We progressives are puzzled. We live in a confusing and dangerous world, where some traditional ways of doing things no longer seem to work. We understand that people will disagree about what to do, and how. So, we appeal to reason and evidence. Yet increasingly, neither seems to be working. Donald Trump’s social media site is called ‘Truth Social’, but it is not truth in any sense that we recognise. And Michael Gove tells us that ‘people have had enough of experts’. So, whatever happened to facts and truth?
The (near) collapse of capitalism
One root of many of our problems lies in the financial crisis of 2008. In that year, Western capitalism came close to collapse. For generations, most people in the West had experienced steady improvements in their lives, and had come to see this as normal. But 2008 brought this to an abrupt end and since then, politics and economics have shown little ability to return to that world.
In the face of a visibly failing system, it was natural that people would look for radical alternatives. In Britain we tore up thirty years of steady, albeit stumbling, technocratic, development with Brexit, and flirted with alternatives from Corbynism to UKIP.
But last year we reacted against this. We elected a Prime Minister who is the epitome of reasonable progressivism: cautious, interested in evidence and not fond of flamboyant visions and promises. But turnout was very low and barely one elector in five voted for Labour. Starmer won on the back of our eccentric electoral system and very much against the tide of global politics. Supporters of radical change may not have won, but it is far from clear that most people think Starmer’s slow and steady strategy will solve their problems.
Science looks backwards: politics looks forwards
The arch priests of progressivism are the technocrats and scientists. They (we?) believe that through patient and impartial investigation, and debate about evidence, we can arrive at the truth. Or more precisely, we can reach an agreement about what is probably the truth, since it is always open to challenge – and revision – with new evidence. But then armed with the truth, we can decide what to do. And because the modern world is complex, on many issues we have to trust the despised ‘experts’.
But people live in a political world, not a scientific one. What they believe, hope for, or fear changes constantly, and scientific evidence can only ever look back. Even today’s opinion poll can only tell us what people said about the world yesterday, when the question was asked.
And describing the past can help us understand the problem, but it can never tell us the solution. For that we need vision. But technocrats, who understand the uncertainties of evidence, are nervous of vision and afraid of over-promising about the future. And when people are anxious and angry, this leaves a vacuum, which others are happy to fill with something else, and something darker.
Authority or evidence?
This is where an intellectual leap takes place. In a recent interview, Steve Bannon, who sees himself as a philosopher of the new right in the US, has described truth as ‘a modernist idea’ and modernity as ‘a disaster’. He sees the origins of our current crises in the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Put crudely, before that, people understood the world through appeals to authority. In the west, what was true was what the Church told them, or what ancient authorities had said. The Enlightenment replaced this with a different idea of truth based on experiment, evidence and reason. It no longer mattered what Aristotle had said if it could be demonstrated to be wrong. But importantly, it was always an uncertain agreement about the truth: open to challenge or to new evidence.
For Bannon, and some on the populist right, this was the mistake which led us into our present crisis. For them, the truth that matters (at least in politics) is not the scientific reality of the technocrat children of the Enlightenment. There are ‘alternative facts’ validated by authority, not by what scientists would call evidence. So, we see the rise of the charismatic leader who offers the certainty of what technocrats would see as a fraudulent vision of a better world. But the fact that people want to believe them makes them, in some sense, ‘true’, especially when you are told that it was the technocrats who got us into the mess.
What is to be done?
In politics, reality and vision matter, as much as – and perhaps more than – ‘objective’ facts. The radical right provides charismatic leaders who offer certainty, and our ‘evidence-based’ challenges fall on deaf ears.
Offered a story you want to believe, especially in a field you know little about, why would you not accept it, especially if the opposition can be presented as self-serving, and patronising? To people who are suffering, there is a visceral appeal in the story that the people who argue about ‘facts’ don’t care about ordinary people: they are doing well out of the current system and they despise you for not understanding things. The technocrats’ facts are tools to bamboozle you and you don’t have to take them at face value.
So progressives need to recognise that vision matters. Highlighting our opponents’ lies may comfort us, and consolidate our followers, but it has no traction with a large swathe of voters. The challenge for the children of the Enlightenment is to step beyond their instinctive caution, to offer a bold vision, and show that it works.
Time is pressing. People feel that they have tried the technocrats’ solutions, and they have failed. It is very possible that the solutions of the new elite, based on the authority of the charismatic leader and ‘alternative facts’, will fail too. But what follows might be darker still.
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