A C Grayling is truly an ornament of British life and letters. A philosopher by training, practice and temperament, there is scarcely an honour in the field which he has not been gifted. One cannot have attained so much without chaining a fierce intellect to an indomitable will to create and succeed. Not only is he greatly admired, he is in many ways admirable.
But then there’s this philosopher’s public response to the news that Nigel Farage and close family members are being blackballed by Britain’s banks, in a way which could conceivably eject him and his family from the polity.
That Russian phrase, carefully looked up and copied into his tweet to smuggle in insinuations of Russian money: ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’
Yet the same day. . .
Is he describing himself there?
What happened to A C Grayling? What explains the degeneration of an intellect, and a personality given to thinking about politics and ethics, to the point where you fear that if Nigel Farage was beaten up in public, he’d be cheering on the thugs?
Who’s the tolerant liberal? Who’s the protofascist?
Let us assume that this degeneration is not merely age-related - although he’s 74 now so a certain increase in irascibility would not be unprecedented. Rather, let us think closely about the object of his ire: Brexit. Even more closely, let’s think about it on his own terms. In 2017, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, he set his complaints against the backdrop of classical political philosophy in ‘Democracy and its Crisis.’ I have read it, partly so that you don’t have to, and partly because - and ACG will appreciate the irony - I have the academic philosophical background to understand it and do it justice. I’m the right sort of reader. ‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” might not be, as far as ACG is concerned.
The foundation for ACG’s political philosophy is that there is an inescapable ‘democratic dilemma’. One horn of that dilemma is that democracy demands political power is accountable to the electorate, but the other horn is that it must also result in ‘sound government’. And the problem which all classical political philosophers from Plato to Jefferson have identified is that in a democracy the electorate are a probably bunch of irresponsible, low-information incipient bigots at the mercy of any effective demagogue or plutocrat who chooses to suborn them.
Generally speaking, this ‘democratic dilemma’ has been addressed in two different ways: either you restrict the electorate so only the ‘right sort’ (usually rich men) get to vote, or you construct a series of constitutional barriers (‘checks and balances’ ensuring that ‘sound government’ can be continued no matter what the bloody electorate thinks it wants. They’ll almost always calm down and ‘consent’ soon enough.
This is putting it very crudely, but the elaboration of the way these two options have been thought about and instantiated in political institutions takes up the majority of the book. The various benefits, flaws and limitations of the responses to the ‘democratic dilemma’ that form the foundation to ACG’s abhorrence of the Brexit vote and its aftermath.
But at this point, because it is so fundamental, it’s worth putting a few question-marks over this classical ‘democratic dilemma’.
The first question to ask is: ‘in this dilemma, what is the question we want to answer?’ And in broad terms, the answer is: ‘Who gets to wield state power’? Philosopher kings, aristocrats, plutocrats, or the mob?
But is this really the question which democracy seeks to answer these days? It is instructive to remember that most of the British tradition of political philosophy started life in the 17th century. As I’ve written elsewhere, the 17th century was an exceptionally poor time to be alive, be it in Britain or anywhere else in the world. It was a time of global poverty so pronounced that populations almost everywhere shrank, starvation was common and regular, and in response almost everywhere regimes fell, wars and civil wars broke out, and human life, never expensive, became cheaper than ever.
Partly in response, Britain and other European powers sought out weaker cultures to conquer and destroy in the Americas, and developed an global industrial-level slave habit.
Moreover, the 17th century was just the latest extension of millennia of, essentially, no-growth and little lasting technological development. In the chart below (which is log-linear), the take-off point for global GDP comes between 1700 and 1820, but only really goes exponential after around 1870.
A world of no or negligible growth and progress is also a world in which all history has taught that access to power is a zero-sum game. If you get power, I must lose it. In these circumstances, the question of ‘who gets to wield state power’ really is the only question which matters.
If ACG re-read those 17th century foundational texts, he’d see that questions of ‘good government’ really are not entertained half so seriously as the grounds upon which power itself can be legitimately gained and retained. ACG repeats the classic misreading of John Locke’s second Treatise on Government as a prelude to or justification of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. But if you actually read it, the entire structure of the Treatise is dictated by the needs to explain and justify, if possible, the colonial expansion, including slavery, upon which Britain was embarked, and with which Locke himself was commercially and practically preoccupied. (For example, Locke helped draft the constitution for slave-holding Carolina.)
I can accept that this was not obvious when ACG first encountered Locke’s Two Treatises. But he really should re-read them now.
The importance of the question ‘ who gets to wield power?’ is made even more important by the other expectation engendered by millenia of experience up to the 17th century: people who get power don’t give it up. So it’s a one-shot deal: if you get the wrong king, he’ll be with you for life, unless you start a civil war and then cut his head off. And what then?
But things change. In fact, they began to change around the time of the Glorious Revolution, not so much because of the decision to kick out James II, but rather because during the reign of Charles II something unique and extraordinary happened in Britain. What happened was the fundamental approach to science, and eventually to everything else, altered from simply observing the world, to understanding that the task in all fields was to provide better explanations.
This revolution in scientific method is described and celebrated in detail in David Deutsch’s book ‘The Beginning of Infinity - Explanations which Transform the World’. This book is extraordinarily valuable, because Deutsch is one of the few academics smart enough and self-confident enough to take on Oxford’s philosophical tradition and, largely, trash it.
Why so confident? Well, Wikipedia gives us a clue: “He is a visiting professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer.”
Not a man, then, likely to be intimidated by ACG’s intellect.
And he is not afraid to take on the whole tradition of political philosophy ACG embodies. Some of the points he makes are actually devastating. I particularly enjoyed his extended explanation that genuine proportional representation is mathematically impossible. It turns out there simply is no fix - simple or complex - that can solve the problem of how to apportion seats in the legislature fairly. The impossibility of fixing it results in recurrent problems about the allocation of seats in the US Congress - all solutions proposed turn out to be unfair and irrational.
Kenneth Arrow extended the implications of ‘apportionment problem’ to a wider logical critique of collective decision making. Arrow’s discovery of the paradoxical inconsistency of axioms we’d think necessary for a proper and rational account of social choice warn us of the fearsome man-traps that surround those attempting go perfect representative democracy. Although Arrow’s problems are not new, ACG seemingly has either not heard of them, or considers them trivial. But they aren’t.
Deutsch’s wider point is that the revolution of scientific method to turn it towards always seeking better explanations - explanations that are harder to improve, that have ever-expanding scope of application - directly helped shift the world from its zero-sum state in which it had languished essentially since the dawn of man. That upward swoosh in the GDP chart began then because we entered a new world, a world ‘seeking better explanations’.
In this new world, the one we inhabit, the ‘democratic dilemma’ is much less important than ACG insists. What matters now in the democratic contest for power is not ‘representation vs sound government’ but ‘is anyone offering a better choice?’
He is not the first to notice that the power-priorities of the 17th centuries are no longer paramount for us. In 1943, Joseph Schumpeter wrote in ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’ that democracy is not about arriving at any particular ideological outcome, but rather about how a society makes decisions.
Thus, by the time Tony Benn’s put his famous five questions of democracy:
“What power have you got?”
“Where did you get it from?”
“In whose interests do you use it?”
“To whom are you accountable?”
“How do we get rid of you?”
it was already clear that the most important of these were the last: ‘How do we get rid of you?’
But, as David Deutsch also makes clear, and as, say, the government of the Netherlands demonstrates, it’s also the one which Proportional Representation (the impossible dream) will always subvert. The problem with PR is that it assigns disproportionate power in the legislature to the third-largest party, and often to even smaller parties. When coalitions are inevitable, as they usually are under PR, it gets harder and harder for the electorate to decide which party, and which policies, will be removed from power. Or to put it another way: you can never kick the bastards out.
By extension, you rarely get the chance to try new explanations, which may be better.
This also alerts us to the other problem of the ‘dilemma of democracy’: its obsession with ‘who gets to hold power’ assumes political choice is not an infinite game. Rather, if the decision is a one-shot, irreversible, then getting it right the first time is all that matters.
But modern democracies at their core assume that we are playing in an infinite game (the only game in which co-operation not defection is the rational choice). The fact that democratic politics is an infinite game is what underpins ‘losers’ consent’ and why that consent is so important. If the present government is making a mess of it, it’ll be gone, and someone else will get the chance to make a mess of it. (Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, I mean you.)
ACG’s work ethic is legendary, so it is honestly curious that he pays little attention to Schumpeter and none to Arrow, but rather concentrates his attention on those philosophers responding to pre-modern conditions.
There are other blunders which cast doubt on ACG’s seriousness. He writes: ‘It was not an original discovery on the part of Daniel Kahneman that people divide into what he calls ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinkers.” No indeed, and it certainly wasn’t a claim that Kahneman made: his whole point is that we are both ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinkers all the time, without recognizing it. No-one who has read Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast & Slow’ could possibly have taken from it that the world divides into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinkers. It raises two questions: first, why hasn’t ACG read the book - it’s one of the most influential books of the last couple of decades after all; and second, having not read it, why does he mention it at all?
This is all preparatory to uncovering ACG’s complaints about Brexit. There are, I think, two strands. The first is his contempt and loathing for Britain’s parliamentary democracy. He’s good enough to be quite open about this, and is particularly splenetic about the First Past the Post system, and the whipping system which attempt to provide discipline to the always-potentially-fissiparous coalitions which comprise the Conservative and Labour parties in parliament. This, he thinks, distorts and undermines the representative process. (Again, he badly needs to read Kenneth Arrow.) He decries those who don’t vote (he’d make it compulsory), and, of course, the argy-bargy of raucous overt and hidden persuasion.
His conclusion: this ‘instance of representative democracy fails by a wide margin to be one, operating in such a way as to be far from embodying the solution that the theorists of representative democracy intended.’
ACG’s open contempt for Britain’s parliamentary democracy is, perhaps, one foundation on which rests his contempt for Brexit.
The other is nowhere stated overtly, but implied everywhere, page after page in Democracy and its Crisis. And it is that second horn of the ‘dilemma of democracy’: the idiocy and vulnerability of the idiot electorate. You and me.
Several things need saying about this attitude, this underlying belief that democracy is probably too good for us. Or, more specifically, that our prejudices and choices will conflict with the aim of 'sound government’.
First, his estimate of the British electorate is disgraceful and unhistorical. For example, he writes that ‘in the mid-nineteenth century perhaps only half the adult population was literate' - which explained JS Mill’s proposals to keep the electorate tiny. But this is simply wrong: as early as 1601 - 250 years earlier - the estimate was that 53% of the British population was literate. The British electorate has been literate - and thus prepared for democracy - far longer than ACG would have us believe.
Second, I suppose he conflates his unfounded belief in popular illiteracy with lack of moral attention. But again, I think the record paints a very different picture. I’ve written elsewhere about the role the working class played in forcing the abolition of the slave trade.
“If proof is needed of the essential power and determination of the ordinary British people to end the slave trade, no matter what, it is found in Manchester in 1787. At the time, Manchester was a rapidly-industrial growing town of around 50,000, whose economy was intimately bound-up with the triangular slave trade: not only were its cotton textiles materials traded for African slaves by the slave-traders, but the cotton itself was imported from the slave colonies of the Americas. In other words, when it came to abolishing the slave trade, Manchester had a lot to lose.”
Still, within weeks of Thomas Clarkson arriving to campaign against the slave trade, the Manchester petition to parliament demanding abolition had gathered more than 10,000 names. - 20% of the entire population.
It took ‘sound government’ until 1833 to get round to abolition. That was just one year after the Great Reform Act of 1832, which widened the electoral franchise. I doubt the timing was coincidental.
Third, I think only people who have never stood for election, never campaigned openly, never spent darkening winter afternoons knocking on doors and talking to strangers in an effort to persuade them to vote, can believe ‘the electorate’ is a herd of basically unthinking, unreflective, beasts. ACG has never stood for election. Which means, honestly, he’s never met the electorate. In this specific sense, he has no idea what he is talking and writing about.
If contempt for parliamentary democracy and contempt for the British electorate he has never met are the underlying reasons for his astonishing vituperation against the Brexit vote, the contingent complaints he raises are . . . actually just rather quaint to read.
There is, first, his belief that the vote was swung by the Big Data manipulation of the electorate. Again, I have to laugh. If he’d ever stood for election, he’d know that one of the biggest perks that keep the major parties in contention is that they, and they alone, know how to use and manipulate the local electoral rolls which are made available to parliamentary candidates. If you’ve never seen a breakdown of the electoral roll, it will be of absolutely no use to you. If your party has spent decades in the game, these electoral rolls are gold-dust, the principal way you know where to focus your efforts. Big Data and Facebook Ho! ho! - tell it to North Yorkshire.
Second, there is his evident belief in Russian money swinging the election. The evidence for this? Why, it’s Carole Cadwallader in the Guardian, quoted multiple times, and footnoted twice. I think maybe he needs to make some changes if the book is re-issued.
Third, there is a point which I find incomprehensible: the Leave campaign, ACG complains, did not put out a consistent manifesto. So how could people know what they were voting for? But they did know: they were voting on whether to say in the EU or leave. Now it is perfectly true that different people had different reasons for wanting to leave, some of which were clearly incompatible with each other. So what? This was a decision about how we make decisions. That’s all.
Fourth, the vote was unnecessary and in any case, only advisory. Except that the Remain campaign told us that this was our decision. Overtly.
Finally, all his complaints about the machinations of Big Data and fears of ‘Deep State’ activities in the 2016 referendum look quaint in the light of what we know about the quite genuine conspiracies in the US 2020 election. It is surprising that ACG is not outraged. It is surprising, also, that ACG isn’t bothered by Farage being potentially driven out of the UK.
I want to end on a note which ACG would appreciate. The real reason for the Brexit rebellion is that in our lifetime, in Britain, and in its membership of the EU, we have not actually had ‘sound government’. This may not have been clear to ACG (CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the World Economic Forum, Master of the New College of the Humanities etc etc).
But it is clear to swathes of Britons who live outside the M25, and particularly who live in those northern parts where industry was wiped out in the 1980s (part of a global phenomenon) but which have been starved of public investment and infrastructure ever since.
The “sound government” he claims to value has delivered some of the worst regional inequalities of any developed country.
“Sound government” delivered crumbling infrastructures, decrepit public services, and massive public debts.
“Sound government” continues to pursue policies such as ‘net zero’ and the associated ‘energy policy’ which are plainly mad.
“Sound government” has encouraged mass migration without giving thought to social, infrastructural and economic stresses involved.
As all this sound government happened, the explanation was always that nothing could be done become Brussels decried it. Sometimes this was correct - Newcastle couldn’t be re-invested with industry, but instead the government was allowed to build arts centres. More often, ‘Brussels’ was the screen behind which hid a demographic of politicians of all parties who’s main characteristic was their indifference to results.
And of course, there was no way you could ‘kick the bastards out’ of Brussels.
Even now, it is plain that when the Tory bastards get kicked out at the next election, the Labour bastards will fail in utterly familiar and predictable ways. We know because . . .
The democratic demand today is for better explanations, and better solutions, not for the impossible perfection of democratic representation. But the demand is urgent, and actually irresistible. The Brexit vote was, above all, simply a first and necessary step in finding our way.
* “Sound” government panicked and created mass hysteria over a bad cold.
The incompetence at the top is staggering
Great article, that was enlightening