Thatcher: An unintended transformation

So Margaret Thatcher has passed into history. She's seen as someone who transformed Britain according to her vision. One day we will understand her real legacy; that actually, she failed to do so

I expect we’ll remember where we heard the news. I was in the living-room of my New York apartment on Monday morning, waiting for my partner to finish with the shower; in the meantime I sat in front of my laptop, quietly e-pottering. As she stepped out of the bathroom, I could hear the morning news programme on the local public radio station, WNYC.  Something about the former British Prime Minister having died in the night. A plummy English voice was interviewed.

“I’m finished with the bathroom,” called my partner. Then: “Are you there? Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said. The sunlight streamed through the blinds; the first day of spring finally with us, after a very long winter.

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Of course everyone had plenty to say. The current Prime Minister assured us that she was a “great Briton”. Parliament was recalled so that MPs could trot dutifully into the Chamber and utter paeans of praise. (An allowance of up to  £3,750 was payable to those Members who had to return from abroad.)  Singer Morrisey, by contrast, said that she was "barbaric" and "without an atom of humanity", and "every move she made was charged by negativity".  Billy Bragg, on tour in Canada, posted a message that was, typically, more thoughtful. “This is not a time for celebration. The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today... of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society. Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this,” he wrote.

For me, Monday was a reflective day, as it will have been for many people of my age whose working lives began as Thatcher came to power, and are now nearing their end; and who, surprisingly often, have felt the need to leave the country she created. Bragg is right. There is nothing to be gained from pouring vitriol on someone who has died at a great age after a long illness; the more so because, despite the ghastly results of her career, she was by all accounts capable of great kindness and charm in her personal life. What is more important is to understand who she was, the world she found, and the one she wanted in its place; and why, contrary to popular belief, she did not bring it about. 

 

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Far too early on the morning of Friday, March 1, 1974, a small grey Morris car chugged north from Oxford to Banbury. It was barely light and the skeletal trees along the road were just beginning to resolve themselves against a dull grey sky. I was sitting in the passenger seat, wearing a dun-coloured raincoat and smoking. I smoked a lot then.

Robin was smoking too. He was a teacher at the college I attended; another of the teachers had just stood as Liberal candidate for Banbury in the general election that had been held the previous day. We had volunteered to act as scrutineers at the count. Then as now, most constituencies began their count as soon as polls closed, and declared overnight; but Banbury was and is largely rural, and the sealed ballot boxes were driven in the night to the Town Hall and opened in the morning.

The scene that we saw in the Town Hall on that day in 1974 was probably much as it was when the reforms of the 1870s ushered in the secret ballot. The hall was lined by 15 or 20 shaky trestle tables; at each there sat a civil servant – most were middle-aged men, soberly dressed in suits and ties despite the early hour. Beside and opposite them sat the scrutineers for the three parties, all volunteers, who observed the votes as they were sorted, and would stop the civil servant if a vote for their candidate landed in the wrong pile. In fact, we simply watched for mistakes; if a Labour vote fluttered into the Liberal pile by mistake, I politely told the teller, and my companions did likewise. All were friendly; the Conservative scrutineer, an elderly man, was warm and chatty, the Labour man quieter but pleasant enough. Now and then two more civil servants would come to the table with another ballot-box. These were of green-painted tin; I should not be surprised if they too had been made for that first secret vote. One was resolutely jammed shut and it took the efforts of three civil servants and a chisel to prise it open.

The count took five or six hours and we declared at midday. Our candidate, Geoff Fisher, came third but had done well to increase the Liberal vote; at least one village, as I recall, appeared to have voted Liberal en masse. (I have long forgotten which one, but in any case, it would be illegal to say.) Victory went to the Conservative, Neil Marten, a distinguished war hero. Someone (Marten, I think) lit a cigar below the No Smoking sign, there were polite speeches, and Robin and I started for home, bleary-eyed but not displeased.

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I am looking back at another world. It ran at a slower pace.  Telephones had heavy circular dials; wait a minute or so as the exchange clicked and whirred; a trunk call was costly, not lightly made. I can remember the excitement later that year when my sister spoke to me from Dunedin, her voice echoing over 12,000 miles with a time lapse so that I had to wait some seconds after speaking before she replied. The little Morris that took us to Banbury still had a starting handle for emergencies; the rear axle rode on glorified cart-springs. In the summer I left college and started my first job, and used a typewriter with heavy keys and a bell that clanged as you reached the margin and returned the carriage, and carbon papers that smeared your fingers black.

But change was coming. Less than five years earlier, my family had crossed the North Atlantic on a Canadian Pacific liner; it was still an economic choice. By 1974 the wide-bodied jets had ended that forever. Concorde prototypes from Fairford flew over our house daily, and in two years they would carry the rich to New York in just three hours. The computers that would replace my typewriter had arrived, although they were still disguised as calculators. Colour TV had arrived too, in a form we were assured was “much better than the American system”. (Actually it was. BBC engineers referred to the US system, NTSC, as “Never the Same Colour”.)

It was also becoming clear that Britain was not prepared for the changes ahead. Nothing exemplified this so much as the motor industry. Long shielded behind high tariff barriers, it had from 1960 finally faced real competition with the first-duty-free imports – Volvos from Sweden, which was in the European Free Trade Area (and at that time drove on the left, like us). From 1973, when Britain joined the misnamed Common Market, the forerunner to the EU, competition got very hot indeed. Herein was the triumph and tragedy of British industry. Britain’s Austin-Morris had pioneered the mass production of cars that were transverse-engined and front-wheel drive, as most cars under two litres now are. The British arms of Ford and General Motors had led the way in unitary construction, belt-driven camshafts and more besides. But quality was dire. A 1972 Morris Marina I bought some years later was so crudely built that the door-handle assemblies moved around in their housings. Unit profitability was also low, through a combination of poor accounting and labour troubles. The latter were blamed for much of the problem although they can only have been part of it. In any case, the unions themselves were not an accident. I remember that when I was 16, the local newspaper carried an item about a man who had retired from the Morris works after 50 years. “Surely the unions have ruined everything today?” he was asked by an eager journalist. “No, it’s a good thing. Back then you could get picked on,” he said. Union activists probably often were irresponsible, but the industry had made its own hell over many years.

While the motor industry suffered a special problem with quality, other sectors also suffered; the shipbuilding industry, in particular, faced harsh competition from Sweden and Yugoslavia and later from Korea. The aerospace industry, too, faced the consequences of poor decisions; the Vickers VC10 was in most respects one of the finest airliners ever built, but had been designed to serve the “hot and high” airfields of the Empire and Commonwealth, not the high-volume routes where the future lay. In the home, one’s radio had been built by Morphy Richards or Dynatron; by 1974, it came from Grundig or, increasingly, Hitachi.

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The political establishment could not respond to the changes. The practice of politics, then, was oddly amateurish; the scene in Banbury Town Hall must have been pretty typical. And neither major party had any real sense of direction.

The Conservatives, in 1974, were an odd coalition. In the 19th century they had represented the aristocratic and landed interest, but in the 1870s their greatest leader, Benjamin Disraeli, had transformed them, introducing the idea of the patrician party that cared for the people; he introduced reforms such as the Artisan’s Dwellings Act, thus establishing that a government could take active measures to help its people. It was a strange precedent to be set by Tories, perhaps; but it was so – a transformation wonderfully described by Edgar Feuchtwanger’s 1968 monograph Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party. In the mid-20th century this spirit was far from dead in the party; in particular, it made strenuous efforts in the 1950s and early 1960s to provide sufficient working-class housing, although not always with happy results. Conservative governments were also not afraid, at times, to interfere in industrial policy, and Midland motor manufacturers were encouraged to replace shipbuilding in the West of Scotland, again not always with success. Thus the Tory Party was not really a free-enterprise party; rather, it was a coalition of businessmen, landowners, and country gentry, presided over by a bunch of amiable toffs who had distinguished themselves in Churchill’s wartime administration but had little real idea of what to do with the peace.

If voters sought a cohesive ideology in Labour instead, they did not get one. Labour had always been a seething mass of internal contradictions and stabbed backs. Between 1945 and 1951 it had pursued, in government, policies of nationalisation and social welfare, but there had been a long-running leadership conflict between socialists on the one hand and moderate social democrats on the other. The latter prevailed in the shape of Hugh Gaitskell, but his early death in 1963 left the leadership to Harold Wilson, who many remember today as a member of neither faction; simply an operator. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s he led a party balanced on a knife-edge between union-driven, socialist and occasionally out-and-out Marxist policies, and centrist managerialism.

It was these two ill-defined forces that faced each other in the election of 1974. The big figures were the two main party leaders and the big beasts of their parties, plus the centrist Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, a flamboyant individualist later charged with (but not convicted of) conspiracy to murder. Few thought of the little-liked Education Secretary, Margaret Hilda Thatcher. But in 1975, in the wake of the party’s defeat, she ran for the leadership and, to everyone’s surprise, including her own, she won. In the meantime, the minority Labour government lurched from one crisis to another, winning a fresh election in the autumn of 1974 with a tiny majority that it could not keep.  In 1979, widely blamed for unemployment and industrial trouble, it lost an election. Thatcher became Prime Minister. 

 

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 As former Development Minister Clare Short pointed out on Radio 4’s PM programme on Monday, Thatcher was not a conservative; she was a radical right-winger. But no-one realised it. They were simply voting out a government they felt had failed, and choosing the alternative. They were wrong. Ideology had arrived on the right of British politics.

Thatcher was driven by a curious mixture of anti-Keynesian monetarist economics and a homespun work ethic. The former was a current of the times, led by the Chicago economist Milton Friedman. It should be seen in context; Europeans were still haunted by the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s, and in Britain inflation of over 20% in the 1970s had eaten into savings and had also driven the wage claims of powerful unions. At the same time, Thatcher was also driven by a deep belief in self-reliance and enterprise. Her father had been a successful shopkeeper; in her view, everyone could be, if they would just get up early enough. Mixed up with half-digested economic theory was a dream of a nation of self-reliant Britons where everyone had their own business and owned their own house, and the state had no role in the economic lives of men and women. As someone wrote the other day in another context, it is a common phenomenon: nostalgia without memory.

I said earlier that, contrary to popular belief, Thatcher did not bring about the change she wanted. Nothing exemplifies her failure so much as this fantasy of a nation self-reliant burghers and prosperous artisans. Subsidised industries went, along with the unions that defended them. If their business was out of date, held Thatcher, it should close. Many did. Mining was old-fashioned, coal was old-fashioned, the mines were a hotbed of unionism. So they went, after one of the bitterest industrial disputes in British history. The shipyards went. The printing industry went. Some car plants also did not survive.

Not all of this could have been prevented. The print unions, in particular, were resisting change that was both inevitable and beneficial. But the wholesale deskilling of a workforce was a blunder on two profound levels. First, we lost the structure of craft apprenticeships and industrial training that allowed German industry to move upmarket and adapt to a changing world. In Britain it was allowed to die, and we were left to make a living by selling other countries' products to each other. Second, a skilled working class with a sense of identity and history was replaced, in many places, by a lumpenproletariat, in which some families have now not worked for two generations. Aspiration and enterprise were not encouraged. They were destroyed along with the pride and sense of self that drives them.

In another, completely different, way, Thatcher’s drive for individual self-reliance backfired equally badly. The sale of public housing was part of a burgeoning property market that people eventually felt obliged to enter whether they wished to or not, and the average householder was burdened with a lifetime financial commitment that constrained their enterprise and mobility as surely as a pair of concrete boots. When the housing market faltered in 1989, a million British houseowners found themselves in negative equity (in US parlance, under water). As we now know, far worse was to follow 17 years later. The “property-owning” democracy is not about self-reliance. It is a prison.

But nothing illustrates Thatcher’s miscalculation so much as the decline in democracy. In a 2008 Guardian article, Vernon Bogdanor pointed out that when Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 it had a membership of about 1.5 million; 30 years later it was down to 145,000. Labour underwent a similar decline between 1996 and 2008, from 400,000 to 150,000. In the 1950s one Briton in 11 had belonged to a political party; now just one in 88 did. Voter turnout, well over 80% in 1974, dropped to just 59% in 2001 (it has since recovered a little). One must be very careful about oversimplifying these phenomena; they’re not confined to Britain and besides, they do not always indicate a simple disengagement from politics – many who no longer vote are engaged in other ways, on single issues or through social media. But the fact remains that there is an increasing disinclination to take part in the mainstream democratic process. 

This would hardly please Thatcher. She was often called a fascist, but anyone who believes she was one of those should meet a real one. In fact she had a profound commitment to democracy; her admiration of Karl Popper’s later works, and her feelings about the Soviet bloc, were evidence of this. But her definition of democracy seems to have been very narrow; its only instrument was the ballot box, and a government so elected might do as it wished. The notion that the governance of Britain would be negotiated between different forces, all of which had a role in giving people an equal voice, would be quite alien to her.

In particular, she would have claimed that her adherence to free enterprise made her an advocate of economic democracy, but that cannot exist without free collective bargaining as well; if it does, a minority will hold the reins of power. This is effectively what happened to Britain after 1979, as the power of trade unions to represent their members was steadily squeezed. But the suggestion that there was any contradiction there would have left her puzzled at best. She would have pointed out, quite sincerely, that her privatization of the public utilities was meant to give ordinary people, as small investors, genuine ownership of national assets.

The world does not work like that. Popular capitalism is a dodgy concept, simply because anything that is of value and for sale will be sold by those who need the money to those who need it less. Shares in public utilities were no different in that respect. So her reforms did not give us those assets; they removed them from us. But that was genuinely not the intention.

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Neither did Margaret Thatcher really create the strong, united Britain that she wanted.

Asked on Tuesday about his successful advertising campaigns on the Iron Lady’s behalf, Lord Saatchi insisted that it was not his marketing; it was the product. “She wanted Britain to be great again,” he told Channel 4’s John Snow. He was not wrong. In 1979 many British people were genuinely affronted by what often seemed like the despondent management of decline. Thatcher seemed to promise, if not a resurgence, at least a certain pride; a Unionist who believed in a very united Kingdom, proud in the world. To many who admire her, Thatcher achieved exactly that; she helped destroy Communism, defended Britain from the Brussels menace and re-established Britain’s place in the world. 

Did she? Four points might be looked at here. The first three concern her greatest foreign-policy triumphs: her part in the destruction of the Eastern bloc, her resistance to a creeping power-grab by Brussels, and her victory in the Falklands war. The fourth point is the unity of the United Kingdom itself.

First, there is the notion that Thatcher, in concert with Ronald Reagan, won the Cold War and brought the Soviet Union crashing down. Where on earth does this idea come from? The bureaucratic centralised structure of the Eastern bloc was riven with internal contradictions that had nothing to do with either Reagan or Thatcher, however warm Thatcher’s relations with Gorbachev may have been. The latter relationship, in any case, cannot have counted for much inside the USSR; Gorbachev’s agenda had little to do with Thatcher. As he came to power, he is alleged to have said to his beloved wife, Raisa: “We can’t go on like this.” But his wish was to reform a sclerotic system, not to transform it into capitalism.

In any case, upheaval within the Soviet bloc was nothing new. The most spectacular instance had been in 1956, when Polish Communist leader Władysław Gomułka broke the absolute link with Moscow – up to a point; in the same year the Hungarians tried to go farther, and were invaded for their pains. But 14 years later Gomułka himself was overthrown. When Solidarity deposed Wojciech Jaruzelski in 1989, they will have welcomed Thatcher and Reagan’s support, but they scarcely needed it; the Polish shipyard workers had already brought down Gomułka in 1970 and his successor, Edward Gierek, in 1980. None of this is to say that Thatcher and Reagan played no role in the downfall of the Eastern Bloc. But it is hard to see that that bloc would still exist today, even if they had not.

What about Thatcher’s heroic resistance to European domination? This, too, holds little water. Her noisy Euroscepticism has drowned out the fact that it was she who signed the Single European Act in 1986, creating a single market that bound the states of Europe together in very much the way that European leaders had intended when they created the European Coal and Steel Community 36 years earlier. To be sure, Thatcher very publicly said “No, no, no” to Jacques Delors’s dreams of European federalism. But would those dreams ever have come true? Current events in Europe suggest not. The creation of the single market bound us to Europe far more firmly than anything Delors had had in mind. 

There remains the Falklands war. It is true that Thatcher acted with great courage when she insisted on mounting a very dangerous mission to retake the islands from the Argentines. But it might have been even better if she had not lost them in the first place. Before March 1982 her administration seems barely to have been aware of the islands, and casually withdrew the patrol vessel that served them, Endurance, as a cost-cutting measure. The Argentine junta interpreted this as a sign of indifference. It was a tragic misinterpretation. Yet when they landed, they must have thought their optimism was justified; they found just 70-odd troops, 20 of whom were only there because they were changing shifts. Nothing can detract from the resolution Thatcher showed through that crisis. But the crisis had arisen from her own government’s neglect. The resulting nasty little war distresses people to this day, dividing British people from Argentines and from each other.

Last but not least, under Thatcher, the great nationalist, the United Kingdom was weakened from within. The conflict in Northern Ireland was not of her making, and was then at its zenith; it would be unfair to blame Thatcher for a cycle of violence that began before her birth. Nonetheless, there seems to have been little will to see shades of grey. One wonders whether things might have been different, not least because, within a few years of her departure, they were.  But perhaps Thatcher’s greatest blow to the unity of the UK was to introduce the deeply unpopular poll tax in Scotland a year before the rest of the country. Many Scots would date the beginning of the likely break-up of the United Kingdom to that tactless and inexplicable decision.

Margaret Thatcher wanted a country of hard-working, aspirational Britons who owned both homes and shares. She created a country where people have been crippled by the debt they have incurred in trying to own their own homes, and where wealth has been concentrated in the hands of those with an eye for the main chance. She wanted a strong, united Britain; she left a country on the verge of disintegration, and wholly at the mercy of market forces. She believed profoundly in democracy, or so she thought; she left an apathetic and cynical people deprived of the means to influence their future.

Nothing so much exemplifies Thatcher’s legacy as the manner of her death – in the Ritz Hotel. It must have been a very different departure from that of the residents of Hillcroft nursing home in Lancaster or Ash Court in London, where the abuse of Alzheimer’s patients has been alleged; or from the 250,000 vulnerable pensioners said by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to have been receiving “poor or very poor” standards of care from private contractors. It is an odious contrast. But it is one that Thatcher, who was neither cruel nor selfish, would genuinely not have relished. The real message here is of hubris, of a misplaced sense of one’s country and its people, and of the pursuit of ideology in place of common sense. 

On Wednesday, the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, described Thatcher as someone who "defined and overcame the great challenges of her age". In fact, more than almost any other British prime minister of the 20th century (except, perhaps, Ramsay MacDonald), she was an abject failure in almost everything she tried to do.

  

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One day in 1987, I was sitting in a pub in London’s Farringdon, then a district of repro houses, platemakers, commercial photographers and other artisans. My companion, now a well-known journalist working in Scotland, was then a colleague of mine on Fishing News, the weekly journal of the fishing industry. She was a frequent drinking partner. I was trying to articulate something that I did not quite understand. The atmosphere in London, I felt, had changed steadily during the 1980s; not something one could define; a change in the way people thought and felt and behaved towards each other. 

“Greed,” she said. 

“Yes,” I said.

A few months later, I left. I went to work as a development volunteer in the east of Sudan. It was the start of a 25-year journey that was to take me to the baked-earth plains of the Horn of Africa, then the Eastern Himalayas, the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, the Amazonian headwaters of Ecuador, Moscow and Kyiv, the emerging nations of Soviet Central Asia, and Rome, Brussels and Washington. Finally, in August 2008, I came to rest in the oddly rootless yet rooted cosmopolitanism of New York. 

On Monday morning I left my sunlit flat and walked along the north edge of Central Park. It really was the first day of spring. The day before, we had walked through a cutting wind; today there was a gentle warmth to the sun and a green haze on the trees, but I wasn’t there. I can’t say why, but I suddenly remembered the Banbury road on a winter’s day, peering out through the small windscreen of a little Morris car at spectral trees that loomed through the early morning mists of a late-winter morning, a fug of cigarette smoke around us, a bare metal dashboard with no radio, the collar of my long coat turned up against the cold. I began to wonder if it was time to begin the long journey home.

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Robbins's novel The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (Third Rail) is available as a paperback (ISBN 978-0-9914374-0-5, $16.99 USA, or £10.07 UK) or as an eBook in all formats, including Amazon Kindle (ISBN 978-0-9914374-2-9, $2.99 USA, or £1.85 UK).

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Easter in Quito

M.Robbins

A post for Holy Week. In 1991 Easter fell at the end of March, as it does this year. I was in Ecuador. Sacked from my job, I had decided to leave a recession-hit London winter and learn Spanish at a language school in Quito. I stayed for several months and travelled widely in the country. This is an extract from the Ecuador chapter of my new book, The Nine Horizons. The names have been changed.

IT WAS now the week before Easter. I had a new teacher. Adriana was very small, clever and gentle with a round face and enormous brown eyes. She was about my age (I was 33) and was married with a daughter. That week, she tried to force impersonal, object and direct pronouns into me with great tact and charm, and I learned much. Instead of switching at the end of the week, we decided to work together for a little longer. I found myself looking forward to school in the morning.

One day Dave and I sitting in a bar (we did a lot of that). It was somewhere in the mountains south of Ibarra, on the Pan-American Highway. I think we had gone up there looking for places to hill-walk. We had not found any. (The Andes, unlike the Himalayas, are rather conical; one is either on a mountain or off it, and they are not such good walking country.) At night, in search of beer, we had walked down to the main road from the village where we were staying, along a narrow country lane, across a little steel bridge that clanged back at us in the dark, the sky a mass of stars.

“I like Adriana,” I said.

“You like Adriana,” he repeated.

“Looking into Adriana’s eyes,” I said, “is like sinking into a hot bath on a winter morning.”

“Oh, good Lord,” he exploded, with something between mirth and exasperation.

Dave was not a romantic, although women certainly liked him. At the time he was just embarking upon a relationship with one of the teachers at the school, but he said nothing about it and I did not ask. He returned to England at the end of summer, but in 1993 he moved to Quito, where they started a family; he went to work for a bank. I last heard from him in 1995. I suppose he is still there.

Adriana and I remained in contact for a little while but there was nothing between us; she was married, anyway. Two years later she travelled with her husband to Belgium, and thence to London, where she did look for me; but I was no longer there. One day at school she had asked me if I had a dream, and I said that it was to see the Himalayas. That was where I had gone. Later Dave told me that she got divorced. I do have a picture I took of her on the roof of the school one afternoon. The wind is blowing her very dark brown hair. She is wearing a blue denim shirt and jeans and smiling, and I have bounced a little flash into her eyes, but I wonder if they needed that. Behind her is yet another white church with twin towers; beyond it, the green of the Pichincha range can just be made out below the startling blue of the sky. But I am older now.

“If you drink tonight, you’ll turn into a fish,” she said one Thursday afternoon. “That is what our people say of those who drink or dance before midnight on Good Friday. And I know that the English students are always drinking on the Amazonas after school.” This was true. There were only a few of us but we had teamed up with the German dropouts.

“Will you go to the processions tomorrow?” she continued. “You should do. You’ll see the cucuruchos.”

I said that I would certainly go to the processions, although I was sure it would be raining. The weather had been bad lately; the previous day had been cold and wet. Walking home at dusk down the Mariana de Jesus, I had turned and looked up at the Pichinchas to see patches of snow creeping into the higher gullies. Today had been grey and cold. But it had not rained.

After school, I headed for the Scottish Bar in the Amazonas. The Scottish was kitsch. A six-foot plastic figure of a Scottish piper towered over the entrance. Waitresses wore short tartan skirts, rather fetching tartan waistcoats and tartan cardboard eyeshades; they dashed about between the gloomy interior and the cluster of blue tin tables on the wide pavement outside. Now and again, when it had been raining and the air was cold, we would be forced inside; more usually we sat outside and watched the world go by while drinking good local lager at 25 pence a pint. The clientele included young American tourists, clearly identifiable from their locally-made sombreros, which Ecuadorians rarely wore in towns. The Germans wore frayed jeans and tee-shirts. There was a scattering of Ecuadorians, mostly smartly-dressed young people. Now and then one of the tables would be taken by a pair of young women in risible skirts and vertiginous heels, mouths glistening red, earrings like hula hoops and big hair to the waist, dyed blonde, a little black showing at the roots.

Every night, Maria would pass by the tables. A middle-aged indigena woman in hat and shawl, she brought a large wooden box, lined with felt, of the sort in which one might expect to see rows of butterflies, transfixed with pins. In this she displayed the jewelry she sold to the tourists on the Amazonas. She said she made it, and perhaps she did; I rather liked it, buying earrings and pins as presents from her before I left. There were beggars too. One, a thin man of perhaps 30 with dark skin stretched tight across his wide cheekbones, came most nights, hauling himself along the pavement, his bent distorted legs dragging inertly behind him; now and then one of us would give him something and he took it without thanks. The poor do not thank you for being rich.

I did not stay long in the Scottish that night. After a beer or two I left alone and hailed a taxi on the Amazonas. The driver was about 60; unusually, he wore a suit and tie and was very polite, even switching on the meter. “Hasn’t rained today,” I remarked. “No. First dry day in two weeks,” he replied. “It’s a miracle,” I went on. “A miracle!” he confirmed with enthusiasm. “A miracle, for Semana Santa. Will you go to the processions tomorrow?”

Carlos asked me the same question as we drank our coffee after dinner. He had studied in a seminary for some years before abandoning the priesthood because the church took too much from the poor. In fact, the Second Vatican Council at Medellín had changed much, and in South America these changes had taken root, leading to a more liberal, compassionate church that was closer to the people. Carlos had a new occupation anyway, running an all-night off-licence. But I do not think he had lost his faith.

    

M.Robbins

“Have you seen the uniforms of the Ku Klux Klan?” he asked. I nodded. “That’s what you’ll see tomorrow. The cucuruchos are purple – well, sometimes brown – and they’ve got those same high pointed hoods that cover their faces. The hoods are pretty heavy, they’re lined with card. They’ll parade slowly through the city for some hours, carrying heavy crosses. It’s an act of penitence for the suffering of the Señor. Sometimes they will whip themselves and those without hoods may wear crowns of thorns that make them bleed. One year, instead of a heavy cross, one man carried a huge cactus instead of a cross. He bled. And they will walk in bare feet.”

“Good Lord,” I said. “Do they heat up the surface of the road as well, just to make things more interesting?”

“Oh, no,” he replied without smiling. “If the sun shines it should be hot enough.”

My flippancy was out of order. The custom of penitence is an accepted part of Catholicism. Its expression in this form arrived from Spain with the conquistadores, who in 1534 founded the city of Quito on the ashes of the old Inca capital, which had been burned by the retreating forces of Atahualpa’s last general, Rumiñahui. The penitents’ parade endured, but got out of hand, as those who sought public office chastised themselves mightily in order to curry favour with the faithful. So the Church had insisted that all the participants disguise their identity. Today, it was said, many a senior politician might be found beneath the sinister pointed hoods. “Including President Borja?” I asked an Ecuadorian acquaintance. “I doubt it,” he replied, “though God knows he’s got plenty to repent.”

The penitents inspired the respect of many, but the puzzlement of others. With 61% of Ecuadorians attending church regularly, this was still a deeply religious society; but it was not monolithic. Agnosticism and Protestantism were gaining ground. Amongst those who did believe, the strict tenets of the Church were no longer law; the Church in Rome had turned its back on the liberalizing spirit of the 1960s, but in South America it had not. Adriana was not unusual in getting divorced, and many priests no longer opposed contraception. The public observance of Holy Week lacked the deep solemnity of 30 or even 20 years ago. Today, the cucuruchos had their critics. They were aware of this.

“Why make fun of us?” one penitent asked a journalist from the daily paper Hoy. “It really worries me that people of some faiths should think they have the right to deny us our manner of worship.” He added that he wished more young people would take part. “This year, I’ll do their penitence for them.”

But the cucuruchos weren’t all old. Another article quoted a 23-year-old driver as saying that, ever since he began taking part, he felt more secure behind the wheel. Many a near-accident, he claimed, had been suddenly avoided without explanation. He was not alone in believing such things. The bus traveller in Ecuador soon got used to the stickers of Jesus in his crown of thorns, displayed above the seat of almost every driver; around the figure was written the words Dios guia mi camino. I wished at times that the drivers would rely on more than divine intervention.

“What, really, do you think of the cucuruchos?” I asked another Ecuadorian. “I think they’re very religious,” he said cautiously.“But these guys whipping themselves?” I pressed. “Oh well, I think they’re sadicos.”

The next morning we met at the Monastery of San Francisco to see for ourselves.

*** *** ***

BROTHER JODOCO Ricke arrived in Quito in 1536, hot on the heels of the conquistadors, and started work on the extraordinary Monastery of San Francisco. Built over the succeeding 50 years, it now stands proud above the Plaza of the same name, its white twin towers shining in the direct equatorial sun, the structure clearly visible from the Panecillo far above. Inside, its finery is a tribute not only to its artisans, but to a culture that was prepared to expend such monstrous sums in the name of God that nothing of the sort could be built today; even the basilica of Yamoussoukro in Côte d'Ivoire cannot quite be judged in the same context. It was said that if just two of the gilded columns in the church of San Francisco were stripped, they would pay off Ecuador’s burgeoning external debt. But there was no chance that this would be done, for the treasures of colonial Quito were a source of justified pride. Here and there one saw notices or stickers proclaiming Quito – Patrimonia de la Humanidad; UNESCO apparently agreed.

M.Robbins

I did. One day I wandered quite by chance into one of the lesser-known colonial churches in Quito’s Old Town. The church was lit by beams of sunlight that streamed through arches around the nave, creating patches of vibrant light and cool, dim shadow; a priest swung a censer on a rope, and the smoke from the censer drifted in and out of the sunbeams, which caught the metal of the censer so that a dull gleam flew backwards and forwards with the rhythm of a hypnotist’s pendulum.

The magnificence of the San Francisco was not solely a product of Renaissance Europe. Its founder, Brother Jodoco Ricke, arrived in Quito just 44 years after the Moors had left Granada. The craftsmen who accompanied him brought influences that were as much Islamic as they were Christian, influences reflected by the courtyard within and its alabaster fountain. The Islamic and Christian traditions had combined Islamic decorative and Christian figurative influences to form one of the most striking buildings I have seen.

At ten in the morning on Easter Friday, I stood with Ellen and Dave in the courtyard of the San Francisco. It was not raining. It was a miracle. For Semana Santa. Knots of soberly-dressed worshippers were holding spontaneous services in the courtyard, sheltered from the sun in cloisters that looked out onto clumps of bright red flowers, contrasting with the white stonework and the brilliant blue of the sky. Deep within the building, in the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Jesus of the Great Power, the cucuruchos prepared body and mind for the six-hour ordeal ahead. Outside the Brotherhood’s door, a sign pointed to the studio of Stereo Radio Jesus del Gran Poder, the sign surmounted with a cartoon of a monk DJ in headphones with a turntable. Through this medium, the Brotherhood spread its message; but the sign pointed, too, to the dispensary, a boon in a city where the public hospitals lacked basic things like needles and sterile dressings.

M.Robbins

We shouldered our way through the crush and out into the Plaza below. Here the faithful ambled across the cobbles, pausing now and then to inspect stands selling hats and craftwork. In the cat’s-cradle of ancient streets behind the San Francisco, market traders sold everything from digital watches to brightly-coloured rucksacks, stereos smuggled from Colombia, jewelry, cheap jeans and whole roast pig. On the steps of the monastery itself, four or five peddlers provided devotional images of the Virgin, votive candles, and postcards of Christ. Two aged beggars sat against the great, open wooden doors of the main church, hands outstretched for alms. No-one bothered them, the odd priest or monk stepping around them with something like respect. We sat on the steps in the growing heat. Everyone was waiting for the same thing – gringos, city families and the pious Indigenas of the Cordillera, for some of whom there was Christ alone and not much else.

At midday, the penitents emerged. The first one saw from the Plaza below was the high purple cones of the cucuruchos; they advanced slowly, two by two, preceded by a military band that belted out stately music, the brass notes with that curious Hispanic balance on a knife-edge of melody and atonality. The rims of the trumpets and tubas caught the fierce sunlight and refracted it, hurting the eyes. And very slowly, the huge statue of Jesus of the Great Power was borne shoulder-high from the doors of the San Francisco, ablaze with gold.

We made for the Calle Guayaquil. Here, an hour or so later, the procession moved slowly down the slope towards us, still escorted by the band, which would continue until the end at half-past six. Behind them came the first cucuruchos. They had a strange humanoid appearance. I raised my camera; normally shy about photographing people, I felt strangely detached from these curious creatures with their high pointed heads, their eyes just visible behind slits in the hoods. Then, as I focused my lens on the leading figure, I saw the eyes staring back at me, distorted by the fresnel screen in the viewfinder. My finger froze over the shutter and I did not take the picture, waiting until he had gone by before raising the camera back to my eye.

M.Robbins

Many cucuruchos passed by, some carrying vast crosses. Later I was to hear that one cucurucho, Humberto Bautista, who was 89, was carrying a three-metre cross that weighed a quintal – about 46 kilos, just over 100lb. Many were even bigger. One or two of the cucuruchos, stripped to the waist beneath their hoods, whipped their backs. Behind the cucuruchos came 15 or 20 Roman centurions, driving before them Jesus figures who they were beating with cats-o’-nine-tails. Others walked past in simple robes, patches of blood showing as crowns of thorns bit into their foreheads. They too were lashing their naked backs with the same short, evil little whips. I saw more than one man who already had what must have been stinging weals between neck and waist. There were children in the procession, too, although certainly no-one was whipping them. Some were dressed as Christ; a few wore purple robes to match their fathers, and one, three or four years old, was a mini-cucurucho complete with cornet hat and cape. Some of the children carried small crosses.

M.Robbins

The procession moved slowly, and stopped often. It must, for a man with a 100 lb. cross on his shoulders does not run, even if he is not 89. The number of spectators grew. In the Calle Bolívar, just after two, I had one of the very few ugly moments I had in Ecuador; part of the crowd, which had swelled to 500,000, which was 200,000 more than expected, rushed the statue of Jesus del Gran Poder in a display of mass piety. We were forced backwards and forwards and half-crushed as a moan of devotion arose from the worshippers. Gringos were now less in evidence.

Later we walked through the quieter streets of La Ronda, further behind the San Francisco, where beautiful houses of neat square proportions with white walls and blue window-frames recalled the elegance of colonial Quito. But the paint was flaking. An indigena, one of the new urban poor, lay against a dirty white wall in the sunshine; he was insensible, but his hand still clutched the neck of an empty rum-bottle. A teenage girl passed us. “They rob you here,” she warned us, whispering. Later I would hear that the fine streets of the Old City, hamstrung by planning and conservation laws, had become havens for the poor, and that people slept in shifts so that up to six could use the same bed. But maybe they were lucky. The following week an unexpected hailstorm caused the collapse of some corrugated-iron shacks on the edge of the city, killing nearly 30 people. Many Ecuadorians, whether religious or not, believed that religion was the cornerstone of the country’s tranquility, preventing it from going the way of some of its neighbours; and perhaps they were right.

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Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing, The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.

It's the science, stupid. Or is it?

Thoughts on what we know, and what we don't, and how we tell the difference

Science is under attack. From the right, sceptics attack climate science; from the left, molecular biology and its products inspire deep suspicion. Science no longer seems to inspire the young or the progressive, who espouse mysticism or retreat into homespun philosophy.  Meanwhile both Left and Right cherry-pick from its conclusions; they accept or reject climate science or advances in biotechnology according to their prejudices, and examine the evidence on neither. This is dangerous, for all of us.

It’s a bad time for us to misunderstand science, because it isn’t going to go away.  Al Gore writes: “The… multiple revolutions in biotechnology and the life sciences will soon require us to make almost godlike [decisions]… Are we ready to make such decisions? The available evidence would suggest that the answer is not really, but we are going to make them anyway.” 

Science should come with a health warning. It only tells us so much, and it does not tell us what it has not told us. But I am also going to suggest that in a deeper sense, scientific principles should underpin our beliefs to a far greater extent than they do now.

Averroës: Study of creation

A word about what this post is not about, which is science vs. religion. For some, to teach evolution in a school is to deny the role of the Creator. Others use the cudgel of rationality to attack religion. Both sides would do well to remember the words of Andalusian scientist and philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in the West as Averroës:  “The more perfect becomes the knowledge of creation, the more perfect becomes the knowledge of the Creator. ...the Law urges us to observe creation by means of reason and demands the knowledge thereof through reason. “ The deeply religious, and strongly irreligious, should both think hard about that quote, but they won’t. In any case, this post is mostly not about religion. It is about the way we see science and interpret its findings; what it tells us, and what it doesn’t; and where it should stand in public discourse.

Let’s start by giving science a good kicking.

Induced belief?
In arguments about policy, especially but not only on climate change, one side or the other is usually saying: “It’s the science, stupid!” But they are almost never completely right.  Science rarely falls neatly to one side or the other.

Science is inductive; that is to say, I observe a single object or phenomenon, and decide that my observation allows me to infer something about other, similar or connected, objects or phenomena. An induction is therefore different from a deduction, in which I observe a number of objects or phenomena and know that a certain fact applies to each one; I don’t have to infer it.

The question of what one may reasonably infer from observation is hardly new. The most reliable form of inference is the syllogism. A syllogism is, in effect, deductive logic. I will say, A working bicycle must have wheels; my bicycle works; it therefore must have wheels. Change this proposition to: A working bicycle has wheels; other bicycles have wheels; therefore they work too. This is not a syllogism, because we don’t know it to be true; all the other bikes might have some other broken part, so might not work. However, we know from observation (of other bikes) that it is probably true, so we may infer that they work. This extrapolation of the general from the particular is inductive reasoning and modern science depends on it.

Why this dependence, if it is not foolproof? Bertrand Russell explains that an induction “has less cogency than a deduction, and yields only a probability, not a certainty; but on the other hand it gives new knowledge, which deduction does not” (A History of Western Philosophy, 1945). This is demonstrated by modern advances in astrophysics; dark matter, for example, is theoretically verifiable and falsifiable but we cannot field-test it. But its existence is a rational probability – one that we would not discover through a deductive process.

The problem with this inductive process is that it excludes the unknown; you cannot include in your reasoning a factor that you do not know to exist. This may be because one could have no reason to suspect its existence. One can argue, in the case of climate change, that the causal mechanism is clear, but what if there is some unknown factor acting upon it, or about to do so? The philosopher Moritz Schlick (of whom more later) spotted this danger in the inductive process when he warned that an inductive inference could not easily be reduced to a syllogism by establishing causality. “There are infinitely many circumstances that might possibly enter into consideration as the cause, since, theoretically, every process in the universe could make a contribution,” he wrote (General Theory of Knowledge, 1925).

Isn’t this all rather theoretical? No. Climate science, for example, is based on a massive induction.  We do not know, in a literal sense, that human activity is changing the climate. We have inferred it from the fact that we are releasing a certain tonnage of greenhouses gases and know that some of it is accumulating in the atmosphere. We also know that that accumulation will make the atmosphere retain more heat. Neither of these facts are inference – we know them to be true; we can (for example) measure the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere and know that it has increases from 280 to nearly 400 parts per million since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century. We also know the extent to which these gases will increase the propensity of the atmosphere to retain heat; this was demonstrated by John Tyndall in 1859. What is inference, is that this process will lead to climate change.  That is because we cannot be sure there is no third factor that would cancel out the interaction between the two.

The history of science and technology is littered with failures that were not predicted due to such a “third factor”. In the 1990s I worked for an agricultural research centre that bred a chickpea variety that was resistant to blight, and could therefore be planted earlier in the season, taking better advantage of soil moisture from Mediterranean winter rainfall. However, within a few years farmers started to report that it wasn’t actually resistant to blight. At least part of the reason turned out to be that farmers were trading seed between them and were often buying, or selling in good faith, seed that was not of the latest release.

A famous example of the unexpected comes from aviation history. The first jet airliner, the De Havilland Comet, entered passenger service in 1952. Very soon, several aircraft exploded in flight. The Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough put an intact Comet in a water tank and pressurized and depressurized it until it suffered the same failure. Pressurization of the cabin had searched out a point weakened by metal fatigue. As the aircraft had been tested to twice its maximum cabin pressure in trials, this should not have happened. In fact it was the cycle of pressurization and depressurization that was the agent of failure, not the cabin pressure itself. As Geoffrey de Havilland was to admit in an autobiography published after his death (Sky Fever, 1979), the Comet was so close to the frontiers of technology that there was nothing in existing experience to predict this. The cause could never have been hypothesized.

The failure of an inductive process to apprehend an unknown factor can also arise because its evidential base is limited in time or space. Conclusions drawn from observations of natural processes are especially suspect in this respect. The social-science theorist R. Andrew Sayer cites one of the Paradoxes of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea:

One of Zeno’s famous paradoxes showed that on an atomistic conception of time as consisting of discretely distinct points, movement is unintelligible. If an arrow can only be at a single distinct point in space and at no other discrete point in time, then it cannot move. As Georgescu-Roegen argues: “That which is in a point cannot be in motion or evolve; what moves and evolves cannot be in any point.” …So, if we [describe] the growth of a plant [in] distinct stages occurring at discretely distinct times we can hardly expect to learn how it happens.” (Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, 1984.)

Again, this seems theoretical; but it has implications for the modelling of environmental processes.  A simple example is that of the naturalist E.P. Stebbing, who observed environmental degradation in northern Nigeria in 1934 and concluded that the desert was moving southward.  In a sense it was, but Stebbing might not have known that it had also moved north in recent times, because his observations were temporally inadequate. However, Stebbing’s views started an ongoing narrative on the desertification menace that at one stage threatened to oversimplify land-management issues in Africa.

The problems of the inductive approach become acute in the case of climate modelling, where the number of different phenomena that would be material is so great that they cannot all be known; so great, indeed, that some may be simplified or excluded even when their existence is known. Thus at least one major climate model was drawn up in the past on the basis of single rate of decay for soil carbon – although mineralization of organic matter, and its release as CO₂, is highly variable and non-linear.

Does this mean we should ignore the outputs of climate science? No. It is based on an induction, but as we have seen, all good science is. There can always be new evidence coming from left field, but I have yet to hear of anything that would really invalidate the climate models that we have so far.  In any case, as the historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pointed out, science rarely provides absolute proofs; rather, a consensus arises between scientists based on what is known, and provided that consensus is wide enough, the majority will ignore the doubters and move on. This is where climate science now stands.

What I am trying to do, however, is to make a deeper point about the rights and obligations of science, the limitations on what it demonstrates, the need for evidence, and the need for humility when its conclusions are questioned.  Failure to find that humility will itself politicise science and throw its objectivity into doubt. It may even bring it into disrepute.

Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, who has written widely on the links between science and politics, demonstrated this in a 2004 paper in which he discussed the furore that erupted over Bjørn Lomborg’s 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist.  Lomborg had argued that environmental threats were exaggerated and that proposed measures to address them were uneconomic. He was subjected to intense and often savage criticism, with one critic going so far as to compare him, by implication, to a Holocaust denier.  Pielke quotes Harvard scientist John Holdren attacking Bjorn Lomborg’s 2001 book because it had “wasted immense amounts of the time of capable people who have had to take on the task of rebutting him. And he has done so at the particular intersection of science with public policy... where public and policy-maker confusion about the realities is more dangerous for the future of society than on any other science-and-policy question excepting, possibly, the dangers from weapons of mass destruction.”

This frustration with Lomborg is understandable (and Holdren is in fact a scientist of distinction; he is now senior science advisor to the White House). However, Pielke’s point is that by taking this view, scientists are themselves politicising science. This is a wise observation in itself, but there is surely a deeper danger. The critics (many far ruder than Holdren) were, in effect, saying to Lomborg:  Science says you are wrong, so shut up. The implications of this will be obvious to anyone familiar with the abuses committed in the 20th century in the name of “scientific socialism”, and the revolutionary doctrine that because we are right, we may behave as we see fit. The fact that Lomborg was wrong is not the point. As we have seen, science is a flawed instrument, and is not in a position to claim absolute truth. One is reminded of John Stuart Mill’s contention (which I quoted in an earlier post) that no opinion should be suppressed “lest it aught be true”.

There is a further implication. If science can provide at best a broad consensus about climate change, how on earth is it to demonstrate the existence or otherwise of God? We can hardly put the cosmos in a water tank and compress and decompress it until the truth is revealed. (Averroës would say, I suppose, that the Large Hadron Collider was doing just that; but I think the “God” particle is a physical phenomenon.)

We have now given science a good kicking. However, there are dangers in this.

“Science Wars”...and a Viennese legacy

Giordano Bruno (Jastrow/Wikimedia Commons)

Science has always had its enemies.  When I lived in Rome some years ago I would often visit the Campo de’Fiori; it had the best bars. In the centre stands the rather threatening statue of Giordano Bruno. (Not to be confused with Bruno Giordano. One was burned at the stake; the other played for Lazio – though, for Roma supporters, that may mean he should burn too.) Bruno was burned on that spot in 1600. His quarrel with the Inquisition was basically theological, but also concerned his science; like his younger contemporary, Galileo Galilei, he believed the earth revolved around the sun. Further, he posited the existence of other life in other worlds, which challenged the Church’s view of creation. Bruno led a life of principled intellectual endeavor. He was also, by all accounts, a disputatious pain in the arse.  His fate reminds us of what might then have befallen Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.

It would be easy to see Bruno’s fate as something of another time, but attacks on science are with us still. The arguments about creationism, and the teaching of evolution vs. intelligent design, are an example; so is the funding by lobbyists of research to discredit the consensus on climate science. However, there have been other, more subtle attempts to undermine the rational, sometimes with good intentions. The best example is the “Science Wars” that began in the 1960s and ran on into the late 1990s.

The “Science Wars” can trace their origin back to a seminal 1962 work by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Very crudely stated, Kuhn’s argument was that what we accept as “scientific truth” is the result of a consensus that is in part a product of society and its preoccupations at any given time, and that certain conditions must occur for that consensus to be reformed (a process he referred to as a “paradigm shift”). Kuhn’s arguments are interesting and complex. A physicist by training, he did not so much question the value of science as try to illuminate how it proceeds, and under what circumstances a scientific consensus will admit of major revisions. However, post-structuralist critics have since interpreted his work as meaning that there is no “scientific” method of inquiry and that what we take for scientific knowledge is actually moderated by a society’s culture and history.

Thus by 1986 the philosopher Sandra Harding could define the radical feminist position as a claim that science is “not only sexist, but also racist, classist, and culturally coercive”.  (Professor Harding also, notoriously, referred to Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual”.) There is no reason why there should not be a feminist critique of the scientific world, which remains very male-dominated. However, science is hard to do, and scientists understandably felt that they did not deserve this from critics outside its disciplines. Perhaps more seriously, some of what academic critics have written about science has been quite meaningless. Richard Dawkins has quoted, with glee, such statements as Jean Baudrillard’s:

Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.

What? In 1994 the physicist Alan Sokal was sufficiently irritated to write a spoof paper that he titled Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Dawkins later described the paper as “a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle.” The paper included passages such as the following:

Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and ‘pro-choice’, so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality).

Sokal submitted the paper to the journal Social Text, which published it as part of a “Science Wars” special issue. Sokal then admitted that it was a hoax. What Sokal, and others, were in effect saying was, look, it’s not OK to just talk complete rubbish.

They were not the first to make this point. The classic example is that of the logical positivists, and their leader, Moritz Schlick. In principle, logical positivism holds that a statement is meaningful if it can be verified. This springs in part from a distrust of metaphysical philosophy. The Vienna Circle – a group of thinkers centred on Schlick who met between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s – argued that philosophy could only be a part of science. In a 1982 memorial volume on the centenary of Schlick’s birth, Eugene Gadol explained that philosophy “could not compete with science because there was only the natural world which the sciences, with the support of observation for their theories, already wholly covered – all it could do was analyse the information which sciences provided…”.  In arguing for this essential unity of science, Schlick and the Logical Positivists were undermining the claims of philosophy, theology and the humanities, which in early-20th century Germany and Austria had, as Gadol put it: “alleged that there were special ways of enquiry (hermeneutics) and special ways of understanding (intuiting, Verstehen) which transcend the ordinary operations of the human mind as it manifests itself in the natural sciences.”

In other words, the theory of the unity of science propounded by the Vienna Circle challenged the right to write anything that did not make sense. The Logical Positivists said that for a statement to be meaningful, there must be some way in which its truth could be demonstrated, at least in theory –  even if the tools to do so were not/not yet available. Schlick once used the example of the dark side of the moon; we could not see it, but might one day be able to (as indeed we did). So a statement about what was there was meaningful, as it might eventually be verified.

On the morning of June 22 1936, as he climbed the stairs to his lecture room at the University of Vienna, Schlick was shot and fatally wounded by a former student, Johan Nelböck. This has often been presented as a political act, but Nelböck was simply deranged. However, Nelböck defended himself in court by arguing that Schlick’s rejection of metaphysics had somehow deranged him.  In the weeks that followed, Nelböck received increasing press support as someone who had rid Vienna of a pernicious left-leaning foreign Jewish philosopher, who had sought to destroy the nation’s moral compass.  He used these arguments to secure a pardon after the Nazis took power in Austria (his sentence had in any case been only 10 years).

An enlightened, West-leaning philosopher murdered by gloomy irrational Central Europeans untouched by the Enlightenment? It’s exactly the gulf expressed by the characters Settembrini and Naphta in Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Indeed Schlick fits the role; a German aristocrat (and not in fact Jewish), he was married to an American and spoke good English. The British philosopher A. J. Ayer, who met him in Vienna in 1932, said that he “made on me above all an impression of urbanity – like an American senator in a pre-war film.”

Arguably this conflict was resolved by the second world war: the rational won. But this is not so clear. The “Science Wars” showed that the validity of science is still under attack from those who do not wish to be bound by its conclusions.  But perhaps even more important, both Sokal and Schlick – in their very different ways – were insisting that it is not all right to make meaningless statements and offer them as knowledge.

This is the real point. As we have seen, the scientific method is flawed. But any alternative is worse. In the first part of this post, I argued science does not always deliver final truths. Therefore those who see themselves as rational should understand that science should not be used as an excuse to berate those who do not agree with them. In the second part of this post, however, I have tried to show that despite its limitations, the basic scientific method is essential, and our public lives must be the realm of disciplined, secular, rational thought. The reason is simple; it is sometimes a short step from talking shit to doing it to other people.

Mike Robbins’s novel, The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (Third Rail, 2014), is available as a paperback (ISBN 978-0-9914374-0-5, $16.99 USA, or £10.07 UK) or as an eBook in all formats, including Amazon Kindle (ISBN 978-0-9914374-2-9, $2.99 USA, or £1.85 UK). The full range of his books can be found here. Enquiries (including requests for review copies) should be sent to thirdrailbooks@gmail.com.

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