The New Year has blown in bursting with more contributions to the 'post-truth' debate. It seems as though the liberal intellectual world has finally discovered Freud! And his fellow founders of depth psychology. A very long time ago we learned from these thinkers that people engage in varieties of rationalisation, projection and denial all the time. And this means all of us! Sadly, it is not a characteristic confined to a few muddle headed types, and nothing to do with us. It is the way in which a human being functions. And these characteristics have now found a label, which is 'post-truth.' It does not make us bad people, just people. So let's start by trying to get the value judgements at least temporarily postponed.
Now, it seems to me, we are socially in a place to consider whether people in fact truly base their opinions on fact, whether they really, really engage brain before opening mouth (as all those mugs used to say.) Psychologists of all persuasions have suggested that unbiased weighing of fact and opinion is a rare activity. The problem is that the psyche is so full of stuff already - as I like to say, it got there before we had a chance to form a mind of our own at all! It had a head start in the hundred metre dash - where even a split second can make all the difference between winning and losing. By the time we wake up to ourselves - the self we discover we possess, usually with some glee - our psyche is well formed with material. Trauma studies suggest that psychological wounds can derive from the earliest experience of birth and before birth. There is now a whole field called transgenerational trauma which harks back to generations ago, and what we may or may not have brought away from those experiences. Epigenetics is showing us just how the brain adapts and doesn't, to all kinds of tiny shifts in our biochemistry. So let's pause in our long-held convictions, to wonder, at least, whether our openness is as great as we imagine it to be.
If the question of 'truth' is on the table at length, at least enough to put it in quotation marks, what attitude ought we to adopt to this discovery? BBC Radio 4 is floating a new series of programmes for the new year called 'The New World' (http://bbc.in/2hx950T) and is worth listening to. I recommend it. Listening this morning my attention was caught by the word 'bubble' - the way we all live, it seems, in bubbles of our own making or choosing. There was anger among Brexiteers about the supposed liberal 'bubble' or the 'Westminster bubble' which they felt had left them outside of the debate. But it turns out that we all live in bubbles - it's just that we don't know about the bubble we actually live in. We spot others' bubbles easier than our own. The bubble is a neat image of the surrounding networks in which we function, within which we get mirroring feedback of the type which helps us to feel that we are the ones in the 'right.' This is true politically and helps to reinforced our political beliefs. Some researchers even suggested that we tend to move geographically into areas where people of like political mind tend to live - this is called psychological geography.
It struck me that it had been common at one time to disparage the way in which immigrants tend to collect in particular areas of the country, as though this were a uniquely negative characteristic of our friends from Pakistan or the Caribbean. Of course, it is a human tendency all over the world, where groups of ex-patriots commonly collect in specific areas of like individuals. The British Raj was a classic example of the expatriate British living in India and doing everything they could to make it as much like home as possible. Racism is not being able to recognise this tendency without reference to ethnic origin, it seems to me. It isn't 'them', it's all of us! Whether it is right or wrong is a separate matter. The wrong, I think, may well be that of the Westminster bubble, who did not think intelligently enough about this human tendency, and its consequences for the differing impacts of large groups of immigrants in areas that once experienced themselves as a typical British 'bubble.'
But the question that we now need to address much more forcefully, I think, is this: given our tendency to congregate in bubbles, whether geographical, intellectual, spiritual or whatever, how can people be brought to change their minds? How do you get out of the bubble you are in? Is it possible to get out of it? Or are we all, Matrix-like, stuck in a virtual programme world where there is no escape? This is a far more difficult question to answer. The radio programme above suggested various ways - one professor thought that ten minutes a day of pausing for doubt would help, for example. I liked the suggestion that we need to seek out opinions contrary to our own - and actually listen to them! The listening part is really hard. I like to read the London Times when I can manage it, not because it is my favourite newspaper, but because a) it still holds claim to some measure of reason and objectivity (this I know is also open to question, but at least news and opinion are kept separate to a degree), and b) because it keeps me in touch with how the 'Establishment Bubble' thinks! The contribution however that I liked the most came from a Southern Senator in the United States, who had changed his highly conservative mind on the subject of the environment. He comes from a place where climate scepticism is the norm, and 'expert' opinion is automatically wrong. He said, speaking about trying to persuade others of his change of attitude, "It's very important to use the language of the tribe in reaching the tribe."
This seems to me a powerful observation from an experienced political campaigner. The Senator was saying, as he elaborated, that in trying to reach climate change conservatives, it was useless to talk in terms of 'scientific opinion' (the dreaded expert) or the need to save the planet for future generations (the liberal conviction of responsibility for others, which seems to leave out 'us' - those who suffer now!). What the sceptics needed to know was how business could benefit from dealing with climate change, how the free market could be engaged to rally to the cause, and so on. And perhaps (remembering the God-fearing nature of some of those constituencies) how God had gifted the world to us to use but not to destroy? These points are not 'wrong', it seems to me, simply viewing the issue from another perspective. This practice used to be called 'rhetoric', and was taught in schools and higher education, with no idea that it was a disgraceful or unethical practice. The brief those generations started from was that persuasion was an art and a skill that everyone needed at their finger-tips - because the world consisted of other people who did not think as we did. The bubble mentality is quite the reverse, it seems to me: it believes that persuasion is beneath one's dignity, that conversations with the undead (namely all those who disagree with me) are not at all desirable but a waste of time. Persuasion, indeed, may be a source of angst - fear that hearing the other's opinion may show me that I am not always right. In the recent EU referendum, the campaigns on both sides seemed to me to be based on failures to grasp these important lessons of rhetoric. They were full of expert opinion, which only revealed how conflicted so-called expert opinion can be. Neither party seemed to have given much thought to what language the opposing tribe could hear. It seems that the 'gut instinct' approach to politics is the norm among the populists, and certainly the gut instinct seemed to prevail on this occasion. I must say I am in favour of gut instincts - they have often led me to a better more sane place than a dozen learned books. But the gut is not the only seat of wisdom in the human body. The gut - the solar plexus chakra - is often the seat of anxiety, of neurotic doubts and depressions. Which is why we get so much indigestion when we are worried. J.R.R. Tolkien liked to use the phrase, "What does your heart tell you?" which seems even better to me than the gut. For the heart chakra contains our broader feelings, making space for our finer feelings of hope, trust and the desire to do right by all our people. Too often the heart has been cut out of our politics - as though we think political questions can be decided by numbers alone. I think I wanted somebody to tell me that being a European meant espousing a set of values and a way of life that suited me. That it represented hope for peaceful co-operation and the healing virtues of community, of sharing, of communal solving of problems, of noticing what we had in common, instead of what divided us. Sceptics will of course scoff that the EU could never deliver such high ideals, and they may be right. But the anti-EU bubble contained its own improbabilities too - of more money in the national coffers which we would personally feel the benefit of, of the limiting of the population to those who looked more like us, of rolling back the tides of globalisation and the restoration of national power and glory. On these ideals too, the jury is still out. Let us wait and see.
The question has been raised, 'what happens when the high ideals with which we vote are disappointed?' There is a fear here that something very dark enters the national psyche. My news is that it was already there, from long ago, and only surges to the surface at certain times and places for complex reasons. I have a worse fear still, which is that evidence has little effect on the 'bubble.' On the contrary, it tends to reinforce the attitudes and beliefs of those in the bubble. Almost any opinion, idea, concept, experience can be dragged into the service of 'what I believe.' What I believe then becomes 'truth.' Jerome Bruner, the American educational psychologist, once said, "The fish will be the last to discover water.' Which I think sums up the bubble mentality only too well. What is always there cannot be seen.
I don't exempt psychology from this truism, by the way. It has its own bubble, a wondrous work of mutual self-mirroring at times, where great work on the human psyche can only be described and explained in the most obscure language, full of the kind of technical language that cannot ever be shared with the population at large. A few years of embedding, and like the fish, we totally lose sight of the water. I personally have not much time for obfuscation in any field, still less in my own. Bruner also said, " . . . any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development." This seems to me to be the most important truth about communication in any field, and does not just apply to children. Only it poses a major challenge, because we have to find the right language in which to achieve this, and that is not easy - requires serious effort and thought, and may well be misunderstood or be castigated as the dreaded 'dumbing down.' The question arises, moreover, as to how far we want to be understood? Or to understand others? Openness does not come easy. Being right is critically part of our self-image.
Yet good minds through the centuries have been able to acknowledge they were wrong. Easy to say, "Einstein could do it, but I'm not Einstein." No, but it was not at all easy for Einstein either! When you have become the possessor a fearsome international reputation, then is the worst possible time to find out you are wrong. The point is, I think, that if the truth you aver seems of overarching importance - more important than your personal pride or self-worth - then and only then can you be openly wrong. Then, maybe, you can find out where your true values lie.
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