The sleep of reason

The expression ‘post-truth politics’ is one which I have only just become aware of, and I am not sure who coined it. The earliest usage I have found is an article about the 2012 US presidential election (Parmar, 2012) but it seems to already have been a term in use at that time.

It has come to the fore in the UK now as people begin to reflect upon the EU Referendum. Since the vote is being held today I don’t know what the outcome will be but the polls suggest the result will be close. Much of the campaign has employed familiar techniques of political rhetoric which inevitably include partial facts, selective interpretations, spinning and sloganizing of all sorts. But it has also seen repeated lies told, especially those which I have written about before concerning the size of the UK budget contribution to the EU and the assertion that Turkey is joining the EU.

It is not that telling lies in politics is new, and it isn’t that which in itself constitutes post-truth politics. It is the sense that the truth does not even matter, or that there is not even a truth to be told and, therefore, that it is meaningless to speak of lies being told. The political roots of that in the UK are associated in my mind, at least, with the way that the case was made for the Iraq War in 2003 and, more generally, with the newly relentless emphasis on ‘news management’ by the New Labour governments.

There was nothing new about spin either, of course, but this was something different. In particular, one of Tony Blair’s distinctive skills when in difficulty was to ‘break through the fourth wall’. This expression, derived from the theatre, refers to an actor speaking directly to the audience and in the process revealing the artifice of the stage. It’s just a play, after all – which we already know, but suspend our knowledge of until that knowledge is shattered. In politics this has the effect of simultaneously acknowledging but re-enforcing the idea that it is all just a game.

For skilled politicians like Blair this is a strangely disarming way of having the cake of playing the game whilst eating the cake of ironized authenticity. The blustering humour of politicians like Donald Trump or, in the Referendum context, Boris Johnson when ‘caught out’ in some particularly preposterous claim is somewhat similar. It draws the audience into a knowing acknowledgment of artifice, whilst inviting applause for the actor’s ‘honesty’ in exposing it. It’s this, rather than the telling of lies as such, which defines post-truth (and therefore post-lie) politics.

The intellectual roots of post-truth may lie with a (bowdlerized) version of post-modernism or of social constructionism: there is no truth, only interpretations. Something like this is apparent in the way that the campaign has been covered by the BBC, in particular, where a commitment to ‘balance’ has meant that every claim by one side has always been accompanied by a report of a counter-claim from the other. Again there is no truth, just opposing representations of truth; thus for every five minutes airtime saying that Turkey is not joining the EU there must be five minutes of airtime saying the opposite. Never mind that Turkey is not, as a matter of fact, joining the EU. I had a conversation at the weekend with someone about the EU debate and she suggested that whatever the facts about – in this particular conversation – immigration these didn’t matter for those concerned about it since what they claimed to be the facts were ‘true for them’ and that was what mattered.

If that is so then we have to give up on any sense of rationality in political discourse, and indeed the campaign can be read as a kind of battle between rational and post-truth politics. Thus the remain campaign deployed endless statements from various experts in economics, trade, security and so on. In response, leading leave campaigner Michael Gove opined that “the people of this country have had enough of experts”. Incredibly, he subsequently compared pro-Brexit experts to the Nazis using scientific experts to denounce Einstein’s theories as wrong, in support of anti-semitic ideology. This from a former Education Minister!

Although usually less colourfully expressed, this trope of experts being in some way corrupt or untrustworthy has run through the leave campaign. It fits very neatly – like the rest of the leave campaign – with a populism in which ‘ordinary folk’ or consistently done down by ‘the elite’ – often, the ‘liberal elite’. The logic is completely circular – the evidence that they are the elite is that they disagree; the reason they disagree is that they are the elite. In this hermetically-sealed world anyone from global corporations to trade union leaders to ‘faceless bureaucrats’ to ‘the politically correct brigade’ to ‘so-called intellectuals’ are all part of an orchestrated conspiracy. Unless, of course, someone from one of these groups comes out in favour of the populist cause, at which point they become the fount of all wisdom, ‘courageously’ speaking out.

There is an interesting and important overlap between post-truth politics and the cosmopolitan and local split which I have talked about elsewhere. For the polling evidence suggests that views on EU membership are very clearly socially stratified: the more educated people are, the more likely they are to favour EU membership; the higher their social class (which is linked to educational level) the more likely they are to favour EU membership. As with Trump’s appeal, the cleavage is between those who gain from, or at least can cope with, globalization and those who suffer from its effects. In this way, post-truth politics are inextricably linked with the consequences of neo-liberalization. And in a way there is a connection between postmodern relativism and neo-liberalism: in the marketplace of ideas you pick the one that best expresses your economic interests.

These things probably connect with the media and social media culture in which ‘passion’ is the dominant value. Thus every game show contestant is judged on how passionately they want to win, just as post-truth politicians assure us of how passionate they are about their cause. What matters most is how strongly you feel. In that calculus, it is irrelevant whether what you feel is justified by evidence or argument; the strength of the feeling is its own validation. And why not? If, as my friend told me in the conversation I mentioned earlier, what matters is what people think is true then between all the different things that people think are true the only way to adjudicate between competing beliefs is the strength with which they are held.

But there are huge dangers here. The Spanish artist Francisco Goya captioned the most famous of his Los Caprichos etchings thus: “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters” (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos). This inspired the title of The Sleep of Reason (1968) a novel by C. P. Snow about whom I have written elsewhere on this blog. It is a reminder of the dangers of the abandonment of rationality, which are just as great as those of an over-attachment to rationality – dangers which include technocracy and totalitarianism. Tomorrow we will learn whether post-truth politics have won the EU Referendum but, even if it has not, its appeal and its consequences will not disappear.

 

References

Parmar, I. (2012). ‘US Presidential Election 2012: Post-truth Politics’, Political Insight 3 (2): 4-7
Snow, C.P. (1968). The Sleep of Reason. London: Macmillan.

Strivers and scroungers

In this post, I want to pick up on an oblique point in my previous one. I mentioned there how a very potent political trope is to draw a distinction between scroungers and strivers. Scroungers, here, are those who do not work and rely on welfare benefits. Strivers are those who are in work and, by implication, are seeking to better themselves through work. I was reminded of this not just in writing my post on Greece but also, today, by an announcement by the British government that inheritance tax liability is to be reduced. It’s the justification that is relevant here, because it was couched in the argument that “hard-working families” who had saved to buy a home and improve it should be able to pass the fruits on to their children rather than to the tax collector.

This term – “hard-working families” – has become a cliché in the political lexicon. It’s a strange expression in and of itself. What is a hard-working family? One in which every family member (and how extensive does it have to be?) works hard? Are single people who work hard part of it? Should the idle rich be taxed more? What about those who go to work every day but slack off?

In relation to inheritance tax it seems especially strange. The new policy is aimed primarily at those whose houses have become very valuable, and in the UK housing market, especially in London, they have indeed become very valuable. But this has nothing to do with work, or saving, or home improvements. All you have to do is sit there and it happens. Recently it was reported that in many parts of Sothern England house price inflation earns homeowners more than they receive in wages. So there’s no particular virtue, and certainly no hard work, or even any work at all, involved in accruing an inheritance based on home ownership to pass on. Moreover, what of the recipients of this inheritance? Manifestly, they have not put in any hard work at all. So why, if hard work is the cardinal value, should they receive anything?

The counterpart, of course, is an equally incoherent – and very longstanding - narrative of the deserving and undeserving poor. Indeed, in the same package as the inheritance tax changes are further restrictions on welfare articulated through exactly the same distinction. Ironically, many of those who will suffer as a result are, indeed, hard-working families in receipt of tax credits to top up low wages. Nothing new there, either: the Speenhamland system of the early 19^th Century was similarly a subsidy for low wages, as the Poor Law Report of 1834 demonstrated.

And those most poignantly affected by welfare changes are the disabled. Here, again, a narrative of the deserving and undeserving is in play, with endless stories about fraudulent claims from the ‘bad back brigade’ accompanying sentimental and self-congratulatory statements of sympathy for the ‘genuinely’ disabled, which seems to mean those who are so self-evidently handicapped that even the most stony-hearted cannot deny it. Or perhaps not, since in some cases people who cannot walk, talk or feed themselves are being called to the job centre. At all events, plans to shift disabled people on to jobseekers allowance suggest a belief that they are ‘shirkers’ and not ‘strivers’. Yet when it comes to migration, the narrative reverses. Here, the problem is the strivers – the economic migrants – pretending to be asylum seekers, or in other words ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. These strivers are to be rounded up into detention centres and deported pronto. Whereas, in a long-remembered phrase, unemployed workers should get 'on their bike' and look for work, an idea espoused by the government as recently as 2011, those who get on the boat (and risk their lives) to do so are the most dangerous of scroungers.  

There is no logic in any of this, unless it is the logic of spite and division. Which is not to say that work – whether ‘hard’ or not – is unimportant. On the contrary, work is massively important both economically and in terms of self-worth and identity. But work bestows or enables value and identity; it does not express it, nor does it disclose any fundamental morality. The idea that it does is deeply rooted, though, enabling the idea that poverty and suffering reflect individual moral failure rather than systemic inequality or just dumb luck. Over a hundred years ago, the founding figure of organization studies, Max Weber, wrote one of the most important books about modern society, a book that influenced me deeply - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It still has much - all too much - to say about the contemporary world.

The Times (they aren't a-changing)

One of the arguments in the book that has caught the most attention is my claim that the rhetoric of unprecedented change, and its use to justify organizational change, is bogus and, moreover, that attempts at change management usually fail (pp. 90-100).

In this context, I had an interesting experience this week whilst stuck on a delayed train for two hours, during which I read The Times from cover to cover. In particular, I read two articles that seemed to sum up this issue (they are pay-walled, so I can’t give links as I usually do). The first was part of a special section on ‘The Agile Business’, and was entitled ‘Change is necessary to survive and grow’ (Charles Orton-Jones, The Agile Business Supplement p.3, The Times, October 14 2014). Here, all the clichés I enumerate in the book were present: incessant improvement is vital in today’s world, an incoherent nod to Darwinism, some examples from the software industry, a lot of wordy rhetoric about the 'oblivion' awaiting those who don't heed the message. So far, so boring – although it does bear saying that since this kind of talk has been around for 35 years or more then the torpid, flaccid corporations it is supposedly aimed at will invariably have been the ones that embraced the same message before. So, truly, this is the revolution that never happens.

Be that as it may, the other article that caught my eye was ‘Watchmaker that defied the passing of time’ (Jenny Hirschkorn, The Times, October 14 2014, p.49) which told the story of luxury Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe. In the 1970s and 1980s the received wisdom was that mechanical watchmakers had no future in the face of quartz watches; that European and US watch markets were finished and the future was China; that watchmakers must diversify from production because the future was retailing. Patek Philippe ignored all of this (the article calls these “counter-intuitive decisions”) and as a result is now prospering as the demand for mechanical watches increases, the China market collapses, and keeping out of retail has enhanced the exclusivity of the product. That the firm was family-owned may be significant; that it remains so surely is; that it is the last family-owned watchmaker in Geneva even more so.

It’s easy to see that had Patek Philippe followed the change mantra it would now no longer exist, except, perhaps, as a brand name shell, like so many British businesses that took the prescribed path. This is one of what I would argue are many cases where the criticisms of ‘critical management studies’ are actually highly relevant to the practical concerns of sustainable businesses. We will never know how many companies have gone to the wall by following the breathless mantra: change or die. But we can be sure that those who champion the mantra of unprecedented, constant change will continue to claim it as an unchanging verity.

Not measuring up

On Tuesday I gave a talk in Paris to a group of business leaders. The topic was secrecy in organizations, which is something I am researching at the moment.  In the discussion session which followed – in a mixture of French and English and, probably, Franglais, so something may have got lost in translation – I was asked the following question: how do you measure secrecy?

There’s no easy answer to that, if indeed there is an answer at all, and much would depend on what is meant by secrecy anyway. But it was an interesting question because it is one which is very commonly asked, not just in relation to secrecy of course, but in relation to organizational issues of all kinds. To respond that it is difficult or impossible invariably provokes, as on this occasion, a disappointment. But what lies behind the demand for measurement?

The obvious answer, I suppose, is something like clarity or certainty; a desire for the tangible and the real. The irony, though, is that measurement almost always provokes heated debates. For a couple of examples, take some stories from today’s news.  An IPCC report makes ‘with 95% confidence’ predictions about global temperature change. But immediately it is published the figures are pored over and differentially interpreted by those on different sides of the debate about climate changes, its causes, and the responses to be made. Meanwhile, in the UK, the opposition Labour Party have proposed a cap on energy bills to which the immediate response has been to point out that in fact UK energy costs are amongst the lowest in Europe. But is that the relevant figure? Or should it be the cost relative to income, or the change over a given time period (and, if so, which time period)? Or should it differentiate between the proportion of the charge that goes to the energy companies and that which goes in tax? As these examples show, measurement does not result in clarity, but perhaps even the opposite: the provision of a measurement provokes a demand for more measurements, which in turn provoke further demands and debates.

In such debates two things are immediately obvious. One is that measurement cannot be separated from meaning: numbers never ‘speak for themselves’, but are susceptible to a wide range of interpretations. They depend on meaning which cannot itself be measured. The very choice of what we measure is dependent on some prior judgement that that is the thing which is meaningful. The second, closely related, thing is that this meaning is a matter of political contestation, and the meanings which prevail are an outcome of power. That is most plain in overtly political stories such as those just mentioned. But it is no less the case in supposedly apolitical contexts such as accounting within organizations, where what is supposedly neutral and ‘independent’ measuring inevitably rests upon interpretative meaning and power – something long recognized by critical accounting researchers.

In the third edition of my book, there are more statistics that in the previous editions and that is because in the new chapter five (where almost all these statistics occur), there is a more overt focus on politics and economics. So, for example, I give figures on things like executive pay and corporate tax avoidance. And the aim here, too, is to seek to advance particular meanings and particular politics. That is to say, measurement is a form of rhetoric: an attempt to persuade by controlling meaning and so to exercise power. But the important thing to note is that this is unavoidable. The question ‘how do you measure that’ is itself a form of rhetoric which is a challenge from the questioner. If, as in my talk on Tuesday, you fail to answer it then the implication, at least, is that you are talking about something meaningless.

The potential stigma of ‘not measuring’ exercises a powerful hold within organization studies which, in its mainstream incarnation, is infatuated with measurement. It is even more evident within economics, which has shifted wholesale from its roots in 19^th century political economy to being dominated by ever more abstruse mathematical modelling. (Deirdre McCloskey's book, The Rhetoric of Economics is great on this*). But because measurement always opens up new terrains of contestation about meaning (as in the examples above) this is a doomed enterprise. Indeed, economics, especially since the financial crisis, is increasingly criticised for being precisely because of its abstraction from reality – a criticism which is again a form of rhetoric that tries to position its opponent as meaningless.

Thus we should not approach this issue in terms of the presence or absence of measurement, but always consider what this presence or absence betokens. In other words, we should see questions of meaning and power as the primary ones and then consider what role measurement plays in the attempt to corral meaning and exercise power. I know this because in a survey 100% of those asked agreed with me. But now I suppose you will want to know the sample size.

 

* And note how throwing in a reference to a 'great' book is another rhetorically forceful way of justifying a point. Here meaning is claimed on the basis of an appeal to authority rather than to a measurement. There is no way of standing outside rhetoric in this sense: indeed commenting upon my own rhetorical devices is a way of advancing the argument I am making. And so is commenting upon my commenting ....