Some of the most unsavoury people are young left-wing Pomo truth relativists like Sam Kriss. They are very lazy thinkers and they annoy me: "Politics is something strange, however: It’s far closer to literature than it is to science—disagreements over political principle can’t be settled through a practical experiment—but for nearly two and a half thousand years it’s faced the criticism that it should be something different from what it is." This is one of the most facile sentences I've ever read. Extremely lazy thinking. This is what happens when you only read French philosophy; you don't even know HOW to think.
Let us now briefly explore the epistemology of politics, to clean the stain placed upon the world by this stupid sentence.
Ok, let's start with ethics, because politics is (I accept) fundamentally normative (political debates are about which policies are good and which are bad, which people are good and bad, which institutions are good and which are bad, which systems are good and which are bad, and so on).
No, ethics has very little to do with science (contra Harris), but there is clearly such a thing as rational moral discourse. Why? Because, though the starting point is our moral 'faculty' (our emotions, our strong belief in values like fairness, equality and freedom), which was programmed by evolution by our utterly contingent evolutionary history, there are extremely strong constraints placed upon rational moral discourse by /consistency/ (do you really apply your values, and your moral criteria, in a maximally consistent way, or do you often contradict your professed commitments?), and bulwarks placed against extreme or excessively demanding (even if consistent) ethical views or ethical systems by our intuitions and emotions (Benthamian utilitarianism fails for this reason). Moreover, the starting point itself (the moral faculty), though contingent upon our own evolutionary history, also has some non-contingent elements. What do I mean by this? Well, unlike the majority of contemporary meta-ethicists, I am actually quite happy to say that there are such things as "ethical truths", because I think there are some ethical "propositions" or judgments that are, undoubtedly, SUPER-ANTHROPIC. Take the following three 'atomic' or 'axiomatic' ethical judgments: Suffering is bad; Co-operation is good; Killing is wrong. If we encountered another intelligent alien species, it seems to me a near certainty that they would have beliefs of this kind (it doesn't matter if they were expressed through a completely different modality -- even if they transmitted mental content through gamma rays or whatever). Why would they have analogous beliefs? Because any intelligent species would have to have something akin to a strong moral faculty to reach civilisation, because civilisation requires co-operation, co-ordination and altruism. Simple.
Once you accept that there's such a thing as rational moral discourse, that immediately has implications for the epistemology of politics. Racists and sexists aren't applying moral values consistently, and usually don't have the facts right (which they use to justify their prejudices). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Right-wing Libertarianism and Anarcho-capitalism assume a value of "freedom" that isn't universalised, which means they are not even willing to engage in rational moral discourse. So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Strong imperialist patriots -- people who think their home country should be allowed to invade another country to impose its will on that country -- are also not applying moral values like justice and freedom consistently (or, to put it another way, not treating all humans as ends in themselves). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those.
Now, of course, the epistemology of politics gets a lot trickier than this once you start talking about how ethics interacts with descriptive beliefs about the world (facts about poverty, about GDP, about debt and deficits, about death tolls in wars), and theories of economics and so on. I think one is forced to be somewhat of a "permissivist" about many political debates: accept that two rational, morally engaged agents could come to different views, even when exposed to the same evidence. However, let me just give some examples of political issues on which I think permissivism is incorrect (some of these are more normative than others):
- The Iraq War was bad. (All rational, morally engaged agents who have some idea of the number of Iraqi civilians who died in this war, how much destruction was unleashed on Iraq, and the utterly counter-productive effects of the war on terrorism will come to the conclusion that the war was bad (with a subset coming to the conclusion that it was repugnant, horrific, nightmarish, etc)). [That the Vietnam War was bad is even more clear-cut, and there are plenty of other clear-cut cases in which the US was involved.]
- Israel has repeatedly committed war crimes. (War crimes has a technical definition which is easily met by Israel. Now, as for debates on, say, what should be done about the Israel-Palestine conflict, well, certainly for a lot of these debates, different opinions could be had by rational, morally engaged people.)
- Deregulation and regulatory capture contributed in some way to the causation of the GFC.
- Neoliberal policies (as I defined them in other places) have utterly failed to deliver growth and have exacerbated inequality (inequality and growth admit of fairly precise definitions, so this is a mere fact).
- Private debt has an extremely important role to play in the causation of all financial crises.
- What the IMF calls "free-trade" and "free-market policies" (letting Western corporations and banks colonise these countries, and prevent them from developing their own manufacturing and industry) have had disastrous effects for the poor in Third-world countries. "Free-trade" has also had very bad effects for working people in the West.
- QE failed.
- The bank bailouts after the GFC were deeply wrong.
- Endogenous money is correct: banks effectively create money by originating loans, they don't need reserves to originate loans, and money has an effect on financial dynamics.
- Women still face significant injustice in the West.
Let us now briefly explore the epistemology of politics, to clean the stain placed upon the world by this stupid sentence.
Ok, let's start with ethics, because politics is (I accept) fundamentally normative (political debates are about which policies are good and which are bad, which people are good and bad, which institutions are good and which are bad, which systems are good and which are bad, and so on).
No, ethics has very little to do with science (contra Harris), but there is clearly such a thing as rational moral discourse. Why? Because, though the starting point is our moral 'faculty' (our emotions, our strong belief in values like fairness, equality and freedom), which was programmed by evolution by our utterly contingent evolutionary history, there are extremely strong constraints placed upon rational moral discourse by /consistency/ (do you really apply your values, and your moral criteria, in a maximally consistent way, or do you often contradict your professed commitments?), and bulwarks placed against extreme or excessively demanding (even if consistent) ethical views or ethical systems by our intuitions and emotions (Benthamian utilitarianism fails for this reason). Moreover, the starting point itself (the moral faculty), though contingent upon our own evolutionary history, also has some non-contingent elements. What do I mean by this? Well, unlike the majority of contemporary meta-ethicists, I am actually quite happy to say that there are such things as "ethical truths", because I think there are some ethical "propositions" or judgments that are, undoubtedly, SUPER-ANTHROPIC. Take the following three 'atomic' or 'axiomatic' ethical judgments: Suffering is bad; Co-operation is good; Killing is wrong. If we encountered another intelligent alien species, it seems to me a near certainty that they would have beliefs of this kind (it doesn't matter if they were expressed through a completely different modality -- even if they transmitted mental content through gamma rays or whatever). Why would they have analogous beliefs? Because any intelligent species would have to have something akin to a strong moral faculty to reach civilisation, because civilisation requires co-operation, co-ordination and altruism. Simple.
Once you accept that there's such a thing as rational moral discourse, that immediately has implications for the epistemology of politics. Racists and sexists aren't applying moral values consistently, and usually don't have the facts right (which they use to justify their prejudices). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Right-wing Libertarianism and Anarcho-capitalism assume a value of "freedom" that isn't universalised, which means they are not even willing to engage in rational moral discourse. So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Strong imperialist patriots -- people who think their home country should be allowed to invade another country to impose its will on that country -- are also not applying moral values like justice and freedom consistently (or, to put it another way, not treating all humans as ends in themselves). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those.
Now, of course, the epistemology of politics gets a lot trickier than this once you start talking about how ethics interacts with descriptive beliefs about the world (facts about poverty, about GDP, about debt and deficits, about death tolls in wars), and theories of economics and so on. I think one is forced to be somewhat of a "permissivist" about many political debates: accept that two rational, morally engaged agents could come to different views, even when exposed to the same evidence. However, let me just give some examples of political issues on which I think permissivism is incorrect (some of these are more normative than others):
- The Iraq War was bad. (All rational, morally engaged agents who have some idea of the number of Iraqi civilians who died in this war, how much destruction was unleashed on Iraq, and the utterly counter-productive effects of the war on terrorism will come to the conclusion that the war was bad (with a subset coming to the conclusion that it was repugnant, horrific, nightmarish, etc)). [That the Vietnam War was bad is even more clear-cut, and there are plenty of other clear-cut cases in which the US was involved.]
- Israel has repeatedly committed war crimes. (War crimes has a technical definition which is easily met by Israel. Now, as for debates on, say, what should be done about the Israel-Palestine conflict, well, certainly for a lot of these debates, different opinions could be had by rational, morally engaged people.)
- Deregulation and regulatory capture contributed in some way to the causation of the GFC.
- Neoliberal policies (as I defined them in other places) have utterly failed to deliver growth and have exacerbated inequality (inequality and growth admit of fairly precise definitions, so this is a mere fact).
- Private debt has an extremely important role to play in the causation of all financial crises.
- What the IMF calls "free-trade" and "free-market policies" (letting Western corporations and banks colonise these countries, and prevent them from developing their own manufacturing and industry) have had disastrous effects for the poor in Third-world countries. "Free-trade" has also had very bad effects for working people in the West.
- QE failed.
- The bank bailouts after the GFC were deeply wrong.
- Endogenous money is correct: banks effectively create money by originating loans, they don't need reserves to originate loans, and money has an effect on financial dynamics.
- Women still face significant injustice in the West.
The question of whether a single person can be "objective" on politics is different. On the conventional understanding of objective, I think the answer has to be a decisive NO. There are many reasons for this, which I have gone into in my project on Chomsky:
"One way of phrasing the question is the following: Is it possible for a human being to be ideally, optimally, deifically objective about politics and human affairs? Taking this extreme formulation, my answer would be No, it is not – and you don’t need any high-falutin’ PoMo vocabulary to say why. Here are the reasons:
• The available sources for any given event or set of events are always going to be patchy and less-than-fully-reliable.
• No matter your level of expertise, or the time you spend researching, a selection bias of some kind will inevitably affect which of these (patchy and less-than-fully-reliable) sources you scrutinise, which of them you carefully scrutinise, which of them you include in your actual analysis, and which details from them you include in your analysis.
• No matter how intelligent you are, the availability heuristic will likely cause you to hone in on certain non-crucial details or issues, and probably colour your perception of the event or events in general (nobody can hold all the details they know and all the images they have seen in their head at once, and weigh them up simultaneously). This becomes especially important when you are actually writing things down (though one does, of course, have an opportunity to revise).
• Every time one writes a sentence, one is framing. There are innumerable different ways of capturing a ‘state of affairs’ (say, a bombing attack) in language, and each of them colours that state of affairs in a different way. Different framings have the power to create the impression that there’s not even one ‘state of affairs’ after all ( clearly, a bombing attack is a very different thing when described from the perspective of those in the sky and described from the perspective of those on the ground). On a more fundamental level, it is a truism of semantics that no two formulations of the same ‘gist’ ever have the exact same meaning and connotations (compare “Sally played with the ball” to “Sally engaged in japes with the globular plaything”). Even merely changing a sentence from the passive to the active mood can completely change the impression (“The leader of the labour union was assassinated by US forces” versus “US forces assassinated the leader of the labour union”), as can subtly changing the diction (“The bombing caused some regrettable collateral damage, with seven civilian casualties reported at the scene” versus “The bombing blew up several innocent civilians, with seven charred and mangled bodies found at the blast-site”). Several well-known psychology studies have shown that “framing effects” can be disturbingly large, and can totally distort people’s perception of what should just be ‘data’ (if we were ideally rational) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)).
One could, of course, argue that framing is irrelevant to the question of objectivity, because the way you put things has no effect on the reality behind them – but this is facile. If it is simply not possible to avoid putting a spin on everything you write, that means that you can never quite be telling it “as it is”, but always with significant interpretation (and this does become a kind of PoMo point (or a Putnamian point about the collapse of the “fact-value distinction”)). Naturally, one worthy goal would be to try to be as consistent with your ‘spin’ as possible – for example, not describing atrocities in vivid detail for one side and talking about “unfortunate casualties” for the other. But one must also recognise that reality is vastly more complicated than anything that can be put down on paper (even in a very long book). In effect, therefore, every time you omit a fact, or a detail, you are omitting a slice of reality.
And even if you did get down every single relevant “fact” about, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict (including the details of every single bombing attack (from both sides), the names and backstories of all the people killed in the conflict overall, all the things the politicians on both sides have ever said, etc), you would still have the problem that no human could satisfactorily digest this data and compute an appropriate response (not even the person who had laid out all the facts). Instead, it is highly likely that anyone who chose to wade into this colossal factsheet would simply have their prejudices reinforced (and note that believing that “both sides are ultimately equally culpable” is itself a prejudice).
• No political analyst has the time, resources or knowledge to “criticise all sides equally” or identify and lament the “worst things” currently happening in the world – and yet this seems to be part of our intuitive conception of “objectivity” (as can be seen in the criticisms of Chomsky we’ll explore later). Most people seem to think it’s necessary for a good political writer to apportion her attention, and her moral judgments, in a way that’s almost exactly commensurate with the state of the world. This makes it unreasonable – for example – to spend all one’s time criticising evils committed by one nation or group, if there are other evils, some of greater magnitude, constantly going on in other places. And yet no-one can even approximate this ideal of bird’s-eye-view proportionality – not on the left or the right. Whereas the lefties focus on American and Israeli imperialism and military aggression (not bothering to talk at all about anti-Semitism and misogyny in Islamic culture), the righties completely downplay American and Israeli military aggression, and talk only about the evils and barbarity of “Islam”. In a sense, all polemics are exercises in tunnel-vision, since a polemic always focusses on a narrow slice of reality to the exclusion of everything else [of course, there are ways of justifying what one focusses on, and Chomsky does give a very strong ethical justification for what he focusses on (he has a chance of changing it).]
• Since politics is much more complicated than physics, involving lots of highly complicated, unpredictable organisms interacting with each other in complex human-created entities called institutions, and those institutions interacting with other institutions and other groups, all of which are situated within an extremely complicated economic structure with yet more complex, unpredictable organisms and institutions, there are no well-tested scientific theories of politics that make useful, novel predictions, and there are no scientific laws of politics. Human societies are complex systems – more complex than even the weather (in fact, the weather is one of the innumerable variables affecting human societies). Yes, it may be true that f (the use of force by a state) equals m (military might) × a (aggression)… but that’s actually a proposition of immense complexity (the aggression of a state is a highly abstract notion, for example), and it really isn’t that useful (it doesn’t enable you to make any specific predictions).
Of course, is also true that, in another sense, politics is much easier than physics, because you don’t actually have to understand what’s really going on in any deep sense in order to understand pretty well what’s going on the macropolitical and macroeconomic level of abstraction – the level of abstraction where the entities are what John Searle would call intentional entities (entities created by consciousness and language), like “states”, “politicians”, “parties”, “corporations”, “the profit motive”, “banks”, “Central Banks”, “Wall Street”, “the stock market”, “money”, “credit”, “debt”, “public debt”, “private debt”, “the military”, “the military-industrial complex” “financial interests”, “regulation”, “demand”, “supply”, “interest”, “inflation”, “deflation”, “GDP”, “capital controls”, “trade agreements”, “the national mood” etc. Whereas a physicist does try to predict things (for example, the path of a rocket through the atmosphere) and make exact calculations, no political scientist is trying to predict what will next happen in the US (beyond the vaguest details), or how the conflicts in Syria will play out, or what will become of the European Union. Instead, they just need to understand well enough how states generally work, how institutions (like corporations, or the UN) generally work, and some basic principles of economics (though they will make a mistake if they take mainstream, neoclassical economics too seriously, which, despite its pretences to “science”, is about as scientific as Ptolemaic astronomy).
Nevertheless, when it comes to investigating the causes of political events, or evaluating the significance of certain developments, this approach can still lead to trouble. What was the secret to the Golden Age of Capitalism, lasting from the 50s to the 70s? Did the abolition of Glass-Steagall contribute to the GFC? Did the War on Terror actually foster terrorism? What are the factors involved in Donald Trump’s rise? Such questions are roughly tractable, but they must be scrutinised very carefully, with an eye for all the evidence, and a wariness of glibness and simplicity (as any academic historians will tell you). Even then, the answers to these questions are not going to be nearly as precise or objective as the answers scientists can give to questions like “How many stars are there in the Milky Way galaxy?” or “What’s the chemical structure of ethanol?” or “How did the eye evolve?” The fundamental reason for this is that historical, political and sociological explanations are always explanations in terms of human intentions and intentional entities (the chemistry and physics underlying all of human cognition is taken for granted), so they are intrinsically airy and imprecise compared with naturalistic explanations of discrete events in the natural world. It is (of course) conceivable that a superintelligent species that had made massive advances in complexity theory and advanced mathematics (but otherwise strongly resembled us) could predict political events like we predict the weather or better, by plugging colossal amounts of physical and chemical data (including lots of neurobiological data, presumably) into a computer model consisting set of supercomplicated, multi-multi-multi-variable differential equations and then simulating this model on an immensely powerful computer. They could probably also use their superior understanding of complex systems to provide far more precise explanations of events (though it would obviously make no sense to discuss political and historical events in terms of physics and chemistry, because that is impossible – political and historical events are 100% emergent from physics and chemistry (and 90% emergent from biology)).
But, even though this is conceivable, such abilities are nowhere near actual for us. Our explanations for political and historical events are normally exceptionally vague, invoking general “interests” of entire groups of people, and “moods” of entire demographic groups or nations. It is impossible to analyse these explanations in terms of the entities of the natural sciences.
• We, as humans, are attracted to grand metanarratives that help us give a shape to the facts and, in the process, systematically distort our impression of what’s actually going on in the world (once you have a narrative, confirmation bias kicks into overdrive, and you lose the sense that there is any complexity). A left-wing buzzword like “neoliberalism” can indeed be characterised in various ways (it’s certainly not meaningless), capturing important developments in economic policy since Reagan and Thatcher (privatisation of state assets, lowering taxes for the wealthy, financial deregulation, regulatory capture, permission of corporate rent-seeking, lowering of capital controls, which all conform to an ideology of “market fundamentalism” (actually, a mendacious label)) which have had various, empirically identifiable consequences (the financialisation of western economies, a large increase in inequality, a quantifiable reduction in democracy, the rapid growth of massive private debt bubbles (such as the one that led to the GFC), the weakening of public services and infrastructure, a massive rise in the price of tertiary education, the decline of university Arts faculties, the mass exploitation of workers in the third world, the degradation of the environment, the exacerbation of climate change, an increase in the stupidity and propagandism of the media, a proliferation of shopping malls) – and yet, as you can see, it is also extremely vague. It is undeniable that, in using this word “neoliberalism” to encompass all these aspects of our society, we make the world look much simpler than it is.
Of course, centrists and right-wing people have far weirder and stupider metanarratives than the metanarrative of neoliberalism (which isn’t actually weird or stupid, and I use the word constantly). For example, that neoclassical economics is theoretically sound, empirically well-tested science (not an aesthetically-pleasing, non-empirical, non-reality-based catechism), that ‘liberalisation’ is always good, that privatising is always good, that conservative governments are better economic managers, that austerity makes any sense as an economic policy, that capitalism inherently tends towards equilibrium (barring “externalities”), that we live in a perfectly free and democratic society, that everyone deserves their place in society because our world is ‘meritocratic’, that Western interventions are about bringing freedom and democracy to the barbarians, that the corporate media is biased towards the left, that patriotism makes any sense, that "free-trade" agreements are actually about free trade, that it’s somehow ‘traitorous’ to criticise the genocidal past of your nation, that free speech is under attack by “cultural Marxists”, that Islam is a totalitarian ideology that’s going to destroy the west unless we stop it, that multiculturalism is a poison destroying the fabric of our society, that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (and that invocations of the USSR in relation to Bernie are uninsane), that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, that Christianity is the foundation of the morality of our society, that modern-day conservatives are not going to look really bad in the history books for opposing gay marriage and deriding vegetarians, and so on."
"One way of phrasing the question is the following: Is it possible for a human being to be ideally, optimally, deifically objective about politics and human affairs? Taking this extreme formulation, my answer would be No, it is not – and you don’t need any high-falutin’ PoMo vocabulary to say why. Here are the reasons:
• The available sources for any given event or set of events are always going to be patchy and less-than-fully-reliable.
• No matter your level of expertise, or the time you spend researching, a selection bias of some kind will inevitably affect which of these (patchy and less-than-fully-reliable) sources you scrutinise, which of them you carefully scrutinise, which of them you include in your actual analysis, and which details from them you include in your analysis.
• No matter how intelligent you are, the availability heuristic will likely cause you to hone in on certain non-crucial details or issues, and probably colour your perception of the event or events in general (nobody can hold all the details they know and all the images they have seen in their head at once, and weigh them up simultaneously). This becomes especially important when you are actually writing things down (though one does, of course, have an opportunity to revise).
• Every time one writes a sentence, one is framing. There are innumerable different ways of capturing a ‘state of affairs’ (say, a bombing attack) in language, and each of them colours that state of affairs in a different way. Different framings have the power to create the impression that there’s not even one ‘state of affairs’ after all ( clearly, a bombing attack is a very different thing when described from the perspective of those in the sky and described from the perspective of those on the ground). On a more fundamental level, it is a truism of semantics that no two formulations of the same ‘gist’ ever have the exact same meaning and connotations (compare “Sally played with the ball” to “Sally engaged in japes with the globular plaything”). Even merely changing a sentence from the passive to the active mood can completely change the impression (“The leader of the labour union was assassinated by US forces” versus “US forces assassinated the leader of the labour union”), as can subtly changing the diction (“The bombing caused some regrettable collateral damage, with seven civilian casualties reported at the scene” versus “The bombing blew up several innocent civilians, with seven charred and mangled bodies found at the blast-site”). Several well-known psychology studies have shown that “framing effects” can be disturbingly large, and can totally distort people’s perception of what should just be ‘data’ (if we were ideally rational) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)).
One could, of course, argue that framing is irrelevant to the question of objectivity, because the way you put things has no effect on the reality behind them – but this is facile. If it is simply not possible to avoid putting a spin on everything you write, that means that you can never quite be telling it “as it is”, but always with significant interpretation (and this does become a kind of PoMo point (or a Putnamian point about the collapse of the “fact-value distinction”)). Naturally, one worthy goal would be to try to be as consistent with your ‘spin’ as possible – for example, not describing atrocities in vivid detail for one side and talking about “unfortunate casualties” for the other. But one must also recognise that reality is vastly more complicated than anything that can be put down on paper (even in a very long book). In effect, therefore, every time you omit a fact, or a detail, you are omitting a slice of reality.
And even if you did get down every single relevant “fact” about, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict (including the details of every single bombing attack (from both sides), the names and backstories of all the people killed in the conflict overall, all the things the politicians on both sides have ever said, etc), you would still have the problem that no human could satisfactorily digest this data and compute an appropriate response (not even the person who had laid out all the facts). Instead, it is highly likely that anyone who chose to wade into this colossal factsheet would simply have their prejudices reinforced (and note that believing that “both sides are ultimately equally culpable” is itself a prejudice).
• No political analyst has the time, resources or knowledge to “criticise all sides equally” or identify and lament the “worst things” currently happening in the world – and yet this seems to be part of our intuitive conception of “objectivity” (as can be seen in the criticisms of Chomsky we’ll explore later). Most people seem to think it’s necessary for a good political writer to apportion her attention, and her moral judgments, in a way that’s almost exactly commensurate with the state of the world. This makes it unreasonable – for example – to spend all one’s time criticising evils committed by one nation or group, if there are other evils, some of greater magnitude, constantly going on in other places. And yet no-one can even approximate this ideal of bird’s-eye-view proportionality – not on the left or the right. Whereas the lefties focus on American and Israeli imperialism and military aggression (not bothering to talk at all about anti-Semitism and misogyny in Islamic culture), the righties completely downplay American and Israeli military aggression, and talk only about the evils and barbarity of “Islam”. In a sense, all polemics are exercises in tunnel-vision, since a polemic always focusses on a narrow slice of reality to the exclusion of everything else [of course, there are ways of justifying what one focusses on, and Chomsky does give a very strong ethical justification for what he focusses on (he has a chance of changing it).]
• Since politics is much more complicated than physics, involving lots of highly complicated, unpredictable organisms interacting with each other in complex human-created entities called institutions, and those institutions interacting with other institutions and other groups, all of which are situated within an extremely complicated economic structure with yet more complex, unpredictable organisms and institutions, there are no well-tested scientific theories of politics that make useful, novel predictions, and there are no scientific laws of politics. Human societies are complex systems – more complex than even the weather (in fact, the weather is one of the innumerable variables affecting human societies). Yes, it may be true that f (the use of force by a state) equals m (military might) × a (aggression)… but that’s actually a proposition of immense complexity (the aggression of a state is a highly abstract notion, for example), and it really isn’t that useful (it doesn’t enable you to make any specific predictions).
Of course, is also true that, in another sense, politics is much easier than physics, because you don’t actually have to understand what’s really going on in any deep sense in order to understand pretty well what’s going on the macropolitical and macroeconomic level of abstraction – the level of abstraction where the entities are what John Searle would call intentional entities (entities created by consciousness and language), like “states”, “politicians”, “parties”, “corporations”, “the profit motive”, “banks”, “Central Banks”, “Wall Street”, “the stock market”, “money”, “credit”, “debt”, “public debt”, “private debt”, “the military”, “the military-industrial complex” “financial interests”, “regulation”, “demand”, “supply”, “interest”, “inflation”, “deflation”, “GDP”, “capital controls”, “trade agreements”, “the national mood” etc. Whereas a physicist does try to predict things (for example, the path of a rocket through the atmosphere) and make exact calculations, no political scientist is trying to predict what will next happen in the US (beyond the vaguest details), or how the conflicts in Syria will play out, or what will become of the European Union. Instead, they just need to understand well enough how states generally work, how institutions (like corporations, or the UN) generally work, and some basic principles of economics (though they will make a mistake if they take mainstream, neoclassical economics too seriously, which, despite its pretences to “science”, is about as scientific as Ptolemaic astronomy).
Nevertheless, when it comes to investigating the causes of political events, or evaluating the significance of certain developments, this approach can still lead to trouble. What was the secret to the Golden Age of Capitalism, lasting from the 50s to the 70s? Did the abolition of Glass-Steagall contribute to the GFC? Did the War on Terror actually foster terrorism? What are the factors involved in Donald Trump’s rise? Such questions are roughly tractable, but they must be scrutinised very carefully, with an eye for all the evidence, and a wariness of glibness and simplicity (as any academic historians will tell you). Even then, the answers to these questions are not going to be nearly as precise or objective as the answers scientists can give to questions like “How many stars are there in the Milky Way galaxy?” or “What’s the chemical structure of ethanol?” or “How did the eye evolve?” The fundamental reason for this is that historical, political and sociological explanations are always explanations in terms of human intentions and intentional entities (the chemistry and physics underlying all of human cognition is taken for granted), so they are intrinsically airy and imprecise compared with naturalistic explanations of discrete events in the natural world. It is (of course) conceivable that a superintelligent species that had made massive advances in complexity theory and advanced mathematics (but otherwise strongly resembled us) could predict political events like we predict the weather or better, by plugging colossal amounts of physical and chemical data (including lots of neurobiological data, presumably) into a computer model consisting set of supercomplicated, multi-multi-multi-variable differential equations and then simulating this model on an immensely powerful computer. They could probably also use their superior understanding of complex systems to provide far more precise explanations of events (though it would obviously make no sense to discuss political and historical events in terms of physics and chemistry, because that is impossible – political and historical events are 100% emergent from physics and chemistry (and 90% emergent from biology)).
But, even though this is conceivable, such abilities are nowhere near actual for us. Our explanations for political and historical events are normally exceptionally vague, invoking general “interests” of entire groups of people, and “moods” of entire demographic groups or nations. It is impossible to analyse these explanations in terms of the entities of the natural sciences.
• We, as humans, are attracted to grand metanarratives that help us give a shape to the facts and, in the process, systematically distort our impression of what’s actually going on in the world (once you have a narrative, confirmation bias kicks into overdrive, and you lose the sense that there is any complexity). A left-wing buzzword like “neoliberalism” can indeed be characterised in various ways (it’s certainly not meaningless), capturing important developments in economic policy since Reagan and Thatcher (privatisation of state assets, lowering taxes for the wealthy, financial deregulation, regulatory capture, permission of corporate rent-seeking, lowering of capital controls, which all conform to an ideology of “market fundamentalism” (actually, a mendacious label)) which have had various, empirically identifiable consequences (the financialisation of western economies, a large increase in inequality, a quantifiable reduction in democracy, the rapid growth of massive private debt bubbles (such as the one that led to the GFC), the weakening of public services and infrastructure, a massive rise in the price of tertiary education, the decline of university Arts faculties, the mass exploitation of workers in the third world, the degradation of the environment, the exacerbation of climate change, an increase in the stupidity and propagandism of the media, a proliferation of shopping malls) – and yet, as you can see, it is also extremely vague. It is undeniable that, in using this word “neoliberalism” to encompass all these aspects of our society, we make the world look much simpler than it is.
Of course, centrists and right-wing people have far weirder and stupider metanarratives than the metanarrative of neoliberalism (which isn’t actually weird or stupid, and I use the word constantly). For example, that neoclassical economics is theoretically sound, empirically well-tested science (not an aesthetically-pleasing, non-empirical, non-reality-based catechism), that ‘liberalisation’ is always good, that privatising is always good, that conservative governments are better economic managers, that austerity makes any sense as an economic policy, that capitalism inherently tends towards equilibrium (barring “externalities”), that we live in a perfectly free and democratic society, that everyone deserves their place in society because our world is ‘meritocratic’, that Western interventions are about bringing freedom and democracy to the barbarians, that the corporate media is biased towards the left, that patriotism makes any sense, that "free-trade" agreements are actually about free trade, that it’s somehow ‘traitorous’ to criticise the genocidal past of your nation, that free speech is under attack by “cultural Marxists”, that Islam is a totalitarian ideology that’s going to destroy the west unless we stop it, that multiculturalism is a poison destroying the fabric of our society, that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (and that invocations of the USSR in relation to Bernie are uninsane), that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, that Christianity is the foundation of the morality of our society, that modern-day conservatives are not going to look really bad in the history books for opposing gay marriage and deriding vegetarians, and so on."
Anyhow, that goes some way towards getting at a TRUER epistemology of politics.
Fact: RELATIVISTS ARE LAZY
Fact: RELATIVISTS ARE LAZY
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