For Central Bylines: Ed Davey takes aim at the unpatriotic right

I have a new article on Central Bylines this morning:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

I wrote this before Ed Davey decided that Nigel Farage is right about badgers being woke and we have to have Churchill on our banknotes.

Ed Davey: "We are a caring country, not a country of thuggery"

An open letter organised by Together With Refugees and signed by more than 200 refugee groups, charities and trade unions called on party leaders to end the pernicious currents of hatred that are fuelling anti-migrant protests.

Ed Davey closed his reply with the words:

That is who we are: a caring country, not a country of thuggery. A nation of laws and decency, not hate and lawlessness. And we must insure this is who we remain.

My first thought was that this was a pretty generous reading of our history, but then I thought of one of my favourite philosophers, the late Richard Rorty.

Carol Nicholson discussed Rorty's account of patriotism in a 2003 article for Philosophy Now:

In Achieving Our Country Rorty applies these views of knowledge and truth to the issue of patriotism. National pride, he argues, is analogous to self-respect and is as necessary for self-improvement. 

Both self-respect and patriotism are virtues found in an Aristotelian Golden Mean between the vices of excess and deficiency. Just as too much self-respect results in arrogance, and too little can lead to moral cowardice, an excess of patriotism can produce imperialism and bellicosity, and a lack of patriotism prohibits imaginative and effective political debate and deliberation about national policy. 

Patriotism is instilled by means of inspirational images and stories about a nation’s past, which help citizens to form a sense of moral identity. Given Rorty’s pragmatic theory of truth, he does not view any of these stories as the ‘objective’ or ‘right’ one. We must make a choice among them based upon the kind of moral identity we want to create, rather than on the basis of correspondence with a pre-existing Reality.

Other than a popular simple-minded militarism, Rorty sees very few stories in contemporary American culture that might inspire patriotism. The academic left today lacks a vision of national pride, and it exhibits a kind of fashionable hopelessness, which Rorty attributes to the breakdown of the alliance between the intellectuals and the unions in the Sixties, the influence of postmodern theory, and the impact of the Vietnam War. 

An autobiographical section of one of the essays about growing up as a “red-diaper anticommunist baby” in the Thirties and Forties gives insight into why he is so dismayed by both the current U.S. administration and the opposition to it.

And that, I think, is a lesson for all Liberals: we must resist fashionable hopelessness.

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Lynton Crosby's divisive approach to politics has wedged the Conservative party into a corner from which they cannot escape, says Adam Bienkov.

Nearly three thousand prisoners are still serving indeterminate IPP - imprisonment for public protection - sentences, which are a relic of New Labour's authoritarianism. Alice Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, explained the need for reform on the eve of an important vote in the Lords. In the event, peers agreed to the government amendments she supported.

Carol Nicholson discusses Richard Rorty's views on patriotism and how they mesh with his wider philosophy: "National pride, he argues, is analogous to self-respect and is as necessary for self-improvement. Both self-respect and patriotism are virtues found in an Aristotelian Golden Mean between the vices of excess and deficiency. Just as too much self-respect results in arrogance, and too little can lead to moral cowardice, an excess of patriotism can produce imperialism and bellicosity, and a lack of patriotism prohibits imaginative and effective political debate and deliberation about national policy."

Helen Day is interviewed about Ladybird Books: "The rarest book of all is thought to be an edition of How it Works: The Computer which was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence in the 1970s.  This book is believed to be the standard 1971 Ladybird book by this name, but with plain covers, intended to spare the blushes of the staff who might feel uncomfortable being seen reading a children’s book. But it is unlikely that one of these books will ever come to light as they were all believed to have been decommissioned and destroyed after a few years."

“I can't imagine Rock Guitar without Pete Townshend ... My playing owes so much to him. I'm not talking about the blues-influenced playing which also underpinned the evolution of 70s and 80s rock music - Townshend brought to the scene a blistering clang of super-amplified but not over-saturated chords - razor-edged monoliths crashing angrily through our brains, biting rhythmic hammer blows which would change the likes of me forever." Brian May on rock's debt to the Who guitarist.

Tim Rolls remembers the night Chelsea won their first European trophy - the Cup Winners' Cup in 1971: "[Hugh ]McIlvanney closed his article with a pithy observation. 'Chelsea reminded us in Athens that the highest rewards can still be won by flair and grace and boldness.' Indeed. Of the fourteen players who played a part in one or both games, seven (Bonetti, Boyle, Harris, Hollins, Hudson, Osgood and Houseman) had all come through the club’s junior system, a wonderful achievement."

Are there Liberal thinkers for good times and Liberal thinkers for hard times?

Politicians can be divided between those suited to good times and those suited to hard times, or so I suggested in a post I wrote here back in 2008.

Looking at some leading politicians of the day and of past days, I divided them like this:

Good times: Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, David Miliband.

Hard times: Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher, Vince Cable, Denis Healey, Alistair Darling

We have lived in hard times for so long now that it's hard to know who among today's politicians would be more suited to good times, so I'm not sure this categorisation is useful today.

But I have been wondering if, among Liberal thinkers, there are some suited to good times and some suited to hard times.

The growing threat of Russian aggression in Europe makes Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin look more relevant than they did 20 or 30 years ago. It's unfair to dismiss them as 'Cold War Liberals', as many on the left do, but their views were formed as a reaction to tyranny and the threat of tyranny.

By contrast, I am an admirer of the postmodern Liberal philosopher Richard Rorty, yet when I came to write about him for Liberator in 2017, I found I had growing doubts about him. I did question Rorty's account of George Orwell, but there was a more fundamental doubt that I steered away from.

It was whether postmodernism's relaxed view of truth was so appealing in a word where Trump was US President and the internet was choked with lies and conspiracy theories.

Rorty, it seemed, was a Liberal thinkers for good times, not hard times.

You might think of Mill as a believer in progress, and thus a good times man. But I remember writing a seminar paper about On Liberty in which I commented on its pessimistic tone. One reason Mill wanted freedom of thought and speech was that he was dissatisfied with the intellectual climate of the day.

There is definitely an element of "All great men are dead, and I'm not feeling too well myself", in Mark Twain's words, about On Liberty.

So if I put Mill in the hard times column, it's more about his temperament than the fine details of his philosophy. 

And, for the same reason, he is joined there by Charles Masterman. Though Masterman was a practical politician - he was the minister who spent countless hours taking Lloyd George's health insurance act through the Commons in the face of implacable opposition from the Conservatives and the medical profession - there is an air of melancholy about his writings - notably The Condition of England.

Jo Grimond, by contrast, has a sunny temperament and that gets him into the good times club.

What do you think? Is this distinction useful?

Handel: Zadok the Priest

It was said of the late Duke of Edinburgh that he didn't favour High Church or Low Church so much as Short Church.

Though Charles III's wish to make the Coronation include more of the Britain of today is to be praised, the service didn't half go on. I would have been happy with I Was Glad, Zadok the Priest and then sloping off to the pub.

And, pace C.P, Snow, not all ancient British traditions date from the second half of the 19th century. The anointing screen you see being deployed here is an innovation by Charles. In 1953 his mother made do with a canopy to give her some privacy from the television cameras.

But why should the most sacred moment of the event be shielded from the public gaze at all? Does this decision arise from a fear that it all looks a bit silly?

Leaving aside Penny Mordaunt's turn as a warrior princess, let's consider the strange assemblage of treasures that were brought out, which varied from the priceless to the odd.

Yes, this sort of pageantry can come over as a calling down of the blessing of the Almighty upon the British class system, but the left's instinct for mockery - which I certainly share - does not always help the reformist cause.

I was reminded of the words of the American philosopher Richard Rorty in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity:

The best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. 

Consider what happens when a child's precious possessions - the little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different from all other children - are described as "trash," and thrown away. 

Or consider what happens when these possessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions of another, richer, child.

So if we want to change this strange country of ours, whose current borders date back to 1922, we need first to understand it.

Zadok the Priest is this weeks' Sunday music video - it's one of the pieces of music I used to play my mother in her last days and yesterday's outing seems to have own Handel many new admirers.

And on another musical note, one of Camilla's pages was a great nephew of hers who is also Steve Winwood's grandson. I hope this marks a decision to honour the Spencer Davis Group in all state occasions from now on.

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"The Lost History not only gives an account of the different meanings that have been ascribed to liberalism and evoked in its uses, but recovers some of those meanings that have been eclipsed, distorted and eroded." Alex Tebble reviews Helena Rosenblatt's book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century.

David Edgerton argues that Labour's lost red wall is a myth. The idea that working-class people voted Labour until Brexit came along, he maintains, is a fiction only the Conservatives benefit from.

"Rorty was deeply worried by the widespread but in his view fundamentally-mistaken equation between the questioning of traditional philosophy’s ‘quest for certainty’ on the one hand and the assumption of a truly ‘post-truth’ politics on the other. " Rupert Read on Richard Rorty and how postmodernism helped elect Donald Trump.

Katherine Willis says government policies will promote further loss and fragmentation of the UK's natural environment/

Nick Bartlett has been watching a 1945 Ealing Studios horror anthology: "Dead Of Night is that rare thing – a classic horror film where the hype is completely justified. It’s an unusual film for Ealing, even for the period it was made, but it’s a masterpiece, and aside from a handful of old-fashioned moments, it still stands up today as one of Britain’s very best horror films."

"I feel inspired by this place, it really deserves the restoration and recognition it is now about to receive." Janine Moore takes a walk beside the Bennerley Viaduct in the Erewash Valley.

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Will Dyer was the Liberal Democrat candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow at this year's general election.

One of the last interviews the philosopher Richard Rorty gave was to Robert Harrison for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Talking of philosophy, Peter Worley believes it should be at the centre of education: "So, what is a suitably philosophical spirit and how can it be taught? I would suggest that it is not merely responding to a problem or question but doing so reflectively and using reason to progress."

"Everybody now spoke as though at last, after decades of shock therapy, debilitating or addicting drug treatment and a stigma that psychoanalysis had done little to dispel, the late twentieth century had simply discovered a cure for depression." Brian Dillon remembers the central place Prozac briefly held in our culture.

"We Are the Martians is everything we hoped it would be and possibly even more." Folk Horror Revival reviews a tribute to Nigel Kneale.

Rob Baker on Ted Lewis, his Brit Noir novel Jack’s Return Home and the film Get Carter.

Richard Rorty: The thinker who foresaw Trump and Brexit

I have been meaning to write an article for Liberator about Richard Rorty for years, if only because I was attracted by the possible headline ‘RORTY BUT NICE’.

In the last issue of the magazine I finally got round to writing it, but I am not sure it is much good.

I had imagined I would write about the ideas in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, but the quote from Achieving Our Country foreseeing the coming of Trump was too good to ignore and that book rather took over the article.

Having written about it, I wonder if the book’s distinction between the reformist left and the cultural left is ultimately much different from the claim of a thousand dull newspaper columns that the left has abandoned the working class and become too concerned with what they call political correctness.

And when I did get around to Contingency, Irony and Solidarity its arguments were so fragile they fell apart in my hands.

Maybe the moral is that, ultimately, we value thinkers for an approach to the problems of living that they represent rather than the fine detail of their doctrines.

Rorty, for me, stands for a recognition that the institutions of the liberal democratic state are among the most valuable things the human race has devised. But he combines that with a recognition that they are far from perfect and that there is much of our lives that they do not touch.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the article.

The thinker who foresaw Trump and Brexit

The days when we expected philosophers to be prophets are long gone, but the widespread sharing of this quotation after the election of Donald Trump reawakened interest in the work of Richard Rorty:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. 

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots….  

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

What particularly impressed people was that Rorty wrote this back in 1998 when Bill Clinton had been elected for a second term and Tony Blair was enjoying his extraordinarily long honeymoon with Britain’s voters.

Rorty, who died in 2007, is the most interesting liberal philosopher of recent decades. He managed to combine being at the cutting edge of postmodern thought in rejecting the idea that philosophy’s role was to discover ‘The Truth’ or ‘Things as They Really Are’  – so much so that his name carried with it a whiff of brimstone in more traditional academic departments – with a reasoned defence of the institutions of the liberal democratic state and draw for enlightenment upon the Western literary canon.

Beyond that, as the quotation above shows, he stood out among philosophers – particularly postmodern philosophers – for the clarity of his prose and his commitment to carrying the non-specialist reader with him. So much academic work today is written to be published rather than read, and so many philosophers seem determined to dazzle or obfuscate rather than enlighten. To those who doubt this I say two words: Slavoj Žižek.

That quotation comes from Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. In the book Rorty draws a distinction between the reformist left that flourished in America until the 1960s and the cultural left that supplanted it.

The reformist left, he argued, shared “the conviction that the vast inequalities within American society could be corrected by using the institutions of a constitutional democracy – that a cooperative commonwealth could be created by electing the right politicians and passing the right laws.”

This reformist left covered a broad spectrum of opinion from Marxists to moderate Democrats, but they were united by a belief in pragmatic reform. There were no purity tests for membership – some of the reformist left cared little for the rights of American Blacks, others were keen supporters of war in Vietnam – but, says Rorty, they were “feared and hated by the Right because they laid the foundations of the modern welfare state.

Rorty was well aware of this, but in a characteristically wry style, he pointed out that “in democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts.”

It was Vietnam that broke this coalition. It was not just that the war was morally wrong and impossible to win: it was that younger leftists saw it as in indictment of America as a whole. And that meant, argued Rorty, they lost interest in the idea of moderate reform:

For if you turn out to be living in an evil empire (rather than, as you had been told, a democracy fighting an evil empire), then you have no responsibility to your country; you are accountable only to humanity. If what your government and your teachers are saying is all part of the same Orwellian monologue – if the differences between the Harvard faculty and the military-industrial complex, or between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, are negligible – then you have a responsibility to make a revolution.

I thought of this when I heard Harriet Harman interviewed by Peter Hennessy recently and she said had gone into politics wanting to “change everything about society”. Change everything is an expression of personal despair, not a programme for government.

This trend towards cultural leftism accelerated on the British left after Iraq. Tony Blair won three consecutive general elections, but his name is really heard in Labour circles – unless it is part of the insult ‘Blairite’. We Liberal Democrats suffered our own miniature moral catastrophe over the Coalition’s decision to increase tuition fees.

Instead, the left has embraced Jeremy Corbyn, a figure whose appeal lies precisely in the fact that he has never held power and is thus innocent of the compromises it demands. Labour now expends little effort on policy formation as its 2017 general election manifesto, an unconvincing document that escaped proper scrutiny during the election campaign because of the supreme incompetence of the Conservatives. 

A style of argument flourishes on the left, perhaps encouraged by social media and certainly most apparent there. It is summed up in a widely used quotation whose origin is not clear: “The right looks for converts, the left looks for traitors.” Someone’s words – and it is usually words and not actions – are examined until they are found guilty of some departure from the prevalent moral view on the cultural left, whereupon they can be given a pejorative label and their opinion on every subject ignored.

The right has not been idle while this has been going on. Rorty, confirming his uncanny ability to see where politics was leading in 1998, wrote: “While the Left’s back was turned, the bourgeoisification of the white proletariat which began in WWII and continued up through the Vietnam War has been halted, and the process has gone into reverse. America is now proletarianizing its bourgeoisie, and this process is likely to culminate in bottom-up revolt, of the sort [Pat] Buchanan hopes to foment.”

If all this sounds familiar from a thousand comment pieces blaming the left and ‘political correctness’ for the rise of Trump or of Ukip, it is worth emphasising that Rorty came from a left-wing background himself and his sympathies already remained with what he described as the reformist left:

For the Right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed: it thinks the country is basically in good shape, and may well have been in better shape in the past. It sees the Left’s struggle for social justice as mere troublemaking, as utopian foolishness. The Left, by definition, is the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains unachieved.

And even when being critical of the cultural left in the New York Times in 1994, he paid it a generous tribute, saying it was “doing a great deal of good for people who have gotten a raw deal in our society: women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. This focus on marginalized groups will, in the long run, help to make our country much more decent, more tolerant and more civilized.”

But he warned in the same article that “A left that refuses to take pride in its country will have no impact on that country’s politics, and will eventually become an object of contempt.”

So it is not such a surprise to find that the opening words of Achieving Our Country are: “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.”

If these words seem strange on the left today, Rorty would no doubt have said, it is because the reformist left has been displaced by the cultural left.

For a way out of this impasse we could turn to an earlier (1989) book of Rorty’s: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. It has many virtues, among them this descripton of it is that we actually argue about politics and other important things

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. ...  

A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as “true,” “good,” “right,” and “beautiful.” The larger part contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, for example, “Christ,” “England,” “professional standards,” “decency,” “kindness,” “the Revolution,” “the Church,” “progressive,” “rigorous,” “creative.” The more parochial terms do most of the work.

Rorty also emphasises the importance of being an ‘ironist’. That is, we should recognise that our own beliefs cannot ultimately be grounded on bedrock beyond our own chosen ‘thick’ vocaulary yet still be prepared to act upon them. He approving quotes Joseph Schumpeter: “To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.”

These days the idea that studying the great writers can teach us lessons about how to live our lives is deeply unfashionable in English departments with their poststructuralists  (and quite possibly postpoststructuralists too). Yet it is too this rather traditional view of literature that the avant-garde philosopher Rorty turns in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, with chapters on Proust, Nabokov and Orwell.

He suggests that what Orwell did in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was to give readers an alternative vocabulary with which to understand totalitarianism. 

Postmodern liberal or not, I still want to say that Orwell gave us a picture that is nearer the truth, but however you describe it Orwell’s view of the subject prevailed for many decades. Indeed, while one could have suggested 20 years ago that this view was now of only historical interest, it seems again compelling in the world of 2017.

We liberals like to insist that we are not mere centrists but have a radical view of our own. I see nothing wrong with centrism in as far as it represents a defence of institutions like the National Health Service and public service broadcasting that made Britain a better country to live in.

But if we seek something more exciting, then the postmodern world view, which accepts the breakdown of the great narratives and is tolerant of local difference, is a promising one to explore. And there is not better guide to it than Richard Rorty.

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Phil Burton-Cartledge looks at the Ukip leader's appeal to voters: "Nuttall's first leaflet goes on about what a great MP he would be. Stoke-on-Trent Central can look forward to 'representation it has never had in Parliament before'. ... Nuttall came 736th out of 756 in terms of attendance at the European Parliament in the 2009-14 session."

Richard Rorty's liberal philosophy is enjoying a revival, says Stephen Metcalf.

Philosophy teaches children what Google can’t, argues Charlotte Blease.

David McLean tells the incredible story of Bessie Watson, "the youngest suffragette".

"While there may very well be those who are critical of his work, dismissing it as weird, oppressive, or impossible to follow (and it very well can be), it would be difficult to deny the subtle genius of his work." Adam Frese on David Lynch at 71.

"Before visiting, I’d had no idea that this wonderful building even existed." Flickering Lamps discovers Southwell Minster, one of England's finest - and least known - cathedrals.

Richard Rorty foresaw the rise of Donald Trump in 1997

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My favourite liberal philosopher of recent decades is Richard Rorty, who died in 2007.

An article by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books quotes a passage from Rorty's 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America:

Watching him blather and mug as he casually leaned over the podium in Boca Raton, seeing him cultivate the applause as if directing a symphony and then raise his two hands in thumbs-up gestures as he surfed the waves of applause and the deafening shouts of “USA! USA! USA!,” I recalled a remark that the philosopher Richard Rorty made back in 1997 about “the old industrialized democracies…heading into a Weimar-like period.” Citing evidence from “many writers on socioeconomic policy,” Rorty suggested that 

members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. 

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…. 

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. 

As Trump put it in Nevada, “I love the poorly educated!”

Happy birthday John Stuart Mill

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Time to post a link to an old Liberator article of mine:

So read Rorty, Popper and Berlin. Read L.T. Hobhouse if you want and pretend to have read T.H.Green if you must. But above all read the Mill of On Liberty.

Why quoting facts does not convert people to our way of thinking

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"When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?" asked Keynes.

And there is no greater praise in modern politics than to call a policy "evidence-based".

But does political argument really work like that? I think not.

An article on the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog today analyses a study published in the journal Discourse Processes:

The researchers assessed 120 student participants for their prior knowledge and attitudes to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and their need for dietary purity, measured by items like “I often think about the lasting effects of the foods I eat.” 

This was the key variable of interest because it was intended to tap into how important food purity was to the participants’ sense of identity. The researchers specifically wanted to find out whether this identity factor would influence how people felt when their beliefs were challenged, and whether they would comply with, or resist, the challenge. 

After the researchers gave participants scientific information worded to directly challenge anti-GMO beliefs, those with higher scores in dietary purity rated themselves as experiencing more negative emotions while reading the text, and in a later follow-up task, they more often criticised GMOs. Crucially, at the end of the study these participants were actually more likely to be anti-GMO than a control group who were given scientific information that didn’t challenge beliefs: in other words, the attempt to change minds with factual information had backfired.

The blog suggests that such fact-based arguments are most likely to backfire when people's sense of identity is threatened.

I am reminded of something Richard Rorty says in his Irony, Contingency and Solidarity:

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. ... 

A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as “true,” “good,” “right,” and “beautiful.” The larger part contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, for example, “Christ,” “England,” “professional standards,” “decency,” “kindness,” “the Revolution,” “the Church,” “progressive,” “rigorous,” “creative.” The more parochial terms do most of the work.

And it is these thicker, more parochial concepts that can be threatened when another cites facts in disagreeing with you.

What to do?

Three years ago I blogged about a couple of studies that, in effect, appealed to people in their own thick, parochial vocabulary to change their minds. That post was helpfully summarised in an article on Wired:

Jonathan Calder on his politics blog, observed that LGBT groups in America won over voters by discussing their quest for equality not in aggressive demands for equal rights, but with language conservatives would refer to their own marriages: love, commitment and family. 

Similarly, a press release from The Association for Psychological Science found that talking about climate change in terms of 'purity' and 'sanctity' of Earth could win over those with conservative morals, traditionally unconcerned with climate change.

The implication of all this, I suspect, is that if we want to persuade people who are tempted to vote Leave to vote Remain, we should frame our arguments in terms of concepts like patriotism and the continuity of British history and not laugh at them and call them "fruitcakes" - as this blog is prone to doing.

Richard Rorty on democracy and philosophy

When Richard Rorty died in 2007 I quoted a tribute by Christopher Hayes in the Nation:

Rorty had an uncanny ability to stare into the post-modern abyss, in which nothing is grounded in the divine or universal, and yet somehow, some way, find a kind of practical empathy that could serve as a beacon in the face of nihilism, authoritarianism and cruelty.

This interview, which he gave in 1997, is a good introduction to the appeal of Rorty's ideas.

David Boyle on post-postmodernism

David Boyle, the nearest thing the Liberal Democrats have to an intellectual guru, has a new book out: The Age to Come: Authenticity, Post-Modernism and How To Survive What Comes Next.

David writes on his blog:

The next age, the coming age, will try to challenge our contemporary conviction that nothing is true and everything is relative. 

It will not reach back hopelessly to previous ages of certainty, though people may accuse it of that: we have lost our innocence about social reality. It will not pretend it is somehow possible to work out unambiguously what is true in this world. It will not turn its back on the understanding and tolerance we have generated with the social construction of knowledge. But it will not be limited by that any more. 

We are moving into an age that will try to satisfy our need for what we have lost, looking around for something we can be sure of – something we can use to measure everything else against – and it is beginning to find it in ourselves and our humanity, and will use that to seek a way out of the paralysis of post-modernism.

I always enjoy David's books, but I suspect I have more time for postmodernism than he does (nor do I believe the concept needs a hyphen).

Certainly, I recommend that anyone with an interest in Liberal philosophy reads Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity before postmodernism goes too far out of fashion.

Richard Grayson on Mill, Hobhouse and T.H. Green

Because of Charles Kennedy's indolence as leader, Richard Grayson had a large say in the running of the party for many years. Which makes him a slightly unconvincing representative of the party's grassroots in today's front-page Observer report by Anushka Asthana and Allegra Stratton.

Richard Grayson has an article of his own on the Guardian website in which he complains:

all we hear from Nick Clegg is lots about John Stuart Mill. Rarely, if ever, is there talk of the Liberals cited by Ed Miliband, nor the originators of social liberalism such as LT Hobhouse or TH Green. A philosophy which seldom goes beyond Mill is firmly stuck in the 1850s, as if more than a century of social liberalism never happened.

The explanation for this can largely be found in an article on Mill that I wrote for Liberator in 2007:

It is fashionable to name check L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green, but I suspect that few who do so have really read their works. Hobhouse’s Liberalism is approachable, but hardly profound when set against Mill, while Green is next to unreadable. In part this is because Green’s heyday came during that brief period in the late nineteenth century when Idealism was the dominant force in British philosophy, and it is hard for we 21st-century realists to make much of him as a result. Equally, however, there was a tension in Green’s thought between his espousal of liberty and the enthusiasms, such as Temperance, which he derived from his religious views. The suspicion must be that he sometimes found it convenient to take refuge in obfuscation.

In short, Green is unreadable and Hobhouse is not that good. But I do strongly recommend Peter Clarke's Liberals and Social Democrats, which looks at the intellectual circles of which Hobhouse was a member.

I was also a little amused that Richard complains that Nick Clegg is stuck in the past, but can offer no alternative thinkers more recent than Hobhouse (who died in 1929) and Green (who died in 1882 ). I wonder what Professor Grayson would make of a student essay that presented these two as representatives of modernity?

In my Liberator article I did manage to mention more recent names: Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Richard Rorty (who had only just died when I wrote it). But what we really need are some current-day Liberal thinkers.

Liberal England recommended by the Independent

Thanks to Nick Barlow for alerting me to the fact that this blog is mentioned in the general election guide published with today's Independent. I rushed out to buy one happened to be passing a newsagent's who had a copy.

Liberal England is one of four "Centrist" blogs listed, along with LibDemBlogs (which is an aggregator, not a blog), Liberal Democrat Voice and Nick's own What You Can Get Away With.

I take their choice as a sign of sound judgement, but Nick has looked a little deeper and suggests that it may be based on scant or out-of-date research. Can't see it myself.

Incidentally, I am not sure I like being called a centrist. Richard Rorty used to call himself a "postmodern bourgeois radical" and I rather like that. Perhaps I should add "with anarcho-nostalgic tendencies" though.

World Philosophy Day: A short film about Richard Rorty

To celebrate World Philosophy Day, here is a short film about Richard Rorty.

Rorty died last year - you may also want to read his Daily Telegraph obituary.

An obituary of Richard Rorty

Rorty's death was one of those stories that spread in cyberspace for some time before the newspapers took it up.

Now the obituaries have started to appear. The first in Britain appears to be the one in the Daily Telegraph:

One of the reasons for Rorty's popularity, and the esteem in which he was held, was his lucidity as a writer; even in technical works for an academic audience, he was at pains to spell out his analyses clearly, and not to duck their consequences. This alone made him stand out from almost all other writers and philosophers who adopted postmodernism.

Richard Rorty dead

The Telos website reports that the American liberal philosopher Richard Rorty died on Friday.

I recommend Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity as one of the best examinations of what it means to be a liberal in the modern world. It consists largely of discussions of writers such as Orwell and Nabokov.

Rorty is normally seen as one of the trendier postmodern philosophers, questioning our notions of truth. But if I am honest I like this book because it represents a rather old-fashioned sort of literary criticism. Rorty still believed that good novels can tell us important things about the world and how we should live our lives.

Thanks to Crooked Timber.

Later. Christopher Hayes writes on the Nation site:

Rorty had an uncanny ability to stare into the post-modern abyss, in which nothing is grounded in the divine or universal, and yet somehow, some way, find a kind of practical empathy that could serve as a beacon in the face of nihilism, authoritarianism and cruelty.

Moral relativism and the Pope

There is a good article in today's Guardian by the philosopher Julian Baggini. In it he takes issue with the moral teaching of the new Pope:

this crude dichotomy between the absolute moral truths of the church and the so-called laissez-faire relativism of the modern secular world is crassly simplistic.

You can read it for yourself, and Simon Titley has quoted it extensively in this posting on Liberal Dissenter, so I will not quote any more from it here.

Instead, here is a relevant thought from Joseph Schumpeter which is discussed favourably by two of my favourite modern philosophers: Isaiah Berlin in Four Essays on Liberty, and Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. It runs:

To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.