Category Archives: Current Affairs

Steering past the eco-crisis, one balanced judgement at a time

Books, Climate Change, Current Affairs, Politics, Systems Theory

A Review of ‘Regenesis’ by George Monbiot (Allan Lane, 2022)

A combination of groundedness, breadth of awareness, balance and a sense of urgency is required to address the highly complex, critical and contested issues around the multiple eco-crisis we are facing. I have been following George Monbiot’s writings for many years, and in 2019 had the privilege of taking part in a podcast interview with him about rewilding. During that time he has only grown into these qualities. His most evident quality as a journalist is his commitment to drawing public attention to the abuses of the rich and powerful, that not only trash the environment but also deny justice to the poor. However, many left-wing journalists are prone to over-simplifying complex issues and getting drawn into tribal one-dimensionality. Monbiot is not. His background in zoology has equipped him with a strong awareness of systems, and of the inter-relationships we all depend on. The fire is always there, but he also examines the science carefully, considers counter-arguments, and references everything assiduously, whilst also producing highly readable prose – no mean achievement. His new book, ‘Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet’ is an exceptional achievement, on a topic of vast importance, that I have been sufficiently impressed by to want to review immediately.

Monbiot’s book is an investigation into how we can address all the competing conditions around food production so as to feed the world without trashing it. That means that all sorts of holy cows (both figurative and literal) need to put firmly into retirement and strongly discouraged from reproducing themselves. The debate around this is full of all sorts of unquestioned absolutizations and entrenched oppositions that can only be addressed by reconsidering the framework in which they are thought about. Monbiot does this by rightly insisting on maintaining the broader question of how the poor of the world are going to be fed alongside that of how environmental destruction from farming can be reduced or eliminated. He does not accept partial answers as final, whether that means organic farming dependent on animal manure, rewilding on the Knepp model with very small numbers of animals culled for meat in a rewilded landscape, or no-till farming that still employs herbicides to clear the unploughed ground for a new crop. All of these models are respected as far as they go – but it is nowhere near far enough to address all the complex conditions we are facing. Monbiot has to constantly employ the Middle Way in practice to find his way through these complex arguments – even though he would probably not call it that, and even still uses the term ‘incremental’ pejoratively. He has to be balanced in a deeper sense of balance, avoiding absolutizations, to be radical in the ways the situation requires.

Monbiot leaves us in no doubt about the urgency and importance of food production as the most important source of our global problems of global heating and loss of biodiversity. 12% of the world’s land area is used to grow crops, and 28% for animal grazing – yet animals fed by grazing alone provide only 1% of the world’s protein, and 43% of those croplands are used to grow food for animals. This means that if everyone adopted a plant-based diet, we could not only eliminate use of land for pasture but also a large proportion of the cropland – freeing up three-quarters of the world’ agricultural land for rewilding (all these figures can be checked on Oxford University’s Our World in Data site). As Monbiot writes:

I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is available for other species… and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which our lives depend. (p.77)

One of the reasons that people often underestimate the importance of land use is that they read figures about the contribution of agriculture to global heating that show it to be just one of a number of contributing sources, not the biggest. Its impact on global heating is systematically underestimated, because these figures do not take into account what the land used for agriculture is not doing because it is being used by agriculture – the “opportunity costs” as Monbiot calls them. These opportunity costs are huge, because they mean that around 30% of the world’s land that could be absorbing carbon as forest, wetland etc, is not doing so. When this is pointed out, the farming lobby often responds with exaggerated claims about the levels of carbon absorption in the soil of pasture when optimally managed (including the work of Allan Savory, which Monbiot carefully debunks). According to Monbiot and his references, not only are these claims exaggerated, but the latest research might lead us to question whether carbon can be reliably stored in soil (other than very wet soil or peat) at all. Another reason why people underestimate it is that they consider global heating in isolation from the biodiversity crisis – which is just as pressing. Land use is indisputably the source of the biodiversity crisis: we are just not giving enough space to other life forms.

Monbiot’s reminders of the widest pressing conditions through reliably-sourced statistics form an important backbone of the case in his book, but there is much more to it than that. The first chapter begins much more personally, in an orchard, where Monbiot sits down to look carefully at a small patch of soil, in the process bringing home its complexity. Most of the book consists of a series of encounters with key people who can give him evidence about potential ways forward in the land use crisis. There is Iain Tolhurst, who successfully produces organic fruit and veg on a commercial scale without using animal manure, through the use of wild flower strips to provide cover for pest predators and applications of wood chip to boost fertility. There is Tim Ashton, the no-till grain farmer, and finally Pasi Vainikka, a Finnish developer of revolutionary new food protein through the fermentation of bacteria in vats. It is this final, “farmfree” high-tech solution to meeting humanity’s protein needs that gets the most emphasis in Monbiot’s publicity video for the book (below), but the other figures were to my mind just as interesting and relevant.

The work of Iain Tolhurst (‘Tolly’) is remarkable because it demonstrates the falsity of the insistence often found in organic or permaculturist circles that animal use is always necessary for a sustainable food system. As Monbiot points out, many organic farms thus make themselves dependent on livestock farms as sources of manure, with little checking of how those animals have been treated or what antibiotic residues might be in their manure. More importantly, manure is also a very blunt instrument for fertilizing a crop, providing constant nutrients when the plant needs them more at some times than others: manure can thus contribute greatly to the washing out of excessive nutrients that is in the process of destroying the ecology of many British rivers. ‘Tolly’ by contrast, has not only found ways of limiting pest numbers by harbouring their predators in a biodiverse area of wild flowers near the crop, but also manages to fertilize it successfully through only limited applications of wood chippings. Monbiot’s case is that crops do not need manure – what they need is the gentler nourishment provided by limited plant material at the right time in their development.

As a functional vegan of about 30 years, who is now developing a forest garden for sustainable food production on former pasture land, this was eye-opening. I have often had doubts about the argument that animals are necessary, but have never had sufficient evident to support it, and thus have increasingly considered it a weakness in the vegan case. However, reading Monbiot’s book has made me much more confident in my belief that I can set up sustainable food production in a forest garden without needing animals or (in the long-term) their manure – although for the moment I have inherited a large heap of it with the land. That’s a great relief, as I particularly do not want the time-consuming responsibility of looking after animals, quite apart from the land use issues. In the short term, that means lots of mowing, but in the longer term that will decrease as the land I am working with becomes more effectively forested and covered with other perennials.

Monbiot also discusses the huge value of switching to perennial plants rather than annuals, so that we do not have to keep breaking up the soil with its valuable micro-organisms, earthworms and rhizosphere (zone around roots set up to sustain a plant). I was already very much aware of this from my reading of agroforestry literature – which oddly Monbiot does not mention at all. He starts to make use of a new perennial type of wheat called Kernza, which again was a fascinating discovery for me, but for some reason he does not discuss all the other ways that trees and perennial plants can help to fulfil our needs for not only fruit and nuts, but also potentially legumes and other vegetables, and the ways that agroforestry can create a very biodiverse space that nevertheless produces lots of food. His question may be ‘Can this feed the world?’ and this is a fair enough question, but one that I would have liked to see him address. My own guess for now is that agroforestry can at least make a significant contribution to feeding the world, because although it does not produce commercial quantities of any one foodstuff, it could offer a very sustainable (and low-labour) alternative means of food production for small communities that does not necessarily require large amounts of land (nor necessarily high-quality arable farmland).

Monbiot’s case, however, is that what we need most of all is a ‘new agronomy’, giving us a detailed enough understanding of fertility to be able to reproduce Tolly’s successful experiment in animal-free organic horticulture elsewhere. We also need the rapid development of perennial grain crops, and the development of ‘farmfree’ protein production. We need to stop worrying unnecessarily about ‘food miles’ which a an almost negligible overall effect compared to the impact of land use, but we do need more community ownership and fair trading to counteract the capture of food resources by massive corporate interests. Livestock farmers need to face up to the fact that their industry has no future, but be given help in adapting and diversifying. He thus avoids a series of absolutizing dogmas: the dogmas of those who reject new technology just because it is new, the dogmas of those who think animal farming must be good because it is traditional and enculturated, and the dogmas of those who focus parochially just on one aspect of the complex picture (such as localism) and assume that that is enough to make food production sustainable. Most of all he questions the dogmatism of those who are content to develop small localised sources of organic or permacultural food at a high price, but who dismiss the wider question of how the poor of the world will access the food they need. At no point does Monbiot belittle those who have made these major achievements in making food production more sustainable, but he still points out their limitations, and disagrees with any dogmatic assumption that they are the final solution.

This is a superb book that I think everyone should read, but it is not without its own limitations and mistakes. I have already mentioned the omission of agroforestry, and no doubt many others will have their own favoured solution that they will complain Monbiot either does not consider or does not do justice to. I don’t think he is aiming to be comprehensive, though, only to raise our awareness of some new solutions that we may not have considered very much before. Amongst these, I was not entirely convinced by Monbiot’s degree of enthusiasm for ‘farmfree’ bacterial cultivation. He is right to point out that the use of technology and the ‘yuck’ factor are not grown-up arguments against this. However, enthusiasm for this, as for any new technology whatsoever, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, until we see how well it works in practice when produced in volume and sold to consumers. There is also the question of how much the use of this technology is really necessary, given that we already have plenty of plant-based meat substitutes providing protein, and that these can be produced on massively less land, with massively less incidental suffering , than their animal equivalents. Time will tell.

On his account of the cultural entrenchment of animal farming, though, I felt there were some basic mistakes. He blames the idealization of animal farming on ‘poetry’ – that is, the strong pastoral tradition that presents the life of the shepherd as a bucolic ideal – and thinks we need more ‘numbers’ and less ‘poetry’. This makes the very basic mistake of confusing meaning and belief – that is, the value of the cultural symbols themselves with the negative effects of the dogmatic beliefs that have become associated with them. Pastoral poetry has inspired generations of readers in all sorts of ways: it is largely archetypal in its effects, meaning that it offers inspiration because of its meaning, independently of the beliefs that may have become associated with particular interpretations of it. Poetry as a whole is not to blame for the interpretation of that poetry as supporting dogmatic beliefs about the absolute value of animal agriculture, only for (at worst) limiting our awareness of its downsides by not making those downsides so meaningful to us. The same point applies in reverse to numbers, which are not in themselves significant at all, and thus not beneficial or otherwise. It is the way the numbers are used, to draw our attention to new conditions by more precisely making us aware of their extent, that is valuable. It is not maths that will save the world (plenty of people have been proficient in maths without doing so), but a broadening of awareness beyond one limited set of interdependent conditions to consider the wider systems in which they are embedded. Behind this error is a more basic, and common, mistake in our culture – the failure to distinguish meaning from belief, and thus credit the value of inspiring cultural symbols without reducing them simplistically to belief effects. Jeremy Lent, whom Monbiot admires as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age” is very much subject to the same limitation: one that I tried to broach with him to some extent in a podcast discussion in 2018.

If Monbiot unthinkingly reproduces a few of the dogmas of our age, however, this is a very minor matter compared to the large number of very important ones that he questions. However others may see him, he is not ideologically ‘left wing’ in any ways that restrict his critical skills, but only in ways that are carefully justified in relation to evidence brought into contact with a wide-ranging compassion. He is also quite literally grounded in a very human appreciation of the soil and of the wider environment – a factor that should not be underestimated. He can write wonderfully, and the message he offers here is extremely important. Whatever its minor defects, I urge you to read this book anyway.

Why the left fails – and how it can succeed

Culture, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychology

The UK is still reeling from the election results of a few days ago, in which Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party not only won a majority, but did so by capturing many traditional working-class seats across the north and midlands of England. Australia has experienced a similar election recently, whilst the US got there first with the surprise election of Trump in 2016. The devastating surprise in all of these elections seems to lie in how far working class people are prepared to vote against what seem clearly their own interests: namely, against improvements in the public spending they rely upon, and in favour of grossly inconsistent right wing governments, supported by big business interests who evade tax and impose exploitative working conditions on them. That’s even before we get onto the pressing issue of climate change, where all our interests are deeply threatened, and the right wing responses are generally either denialist or inadequately weak. The jokes about turkeys voting for Christmas have abounded.

But beyond that, how can we helpfully understand and learn from the underlying problem here? Very few analyses seem to drill down to the most basic issue, which is one of human judgement. Applying the Middle Way, one tries to avoid absolute assumptions, whether negative or positive – which in this case probably means avoiding the single cause fallacy. Why, then, do so many working class people – whether in Workington, Brisbane or Des Moines – persist in voting like turkeys? It’s very easy to take one kind of explanation and absolutise it, in accordance with the particular political concerns your experience has equipped you with, but in the process avoid the most basic underlying issues. We can blame leaders, we can blame biased and sometimes false media coverage, we can blame party policies and manifestos, we can blame party tactics, or even voter stupidity. All of these factors are no doubt part of the picture, but they need to take their place in relation to the question of human judgement. What actually decides the values that actuate people when they cast their vote?

In understanding this, I’ve found the following video from Rebel Wisdom helpful. It mentions a couple of things that I think are very relevant. One of these is the analysis of six foundational political values by Jonathan Haidt (authority, loyalty, sanctity, care, justice, freedom) – see my review of his book. Another is an idea that comes from Ken Wilber – the pre/trans fallacy: namely that people often react against a later stage of integrative development that has incorporated the more helpful elements of an earlier one, because they mistake it for the earlier stage. I do recommend watching the video if you have time, although it’s 35 minutes long. It doesn’t answer all the questions that I think need to be asked (which I continue with below), but it provides a very good starting point.

Where this video leaves us is with the idea of “performative contradiction”, namely the idea that the left contradicts itself unconsciously by committedly extolling the values of care and justice, but doing so in a way that feels exclusive to working-class people. Whilst I think that’s a good point, I also think it’s not sufficient to leave it there, because it has the implication that the left is to blame for being too exclusive by being intellectual, middle class etc, when these are largely just part of the conditions that middle class left wingers are working with.

However, if we take the six foundational values of Haidt and probe them further, we can start to ask what the values of working class people may be, and why they are opposed to those of middle class left wingers. The obvious answer seems to lie in those values identified by Haidt as more collective ones: authority, loyalty and sanctity. Haidt’s major point is that conservatives combine these three values with the others (care, justice and freedom), but ‘liberals’ (in the American sense) concentrate only on care, justice and freedom and fail to understand why anyone values authority, loyalty or sanctity. This is also somewhat hypocritical of the left, of course, because left wingers, being human, do have their own values of authority, loyalty and sanctity, but they tend to confine them to private life (family, friendships, religion, maybe business or professional relationships). Left wingers just don’t feel it’s appropriate to make political judgements on the basis of authority, loyalty or sanctity, meaning that they are more likely to be anti-elite, internationalist and anti-religious.

But do the working classes share these ‘left wing’ or ‘liberal’ types of value? It seems obvious to me that the majority do not, and the psychological preferences of the majority help to create cultural trends that subsume many more (such as the popularity of Brexit). Why, then, have working class voters in industrial towns across northern England traditionally voted Labour? Obviously care, justice and freedom are of some concern to these voters, but they are not prepared to use them as a sole basis of judgement without a good helping of authority, loyalty and sanctity to help them along. In traditional industrial northern England (where I spent much of my childhood) these sources of authority, loyalty and sanctity were clearly present in working class culture. Socialist leaders, some of working class origins, provided authority. Working class solidarity itself, particularly exercised through the unions, the pubs and the churches, provided the basis of loyalty. In the past, voting Tory would have been an unthinkably disloyal thing to do. Sanctity, too, was present in the power particularly of non-conformist Christianity in the earlier Labour movement. Even in the 1970’s, when I was growing up amongst the small towns south east of Manchester, the churches of each town would all parade with their banners and assemble outside the town hall, dressed up in pride for the ‘Whit Walks’ every Whitsuntide Sunday: a display uniting the sanctity and solidarity of the churches, the town and civic society (see this link for pictures: one of which is here). However, under the impact of social and economic change, these sources of value are largely gone: church attendance has plummeted, pubs have closed, and unions have been seriously weakened. The left has become an increasingly middle class phenomenon, including those who may have been born into the working class but adopted middle class culture and expectations. The working classes are left to rudderless individualism.

I think there’s a further theoretical perspective that can shed light on this: that’s the work of Robert Kegan on the stages of adult psychological development. Kegan extended the work previously done by Piaget on how children develop, in the process identifying some quite well-definable stages in both the cognitive development and the changing values of adults. The video below gives an introduction to the five stages of development in Kegan’s thought.

The vast majority of adults are at either what Kegan would call the ‘interpersonal’ stage (stage 3), or at the ‘institutional’ stage (stage 4). In the interpersonal stage, we rely to a greater extent on other people’s approval as the basis of our values, so we could expect this to largely correspond to the ‘conservative’ six values thinking in Haidt’s analysis. If your relationship with others is the prime basis of your values, then authority and loyalty will continue to be important to your judgement. Care, justice and freedom will also be part of the mix, but not by themselves in too much abstraction from the social context to which you feel your loyalty. It is only when people are able to move on to stage 4 that they are likely to be able to adopt those ‘liberal’ values: justice, care and freedom applied systematically beyond the bounds of immediate group loyalties. If they are able to move beyond stage 4 into the ‘interindividual’ stage 5, they will then see the limitations even of these systemically applied values and how their interpretation is limited by contextual assumptions – but only a relatively small number of people manage this. Mistaking stage 5 for regression to stage 3 is the pre/trans fallacy mentioned above.

The crucial factor in people’s lives that helps them to shift from stage 3 to stage 4, according to Kegan, is likely to be either university study or the demands of a profession. To do either of these, generally speaking, you are forced to adopt more systematic habits of mind, and to adopt a standpoint beyond that of loyalty to your background group or social class. However, when you get a university degree or join a profession you almost by definition become middle class, and in the process are likely to adjust your peer groups, your housing, your location, and your voting habits. I can’t find any research that has been done on the correlation between Kegan’s stages and social class, but I would be astonished if there does not turn out to be a strong correlation when such research is done.

So, to return to the main theme, why does the left fail? Why do the working classes fail to support it? My hypothesis for the key answer is that they fail to support it because they are still at stage 3, and thus because they still require authority, loyalty and perhaps sanctity as an element in the basic values of what they will support. The reason is thus not primarily leadership, policies, media or tactics, although these all undoubtedly interact with people’s basic values and produce smaller short term changes in voting habits. With the growing individualism in society, the working classes have lost whatever basis of loyalty to the left they ever had. Instead, the conditions that produce systematic thought about the application of care, justice and freedom (along with systematic thought about how to respond to issues like climate change) are overwhelmingly those of university education.

The voting figures for the recent UK general election show big disparities, not just by region, but by age and education. According to YouGov, age and education are now clearly the most important indicators of voting intention. The following graphs show just how big that disparity is. But it needs to be remembered that these are not just social categories – they are also psychological ones determining how people make judgements.

So, how can the left succeed? Not by wooing the working classes back, but by coming to terms with the fact that the basis of left wing support is education – and that this means that in the longer-term, conditions are on their side. All they have to do is maintain the support of a majority of educated voters, and wait for higher levels of education to filter through the population. Of course, anything they can do to support and spread education is also part of the key to success. Reforming education itself so that it is more effective – including basic knowledge of the political system and more effective teaching of critical thinking skills for all – would also help.

The removal of unnecessary divisions on the left would also help a great deal to get them into power sooner rather than later. In the UK Labour and the Liberal Democrats are competing with each other and splitting the anti-Conservative vote in many seats, with the first past the post system making this disastrous in its effects. These parties need to merge or ally themselves in order to stand a chance, because they are largely fishing in the same pool of educated voters. the only differences between them lie in the degree of emphasis between the three ‘liberal’ values, with Labour emphasising care and justice rather more, and the Lib Dems trying to strike a balance between justice/ care on the one hand a freedom on the other. Their commonalities are much more important than their differences. Both parties now face a change of leadership, and it is to be hoped that the new leaders see the sense of creating an alliance rather than competing. In the Labour party, though, this means facing down those who are attached to the Marxist belief that social change must be instigated by the oppressed themselves: Haidt and Kegan between them have shown that this is wrong.

In my personal judgement, in the embodied situation I find myself in politically, a Middle Way judgement means that one needs to support the left. However, I can well understand that people will reach different political judgements by sincerely applying the Middle Way in different circumstances. I support the left, not because of any absolute commitment to care, justice or freedom (I think these need to be balanced with the other values, making me in some ways a small-c conservative – see blog on this), but because I think justice, particularly, has been neglected in the Western world since the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s, and because systematic thinking is overwhelmingly needed to address climate change. My political views are pragmatically led. This is not the time for exaggerated suspicions of the state, nor for any other distraction from the big picture of the conditions we need to address and the best way of getting there. Nor is it time to give up hope. Tony Blair had many weaknesses with his strengths as a leader, but he seemed to be right in one well-known statement of his priorities: “Education, education, education”.

 

Cutting the Gordian Knot

Current Affairs, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics, Religion

The ability to cut through complexity and reach a simple resolution has an obvious appeal, yet ‘shortcuts’ can also be very damaging because they fail to engage with complexity. Are shortcuts always absolutisations? The story of Alexander the Great cutting through the Gordian Knot has always appealed to me. Here were lots of people arguing with endless complexity about how to untie the knot, and Alexander saw intuitively that all this complexity was unnecessary and unhelpful – so he cut the knot! Can this be justified?

I think it can. Absolutisations are always shortcuts, but shortcuts are not always absolutisations. Sometimes shortcuts are the best practical response to a situation in which continuing to try to address complexity is just creating more and more loops of conflict. Endless complex debate can also reinforce a certain limited framework within which a problem is being understood, with the boundaries strangely being reinforced by the complexity of discussion. Complexity is always there, and things are indeed likely to be more complex than we recognise, but that does not necessarily imply that a response that tries to limitlessly deal with complexity is the best one for us as agents within that system.

Alternative examples to Alexander cutting the Gordian Know can be found everywhere. For example, I think that agnosticism about God is a good example. The ramifications of theological debate about God’s ‘existence’ are endless, but their complexity depends on particular conceptual assumptions that do not actually help us address the complexity of conditions. Cutting the Gordian Knot here means pointing out that it’s totally irrelevant to our experience of phenomena (including religious experience), and of value, whether or not God ‘exists’ as a supernatural entity. The obsession with God’s ‘existence’ consists of a set of assumptions that we can simply cast aside. As long as we are caught up in the complexity of the arguments, that approach seems unthinkable, until one moment when it simply occurs to us that we don’t actually have to take a position on all of this. We can cast the burden aside and walk free.

But how can we tell when it’s justifiable to cut a Gordian Knot, rather than try to face up to complexity? I’d suggest that the key test is not about complexity at all, but about whether we’re facing up to alternatives. If we are offered alternatives that we simply ignore or dismiss because they are ‘off the map’ (not because of a reasonable judgement about their credibility), then the chances are that we are absolutizing, whether the alternative we’re ruling out is simple or complex. In the case of agnosticism about God, in most cases agnostics have tried out the arguments about God’s ‘existence’ and found them only productive of conflict, and have then recognised agnosticism as an alternative. Theists and atheists, on the other hand, routinely misunderstand, ignore or dismiss agnosticism: they have not engaged with it as a genuine option. On the other hand, many British attitudes to the EU routinely ignore its complexity, especially by jumping to the conclusion that it is ‘anti-democratic’, without examining the great complexity around the question either of what democracy means, or what it would mean for a supra-national body to be appropriately democratic. In this case, in my view the failure to face up to complexity is also a failure to consider alternatives to the easy view one has adopted, or to break out of the limited assumptions of a particular discourse.

My thoughts on this question have been especially stimulated recently by the Brexit impasse as it is continuing to ramify in the UK. I have taken a great interest in the complexity of these events, and am inclined at times to feel frustrated at the failure of most members of the public to engage with this complexity. However, I’m also beginning to think that one particular simple answer may in practice be the best one: that is, the recently adopted Liberal Democrat policy of simply revoking Article 50 and thus ending the whole Brexit debacle through one parliamentary action. It’s been pointed out to me that this would not be ‘simple’ at all, because it would create a lot of resistance, but this is where we also need to avoid the nirvana fallacy and compare different possible courses of action with each other rather than with an impossible ideal. The UK is deadlocked because there is great resistance to any possible course of action – so the choice seems to be between different actions that would all create great resistance: no-deal, deal, second referendum or revocation. Of these, the first three all threaten to prolong the impasse, because of the contradictions and impracticality in the case for Brexit itself. Only revocation seems to stand a chance of ending it in the long-term: but its simplicity seems to be one of the main barriers. Those who have been trying to engage with the complexity for so long can no longer believe that it might be that simple: just let go!

Part of the problem with discussing this topic also seems to be that people’s assumptions about what is ‘simple’ and what is ‘complex’ vary hugely with their background and perspective. If we are accustomed to dealing with complexity in a certain subject area, our handling of the concepts gets gradually easier, so it no longer seems ‘complex’ to us at all. Things that seem simple in one respect may also be complex in another – as I think is the case with Middle Way Philosophy in general, which is simple in its key idea, but complex in its application. However, we can probably all agree that cutting the Gordian Knot is a relatively simple action compared to trying to untie it. I expect lots of disagreement with my views on the two contentious examples I have used – God and Brexit, but the key point in my view will be not so much whether you are prepared to  cut Gordian knots on occasion, but what your approach is to judging those occasions. Can you face up to alternatives, even if those alternatives sometimes seem unacceptably simple rather than unacceptably complex? That is an ongoing practice for everyone.

Picture: Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot by Lorenzo de Ferrari (Wikimedia Commons/ Carlo Dell’Orto CCBYSA 4.0)

Critical Thinking 22: The Slippery Slope Fallacy

Critical Thinking, Current Affairs, Politics

I’m moved to return to this blog series on Critical Thinking by the appearance of a particular fallacious argument in current political discourse in the UK (in the form of the “best of three” argument about a possible second referendum on Brexit). This is an example of the slippery slope fallacy, which I’ve not yet covered in this series. This fallacy doesn’t seem to be as widely understood as it should be. I regularly see people online using “slippery slope” as though it was a justification rather than a fallacy, and even highly-educated BBC journalists seem either unaware of it, or otherwise unwilling to challenge politicians who use it.

The slippery slope fallacy, like any other bias or fallacy, involves an absolutized assumption that is usually unrecognised. In a Middle Way analysis there is always a negative counterpart to an absolutized assumption (assuming the opposite) and that’s also the case here. In the case of a slippery slope fallacy, it involves an assumption that if one acts in a particular way showing a tendency in a particular direction, this will necessarily result in negative effects that include further movement in the same direction, with further negative effects. The absolutisation here lies in the “necessarily”. Those who think in this way do not consult evidence about what is actually likely to happen following that course of action, or justify their position on the basis of such evidence. Rather, they just apply a general abstract principle about what they think must always happen in such cases. Such general abstract principles are usually motivated by dogmatic ideology of some kind.

Some classic examples of the slippery slope fallacy involve arguments against voluntary euthanasia or the legalisation of recreational cannabis. The argument against legalising voluntary euthanasia goes along the lines of “If you allow voluntary euthanasia, then there’s bound to be a creeping moral acceptance of killing. Respect for human life will be undermined. Before you know it we’ll be exterminating the disabled like the Nazis did.” The argument against legalising recreational cannabis would follow the lines of “If you let people smoke cannabis, they’ll soon be on to harder stuff. It’s a gateway drug. We’ll soon have the streets full of heroin addicts.” In both of these arguments, there is no particular interest in whether there is any evidence that the lesser effect would in fact lead onto the greater one, just the imposition of a dogmatically-held principle that proclaims what would always happen. The absurdity of assuming that this is what would always happen becomes clearer if you think about how easily we could use these slippery slope arguments against currently accepted practices: “If you allow euthanasia for dogs, you undermine respect for life and before you know it, it will be applied to humans.” or “If you allow people to smoke tobacco, they’ll soon be smoking heroin. It’s a gateway drug.” In practice, we draw boundaries all the time, and in law we enforce them. There is no particular obvious reason why new boundaries should be harder to enforce than previously accepted ones.

So now we come to the current use of the slippery slope fallacies in UK political discourse. This is by Brexiteers opposed to the idea of a second referendum – which, at the time of writing, is looking increasingly like the only viable option to release the UK parliament from deadlock over Brexit. There argument goes along the lines of “If we have a second referendum, what’s to stop us having a third one or a fourth one? We’ll never resolve the issue.” Here’s one example of many uses of this argument in the media.  As in the euthanasia and drug legalisation arguments, the objection appears to simply involve the dogmatic application of an implicit principle, in this case, that “politicians can call as many referendums as they like until they get the result they desire”. As in those arguments, also, there is no positive evidence that this would actually be the effect, nor that this is actually part of anyone’s motives. In practice, it seems much more likely that the amount of public resistance would grow the more referendums were called. In its imposition of an abstract dogmatic principle on the situation, this argument completely misses the point that the call for a second referendum is a pragmatic response to a particular situation of deadlock, not an invocation of a general political principle.

As with other biases and fallacies, there is also a negative counterpart to the positive slippery slope fallacy. This is the failure to acknowledge actual evidence that a “slippery slope” might happen, due to an absolute reaction against the slippery slope fallacy. There are some instances where there is positive evidence that a particular course of action can initiate a gradual deterioration – for instance, being unemployed is often correlated with poverty and depression. Not that everyone who is unemployed will necessarily suffer in these ways, but that your chances of becoming poor and depressed demonstrably increase once you are unemployed. The danger of further negative effects from unemployment is probably something you should take into account before you resign from your job, if you have no alternative available: but taking it into account does not necessarily mean that it should determine your response.

So, the slippery slope fallacy is just another common instance of dogmatic assumptions applied in unconscious everyday thinking. It doesn’t imply that there are no “slippery slopes”, only that you need to look carefully at the slopes before you set off down them to see how slippery they really are. You might well be able to keep your footing better than you expect.

Link to index of other blogs in the Critical Thinking series

Picture: ‘Slippery Slope’ by S. Rae (Wikimedia Commons) CCSA 2.0