Cheese fondue and the fear of freedom

I've been living in Hong Kong for many years and until recently had never used any of the 'expatriate' forums. To be honest I've never really known what an expatriate is. I'm a bloke, originally from the UK, who lives in Hong Kong. Does that make me an expatriate, an immigrant, a resident? Who knows? Some people seem to have a very clear idea about these things, however.

Anyway, I occasionally post on forums such as Asiaxpat where I have to admit that I get an unseemly amount of childish pleasure from continually getting banned for any number of increasingly absurd infringements of the sites posting regulations. This particular site is well-known for being run by a little Nazi chap (I don't really know if he's little but I always imagine such people sitting behind their desk in a Napoleon costume) who likes to ban people for such thought crimes as 'being a bit sarcastic'.

Recently, for example, I was banned for posting unacceptable opinions about cheese fondue, an achievement of which I am perhaps unduly proud. Somebody asked for recommendations for cheese fondue restaurants so that they could compile a list of said restaurants (this is what passes for entertainment around these parts). Several people posted suggestions of restaurants where they had enjoyed the aforementioned melted cheese delicacy, at which point I lumbered in with my unseemly and offensive opinions about cheese fondue. I pointed out that, historically, the purpose of cheese fondue was as a way to use up stale bread and cheese that had become hard and inedible during the course of the cold European winter. As we now possess refrigerators this was no longer necessary so perhaps the posters might consider simply purchasing some nice cheese and eating it, thereby negating the need for a fondue. I was of course immediately banned for the statutory 7 days for posting such a scurrilous and offensive suggestion.

What is interesting about this is not the fact that there is a little man somewhere who likes to exercise the little bit of power he has managed to gain by banning people from his website. This is, I'm sure, quite common and is similar to the officious bureaucrat, traffic warden, security guard etc. What was more interesting was that the banning came at the request of the person who started the thread who demanded that I be banned for suggesting that she might like to try unmelted cheese. This small piece of psychology interests me.

What goes through peoples' minds when they choose the solution of requesting that people be banned or censored for expressing opinions that they disagree with, even about something as insignificant as melted cheese? There are of course many perfectly reasonable responses she might have made to my point. She could have said that she didn't care what the historical purpose of cheese fondue was, that she enjoyed the taste and was going to continue eating it regardless, for example. A position for which I would, of course, have the utmost respect. Instead she decided that she needed to appeal to the leader to protect her from exposure to unsettling anti-fondue opinions.

I realise that I am in danger of making rather a meal (ha ha) of a cheese fondue incident but it reminded me of reading Eric Fromm's the Fear of Freedom, where he explores the psychological reasons that people end up submitting themselves voluntarily to fascist or other authoritarian regimes. Fromm is right to feel that the interesting thing is not the psychology of the leader in these circumstances, who has some fairly obviously explainable motivations, or of his opponents, but the psychology of people who voluntarily choose to submit themselves to his rule.

So next time you see someone asking for you to be banned from a forum for upsetting their notions about cheese fondue, beware. It's the thin end of a wedge that leads to totalitarian dictatorship I tell you.

Anybody fancy some cheese?

Different but the same

I have been reading a couple of books recently which deal with Twentieth Century history from very different writers. The first was re-reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, covering the period from the end of the First World War to the nineties. The second was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, not a history as such but a book that covers a range of post-war events in support of her shock doctrine theory.

On the surface you couldn’t imagine two more different writers. Johnson is a conservative, Catholic writer, closely associated with and supportive of Margaret Thatcher and her free-market reforms in the 1980s. Klein, on the other hand, is the darling of the anti-globalisation movement and is very critical of the free market and globalisation. What struck me, however, were the similarities rather than the differences between the two books.

In Johnson’s book there are some main threads that he picks up in his history of the twentieth century. He lays the blame for many of the problems and tragedies of the twentieth century firmly at the door of the tendency in this century towards utopian solutions to society’s problems. He argues strongly that the arrogance that makes people feel that they know how the ideal society should be organized, and the conviction that revolutionary change is therefore necessary to achieve this utopian dream, leads inevitably to moral relativism, totalitarianism and corruption. The idea that they are working towards some utopian future leads to the justification of atrocities in the here and now in order to achieve them. The examples he gives are those that you would expect; Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot etc. He is conservative in the sense that he thinks that these radical tabula rasa solutions are doomed to failure and ignore the needs of real people. He sees the work of leaders like Reagan and Thatcher as a move back towards a more liberal world, based on individual freedoms and gradual progress.

Klein comes from a very different perspective and certainly when it comes to particular historical figure and events her analysis couldn’t be more different. Her descriptions of figures like Pinochet, Thatcher and Yeltsin, for example, are very different from Johnson’s, to say the least. That said, for me, the central and most interesting argument of Klein’s is not the Shock Doctrine described in the title (which is often quite poorly argued) but rather her placing of the free market policies advocated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics in precisely the utopian, tabula rasa-like sphere that Johnson describes so well in taking apart left-wing movements in the twentieth century. Klein, rather than being the radical that many would imagine her to be, is in fact a conservative. A conservative of the left rather than the right, for sure, but a conservative none the less.

Klein argues also that the Chicago School free market advocates have gone down a similarly utopian path to the communists described by Johnson, arrogantly believing that their economic system leads to an ideal society and justifies extreme measures to achieve it. Like the utopianism described by Johnson, Klein argues that this utopian vision leads also to moral relativism, supporting dictators like Pinochet for example and turning a blind eye to the atrocities because they were less important than the utopian economic reforms. Like Johnson, she also argues that these utopian visions do not serve the real needs of people who don’t want the slate wiped clean but want gradual reform and development within a democratic framework. It also leads to corruption, as in totalitarian regimes, with people taking the opportunity to line their own pockets whilst telling themselves that they are serving a higher cause. Johnson and Klein have different targets but their criticisms of those targets are remarkably similar.

All in all, reading these two books together drives home for me the point that the late nineteenth and twentieth century cul-de-sac of left and right based politics has been a disaster. What we need, rather than the utopian solutions of either the right or left, is a return to the classic liberalism of individual freedom and a pragmatic approach to what Karl Popper calls ‘piecemeal engineering’, trying to improve institutions and solve problems in a practical way, based on the needs of real people and with democratic institutions that enable the people to remove leaders when they go against the needs of people.

Marxist Nutters

Since the collapse of communism there has always been an argument that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were an aberration from real Marxism and therefore that real Communism had never really been tried. This has enabled some on the left to keep alive their belief in Marx despite the seeming failure of communism. Of course this is nonsense because, rather than being some accidental aberration, the totalitarianism that has resulted in every attempt to implement Marxism was an inevitable result of Marxism’s closed, utopian system and of the class-based demonization of whole groups of people, however well-meaning Marx’s original sentiments may have been in some respects. It does at least have some semblance of a basis for discussion, however.

This cannot be said of a whole other group of nutters who, rather than regarding Stalin and Mao as aberrant monsters, regard the real problem that caused the failure of communism as being that these great leaders were sold out by wishy-washy liberals like Kruschev and Deng Xiaoping. If only hard-core Stalinists and Maoists had inherited the mantle of communism, they argue, they could have carried on the good work, exterminated the last few million reactionaries opposing them and achieved the glorious world communist revolution. I first came across this weird field of human thought when reading some of the work of the French Structuralist, Marxist influenced philosophers like Badiou and Althusser. Badiou, for example, was for many years a Maoist, regarding the Culural Revolution as a great event. He has since gone on to create a new definition of the ethics of evil, which can accommodate his previous support for Mao, rather than simply `fes up and admit that he had been a bit of an idiot and wasn’t quite as smart as he thought.

Whilst this sort of behavior is perhaps not so unexpected from ivory tower French intellectuals, my prize for Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist Nutter of the year goes to this guy, Comrade Zero. It`s hard sometimes not to think that this site is a satire but he is seemingly for real. The site is replete with a multitude of ironies, for example simultaneously campaigning against police brutality in the USA whilst also arguing for the implementation of the policies of Stalin; that well-known advocate of caring, community policing.