Once a man’s understanding has settled on something (either because it is an accepted belief or because it pleases him), it draws everything else also to support and agree with it. And if it encounters a larger number of more powerful countervailing examples, it either fails to notice them, or disregards them, or makes fine distinctions to dismiss and reject them, and all this with much dangerous prejudice, to preserve the authority of its first conceptions. So when someone was shown a votive tablet in a temple dedicated, in fulfilment of a vow, by some men who had escpaed the danger of shipwreck, and was pressed to say whether he would now recognize the divinity of the gods, he made a good reply when he retorted: ‘Where are the offerings of those who made vows and perished?’

The same method is found perhaps in every superstition, like astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgements and so on: people who take pleasure in such vanities notice the results when they are fulfilled, but ignore and overlook them when they fail, though they do fail more often than not. .. Even apart from the pleasure and vanity we mentioned, it is an innate and constant mistake in the human understanding to be much more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives, when rightly and properly it should make itself equally open to both; and in fact, to the contrary, in the formation of any true axiom, there is superior force in a negative instance.

- Francis Bacon, The New Organon

Reading the second part of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun has for me been a dreamlike experience.  I gave up on the first part once because it got too weird, but now that I’m attuned to Wolfe’s style, that is no longer a problem.  Now it works like hypnosis.  A few paragraphs in, and my brain shifts to a different gear: Slow, focused. Dreamlike.

The story takes place at the end of Earth’s life, when the sun is cooling, a setting introduced in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories.  Everything that could happen has happened, and people are surrounded by monuments from greater times.  The end is coming, or possibly the birth of a better world.

Events follow a jagged path that seems random but at the same time full of meaning.  There are echoes of mythology: Christian, classical, and modern.  And there are events that seem meaningful at first, then turn out not to be.  The protagonist, an exiled torturer, is given a magnificently named sword at the beginning, which he carries through all his adventures.  And then he loses it, and the story continues.  It was just a sword.

A gem that brings dead people back to life is possibly just a gem, or possibly magical.  A boy that shares the torturers name seems to represent something, but we never learn what.  Questions remain unanswered, and what I’m left with afterwards is mostly the feeling that I’ve been through something wonderful, something that resonated deeply with me.  Just like a dream.

Nor should we attach much value to consensus itself and its longevity. There may be many kinds of political state, but there is only one state of the sciences, and it is a popular state and always will be. And among the people the kinds of learning which are most popular are those which are either controversial and combative or attractive and empty, that is, those which ensnare and those which seduce assent. This is surely why the greatest geniuses in every age have suffered violence; while men of uncommon intellect and unerstanding, simply to preserve their reputation, have submitted themselves to the judgment of time and the multitude. For this reason, if profound thoughts have occasionally flared up, they have soon been blown on by the winds of common opinion and put out.

The result is that Time like a river has brought down to us the light things that float on the surface, and has sunk what is weighty and solid. Even those authors who have assumed a kind of dictatorship in the sciences and make pronouncements about things with so much confidence, take to complaining when they recover their senses from time to time about the subtlety of nature, the depths of truth, the obscurity of things, the complexity of causes, and the weakness of human understanding; yet they are no more modest in this, since they prefer to blame the common condition of man and nature rather than admit their own incapacity.

- Francis Bacon, The New Organon

Fremskrittspartiet er det ene av de to ekte opposisjonspartiene i Norge.  Det er riktignok ikke klart hva slags opposisjon de representerer.  Andre partier har politiske plattformer, FrP har personlighet, og da først og fremst Carl I. Hagens personlighet.  En vinglete, opportunistisk personlighet som har introdusert noen av de beste og de dårligste ideene i norsk politikk.

Kong Carl av Jan Ove Ekeberg og Jan Arild Snoen er ikke en god Hagen-biografi.  Vi får en skisse av personen Hagen, men den går sjelden i dybden.  Derimot er dette en interessant fremstilling av FrP’s historie, og spesielt av FrP’s personlighet, blandingen av liberalistiske, konservative og populistiske strømninger som Hagen etter et par utrenskninger til sist fant en levedyktig balanse mellom.

Det er spesielt fascinerende å lese hvordan Hagen bygget en partiorganisasjon ut av Anders Langes Parti.  ALP var ment som et anti-parti, Langes personlige folkebevegelse.  Hagen brøt med ALP nettop derfor, og det var kun Langes død som fikk ham tilbake igjen.  Lange skapte FrP helt utilsiktet.

Jeg kunne forresten tenke meg å lese mer om Anders Lange.  De puslespillbitene jeg har funnet fra hans liv gir inntrykk av en blogger før sin tid: Egenrådig og uforutsigbar, med en så sterk vilje til å dytte sine personlige meninger på folk at han stiftet både Anders Langes Avis, Anders Langes Frihetsbevegelse, og Anders Langes Parti.  Fantastisk!

Det er FrP han vil bli husket for, men jeg mistenker at Lange er en langt mer interessant person enn Hagen.  Hvor i all verden er den store Lange-biografien?

One feature of this daily barrage of anti-Americanism is the tireless reference to “American conditions”. The term crops up again and again in reports on undesirable trends in European society. (Its connotations are always negative.) Is traffic getting worse? Are children getting fatter? Oh, no – we’re being overtaken by “American conditions”. The versatility with which the term has been used is impressive. When I recently googled its Norwegian version – “amerikanske tilstander” – I got 1,600 hits. I looked through the first hundred or so; most were newspaper articles about a wide variety of topics. Was money playing more of a part in Norwegian politics? American conditions! Was personal wealth increasingly determining the level of health care one received? American conditions! [..]

I found the term equated with macho behavior, the prescribing of antidepressants to children, Internet spam, overpaid executives, long working hours, animal abuse, lack of sensitivity to needs of convicts, the use of terrain bikes in heavy traffic, ponds being stoked with fish for “sports fishermen”, interest-free financing on cars, schools advertising for students, and the “chaos” of having many commercial radio and TV stations instead of one nice, tidy government-owned station. Perhaps the most outrageous examples I found were an article equating “American conditions” with “long hospital queues” (sorry, that comes under the category of “European conditions”), and another article claiming that “Ruper Murdoch controls the American presidential election through Republican propaganda on Fox News” and asking whether Norway’s wonderfully objective media might someday fall victim to such dastardly ideological control.

- Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept

There are two books in Bruce Bawer‘s While Europe Slept: One looks at the anti-Americanism and multicultural delusions of the Netherlands and Norway in the years around the 9/11 attacks.  It’s based on Bawer’s personal experiences as a resident of both countries.  It’s hard-hitting, subjective – and worth reading every word of it.

The other retells the Bat Ye’or conspiracy theory about Eurabia, about how the European establishment made an agreement with the Arab countries decades ago to turn Europe into a Muslim continent, and now all the angry Muslims are turning the rest of us into dhimmis.  It’s a retarded theory, and Bawer presents it uncritically.

And even at its best, the book is marred by that tone of angry sarcasm that is so common in anti-p.c. rants.  I got enough of that in the warblog years.

But read it anyway, especially if you’re Norwegian.  Bawer is the grumpy outsider who impolitely exposes the assumptions and delusions of our society, who observes things native Norwegians don’t, and comes at issues from unexpected angles. We need that perspective.

There’s a lot here that matches my own views exactly, for instance his criticism of the Norwegian media coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I believe the Iraq war was wrong, but most Norwegians commentators didn’t even understand why it was fought.  They assumed they already knew, and didn’t bother to find out.

It’s such perspectives that make this a valuable book, major flaws aside – far more valuable than yet another boring insider’s view.

The pillars of U.S. immigration policy are integration and emplyment; officials in Western Europe, by contrast, thought they were doing immigrants a favor by not requiring – or even encouraging – either. One might wonder why European authorities didn’t try to learn from the spectacularly successful history of U.S. immigration. I’ve lived in Europe long enough to know why: they didn’t see it as a success story. In the eyes of the Western European establishment, America is a fundamentally racist and materialistic nation that cruelly compels immigrants to shake off their identities and fend for themselves under a heartless, dog-eat-dog economic system. [..]

While immigrants to America are encouraged to become full members of society – and are rewarded for doing so – in Europe (where the native-born children and grandchildren of immigrants are actually called “second- and third-generation immigrants”) the establishment prefers its minorities unintegrated. Why? The supposed reason is that it respects differences; the real reason, as I gradually came to understand, was a profound discomfort with the idea of “them” becoming “us”. Immigrants to Europe are allowed to perpetuate even the most atrocious aspects of their cultures, but the price for this is that no one, including themselves, will ever think of them as Dutch or German or Swedish.

- Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept

Though immigration and integration have become major points of contention in Europe, they weren’t even open for discussion when I was first living in Oslo.  On these topics, the “one idea” of the “one-idea state” was clear: Muslims in Europe were a colorful and enriching asset – period.  In Norway, the expression on everyone’s lips was “fargerik felleskap” – “colorful community”. On the rare occasions when immigrants were mentioned on TV or in the press, you could be sure these words would figure prominently. Norwegian journalists, professors, and politicians loved to use the term. But from the beginning, I found it offensive. Its fixation on the skin color mocked Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society, and its reduction of immigrants to their most superficial aspect turned them into mere window-dressing – an outward sign of ethnic Norwegians’ inner virtue. Often, hearing and reading comments on immigration by Norwegian establishment types, I nearly gasped at their grotesque condescension, their inability to see immigrants as individuals, and their view of the whole business as a morality play; with Muslims in the role of needy victims and Norwegians as heroic benefactors.

- Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept

Liberalisme på norsk – Ideer om frihet, 1980-2000 samler artikler fra det liberalistiske tidskriftet Ideer om frihet, et tidsskrift jeg aldri har hørt om, og dermed er vel mye sagt om tilstanden til norsk liberalisme.

De beste artiklene i samlingen forsøker å grave frem sporene etter en ørliten liberalistisk tradisjon i norsk politikk.  På midten av 1800-tallet var denne tradisjonen representert ved stortingsmannen Søren Jaabæk, en slags norsk Ron Paul som var kjent som “Neibæk” fordi han stemte nei til enhver økning av offentlige utgifter.  Kulturelitens skrekkbilde fra fjorårets valgkamp var faktisk en realitet: Jaabæk stemte nei til kunstnerlønn for Bjørnson og Ibsen.

Og allerede før 1800 var det en forsiktig interesse for markedsliberale ideer blant dansk-norske embetsmenn, som i 1779 sørget for den første offisielle oversettelsen av Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Den ble riktignok ikke lest.

Det er også mer filosofiske artikler her, blant annet av SF-forfatteren Øyvind Myhre.  Det er noe virkelighetsfjernt over liberalistisk filosofi, men samtidig er det interessant på sin måte.  Liberalister er blant de få som fremdeles tenker prinsippielt om grunnleggende politiske ideer, så som i hvilken grad man rasjonelt kan begrunne statens legitimitet.  Det har lite direkte relevans for virkelighetens politiske liv, men det bidrar til å belyse aspekter vi lett går glipp av oppi all pragmatismen.

Liberalismens mer frustrerende sider er også representert, med en lengre debatt rundt en av Ayn Rands grunnteser.

Mange av artiklene kan leses her.