Charlie Rose

REMant  03/26/2009 06:45 PM Report

Singer is an avowed utilitarian. He undoubtedly acquired it early in his professional career, when he became interested in saving animals, just as Jeremy Bentham, utilitarianism's founder, also wrote about animal welfare. Mr Singer has found a home at Prineton without a doubt because he is just the kind of politically correct fellow that and many other Ivy League institutions have been at pains to hire in recent years. Old-fashioned Princetonians like Charles Hodge or James McCosh tho must be rolling over in the graves. I would not be surprised to find him a good friend of Mr Bernanke. Despite having been a prolific writer, he is a very shallow one, and lacks the expected credentials.

He is also an Australian and we should not be surprised either at finding ourselves yesterday treated once again to Messrs Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, arguing along basically Keynesian lines (tho Keynes, himself, eschewed utilitarianism), for more "stimulus," which is essentially the same as increasing welfare. It has always been argued in opposition both to this and to welfare in general that it impedes real economic adjustment. The entire EU is opposed to them now, the EU President, in fact, calling it "the way to hell." It is a surprising turn of events, when the originators of social democracy, turn their backs on it, and those nations, which have historically been so strenuously opposed, are now so strongly in favor. In part this is because social democrats are in power there, but I think it is also a matter of history. The Europeans have discovered the shortcomings of social democracy; the US, GB and Australia have yet to learn. The same could be said within this country, for it has its strongest supporters in the New South and Far West, the emerging mkts of the US. Murray Rothbard picked this up in his study of the origins of the economic argument in the 1930's, and traced it to Progressivism. Milton Friedman seems to have understood this as well, as he increasingly turned away from the Keynesianism in his thinking, and emphasized the classical Liberalism. Anyway, to hear them, you'd think the Fascists were on the march again. Well, maybe. After all, the Brits and the Aussies are the ones who supported the war in Iraq, begun by sons and daughters of the New South, and Far West, and orchestrated and championed by Jews and evangelicals.

But back to utilitarianism. Altho, given the way it is taught nowadays, students are apt to think of utilitarianism as the bedrock of microeconomics, it is not connected to in any way to Adam Smith or Manchester Liberalism. Nor indeed has it been the major influence at the London School of Economics, which was once the home of Keynes' opponents, Hayek and Robbins. But utilitarianism is to be equated with 19th century Whiggism, or, sometimes called here the doctrine of improvement, and the backbone of the Second Great Awakening. In that respect it merged into the democratic socialism of the Germans in the Progressive movement. There are no absolutes in utilitarianism in theory, nor does prudence, or educated self-interest play a part, rather values are entirely selfish, and equilibria are sought by a mkt mechanism. It is like Locke without the higher understanding. It is not possible to get to any universal morality from that, tho Singer claims to have and so did the Benthamites, via a route that supposes that whatever is good for me, should be good for everyone else, and ends up forcing it upon them. As a result tho Whiggism ends up being neither free nor just. There is in Bentham's work a decided emphasis that ends justify means. Dickens was quite a good critic of all of it, as were Samuel Butler, Anthony Trollope, and even Mandeville.

It is precisely this that the two women here are criticizing. It is this attitude, which perpetuates the British Empire, even today, and which we tried, somewhat unsucessfully, I think, to liberate ourselves from in what the British like to call the War for Independence. Bentham was also opposed to the colonies' quest for independence, unlike Smith, and to its employment of natural rights argument, which he considered repugnant to the Whig constitution, and, he also argued in favor of monetary inflation like Thomas Attwood. And continuing the irony, while a common lawyer, he pushed his entire life for its codification. He made much of a system of rewards and deprivational punishments like his progeny the behaviorists. Foucault considered him prototypical of the trend of modern society towards discipline, but it is a monastic discipline, a sentimentality, and more akin to the rise of domesticity, or to what has been termed, the feminization of America (and Britain before) than to market discipline, for there is no room for real education, nor for warfare. The result is the sort of smothering that Tocqueville found in his travels here, and the squalor he found in England. The irony of Whiggism is that it creates the problems that it is so intent on ameliorating, but that is inherent in its religious nature and the peculiarity of equating freedom only with the production of zombies. If you want to understand precisely what this entailed you may want to read the Baptist Brown University President Francis Wayland's account of his son's conversion here: http://www.merrycoz.org/articles/WAYLAND.HTM And so we find Carnegie's and Rockefeller's robbing the poor and destroying the middle-class and endowing libraries and organizations for peace. (NB- I have already written exhaustively about how easy money makes this much essier than it would otherwise be.) It is also to be found in the patronizing NAACP attitude Obama no doubt imbibed and carried with him to Chicago, where it seems he, himself, found it wanting, yet seems loath to entirely abandon.