Karl Loewenstein once said charisma “in politics is a phenomenon of the pre-Cartesian world.”
Is this true? Does our post-Descartes tendency to doubt everything lessen the impact of charisma in leaders? If so then to what extent?
The words pragmatism and agnosticism are very popular in today’s society. In fact they form a large part of modern society’s identity. But they are as ideological as any other mode of thought from human history. Indeed neither arose from simple ‘common sense’ as people often like to say. Pragmatism for instance, arose thanks to a large amount from the works of theorists such as John Dewey et al.
But given that we find it hard to even identify such things as ideologies it seems impossible that we might be able to guess what we will be thinking and saying 50 years from now, right?
In actual fact there have always been clues as to what the next leap in human thought would be through history. And they were almost always found in our beliefs about reality.
It is therefore quite profound to note that ideas such as the above are based on outdated beliefs in science. As Henry Staff (theoretical physicist from Berkeley) said “orthodox quantum mechanics insists […] that the physically described world is not a world of material substances, as normally conceived, but it is rather a world of potentialities for future experiences.” To this extent modern science completely rejects the very bedrock of pragmatic and agnostic beliefs, for both are built upon a materialist conception of reality. Or to put it another way both would have a hard time explaining Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
The important question that remains therefore, is what will replace such beliefs? What do you think?
The BBC has broadcasted a report noting that the number of people who suffer levels of stress so high that it affects their health was over 40% of those surveyed. No matter what the sample was this is a staggeringly high figure. So it’s perhaps sad that some readers won’t be surprised. Those people might highlight the number of new technologies introduced in recent years, particularly in developing countries, increased expectations from the recession, and also the sheer quantity of information to which we’re exposed today. It’s also possible to simply look at our way of life for an explanation. Stress hormones are produced naturally by the body, in order to prepare us for an action or event. We can in some cases burn them off through physical exertion, even taking a walk. But if we’re stuck in the car or the office this simply isn’t possible.
Given the above evidence of increasing stress, do you think overall levels of stress are increasing? If so do they look set to increase still further into the future? What can we do to reverse the trend as a society?
We have 3d printers, cars that park themselves, iPhones and apps, and advances in robotics. At 7 billion there are more of us to create and innovate than ever before. And yet this week the Economist’s main article is highlighting the number of scientists who think that we’re not only in an economic recession but also a recession of innovation, invention and creativity.
Given that one of the premises of a book that I’m currently writing is in fact the opposite (that we’re living in a creative revolution) I immediately sought to challenge their article. But what do you think?
Imagine that in an apocalypse scenario where this is possible, you walk into the woods to make your life anew. You spend weeks finding the right spot, and then months of hard work building a house. Towards the end of your labours a rather seedy looking man with a rifle comes and watches you work. You toil day and night while this person watches on, sat on a nearby log and occasionally using his rifle to shoot deer. Eventually you finish, and you look back on your work with a smile, when all of a sudden you hear the cocking action of a rifle.
“Thanks. Now be on your way” says the seedy looking man.
To Locke, such an an action is inherently wrong; it goes against all notions of natural justice, since people should own the product of their labour.
Using exactly the same argument Marx later said that Capitalism is theft, since under this system you don’t own the product of your labour. He wrote for example about a political debate that was happening at the time. Reformers argued to restrict the number of working hours in the day, whilst capitalists argued that doing so would restrict the potential for profit. Now to Marx this would be good, since profits are viewed as relating to surplus value. For example if you produce enough in 4 hours to cover the resource and labour costs then all value produced thereafter is surplus. It no longer benefits the worker, only the owner of the capital. And thus it fails the liberal, Lockian test of allowing workers to benefit from the toil of their own labour. Furthermore capitalism inevitably worsens this margin according to Marx i.e. as businesses grow workers become able to produce more in the same time, and yet are still required to work long hours due to competitive forces and the need for profit.
In arguing along such liberal lines, and using capitalism’s own logic to undermine it, does Marx have a point? Is Capitalism theft?
A couple of years ago I found myself launching a new political party called the Democratic Reform Party. And although at the start there was no single idea on which it was founded (we stood strongly against the principle of single issue parties), the central principle on which the party came to argue was the existence of an unrealised cognitive surplus, which democratic reforms could redress through the employment of new technologies in order to make the creative generation of new ideas a key pillar of a new and revised democracy.
In 2010 and 2011 I spoke to thousands of people, often over the Internet, and also campaigning in cities like London, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Worcester. Practically, the experience taught me a great deal. And it also reinforced a lot of what most people only guess. One of those things is the existence of a silent majority. The people most willing to talk and work for change are neither the educated, nor those who’re bristling with ideas. I’ll warn you now, for a democrat this may sound terribly elitist. But those most intellectually able to affect real change are most often those who refuse to act, due to a lack of time, and also a lack of confidence. Those who push most, talk most, and politically speaking shout the loudest, are all too often the principled, but uneducated. The calls you hear from these people, often used to berate all politicians as if they were another species, are in fact so often quotations of what politicians have in the past coined up that it makes you cringe. And they almost always shout about it being “common sense”, which of course really means that they simply don’t know the counter-argument, and have decided to get angry about it rather than open a book. Now I am of course hugely generalizing here. Speaking to thousands in the greater scheme of things is merely a drop in the ocean. And then you have my subjective take on the whole experience to boot. But my point is this: if in addressing so many people I ended up talking to an oversized minority (from day to day life I’m sure you know that the type to take any opportunity to rant about political, economic and philosophical issues they don’t understand is not the majority) then is the majority too quiet? Will the majority ever speak up, or is it always the minorities doing the talking? And what does this mean for democracy? Is it something we could change? Is it even something we would want to change?
As you can probably guess, my take is that if creativity, the generation of ideas, discussion and debate formed a central role in the state then we would be effectively channeling the input of this outspoken minority, and giving a chance to the majority that they might use more occasionally. What’s your take?
The word sovereignty basically means power and/or authority. It’s etymology is rooted in a variety of sources, and hence it gives a variety of opportunities for interpretation. Religious men, together with absolutists, have often throughout history said that the ultimate source of sovereignty can only be the ultimately virtuous and powerful i.e. God. Hobbes implied that power lies where it must. Indeed one of the major criticisms of Hobbes, coming from Locke, Rousseau and Mill, was that his work implied we must give up all rights of judgement to the sovereign power. In other words for Hobbes sovereignty was about power, plain and simple. If you lost it then there was a ground for revolution, but not before. For Locke sovereignty was vested in the people, as many people would say it should be today. And for Rousseau it lay not with the people themselves but rather the general will of the people. For the latter one could point to the written constitution as a modern example of that will being written down and made available for interpretation by specialists. Although his argument was also claimed by many of the twentieth century fascists.
Where do you think sovereignty should lie in a political entity? Who or what should hold the right to be the legitimate source of authority for all political decisions?
Some people believe our ability to help is boundless. Such people think we can set our sights on helping the collective, where more individually minded people (often the majority) say that if we all help just the few in our inner circle everything will be ok.
Suppose that you buy the former argument; is it possible for just any of us to help the many? How should one do it?
Have you ever heard of a tyrant who wasn’t also an idealist? From Caesar to Lenin a great many have literally stepped over corpses in order to destroy democratic forms of government and seize power as dictator. Yet what is often most scary to sworn democrats is that many of these peoples’ intentions match our own. Take Caesar for example. By today’s standards he was a barbarous, genocidal maniac. And yet if it were not for he the land reforms would not have passed. That famous success story of the Empire; that not only Italians could gain in power and become Senators or more, would never have come to pass. Indeed it is quite likely that without Caesar inequality would have continued to grow, until it so threatened security that it brought down the Republic.
Thus my question is this: just as with businesses we are more concerned with what they sell than matters of corporate governance, should we not be more concerned with the left/right disputes than with our system of government? Would you rather live in a democracy where the government never did as you saw fit? Or would you rather live in a dictatorship where you agreed with every action taken?
Unlike Plato, who dreamed of an authoritarian system of government ruled over by elite “guardians”, Aristotle said that there are 3 forms of government: rule by the one, rule by the few and rule by the many. But unlike today where we say one is better than the other, Aristotle said that there is a good and bad form of each. Indeed he said that the best form of government would combine all three types, which you could say representative democracy seeks to do to some extent. But the point relevant to this debate is that the ‘bad’ form of rule by the many according to Aristotle was called democracy, which he called bad because it creates a tyranny of the majority whereby the majority rules at the expense of the minority. The good form was called a polity, which would seek to include and account for all people, not just the majority.
But is such a notion – that of a polity – realistic? Or is it merely naive to think such a state of affairs truly possible?
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