I blame John Stuart Mill, myself

The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy describes Mill as “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”.

That may well be true. Yet influence can be good or bad, and I find most of Mill’s ideas repugnant. But not all of them.

Mill’s works, especially his essay On Liberty, can be legitimately regarded as the scripture of modern liberalism, its New Testament building on, and deviating from, the legacy of the eighteenth-century Whigs.

Hence Mill’s advocacy of placing definite limits on state power, of free speech and even of private education, which he correctly judged as essential to fostering diversity of opinion. Yet all those good things aren’t philosophy but only some of its derivatives.

These particular derivatives of Mill’s philosophy are benign, but the philosophy itself was flawed. In fact, most perversions of today’s modernity can be traced back to Mill’s basic ideas.

For example, while critical of state interference in general, Mill argued that it was justified when it promoted and enforced Enlightenment egalitarianism.

Thus he was in favour of inheritance taxation because equality was to him a higher principle than property rights, and taxing inheritance prevented some people from getting a head start in life. But then Mill contradicted himself by opposing progressive taxation, partly redeeming himself in my eyes.

Progressive taxation, he argued, was “a mild form of robbery” because it penalised hard work, enterprise and fiscal prudence. True. But exactly the same could be said about inheritance taxes, which penalise the same man’s family by not allowing them the full benefit of his hard work, enterprise and fiscal prudence.

The clue to understanding Mill is his statement that he regarded “utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions.” Actually, that idea was neither good nor original.

It was a development of utilitarianism, the trend championed by Jeremy Bentham in the generation previous to Mill’s. Mill’s thought was more nuanced than Bentham’s “greatest good of the greatest number”, but ultimately as capable of injecting toxins into subsequent ideas.

Utilitarianism severed every strand of the ganglion linking society to Christendom with its concept of natural law and absolute moral truths.

According to Mill, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant… .”

Hence any individual must have “the freedom to pursue tastes (provided they do no harm to others), even if they are deemed ‘immoral’.” This sounds good, but it leaves a logical hole through which can creep in “the tyranny of the majority”, the term Mill borrowed from Tocqueville.

Define harm, as any conservative thinker would insist. If you can’t, who can? Since we no longer recognise religious authority, this has to leave the state as the arbiter of what constitutes “harm to others”. And the state is happy to oblige.

In a series of statutes, the British state has for all intents and purposes equated physical and psychological harm. This reminds me of the spoof of country and western songs my Yankee friends and I sang in Texas years ago: “Honey, you broke my heart, and I broke your jaw.”

A broken heart is becoming in Britain a moral and legal equivalent of a broken jaw. Hurting someone’s feelings may still be a lesser offence than hurting someone’s body, but it may be treated as a crime nevertheless.

Hence various statues, most of recent coinage, that penalise ‘hate speech’. Our laws now say that “something is a hate incident if the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on: disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation.”

We can ridicule this nonsense to our heart’s content. We could say, for example, that surely there ought to exist more objective criteria of criminality than the opinion of a passerby who overheard one man calling another ‘a fat bastard’.

But this illustrates the intellectual paucity of liberal thought, as exemplified in this case by Mill’s theory of harm. Loose lips may sink ships, but loose definitions sink laws – and ultimately justice.

Mill himself laid down the directional vector of his ideas. In his later work Socialism, he waxed downright Marxist.

The prevalence of poverty in contemporary capitalist societies was “a failure of the social arrangements”. This state of affairs couldn’t be condoned as being the result of individual failings. An attempt to do so represented a denial of “an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering.”

Subsequent history has shown that the liberal state is more likely to cause suffering than protect “every human being” from it. Loose definitions again: Mill neither defines suffering nor cites the source of that “irresistible claim”. That’s slapdash thought.

This champion of the individual ended up preaching collectivism at its most soaring, something I’d argue to be the only direction in which utilitarianism can go. Mill rejected the Christian view of morality as a matter of free will, with the Church doing its best to help the individual make the right moral choice conforming to its teaching.

That’s a losing proposition, according to Mill. Society should concentrate not on making individuals moral, but on ensuring that a generation is moral as a whole.

Translating this dictum into today’s realities, our generation is generally moral because it believes in animal rights (another one of Mill’s pet ideas, as it were), global warming, hate speech as a crime worse than theft – and so on, all the way down the list. Some individuals whose ideas of morality may be different and therefore inferior can’t spoil the otherwise serene moral landscape.

The same goes for Mill’s economic ideas, which didn’t start out as socialist but ineluctably moved in that direction. Bothered by inequality of wealth, Mill believed it was the state’s task to institute economic and social policies that promote equality of opportunity.

This has become the favourite shibboleth of modern egalitarians who develop Mill’s ideas. They acknowledge that equality of result is an indigestible pie in the sky. However, they insist that equality of opportunity is a goal that’s both laudable and achievable. In fact, it’s more or less the other way around.

The state can promote equality of result by enforced levelling downwards (the only direction in which it’s ever possible to level).

It’s possible to confiscate all property and pay citizens barely enough to keep them alive (this was more or less achieved in the country where I grew up). It’s possible to put in place the kind of dumbed-down schools that will make everybody equally ignorant (this has been more or less achieved in the country where I grew old).

What is absolutely impossible is to guarantee equality of opportunity. A child with two parents will have better opportunities to get on in life than a child raised by one parent. A boy who grew up surrounded by books will have a greater opportunity to get ahead intellectually than his coeval who grew up surrounded by discarded syringes and crushed beer cans.

A girl who goes to a good private school will have greater opportunities in life than one who attends a local comprehensive (closing private schools down, an idea Mill rejected but his heirs champion, wouldn’t redress this imbalance: middle-class parents will find a way of supplementing their daughter’s education either abroad or at home).

A child of two professional tennis players will have a better chance of becoming good at the game than a child of two chartered accountants. A young businessman who inherits a fortune will have a better opportunity of earning a greater fortune than someone who has to start from scratch (again, confiscatory inheritance laws, which Mill didn’t really mind, will fail: as with all unjust regulations, people will either find a way around them or flee).

The title above is jocular: I don’t really blame Mill for all our ills. Although a brilliant and erudite man, he was as much a product of wrong philosophies as their originator.

But the philosophies were fundamentally wrong, and we are all reaping the poisonous harvest of ideas planted by Enlightenment thinkers. Such as John Stuart Mill.