Writing about ideas makes it possible for folk to change their minds

The inestimable Graeme Archer proclaimed yesterday - on Twitter, which is the modern equivalent of what my late colleague David Emmott called 'just pub talk' - that nobody changed their minds reading stuff so it was pointless writing it (I write this from memory as I can't find the Tweet). And that's cool - if you write opinion, you have to believe there's a fighting chance of what you read actually changing somebody's mind. What's the point otherwise?

The thing here is that Graeme's right. We really don't change our minds about things very often and almost never as a result of reading something in a blogpost or hearing something at a lecture. This isn't to say that we don't learn things from these places or, indeed, hear things that make us go wow! I remember being at a lecture about the boundaries of maths where the lecturer (my apologies, I forget her name) said something along the lines of "just because the universe is infinite that doesn't mean it hasn't got an edge". Every day I read things that are fascinating - Josiah Wedgwood created thousands of innovations and refused to patent any of them, the Daddy of Open Source! Our minds aren't changed but they are bigger and we are wiser.

Thing is, we don't change our minds very often about big important matters of ideology, about the faith that's core to the way we see the world. And, when we do change - stop being a socialists, reject belief in God - it's the conclusion of a process not a Damascene conversion brought on by reading an individual article or hearing a solitary lecture. For sure, we do change our minds about mundane stuff - whether we prefer rice or naan with a curry, our favourite singer or how we'd like our hair cut. But on other stuff this doesn't happen often, if at all.

I remember a friend who was a Bradford City season ticket holder, a real enthusiast. In one, possibly drink-fuelled moment, he whispered that the result he looks for first isn't City but Arsenal, the team of his childhood. If it's that damned hard to switch allegiance from a team 200 miles away to the team where you live, what chance is there of Graeme or I writing an article and having you change your view about politics, society or the economy? And, just so y'all don't think it's because Graeme and I can't muster an argument, the same goes for even the wisest, wittiest and best-informed. I'm sure there were ancient Greeks meandering back from the agora after another afternoon of Socrates asking difficult questions, who would say 'dunno what he's on about, it's rubbish and I'm sticking with The Gods, you know where you are with The Gods.'

But we know that people do change their ideological minds - non-believers become believers, redemption and true-seeing are real, they're just not pinged by just one article. This realisation might, as Graeme remarked, suggest that writing opinion and ideas is fruitless, purposeless. But perhaps it's not, perhaps the little seeds we plant in the minds of others allow them to think more broadly about their faith, their ideology. As a conservative, doubt is central to my philosophy - everything is to be challenged, questioned and change only follows this process - and for doubt to work as analysis it has to be informed, it needs fuel. And that fuel is the words of people like Graeme Archer and a thousand others, the lumps of coal that come from writers, poets, singers, those speaking in the public square.

So our words, however small the splash they make in the ocean of ideas, matter and we should not be afraid to speak them. Nor should we fear the words of others, the questions and challenges that latter-day would-be Socrates ask in our 21st century town square. No, say those things, put them out into that world of ideas because who are we to know that, for some person out there, those words are an affirmation of belief, a final jigsaw piece in revelation's puzzle, the spark that lights a fire in that person's heart. We don't change our minds very often but, I'm absolutely sure that, were there fewer words from the likes of Graeme that process of change would be more sclerotic and the world would be poorer.

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I wish I was clever...

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I wish I was as clever as those people who write about how thick other people are. It must be fab being so super brainy. Every day you see this but the writers merely display their arrogance. For sure they want us to be in awe of their intellectual majesty - ho ho ho we're supposed to respond as we smile at the daring criticism of whoever it is our genius has decided makes two planks of wood look like a proto-Einstein.

If only I had the supreme confidence to declare a cabinet minister a "thicko" despite never having met that person, had a conversation with them or looked at their skills, experience or knowledge. It is a joy to behold that arrogant confidence in another's stupidity - even one who went to Cambridge and had a 20 year business career before getting to parliament.

I am not so confidently clever, I doubt my beliefs every day. When someone challenges my thoughts or comments a shudder of that doubt runs through my body.

But then I like doubt. My arm is elbow deep in that spear wound. Doubt is what keeps us from torturing people because god said so. Doubt is what makes us hesitate, makes us ask whether the other person might be right, makes us check. Makes us listen.

Over the past years I've changed my mind about a lot of things - climate change, gay rights, Europe, immigration, community, even god. But my mind is still not made up. So keep telling me I'm wrong - just as I'll challenge what you say. Just try not to to call people stupid, dumb, thick, ignorant, immoral - that's not helpful, kind or - much of the time - accurate. And it will never change anyone's mind about anything.

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Doubt and the problem of planning - a thought on conservatism

In recent times I’ve tried to explain to people that conservatism isn’t some form of brash, know-all ideological fix for mankind’s problems. Indeed, to proclaim something unquestioningly true is to deny an essential truth of conservative thinking.

Perhaps I should qualify this by pointing out that this view is an English conservatism – something of a philosophy of doubt and insecurity. Today, speaking with my wife, I observed that I no longer have the absolute certainty expressed in my youthful bedroom wall poster:

“I may have my faults but being wrong isn’t one of them!”

Who are we if, with the flimsiest of evidence and rarely evidence that is unchallenged, take it upon ourselves to claim that there is only one true path, one solution to a given problem? As conservatives we should always proceed with care and caution for we may be wrong. It is this appreciation of human fallibility that separates conservatives from liberals, socialists and other such ideologues.

This isn’t a cry for inaction but is intended to explain why change should not be imposed simply for that change’s sake and certainly not because it merely conforms to our ideological bias. The reasons why conservatives prefer the small state, opt for local over national and national over global is because we doubt that the state can really resolve mankind’s problems and challenges. This isn’t a rejection of the state but instead recognises that most of the time that old H L Mencken comment applies:

 "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

This helps explain why conservatives are doubtful of planning. It’s not an ideological objection but a practical one. To use the example of our “predict and provide” approach to housing - we employ experts to estimate how many houses we’ll need so as everyone has a roof over their head. I know just one truth about these ‘housing number’ predictions – they are always wrong. Not because the experts are inexpert but because it is impossible to make such estimates with confidence. Yet we make these informed guesses and then try to provide the houses. And the result is that (almost without exception) a wholly different number is actually built to meet the actual demand for housing.

For housing we could substitute anything else from coronary heart attacks to road accidents - the estimates of “need” are wrong and, as a result, the plans proposed tend to fail.

Now before you all assume that this is simply an argument for classical liberalism and laissez-faire social organisation (or should that be ‘un-organisation’) let’s be clear that planning for the future isn’t a bad idea. We just need to treat what the experts tell us with caution and proceed accordingly. To borrow another quotation – this time from Robert Heinlein:

 

“No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.”

As conservatives our first question should be one of doubt – we should take St Thomas as our patron. When the expert – the authority – presents his solution we should begin by doubting its efficacy. We should recall that Lloyd George didn’t want to preside over the death of friendly societies – organisations he knew and loved - but, by introducing a state social insurance, he ensured their rapid demise.

England’s current polity is anti-conservative because everything it does – the core of its ideology – is rooted in action founded on planning. Our governors – the one’s who’ll be around regardless of the politicians – cannot conceive of an unplanned world. For sure, they’ll claim to admire Jane Jacobs, to support free markets and to value voluntary and local but the truth (perhaps – remember I might be wrong) is that they dislike all of these things.

Our governors want our cities tidy, ordered and regimented. They must regulate markets to make them ‘fairer’ (whatever that means). And they prefer uniformity of provision centrally-directed over local variation and variety.  This control is exercised through planning – ‘evidence’ is gathered (often ‘evidence’ prepared by the self-interested or even the down-right biased) and plans are drawn up on its basis. And when the plan fails – because the evidence was wrong – the solution is further evidence gathering followed by a new plan.

As conservatives we must begin to question – to doubt – this planning. We must start to reject planned solutions to grand problems and look instead at free action, at the local and above all at the voluntary. This, I know, isn’t a solution to those grand problems but since government has failed entirely in resolving those problems it might be a wise move to do a little less and, when we do act, to do so with care, caution and in as limited a way as possible.

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Put the books down, look out the window and think for yourself.

Once upon a time there was a blank page – Locke’s tabula rasa. We couldn’t lean on some other persons thinking as a replacement for our own consideration of the truth. We had to look, listen, poke at, pull apart and generally fuss around at the world so as to get some information – followed by thinking about what it all meant.

Somewhere we’ve lost this – not entirely but mostly. Rather than craft our own arguments based on the evidence we’ve found, we turn instead to Professor X or Doctor Y and say, “look at the very clever person and what they say, I am clever too because I’ve read their writing and cleverer still for telling you about its wonders!”

Essays, articles, reports – even dissertations – are constructed through the careful rewashing of someone else’s work. This isn’t plagiarism, nor is it entirely without use but such an approach reveals in us a lack of thoughtfulness, a craven adherence to the status quo presented by our betters. We comply with authority’s bias and prejudice for fear that disagreement would mark us apart and down.

The creation of entire philosophies through the recycling of others' opinion – I quote someone, someone else quotes me quoting that someone and so on until the original someone quotes me quoting him! Replacing that blank page we have a vast wall covered in scribble, indecipherable as a whole but interpreted by a select group who understand the occult nature of that graffiti. As a result we learn nothing but that some acolytes are granted the great privilege to interpret the myths for us lay supplicants. And woe betide those who question those acolytes.

Perhaps we should start to question the basis of our policy-making – the pretence that the evidence it uses is real, the fiction that its processes allow for genuine review. What we need isn’t just a politics of doubt but a rediscovery of autodidact questioning and the questioning of authority. We need an end to telling people their opinion is worth less than some other person clutching a piece of paper from one university or another.

Above all we need to promote and champion people who doubt – who start with that tabula rasa rather than with someone else’s – be it Marx, Keynes or Rothbard – prescription for perfection.

Put the books down, look out the window and think for yourself.

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I doubt, therefore I am - the limits of "skepticism"

Regular visitors to this blog will have heard me talk about how doubt is at the heart of conservativism – indeed, it is only my doubting that makes me a conservative. And I am grateful to find that the rationalist position fits well with Balfour’s philosophic doubt.

Chris Snowdon in his Velvet Gove, Iron Fist blog provides a link to an interview with John Ioannidis the author of “why most research findings are false”. In what seems to me a beautiful demolition of the “skeptic” obsession with scientific method as the only response to doubt, the article reports that:

He (Ioannidis) and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.

Yet we are enjoined to believe the researchers, to accept the exclusive use of evidence rather than judgment in decision-making and to take whatever academics place before us as truth rather than as something to be questioned and challenged – to be doubted. Not merely through a self-serving and excluding process of peer review but through the prism of our understanding.

Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.” What’s more, the peer-review process often pressures researchers to shy away from striking out in genuinely new directions, and instead to build on the findings of their colleagues (that is, their potential reviewers) in ways that only seem like breakthroughs—as with the exciting-sounding gene linkages (autism genes identified!) and nutritional findings (olive oil lowers blood pressure!) that are really just dubious and conflicting variations on a theme.

Doubt must be universal. It should be the starting point for our decision-making, the guiding factor in how we monitor and the central principle in evaluation. And mail order marketers will tell you – it’s all about test and learn. The science is never settled, the truth is never known.

There is only doubt.

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Life's mosaic...

I'm a mosaic - a fragmented, fractured collage of flotsam, jetsam and washed up driftwood. I'm not a clear fresh painting but a creation of doubts, questions and uncertainties. I do not understand those people who are so certain in their belief - or their unbelief - that they can dismiss questions and doubts without thinking, without consideration. I had a parish priest once - Father Best - who doubted. His homilies were not what the comfortable, certain congregation wanted - Father Best challenged his faith, questioned what it was all about, explored what it meant to believe. He doubted in public. And there were mutterings; "this isn't what we come to mass for, we come to be assured of our salvation not laden with doubts." What those certain folk do not understand is that doubt makes us human. Without doubt, without challenge, without question we become automata - mere machines stamping out our short time on earth to the rhythm of our masters, of whatever definite thing we choose to believe. Without doubt there is no magic, no discovery, no joy. And we must take the pain - the agony - of doubt with that joy. We must take it because it makes us what we are - independent, creative and exploring. There are those who would have us be machines. Who want us to march in step with the wisdom that they impart to us. Who wish us not to doubt. These people are the evil ones - the ones who would deny the truth of humanity. Whether it be politics, religion or science, we must never ever condemn those who doubt, who question, who challenge. They may seem mad - we may beleive them mistaken. But their doubt is more important than our certainty. I am a mosaic of doubts. I am certain only of the absence of certainty. And this imperfect pattern of bits and bats presents its face on the world - to challenge, to argue, to question and to say that your certainty is not so. And that fragmented, uneven picture lasts better than the smooth, unblemished coat of clear colour - it is real, living, a construct of doubt rather that certain truth. It is life's mosaic... ....