Justifying Male Anger as a 'Defense' of 'Their' Women
The Washington Post put up this simple animated cartoon under the heading 'Men: Stop Telling Women What to Wear.' Pretty simple. Captures the anger of men, directed at other men, as if unrelated to the object that is women's bodies.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Comparing Apples and Oranges
You
probably do not want to read this blog post.
My gut tells me I am writing mostly for myself. So, walk away now and go pet your dog or hug
someone or take a nap.
Still
here? Okay, I have a long-standing
problem with the way many (most?) Americans think & talk about China.
Including my fellow political scientist below, Bruce Dickson. Just to be clear: I do not know Bruce and my
guess is I would like him very much if I were to meet him. I have not read his larger book and it is
entirely unfair to take him to task as I am about to do on the basis of an
op-ed.
This
op-ed demonstrates at least three common errors I have observed over the years
in my compatriots analysis of China.
First,
the analysis is based on an overly simplistic understanding of America, in this
case American democracy. Second, the analysis then pairs this up with an
equally plastic understanding of China, in this case Chinese views of democracy,
that (third) just so happens to then become the perfect foil against the high
school civics picture of American democracy. I tried to put comments in blue but the program refused to allow that in a couple of places, but all comments are also in [brackets].
Democracy in China? It's in the Eye of the Beholder.
By Bruce J. Dickson in LA
Times
China watchers in the West have been
fruitlessly searching for signs of democracy for more than 25 years. But there
has not been a sustained democracy movement in China since the tragic end of
protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in 1989. Most outside observers
agree that the People’s Republic remains what it has been since its founding in
1949: a one-party authoritarian regime.
[I am going to jump right in. I will likely seem petty and mean at first. Only
the injection of ‘sustained’ makes this paragraph accurate. At the same time, I find zero evidence of a ‘sustained
democracy movement' in America since 1989.
Polls repeatedly show that Americans hold our government in very low
regard and the most salient political movement in American today, Trumpism, is
more a rejection of democracy than a democratic movement.
If you are paying attention, you are likely
thinking this ‘depends on how we define democracy.’ Precisely, and as you see below, that is a
question I want to ask. Without making the mistake of asserting that my
definition is the only one, let me offer a definition from one of our greatest
political scientists of all time, EE Schattschneider: Democracy is a competitive political system in which
competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public policy in
such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process.
Keep this in mind as we proceed…not because it is correct, but because it
contrasts in useful ways with the definition offered here as obviously correct…and
once we see that there is wiggle room, the argument advanced here starts to look
like a paper tiger.
I
am sure an intrepid reader can find a public opinion poll showing that American
understandings of ‘democracy’ vary and often present a picture and set of
aspirations very different from the definition asserted here. In fact, that would be central to defining
democracy…that we get to define it, which is not captured by the platitudinous
definition here.
Further, if we go to Everyday
Democracy we can see that Americans regularly define democracy is ways closer to
Schattschneider and in tension with the author here.
What does democracy
mean to you? See more at Everyday
Democracy here.
“We can have a role in influencing decisions that affect us
on a regular basis – not just when we vote.
Democracy means to me......majority rules
Creating a culture where all voices are valued as an
instrument for change.
Democracy means being able to disagree.
Democracy means no forced vaccinations, no state schooling,
no taxes propping up banks & GE and no central banking aka "The Fed.
Not feeling like your vote doesn't matter, Because money is
more important than humanity.”
Democracy.....just
a word unless it is about people living and working together with respect and
equal rights and elected leaders who value and practice the same.”]
Most Chinese citizens do not see it that way, however.
[Full stop. Let’s
consider the possibility that the people here know their own minds and
interests. And if it conflict with the definition a scholar uses…maybe the definition
problematic.]
In a nationwide survey in 2014, more than 4,000 urban Chinese
were asked how democratic they perceived China to be at different points in
time. The vast majority view the level of democracy as increasing steadily
since the late 1970s. Almost 60% believe China is already somewhat or very
democratic today. Remarkably, more than 80% are optimistic that in the near
future China will enjoy a level of democracy on par with the United States.
How can this be? How can external assessments of China’s
government and the perceptions of people living under it be so radically
different?
[External assessment—at least those that agree with the author—are
wrong.]
The answer turns on the meaning of the word democracy.
[Yes it does, but we have covered that already.]
Survey respondents were given the opportunity to define
democracy in their own words. Most Americans would define it as a political
system with free elections, competitive parties, rule of law and related
institutions of liberal democracy.
[Frankly, I would like to see that data to defend this
assertion.]
But less than 5% of Chinese pointed to those attributes.
About 15% defined democracy in terms of rights: for example,
“people enjoy the right to information” and “the opportunity and right to tell
the government their views.” Another 15% identified equality and justice among
citizens: “Everyone is treated equally” and “to be more equal in terms of
income, housing, and employment” were typical responses of this type.
[Okay, this is a case of poor writing. In the sentence that follows my insert here
the author seems to be saying that the 30% above are the Chinese who see
democracy as we do, in terms of checks and balances. But the language used here
makes that similarity sound like a difference as we read it. First, most
Americans would also place ‘rights’ at the center of our definition of
democracy, as does the US Supreme Court.
Second, most Americans would put free speech and free press at the top
of the rights list…because these allow us to communicate our views to our
government. I don’t know about you, but for me ‘justice among citizens’ and ‘everyone
treated equally’ is at the core of what I mean by the ‘rule of law,’ which is
part of the American definition provided here and supposedly at odds with what
Chinese people think.]
In short, about one-third of urban Chinese defined democracy in
terms of checks and balances or other ways that closely match Western
notions.
By contrast, a different 30% of Chinese described democracy in
terms of how leaders should run the government, not how they are chosen.
Comments such as “the people and the government are interdependent” and
“government policies reflect public opinion” get at this notion. More
importantly, these comments suggest that the public’s interests and the state’s
interests are fundamentally in harmony (or at least should be).
[We regularly ask Americans and evaluate leaders on how well
they govern. This is not a ‘contrast’ to our definition, because we do not
define democracy only in terms of how leaders are elected. What America does
not believe that when ‘government policies reflect public opinion’ that is more
democratic, despite the fact that this opens the door to an understanding of
democracy that can easily become anti-democratic? Finally, ‘these comments’ DO
NOT suggest the interests are in harmony, but that they should be if we want to
call it democracy…and that is completely consistent with how Americans think
and talk about democracy.]
The purpose of democracy, as seen by many Chinese, is to make
the state strong so that it can better provide for the common well-being of the
people and the nation as a whole. It is not a way to hold leaders accountable
through elections, limit the state’s authority in order to protect individual
rights and freedoms, or adjudicate between competing interests.
[I am fit to be tied at this point. Watching Trump supporters
call for massive deportations and the constant call on the state to fight Wars
on Crime and Wars on Drugs and Wars against Terror or War on Poverty or War on
Ignorance and more all suggest that there is a very strong element of the
American public that craves a “state strong enough to provide for the common
well-being of the people” even if what that looks like can vary. And…in America (where we are allowed subtle
analysis such that we can want two things that can be seen as in tension) we
want this AND we want to hold our leaders accountable to delivering it. Why is it that Chinese people wanting this
makes them the opposite of democratic?
And do Americans only focus on accountability through elections
or do we know from experience that elections are just one event and that
accountability depends on using the courts and protests and working in
legislatures and more? Then the author here
refers to ‘rights consciousness’ as a point where the Chinese differ…even
though earlier the author himself has said that 30% of Chinese ‘agree’ with us
by focusing on rights.]
Despite lacking
political rights and freedoms that we take for granted here, many Chinese see
their country as becoming more open.
[Because it is becoming more open and openness is not only about
individual rights that we take for granted.]
But by far the most popular definition of democracy — given by a
third of the urban Chinese respondents — was “I don’t know”!
[Do I even need to say it? Ignorance
of politics is probably a defining characteristic of Amercians.]
These differing definitions of democracy correlated with how
satisfied people felt. Almost 65% reported they were satisfied or very
satisfied with the level of democracy China has. Those who defined it in terms
of elections, parties and rule of law were the least satisfied — and rightfully
so — whereas “by and for the people” and “don’t know” were at the high end of
the scale. The most satisfied were those who defined democracy in terms of
economic growth, but less than 3% did so.
[This is consistent with polling data in America showing Whites
see no racism while blacks see lots. And while most Americans see the American
economic system as unfair, wealthy Americans do not agree.
I have to ask: how is that any different?]
These popular understandings (or misunderstandings) of what
democracy is help explain why there has not been a sustained democratization
movement in China. People who are optimistic about the future are less inclined
to support calls to fundamentally change the regime.
[So, it is because the Chinese people misunderstand the
definition of democracy that they (in your view) lack a democracy movement? The
misunderstanding is as groundless as is the contention that there is no
movement.]
The activists who promote Western-style liberal democratic
reform face suppression from the state and indifference from much of society.
Liu Xiaobo, for instance, was arrested in 2008 for his role in drafting Charter
08, a bold call for building liberal democracy in China. When he won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2010, many in China were unfamiliar with him. Others doubted he
had achieved anything worthy of the prize.
[This just repeats the previous point that the Chinese are
uniquely ignorant about politics…which is untrue. Does the Chinese leadership use
less subtle tools to control dissent? Yes, but that is a very different point.]
Despite lacking political rights and freedoms that we take for
granted here, many Chinese see their country as becoming more open. Even as the
Communist Party continues to monitor and suppress any potential threats to its
monopoly on power, most citizens still see the state is less intrusive than in
the Maoist era or in the immediate post-Tiananmen years.
[The state IS less intrusive than during the Maoist era.]
Still, it’s hard to be sure that trend will continue.
Since Xi Jinping became president in 2013, the scope of
repression has increased. The party has tightened control over media content,
arrested human rights lawyers and warned scholars against discussing topics
such as universal values, civil rights, civil society, press freedoms and judicial
independence.
[Okay, this is more complicated. I grant that these are trends I
abhor and even with more space it would be difficult to argue there is as much
similarity here as above. But—there is similarity AND even though limited this
does not change the point that the author here is contrasting Chinese public
opinion with a platitude that does not exist in America.]
Xi’s ongoing anticorruption campaign has exposed the venal top
echelons of the party, government and military, which may erode support for the
regime. Growing economic inequality and social injustice may also lead people
to be less satisfied with the status quo.
[While not an ‘American’ approach…the anti-corruption campaign
targets elites and it us just as likely it will increase support for the regime
for that reason.]
But for the moment, besides the party itself, the major obstacle
to China’s democratization is the popular belief that the process is already
underway.
[I could not disagree more.]
Bruce J. Dickson is professor of political science and
international affairs and chair of the political science department at George
Washington University. This article is adapted from his recent book, “The
Dictator’s Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival.”
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Framing Enables and Constrains
Thinking
When we frame
‘intelligence’ as a ‘human computer’ or a gift from God, using a hydraulic or
steam punk metaphor…the choice we make makes it easier to think about thinking
in certain ways…and constrains our capacity to think beyond or outside or
without the categories that make up the metaphor.
It is
sometimes difficult to explain the importance of winning the argument over what
we should be arguing about (framing). This meta-conflict is usually
hidden-in-plain sight despite being the struggle where elites most powerfully
impact the outcome of a wide range of conflicts.
Epstein helps
us see this and more below, noting that the metaphor we use to frame
intelligence today (computing) ‘encumbers our thinking
with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around
them.’
The Empty Brain
Your
brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories.
In short: your brain is not a computer
In short: your brain is not a computer
Robert
Epstein in Aeon, 2016
No matter
how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find
a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures,
grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain
isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the
things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.
Our shoddy
thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of
computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century
now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human
behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.
To see how
vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human
neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world
prepared to interact with it effectively. A baby’s vision is blurry, but it
pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s.
It prefers the sound of voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one
basic speech sound from another. We are, without doubt, built to make social
connections.
A healthy
newborn is also equipped with more than a dozen reflexes – ready-made reactions
to certain stimuli that are important for its survival. It turns its head in
the direction of something that brushes its cheek and then sucks whatever
enters its mouth. It holds its breath when submerged in water. It grasps things
placed in its hands so strongly it can nearly support its own weight. Perhaps
most important, newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that
allow them to change rapidly so they can interact increasingly effectively
with their world, even if that world is unlike the one their distant ancestors
faced.
Senses,
reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite
a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth,
we would probably have trouble surviving.
But here is
what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software,
knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories,
images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers –
design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently.
Not only are we not born with such things, we also
don’t develop them – ever.
We
don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them.
We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them
in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation
into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or
images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but
organisms do not.
Computers,
quite literally, process information – numbers, letters, words,
formulas, images. The information first has to be encoded into a format
computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised
into small chunks (‘bytes’). On my computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a
certain pattern of those bits stands for the letter d, another for the
letter o, and another for the letter g. Side by side, those
three bytes form the word dog. One single image – say, the photograph of
my cat Henry on my desktop – is represented by a very specific pattern of a
million of these bytes (‘one megabyte’), surrounded by some special characters
that tell the computer to expect an image, not a word.
Computers,
quite literally, move these patterns from place to place in different physical
storage areas etched into electronic components. Sometimes they also copy the
patterns, and sometimes they transform them in various ways – say, when we are
correcting errors in a manuscript or when we are touching up a photograph. The
rules computers follow for moving, copying and operating on these arrays of
data are also stored inside the computer. Together, a set of rules is called a
‘program’ or an ‘algorithm’. A group of algorithms that work together to help
us do something (like buy stocks or find a date online) is called an
‘application’ – what most people now call an ‘app’.
Forgive me
for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do
operate on symbolic representations of the world. They
really store and retrieve. They really process. They really
have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without
exception, by algorithms.
Humans, on
the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so
many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?
Bottom of
Form
In his
book In Our Own Image (2015),
the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past
2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the
earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible,
humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused
with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our
intelligence – grammatically, at least.
The invention
of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a
hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different
fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental
functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more
than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s,
automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring
leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans
are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas
Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the
brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and
chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely
metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in
communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.
The
mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human
nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel
between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components
of the human brain.
Each
metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after
the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain
was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware
played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software. The landmark
event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the
publication of Language and
Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller
proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from
information theory, computation and linguistics.
This kind of
thinking was taken to its ultimate expression in the short book The Computer and the Brain (1958),
in which the mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of
the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’. Although he
acknowledged that little was actually known about the role the brain played in
human reasoning and memory, he drew parallel after parallel between the
components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human
brain.
Propelled by
subsequent advances in both computer technology and brain research, an
ambitious multidisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence gradually
developed, firmly rooted in the idea that humans are, like computers,
information processors. This effort now involves thousands of researchers,
consumes billions of dollars in funding, and has generated a vast literature
consisting of both technical and mainstream articles and books. Ray Kurzweil’s
book How to Create a Mind: The
Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2013), exemplifies this perspective,
speculating about the ‘algorithms’ of the brain, how the brain ‘processes
data’, and even how it superficially resembles integrated circuits in its
structure.
The
information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human
thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of
discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing
this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour
could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or
deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed
without question.
But the IP
metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense
of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that
preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by
another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.
Just over a
year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research
institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human
behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They
couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email
communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the
problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer
an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our
thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking
around them.
The faulty
logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty
syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable
premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable
premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty
conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are
information processors.
Setting aside
the formal language, the idea that humans must be information processors just
because computers are information processors is just plain silly, and
when, some day, the IP metaphor is finally abandoned, it will almost certainly
be seen that way by historians, just as we now view the hydraulic and
mechanical metaphors to be silly.
If the IP
metaphor is so silly, why is it so sticky? What is stopping us from brushing it
aside, just as we might brush aside a branch that was blocking our path? Is
there a way to understand human intelligence without leaning on a flimsy
intellectual crutch? And what price have we paid for leaning so heavily on this
particular crutch for so long? The IP metaphor, after all, has been guiding the
writing and thinking of a large number of researchers in multiple fields for
decades. At what cost?
In a
classroom exercise I have conducted many times over the years, I begin by
recruiting a student to draw a detailed picture of a dollar bill – ‘as detailed
as possible’, I say – on the blackboard in front of the room. When the student
has finished, I cover the drawing with a sheet of paper, remove a dollar bill
from my wallet, tape it to the board, and ask the student to repeat the task.
When he or she is done, I remove the cover from the first drawing, and the
class comments on the differences.
Because you
might never have seen a demonstration like this, or because you might have
trouble imagining the outcome, I have asked Jinny Hyun, one of the student
interns at the institute where I conduct my research, to make the two drawings.
Here is her drawing ‘from memory’ (notice the metaphor):
And here is
the drawing she subsequently made with a dollar bill present:
Jinny was as
surprised by the outcome as you probably are, but it is typical. As you can
see, the drawing made in the absence of the dollar bill is horrible compared
with the drawing made from an exemplar, even though Jinny has seen a dollar
bill thousands of times.
What is the
problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a
‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make
our drawing?
Obviously
not, and a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of
a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is
not there to be found.
The
idea that memories are stored in individual neurons is
preposterous: how and where is the memory stored in the cell?
A wealth of
brain studies tells us, in fact, that multiple and sometimes large
areas of the brain are often involved in even the most mundane memory
tasks. When strong emotions are involved, millions of neurons can become more
active. In a 2016 study of survivors of a plane crash by the
University of Toronto neuropsychologist Brian Levine and others, recalling the
crash increased neural activity in ‘the amygdala, medial temporal lobe,
anterior and posterior midline, and visual cortex’ of the passengers.
The idea,
advanced by several scientists, that specific memories are somehow stored
in individual neurons is preposterous; if anything, that assertion
just pushes the problem of memory to an even more challenging level: how and
where, after all, is the memory stored in the cell?
So what is
occurring when Jinny draws the dollar bill in its absence? If Jinny
had never seen a dollar bill before, her first drawing would probably
have not resembled the second drawing at all. Having seen dollar bills before,
she was changed in some way. Specifically, her brain was changed in a way
that allowed her to visualise a dollar bill – that is,
to re-experience seeing a dollar bill, at least to some extent.
The
difference between the two diagrams reminds us that visualising something (that
is, seeing something in its absence) is far less accurate than seeing something
in its presence. This is why we’re much better at recognising than recalling.
When we re-member something (from the Latin re, ‘again’,
and memorari, 'be mindful of’), we have to try to relive an experience;
but when we recognise something, we must merely be conscious of the fact that
we have had this perceptual experience before.
Perhaps you
will object to this demonstration. Jinny had seen dollar bills before, but she
hadn’t made a deliberate effort to ‘memorise’ the details. Had she done so, you
might argue, she could presumably have drawn the second image without the bill
being present. Even in this case, though, no image of the dollar bill has
in any sense been ‘stored’ in Jinny’s brain. She has simply become better
prepared to draw it accurately, just as, through practice, a pianist becomes
more skilled in playing a concerto without somehow inhaling a copy of the sheet
music.
From this
simple exercise, we can begin to build the framework of a metaphor-free theory
of intelligent human behaviour – one in which the brain isn’t
completely empty, but is at least empty of the baggage of the IP metaphor.
As we
navigate through the world, we are changed by a variety of experiences. Of
special note are experiences of three types: (1) we observe what is
happening around us (other people behaving, sounds of music, instructions
directed at us, words on pages, images on screens); (2) we are exposed to
the pairing of unimportant stimuli (such as sirens) with important
stimuli (such as the appearance of police cars); (3) we are punished or
rewarded for behaving in certain ways.
We become
more effective in our lives if we change in ways that are consistent with these
experiences – if we can now recite a poem or sing a song, if we are able to
follow the instructions we are given, if we respond to the unimportant stimuli
more like we do to the important stimuli, if we refrain from behaving in ways
that were punished, if we behave more frequently in ways that were rewarded.
Misleading
headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain
changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the
song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has
simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song
or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither
the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain,
any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my
desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.
A few years
ago, I asked the neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia
University – winner of a Nobel Prize for identifying some of the chemical
changes that take place in the neuronal synapses of the Aplysia (a
marine snail) after it learns something – how long he thought it would take us
to understand how human memory works. He quickly replied: ‘A hundred years.’ I
didn’t think to ask him whether he thought the IP metaphor was slowing down neuroscience,
but some neuroscientists are indeed beginning to think the unthinkable – that
the metaphor is not indispensable.
A few
cognitive scientists – notably Anthony Chemero of the University of Cincinnati,
the author of Radical Embodied
Cognitive Science (2009) – now completely reject the view that the
human brain works like a computer. The mainstream view is that we, like
computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental
representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of
understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between
organisms and their world.
My favourite
example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now
call the ‘anti-representational’ view of human functioning involves two
different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball
– beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University,
and his colleagues in a 1995 paper in Science. The IP perspective requires the
player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s
flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of
thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which
the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor
movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball.
That is all
well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his
colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs
to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship
with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a
‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually
incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and
algorithms.
We will never
have to worry about a human mind going amok in cyberspace, and we will never
achieve immortality through downloading.
Two
determined psychology professors at Leeds Beckett University in the UK – Andrew
Wilson and Sabrina Golonka – include the baseball example among many others
that can be looked at simply and sensibly outside the IP framework. They have
been blogging for years about what they call a ‘more
coherent, naturalised approach to the scientific study of human behaviour… at
odds with the dominant cognitive neuroscience approach’. This is far from a
movement, however; the mainstream cognitive sciences continue to wallow
uncritically in the IP metaphor, and some of the world’s most influential
thinkers have made grand predictions about humanity’s future that depend on the
validity of the metaphor.
One
prediction – made by the futurist Kurzweil, the physicist Stephen Hawking and
the neuroscientist Randal Koene, among others – is that, because human
consciousness is supposedly like computer software, it will soon be possible to
download human minds to a computer, in the circuits of which we will become
immensely powerful intellectually and, quite possibly, immortal. This concept drove
the plot of the dystopian movie Transcendence
(2014) starring Johnny Depp as the Kurzweil-like scientist whose mind was
downloaded to the internet – with disastrous results for humanity.
Fortunately,
because the IP metaphor is not even slightly valid, we will never have to worry
about a human mind going amok in cyberspace; alas, we will also never achieve
immortality through downloading. This is not only because of the absence of
consciousness software in the brain; there is a deeper problem here – let’s
call it the uniqueness problem – which is both inspirational and
depressing.
Because neither
‘memory banks’ nor ‘representations’ of stimuli exist in the brain, and because
all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change
in an orderly way as a result of our experiences, there is no reason to believe
that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience. If you and
I attend the same concert, the changes that occur in my brain when I listen to
Beethoven’s 5th will almost certainly be completely different from the changes
that occur in your brain. Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the
unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed
over a lifetime of unique experiences.
This is why,
as Sir Frederic Bartlett demonstrated in his book Remembering (1932), no two people will repeat a story they have
heard the same way and why, over time, their recitations of the story will
diverge more and more. No ‘copy’ of the story is ever made; rather, each
individual, upon hearing the story, changes to some extent – enough so that when
asked about the story later (in some cases, days, months or even years after
Bartlett first read them the story) – they can re-experience hearing
the story to some extent, although not very well (see the first drawing of the
dollar bill, above).
This is
inspirational, I suppose, because it means that each of us is truly unique, not
just in our genetic makeup, but even in the way our brains change over time. It
is also depressing, because it makes the task of the neuroscientist daunting
almost beyond imagination. For any given experience, orderly change could
involve a thousand neurons, a million neurons or even the entire brain, with
the pattern of change different in every brain.
Worse still,
even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion
neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a
computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the
brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP
metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers
do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long
periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains
our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch.
Either the brain keeps functioning, or we disappear. What’s more, as the
neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s
current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life
history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social
context in which he or she was raised.
Think how
difficult this problem is. To understand even the basics of how the brain
maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state
of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the
varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of
more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the
moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity
of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part
because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s
prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. (In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, the
neuroscientist Kenneth Miller suggested it will take ‘centuries’ just to figure
out basic neuronal connectivity.)
Meanwhile,
vast sums of money are being raised for brain research, based in some cases on
faulty ideas and promises that cannot be kept. The most blatant instance of
neuroscience gone awry, documented recently in a report in Scientific American, concerns the $1.3
billion Human Brain Project launched by the European Union in 2013. Convinced
by the charismatic Henry Markram that he could create a simulation of the
entire human brain on a supercomputer by the year 2023, and that such a model
would revolutionise the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders,
EU officials funded his project with virtually no restrictions. Less than two
years into it, the project turned into a ‘brain wreck’, and Markram was asked
to step down.
We are
organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business
of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary
intellectual baggage. The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing
few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key.
Robert
Epstein is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for
Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He is the author of 15 books,
and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology
Today.
You can find
this article here.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Monday, August 15, 2016
'It's Just Politics' Seems to Obscure More Than It Reveals
When I see a talking head or fellow citizen throw up their hands or roll their eyes while concluding that something is 'just politics' or the actors are 'politicizing' something that speaker is implicitly arguing should not be politicized...this is one of those rare times I feel driven to examine what we mean by a commonly shared term...in this case, the word 'politics.'
So, when I ran into this lecture I read it with great interest. Flinders does not make the argument I initially expected or the one I imagine myself making were I to sit down and try...but his lecture is worth thinking about, which is why I provide it in full here. I have made a few comments, mostly to myself, in [brackets] and highlighted some portions of his text in blue, because that is what I do.
I want to sing out in praise of politics! This seemed such a good idea twelve months ago but in front of five hundred people—friends, family, colleagues—and in the wake of even more stories about MPs not declaring foreign trips and former ministers demanding ‘cash for access’ the idea of trying to defend politicians and praise politics suddenly seems like a very bad idea. 1.
This lecture has attempted to restore a degree of confidence in the virtues of politics as a great and civilizing human activity. In this endeavor I have tried to swim against the tide of popular opinion and I hope you feel I have at least been able to tread water, and have not drowned in my attempt to adopt what some might view as a brave, courageous or foolhardy position. But as Crick said, ‘Free men stick their necks out’.21 I hope I have at least provided food for thought that may nourish a more positive and constructive approach to political matters. I have tried to show that politics matters because on the whole it delivers far more than most people recognize, and the alternatives are far worse.
When I see a talking head or fellow citizen throw up their hands or roll their eyes while concluding that something is 'just politics' or the actors are 'politicizing' something that speaker is implicitly arguing should not be politicized...this is one of those rare times I feel driven to examine what we mean by a commonly shared term...in this case, the word 'politics.'
So, when I ran into this lecture I read it with great interest. Flinders does not make the argument I initially expected or the one I imagine myself making were I to sit down and try...but his lecture is worth thinking about, which is why I provide it in full here. I have made a few comments, mostly to myself, in [brackets] and highlighted some portions of his text in blue, because that is what I do.
In Defense of Politics
MATTHEW FLINDERS
MATTHEW FLINDERS
Politics Professor from Sheffield University, 2011
I want to sing out in praise of politics! This seemed such a good idea twelve months ago but in front of five hundred people—friends, family, colleagues—and in the wake of even more stories about MPs not declaring foreign trips and former ministers demanding ‘cash for access’ the idea of trying to defend politicians and praise politics suddenly seems like a very bad idea. 1.
And yet it
is exactly because politics is held in such low esteem that this lecture is so
important. Democratic politics matters because it achieves far more than we
generally give it credit for. The first person I told about the title of my
inaugural lecture happened to be based on the other side of the world in
Australia. He emailed me back very quickly to inform me ‘Someone’s already
beaten you to that one, by about half a century—Crick— bad luck!’
For those
of you who might also be a little worried that my title and topic is not as
original as I may think I want to set your mind at ease—I am well aware of
Bernard Crick’s classic little book In
Defense of Politics and I want to return to it for the simple reason that
its arguments are more appropriate today than they were when it was first published
in 1962. Moreover, as he was the first Professor of Politics at the University
of Sheffield, a post he held between 1965 and 1971, working within the contours
of Crick’s work provides a direct relationship with the heritage and history of
the department that has been my intellectual home throughout my career.
We live in strange and troubled times. Public opinion surveys
suggest that large sections of the public are more distrustful, disengaged,
skeptical and disillusioned with politics than ever before. ‘Politics’, for the
many rather than just a few, has become a dirty word conjuring up notions of
sleaze, corruption, greed and inefficiency. On the eve of a General Election it
is impossible to deny the conclusion that although a central aim of New Labour
was to rebuild public trust and confidence in politics it has failed.
- ninety per cent of the public distrust politicians;
- seventy-five per cent believe politics is broken in Britain and is in need of significant and urgent reform;
- over seventy-five per cent of the public believe most MPs make significant amounts of money by using public office improperly; and
- sixty-five per cent of the public believe that MPs put their own interests before their party, constituents or country.
Let me be the person who dares to put his head above the parapet
and speak in defense of politics. Let me stand up and argue against the current
anti-political sentiment and state in no uncertain terms that the vast majority
of politicians are overworked and underpaid, that public servants generally do
a fantastic job in the face of huge pressures, and that, most broadly, politics
delivers far more than most people acknowledge or understand.
Democratic politics can and does affect and shape people’s
lives. It saves lives. It
forges a sense of collective endeavor, social support and a sense of humility. We must not allow our political system to become synonymous with failure because public apathy and distrust places a mighty weight on those who have stepped forward on behalf of society in order to attempt to deal with the wave after wave of crises (social, economic, environmental, etc.) that crash upon the shore of politics with ever increasing frequency.
forges a sense of collective endeavor, social support and a sense of humility. We must not allow our political system to become synonymous with failure because public apathy and distrust places a mighty weight on those who have stepped forward on behalf of society in order to attempt to deal with the wave after wave of crises (social, economic, environmental, etc.) that crash upon the shore of politics with ever increasing frequency.
Let me be even bolder. In the United Kingdom a cost-benefit
analysis of the Telegraph’s exposure of the MPs’ expenses system in 2009 would
probably reveal a negative balance sheet. The sensational drip-drip-drip
approach to covering the issue was the political equivalent of napalm or
carpet-bombing and appears to have left all politicians as weak and cowering
aspects of a rather dejected political landscape.
In the United States the great expectations that propelled Obama
into office, the promises of change and new beginnings, now weigh heavily upon
not only the president as an individual, but also on the political system more
widely. As such, it is important to realize the argument I seek to make—my
defense of politics—has merit far beyond our shores.
I am not arguing that democratic politics, as we know it, is
perfect. Politicians frequently promise too much and deliver too little. Some
politicians have abused their positions for personal gain. But I will not let
the behavior of a few destroy the achievements of the many (most politicians
and public servants are just; only a few are just awful).
Although imperfect, we can do much worse than honor ‘mere
politics’. Indeed we must examine very carefully the claims of those who would
do better or who would apparently
turn their backs on politics completely. We must also challenge those who bemoan politics but in the next breadth demand that the institutions of the state do more and more. Politics can and does make a positive difference to peoples’ lives. It delivers far more than most ‘critical citizens’ in the USA, the UK and other ‘disaffected democracies’ realize. Politics can and does make a positive difference to people’s lives.
turn their backs on politics completely. We must also challenge those who bemoan politics but in the next breadth demand that the institutions of the state do more and more. Politics can and does make a positive difference to peoples’ lives. It delivers far more than most ‘critical citizens’ in the USA, the UK and other ‘disaffected democracies’ realize. Politics can and does make a positive difference to people’s lives.
The brave (or the foolish) individuals who dare to challenge
public opinion frequently find themselves ploughing a rather lonely furrow, but
speaking in praise of politics I will actually be following a line of argument
that has already been made in recent years, in slightly different ways and from
varying perspectives, by a number of my friends and colleagues—notably Andrew
Gamble, Gerry Stoker, Tony Wright, and most recently Peter Riddell—but I want
to make the furrow slightly wider and deeper; I want to stick my neck out even
further and suggest that the public have become politically decadent in their
expectations about what politics should deliver, how politicians should behave
and their own responsibilities within society.
[Reasonable, but is this not a reflection of decades of public miseducation
by the far right railing against the possibility of good government and
exaggerating both the possibility and desirability of running everything like a
business? Is there no place for an
analysis of power here?]
I want to suggest that people ‘hate politics’ because they
simply do not understand it; and they are generally not helped to understand it
by the media (or university professors of politics for that matter).
There may also be a demographic factor at play: this
contemporary climate of anti-politics is arguably rooted in a generation that has
become complacent and parochial, and in doing so has forgotten the alternatives
to democratic politics.
Those individuals who remember the two world wars that stained
the first half of the twentieth century might well possess a far more urgent
and personal understanding of why politics matters and why it is sometimes
necessary to speak up in its defense. The experience of living through or
losing loved ones forged a great collective belief in both
democratic politics and the capacity of the state. It also taught many people never to take things for granted.
democratic politics and the capacity of the state. It also taught many people never to take things for granted.
My concern is that, despite the pain and suffering of two world
wars, we seem to have forgotten this basic piece of information and in its
place have created little more than a political marketplace in which there are
very few incentives for politicians to actually tell the truth, and too many
people who take politics and what it delivers for granted.
Politics succeeds because it generally ensures stability and
order: it avoids anarchy or arbitrary rule. Those who argue that democratic
politics is broken would do well to read Tim Butcher’s Blood River, an account of his recent journey across Africa and the
raw violence, manipulation, poverty and extortion he encountered. My
involvement with international research projects and more recently my work for
the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in South-East Asia has underlined the fact
that by international standards politicians and public servants in the UK are among the most honest
in the world. I’m not saying that the MPs’ expenses scandal and more recent
controversies surrounding foreign trips and the behavior of former ministers is
irrelevant but I do think it is important to put things in perspective.
As part of this fightback against the anti-political climate,
however, politicians urgently need to rediscover the moral nerve and capacity
to speak with the authority and weight of their predecessors. At the heart of
this rediscovery must be the acceptance that the ‘the first business of
government is to govern’, as Churchill put it, ‘which may at times call for the
deliberate endurance of unpopularity’.
And yet it is this paradox, let us call it ‘the governing paradox’—the need for politicians
to garner and sustain popular support versus the more basic need for
politicians to sometimes deny the public, reject demands or make unpopular
decisions—that I want to put at the heart of this lecture.
It could be argued that this governing paradox is not as extreme
as one might think: the public are not stupid. They understand that in the wake
of the global financial crisis (the ‘GFC’ as it is increasingly known) the
economic situation is not positive and that around the world significant cuts
within the public sector will have to be made; just as they are aware that responding
to climate change is likely to require significant lifestyle changes. And yet
the public can also be a selfish master to serve. My concern is that the
contemporary negativity, the expectations that we hold, the very big gap
that has emerged between the governors and the governed, has made us lose our
sense of what might be.
Just as Crick’s original In
Defense of Politics was written ‘in one deep breath at a particular time’,
so was this lecture. It was conceived and for the most part written during a
ten and a half hour train journey from Exeter to Sheffield on 18 December 2009.
Since then I have sought to finesse and develop my arguments, but my ambition
has not been to write a sequel to Crick’s classic text but instead to pen a
complementary text that projects and amplifies his argument into the
twenty-first century. This is because his simple quest to restore
confidence in politics and pierce the skin of the anti-political climate
remains more important today than it did almost half a century ago.
However, if imitation is the highest form of praise then I am
happy to admit that I have sought to imitate Crick’s seminal book in terms of
structure and style. Sequels, as film lovers will generally attest, are rarely
as good as the original and in this sense I anticipate that many people will criticize
me for attempting to build so directly upon Crick’s work—I can already hear the
quills being sharpened—let alone daring to speak in praise of politics and in
defense of politicians! But that is exactly what I intend to do by adapting the
structure of Crick’s In Defense of
Politics, in order to structure this lecture.
It is
beyond the scope of this lecture to discuss each of these themes in any detail.
My
intention is to give you only a flavor of my argument by focusing on the changing
nature of political rule and what I call the politics of public expectations as the common chord linking each of these sections together. So let me begin by reflecting on
intention is to give you only a flavor of my argument by focusing on the changing
nature of political rule and what I call the politics of public expectations as the common chord linking each of these sections together. So let me begin by reflecting on
1.The nature of political rule in the twenty-first century.
Let me begin by exploring how the nature of political rule and
the challenges of governing have altered since the middle of the twentieth
century. In doing so I want to very briefly highlight ten issues. The first and
most basic change in the nature of political rule concerns levels of public
trust (1) and confidence in politics.
Public commitment to the concept of ‘democracy’ remains high;
whereas faith in the day-to-day operation of politics has fallen further. It is
true to say that politicians have never been popular people and their motives
have always been questioned, and to some degree a suspicious and wary public
reflects a healthy and connected citizenry. The paradox of our current
situation is that despite the fact that democracy has flourished in large parts
of the world in recent decades (Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and large parts
of South America) the extent of public apathy, anger and frustration with the
operation of democratic politics seems to have gone far beyond what is healthy.
As we shall see later, this negativity has created an
anti-political climate (2) or context that appears to have sapped the moral
integrity of politicians. Functions, responsibilities and decisions are
increasingly transferred away from elected politicians to a range of
scientists, technocrats, judges or ethicists on the basis that professionalizing
or ‘depoliticizing’ decision-making will somehow produce ‘better’ decisions.
And yet this narrowing or infolding of politics possesses a certain ‘out of the
frying pan and into the fire’ unease for those who want to revitalize
democratic politics.
Other changes, moving on more quickly, that have affected the
nature of politics in recent decades include: the development of new forms of
information communication technology (3) like the internet, twitter, blogs,
etc.; changing patterns of ownership, distribution and editorial policy within
the media (4); scientific advances (5) concerning—amongst other things—stem
cell technology, human embryology, cloning and xenotransplantation that place
new opportunities, decisions and regulatory demands on the political agenda; at the same time the topography of politics,
the institutional landscape (6) through which politics functions has become
increasingly complex and interdependent at a time when the challenges facing politicians and
policy-makers are more grave and pressing than ever before.
More broadly, standards of conduct and behavior are now exposed
to the light of public and media scrutiny by the emphasis on transparency (7)
and also through the growth of a regulatory industry of complaints processes,
sleaze busters and political watchdogs.
At the same time, public expectations (8) of politics, in terms
of the behavior of politicians and the standard of services delivered by the
state, are increasing at a period in which not only the resources to satisfy
these demands (public support, financial capacity, etc.) appear in short
supply, but the challenges faced by politicians have also become more intricate
and thorny (security issues, resource depletion, global warming, etc.).
By emphasizing the shift towards transparency, the creation of
numerous investigatory bodies and increasing public expectations I am not in
any way seeking to defend politicians or officials who abuse power, tell lies,
or engage in corrupt (or morally dubious) practices, but I am trying to put
things in perspective. Attacking ‘politics’ in general, and ‘politicians’ in
particular, is becoming something of a national blood-sport in many countries.
Very few politicians or public servants abuse power, tell lies,
or engage in corrupt practices—at least not in those countries that seem to
have lost most faith in politics—but by treating them as if they do we risk
destroying ‘a great and civilizing human activity’, as Crick argued ‘something
to be valued almost as a pearl beyond price in the history of the human
condition’.
This brings me on to a further and particularly significant change
in the nature of politics—the role and influence of ideology (9). Simply
stated, fifty years ago politicians might also have lacked resources but they
did at least arguably have a clearer and more stable ideological foundation.
The politics of the left or the right provided a form of moral compass or
anchorage through which politicians could rationalize their responses to social
challenges and offer a relatively coherent governing narrative. I am not for
one minute arguing, like some, that we exist in a ‘post-ideological’ historical
phase but I am suggesting that politicians appear to have lost their political
safety-blankets, by which I mean recourse to a fairly clear and coherent
ideological position, be it liberalism, socialism or any other variant that
provided a sense of direction.
I might be wrong. It could be argued that the ideological
foundations of mainstream politics have not waned but have, in fact, narrowed
as political parties have clustered increasingly around a rather restricted
acceptance of a market economy in which the legitimate and appropriate role of the
state vis-a`-vis the market has been, at least until last year’s global
economic crisis, relatively uncontested. At the very least it would appear that
as the ideological battleground has narrowed so politicians and the media have
been forced to construct even more artificial boundaries.
Finally, one of the less discerned changes to the nature of
politics since Crick’s In Defense of
Politics was published relates to the academic profession (10) itself.
We—and I mean we—are in danger of becoming strangely depoliticized ourselves.
As a discipline the study of politics has been somewhat sanitized by the
managerialist direction of higher education policy.
The pressure to ‘publish or perish’ within an increasingly
contract-based environment, to produce evidence-based research and demonstrate
‘impact’ while also teaching and supporting increasingly demanding – and
rightly so – students – seems to have sapped the moral vigor of academics and
narrowed the profession.
This is a point that I hope to return to elsewhere and it is
sufficient for me to note here that for me one of the benefits of becoming a
professor is a greater degree of personal and professional security which
brings with it the confidence to stand up, stand back and view your field of
study as a whole. As such, tonight I want to fly a few kites and make some very
bold statements in order to challenge established stereotypes. I want to argue in favor
of a paradigm shift in the way we view and understand politics because there is a
pressing need to be a little brave—to risk inevitable misunderstanding and
deliberate criticism—in order to defend politics from those who seek to narrow
and subvert the political realm and against those who have become politically
decadent.
Decadent because they can no longer appreciate the great
benefits that being a member of a democratic community delivers. Decadent
because they carp from the sidelines but refuse to step forward and make a
positive contribution themselves. Let me simply say that democratic politics
matters more than most people understand and acknowledge. Politics matters more
than ever. It matters because on the whole it delivers.
This lecture—as by now I am sure you realize—attempts to restore
confidence in the virtues of political activity and through this contribute to
reconnecting the governors with the governed. It is not a systematic or
evidence-based treatise. But it is an attempt to respond to contemporary
political disenchantment by (in turn) defending politics against itself,
against the market, against depoliticization, against the media, and lastly
(but certainly not least) against crises.
As such it seeks to recast Crick’s argument within the contours
of contemporary debates and themes by remaining true to the intellectual thrust
and style of In Defense of Politics
while at the same time forging a distinct line of argument regarding the limits
of politics and the need to reflect on the emergence of an expectations gap
between what is promised by politicians, expected by the public and what can
realistically be delivered by the state.
This is
clearly a wide-ranging lecture and, like painting on a large canvas, this will
require the use of a fairly broad brush, in analytical and empirical terms.
However, I hope that by emphasizing some of the achievements of politics and
daring to swim against the tide of popular opinion I might provoke some
reflection on whether political institutions, political processes and
politicians really deserve to be the focus of such extreme public ridicule and
derision.
Having
examined the nature of governing in the twenty-first century let me build upon
these challenges by offering my first defense, and what may at first appear quite
an odd point of departure.
2.
A defense of politics against itself.
There are some who will tell us that the twentieth century was
the democratic century as huge numbers of previously authoritarian regimes
around the world transformed into various manifestations of what would usually
be accepted as ‘liberal democracy’. Indeed, such was the gusto behind such a
sense of democratic triumph that some even spoke of the ‘end of history’.
There are some who would argue that democracy is the true form
of politics—a form of societal organization and behavior that is innately
superior to other forms of political regime. The simple argument I am making
here is that in the absence of any broad public understanding of the simple
aims (and costs) of democracy in modern politics will inevitably contain the
seeds of its own ruin because at the root of democratic politics lies a
preference for collective goods over individual desire.
The warning being—as Crick originally set out—that democracy,
taken alone and without any true and honest understanding of its core emphasis,
represents little more than the destruction of politics.
Without this social acceptance of the need for restraint an
‘expectations gap’ can emerge between what politics promises and what it
delivers that continually fuels public cynicism, distrust and disengagement.
What then would a true and honest understanding of politics look
like and how would it help in closing the gap that has apparently grown so wide
between the governors and the governed?
For me, and those other brave souls who have dared attempt to
defend politics, a more accurate and straightforward understanding of politics
would be built upon three pillars. Firstly, any evaluation of democratic politics must reject idealized
notions of ‘the Republic’ or ‘the people’ and instead reject the naive view that it is possible for anyone
to identify and protect the ‘public interest’, when the reality is that
societies increasingly consist of a heterogeneous mix of social groups with
radically different demands. The role of a politician is therefore invidious
and messy as they are frequently forced to rob Peter to pay Paul, and must
decide which particular constituencies to represent, protect or assail at any
given time. ‘The real problem with politics’, Stoker therefore argues, ‘even in
democracies, is that it is inevitably destined to disappoint because it is
about the tough process of squeezing collective decisions out of multiple and
competing interests and opinions.’6
This is the beauty of politics—not its failure. Democratic politics (secondly)
rejoices in the existence of difference and the smooth assimilation of
different social groups and competing demands without resorting to
authoritarian modes of control. What gives politics its beauty then as a form of social organization
is that it is not solely concerned with the fulfilment of societal demands but
is equally tasked with the rejection of specific demands, possibly on the basis
of resource limits, impracticability, fairness, a desire to protect the
interests of less literate social groups, or even to protect the life chance of
future generations from the detrimental behavior of the current cohort. For
Crick, ‘politics’ was ‘often settling for less than what we want, because we
often want to live without violence or perpetual fear of violence from other
people who want other things’.7
The fact that politics often produces messy compromises; that
suboptimal decisions are made and bureaucratic processes appear slow and
cumbersome; and that politics inevitably disappoints some sections of the
community is simply the price we pay for seeking to govern through consensus.
Finally, gauging politics against the realities of governing
rather than some idealized system of rule underlines the simple fact that
politicians must be able to make decisions. Governing capacity is therefore a
requirement of any political system. My point is that we cannot bind the hands
of politicians by placing more and more limits on their governing capacity, or
by subjecting their every decision to forensic analysis, and then attack them
for failing to govern with conviction or take decisive action.
These three pillars coalesce around the theme of public
expectations and it is exactly this issue that I want to promote as the central
strand of my lecture. I want to suggest that a number of factors may have
combined to raise the public’s expectations of politics to a point against
which it will always fail. Moreover, the incentives and sanctions structure
associated with conventional forms of democratic engagement arguably encourage
politicians to promise standards of behavior, levels of public services and institutional
relationships that are unrealistic and unattainable; but having inflated public
expectations, the subsequent performance of those politicians undermines public
confidence, thereby fueling disenchantment and apathy. This focus on the
creation, management and potential pathologies of public expectations therefore
provides a way of understanding and teasing apart a central driver of the trend
towards political disenchantment.
Crick implicitly highlighted what I would term the ‘expectations
gap’ when he noted a tendency for politics to ‘lead to false expectation. It
may lead people to expect too much—and the disillusionment of unreal ideals is
an occupational hazard of free politics.’8 If ‘saving politics from itself ’ is
tied to the management of public expectations then it is necessary to reflect
on the evidence and implications of this argument before considering its
relationship with the other parts of this lecture.
The notion
of an ‘expectations gap’ is not purely academic. It was first coined by David
Miliband when he was director of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit (1997– 2001)
and referred to the difference between the politicians’ promises and the
public’s expectations of what politics and the state could and should deliver,
on the one hand, and what politics and the state could realistically deliver
given the resources it was provided with, on the other. The important aspect of
Miliband’s approach to this dilemma stemmed from his acceptance that although
the government’s public service modernization agenda could marginally increase
performance, it was never going to close the gap. The most important role for
ministers, Miliband argued, was not driving forward reform but suppressing (or
at least not inflating) public expectations. This focus on an ‘expectations
gap’ suggests that politicians have three main options—Option 1: increasing
supply (moving the bottom bar up); Option 2: reducing demand (moving the top
bar down); or, Option 3: a combination of Options 1 and 2 (closing the gap from
above and below). Framed in this manner, the rather difficult position of
politicians becomes slightly clearer; increasing supply, in terms of financial resources, is not an
option in the wake of the global economic crisis, and reducing demand is easier
said than done in the context of electoral competition.
Pushing
the issue of public expectations a little further allows us to think of it as a
form of linkage and as such that it can be divided into at least two distinct
forms: there are public expectations about political behavior; and political
expectations about public behavior. The need to secure and maintain public
support arguably makes it difficult for politicians to impose their views on
the responsibilities of the public vis-a`-vis public services. Indeed,
politicians and public servants who have spoken in favor of placing greater
emphasis on the duties and responsibilities of members of the public to society
as a whole—like showing evidence of adopting a healthier lifestyle prior to
medical treatment, ensuring children have a good night’s sleep (and an
appropriate breakfast) before school, or introducing incentives for recycling—
risk upsetting those on whose votes they depend. Reducing (or at the very least
recalibrating) the public’s expectations or promoting significant behavioral change
is therefore harder than most people understand. As such, the main statecraft strategy used in
many countries in an attempt to ‘close the gap’ has in recent years focused
upon increasing supply through the absorption of market principles within the
public and political sphere, a point that leads me to the third part of my
lecture.
3
A defense of politics against the market
Politics would not be interpreted as failing so frequently and
people would not ‘hate’ it as much as they do if it was judged against a more
realistic set of expectations.
That is essentially the argument I am trying to make, and in
this section I want argue that the incursion of market-based values,
relationships and institutions within the public sphere has played a role in
damaging public confidence in politics by failing to recognize the basic
essence of democratic politics, in general, and promoting unrealistic public
expectations about what the state can and should provide, in particular.
In giving the 2009 Reith Lectures Professor Michael Sandel made
the argument that politicians and other influential social actors had
mistakenly accepted and perpetuated a belief that the institutions of the
public sector should be structured and managed to emulate a well-functioning
competitive market. I too have argued that the public sector ought not to be
automatically modelled on the private sector, but to criticize the gradual
capture of the public sphere by the market is hardly original.
Graham Allison wrote his seminal article over a quarter of a
century ago on the innate differences between the public and private sectors in
terms of values, assumptions and ambitions.9 More recently, David Marquand—my
erstwhile PhD supervisor before he departed for Oxford—has developed these
themes in his The Decline of the Public
(2004). However, in the context of the GFC these debates concerning the
relationship between public and private modes of governing have assumed greater
significance.
Once-secure assumptions have been stress-tested—not to
destruction but in a way that poses new questions about long-standing
weaknesses and fault-lines. The Spectre at the Feast,
to use the title of Andrew Gamble’s book on the topic, has always been the risk
of crisis but I want to turn things around and suggest that those who dare to
speak in praise of politics should never waste a good crisis.10
The GFC has created an arena of political debate in which ideas
regarding the respective advantages and disadvantages of public and private
modes of governance and decision making can be reviewed. I have played my role
elsewhere in these debates and I do not want to revisit my work on the manner
in which dominant understandings of ‘good governance’ have frequently veiled
the imposition of highly normative market-based notions (the logic of
contestability, the logic of the market, the existence of ‘splintered logic’,
etc.) within the public sector.
What I want to emphasize here is that what we might term the
‘logic of the state’, the ‘logic of politics’, or the ‘logic of collective provision’
offers far more than has commonly been recognized. My argument is that
‘post-crisis’ politics may provide the creative space in which to move beyond prosaic and
perennial set piece debates (‘big state versus small state’) and in its place
facilitate a more sophisticated discussion regarding ‘the smarter state’—the
boundaries and contours of which remain unclear.
The notion of the ‘smarter state’ is a topic I am currently
exploring with colleagues at the Institute for Government and the Institute for
Public Policy Research and I therefore have no answers to give on this topic at
present. What I can do, however, is tease out some of the ways in which any
attempt to build a ‘smarter state’ must acknowledge that the marketization and
commodification of the state played a key role in undermining public confidence
in politics.
It emphasized individualism, personal choice and material
benefits while doing little to foster or safeguard those facets of collective endeavor
(the public sector ethos, citizenship, institutional memory, etc.) that had
taken half a century to build. More germane to the argument of this lecture was
the way that managerialism has and continues to cultivate ‘citizen-consumers’
who are encouraged to expect those levels of service provision that they would
commonly expect from the private sector. Thereby inflating public expectations
far beyond what the state or politics was ever intended, expected or resourced
to provide. This is the political equivalent of self-harming.
Democratic
politics and the role of the state is built and sustained on the basis of externalized
rationing in which certain decisions about the allocation of resources (and
paying for them) are imposed and enforced by the state. This externalized
rationing system may sometimes appear overly centralized, controlling and even
unfair but it has been established and sustained on the basis of (1) a coherent
logic based upon the need to protect certain shared resources; (2) the need to
avoid inferior social outcomes, protect individual freedoms and deter
free-riders; and last but not least (3) the view that some resources are too
important to be left to the vagaries of a pure market. As such, membership of a
democratic political community brings with it an acceptance that some people
will take out more than they put in, and not everyone would receive the level
of service provision they might wish for.
The
conception of citizens as consumers risks inflaming rather than reshaping
public expectations because, as Gerry Stoker has set out, ‘the discourse and
practice of collective decision-making sits very uncomfortably alongside the
discourse and practice of individual choice, self-expression and market-based
fulfilment of needs and wants. So it turns out that a propensity to disappoint
is an inherent feature of governance even in democratic societies.’11
But the marketization
of the public sphere has done much more than this. It has eroded a sense of
human solidarity and belief in the utility of collective action, and through
this has served to downgrade the merits of democratic engagement. The architecture of
democratic politics has arguably overemphasized individual rights and in doing
so created a less deferential and more consumerist public who think of
themselves as customers rather than citizens. This is reflected by those who assert their rights
in a selfish way without regard to the rights of others. A stronger and bolder
argument, and one I am sure Bernard Crick would have made, is that the public
sector is a civilizing and humane expression of collective sentiment, shared
challenges and a common fate that should not automatically be viewed as
inferior to the market. Not only will whoever wins the general election have
to acknowledge this fact if they are going to construct a ‘smarter state’
but they will also have to accept that the role of elected politicians is to
make difficult and frequently invidious decisions—a point that leads into…
4
A defense of politics against depoliticization
Such is the extent of the political climate that many
commentators—even politicians— now argue in favor of reducing the role of our
elected representatives and drawing more heavily on the skills and knowledge of
what I might term the ‘enlightened elite’. If party politicians are
self-interested, irrational, corrupt and lacking in specialist skills—so the argument
goes—why not simply transfer decision-making powers to (nonpartisan)
scientists, engineers, technocrats, ethicists and judges? This preference for political outsourcing has been promoted by pressure groups, think tanks, the World Bank and the United Nations as a way of not only increasing the efficiency and responsiveness of the state but also (paradoxically) as a way of rebuilding public confidence in politics.
scientists, engineers, technocrats, ethicists and judges? This preference for political outsourcing has been promoted by pressure groups, think tanks, the World Bank and the United Nations as a way of not only increasing the efficiency and responsiveness of the state but also (paradoxically) as a way of rebuilding public confidence in politics.
Depoliticization—the transfer of responsibility for major areas
of public policy away from elected politicians—has therefore emerged as a
central element of modern politics and governance around the world.
[So, is politicization the transfer of responsibility for major
areas of public policy to elected politicians (as opposed to bureaucratic
experts or the market)? Like Schattschneider’s ‘socialization’ that occurs when
we expand the scope of a conflict to include the state as an interested
party…is this politicizing a conflict and thus, depoliticization is privatizing
conflicts by narrowing the scope of the conflict to exclude the state? How do various ‘publics’ existing in the
middle here? For Schattschneider, the
‘audience’ was a metaphor for state actors, but as mass and social media grow
in influence and independence from the state we need to revisit his ‘audience’
to include various competing and overlapping publics as factors…but not agents?
Yet, below turns to nature of the conflict/good as key in determining what is
political/public and not, regardless of the venue or arena or sphere.]
Jacques Rancie`re may well be correct that ‘depoliticization is
the oldest task of politics’12 but my aim is to ask how are we to revitalize
politics when politicians themselves increasingly deny their own capacity to
make a difference? Does an issue become any less political in terms of its social
and economic impact if decisions are made beyond the purview of our elected
politicians? No.
The arena might change but the politics remains.
Depoliticization is a dangerous trend; the gradual infolding and
hollowing-out of the political sphere to the burgeoning sphere of ABCs
(agencies, boards and commissions) is a threat to democratic politics, not its savior.
Colin Hay— someone who I am very pleased and proud to have as a friend and
colleague— has examined the relationship between depoliticization and public
attitudes to politics in his award-winning book Why We Hate Politics.13 All I want to do at this stage of the
lecture is very briefly relate depoliticization to two important issues: our
old friend public expectations, and the issue of political leadership.
For politicians the opportunity to transfer difficult decisions or
areas of policy provides a way of dealing with the pressure of public
expectations. As Tony Wright argued in his 2009 Political Quarterly lecture, politics is a ‘messy business of accommodating conflicting interests,
choosing between competing options, negotiating unwelcome trade-offs, and taking
responsibility for decisions that may often represent the least worst option’.
If the public, pressure groups, journalists or members of the
opposition are either unable or unwilling to understand this basic point then
is it really surprising that politicians seek to restrict the sphere for which
they can be held personally responsible? Is it any surprise that at the general
election we will witness the largest turnover of MPs in modern history! To some
MPs I have no doubt we should say ‘good riddance’; but the majority are leaving
not because they have abused the expenses system but simply because they have
had enough of trying to operate within a low-trust high-blame attack, attack,
attack political context.
The problems we face are not simple and (most) politicians are
not fools. Those
anti-political agitators do society an injustice by suggesting that we merely
need to eradicate party politicians through a mixture of citizen participation
and technocratic rule. There is very little evidence that the public actually wants to
participate; and even less evidence that technocrats or judges can deliver
unequivocal answers to complex socio-economic questions.
As Crick argued with his typical literary elegance, the man
who claimed he could rule beyond the polis was either a ‘God or a beast’.
This notion of gods or beasts flows into the relationship between the outsourcing
of politics and political leadership. Few members of the public would seek to
deify politicians in the current climate; most would define them as beast
(though I, of course, would not). But I do believe that the almost knee-jerk
reaction of politicians to respond to new social challenges or incidents by
creating a new specialist body to assume responsibility reflects a loss of
confidence amongst
our political elite. Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the
United Kingdom, have arguably lost their nerve, their confidence to make difficult decisions. Where are the politicians who are willing to stand-up and defend their
role? The issue of moral courage and political leadership is one I will return to later.
United Kingdom, have arguably lost their nerve, their confidence to make difficult decisions. Where are the politicians who are willing to stand-up and defend their
role? The issue of moral courage and political leadership is one I will return to later.
However in order to understand better the position of
politicians and mount an effective defense of politics it is now necessary to
turn our attention to, dare I say, the real sinners. [!]
5
A defense of politics against the media
In turning my attention to the media I make no apology for my
lack of restraint and my inability to talk in anything but fairly harsh terms.
If we really want to understand how the public are misled, abused and exploited
then it is to journalism and the media, and not just to politicians and
politics, that I think we should turn.
It is a curious paradox of modern times that just as we have
more media space than ever its content is generally found to have less and less
healthy debate. Few issues are addressed in any real depth or in a way that
engages with large audiences—talking points (and usually the same one across
all outlets), rather than issues of social concern, dominate. Sound bites, by
their very nature, are the opposite of balanced reporting and comment.
I’ve lost count of the number of times in recent months I have
been approached by journalists and asked to provide a list of the ‘ten worst
quangos’, my views on the ‘sleaze ridden’ House of Commons, or have been
offered large sums of money to add my name to articles written elsewhere. This
trend, however, is not benign but has major political implications due to the
manner in which the forces of technological change and intense competition have
emphasized
speed rather than accuracy, hostility rather than balance and a tendency never
to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
I am not alone in making this argument as an increasing number
of journalists have reflected on the gradual but constant demise of their
profession. John Lloyd, for example, has written at length of the manner in
which the media have shifted from a check on the excesses of politics to an alternative
establishment dedicated to a theatrical distrust of individual politicians and
a furious and calculated indifference to the real-life intricacies of
policy-making.14
Similar themes pervade Thomas Patterson’s book Out of Order and generate a compelling
critique of the media’s domination of the political process in the USA.15 In
2007 Jeremy Paxman used the MacTaggart Lecture to suggest that journalists were
increasingly betraying ‘the people [they] ought to be serving’. In addition to
noting this general shift in the nature of journalism he also made a point of
direct relevance to this lecture’s focus on the issue of ‘public expectations’
by emphasizing what he called the ‘expectation inflation’ that had resulted
from the emergence of 24/7 news. He confessed that on some days as a presenter
on Newsnight if he was truly honest he
would have started the program by stating in no uncertain terms, ‘Not much has
happened today. I’d go to bed if I were you.’ However, in the current climate
the media ‘chatterati’ cannot accept such truisms—‘The story needs to be kept
moving, constantly hyped. . . . in this context even the slightest development
. . . is fallen upon as if it were a press release announcing the second
coming.’ If there is no story one will have to be invented—hence the rise of
celebrity culture and reality television.
Hugh Cudlipp, one of the giants of British journalism and editor
of the Daily Mirror when Crick was
writing In Defense of Politics, once
said ‘A tabloid newspaper should strive—more diligently perhaps than ‘a serious
quality newspaper’—to be acknowledged as mature, stable and fair in its
attitudes to people and public issues.’ How far the media seems to have moved
from such a position; and what is particularly critical for the focus of my
lecture is that the media in all its forms has become imbued with a culture of
negativity that I cannot help but feel has corroded public confidence and
understanding in politics.
As Alistair Campbell stressed when giving the 2008 Cudlipp
Lecture, ‘failure, it is thought, is what sells and what people want to hear
and read about. I am not so sure. Britain is not the basket case, nor its
politics and public services the abject failures conveyed through the media.’16
Robin Cook, someone I knew and respected through my work with the Hansard
Society, used to cite a study showing a shifting ratio of positive to negative
coverage of issues and events in the national press. During the 1970s the ratio
was three positive stories to one negative, but by the millennium the ratio had
shifted to one positive story for every 18 negative.
My point here is not to deny the existence of problems with our
political system but to simply emphasize the corrosive influence of constant
negative media reporting on public confidence in politics. I am arguing in favor
of a shift towards ‘civic journalism’ that would: not feed on speculative stories that owe little to
reality; not amplify specific incidents into systemic failings; not focus on
the ambitions that were not achieved rather than the majority that were; and
although civic journalism would have to be ‘right’, as in correct in terms of
factual content, it would not need to be right now, in terms of being the first
to break a story.17
Let me go even further and link this critique of the media to my
earlier focus on the market. The media is increasingly concerned with what could be termed
the commodification of social issues in order to protect and enlarge market
shares.
Some months ago I spoke at a public event on the topic of ‘Was
politics broken in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal?’ alongside
journalists from the Telegraph and
the BBC. It was I, you might not be
surprised to learn, who made the simple point that if you actually stood back
and examined the position of all MPs you would find: a small number of MPs who
may have broken the law; a second larger group of between 40 and 50 MPs who had
clearly abused the spirit, if not the letter, of the system; and then a larger
group of possibly 200 MPs who had been asked to make repayments due to a
mixture of administrative incompetence, confusion about the scope of legitimate
expenses and the rather harsh retrospective reasoning of Sir Thomas Legg. (This
is a point that was underlined by Peter Riddell just a couple of months ago as
he sought to set out his own defense of politicians.)18
If you add the members of those three groups together you find
that the ‘scandal’—the ‘meltdown’ of British democracy—did not even involve
half of the members of the House of Commons. Let us not pretend that the Telegraph’s coverage of the MPs’
expenses scandal was concerned with public propriety any more than the
tabloids’ focus on Madeleine McCann is driven by concern for the child.
The word ‘Madeleine’ sells; the word ‘sleaze’ sells. I,
personally, would like to see how many of today’s journalists could cope with
the pressures of life as an MP—or would even think of getting out of bed for
the salary of a backbencher. But more broadly I want to emphasize that the
political implications and corrosive influence of purely negative reporting
has very simple and straightforward implications in terms of hollowing out
public confidence in politics and deterring individuals from engaging in public
service.
But now I need to move on (I hear a Red Deer19 bellowing to me
in the distance), the approach of the media to politics is couched more and
more in the language
of extremes—there
is little room in modern political coverage for shades of grey. Politics is portrayed as
an arena forged upon binary distinctions— saints and sinners, triumphs and disasters, savior
to failure, hero to zero, knights and knaves—and as a result
issues become strangely depoliticized within public discourse as the more interesting shades of grey
that provoke debate and offer real options are rarely exposed.
[This
is an interesting use of depoliticized, defined above as—‘the transfer of
responsibility for major areas of public policy away from elected
politicians—has therefore emerged as a central element of modern politics and
governance around the world.’ I do not think the author means to argue that the
language of extremes results in the transfer of responsibility for policy away
from elected politicians, does he? Here
he refers to being ‘depoliticized within public discourse,’ and that seems to
highlight a more symbolic dimension of depoliticization. Or does he mean
(skipping logical steps) to assert that the language of extremes has a
corrosive impact on public opinion, which in turn enlarges the expectations gap
in ways not specified here, which in turn results on either citizens or elites
or both being more likely to see issue x (or a large menu of issues) as best
managed with market tools rather than politics.]
Of course,
the generally cynical approach of media reporting that I have sought to
highlight in this section creates a predisposition towards the negative side of each
of these counterparts and an emphasis on the most overused word in political
reporting– crisis.
highlight in this section creates a predisposition towards the negative side of each
of these counterparts and an emphasis on the most overused word in political
reporting– crisis.
6
A defense of politics against crises
If politics is in crisis then it seems to have been so for some
time. ‘The Crisis of
Democracy’, for example, was the title of the final report of the trilateral commission
into political disaffection in Western Europe, the United States and Japan in the 1970s. That is not to deny the contemporary relevance of responding to the apparent decline in public confidence in politics but it does at least help keep things in perspective. It might also be used to support the claim that the term ‘crisis’ is in danger of becoming overused in the sense that it has been so broadly applied in recent years that it has lost its meaning in a world obsessed with hyperbole.
Democracy’, for example, was the title of the final report of the trilateral commission
into political disaffection in Western Europe, the United States and Japan in the 1970s. That is not to deny the contemporary relevance of responding to the apparent decline in public confidence in politics but it does at least help keep things in perspective. It might also be used to support the claim that the term ‘crisis’ is in danger of becoming overused in the sense that it has been so broadly applied in recent years that it has lost its meaning in a world obsessed with hyperbole.
Political science has for some time explained instances of rapid
change with reference to the role of crises because dominant assumptions about
the efficacy of certain governing arrangements can be destabilized by a crisis which, in turn, both reduces the capacity of the incumbent
government to prevent reform while also increasing the resources of reform
advocates. One of the challenges of
governing in the twenty-first century is that crisis situations appear to have
become the norm as opposed to the exception.
There is hardly a day goes by without another crisis for
politicians to attend to—mad cows, avian flu, fuel blockades, predatory pedophiles,
feral hoodies, economic collapse, terrorist plots, volcanic eruptions—and as
Chris Mullin laconically acknowledges in his diaries, even in periods of
relative calm politicians know ‘It can only be a question of time before a new
crisis is organised’.20 And yet in reality most of these issues are not really
crises but elements of the general rhythm—the ebb and flow—of politics.
Fortunately, events that I would class as crises (civil wars,
natural disasters, invasions, etc.) are few and far between in those
established democracies that appear most disaffected. But what this focus on
crises reveals is the role of the media and opposition parties in articulating
crisis narratives, amplifying risks and increasing the public’s expectations of
politics in order to place pressure on incumbent politicians.
Put slightly differently, crises do not happen, as such, but
incidents or issues must be socially constructed by social commentators and
articulated as such.
The phrase ‘Crisis, what crisis?’, for example, has gone down in
political folklore as Jim Callaghan’s response to a question about the Winter
of Discontent that helped bring down the Labour government in 1979. Although
the phrase reinforced a popular sense that the government had lost touch with
the country the Prime Minister never actually said it: it was a creation by a
journalist working for the Sun. If
the facts were rarely allowed to get in the way of a good story thirty years
ago then the pressure on journalists to deliver ‘breaking news’ today creates a
powerful tendency towards ‘crisis inflation’ in which even the smallest issue can be
rapidly amplified into an example of systemic failure.
[Highlighting
(1) what Bennett calls a journalistic preference for more dramatic and
fragmented and personalized angles on stories and (2) the struggle to amplify
some, and mute other, conflicts. And the
semi-independent incentives for journalists to participate in this struggle for
reasons that may have little or nothing to do with either the nature or
importance of the conflict OR with
elite agenda-setting struggles.]
Why then does this increased emphasis on crises matter? Firstly,
it matters because it drains and distracts politicians and officials from focusing on
the long-term strategic management of public services. Doing nothing is generally
not perceived as an option, even when it is unclear what exactly an effective
response would look like. Secondly, it matters because it creates a constant climate
of instability, insecurity and political failure that, in itself, reinforces a
negative view of the capacity of politicians to take control. This (thirdly) feeds into
the fact that whatever
the source of the crisis it is politicians who will be held responsible and
generally blamed.
[Since the topic here is mass media, should we not start with
its impact on public opinion, or the ways it ‘drains and distracts’ citizens?]
No allowances are made for ‘acts of God’, human nature or simple
mistakes. Politicians know that being held to account will not involve a
rational examination of the available evidence but a desperate exercise of
blame allocation and the demand for a sacrificial lamb. Accountability is very
much of the ‘gotcha’ variety.
This focus on the existence of fate flows (fourthly) into this
lecture’s emphasis on the ‘expectations gap’ due to the manner in which crisis-related stories
inevitably place unrealistic expectations on the shoulders of politicians and
public servants.
The benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing after an event.
What makes the issue of crises within the context of increasingly ‘disaffected’
democracies particularly interesting is that it is possible to identify an
element of transference as the public’s anger and frustration about one issue
can be conducted and earthed, to some extent, through political outlets. I have
no empirical evidence to support this point—I did say that I was going to fly
some kites—but I cannot help but feel that the incredible public outrage over the
MPs’ expenses scandal—and it was a scandal not a crisis—was to some degree
connected with the broader social outrage at the behavior of bonus-fueled yet
largely unidentifiable city bankers.
Parliamentarians therefore provided a convenient and timely
lightning-rod
for social unrest; a number of MPs deserved everything they got and, more
broadly, acting as an outlet for public anger can be viewed as a proper and
legitimate role for the House of Commons. But at the same time any individual
can only cope with a certain an amount of abuse and hostility before they
question their ability to play a positive role without a step-change in the
broader context.
Let me inject a little story to burnish this point: I was
recently interviewed for a high-profile but non-partisan position within the
public sector and was not entirely surprised when the main focus of the
interview was not so much on the fit between my skills and experience and the
specific requirements of the post but on how I would cope with the media going
through my bins, with my children being followed to school and with anyone I’d
ever met being offered large amounts of money for salacious stories.
The mixture of issues that shape the nature of governing in the
twenty-first century (discussed above) already make governing difficult enough.
Do we really need to make things any harder by adding to the burdens of politicians
and public servants in this way; what does anyone gain from adding to the
shrill discourse that encourages us to view all politicians and public servants
as corrupt and unreliable?
The maintenance of a perpetual state of crisis or political
outrage and the outsourcing of politics beyond the grasp of electoral control
prevents us from stepping back and acknowledging all that politics delivers. I am not encouraging
voters to follow the advice of Bernard Baruch, an adviser to Presidents Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the USA, to ‘vote for the man who promises
least because he’ll be the least disappointing’ because to do so would be to
let the pessimists, detractors and politically depressive from robbing us of
the sense of optimism and hope that democratic politics offers. But I am
suggesting that if the public genuinely believe that politics (and therefore
politicians) are failing them then this may well tell us more about the
public’s expectations than the failure of our politicians.
The link between unrealistic public expectations and crises has
possibly been clearest in the United States since the election of Obama. His campaign was based on
the promise of radical and distinctive change: nothing more; nothing less. As
the campaign came towards an end, and particularly as public opinion surveys
suggested an Obama victory was likely, his campaign team’s focus shifted to an
emphasis on lowering public expectations about what he would be able to achieve
if elected. The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful
recession increased the urgency inside Obama’s campaign team to bring people
down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of
‘hope’ and ‘change’ were suddenly confronted with the reality of a stricken
economy. Seeking to dampen down public expectations continued throughout the
transition period following the election in an attempt to prevent ‘a vast mood
swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair’ as one of Obama’s senior
advisers noted. In response to questions about his immediate priorities on
taking office Mr. Obama repeatedly told the world’s media that ‘the first
hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably the first thousand days
that makes the difference . . . I won’t stand here and pretend that any of this
will be easy—especially now’.
It clearly
has not been easy for Obama as the challenges of getting into office seem to
have paled into insignificance against the challenges of governing. ‘Yes we
can’ has in relation to many commitments turned into ‘I’m still hoping we can
at some point’ and his approval ratings have fallen accordingly. And yet I’m
personally quite relieved that Obama is not Superman. (Too many people sidestep
their own individual responsibilities as a citizen by looking for a superhero
to take control.) And yet the election of Obama still demonstrates the capacity
of democratic politics to renew itself, to reconnect with sections of the
political community that had effectively become disenfranchised, and to secure
agreements on ambitious policies that many thought could never be achieved.
With these more upbeat thoughts in mind I want to conclude by coming full
circle and speaking in praise of politics.
7
In praise of politics
This lecture has attempted to restore a degree of confidence in the virtues of politics as a great and civilizing human activity. In this endeavor I have tried to swim against the tide of popular opinion and I hope you feel I have at least been able to tread water, and have not drowned in my attempt to adopt what some might view as a brave, courageous or foolhardy position. But as Crick said, ‘Free men stick their necks out’.21 I hope I have at least provided food for thought that may nourish a more positive and constructive approach to political matters. I have tried to show that politics matters because on the whole it delivers far more than most people recognize, and the alternatives are far worse.
Let me provide you with a reference point: ‘A vast, chaotic,
misgoverned, dysfunctional morass; its rulers historically preoccupied with
looting rather than governing. The armed forces bloated, parasitic, disloyal
and generally useless except in so far as they threaten the lives and welfare
of the much put upon civilian population.’ 22 Reflecting upon this recent description
of an African state might encourage some of the critics who bemoan what
democratic politics delivers to pause for thought.
When was the last time you were forced to pay a nurse, local
official or police officer a bribe to access certain public services? Why do people believe the
NHS is in crisis yet rate their personal experience of services as generally
very good? Why does the public seem to distrust MPs as a political class,
but tend to hold far more positive views about their own constituency MP?
[In the end, this single reference to ‘it is a lot worse in
Africa’ turns out to be the only arguments in defense of politics. The rest focuses much more on explaining why
average citizens expect too much from politicians and that this erodes
confidence in ‘politics’ itself, rather than on defending the proposition that
we should, even in the face of the forces explained here as undermining our
confidence, still see politics as worthy of our confidence and support. Or even defending the proposition that—if we
could reduce the expectations gap—we would then be able to renew our confidence
in politics.]
The intention of democratic politics is not to deliver
individualized public services exactly when, where and how you want them.
Politics arises from recognition of restraints and a commitment to
respecting diversity; it is a moral, humane and civilizing activity that never
claims to be able to solve every problem or ‘make every sad heart glad’ but it is
far better than other forms of rule. When put like this I put it to you that
maybe the fabric of politics is not quite as threadbare as many think.
Speaking in defense of politics is not easy. Anyone daring to
stand up for politicians or political processes risks being immediately
labelled as irrational, mad or—even worse—harboring political ambitions
themselves. I harbor no ambitions within party politics but can no longer stand
on the sidelines and watch a noble profession—public service interwoven with a
belief in the capacity of collective endeavor—be the constant
focus of ridicule and derision. Especially when anti-political arguments are commonly
deployed as a Trojan horse for market-based solutions that risk deconstructing
a public sphere that we have spent a century building.
focus of ridicule and derision. Especially when anti-political arguments are commonly
deployed as a Trojan horse for market-based solutions that risk deconstructing
a public sphere that we have spent a century building.
Almost half a century ago Bernard Crick wrote In Defense of Politics as a sharp and
thoughtful rejoinder to those who would decry the achievements and principles
of democratic politics. His argument is even more relevant today. So as my
lecture comes to an end we might view this moment as the calm before the storm.
Politics over the short to medium term will be focused on managing the process
of reducing the public’s expectations of what the state can and should provide;
on reducing the ‘expectations gap’ from above rather than from below.
And yet it should be remembered that crises bring with them
opportunities and, as such, should never be wasted. The GFC is going to force
many governments to address difficult questions about the future of public
services and what it is realistic to expect the state to do in the twenty-first
century. Difficult decisions will have to be taken by politicians, but the
opportunity exists to use these challenges in order to generate a more realistic set
of expectations amongst the public. In the UK the general election will also deliver fresh hope in
the form of an influx of new MPs untainted by accusations of sleaze and
corruption. I certainly get the sense that the public hankers after a more
optimistic, balanced and informed account of politics, particularly in terms of
what it might offer in the future.
My debt to Bernard Crick is great but in order to conclude my
inaugural lecture I want to go back not fifty years, to Crick’s Defense, but to almost exactly one
hundred years and to a speech delivered, on the 23 April 1910, with both anger
and passion by Teddy Roosevelt. ‘The Man in the Arena’ remains the most authoritative rebuke to
those who carp from the sidelines about the failure of politics. It is not the critic who
counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the
doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who
strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is
no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the
deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in
a worthy cause. It is in this spirit that I want you to reject the bland
fatalism that has for too long blinded us of the merits in politics and in
future sing out in its defense.
This lecture was posted on this blog in June 2011.
Added on 8/23: Heard a colleague refer to a powerful leader on campus as being 'very political' and that we should expect his comments to be 'political statements' and that he advised this person that political statements would work/be ok for a while, but not too long.
I took him to mean that 'being very political' in making 'political statements' means to be expedient, to be making comments that are designed to get us through the moment or conversation without derailing momentum, even if doing this means being less than clear.
Interesting. I need to think about this more.
Added on 8/23: Heard a colleague refer to a powerful leader on campus as being 'very political' and that we should expect his comments to be 'political statements' and that he advised this person that political statements would work/be ok for a while, but not too long.
I took him to mean that 'being very political' in making 'political statements' means to be expedient, to be making comments that are designed to get us through the moment or conversation without derailing momentum, even if doing this means being less than clear.
Interesting. I need to think about this more.
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