Bumper edition
Yes folks, I’m trying to write something on why Karl Popper was on the wrong tram and Michael Polanyi was on the right one — or at least a better one. This is not easy — for me at least. Popper is bombastic and evasive, so actually pinning down what he is saying is tricky. This leads to his enigmatic status summed by his one-time acolyte Alan Musgrave (most of his acolytes fell out — including Feyerabend and Lakatos who were devout Popperians):
The situation with Popper’s philosophy is most peculiar. There are twelve or twenty folk, the self-styled ‘Popperians’, who think it is the bee’s knees. Most philosophers ignore them. Popper’s philosophy of science is popular among scien- tists. Most philosophers of science think it fatally flawed. Popper talks about ‘The Growth of Scientific Knowledge’. Most philosophers regard him as a sceptic who thinks scientists know nothing. Popper says he is a ‘critical rationalist’ and extols the virtues of reason. He is one of the Four Irrationalists discussed in a recent book of that name.
Why am I telling you of my difficulties. Which means that the procrastinational (sic) value of compiling my newsletter surged.
And still there’s no paywall!
And now for some #HitlerBingo
#HitlerBingo: Great review by Ian Leslie
I’ve extracted the last quarter of a great and unpaywalled Substack article by Ian Leslie. It’s on the new movie The Zone of Interest, in which we learn of the quiet suburban life of Rudolph Höss. He is a decent sort of person, loves his job, gives his wife a peck on the cheek and then leaves his house and goes next door to work. Which is the murder of a million odd souls. A good review.
To win a war you must make yourself, at least to some extent, indifferent to killing. It is a necessary means to an end. To carry out a genocide, you must see the act of killing as an end in itself: a source of purpose, pride and joy. Goldhagen quotes an air force sergeant, writing in 1943, who tells proudly of the destruction of the largest Jewish population in Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto … . He sounds as if he’s congratulating a sales team on a particular strong quarter: “We flew several circles above the city. And with great satisfaction we could recognise the complete extermination of the Jewish Ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job.”…
The Holocaust throws into question some of our fundamental beliefs and assumptions: for instance, the idea that culture is civilising, or that a multitude of people is always basically good with evil always confined to a minority. One reason The Zone of Interest is so powerful is that it is not interested in explaining, merely in showing, in a manner which is subtle and oblique, though no less horrifying for it.
Reading Goldhagen’s book made me think about the horrific accounts of October 7th. While Douglas Murray was wrong to suggest that German soldiers were mostly reluctant perpetrators of genocide, he was right to highlight the zealous joy with which Hamas’s killers went about their work. I don’t know how widespread or how deep antisemitism is among the Palestinian and Arab populations, but we certainly saw its most virulent manifestation on October 7th.
The book also made me reflect on the claim that Israel is bent on genocide. It seems clear to me that the Israelis do not take symmetrical pleasure in killing Palestinians. It can certainly be argued that Israeli indifference to Palestinian lives is morally appalling. But I do not believe that Israelis are killing Palestinians because they are Palestinians. …
The attitude of Israelis to Palestinians seems nothing like that of Germans to Jews in the 1930s. As for the other side, Hamas do not have the means to carry out an eliminationist program of destruction against Jews, and thank goodness. I’m not an expert on the legal argument over whether Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, but the genocidal impulse is most clearly instantiated in the actions of Hamas on October 7th: the hunting expeditions to catch those who escaped from the carnage at the music festival, the mass rapes followed by murders, the demonic glee with which Hamas’s killers inserted weapons into the genitals of their victims, or sliced foetuses out of pregnant women - and the sharing of these atrocities, via video, with the folks back home; pride in a fantastic job.
Commanders for Israel’s Security
How things could be different. Another great podcast by Ezra Klein, who continues to wonder aloud, incredulous about a time when the war is over and 80% of Gazans have been displaced and about half of them have a family member who was killed or maimed by the Israelis. And then what?
From the left
I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s worth pondering the process by which bureaucracy interposes itself, and injects its own logic into grave moral questions.
On Wednesday 31st of January morning I woke up to an email from the right-wing newspaper Welt am Sonntag. They declared me to be ‘an activist for the BDS boycott movement for years’ which has never been the case. I take my job as an academic too seriously to have time to be an activist.
I was informed that the newspaper’s so-called ‘research team’ that ‘since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, we have noticed that you have been making increasingly drastic statements towards the State of Israel’… It didn’t seem to occur to them that maybe this was because Israel was engaging in an on-going mass murder of Palestinians. …
Two months into the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and its killing of thousands of Palestinians, my colleague Livnat Konopny-Decleve, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, invited me to participate in an EASA (European Association of Social Anthropology)-organised debate on Violence and Postcolonialism. The thought came to me that if anthropologists have anything specific to add to the scholarly analysis of political violence, it probably had to do with trying to show that political violence is not something that is the same everywhere: there are different cultures of violence. Looking at a photo of naked Palestinian prisoners being led by Israeli soldiers in the ruins of Gaza, I began thinking about the relation between violence and humiliation. As I often do when I am writing, I posted the idea I had on Facebook:
The Israelis like to say that what they are doing in Gaza is like what the allies did in Dresden. But this is not true. The allies never tried to humiliate the people of Dresden. Israeli violence resembles far more Nazi antisemitic violence in this regard in its destructive power and desire to humiliate. It also resembles Nazi violence by its vulgarity.
I am taking my time contextualising this Facebook post as it is one of the posts that were deemed by the lawyers of the Max Planck Society to put me in contravention of the law in Germany: it is apparently antisemitic to engage in a comparison between Israel and Nazis. That is what I was told anyway. As far as I understand, this is, in a nutshell, what has put me at odds with Max Planck Society’s lawyers. What to me is a fair, intellectual critique of Israel, for them is ‘antisemitism according to the law in Germany’.
This is why, if Max Planck Society’s president limited himself to saying something like the above, I could have lived with it. I might not like the way the critique of Israel is conflated with antisemitism, and I find the German’s pseudo philosemitism self-serving, and at times racist, instrumentalised to racialize the Palestinian and more generally the Arab and Muslim community in Germany. But as a visitor there is a limit to the extent to which I feel entitled to critique this.
A thuper therious thnake
War on terror, war on journalism: Assange
I remember watching John Kay and Paul Collier talking about four years ago about the way in which lawyers in large companies’ principle responsibility is to ensure that senior management can always escape legal accountability for what they do. The flip side of this is that in addition to being immune from responsibility, the law is sufficiently complex that those at the top can entangle anyone they want, for pretty much as long as they like, no matter how little they are able to come up with to demonstrate the guilt of the entangled. It’s quite a state of affairs. Just a generation and a half ago, the law protected Daniel Ellsberg for publishing the Pentagon Papers.
Britain’s political class rightly responded to the mysterious death of Alexei Navalny with an assortment of horror, outrage and indignation. The Kremlin critic’s treatment was an “appalling human rights outrage”, foreign secretary Lord Cameron said. Putin has to be “held to account”, Labour leader Keir Starmer added. So, when Julian Assange arrives at the High Court today for his final hearing, after being held without trial in Belmarsh maximum-security prison for almost five years, will the country’s political elite once again proclaim their commitment to human rights? I suspect not. …
Those not privy to the case’s details may even think that Assange is in jail because he’s been convicted for one of the many crimes he’s been accused of over the years — from rape to cyber-crime to espionage.
Yet this would be a gross misreading. Since 2019, Assange has been imprisoned in Belmarsh — and subjected to “prolonged psychological torture”, according to a UN report — despite being technically innocent before British law, since he’s never been convicted of any crime except violating his bail order when, 12 years ago, he sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 12 months. …
As Nils Melzer, former United National Special Rapporteur on Torture, wrote in a scathing report on the Assange case, there are “strong indications that the Swedish police and prosecution deliberately manipulated and pressured [at least one of the alleged victims], who had come to the police station for an entirely different purpose, into making a statement which could be used to arrest Mr Assange on the suspicion of rape”.
One of the many myths surrounding the case is that it never went to trial because Assange evaded justice. In reality, Assange, who was then in the UK, made himself available for questioning via several means, by telephone or video conference, or in person in the Australian embassy. But the Swedish authorities insisted on questioning him in Sweden. Assange’s legal team countered that extradition of a suspect simply to question him — not to send him to trial, as he had not been charged — was a disproportionate measure. …
[T]hanks to a FOIA investigation by Maurizi, we now know the reason. During this period, the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then led by one Keir Starmer, played a crucial role in getting Sweden to pursue this highly unusual line of conduct. In early 2011, while Assange was still under house arrest, Paul Close, a British lawyer with the CPS, gave his Swedish counterparts his opinion on the case, apparently not for the first time. “My earlier advice remains, that in my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK,” he wrote. Why did the CPS advise the Swedes against the only legal strategy that could have brought the case to a rapid resolution, namely questioning Julian Assange in London, rather than insisting on his extradition? …
As a result of the Swedish authorities’ highly unusual behaviour, Assange had by then been arbitrarily and illegitimately forced into detention for seven years, as was concluded even by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Melzer, the former UN Rapporteur, would later list 50 perceived due-process violations by the Swedish authorities, including “proactive manipulation of evidence”, such as replacing the content of the women’s statement unbeknown to the latter. “[T]he Swedish authorities did everything to prevent a proper investigation and judicial resolution of their rape allegations against Assange,” Melzer concluded.
The futility of arguing against identity politics
Excellent essay from Joseph Heath. I’ve truncated it fairly severely with edits, so you may benefit from reading the whole thing through from the link below. I had previously decided I’d ignore this insight-free bit of anti-racist racism on the whiteness of Taylor Swift — our peak narcissist of the moment. (At least I liked the heading “White Noise”.) But the concluding passages of this piece changed my mind. Shame on The Saturday Paper.
Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining [that I’d seen it all before], I reread Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference, which was published in 1990 and immediately because hugely influential. Sure enough, the basic point about intersectionality is right there:
From often heated discussion among socialists, feminists, and antiracism activists in the last ten years a consensus is emerging that many different groups must be said to be oppressed in our society, and that no single form of oppression can be assigned causal or moral primacy. The same discussion has also led to the recognition that group differences can cut across individual lives in a multiplicity of ways that can entail privilege and oppression for the same person in different respects. Only a plural explication of the concept of oppression can adequately capture these insights (p. 42).
Again I would like to emphasize that this was published more than 30 years ago. The “heated debates” that she is referring to occurred in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. The only thing missing in Young’s discussion is the handy catchphrase “intersectionality.” (On the other hand, a notable feature of Young’s work is that she tries explicitly to bring this politics of “group identity” into relation with traditional egalitarianism, and is troubled by the tensions that arise. This is something that contemporary theorists have put a great deal less effort into.) …
The essay then explains how nationalism creates benefits of solidarity at the cost of (potentially catastrophic) out-group hostility. It then compares it to wokery.
In addition to its practical effects, this sense of in-group membership provides many people with a sense of belonging that they crave (which the abstract universalism of liberal institutions fails to satisfy). Nationalism provides the same for many people, and yet majority nationalism is often seen as chauvinistic and intolerant, and thus incompatible with liberal ideals. Identifying as a member of the oppressed, by contrast, allows people to have it both ways. They can indulge their atavistic desire for group belonging while nevertheless convincing themselves that it is all in the service of justice. …
And yet, just as in the case of nationalism, there are obvious risks to the identitarian strategy, precisely to the extent that the heightened in-group solidarity is accompanied by out-group animosity. Indeed, the most powerful critique of identity politics is not based on the concern that it violates universalist principles (either moral or epistemological) – this much is obvious – but that it runs the risk of becoming self-defeating, because of its failure to take seriously the negative psychological effects of its own central strategy (or to claim innocence when these effects become manifest). In order for the “heightened solidarity” effect to be emancipatory, it must occur only among the oppressed and not among the oppressors. In other words, it requires that a fundamental asymmetry be maintained, a sort of “identity politics for me, but not for thee.” Specifically, it requires that only minority group members advance identity-based interests, while majorities refrain from doing so. …
As Mounk observes, many proponents of identity politics have been culpably naive when it comes to the likely consequences of their political interventions. Perhaps the most reckless has been the intentional cultivation of “whiteness” as a social identity (along with its academic correlate “whiteness studies”). This seems like taking an unintended negative consequence of identity politics and turning it into an intended consequence. The idea that one could cultivate a specifically racial identity among majority group members, and yet insist that this be adopted only as the basis of guilt and repentance, seems not just implausible but positively wild. …
But there I go, arguing against identity politics, which is not what I want to do. My suggestion instead would be that we treat it the same way that most of us have learned to treat nationalism, which is to regard it as 1. essentially unprincipled, 2. psychologically obdurate, 3. instrumentally useful, with 4. potentially negative side-effects that need to be actively sublimated. In the case of identity politics, what we need right now is greater focus on 4. Specifically, progressives need to worry a great deal more about the possibility that growing exophobia in Western societies constitutes a strategic failure of the approach they have adopted to advance the cause of social justice.
Nixon: political pro
Somehow YouTube notices that I play Nixon when he’s served up, and he’s almost always on the money — spookily so here.
Australia Day and the Hollowness of Identity Politics
I’ve previously drawn your attention to Charles Wylie’s mulling over his experiences in Tennant Creek and the disconnect between it and our political system. Here’s some more mulling prompted by Australia Day.
One of the most fundamental absurdities that Tennant Creek illuminates about the national discourse, is that it is almost entirely disconnected from the concerns and interests of the most marginalised Indigenous Australians in the country. … [T]he deeper into the bush you go, the less people are animated by or even conscious of the raging culture war debates which animate the residents of Australia’s capital cities. …
Activists don’t want to talk about the issues afflicting remote communities.
Bringing attention to the specific problems of remote communities makes identity activists uncomfortable (to the extent that they are even aware of them), because these problems do not easily reconcile with their … model of the world.
When obliged to address the specific issues of Indigenous communities, Indigenous identity politics functions by:
a) denying the existence of social problems that are concentrated in Indigenous communities, or the legitimacy of talking about them; or
b) framing those problems as the causal responsibility of white Australia.
[Why?] Identity politics is fundamentally about advancing the symbolic status and self-esteem of the collective group, rather than advocating for people’s material, objective, and mundane interests. …
To illustrate with a real example: Endemic domestic violence in remote Indigenous communities. It exists, but it looks bad, so the activist’s solution is basically not to put too much energy into drawing attention to it, to discount the agency of Aboriginal people by appealing to absolving factors like intergenerational trauma, or to simply deny the issue altogether.
The flip-side of this dynamic is that conservatives are generally happy to highlight such issues, because of the way these signal that white Australia is not wholly responsible for ongoing adverse outcomes in Indigenous communities. This is understood and dismissed by progressives as a way of also putting blame on Indigenous people themselves - not always incorrectly. However, the end result is that Indigenous Disadvantage is reduced to the status of political sledgehammer which both sides use to hit each other with, while the real problems remain unaddressed.
Domestic violence at Sydney Cove
Speaking of DV, this is from Inga Clenndinen’s masterpiece Dancing with Strangers.
Worst, and despite British disapproval, men continued to beat their women as of right, and then nonchalantly took them off to the hospital and Surgeon White to have their wounds and bruises dressed. Some women seemed to prefer this treatment to the sedate pleasures available in the colony. At the end of December a young girl had begged to be allowed to live among Phillip’s servants and under his protection, but she stayed for only a few days before, curiosity satisfied, she returned to her old life. Before she left she stripped off all her clothing, retaining only the woollen nightcap she had been given to keep her newly shaven head warm. Phillip drew the unavoidable inference: ‘She had never been under any kind of restraint, so that her going away could only proceed from a preference to the manner of life in which she had been brought up.’ Even young Boorong could not be kept within the settlement, however brutally she might be treated outside it. One day in the new year she came paddling in with another girl who had also enjoyed a spell under British protection, both of them hungry, both of them beaten around the head and shoulders. They said two men known in the colony had beaten them because they refused to sleep with them. And yet, after a couple of days of food and Surgeon White’s care, they paddled away again.
Both the girls’ freedom and their vulnerability were probably the consequence of the disruptions effected by the smallpox epidemic, exacerbated by the proximity of the British camp as an alternative resource and refuge. But Phillip was in no mood for sociological analysis, gloomily commenting, ‘Making love in this country is always prefaced by a beating, which the female seems to receive as a matter of course.’ His comment does not illuminate the case—the girls were beaten precisely because they said no—but it captures his increasing despondency.
My last words, again: Navalny in 2014
Translated by Konstantin Kisin:
How many times can a man who isn’t breaking the law give his last words? Zero. If he’s really unlucky, once. But, over the last two years, I’ve been asked if I have any last words six, seven, maybe ten times. …
[Speaking to the Judges] If I took a photo of the three of you, or better still, a photo of you together with the counsel for the so-called victims in this case, you are the people with whom I have spent my recent days. I call you “people who look the other way” [The Russian expression is ‘look at the table’]. Do you even notice that you are constantly looking down? You’re looking the other way. I am talking to you but you’re looking down all the time. None of you have anything to say.
[Speaking to the Presiding Judge] - Elena Sergeevna, what is the phrase you keep repeating to me? All of the people I deal with: investigators, prosecutors, prison wardens, civil and criminal judges - you all keep saying the same thing to me: “Alexei, you understand the situation”. It’s true: I understand the situation but what I don’t understand is why do you keep looking the other way?
I have no illusions. I know that none of you are going to jump up, flip the desk over and say “I’ve had enough”. I know that the counsel for my accusers will not stand up and say “You know what? Navalny has changed my mind with his brilliant speech”. Human beings don’t work like this.
The human psyche finds a way to avoid the feeling of guilt. If it didn’t we would throw ourselves onto the shore like dolphins. You can’t just go home tonight and say to your family: “What did I do at work today? I put an innocent man in prison. I am suffering for it and will continue to suffer”.
People don’t work like this. That’s why you say “Alexei, you understand the situation” or “There’s no smoke without fire”. Or they’ll say “He knew what he was doing when he came after Putin” as someone from the Investigative Committee was quoted as saying recently. “Why did Navalny have to draw attention to himself? Why did he get in the way? If he had kept his head down, he’d be fine.”…Everything is built on lies. Do you understand? And the more convincing the evidence any of us produces, the bigger the lies that are thrown back at us. These lies are the tool the state uses, they have become the very essence of our society.
Our leaders lie about everything, big and small. Putin gave a speech yesterday in which he said “We don’t have palaces”. We’ve been taking photos of his palaces for ages - three a month! We publish them and we’re told “We don’t have palaces”!
Why do you tolerate these lies? Why do you look the other way? I’m sorry if I’m dragging you into a philosophical discussion but life is too short to look the other way. …
For all of us, the moment will come when we will realise that none of the things we achieved by looking the other way and keeping quiet mattered. The only moments that matter in life are the moments when we’re doing the right thing. When we don’t have to look the other way, when we can raise our eyes from the floor and look each other in the eye. Nothing else matters. …
I am not going to stop fighting this junta. I will keep fighting them, starting trouble and trying to rile up the people who are looking the other way. You included. I will never stop. …
I am repeating the last words I said in another case against me: nothing has changed. We let them rob us by looking the other way.
I call on everyone to live not by lies. I know that it sounds naive and there is a certain pleasure in laughing and grinning sarcastically as I say it. But there is no other way. There is no other solution for our country right now.
Thank you everyone for your support. I know for a fact that when they isolate and imprison me, another will take my place. Nothing I did was unique or special. Anyone can do what I did. Live not by lies.
Navalny’s words remind me of Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless where he speaks of a system of oppression that operates principally by drawing everyone into complicity with its lies. There is an important difference though. Havel is talking about what he calls post-totalitarianism, a generalised system that has subsumed the system of domination that was totalitarianism. It is a system perpetuated by those within the system rather than a single figure of terror at the top.
They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system. … In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife.
A story that might save you 50K
You can read or listen to this story, and you don’t need to listen to it all (though I was gripped) but you should listen to it for at least the first third so you get the way these guys disorient and isolte you. It might innoculate you against a big mistake one day. If it does, please ring me for further instructions.
On a Tuesday evening this past October, I put $50,000 in cash in a shoe box, taped it shut as instructed, and carried it to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, my phone clasped to my ear. “Don’t let anyone hurt me,” I told the man on the line, feeling pathetic.
“You won’t be hurt,” he answered. “Just keep doing exactly as I say.”
Three minutes later, a white Mercedes SUV pulled up to the curb. “The back window will open,” said the man on the phone. “Do not look at the driver or talk to him. Put the box through the window, say ‘thank you,’ and go back inside.”
The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.
Now I know this was all a scam — a cruel and violating one but painfully obvious in retrospect. Here’s what I can’t figure out: Why didn’t I just hang up and call 911? Why didn’t I text my husband, or my brother (a lawyer), or my best friend (also a lawyer), or my parents, or one of the many other people who would have helped me? Why did I hand over all that money — the contents of my savings account, strictly for emergencies — without a bigger fight?
Nice bit of propaganda against the odious Tucker Carlsen
Central bank digital currencies
Another five steps forward, and four steps back
The Bank of England, which, at least for as long as Andy Haldane remained there I was confident was the best central bank in the world, has released a proposal according to which it would issue central bank digital currency. Just like I proposed way back when. Only, like Philip Lowe, they’re keen on disruptive innovation, just not in their own business. So they’ve designed it carefullly to keep everyone happy, most particularly the banks. But that’s a bit like making sure that you can only access Wikipedia by buying 24 leather bound volumes to sit on your bookshelf, or designing Google to make sure Alta Vista retains its market share.
The challenge for authorities is to develop a more compelling customer proposition for a CBDC. Their primary argument for one, framed around hypothetical monetary fragmentation and the vague promise of future payment innovations, are too abstract to persuade the public of its utility. Instead, authorities should highlight four key consumer benefits from a CBDC and reflect these in its design. First, a CBDC could give consumers greater choice by providing a digital means for making payments with fewer conditionalities. A CBDC would guarantee universal access to digital payment systems for people in an increasingly cashless economy, regardless of their credit history or political beliefs, and without imposing minimum balance or usage requirements.
Second, a CBDC could provide consumers with a truly risk-free asset. While banks can default on deposits, central banks cannot. Although deposit insurance provides some protection, researchers at the BoE have noted that it is a double-edged sword that encourages moral hazard in banks and systemic risk. Introducing a CBDC could pave the way for gradually phasing out government backed deposit insurance. The interest paid on bank deposits would also become more competitive if CBDCs were remunerated. As banks earn interest on their deposits with the central bank, it could prove politically difficult for authorities to pay none to households.
Third, the potential value for consumers from a digital pound extends well beyond the UK’s borders. Authorities are wise to propose making the digital pound available to non-residents. This could offer people in poorly governed countries a better store of value than their own domestic currencies. A digital pound could thus shore up sterling’s role as a reserve currency.
Finally, a CBDC could benefit consumers by protecting their data. Much of the controversy surrounding CBDCs has reflected concerns that authorities might abuse their access to transactional data for state surveillance. The consultation response proposed additional legislation to prevent them from doing so. But a CBDC could also furnish the public with a digital means for making payments that protects them from private sector surveillance. Alas, the preferred UK model for delivering CBDC through payment interface providers makes erecting such safeguards difficult. PIPs do not yet exist and may never do so because the numbers are not likely to stack up.
This list gave me an idea — hinted at, but not squarely identified in this piece. Because of a CBDC's digital visibility, as payments through the CBDC leached payments away from the existing payments system, the black economy would be isolated to the old system, and over time progressively marginalised. Hardly a minor consideration for our times … though I'm not across how well the blizzard of regulation you must now go through in banking (Know your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulation) addresses these things — I'd be naturally suspicious that it can't do nearly as good a job as a full digital record of all transactions.
Bartholemew Balls
Fixing DEI
I liked this post from Ian Leslie, and the paywall kicks in after a fair bit of value has been delivered.
Just as in the 1980s nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM, nobody the 2020s gets fired for commissioning a course on unconscious bias; the difference being that IBM computers were demonstrably useful. For employees, DEI is more of a timesuck than a form of brainwashing: it means you have to fill out more forms than you would otherwise, and go to training days about the menopause or anti-racism, and nod politely at the trainer as they spout tenuously supported blather. It’s a bore but it’s not a satanic corporate cult.
DEI is still quite problematic, however. It has so far involved a ton of training, and the training has been of very low quality. A recent academic study used data on 800 American firms over three decades. The authors found that five years after diversity training for managers became compulsory, the proportion of senior black women and Asian-Americans actually dropped. That is just one study, but there are many studies with similar findings, as the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi shows in this comprehensively substantiated piece. In short, the evidence suggests that diversity training is ineffective at best and actively harmful at worst. …
The insidious assumptions which underlie these problems - DEI’s focus on ‘equity’ of outcome rather than on integrity of process; its tendency to see identity labels rather than individuals; its disparitism - the facile and anti-scientific idea that any disparity in social outcomes is evidence of oppression and must therefore be corrected for - should be exposed and interrogated. But since I don’t want this to be one long moan, I’m going to discuss how to make the DEI we have better. So, if you hold a senior position in a large organisation, this is for you. It’s based on my conversations with various organisations, and with some very informed Ruffian readers. I propose nine principles or guidelines:
- Define Your Goals
- Actions Over Symbols
- Simplify Ruthlessly
- Favour Universal Solutions
- Resist Abstraction
- Cultivate Class and Cognitive Diversity
- Check Your Viewpoint Diversity
- Measure Efficacy
- You Are Not a Political Movement
The bolded headings are all outside the paywall, and I think I can guess the others — and if I’m right I support them all. I also applied for ethics approval to extract what I did above and expect the answer back by Christmas.
Poundbury: maybe I was wrong
Another opinion
In any event, you’ve got to admire Charles’ attempt to actually do something. He may be the first royal in a long time to, you know make a project happen rather than just ponce about and open buildings.
A nauseating catalogue of intrusion and lies. Surely not?
I remember a conversation I had with a prominent left of centre journo at the time of the Levison inquiry in the UK into the phone hacking scandal (you know, the one where Rupert had the most humble day of his life and Wendy Deng celebrated by reprising Nikita Kruschev’s unguarded moment at the UN lectern by taking off her shoe and launching herself at Rupert’s assailant. As you do. But I digress.) Anyway, my journalist friend said “at last Rupert is finished”. I wondered why he’d be finished. She said News Ltd would be taken over by corporate managers, rather than the dynastic leaders Rupert had appointed.
Well, not yet it hasn’t. Anyway, Alan Rusbridger from Prospect Magazine offers this reporting on what Prince Harry’s defamation proceedings dredged up. Just systematic illegality — but nothing that wasn’t 99% visible from the outside.
You need a strong stomach to read Mr Justice Fancourt’s devastating 386-page judgment, published in the High Court yesterday. It is a nauseating catalogue of intrusion, lies, concealment and dishonesty by the very people we rely on to tell us the truth. …
We know the dark arts didn’t stop when the Information Commissioner exposed it more than 20 years ago. They didn’t even stop when a News of the World journalist was arrested in 2006. They didn’t stop when the Guardian revealed a Murdoch Inc boardroom cover-up over payments to victims in 2009. They didn’t even stop with the Leveson Inquiry in 2011.
We know that newspaper managements at two of our biggest media companies have consistently concealed and denied the truth about what went on. They have issued dishonest statements and have lied to parliament, the stock exchange, to other journalists, to regulators and even the Leveson Inquiry, set up to establish the truth. And now some have been caught telling porkies in court.
Two companies—Murdoch Inc and the Mirror Group—have shelled out more than £1bn in costs and damages, while continuing to deny or admit the truth of what went on. Sadly, millions of emails and documents that might have cast light on the truth have gone missing.
In some cases the same people are in charge today as were running the company at the height of the scandal, which somehow they failed to notice. Take a bow, Rebekah Brooks, CEO of News UK and a former editor of the Sun and News of the World.
And take a further bow, Piers Morgan, now a star TV presenter for Murdoch Inc and editor of the Daily Mirror for nine years while phone hacking was raging. His newspaper was shelling out hundreds of thousands a year on private investigators using unlawful means to target people in public life, but he somehow failed to notice. …
In announcing the inquiry the then prime minister, David Cameron, said the first part would look into broad questions to do with the ethics and culture of newsrooms. Part two—designed to run once the civil actions were exhausted—would look forensically at the extent of unlawful news gathering in the industry.
Guess what? Fleet Street wasn’t keen on part two, for reasons that become apparent every time Murdoch Inc pays off a new group of victims; and which leap out from every single page of Mr Justice Fancourt’s 386-page text. … “Today marks a great victory for a free and fair press,” chirped Matt Hancock—to cries of “shame”—as he buried the inquiry Cameron had promised.
It was a close run thing. The House of Lords rejected the axing of the Inquiry. Leveson himself protested strongly. But the government eventually won the day by a narrow margin on a second vote in May 2018.
How ironic that it took a prince living in exile to drag out the evidence that the newspaper managers thought they had buried along with the inquiry.
Accessing the NHS treasure trove of medical data
A good, 10 minute segment from Tim Harford on Ben Goldacre’s new set up at Oxford University. Not only does it allow researchers to interrogate the NHS database whilst keeping individual patients’ data both private and very hard to deanonymise. It also does what good IP regulation should do which is do a trade. Patents give people an asset (exclusivity) but in return for a public benefit — the ultimate donation of the IP into the public domain. Also, mining exploration rights can be administered in the same way — the discoverer of minerals gets a period of exclusivity to exploit their discovery but their geological data goes into the public domain where it’s valuable, particularly in understanding the geology of areas beyond the area of exclusivity. Likewise, you access the NHS data by writing code to interrogate the data. And that code is visible to those running the platform (who can keep an eye out for any bad intentions) and can be published for others to use or build on.
It’s not about government OR the market, it’s about the INTERFACE!
The great weirding of technical and civilisational acceleration
Kevin Munger reminds us that there have been other times like this, together with commentary on it from someone attentive readers will remember me quoting before. Walter Lippmann, arguably the most influential and thoughtful American journalist of the 20th century.
We’ve experienced “rapid technological change” before. The Industrial Revolution is often considered to be a pretty big deal, though the effects certainly weren’t felt as widely as quickly. The Second Industrial Revolution—the period from 1870 to 1914—had a much larger impact. With innovations like electrification, industrialization, mass communication, the telegraph, the railroad, oil and steel, the daily life of most Europeans and Americans became unrecognizable in two generations.
But so what happened then? Did things proceed more or less normally, except that everyone was richer, had more free time and cheaper TVs or phonographs or whatever? Did people think that things were normal?
No. That’s not what happened. This led immediately to WW1 and then the Nazis, to the Russian Revolution and then Communism. In Europe, at least, the weirdness from technological change was undeniable.
But nothing like that really happened in the United States. I’m increasingly convinced that the contemporary American historical perspective is unique in its sense of continuity, a story that goes something like this:
«Veni vidi vici -- we achieved our manifest destiny, according to the plan laid out by the Founding Fathers and through the dedicated application of our spirit of self-reliance, hard work, and technological progress. We’ve got professional baseball records that go back to the 1890s, and presidential biographies that go back much farther, with no sense of a dramatic historical break. The exception, the Civil War, has been neatly historicized as the second Founding, a necessary but circumscribed effort to solve the one little issue in the Founder’s vision.»
This longer historical perspective reinforces the experience of Boomer Realism, I think; a lot of this narrative emerged specifically in the postwar era in which they were raised.
But even though the US avoided radical change, it’s useful to go back and see what the vibe was at the end of the Second Industrial Revolution. Walter Lippmann’s first major book, Drift and Mastery, provides an excellent overview.
The thesis is that the scope of the world has dramatically expanded, that this new world demands more and different things of us and of our relationships.
We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation...There are no precepts to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.
And read on for a list of things Walter Lippman says 110 years ago that bear on our time. On News, Clickbait, Conspiracy Theories, Cancel Culture, Urban Alienation, Left/Liberal Divide, MAGA, Office Life, The Reactionary Impulse, Incel-ism.
Scott Alexander on political media as trauma addiction
HT: Rory Sutherland.
Here’s the premise of a recent essay by Scott Alexander.
Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on? I’m only half joking. … You’ll object: politics only metaphorically “makes people crazy”; we just use the word “crazy” here to mean “irrational” or “overly emotional”. I’m not sure that’s true.
Alexander argues that the right concept is ‘trauma’. That’s not full-blown PTSD, which is in the DSM, but the background condition driving PTSD. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a particularly helpful framing, but it does lead him to the conclusion that “the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts”. Or as Matthew Crawford puts it “addiction by design”. Here’s the conclusion of Alexander’s essay.
Is this actually a good way to express a concept for public consumption?
I’m nervous about the creeping expansion of “trauma”. On the one hand, it’s good that people who feel traumatized by things can have access to trauma-related resources and have other people respect/validate their suffering. On the other, it might be dangerous to create an expectation of traumatic consequences for minor wrongs.
Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD. Everything about this claim is still controversial, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing. I think this story is backed up by cross-cultural comparisons and research on depression: thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms.
So this theory is dangerous even if it’s true: it might make people feel more triggered by political disagreements and less able to laugh them off. On the other hand, I don’t really see a lot of people laughing off political disagreements now. Maybe we’ve already maxed our our ability to feel traumatized by political stimuli?
This is a strong claim, but I make it in the context of the whole political ecosystem. Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts. Combine that with the explicit, confessed desire on both sides to “trigger” the other as much as possible, and you have a lot of very clever people all trying to maximize one another’s trauma levels. On the external level, that looks like weaving as strong a narrative of threat and persecution as possible and trying to hit people in their psychological weak points. On the internal level, it means making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil and everything they do is for specific threatening and evil reasons. Once you have a machine like that running, I’m not sure that identifying it will make things too much worse.
But thinking of things this way has made me less interested in consuming this kind of media, and I hope it does the same for you.
Garry Trudeau, Living international treasure
Glen Gould: Pretty astonishing!
From the fun facts department
Alasdair McIntyre
Thanks to reader Robert Banks for sending me this piece.
I’m someone who’s always brought up short by someone asking me “what books changed your life or view of the world?” or “What are the ten books you’d recommend I read?”. I real a lot, but think things through slowly, and mostly through observing and talking and thinking for which books are an important adjunt, but not beacons. I can’t say any book has turned my world upside down. About the best compliment I can pay a book is that it made a big impact when I read it, and it’s kept on rumbling away. And I’d defs pay that compliment to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
I remember reading its opening pages in ANU Co-op bookshop when it first surfaced in 1981. They present a story in which science is destroyed by revolution and culture war. As they recover from this cataclysm people wander among the rubble finding artefacts from the old world from which they piece together what they take to be the science of the ‘ancients’. But it’s a jumble of artefacts and techniques. Noone really knows the big picture of what they’re doing because the traditions and practices by which things were connected up and related to each other are all fractured.
It struck me as a fantastic analogy for neoclassical economics. MacIntyre’s story is an allegory of what has happened to the West in throwing off a unified ethical system and, in his view ending up with a jumble of ethical artefacts all papered over by analytical philosophy which encourages ‘emotivism’ — the idea that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference.
Emotivism, for MacIntyre, departs from the classical and medieval traditions that ground ethics in a shared conception of the good life and the virtues necessary for human flourishing. Anyway, thanks to Robert Banks for sending me a review of a recent French biography of MacIntyre which I thought was pretty terrific (perhaps because I think MacIntyre is pretty terrific.) Here are some extracts:
The decline of morality had been abetted, MacIntyre said, by a vast intellectual movement which he referred to as ‘the Enlightenment project’. Proponents of the project believed that human conduct can be explained ‘in mechanical terms’, without reference to culture, language, meaning and history, and they liked to present themselves as architects of a scientific brave new world. In practice, however, they were less interested in construction than in the conceptual equivalent of slum clearance: sweeping away the ramshackle superstitions of the old moralistic world to make room, eventually, for the splendid truths of science. And they didn’t confine their attention to ideas: they were also intent on cleaning up conventional social arrangements by turning them over to a cadre of ‘scientific managers’.
The ‘fetishism of commodities’ described by Marx had been joined, MacIntyre said, by another fetishism – the fetishism of ‘bureaucratic skills’ – and management was threatening to take control of our lives, in the name of abstract all-purpose scientific efficiency.
The enlighteners were obsessed with science, but they had no idea how it actually worked. They treated it as a monolithic enterprise with immutable methods, rather than a collection of diverse practices – ethnography, botany, virology, linguistics, economics, mathematics and so on – each with its own purposes, protocols and techniques. On top of that they assumed that scientific progress happens automatically whenever a fresh fact is discovered or a new theory proposed – rather than when a bunch of scientists come up with a story which persuades their colleagues that there is something wrong with what they thought before. (‘The criterion of a successful theory,’ as MacIntyre put it, ‘is that it enables us to understand its predecessors in a newly intelligible way.’) …
The Enlightenment project had started off as an attempt to replace our sentimental storied world with a utopia based on the solid facts of science and the ‘expertise’ of managers; but it was turning out to be just another sentimental story, and a peculiarly unconvincing one at that – and this is why ‘the Enlightenment project had to fail.’ …
You may be tempted to evade the issue, either by resorting to the relativism which says that you have as much right to your opinion as anyone else, or by embracing the absolutism which assures you that your own opinions are the whole truth, and anyone who disagrees must be wrong. Neither of these escape routes will get you very far, though, and in the end you will have to accept that your opponents are in the same boat as you: trying to do the right thing on the basis of the versions of justice and rationality that seem to them to make most sense. This does not mean, however, that everyone is shackled for ever to the traditions that shaped them. Traditions aren’t juggernauts or settled destinies: they falter, duck and weave in response to internal conflicts and external shocks. And they aren’t blindfolds either: they offer genuine insights, however partial, into the world we all share. …
One might have expected the account of morality in After Virtue to lead to a turn towards politics. MacIntyre’s emphasis on community, tradition and social change seems to point in that direction, and so does his interest in moral disagreement and the idea that, as he put it, ‘it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are.’ From here it would be a short step to sceptical democratic liberalism in the manner of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty, and perhaps to a celebration of politics as the noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist individualism, seeking to reduce the complexities of human existence to a grim tug of war between ‘arbitrary choices of individuals’ and ‘collectivist control’. Meanwhile democracy – whatever it may mean in theory – is always commandeered by elites who ‘determine the range of alternatives between which voters are permitted to choose’, so as to ensure that ‘the most fundamental issues are excluded.’ For MacIntyre, therefore, there has never been any such thing as liberal democracy, only ‘oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies’.
His disdain for liberal democracy does not mean he favours any of the alternatives. He surveys the entire field of modern politics with impartial contempt. The state-nations and nation-states that now dominate political activity strike him as further embodiments of the bogus rationality of bureaucratic management, while the idea of laying down your life for your country is, according to him, ‘like being asked to die for a telephone company’. Politics is optional in a way that morality is not, and in its modern manifestations it is best avoided.
MacIntyre once believed that Marxism offered a solution, but by the time he wrote After Virtue he thought that it was ‘exhausted as a political tradition’, even if it remained ‘one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society’. The familiar liberal explanations of its failure missed the point, however: the problem with political Marxism isn’t that it is dogmatic, scientistic, authoritarian or economistic, but that it is ‘deeply optimistic’. This is a typical MacIntyre moment: simple, surprising and – when you come to think about it – completely true. If there is a single thread running through the works of Marx, it is that the evils of capitalism, terrible as they are, will soon be outweighed by its double legacy: on the one hand the enormous wealth generated by modern industry, and on the other an international proletariat with the strength and wisdom to put it to good use. But Marx’s optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting ... political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a ‘tolerable alternative’. The resulting ‘exhaustion’ had spread from Marxism to ‘every other political tradition’, plunging the world into a ‘new dark ages’, darker than ever before. (‘This time ... the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,’ MacIntyre wrote, ‘they have already been governing us for quite some time.’) The only chance of building a better world, he concluded, was to abandon politics and concentrate on ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained’. …
In the preface to After Virtue, MacIntyre himself said that his suspicions about the ‘moral impoverishment’ of Marxism dated back more than twenty years. [At that time he wrote] a memorable essay on ‘the moral rejection of Stalinism’. He began by noting that ex-communists liked to say they had left the party for reasons of ‘moral principle’. They seemed to be crediting themselves with an unerring instinct for the right and the good, and dismissing everyone else as dishonest and immoral; but for want of any philosophical reflection on the nature of moral disagreement they defaulted to liberal individualism – in other words, to ‘that liberalism in the criticism of which Marxism originated’ – and ended up ‘taking a Stalinist view of historical development and adding liberal morality to it’. Their moral narcissism had left them wandering in a ‘moral wilderness’, but MacIntyre hoped to lead them to safety by devising a historical account of moral rationality worthy of Marx.
Once he had worked out his theory of stories, practices and traditions, however, he began to realise that he couldn’t square it with political Marxism, or indeed with modern politics as a whole. But as usual he took a long time to make up his mind. … In 1970 he wrote a short book about the German-American leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who was, like him, disappointed with the labour movement, but hoped that the revolutionary slack would be taken up by a coalition of discontented students, sexual radicals and Third World insurgents. MacIntyre was not impressed. ‘To be in conflict with the established order,’ he said, ‘is not necessarily to be an agent of liberation.’ The victims of capitalism could not be ‘liberated from above’: they needed to fight their own fight for freedom, and they didn’t need lectures from Marcuse’s ‘idealised students’, who were in any case no more than ‘middle-class whites’ indulging in ‘parent-financed revolts’. Sexual liberation was problematic too. (‘What will we actually do in this sexually liberated state?’) And as for countries like China, Cuba and North Vietnam, they were not the beacons of freedom that starry-eyed students imagined, but bastions of ‘right-wing communism, an oligarchical disease’.…
The belated appearance of Perreau-Saussine’s book in English will give a fillip to scholarly interest in MacIntyre. But he will not be particularly pleased. His work has always been intended for the kind of reader who would, as he puts it, be ‘considered marginal by those who occupy the dominant positions in today’s societies’, and he detests the prospect of being liked by ‘lawyers, bureaucrats, business school professors, and the ambitious, the powerful and the rich in general’. He is wary of philosophy too: it ‘tends to sterilise the mind and the imagination’, he says, especially when captured by the ‘conformism’ of academic inquiry; and moral philosophy will not flourish unless it takes care to stay ‘on the margins, intellectually as well as politically’. His writings are, however, so vigorous, acute and informative that he may have to put up with more admirers than he would like.
Bureaucratic skills
The mention of ‘bureaucratic skills in the passage quoted above sent me back to After Virtue — to find this:
The expert’s claim to status and reward is fatally undermined when we recognize that he possesses no sound stock of law-like generalizations and when we realize how weak the predictive power available to him is. The concept of managerial effectiveness is after all one more contemporary moral fiction and perhaps the most important of them all. The dominance of the manipulative mode in our culture is not and cannot be accompanied by very much actual success in manipulation. I do not of course mean that the activities of purported experts do not have effects and that we do not suffer from those effects and suffer gravely. But the notion of social control embodied in the notion of expertise is indeed a masquerade. Our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone’s, control. No one is or could be in charge.
Belief in managerial expertise is then, on the view that I have taken, very like what belief in God was thought to be by Carnap and Ayer. It is one more illusion and a peculiarly modern one, the illusion of a power not ourselves that claims to make for righteousness. Hence the manager as character is other than he at first sight seems to be: the social world of everyday hard-headed practical pragmatic no-nonsense realism which is the environment of management is one which depends for its sustained existence on the systematic perpetuation of misunderstanding and of belief in fictions. The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by another just as important fetishism, that of bureaucratic skills. For it follows from my whole argument that the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively-grounded claims function in fact as expressions of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference. Keynes’s description of how Moore’s disciples advanced their private preferences under the cover of identifying the presence or absence of a non-rational property of goodness, a property which was in fact a fiction, deserves a contemporary sequel in the form of an equally elegant and telling description of how in the social world of corporations and governments private preferences are advanced under the cover of identifying the presence or absence of the findings of experts. And just as the Keynesian description suggested why emotivism is so convincing a thesis, so would such a modern sequel. The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skillful dramatic imitation of such control. It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.
To this many managers and many bureaucrats will reply: you are attacking a straw man of your own construction. We make no large claims, Weberian or otherwise. We are as keenly aware of the limitations of social scientific generalizations as you are. We perform a modest function with a modest and unpretentious competence. But we do have specialized knowledge, we are entitled in our own limited fields to be called experts.
Nothing in my argument impugns these modest claims; but it is not claims of this kind which achieve power and authority either within or for bureaucratic corporations, whether public or private. For claims of this modest kind could never legitimate the possession or the uses of power either within or by bureaucratic corporations in anything like the way or on anything like the scale on which that power is wielded. So the modest and unpretentious claims embodied in this reply to my argument may themselves be highly misleading, as much to those who utter them as to anyone else. For they seem to function not as a rebuttal of my argument that a metaphysical belief in managerial expertise has been institutionalized in our corporations, but as an excuse for continuing to participate in the charades which are consequently enacted. The histrionic talents of the player with small walking-on parts are as necessary to the bureaucratic drama as the contributions of the great managerial character actors.
Ian Leslie was good, then fell into an absolute hole right at the end. There are plentiful examples of gleeful Israeli state actors getting terribly excited about the genocide of the Palestinians.
Enjoyed the piece on Poundbury (I'd never heard of it - or not that I recalled) and followed it up with the same speaker on the rebuilding of Dresden. Other pieces held my interest, too - as per usual. Thanks.