Political Justice

by Alexander J Illingworth

  Oaths in the political sphere have attract some controversy, from republicans in Britain because of the oath of loyalty to the monarch, and in other nations, particularly the United States, but others as well, due to references to ‘God’ which continue to anger secularists. Without becoming bogged down in a theological quagmire, it stands to reason that even an atheist or agnostic man must believe in the nation which he hopes to serve in a political fashion. The spirit and values of that nation, whether you call it ‘The Spirit of the Nation’ or whether you call it ‘God’ as a result of Divine Providence having passed that spirit from Heaven to Man, is irrelevant. Political oaths are often called unnecessary by the left, but they are not merely a spiritual expression of loyalty — they are a public declaration of membership to a value-system, a national attitude and belief in the people that a politician represents. If the monarch embodies the spirit of the nation, it suffices to swear loyalty to the monarch; ultimately that monarch is only there due to the love of his people, thus the politician still serves his community. Political oaths require a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, and since yes must mean yes and no can only mean no, there are no grey areas when legally interpreting the obligations of an oath of office, or military oath.

  Oaths are important in the case of treason, since the betrayal of the people of a nation is arguably the vilest crime of all, since the community, national and local, which a politician swore to protect was placed in existential danger by that supposed servant. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that our own conscience is the seat of our obligation to society. To swear a public ‘yes/no’ oath is a clear expression of intent and forms a binding connexion to society at large. It is necessary for the protection of the national and local community that politically motivated men and women should take an oath — that way, the line between loyalty and treason is clearly marked, and those of virtuous disposition dare not cross it.

  Chapter XIX

  Libels

  Libel is perhaps the most ambiguous crime in the whole of legal history. ‘Defamatory publication’ is open to a great deal of interpretation, but in an age in which speech is increasingly restricted in the name of preventing certain ‘-isms’ and ‘-phobias’, we must be careful to preserve the sacred right of free citizens to freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

  Godwin considers it impossible to find any fair grounds for the prosecution of individuals for this sort of speech or publication, since often the grounds for defining ‘defamation’ are rooted in the anger of an individual at perceived offence or opposition to a particular agenda that this individual may espouse, leading him to seek to use such ambiguous legal proceedings as a weapon against his political enemies. In almost all cases where speech or publication has not been used to incite violence against a particular group, this is broadly true. It is of course a natural human instinct to take offence at disagreement, or at whatever someone else puts forward which does not appear to be right within a different interpretation of human reason. What’s more, humans often fear what they dislike or do not understand, and so are inclined to lock it away far from the consensus of society so as to ensure that they are not offended further by the strange opinions or habits of dissenters.

  Whilst libel against the individual is not necessarily as common in court as it used to be, in Europe in particular a new kind of libel has taken hold in the form of criminality: ‘hate speech’. The left is very much behind the criminalisation of hate speech, but in a society which values the free dissemination of opinion, can we ever truly restrict speech on grounds of hate? We must recognise the criticisms offered against hate speech; in some cases hate speech is indeed derived from prejudice rather than informed opinion, but even if this were what hate speech laws were used to prosecute, surely the most effectively way to combat irrational prejudice is through education rather than criminalisation. After all, speech does not have the capacity to cause any physical harm whatsoever unless it is actually urging others to harmful behaviour. To express a hypothetical opinion, say ‘I think Muslims are awful people who should not be European citizens’ is quite different from saying ‘Muslims ought to be eradicated’. The former is simply an opinion, the latter is genocidal in nature. We do not know the context of the first statement: perhaps the holder of the opinion has reason for believing that Muslims are awful; he might have rational arguments to offer as to why Muslims should not be European citizens completely separate from whether or not they have a right to exist.

  If we take the example of UK law against hate speech, and examine the detail of the relevant law:

  (1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with the intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress he (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, thereby causing harassment, alarm or distress.38

  Law prohibiting harassment against individuals already existed separate from the law concerning matters of race, and right to be free from assault on or threat to the person exists for every citizen. However, when the law dallies with terms like ‘distress’ and ‘insulting words’, it immediately opens the door to prosecution for the sake of individual opinion. Opinions are always going to provoke distress in some, since it is natural and human to be offended by those things which criticise one’s preconceptions, way of life or religious beliefs. Ambiguity, as usual, is the perpetrator of a restriction of freedom which occurs over a period of time, exploited by certain interest groups to remove the ability of the free-thinking population to express their own independent will. With the death of this sort of freedom of speech comes also the death of democracy and the libertarian society. What is perhaps most worrying is that, in UK law at least, dissemination of all ‘hate speech’ against religion, race, sexual orientation or citizenship extends to almost all media: published material, plays, recordings, broadcasts and possession of any kind of ‘inflammatory material’. Liberty is surely dying, and a politically just society cannot afford to lose it.

  Ultimately, such symptoms are the product of political mismanagement rather than malice, but eventually, when the time comes that a malicious government does wish to remove the right of its citizens to express their individual opinions, libel and hate speech legislation will most certainly be used to suppress any attempt at challenging the status quo.

  Chapter XX

  National Education

  Godwin states that a national curriculum is often used by government to imbue the wealthiest with a belief in authoritarianism and control which allows them to more easily manipulate the population, whilst manipulating the younger generations. This may have been true in Godwin’s day, but since the recognition of education as a human right, there will be no removal of national education anytime soon. Ultimately what education should include comes down to a matter of individual opinion, and we have already considered education as means for moral improvement in Chapter IV of Book II. We have emphasised the importance of balance between empiricism and art, and we have previously lauded the value of the classical education and high culture derived from the intellectual Indo-European traditions of Rome, Greece and Persia.

  When considering a virtuous education, the curriculum for which is often set by the state, we must consider two things: first, of what should be taught, and second, of how the system of schooling ought to be structured. When approaching the first question, many societies throughout history have looked further back to the origins of the human quest for knowledge, to philosophical and theological organisations, for inspiration. One need look no further than the very names of many schools on the European continent, with the French lyceum and German gymnasium lifted directly out of ancient Greek tradition. Education, when properly considered in the context of preparing children for a future within a local and national community, is as much about teaching the importance of educational and sociological inheritance as it is about cramming knowledge in
to young minds. By preparing the young in education, and giving the historical and empirical sweep of human progress, regress and ultimate improvement, we will make them more readily able to tackle the questions of the future which present mankind with the potential for further and faster self-improvement. In history, this quest has frequently been connected with a deity of some kind, and it is for this divine representation of moral knowledge that Socrates was poisoned, Jesus Christ was executed and Zarathustra challenged the paganism of central Asia. The teaching profession in many Western nations today has lost sight of this divine goal. To ask any person on a British street today about the political associations of teaching immediately brings up a left-wing bias. A heavily unionised profession which has been increasingly corrupted by critical theory is sure to yield its problems, and indeed, often half-truths are taught in history lessons.

  I may speak from personal experience when I say that I never had a teacher or higher education supervisor who was not of either a left-wing or centrist disposition. I have had teachers accuse European nations of guilt for their participation in the slave trade, without also adding that every human civilisation has at some point in its history been guilty of slavery, with Europe being the first continent to seriously begin its abolition; I have had teachers denounce the Crusades as a religious aggression which debunks the necessity for religious society, without adding that in previous centuries the Arab Islamic Empire had conquered huge swathes of previously Christian lands for the same reasons; I have had instructors who denounce right-wing statesmen from history as bigoted and racist, when their crime was only to have predicted some fifty to one hundred years ago what is actively and undeniably being fulfilled today. Even Godwin states that education ‘is the mirror and tool of government itself’, and if this is so, then what we see is a sorry reflection of the agenda of modern government. Government has replaced God, and the young people in education look to government for their earthly salvation rather than to selfless moral improvement, the divine spirit of God and Reason.

  Whether or not we teach our children classical history or merely ways of interpreting certain key historical events, whether we teach them creationism, evolutionism or both, what is most important is the skill of critical thinking. The evaluation of facts and the conclusion of independent personal opinion is at a paucity in many educational systems, and it will continue to be, so long as educational instructors inject the education system with their own private opinions, rather than allowing their wards to come to their own conclusions. Rather than teaching children the nature of their constitution, why we have certain inalienable rights, and why the spirit of the nation must be maintained within that constitution, all the youth of today can think about are flaws, emotional infringements and ‘feelings’. Abstract conceptions of equality and fairness are considered the only moral ends, not because they make rational sense, but because they ‘feel’ good, or ‘seem’ right. Things are not as they seem. If education itself loses sight of reason, the governments of the future, which will be comprised of today’s young generations, can only be irrational.

  ***

  Mankind, as we know, is an unequal race. Therefore, we would be dishonest with ourselves to say that all children have the same aptitude for education, the same mental means for critical thinking, the same possibilities and the same successful futures. This is what the left would have us believe, and this view has its intellectual origins in the Godwinian hope for a future marked by ‘great intellectual improvement’ among the general populace, where each and every man is freely able to express his own rational opinion and settle moral issues independently of authority. But there will never come a time, certainly not in the coming millennia, when all human children will have the same capacity for intellectual improvement. When an educational system is constructed, it must honestly take this irrefutable fact into account.

  There will be students who have the aptitude for future academic careers, those who seek financial careers, literary careers and practical careers in architecture and engineering — the possibilities are endless. But we will always also see those who do not even have the aptitude for high education after their pre-university schooling. Britain used to cater for these eventualities under the tripartite schooling system which existed from 1945–1974. This system divided post-primary students by an aptitude test into three groups: those who went to one of the country’s ancient ‘grammar schools’, which received their name for placing special importance on the teaching of classical languages, but also those gifted in mathematics and science, whilst the rest went to either ‘secondary technical schools’, which placed special importance on science, or ‘secondary modern schools’, which effectively acted as the tier below the grammar school. Those with enough money were able to afford to send their children into private education, whilst those from poorer backgrounds who might well have been intelligent enough to deserve private-level education were excluded from this by monetary limitations; thus, by showing a degree of aptitude in an exam taken at age eleven, the wheat, we might say, was separated from the chaff, and those who could prove their level of intelligence were allowed to enter a grammar school.

  By the late 1960s, with the publication of Michael Young’s satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which the meritocracy of education was openly criticised, the Labour Party in Britain abolished the system and closed many grammar schools. Whilst today some grammar schools have survived on a provisional basis, many remain closed, and some have entered the private sector, whilst the replacement of such ‘elitist’ schools with state comprehensives remains the long-term goal of the left, hand-in-hand with the strange and dishonest ideology that every child deserves and responds to the exact same standard of education. Contrary to hopes, the comprehensive education system has not raised all schools to the same high level of education, but has driven the best teachers into the private sector and left comprehensive schools with equal standards, but equally low ones.

  In a virtuous society, the ultimate value of education is preparation for both political duty and communitarian duty. Working in a stable job earning money for a stable family may be part of that duty to community, but fundamentally, the interests of students will be different, and trying to create a comprehensive system with a one-size-fits-all educational model cannot work, since it is incompatible with the natural inequality with is present in the human race. The attempts to argue that each child has the same capacity for learning and will not be held back by being forced (yet another restriction of freedom) to choose an egalitarian schooling system rather than the private choice, or taking the test for selective state schooling, will force the egalitarian mindset into children themselves, and surely cause a plethora of irrationality to take hold of those who will be the future shapers of society. Once again, we see that even in matters of national education there cannot be an equality of education and a freedom of choice. Liberty and equality are incompatible, since in forcing equality on the population, choice of schools must be restricted. It will not surprise our reader to learn that we believe in a completely libertarian society the state should always allow its people freedom of choice rather than enforcing abstract equality.

  Chapter XXI

  The Fraud of Economics

  The final discussion of this division will be centred on economic theory. In truth, economic science deserves a full enquiry in its own right, so our discussion will be somewhat limited to the broad goals of economy, how economy has failed society in the modern world, and how we might go about changing attitudes towards economy in order to bring about a more practical, but also just, system of political economy. No doubt at some later point I may endeavour to take my reader into a new full work with ethical economics in mind.

  Modern economy is founded on deception, for fundamentally the economic and monetary system of the modern world has turned towards transactions that use money which simply does not exist. This ‘non-money’ is manifest in several different ways: first, the deception of the
populace by false promises of money which the state does not have, or cannot afford to spend; second, the adoption of a monetary system which creates currency as debt, and derives the value of currency from an ‘I-owe-you’ system rather than actual monetary value; third, the use of paper and copper alloy as money rather than gold and silver, which is valuable due to its preciousness on the face of Earth. The fact that the economic system operates based on these deceptions also sheds great light on modern ‘capitalism’, or rather disproves its existence, and reveals a great deal of uncomfortable truths about the manipulation of economy for the means of control rather than public benefit. If the commonwealth of citizens is the purpose of society in the first place, then economy is perhaps the most crucial tool in securing that commonwealth.

  First we must consider the greatest Ponzi scheme ever to defraud the people of this world, particularly in Europe, where the welfare state has been most engorged. Many of the assurances which the governments of Europe have offered their people are in fact fraudulent. In the United Kingdom for example, citizens who are forced to pay part of their salary into state pension contributions are forced to do so on a regular basis, on the promise that once they reach retirement age they will be able to claim a pension. However, all long-term promises, as we have discovered in Book III Chapter III, are unsustainable. The UK government has now found that it is unable to pay back everyone who has paid into the pension scheme, since instead of each individual paying into his own personal pension fund, the money is treated like a tax, and the government has spent that money on other things over the pension scheme’s lifetime. Therefore, we have reached a situation where there are more people set to claim pensions in years to come than there is money to pay for them. Hence the government has been forced to resort to tactics such as raising the pension age, and that which was once 60 is now set to be 68 by the 2030s. It is this same inability to provide the money after over 50 years of borrowing that is forcing governments across Europe to implement austerity measures. Such measures are of course unpopular, and we cannot deny that they are affecting many people adversely, but they are entirely the consequence of the false promises made by the left-wing governments of previous years. The 2008 financial crisis proved that the entire economic system was flawed, and yet now almost ten years on very little has changed.