Tag: liberalism

Categories
Liberty Society

[1207] Of a moderate with no moderation

In the NYT:

One day last month, a young man stood at the center of a stage with long ropes bound around each wrist. One pulled him to the left, the other to the right — one toward secularism, the other toward religious extremism. His father struggled to hold him in the middle, shouting “Enough! Enough!” Looking at the religious side, he said, “From here, there is destruction and zeal.” Then looking to the other side, he said, “There, is doom.”

The play, “A Moderate With No Moderation,” had been performed since last November at Al Yamamah College, one of a new group of private schools that are considered a concession to the reform agenda. During the opening performance, religious zealots attacked the audience and the performers and forced a cancellation of the show. But the next day the show went on. [The (Not So) Eagerly Modern Saudi. NYT. May 6 2007]

The tug of war continues.

Categories
Politics & government

[1178] Of Sarkozy at The Economist

The cover of the current issue of The Economist:

Copyrights by The Economist. Fair use.

How do the candidates measure up? Only three of the 12 are serious runners… A fourth who may shape the outcome is Mr Le Pen, the veteran leader of the racist National Front, who shamed France by edging past the Socialist candidate into the run-off against Mr Chirac in 2002. Mr Le Pen’s poll numbers are better now than they were at the equivalent stage then. It is vital for France and its image that Mr Le Pen be kept out of the second round this time.

Ms Royal would be an asset in the second round, turning it into a satisfyingly direct left-right contest. She has other attractions: the first woman to be a serious contender, the boldness to push past the elephants in her party to win the nomination, a willingness to break with Socialist taboos by praising Britain’s Tony Blair and criticising the French state’s imposition of a maximum 35-hour working week. Unfortunately her policies are woolly even by modern standards. And in economics, she stands squarely behind all the old left-wing shibboleths: state intervention, rigid labour protection and high taxes.

On the face of it, the centrist Mr Bayrou is more promising. His pledge to curb the public debt is more credible than Ms Royal’s and even Mr Sarkozy’s. But he has failed to promote a free-market agenda—he is distressingly fond of farm subsidies and state intervention. Nor is it clear how he would form a government: his centrist party is tiny, and his vague musings of drawing in like-minded leaders from left and right smack of the lowest common denominator.

[…]

Which leaves Mr Sarkozy as the best of the bunch. Unlike the others, and despite his long service as a minister under Mr Chirac, he makes no bones of admitting that France needs radical change. He is an outsider, born to an aristocratic Hungarian émigré father; he openly admires America; he is enthusiastic about the economic renaissance of Britain. He plans an early legislative blitz to take on hitherto untouchable issues such as labour-market liberalisation, cutting corporate and income taxes and trimming public-sector pensions. [France’s chance. The Economist. April 12 2007]

For a libertarian, he might be the best credible candidate that is worth considering, despite his shortcomings.

Categories
Economics Liberty

[1120] Of analogizing free market as democracy

It is Saturday morning and I just woke up from sleep. Being the internet addict that I am, within 15 minutes of consciousness, I was already log onto the internet, reading my bookmark, scouring for news or any interesting reading. Somehow, through random clicking, I reached Wan Saiful’s blog and found myself downloading “Apa itu Liberal dan apa itu Liberalisme?“.

I am not sure what I downloaded it in the first place. It might be caused by the launch of a book entitled, “Apa itu Pencerahan?“, a Malay translation of Kant’s “Was ist Aufklarung?“. Liberals that do not read German might be more familiar with its English title: “What is Enlightenment?” So, perhaps, I took the recurrence of the term “Apa itu… ?” as a sign; I need to read it.

So, I read it with relative ease. With ease because there is almost nothing new in the document; I, proudly, am familiar with almost all the ideas and the cited authors. So, it is dull except at the manner the author argues for free market, which I feel is ingenious.

On the fourth page, in Malay:

…Sebagai contoh, sebab apa percaya bahawa instituisi [sig] ekonomi yang bebas itu lebih adil, pertama sebab pasaran yang merupakan satu pilihanraya setiap jam dan minit. Contohnya A dan B jual nasi lemak, siapa yang menentuka [sig] A dan B boleh jual atau tidak? Yang menentukannya adalah pasar, peti undinya adalah pasar. Jika nasi lemak A tidak sedap dia akan kehilangan undi. Keadilannya terletak di sini.

Roughly in English:

…As an example, why free market institution is fairer than the other? First, the market is an election held every minute. For instance, who would decide A and B could sell nasi lemak? It is the market; the market is a huge ballot box. If A sold low quality nasi lemak, he would lose vote. The fairness of the system is here.

Though the idea is not foreign, I had never seen it stated in such an explicit way that links democracy with free market. I think this is the first time somebody explicitly uses democracy to justify free market.

Perhaps, such presentation of free market it is nothing more than an analogy. Nevertheless, this analogy could be used to entice fervent supporters of democracy that are neutral of the liberal-socialist divide towards free market and to a certain extent, liberal democracy.

Categories
Liberty Society

[1092] Of liberalism, multicultural societies and multiculturalism

One of the characteristics of liberalism is tolerance. While that might be true of liberalism taken as a whole, as usual, I am interested in classical liberalism and will refer such liberalism as simply liberalism. This tolerance originates from the non-aggression axiom. While I understand the relationship between tolerance and the non-aggression axiom, I had a hard time trying to justify multiculturalism in the name of liberalism. It turns out that it is hard to justify because it is unjustifiable.

I had the impression that multiculturalism is the apex of tolerance where different people from very different backgrounds come and live together in harmony, respecting each others’ rights. This impression, that both are related to tolerance, has brought me to assume that liberalism actively supports multiculturalism by virtue that both share the characteristic of tolerance. That opinion further strengthened my opinion on the relationship between liberalism and multicultural societies; that a liberal society is a multicultural society and multicultural society is synonymous to multiculturalism.

After a couple of headaches, enlightenment rained upon me. I somehow began to realize the difference between the descriptive multicultural and the prescriptive multiculturalism. The former merely describes a state of a society without espousing what state should the society be. The latter actively advocates for a state of multicultural through policies collectively called multiculturalism. With that realization, I have come to the conclusion that liberalism is neutral of multicultural society and unsupportive of multiculturalism.

It must be noted that a multicultural society is the natural course of a liberal society. Be aware that this is not similar to stating that the only cause a multicultural society is liberalism.

Liberalism by its very nature is tolerant and a liberal society is a tolerant society. This tolerance exhibited by liberal societies attracts people from all over, especially from illiberal societies. While liberalism produces multicultural societies, multicultural societies are not the goal of liberalism. To make the idea clearer, multicultural society is a side effect of liberalism; liberalism indirectly causes the creation of multicultural societies. The relationship between liberalism and multicultural societies stops there and goes no farther.

To actively encourage the formation of a multicultural society is taking it one step farther; that is multiculturalism and not liberalism.

A pillar of liberalism is spontaneous order. The policies of multiculturalism contradict the spirit of spontaneous order. A liberal must not force to turn a society into a multicultural one. By force, I mean, the state, which has the monopoly of policing power, actively promoting multicultural society as an end. It is worth reiterating that a liberal society would sooner or later become multicultural unconsciously. Forcing the process to go faster is counterproductive. Just as we cannot force others to be free, we cannot force society to become multicultural.

While multicultural society is, depending on point of view — I certainly do see it as such — a positive unintended effect of liberalism, liberals themselves, or rather, liberal states, should be neutral on issues relating to multicultural societies. Such neutrality is essential because whether a society is multicultural or monocultural, it is not related to liberty. In an already liberal society when negative rights are secured, do we expect the state of multicultural to affect liberty in any way?

I would answer no.

I do believe that I was not the only that that had tried to say multiculturalism is part of liberalism. A lot of multiculturalists do call themselves as liberals and it is easy to understand how such confusion could occur.

As stated earlier, a creation of a multicultural society is a side effect — a symptom — of liberalism. Advanced liberal societies more often than not are multicultural societies. Those that misunderstood the relationship between liberalism and multiculturalism will try to emulate these advanced liberal societies to the letters, instead of to the spirit. The strong relationship between liberalism and multicultural societies blurs the causality and causes many liberals — I would call these liberals as neophytes — to accept multicultural societies as central to liberalism.

Again, multicultural society is a symptom of liberalism; a multicultural society is simply a sign of a maturing liberal society. Multicultural society is not central to liberalism while multiculturalism is out of the equation.

For us to emulate advanced liberal societies, we need to secure the roots of liberalism, not the symptoms of liberalism. For once the roots are secured, the symptoms will come in good time.

Categories
Liberty

[1053] Of Liberal Islam is not liberalism

I have a tingling suspicion that the school of Liberal Islam is not part of liberalism. Earlier, I have reasoned that while I am a liberal, I am not a member of Liberal Islam. This entry will further strengthen that assertion.

Forgive me but when I refer to liberalism, I really mean classical liberalism. Nowadays, the core concepts of liberalism have won the global ideological battle so greatly that almost everybody at least gives a lip service to liberalism in order to share the victor’s glory. Everybody loves winners and this includes Liberal Islam. Even religious conservatives through varying degree nominally accept certain aspect unique to or introduced by liberalism. Thus, I must qualify liberalism before I go on.

The problem with Liberal Islam is that, it does not hold the concept of liberty for the sake of liberty. Rather, it holds liberty — particularly civil liberty — because the school interprets the sources of Islam to allow as such. Whatever the conservative camps are saying, Liberal Islam still refers back to the sources of Islam. At the very least, it is the Koran. A real liberal does not embrace liberalism because “revealed knowledge” tells him or her to do so. A real liberal embraces liberalism simply for the sake of liberty through his or her own reasoning. A real liberal is not a slave that follows every order or commandment presented to him or her. A real liberal thinks for him or herself.

If it is true that Liberal Islam is not part of liberalism, why does Liberal Islam call itself Liberal Islam?

I would venture to say that the term “liberal” of Liberal Islam acts as a superlative. The term “liberal” in Liberal Islam simply describes the fact that Liberal Islam is more liberal in its interpretation of the sources of Islam compared to that of religious conservatives’. Nothing more. In comparison, the same reasoning is meaningless in liberalism; it should be meaningless simply because “revealed knowledge” is irrelevant.

It is no question that some of the tenets of Liberal Islam are similar to that of liberalism. Nevertheless, Liberal Islam does not go as far as liberalism in embracing liberty. And that liberty encompasses more than civil liberties. Free market is an important pillar in liberalism but Liberal Islam does not seem to stress too much of it.

The fact that term “liberal” in Liberal Islam is a superlative, a socialist could be a member of Liberal Islam. Socialism is affirmatively not part of liberalism. If socialism were liberalism, then the Cold War would not have made sense.