Prof. Utsa Patnaik's novel 'drain theory'.

Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University
In a recent newspaper article it writes-

How exactly did the British manage to diddle us and drain our wealth’? was the question that Basudev Chatterjee (later editor of a volume in the Towards Freedom project ) had posed to me 50 years ago when we were fellow-students abroad. After decades of research I find that using India’s commodity export surplus as the measure and applying an interest rate of 5%, the total drain from 1765 to 1938, compounded up to 2016, comes to £9.2 trillion; since $4.86 exchanged for £1 those days, this sum equals about $45 trillion.

Wonderful! World GDP was about one trillion when the Raj began and about 4 trillion by 1919 which was when Britain stopped making much of a profit and were breaking even in what is now India.

This Professor is telling us that the British managed to drain India of twenty times more wealth than the entire world was capable of yielding (because of Technological progress, Wealth is now a higher multiple of Income).

How did they manage it? The answer must be that India was not part of this World. It existed in a parallel dimension. Moreover, Britain did not exist entirely in this Universe. So faery Britain drained faery India of faery gold. At least, according to the sort of Economics they teach at JNU.

Let us hear more about this wonderful faery economics.

The exact mechanism of drain, or transfers from India to Britain was quite simple. The key factor was Britain’s control over our taxation revenues combined with control over India’s financial gold and forex earnings from its booming commodity export surplus with the world.

India was a poor country which yielded little tax revenue- no more than ten percent of GDP.
Its 'booming commodity exports' were not controlled by the British. How could it have been?
There was no exchange control back then. Anyone could own unlimited gold or silver or any other sort of financial instrument and use it to finance trade.  When a Gujerati Seth or a Chettiar merchant dealt in cotton or rice or opium there was no formal requirement to do so through British channels. Hawala networks were perfectly legal. Hundis were not regulated in any way. It is a different matter that some transactions were done on 'stamped paper' so as to be more easily justiciable in a British court. But the profit on this was small.

Simply put, Britain used locally raised rupee tax revenues to pay for its net import of goods, a highly abnormal use of budgetary funds not seen in any sovereign country.

India was not sovereign country. It was ruled by British Governors and Judges and Civil Servants and Soldiers. This was an 'invisible export' of Britain's. A calculation similar to Utsa Patnaik's could show that Britain increased Indian wealth by far more than it took. This is because Indian GDP and population did go up in a manner directly linked to the 'invisible' services provided by the Brits.

Some Indians thought such services were too expensive or not fit for purpose. Mahatma Gandhi thought Indians could get on without British law courts and Colleges and so forth. He was wrong. His disciple, Sardar Vallabhai Patel went running to the British Court so as to cheat Netaji Subash Chandra Bose out of a legacy, to be used for a patriotic purpose, that Patel's elder brother had left the Bengali leader. If India did not need the Brits, why did Utsa herself go to Oxford to do her PhD? Why did the Indian Government, after Independence, still spend tax-payer's money on scholarships for people like Utsa?

A sovereign country might hire foreign administrators and soldiers and judges and so forth and pay for them with tax revenue. It is unlikely to do so. Why? Positions of power can yield 'rents'- i.e. more or less opaque, if not corrupt, opportunities for enrichment- and thus the native elite is likely to want to monopolise the top jobs.

The odd thing about the Brits in India- at least after the Crown took over from John Company- is that most natives thought the White Man was less corrupt than one of their own colour. Today, an IAS officer is as likely to be corrupt as not. Amongst ICS officers the thing was exceedingly rare.

The East India Company from 1765 onwards allocated every year up to one-third of Indian budgetary revenues net of collection costs, to buy a large volume of goods for direct import into Britain, far in excess of that country’s own needs. Since tropical goods were highly prized in other cold temperate countries which could never produce them, in effect these free goods represented international purchasing power for Britain which kept a part for its own use and re-exported the balance to other countries in Europe and North America against import of food grains, iron and other goods in which it was deficient.

In other words, John Company extracted rents- often in unconscionable ways- but then so did Native potentates. But the amount of 'rent' sent back home to Blighty was about 3.3 per cent of the GDP of the areas they ruled.

Even with this 'drain', the fact remains that some areas did better under British rule- like pre-Mutiny Delhi. Few did appreciably worse. In a Native State, a clerk might be asked to send his wife to the bed of a superior. That is why people preferred to take employment in British districts.

Why does Utsa thing 're-export' is a form of theft? Transporting things costs money. The Indians had no mercantile navy able to cross great oceans and reach America or Europe. The British bought cheap in India, did some processing back home and then marketed finished products across the globe. This was value-added by British people- not Indians. An Indian merchant- at least after the abolition of the last Navigation Act in 1849- was perfectly free to buy cloves in Zanzibar and process them into clove oil which he could then sell in China or anywhere else. Some Indian merchants did so and, if their luck held, became rich. Many a big business house in India got their start in opium or cotton.

The British historians Phyllis Deane and WA Cole presented an incorrect estimate of Britain’s 18th-19th century trade volume, by leaving out re-exports completely.

This is scarcely surprising. Their book came out in 1962 and conformed to the methodology of the time. In any case, 're-export' involved processing, packaging, marketing, insurance, transport and so forth.

I found that by 1800 Britain’s total trade was 62% higher than their estimate, on applying the correct definition of trade including re-exports, that is used by the United Nations and by all other international organisations.

So what? How things are measured don't affect anything real. What matters is that a metric is applied in a consistent and sensible manner.

When the Crown took over from the Company, from 1861 a clever system was developed under which all of India’s financial gold and forex earnings from its fast-rising commodity export surplus with the world, was intercepted and appropriated by Britain.

Nonsense. Everyone was free to buy gold or currency anywhere and take it anywhere. If you sent a shipment of opium or cotton or tea to a foreign country you could ask to be sent gold or currency or anything else that took your fancy. It may have been safer and cheaper to use British financial intermediaries- but that is still true. That's why some Indian billionaires are based in London.

As before up to a third of India’s rising budgetary revenues was not spent domestically but was set aside as ‘expenditure abroad’.

Sure. There was a 'Home Charge' for pensions and to pay for British 'invisible exports'- including Public Goods like Defense. Pax Brittanica wasn't cheap. Ruling the waves costs a lot of money.

The Secretary of State for India in Council, based in London, invited foreign importers to deposit with him the payment (in gold, sterling and their own currencies) for their net imports from India, and these gold and forex payments disappeared into the yawning maw of the SoS’s account in the Bank of England.

Yawning maw? Did the Secretary of State- like a notorious Nigerian Petroleum Minister- put the money into his own pocket? No. The account was properly audited and all monies were used for a proper purpose. How come? The Opposition Party in Parliament would have seized upon any evidence of malfeasance to bring down the Ministry.

Against India’s net foreign earnings he issued bills, termed Council bills (CBs), to an equivalent rupee value. The rate (between gold-linked sterling and silver rupee) at which the bills were issued, was carefully adjusted to the last farthing, so that foreigners would never find it more profitable to ship financial gold as payment directly to Indians, compared to using the CB route.

In other words, there was no 'yawning maw' and no rent extraction. Arbitrage was unrestricted. Thus a useful economic service was provided in return for a small mark up.

Foreign importers then sent the CBs by post or by telegraph to the export houses in India, that via the exchange banks were paid out of the budgeted provision of sums under ‘expenditure abroad’, and the exporters in turn paid the producers (peasants and artisans) from whom they sourced the goods.

What's wrong with that? If the SoS got greedy the market would disintermediate him. There was no law against shipping gold or silver or currency to India or from it.

The United Nations (1962) historical data for 1900 to 1960, show that for three decades up to 1928 (and very likely earlier too) India posted the second highest merchandise export surplus in the world, with USA in the first position.

So what? It is the level of exports, not the surplus or deficit, which matters. India (excluding Burma) was stagnating which is why Egypt in 1910 was attracting more f.d.i. than the whole of India.

Not only were Indians deprived of every bit of the enormous international purchasing power they had earned over 175 years

Every bit? Did India import no visibles at all? No doubt, Railway engines and Telegraph equipment just grew on trees.

even its rupee equivalent was not issued to them since not even the colonial government was credited with any part of India’s net gold and forex earnings against which it could issue rupees.

OMG, I've just discovered my Bank is robbing me! I put in my salary check every month and they just eat the whole thing- those greedy bastards! I just checked my account. It shows I can't afford even the pizza I was about to order. Twenty years I've been putting my salary into that Bank and they have frittered away every penny!

The sleight-of-hand employed, namely ‘paying’ producers out of their own taxes, made India’s export surplus unrequited and constituted a tax-financed drain to the metropolis, as had been correctly pointed out by those highly insightful classical writers, Dadabhai Naoroji and RC Dutt.

Very true. But this malpractice continued after Independence. My Daddy paid Income Tax to the Indian Government. They used this money to pay his salary. Thus he was actually working for free! All those young people eager to get into the IAS are utter fools. Government will use their own money to pay them. They should simply cut out the middleman and pay themselves to sit at home.

Naoroji had no impact as a British MP because even the unlettered voters of the East End understood that India was getting something in return for the money it paid the British. It was getting law and order and seas free of pirates and roads free of thugee. His famous 'knife of sugar' speech disappointed his Fenian supporters. They thought British landlords were rack-renting their Indian estates and getting coolies whipped on their plantations. Naoroji was saying this wasn't the case. Everything was sweet and legal- it's just the people kept getting poorer all the same. But the reason for that was obvious. Malthusian pressure giving rise to Ricardian rents. The technological backwardness of the Indians prevented them industrializng rapidly. Thus the 'White Man's burden' was to lift up his backward 'Aryan brother'.

If one looks at Hansard, one sees that debates on India featured die-hard Tories, who had quit that country forty or fifty years previously, gassing on about how the Indian village was a Utopia where the strong helped the weak and adherence to ancient ways ensured bountiful harvests. This was similar to Gandhian stupidity. The younger Liberals who had returned more recently from India explained that the Indian village was no different from the English village. The strong sought to acquire the land and labor of the weak. The old ways were unproductive. The guy with the capital and know-how to employ new techniques could soon swallow up the holdings of his fellows. Thus the Indian hinterland was not self-regulating. There could be massive famines or displacements of people unless the Administration was pro-active. A Night Watchman State might preside over demographic collapse.

Progressive Civil Servants like Hulme, Wedderburn & Cotton started the Indian National Congress so that people like Naoroji & Gokhale could explain that India needed smarter, better, Governance. Unfortunately, the INC turned against this sensible program under the influence of either the Mahatma or Marx or some other such Moonshine.

Indian Economists contributed greatly to this outcome. Consider what this "Professor Emeritus' says next-

Surplus budgets to effect such heavy tax-financed transfers had a severe employment–reducing and income-deflating effect: mass consumption was squeezed in order to release export goods.

This idiot is assuming India exhibited price and wage stickiness during the period. What actually happened was that silver continually devalued and only silver mattered as far as domestic prices and wages were concerned. Thus no Keynesian argument can apply. Indeed, that's why Ambedkar stopped banging on about Monetary policy. Returning to India, he saw it was irrelevant. It was a different matter that the low marginal efficiency of Capital (which Marshall had already predicted on the basis of the short-termism and lack of scientific education of the mercantile castes) meant India reverted to being the 'sink of gold' with a vengeance. Later, it took the genius of Morarji Desai to ensure that India subsidized the Gulf. Gold smuggling was a riskless way to double your money. The young Darius Guppy, Boris Johnson's chum from School, began his criminal career in partnership with the son of an Indian judge who'd been to Winchester School. Darius was amazed at how easy and safe and hugely profitable it was to smuggle gold into India.

The reason the Brits were able to turn a profit on running India was that they opened up wholly new markets for Indian agriculturists- that's what 'released export goods', many of which did not previously exist on Indian soil, or which could not previously be transported over any great distance- but the profits went to middlemen. No doubt, the Brits charged through the nose for its invisible exports to do with Shipping, Railways, Law & Order and so forth. But Indians were welcome to try to produce these things more cheaply themselves and thus to disintermediate the Brits. That was what the Mahatma was trying to do with his notion of 'swadeshi' and economic 'swaraj'. But Gandhi failed miserably. Why? Shite economists- like Kumarappa- wanted to prove the Brits had got rich only by robbing Indians. Clearly, only if Indians stopped doing anything productive and just starved to death would the Brits take the hint and leave.

Per capita annual foodgrains absorption in British India declined from 210 kg. during the period 1904-09, to 157 kg. during 1937-41, and to only 137 kg by 1946. If even a part of its enormous foreign earnings had been credited to it and not entirely siphoned off,

Lots of Indians were siphoning off money. What was stopping the Princes and Zamindars from feeding their people instead of buying Rolls Royce cars? Land Revenue declined in importance while the provision of Law & Order improved. This did yield a surplus for the British but it became too small for the British Parliament to get fussed about. Nobody was getting very rich off it. By contrast, the Indian middleman, more often than not, was a parasite pure and simple.

How did the Tatas make their money? Shipping opium to the Chinese and then taking advantage of the American Civil War to speculate in cotton.  What about the Marwaris and the Chettiars and so forth? All were enriched by exports and imports. They weren't landowners.  How else could they have gained such wealth?

India could have pursued an 'export led' growth strategy after Independence. It chose to do the opposite. As a result per capita food consumption declined. In parts of India, the average height and weight decreased noticeably reaching a trough in the late Sixties.

India could have imported modern technology to build up an industrial structure as Japan was doing.

India did import modern technology- railways, telegraph etc before Japan did. Instead of following Mahatmas or Marxist nutjobs, it could have grown wealthy the way other countries did- viz. by producing and selling useful stuff. Instead, it went in for the begging bowl and continual whining about how ruthless exploitation by all and sundry had made Indians unfit for any useful work.

Instead the masses suffered severe nutritional decline and independent India inherited a festering problem of unemployment and poverty.

Why? A poor guy will work cheap. If you have a lot of poor people, you can get them making stuff cheaper than other countries can. Then you export that stuff and buy nice things. India decided buying nice things was wicked. So was doing anything sensible. Instead, one must prove that Britain drained India of twenty times more Wealth than actually existed on the Globe. They did this very cunningly using exactly the same tactics that my Bank uses to steal my salary check every month. Hai! Hai! When will this looting end! Won't someone think of the children!

Naipaul's Universal Civilization & its Indonesian alterity.

A few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, V.S Naipaul gave a speech to a bunch of rich Americans- id est ignorant hicks. In his suave, yet servile, manner, the soon to be Nobel laureate said-

 Eleven years ago, when I was traveling in Java, I met a young man who wanted above everything else to be a poet and to live the life of the mind.

This would have been in 1979. The poet-playwright, W.S Rendra, had just been thrown in jail by Suharto's brutal regime. More cautious poet-intellectuals- some who had studied in the U.S on scholarship- cultivated a hermetic art in the 'inner exile' of the academy. However, Indonesian poetry had already taken on protean, populist, yet intensely avant garde forms, precisely because of the repressive political atmosphere.

Unlike the Anglo Saxon world, where poetry declined in political influence and social relevance, Java's poets, some of whom were 'U.S returned', could bridge the gap between elite academia and popular culture in the manner of our own Girish Karnad, who had been a Rhodes Scholar in the early Sixties. India, of course, had a big film industry and so Karnad soon became better known for his films than his plays- like Yayati (which was based on a character in the Mahabharata).

Unlike Indonesia, where the Communists had been massacred fifteen years previously, India was hospitable to Radical poets many of whom found a lucrative market as lyricists for blockbuster films whose stars, in South India, frequently entered politics and became Chief Ministers- like Tamil Nadu's M.G.R or, a little later, Andhra Pradesh's N.T. Rama Rao.

 I suppose, the young man Naipaul met would have known of the 'Bollywood' influence on Dangdut music as represented by the superstar Rhoma Irama.
No doubt, the young man was more Left wing and cerebral than Irama who was moving in a homiletic Islamic direction in the Seventies. Thus he may have appreciated a scholarship to study in India, assuming one to Europe or America was out of reach, so as to engage with a flourishing radical intelligentsia- often Muslim by religion- not too differently situated from his own people, socio-economically speaking.

This could have been easily arranged. Naipaul had many admirers among both the Indian bureaucratic elite as well as the moneyed class.  Suppose he'd dropped a line to my Dad at the High Commission in London. The young Indonesian poet could have either got a PhD at JNU and then become a sexually predatory Leftist on an American campus or else gotten married & rich working for the likes of Laxmi Mittal.

But Naipaul did nothing for the young man. Why? He doubted there was anything to him because the fellow spoke of a desire to write and cultivate the life of the mind despite being an obvious nig-nog living in some Third World shithole. Thus poetry and the life of the mind were beyond his reach.

This ambition had been given him by his modern education; but it was hard for the young man to explain to his mother exactly what he was up to. This mother was a person of culture and elegance; that should be stressed. She was elegant in visage and dress and speech; her manners were like art; they were Javanese court manners.
So I asked the young man—bearing in mind that we were in Java, where ancient epics live on in the popular art of puppet plays, “But isn’t your mother secretly proud that you are a poet?” He said in English—I mention this to give a further measure of his education in his far-off Javanese town, “She wouldn’t have even a sense of what being a poet is.”

Which Mom in Hampstead or Bel Air would have felt pride hearing her 28 year old son wanted to be a poet? One might get nachas if one's ugly and unmarriageable daughter escapes a dingy existence working in a dry-cleaners by winning a Pulitzer for a volume of verse about the Holocaust. But, a 28 year old son? What on earth could he write about? Vietnam was not a popular war and Rehab or Bathhouses not yet entirely respectable themes.

Did anyone, anywhere, have a sense of why being a poet might be a good thing in 1979? What about 1959 or 1939? You'd have to go back to 1919 to find a Mom proud her son had published a volume of poetry- but only if he was dulce et decorum dead and posthumously decorated.

No doubt, there were a couple of Professors in shite University Departments who pretended otherwise but poetry was and is a superior type of finger painting for damaged or retarded people.

And the poet’s friend and mentor, a teacher at the local university, amplified this. The friend said, “The only way he would have of making the mother understand what he is trying to do would be to suggest that he is being a poet in the classical tradition. And she would find this absurd.

As would any Mom who learns her son is setting up to be the new Virgil or Dante.

She would reject it as an impossibility.” It would be rejected as an impossibility because for the poet’s mother the epics of her country—and to her, they would have been like sacred texts—already existed, had already been written.
They had only to be learned or consulted.
For the mother, all poetry had already been written. That particular book, it might be said, was closed: it was part of the perfection of her culture. To be told by her son, who was 28, not all that young, that he was hoping to be a poet would be like a devout mother in another culture asking her writer son what he intended to write next, and getting the reply, “I am thinking of adding a book to the Bible.” Or, to attempt another comparison, the young man would be like the character in the story by Borges who had taken upon himself the task of rewriting Don Quixote. Not just retelling the story, or copying out the Cervantes original; but seeking, by an extraordinary process of mind-clearing and re-creation, to arrive—without copying or falsity, and purely through original thought—at a narrative coinciding word by word with the Cervantes book.

Is Naipaul serious? He knew very well that Suharto's goons were arresting poets. The boy's Mum didn't want him to write poetry for that reason. It was not that the Javanese couldn't write a 'Yayati', based on the Mahabharata, or a 'Tughlaq' drawing on their Islamic history, Rather, it was that they might be jailed if they did.

The safer course would be to get a foreign scholarship- even to India- and leverage one's language skills to get either an academic gig or something better paid with a Business House.

To be 28 and a poet at ease with foreign journalists is dangerous under a Military Dictatorship.

But Naipaul tells his wealthy American audience- many of whom would be the descendants of refugees from similarly brutal regimes- that the young man couldn't be a poet because he belonged to a culture where no new poetry could exist. But this would also mean that Suharto would have had no need to jail W.S Rendra.  This would certainly have been a convenient truth,- for the American foreign policy establishment.

Naipaul next says something extraordinary-

I understood the predicament of the young man in central Java. His background, after all, was not far removed from the Hindu aspect of my own Trinidad background. We were an agricultural immigrant community from India. The ambition to become a writer, the introduction to writing and ideas about writing, had been given me by my father. He was born in 1906, the grandson of someone who had come to Trinidad as a baby. And somehow, in spite of all the discouragements of the society of that small agricultural colony, the wish to be a writer had come to my father; and he had made himself into a journalist, even with the limited opportunities for journalism existing in that colony.

Yes. Naipaul's father rose by the pen. Had he lived longer, he would have prospered under the transition to Democracy. He would probably have made a better, or at least more successful- that is richer- politician than Naipaul's Uncle- a Physicist at King's- who claimed that his knowledge of Einstein's theory of Relativity would enable him to speed up Time and thus achieve higher Economic Growth.

Trinidad was small. Java had a huge population. A Javanese poet might wield enormous influence- he might become the equal of a Tagore, an Iqbal, a Faiz or Neruda.

More- he might become a Bob Marley.

We were a people of ritual and sacred texts.

As was Tagore. He won a Nobel Prize and had an international following. Eliot, or Pound or Yeats were provincial by comparison.

We also had our epics—and they were the very epics of Java; we heard them constantly sung or chanted. But it couldn’t be said that we were a literary people.

Because Trinidad was too small a market. Java, on the other hand, was huge.

Our literature, our texts, didn’t commit us to an exploration of our world; rather, they were cultural markers, giving us a sense of the wholeness of our world and the alienness of what lay outside.

Nonsense! These guys had already crossed half the globe and they continued to be mobile- some slipped into Venezuela. Others went to New York. More, like Naipaul himself, went to Britain and did very well there.

I don’t believe that, in his family, anyone before my father would have thought of original literary composition.

Because there was no market for it. However, by the Nineteen Twenties, even small towns in Champaran- North Bihar- had high enough literacy and newspaper circulation to make journalism a viable career. But, already, there were novelists who could do quite well for themselves. Once the 'talkies' took off- that is, by the mid Thirties- novelists and lyricists could get rich. Premchand was able to pay off his own striking workers with the money he earned from a film about a strike featuring evil capitalists.

That idea came to my father in Trinidad with the English language; somehow, in spite of the colonial discouragements of the place, an idea of the high civilization connected with the language came to my father; and he was given some knowledge of literary forms.

If  Shivprasad Naipaul had sold 'Gurudeva' to a Hindi magazine and it had been a hit- which it might well have been- then he'd have happily switched to Hindi and returned to the motherland to live in a nice bungalow and travel around as a pracharak for the Arya Samaj. After Independence, he'd have got a comfortable sinecure in New Delhi.

Sensibility is not enough if you are going to be a writer. You need to arrive at the forms that can contain or carry your sensibility; and literary forms—whether in poetry or drama, or prose fiction—are artificial, and ever changing.

They are also irrelevant, if you have something to say and can do it in a witty, pithy, or otherwise affecting manner.

This was a part of what was passed on to me at a very early age. At a very early age—in all the poverty and bareness of Trinidad, far away, with a population of half a million—I was given the ambition to write books, and specifically to write novels, which my father had presented to me as the highest form. But books are not created just in the mind. Books are physical objects. To write them, you need a certain kind of sensibility; you need a language, and a certain gift of language; and you need to possess a particular literary form. To get your name on the spine of the created physical object, you need a vast apparatus outside yourself. You need publishers, editors, designers, printers, binder; booksellers, critics, newspapers and magazines and television where the critics can say what they think of the book; and, of course, buyers and readers.

Trinidad had petrol. There were people there- amidst all that poverty and bareness- who were given the ambition to make money out of that petrol. How did they do so? Did they develop a certain kind of sensibility? No. They found a market and sold the thing as fast as they could get it out of the ground.

Everybody depends on markets for almost everything. Sensibilities can't create markets. However, they can give one the illusion that one isn't serving a market by doing the same thing again and again. Bis repetita placent. 

I want to stress this mundane side of things, because it is easy to take it for granted; it is easy to think of writing only in its personal, romantic aspect. Writing is a private act; but the published book, when it starts to live, speaks of the cooperation of a particular kind of society. The society has a certain degree of commercial organization. It also has certain cultural or imaginative needs. It doesn’t believe that all poetry has already been written. It needs new stimuli, new writing; and it has the means of judging the new things that are offered.

Naipaul could scarcely have visited Java without reading Benedict Anderson. By the time he made this speech, he would surely have been familiar with the notion of 'print capitalism'. Even supposing he wasn't, the thing is too obvious to need spelling out. Printing presses made books cheap. Then the Cinema came along as did Radio and then Television. As a professional writer, Naipaul knew that only the market mattered. And markets depend on technology- not sensibility. Moreover, markets like linking up with each other, shrinking distances and making the global local.

This kind of society didn’t exist in Trinidad. It was necessary, therefore, if I was going to be a writer, and live by my books, to travel out to that kind of society where the writing life was possible. This meant, for me at that time, going to England.

Naipaul went to England to read English Literature. His Professor was Tolkien. However, it was his own stupidity and prejudice which made him his own little Hobbit hole in Universal Literature.

I was traveling from the periphery, the margin, to what to me was the center; and it was my hope that, at the center, room would be made for me. I was asking a lot—asking, in fact, more of the center than of my own society. The center, after all, had its own interests, its own worldview, its own ideas of what it wanted in novels. And it still does. My subjects were far-off: but a little room was made for me in the England of the 1950s. I was able to become a writer, and to grow in the profession. It took time; I was forty—and had been publishing in England for fifteen years—before a book of mine was seriously published in the United States.
But I always recognized, in England in the 1950s, that as someone with a writing vocation, there was nowhere else for me to go.

This was because Trinidad was a Colony. That was why the Brits spent a little money making room for people like Naipaul.

And if I have to describe the universal civilization, I would say that it is the civilization that both gave the prompting and the idea of the literary vocation; and also gave the means to fulfill that prompting; the civilization that enables me to make that journey from the periphery to the center; the civilization that links me not only to this audience but also that now not-so-young man in Java whose background was as ritualized as my own, and on whom—as on me—the outer world had worked, and given the ambition to write.

No civilization linked Naipaul to that not-so-young poet in Java, the year W.S Rendra was arrested. Common decency- civility, if you like- required Naipaul to do something for the young man- get him a scholarship or a grant or something of that sort-

It is easier today for someone setting out to be a writer from places like Java or Trinidad; subjects once far-off are no longer so. But I have never been able to take my career for granted. I know that there are still large tracts of the world where the cultural or economic conditions I described a while ago do not obtain, and someone like myself would not have been able to become a writer. I couldn’t have become the kind of writer I am in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union or black Africa. I don’t think I could have taken my gifts even to India.

Why? It is because India held back Radio and TV. Cinema was heavily taxed and had to rely on music sales- which is why the song-writer was better paid than the script-writer- but R.K Narayan (who had had to self publish after getting his start) was able to sell 'Guide' to a Bollywood-Hollywood collaboration and made a decent sum.

Writing in vernacular languages remained more prestigious and gained perquisites from the Government. However, those who wrote in English barely got by or had to emigrate to an American campus. Thus writing in English remained a 'genteel form of clerkship'. Some 'brown' authors tried the Tolkien route- S.P Somtow & the Rushdie of 'Grimus'- tried it, but it wasn't very profitable. Somtow was an aristocrat and returned to Thailand as a music composer. Rushdie- but we all know about Rushdie. In the end, he turned out to be an Englishman of the Boris Johnson type leveraging an exotic background merely in order to indulge in puerile jibes at the Religion of his Ancestors.

Moral Desert & Dennett & Caruso

The problem of 'moral desert' is closely linked to regret minimization. 

It is useful to have a notion of 'deserved outcome' alongside one of 'actual outcome'. In some contexts, it makes better sense to minimise regret with respect to the former not the latter.

Why? 

Well, as Ecclesiastes says- For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

The regret minimizing course is to invest in 'non thetic awareness', Bataille's 'non-knowledge', agnotology, or any thing else which moves society to reliance upon open markets or zero knowledge proofs.

Moral desert then becomes a problem of 'mutual information' which in turn can be looked at as one of 'Brown clustering' which in turn could enable better 'directed information'. There is a technical reason why 'mutual information' must be 'ontologically dysphoric'- i.e. arise only by something like 'Cohen forcing'- if we evolve on an uncertain fitness landscape.

Obviously, there is a canonical way of saying this but, till South Park does 'the Good Place', I don't know what that is.

Meanwhile, here is Caruso & Denett's comedy double act- 

Caruso: [Dan,] you have famously argued that freedom evolves and that humans, alone among the animals, have evolved minds that give us free will and moral responsibility.

But, if a trait has evolved, then some members of the species won't have it or will have it in a different way. In that case nothing involving universal morality could be predicated of it. 

I, on the other hand, have argued that what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, and that because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions, in a particular but pervasive sense – the sense that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward.

The fact that something can't be truly predicated doesn't mean it can't be usefully predicated- i.e feature in pragmatics. We can get along just fine without 'true' Justice. But we do need a more or less independent, protocol bound, juristic process to get along. Thus, it is enough that there be 'natural' or 'canonical' Schelling focal points for coordination games to proceed in an orderly fashion as if there were a 'true' public signal giving rise to a robust correlated equilibrium.

While these two views appear to be at odds with each other, one of the things I would like to explore in this conversation is how far apart we actually are. I suspect that we may have more in common than some think – but I could be wrong. To begin, can you explain what you mean by ‘free will’ and why you think humans alone have it?

Dennett: A key word in understanding our differences is ‘control’. [Gregg,] you say ‘the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control’ and that is true of only those unfortunates who have not been able to become autonomous agents during their childhood upbringing. There really are people, with mental disabilities, who are not able to control themselves, but normal people can manage under all but the most extreme circumstances, and this difference is both morally important and obvious, once you divorce the idea of control from the idea of causation. Your past does not control you; for it to control you, it would have to be able to monitor feedback about your behaviour and adjust its interventions – which is nonsense.

In fact, if your past is roughly normal, it contains the causal chains that turned you into an autonomous, self-controlling agent. Lucky you. You weren’t responsible for becoming an autonomous agent, but since you are one, it is entirely appropriate for the rest of us to hold you responsible for your deeds under all but the most dire circumstances. As [the American country singer] Ricky Skaggs once put it: ‘I can’t control the wind, but I can adjust the sails.’ To suppose that some further condition should be met in order for you or anyone else to be ‘truly deserving’ is to ignore or deny the manifest difference in abilities for self-control that we can observe and measure readily. In other words, the rationale or justification for excusing someone, holding them not deserving of criticism or punishment, is their deficit in this competence. We don’t try to reason with bears or babies or lunatics because they aren’t able to respond appropriately. Why do we reason with people? Why do we try to convince them of conclusions about free will or science or causation or anything else? Because we think – for good reason – that in general people are reasonable, are moved by reasons, can adjust their behaviour and goals in the light of reasons presented to them. There is something indirectly self-refuting in arguing that people are not moved by reasons! And that is the key to the kind of self-control which we are justified in treating as our threshold for true desert.

We would long ago have abandoned reasoning if our aim was to change others' behaviour because, experience has shown us, only economic incentives, or juristic penalties, can do that. However, being able to give reasons for our actions has a signalling or screening function. 

Caruso: I don’t disagree with you that there are important differences between agents who have the kind of rational control you highlight and those who lack it. Such a distinction is undeniable. A normal adult who is responsive to reasons differs in significant ways from one who is suffering from psychopathy, Alzheimer’s or severe mental illness.

This is merely a difference of degree. Furthermore, 'normal adults' may also lack capacity of a similar kind by reason of lack of knowledge or means or opportunity or motive.

I have no issue, then, with acknowledging various degrees of ‘control’ or ‘autonomy’ – in fact, I think you and other compatibilists have done a great job highlighting these differences. My disagreement has more to do with the conditions required for what I call ‘basic desert’ moral responsibility. As a free-will skeptic, I maintain that the kind of control and reasons-responsiveness you point to, though important, is not enough to ground basic-desert moral responsibility – the kind of responsibility that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward in a purely backward-looking sense.

Nothing is 'grounded'. It is either useful of useless. In any case, grounding could always be in something like Bataille's 'base materialism' or involve weird 'zero-point energy', so why bother with it?

Consider, for example, the various justifications one could give for punishing wrongdoers. One justification, the one that dominates our legal system, is to say that they deserve it.

Nonsense! The legal system only punishes illegal acts. It takes no cognisance whatsoever of all manner of wrong-doing- e.g. sticking pins in a voodoo doll with the intent of causing excruciating pain to me.

This retributive justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that he/she deserves something bad to happen to them just because they have knowingly done wrong.

But this is not the theory which underpins our legal system. Legal positivism has no trace of it. 

Such a justification is purely backward-looking.

Rubbish! Consider the famous case of Regina vs Shivpuri. The letter of the law said that intent- which is forward looking- is enough. This was upheld. Shivpuri, who studied Law at S.O.A.S, thought he couldn't be convicted because it was 'impossible attempt'- he hadn't brought any drugs into the country, rather he had proof that he had brought in some thing which looked like drugs but was  harmless. The Court still thought he had 'intent' and so he was sent to jail.

For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment.

Not necessarily. The retributivist may just get off on punishing people, or seeing them punished, and suggests that this desert attaches itself to him with respect to criminals but not law-abiding people.

This means that the retributivist position is not reducible to consequentialist considerations that try to maximise good outcomes in the future, nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished.

But, it could easily do so by assigning a value to the pleasure taken in another's punishment, or by postulating a 'demonstration effect'. 

I contend that retributive punishment is never justified since agents lack the kind of free will and basic-desert moral responsibility needed to ground it.

You could also contend that retributive punishment is never justified since the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat said so. The epistemic value of both statements is equal. They are wholly arbitrary.

While we may be sensitive to reasons, and this may give us the kind of voluntary control you mention, the particular reasons that move us, along with the psychological predispositions, likes and dislikes, and other constitutive factors that make us who we are, themselves are ultimately the result of factors beyond our control.

But not beyond the control of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat.

And this remains true whether those factors include determinism, indeterminism, chance, or luck.

Which is why no situation where we have caused a person to be unjustly punished was our fault or represented a moral failure.  All is as willed by that Nicaraguan horcrux.

This is not to say that there are not other conceptions of responsibility that can be reconciled with determinism, chance or luck.

Nor is it to say anything at all. 

Nor is it to deny that there may be good forward-looking reasons for maintaining certain systems of punishment and reward. For instance, free-will skeptics typically point out that the impositions of sanctions serve purposes other than punishment of the guilty: it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating and deterring offenders.

But only if the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat wills it so.  Otherwise the free will sceptic isn't really making any sort of argument any more that a parrot, or a wind up toy can make an argument.

My question, then, is whether the kind of desert you have in mind is enough to justify retributive punishment?

Free will, exercised in good faith, is its own justification. However a justification offered by some one acting in bad faith, our under the control of another, is no justification at all. Why? To be worthy of evaluation, a justification must have a concrete model- i.e. someone, with free will and in good faith must actually believe it to be a justification. 

If not, then it becomes harder to understand what, if anything, our disagreement truly amounts to since forward-looking justifications of punishment are perfectly consistent with the denial of free will and basic-desert moral responsibility.

No justification is consistent with the denial of free-will because it can not certify itself as a good faith proposition.

And if you are willing to reject retributivism, as I think you might be, then I’m curious to know exactly what you mean by ‘desert’ – since it’s debatable whether talk of giving agents their just deserts makes any sense devoid of its backward-looking, retributive connotations.


Dennett: You grant that the distinction I make between people who are autonomous and those who are not (because of various limits on their abilities to control themselves) is important, but then say that it is not enough for ‘the kind of desert’ that would ‘justify retributive punishment’. I too reject retributivism. It’s a hopeless muddle, and so is any doctrine of free will that aspires to justify it.

A muddle, like a ball of string which has gotten knotted up, may be very difficult to untangle. Indeed, it may be a hopeless task for most people. But, if the thing was important enough, an expert in knot theory might be able to do so. 

An innocent man may give a hopelessly tangled account of how he came to appear, circumstantially speaking, indisputably guilty. Yet, Perry Mason can untangle that muddle. 

It is enough that a person with freewill, acting in good faith, has a, however muddled, justification of a certain sort, for that justification to have a consistent depiction as a set of juristic doctrines. If this were not the case, then no juristic proceeding could be both positivist and Fair. It must be the case that the game has been rigged in advance.

But that doesn’t mean there is no ‘backward-looking’ justification of punishment.
It’s quite straightforward. On Monday you make me a promise, which I accept in good faith, and rely on when I adjust my own activities. On Friday, I discover you have broken your promise, with no excuse (what counts as an excuse has been well-explored, so I will take that on without further notice). I blame you for this. My blaming you is of course backward-looking: ‘But you promised me!’

It is also retributive.  The person upbraided in this way loses face. That is itself a punishment.

Autonomous people are justly held responsible for what they did because all of us depend on being able to count on them.

So are slaves or agents or heteronomous people or animals trained for specific tasks. Autonomy neither increases nor reduces responsibility. What matters is whether others had a right to count on them. 

It is for this reason that among their responsibilities is preserving their status as autonomous agents, guarding against the usurpation or manipulation of their own powers of discernment and decision.

There is no such responsibility unless we have a legal right, arising from a contract, or statute or customary law, enforceable against them. 

Thus if Dennett gets drunk and is duped by an Iyengar, I have no recourse against him. He has no responsibility towards me with respect to abstaining from alcohol or not conversing with cunning Iyengars.

So we can blame them for being duped, for getting drunk, etc.

No we can't- at least, if we wish to preserve our reputation for sanity. 

When we blame them, we are not just diagnosing them, or categorising them; we are holding them deserving of negative consequences.

No. We are displaying our stupidity and childishness. 

If this isn’t ‘basic desert’ then so much the worse for basic desert. What is it supposed to add to this kind of desert?

'Basic desert' could mean the set of shadow prices associated with a particular solution to Society's Kantarovich-Monge problem. If this solution is 'Muth Rational' and coincides with the outcome of a repeated game, then a system of positive law could enforce it. We could say 'Basic desert' can have a concrete model as a Moral Economy. This enables us to dismiss stupid or childish claims of the sort Dennett has put forward. It gets rid of the nuisance that would be occasioned by everybody holding everybody else accountable for things which they are not legally accountable at all.

The fact is – and I invite you to consider whether it is a fact – that autonomous people understand that they will be held to account and have tacitly accepted this as a condition for their maintaining their freedom in the political sense.

But, heteronomous people understand this even better as do animals trained for a specific economic purpose. 

Autonomous people have the right of exit. If they don't wish to use that right, they may still use their own countervailing power to hold the other to account if they make a nuisance of themselves. 

I take this to be all the grounds we need for justifying the imposition of negative consequences (under all the usual conditions).

No. You are assuming that autonomous people have already tacitly accepted the thing which you want to impose. Why bother? It would be a waste of resources. We have all tacitly accepted that we need to breathe in and then breathe out. There is no need to justify the imposition of negative consequences for failure to breathe in and then breathe out.

The difference between the madman who is physically restrained and removed to quarantine for the sake of public safety, and the deserving culprit who is similarly restrained and then punished, is large, and it is a key feature of any defensible system of government.

The differences between madmen are large as are the differences between culprits. So are the differences between the stars and flowers. So what? Such assertions have no epistemic value. 

A defensible system of Government is one that can defend itself against actual threats. Philosophers are too stupid and ignorant to defend anything.

The culprit has the kind of desert that warrants punishment (but not ‘retributive’ punishment, whatever that is).

There is no way to prevent a culprit who is being punished from being retributively punished in the eyes of his victims.

There is no incompatibility between determinism and self-control
As I have argued before, we can see this rationale in a simpler domain of human activity: sport. The penalty kicks and red cards of soccer, the penalty box of ice hockey, the ejection of players for flagrant fouls, etc, all make sense; the games they enable would not survive without them. The punishment (consider the etymology of ‘penalty’) is relatively mild because ‘it’s only a game’, but if the transgression is serious enough, large fines can be assessed, or banishment from the game, and, of course, criminal prosecution for assault or cheating also lurks in the wings. Free-will skeptics should consider if they would abolish all these rules because the players don’t have real free will. And if they would grant a special exemption for such penalties in sport, what principle would they cite for not extending the same policies to the much more important game of life?
You also say ‘the particular reasons that move us, along with the psychological predispositions, likes and dislikes, and other constitutive factors that make us who we are, themselves are ultimately the result of factors beyond our control’. So what? The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc.

But this is equally true of kids- who play way more hockey and football and so on than elderly academics- as well as slaves or fatalists or people under the spell of a hypontist. Autonomy adds nothing and takes away nothing from what is simply an adaptation to the fitness landscape. 

Yes, a great deal of luck is involved, but then a great deal of luck is involved in just being born, in being alive. We human beings are well designed to take advantage of the luck we encounter, and to overcome or deflect or undo the bad luck we encounter, to the point where we are held responsible for not taking foolish chances (for instance) that might lead to our losing control. There is no incompatibility between determinism and self-control.

Obviously, 'self-control' is only meaningful if there is some deterministic process whereby the self can be controlled. If the thing is wholly non-deterministic, self-control might still exist but- with our current level of mathematical and biological knowledge-  that self would be something truly rich and strange.

Caruso: Well, I’m glad to know that you reject retributivism along with ‘any doctrine of free will that aspires to justify it’. This point of agreement is significant since it entails that major elements of the criminal justice system are unjustified.

Is Dennett a judge? Has he helped Society reduce Crime? What about Caruso? If neither of them have achieved prominence in the field of Law or Criminology, how can any point of agreement between them entail anything at all? 

Aikin & Talisse on why Democracy entails Cannibalism.

Democracy is a word which means that the majority of people in a country get to decide who rules it and how it is ruled. This majority may want to get rid of minorities or to force them to change their ways. It may bind itself to the Rule of Law such that minorities have considerable freedom in their private lives. But, it may change its mind.

This is the common sense view. It is not that of Aikin & Talisse. They write in 3 Quarks.

Democracy is many things: a form of constitutional republic, a system of government, a procedure for collective decision, a method for electing public officials, a collection of processes by which conflicts among competing preferences are domesticated, a means for creating social stability, and so on.

Democracy is not a thing. It is a word which may be associated, by pedagogues or polemicists, with certain things of the sort Aikin & Talisse enumerates. But then, it may also be associated with regimes like that of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Aikin & Talisse appear to be blissfully ignorant of this historical fact. They write-

But underneath all of these common ways of understanding democracy lies a commitment to the distinctively moral ideal of collective self-government among political equals.

This is nonsense. There is no commitment of this sort on display in Aikin & Talisse's own country, nor in any country they have any knowledge about.

Instead, there is inter-elite competition which is resolved by seeing who can get the most votes by fair means or foul. It is entirely false to suggest that the elites consider the masses to be 'political equals' as opposed to ignorant and prejudiced fools who can be manipulated in a crude manner.

And this commitment to the political equality of citizens is what explains the familiar mechanisms of democratic government.

Nonsense! The 'familiar mechanisms' of democratic government operate in an occult manner such that 'political equality' is revealed to be mere window dressing.

Our elections, representative bodies, constitution, and system of law and rights of redress are intended to preserve individual political equality in the midst of large-scale government.

No. They are intended to protect the Elite from internecine conflicts getting out of hand and thus becoming utterly destructive to themselves as a class. Checks and Balances operate so as to safeguard the Person and the Property of the defeated rival and to prevent a scorched earth policy being implemented by an incumbent fearful of being voted out of office.

Absent the presumption of political equality, much of what goes on in a democracy would be difficult to explain.

On the contrary, what goes on in a democracy would be wholly impossible to explain if we cling to the belief that the power elite is committed to political equality. Once we understand that democracy enables a benign circulation of elites, such that the property and persons of those involved are protected, its apparent dysfunctions can be appreciated as the outcome of deliberate design.

Why else would we bother with the institutional inefficiency, the collective irrationality, and the noise of democracy, but for the commitment to the idea that government must be of, for, and by the People, understood as political equals?

We don't bother with the 'institutional inefficiency and collective irrationality and the noise of democracy' in order to secure our livelihoods and guard against most types of risk. Instead, we rely upon the market for tradable goods and services and upon a network of private or segmentary relationships for almost everything else. There are some 'club goods' which, historically, governments provide and we use our votes to try to ensure that Elite competition can't dissipate rents beyond the point where the provision of a basic level of club goods is crowded out. This does not always work. There are plenty of failed States where Democracy couldn't curtail excessive rent dissipation by rivalrous Elites.

To be clear, the democrat’s commitment to the political equality of the citizens does not amount to the idea that all citizens are the same, or equally good and admirable, or equal in every respect. Political equality is the commitment to the idea that in politics, no one is another’s subordinate.

This is why President Trump is not the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. No General is subordinate to him. Nor is any private subordinate to a General. If a police man, or an F.B.I agent, points a gun at you and tells you to assume the position, you don't have to do so. You won't get shot if you refuse to comply. Really, you won't- even if you are Black. Aikin & Talisse say so, thus it must be true.

Put differently, among political equals, all political power is accountable to those over whom it is exercised.

Rubbish! The Executive may be accountable in different ways to the Legislature and the Judiciary. It is true that Legislators need our votes to get re-elected but they need money from lobbyists even more. As for the Judiciary- it is not accountable to us at all.

Accordingly, although in a democracy there are laws and rules of other kinds that all citizens are obligated to obey, no one is ever reduced to being a mere subject of legislation.

Everyone in Britain is a mere subject of the Crown in Parliament. Every US citizen is a mere subject of a Presidential Executive Order.

In a democracy, even when a law has been produced by impeccably democratic processes, citizens who nonetheless oppose it may still enact various forms of protest, critique, and resistance.

All of which may be punishable. The Judiciary, on the other hand, can review and strike down such Executive Orders or Statues of the Legislature. However, they may choose not to do so. There is no mechanism whereby a citizen can force the hand of the Judiciary in such matters nor is there some Citizen's Ombudsman who has the power to review the decisions of the Supreme Court.

Under certain conditions, citizens may also be permitted to engage in civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is not permitted. What Aikin & Talisse mean is that under certain conditions civil disobedience may not be punished.

Once again, the democratic thought is that where citizens have rights to object, oppose, and criticize exercises of political power under conditions where government is accountable to its citizens, they retain their status as political equals even while being subject to the law.

This is sheer mystification. One might as well say- taking the Book of Job as one's text- that man is equal to God because, on one occasion, God gave an account- not a satisfactory one by any means- to a particular subject who had been subjected to terrible trials and tribulations. If Theodicy is part of Theology, we could argue that, in precisely the same sense that Aikin & Talisse maintain that ordinary people like you and me are the equals of Trump & Macron, we truly are, as it is written in John 10:34, 'Gods'.

In this way, democracy is commonly thought to be the only viable response to the moral problem of reconciling the political power with the fundamental equality of those over whom power is exercised.

This is sheer nonsense. The King or Pope or Grand Commissar may say that he is the servant of the People and wholly accountable to them in some occult way, and- moreover- that all are equal in the eyes of the Creator and Final Judge- but that changes nothing. What matters is if there are regular elections which cause some change in the Executive and which reflect the preferences of the majority. If this obtains, we say- this is a Democracy.

Notice, however, that democracy is built on the premise that conflicts and disputes over how political power should be deployed will be ongoing among democratic citizens.

So is every other form of Government. If Political Power exists, there will be conflicts about how it should be used. Why say- 'Democracy is built on the same premise as Aristocracy or Gerontocracy or Bureaucracy or Kakistocracy?' What is the point?

In fact, as many conceptions of democracy explicitly call for citizens to be perpetually engaged in the processes of self-government, ongoing political disputation is not merely tolerated in a democracy; it is celebrated as a duty of citizenship.

Nonsense! Representative Democracy means only a very small number of citizens have to be 'perpetually engaged' in political processes. Voting once every couple of years is celebrated as a duty of citizenship- but it only takes an hour or so.

This is why democracy holds frequent elections, referenda, and various other forums where citizens can confront and instruct a government that is accountable to them. And yet this condition of enduring political contention presents a difficulty of its own. To wit: according to the democrat, political power is legitimated by the fact that democracy provides a range of channels by which equal citizens can hold those who wield power accountable. But we have also seen that in a democracy one should expect the citizens themselves to disagree about political power should be employed.
The difficulty that emerges is evident. Democracy depends on the capacity of citizens to sustain their commitment to the political equality of even those who they regard as their most benighted, vicious, and depraved political opponents. That is, in a democracy, citizens must regard each other as political equals, even when they disagree bitterly about things that matter most. They must sustain a commitment to recognizing one another as entitled to an equal say in directing politics, even when they are vehemently opposed on political issues.

Utter crap! Democracy is about not having to talk to nutjobs who don't get that only the majority matters. The Judiciary may grant their weird beliefs an equal status and may challenge, in the short run, the constitutional validity of Executive orders or Legislative statutes which punish such minorities, but- in the medium to long term- the majority prevails. The minority either conforms or is runs away.

At work, I may have to put up with other people on the basis of our human equality. But, politically, I can oppress them as much as I, and the majority I belong to, considers salutary. This is because there is no political equality at all under democracy.  In the short run, there may be judicial equality- but Laws can change and Constitutions can be amended.

Aikin & Talisse are saying American Christians must give an equal say to Islamist nutjobs even though only a very small number of such people are American citizens.  This is sheer madness.

Maintaining this stance is not easy. After all, in a democracy the stakes often are high. Citizens recognize that everyday political struggles over taxation, privacy, immigration, military spending, and healthcare invoke deeper commitments concerning the most fundamental values of justice, liberty, autonomy, and dignity.

Everyday struggles concern fundamental values, precisely because fundamental values are involved in quotidian activities. Why? Because the stakes are very high all the time in daily life. Crossing the road involves fundamental values. If you don't do it at the appointed place and in a proper manner, you may be hit by a bus. This may cause you to shit your pants- which injures your dignity. The bus-driver may laugh at you but still not get convicted of negligence because the Court may decide that you acted negligently. You may feel this very unjust. Furthermore, you may die because of your injuries- thus suffering a loss of liberty and autonomy and the right to sing 'O Paddy dear' in an accent highly offensive to people from Ulster.

How is it that we can go about our daily lives- often crossing many busy roads on our way to work or school or the pub- while maintaining a commitment to fundamental values without biting each other or pushing sticks of asparagus up each others' nostrils?

Is the answer that we all share a deep commitment to whatever shite Aikin & Talisse are blathering on about? No. Don't be silly. We know how to go about our daily lives in relative safety because since infancy we have imitated the actions of the majority. Perhaps this is because of 'mirror neurons' in the brain. I don't know. However, I am certain that only mimetics matter, deep commitments can go hang. They are worthless. Believing otherwise causes people to say stupid things like-

Hence we cannot help but regard at least some of those with whom we disagree about political policy as ipso facto committed to derelict conceptions of the values that matter most. Indeed, in certain cases, we are bound to take some of our political rivals are positively committed to injustice, oppression, and the degradation of persons.

This only happens if we believe there is some link between 'deep commitments' and policy choices. It is silly to do so. The thing is purely economic. So long as the majority votes according to their economic interest- even if they are wrong about how it is to be realised- the nutjobs cancel each other out as noise. All that is left is Mechanism Design- and that is purely empirical so there can be overlapping consensus about it.

Pedants & Polemicists may get off by pretending that anyone who wants to pay less in tax and get more in public goods, is a Nazi or a Communist or a Race Traitor or a Satanist or what have you, but that is why we all think pedants and polemicists are sick little puppies.

They are ignorant and stupid and write shite like this-

Hence one might wonder whether it is even possible to sustain a commitment to the political equality of citizens when we are inclined to take so grim a view of those with whom we most severely disagree. One might ask: In virtue of what are those who are committed to what I am bound to regard as injustice nonetheless my political equals?  

The answer is 'in virtue of the fact that you got shit for brains'.

What entitles them to an equal say when they are so consistently wrong?

The answer is 'coz they too got shit for brains'.

The difficulty just identified hence takes on the character of a vulnerability to which democracy is subject.

The Law of Large numbers, or Condorcet Jury theorem, explains that shitheads cancel each other out. So long as the majority vote their economic interest- a proper signal is received for preference aggregation. Mechanism Design has something to work with.

Democracy is the solution to the moral problem of rendering political power consistent with political equality.

Rubbish! The moral problem of political power is the same as the moral problem of any sort of power- viz. it impedes information aggregation or distorts the operation of Decision mechanisms.  Democracy does not solve anything. Rather it is a Mechanism whose Design must be improved by its own workings. The first step for this to happen is to disintermediate shithead pedagogues or polemicists like Aikin & Talisse who say stupid things like-

In order to establish the envisioned consistency, democracy appeals to the ability of citizens to hold political power accountable, and thus to play a role in directing it.

Nonsense! What matters is that some citizens should specialise in Mechanism Design with the backing of other citizens and that there is a purely empirical competitive process which is efficiently evaluated by voting procedures.

But when the citizens themselves disagree sharply about how power should be directed in the cases that matter most, they will come to regard one another as obstacles and obstructions rather than as fellow citizens who are entitled to an equal political say. The result is civic enmity – a condition where one acknowledges that one’s political rivals have an equal say, but can no longer understand why they are entitled to it.

In other words, a Democracy may face a situation where preference diversity is too great. This means that there is no coordination game of a certain type. Instead there are two separate discoordination games which however can be arbitraged. One method of doing so is spatial 'Tiebout sorting' and greater subsidiarity. Another is a non-spatial consociationality.

However, human beings are highly plastic. It may well be that some coercive 'channelisation' will quickly restore the salience of 'universal' focal points- i.e. a pooling equilibrium re-emerges.

The neat thing about us as a species is that our more or less hard wired mimetic heuristics allow us to spot when this is happening. We may continue to 'hedge' on discoordination games- but this gets dammed up as 'capacitance diversity'. Thus Social processes can be highly robust- provided shitheaded pedagogues & polemicists are named and shamed as such.

Thus the vulnerability: when high-stakes political decisions are the focus of large-scale political participation among citizens who are disposed to regard their opponents as depraved rather than merely mistaken, democracy becomes an engine for producing civic enmity.

So does any sort of regime. Democracy is probably more robust than Theocracy in this matter precisely because pooling equilibria can be restored coercively such that we shoot a few of the noisier shitheads on both sides and kick the pedagogues and the polemicists repeatedly in the goolies.

Those who feel the pull of such enmity also feel the pull of the thought that perhaps political equality is overrated, or at least is an impediment to things that matter more. Democracy thereby threatens its own legitimacy.

Everything threatens its own legitimacy if it goes crazy. Suppose Prince Charles appears on TV saying his Mummy isn't the Queen but rather a large orchid he has in a pot at Highgrove. This revelation would threaten his legitimacy. Parliament may decide to exclude him from the order of succession.

Our democracy has devolved into a brawl among political factions that can no longer discern a basis for the political equality of their opponents.

Nonsense! A certain type of pedagogue feels miffed. But another type feels vindicated. But pedagogues don't matter. What does matter is that American Democracy needs to deliver more for the median voter of today- not the one likely to hold the balance in fifteen or twenty years time. But, that is quite easy to do and so it will be done- Politics, after all, is about paths of least resistance.

The result is a politics driven by the aspiration to humiliate and denigrate those with whom one disagrees in the hope that, once adequately dispirited, they will quietly disengage and simply submit to the power of one’s own faction. Thus democracy is transmogrified into a cold civil war. The trouble is that once we acknowledge that we are now engaged in a cold civil war rather than a program of collective self-government among equals, we must also jettison the idea that political power is being exercised legitimately. Hence there is nothing to prevent our cold civil war from erupting into a hot one.

Yes there is. It's called the Army. Since 1860, its asymmetric power has grown exponentially. So has that of the carceral State.

Are Aikin & Talisse really so ignorant they think a second Civil War is in the offing?

No. They are snowflakes. They fear not bullets but bumper stickers.

Consider a curious phenomenon particularly prevalent among professed conservatives – that of reveling in ‘liberal tears’.  We have the ‘coal rolling‘ phenomenon – that of converting one’s pickup truck so that it can release black exhaust into the windshields of Priuses.  There is the fact that Ross Delingpole of Breitbart wrote a book titled, 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy. Or the simple animus of a bumper sticker with the invocation of Trump’s re-election being something to cheer for, if only for the sake of causing pain to progressives. It seems the height of civic vice to propose policies or adopt a mode of life for the sake of expressing one’s contempt of another group.  But this is the contempt that the familiarity of political recognition breeds. Indeed, it is the contempt that democratic norms of equality, precisely because of the fact of disagreement and reasonable pluralism, fosters. And the great irony, of course, is that for as anti-democratic as these expressive gestures seem, they are the products of democracy’s call to engagement and recognition.  The problem, of course, is that if we do not have a culture of productive engagement, cold civil war perhaps is the best we can hope for.

So there you have it. Democracy is in peril coz of some guy's bumper sticker. No wonder Trump is making nice to North Korea's dictator. What if the fellow stops making nuclear missiles- which THAAD could shoot down- and starts handing out T-shirts saying 'Liberals be cray-cray'? Aikin & Talisse will experience so much psychic pain, they will simply expire. As will the entire Ivy League bien pensant class. Democracy will crumble. Society will revert to cannibalism.