The genes and geography paper is out

Our paper "Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain" is out in Nature Human Behaviour. I and Abdel Abdellaoui, the lead author, have written a non-technical piece about it in The Conversation, and here's another article from Abdel. The short version: we look at genetic differences across different areas of the UK, in particular rich and poor regions, and find that they are increasing. We use polygenic scores – DNA-based estimates of a person’s characteristics, like their education level, height, personality or proneness to disease. Over the past half-century, people with high polygenic scores for educational attainment have been leaving poor areas and moving to richer ones, making Britain more unequal. Here, I just want to give some more personal reflections on the paper.

First, I’m very happy with this work. Though I only contributed a small part to a much larger body of evidence pulled together by Abdel, I still feel proud to be part of this project. I am mostly a sceptic about “scientism” in the social sciences – the idea that we can discover timeless truths about society, the way the hard sciences do for the natural world. But there is genuine science to be done, and in my view this is an example. Much is still unclear about the import of these results, and there are still many interesting questions to explore, but the paper proves its core claims beyond reasonable doubt.

Second, it’s been an interesting process. The paper’s topic – genetic differences across different regions – is controversial. Early on, I predicted that people would either see our results as obvious, or as unconscionable. The preprint generated a lot of tweets. When I put an early chart from the paper on Facebook, one person accused me of “shitting out” a random result and unfriended me. I was also accused of being part of the Bremainer elite. Heh. Needless to say, this paper makes no claims about the rights and wrongs of Brexit. I expect more of this in future (and, to people outraged by our findings: would you prefer us to change the data?)

Then, I am still very uncertain about the practical implications of the results. Partly this is because some scientific uncertainties still remain. Our Conversation article glosses over the fact that geographic clustering of genetic variation raises awkward technical issues for geneticists. DNA data does not magically rule out confounding variables. If people with high polygenic scores for educational attainment live close to each other, how much of the “effect” of the score is really due to the environment they live in? Within-family studies, which give true causal estimates of these effects, due to the “lottery of meiosis” – the fact that siblings randomly get different amounts of Mummy’s and Daddy’s DNA and hence different polygenic scores – limit this concern. But it still needs to be investigated further.

But even if all the scientific uncertainty were resolved, I’d still be unsure how to respond to our findings. Our Conversation article gets at one point: genetic differences exist between regional populations, and these are likely to explain some of the regions’ economic performance, and maybe also other outcomes such as health outcomes – though this is still unclear.

What should we do about this, though? How serious is it? H. G. Wells’ Time Machine is a nightmare vision of the future, where the human race separates into privileged, childlike Elois and the underground Morlocks, descendants of the working class, who feed on them.

London 2019: Angry Morlocks savage an isolated Eloi. Source

Should we be that worried? Eh, probably not. We still know so little about the pathways from DNA to complex social outcomes like education. But should we be somewhat worried? Maybe.

One point is quite simple. We show differences between rich and poor area averages for many polygenic scores. For a generation or more, geneticists fought to persuade social scientists that individual differences in outcomes may reflect genetics rather than the environment. I’d say that battle is mostly won. With these results, we can start having the same debate about geographic differences. Commentators and policy reports often point to regional inequalities as evidence of social injustice, or of institutional failings in the worse-off places. (Here is a recent report from the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, about the very areas our article focuses on; here's The Mirror blaming Thatcher, though in fact, these areas were declining from the 1920s onwards....) Now, another potential explanation is available.

That does not mean there is nothing to do about these inequalities – as anyone who wears spectacles should know, genetic does not mean unalterable. But it does challenge the presumption that all geographic inequalities must be down to social or institutional differences. It ain’t necessarily so.

Why I am a nationalist

There are three attitudes you can take to the world around you. You can be nationalist or patriotic, caring about your country as a whole and trying to improve it. You can be self-interested, caring for yourself and perhaps your family. Or you can care about the poor in your country, and try to improve their position. Just for a simple label, let’s call this being a socialist.

Garibaldi, another bearded nationalist

 Some people think there is a fourth position: being an internationalist and caring about the world as a whole. There are some saints who truly act on this ideal, but they are few. Most people who call themselves internationalist behave quite like self-interested people. In other words, internationalism is hot air. There is a reason for this. Helping people is not achieved by sitting and wishing it. It requires institutions and organizations. The most important mutual help organizations in the modern world are nation-states. Without these, internationalism is reduced to good intentions.*

So, the important choice is between attitudes to the state we are in. Should we spend our energy trying to make our nation better for everyone, or should we try to make it more equal, giving more to the poor and taxing the rich?

I forgot self-interest. Though I am certainly no less selfish than other people, I don’t find selfishness attractive as a philosophy of life. I cannot prove it is wrong, so I will leave it at that.

Helping the poor might seem noble, but the struggle between poor and rich is zero-sum. Redistribution cannot make us all richer, and too much redistribution can even make us all poorer. In the 19^th century, the poor might starve. Fighting for them made sense, since a dollar redistributed was worth much more to the poor person. In rich countries in the 21^st century, poverty is relative. That does not make it trivial, but it does mean the problems of poverty are complex and cannot be solved by redistribution alone. Otherwise we would have already solved them, since all modern democracies redistribute massively.

Nationalism, on the other hand, means trying to make your nation stronger and better. Doing this benefits everyone in your country. So, it is better to be a nationalist than a socialist (in the broad sense of trying to improve the position of the poor). Nationalism potentially benefits everyone. Socialism helps the poor but harms the rich.

Nationalism can go too far, so that we try to benefit our country at a cost to other countries, for example, by fighting wars of conquest. Some people think that we should separate patriotism (good) from nationalism (bad). This is a mistake. It is like thinking that because you can be too tall, there are two kinds of height: good height and bad height. Nationalism and patriotism are two words for the same thing.

I could say “I am a patriot” but that sounds anodyne. Since nationalism is controversial today, whereas it ought to be less controversial than socialism, I prefer to say I am a nationalist. (Would you have read this post if it were entitled Why I am a patriot?)


* Of course, there are organizations dedicated to helping people internationally, like development NGOs. Some of these surely do wonderful work. Overall, though, their level of success is weak. After mountains of study, there is little evidence that international aid helps countries develop. It may even harm them, by supporting corrupt officials and politicians. One reason for this poor record is probably that well-intentioned outsiders fail to understand what is going on in the places they are trying to help.

A history of Brexit from the earliest times

1. To understand Brexit, we need to start early enough – say, in 1815, on the battlefield in the aftermath of Waterloo. Thread your way through the masses of wounded, dead and dying, and consider: democracy did not spread through Europe because of Progress or Enlightenment. It spread because military technology favoured the development of mass citizen armies. These armies made citizens powerful, and over time that power was reflected in the political system. Political economists have found empirical support for this process, but the best description was given by Céline in his novel Journey to the End of the Night:

... it was the philosophers who first told stories to the people…. That’s it, the people started saying, that’s just it! That’s exactly it! Let’s all die for that! The people is always so keen to die…. “Long live Diderot,” they yelled and then “Hurray for Voltaire!”… At least those guys won’t let the people die in ignorance and superstition…. First up, may everyone know how to read the newspapers! It’s healthy! By God! And quick! No more illiterates! They’re not needed! Nothing but citizen-soldiers! Who vote! Who read! Who fight! Who march! Who blow kisses!.... And that was the send-off of the first battalions of the frenzied emancipated! The first of the voting, flag-waving sods that Dumouriez led off to get shot up in Flanders.

The aftermath of Waterloo: dead and dying citizen-soldiers

2. Democracy means deciding by majority rule. Sometimes the majority will be narrow, but if narrow majorities cannot get their way, then you do not have democracy but some other system. (After all, if 80% of the citizens favour a policy, then even authoritarian regimes are likely to implement it.)

3. There is no magic to democracy. Voters are unlikely to think hard about their choices, since each individual has such little influence on the outcome. Democracy does not guarantee sensible outcomes.

4. Since democracy is majority rule, it also means that the majority will tax the minority and transfer money to themselves. Indeed, most democracies have generous redistributive welfare states. Conservatives have always worried this will lead to the downfall of democracy in a spiral of expropriative taxation. In the 1970s, there were fears that Britain was turning into an elective dictatorship.

5. However, the peace afforded by Europe, and the shift in warfare away from mass citizen armies towards more capital-intensive technology, removed the underlying cause for democracy’s spread. Although the high point is usually seen as the 1990s after the collapse of the Socialist bloc, in fact, even in the 1970s, limits began to be set to the power of democratic majorities.

6. The courts have been one actor involved in imposing these limits. Government actions have become increasingly justiciable, and are now regularly challenged in courts. This is a deep change in the UK’s political system, in which, traditionally, parliamentary sovereignty had been central.

7. This change was always a matter of politics. No political scientist should take seriously the judiciary’s claim to stand above politics. Judges are people with interests, like the rest of us. This is obvious in the US, where some judges are even elected.

8. Another limit to the power of majorities is competition between governments. Exit to a different state lets individuals avoid burdensome taxes. In turn, the prospect of this flight acts as a deterrent on expropriative taxation. This may be one reason why the US has stayed democratic for so long – it is a highly federalised system, which in addition had an open frontier for the first half of its existence. Very highly redistributive polities, such as socialist states, have always had to ban emigration.

9. The EU came into being in order to bind France and Germany together and preserve the peace in Europe. But as it grew it fulfilled another function, of allowing people, goods and capital to flow between states. This promise was especially valuable to those in poor countries with inefficient governments, but it provided a safety valve for the rich, talented and mobile everywhere. Europe began to develop as a network of cities, competing for intellectual capital.

In the Monocle world view, skilled mobile labour chooses between competing cities...

10. Those left behind without transferable skills, and with stronger ties in social networks at home, did not see the benefits of exit as a safety net for the rich. They felt threatened by the entry of poorer workers from the east of Europe, and by the possible collapse of the democratic welfare state. The Brexit vote was an attempt to tie the elites back to their poorer co-nationals, to limit both entry and exit.

... but not everybody is a fan of the highly mobile rich.

11. Since the referendum, the UK’s political system has not negotiated successfully or unified around a political strategy. The reason for this is that 80% of MPs favour remaining within the EU. Referendums have a weakness, which is that they mandate a policy without voting in representatives to implement that policy. The reason Parliament did not successfully negotiate Brexit in the past three years is not that Brexit is impossibly difficult. It is that Parliament did not want Brexit.

12. Indeed, the whole political and social system did not want Brexit. Leave won by votes counted, but if those votes had been weighted by political power, income, or social influence, then the result would have been 80-20 remain. In the normal course of things – even in democracies, where majority rule decides the overall shape of taxation and redistribution – what happens is determined by the weight of political power, income and social influence. We are therefore in an unusual situation, where the principle of democracy challenges the normal way things work.

13. The courts are simply another organ by which the social system expresses its demands. This is no disrespect to the judges involved in the ruling on the recall of parliament. It is certainly an unprecedented intervention into politics. But the legal groundwork for this kind of intervention was laid over a long period by the increasing justiciability of political decisions – perhaps as a response to the flaws in democratic politicians’ decision-making. They are simply pushing further on down a well-trodden path.

14. We are in the middle of a struggle between democracy, and the ordinary way of deciding things in a society, which is that the rich, established and powerful get their way.

15. There is no particular reason you should favour democracy in this struggle. Voters can be stupid. The outcome of votes can be stupid too. A bare majority is hardly more likely to be right than wrong. Political campaigns rarely come up to the ideal of rational debate. You may very well prefer an enlightened bureaucracy with the occasional vote as a safety valve – like, say, the EU today, whose Parliament has about as much power as the Imperial German Parliament in 1912.

16. But you should be clear what you want. If you think majority rule is a bad idea, then say so and be honest about it. You should not pretend that you care about the will of the people, or that asking again until you get the right answer is democratic, or that the referendum result was not truly democratic because the campaign did not come up to your ideal of debate, or that Parliament is defending its proper role when it tries to settle the government’s foreign policy in advance (another unprecedented innovation). This is sanctimonious hypocrisy.

17. The day after the referendum (in which I voted remain, by the way) I spoke to a Big Issue seller. “It won’t happen,” he said. “If voting changed anything they’d ban it.” I was more sanguine. I thought that the urge to preserve democratic legitimacy would be strong among elected representatives. But his comments have resonated with me over the past three years.

18. Personally – perhaps out of nostalgia – I favour democracy. Maybe it was stupid to allow a direct vote which risked bringing the principle of majority rule into conflict with the wishes and beliefs of the most influential. But if we do so, and the whole political system promises that the vote will be meaningful, then I think we had better implement that vote. Otherwise, who are we kidding with this democracy stuff? For that reason, I am now a Brexiteer.

19. I hope that we will soon have an election involving a clear choice between pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit parties. I hope that the pro-Brexit parties will win, giving us representatives who are prepared to implement the decision we took in 2016. I also hope that the judiciary recognizes that there are wise limits to judicial power, and that judges should not get involved with micro-managing the political process.

Death and the salesman

(Conference blog number two, it's like a social science Meine Preise, but without the prizes. Meine Preise is Thomas Bernhard eviscerating all the awards he ever got. It’s in German. He’s an Austrian modernist novelist, you fuckers. But I anticipate. Here's number one.)

A libertarian US think tank which publishes many classics of liberalism – OK? – offered $900 to attend one of their conferences. This seemed deeply corrupting. I said yes at once.

The place was a very fancy country hotel, suitable for politicians negotiating a peace treaty: “Sit down and bargain / All you like, grizzled old foxes / We’ll wall you up in a splendid palace…”, but with no war zombies waiting to drown us in putrefaction, just political philosophers.

They had sent us a big book of readings. These all reminded me of when Theresa May (who?) came to town and gave the party a ringing speech. The Corbynites would return to the policies of the 1970s. “And to challenge them… we must return to the arguments of the 1980s!” Cue cheers while DHJ groans. So: liberty yadda yadda, self-ownership yadda, Nozick, inalienable yadda. (In-al-i-en-ab-le, a hard word when you’re drunk.)

They seemed strict about attending all the sessions and starting on time. And indeed, when I skipped the first lunch a delightful young lady, all impeccable hairdo, manners and remembering everybody’s name, asked me in the loveliest way whether I’d mind attending the rest of the dinners in future because of, you know, team-building. No problem, Lady Liberty. Nine hundred bucks.

In the first session, they explained the discussion rules. To make a comment raise your hand, and you’d be entered in the long comment queue. But to make a short comment, you could enter the short comment queue, by putting your thumb and forefinger together and making the Pepe Le Frog signal. (Nancy Maclean, get in touch. I have material for Democracy in Chains 2: The Alt-Rightening.) This sounded fun. Oh boy! Everybody has their hand up already!

Intellectually… well, you know. These people have been arguing since Aristotle, and they still haven’t defined their terms. Freedom this and that. People uttered various concerns. To respond to anyone, you had to do the Pepe and get in the short comment queue. Some Nordic chap called out the next speaker. Intuitively this seemed offensive to me – there’s 16 of us and we need a ringmaster? But it might make sense when you have a bunch of people talking past each other. Like, if there is no shared academic project, you know? I began to appreciate the benefits of the hard-edged econ seminar, where every question is like “your standard errors are wrong, NO FUCK YOU, THEY’RE WRONG.” At least we all agree what we are doing. I think it turns out, even if what we are doing doesn’t make sense, you need that agreement to focus the conversation. This was more like pub talk, but with sparkling water not beer.

Oh, and with political philosophers. Lordy. Chinos and “informal” jackets on the guys. Everybody talks in complete sentences the. Entire. Fucking. Time. & never mind swear words: I have yet to hear slang. Everybody is cosplaying that it’s 1870 and they’re civilized.

Freedom’s last line of intellectual defence is a bunch of Goody Two Shoes.

My last straw was at the end of the (splendid) dinner. The waiter announced the pudding menu – the dessert menu, no, God damn it, afters – in native French. Around my table, four international voices rise in gratified chorus: “Merci!”

Why, I see you all speak French! You prissy fuckers. Of course you do.

I went back to my room. I browsed Reddit. I read Deborah Devonshire, one of the Mitfords. Her father only read one book in his life, White Fang, and afterwards he gave up, because nothing could beat that.

It’s 3 am. I’ll get the first bus. I just hope they don’t bill me for the hotel.


Day two

Morning

Yeah… well... it’d be bad manners… $900, you know….


Evening

Today was fabulous. Not the sessions, though there was one decent one where I got to talk a bit. But during the compulsory dinner afterwards and BOY THE FOOD IS MAGNIFICENT, these people really know how to buy an academic, although they don’t seem to know what they’re buying.

The wine wasn’t bad either.

I say compulsory. I mean: I wanted to catch an early train, and the poor chap who organizes these things – why do you never get a sinister authoritarian scumbag making these kind of threats? Why is it always a poor frizzy guy? He looked so helpless and unloved – said he would withdraw my honorarium. Because the dinner is compulsory too! You Must Schmooze For Freedom.

So during the compulsory dinner, ‘twas me and a buddy, plus a splendid old intellectual historian in the right kind of suit and tie, plus another young-well-spoken-genericity, plus a female American prof, another poor poppet, as I thought at first. She revealed her steel slowly. And thinking back to the sessions, I realised that her every intervention – an intervention is the argot for when you say something which changes nothing – had pitched Her View, like a patent medicine guy on the back of a Nevada steam train. “Cures gout! Contains rattlesnakes!” Her View was a unique brand of Kantianism-libertarianism. “Cures rattlesnakes! Contains gout!”

Anyway, in the course of asking her what influence political philosophers had had on anything since, say, Marx, I made the mistake of interrupting her and then not stopping to apologize, because I wanted to, you know, actually find out what influence etc. So then she froze me out for half an hour, because this interrupting Needed To Be Put Into The Context Of. With grim, determined gaiety she talked only to the genericity, and I talked to “the guys”, feeling in disgrace and thinking, why should The Sex, as they'd say in the 18th century, have this extraordinary normative power, and longing to be yet older and more sexless so that, like Yeats, I might escape the Lethean foliage. But eventually the conversation resumed its normal form, and then we learned where the Patent Kantianism came from.

Her PhD had been in Harvard, home of the, as we now know, unfortunately named PED, also The Top of US philosophy and recall, please, that the power of professors in any discipline is inversely proportional to the intellectual importance of the discipline. The less the importance, the fewer the jobs, the more the power. To butter myself up with The Sex, I got on to #metoo. Then the anecdotes came out, and the Splendid Old Historian said something that seemed homophobic but it turned out we could think of it as just #metoo but gay, so we could redeem him luckily, because he was such a nice and interesting chap even if not quite au fait with modern manners. So The Sex put him in the bless-the-funny-old-fellow box not the unacceptable box, and as in the 18th century, their judgment is final. But I digress. It really was excellent wine. I can never sleep in hotel rooms.

It turned out that Ethics in Harvard was funded by a very rich woman, called Lily Savage or something, who had allegedly not merely raped or trafficked, but actually killed her husbands, one after the other, in increasing order of wealth. (Pause to google “can you libel a dead person”, followed by “are damages increased if you check if you can libel a dead person”.) Of course this is all unfounded speculation. And she (Doc Kantian) had been a fellow at the Savage or something Center, attended parties where Lily gave speeches, drank her also doubtless excellent wine etc.

Anyway, I suppose I’m still unforgiven and will become part of an anecdote about Male Academics Interrupting and, if Doc K ever returns to the US, of how In England They Are Still So Backward. I may have interrupted, but at least I didn’t take Gilded Lily’s Shilling of Killing.

So, academia. You can holiday on Epstein’s island, if you’re a Top Thinker. Just be careful with your phrases, and don’t interrupt.

And what influence has political philosophy had on anything since, say, Rousseau? We never got back to that question.


Day 3 

Morning 

Taxi to magnificent York station. In West Cornwall Pasty Company, the local kids are ordering. It's not easy. You can choose a bacon roll, a sausage roll, or a bacon and sausage roll. On Sunday before breakfast, that’s advanced combinatorics. I'm heading home to scratch someone else's chin for a change.

Who is an enemy of the people?

(From an argument with old friends on Facebook.)

In political debate today, a common way of arguing is to attack one’s opponent’s language by comparing it with the language used by other bad people. This is a form of guilt by association. You said such-and-such. X also said such-and-such. X is bad. So you are bad.

For example, the Daily Mail printed this headline in November 2016:

This caused outrage in high places. Some people claimed that the Mail was using Nazi language to attack its political opponents. Was it?

Well, yes. The Nazis used “enemy of the people” – Volksfeind – to describe Communists and Social Democrats, in a 1933 law which expropriated those parties (Gesetz über die Einziehung volks- und staatsfeindlichen Vermögens). Later, they used the same word for gays.

But there is more to the history of the phrase. The people who really used it were the Soviets. Lenin coined it (Враг народа, Vrag Naroda) in 1917 as a replacement for the more common “class enemy”. It was used to condemn the Cadet party, one of the Bolshevik’s rivals, whose leaders were arrested and shot. It came into its own under Stalin, where “enemy of the people” covered a wide variety of cases, including kulaks, and a denunciation as an enemy of the people was enough to get someone deported or killed. The phrase made it into the 1936 constitution: “Persons committing offences against public, socialist property are enemies of the people.” The Communists seem to have used it much more than the Nazis. Volksfeind appears only once in Mein Kampf, for example. In power, the Nazis preferred Staatsfeind – enemy of the state.

This hardly exonerates the Mail. Communism under Lenin and Stalin was about as evil as Nazism. Still, it is a bit harder to accuse the Mail of communism than of fascism.

Let’s go further back. 

In every form of government in which the possessors of the supreme operative power have not the great body of the people for their constituents, the situation of every possessor of a share in the supreme operative power is that of an enemy of the people. 

In an absolute monarchy, the situation of the monarch is at all times that of an enemy to the people.

In a limited monarchy, limited by representatives of the people, spurious or genuine, the situation of the monarch is at all times that of an enemy to the people.

In a limited monarchy, limited by a representation of the people, spurious or genuine, the situation of a representative of the people is that of an enemy to the people.

In a limited monarchy, limited by two bodies, one composed of the representatives of the people, spurious or genuine, the other of a set of men succeeding to one another upon the principle of genealogical succession, (rendered thereby a perpetually existing aristocratical body,) the situation of every member of that body is at all times that of an enemy to the people.

A people governed in any one of all these ways, is a people governed by its enemies.

This is Jeremy Bentham, the philosophic radical and founder of utilitarianism.

In fact, the phrase was most used in the 19^th century by radicals and Chartists. William Cobbett, the journalist, wrote “let anyone say what he will, if he be not for Reform, he is the enemy of the people: and, as such ought to be considered and treated.” Leigh Hunt, in a Parliamentary speech on education, said: “he who would… resist every attempt to improve the moral and intellectual capacities of the many, is not the friend but the enemy of the people.” William Hone and Francis Place used it in the Reformist’s Register. So did the anonymous author of The Rights of Nations, a Chartist tract.

These phrases must have frightened the establishment. But their users were hardly authoritarians. They were fighting to extend the right to vote.

The phrase originated, as far as we know, in the Roman republic (hostis publicus – public enemy). Its first modern use in the context of authoritarian terror was in the French revolution. A 1794 law gave ennemis du peuple the death penalty. This has the hallmarks of the classic authoritarian usage: targeting a broad, loose category of people and an ill-defined set of offences.

Here's an interesting sidelight: the phrase gained currency when Ibsen used it as the title of a play. A heroic doctor publicly denounces the town spa for being unclean, and is attacked by the townspeople for telling the truth. This sounds like another clash between liberalism and populism. Indeed, after World War II, Arthur Miller wrote an adaptation along these lines.

The truth is more complex. Miller’s rewrite concealed that the noble Doctor Stockmann was a eugenicist:

The masses are nothing but the raw material that must be fashioned into the people. Is it not so with all other living creatures on earth? How great the difference between a cultivated and an uncultivated breed of animals!... Don't you believe that the brain of a poodle has developed quite differently from that of a mongrel? ... we are animals... there is a terrible difference between men-poodles and men-mongrels.

In fact, a version of Ein Volksfeind was filmed under the Nazis. It got a happy ending: the doctor is saved from the democratic mob by the intervention of a minister from the central government – the new, Nazi central government.

So, the truth is more complicated than the Mail’s opponents have noticed. “Enemy of the people” was used by authoritarians to target their opponents, but also by democrats struggling for the suffrage. And the Nazis themselves made a propaganda film… about the dangers of unchecked populism.

Isn’t there an obvious way to separate the good and bad uses of this phrase? The good uses are in the context of a people’s struggle for democratic representation against those in power. History shows these struggles really do exist. The bad uses are by an authoritarian state, targeting ill-defined categories of people, with a broad, catch-all crime. That happens, too.

There is a lesson here about the idea of populism. This word is usually used by its opponents. Most current definitions say something like: “populism pits the people against the elites, and claims that some politicians truly represent the people.”

This definition is too broad to be useful. Basically, all democratic political parties claim to represent the people. (Pop quiz: which party described itself, in its manifesto, as “the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole”? Answer: New Labour in 1997.) In fact, this notion is hard to distinguish from the very idea of democracy, which also features politicians who supposedly represent the people.

Coming back to the Mail headline, is it in the Nazi tradition? Here it is in full:

Enemies of the people: Fury over ‘out of touch’ judges who have ‘declared war on democracy’ by defying 17.4m Brexit voters and who could trigger constitutional crisis

Whether this is right or wrong – and its 2016 warning of constitutional crisis is not looking too shoddy – it clearly is not the authoritarian usage. It is targeted against a well-defined set of powerful individuals, who (it says) are opposing democracy, not a broad minority for vaguely defined crimes. It is much more like the Chartist usage.

Maybe the headline is overblown or wrong. But comparisons to the Nazis don’t make sense. What we have in the UK is a dangerous constitutional crisis. We do not have an authoritarian state murdering its enemies.

The Mail was condemned by important people like Lords, bishops and MPs. The accusation of Nazi language “did the rounds”. It was widely reported. Nobody seems to have checked up on it. It was easy to check up on, thanks to Wikipedia and Google Books. People dislike being attacked in public, and are very likely to feel persecuted – especially when they think of themselves as high-minded, politically neutral public servants. That don’t mean it is so.

In short, this accusation is itself an example of the hysteria of crowds.

There is some language that genuinely should not be used. Words can become a public signals targeting others for attack.

But in general, we should also be wary of these arguments. They themselves involve guilt by association: you said such-and-such; X said such-and-such; so you are like X. This can be a lazy way to avoid the real issues.

The real issue raised by the Mail article, and by the recent High Court decision, is: do we now have a conflict between democracy and the elite? Nothing here has addressed that serious question. Dire and facile historical comparisons don’t help.


Update

Hey, Google ngrams is useful for this sort of thing. 

Volksfeind  

Kicks off in the 1940s and strangely, peaks after the war. (Possibly people talking about the concept, rather than using it.)


Враг народа

This is very clear and grim. Never used before 1917; a huge spike at the peak of the denunciations. Then censored until 1990.

Ennemi du peuple

Starting in 1750 to catch the revolutionary spike.

 

Stealing the initiative

In 2001, four American political scientists published a small book called Stealing the Initiative: How State Government Responds to Direct Democracy. It was a specialist title, dealing mostly with direct democratic "citizen's initiatives" (a kind of referendum) in the individual US states.  But it is a useful guide for understanding UK politics since 2016.

Their basic claim, stated in the introduction, is: "government actors must choose to comply with an initiative if it is to affect policy. ... We find that full compliance with initiatives is the exception, not the rule." Indeed, "[i]f... a legislative majority and the governor are united in their opposition to an initiative, then full compliance is extraordinarily unlikely – even if citizen support was high." They back this claim up with 11 case studies of California citizen's initiatives.

Another insight: "to ensure greater compliance with one's winning initiative, simply write a measure that is clearer in its instructions about implementation and enforcement...." But this might be hard: "an initiative's policy consequences may be difficult to anticipate, requiring government actors to retain discretion...." And, vagueness may help you win the election, since a too specific policy might present an easy target for opponents.

The other solution initiative proponents might have is "sanctions". "[Proponents] may also be able to mobilize voters... to withhold electoral... support from uncooperative elected officials".

We'll see!

How to think about Brexit

 

As promised. First draft. 

 

 

What kind of decision?

 

As we shall see, the economic consequences of Brexit are hard to know. The political consequences are even harder. In the end Brexit is not economic or even political, but existential. Existential decisions, like the choice to get married or pursue a particular career, are not about means and ends. They are about who we are. Still, some economic and political considerations are relevant. 

 

I will simplify the issues into a set of binary questions. One answer favours Remain, the other Leave.

 

 

Bad arguments

 

First let’s clear away some weeds:

 

The EU preserves peace in Europe. NATO provides protection against Russia. The EU preserves peace by binding France and Germany together, preventing future conflict between them. This worked before Britain joined. It will keep working after we go.

 

The referendum campaign was dishonest. Worse than the average election?

 

 

The economics

 

Economic analyses predict large losses from Brexit. They need to include numerous effects. Trade will decrease due to tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Unfortunately, it is hard to estimate the effect of NTBs, and these are the most important for Britain, especially as it is a services economy. Immigration, firm productivity, the quality of managers, and policy changes are all possible channels. Many of these are hard to predict. Here is a randomly plucked example. The 2016 OECD paper The Economic Consequences of Brexit predicted that net migration would decrease by 50000 per year after Brexit. So far, net migration has held constant.

 

Work like this deserves a hearing, but involves a lot of informed guesswork, which can be wrong even over a short time horizon. (Sometimes the guesswork is hidden within complex economic models with many moving parts.) Experts are not immune to cognitive biases and motivated reasoning. Many short term predictions of disaster have not really materialized. 

 

Beyond this, some consequences are simply inestimable. What if the Eurozone breaks up? Does Brexit make it more likely? Does it insulate us from the fallout? These questions involve Knightian uncertainty: nobody knows what the chances are.

 

So, we must each make our own judgment. Britain’s economic performance has been successful over the past forty years. Why?

 

One perspective is "Hong Kong". We pushed strongly for economic freedom. As a result we grew rich. Our neighbours have been trying to copy these policies for twenty years. Germany did so in the 2000s. Italy and France have not yet succeeded. The EU bureaucracy threatens our advantage. Leaving will free us.

 

Another perspective is that the EEC, later EU, was a complement to Thatcherism. It gave our firms big markets to sell to. Later, it provided cheap skilled labour, making up for the failings of UK education. The EU bureaucracy itself is now basically converted to economic liberalism, while the UK has devolved into what the Economist calls a chumocracy. All political systems eventually gum themselves up. (This is Mançur Olson’s idea in The Rise and Decline of Nations.) Europe is newer and fresher.

 

Or you may, like Jeremy Corbyn, regret Thatcherism and look back fondly to the 1970s. If so, I cannot advise you.

 

Economic freedom…

Needs the right policies: remain.

Needs a big market: leave.

 

 

Banding together

 

The real reason that my well-known journalist supported the EU is that it enables European countries to stand together against big rivals like Russia, China, and the US. This makes sense.

 

In 2007, Iran arrested some British marines who had strayed into their waters. In the nineteenth century we would have sent a gunboat. We can no longer do that casually. Iran backed down when the EU threatened sanctions. There is strength in numbers.

 

The historical precedent that keeps me up at night is the fate of Italy in the Renaissance. Wealthy, culturally avant-garde, financially advanced, but politically divided, the Italian city-states were chewed up by their big neighbours France and Austria. Divide-and-rule is Putin’s strategy, so it would not be surprising if he supported the Leave campaign.

 

There is an opposite worry. Progress has always taken place in times of state competition: Ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, Europe 1600-1900. This progress has always been resolved by unification. Now we are competing at the highest level – a few global power blocs, the world of Orwell’s 1984. Where can we go from here? Perhaps we can only preserve freedom by keeping our rulers divided and in competition. If so, then the EU needs to be kept honest by a lively rival on its border.

 

What threatens European freedom?

Outside powers: remain.

A European superstate: leave.

 

 

Migration

 

The practical bite of arguments about “sovereignty” is that leaving the EU lets us control migration. Staying in prevents that. Remainers never had an answer to this point.

 

It’s arguable that EU membership shifts immigration towards people that nationalists would prefer (white, European, Christian). Angela Merkel’s choice to unilaterally open borders in response to the 2016 refugee crisis killed that argument, by making it clear that European border policy could be decided in Germany. That Leave.EU billboard was maybe nasty, but it pinpointed the issue. Merkel’s decision probably lost the referendum.

 

The economic case for free migration is fairly clear. The cultural case against it depends on many intangibles. There’s evidence that heterogenous communities find it harder to work together to provide public goods and control politicians. On the other hand, maybe good enough institutions can successfully integrate people from all over Europe.

 

What matters most to economics and politics?

Institutions: remain.

Culture: leave.

 

 

Democracy

 

Everyone in the original debate was clear that a vote to leave would be implemented. The EU has form in asking people twice when it doesn’t get the right answer.

 

Democracy came into Europe in the era of mass armies:

... it was the philosophers who first told stories to the people…. First up, may everyone know how to read the newspapers! It’s healthy! By God! And quick! No more illiterates! They’re not needed! Nothing but citizen-soldiers! Who vote! Who read! Who fight! Who march! Who blow kisses!.... And that was the send-off for the first battalions of the frenzied emancipated! The first of the voting, flag-waving sods that Dumouriez led off to get shot up in Flanders. 

Céline

As payback, the mobilized masses had to be given control. That era is past. It is not clear how the majority can enforce its will, when the rest of the system – the civil servants, political players, owners and managers of capital – is against it. Brexit is a test of strength.

 

Recent years have seen a decline in democracy, and even worries about its future in advanced Western democracies. These worries usually refer to Weimar Germany and other cases where demagogues have taken over. More likely, democracy will end not with a bang but a whimper. Walter Walter Bagehot said that political systems contained two parts. The dignified part looks good, while the efficient part is where policy is really decided. We may be moving towards a system where democracy and parliament are the dignified part, enacting the people’s will on trivial matters, while real decisions take place elsewhere. A second referendum would be a step towards that.

 

Who are we?

 

I have been puzzled to see young people marching and waving European flags. How do they think about the fact that they are marching to overturn a democratic decision? Perhaps they tell themselves that the referendum was stolen because the ignorant masses were duped.

 

Two visions are at war. One is of national democracy. The other is a post-democratic liberal arena. This goes beyond economic efficiency. The democratic vision goes back to the political struggles of the nineteenth century. It is part of us.

 

But it may be passing. In 1837, Thomas Carlyle thought it would last

Two centuries; hardly less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful, stages of Quackocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have begun to grow green and young again.

Democracy fails in predictable ways. Voters have little incentive to study the issues deeply. Politicians may ignore the long term in favour of the here and now. Delegation to bureaucrats might help with that. So might federalism. The world’s longest-lasting democracy is a federation of states, with many powers reserved to the members. This preserves the freedom of people and capital to move away from inefficient local governments. 

 

The counter-argument is that a democracy requires a nation, with a sense of shared interest and a common future. Free mobility erodes that: as the economist Albert Hirschman said, the availability of exit can atrophy the art of voice.

 

Who are we?

Post-national liberals? Remain.

National democrats? Leave.

Inside the incompletely-baked establishment conspiracy to foil Brexit

I got invited to a mini conference in Oxford, run by an important German research institution. Speakers included a historian who often writes on Europe in the newspapers. I am protecting myself with this thin layer of anonymity so as to bite the hand that feeds me.

 

The first day was International Relations theory, genus: high patrician. The ratio of verbiage to assertion was high.  One speaker talked a lot about the global. When adjectives are used as nouns, the wise man starts organizing his email. Another verbal tic is plurals on everything. Academics love plurals because they help divide up the grant money. Sure enough, soon someone suggested “contestations of the scripts of liberalisms”, as an improvement on “contestation of the liberal script”.

At dinner the conversation got more concrete. Everyone was talking about… oh, guess. As background, think panelled oak, candlelight, glasses of red and white; young academics, dressed to impress in jackets, quiffs and trousers; older chaps with accents and mannerisms from a world I thought long vanished. A former ambassador type person got on his hind legs. He started his speech with a quotation. “No man is an island, entire of itself.” I think it’s by Stormzy.

So then the historian-who-often-writes got up and corrected his quotation for him.

Basically, imagine a parody of the British establishment conspiring, produced by Russia Today.

 

Later the historian himself made a speech. Just a few details remain (the wine was good):

• 13,000 letters* have gone in to Corbyn, persuading him to move.
• “Write to all the MPs you know”.
• During the campaign, Europeans will have to “love bomb” the UK – even though we’ve been very silly.
• He thinks the Brexiteers will use the slogan “tell them again”. He wants a good counter-slogan, maybe “you didn’t vote to be poor”.
• And having a narrative will be key. (Grammar of political persuasion: they spread fake news; you spin; we have a narrative.) The ambassador suggested “it’s like buying a house, you don’t sign off until you’ve done the survey”. I said I wasn’t sure how relatable that would be in Grimsby. He stared crossly at his drink.
• Tony Blair is on board, but nobody’s going to listen to his arguments. The best figurehead, he thought, would be John Major.

 

As people ask at the end of conferences, what have we learned?

1. There really is an Establishment;
2. They really do want to thwart the people’s will;
3. They’re clueless.

The third point is important. Somewhere inside, left over from childhood,  I must have been holding the belief that there is someone in charge who know’s what best. This dinner killed that for me. These guys are the ultimate insiders… yet, they have no more expertise or wisdom on the topic than, say, the Big Issue seller who told me the day after the referendum that capital-T They would “never let it happen”. (“I think you’ll find they will,” I replied, strong in my democratic faith.)

 

The arguments I heard were entirely conventional. These being polisci people, they were mainly of the preserve-the-peace-in-Europe variety. The mournful consensus was that this argument was hard to convey to a generation that grew up with the blessings of peace.

Or maybe it is just not very compelling. What is the story which convincingly takes us from Britain exiting the EU to war in Europe? Does Germany invade France again? But those guys are staying in the EU, right?

 

There was no sense of the risks from the point of view of democracy. The historian suggested having a three-pronged referendum: no deal, May’s deal, stay in. I pointed out that three-option votes are shady from a democratic perspective – they split the opposition and induce strategic voting. Someone said, “I don’t see why we can’t use the Single Transferable Vote”.

 

Sounds optimal.

 

Hearing Tony Blair’s name took me back to 2003. I read in his memoirs about why he supported the Iraq war. It was an argument about needing to keep the Western alliance together. It was too subtle for the masses, but he saw! He could see further than anyone else! So he supported Bush, and we went to war, and now we know how that worked out for the Western alliance.

 

These guys think the same way. They think they’re the shepherds. They need to recall the flock from the error of its ways.

 

I haven’t said anything about the substantive issues of Brexit. I will try to do so soon. Preview: they’re huge, long-run, unfathomable. But political scientists talk about the authority heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that voters follow the judgment of experts they trust. We all need and use that heuristic, in this murky world. We’d all like to find someone to trust.

 

These people want to fill those shoes. But they can’t be trusted, because they don't know any more than the rest of us poor fools.

 

 

* Letters, yes.

Update: tweaked style, jokes, slightly more polite. I forgot to mention the very kind lady who paid my hotel bill when I couldn't because the *☠️😖* admin haven't reimbursed me for last month's workshop yet. Or that the next night saw me eating Mickey D's in Westfield Stratford City, waiting for my bus home, for the same reason. Ah, the contrasts that make life such a story.

 

 

On racism

I wrote a blog post on the concept of race, and I promised to write another one on racism. Here it is, long overdue.

Racism is easier to recognize in the flesh than to define. We know it when we see it, but its boundaries are hard to draw. Today it seems to be one of society’s master concepts – partly because it is so contested. On the one hand, we have the Guardian talking about microaggressions and unconscious bias. On the other hand, serious people are writing books defending white ethnic identity, and asking how much to concede to the popular backlash against immigration. Perhaps thinking about the concept of racism can throw light on this process.

The idea of racism is woven from three different strands:

A.    The history of colonialism, the encounter of white Europeans with other peoples, the ideas they developed about them; the development of European empires and the influence of Darwinism. In this aspect racism is white people’s superiority complex.
B.    Racism can simply mean the belief that races are different – usually, biologically different – in some non-trivial way.
C.    Racism can be defined by a set of attitudes and behaviours which range from hatred, aggression and genocide, through prejudice and discrimination, down to simply having different mental associations about different races, perhaps without conscious thought.

The power of the racism concept lay in putting these three things together. It developed after the Second World War. The Nazis came out of a background of A; explicitly held B; and implemented C in its most evil form, by targeting minorities for murder. Racism was a shorthand for the whole complex. Intellectuals in the US recognized that all of A-C extended beyond Nazi Germany; they found a home, too, in America, especially in the segregated South. This background strengthened the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s. Since then, as the rest of the world has got richer relative to Europe, America, and other countries of mostly white people; and as immigration to those countries has made them more diverse; anti-racism has continued to be the left wing’s  strongest moral suit, as well as a guarantee of being on the right side of history.

A, B and C do not always go together. My post on race argued that B and C are separate issues. A and C are separate, too. Hutus murdering Tutsis, violence against Zimbabwean immigrants in South African townships, or the Burmese assault on the Rohingya make it clear that non-white people can murder outgroups with as much enthusisasm as white people. You can rescue the association if you say that by definition, only whites can be racist. Some people have tried to make this argument. But it is just implausible. What the Burmese army has done to the Rohingya looks like a duck and quacks like a duck (and after her Nobel Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi drinks milkshake like a duck). If we don’t call it racism, we will just need to invent a new word for evil behaviour to ethnic outgroups.

For that matter, there need not be a link between A and B. In some sense, clearly, race is a concept which develops in 19th century European science and thought. But the broader idea of differentiating and categorizing people based on their tribe or where they come from may simply be part of human mental furniture. The Ancient Greeks called outsiders barbaroi – barbarians – supposedly meaning people who, since they couldn’t speak Greek, simply bleated nonsense like sheep. (Of course, really, the Greeks understood perfectly well that other languages existed.) Many human groups simply refer to themselves as “people”.

As time moves on, and the eras of first European, then American global dominance fade and recede, the spotlight is focusing more on C. Correspondingly, antiracism will become less about dismantling entrenched power structures, because so many of them have indeed been dismantled. Instead, antiracism will focus on individual behaviours and attitudes, on C – and it will become more top-down. (You can avoid this conclusion, so long as capitalism continues to exist, if you argue that capitalism itself is the ultimate power structure and is also inherently racist. I don’t find that plausible, and it will become less plausible as many non-European nations get rich.) The confusion between A and C lets people in authority think of themselves as freedom fighters, whilst in fact they are regulating and monitoring the behaviour of less powerful others.

Indeed this is happening. A cornerstone of modern racism is the idea of unconscious bias, motivated by a powerful psychological experiment called the Implicit Association Test or IAT. You can take this test at implicit.harvard.edu. The IAT uses reaction times to measure how strongly we associate different concepts. This is a test you can’t fool just because you want to sound, or even be, non-racist. It has been a huge hit, generating reams of controversy, an industry promising to improve your unconscious bias, and several competing metaanalyses. It has even entered Artificial Intelligence as a yardstick for judging how computers can learn certain kinds of prejudice. Today, psychology provides a dominant interpretation of racism, as it does for so many other concepts.

A second strand of thought looks at how we talk and think about outgroups. The keyword is “the Other”, which has now been verbed: people think of outsiders as Other, and they “other” them in the ways they talk about them.

Through these spectacles, racism is mundane and pervasive. Everyone does it a little bit.
And it is within ourselves: as George Orwell says, it is a noxious plant that we must diligently weed out from our minds.

This is a powerful, intuitive perspective. Haven’t we all felt afraid of outsiders? Don’t we all try to quell or overcome our prejudices? But it depends crucially on the claim that these mundane behaviours are indeed related to more serious forms of prejudice – say, discriminating against job applicants.

For the IAT, there is some evidence that this may be true, but not really enough to be persuasive. At best, the jury is still out on whether “everyday” implicit bias links to the important differences in outcomes that we see between ethnic groups.

Similarly, while we know that hate speech can help propel genocide – for example, hate radio helped do so in Rwanda – we cannot be so sure about the effect of everyday ways that people talk about other ethnic groups. Indeed, the very idea of “othering” has unclear boundaries. Does it include using the word “they” to describe an outgroup?

If these kinds of pervasive behaviour are not actually linked to real discrimination, then I foresee a problem in describing them as racism.

We all have two sides in us. One side wants to seek out and experience new things. Another side prefers what is safe and familiar. Different people have these sides to different degrees; they are captured by Openness, one of the Big Five dimensions of human personality. These two sides may even be rooted in biology – in how animals resolve the conflict between approach and avoidance, for example. In a big, multicultural society, openness is good to have: it correlates with intelligence and income, for example.

But we all also have the other side; we want to stick with what we know. And this too has a positive aspect: it coincides with what we appreciate more deeply. It is the sense of home. Familiar environments are not just emotionally satisfying. They also enable deeper communication. It is wrong to think that because somebody is from my own culture, I have nothing to learn from them. In fact, shared culture enables deeper communication. At the most basic level, we need some shared language to communicate at all. Beyond that, shared cultural reference points act as a shorthand. I spend much of my time speaking global English – “Globish” – with academic colleagues from all over the world. But when I talk to somebody who shares elements of my own culture – the English middle class – I can communicate in a different way. Calling a politician’s wife Lady Macbeth, for instance, carries a set of implications that would take paragraphs to spell out explicitly.

In fact, these two sides are complementary. Openness lets us appreciate and learn from other people’s languages, customs and cultures. Those languages and customs are different from our own, because they developed separately, over many centuries, among people who preferentially interacted with others like themselves.

It is not a good idea to lump the human preference for familiarity and safety, with the inhuman extremes of race hatred. We all have that tendency. Some have it more than others. Those who have it more tend to do less well in modern society; to stay near home and family rather than moving to opportunity. They are the “somewheres”, in David Goodhart’s phrase. Modern anti-racist discourse, with its very broad definition of its object, risks treating these people as primitive beings who are unable to appreciate diversity, or worse still, as incipient fascists. That is unjust. It is also politically unwise, because it is may push people into the arms of genuine racists – who at least, from their point of view, show them some respect.

Next, a post about sexism... hopefully within the year.

I read Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy

In three days. I got the first book three days ago and read it that evening, ordered the second one and read it the next day, ordered the third, got it two days later and read it that evening. (Thanks, Amazon Prime. I had to buy the hardback, but I couldn't wait.)

It is very serious art, and unabashedly highbrow. I don’t follow the literary world, but I have a vague sense that there has been a backlash against high-faluting “literature” and in favour of genres and what would have previously been thought middlebrow. These books do not partake in that. There is very little plot, no dramatic events, just one conversation after another. And almost all the conversations are extremely intense: self-aware people dissecting their lives and relationships with the expertise of a sushi chef and the passion of a flagellant.

Reading it is unnerving. The narrator – Faye, a female author doing the rounds of writing courses and literary festivals – talks to other people, or listens to their monologues. They talk about the deepest things in their lives. Other characters are pinned down like butterflies, sketched in a few strokes of extreme skill. Everything is implicit. Neither Faye nor the author – it's in the first person, so the distinction perhaps does not matter – often expresses an opinion.

 But, like Tom Cruise’s pick-up guru in Magnolia, Faye is “quietly judging you”. Family, and divorce, are pervasive in the conversations; everyone has behaved badly, but few want to admit it. Children, even when they are annoying or burdensome, come across as sinned against, not sinning. Freedom is weighed against commitment and it almost always comes out worse, or at least as a let-down; people are at their wickedest and stupidest when they exercise power thoughtlessly. As a child of divorce, I liked the books very much. But I was also troubled and provoked by them, because the narrator, and I guess the author, is a feminist, in some sense, which I am not. (There is plenty of mansplaining, and some atrocious behaviour by entitled guys; and sometimes that feeling of a conversational elephant-trap being laid as a man is allowed to talk himself into a corner.)

In Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, there is a chapter after the Great War when the cast reassembles, and the author suggests almost playfully that the values they hold should not really be taken seriously; as if the great comedy of the Victorian age, and its literature, can no longer be played straight. Reading Outline felt as if I was rewinding through that historical moment.

Nineteenth-century literature was explicitly judgmental. Dickens and Thackeray, for all their subtleties and play, saw wickedness and called it; and showed it in its harshest colours. And then that earnestness quite quickly vanished. Why?

A superficial answer is the rule of craft that says show, don’t tell. I think a deeper answer is that after the Edwardians, moral judgment got mixed up with aesthetic judgment, judgment of taste; and English judgments of taste, since (I guess?) the eighteenth century, have been made in silence and in code. You couldn’t say that someone was explicitly inferior; but you could imply it to those in the know, with a raised eyebrow.

One danger of this is passive-aggressiveness. I talked to somebody about On Chesil Beach and she asked if I had noticed that the heroine had been sexually abused. And I have heard about literature classes being told the same thing. “Did you spot that? Well done – you are aesthetically and morally sensitive – alive to other people’s hidden sufferings.” But if I was supposed to spot it, why didn’t Ian McEwan make sure I did? What is this, a cryptic crossword?

And in fact, where Faye does speak up and give her own opinions, she seems both warmer and braver. She lays it on the line.

About her we learn very little. She starts the trilogy after her own divorce, and has remarried by the third book. Occasionally her children call. These conversations are very different from the others. There’s less indirect narration, and more ordinariness. These, along with the narrator’s own talk, are the warmest parts of the book. It’s as if she and the reader can suddenly breathe out.

At the very end, the narrator is bathing in the sea when a man comes to the water’s edge and pisses in it. She watches his “merry, cruel face… and I waited for him to stop.” It’s a scene out of myth – the sighing breast of the sea, and the grinning Satyr. But I don’t know whether Rachel Cusk thinks of it really as myth, or as a piece of history, which could be brought to an end somehow.

 

 

The House of Government and the relative nobility of communism

Robert Conquest, the poet and deeply anti-communist historian of the Soviet Union, thought that fascism was worse than communism. Asked why, he replied just "I feel it to be so". Perhaps the feeling is that communism was a noble cause that went wrong, whereas fascism never had anything noble about it. Anyway, reading The House of Government made me question that idea.

It is a huge, brilliant book about the inhabitants of one house in Moscow – a purpose-built creation designed to house the elite of the new regime, and inhabited by the Old Bolsheviks, who had made the revolution and fought the civil war against the Whites. The Old Bolsheviks certainly have something of the nobility of an old-time religion: they start the book under Tsarism, holding secret meetings by gaslight, or exiled to Siberia. And the book itself takes the communism-religion analogy very seriously, drawing comparisons from early Christianity, early Puritanism, and the Great Disappointment of the US Millerite sect.

But before admiring devotion to a cause, we need to know the cause's nature. An especial wickedness of communism, which it shared with fascism, was that it deliberately endorsed and encouraged hatred and cruelty against the enemy. For example, here is a passage from The Iron Flood, a civil war novel, in which the heroes take a Cossack town:

Note that this is not an underground or marginal text. It was a set text in schools until the end of the Soviet period. It is not atypical either. In the civil war, merciless killing of men, women and children was endorsed in reality as well as novels. To be merciless and brutal, since mercilessness and brutality were necessary, was a mark of moral strength and hardness. Stalin meant "man of steel". The Bolsheviks were the first people to favour the tough-looking leather jacket.

The catalyst for this evil was surely the brutality of the conflict, but it must also have had roots in Karl Marx's crisp analysis of conventional morality. Bourgeois morality was part of the bourgeois economic system: talk of human rights or humanist values was claptrap when most of humanity was enslaved. The only morality was to do whatever furthered the revolution. Then again, perhaps communism was simply of its time. The same worship of strength can be found in Kipling, say; expressed more subtly, in Nietzsche; later, in fascism. The result, in any case, was that Bolshevist communism became a death cult.

Some of the behaviour patterns are still with us. The bilious twitter monkeys of the extreme Left, for whom abuse and hatred are both tactics and habits, are more or less conscious followers of this Bolshevik tradition. Luckily, as of today they remain safely confined to the zoo.

Vague theories: a defence

Most scientists believe that vagueness is bad in a scientific theory. In fact, if it’s vague, it cannot really be a theory at all. At the hard end of the social sciences, economists insist that theories should be formalized in the crisp language of mathematics. Even in softer-edged disciplines, which often get accused of vagueness and waffle, very few people defend vagueness explicitly. Instead, they use arguments about the meaning-ladenness of human action, or the holistic interconnectedness of the social world, to argue that social science should aim for understanding rather than explanation. But understanding is still meant to be clear.

Actually, mathematics is not enough to avoid vagueness, as Paul Romer has pointed out in a controversial article on “mathiness” in the theory of economic growth. Mathiness is a word coined on the analogy of the Daily Show’s “truthiness”: when something “feels true in your gut” rather than actually being true. Mathy economic theories have a valid mathematical argument in their model, but the connections between the maths and reality are vague or ill-defined:

McGrattan and Prescott (2010) establish loose links between a word with no meaning and new mathematical results.

Boldrin and Levine (2008) make broad verbal claims that are disconnected from any formal analysis.

This suggests a puzzle. If the words and verbal claims in a theory must be connected via tight links to a formal analysis and mathematical results, why aren’t they part of the mathematics themselves? If economists build models because ordinary language is imprecise, then why is any ordinary language allowed?

Having sown these seeds of doubt, I will present three examples, and a bonus fourth, of theories that are vague but useful. I am not arguing that vagueness is a theoretical virtue. Instead, it is a disadvantage that must be traded off against competing values, such as relevance. Also, perhaps, the tradeoff approaches infinity as vagueness goes to zero: a perfectly defined theory would be a theorem in pure mathematics, with no relationship to the world; insofar as it connects to the world, it has to be a bit vague.

Theory 1: watch out for that truck!

 

This is a very simple theory. Its usefulness, if you are about to step into the road, should be obvious. But it is vague, because a key term is not precisely defined. What exactly is a truck? When does a van become a truck? Even people from Texas aren’t sure.

Van? Truck? Vruck?

Theory 2: Western societies are threatened by Islamic terrorism

 

This theory could be true or false. It is perfectly legitimate to argue that terrorism’s threat to the West is manufactured, or hyped, by the warmongers in power. But the theory is at least worth arguing over. After the Twin Towers attack, Western societies needed to decide what to do, which involved making judgments about this theory. Yet the theory is clearly vague. There is no clear uncontested definition of terrorism, or of “Islamic” terror. (Is it Islamic terror when a small-time drug dealer or mentally unstable loser decides to ram a van into some people, after posting some Islamic-tinged rants on Facebook?) Or of “threat”. Or of “societies”. Or of “Western”. A lot of the debate about this theory consists in making terms more precise. But you have to start somewhere.

Theory 3: fluxions

 

Modern science, with its mathematical basis, was kickstarted by the enormous prestige of Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Under that theory lay his advanced mathematics, in particular his development of the mathematical derivative – he famously fought Leibniz over priority on the topic.

The derivative can be loosely defined as the slope of a function. Awkwardly, its precise definition was not clarified until 150 years after Newton wrote. In particular, the idea of a slope at a point involves the idea of a “limit”, which was finally explained by Bolzano and Weierstrass in the 19th century.

For the first half of its history, Newton’s theory, the key theory underpinning the development of modern science, was vague, meaning not that it had an uncertain real world referent à  la “truck”, but that we could not even explain clearly what a key term meant. Newton recognized this explicitly and was uncomfortable enough to write a book about it.

Bonus Theory 4: the truth shall set you free

 

This is a saying attributed to Jesus. The actual quote, from John 8:32 in the King James Version, is: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

The theory is frankly obscure. But it would be hard to say that it has not been influential. It may be that with respect to it, we are in the position of eighteenth-century mathematicians with respect to the calculus. It is a theory that seems important, but we cannot explain why.

I'll finish by quoting Edmund Burke's catchily-named A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The argument in this remark seems superficial, but I think a deeper point is lurking there.

But let it be considered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.