potlatch

For and against uncertainty

I listened to an excellent paper from Amos Witztum as part of this conference at Copenhagen Business School in January (where I also gave a paper), in which he described modern liberalism as a form of anti-tragedy. Greek tragedy, as any fan of The Wire also knows, involves characters straining in vain to resist their fate. They face dilemmas and choices, but ultimately these all result in the same outcome. Modern liberalism, especially in the form of Enlightenment, abandons this fatalism. But I think the point Witztum was making was that liberalism doesn't replace tragic fatalism with some form of heroic rationalism, as if we become masters of our own destiny. It replaces fatalism with uncertainty.

This interpretation of liberalism-as-uncertainty is shared by Friedrich Hayek, for whom freedom was found in ignorance regarding the future. Hayek's ambition for neoliberalism was to restore a form of government that made no predictions or guarantees regarding future economic outcomes. His opponent, of course, was not the Greek God but the socialist planner, who insisted that things turn out according to his bureaucratic dictat. Though as countless anecdotes about Soviet productivity rising by "20%" in a year or crops being planted only alongside the railway lines which Mao was due to travel down, socialism was less beset by the fatalism of tragedy, and more by the raised eyebrow of comedy. The person who is certain what's going to happen, and is almost certainly wrong, is another important figure when considering the politics of uncertainty.

There's a bastardised (aka Policy Exchange) version of Austrian economics, which says that the UK government can restore growth by getting out of the way. But Hayek's lesson is not that small government will 'deliver' better outcomes; it's that government should abandon any scientific concern with outcomes altogether. That is scarcely an option available to a modern politician. As I argued here, George Osborne's policies have a comedic air about them, resting on bold claims about the future that nobody seriously believes, possibly not even him. The Office for Budgetary Responsibility is being dragged into this comedy, performing its 'independent objectivity' with a smirk forming around its lips. Martin Amis could write a sequel to his critique of socialist irony, subtitled Laughter and the 2011 Growth Forecast.

Whether or not anybody today is really a whole-hearted Hayekian, this nevertheless poses an interesting question: how much uncertainty do we want in our economy and society? The term 'uncertainty' is sometimes misunderstood, thanks to mis-readings of Frank Knight. Many people, including economists, are prone to say that there are two types of situation, those which involve risk (and can be subject to probabilistic calculation) and those which involve uncertainty (and can not be subject to such calculation). This is entirely wrong. Knight's argument was that all situations involve uncertainty, as an existential fact of human life. But we have various pragmatic responses to it, including the construction of risk models, which succeed to varying degrees. Other pragmatic responses to uncertainty involve seeking to actively reduce it, through forms of concerted action and co-operation. For instance, the nudgers have discovered that if you get an offender or truant to sign a piece of paper promising to improve their behaviour, they are more likely to do so; uncertainty has been reduced.

'Actually existing' neoliberalism of 1979-2008 was organised around two contradictory positions on uncertainty. On the one hand, competition was to be unleashed and manufactured, for the sound Hayekian reason that this would produce uncertain outcomes. This treated uncertainty as something that was valuable in and of itself. On the other hand, risk modelling, audit and managerial expertise was honed in order to reduce uncertainty, in the interests of corporations, finance and other elites. In between these two, at the conflicted heart of the neoliberal project, lay the problem of corporate governance elicited by the separation of ownership and control of firms. It is no surprise that the project eventually combusted thanks to 'agency' problems.

Social democrats, communitarians and Keynesians have often criticised neoliberalism for valorising uncertainty, making stable families and communities harder to sustain. The privatisation of pensions, for example, means that we have no confident knowledge of our retirement income. But it is surely wrong to argue that ordinary people necessarily want uncertainty to be reduced. Our obsession with sport, gambling, talent shows - admittedly all riffs on a Hayekian vision of competition - demonstrate how much we thirst for the unknown outcome. This is despite the fact that rapid and unexpected changes of income/status can be as disruptive on the way up as on the way down. I, for one, refuse to accept that we automatically want a society in which uncertainty is kept to a minimum. It seems sociologically and politically naive. It misses the significance of 1968. Worst of all, it shows scant understanding of cricket as a source of romanticism and politics.

What is far more significant to the current moral crisis of neoliberalism is not that ordinary lives are mired in uncertainty, but that elite lives and institutions are not. While elites and managers spoke of innovation, competitiveness and constant 'ever-faster change', it seems that they were partly doing so in order to exempt themselves from so much uncertainty. The rhetoric was Austrian and liberal, but the behaviour was quasi-socialist in its extreme effort to dictate outcomes. The significance of so many recent books about inequality in the West is not simply in the levels of inequality that they identify (though that clearly matters) but in the patterns, repetitions and rationales that they identify in how inequality comes about. The dice are loaded. It's not that life is unfair, which is something that most adults should be able to handle; it's that it's unfair in unfair ways. Liberalism, whether of a Rawlsian or a Hayekian variety, is something we might be able to stomach, if things really were left to chance (be it via the veil of ignorance or market spontaneity) but the dominant view, post-2008, is that they're not.

In considering a future and better economic policy paradigm, we need to consider the political status of uncertainty. Possibly we need to find appropriate spheres for liberal, tragic and comic perspectives on the future, and not confuse the three. Uncertainty won't disappear, but it will be distributed in certain ways. The ability to calculate the future is unevenly distributed, as Koray Caliskan's Market Threads illuminates. And the ability to control the future is also unevenly distributed. Some people would dearly love more uncertainty in their lives; others would dearly love less. Maybe a good life is one in which the individual takes some responsibility for the outcome, but not complete responsibility. Equally, an honest politician is one who claims some responsibility for policy successes and failures, but not all.

Richard Dawkins versus the Enlightenment

James Wood has written one of the most elegant and intelligent critiques of the 'new atheism' of Richard Dawkins et al, initially given as a lecture and then published in Saturday's Guardian. He argues that the 'new atheism':

parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a "personal God", so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities. This God, the God worth fighting against, is the God we grew up with as children (and soon grew out of, or stopped believing in): this God created the world, controls our destinies, sits up somewhere in heaven, loves us, sometimes punishes us, and is ready to intervene to perform miracles. He promises goodies in heaven for the devout, and horrors for the damned. Since militant atheism interprets religious faith, again on the evangelical or Islamist model, as blind – a blind leap of faith that hurls the believer into an infinite idiocy – so no understanding or even interest can be extended to why or how people believe the religious narratives they follow, and how often those narratives are invaded by doubt, reversal, interruption and banality.

There is a venn diagram connecting the 'new atheism' with the 'new biologism', with Dawkins himself sitting proudly in the middle. The combined movement does for The Enlightenment what neo-conservatism does for democracy: defends and extends it so vigorously as to destroy most of its residual value. Paul Wolfowitz values democracy so highly, that he cannot leave it to the demos; Dawkins values Enlightenment so highly, that he no longer trusts the deliberative public sphere, which Kant saw as its animating force, to secure it. For a brilliant tour of the 'new biologism' and its errors, see this NYRB review of David Brooks's strange new book.

The great virtue of the original Enlightenment, over this post-modern, pastiched version, was its discovery of two things, which the 'new atheism' and the 'new biologism' appear to have forgotten. Firstly, that even if history appears to be moving in a certain direction, it doesn't stop moving altogether. This motion and contingency engulfs science as much as politics or culture. Secondly, that there is a distinction between knowledge and truth. If one wanted to combine these two insights in one, it would be that human civilisation is evolutionary. Dawkins is apparently entirely blind to the non-biological forms of evolution, which would surely have to include the 'meta-evolution' of evolutionary theory itself (I am not aware whether Darwin himself was interested in the broader implications of evolutionary theory, though Marx, Nietzsche and the American pragmatists certainly saw such implications in Darwin's work).

My question to Dawkins, Brooks and much of the neuro-brigade would be the following one. If human beings have existed for several hundred thousand years, and evolved from other species over millions of years, and if they could feasibly remain in existence for another hundred thousand years (potentially to evolve to a higher species over millions of years!), why should 2011 be the point at which we hold the truth of this process, and the truth of who we are? Why indeed should it be the 21st century, or the 19th century or the last 400 years of modernity? Why, if you believe that 'truth' about humans is possible, would it not appear in 3011? Or perhaps in the year 45627?

Do you think that the craniologists of the late 19th century went around saying "this is only an approximation of the truth; to get to the real truth, we'd have to know which parts of the brain 'lit up' when a child was hugged, which probably won't be possible for at least another 100 years"? Do you honestly think that scientists in 2100 will be citing neuroscientific or primate research from 2011, regarding the 'truth' of who we are? Does David Brooks honestly think that scientists in 2011 cite believe that we have discovered the 'truth' of who we are?!

A silly version of postmodernism would suggest that contemporary scientific claims are identically as valid as those made in the dark ages, whereas really they are valid in different ways. Whereas a smart critique of rationalism (and of the Dawkinsesque pastiche of Enlightenment) is one which recognises the evolutionary nature of science, capitalism, culture, such that we cannot throw off our current mindset, culture or language, but nor are we imprisoned in it. We recognise the present as constitutive of who we are, but also as a single moment in an unfolding drama with no apparent conclusion.

This was the approach to modernity that enabled Nietzsche to take biology seriously, as contributing to the death of god, but also as undermining the capacity for certainty (for if we are part of nature after all, then we lose any privileged perspective upon that nature). It is also exhibited in Foucault's engagement with Kant, in his own 'What is Enlightenment?'. From these post-Enlightenment perspectives, the central characteristic of Enlightenment that needs reviving is the great new uncertainty that it unleashed. Dawkins, by this account, is an anti-Enlightenment thinker, as James Wood's article implies.

This same challenge needs posing to economic policy-makers and intellectuals today. Paul Mason recently chaired a BBC radio debate between Keynesians and Hayekians, to discover which thinker had the most convincing analysis of the current crisis, or the best policy advice. But one wonders whether either thinker would have been happy being turned into a rationalist totem in this way (which isn't to devalue the great work that Mason is doing in furthering public understanding of this crisis). Marx famously said that he was not a 'Marxist'. Would Keynes today be a 'Keynesian'? Would Hayek be a 'Hayekian'? Surely thinkers with such an acute awareness of uncertainty as the central problem of human existence (and not only of capitalist institutions) would have been loathe to have their ideas packaged up and offered as potions for the sick patient, 80 years after they were formulated.

Regulationists, pragmatists and post-Keynesians would argue that we are currently operating without any rational basis on which to resolve the current crisis, because the old ones contributed to it. Only when a new paradigm has emerged will the crisis begin to subside - but we have to appreciate the fact that the new paradigm may look nothing like the old one, in fact it may not even be recognisable as a stable paradigm at all, as I wondered as the banks were collapsing. Surely that is the most important insight of the evolutionary perspective.

Nietzsche had a particular notion of the 'hero', as the figure who provides an example, but not an instruction. For him, modest fellow that he was, this included Socrates and Jesus Christ. The 'new atheism' and the 'new biologism' offer instructions, but few heroes (which makes Christopher Hitchens' alliance with Dawkins all the more unfortunate). Equally, its protagonists look to the 18th and 19th century in search of instructions, just as the Left currently turns to Keynes's General Theory in search of instructions. From a Nietzschean perspective, Kant, Darwin, Marx and Keynes can be heroes, inasmuch as they recognised the incomplete nature of human progress and the uncertain nature of human knowledge, yet charged on regardless. By comparison, their particular instructions are somewhat less helpful several hundred years later, except as articles of faith and comfort blankets.

Wittgenstein, insurance companies and apes

The era of the psycho-economy and the neuro-economy also appears to be an age of Wittgensteinian problems. Some nuggets of Wittgenstein, scattered through the Philosophical Investigations:

 - Just try - in a real case - to doubt someone else's fear or pain.

- You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

 - I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say "I know what you are thinking" and wrong to say "I know what I am thinking." (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar).

- If a lion could speak, we could not understand him

- A dog cannot be a hypocrite but neither can he be sincere

Jack Straw has entered Wittgensteinian territory this week, by discovering that there is no way of diagnosing whiplash following a car accident, other than a declaration of neck pain. A shadowy insurance economy has developed on the back of this epistemological problem. Listen to this fascinating discussion with a doctor from yesterday's Today programme. As Wittgenstein might have said:

How do I know I have whiplash? Because my car has a massive dent in it.

Today, the news is that happy orangutans live longer than unhappy ones. The fact that this has made the headlines might be considered another case of the strange appeal of anthropomorphism  in the digital age. Equally, it presumably implies more sunny psycho-optimism for the human race. But as I lay in bed listening to this news item on the radio this morning, I had the unfortunate experience of hearing the great Austrian misery guts muttering in my head:

How do I know my orangutan is happy if he cannot speak? Well - he's still alive, isn't he?

Or maybe the orangutan is French, and is simply experiencing joie de vivre, which confused the scientific researchers into making claims about the relationship between happiness and life. The philosophical riddles are bottomless.

I suspect such riddles are going to become commonplace, as the concern for wellbeing, happiness, quality of life develops, and neuro-mania accelerates. The twentieth century was the century of behaviourism, in which experts were content to watch us, judge us, feed us and regulate us. If we could speak, they should not be able to understand us, or at least were unlikely to try. But the rise of the mind and of the brain since the 1970s has brought subjectivity, interiority and self-consciousness crashing into the apparatus of government and measurement. 

One of the striking features of the neuro-ification of society is that its initial impact is that it (as Wittgenstein said of philosophy) leaves everything as it is. Initially, we simply take everything we know to be true - that cocaine is addictive, that cities create sensory overload etc - and re-code these claims via different areas of the brain 'lighting up'. The most interesting aspect of these claims is their banality. Where previously these observations were made on the basis of observation and experience, now they are re-packaged in terms of our objective subjectivity. Could it be that neuroscience is actually one vast misunderstanding of language, as Wittgenstein believed philosophy to be? As he said, "Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday". Surely the greatest misunderstanding surrounding neuroscience is the notion that language has been bi-passed, and that brains are now speaking their own language.

Then there is the rise of evaluation via the subject, that I partly address here. It is no longer enough to be 'healthy', 'wealthy', 'educated' - all descriptive, implicity behaviourist terms that link us indelibly to society and experts - one has to feel it, to be satisfied, made happy by it. The question is no longer "is this school any good?" but "how does this school make me feel?" and "what do my feelings about this school reveal about the quality of this school?"

This also represents a linguistic holiday. The hope is that experts can be bi-passed in the provision of professional and public services, such that we provide our own personal measures of satisfaction and wellness. No doctor knows how well I am any more, only I do. It transpires that many of us are miserable, no matter what any doctor says about our health; the turn towards 'quality of life' in health economics and 'subjective wellbeing' in economics has greatly raised the value attached to mental health. Could it not be the case that this break down of understanding is contributing to our misery? Might we not be happier if we re-learnt the Wittgensteinian insight that knowledge is social and linguistic, and that the rest is a mystery?

Some people will no doubt wait, until there is a brainscanner in every home, classroom and doctor's surgery, in the hope that then the world will really know how they feel. At which point, the cry will go up "yes, that's it! That part of my brain which shows up red! That is how I have been feeling all along!" Unfortunately, my neuro-maniac, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations pre-empted this too:

- How do I know that this colour is red? It would be an answer to say: "I have learnt English"

Meanwhile, orangutans will still be best treated well, because that is a more humane way of being human. And car accidents will attract vultures. Things are basically left as they are.

where are the psychologists of the night?

At the CRESC debate on The Big Society on Monday, Karel Williams and Mick Moran analysed 'the big society' as a myopic strategy by certain London elites, to avoid discussing the real pathologies affecting the UK, namely the decline of party political organisation, rampant regional inequality and the fact that Britain's private economy has failed to generate jobs or wealth outside of the South East since Margaret Thatcher came to power. Today, John Harris has a nice article, identifying another myopia:

Every week, in fact, brings another lecture or book about the political uses of neuroscience, or what Twitter is doing to human consciousness – everything, it seems, apart from what's actually most important. The world arguably needs a new Marx, but it keeps creating Malcolm Gladwells, pirouhetting around their flipcharts and ignoring the real problems.

My question to Williams and Moran was the following. Given Michel Foucault's claim that, since the late 18th century, modern governments have relied on accurate socio-economic and statistical knowledge of populations in order to govern us effectively, what will be the consequence of this turn away from rationalist, quantitative knowledge? Will the government eventually suffer? Or... could we be finally discovering the true consequences of 'post-modernity', whereby policy elites base decisions on subjective impressions, anecdote and a Schumpeterian cult of the entrepreneur?

If Nigel Thrift is to be believed, private sector managers have been heading down this latter route for some time. But they are managing teams and organisations, not governing populations; scale surely matters here. And yet, given the horror expressed by many economists and policy experts regarding the total absence of policy evaluation going on under this government (as manifest in NHS reform-for-reform's-sake), and given the cuts in social science funding, it is not inconceivable that rationalist, liberal government-by-numbers has peaked, and is now in decline. There will still be experts offering advice, even when it is not based in evidence or economics, as the continued public sector addiction to consultants demonstrates.

Throw in the economic pressure for academics to start researching bogus sociological concepts, and suddenly we face the prospect of a government that is not so much driving while looking in the rear view mirror, but driving while reading a work of fiction. Is an accident not likely? Against this backdrop, the commitment to measure national wellbeing should be commended for at least having some air of realism and inclusivity about it. But Karel Williams believes that policy elites can continue on this surrealist path indefinitely, so long as they remain safely insulated in their metropolitan bubble.

On this same theme, I've been wondering about the vocation and responsibility of psychologists. To put it crudely: since when did psychology become a paean to the loveliness of the human spirit? What happened to the followers of Stanley Milgram or the Stanford Prison Experiment? Sure, some of those experiments are illegal or considered unethical now. But in case there are any psychologists out there reading this, a warning: your profession has accidentally convinced the entire London policy breakfast seminar circuit that human beings are fundamentally nice, caring, sharing animals, not unlike those friendly chimpanzees, who would love to help the needy and the sick, if only they received the right 'cues' and 'choice architectures' through which to do so. Did you guys all just suddenly stop reading Freud? Is BBC 2 not showing enough Nazi documentaries or something? And have you looked at the state of the world recently?

Social psychology, and its off-shoots of marketing and Human Resources, has long had some complicity with individualist economic culture, providing the cooperative techniques which capitalism depends on but otherwise threatens to undermine. There is, then, a division of labour, in which economists declare that humans are rational and selfish, and psychologists off-set the worst aspects of this by claiming that they are emotional and altruistic. In this sense, the contradiction between the two is necessary, as a way of coping with the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism.

This is now infecting elite policy discourses in new and somewhat troubling ways. "We know now that human beings are not competitive, but co-operative". "We know from experiments on chimpanzees that gift-giving is biologically innate". These are some of the things that are heard in debates that were once dominated by free market economists. References to the brain exacerbate the problem. None of this represents optimism, less still hope. I've never understood it when people stand up at Labour Party meetings and say "what we all share on the left is an optimistic view of human nature". Do we? Who says? Some of us don't even have a view of human nature. Surely the great purpose of socialism is to aleviate deliberate and organised exploitation, not simply to stop believing it is real.

And so neuro- and psychological claims about innate goodness produce yet another layer of insulation between policy elites and what is actually going on in society. The more the evidence piles up to endorse a Nietzschean view of humanity as lustful for power (for example in and around the financial sector), the greater the demand for theories, anecdotes and pop classics that present humans as sociable, charming and eagre to help old ladies cross the road.

I don't for a second believe that this gives a complete picture of academic social psychology today (or even of neuroscience). The ethical and psychological claims of Freud and Nietzsche cannot have simply evaporated from intellectual debate, and nor can empirical interest in obedience, domination, sadism and status obsession have subsided. But there is only one, very jaundiced view of the beings that is currently penetrating policy discourse right now. To counter this, one almost wishes for a proper neo-liberal such as Milton Friedman to return, whose pessimistic view of human nature at least offers some more truthful depiction of reality, albeit as .

The reason this matters, as Adam Curtis's recent series went a small way to explaining, is that it produces a strange form of progressive-conservativism, which suggests that society will fix itself, if only it is relieved of various trappings of modernity and culture. In this crypto-Rousseauian vision, "man is born co-operative, but everywhere he is desparately trying to shaft society and get on X Factor". The question of why there is so much egoism, competitiveness, indifference to others and so on, is never intelligently asked - perhaps because the answers might be sociological and political - and instead we can comfort ourselves that, deep down, we're absolutely fine.

Paradoxically, a psychologist who communicated the dark appeal of winning, beating others, hording wealth, abandoning others and ego valorisation might also be able to start a conversation about the sorts of institutions and civic frameworks necessary to cope with those instincts, only some of which will be markets. This, for example, is part of the contribution of criminology. They needn't even claim in any Dawkins-esque fashion that these habits reflect biologically inate tendencies (I for one am very happy to abandon all claims to innate biology, especially in politics). But they might at least cast some light on the fact that, seemingly uncoerced, human beings alive today appear to operate without much concern for the common good, much of the time.

the deathly Blairification of David Cameron

David Cameron's debt to Tony Blair has been remarked on from the beginning. His age, family, idle use of 'yer knows' in front of the camera, lurking anxiety regarding media profile, bad taste in jeans... These all added to the sense that the Tories had found their own answer to a politician they considered unbeatable. Michael Gove, apparently, has gone around referring to Blair's memoirs as a key reference point against which to check Conservative policy-making.

But what about Blair 2.0? What about the one who experienced strange stirrings in his belly, at the sight of jets taking off for Kosovo in 1999, at his command? Who returned to that strange potion for another hit in Sierra Leone in 2000? And who, catastrophically, saw a "kaleidoscope being shaken", when everyone else saw two passenger planes colliding with two skyscrapers in 2001? Will we see a Cameron 2.0 as well? Listening to the tone of his speech (as opposed to the policy itself) about the "military covenant" earlier this month, then seeing how he has leant on Barack Obama over Libya, I began to wonder.

All politics involves some stance towards temporality and, hence, to mortality. The birth of Western political philosophy, Plato's Republic, represents the challenge of politics as the attainment of a social order that transcends time in some way. If the philosophers are in charge, and the philosophers have knowledge of eternity, then the republic will be governed according to principles that will out-live any individual life. Politics, by this account, is a secular religion: it provides rituals, forms, order that endure, where human life does not. It contrasts with the ephemera of the marketplace or the mob.

There are less oppressive answers to this same problematic. Rome is still known as the 'eternal city', thanks to the belief that the republic would outlast everything. 'Civic' and 'democratic' forms of republicanism may be committed to the ephemera of chit-chat and politicking, but they do so on the basis of philosophical and anthropological principles that are no less permanent than Plato's. Then one might think of Edmund Burke's famous argument, that the social contract is not only between the living and the living (as Locke and others had argued), but between the dead and the living, and the living and the not-yet-born. Finally, there is the stark political nihilism of Carl Schmitt, for whom politics is about who we would die for (the 'friend'), and who we would kill (the 'enemy').

The problem of time, and hence of death, is inerradicable from the urge to create and govern political order. Politics without an awareness of finitude is mere policy or flim-flam. I guess Hobbes's Leviathan sets the stage for a form of empiricist utilitarianism of a sort, by positing the saving and prolongation of life as the first principle of the modern state. This may be the instinct of many politicians today, and certainly the worldview of many economists and policy-makers. One of the risks of Marxism is that, in attacking capitalism's oppression of the living by 'dead labour' (i.e. capital), it simply inverts the problem, and leads to an exuberant modernism which only cares about the now; in this, New Labour and its Marxist forebears were equally culpable.

We need political leaders to see beyond the empirical, beyond what lives here-and-now. And the danger represented by Blair and Cameron is of politicians who discover mortality and finitude only after they have risen to power. Traditionally, a politician would become Prime Minister in their 50s or 60s, when they would be likely to have lost a parent. A long time ago, they may well have lost a child (as both Gordon Brown and Cameron actually have). Certainly they would have experienced war at first or second hand, and be well-acquainted with the experience of mourning.

The early appeal of Blair and Cameron - their 1.0 incarnations - was that they lacked metaphysical baggage. Especially in the case of Blair circa 1997, he represented a glorious post-modern lightness, a play of smiles and football banter, a man who felt equally comfortable with foreign leaders as he did with pop stars or the man on the street. Possibly this lack of baggage or relation to history actually aided him in his great domestic triumph in bringing peace to Northern Ireland: who better to draw a line under the past than a management consultant? But he admits now, as Blair 2.0, that his great regret was that he cared too much about the media and what people thought of the Labour Party. Cameron's attempted 'de-toxification' of the Conservative brand has followed a similar path.

These are men of focus groups, Clinton-esque handshakes, drinks parties and interviews on sofas. But they then discover that they control submarines, bombs, and warships. Not only that, but they can send orders to the type of uniformed toffs who they thought had disappeared decades ago, who then send down orders to working class boys to shoot people and get shot at. For a young Tony Blair or David Cameron to discover the military must be like moving into a trendy new condo appartment, and discovering that someone has left a ouija board in one of the cupboards. At first, you shut the door in horror. But eventually you're going to become curious about what it might do for you.

This is the danger of discovering death, destruction and killing only after one becomes Prime Minister. That strange look Blair began to get in his eye, and the ever-longer pauses that he left between sentences in his speeches, were the signs of a man who had acquired metaphysical baggage for the first time. But he discovered it not in the endurance of democratic freedom (which would have oriented him to at least care about the constitution) but in the military. He jumped straight from the flim-flam and ephemera of focus groups and BBC Breakfast, to the existentialism of bombs and coffins.

But surely these are the outlying poles of political temporality: to move from the hourly tittle tattle of news, to the eternity of death in one clean move, is to pass over everything of long-term value. Between these, politics consists of all manner of temporal relations - to law, to human rights, to the nation (as Blue Labour has now discovered), to nature, to the elderly, and to the newly born. A financial system dominated by the short-term could still give way to an alternative dedicated to the long-term, though there is remarkably little sign of this happening.

Whether Cameron will become fully Blairified remains to be seen. A 'good' conservative leader would discover a Burkean, possibly also a republican, relationship to time, rather than leap whole-heartedly into the Schmittian existentialism that Blair revelled in. The examples of the Military Covenant and Libya are themselves measured, even noble. The private tragedy of losing a son no doubt gives him a greater sense of temporality than his career in PR ever would have. But if Cameron develops that look in his eye, I will worry.

intellectual firepower

Gideon Rachman's FT comment piece alerts me to a pretty hilarious 'Top 100 Global Thinkers' list, compiled by Foreign Policy magazine. Rachman wants to know 'where have all the thinkers gone?' Well wherever they are, Foreign Policy clearly has no idea.

The top ten includes none other than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (tied 1st equal), Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Robert Gates, David Petraeus, Dominique Strauss-Kahn... err.. hang on, no, surely that's the invite list for a Davos breakfast seminar on 'Chinese Monetary Policy for Beginners'. But no! Quite seriously, these are presented as amongst the world's ten leading 'thinkers'.

This almost requires someone to write an updated and abridged version of Heidegger's What is Called Thinking. Because if these are the world's leading practitioners of that mysterious art, then I have no idea what it is any more. Is 'thinking' now something that requires access to billions of dollars? If so, it is certainly the case that when Bill Gates or Ben Bernanke has a 'thought', that it must be a truly excellent one. Or is (what is called) 'thinking' now a polite word for 'altering' or 'impacting'. I'd have to agree that Angela Merkel's and General Petraeus's 'thoughts' therefore put them amongst the world's great intellectuals. Or is Foreign Policy merely engaged in the lowest form of sycophancy to power, to rival that of the aristocrats deliberately letting Henry VIII win at tennis?

I diagnose come combination of all of the above. This is the problem of Reverse Platonism, common to American neo-conservatism. Plato deduced from the idea of Truth that the perfect state would be run by philosophers, ensuring that power was allied to wisdom. Foreign Policy has simply done the reverse. Where Plato asked 'who should be powerful?', and answered 'the wise', Foreign Policy asks 'who should be wise', and answers 'the powerful'.

Seeing names such as Obama, Hilary Clinton and David Cameron on this list would appear to announce the most monumental aristocracy (rule by the best) ever imagined! Or else spell the end of intellectual discourse, as something separate from the wheels of power. Kant famously defined Enlightenment as the separation between one's 'public' and one's 'private' use of reason, where the former (as exercised in the media, academia, bourgeois salons) was to be uncensored, and the latter (as exercised in one's paid employment, public office or religious role) was amenable to regulation and censorship. Where, then, does Foreign Policy leave Enlightenment, if one can only become a top 'thinker' through clambering to the top of political and financial ladders?

This may betray the profound, if unintentional, impact of a century of American pragmatism. So strong was the Deweyian desire to inject rationality into government, to connect expertise to the state, and so extensive were the efforts of think tanks and the like to support this from the 1950s onwards, that the distinction between 'truth' and 'power' appears to have been lost in some strange post-modern soup of 'power-knowledge'. What has also been lost is the progressive suspicion of money in public life, with Gates, Buffett, Jobs, Brin and other American billionaires all in the top 25 'thinkers' in the world. The blurb introducing the list remarks on the 'great new ideas' that this 'very smart crowd' has produced. The question is whether an 'idea' still exists, without the financial, technological and military muscle to convert it into something beyond its own expression. This list suggests not.

the happiness debate

Open Democracy are running a debate on 'happiness' as a statistical, economic and policy concern. I've kicked it off with an article about the potential for this new body of socio-economic knowledge to shift political attention to production, and away from consumption, as the arena in which valuable economic activity takes place. Here is a chunk:

For the first time since the collapse of socialism, the importance of production to society and individual dignity is about to receive an objective economic rationale. For beyond the confines of the doctor’s surgery and the family, work  - its quality, quantity, whether we have it at all - is the single biggest influence over measured happiness levels. This potentially enables a shift in our dominant economic discourse, which any canny politician should be looking to exploit. It’s worth standing back and considering the historical context in which this new national performance indicator (and the burgeoning associated evidence) will arrive. A particular epoch of both values and valuation techniques may be drawing to a close.

There is already a debate developing in the comments underneath the article itself (including from a mysterious 'MP'), so if you'd like to contribute, please do so at the link above.

Michael Walzer and university cuts

The lumping together of the US and Britain as a shared 'variety of capitalism', most famously by Hall and Soskice, has a certain analytical appeal, but necessarily papers over various cultural and historical differences.  Maybe times of crisis make this even harder to sustain. Looking at the direction of higher education funding in the UK, my anxiety is that the British are capable of uniquely bad variations on the 'American' model of capitalism, that the US itself does not have to tolerate.

Acccording to Hall and Soskice, both nations have Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) in contrast to European and Japanese Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs). But while the US has the diverse bookshops, boutiques and cafes of downtown Manhattan, we have Oxford Street, effectively Stanstead airport without the seating. When American neo-liberals sought to unleash market forces in the 1970s, they merely had to roll back Democrat legislation and wait for their capitalist friends to do the rest. We had to invent privatisation, PFIs and various new public management trickery in order to convince ourselves that we are an enterprising nation, when quite evidently we are not.

Now consider higher education. It can be argued that the US has long treated a university degree as a private good, associated in the mind of the student with large amounts of debt, and heavily subsidised for the poor through scholarships. If one couldn't be bothered to think for a moment, one might choose to describe this as 'fair'. The model is also associated with stronger university-business links, better practical application of science, and overall a comparatively high level of R&D spending as a proportion of GDP (though this fell under Bush).

Why would Britain not want this? The answer is that Britain could indeed want this, but may find it impossible to replicate for the following reasons.

Firstly, the fairness brigade might want to put down their John Rawls, and pick up Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice. This means dropping hallowed metaphors of 'level playing fields' and equality of opportunity (which don't seem to be having much effect in the first place), and considering how different sociological forms of inequality do or do not influence one another. Walzer's argument, very simply, is that there are multiple spheres of inequality in any society. The task is not to erradicate them, but to ensure that none trumps or determines all of the others. So, for example, political contests cannot become dictated by economic contests (which is where the US most conspicuously fails), or vice versa.

When looking at British and American neo-liberalism, the question is whether each society has robust enough non-economic forms of inequality to withstand the unleashing of capitalist relations of domination into more and more spheres of society. To put this another way, resistance to capital in the social, cultural and political spheres is dependent on non-capitalist elites and non-capitalist forms of competition, or alternatively aristocracy of some kind.

The LME/CME model is faintly Polanyian, issuing thoughts of 'disembedded' versus 'embedded' markets. What both Polanyi and the varieties of capitalism perspective miss is the Walzerian point, that market inequality is often best resisted not by 'equality', 'society' or being 'embedded', but by rival forms of inequality and by becoming disembedded from parallel social, cultural and political arenas of competition.

The anxiety regarding British neo-liberalism is that it has been used to subsume non-capitalist elites (academics, cultural elites, the BBC, the judiciary) within the logic of the market. Where the US has a fiercely competitive culture of scholarship, which is tinged by a mindset of enterprise but not remotely reducible to it, Britain has invented the Research Assessment Exercise to ensure that scholarly inequality is technically commensurable with the logic of economics.

The US university sector operates a bit like a market (there are various ways in which it self-evidently is a market, such as competing for top professors with offers of cash) but it is not the market. US universities are business-like (Weber noticed this over a century ago) but they are not businesses. The commitment to the public sphere as a non-market space of discovered inequality runs very deep, which admittedly has the side-effect of capital seeking to buy dominance of it via Fox News.

By contrast, my fear is that Britain in the future will become like a Gary Becker fantasy, in which 'human capital' is entirely governed by a logic of return on investment, of universities selling the humanities in the same way that Thomas Cook sells the Maldives, of MBA-style rankings (based on average salary after graduation) infecting undergraduate education to the point where campuses are over-run with law and marketing students, while scholarship and intellectualism simply appear like monopolies to be broken up. As Zizek argues in this piece, given Kant defined an Enlightened society as one where people had free use of "public reason" (i.e. separate from their occupations and professions), what is currently going on amounts to an attack on this use of reason, and thereby on Enlightenment.

What this all suggests is that any form of justice, from a Walzerian perspective, is extremely path dependent and fragile. Different spheres of inequality must be allowed to emerge organically, and then be kept strategically separate. Neo-liberalism may have been an Austro-German intellectual invention, but its applied form was entirely American - the Chicago School were offering a rationalisation of economic and political norms that were already present in American society. And because they were already present, they had emerged alongside rival forms of conduct that could potentially resist them. It is difficult to imagine even the most market-friendly American government managing to alter Harvard University's priorities or notion of value even slightly.

Britain, as has been our fate, was the great experiment in artificially generating US-style dynamism via government. The outcomes are potentially worse, given the lower levels of competition in non-market areas of society. Our elites are sleepier, less competitive and less assertive of their rights to remain separate from capitalism. A government-driven neo-liberalism, such as our's, is better able to bring all corners of society within a single logic. Hence the same model, same policies, that have emerged in a vaguely tolerable way in the US, are imposed without the necessary cultural checks and balances over here. Maybe, in the face of the marketization of everything, it's time to stop demanding less inequality, but more inequalities.

the era of 'fairness'

There's an argument, stemming from Hegel, that a political idea is only fully realised by its opponent. Hegel explored this via the master-slave dialectic: the master is implicitly dependent on the slave for his mastery, whereas the slave's freedom - when it arrives - is actually real. Overthrowing something enables one to realise its inner possibility. Marx reinvented this in class terms, which is why the proletariat has the potential for a higher form of liberal freedom than the liberal bourgeoisie themselves. 

Similarly, I think Zizek points out somewhere that Blairism was a more consistent realisation of Thatcherism than Thatcher could ever achieve. Precisely because Thatcherism was the forceful imposition of a new political programme, its identity (like that of Hegel's master) was partly dependent on the resistance of those it was aiming to disempower. By contrast, Blairism - stemming from Thatcher's opponents, internalising its policies - represented neo-liberalism as a sociological reality, rather than as a political goal. Thatcherism was defined in opposition to the power of unions, whereas Blairite policies were considered responses to the 'competitive challenges' of a de-regulated, flexible economy that simply was.

If, for the sake of a thought experiment, we follow this through, it's interesting to ask which of the hard-fought, political goals of New Labour will reappear as unquestionable facts under the new Coalition government. I suspect it will have something to do with inequality and fairness.

It must be said, in appreciation of New Labour, that raising the incomes of those at the bottom of society in real terms, and relative to median incomes, was something they expended a tremendous amount of energy on. Overall levels of inequality fell during the second term, for the first time since the 1970s. All manner of fiscal tricks were pulled to establish this, and high levels of sustained growth facilitated it. So much political effort, so many tricks and so much growth went into it, in fact, that it could be achieved without having to disrupt the distribution of power, ownership or cultural capital in British society. The political struggle of New Labour was to separate egalitarianism and 'fairness' from class politics.

It is a measure of New Labour's success in doing this that George Osborne's policies are presented in the language of fairness, and defended on the basis that they will not exacerbate inequality. These values are now part of the furniture, just as flexible labour markets were for Blair. But equally, we now see the truth of what 'fairness' means, partly thanks to the fiscal retrenchment.

Since taking power, the Conservatives have made various announcements to the effect that the 'pain' of austerity will be felt equally. Ministers are now having to use the tube and been given pay cuts. Transparency now means knowing what public servants earn, as a basis for perhaps even more 'fairness'. Elites are beating themselves up on a daily basis. The outrage at senior salaries is being harnessed by David Cameron in an interesting way.

Aside from any sense that these might be media gimmicks, what do they say about the emerging political economy? The implication is that the Coalition stands for an even greater level of fairness than New Labour, yet still within the existing structure of power relations, ownership and cultural capital. New Labour's push for fairness was undermined by the sense that they were not only comfortable with the filthy rich getting filthier and richer, but they were quite tempted to join them (Tony Blair now charges up to £400,000 an hour). David Cameron is outflanking Brownite ascetism by wearing the hair shirt on his own back.

To apply pain and gain equally, proportionately and fairly across every rank in society is the ultimate legitimation of the ranks as they presently stand. The status quo receives an endorsement, not in economic terms (it is efficient) nor in conservative terms (it has worked in the past) but in liberal ones (it will be managed fairly). It is the final abandonment of the possibility that the rankings might be rearranged, that power might be challenged or society reorganised. The disavowel of inequality getting significantly greater is at the same time a morally confident statement that it needn't get any less either. The next step would be to throw the odd sacrificial CEO into jail, as occurs periodically in the US.

This is Rawls's 'justice as fairness', but instead of being designed from behind a veil of ignorance, it is being designed and upheld within a set of contingently unequal social, economic and political relations. "What", the Rawlsian Tory asks "would it mean for this political-economic arrangement to be made fair?" To which the answer is "5% pay-cuts for everyone."

All of which makes me wonder if greater equality is another of those political goals that is best pursued obliquely. It is taken as read that the Labour movement has always been about greater equality. Has it really? Were statistics of this sort available in the 1870s? Is social justice really just a matter of earnings, be they of labour or capital? Was the welfare state about reducing some quantifiable gap, or was it about tackling degradation? Today there is a case for reforming corporate governance structures, quite aside from the inequality that they produce; inequality may be reduced obliquely as a result.

Building on these thoughts of a couple of days ago, I think it would be mistaken were the Labour Party now to try to wrest back the 'fairness' and 'equality' agenda from the Coalition government. How much fairer can you get than sending Ministers on the tube, they'll say. What was so fair about the celebrity-obsessed era of New Labour? We are the new egalitarians, Osborne will reply, as the cuts are affecting top and bottom equally (never mind that that would be termed 'regressive' if the same logic were applied to taxation). Best to let them have fairness, and see how far they can run with it, just as the Tories had to let Labour do the same with open and competitive markets.

This post has since been re-posted to Open Democracy here, and is attracting some interesting responses.

what future for the Left?

Thursday saw a high quality seminar take place, jointly hosted by Demos's Open Left project and Soundings. Its purported aim was to bring together thinkers from across the spectrum of the centre left, with John Cruddas and David Milliband turning up to represent this politically.

Defeat, and economic crisis, certainly broaden the scope of such seminars and the intelligence of the discussion. It becomes possible for someone like David Milliband to talk about capitalism as something which varies, not least in its injustices, rather than as some autonomous global cash-cow that won't ever be questioned. Meanwhile, those beyond the reaches of Blair's Big Tent become empowered to talk in less aggrieved terms, now that they feel listened to.

What continues to frustrate me on such occasions is the difficulty posed by that old Humean dilemma, how to move from 'is' to 'ought'. There are various ways that those on the left currently tend to combine empirical and normative claims.

1. Moral tautology: People accuse positivists of speaking in tautologies, but surely moralists do as well. Perhaps an analytical philosopher can help me out here, but isn't the sentence "we ought to pursue a more just society" actually empty of any meaning? Don't the words 'ought' and 'just' cancel each other out? This is a charge that is levelled at Kantians and Rawlsians, when they argue that the just action or society is the one that the reasonable and just person would select. The question is how moral categories can achieve some bite upon the world.

2. Appeal to 'our history': This is never to be under-estimated, but lets not forget that Tony Blair was appealing to 'Labour values' when he distanced himself from Labour policies. Weberian 'traditional authority' ('you should obey me because that's how we do things') is important, but still doesn't get you much closer to working out priorities and policies than the moral tautology. The New Labour neglect of its 'core vote' won't be reversed, simply by quoting Nye Bevan; it will require working out who that core vote is, who they consider themselves to be, and how they differ and resemble previous 'core votes' from the past.

3. Utilitarianism: Values often get smuggled into technical economic arguments. At the moment, this is taking place in the refreshingly grand, politically charged sphere of fiscal argument. The right and the left argue about whether the deficit really is too high, whether the bond markets really do have the power the media claims, whether deficit reduction really will impede the chances of growth. Clearly these are latently normative perspectives in conflict, but they purport to be technocratic. And then we're on the slippery, de-politicising slope towards 'what matters is what works'. 

4. Ideology: If there's one thing ideologies are good for, it's moving from 'is' to 'ought'. But they leave me feeling a bit how Adorno felt towards religious believers - just because it would be nice and helpful if God did exist, is no reason to ignore the awkward existential possibility of nihilism. As Marx himself said "I am not a Marxist".

The reason ideology stifles is that it takes the other three - moralism, history and technocracy - and combines them neatly into a package, which it would otherwise be the job of politics to produce. What is missing, I suggested at the seminar, is a different account of history, as provided by sociology.

Anthony Giddens took a lot of flack for The Third Way, but that was because (in Hume's terms again) everyone, perhaps even Giddens himself, mistook an 'is' for an 'ought'. To draw the Labour Party's attention to globalisation, risk cultures, post-industrial production and individualism never had to be a call for even more globalisation, even more auditting, an even bigger retail sector, or even more individualism. He wasn't even a Lord back then!

But it did supply something that (1) moral tautologies, (2) reading Tawney, (3) designing tax credits and (4) reading Marx couldn't do on their own, namely re-ground a political movement in the present and for the future. Marx wrote that "men make their own history, just not under circumstances of their own choosing". Giddens played an important role in reminding people of the second half of that sentence; unfortunately he also somehow persuaded people to forget the first half, although tragically not when it came to foreign policy.

What is there between a moral instinct and a technocratic problem? How's this for an answer: a publicly expressed and measurable sociological development that demands a collective response.

This means not defining a political movement in terms of this year's policy agenda (welfare, immigration), nor in terms of new clever policy innovations (tax credits), nor in terms of media myths (crime). Instead, social history - or rather, capitalist society - will throw up ever new collective threats that capitalism itself will struggle to solve. In Marxist terms, it produces contradictions that the state's task is to alleviate; in neo-classical terms, each epoch has its own defining 'negative externalities'.

19th century 'Manchester liberalism' produced the extreme negative externalities of degrading factory conditions, corrosion of family life and disease. This was publicly expressed, measurable and it demanded a collective response, which it received in the birth of the labour movement. 20th century Fordism collectivised and rationalised the economy, but left individual risks - unemployment, ill-health, old age - as negative externalities. With the birth of national statistics and national media, these had become publicly expressed, measurable and they demanded a collective response, which they received with the post-45 political settlement.

So the question is, what might be the equivalents today, that are not only technical problems in need of a technocratic solution, but defining short-comings of contemporary capitalism? Here are four, and note that not one of them would have shaped Tony Blair's thinking fifteen years ago:

Mental ill-health and loneliness: I've been looking at some policy documents on mental health in the UK, and the figures on its reported rise are quite startling. Admittedly some stress might need to be on 'reported'. But in some respects, depression and anxiety are the supreme negative externalities of consumer-oriented capitalism, generating capitalism's latest contradiction - that we can drag ourselves outside to shop, but not to produce or co-operate with one another. Incidentally, recognising this is not in itself a call for more policies to promote, teach or maximise happiness.

Energy scarcity: We recognise that climate change will be the definining policy challenge of the next century. Maybe it will eventually lead us towards a more thoroughly planned economy. But in the medium term, energy prices will rise sharply and Britain will need to produce more energy from renewable (or else face even higher prices). Current financial structures or corporate structures weren't designed to make this happen. Energy poverty will get worse. Yet there are potential co-operative solutions, and no doubt plenty of as-yet-unthought-of ones. 

Zero growth: This isn't really a negative externality, although it is a collective action problem which markets won't solve. What if Britain has no growth for the next decade? What if Britain can't pursue its environmental goals at 3% growth a year? The knee-jerk Keynesianism of some on the left amazes me. Historical sensibility, and the possibility of not being in power for another decade, would require a broader view that did not cling to the policy tools and goals of the latter half of the twentieth century. Of course national accounts will continue into the future; but they will not be so prominent for ever. This is a major challenge for the centre left, that could cripple it.

Housing: Our present financial structures, and culture of ownership, strategically under-deliver housing. This is hugely socially divisive.

It's crucial not to view any of these as policy challenges that the state can simply solve, not even if it had all the money it needed, especially the first. But, strange as it may sound, seemingly intractable collective needs and problems may be more effective bases for political mobilisation and identity than technical faults that require an engineer to come and fix. Experts will play a role in advising on each of the above, but they cannot promise results. This too is beneficial for political mobilisation. I can identify with CND in its endlessly frustrated ambition to erradicate nuclear weapons; I can't identify with a government department, perhaps least of all the most effective ones.

Far be it from me to tell the Labour Party what it is about. Maybe none of the above four is relevant or concerning to the left. What I think the emphasis on "publicly expressed and measurable sociological developments that demand a collective response" can do is to break people out of the previous four traps, in which we swing wildly between moralistic slogans and technical intricacies. Max Weber argued that to have a vocation for politics was to have a "matter of fact devotion to a cause". Take out either the facts or the devotion to a cause, and you end up with something politically inert.