cultural Marxism's obsession with Language – part 2

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The term ‘cultural Marxism’ is here used to mean:
the corpus of Marxist ideology excluding the parts that are overtly about economics or politics,
not the ‘Cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theory, usually spelt with a capital C.

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TERMINOLOGY

The fact that the combination of the words cultural and Marxism is also found in the context of a conspiracy theory is regrettable, but does not change the fact that there is something deserving of the term ‘cultural Marxism’. Attempts by the Left to rule use of the phrase as taboo should be resisted. Such attempts should be seen as part of a broader programme to block discussion by seeking to control language.
   Using the term ‘Critical Theory’ to describe what is essentially Marxist ideology may have been an acceptable rehabilitation exercise in the 1960s, when it was still possible to ignore the horrors of Marxism as implemented in practice, and at a time when most intellectuals treated Marx as a kind of colossus or demigod, so that the qualifier ‘Marxist’ was practically unnecessary when discussing sociology or political theory. In the twenty-first century, given our knowledge of what happens under communism, continued use of this rebranding amounts to subterfuge.
   It is easy to see, however, why those engaged in ‘Critical Theory’ dislike having their work identified as Marxism. Highlighting the intimate connection between the two weakens their claim to moral superiority, and it is this pretence to moral virtue on which much of their current cultural and ideological power depends.
   It is part of the marketing strategy of cultural Marxism that it claims to have resulted in the empowerment of underprivileged social groups. However, there is little hard evidence of any effect in this area, beyond the observation that cultural Marxism has contributed to the associated debates becoming increasingly heated and polarised.
   One response to Critical Theory which has proved popular, particularly among the Right, is to evade the Marxism issue by diverting critical attention to the phenomenon of ‘postmodernism’. The latter concept is extraordinarily vague – which may help to explain why it has become an attractive scapegoat for commentators from both Left and Right.
   The labelling of cultural Marxism as ‘postmodernism’ derives from reactions to the work of a group of Marxists associated with the Paris Sorbonne – the primary home of cultural Marxism during the sixties and seventies. These Marxists began theorising in an even more ‘philosophical’ and less rule-bound way than their predecessors, and exhibited selective scepticism about some of the dogmas of Marxism, e.g. historical inevitability. We are talking here about individuals such as Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida.
   This group of academic Marxists is now often lumped together with anarchic and self-parodying trends in architecture and art, under the heading ‘postmodern’.
   There are two problems with shifting blame from Marxism to postmodernism. First, doing so means falling into one of the deception-traps of cultural Marxism. The trap involves accepting the theorising and pseudo-scepticism of postmodern Marxists as what it is held out to be, namely philosophising, in the classical sense of exploring possibilities and arriving at the most logically persuasive one; rather than seeing it for what it is. Namely, just another device used in a biased way to produce conclusions Marxists like. As with other branches of cultural Marxism, political collectivism appears to be the background goal and driver, and any conclusions arrived at via abstruse ‘postmodern’ theorising are required to fit with this goal.
   Second, by linking Marxist theorising to the playfulness of postmodern art, such theorising acquires an air of being ‘fun’. Who, after all, could see philosophical playfulness as threatening, other than the most rigid of cultural conservatives?
   It seems best to avoid such tacit legitimising or romanticising. Cultural Marxism, notwithstanding occasional pretend-playfulness, is simply Marxism with a prettier dress. Marxism is no more characterisable as ‘fun’ than Nazism.
   The concept of cultural Marxism, and awareness of the expansion of the realm of cultural-Marxist ideology via the university system, can help us make sense of a number of otherwise puzzling contemporary phenomena. These include the polarisation and intensification of attitudes about gender, race and inequality; the increasing monoculture of highbrow debate; and the gradual elimination of free speech from campus. These phenomena may not seem linked to obvious Marxist tropes, such as dictatorship of the proletariat or abolition of private property, but they can be connected to the cultural/philosophical parts of Marxist ideology without much difficulty.

part 1: introduction
part 2: terminology
part 3: ‘ideology’
part 4: which ideology is dominant?
part 5: ‘good’ and ‘evil’
part 6: ‘culture is a social product’ (extract from my forthcoming book)
part 7: Language (extract from my forthcoming book)

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cultural Marxism’s obsession with Language – part 1

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The term ‘cultural Marxism’ is here used to mean:
the corpus of Marxist ideology excluding the parts that are overtly about economics or politics,
not the ‘Cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theory, usually spelt with a capital C.

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In other words, cultural Marxism is those elements of Marxist ideology that deal with cultural or philosophical topics, and which are currently found widely disseminated among the academic humanities, particularly in literature studies and other arts subjects, usually under the misleading label of ‘Critical Theory’.
   Here is an example of cultural Marxism, from literature professor Terry Eagleton’s undergraduate textbook Literary Theory.

... ‘pure’ literary theory is an academic myth: some of the theories we have examined in this book are nowhere more clearly ideological than in their attempts to ignore history and politics altogether ...

It is not the fact that literary theory is political which is objectionable ... what is really objectionable is the nature of its politics ... [Literary theory] assumes, in the main, that at the centre of the world is the contemplative individual self, bowed over its book, striving to gain touch with experience, truth, reality, history or tradition ... It is a view equivalent in the literary sphere to what has been called possessive individualism in the social realm ... it reflects the values of political system which subordinates the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise.

Both conceptually, and in terms of academic practice, there is a cultural/philosophical part of Marxism that is distinct from the overtly political part. This more philosophical part includes ideas about the individual, about psychology, about culture and about other related topics. It can appropriately be referred to as ‘cultural Marxism’, to distinguish it from political Marxism.
   In the West, cultural Marxism some time ago acquired an identity and momentum of its own, relatively independent of the oscillating fortunes of political Marxism. It can be – and is being – taught to students without the requirement of thinking in any detail about the associated politics. One needs to bear in mind, however, that since these more cultural elements of Marxist ideology were invented with the political goal in mind, that goal is likely to be embedded in all cultural-Marxist material, even when not immediately visible.
   The history of cultural Marxism goes back to the early days of Marxism following the death of Marx; rather than beginning in the 1950s with the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ based at Germany’s Institut für Sozialforschung, as some analysts argue. Georgi Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life (1912) and Franz Mehring’s The Lessing Legend (1893) are early examples of cultural Marxism.
   Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism describes Mehring’s ideas as follows:

In his works on literature Mehring generally endeavoured to show that the greatness of a writer was measured by his success in presenting the aspirations and ideals of the class which he historically represented ... He held that no artistic values or tastes were permanent irrespective of history, but that all were relative to social situations.

The above two quotations illustrate one way of interpreting cultural Marxism: the collectivist mindset applied to cultural/philosophical topics. Culture, which might, in the absence of Marxist ideology, be seen as individualistic, is to be reinterpreted as a collective activity that should be subordinated to collective needs and interests. Pure art – art that does not involve politics – is to be regarded not only as unacceptable but as impossible.
   I will consider the idea of ‘collectivism’ – and its popularity with intellectuals – in a later instalment, but we should note straight away that the concept is not equivalent to some kind of pure democracy in which everything is decided by ‘the people’ (that is to say, everyone acting collectively). Collectivism involves massive state control (supposedly in the interests of all citizens), and since the state must operate through authorised agents, it inevitably means – as under Soviet communism – the existence of a large political elite.
   Analogously, cultural collectivism is likely to involve culture being controlled and policed by an intellectual elite.

QUOTATIONS
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (second edition), Blackwell 1996, pp.170-171.
Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism Volume 2, OUP 1978, p.59.

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part 1: introduction
part 2: terminology
part 3: ‘ideology’
part 4: which ideology is dominant?
part 5: ‘good’ and ‘evil’
part 6: ‘culture is a social product’ (extract from my forthcoming book)
part 7: Language (extract from my forthcoming book)

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Wikipedia and the culture war

• In January 2018 I published a post about the Ethics-and-Empire scandal. This was a shameful episode in the history of academia, centred on the University of Oxford, in which a number of junior and senior academics engaged in a bullying exercise against one of their own, for daring to flout the prevailing taboo against discussing the topics of empire and colonialism other than negatively. I had, and still have, no personal interest in this topic, but I felt that the behaviour of the dons in question was wrong and harmful.
   My post was intended to make the perpetrators of the bullying look bad, and I guess it succeeded in doing so. It can't have been pleasant for the academics to have been exposed and censured in this way, but I do not think bullying of dissidents should be tolerated, and there was nothing underhand in my critique. The academics in question should have taken it on the chin.
   Ten days after my post appeared, two Wikipedia users, acting in apparent collusion, succeeded in getting my Wikipedia article (which had been there for 15 years) nominated for deletion. The timing was so close to that of my blog post that it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the vandalism was a revenge attack.
   Rather than demoralising me, the vandalism encouraged me to write a full-length article about the Ethics-and-Empire issue. This generated a significant number of views, and seems to have widened awareness of shenanigans within the humanities well beyond what would have happened if I had not written anything more than the blog post. So the action of the vandals backfired. (The deletion attempt, incidentally, failed.)
   I have no idea who was behind the attack: whether it was some of the academics themselves, or one or more of their minions, or some fanboys/girls of one of the academics, or simply one of the global army of SJWs who believe they are fighting on the same side as intolerant humanities professors.

• As anyone who has been observing political and cultural affairs for the last few years should have noticed by now, there is — in the words of the Home Secretary — a war out there. If you don't observe things with a critical eye, the war can seem invisible, but that is because the media is largely on the side of what has become the culturally dominant team.
   Calling it a culture war captures only half the truth. Physical violence is rarely involved, but the war goes well beyond mere intellectual and moral positioning. People's lives and careers are at stake. Many of those who consider themselves on the 'right' side — and SJW is as good a term as any for them — seem to feel justified in using whatever methods are available, including dirty tricks.
   They like to present themselves as being on the side of the deserving underdog, and the opposition as hostile to underdog groups. Since they control cultural institutions and hence the dominant narratives, this myth has become easy for them to perpetuate.
   In reality, the war is about oppression versus tolerance. Ironic, since it is they who have always claimed to oppose oppression and intolerance (though there is less reference these days to the latter, presumably because their claims to be on the side of tolerance have become hard to sustain). It is they, rather, who are the oppressors, or wanna-be oppressors.
   Every day they no doubt convert hundreds more to their cause, using their control of parts of the education system, particularly in the tertiary sector, to indoctrinate students. Given their apparent dominance, the counter-struggle to maintain openness and tolerance can easily seem doomed. Fortunately, the Brexit and Trump phenomena demonstrated that there are many ordinary people on the side of anti-oppression. Contrary to the wisdom of the il‑liberal elites, those ordinary people are not stupid, or racist, or any of the other slurs SJWs like to throw at them.

• Perhaps I am getting too close again to exposing some of the intellectual frauds at the heart of the academic humanities profession. Last year I began to critically analyse Oxford professor Paul Collier's socialist handbook, The Future of Capitalism (see here, here and here); earlier this year, I highlighted the contradictions of anti-individualists such as Daniel Kahneman.
   This time, the interval between critique and counter-attack has been longer. And rather than attacking my page — which may have been deemed unsuitable as a target since it survived a take-down attempt too recently — they have gone for the page of my colleague Celia Green.
   Via what appears to have been another hostile double act, within a 48-hour period starting on 31 May my colleague's article — which had remained largely stable for over ten years — was first nominated for deletion, and then given a makeover to reassign her to the derogatory category of 'parapsychologist'. The effect of the hostile edits was detraction from what she is best known for: philosophical scepticism, through books such as The Human Evasion, and pioneering research on lucid dreams and false awakenings which helped to put those two phenomena on the map. At the same time, the article on our organisation, Oxford Forum, was also mooted for deletion by one of the double act (by adding a notability tag).
   Oxford Forum is of course a thorn in the flesh of the University, not because we pose any meaningful threat to an organisation hundreds of times larger than ours, but simply because, like most other members of the il-liberal elite with comfortable positions, they find it hard to tolerate serious challenge of any kind.

• Inevitably, Wikipedia is becoming yet another locus for the culture war. The gradual woke‑isation of many of the articles with political themes highlights the weakness of the wiki model, which in other ways seems to have been surprisingly successful. The model works well in uncontroversial areas such as most of the sciences, history and general knowledge. It can be argued there is excess volume in certain areas — whole pages devoted to minor cartoon characters or individual soap opera episodes — but those can be ignored. By and large, Wikipedia has become an incredibly helpful tool.
   However, the wiki model works less well with controversial topics, or with living persons. No meaningful "NPOV" is possible when it comes to issues such as Trump, or alt-right, or cultural Marxism, or communism. It boils down to a battle of numbers: how many Wiki contributors have the skill and energy to spin the article in one direction, versus those who would like to spin it in the other direction.
   Take the article called 'Collectivism'. In 2012 this reflected a reasonable balance between positive and negative. (Here is a link to a saved version of the old article; note particularly the section 'Criticisms'.) By 2021 the article had turned distinctly biased, with collectivism being given a largely positive spin (paraphrasing: "it's so much better than individualism, which is selfish and uncaring!"), and the Criticisms section disappearing. Unfortunately I didn't keep a copy of the 2021 version — I assumed I could come back to it later — because the article has now been removed altogether. What remains is an article on Communitarianism which is almost entirely favourable, and dominated by woke-speak such as the following:

Early communitarians were charged with being, in effect, social conservatives. However, many contemporary communitarians, especially those who define themselves as responsive communitarians, fully realize and often stress that they do not seek to return to traditional communities, with their authoritarian power structure, rigid stratification, and discriminatory practices against minorities and women. Responsive communitarians seek to build communities based on open participation, dialogue, and truly shared values.

Such woke-speak is not exactly false, but hopelessly vague and one-sided, rather like material in a religious manual.

My verdict on Wikipedia:
Do not consult it on any topics to do with political theory; articles in this area are (by now) likely to be unreliable and/or biased. For such topics you are better off with Encyclopedia Britannica. Or supplement with Conservapedia to get a different perspective, for the sake of balance.

Gender Pay Gap ideology

This is a story about a yoghurt manufacturer. This yoghurt manufacturer makes excellent yoghurt. So much so that the firm now has a dominant market share. Having become hugely successful, the yoghurt manufacturer decided to employ a marketing director. The marketing director announced that, as the company had become dominant, it no longer needed to focus its advertising on product quality, and should switch to virtue signalling. It was decided that this should be done in two main ways, one to do with the environment, the other to do with gender.
   With regard to the environment, it was decided that the company should abandon plastic lids, and leave people to rely on the film covering. This, the company announced, would avoid many tonnes of plastic waste. Instead, people could apply to the company for a reusable lid. However, this required customers first to collect points on their phone by scanning QR codes on the yoghurt tubs. Unfortunately, this scanning technology often failed. Also, for many months the company was out of reusable lids; however, it assured customers that the lids would soon be back in stock, and to "keep checking back on the website!" Meanwhile, supermarkets delivered many lidless tubs of the yoghurt to customers. A significant percentage of these tubs were damaged in transit due to lack of lids, leading to spillage of yoghurt over customers' deliveries, and resulting in much wastage of food. However, those losses were outweighed (from the company's point of view) by its enhanced public image.

With regard to gender, the company smugly announced on its website that it was working hard to reduce its "gender pay gap" (GPG), providing statistics to prove this was indeed the case. Since no target GPG was mentioned, readers were left with the implication that the most desirable level of GPG would be zero, and that this was what the company was aiming at. Readers were also left with the impression that a non-zero GPG was somehow morally wrong.

* * * * *

Treating a gender pay gap as an automatic negative, thus implicitly calling for action to reduce it to zero, is not about making sure that a woman doing the same job as a man is paid the same as the man. It is — in effect — about arranging that women do the same jobs as men. In other words, if there are four company directors, two of them should (it is implicitly demanded) be women. If there are six secretaries, three of them should be men. If there are two cleaners, the gender split should again be 50:50. That seems the more obvious way of eliminating the GPG, by equalising proportions.
   The less obvious way of eliminating the GPG would be to equalise pay between different jobs. If directors, secretaries, cleaners, and other jobs were all paid the same hourly rate, the gender pay gap would disappear, because everybody would receive the same rate of pay.

The idea that the female members of a company’s workforce should, on average, earn exactly the same per hour as the male members rests on a particular theory of gender differences. Namely, that they should not exist.

* * * * *

Let's start by clarifying the terminology. Discussions about whether women have a greater or lower level of X than men, where X is some characteristic such as intelligence or management skill, are befuddled by the fact that talking about differences between populations requires a different approach from talking about differences between individuals. We can say "women have Fallopian tubes, men do not" without much risk of error, but saying "women are shorter than men" is misleading. What is really meant is:

average-height-of-women has a lower value than average-height-of-men.

If you want to abbreviate this, you could write it as:

{women} are shorter than {men}

where curly brackets round the word "women" indicates that what is meant is "the average woman" or "the population of women, considered in terms of its statistical properties". Note that although {women} are shorter than {men}, there are many women who are taller than the average man.

The red (green) bell curve shows the distribution of men's (women's) height.
The shaded area represents women who are taller than the average man. (schematic)

We could easily pick a group of tall women (call them T-women) and a group of short men (S-men) where we could say:

T-women are taller than S-men

without risk of being misleading, since every single T-woman would be taller than every single S-man. Similarly, we could easily pick a group of women ("alpha-women") and a group of men ("beta-men") where it would be fine to say "alpha-women are cleverer than beta-men" (meaning every alpha-woman is cleverer than every beta-man) — just as easily as it would be to do it the other way round, and find two groups where we could say, "alpha-men are cleverer than beta-women".

* * * * *

Having got that out of the way, the question arises:

Are {women} the same as {men}?

In other words: we know that men are different from one another, and that populations of them normally exhibit bell curves for any given characteristic (height, intelligence, artistic skill etc). Do {women} have exactly the same bell curve as {men} for every single characteristic? Or, to rephrase that, to exclude physical differences such as strength or height:

Do {women} have exactly the same bell curve as {men} for every innate characteristic relevant to white-collar jobs?

Prima facie, this is highly unlikely. Take any two populations that have been selected by two different criteria, and the chances that the two populations have identical averages on every one of a group of measures is extremely small. The probability of exact equality on a single measure is already very small — though if you sampled data often enough, equality of a single measure might happen occasionally by chance, especially if you have to allow for errors in measurement.

* * * * *

How then can it make sense to aim at zero GPG? We know that childcare (still) makes a difference to what women currently choose to do job-wise, so that is one reason we would not expect to see perfect equality between the jobs that {women} and {men} do. Even if we allow that some of what happens is not due to innate differences, but the result of cultural factors, so that in theory things could be different, the assumption that:

innately, {women} and {men} are identical in terms of all preferences and talents

is without empirical support, and a priori highly implausible.
   Of course, that doesn't imply {women} are less intelligent [or: insert other required employee property] than {men}. Depending on how you define intelligence, for example, it could well be that {women} are more intelligent than {men}. The chances that {women} are exactly as 'intelligent' as {men}, however, can safely be taken to be negligible.

Note
The requirement for UK firms with more than 250 employees to calculate and publish their gender pay gap data came into force in 2018. The legislation was invented by Labour but its implementation was resisted by the Conservatives for some years, until David Cameron's pledge in 2015 — to "end the gender pay gap within a generation" — triggered its go-ahead via the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act.
   Employers do not have a legal duty to take action to reduce the gap. However, the requirement to publish their figures is clearly intended to put pressure on firms to find ways to make the gap disappear — regardless of whether it's efficient for them to do so.

subcontracted ‘caring’

• How does one improve society? Simple: find an individual who needs something but is unable to get it, and give up some of your own resources to help him or her get the thing they need.*
   Since you've chosen your altruistic action, rather than having it forced on you, you will hopefully feel better — at least on some level — as a result of carrying it out. Hence you're better off overall, as well as the other person. It's win-win.
   As with other voluntary transactions between two individuals, both parties benefit, and so 'society' (meaning: everyone in a society, considered in aggregate) can be said to be better off than before.
   Important caveat: make sure no one else is worse off as a result of your help. Example: helping someone build an outhouse in her garden which will accommodate her grandfather is good for her, and good for him — and good for you, if it makes you feel pleasantly virtuous — but not good for the neighbours if it spoils their view. Once you have to weigh pluses for some people against minuses for others, the goal of 'improving society' ceases to be a simple one, and becomes difficult or impossible.

• One benefit of capitalism is that it can make it easier to provide such help by simply giving an individual money. If markets are sufficiently developed, a better way for the individual to get what they need may be by purchasing it, using money provided by the donor, rather than the donor trying to provide the help directly.

• Is there any way of doing such uncontroversial improving-of-society on a larger scale? You can try to encourage others to follow your example, of providing help on an individual-to-individual basis. Or you could get together with others to provide help to particular individuals. (If your group tries to make assistance available to everyone, it may find itself swamped with excess demand — unless the service is one only required in emergencies, such as sea rescue.)
   There are overseas charities that try to operate on this principle, getting volunteers to give hands-on help in villages, with basic things such as building wells.
   You can try to get other individuals to fund your group's society-improving activities — not the state, however, since that would involve involuntary funding by individuals, via taxation.

• This simple at-least-one-person-is-better-off-and-no-one-is-worse-off formula provides a basic model for interpreting — objectively — the idea of 'social improvement'. Beyond that, we are in the territory of subjectivity. There is no way of objectively adding gains for some to losses for others, in order to determine whether a change produces a net positive increment for 'society'.

• The above types of action are not, however, what most people mean when they think or talk about 'improving society'. What is meant tends to be one of two things.
1. Demanding that the state engage in some activity ostensibly intended to improve the position of the less fortunate, or demanding an increase in the level of an existing activity of this kind. Implicit in such calls for state action — though rarely expressed — is a demand that taxation be increased to finance the activity. In other words, this version of 'social improvement' involves the coercive removal of resources from individual citizens, for the supposed benefit of a subgroup of citizens. The target subgroup may constitute anything from a tiny minority to the majority of the population.
2. The second kind of 'improvement' that gets discussed is one which more blatantly involves removal of resources from one group in society, in order to reduce economic inequality. Such reduction of inequality is supposedly a good thing in its own right. Action of this kind on the part of the state is often described as redistribution, the implication being that it involves taking from some and giving to others, à la Robin Hood. This is misleading since most of the time, nothing is given to individuals in the way of spendable resources as a result of such 'redistribution'.
   What additionally confiscated funds are typically spent on (if it's anything beyond financing the deficits from programmes already committed to) are state-supplied services. Such services are ones for which (a) an individual normally has to demonstrate entitlement, often laboriously, (b) the content is determined by the preferences of service providers, rather than by users.

• There are of course many different ways of arguing in favour of any given policy, including policies of type (1) and (2) above. One can vaguely talk about "making things better", or "making things fairer". Or one could simply say "a lot of people want this", and have the issue put to a vote via an election. It's clear, however, why such concepts as "social improvement", or "increasing social welfare" are relatively attractive. They sound scientific. If a politician wants to look like he has the backing of expert opinion, he is more likely to want to talk about "society" or "social welfare" — because it generates an (erroneous) impression of objectivity — than about something that seems more nebulous or populist like "the good of the nation".

• In the nineteenth century, when social theorising first became all the rage, the issue for many intellectuals was merely one of which candidate system would generate the solution of universal human happiness. Should we have communism or anarchism? Voluntaryism or syndicalism? Given the horrors of the twentieth century, we should by now have grown up, and moved beyond the idea of a single answer that can magically make things marvellous for all. No social formula, when applied, is going to make everyone in a society feel better than before. Any given policy is going to be good for some and bad for others. To press ahead with a policy means, in effect, to write off the concerns of those who disagree. It's inevitable in government. No amount of analysis, science, or emphasis on spurious 'rationality' is going to get round this basic problem of politics. Pretending there is an objective solution to the conundrum, and a way of prioritising some policies as more 'rational' than others, or of regarding some voters' interests as more valid than others', is merely an invitation to authoritarianism.

• Notwithstanding these considerations, an ideology has developed in the West according to which 'improving society' is not only an admired but, increasingly, a required objective. There is now moral pressure to conform to the social improvement goal. Leaving things be and not doing anything (where doing typically means some new state action) is not regarded as an acceptable option, at least not among most bien pensants. If you're not seeking to improve society you should be, the ideology says. It's called caring (and failing to do so not caring), except that you typically express your 'caring' by contracting it out to the state, both in terms of providing the supposed help, and in terms of funding it via enforced subscription from taxpayers.
   Given that these versions of 'social improvement' and 'caring' involve people being coerced, it's not clear whether those who seek social improvement should be regarded with admiration or suspicion.
   An individual may of course feel strongly that something should be done in some area, e.g. climate change, the position of women, freedom of speech. Other individuals — and that includes me — may agree with some of the changes that are urgently proposed. To demand change, whether on behalf of oneself, or on behalf of a group one doesn't belong to, is legitimate. What is questionable is the claim that the change will "make society better".

• Take-home message. The concept of a policy improving society is, strictly, illegitimate. (Unless the policy is one to which, implausibly, every individual in the society assents.) As a scientist or an academic, one should avoid making use of the concept, either explicitly or implicitly.
   For a non-professional campaigner, it may be acceptable to talk about improving society — for the reason that he or she may be asked to justify their advocacy in such terms by others. I.e. "will your proposed change improve society?", to which it seems fair enough to respond "yes" rather than "possibly", "no", or "don't know". Provided the response doesn't come labelled as 'expert' or otherwise authorised, the questioner is free to take it or leave it — in contrast to a professional context, where there is an implication that one should accept the response as authoritative.
   I leave it as an exercise for readers to consider which of these two categories should apply to a politician. Is it ethical for politicians to talk about improving society, given the dodginess of the concept? If we think of them as merely campaigners for a particular position which reflects either voter demand or their own opinion, then it may be acceptable. If, on the other hand, as is increasingly common, a politician talks as if his proposals are somehow linked to scientific or other expertise coming out of academia, there is a case that he should make every effort to avoid invoking concepts such as 'social improvement' or 'social welfare'.

* Okay, so perhaps it's not as simple as I've made it sound. But the ways in which it's complicated don't disappear when you start thinking in terms of groups or classes rather than individuals — though they apparently become easier to ignore.

hyper-rationalists and their biases

• There is a category of person who believes the world would be improved if people could be made to act more rationally. Let us call such persons 'hyperrationalists'. (The prefix hyper- is not intended as pejorative.) Clearly there are many economists and psychologists working in, or associated with, the field of cognitive bias who fall into this category. The problem hyperrationalists need to deal with, but tend to avoid, is: what exactly is rational, and what is irrational? How does one (scientifically) define a 'good' or a 'better' decision, versus a 'bad' or 'worse' one?

• Hyperrationalists need to tread carefully when publicising their conclusions, especially when these come labelled as being 'expert' or 'scientific'. The insistence that some things are indisputably correct and others are not, and the ability of some group to claim authority in this matter, is one of the ingredients of totalitarianism. On a less extreme level, the belief that one is part of a group which has acquired the wisdom to see through illusions can lead to a kind of lazy arrogance. 'Oh yes, we know all about that point of view, we can safely dismiss it.' Or: 'Applying the nudge strategy is fine, because we have worked out what is in your best interests – and you don't even need to know about it!'

• Hyperrationalism is part of the post-Enlightenment programme that believes humans can be improved; and that humans can use logic, rationality, critique and science to make better decisions, improve their own lives, and improve society. But many of the assumptions of this programme have been tested and found wanting. Science and technology don't invariably improve people's lives, at least not without costs that are often not apparent initially. The belief that societies can be improved, or made perfect, has ironically led to human suffering on an appalling scale.
   The basic problem, which a long line of rationalists — culminating in the hyperrationalists — have tended to ignore, is three-fold:
(1) How do we define 'better'?
(2) Is 'improvement' going to be undertaken by individuals, or collectively? If collectively, which individuals will be making the decisions about 'improvement' on behalf of everyone else?
(3) How are differing ideas of what is 'better' to be reconciled?
Ignoring these issues leads to a kind of casual authoritarianism, where potential doubts and disagreements are dismissed or ignored, and the 'correct' answer is simply imposed on others, with or without their consent.

• As a result of the biases/irrationality research programme initiated by behavioural economists such as Daniel Kahneman (and before him Richard Thaler), and the subsequent pop-economics bandwagon (involving such books as Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational), there is now a general presumption that it has been proven that people are irrational. This is far from being the case. Yet the presumption — now habitually treated as a truism — has passed into popular intellectual mythology.
   Take an article published 2016 in online magazine Quanta, and republished by Pocket last year. Entitled 'The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions', with the subheading 'Irrationality may be a consequence of the brain's ravenous energy needs', the article simply takes it for granted that humans are irrational, the only thing remaining being to investigate when and why.
   To illustrate its thesis, the article cites research by Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at New York University. Glimcher and his colleagues "asked people to choose among a variety of candy bars, including their favorite — say, a Snickers." If offered a small number of competing candy bars along with a Snickers, participants would always choose the Snickers.

But if they were offered 20 candy bars, including a Snickers, the choice became less clear. They would sometimes pick something other than the Snickers [... However, when the experimenter removed all the candy bars] except the Snickers and the selected candy, participants would wonder why they hadn't chosen their favorite.

The results are interesting, and perhaps tell us something about human cognition and decision-making. But like all experiments of this kind they cannot tell us anything about 'irrationality', because there is no objective way of defining it.

• In the case of the NYU experiment, as in many others cited by behavioural economists, 'irrationality' or 'bad decision' is defined in terms of a person's subsequent remorse, or his/her wish to give a different answer after the event. Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational is peppered with examples of this kind. E.g. in the evening you make a decision about how much to drink, and the next morning you say that you definitely chose wrong. Then the next evening you repeat the whole cycle — possibly leading others (and/or yourself) to label you a fool.
   In an everyday context, there is nothing controversial about another person commenting, 'you are not acting in your best interests', or 'you are not giving sufficient weight to how you will feel in the morning', or even 'in the morning you are rational but in the evening you are irrational'. As someone being rigorously scientific one cannot make judgments of this kind, and one is not entitled to conclude anything about irrationality, or supoptimal decisions, from the data. The subject may have a good reason for recurrent heavy drinking, which he himself may not even be aware of. Even if he is aware of it he may not tell you, if he doesn't expect it to pass the reasonableness criterion of the average outside observer — let alone that of a scientific investigator.
   The phenomenon of subjects wishing they had made different decisions may tell you something about human psychology, but it cannot tell you anything about human rationality, unless you first assert norms of rationality which have no particular scientific basis. E.g. you impose the requirement that 'for a choice to be rational, one must not express regret about it later'; or: 'for a choice to be rational, it must depend only on material end results and not on the way the options are presented'.
   Of course our drinker may decide to mend his ways, and may do so by deciding his abstaining self is his more rational self. Impartial observers may opine that he has improved his life, by making better choices. What one cannot do is to assert that any of these perspectives is more rational than the one where it seems right for him to go on drinking, and to claim this assertion has scientific backing.

• Identifying one cognitive bias may be useful, as a way of expanding knowledge of psychology — though whether this knowledge can be used to 'improve' anything is a far less straightforward question than many hyperrationalists seem to assume. Collecting together several cognitive biases, and basing a grand theory on your collection, risks generating a bias of your own, given that the individual biases — and your collection — are unlikely to have been selected randomly.
   Daniel Kahneman is happy to let the biases he selects in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow lead him to the conclusion that others should, in general, be more involved in a person's decision-making. Indeed, he goes so far as to argue that rigorous respect for individual autonomy is "not tenable":*

[...] a theory that ignores what actually happens in people's lives and focuses exclusively on what they think about their life is not tenable [...]

However, the biases he chooses to include — or that have previously been picked for experimental investigation, by himself and others — mostly tend towards one particular implication. There are other biases, however, which do not. So far in my reading of his book I have not come across any mention of social biases — biases that arise when people make decisions or judgments in groups, such as the bandwagon effect. It's clear that emphasising such biases would undermine the policy conclusions Kahneman seeks to draw from his data.

* In a book seeking to lecture readers about objectivity and rationality, Professor Kahneman should perhaps have avoided the phrase "not tenable", which sounds like it means "logically inconsistent and hence necessarily false" but in this case merely reflects a subjective reasonableness standard, set by him and others with the same outlook.

• Human psychology is complex. By focusing on findings of a particular kind, it's easy to generate a biased picture. There are experiments purporting to show that, in certain contexts, individuals express overconfidence about their own (erroneous) judgments, and these experiments form part of Kahneman's narrative. But this is only one side of the story. In other contexts, individuals appear unduly willing to devalue their own judgments in favour of those of another person, if that person receives reinforcement either from numbers ('there's more of them than of me') or from some accreditation that supposedly makes him more knowledgeable or otherwise authoritative ('he is a someone, I am a nobody'). The Milgram experiments, where individuals obey an instruction to administer electric shocks in spite of their own misgivings, provide a classic illustration of the latter phenomenon.
   In other words, people may be just as likely to have too little faith in their intuitive judgments (e.g. 'I felt it was wrong to give painful electric shocks to the experimental subject but the scientist from the university told me to go ahead') as too much (e.g. 'I'm certain I remember correctly what happened at the accident'). Highlighting one type of bias at the expense of another in a popular book gives readers – well, a biased perspective.

• The pop-economics bandwagon re bias/rationality can itself be seen as a grand experiment about bias, with the following hypotheses being tested.
Is it possible for the author of a popular economics or psychology book to:
— exploit an emotional bias in readers (call it 'insecurity') in favour of believing they are poorer at making judgments than they thought, and that they would be better off deferring to others, at least in some areas where they previously did not?
— invoke the image of science (experts, experiments, peer-reviewed journals etc.) to create a framing effect, in which people become less critical about what they are reading?
— present information in a way that manipulates readers, so that they believe adequate evidence has been adduced to support a radical thesis, when in fact it has not?
   The reception given to books such as Thinking, Fast and Slow and Predictably Irrational suggests the answer to all three questions is: yes.

Quotation by Daniel Kahneman is from Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar Straus & Giroux 2011, p.410.

de Tocqueville: enervation & stupefaction

When Alexis de Tocqueville published the second volume of his Democracy in America in 1840, democracy was still in its infancy. Some of de Tocqueville's fears and predictions about what it might lead to now seem misplaced. The following extract however still strikes a chord.

Above [the multitude in a democracy] stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. [...] For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances — what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. [...]

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform [...] The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. *

It's not known whether Nietzsche read Democracy in America, but his reflections on the 'Last Man', written four decades later, sound a similar note.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.
"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" — so asketh the last man and blinketh.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.
"We have discovered happiness" — say the last men, and blink thereby. [...]
No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane," — say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby. They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery.

(from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, transl. Thomas Common)

While Nietzsche's version seems more poetic, and perhaps more profound, de Tocqueville's is the more politically astute. Unlike Nietzsche, who talks of "no shepherd", de Tocqueville recognises that a society in which passivity, compliance, and homogeneity have become norms provides enormous scope for some to have power over others.

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* Part 4, Chapter 6, transl. Henry Reeve. Via George H. Smith & Marilyn Moore, Individualism.

Kahneman: pseudoscience on a grander scale

• I thought it would be interesting to alternate our reading of Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism with a book by another highly decorated economist: Daniel Kahneman. Professor Kahneman is a well-known name among economics students. Research carried out by him and Amos Tversky in the 1970s highlighted some of the limitations of conventional economic analysis, by showing that choices made by the average person often fail to conform to what economic theory predicts. But in Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow, this awareness of theoretical limitations is inverted, and spun into a grand narrative about human rationality.
   The work has become hugely popular with intellectuals. "Daniel Kahneman has done us a great service" is a typical comment by a reviewer working in the humanities. Why has the book struck such a chord with intellectuals? Various explanations are possible, including that proposed by another reviewer, claiming that Kahneman is on a par with greats like Freud in advancing understanding of human psychology.
   I suspect one of the principal reasons the book has proved popular is its central thesis, according to which research shows that humans are irrational. Why does this thesis appeal to intellectuals? Because it provides ammunition for the interventionist-paternalist programme, which tacitly assumes that intellectuals should rule society (in the sense of controlling, among other things, education, medicine and cultural output — supposedly in everyone's best interests) rather than leaving things to the decisions of individuals and the markets.
   It's ironic that, having carried out research which usefully demonstrated that some of the assumptions of economic theory about how humans behave were plain wrong, Kahneman’s book assumes another theoretical model of rationality, and in effect says that where theory and practice differ with regard to behaviour, it is practice which is wrong!

• The issue hinges on the concept of rationality, and whether it is possible to define it objectively. The short answer is: no, it's not. There is no behaviour, or belief, about which it is possible to assert irrefutably "this is irrational".
   Take for example a textbook illustration from economics: you are bargaining with a buyer, who could be an employer, for the sale of an object or your own labour, and the buyer offers a choice between you getting £1000 and £1100, all other things being equal. Some would argue that you are definitely irrational if you strongly prefer the £1000 option — after all, you could (they would say) dispose of the extra £100 easily enough. But you may well have reasons for making that choice which cannot simply be dismissed. You may not even be aware of what the reasons are, but it would be impossible to disprove the proposition that ultimately, in some sense, this choice is in your interests. (All sorts of effects could be present here to complicate the picture but being left out of the equation; some of them known about, such as reputational effects; others not known about.)
   Or take a belief in something supernatural, for which (a sceptic would say) there is no good evidence. How about belief in the existence of God? Richard Dawkins has argued this belief is irrational, but that would make a lot of clever people from history irrational. In any case, the concept of God is too ill-defined to say what would constitute evidence. How conclusive would the evidence have to be? The evidence for global warming, or the carcinogenicity of tobacco, is strong, but not completely conclusive. At what level of evidence does a belief stop being irrational, and start to be rational?
   The point is: the question of what is rational is ultimately subjective. Kahneman, and the psychologists he cites, may have done experiments which comply rigorously with scientific standards and which generate interesting results, but such experiments are — and arguably always will be — incapable of yielding the sorts of conclusion that Kahneman draws.
   Conclusions such as the following; Kahneman is here referring to an experiment in which subjects are asked to express a preference between two types of experience involving mild pain (my italics):

An objective observer making the choice [on behalf of an individual] would undoubtedly choose [differently from the individual].

... The choices that people made on their own behalf are fairly described as mistakes.

Again, there's an irony in the fact that Kahneman at other points in the book criticises evaluations made on a gut basis, in ignorance of reality being more complex, yet is here guilty of the same thing. He appears to think we can obviously dismiss some judgments as being irrational or inadequately thought out, and that some preferences are just wrong. "This person says she prefers strawberry jam because it leaves a nice aftertaste, but she ought to prefer blueberry jam because it is more satisfying while it is being consumed" is a statement Kahneman does not make — but it's analogous to some of the things he does say.

• Some beliefs or preferences may strike a high percentage of ordinary people as bizarre or unjustifiable. Others may strike an even higher percentage of intellectuals as ridiculous. No doubt some intellectuals would like to have conclusive scientific support for rejecting certain beliefs or preferences. Attempts to use science to justify the decisive rejection of one preference over another, however, inevitably involve the abuse of science.
   I don't wish to de-legitimise the concept of 'irrational' as used in an everyday context, but we have to recognise that judgments about rationality are judgments, not scientific findings, and are ultimately not capable of being given irrefutable justification.
   Whether something is true or not may seem simple in some cases (is London the capital of the UK or not?) but most questions do not have easy yes-or-no answers, meaning there is little conclusive basis for assigning irrationality to one answer rather than another.
   With regard to preferences, there is certainly no adequate justification for intruding on individual choices to argue: your preference for A is wrong, our data shows you should be preferring B [*said in severe tone, by figure in lab coat carrying clipboard*]. Believing such intrusions are justified by science is not only wrong, it is dangerous.

• In the next instalment we'll take a look at the experiments on which Kahneman bases his conclusions.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2011. Quotes are from p.409.

social mobility

• More on the topic of science and morality, and how getting them muddled can have bad results: a follow-up to my previous article on social mobility.

Social mobility ‘research’:
science vs normativity

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• I consume a fair amount of Kindle Unlimited fiction and like to give a plug to anything particularly noteworthy. Harriet Smart's Northminster mysteries are set in Northern England during the first years of Victoria's reign, and feature a police officer and a young surgeon, both male, as the main protagonists. Some of the books could do with additional proofing and I occasionally find them a bit grisly for my taste, but there is a touch of genius in the portrayal of early-Victorian society and of the psychology of the characters, as well as in the complexity of the plots.
   Speaking of male protagonists, I recently read a contemporary sci-fi novel in which all the spaceship team were male (though from diverse alien races). Highly unusual but also highly refreshing. I used to find novels refreshing in which plucky heroines proved they were better than their stuffy male counterparts, but it has now become so monotonously regular a feature that it's getting tedious. I came to realise, in reading this unfashionably androcentric sci-fi book, the possible advantage of leaving female characters out altogether. For most contemporary writers, the moment a female principal character is introduced, there appears to be a need on the part of the writer to demonstrate that she is at least as 'good' as the males, in whatever department. (A type of virtue signalling?) She cannot be allocated a merely supportive role, since this might be taken to imply something about being female, and we cannot have that, even if the something is merely statistical. Thus in practice women in fiction are now largely confined to certain predictable roles — just as they were in the past, except that the predictable roles are now different ones. We see this in Amazon's Rings of Power, for example, where (a) it's fairly inconceivable that the position of lead character could have been assigned other than to a female character, and yet (b) a little digital tweaking of the appearance and voice of Galadriel (ably played by Morfydd Clark), and many viewers could surely be fooled into assuming, from the action and dialogue, that it was a male elf that was being represented.

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     Queen Elizabeth II (1926 - 2022)     

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world leaders in inflation

That America has called its latest piece of pro-state legislation an "Inflation Reduction Act" may well come to be seen, in due course, as the defining irony of Joe Biden's presidency. There seems little in the Act likely to significantly impact inflation in the intended way. We know from history that once inflation hits levels where everyone feels the pinch, it tends to become self-sustaining. We also know that trying to control prices or wages under such conditions tends not to work and can make things worse.
   The time to reduce the risk of inflation was before it started, by being aware of the possibility that massive money creation might eventually — under certain triggering conditions — cause problems; and by not getting complacent, as Mario Draghi for example seems to have done, that because we had not had the triggering conditions for a long time, that could be relied on to be permanent. (Comparable to the delusion, popular a couple of decades ago, that busts had been eliminated, simply because the boom had lasted longer than usual.)
   It is unfortunate for America, and for the rest of the world, that the time when caution was, and is, particularly needed has coincided with the White House being occupied by one of the most spendthrift Presidents in US history. In sharp contrast to Donald Trump, Mr Biden's approach receives support from an army of pro-state intellectuals. There still appear to be a few financially responsible politicians in America, otherwise Mr Biden's original $4 trillion plan might have been implemented, rather than the c.$2 trillion committed so far.
   Signs of suppressed inflation have been hiding in plain sight for years, prior to the recent wake-up call. (Among other things, progressive shrinkflation and skimpflation; and consistently faster-than-headline inflation in sectors where efficiency gains from the IT revolution — an effect that will run out eventually, and may already be starting to do so — haven't exerted downward pressure on prices.) Either successive Presidents have chosen not to listen to the warnings of their economic advisers or, more likely, those advisers didn't bother with warnings, choosing instead to look the other way.
   Of course America is not unique in this respect. The UK, the rest of Europe and Japan have all adopted comparable programmes of money expansion and ballooning state expenditure. It's conceivable, however, that they might have felt a bit more restrained without the USA's example.
    Governments' best hope at this point for controlling inflation is to commit to fiscal prudence — not to engage in posturing, let alone indulging in even more state largesse.

science and morality don’t mix

• We are continuing our reading of Professor Paul Collier's book The Future of Capitalism. This is proving to be a useful way of exploring a range of issues in political theory. My reason for choosing this particular book is not because it's an especially egregious example of leftist academia. Collier's brand of ideology is relatively mild, and his book shows some recognition of opposing points of view. Collier isn't fundamentally opposed to capitalism as many of his peers are. It's because the book's approach is relatively sober and unemotive — compared to similar publications by other humanities professors — that it provides a convenient springboard.
   Despite the book's relative mildness, many of its core themes are essentially the same as those of most other books on politics or society written by academics over the last forty years. Indeed, the regularity with which the same ideas recur in each new book that comes along is nothing short of remarkable, and suggests the possibility of some kind of underlying motivational bias.
   Feedback can be given via the email listed in the sidebar.

• Chapter 2 of TFOC is entitled 'The Foundations of Morality'.
   Let us start by noting that there is not, nor can there ever be, a science of morality.* Science and morality occupy different parts of the intellectual landscape. A long line of philosophers, stretching from David Hume to A.J. Ayer and beyond, have pointed out that the gulf between is and ought blocks the possibility of proving that any particular moral position is correct.
   That hasn't stopped other philosophers persisting with the search for proof. People want to know how they ought to be behave, and intellectuals of course would like to know what to tell them. This leads to the temptation to believe that, given a clever enough mind working with the latest ideas, irrefutable moral or political truth is potentially accessible. In his 1993 book How Are We to Live, for example, philosophy professor Peter Singer endorsed the view that, with further advances in academic philosophy, we could arrive at ethical propositions that are as indisputable as those of mathematics.
   Since science has now become the only generally accepted basis among intellectuals for generating objective truth, attempts to provide firm ethical or political conclusions often try to hang their arguments on some scientific finding or other, but this endeavour is doomed, and usually relies on a fudging of the issues.
   For instance, TFOC cites a study purporting to show that the regrets which people say they feel most keenly, in relation to decisions they might have made differently, are about social bonds or obligations and not about financial or other economic choices. That is interesting, but hardly enables us to say anything profound that goes much beyond the raw data. Collier treats it as evidence about "the relative psychological importance" of wants versus oughts. This is a good example of a tiny piece of data, probably highly dependent on the way the study is framed, and on how exactly the questions are put, being used to support a grand narrative about psychology or politics. Simply because some factor features larger in the conscious mind at any one time need not necessarily reveal much about how big a driver of behaviour that factor is, quite apart from the question of how honest subjects are in questionnaire studies.

• There are three tasks facing someone who wants to write a political philosophy book — at least one that seeks to offer 'solutions'. First, they need to identify 'problems'. Second, they need to identify the root of the supposed problems. Third, they need to predict what policies will attack the supposed root in such a way as to eliminate or reduce the problem.
   None of these tasks is one that is particularly amenable to science. The best that can be done is to tell a convincing story. In the process, you can adduce some research that seems supportive, but the likelihood in that case is that your conclusions are reached via a sort of 'logic lite' that can easily amount to pseudoscience. The implications of the research finding are stretched way beyond its significance. The chain of argument seems loosely scientific because you cite some peer-reviewed academic paper, the data of which the reader is unlikely to investigate for themselves. It's pseudoscience in the sense that it's made to look scientific but isn't.
   Furthermore, task (1) inevitably involves the writer's own moral biases. In identifying something as a problem, the writer will have to make assumptions about other people's preferences, those assumptions typically being based on his own preferences. Or assumptions will be made about what other people's preferences ought to be.

• Having read chapters 1 and 2, it has not yet become clear what core problem Collier sees as plaguing modern society. He complains about social engineers inspired by utilitarianism, and about populist politicians; and seems to see the former as part of the cause of the problem, and the latter as a (bad) response to the problem. But what precisely is the problem? Apparently something to do with the loss of communitarian values, but this is not spelled out in any detail. What we do get is:
(a) allusion to the well-honed idea that capitalism tends to promote selfishness, and an assertion that what is needed is to "build reciprocal obligations";
(b) the idea that there's a way to tackle the selfishness issue that is different from the old paternalist-utilitarian approach.

• By the end of chapter 2, Collier confidently asserts:

We now have a coherent picture that shows us how individual behaviour is shaped by obligations, why it matters, why it might "go wrong", and how it might be put right.

The chapter started with a discussion of the possible origins of communitarian behaviour (Collier uses the analogy of sheep — is this sending the right signals?), and ends with the claim that a coherent picture has been generated of what might "go wrong" and how it might be "put right". What logic is used in between, to get from one to the other?
   Collier proposes that a society can be wrong and yet stable, in the sense that everyone would prefer another kind of society but agreed norms mean that no one is in a position to bring about change. Though he doesn't use this as an illustration, it seems plausible for example that Soviet-style communism was unloved by the vast majority of its subjects for many decades but nevertheless remained highly stable, and that it required a revolutionary movement to flip Eastern European societies into a different configuration. Of course, this is speculation: we have no way of knowing for sure what the majority of (say) Poland wanted, and no doubt there were some Poles who preferred communism. This is the problem with getting into the position of having opinions about 'wrong' and 'right', beyond simply describing such models as theoretically possible: you need to make assumptions and/or value judgements.**
   Beyond this reference to the possibility of stable but suboptimal collective outcomes, there is nothing in chapter 2 to explain how the specific defects of "individual behaviour ... shaped by obligations" might be identified for a particular society, and nothing about how to ensure that proposed remedies will make things better rather than worse. The basic problem of how to identify right and wrong in relation to a society, in a way that is objective and not dependent on an intellectual's own preferences and prejudices, is left wholly intact.

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* I am not talking about the kind of science that investigates what moral beliefs people actually hold (a question of fact); or the kind that asks why particular moral beliefs might have developed in response to particular drives or needs (a question of biological or sociological theory). Both can be illuminating but don't get us very far. One might be told that most societies commit genocide, one way or another; or that genocide is beneficial for the genes of the survivors; but one would not find either a compelling reason for regarding genocide as a good thing.

** There may be a good reason why it was not in Collier's interests to mention communism at that point, as an illustration of a suboptimal social configuration, given that TFOC is trying to promote the idea that the state can be used to change configurations to more positive ones. Communism and its collapse is too suggestive of the opposite idea: that the use of the state to improve things generates a worse (but stable) outcome, and that societal improvement may require rejection of the state as an instrument of welfare.

Sir Paul's book on capitalism — part 2

I am finding Paul Collier's book The Future of Capitalism readable and thought-provoking. Unlike most other books in its subject area, it displays some sympathy for the opposition. But given that the book aims to be a blueprint for socialism, this sympathy is unlikely to run very deep. It behoves readers to remain on the alert for the standard assumptions and devices of anti-capitalist ideology.
   Readers also need to be aware that a socialist canny enough to highlight the flaws of other socialists is not necessarily going to avoid falling into the same traps. There is something irresistible about socialism for many intellectuals; the fact that Collier himself draws attention to some of the features of this phenomenon early on doesn't mean he is necessarily going to eschew the standard tropes further down the line. For example, he criticises use of victim-ideology, but is not immune himself to the temptation of representing people as the passive casualties of circumstance, desperately in need of help from the state. He talks of the less-well educated being in crisis, stigmatized as the white working class; of a collapse in the sense of a purposeful life among the American working class; and of redundant over-fifties drinking the dregs of despair.
   Crisis, incidentally, is a standard trope of socialist ideology. Well before the Great Depression, early twentieth-century socialist pioneers such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb were talking about the supposed crisis of capitalism, and the trope has remained in the intellectuals' top ten ever since — to a large extent regardless of rises and falls in economic fortunes.
   One of the standard devices of anti-capitalist ideology is to be vague about what the word 'capitalism' means, and to treat it as a bucket concept. Roughly speaking, the term refers (or ought to refer) to a society in which there is minimal state involvement beyond maintaining personal and property rights; in other words, a society where interactions between individuals depend predominantly on what those individuals agree between themselves. With advanced capitalism, the state may issue and enforce more complex rules that facilitate relatively sophisticated interactions, such as credit rules for banking, or the existence of corporate entities which are treated as legal individuals.
   We, by contrast, live in a world in which the state spends nearly half the national product. The state intervenes massively in employer-employee and consumer-vendor interactions. Most of education and medicine are provided via the state. In other words, we do not live under capitalism, but under a mixed system of 50:50 capitalism and socialism. This 50:50 condition has prevailed for many decades. Thus in talking about some supposed current problem of society, one ought to at least pause for thought before rushing to the conclusion that 'capitalism' is to blame. This, however, would complicate the narrative; hence most commentators on 'capitalism' — academic or otherwise — ignore the issue.
   It's easy to produce a knee-jerk reaction against capitalism — socialism is supposed to be about 'helping' (controlling?) other people, so it must be 'nicer' than capitalism; this reaction is readily exploited by authors who want to induce the standard head-shaking and breast-beating responses. Hence 'capitalism' becomes a bucket concept: it's the obvious villain when discussing social problems.
   This bias — that capitalism is automatically on trial, assumed to be guilty, and has to justify itself before 'we' (the elites) will allow it — already makes an appearance in the first chapter of TFOC. Collier argues that

capitalism's core credential of steadily rising living standards for all has been tarnished: it has continued to deliver for some, but has passed others by.

Having accused others of preaching ideology that deviates from normal people's values, Collier here appears to be doing the same thing. Surely only a socialist intellectual would demand that capitalism must deliver "steadily rising living standards for all" in order to avoid being ditched in favour of state control of the economy (probably involving management by socialist intellectuals).
   With further reading of chapter 1, the apparent underlying message of TFOC begins to emerge. The tone is patient, parental even. 'Dear voters, yes you have been right to resent the leftist elites, but their arrogance is not a failing of socialism per se. We need to give emphasis, not to the individual's supposed rights against the collective (such rights do not exist), but to the communitarian values that we had under the type of socialism that prevailed in the 1950s and 60s.' (my paraphrasing)
   The theme there is too much individualism, we must have more community — very popular among intellectuals of both Left and Right — appears to be another theme of TFOC. But what Collier means by 'community' may simply equate with collectivism — in the sense of control by the state, even if a state ostensibly endorsed by the majority. A nostalgia for community of the voluntary kind, perversely expressed by trying to impose 'community' from above, is another standard trope of socialist ideology. Collier seems not to understand the difference — or else he is being disingenuous. He approvingly describes the rise of cooperative societies in the nineteenth century.

Through recognizing that they had a common attachment to the place where they grew up, communities such as Sheffield's built co-operative organizations ... that reaped the benefits of reciprocity ... From its crucible in northern England, the co-operative movement rapidly spread across much of Europe.

From there the book jumps to state socialism as being similarly benign, one of those sleights-of-hand popular with political philosophers.

By banding together, these co-operatives became the foundation of the political parties of the centre-left: the parties of social democracy. The benefits of reciprocity within a community were scaled up as the community became the nation. Like the co-operatives, the new policy agenda was practical, rooted in the anxieties that beset the lives of ordinary families. In the post-war era, across Europe many of these social democrat parties came to power and used it to implement a range of pragmatic policies that effectively addressed these anxieties. Health care, pensions, education, unemployment insurance cascaded from legislation into changed lives.

There is a big difference between a genuinely cooperative movement, based on the consent of all its members, and 'cooperation' imposed by the state. Presumably some of the citizens actually want to cooperate in the way commanded from above, perhaps even the majority, but others will inevitably be coerced, giving the venture a very different character from the original voluntary communities.

Sir Paul's book on capitalism

Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Oxford. Browsing Amazon for books on capitalism, I came across his The Future of Capitalism. Unlike many books in this area, Collier's makes an effort to take on board the post-2010 backlash against the paternalist-interventionist approach that has been popular with intellectuals since the late 1800s. This makes the book relatively readable. We don't get the leftwing virulence of a Stiglitz tome, or the dogmatic fervour of the average American philosophy professor. The book is critical of Marxists who have failed to learn lessons from the collapse of Soviet communism.
   Left-leaning readers need not be alarmed however; Professor Collier remains firmly in the socialist camp. He hopes his book can become another socialist blueprint, along the lines of Tony Crosland's The Future of Socialism.*
   TFOC is not of course an economics book. Like others in its subject area, it is little more than informed story-telling. Collier tries to extract meaning and morality from hard data, but this requires the weaving of a subjective narrative around the data that, by necessity, is highly sensitive to the worldview of its author. A completely different narrative is possible. The success of any one narrative tends to be judged by how well it is told, and how well it fits with the preconceptions of its readers. Collier's story certainly starts well, and his first chapter hits some of the right notes.

The newly successful are ... the well educated with new skills. They have ... developed a distinctive morality, elevating characteristics such as minority ethnicity and sexual orientation into group identities as victims. On the basis of their distinctive concern for victim groups, they claim moral superiority over the less-well educated [and have] forged themselves into a new ruling class ...

One of TFOC's targets for criticism is utilitarianism. It's an attitude I broadly have sympathy with, though some of Collier's detail seems a bit skew-whiff.

The intellectuals of the left were attracted by the ideas of a nineteenth-century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. His philosophy, Utilitarianism, detached morality from our instinctive values, deducing it from a single principle of reason: an action should be judged as moral according to whether it promoted 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Because people's instinctive values fell short of this saintly standard, society would need a vanguard of morally sound technocrats who would run the state.

Bentham and J.S. Mill are credited with building utilitarianism. (J.S. Mill's father James Mill, who along with Bentham was one of the earliest appliers of utilitarianism to practical policy, is left out of Collier's equation.) Their philosophy was implemented by a vanguard of social planners, confident of their moral rightness.

The emblematic illustration of this confident paternalism was post-war policy for cities. The growing number of cars needed flyovers and the growing number of people needed housing. In response, entire streets and neighbourhoods were bulldozed, to be replaced by modernist flyovers and high-rise towers ... Bulldozing communities made sense if all that mattered was to raise the material housing standards of poor individuals. But it jeopardized the communities that actually gave meaning to people's lives.

There are two major difficulties with Collier's analysis. First, he sees part of the problem stemming from the fact that Bentham and J.S. Mill "were not latter-day moral giants, equivalent to Moses, Jesus and Muhammad; they were weirdly asocial individuals."

Bentham was so bizarre that he is now thought to have been autistic, and incapable of having a sense of community. Mill stood little chance of normality: deliberately kept away from other children, he was probably more familiar with ancient Greece that with his own society. Given such origins, it is unsurprising that the ethics of their followers are highly divergent from the rest of us.

It's always helpful for a story if you can identify one or two specific individuals on whom to hang the blame. But it's unlikely that the source of the problems Collier discusses were the personalities of Bentham and John Stuart Mill, or that things would necessarily have been very different if they had been more like Moses or Muhammad. Any philosophical idea is capable of being over-applied, and the drive for doing so came largely from the social tinkerers who came long after the initial philosophical input. Marx and Engels may have been less 'autistic' than Bentham or Mill; that didn't stop their followers from generating policies that were seriously at odds with the values of those on whom the policies were imposed.
   From a socialist point of view, Bentham should surely count as heroic rather than dodgy. He helped to reduce the barbarity of many aspects of British law, particularly with regard to sentencing and punishment.
   The second oddity is that Collier blames the excessive application of utilitarianism on economists. That doesn't chime with my understanding of the history of utilitarianist policy. It's hard to know what to make of this nostra culpa assertion. Should one respect Collier for being willing to criticise his own profession? Or is it a way of avoiding criticism of other professions such as sociology — which we know doesn't go down well within the academic community (the likely response would be: you're not qualified to comment).

The weird values of Bentham would not have had any impact had they not been incorporated into economics ... Economic man is utterly selfish and infinitely greedy, caring about nobody but himself. He became the bedrock of the economic theory of human behaviour. But for the purpose of evaluating public policy, economics needed a measure for aggregating the well-being, or 'utility', of each of these psychopathic individuals. Utilitarianism became the intellectual underpinning for this arithmetic ...

I think Professor Collier may have his history a bit askew here. It was part of nineteenth-century ideology, following on from the Enlightenment, to seek secular intellectual input into policy issues. It's how the whole -ism thing got going in Europe (ultimately culminating in disaster and disillusionment). The involvement of professional economists doesn't seem to have been an essential ingredient in this process. To give one illustration, in Uday Mehta's fascinating book Liberalism and Empire we read that James Mill was told in 1827 by the Governor-General of India:

"I am going to British India, but I shall not be Governor General. It is you that will be Governor General."

In other words, there was a definite plan to apply the utilitarian logic of philosophers to social policy in India. This suggests a British state that was already very open to input from intellectuals and their abstract systems, independently of any later detailed cost-benefit rules contributed by economists.

---

* Privately-educated Anthony Crosland is now best remembered as the 1960s education minister who said he was determined to destroy "every ****ing grammar school" in Britain — a quest at which he largely succeeded.

sundry

intangibles
An interesting article (subscription required) from champion stockpicker Quentin Lumsden, about non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a new kind of digital asset class which — like Bitcoin — depends on blockchain technology. Last year Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold the NFT of his first tweet to Malaysian billionaire Sina Estavi (via auction website Cent) for the princely sum of $2.9million. NFTs seem to be hot right now in the art world.

The pandemic has brought much of the doggedly analogue art world kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and NFTs are benefitting from that seismic shift. "Covid is definitely a big piece of this frenzy, people are sitting at their computers all day — they’re locked inside and have fewer options. If there was no Covid-19, I honestly don't think the space would have accelerated this fast," Winkelmann says. (Winkelmann is the real name of an artist known as Beeple, one of whose images sold at Christie's for $69m.) Another Beeple piece, Crossroad — a 10-second video NFT showing animated pedestrians walking past a giant, naked likeness of Donald Trump, collapsed on the ground and covered in graffiti — sold for $6.6m in Ether on Nifty Gateway. The seller was Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, who had bought the piece in October for about $67,000.

   The fact that it's considered possible to hold assets as intangible as a person's 'autographed' tweet, and that serious money is changing hands for NFTs, gives me more confidence that blockchain technology is reliable, which in turn makes me feel less suspicious of cryptocurrencies.
   (I've given a link to Simple Wikipedia's article on blockchain ... even that will probably be above most people's heads ... like the cloud, it's a concept that will gradually become comprehensible as people rely on it more.)

'recreation centres'
Britain used to have places called recreation centres. They were sites financed and run by local councils where individuals could engage in a range of leisure activities, from sports to adult education. I hadn't visited one for some time but recently happened to be passing one and thought I would look in. A couple of people were coming out, chatting in a relaxed way and casually dressed, which boded well. There were plenty of posters up near the doors, the most prominent of which warned visitors to wear face masks in the building. Like a good citizen I donned my face mask and entered as the two people were leaving. Having passed the first set of automatic doors, there was a second set which did not open. A red light was showing and there was a spycam, so I guessed one had to be visually vetted to enter. I realised then that the first set of doors was similarly secured and so found myself trapped between two sets of doors, waiting for the light to go green so I could go in. After about a minute, an officious-looking agent arrived and grimly advised me that the recreation centre was not open to the public. Fortunately she permitted me to leave the way I had come.
   Looking more closely at the posters near the door, I saw one that said the recreation centre was closed to the public for the foreseeable future. I was left wondering: if there are no actual leisure activities taking place at our recreation centres, what exactly is going on at these sites? Secret government research? I think we should be told.

music streaming
Is the music streaming business model starting to crack? Trialling Apple Music again a year after a previous trial, I was surprised to find a number of key recordings have disappeared from their catalogue, or have gone partial — you can listen to some of the tracks from an album but not all.
   Artists have been grumbling for some time about lower revenues in the digital economy, though not much in public, presumably for fear of sending the wrong signal. (It has been estimated that it takes about 200 streams of a whole album to generate the same revenue for an artist as the sale of a CD.) With far lower income from live performances under the COVID regime, the grumbling has become more audible.
   While the finger is being pointed at streaming providers and record companies, the main source of the problem is surely the internet ethos which has everyone used to the idea that content is, by default, available without charge.
   People have been illegally sharing MP3 files for decades, but the blatant copyright breaching tacitly endorsed by YouTube since 2005 seems to have established in people's minds that music is essentially free — though you may expect to pay to gain full control over what you listen to, or to have it free of ads.

time to push back
Tolerating intolerance is dangerous. (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil etc.) And free speech needs to be supported whether you agree with what is being said or not. (I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death etc.) A culture of punishment has developed, in which anyone saying anything that might upset someone is an excuse for others to roll out intimidation tactics. This needs to be actively opposed or it will only get worse.
   I was appalled, for example, by the attempt to shut down British empire researcher Professor Nigel Biggar using bullying on social media, and I expressed my disapproval in an article which received significant attention. But obviously I cannot write an article every time this happens. For lesser transgressions, I've decided to start a blacklist (see sidebar). When I come across an organisation, or other group, that have tried to use their own supposed respectability to penalise an individual for saying something they don't like, or who otherwise try to boycott free speech, they will be added to the list. It's a small way of pushing back.
   What has triggered this was my coming across the story about the American Humanist Association stripping Richard Dawkins of his humanist-of-the-year award (granted in 1996). His supposed crime? Speculating about gender definitions on Twitter. This kind of action is not only unethical, it stifles any meaningful scientific discussion. (Note to celebrity intellectuals: J.K. Rowling returned her award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center after the Center's president criticised her views on gender. Why not go one better and preempt any withdrawal of rewards by not accepting them in the first place, at least not without some kind of 'pre-nup' clause preventing clawback.)
   I am also adding the Chicago Review of Books which in 2017 tried to use its influence to stop Simon & Schuster (and, by implication, other top publishers) from issuing books that are too rejecting of liberal ideology.
   Other miscreants will be added as and when I come across them. Removal from the list is simple: issue a public apology, and reverse any action as required — e.g. restore an award inappropriately withdrawn. (Actually there's an argument that an award or an honour should never be withdrawn. If you can't issue such a thing without it being conditional on future behaviour, or you're not sure you'll be able to stand up to external pressure for it to be rescinded years later, don't issue it in the first place.)