In Dominic Sandbrook's brilliantly discursive and sometimes hilarious book "Seasons in the Sun - the Battle for Britain 1974 to 1979" there is a particularly depressing photograph. It shows a teacher supervising a lesson, which is taking place on waste-ground next to a row of dilapidated terraced houses somewhere in the UK in the mid 'seventies. Children sit aimlessly around a fire. Some mooch in the background and the teacher, all long hair and hands in pocket, looks strangely aloof and disengaged. There is a palpable lack of energy in the scene. In 1979 Pink Floyd produced "Another Brick in the Wall", its song about perceived classroom authoritarianism. "We doan need no educayshun", they groaned. "We doan need no fought contro". They needn't have bothered: that class of '75 got "no educayshun" and came of age between the severe recession of the early 'eighties and the height of the miners' strike in 1984. It is largely that cohort which has been running the country for the past twenty years, and which has filled the upper echelons of its cultural and academic institutions.
When your leaders are poorly educated and reach maturity in circumstances which enhance their sense of alienation, can anyone wonder about the total mess that is presently Governance UK?
There have been a number of episodes in post War British history in which an atmosphere of existential crisis has been marked: Suez; the so-called Three- Day Week; the "Winter of Discontent"; the 1984 miners' strike; the financial crash of 2008 and the EU Referendum in 2016. Apart from the last two, all these instances also took place against the threatening back drop of a nuclear-armed Cold War. In three of them, there was an additional paranoia induced by Ulster connected terrorism, which frequently erupted onto the mainland UK.
In the crises before the Millennium the essential organs of the modern British state held firm, despite a background of profound political turmoil and the possibility of civil strife. A dutiful and dis-interested monarch smiled and waved. Religious leaders were on hand to sooth the wounds of antagonism. The courts continued to dispense justice as found in UK based law. The police were largely trusted to uphold law and order. The professionalism and capability of the Armed Forces was mostly unquestioned. The Civil Service ensured the continuity of national and regional administration. The BBC's approach to public affairs was impartial and evidence based. There was no question of the break-up of the UK (despite the best efforts of the IRA). There was a firm belief in democracy and a healthy scepticism of blue-prints and ideology.
As the sharper elbowed of the class of '75 entered the cadre of national leaders at the turn of the century, the wheels began to fall off. The age of the charlatan had arrived, aided and abetted by the corrosive dominance of the social sciences in public life. It did not matter that the various schemes for the perfection of the citizen founded in the social sciences had manifestly failed, not least in the communist bloc. Unembarrassed, so-called "progressives" now asserted personal "truth" trumped objective truth. Indeed, the whole concept of objective truth was challenged by the increasingly shrill post-Modernist agenda, the sole purpose of which seemed to be the provision of axes to grind and the degradation of rational enquiry and well-tested custom. Social equality would be achieved by the promotion of nonsense - at least then we would all be united in ignorance.
Political chicanery flourished. Blair took the UK to war on the thinnest of pretexts and also because he personally "believed" it was the right thing to do. Brown supervised the largest accretion of the state in peacetime based on his hunch that only he and his coterie could deliver "fairness", whatever that meant. His successors were cast from the same mould in that they too were mostly untroubled by doubt. The vanity, shallowness and fragility of Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss tested to destruction the idea that Oxbridge (or at least Oxford) is the mother lode of educated talent. From these conceits much dross flowed.
When the upper reaches of civil society are as gripped by unreason as is more typically found at its base, there is a problem. Democracy cannot properly function where knowledge and practical experience (as opposed to "lived experience") are relegated or ignored. If accountability is either weak or non-existent, it becomes a lot easier to disregard decisions that have been democratically decided. Nor can democracy work where the fundamental assumptions behind it are endlessly challenged and weakly defended by those who ought to know better.
Charlatans once lived in constant risk of exposure by advances in science and philosophical enquiry. Alas, not even the scientific method has been immune to the contamination of objective truth by post Modernism, while the advances in technology have arguably facilitated the rate at which imbecility flourishes. Ask anyone to name a recently famous UK scientist, and chances are they'll mention Professor Stephen Hawking, the recognition of whom was much enhanced by his wheelchair bound existence and computerised utterances. Hawking made his name in the arcane and highly speculative area of theoretical physics. Although he conceded that so-called M Theory ("The Theory of Everything") was no more than a collection of unproven and unprovable hypotheses, it did not stop him and his collaborators from claiming that this branch of science had supplanted both philosophy and theology. As God had nothing to do with the rightness or otherwise of their speculations, ergo God did not exist either. The British love an underdog and enjoyed the spectacle of the boffin in the wheelchair taking on the Almighty in a contest that no sensible theologian would have asked for.
To say that Hawking deserved his prestige would be overclaiming. But his public popularity and association with speculative science rather than the more precise realm of observed instances also gave a big boost to the quackery of so-called Model Dependent Realism. The very fashionable idea that we can have no concept of a reality outside the models or pictures we construct in order to explain the world has given a big boost to charlatans everywhere. Rational scepticism can be discounted just so long as what you are trying to prove (or disprove) can be fitted into a model. No other considerations apply. Sound familiar? Among the major economies, the UK's strategy to deal with the Covid pandemic was especially dominated by Model Dependent Realism. It did not matter that the assumptions were flawed, and the assigned probabilities seemingly taken out of a hat. The establishment was quick to claim it was "Following the Science" although the experience was a costly and predictable disaster. All the while, the well-founded suspicion that the pandemic had itself been engineered by scientists in a laboratory was ruthlessly supressed.
The "science" of Man- Made Climate Change is similarly compromised by the chicanery enabled by Model Dependent Realism. This has now passed from the realm of scientific enquiry to that of dogma. Notwithstanding the proper application of the scientific method has shown human activity to have a vestigial impact on global warming, sceptics are denounced as dangerous heretics. The Old Testament of anthropogenic climate change is routinely preached by the BBC, with the nonagenarian Sir David Attenborough cast in the role of a modern Elijah. It does not matter, for example, that drought in the Horn of Africa has been endemic since long before global industrialisation. More recently, it has been exacerbated by ethnic conflict, government oppression and widespread corruption. Amid the recent heart- rending scenes of starving infants, the BBC would have been nearer the truth had they said the drought was no fault of these beautiful children. Instead, we were told the catastrophe was entirely the result of Man- Made Climate Change. Never mind the suffering, just admire how on-message is our intrepid and air-conditioned reporter.
Have there been any philosophical defences erected against the rising tide of "personal truths" validated by "lived experiences"? The British pride themselves on their stout- hearted aversion to intellectualism, particularly in the public sphere. From that has arisen the conceit that Britain is somehow immune from any idiocies blowing in from abroad. Post Modernism - isn't that a bit French? Critical Race Theory? That's some nonsense from the US campuses. They'll never catch on here.
Yet arguably the post Modernists bombed the ground that had already been ploughed up by that school of philosophy called "pluralism". This held that romanticism, for example, was as valid a way of looking at the world as rationalism. Or that the wisdom of the ancients was as relevant to our system of morality as the Judaeo Christian tradition. You get the picture. If you asked anyone over 40 if they could name a famous British philosopher, chances are they'd name Sir Isaiah Berlin OM. Lionised by the establishment and adopted as the celebrity house philosopher of UK social democracy, Sir Isaiah owed his renown to apercus like this:
"I regard equality as one of the ultimate goals of men, and its rejection as such is deeply unsympathetic to me...I am not at all against believing that life can be ordered for the better, following a rule of conduct or a critique of culture or a method, even a scientific law - often one can, and if one can, one should".
and this
"Equality and freedom may sometimes be reconciled and sometimes not...there are forms of inequality which diminish freedom, forms of oppression which destroy equality etc".
and this
" I do not think that I intend to throw doubts on religious morality as such, only on one that excludes all non-religious values"
Read those highly conditional sentences again and you realise Berlin is not saying very much at all. His fellow pluralist Michael Oakeshott was more obviously suspicious of "systems". This and his reverence for practical knowledge, well tested custom and the human capacity for adaptation have led many to conclude he was an exemplar for the right. Perhaps for this reason, Berlin detested Oakeshott and called him a charlatan. So much for pluralism.
Where the pluralists were in the business of examining the multiple roots of our moral understanding, the post Modernists have tried to dig them up and burn them. They have had quite a bit of success. Politicians are unable to say what defines a woman and eminent doctors of the church can be found to affirm that Christ was, in fact, "trans". Members of the royal family would have us believe they are oppressed. We have been told to assume that we have a right not to be offended, particularly if we are "vulnerable" on account of our "protected characteristics". If objective truth makes anyone uncomfortable or is otherwise "problematic" or "inappropriate", it must be suppressed. Nonsense now has a code of approved attitudes to which citizens must adhere on pain of excommunication ("cancelling" in the vernacular) and even deprivation of their livelihoods. We turn to superannuated footballers masquerading as philosophers for our moral lessons and to professional agitators as our guides to modern manners. We throw billions at business charlatans and allow them to remain at liberty when they should be in jail. As one would expect in the "progressive" world of PO-MO, the zealotry of unreason is most pronounced in our institutions of higher learning. There has been nothing this culturally crazy since the witch burning of the 17th century.
As we enter the Advent season, it is good to be reminded that we were given a perfectly good rubric to help us lead better lives with purer hearts over 2,000 years ago. The Jesus of the Gospels didn't invite us to solve moral problems or to agonise where good ends might conflict - he enjoined us to lead a life of justice AND mercy. He did not assert, and he certainly wasn't in the excommunication game. He did however show that there is a wrong way, and that evil is ever-present. But he would also have been more forgiving of the charlatans than they have ever been of him.
Happy Christmas.
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