Killing the opposition doesn’t prove that you’re right
Maybe I’m a little behind the music here, but it’s just beginning to dawn on me how often we see the phrase, “The two sides cannot agree”, or “negotiators are deadlocked”. Relativists will say, as ever, that it’s always been like that…but it hasn’t. In the 1930s, only one socio-political debate separated people to the point of violence: Nazi vs Soviet ideology. And even there, the majority of people in most countries still said they were on neither side – they were democrats. The Nazis never got the votes of more than 31% of the German electorate.
Extremism of viewpoint is one of the great cancers of our age. Global warming – a subject so vast and complex that the layman at least should be prepared to accept that either side could be right in the end – attracts more venom than any other of which I’m aware – why? Of course, it’s vitally important: but as with the 1930s extremes of politics, a reality neither side can accept is that the overwhelming majority of people simply don’t know…..and they don’t really get anything practical out of the two sides chucking slapstick pies at each other.
The Inflation v Deflation argument has been going on since at least 2004. Now it is at last beginning to look like we’re going to get both. But I’m not God, so I don’t know – do you? No, really – do you?
Only last month, the US Congress took the nation to the brink of technical default. Nobody with a brain expected anyone in that game of chicken to go all the way, but the vast majority of electors were horrified and/or disgusted by it. Powerful evidence of this came this week from Bill McInturf of Public Opinion Strategies, whose poll shows pretty conclusively how much damage this silly playground behaviour did – and not just to the reputation of the American political class.
The debate – if one can grace it with that term – was between one set of infants unable to see that huge increases in public expenditure were a bad idea when the economy was flat…..and another mob in short trousers insisting that taxing 6% of the population (the mega rich) in a way they’d notice less than a gnat’s bite on the ass would scupper The Recovery. (A recovery, by the way, that doesn’t exist with three trillion dollars o help it along).
As a result of the pathetically childish nature of the debate, consumer confidence dropped 15 points in two months to its fourth-lowest level since the POS survey began in 1952, says McInturf.
“Make no mistake,” he insists, “this collapse of economic confidence is not an independent event driven only by economic reality. This sharp a drop in consumer confidence is a direct consequence of the lack confidence in our political system and its leaders.” Market Research used to be my my business: I’ve checked the guy and his survey out, and I’m satisfied he has a point.
And that’s partly why I refer to extreme viewpoints as a socio-cultural cancer. Once such insistence gains ground, liberal democracy has little chance of survival – because each tendency tries to suggest that their way is the only way. And most folks, unsurprisingly, find that scarey: they think, “Maybe I better be one or the other”…when the democratic answer is usually to read the data for yourself and be neither. And if you were educated before 1985, that option is still open to you.
About eight years ago, Michael Bywater wrote a compelling and funny book called Big Babies. It’s main thesis was that the reason why Nanny State puts up f**kwitted signs assuming we’re all five years old is because an increasing number of us appear to be exactly that. Well, another way we display a lack of socialisation – and zero progression into adulthood – is clinging to extreme positions, despite (a) the possibility that the other side is right – or even (b) an overwhelming probability that the other side is right.
Looking at (a) first, never, ever assume without looking at the data that received wisdom is infallible. I was intrigued some years back to find a biochemist who thought the correlation between salt and hypertension wasn’t causal. This struck me at the time as seriously wacky. But over time, I’ve discovered two things: first, a growing majority of medical researchers are convinced that for folks over sixty, declining ability to retain vital body salts makes a nonsense of the advice about reducing salt intake. And second, a vocal BMA minority says the salt thing is a shibboleth based on an assumption of causality years ago following a seminal study.
However, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that in this debate too, there are two sides with little in between.
Taking (b) above, you have to be a major denialist to stick to the idea of a flat Earth, behaviourist views on gender, political support for multiculturalism, and belief that our current capitalist model needs nothing more than a bit of tinkering here and there. Again, I say this not from polemic faith, but from spending the best part of thirty years using published information to make up my own mind – rather than soaking up the drivel emitted by True Believers from Thatcher to Brown via Levitt, Harman and Friedman.
This doesn’t mean we have to be slaves to empiricism: there’s everything to be said for looking at what is, and then aspiring to what could be. But we won’t get anywhere, as Robert Redford recently said, “by simply trashing each other”. And we will go backwards if – like the Guardian and the pc Left – we ignore each and every finding we don’t like.
The Slog 