On the border of science & politics

By now I’m sure everyone has formed their opinion on the Professor Nutt vs. Alan Johnson drugs debacle. On the one side you’ve got the screaming hordes of Daily Mail believers (I hesitate to call them readers; that might imply they could use that skill to read other media that might occasionally dabble in actual science), and Alan Johnson, claiming that Professor Nutt’s voicing of his conclusions require him to be sacked from the drugs advisory committee, and on the other a significant part of the UK’s scientific community, who are condemning Johnson for sacking an advisor for apparently providing him with advice with which he disagrees.

There’s an important underlying point here, which has been missed in the raging debate over the future of Government scientific advisors, and that’s the relationship between scientific knowledge and political debate. While every party has been quick to reaffirm how important science is for policy making, the Tories have affirmed Johnson’s decision and called Nutt’s expression of his views in terms of ecstasy being relatively safer than horse-riding ‘particularly ill-judged’. Their use of this phrase is telling.

Ill-judged in what sense? Certainly not in a scientific sense; Nutt’s judgement of the risks attached to particular activities is borne out by evidence. Politically, of course, it is a poorly judged comparison – the general public are much more happy to accept certain risks as being palatable than others, and therefore anyone willing to claim that commonly-held impressions of risk are incorrect is likely to cause an adverse reaction amongst the voting public. This is politically trivial.

However, this is not the sort of contrast being put forward by Johnson. He has specifically stated that he disagrees with Nutt’s ‘views’ – as though scientific judgements hold to the same standard of knowledge as political judgements. Since they both cover different domains of knowledge (public opinion and biological fact) and relate to those domains in very different ways, the meaning behind Charles Clarke’s comment about the drug classification system being hopelessly confused becomes clear: while Johnson perceives the classification system as a reflection of public opinion about the potential dangers attached to particular drugs, and thus as a means of representing both action on those drugs and a tool to discourage their use, Nutt perceieves the classification system as representing biological risk. These two approaches are incompatible.

Different standards of knowledge are at work here, and a liberal state requires some means of distinguishing between them. Instinctively, I want to say that science should always have primacy, but in the case of drugs there’s another standard of knowledge and type of judgement to consider, which is moral judgement. Johnson shares the moral judgement that ‘drugs are bad’ with much of the electorate, contributing to the political judgement he has made in this case. This is, again, a different domain of knowledge to scientific judgements, which cannot say which actions are right and which are wrong. Similarly, moral judgements cannot say which drug presents the most biological risk. They can, however, say which type of biological risk is the ‘worst’, and so it is internally consistent for Johnson’s system of morality to keep tobacco legal and cannabis illegal, if he judges schizophrenia to be a worse risk than lung cancer – even if this appears nonsensical.

The drugs advisory council clearly believe that scientific judgement should trump moral judgement in this case, because certain risks can be demonstrably worse for an individual – an individual with schizophrenia is, at least, not dying in the same way that someone who contracts lung cancer may do. However, despite this apparently being a scientific judgement, it is in fact a moral one: it states that death is worse than schizophrenia as an outcome. There is no scientific reason to prefer one to the other without a pre-made value judgement, because scientific knowledge merely indicates how the world is, rather than how it should be.

This presents a problem for liberals. Any form of political decision requires a moral judgement – even something as obvious as cutting waste requires the moral judgement that waste is bad. But part of the reason why I was attracted to liberalism was its clear inspiration from the scientific method: freedom to express opinion and freedom to engage with the economy represent a testing of ideas & plans against the world rather than the judgements of society’s rulers, similar to how scientific hypotheses are tested to determine their veracity. Debate is meant to produce the ‘correct’ outcome, but ‘correct’ is never specified beyond the moral judgements of everyone in our society. This means that science does not have primacy in a liberal state, rather the average of the moral judgements expressed by its citizens as represented by its government do.

Professor Nutt’s judgement about the risks posed by particular drugs is correct. Alan Johnson’s moral judgement about the relative ‘badness’ of the risks given by particular drugs is, in my view, wrong. But in a liberal society primacy is not given to scientists merely because they are scientists, but to the moral judgements expressed by elected representatives of the people. Johnson was correct to sack Nutt for expressing a minimal moral judgement about the status of scientifically incommensurable risks (i.e. schizophrenia and death) – this being the extent to which one could describe his ‘views’ as, well, views. I actually wrote this article intending to express the opposite opinion, but the logic of different domains of knowledge in the context of our society has forced me to change my mind.

Liberal Interventionism and the blasted Afghans

It is doubtless the case that the recent law passed by the Afghani parliament will cause more cries of, “Why the devil are our boys being killed on behalf of a bunch of barbarians?” Make no mistake, this law is truly barbaric – anyone who really entertains the suggestion that putting one sex in such a position of power over the other can be excused as a matter of culture has no regard for any humanity beyond their own kind.

However, it also represents the classic liberal dilemma – a democratically elected government rejecting liberal norms to reflect the wishes of its constituents. While it is clear that the Afghani President, Hamid Karzai, is making this move to shore up his support amongst the Shia population of Afghanistan and counting on the West being too concerned with the Taliban to allow him to get away with it, it’s been claimed that it runs counter to the Afghani constitution itself.

Except it doesn’t. Article 131 states , “Courts shall apply Shia school of law in cases dealing with personal matters involving the followers of Shia Sect in accordance with the provisions of law.” This new law only applies to the Shias, and while the constitution does provide for equal treatment of women before the law, I would anticipate that any effort to seek judicial review (which is currently not possible in Afghanistan in any case) would founder on this matter. The Afghani constitution also requires that any law does not conflict with the rules of Islam, and a very specific law targetting a specific type of Islam would probably fall under this purview.

So, what the Afghani Government has done is most likely legal, if repellent. How should the West respond? Does this mean we should withdraw our forces and let the barbarians fight it out amongst themselves? This latter position has been advocated by other Lib Dems. I suspect that the main impetus towards it thus far, apart from the illiberal nature of the Afghani Government, is that the war has been incompetently prosecuted by Labour – a summary of which is in my response to the Payne article.  We can’t do anything about Labour’s mishandling the military for now, so let’s consider other options a future government might take.

1) Withdrawal, and abandoning the Afghanis to their fate. This will result in human rights abuses and most likely a long civil war in which many people will die. It’s also a war I’m not convinced Kabul would win – although the Afghani army has improved, it’s no match for the tribal forces without the West’s help.

2) Continuing our current strategy of shoring up Karzai’s government while attempting to defeat the Taliban. As has been pointed out, this may take upwards of 40 years, and given the weakness of the current constitution and its attached judiciary, may not in the end produce a liberal state regardless.

3) (As you may have guessed, we’re coming up to my preferred option in my capacity as a Swivelly Chair General) Identify the flaws in the current Afghan state and use our forces in the country to supplement them.

What do I mean by that? Well, I’ve previously touched on the idea that the state is not the be-all and end-all of service provision, or indeed the only foci of power within a country. We need to get away from the idea of identifying a nation with the apparatus of its state, and consider it more as its collective of people.

In this case, part of the problem with the Karzai government is that its judiciary is notoriously weak and corrupt, and that the legal system tends to take an age to reach a decision. This has been part of the reason for the success of the Taliban, who are much more efficient at providing justice to the citizens in areas under their control – Afghanis have been known to go to Taliban representatives to settle disputes in Government-held areas, rather than to the courts.

My suggestion is that we stop protecting the Afghani Government and leave it to its own devices. If it is effective at representing the will of its people, it will withstand the Taliban thanks to the popular support being an effective representative will engender. However, I’m not suggesting we leave Afghanistan. I’m rather suggesting that we divert our military resources to protecting the infrastructure and institutions that will comprise the foundations of a liberal state – the schools, the roads, the power & water supply.

We provide military courts in areas in which Afghani Government justice is inadequate, and guarantee the rights of all children, male and female, to attend school and live within a legal system that recognises these rights. We do not require children to attend school, but we step in when they are denied the choice or intimidated into not doing so. We do not require Afghanis to use our courts, but we step in when they are denied the choice or intimidated into not doing so. We will stop the Taliban burning down schools, but we will not prevent families from sending their children to madrassas. Our aim will be to prevent the removal of those choices by the Taliban, not to enforce them on the Afghans. We will have achieved victory when every child in Afghanistan has not only the right to attend school, but the freedom to do so. We will have achieved victory when every Afghani woman has the freedom to exercise equal rights to every Afghani man. We will not require these rights, we will merely enforce them when they are taken away.

In essence, we will create a parallel legal system within Afghanistan. We will give the Afghanis the option of a liberal state, and leave it up to them to choose. After all, if we believe that liberalism is the way ahead, surely we must believe that others will believe it too.

We can’t do this everywhere, but the current situation in Afghanistan is down to our intervention, and is therefore our responsibility.

Seriously, The Left, shut up about the state. There IS an alternative.

Over Hyde Park, the weather appeared unable to make up its mind. The blazing sun was interrupted by showers of hail, seemingly depending on who was on stage at the time. Whether this counted as some sort of divine disapproval was uncertain, as the hailed-on speakers took it as an opportunity to praise the crowd for braving the weather. And indeed ‘brave’ was the right word – unlike many of these protests I’ve been to, most of the crowd looked like they were unused to mud.

This was the ‘Put People First’ march, whose clarion call was ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’. Given the diversity of groups under its banner (154 separate organisations at current counting), the lack of specificity in how these goals were to be achieved was probably inevitable. There was a clear consensus on who was to blame for them not being achieved, however, and at the top of that list were the bankers. There was also a clear consensus on who would provide the means to achieve those goals – the leaders of the G20.

Flash forward to Wednesday, and the agenda of the G20 protesters becomes even less focused. Now it’s about simple anger at a banking sector collapsing in under its own hubris. Change is demanded – but what change?

In Hyde Park, only Mark Thomas actually used the word socialism, and only to condemn Labour for not believing in it. Even Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, limited himself to condemning government incompetence. The focus of the grand anti-capitalism protests – Seattle, Genoa, May Day – has always been on actions the protesters are demanding from the state, or from international organisations. It has never been as a coherent ideology, which has meant their efforts are frequently (and correctly, in today’s case) painted as simple anger with the system. The classic of this has always been the banner which states, ‘Let’s overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer!’

That anger has always been with the state in its role as an agent of change – in essence, it presupposes that the state is the sole agent of change within society. It comes from a statist viewpoint, even if it never describes itself as such. The actions demanded by Put People First are exclusively about what the state can do to mitigate the financial crisis.

At this point, I imagine a lot of you are going, ‘Well, duh, the state has all the power.’ This is wrong. One of the worst aspects of socialism is the disempowering impact it has on the individual; jobs, justice and the mitigation of climate change are on this viewpoint something that can only be provided by the state. The left has been talking the talk of socialism for many years without actually believing it, and it has been left without a coherent ideology of its own.

The original pre-9/11 anti-capitalist movement took its inspiration from the excesses of capitalism as detailed by the investigative journalism of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the work of people like Naomi Klein and John Pilger. These were not political treatises, but rather exposes of the dubious nature of many of the monoliths of corporate world. Again, the language was the same, to do with the actions of states against the villainous corporations. It was moral indignation in a socialist framework, with the meat of the socialism part taken out.

Now in this crisis of capitalism the left has been reduced to merely demanding more government power over the economy, when it was precisely the government’s mismanagement of the rules of credit that brought us to our current predicament. There is no coherency to the movement, beyond the indignation we have seen previously.

The root cause of this indignation has been claimed to be the structure of the corporation itself as a legal entity. Because shareholders do not manage a corporation, and because the managers of a corporation only have a responsibility to create profit for the shareholders, at no point within its structure is there a place for moral accountability. The manager who employs sweatshop labour can claim that he or she is compelled to do so by the duty to create profit for the shareholders, and the shareholders can claim that since they do not control the actions of the corporation, those actions are not their responsibility.

We have seen this in the banking sector. The enormous bonuses given for producing short-term gains were a direct consequence of the duty of the directors to maintain the profitability of their bank and maintain the share price of the company. Therefore the long-term interests of the banks (and therefore the economy based on them) were sacrificed for short-term profit. And yet, no-one is morally responsible.

It is this structure, rather than capitalism itself, which I argue has been the root cause of the anti-capitalist protests over the past two decades, and to which the left must propose an alternative.

Thankfully, we need not look far, as an alternative has been in existence for hundreds of years. In Principles of Political Economy, JS Mill argued for the institution of limited liability partnerships in which every worker would contribute a share of the capital. Today, we call those co-operatives. And they work, and work well, across the world. Indeed, I bank with one. The Co-Operative Bank has been one of the few high street chains to come out of the credit crunch entirely intact. Unlike a corporation, the members of a co-operative are collectively responsible for its actions, as they are involved in both its financing and its day-to-day running. They are the progressive left’s answer to corporatism.

But this leads me to the most important part of this argument. Co-operatives can be set up in law already – there is no need to lobby the state. They create jobs, they lift people out of poverty and are generally environmentally friendly. The only remaining element necessary for change is not the state, but you. Do you want to put a stop to corporate excess? Then find others who feel the same way you do, and compete against those corporations.

The left needs to accept that the agent of change in society is no longer the state, but the individual. The state has a role to play in enabling the founding of co-operative businesses, in terms of providing education, training and start-up loans – but it already does that. Those on the left who wish to see the demise of the corporate system need to stop lobbying the government, and engage with the rest of the population, to tell them that they can co-operate to get themselves out of poverty, and no longer have to rely on provision by the state. Socialism is not the answer – working together at the individual level is.

As I write this, the windows of the RBS branch on Threadneedle Street are being broken. RBS can afford to lose a few panes of glass. But if the 35,000 people who attended Saturday’s protest started banking co-operatively, that would be a different story entirely.