Overspill
Nicolas Walter
Pornography, Psychedelics and Technology E.J. Mishan (Allen & Unwin £12.50) Nothing is deader than last week's newspaper, except perhaps last year's magazine or lecture. The republication of such things in book form may be forgiven if the subject is important and the treatment is interesting, but this is hardly ever the case. The publication of Ezra Mishan's collection of Encounter articles from 1969-76 and Canadian lectures from 1978 is unfOrgivable because his treatment of important subjects is so uninteresting. He is a professor of economics, but his treatment of economic subjects isn't convincing enough to impress a layman, whatever it may do to his colleagues; and his treatment of noneconomic subjects is no better than that by anyone else, and often worse.
Mishan's subtitle is 'Essays on the Limits to Freedom', which should really have been the title, and his general target is 'the Established Enlightenment', which normally allows too much freedom for things he disapproves of, but occasionally too little for things he doesn't disapprove of. The patronising and moralising tone belongs to the pulpit rather than the page, and in fact the six essays are sermons about sin: he is against it. His most prominent particular target is growth — both of the economy and of the state. The most interesting statement in the book is that the two are intimately connected, historically as well as socially and politically, but this is supported by assertion rather than argument, and Mishan offers no way to check economic growth other than by state action, which rather spoils the point.
A set of subsidiary targets are the 'spillovers' of growth, especially all the various kinds of pollution, but again most of the solutions proposed seem likely to make matters worse rather than better. One typical example is the proposed 'scheme for a number of large residential areas through which no motorised traffic would be allowed to pass' and 'in our larger towns and cities' for 'a ban on all private traffic except , perhaps for a taxi service (allowance being made for commerical deliveries during the small hours, say from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m.)'. So urban and suburban families with young children and old grandparents could never use their own cars, and wouldn't get much sleep either with lorries and vans visiting local shops through the night. One wonders where professors of economics live, and how clever you have to be to become so silly.
The most unexpected item in the book is a lecture advocating that hallucinogenic drugs should be made legal, in which the libertarian for once gets the better of the authoritarian in Mishan's split mind. Unfortunately the advocacy is so prosaic and ponderous that it tends to defeat itself, and in the end it becomes absurd. The obvious arguments on either side are that such penalised drugs as LSD and mescalin are less dangerous than such permitted drugs as alcohol and tobacco or such different activities as motorcycling or mountaineering, but that legalising them would encourage abuse by the foolish and profits for the greedy. Whichever side one takes, there is surely no serious reason to believe that official resistance to such a reform is really based on fear that psychedelic drugs would threaten economic growth!
The most expected item in the book is the argument first printed in Encounter a decade ago, and already reprinted elsewhere in book form, that pornography should be made More illegal, in which the authoritarian takes over completely. The very simple point is that, however much one dislikes pornography, the problem is whether it actually does more harm than other forms of unpleasant verbal and visual material and whether punishing it does less harm than permitting it. A strong argument could easily be made that, say, professors of economics have done more damage than purveyors of erotica, but few people would conclude that economics should or could therefore be made illegal. Mishan himself
mentions the point that much material directed at children in myths and fairy-tales is sadistic, but he pushes it aside because ot the moral message of such material, not seeing that this is what makesthesadism more rather than less objectionable. Pornography is only one of many kinds of disgusting material, and an obsessive attitude to the subject — whether favourable or unfavourable — tells us more about the obsessive attitudiniser than the subject. In the end Mishan's attack is too ill-informed and ill-written to strike home, just as his book as a whole is too boring to bother about. The question is why it has been published at all.
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