Liberal Vision

Does this man – make your man – feel inferior?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Old Spice ads. In what has been one of the most clever marketing campaigns this year, sales of Old Spice products have sky rocketed from a prolonged lull. No longer the scent of your dad, or just old men in general, the adverts featuring ebony adonis Isaiah Mustafa have reinvigorated the Old Spice brand.

This advert  is an egregious play on hyper-masculine stereotypes.  The caption underneath this video on Youtube is as follows: “We’re not saying this body wash will make your man smell into a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it.

Surely, then, it is only a matter of time before Jo Swinson and Lynne Featherstone condemn these adverts? Afterall Old Spice openly mocks their consumers for not being able to ever look like Mustafa. Previously when criticising the “Real Women” campaign I was not over-inundated with adverts displaying the male equivalent. Some would interpret this as rendering my arguments invalid.

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However, were a Victoria’s Secret model to star in an advert admitting she has a level of beauty unattainable to most of the female population I happily wager that  Swinson and Featherstone would condemn it within hours.

If I apply the narrative that was used to defend the Real Woman campaign to the Old Spice ads it goes something like this: “The self esteem of young boys might be harmed when they realise they can’t swan dive into a hot tub which has a motorcycle in it. These adverts should contain a warning that Mustafa has only be able to accomplish these feats with the aid of computer alteration. What about our SONS?!?! Will no one think of the Children?!”

Obviously that’s completely ludicrous.  

Luckily something tells me there won’t be a motion at Conference condemning the Old Spice ads. But sadly, I fear it won’t be because they’ve come to the conclusion that politicians shouldn’t be responsible for our self-esteem. I would pity the poor souls who open their mail if they were. Can you imagine:

Dear Michael Gove*,

This month’s Cosmo came out to day and I’m feeling a bit shit…

Kind Regards,
Sara Scarlett

[*My local MP. Aren't I lucky...] 

The fact of the matter is there won’t be the same out-cry over the Old Spice ads because even if they’re making men all over the western world feel inferior - men don’t like to victimise themselves in the same way women do. The Real Woman campaign completely codified the collective self-pity of a fraction of women. It was wrapped in a bunch of other, more worthy, issues to shove it through conference. It sent out the message that it was okay to absolve yourself of responsibility for your own self-esteem; a message that does women no favours.

Having seen candids (un-airbrushed paparazzi pics) of Isaiah Mustafa – I can attest to the fact that he is as lovely without the aid of computer wizardry as he is in the Old Spice ads. In the same way that Elle MacPherson is stunning in candids too. So until good looks can be redistibuted equally there’s no escaping the reality that some people are just better looking than others. No amount of nannying from busy-body politicians is going change that.

Five Books interview with Brink Lindsey

Check out this fascinating interview with the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey:

I think the typical view of politics from inside a partisan mindset is to see politics as a battle of the good guys versus the bad guys. Maybe the good guys are on the left, maybe the good guys are on the right, but it’s this Manichean struggle and the way to get progress is for the good side to win and impose their will. Mill sees through that and sees that, in fact, politics is a dialectical process. At any given time truth is partly on one side and partly on the other. It’s more a battle of half-truths and incomplete truths than of good versus bad. The excesses of each side ultimately create opportunities for the other to come in and correct those excesses. Liberalism, in Mill’s view and in mine, provides the basic motive force of political change and progress. It will go astray, it will have excesses, it will make terrible mistakes – and a conservatism that is focused on preserving good things that exist now will be a necessary counterweight to that liberalism.

Brink also talks about the great books that influence modern classical liberalism in a very thoughtful and considered manner. Excellent stuff.

Freedom, but only for Jesus-loving ‘Murcans

The 9/11 attacks were coined an “attack on our freedoms” both in the USA and in other parts of the West (like here). This seemed like reasonable rhetoric, at least until the US government came up with the Patriot Act and a variety of plans to drop a load of bombs on people in the Middle East.

The latest sadly ironic post-9/11 assault on freedom involves the reactionary opposition to some community centre in New York which will apparently include a mosque. This has widely been reported as a plan to “build a mosque on ground zero”, yet as this blog post shows, the mosque isn’t even that close to ground zero:

To borrow Big Apple parlance, the mosque is “two blocks” away. Presumably some flats/shops/offices in that area even include people called Mohammed.

Tags: 9/11, Ground Zero, Islam, World Trade Center

God v Satan

One for Laurence Boyce:

Hat-tip: ChartPorn.org

Tags: God, Satan

Samuel Fleischacker: a Third Concept of Liberty, Judgement and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (1999)

Fleischacker is a Professor at University of Illinois-Chicago. Though all his degrees and academic appointments are from the USA, he is English in origin. He is a leading Adam Smith scholar, author of On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (2004) and co-editor of Essays on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (2010). Amongst currently active thinkers inspired by classical liberalism, he could be taken as representing the other pole to Chandran Kukathas, who was discussed in my last post. Fleischacker is definitely a ‘liberal’ in what is now the normal sense in America, that is someone of egalitarian left leaning inclinations. However, he is also much less of a statist social democrat than the average American ‘liberal’, and he tries to establish an alternative to the kind of top down statism often employed to advance social egalitarianism. He is critical of libertarians for what he sees as indifference to the need for government action to aid liberty, but much of what he says fits with those libertarian thinkers who believe government has a role in promoting public goods.

Fleischacker looks back to Adam Smith and to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who will be addressed soon in this series of posts. Kant was greatly influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, and has similar ideas to Smith about the benefits of free trade, property rights, and individual liberty under law. Kant also puts those Scottish Enlightenment ideas in the context of a philosophy much more concerned with ‘transcendental’ questions, that is questions of the limits of knowledge, and the way our knowledge of the world depends on the nature of our consciousness.

One part of Kant’s study of our consciousness is concerned with the power of judgment itself, which he thinks is at work in our taste for beauty and our philosophy of nature. Fleischacker is particularly concerned with beauty in Kant, which Kant connects with the most inner and subjective aspects of judgment. Kant’s view of our power for subjective judgements of beauty, is that it joins with everyone else’s judgement of beauty in ways which are the basis of communication, which join subjective pleasure with universal standards. For Kant, the capacity for judgments of beauty is deeply connected with our freedom as human beings and with our capacity to make moral judgements regarding other free individuals.

This aspect of Kant builds, in part, on ideas in Hume and Smith about the improvement of human morality, liberty, and taste over history. It is this capacity which provides a third concept of liberty beyond, the ‘negative’ liberty of freedom from interference, and the ‘positive’ liberty of collective action to provide conditions of liberty.
Fleischacker looks at liberty and self-determination in Kant in the first part of the book, and follows it up in the second part with an examination of the moral and political aspects of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Fleischacker thinks of Smith’s political economy as referring to the kind of values of moral reflection and freedom from external domination, that can be found in Kant. He looks at how for Smith, the increase in the prosperity and independence of labourers is a prime concern.

Fleischacker refers to the various points in Smith, which identify the manipulation of markets by the rich and powerful who try to exclude competitions. Merchants collude in trying to rig markets against new competitors, guild masters try to limit and control the people entering that guild.

Fleischacker looks at Smith’s famous line about the benefits we receive from the self-interest of butchers, bakers and brewers, rather than from their benevolence. The main point for Fleischacker is the value of personal independence. It is better for me to depend on myself for my food and drink, rather than depend on anyone’s charity. Fleischacker also notes Smith’s enthusiasm for indirect taxes on luxury goods rather than taxes which bear on the poor, and his disdain for those who look down on, and preach at, the poor for their supposed irresponsibility. Fleischacker’s extrapolation that Smith would be a supporter of redistributive tax and welfare policies are no doubt open to debate, but his views are certainly based on deep knowledge of Smith’s writings.

The last part of A Third Concept of Liberty is concerned with John Rawls, the dominant figure in recent egalitarian liberal political theory. Though Fleishacker agrees with Rawls’ overall view, he thinks Rawls leans too much towards rigid views of social organisation and distribution of income. Fleschacker argues for a more contextual approach, in which policy solutions emerge in reaction to particular conditions. He argues for public action to be directed against monopolistic economic power, rather than towards distribution of income. Rawls himself is often take as master thinker of left-liberalism and social democracy, but he also been taken up approvingly by some classical liberal and libertarian thinkers including Friedrich Hayek (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2 The Mirage of Social Justice, 1979). So if Fleishacker takes Rawls, and tries to move away from the more designed from above elements of Rawls thinking, he certainly has something positive for classical liberals and libertarians. Rawls himself will be dealt with in a future post.

Tags: a Third Concept of Liberty Judgement and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith, Adam Smith, Kant, Rawls, Samuel Fleischacker