Here comes the science bit – segregate!

Giles Wilkes muses on the libertarians and other assorted right-wingers who take climate change ‘scepticism’ to the point of ideological denial – and, by extension, the anti-consumerists who almost religiously grab the opportunity to argue that we need to replace the whole economic system:

For a great proportion of our scientific beliefs, we have to rely on a long-established consensus. … For views on evolution, the Holocaust, whether transfats cause cancer, or carbon dioxide causes global warming, no single person can themselves compile enough evidence. You need to rely on scientists who themselves rely on more scientists.
…
However, people often form opinions, or choose which ‘consensus’ to trust, on the basis of feelings. This particularly works in a negative way; if you really hate X and his/her group, then X believing something, and in particular X thinking it is important, then thinking and proclaiming it as untrue gives enormous pleasure. This happens whether X is some braying redfaced foxhunter or sanctimonious good for nothing leftie student. Most political extremes have convoluted theories for why their opponents think the rubbish that they do.

A very interesting paper in Nature last week supports this, explaining finding on the ways that “ordinary citizens react to scientific evidence”:

People endorse whichever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important commitments. As a result, public debate about science is strikingly polarized. The same groups who disagree on 'cultural issues' — abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer — also disagree on whether climate change is real and on whether underground disposal of nuclear waste is safe.
…
A process that does account for this distinctive form of polarization is 'cultural cognition'. Cultural cognition refers to the influence of group values — ones relating to equality and authority, individualism and community — on risk perceptions and related beliefs. …
For example, people find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.
Our research suggests that this form of 'protective cognition' is a major cause of political conflict over the credibility of scientific data on climate change and other environmental risks. People with individualistic values, who prize personal initiative, and those with hierarchical values, who respect authority, tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire. By contrast, people who subscribe to more egalitarian and communitarian values are suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as sources of unjust disparity. They are thus more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted. Such differences, we have found, explain disagreements in environmental-risk perceptions more completely than differences in gender, race, income, education level, political ideology, personality type or any other individual characteristic.
Cultural cognition also causes people to interpret new evidence in a biased way that reinforces their predispositions. As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarized, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information.

It’s a fascinating piece.

(Update: Just remembered I came across this paper via Chris (I think), so consider my hat tipped.)

Loss aversion and the bias towards conservatism

Anatole Kaletsky ponders the US Democrats’ political troubles:

Left-of-centre parties the world over might learn from this electoral disaster. They might start to understand why conservatism has an inbuilt advantage in all advanced democracies…
The conservatives’ advantage is simple: they know exactly what they are trying to achieve. They seek to preserve, as far as possible, existing structures of economic privilege, power and social traditions. … To achieve this, conservative politicians and voters are willing to bury all minor ideological differences and use every conceivable mechanism to keep power.
Progressives, by contrast, are united only by what they are against. They do not like the status quo, which they consider unjust. But once they gain power, as shown by the Democrats’ internecine struggles over healthcare, they are riven by conflicts. Because progressives are fighting for an infinite range of possible reforms, it is much harder to unite behind any specific programme.

I think he’s painting with a bit of a broad brush – a new government could well seek to transform things in a rightwards direction (Thatcher in 1979) – but he does have a point.

He doesn’t get to the bottom of it, though: even most of the people who are pretty comfortable with the way things are could think of changes to their advantage, and there are plenty of changes that parties of the left might introduce that would benefit more people than they harm. But even individual reforming policies often face an uphill struggle to be implemented, on top of left-wing parties’ difficulties in keeping together in power. So why a systemic bias in favour of conservatism?

Partly, no doubt, because the people who are doing well out of the status quo can exert more influence than those marginalised.

Partly also because of different campaigning styles of right and left: it’s easier to point to sins of commission than to sins of omission, and active-government parties of the left will have more of the former while anti-state right-wingers will have more of the latter. The right can be more gung-ho and direct in its campaigns because the points it’s making seem more concrete (‘they’re going to tax you for driving’ vs ‘they’re not going to tackle climate change’).

But part of the answer is psychological: loss aversion. People respond more strongly to losses than to gains. We’ll fight harder to keep something we have than to get an equivalent something more. This means that the potential losers from any policy shift will make more noise than the would-be winners, even if they are fewer. So it’s hard to assemble and maintain a popular coalition for reform.

If this is true, then we’d expect that psychologists would be able to pick up a greater bias towards loss aversion in people with right-wing politics. I don’t know of any studies that have looked at this. (Anyone?)

And there’s a strategic tip for the left in all this: if we want to succeed, we need (more than the right needs) to find policies that will demonstrably benefit as many people as possible. A party that’s seen as just the party of the poor is going to get shafted.

Passive-progressive conservatism

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll, ‘Through the Looking-Glass’)

And so to David Cameron’s new year’s message to the masses, delivered on 27 December:

whether you’re Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, you’re motivated by pretty much the same progressive aims: a country that is safer, fairer, greener and where opportunity is more equal. It’s how to achieve these aims that we disagree about

‘Progressive’ is one of those words that has been almost drained of meaning by the political classes. It has connotations of egalitarianism and liberalism, and has been far more associated with the left and centre than with the right, but in the absence of anyone willing to stand up explicitly for ‘regressivism’, it’s hard to say much definite about it.

I want to focus on Cameron’s use of ‘fair’ – an even more widely claimed, more fundamental and vaguer term. Yes, we all want Britain to be fairer. But do we all agree on what counts as fair? Of course we don’t. This smothering of all ideological difference by a single syllable reminds me of Wittgenstein’s “cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar”.

Is it fairer for the benefits system to recognise the hardship faced by single parents or to encourage two parents to stay together? What is the fairest point in the trade-off between police powers and civil liberties? When reducing the deficit, are tax rises fairer or less fair than spending cuts? Which taxes are fair and which unfair? Which public spending? What is the fairest level – national government, local councils, community groups, individuals – for any given political choice to be made? Which economic inequalities are unfair and when does action to reduce these become unfair?

The mere concept of ‘fairness’ will not answer any of these questions or a thousand others, and nor are they factual questions to which competent administrators could provide definitive answers. These questions are the stuff of politics, and Cameron is trying to wish it all away.

An opposition leader who was confident of winning for positive reasons, rather than because the government seems knackered and useless, would be making a very different case.

(Anne Perkins deplores Cameron’s attempt to foster a “myth of consensus”, and Paul Cotterill scents unease in Cameron’s plea that the election not be “some exercise in fake dividing lines”.)

I think that the biggest change in the Tory party over the last four years has been not in the image it presents to the public but in the image it holds of itself. I’m happy to credit Cameron and some around him (certainly not all) with sincerely caring about poverty more than their predecessors did – they think of themselves, if you like, as being more progressive. But the change in their plans for government have been far smaller. To adapt John Prescott’s maxim, the Tories have traditional policies for modern reasons.

I doubt this will end well, for them or for us.

Sunder Katwala has a good blog post up about this. He quotes Richard Reeves and Philip Collins:

"At present, he is signing himself up to Labour-style poverty and inequality measures, even as he rejects Labour-style redistribution. In other words, he is setting his own big trap and trotting gamely towards it"
And so Cameron's advocacy of "conservative means to progressive ends" risks turning into "Thatcherite arguments while hoping for the opposite results".

God only knows that Labour’s performance has been poorer than most of its 1997 supporters had hoped, but I’m sure the new Tory blend of fierce anti-statism and compassionate good intentions would be worse overall. They may relish some flavour of ‘fairness’ and they may truly feel themselves ‘progressive’, but I’m afraid their policies will be all too passive in the face of the market’s natural drive towards inequality.

Cameron, the state and society

Bit busy, so no in-depth commentary on David Cameron’s speech. But I recommend these two posts by Giles Wilkes.

I’ll also briefly add that the fallacy at the heart of Cameron’s politics – and, if the polls are right, the tragedy that will be at the heart of his government – is his conviction that ‘the state’ and ‘society’ are not just wholly distinct entities but rivals engaged in a zero-sum game. They are, in a democracy, deeply interdependent; sometimes different parts of either get in one another’s way; sometimes they help one another.

He says: “The more that we as a society do, the less we will need government to do.” Which has a truistic ring to it. But what his approach in power would be is: “The less that government does, the more society will do.” In other words, if you reduce the supply of social policy provision coming from the state, the demand for it will rise and other providers (businesses, charities, community groups, churches) will appear. And, because they’re not the state, they won’t have any of the failings that the state does. And they certainly won’t have any distinctive failings of their own.

Good luck with that.

And there are two wholly different arguments about “big government” that the Tories are very happy to muddle together. Cameron (and others in all parties) often sound appealing when they talk about decentralising government, so that local organisations and individuals can wield more power. But arguments in favour of that are being used to also justify a big shrinkage in the size of government overall. The former is about redistributing power; the latter is about creating a vacuum and hoping it will be nicely filled.

Sen on equalising capability

Danny Finkelstein is usually very astute, but here I think he misses the point. He’s talking about Amartya Sen’s views on “equality of capability” (as discussed by James Purnell), which is intended to be less money-centric than equality of outcome and more substantive than equality of opportunity:

Sen’s idea is that the correct goal for those seeking to further social justice is to remove barriers to people living the life that they choose and to give them the wherewithal to achieve what they can. Illiteracy, poor nutrition and discrimination are examples of ways in which people’s capabilities are damaged.

Danny likes this, but is concerned about the word ‘equality’ in this context:

Purnell used this word for political reasons, to reconnect Blairites with the Left. But it is hard to see it being helpful. In fact, the very idea of capability — which stresses individual differences that act as a barrier to them living a full life — pulls against the idea of equality.
And… although Purnell wants a debate about capability, he is going to get one about equality.

This suggests that Danny doesn’t know his Sen as well as he might. Purnell used the word because it’s the word Sen himself regularly uses. And the notions of capability and equality don’t pull in opposite directions at all. Consider this passage from Sen’s 1992 book Inequality Reexamined:

Libertarians must think it important that people should have liberty. Given this, questions would immediately arise regarding: who, how much, how distributed, how equal? Thus the issue of equality immediately arises as a supplement to the assertion of the importance of liberty.
…
It is neither accurate nor helpful to think of the difference…in terms of ‘liberty versus equality’.
Indeed, strictly speaking, posing the problems in terms of this latter contrast reflects a ‘category mistake’. They are not alternatives. Liberty is among the possible fields of application of equality, and equality is among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty.

Substitute ‘capability’ for ‘liberty’, and it’s just as true: capabilities can be distributed more or less equally. Of course Danny’s right that there are great individual differences, but that’s just the point: many people’s lives are blighted because they lack the capabilities that others take for granted.

And of course total equality - of income, opportunity, health, happiness, capability, almost anything - is a chimera whose unwavering pursuit would be folly, but Sen takes an ameliorative rather than a utopian approach, as these two reviews of his latest book make clear.

The idea is to identify specific cases where some people are prevented from making the most of their lives by obstacles that many others do not face and that can be feasibly removed through political action. We need not pre-define a perfectly just society in order to remove some of the most glaring injustices that exist. And the desire to prioritise people whose circumstances are the most fraught rather than the desire to promote capability generally, even among the already advantaged, is what motivates talk about equality of capability.

Purnell’s aim, I suspect, is less to spark an intra-left debate about the focus of equalisation than to muster strength for a left-right debate about the distribution of capability – although the former may be a stepping-stone towards the latter.

Meritocracy and the left

I’ve been thinking about meritocracy, partly in conversation with Liam, partly in relation to the left’s attitude to bad luck, and partly in response to something Don Paskini said:

In a meritocratic society, power is wielded by the minority who are judged to have the most 'merit'. Is that really what the left should be aiming for?

There’s a vital question hinted at here: who defines ‘merit’ and decides how much we all have?

In meritocratic theory, the market; in practice, the biggest market participants. (OK, Don was talking about political power rather than financial success, but the question can be posed of either; I’m looking at the latter.)

Now it’s true that, insofar as markets and their larger participants operate by catering to the desires of the many ordinary consumers, a market definition of merit will have some connection to public opinion. But there’s a vast difference between providing the products that customers want and treating the people involved in that process in a way that the customers deem fair.

And yes, markets will tend to favour people who, within a given line of work, are harder-working and more talented. Markets will also tend to favour those in lines of work where the necessary skills are rarer relative to the demand for them. These two features – especially the former – will seem fair to most, although there remains a huge question about people who, through no fault of their own, have limited skills for which there is either little demand or oversupply. Do they merit the pittance they can get?

More fundamentally, the means of developing the qualities that might count as ‘merit’ are distributed neither equally nor meritocratically (however defined); the distribution of merit isn’t independent of, say, the pre-existing distribution of power and wealth.

Meritocracy can thus become a hierarchy, with levels that shift in response to a series of market echoes of the prejudices of whoever had previously been in the strongest position.

That’s clearly not what the left should be aiming for.

So the questions for the left are: if we think that rewarding merit is to whatever extent reasonable, how do we promote non-market notions of merit? How much do we restrain the market’s freedom to punish those it deems lacking? How do we most widely spread the ability to acquire merit (of whatever type)? How far, in other words, can we go towards Tawney’s ‘equal start and an open road’?

Luck vs choice in the left-right divide

James Purnell’s Open Left project is interesting. It’s asking people on the left why they’re on the left rather than the right. Purnell’s own answer (set aside what you think of the man himself) contains some sound points:

First, the Right tolerates inequalities that the Left hates. …some people have it very easy in our society, others far too hard. The goal of policy should be to correct these inequalities in power. …
Second, I believe that governments succeed more often than they fail. People on the Right are more sceptical of government’s effectiveness. …
Third… People on the Left tend to have a vision of what society could be like, and believe it’s the role of democracy to try to make that a reality. People on the Right are more likely to value the status quo, believing it represents the tested wisdom of previous generations.

But these three may all originate in the same phenomenon: that the right is more inclined to see people’s circumstances as the results of their own choices, and the left is more inclined to see people’s circumstances as the results of factors beyond their own control. (You can see this view in, for instance, Chris Dillow's comment about Open Left.)

From this, it follows that the left desires to reduce the unfair effects of bad luck on people’s lives, whereas the right sees the natural order of things as fairer, and that change would likely be for the worse. The primary candidate to promote such change (by any number of direct or indirect means) is the state, and judgements of the state’s effectiveness tend to be in proportion to judgements of the merits of its aims.

Hence also the differences on the value of the status quo versus change (the Thatcherite revolution was an exception that proves the rule: it was mostly about changing a situation that previous governments had created).

So, is the left-right split just a difference in opinion on the roles of choice and luck? Almost certainly not. But I think there’s something in this.

(And, as I argue in another post today, the arbitrary and unequal role of bad luck is a good reason for the left to be wary of pure meritocracy.)

Secular liberalism and social theocracy

Aidan Nichols, a Catholic theologian, says that secularism is detroying the fabric of society and that Christianity is vital to make us behave morally. I might have just let this go, but I’m starting to really worry about how much power and influence a Conservative government would give these people, what with David Cameron arguing that “public morality” is the answer to poverty, as he plugs the role that faith groups could play in public service provision, and in turn the C of E making doe eyes at this Tory rhetoric.

Nichols does not, at least not in this article, call for fully theocratic government, nor does he deny religious freedom. But he does insist that the key purpose of the state is “to guard the spiritual civilisation of its own society” – that spiritual civilisation being Christian. I’m going to describe his view as ‘social theocracy’.

He says:

Typically, secular liberalism finds it impossible to base rights discourse on anything other than the parity of each and all as they choose the way of life they prefer to follow, whether their preferences be well-founded in the objective moral order or not.

Well, no: if “the way of life [someone] prefer[s] to follow” involves causing undue harm to someone else, then secular liberalism decries it. And if the social theocrat thinks that his scriptures are a “well-founded” guide to “the objective moral order”, then good luck to him in convincing the rest of us..

Inevitably, this is a recipe for irresoluble quandaries in matters social: how should one adjudicate the preference of a feminist employer not to accept a polygamous employee?

These are clearly the comments of someone who has failed to think properly about liberalism. If polygamy is OK, then there are no grounds for discriminating against polygamists in the workplace. So is it OK? To judge that, we can look at the power relations involved – are the wives being coerced into accepting a husband’s dominant status? Through most of history, marriage has given husbands greater advantage than wives, which is a noxious condition – however many people are involved. Notably, most polygamy in the West today is religiously motivated.

If a group of people are, freely and equally, happy to join in a many-sided relationship – whether this involves a formal contract or not – then, if they injure no more than anyone else’s sensibilities, so be it.

(A libertarian, by contrast, would insist that any employer has the right to choose employees on any basis; the difference between that and liberalism is that the latter has more capacity to take note of power relations.)

Nichols says:

The human poverty of secular liberalism can already be inferred from the results of contemporary secularisation. In modern England, moral discourse is in danger of becoming a parody of infantile egoism. What I want becomes what I need, which in turn becomes my 'right'.

A vicious and preposterous lie. We all know of selfish people who feel entitled to all sorts of things that they merely happen to want – or rather they feel frustrated when they don’t get it, and may rant using the language of rights and entitlements – but liberalism, because it must apply equally to all, places no burden on anyone to satisfy anyone else’s mere wants. Likewise, Catholicism per se places no burden on choirboys to satisfy the wants of a priestly paedophile. Bad people will exploit the customs and practices of whatever culture they find themselves in.

It is true that the moral life begins with desire. But such desire, as Plato argued, is not the desire that leads us to pursue “enlightened” self-interest, in the form of the hedonistic calculus that asks how I can maximise pleasure. The desire that impels the moral life is, rather, desire for the good because it is beautiful.

And who gets to say what is beautiful? Most of us atheists find homophobia for example, a source of very little beauty indeed. Unless we accept that a necessarily human authority should tell us all what is right and wrong, then we must grant that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We must let each other be free to live as best we can. And of course we can learn from each other about what makes a life good. That’s part of – if I may say – the beauty of secular liberalism: social theocrats such as Nichols are free to make their case, and the rest of us are free to take as much or as little as we think worthwhile from it.

But truly, if you want “human poverty”, then social theocracy won’t let you down. Key to the wealth of humanity is our diversity, and a moral outlook that denies this, preferring Bronze-Age dogma to the intricate business of finding mutually rewarding ways to live with each other, is impoverished indeed.

He goes on:

Too much modern human-rights talk elevates freedom over virtue, not realising that any significant freedom – as distinct from my indifferently choosing a vanilla rather than a chocolate-flavoured ice cream – is always freedom for the good.

At this point I start to wonder whether he’s writing such drivel as part of a bet. Because if his Church gets to say what counts as “the good” for all of us, then that’s not “freedom” at all. Can it really be said, for instance, that Zimbabweans have the “freedom” to support Robert Mugabe? Giving people freedom allows them to show and develop and share their virtues. It’s the opposite of telling them what’s virtuous and then corralling them into a pen where they’re “free” to do just that.

And liberalism prevents no one from discerning the difference between more and less “significant” choices. Say you see a man clutch his chest and fall to the ground: you could walk on by, you could take his wallet and run off, you could stop to help as best you can. Does anyone imagine that this is far more morally freighted than vanilla vs chocolate?

And ponder this: how wrong would it be for the state to ban an arbitrary flavour of ice cream, with stern punishments for those found in possession? Some freedoms may seem trivial, but their denials are always serious.

But on one count I agree wholly with Nichols: “secularisation is not an inevitable process”. Indeed it is not. It is fragile and must be defended from its enemies.

The Guardian has recently been running a series of pieces on liberty. I’ll just quote a few as a contrast to Nichols.

Richard Reeves:

"The only freedom which deserves the name," according to John Stuart Mill, "is that of pursuing our own good in our own way". …
Equality before the law, and rights to fair trial were important precisely because they allowed people to live the way they chose, even if eccentric or even disgusting to the majority, so long as they did not actively harm others in so doing.
For Mill, liberty could therefore be threatened as easily by peer pressure, majority opinion and social intolerance, together creating "a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression". The state could coerce and oppress: but so could the citizenry. Society could "issue its own mandates" and when it did it left "fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs also protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling."

Shami Chakrabarti:

As we are essentially social creatures, our rights and freedoms are not isolating or selfish but protect us within the social units in which we thrive – family, trade union, faith community, democratic society, etc.

AC Grayling:

Liberty – individual liberty, the autonomy of the human – matters because no one has the right to dictate to others how they should live, what they should choose, whom they should love, or what goals they should pursue, except if any of these things threaten harm to others, where harm includes limiting others' freedoms to choose. …
Only in a pluralistic dispensation can all [human] variety express itself, and pluralism needs liberty because it is impossible without it.
No one should be the property of another, or of a system. We should each be volunteers in society, and should choose our place in it.

And Martin Bell:

Freedom is a secular state of grace which exists in permanent tension with tyranny and which we can claim for ourselves only if we never, ever, seek to deny it to others.

What lies beneath

Greg Clark, Tory front-bencher, says that “tax credits are masking the extent of underlying poverty in Britain today”.

This concept of underlying poverty he defines as covering those people “who either are in poverty or would be without tax credits”. Hmm. So that’s those people who are in poverty plus some of those who aren’t but would be if not for a particular government policy.

But why, among all government policies, just tax credits? Why not child benefit and jobseeker’s allowance too? I bet they’re masking some poverty. Or the minimum wage? There must be plenty of poverty underlying that. Or the Sure Start childcare provision that allows parents the chance to go out and earn money? Or state education? That must help a few people get decent jobs who otherwise wouldn’t. Or Bank of England independence? Without that, the economy would have done less well these last ten years…

It’s almost as if Clark has it in for tax credits. Although he swears he doesn’t:

Let's be clear: tax credits are an essential part of a modern welfare policy, because it is obviously better to increase someone's income in work than to see them either in poverty or out of work.

But there’s a but:

But, surely, something has gone badly wrong with our economy - and our society - when more and more people every year are unable to earn enough to keep themselves and their families off the breadline.

By “unable to earn enough” he really means “unable to earn enough in the absence of certain government policies, namely tax credits”. Has something gone wrong with our economy – and our society – if this is true?

Well, that’s two questions. The point of the economy is to… actually, there isn’t a point to the economy. It’s the aggregate of the buying, selling, working, hiring, producing, consuming and other such activities that we all carry out. We carry these out to advance our own interests. If the untrammeled workings of the market would leave some people badly off, that’s no fault of the economy per se.

But most of us don’t want an economy with no government intervention. We expect our governments to do just that, in various ways and to various extents. Our society thus affects the working of the economy. One of the key reasons it does this is to ensure that those who’d lose out from laissez-faire are in a better position. There are many ways of doing this.

Clark mentions skills, and of course the government can make itself useful there. But there will always be a lot of low-skilled jobs. For every office block full of well-educated professionals, you’ll need catering and cleaning staff. If we want these people to be able to keep their families off the breadline, then we can’t imagine that the free market will do that. Society – via government – will have to compel employers to pay them more or will have to add to their wages directly. Or both.

As we do.

‘Underlying poverty’? The notion seems to treat anything achieved by government as somehow illegitimate and even unreal. Perhaps we should also have figures for underlying crime (counting those that would be committed if there were no prisons), underlying child mortality (including those deaths that the NHS prevents) and underlying school league tables (showing what exam results would be if schools stopped getting public funding).

You’ll always have a past

David Edgar has written a piece apparently about “defectors” from the “left” – although, given that he appears to count Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of the left, I may have misread the article completely. Perhaps it’s actually about Bolivian transport policy, or Renaissance dentistry, or fairies.

I don’t wish to add (much) to the good responses that have appeared already (see Andrew Anthony, Norm Geras, David Thompson and Oliver Kamm); I’ll just note one thing.

Edgar says that he’s “interested in the politics of defection”, although he seems to be more fascinated by the psychology of defection (or rather, the psychology of changing your mind when political cliques of some sort are involved). Key to his view is this:

Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before.

Well, yes, that’s probably true. But you can also make a perfectly good psychological case with which to loftily sneer at consistency of view.

If my now thinking ‘X is bad’ is inevitably coloured by my having once thought ‘X is good’, then of course your now thinking ‘X is good’ is even more so coloured by your record of having thought ‘X is good’ all along. Dare you not be self-critical? Do you magnify, deny or simplify new developments so as to justify keeping your old position? Do you refuse to see things in new ways? Have you invested so much of your life in slogans and tracts and comradeships that to break with that would be more harmful to you than a mere admission of error?

We all have pasts; we can never escape them; our futures will always be coloured by them. Welcome to the human race.

The need for opinion-based politics

I’ve never liked communalist politics, whether based on class, race, sexuality or any other demographic category.

Where there are injustices against members of a certain minority, it’s the business of all decent people. If only that minority is expected to fight the injustice, then success will be harder and society will polarise. Conversely, if there is broader concern for a minority injustice, but it takes the form of an uncritical political privileging of the affected group – and its ‘leaders’ – then the whole point is lost.

As Marko Attila Hoare (via HP) says:

All social classes and ethnic groups should be judged by the same standard; none has any inherent nobility greater than the others; all should be subject to criticism but defended when necessary. So long as one places the support of groups above the support of principles, then principles will inevitably degenerate. It is principles, not groups, that should be supported: support social justice and trade-union rights, rather than the ‘working class’ as such; national self-determination, not Croats or Palestinians as such; religious tolerance, not Muslims as such; anti-racism, not Jews or black people as such.
It is humanity as a whole that should be supported; the only principles worth supporting are those that apply to the whole of humanity.

Exactly. I wouldn’t want to be part of any political movement based on ‘people like me’. The exception, of course, is that I’ll join up with people whose opinions are like mine.

The greatest trick the right ever pulled

Harry Mount doesn’t like the new ‘contextual value added’ school league tables:

Have you ever judged a restaurant by the people that eat there, not by the food or the service? Or rated a book because the other readers had a rough childhood?
This is the idea behind the latest school league tables. Along with exam results, the class, ethnicity and gender of the pupils were considered. And so four excellent grammar schools came in the country's worst 100 schools because their intake was too middle class. The wicked lunacy of these criteria - judge an institution not by its standards, but by its clientele - isn't shocking any more because it's so familiar.

“Wicked lunacy”? Taking into account the scale of the task as well as the end result?

The quality of a book manifestly doesn’t depend on the backgrounds of its other readers; and I’m pretty sure we all do partly judge a restaurant by our fellow diners. If a place that serves food I like gets a lot of stag and hen parties in, I’ll probably stay away.

But imagine two surgeons: one treats ingrown toenails, with a patient survival rate of 90%; the other treats gunshot wounds, with a patient survival rate of 85%. Which surgeon is better – the one with the higher rate, or the one doing the harder task?

It’s an enduring and cosy delusion among fans of (overt or de facto) socially selective schooling that the “standards” of such an “institution” are somehow independent of its “clientele”. The schools themselves certainly know this: that’s why they select. The parents know it, too: that’s why the ones who’ve paid top dollar for their catchment areas are angry about the new admission lotteries.

Baudelaire said: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist” (it was borrowed by ‘The Usual Suspects’). The greatest trick of conservative politics is to present itself as not political at all: contentious ideology becomes common sense while disagreement becomes leftist propaganda, political correctness and overbearing statism. Further strengthening the already strong is nothing more than respecting the natural order of things, while strengthening the weak is a dangerous top-down project of upheaval.

Thus the view that it’s “social engineering” to require state schools to be more socially egalitarian in their admissions. Well, actually, I agree that it is; in fact, it’s social engineering to even have a system of state schools providing universal education regardless of ability to pay. And a good thing, too.

But it’s also social engineering – and in a bad way – to argue that the better-run schools in the state system should only be open to a certain class of applicant. It’s not the default, naturally just setting of society for taxpayers to fund educational gated communities for the well-to-do.

A policy of favouring the already advantaged is as much an ideological stance as one of favouring the disadvantaged.

Compassionate noises and stealth conservatism

I’ve written before that Neal Lawson likes “to attack the government while gushing about David Cameron”, which you might think odd behaviour for someone apparently on the left, and that Lawson’s public statements “seem carefully designed to rubbish the government’s successes and reduce its popularity”.

He’s doing it again:

British politics is in a state of extraordinary flux. What is at stake is the emergence of the first truly post-Thatcherite political party. But what is breathtaking is that we don't yet know whether it will be Labour or Conservative.

He argues that “New Labour can best be defined as an attempt to humanise Thatcherism, not replace it” and that “the party never really believed in social justice, only employability”. I’m not sure how this is supposed to square with the introduction and regular increases to the minimum wage, or the increase in employer NI contributions to fund the NHS, or signing up to the EU Social Chapter – I’d recommend Lawson to listen to the wails about ‘red tape’ and ‘tax burdens’ from the likes of the CBI.

He says that “New Labour transferred the rules of the economy to public institutions, resulting in the commercialisation of public services”. Well, some aspects of user choice have been introduced into some public services, with predictably mixed results – and this has gone a lot less far than many advocates of that model would like to go. He doesn’t consider that choice within free-at-point-of-use public services is a very different beast from choice within a market driven by ability to pay.

He adds that this government’s view has been that “The market was not just more efficient, but provided a moral vision for rampant individualism in which democracy is replaced by consumerism.”

I’m not really sure what this sentence means, but I think ‘people democratically deciding not to vote for parties that don’t accept the principle of a not-too-regulated market economy’ would be more apt than ‘democracy is replaced by consumerism’.

Lawson charges New Labour with “neoliberalism”, the second-dirtiest word he knows (the dirtiest also begins with ‘neo’). Neoliberalism is “the ideological belief that markets are always preferable to the state or other social institutions. For the notion of the social demands a limit on the role of the market. There are places where profits should not and must not be secured.”

Strange, then that the state should have expanded so under New Labour. I do recommend dipping into the comment pages of the Telegraph, the Times or the Spectator for a corrective to the view that the government is basically a creature of the right.

But of course there must be limits to the role of the market (just as there must be limits to the role of the state – and the trade union, the family, the NGO…). Private markets can’t themselves deliver an equitable health system, say. But that doesn’t mean that competition and profit motives can’t possibly operate within the NHS. Do any nurses make any money from their work? Have two doctors never vied for a promotion?

Lawson goes on:

Strangely though, as the tide turns against New Labour it isn't ebbing back to raw neoliberalism. People can still taste the free-market medicine of the 1980s and don't want more. David Cameron knows this. In a speech shortly after becoming leader he said that "social justice means social responsibility: the idea that we're all in this together, that there is such a thing as society" - but went on to say: "It's just not the same thing as the state."

He notes, rightly, that there are “contradictions” between Cameron’s rhetoric and his broad policy approach, but despite this:

As only Nixon could go to China, could only Cameron attempt to save society, or will Labour take up the real political challenge? …
If the [Labour] party continues to refuse to seize the moment by defining the terms of this new collectivism then Cameron, in all his contradictions, will.

It’s in this last sentence that the defining flaw of Lawson’s politics is made clear. Cameron “will” what? Seize the moment or define a new collectivism? And is defining a matter of communicating an impression or implementing a policy agenda?

It doesn’t really matter. What Lawson really wants is to hear narratives that are passionate and earnest about the needs of society. Blair used to be wonderful at that. Now Cameron is moving onto that turf. It seems hardly to matter that, on all the (non-rhetorical) issues where Lawson finds Labour too right-wing, Cameron’s policies are farther to the right.

There is a certain sort of person: middle-class, well-educated, passably well-off, socially liberal, cosmopolitan and internationalist, distasteful of ‘excessive’ corporate greed, and emotionally if not intellectually concerned with the ‘fabric of society’. They loathed the last Tory government, voted Labour or possibly Lib Dem in 1997 and then grew to resent Blair. They find Brown deathly dull and impossible to relate to as a person.

They want a politics that allows them to feel that they’re expressing their social concern without having to make sacrifices, that the ills of the nation – whether they persist or even worsen – are not in their name. It’s the dislocation of values from outcomes.

I’m not saying that Lawson fits this description perfectly; he doesn’t. But articles like his are a small part of the conveyor belt that’s slowly drawing these people nearer towards voting for ‘compassionate’ conservatism.

Careful how you go.

Gordon Brown wants your body

I don’t feel at all uncomfortable with the idea that we should switch from an opt-in system of organ donation to an opt-out one (so that the default, if you don’t express a preference, is that your organs can be used).

But some people are bothered, generally people on the political right. Matthew D’Ancona is typical, fuming at “the nationalisation of the body”. He argues: “As a matter of philosophical principle, the State should presume my consent for nothing unless I specifically give it.” (Cassilis is a notable exception – but while generally on the centre-right, he’s refreshingly hard to pigeonhole.)

People on the left seem mostly not to be worried. Justin McKeating is a good example : “They might as well be saying 'Gordon Brown can pry my liver from my cold dead hand' for all the sense they're making. …
What it boils down to is putting your principles before the lives of dying people.”

That’s more or less how I feel. Corpses have neither needs nor property rights, and an opt-out system will lead to more organs being available to save more lives.

And this is nothing like inheritance tax: you won’t be leaving your kidneys to your children, who despite having decent jobs are finding it really hard to get onto the dialysis ladder.

As for the state’s ‘presuming my consent’, I don’t see how this is different from having income tax taken from your wages via PAYE, which you then might claim back – whether you’ve voted for such a saystem or not.

But I wonder. Sometimes our opinions on one thing are shaped by our broader attitudes.

Try a thought-experiment. Imagine we live in a country where healthcare is private. A new law is proposed, which would let health insurance providers start introducing clauses in their contracts saying that if you die as a member of their scheme, they have the right to use your organs for transplant – although you can ask them for a form to fill in to specify that you’re withholding consent.

How do you feel now? You’re still dead. You still don’t need the organs. People’s lives are still being saved. The opt-out is still freely available, although your consent is still initially being presumed. The utilitarian and libertarian issues remain the same.

Do leftish opt-out supporters feel less comfortable now that it’s profit-making private companies using the organs, rather than the NHS? Conversely, do rightish opt-out opponents feel more comfortable now that this is a transaction in a marketplace, rather than the clunking fist of the state reaching into your chest cavity?

Does a lot of this boil down to how much, in very general terms, we trust the state?

Super-cleaners vs middling managers

Chris Dillow imagines a parallel world:

In it, office cleaners are very well paid. This is because most people believe a clean office is vital for an organization’s productivity.

Managers, on the other hand, are paid decently but not massively: their organisational skills are certainly valuable, but it’s not seen as worth a fortune – and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to spot the rare super-managers reliably.

Chris argues that:

the forces of demand and supply that cause high or low salaries can be ideological constructs. In our parallel world, ideology creates a high demand for cleaners and low one for bosses. In our actual world, things are reversed.

Say Chris is right. If so, then there’s probably too much inertia in the system for this to change easily – even if some people realised their ideological mistakes. Markets treat well-paid managers and poorly paid cleaners as a sign of a good business model (attract executive high-flyers, but keep other costs down), and variations from this are liable to be punished by falling share prices. Furthermore, if most of the market sticks with the existing view, then a merely reasonably paid managerial job will be hard to fill.

Ideology isn’t an abstraction; it seizes people’s minds, often subtly, and shapes the world through them. As Joan Robinson said: “Ideology is like breath: one does not smell one’s own.”