Scribblings VI: Old lags, metaphysics, arts funding, pubs and public health

Trying to keep up with assorted Scribblers is challenging and this is a selection that tries to avoid stuff about the US Presidential Elections, Brexit and the leadership of the Labour Party. Not that these things are unimportant but that they've a tendency to crowd out other stuff that's just as interesting (and maybe important).

On the latter point, this post from Anna Raccoon is definitely important - what do we do with elderly and ill (even terminally ill) prisoners?

The number of older prisoners in the UK has more than doubled in the last decade, with the greatest increases amongst those over 70. Around 40% of older prisoners are sex offenders, many of whom are in prison for the first time due to historic abuse. Longer sentences and more stringent release criteria mean that increasing numbers of ‘anticipated deaths’ in prison are predicted.

Fascinating - especially the issues with painkilling drugs (most of which are, from a different angle, narcotics).

Meanwhile the Flaxen Saxon is getting all metaphysical:

Philosophers as far back as Plato (see the allegory of the cave) have reasoned that what we perceive is not reality. With the advent of computers and especially the stupendous increase in computing power, we have to ask ourselves- are we part of a huge computer simulation? Sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? Perhaps, but there are serious professional physicists and philosophers out there who consider the concept not only plausible, but likely. And no, these folk are not inmates of a secure mental health facility, they are, in the main, tenured academics.

As I commented on the blog - all reminds me of Brian Aldiss's 'Report on Probability A'. Which rather takes us to that age old question as to whether we can, in the manner of Azimov's 'psychohistory' break everything down into equations, algorithms and metrics. As Demetrius asks in talking about arts funding:

So many of us ask for the arts to have some funding and support to ensure their survival and continuance in a difficult world. Now it seems that this can only be if extensive management is applied to the distribution and assessment of those which are being assisted.

Having just re-read Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We' (written in 1921 as a critique of Taylorism but banned by the Soviets as it applies as well to Scientific Marxism) it's clear that this breaking down of everything into numbers and measurements remains a challenge to civilisation.

Indeed there's a part of this problem displayed in the endeavours of public health to use science to promote their rather joyless ideology of wellbeing. And both Frank Davis and Paul Barnes pick up on this. First Paul on Stop Smoking Services (SSS) and e-cigs:

This is where I begin to have a niggly problem with SSS. I don’t knock the work they do, but nine times out of ten when a positive article appears in the press there is always this cessation approach – the “they can help you quit smoking” – type line. Broadly speaking that statement is true, but e-cigarettes are substantially more than just a bloody quit aid.

And Frank on 'junk food':

My conclusion is that “junk food” is perfectly good food, but “disapproved food”. It’s food that’s been labelled as “junk”, and most likely libelled as “junk”. And there is no rhyme or reason for this disapproval, much like there is no rhyme or reason for the disapproval of everything else the disapprovers disapprove.

Only approved pleasures are allowed, citizen!

But we like pubs, of course. Pubs are about community - wholesome, clean, caring community. And we should save them. Old Mudgie takes issue with this simple mantra as promoted by Greg Mulholland MP:

Now, I recognise that pubs can have a value as community resources that transcends narrow financial considerations, and that ACV listings, if properly applied, can give them a valuable stay of execution if they are threatened. I’d also support pubs being given protection from being turned into shops or offices without needing planning permission, subject to a reasonable minimum time limit of trading as pub.

But it has to be accepted that society changes and moves on over time, and that most of the current issues around planning and redevelopment are symptoms of the general decline in the demand for pubs, not its cause.

The idea - as Mulholland has promoted in Otley - that every single pub (there are over 20 in Otley) merits protection is hard to defend. Helping locals save the only village pub is a great idea but using planning and regulation as a stick to beat PubCos really won't work if the pub isn't viable in the first place.

Perhaps, if we're concerned about community, we need to ask about how councils, police and fire services are stopping local events unless they pay up or provide their own security (at great cost). Here's Julia:

So....what's happened here is the council get to shrug their shoulders and say 'Toree cutz, mate, innit?' Because that's easier than changing the event into something more manageable.

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No, I'm not a special kind of lovely Tory - just the regular kind

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The attitude of some of my left-wing friends to Conservatives is best compared to the old racist who when challenged about his racism - "but what about Dave, you're OK with Dave?" - replies with something like, "ah, Dave's OK but the rest of those blacks....". Here's an example:

It constantly amazes me that you'd rather wallow in Tory rapacious greed. Cos I don't think you belong there.

You see the problem with all this is that I really am a Conservative. Not a special kind of lovely Tory but the regular sort. I know hundreds of Tories and overwhelmingly they're ordinary, decent, kind, caring, helpful folk. There's no sign of any 'rapacious greed' and I've yet to be served baby at a dinner party. Now I'm prepared to speculate that it may just be that I'm not invited to the sort of dinner parties where rapacious greed is celebrated but somehow I doubt it.

So when I'm with Tories, what do we 'wallow in' if it's not 'rapacious greed'? Well from my experience, what we talk about ranges from the mundane ('lovely weather', 'did you get away for a holiday this Summer', and 'how are the children doing') to matters such as schools, crime, clean streets and green fields. If we get a little more philosophical (although being conservatives we don't like to do this too often - gets in the way of our cherished 'stupid party' positioning), we might discuss the limits of free markets, the decline of religion or the balance between a liberal arts and vocational curriculum in schools.

When we're pushed, we'll give you an answer about what conservatism means and words like independence, choice and heritage might crop up. The discussion might mention the importance of institutions and the idea of 'putting something back'. Plus of course the principle that its right that value added to society is rewarded and that we've a duty to do right by ourselves, our family and our neighbours. On the harder crunchier economics the response will be a visceral support for 'business', the centrality of property rights and a slightly equivocal relationship with the idea of markets. And we're not the biggest fans of taxes.

Now it's true that I tend towards the liberal wing of the party but that doesn't mean I don't accept the idea of personal responsibility, don't think that institutions should be changed gently (if at all) rather than torn down in a fit of nihilistic creative destruction. In the end, I've come to recognise that there's a limit to idealism and that most people I represent want practical, pragmatic things from their elected representatives - a sort of 'soft loo paper conservatism'.

So yes, I care - but then so do most conservatives, the very conservatives you'll find on the 'fair trade' stall at church or working in the local charity shop. The same conservatives who help set up car clubs to run people without transport from their village to the doctors or the hospital, who organise a lunch club for elderly neighbours, who help run the village hall, who rattle tins for a bewildering range of good causes, who cherish local history societies and get their hands dirty with the gardening club or their faces daubed for the am-dram panto.

So my left-wing friends, I'm glad you've noticed that I'm neither rapacious or greed-filled. What you need to learn now is that I'm pretty typical of conservatives in England, of the people who for the last 20 years have trusted me as one of their Conservative councillors in Bingley Rural. These people aren't rapcious or greedy either, they're just decent, honest folk who want to get on with their lives, who want to live in a safe, happy and strong community and who know that the best way to do that is to elect Conservatives.

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"You're not entitled to your opinion": Plato, proto-fascism and the cult of the expert

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You're not entitled to your opinion insists philosophy lecturer, Patrick Stokes:

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Let's get the first thing out of the way. You may be entitled to your opinion but that doesn't stop it being a stupid opinion. And Stokes is right when he observes that students in his class have to argue for their opinion (it is, after all, a philosophy class) The problem is that, as is common in this argument about the value of opinion, Stokes then invokes Plato to substantiate his opinion on who else is allowed to have an opinion. This invocation is backed up with a particularly egregious example of bad opinions being given too much credence.

My problem with this isn't that (using Stokes' example) arguing against vaccination programmes has much validity but rather the wider difficulty in deciding who is or is not an expert. In the case Stokes cites, the distinction is easy but this is seldom the case when it comes to argument. Let's take economics and the example of Paul Krugman. Now Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the very acme of the expert, he is - in Stokes' view - entirely entitled to his opinion. Yet what we get as a result is statements made purely on the basis that 'I am an expert ergo my opinion is valid, you are not an expert ergo your opinion is not valid'.

I wrote about an occasion of Krugman's approach to being an expert a year or so ago:

When confronted with the moral argument that debt means having something now rather than later - meaning of course that we, given the likely timescale for debt repayment, are taking that from future generations - Krugman chooses instead to talk about the lack of graduate job prospects. Rather than addressing the real issue raised - government debt as deferred taxation, Krugman chooses to talk about a relatively minor labour demand issue.

And then when Angela Leadsom raises supply side considerations - how to help the economy create jobs - Krugman lapses into accusations that Ms Leadsom and others are ideologically motivated and using the current crisis to shrink the size of the state. At no point in this does Krugman respond to or consider whether there are any supply side constraints. He waffles vaguely that there's no evidence of supply side constraint (in the US) and states baldly that the whole problem is a matter of demand. More seriously - from the point of debate - he accuses others of insincerity and exploitation without evidence.

What we see here is a 'cult of the expert'. Krugman is right because he is an expert not because, as an expert, he has set out his opinion and refuted (with reason) the arguments from others that challenge that opinion. This is the core ideal of Plato's politics - that society would be better if its management wasn't left to the ignorance of everyman but determined by ruling philosophers. This proto-fascism is the prime cancer in European thought since it seeks to deny the ignorant agency while at the same time deciding ignorance on the basis of an ideology - "I am an expert and you are not".

The argument that Stokes puts forward - "equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse" - might have some validity if experts were limited by their expertise. We have no issue with a scientist making clear that ceteris paribus vaccines are safe and providing scientific evidence to support that opinion. Indeed decision-makers would be foolish to disregard such an opinion unless there was a substantial and evidenced challenge to it.

The problem is that relatively few things within public discourse are as clear as the example that Stokes is using. This means we either have competing experts or else a situation where there is no valid expert opinion. And we still face the problem as to who defines the expert - here's a good example.

A few days ago two academics, Sara Kalkhoran and Stanton Glantz, published a 'systematic review and meta-analysis' of ecigs and smoking cessation concluding that ecigs reduced rates of smoking cessation. Now these are experts (I think we can state, for the sake of our argument, that an academic publishing research is de jure an expert) so, using Stokes argument, we should be giving credence to their opinion. Indeed the World Health Organisation has done just that - using Glantz's research and comment as a core element in its published advice to policy-makers on ecigs.

The problem is this:

"The problems with the authors’ interpretation of the two papers mentioned above are as follows: The first study (Adkson et al) is not longitudinal as has been reported here – e-cigarette use was measured at follow up, the same time as quit status was ascertained. The second study (Hitchman et al) included smokers who were using e-cigarettes at baseline and therefore included smokers who may have tried to use e-cigarettes to quit and failed, and excluded smokers who successfully used e-cigarettes to quit. The authors of this meta-analysis had been previously informed by the authors of the Adkison paper that they were misreporting the findings.”

Such a damning response doesn't, of course, stop the 'public discourse, from presenting Glantz's work without challenge or question. Were Glantz simply an ideological advocate in the manner of Meryl Dorey (Stokes' anti-vaxxer) then he could be dismissed in the same manner. However Glantz is a tenured academic as well as an ideological advocate - his expertise remains even when other researchers present effective challenge. The same - which is why Stokes' position is wrong - applies to Paul Krugman. Without the possibility of some little boy pointing out the emperors lack of clothes, we have the prospect of rule by an ever less accountable 'intellectual' clique conforming to the central Platonic error - that society can be managed by clever men.

Since we're arguing here about the distinction between 'the man in Whitehall knows best' and 'trust the people', it makes sense to enquire which of these two positions manages society best. And there's lots of evidence - some scientific, some historical and some based in reason - arguing both sides. Indeed there are many supporters for the 'philosopher king' model of rule by experts despite the evidence from Soviet Russia, from Germany and, more recently from Cuba or Venezuela that such a model will always (you can't think of everything) result in sub-optimal outcomes. Including some sub-optimal outcomes that result in millions dying painful and premature deaths.

Today this cult of the expert more and more governs our decision-making:

Right across government we see decision-making that should be done by people accountable to the public being done by the unelected - local enterprise partnerships, schools forums, probation boards, a veritable host of the unelected and unaccountable. This is post-democracy - consultation, partnership and the 'professional' have replaced the tried and tested process of electing people to make decisions on our behalf. We have decided that democracy - elections, MPs, councillors and so forth - are a bit of a pain. Or rather we haven't decided, the system has gradually sidelined politicians - the people's representatives - to the stage where the only way for us to effect any change is for us to join in the game, to play at post-democracy.

Democracy isn't modern and it runs counter to our cult of the expert, our obsession with that unreachable ideal of 'evidence-based policy'. So the powerful have emasculated democracy and replaced it with a pretty spectacle, a place of sound and fury. Great fun, as observers of parliament know, but ultimately pointless. The decisions are made somewhere else.

And so long as men like Patrick Stokes, for noble reasons and using egregious examples like Meryl Dorey, promte that cult of the expert to students will will continue to undermine liberty in the cause of better government, to take a few more baby steps towards the Platonic ideal of a fascist autocracy where all-knowing philosophers order society in the interests of a supine unquestioning (for questioning the expert is a sin) mass of the population.

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Celebrating soft loo paper conservatives - a critique of the "Good Right"

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During the recent election there were - as the opinion polls seemed reluctant to shift in the Conservative Party's favour - voices that criticised the campaign strategy and messaging. Most notably Tim Mongomerie who railed against the narrow focus of the campaign and argued that the simple messaging on the economy, welfare and taxes was missing the real concerns of British people.

The reduction of politics to a few simplified messages - repeated endlessly can work in a campaign against a weak opponent but it can't be a governing philosophy.

The problem is that the circumstance of that messaging - the relentless 'long term economic plan' and the idea of rewarding 'hard work' - is absolutely within the context of a campaign. And the first rule of campaigns is that you have to win them. Having a great message, slick organisation and support amongst the great and good is pretty useless if the other side wins - if you're not sure about this ask Neil Kinnock.

I suspect that Tim Montgomerie, in crafting his critique, did so at least in part as an exercise in what us marketers call positioning. At the time it didn't look like the Conservatives were going to win the election - the polling showed the main parties neck and neck, the insurgency of UKIP was damaging the Tories and it looked like the limpet-like nature of the Liberal Democrats would see them holding a load of seats the poll ratings said they should lose. So Montgomerie's critique positioned his "Good Right" argument away from the core of the campaign, away from that simple messaging and the drumming repetition of a choice few slogans.

And I guess that, with Montgomerie and others proved wrong about the election results, it's quite understandable for the architect of that Conservative overall majority to have a celebratory dig at those who criticised his campaign. A campaign that was a vindication for the argument that winning an election is about making people's choice simpler - a binary choice. In this case between 'competence and chaos', between Cameron and Miliband, between a Conservative government and one led by Labour. It may be the case that such things as Montgomerie's 'Good Right' proposes are a sound basis for a future Conservative agenda (although I'd note that if it's just "extending home ownership, cutting taxes for the low-paid, renewing the infrastructure of the north and building world class public services" then we've just elected a government on an agenda to do just that) but getting all wonkish about policy is a sure fire way to lose an election - especially when it involves the sort of crass segmentation beloved of the Labour party.

I have something of a problem with Montgomerie's 'Good Right'. Firstly it's because it implies that the regular sort of right isn't good - that if we question above average rises in minimum wages as bad for job creation or challenge the idea that luxury goods taxes are a good idea then we are bad people. But mostly the problem with the 'Good Right' is that it sees the solution solely through the prism of progressive government intervention positioning the party as a sort of blue rinsed version of Blair's New Deal. And, with its ringfencing of revenues, and centralised "needs-based assessments" to move money to deserving places, it owes more to modern technocratic government than to any moral argument for Conservative ideas.

When I was a student there was a group of Conservatives who wanted our manifesto for election to the student union council to be about services to students rather than the more regular fare of undergraduate politics. We dismissed this group as 'soft loo paper conservatives' - more bothered with such things as the opening hours of the canteen, the stocking of the bars and the provision of discounted dry-cleaning than with the grand affairs of the day (and the latest excuse for a boycott, a sit-in or a lecture strike).

Looking back I see that this group - the soft loo paper Tories - were far more in tune with real conservatism than the rest of us. After all the purpose of government shouldn't be grand sweeping (upsetting) change but the good administration of the services people want government to provide. And we do this knowing that, left to their own devices, people are pretty much able to run their own lives without agents of government to guide them in their choices. Even better - and unlike government - those people will be creative, innovative and entrepreneurial helping make their world richer, happier and more fun.

It seems to me that Lynton Crosby's simple message that Conservatives know what they're doing and can carry on getting the economy fixed while reducing the welfare burden and maintaining health funding is merely that 'soft loo paper' argument writ large. We don't need to set out a precise and detailed blueprint for the government's agenda merely to demonstrate competence and provide a direction that sees service quality improving (and hopefully the price of those services dropping).

Finally if there's a need to demonstrate how the right is morally justified - to promote a 'Good Right' - then it should lie in making the case for free enterprise, challenging the demonising of profit and arguing that property rights underpin our civilisation. Gathering a collection of centrist interventions and badging them as "good" completely ignores the moral basis for lower taxes, the case for decentralising decision-making, the rightness of private initiative in every aspect of life, and the wrongness of the left's nationalising of compassion. If as Tim Montgomerie suggests we need a 'governing philosophy' then let's not make it a sort of half-cooked social democracy, let's make it conservatism.

A while back I wrote this - by way of a felt conservatism:

In Bingley Rural – five villages in the South Pennines – there aren’t many millionaires. The roads aren’t cluttered with flash cars, we don’t have fancy wine bars or posh boutiques, the merchant banker is most definitely a foreign beast – but we are pretty conservative. We like the place as it is, we like the features of the villages, the pubs, the farm shops, the butcher, we enjoy the company of neighbours and friends and we want to work. We love the setting and the country around us.

What we ask of our government is pretty simple – protection from crime, good schools and skilled doctors, helping keep the place clean, maintaining the roads, pavements and parks, providing support – when needed – to those in need and preserving the good things about the places. We don’t ask for lectures about “climate change”, about drinking and smoking, what kind of car we drive or holiday we take.

When I knock on doors and talk to local folk, they don’t ask me about the carbon footprint of Easyjet or the need to ban booze advertising. People don’t mention ‘gross national happiness’ or the equalities agenda. What they ask is why the pubs are going bust, how expensive basic staples – food and fuel - have got, how they never see a copper and why their son can’t afford a house in the village.

Simple, easy-to-understand things concerned with the place we live, with keeping it nice, with making it better – conservative things.

Soft loo paper.

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Why the default political action should be to do nothing...

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“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”

Dostoevsky (from The Idiot)

One of my very earliest pieces on this blog was to write in praise of idiots, to explain and celebrate the growth of apathy:

Above all we should listen quietly to what this “apathy” calls for – it is less bothersome, less interfering, less hectoring and more effective government. Such people want government to be conducted at their level not to be the province of pompous politicians with overblown and lying rhetoric. And they want the language of common sense, freedom, liberty and choice to push away the elitist exclusivity of modern bureaucratic government.

The point I was trying to make was that these people were quietly getting on with their lives and the actions of politicians and bureaucrats served mostly to impede that quietly getting along. And that it is wrong to tell such folk that somehow they are bad citizens for not bothering to attend the village hall on voting day.

The thing with politics today - or rather our dominant political ideology - is that it believes there are always things that government can do to "fix" the problems of society. There is a belief - bordering on hubris - that if only the right levers are pulled, the right taxes levied, the proper regulations in place and the appropriate leadership employed, if only these things are done then everything will suddenly be better.

The problem is that we really haven't the first idea what we're doing. I listened today to a public health person telling us that inequality creates inequality - it took him longer to say it but this was the gist of his philosophising. There was no logic to this man's argument (although it contained enough buzzwords to get the audience nodding and making little grunts of assent) but it referenced the greatest societal sin of modern thinking - inequality.

The problem is that there isn't any consistent or robust evidence saying that inequality is the problem let alone ways of solving the "problem" of inequality that don't involve throwing the baby out with the bath water. To help us understand this, here's Michael Huemer from the University of Colorado:

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies – almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.

Except, of course, that every day one or other (often self-interested or self-serving) agitator pops up on the radio, TV or in the newspapers explaining, usually with carefully selected facts and figures, that this is terrible and that something must be done. The relevant minister, QUANGO boss or council leader is dragged blinking into the studio to explain just why they hadn't done something and when they plan on doing that particular something.

The problem is that - as Huemer describes - the experts prescribing the 'somethings' that must be done really aren't very good:

Unfortunately, when it comes to descriptive social theory, even the experts’ knowledge is unimpressive, as demonstrated recently by the social psychologist Phillip Tetlock. Tetlock conducted a fifteen-year study in which he collected tens of thousands of predictions from hundreds of political experts concerning matters within their areas of expertise (for example, would the economy slide into recession, would the Soviet Union survive, who would win the next Presidential election, and so on). Tetlock’s finding, in brief, was that the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes. When asked to assign probabilities to their predictions, experts proved systematically overconfident; for example, events predicted with 100% confidence happened less than 80% of the time.

So when the latest policy wonk (from right, left or centre, it doesn't matter) sounds off on the Today programme or pontificates on Newsnight bear this failure in mind, head for your kitchen cupboard and take an appropriate (not too much because those 'experts' say it's bad for you) amount of salt with the wonk's opinion.

So what should we be doing if there isn't some sort of social scientific unified theory of everything? The answer is perhaps two-fold:

1. A great deal less than we do at present - as my idiots know, people just getting on with their lives and not interfering too much in the lives of others is as good a solution as any other.

2. Simpler, more understandable things done locally - those same idiots also want to understand things and the best way to do this is for those things to be discussed in a manner they understand and at a scale they appreciate.

This approach may be a little bit untidy. It may lead to folk popping up on radio, telly and in the papers talking about "postcode lotteries" or "place inequalities" but it has the merit of allowing nearly everyone the chance to be involved. Just as importantly that essential principle - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - applies. And most of society's problems are more a consequence of us trying to fix things than of things needing to be fixed.

In the end our default political action should be to do nothing. Sadly the imperative of today's politics demands that this default political action is something. The result is failure and misery not a better society.

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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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The dafodils of freedom...

Various folk have commented on the case of the daffodils – or rather the picking of daffodils.

Sienna Marengo was picking flowers with her sister India, 10, and step-sister Olivia, six, when they were spotted by a passing councillor who reported the incident to the police.

Two officers then warned the girls’ mother, Jane Errington, 35, that she and her partner Marc Marengo, 49, could be arrested for theft and criminal damage before moving them on.

Now much of this is about the pettiness of this act, the waste of police time and the impact on the two small children involved in the terrible picking incident! But in one comment – essentially a defence of the busybody – from Deborah Orr an important philosophical term was purloined and misused:

Yet there is one aspect of this case that does pinpoint a distinctive feature of contemporary British life, and that is a widespread and powerful attachment to "negative liberty", in which people want very much to be able to get on with their own business without do-gooders or agents of the state interfering, yet tend to engage little with the concept of freedom and how it works at a societal level.

The term – as the eagle-eyed reader will have spotted – is “negative liberty”. What Ms Orr implies – pretty strongly – is that such an attitude is a mere bagatelle next to how freedom works “at a societal level”. I’m sure there will be dissenters but the initiator of the idea of “negative and positive liberty” was Isaiah Berlin and his use of the words “negative” and “positive” was not intended to reflect “good” or “bad”. Berlin, by using “negative” meant the absence of controls, restrictions or bans – the idea that we are free to act.

The problem for Ms Orr is, of course, that Berlin wasn’t especially keen on “positive liberty” – on liberty at the “societal level”:

Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole — “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers. “Once I take this view”, Berlin says, “I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ... must be identical with his freedom” (Berlin 1969, pp. 132-33).

The point here is that “negative liberty” is, indeed, what we understand by freedom. The “concept of freedom and how it works at a societal level” sounds like Berlin’s idea of “positive” freedom to me – and that is a precursor to illiberal acts, totalitarianism and the arresting of four-year-olds for picking a couple of daffs.

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Dear Mr de Botton, if you're going to attack advertising, try to understand how it works

The popular philosopher, Alain de Botton, has had something to say about nannying fussbucketry – he titles it: “In defence of the nanny state.” Now I was tempted to take the entire piece and especially its central premise and point out it flaws – although no genuine liberal would get past this:

Modern politics, on both left and right, is dominated by what we can call a libertarian ideology.

Once I had picked myself up, dusted myself down, stopped giggling and become thoughtful again I was able to read on – mindful that at any point a further statement of such mindboggling stupidity might spring from the page again. And lo, such a phrase arrived – slightly better wrapped this time but just as wrong:

We don't currently live in a "free" society in the true sense of the term. Every day, our minds are assaulted by commercial messages that reach us from all sides. The whole billion-pound-a-year advertising industry runs counter to any assertion that we're currently free and un-nudged as it stands.

Mr de Botton falls into a very familiar trap when talking about advertising – that its messages are somehow different from the millions of other messages we receive, process and respond to in our lives. And our philosopher goes further to suggest some kind of balancing of advertising – doubtless under the control of Platonic Philosopher Kings or maybe just the vanguard of the ‘general will’.

Advertising messages are mere communications – of course they seek to nudge us, at least insofar as their objective is to affect our behaviour. Most commonly the purpose of advertising is not to sell you something but to persuade you to carry on buying the thing you’re already buying. The promotion of brand loyalty – the core purpose of much advertising – is, if anything, anti-nudge.

Now Mr de Botton, I hope, will understand the meaning of ‘heuristic’ – how our minds develop techniques to speed up decision-making in a world of (inevitably) imperfect information. That is what brand marketing does – create heuristic responses in consumers. But advertising is not alone in doing so – we seek short cuts from other sources, from experts (the philosophers of consumerism, if you will) and, above all, from friends, neighbours and family. The brand does not sit in isolation within the individuals recall but fights for space with a load of other information, good, bad, right and wrong.

A great deal has been said by well-heeled, intellectuals such as our friendly philosopher about brands, advertising and marketing but nearly all of it has been predicated on a profound misunderstanding of where advertising messages sit in the wider communications environment. Despite the seeming ubiquity of advertising, such messages are a very tiny proportion of the messages we receive. Advertisers would love their messages to be as effective as Mr de Botton thinks they are!

I don’t wish to comment on Mr de Botton’s overall message – except that it is deeply depressing. What I can say is that he doesn’t have the first idea about advertising.

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Les choses sont contra nous

Why? Just why?

Two days before Christmas when half the populace have stopped working, the temperatures are plumbing new global-warming inspired lows and we would rather be powering down in anticipation of a pleasant, food and drink filled festive break - two days before the ever older relatives arrive the bloody boiler breaks down. Why?

There is, of course, a theory - a philosophy brought to us English speakers by that great thinker Paul Jennings. He writes:

This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialisin, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre. In transferring the dynamic of philosophy from man to a world of hostile Things,’ Ventre has achieved a major revolution of thought, to which he himself gave the name ‘Resistentialism’. Things (res) resist (résister) man (homme, understood). Ventre makes a complete break with traditional philosophic method. Except for his German precursors, Freidegg and Heidansiecker, all previous thinkers from the Eleatics to Marx have allowed at least some legitimacy to human thought and effort. Some, like Hegel or Berkeley, go so far as to make man’s thought the supreme reality. In the Resistentialist cosmology that is now the intellectual rage of Paris Ventre offers us a grand vision of the Universe as One Thing – the Ultimate Thing (Dernière Chose). And it is against us.

Ah yes - les choses son contra nous. I knew it had something to do with the French.

Well, just so you know 'things' - some of us are fighting back! While Jennings reports:

Resistentialism thus formalizes hatred both in the cosmological and in the psychological sphere. It is becoming generally realized that the complex apparatus of our modern life – the hurried meals, the dashing for trains, the constant meeting of people who are seen only as ‘functions’: the barman, the wife, etc. – could not operate if our behaviour were truly dictated by the old, reactionary categories of human love and reason. This is where Ventre’s true greatness lies. He has transformed, indeed reversed the traditional mechanism of thought, steered it away from the old dogmatic assumption that we could use Things, and cleared the decks for the evolution of the Thing-process without futile human opposition. Ventre’s work brings us a great deal nearer to the realization of the Resistentialist goal summed up in the words, ‘Every Thing out of Control.’

...some of us are at the forefront - nay, the VANGUARD - of a new order where man reasserts his god-given authority over things. Antiresistentialism is born!

So look out boiler, I'm coming for you first!

....

Happy Days!

Until a couple of days ago I was happy.

Happy in the knowledge that my Government intended to base its policy prescriptions on an objective assessment of the economy, the environment and social circumstances. Assessments that – while open to challenge – have the merit of being about tangible things like money, jobs, pollution and illness.

But now it seems – in a fit of nonsense – my Government has decided that all these carefully set, often sophisticated measures are not the thing. Instead we’re going to base policy decisions on measuring happiness. And we’re going to base that measurement on a clever appraisal of behavioural indicators, psychometric models and statisical analysis?

Er…no. We’re just going to ask people how happy they are. Four times a year.

That’s it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m largely in favour of happiness – or at least its pusuit. But I wonder about the objectivity of happiness measures for a load of different reasons – some philosophical, some moral and some operational.

I guess we should start with the philosophical and moral questions – what is happiness. OK so I know some of those clever psychologists think that happiness is a physiological state and therefore nothing to do with philosophy, let alone metaphysics.

Scientists have observed common physical side effects of happiness. From brain waves, to hormone levels, to heart rate and blood pressure, happiness carries markers in the body.

But note that these are “physical side effects” – all the clever psychologists can tell you is that when you’re happy we can detect these side effects. That doesn’t begin to tell us what we mean by happiness.

The concept of happiness – and its importance can be traced back to Plato:

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself and not upon other men has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderstion, of manly character and of wisdom

Plato saw well-being as a central element in society and more significantly that happiness is a consequence of justice and that it was not the result of hedonistic indulgence. Thus:

The descriptions of the pleasure seeking nature of democratic individuals and the just man, who pursues a balanced and harmonious lifestyle, not surrendering himself to ‘savage and unreasoning pleasure’ show that Plato’s view was that pursuit of happiness and pleasure for its own sake leads only to injustice and enslavement.

It seems to me that this rejection of pleasure as a source of well-being is reflected in the proposals we now see to measure happiness. And therefore, that this happiness cannot be addressed through panem et circenses but must be addressed through the superior class putting in place laws, systems and measures that promote well-being. This might be expressed in the manner of Bentham and Mill:

Yet it may still in the end be the case that his (Bentham’s) most persistent and consistent concerns lay neither in ethics nor in politics but in government. He believed that efficiency, order, rationality, system, when developed and sustained in the business of government, administration and judicature, would produce better societies for human beings to live in.

Thus the pursuit of happiness was, for these utilitarians, a matter for government rather than for the individual. The purpose of government is “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” whether they like it or not. This is the type of government that sees the banning of minority interests to serve a perceived wider interest as just.

The idea of government endorsed happiness is an elitist and deeply reactionary concept that derives from an authoritarian conception of government’s purpose.

Which rather brings us – my apologies for this being at something of a canter – to the modern day idea of ‘well-being’ or happiness. And we find that modern proponents of ‘happiness economics’ remain at heart utilitarian. Here’s Richard Layard:

The need is pretty obvious, but one fact makes it absolutely essential. People in the West have got no happier in the last 50 years. They have become much richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier.

Note that we're not told we are less happy - merely that progress is pointless as it does not make us more happy. Because of this Prof. Layard and others argue that the entire basis of our policy-making must be changed. Away from the enlightenment settlement – the idea of human progress through adventure – to an earlier idea of stabilily. An idea more akin to the work of Hobbes (and indeed back to Plato’s ‘guardians’) where we see that submission to authority is a prerequisite of ‘contentment’. We know our place in the order of things.

So much for the philosophical and moral questions although I find the appeal to authority implicit in Layard’s work somewhat disheartening – even, dare I say it, depressing – we should not be surprised that successive governments under the leadership of Britain’s ‘guardian’ class are attracted by the idea of directing the happiness of hoi poloi. Suffice it to say that the concept derives from authoritarian approaches to rule rather than to the idea of liberty and human progress. A concept I find to be without moral justice.

Indeed, the happiness beloved of the utilitarians, Hobbesians and modern day Platonists isn't the excitement of achivement - the joy of 'Eureka' - but the contentment of a gentle boat ride down the river. The aim is too eliminate stress and promote a form of benign comfort - a slippers and comfy chair kind of world. There is no room for 'grit in the shoe', for the little irritations that drive innovation. We must accept our place, be content with our lot.

These gurus of happiness do not want anger, challenge, debate and annoyance as these things are stressful - they undermine 'well-being'. We are to be gentled - made docile by our masters' policies. Resistance will be punished to serve the 'happiness' of fifty plus one. And it sounds so pleasant, so lulling:

"Wellbeing can't be measured by money or traded in markets. It's about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times."

I think, Mr Cameron, you should have stopped after the first four words in that statement!

Happiness doesn't seem to relate directly to anything that public policy actions address. We could argue just as much that the relentless increase in taxation and state control is driving unhappiness as we can that it is misdirected economic policy. In truth:

"...happiness research cannot be used to justify government intervention in the way its proponents suggest. Those who would wish governments to take into account measures of wellbeing when setting policy often point to the fact that increases in income have not lead to increases in measured happiness, and thus governments should concentrate on redistribution and improving the quality of life, rather than on allowing people to benefit from economic growth. In fact, measured happiness does not appear to be related to public spending, violent crime, property crime, sexual equality, disability, life expectancy or unemployment either. The stark fact is that the difficulties in measuring society's happiness are insurmountable, and policymakers should not claim that they can control and increase happiness through public policy decisions."

My concern, more than anything else, is that 'gross national happiness' will prove to be a justification for more rules, more controls and more intervention in our lives. All for the greater good, you understand. Another excuse for those ever more forceful nudges.

And at the end of it?

We won't be any happier.

....

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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MYOB or Why I'm a Conservative not a Libertarian

***

There’s a great deal to be said about libertarianism – although it would help if those advocating it would make up their minds as to what it all means. And, as I’ve described myself as an occasionally intolerant libertarian, I guess there comes a point at which to explain why – despite the appeal of that creed – I remain a conservative.

I am – as all good conservatives should be – a sceptic. After all it was a Conservative prime minister who wrote “A defence of Philosophic Doubt” and we are led to the view that (as H. L. Mencken put it): “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong”. Libertarianism – like Marxism, socialism and assorted other –isms is one of such solutions.

The second reason is that people – how to we put it – need a modicum of moral encouragement. Since libertarians accept a role for government – again a role not necessarily specified or agreed on – it falls on us to ask about that role and how it might work. Simply stopping at enforcing property rights (however defined) seems unnecessarily limiting.

The non-aggression concept at the heart of libertarianism is fine – until we stop to think about what it means, where its limits are and how to enforce its strictures. The resulting arguments are more akin to discussion of angels dancing on pinheads that to a discourse about the reality of politics.

My worry – and the point at which I am wont to part company with my party – is that the Conservative Party accedes too easily and contains too many who believe in controlling the behaviors of others simply because we have arrived at a judgment on that behaviour. English conservatives need to ask what it is they are conserving – is it some defined set of behaviours handed down to us by some benign leadership steeped in the traditions of England (let’s call this the Scruton-Heffer position) or is the target of conservation the liberties, freedom and independence of English men and women (the Hume-Carswell position)?

For me we seek to defend the things that define what we are – some are cultural like pubs, folk music and pies while others are more fundamental such as equality under the law, property rights, free expression and free association. However, the fundamental principle of English conservatism is for me MYOB. Our inalienable right to tell whoever we want, whenever we want to “mind your own business”.

...

Wednesday Whimsy: why I believe in Fairies

It has long struck me as odd that it is socially acceptable to believe in ghosts but considered a sign of utter madness to believe in fairies!

Of course it was not always so as a couple of girls in Cottingley showed - sensible grown men and women were taken in (maybe distracted by the day job of getting thousands of Frances and Elsie's neighbours blown to bits in Belgium) by their pictures of real live fairies!

It does however strike me that fairies are far more believable and understandable than ghosts - which makes absolutely no sense at all to me. At least I can see a route back to belief in the spirits of stone and tree and stream - things that may have no reality but which chime with our love of anthropomorphic representation. Indeed this humanising of the non-human seems a huge part of our modern culture perhaps suggesting that Paul Jennings was not so far off the mark with his spoof philosophy - resistentialism. "Les chose sont contra nous" - Jenning wrote: and do we not echo that every day in our talk of bugs and gremlins, fates and breakdown?

Surely these are modern day nature spirits - the 21st century fairies. Far more real than ghosts - merely things to scare or else reflecting a fearful realisation that our time on this earth is short and we have no idea what does or doesn't happen after.

So yes, I'm prepared to believe in fairies. But ghosts - no way, no such thing.
.

Is government futile? Two premises of government defined.

It’s not often that I’m reminded of this truth – and never before by someone claiming to be a Liberal Democrat!

The first premise of government is that we the people are unable to organise our lives by ourselves. We can’t be trusted not to mess up. Or worse we’ll commit dire crimes such as not recycling, educating our own children or eating the wrong combination of green stuff. But we’re good at looking out for ourselves – its human nature, instinctive, visceral – we don’t need a government to do it for us.

Government organises our lives in the social interests of the rulers not the ruled

The second premise of government is that markets don’t work. We cannot be allowed to trade free from intervention, from rules and from paying the bureaucrat his slice for managing such intervention and rule-making. Despite the fact that we have proof that markets work – under any condition.

Government intervenes with economic behaviour to the economic benefit of the rulers not the ruled.

I am prepared to accept government only under the conditions where the rulers and the ruled are coterminous. Under all other conditions it is my duty to seek to change it so as to achieve such conditions. I must never defend the actions of government just because they accord with my interests – those actions must accord with the interests of all.