Category: Politics

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The Open Society and its enemies

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“The Open Society and its enemies” is a two volume work by Karl Popper claiming that Plato, Hegel and Marx were the enemies of open societies. I am not sure that this is fair judgment of Plato’s political ideas since many of these are still used as a standard by which to measure justice in societies today. Plato was definitely not a liberal but many humanistic liberals have sought and found inspiration in his dialogues. It should also be remembered that Plato’s “Republic” is the first systematic attempt to analyse political ideas such as justice and freedom. Since I have, in earlier posts, raised the question of whether humanistic liberalism is in the process of being dismantled by current events in the UK and USA it might be useful to use some of Plato’s ideas to analyse the phenomenon of  Mr Donald Trump in terms of the idea of being an enemy of the open society. The BBC in a short critical presentation compares some of Plato’s criticism of  classical Greek direct democracy with what is currently happening in the USA. According to the BBC’s presentation of Plato, when parents are no longer respected by their children and when teachers become afraid of their students a tyrant from the oligarchs will emerge to tempt the people with promises that he will solve all their problems and deliver a better life. Now one of the reasons why our liberal democracies are representative and not direct democracies is partly to eliminate the phenomenon of the tyrant via  a system of representative democracy which functions in accordance with the classical Greek idea of areté.  Areté means excellence  when referring to action and virtuous when referring to an agent and involved in this idea is the message of the Republic which is that no one can govern in accordance with areté unless one has the appropriate knowledge. The warning bells relating to President Trumps  lack of practical wisdom and competence have been ringing all through his campaign. A stable liberal representative democracy would have heeded the significance of these bells and any  candidate should have been stopped in their  tracks by the collective tonnage of  rational argument in the media and through the collective tonnage of resultant public demonstrations. Now unfortunately the media did not  fulfill its obligations in this respect  and demonstrations only reached significant proportions the day after Trump was inaugurated.

In classical Greece during the time of the philosophers, a man of practical wisdom  could stand in the market place and his arguments be heard and understood. I do not think the media are the only party to blame  for the current chaotic situation because I am sure they will maintain  that the argument that Trump was not qualified for the position of the Presidency was presented adequately to an audience that refused to listen or understand. Plato, suggested in the Republic as a definition of Justice in the State, a principle of specialisation in which he claims that people of  the wealthy class should not interfere with the ruling class and furthermore the wealthy man should never rule  for fear of the corruption of the office through abuse of power in for example, favouring his friends and family. But the real bite of the principle of specialisation relates to areté, the excellence of the rulers political wisdom, and in this respect the medias argument is a poor one  because quite simply the sound bites we heard in the media interviews of Trump never achieved the level of practical wisdom, never were in accordance with areté, the excellence we expect from a President and his interrogators. One of the messages of the Republic was that training and thorough education was of vital importance for the rulers but since Ronald Reagan one must assume that the Republic of the USA no longer believes in that idea. Perhaps the future will see the birth of the concept of the apprentice President.

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Political Responsibility

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Paul Ricoeur, the late French Philosopher, would have been fascinated by the twistings and turnings of current events in two of the bastions of political liberalism: the UK and the USA. His ethically based political theory reaches back to the Greeks and Aristotle, the Enlightenment and Kant, and engages with contemporary theories of Justice as manifested by the debates between Rawls and Nozick, Habermas and Gadamer. Ricoeur’s  primary claim is that Politics is vitally important to the well being of us all, yet it is simultaneously surprisingly fragile. Both of these factors, he argues entails that we owe it to politics to act and vote responsibly. In particular we owe a complex allegiance to our body politic which involves both respecting the status quo which has given us so much, and respecting those that criticize the status quo for its inadequacies to deliver the flourishing lives we all hope for.  Ricoeur analyses political discourse and finds a number of dialectical processes operating. Among them is that between  the utopia we hope for and the values of the ideological factors that constitute the status quo which historically has provided us with so much stability and prosperity. We need to maintain a delicate balance between these two factors in our political acts and political talk. Politics, he argues, is a unique arena which requires the mastery of a unique set of capacities amongst which good judgment and sound reasoning are paramount. Ricoeur refers to a number of  other paradoxes which constitute the fragility of political life including the problem of transference, i.e. the problem of people from other arenas of life bringing the capacities that they use in those arenas, into politics. Two  arenas which immediately spring to mind in relation to this point are the arenas of business with its practices of wheeling and dealing and contractual “interpretations” and the arenas of science with its theoretically oriented practices, manipulation of  variables and experimental reductionism and verification. To appreciate the differences for example between the business world and the political world it suffices to compare the stability and longevity of the institutions of  business (a company or a bank) with the longevity and stability of political institutions like the legislative system or the educational system.Running a country is nothing like running a chain of hotels. Ricoeur’s criticisms of populism would point to the role of facts in the sound reasoning process. Without facts which by definition are true beliefs, reasoning cannot proceed to sound conclusions. Subjecting facts to an “interpretative process” might enable voters to vote for popular people with what they perceive to be unique interpretative and rhetorical abilities but time is going to reveal the consequences of such voting for the political system. Some commentators are arguing that we can forget about the dialectic between  a better more hopeful future and the present status quo. What is at stake is a dismantling of the political status quo in favor of an economic roller coaster ride ending at an unknown destination.

Such is the fragility of the political process and the nature of our responsibility toward it.

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The Dismantling of Humanistic liberalism?

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It must be difficult for both journalists and academics to describe  and explain what has happened in the world over the past 6 months. Two of the bastions of liberalism, the United Kingdom and the USA have both radically changed their political direction. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were not just unexpected because  of a miscalculation of the values of a number of variables. These events were unexpected because a number of variables suddenly became irrelevant and a number of new variables seemingly appeared on our horizons. One of the variables which almost overnight  seemed to become irrelevant, and which had become part of the framework of political expectations in all developed nations since the Age of the Enlightenment, was that of Globalization. Whether it be the global exchange of ideas or of goods and services no expert  or group of experts could have foreseen that these processes would be displaced by populist slogans such as “Make America Great again ” or “Let us take control of our country again” which in their turn led people to  vote for the least likely of a pair of alternatives. The analysis of the reasons for our modern predicament by journalists and the more popularly inclined academics who appear constantly in our media  refer to  an interesting number of factors which possibly could help to describe exactly what has happened, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to explain the phenomena which have recently presented themselves. The ground swell of attitudes and opinions that were leading us toward Globalization, or what Kant referred to as Cosmopolitanism, suddenly were affected by the two seismic events referred to above  and the whole Project of the Enlightenment, namely the moral progress of the world appears to have been stopped in its course. The two world wars and the cold war of the last “terrible century”(Hannah Arendt) failed to permanently alter the agenda of the Enlightenment. Since then we have had over 70 years of Kantian progress which included the formation of the United Nations and the European Union. Humanistic liberalism seemed to have triumphed and the hundred thousand year journey which Kant predicted appeared to be much closer to fulfillment than expected. I do not believe that the phenomena of Brexit and Trump defy analysis  but I do believe that we do not as yet have an analysis of why what happened, happened. The academic and political project of humanistic liberalism has suffered a setback. Some have claimed that  this project is in the process of being dismantled. If this is the case one can well wonder whether this century is merely going to be a continuation in spirit of the previous century.

Michael James