Stan Grant: Guy Rundle's brilliant take

And other great things I found on the net this week

Martin Wolf endorses Operation Pericles

I was thrilled to hear that Martin Wolf wanted to write up my ideas about healing democracy in a follow up to his excellent earlier column on the way Fox News tripped over a billion dollar liability by carelessly defaming another corporation in its war on Truth. Herewith the money quotes: If you’d like a copy of my paper, please email me and I’ll send it to you.

“Brexit has failed.” This is now the view of Nigel Farage. … He is right, not because the Tories messed it up, as he thinks, but because it was bound to go wrong. The question is why the country made this mistake. The answer is that our democratic processes do not work very well. Adding referendums to elections does not solve the problem. But adding citizens’ assemblies might.

In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.

There are two arguments for introducing sortition (lottery) into the political process. First, these assemblies would be more representative than professional politicians can ever be. Second, it would temper the impact of political campaigning, nowadays made more distorting by the arts of advertising and the algorithms of social media.

A modest way to do this is to introduce citizens’ juries to advise on contentious issues. These juries would be time-limited, compensated for their time and be advised by experts.

There is evidence that such a citizens’ jury would have come to a different decision on Brexit than in the referendum, since Leavers will change their minds in response to the evidence.

One could go much further, by selecting a people’s branch of the legislature. This, too, could be advisory. But it could decide to investigate particularly contentious issues or even legislation. If it did the latter, it might ask for the legislation to be returned to the legislature for secret votes, thus reducing the control of factional party politics. The people’s house might even have oversight of such issues as electoral redistricting or selection of judges and officials.

Citizens’ assemblies could be started on a purely private basis. Donations would be needed to get some going on particularly significant issues. In the UK, I suggest one on immigration. Participants would need financial compensation and resources would need to be found to run them. … Suppose a citizens’ assembly had fully investigated the claims in the Brexit debate — how much cost it might have prevented!

There is a lively debate among political scientists over whose preferences are reflected in democratic politics. The evidence is that the preferences of the wealthiest are over-represented. But, as important, is how far manipulation influences how preferences are formed.

This is where the assemblies could be most helpful. After my experiences as a juror, I have come to share the view of Alexis de Tocqueville that juries are a fundamental institution of citizenship. Given time and open debate, ordinary people show great perspicacity. Lacking the ambition for power, they could contribute hugely to our public debates.

Four ways to fix the world

If I had four words to sum up where I've got to over the last couple of decades thinking how to improve the world, they'd be these (the first two words are ancient Greek).

• Isegoria

• Parrhēsia

• Merit and

• Fidelity

In discussing them with friend, philosopher and school teacher Martin Turkis, I gave myself the challenge of summarising them in a page and a half for him to present to his high school students. This has got to be a better test of their value than whether they can be published in a learned journal.

You can read the result on my blog ClubTroppo and at the end of this newsletter.

If you prefer to imbibe through audio only, here is the mp3 file.

Stan Grant: Guy Rundle cuts through

A brilliant piece. About craft verses art. The tacit verses the explicit. Sensibility versus ideology (with some rebranding along the way)

Rundle explores an increasingly common phenomenon where we get to choose between two sides of a debate or story when the real issues lie elsewhere (there should be a good German word for that!). As one might expect when, as Guy Rundle argues, the most salient aspect of the protagonists is their recent rebranding. 

Were you to write a satire of our current situation it might go something like this: a leading journalist and presenter, who made his career as a pioneer of tabloid TV that went after “dole bludgers”, single mothers etc, reinvents himself as an upmarket presence. Though he has never denied his First Nations’ heritage, as he makes the media market transition, it becomes a more prominent part of his public identity, and of his output. Increasingly the performance of his own pain at the country’s racist history becomes a focus for the national discussion of where we should go.

When, as a de facto leader of this process, he is attacked by his opponents on a reactionary, spite-slum TV station with 30,000 viewers, he quits a public network with millions of viewers, denouncing the entire organisation. At his last appearance, a show designed to hear from a range of viewpoints by Australian opinion makers and the public is reorganised so that he can make a final performance of his agon, at which he announces that it is not racism at all, but the media in general, and he himself, to blame, for which he gets a sustained standing ovation.

Have I missed anything?

Look, Stan Grant is clearly not a bad guy, but he’s been a TV presenter for decades, and inevitably he has a touch of narcissism, which is to on-air types what black lung is to coalminers. You’re just going to get it sooner or later, so you may as well plan for it. …

There’s also some hilarious hypocrisy going on. On Tuesday Patricia Karvelas on RN Breakfast grilled Defence Minister Richard Marles, fresh from a News Corp-sponsored conference on Australia’s defence (News Corp and weapons manufacturers), and pushed him to condemn News Corp’s attacks on Grant. “Disclosure,” Karvelas said. “I worked for The Australian for years.”

Disclosure: Karvelas didn’t disclose that when at The Australian she was the lead author of a string of articles attacking First Nations’ academic Larissa Behrendt for a funny, mildly bad-taste tweet she made to her 800 followers (while watching a Q+A episode featuring Bess Price). The Australian, with Karvelas in the lead, went Behrendt day after day on its front page, with a series of attacks that were far more implicitly racist — how dare a Black girl be an academic and thought leader was the unstated tenor of them — than anything Sky has thrown at Grant in the past week.

The attack on Behrendt was the first in a series of truly brutal attacks by The Australian, using the powers it once had as a paper that people read. The aim was to psychically terrorise the victim with the prospect of something new every day, relevant or otherwise. The campaigns were either indifferent to what they were doing, or actively seeking to prompt psychic collapse in the victim. They culminated in the truly malign attacks on Yassmin Abdel-Magied, driving her out of the country.

Karvelas’s campaign against Behrendt provided the template for that. It should have excluded her from a job at the ABC; instead she was allowed to reinvent herself as “PK”

Hannah and her sisters

A hatchet job on Hannah Gadsby’s follow up to Nanette. The full NYT piece is here.

Crikey’s ‘investigation’ of Crosby Textor (C|T)

I know both Mark Textor and Lynton Crosby a little. Unlike a lot of political types, I’ve enjoyed good, wide ranging conversations with them about the state of our world. What I like about both of them is that the conversations are not ideological. At least to meet, they carry their ideology lightly — as I try to carry my own fairly different ideology. It’s a basic conservative truism that in a good society, politics and ideology is not that important. It’s important for governing obviously, but much less so for appreciating things about the way the world is, or even many of the ways we’d like to see it improved. Even on the latter point, ideology mostly becomes relevant only once one reaches for the means with which you hope to improve the world.

Mark Textor and I share a background as policy geeks who’ve built on that in pretty different ways. C|T perpetrate the dark arts of politics — as political operatives generally do. They run disinformation operations (spin) and disinformation operations (smear). Right now the party you generally support will be doing something similar, though you’ll probably be more forgiving of them than you are of the other sides. And I’m not arguing for moral equivalence. I am arguing that these things are matters of degree. There’s never been a politician that didn’t spin and most are forced into various kinds of misrepresentation of their opponents policies and motives because it’s very hard to get elected if you don’t smear. It’s also true that every political party has particular folks who lean in.

Still, I deplore some of the things our conservative friends have got up to in the last generation — most particularly the soft racism that was one of the keys to John Howard’s success. Imagine if the brown boat people washing up on our shores — the product of wars we’d helped initiate — had been white Rhodesian farmers! Something tells me they wouldn’t have ended up on Christmas Island. John Howard was the only member of Fraser’s Cabinet (and I think Ministry) who objected to us receiving the Vietnamese boat people. So those aspects of the success of Crosby Textor sadden me.

Fresh from its legal victory over Murdoch, Crikey is running a self-titled ‘investigative’ report on C|T with the flavour of the dog that caught the car. Just as in some ways the Murdoch press took over the Liberal Party as it helped overtake the US Republicans, perhaps CT is doing the same. It’s an interesting conceit, so it’s definitely worth investigating. And CT make a great deal of money from helping large companies resist the public interest — like a sugar tax for instance. So Crikey’s ‘investigation’ is a good idea.

Alas, though they’ve packaged it into three separate articles — each lavishly cross referencing the other — they don’t have much to tell us. The big firms benefiting from AUKUS were C|T clients (which is not surprising). And Crikey sent a set of questions they put to Scott Morrison and C|T all of which received unsurprising answers.

Still it’s always fun trying to guess which of #ScoMo’s answers is a bald faced lie :)

Everyone loves a mirror disguised as a windowpane: Jerry Fodor’s Enduring Critique of Neo-Darwinism

In case you’re interested. From an obit in the Newyorker:

The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed, to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day. …

Fodor attacked neo-Darwinism on a purely conceptual and scientific basis—its own turf, in other words.… Fodor was interested in how the distinction between an adaptation and a free rider might apply to our own behavior. It seems obvious to us that the heart is for circulating blood and not for making thump-thump noises. (Fodor did not believe this for was defensible, either, but that is for another day.) Pumping is therefore an “adaptation,” the noise is a “free rider.” Is there really a bright sociobiological line dividing, say, the desire to mate for life from the urge to stray? The problem isn’t that drawing a line is hard; it’s that it’s too easy: you simply call the behavior you like an adaptation, the one you don’t like a free rider. Free to concoct a just-so story, you may now encode your own personal biases into something called “human nature.”

Once you’ve made that error, the nonfiction best-seller list is yours for the asking. Everyone loves a mirror disguised as a windowpane: you tell whatever story your readership wants to hear, about whatever behavior it wants to see dignified. So the habits of successful people have been made, over the past thirty years, into derivatives of the savannah and the genetic eons, and “natural selection” has been stretched from a bad metaphor into an industry. Nobody was better at exposing this silliness than Fodor, whose occasional review-essays in the L.R.B. were masterpieces of a plainspoken and withering sarcasm. To Steven Pinker’s suggestion that we read fiction because “it supplies us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday,” for instance, Fodor replied, “What if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world?” …

“We are artifacts designed by natural selection,” Daniel Dennett wrote, to which Fodor said no. “Darwin’s idea is much deeper, much more beautiful, and appreciably scarier: We are artifacts designed by selection in exactly the sense in which the Rockies are artifacts designed by erosion; which is to say that we aren’t artifacts and nothing designed us. We are, and always have been, entirely on our own.”

His thanks for this insight was to be treated as a crank and a pariah. In the wave of Fodor anecdotes shared on Twitter over the last couple of weeks, my favorite came from Leonard Finkelman, a professor of philosophy at Linfield College. Finkelman was attending his first conference, and Fodor was a featured speaker. It was just after he’d published “What Darwin Got Wrong,” and the talk bombed. At a reception later, Finkelman, “shy and intimidated,” sat at a table that was empty save for one other conference-goer. “Only after I sat and started eating did I realize it was Fodor,” he recalled. “I inadvertently let out a surprised, ‘You’re Jerry Fodor!’ He audibly sighed and responded, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ”

Richard Bell: click through for more compelling images

Max Eastman: From the Epilogue of Young Radicals

I’ve just finished listening to Jeremy McCarter’s Young Radicals about five young American kids who came of age at the end of the long nineteenth century — that is just before WWI smashed the whole thing to smithereens. The book was written for its relevance to our time and I was greatly taken with its relevance. Though the pathway this generation has taken to disillusion is completely different, we are as confused as any modern generation about what might actually make a better world. In the meantime our one idea is to have “ignorant armies clash by night” in an electoral competition. Those are Matthew Arnold’s words, but by the end of the period covered by the book, one of the young radicals — Walter Lippmann — had provided the ‘theory’ for that idea. 

I was particularly taken by the way the book showed how each of its five protagonists (except Randolph Bourne who was disabled, always an outsider, usually sick and who died very young of Spanish flu) became caught up in the contradictions of power almost immediately they acquired any real power or influence. 

In any event, here is the epilogue for Max Eastman, who spent many decades of his youth torn between poetry and radical activism. His friend John Reed is more famous as the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, and the subject of Warren Beatty’s epic biopic Reds.

When Max Eastman left for Russia in 1922, he said he was going to find out if the things he had been saying were true. It took him twenty years to give a definitive answer: No.

The break didn’t come all at once. He spent the 1920s and ’30s in a slow, unsteady retreat from the convictions that he had risked his freedom and even his life to defend. Two years in Russia convinced him that Joseph Stalin had hijacked Lenin’s revolution. He even arranged the first English-language publication of “Lenin’s Testament,” the warning against Stalin that had been suppressed by his successors. But the horrors of the 1930s convinced him that the problem wasn’t a single brutal ruler, it was the nature of the Russian regime itself. (His wife, Eliena Krylenko, was the sister of an Old Bolshevik: Her entire family disappeared in the purges. Eastman worried that he might be next. You would worry, too, if Joseph Stalin denounced you by name as a “gangster of the pen.”) By the early 1940s, his observations of Soviet conditions and a rigorous study of Marxist literature convinced him that the problem was deeper than Stalin, deeper than Russia: It lay in Marxist thought itself. The collectivizing action of socialism would always lead to tyranny. Socialism was an enemy of freedom, “a dangerous fairy tale.”⁶

This decision “to let go of an idea around which one has organized a lifeful of emotions” didn’t lead him to retreat from the field of rhetorical combat. Feeling a share of responsibility for having propagated socialism in America, he attacked his old allies, and was attacked in return. Even Art Young, much-loved comrade of his youth, dropped him for life. Eastman traveled so far from his youthful socialism that he ended up in Joseph McCarthy’s camp: The man hounded and harassed during the first Red Scare became an advocate of the second. When his young friend William F. Buckley, Jr., founded a magazine to articulate a forceful new version of conservatism, Max was glad to offer advice. This is how the editor of The Masses turned up, forty unlikely years later, on the founding editorial board of National Review.

If Eastman’s story ended there, you could read it as a parable about the wisdom of age correcting the delusions of youth—especially since he also spent these years as a roving editor of Reader’s Digest, the squarest and least radical magazine in America. (At last, he really was writing for the masses.) But Max’s life was messier and more interesting than that.

As he swung from one ideological pole to the other, he went on writing and publishing his poems. He and Eliena had a happy, devoted marriage that was very, very open. His papers are full of letters from lovers, ex-lovers, and prospective lovers, stretching from his youth into his seventies. And his stay on the editorial board of National Review proved to be short-lived. Eastman couldn’t abide the overlay of Christian theology in its struggle against communism. Less than three years after the magazine’s founding, he told Buckley to remove his name from the masthead. Impossible Max!

By his eightieth birthday, in 1963, Eastman was a pagan libertarian poet living on a hilltop in Martha’s Vineyard—the fruit of that Reader’s Digest sinecure. Having nursed Eliena through her final illness, he had married a young third wife. He was, in almost every way, free beyond the furthest dreams of old Greenwich Village: healthy, still handsome, and convivial in company. But he was distressed.

Eastman had come to feel that he had betrayed his talents. A poem that he intended to be his epitaph ended with the despairing self-assessment: “I am not science, and I am not song.” His dismay had a social dimension, too. He gave a revealing interview to a New York Times reporter in 1969, a few months before his death (at age eighty-six, in Barbados, sun-chasing to the end). He said that he recognized the militant attitude of that era’s rebels, but he pitied them.

“They want to make a revolution but they have no ultimate purpose,” he said. “We had a program and a purpose, which was to make over capitalism into socialism, and it was based on an ideal and on an ideology.”

It’s odd to hear him sound nostalgic for a phase of his life that he had spent the last few decades denouncing as a fogbank of error. It’s strange to see him speak fondly of “a program and a purpose” after years of arguing that in a world of continual change, we must forgo all doctrines, and take each crisis as it comes. One way to interpret Eastman’s remark is that it’s not enough to abandon false theories. Without a true theory, a viable explanation for how to effect change, we are left with resignation—and resignation is never satisfying. “We have to patch up the world as it is and accept it,” he told his interviewer, “although I don’t feel very happy about it.”

Eastman almost never felt very happy. (As his readers pointed out, there wasn’t much enjoyment in his memoir of his early years, which he called Enjoyment of Living.) But it’s easy to see why, at the end of his life, he’d feel nostalgic for his radical youth. Though he often felt burdened by the demands of running The Masses, and wished he had more time for his own pursuits, it was the only phase of his long, strange career that offered full scope to his abilities. Eastman was, like Alice Paul, that rarest of specimens: not just a radical, but a radical leader—a genius at nurturing the political and cultural expressions of dozens of gifted contemporaries.

In his youth, Eastman had shown how to fight for freedom, and help others do the same. In old age, after he abandoned his theories, and his comrades, and so many other encumbrances, he offers a second lesson, equally vital to us today, when so many Americans are looking for a cause greater than themselves: that freedom is essential to the good life, and freedom isn’t enough.

Four ways to fix the world

Every society evolves unique ways for people to live together happily and productively. But they change over time. Modernity has eclipsed these four ideas.

Recovering them can make us happier and more productive. 

As some Troppo readers may know, I regard most diagrams as a kind of disinformation. Unless that is, their representations add a little to understanding the relationships being depicted, which is (arguably) true here.  

Isegoría  

Isegoria was a foundation of ancient Greek democracy. It meant not freedom but equality of speech. 

Our institutions mostly fail to honour those of lower status. Yet, those people do most of the work, so they understand it best. Toyota understood this and empowered workers on the production line to measure their performance and endlessly optimise it, quadrupling their competitors’ labour productivity. Quadrupling!

More generally amongst those in charge — for instance in congress/parliament, in management and on mainstream media — university graduates outnumber the less educated 20 to one compared with 50:50 in the population. 

Thus, many feel their voice and perspectives are unwelcome or unpersuasive in public speech. When they do participate, they’re often belittled as racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc.

Banishing their concerns from polite discourse isn’t just undemocratic; it sets off toxic culture wars. Those concerns should be welcomed in the search for democratic ‘win-win’ responses. 

Parrhēsia

Our concept of freedom of speech helps build a ‘free market in ideas’. But we’re starting to learn that, if the best ideas are to win out, they need to be received and considered in good faith. 

The ancient Greeks understood our weakness for flattery. And the way those in power demand to be flattered. 

Their antidote was parrhēsia. Our idea of speaking truth to power is similar. But parrhēsia is richer.

1. In parrhēsia, the speaker speaks to the powerful but without trying to please or manipulate them. By contrast, our own public speech is sodden with rhetoric (PR, spin, ‘comms’, ‘messaging’).

2. We gain confidence in parrhēsiastic speech not because it persuades us that it’s more scientific based on objective evidence — as if we are the arbiter of truth — but because the speaker speaks from their heart as demonstrated by the fact that they put themselves at risk.

3. It draws the powerful into relation with those they have power over. It imposes a duty on the powerful to overcome their vanity and so open themselves up to others’ perspectives, and so, reality.

Merit

We are so preoccupied with moral arguments for the justice of democracy that we downplay the other argument for democracy — that democratic decisions are better decisions. 

Take Wikipedia. We love the paradox that allowing anyone to edit it ought to create chaos, and yet we get an encyclopaedia. But we don’t take the next step and ponder why. Wikipedia is a meritocracy. As authors contribute more and better work, they gain recognition, status and authority. 

Democracies must be open to all. But, like Wikipedia, to work well they must weed out the self-seeking flatterers, the foolish and the boastful, to recognise and give greater authority to the best contributors. 

How’s that working out then?

Fidelity

We love harnessing people’s self-interest to serve public needs. This is Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. A farmer needn’t ask the public which crop they most need, because the information is embedded in the price they’re willing to pay. So the most profitable crop is also the most socially needed. 

Likewise we think competition between politicians gives us good government and managers competing for promotion or executive bonuses gives us good management. 

But we also need integrity. However cleverly designed, no social system is healthy without its participants buying-into its common purposes. No sophisticated order of human society — neither government, management, science, nor law — not even the market — can be healthy without also being a fiduciary order — with a ‘moral fabric’ binding people to serve one another. 

The extent to which we can improve all aspects of human accomplishment — our productivity, expertise, cooperation and wellbeing — depends on our prior fidelity to common purposes. As businessman Charlie Munger says, “the highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.”  

Competition 

Competition is indispensable to a social order, just as it is to a game. Markets and government are games of a sort. They provide a framework of rules within which people compete. 

However taken to extremes, competition breaks out of its bonds and undermines the ethical forces that bind us together, just as it can if competition in a game leads players to cheat. Today, extreme competition is breaking through these ethical boundaries, and that’s undermining the four qualities above. 

So how can we build the society Wikipedia hints at, keeping competition vigorous where we need it, and yet protect isegoria, parrhēsia and the common understanding of our shared interests in cooperating? If we can, those winning the competition will be the best, not the most self-interested and ruthless. 

Here are a few hacks from which to build. 

De-competitive representation 

We’re represented by a jury, not because we voted for its members but because they’re just like us. So we need to bring citizens’ juries into our politics — groups of people chosen to be just like us — to thrash out issues and decide what’s in our interests. 

Where our elected representatives are hugely skewed towards highly educated, middle-class, prime working age, articulate and self-assertive people, a jury’s membership has a mix of abilities and temperaments just like us. That’s isegoría or equality of speech in action. 

Further, there’s no competition to be won. So discussion is more deliberative, less performative. And it focuses more on the interests of the group than individuals or factions getting their way. 

They speak and listen to improve their ideas and work towards a compromise everyone can agree on. So there’s more room for honest, unembellished communication. Less incentive to flatter and ‘spin’ to the  audience — either inside or outside the jury. 

Citizens’ juries could lead debate on contentious issues, like abortion, gay marriage and greenhouse action, as they have in Ireland and the UK and France. They could act in myriad ways as a check and balance on our electoral system. They could consider and advise on citizen-initiated referendums — as they do in Oregon. They could supervise redistricting as they do in Michigan. Citizens’ juries could sit as shadow houses of congress or parliament as they do in East Belgium and Paris. 

De-competitive merit selection

If rules are followed, competition selects the best in sport. But most other competitions are set up by the powerful. They choose who gets hired or promoted. Voters decide which aspiring leaders please them most. 

Now we trust juries to determine criminal guilt. So now imagine a situation where a jury — a random group of peers met, deliberated and held a secret ballot for who should be promoted, or made president — of the nation, a corporation or the Student Council.

Those chosen gain no authority to perpetuate their own power, preferences, prejudices or prowess. And the kind of merit selected would include service to those on the front lines and to the group more generally, rather than self-assertion and currying favour with the powerful. For someone seeking the honour of representing students on the Student Council, helping others might work better than self-promotion.

This method of randomly selected ‘electors’ choosing the best is how Venitian leaders were chosen — from the Doge down to Senators and cabinet members. While other Italian cities suffered blood feud-driven crises, coups and civil wars, Venice enjoyed 500 years of stable government until Napoleon invaded in 1797.  

Building society upon the better angels of our nature

Both representation by sampling and ‘de-competitive merit selection’ interdict direct competition and moderate hierarchy — building it from the bottom up. Each gets the best from people, not by imposing rules and accountability from above, but because they feel how doing their best can be a gift between one another offered in faithfulness to the group.

They’re hacks — tried-and-true — that can revive isegoria, parrhēsia, true merit, and good faith to all.