Richard Rorty foresaw the rise of Donald Trump in 1997

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My favourite liberal philosopher of recent decades is Richard Rorty, who died in 2007.

An article by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books quotes a passage from Rorty's 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America:

Watching him blather and mug as he casually leaned over the podium in Boca Raton, seeing him cultivate the applause as if directing a symphony and then raise his two hands in thumbs-up gestures as he surfed the waves of applause and the deafening shouts of “USA! USA! USA!,” I recalled a remark that the philosopher Richard Rorty made back in 1997 about “the old industrialized democracies…heading into a Weimar-like period.” Citing evidence from “many writers on socioeconomic policy,” Rorty suggested that 

members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. 

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…. 

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. 

As Trump put it in Nevada, “I love the poorly educated!”

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Happy birthday John Stuart Mill

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Time to post a link to an old Liberator article of mine:

So read Rorty, Popper and Berlin. Read L.T. Hobhouse if you want and pretend to have read T.H.Green if you must. But above all read the Mill of On Liberty.

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Six of the Best 597

The Conservative Party's advice to agents in marginal seats at the last election contradicted official Electoral Commission advice, suggests Mark Pack.

Alwyn Turner remembers Michael Gove as a young Scotsman on the make: "No one could have behaved more naturally than he in a staffroom that looked as though it were unchanged since 1954."

Does Little Sheffield show small economics can revive a post-industrial city? asks Gareth Roberts.

Anthony Gottlieb on the rise and rise in the reputation of the philosopher David Hume.

Simon Kuper examines the reasons for England's World Cup victory in 1966: "Perhaps the men of 1966 really were a generation of giants who put all future English footballers to shame. Or perhaps what happened is simply that the fittest, luckiest and most sober team of that summer squeaked a narrow victory in a three-week tournament at home."

"When police Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) tries to find material witnesses for the case, he comes up short. Even stranger: none of the Lake’s are mentioned on the passenger list for the ship they arrived from America on the week before...." The Retro Set watches Bunny Lake is Missing, an minor but intriguing British film from 1965.

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The Mandela Effect and the social production of knowledge

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As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a "categorical pledge" were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

There has been some discussion on Twitter today of the Mandela Effect website. I tweeted a link to it myself.

Nick Barlow describes what you find there:

The Mandela Effect falls into that confused territory between conspiracy theory and weird belief system that you often find in these corners of the internet. It’s named after some people’s belief that they have memories about how Nelson Mandela died in prison, so never got to be President of South Africa and everything else that happened after his release. They believe that either history was changed, or that they slipped into a parallel universe where that event happened before coming back to ours where they were confused to find that it hadn’t.

He also offers a critique of it:

Like any conspiracy theory, the Mandela Effect is interesting for what it reveals about those who believe in it. We want to believe our memories are perfect records of our histories because they’re an important part of what we are, so when we discover that we’ve been remembering something wrongly, we can either admit our fallibility, or adopt the position that the universe must be fallible instead.

All true. But we should not overlook the extent to which what we know is subject to social confirmation.

Two examples. First, when their was widespread discussion a few years ago of the practice of sending children from British institutions out to Australia, I read letters in the newspapers from people who had come across those children. One had been a ship's barber who had cut the boys' hair on the voyage out to Australia.

I don't suppose they had talked much about this experience in the intervening years because the sending of children from homes to Australia had dropped out of public memory. It was never a secret - at one time it was a widely discussed public policy: it was just forgotten.

Second, in 1971 my father returned from a business trip to South Africa and (illegally) Rhodesia, he brought with him the news that Tony Greig was an epileptic.

I never heard anyone else mention this, and if I raised the subject I was met with scepticism. Years later Greig chose to talk about his condition and I could console myself that I had known this all along.

But had I? It seems there is an inescapable social element to what constitutes human knowledge. It was for this reason that the French philosopher Michel Foucault talked about "power/knowledge".

I am a Liberal, not because I am confident the human spirit will overcome any social pressure, but because I fear it may not.

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Why quoting facts does not convert people to our way of thinking

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"When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?" asked Keynes.

And there is no greater praise in modern politics than to call a policy "evidence-based".

But does political argument really work like that? I think not.

An article on the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog today analyses a study published in the journal Discourse Processes:

The researchers assessed 120 student participants for their prior knowledge and attitudes to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and their need for dietary purity, measured by items like “I often think about the lasting effects of the foods I eat.” 

This was the key variable of interest because it was intended to tap into how important food purity was to the participants’ sense of identity. The researchers specifically wanted to find out whether this identity factor would influence how people felt when their beliefs were challenged, and whether they would comply with, or resist, the challenge. 

After the researchers gave participants scientific information worded to directly challenge anti-GMO beliefs, those with higher scores in dietary purity rated themselves as experiencing more negative emotions while reading the text, and in a later follow-up task, they more often criticised GMOs. Crucially, at the end of the study these participants were actually more likely to be anti-GMO than a control group who were given scientific information that didn’t challenge beliefs: in other words, the attempt to change minds with factual information had backfired.

The blog suggests that such fact-based arguments are most likely to backfire when people's sense of identity is threatened.

I am reminded of something Richard Rorty says in his Irony, Contingency and Solidarity:

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. ... 

A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as “true,” “good,” “right,” and “beautiful.” The larger part contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, for example, “Christ,” “England,” “professional standards,” “decency,” “kindness,” “the Revolution,” “the Church,” “progressive,” “rigorous,” “creative.” The more parochial terms do most of the work.

And it is these thicker, more parochial concepts that can be threatened when another cites facts in disagreeing with you.

What to do?

Three years ago I blogged about a couple of studies that, in effect, appealed to people in their own thick, parochial vocabulary to change their minds. That post was helpfully summarised in an article on Wired:

Jonathan Calder on his politics blog, observed that LGBT groups in America won over voters by discussing their quest for equality not in aggressive demands for equal rights, but with language conservatives would refer to their own marriages: love, commitment and family. 

Similarly, a press release from The Association for Psychological Science found that talking about climate change in terms of 'purity' and 'sanctity' of Earth could win over those with conservative morals, traditionally unconcerned with climate change.

The implication of all this, I suspect, is that if we want to persuade people who are tempted to vote Leave to vote Remain, we should frame our arguments in terms of concepts like patriotism and the continuity of British history and not laugh at them and call them "fruitcakes" - as this blog is prone to doing.

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Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 6

And so we reach the last video from Uncertain Truth.

This was a series of three programmes featuring interviews with Sir Karl Popper in 1988.

The first programme, where the other participant was Ernst Gombrich, looks at the understanding of history. It takes up two videos:

Watch part 1
Watch part 2

The second programme, where the other participant is Sir John Eccles, looks at language.

Watch part 3
Watch part 4

And this third programme where the other participant is Anthony Quinton, looks at human knowledge.

Watch part 5

As I said when introducing the first of these videos, Popper was one of the most important liberal thinkers of the 20th century.

This was as much for his development of an evolutionary understanding of human knowledge as for his more overtly political books.

He died in 1994 at the age of 92. I heard him speak in York round about 1981 when he gave an inaugural lecture for some good cause connected with the Rowntree family.

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Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 5

And so to the third and final programme in this series, where the interviewer is Anthony Quinton.

Like the other programmes, this one is split across two videos.

Watch part 1

Watch part 2

Watch part 3

Watch part 4

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Six of the Best 572

Mark Pack and David Howarth have published a second edition of their 'The 20% Strategy: Building a core vote for the Liberal Democrats'.

Michael Oakeshott is an important 20th-century British Conservative thinker. Aurelian Craiutu reviews his notebooks.

Richard Gooding looks at the trashing of John McCain, which helped George W. Bush win the Republican nomination in 2000.

Like Ray Gosling and Alan Moore, Jeremy Seabrook is a product of working-class Northampton. Here he writes of growing up gay in the town in the years after World War II.

"Robert Mitchum considers The Night of the Hunter one of his most impressive roles. Gentle, subtle and seductive, but deranged and psychotic, Mitchum’s character is one of the scariest villains in film history." Cinephilia & Beyond on the only film directed by Charles Laughton.

"It was while working on Time Out’s annual pub guide in 2000 that I heard the tale of the Camden castles. A reviewer claimed that there were once four Camden pubs with castle in their name – the Edinboro, Windsor, Dublin and Pembroke – and these had originally been built for navvies digging Regent’s Canal." Peter Watts gently explodes a myth.

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Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 4

This is the other half of the second Uncertain Truth programme, which sees Popper in conversation with John Eccles.

Watch part 1.

Watch part 2,

Watch part 3.

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Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 3

We have reached the second Uncertain Truth programme.

This video is the first half of that programme. This time Popper is in conversation with John Eccles.

Watch part 1.

Watch part 2.

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Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 2

This is the second half of the first Uncertain Truth programme. The other participant is Ernst Gombrich.

Watch part 1.

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Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 1

Karl Popper was one of the most important liberal thinkers of the 20th century, as much for his development of an evolutionary understanding of human knowledge as for his more overtly political books.

For an excellent short introduction to his work see the book by Bryan Mageee.

In 1988 Popper took part in  three programmes for Channel 4 under the title Uncertain Truth. In the first one he was interviewed by Ernst Gombrich, and by John Eccles and then Anthony Quinton in the next two.

Those programmes are on Youtube. Each is split in two, there are six videos.

This is the first.

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Six of the Best 560

Joanna Ferguson announces the relaunch of Liberal Youth's blogging platform The Libertine.

"Measurement, Bob says, is the big challenge facing the outdoor education industry. You can measure a child's progress in maths, spelling, grammar… so we tend to hone in on those things. But it’s so much harder to quantify how much more confident or empathetic or happy a child is this term versus last. So we don't prioritise these things, and so nor the activities that develop them.'" Dominic Collard speaks up for outdoor education.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent some time teaching in an elementary school in the Austrian mountains. Spencer Robins looks at that period's influence on his thought.

"Self went on to argue that understanding the age of buildings was a key to understanding the built environment. Elderly people were better at it, he said, because they had often seen the buildings being constructed. Young people less so." Steven Morris follows Will Self on a psychogeographic walk through Bristol.

Dave Walker is puzzled by an undeveloped plot in South Kensington. Someone Twitter said it had been earmarked for a new Iranian Embassy that cannot now be built because of economic sanctions.

London Traveller follows the Ravensbourne River through a surprisingly rural landscape from Bromley South station to Caesar's Well.

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The Free Speech Bites podcasts

The other day I tweeted about Danny Alexander's endorsement of the Philosophy Bites podcasts.

Today I learnt that Nigel Warburton, the host of that series, has created Free Speech Bites. This is a spin-off series of podcasts dedicated to freedom of expression.

Among them you will find Irshad Manji on religion and free speech, Ma Jian on political and artistic freedom in China, and D.J. Taylor on George Orwell,

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What does J.K. Rowling know about Harry Potter anyway?

@jk_rowling no he died to clear his conscience

— Harry Potter Fans (@__HpFans__) November 27, 2015

I suspect this to be the greatest act of mansplaining of all time https://t.co/TXAqOvW6BV

— Matthew Hankins (@mc_hankins) November 27, 2015

This exchange turned up in my timeline. No doubt I was meant to laugh at Harry Potter Fans and praise Matthew Hankins for condemning mansplaining.

But I think the Harry Potter Fans tweet is fine.

Behind Hankins' contempt lie a number of connected and faulty aesthetic theories: that a work of art has one fixed meaning; that its meaning derives solely from the author's intentions; and that those intentions are somehow transferred from the author's mind to the book, which it then inhabits as a sort of ghostly substance.

The truth is different. As soon as a book is published the author loses control of it. There is no single correct reading of it that derives from her intentions. Readings multiply as its readership multiplies.

You could even argue that the better a book is, the more diverse the possible readings are, It this sort of fluidity of meaning that keeps the classics alive and makes us still want to read them.

Good criticism may reveal things the author was never conscious of. Here is G.K. Chesterton writing about Charles Dickens:

It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.

This is brilliant imaginative criticism - and it would be just as much if Chesterton were discussing a woman writer.

I will confess that I have read little by Rowling - because I found her a dull writer when I tried. But my prejudice is that everything in the Harry Potter world is that way because she says so. The stories failed to take on a life of their own that surprised their own author.

So it may be that Rowling's telling of the stories is the only possible one. But if that were true it would be a sign of her weakness as a writer not her strength.

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Danny Alexander takes defeat philosophically

Been listening to superb @philosophybites podcasts - highly recommended

— Danny Alexander (@dannyalexander) November 28, 2015

They are very good podcasts and you can find them on the Philosophy Bites website.

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