How Nature might help us to distinguish between good and bad ideas - Paul Regan
Amidst the apparent randomness, fragility, and mystery of our existence, there are certain phenomena, which strike us as both necessary and real. My list, though by no means exhaustive, would include the following: free will; the duality of mind and body; the uniformity of nature; causality; and the universality of numbers and logic. Belief in free will allows us to create legal systems based on notions of moral agency and personal and collective responsibility; the intuition that we are essentially dualistic motivates us to search for awe and wonder in a non material dimension; the uniformity of nature and causality permit us to live our lives according to a high degree of routine and predictability; and the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’* of mathematics has helped to create our technologies and infrastructures, and to gain a sophisticated understanding of our cosmos.
Worryingly, some of the greatest minds have challenged the truths and reality of all of the above, and a few, such as the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume, have convincingly argued against, inter alia, the existence of cause and effect and moral realism. Regardless, on a personal level, these innate beliefs do stick and persist across time and place. We cherish them because they are essential to our sense of normality and identity, and no amount of theorizing can dislodge them from our minds. Most of us remain convinced that they are real.
Why are these notions so successful and ubiquitous? I suggest that it is for the simple reason that they have had to compete in the evolutionary university of ideas by proving themselves useful over millennia of trial and error. The invisible hand of Nature has selected them for replication because they are pragmatically essential to our well-being. Their origins, in other words, are embedded in the natural world, and having undergone a gruelling audit to assess their suitability, they have been awarded tenure.
* Eugene Wigner
The human marketplace of ideas, by contrast, is not as unbiased or as patient as Nature’s. Moreover, it seems to have no rules. Institutions and customs that do work or have worked for a privileged minority, such as slavery, offensive warfare, and state tyranny, have caused untold misery for the majority. Religious and political ideologies, whose origins may have been benign, have been hijacked time and again by self-serving elites and cults. Good ideas, on the other hand, struggle to achieve takeoff probably because they threaten those same elites. The abolition of slavery in Britain in the early nineteenth century stands out because it capitalized on a conjunction of events, personalities, and ideas, which came together after a heroic struggle.
Even certain theories which have started innocently enough in academic journals, scientific circles, and university Humanities departments, once they gained momentum, have often proved disastrous when adopted as public policy. It is for example possible to trace a long and winding path from the eugenicist practices of Nazi Germany right back to the infamous ‘ nature vs. nurture’ strapline of the British scientist Sir Francis Galton, who first articulated the debate in 1869.
It is chilling now to read about inter war parliamentary committees recommending forced sterilization of the unfit and disabled, and about how large sections of the British press either supported or failed to challenge these ideas, euphemistically renamed as ‘Social Darwinism’. The very term conferred respectability on a wicked doctrine. Eugenics theories did indeed prove very sticky, and permeated large sections of the British establishment until Hitler's gas chambers prompted a race to disown them. The architect of the Welfare State himself, William Beveridge, regularly attended eugenics lectures even during the Second World War period. Huxley’s ‘ Brave New World’, written in 1933, a cautionary tale of state-regulated births and deaths, can be read either as a warning or as a bible depending upon the view of the reader.
Another bad but sticky idea was Karl Marx’s ‘ Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. It is doubtful that Marx, when he first penned the term in 1850, either foresaw or intended the mass murder of millions of Russians under Stalin’s purges of the 1930’s to 1950’s, but that is what happened anyway. Yet again, a significant minority of the British intelligentsia, including the writers George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells, naively bought into the communist narrative, even as it was leading to despotism and mass murder. The fact that neither of these awful developments came to pass in our country owes more to the common sense of the silent majority in a parliamentary democracy who rejected the cruel, anti-humanist views of many of our elite influencers, some of whom are still revered today.
So who can we trust when new ideas are thrust upon us and why does it matter? It matters because we are never free from attempts to instill conformity from one elite or another, and vigilance in recognizing and testing their theories is our only self-defence. I believe that now, more than ever, we need to hone those skills for the following reason.
For the past twenty or so years, a set of interrelated ideas which were once contained in esoteric literature have gone mainstream. It is arguable why this has happened, but one plausible and simple reason is that the graduates of those universities where this literature was once studied, are now leaders in office, and have morphed into the new authoritarians. Consequently, large sections of our current establishment including much of our political class, the Media, many public institutions such as the Police, the NHS, the BBC and the Church of England, and some of our universities and schools have subscribed to popularized versions of them. More recently, the business and advertising industries, with an eye to their profits, have also come on board.
It is by now evident that these ideas, and the theories that explain and justify them, have in common a view about society, culture and history, which is overtly destructive, even iconoclastic. They are extreme in that they clearly do not appeal to the majority of people but, like the eugenics movement of a century or so ago, they can be owned by the left and the right but in different ways. A foundational tenet of this cultural movement is that our thoughts, actions, beliefs, and desires are dictated by our identity, which is located within a rigidly classified hierarchy based upon race, gender, age and geography, amongst other things. Furthermore, in order to speed up our conformity, an attitude of offence has been weaponized to neutralize real or imagined dissent.
We are literally bullied into accepting our assigned identity as an immovable item, and thereby to acknowledge any so-called unconscious biases that arise from that. We are obliged to admit to a worldview defined by that identity, and are not allowed to deviate from it. Social mobility, imagination, creativity, and unity are all under threat. Really, they might as well divide us all into alphas, beta minuses, gamma pluses, and deltas!
The ‘cancel culture,’ so–called, seems to rely on two major assumptions. Firstly, that a definition, belief, change of language, theory or proposition, regardless of their truth-value, must not be challenged once passed as orthodox by an unelected priesthood; and secondly, that any opposition will be interpreted as a moral outrage and the person responsible will be cast out.
This new wave of political correctness may seem overwhelming, but, put into perspective, it is neither new or something we should be afraid to reject. Most new ideas are championed with passion, intolerance, and exclusiveness which normally develop into groupthink and confirmation bias from amongst their supporters and followers. Just study any cult through history and you will find the same or very similar phenomena. But once an ideology has captured the loyalty of elite groups, its transition into the mainstream can be disorientating for the rest.
What is different now though is the speed of travel of ideas via the 24-hours news and social media feed. This has led, I think, to a paradox. The more widely educated our societies have become, the better we should be at protecting ourselves from undue influence, and at choosing those ideas, which like Nature's, will enhance our humanity, happiness and survival. And yet we seem to be getting worse at this task, happy to outsource our thinking and discrimination to social media trolls, tech giants, and celebrities.
I have a few recommendations to anyone who instinctively feels that this policing of ideas is somehow not right but does not feel equipped to respond to it. Firstly, any new idea should be open to satire, and if it cannot withstand a few jokes at its expense, then it is fragile. Secondly, a new idea, if not just a pseudo concoction of biases, should be falsifiable. If events prove the idea to be faulty in some way then its adherents should go back for a more reliable hypothesis. And thirdly, a new idea should be robust enough to be explained without offence. The use of ad hominem attacks is unworthy and must be called out. Nobody should be afraid, within the bounds of common sense, reasonableness and decency, to challenge and oppose any idea, theory, or claim to truth that they wish. If an intolerant and permanently outraged minority does not approve, then that is their problem, not yours.
Paul Regan