Geoff Fox sent me this interesting account of his time in Indonesia. Well worth a look.

Following a piece by Gerard Henderson noting the preponderance of ex-leftists on the Australian intellectual right, quite a few bloggers have revealed themselves as part of this tendency to a greater or lesser degree.

It has always struck me how much of the tone of the Australian and US right is set by ex-leftists and particularly by ex-Marxists. Particularly noticeable is the fact that, despite having been deceived by one ideology claiming to have all the answers, the ex-Marxist rightwingers are just as dogmatic in their new faith as in the old one – Keith Windschuttle is just the latest example of this.

Another feature which is almost as universal is the persistence of whining about persecution. This was always rather tiresome when leftists were complaining about being persecuted by ruling classes (‘Dennis’ in Monty Python and the Holy Grail captures the tone perfectly), but after all there was some basis for the complaint. The left was routinely spied on by security agencies and the Menzies government did try to ban the Communist party. To hear the same whining tone when highly paid employees of well-funded thinktanks are complaining because a few students call them nasty names is just pathetic. David Horowitz is the prime exponent of this, but it’s the central characteristic of the whole right-wing campaign against ‘political correctness’.

The final noteworthy characteristic is over-compensation for past sins. Undoubtedly it was a mistake to support dictators like Ho Chi Minh and Castro, as many leftists did in the 60s and 70s, let alone Stalin and his successors. But recognising that obvious fact shouldn’t blind people to the fact that there are plenty of very nasty types on the other side, starting close to home with Suharto and his cronies. Nor should an appreciation of the faults of communism lead to automatic endorsement of capitalism. This latter point was recognised by consistent anti-communists like BA Santamaria and Robert Manne, both of whom moved sharply to the left once it was clear that communism no longer posed a threat.

I don’t feel any need for such compensation myself. I don’t go in for protest marches these days, but when I did, I was just as keen to demonstrate against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as I was to protest against apartheid and the neutron bomb. The spectacle of people who were once far to my left whizzing past me on their journey to the far-right leaves me bemused, especially when the tone in which they attack social-democratic views like mine remains essentially unchanged.

In the comments thread for my post on ‘political correctness’, Derrida Derider argues, citing Orwell, that

The language gamesters are unfortunately right – you CAN change the way people think, up to a point anyway, by changing language.

I think Orwell’s discussion of the issue left some ambiguities unresolved. Orwell is clear on the point that sloppy language can be a tool for self-deception. The prime example of this is the 1984 concept of ‘doublethink’, the capacity to maintain two contradictory beliefs at the same time that is essential to survival in a totalitarian system.

But the other side of doublethink is that, at some level, everyone knows the score. Experience of totalitarian systems over a long period suggests that in the end, command over language does not entail command over thought. Rather, in a totalitarian system, people necessarily develop a series of language codes:

• the official propaganda language for business dealings

,

• a set of very subtle and deniable codes for talk with a general circle of friends to be used, for example, to refer to blackmarket transactions or office politics
• and a still-coded but more direct language for intimate friends who can be presumed ‘safe’

.

I’ve referred to totalitarian systems in general, but in fact a lot of this discussion is only really applicable to Communist systems, which claimed to be democratic socialist states run by and for workers. Reflecting La Rouchefoucauld’s maxim that ‘hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue’, the maintenance of this claim in states which whose oligarchical and exploitative nature was evident to all required a high degree of ‘thought control’.

By contrast, as I observed in my review of Lilla’s Reckless Minds, ‘Although Nazi propaganda was mendacious in every detail, it never concealed the fundamental nature of Nazism.’ The Nazis never pretended to embody ideals of peace and democracy, openly declaring their preference for war and mastery. As a result, the language of the Nazis was mostly simple and direct. As with Bismarck a generation or two earlier, Nazi rhetoric was full of references to blood and iron, and this was a pretty fair summary of what they actually gave the world.

Virginia Postrel has quite an interesting piece on Tax Policy as a Tool and a Weapon focusing on the compromises that inevitably upset economists when their ideas on tax reform get implemented.

A little while ago, I mentioned the topic of urban heat islands as an example of a dead horse that shouldn’t be flogged any further. But no topic in discussion today is as tired as that of ‘political correctness’, dragged up in today’s Oz by Les Murray.
Australian users of this phrase betray their ignorance, since the term ‘politically correct’ was never used in Australia until people like Les imported it from American right-wingers campaigning against its alleged tyrannical sway over public debate. The equivalent term in the Australian Left was ‘ideologically sound’.

More significant is the fact that the term ‘ideologically sound’ was almost invariably used ironically, as a gentle criticism of those on the Left who were more concerned with getting verbal formulations of policy precisely right than with actually getting anything done. As far as I can tell the same was true of ‘politically correct’, before the Right got hold of it.
One aspect of this focus on words rather than deeds, more pronounced in the US than here, was the belief that appropriate use of language would automatically bring about desirable social change – for example that attitudes to less developed countries would change for the better if they were referred to as ‘developing’.

This idea was the subject of much well-deserved parody – the invention of terms like ‘gravitationally challenged’ in place of ‘fat’. The obvious implication of this kind of parody was the one that left-wing users of terms like ‘politically correct’ had already drawn – that practitioners of this kind of verbal gymnastics were unlikely to pose any serious threat to capitalism, or to anything else except the English language (which has, however, shown almost infinite resilience in the face of misuse by lawyers, bureaucrats and others).

Yet the right-wing critics of political correctness sought to make exactly the opposite claim. Somehow, a handful of leftists playing verbal games were elevated into a tyrannical dictatorship, posing a fundamental threat to freedom of speech. Thus, in Australia, we have had the absurd and continuing spectacle of a government which has not only a tightly controlled House of Representatives and a publicly-funded official media machine, but also the editorial support of most newspapers and a vociferous claque of commentators in electronic and print media, posing as an underdog fighting against an entrenched ‘elite’. The situation in the US is similar, but even more laughable because of the absence of anything even faintly resembling an organised political left.

It’s a day late, but it’s time for everyone to have their say. Suggested topic: predictions and hopes for the New Year, but, as usual, anything (clean and civilised) goes.

Hi everyone! I’ve been travelling in various parts of North Queensland, most recently beautiful Mission Beach, but now I’m back on air, though it will still be fairly light for a week or so.

The announcement (still not verified) that a cloned baby has been born seems likely to produce the usual handwringing about Brave New World and technology running ahead of the law. In fact, while it will be almost impossible to stop human cloning, my assessment is that the net social impact will be close to zero.
The basic premise for this claim is that hardly anyone wants a fundamental alternative to the traditional method of conception. All the popular applications of human reproductive technologies have involved making the traditional method work more reliably – either by enabling infertile couples to have children or by preventing the transmission of genetic defects.
Conversely, most of the supposed ‘Brave New World’ applications have been feasible, using low-tech methods, since the dawn of time, or at least since the basics of genetics became properly understood around a century ago. The only widespread example of genetic selection has been the use of amniocentesis, followed by selective abortion, for sex selection. This is just a marginally modified version of selective infanticide, though for some, the differences are crucial. A similar point applies to the most likely non-therapeutic use of cloning, to permit lesbians to have children without male intervention.
With these marginal exceptions, interest in human applications of genetic engineering, both high-tech and low-tech, has been close to zero. From attempts at promoting eugenic breeding in the early 20th century to the ‘genius’ sperm bank of the 1980s, hardly anyone has been interested in improving the genetic quality of the species, and particularly not if it involved removing their own genes from the pool (of course, as the famous Darwin awards attest, many of the less-fit manage to find creative ways of removing their genes from the pool before reproducing).
Coming back to cloning, if a science-fiction version of cloning were possible, producing exact adult copies of a given individual, there would probably be men rich and egotistical enough to go for it (I can’t imagine women being interested). But I doubt that many men would really want an identical twin thirty years younger than themselves, and whose inevitably disappointing behavior can’t be blamed on anyone else.

Humans have always tried to predict the future, generally with limited success. Before the modern era, most attempts at prediction relied on magical approaches. The only science with a record of successful prediction was astronomy, and this success gave rise to its magical counterpart, astrology.
Over the course of the modern era, the predictive capacity of scientific disciplines, from geology and meteorology to demography and economics, improved steadily. Nevertheless, on most issues of central concern in human society, our capacity to predict events more than a few years into the future remains modest, especially by comparison with the grandiose claims made by the 19th Century pioneers of the social sciences.
The idea of futurology as an organised effort to predict the future became popular around the middle of the 20th century, and was most closely associated with Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute. The aim of futurologists was to bring a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to bear on the task of predicting future developments in society and technology.
The most notable innovation in futurology was methodological. In place of forecasts, futurologists introduced the idea of ‘scenarios’, a metaphor taken from the technical language of scriptwriting. In futurology, a scenario is a general description of conditions which forms the basis of more detailed conditional predictions of specific outcomes. Thus, we might consider a scenario for 2050 in which the United Nations has become a world government or, alternatively, has ceased to exist.
Scenarios were initially used to add rigor to informal forecasts. Increasingly, however, they have been used as a way of specifying parameter values for simulation modelling using large-scale computer models. The first such exercise to gain widespread attention was the ‘Limits to Growth” model produced by the Club of Rome in the 1970s. The weaknesses of this model, which predicted severe shortages of most commodities to emerge by the 1990s, supported critics who argued that the large scale of the model distracted attention from fundamental theoretical difficulties such as the failure to take price responses into account.
Scenario-based approaches to prediction of the future do not lend themselves to empirical testing, since they are, in essence, conditional forecasts and the conditions are rarely satisfied exactly. It is safe to say, however, that the prediction of social events remains an unsolved problem. Since the act of making predictions may well affect social outcomes, the problem may in fact be insoluble.

In the 1930s and 1940s, economists reformulated economic analysis in terms of preferences, eliminating, seemingly once and for all, the troublesome notion of utility and the link between classical economics and utilitarianism. Almost immediately, however, the concept of cardinal utility theory was revived by von Neumann and Morgenstern in their analysis of behavior under uncertainty, and its application to game theory, based on the idea of expected utility maximisation. When faced with an uncertain prospect, under which any of a set of outcomes could occur with known probability, von Neumann and Morgenstern suggested attaching a numerical utility to each outcome and evaluating the prospect by calculating the mean value of the utilities. This procedure is feasible only for cardinal measures of utility.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern denied that the cardinal nature of the utility function they used had any normative significance, and most advocates of expected utility agreed. Savage (1954) warned against confusing the von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function with “the now almost obsolete notion of utility in riskless situations.” Arrow (1951) described cardinal utility under certainty as “a meaningless concept”. However, as Wakker (1991a, p. 10) observes
The same cardinal function that provides an expectation representing individuals’ preferences over randomized outcomes is also used to provide the unit of exchange between players. The applicability of risky utility functions as a means of exchange between players is as disputable as their applicability to welfare theory, or to any other case of decision making under certainty.
This view was adopted by Allais (1953), the most prominent critic of the expected utility model. Allais argued that a proper analysis of choice under risk required both a cardinal specification of utility as a function of wealth under certainty and a separate specification of attitudes towards uncertainty. Allais’ position has been strengthened by the development of the rank-dependent family of generalisations of the expected utility model (Quiggin 1982), in which there is a clear separation between diminishing marginal utility of wealth and risk attitudes derived from concerns about the probability of good and bad outcomes. These models have been combined iwth other generalisations such as the prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979).
The use of cardinal utility models of social choice has been encouraged by the popularity of contractarian models such as that of Rawls (1971). Rawls introduces the device of a ‘veil of ignorance’ behind which individuals choose social arrangements without knowing what place they will occupy in those arrangements. Rawls argues, largely on the basis of intuition about choices under uncertainty, that rational individuals will adopt a ‘maximin’ criterion, focusing on the worst possible outcome. This is an extreme form of the decision-weighting process represented in rank-dependent expected utility. From the maximin criterion of choice under uncertainty, Rawls derives his theory of justice based on concern for the worst-off members of the community. The approach used by Harsanyi (1953) may be interpreted in similar terms. Unlike Rawls, Harsanyi assumes that rational individuals seek to maximise expected utility. He therefore derives the conclusion that they will prefer utilitarian social arrangements.

Bibliography

Allais, M., (1987), The general theory of random choices in relation to the invariant cardinal utility function and the specific probability function: The (U, q) model – A general overview,, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Paris.
Arrow, K. (1951), ‘Alternative approaches to the theory of choice in risk-taking situations’, Econometrica 19, 404–437.
Harsanyi, J. (1953), ‘Cardinal utility in welfare economics and in the theory of risk taking’, Journal of Political Economy 61, 434–435.
Quiggin, J. (1982), ‘A theory of anticipated utility’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3(4), 323–43.
Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice, Clarendon, Oxford.
Savage, L. J. (1954), Foundations of statistics, Wiley, N.Y.
von Neumann, J. and Morgenstern, O. (1944), Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press.
Wakker, P. (1991), ‘Separating marginal utility and probabilistic risk aversion’, paper presented at University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen.