied that opportunity at the instruction of Auckland Mayor Phil Goff. This has raised concerns about freedom of speech in New Zealand, and not just among those who agree with their position. Chris Trotter, New Zealand’s most respected Left blogger, has taken up the cause in several recent posts on his blog Bowalley Road.

I’ve been drafting this post for two years now; the issue keeps coming up and going away again, and I have to change the bits where I relate it to current events. It’s a bit bigger than I can really pin down in one post. I’m going to skip out some things I originally planned to say about particular progressive concerns that some believe constitute assaults on free speech – trigger warnings, safe spaces, cultural appropriation – because they just make the whole thing too unwieldy. I may devote more blog posts to them in future. Today my topics are: What is the ethical basis of the right to free speech? What sort of policies do we need to build around it? And what are its limits?

Political discussions frequently open with assertions of rights that the disputants hold to be incontrovertibly inviolable – endowed, in the famous words, by the Creator. But what makes a right a right? Why is it that some good things you might want are your “right” to enjoy, while others are merely privileges? What makes the difference? And what if one of your rights can’t be granted without breaching someone else’s rights? What do you do then? This sort of question is why I like to go back a bit further, behind the concept of rights to their basis in ethical philosophy.

In case you’re a new reader, I’ll just quickly run you through my basic moral philosophy. Morality isn’t something objective, not if by that you mean it’s something “out there” in the universe, independent of our minds. You can’t logically prove a “should” statement from an “is” statement without at least tacitly calling in another “should” statement, and if you try to prove that second “should” statement you just go around the circle again, and so on forever. And perhaps that’s just as well, because if morality was something “out there”, then any intersection between moral facts and human well-being would be coincidental. Appeals to moral authority, even cosmic moral authority, don’t help: “You should obey the authority” is just another “should” statement and another trip around the circle.

Hence, morality is subjective. But “subjective” is not the same as “arbitrary”. To call something “subjective” just means it’s an experience that people have rather than a thing in the universe – it’s “in here” rather than “out there”. Sweetness is subjective, but no-one disagrees as to which is the sweeter of maple syrup and grapefruit juice. You can justify a “should” statement; you just have to back it with an “I want” statement. (I want to be healthy, therefore I should exercise more than I do.) As a social species, pretty much anything we want requires cooperation with other people, and cooperation requires trust, so we evolved moral instincts to allow us to trust each other. Therefore, in my view, trust is the basis of all morality.

To earn trust, your actions must fulfill three conditions. They must be benevolent; they must be consistent; and both of these facts must be clear to other observers. Benevolence alone is not quite enough. Pure benevolence, the greatest good for the greatest number, is the moral philosophy known as utilitarianism. The harmonics of cold calculating efficiency that cling around that word somewhat misrepresent the idea; “utility” in the philosophical sense includes beauty and joy as well as usefulness. However, the “calculating” part is bang-on. Utilitarian philosophers spend a lot of time balancing harms and benefits and fretting about whether they’ve left something out. And I don’t know about you, but that makes me nervous. I can’t help worrying that they might end up putting the things I care about on the “sacrifice for the greater good” side of the equation.

When you factor in the consistency and the clarity, utilitarianism gives way to a couple of other moral schemas. One of them is virtue ethics – if you practise being a good person until it becomes habit, your actions will be clearly and consistently benevolent. This isn’t particularly relevant to today’s topic, and I mention it only for completeness. The other one, however, is the answer to our question: the origin of rights. To be clearly and consistently benevolent is to commit to doing some good things all the time for everybody while refraining from doing some bad things ever to anybody. When a society makes such a commitment, whether in law or custom, it thereby grants its members the right to enjoy the good things and the right not to suffer the bad things. That’s where rights come from.

And that helps us answer our other question. When you have to choose one right over another, you should honour the one that best serves the principle of trust. Suppose you’re a surgeon, and you have in your hospital five people urgently needing different organ transplants and also a healthy young person who’s come in for a sports injury. A utilitarian calculus might prompt you to at least consider killing the young person to harvest their organs, sacrificing one life to save five. But of course if you did that, no patient could ever trust you again not to kill them for their organs. The trust principle would therefore accord with what (I sincerely hope) your moral instincts tell you and render such a course of action unthinkable.

Since the seventeenth century most of the questions vexing Western political theorists have been variations of “What is the right balance between peace, justice, and freedom?” When you find yourself facing a trade-off between the three, how do you choose which to preserve and which to sacrifice? (This is not quite the same as the question actually driving social progress, which is “How many crumbs do we have to give these annoying poor people before they’ll shut up and go away?”) What’s often not noticed is that peace, justice, and freedom all have the same end-goal, i.e. not having to fear violence any more. Peace means you don’t have to fear violence from strangers. Justice means you don’t have to fear violence from your neighbours. Freedom means you don’t have to fear violence from the state.

But you can never have complete freedom in any society, because freedoms are necessarily in tension with each other. If you are free to do some particular thing, that means I am not free to stop you from doing that particular thing, and vice versa. So, for instance, you are free to play irritating contemporary music and there’s not much I can do about it, but I am not free to walk around in public wearing the amount of clothing I feel physically comfortable in. If I call the police and complain about your music I’ll be ignored, unless it’s very loud; if you call the police and complain about my nudity I’ll be arrested. Conversely, if I try and cut the power cord on your stereo I’ll be the one in trouble, whereas if you threaten me with assault unless I put some clothes on the authorities will probably agree I had it coming. (As you see, legal freedoms tend to get skewed towards majority cultural groups and away from, in this case, those of us who have autistic sensory issues.)

---

Now we can narrow in from freedom generally to freedom of speech in particular.

TERFs are wrong – why that’s a problem for the Left

“TERF” stands for “transgender-exclusionary radical feminist”. The term is very, very familiar to anyone who follows LGBT and feminist issues on social media, and probably quite obscure elsewhere. For what’s supposed to be a network for mutual support and protection, the online LGBT community spends an extraordinary amount of server space debating who belongs in it and who doesn’t. Nowadays it’s generally accepted that transgender people do belong; the big debate, online, is over whether asexual people do. But “generally accepted” isn’t the same as “universally accepted”, and the ones who don’t accept it can get pretty nasty sometimes.

TERFs don’t accept transgender people’s identifying gender, and in particular they don’t accept that trans women are women. Like other transphobes, TERFs read transgender women as “men pretending to be women” – a misframing which does real harm (an identity is not a pretence), but fundamentally a matter of perception rather than of fact. What distinguishes TERFs from other transphobes is the motive they ascribe to transgender women for this alleged pretence, namely “...so they can rape lesbians.” That is a matter of fact, and the facts are clear. Transgender identities are not motivated by a desire to rape lesbians. TERFs are wrong. I’m not debating this point any further. I’m not going to waste space rehashing here what I’ve already written about gender identity, when trans people are far more worth listening to on the subject than I am; and the rape accusation is preposterous, but the people who need convincing of that aren’t likely to listen to me.

So why am I writing this? Because, preposterous as it is, TERF ideology is a necessary logical consequence of three propositions which the Left today holds dear. Since TERFs are wrong, one or more of the three propositions must be false. We need to find out which one and stop using it – even at the cost of having to mince words like moderate liberals instead of making bold sweeping proclamations about overthrowing oppressors and remaking society. The three propositions are

1. Feminism. Women do not yet enjoy basic rights equal to men. This is due to men’s actions, and social structures upheld by men’s actions.
2. Social constructionism. Most, if not all, things we perceive as enduring realities are in fact products of societal roles and institutions – gender most pertinently.
3. Dialectical materialism. Institutions such as the state exist to allow powerful classes to exploit powerless ones. Classes are distinguished by having divergent material interests, and individuals act in their class’s interests, so the exploitation can only end if the powerless class overthrow the institutions.

See what follows when you put these together? Men, the powerful class, materially exploit women, the powerless class, by impregnating them. A woman is someone who can get pregnant and a man is someone who can make a woman pregnant; those are the material interests by which alone the two classes are meaningfully distinguished. Any other distinction is merely a gender role, socially constructed to maintain the power of men over women. If someone who can make women pregnant adopts womanly roles and calls themself a woman, it must be somehow a subterfuge to advance the interests of men, and the only way that makes anything remotely resembling sense is if they are trying to infiltrate the ranks of those women who have refused to act as brood-stock – i.e., lesbians. Hence TERF ideology. If we agree that the conclusion is preposterous (and if you don’t, please take the debate to a different post) then one or more of the premises must be false. Our remaining task is to find out which. Let’s examine them one by one.

How to pour money down the drain

Ever commit yourself to something and then regret it? I’m starting to feel that way about this blog post. I realized something, you see, for whatever that’s worth, and I thought I might share it. But in order to explain it I first have to go over basic economic theory. Only, some people who are close to me in their politics have a very different economic theory, which doesn’t yield the same insight. So I have to start by explaining the two theories and why I think the first one has more explanatory power, and then I have to show that, although politics like ours traditionally uses the second theory, it doesn’t need it. I would rather just skip ahead and tell you my idea, but it doesn’t make sense if you haven’t sat through a few economics lectures. So here goes.

Where does profit come from? Capitalist economists explain with the trade theory. Suppose your old car is getting elderly and taking up space in your garage. You reckon that if someone nicked it you’d only be down $2500 all told. At the same time, I need a car for my work, doesn’t have to be flash or new, but I figure even an old banger will easily net me $4000 with the use I can make of it. So I offer you $3000, which is $1000 less than what I’m expecting to gain. You take it, because that’s $500 more than the car is now worth to you. This is what’s called a “positive-sum interaction”. You gain $500 in cash, and I gain $1000 worth of car. A total of $1500 has appeared out of nowhere. This $1500 is “surplus value”.

Economists apply this theory to all kinds of transactions, including labouring for a wage. The labourer is the seller and the employer is the buyer, and obviously the wage must be worth more to the worker than their time or they’d quit, while the labour done in that time must be worth more to the employer or they’d lay the worker off. Karl Marx disagreed. Goods don’t appear out of nowhere. Goods are made from raw materials when labourers put labour into them. Therefore, the labour is the source of the surplus value (measured as the price of the product minus the cost of the materials), and the labourer is the rightful owner of that value. According to the labour theory, an employer who then takes away the goods, sells them, pockets the profit, and doles out a fraction of it back to the worker, is nothing but a thief.

Which theory works? Another parable. Mr Miggs runs a back-shed factory making plastic coat-hooks that you can stick on a door. He sells them at $5 for a packet of three, but his cost to make those three, including labour, is only 50c. According to the labour theory, he’s robbing his staff of $4.50 per unit. But one day Mr Miggs buys a 3D printer, an automatic packet-sealing machine, and some drones to carry things around the factory. He sets up an automatic e-mail system to alert his courier when there’s a shipment ready. In short, Mr Miggs automates his process totally, and lays off all his employees. He can now make his coat-hooks at a cost of 10c per unit. He drops his price from $5 to $4.80, which raises his sales by 2%. Not only is he selling more units, but his profit per unit has gone up from $4.50 to $4.70. The trade theory easily accommodates this scenario; the labour theory boggles. Whose labour is Mr Miggs exploiting? Where is that $4.70 coming from?

Score one for the trade theory. But I would have to query whether Mr Miggs’ staff, back when he was employing staff, were genuinely free agents. When your only choice is between two bad alternatives (such as: break your back working for peanuts, or watch your children starve), then technically you could count as a gain the advantage that the lesser evil holds over the greater, but that seems awfully sophistical. If someone mugs you for your wallet, they get your money and you get to stay alive – it’s a win-win! The higher the stakes are for you, the smaller your bargaining power. The outcome might well be positive-sum, but if you can’t realistically negotiate your share of the benefits, they’ll be massively skewed in the other party’s favour. That sounds like exploitation to me.

Actually, “the higher the stakes” is not a good way of putting it. A speculator might lose millions in a day in a derivatives clearinghouse, whereas a drain-layer begging for a raise is only dropping a few hundred a week if their employer decides to fire them instead. That doesn’t mean the speculator is in direr straits. What constrains your bargaining power is how much you’ll be left with if things go sour. Back when I was taking my first semester of economics lectures, I wrote a post about what I saw as the major problems with economic theory as it is taught to university students. If I were writing it now I might moderate my tone in places, but I would not make any substantive changes. And the main point of that post is the proportionality issue I’m talking about here: some people can better afford to lose millions than others can afford to lose hundreds.

Now my realization is about the destruction of value, which the labour theory also doesn’t account for. If value can come out of thin air, it can also vanish into thin air. A simple example might be if you were competing with yourself. If that sounds like nonsense, think of professional sports. Their revenue comes from two sources: stadium seats and television ratings. These two are in direct competition with each other. The more people watch from the sofa, the emptier the stands are. Some portion, at least, of the advertising for either one shifts revenue around instead of increasing it. The money spent on that portion of advertising might as well be dumped into a shredder.

Racism is crawling back out from under the rug

The world is changing. The last time the World News pages looked this unfamiliar was fifteen years ago, in September. Fortunately, this time the death toll has not been in the thousands. But Britain leaving the European Union is a much further-reaching geopolitical shift than the World Trade Centre attack – assuming it ends up happening. Since the referendum it’s become apparent that none of the people pushing the Leave campaign had a plan for what would happen if they won.

But there have already been very ugly consequences in Britain. Despite the denials coming from the Conservative section of the Leave campaign (less so from UKIP), it seems that at least a large minority of their supporters believed they were voting to expel immigrants and people of colour from the country. Content note: racism.

Hegel has a lot to answer for

Writing this post is making me a little edgy. Most of the friends I’ve made since leaving high school, I met through student activism in one capacity or another. Which means a lot of my friends are people who hold Marxism dear. That makes criticizing Marxism a painful thing for me to do. And it’s not as if I have to do it, exactly, I could just meander to the back of the crowd and mumble insincerely when my political coalition voices opinions that I find problematic in support of the positions that I am trying to help them defend. But I don’t feel that that’s entirely honest, for one thing; and also, unexamined assumptions in my worldview niggle at me. They keep me awake at night. So before I even start on what the problems are, let me talk about the parts of Marxist theory which I do agree with.
In fact, I’ll start with one that will most clearly establish where my loyalties lie. With the Marxists, and against free-market economic theory, I think that profit in a capitalist economy depends largely or wholly on the exploitation of labour. But this is going to make me look like an economic naïf if I don’t explain a bit. Which I don’t mind doing, because although I’ve said it a few times before, I think it’s one of those things that needs to be said again and again until people get it.

What’s wrong with economics

When you take lecture-notes for students with disabilities, you learn all kinds of interesting things. Well, it depends on the subject, of course. Fourth-year dentistry is of limited application, given I have no intention of ever becoming a dentist. But last year I took a first-year Economics paper – OK, I only took half of the lectures for that one, the other half went to some other note-taker, but it has given me considerable insight into how and why Western society is so screwed-up. (I also took several ecology-themed papers, so now I know both what we’re doing to our food supply and why we’re not going to change course until it’s too late.)
Lots of things have been suggested to explain what’s wrong with economics, so first of all let me say what the problem isn’t. The problem isn’t that economics models complex real-world situations with mathematical abstractions. Plenty of sciences do that; simplifying complexity is how we come to understand it. The problem isn’t that economics puts a money value on everything. Money is basically a measure of how much of a crap people really give about things, as opposed to wishing other people gave a crap about them; consider the saying “put your money where your mouth is”. The problem isn’t that economists don’t recognise the “intrinsic value” of natural systems (in the landscape, the biosphere, or the body). Value is about choices, priorities, and meanings, and those are people things, not world things. The problem isn’t that the models require people to act “selfishly”. People do act selfishly quite often – that’s why moralists everywhere have always had to tell us not to – but, more to the point, the logic of making and saving money applies regardless of whether it’s for you or for someone else. The problem isn’t that economists are all bourgeois intellectuals seeking to maintain the class structure that upholds their power. That might explain why errors have been made and not corrected, but not what the errors are. And the problem isn’t that economics assumes rational actors whereas people are in fact stupid – but that’s getting closer, except for the “stupid” part. People don’t behave the way economics presupposes they should. I’m going to have to go into a bit more detail here.