Agent Of Status Quo

In middle of Sullivan-Goldberg love fest, Goldberg gives an insightful definition of conservatism.

Oakeshott was a brilliant advocate for a small-c conservatism of temperament, one that placed trust in institutions, trial-and-error, and muddling-through without iron-clad dogma.

Conscience is important, but conscience must be informed — not dictated to — by institutions, religion, tradition, and, of course, reason.

Of course it is irrelevant to India where every party including BJP aspires for some shade of socialism.

Intervention

I know I may be little late, but please read Jonah Goldberg. Reading the American journalists makes one wonder why do we have such pathetic journalists.

Update: For a flavour, read Tradition matters

It Is About (Political) Economy, Dear !

I forgot to mention this article by Swaminathan Aiyar, which deals with retreat of Reliance Fresh from UP.

By the way, my smugness in earlier post was premature. Sorry TamizhNadu, we* still suck.

* By we, I mean UP, unfortunately there can be no name for people of UP, a condition which is not even found in Bihar.

Short & Quick

#1. Watch Johnny Gaddaar . In Neil Mukesh I think we have a new star.

#2. This article ends with the one of the worst mistakes an intellectual can make.

#3. This article is horrible and I have read only one line of it. More on it later.

Double Bad

Two bad articles by Pratap Bhanu Mehta.
Deconstruction at leisure.

Intervention

Read. Learn. Imbibe.

Intervention

Pratap Bhanu Meha on the topic well trodden by this blog*,

The focus on the state and economy is crucial. But they seldom on their own determine what the security or character of life and self is going to be like in any society. Despite the explosion of aspirations, and feverish activity, will we escape the charge that Muktibodh levelled against urbanising India decades ago: that it was a font of meaninglessness, disguised by divertissements [sic]? It would be premature to engage in pessimism. But the striking absence of self-reflection on emerging pathologies in society should worry us. Broken states can be fixed through collective action, economies can be energised through policy, but sick societies are harder to cure. [Indian Express]

I have a different perspective (than the article) on the churning that India is witnessing, or to be precise the churning at the moment, because since Independence India has always been churning, that it is not always too visible to commentators is a different matter altogether (one which deserves attention on its own merit). My rather woeful perspective will have to wait for another post but it is influenced by India:A million mutinies now.

* Yes this is self-plugging. Yes I have no shame, or self-esteem.

Intervention

Although I am not a journalist, I believe that first rule of shoddy journalism must go something like, "If you aspire to dish out a pathetic article, base it on poorly constructed and half baked arguments".

Fortunately we have example

Intervention

Tarun Vijay on Band-Aid nation*

A nation living on a self-denial mode can never defeat gun runners. A polity that declares Ishrat Jahan innocent even before a police enquiry begins, which allows secessionists in Nagaland to open and run their 'free republic' headquarters and celebrate 'Independence Day' separately, which turns aliens into voters, thrives on a self-obsessed people who remain as engrossed in their routine of earning and dying as they were in the East India Company's babudom.

Strong nations move on their heritage and civilisation, whether it's Russia, China or the United States. They know who they are and who the enemy to their existence is. But here, we have a state which tries to de-recognise its civilisational moors, rather demoralises the patriotic forces ( from Kashmir to Kohima) and sleeps with the foes of our ancestral past so much so that we love to honour the memory of a bigot like Aurangzeb, the ideological 'great grand pa' of today's Taliban, by naming a major road in the Capital after him, but fear to honour Dara Shikoh, the learned scholar of Upanishads and a bridge of love between Muslims and Hindus( Japanese PM Abe quoted him in his address to Indian Parliament recently). Dara Shikoh was jailed and killed by his brother Aurangzeb and his grave lies unheard, uncared for in the precincts of Jama Masjid, New Delhi, where even the fashionable heritage-walkers of the NDMC-Habitat variety do not visit. [TOI]

*I have read this term somewhere earlier, though can't recollect at the moment

Intervention

I find granularity interesting. How well a system works is dependant on how granular it is. Typically there is optimum limit for granularity. A system too-coarse or too-fine grained, will not give the desired output, in worst cases it may even crash.
To decide granularity, theory and even observations are of limited help. Right size, is a question of instinct, a gut feeling so as to say.

Two things..

The trivial one: Rationalism, atheism, morality. Pick any two.

The important one: I absolutely hate excessive use of emoticons. When I am benevolent dictator, I will ration the use of emoticon. The usage will depend on the relevance, and my discretion.

Intervention

Read on fatigue. The causes behind fatigue seem insignificant and hence are ignored. But the effect is spectacular [1],[2],[3].

After that may be resonance will interest you.

Intervention

Gurucharan DasGupta writes on something that I have long pondered upon.

"We are aware of the missed opportunities and the economic loss from Nehru's decision to place the State at the 'commanding heights' of the economy. We don't realise how much damage Nehruvian socialism has done to our moral character. Our reforms are rightly shrinking government's role in business, but it will take much longer to rebuild character. Are people honest only because of the fear of punishment ? Without checks would people behave like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata? Modern social scientists assume that people are only motivated by 'self-interest'. But is that true? If a child is in danger, don't we have a natural desire to rush and save it?"

"Institutions have to depend both on the 'good' and 'bad' in human beings. If one is cautious and re-designs government only on selfish motives, you might erode whatever public spirit that exists. But ours was the opposite mistake — we relied on too much public spirit. To restore accountability now you don't need new solutions. Just adopt the accountability systems of high performing governments like Canada and Australia. Even better, follow the recommendations of our own administrative reforms commissions. "

[TOI]

My tentative hypothesis is that humans act on their instincts, self-interest which is just economicspeak for selfishness is one such instinct, altruism is another. Which instinct predominated is decided by social conditioning. I guess, among all animals, human is the most suggestible.
The real problem is in deciding our value system. Should it be independent of empirical observations? If yes then how do we judge one system is better than other ?
As far as I am concerned, value systems can only be reasoned and therefore judged, when it is assumed that our data or observations have some relevance. Which, to me, means that life and evolution has a meaning beyond bio-chemistry.

Intervention

Pratap BhanuMehta on menace of Jihadism,

A thought provoking perspective, albeit a liberal one, which means hampered by liberal bias.

Dissection at convenience

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I never thought there would come a day where I will be linking to Tavleen Singh, but today is the day. Good reads.

A dark, distorted Hinduism and Our Sunita complex

Slamming non - PM

Kick ass, totally.

What interests or rather troubles me is not the content of speech that our honourable non PM gave. He must have known, as someone who can be assumed to have at least rudimentary knowledge of economics, that the speech was nothing but bovine manure.He was casting industrialists as villain, essentially pandering for votes, harking back to hey days of Indira Gandhi and her delusional daddy, when surplus labour was the socialist equivalent of blood libel.

In other words, the speech was nothing more than pink Schick. Now this whole pandering business is something which happens frequently in politics. However what made it worse in this case is that, it made no political sense!

This socialist grandstanding is past its sell by date. Law of diminishing returns has ensured that any further invocation of this mantra will result in zero returns. This dead horse is not going to gallop howsoever MMS may flog it. The times they are a-changing.*

This is what frightens me. This is not just bad policy, but also bad politics. Whatever be the shortcoming of Indira Gandhi she knew the pulse of "common people". However the direction of the agenda that Sonia Gandhi has pursued since coming to power (due to sheer luck) only suggests that she is out of touch of reality or groundswell.

If there is anything worse than an opportunist politician, it is an opportunist politician, who is out of touch of reality.

* More about it later

Discuss ...

Fascination with Ayn Rand and resulting Aym-Gramdism is in fact proxy for Oedipus complex

On freedom

To continue from earlier post, I think any discussion on freedom is essentially framed around two propositions, one the extent to which freedom can be restricted, and more importantly the rationale behind freedom.


Now using libertarianism as the reference point, as I pointed out (rather obviously) that libertarianism (or to be more precise mainstream libertarianism distinct from anarcho-libertarianism or similar crazy stuff) doesn't guarantee unrestricted personal freedom, but this is not inconsistent because the restriction is only to extent of imposing institution(s) whose only mandate is (or should be) to safeguard the rights. Hence even libertarianism aims to optimize the extent of freedom.

Now comes the rationale, one point of view is of right theorists, essentially holding freedom as an end in itself, or to put in other words, starting point of any discourse. Now this sort of axiomatic position is bound to pass unchallenged in polite society, considering how any disputation to notion of inviolability of freedom will be considered scandalous. Being impolite I hold this position to be more or less worthless, and entirely based on contemporary sentimentalism.

The second position, of consequentalism, holds more appeal for me. Briefly, this position supports freedom as the means with overall social prosperity as the end. However in this case to determine the extent of freedom is a very difficult question and determined by prevailing definition of social good, and also broadly by the social conditions. The nature of rights have a profound effect on civilization.

Now personally speaking, I have yet to arrive at any concrete conclusion of my own. Meanwhile the premises (or the guidelines) that I favour for my orientation are

1. Any constructive work, any innovation is only possible out of a man's own volition. If I were to elaborate, explanation would be something like this.

2. People, generally speaking, are idiots. Therefore it follows a vast majority will use freedom to do something idiotic, with some able to accomplish acts stupendously idiotic in nature.

3. State, by virtue of having monopoly on use of force, is inherently evil.

Intervention - (Of nuance)

(Most of this is speculation, it may be correct, or it may be way off the mark)

The previous intervention was rhetorical. However the purpose of rhetoric was not to imply any contradiction and hence invalidate libertarianism, but to emphasize the nuance involved in the personal freedom argument. Now at risk of repeating, I am not well versed with libertarianism and hence this is speculation.

Now taxation as a rule involves coercion by state, with many people paying taxes only to avoid punishment by state, some of course even risking the punishment by evading tax. Hence taxation as policy does suppress and restrict personal freedom. Even then taxation doesn't introduce contradiction in libertarianism.

Now libertarianism comes in hazaar flavours (which is one of the reasons that I am not committing), however following statements holds true for most of the case.

"State will not restrict personal freedom of individual(s), (which includes transaction between two individuals) unless any non-consenting party is affected adversely as result of action of the concerned individual. "

From the above definition one may be tempted to conclude that taxation is unreasonable restriction of freedom by state. However this is not true, and not very hard to see why.

State collects tax to fund its activities and organization, without tax state can not exist.

But existence of state is assumed as given in the above definition of libertarianism.

This essentially implies that even with libertarianism while individual can not be stopped by state from exercising his freedom, his submitting to the authority of state is not subject to his agreement, he is coerced to accept the authority .

This means that personal freedom is circumscribed. This of course follows from definition of state and social contract.

I do admit that I am being Captain Obvious. Unfortunately people seem to miss obvious nowadays and increasingly consider Personal freedom to be either axiom to be used in deductive logic or holy grail of induhvidualism. It is nothing of sort.

Intervention - (Another anti libertarian one)

I am against tax evasion.
I don't care about US or France.
I also don't care what people do with their money after they have paid taxes.

PS Was Al Capone being a libertarian hero ?