Peter Emmerson

The posturing and obfuscation displayed by team Miliband betrays other sub-executive, profound long-term flaws that pattern Labour’s ideological message, which have been incapacitating even competent Labour governors ever since 1945 when they changed the balance of responsibility for personal welfare in favour of governmental functionaries.  Living with the legacy of these changes has been tortuous, for what was deemed to be the panacea for social injustice, has turned-out to be nothing more than just another great experiment in socialism.  This outcome was extremely likely when you realize that the plans formulated by Beveridge’s group were driven more by wish-statements that privileged idealistic aims such as social justice and equality over practically established engineered objectives that could be evaluated and modified.  Concomitantly, politicians since 1945 have been involved in constant operational tinkering to defend governmentally managed welfare programmes against insatiable expectation and demand, as people gradually developed the habit of unloading their self-reliance onto governmental officers for things that had been largely personal/familial/neighbourhood responsibilities.  However, more radical changes were made after the election of 1979 as significant numbers of people voted for governmentally managed welfare to be dismantled.  How could team Attlee have been so naïve?

Labour’s willingness in 1945 to construct and put into operation an untested, prototype welfare model grounded in ideals was unfortunately very predictable.  One of the areas where developments in engineering have had little impact is political life.  Sadly, this is still the case.  Correspondingly, the standard procedures for analysing and solving political problems remain rooted in ancient theometaphysical conventions that utilize ideal terms such as ‘democracy’.  Oxford University degrees such as Philosophy, Politics & Economics, so connected with those who achieve political eminence (see Adrian Wooldridge’s article in The Sunday Times, 28/12/14, p22), evidence this pattern – why not EPE, Engineering, Politics & Economics?  20/01/15 was Democracy Day on BBC Radio 4.  I listened to a brief debate chaired by Today’s ultimate authority on these issues, the public philosopher, Michael Sandel from Harvard and the LSE.  We could have been in ancient Athens listening to Socrates (Plato).  Contemporary political thactivity is shot-through with fantastical notions like democracy that structure political analysis according to ancient idealistic rules whilst at the same time reinforcing the status and longevity of such ways of thacting and the people who purvey them.  Why is this a problem?  It is a problem because these techniques have failed us in some of the most pressing human tragedies: just consider our continuing preparedness to resort to serious violence in resolving human conflicts.  In addition, the problems that confront British people in 2015AD are very different from those of Greek people in 500BC.  We in Britain have benefitted enormously from taking an engineering approach to our material problems.  However, as stated above, we have seen much less application of this approach to psychosocial issues.  One reason for this limited development is our unquestioned reliance on obsolete, inappropriate ancient habits, which is why Sandel chaired the debate rather than a political engineer.  Isn’t 2500 years of failure sufficient time to judge such conventions unfit for purpose?  The limited level of penetration into political analysis by engineering methods is alarming.  Unfortunately, the nearest a systematic application of engineering methods has come to sorting out human problems is illness where we have largely jettisoned of Hippocratic and Galenic models.  Why do we continue on this merry go round of dreams as regards psychosocial issues?

People use their ideals or truth-beliefs in all sorts of ways, but I want to concentrate on how we deploy such fantasies to obtain sufficient influence to take control of our lives, whether it be in relation to our mundane problems or achieving high governmental office: listen to Barack Obama’s inaugural address of 2008 where he states his vision of the ‘change’ that could in fact not possibly come.  Unlike Obama, team Attlee achieved landslide victory in 1945 which provided them with a mandate to put their truth-beliefs into action and make big changes.  Truths function by reassuring us that we are in control of our circumstances.  For the most part truths come to us from previous generations as tried and tested, ready-made proverbial guides for managing life’s ups and downs.  Examples are: fatalistic beliefs, which allow us to offload responsibilities for what happens onto something or someone else – ‘what will be, will be’; rationalistic convictions, that motivate us to take responsibility and plan – ‘your fate is in your own hands’. 

There are however other, higher order truths, developed by professional truth-finders who have honed their techniques since ancient times in an attempt to manufacture knowledge that is immune to the perfidies of profane experience, knowledge that can be relied upon with absolute certainty.  This work has been carried out by two groups of people who operate interdependently: priests (theologians) who oversee supernatural (religious) knowledge and philosophers/pure mathematicians (metaphysicians) who supervise the formulation of reasoned/logical (secular) truths.  From what I can see these people have in common one aim and that is to find the absolute truth of things, hence, I call them theometaphysicians. 

Their programme of formal truth finding has been very influential.  The Ten Commandments that Moses is said to have received from God has been adopted by enormous numbers of people as well as Jews.  The ideas of ancient philosophers such as Plato and their logical methods have defined our ways of thacting for millennia.  The pure mathematics credited to Pythagoras continues to influence contemporary mathematicians and engineers.  These formal truths are absolute, they cannot be disproven.  This is their great attraction!  They provide security by reassuring us that certain knowledge and stability persists above, below and within mundanity (mundane existence), guiding its comparatively uncertain processes.  Knowing with certainty offers the possibility of absolute control over our fears and anxieties about earthly volatility: religious truths clearly have great utility in this respect as the willingness of martyrs to accept torturous deaths evidences!  Nonetheless, we must not underrate the significance of metaphysical truths such as justice and equality in human motivation.

The purveyors of these profoundest, truest of truths, offer up the possibility of thacting with absolute authority, control and security in a world that is always changing; absolute truths are secure mental platforms on which to stand and make judgements on chaotic life experiences!  Thus, these truths are held in highest regard and accrue serious status and influence, as do the theometaphysicians who supply them, whether priests like the Pope, philosophers like Michael Sandel or pure mathematicians like Stephen Hawking.  However, just because they are more truthful does not make them more useful.  In fact I would argue that the opposite is the case: using them distorts our perceptions and impedes the development of engineered problem solving efforts.  Absolute truths merely mimic earthly mundanity, they do not replicate it: such truths are not in evidence anywhere other than the minds of people: the absolute truth of the Ten Commandments is a matter of faith not fact; the absolute truth of a logical argument breaks down when the facts have to be taken into account; the absolute truth of Pythagoras’ theorem is reliant on a triangle that cannot exist.  Absolute truths are mental tools or what Tversky & Kahneman (1974) call heuristics, which do not constitute mundane reality as many influential people believe, they merely model it.  Absolute truth heuristics were developed by ancient people to deal with their specific fears and anxieties so that they could function effectively.  We have inherited their words and conventions and continue to apply them uncritically even when they have outlived their usefulness; because like them, absolute truths make us feel safe. 

Safety is experienced at various levels, one being self-belief.  By deploying a-t heuristics (absolute truths) we are safe in the knowledge that we can thact with conviction, even when confronted by serious resistance from people with far more influence than ourselves.  Belief in absolute truth will sustain us during periods of obscurity when all seems lost.  Orwell (1989, pp. 92-3) explains this process well in his book 1984 when describing what gives Winston Smith the strength and motivation to live with desperate isolation and resist Big Brother: “His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in the debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer.  And yet he was in the right!  They were wrong and he was right.  The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended.  Truisms are true, hold on to that! ……. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four.  If that is granted all else follows”.  Ideals can fortify us to take a stand, by providing us with something that is worth fighting and dying for – the absolute certainty that we are right and that anyone who disagrees is wrong and should be stopped.  Such certainty opens up the possibility of managing our fear and anxiety so that we can be assertive and live rather than just existing in dissonant apathy so well described by Sartre in The Roads to Freedom.  In giving us a definite reason to die a-t heuristics motivate us to live!

Nonetheless, the facts suggest that such beliefs are illusory as pointed out some 300 years ago by the philosopher David Hume.  As far as I can see, certainty of thaction is a habit learned from a previous generation, fostered by centuries of commitment to the efficacy of a-t heuristics conjured by ancient people very different from ourselves with comparatively little knowledge of engineering.  I want to look at a modern example, socialism, developed by theometaphysicians during the 18^th and 19^th centuries committed to ideals that celebrate and proselytize the virtues of togetherness or limited personal autonomy.  However, socialism is also an ideological weapon, in the grand Socratic dialectical fashion, with which to win an argument and if necessary mobilize an army of people with reason to fight and die in the battle with so-called capitalists, who are without doubt wrong.  From socialism’s point of view capitalists are bullies and liars who busy themselves exploiting their potential for greater personal autonomy through commercial thactivities.  From an engineering perspective both socialism, and capitalism for that matter, are a-t heuristics manufactured by theometaphysicians  to help us avoid engagement with comparatively uncertain mundanity, the former espousing ideals such as social justice and equality epitomized by Marx’ dialectical class model, the latter extolling the virtues of individual freedom and inequality governed by the divine hand of the market as per Smith’s model of political economy.  As such both socialism and capitalism provide definitive answers to what is going wrong and what needs to be done, opening up the possibility of achieving levels of self-belief (the illusion of conviction) needed to push on at all costs even in the face of serious resistance that may well end in martyrdom or killing others.  The a-t heuristic socialism offered justification for teams Stalin and Mao to sanction genocidal killing and the forced migration of large numbers of people who threatened the ideals of their revolutions.  On a less murderous scale, socialism authorized team Attlee to give government officials responsibility for managing personal welfare.  Both were done with conviction, conviction driven by self-belief in the absolute truth, the a-t heuristic that is socialism.  In fact, as with all a-t heuristics, socialism is an over-simplification of what goes on, high on ideals low on engineering, patterned by theometaphysical rules developed by modern specialists in the provision of certainty and control such as Marx, for imposition onto comparatively uncertain mundanity and its insecurities.  Rather than engage more fully with mundanity by deploying techniques of engineering that should make us wary of anything ending in ‘ism’, we continue to adopt illusions such as socialism to justify our feelings and make us feel safe in the fight with those with whom we disagree.  The absolute truth offloads personal responsibility for killing and dying.

We could easily discuss such issues in relation to another more recent version of conviction politics, associated with an equally idealistic enterprise: the obsession with the individual and the market that characterises the a-t heuristic capitalism, an ideal which drove team Thatcher to destroy the lives of so many who stood in their way.  This essay is not a polemic against socialism; it is a polemic against the committed and uncritical application of a-t heuristics.  In allowing the a-t heuristic of socialism to govern their policy making, team Attlee was thacting normally and duly delivered us down the well-trodden road of impossible dreamy abstractions and the continued deafness to those with little influence.  These conventions are so habituated into our thactivity that they seem as natural as drinking water.  In fact they are human inventions that desensitize our critical faculties to the extent that we ignore more fruitful, mundane, engineering forms of analysis.  Thus, we persist in deploying ideals ill-suited to analysing our political problems that were developed by people with very different priorities. Our engineering triumphs testify to the inadequacies of their ancient ways when dealing with earthly issues such as other people.  However, applying engineering techniques will be uncomfortable because they take us beyond our safety zone from certain knowledge into comparatively uncertain mundanity, where a-t heuristics are abandoned. Thus we are left with our much less secure engineered heuristics such as proverbial beliefs (p-b heuristics) rather than truths of any sort.  P-b heuristics are at best contingent, assessable as probabilities not certainties.  Living a life with p-b heuristics denies complete self-belief and correspondingly amplifies feelings of personal responsibility in the comparatively uncertain process making any decision.  As engineered heuristics don’t offer any ultimate authorities, living is more insecure and anxiety laden, a condition wrongly termed post-modern when in fact it is very, very modern.

Protestants are a good example of people who moved in this direction by rejecting the ultimate authority of Roman Catholic priests in wishing to know God for themselves.  Accordingly, Protestants engage with mundanity much more directly through personal reading and interpretation of the scriptures, God’s words, which must be made accessible by translation from the language of clerics, Latin, into German, English, Dutch etc. Such religious changes correspond to a push for general literacy: “if I don’t read my soul be lost, it’s nobody’s fault but mine” as the song goes.  Protestants need their personal bibles: salvation is a matter for you and your God; providence will inform you of your progress in doing God’s will.  Not unsurprisingly a further move towards mundanity was developed by someone brought up in this tradition – Nietzsche.  Nietzsche’s move was even more difficult than the move from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism because he abandoned supernatural safety altogether.  He was the last philosopher!  By smashing once and for all the theometaphysical model, his work put an end to the programme that was inaugurated by the post-Socratic ancient Greeks.  His philosophy of earthly solitude is as far as philosophers can go without becoming engineers.  He was paid back for his heresy by being ostracized and stigmatized.  His philosophy is an attempt to describe the agony and ecstasy of ‘overcoming’ his habituation to these ancient theometaphysical ways.  I would interpret his work as the impossible struggle to make philosophical sense of his fuller engagement with comparative uncertainty.  The legacy of his pioneering effort is to leave philosophical heuristics behind and use engineering heuristics to foster as full an engagement with comparatively uncertain mundanity as possible.  But as Nietzsche so bravely affirms, to leave the safety provided by absolute truths is very isolating and dangerous!  Concomitantly, we still largely maintain our passionate attachment to political ideals such as democracy, justice and equality continuing to apply them to our mundane problems just because they are truer and safer.  This is a serious mistake!