The Threat to Reason

Enlightenment Revisited

2011-04-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

I've mostly been blogging at The Return of the Public. The other day I found myself retracing my argument in The Threat to Reason. The post is here. There is mystery enough in the world still, it seems.

2009-09-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month the BBC Trust commissioned a poll that looked like an attempt to kick the part of the Digital Britain report dealing with the provison of local news into the long grass. Sir Michael Lyons came out to bat on September 9th, in the Guardian:

Quoting the BBC-commissioned survey of more than 2,000 adults, Lyons said they had been given six choices what to do with the licence fee surplus once digital switchover was complete.

"Around half of those asked would prefer the licence fee to be lowered by £5.50, compared to just six per cent who wanted additional money to be spent on regional news on other channels," said Lyons.

That's not a terribly helpful precis of the 'topline' data from the survey. 61% of those polled supported the idea of getting £5.50 back (they scored it between 7-10 on a scale of 1-10 where 1 meant 'No Support at all' and 10 meant 'Complete Support'), and 49% of those polled saw the lower license fee as their preferred option. That much is true.

But 27% of those asked supported increased funding for regional news (it was the preferred option of 6%, as Lyons says), 29% supported increased funding for other forms of public service content outside the BBC and 36% supported increased funding for program-making at the BBC.

Now here's the thing. Until we know how many of those who saw a lower licence fee as the best outcome also supported the use of funds for expanded program-making, we don't know how many people in the survey had registered the fact that a lower license fee would rule out all the other options, and weren't really clear about what the survey was asking them, or weren't really that bothered about having all the money back, but gave that answer because they wanted some of it. I can well believe that many people want a lower licence fee, but how many of them also want improved public service content?

After all if I strongly agree with the idea of giving the money to regional journalism and with having all the £5.50 back, I am not really paying attention, and am probably in a hurry to be somewhere else, away from the stranger with the clipboard.

The head of the BBC Trust will doubtless take the trouble to publish the full report on the poll with as much fanfare as it has presented its own highly partial summary of the 'topline' data. But it would be even better if they re-ran the survey with a couple more questions -

Do you think that the £5.50 from the digital switchover should be used to fund investigations into local and national corruption, abuse of the planning system and criminal behaviour by local and national elites, these investigations to be chosen by a democratic vote, like in TV talent shows, only with crooks in high places. Britain's Top Economic and Political Gangster, sort of thing?

Or do you think that the £5.50 should be spent on what you, as a public organised locally, regionally and nationally want, including but not limited to Britain's Top Economic and Political Gangster as above?

Now that's a survey I would like the body statutorily responsible for defending the interests of the BBC's audience to commission.

Adventures in Consultation Land

2009-09-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

The government has asked for responses to its white paper Digital Britain by September 22. I urge all my dozens of readers to go here and make their voices heard. The report authors insist that while Ofcom, the BBC and Channel 4 are all important, they want to hear from members of the public. I am not sure if they actually expect to hear from us, so it would nice to surprise them.

It would be particularly interesting to see what they say about attitudes revealed in the answers to question 4, given its farcical structure.

1. Do you agree that securing plural sources of impartial news for the Nations, locally and in the regions should be a key priority?

Yes/No?

Yes.

The existing mix of private and state institutions is demonstrably failing to provide accurate, timely, publicly relevant and impartial news. This failure has played out at the local, regional and national level. There is now a growing crisis of plausibility in the news media and it is vital that the review of Digital Britain addresses this.

The proposals in Digital Britain should be seen as a starting point for a period of public debate as to the institutional structure of news-gathering in Britain and the need for wide-ranging reform. Particular attention should be paid to the need for democratic control of the commissioning process in journalism. Where public subsidy makes investigative journalism possible, the citizen body should have the right to decide what forms of investigation serve its interests.

2. Do you agree that sustainable, impartial news in the Nations, locally and in the regions is likely to require some top-up public funding?

Yes/No?

Yes

Clearly the market cannot be left to provide news unaided. Public money will be needed. The crucial question concerns who controls this money. Do we leave it to bureaucrats, or do we ensure that the public controls the uses to which its own money is put?

3. Do you agree that the Television Licence Fee should be used to support impartial news in the Nations, locally and in the regions in addition to BBC services?

Yes/No

Yes.

The TV licence fee is a natural source for top up funding. There is also an argument for imposing a levy on highly profitable companies that benefit from the use of public resources. I would be particularly keen to see News International subject to a levy, given its imaginative approach to the country's tax laws and the longstanding contempt that its owners and managers have shown to common decency.

4. Do you agree that any funding within a contained contestable element of the Television Licence Fee not required for impartial news should potentially be available to fund other forms of essential public service content, or should such funding be limited to news?

Yes/No?

Yes.

This is a trick question, isn't it? If I am answering the first question then the answer is yes, if the second the answer is no. How many of your respondents have spotted this? How have you addressed the question's ambiguity in your work on the consultation?

The money should be used to support news-gathering and the creation of civic content - that is, it should be made available to journalists, researchers and citizens who are able to persuade their fellow citizens of the merits of the projects they wish to work on. It should be up to the citizen body to decide on the kinds of content it wants.

5. Are there alternative funding mechanisms that you believe would deliver the previous objectives more effectively?

Yes/No

Yes [sort of]

As said above, a levy of communications companies should be considered. But given that some money previously controlled by the BBC seems to be available, we should start with that and move on to industry levies as the public realizes how much fun it is to control the investigative infrastructure.

6. Do you agree with the proposal to set a maximum percentage of Television Licence Fee revenue which could be set aside as a contained contestable element?

Yes/No?

Yes.

There is no point going hog wild at this stage. The BBC produces a great deal that the public value and it should be kept as a strongly financed state broadcaster. Money can be found for other sources for further expansion of the democratic media.

Besides, £126 million per year is quite a lot to be going on with, especially if it is administered through public commissioning and not frittered away on management salaries, consultancy fees and various other boondoggles.

7. Do you agree that amending the BBC Agreement could provide the necessary protection to the BBC's future funding and independence?

Yes/No?

Yes.

I have put yes, because I have to answer something here, but the honest answer is that I don't know.

8. Do you agree that the use of any contained contestable element within the Television Licence Fee should be restricted to the public purposes set out in the BBC Charter?

Yes/No?

No.

The uses made of the contestable element should be determined by the relevant publics. The BBC has not proved adequate to serving the public interest in crucial respects and its charter cannot be allowed to preempt the actions of the public.

Responding to "Digital Britain" Part II

2009-09-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

The proposals in Digital Britain for public service content are interesting and, in some respects encouraging. It is right for the government to recognise that the existing media system is failing in the regions and in the devolved nations. But both the diagnosis and the proposed course of treatment are inadequate.

Journalism in Britain is not struggling simply because the existing news media are facing a squeeze on advertising revenues caused by both the recession and competition from the internet. Journalism is facing a crisis of plausibility as its repeated failures to describe reality become more and more difficult to explain away or justify to the general public (senior journalists remain almost infinitely forgiving of their profession's derelictions of common sense, of course - see, for example, Timothy Garton Ash on the Iraq War. He has been 'kicking himself' ever since he swallowed all that stuff about WMDs in 2002. And now that it doesn't matter he has promised to be much more suspicious in future.

I digress.

Journalism is in crisis because it cannot describe the world in terms that are recognisable to an averagely observant person. The world-view that informs the media in Britain and the United States lacks a factual base. People can see how their towns and cities are being transformed by corporate development, yet the media says little or nothing about the process by which this happens and so denies the majority any meaningful say in matters of everyday importance. People can see how their money is now being used to prop up an ailing financial system after a generation of being told that the private sector had to be left alone to work its magic. People can see that governments lie outright when the stakes are high enough, as they in the case of Iraq. People can see that the media ignore issues that touch on their own vital interests and the vital interests of their patrons in the state and corporate sectors.

Given the narrow scope of the analysis of the problem, it is hardly surprising that the proposals for reform in Digital Britain are timid, going on counterproductive ...

[...]

The cure does depend on finding money from somewhere other than the market place. The cure does depend in part on diverting money from the BBC to other news providers. But these news providers must be much more responsive to the needs of their audiences and much less concerned to serve institutional masters whose motives are at burst murky and at worst downright vicious. Rather, money raised on an equitable basis from the public should be used to support journalism of the sort desired by the public. The public should exercise direct control of the research agenda of journalists seeking public money to assist them in their work. In other words, money taken from the license fee should be given to journalists who can convince the public (their paymasters) that their work will serve their interests. I can see no just or justifiable alternative to a democratic system of commissioning.

At the moment the major news media keep a very tight leash on their investigative reporters, and appear to the casual observer to be engaged in a kind of permanent campaign of implicit blackmail and counter-blackmail with both their competitors and with potential threats to their interests. The power to commission investigation lies at the heart of the media's power. And this is so even if, especially if, much of the material discovered remains unpublished. It is up to us to insist on meaningful media reform, and to demand that our money is spent on inquiries of which we approve.

Such a system of funding would allow us to conduct preliminary 'public inquiries' into matters that concern us, but that have no elite backing. In this way an important, perhaps crucial, element of the information economy would be democratised, and the power for the state and of the interests that dominate it to shape the news agenda would be significantly reduced. A new form of tribunician journalism would be made possible as individuals saw the possibilities of a career serving the wishes of the public, rather than those of their current patrons and employers.

None of the established interests are going to support this move, since it promises such thorough-going disruption of their prerogatives. Only the public, organized perhaps through this wonderful invention, the internet, can put this onto the political agenda.

Responding to "Digital Britain"

2009-09-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

Introduction

The publication in July of Lord Carter’s extensive review of the UK’s media policy, Digital Britain, prompted a vast amount of coverage in the UK media. Setting aside their usual reluctance to discuss the structure of the media devant les enfants, the major newspapers and the BBC waded in to tell us what they thought of the report and to give some impressionistic summaries of what was in it. Lord Carter himself was unimpressed by the quality of the coverage:

I think 90% of the people that are writing these articles have not read the report … But that does not stop them producing 2,500 pieces of copy, almost all of which are inaccurate. There is a conflation of what we are recommending on broadband, there is a blatant inaccuracy in what we are saying on local news, there is no attempt to read what is laid out in complete detail in chapter nine.

In what follows I set out to provide a summary of the report’s proposals for public service content. The report calls for a period of consultation between now and September 22. The public needs to have as clear an understanding of what is being proposed as possible, insofar as it relates to the provision of public service content on television and radio, in print and online, so that it can contribute to this consultation process. I urge readers to engage in the consultation process, and to go beyond the quite narrow bounds of the process as currently structured. If you have ever thought that media reform would be a good idea, now is the time to take action. Changes are inevitable - the form they take is up for grabs

So far the BBC and the private media groups have dominated the response to the government’s proposals. With one or two honourable exceptions they have to date failed to provide the public with an accurate and adequate summary or set out a reasoned account of how public service content might be improved in this country. Accordingly I sketch an approach to public service provision that, while building on the proposals in Digital Britain, would more substantially safeguard the interests of media workers – journalists, broadcasters – and better serve the interests of the public as a whole. In the period between now and September the government is running a consultation on Digital Britain. I hope that what follows will encourage more people to engage in what is a chance to make important changes to a media system that needs to be reformed for the common good.

The Findings of the Report

Digital Britain discusses public service provision in the executive summary and in chapter 5 of the report. At the outset the report states that there are ‘gaps in market provision where plurality of provision, beyond the BBC, ranged from the desirable to essential’. In this context it mentions material for older children and ‘particularly news in the Nations, regionally and locally’ (p.19).

It therefore proposes that some portion of the 3.5% of the license fee currently being used to fund the digital switchover should be used to support public service content. It says that it is ‘open to other proposals for funding in the consultation process’, but it makes it clear that the license fee is the obvious source of extra funds for this purpose: ‘The Television License Fee is the major intervention for content and is the most suitable source for this funding’ (p.19).

It goes on to say that it will ‘discuss with the BBC Trust how the remaining part of the emerging underspend in the Digital Help Scheme, that is not being used to help fund the Broadband Universal Service Commitment, could be used to fund pilots between now and 2012’ (p.20). It also insists that ‘any funding needs to be contestable, allocated against clear clear range, reach, and quality criteria, by an arm’s length body’ (p.20). So the government wants to give some money to content providers who are not the BBC and it wants to establish a transparent mechanism for doing so.

Since publication Ben Bradshaw, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has made it clear that the government is thinking of using all of the 3.5% of the TV license fee to support public service content:

We think it reasonable to use about 3.5% of the license fee – the proportion currently ringfenced to help pay for digital switchover – to ensure there continue to be plural, local and regional news.

In chapter 5 of the report the authors go into a little more detail about their reasoning and their intentions. The case for strong intervention by the state to deliver public service content has been ‘accentuated by the rapid diminution of advertiser-funded market surplus that had funded commercially-provided public service content’ (p.137). In other words ITV and the local newspapers are running out of money as their hold on the advertising market weakens. And if we, as a society, decide that ‘we want plurality that the market unaided will not provide, we need also to decide how we are to fund it’ (p.137). If we will the ends, we must also will the means.

It identifies three gaps in market provision:

1.) News in the Nations, regionally and locally
2.) Material for older children
3.) Hard factual content and documentaries

The report specifically rules out new funding for satire and innovative content and later identifies Channel 4 as the focus for the production of children’s content outside the BBC:

We believe that the most appropriate way to future proof the provision of original children’s production in the UK is to enshrine within the newly defined remit for Channel Four, a solid commitment to children’s content, with priority given to older children – the area where there is the greatest market failure. We are looking forward to considering the proposal of Channel 4’s board. (p.147)

This leaves news and hard factual content as possible areas where new funding models need to be found. The government thinks it is a good idea to support regional and local journalism because:

It is important for civic society and democracy for people to have a range of sources of accurate and trustworthy news at all levels, local, national and in the Nations as well as UK-wide and international news that is guaranteed, beyond market provision. (p.141)

This will require, the government concedes, some institutional innovation:

To sustain the vital civic function of journalism, citizens, government and business will need to devise new ways to find the news. (p.149)

It is tempting to ask at this point whether the public sector support of journalistic content before now has been able to deliver ‘accurate and trustworthy news at all levels’. Public engagement with the political process has been in decline on most measures for most of the post-war period. The shortcomings in local and regional provision in both print and broadcast were apparent long before a crisis hit the advertising markets. The decision to support plural provision of public service content is to be welcomed, but it is difficult to accept that tacit assumption that the previous system adequately supported civic society and democracy.

Be that as it may, the report makes it clear that the BBC’s proposals to share infrastructure with other news providers will be adequate to offset the collapse of local and regional news provision (p.142).

The report does not propose simply subsidizing the existing ITV local news infrastructure, in part on efficiency grounds:

Funding would achieve substantially more per pound of input in the hands of new operators using new media than to sustain a legacy broadcast network and studios for regional news built in and for the days of surplus in the system. (p.142. The waywardness of the prose in the section quoted is unfortunately somewhat characteristic of the report as a whole.)

This ties in with the report’s hope that new forms of plural provision will ‘provide regional and local hubs for the development of multi-media skills’ (p.22). The emphasis seems to be on moving beyond a traditional broadcast model and on using public money to promote innovation in the media market.

The move to change the structure of public support for content will have to be done in such a way as to ‘deliver independence both from the government and from the BBC’s own editorial independence’. (p.142. Like I said the prose is kind of a worry at times.) Nothing is said about the need to deliver editorial independence from the commercial interests of the new publicly funded bodies themselves, a point to which we shall return.

The preferred institutional vehicle for delivering contestable and editorially independent news is the Independently Financed News Consortium (IFNC). And just what is an IFNC? The report explains:

Independently Financed News Consortia are a joining of interested parties who will provide a more ambitious cross-media proposition and enhanced localness compared with current commercial television regional news; but which, to maximise audience reach, will also broadcast in the regional news slots in the schedule of current Channel 3 Licensees.

Consortia would include but not be limited to existing television news providers, newspaper groups or other newsgathering agencies. IFNCs would be chosen against public criteria. As essential criteria these are likely to include: the ability to achieve reach and impact; high production and editorial standards to sustain accuracy and impartiality; and the financial stamina to sustain the service at quality throughout the period of the award. Criteria for desirable outcomes could include the ability to raise the proportion of total activity devoted to journalism; commitments to distinctiveness and original/investigative journalism; commitments to multi-media training and willingness to/arrangements for syndication of news stories to other news organisations, whether nationally, regionally or locally.

…

The necessary governance arrangements will ensure that IFNCs deliver value for money, with sufficient reach and impact to justify the public investment; are editorially independent; simple and transparent in their set-up and on-going administration, properly accountable for their use of public funds and capable of providing regional news programmes based on clear service level agreements. (p.156-7)

So the IFNCs will deliver broadcast news over the ITV network, though they will be expected to deliver ‘enhanced localness’ and ‘a more ambitious cross-media proposition’. The report goes on to say that it is minded to mount three pilot schemes, one in Scotland, one in Wales and one in an English region:

Third parties wishing to join the pilots in Scotland and Wales would need to meet essential criteria, including being either an existing news provider with an established audience in the relevant Nation (e.g. a local newspaper or radio station), a media production company or other broadcast, local television or multi-media company with a track record of delivering news or current affairs in the Nation; and can meet financial integrity and compliance tests [...] Similar criteria will be applied to the overall composition of the Consortium for the English region. Third parties with clear business and financial integrity with experience in news provision would tend to be in a stronger position. (p.157)

As it stands the criteria for joining the pilots would tend to favour the large regional media players. In fact the casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that the consortia are intended to channel subsidies to the newspaper chains, a class of corporation that has not in the recent past shown any great appetite for hard-hitting journalism.

To recap, the government appears to be saying that it will use 3.5% of the license fee (around £126 million every year) to support journalism at community, regional and National levels. It wants third party ‘news consortia’ to join pilots in Scotland, Wales and one of the English regions. These consortia will need to demonstrate a track record in news provision and financial integrity. There are two kinds of criteria on which these consortia will be chosen – essential ones and desirable ones. The consortia must convince those who control the pilot scheme that they can reach an audience (‘achieve range and impact’), that they will be accurate and impartial, and that they are sufficiently robust financially to maintain high levels of service. It would be desirable if the consortia increased the amount of actual journalism, if they commissioned more investigative journalism and if they were willing to share their findings with other news organisations.

At this point it is worth noting the comments of the head of Ofcom about the likely costs of delivering a ‘straight replacement’ for ITV news. In a speech at the end of April Ed Richards estimated that it would cost between £40 and £60 million to replace existing ITV news provision:

At its most basic the new set-up could act as a straight replacement for existing provision, based upon the existing licence areas and limited to linear television. We estimate the costs of such a service to be in the region of £40-60 million.

But, he added, there were ‘more exciting possibilities that meet the aspirations of healthy local democracy, quality journalism and the needs of audiences in the digital age’. He continued:

We estimate that £60-100 million could deliver a service capable of meeting these objectives to a higher standard, providing a quality news service of impact and relevance. Additional value could be achieved through synergies and cross promotion from other media and partners in the consortium. This would differ from region to region, according to the mix of players in the successful consortium and the existing local media scene.

It is not clear what percentage of the government’s additional subsidy the consortia will eventually control, but at first glance there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason for the consortia to have much in the way of 'financial stamina', unless this is simply intended to discourage genuinely regional players from forming them.

After all, elsewhere in the report the government notes that commercial institutions will ‘need to be supplemented with a range of alternative models – for example, local ownership, community media and non-profit organizations’ (p.149). It would be quite irresponsible to permit unitary consortia dominated by commercial interests to monopolise editorial decisions regarding the use of what is, after all, public money, just because they are able to demonstrate ‘business and financial integrity’. There are plenty of independent media that could use government money to expand and develop their service to the communities they serve – a unitary ‘consortium’ put together by commercial interests is unlikely to pay much more than lip service to the contribution that such players could make. Whereas a coalition of existing and new independent media providers could greatly expand its capabilities with the help of public money, and do so in ways much more likely to address the civic concerns of their publics.

Given the demonstrable failure of existing regional and local commercial news media to support civic engagement in recent decades, the government’s proposals for new forms of subsidy should be taken as no more than a point of departure at this stage. We should therefore set out measures for making political life in the Nations and the regions more accessible to the public. Increased public support for journalism can only be justified if it serves to promote a more substantive democratic culture.

Responding to Digital Britain

It is not always clear what the report has in mind. The stated aims are sometimes at odds with the means favoured. So, for example, the desire to use money to encourage the creation of 'multi-media hubs' seems to sit uneasily with the preference for established media companies as bidders to become IFNCs. As noted the prose isn’t always as clear as it might be, and the report covers a huge amount of ground. The responsibilities of the IFNCs are very vaguely set out - they are to replace ITV's regional news, but are also to other things.

The situation hasn’t always been helped by the response of the major media groups. The Guardian was at pains to note its institutional interests, even if it did tend to downplay the provisional nature of the proposals and the government’s stated desire to hear from the public. The proposals on consortia were pretty much set in stone as far as most articles were concerned:

Each consortium is likely to be made up of existing TV news providers, media organizations, several of which – including Guardian Media Group, STV and the Press Association – have already expressed an interest in the scheme.

News International objected to the extension of public support by taking the moral high ground. Its employees argued for journalistic freedom in a concerted, not to say regimented, way. Mike Darcy, the Chief Operating Officer at BSkyB condemned a ‘culture of dependency’ in British journalism. John Ryley, the head of Sky News insisted that ‘the fundamentals of journalism are independence of spirit and inquiry, which stem in part from independence of funding’. It would be easier to take his comments seriously if News International permitted anything approaching ‘independence of spirit’ in its newspapers or paid more than homeopathic amounts of tax in this country.

The Director General of the BBC has attacked plans to ‘topslice’ the TV license fee (or the BBC license fee as Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC Trust, has a habit of calling it). The BBC enjoyed considerable support from groups who have little cause to feel grateful to the corporation and who have a great deal to gain from a more plural and more evidence-based approach to newsgathering. Both the NUJ and BECTU have spoken out against the plans. Jeremy Dear, the head of the NUJ has warned that:

Sharing the licence fee with other organisations is the start of a slippery slope towards the politicisation of the BBC. When politicians start to decide how the licence fee is divvied up, the independence and impartiality of the corporation will be put at risk. while BECTU has called for money to be levied from media groups such as Virgin and Sky, rather than from the license fee. This is a good way to boost public service provision, but politically it makes sense to argue that the licence should be democratized, since the idea of breaking the BBC's monopoly control of the licence fee is now on the agenda.

The head of Trinity Mirror, Sly Bailey, says that:

[…] we are keen to understand the proposed independently-funded news consortia and, as the pilots are expected to take place in our areas of strength, we will continue the exploratory talks we are already having with potential partners.

Since the publication of the report Trinity Mirror has announced the creation of a ‘public service reporting ’ pilot on Merseyside in a joint venture with the Press Association. Separately the Press Association has expressed an interest in developing its regional news services. According to www.how-do.co.uk:

The Press Association, along with other commercial news providers, is investing in the development of new services and exploring opportunities to collaborate and work together in partnership to ensure the continuing provision of news services.

Meanwhile the Conservative party has announced that it wishes to strip Ofcom of its policy-making powers. Cameron must be aware that Digital Britain has deeply irritated News International and is manoeuvering to secure Murdoch's backing in the next election.

The report itself says that it hasn’t ruled out further refinements to its plans:

The Government will be open to other ideas and proposals in the consultation period which meet the objectives of maintaining a strong, independent BBC, while providing a sufficiency of sustainable, contestable funding in local, regional and Nations news. (p.144)

It is also at pains to insist that doesn’t only want to hear from the BBC Trust and from Ofcom:

There are two organisations with specific responsibilities in relation to the issue of funding plural public service provision: firstly the BBC Trust, with their responsibilities in relation to the licence fee payers and for maintaining the independence of the BBC; secondly, the independent Statutory regulator, Ofcom with its duties towards maintaining and strengthening the quality of public service television broadcasting in the UK which cover the BBC but go wider. Evidence and views from these bodies in the consultation will be vital. In addition, there are other public service bodies such as S4C and C4 Corporation whose views will be pertinent, as will those of the wider market. Most importantly [sic], however, are the views of the audiences and users who pay for these public services, and those who represent them. (p.144)

As noted above, the government’s willingness to hear from the public and to consider different approaches did not feature prominently in any of the mainstream coverage of the report, as far as I can tell. This is a shame, since it creates the impression that those who are at present ‘likely’ to form the news consortia are happy to let things proceed on their current course, in the hope of securing commercial advantage in the months to come. Either that or, in the case of News International, the absence of any commercial benefit has made them narrowly opposed to the whole idea of public support for journalism, no matter how it is managed.

In what follows I present some proposals that build on the government’s own ideas. They do not, I believe, undermine the stated goals of the report and indeed they go some way to ensure that the civic purposes of journalism are strengthened by the use of public money.

Making the Consortia Work

In the section on IFNCs the report states that:

Criteria for desirable outcomes could include the ability to raise the proportion of total activity devoted to journalism; commitments to distinctiveness and original/investigative journalism […]

These outcomes should be considered essential when judging applications for public funds to support journalism in the regions and the Nations. If the new institutions don’t deliver more original and investigative journalism than the old ITV news services, then there is no reason to give them more than the £40-60 million that Ed Richards gave as an estimate of the cost of providing a ‘straight replacement’. And, given that the report itself recognizes how much more efficient ‘new operators using new media’ would be, even the lower end of Richards’ estimate might be excessive. It would be interesting to know what resources the ITV franchises devoted to news provision five years ago and what could now be saved with new technology and infrastructure sharing with the BBC, and therefore freed up to support journalism. Our first task must be to estimate how much a straight replacement for ITV regional news would cost to put in place. This estimate should be based on the cost of the existing system while taking into account how both new technology and infrastructure sharing with the BBC can reduce costs.

The structure of the IFNCs should also be considered very carefully. At present the qualifying criteria for the pilots favour large media groups such as STV, Trinity Mirror, PA and Guardian Media Group. These large companies have already welcomed the report’s recommendations. Yet this tilt to large companies is hard to square with the report’s recognition that the commercial model will ‘need to be supplemented with a range of alternative models – for example, local ownership, community media and non-profit organizations’ (p.149). An IFNC able to demonstrate that it could achieve ‘reach and impact’ would surely have its origins in an existing network of local news organizations. There is a real danger that a consortium made up of large national and regional players would do no more than deliver an expensive simulacrum of community media, while starving innovative, responsive and cost-effective players of public money.

To repeat, the insistence on ‘financial stamina’ as an essential criterion makes no sense if the operations of the consortia could be wholly funded by public money. Of course the news consortia should be accountable for the money they receive and should be professionally and responsibly run. But they do not need to be a means by which large corporations receive subsidies from those who pay the TV license fee.

Accordingly, the government should revise its plans and separate out their two main objectives – the replacement of the existing ITV regional news and the expansion and improvement of publicly funded journalism in the regions and the Nations.

The news consortia that deliver the ITV broadcast news should be non-profit institutions, structured in a way that protects the interests of employees and the interests of their audience. They should be mandated to produce the ITV broadcast news and specific online services, using BBC technology where possible. Allowing for the sale of advertising time, infrastructure-sharing arrangements with the BBC, and the syndication of locally generated news, the public money necessary might be considerably less than the £40 million figure mentioned above.

There is no reason why these companies should be limited companies of the conventional sort – they will not investing risk capital, but will be fully supported by public money. The government should therefore make it clear that it will encourage cooperatives and employee owned corporations to come forward to take on this role. This will keep income inequality in the companies to a minimum and will prevent public money being used on a large scale to cross-subsidise commercial activity by large companies, to deliver dividends to shareholders or to pay high salaries for managers.

Employee ownership and control will help promote a diverse range of local and regional views, along with a greater sense of accountability to, and connection with, the communities, regions and Nations they serve. To repeat, given that the companies will be mandated to deliver a clearly defined service, and that they will rely wholly on public funds, the consortia should not have a profit-driven structure. The professional broadcasters employed by the consortia should concentrate on developing a wide range of formal and informal connections with the communities they serve. The consortia should pay their staff appropriately, but it is distasteful to think of public money being used to protect or increase the dividend enjoyed by private investors. As a regressive form of revenue-raising the TV license fee should be distributed with great care in order to secure socially just outcomes.

The rest of the money (£84 million per year) would be free up to support original, investigative journalism in the regions and the Nations, as directly as possible. Rather than being used to fund publishing outlets for content, this public money could be used to support the generation of that content. The emphasis should be on delivering the kinds of journalism that have become increasingly rare in the state-owned and private British media – that is, investigations in the public interest.

If more material of concern to the public is made available, then existing print and online outlets will take on the role of publisher, or new publishing ventures will be created for the purpose. The expansion and improvement in local and regional news provision needs to be content-driven. The use of public money in pursuit of objectives as vague and subject to manipulation as the creation of ‘multimedia hubs’ is, I am afraid, an invitation to endless box-ticking and bureaucratic make-work. We can be confident, however, that multimedia hubs would be created by the spontaneous operations of the market and of civil society, once an interactive system of commissioning began to deliver a steady stream of pertinent and original information on matters of common concern.

Public funds should be contestable and distributed on transparent criteria as Digital Britain frequently says. Accordingly, the lion’s share of the £84 million or so left over once the ITV’s news provision has been replaced should be made available to journalists through a system of public commissioning. An independent body would publish the proposals of journalists in particular categories – local and regional investigations, National investigations, civic reporting on 6 or 12 month contracts, and so on. The public would then vote on the proposals that it wished to see funded. To avoid voting irregularities, voting would have to take place in a library, perhaps against the background of a series of public meetings with journalists and the public.

Once a particular investigation was concluded the journalists would be obliged to publish their findings online and the body responsible for managing the process would also make their reports available in libraries in the region. The regional news consortia would be able to run reports on the material released, although other news organizations might be obliged to pay syndication fees of some kind. The journalists responsible for the reports could themselves re-use the material in different commercial contexts, according to a fixed system of rights splits with the managing bodies.

Journalists would have to cost their investigations at an agreed level, set according to NUJ guidelines on rates of pay. The aim would be to support the creation and maintenance of cadres of investigative journalists operating in the public interest. Sometimes journalists might combine into specialist teams, sometimes they might collaborate on a story-by-story basis. Though, of course, journalists would be looking for scoops of various kinds, the structure of the bidding and awards process would encourage them to ‘show their working’, in order to secure a chance of further funding when particular lines of investigation do not prove immediately fruitful. As a result a permanent mechanism for describing and explaining the structure of power at a local, regional and National level will emerge – always assuming that the public is interested in such a thing.

At present local and regional journalism takes place against a background of deepening ignorance about the institutional basis for decision-making at all levels. The public have only a vague notion of who controls the local councils, and a much vaguer notion of what decisions are taken at regional level. Politicians interact with lobbying interests in an environment all but devoid of meaningful public scrutiny. Public commissioning gives the public the power to rectify this, should they choose to do so. By removing the commissioning power from individuals with commitments to the institutions where they work, this approach will underpin public interest journalism. Indeed it will contribute to the re-creation of local, regional, and national publics, by giving people the power to secure access to the information that they consider valuable.

Anyone can bid for funding from these bodies, of course, and there is nothing to stop local media companies from using the system to fund their investigative teams, always allowing for the obligation to publish their findings via the funding body. Regional consortia could use the public commissioning system to support investigations teams who would work alongside broadcast journalists to develop news reports, and documentaries as well as online reports published by the regional commissioning body. The consortia would certainly be required to publicise the public commissioning process. The creation of coalitions of civil society groups, academics and journalists is to be expected and welcomed. The agitation for certain forms of inquiry, as well as the data thus generated, would be part of a process of political engagement and, where appropriate, reform.

Abuse of the system would be policed by actively engaged citizens. Journalists who were tempted to withhold stories in order to publish them commercially would be subject to nothing more than the risk of public disapproval. The investigations conducted would be, by definition, ‘of interest to the public’, insofar as they would be limited to those projects that could secure adequate levels of public support. It would be up to citizens to ensure that the stories supported tended to be ‘in the public interest’ as well as ‘of interest to the public’. Some might object that the public have such degraded tastes that they will end up funding trivial and intrusive journalism of the sort that fills so many popular newspapers, magazines and websites. While this attitude might seem worldly wise, there is absolutely no evidence that the public will commission, as opposed to consume, such material. To assume that they will squander what is after all their own money on the pursuit of trivia is to succumb to anti-democratic dogma of a kind that is all too common in defenders of the established order.

The public might recognise that celebrity-driven journalism needs no further public support and will prefer to commission those forms of journalism that help them to defend their interests as consumers and citizens. In order to prevent public money from being wasted in legal fees, some kind of qualified privilege could perhaps be given to journalists working on public commission. After all, they are working in a public capacity and have a right to be protected from vexatious legal attack from those they have sought to hold accountable.

If £84 million was made available to journalists by a system of direct commissioning, it would be sufficient to pay 3,500 journalists an average of £24,000 per year – enough for 318 full-time journalists, researchers and editorial support staff in each English region and devolved Nation. There are, according to knowledgeable estimates, between 75 and 125 full-time investigative reporters working in Britain as a whole at the current time. This is not sufficient to supply the public with information critical to the functioning of democracy. A well-organized transfer of funds from the digital switchover surplus could begin to address this democratic deficit in news provision. It would also build on Britain’s reputation as a world leader in the media industries, by breaking the historical bond between the commissioning process and institutional power.

In its last (2007) industry survey, the Newspaper Society reported that 11,100 editorial staff worked in regional newspapers out of a total of 37,700 full-time employees. This was down from 13,300 editorial staff out of a total of 50,000 full-time staff in 2004. Job losses in the industry have, if anything, accelerated in the regional newspaper sector and have only been partially offset by new employment opportunities in online publishing. Public support for journalism must find its way to journalists. It must not be used to prop up media conglomerates that continue to demand unsustainable profits from their properties and that retain top-heavy cost structures.

The sums the government have in mind could end up providing a useful addition to the balance sheet of Trinity Mirror, Press Association and the rest, while leaving in place a failing system of regional news provision. Or the money could support a reinvigorated investigative infrastructure that would both provide a public service and support commercial players, by providing content for use across a range of platforms and media. Wisely spent, 3.5% of the license fee could provide employment for thousands of journalists without competing with existing commercial media or with the BBC.

Conclusion

The government says that it wants to promote plural news provision at the local, regional and National level. This is to be welcomed by anyone who wants to become less vulnerable to various forms of state and corporate manipulation and better able to make decisions for themselves on the basis of reliable information. It is also to be welcomed by those who would like to see powerful institutions (including media institutions) subject to more effective scrutiny. Journalists also stand to benefit from a system that supports their work directly and does not leave them dependent on private owners or on employees of the state. There is a compelling case to be made for increased public support for journalism, if this increased support brings with it increased public control over the uses made of journalists’ skills. Progressives of all stripes should insist that reform takes place on lines that are publicly defensible. Public commissioning must be at the heart of any extension of public support for journalism.

It is time for trade unions and NGOs, academics and journalists, activists and interested members of the public to intervene in the consultation process and ensure that the opportunity to reinvigorate Britain’s journalistic culture is not lost.

An annotated version of this piece is available in Word or .pdf.

To respond to Digital Britain, go to:

http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/media_releases/6246.aspx/

The consultation period ends on September 22.

Sign Up to Campaign for Media Reform and Public Commissioning –

http://public-commissioning.socialgo.com/

Nick Davies On Truth

2009-07-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

Interesting coincidence last week. Was sent a copy of Conversations on Truth by one of the editors, Chris Wilkinson. In it there is an interview with the journalist Peter Wilby in which he talks at some length about the impact of Alistair Campbell as someone who was able for several years to dominate press coverage thanks to his intimate understanding of its structure and practices. Campbell grasped how the Sunday papers set the tone for the coming week, he knew how to browbeat and intimidate journalists, exploit the ambition and the anxieties of the younger ones in particular, and so on.

At the same time I am reading this I am reading Nick Davies's Guardian story about the, how can one put this delicately, the culture of surveillance at the News of the World under its former editor, Andy Coulson. And of course Coulson is so valuable to Cameron because he can be expected to secure a lock on much of the media as Campbell did. Plus Coulson brings the extra background of a doubtless strong relationship with Murdoch. Murdoch likes tabloid hard cases as much as he likes anyone.

So the fate of Coulson has serious implications for the politics of the next few months, perhaps for years to come. Without Coulson it is not clear that Cameron can win. Certainly the sense air of inevitable Tory victory that has been building in the media will dissipate somewhat. And perhaps more than that, perhaps the Liberals and Labour will sense in the travails of the News of the World a chance to secure a non-Conservative government and electoral reform at the next election.

If the News of the World was engaged in systemic illegal activity then Coulson will have to go and Murdoch will be vulnerable in this country for the first time in decades. Maybe Nick Davies has hit the big one. I just wonder if the British public can be persuaded to shake off its passivity at last and see that a chance now exists for a fundamental realignment in British politics. Assuming, of course, that there was systemic illegal activity at a major British newspaper. And that will be something for the courts to decide, in the end.

Although the responsibility for Murdoch and the rest is ours in the end.

Where They Are Now, An Occasional Series

2009-07-03T05:29:00.000-07:00

David Miles, the housing market expert and member of the Monetary Policy Committee has this week said that his 'hunch' was that 'we have seen most of the aggregate house price falls'.Much of the coverage has referred respectfully to Miles' work as the author of a 2004 report on the mortgage market. Now it would be easy to make fun of the Miles Review by pointing out that it didn't notice that the mortgage market was in the grip of an unsustainable and ultimately ruinous mania while it placidly made its recommendations. In fact I think we should make fun of it for precisely that reason. Given that his remit was consider whether there had been any 'market failure' in the mortgage sector, it is a shame that he didn't spot the imminent collapse of the mortgage market in the summer of 2007.

Still, even if we overlook the failure to spot the danger of a vast bubble in the housing market, it is interesting that the Miles Review recommended that building societies be allowed to raise a higher percentage of their funds from the wholesale markets rather than from depositors' funds. It was over-reliance on wholesale funds that did for the former building society Northern Rock, remember. It also contributed to the problems at the Dunfermline and West Bromwich Building Societies. If the rest of the mutual movement had increased its use of wholesale funds as Miles recommended, who knows, we might not have any building societies left at all.

Anyway, I have a 'hunch' that, with the economy shrinking at a terrifying rate, public finances looking like a bombsite and unemployment rising rapidly, the housing market still has some way to fall.

Regulating Global Finance and the Impact on Developing Countries

2009-06-29T01:52:00.000-07:00

Last Friday the Bretton Woods Project organised a panel debate on the financial crisis, to some extent as a briefing for those working in development NGOs, I guess. The talk took place under the Chatham House rule, so it is difficult to go into much detail concerning the differences of emphasis among the speakers. I think I can say that they divided 2:1 on the regulatory failure vs secular build-up of debt account of the origins of the crisis.

I don't think I will embarrass any of the speakers when I say that there was broad unanimity that effective regulation of the global financial system would be possible without the abolition of the banking secrecy afforded by the offshore sector. Indeed some impatience was expressed about the idea that in order to establish effective financial regulation it might be necessary to abolish the offshore sector - as though it was a distraction from the serious business of regulation.

This reluctance to recognise the role that offshore centres play in undermining financial regulation struck me as both interesting and ill-conceived. The offshore sector facilitates and encourages capital flight and enables kleptocrats to operate with a reasonable expectation of impunity. If financial regulation is to have any positive impact on the developing economies then it must surely address the massive problem of illicit capital flows into the Western banking system.

Furthermore, given the proven failure of state regulators to identify and defend the public interest, the continued existence of a machine that might be used for the furtherance of grand corruption in the developed world might be considered pertinent to a discussion of effective regulation. How do we know our politicians and regulators are honest if the means exist by which they might be bribed under conditions of perfect secrecy?

With that in mind, I started to wonder about the relevance of offshore holdings to the UK Parliament's Register of Members' Interests. The purpose of the register is "to provide information of any pecuniary interest or other material benefit which a Member receives which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in the capacity of a Member of Parliament". The receipt of benefits from offshore trusts or other financial vehicles would seem at first glance to constitute something that might reasonably be thought by others to influence a politician's actions, as they pertain to the offshore sector in particular and to financial regulation in general (pace the speakers at last week's meeting).

If we are to love and trust our elected representatives again - and how we long to do so - then it is necessary for us to know whether they have assets parked offshore, regardless of their provenance. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether the use of offshore facilities is consistent with working as a representative of the British people, but we must be able to go about our business secure in the knowledge that our MPs are not being bribed by shadowy business interests.

I am not saying that they are - I am just saying that we have a right to know whether our representatives are taking advantage of a system that facilitates tax avoidance and evasion on an epic scale, given that their involvement in the offshore economy might reasonably be thought to influence their actions.

Spinwatch Article on Public Commissioning

2009-06-24T03:12:00.001-07:00

Spinwatch has just published an article of mine on public commissioning. I am now working on summary of the government's plans for public service content in the Digital Britain white paper. The opportunity exists for us to change the economy of knowledge in this country to an unprecedented extent.

There is a little bit of urgency in all this, mind you. The danger is that the Conservatives are going to get in and use public money to subsidise the activities of US-style local TV/media groups. I am trying to figure out what they have in mind at the moment, but it won't be the well-intentioned transparency and accountability liberal bean feast that the government seems to have in mind, let alone the hearts-and-flowers, democratic-to-its-core be-in that I have put on the table.

Investigations Fund Launched

2009-06-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

A group of distinguished investigative journalists working as the Foundation for Investigative Reporting have announced the launch of a new foundation to support investigative journalism:

"We have decided to announce the formation of a Foundation for Investigative Reporting to look at what practical steps can be taken, both to experiment with new means of funding essential investigations and to inspire a new generation of reporters. The Foundation will act as an incubator for new ways of conducting journalism and for new ideas of how to finance this kind of reporting."

The foundation will administer a fund that will be used to support investigative projects - more information can be found at their website, http://www.investigationsfund.org.. At the moment the money will come from private donations. The move has attracted some impressive support - the head of communications at Google has signed the letter and the company is supplying technical assistance - the head of the NUJ is listed as a supporter.

The Foundation for Investigative Journalism also call for a debate about the future of journalism.

This is an initiative that is very much to be welcomed. The crisis in reporting is bad and it is getting worse. There is no question that things are going to change rapidly in the coming months, it is just a question of how they will change. It is important for us all to join this debate - only cooperation between professional investigators and an engaged public can ensure that the changes that take place leave us with a strengthened system for providing the public with the information that it needs.

There are two things to say about this initiative.

Firstly, the sums needed to support journalism as a truly effective check on the state and other powerful institutions are truly vast. The government's plan to give £126 million from the TV license to independent news operations should be the focus for discussions about how we fund investigative journalism in the future. If the Foundation agitates publicly for a mechanism that does not simply give the money to existing institutions it has a real chance to make an important impact on public life in the immediate term.

Secondly, the commissioning process is the crucial point to address. If the public is going to fund investigations through the TV license (or is to raise funds by any other mechanism, such as introducing a levy on certain classes of company) then the public should determine which subjects are investigated. Someone has to decide what gets investigated. If public money is being used, and the aim is to defend and promote the public sphere, then the public should decide how that money is spent.

The practice of investigative journalism will be changed by the introduction of public commissioning, but it is a change that should be embraced by those who wish to see journalism become a civic resource that is truly able to call established power to account and give us due warning of impending disaster.

To find out more -

http://public-commissioning.socialgo.com/home.html

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=120980901717

Responses to "Digital Britain"

2009-06-22T03:37:00.000-07:00

Lord Carter has complained today about the media response to Digital Britain:

"I think 90% of the people that are writing these articles have not read the report. But that does not stop them producing 2,500 pieces of copy, almost all of which are inaccurate."

Carter has a number of complaints, and seems particularly exercised by Sir Michael Lyons' (the head of the BBC Trust) habit of calling the television licence fee 'the BBC licence fee'. And it is certainly true that in the masses of coverage of the report I have seen, the proposals for contestable funds for regional and local journalism have been either entirely absent, downplayed or else have suggested that the new funds would go to already established commercial operations. Here's Oliver Luft in the Guardian, for example:

"Each consortium is likely to be made up of existing TV news providers, regional newspaper groups and other media organisations, several of which – including Guardian Media Group, STV and the Press Association – have already expressed an interest in the scheme."

This claim seems to run somewhat counter to what Digital Britain actually says:

"It is clear that additional funding could achieve substantially more per pound of input in the hands of new operators using new media than to sustain a legacy broadcast network and studios for regional news ..." (page 142)

The prose is a little opaque, but it isn't obvious that the authors of the report think it likely that the news consortia proposed will be made up of existing media operators. And indeed if they were it might look like an extra treat for shareholders and senior executives rather than a way of defending and promoting journalism as a civic resource.*

The established media operations have no great interest in promoting the idea of public commissioning. Only the public can promote an idea that cuts across of some many institutional interests.

I wonder if such a public exists in Britain?

*I have finally finished Digital Britain, and the Guardian gloss is in line with its comments on New Consortia on page 156 of the report. These comments do seem to contradict the spirit of the section of the report quoted above. They also sit uneasily with Ofcom's comments earlier this year about the likely costs of replicating ITV's regional news coverage. I explore these and related issues in a summary of the implications of Digital Britain for public service content.

Lessig and Kelly on Socialism

2009-06-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

Larry Lessig has taken issue with Kevin Kelly's use of the word socialist to describe the new forms of organization that are emerging on the web. Lessig feels that socialism must entail state compulsion and that to describe the free collaboration online as socialist is to misuse the word, or to use it in a way that is inevitably misleading.

Lessig's hypothetical example, of using the word fascist to describe Obama's policies, is interesting. It would be a major loss if the racist and hyper-nationalist complexion of really existing fascism made it impossible to trace important similarities between the corporatist and anti-democratic politics of the mid-century and the current moment. Another comment has pointed out that it would irresponsible to call Obama's policies fascist and leave it at that. This is exactly correct. His attempts to shore up corporate capitalism with state intervention should be considered in light of what we know about Italian and other forms of capitalism - there are other important parallels, with Britain's National Government in the thirties, for example, But it would be an impoverishment of debate if the connotations of the word fascism made it impossible to make distinctions between elements in fascist thought and policy.

If we turn to socialism, the Marxist tradition contained with it a strong anarchist component - these people were often denounced and killed for the crime of 'left deviationism'. But it is not true to say that Marxism entails statism - Marx has no plausible account for how and why the state would 'wither away' after the Revolution, but that is what he hoped would happen, and many, though by no means all, of his followers agreed with him. And Marxism is not the only, or the most important, tradition in socialism today. The anarchists are dedicated to the end of coercion and see themselves as socialists. Chomsky doesn't describe himself as a libertarian socialist for larks, after all.

There is a strong statist tradition in socialist thought and practice - but there is also a tradition of seeing the state as an institution to be transcended by free human beings engaged in free cooperation and collaboration. There are plenty of problems with describing the various initiatives on the web as socialist, but they cannot be resolved by lexicographical fiat.

Science and the Public Interest

2009-06-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

There was a thought-provoking program on scientific innovation on Leading Edge last night, which I caught on my way to the Apollo in Herne Hill. They interviewed an author and engineer called Anne Miller who has studied how to overcome resistance to new ideas in some detail and has written about her findings in a book called The Myth of the Mousetrap.

They also spoke with someone called Don Braben, a scientist who is vehemently opposed to the idea of leaving science to the vagaries of peer review. He proposes that much more research has a genuinely 'blue skies' quality - that is scientific managers concentrate on hiring creative people and then give them the freedom and the time they need to explore things that interest them. This seems like exactly the right approach to science, and is close to what most of us think science is supposed to be about - a mass of divergent projects some of which might end up having some interesting results, a few of which will end up changing the world.

But the current model of proposal and peer review works against this culture of scientific freedom - ideas that might turn out to be world-changing will often (nearly always, perhaps) seem preposterous to a group of informed experts. The difference between a truly innovative approach and a blunder can only be established in retrospect.

I have been arguing for a while that in journalism the public needs to be much more closely involved in the commissioning process. In science I think the public's role is somewhat different. Part of our responsibility is to ensure exactly the kind of scientific freedom that Braben advocates. There is a place for applied research, that is for research within established parameters that does not seek to achieve game-changing results. This kind of research can and should be open to much higher levels of public scrutiny and involvement - it is, after all, our money. But some significant portion of research should be left at the discretion of scientists themselves. Every effort much be made to create a space in which curiosity is given free rein.

To put it another way, some science is like journalism, in that the researcher knows what they want to find out and broadly how to go about it. Some science isn't. It is speculative and easily dismissed up until it is proved to be correct. The challenge is to replace the oligarchy of peer review with a democratic field of public engagement with science on the one hand and an anarchic space for individual inquiry on the other.

A Note on Public Commissioning, Again

2009-06-12T03:23:00.000-07:00

What?

Public commissioning is a process by which the public directly controls the funding of investigative journalism. The principle is simple:

Public subsidies to journalism should be spent at the discretion of that public.

In public commissioning journalists write up and present proposals. They can vary in scale and scope from a few weeks to a few months, from the local to the national, from single journalists to teams. The proposals are also made available in printed form in the local library and online. The public can vote for the projects they want to support.

Why?

The existing commercial models for funding journalism are in crisis. Public money will be required if journalism as a civic resource is to survive. But existing state-owned and private media have not proved equal to the task of investigating the state or the dominant interests in the economy. Indeed it is clear that they are structurally unable to do so.

Public commissioning presents an opportunity for the public to gain the information it needs in order to be meaningfully sovereign.

Who?

Journalism needs more public money. The public needs more publicly oriented journalism. The deal that can be struck is clear.

When?

The time is right for a reform of this kind. The Coalition is now arguing for extensive cuts in bureaucracy. What could be more efficient than removing the editorial filter from publicly funded journalism?

How

A set of practical questions needs to be answered. It is clear that new technology provides us with the means to translate public preferences into funding for journalists. The devil is of course in the details, but this site is intended as a forum in which to work through those details and so deal with likely criticisms and objections.

Where?

The proposals can be discussed here along with other elements of a campaign of media reform.

Today I Have Been Mostly ...

2009-06-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

Pointing and clicking.

This morning I set up a social network to organise and promote media reform.

This afternoon I am promoting it through my blog.

I expect you all to sign up this evening and get on with building a democratic media culture. If we all get on with it then we could have the whole thing wrapped up by, oh, Tuesday of next week?

It's Finished

2009-05-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

A good piece from John Lanchester on the nature of the government bailout of the banks and the need for a state takeover of the financial sector in the LRB:

In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employees’ rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values; then you have the conversation about costs. In Britain in the last 20 to 30 years that has all been the wrong way round. There was a reverse takeover, in which City values came to dominate the whole of British life.

That, as the saying goes, is about the size of it.

Hearteningly, Lanchester has taken seen the benefits of a bit of the old swearing, and shows a natural aptitude for lacing shrewd financial analysis with rude words.

The Return of the Public 2

2009-05-17T04:13:00.000-07:00

Alan Keen, one of the MPs caught up in the expenses shambles, had occasion to ask in April of this year whether the journalist Heather Brooke had some sort of 'vested interest', because he had seen her being interviewed. It was Brooke's attempts to use the Freedom of Information Act to access MPs' expenses that led directly to recent revelations about the antics of our elected representatives. Funnily enough Alan Keen and his wife have been a focus of particular interest in the scandal. I believe the expression is a 'wolf couple'

The exchange between Alan Keen and Roy Greenslade is reproduced below (taken from Ms Brooks's website, which in turn derives from Hansard's record of oral evidence from 21 April) -

Q484 Alan Keen: There is a woman who has frequently been on television and in the press who appears to me to be a campaigner for freedom of information, an American I think.

Mr Nick Davies: Heather Brooke?

Q485 Alan Keen: Yes. Does she earn a living from this?

Mr Davies: She is a journalist. She is a specialist in freedom of information. I think she is actually British and she worked in America and used their Freedom of Information Act, came back to this country just as ours was about to come into force so wrote a book which is a guide.

Q486 Alan Keen: I have seen her being interviewed.

Mr Davies: You are wondering whether she has some vested interest.

Q487 Alan Keen: Yes, because I have seen her on television being interviewed.

Mr Roy Greenslade: I know her quite well. She teaches the students at City. She is a single interest journalist in the old tradition of having one niche interest and following it to its logical conclusion. She lives, in monetary terms, on the margins.

'She lives, in monetary terms, on the margins.' At a time when increased subsidies for journalism are on the agenda, we should surely ask how Ms Brooke and journalists like her can be brought in from the margins.

As a one-off perhaps Parliament should vote her an award for the work she has done in the public interest in this matter - some percentage of the money handed back by MPs, perhaps?

After that we need to look again at the mechanisms by which journalism is funded. If public money is to be used to support journalism, then the public ought to have direct control over the commissioning process. If Heather Brooke, or someone inspired by her example, wants to pursue, say, the links between the financial sector and the political class, then the public should have an opportunity to fund them in the painstaking work of bringing the full story to light. We cannot rely on the investigative zeal of the BBC or of the private media groups.

They will take the view, on our behalf, of course, that we are not interested in such dry and technical matters and watch impassively as hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money is used to shore up a financial sector that has hijacked the political process.

There is, as Ms Brooke has noted, a certain piquancy in Mr Keen's suspicions about a 'vested interest'. It is time that we reasserted the primacy of the public interest as discovered by the public in open debate. The monopoly enjoyed by the likes of Mr Keen has clearly not served our common interests.

Brother, Can You Spare a Drachma?

2009-05-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, it's all Euros these days ...

I learnt a little while back from someone called Stratos Fountoulis that my masterwork, The Threat to Reason, is now available in Greek, from the redoubtable publishing house of Thyrathen. This cheers me up immensely, not least because I didn't have a clue how to pay my rent and now I do ...

Those not blessed with a working knowledge of Greek can always find a paperback copy of the English version on the Amazon website.

On the other hand, if you have a penchant for reading on screen you can download the book for free from the Ready Steady Book website. How's that for deflation? From £14.99 to £0.00 in less than two years ...

Still, it is sweet to know that the notion of a Kantian public is percolating through the common culture. I publish a book in the summer of 2007, calling for the end of private domination of the intellectual culture and the restoration of a disinterested public as the agent and arbiter of substantive enlightenment. By the summer of 2009 the neoliberal model is in ruins, nationalisation of the banks is on the agenda, and the public is back with a vengeance.

David Aaronovitch is quite right in this instance. One doesn't need complicated conspiracies to explain recent history, since I did the whole thing, myself. On my own.

The Return of the Public

2009-05-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

Last week Steve Richards, the head of Ofcom, proposed a new funding model for ITV's regional news. Rather than leaving it to ITV franchises struggling in an advertising recession, we should use public money to fund ‘news consortia’. These news consortia ‘would operate transparently, through a tender process and contracts awarded against clear criteria of delivering public purposes’. He thinks that £40 to £60 million would be needed to provide a ‘straight replacement’ for the existing ITV service. But £60 to £100 million could ‘meet the aspirations of healthy local democracy, quality local journalism and the needs of audiences in the digital age’. More than that, the extra money could be used ‘to design in full cross-media capability’. Presumably he has noticed that local newspapers are being eviscerated by online competition. Richards suggests that there is some money somewhere in the BBC that could be used for this purpose.

It is certainly high time we looked again at how journalism is funded. But the devil as always is in the details. Richards soothingly suggests that ‘we should not get unduly distracted by who the awarding body should be’, before mentioning Ofcom’s Content Board as possible candidate. But the way in which funding is awarded is crucial to successful media reform. If control remains in the hands of a bureaucracy, the deficiencies in local news coverage documented by Nick Davies, Jonathan Cook, and others will be replicated, with a bit of state manipulation thrown in for good measure.

Maybe we should set aside £40 million to provide a ‘straight replacement’ for ITV’s local news coverage. But the other £60 million should be made available to investigative journalists who wish to pursue the kinds of stories that the public want.

The money could be provided to funds covering the existing ITV regions, to smaller units, and, what the hell, to a national investigative journalism fund. ‘Consortia’ of journalists could then publish proposals for funding at an appropriate level of detail. The proposals could outline their credentials and relevant experience, the aims of the investigation, the time needed and the budget. Each of us could register and vote for the projects that we wished to see pursued and the funds would then be released. Voting could take place at the local library, perhaps, to prevent people from supporting whimsical projects. The journalists’ ‘consortia’ would then publish their findings online and make them available on license to other media providers (newspapers, websites, and so on).

The public could vote further funds to projects that they valued and the ‘consortia’ that came up with the goods would be able then to work to bring their work to a wider audience via broadcast, print or online media as appropriate. Book publishers could pick up rights to publish print editions of particularly successful and significant investigations.

In this way we would have a direct role in editorial decision-making, without the doubtless well-intentioned interference of a mediating bureaucracy like, say, Ofcom. Public money wouldn’t be spent subsidising the established media groups. Instead journalists would be motivated to serve a mass constituency at a local, regional or national level, without the worry of keeping employers and advertisers happy.

Some of this magic £100 million could be used to fund local and regional print and online media, too, like the Salford Star, so that the findings of these publicly funded investigations can find their back to the widest possible public. The investigations could provide content for a flourishing culture of pamphleteering, publishing and civic engagement.

Journalists in this country could regain their old eminence as tribunes of the people, and have a laugh asking powerful people impertinent questions. Grizzled burnouts could get to hang out with doe-eyed bloggers. Think of it. Instead of churnalism, we could have properly funded investigations into corruption and conflicts of interest throughout the body politic. Assuming we could be bothered to vote for them – and the beauty of the system is that only the most earnest people will get it together to go to the library and vote.

Local journalism is in serious trouble. But its problems will not be solved by an extension of the existing public service model. The curiosity of journalists needs to be set free from commercial and state interests and connected more directly with the needs of a sovereign public. The same applies to our national media. The BBC is hamstrung by considerations of balance, the private media groups by their reliance on advertising and the often wacky views of their owners. The result has been a series of failures to describe reality accurately to most of the viewing and reading public. These failures have already cost taxpayers tens of billions and will cost incalculable billions more in the years ahead..

It is time to set journalists free. God help us, they’re all we’ve got.

Yes, You Can (Help President Obama)

2009-05-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

Like many people in Britain I was delighted that Obama won the election. I won't rehearse the reasons. But I have been at a loss to know how to express my support for the new President.

But now at last British admirers of Obama have a way of taking a stand and being the change we are waiting for. According to the New York Times, President Obama has announced a crackdown on tax havens. Some economists have argued that the lax attitude towards offshore centres of America's competitors means that his moves will jeopardise US jobs and businesses:

Tax experts, including some with Democratic leanings, caution that the proposals could put American corporations at a competitive disadvantage. The United States is part of a dwindling minority of industrialized countries that tries to tax corporate profits on a global basis. Most European governments tax corporations on the basis of their profits within their borders. “If other countries are adopting systems that are friendlier to multinational corporations, then companies will have an incentive to locate their corporate headquarters outside the United States,” said Alan Auerbach, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley ...

There is only one thing to do. We must express our support for President Obama by demanding that Britain and other EU countries tax corporate profits on a global basis, with country by country accounting. That way we can finally feel part of the Obama campaign with its soaring rhetoric, Blackberry-punching, surreptitious smoking, and effortless cool.

Oh, and we can raise billions of pounds for the UK exchequer at a time when, God knows, we need every penny we can get.

Jump! You Fuckers! News

2009-04-27T04:26:00.000-07:00

A little while back someone called John Brissenden was in touch to tell me that he had set up a blog for my article, Jump! You Fuckers! I was so flattered that I then neglected to mention it, pretty much to anyone. So, if you haven't yet read my contribution to the literature of the crash, do pop over to the site and thrill to my jokes 'n' political economy combination.

Since I left Random House, irony of ironies one of the victims of the downturn, I have been turning said article into a short, sharp book. I am trying to persuade print publishers that it would be an idea to make the thing available to people so they can buy it and, I don't know, read it in the bath, on the train, or in the local coffee house. So far a certain scepticism has been in evidence, on the grounds that I have absolutely no credentials or qualifications in economics or finance or politics or pretty much anything else.

My counter-argument, that the problems have been caused by hard-working experts, and can therefore only be solved by feckless amateurs of, at best, average intelligence, hasn't cut much ice.

All I can do, dear readers, is assure you that I for one am not about to start carving up debt in impossibly complicated ways and sell it to naive and gullible institutional investors. Of that you can be quite sure.

Buildings and their Inhabitants

2009-04-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

As the current economic crisis worsens the public will start to demand change. The traditional way of dealing with a failure among the elites is to replace the personnel and leave the institutional structure in which the elites operate intact. So, after Watergate the President and certain of his key advisors were removed (some of them went to jail) and in the 1976 election the American people elected a new president who promised to reform Washington. Similarly after the Bush presidency collapsed a candidate promising change was elected.

After Watergate continuity in the structure of the institutions ensured that the same sorts of people were left free to manage things in much the same sort of way. Time will tell whether Obama is able to achieve more in the White House than Carter.

In Britain, equally, it looks as though the electorate will punish the current administration and put into power a new set of managers, probably from the Conservative party.

The people are removed, but the buildings themselves remain untouched. A kind of neutron bomb model of reform.

The correct approach would be to concentrate on changes to the structure and to worry less about the personnel within it. The heads of the major political parties and the teams of communications managers they rely on are somewhat similar to one another. They tend to be quick-witted, ambitious, and capable of combining that ambition with disciplined obedience to the party line, or to the line of the faction they belong to. In this they are not so terribly different from the most effective operators in the NGOs, in the unions, in journalism, and so on. The world will always be run by people of this stripe. Many of them will adapt themselves to a new dispensation and very quickly elbow aside those who have less energy and less determination to be at the centre of things, wherever the centre happens to be.

If we settle for a change of personnel, then they will leave the system itself unchanged. It is one they understand, after all, one that have prepared themselves to run. Their knowledge of its workings gives them an important advantage over the rest of us.

But a change of personnel is not enough. One only has to consider the Conservative party's attitude towards the City over the last three decades to see that they did not see the crisis coming, and have no plan as to how it might be addressed. George Osborne's response to the budget insisted on the need to 'cut wasteful spending and debt', as though waste in the public sector was responsible for the recession that is now beginning to bite. In his concluding remarks he was heavy on the need for change:

"David Cameron and the Conservatives would like to prove to you that change is possible [...] Only you can hold your government accountable and bring about the change this country so desperately needs. When the time comes if you give us the chance we will show you that we can change this country for the better, that we can put Britain on the right track."

Clearly the Conservatives have been studying Obama's campaign rhetoric. But the vacuity of the response is unmistakeable.

The elites have failed catastrophically and they will continue to do so if they are allowed to remain in the comfortable familiarity of the system through which they have gained advancement. The system, rather than any ineptitude in managing it, has brought us to our current predicament and the system has to change.

The elites know that they can only stay at the centre if they are carefully responsive to the public's demands, albeit while professing to show principled leadership. We have to remodel the infrastructure of public life now, while we have a chance to do so.

It is time to think big. The inhabitants of the governing institutions matter less than the structure of information and law in which they operate.

What I Meant to Say ...

2009-03-27T03:25:00.000-07:00

Thinking and talking at the same time has never been my strong point. I mean, in a bar, I can talk with the best of them, as long as I keep the thought to a minimum. And I am not entirely incapable of thought, as long as I keep my tongue clamped firmly between my teeth.

But every now and again I have to combine the two and the results are rarely pretty. The RSA will make public my faltering efforts to present a case for a reformed system of expertise on their website, and may already have done so. But, for the record, this is what I meant to say:

26th March, 2009, Debate at the RSA

To what extent has the global economic crisis triggered a crisis of confidence in our previously trusted repositories of knowledge?

1.

In the description of this debate on the RSA website one question stood out for me -

Can we continue to have confidence in the professional authority of bankers, financiers and economists, when they seem to have so grossly failed us?

The answer - as far as I am concerned is – I hope not. Not now. And not until important reforms are put in place.

And I would add most economics journalists to that list of people who have failed to give an accurate account of reality to the public. There are many honourable exceptions. I am thinking of Larry Elliott, Dan Atkinson, Will Keegan, and there are plenty of others.

But the journalistic profession as a whole did not appreciate what was happening in the seamier parts of the shadow banking system, and did not see the disaster coming.
More generally, they did not understand the flaws in the current model, and accepted that there was no alternative to debt-driven expansion.

It is important, I think, to take a little time to appreciate the extent to which the orthodoxy concerning political economy has collapsed. Speaking in October of last year, the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, said that he had found what he called a ‘flaw’ in his economic philosophy:

I don't know how significant or permanent it is … I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

Given that neo-liberalism rested on the idea that market actors were the only effective source of regulation, and given that a deregulated financial market has just exploded in an air-fuel conflagration of corruption and high-end mathematics, this admission by Greenspan is both significant and permanent. The most authoritative expert on the economy, in the reckoning of much of the media, the political establishment, and the economic elite, was wrong. Neo-liberalism wasn’t just pernicious in its effects and wrong in detail, it was wrong all the way down.

Now, as I say, to the extent that experts assured us that neo-liberal ideas were intellectually sound then these experts have forfeited any right to be taken seriously as experts in the future. Or rather, they will have to regain their status as experts by the simple expedient of not talking nonsense anymore.

And it is not true that everyone was wrong. People with prestige and power within the system tended to believe that the system was sound and even that we were living in the best of all possible worlds, in Pangloss’s immortal words. But there were exceptions among the elite. One thinks for example of George Soros, a highly successful market operator who understood intimately the defects in markets. In this country Peter Warburton and Ann Pettifor wrote presciently about the structural problems that were inherent in the neo-liberal model. There are others, and we should figure out who they were and ask them what we should do next, if we want to have serious experts advising us.

A reformed economy of expertise requires a certain amount of work from each of us. We need to look at the published output of as many writers on political economy as possible and assess what they said in light of what happened in 2007-2008. Those who were proven to be correct should command more respect and attention than those who were wrong. Expertise must be established against the historical record.

Before I continue, I want to make it clear by the way that I don’t want to focus too much on individual culpability tonight. I think it is important that we establish what experts said in the run-up to the crisis, the better to appreciate the extent to which the system of expertise in political economy as a whole broke down. Part of a serious process of reform must be a serious history of the last thirty years. Biography – combative biography even – must be part of that serious history.

That said, I think we should think for a moment about the people who were sufficiently honest and honourable to refuse to believe what was clearly untrue, who paid the professional and personal price. Those who made a career over the last generation advocating deregulation, privatization, and the wonders of the free market did so at the expense of men and women who had a more true claim to expert status than they.

But it is the systematic failings that matter. In many instances experts were recognised as experts, and rewarded as such, because they believed in the truth of the neo-liberal ideology. One thinks here of those distinguished scholars and visiting fellows at the various neo-liberal and neo-conservative think tanks. Under the circumstances, the system of rewards and punishments is more important than the behaviour of agents with it.

So, yes, the current crisis should cause a crisis of confidence in our previously trusted repositories of knowledge, to a very considerable extent. I hope it has done so in the audience.

If it hasn’t I am not sure what else it would take.

2.

So, the system of expertise itself failed. With respect to Mr Keen, the menace of the recent past has turned out not to be the pyjama-clad keyboard commandos of the journalistic imagination. The menace that mattered was a kind of swindling use of expert status to dazzle the lay public and to marginalise dissent. It is not The Cult of the Amateur, but the cult of the expert that should trouble us. Mr Greenspan was no blog-writing dabbler, remember.

Now people who have, and enjoy, expert status like this question a lot -

What can we do to restore public trust in us?

When times are good, or crisis-free, experts like to call on the public to pull itself together and stop believing people who aren’t experts and who say nasty things about established authority –

We need a better public, a public worthy of us!

When crisis hits, the experts have another line, it’s one you hear a good deal at the moment in the newspapers -

We must try harder!

Yes, errors were made, yes there was an excess of enthusiasm, a certain lowering of critical standards. But lessons have been learned, a new mood informs our operations, we are resolved never again to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Until the next time.

We heard ‘never again’ after the Savings and Loans scandal, after the dot.com bubble and the accounting scandals at Enron, World.com and elsewhere. We heard ‘never again’ after the fiasco that was the reporting before the invasion of Iraq.

And we are hearing it now.

I am afraid that this will not do. Exhortations to try harder are so much self-absolving humbug in the absence of serious changes to the economy of knowledge in our society, part of which will require radical reform of our most powerful repositories of authoritative information – the state, the media, the universities, and the large commercial enterprises – the institutions, in other words, that can effectively confer expert status.

Now, the current media system has repeatedly proved unequal to the task of describing reality accurately. It has failed to keep government and the large enterprises honest. At critical moments it has failed to serve the public interest. Coincidentally, its business model is also broken.

It is time to introduce a suite of reforms to ensure that it is tolerably honest from now on. Libel law must be changed to allow free political speech. The current arrangements are a scandal and a standing invitation to sycophancy and bad faith.

Expert libel lawyers hate hearing that one, by the way.

The BBC as a public service broadcaster must be democratised, and its operations put at a proper distance from an habitually shifty and unreliable state apparatus.

There are other steps we could take – commercial media that receive advertising revenue could be required to pay a levy that would fund local, national, and specialist investigative journalist bureaux, who would in turn be subject to direct control by readers, and would have guaranteed access to the mainstream, advertising subsidised media. In this way, professional journalism could be set free from concerns about advertising and focus instead on serving the public interest.

Incidentally, large enterprises should, where possible be controlled by the people who work there, and their political activities mandated by them. Too much propaganda that undermines the collective interests of most people has been organised and paid for by the very companies in which they make their living. The corporate sector has proved an unreliable guardian of the public interest, and should now therefore be reformed. Companies that wish to develop and fund experts should do so only at the initiative of the people who work in them.

It is also clear that finance is too important to be left to financiers. The private domination of investment in Britain has proved unable to deliver stable growth and should be replaced by a system in which priorities are debated publicly. The kinds of technologies that Don Tapscott talks about can play an important part in hosting these debates.

3.

Now, I hope it should be obvious that I don’t think that this means we should do away with the idea of expertise, or anything like that.

In a complex society we can’t possibly understand every aspect of our arrangements ourselves, and we have to put our trust in experts every day. We put our trust in doctors, for example; we will need to our trust in all manner of experts in the future.

Our trust, but not our faith. And the distinction matters.

We should not be forced to choose between a rigid hierarchy of unassailable experts, passing information down to an essentially docile public on the one hand, and an online free-for-all on the other. The choice is a false one, for reason I just gave – we need and will continue to need experts, people who know things we don’t know, who have skills and experiences we don’t have.

But expertise must be earned and kept by honest means. Those who misinform the public must be denied expert status, those who speak honestly and wisely should be rewarded with it. Publicly accredited expertise depends on service to the public, not on the imprimatur of mediating institutions that can only fitfully and in qualified ways concern themselves with the public interest. Apart from the RSA, of course.

Our task is to ensure that the flows of information reaching us are accurate and relevant to the needs of a sovereign public. In my view that requires material change to the structure of institutions that we rely on for information, pre-eminently the media (as a parenthesis, I don’t think it will surprise anyone if I say that I think that universities should be protected from commercial pressure for this reason).

In the end, only such material reform – reform that addresses issues of money and status – can ensure durably reliable and well-informed comment and reporting.

We also need to be very clear about the limits of expertise. In a democracy there are finally no experts in citizenship. We are all, by dint of our being citizens, equally authoritative.

But in a democracy a sovereign people has certain responsibilities – among them we must take reasonable steps to ensure that we are well informed.

In that regard I think we are failing in our duty, and demonstrably so.

Experts must, if they are to enjoy public trust, serve a sovereign public faithfully. And the public must have effective means to ensure that their advisors remain faithful.

Until we make the requisite institutional and structural changes we are no better than a befuddled and foolish king, deceived by his courtiers, who knows little and cares less about the outrages committed in his name.

The crisis calls us to wake now from our faith in experts, and to exercise our own powers of discrimination.

Heaven help us if we do not.

Back to the RSA

2009-03-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

I had completely forgotten, but I am participating in a debate on Thursday at the RSA. We are talking about the new age of uncertainty, the crisis of knowledge and the collapse of trust in authority.

In other news, Verso has started twittering and blogging and all sorts.

Back to Comment is Free

2009-03-19T04:38:00.000-07:00

The Guardian have just posted my contribution to the debate on the adequacy or otherwise of media coverage of the economic crisis.

I'd like to work up a more detailed look at this subject in the weeks ahead. Anyone interested in seeing what I come up with can leave a post here with their contact details or email me at dcehind@hotmail.com. And if you are aware of any examples of hopeless puffery, blatant log-rolling or fantastical optimism from journalists, economists and other opinion-formers, then I would love to hear from you.

Excellent Piece on Lobbying

2009-02-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

Someone called Tamasin Cave* has written a very good piece on the need for a mandatory register for lobbyists in the UK. The recent news stories have focused on the alleged antics of various peers, but, as Cave points out, we need to focus on those who are seeking to influence our representatives. Without complete transparency our system of government will continue to excite justifiable suspicion.

You can read the article yourself here.

*In the interests of transparency, I must state for the record that I know Ms Cave.

Jump! You Fuckers!

2009-01-21T15:17:00.001-08:00

I have just finished a 10,000 word piece on the origins of the current economic crisis. A pdf can be downloaded here at Verso's website. It is released on a Creative Commons license, so you can edit and expand on it and forward it freely on a non-commercial basis. If you need a Word version, drop me a line.

In it I look at the various explanations as to why we are such deep trouble and I sketch the one I have come across that seems best supported by the evidence. The good news is that it is possible to understand what has happened over the last generation in Britain and America. The other good news is that we'll have to create a more equitable economic system if we are going to get out of the current shambles. The bad news is that the current political and economic establishment, to the loud applause of their many tame intellectuals, have really gone and fucked the dog on this one.

Quantitative Easing and so on

2009-01-17T16:17:00.001-08:00

Ok,

So, the Independent has this today:

Treasury officials said yesterday that Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Mervyn King are looking at options ranging from introducing "quantatitive easing" – printing money – through underwriting or insuring the toxic assets of the UK's banks, to full-scale nationalisation. Speculation that the Government is set to create a "toxic bank" to isolate all the sector's bad debts was, however, played down by the Treasury because of the complexities.

The government are on now talking about printing money. This is coming up a lot. I am sure that they have their reasons, a banking crisis and all that. But before we start debauching the currency couldn't we start prising some money out of the tight hands of our beloved large corporations and high net worth individuals - they have been skipping tax offshore for a generation now. This has recently stirred the indignation of the union Unite. According to the Guardian:

The union cites figures published by analysts Tax Research UK, which suggest that Britain's top companies avoid paying £25bn in tax a year through the use of tax havens. In addition, a conservative estimate suggests that wealthy individuals - those earning over £200,000 a year - avoid a further £8bn in tax.

OK, so £33 billion a year. Let's say that they have to pay back taxes of £330 billion plus £33 billion for 2008-2009. Now, I am not an expert, but wouldn't using that money to buy out the banks have a less inflationary effect than printing a stack of money? Wouldn't it have the added benefit of shifting the cost of saving the capitalist system onto those who have benefited in ways that others have been unable to profit from? Inflation hits anyone with savings. This only hits people who've been skipping taxes. If some sort of massive bailout is necessary to head off a disaster, then surely the burden should be borne by an opulent and devious minority, rather than by the rest of us, too slow-witted or scrupulous to get with the tax avoidance program?

Counter-Enlightenment Today

2009-01-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

In a debate with Noam Chomsky at Ohio State in 1988 Richard Perle ends his opening remarks with a stirring call for his audience to set its face against discussion of the documentary record:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As we continue the evening, ask yourself whether the adumbration of documents that you haven’t seen and I haven’t seen, and the weight and the consequences of which it is impossible to estimate, bears up against your impression of where the United States has been in the post-war period and your sense of what the United States represents both at home and around the world.

Thank you.

(the relevant section comes at about 4.22 on the clip)

Chomsky has offered evidence to support his claims, Perle prefers that we concentrate on our 'impression of where the United States has been in the post-war period' and our 'sense of what the United States represents both at home and around the world'. The appeal to pre-existing sentiment, and the dismissive attitude to information that might weaken the hold of that sentiment, are characteristic of hostility to Enlightenment. The are often successful, since they show a shrewd appreciation of the role that 'sense' and 'impression' play in the selection and rejection of information relevant to the construction of a political world-view. Few of us can give up an hospitable 'impression' for the desolation afforded to us by the mere facts.

Public Trust

2009-01-03T05:18:00.000-08:00

One of the criticisms offered for The Threat to Reason is that it states the obvious. The public already distrust the mainstream media, corporations and governments, so what purpose does it serve to argue that an enlightened society depends on a less trusting attitude towards these institutions?

Certainly the evidence is there, that the public are deeply sceptical of the same things that I am. But the responses to this scepticism are what interest me. Instead of asking whether it might be justified, commentators tend to assume that 'trust' is something that can be won back with more sophisticated communications techniques, that it can be restored if the public take a more adult approach to the complexities of policy-making, or if they give up their addiction to conspiracy theories.

In other words privileged commentators assume what they need to demonstrate - that powerful institutions are deserving of trust. They then take the public's refusal to trust these institutions as evidence for their intellectual or moral infirmity, or for ineptness on the part of those charged with informing the public. The language of Enlightenment is relevant here, since the public's attitude towards power is taken to reveal its benightedness. The majority will only be enlightened when they come to believe the same things as the privileged minority. They will be enlightened when they too take the claims of power on faith.

This supposedly enlightened position depends on a refusal to engage with the evidence. It is taken as uncontroversial that powerful institutions are trustworthy. If you internalise that assumption you are qualified to comment on the problem of trust. If you doubt it you are part of an ignorant and hysterical mob.

Happy Birthday, Professor Chomsky

2008-12-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

There is a long interview with Chomsky available here on ZNet. In his discussion of the latest crisis in global capitalism he quotes the Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik -

John Maynard Keynes [...] had located the fundamental defect of the free market system in its incapacity to distinguish between `speculation' and `enterprise.' Hence, it had a tendency to be dominated by speculators, interested not in the long-term yield on assets but only in the short-term appreciation in asset values. Their whims and caprices, causing sharp swings in asset prices, determined the magnitude of productive investment and, therefore, the level of aggregate demand, employment and output in the economy. The real lives of millions of people were determined by the whims of 'a bunch of speculators' under the free market system.

Now that makes Keynes sound much more interesting than the shy and timid Keynes who can be spotted every now and again on the comment pages of respectable newspapers. The absence of an accessible and wide-ranging guide to Keynes's thought is rather irritating, in the current circumstances. Anyone interested in having a go?

Patnaik's presentation, entitled The Present Crisis and the Way Forward, can be found here. In it he points out the disastrous impact of both booms and busts on developing nations and argues for a restoration of capital controls as part of a meaningful response to the crisis.

Patnaik's piece is part of an interactive thematic dialogue organised by the United Nations. There are other contributions and resources here.

Professor Chomsky is 80 on Sunday. Happy birthday.

The Current Crisis Explained

2008-10-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

Richard Wolff, a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, situates the cause of the current economic crisis in the decline of workers' income as a percentage of total output. He goes on to offer a modest proposal for economic organization in the future.

You can watch the video here.

Martin Wolf, Scourge of the Bankers

2008-10-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

In his spirited defence of liberal capital markets and free trade, Why Globalization Works, the associate editor and chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, addresses the question of effective banking regulation. He writes:

"The management of any systematically important bank that has to be rescued by the state should be disbarred, as a matter of course, from further work in the financial industry. Remember the fundamental point. Big banks have consistently operated in the knowledge that their profits are private and losses, if large enough, public. In other words, the institutions they run are underpinned by the state. Managers are, in an important sense, public servants. If they abuse that trust, they should be treated accordingly."

Why Globalization Works (Yale, 2005, paperback edition, page 298)

So, what should happen to the managers of those banks now being rescued by the state in the US and the UK? In the view of the associate editor of the Financial Times they should be barred from further work in finance, as far as I can tell.

Talk at the Institute for Public Policy Research

2008-09-08T10:02:00.001-07:00

Below is the text of the talk I gave at the IPPR last Friday. Well, it is the text of the talk I prepared, not the talk I actually ended up giving, which was a much more ad hoc affair.

An interesting point was raised in the questions afterwards, which I hope to address here at some point.

*

The idea is that I will talk for 20 or 25 minutes. I’ll describe what I think is the most pervasive and influential way of thinking and talking about the Enlightenment – the genre of stories we tell ourselves about the threats to an enlightened polity.

And then I’ll talk about what I think are the problems with this way of talking and thinking about Enlightenment and I’ll suggest another way.

Once I’ve done there’ll be some time for questions.

1.

First of all I want to emphasise the central role that Enlightenment plays in modern politics.

We constantly hear politicians justify themselves through appeals to the great figures of the Enlightenment. So, for example, talking in London in November of 2003, Bush responded to critics of his foreign policy -

We’re sometimes faulted for a naive faith that liberty can change the world. If that's an error it began with reading too much John Locke and Adam Smith.

One can criticise George Bush for many things – but perhaps an excessive enthusiasm for the works of John Locke and Adam Smith isn’t the most obvious of them. But for Bush and his speech-writers, it was important, vital even, to establish title to the legacy of the British Enlightenment.

And Bush’s choice of reading material wasn’t arbitrary. John Locke’s doctrine of terra nullius had an important influence both on British colonial policy in the Americas and on the framers of the United States Constitution. Mention of him was perhaps a very sly wink at the deep background of the ‘special relationship’.

Adam Smith is a staple in contemporary discussions of economics. Since the late forties his was prestigious name to conjure with in struggles with the regulatory, Keynesian state. Supporters of Thatcher and Reagan both invoked his ideas – and some of them may actually have believed that free market policies had made Britain and America rich.

(it is a belief that flies in the face of the evidence, alas)

The concepts associated with the Enlightenment - progress, secularism, modernity – are central to the legitimacy of the liberal democracies. Even Bush, who built his popular appeal on his professed Christian faith, felt the need to lay claim to them. Gordon Brown also makes much of his Enlightenment credentials – going so far as to let it be known that he has read and found uplift in the works of Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative admirer of the British Enlightenment.

This is before we mention the Conservative Party’s recent attempts to appropriate the language of liberty, equality and fraternity as part of its reinvention – an act of political chutzpah that Burke would have looked on with a degree of distress. Brown laying claim to the legacy of Hume and Smith, Cameron embracing the principles of the French Revolution - across the ideological spectrum, the Enlightenment in Britain has become something of a free-for-all in recent years.

More generally the enlightened ideal of evidence-based reasoning has been at the centre of political debate since the seventeenth century. Legitimacy has depended to a very large extent, at least in elite discussions, on demonstrating that one is acting in an enlightened fashion. As reverence for inherited authority has declined, and the constitution has become more democratic, the Enlightenment has only become more central. In place of God and monarchy we make do with appeals to evidence.

So the Enlightenment matters – it matters a great deal. If you can convince key audiences that your opponents stand opposed to rationality and scientific progress, you have gone a long way to securing consent for your agenda. Look at the political struggles over globalization and the environment - there is a very lively effort on all sides to paint opponents as irrational, unscientific and so on.

2.

This leads me to the Enlightenment as it plays out in contemporary discussion. Enlightenment recurs as part of a language of crisis, of imminent disaster; rational modernity is threatened with annihilation by the forces of unreason.

A clear binary division is made in most invocations of the concept, between those who belong to the Enlightenment tradition on the one hand, and the enemies of truth and reason on the other. So, for example, Richard Dawkins has declared that ‘the enlightenment is under threat, so is reason, so is truth’. And the threats to reason and truth that concern him are those that come from the irrational – from Christians, and homeopaths and faith healers. ‘Primitive darkness’, he says, ‘is on the rise’.

And this confrontation is taken to be one of world-historical significance. As far back as 1945, Karl Popper warned that ‘the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual, and perhaps even moral, issue of our time’. Nowadays we sometimes hear that the opposition between Right and Left has been replaced by the conflict between Reason and Unreason.

Richard Taverne, the politician and writer, claims that ‘the new Rome that science built is under siege by the barbarians’. And again, the New Scientist worried in 2005 that ‘after two centuries in the ascendancy, the Enlightenment project is under threat. Religious movements are sweeping the globe preaching unreason, intolerance and dogma, and challenging the idea that rational, secular enquiry is the best way to understand the world’.

So when we hear about the collapse of rationality we almost always hear about the public’s appetite for New Age philosophy, about the growing popularity of alternative medicine, about the pernicious effects of post-modernism in our universities.

Columnists like Charlie Brooker and Melanie Phillips worry about the credence given to fantastical conspiracy theories.

There is a mini-genre of books that offers us variations on this theme of an Enlightenment in danger from the forces of unreason. Taverne’s The March of Unreason I’ve just quoted from. Contributions by journalists include Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, and Damian Thompson’s Counterknowledge. Stephen Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment is more interesting than those two, but it adopts the same basic structure.

The atheist polemic of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens also distinguishes between the Enlightenment and it external enemies. The faithful are throwbacks to the counter-Enlightenment, they stand outside the Enlightenment and they seek to destroy it.

We find the same opposition being described in the debates about human health. Modern medicine embodies the virtues of the Enlightenment and its opponents are fantasists who base their beliefs on wishful thinking or cranky metaphysics. That is to say, the threats to the freedom of researchers to pursue interesting and useful lines of inquiry come from those who openly declare their hostility to science and evidence-based medicine.

In sum, the Enlightenment overwhelmingly features in our culture as a city under siege. Its defenders man the battlements staring steely-eyed into the gathering darkness as its enemies gather.

The conception of Enlightenment, as a city locked in conflict with external enemies I call the Folk Enlightenment. In part I call it that because of its versatility – you can change the lyrics to taste, but the tune, the intellectual mood music comes through loud and clear.

3.

Now all this stuff has a certainly attraction. It lends colour to the intellectual landscape and it isn’t always wrong as far as it goes. Fundamentalism Christianity can promote intolerance, after all.

But there are important problems with it. For one thing it often depends on a wholly inadequate account of what the Enlightenment was. For example, atheists like to claim the mantle of Voltaire and Jefferson and somehow identify Enlightenment with the struggle against religious faith. But Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant, who are arguably the alpha and omega of Enlightenment thought, were both Christians.

More seriously, though its exponents insist that we to base our beliefs on evidence and reason, not one of them has, as far as I know, provided a clear explanation as to why the enemies of reason they identify are the ones we should worry about most. Endless books, articles and documentary sound the alarm. The irrationalists are coming! The irrationalists are coming!

But why do these particular enemies – I’ll list them again – postmodernists, fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, alternative healers, crystal-peddling hucksters – why do these coalitions of the Old Testament and the New Age pose the most serious threat to the enlightened ideal of a reasonable public sphere? Because they say so?

I agree with Dawkins, Taverne and their many allies. The best ideals of the Enlightenment – a commitment to free inquiry and free speech – the very possibility of a sovereign and rational public - are threatened. I agree that this threat – this threat to reason – is extremely serious. But the notion that the most serious threats come from external, avowedly irrational, enemies cannot stand sustained inquiry.
The threats to reason that matter – the threats to the public’s capacity to make informed judgments – do not come for the most part come from irrational enemies. They come from institutions that noisily insist on their enlightened credentials. These institutions act rationally to promote unreason, false beliefs and magical thinking in target populations.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, 3% of Americans mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein when asked who they thought might have launched the attacks. By March 2003, just before the invasion, 52% of Americans thought that the US government had found clear evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In June of 2003, 70% of Americans thought it likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved. And last year 90% of troops in Iraq thought the war was retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s role in 9/11.

From 2001 onwards, and at an accelerating pace after September of 2002, the Bush administration and its allies in the media used every trick of juxtaposition and insinuation to link the proposed invasion to the 9/11 attacks. Where necessary they resorted to outright deception, as in their claims about Atta’s meeting with Iraqi intelligence in Prague.

Iraqi complicity in 9/11 was only one strand of a propaganda campaign that also included the famous exaggerations of Saddam Hussein’s WMD program and enlightened rhetoric about bringing democracy to the region.

The results were measurable and they were by any standards impressive.

This manipulation of the public was integral to process by which the American people were inured to the need for war. Casualties from that war are now measured in the hundreds of thousands, responsible researchers have put the number at a million premature deaths.

So was the American public able to make a reasonable assessment of the justice or even the prudence of an invasion? Every effort was made to prevent them from doing so.

Nor did this poetry of insinuation stop after the Iraq invasion. There are always new enemies, it seems. Last year the the Republican Congressman Mark Kirk said in a BBC interview that Iran has for 15 years been, and I quote, ‘probably the top funder of terrorism around the world’. Now that’s arguable, but this is where the magic happens. He went on to say –

These terrorist organizations operate no just in New York City, they operate in London, they operate in Madrid. We’ve seen attacks in Saudi Arabia etc and the number one financier is the government of Iran.

To repeat – the number one financier is the government of Iran. So now it was Iran, not Iraq, that was behind 9/11 and much else besides.

Next time to read a journalist complaining about the public’s irrational appetite for conspiracy theories, take care that you are not being led in that well populated fantasyland where conspiracy theories are only ever concocted by confused individuals with too much time on their hands and an internet connection.

It isn’t only states that work assiduously to undermine the public’s capacity to make reasoned judgments. Corporations spend more than $400 billion every year advertising their products. Again, every form of insinuation and intellectual sleight of hand is employed to associate these products with desirable qualities – we are invited to have an emotional connection with an imaginary brand or an inanimate object – the sort of idolatry that doesn’t seem to trouble those brave atheist polemicists.

And again corporations spend large sums trying to persuade us that they can be responsible ‘corporate citizens’ – the term is itself a lavishly gold-plated contradiction in terms. Corporations are not citizens – they are entities designed to serve the economic interests of their shareholders (even allowing for the slight difference in law between US and UK corporations). Indeed for all the money spent assuring us that corporations can be trusted to act in the public interest, it is demonstrably the case that they do not. On a subject such as global warming, for example, the oil lobby has recklessly sought to obscure the state of the scientific consensus.

The state and the corporation are in some senses heirs to one particular Enlightenment tradition – indeed, perhaps the most venerable tradition, the one associated with Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke, in which the pursuit of knowledge coincided with an enthusiasm for a powerful and, where necessary, secretive state.

And note that states and corporations use rational means – market-testing, polling, trial-and-error – to promote irrationality in the public. And they can even be pro-science and pro-Enlightenment, as long as they don’t get in the way. After all, it makes for good public relations.

It is no good pretending that we can fit state and corporate power in to the neat binary division offered by the Folk Enlightenment.

So states and corporations promote outright fiction and fantasy. They also artificially promote doubt and they suppress inconvenient information. There are, arguably, more subtle forms of mystification, which are not necessarily seen as such by those who promote them.

(Power worship can often be a sincere form of religious expression, after all)

4.

Compared with state-corporate assaults on the public’s ability to understand matters of deep importance, the chosen targets of the Folk Enlightenment pale into insignificance. While the folksy defenders of the Enlightenment are quick to denounce fantasy and paranoia, they give us precious few grounds to believe that they are not themselves lost in a sort of intellectual fugue.

Why on earth should one limit one’s concerns to enemies of the Enlightenment who sportingly identify themselves as such?

By insisting that the division that matters most is that between the rational and the irrational they all too often end up ignoring or misunderstanding the entirely rational, and often impressively scientific, efforts by states to undermine the public’s capacity to make reasoned judgments.

In these circumstances, the Enlightenment becomes at best a part of the entertainment economy. Dawkins and others can defend science against astrology and the New Age as if he were Francis Bacon. Christopher Hitchens can denounce Christian fundamentalism as though he were Voltaire railing l’infame of Catholic superstition. It amount to a kind of historical – or hysterical – re-enactment.

At worst the Folk Enlightenment I have described becomes a resource that can be used by the powerful to suppress legitimate criticism of state and corporate power, and to support its own policies. We see this when those who reject the Hollywood-ready hallucinations of the War on Terror are attacked for betraying the Enlightenment. We see this when the intellectual defenders of pharmaceutical medicine, maliciously or not, mistake serious calls for transparency and reform with a demand for more homeopathy.

I want to emphasise that I am not suggesting we ignore the irrational threats to the Enlightenment. Rather, I want to suggest that we construct a rationally defensible order of priorities when we come to consider the threats to reason.

Furthermore we need to recognise the extent to which legitimacy today rests on claims about material reality rather than what God wants. Exploding theological claims is fish-in-a-barrel easy compared with the business of unpicking scientific description from boosterism and bullshit in the productions of the pharmaceutical research-and-marketing complex.

5.

If we take all this seriously, it does lead us to a certain discomfort. If it isn’t enough to rail against fanatics, what does it take to be enlightened?

Well, it might be an idea to start by reading all of Kant’s famous essay, What is Enlightenment? Many of you will be familiar with it – I knew the famous bits -

- Enlightenment is man’s liberation from his self-incurred immaturity of mind – Aude sapere! Dare to Know! This is the watchword of Enlightenment.

But after the ringing declarations and slogans, Kant spends much more of his time talking about how Enlightenment can be consistent with public order. Enlightenment can’t have been a recipe for chaos, as far as Kant is concerned. But how can we question everything without undermining civil authority?

The solution that Kant proposes is ingenious, and much more radical than it appears at first glance. He distinguishes between the public and private use of reason. In our private capacity as employees and economic agents, we have to accept the rules as we find them. We can’t morally promote what we believe to be untrue, but we can honourably accept claims that might be true. He gives the example of a priest, who may not wholly concur with the doctrines of his church but presents them faithfully, since it is not ‘in fact wholly impossible that they may contain truth’.

Obedience is necessary, virtuous even, when we are bound by our private undertakings. But Kant insists that we can also address one another as scholars before a reading a public. When we do so, we make public use of our reason – in such a context reason has no external limits. There is no fear of punishment, not hope of advancement. And there is no danger of civil disorder. What we decide on as self-consciously public agents cannot be at odds with the principles of universal justice and legitimate authority cannot be threatened by the decisions of such a public. Information is not traded, it is shared.

Kant’s idea of an objective public realm, in which we approach controversies not as self-interested partisans, but as disinterested researchers, suggests how we might reclaim Enlightenment as a matter of lived experience.

It is not a matter of aspiring to total Enlightenment, but of attending to reality for its own sake, without hope of reward, for some part of our time. At the level of the individual it seems kind of modest, timid even. It is certainly a far cry from romantic calls for total revolutionary commitment.

(Kant was unduly sanguine about how authority would react to his ideas, by the way; he was banned from political activity, which is more than can be said by the many smart-alecks who mock him for his caution).

Notice, by the way, that’s Kant’s notion of a public sphere excludes states and corporations and their representatives. It is only when we address one another unencumbered by our institutional commitments that we are acting publicly in Kant’s sense of the word.

Indeed it is in this public realm that we can hope to look at power relations in society, and our own entanglement with them, without flinching. The decision for Enlightenment reaches outward to comprehend society’s dominant institutions, and inward to a recognition of our participation in their workings.

Kant doesn’t offer us total liberation. There will always be a gap between the public and the private – between the arrangements we have and the arrangements we should have. Our responsibility is to narrow the gap between them, by the most appropriate means we have to hand, according to circumstances. We do not have to renounce our private identities. But we do have to recognise that our roles as employees and consumers do not constitute the full expression of our humanity.

6.

Norman Hampson, the great historian of the Enlightenment once wrote that

Within limits the Enlightenment is what one thinks it was.

It is up to us to decide what we want to take from the philosophy of the Age of Reason, to decide what would constitute Enlightenment in the modern era.

It seems to me that the news from the Enlightenment that stays news is that power is illegitimate when it rests on untrue claims. Religious claims underpinned the monarchy in France in the 18th century. Accordingly the French philosophes attacked the Church. But what does secular power depend on now? Policy-making depends on claims about what is scientific, on claims about human nature, and on claims about the constitution of reality. The current order of things purports to be reasonable, inevitable, natural, and based on a scientific understanding.

In many ways it is not.

Progress to a more just and resilient civilization depends on our willingness to explore this system of material justifications in our capacity as public agents.

The notion that the forces of unreason are gathering seems to invite us to a world intellectual heroism. But I would urge you to resist. If you adopt the assumptions of the Folk Enlightenment you are entering the brightly lit world on infotainment.

The Enlightenment is not a city under siege.

The Enlightenment is a city in civil uproar.

To change the metaphor –

The struggle of our times is not between light and darkness. It is rather the struggle between illumination on the one hand and dazzlement on the other – the struggle between the use of rational methods to enlarge the province of human understanding, and the use of those same methods to manipulate and confuse in the service of tyrannical power. It is the light of the human spirit against the interrogator’s lamp.

So, let us be against the light that blinds.
And let us be for the light that reveals.

Thank you very much.

Comment is Free - The Fallout

2008-07-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

Bitethehand

So have you any other examples [of wide-ranging conspiracies] that might prove your case?

The psychological warfare operation to link al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in the minds of the US and global public. That's one, I would have thought.

Greymatter

My point is that there is a magnitude of difference between plotting to manipulate public opinion or undermine a political leader, which can be done by stealth with comparative ease, and organising in total secrecy the huge logistical project of men and materials that would have been required for a 'false flag' 9/11. It is the sheer improbability of the latter that vindicates the viewpoint of Charlie Brooker and indeed all the rest of us who have preserved our collective sanity in relation to these events.

Like I said in my piece, I have no idea what to make of the attacks. To argue from "sheer improbability" is problematic from any number of angles. Highly improbable events are a banal fact of life. More seriously, there are alternative accounts one could give of 9/11 that don't rely on a large scale cover-up of the sort Brooker assumes would be necessary. To conflate all the alternative theories doesn't to my mind seem legitimate.

This, by the way doesn't mean that I am sceptical about possibility of holding true beliefs about the world, with a reasonable degree of certainty. Nor does it require to sign up to any of the theories concerning the nature of the attacks or the authors. I just don't think it is evidence of mental infirmity to express doubts about the official account, given the very limited state of our knowledge.

cebolla

The author also tries to equate Brooker with Melanie Philips...nice smear! Philips, whatever she may be, is not a rationalist.

Brooker's approach is relevantly similar to Phillips's. It is kind of funny, no?

Charlessurface:

Also - don't you see the problem with pointing out instances of goverenment involvement in assassinations? We *know* about them.

I am not making a direct comparison with 9/11 conspiracy. I was referring to the Arbenz and Allende coups precicesly because everyone now knows that the CIA were involved.

The fact that we know about previous conspiracies doesn't tell us very much about 9/11. It is possible we don't know about all historical conspiracies - so we don't know what kinds of things can be kept secret with any degree of certainty.

watfubar

This article is a mess. The reason Charlie Brooker didn't talk about that in his piece was because he WASN'T TALKING ABOUT THAT. Geddit? His article was about the nutbag theories not the geopolitics of the situation. This doggytyrd article is to let YOU preen and try on the Chomsky big brains badge - well I've got news for you Dan. It doesn't suit you, aside from the fact you'd stick the pin through your own thumb putting it on your ego has blinded you to the bleedin' point.

Hi mum.

The Saddam Hussein -al Qaeda link is a nutbar theory. It has been far more influential - and fatal - than any single variant of the other conspiracy theories. The fact that it doesn't feature in attempts to account for the public appetite for conspiracy theories strikes me as being noteworthy.

Manoa

Brooker did not say there are never any true conspiracies or that conspiracy theories are per se lunacy. There is no logical reason to believe that because there are true conspiracies, 9/11 must have been the result of one. Yet, that is the ultimate point of Hind's column.

That isn't the ultimate point of the column, at all. I am saying that scepticism about 9/11 is understandable and legitimate given the current state of our knowledge. I explicitly don't rule out the official explanation, I just don't think that doubting it is evidence of mental infirmity.

Dangbh

No kidding! Hind's column is constructed from a fallacy wish list:

Poisoning the well, followed by tu quoque, followed by a straw man, followed by something I can't quite put my finger on, followed by a false dichotomy, followed by mistaking some for all, and climaxing with a whopping three-paragraph non sequitur. And a final paragraph where a straw man sort of dances around the poisoned well.

I like the idea of a straw man dancing around a poisoned well.

How about if I try to put the argument in a more rigorous way:

1.) Most attempts to account for the public appetite for conspiracy theories seek to explain them in psychological terms. People for some reason find them reassuring.

2.) But in general the public are right to entertain conspiracy theories, since conspiracies are a fact of political life.

3.) In the specific case of 9/11 attempts to dismiss those who question the official story on the grounds that they are somehow seeking to compensate for deficiencies in their own lives is mistaken. The state of our knowledge does not permit us to adopt such a position. As well as being mistaken it also quite offensive, hence the knockabout in the original piece.

Armaros

It is tempting to seem sophisticated and say that " I do not believe the government" but should that automatically lead one to believe those who hustle conspiracy theories?

No, it really shouldn't.

Pickledpelican

Dan Hind actually makes a point which is one of the strongest cases against believing in any 9/11 conspiracy:

The most important conspiracy theory about 9/11 rarely gets mentioned by writers like Brooker and Phillips. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq the White House made every effort to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida. Far from being a production of what commentators like to call the tinfoil hat brigade, this particular paranoid fantasy emerged from the work of a highly focused and skilled group of people.

Exactly. Any sane enquiring person knows that a cabal around Bush deliberately tried to tie Saddam, 9/11 and Al-Qaida together. How do we know this? Because the evidence is abundant and public. The sheer breathtaking scale of the lies put together by Cheney and his gang were glaring. And of course dear Blair went along with it and the rest is dead bodies and history.

Not sure what this establishes. Is it a variant of the argument that because we know about some historical conspiracies, the ones we don't know about don't exist? Plenty of sane, inquiring people thought there was something in the Saddam Hussein-al Qaeda connection when it was politically important for them to do so.

Is Charlie Brooker Melanie Phillips?

2008-07-16T11:01:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week Charlie Brooker set out to generate the largest number of online responses to an article in the history of Comment is Free. Cannily, he chose as his theme conspiracy theory in general and the 9/11 conspiracy theories in particular – some 1500 comments have been posted so far. Brooker thinks that conspiracy theories console those who find reality too dull and complicated without the garnish of a hidden agenda - ‘embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you’re part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgeon and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time’.

Brooker’s line belongs to a mini-genre of attempts to explain the public’s willingness to entertain conspiracy theories in psychological terms. Indeed he is very close to that stern rationalist Melanie Phillips, who has decided that, in the absence of religion, conspiracy theories satisfy ‘our desperate need to make order out of chaos’.

The conspiratorial world-view does have its consolations. But so does Brooker’s. There’s a certain pleasure and drama in declaring that the world is driven by incompetence, inadvertence and error, and that things are more or less as they seem. You can preen yourself on how well adjusted you are, how you haven't fallen for that stuff about lizards, or Illuminati. You have learnt to live without magic. You’re saying ‘I don’t believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories’, but you are signalling that you are sceptical and rational and that you don't have personal hygiene issues. There’s a psychological pay-off for the cock-up and the conspiracy theory of history.

Our willingness to entertain conspiracy theories is doubtless influenced by our life experiences. A man in his 20s with time on his hands is more likely to be drawn to the wilderness of mirrors that surrounds the death of John Kennedy than a successful columnist in his thirties. But this is beside the point. Wide-ranging conspiracies do take place, whether we are inclined to believe they do or not. It might well be consoling to believe that the CIA plots the overthrow of unhelpful foreign regimes. But it is also true. To insist that, say, the CIA had nothing to do with the fall of Arbenz or Allende might feel terrifically sensible and sane – we can't always be seeing the hidden hand of the CIA, there’s no call for reductionism. It is also, you know, wrong.

What happened on 9/11 is, in the end, a matter of fact – whatever our world-view might incline us to consider plausible or possible. The true authorship of the attacks is as difficult to establish as anything else about the world of international terrorism and espionage. For myself, I have no idea what happened, because I have no more idea of how the business-intelligence-political nexus works than I have about what chess grandmasters are up to when they are staring at the board, looking all thoughtful. That whole thing, the thing of which 9/11 is part, is something to do with oil, and drugs, and money, and organized crime, and imperialism, and actually existing institutions and us. And religion, and a lot more money.

It might feel wise and sensible to declare that any explanation that differs from the official account requires hundreds of impossibly tight-lipped bureaucratic killers. But that presupposes that we know how the world works, and we don’t. Maybe the 9/11 attacks were all about a small team of terrorists who managed to hold it together in a world otherwise characterized by crossed wires and blundering incompetence. But I don’t know, and nor does Charlie Brooker.

The most important conspiracy theory about 9/11 rarely gets mentioned by writers like Brooker and Phillips. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq the White House made every effort to link Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. Far from being a production of what commentators like to call the tinfoil hat brigade, this particular paranoid fantasy emerged from the work of a highly focused and skilled group of people. They worked in secret to manipulate the American and the global public and we can trace the impact of the efforts over time. So here is a (really existing) conspiracy to promote a (false) conspiracy theory. The White House's psy-war operatives were doubtless a professional and measured lot. I am sure that they knew how to behave in socially appropriate ways and enjoyed their work. They also helped pave the way for an illegal war in which more than half a million people have died. There’s a 9/11 conspiracy theory hard at work, right there. It doesn’t matter what sort of person you are, whether you are coolly rational or groping around for meaning in an indifferent world, America’s spooks conspired to stampede the public into war on a false prospectus.

Some of the same people are now working hard to convince us that Iran poses an unacceptable threat to the peace-loving nations of the world. If they can they will use conspiracy theories of various kinds to do it, all the while acting conspiratorially. So it is hardly surprising that people, intelligent, level-headed people, are willing to believe that sophisticated conspiracies exist and that they are sometimes extremely important drivers of events. Given that they demonstrably do exist. And while elements in the American state angle for another war in the Middle East, Melanie Phillips and Charlie Brooker will doubtless continue to heap scorn on an irrational public. Which seems a little, well, paranoid, under the circumstances.

A slightly different version of this can be found at the Guardian's Comment is Free site.

Brooker Slams Conspiracy Types

2008-07-14T10:52:00.001-07:00

Charlie Brooker has set out to generate the largest number of reader responses in Comment is Free's history with a piece condemning 9/11 conspiracy theorists (501 comments at the time of writing, no, 508. Oh no, it's now 770). The piece reproduces the standard line on the conspiratorial turn of mind. People believe conspiracy theories because they offer consolation of a sort; "I've seen through the deception that other people accept. What looks overwhelmingly complicated is, properly understood, comprehensible; there is a system, albeit a malevolent one. My life might seem dull, but really I am an actor in a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil". In this Brooker echoes Frank Furedi, who likes to suggest that the popularity of conspiracy theories is part of a quasi-religious retreat from reason. I think Melanie Phillips's position is similar. Cor, Charlie Brooker and Melanie Phillips.

The conspiratorial world-view does have its consolations. But there are also pleasures to be had from embracing the idea that it's all a matter of messy flux. You can preen yourself on how well adjusted you are, how you haven't fallen for that stuff about lizards, or Illuminati; "I am sceptical, I am rational. I don't have personal hygiene issues".

There is a psychological payoff either way.

We are still left with the question of whether particular conspiracies took place. It might well be consoling in some way to know that the CIA plots the overthrow of unhelpful foreign regimes. But it is also true. To insist that, say, the CIA had nothing to do with the fall of Arbenz or Allende might feel terrifically sensible and sane - can't always be seeing the hidden hand of the CIA, no call for reductionism ... It is also, you know, wrong.

What happened on 9/11 is, in the end a factual matter – it’s up to you to decide whether or not the evidence stacks up for the official version, and how it does so exactly.

Personally, I have fuck all idea what happened, because I have no more idea of how the business-intelligence-political nexus works than I have about what chess grandmasters are up to when they are staring at the board, looking all thoughtful. The whole thing, the thing of which 9/11 is part, is something to do with oil, and drugs, and organised crime, and imperialism, and actually existing institutions and us. Oh, and a bit of religion, and a lot of money.

But how it all fits together, or doesn't, that is some way over my head. Maybe no one knows, maybe no one can. Maybe it is all, in the end, inadvertence and error. But it is possible - highly likely - that some people know a sight more than I do, than Charlie Brooker does.

(It's worth noting as an aside that the most pernicious conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks was promoted by the American state. In the run-up to the Iraq war every effort was made to link Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. Those who want to debunk conspiracy theories have an awkward time with this one - that particular paranoid fantasy wasn't pushed by the tinfoil hat brigade, but by a highly focussed and skilled group of people working in secret to manage the perceptions of the American and global public ... A conspiracy to promote a (false) conspiracy theory. That's much less entertaining than the 9/11 Truth Movement. The White House's psywar team were successful and apparently well adjusted. And they helped prepare the way for an illegal war in which more than half a million people have died. Did someone say something about holograms?)

Britain's Small Housing Problem

2008-07-14T03:22:00.000-07:00

Angela Knight, head of the British Bankers' Association, has tried to draw a distinction between the current problems in the UK housing market and the situation in the United States. She is quoted in the Observer saying:

'In America, they have lent money to people with no proof of income to buy five-bedroom houses. That has not happened in Britain.'

Well, I suppose that's broadly true, five-bedroom houses being thinner on the ground in this country than in the continental United States. In the US the average house is around 2200 square feet, in the UK it is around 800 square feet. That is, the average American family rattles around in a property almost three times larger than that occupied by their British cousins.

In Britain it would hardly be surprising if the money lent to people with no proof of income was used to buy flats and small houses. So Angela Knight seems to be saying no more than:

'Everything is fine. In America houses are much bigger than they are here. So can everyone stop worrying?'

Obesity, Responsibility, Plausibility

2008-07-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

David Cameron has just weighed (pppffffttt) into the Great British Obesity Debate with a call for fat people to face up their, alright our, responsibilities. It's our fault that we are fat and it's up to us to do something about it. No use pulling a tarpaulin over the elephant in the room: we're fat because we're greedy and lazy and it is time to take ownership of our problems. Political correctness has gone too far. We need to start judging people a litle more.

But what to do? How should we take responsibility for ourselves and our families? For the Nation? Well, perhaps the smoking ban gives us a clue. Since July of last year 400,000 smokers have quit, according to the world-famous Chard and Ilminster News. Which seems like a lot, but anyway - let's say that's true. Changes to the environment can have a major impact on behaviour. If people don't want to be fat and unhealthy, they (we) will probably welcome reforms that hold out the prospect of their losing some weight.

So let's not whine about processed food and the corporations that promote it, or go on about the obesogenic horrors of modern life, like a bunch of tofu-munching, Hampstead-haunting, Guardianista , more-organic-than-thou, er, bi-coastal, food Nazis. Let's get to it and put into place a series of public interventions that will reduce obesity; we could ban advertising to children, we could remove junk food from schools and public institutions. We could, if we were really serious, ban the promotion of foods with a high sugar and fat content, or require processed food advertisers to pay for equal air time for advice on healthy eating.

Surely David Cameron, hungry for votes as he is (I am killing me here), can see that steps to improve public health like this are sure-fire vote winners. And unlike empty and vicious calls for the healthy and wealthy and wise to despise the poor and the disadvantaged (from a former booze peddler, no less), action of this kind stands a chance of working.

So what if a few extremely powerful vested interests will suffer! They are filth-peddlers and it's political correctness gone mad not to judge them for it.

The Threat to Reason Reviewed in the Guardian

2008-06-16T02:00:00.000-07:00

The Threat to Reason is Nicholas Lezard's paperback choice in the Guardian this week.

(Yep, and I have just figured out how to embed images on this blog thing. Next week, video ...)

A Modest Proposal on Political Funding

2008-06-13T01:42:00.000-07:00

Political parties in a liberal electoral system need money. Indeed anyone who has spent any time with professional politicians will know that the one thing they like more than applause is money. Money buys promotional opportunities, it allows them to publish political information (what was once called propaganda), it pays for staff, for office equipment, phone calls and so on. Money makes it possible for politicians to promote their agenda to the public effectively.

Under current conditions it is almost inevitable that the main contenders for political power will gravitate towards the small number of donors who can provide them with large sums of money. Political activity costs more as party membership declines while a shrinking membership also reduces party revenues. As aggregators of political contributions by individuals, trade unions are important investors in the political system but they pale into insignificance when compared with the private donors so beloved of the three main parties.* Given their pivotal role in sustaining the activities of the main parties, it is reasonable to assume that these large-scale private investors will want to have some sort of influence on party policy, or that they will favour those parties that most closely conform to their agenda. While the purchasing of honours is one symptom of this dependence on rich individuals, it is the tendency of the main parties to conform with the wishes of these major investors that should worry us most.

After a series of funding scandals we have heard renewed calls for the state support for political parties. At the moment the idea seems to be to allocate public funds on the basis of electoral performance. This seems inadequate as a response. Though it will strengthen the position of the main parties relative to the major donors, there is no guarantee that it will lead to a political system that is more responsive to the electorate. Indeed, America shows how quite high levels of public subsidy can support a political system that reliably favours a tiny minority of large-scale private donors.

What would work better than the state allocation of political funds? The best suggestion I have seen is for each tax-payer to receive a rebate on their bill that could be allocated to the political party of their choice. Each voter would have the same sum to spend promoting political activity. and political parties wouldn't be required to register with the state, of course. They'd just have to register if they wanted to receive funds via this route. NGOs and civil society groups could create political campaign bodies that would promote their agenda in the political arena, whether or not they fielded candidates.

(The idea of a discretionary contribution by tax-payers comes from Thomas Ferguson's Golden Rule: Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-driven Political Systems. But it would be unsafe to assume that this post accurately summarises his position ...).

By breaking the link between votes cast and political funding this approach would encourage voters to provide financial support to groups that most closely addressed their concerns - concern over 'wasted votes' forces many of us to vote for parties that are the 'least bad' of those parties considered to be electorally viable, rather than for parties whose policies we actually agree with. The major parties would retain formidible advantages, but would be faced with effective competition for public funds (and therefore for access to public debate) by new entrants. Actually voting for these parties would remain problematic - but political activity enabled by this money would help new entrants to overcome voter concerns. This more open forum for public debate would of course provide opportunities for anti-democratic parties of various stripes. But it would also force a greater degree of responsiveness on the major parties, or else foster new parties that are willing to address issues of substance and thereby undermine the appeal of these anti-democratic groups.

In the context of the current two-party system, Labour and the Conservatives will naturally compete for private funds to support their activities. Their competition for votes will never be allowed to make them unacceptable to the constituents that they absolutely must win over - the major private investors in the political process. We can therefore look forward to an ever increasing emphasis on the 'character' of political leaders, and to political campaigning that restricts itself to matters in which the major backers have little or nothing at stake. Those looking for an explanation as to why the political classes are now almost hysterically silent about the structure of the British economy might begin by asking who benefits from the current arrangements and the role they play in party funding.

This move would by no means mark the demise of the money interest. Private investors will continue to be extremely important political actors in a capitalist society. But they will no longer be able to hold veto power over those parties that enjoy sustained access to the public. Political discussions could be expected to include contributions from those who wish to see the current arrangement reformed or made anew. How loudly we hear from those who wish to see a new political settlement in Britain will depend on our willingness to make their voices more generally audible.

Of course, we need to establish how much political activity we want to fund in this way. Current levels of expenditure by political parties could be matched by this method of funding without costing very much at all - we could pay for a much higher level of political activity for sums that would remain individually trivial. I haven't done the arithmetic, but I will do if I have more than say 3 comments to this post, preferably not from the same person.

*This is true even if the unions provide the bulk, or a significant proportion, of the funding for one of the main parties, as we have seen under New Labour. In the United States unions provided the post-war Democratic party with the bulk of its funds until the mid-seventies, while managing to do little more than to protect the rather modest achievements of the New Deal era. The reasons for this are complex, and I don't propose to go into them in detail here. But there is an obvious problem with aggregating political decisions - the aggregators can come to have strong incentives to maintain arrangements that benefit themselves but not those on whose behalf they act. Robert Brenner has written about the ways in which the Democrats contained the unions in this piece in the New Left Review.

I Have Caved In ...

2008-06-10T01:35:00.001-07:00

... You can now post anonymously. Knock yourselves out.

The Perfect Father's Day Gift

2008-06-10T01:06:00.000-07:00

The paperback of The Threat to Reason comes out this week. The keen-eyed among you will notice that we've ditched the b-movie aesthetic and gone for something a little more, how shall we say, serious.

Many, many people praised the book (sometimes on their way to putting the boot in, but I am hustling here, so you can't really expect full disclosure). It is about the form of our uses of the Enlightenment and the substance of the concept. It is a miracle that I managed to write the damn thing, looking back. And it looks like the sort of book you can read on the bus without excessive embarrassment. Whether you think that the Enlightenment was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, or that it might have contained Elements of Both, you owe it to yourself to read it. Maybe.

So go and buy it. Or borrow it from a library if you prefer.

Rod Liddle, Sunday Times
Fine, lucid and sharp ... well written and worth reading before the next wave of western tanks crosses a border, somewhere in the Middle East.

James Harkin, Independent
Since September 11 2001, the idea of Enlightenment has been ripped from university textbooks and airlifted into battle between the West and its irrational enemies. In this elegant polemical essay, Dan Hind rightly quibbles with this supposedly Manichean tussle between the guarantors of Enlightenment in the West and everyone else. Hind wants to rescue the idea of Enlightenment from its usurpers, while pressing it into the service of something better.

Harry Eyres, Financial Times
In this thoughtful polemic Dan Hind argues that we are being misled by a debased "Folk Enlightenment" which has little in common with the Enlightenment initiated by Bacon and championed by Voltaire, Hume and Kant.

Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation.
The Threat to Reason is in the tradition of those great works that ask big and fundamental, yet curiously unexamined, questions. A profound and much-needed contribution ... In the spirit of Enlightenment thinkers, he both reveals the contradictions and hypocrisies of contemporary politics, and also points a way forward.

There is No Left, and No Right

2008-05-28T03:14:00.001-07:00

Daniel Johnson stands poised to launch Standpoint, an exciting new magazine that will defend and celebrate Western civilization while challenging multiculturalism and political correctness. The magazine is not right wing or anything. In fact Johnson insists that 'since 9/11 at the latest, the world's changed beyond recognition. The old left/right categories don't work any more'.

This is a tune we have heard before. In Reagan's 'A Time for Choosing' speech in 1964 the Great Communicator had this to say:

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down - up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order - or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Not left or right, but up or down. Up being the right way to go, naturally.

(Candidate Kang updated Reagan's rhetoric with his stirring call for a new direction in American politics; 'we must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom'.)

Anyhow, does anyone have any earlier examples of this end of left and right tune? As always, there are no points for a Hitler reference.

And while we're on the subject ... The Cash of Civilizations Part 2

2008-03-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

Damian Thompson's Counterknowledge makes a big fuss about the public's appetite for 9/11 conspiracy theories. A couple of weeks after his brave and impressive denunciation of such feeble-mindedness, the Saudis slightly spoilt things by apparently threatening "another 7/7" if the Serious Fraud Office didn't back off. This from the Guardian -

"Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE."

Take one transnational arms company, one hereditary ruler, mix in some illegal payments, doubtless a spook or two, and then ... threats of another 7/7 ...

So how many spooks, arms companies and dollars would it take to have yourself an actual 7/7? And how many of the above would you need to have an actual 9/11?

I have been drinking coffee all day, and it's been a long week, but I don't think it constitutes a flight from the values of the Enlightenment to notice the fact of state-sponsored terrorism and to adopt an attitude of curious agnosticism on topics where we essentially know fuck all.

Compare and Contrast

2008-03-07T08:58:00.001-08:00

.. the following.

1.) This from the publicity material for Damian Thompson's Counterknowledge -

"Conspiracy theories, alternative medicine, creationism and the like are all notions consigned largely to the outer reaches of societal thinking, right? Wrong, according to Damian Thompson. Having spread – largely care of the internet – in the 21st century, such wacky ideas as the US administration masterminding 9/11 and China discovering America in 1421 are penetrating dangerously far into public, and even government thinking. All that, despite being ‘counterknowledge’ – ie sexed-up theories based on not a shred of empirical truth."

2. This from the Guardian -

"Not only did Seroxat make some children feel like killing themselves, but it worked no better than a placebo, the document showed ... The [Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority] made clear yesterday it was convinced GSK was aware of the dangers of Seroxat to children some time before the company told the regulator. But not only was it unable to prosecute GSK under the existing laws, it was also prevented from revealing what it had discovered under secrecy rules related to the commercial confidentiality arrangements.
So at the end of an investigation in which the MHRA's investigators negotiated on 103occasions with GSK lawyers over obtaining documents and accumulated 1m pages of evidence, the situation remains as it was in 2003. Nobody outside GSK and the MHRA officially knows who knew what and when."

Now, tell me, just how much use is it to go on about the problems associated with alternative medicine while ignoring the very serious problems in conventional medicine?

Happy New Year, Truth Lovers!

2008-01-22T11:34:00.001-08:00

I'll be posting more regularly, once I have finished a piece for The Philosopher's Magazine. After that, I am new media all the way.

Honestly.

Oh, and New Scientist readers can read a piece by me here if they like. Non-subscribers can read the transcript below, on which it is based.

RSA Talk, November 1st, 2007

2008-01-22T11:18:00.000-08:00

There can be no better venue than the RSA to ask what we can learn from the ideas of the 18th century, and more pressingly, what it would mean to be enlightened in the 21st. As an institution the RSA is committed to the use of reason, to open debate and to the best of the Enlightenment tradition.

So I am very glad to be speaking here, and grateful to the staff at the RSA for giving me this opportunity.

When I first started to look at putting together a talk that summarised some of the arguments in the book, I couldn’t help being reminded of something Harrison Ford once said. In the middle of shooting a scene for Star Wars he turned to George Lucas and said, ‘George you can write this stuff down, but you sure as hell can’t say it out loud’.

Well, I’ll try to give an outline of what I am arguing in the book – and after half an hour or so we’ll open things up and take questions and contributions from the floor.

The first thing I do in the book, pretty much, is to emphasise the central role that the ideas and prestige of the Enlightenment play in modern politics.

We constantly hear politicians justify themselves through appeals to the great figures of the Enlightenment. So, for example, talking in London in November of 2003, Bush responded to critics of his foreign policy -

'We’re sometimes faulted for a naive faith that liberty can change the world. If that's an error it began with reading too much John Locke and Adam Smith.'

One can criticise George Bush for many things – but perhaps an excessive enthusiasm for the works of John Locke and Adam Smith isn’t the most obvious of them. Still, for Bush and his speech-writers, it was important, vital even, to establish title to the legacy of the British Enlightenment.

Mind you, it would be a mistake to think that Bush’s choice of reading material was arbitrary. John Locke had an important influence on British colonial policy in the Americas and on the framers of the United States Constitution. Mention of him was perhaps a very sly wink at the deep background of the ‘special relationship’.

As for Adam Smith, Smith often pops up in contemporary discussions of economics. Since the late forties his was prestigious name to conjure with in struggles with the regulatory, Keynesian state. Supporters of Thatcher and Reagan both invoked his ideas – and some of them may actually have believed that free market policies had made Britain and America rich.

A belief that, irony of ironies, flies in the face of the evidence.

The concepts associated with the Enlightenment - progress, secularism, modernity – are central to the legitimacy of the liberal democracies. We’ve seen already that Bush, who makes much of his Christian faith, feels the need to lay claim to them. Britain’s new Prime Minister also makes much of his Enlightenment credentials – going so far as to let it be known that he has read and found uplift in the works of Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative admirer of the British Enlightenment.

This is before we mention the Conservative Party’s recent attempts to appropriate the language of liberty, equality and fraternity as part of its reinvention – an act of political chutzpah that Burke would have looked on with a degree of distress. Spinning, graves, and so on. Brown laying claim to the legacy of Hume and Smith, Cameron embracing the principles of the French Revolution - Across the ideological spectrum, the Enlightenment in Britain has become something of a free-for-all in recent years.

More generally the enlightened ideal of evidence-based reasoning has been crucial to the legitimacy of the modern state since the seventeenth century. Once Catholic monarchy was decisively rejected, the British committed themselves to a program of expansion based on experimental inquiry. Legitimacy has depended to a very large extent, at least in elite discussions, on demonstrating that policy rested on sound evidence.

As reverence for inherited authority has declined, and the constitution has become more democratic, the Enlightenment has only become more central. It is, to a very large extent, what we have instead of God and monarchy. In rhetorical terms at least, and certainly among the politically active, the Enlightenment has triumphed. For Dick Taverne, the politician and writer, the genealogy is clear -

'The building blocks of today’s liberal democracies were laid in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries … It is no coincidence that this was the time when modern science was born. Indeed science was the chief progenitor of the Enlightenment.'

So the language and the prestige of the Enlightenment are at the heart of the Anglo-American liberal project, and have been for centuries.

But commitment to Enlightenment in Anglo-America has always run alongside an acute anxiety about the prospects for an enlightened future. Taverne’s own work, The March of Unreason is a recent example of a genre that has a long pedigree. In 1945, Karl Popper wrote that ‘the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual, and perhaps even moral, issue of our time’.

Many irrational threats to the Enlightenment tradition have been identified – some plausible, some less so. At various times the Enlightenment has faced extinction at the hands of Catholic despotism, fascism, and communism. It is undeniable that liberal support for the New Deal in America, for example, rested on a self-conscious commitment to ideals of the Enlightenment – although one should be careful not to exaggerate. Much of the popular support came from the American labor movement.

One strand of Cold War rhetoric insisted that the liberal democracy stood for the Enlightenment, and so on. In the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the palmy days of the Clinton Presidency, there was much talk about UFO abduction and irrational opposition to free trade.

But the longstanding sense that the Enlightenment legacy was in mortal danger from external enemies appeared to receive really spectacular confirmation in the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

Commentators were quick to interpret them as an assault on the values of the Enlightenment:

The liberal gadfly Christopher Hitchens declared that -

'The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.'

The right-wing head of the Institute of Objectivist Studies, David Kelley, the keeper of Ayn Rand’s flame, and a figure on the libertarian right, declared that –

'It was obvious to virtually everyone that the World Trade Center was targeted because it represented freedom, tolerance, innovation, commercial enterprise, the pursuit of happiness in this life. Our modernist values were thrown into sharp relief by the hatred they provoked in our enemies.'

The incidence of the phrase ‘Enlightenment values’ roughly quadrupled in the British press in the years after the attack. And politicians were happy to draw on the language of the Enlightenment to explain their policies in the Middle East. Neoconservatives in Washington hinted heavily that it was the desire to create an enlightened democracy in Iraq that provided the real motive for invasion. Hitchens again was on hand to talk about how the idea of a ‘slum clearance’ of ‘the region's rotten nexus of client states’ was ‘beginning to form in the political mind’. The planners in the Pentagon became, through the alchemy of their admirers' prose, the spiritual heirs of Voltaire and Paine.

Politicans who promote the idea of a War on Terror insist that enlightened Western modernity faces a possibly fatal challenge from Islamic irrationalism. Terrorists were repeatedly described as being motivated by a ‘fear of progress’.

For example, three years after the Iraq invasion, former British Prime Minister saw in the politics of the Middle East -

'The age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other.'

Needless to say Britain was unambiguously on the side of optimism and hope.

Alongside the decision to understand the attacks as part of a Counter-Enlightenment ran an insistence that it was time to put aside moral relativism and embrace the icy certainties of an earlier age.

People started to be asked whether or not they felt morally superior to the Taliban, for example. To be for the Enlightenment was to for intervention in the Middle East. Opposition to the war could only be a kind of irrationalism – feverish anti-Americanism, perhaps.

This new emphasis on the need to defend and promote Enlightenment, if necessary by force, joined with a more general concern that the forces of irrationalism were on the rise. Enlightened intellectuals were already worried about the threat posed by a constellation of irrational forces - Christian fundamentalism, post-modernism and the New Age. In recent years this theme has been developed ever more explicitly – to the point where it is a staple of public debate, a cliché, even.

In the arena of science, Richard Dawkins declared that ‘the enlightenment is under threat, so is reason, so is truth’. Accordingly he set up the ‘Richard Dawkins Society for Reason and Science’ to defend science from ‘organized ignorance’ and ‘to go on the attack for the sake of reason and sanity’. And Dawkins has left us in no doubt about the threats to reason that matter. There is his heavily advertised atheism, of course. But when he talks about medicine, the target is slightly different. In a two-hour long documentary broadcast this summer he repeatedly insisted that the enlightened scientific inheritance faces a possibly fatal challenge from homeopaths and the likes of Deepak Chopra. ‘Primitive darkness’, he said in tones that made the flesh creep, ‘is on the rise’.

And again, the New Scientist worried in 2005 that ‘after two centuries in the ascendancy, the Enlightenment project is under threat. Religious movements are sweeping the globe preaching unreason, intolerance and dogma, and challenging the idea that rational, secular enquiry is the best way to understand the world’. As Taverne puts it ‘the new Rome that science built is under siege by the barbarians’.

Again and again we find a model of Enlightenment in which its most serious enemies come from the Irrational Other. Liberal secularists worry about the dangers posed by Christian fundamentalism and don’t hesitate to frame their objections in terms of a desperate fight to save the Enlightenment. Critics of the Bush White House have denounced its faith-based approach to policy-making. Al Gore has complained about a Republican ‘assault on reason’. Liberal scholars struggling to explain why truth matters put an overwhelming emphasis on the threat posed by postmodern relativism and skepticism.

Again and again, the most serious threats to an enlightened public sphere come from sources external to the Enlightenment tradition – they are some variation on the old Counter-Enlightenment – blood-and-soil ultra-nationalists, Koranic literalists and so on.

Elemental metaphors are a regular feature of this kind of talk. Along with the idea that light is struggling with darkness, we are often told that we face a ‘rising tide’ of unreason. Martial metaphors are also common and heighten the sense of ongoing emergency. So last week end in London, the Institute of Ideas organized a ‘battle of ideas’– presumably to defend the Enlightenment against the mustering forces of unreason.

Enlightenment values can be described in ways that sound both left-wing and right-wing, and the threats to reason vary according to taste. But the central division, between the enlightened inheritance and the forces of unreason, constantly recurs. The enemies of reason that matter – whether they are jihadist terrorists, post modern academics or reiki healers - are external to the Enlightenment and its values. They reject reason entirely, and make no attempt to hide their hostility.

It is sometimes hard to imagine another way of thinking about Enlightenment. Talk of an elemental struggle between faith and reason saturates intellectual culture and provides a common theme for writers as diverse, and antagonistic, as Melanie Phillips and Christopher Hitchens.

We hear it so often that it makes it easy, even natural, to think of Enlightenment in these terms. We are told so often that the fight against the forces of unreason is a matter of world-historical significance, that it can feel irresponsible, even cowardly, to question it. After all, if you are not squarely on the side of reason in this struggle, whose side are you on?

We find this idea, as we have seen, in both Democrat attacks on Republicans and in Republican, and indeed in Blairite, rhetoric about the War on Terror.

In my book I described this model of Enlightenment, this way of using Enlightenment values and of understanding current conflicts as a Folk Enlightenment. The lyrics change, but tune itself, once you listen out for it, can be heard over and over again.

There are two problems with this Folk Enlightenment. For one thing it rests on a simple-minded and downright inaccurate description of the historical Enlightenment. One example. Atheist polemic often insists that the Enlightenment can be summarised as an atheist movement. Though plenty of Enlightenment philosophers were atheists, plenty weren’t. It won’t wash to claim that the 18th century struggle against religious tyranny is simply analogous with the modern debate about the existence or non-existence of God. For every Hume there is a Kant.

More seriously, although its exponents insist that we to base our beliefs on evidence and reason, not one of them has, as far as I know, provided a clear explanation as to why the enemies of reason they identify are the ones we should worry about most. Endless books, articles and documentary sound the alarm. The irrationalists are coming! The irrationalists are coming!

But why do these particular enemies – I’ll list them again – postmodernists, fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, alternative healers, crystal-peddling hucksters – why do these coalitions of the Old Testament and the New Age pose the most serious threat to the enlightened ideal of a reasonable public sphere? Because they say so?

I agree with Dawkins, Taverne and their many allies. The best ideals of the Enlightenment – a commitment to free inquiry and free speech – the very possibility of a sovereign and rational public - are threatened. I agree that this threat – this threat to reason – is extremely serious. But the notion that the most serious threats come from external, avowedly irrational, enemies cannot stand sustained inquiry.

The threats to reason that matter – the threats to the public’s capacity to make informed judgments – do not come for the most part come from irrational enemies. They come from institutions that noisily insist on their enlightened credentials.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, 3% of Americans mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein when asked who they thought might have launched the attacks. By March 2003, just before the invasion, 52% of Americans thought that the US government had found clear evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In June of 2003, 70% of Americans thought it likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved. And last year 90% of troops in Iraq thought the war was retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s role in 9/11.

From 2001 onwards, and at an accelerating pace after September of 2002, the Bush administration and its allies in the media used every trick of juxtaposition and insinuation to link the proposed invasion to the 9/11 attacks. Where necessary they resorted to outright deception, as in their claims about Atta’s meeting with Iraqi intelligence in Prague.

(As an aside – the champions of the Folk Enlightenment tend to take a very dim very of ‘9/11 Conspiracy Theories’. I would be more inclined to take them seriously if they focussed their attention on this particular conspiracy theory – it is, after all the one that counts)

Iraqi complicity in 9/11 was only one strand of a propaganda campaign that also included the famous exaggerations of Saddam Hussein’s WMD program and enlightened rhetoric about bringing democracy to the region.

This manipulation of the public was integral to process by which the American people were inured to the need for war. Casualties from that war are now measured in the hundreds of thousands, responsible researchers have put the number at a million premature deaths.

So was the American public able to make a reasonable assessment of the justice and prudence of an invasion? Every effort was made to prevent them from doing so – by an administration led by a man who claims he has spent too much of his time reading John Locke and Adam Smith.

And don’t imagine that this is a matter of merely historical interest.

Last Friday (October 26th) I was listening to the Today program, and heard the Republican Congressman Mark Kirk being interviewed about the Iranian regime. Iran, he said, has for 15 years been, and I quote, ‘probably the top funder of terrorism around the world’ and he went on to say –

'These terrorist organizations operate no just in New York City, they operate in London, they operate in Madrid. We’ve seen attacks in Saudi Arabia etc and the number one financier is the government of Iran.'

To repeat – the number one financier is the government of Iran. The clear implication is that it was Iran, not Iraq, that was behind 9/11 and much else besides.

Jim Naughtie left Kirk’s claims entirely unchallenged. The overly suspicious, too-adversarial media we keep hearing about were absent that morning, as they tend to be when the powerful are presenting their pet conspiracy theories about official enemies. That morning a kind of poetic relationship was successfully established between 9/11 and the need for sanctions against Iran. Radio 4 listeners were left a little more estranged from the real world. Quite where this program of creative insinuation will end we can’t tell. But we can call it by its name.

It isn’t only states that work assiduously to undermine the public’s capacity to make reasoned judgments. Corporations spend more than $400 billion every year advertising their products. Again, every form of insinuation and poetical sleight of hand is employed to associate these products with desirable qualities – watch enough car adverts and you will be convinced that buying the right one will make you irresistible to women, transform you into an admired and respected parent, or even make you an environmentally responsible citizen. In general advertising promotes consumption as a route to happiness and it does so, it has to do so, by promoting irrational beliefs in the public.

Corporations also spend large sums trying to persuade us that they can be responsible ‘corporate citizens’ – the term is itself a lavishly gold-plated contradiction in terms. Corporations are not citizens – they are entities designed to serve the economic interests of their shareholders. Indeed for all the money spent assuring us that corporations can be trusted to act in the public interest, it is demonstrably the case that they do not. On a subject such as global warming, for example, the oil lobby has recklessly sought to obscure the state of the scientific consensus.

It might seem strange to mention commercial advertising in the same context as state propaganda. But it isn’t strange to the people involved. When asked why, in September 2003, the White house was suddenly talking about the need for action against Iraq, the Chief of Staff was quite forthright –

'From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.'

I could go on about the overlap, but I won’t. The relationship between science and state and corporate power is complicated, and I don’t have time to do it justice. But it is worth noting that the state and the corporation in its modern form are in some senses heirs to one particular Enlightenment tradition – indeed, perhaps the oldest tradition, the one associated with Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke, in which the pursuit of knowledge coincided with an enthusiasm for a powerful and, where necessary, secretive state.

And note that states and corporations use rational means – market-testing, polling, trial-and-error – to promote irrationality in the public. And they can also be enthusiastically pro-science and pro-Enlightenment. Indeed where the evidence supports them, they love evidence and reason, can’t get enough of it.

It is no good pretending that we can fit state and corporate power in to the neat binary division offered by the Folk Enlightenment.

Compared with state-corporate assaults on the public’s ability to understand matters of deep importance, the chosen targets of the Folk Enlightenment pale into insignificance. While the folksy defenders of the Enlightenment are quick to denounce fantasy and paranoia, they give us precious few grounds to believe that they are not themselves lost to magical thinking. Why on earth should concentrate on enemies of the Enlightenment that sportingly identify themselves as such?

By insisting that the division that matters most is that between the rational and the irrational they all too often end up ignoring or misunderstanding the entirely rational, and often impressively scientific, efforts by states to undermine the public’s capacity to make reasoned judgments.

In these circumstances, the Enlightenment becomes at best a part of the entertainment economy. Dawkins can defend science against astrology and the New Age as if he were Francis Bacon. Christopher Hitchens can denounce Christian fundamentalism as though he were Voltaire railing against l’infame of Catholic superstition and autocracy. It amounts to a kind of historical – or hysterical – re-enactment.

At worst the Folk Enlightenment I have described becomes a resource that can be used by the powerful to suppress legitimate criticism of state and corporate power, and to support its own policies. We see this when those who reject the Hollywood-ready hallucinations of the War on Terror are attacked for betraying the Enlightenment. We see then when the intellectual defenders of, say, pharmaceutical medicine conflate serious calls for transparency and reform with a demand for more homeopathy.

I want to emphasise that I am not suggesting we ignore the irrational threats to the Enlightenment. Rather, I want to suggest that we construct a rationally defensible order of priorities when we come to consider the threats to reason.

In my book I talk at some length about how we can practically respond to the current threats to reason – how we can live up to our claims to have inherited the legacy of the Enlightenment.

I can only offer a brief sketch of my argument here. In a nutshell I suggest that it might be an idea to start by reading all of Kant’s famous essay, What is Enlightenment? Many of you will be familiar with it – I knew the famous bits -

'Enlightenment is man’s liberation from his self-incurred immaturity of mind – Aude sapere! Dare to Know! This is the watchword of Enlightenment.'

When I started to think about the Enlightenment more seriously I took the bold step (for me at any rate) of reading the essay from start to finish and I found something rather interesting. After the ringing declarations and slogans, Kant spends much more of his time talking about how Enlightenment can be consistent with public order. Enlightenment can’t have been a recipe for chaos, as far as Kant is concerned. But how can we question everything without undermining civil authority?

The solution that Kant proposes is ingenious, and much more radical than it appears at first glance. He distinguishes between the public and private use of reason. In our private capacity as employees and economic agents, we have to accept the rules as we find them. We can’t morally promote what we believe to be untrue, but we can honourably accept claims that might be true. He gives the example of a priest, who may not wholly concur with the doctrines of his church but presents them faithfully, since it is not ‘in fact wholly impossible that they may contain truth’.

As a publisher of non-fiction I can see what he is getting at here.

Sometimes obedience is necessary, when we are bound by our private undertakings. But Kant insists that we can also address one another as scholars before a reading a public. When we do so, we make public use of our reason – in such a context reason has no external limits. There is no fear of punishment, not hope of advancement.

Kant’s idea of an objective public realm, in which we approach controversies not as self-interested partisans, but as disinterested researchers, suggests how we might reclaim Enlightenment as a matter of lived experience.

It is not a matter of aspiring to total Enlightenment, but of attending to reality for its own sake, without hope of reward, for some part of our time. At the level of the individual it seems kind of modest, timid even. It is a far cry from romantic calls for total revolutionary commitment. But imagine for a moment a nation of part-time scholars acting in the public interest. What could such a nation achieve? We can’t know. But tell me you aren’t just a little curious to find out?

Notice, by the way, that’s Kant’s notion of a public sphere excludes states and corporations and their representatives. It is only when we address one another unencumbered by our institutional commitments that we are acting publicly in Kant’s sense of the word.

Indeed it is in this public realm that we can hope to look at power relations in society, and our own entanglement with them, without flinching. The decision for Enlightenment reaches outward to comprehend society’s dominant institutions, and inward to a recognition of our participation in their workings. Kant’s public/private distinction doesn’t lead to adolescent complaint. Rather it forces us into an adult engagement with political reality. The strict division does not lead to a cartoonish vision of ‘us and them’. The price of naming and knowing tyrannical power is the realisation that most of us are not innocent.

Kant doesn’t offer us total liberation. There will always be a gap between the public and the private – between the arrangements we have and the arrangements we should have. Our responsibility is to narrow the gap between them, by the most appropriate means we have to hand, according to circumstances. We do not have to renounce our private identities. But we do have to recognise that our roles as employees and consumers do not constitute the full expression of our humanity.

Before I stop, I want to suggest to you that it is important that we must recognise the unfinished nature of Enlightenment, the sense in which Enlightenment can never wholly be achieved. Though it is often translated as ‘liberation from immaturity of mind’, the word Kant used in his famous definition, Ausgang, movement-out-of, suggests that we think of Enlightenment as an ongoing process – Enlightenment resides in the act of moving away from our self-incurred immaturity of mind. Enlightenment seen in this way is not something we defend. It is something we do.

I also want to stress that the historical Enlightenment was not a unitary phenomenon, and what we take from it is, to a very great degree, a free choice. We can find anti-democratic and racist (especially anti-Semitic) thought there. We can find hyper-rationalist utopianism of the kind that John Gray talks about. We can find, if we know where to look, a delight in the military potential of a state that has harnessed the power of scientific inquiry.

But we can also find a sovereign commitment to finding and sharing the truth in the service of all mankind.

To choose between these Enlightenments requires that we look again at the great works of the Age of Reason. But it calls for more than this. It requires us to take responsibility for the concept of Enlightenment in our own times. Which is another way of saying that it is time for us to grow up. Time to do without the parental reassurances of powerful institutions, at least in our public dealings.

I talked earlier about how metaphors get thrown about by the folksy defenders of the Enlightenment. That stuff about armies and the weather.

When Bacon spoke of ‘kindling a light in nature’ he drew on a long, pre-modern body of metaphor and he inspired an Age of Enlightenment. It is an idea that still speaks to us – the forces of light, the forces of darkness. When we hear this kind of talk we can’t help thinking that something important is at stake, epic in a Tolkien kind way.

I have tried to suggest that it is inadequate a way of understanding the contemporary world.

I want to offer a different metaphor to finish with.

The defining struggle of our times is not between light and darkness. The defining struggle is the struggle between illumination on the one hand and dazzlement on the other – the struggle between the use of rational methods to enlarge the province of human understanding, and the use of those same methods to manipulate and confuse in the service of tyrannical power. It is the light of the human spirit against the interrogator’s lamp. Which side we choose will determine whether our claims to Enlightenment are hollow self-congratulation or something else, something finer, something world-changing.

So, let us be against the light that blinds.
And let us be for the light that reveals.

Thank you very much.

RSA Talk MP3

2007-11-28T02:49:00.000-08:00

The talk I gave at the RSA earlier this month is now available for download. You can find it here on their web site.

You were dying to ask, I know

2007-11-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

What books have I worked on as an editor? Well in a career in books publishing that stretches all the way back to the Autumn of 1998, I have edited and helped publish some terrific books, most of which you won't have heard of, in all likelihood. Because that is how it is with books, I am afraid. Still, a partial list of books I've worked on might look something like this -

Democracy in Europe - Larry Siedentop (still the most exciting book about European federalism I've ever read. I was only an editorial assistant on this one, but since I was going to get the blame if it didn't work, I still think of it as my first foray into the wacky world of non-fiction editing)
Rebel Code - Glyn Moody (still the most comprehensive history of the open source software movement I've ever read)
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser (woo-hoo, junk food isn't the best idea anyone ever had. This is the book that, indirectly, saved Jamie Oliver's career)
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - Greg Palast (paperback only - Pluto commissioned the book and published it in hardback)
Weapons of Mass Deception - Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (In the UK, that is. Penguin Tarcher published the book in the US. I also published their Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Banana Republicans. WMD was published in the late summer of 2003 and is still the ... well, we here in England haven't yet got round to nailing the 2002-2003 propaganda with anything like the skill these two managed to bring to bear on the US situation. And they wrote this more or less in real time)
Love All the People - Bill Hicks (because you have to laugh sometimes - and, besides, Hicks knew how put the pieces together, ifyouknowwhatimean)
The Corporation - Joel Bakan (probably the best-written polemic of the last decade)
The Next Gulf - Andy Rowell, James Marriott, Lorne Stockman (a good book about Nigeria's oil politics)

Sure, I have edited some other stuff, of course, some good stuff too. But that's what I am willing to put my hand up for right now.

Oh, and this year Verso published my first book, The Threat to Reason. It is still the best book-length attempt to prise the Enlightenment from the grasp of Richard Dawkins, Dick Taverne and Christopher Hitchens.

Talk at the RSA

2007-10-29T04:20:00.000-07:00

I am giving a talk about the threats to reason at the RSA on Thursday of this week. You can book (free) tickets here.

A Public Project

2007-09-14T06:22:00.001-07:00

I'd like to organise a copyleft translation of Kant's essay What is Enlightenment, for publication on the internet, and possibly in print.

I'd do it myself, but many hands make light work, and my German is pretty much non-existent. So does anyone feel like helping?

The essay itself is non-technical, and short (about 20 pages); it is incredibly important as a document, I think, and it could help make it more difficult for people (no names) to make inappropriate, even fatuous, use of the concept of Enlightenment.

Intervention 'versus' Free Markets

2007-08-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Just read a good, clear piece about recent events in the financial markets, over at the Democrat's Diary.

Comment is Free - A Reply

2007-08-28T05:38:00.001-07:00

Last week I wrote a piece about Dawkins's 2-part documentary The Enemies of Reason for the Guardian's web site. You can read the piece here.

The piece attracted a large number of responses from readers. I will try to address the main issues raised here.

Firstly, a number of posters asked about the factual basis for some of the claims I made. CommanderKeen asked for a source for the claim that:

The pharmaceutical companies receive far more in public subidies than is spent supporting alternative medicine.

Under the formula agreed by government and business at the end of 2004, 28% of the money paid for branded drugs is a earmarked to support research and development (see this BMJ article for more about the scheme). The NHS spend £10.3 billion on drugs annually according to the Department of Health. 80% of NHS drugs are covered by the agreement, according to Pharmacy Management, ie £8.24 billion. Of this £2.3 billion is therefore an r&d subsidy.

Figures for spending on alternative health are more difficult to come by. But last year the Times estimated that NHS spending on CAT was around £450 million. How much of this could legitimately called a subsidy is less clear. The £10 million spent helping to refurbish the homeopathic hospital, perhaps. Anyway, total taxpayer funding for CAT (which incudes sports massage, GP-referred acupuncture and so on) is around a fifth of the allocated subsidy for the pharmaceutical companies. This is separate from the fixed profits that the companies enjoy on sales to the NHS. We ought also to bear in mind the state support for tertiary science education, which provides the pharmaceutical industry with trained staff, and the state support for basic research, which often feeds into commercial product development.

CommanderKeen also asked for a soource for the claim that:

[Public money] overwhelmingly goes on marketing treatments for lifestyle complaints.

According to Rachel Cohen of Medecins san Frontieres in 2000 'no drugs were being developed to treat tuberculosis, compared with 8 for impotence or erectile dysfunction and 7 for baldness' (quoted in The Corporation, Joel Bakan, Constable: London, 2004, p.49). These figures broadly generalise, I think, for understandable commercial reasons.

I might have added that almost all major breakthroughs in pharmaceutical medicine have depended on fundamental research by state and academic institutions. Much of the original work on the BCG vaccine was done at the Pasteur Institute, for example.

The key question is whether the corporations are safe custodians of the public health research agenda. Should we give them vast sums of money for research? Or should we look to find other ways to promote innovation in medical science and public health policy (the two are not always identical)?

I don't mean to imply that Big Pharma is worse than other businesses in any essential sense, by the way. Dawkins spent an hour talking about medicine; Big Pharma is relevant in that context. It is important to recognise that there is more to this than an anti-capitalist critique. The sector enjoys very high profit margins while receiving very considerable public support.

Theophobic asked for background on the following:

States and corporations habitually use rational means to promote irrationality in target populations. They exploit the prestige of science to marginalise their critics. They cook up marketing strategies that sound scientific but are no more than mythmaking.

State propaganda standardly promotes false beliefs and hence irrational ones. In the USA much of the population thought the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi; they thought that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks; that Bush was invading to avenge an assassination attempt on his father and so on. Similar campaigns for war were run in 1916-17 in the US, in the late 30s, in the late 40s (to help kick off the Cold War), in the 80s (against the Sandinistas) and so on.

Corporations promote irrational beliefs about their products, quite standardly. It's called advertising. They also promote irrational beliefs about themselves. This is called Corporate Social Responsibility.

The best example of science in the service of myth I have come across is the 'serotonin myth', which David Healy discusses in Let Them Eat Prozac (New York University Press, New York, 2006). We all think that Prozac and the other SSRIs work by raising the level of serotonin in the bloodstream. In fact we have no idea how the SSRIs work. Which, I grant you, isn't as snappy from a marketing point of view.

On the use of the prestige of science to discredit legitimate critics, I suggest you go and look at Sourcewatch; they provide a handy list of business-funded think tanks. If you look at the work of these think tanks, you will see that they often accuse critics of business of technophobia, or irrationality.

(Theophobic - on the matter of the 'deep time machine', I don't accept that the universe is a machine, much less a time machine. Machines are made for a purpose. It is no more than whimsy to call the universe a machine)

Aside from these matters of fact, there are two related themes in objections to the piece. One is that Dawkins can't be expected to take on everything. There are plenty of people researching the problem of state and corporate mendacity, so there is no great harm in his focussing on homeopaths and whatnot (henrykrinkel, Everytimereferee etc).

The difficulty I have with this is that Dawkins couched his argument explicitly in terms of a defence of the Enlightenment tradition of free inquiry and open debate. He claims to see a rising tide of superstition and magical thinking among the public and a growing distrust of science. He further claims that alternative and complementary practitioners (charlatans as he would see it) are central to explaining the public's growing distrust. My own view is that the factual basis for this claim is pretty shaky. There is some considerable concern about the structure of the medical/scientific system (the medical industrial complex, to sound a more polemical note). Some of that is stoked by the anti-rational claims of snake oil types. But some of it derives from legitimate anxieties about the corruption, danger, waste, and wasted opportunities, in the current mechanisms for research funding. If you are serious about defending the Enlightenment you need to be careful to register the difference. It might even be possible to do a little research into the link between CAM and distrust of conventional medicine.

The second main objection (Mujokan, for example) is that alternative therapists are more serious as a threat to reason because they reject science, rather than manipulating it for their own ends, as the corporations do - 'misuse of science is bad, but at least it requires acceptance of science'. I think this is an interesting point. It suggests a different way of ordering priorities, one in which radical differences at the level of theory matter more than the material impact of various agents on the wider society. So a rationalist must care more about what an openly irrational agent gets up to than they do about someone who is also rational, but happens to be engaged in deceit. This is part explains the prominence of postmodernism in attempts to defend the Enlightenment. Because some postmodernists claim to be 'radically sceptical' about the Enlightenment project (and inded sometimes define themselves against any such project) they excite the hostility of those who see themselves as the Enlightenment's defenders.

I would reject this way of thinking, though. Even if we limit ourselves to CAM, it doesn't seem obvious that a rational materialist conman is less of a worry than a well-intentioned, but deluded, advocate of some kind of esoteric treatment. Both should be treated with extreme caution, but the former seems more morally disgraceful. Looking more widely, rational agents who promote irrationality in pursuit of their goals are much more powerful than the mostly good-natured types who really think that crystals or magnets are the answer to the world's woes. Indeed in part it is their open-eyed use of rational means (polling, research, experiment, etc) to promote delusional ideas in the wider population that makes them so powerful.

The clash between faith and reason, between the rational and the irrational, and so on, is dramatically appealing. It feels urgent and brave to attack the irrational on the terms that Dawkins does. I just don't think it is.

I hope that clarifies my position a little.

Comment is Free

2007-08-24T02:37:00.000-07:00

Work is really hectic right now, but I will try to post a response to some of the comments on my Guardian piece next week.

The Enemies of Reason

2007-08-23T03:31:00.000-07:00

The Guardian's Comment is Free has just posted an article by me about Dawkins' problamatic relationship with the Enlightenment. The readers' responses haven't been quite as hostile as they were last time. The most powerfully expressed objections seem to be that a.) Dawkins doesn't need to address corporate and state efforts to promote irrationality, because that's John Pilger's job and b.) I am an elitist bastard.

(there are more subtle and interesting criticisms than that, in fact)

My favourite comment so far comes from 'Henuttawy' -

Ah, how sad. The expectant followers of the great Prophet Dawkins find that his attempt at a Sermon on the Mount merely tried to put the world to rights by attacking the likes of horoscope-writers.

As was related in the gospel according to St. Dawkins, Chapter II, verses 14-18:

And then didst the followers of the Prophet Dawkins gather together in CIF.
"What about the really big issues, O lord?" the followers cried unto him. "What about the really big fibs, the ones that multinational corporations, politicians and the like tell? Wilt thou also tell them to be less economical with the truth?"
"Shut your stupid faces," the Prophet said unto them, pocketing the fee which Channel 4 had given him. "For unlike the faith-heads, they have big-shot lawyers and the media behind them! In other words, they have power!"
"But how does this help to establish the new religion of reason, O lord?" the followers asked their Prophet.
"Never mind that - just keep repeating the new lord's prayer of gimme proof, gimme proof, gimme proof," the Prophet sayeth unto them. "Just don't ask politicians and multinationals the same question, that's all..."

Get Your (Think) Tanks Off My Lawn

2007-08-16T03:35:00.000-07:00

Controversy continues to rage over The Threat to Reason. In the Independent James Harkin denounces the 'toothless and muddled' version of Enlightenment that he claims to find in the book. Needless to say I am not wholly convinced by his claims. Toothless and muddled I may be, but the model of Enlightenment I champion is inhumanly clear-eyed and toothy.

You can read his review here and I have written a response to him on the Prospect blog, which you can find here. Hopefully we will have an enlightened exchange of views.

A friend and colleague of Frank Furedi, one Dolan Cummings, reviews the book here on the slightly nerve-wracking Culture Wars site. In a moment of fair-minded transparency Cummings acknowledges the link with Furedi. Not surprisingly he prefers Furedi's approach to mine - 'Furedi wants to argue with the public; Hind wants to enlighten it'. Maybe.

Meanwhile over in the much reviled mainstream media Harry Eyres has written a glowing review in the Financial Times. The comparison with Chomsky is flattering, but I am not sure he is right.

Did I ever tell you I was on that Start the Week? You can still listen to my frantic attempts to remember the book's argument here.

Meanwhile everyone appears to have been hypnotised by Richard Dawkins's latest intervention, The Enemies of Reason, in which he bravely attacks psychics, homeopaths and other threats to an enlightened understanding. Those of you who have had more than a couple of drinks with me will know how glad I am that Dawkins is still getting away with this stuff.

Exchange with Jonathan Derbyshire

2007-08-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

Keen readers of this blog (are there any, I wonder?) will recall that Jonathan Derbyshire reviewed my book for the New Humanist. We had a brief exchange about the review, which I reproduce here:

1.)

27 June, 2007

Dear Mr Derbyshire,

I have just seen your review of my book, The Threat to Reason. It is the first I have seen, so I read it with great interest, as you can imagine.

I am glad you thought it was breezy; I did want to write something that would be accessible to non-experts.

I am sorry that that you found it hard to tell what kind of Enlightenment-sceptic I am, or if I even am one. For the record, I like lots of things we associate with the Enlightenment; free inquiry, a commitment to material progress through the advancement of knowledge, and so on. But as you are aware the history of the Enlightenment is complex and cannot be defended (or attacked) as an indivisible whole. We shouldn't be forced to choose whether to be for or against the Enlightenment; indeed I don’t know what it would mean to be for or against a historical period.

I wish I could have been clearer about this in the book, but there it is. I was conscious while writing that I was operating at the very limit of, and sometimes beyond, my powers.

One thing did puzzle me, and I wanted to ask you about it. In the conclusion to the review you write that:

The problem with this kind of analysis is that it criticizes the dupes of military or corporate might on the basis of principles (justice, say) that, by its own lights, cannot be anything but the ideological residue of power politics. But the ‘betrayal of the Enlightenment’ that Hind denounces wouldn’t be real if its principles themselves weren’t real.

Why do you think that my analysis requires me to believe that moral principles ‘can’t be anything other than the ideological residue of power politics’? I certainly don’t believe that, and I would be very disappointed (horrified, in fact) if I had written anything that gave the impression that I did. I’d be very keen to know what prompted you to think this.

It would be fun to have a bit of a discussion about this and related topics. What with Hitchens’s call for a new Enlightenment the other day and the current vogue for atheist polemic, I would welcome a conversation about what it would mean to be enlightened now, and about what we can learn from the history of the Age of Reason. If you like we could aspire to one of those public debates that Kant was so keen on.

Yours sincerely,

Dan Hind

2.

2 July, 2007

Dear Dan (if I may?)

Very sorry not to have replied to your email sooner - I've been away.
I'm sorry you're puzzled by that paragraph in my review, so let me try to clarify the point I was trying to make. You argue that Enlightenment principles have been "betrayed" (p134). As I point out, this entails that those principles are real, that they have substantive content and are not just ideological epiphenomena. However, you also argue that Enlightenment ideals routinely provide cover for power politics (see, for example, p105).

Now, you could quite reasonably reply that those two claims are perfectly compatible and that what you mean by "betrayal" is just the latter. But if that's the case, I don't understand why you insist on using the notion of the "Occult Enlightenment". If it's a "betrayal" of the Enlightenment, why use the term at all? It seems to me that you're tempted here, perhaps for polemical purposes, by what can plausibly be described as an Enlightenment-scepticism too strong for the rest of your argument to bear.

Does that help?

All best,

Jonathan

3.

14 August, 2007

I have thought about Jonathan's point for a while now and can understand how he could see a problem with my position.

He is right, I think, that I should have worked harder to distinguish between two ways in which the state-corporate system relates to the Enlightenment.

Firstly, states and corporations exploit enlightened rhetoric to maginalise and discredit their enemies, as when corporate-friendly think tanks set up a confrontation between enlightened experts and an irrational, risk-averse public.

Secondly states and corporations support scientific institutions under conditions of secrecy, or at least commercial confidentiality. I call this the Occult Enlightenment in the book.

The work of the Occult Enlightenment remains recognisably in the Enlightenment tradition. The work of scientists developing biological weapons may well be scientifically impeccable, albeit morally disgusting. It doesn't make sense to declare that this work is simply a 'betrayal of the Enlightenment'. It is too close to the program for knowledge suggested by Bacon and indeed too close to the program of the Royal Society. On the other hand I do think it should be resisted, should indeed be the focus of enlightened public inquiry. In the Occult Enlightenment, open sincere debate takes place behind closed doors. Hence the attempt to contrast an Open with an Occult Enlightenment.

Of course the two approaches do sometimes coincide, as when an intelligence agency market-tests and then deploys enlightened rhetoric to damage the reputation of their enemies - as when an official enemy is declared to be an enemy of freedom of speech, a strong theme in CIA propaganda against the Sandinistas in the 80s, for example.

So, for the record, activities can both plausibly inhabit the tradition of the Enlightenment in one sense, and at the same time undermine it in another.

Exciting, isn't it?

(15 August, 2007 - I have decided to change the wording on page 134 in future editions of the book to remove any ambiguity. I do try to distinguish throughout between Enlightenment as a moral commitment to truth and Enlightenment as a set of rational techniques deployed in an institutional setting, so I don't think that Derbyshire's point generalises, but as I say, I can see why he might have been confused by this particular sentence)

Chattering Classes Unite!

2007-07-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

Simon Jenkins mentions the book is the Guardian today in the context of the row about the BBC. He urges the chattering classes to put down their ciabatta and philosophise with a hammer in his most recent column.

More Coverage for the Book

2007-07-13T01:35:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday (July 5th) Popbitch decisively backed The Threat to Reason:

Worried you know too much about Britney and Lindsay? Easy way to make yourself look clever - Dan Hind's The Threat To Reason, a notorious but accessible new look at the Enlightenment, God botherers and God botherer-botherers.

And on Sunday Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times described the book as "fine, lucid and sharp".

On Tuesday 10th I talked at an Indymedia screening about 9/11 at the Inn on the Green. Anyone who wants to listen to my stray thoughts about conspiratorial research can find them here.

Apparently there are some print reviews still to come, maybe some this week end. Next week I will mostly be doing radio interviews, apparently.

From SW3 to the SWP

2007-07-05T03:25:00.000-07:00

The blog Lenin's Tomb carries reviews of The Threat to Reason and Hitchens' God is not Great here. The latest edition of the Spectator runs an article by Hywel Williams focussing on the role that a fantasy version of Enlightenment plays in the recent wave of atheist polemic. He gives the book a ringing endorsement along the way. You can read it online here.

Third Review for The Threat to Reason

2007-07-04T03:26:00.000-07:00

Socialist Review has just published an extremely interesting and broadly positive review of The Threat to Reason:

Although different in emphasis, books like Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Sam Hall's Letter to a Christian Nation, and Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great are all loitering with intent on the same street corner, waiting to club passing believers insensible with the baseball bat of reason. It seems that two important Enlightenment virtues these authors have not absorbed are those of tolerance and respect for the views of others.

But, whatever other disagreements we may have with these authors, surely they are right to attack the obscurantism and irrationality of religious belief? In a commendably short and well argued book, Dan Hind argues that they are not. In fact, as Hind convincingly shows, they are either, at best, staging an unconscious diversion from the real threats to the Enlightenment tradition or, at worst, providing ideological cover for imperial politics. It is no accident that under the cover of attacks on religion in general the greatest bile is invariably reserved for Islam.

The reviewer, Neil Davidson, doesn't go along with everything I have to say, as you might expect. But I can understand his reservations; I am generally quiet about class relations in the book, and I don't advocate a straightforwardly Marxist position when I try to offer an revised idea of what it would to be enlightened. You can read the full review here.

Adventures Online

2007-07-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

The Guardian have published a piece by me here. The comments have been either very favorable or wrong-headed so far, in my entirely fact-based opinion. The literary web site Ready Steady Book are running a long interview over the week here.

Being published in the modern era is an odd experience. Everyone seems to hate you suddenly, in real time. It is kind of fun.

The Pitfalls of Eloquence

2007-07-02T07:21:00.000-07:00

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

This is one of those bold assertions for which Hitchens is famous. It is billed by him as an ‘elementary rule of logic’, but if he seriously believes it, he is committed to a very exotic philosophy. For there is a class of assertions for which we cannot provide evidence, but which would be reluctant to dismiss lightly. Moral statements (‘It is wrong to murder’, ‘You should tell the truth’, you know the kind of thing) cannot be supported by anything like evidence. Of course you might tell a story about how we have evolved to be moral, or you could point out the prudential advantages of a moral life. But this very far from being evidence that you must be moral now.

If moral statements are in some sense true and at the same time cannot rely on evidence, we have to be very meticulous as to how exactly they differ from religious claims. Now there might be a case for treating religious and moral claims differently; but it is a case that must be made. Assertions that lack evidence cannot be dismissed by fiat, by the power of a well turned aphorism.

Another aphorist once said that 'the good is outside the space of facts'. This is a claim that lacks factual corroboration (how could it not), but it is very beautiful, and perhaps even true.

This Thing of Theirs

2007-06-30T03:56:00.001-07:00

Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime movers in the invasion of Iraq, recently resigned as head of the World Bank. Having set out on an anti-corruption campaign Wolfowitz was found by an internal investigation to have broken Bank rules in arranging apparently preferential treatment for his partner. A report seen by the Guardian quotes Wolfowitz warning that there would be serious consequences for senior figures in the Bank if they put pressure on him over his conduct:

'If they fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too.'

The Guardian reporter, Richard Adams, suggests that he sounded 'more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international leader'. But I am not sure. In a recent report on Pentagon conduct in the Abu Ghraib affair, Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker how General Abizaid told Antonio Taguba, the officer who had investigated allegations of torture at the prison, that he and his report would be investigated. Taguba describes his reaction:

'I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.'

It can take that long before an honourable man comes to realise that, in the words of another general, Smedley Butler, 'war is a racket'.

The bleed between the language of politics and organised crime can take on a comical aspect. Ralph Reed, the 'Republican strategist', describes his born-again experience in terms that have more than a little of the protection racket about them. According to (this from his Wikipedia entry, which cites Nina J. Easton's Gang of Five:

'The Holy Spirit simply demanded me to come to Jesus.'

As a former Enron consultant and associate of Jack Abramoff, it is perhaps fitting that Jesus's consigliere made Reed an offer he couldn't refuse.

Maybe This Was the First Review ...

2007-06-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

Tom Chatfield calls The Threat to Reason 'excellent' on the Prospect blog in the entry for June 20th (now on page 2). Which is a review as far as I am concerned, albeit a short one. He also worries that the cover it too racy for reading in public. Can't say fairer than that ...

An Actual First Review For The Threat to Reason

2007-06-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

So I've just seen my first review for The Threat to Reason; Jonathan Derbyshire's piece for the New Humanist is published online here. It is fair to say that he isn't overwhelmed by the book, which is fair enough, though he does call it 'breezy' at one point. Breezy I can live with.

But in his conclusion Derbyshire makes a claim that I find very troubling. He says, of my comments on the danger posed to free inquiry by states and corporations, that:

'The problem with this kind of analysis is that it criticizes the dupes of military or corporate might on the basis of principles (justice, say) that, by its own lights, can't be anything but the ideological residue of power politics. But the ‘betrayal of the Enlightenment’ that Hind denounces wouldn’t be real if its principles themselves weren’t real.’

I can't see why he thinks that my analysis implies that moral principles are 'the ideological residue of power politics'. I yield to no one in my ethical and epistemological simplicity / simple-mindedness; the truth is the truth, no matter what power politics tells us, and it is good to try to find out the truth and to share it with others. In my book that's what the Enlightenment is, or should be, and it is entirely possible to betray it.

I have written to Mr Derbyshire to ask him why he thinks the analysis in the book implies some sort of scepticism about morality. It would be horrible if I gave anyone that impression. Hopefully we can have a public-spirited debate about the meaning and relevance of the Enlightenment in the modern day.

The Cash of Civilizations, Part 1

2007-06-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

There has been a good deal of coverage of recent events in Turkey, largely couched in terms of a struggle between secular nationalists and Islamists. We're quite familiar with the structure of this story - a democracy on the brink, clash of civilizations and all that - but the case of Sibel Edmonds suggests that there is more to that country's politics than a struggle between Western modernity and Eastern irrationalism.

Edmonds is a Turkish-American translator who was fired from the FBI in 2002 after she raised concerns over the questionable, even treasonous, activities of certain US officials. A series of gagging orders means that Edmonds can only describe what she found out in very general terms, but the suggestion seems to be that illicit cashflows were set up and managed by individuals in the Turkish and American defence/security establishments. There is a long interview with Ms Edmonds here and you can read a Vanity Fair piece about her case here.

On Not Reviewing Al Gore

2007-06-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

What do you do when a former Vice President writes a book warning that modern politics is becoming a sound and light show in which reason and meaningful participation are increasingly marginalised? That what Al Gore has done in The Assault on Reason.

And the response has been all but unanimous. Let's not discuss the book's argument, let's have a pop at silly old Al Gore. If he says there is no room for serious debate in the modern media, let's wildly over-simplify his argument ('His latest book goes over a lot of well-tilled ground about Mr Bush's "faith-based politics"' - good work there from the Economist; let's ignore the fact that Gore believes that 'is is truly power that is key to understanding the cynical manipulation of faith and the assault on reason' and that Gore says very little about Bush's Christianity or lack of it).

If he suggests that technology might have an impact on political culture, let's denounce him for his 'technological determinism'; if calls for a renewed commitment to reasoned deliberation then he is of course a Vulcan, and a 'radical technological determinist' (stand up David Brooks).

And my personal favourite; writing on the Guardian web site, Richard Byrne pauses to acknowledge that 'Gore's right' about the trivialising effect of tabloid television and moves briskly on to the 'deeper question' - whether 'Al Gore is the right messenger'. That's the way, Richard. Never mind the content of a claim, let's concentrate on the person making it. Isn't that after all what the Enlightenment was all about?

(ps A helpful copy editor had headlined the piece 'Kill the Messenger' - so perhaps the lights are still on in EC1)

Denialism on the Radio

2007-04-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

BBC Radio 4's You and Yours had a feature on 'denialism', the methods used by industry to head off the danger of consumer protection legislation. The academic and former lobbyist Chris Hoofnagle explained that companies used a 'predictable set of tactics' when faced with increased regulation by law. He uses a pack of cards to illustrate the point; the two of hearts is the 'bad apple' argument; abuses are not characteristic and so there is no need to regulate industry as a whole. The nine of hearts is 'muddy the waters', and so on.

The programme invited Patrick Barrow of the Public Relations Consultants on to discuss 'denialism'. He made frequent use of the two and nine of hearts. Interested readers can listen for themselves. I particularly liked the bit where he said that, unlike in the US, British consumers and media were too sophisticated to be taken in by PR trickery. If you believe that ...

Anyway, he gave one bad apple argument that ought to be challenged. On air he denied that the tobacco industry was representative of other businesses - 'I am not sure anyone would be using them as a model'.

Let's compare these two statements. the first is an internal document from Brown and Williamson, the tobacco company. It was written in 1969:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with a "body of fact" that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognize that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health.

The second comes from the Republican strategist Fred Luntz. Speaking of global warming (or climate change, a term he prefers) Luntz noted that:

Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.

I think Mr Barrow underestimates the sophistication and historical awareness of his profession. Doubtless an innocent mistake.

A small thing

2007-04-07T03:56:00.000-07:00

The Observer, a newspaper I don't seem able to kick on a Sunday, runs a column by Jasper Gerard. Which isn't, how can I put this, always essential reading. As someone who spends more time than I should staring at blogs, I was wondering if we shouldn't encourage the editor of that newspaper to free up some space for an 'interactive' column, where we would vote on a Friday for our favourite blog piece to run instead of Gerard's column. It might seem unfair to single out Gerard in this way, and perhaps we could nominate a blog piece and a columnist we would like to see dropped from that edition. The Guardian group is very keen to adapt to the exciting new world of Web 2.0, perhaps this would be a step in the right direction?

Who's with me?

Books you don't have to read, part 2, Terror and Liberalism

2007-04-07T03:37:00.000-07:00

In fact it might be an idea to read this one. It is about the most influential book for those on the pro-war liberal 'left'. But early on the Berman gives a hint of what the reader can expect. In the preface to the paperback edition he describes how first publication prompted two questions: 'So what do you think now - given the many astounding and terrible events that are lately taking place?' (an unlikely form of words, but anyway) and 'This book of yours - where does it fit on the political spectrum, on the left or the right?' These two questions came at him 'from everywhere at once', from the audience at bookstore events, from press coverage, from the internet. And, Berman adds:

Old friends stopped me on the sidewalk, their kindly faces wrinkled into puzzled expressions.

Who talks about their friends like that? He sounds like an enlightened landowner trying to reassure a group of confused and superstitious peasants.

Incidentally, if you have read Berman or are interested in the debate his book provoked, check out this. There are seven sections in all.

Books you don't have to read part 1, The Shield of Achilles

2007-03-03T02:25:00.000-08:00

Time is short, and there's a lot to do. All the while the defenders of the current order of understanding set out their case in well-upholstered cultural products; documentaries, newspaper articles and books, books most of all. At vast length officially approved intellectuals explain the world to us and, with mechanical regularity, receive their share of praise.

Take Philip Bobbitt. The Shield of Achilles is described as 'awe-inspiring ... a triumph' by William Shawcross, and 'a majestic book' by Simon Jenkins. Sir Michael Howard says that 'it will be one of the most important works on international relations published during the last fifty years'. It boasts high praise from The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, The Times, and the former speaker of the US House of Representatives. Frederic Raphael asks 'what review could do justice to the range and intelligence of a work so full of ideas, proposals and fears and hopes for the future of civilization?'

It's a good question. The book is absolutely vast; its index ends on page 922. By the time the reader reaches the beginning of the main text she will have waded past a dedication ('To those by whose love God's grace was first made known to me and to those whose loving-kindness has ever since sustained me in his care'), an extract from the Iliad (Fagles' translation), a foreword, a prologue and a poem by Czeslaw Milosz - 33 pages of Roman numbered pages, including two interludes in verse, before the reader plunges into the profoundities of Bobbitt's oceanic prose. If we are not to take the declarations of his reviewers on faith we might have to read the thing, and 'have our view of the world turned upside down by this superb book' (Chris Patten, Guardian).

Except ... except we don't really. Bobbitt makes it clear almost at the outset that what lies ahead will be hidden shoals, shipwrecks and disaster. On page xxi, before we have even cleared the beach of the preliminaries, Bobbitt plants his black flag; 'For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state'. At first glance this sounds terrifically bold and intellectually exciting. We are in safe hands here, this is going to be some journey! And yet, consider the claim even for a moment and its ludicrous falsity soon becomes clear. Was the Stuart monarchy destroyed by state? Did the ancien regime fall as a result of an attack by another state? Tsarist monarchy, was this brought down in 1917 by an invading army?

In what aspires to be, and has been widely described as, an attempt to reshape our understanding of the nature and purpose of the modern state, we find at the outset a claim that makes no historical sense. Ask yourself why none of those who praised the book noticed this. Did they not reach the second sentence of the prologue? Did they call on the public to cross an ocean without themselves rolling up their trouser legs?

Enlightenment as Discomfort

2006-11-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I talked a little about how one might respond more sensibly to the challenge supposedly presented by religion to the secular liberal order. Today I want to post briefly about the secular liberals, the inheritors of the Enlightenment.

Something of the coherence of these defenders of the Enlightenment seems to come from their dislike of religion and especially fundamentalist religion. Which is all very well, up to a point. But while it is clear that the faithful are being bamboozled into acceptance of the 'War on Terror' through the the idea of a religious struggle between Jesus and Mohammed, I don't think that liberals have entirely appreciated how the idea of a confrontation between the enlightened West and benighted Islam also serves to make the 'thoughtful media' safe for American foreign policy aims.

In this respect, as in so many others, it seems that Enlightenment resides in putting an end to a certain kind of comfort and in recognising that we can also become caught up in a system of unstated resentments and inadmissible satisfactions. Though the language differs according to taste and cultural background, the temptations are not so very different - to live in a world of simple binary divisions.

Faith and Reason (Part 1)

2006-11-01T21:20:00.000-08:00

This is a topic I will come back to, again and again, I suspect, so I thought I would start as I mean to go on.

There has been a spate of books in recent years that have sought to set out a simple division between faith and reason in which faith is understood as being a commitment to Biblical (or Koranic) literalism and reason is a commitment to materialism and the values of the Enlightenment. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The End of Faith by Sam Harris adopt this central organizing division.

We will have plenty of opportunities to examine this style of thought in the months ahead (Christopher Hitchens and Al Gore both have books coming out that will, I suspect, seek to join a party already in full swing). But right now I just want to ask whether if what Dawkins and Harris say is true - that fundamentalist religion poses a unique and autonomous threat to secular society, even to the survival of mankind - their response is a sensible one. (They are quite wrong of course, let's be clear about that, but like I say, we have plenty of time).

Because faced with this terrible threat to science and reason, both Dawkins and Harris seem to think that a campaign of ridicule makes sense as a response. "My, aren't they all idiots, these religious nuts - they think the world is 6,000 years old! And they are scary too - they want to kill all the witches and the infidels!" That seems to the the sum of their program. Mock them enough and the Christians will finally see the error of their ways.

Wouldn't it make more sense for progressives to recognise the sincerity and decency of many millions of fundamentalist Christians, and stop fantasising about a world where brilliantly enlightened polemic would be enough to make them change their Bible-loving ways? Because if we tried to speak with these Christians in a register they understand, it would be more likely to result in trouble for the religious right, who we can all agree are a trouble to the world.

For example, much has been made in recent years about the unnerving character of the modern, publicly traded corporation. Without wanting to imagine that all the ills of capitalism can be solved by better regulation or reform of corporate law, the corporation is important to the modern system both practically and symbolically. There is no reason why fundamentalist Christians cannot be enlisted in the campaign against corporate power just as secular progressives have. After all, corporations have some very thought-provoking characteristics. Joel Bakan describes them as being psychopathic in his book The Corporation. But we can use another register altogether.

After all, a corporations is immortal and possessed of an inhuman clarity of purpose, to seek profit above all other considerations. An immortal and fictitious person, incapable of any human feeling yet entirely ravenous, a leviathan given form and cover by thousands of human beings: such a monster must surely outrage the faithful. If the evangelicals wish to fight dragons, then let us invite them to join us in a crusade against these demonic concentrations of greed – for what is a thing that does not live and does not age? The overwhelming moral emergency presented by the modern industrial corporation seems more likely to appeal to the evangelical imagination than the managerialist policies of the Democrats and the Labour Party.

It's just a thought. For decades fundamentalists in the United States have been cannon fodder for all kinds of nutty policies. It is high time secular progressives started to speak to them in terms that they will recognise, to show them a way out of the torments of the 'culture wars'. If anyone starts talking about prayer in schools or creationism, you can just point out that Reagan was a warlock and that Bush isn't really born again. Neither of those two factoids are jokes, by the way, they are just stone cold facts that have their basis in the word of the Lord. Hallelujah!

The history of the Labour Party shows that deep religiosity doesn't have to mean hostility to progress. In fact the party was a sight more radical when it was run by born-again Christians than it is now. God knows the left could use a few million people who get up early, do what they say they will do, and who look forward to a better world than this.

2006-10-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

Welcome to The Threat to Reason. I'll be posting here regularly from November 1st onwards. Until then I'll be in a library trying to finish the final draft of my book ... The Threat to Reason.

The book - and this blog - will look at the ways in which the ideas and prestige of the eighteenth century Enlightenment are used in contemporary political debate. In particular I want to show how attempts to define Enlightenment primarily as a conflict between reason and faith can function as a form of enchantment, and distract us from the work of understanding the world.