Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason                                                 July 2020 Click square for index William Davies’ book Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason was suggested to me as an interesting book at Christmas 2019. So when it appeared in paperback in summer 2020 I ordered a copy. The review in The Guardian called it “a much-needed book that provides an explanatory framework for our current predicament – Trump and Brexit included.” The introduction begins with a chaotic scene as people rush from a London underground station. Someone says guns were fired. A terror attack is feared. Subsequently, the police confirm no terrorists, no guns and an altercation on the underground platform. People react to things out of fear and suppositions. Social media contribute to false impressions. Facts take much longer and require a discipline. The low statistical chance of dying in a terrorist attack is irrelevant to the people who are afraid. Feelings are a valuable source of data. Yet emotions are not always welcome in public life. During the 17th century feelings were treated with suspicion and with an attempt to regulate them. The philosopher Hobbes argued that the role of the state was to remove mutual fear that might trigger violence. Rules emerged for recording impressions that avoided distortion. Numbers were used and record keeping began. This led to experts – people who kept their personal feelings at bay. The legacy is notions of truth, scientific expertise, evidence, public administration and progress. The elevation of reason was important – not just for knowledge, but for preserving peace. The book falls into two parts. The first, “The Decline of Reason,” tells about the 17th century social model and how it ran aground. Experts and facts no longer settle arguments. Objective claims cannot be separated from emotions. Public trust in the media is low. The EU and Washington are regarded as self-serving centres of elites. Feelings of nostalgia, resentment, anger and fear have disrupted the status quo. Populist leaders are a symptom of the underlying problem that allows the denigration of expertise and the harnessing of society’s emotional discontents. The book aims to show how this new phenomenon arises. Objective indicators like GDP hide deep fractures in society. People’s lives are being shaped by different health, different life expectancy and encounters with different physical and psychological pain. The shorter second part of the book, “The Rise of Feeling,” looks at other changes that have occurred. The desire to harness emotions and physical instincts has frequently been to further conflict or war, and not peace. The arrival of aerial warfare brought new demands for managing public sentiments and sensing incoming threats. The computer and internet are part of the response to that. The right emotions must be triggered in the public and enemy plans and movements must be rapidly sensed. This is far from the scientific ideals of reason and expertise. Speed of getting knowledge and rapid decision-making is crucial - consensus is side-lined. People need to feel safe. If people don’t feel safe, they will take matters into their own hands. Peoples’ feelings have to be taken seriously. Populism may contain opportunities. The book explores the forces changing democracy and calls us to delve deeper into the world of feelings to find a common new world. The way forward is not a matter of more intelligence, but less speed and more care in our collective thinking and feeling. Ideas and feelings need to be articulated and heard. We should value democracy’s capacity to give voice to fears, to pain and to anxieties that otherwise might be diverted into destructive and conflictual directions by others. The book reads well, but it is not an easy read. The construct of 17th century science and reason as opposed to current emotions is not entirely convincing but it does enable some insights along the way. In the end, we do understand trends in our world but we are not offered many convincing ways out. Some time ago Judt, in his book Reappraisals, Penguin, 2008 observed the anger and loss in dead industrial former socialist cities in the Western world. Stripped of jobs, meaning and the social life that had come from union halls these cities were shifting to alt right movements then. The need for work, status and a meaningful social life of human contact were already at play and providing these seems to me to be part of a solution. As usual I give a chapter by chapter summary of this book without critical comment. Part 1 The Decline of Reason 1. Democracy of Feeling. The New Era of Crowds. There was controversy about the inaugural crowds for Trump. There are always uncertainties about the sizes of crowds – it depends on where one stands. The size for Trump related to an emotional issue – the sneer of critics and the love of fans. The new era of public rallies like Occupy involves social media and the new possibility of real time coordination of crowds. Mass democracy involved having most people at home and having representative speakers - for example a judge or a parliamentarian. Professional political parties, agencies, newspaper publishers processed important issues. Today people are reluctant to have others speak for them. Crowds are less about peaceful representation and more about mobilization. They don’t represent anything but reflect a depth of feeling. Crowds allow individuals to feel part of something big. Logic does not attract a crowd. Bodily Congregations tells of the psychology of a crowd, its “visceral transformative potential” and its danger. Le Bon wrote about how crowds work in The Psychology of Crowds. A single mass psychology emerges in a crowd that can replace individual common sense or morality. The feeling of power can encourage foolhardy, immoral or embarrassing actions. The size matters only on an emotional level - big enough to allow individual judgment and inhibition to give way to feelings. Being close to others in a crowd is special – unlike a market or a political system. The crowd allows a range of feelings to emerge and spread. Individual bodies are wired into a single nervous system. Ideas and emotions swirl like a contagion. They are susceptible to orators “making abusive use of violent affirmations ... to exaggerate, affirm, to resort to repetitions, never to attempt to prove anything...” Le Bon saw potential for violence. Crowds can be mobilized for purposes other than fighting. They can take private feelings of fear and pain and make them public. They can be assembled so as to be threatening: but they can also express solidarity with what is under threat. Politics and Virus. “Viral marketing” that targets influential people rather than the public is trying to use contagion. There is use of digital sentiment analysis, capturing the emotion of a tweet or an eye movement or tone of voice. Face recognition allowed police in Nanjing 2018 to find a suspect amongst 60,000 at a pop concert. First past the post democracies are susceptible to viral tactics and crowd surges because a few people in pivotal areas can sway an overall election outcome. The logic of the crowd permeates life today. We are susceptible to emotional contagions in daily social interactions – like talk at a dinner party. It’s less what is said than the way it makes us feel. Contagions are more graphical and physical – ideas converted to images change the way we feel and they travel person to person as sentiments. In a 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays suggested these techniques should apply in politics – to save democracy. Bernays believed people need the feeling that they are close to power – a sense of intimacy. Those ruling should use combinations of imagery, sound and speech to produce the right type of popular sentiment. Thirty states around the world use social media to manipulate public opinion and voting behaviours in democracies like the US and the UK. Propaganda is a concern given how fast information circulates if it looks and feels true on an emotional level. Lies travel faster on twitter than established facts. A Financial Times reader may feel influenced by data and methodology. But when content is shared on Facebook, is the attention really influenced by the Financial Times logo and the pink and white background that emotionally convey credibility? The discerning and educated public exist in their own bubbles of content sharing. Numerical evidence can carry an emotional response. It is as feeling creatures that we are susceptible to contagion. Of course that flies in the face of the general assumption of an informed rational electorate. Populist movements disrupt the status quo by bringing a deeper range of feelings, fears, and needs into the political process. Crowd dynamics help reconnect politics to deep human needs, bringing shared feelings and vulnerabilities directly into the public domain. This does not necessarily support an autocrat. One emotion, fear, can do that. In a crowd, a perception of a threat gets amplified and a feeling of violence can produce actual violence. The nervousness around democracy comes from difficulties identifying the sources and nature of the violence. Weapons of Everyday Life. Major violence is now produced by misuse of readily available objects. It was routine civilian aircraft flights that caused terror on September 11, 2001, not a new weapon. Cars have driven into crowds in big cities to create terror. This is disturbing because little planning is needed. Moreover the incidents leave an unconscious feeling that violence could appear anywhere. There is a perceived risk in ordinary everyday activities. Even in rich countries, citizens are vulnerable to attacks by terrorists without conventional weapons and without political power. Security services find that hard to combat. Social media can be used by foreign powers like Russia as tools for disruption and violence. Peaceful activities can be viewed as possible opportunities for disruption and harm especially when there is a crowd. Media technologies play a role. The 9/11 attack was designed for television. Smartphone and social media expand activities that can be shared globally allowing minor sabotage events to be viewed as of heroic status. Power is a capacity to organize large numbers of people using rules, infrastructure and leaders. It builds a bureaucracy, plans, agreements and policies costing time and money to maintain. A military force can exercise power when it occupies a territory. Power is predictable and visible in operation creating a sense of reality and normality of process. Violence forces someone to do something against their will. It doesn’t build anything. It exploits an opportunity. Violence can destroy power, but power can never grow out of it. We have to become better at distributing power than offering opportunities for violence. In practice power and violence go hand in hand. Governments have laws, procedures and elections (power) but also prisons, secret services, riot vans (violence). For terrorists, disruption is an alternative to control. What is to be done with a feeling of physical vulnerability? Le Bon assumed a crowd would resort to violence if led by a reckless charismatic leader. And a sense of collective victimhood can be cultivated until it leads to violence. Nationalists have argued that society is weakened and needs to be repaired by war. On the other hand, the quest for civil rights and opposition to violence (war) have produced the largest crowds. A violent crowd cannot easily be distinguished from a non-violent one. The crowd mobilizing for non-violence is not exclusive – it is potentially a universal human one. Especially online, emotions of anger and rage have a peculiar capacity to move and coordinate people. Outrage attracts more attention than calmness and reasoning. Texts spread more virally if they contain a highly moral emotion. There is a sense in which speech is “weaponized” with an uncertain boundary between speech and violence. Public debate has been framed as war where the strong must overcome the weak – or fall back on calling for the right to free speech. Who can say whether metaphors of violence provoke real violence. Resistance to nationalistic sentiments cannot just reject the nationalistic crowds. It needs to identify a different set of feelings to generate a different type of crowd. Not in My Name. The “March for Science” was a crowd aiming to support the vital role science plays in society. There was questioning of the value and purpose, but a crowd is its own purpose. The risk is that in a crowd objectivity and reason become political values promoting just another something that needs justification. If crowds are where feelings substitute for reason perhaps a march for science is a contradictory thing. Scientists slow things down. They collect data carefully, analyze it critically and present it in standard form. For doing this, scientists seek our respect. They want that trust we put in a professional journalist, an accountant or a doctor. This trust is what goes when people enter a crowd. It is what is slipping away as the basic institutions of democracy and the professional media go into decline. People do not believe experts are independent. Climate scientists claim to give the data but then they appear to jump into bed with environmental NGOs. They serve particular interests. All are deemed guilty of hypocrisy. If there is one thing that will convert indifference to rage it is hypocrisy. Populism is rebellion against systems of representation. When trust in one elite group disintegrates, trust in any expert group tends to go. Truth no longer matters. Liars can be applauded. “Not in my name” became a popular slogan in anti-war protests. It means the representatives are not my representatives. The dilemma of the March for Science is faced by many experts. Do they keep the demeanour of rationality and be accused of being cold, or show passion and be considered no better than their critics? Many wish normal politics would survive by reassertion of existing centres of expertise. That is not an option. The separation of reason from feeling is no longer clear cut. Scientists should recognize themselves as activists. 2. Knowledge for Peace. The Birth of Expertise. Britain’s National Audit Office, NAO, 2009 report evaluated the decision to bail out banks in 2008 using cost analysis. It is an example of the political power of experts that has a lot to do with the quest for social peace and less to do with truth. The rescue package cost enough to finance the national health service for 8 years and the national debt doubled 2007 to 2011. Decisions came from a small group of politicians and advisers. The impact of a bank collapse, the lack of cash and credit, on day-to-day life would have been huge. “Money performs a basic peacekeeping function.” After the bank bailout, technocrats emerged with more power. The slow recovery was overseen by central banks staffed by unelected experts focused on preventing renewed collapse. The technocrats ran this making quick-fire decisions of great consequence without consultation or public debate. It is difficult to know if this “Quantitative Easing” process worked well. But it benefited the wealthy by inflating the price of assets like real estate. The process coincided with the arrival of the Tea Party movement in the US. Politically appointed experts and politically aligned civil society think tanks now tie together the pursuit of facts and the pursuit of power. To understand the growth side by side of experts and modern government we go back to a time when war and peace were entangled and questions of truth were matters of life and death. Constant physical threats gave rise to a premium in Europe for keeping the peace. Out of this grew government with a professional civil service, professional salaried military, expert economic advisers, publicly funded science and the Bank of England. The Escape from War section begins with philosopher Hobbes in exile in France from the English Civil War, 1642-1651. In Europe, the Thirty Years War involving protestant states and catholic states raged from 1618. Hobbes felt that philosophy and science should provide a peaceful basis for consensus and avoiding violent conflict. Reason could operate on secular lines and philosophy could guide scientific enquiry. Strict rational building sets one building block on another, testing each proposition in turn in a painstaking fashion. Hobbes hoped that in this manner questions of natural philosophy could be answered in ways that everyone could accept – and social conflict would be over. Picturing the World. The world philosophy dominated by philosopher Descartes considered the mind an observatory through which a separate physical world could be inspected, criticized, replicated in scientific models, committed to paper and shared. This camera mind gives special place to the visual. Senses like “gut feeling” do not generate reliable knowledge. The philosophy made possible an authoritative rational perspective on things, but a person becomes an isolated observer, cut off from the physical world. Feelings are things that afflict the body. The philosophy retreats from everyday experience, downgrading appearances and sensations. Hobbes followed the split of mind from body. Science could study laws of nature by a combination of mathematics and the notion of cause and effect, putting an emphasis on reason. But people trust appearances and gut instinct. And questions of truth have always been tied up in politics. People don’t use language in the same way. They only know their own thinking and they place greater weight on their own idea of truth. The threat everyone faces is from each other – trust and peaceful exchange is hard to achieve. Violence is inevitable because everyone is fearful of and vulnerable to the other. Violence is a state of mind, mainly paranoia, as much as a physical act. Violence is often the product of fear- so that reducing fear reduces violence. Lack of safety is felt rather than known. Peace at all Costs. Hobbes’ solution is that everyone submits their wills to one person, “the sovereign,” who decides for them. People create an institution that everyone agrees to obey in return for freedom from fear and violence from the others. The thorny questions are passed to the sovereign to arbitrate. Today the state is that sovereign. The brain is 30% allocated to reasoning and 70% protection and managing bodily functions. When danger arises, physical response takes over. Preventing such reaction matters for a society based on reason. Impulses and threats are to be kept out of politics. Everyone’s interest is in escaping fear and so self- interest in self-preservation became the basis of Hobbes’ ideas of law, justice and government. Promises are trustworthy because the law comes backed by fearsome punishments. Fear, a primitive human emotion, becomes the one certainty on which the institutions of law and society could be built. We fear the common power of the sovereign – not each other. Paranoia gives way to deference. For this to work the state must have absolute power. There is no middle ground. This “brutal binary” of Hobbes’ logic can lead to exceptional and extraordinary measures simply because they are necessary to uphold peace. As new risks emerge, the state must find new techniques to preserve its monopoly on violence. Cyberattack and hate speech pull the state into more areas of life. The separation of situations of war and peace with parallel systems governing civilian activity inside borders and military activity outside them is of huge importance. Today assassinations with drones, Russian killing with nerve gas in the UK, occur with no formal declaration of war. The starting point of the selfish fearful individual forms a general template – for example seeking to maximize our own satisfaction in economics. If we were not led to fear mortality but to follow irrational obsessions rituals and desires, the argument for sovereignty fails. This would apply to suicide bombers. Describing Brexit as self-harm implies it is senseless – but what if people deem some things worth suffering for? Hobbs leaves out a purpose of life. Death is something to be avoided and the human need to make death meaningful and memorable is ignored. The desire for the heroic could mean as much as the desire for protection. His position is understandable given the civil and religious conflict Hobbes lived through. But is delaying death always better than confronting it? Religious and moral ideals provoked violence, and reason offered a way out. It is possible for the state to act for us all if we all agree to respect it. This is not a democratic vision and yet Hobbes took every member of society’s interest into account. Trust is essential, but does trust need force? The Civility of Facts. Trust in action: shareholders are told of reduced dividends for the quarter because sales were down. Shareholders accept that. A house burns. The owner claims a payout from the insurance company and receives one. Recording instruments and techniques are in place so that words become trustworthy. Such techniques go back to the 17th century illustrating a way that social interactions can occur on the basis of facts when individuals follow the protocols for recording. There were innovators who learned to record facts out of their day to day experiences. They had experience and became experts. Trust could be established by specialized instruments and artifacts - pen, paper and money. The spread of commercial practices underpinned by experts like brokers and accountants avoided both violence and state control. Merchants could operate across distances and religious and cultural boundaries. They became readers of newspapers that emerged in Northern Europe and Holland in particular before establishing in London and Boston. The scientific revolution grew with the Royal Society in England, which established norms for experimenting in natural science. Credibility depended on the facts and arguments not the author – the approach that led to peer review today. The Royal Society recorded deliberations and made these open to scientific communities across Europe. Open available data is a basis for establishing truth and related trust. It was argued then, as it can be now to deny climate change, that these are members of an elite operating like a religious cult – they only look for evidence supporting their beliefs. If they don’t offer consensus, their facts are fraught with politics. The Royal Society practices aimed to minimize such charges but to respect each other by civil and peaceful disagreement. The sovereign of Hobbes would represent the public by defining justice, and the scientists would do so by defining reality – producing a social and natural world we could all accept. Language is used in a strict independent fashion supposedly immune to political or cultural influence. The sense that the claims are bogus produces the resentment of today. The sense that they follow their own political agendas and self-interest is augmented by tales of moral failings. Objectivity is seen as unemotional and uncaring. The neutral objective language adds to the sense of elitism. As the bankers in the 2008 crash showed, the fact reporting and the law making cannot be separated. The convergence of political and scientific authority is “technocracy.” The First Technocrats. Beginning with the 1651 end of Civil War in England and 1648 end of Thirty Years War in Europe technocratic societies emerged. War and peace were separated. A regular army was paid for and housed by the state. Collecting, storing and publishing data and mercantile accounting for taxes spread to government with a growth in civil servants. New communities of expertise developed. In 1694 the Bank of England was established to allow the state to raise money to finance war. It was a time of imagining uses for mathematics and data in society, and reference books appeared. The life of Petty illustrates the kind of technocrat emerging. Of modest birth, he applied his mind to medicine, cartography and economics, moving from one country to another and from one elite group to another. A cross channel cabin boy, he made money trading his own goods, moved to London and joined the Navy. At 20, he moved to Holland and studied mathematics and anatomy then took this technical training to Paris where he met Hobbes. He became Hobbes assistant. He returned to England, studied at Oxford and became a founder member of the Royal Society. Working as a physician in Cromwell’s army he won a contract to estimate the size of reconquered territory in Ireland – the ground-breaking Downs Survey which took only 13 months and could be understood by soldiers who were willing to accept its findings. He pushed facts and figures in government. Indeed, his major book was about what we would call “evidence based policy.” Why would such technocrats now attract hostility? The Violence of Experts. Petty’s Downs Survey came after Cromwell had brutally put down an Irish rebellion. The expertise that Petty pioneered is tangled with the development of colonialism and slavery. Censuses, surveys and maps are a priority for those who are governing people they don’t otherwise know. Developing societies have been test beds for economic policy, for drug trials and for centres of learning. Political opposition to expert knowledge was always there. It was just not seen by Westerners. That has changed. Technocrats are seen as quasi-colonial tools of domination. Even if not oppressed, people feel belittled in their daily lives. EU technocrats are twice as distanced from ordinary people as national technocrats. European “elites” view the EU as having delivered peace. Other members of the public see it as removing national borders, uncontrolled immigration, a refugee crisis and a single currency. Modern bureaucratic government is seen as the enemy. The nativist idea that a nation needs reclaiming from elites echoes anti-colonial nationalism. Rural resentment of universities and big cities comes from their sense that a group of technocrats is governing in its own interest. Racist and ethno-nationalist groups take the language of minorities and argue they themselves are the downtrodden. This is shocking, but economic and social inequalities have put a wall between centres of elite power and people at large. Technocrat overreach can be blamed. Technocrats talk about unemployment but cannot know what it feels like. The state looks like a game for insiders. 3. Progress in Question Feeling beyond statistics. There can be political disagreements in democracy but some things must sit outside politics if peaceful disputes are to go on – such as basic facts of economics and statistics. Consensus is expected on GDP, life expectancy and income inequality. But these are losing their power to end disputes. In Britain, 55% believed the government was hiding the truth about the number of immigrants. With confidence in the media in decline and the spin on statistics everywhere, fact-checking websites have emerged. Campaigns without statistical credibility can be successful. For the Brexit vote experts were used, but people are dulled to numbers and cannot distinguish experts from politicians. As trust in governments declines, introducing statistics and economics provokes anger because it is felt as an elitist framing of an issue. People don’t care that migration helps the GDP. When evidence no longer builds consensus that opens deeper discussions. Picturing a Society. John Crauper, a 17th century draper, got interested in death; his story shows how numbers got into policy. London parishes had a system of recording deaths. With mathematical modelling Crauper calculated the probability of different age groups dying and therefore the life expectancy. He published it at the Royal Society. Charles II wanted such data to prepare for plagues, for raising an army, and for taxes. The project rests on assumptions that people react to their environment in the same way and with a simple psychology. The model then follows basic cause and effect. The simple psychology was that people wanted safety but also some prosperity. Rulers find demography helpful, but the elite have a different perspective, and different assumptions, from ordinary people. Tables of mortality do little to help someone find meaning in life. And social life has lots of things that defy arithmetic. Only by assuming everyone wants to work for money can we define statistical “unemployment.” Only by assuming everyone wants everything as cheap as possible can we use market prices to determine the value of goods. And so it goes on with society’s statistics. The Measure of Progress. The 18th century pioneers of statistics wanted to make society better and the collective dream of progress gave rise to the cold basic statistics - GDP, life expectancy, literacy rates. As statistics became more widespread, they became National Statistics and were part of defining a national citizen. The idea of progress was part of the Enlightenment and reached a peak in the French Revolution of 1789. We were on a journey from a past veiled in ignorance and superstition to a future of freedom and reason. Statistics provided the measure of this progress. Post WWII developments created new bodies with GDP foremost – e.g. the UN, OECD. People knew that the average may not apply to them but hoped that society overall might be improving. Numbers let us see society objectively, but coldly and without emotion. And this objectivity can be weaponized. Politicians can ask consultants to produce numbers to suit their projects. Now this cloak of numbers is losing its magic. How Social and Economic Reality falls Apart. The US GDP in 2016 was 3 times that in 1970 and the GDP per person more than doubled from $25,000 in 1978 to over $50,000 in 2016. Inflation was low. Job creation was positive. The rage and the Trump election were in part from inequality. While overall income rose 58%, the income of the bottom half fell by 1%. The top 10% experienced a 115% income increase: the top 0.001% experienced a 685% increase. For about a century rich US states and poor US states converged economically. Then around 1990 they began to diverge with political consequences in 2016. Britain has a similar story of rich and poor regions and the outcome of the Brexit vote. From 2010 to 2015 incomes rose in the London area by 14% and fell by 8% in Yorkshire and Humberside. National statistics don’t reveal change at the sub-national level. Fluctuations can be expected. However, if the same regions and populations are always losing that is a problem and the “expert” government is thrown into doubt. The Problem of Intensity. Statistics capture the number of people but know nothing about how intensely they experience something. Counting “dead” or “alive” gets complicated with today’s many identities. Opinion polls got elections wrong because they did not know whether the person felt strongly enough to vote. Getting data is now harder. In 1980 72% of people who were phoned answered a polling interview; in 2016 it was 10%. Political alienation means not voting unless a leader or campaign can convert alienation into anger - because anger can be converted into a vote. Measuring unemployment has become harder. There were employed, unemployed seeking work and non-employed – traditionally women. Non-employed numbers fell as women went to work but there could be unemployed men. Underemployed, who have some work but not enough, are a complication that can get mixed in with self-employed. The psychological stress of not enough work is considerable. The recovery from the 2008-09 crash brought with it falling quality of jobs, rising cost of living and shrinking government services. The emotional and physical experience of daily life got worse. Employment data may have looked good, but a large number of young people never got started in England and France. In these circumstances less- statistical explanations gain credibility. Once More with Feeling. Social impact of models of development began in the 1990s when the global economy took off. Those times featured centres of innovation around university towns for a knowledge economy. The application was limited, but London and New York boomed. The prosperity of urban graduates came at the cost of rural, ex-industrial and former mining regions. The model fuelled a graduate v non graduate divide in the US. Coastal US areas, big cities and university towns vote democrat, the rest votes Republican. It divides countries down the middle. The UK EU vote made this same split. Major cities and university towns voted stay, the rest voted go. For those untouched by growing GDP, other sources of identity and history become important and nationalism is a candidate. Nations are imagined communities in which vast numbers of people buy into a single fiction of what they hold in common. For those who accept the GDP statistical scheme, the present is better than the past. Not so for those bound by the romantic ideals of blood and soil. They know their father was better off than they are. Narratives that explain their sense of suffering experienced matter. Economics is supposed to be an everyone wins game in which the rich have not taken anything from the poor. Nevertheless, the economy grants status to people. There is a feeling of deprivation from the awareness that one has been overtaken in income growth. This can become strong resentment. The exorbitant salaries of CEOs arise from a need to uphold their self-worth viz a viz the other CEOs – income beyond a certain point is objectively not necessary. The Blindness of Facts. When statistics keep to the basic facts, they hide truths about the human condition and the everyday experience of market forces. Dismissal of concerns feels like a punishment. It feels worse if politicians are talking about progress. One’s memories of thriving manufacturing or mining towns, now derelict, are painful. The way inequality and injustice impact us physically, determining how and when we die, could undermine hope for a scientifically governed society. 4. The Body Politic Feeling beyond Medicine. How people feel about their human body and others marks a big schism. Those linked to nationalist parties have below average health prospects and life expectancy. They are more likely to have “authoritarian values” – belief in using the death penalty, physical punishment of children, torture – settling life and death matters in public and giving vent to anger. Guilt means pain; innocence means comfort. Interestingly, as trust in politicians, journalists and the judiciary falls, trust in doctors and nurses in the UK is rising. Awareness of mortality is universal, but sectors of society feel unusually fearful and vulnerable. For them, this elevates issues of health, physical care and physical punishment in discourse. Medical progress has been remarkable in part because the body could be studied like anything else without particular moral or political concerns. Now ailments, fears and resentments are tangled in disputes over homeopathy and vaccinations. In several developed societies people are unwilling to treat physical health as a matter for the scientific community to solve. Under the skin. Medicine began when dissecting dead bodies became possible in the 14th century. In the mid 17th century it became an exploration of how things worked. The body was distinct from the soul and thus examining the mechanical body was free from religious controversy. However, ordinary people were uncomfortable. Treating the diseased as physical objects seemed to violate something moral. Modern medicine follows a model: a patient presents a symptom to a doctor who uses it to diagnose some cause. The layman works with feelings and on surfaces, the medic delves beneath. A trust is needed to accept the doctor’s assessment above one’s own sense of the problem. People live longer. Resistance to medical research links to not wanting to accept (?) that the human body is just another object. That scientific view does some violence to instinctive views of memory and mourning. The quest for something more symbolic may be because governments have not kept their side of the bargain in keeping us all safe. And progress itself is then rejected. Physical Progress in Question. In 2016 Trump supporters were notably inferior in physical condition to Clinton supporters; divisions like city/rural, college/non-college divides extended to physical health divisions. A 2015 report found a rise in mortality for middle aged white males from medical conditions and suicide, with cases concentrated in economically struggling rural areas. In 2015 life expectancy in the US started to fall while in the UK there was rising mortality and falling life expectancy largely resulting from social care cuts to the elderly. Living in Chelsea brought a life expectancy of 83. In Blackpool it was 74. Mortality in young men has been falling in the South of the UK but in 2011 it began rising in the North. Austerity after 2008 brought similar effects in Southern Europe. For some, this signals a breach of the social contract: no violence, no heroism and no existential drama in return for becoming progressively better off physically and economically. If physical and economic goods are not delivered, these groups react generally against the progressive model. And people who engage in populist movements have a visceral bodily dimension – health inequalities – living in regions of low life expectancy and lower health outcomes. Democracy as a space where people participate through reasoned verbal dialogue is threatened by physical condition and future prospects as well as by values or preferences. The experience of physical deterioration gives desires for different political rules altogether – without experts of technocrats. Psychosomatic Politics. The 2015 report found a rise in the number of Americans living with chronic pain that was most pronounced in the middle-aged white sector. Aging populations in Europe display rising rates of pain, as do 1/3 to 1/2 of all adults in the UK. Medical advances keep people alive longer but there is rising physical pain among these older people. Psychosomatic health is where mind and body interact. Physical injuries can be seen. To have pain is certain but to hear about another’s pain is to have doubts. The sufferer depends on others for believing and empathizing. The politics is in differing views of who is credible and who deserves empathy. Pain spans the mind and body – those with pain are more susceptible to depression and mental health issues. There are cultural variations in the experience and reporting of pain. Pain was initially regarded as part of health. In the late 19th century the use of anaesthetics widened. In recent decades, the status of pain has changed. The McGill Pain Questionnaire made it a medical fact and in Western societies relieving pain such as that of cancer sufferers became a moral obligation. Opiates like heroin and morphine were resisted on account of addictive properties. Then over the 1980s pharmaceutical companies and patient groups pressed for their use in other situations like back pain. In the 60s a new neurological paradigm emerged that showed that physical back pain is not intrinsically different from psychological loneliness pain. The mind and body use the same circuits. Feelings are the problem. This questions the role of the expert. Treating the Symptom. Just curing pain as opposed to a disease questions the authority of medical expertise. Pain is psychological and cultural and so medicine and politics are mixed. Pain grew in importance because it was felt that pain itself was bad – but that is a moral judgment. By 1980 new medical theories of depression took hold and misery moved from symptom to disorder. By the 1990s, therapeutic intervention aimed to remove unhappiness or add happiness. Pain and mental illness were collapsing into each other. Is the doctor’s function just to remove symptoms rather than deal with an underlying source? Without the latter there is no meaning or context. In earlier times pain might have been a social or religious punishment for a crime or sin. Pain demands an explanation – handing out pills to enable daily life to continue lacks an essential narrative. The alternative is to replace the whole health progress narrative with control. Taking Back Control. WWI shell shock victims’ unconscious minds kept returning them to traumatic experiences. Freud suggested this destructive instinct drives us to restore an earlier state of things that gives a sense of control in the process. Vietnam war veterans had post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Some kinds of suffering we cannot let go of. The neuroscience of stress finds that when survival is threatened adrenaline is released enabling rapid action – fight or flight. Subsequently, cortisol is released which returns things to normal. Some reminder of a traumatic event can introduce panic. PTSD makes it harder to experience normal emotions so that stress may be sought by a sufferer just to have any feelings about anything. Originally found in veterans, it has also been found in some abusive relationships or assaults. PTSD has raised questions of traditional notions of harm. Language can inflict real harm beyond the usual association of threatening language and violence. PTSD has taken on political and cultural significance. The interplay between disempowerment, memory, stress, repetitive behaviour offers a way of making sense of many current forms of unhappiness. The Injury of Disempowerment. Disempowerment, not pain is the essence of trauma - PTSD can come from an assault or car crash in which a person has felt helpless. Seeking control over suffering can take the form of self harm – poison, suicide, cutting. This can occur when it is the only freedom left. It can apply to prisoners or young women who feel trapped by exacting standards of appearance and behaviour. The issue of control is also relevant for the midlife mortality spike. The launch of OxyContin began an opiate abuse epidemic that spread across America. Between 1999 and 2017, 200,000 died - more deaths than from the Vietnam war. The pharmaceutical industry and doctors were complicit in this epidemic. The epidemic occurred in suburbs and economically depressed rural areas so there was not the violence associated with drugs like crack cocaine. The epidemic is in part tied to consumer capitalism. The notion that nobody should have to endure pain developed and combined with the profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies. The drugs are horribly addictive and hard to break away from because of the sense of control they give while the drug experience lasts and the sense of disempowerment that returns when it is over. Gambling and heroin give the same sense of control while the high lasts. These aspects tend to be overlooked in discussions of public health and well-being. Taking control of feelings even if that means inflicting pain brings relief. Desperation for control is a political syndrome in which disenfranchised groups might sabotage their own prosperity if that grants a little more agency over their own future. Better perpetrate harm than always be the victim even if it is harm to oneself. In Search of Empathy. People will search for recognition of their suffering and explanations for it. Populist leaders have visited depressed areas and conveyed empathy to people ignored in ways that mainstream politicians do not do as convincingly. Political threats led by media, business or political margins can perform a powerful function when they give voice to pain otherwise hidden. Populist leadership is disturbing when it converts distress and disempowerment into hatred. People seeking empathy can take several political directions, but nationalism is seductive. The leader promises to restore things as they were – including capital punishment, back breaking physical work, patriarchal domination etc. This does not make life more pleasurable - it promised to restore a political order that made sense despite harshness. It rejects progress in all its forms. It is troubling that at least at the rhetorical level it is also a rejection of peace. The language of politics becomes violent and democracy becomes more violent, with institutions weaponized. In the nationalist imagination, war offers a form of community and emotional empathy. It provides recognition, explanation, and commemoration of pain. Paradoxically, nationalism is often kindled by defeat: the British solidarity formed fleeing Dunkirk; the common identity of the American South forged in the defeat in the Civil War. War helps to narrate pain. It does not treat pain. Scientific expertise and modern government established a basis for civic interaction from which violence had been eliminated. The boundary between war and peace was unambiguous. Now the boundary is blurring. There are reasons. War is attractive because it is a form of politics where feelings matter. Part 2 The Rise of Feelings 5. Knowledge for War Secrecy, sentiment and real-time intelligence. Russian General Gerasimov wrote that war is no longer declared and non-military means of war could be more effective - perhaps explaining Russia’s use of cyberwar, online trolling and fake news to create civic unrest and interference in Western elections. This has implications for peace. If civic and economic mechanisms are weaponized then areas of peaceful exchange become combative and uncertain in like manner; trolls and fringe groups use public argument as warfare with repeated attacks on public figures to discredit and intimidate them. It’s not just Russia. Businesses and political parties use Facebook to tailor communications for different psychological profiles. The secrecy of that is more consistent with war than peace. Warfare requires knowledge different from peacetime. Facts establish a common basis for agreement that can build peace and questions of truth are outside politics. Knowledge for combat, on the other hand, is kept hidden with efforts to mislead the enemy. Science and expertise have much to offer, but lose their founding principles when applied to war where speed of research and advice is all important. Emotions take on a new importance. Combat requires aggression, solidarity, a belief in one’s superiority and sometimes assuming enemy inhumanity. Undermining the spirit of the enemy is an important tactic. War elevates feelings of status. Some emotions have fundamental value: courage; stamina; optimism and aggression. Feeling becomes navigational when without agreed facts each side must use combinations of private information and instinct. Increasing human senses to detect threats – like developing radar -- is as important as making new weapons. Mobilizing the masses. War changed after the 1789 French revolution with Napoleon’s arrival. Popular revolutionary spirit gave way to military fervour. Conscription began in 1793 giving rise to a huge army. This was not the traditional collection of undesirables and mercenaries led by an old nobleman, but people with a public enthusiasm. Women and children became mobilized into economic production. Every member of society was given value. Napoleon’s conscripted army used new tactics – and something that developed into the distribution network. No state had organized so much of its administrative capacity to war – horses, textiles, agriculture - and introduced rationing among civilians. After this a new style of government would be needed. A Prussian army man, von Clausewitz, was fascinated by Napoleon and realized that the mobilizing of an entire population behind a war was new; he wrote On War. It regained fashion after the Vietnam War as did his notion “war is the continuation of politics by other means” that is consistent with the thinking of Russian General Gerasimov. The word “war” is now part of civilian politics. There are wars on crime and on drugs and there are social justice warriors. These are not real wars but they serve to mobilize supporters and frighten opponents. The power of facts and expertise to settle disputes is fading. Framing cultural and political conflicts as wars resonates and it is important to figure out why. We need to see war’s appeal and its threat. The separation of mind and body is replaced with a fusion of instinct, emotion and calculation. The separation of war and peace is blurred. Bookkeeping and scientific publication is replaced by military intelligence, real-time decisions and sensory devices. From “facts” to “intelligence.” From the perspective of 17th century when science was open to public scrutiny and was separate from emotions or politics, war can do tremendous damage to truth. Yet war has been a catalyst for scientific and technological advances like the computer, game theory and climate science. Science and technology became more intimate, R&D. The challenge is taking decisions if facts are not available. From Napoleon’s time, numbers mattered – the size of the armed force and the resources behind it. But war is also a game of detection and awareness that puts a premium on speeding up the getting and processing of information. The Nose surpasses the Eye. Clausewitz felt that a great general had an instinct for what to pay attention to in a complex fast-moving environment: “scent out the truth.” Sight and sound are usually more trusted senses, and in the military “scenting the truth” became a quest for technologies: seismic centres for nuclear tests; water-boarding to get information from Al Qaeda; satellites and spy planes. The flip side is secrecy and encrypting with growing numbers of things secret on account of national security. The seventeenth century model of facts and truth as a basis for public consensus collapses if the facts cannot be known. But things change with the needs for war. Techniques are needed to help fast decision-making by military strategists. The Language of the Body. By the 19th century the mind was just another part of the body; thinking was scientifically studied, and facial and bodily expressions could be observed and classified by desires and wants for the advertising industry. Techniques of detecting emotion threaten privacy and enable propaganda. The role of emotion arose in war – the role of the enthusiasm of Napoleon’s forces and the use of bombing to undermine morale in WWII. War aims to boost morale, to discount pain and fear, and to emphasize honour and renown. Collectivizing Pain. If war was an extension of politics, peacetime was a prelude to war. Clausewitz wanted a national program to develop courage and enthusiasm for war. Before mass literacy allowed promotion of general national myths, Clausewitz figured resentment over past losses was a powerful tool. People resent a loss far more than they relish [you need some kind of verb here; I don’t think you want it to read as “resent a gain”] a gain in war - as in economics. Having lost can be mobilizing. Politics can revisit losses to mobilize support like Trump did with America’s imagined defeats on the world stage. “Peace loving” countries are those that have triumphed – that is their weakness. Being small and weak gains strength inflicting harm on the strong like guerrillas, computer hackers, suicide bombers and internet trolls do. They have little power to lose. Resentment can even lead to self-sabotage. Resentful people don’t care about being worse off after Brexit. From consensus to coordination. The Napoleonic style great leader has the tenacity to stick to their strategy and beliefs even in the absence of facts. Whether politician, general or CEO the leader has an intellect that steers in a bewildering world focusing only on what is deemed important. The particular knowledge is a tool to act on the world and the minds of others. It no longer involves honesty, but resolution; no longer reporting accurately on the world, but dominating it. Business leadership says the challenge of steering through changing situations is combining instincts, emotions and knowledge for rapid decision-making. Propaganda is not criticized because people are being lied to but because the distinction between fact and fiction has become irrelevant. Language becomes like a set of military commands unconnected to facts but taking into account the emotional and psychological make-up of the audience. As politics becomes more like warfare, words are weapons chosen to inspire or enrage one’s own side and to demoralize or hurt the other side. “Knowledge” is not for accuracy, but for steering the decision maker through chaos. In the modern war or corporate strategy what emerges is less about getting social consensus and more about social coordination. The leader’s basic injunction is follow me. The notions from war now extend in society including how businesses maintain their advantages and public influence. 6. Guessing Games Market sentiment and the price of knowledge. Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal and venture capitalist has a philosophy built around his belief in entrepreneurship. The world is a number of secrets waiting to be exploited by entrepreneurs then guarded by them to become future business empires. For this, traditional scientific research is of little value. Scientists lack the passion to identify or guard secrets. Thiel and his Palantir data analytics company that was originally founded for counter terrorism and counter insurgency consultancy, provide security and border control services to governments around the world. Thiel has extreme libertarian views, a deep dislike for pacifism, and accuses Hobbes of celebrating the cowardly life rather than heroic but meaningless death. Yet such thinking lies behind the policy push for a “knowledge economy.” Knowledge as a business instrument attracts military techniques into business affairs. The origins of market “warfare” trace to early 20th century Vienna. The warrior entrepreneur. After World War I Austrian philosopher Neurath noted that states could manage the wartime economy more efficiently than private business and thought this might be true in peace – it suggested the superiority of socialism. Ludvig von Mises conceded that for a simple agrarian economy planning could work. But he argued that for a complex economy the data and calculations needed to plan took too long whereas the free market could calculate the value of goods in real time. Markets were also effective ways of gauging the many tastes and opinions by responding rapidly to consumer preferences. Like the military, markets coordinate people without a need for consensus. Mises became the hero of the US libertarians in the 60s. Mises also paved the way of thinking for the entrepreneur like Thiel. The analogy between business leaders and military was made explicit by Viennese economist Schumpeter in 1930. The free marketeers were not arguing businesses are always right, but that only a system of flexible prices could ensure that errors came to light. In a competitive economy bad strategies would soon be abandoned. The role of governments was not planning the economy but protecting property. Funded by wealthy donors the US libertarian movement has worked tirelessly against social and economic regulations. Useful knowledge. Another WWI Austrian product was Hayek. His work defended practical know-how and instinct such as that of a business person and attacked arrogant experts who claim to know how society works. Hayek found Mises’ work compelling and he worked as Mises’ assistant before taking a junior lectureship at the University of Vienna in 1929. During the 1930s and 40s he was employed at the London School of Economics where he explored the use of knowledge and who benefitted. He wrote of unorganized knowledge beyond scientific knowledge. Statisticians might be able to spot laws, but they are less useful than managers, entrepreneurs and engineers who apply their knowledge in concrete situations. The unorganized knowledge is difficult to publish. It is personal. Efforts to produce generally agreed facts have a dampening effect on enterprise. They threaten freedom. Hayek’s 1944 classic book The Road to Serfdom made him a cult figure in the US. He was a hero to Milton Friedman and spent the 1950s at the University of Chicago. He was subsequently lauded by free-marketeers Reagan and Thatcher. Against experts. Hayek became concerned with intellectual socialist tendencies and their view that there are laws governing society as a whole. To understand social and economic changes Hayek believed it would be more useful to ask the people making changes happen. Putting money into scientific research created a cadre of intellectuals controlling institutions with minimal competition whose “objective” views shaped how people were governed – like views on smoking or climate change. He formed societies to promote libertarian views and to challenge delusions of objectivity. Injecting competition into academic cartels reaped dividends for business at a terrible cost. Oil companies through opaque bodies like the Donors Trust funnelled money to institutes and quasi academics willing to challenge the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels caused climate change. Phony science can be demolished, but it takes time. In the case of climate change, it may be far too late. Real time knowing. From 1970 on, using Keynesian theory to manage economies broke down for various circumstances. The end of fixed currency exchange and border controls on currency movement meant the value of money was set by international markets. Economic planners were not in vogue and Mises, Hayek and Freedman were. In the 1980s with the victories of Reagan and Thatcher a new orthodoxy had emerged. It reduced the need for experts and for “truth.” That was replaced by coordinating people peacefully in real time. The market is a kind of “post truth” institution saving us from having to know what is going on overall. Markets have a populist anti-intellectual aspect. The market is a mass sensory device gauging our feelings. While the market takes responsibility for knowledge, the human being simply makes choices that don’t require objective knowledge or rationality. Distinctions between good and bad decisions and true and false opinions is for the market to sort out. To live in the free market society that is still with us is to live with constant flexibility and reactivity. Individuals must focus less on truth or objectivity and more on being adaptable. Education matters less for knowledge than for employability. “Networking” seeks knowledge others don’t have for the competition of distinguishing oneself in qualifications, image-making and self-management. And this flows into the academic realm with pressures to publish and to patent quickly. Universities manage images and market to appear “excellent” in the overall market. More research is called for at higher speed. The market does not require any consensus of what is going on - it just coordinates a lot of contradictory perspectives, ideas and sentiments relieving governments and experts of the need to take responsibility. The problem is that there is a radical sense of egalitarianism in all this that is, in real material terms, anything but egalitarian. Survival of the truest. The Napoleonic willpower and strategic brilliance bending the world to his vision is disruptive. Darwin’s evolution is the result of freakish biological disruptive accidents. The initial disruption is superior and so becomes the new norm. This idea moved into science, social evolution and economics with the philosopher Karl Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies and with Stumpeter’s call on entrepreneurs to unleash “creative destruction” on the economy. The pursuit of wealth, power and truth merge. Prior to 2007, banks deceived customers on the risks of derivatives they were selling because the banks were given AAA ratings by experts who were earning money for providing a rating. Truth loses its meaning in a market governed by subjective impressions and opinions. And the market approach installs social Darwinism as the organizing principle for society, with resultant spiralling inequalities. Manufacturing stopped in Indiana not because it was not productive. Attacks on socialized health changed the mortality rate of poor Americans. The stress of the dwindling chance of winning gave rise to the growth in physical pain. The post-industrial economy throws more and more onto their physical bodies forcing them to work as cycle couriers or sex workers to get by. The “gig economy” creates flexible low-wage labour markets farming out small chunks of work. In the new age extremely wealthy company owners have huge political autonomy and no need to be public about what they do. Their family becomes the agency that ensures that the huge inequality will outlive the company owner into the next generation. The Darwinian world is uncomfortable for everyone – including the winners. Possibly the Hayek model will end in a system of private empires that are more like states competing with one another – planning to travel to Mars or straddling political and military intelligence operations. The capacity for violence is shifting from states into private hands. War, prison systems, immigration enforcement and border control are increasingly delivered by commercial contractors. Silicon Valley is a central point of challenges. 7. War of Words. From facts to data. Facebook aims to allow thoughts to be transferred. Technologies like DARPA allow limited forms of mind reading. Human languages become incomplete. Thoughts in a mind are a kind of secret and indeed war has had interests in telepathy and the like. The aim of Facebook will require some form of language and it will create privatized communication. That brings questions about the author’s control of which thoughts get released. Given Facebook relies on advertising, the result is likely to be an advanced marketing infrastructure. And a purely physical brain disposes of any notion of a mind that can aim to be objective and can offer expert advice. The physical mind. Computers and their networks began as instruments for war in response to the dangers of aerial attacks – to provide more accurate anti-aircraft guns and detect incoming enemy bombers. Computers met logistical needs – coordinating wartime resources and anticipating the enemy’s (the enemies’ what?). The machines were programmed by humans but then they did the calculations on their own. The programs are a set of commands and this is the form taken by communication. Weaponizing the mind. As the cold war moved to ballistic missiles, these technologies moved faster than the human mind’s ability to monitor and control them. The Cold War became conflict between the national intelligence infrastructures of countries – espionage and artificial intelligence. After the Cold War the internet was briefly idealistic and democratic and it is now established as a civilian technology albeit with some of its military character in its ability to serve governments and businesses for surveillance, pattern recognition and control. Now the technologies of Silicon Valley are not advancing scientific goals of factual consensus or objectivity but military-type goals of effective coordination leading to victory. Between mind and world. Internet and smartphone users are aware of the surveillance nature of the technologies they use. The companies learn a lot about their users. “Big Data” differs from traditional statistics. In one, a small known group of experts collects statistics and makes them public. In the other, a large group of individuals make their data available to a small group. The bigger difference is philosophical. Descartes’ concept of mind relating to world is now done via the technology – and a particular technology. To communicate, we turn to Facebook; to know, we turn to Google; to go we turn to Uber; to obtain we turn to Amazon. When we do, we leave a footprint in the sand – not of a public beach, but of a private beach. There is no attempt to create an accurate picture of society, but rather to provide something on which we all depend and to capture our movements and sentiments with the utmost sensitivity. The machine analysis of facial movements and body language can determine how someone might be feeling. And this can be done internationally. This has a huge advantage over traditional statistical methods: there are no experts to resent or questions to ponder. From science to data science. Data processing is not done by scientists familiar with a particular social science but typically by mathematicians or physicists, whether the data is bacteria, cars, atmosphere or finance. The data volume is large and is sifted by algorithms. In psychology, data can reveal emotions, behaviours and anxieties across populations and an advertisement can be targeted with precision. But those studying cannot study how political attitudes form or what they are, or which are worth studying. The analyst can only select something that appears meaningful for a client and leave the rest. Clients like banks can obtain algorithms for price movements. Palantir can help security services identify potential threats. These serve strategic goals rather than giving some common reality. And it becomes possible to create a partial or misleading portrait of a person or event that can be dangerous in the hands of those interested in racist or nationalistic policies. Traditional statisticians are concerned that their models are representative of a population. This concern is democratic. In contrast, digital data is what was captured – what it represents is secondary and a civic dimension is hard to sustain. Blanket surveillance creates a rich profile of those it targets but is not typically used for a portrait of society as a whole. Our lives are structured by intelligence techniques designed to plan and resist nuclear attacks. The result is that parts of our lives follow our personal whims but the possibility of peaceful consensus is vanishing. Mobilizing people in quasi-military fashion has reached new technical heights so that political argument, especially online, feels more like conflict. The pursuit of war by others. Computer programmers have little control over the whole, but they do have a power of sabotage. Their humour crosses human language with its metaphor and poetic description, and machine language where a chunk of information is a command to be executed. Gamers cross the same boundary – violence is instrumental and free of ethical concerns as in an ideal for war. Trolls operate in an online space where everything is about point-scoring and controlling the outcome. When it meets ordinary internet users using computers for day to day events it can wreak havoc because it is really a form of guerrilla warfare where those with no power use the only power they have – sabotage. Aspects of troll culture have leaked into mainstream political discourse. Causing offence is seen as a form of victory taken to illegal extremes in hateful and threatening messages sent to public figures, particularly women and civil rights campaigners. The communities seek as much harm as possible then retreat to “it’s all just a joke” or “freedom of speech.” Part of the technique is to mess with anonymity and identification for destructive effect. The scientific review uses anonymity when evaluating a work on its own merits; then the author’s identity emerges if the work is deemed valid. Trolls maximize anonymity for themselves without revealing their identity. Thousands of emails were leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit 2009-11, undermining climate science and the neutrality of climate scientists. The “enemy” is transparent. The perpetrator remains opaque. Russia and private wealth haunt us as we seek explanations for political upheavals and chaos because they are not constrained by public regulation. Sabotaging power. The troll does not aim to gain power but to inflict pain. It is difficult to fight against the powerless because there are no obvious centres of organization – which was why the internet was created in similar fashion. So the internet is useful for those who feel ignored and powerless and desire attention. The internet has been useful for undermining established institutions of democracy – such as mainstream media. Established political party machines can be hacked – as was Hillary Clinton’s – and implausible figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump can impose themselves on organizations that shunned them. The internet meshes with the anti-elitist instincts of the population. The flip side of this dialogue-as-warfare is dialogue-as-empathy. So one set of spaces emerges where differences are presented as violence and another set is created to maximize empathy. Zuckerman claims to want to build a Facebook community that help keeps us safe. That seems similar to nationalistic projects uniting people around their resentments and phobias. And the quest for sanctuaries is not just for the weak and victimized, but those who fear losing their power, or their wealth or their racial advantages. Meanwhile the argument for free speech has collapsed into the nihilistic libertarianism of troll culture and community has morphed into a hyper defensive valorization of intimacy. Mining the crowd. Owning data puts corporations in the monopoly position of controlling prices of goods and services like advertising. They seek to influence politics and civil society in discreet ways. Academic articles about Google were found to be funded by Google without disclosure of the fact. Data secrecy can be countered by open data projects and Twitter has shared some of its feeds with academics. The effect of platforms on behaviour is not well known. Companies do small scale tests on their platforms but such tests become serious when combined with artificial intelligence that can interpret user’s text and photographs. There is paranoia after Facebook sold $100,000 in advertising space to a pro Kremlin Russian “troll farm” in the run up to the 2016 US election, which was seen by 126 million Americans. Earlier elites wanted to monopolize representation; the digital elites seek to monopolize control. And they change politics. Mass democracy aimed at mass public messaging. Now messages are targeted at niche demographics that are invisible to everyone else. The fear is that this could change a vote or make or stop a vote. The internet has become an excellent weapon for sabotage. It makes conventional industries unviable or dependent on structures provided by the likes of Amazon and Facebook, which users use as best they can rather than shape or defend them. This contrasts with the enlightenment when intellectual and political spheres supported institutions like the free press and scholarly debate. In place of society the internet offers war games, and democracy itself is included. The boundary between politics and violence becomes blurred when the purpose of argument is to wreak emotional harm and destabilize agreements. There can be a thrill of watching elites tumble as they underestimate the resentment of the powerless and the violence of new computational instruments at play. But the division between war and peace becomes weakened. 8. Between war and peace. Resisting the new violence. Media and elected governments that deal in words attract suspicion, but those tasked with rescuing and protecting us, such as the military, doctors and nurses still command respect. Government action is slow and unresponsive to people’s needs and feelings right now. Silicon Valley and fascism insist on fixing a problem without debating it first. Economic prosperity and reduced inequality would limit but not prevent this. The role of representative experts – judges, politicians, media – needs change. The notion of science’s studying an on-going natural world needs changes as evidence mounts of wildlife extinction and climate change related to science and technology. Nature gets political. Nuclear weapons linked science to annihilation and removed separation of war and civilian life. Burning fossil fuels changes the earth’s climate. Exceptional storms and becoming familiar. The atmosphere is approaching 1C warmer than in 1880. Even the upper limits of warming aimed for in the Paris climate accord will have an impact on sea levels and agriculture, which is likely to lead to migrations and famines and resource wars. Resistance of diseases to drugs is rising. Antibiotics in farming and poor disposal of agricultural waste provide an environment for the development of super bugs. Then there is extinction of species including amphibians, insects, birds and large mammals. It is no longer possible to study nature in tidy expert categories and model with mathematics. Nature and what is objectively true is tied to the political question of how to survive in peace. The new demands on science involve unclear facts – that is, rapidly evolving and complex, disputed values, high stakes and urgent decision-making. The facts alone won’t save us. Responding to Trump’s response to the science of global warming requires more than attempting to reinforce science and experts. Bravado rationalism assumes that with sufficient freedom of speech consensus can be re-established. Unfortunately, elite appeals to objectivity are growing more vulnerable all the time. It has been shown that it is impossible to separate the rational and emotional functions of the brain as Descartes supposed. Promotion of free speech is itself a trap. Alt-right movements use it to push hateful and threatening messages to minority groups. And free speech has become a cloak for corporate lobbyists to further economic interests. So free speech is best a matter left to be addressed by institutions like student societies. The 17th century model of the scientist preserves for an elite group the right to represent nature and society. The rage this provokes in some disfranchised political quarters is real. We now have a range of media outlets and quasi experts. We may side with the traditional science but we cannot ignore the rest. Most people cannot distinguish the traditional expert from the lobbyists and their think tanks. Science has not engaged the political dimension and doing so makes them similar to the rest. At the same time, there is no choice. The former monopoly will not return. Scientists with credentials, expertise and objectivity have to face up to their new predicament as part of a political situation. The desire for war. Trust in the scientific establishment still polls well, but it lacks the emotional appeal of nationalism, heroism and nostalgia. Elites don’t seem to understand why. Populists are dismissed as bad policy makers. Judgments on supporters are harsher. Nationalism began as a left-wing revolutionary phenomenon offering solidarity and equality in economic systems that corrode those things. There are yearnings for community and popular power that are otherwise not available. War offers a type of togetherness and shared sentiment. The promise of nationalism and of the type of war pioneered by Napoleon is that ordinary individual lives take on meaning. In the absence of religion, war provides the rituals and institutions to publicly acknowledge and sooth pain. The pain relates to ill health, rising mortality rates and authoritarian sympathies. When a political and economic system seems rotten, a liar can voice underlying truth. Self-esteem is more important than prosperity. Progress does not give value to pain. Heroism involving physical or emotional pain does – and has tremendous appeal. Institutions held apart war and peace in the late 17th century. Now “war” appears in economic political and civil institutions. War as cyberwar and as in the broad strategy approach of Russia is already underway. We should face that we are in quasi-war with different forms of violence than those faced by Hobbes. Now consensus may be difficult. But coordination is easier. And the intelligence power of business, computing and the military are growing in its ability to deal with the problems of the Anthropocene. Diverting war. Climate Mobilization seeks to use WWII lessons for a war against global warming – like retooling industries. The Pentagon takes climate change as the main threat to global security. This is an unlikely sign of hope in the face of existential issues that demand a practical response. There is a hunger for changing course. There is a question of technologies originally developed for war could be repurposed to protect human and non-human life. Yet everything should be coordinated – amateurs and experts too. And experts with feelings and political opinions. As ecological problems escalate, rescue operations are aimed at protecting people and nature. Metropolitan centres have been growing apart from smaller rural towns in economy and sense of worth. This may shift in the Anthropocene as the know-how of those living with nature takes on significance alongside the distanced theories. It will be necessary and politically useful. Making promises. Some of the resentment against professional classes has been that their jobs have not been affected by new technologies. However, that could be changing as AI and computers can take on work related to journalists, lawyers, accountants and architects. Robots are the same as us but also unimaginably different. What do we have left? How to make promises was part of the 17th century world. Words were not enough. And violence could result. A powerful state could require rules to allow promises like contracts to become reliable. A promise has a peculiarly binding power because breaking it takes on a significance that can leave emotional and cultural wounds. Behind tales of individual geniuses the Scientific Revolution involved institutional innovation – judging evidence and arguments on their merits, standardized record keeping and reporting. It is difficult to imagine whether a computer could make a promise. The 2007-9 financial crisis arrived from an erosion of promise-making in the financial sector. The mistake redefined a debt as an asset – a source of future income rather than an interpersonal bond that endures over time. Repackaging the right to receive future income from a debtor lost the significance of the person – the people – and whether they could repay. That merely called for insurance. Hayek’s notion of replacing experts with market indicators imploded. Facebook does something equally cynical – using relationships of trust and friendship as a source of surveillance and advertising. Inserting itself into our daily personal and political lives it has achieved unique global influence at a cost to social and political trust. In these intrusions into economic and social life nothing permanent is constructed but a lot is damaged. In Hannah Arendt’s distinction, this is the logic of violence not power. Experts on the old model are more than carriers of knowledge. They overcome conflicts. Cultural and informational wars of the 21 st century might also be overcome if we think about the institutions we need to build to support promise making today. Institutional innovation. Only law can push back on the owners of the digital power of today. Populism originated in 1880s Kansas against the elite monopolies of railroad and oil companies. Anti-trust laws became a vehicle for politicians to show populism right up to the 1970s. Opaque intricacies of economic efficiency have undermined these laws so that monopolies have prospered, with Silicon Valley giants as beneficiaries. New interventions must go beyond breaking up monopolies. For example, a danger in Facebook is that no member of the public can see the full range of personalized political advertisements used – only the ones tailored for them. Unlike statistics, there is no way to see in impersonal form. Platforms could be treated as information fiduciaries or a position of “platform neutrality” could be enforced. But regulators would need the power to deal with social problems beyond those opaque economic efficiency intricacies. The lure of populists is promises – like Trump’s promise of bringing back traditional manufacturing jobs to the midwest. Tea Party enthusiasts felt some moral agreement had been broken when their patience and hard work was no longer enough to allow them to be recognized as respectable citizens. They blamed government rather than business. In this climate, policy makers must find an ability to make and deliver simple realistic life-changing promises. Universal policies like UK Labour’s free school meals for all had appeal. Politics has always had liars, but complexities in policy-making have made politics distant from common sense and reality. Just one or two clear simple policies would help. There is no reason to suppose that the capacity to produce new institutions for social contracts and peace, that was so powerful after WWII, has evaporated. New institutions now would pre-empt violence and not just react to it. Nonviolence. Today’s challenge is finding a shared future world inhabited by beings who think and feel without the elite power of the past. Expertise remains important, but cannot have a monopoly on how society and nature are described, nor for answers to divisive social questions. Language needs to become a tool of promise-making rather than used as a weapon if democracy is to feel less warlike. That depends on the social, economic and environmental situation being taken seriously and the feelings from that situation also being taken seriously. Activism and protest in the non-violent way of Gandhi might be helpful. Politics is being organized around key needs and demands – like Black Lives Matter. The US does not protect all lives equally. Threats to life do not need to be as direct in order to be similarly politicized. The Missing Migrants Project relates to lives taken in overcrowded boats crossing the Mediterranean. This is a big step from the Enlightenment notion of humanity seizing the power of science to move forward as a single united species. The fallout from science includes the gravest threats that face us. Ultra-privileged elites hoard the resources and benefits from science in the form of greater protection from natural disasters and political upheavals and longer healthier lives. Their future cannot include most people. It reveals the libertarian dream of uncoupling scientific and social progress. TOP   Click:

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