Creative destruction

A friend of mine mentioned the other day that he couldn’t disapprove of hip hop because he couldn’t make out the words.  I can’t remember any of the conversation that led up to that line, but I suggested, in return, that perhaps he just didn’t enjoy it enough to disapprove of it.  Secret, shameful pleasure often seems a key component of disapproval; on the other side of the cultural divide, perhaps the more liberal minded are (in ways that make them nice people to be around) less in touch with what Stephen King called “the dark fuckery of the human heart”, and so are less aware of how thin is the film between civilisation and its alternatives.  This is captured to hilarious effect by the absurd, medievalist character of Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, who takes great pleasure in regular trips to the cinema to simultaneously denounce and get off on what he sees:

“Filth!” Ignatius shouted, spewing wet popcorn over several rows. “How dare she pretend to be virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”

(The same phenomenon was also recently captured in a dubious story in the Daily Mail about the effects of porn, illustrated by a photo of a man looking at actual porn.)

I’ve only been to one rap gig (are they even called gigs? probably not) but it was one of the best I’ve been to; the energy, lyrical dexterity and interactivity of Skinnyman and Killa Kela were such a refreshing change from the mumbling, shoegazing, tedious indie bands I usually went to see in those days.  Skinnyman’s theme tune was about his shooting a crackhead paedophile, so his music at least had a sort of spaghetti western morality to it, rather than the usual gangsta rap bravado.

It seems odd that a song about shooting a crackhead paedophile could be made to seem quaint and innocent, but this guy manages it.  The Guardian won’t stop writing about him, so I feel compelled to do the same.  His shtick seems to be rapping about rape and calling everyone a faggot.  Naturally the Guardian divides into two camps: the nihilists, who think words don’t mean anything so we shouldn’t take them seriously and should just relax and enjoy the music; and the moralists — in this case gay and women’s rights lobbyists, as those who are primarily troubled by the glamorisation of young black men shooting other young black men have long since been sidelined — who disagree.  As Ken Clarke’s rapegate showed, feminists and gay people are now the foremost moralists in our society.  My sympathies are with them, but maybe I’m just jealous because the band I was in at his age had equally depraved lyrics, but it never made us rich.

I don’t want to get too far into assomeonewhoery, but as someone who makes a living out of correcting other people’s grammar, I of course think language is important and has social and political consequences.  Context is of paramount importance.  You and I can see that the cheeky chap in question isn’t really a rapist, and very probably isn’t really even a homophobe, and that he’s merely trying to shock a largely unshockable postmodern culture by challenging some of its last taboos; I suspect there would be much more of an outcry if someone clearly devoid of irony — 50 Cent, say — were to mine this seam instead.  No doubt going to a concert of his full of other irony-drenched Guardianistas in their late 20s would be very entertaining.  But I would be troubled to find myself at such a show surrounded by impressionable 13-year-olds, who may not yet have developed an advanced capacity for irony and so may take the words at face value.  Does this make me sound hypocritical?  Perhaps, but hypocrisy gets a worse press than it deserves.  Were you, cynical and worldly wise reader, honestly not more impressionable, more open to peer pressure, when you were 13 than you are now?  I think you were.  Hypocrisy (in the sense of one rule for me, another for others) is often a sensible alternative to irresponsibility.  I don’t imagine that most or even many people of that age will immediately hear gangsta rap, or rape rap, and go out and start shooting or raping people, but very few of us are quite as insusceptible to cultural influences — to the vast sums spent very effectively but more prosaically on advertising, marketing and branding, for instance — as we suppose, and some of us have minds so open our brains have fallen out completely.  To quote my favourite socially conservative anarchist: all art is propaganda.

So, the extent to which artists (or, more realistically, those who sell their work) are obliged to exercise moral responsibility really depends on their hinterland.  In the case of Lars von Trier, for example, his audience entirely consists of sophisticated intellectuals dripping with irony and thus with emotional immunity to anything they might rationally be able to see as morally dubious.  He is therefore freed of the same responsibilities that should lie with those shaping young and impressionable minds, which is why I can’t believe anyone could really be shocked by anything he does, whether making an outrageously misogynistic (but brilliantly done and impossible to take seriously) film like Antichrist, or this week pretending to be a Nazi.  He is a professional provocateur and should be enjoyed as such, whereas because of the different context I can’t quite share the nihilists’ sanguinity about the rapey rapper.  Honestly, though, I defy you to read the transcript of Lars von Trier’s gaffe and not lol.

Anyway, here’s a slice of hip hop we can all enjoy —

Their first effort wasn’t bad either, though it should be pointed out that the people behind the videos are big Hayekians, which explains his underdog treatment —

Who’s right?  No idea.  I have a lot of time for the idea that the Second World War and its highly ordered, heavily mobilised aftermath was the closest Britain ever came to being an equal and unified society.  Keynes’ theories have clearly not withered with the winding down of wartime production, but in times of peace, freedom and openness Hayek’s epistemological scepticism seems more appealing and more relevant.  My sense is that both are somewhat misrepresented in today’s debates (and in these videos, however entertaining) and that there is perhaps more common ground than meets the eye.  I read The Road to Serfdom recently, and didn’t recognise the libertarian bible it’s held up to be at all.  He argues that, while the government should practise economic liberalism (in the old sense of the word), it should also use taxes to fund a social safety net for those left behind, and should intervene in the market to prevent the growth of monopolies.  This seems much more like a small-c centre-right agenda than a minimalist one.  Ayn Rand, the Mrs Rochester of the American right, recognised this and thought him a despicable traitor (another big point in his favour for me).  As for Keynes, his contemporary supporters seem too happy to overlook the bit about reducing deficits during booms — but should we expect governments to do this, any more than we should expect them to follow Hayek’s advice and put interest rates up?

The question I would ask any Keynesians who might be reading is this: if everyone as a whole, i.e. the market left to its own devices, is incapable of organising the economy efficiently, why should it be the case that a far smaller group of people, i.e. the government, should be able to do any better?  The dispersal of information seems to warrant the dispersal of power, which is why I support more direct democracy.  The paradox of this, of course, is that a completely democratic society would never vote for a completely unfettered market.

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The wisdom of the crowdsource

As a politics student I never much liked the term ‘political science’.  It seemed to imply that those of us doing the studying could somehow put our own prejudices aside, achieve a pure state of dispassionate reason, and study other people as if they were rats in a laboratory, rather than people just like us.  In the same way, the problem with ‘evidence-based policymaking’, which is one of the buzzwords of the day, is that the certainty of the sciences can never be fully applied to the social sciences, because it’s never possible to run fully controlled experiments on people’s lives.  Correlation, in trying to analyse the effect of one influence among millions on how people act, can rarely prove causation: at best it can give us an educated guess, which falls some way short of pure science.

Economics is a good example: the mountains of data it has accumulated still refuse to point to a clear conclusion.  The more the discipline progresses, the more disagreement there is between the Keynesians and the Austrians, both of whom can torture the statistics as they see fit and produce apparently convincing arguments.  The more I read from either, the less clear I am about which side is right: in theory the Keynesian position is appealing, but in practice the amount of responsibility it places in relatively few hands is a problem too.  Neither Ed Balls nor George Osborne really has a clue what will happen if we fiscally retrench, stimulate demand, put up interest rates, print more money, or whatever.  Each can quote roughly appropriate and superficially attractive examples from history to support his case, but neither can possibly quote examples that cover all of the variables that are in play in what is today an enormous, unique and uncontrollable experiment.  Beyond the very short term, our economic outlook is simply unknowable: unfortunately, politicians and commentators are respected for making confident predictions (even if those turn out to be completely wrong) so you won’t catch many of them admitting it.  Science and social science are, as it were, overlapping magisteria: the bigger and more complicated the political question, the weaker our ability to deal with it by scientific method.

The phrase ‘evidence-based’, then, when applied to politics, where there is rarely a definitively correct answer, is one we ought to be wary of.  Indeed, since governments so often debase evidence-based policymaking into policy-based evidencemaking, we have to be even more sceptical than usual when dealing with any politician, journalist or public figure who purports to be operating on the basis of ‘the evidence’.  Politics is about how we run society, what we do with our and other people’s money, how we share our time on earth with other people, how we order the fundamentals of our lives.  Unlike crunching data from radio telescopes or splicing plant genomes, these are emotive issues, and it is impossible to be fully dispassionate and to disregard our own experiences of our lives and of society.  Anyone who claims to be able to do so should warrant our suspicion.  Anyone who can genuinely do so is a sociopath.

If we are being honest, we all — scientists and academics included — at some point or other fall into one of the following:

1. anchoring trap — giving disproportionate weight to the first item of information received
2. status quo trap — bias towards maintaining the current situation
3. sunk cost trap — making decisions which justify previous decisions, even if these are no longer sound
4. confirming-evidence trap — concentrating on finding evidence to support a favoured option
5. framing trap — posing the question for the decision in a particular way
6. overconfidence trap — overestimating the accuracy of estimates and forecasts
7. prudence trap — being over-cautious
8. recallability trap — giving more weight to recent and dramatic events

(Hammond, J S, Keeney, R L and Raiffa, H (1998), ‘The Hidden Traps in Decision Making’, Harvard Business Review, September-October)

As ever, Orwell is ahead of me:

Implied in the demand for more scientific education is the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one’s approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had had no such training.  A scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman.  The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. … The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook.  The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly and secretly working away at the atomic bomb, are a demonstration of this.

Go and read his short piece in full, then come back to this one.

The problem is at its most acute when, as with the Keynes/Hayek question, an issue presents us with binary choices.  The drugs debate is a good example, and one where the liberal side (including the BBC’s Mark Easton, who no longer makes any pretence of impartial journalism) claims to have monopolised the evidence, citing Britain before prohibition, contemporary Portugal, and elsewhere as examples of successful legalisation and harm reduction.  Many of these arguments are convincing, but then so is the argument that giving visitors boarding passes that read WARNING: MANDATORY DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW, and carrying out the threat, has resulted in a low drugs problem there.  Though they are clearly incompatible, essentially I agree with both sides: either extreme would be an improvement on the status quo.  But there is evidence on both sides, and neither side can conclusively demonstrate that their position, when applied to all of the other circumstances that are unique to our socio-economic situation, will work as they intend it to (for example, on the one hand the relaxation of late-night licensing laws failed to turn us into a continental-style cafe culture and merely extended the existing problems later into the night in the areas that adopted it, but on the other we had the legality and availability of ‘legal highs’ like mephedrone to thank for a drop in the use of other, nastier drugs like cocaine — at least until we made them illegal highs).  Both sides are advocating a leap in the dark, to a greater or lesser extent: but both are on firm ground to say that it is impossible to call the compromise that is our present policy a success.  What we ideally need is a global referendum in which the status quo is not on the ballot.  Much the same applies to the debate on crime and penal policy, where again the government seem to be advocating a mixed policy of community-based rehabilitation rather than short-term imprisonment, but without the vast amounts of money that such a policy would clearly need to have any chance of working — this seems to be the same sort of compromise as we have in drugs policy, and seems to me to have about as much chance of working.

The best way forward for politics and political science is to try to apply the methods of the information revolution: by acknowledging the limitations of social science as a discipline and the limitations on how much any individual or small group of people can know, by admitting the role of individual and social experiences in shaping people’s opinions, and by aggregating as much information as possible when formulating policy.  Policy should operate in the free market of ideas as price does in the free market of exchange: in the modern parlance, we should crowdsource it.  This is the opposite approach to fascism and communism (both of which, Orwell tells us, were supported by plenty of scientists and academics in their time), which both ultimately failed because too many decisions were being made by too few people with too little information.  The representative democracy we currently have — whereby we are ruled by an elite making what it thinks are the best decisions on our behalf, with a degree of our consent — is half way between the two positions.  The ultimate, revolutionary, goal — in synthesis with the revolution in access to information, which inclines me towards the rational optimist camp — is for as many people as possible to have as much of a say in as many decisions that affect them as possible.  Direct democracy may be some way off yet, but it is the direction in which we should be agitating to travel.

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Where to draw the line when squaring the circle of triangulation

Occasionally on this blog I’m a little behind the news agenda: usually that’s just because life gets in the way, but sometimes I like to have a good think about some issue before I write about it.  This is not a problem that burdens 99% of other bloggers.

The point is relevant to today’s post.  I’ve been thinking about Switzerland’s referendum vote to ban miniature cigarettes minarets.  I suspect I’d've sheepishly voted in favour of the ban, not for any particularly good reason but from a visceral fear of the country turning into relativistic Britain or the ghettoised Netherlands.  Perhaps that shows that the ‘no’ campaign were right to call the whole thing dangerous populism; but the vote should stand, and Swiss democracy will be weakened if, as now seems possible, the vote is overturned by the Swiss supreme court or even the European Court of Human Rights.

Our own representative democracy has failed in many ways: turnout is collapsing, the professional elite who conduct politics seem an ever more remote and self-serving class, and voters are losing patience with mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties and looking at more radical options.  Direct democracy, Swiss-style, therefore seems very appealing.  On the right, Dan Hannan and chums suggest a set of US-style reforms (elected sheriffs, recall elections, open primaries) that would make our democracy more direct, and so re-engage individual and community participation.  On the other side, many liberals and leftists think a more proportional voting system is the answer.  All very nice ideas, though in the former case our love of good public services and hatred of paying for them might well lead to a fiscal collapse of Californian and not merely British proportions, and in the latter case party lists would surely produce even more robotic, docile MPs.  (And the House of Lords, for all its logical incoherence, has stood up to the executive on freedoms of speech, detention without trial and ID cards in a way the Commons hasn’t: so liberals and social democrats should be careful what they wish for.)  Also, look at the direct relationship in the US between local control over electoral boundaries and partisanship and corruption: gerrymandered constituencies become unloseably safe seats, candidates are forced into extreme positions to win primaries, and – like Labour in Glasgow – have no incentive to govern well after their inevitable victory.

So: the Athenian ideal is of an informed citizenry consulted on as many matters of governance as often as possible.  Perhaps the Swiss are nearest this ideal: the US certainly isn’t.  At the moment Britain does worse on the second criterion: but I worry that a US-style relaxation of our broadcasting rules (as seems to be universally supported on the right, if the most popular blogs are anything to go by) would permanently destroy the possibility of the first.  The problem is that most people choose to expose themselves only to the ideas they already agree with, and consume media accordingly: be that Fox News or the Morning Star.  The man on the Clapham omnibus – damn him – prefers to have his opinions massaged than challenged.

What, then, would stop us ending up like the US, where the media has led society to a partisanship of 1860s proportions?  And how uninformed must a society be to elevate buffoons like Glenn Beck and Michael Moore to the status of revered commentators?  The BBC, for all its haters – and it’s to their credit that their news output manages to upset Israeli and Palestinian supporters in equal measure – seems to be one of the few sources of social cohesion left in Britain: and every time it chases ITV (or the increasingly degraded Channel 4) in the ratings race to the bottom, and every time we read that presenters are paid seven-figure salaries, and that hundreds of dispensable middle managers are paid six-figure salaries, its moral and cultural authority weakens a little more.  OK, Sky News is just as capable as News 24 of putting a competent reporter in Westminster to deliver the gossip.  But, as Peter Hitchens repeatedly points out, the BBC is still the only media outlet that bothers to produce challenging, high-quality broadcasting (another strand to his thesis, which perfectly sums up my own political philosophy, that selfish libertarianism is “profoundly unconservative”).  The wonderful serendipity of shows like The Forum on the World Service would, I suspect, never materialise in a purely commercial system.  The most recent episode of that show flits between forest fire management, the efficiencies of global food production, and the relevance of Dadaism.  In an increasingly niche market there might be money to be made in equally deep broadcasting, but not in equally broad.

A little cultural elitism, then, is necessary to stop democracy – which in our case could already become more direct with a referendum on whether to leave the undemocratic European Union – collapsing into mob rule and atomisation.  Would anyone, even fans of capital punishment, be happy with the idea of Simon Cowell deciding such matters in his bearpit?  It’s no surprise that his proposal is to physically divide the audience into two opposing factions, like the Greens and the Blues in the Colloseum, with no possible room for nuance or consensus.  Why not just go the whole hog and literally show bear baiting live on Sky One: that would be a logical consequence of Randy libertarianism too.  Restrained broadcasting, like independently set constituency boundaries, is therefore another example of the necessity of political vaccination: in the same way that a tougher line on debt a few years ago could have prevented our economic collapse, a mild state religion is the best defence against creepy evangelism, and a tougher line on immigration would have prevented the election of fascist representatives today.  Sorry if this doesn’t fit easily into predictable left / right pigeonholes – but you’re welcome to read that on 99% of other blogs.

P.S.  Peter Hitchens is worth quoting in full -

Those who call for the abolition of the BBC show a strange faith in the ability or willingness of commercial broadcasters to attempt serious reporting of news, high culture or religious broadcasting. Without the BBC such things will vanish from the airwaves. They also seem to assume – for reasons I don’t grasp – that privately owned monopoly or oligopoly broadcasters will be inclined to support conservative positions. There is no evidence of this. The three main (commercial) networks in the USA are relentlessly liberal, and Fox is neo-conservative, that is to say uninterested in the great moral and cultural issues. Of course if you want broadcasting to be a howling wilderness, then abolishing the BBC will certainly produce that result. But the BBC will in any case defeat such a campaign, precisely because it is true that commercial broadcasters can’t and won’t produce broadcasting of the quality of Radios Three and Four, or even that of the old (not current) BBC2 or the better bits of (publicly subsidised) Channel Four. Reform, such as I propose, is both more credible and more likely to succeed in the long run. Of course, you may say that it is unlikely (it is) or impossible (it may be) but these are counsels of despair, and if you really believe there is no hope then why bother to enter the debate? Better to cultivate your garden and seek shelter from the coming storm.

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