Science, Belief and the Fall of Empires

I never visited the old Soviet Union. This may be a bit of a surprise, especially considering my youthful left-wing politics but I was really too young to be taken in. I was born in the year of the Hungarian uprising and one of the first big international events I can recall is the Prague Spring and its subsequent brutal suppression by Brezhnev’s tanks. I grew up with the understanding that whatever the attractions of Marxist-Leninist political theory its actual application in the real world had failed to live up to expectations. So, I felt no more desire to go there than I did Apartheid-era South Africa. I have actually been to both Russia and South Africa since the fall of those two regimes and I may write more about them some day. But for today I want to focus on just one aspect of the totalitarian state that emerged after the 1917 revolution.

Joseph Stalin was a monster. There is no serious doubt about that. He was responsible for the death of more of his own countrypeople than any other person in modern history. He constructed a state in which his control over people’s lives was all-pervasive. He, and his party apparatus could, and did, direct every aspect of life in the Soviet Union. The extent of his power was nearly absolute and he used it with great enthusiasm. Stalin probably came to believe that his power actually was absolute and that his word was law in all respects. And that was where some of his problems lay.

Unlike King Canute, whose command to the sea that it should recede was intended to demonstrate to courtiers the limits of kingly power, Stalin really did appear to believe that he could order nature to bend to his will. Science in the Soviet Union was constrained to operate within ground rules laid down by the Party. Where it furthered the aims of the Party it was supported and financed to the extent that it achieved stunning success in fields such as space flight. The state also funded so-called science that followed its agenda but was built on a tissue of falsehood and ideological positions in place of observation and experiment. The career of Trofim Lysenko came to symbolise this tendency but it was not the only example.

It wasn’t only in natural sciences that the dead hand of the Party forced ideological solutions that simply didn’t work. Economic theories based on a command economy and isolation - “Socialism in One Country” – caused the resources of the empire to be squandered and most the people to be impoverished while a small number of Party insiders enjoyed such wealth as was available. In Stalin’s own time there were probably enough old people around with memories of the last days of the Czars that it was possible to keep a lid on things.  As that generation died out the contradictions in the system became less and less tenable and Stalin’s successors were unable to do so any more. Eventually the whole thing fell apart in 1989 and the Soviet Empire fell as surely as Empires have eventually fallen throughout human history.

Regular readers – assuming I have any – will probably have already realised where this is going. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the United States has been the dominant world power and I have no doubt that among its political establishment there are many who believe its power is near absolute. Leaving aside the rise of China in recent decades it is a supportable position.

Although the United States like the Soviet Union was born in revolution, the nature of that revolution was quite different. The founding fathers of the USA were men (predominantly) of the Enlightenment. They tried very hard to be guided by empiricism and reason, explicitly confining the irrational (religion) to the personal realm and separating it from the management of the state. It proved to be a good model and as a result the new state prospered and was able to parlay its abundant natural resources into wealth greater than any other country has ever seen. Along the way it remained substantially true to its founding ideals and offered its military might to support others who shared those ideals, notably in the two world wars of the 20^th century.

It is a truism however that no human construct is ever perfect and there have undoubtedly been imperfections in the United States. The support of slavery by some of the states led to the horrendous civil war of the 19^th century. The discrimination against black people even after the end of slavery was a shameful stain on the country. Fear and suspicion of different ways to organise a country led to irrational foreign-policy positions, some of which caused great harm and suffering around the world. These imperfections, some of them substantial, must be set against the successes but overall it is possible to make a solid case that the United States of America has been broadly a force for good in the world. On the whole it has applied its founding principles of reason and justice to improve the lot of its own people and many in other nations.

This legacy of sustained progress towards a better world is constantly under threat. There have always been those that reject the founding principles and seek to change the country for their own purposes. These purposes are often around personal enrichment at the expense of others. Sometimes they are based on religious irrationality and sometimes on misguided ideas of the innate superiority of one section of humanity over the rest. Sometimes it is hard to tell where one ends and the others begin. The framers of the US Constitution understood these threats and built in the famous checks and balances to guard against them. In general they have been successful for two and a half centuries but their continuation into the future is by no means guaranteed.

In the modern world the aspiration to manage affairs by means of reason is best exemplified by science. Science is not a list of formulae or a laboratory full of bubbling apparatus although both these things may play their part. Science is a method of investigating and thinking about the world to better understand its workings. Its tools are observation, experiment, reasoning and collaboration. It has been stupendously successful in enabling humans to live the lives they do with the comforts they enjoy, free from many of the dangers that used to beset us. It is also profoundly democratic. No scientist, however exalted, can successfully defend a position when the evidence contradicts it. The laws of physics care nothing for the status of the physicist. To quote a t-shirt I have seen recently, “The great thing about science is that it is true whether you believe it or not”. Failure to understand and accept this truth contributed to the fall of the Soviet Empire. My great concern is that the United States could go the same way.

Creationism is an obvious issue. Somewhere between a third and a half of American adults believe that the Earth was created around 6,000 years ago. By itself this probably doesn’t matter very much. The practical implications for day to day life are small. Separation of religion from civil power means that this irrational belief can do little harm. The problem is that in order to support that belief it is necessary to discard a huge proportion of the findings of science: geology, astronomy, physics – including kinetic theory, thermodynamics, electromagnetic theory, nuclear physics -  chemistry and genetics. These scientific fields are supported by many years, or even centuries, of observation and experiment. Together they provide a coherent description of the universe that enables us to survive and prosper as a species. It is no exaggeration to suppose that our future security and prosperity depend on the continuation of the victory of reason over superstition. If the protections that the founding fathers built in to the Constitution are eroded and the workings of the state become predicated on irrationality the dangers are evident.

The new American president has said that he believes climate change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese in order to fetter US industry. If he genuinely believes this it is an irrational belief not dissimilar to the belief that the universe was created in six days 6,000 years ago. Unlike a belief in young-Earth creationism this piece of irrationality has direct and grave consequences. It provides a pretext for policy decisions that are demonstrably harmful to the majority while helping a small minority to become wealthier. Precisely the thing that Washington, Jefferson et al sought to avoid.

Apparently President Trump has also decreed a GDP growth rate of 4% for the US economy in order to justify some of his financial plans. This is a small step for a man who is prepared to deny basic science and in some ways it is less challenging. Economists have a knack of making measurements that suit their expectations – a habit that real scientists are trained for years to avoid. I must say that when I heard this story I was immediately put in mind of the old Soviet Union where Brezhnev would decree the number of tractors to be produced in a five year plan and produced they would be. Whether any of them were actually fit to do real work was another matter. If Trump’s America produces a notional 4% GDP growth but fails to improve living conditions for its people who will benefit?

Denial of science and denial of economic data appear to be par for the course in the new world of Washington DC. In just a few weeks I have lost count of the time that President Trump has been caught in easily-demonstrable falsehoods. It is rapidly becoming the new normal. Over time the most dedicated fact-checkers and myth-busters will be worn down. It may even become a little quaint to expect to hear truth from power. Trump hasn’t yet claimed a round of golf with eleven holes in one as Kim Jong Il infamously did, but some of his boasts are straying into dangerously similar territory. And on the other side of the coin, speaking truth to power may become almost as dangerous as it was in the Soviet Union or is today in North Korea.

I suppose what it comes down to is this. Denial of evidence, lies and manipulation may keep a government in power in the short to medium term but eventually the dam will break. It worked for Stalin, less so for his successors. For the Soviet Union the fall when it came was absolute. Donald Trump may be able to hold his mentirocracy* together for a while but eventually it will give way. The Constitution of the United States should prevent a collapse exactly like that of the Soviet Union. But to do that it needs people in power who believe in its aims. That’s the bit I am worried about at the moment. 

 * A Government based on lies and falsehoods. I think I just invented that word but I am open to correction.

Saying What We Mean

It’s been a strange time, the last year. I won’t try to enumerate all the ways in which it has been strange. I’m sure that everyone has their own ideas. I’m also sure that the strangeness isn’t going away any time soon. For the moment I am just thinking of a development in public conversation which probably isn’t new but which I seem to be noticing more and more. This is the way in which people seem to be self-censoring when they state a position that they expect to be controversial.

One of the executive orders that President Trump has not yet had rescinded by the Supreme Court devolves power to individual States to determine which toilet people should use. I haven’t researched it, but I am not aware of any other nation in the world that has found it necessary to legislate in this area. But in the Land of the Free ™ there are multiple “Bathroom Bills” coming before state legislatures. North Carolina passed the first of these pieces of mediaeval legislation last year and now a number of other states, including Texas, are considering their own versions. The intent of the laws is to require that people using public toilets must only use the one that aligns with the gender stated on their birth certificate. Proponents say that the point is to prevent sexual assaults perpetrated by males entering women’s facilities under false pretences. The problem with that argument is that in the entire history of the United States there has not been a single case of sexual assault recorded by a male person in a female restroom. http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article70255967.html The researchers of this article did find a solitary case in Canada although there was no suggestion that the male in question identified as transgender. Clearly the “protect the children” argument is completely spurious but to its supporters it may appear more humane than the alternative “transgender people are an abomination to my small-minded god and should be denied as many human rights as possible”.

                          

We saw similar developments in the UK during and after the Brexit referendum. There was a notorious case when a caller to a radio phone-in programme claimed that he had voted Leave in order to free his downtrodden country from the yoke of overbearing European legislation. Unfortunately, when pressed to name a single one of these excessive laws he was unable to do so. I would speculate that this person had voted Leave for reasons of simple xenophobia but was reluctant to say as much because deep down he knew that would expose him as a small minded racist.

And of course the great climate change denial probably falls into this category. The evidence for human influence on climate is completely overwhelming. There is no more scientific doubt about it than there is about the theory of gravitation. And yet millions continue to deny that it is real or that it matters. I think that climate change deniers are mostly of the opinion that those affected by the changing climate will be people of different races living in poor countries far away. Saving their lives, property and livelihoods is not important compared to maintaining the conveniences of comfortable folks in the developed world. But of course it wouldn’t be acceptable to state such a position out loud so the fiction of the Chinese hoax is trotted out.

There are many other examples of this level of societal hypocrisy and it would be tedious to list more of them. Strangely enough though I find it hopeful that they exist. If things were really bad there would be no stigma to saying out loud that we just don’t like people different to us. It means that all is not yet lost. There is still hope that we are not doomed to a rerun of the 1930s. The Nazis are still confined to the closet although they are hammering ever louder on the door. “Ordinary people” are not yet ready to support the Stormtroopers, at least not in public. There is still time for good will and tolerance to prevail.

Let’s make it so.

That Was the Year That Was

It’s been six months. Six months since I wrote anything here. Was I waiting for the dust to settle? Was I just too shocked? Was I trying to get on with life despite the lunacy? Probably all of the above.

It’s been a strange year and I don’t hold out much hope for normalcy in 2017. I just did one of those Facebook things where an app makes a picture of the words you have used during the year with the most used words in the biggest font. My most-used word of 2016 was Nazi. I didn’t post the picture.

On both sides of the Atlantic voters have made lunatic and self-harming decisions based on a consistent stream of lies in the media, both traditional and online.

In Britain the engineers of the Leave campaign immediately fled the scene, leaving my local MP to try to sort out the mess. Good luck with that one Mrs May. The next couple of years are likely to be bloody.

In the USA a misogynist, racist, narcissist was elected due to an exquisitely aligned set of circumstances that included, in no particular order, the Republican party being completely unfit for purpose and unable to field a rational candidate, the Democrats choosing a candidate who though supremely well-qualified was out of tune with the times, the Director of the FBI keeping alive a non-story about a minor indiscretion with email arrangements, the Russian intelligence service stealing and leaking information detrimental to the Democrats and finally a constitutional arrangement originally designed to appease slave-owners delivering victory to the candidate with almost three million fewer votes. If they reran the election a thousand times I doubt if they would ever see all those stars lining up in quite that order.

Compared to the ructions in Britain and the USA, the resignation of an Italian Prime Minister and the concession by the French Socialist Party six months ahead of the first round of voting seem like minor bumps in the road but they are both important. The tide of madness is not yet receding. Consider the irony that probably the single most hopeful political event of the year – to this old pink wishy-washy liberal leftie at least – was the news that Angela Merkel intends to run for another term as Chancellor of Germany.  

So what will 2017 hold? The portents are not good. It’s very easy to make comparisons with the 1930s and judging from that Facebook app, I have been doing. But despite the frightening similarities it’s not the same. There was no Internet in the 1930s and no nuclear weapons either. The people on whom the burden of scapegoat fell represented small minorities; Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Communists. Muslims are almost a fifth of the world’s population and so-called “minority” groups make up over 35% of the population of the USA. Events simply will not pan out exactly as they did in the middle of the 20^th century.

So, given that things will be different it is reasonable to believe that they will eventually be better. We will pass though this period of lunacy. People of goodwill will find ways to organise and resist the worst excesses. It will be hard and there will be more setbacks but the world will eventually be a better place.

My text for 2017 comes from a quote that I first heard from movie critic Mark Kermode although I don’t think he claims to have coined it.

“Everything will be all right in the end. And if it’s not all right now then it isn’t the end.”