Pod People

Is the mediocracy concept just a catch-all for the things I dislike about modern society, as someone once suggested? Certainly not. (I shall elaborate in a future post.) And does the Mediocracy book have "an unfinished feel", as an otherwise complimentary reviewer on Amazon alleged? Possibly. It is an original theory, and in some ways I was still working through the ideas of it when I wrote the book. It may not be structured in terms of Proposition 1.2003, Corollary B4 etc, but not everything is suited to a Tractatus-style delivery. (Arguably nothing, not even philosophy, is suited to the style of the Tractatus, except perhaps modern pseudo-economics.)

Shame on the British intelligentsia for not giving the book a hearing, considering the miles of column space devoted to something as facile and predictable as The God Delusion.* Regardless of whether or not one is impressed by my mildly tongue-in-cheek theory, it might at least have been shown polite interest. Is it too satirical to be considered as bona fide cultural analysis? But plenty of books with the words s**t or c**p in the title receive serious literary attention these days.

Brickbats go in particular to the right-wing intelligentsia — what there is of it — in view of the fact that the book's critique of the dominant il-liberal ideology seems to put it in a right-wing pigeonhole as far as most people are concerned. Even if my book were (for the sake of argument) merely mediocre, there are plenty of mediocre books of the 'right-wing' variety which do get review space. Damian Thompson's Counterknowledge — which seemed to say precious little of substance that hadn't been said before — comes to mind.

Of course, the failure of the intellectual Right to take on board the work of figures outside the establishment is symptomatic of a larger malaise. The Right has lost the culture war, as a blog (now defunct) associated with the Dale blogocracy used to assert. This means the political Right has two credible options: (1) fight the cultural elite, as the Thatcherites did (this is likely to have only short term success at best, particularly by now, since the cultural elite can easily launch a successful counteroffensive for hearts and minds) or (2) be prepared to embrace ideological dissidents. The latter, after fifty years of 'liberal' hegemony, are likely to be socially positioned well away from the centres of cultural power. So it's not much good scratching around for support from the one or two established economics, philosophy or education professors who are still prepared to express scepticism about state intervention. That's a bit like looking for pop stars willing to openly back conservatism. You have to accept you are cultural outsiders and work with that — after all, the Left had to do it for several decades in the first half of the twentieth century. This, however, the Right seems unwilling to do.

The only other option, and the one currently being pursued, is the Pod People strategy:

“They ['Conservatism'] would replace the dominant species [socialism] by spawning emotionless replicas; the original bodies [Labour politicians] would then disintegrate into dust once the duplication process was completed.”

Even assuming this strategy could be successful, it is not very attractive to voters who have no great affection for the state. Unless there is some kind of reverse metamorphosis after the acquisition of power — which would make the Tories seem dishonest and untrustworthy — we are going to end up with a situation that is worse, not better. There will no longer be any anti-statist rhetoric, except perhaps from parties which currently take no more than 5% of the national vote and which are thoroughly marginalised by the mainstream media.

Note 1
As in the case of The Lord of the Rings, a lot of nonsense has been written about the supposed symbolism underlying the Invasion movie. LOTR is supposed to be about Christianity, Invasion about Cold War paranoia and/or McCarthyism. This has always struck me as false. Lead actor Kevin McCarthy agrees, saying in an interview on the DVD that no political allegory was intended. (Yes I know he is an actor, but even Hollywood stars were less dumbed down in the 50s.) Personally, I have always felt the movie to be a reflection on conformity, and on the way many people will adapt their views to fit with whatever will get them on most comfortably, even when their new views appear incompatible with what they previously professed to believe in.

Note 2
You may observe I am breaking a social taboo in daring to complain about being ignored. However, modesty is a privilege reserved for those with established careers. I would love to be able to exercise it, but regretfully cannot. To misquote Bette Davis: dissidence is not a place for sissies.

* I believe I am not the only one to have such sentiments.
** Still from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) via InfiniteCoolness.com.

Structured by (trained) cows

The saga of dodgy dealings at premier financial houses continues. One wonders what nasties will crawl out of the woodwork next. And how many more of them will be blamed on “computer bugs”?

Moody's, the credit rating agency, yesterday said ... it had incorrectly rated about $1bn of complex debt securities due to a computer error ... Moody's admitted that an external investigation ... had shown that [employees] breached internal codes of conduct over an instrument known as constant proportion debt obligation (CPDOs) ... Investors in some CPDOs have lost up to 60 per cent of their capital. (Financial Times 2nd July)

A mediocracy does not believe in innate ability. It believes that anyone can be a philosopher, mathematician, or central bank chief — provided they have had appropriate training.

as one senior risk manager writes ... “we did express to senior management that we lacked the analytical skills ...” (FT)

A mediocracy does not believe in the value of thinking, or in individuals having innate powers of judgment. It believes in following procedures, making rules, ticking the boxes.

Moody's is moving to re-examine the accuracy of all its computer models and place them under a centralised monitoring system ... Moody's will also introduce a standardised protocol for fixing computer errors in the future (FT)

A mediocracy does not believe that the untrained can assess whether a theory makes sense. If a model looks clever by making sufficient use of technicality, and if trained ‘experts’ assert that the model is a good one, the model shall be relied upon.

the cult of models has become so extreme that banks have believed them even when this collides with common sense. (Gillian Tett)

[In the] dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (nowadays the main analytical tool of central banks all over the world) ... money and credit play no direct role. Nor does a financial market.This model has significant policy implications. One of them is that central banks can safely ignore monetary aggregates and credit. They should also ignore asset prices and deal only with the economic consequences of an asset price bust. They should also ignore headline inflation. (FT)

A mediocracy does not believe in the principle of truth-telling. Appearance trumps reality in the mediocratic value-hierarchy. Appearance is socially controlled, with the relevant criterion being effect on audience rather than objectivity — since objectivity is considered intellectually unsound, and uncool.

The FT revealed in May ... that Moody's had discovered the error in early 2007. However, Moody's maintained the top-notch ratings on these products until 2008, when they were downgraded amid general market declines. (FT)

In a mediocracy, appearances are required to fit with ideology, but the people actually running things know that the underlying substance is, by necessity, quite different. Whistleblowing is only encouraged where it reinforces the ideology; the other kind is punished. The obvious remaining course is to feed at the trough while the party lasts — after all, everyone else is doing it.

Documents cited in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission report this week ... uncovered poor disclosure and conflicts-of-interest practices. The report cited e-mails suggesting that the raters knew that collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) – pools of debt linked to subprime mortgages – were headed for problems ...

One e-mail from an agency analyst said that her firm’s ratings model did not capture “half” of one deal's risk, but that “it could be structured by cows and we would rate it.” In another e-mail, a ratings agency manager called the CDO market a “monster” and said: “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.” (Reuters)

* * * * *

Pertinent observations about the decline in financial standards, in favour of pseudo-egalitarian ideology and style-over-substance technicality, will however be ignored. The morals which will actually be read into this story are those which will reinforce, rather than question, the dominant ideology.

We will, for example, be reminded of the need for more socialisation, and the desirability of keeping backroom intellectuals (now habitually referred to, even by supposedly serious writers, as ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’) in their place.

banks have become so dazzled with their powers that they have ignored how they interact with the rest of society ... the industry has slipped, almost unthinkingly, into an assumption that "credit" is a collection of abstract equations, stripped from any human context ... credit [is actually] a social construct (Gillian Tett)

We will also, no doubt, hear much about ‘greed’ (or perhaps ‘individualism’) as a culprit. If greed can now be blamed for knife crime, it can surely be invoked as a convenient scapegoat for the shortcomings of a dumbed down banking system.

* * * * *

A somewhat larger crisis than the one involving Moody’s is currently unfolding with regard to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which between them back about half of all US mortgages. Readers may remember an accounting scandal at Fannie a couple of years ago. Are we dealing with another Enron? If so, the shock waves could be considerable.

I wonder how many other dodgy practices are concealed at the heart of the key assumptions on which the global economy rests. Perhaps we will soon hear a report that previous estimates of oil reserves were based on a ‘flawed model’ or a ‘computer bug’ ...

Mediocratic banking: the ideology kicks in

The Financial Times's Gillian Tett has a prescription for how to prevent another banking crisis:

there is one simple step that might help improve matters inside the financial world: bankers should be forced to talk about their business with a wide pool of colleagues, including those outside their immediate silo, rather than just their bosses alone.

Ms Tett's remedy is inspired by an HR-style exercise conducted at a recent banking conference, which purports to show that managers are more likely to reject an obviously risky product if they have first discussed it with other managers. What does this prove? Not much, other than that something which 'obviously' (from a collective perspective) has quality X is more likely to be judged by an individual as actually having quality X if they have first discussed it with others.

Whether prior discussion makes judgement more reliable, however, depends on how often it is the case that things which are socially 'obvious' are actually true. It seems plausible, for example, that for many banking insiders pre-2007, subprime lending was 'obviously' a good thing since it brought the benefits of credit to those who would otherwise not be able to enjoy it — so this prescription is unlikely to prevent that particular type of problem.

Since the dogma seems to have been well established by now that the banking crisis was the fault of irresponsible capital markets — rather than having something to do with an ideology that promotes the idea of credit for all — I suppose it was only a matter of time before individualism (here in the form: making judgements without sufficient reference to others) began to be touted as another convenient scapegoat.

It might of course be pointed out that the same dubious mortgage-related products were being marketed by several institutions at the same time, and that these institutions could hardly have failed to be aware of what the others were up to. No doubt UBS was reassured by the fact that Citigroup was doing it, Citigroup by the fact that Merrill was doing it, and so on. So perhaps the problem was, rather, too much attention to what others seemed to be endorsing, and not enough to one's own personal misgivings. This possibility, however, fits less well with mediocratic ideology than the thesis that it was specific banking managers, behaving individualistically and without due 'consultation', who were the drivers for the dodgy products.

* * * * *

À propos the banking issue, I notice that according to Bloomberg, the much-quoted LIBOR interbank lending rate has been having credibility problems.

"We have not run away or hidden from the need for reform" ... British Bankers' Association Chief Executive Officer Angela Knight said at a hearing of a parliamentary committee in London today ... The association, an unregulated London-based trade group, is under pressure to show that Libor is reliable following complaints by investors that financial institutions weren't telling the truth about their funding costs after rising mortgage defaults contaminated credit markets and drove up borrowing costs.

While the association set the one-month dollar Libor rate at 2.72 percent on April 7, the Federal Reserve said banks paid 2.82 percent for secured loans later that day ... "The Libor numbers that banks reported to the BBA were a lie," said Tim Bond, head of global asset allocation at Barclays Capital in London. "They had been all along."

There are a number of reasons why truthfulness is not considered necessary in a mediocracy.
• Mediocratic analysis casts doubt on whether concepts such as objectivity are meaningful.
• Mediocratic techniques such as blurring and boggling create the impression that reality is fuzzy.
• Appropriate social ends are assumed to justify the means.

Would you like some anaesthetic with your organ removal?

Further to this.

I just came across the following letter to The Independent (via The Week) which demonstrates the importance of thinking issues through, rather than treating them as 'no brainers', as our dear Prime Minister, along with many other 'right-thinking' persons, seems to like doing.

Do think about the fine print when you consider whether to sign up/out/whatever to organ donation.

How dead are organ donors?

Organs for transplant have to be taken from still-living bodies, bodies still perfused by their naturally beating hearts, warm and so reactive that muscle-paralysing drugs may have to be given to facilitate the surgery.

Their owners will have been certified "dead" on the controversial basis of bedside brain-stem testing, a procedure not sufficiently stringent to exclude some persisting brain-stem function and which includes no test for what may be abundant life elsewhere in the brain.

Many or even most of those who have put their names on the NHS Organ Donor Register may have thereby offered their organs to be taken for transplant purposes on the (mis)understanding that the wording "after my death" on the application forms meant that they would be dead in the commonly understood sense before their offers were taken up.

If so, they have made their offers on a false premise and those offers cannot be regarded as valid. [FT: I assume he means morally valid; I doubt anyone will be worrying about the legal validity.] Had it been explained to them that they would be dead in only a notional ("brain-stem death") sense, at least some of them might have wished to specify general anaesthesia to cover the organ procurement procedure. [Or got the screaming heebie-jeebies about agreeing in the first place.]

David W Evans
Sometime Consultant Cardiologist at Papworth and Addenbrooke's Hospitals, Cambridge
23 January 2008

"Helping the gifted" and other deceptions

To those of a relatively uncynical persuasion living in a mediocracy, caution is to be recommended. Things may not be quite as they are presented. The reality may be the opposite of the appearance.

For example, when medical staff and 'bioethicists' (= apologists for medical authoritarianism) speak of promoting patient autonomy, they may be talking not about self-determination, but about the opposite: manipulating clients into choosing the 'correct' option and into feeling they are exercising choice.

When egalitarians speak of improving social mobility, they may be talking about what is now charmingly referred to as "encouraging downward mobility": ensuring that the bourgeoisie do not pass on any advantages to their children, so that more of them drift down the social ladder.

Similar inversions apply to consultation, democratisation — and now, also, liberty.

Likewise, when there is talk of helping gifted children, perhaps in response to the observation that they are being bored and frustrated to the point of despair by the degraded syllabus now passing for secondary education, this needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

More analysis here, from a former gifted child.

New Labour, New Liberty

I am surprised anyone was taken in by Dr Brown's recent speech on civil liberties. Even the sceptics seemed disinclined to doubt his sincerity. Martin Kettle deemed Brown to be genuinely concerned about the decline in liberties, but reluctant to follow through because of the "long shadow Blair cast over liberal values with his conviction that liberals have no effective answers to the public's fears and anxieties." A C Grayling opined that "so major a speech on liberty is too big and emphatic a marker of intent, and it is evident that he means what he says in honouring the tradition of liberty that defines this country."

There is a much better explanation to hand. Brown's team understands that Blair's open contempt for libertarian values was too risky and unnecessarily blatant. Far better to pretend to be supporting liberty by suitably redefining it.

The transformation from old-liberty (= right not to be interfered with) to new-liberty (= right to be interfered with) takes place, as Dr Brown showed us, in 13 easy steps.

1) First, remind your audience about the association of old-liberty with 'selfishness'.

... a distinctly British interpretation of liberty - one that ... rejects the selfishness of extreme libertarianism and demands that the realm of individual freedom encompasses not just some but all of us.

(New-liberty isn't liberty if not everyone has the same amount of it.)

2) Remind people that new-liberty is 'positive liberty', i.e. freedom to get stuff which the state provides using taxpayers' money.

Too often the political debate has become polarised between a new right that has emphasised laissez-faire more than liberty and an old left that has mistakenly marginalised liberty by seeing it as the enemy of equality.

3) Stress that new-liberty has much more to do with community than was previously thought.

the progress of the idea of liberty has gone hand in hand with notions of social responsibility: 'the active citizen', the 'good neighbour', and civic pride, emphasising that people are not just self interested but members of a wider community - sustained by the mutual obligation we all feel to each other.

4) Remind everyone of J S Mill's (much-abused) let-out clause.

John Stuart Mill did not, in the end, call for unfettered freedoms, but argued that 'there are many positive acts for the benefit of others which he may rightfully be compelled to perform'.

5) Start talking more and more about new-liberty, citing Mill's rival T H Green ...

liberty [is] best advanced in the modern world when we recognise the responsibilities we owe to each other; and now as a new generation expands the frontiers of liberty, also increasingly about empowering the individual to make the most of their potential. As T. H. Green put it: 'when we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others'.

6) ... Hobson, Hobhouse, and Tawney.

from more than a century ago, in the view of British thinkers - not just Green but Hobson, Hobhouse and Tawney - freedom could only be fully realised when society was prepared to overcome the barriers that prevented people from realising their true potential. ... in this modern view freedom comes to mean not just freedom from interference, but also freedom to aspire - the opportunity and the chance to live a rounded life

7) Follow with further scathing references to libertarianism and naughty old 'license'.

liberty has been reduced to a simplistic libertarianism in which freedom and licence assumed a rough equivalence

8) Talk more about free speech:

Indeed, the components of our liberty are the building blocks for such a society: our belief in the freedom of speech and expression and conscience and dissent helps create the open society ...

carefully avoiding reference to an earlier incident in which you

intervened after an all-white jury decided that BNP chairman Nick Griffin broke no law when he condemned Islam as “a wicked, vicious faith” at a secretly filmed meeting,

by pledging

to bring in tougher powers to raise the chance of convictions in similar cases.

9) Begin to shift the discussion by pointing out (more in sorrow than in anger) that new-liberty has to be weighed up against other objectives, e.g. security.

we need to consciously and with determination found the next stage of constitutional development firmly on the story of British liberty. This will only be possible if we face up to the hard choices that have to be made in government. Precious as it is, liberty is not the only value we prize and not the only priority for government.

10) Suggest that it is the people themselves who are demanding greater government intrusiveness.

citizens themselves are recognising that it is in their interests to have a modern and secure means of identification which better protects against crime, fraud and illegal immigration and also protects each of them as individuals, their property but also their privacy.

11) "The debate has moved on, get used to it."

the issue for the future is not whether biometrics are used - they are now already being used by companies, by retailers, on new laptop computers in place of passwords to protect personal security and privacy: the question is how they will be used and under what protections for the rights of the individual.

12) Everything will be fine as long as we have sufficient 'transparency', 'scrutiny' and 'accountability'.

it is right that the Information Commissioner - independent of Government - should continue to have, on behalf of the public, oversight of how Government collects, hold and uses data - testing it against the best data protection laws and ensuring individuals will have the right to see the information held on them. ... we must always ensure that there is - as we have legislated on ID cards - proper accountability to Parliament, with limits to use of the data enshrined in parliamentary legislation, the exercise of responsibilities in this area subject to regular and open scrutiny by Parliament, with detailed reports on any new powers published and laid before it.

13) But we do need that national collective debate about what citizenship and new-liberty are to mean in the Glorious New Era. Leading to a Bill of Rights Bill of Rights and Duties.

Jack Straw is signalling the start of a national consultation on the case for a new British Bill of Rights and Duties ... This will include a discussion of how we can entrench and enhance our liberties - building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them - but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights. We will also examine the rights and responsibilities that flow from British citizenship, informed by the work being carried out by Peter Goldsmith on citizenship.

The government will research the matter, then tell us what our new rights and responsibilities shall be. Don't be surprised if they are radically different from what they were before, and focus more on the rights of the collective. The government may decide that new-liberty turns out to be considerably less aligned with bourgeois values than old-liberty.

Apposite cynicism about "rational" debate

We believe if you talk about your [inalienable] rights, you will defin­itely lose part of them.
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The President of Iran yesterday expressed his scepticism about proposed talks with the European Union regarding his country's nuclear programme.

Now, while I do not mean to endorse Iran's position on nuclear power, I do think Ahmadinejad's interpretation of what is being offered may be correct. Once you start 'discussing' whether an important right or principle (e.g. habeas corpus; torture is wrong; no censorship) should or should not be upheld, you have basically lost the crucial battle of the war.

Inalienable rights, to the extent they exist, and whether they are right or wrong, are not based on rational argument but on feeling. This is something certain people, who go in for strenuous efforts to provide key principles with rational support, seem not to understand. Or perhaps they do, and are in fact ambivalent about those principles?

Once you start having to argue about why torture is wrong, or why liberty from unwarranted surveillance might matter, you know the ground has shifted. Compare contemporary discussions of torture with, say, the hoo-ha stirred up by James Watson's comments about race. On one of the two issues, discussion is out of the question. On the other, the answer is up for grabs. Which is more likely to happen soon in Britain: financing of research into racial differences in IQ, or the legally sanctioned torture of a suspected terrorist?

The point is not the postmodern one that rationality is merely one of many equally valid positions, but that what is presented as rational debate is often a cover for an attempt to force a desired change. (Cf. citizens' juries and similar types of phoney consultation.) There is by now a well-established tradition of pseudo-rationality in the West. Ostensibly, we seem to be dealing with intellectual analysis; in practice, the conclusions are almost always in a particular direction: e.g. in favour of pseudo-egalitarianism and more state intervention, and against Christianity, privacy and any kind of non-collectivised hierarchy. Entire collective blogs are based on this kind of pseudo-analysis.

Let me push this point one step further, though here I am getting speculative. Is it possible that one of the key things which certain non-Westerners hate and fear about the West is precisely this pseudo-rationalism, which tends to question and undermine any values other than its own?

The end justifies the lie

The excellent Bel — who's in my top 10 of UK political blogs (the real one, not the spoof) — last week gave us three examples of what I regard as a key feature of mediocracy: deception. (A manifestation of the more general theme of style-over-substance, or appearance-matters-more-than-content.) The worst of the examples cited by her is the recent case of Culture Minister James Purnell, who turned up late for a hospital function but was

photoshopped (by the hospital, and allegedly with his knowledge) into a picture taken earlier, so as to give the impression that he had arrived and posed with the other MPs there ... It would appear that it is no longer important to get the facts right, so long as the bigger ’story’ or narrative, is in place.

It reminded me of a similar phenomenon described by reporter Jenny Kleeman in a Dispatches programme two years ago, in which we were told that "The Labour Party kept files called ‘real people’ — lists of seemingly ordinary individuals who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to endorse Labour in public, or to pose for photoshoots. And if too few ‘real people’ were around, party workers would make up the numbers." *

Bel continues:

There is this whole idea that deliberate inaccuracies do not matter, as long as the objective, or the story, is valid, or for a good cause. I find that troubling. We saw that a few years ago in the case of the Mirror newspaper and the faked torture pictures. When the pictures were discovered to be fake, the defence used by the newspaper was along the lines of, ‘the pictures might have been fake, but the stories of abuse which they were highlighting, were true.’ That is a very dangerous line of reasoning, and one that has crept into social and political discourse.

The same kind of ideological-correctness-matters-more-than-reality approach is at work in the state education system.

... there is a disregard for facts, even in the classroom. A school, especially at elementary level, should be a place free of agenda, full of questioning, and with more than a passing regard for basic facts. That this is not the case is highlighted by news this week that a father has applied to court for an order to stop Al Gore’s climate change movie being shown in the classrooms. Gore’s movie is by no means the last word on climate change, its science has actually been challenged in places by serious scholars of the subject. For the Government to allow it to be shown in schools without giving room for a counter-view is just more evidence of the prevailing disregard for facts.

For Gore to call his film 'An Inconvenient Truth' is doubly tendentious. First, if his 'truth' is indeed true, you could equally well argue that it is a convenient truth for most governments, since it rationalises increases in state intervention. (The US is the exception to the rule here, and probably only because they happen to have a particularly stubborn President, whose faith in experts is not what it 'ought' to be. Not for very much longer, methinks.) Second, the real inconvenience is data which doesn't fit with the preferred belief system of the il-liberal elite, e.g. research which fails to support the so-called consensus view on climate change. There are now plenty of people who argue that such research simply shouldn't get done.

From my experience, I would say that a phenomenon similar to that in schools is at work inside academia. In most institutions it may not yet have reached the point of denying or even falsifying data. But I am pretty certain there is a good deal of bias going on in favour of research which will buttress the ideologically desirable viewpoint, and against research which might undermine it.

The polemicisation of evolutionary biology by people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is an example of how belief in the rightness of a particular perspective is beginning to trump genuinely critical enquiry, even in scientific areas. (Though of course the proponents of this quasi-religious approach like to portray themselves as thoroughly 'critical').

* This quote by Kleeman is actually from a follow-up article by her in the Daily Mail of 21 May 2005. Does my claiming it's what she said in the programme count as doctoring? Possibly, but at least you're getting all the facts. Comment

Liberal posturing

President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger:

this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself ... [In] universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power. We cannot make war or peace. We can only make minds. And to do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.

On Monday, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech at Columbia. This, not surprisingly, aroused some controversy. Columbia claimed its right to invite whom it likes, as part of its remit of promoting free debate. Fair enough.

But claiming that this demonstrates the perfect liberality of the contemporary academic community, and its tolerance of the full range of viewpoints? "In universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth"? Excuse me if I'm a little sceptical. Bollinger claimed that they would have invited Hitler if he had been willing to engage in debate. This seems disingenuous. I cannot imagine Columbia inviting (say) Jean-Marie Le Pen or Jörg Haider — or, come to that, anyone with seriously non-PC views.

Stanford cannot even elect Donald Rumsfeld to a Hoover Institution fellowship without faculty members being up in arms about it. Harvard could not bear its President Larry Summers suggesting that inequality between the sexes might have something to do with genetic endowment.

In January 2005 Summers suggested ... the possibility that many factors outside of socialization could explain why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering positions. He suggested one such possible reason could be men's higher variance in relevant innate abilities or innate preference ... On March 15 2005, members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a motion of "lack of confidence" in the leadership of Summers. (Wikipedia)

The US is one of the few places where an explicitly conservative academic body (Hoover) is permitted to exist in association with an A-list university (Stanford). In Britain, the kind of hoo-ha over Rumsfeld couldn't happen: someone of an obviously right-wing persuasion would never be considered for faculty in the first place.

A mediocracy likes to take pride in its supposed tolerance and liberality. What it is actually tolerant and liberal towards may be rather specific, e.g. sex, rudeness, brutality in movies, certain types of crime, resentment of inequality, other cultures (provided they are large enough).

On the other hand, things which mediocracy tolerates only grudgingly if at all include: capital accumulation, celibacy, non-egalitarian ideologies, non-proletarian versions of masculinity, private medicine, business, Christianity, hierarchy, and aristocracy. What distinguishes mediocracy, then, is not greater tolerance per se, but an ideological shift accompanied by promotion of some things and disapproval of others.

If you want some ideas about why Islam seems to pass ideological criteria for being tolerated better than Christianity does, see this post at Protein Wisdom.

More scepticism about Columbia's moral high ground here.

Enemy Number One?

Richard Dawkins seems to be at risk of turning into a parody of himself. Careful, Professor Dawkins, the mediocratic media doesn't really like intellectuals, and has a tendency to crudify both the things they say and their (the intellectuals') social image. Also, remember that the media's attitude to celebrities is highly ambivalent. They may build you up, then, equally gleefully, collaborate in tearing you down. Still, at least you're (presumably) making some money out of it all.

Dawkins' latest media appearance is in Channel 4's The Enemies of Reason. But I wonder whether, in his rigid but selective cut-offs between science and non-science, he doesn't come out as an enemy of reason himself.

Dawkins talks about "the rigours of logic, observation and evidence" and emphasises "respect for evidence". Yet he fails to produce evidence for his assertions that there is an "epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking", or that "we live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining ground", or that "primitive darkness is coming back", or that "every day of the week we're encouraged to retreat into the fog of the superstitious past". Without data showing that (e.g.) an increasing proportion of people believe in astrology, these claims are mere hyperbole.

Dawkins shows an experiment on dowsing which proves to be negative. Like most experiments of this kind, the conditions are rather different from those under which the people who claim it works would normally do it. (Several of the dowsers refer to this point, but Dawkins has little time for these "excuses".) In any case, a single negative result doesn’t prove much. *

Yet the refusal to accept from this one experiment that dowsing doesn't work makes Dawkins feel entitled to opine that the dowsers'

state of denial is extraordinary. Even when confronted with hard fact these dowsers prefer not to face up to truth but retain their delusion.

Is this "respect for evidence"? Or just respect for his own prejudices, and hence not much better than the position he attributes to the dowsers?

Invoking illusionist Derren Brown as a source of support may be revealing about the underlying motivations of Dawkins' mission. Brown is shown deceiving members of his audience into believing that he has contacted their dead relatives. An extract is shown from Brown's programme “Messiah”, in which (according to Wikipedia) "Brown tricks three women into believing that he is in contact with deceased loved ones and many tears are shed. Afterwards it was explained to the participants that it was a trick, and those appearing agreed to broadcasting the event." So Brown has effectively made money (big money, rather than the piddling amounts made by most psychics) out of other people's gullibility, even if he enlightens them after the event. However, Brown is (Dawkins tells us) "a celebrated illusionist but also a sceptic". That must make it okay, then.

Why are many people drawn to pseudoscience, as Dawkins complains? Perhaps because they find the de rigueur reductionism of many contemporary scientists and intellectuals oppressive. In The Power of Life or Death I wrote that

It is easy to despise the alternative therapies industry for being unable to offer remedies which are genuinely effective, and many doctors appear to regard it in this way. However, the situation in which a more sympathetic, client‑subordinated service is only available in a completely emasculated form because of legal restrictions is one for which the conventional medical profession is itself largely responsible.

Perhaps there is something similar at work in science, which proselytisers such as Dawkins would do well to bear in mind. The more you insist that science unquestionably excludes interesting exotic things at the margins, the more you may find that you steer your audience into the arms of pseudoscience.

By being polemical and 'passionate', Dawkins comes across as not much better than the breathless enthusiasts for the paranormal that you get on programmes such as Most Haunted. The pressing, cajoling quality of his voice-over verges, at times, on the embarrassing. Is this really designed to sell science to those he deems 'gullible'? If so, I doubt its efficacy.

The suspicion that Dawkins' aim is to sell a particular worldview, rather than the scientific method, is strengthened by his resorting to political correctness in attacking those he deems 'enemies'. Talking about astrology, for example, he compares it to racial stereotyping in being "guilty of facile discrimination".

On the face of it, The Enemies of Reason is addressed to ordinary people who are insufficiently critical about astrology etc. Dawkins' explanation for the attitudes of such people is that "we desperately want to feel there's an organising force at work in our bewilderingly complex world". However, he has so far failed to show why people who don't need to apply rigorous scientific criteria in their everyday lives should choose to adopt his somewhat selective scepticism. Perhaps he will do so in the second instalment.

More thoughts about Dawkins here and here.

* Please note, I have no views about dowsing.

Inversions and deceptions in economic data

The charts below claim to show real US money growth and inflation — compared to reported. They're taken from John Williams' Shadow Government Statistics site.

I can't comment on the accuracy of Williams' data, but it's worth thinking about. In particular, consider the extrapolated chart of M3 — a statistic which the Federal Reserve last year stopped reporting, for reasons which were not made very clear at the time.

Phoney consultation: I told you so

A couple of months back I wrote a post satirising the government's latest "public consultation" exercise. I suggested this was a prime example of phoney pseudo-egalitarianism — one of the key themes of mediocracy.

Appearance: The people in power are being "inclusive"; the establishment cares what ordinary people think.

Reality: Your answers are welcome, so long as they agree with what has already been concluded.

The exercise took place last Saturday. An article in today's Guardian by Liam Curtin, one of the members of the public chosen to take part, provides support for my suspicions. For example, I said the way the questions were framed could easily bias the answers in a particular direction. Curtin reports that one of the questions was "Should people who harm themselves by smoking, etc, be allowed hospital treatment?", with the possible answers being "strongly agree", "tend to agree" or "not sure".

I don't think the results of this type of questioning would be considered meaningful by anyone familiar with social survey methods. Certainly not meaningful in the way they will probably be taken to be, by our friendly, caring, accessible government.

Update

Ben Page of MORI (the firm which organised the exercise) has left a comment, reproducing his response to Liam Curtin’s criticisms. He denies Curtin’s claim that the range of possible answers to questions were skewed towards agreeing.

He also argues that "people mostly tell us that they don’t want to start from a completely blank sheet of paper". I do wonder slightly whether this is a euphemism for offering people pre-determined attitudes which they can either take or leave, but without scope for them to suggest a completely different attitude. We know that Mr. Blair thinks the model of the state/individual relationship should be changed in a particular way; is it too cynical to think this aim was incorporated into the agenda of the consultation?

What might have been more useful, but no doubt at variance with the kind of ‘democratisation’ aimed at by New Labour, and in any case too threatening, is to have done precisely that: give members of the public a completely blank sheet and see what they come up with.