The Constitution of Knowledge – Making the Marketplace of Ideas Work

Free speech activist Jonathan Rauch giving himself a well-deserved hug

Do we live in a post-truth world? Has freedom of expression simply allowed bad ideas to spread like rancid butter on hot toast, seeping into every pore of civilized life, ruining the crunch of truthful exchange of views and turning the Marketplace of Ideas into a chaotic and worthless free-for-all? Many would say ‘yes’ to this and either blithely exploit it or seek to remedy it by attacking what they glibly dub “freeze peach”. 

In his engaging book, The Constitution of Knowledge – In Defence of Truth, Jonathan Rauch, the author, journalist and free-speech advocate, seeks to show how we can overcome the inherent weakness in the marketplace of ideas: the risk that the market prefers bad ideas. 

In chapter 4 Rauch puts his finger on it when he says “...free speech is necessary […] But free speech is not sufficient.” Free speech is a necessary condition for truth and good ideas to emerge, but something else is needed to ensure that the best ideas come out on top, and this something is a systematic orientation towards reality.

This is easier said than done. In his 2002 book The Blank Slate, the cognitive psychologist Dr. Steven Pinker writes about our evolved ability for self-deception; favoured by evolution because the liar who believes his own lies has the greatest chance of convincing others. Self-deception is moreover often reinforced by others, not least through the satisfaction of belonging to a group of right-thinking persons (also an inclination favoured by evolution according to Pinker: the affiliation to kin and tribe to perpetuate genes and for greater safety).

Rauch, without referencing Pinker, explains that this ability for self-deception has led to a schism, not just in terms of political outlook, but also in terms of how people see reality; what he calls “an epistemic crisis”. 

The tendency to identify with a tribe was undermined by the hedonistic individualism of the 80s and 90s, but has in recent years re-emerged as identity politics, supercharged by social media, of which Rauch has much to say, and it’s a problem on the right as well as the left in American politics in particular.

In the U.S. you have at the moment not only the traditional divide between the typical conservative values vs. the more left-liberal values but a much deeper divide between how large swathes of people actually see reality and the world – exemplified by the popularization of post-modern concepts such as the claim that there are several “truths” and that subjective “lived experience” trumps objective, measurable facts. 

How can we ensure that, although we may disagree on policies or values, we can at least agree on the facts on the ground, the shared reality (not realities) that we base the premises of our arguments on?

Well, this is where the Constitution of Knowledge comes in, according to Rauch.

Rauch interestingly compares this theoretical construct – or what he calls an “epistemic system” – with the actual constitution of the United States of America:

“The uniting thread [of science and the broad “reality-based community”] is not a common research method or a common body of opinions but a common commitment: to the Constitution of Knowledge. In that respect, the Constitution of Knowledge resembles the U.S. Constitution. […] Both fundamentally are mechanism of public decisionmaking and social adjudication.”

He goes on to say:

“Both are fundamentally liberal inasmuch as they specify a process, not an outcome.”

“[…] the outcome on any day matters less than that the argument [about big or small government] should never be finally settled, ensuring the system remains dynamic and adaptive.”

“The vital ingredients for both systems’ stability? Both are built to institutionalize self-correction.”

“For all their dynamism, the political and the epistemic gain stability by being biased toward continuity and respect for precedent. Both are in that sense not only liberal but conservative.”

Again we can look to Dr. Pinker for a second opinion. In The Blank Slate he writes: “Constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature, in which “we” are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect humans”. 

The same appears to be true according to Rauch if “the Constitution of Knowledge” was substituted for “constitutional democracy” in that quote. 

One obvious danger with this analogy is that in politics many would say we do not often arrive at the “truth” (whatever that may be in a political context) or even the ideal policies. Compromises, horse-trades and “dirty deals” are legion in the world of toing and froing that is the corridors of power, be they in the US, Britain or any other reasonably well-functioning democracy. 

Yet, as Rauch alludes to, the purpose of the political constitution is different, even if similar in some respects, to the Constitution of Knowledge. The political constitution is there to provide stability, to pit, as Madison put it, “ambition against ambition”, so that no one faction gains too much power. As Rauch goes on to say, “Both systems rely on another buffer against radicalism: they are participatory but not populist.”

Importantly, Rauch posits that a political constitution (whether codified or not) can only work if people are committed to be ruled by it. “[…] the written U.S. Constitution is only words on paper; the real Constitution is a dense system of explicit and implicit social rules, many of which are not written down.” This is even more true of Great Britain, where the constitution (such as it is) is a combination of traditions, precedents and customs as well as some written documents, and not one written Constitution. 

I was therefore slightly disappointed that in the discussion of “cancel culture” (socially enforced conformity, as Rauch also calls it) the concept of a culture of free speech was not more explicitly highlighted as a necessary prerequisite for an open exchange of ideas. The phrase is mentioned, as is John Stuart Mill’s warning from On Liberty against socially enforced conformity (cancel culture is nothing new), but the phrase and the concept it describes deserves far more attention given to it: free speech (in effect the protection of offensive and/or controversial statements) can exist on paper as a formal right, but can be undermined in its practice by people excessively self-censoring. You cannot protect in law against self-censoring, but the effect of making the marketplace of ideas poorer is just as real. The only bulwark against self-censoring is a culture of tolerance of utterances, or a culture of free speech. 

Rauch indirectly discusses this as he cites statistics (and references the scary but excellent book by Jonathan Height and Greg Lukianof, The Coddling of the American Mind, reviewed here) that show that both students and academics are censoring themselves on campus to avoid disapprobation. He references a 2020 study showing that 62% of Americans refrained from saying anything that someone might find “offensive”, an increase of 4 percentage points from 2007. But bad as this is in general society, Rauch bemoans that it is especially bad when it happens in universities:

“The chilling of the intellectual climate on campuses and in classrooms represented not just an unfortunate social development but a catastrophic failure of universities to defend and fulfill their mission.”

A recent criticism of freedom of expression has come from those – especially academics and students – who see speech as an act with the same properties as a physical action. In linguistics, the concept of a “speech act” is well known to those of us who studied linguistics, but in that discipline the term is used to describe something that is done with language, such as apologizing, requesting, complementing, refusing, thanking, etc. Saying “I’m sorry” is the speech-act of apologizing, for example. But this is clearly distinct from the notion of speech as an act: “[…] the “words that wound” doctrine went much further: speech deemed hurtful or oppressive is literally violence or oppression – an act, not an idea.”, writes Rauch.

He goes on to explain that the Constitution of Knowledge cannot allow criticism, offense, or the emotional impact of words to be regarded as violence, because that leads in a couple of steps to science being a human rights violation. (P. 202).

The logic of “words as violence” also has dangerous real-world consequences: “If words are violence, then using physical violence to silence a speaker is justifiable self-defence.” (P. 207), something we have seen several alarming examples of in recent years.

Rauch acknowledges that “…ideas and words can be subjectively hurtful”, and he posits that the Constitution of Knowledge, although it can cannot and should not protect us from ideas, can mitigate the emotional impact of challenging ideas, by pushing us to “… interact civilly, depersonalize our disagreements, listen attentively, substantiate our claims, and wage our controversies through mediated channels like edited journals.”

Rauch also reminds today’s “social justice warriors” that it was not censorship or silencing that won the important victories of the past, whether civil rights or equal rights for women and gays, but precisely the protection against censorship and silencing that the USA has in its legal constitution:

“The biggest breakthrough for gay equality was not the Stonewall riot of 1969; it was the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1958, more than a decade earlier, that the government’s censorship of ONE [a gay magazine] was illegal.”

The ruling, Rauch says, gave the editor “…and other homosexuals the weapon they needed: their voice.”

The enforced conformity of the woke-left is not, according to Rauch, the only threat against the Constitution of Knowledge. The other is what he calls “troll epistemology”, the spewing out of falsehoods or unproven claims – often knowingly and consciously (known as “bullshitting” in the technical parlance) – through social media channels and picked up by mainstream media, crowding out the more fact-based or reality-oriented reporting, in Rauch view.

In this discussion he mainly targets the American right (but not exclusively, just as “cancel culture” is not exclusively left-wing). The proudly designated Troll-In-Chief, Donald Trump, supported by people such as Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, Milos Yannopolis and others come in for particular criticism (note that he does not criticise Trump’s policies, but his use of false or inaccurate claims). Rauch cites Bannon im saying, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Worth noting that in the American idion, “shit” can sometimes mean “stuff”, not necessarily rubbish, although both these meanings may very well be intended by Bannon.

Rauch argues that if politicians and people in general do not have a commitment to the Constitution of Knowledge it is difficult to enforce it in a situation where everyone can put out unfiltered nonsense through social media. It was not thus in the good old days, Rauch more or less says, when mainstream media were the gatekeepers for what reached a mass-market in the daily or weekly news, and outside of these you had to print up physical books or pamphlets in order to spread your views or theories.

It is certainly true, as Rauch points out, that the early optimism about how the Internet would usher in a golden age of peace and love by connecting people across borders, has certainly not come to fruition. Instead the Internet has amplified some of the baser instincts of human nature: distrust of the stranger, impulsiveness, the tendency toward tribalism, self-deception, reinforcement of prejudice, etc. 

Rauch is of course correct to say that within what is now the traditional media organisations, ethical standards were adopted from the 1920s onwards, leading to what many regard as the golden age of journalism (Rauch himself entered journalism in the late 1970s) and that these ethical standards have no import whatsoever on what is being put out on the various social media channels. This lack of “bullshit” filter is what demagogues and conspiracy theorists can exploit to spread their mal-information and mis-information respectively. 

I think Rauch is correct in his diagnosis, but he fails to recognize that a lot of what is spread on social media happens in the vacuum created by a mainstream media that censors its output not merely on the basis of journalistic standards of probity but also on the spurious basis of political correctness.

There have been countless examples of this in Britain, not least in connection with the sexual exploitation of young girls by Muslims in the north of England a few years back, but also recently as identified in this article by Douglas Murray. We have also seen it in the coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic, extensively discussed in Laura Dodsworth book A State of Fear, reviewed here. Another good example is how the theory that the Sars Cov-2 virus could have emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan was shouted down by more or less all mainstream media, not just by stating that it was not at that point the most likely theory (which in fairness it wasn’t), but by vilifying those who entertained the theory as “conspiracy theorists” (which of course some were, but not all). 

In this podcast interview with Brendan O’Neill, Rauch turns this last example around to be an example of mainstream media applying the principles of the Constitution of Knowledge to get to the truth in the end: a couple of persistent journalists in established titles carried on digging until they found that it was perfectly feasible that the virus could have escaped by accident. 

But although Rauch is correct about this, he does not deal with how media outlets shouted down and vilified people to begin with. Andrew Sullivan gives Rauch a bit more push-back in this podcast conversation, which is really worth listening to, not least because Sullivan is one of those rare centre-ground voices who stands up uncompromisingly for honesty and Enlightenment values in the public discourse. In this blog-article on the Atlanta killings earlier this year, entitled When The Narrative Replaces The News, he shows how journalism, when it becomes the lackeys of ideology, turns out misleading articles that serve the ideology rather than the objective truth that Rauch seeks to serve.

The blog article is behind a paywall, so here is an extensive quote:

“We have yet to find any credible evidence of anti-Asian hatred or bigotry in this man’s history. Maybe we will. We can’t rule it out. But we do know that his roommates say they once asked him if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. And they say he denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex. That needs to be checked out more. But the only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward it.

And yet. Well, you know what’s coming. Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fuelled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.”

Cases such as these are why I have less of an optimistic view than Rauch when it comes to mainstream media these days, or indeed, as Rauch seems to favour, certain social media platforms’ attempt at “fact checking”. 

I have myself experienced that Facebook first blocked a post I wished to share, then put various “warnings” across it once I was able to share it. I was not attempting to spread conspiracy theories or misinformation but an article from the Spectator (one of the oldest periodicals in the world and highly respected) about a Danish study on facemasks carried out by 20 senior Danish academics, showing that in a group of 6000 volunteers, 3000 wearing masks and 3000 not, the wearing of them did not make a statistically significant difference for contracting the virus.

“Fact checkers” limiting the spread of facts they don’t like at Facebook

How could “fact checkers” try to block the spreading of such fact-based information? Indeed, if anything, the study is an expression of precisely the sort of thing Rauch talks about: the systematic approach to expanding knowledge by the use of a scientific method. But it didn’t fit the narrative of “us” (the sane people who support mask-wearing) against “them” (the crazy conspiracy theorists who think mask wearing is about social control).

But as Dodsworth points out in her book, media organisations, even worthy old auntie BBC, were during the Covid pandemic guilty of publishing alarmist headlines that often had little or nothing to do with the content in the articles themselves. This click-bait journalism in turn fed the paranoia (or rational concerns if you like) of people who felt increasingly sceptical of the claims that our liberties had to be curtailed by force in order to deal with the virus, and later that we all should take the vaccines. Any questioning of either of these narratives, to use Sullivan’s phrase, was and is still seen by some in mainstream media as expressions of irrational conspiracy theories. 

Rauch is of course himself a journalist who has worked in well-established titles in the media world (his biography at the Brookings Institution lists the various publications he has written for), so it is perhaps understandable that he should have great expectations as to the ability of mainstream media organisations to self-correct and get back on the right track, the one guided by the excellent principles Rauch sketches out as the Constitution of Knowledge. But the failure to dig deeper into the failings of mainstream media as it is at the moment is a serious one, not least because Rauch’s medicine – a commitment to the principles of the Constitution of Knowledge – is, I think, the right one. But I think his confidence in the mainstream media is bordering on naive and feels out of touch with the reality he seeks to re-establish in the public discourse. 

On social media I think Rauch is broadly right (he spends some time discussing Wikipedia as an example of an internet phenomenon gone right) in terms of the ills, but apart from the technicalities (such as a “delay” button on Twitter) there is little practical that can be done unless people themselves choose to be committed to the principles of the Constitution of Knowledge. He mentions “fact checking” as a positive step, but as I explained above, that can very easily go wrong, if the platform takes an editorial line that aligns with a certain narrative or ideological outlook.

I did enjoy Rauch’s attacks on what he calls socially enforced conformity, aka. cancel culture (or wokeness or political correctness; take your pick), and the final chapter is a powerful exhortation to counter it, called Unmute Yourself: Pushing Back. Apart from the chapter where he outlines the Constitution itself, this was perhaps my favourite part of the book.

Rauch points out that the same postmodern philosophy that lays behind some of the woke-left thinking, also underpins Trumpism:

“Actually, the left understood his [Trump’s] language perfectly well, having done much to invent it. For decades a gaggle of influential academic doctrines – subjectivism, postmodernism, perspectivism, intersectionality, and more – had denigrated the idea of objective accuracy and the privileging of factuality.” 

Refreshingly, he inverts one of the mantras of the woke-left: “Check your facts, not your privilege”. 

Despite the weak spot on the discussion of mainstream media, the book is a great read – well-argued and beautifully written – for anyone interested in salvaging our public discourse from tribal identitarianism and subjectivism; I hope it gains a wide readership.

Is there a libertarian case for mandating the coronavirus vaccine?

Many people who are opposed to the enforced general lockdowns that we have seen and are seeing in many countries (I am presently writing from the green and pleasant locked down land of England) are also concerned about the new, much anticipated vaccine against the coronavirus, even if this may be our best way out of lockdown. Is there a classically liberal argument for mandating this vaccine?

Some of those who are sceptical of the coronavirus vaccine say they are not against vaccines as such (careful not to portray themselves as so-called anti-vaxxers), but they are against enforcing a vaccine that seems at best to have been rushed through, at worst to be essentially experimental.

I think such concerns are perfectly reasonable and rational to have. And as long as these concerns are about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, they can be addressed by openness on the part of the pharmaceutical companies as well as honest and credible information by governments and health authorities, and by not hiding or suppressing information that may be negative for the pro-vaccine argument, as Joanna Williams argues in her article Don’t silence the anti-vaxxers in The Spectator Magazine.

I cannot say anything scientific about the vaccine – I am an Arts graduate, and write this post as a “concerned citizen” trying to take a reasoned stance based on liberal-conservative values. Perhaps it is useful for you too to follow my reasoning.

Since I am not a scientist, I will assume for the sake of argument that the coronavirus vaccine is as safe as is reasonable to expect, and as efficacious as they claim it to be (around 90%). Can it in such a scenario be justified to force or mandate people to take the vaccine?

The statists – left- and right-wing believers in the big state and intervention – will, I suspect, quickly rush to click on the “yes” button – this is a purely pragmatic question about saving lives, of course we must mandate the vaccine, just as we had to mandate an enforced general lockdown.

Those of a more libertarian, or even anarchistic, bent, again both left and right – those suspicious of big government and/or big pharma – will, I equally suspect, rush to press the “No” button – this is about government control vs. individual agency, and the big companies are in bed with government to feather their own nests.

They both have a point, but I also think they are both wrong: this is not purely a pragmatic question but neither is it about government control. The question of mandated vaccination is about the proper boundaries of liberty when living in society with other individuals. To consider where this boundary goes, I find it is useful to go back to the philosophical source of liberalism (incl. libertarianism).

John Locke wrote The Second Treatise of Government in the 1660s (published in 1689) after the dramatic English civil war, to establish the theoretical principles for proper government and the boundaries of its authority and power.

The principle Locke establishes can perhaps most succinctly be expressed by a line in chapter XI, where he discusses the extent of legislative power: “For nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself“

John Locke, great ideas – bad hair. Image: Godfrey Kneller, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

He goes on to explain how the ruler, let’s stick to calling it “the government”, can not be given, by voters, more power than each individual citizen has as an individual. In other words, a citizen has, Locke says, the right to defend his own life, liberty and property against assault, including the right to revenge himself, and this right he can transfer, or delegate, to the government, including the process of seeking redress for grievances, so that instead of the nightmare-scenario of everyone’s fight against everyone that Hobbes feared, the government can keep the peace, protect citizens’ lives, liberty and property on behalf of the citizens, but not be itself allowed to do more than this: government is itself limited by the law. A principle still seen as fundamental to this day.

What the government cannot do, in this view, is to take citizens’ money away from them in order to pay for another man’s education or health care. No citizen has the right to go to his neighbour and demand to get money for education or health care, and therefore he cannot delegate this power to the government. I mention these to show how far we have strayed from the original principle of liberalism, under which philosophy there can be no welfare state, no regulation of behaviour that hasn’t got a direct bearing upon another, and no taxation that is not directly related to upholding the peace as outlined above. (And any Americans reading this, take note that your “liberalism” is NOT liberalism, hence the need for the neologism “libertarianism”, which I don’t like, but use to avoid confusion).

But can the government under this principle force people to take a vaccine?

I believe yes, it can, in certain circumstances. Let’s take a scenario where we are living in a society organized purely according to Locke’s principle. You come to a man’s house or place of business and you wish to enter. He responds that in order to enter you need to wear a purple tie. You can at this point either walk away, or choose to accede to his demand. But what if his demand was that you show a vaccination certificate for a particular set of illnesses? Your choice would be exactly the same: get the vaccines and come back with the certificates in order to be let in, or give up your attempt to enter. I hope you accept that it is the other man’s total right to make this demand, because you are about to enter into HIS property, and you have no right to enter his property except by his permission.

But now we get to the difficult part: what if a city says: you cannot enter this city without a certificate of vaccination? In this case it is the government of that city making the demand. Well, if we agreed that a citizen can demand of you that you have a certain vaccine in order to enter his home, then this is a power he can delegate to the government. The city is the collective home of all the inhabitants therein, the sum of private property (there would of course not be any public property in this libertarian scenario), and so if a majority of citizens are in favour of demanding visitors to be vaccinated before being granted entry, then that is perfectly justifiable on the liberal principle.

Even today, if you wish to travel to certain countries, where diseases are still present that have been eradicated in Western countries because of vaccination, a certificate of vaccination must be shown before you are granted entry. So the point is not a far-fetched one.

What about the citizens already living in the city? (And to make it more analogous to our present situation, let’s assume they cannot easily relocate). Here it is useful to go back to Locke. He explains, continuing from the quote above, that men can subject themselves to the authority of government “[…] only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself and the rest of mankind“. And then, “Their power in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power that hath no other end but preservation and therefore can never have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects.“

The term “public good” has been rather extended over the centuries, but Locke defines it here as merely the preservation of those people who live in the given society. Now, if by vaccination we preserve or save lives that would otherwise have been destroyed, not taking it is akin to wilfully destroying lives, as Roald Dalh, the Norwegian-British author so powerfully argued in a pamphlet written after his daughter died of measles:

“In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out. Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.“

The citizens of the city have each of them a right to preserve their own lives and those of their children, and they therefore have the right to delegate this power to the governor of the city to demand that all those who venture out of their own private dwelling, must be able to prove vaccination. Note, that as long as you stay within your own four walls I cannot see that the governor of the city has the right to demand your vaccination.

Now, take this principle and write it large for our present day society. We have, as mentioned, ventured far from the pure liberal principle that Locke put forward 360 years ago. But for those among us who see themselves as libertarians (or liberal-conservatives in my case), Locke’s principle should be a guide to thinking through whether the government has, in principle, the philosophical right to mandate vaccination. I think I have shown that according to Locke’s principles it has, if a vaccine protects against a known harm and not taking it represents knowingly submitting other people to imposed harm and the risk of taking the vaccine is lower than the risk of not taking it.

Should government force you to take it?

(For a fuller discussion of the moral duty of people to vaccinate, see the article Victims, vectors and villains: are those who opt out of vaccination morally responsible for the deaths of others? by Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Toby Handfield and Michael J Selgelid, published in The Journal of Medical Ethics. The American philosopher Jason Brennan has also argued in A libertarian case for mandatory vaccination, behind a paywall, unfortunately, a case for mandated vaccination based on the “clean hands” principle; that no individual should be allowed to participate in collective behaviour that is harmful to individuals).

Whether the Lockean principle that I discuss applies to the specific coronavirus vaccine, is of course another question. Polio, measles, chickenpox, mumps, hooping cough, etc. can all cause suffering and death in children and adults, and they have all been largely eradicated by vaccination. It would be folly in the utmost to say that we should only administer these to people above the age of 18 after having had these individuals’ explicit consent, in order to further the cause of liberty, when in fact it would offend against the principle of liberty that dictates that legislation should aim to extend self-preservation from imposed harm.

The coronavirus is of course not necessarily as deadly or damaging as the diseases mentioned or others like them. In England and Wales, as I write this, only around 600 people under the age of 45 have succumbed to the virus, thankfully only 6 children. Furthermore, 90% of those who have died are above age 65, with 42% being above 85, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics (see Deaths registered by age group).

The risk-profile is therefore very different with Covid-19 than with the other diseases referenced above, even if a small percentage of those who get it badly and recover do have some longer term symptoms (long Covid), but much is yet unknown about this phenomenon, so it is difficult to factor it in to a significant degree. A recent study from Imperial College found that average mortality is about 1%, but the actual risk varies greatly based on age: “Age-specific IFRs increased from 0.1% and below for individuals under 40 years to greater than 5% among individuals over 80 years.”

The authors call this risk “high”, but they don’t provide a threshold to judge it against other risks, so it is a bit difficult to know if this assessment is reasonably objective or just their subjective opinion.

In a Nature article Leslie Roberts claims that for measles, “Estimates are uncertain, but the death rate in developing countries hovers around 3–6%, and it can spike as high as 30% in the worst outbreaks, according to the WHO“. 30% seems high to me. 1% does not. On the other hand, chickenpox apparently has a mortality rate of 0.0016%, so that is a lot lower, and yet we vaccinate against it. Smallpox can have from 1%-30% mortality, depending on type, according to the WHO.

Of course, for children the regular flu is deadlier than Covid. According to the ONS, 14 children from 0-14 died from the flu in 2018, but thankfully only 6 children have died with Covid so far in England and Wales, and they had severe underlying health conditions (as have 95% of all who die with Covid). This would suggest an argument for mandating the flu vaccine rather than the Covid vaccine. But whereas the mortality risk of the flu goes down, before increasing again in old age, the mortality of Covid roughly doubles every 8 years of increased age.

I had to look up and read about these various other diseases, because they are no longer a part of our lives as they once were – and thank goodness, or rather thank vaccines, for that. But based on these facts I would say that the coronavirus is not particularly deadly on average, but it is quite deadly to some, and deadly enough, I think, to justify mandating vaccines, if they are safe, meaning the risk of taking it for the non-vulnerable is so low as to justify the reduction in risk to the vulnerable.

The question is whether people trust the information given to them by the government, the mainstream media and the pharmaceutical companies about the safety of the vaccine.

Do you trust the people in the building on the left?

When people get the feeling that “the system” is conspiring against their best interest, they stop trusting in what those say who they deem to be part of this “system”. This is not helped by the government using outdated statistics to justify the second lockdown. If people feel there is another, hidden, agenda behind the lockdown, and that the big pharmaceutical companies have their own hidden agenda (making money – not that hidden, after all), and that these various people are in cahoots to make ordinary people toe the line and do as they’re told, then this of course will make it very difficult to convince them.

If this difficulty in terms of trust then leads to the authorities wanting to silence by law any voice of dissent they deem cranky or peddling “misinformation”, as Labour recently advocated, this only feeds the conspiracy beast (“told you so!”). Misinformation is dangerous, but distrust is infinitely more dangerous. If people trust those worthy of trust, misinformation is water off the proverbial duck’s back.

In conclusion then, I think:

• If possible, the coronavirus vaccine should be taken voluntarily; if enough people take it, it may not be necessary that everyone takes it, but if people trust it, most will;
• There is a liberal (or libertarian, if you prefer) case for mandating the taking of a vaccine, if, and only if, it can definitely save lives and it is safe for those who take it;
• Anti-vaccination attitudes are in part driven by distrust of “the system”. It is therefore crucial that open and honest information is given, and that the government does everything it possibly can to re-earn the trust of the people.

Colchester, 15th November 2020

Update 17th July 2021: As we now have a few months of experience with the various vaccines, I wish to add that I do NOT think my above criteria are met, because there is a certain risk to people, especially the younger, that could outweigh the benefits of taking the vaccines. As long as adults take the vaccines voluntarily after considering the information given, I do not see a problem with it, but mandating it is wrong in current circumstances. It is also wrong to force people to take it for certain jobs, as is currently being pushed through Parliament in Britain, as workers can easily take a lateral flow test to see if they are positive before coming in to work and we know that vaccinated people can still carry and pass on the virus, so the principle of not doing harm to others do not apply.

Tickled Pinker

Question: how long is the average person globally expected to live? Your answer is almost certainly wrong. (It will be revealed further down).

 

Professor Steven Pinker is content.

Steven Pinker, the professor of psychology, linguist, thinker, author and 1980s glamrock star lookalike, has committed a book on the case for Enlightenment values – Enlightenment Now – The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress – (out now in paperback and Kindle). Let’s look at a couple of reasons why I think you may find this book fairly interesting.

 

The right question

Pinker, himself of the American centre-left, satisfyingly kicks both to the left and to the right politically (he’s Canadian originally). The book is neither primarily nor overtly political, but an empirical look at where the world is, through numbers, figures and facts, and an attempt at understanding what brought us here – and consequently what can help move us forward in the same general direction.

A key point Pinker makes is that entropy rules. In short, what that means socially for human life is that unless there is a force (or energy) creating a useful order, a million different disorderly outcomes are more likely. A building left without maintenance will disintegrate, just as heat will dissipate from a cup of coffee left on the table. A key point to learn from this is that there can be no such thing as “social justice”, because there is no natural just social condition. The poor was not once rich and then had their money or property taken away from them. Indeed, the natural state of human kind is one of poverty, illness, cruelty and early death. As Pinker says,

“Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.” (P. 25).

What then are the causes of wealth? Quite contrary to what Luddite left-wingers or protectionist right-wingers might think, global free trade has not made the world more unfair, unequal or worse off.

According to Pinker, statistics inform us that globally we are becoming richer, more equal and happier, and that global starvation and poverty is fast becoming a part of history.

“The international and global Gini curves show that despite the anxiety about rising inequality within Western countries, inequality in the world is declining. That’s a circuitous way to state the progress, though: what’s significant about the decline in inequality is that it’s a decline in poverty.” (Page 105)

Capitalism – free trade – has achieved more than the wishful thinking set out in the UN’s Millennium Goals, and five years ahead of schedule, (p 122).

“By 2008 the world’s population, all 6.7 billion of them, had an average income equivalent to that of Western Europe in 1964. And no, it’s not just because the rich are getting even richer (though of course they are, a topic we will examine in the next chapter). Extreme poverty is being eradicated, and the world is becoming middle class.” (P. 86)

The claim that we are becoming more unequal is simply not true; or certainly not the whole truth, and it is not supported by a fair reading of all available data.

The world is getting wealthier, healthier and much smaller!

Combating “progressophobia”

So why do left-wing intellectuals, politicians and protesters counterfactually claim that it is? Pinker attempts to explain this phenomenon:

“Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress . […] It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class — the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.” (P. 39)

Pinker’s criticism of some intellectuals’ “progressophobia”, as he calls it, has something in common with a point Roger Scruton makes in the chapter Extinguishing the Light in the book A Political Philosophy – Arguments for Conservatism:

“The most striking feature of the postmodern curriculum however, lies in its explicit rejection of Enlightenment, its disposition to treat reason as a parochial concern of Western culture and to place ‘truth’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ in inverted commas.” (Scruton, p. 112).

But it is not only the intellectuals that think the world is going to hell in a handcart, whilst things are evidently becoming better all around them. Another reason Pinker points to for the pervasive negative view many people hold of their contemporaneity, is the phenomenon known as availability heuristic – the tendency to think that frequency of learning about events equates to increased probability of such events to happen. Together with the negativity bias of the media (if it bleeds it leads) this adds up to a warped view of reality that does not tally with the actual state of things.

“People rank tornadoes (which kill about fifty Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than four thousand Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.” (P. 42).

This can have dangerous consequences, whether it is people voting for “populists” (whatever that is) who will cure imagined ills, or young people, as reported from Scandinavia, who are now suffering from anxiety and depression, because of the media’s reporting around the issues of climate change. In the article I link to, it is interesting to note that the campaign slogan “climate crisis” is being used as if it were an objective term of description, no doubt further contributing to the feeling of mindless dread and powerlessness by the readers.

 

Simplistic On Nationalism

The academic John Grey, who incidentally fits the above-mentioned category of modern intellectual, criticises the book for being simplistic about what the Enlightenment was and is, preachy about its liberal values and overly optimistic in a scientistic, humanistic sort of way. “The message of Pinker’s book is that the Enlightenment produced all of the progress of the modern era and none of its crimes“, he says in a review of the book in The New Statesman.

I think Grey is missing the point. What Pinker is trying to set out is how the Enlightenment ideals were different and unique from what had gone before, and how the modern world – in many areas – are a lot better off than it could have been, precisely because of those unique ideas.

Karl Marx, for example, is regarded as standing in the Enlightenment tradition, and called his theory “scientific” – as Scruton points out, many “…Enlightenment thinkers have been tempted by the idea of a planned society […]” (p. 174, A Political Ideology – Newspeak and Europspeak). But the fact that Marx’ particular ideas were so bad that they led to mass murder and destruction on an unparalleled scale of enormity, is not the fault of the Enlightenment ideals per se, any more than a particular malfunctioning car is the fault of the principle of the internal combustion engine.

They’re all equal now – Communism in practice at a Soviet Gulag.

I agree with Grey that Pinker is perhaps a little simplistic in his analysis of counter-Enlightenment thinking, pinning most of the blame on Nietzsche. Pinker’s offhandish rejection of nationalism and uncritical lionising of international institutions certainly put him at odds with Yoram Hazony, whose book on nationalism I review in another place on this blog. Pinker seems a little too happy to throw all the stuff he likes into the bag labelled “Enlightenment” (including all kinds of international organisations and institutions) whilst all the things he doesn’t like must languish in the darkness outside where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

“A second counter-Enlightenment idea is that people are the expendable cells of a superorganism—a clan, tribe, ethnic group, religion, race, class, or nation—and that the supreme good is the glory of this collectivity rather than the well-being of the people who make it up. An obvious example is nationalism, in which the superorganism is the nation-state, namely an ethnic group with a government.” (Pp. 30-31).

Not that this is merely a right-wing problem:

“But not so long ago the left was sympathetic to nationalism when it was fused with Marxist liberation movements. And many on the left encourage identity politicians and social justice warriors who downplay individual rights in favor of equalizing the standing of races, classes, and genders, which they see as being pitted in zero-sum competition.” (P. 31).

Europe – home of the Enlightenment and the nation state – and the frankfurter!

But the nation state does not necessarily conflict with the Enlightenment project – a supranational imperialist project just as can easily come in conflict with Enlightenment values. As Hazony points out in his book, surely there is enlightened nationalism, which is not about racial or national superiority and attempts at dominating others, but which is about preserving a nation’s unique character and keeping its leaders accountable to the citizens.

Pinker does not discuss this in any depth, just as he fails to discuss how the excessively mechanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment period fed the emergence of subjectivism, such as that expressed by Kant (mentioned as an Enlightenment thinker) in his famous dictum, das ding an sich – the thing in itself as opposed to how the thing appears to me. This shift in thinking not only fuelled the Romantic movement within art, but also lit the fuse of the extreme subjectivism that exploded in 20th century philosophy, not least in the post-modern thinking that Pinker appears to be criticising.

 

Essential Reading

The miracle of this book is that it achieves to present facts and statistics and yet be a highly readable text – indeed eminently enjoyable. And despite some of the minor shortfalls as mentioned above, the facts and figures require a reaction. They require a reaction because they gainsay some of the doom and gloom we are currently surrounded with from both left and right: a two-headed monster ceaselessly shrieking its latter day apocalyptic warnings for very different reasons, its ears deaf with wilful ignorance. For this reason, and many others, the book is essential reading to anyone who wishes to think rationally about societal issues, whether political or more broadly.

Now, back to the question I started with: what is the average global life expectancy? What was your guess, then? 40? 58? 65? I shall let professor Pinker provide the answer:

“How long do you think an average person in the world can be expected to live today? […] The answer for 2015 is 71.4 years.”

Happier, wealthier, healthier, more equal, and living longer. Let the Enlightenment-tree be known by its fruit, seems to be the message Steven Pinker wishes to give the reader in this engaging and surprisingly easy to read book.

If you haven’t yet decided on your light summer reading, you could do a lot worse than lifting your spirit with this dive into fact-based optimism.

Except where otherwise stated, the quotes are from Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

 

Although I used a Kindle edition for this article, I bought my paper copy from the local #bookstore in Colchester: Red Lion Books.