June 12, 2011
On Writing, and Myself.
“And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.” – Montaigne, Essays
I’ve often thought about trying to write about depression. But when you’re depressed, there’s no point in writing about it. Everything, after all, is pointless. Most especially your own meditations on your own pointlessness. And when you’re not depressed, well, you don’t want to write about being depressed. It’s depressing.
So I’m not going to write about being depressed. I’m going to write about not wanting to write. In which I am of course being slightly dishonest. Because if I really didn’t want to write, I wouldn’t be writing at all. (Though actually everything turns on what you take by “really”. And the way you take to – or reject – various putative paradoxes in human psychology and the philosophy of mind. But I’m not going to write about those.)
I used to love writing. It was my hobby. Even before I started blogging,* I used to adore producing vast reams of turgid, tedious, self-involved prose. Most of it was crap, even by the standards of whatever age I was then. But it served a purpose beyond the GCSE/A-Level/Degree study I was officially engaged in. It was in itself therapeutic. Challenging. Entertaining. And quite often actively fun. I used to write for fun. And that made studying all the easier – and guaranteed that deadlines were never a problem for me.
But now I don’t love writing. Now I (almost) hate it. I get anxious before I have to do any. I dislike the process when I’m doing it. I’m dissatisfied with the end products. All of it bores me. And it’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s not even a good mental work-out anymore.
What happened? I’m not really sure.
I stopped enjoying writing sometime last March. I know it was around March, because in February I wrote 13,000 words on the interminable bore and 3rd rate moral philosopher, Francis Hutcheson (yes, he of the weird chicken fetish).
I detest Hutcheson’s writings, but regardless I wrote that piece at nobody’s behest and for nobody’s benefit (though what the hell, here’s an upload). The thing is, I still enjoyed writing it. It allowed me to work out a few conceptual moves, and in terms of keeping track of Hutcheson’s “arguments” (I use the term loosely), it was more efficient than a series of notes that, if unearthed in two years, would mean nothing.
Right now the prospect of doing anything like that again fills me with horror. Indeed I thought about writing a review of Jonathan Wolff’s new book Ethics and Public Policy for this blog. It’s quite a good book. Accessible to beginners, but cleverly addressing more interesting philosophical issues as it goes along. But frankly, I can’t face telling you anything more about it. The prospect appalls me.
So OK. I don’t like writing anymore. Boo hoo for me. So what?
Well this is my party, and I’ll gaze at my reflection in the glittering pool if I so choose.
Number one: if I’m going to be an academic, not liking writing is something of a problem. Writing is going to be a big part of my job. Career-satisfaction does not appear to loom. Nasty.
Number two: this apathy and dissatisfaction is worrying. What is wrong with me? Have I permanently changed? Can people even change that dramatically and suddenly? Is this symptomatic of a wider, growing apathy with intellectual pursuits more generally? I don’t know, and I don’t like it. But I don’t really give enough of a fuck to write to you about it.
Number three: bringing together the above considerations, if I don’t write, will I get stupid? All the cleverest people write all the time, even if it’s just in vast piles of unpublished notebooks. When I used to write regularly, I stayed sharp. Literally, a sort of mental workout. Does giving it up mean a one-way ticket to cognitive obesity?
Dear readers, I’d like to explore this further. Except I wouldn’t, because as I said, I can’t be fucked. I started with a quote from Montaigne – prolific writer that he was, the bastard – so I’ll end with one too. “Everyone thinks his own fart smells as sweet as apples”.
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* Some 4 years ago now, though the early efforts have thankfully been dispatched into the abyss.
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April 1, 2011
The Day of Judgement
BOOK REVIEW: The Case Against Voting Reform – Why the AV System Would Damage Britain by James Forder, (2011: Oneworld, Oxford), pp. 158, £6.99
(Available as a PDF, because this review is so damn long).
The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it. – Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
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News that James Forder was publishing a book arguing against electoral reform must have been badly received by the intellectual wing of the Liberal Democrats – assuming there is, or ever was, such a thing.
In his 1999 split volume Both Sides of the Coin, Forder eviscerated (that is not too strong a word) the case for British entry into European Monetary Union. As well as laying out the wider case against, Forder in passing demolished the pro-entry argument as put forward in the same book by Chris Huhne. Back then, Huhne was an MEP for the Liberal Democrats, the only major party in Britain ever publicly committed to EMU. Today, Huhne is Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, thanks to the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition deal struck last May – a deal which guaranteed the Lib Dems a referendum on switching to the Alternative Vote (AV) at general elections. Back in 1999, Liberal Democrats must have hoped as few people as possible read the Forder-Huhne volume. If they’re brave enough to pick up The Case Against Voting Reform, they’ll be thinking exactly the same today.
Forder’s stated and unambiguous aim is to defend the present system of “First Past The Post” (FPTP) as an entirely superior electoral system not just to AV – previously dubbed a “miserable little compromise” by none other than Nick Clegg – but to all forms of Proportional Representation (PR) too. His strategy is to consider the advantages of FPTP vis-à-vis PR, on the justified assumption that nobody actually wants AV. (It is, on all measures, a worse system than either FPTP or PR, as indeed both reformists and their opponents were happy to admit prior to the referendum announcement last May.) Forder notes – rightly – that those now campaigning for AV are doing so either because of a mistaken belief that it is closer to PR than the present system, or on the hope that a successful “Yes” vote will open the door to a subsequent vote on PR-proper. The bulk of argument, therefore, is dedicated to advocating FPTP over PR. Insofar as that succeeds, AV is doubly damned: both by its own failings, and by those of its supposedly superior PR alternative.
The foundation of Forder’s argument, however, rests in a particular conception of democracy, or more fundamentally, of politics itself. His intervention can only be understood and assessed by first appreciating that conception; for although he is a professional academic economist, Forder has a sharp eye for the workings of the political. And this is fitting, because the most obvious intellectual debt in this short yet powerful volume is to another academic economist with a sharp eye for the political: the Austrian-born American émigré, Joseph Schumpeter.
The vision of democratic politics which Schumpeter put forward, and which Forder explicitly endorses, is a direct rejection of the sort of view associated with the quote of Rousseau’s I began with. Rousseau’s most famous idea – at least in its popularised version (the properly-understood version is rarely appreciated, not least by Schumpeter himself) – posits “the people” as voting to determine a “general will”. This “general will” binds the citizens in a harmonious unity and prescribes the true laws which all agree to be governed by, even if they actually voted the other way. Obedience to the collectively-determined general will allegedly guarantees freedom via self-government. Thus Rousseau’s most infamous dictum: that extracting the obedience of a citizen dissenter “means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free”.
Schumpeter explicitly attacked and rejected this Rousseauist vision of democracy. Concepts like “the people” and “the general will” were (Schumpeter thought) both conceptually incoherent and empirically unsustainable. Against the Rousseauist vision of democracy as harmonious self-legislation and collective emancipation, Schumpeter put himself firmly in line with the thinking of another of the 20th century’s great German-speaking intellectuals, the sociologist and political thinker Max Weber. Specifically, Weber championed what he termed the Principle of Small Numbers: “that politics is always rule by minority elites”. Schumpeter agreed entirely. A brute fact of all human organization, he thought, is the eventual necessity of organizational hierarchy and leadership, and in particular the need for control and direction. Whatever egalitarian set-up we may start with, a combination of personal self-aggrandizement and the necessary division of labour within political and economic society guarantees that in the end a few will rise to rule the many. What matters is both how the few get to be in charge, and in turn how (if at all) they are controlled.
For Schumpeter, what marked democracy out was that it was a particular mechanism – albeit an extremely impressive and efficient one – for selecting and controlling the minority elites who would inevitably vie for political control: a way of regulating “the competitive struggle for power and office”. Crucially, on Schumpeter’s view individual voters did not collectively constitute “a people”, and they did not form a “general will”. They remained different individual voters who attempted to select different leaders, who could then be entrusted with power – or if necessary, stripped of it. In all of this, the charismatic appeal of individual leaders who are able to sway enough of the electorate was irreducible and usually paramount (here Schumpeter follows Weber closely – Forder, to his sharp-eyed credit, less so):
“Voters do not decide issues. But neither do they pick their members of parliament from the eligibly population with a perfectly open mind. In all normal cases the initiative lies with the candidate who makes a bid for the office of a member of parliament and such local leadership as that may imply. Voters confine themselves to accepting this bid in preference to others or refusing to accept it.”
Schumpeter’s is a starkly deflationary view of democracy, where voters are confined to handling an instrumental mechanism for picking leaders from a self-selecting and self-promoting minority elite. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a deflationary view actively despised by many. In political science departments across the globe, scores of scholars working typically on “democratic theory” or more specifically on “deliberative democracy” valiantly attempt either to deny the adequacy of Schumpeter’s account for the real world, or decry its endorsement of Weber’s Principle of Small Numbers as a stunted present aberration that must be transcended. Forder, by contrast, is quite happy with the basic Schumpeterian diagnosis. And the nasty rub for the anti-Schumpeterians is that Forder appears to have reality on his side.
According to what considerations do voters select amongst candidates at British general elections? Some different models are available. Voters might see MPs as delegates, who trundle off to Parliament to represent their constituents views. But this is plainly not what actually happens, nor could it ever happen for as long as MPs represent more than one constituent, and are members of political parties with manifesto commitments and policy positions. Alternatively, voters might select MPs as agents who deliberate in the Chamber in order to formulate legislation. But again, this is manifestly not what happens: British legislation is handed down by the Government for its majority in the legislature to ratify, without there ever being any real debate of the sort that actually changes party voting lines. So, are voters then voting on the policies put forward by the parties? Certainly this has more potential. But the problem is, no voter ever seriously endorses all the policies of any one party, and indeed none but the worst of political anoraks will know more than a handful of each party’s policies. At best, voters opt for one party’s overall package of policies, when compared to that offered by the others.
Forder is unhesitating in his correlate conclusion: the most plausible account of what voters are actually voting for at general elections is the appeal of party leaders. Certainly, part of the appeal of competing leader will lie in their promises to implement their party’s package of policies. But following the successes of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, then the spectacular failure of Gordon Brown but lukewarm reception of David Cameron (which ended in the first hung parliament for 40 years), it is undeniable that party leaders are what matter most come election time. This conclusion only becomes more forceful when coupled with the general ignorance of most voters, who are far more likely to know the name of a party leader than their own incumbent MP.
All of which is nothing to be disconcerted by, especially on a Schumpeterian outlook. Leaders are indispensable, and will always emerge in the end. If one is committed to democracy as a form of government (and Forder unambiguously is), it is obviously better if voters are picking leaders (rather than shady backroom deals between professional political animals). And indeed it is quite sensible for voters to focus on leaders, rather than specific party policies or individual MPs. As Forder notes (here he follows Weber), whatever the pretensions of party activists, the purpose and function of mature political parties in established democracies is to promote and support their leader in the hope that he or she gains power. If successful, the leader can distribute the spoils of victory downwards, and even carry out some of the policies that loyal activists have campaigned on and in some instances even believed in. But without a charismatic leader able to win the hearts of the people, a political party is dead in the water. As Forder wryly observes, in the final instance parties are “parasites” who depend on the success of their leaders over time in order to survive. When voters pick leaders, they are also picking party bosses; the top dogs who get to decide whether the advertised package of policies really will get implemented or not.
Unfortunately, the truth about politicians – and especially about successful politicians who make it to the top – is that they are power-hungry egomaniacs with delusions not only of grandeur but of their own infallibility. (This, by the way, is not a vacuous insult. It is just a fact that anybody who makes it to the top in politics will need to possess those sorts of qualities in order to beat off the competition and keep going through all the set-backs and defeats, the denigrations and compromises.) Above all, given the nature of power and the multiple opportunities for its abuse, all politicians need to be controlled. And the beauty of electoral democracy is that it offers an extremely effective way of controlling them: the carrot-and-stick of re-election.
The promise of potential re-election (which all politicians and their parties crave) keeps politicians mindful of what the voters will tolerate, and thus moderates them in office. Correspondingly, when politicians go beyond the pale – and particularly when leaders fail outright – in democratic systems voters can kick them out. And this really matters. Indeed, it matters so much that Forder gives general elections a suitably melodramatic name: The Day of Judgment.
Having laid his Schumpeterian ground, Forder’s argument is ready to bite. For we must recognise that The Day of Judgement – the most powerful and important feature of electoral democracy as a system for choosing and rejecting governments – is that it can take many forms, but not all of them are equally good. Forder’s contention is that, on balance and in a necessarily imperfect world, FPTP is a superior mechanism for administering The Day of Judgement than PR can ever hope to be.
The main reason for thinking this that Forder puts forward revolves around the threat of permanent coalition that all forms of PR guarantee. In the regular (and boring) ding-dong between electoral reformists and their opponents, it is typical to hear the anti-reformists decry the “instability” and “weak government” that attends coalition. Forder, however, has little truck with these arguments. For a start, they are easily countered by examples of stable and strong government from Germany and elsewhere. His focus on the undesirability of regular coalition is different.
Firstly, Forder draws attention to the possibility of parties (particularly smaller ones) staying in power for decades despite having only minority shares of the vote because they are able to successfully cut deals with larger parties at each negotiating round. This is clearly an offense to the principle – surely a democratic principle – that voters, not political hustlers, get to decide who stays in government. For minor parties in particular, the trick to staying in Government is likely to be doing little or worth but remaining valuable to bigger coalition partners – thus defying the outcomes selected by actual voters. Yet this is only the least of Forder’s worries.
Many advocates of PR claim that a virtue of such systems is that they encourage “compromise” and “consensus” between parties. When left at a level of vague generality this suggests a sort of placid niceness, a counter to the Punch and Judy idiocy of Prime Minister’s Question Time. But Forder encourages us to look a little deeper; to notice that conflict and confrontation is the sign of a healthy democratic political system. After all, if there is a clear opposition party distinct from the government, whose aim is to wholesale replace the present administration, then that opposition has every incentive to scrutinise the present government and hold it to public account. This, in turn, should make for better government and a better opposition keen for the winner-takes-all prize of single party rule. By contrast, if permanent coalition is the norm, all parties have an incentive to meliorate their criticisms and avoid exposing the failings of their opponents – sections of whom might one day soon be their partners. Healthy democracies with high standards of accountability do not run on consensus, they run on conflict. FPTP unambiguously delivers more on this front than PR can – and that is a virtue not a vice.
Yet for Forder the really damning fact about coalition is the necessity of evasive dishonesty it ensures. Coalition makes it virtually impossible for voters to judge what parties will actually do in power before being elected, and to judge them on their record once they’ve spent time in office. This is because coalition necessitates compromise between parties – and as a result, coalition agreements must trump manifesto commitments. Although Vince Cable was widely ridiculed when he claimed that the Lib Dems did not break any promise on raising tuition fees because that promise only applied to the eventuality of a majority Lib Dem government whereas the Lib Dems only raised tution fees as part of a coalition government, Forder argues that we should accept the impeccable logic of Cable’s position. After all, because coalition always demands compromise, nothing a political party says before an election can be held against its name when it rules in partnership. Manifestos become, at best, indicative of potential policies – and even then especially opaque ones, because parties must keep their cards close to their chests when negotiating with their rivals-cum-partners. As a result, PR drastically reduces the ability of voters to effectively administer The Day of Judgement. Parties cannot be judged on their manifestos nor on their records, because everything is pinned to a coalition agreement which, ipso facto and by virtue of a new election having been called, is already confined to history. Voters are disempowered to punish or reward parties, and in particular their leaders, and the ability to form and conduct government shifts to the politicians who are supposed to be controlled by democratic arrangements. If we believe in democracy – in power for voters – then this is a particularly unsettling result for PR to deliver.
Forder’s key point here – and it is not to be overlooked – is that when comparing PR to FPTP, we are not evaluating whether one system is “more democratic” than the other. Democracy is a complex thing, and so are electoral systems; to claim one system is uniquely more “democratic” than another is just a piece of propaganda. Instead, we must assess systems on the basis of their various virtues and vices, for it is a brute fact of life that no electoral system is perfect. Forder’s contention is that overall FPTP is a far better mechanism for administering The Day of Judgement than PR can be, because more often than not FPTP offers the chance for voters themselves to completely overhaul governments, punishing bad leaders and giving new ones a chance, with the warning that the same fate can await them too if they misbehave. As The Day of Judgement is the primary tool for selecting and controlling political leaders, this is a strong argument in favour of FPTP, at least for anyone sharing Forder’s basic Schumpeterian outlook (an outlook which corresponds rather closely to the world we find ourselves living in). None of which is to say that FPTP is perfect. Forder readily acknowledges that it can be a capricious system, sometimes producing vexingly bizarre results, and not itself immune (as we have recently seen) to the vagaries of coalition. The point is that it is less imperfect than any system of PR promises to be. Given that we live in an imperfect world and will only ever have imperfect democracies, this is nothing to be sniffed at.
But an obvious question now arises: even if PR loses out to FPTP regarding The Day of Judgement, can it not be a better system on balance by exhibiting countervailing virtues which FPTP lacks? It is often assumed by electoral reformists that PR can deliver in many areas that FPTP cannot. Yet here too Forder must be reckoned with.
The most common argument heard for moving to PR is that it ensures “fairer votes” – but what does this actually mean? Frequently the pro-reformist camp will cite facts such as that the Liberal Democrats require 120,000 to secure one MP, whereas the Conservatives require only 35,000. Is this not manifestly unfair to Liberal Democrat voters? Whilst this appears to be an eminently straightforward thought, the problem is that “fairness” is a terribly vague concept and that as soon as we try and unpack it jack-in-the-boxes aplenty spring forth to cause trouble.
Forder offers a careful discussion of the underlying mathematical logic of preference voting systems, and how they are eventually guaranteed to generate outcomes which it becomes essentially impossible to designate as simply “fair” or “unfair”. This point is again important: “fairness” is a matter of many competing concerns, and no voting system can be simply designated “fair” in vacuou – we need to know along what dimension of fairness it allegedly offers superior outcomes than others.
Yet one striking problem with PR and “fairness” does quickly arise: that the logic of “fair votes” cannot actually be completed on the very terms its advocates usually set forth. After all, why is it “fair” for one party to win, and another to lose? Or for that matter, for several parties to form a coalition which governs, and several other parties to be left out? After all, the left-out parties received many votes too. Should they not be entitled to govern, as well, albeit in proportion to their vote-share? If the premise of PR being “fair” is that more parties get to govern thus reflecting more voter preferences, why stop at only some parties? Surely, the conclusion of this line of reasoning with regard to “fairness” is that all parties should be in government, all the time, proportionate to their vote share.
Yet this is surely an untenable conclusion. If all parties are in government all the time, there is no opposition left to scrutinise and demand accountability, as well as there being very little possibility of viable and effective rule. Such a situation also destroys the possibility of The Day of Judgement. In short, it is nonsensical and the worst of all worlds – hence indeed even advocates of PR fall short of demanding government-for-all, instead introducing anti-PR checks into their own nominally PR systems (such as stipulating a 5% of the vote threshold to secure election). Forder thinks this illustrates the deeply wrong-headed nature of PR; better just to have the Day of Judgement via FPTP which (usually) turns-over governments quickly and decisively. If there must be winners and losers, better a relatively clean switch from one party and its leader to another, and not worry about the “unfairness” (whatever that means) of some voters being left unrepresented this time around.
According to Forder, then, the advocates of PR are defeated by their own logic – and deep down they already know it. Yet here he is actually at his weakest, and something (but I stress, only something) must be said in favour of PR. Namely, that there is nothing particularly wrong with accepting that there must be some point at which governments are selected and thus some parties excluded. PR proponents can justifiably reply that they are making the best of a bad situation and trying to make votes as fair as possible, even if – due to the imperfect nature of the world and of any electoral system – this is inherently limited in potential. And if Forder replies (as he surely would) “but what does fair mean?” the reformists do have an answer. It is the answer I once heard a woman at a packed Fabian Society event stand up and demand of Gordon Brown: when will all British citizens’ votes count equally, and not just if they are lucky enough to live in that third of Parliamentary constituencies which, as marginals, decide each and every election? Put differently: when will the communist in Kensington, or the Tory in Tyneside, be able to cast their ballot without it being a foregone conclusion that their vote is wasted because their candidate can never, ever win?
In fact, whilst this reply has a certain superficial plausibility – and, interestingly, it is not considered at all by Forder – upon closer inspection it actually does no good to the PR cause at all. But let us leave that until later, and consider first another major set of arguments typically put forward by advocates of PR: that it will increase the representation of minority groups and lead to more co-operative and constructive government.
In our age of equality and inclusion, many assume it can only be a good thing if more minority groups are given representation in political decision-making. But this is a complacent and naively optimistic assumption. For the problem with minority groups is that they are minority groups because they appeal to and serve sectional interests. That, after all, is their function: if the main parties were catering to the relevant demand, there would be no need for minority parties. Yet in so catering to sectional interests, minority parties are likely to strike deals with larger coalition partners, but which disproportionately favour their narrow support base. It’s hard to see what’s “fair” about that. Furthermore, insofar as an opposition is fragmented amongst multiple competing parties, the ability for strong scrutiny and accountability to be exercised is weakened.
By contrast, under FPTP because all parties aim at a clean sweep rather than permanent coalition, any party with a realistic chance of government must broaden its appeal so that it can secure an overall majority. This forces governing parties into the political centre, and the threat of The Day of Judgement is more likely to keep them there. As a result, it is FPTP that generates political moderation. PR empowers sectional minority interest parties more likely to use their bargaining power to drag politics away from moderation and towards the interests of their specific support base.
That last point puts us in the ballpark of an oft-heard exchange on these matters. It is typical for opponents of reform to simplistically state that PR would be bad because it would (for example) reward and empower the British National Party, or some other such bogeyman. Their opponents valiantly reply: “but that’s just democracy – you should accept what democracy gives you, not try and rig the system in advance!” Now the reformists certainly have a bold and valiant principle on their side. The problem is that in politics principles come at a price.
Forder’s take on this issue is astute. For despite appearances, the “it’s just democracy!” reply is inaccurate. A more precise reply is: “it’s just one form of democracy!” After all, FPTP remains a form of electoral democracy – it just happens to be one that discriminates against minority parties (some of whom are extremist). PR is also a form of electoral democracy – it just happens to be one that rewards minority parties (some of whom are extremist). The important question is why we should, on balance, pick one over the other. Advocates of PR seem to assume that in giving more equal representation to sectional interests, PR is somehow vindicated over FPTP and there’s nothing more to be said. But on Forder’s Schumpeterian analysis, this is a somewhat naive mistake, and at root it rests on a deep misunderstanding about what an electoral system is. The core point Forder is driving home (though he does not say it in so many words) is that an electoral system is not some neutral, independent mechanism outside the world of politics that is brought in as a helpful tool for allocating Parliamentary seats and which if rigged up for PR embodies principles like “fairness” better than its rivals. Rather, an electoral system is part and parcel of the political milieu, itself an aspect of the agonistic conflict and competition that necessarily characterises all political engagement.
We in affluent early 21st century Britain can generally afford to be complacent about this. We easily forget that electoral systems are vital components in the careful balancing act of control and stability that all successful political societies need if they are not only to survive, but to avoid the worst excesses of prejudice and persecution they can so readily fall into. We should not, however, be complacent that in the unknown future the things currently promoting stability – economic prosperity, resource abundance, international peace – will continue to hold. If they don’t, if Britain one day starts to look more like the Germany that Joseph Schumpeter fled, then the value of an electoral system which rewards single parties offering broad appeals comes much more clearly into focus. It is naive to assume that democracies cannot do bad things, or that everything they do is good. Democracy itself sometimes needs to be carefully controlled (Adolf Hitler, as we all know, was elected). For all its faults, on balance FPTP offers better built-in correction mechanisms that PR. This is the reality of our world, because it is an imperfect and cold one. As Forder says, this fact simply cannot “be washed away by watery-eyed visions of harmony”.
As with Forder’s book, most of this review has been dedicated to assessing FPTP as compared to PR, rather than the “miserable little compromise” of AV. Insofar as Forder’s arguments are successful, then the bottom really falls out of the case for any switch to AV. If it’s a step on the road to PR, then that becomes a mark against its name. Equally, it is hard to see why anybody would want AV even for its own sake. Producing results even more freakish than FPTP sometimes achieves, usually with even more disproportionate results, AV is surely more offensive to PR advocates than the present system. Yet it is also offensive to Schumpeterians like Forder: because it is a preference voting system, it generates complicated issues of tactical voting and provides incentives for political parties to engage in dishonest positioning and campaigning, thus making The Day of Judgement harder to administer. Insofar as AV is generally even more freakish than FPTP, it may struggle to maintain the relative popular support – and in turn, governmental legitimacy – that FPTP generally manages to hold on to. It is, therefore, the worst of all worlds.
But has Forder really considered and defeated the best cases for PR? Here we must return to the argument noted above, which Forder does not address. Rather than being lumped under the inherently vague and unhelpful heading of “fair votes”, PR advocates look to be on firm ground in demanding equal votes. After all, it seems manifest that at present, the only votes that matter in Britain are those cast in marginal constituencies whose outcomes determine Parliamentary swings. The communist in Kensington and the Tory in Tyneside may as well throw their votes in the bin, as long as we stay with FPTP.
But if we switch to PR it seems that this would be much less the case. Although our communist might still find too few fellow believers to elect even the last proportionally-selected candidate, our Tory would certainly not be in that boat – his vote would land with a pile of others, and definitely see (at least one) Tory elected. This raises an important point: that PR appears to better enshrine a principle of equality amongst citizen voters, each of whose ballots better approach something like carrying equal weight in the selection of representative and in turn governments. Indeed this is a point anti-Schumpeterians frequently press: that the Schumpeterian conception fails to see the inherent egalitarian potential of voting mechanisms – and crucially the respect for citizens they can better enshrine – and focuses unduly on the mere instrumental mechanism of leadership selection.
This is an important point – but it is not clear it can finally do the work that will need to be demanded of it by PR advocates. Firstly, that an electoral system better enshrines a principle of equality, or citizen respect, is certainly an admirable principle. But as we saw above, principles come at a price. If the upshot of PR is less accountable weaker government less easily removed by voters, it is not at all clear that this is a price worth paying.
Secondly, if we pursue the logic of the “equal votes” reasoning it may take us to some troubling places. For is it really the case that with PR each vote matters equally, whereas this is not true of FPTP? The problem with such a line is that it starts to break down quite quickly. Consider again our communist in Kensington. If there are too few fellow communists in Britain, he will still not get an elected representative under PR – is his vote thus still “wasted”, and is he suffering from electoral “inequality”? Given that in politics some people always have to lose, such a conclusion looks extravagant, to say the least.
And things get worse. Imagine now our Tory in Tyneside. Under PR as opposed to FPTP, it seems he can say that his vote is not “wasted” because it ends up on a pile which is translated into (at least one) Tory MP. But here a nasty problem arises. What if our Tory asks himself a simple question: “if I stay at home and simply don’t vote, will it make any difference at all?” Unfortunately, under both PR and FPTP, the answer appears to be “no”. Because the point about elections is that they are never decided by just one vote (for indeed when the margins are that small in the real world, recounts, re-runs and legal disputes are what settle the outcomes, not crucial final ballots). In mass-democratic elections, no one vote ever makes the crucial difference. Under PR, it may feel to the Tory in Tyneside that his vote “matters” and therefore is treated “equally” with others. But this is hard to sustain, when we note that under either FPTP or PR if our Tory stays at home and everyone else votes as before, the outcome will be exactly the same in either case.
This raises many tricky problems about the paradoxical nature of voting. After all, how can it be that each individual vote makes no difference, but all of them summed collectively make all the difference? These are the sorts of issues – and they are complicated indeed – that Richard Tuck addresses in his important book Free Riding. Tuck thinks he can establish the rational justification of each individual voting, based on a particular philosophical theory of causation. Personally, I am sceptical about the ability of a refined esoteric philosophical argument to overturn the common sense observation that if I don’t vote this makes no difference to the outcome, therefore my vote considered individually simply does not matter. But the point here is to stress that Forder is neatly and deliberately side-stepping those sorts of questions altogether. His emphasis is not on the question of individual votes, but on the merits of overall systems of voting. He wants us to look at the big picture, and decide which system is better for Britain. If we accept his view that what really matters is selecting and rejecting leaders who control parties, the case for FPTP is strong indeed.
But strong as it is, it also opens some troubling questions. In his review of Free Riding David Runciman made an astute observation about declining voter turnout in western democracies: that it “has coincided with an increasing scepticism on the part of the public about what their governments are for, and what they are capable of achieving, in the face of international markets.” This point, today more than ever, matters.
Forder’s argument ultimately rests upon the claim that electing and controlling political leaders is essential because these are the people that ultimately call the shots, and can call the shots in different ways. But to what extent is this true now and likely to be so in the future? For many, one of the most striking features of the AV debate will be its apparent irrelevance. After all we are living in a period of profound social and economic reconfiguration. Following the great crash of 2008, governments around the world – ours most especially – are scrambling to implement fiscal retrenchment and austerity packages demanded by an economic situation beyond the control of any one sovereign government. So because the banks crashed in 2008, we are told that British higher education must be made more exclusive and socially divisive, the healthcare service be destroyed, welfare support for the disabled and elderly withdrawn, public sector employees thrown into unemployment, schools left unbuilt and socio-economic inequality allowed to spiral ever more out of control.
Against this, multinational corporations are permitted to avoid billions in tax, whilst the banks that caused the giant mess are not only rescued with public money, but allowed to continue paying out eye-watering bonuses whilst the “rules” which allowed the entire catastrophe to occur in the first place remain conspicuously unchanged. International credit rating agencies sombrely intoning that Britain’s AAA status is at risk carry far more political and economic weight than any member of the opposition ever will. Forder emphasises appealing to the political centre in order to gain a majority as a factor in Britain’s post-1970s electoral history. This is certainly important. But this period coincides with the rise and rise of unrestrained global financial capitalism, and the demands which unelected, unaccountable corporate institutions can now press upon sovereign governments. If Tony Blair and Gordon Brown feared anything more than Rupert Murdoch’s News International, it was the City of London – to whom they kowtowed obsequiously with such spectacular results.
Joseph Schumpeter’s best known idea – the one for which he is still rightly famous – remains his principle of “creative destruction”; that what drives capitalism is not static competition between firms, but dynamic long-run innovation which destroys the old ways of production and puts new, better ones in their place. Schumpeter saw this as the great driving success of capitalism, but feared it would be replaced by forms of state socialism promising (if not necessarily delivering) greater socio-economic equality to the downtrodden and excluded. Clearly Schumpeter’s anxieties were not fulfilled: socialism as a realistic economic and political arrangement is firmly confined to the dustbin of history. But what ought to worry us all is the way in which capitalist “innovation” went so spectacularly wrong in 2008.
The “innovators” in the financial industry did not come up with new and better ways of doing financial capitalism. They came up with short-term arrangements to maximise profit which in the longer-term nearly dragged the entire global economy off the edge of a cliff. But worse, rather than this resulting in a process of what we might call “destructive-destruction” – i.e. the failed innovators exiting the stage as better alternatives present themselves – the failed innovators have been rescued and preserved. The web of banks, ratings agencies and insurance companies that in complicity crashed the global economy almost all live on – some of them directly owned and supported by taxpayers. What is more, these institutions now know for sure what they had previously only suspected: that they are too big to fail, and that when push comes to shove governments will rescue them.
The situation is perverse. Multinational capitalist behemoths with turnover well in excess of most nation-state GDPs are supported and guaranteed by the tax dollars of citizens earning minimum wage. These behemoths cannot fail. Indeed, they can dictate terms to the sovereign governments whose tax dollars guarantee them. This new international capitalism is a strange beast, and not one that Schumpeter – or perhaps anyone else – previously imagined. In this brave new world, the importance of elected leaders suddenly seems to diminish. Of course, the destruction of the British welfare state currently being witnessed is very much a political preference of the Conservative Party in particular, and one being enabled rather than dictated by the circumstances of the global economic situation. Yet given the pattern of the last Labour government, one has to wonder if the difference would ultimately only ever have been one of degree.
Forder wants us to acknowledge that political leaders matter and therefore so does picking and controlling them. Insofar as he is right, his case for retaining FPTP is strong; to quote Schumpeter a final time: “If acceptance of leadership is the true function of the electorate’s vote, the case for proportional representation collapses because its premises are no longer binding”. But if we become sceptical about the future power and importance of political leaders in our increasingly globalised brave new world, it is not clear that Forder (or anybody else) can offer a compelling answer to the question of why, next May, one ought to bother voting in the AV referendum at all. This is not just because of the niggling fact that your vote taken individually will make no difference to the outcome (that is true for all of us considered individually, at every election). It is because even on a Schumpeterian outlook of deflated democracy, there is a feeling that The Day of Judgement is fast becoming a mere ceremony. That increasingly power does not lie (as Forder so correctly insists that it should) with the voters, but with the wielders of economic forces who have only passing contempt for the wishes of electorates in (what were?) sovereign nation states.
January 19, 2011
Book Review: Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature – An Introduction
Book Review – Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature An Introduction by John P. Wright, pp. 316, Cambridge, £16.99
This is a noteworthy book from a noteworthy author, to mutually reinforcing effect. John P. Wright is that rare thing: a scholar with a sophisticated grasp of the complexity of philosophical argument who is also a serious historian of philosophy (with an emphasis on “historian”). These two things have here combined to produce a beginner’s guide which doubles as a valuable scholarly contribution for more advanced readers.
Wright has succeeded in capturing the complexity of Hume’s arguments in the Treatise whilst maintaining a prose style which makes the material accessible, without disguising that readers must work hard to keep up. Particularly pleasing is the seriousness with which Wright treats Hume’s positions. Whereas many “introductions” give-in to the temptation to pass (usually dismissive) judgement on Hume’s arguments, Wright instead notes common objections before providing the more sophisticated Humean response, leaving readers to decide where to go from there. He is also scrupulously honest in making clear when he is taking sides in any interpretative debate (and in Hume scholarship, this is no infrequent thing). This is best exemplified in his meticulous discussion of Hume’s account of causation in the Treatise.
Wright correctly notes that the bulk of the “problem” of causation for Hume is epistemological – the issue of how we can come to “know” of causal connections in the external world. Providing an admirably thorough and accurate exposition, Wright follows Hume’s argument to the letter. Illustrating the powerful nature of the sophisticated epistemological scepticism in play, Wright explains the sheer intellectual force of the reasoning which leads Hume to suppose that our only basis for a belief in causal necessity resides in our own minds. Yet Wright notes that there is also an outstanding corollary debate in this area: that whilst Hume was intractably sceptical as to our ability to “know” of mind-independent causal connections, there remains the issue of whether he nonetheless thought causal connections obtained “out there” in an underlying reality, to which we do not actually have access.
On this “ontological” question Wright’s commitments are “realist”. That Hume believed there are necessary causal connections built into the fabric of existence, even if we can’t have direct access to them. Personally, this is far too quasi-Kantian a conclusion to deduce for my liking. My preferred reading is that Hume is thoroughly sceptical here, too: that whilst there might be causal necessity built into the fabric of existence, equally there might not. As we don’t know (and will never have any way of knowing), the correct position is not ontological “realism”, but simple, healthy, sceptical agnosticism. Wright, however, is quite open about his own commitments and the alternatives available, and his footnotes provide ready ammunition for opponents.
Of particular interest to more historically-minded readers will be both Wright’s lengthy and detailed introduction, and his constant endeavour to situate Hume’s arguments against a background of contemporary debate. Whereas many beginner’s guides simply regurgitate basic biographical platitudes, Wright has taken the trouble not only to provide a detailed over-view of Hume’s early life but also to stress the possible connections between the young man and the later philosophy (if only slight later: Hume finished the Treatise when he was just 27 years old).
Of particular interest here is Wright’s suggestion that Hume’s early psychological breakdown – before his new “scene of thought” which inspired the penning of his masterpiece – was induced by a rigorous attempt to conform his life to the stoic moral teachings of Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury, two extremely prominent moral theorists of the early 18th century. Basing this claim not in idle speculation but in Hume’s correspondence, Wright thus makes an important historical contention about the possible motivations for – and our interpretations of – Hume’s repudiation of the stoic “moral sense” theories in favour of an epicureanism that placed pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance at the centre of human psychology. For those who wish to combine philosophy with history to good effect, Wright’s is no trivial suggestion.
Indeed historical sensitivity is one of the most pleasing things about this volume, where intellectual context of Hume’s arguments is always sketched. This is not only interesting in itself, but also helps both to illustrate Hume’s own rival commitments as well as guiding the reader towards interpretations that avoid retrospective conceptual anachronism. This is particularly important when Wright comes to discuss Hume’s moral and political commitments in the final sections of the book.
On one level, by locating Hume’s intervention as a complex response to (amongst others) Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, John Locke and Samuel Clarke, this book happily avoids the trap of becoming a narrow, tired discussion of Hume’s arguments against ethical rationalism to the exclusion of all else. Whilst handling Hume’s rejection of any moral realism derived from a faculty of reason with aplomb, Wright is also wholly alive to the fact that Hume’s real targets in the Treatise were the “moral sense” realisms of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, and the non-naturalistic sceptical moral irrealism of Bernard Mandeville. Accordingly, it is the responses to these authors which command the bulk of Wright’s treatment – which is exactly how it should be, for that is how it is in Hume.
In doing so, however, Wright also makes a subtle yet important scholarly intervention as to the extent of influence upon Hume. The great student of Hume’s thought, Norman Kemp Smith, famously claimed that Hume entered philosophy through the “gateway of morals” and that his moral and political thought were essentially an extension of Hutcheson’s. This interpretation has been followed in recent years by David Fate-Norton in particular, but Wright here aligns himself with scholars such as James Moore and Luigi Turco who emphasise the radical discontinuity between Hume and Hutcheson, with the Treatise constituting a thorough-going repudiation of the Glasgow professor. For what it’s worth, Wright further convinces me that the Kemp Smith interpretation must indeed be rejected.
Insofar as a beginner’s guide can be a tour de force, it is fair to describe Wright’s volume as such. It is, to my knowledge, the best introduction to Hume’s Treatise – and by extension, Hume’s thought – on the market. If you teach a course on Hume, or 18th century philosophy, or ethics, it should be on your reading list. For those just looking for a helpful place to start exploring one of the greatest works of genius ever produced, here it is. This is a book for all, and it deserves attention.
November 22, 2010
“Jaw-Droppingly Rude”
Book Review: Chasing Rainbows – How the Green Agenda Defeats its Aims by Tim Worstall
Tim Worstall – scourge of leftist bloggers, and bane of all those he takes to be stupid (which in practice means: almost everyone he disagrees with) – has written a book. Or has he? For Chasing Rainbows: How The Green Agenda Defeats its Aims (Stacey International, £8.99) is above all the paper version of timworstall.com. And the effect, unfortunately, is frequently unsatisfying. Flippant sentences which might work as part of a 200-word blog entry often read as convoluted and clumsy in the midst of a chapter running to several thousand words. Paragraphs of assertion, or wink-wink allusion, are much less workable when there’s no hyperlink to enlarge the issue.
But attempting to put aside the big niggle – “is this actually a researched and long-pondered book I’m reading, or a collection of brief musings dashed to the printers”? – it’s helpful to consider Worstall’s core strategy. Namely, to apply a set of basic economic concepts (of the sort known to any competent A-Level student) – like opportunity cost, comparative advantage, specialisation, growth, cost-benefit analysis, etc – to a set of issues raised by the environmentalist movement. Or as the book’s title puts it, by the (far more sinister-sounding) “green agenda”. An “agenda” that Worstall does not deny is important, but simply claims to be misguided because of its lack of basic economic understanding.
At times the strategy works remarkably well, paying-off in conceptual clarity and useful illustration. Worstall’s chapter on recycling, for example, is very good. It is a clear exposition of how to think logically and sensibly about a given problem. And his solution is an eminently sensible one: that if the aim is to get more stuff recycled (and Worstall is quite right that the “if” in this situation is a live one, because recycling may not always be the most sensible thing to do), then paying professionals to sort out the stuff in question is likely to yield better results than expecting households to do it in their own leisure time. Hence, if the “green agenda” is serious about recycling, it should take a cost-benefit analysis seriously, and adhere to its outcomes.
Similarly, Worstall’s discussion of population growth is sharp. He (correctly) points out that not only is economic growth properly understood a good thing insofar as it drastically improves the lives of the worst off, he also explains clearly why (paradoxically) improving living standards and increasing life expectancy in developing countries leads to population control over time. (Quickly: because if you and your kids are more likely to survive, it’s less of a gamble raising sprogs, so you can have fewer of them, invest heavily in them, and not offset the chances they’ll die by having more to act as potential replacements). Unfortunately however – and this is a recurring problem in the book – Worstall fails to draw the explicit connection between why controlling population growth through raising living standards is something the “green agenda” misunderstands, thus “defeats” its own “aims”. Rather, the discussion of population growth becomes a self-contained unit, sharply addressing that particular issue but not linking-up to the book’s implied promise of skewering self-defeating greens.
I say implied, because this has to be pretty much imputed from the front cover alone. Worstall’s “introduction” is really just chapter 1, and there’s no serious attempt to lay-out what it is the “green agenda” thinks, and to explain systematically why it is “self defeating”. Rather, separate chapters treat separate topics, which (one either assumes, or knows from experience) have something to do with various claims made by environmentalists. Worstall then applies his basic economics to these topics, in order to show how he thinks about them and believes we should too. Sometimes (as with recycling) the pay-off is fairly clear. Other times, however, it’s hard to see why exactly Worstall thinks he’s exposed something “self-defeating”. The lack of a serious attempt to connect chapters together (and there’s no conclusion to the book at all, just the end of the final self-contained chapter on tax, and cap-and-trade) reinforces this problem – as well as the impression that one is reading a series of collected blog posts, not a book.
Worstall’s effort is, however, downright frustrating at times. Take, for example, his discussion of economic growth. The basic strategy here is to explain – again, correctly – that economic growth need not be predicated upon a necessity of resource consumption. Accordingly, environmentalists are making a mistake if they construe growth and resource-consumption as a necessary relationship, and in turn are mistaken if they think growth is necessarily the antithesis of environmental sustainability. We can in many instances achieve economic growth without chewing up the planet, so growth can be good from an environmental point of view – especially if it leads to (say) improved standards of living, lower child mortality, and thereby population control (which environmentalists allegedly want to see). This from Worstall is all fine (although I’ve drawn the argument more explicitly than he does in his chapter, and that’s not to his credit, as the point of his growth-can-be-compatible-with-environmentalism claim is largely lost accordingly). What’s not fine is acting as though the action stops there. Because clearly it doesn’t.
We can all agree that growth and environmental protection need not necessarily be in opposition. But the point environmentalists make is that at present they are, and that it seems like they will be for the foreseeable future, and hence this could have disastrous consequences. That is where the action is – and Worstall even acknowledges this to be the case at the outset of a later chapter – but the action is basically left un-addressed. Which is a problem, because Worstall has sketched the beginning of an argument, not the conclusion of one.
A similar problem occurs at the outset of the book, and I’ll dwell on it to illustrate the wider problem at play. Worstall deploys the concept of opportunity cost – i.e. whatever option was foregone so that what was actually chosen could be had – to ridicule environmentalists who tout the higher-levels of job creation associated with renewable energy production as a benefit. Worstall argues that this is wrong-headed; that having to employ more people is a cost not a benefit of a scheme, because if we have to employ 20 people to get X amount of energy, that’s 20 people not producing anything else. If only 2 people are needed, then the other 18 can go off and produce other things, making everyone better-off as we get more out of limited resources (in this case, labour). More people employed on one thing is thus a bad outcome, not a good one.
Now this is all fine as things stand; in a basic situation like the one Worstall illustrates his criticisms with job-creation is a cost not a benefit. But things get much trickier when we translate up to the national political level where the “green jobs” argument is typically being made in actuality. For there, we may not have the full employment background assumption that allows Worstall to run his ridiculing line. For imagine that there are, as at present, 2.5million people sitting on the dole. In this case, an energy-production method that employed a million people more than other alternatives might look like it provided a very real benefit – not just jobs, but jobs for a million people who would otherwise be doing nothing else with their labour at all (thus there is no opportunity cost problem of the sort Worstall’s simplistic model brings out). Indeed, things get more interesting if one brings in macroeconomic thoughts derived from Keynes. Let’s say we have 2.5million unemployed because the national economy is in the midst of a recession. Keynes-friendly economists will greet the job-creation scheme as very welcome if it has the effect of stimulating demand and thus kick-starting the economy. In turn, politicians – and the environmentalists that Worstall attacks over job-creation claims typically are politicians – are in a specific situation whereby there are all sorts of political advantages to touting job-creation as a benefit of renewable energy schemes. Suddenly, things look a lot more complicated than Worstall’s “yah-boo aren’t they all so thick because they don’t understand opportunity cost” shtick. Not least because by touting job-creation as a political move (rather than a narrow economic one of the sort Worstall myopically focuses on) then the “green agenda” does not “defeat” its aims but may well in a political context advance them quite considerably. That this is against the economic truth as seen by Worstall really is quite besides the point, if the aim of the book is supposed to be about how environmentalism is self-defeating.
My point here – and I should stress this clearly – is not that Worstall cannot reply to the above arguments. I’m absolutely sure that he can and would. As somebody who rejects Keynesian economics (for example), Worstall will have all sorts of reasons for dismissing much of the above as fatuous and false. My point here is to draw attention to the fact that he doesn’t bother to make any of the difficult arguments in his book, or to treat his opponents as anything other than simpletons who haven’t grasped economics 101. This occurs again and again, with the partial exception of the final chapter where a more sophisticated argument regarding Pigou taxes is considered – though as usual serious intellectual replies are basically absent from any discussion.
Now this tendency to resort to basic economic concepts and exposition might not be terribly objectionable in and of itself. If Worstall’s sole aim was to delineate some basic economic concepts for the good of the masses, then there could be little cause for complaint that he doesn’t engage with the more complicated side of economic reply, mixed-up with the complexities of real-world-distorting politics, next to which all real economic decisions end up being made. Similarly, if he reserved his ire for genuine economic maniacs and imbeciles like the new economics foundation alone, his lashing tongue could be fairly easily forgiven. What rapidly becomes tiring is Worstall’s scorn and caprice being directed at very clever people who cannot reasonably be lambasted for failing to grasp economics 101.
Whatever Worstall thinks of Alistair Darling (and the answer is clearly “not much”), it is fatuous and facile to treat the former Chancellor of the Exchequer as a simpleton who does not understand the basic concept of opportunity cost, and as though he was not making his economic decisions and pronouncements in the middle of extremely difficult and sensitive political contexts. I have no particular love for (say) Caroline Lucas or even George Monbiot, both of whom receive Worstall ire a-plenty, but it’s quite a different thing to casually dismiss Karl Marx’s ideas as “barking mad”. Whatever one thinks of the Labour Theory of Value – and it is true that few now hold it to be tenable – it is tedious to find Worstall lambasting one of the greatest and most innovative minds of the past several hundred years as though he were a garden-variety nincompoop. Marx may have got his labour theory wrong (derived as it was from a complex reading of Adam Smith and Ricardo, as well as drawing upon long-standing themes regarding exploitation and justice stretching way back into the pre-Smithean natural law tradition), but there’s something particularly unpleasant about Worstall’s sneering in a book that is itself so utterly superficial in much of its analysis.
Indeed, just to reinforce that point, Worstall deploys the snark against politicians of all stripes ad nauseam by reiterating how stupid and destructive he thinks they all are. Whilst this may be true of some particular cases (John Prescott isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and Nicholas Soames is clearly a pratt), Worstall shows no sensitivity to the difficulties of institutional decision-making in constrained representative democracies against the background of interest-managing, wherein politics can never be the straightforward application of basic economic logic (least of all, economic logic solely as Worstall conceives it). The result is a tired, boring and uninsightful mantra of how awful and thick politicians are – as presumably contrasted with the wise author, who sees things so much more clearly than the stupids he is constantly insulting in his long-established play to the gallery.
You may think that the above is all, therefore, a very long-winded way of complaining that Worstall has written a book that isn’t for me, or for people like me. After all, the book is pursuing what has proven to be a very successful strategy elsewhere. Timworstall.com makes, by all accounts, a decent sum for its author, and has led to many opportunities (not least this book). Clearly there is a demand for what Worstall does, and Worstall admittedly does it very well. If the book is therefore a success amidst its target audience, can I reasonably be complaining about anything other than that I didn’t get a book for me?
I think I can, because I see this book as a frustrating missed opportunity. Part of the reason Worstall is hated by so much of the left is precisely because he is sharp. He sees how arguments fit together, he spots other people’s fallacies, and he points them out in devastating ways (and whilst the rudeness is a source of considerable friction, it is made infuriating precisely by the fact there’s often an actual intellectual point being made too). What I was hoping for from this book, however, was the next level: Worstall taking himself seriously as a thinker and constructing something that goes beyond the “yah boo sucks you’re all stoopid” formula of his website. I wanted to see what Worstall really had to show. Instead, we’ve been given a book that clearly isn’t about serious engagement. If it was, it wouldn’t be published by a group that is clearly in the business of climate “scepticism”*, and written in an obnoxious self-congratulatory tone that is guaranteed to irritate most environmentalists beyond the point where meaningful interaction will be possible.
Tim Worstall has written a book that will please his target audience – the people who read timworstall.com already. Worstall has thus elected to stay in his comfort zone, and stick to what he knows. His book thus has very little to say to those of us who sincerely want to push things further.Or who want to see if Worstall is as clever as he keeps telling us he is; as clever as he ultimately needs to be if he’s to get away with being (as one reviewer on the dust-jacket puts it) so “jaw-droppingly rude”.
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*Other titles from other authors include The Hockey Stick Illusion, The Wind Farm Scam and Climate: the Great Delusion all published under the indicative banner “Independent Minds”
April 24, 2010
The Universal Panacea
Yesterday Johann Hari declared “a fact that is usually kept obscure: Britain is a country with a large liberal-left majority.” The evidence? Hari assures us that 85% of Britons want greater equality, 58% support “dramatic” minimum wage increases, and the same number want to ditch Trident. 77% want to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and 53% reckon people are worse when they leave prison than enter it.
We know Hari has problems with statistics. (This is the man who once claimed 90% of the world’s fish have been destroyed by commercial fishing. Certainly the devastation to our oceans has been immense – but just think about what it would mean for 90% of the world’s fish to be gone). Unfortunately for Hari, this latest batch doesn’t straightforwardly translate into a “left liberal majority”. He is conveniently leaving out results from (for example) the British Social Attitudes Survey, which told us that only 21% think unemployment benefits are too low and cause hardship, and that only 38% think the Government should do more to redistribute to the poorest. As the saying goes, you can prove anything with statistics so long as you pick the right ones.
What’s interesting about Hari’s piece, however, is the conspiracy theory running through it. It’s declared loud-and-clear by the title: “The Forces That Have Been Blocking British Democracy Are Becoming Visible in This Election”. Hari’s culprits are foreign-born newspaper-owning billionaires who distort our political discourse to the right, and the electoral system which rewards the entrenched parties of the old right-wing politics.
Of course Hari has something of a point. The extent to which our media is right-wing and pushes an agenda which overwhelmingly benefits a privileged few is profoundly troubling for leftists. And the electoral system certainly needs reform. But what’s interesting in Hari’s piece is the assumption that there is a “real” British democracy that is being supressed by sinister interests and institutional mechanisms. Interests and mechanisms which if over-turned would allow the real democracy to flourish. A real democracy which it just so happens would deliver the left-liberal political values that Hari himself holds. How interesting. How convenient.
As I’ve remarked before, democracy is in many ways the modern cardinal political virtue. Despite being synonymous with anarchy, mob-rule and chaos for most of the past 3,000 years (excepting a 100 year experiment in Ancient Athens, and then 20th Century North America and parts of Europe), it is now seen as the only legitimate political system on the planet – as well as the highest political value. Indeed if you want to smear somebody you don’t like, it’s easy to follow Rod Liddle and tar them as anti-democratic. It’s a guaranteed winner.
It is exceedingly common for people to assume that all their values coincide with democracy. And if those values are at present un-realised, then there must likewise be some unrealised “true” democracy to fight for. There’s a piece up today at Liberal Conspiracy demonstrating exactly this sort of mind-set.
Josh Mostafa wants us to move beyond the false democracy we have now: where voters are not (as we are misleadingly told) “apathetic”, but “disillusioned: they see through the charade, and they feel powerless and angry. It’s not because politicians are ‘not listening’, but because our input as citizens is limited to a choice.”
Apparently we need a more authentic democracy. One that involves lots of civic participation, and a socio-economic base that allows for people to participate frequently in democratic institutions. Some vague reference to the Ancient Athenian practice of assigning public posts by lot is cited in support. Without noting that the Athenians could do this because they had slaves and disenfranchised women to do all their manual labour thus providing a lot of free time for the male citizenry to sit around in the Assembly.
Accordingly Mostafa is pretty thin on details of what the true democracy would look like. A bit like David Cameron and his big society, actually. Something which has apparently been dying on the doorsteps, as voters tell the Tories that they don’t want to run their own services in their free time – they want to walk their dogs and play tennis and have paid-up professionals deliver services for them.
Yet Mostafa is undeterred. The real democracy (still undefined) would apparently be a better Britain. Why else advocate the “complete reinvention of the idea of what it means to be a citizen: a much greater responsibility, a demand on our time”? If the real democracy didn’t promise a better future, why else “can’t [Mostafa] help but look back with admiration on a society that-for all its faults-coined the word ‘idiot’ to mean someone who does not participate”?
But contrary to Hari and Mostafa’s animating assumptions, democracy just doesn’t necessarily track all our values. And it is not always the case that more or more authentic democracy – whatever exactly that might mean – is a panacea for a better society. An excellent illustration of this is provided in Richard Bourke’s book Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas.*
Bourke’s thesis is clear and compelling: that lying behind the Northern Irish “troubles” were rival – and incompatible – understandings of democracy. Loyalists understood democracy as the ratification of institutions and elected governments by simple majority. This was convenient, as the majority of Ulster was protestant and loyalist-leaning – meaning loyalist-leaning protestants dominated politics and manipulated institutions to the advantage of loyalist-leaning protestants.
By contrast, Republican-leaning Catholics were marginalised and disenfranchised by the political set-up of Northern Ireland. For them, a system of elections that kept them in a permanent minority, meant they never had a chance at wielding power and were systematically passed-over in the scheme of patronage and resource-allocation, could not bear the title of democracy. To steal a phrase, this was but the tyranny of the majority.
In Ulster both sides advocated “democracy” and claimed that peace could only be achieved if “democracy” were respected. But with their rival – and incompatible – understandings of what democracy meant this led only to further bloody conflict. It wasn’t until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement radically altered the institutional set-up of Northern Ireland that both sides (and the scores of actors with competing value and power-bases within those sides) could come to apply their respective understandings of democracy to the political set-up of Ulster, without coming into bloody conflict.
The lesson is that democracy is not a panacea for all political ills. On the contrary Northern Ireland shows that there can be many understandings of democracy and which in certain circumstances can clash with spectacularly murderous force. There is likewise no guarantee that simply advocating the monolith of “democracy” (whatever exactly that might mean) will result in all one’s favoured political values ripening to fruition. Not least because one man’s democracy may easily be another man’s tyranny.
In similar vein, we should not forget that a potential result of giving “power to the people” is always that “the people” can use their power in ways we may not like. If we had a referendum on hanging – and what could be more democratic than that? – it would almost certainly be restored. But how would that look for Mr Hari’s left-liberal “silenced majority”? Democracy is not a simple value, and we cannot assume that simply shouting “more” or “better” democracy will give us the happy world we all dream of – in our different ways. Just ask the people of Northern Ireland.
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* Disclaimer: I know Richard. He was going to be my PhD supervisor if I’d stayed in London.
April 21, 2010
Book Review: David Runciman – Political Hypocrisy
David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy poses an especial challenge to reviewers. The author himself reminds us that “There are not many professions, or callings, that can claim to rival medicine for the range and varieties of hypocrisy that they place on disply. But book reviewing its certainly one of them.” Ouch. Better tread lightly then. Or at least, have you think I am.
For those wishing to come down from the ivory tower and make the often esoteric and byzantine researches of intellectual history accessible to other disciplines or lay readers, Runciman’s book shows not only that this can be done, but how it should be. Down-playing the oft-intimidating style of “academic” work (footnotes are placed at the back, and language kept clear and non-technical), Runciman bridges the gap between the murky depths of the history of political thought and the problems and concerns of modern politics. For those self-assured practical sorts who loudly presume that the philosophical rumblings of long-defunct academics have no use, Runciman has news.
The thesis of Political Hypocrisy is that in the politics of modern liberal democracies some hypocrisy is inevitable, but it is not enough to simply recognise that fact and believe one has arrived at some important truth. On the contrary, the trick is to recognise that whilst some hypocrisy is irreducible, not all of it is desirable or to be tolerated. Runciman accordingly sets out to trace a line of thinking about hypocrisy which aims to separate different sorts of hypocrisy and to classify them broadly as to whether they fall into the camp of tolerable, necessary and perhaps even good, versus intolerable, unnecessary and most certainly bad. And then trying to work out how to keep the former, but ditch the latter. Without becoming a hypocrite. Or rather, a hypocrite of the bad sort.
Reading this book one realises just how complicated hypocrisy turns out to be. In particular this is because there are different levels of hypocrisy, a point brought out excellently in the discussion of Mandeville and what Runciman calls “first” versus “second” order hypocrisy. First order hypocrisy is (usually) the sort we’re all familiar with; saying one will do A but knowing one will in fact do B; campaigning for not-X but then doing X when in power. But things don’t end there. For hypocrisy can be hypocrisy about hypocrisy, too. Campaigning for not-X, but then doing X, having known all along that anybody faced with the situation would have to do X. Or, to put it more bluntly, and to pick a contemporary example, going round saying the other political parties are broken, that you will clean up Westminster, and pointing to the modest expenses claims of your own MPs – knowing full well that if you’d had as many members in the House as the other parties you’d be as embroiled in the scandal as they are.
But things don’t end there. For there’s also the question of self-consciousness about hypocrisy about hypocrisy. For one can be a hypocrite without even knowing it. Here Mandeville comes to the fore: if one is fooled by one’s own hypocrisy into thinking ones vices are virtues, then one becomes a very special sort of self-deluded hypocrite – though one whose selfish actions may have public benefits…so long as one does not join Lord Shaftesbury on the Pompous High Horse of socially asphyxiating self-deluded moralising. Which is of course a position of (you guessed it) hypocrisy. And then on top of all that, there’s the question of which hypocrisies (and at which levels) we are to tolerate, and which to attempt to expunge. Without becoming hypocrites.
If those last two paragraphs made you double-take, their work is done. For Runciman’s subject matter is fiendishly complex, and it is a testament to his skill that for the most part his prose flows with remarkable ease. There are sentences which require treble or quadruple readings, but one gets the feeling that few writers would have succeeded in doing a better job of elucidating such complex material.
Having said that, at times one loses sight of the unifying thesis of the book. Runciman’s breadth of range is astounding. Cruising easily through the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries and exhibiting a remarkable affinity with such a wide variety of scholarship and (intellectual) history as to include Victorian novelists and the American founders. Certainly it is clear that the authors Runciman has under discussion are all preoccupied with the complexities of hypocrisy – but it is not always clear that they are interested in it in sufficiently similar ways to warrant the treatment of a definite tradition in liberal political thought going back to Hobbes.
However, a helpful concluding chapter draws out the broad similarities and strengthens the contention that all western liberal politics is hypocritical, but not all political hypocrisy is equal – and that thinkers from the past often realised this better than we do. So even if one is left unsure as to whether as much of a definite tradition exists as Runciman suggests, the exercise in faithfully tracing past thinkers’ arguments and thereby taking our intellectual forbearers seriously is one of great intellectual pleasure. It is also a demonstration that knowledge of one’s philosophical inheritances can provide better self-awareness of oneself and the problems one faces – and can be achieved without turning the thinkers of the past into mere porte-paroles for predetermined contemporary viewpoints.
Overall, Runciman’s book is that rare thing: a work with as much appeal to the historian of political thought as to the curious lay enquirer. Although one might quibble that it would have been interesting to see the development of Oliver Cromwell’s legacy explored in more detail (Cromwell being associated with unforgivable hypocrisy through the 17th and 18th Centuries, but apparently enjoying a reversal of fortunes by the 19th), that is a minor complaint in a book jam-packed with unexpected gems and intriguing historical asides.
But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? Beware the review of the precocious graduate student. Or rather, beware what he wants you to think about what he thinks about what you should think about the work of somebody higher up the academic food chain. Academia, like politics, is hardly a profession in which certain dark arts are unknown.
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Political Hypocrisy, The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond by David Runciman. (Princton, pp.272, £21.99, 978 0 691 12931 0)
