Political narratives

Unless we postulate an all-seeing, all-judging God, there is no one true narrative about any person or sequence of social events we care to specify. For each case, there are countless possible narratives or variations of narratives which could be seen to fit the facts. Much of the variation is value-framework related. Different assumptions regarding moral priorities will produce different interpretations of events, and so different stories.

Personal and ideological narratives are an inevitable part of life, but they should always be seen as highly provisional. Science and reason and common sense can effectively identify false or pathological narratives, those that just don’t fit the facts or which incorporate values which are incompatible with social existence; but science and reason cannot adjudicate on most questions of value. Consequently we are left with a plethora of more or less plausible but incompatible narratives.

The tradition of classical liberal thinking in the West could cope with this, to a point. It was not geared to prescription or thought control, but was focused on providing a space for (a certain amount of) individual privacy and freedom of thought and action via institutional structures which would allow individuals and groups to interact in productive ways.

F.A. Hayek was a significant 20th-century thinker who tried to crystallize these ideas into an explicit ideology. He emphasized such things as spontaneous order and individual freedom, and he had an entirely process-based notion of justice. Many of his ideas I find persuasive. But my suspicion is that it is a precondition for this kind of liberal polity to work that there be a common culture in place (as there was, in fact, in the world Hayek knew).

We are now in a very different world, having lost, or being in the process of rapidly losing, that common culture and the shared narratives which supported it. Indicative of these changes is the fact that political and legal institutions which once seemed more or less adequate are no longer effective and no longer respected.

Conservative thought (and, significantly, Hayek did not see himself as a conservative) has always been wary of ideologically-driven thinking. For the conservative, the context is crucial, and every context is different. Consequently, the only general prescriptions which are seen to have any worth are cautionary rather than positive. For example, conservatives typically emphasize the inevitability of unintended consequences of political actions. Positive prescriptions need to be tailored to the specific circumstances involved, and based on judgment honed by experience.

Such an outlook can easily lead to a certain detachment and political quietism. I don’t know that this is necessarily such a bad thing. Activists do harm as well as good. It’s well to be aware, at least, that powerful cultural, social and economic forces, well beyond the scope of a human brain to grasp or fully understand, are always in play.

Politically the best we can hope to do, as I see it, is to incorporate small aspects of this vast churning process into plausible narratives so that we may understand these aspects of reality in terms of our own personal value systems and so respond in more or less coherent and meaningful ways.

Narratives can be group-based or individual; they operate on different levels. There are meta-narratives and there are stories focused on particular incidents or individuals. There are private narratives and public narratives (political myths).

Fact-based testing cannot be applied directly to meta-narratives and political myths except to the extent that such myths make specific historical claims. These specific claims can, of course, be tested.

I learned a lesson early in my blogging career about not allowing a convenient meta-narrative to drive one’s thinking about a particular incident.

A local resident, an Iranian immigrant who had converted to Christianity, disappeared. Her Iranian husband talked to the press about threats she had received from extremists, and it was generally thought (and I went along with this) that she had been abducted and perhaps murdered by these extremists. The story played into a well-known meta-narrative about Muslim apostates being punished by the wider Islamic community. If such an abduction (and killing) had happened in the manner in which it was alleged, it would have been a big international story.

It turned out, however, that the woman’s husband had killed her and buried her body in the back garden. What happened certainly did not reflect well on aspects of Iranian and Muslim culture, but it was basically a sad, tragic, personal story without clear political implications.

One meta-narrative (or set of meta-narratives) with geopolitical implications which is depressingly compatible with many observed facts in today’s world relates to the notion that the political system has been corrupted by a system of patronage based around the military-industrial complex and (elite levels of) the political, intelligence and media establishments. President Dwight D. Eisenhower spelled out the dangers in his farewell address to the American public in 1961, and since that time much evidence has accumulated of endemic corruption at the highest levels of government, much of it associated with the arms trade and other “national security” issues.

Meta-narratives can help to make sense of events. They can also encourage confirmation bias, as inconvenient facts are ignored or twisted to fit preconceived ideas. They also play another role: they facilitate communication between those who share the same general framework, while at the same time preventing effective communication between those whose frameworks are different. My distrust of and lack of respect for all but a few mainstream media outlets sometimes make it difficult for me to communicate with people who trust the sources I reject.

This brings me back to my point about a liberal society being dependent on the existence of common frameworks which cut across social divisions. The spectacular failure of public discourse which we are currently witnessing could be seen to be a direct consequence of the lack of common narratives which transcend class and tribal-political boundaries.

A voice from the past underscores the points I am making. Paul Volcker’s politics are not my politics, but he does not see things in a narrowly ideological way.



He is a Democrat, and was at one time an economic advisor to President Obama. He is remembered as the Federal Reserve chair who raised interest rates to very high levels to counter high and persistent inflation in the early 1980s.

Volcker is now 91 and very ill, maybe dying. He recently talked to the New York Times. He sees “a hell of a mess in every direction,” including a lack of basic respect for government institutions.

“Respect for government, respect for the Supreme Court, respect for the president, it’s all gone,” he says. “Even respect for the Federal Reserve.”

“And it’s really bad. At least the military still has all the respect. But I don’t know, how can you run a democracy when nobody believes in the leadership of the country?”

America is developing into a plutocracy: “There is no force on earth that can stand up effectively, year after year, against the thousands of individuals and hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington swamp aimed at influencing the legislative and electoral process.”

Here is one meta-narrative at least upon which the left and the principled right can agree.


[This article was first published at The Electric Agora.]

Hayek and Hobbes

I recently expressed an affinity for the social views of F.A. Hayek, noting that this position might appear to be difficult to reconcile with my fondness for the writings of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).

Hobbes is most famous for his contention that without a strong central authority societies disintegrate into conflict:

[D]uring the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war, as is of every man against everyman ... In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [Leviathan (Basil Blackwell, 1960), p. 82.]

The common power of which Hobbes speaks is conceived as a sovereign individual or group of individuals which is granted supreme power to act 'in those things which concern the common peace and safety.' The sovereign - so conceived - is the source of all law, and rights are a matter of legal definition.

There are obviously conflicts here with the views of Hayek. Hobbes had a major influence on the 19th and 20th-century tradition of legal positivism and the command theory of law, a tradition of thought to which Hayek was steadfastly opposed. Hayek accepted that the idea of law as a command is appropriate in systems of regulation applied to administrators and government officials, but if it is applied to the population at large then everyone is reduced to the status of unpaid servant of the state.

Hayek felt that healthy ideas of the rule of law were undermined in the later 19th century by proponents of legal positivism. The dangerous idea that whatever the government does is right and legal led to the perversion of the Rechtsstaat into the Kulturstaat and to various forms of totalitarianism. It also led to the acceptance of ideas of 'social justice' (involving, amongst other things, the redistribution of private wealth). Hayek believed that laws should not involve arbitrary elements and should be process-based and not directed at particular individuals or towards particular ends. His purpose was to delineate a private sphere where individuals are free to act without fear of coercion by government.

Fundamental to Hayek's position is his rejection of the view that order needs to be created by a sovereign authority. For order arises spontaneously, and any imposed order will - because no central orderer can ever have or process the required information - necessarily be inefficient and oppressive. But I think it's fair to say that Hayek also had a strong belief in individual freedom as a value in itself.

The major threats to individual freedom in Hayek's day were secular totalitarian ideologies (and social democracy which had - as he saw it - a tendency to drift in a totalitarian direction). For Hobbes, however, the main threat was social chaos, but also religious ideologies. Hobbes' sovereign (unlike religious authorities) was not concerned with the private lives of its subjects. Secular totalitarian threats were just not there in 17th-century England, and it is a mistake to see Hobbes as some kind of proto-fascist. Arguably he was just as concerned to protect human freedom as Hayek - and he was certainly opposed to totalitarianism.

Strangely, the tenor of Hobbes' thinking seems quite close to that which led to the development of game theory, one of the most significant new tools of 20th-century economics (and pioneered by Hayek's friend Oskar Morgenstern). Hobbes' suggestion that the individual should first seek peace, but, if betrayed and attacked, is justified in availing himself of 'all helps and advantages of war' to defend himself, approximates to the famous 'tit-for-tat' strategy which generally outperforms other strategies in the 'prisoner's dilemma' game. In one-off versions of the game, the outcome Hobbes predicted occurs and everybody loses (though tit-for-tatters lose less badly than others). But in iterated versions of the game, where artificial agents interact (in what could be seen as a model of society), pockets of spontaneous order and cooperation develop and thrive (providing evidence to support a Hayekian view).

I recognize the reality of spontaneous social order, though I suspect it is not quite so robust as Hayek assumes. As Hobbes (and Hayek in fact) knew from first-hand experience, civil disorder and war are real dangers, and something like Hobbes' sovereign, with strong and undisputed power, may be a necessary condition for peace in many contexts. Certain societies, especially highly cohesive ones with strong systems of morality in place, may be able to exist for long periods without the need for such an authority but history shows that civil conflict can erupt unexpectedly.

Both Hobbes and Hayek saw themselves as men of science, but appreciated also the other dimensions of human culture and the contingency of history. Both men were responding in their work to what they saw as the key social problems of their times in a rational, unsentimental and entirely secular manner. Hobbes' outlook is less colored by religious or metaphysical ideas than that of most of his contemporaries; and, of all the European neo-liberals, Hayek was probably the closest in spirit to logical empiricism, the anti-metaphysical and rigorously secular movement - exemplified in the Vienna Circle - which sought to replace obscurantist philosophies and religions with a view of the world based on science and a new understanding of logic and language.

Who cares about the compatibility or incompatibility of the thought of these two men? Why is the issue even worth raising? Because, I suggest, their differences bring to the fore very important questions about might and right, pragmatism and morality, ends and means.

I have the sense that - for better or for worse - Hayek's thinking retained traces of philosophical idealism, and this may have been what drove him to attempt to justify (certain types of) law on non-legal grounds and to place such an emphasis on human freedom. But the important questions are not what Hayek (or Hobbes) thought about this or that, but rather about what is, and what is not, the case.

Facts and values are intertwined in all discussions of social philosophy, and, if any progress is to be made, they must - no easy task! - be disentangled. The factual questions may be resolved through empirical research and reason, but questions of value will, I suspect, always remain contentious.

Neither fascist nor socialist

I have been modifying and expanding the summary of my social views which currently appears as a stand-alone page under the title 'Sketch of a social philosophy'. I refer there to a particular European tradition of thought upon which I am consciously drawing and which may be characterized as both conservative and classically liberal.

"During the 1930s, a time of great political instability and polarization, a small group of European and American thinkers set out to revive and revise the classical liberal tradition. The group first came together in 1938 at a conference in Paris organized by the philosopher Louis Rougier, and was re-formed after the World War II as the Mont Pelerin Society. Its members were generally conservative, steeped in the cultural traditions of Europe, but forward-looking and seeking to apply new developments in economic theory and new political thinking to the economic and social problems of the time. Since then, of course, much has changed - new technologies have radically altered the way we communicate, and traditional and homogeneous cultures have been replaced by mixed and fragmented societies severed from their historical roots - but these scholars, largely because of the breadth and depth of their cultural understanding and their acute awareness of the contingencies of history, retain their fascination and relevance.

The European neo-liberals remained independent thinkers and did not really constitute a single school of thought. Some, like Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, favored relatively unregulated markets; others, like Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and Louis Rougier, argued for a more active role in the economy for governments. Ultimately, the test of social and economic principles is whether they work in a given context - though, admittedly, there will always be an ideological element in such judgements.

Instinctively I favor the less interventionist approaches of Mises and Hayek. It's clear that command economies, such as those of the old Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe, do not work. But Hayek saw as fatally flawed not just socialism but also social democracy. Both systems may be utopian in inspiration but are oppressive and inefficient in practice. And, indeed, most European experiments in social democracy have failed miserably.

Hayek's attitude to social democracy was linked to his view that justice is not a matter of outcomes but of process, so the legal system should provide a framework for free human action that does not seek to direct it to predetermined outcomes. He was especially wary of the idea of 'social justice' which he saw as incoherent (because it is concerned with outcomes rather than process). I have some sympathy with this view, and, though I believe the unlucky and those not able to cope should be helped, I don't think it's a matter of rights or justice, but rather of benevolence or common decency. (See my short piece on rethinking rights.)

Socialist and social democratic programs may have failed, but there is a crisis also in economies more closely associated with free market approaches such as the United States, and so Hayek's optimism about spontaneous order may seem to have been unjustified. But, arguably, the financial crisis of recent years was caused (at least in large part) by inappropriate government interventions (for example, the politically motivated programs which encouraged people without means to buy homes).

Nevertheless, it can't be denied that there were failures in the financial markets also, and the expected self-regulatory mechanisms did not deliver. My explanation is that the spontaneous economic order which Hayek championed cannot be divorced from more general social values and norms, and these common values have been seriously eroded in the West in recent years. A lightly regulated system will only flourish in a moral and cohesive society. On the other hand, a proliferation of laws and regulations is no substitute for basic moral values, and may only succeed in stifling entrepreneurial and general business activity. In fact, whatever one's views on the nature of law and justice, it's undeniable that laws and regulations tend to proliferate beyond what is required to secure human freedoms or enhance other aspects of well-being."


[Since I wrote this I have been reflecting on my attachment to the writings of Thomas Hobbes which seems on the face of it difficult to reconcile with the views outlined above. More on this matter later.]