Medworth.org.uk

This week has been one of the busiest of my life, philosophically speaking. I would like to share some of the news with you.

I have been asked to chair a new organisation called the Ayn Rand Forum. Its purpose is to promote Ayn Rand’s literature and philosophy here in the UK, and it will do this by a variety of means. Primary among these is the development of relationships with similarly-minded individuals and organisations, with a view to creating some speaking opportunities for Objectivist intellectuals in this country.

This week was the focus of our first major effort along these lines. Dr Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, was visiting the UK. We asked the fine folk at the Adam Smith Institute if they would be willing to host an evening talk on Tuesday February 10th, and they said yes. This was the result: Dr Brook gave his speech “Capitalism Without Guilt: The Moral Case For Freedom” in front of an absolutely packed house. The turnout was remarkable given that we did not even use some of our most effective publicity techniques (the event filled up too quickly).

Prior to Dr Brook’s talk, I conducted a short video interview with him at the ASI’s offices. He is an unbelievably good interview subject, and I was delighted with the way it went. The video should soon be available online, and I will let you know the moment it is. Dr Brook’s talk was also taped, and the video for this will also be publicly available soon.

Dr Brook began by pointing out that while our economic system has failed, that system is not capitalism (which would involve a complete separation of economy and state) but the mixed economy. He highlighted the causes of this crisis in government intervention (primarily the interest rate-controlling activities of the central banks). However, he spent most of his time on the moral aspects of the crisis, pointing out that our tendency to blame bankers for the downturn derives from our prejudices about self-interest. He spent some time defending self-interest and pointed out that this is the unique Objectivist contribution to the debate. Adam Smith’s utilitarian arguments for capitalism, he argued, have failed, and we need to take a deeper, more radical approach based on the morality of rational egoism if we are to defend this social system which is so vital for all our lives.

The talk was followed by a brief question-and-answer period. As usual, there was a mix of good and bad questions. The good ones explored the implications of Dr Brook’s views for related concepts such as democracy. The Objectivist view of emergency situations (such as whether you should pull a drowning child out of a lake) was also explored.

However, I was very disappointed by some of the bad questions: some were off-topic, and others seemed designed purely to get Dr Brook to say something controversial. For example, someone asked about foreign policy, and someone else asked about the propriety of torture. Now these are interesting questions, and clearly in some contexts they would have been proper. However, after a speech about economics and ethics, where a large number of people have gathered out of interest in those topics, it strikes me as rude and thoughtless to use up the public question period by asking about an unrelated subject which you happen to be interested in. This becomes much worse when you are not really even interested in what you are asking about but are just trying to embarrass the speaker (though of course I cannot know whether the torture question was truly motivated in this way).

Of course, Dr Brook handled the whole thing brilliantly: he did not refuse to answer any of the questions, and tackled them head-on. He certainly is not mealy-mouthed, and this must have made a refreshing change from the politicians the ASI is more used to hosting. The Q&A was followed by an evening reception, where we mingled and made new friends.

I was delighted at how the evening went, and I was even more pleased that the ASI staff also seemed very happy with the outcome. I would like to thank the ASI very much for their support, and I hope to be able to continue to offer them exciting speakers in the future!

On Wednesday 11th, Dr Brook travelled to Oxford to speak at a philosophy seminar at the James Martin 21st Century School. I and a number of other UK Objectivists travelled with him as guests. As a graduate in mathematics and computer science, I had never been to a seminar like this in my life before, so I was curious to see what they were like. The room had, I would guess, 15-20 people, both students and adults.

Dr Brook spoke on ethics, highlighting Ayn Rand’s unique solution to the problems of that field. He spoke of the standard of morality being the agent’s own life, and defended rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism on that basis. He spoke for about half an hour, and a question period of a similar length followed. Again, there was a mix of different sorts of question. There were some excellent ones about the consequences of Ayn Rand’s views for key philosophical topics such as the fact-value problem. However, there were also a number of questions about emergency situations which were phrased in a slightly hostile manner. I do find annoying the modern tendency to explore confusing issues before you thoroughly understand clear ones. There was one question about what would happen to newborn babies whose parents had died, and there was one about why you shouldn’t cut your boss’s brake cables if you know he’s going to fire you and you “know you will get away with it”.

Dr Brook again handled all this very well. Some of the better, deeper questions he was not able to answer fully due to time constraints, but we had brought some copies of Ayn Rand’s essay “The Objectivist Ethics” with us, which Dr Brook handed out. I hope those curious students will read the essay and find the answers they are looking for in it. Dr Brook also did an excellent job with the emergency situations, pointing out that our love of life is the best guarantee of charitable behaviour. If we water our plants because we love seeing and nurturing life, how much more will we be inclined to help the unfortunate? In regard to the newborn baby, Dr Brook said the government’s role is to look after it until adoptive parents or other private arrangements could be found.

In regard to the murder of the boss, Dr Brook politely pointed out the absurdity of the suppositions of the question. There is no way the perpetrator could be certain of getting away with his crime, particularly since he has a clear motive. In addition, it is doubtful he would keep his job even if his boss were dead, since he is probably being fired for incompetence, misconduct or because the company is in trouble, none of which facts would be affected by his boss’s death. Also, the question evades the need to earn the values necessary for life: a person who retained a job by murdering his boss would not be worthy of it, and would constantly have to confront that fact to himself, his colleagues and his clients, doing terrible damage to his self-esteem. (There are further points to be made here, such as the fact that you cannot claim for yourself a right which you deny to others.)

Again, on that visit I made some terrific contacts and had a very interesting time.

On Thursday 12th, Dr Brook spoke in an evening debate at the Oxford Union. The motion was “This house blames the bankers”; Dr Brook was (of course) opposing the motion. The other speakers were: in proposition, Geraint Anderson (author of “City Boy”), Mike Macnair (a Marxist academic) and Rachel Elnaugh (an entrepreneur made famous by the TV programme Dragons’ Den), and in opposition, John Redwood (the Conservative MP) and Ron Sandler (the government-appointed chairman of the nationalised Northern Rock bank).

I had never been to a debate like this before: I did not join the Cambridge Union while I was a student in Cambridge, largely because they invited the French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen to speak early in my time there, and I thought this evidenced a profound contempt for ideas and a lust for mindless sensation. (Not to be outdone, the Oxford Union more recently invited Nick Griffin and David Irving, but I digress.) I was interested, therefore, to see how Union debates work: it turns out the rules are artificial, but have presumably developed over time and seemed reasonable to me. Many are rooted in politeness; the only thing which surprised me was the way members can stand up to ask to raise a “point of information” while someone else is speaking, and it seems to be expected that speakers should allow this at least once or twice during their speeches.

The debate started with opening statements from the proposition and opposition, given by university students who were members of the Union. Both openly confessed to a limited understanding of economics and finance, and frankly they showed it. The proposition opened with predictable arguments about “obscene” bonuses and “irresponsibility” with other people’s money. However, the opposition’s opening statement was far more disastrous from a pro-capitalist perspective. Given by a philosophy student, it claimed to analyse the concept of “blame” and said that bankers could not be blamed given that they were acting in accordance with their “structural incentives”. Basically what this meant was that the bankers aren’t to blame, freedom is! I was reminded of Ayn Rand’s observation that those claiming to be capitalism’s greatest defenders are often its worst enemies.

Geraint Anderson’s main observation was the immoral behaviour he witnessed in the City while he worked there. He began, interestingly, by saying that he didn’t understand much about finance or economics either, and that this was an indictment of those who had employed him! In my view, his argument is beside the point, which is not that bankers are good people (though I know many of them are), but that their incentives have been systematically warped by government policy over many years. In effect, they have been “selectively bred” for the kind of behaviour Anderson was talking about for a long time.

John Redwood’s speech was disappointing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his focus was blaming the government for the problem. His main thrust was that the changes Brown made to the Bank of England and the system of financial regulation led to this crisis, and that the banks had been prudent under the Conservatives. As someone who loathes party politics, I found this annoying, particularly because many of the regulatory changes were made as a response to the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995 under the Conservatives. Besides, all this misses the essential mechanism through which governments caused the downturn (as Dr Brook was to point out later).

Mike Macnair, the Marxist, actually gave a very interesting speech. The thrust of his argument was that bankers had politically campaigned for the current system of regulation (and social organisation more generally) and were to blame for this reason. He argued that boom-bust cycles are inherent in “capitalism” and that bankers were to blame for advocating that system.

This is actually a much more sophisticated argument than the populist lynch-mob stuff which had preceded it. I do hold some bankers responsible for the way in which they have campaigned for the current economic system, where there is a state-sponsored lender of last resort and an implicit (now explicit) guarantee they won’t go bust as they’re “too important”. If there is a way in which they are to blame for the crisis, this is it. But it hasn’t just been bankers who have called for this system, nor, I think, are they the primary reason it was adopted. The government has had a great time collecting taxes from the financial services industry over the last ten years or so.

Besides, we clearly aren’t talking about “capitalism” here: a group of bureaucrats sitting round a table deciding what interest rates should be this month is not capitalism (in fact it is much more like the social system Dr Macnair presumably wants), nor is the fact that the state stands ready with massive bailouts if bankers get it wrong. The importance of defining our terms, as Dr Brook was saying at the ASI on Tuesday, comes to the fore once again.

Ron Sandler spoke next, in another disappointing speech. His main thrust was that the financial system is complex, and there are lots of different kinds of bankers, many of whom bear no responsibility for this crisis. This is true, but in the context it is really pretty weak, and Geraint Anderson picked him up on it, saying it was the structured finance people who were specifically to blame. Sandler did make some good points though, observing that if we’re going to blame bankers for the 4% estimated decline in the economy this year, we also have to praise them for the more than 40% of growth which had occurred over the last decade or so.

There was then a short floor debate, during which student members could speak alternately for and against the motion for a maximum of 2 minutes each. Nothing terribly interesting was said during this time. After that, Rachel Elnaugh and Dr Brook concluded for the proposition and opposition respectively.

Dr Brook was simply outstanding. The large Union hall gave him freedom to move around, and he was in his element. He was enthusiastic, articulate and went straight to the root of the issue, and people could tell. Everyone speaks unamplified at the Union, and previous speakers’ voices had been, to some extent, lost in the vast space. For most of the debate, a background rustling and murmuring was audible. Not so for Dr Brook. The house sat in rapt silence as he delivered his speech. He spoke about the credit expansion pursued by the Federal Reserve through low interest rates which essentially amounted to paying people to borrow money. He spoke about the regulators who have always been intimately involved in every part of banks’ operations, forcing them to use the bad valuation models which have caused them to underestimate risks. He spoke about the vital role bankers play in the economy as a transmission mechanism for capital. His speech was passionate, stirring stuff, and it clearly influenced the crowd. To my shock, the opposition won the debate by a big margin.

I was watching John Redwood while Dr Brook was speaking. I was very interested to see that he was nodding along very enthusiastically. (His approval of Dr Brook’s speech is confirmed by his report on the debate.) If he agreed, I wonder why he couldn’t have said similar things himself? I guess people just don’t talk that way in British politics today. It would have been really useful if he could have covered some of the economic points, because all the speakers were time-limited, and Dr Brook would have been a lot more effective if he could have got onto his arguments about morality. He did say he thought bankers’ greed was a good thing at one point, but had no time to justify this. He also said that in a truly free market, crises like this wouldn’t happen, but again there was no time to expand on this.

I overheard several groups of people talking about Dr Brook’s speech afterwards. They were wondering how he could say the things he did, such as that there should be no regulation of banks. I hope they will explore free-market ideas further, by reading Ayn Rand and some of the economists Dr Brook referenced in his speech, in order to find out. If even a few of them do, then the mission will have been accomplished!

These three events went terrifically well, and in each case Dr Brook showed what is distinctive about Objectivism in a clear and passionate way. This, along with other things I saw and did this week which I cannot make public here, gives me a great deal of hope for the future of Objectivism in the UK. I would like to thank Dr Brook for his visit and look forward to welcoming ARI speakers to this country again in the future.

Last, but by no means least, last night I participated in the recording of a podcast on the subject of probability for Big Ideas. Three of us took part, and the topics ranged over surprising results from probability theory, psychological questions around why our intuitions about probability are generally so bad, and some more philosophical topics about what probability really means and how it is useful. I managed to get in some points about how Ayn Rand’s ideas apply to probability, so there will almost certainly be some material which you haven’t heard before. When the final version of the podcast is available online, I will let you know.

I’m quite tired after such a busy week, but happy that it has all gone so well. Watch this space for further developments!

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