Month: June 2019

I’ve been a regular at the IAI’s “How The Light Gets In” (HTLGI) festival at Hay-on-Wye in recent years, but was unable to attend this year (though I may make it to the London event later in the year). They’ve started putting-up the video recorded sessions since the May bank holiday weekend event.

As a fan of Rebecca Goldstein, this is one I was looking out for, with Hilary Lawson (an integral part of IAI and HTLGI) and Homi Bhabha hosted by Rana Mitter.

After Post-Truth
How do we navigate a world where truth is tribal?

Apart from a slight blip (where Mitter raises a rhetorical question about Heisenberg and Nazism!) and a digression (on whether to “blame” post-modernists), it’s a very good session. Proper dialogue closing in on points of agreement, so much so that Lawson is required to add some disagreement barb for effect in his own closing remark.

I have lots of notes on what each says, but just watch it. Summarising the overall discussion:

All assertions are somewhat “tribal” from a position of identity of the person making the assertion, even a scientist making a would-be scientific assertion or a philosopher analysing its truth value. That’s nothing new, even if the social-media “post-truth” world seems to exaggerate and more transparently expose such tribal positions.

We shouldn’t abandon capital-T objective Truth of the real world out there as a concept that is the focus of science, but we should abandon it as the privileged form of truth in human discourse in general. In discourse all truths are in some sense perspectival and metaphorical, and the focus should be the process of the discourse. Rather than the objective truth, the focus is epistemological; how we get to know. The process must include looking and listening with respect for the other and giving credit for some recognisable version of their position (some minimum form of Rappaport or Steel-Man). Part of what Homi Bhabha calls “Interpretational Good Practice” (and I call Rules of Engagement). Even as a philosopher of science, defending the objective truth of realism in science, Rebecca Goldstein the fiction author majors on affect and love in human relationships. Attention to the other in the moment.

(Aside – tickled to notice that Lawson tags himself PoPoMo, exactly as I do.)

Watch this one, here.

This topic is doomed to forever remain a stub for a more complete piece as it is continually added to by events.

Whatever we call it the Citizens’ / People’s Assembly (aka Standing Constitutional Convention) is an old idea whose time seems to have come.

Citizens’ Assembly is the term Rory Stewart is using in his latest high profile moves to highlight his credentials in bringing the country together as party leader (Tories that is, but it hardly matters.) He’s used it for both getting agreement on breaking the Brexit deadlock and to resolve resource priorities in Adult Social Care.

Previously any number of other topics have suggested the same idea: Lords Reform, Voting / PR reform, National & local devolution, Inter / Super-national federation, Lobbying rules, any number of constitutional changes. The point being with subjects that underlie our political processes, as opposed to the content of parliamentary business, it is easy to agree that something’s wrong and needs reform but almost always impossible to agree which solutions we should adopt. When the process is simply one of competing ideas criticising each other in a debating chamber until no single idea can “win” outright …. the status quo remains unchanged, and often the level of division, confusion and frustration has simply been increased.

We need a standing convention – and assembly that convenes on topics like these, but whose own constitution and make-up has been predefined independent of the particular topic. And it needs to be an assembly whose make-up is representative in ways different from partisan politics of Westminster and more importantly it delivers not legislation – that still the job of the legislature – but proposals framed as tractable motions to be put to the legislature. And whilst it would be a “parliament” – a talking shop – in a literal sense, it would not be a debating chamber. Debate is the too-limiting model that gives rise to deadlock in the meta-business underlying existing processes. It would be more like “committee” room business on a larger, publicly engaged scale. (Some have pointed out that set up this way the assembly itself would fulfill the original intended role of the second chamber and its own reform would be a natural outcome.)

The big risk in setting up the assembly is in getting its own constitution wrong too quickly and living to regret another broken piece of democracy. It must have limited immediate power and it must have values-based rules that permit their own evolution in specific mechanisms and procedures. Less is more when it comes to its constitutional definition.

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[And within minutes, …

He’s right. When Labour tried to deal with adult social care, the Tories cried “death tax”; Tories’ plan was in turn dubbed a “dementia tax” by Labour. Parties need to get together to sort this out. https://t.co/HBoVc5O36m

— Andrew Harrison (@andyhamamatsu) June 1, 2019

The partisan debating gets further polarised by social media sound-bites and memes reducing arguments to slogans and …. nothing gets done. We need the combined “committee” approach whose job is to produce a balanced proposal BEFORE it gets to the legislature.]

 

Queer Theory – A new one on me, something I know literally nothing about, but I’ve been following an interesting series of social media threads from @Glinner (Graham Linehan) doing battle with the more PC extremes of gender and sexuality “terminology” – particularly the “self-identifying trans” debate – and getting inundated in trolling and flak attacks for his efforts. He’s on the right side of this, but …

Things we need to recognise as binary-distinct for good reasons and the terminology or taboo / lack thereof that limits our ability to talk about them is pretty central to my epistemological – “how do we know?” – thesis. However, I do defend PC considerations in their place, using PoMo philosophers to support my arguments where appropriate. It’s the extremes that kill us, especially when bureaucratically (autistically) enforced. Rules are for guidance of the wise and the enslavement of fools – especially when it comes to language and terminology. (I call myself PoPoMo.) Language is useless without wisdom.

My ears pricked-up when @Glinner shared this short video of Derek Jensen with a class of students talking about “queer theory” and Foucault gets a mention (along with other founding proponents of its ideas) – basically using the theory to justify paedophilia (!)

[The clip is actually fascinating from the whole safe-spaces / trigger-warning perspective – on who’s allowed to say what in an educational environment – and how Jensen handles his jeering students. A exemplary lesson in teaching practice I’d say – but that would be to digress for now.]

Foucault is well known as one of the “foggy froggie” PoMo’s and controversially extreme on his rights, freedoms and equalities agenda in sex & gender and on society & crime – about which I know little beyond “controversial”.

He is however an interesting philosopher from a fundamental metaphysical perspective. Foucault is someone I’ve used explicitly.

Again it’s about the need to make distinctions – choose distinct words – whilst nevertheless understanding their proper dynamic relations. If we set the distinct items up as “objects” in their own right, we end up fighting battles over how definitive they are. This is necessarily polarising between extremes unless we apply PC rules that “ban” certain distinctions, limit meaning and flatten the dialogue. A choice between polarisation and meaninglessness. It’s “Identity Politics”, but we need distinctions to function. However distinctions need to have “good fences” because good fences make good neighbours and meaning is allowed to flow across them whilst we nevertheless respect their distinction.

For me this is another whole example of the populism problem when it comes to accentuating extremes. Explicitly here the idea that Foucault was controversial therefore to be condemned as entirely bad unless you’re agenda is to defend some specific political aim. Whereas like most human thinkers, good in parts but whacky, speculative, mischievous or plain wrong in others. Take care not to selectively misappropriate sound-bite quotes that can only ever make sense in some more nuanced context, and may not have been that good in the first place. The immediate preceding post was another example – whereby “pop-psychology” turned left-right brain considerations into caricatures too toxic for serious scientists to risk talking about.