January 31, 2012
On Politics
Obviously, not much being said around here. Mostly, because I haven’t got much to say.
But recently I’ve found it hard to articulate to people what, exactly, it is I tend to believe about politics (and why I get so fed up with so much of the left). As it happens, John Dunn’s remark from his 1968 book on Locke sums things up pretty well:
“Against the morality of those for whom changing the world is such a pressing necessity that the consequences of attempts to change it, however forlorn the efforts or ghastly their results, become wholly trivial, there must be set the morality of those whose moral interpretation of the world is restricted by an accurate sense of the limited possibilities for changing it. The exploration of the moral potentialities of authentically possible social change cannot be assimilated to the reactionary claim that social improvement is impossible. What matters is whether the change commended is derived from the exploration in fantasy of what is desirable but only logically possible or the investigation of what is desirable and sociologically possible. Willing the millennium is not a substitute for exploring the moral potentialities of the possibly available orders of repression. Still less is it a moral improvement on the latter enterprise. There should be no moral prizes for insecurity of grasp on the ‘reality principle’.”
Note that only an idiot would interpret that as a species of conservatism.
November 22, 2011
Selfish and Deluded
Tonight I intended to briefly join the protest at Cambridge University against Universities Minister David Willetts. Arriving at the venue at 5.55pm, however, the protest was already over. So I decided to go inside and listen to the advertised speech and debate.
Willetts was introduced – with an explicit appeal for reasonable discussion – and the man himself took the stand.
But as he began speaking, he was immediately interrupted. A single individual – whom I shall not name – began shouting. His every line was immediately repeated by 20-30 or so others. Thus began a long, ponderous series of declamations, bizarre poetic allegories, and varying denunciations of Willetts, his Government, the future of education, and everything in between.
Willetts could not get a word in edge ways. And it was horrible. The tension in the room was dramatic. Despite calls from the floor – mostly from Cambridge academics who had come for a debate – for this to stop, it continued unabated. Turgid, self-indulgent, incoherent, and pretentious would only just about cover the contents of this “speech”. It felt like it went on and on. Shout then chant, shout then chant. What was probably only 7 or 8 minutes was experienced as 30.
When the “speech” from the floor was over, the instigators began chants of “Willetts Willetts Willets, Out Out Out”, and surged forward. They took the stage. Willetts had already left. By 6.20, the event was abandoned. A hundred or so other people were forced to exit without being able to voice their opinion or take part in the public debate they were invited to attend
*
I left the hall angry, disgusted and embarrassed. And I write as somebody who took part in the Cambridge Occupation last December, and has attended several recent protests against the Government’s cuts. I’ve been through my fair share of kettles and marches to get to this point.
This “action” was organised by Cambridge Defend Education, or “CDE”. Perhaps “Childish Deluded Egomaniacs” would be a better rendering. CDE claim to be upholders of free speech and democratic fairness. Yet they presumed to speak on behalf of myself and every other person in that room, whilst disregarding our rights, opinions, concerns and beliefs entirely.
CDE will no doubt claim – as at one point in the rambling “speech” it was indeed claimed – that having a debate with Willetts was pointless anyway. As we all know, he and this Government have already decided what they are going to do, and public engagements are largely cosmetic PR exercises.
There is of course a great deal of truth to this claim. So let’s take it to its logical conclusion. If the debate was not going to ultimately change anything, what, exactly, could be achieved by disrupting it so completely and outrageously?
Two things: firstly, greatly offending and irritating all of those in the room who were not privy to CDE’s unilateral decision. The result was the wasting of their time, upseting them, making them feel marginalized, and in many cases also very angry. This is unacceptable and indefensible in itself. And it’s hardly a good strategy for winning friends either.
Secondly, it allowed Willetts to leave Cambridge being able to claim that he’d tried to engage openly, but that irrational, unreasonable, selfish students had prevented any constructive dialogue. Anybody who thinks that this “action” was a victory against Willetts is living in cloud cuckoo land.
There’s a considerable irony here too. One of CDE’s stated complaints about Willetts and his Government is that it is so sure of its own convictions they ride rough-shod over the opinions, concerns, rights and needs of others. And yet that is exactly what CDE did tonight.
I’ve had my run-ins with the Cambridge “activist community” before, leading me to urge that they think a little more carefully about the certainty of their convictions. Tonight demonstrated some of the worst excesses of selfish, childish, self-righteous, politically imbecilic stupidity imaginable.
It was a show of disguised selfishness; the indulgence of a self-satisfied false moral superiority fraudulently passed off as bravery on behalf of others. Others who were never consulted, engaged, or allowed to speak for themselves.
UPDATE:
Here’s a short video. You can see me walking out at the end, stopping the main “speech” maker on the stairs to tell him he was not speaking for me.
UPDATE TWO:
The text of the absurd “speech” delivered from the floor has been posted online. Quite spectacular is CDE’s lack of self-awareness or sense of unwitting parody.
November 7, 2011
The Ethics of Derren Brown
Over the past decade the illusionist, magician and psychological manipulator Derren Brown has produced some of the most consistently entertaining and provocative television available. But my appreciation extends beyond mere entertainment, and well into the professional.
A large part of my research consists in understanding the foundations of the major western schools of moral philosophy. To simplify rather a lot, probably the two most influential and important approaches to moral philosophy in the modern Anglophone tradition are as follows. First, that which locates our moral commitments and beliefs in the operations of sentiment and emotion and relegates reason to the role of handmaiden. Second, that which privileges reason and makes rationality foundational.
David Hume remains the great proponent of the first, “sentimentalist” tradition. For Hume, “reason is, and ought only ever to be, the slave of the passions”. Moral codes are built on patterns of emotional reaction to our peers, developed over time, and heavily influenced by custom as we sympathetically identify with each other to build bonds of psychological commitment. Our moral judgements originate in our inner sentiments. They are brought by us to the world we experience and which we “gild and stain” with the passions; they are not found there by some faculty, or revealed to us by the operations of reason alone.
The alternative, rationalist, view receives its most sophisticated formulation in the work of Immanuel Kant. Simplifying terribly: Kant proposed that each rational agent could discern universal moral laws founded in the operations of reason by applying a test of universalizability to any proposed action. In essence, a highly sophisticated extrapolation of the principle that you should not do to others what you would not have done to yourself, but now on pain of fundamental contradiction as an agent engaged in practical reasoning, inviting moral failure by the transcendent and immutable standards of reason and logic. (It is a not-insignificant fact that Hume preceded Kant, and that the apparent limitations of the Scotsman’s project were a motivation to that of the East Prussian’s. And although Kant wasn’t Anglophone, his influence on English-speaking philosophers has been enormous.)
Derren Brown’s output surely lends support to some species of the Humean position (though it may generate a darker view than the great optimist Hume himself entertained). Take Brown’s latest series, “The Experiments”. In week two, a crowd thinking they were taking part in a comedy game show systematically voted, by clear majorities, to inflict ever more unpleasant events on a hapless, unwitting target. From having this unsuspecting man falsely accused of sexual assault in a bar, they then framed him for shoplifting, ordered somebody to enter his flat and smash his TV, then voted for him to be kidnapped by a masked gang and thrown into the back of an unmarked van. All in under an hour.
The power of reason was conspicuously lacking there, as the passions of mob-mentality rapidly took over. In previous series, Derren has performed a range of stunts, from manipulating ordinary people into committing armed robberies, to directing them to pick seemingly random objects and “predicting” this in advance, to getting strangers in the street to hand over their wallets and keys just by being asked. Brown’s work consistently shows just how malleable we are; not only in our behaviors, but in our reactions to each other and in particular to figures in authority.
Of course, proponents of Kantian positions will say that this is all besides the point: “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”, as Isaiah Berlin famously embellished. That human beings are in fact prone to manipulation, and that reason is frequently over-ridden by their passions, is allegedly irrelevant to the question of what they should do, and whether a more fundamental moral law does exist. Maybe so. Though perhaps one might wonder what the point of such a law is, if it seems to easily ignored, assuming it’s ever even discovered by any human being in the first place.
Rgardless, the implications for politics (as distinct from abstract moral theory) are surely different. Politics absolutely is about what will happen, and not merely what it would be nice in an ideal world. Yet the evidence from Brown, handily available online at 4OD, is that rationality and reason are just about the last things governing most of us. Not only are we buffeted about by our passions, but more worryingly, those who understand how to manipulate those passions can buffet us in directions they choose. This was something well known to Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, and now variously credited with the invention of both modern political propaganda and mass consumer advertising.
Kantian political philosophies that emphasise the rationality of citizens as the primary loci for discussions of (for example) what more just and equal societies might look like, may thus be barking up two wrong trees simultaneously. Firstly, if rationality is not be the primary matter of political action and reaction, taking it as one’s starting point may well doom one’s conclusions to parochialism and irrelevance. Secondly, waxing hypothetical about what a more just or equal society would look like risks missing what really matters in politics: working out who controls who, how they do it, and making sure they do it in ways that are less nasty than others. To spell the point out: the symbiotic relationship between Fox News and the Tea Party, with the specter of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election now firmly on the horizon, surely does not reflect well on the dominant trend for rationalist political philosophy in many North American and British universities.
In these respects, Derren Brown offers important materials for thinking about both moral and political philosophy, at least for those willing to accept that dusty tomes and wise authorities do not have a monopoly on insight. Of course, it may be replied that there’s nothing in Derren Brown that can’t be found in the properly peer-reviewed experimental psychology literature. Don’t we know all of this from Milgram and the Stanford Prison experiments? Actually, this simply raises another host of questions. Because in his latest series, Brown has been conducing “experiments” that would never pass a modern academic experimental ethics committee.
Take his latest offering: The Guilt Trip. In this special feature, Brown systematically manipulated a totally unsuspecting man, Jody, into feelings of guilt, whilst inducing situations which caused him to repeatedly doubt his own memory. Over the course of a weekend, Brown – working behind the scenes – used systematic deception and manipulation to maneuver Jody into confessing to a murder he did not commit. Jody was subjected to increasing stress over a series of days, and his every move was filmed without his knowledge (including the use of cameras in his hotel bedroom). During his first interview with the “police”, and in the interval between this interview and his walking to the local police station to hand himself in for a murder he did not commit, Jody exhibited high levels of stress, confusion and panic. He consented to none of this. Given how uncomfortable this was as viewing “entertainment”, one can easily imagine how it felt to be Jody. And to know one would not like it.
I say that this “experiment’” would not have passed an academic ethics committee. How do we know? Because by the standards of modern experimental ethics committees, no academic department would now permit the Milgram or Stanford Prison experiments. (Indeed it was partly because of these experiments that the rules on what you could and could not do to volunteers were dramatically tightened). Yet, arguably at least, judging by the standards of prolonged distress and acute anxiety – not to mention systematic manipulation, deception and unwitting surveillance – what Brown did to Jody was worse than, say, what Milgram had his subjects think they were doing to other people.
But does this simply mean that vital psychological experimentation can now only be conducted outside of the academy? Brown’s results in his latest series – pace any discrediting hidden trickery – are fascinating. Getting a hypnotized man to think he’s shot Stephen Fry; directing a masked television audience into advocating the kidnap of an unsuspecting man; manipulating an innocent into confessing to a murder he did not commit. These “experiments” stand to tell us not just about our psychologies as individuals and groups, but about the moral and political philosophies compatible with those internal workings. Has academic science now become so restricted that truly important work has to be done in the intellectual wild west of television?
That’s a difficult question. But it wasn’t the one that bothered me the most when watching a traumatised Jody agonise about whether he had been capable of murdering a man with a croquet hammer, and not even remembering he’d done it. What most truly disturbed me was the feeling that Brown had simply gone too far this time. My sympathetic identification with Jody ensured I spent most of the hour wanting this “experiment” to stop. Here was a man being put through hell, and not primarily in the name of science (let’s be honest), but for mass entertainment.
When it comes to science, questions of the benefit some potentially harmful experiments might yield versus the rights and welfare of the individuals affected are notoriously difficult to settle. Was the insight gleaned from Stanford sufficient to justify the abuse the “prisoners” went through at the hands of their “guards”? Do utilitarian benefits trump some of the rights of some individuals? Given the value of scientific and intellectual advance, those are genuinely difficult questions. What seems more clear cut is that framing a man for shoplifting (with corresponding “arrest” by “police”), or getting another to think they have killed another human being in cold blood, simply in the name of Friday-night-fun, is not acceptable.
But then, Brown has a strong reputation for looking after the psychological wellbeing of his subject (victims?) after the show is over. And in the case of Jody, several minutes were dedicated to his personally enthusing after the event about how great the experiment had been. Cue numerous shots of Jody immediately seeing the funny side of it all, laughing along with not-a-little relief. By pulling the emotional heartstrings so adeptly, Brown dramatically lessened the sense of viewer guilt that what had been done to this man was wrong. All’s well that ends well. Right? And who’s to say whether Brown was wrong to so manipulate us viewers – isn’t that part of what you accept when you tune in to this sort of show? And if – and it’s a big ‘if’ – we actually learn from Brown’s “experiment”, does that make it OK? Even when bearing in mind that what he ultimately gets paid for is the provision of our entertainment?
November 2, 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS
Oikonomia, Economy and War: 2012 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History
University of Cambridge
19-20 March 2012
Paper proposals are invited for the fifth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, to be held on 19-20 March 2012 at the University of Cambridge. The theme of the 2012 conference will be “Oikonomia, Economy and War”, and papers dealing with any period and tradition in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present will be considered. Papers which bring an historical perspective to bear on problems of contemporary political theory are welcome. A keynote address will be given by Professor Andrew Gamble of the Cambridge Department of Politics and International Studies
The conference theme should be interpreted broadly; papers relating to any aspect of “oikonomia” “economy” or “war” will be considered. Up to eight papers will be accepted. Panels will be led by a discussant from Cambridge, who will offer comments on each paper before general discussion with Cambridge faculty and conference participants. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Accommodation will be provided for speakers from outside Cambridge.
Abstracts of up to 500 words are requested by 5 December 2011, with accepted papers to follow in full by 5 March 2012. Please submit abstracts, along with your name and a brief academic C.V., to ptihconf@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
Registration will close on 27 February 2012; those wishing to attend the conference without presenting a paper should write to the above address with their name and institutional affiliation before that date.
2012 Conference committee:
Jared Holley
Dom O’Mahony
Paul Sagar
Tara-Jane Westover
Waseem Yaqoob
October 27, 2011
Occupy (my attention)
A friend – who happens to be both left-leaning and employed in City finance – sent me a text:
“Not that I’m against it, but what is the stated reason for the St Paul’s protests? Just awareness or do they want something specific? Normally there’s a reason – Uni fees a very valid one – but this just seems like a bit of a moan. The timing seems odd, even if it is jumping on the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon. It’s been two weeks though, who has that much time?”
I sympathise.
Recently, I’ve become utterly bored by day-to-day politics. Paradoxically, this has afforded me some insights.
I don’t really know what Occupy London Stock Exchange (OLX) is about. I haven’t had the time or inclination to find out. Because I don’t really care. Because I am uninterested in the repetition and tedium of daily political debate and exchange. I’m interested in politics (hence why I’m doing a PhD in it), but then I increasingly think that’s really something else. What I’m certainly not interested in is the daily outrages and accusations; the ranting; the tribalism; the he-said, she-said; the bla bla bla ad nauseam .
Which itself wouldn’t actually be so bad, if people were quietly conscious that they were being hypocrites and opportunists in pointing out the hypocrisies and opportunisms of their enemies. What I have no time for is the pathetic sincerity of the daily outrage. “Oh, my political enemy has done something nasty and underhand! How outrageous! How shocking! I am so appalled! Something Must Be Done!”
Yawn.
I don’t really know what OLX is about. It seems a bit silly. And that’s an interesting perspective coming from me, given that a year ago I was involved in the Cambridge student occupation, attended quite a lot of demos, and was generally Pretty Interested In Daily Politics.
But it may be instructive, for precisely that past, to observe just how off-the-radar OLX is to me. Somebody busy with their research (which is not much like having a real job). With teaching commitments. With Friday nights. With the football season. With time on my hands. With left-wing views. With a tendency to read the news.
If I don’t register OLX, how much do you think it gets through to people working 40+ hour weeks? With kids? With bills and mortgages to pay? Worried about job security and inflation? Who don’t have time to read the paper? Who aren’t particularly left-wing?
Of my friend’s text, however, what really stands out is his closing line: “It’s been two weeks though, who has that much time?”
When I used to box at a gym in Southport, a post-training discussion once turned to the TV series Big Brother. The general conclusion was that not only were all the contestants freaks, but they were Not Like Ordinary People. Why? Precisely because they could swan off for 10 weeks without worrying about work. For most in the discussion, that was enough to discredit each and every contestant. The BB housemates weren’t from the real world. The world where kids and mortgages ruled out such summer sojourns. And that bred both a fairly obvious contempt, but also an underlying if mild resentment.
Leftist activists might endorse OLX with passion. Many of them are out there right now, proudly taking part, braced against the cold by the sincerity of their views. But activists should remember that goldfish bowls create visual distortions, in both directions. And like it or not, dissimilarity quickly breeds contempt.
August 10, 2011
Riot of a Time
Very quick thoughts on the recent riots.
1. Clearly it is true that poverty, alienation, deepdisgruntlement with the police and lack of opportunity are important background facts that any serious attempt at understanding will have to take into account.
2. But these alone cannot explain what was clearly, in many cases, opportunistic theft and glee in destruction.
3. So where do we go from there?
4. I take these to be true and important components of any description of modern British politics and society: that it promotes self-interested greed, materialism, the possession of ostensive goods for status, immediate gratification, and a toleration (even encouragement) of ruthless competitiveness with a deep disregard for the welfare of others. (Call this the “no-such-thing-as-society society”, if you like.)
5. Putting 1 and 2 together with 4, and adding in conditions of spontaneity, anticipated impunity and evident opportunity, a basic yet broadly sufficient explanation appears to emerge.
6. Note that the things described in 4 above constitute the core tenets of the political ideology broadly known as ‘Thatcherism’ (or if you want to bring things up to date post-1997, ‘neo-liberalism’).
7. Also note that the conditions described in 1. have been massively and continuously exacerbated by Thatcherism (or ‘neo-liberalism’), especially if enormous inequality and its debilitating effects on individual well-being and self-respect are included too.
8. So actually this may not be such a mystery after all. If you constantly tell people to be selfish, ruthless, competitive, greedy and disregarding of the welfare of others, then you can’t really be surprised when they behave as they are told they fundamentally are and must be (even if they forget about the bits to do with obeying the law).
9. However, if you happen to be the prime minister just invoke some vacuous covering fluff about ‘moral responsibility’. Continue to condemn loudly, and then get back to promoting the elements in 4. on a daily basis. Without wondering about which ways the knife may cut.
June 5, 2011
Telly Don University
So Telly Don University – or the New College of Humanities – has been unveiled. Professor A.C. Grayling is the mastermind, and apparently the head honcho too. “Top” academics have been recruited to the cause. Proper academics, predictably, don’t like it.
Now don’t get me wrong, TDU definitely suggests some unpleasant prospects. As Chris Bertram has pointed out to me, an institution charging £18K a year will give other university Vice Chancellors a pre-text to both bust open the new £9K fee cap, and maybe even privatise in a bid to “compete”.
Personally, however, I see TDU as being – at most – a catalyst. My sense is that the flood gates are open on fees (not least as the maths was done so badly that the Treasury is going to have to fork out loads under the current regime anyway), and that universities not receiving significant state support may opt to privatise anyway. After all, why put up with the constant government interference if you’re not even getting the money any more?
In any case, what’s happening to British higher education looks like part of a much bigger process. Namely, the systematic marketisation of publicly provided services, coupled with a belief that in the brave new world this is the only option. Meaning that assaults on state-provided services are seen as both status quo, and as inevitable developments, by the politicians carrying them out. Thus drastically reducing any room for alternatives to find a voice, or for policies to be reconsidered and reversed.
In sum, I think that British higher education is undergoing a sea change that started (at least) with New Labour when it bought the basically pro-market vision of politics which reduces the state to the fawning provider of safe-habitats for business,whilst abandoning anything that can’t make a profit to die in the cold. I don’t know what will happen to Britain’s university system over the next 20 years, and I’m not optimistic. But I doubt Telly Don University alone is going to make that much of a difference.
Accordingly, we might like to do a spot of pointing and laughing to cheer ourselves up. TDU bills itself as attempting to rival Oxbridge (a boast Mary Beard has already queried). Its main claim to this appears to be two-fold: 1) that Famous People will do some teaching, and 2) students won’t just do arts subjects they will also have “science literacy” and business-type awareness programmes to boot.
Both of these things make me chortle. Let’s first consider some of the Famous People who will allegedly be teaching at TDU:
- Richard Dawkins: loud-mouthed pop-biologist, who writes exceptionally bad books about religion and who would fail any decent undergraduate philosophy first year course.
- Steven Pinker: pop-psychologist, generally not taken seriously by large sections of the psychology research community because he allegedly ignores and manipulates data that doesn’t fit his story-book narratives. [If anyone genuinely qualified on this subject could say one way or the other, it would be good to hear from you - this is just reporting what I've heard from people in the field.]
- Niall Ferguson: telly-don extraordinaire, who will apparently be teaching economics, even though he is not an economist. He is in fact a pop historian (who hasn’t done any serious work for donkey’s years), who has appointed himself a finance expert following his success in the oh-so-tricky world of making money in hedge funds. (Amusingly, rival telly don Tristram Hunt claims that Ferguson’s successful book on the history of money and finance – later a TV series, of course – manages to hardly mention Marx and Engels at all. So a rounded education can no doubt be expected from a man who is certainly anything but a right-wing ideologue.)
- A.C. Grayling: telly-don philosopher, who is mostly famous for writing a lot of books. The reason he writes so many books, so quickly, is of course that none of them are any good.
- Ronald Dworkin: actually a serious academic with an incredibly illustrious publishing history, who had an enormous impact upon both political and legal philosophy over the past 50 years. But still notorious at Oxford – about 30 years after he left – for being the laziest and most unhelpful supervisor imaginable (I was warned not to expect any contact with Dworkin at all if I went to NYU for a masters degree, whatever it said on their website.)
Also a huge hypocrite, given that he spent most of his career writing about egalitarianism, and is now a flagship academic at an institution which is anything but.
You get the picture. Big famous names are not the same as good, serious educators of university minds. If you go to TDU thinking you’ll get a good education just because some famous people are there, you’re a fool. As anyone who’s actually been taught well at university level knows, the best teachers are not the big public names (even if they are famous within the academy). But given that TDU will charge £18K a year, you’re a rich fool if you go there. So more fool you, as at least hopefully this will free up some places for serious young thinkers at Britains’ other, proper, universities. Who can hopefully be drawn from the state sector thanks to some reduction in competition from brats who just want a primer course for the City.
As for the second alleged benefit – science literacy and business awareness – this is highly amusing. If you want “science literacy” you can read Ben Goldacr’s book Bad Science, and then bother with some of Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful output. If you want more than mere science “literacy”, then you have to do a science degree and become a scientist. Sorry about that, but the human mind is limited and specialization is required if you want to acquire a serious understanding of any contemporary field. TDU can’t undo the complexities and advances of modern day academic divisions of labour, whatever else it may claim.
Regarding “business awareness”, or whatever, this is also silly. You don’t get good at “real world” thinking by “studying the real world”. You get it by training your brain to think sharply and analytically, applying these skills elsewhere as and when it is fit to do so. Some people never learn to transfer these skills, and some people have them without being any good at academia. Either way, it actually turns out that the best education for business is not a business education. (You may be surprised to learn this, but apparently it’s actually philosophy.) So you’d be just fine at normal, proper university.
So overall I’m inclined to laugh at Telly Dons University. It looks like a big con, taking the money of rich people silly enough to think they can buy a proper education, at premium rates, simply because there’s some Famous People on the tin.
But, sadly, that’s not the end of the story. Because TDU is plainly responding to a certain sort of demand, and a wider and ever more entrenched expectation of what universities should be, and what they should provide. And if TDU is successful – which it may very well be – it’s exactly what Vice Chancellors and politicians will point to as the model for the rest to adopt.
Hence, we should laugh and be merry this evening, for in the morrow the hangover is coming. And it’s going to be a nasty one indeed. Even if TDU is only one small part of the bigger mess.
UPDATE: I see that Peter Singer and Simon Blackburn are also members of the Telly Don 14.
Peter Singer: Philosophical charlatan par excellence. A disseminater of complete nonsense, from a man who couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag. Even if he did do exceedingly well for himself by generally just being controversial and annoying.
Simon Blackburn: Actually one of the most distinguished and sharp-thinking philosophers of the past 30 years. A seriously impressive mind (even if he’s spent the last decade saying the same thing over and over again). However, by all accounts a close rival to Dworkin for Laziest and Least Helpful Teacher On Offer. At least judging by the reports of his supervisees. Whose testimony can be effectively summarised as: “He doesn’t read your work. Even if you’re his PhD student”.
What a stellar teching line up the TDU has on offer!
May 8, 2011
A Reply to My Critics?
I’ve not much time for blogging these days, as on balance I find reading novels and cycling are far better ways to waste my life.
Nonetheless, it has come to my attention that I am rather unpopular with some sections of the Cambridge activist community. Apparently I have the wrong views about political violence, the nature of capitalism, the inevitable proletarian-student revolution, or something.
I thought I might do a post drawing on some of the finer thinkers of the 18th century. Specifically David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and the problem of political “enthusiasm”. Or as we would now call it, fanaticism.
The manner in which self-righteous, self-assured political conviction so easily takes hold over people’s minds. And then drives them to do terrible, murderous, destructive, and often outright evil things. Because enthusiasts are convinced that they have all the answers. And that everyone else is either too blind, or too morally twisted, to see their truths.
Or as Max Weber put it, describing a very similar thing:
“One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility, or when the one and when the other. One can say only this much: If in these times, which, in your opinion, are not times of ‘sterile’ excitation–excitation is not, after all, genuine passion–if now suddenly the Weltanschauungs politicians crop up en masse and pass the watchword, ‘The world is stupid and base, not I,’ ‘The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the others whom I serve and whose stupidity or baseness I shall eradicate,’ then I declare frankly that I would first inquire into the degree of inner poise backing this ethic of ultimate ends. I am under the impression that in nine out of ten cases I deal with windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations.”
But I have neither the time nor the heart for such exertions. And indeed, political philosophy is perhaps an unfruitful place to start. I gather that English Literature is the modern revolutionary’s Oxbridge degree of choice. Several thousand years of cumulative wisdom – helpfully captured in books now available at paperback prices – from the most intelligent people to have walked the earth, is all irrelevant. Art and deconstruction will fuel the revolution, which is itself unquestionably a good thing. Or so I’m told.
So let’s instead start from some putative common ground. Philip Roth is surely one of the great literary figures of the 20th century, and perhaps America’s finest novelist in the post-war era. For what it’s worth (basically nothing), I think that if we’re going to be political litterateurs, then we should begin with Roth’s blindingly brilliant I Married a Communist.
Here’s a short passage, from the culmination of a genuinely profound work:
“You control betrayal on one side and you wind up betraying somewhere else. Because it’s not a static system. Because it’s alive. Because everything that lives is in movement. Because purity is petrification. Because purity is a lie. Because unless you’re an ascetic paragon like Johnny O’Day and Jesus Christ, you’re urged on by five hundred things. Because without the iron pole of righteousness with which the Grants clubbed their way to success, without the big lie of righteousness to tell you why you do what you do, you have to ask yourself, all along the way, “Why do I do what I do?” And you have to endure yourself without knowing.”
If you don’t understand what that short passage is saying, the rest of the book will explain. I would recommend it as seriously worthwhile reading for anybody who is particularly sure of their convictions.
April 29, 2011
From Rap Battles to Libertarian Myopia
Following that brilliant first instalment, Keynes versus Hayek Round II is here:
There’s no denying this is greatly entertaining stuff. But as with the first video, I find the pro-Hayek message rather irritating (well I would, wouldn’t I?)
To pick up on one specific thing, however, I’m frustrated by the Hayek character appropriating some words of Adam Smith about human beings not being mere pieces on a chessboard.
The original Smith quote, from his Theory of Moral Sentiments, runs thus:
“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”
Smith’s point is simple but extremely important. However ingenious and complex a plan or system may be, it can never match the complexity of the world upon which it is unleashed. Each action sets off incalculable further reactions. Each human agent affected by these actions and reactions will in turn be propelled by his or her own “principle of motion” in ways that cannot be predicted or controlled. No plan or system ever works out the way “the men of system” hope. As Smith, in his typically understated way implies, failing to see this can lead to social, political and economic disaster.
Libertarians (and “classical liberals”, Austrian economists and whoever else is on the wagon this week) are fond of quoting this passage. Over at CafeHayek it is proffered as advice for “would-be czars and other experts to remember”. Yet libertarians (et al) rarely realise that Smith’s reflections apply – with devastating force – to their own state-minimalist politics.
Even in the world of minimal-state libertarian fantasy, there will inevitably be economic recessions.* Eventually, at least one of these will be severe. In recessions people suffer; that’s what unemployment and poverty entail, especially under the minimal state where there is presumably no welfare support. When people suffer, however, they do not sit around idly and wait for the market to fix itself – whenever that might be. They take action to alleviate their sufferings as soon as possible.
Under such circumstances, large-scale collective action will be taken by individuals seeking relief from suffering. Action of this sort is known as “politics”. In this “politics”, human beings mobilise so as to put the levers of power into the hands of those who will (or at least promise to) alleviate their sufferings. In modern societies this is done via the state apparatus. Hence even if (magically) we start out with libertarian state minimalism, we will not stay there. The power of the state will eventually be deployed so as to interfere with the market forces currently failing to alleviate the sufferings of ordinary people.
Two things follow. First, and with especial irony, the libertarian minimal state can only be sustained by coercive state force. When ordinary citizens mobilize to demand state action to alleviate suffering, the politicians they select, and the movements that propel them to power, must be repressed in order to preserve the minimal state which refuses to interfere in the economy or to provide state support. Minimal state libertarianism either organically gives way to state interventionism, or resists this organic development by becoming an anti-democratic tyranny. At a conceptual level, this basically means minimal state libertarianism tears itself apart upon any contact with the constraints of reality.
Secondly, with such considerations in place we can return to the real world and look at the alarming historical record. During the 20th century, when economic situations became sufficiently dire for sufficiently long, it was not mildly interventionist Keynesians who took power. It was murderous Fascist, National Socialist and Bolshevik regimes, who either wrested control of the state by force or were selected by desperate populations via popular vote.
Hayekians (or whatever) are being extremely myopic when they denounce Keynesians and other interventionists who broadly support market-economic systems whilst attempting to actively mitigate their worst failings. For the Hayekians fail to see that Keynesianism and other economic interventionist programmes take place against a complex real world background. A real world in which attempts at basic economic management (i.e the alleviation and prevention of suffering) are a bulwark against disaster. A bulwark against the sorts of regimes that are deeply and murderously antithetical to individual and economic liberty in ways economic-interventionist capitalist democracies have never been, nor ever will be.
Libertarian state-minimalism and attendant Austrian laissez-faire economics are fine for fantasists pining to live in a fantasy world. But for those of us preoccupied with the perils, dangers and constraints of this real world, they and their loud-mouthed proponents are usually little more than a nuisance.
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* The really nutty crowd, of course, claim that without government there would never be any market failure, recession or depression. This piece of deliberately self-serving wishful naivety is best treated by simply being ignored.
