Nowadays we hear it repeated ad nauseam that ours is the post-truth age,
the age of alternative facts and fake news. It is similarly repeated that this
state of affairs has contributed to some of the more surprising events of
recent years, notably Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of
so-called populism from Italy to the Philippines. For some people it's easy to
pin this all on the Russians; their governing through chaos, their interference
in foreign elections, their undermining of international norms, their mockingly
deadpan sense of humour, etc. For others, predominantly of a liberal shade,
it's the abandonment of facts in political affairs that has let in the spectre
of civil unrest and international discord. A politics not grounded in facts -
they argue - is a perfidious thing, libel to stir up the emotional and the
credulous among globalisation's less fortunate souls; inciting them into acts
of self harm such as voting to leave the cosy neo-liberal bosom of the EU. As for
the British Parliament - slouching into the New Year in deadlock over the
Brexit deal - the clamour for a second referendum continues to grow. Here we
find the question of facts raised pointedly.
Leading proponents of a second poll
point to notorious incidences like Boris Johnson's Brexit bus, plastered with
the claim that £350 million a week could be invested in the UK National Health
Service after exiting the EU, as proof that the people were deceived and sold a
pipe dream of Brexit Britain that could never have been delivered. Others say
that now the terms of the deal are known people should be able to vote on the
facts rather than speculations and promises. On the face of it there's nothing
controversial about the facts of an issue being known (as if what constitutes
‘known’ isn’t itself controversial in matters of mass democracy), but the Remainers
who argue that a politics of facts will deliver them the result they want, or
heal the divisions in Britain are fundamentally mistaken, both about the Brexit
conflict and the nature of politics more generally.
This valorisation of facts and the
notion that if everyone has access to the same information they should come to
similar conclusions, is rooted in Enlightenment ideas about objective reason
and more deeply an inherent liberal distrust of political contestation over
values and what used to be called 'the life questions'. Consensus politics (liberal
politics par excellence) assumes similarly that people given the same facts and
without obvious distorting prejudices will not end up taking incommensurate
positions. All that would then be needed to resolve an issue and form a general
will would be a degree of compromise on all sides and perhaps some level of
debate with reasoned argumentation as the leading light. This is of course the
logic not only of political liberalism but of that mode of
quasi-anthropological thought that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries along
with the scientific method more generally. The twin advent of political
liberalism and modern science is well known, as are their shared premises of
economic, technological and political progressivism. Less well understood is
what has been excluded in political life the more it has become a matter for
technocratic horse trading and global economic consensus.
2a) The Elimination of Conflict and the Rise of the Fact
The Brexit debacle has done much to challenge
the illusion that good governance is always conducted from the centre ground.
Ever since the vote in June 2016 political and social polarisation have
increased and now culminate in the factional deadlock at Westminster. Liberal
Parliamentarism seems unable to restore
what has been broken by the uncharacteristic move to hold a plebiscite on
Britain's membership of the EU. What this breakdown has also shown up is the
huge distance between the position of the governing class and that of the
governed. 52% voted to leave the EU but it has been obvious from the outset that
the establishment position and that of the vast majority of MPs was and still
is to remain. With the process seemingly stalled, this contradiction has become
ever more apparent and is feeding the growth of the far Right who have parasitized
the conflict, polarising it still further by attempts at painting remain MPs as
pro-immigration, anti-democratic traitors, putting foreign interests ahead of
the "native" British population. Former English Defence League thug
Tommy Robinson has become something of a poster boy for the combined forces
(including UKIP and a panoply of conspiracy theorists) leaning in this
direction.
From its origins in the early modern
period, liberalism has forever been a means of excluding conflict from political
affairs. This has been achieved substantially by a centuries long development
whereby the scope of politics has been increasingly restricted and rationalised
to matters of individual rights and economic management. Many of the most familiar terms of
contemporary liberal discourse testify to this history. Common sense, the
centre ground, consensus, and of course the neutrality of facts are all terms
that denote a degree of naturalism and necessity which by reason should exclude
serious conflict between interlocutors. The British model is perhaps the most
successful in history in this regard. Since the settlement after the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 the British system has withstood all the revolutionary
movements in Europe, the industrial revolution, the rise of the workers
movement and seen the rise and fall of its own Empire. All the while it has
stuck steadfast to a constitutional system that absorbs and manages the changes
happening around it.
If it is the case - as many Marxists
argue - that Britain's modern parliamentary system has been predominantly a way
of managing and promoting the interests of the propertied classes, beginning
with the land owners and nascent industrial class of the 17th century, and
continuing today with the financial elites, we can see how Brexit has truly
created a scission at the heart of British politics. Business and finance
elites both globally and in the UK were almost unanimously against Britain
leaving the EU. The frictionless movement of goods and capital as well as a
common system of rules regulating (or not regulating) their activities has been
a core driver of globalisation. But now Parliament, that institution which for
over three centuries has been in the front row serving the interests of capital,
is tasked with striking a blow against the global consensus, against the very
concept of global governance itself. More than that, it has pitted the Tories
against their natural base in business, effectively alienating the ruling class
from their traditional representatives in the Conservative party. This
antagonism has led to factionalising within the Tories themselves as one side
attempts to reverse the Brexit process and side with their base while the likes
of Boris Johnson and Rees-Mogg conjure up Churchillian rhetoric in support of
building England's post EU Jerusalem. All this before we even consider the
divisions in the Labour party between a youth driven resurgent socialism and
the Blairite centrists who in effect form a third party with the remain faction
of the Conservatives. None of this has come about through a paucity of facts.
2b) In the
same period during the 17th century that saw England's finest hour when the
head of Charles I was divorced from his body, it was determined, in the wake of
the wars of religion and the English revolution that politics would take place
on the plain of artifice. Consequently, political life would increasingly be
delimited to a specialised and exclusive administrative art. The life
questions, to say nothing of contestation between forms-of-life would come to
be banished from the public realm. Matters of ethics, the Good life and of
course religion were increasingly determined as purely private concerns,
matters of conscience. This is the backdrop to the formation of liberal parliamentarism
that extends deep into the social fabric not only of Britain but of Europe as a
whole.
Thomas Hobbes epoch defining
description at the introduction to his masterwork presages not only the
direction of English politics but of the modern "globalised
Leviathan" for which his national model was the prototype: "Art goes yet further, imitating that
rational and most excellent work of nature, man.
For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, (in
Latin Civitas) which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and
strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended;
and in which, the sovereignty is an
artificial soul as giving life and motion to the whole body;..."
Here stated plainly is most
significant gift bequeathed by the 17th century; the mechanistic model of
nature as an enclosed system of efficient causes with Man at its centre. The
"artifice" of statecraft is in mimicking the rational form of natural
processes as closely as possible, thus bringing the realm of artifice
(politics) and the realm of nature into a harmonious totality. A correlate of
this naturalistic and supposedly scientific view of political life is that
anything which does not conform to it, that bases its communality on other values,
is excluded as irrational, unnatural or simply groundless opinion. This wasn't
yet the dominion of empiricism that we live under today, but the work of
theorists like Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke substantially delimited the
scope of politics, laying the foundations for what was to come.
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Looking further back it was the
intractable series of conflicts during the Reformation that began the process
of relegating the 'life questions' to the private sphere. In the wake of the
reformers return to the Gospel, scholastic speculation gave way to scriptural
objectivity, which rather than settling truth claims about religious doctrine
by grounding them in the Word, instead opened up endless conflicts over
interpretation. Magisterial and radical Protestants, united in their rejection
of the authority of Rome, fought each other over the meaning and extent of
their reforms. Sola Scriptura, so
seemingly simple a notion opened up a whole new plain of conflict. And since
such questions could never be settled agreeably between all parties they were either
settled by authority through the creation of confessionalised states and
universities, or deemed not to matter in political life and were relegated to
the private domain of individual conscience. Religion was progressively
neutralised as a site of political conflict just as politics was increasingly
secularised. An attendant result of this process was that politics increasingly
became an arena for rational technocratic solutions, administrative problems
and questions of good governance rather than a contestation over values and
forms-of-life. This is political liberalism’s basic epistemological ground.
3) Neutralisations and Big data
Each of these developments share a
commonality in that they sought a form of knowledge and politics that excluded
the possibility of conflict between different forms-of-life. In doing so the
scope and potential for political contestation became increasingly
circumscribed. The "centre ground" and English common sense have
their roots here, as does the valorisation of rational empirically based
political claims rather than assertions of values. The result has been that the
things which give people's lives meaning have become entirely separated from
political life, all the while our lives have become increasingly controlled by
impersonal forces we scarcely understand.
The German jurist Carl Schmitt in the
first half of the 20th century described this process as a one of "neutralisations
and depoliticizations". He glosses the history of the last four centuries
as one of shifting "central domains" from which politics has
attempted to govern from a position of neutrality. From the theology of the
late middle ages to the metaphysics and science of the 17th and early 18th centuries
and then onto the moral and economic centrality of the late 18th and 19th
centuries; each time the central domain became a site of struggle politics
shifted towards another supposedly more neutral domain. Each time this occurs
the previous domain is deactivated as a site of political importance, rendered
a matter of personal preference (in the case of religion and morality) or
incontestable objectivity (in the case of economics and metaphysics). Whether we accept Schmitt's schema or not, he
is I think correct in asserting that today's central domain is not - as is it
usually understood - the economy, it's technology. "Unlike theological,
metaphysical, moral and even economic questions, which are forever debatable,
purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual about them. They
are easy to solve, and it is easily understandable why there is a tendency to
take refuge in technicity from the inextricable problems of all other
domains".
Big data and the digital revolution
are the latest stage in this development, portending of a
"post-political" world of algorithms and managed outcomes.
German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han has in a series of books detailed the
possibilities of this new technology of power. He argues it leads to an era of
"psycho-politics" in which big data technologies are increasingly
used to bypass any form of "subjective arbitrariness" in decision
making. Intuition, context or deeper understanding of cause are all irrelevant
in the mass collection of data. He quotes Chris Anderson's article The End of Theory to emphasise the attendant
attitude of the big data gurus: "Out with every theory of human behaviour,
from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology and psychology. Who
knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and
measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for
themselves".
This barbarism of data as Han calls it is just the latest stage in the centuries
long process I have sketched above. The progressive elimination of values and
possible subjective conflict reaches its apogee in big data's correlationist utopia,
in which knowledge itself is reduced to its lowest common denominator. Every
click and digital interaction contributes to a vast storehouse of correlations
that can be deployed to micro-target individual voters or groups with political
advertising, smear campaigns directed at opposition politicians, rage-fodder or
outright fake news. The individual subject of Rights - in modern liberal
parlance - is reduced in the era of big data to the totality of preferences as
expressed through their digital interactions. This totally empty and artificial
individual will be the "fact" governing political decisions of the
future.
4) Conflict is the Irreducible Core of Political Life
It is precisely through the lens of this
modern "politics of technicity" that the liberal centre attempted to
frame the question of EU membership during the time of the referendum and
continue to do so today with their demands for a second poll. The question is
posed as purely technical, to do with economic realities and empirically
measurable outcomes. The suggestion that it might involve ideological
commitments or different value systems is ignored. But this is precisely what
was brought into play by directly evoking the constituting power through a referendum.
It opened a window onto parts of Britain that had been ignored by the neo-liberal
consensus over decades of stagnating wages, "bullshit jobs" and
stigmatisation by the media. Suddenly they had the chance to remind Westminster
(and much of the South East of England) that they existed. This window cannot
now be closed.
In this context it should be noted
that the 2016 referendum did not create the factions we now call Remain and
Leave, but it did name them. That alone was sufficient to bring the present
conflict, either side of which they stand, into public actuality. What we see
with the ongoing deadlock and ever more entrenched positions at Westminster is
the undeniable reality of that schism within the nation. It is a real
antagonism between very different value systems and visions of what a future
Britain should look like. No amount of facts about the value of the common
market to UK GDP or the vital role immigration has played in maintaining
Britain's public services is going to override the immediate and irrefutable
feelings of many people across the UK, that the EU and globalisation have done
nothing for them. Nor will such facts placate those whose opinions are rooted
in racism and xenophobia, the same prejudices that successive UK governments
have played upon over the last thirty years when it suited them. Thus, it may
be the case that the notorious statement plastered across Boris Johnson's
Brexit bus was false, but it aimed at a sentiment and perspective that is real
and refuting the lie will not make those sentiments disappear.
Parliament’s deadlock stems from the
attempt to come to a decision regarding values and possible forms-of-life using
institutional mechanisms and a type of political discourse that have developed
expressly to avoid making such decisions. The persistent referral back to the
facts or to economic necessity merely dodges what is really at stake, which is
the potential for Britain to break with the post-war consensus and forge a path
away from neo-liberalism, toward something radically different. The Brexit vote
has precipitated a rupture of genuine political conflict in British public life
for the first time since perhaps the Miners Strike of the Mid Eighties. Unlike
that conflict, which was settled by the authority of the state (deploying a
good deal of violence in the process), it is the very authority and legitimacy of
Britain's political institutions that are now in question as each side vies for
control over what appears like an increasingly empty seat of power.
Facts are weightless things until
they are embedded within a system of values and a form-of-life. Only then do
they find their pathos and take on
meaning, only then can they contribute to a decision. A politics of facts and
technocratic administration can attempt to obscure and neutralise social
conflict but it cannot abolish it. It was Carl Schmitt, in providing one of the
20th century's most acute diagnoses of the 'crisis of parliamentary democracy',
who never ceased to emphasise that facts, whether of a textural, scientific or
economic type cannot do away with the eternal question of who judges and who
interprets. Therein lies the struggle. There is politics.
