Thoughts on intellectual authoritarianism without philosophical reflection
Those who lean into Trump and Farage aren't the only offenders
Later on in this piece I bit my tongue for one of the most cringeworthy mea culpas I've ever issued. And it felt good to write it.
Cambridge philosopher Dan Williams sums up a problem in this Note. That being a naive view of political values and morality as self-evident to a certain class of 'enlightened' people - typically educated and very liberal in the social sense.
As Dan says there:
"if you believe the legitimacy of the state is fundamentally tied to political equality among democratic citizens, the spectacle of non-democratically-elected parts of the state (the judiciary, the civil service) playing a substantial role in shaping and constraining policy in accordance with their values will seem deeply wrong. If you don’t understand that this is how many populists see and evaluate things, their political choices will not make sense."
Dan's Note landed just as I was reflecting on the kind of intellectual authoritarianism often found in those who are academically or technocratically accomplished, but less philosophically reflective.
I have some intuitions about this, chief of which is that there is a religious quality in people treating 'The Science' and everything that underpins 'evidence-based policy' as a kind of surrogate moral authority.
Typically you will see more moral judgement and condemnation than philosophical intellectual curiosity from such actors, suggesting that their thinking brains are kind of bypassed when confronted with those who don't share their intuitions about the world. In this way they behave as if they belong to a religion which they have a mission - or duty, even - to defend and promote.
They're often otherwise clever and accomplished, but having deep procedural knowledge about the material world does not in itself represent intellectual sophistication. You might be the cleverest person in the room at controlling aircraft or designing them while still remaining a binary thinker outside your specialist domain.
In fact, these kind of people might sometimes be the least equipped for philosophically complex problem-solving, having originally chosen fields which reward certainty and mistrust ambiguity.
Of course we need such people. Without them we'd never get things done and we'd still be dying from preventable things. The pragmatic point is that it isn't obvious that they should always be running things. Because theirs seems often to be a thinking style, outside their wheelhouse, that is unyielding and brittle, somewhat akin to a religious fundamentalism.
These are the people who will tweet (or, more likely these days, skeet) about it being just 'the law' and 'human rights' when obviously undesirable people are given 'asylum'. They haven't read the legal philosopher
analysing the difference between law and its interpretation or application; the clear shaping of policy by a judiciary who are not at all neutral in their rulings.In this way they are often quite authoritarian, with 'The Law' joining 'The Science' as The Word on everything.
—
During Britain's Brexit referendum these kind of people were overrepresented on the Remain side, with which I firmly identified too. I remember thinking that it was surely obvious that Remain was the 'correct' vote because it was supported by much more academically, educationally and professionally accomplished people. It took me years to realise why people voted the way they did and respect their reasons as valid in a different way to my reasons for voting against leaving.
As an aside, if that referendum were run again it's no longer obvious to me which way to vote. I have new understanding of many aspects of the EU project and see it through multiple frames now. I have fewer feelings about it all.
But even now you often see people in the PMC (professional-managerial class) equating scepticism about the project of the European Union with 'anti-intellectualism'. As if it's simply not possible to be smart and not toe the PMC party line. And, of course, mistrust, unease and hostility toward heavy immigration is also cast as ignorant and xenophobic by those who either cannot or will not understand it.
Of course, lots of this insistence on deference to “the experts” functions as a social or tribal marker. And in many educated circles, scepticism is equated with anti-intellectualism. Only this week the theoretical physicist
Hossenfelder was disaffiliated with the LMU Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy for her scepticism around much work in her field - another example of the incentives to keep your head down. This problem is well documented in climate science where challenging predictive models has become risky because they are somehow sacrosanct, like religious artefacts.None of this would be happening in a healthy intellectual environment where humility was respected. A culture in which these amazing and important fields of knowledge-gaining endeavour were recognised as a human and always provisional, error-correcting enterprise. And which also sought to understand itself better, by recognising the obvious anxieties and incentives in play. But not only that. A wider appreciation of the philosophy of science and a more respectful recognition of other frames.
All of this seems to apply broadly to technocracy in general, with little recognition that what's believed and what should be done is a dichotomy subject to obvious human prejudices, biases, incentives and investment in identities.
But, as Hossenfelder was just reminded, scepticism is considered anti-intellectual, which is ironically itself a sign of low intellectual sophistication.
'Populists' like Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen are always dismissed as oversimplifying complex problems. Which they obviously do. And it's therefore convenient, so that their 'stupid' supporters can be denigrated. And yet those who do this oversimplify too, by failing to grasp complexity and then flattening issues from should we consider doing this to how can we do this? As if it's obvious that certain things will make the world better. A perennial example in the UK is the National Health Service and whether injecting more money will lead to better, faster treatment for more people.
That's a classic flattening proposition that assumes there is nothing else going on when the NHS consistently fails on many performance measures. I yearn for the announcement that the government is going to get someone in to analyse how the whole seems so different than the parts. How the inputs get chewed up by the dynamics that emerge in highly complex organisations that are not really anybody's fault because it's just how things end up.
Yet you'll constantly hear from those who take an interest in an NHS they love that it just needs more money or that the managers must be bad and should be replaced with better ones who'll finally make it work. But it's vanishingly rare to hear anyone say that maybe countless interdependencies between staff, processes, and culture in the NHS leads to weird and unavoidable emergent dynamics that more money and different managers will be ineffective at solving.
It isn't just the populists who oversimplify and lack the sophistication to recognise the complexity of things.
On the subject of immigration, at least in Britain, I have never heard an argument from my own class that says people might be wrong from an economic standpoint to want it reducing but that the subjective wellbeing of the citizenry is important enough to consider prioritising. Instead they're sneered at and lectured by people who are themselves prioritising their own subjective feelings on the matter and assuming that what they value is best for everyone.
There has been much mockery of the article written by British politician Daniel Hannan1 before the Brexit referendum. In it he painted a mawkish vision of a wonderful Britain ascending to its 'sunlit uplands' ten years after the vote. Today, a decade later, it's an easy target because it was such obvious bullshit. Read it yourself and lol.
But if all you can do is lol, you aren't really that smart. You haven't considered what he was saying. Some of his points are reasonable. Such as the suggestion that a polity only really flourishes when it has agency and its people trust that their institutions are acting in their interests. Or that supranational law dilutes the accountability of those in power, domestically, distancing their decisions from those who are most affected by them. And that political sovereignty is a good and that restoring democratic legitimacy regardless of immediate economic cost is a justifiable project.
This doesn't mean that I agree with Hannan now. I'm close to dispassionate about the old Brexit tribal positions. I see the merits in both. The shift that's occurred is a sense that simply sneering at certain philosophical principles is more a sign of ignorance than it is of progressively-oriented sophisticated enlightenment. (Even though I can't help sneering at elements of progressivism and 'Trust the Experts', mostly because the people there are so convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority).
There's no cool payoff here. No kind of rhetorical flourish I can muster. There are no answers, because of course there are no answers. It's just a series of observations on the post-ideological scepticism that I currently enjoy experiencing.
In case you missed it first time …
Quick thoughts on being a little less reactive
So Charlie Kirk was murdered and I was as perturbed as anyone by another apparent act of 'political' violence. As a growing sceptic of emotions too, I immediately began self-monitoring.
My Substack Notes feed featured little else but reactions to Kirk's murder. It was interesting that I was dying to add my thoughts. Agree with people or disagree with them, offer some kind of alternative perspective from that of the herd. On other platforms I saw various justificatory declamations that he had it coming for one reason or another. Those infuriated me. But still I held my counsel.
It was hard.
But I resisted those urges. The urge to be part of something. Bear witness to a tiny moment in history. To have the right take. To identify with the right people and slag off the wrong people.
When things like this happen and everyone feels the need to react, there seems to be a somewhat undignified aspect to it. I remembered this and refused to relent to my urges.
What was good about this was that the world didn't need to know what I thought. Which was mostly that I couldn't get the video clip out of my mind where his little girls run to greet him somewhere.
Also, I was following my own blithely expressed advice not to talk about things before you really know what happened.
Was it an increasingly violent leftishist culture? I've no idea. Was it part of a bigger picture in general? I'm not really seeing that. Was the man who did it a fucked up idiot, untethered from normal life? I'm guessing so. Yes, insofar as I have any kind of take, that's it.
I have nothing further to say, beyond that I'd rather things like that wouldn't happen. And that if you think that there's any kind of justice in putting a bullet into someone for the words that have come out of them, you should examine that closely. That's an even worse form of emotional reactivity than needing to say things as soon as something happened.
There, I said some things in the end. But at least I waited a bit.
Hannan was perhaps my personal favourite hate figure around that time. I took delight over several years in building something called a 'Twitter Moment' which captured my often-inspired mocking observations of him. I’m good at that kind of invective and so he, of course, blocked me which provided the satisfaction of knowing that I'd irritated him. It was years before I deleted that Moment, which had been shared many times, because dunking on people came to feel more like what it was than what I thought it was. Which was an expression of my own powerlessness and childlike belligerence. And, obviously, I ended up deleting Twitter entirely and never looked back.