Very proud to announce the result of 12 months of writing and 35 years of learning: The Really Practical Guide to Debating: How to Win Every Argument That You Don’t Lose is now officially published on Amazon Direct Publishing by LockeStep Publishing, and features a foreword by Distinguished Toastmaster Paul R. Carroll.
Honest, good-faith debating is not all about winning (that would be sophistry), but about having meaningful exchanges of opinions between rational people – something that seems to be in shorter and shorter supply these days.
I hope this book will inspire, entertain, and spur you on to make better arguments, to listen better to other people’s arguments, and perhaps even to come along to a debate at some point!
Before you rush to disagree with someone, ask them questions to not only understand where they are coming from, but so that you may reach a common ground of agreement. This is called “stasis”, the bedrock of standing still before you go separate ways.
It may be something as simple as agreeing about a fundamental value that you share or on what the problem is.
You’ll be amazed how often disagreement turns out to be agreement in disguise, because you are talking about different things but didn’t realise.
Determining a shared point enables you to refer back to it if the discussion starts going off track, and it helps you to build a meaningful exchange of views.
The row over the editorial vandalism of Roald Dahl’s children’s books to sanitise them for a modern audience and the outrageous fact that Penguin’s editors have attempted to “improve” the greatest prose writer in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, have raised the debate temperature about words, wokeness and the culture war to yet another boiling point, provoking an unprecedented backlash. Is this the definitive turning point, where our shared, classically liberal values are reasserted, or will the more extreme versions of “woke” continue to triumph as long as we avoid a confrontation with the real culprit: Political Correctness?
The semi-Norwegian author Roald Dahl: perhaps the cigarette ought to be censored out…
Changes to literary works to “update” the language is nothing new. The term “bowdlerise” was born when Mr. Thomas Bowdler decided to shave off a bit of Shakespeare’s more fruity language in an 1818 edition of the Bard’s work, as Bowdler himself explained, “… nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” He clearly hadn’t met my family.
In 1939, Agatha Christie’s crime novel Ten Little Niggers were renamed for the American market to And Then There Were None, which also became the name of the subsequent film version. In Britain, the original title was printed until 1985(!). I have one of the offending articles in my bookshelf (hidden behind How To Be An Anti-Racist).
In 2011 the Guardian reported that Mark Twain’s work would be “cleaned up”, to stop his books being banned by schools. Twain himself, as is well known, was an active voice against racism who donated to civil rights organisations, and as Dr. Sarah Churchwell, senior lecturer in US literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, said at the time,
“The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society. These changes mean the book ceases to show the moral development of his character. They have no merit and are misleading to readers. The whole point of literature is to expose us to different ideas and different eras, and they won’t always be nice and benign. It’s dumbing down.”
Or said more simply: the educators are failing to educate. The word in this case was again “nigger” but also “injun” and other derogatory racial terms. But even in Scandinavia, thankfully lacking the particularly difficult historical context of the USA when it comes to race, books have been sanitised for modern sensitivities.
In 2006 the word “negerkonge” (negro king) was removed from Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking stories, and replaced with “Sydhavskonge” (King of the Southseas). Even the extremely popular TV-series from 1969 based on the stories was edited to remove the reference and also to cut out a scene where Pippi attempts to look Chinese by pulling her eyes back to make them more slanted.
So changes in literary texts have a long history and even Roald Dahl’s children’s stories have been changed before, indeed by the author himself. The original description of the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was as black pygmies from Africa and not only that but (which ought to upset the Right and the Left equally for different reasons) they were cheap foreign labour brought in to replace the English workers who were sacked. Faced with mounting pressure, Dahl eventually changed the description of the happy little workers to dwarfish hippies with long golden-brown hair and rosy-white skin. Important to note that this was the author himself making these changes in a way that he felt kept the integrity of the wider story and tone of the text.
What is particularly interesting about the recent controversy around Roald Dahl’s work is that the words that are being ripped out are so … well, non-offensive. They are adjectives such as “fat”, “ugly” and nouns such as “men”. It may not be polite to describe someone as “fat”, but if “fat” is to become unacceptable, we will have to yet again set to work with the scissors on naughty old Shakespeare, as he repeatedly used the adjective, for example in the Merry Wives of Windsor, “There was a fat woman with me.” Oh fye! And this they teach kids in schools?!
Politically correct Oompa Loompas. Or are they …?
The reason Puffin gives for the changes in Dalh’s work is the need “… to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today“. This entails a massive assumption: that Mr. Dahl’s stories cannot be enjoyed by all today in their original form. Is that really true? And why should “all” enjoy them? Hardly any work of literature appeals to everyone.
The troubling thing as I see it, apart from going against Dahl’s expressed wishes, is that these publishers charged with looking after Dahl’s literary legacy seem to have completely missed the mark: one of the main reasons children (and some adults) like Mr. Dahl’s stories is that they are slightly subversive. They are naughty. Although good mostly triumphs over evil – children do like to see order and justice restored – there is something in Dahl’s writing that flies in the face of po-faced grown-up niceties; which is of course exactly what these changes are.
The truth is that these changes are not done for pragmatic reasons to make the text more accessible, such as regularising old-fashion spelling or inserting modern “translations”, as they do with Shakespeare for college students, but rather they are ideological: “people” substituted for “men”, for example; the addition of a sentence about how some women wear wigs for “other reasons” and how this is “perfectly fine” in The Witches; and removing references to Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad in Matilda and replacing them with Jane Austen and John Steinbeck. These types of changes do not make the books more accessible to a modern audience, but it does make them more ideologically aligned and certainly less Dahl-ish, which is actually pretty offensive, if you ask me.
These changes, along with the changes I mention further up, are the logical consequences of our old friend Political Correctness of which wokeness is only one expression. There has been an unprecedented backlash against these changes and the publishers have partially relented and said they will also publish a “classic” (i.e. uncensored) version alongside the bowdlerised new version.
But those who are only now waking up to what is going on, including authors rushing to get written guarantees from their publishers on how their legacy is to be dealt with, are rather late to the party. Nevertheless, they are welcome. But in order to combat the phenomenon that the Dahl-controversy is only one example of, and stop it happening in future, we need to tackle the root of the rot: Political Correctness.
The three basic components of Political Correctness
The assumptionof guilt: One of the principles of political correctness (PC for short) is that it starts from an assumption of guilt. You may be familiar with the Anglican church’s general confession: “We have left undone those things we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.” (My bolding). PC is premissed on a secular notion of original sin being present in each and every one of us (implicit bias, toxic masculinity, heteronormitivity, etc.), and only by actively declaring your turning away from sin and conforming to the expressions of the politically correct creeds, can your assumed guilt be temporarily commuted.
The various Pride events in different countries in the summer of 2021 offered countless prime examples of the phenomenon I refer to; corporations and public bodies were falling over each other in the clamour to be the loudest declared gay-friend with flags, banners, posters, adverts and all kinds of public relation messaging to drive home the message: we are on-board, we have NOT left undone those things we ought to have done and we have NOT done those things which we ought not to have done, and we’re not guilty!
Of course, had this been in the least bit controversial, not a single major company would have done it. How many of these multinational banks declared their gay-friendliness in Muslim countries? PC means people and organisations do things, not from conviction, but to conform and express their lack of presumed guilt.
One of about a dozen almost identical posters with similar people stating broadly the same message in the name of celebrating “diversity”. (Pic. taken Dec. 2021, London Underground).
Ignorance of intention: In 2015, the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch used the phrase “coloured actors” in a discussion about the need to make sure non-white actors get the same opportunities that everyone else has and immediately faced a barrage of criticism (mostly online which was then picked up by real news outlets) for his use of this phrase. As a linguist, I feel duty-bound to point out that the clunky expression “actors of colour” is pretty much semantically identical to “coloured actors”, and so the difference is not in the meaning but in the expression being used as a signifier of membership of the correct tribe.
What’s crucial though, is that although some critics did acknowledge that Cumberbatch (probably) did have good intentions, they still found his use of the adjective+noun structure “offensive”, and so Mr. Cumberbatch issued the following statement: “I’m devastated to have caused offence by using this outmoded terminology. I offer my sincere apologies. I make no excuse for my being an idiot and know the damage is done.” He could have added There is no health in me.
Of course, the only “damage” was to his reputation among the “woke” PC tribe. Nobody else cared. No actual “damage” had been done to anyone and none had been intended – indeed, exactly the opposite had been intended, but the intention had been wilfully ignored. As with Mark Twain, the context and the intentions are disregarded in order to assert tribal purity or due to misguided safetyism, as discussed by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in the The Coddling of the American Mind.
Roland Barthes spoke of the Death of the Author – in the sense that meaning is always created afresh each time a text meets a reader – but Political Correctness, as expressed in the editing of Roald Dahl, P.G. Wodehouse, Twain and others, represent the Death of Context – an extraordinary ignorant and ignorant-making approach to “looking after” our literary heritage. Sensitivities change over time, if you’re unable to contextualise, you need to learn it. If not you remain less informed and enlightened than you might otherwise have been. Are we seeing what the philosopher Roger Scruton called the anti-Enlightenment at play here? Instead of educating our younger readers, we censor the texts to make them conform to orthodoxy.
Evelyn Waugh called Wodehouse “The Master” for his unparalleled ability to write perfectly shaped sentences with an new original simile on pretty much every page. Who would dare to edit such perfection?
Controlling the narrative: If your intentions and the context are immaterial and it’s only outward conformity that matters, then this gives an awful lot of power to those with the power to define what the correct outward show of orthodoxy is, to control and steer the narrative.
The criticism of Mr. Cumberbatch or the order to clean up Roald Dahl’s or P.G. Wodehouse’s work was not issued by a central authority of Political Correctness; there is no episcopal structure issuing edicts on the correct use of language, and talk of a conspiracy of the Woke Elites misses the point.
Instead I would point to what the German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman called a “spiral of silence”. The concept is discussed in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Truth (reviewed here), and points to the fact that we all tend to have a strong conformity bias, “we harmonize our beliefs and even our perceptions with those of the people around us“, as Rauch puts it, and the more uniform and mono-cultural our environs are, the stronger the pull will be towards certain opinions becoming dominant. As Rauch explains:
“[…] a view which may initially not represent a consensus at all, which indeed is in the distinct minority, can make itself first seem dominant and then actually become dominant as holdouts fall silent, succumb to doubt, or convert to what they think is the prevalent view.” (P. 195).
So it’s not about a small cabal of powerful wokesters trying to control the rest of us, but rather that a narrow set of beliefs become dominant and take control of the discursive narrative, setting the parameter for “acceptable” speech and therefore “acceptable” thought because the gatekeepers dare not speak up or deviate.
The consequence of that is an intellectual and cultural impoverishment – as any mono-culture tends to lead to – but also an entrenchment of positions and a deeper and wider polarisation of society as people retract into their respective comfortable echo chambers where the circle of silence spirals into ever darker depths.
As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, “Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?” Substitute “politically incorrect or unwoke” for “irreligious or immoral” and it’s pretty much spot on 160 years later – Political Correctness has a massive opportunity cost.
What can be done (and why should we do it?)
What happened in the Dahl controversy was that the spiral of silence was interrupted by the sort of people whose opinion matters to the editors at Puffin. This is a crucial point. That some right-winger whines on about “political correctness gone mad” or “woke madness” or “free speech” has no traction whatsoever to break the spiral of the gatekeepers, indeed it rather contributes to strengthening it, as such people are already beyond the pale; the deplorables.
The spiral must be broken from within, which is why I believe it is so important that on the issue of classical liberal values, the bedrock of a free society, we must build a strong consensus across the left-right divide, and that includes a strong commitment by those on the left as well as those on the right to educate the younger generations in these values, why they matter and what that looks like in practice, for example tolerating opposing views and the rejection of compelled speech.
A good example of a spiral breaker is the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her excellent Reith Lecture on Freedom of Speech.
Why should we do it?
Anyone can get caught up the spiral of silence or intellectually sterile echo chambers, including right-wingers and churchgoers, but it matters much more when they are the gatekeepers of society’s wider discourse, i.e. newspaper editors, book editors (as we have seen), museum curators, journalists, senior academics, and those activists and students who have such people in their Twitter cross-hairs. The reason is obviously that although this is a very small proportion of society, they are disproportionately powerful when it comes to setting the tone and deciding what words and phrases that are to be used and which narratives are to be permitted.
And that matters because what words and phrases are permitted is important for delineating what thoughts are permitted. In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell writes, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought“. It is a theme he goes on to develop in his dystopic novel 1984 where the regime’s new version of English, Newspeak, is designed to make heretical thinking or Thoughtcrimes impossible. In an entertaining appendix to the novel, Orwell explained Newspeak more in depth:
“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words […] This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.” (Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Annotated Edition. Penguin Books Ltd. – my bolding).
An example of this happening today is the term “equity”, which suddenly seems to be everywhere; used by institutions and corporations as a matter of course, usually displacing the term “equality”. So what?
“Equality” is a nuanced term that can mean on the one hand equality of opportunity and before the law (which is broadly supported by some on the left and most on the right), and on the other hand equality of outcome (which is mainly supported by the left). Equality of outcome entails an active enforcement of some policy of distribution or even more controversially by what is often called “positive discrimination” (or “affirmative action” in the US).
“Equity”, on the other hand, as eminently explained in this PDF published by Marin County in California, can only mean equality of outcome:
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”
Note how “equity” functions exactly as Orwell’s Newspeak intended: it precludes the undesirable concept of equality of opportunity and allows ONLY the concept of equality of outcome. Wrongthink becomes literally impossible if “equity” is the only acceptable term and “equality” goes out of usage (which it hasn’t quite done yet, I’m glad to say).
From Marin County’s PDF: an example of inequity or stupidity? He could have just moved the ladder!
“But surely,” you may say, “it’s a good thing that we slowly and gradually make racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry or prejudice impossible by changes to the language?”
There are two problems with that: the narrowing of the field of “permitted thought” will not only expunge bad and horrible ideas, it will also inevitably disallow true and good ideas. We know that in recent years academics have held back from stating publicly what they know privately to be true, because the truth may be “unhelpful”, i.e. it goes against what is politically correct.
The second problem is that any attempt at limiting Wrongthink will for the most part only lead to surface conformity, not a genuine change of heart. Rauch makes the point that homosexuality has become accepted in Western societies, not because gay people was successful in censoring anti-gay sentiments or opinions being uttered, but because they took advantage of freedom of speech to argue, explain and show why same-sex attraction was something to be tolerated rather than feared. (P. 251).
“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. That decision gave Frank Kameny and other homosexuals the weapon they needed: their voice.“
At a time when being anti-gay was the political correct opinion, it was the assertion of a politically incorrect view that in the end changed minds and hearts, and in turn how people spoke about gay people.
The controlling of language may lead to an impoverishment of academia, high literature and culture, but it won’t change most people’s hearts and minds. True change requires understanding and understanding arises from conversations, debates and discussions in good faith (which is one reason why I am very enthusiastic about debating clubs and societies, such as the one I am involved with, called 104 London Debaters).
If all good people, left, right, centre, and all over the place, stand together against politically correct whitewashing of our language, a true and honest conversation may in time lead to real and positive change. Telling people what not to say, or indeed what to say, as in compelled speech – a step further into authoritarianism – is only likely to provoke even stronger resistance and entrenchment of views.
The concept of “whitewash”, incidentally, is from the Bible, where Jesus is reported to have given a broadside to the hypocritical elites of the day:
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” (Gospel according to St. Matthew, ch. XXIII, v. 27-28)
Let’s not be like the Pharisees; let’s reject Political Correctness and all its works!
On Saturday 15th October I attended The Battle of Ideas Festival, founded by the independent peer, Baroness Claire Fox, in Westminster, London. The festival has been running since 2006 and the motto is: “FREE SPEECH ALLOWED” (yes, in capitals). It’s organised by the Academy of Ideas and the purpose is to create a space (perhaps even a safe space) for the free and frank exchange of views, not least those that may be deemed politically incorrect, as two of the co-organisers say on the website, “We aim to make all our events an antidote to intellectual silos and closed-off echo chambers.”
Baroness Claire Fox (third from left) chaired the first discussion, on the Culture Wars
The first event I attended was a panel discussion on the Culture Wars, chaired by Baroness Fox herself. Professor Doug Stokes, a self-identifying East-Ender, said that some of the “Woke” movement represented a post-modernist attack on the values of the Enlightenment and that it was quasi-religious.
Aquil Ahmed from Channel 4 believed the Culture Wars were a number of individual issues that often get lumped together without necessarily being connected, rather than one great conflict, and that it was in many cases connected to the fear of change. He emphasised the importance of nuance instead of the grand narratives.
Inaya Falarin Iman, co-founder of the Equiano Project, asked what kind of citizens we get if one side is allowed to impose its views on the rest of us. She wondered why some religions could be criticised whilst others seemed beyond criticism.
With only time to draw breath and get a coffee it was back in the same hall for the next discussion: The Road to Ukraine. Opening speaker was Emeritus Professor Frank Furedi, a sociologist and social commentator, who recently published a book on the Ukraine situation. His argument was that the West has suffered from historical amnesia since the end of the Cold War and that we became complacent about the importance of borders and culture as we succumbed to the Siren Song of Globalism.
Mary Dejevsky, an Independent columnist on foreign affairs who has written extensively on Russia, was first responder, and talked about the lack of understanding of Russia in the West, and how many of the most recent states to join the EU actually joined it to protect their sovereignty and borders. She believed Putin does acknowledge the importance of borders but that the border with the Ukraine is complicated; a bit like our current situation with Northern Ireland, she said
Next responder was comedian, commentator and author Konstantin Kissin, himself of Russian heritage. He agreed that the West tends to misunderstand Russia – the Russian mentality on political leadership, he asserted, could be summed up as “chaos bad, order good”, and if a strong leader provides order, then this is seen as a good thing. He pointed out that the notion that Putin could be toppled and someone better take over was a dangerous delusion. He rhetorically asked, “who do you think would take over, Nick Clegg?”, making the point that the alternatives to Putin are almost certainly even worse.
It was then time for a quick lunch, and on my way I ran into columnist Rod Liddle from the Spectator, who believed that in the current political malaise, it was a great opportunity for the Social Democratic Party, but he acknowledge they need a charismatic leader, a social democratic Nigel Farage, in order to sell their message to the public.
Back at Church House after a liquid lunch it was time to discuss the so-called Online Safety Bill.
Charles Colville, an independent hereditary peer, argued that the bill, with certain safeguards for free speech, could work, if objective psychological tests were put in place to measure the bill’s concept of “extreme psychological harm”. Two of the audience members, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, both challenged him on this, saying they do not know how this could be measured objectively.
Toby Young, the Chairman of the Free Speech Union (of which I am now a member) spoke about the concept creep of terms such as “safety” and “harm”. The bill, he argued, is not about protecting children from exploitation or actual harmful content, but to protect adults from words they may not like. It’s an instance of what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call “safetyism”.
The legal expert, Graham Smith, said that one of the many dangerous aspect of the bill is that it will apply to small platforms as well as big tech, and that the “duty of care” principle with understandably cause these various platforms to err on the side of caution and close down far more speech than what the law may strictly speaking require them to. “Free speech is not a tripping hazard,” he said.
Another danger is that as the bill stands, the laws in Scotland, where they have clamped down heavily on free speech recently, will have to be applied on all online platforms across the United Kingdom, giving the Scottish Nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon the de-facto power to regulate freedom of expression across the entire country.
The final conference event I made it to was a live recording of Free Speech Nation with the brilliant comedian, author and free speech activist, Andrew Doyle.
Among his guests were the feminist choreographer Rosie Kay (who was cancelled by her own theatre group), the actor James Dreyfus (whose picture was literally erased from the cover of work where he had contributed, after he publicly supported J.K. Rowling), and the biologist and science writer Matt Ridley, who has written a book about the origin of the coronavirus, presenting the arguments both for the theory that it originated in a market place and the theory that it came out of a lab.
Afterwards I got Andrew’s signature on my copies of his books, Woke, Free Speech and The New Puritans. All worth-while reading, but especially the last one.
In the corridor I ran into Yaron Brook, leader of the Ayn Rand Institute (read more on Rand here) who had been participating in a panel discussion on the US midterm elections.
Then it was off to the drinks reception where a couple of hundred people from the conference were treated to free wine and live Irish music. I even got sucked into an Irish jig, but was quickly shunted back out again, so I don’t think I was particularly impressive on that front.
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is seen by some as a dangerous influence: an amoral wolf disguised as a philosophic chain-smoking grandmother, whose melodramatic pulp fiction draws in generations of young, naïve little Red Reading Hoods who wonder at what big premises she has. By others she is seen as the High Priestess of individual liberty who rose, Venus-like, fully formed out of the revolutionary swamps of Russia and whose writing soars inspirationally above the cesspit of collectivism, Marxism and religious dogma. Both extremes are wrong in my view. Read on for what I hope is a balanced introduction to some of Rand’s ideas and why you should read her.
“Look into my eyes!”
On Rand the philosopher
In my view it is a mistake to see Ayn Rand as a philosopher first who wrote books to illustrate her ideas; I believe she should be seen primarily as a novelist and secondarily as a thinker who worked hard to define the values that informed the fictional universes she created. Her philosophical system, Objectivism, was after all only really developed after the publication of her breakthrough novel The Fountainhead (1943) and never went through the usual cut and thrust of academic work through which knowledge is usually forged, as Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge (reviewed here), because Rand for the most part chose to stand aloof from her contemporary professional philosophers.
One reason she gave for not wanting to engage with contemporary academic philosophy was that she believed their fundamental premises, their axioms and basic assumptions about the reality of existence, the nature of reality and of knowledge (metaphysics, ontology and epistemology), meant they had very little meaningful to contribute to the discussion of right and wrong (ethics). As a 17-year old she had been introduced to Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and was deeply influenced by his criticism of Christian altruistic morals (Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the world she made, p. 42), although later she became critical of what she saw as Nietzsche’s approval of subjective whim: the “superman” has no more right to sacrifice others to himself than they, the masses, have to sacrifice him to their, she came to believe (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, (1961).
In her biography of Rand, Goddess of the Market (2009), historian Jennifer Burns discusses correspondence between Rand and Isabel Paterson, a conservative novelist and thinker who was an important influence early on in Rand’s writing career. Although Rand had studied philosophy at St. Petersburg, Paterson was concerned that Rand’s foray into philosophy did not have a strong enough foundation in knowledge of what had gone before her. But Rand “…rejected Paterson’s comparison of her to other philosophers, insisting, ‘I have not adopted any philosophy. I have created my own. I do not care to be tagged with anyone else’s labels.'” (P. 127).
Isabel Paterson – a critical friend of Rand
She had some interaction with academic philosophers – not least the great classically liberal thinkers Ludwig Mises and Friedrich Hayek, but rejected the latter for his willingness to contemplate limited government programmes and the former for his acceptance of altruism, which she saw as spiritual cannibalism (Burns 105-106); the thin end of the moral wedge with which collectivists prise open one concession to big government after another.
In the spring of 1960 she struck up a friendship with a college professor of philosophy, John Hospers (Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C. Heller, p. 129). They had long and deep discussions, and Hospers, who went on to become the first presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1972, said she had helped him clarify his thinking on politics and capitalism. But as Heller writes,
“He wasn’t always able to make clear to her how her ideas fit in a historical context or introduce her to new concepts. At that period, ‘she read almost no philosophy at all,‘ he said […]” (Heller, page 330).
Spurred on by her interaction with Hospers, Rand also had discussions with other professional philosophers, such as Martin Lean, a Wittgenstein expert and chair of the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College. After a reportedly rowdy debate with him he wrote to her saying, “‘For my part I cannot recall having argued with anyone as intellectually dynamic, challenging, and skilled as you since my … Fullbright year at Oxford’ […] ‘It is academic philosophy’s loss that you did not choose this as the field of your concentration‘.” (Burns, pages 186-187).
But these interactions were short-lived, and due to her lack of engagement and reading of other thinkers, Rand’s value as a critic of other philosophers and philosophies is somewhat limited. This, however, does not mean that her contributions in other areas are not valuable, in particular her insistence on the importance of metaphysics and the possibility, indeed necessity, of objective reality and therefore objective truth, as well as her ethical theory.
Moreover, her literary achievement, creating a moral universe based on her own vision, is a massive one – whether one agrees with it or not.
Objective Reality
Apart from the content of her thinking and writing, the fact that she has kindled in thousands of people an interest in philosophy, or at least a philosophical approach to the big (and small) issues of life, is also one of Rand’s great achievements. Her criticism of the tendency within her contemporary culture and philosophy to reject objective reality, something she traced back to Kant’s work, not least his notion of the difference between the thing as it is in itself and the thing as it appears to me (more about that here), is all the more relevant today, as we see not only sandal-clad obscure academics but even celebrities and others talk of “my truth” rather than “the truth”; we see the objective reality of biological sex being undermined by subjective notions of “gender identity”; and we see free speech, textbooks, literature as well as historical figures and much else besides, routinely assessed in terms of how they make certain people feel (especially feeling unsafe or some emotional “harm”, often meaning being made to feel uncomfortable, as discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff).
In the essay “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-made“, Rand writes, “The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward.” (Published in the essay collection Philosophy; Who Needs It, 1984).
From this line of thinking follows what she says in another essay in the same collection, Philosophical Detection, dealing with the popular catch-phrase It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me (made extra relevant these days after Megan, duchess of Sussex, talked about “my truth” in an interview on an American talk-show):
“Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means: a. that the Law of Identity is invalid; b. that there is no objectively perceivable reality, only some indeterminate flux which is nothing in particular, i.e., that there is no reality (in which case, there can be no such thing as truth); or c. that the two debaters perceive two different universes (in which case, no debate is possible). (The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.)“
There may be technical criticisms to make from the point of view of an academic philosopher, which I am not qualified to make, but I do think that Rand throws down the gauntlet to our own present time: if there is no objective truth, if we cannot perceive reality accurately, if there are only “truths” and “histories” rather than Truth and History, if subjective notions of identity and the perception of the world can be asserted merely on the basis of feeling, and if all language is primarily what some Post-Modern thinkers described as “power-relations”, rather than linguistic expressions of concepts that can be logically deduced and agreed upon, then do we even have the basis for thinking about our world and communicating with each other about it? Is debate even possible? As Steven Pinker says: “Each of us has a motive to prefer our truth, but together we’ve better off with the truth.” (Rationality (2021), p. 315).
Rand’s notion of selfishness(AKA rational self-interest)
This drawing by Edward Sorel perfectly illustrates Sorel’s ignorance of Rand’s philosophy
Rand’s advocacy of “selfishness” as virtue and “altruism” as evil is perhaps the best known and most wilfully misunderstood of her philosophical positions. What did she mean by it?
The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, in his article Altruism and Selfishness, writes about how Rand in many ways redefines “selfish” to mean also those benevolent things you do to others because you love them, but then criticises this usage of language, saying, “Learning to love your neighbour as yourself is learning to take pleasure in the things that please him, as a mother takes pleasure in the pleasures of her child. To call this “selfishness” is to abuse the language…”
Scruton is right to point out that to redefine a word (selfish) that is deeply engrained in our culture and language as meaning that which is bad and immoral, to meaning something which is good and virtuous, is very problematic; indeed it is in part the source of the lazy assumption that Rand saw as defensible those actions that we tend to call “selfish”. She did not necessarily do so. Rand was alive to this. In her working notes to The Fountainhead (so before she had systematised her philosophy) she wrote:
“I. The first purpose of the book is a defence of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith. Therefore – a new definition of egoism and its living example.” (Journals of Ayn Rand, p. 77).
Also, in the introduction to the essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness (1961), she writes, “The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: ‘Why do you use the word “selfishness” to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?’ To those who ask, my answer is: ‘For the reason that makes you afraid of it.'” (page vii).
She goes on to explain that the popular usage of the term is wrong because it equates looking after one’s own interest with evil and looking after someone else’s interest with good, i.e. that the nature of the beneficiary is the criterion; the self: bad, others: good. But, as she goes on to explain: “The evil of the robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues is own interest, but in what he regards as his own interest, not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value […]” (p. ix – my bolding).
It is also worth noting that “ethical egoism” is a term that exists in moral philosophy independent of Ayn Rand’s contribution to ethical theory. The key thing to understand from this theory is the difference between ethical egoism: that it is right to act in one’s own interest, and on the other hand empirical egoism: that people do in fact act according to their self-interest, whatever their professed beliefs or principles may be. Rand’s theory of ethics belong in the first category.
In the essay The Objectivist Ethics, Rand explains:
“The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness – which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man – which means: the values required for human survival […].“
By “human survival” Rand means life as rational (or thinking) creatures, i.e. with the freedom and need to think, speak and act, and not just for the preservation of biological existence, but also the enjoyment of art and beauty – it is important to stress that Rand did not see a rational person as a humanoid calculation machine, but rather one whose emotional responses to people and things would spring from his values, and that those values would have been carefully chosen or at least filtered. In Rationality Steven Pinker makes a similar point to Rand. He writes, “Rational choice is not a psychological theory of how human beings choose, or a normative theory of what they ought to choose, but a theory of what makes choices consistent with the chooser’s values and each other.” (P. 175).
And what are values? Rand explains that only a living – mortal and vulnerable – creature can have values, “[…] try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose […].” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 16). Just as Steven Pinker argues, Rand says that values are determined by goals: “‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept ‘value’ is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.”
And that is one reason why the use of force (including government force) is not only immoral but literally inhumane according to Rand: it removes the presence of alternatives that make values possible for a mortal creature – funnily, for someone as anti-religion as Rand was, this is what some Christian theologians argue was the reason why there was in Eden the possibility of sin: man’s obedience to God is worthless if it’s not a real choice.
So to be rationally self-interested, according to Rand, is not about being an unfeeling, Spock-like person who doesn’t care about others, but one who cares based on his defined values. In the essay The Ethics of Emergencies, Rand writes, “Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another“.
How do you arrive at what exactly you should value? Inspired, no doubt, by the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, Rand suggests that man’s happiness is his moral goal – which can sound like a licence to follow whatever whim that makes you happy, even if it hurts others. But two important qualifiers need to be taken into account here: 1. Rand condemns the indulging in whims: this is irrational and something that will lead to your destruction sooner or later, and 2. You are not to use other people as means to your happiness.
So if, for example, a great advantage for your business can be had by your tolerating unreasonably high risk levels for the general public (and you can get away with it), is that fine? After all, they are all strangers to you whereas your business may be your life’s work and what makes you happy. Can you sacrifice these strangers’ interest in favour of your own benefit? The answer to this lies in what Rand says in the The Objectivist Ethics:
“The basic social principle of Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others – and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”
The key passage here is, “an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others“, a point echoing what Immanuel Kant said, namely that we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. This means that you do not need to justify your existence in terms of how useful you are to others or to “society” (note the common defence for businesses and successful individuals: “we pay our taxes”); you are not merely a tool for other people’s happiness but also that you should not use others merely as means for your welfare or happiness – the respect for the integrity of the individual cuts both ways.
Those with a cartoonish (mis-)understanding of Rand tend to think that she is favouring Nietzschean supermen trampling all over the weak and worthless common people. Although, as mentioned above, she did study Nietzsche and found his criticism of the Christian “slave morality” compelling, she also rejected his conclusion that the superman can trample over the “common man”. This is well presented in the story of The Fountainhead where ordinary working people who with pride and integrity go as far as their abilities take them, are portrayed in just as positive a light as the brilliant genius Howard Roark.
Right or wrong?
Rand’s stance on the objectivity of reality, the supremacy of reason and the morality of a value-driven self-interest, are every bit as relevant today as it was when she was alive. The usefulness of any theory is usually judged by its ability to tell us something about phenomena in the world, including the ability to make accurate predictions.
She was wrong to suggest that the only difference between the welfare states of Europe and Soviet Russia was time. But she was surely right to point out that technological advancement would be hampered by authoritarian rule, she was prescient in her warnings against the rise of the religious right in America (Burns, p. 191), and her extremely radical views in favour of a woman’s right to abortion has received new currency with the potential re-evaluation of the Roe vs. Wade ruling.
I also believe that she stressed the utter, almost atomised, independence of the individual too much. The father of British Conservatism, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), said in a criticism of the classically Liberal notion of a societal contract between the individual and the state, that it was more useful and true to look at society, not as a contract between those now living and the current state, but between those who went before us, those living now and those yet to be born. In other words: we who live now benefit from what has been handed down to us from our forefathers, and we in turn have the responsibility to hand it on the the next generation in at least as good a condition as we were given it. This is a perspective that speaks to many current issues, including the tearing down of statues and institutions in the name of “social justice”, and the environmental debate – our forefathers gave us this world, we need to pass it on to the younger generations without having messed it up too much.
Unfortunately, many young (and not so young) people today in the “social justice” movement think they have all the answers; they reject traditions and those that have gone before on the grounds of their imperfect views or lives, and they think they alone have the insight and wisdom to rebuild the world anew. This is in certain ways similar to some of Ayn Rand’s followers, who also believe they have all the answers, or at least in Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, the key to unlock all the answers. They also often don’t value tradition or the collective achievements of institutions, just as the left-wing revolutionaries.
The power of Burke’s formula is that it reflects more perfectly the real world experience of all of us: we benefit (unless we are unlucky) from what our parents gave us and in turn try to help our children. Scientists, in Newton’s famous image, stand on the shoulders of the giants that went before them, and established institutions contain within them the collective memory and wisdom of thousands of individuals and countless generations. We simply are not unmoored individuals floating about in a relationless universe. (Note that Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is the only main character with no back story, no family, no history of friends, relations or dependants).
I think Rand as a person truly did not understand or see the value of established traditions and their importance in the maintenance of individual rights in England and the former English colony USA, where English Common Law was adopted. And the Common Law is the formalisation of tradition: as Hayek explains in his seminal work on justice, Law, Legislation and Liberty, a Common Law ruling is about discovering law, not inventing it; i.e. when looking at this specific situation before us, what is the most just solution based on what has gone before, established rights and duties, claims and counter-claims, similar rulings, etc. Law, Hayek argues, is older than legislation.
The Common Law tradition made English society stable, and gave stable property rights, something that many historians, not least Joyce Appelby, believe was crucial in England becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country in earth; the country now holding that position, the USA, has a version of the same legal system.
But all that is not to say that Rand’s individualism is without value, far from it. In a world where the state has the means to become extremely and terrifyingly powerful, as we saw in the inhumane Covid-lockdowns instituted after the model of the Communist regime of China, we need to constantly ask what is the purpose of the state, and what is the proper relationship between the individual and the collective. One does not need to agree with Rand to see that her principled approach, always arguing from first principles, always asking “what are your premises?”, still makes so much of her philosophical writing fresh, interesting and relevant, even decades after she penned them.
Rand’s Fiction Literature
I said at the start that Rand should be seen as a novelist first and philosopher second, and then went on to discuss her philosophy first. Well, that was for a reason: I wanted to dispel a couple of myths, firstly that it is impossible to be a critical friend of Rand; that one must either worship her or denounce her; instead I believe it is possible to find her interesting and to be inspired by the challenging and interesting questions her writing poses without necessarily swallowing whole all the answers she gave. Secondly I also wanted to clear up a common misunderstanding, namely that her defence of “selfishness” meant a defence of what is commonly understood as bad behaviour, which it didn’t and doesn’t.
But it is literature that is my area of competence and as I champion the view that Rand was a novelist first and foremost, I should mention the reasons why one should read her fictional works, and the order in which one should ideally read them:
1. We The Living– Rand’s first novel is a semi-autobiographical story set in post-revolution Russia. The main character is Kira, an independent-minded girl in her late teens who wants to study engineering against the wishes of her parents, but soon finds herself in difficulties due to her lack of party membership or interest in any form of politics. She falls in love with the mysterious Leo, and as they struggle to survive as non-party members, the book lays bare bare the soul-crushing dullness of life under Communism and the struggle of ordinary people to survive, sometimes heroic, sometimes pathetic.
WHY read it? It is a very different story in many ways to her later, more famous works, although some of the themes shine through on the pages. It is well-written, in that almost film-script like style that she would go on to perfect – the characters are interesting and some of them, like Kira’s once heroic uncle, whose great spirit we see slowly ground under the iron heel of Communism, is deeply moving. So is her portrayal of Andrej, the ardent Communist Party member that Kira befriends. His character is sympathetically drawn, it’s rounded in a way Rand’s characters seldom are, and Andrej’s development is one of the most profound of the entire book.
It makes sense to start with this because it gives a better understanding of what and where Rand came from: like her fictional heroine Kira, Rand was born and grew up in St. Petersburg (her given name was Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), and her father had his business confiscated by the Communists. Rand said about the novel that it was her most autobiographical work and it is notable that the tone of the novel carries a sense of vulnerability that her later works do not.
2. Anthem– this is a short story, or novella, that she wrote as she was taking a break from writing The Fountainhead. WHY read it? After laying the foundation with We The Living, this is a nice aperitif to her more philosophically based writing. The story is clearly inspired by Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We (read a comparison here), and is set in a future world that is entirely collectivist. What is interestingly different from this story from almost any other futuristic dystopia, is that this society is not depicted as technologically advanced, quite the contrary: since the global revolution science has gone into reverse, and electricity as well as the use of the personal perpendicular pronoun, “I”, have been lost to humanity. The main character, known only by his number, rediscovers electricity and slowly but surely starts to rediscover his sense of self.
A rather too old Cary Grant as Howard Roark in the film version from 1949
3. The Fountainhead – Rand’s breakthrough novel about the architect Howard Roark, whose fierce independence sees him struggle to be employed as an architect because he refuses to build as his customers wish, unless they give him full creative freedom. He is also undermined by the villainous Ellsworth Toohey, who sees in Roark’s work an unwillingness to conform to a collectivist (low) standard, and therefore a threat to the power of people such as Toohey.
WHY read it? Well, for one it is – whatever one thinks of it – a modern classic. It is also the novel that perhaps best exemplify Rand’s philosophy in the characters and actions of the story. I once heard a philosopher who suggested that Rand was inconsistent because Roark did not follow the demands of the market and Rand was in favour of the market. He had clearly missed the point completely: what Roark exemplifies is both how the ideal person acts, namely guided by his values, not merely material expediency, even if this puts him at odds with society and the market place. Rand is in favour of the market precisely because you may withhold your labour if you don’t consent. Another person, Peter Keating, exemplifies the type who does conform to society’s expectations and the demands of the market whatever he himself may think or feel; he has material success doing this, but he also loses his soul in the process.
Then there is the wonderfully awful Dominique Francon, a dreadful woman who destroys museum pieces so the common man cannot defile them with his uncomprehending eyes. She decides to give Roark the same treatment – she wants do destroy him because she loves him. Keating and Francon represent two different takes on being overly concerned with other people’s opinions. Next is the wonderfully portrayed newspaper magnate Gail Wynand, apparently inspired by William Randolph Hearst and his use of “yellow journalism”, Wynand has many great qualities but his big character flaw is to be too concerned with the masses: he wants to control them, but in the process ends up being controlled by them.
The arch-villain of the book is the highly intelligent and utterly amoral Ellsworth Toohey, partly inspired by the British economist and political scientist Harold Laski. He believes that in order to exert control over the masses, one must undermine their belief in individual greatness and achievement, and Roark’s stubborn independence stands in the way of this project. It is all going very well according to Toohey’s plan, when an unforeseen thing happens: a couple of swindlers wanting a holiday-home property project to fail, hire Roark, believing based on what Toohey has written about him in Wynand’s newspaper, that he is a rotten architect and will create such ugly holiday homes that no-one will want to buy them.
On the pages of The Fountainhead Rand show-cases the script-writing skills she had developed whilst working in Hollywood for Cecil B. DeMille: the characters are larger than life, the surroundings brought to life through carefully scripted mise-en-scene, the dialogue is snappy, often with more than a hint of Bogartesque film-noir. If you only wanted to read one book by Ayn Rand this would have to be the one I would recommend: it sums up her philosophy – not least in the great court-room scene – and it is a cracking read
4. Atlas Shrugged – This is the big one that many quote as a decisive influence on their lives, on par almost with the Bible. It is around 1100 pages, depending on edition, and contains the famous, or infamous, speech that goes on for 60 pages. It was Rand’s final work of fiction and she saw it as her magnum opus, her full and complete statement containing all the main points of her by then developed philosophy, Objectivism.
WHY read it? Whether despite of or because of its philosophical inspiration and great length, the book is a very enjoyable and entertaining read. The basic premise of the story is that collectivism has taken so strongly hold in the USA that some of the greatest minds and talents have decided to withdraw their cooperation as they don’t wish to be under the thumb of lesser men who have wangled positions of power in the government – power that they are very happy to use. As these great minds are on strike, the US slowly descends into decay and chaos.
But not all able-minded people are on-board with the strike. Dagny Taggart, a woman every bit as independent-minded as Dominique Francon, but far more likeable as a character, tries to run her family-owned railway company together with her less able brother to the best of her abilities. This leads her to Hank Rearden, a genius industrialist who is still operating and who has invented a new type of metal that he calls Rearden metal: it is lighter and stronger than any other metal alloy, and Taggart wants to use it for her railway. Hank’s and Dagny’s storylines in the book are truly riveting (no pun intended) as they entwine on their route to the realisation of the evil of contributing to make the current system work.
Apart from the fascination of a story where the great industrialists and business executives are not seen as “robber barons” but creative geniuses who are the drivers and upholders of wealth creation in a free society, the novel is filmatic in its epic scope – in the storytelling Rand seems to have blazed a trail for a form of storytelling that is common these days in series on streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon: multiple characters and storylines woven together by a common thread that only reveals itself gradually as the story is unpacked episode by episode over sometimes several series often containing 15–25 episodes per series. Atlas Shrugged is made up three parts, the three series if you will, each containing ten chapters, or episodes, through which the various heroic characters, such as Francisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjöld and the mysterious John Galt emerge from the shadows against the backdrop of corruption and degeneration.
R.J. Bidinotto, in his article Atlas Shrugged as Literature, quotes Ayn Rand as saying, “My characters are never symbols, they are merely men in sharper focus than the audience can see with unaided sight […]” It is not only the men and women who are in sharper focus in Rand’s literature, but also the values that she saw as essential for our survival as rational humans beings – not just biological survival, but spiritual survival. The themes she lifts up to our attention are as universal and eternal as human civilization itself – they transcend grubby politics and have relevance whatever your philosophical outlook may be, or especially if you never thought much about it.
An interesting difference to note between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, is that whereas the former is concerned with how one ought to live in the world and society as it is, the latter is concerned with how society ought to be. Both takes are interesting, but one could say the The Fountainhead has more of a practical value in showing what Rand’s values mean to those who live by them in the world as it is.
In a world where social media make us at once instantly connected and utterly isolated, where collectivism guides the expansion of the state to solve financial, health and environmental problems as well as dealing with the Coronavirus outbreak, and at the same time a form of barren individualism emerges in the online world, where people create their own little “realities” making debate in a shared reality almost impossible, we need Ayn Rand’s insistence on adherence to the Aristotelian notion that A=A: a shared reality exists; we have it in common and logic is the path to knowledge about it, as well as her assertion of the Kantian principle that you are not merely a means to other people’s (or the state’s) end, a cog in the societal machine, but neither should you use others as mere tools to your ends.
There is no reason to be afraid of Ayn Rand, unless you are afraid of thinking.
My semi-autobiographical novel, In Good Faith, is available on Amazon and in good, independent bookstores.
Much of the book is based on real events from a religious sect in London with more than one skeleton in the closet.
Here’s what one reader says:
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It can be ordered from the link below, or message me privately for a special discount AND personalised signature.
As we have started to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, eyes blinking, adjusting to the bright sunlight of the “new normal” (whatever that is), it is crucial to take a critical look at what the hell happened. The investigative journalist and documentary film maker Laura Dodsworth has done just that in her hot off the press book, A State of Fear – How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The Ethics of Using Fear
The first thing to say is that this is not a book about the pros and cons of lockdown (although this is also discussed); it is a book about the ethics of deliberately using fear to achieve compliance with government policies. Those who supported lockdown as a public health measure can read this book with just as great interest – if not even greater interest – as those who were less keen on that unprecedented method, not least because so much of the justification for the removal of our liberties was based on fear: the fear of overloading the NHS, the fear of “long Covid”, the fear of dying or suffering severely from Covid, the fear of passing it on to a vulnerable person, etc., etc.
Hey! Matt Hancock, she’s looking at you!
Fear Works
People in this country have been overwhelmingly supportive of lockdown, and this book suggests that the reason for the high level of support is that people were frightened. Sometimes fear is a perfectly rational response to a threat, but the book asks whether the levels of fear in this country have been proportional to the threat represented by the Coronavirus.
Dodsworth points out in the chapter called The Metrics of Fear that “The British public thought 6–8% of people had died from coronavirus – around 100 times the actual death rate based on official figures.” Indeed, Britons had become the most scared people in the world, according to an international study carried out by a team from the University of Cambridge. Was this wrongful and inflated sense of fear intentionally engineered by the government to get the sheep (you and me) to do as we were told?
Interestingly, in the article referenced by the book there is the following line: “Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, the head of the University of Cambridge’s Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication which carried out the study, has expressed his concern that the UK has become “over anxious” and called for a campaign to get people “to start living again“.”
Low risk for most people
It is worth noting that Dr. Spiegelhalter is one of the leading statistical experts in Britain and the world. And on 21st March 2020, he published an article that enabled me to face the pandemic without undue fear and with a sense of proportion.
In an article called How Much ‘Normal’ Risk Does Covid Represent?, Dr. Spiegelhalter used the then known data to demonstrate that the risk of dying from Covid if you catch it, follows almost exactly the risk you have of dying normally (later, in July that year, on BBC Radio 4’s More or Less, he said that if anything, those figures could be adjusted down for the younger, saying, “[…] everybody under the age of 35 has been more likely to die in a road accident this year than die from Covid”, (ca. 27 mins. into the programme).
According to Dr. David Spiegelhalter’s graph, people under 35 were more at risk of dying in traffic than from Covid – hence the lockdown: to reduce traffic.
In the article he explains, “It’s important to note that all the risks quoted are the average (mean) risks for people of the relevant age, but are not the risks of the average person! This is because, both for COVID and in normal circumstances, much of the risk is held by people who are already chronically ill. So for the large majority of healthy people, their risks of either dying from COVID, or dying of something else, are much lower than those quoted here.”
If the government had presented this to the nation, my guess is that we would not have been the most scared country in the world. So, did the government selectively present data in such a way as to engender maximum fear as a conscious and intended policy aim? According to this book: yes.
Dodgy data
My only doubt about that central claim is that the government at the start of the pandemic seemed to want to downplay the threat to some degree. There were many ordinary people expressing their already existing fears on social media, long before I noticed any systematic attempt by the government to ramp it up. But, as Dodsworth points out, there was a shift in approach in March 2020, which led to the decision to instigate what was supposed to be a 3 week curfew, or “lockdown”, to “squash the sombrero”, in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s colourful phrase. Since then the government has done its best to prove the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman right, when he said: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”.
To justify the continued lockdown(s), the book points out how we were treated to a daily “horror show” of death figures from Covid without any context: i.e. we were not told how many had died in total from all causes (on average 1600 people die every day), we were not told the age profile (average age of those who died with Covid is 82, above the average mortality age), and crucially we were not told how many recovered after having been infected (approx. 97.6% of confirmed cases – obviously there are countless unconfirmed cases, so the real recovery figure is much higher). The book does not suggest an evil conspiracy to hide the figures – they were available on the website of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) – but rather that the government wilfully presented figures selectively to support a certain narrative – one that maximised fear.
Not only did the government hold back any information that could be regarded as reassuring or vaguely “good news”, but the book also highlights various subtle ways in which the government presented data misleadingly. We often hear, for instance, that so and so many people have been “admitted to hospital with Covid.” However, the category “…’patients admitted’ actually includes ‘people admitted to hospital who tested positive for COVID-19 in the 14 days prior to admission, and those who tested positive in hospital after admission […]’“. [My bolding]. This is the government’s own definition, and it means that people who are admitted to hospitals for other reasons, but happen to test positive after admission, or become infected in hospital, are included in the figures presented.
Laura Dodsworth – not afraid to tell it as it is
Why is this important? It has become well-known that around 20–30% of Covid cases in hospitals caught the virus whilst in hospital. In a study by four senior academics, published in The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, the problem is laid bare: “In England, South Tees Hospital Trust has had seven separate outbreaks of Covid-19. An inquiry was launched in Tameside as in a small district hospital more than a third of all coronavirus deaths among inpatients in England occurred in a week. It has been found that 150 patients caught coronavirus in hospitals operated by University Hospitals Bristol and Weston Foundation Trust, of which a third died. This itself makes up almost a third of the total of 154 deaths in this trust over the course of the entire pandemic so far.“
In March 2021 the Guardian published an article showing that 20–25% of Covid patients in hospitals caught it whilst being an in-patient. What neither of these two publications mentions, however, is what Dodsworth points out: that the way the government presented the figures, the impression was given that all those in hospital with Covid were infected in the community and then went on to become hospitalised due to the severity of the illness; this is not true, and the difference should have been pointed out to avoid the figures being misleading.
Not that I wish to trivialise infections caught in hospital. As the Guardian article goes on to state, “[…]experts in hospital-acquired infection pointed out that many of those being admitted for other reasons – such as an operation or after a fall or flare-up of an existing medical problem – are frail and vulnerable and have underlying poor health, so would be more likely to die if they did get Covid.”
But that is an issue of poor protection of the vulnerable (where have we heard that before?). Blurring the distinction between hospital-acquired and community-acquired infection is an issue of wilfully presenting data in a misleading way.
The Nightingale Covid Hospital in London – remained the most efficiently run hospital in England, according to Sir Humphrey Appleby. Patients just mess things up.
We are also familiar with the overcounting of deaths, vividly illustrated in the book with the example of a care home resident who died well into her 80s, who “…tested positive for Covid at the end of March 2020, when she had mild symptoms. She recovered, but went on to die in August. A covering doctor who had never met the resident, or seen the body, insisted that Covid must have been a cause of death.” According to the ONS about 50% of all Covid registered deaths are people above the age of 85, so we can only guess how many of these are similar to the case above. The counting method was tidied up eventually, but still includes anyone who dies 28 days after testing positive, even if they die of other causes.
Even the data used to justify the first lockdown, such as the models of professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, have been shown to be inaccurate, according to Dodsworth. Professor Ferguson’s model “…assumed no existing immunity to Covid. Since then, six studies have shown T-cell reactivity (which gives protection) from previous coronaviruses in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to Covid.” In Ferguson’s defence it could be said that this was not necessarily known at the time. However, Dodsworth also interviews Dr. Knut Wittkowski, former Head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University, who said to Dodsworth that “...’among scientists, Neil Ferguson does not have any credibility because his predictions are always wrong.‘”
Rather than learn from this, the book points out that the government doubled down on its use of dodgy data. To justify the second lockdown, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patric Vallance presented a false scenario based on outdated figures that suggested 50,000 cases and 4,000 deaths a day. The use of inaccurate data was criticised by the UK Statistical Authority at the time, and I remember the aforementioned Dr. David Spiegelhalter excoriating Whitty and Vallance over their sloppy use of data. But was it sloppiness or what former Prime Minister Theresa May described as making the figures fit the policy rather than the policy the figures? I think the book makes a strong case for the former.
Not Gilbert & George but Whitty and Vallance – criticised by the UK Statistical Authority for using out of date data to justify lockdown II
Fear as policy
SPI-B is an acronym that stands for Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (who makes up these names?) and along with a couple of other similar groups that advise on other topics, it feeds advice to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) on how to engender compliant behaviour. Dodsworth was able to interview four members of this group, so central to the management of messaging around behaviour (remember “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives”?).
Some members of SPI-B would only speak to Dodsworth under promise of anonymity. One of them told her: “There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. […] The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable.” The member went on to say that he or she felt “…we have lost the balance between protecting people from a virus and protecting what makes us human.”
Dodsworth asked all of them “[…] if they had been commissioned to think about helping people manage their fear and the ending of lockdown. A SPI-B paper put forward the idea of elevating fear, so I assumed that they would have considered the exit plan. […] They all seemed surprised to be asked. The idea was obviously not on the table yet.”
As with lockdown itself, it seems that the government went headlong into creating fear to engender compliance, but had no exit strategy. No wonder people are still terrified every time there is a mention of an increase in “cases”, which actually means positive tests (including completely asymptomatic and false positive cases).
The compliant media
Dodsworth is not just casting a critical eye on how the government used fear as a policy. She also discusses how the media in most cases seemed to go along with the government’s narrative almost uncritically at times – with much of the criticism from main-stream media and the official opposition being that the government ought to have locked down sooner and harder and more and longer.
She also points to the fact that many media companies have a reward structure – such as bonuses for number of clicks – that rewards sensationalism and scary headlines that are often not supported by the facts when looked at more closely.
To some degree we expect this from the tabloids and commercial media, which is why the BBC was particularly disappointing for many during the pandemic. “I talked to former BBC journalist Sue Cook. She told me she had been surprised and disappointed by the BBC’s once-sided coverage of Covid, and the lack of vigorous questioning.” The book references the BBC’s Charter, which includes guidelines on how to use language during “...times of terror, war and disaster. One promise is that ‘care is required in the use of language that carries value judgements‘”. Dodsworth goes on to demonstrate that this charter was clearly more honoured in its breach than its observance by the BBC’s editorial teams. This can still be observed – in the last few days I have heard on BBC radio and read on their website that the number of cases (positive tests) are “surging”. This is not a neutral word. “Increasing” would have been reporting in a neutral and objective way, “surging” is dramatizing the news and adding a value judgement that serves to engender an emotional response.
Social media – arbiters of truth?
Social media have also played a role. Thankfully, Dodsworth does not dive too deeply into what can sometimes be a cesspit of unending nonsense, with certainly a lot of misinformation spread on all sorts of issues. But in order to combat this, some social media companies have clearly gone too far in the other direction, and arbitrarily added “fact check” notices on reputable articles, and: “As Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch said to me, ‘I have to pinch myself sometimes that doctors have been removed from YouTube for talking about their medical experience of treating patients.‘”
The above mentioned Dr. Knut Wittkowski had his video removed from YouTube after being seen nearly 1.5 million times. In the video Wittkowski expresses his lockdown critical views, but YouTube claimed it “violated” community standards. “Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, warned that the platform would remove any information about the virus it regarded as ‘problematic’.”
It is strange that the considered opinions of one epidemiologist are considered “problematic” but not those of another. Is this really about controlling the narrative?
Dr. Wittkowski goes on to say that he thought “[…] ‘politicians and media are spreading fear. It goes far beyond what the situation would justify […] like in 1984, it is fear which keeps people in a state where they follow the government. It’s not Oceania and Eurasia anymore, it’s Covid’.”
The government’s new Covid slogan?
#MeToo
Here I can add my own personal experience. On 4th July 2021, as newspapers were reporting on the potential dropping of the mandated wearing of face coverings, I wanted to re-share an article published last year in one of the oldest and most respected magazines in the world, The Spectator. The article is called Landmark Danish study finds no significant effect for facemask wearers, and iswritten by Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Tom Jefferson, a senior associate tutor and honorary research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford. Not exactly QAnon conspiracy theorists.
The article presents a study conducted by more than 20 Danish academics, using 6000 volunteers, of which 4862 completed the study. Not exactly cranks spewing out unverified opinions. Yet when the article was first published, Facebook presumed to put a “fact check” warning over the post, and when I tried to share it as part of the above mentioned discussion on removing restrictions, Facebook proceeded to block my permission to share links altogether for 24 hours!
Facebook knows best…or not
The reason? Who knows? They don’t give reasons. I can only see two likely explanations: 1. There was an error in the algorithms, or 2. The conclusion of the study, as reported in the article, was not in line with Facebook’s desired narrative: “In the end, there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19.“
Dodsworth also interviews one of the leading scientists behind this study, Dr. Henrik Ullum, who since the study has been made Director of Statens Serum Institut (the Danish equivalent of Public Health England). Although he is careful to point out that he has no wish to rock the boat of global pandemic management, he also says “[…[…] ‘we haven’t managed the fear well enough. There has been too much fear. This is a serious epidemic, and we need to do the right things, but it’s not an apocalypse.’“
My experience bears out what the book reveals about how the government either directly used social media (such as through the 77th Brigade, part of the 6th Division of the Army and “[…] specialising in ‘non-lethal forms of psychological warfare“, who is allegedly behind the “trolling” of Twitter users who did not toe the government approved line) or were indirectly supported by “group-think” within big tech companies and mainstream media, most of whom for example deemed the theory of the Coronavirus having escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan as a “conspiracy theory”, until suddenly, when the explanation became increasingly likely and impossible to rule out, as pointed out in this article on the BBC website from May 2021, it wasn’t.
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink
One school of thought that has been very popular within public policy for the last decade or so, the so-called nudge theory, also comes in for criticism, in what I found a less convincing, if still interesting part of the book. Nudge theory became popular precisely because it doesn’t use compulsion, but instead other subtle means to engender the desired outcomes. It is fair to ask, as Dodsworth does, by what right these technocrats and politicians claim to know better what is good for you and for me than we do for ourselves. This is an interesting debate, but in terms of the pandemic, the real question as I see it is whether nudge went out the window in favour of a firm push behind the shoulder blades. If we were nudged during this pandemic, it was with a very sharp bayonet, not a juicy carrot or the painting of flies in urinals to improve men’s aim.
Is the future wearing a face mask?
But it is easy to see the sinister side of nudge as applied during the pandemic: in supermarkets they have marked the floors with big, round dots or circles and lines to mark distance. Whether these measures have any effect in lowering transmission is impossible to measure, but they are visible reminders that keep the paranoia alive. The same thinking is behind the mandating of face coverings, according to Dodsworth:
“[Masks] have turned the UK population into walking billboards that announce we are in a deadly epidemic. […] The unintended consequence of the masks is that they keep the fear alive and modify our behaviour […].“
The doctor will see you now: face masks have been proven to make the wearers feel morally superior to those who don’t wear them
Dodsworth relates a headline on Bloomsberg: “‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic […] we may never go back to normal.'” Whilst this may sound particularly hysterical, we should remember that almost everybody thought it was inconceivable that people would go along with being locked up in their own homes like prisoners without a fair trial (the above mentioned professor Ferguson – who earned himself the nickname Professor Pantsdown after he himself broke the lockdown rules he recommended to meet up with his married mistress – used the phrase “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought” and Dodsworth points out that this is a revealing way to put it). Yet people did go along with it and the government did get away with it.
In one of the appendixes Dodsworth quotes from a report by the Centre for Political Studies in Denmark, that stated that “‘Studies […] find that, on average, mandated behavioural changes accounts for only 9% (median 0%) of the total effect on the growth of the pandemic stemming from behavioural changes. The remaining 91% (median 100%) of the effect was due to voluntary behavioural changes.'[…]”.
But don’t people change their behaviour voluntarily because they are afraid?
Is fear a necessary evil?
The question that the book does not answer is whether voluntary measures would work if people did not feel the same level of fear. Dodsworth appears to slightly undermine her own message by telling the story of her friends who invited friends over, but only two at a time and only for drinks, as if the virus had the good sense not to infect people who were merely having a gin & tonic of an evening. They were clearly not overly worried, then. She also refers to the young people who “[…] crowded into parks around the country on 29 March 2021 when restrictions eased[…]”. She frames this in terms of “Fear is not sustainable.” She may be right about that, but another element that enabled people to support lockdown with such enthusiasm was the furlough scheme, through which people were being paid by the government to sit at home – remove the furlough, and the fear might have gone out the window before you could say ‘next pay cheque’. This is an aspect the book fails to take into account or discuss at all.
In my own immediate circle, I observed changes in behaviour among my daughter’s friends, as the urgency of friendship and being together took on greater importance than any worries they might have had about the virus. However, I can also tell stories of teenagers being deeply anxious and of those who were threatened by their own parents that if they don’t follow the rules to the extent of not meeting friends outdoors, their grandparents’ blood will be on their hands. The evil of saying such a thing to your own child is almost beyond comprehension for me as a parent, but it stems directly from the campaigns of fear, telling us that by doing normal things we might “kill granny” or that a cup of coffee could “cost lives”.
There is no treatment of the Hancock affair in this first edition, but it is worth noting that when we see the now, thankfully, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock – one of the main drivers behind the fear propaganda and lockdowns – not taking it terribly seriously himself, it is fairly safe to assume that many people will start to question whether the government really believed its own hype and whether it really was all worth it (spoiler alert: no, it wasn’t).
A bit of a cock-up: former Health Secretary Matt Hancock practising hands, face, space, but not necessarily in that order.
In conclusion then…
My own feeling is that if people did not feel a degree of fear (and were paid by the government to indulge this fear), they would not have taken the guidelines as seriously as they did take the enforced lockdown and other measures. But as I see it, this does not matter. If people are presented with the objective facts, and have the freedom to make their own risk assessment, and having done so choose to take very few precautions, that should be their right – as long as they don’t do anything that knowingly exposes a vulnerable person to undue risk (for example a care home worker who, aware that she has the virus, still goes in to work. I have also discussed the libertarian case for mandating vaccines in another blogpost – although I do not think the current circumstances fulfil the criteria I outlined). If this leads to an overwhelming of the Health Service, then we need to look at how the Health Service is organised and emergency care provided. The Health Service is there to serve the people, not the people the Health Service.
The message of the book is that the overt use of fear was unethical, which I think the book makes a strong case for. But then it also says that nudge is problematic, and that enforced measures do not work anyway. This seems to me to be a little inconsistent and contradictory. The government in this pandemic threw everything and the kitchen sink at the problem, and that was quite possibly an overreaction, not least since Sweden, who took a more measured approach, have seen far fewer excess deaths %-wise than Britain and other countries with very strict lockdowns, and less damage to its economy, children’s education, etc., but Dodsworth appears to want neither nudge nor force nor fear, so what then? Nothing at all? Perhaps not a bad idea, but she doesn’t make this quite explicit, if that is what she means.
To be fair, the book is an excellent presentation of certain problematic aspects of the management of the pandemic, seen from a different point of view than the “should-have-locked-down-sooner & harder“-perspective, which I think is a very necessary and valuable contribution to the post-pandemic conversation that we need to have. I don’t think the book provides all the answers, but then again, that was perhaps not the author’s intention.
All in all: 8/10 sunflowers, and certainly recommended for those who wish to have an informed opinion about the biggest issue for a very long time in politics and society, and one that I think will haunt us for decades to come.
Is NOT the title of Matt Ridley’s latest book. It is in fact the far more optimistic How Innovation Works, befitting the author of The Rational Optimist. As such, one might expect this to be, well, a rationally optimistic take on innovation. For the most part it is. But Ridley also throws down a number of gauntlets (itself an innovation once, I suppose) as well as challenging some of our common preconceptions about innovation.
The first among these to mention is a theme that runs like a red thread, or some might even say red flag, through the book.
The 5th viscount Ridley reading something funny, but is it innovation?
“One of the flaws in the way we recount stories of innovation is that we unfairly single out individuals, ignoring the contribution of lesser mortals.”
Firstly let’s note the difference between “invention” and “innovation”, which Ridley makes clear early on. The former is the discovery or development of a new thing or concept, the latter is the process by which this thing is turned into a practical solution that gains widespread usage in its relevant field. A brilliant invention sitting in a shed is no good to anyone, it is only when it has been applied to a real-world situation, or satiates a need (real or perceived) that the invention becomes a useful innovation. This distinction is crucial, because most inventors are not good innovators, and many innovators are not really inventors at all.
Keeping that in mind, let’s look at the author’s claim that we tend to single out the heroic individuals too much. If I ask you who invented the light bulb, I bet you would answer “Thomas Edison”. You’d be wrong. And you’d be right. He did, but so did, according to Ridley, twenty other people before the 1870s. The light bulb, claims Ridely, “was bound to appear when it did, given the progress of other technologies.” Where Edison was different was in his ability to turn a novel invention into a useful, practical item that actually made a difference to ordinary people’s everyday life. This he did, not by one brilliant insight, but by his and his team of assistants’ putting in thousands of hours of hard work, as Edison famously said, “genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”.
“Let there be light” …said about 20 inventors – but Edison removed the bushel
Nearly all inventions, Ridely argues, from the steam engine, through internal combustion, electricity, the light bulb, aeroplanes, vaccines, clean drinking water, the computer, and so forth, become workable innovations through a long slog of trial and error over time, with one person standing on the shoulders of the giants who went before, in Sir Isaac Newton’s famous metaphorical imagery.
Now, if you are of the “rugged individualist” school of thought, often illustrated by the character in Ayn Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged Hank Rearden, you may rear up (pun intended) in annoyance and disgust at this. Rearden is an industrialist, inventor and innovator; he develops a new super-steel, Rearden Steel, makes railways out of it, lays the tracks and runs the railroad. Such a character is most unlikely in the real world, if Ridley is to be believed. Yet, the message of his book is not in such diametrical opposition to the Randian world view of Atlas Shrugged as at first it might seem.
In Atlas Shrugged Rearden is opposed tooth and nail by the established players in the steel and railroad industries. They lobby the government to squeeze the life out of his invention and to quell it before it becomes an interruptive invention, to coin Clayton M. Christensen’s phrase, with heavy-handed precautionary regulation. In this Rearden is a most realistic representation of the innovator:
Ridley tells of numerous examples, where new, innovative solutions that could challenge or threaten existing players, were held down and back by heavy-handed regulation enacted by politicians under the influence of existing “crony capitalists”, as Ridley puts it.
It also bears mentioning that the shoulders Newton singled out for standing on were those of giants, not dwarfs. If 21 people invented the lightbulb out of the millions of dullards who didn’t, Rand’s assertion that a few brilliant people move the word forward, is not entirely wrong.
But it is concerning the hindrance of over-zealous regulation you will need to put on shoes with protective toe-caps for all the gauntlets Ridley throws down: he is wisely careful not to enter into the debate about Britain’s membership of the European Union, and he points out the importance of free, international trade, but he also makes two interesting points:
1. Innovations historically seem to flourish in smaller, national countries – even city states – with a well-established framework of just law, peaceful conditions and social and economic freedom. In nearly all the cases where regimes develop into empires, innovation grinds to a halt after a while. One modern exception may be the USA, but Ridley argues that is at least in part due to its federalist structure. I would like to have seen some more discussion of this. Empires can be good at promoting cross-border trade, which we have seen through history, even with our own EU “empire”. Perhaps there is a point when these empires grow too top-heavy and centralized, with too many vested interests in the status quo, at which they tip over into an unhelpful state of governance.
2. Although he does not directly mention the EU in this empire critique, he later in the book deals in some detail with the hindrances and barriers to innovation raised by the EU under the influence of lobbyist, from the issue of GM food to bagless vacuum cleaners, the EU has shown itself as a handy tool for the incumbent with lobbying power to stifle disruptive innovation. (On the bagless vacuum cleaner, the EU decided to test energy efficiency in dust free environments(!), in contrast to international test standards, apparently in order to make German made vacuum cleaners appear as energy efficient as the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and only after a lengthy and expensive legal battle did they finally back down).
The result is, according to Ridely, a famine of innovation creeping across Europe, but also, surprisingly, the USA, with an increasing number of innovators moving away from Silicon Valley due to suffocating regulations. He points out how innovation has been taking off in China and India, and although he does not ignore that China’s political system may in the end collide with the most fundamental requirement for innovation: freedom, he thinks the Old World (including the USA) has grown complacent, fat and self-indulgent, obsessed with over-precaution, laden with top-heavy regulation and slowed by a decline in work ethics.
Innovation tends to take off in societies that work according to the 9-9-6 structure: from 9am to 9pm six days a week. When Britain and the US had this, they led the world; now China has this and is taking the lead.
Another point that I found challenged my prejudices, was that patent law, far from helping innovation, often hinders it. Ridley cites examples of patents being bought and sold as commodities in themselves, throwing a spanner in the works of innovators. He also points out cases where innovation has taken off when patents have lapsed or been released through one means or another. I would proceed very carefully with a discussion of this.
The value of an idea is perhaps the single most important factor in what creates added value and makes capitalism work, an understanding that evaded Karl Marx, focussing as he did on what the labourer physically contributes in the process of production. Ridley references the work of the economist Deidre McCloskey, who uses the term “the innovation economy” as a more accurate descriptive for the economic system we call capitalism.
Ayn Rand, in her essay Patents and Copyrights (in the collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), argues, “Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.” But she goes on to acknowledge the problem that Ridley identifies in the book, “A patented invention often tends to hamper or restrict further research and development in a given area of science.”
Her conclusion, not too dissimilar to that of Ridley, is that whilst patent laws must offer the originator some protection of the value that lies in an invention or innovation, enabling long-term certainty for investors (Ridley mentions drug companies using many years and millions of pounds in R&D before a new drug can be marketed), it must not offer unjust reward to those who do not have a moral claim to the accruing benefits, and it should avoid, as Rand says, “…infringing the right of others to pursue independent research.”
Unlike physical property, an idea’s intrinsic value is not exhausted by its sharing, indeed its value may increase, Ridley points out, yet the oil in the innovation economy is capital, and if some capital-lubrication does not flow in the direction of the inventor and the innovator, then the cogs will soon cease up.
Ridley had finished this book just as the coronavirus hit our societies with all its panic inducing capability, and he has therefore included an afterword where he discusses innovation in light of the challenges thrown up by Covid-19. Not surprisingly he expects the solution to be an innovation – perhaps an unexpected one. If that sounds optimistic, however, remember that if the examples in his book are anything to go by, this could mean years of hard work before we’re anywhere near an innovative solution.
Champagne was once an innovation – enabled by the better glass bottle technology of England.
Ridley’s message is a most important one to disseminate throughout our society: capitalism and innovation go hand in hand. But the process works best if divorced from politics, so as to avoid too much lobbying leverage by existing players; the system must be open to interruption, and the bureaucracy should be light-handed to support, not stifle innovation.
One last story from the book to illuminate (this pun also intended) this point and to bookend the review with the light bulb: when politicians around 2010, under lobbying pressure from environmental campaigners and producers, decided to phase out the incandescent light bulb, they pushed hard for the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL). Do you remember those? They took forever to come on and were very expensive. According to Ridley, “The cost to Britain alone, of this coerced purchase and the subsidy that accompanied it, has been estimated at about £2.75bn.”
Cue the innovative solution of LED lamps, and we have a light-technology that is now cheap to buy, very inexpensive and energy-efficient to run, and extremely flexible. Ridley compares the CFL policy to the government in 1900 forcing people to buy steam cars rather than waiting for the internal combustion vehicle to develop.
And really lastly: Although I have bought two hard-back copies of this book to give away, I actually listened to this book through the complimentary audio book version you get by trying Audible.co.uk. I felt it right to mention this, because even though it was nice to be able to listen whilst doing other things, I prefer to consume my literature – especially non-fiction – pencil in hand, making notes in the margins and underlining, and so I won’t be going on to a paid subscription. This little commercial is me paying my dues.
And totally lastly: I hope you will support your local bookshop if you still have one. (At the moment the government’s face-mask enforcement policy is putting me off going into my local bookstore, more on that here. So much for getting the economy back on its feet). As pubs do not require face masks, I now have a double excuse for doing a lot of my reading there: no face masks, AND I am supporting the local economy. Happy reading!
My local newspaper published a rather brutally edited version, so for those who are interested in the issue of whether the government should enforce the use of face coverings in shops, here is the original text:
The latest official figures estimate that 0.04% of the population are carrying the coronavirus. That means nationally you need to meet 2,300 people before you meet one with the virus. But in Colchester, as the Gazette reported a few days ago, the infection rate is 1 per 100,000. I know it can get busy at the Tollgate Sainsburys, but not that busy.
And even if you did manage the feat of meeting this one person carrying the virus, it is far from certain you would catch the virus. And if you did? Well, Dr. David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University estimated the mortality of Covid at the start of the outbreak, and his figures have been borne out: up to the age of 49 average mortality risk is 0.14% and up to age 59 it is 0.6%. As a motorcyclist the mortality rate is 1.7%.
The current average infection rate is 0.7-0.9 and at the start of the month the total number of registered deaths were 0.5% below the five year average.
In light of this, it is quite absurd to introduce a law forcing people to cover their faces in shops all over the country, like the one that came into force this Friday 24th July. Why?
Risk management: Protecting yourself and others whilst out and about is about managing the risk level. As this is already so low, especially in Colchester, what difference will it make now to cover your face? At the height of the pandemic, perhaps it would have made a difference in some parts of the country, but now? Sweet F.A.
Arbitrary:You pop into your local grocer for a pint of milk, you have to cover your face, although you’re in and out of there in five minutes flat. Then you go and sit down at the pub with several other people indoors for a couple of hours. No covering required. Same in schools and offices. In most shops it is not difficult to keep six feet away from people, not least as crowd control is practised these days anyway. You are in shops for a short period of time, and they tend to have fairly good ventilation. In addition, the people who are in shops for longer periods, the staff, are not required to wear face coverings, although they are shielded behind plastic screens (to make sure you cannot hear what they are saying). The law is arbitrary and illogical
Efficacy: The government guidelines do not require you to wear a medical grade mask. It is quite enough to tie a bandana or old hankie around your nose and mouth, like a highwayman (I seem to remember Boris Johnson had something to say about people looking like bank robbers a little while back). These flimsy pieces of fabric have been likened to wearing a chain link to stop a hail of bullets. The virus apparently hovers with the mist from our breathing in the air for a while. Unless you wear a medical grade mask you will not stop these microbes from intermixing with your breath. So you might as well wear a wreath of garlic (at least that will help with social distancing).
How long? If you introduce masks now that the infection level and R-number are so low, when on earth do you lift this requirement? The government is backing itself into a very tight corner: the corner where depriving citizens of their liberties is the new normal, rather than a short-term emergency measure.
The message:If the government told us to wear lucky heathers, the same purpose would have been fulfilled as this law seeks to fulfil: make people feel it is safe to go shopping so that they will spend, spend, spend, and repair the damage from the government’s overly strict and far too long lasting lock-down. But I fear the effect may be the opposite: some people (like myself) will resent being forced to wear a mask, and so will stay away from local shops in Colchester and all over the county, and instead order online. For others, seeing people walk around with masks, as if we’re all extras in an apocalyptic horror film, will induce fear. They will think, ‘well, if we have to wear masks in public, it must be bad’. Just as local shops need our support, and just as it is safe to go to them, this will make many people stay away.
The role of government is to protect our liberties. To do this we accept that the state has the monopoly on the use of violence. We accept that this fearsome power must sometimes be used to limit our absolute liberty in the public interest. We accepted the lock-down, although it was a monstrous imposition on our freedoms, as the Prime Minister admitted, because it was an effective way to stop the spread. It worked, the virus is under control. To use the power of the state now to force people to wear a flimsy face covering on pain of a £100 fine, can simply not be justified – it is a draconian and disproportionate measure.
Think also of the pressure it puts on staff – I wouldn’t want to challenge a six foot builder with tattoos not wearing a mask! Sainsburys has already declared that their staff will be told not to challenge non-wearers; they will assume they have a good reason for not doing so. The police have said they can’t be running around arresting non-wearers. So that gives us point no. 6: it is unenforceable. Laws that are unenforceable contribute to erode people’s respect for The Law in general.
I am not a rebel. If I absolutely have to go to the shops in the next few weeks, I will wear a face covering. I have a pair of old underpants customized for the purpose.
M.W. Hagerup – Words Matter 
