The inherent contradictions of truth

We say we value truth but favour our own version of it

No 569 Posted by fw September 16, 2012

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”  ―Friedrich Nietzsche

Continuing with the theme of truth, and with excerpts from Ophelia Benson’s and Jeremy Stangroom’s book, Why Truth Matters, Continuum Books, 2006, this post features selected passages from Chapter 1, The Antinomies* of Truth. (*inherent contradictions). Although the original text has been edited and abridged, the main ideas and supporting arguments have been maintained.

Chapter 1 – The Antinomies of Truth

We do not always love and embrace the truth

It is no great wonder that we do not always love and embrace the truth. We suspect that at least part of the truth (in some times and places) is that we are a nasty, brutal species with a strong taste for torture and murder, that whenever there is an opening we make serious sustained energetic efforts to eliminate whole branches of our own kind, that even in peaceful times we persecute and coerce and extort labour from each other, that anything the smallest bit admirable, disinterested, ameliorative about us is only a thin surface …

So it could be said that we have good reason to hate and fear the truth; to resist and reject it in order to take refuge in more emollient, hopeful interpretations. “Facts are precisely what they are not, only interpretations”, Nietzsche said: so if one interpretation makes us feel lost in space, we might as well pick another. That is the thought.

Thus the upshot is we don’t love the truth, not all of it, not all the time. We reserve the right, most of us, to accept some truths but to reject others, no matter how well warranted, how supported by evidence, how tightly argued. “That’s as may be”, we say or think, smiling thinly, “but there are other ways of viewing the matter.” No one is infallible, no one knows for certain, and I will think what I like.

The mental reservation method — We say we value truth but favor our own version of it

On some topics, many people are not really interested in believing the truth. They might prefer it if their opinion turns out to be true, but truth is not too important. To make it clear that truth is neither here nor there, they declare, “I am entitled to my opinion.” Once you hear these words, you should realize that it is simple rudeness to persist with the matter. You may be interested in whether or not their opinion is true, but take the hint, they aren’t.

The mental reservation method is useful and popular because it is simple and therefore easy: a labour-saving device. It obviates the need to come up with alternatives, suggest other hypotheses, give reasons, offer evidence, and think through implications.

We say we value truth but too often rely largely on authority figures to tell us what to think

Another method that shares this labour-saving character is the appeal to Authority: external denial rather than internal. This role of Authority – to tell people what to believe and think, or at least what to appear to believe and think – can be seen in two ways, or from two directions. It was coercive and authoritarian, but it was also in a sense liberating: it liberated people from responsibility and the hard work of thinking. It was external, imposed, top-down, but that very top-down externality made it a source of inner security and comfort.

Nevertheless, it may be that the basic idea – that the truth is what the higher authorities say it is, rather than what it is independent of any human – had its effect on habits of thought over all these years. The notion that certain special humans can decide what truth is entails believing that human decision has some sort of transformative effect on reality, bestowing truth or withholding it. Thus for instance it is still a very popular thought that, whatever the truth may be, the important thing is that everyone should be on the same page; that social cohesion and peace are much more important for everyone’s wellbeing and smooth functioning than are truth and free enquiry. On this view, truth is a political matter. It is what is good for the community, religious groups, union members, political parties, or other collectives.

This system or method is still popular not only because it promotes unity but also perhaps because it frees up a lot of energy. Letting the higher authorities, whether autocrat or majority opinion, do our affirming or denying for us saves us large amounts of time and effort, allowing us to get on with other things – earning a living, having fun, improving the world, smelling the flowers.

We say we value truth but block out opposing viewpoints by declaring certain topics to be taboo, sacred, off-limits.

Another tactic is to cordon off certain sets of ideas, to declare them special, inviolate, taboo, sacred: different from ordinary mundane sets of ideas. Salman Rushdie (who has intimate experience with this distinction) talked about this cordoning off in an article:

At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalize, but you have no respect for people’s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

This tactic has become a powerful way of shutting people up, because it operates not as external authority and coercion, which can be resented, resisted, laughed at, but as internalized guilt and bad conscience, which are much harder to resist or laugh off. If “The Bosses” tell us ‘you may not think that’, there seems to be a certain nobility in defiance and rebellion. But when the taboo issues not just from “The Bosses” but also from “The Community”, especially from The Community speaking on behalf of the victimized and downtrodden, then resistance becomes altogether more difficult.

This is arguably one of the most powerful and effective tools of denial going at present. Simply invoke the holy name of “The Community” or “Religious Beliefs” or “Their Culture”, and very often disagreement will slam to a halt, in a fog of embarrassment and guilt.

There are at present many such ring-fenced, Taboo no-go areas in disputes over truth; places where disagreeing with people is treated as tantamount to peeing in their soup. Where people see themselves and are seen by others as entirely justified in declaring themselves “Offended”, which being interpreted means, not “Let us eagerly continue this discussion in an attempt to discover the truth“ of the matter, without fear or favour’, but rather, “This discussion must immediately cease in order to spare my outraged feelings, and it would be no bad thing if you rescinded what you just said, apologized humbly, and made a large donation to a charity of my choice by way of recompense.”

We say we value truth but, if all else fails, we resort to maligning or ridiculing the messenger with opposing viewpoints

Shooting the Messenger is generally more difficult in modern times – although not always and everywhere difficult enough. Galileo was coerced. Books were placed on the papal index. Stalin and Hitler silenced people in wholesale lots, as did the Red Guards and the Khmer Rouge, Mao and Pol Pot, Pinochet and the Shah. Salman Rushdie was fatwa’d, a translator of his book was murdered, Theo van Gogh murdered, and so on, into the bleak future.

We say we value truth but sometimes employ techniques of confusion and obfuscation to support our own versions of “the truth”…

Confusion and obfuscation are arguably the best way to go. Obfuscation is legal, it’s easy, there is always an abundant supply and it often does the trick. The more abstract or unclear it is exactly what one is arguing, the more trouble one’s opponents will have in refuting one’s claims. Confusion is easily created by using a shotgun approach – spray the opponent with a profusion of claims until they give up and wander off in fatigue and exasperation. It’s always worth a try.

We say we value truth but then search for opposing evidence to support our version of “the truth”

Looking for rival evidence, evidence that will support the opposite conclusions from the ones the searcher dislikes looks at first blush like a perfectly legitimate move – like not even a move at all, but simply what enquirers and researchers and truth-seekers do: look for evidence. It looks as if we’ve left the territory of truth-denial and are back in the well-lit world of properly conducted research. But no. The trouble is that an enquirer who starts with a claim he wants to find evidence for is extremely likely to overlook disconfirming evidence.

What we called looking for alternative evidence, that is, knowing, in advance what one wants to find and then searching it out is fundamentally at variance with the methods and values of rational enquiry.

We say we value truth but won’t hesitate to seek a rival explanation that “fits our facts”…

A similar approach – similar in that it starts from a desired conclusion, then devises a way to get there, and then proceeds to carry out the plan – is that of seeking a rival explanation. If you don’t like the theory that (as far as present knowledge can tell) best fits and explains the evidence, then you set to work and think up another. It is always possible to think of alternative explanations for any set of data. The alternative explanations may be awkward, contorted, uneconomical and generally far-fetched and ignore norms of elegance, beauty, plausibility, avoidance of supernatural explanations and gods of the gaps. But if one is not deterred by such considerations, alternative explanations can be generated and made to ‘fit’.

We say we value truth but when it comes to a choice between the path of rational enquiry versus that of personal wishes, beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, we choose the latter

Should rational enquiry, sound evidence, norms of accuracy, logical inference trump human needs, desires, fears, hopes? Or should our wishes and beliefs, politics and morality, dreams and vision be allowed to shape our decisions about what constitutes good evidence, what criteria determine whether an explanation is supported by evidence or not, what is admissible and what isn’t? After all, what is important to us is important to us.

The truth is important to us, but so are our needs and desires and hopes and fears. Without them we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves. Without them, we think, we would merely be something like an adding machine. An adding machine can get at the truth, given the right input, but it doesn’t care. We want the truth but we also want to care – wanting the truth is indeed inseparable from caring. We want it, we care about it, it matters, and so do various other things we want and care about, some of which are threatened by the truth. So we’re stuck, and keep arriving back at the fork in the path again.

But we have to choose. Even though our choosing doesn’t make the crux go away, even though we still have to go on making micro-choices over and over again, still, we have to choose which fork in the path we are going to take. If we don’t, we have a tendency not to notice the crux when it does appear. If we’ve never bothered to decide that truth matters and that it shouldn’t be subject to our wishes – that, in short, wishful thinking is bad thinking – then we are likely to be far less aware of the tension. We simply allow ourselves, without much worry or reflection, to assume that the way humans want the world to be is the way the world is, more or less by definition – and endemic confusion and muddle is the result. There may be reasons to prefer true beliefs to false ones.

Why should we prefer to believe true beliefs over false ones? What reasons? There are many. One is that truth is something of an all-or-nothing proposition. It is intimately related to concepts such as consistency, thoroughness, universal applicability, and the like. If one decides that truth doesn’t matter in one area, what is to prevent one from deciding it doesn’t matter in any, in all?

It is surely of the nature of truth that it has to be all of a piece. Its norms have to apply here as well as there, if they are to apply at all. That’s why relativism about truth is always self-undermining. If we say ‘there is no truth, truth is an illusion, a myth, a construct, a mystification’, then that statement is not true – so there is truth then. If we say ‘your truth is as true as mine’ then you can say ‘my truth is that your truth is not true’, and round we go.

Such reasons are especially cogent as soon as we leave the comfort of our own minds and enter the public realm; as soon as we start influencing each other, by talking, arguing, persuading, communicating – and above all, by teaching. If we are going to influence people, it’s important that we get it right.

Fair Use Notice: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing

Why Truth Matters

No 568 Posted by fw September 15, 2012

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ―Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

In my post The politics of flagrant lying in U.S. elections, (September 10, 2012), I cited the host of an Aljazeera weekly video program who, in his introduction to a segment entitled, The Politics of Telling the Truth, asks – “Living in a post-factual America, does the truth even matter anymore when the prize for winning this election is the White House?”

As the program goes on to evidence, it appears truth matters not at all in post-factual America. In the words of a Republican pollster: “We are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Well, truth may not matter that much to Romney, Ryan, Obama and many other U.S. (and Canadian) politicians, but it certainly matters to Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom co-authors of Why Truth Matters, Continuum Books, 2006.

To help explain why truth matters to Britons Benson and Stangroom, below are selected extracts from the final chapter (8) of their book, also titled, by the way, Why Truth Matters. The subheadings, added hyperlinks and text highlighting are mine. (I have not bothered to use ellipsis or to indicate gaps between the selections but they are in the same order as they appear in the book).

Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom

Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom

Selections

REASON 1 — Truth matters because we are the only species that has the ability to discover it

Why does truth matter? It matters because we are the only species we know of that has the ability to find it out. In a way, that makes it almost a duty to do so. A duty imposed by no one, for which we don’t have to answer – but a kind of duty all the same.

However, some people prefer to protect their illusions

However, not everyone sees the matter that way. It’s a human impulse to try to understand and investigate, but it’s also a human impulse to try to protect our illusions, or at least a little breathing room for our illusions; to keep some possibility of optimism, which can often seem to require the kind of blurring or minimization of truth.

The Left seems to have a built-in motivation to improve social ills

There is a political dimension to this impulse. To the extent that the Left is committed to hopes for improving the intractable social ills that have tormented humans as far back as we can see – inequality, exploitation, injustice, violence – it seems to have built-in motivation for wanting to be hopeful about the future.

Social ills tend not to be on the Right’s radar

People who are less worried about social ills – because they happen elsewhere, to other people, or are better than they used to be, or are necessary for the economy, or are just generally not on the radar – are more willing to think the future will be much like the present only with more electronics.

REASON 2 — Truth matters when it liberates us from postmodernist, emotionally charged, rhetorical flimflam

Postmodernism has eroded public belief in reason, evidence, logic and argument

Thus if postmodernism  – [postmodernism is based on the position that reality is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality] – has busily eroded public belief in reason, evidence, logic and argument for the past 40 years or so, as it has, then all too often it is the case that rhetoric is all that’s in play. And behold, it wins, even though the other side has the better case. All rhetoric has to do to win is convince people, it doesn’t have to do it legitimately.

‘Facts’, according to postmodernism, are held to be ‘relative’ to the speaker or group

So epistemic relativism – [facts used to establish the truth or falsehood of any statement are understood to be relative to the perspective of those proving or falsifying the proposition] — makes possible a world where bad arguments and no evidence are helped to win public discussions over justified arguments and good evidence. This is emancipatory? Not in our view. It is not emancipatory because it helps emotive rhetoric to prevail over reason and evidence, which means it helps falsehood to prevail over truth. Being trapped in a world where lies can’t be countered seems a strange idea of emancipation.

But how is justice to be served where there are just “points of view” alongside doubt that ‘evidence’ is even possible or attainable?

If postmodernism amounts to a thoroughgoing doubt that ‘evidence’ is possible or attainable, along with doubt-free respect and attentions for points of view, then what is to prevent extrajudicial but destructive and punitive show trials from being staged whenever anyone has a grievance no matter how ill-founded?

Too much attention to “points of view” with too little scepticism can get innocent people convicted of crimes, on the basis of testimony from people with “points of view” but no evidence. A number of US court cases dealing with putative recovered memory, Satanic ritual abuse and child abuse in day-care facilities have achieved just such a result in the past two decades. Law-enforcement officials and juries were solemnly instructed to “listen to the children”, and long prison sentences were handed out to people who were not, in fact, Satanists or secret child-murders. The dangers seem obvious, but not everyone sees them.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm feels a personal responsibility to rebut those who hold that “there is no clear difference between fact and fiction.” In the interests of social justice, truth does matter, as he illustrates

[British historian] Eric Hobsbawm used to think, he says, that the profession of history “could at least do no harm” but now he knows it can. Historians’ studies can turn into bomb factories. Thus historians have “a responsibility to historical facts in general” and to criticize the “politico-ideological abuse of history in particular.” He is obliged to talk about this responsibility partly because of “the rise of ‘postmodernist’ intellectual fashions in Western universities which imply that “there is no clear difference between fact and fiction.”

But there is [a difference], and for historians, even the most militantly anti-positivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental. We cannot invent our facts … Either the present Turkish government, which denies the attempted genocide of the Armenians in 1925, is right or it is not.

These and many other attempts to replace history by myth and invention are not merely bad intellectual jokes. After all, they can determine what goes into textbooks, as the Japanese authorities knew, when they insisted on a sanitized version of the Japanese war in China for use in Japanese classrooms.

Historical accounts must be better, i.e., more truthful, regardless of the outcome

The only way to counter historical lies, distortions, misrepresentations and disguises is with better accounts: better because more truthful. There is certainly no guarantee that the truth of the matter will be what one wants to hear, but the only alternative to trying to get at the truth is simply allowing exculpatory fictions to flourish. That outcome tends to outrage the many victims of historical atrocities.

Postmodernist fashion – or should we say ‘fiction’ – is afoot and real tyranny is being unleashed

But the idea is abroad – partly due to that “rise of postmodernist fashion” in universities – that in fact anti-realism, general skepticism (except about one’s own truth-claims), anti-scientism are indeed emancipatory, that the power of science, rational enquiry, logic, and evidence to get at the truth is a kind of tyranny, and something we need liberation from.

But the real tyranny is being required to let humans – the community, the mullahs, the Vatican, the Southern Baptist Convention [and, may I add, the politicians] – decide what the truth is independent of the evidence – cut free from the facts of the world. That’s tyranny for you.

Rhetoric alone, absent evidence, is not liberating

Rhetoric itself in the absence of evidence is not emancipatory; rhetoric not as a communication aid, an addition to reliable evidence and sound inference, but as a substitute in their absence, is the very opposite of emancipatory. It’s the equivalent of forced confessions – the kind that are thrown out of properly conducted courts, because they are not reliable.

Rhetoric represents the replacement of truth by will or, if you wish, truth by decree

Rhetoric is not emancipatory because it represents the replacement of truth by will. It is a Rube Goldberg contraption: a feeble contrivance of duct-tape and paper clips. But truth and will are two entirely different kinds of things. Will can do a lot, but it cannot determine what the truth is. A world in which people decide (wilfully) to pretend that it can, may be a lot of things – unified, reassuring, simplified – but emancipated is surely not one of them. That world is the Vatican’s dream-world where the pope declares what is true about anything he is moved to declare on, and his subjects accept that without further investigation. Mind-forged manacles, in short.

In the final analysis, truth that boils down solely to a matter of personal preference is no truth at all

In the end, this boils down to preferences. Even the preference for a world where the lies of genocidal tyrannies are eventually corrected is still ultimately a preference; a highly reasonable, well-grounded preference but still a preference.

If we didn’t have minds and emotions, and the moral thoughts that go with them, mass slaughters would just be something that happened, like rain.

Some prefer to live in a make-believe world, whereas truth seekers prefer to try to find out what really is true

Some people do prefer to live in a thought-word where priests and mullahs claim to decide what is true. Others prefer to live in a thought-world where ideas about what is true are lenient, flexible, fuzzy around the edges, where it is possible to sort-of-believe, half believe and half hope, believe in an as-if or storytelling or daydreaming way. Others prefer, genuinely prefer, to try to figure out what really is true, as opposed to what might be, or appears to be, or should be. This is a preference. One can adduce moral and psychological reasons for both preferences.

Truth may be tentatively based on “good reasons” without being final ones

The reasons we’ve given for thinking truth matters rest on preferences, and there’s no final definitive knock-down case for them, at least not that we’ve been able to think up or find. But reasons can be good reasons without being final ones.

REASON 3 — Truth matters, really matters, because it makes it possible for us to create a true self, a self worth having

And one last good reason for thinking that truth matters, it seems to us, is all about preferences. In the largest and most humanly important sense, it’s about happiness, flourishing, enthusiasm, about what makes life worth living, why we prefer being awake to being asleep, why it’s a privilege to be human. It’s about why truth matters. Really matters. Not in a dull perfunctory dutiful sense, but in a real, lived, felt sense.

This is the kind of mattering we’re talking about here – personal but also public, subjective but also communicable and sharable, immediate but also permanent, cognitive but also emotional. In a way, it’s about community and solidarity, but it’s a community that thinks truth matters rather than one that prefers solidarity to truth.

This reason is based on the thought that enquiry, curiosity, interest, investigation, explanation-seeking, are highly important components of human happiness.

Public rhetoric that promotes family, safety, money, and fame sells us short. Surely there is so much more to life

This doesn’t appear to be a terrible popular thought right now. Public rhetoric tends to aim so much lower, for some reason. It seems to see us all as hunkered down, and settling, settling for minimal, parochial, almost biological [and psychological] satisfactions – family, safety, money [and, may I add, fame]. But that underestimates us. We want more than that. We want to ask questions, we want to learn, we want to understand. That’s a very human taste and pleasure. It seems a waste not to use human capacities and abilities. Anyone can settle for just survival and reproduction and comfort, but we can do more. That’s a privilege – and it seems a kind of sacrilege not to use it.

Real enquiry presupposes that there are worthwhile things to discover and that truth matters in their discovery

And real enquiry presupposes that truth matters. That it is true that there is a truth of the matter we’re investigating, even if it turns out that we can’t find it. Maybe the next generation can, or two or three or ten after that, or maybe just someone more skilled than we are. But we have to think there is something to find in order for enquiry to be genuine enquiry and not just an arbitrary game that doesn’t go anywhere. We like games, but we also like genuine enquiry. That’s why truth matters.

Fair Use Notice: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing

Wishful thinking can lead political activists into the quicksand of false beliefs

No 567 Posted by fw September 13, 2012

Any political analysis that is at all reformist in its views is likely to include an element of wishful thinking. And wishful thinking can lead political activists into the quicksand of false beliefs.

That in a nutshell is a central theme of Chapter 6 in the book Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, Continuum Books, 2006.

Here, extracted from the beginning of Chapter 6 — Wishful Thinking and Epistemological Confusion — is, I think, the essence of the case in support of their thesis in the authors’ own words. The subheading, hyperlinks and text highlighting are mine.

(*Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses mainly the following questions: What is knowledge? How is knowledge acquired? To what extent is it possible for a given subject or entity to be known? Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification).

Wishful Thinking and Epistemological Confusion

Two stories indicative of wishful thinking

In the July 1986 edition of the now defunct Marxism Today, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques argued that a new kind of politics was sweeping the UK [People Aid: A new politics sweeps the land]. It was, they claimed, rooted in the various charity events which had taken place over the previous twelve months: Band Aid, Live Aid and Sport Aid. This new kind of politics, we were told, offered an alternative vision of society, organized around a dynamic of ‘caring’, and it represented a severe blow to the ideology of selfishness which underpinned Thatcherism. Hall and Jacques’ optimism was short-lived, however; by December 1986, they were arguing that even those people opposed to Thatcherism were not ‘for’ anything else in particular, and that there was no end in sight to the ‘nightmare’ of Conservative government. [No light at the End of the Tunnel].

Fast forward some seventeen years, and it is possible to find Madeleine Bunting arguing in the Guardian that the demonstration against the Iraq War which occurred in London on 15 February 2003 represented a defining moment in contemporary political culture. After such a day, she informed us, it was so much harder to speak of the selfish individualism of consumer society. And about the consequences of a war in Iraq, she opined:

“What happens once the orphans, the widowed and the killed appear on our screens? The stubbornness will become anger. We said No, Not in our Names and we meant it. Blair will never be forgiven. A tragic end to a good prime minister.” [We are the people, Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, February 17, 2003]

Reformist beliefs lauded as turning points may turn out to be fleeting

The point about these two stories is that they are indicative of a wishful thinking which all too easily infects political analysis. It might have appeared to Hall and Jacques in the summer of 1986 that the hegemony of Thatcherism had been broken, but a year later the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher were re-elected to government with a majority of 102. And to some of the people marching through London early in 2003, it might have seemed that they were part of a new kind of political mobilization, but six months later similar events attracted only a tiny fraction of the number who attended the February [Iraq War] demonstration.

Lesson: Be wary of wishful thinking based on dubious notions of human rationality infecting reformist’s analysis

Wishful thinking of course is not a monopoly of the Left. Libertarians [those who advocate maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state] rely on some highly dubious notions of human rationality, of universal access to complete and disinterested information, of the market’s ability to solve all problems, and the like. Conservatives irritated by some of the products of modernity like to counter progressive accounts of history with a version in which the present is a dreadful falling-off from the Golden Age when people knew their places and everything was bliss.

Political thinking by its very nature is likely to include wishful thinking

In short, any kind of political theorizing is by its very nature likely to include an element of wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is in a sense fundamental to political thinking, is woven into the very heart of it. At least, into any political theorizing and tendency that is at all reformist in its views, as opposed to simply more of the same [theorizing] please. Political thought in other words generally includes a prescriptive element as well as a descriptive. It is about ought as well as is – that is part of what Left and Right mean: we should do this, or alternatively that.

According to Hannah Arendt, the ability to bring about political change necessarily involves the ability to lie

Reformist political thinking is about change, and human efforts to make change. In order to conceive of, argue for, and make political change one has to think about it: one has to imagine that things could be otherwise. One has to entertain counterfactuals, look at alternatives, ponder thought experiments. In a sense one has to tell lies.

Hannah Arendt pointed this out in an essay on the Pentagon Papers in 1971, in which she noted that truthfulness has never been a political virtue, and that it is surprising how little attention philosophers and political theorists have paid to the significance of this fact for our capacity to second-guess what happens to be the case.

In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth – the ability to lie – and the capacity to change facts – the ability to act – are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source imagination. [Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers, by Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1972].

The ability to think the thing which is not, is the crack by which wishful thinking gets in

Looked at from this angle, this ability to think the thing which is not, is an essential human ability; without it nothing could ever improve except by accident. It is a good thing. But it is also the crack by which wishful thinking gets in. We want things to be better – so we may start to delude ourselves that it won’t be too terribly difficult to make them better.

The key to making things better—especially for the left —  is to presume the infinite plasticity of human nature

One key way to doing this is by insisting on the infinite plasticity of human nature. Any change in social arrangements is at least possible because there is nothing built into our natures that would rule that ‘anything’ out. It may be that left-wing thought is more dependent on this view than right-wing thought.

Conservatives (though not libertarians and anarchists, which can be either Right or Left) tend to emphasize human limits and limitations… Progressives tend to emphasize Romantic notions of human perfectibility and glorious potential.

Progressive thinking rests on the mistaken view that human beings are blank slates, thus allowing the possibility of human perfectibility

Progressive thinking of this kind is founded on the Lockean view that human beings are blank slates; that whatever one finds in their minds has come in from the outside. The importance of this doctrine is that it allows the possibility of the perfectibility of humankind. If people behave badly – if they harm each other in various ways, for example, it is because of distorted social relations; or a breakdown in the normative system of society. It is not because they are dispositionally inclined towards aggression or selfishness. It is possible, therefore, to look forward to the day when human beings will live in harmony with each other; if you get society right, then you will get people right.

Not so fast — The blank slate premise conflicts with a trove of empirical evidence

However, the trouble with this view is that it runs contrary to a wealth of evidence which suggests that Homo sapiens is far from being a blank state. [See, for example, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (202) by Steven Pinker. Pinker argues that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological  adaptations]. And, of course, one result of holding to a view which flies in the face of evidence is that you very quickly get into difficulties if you try to build a political theory on top of it.

Where Karl Marx got it wrong

This is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Marxism. It is debatable whether Karl Marx was committed to a genuinely blank-slate view of human nature. However, he was certainly in the spirit of this view with his argument that the ills of society, and indeed of humankind, are ultimately a function of the way in which production was organized; that is, that they are societal – or material – in origin.

Marx’s utopian theory was based on a highly implausible claim, a true example of wishful thinking

Two key concepts drive this argument: class conflict and alienation. It was Marx’s claim that all hitherto existing societies have been based on a fundamental conflict between those who own and control the means of production and those who don’t. In capitalism, this means a conflict between two great antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (who own only their labour power). In this scheme, the proletariat are the bearers of the emancipatory potential of humankind. As a collectivity, a class-for-itself, they hold the ability to abolish all class distinctions, instituting a new form of society based on collective ownership; in doing so they will end the alienation of people from the products of their labour, from the labour process itself and from their species-being.

At base, Marxism is just another utopian theory, albeit dressed up in some fancy philosophical clothes. Communism is posited as the end state of history. It is a form of social existence devoid of systematic conflict and antagonism. People in communist society – rational, self-aware and other-regarding – will no longer be estranged from each other or themselves.

The major problem with this vision of a future without conflict is that it is predicated on the highly implausible claim that one can eradicate strife from human social relations simply by altering the material condition in which people live. In other words, it is a true example of wishful thinking. [It flies in the face of abundant empirical evidence which suggests that violence and aggression are an inevitable part of the human condition].

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[As an aside, the passage below is where the “epistemic confusion” of the authors’ title creeps in. I introduce it only in passing. For the purposes of this post, it can safely be ignored].

It is one thing to say that people should not be oppressed and exploited; it is quite another to claim that the ‘ways of knowing’ [the epistemology] of the oppressed and the exploited are privileged in some systematic way. Not least, the oppressed and the exploited are not a solid undifferentiated mass, nor are they a unified univocal group every member of which has identical interests with every other. [It is not uncommon for the oppressed and exploited to be victimized by others within their own ranks]. (Page 130)

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