"The identity politics Left often prioritises experience over data." Credit: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty
I am a privileged white man, and for much of the last 20 years I have been writing about people, and issues, about which I have almost no first-hand, personal experience. I have written a book about the political alienation felt by so-called “left behind” communities and another one about race and the condition of ethnic minority Britain.
When I started on this course, I was seldom challenged. I was asked to make a radio programme about the changing face of ethnic minority politics in 2011 and no one then thought to question my right to do so because of my colour.
For better or worse, this would be far less likely to happen today. I have just been appointed to an official body concerned with combating discrimination of many kinds, none of which I will ever experience myself. Some people complained that my background renders me incapable of doing the job properly.
I hope to prove those doubters wrong, but there is a serious point here. Personal experience is, of course, very important in shaping one’s views. To take a topical example, I notice that friends who have had a bad dose of Covid-19 tend to be more supportive of tough lockdown measures than friends who have not had it at all or only lightly.
Personal experience is a kind of knowledge. But it is also highly constrained and even misleading, that’s why accusing someone of being anecdotal is usually an insult in an argument. Your own experience is one part of the truth but usually quite a small one.
When we are talking about big abstract things, like society or the economy we would not get very far just basing things on our own direct experience. We need facts, reliable data, objective things which can give us a handle on the bigger picture. We may then select the data based on our own interests or worldview — indeed it is almost impossible not to — but at least we are making some effort to use the apparatus of objectivity: logic and evidence.
Our knowledge of the world is usually some sort of balance between personal experience and abstract ideas. And it is my contention, perhaps not a very original one, that in recent years the balance has been tipping away from the realm of the objective towards personal experience.
To repeat, that is not always a bad thing. One of the reasons we want our institutions to be at least somewhat representative of our society is that we recognise the importance of different experiences of the world: female, gay, ethnic minority and so on. And making it easier for people, especially from previously unheard groups, to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for, is self-evidently a step forward.
I have just written a book called Head, Hand, Heart which argues, among other things, that those with a certain kind of academic/analytical intelligence have been too dominant in our institutions and that we need more space for other aptitudes, intelligences and experiences.
But the focus on the primacy of subjective experience, and the authority that it is thought to bestow, can also go too far. At its most extreme it might call into question much of art and literature. Can, for example, the female writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner write truthfully about the sex life of the male lead character in her novel Fleishman is in Trouble?
That may seem like a silly example, after all, if she couldn’t plausibly get inside a man’s head, no one would have bought her best-seller. Yet quite extreme subjectivism is on the march. Consider America’s current polarisation with pro and anti-Trump forces having not only different opinions but selecting different facts about the world to fit their experiences.
The identity politics Left also often prioritises experience over data. Indeed, identity politics is partly based on the authority of who it is that is saying something, rather than what they are saying. And this is not a fringe phenomenon: the BBC’s new guidelines on racist language ask the reporter to consider who is saying the words.
The other source of this new bias towards individual experience as the source of knowledge and authority is surely social media. The new forms of public communication have dispatched the old gate keepers of the elite media, and given everyone who wants it access to the public square. Now conspiracy theories seem to compete on almost equal terms with well-established facts in an information free for all.
The personal experience bias of social media has also seeped back into more traditional forms of media. The stiff, but authoritative, news programmes of my youth have given way to news that is much more focused on emotion and human interest, something all too evident at the height of the pandemic.
And our schools are not immune either. I was recently invited to speak about the Black Lives Matter movement to the sixth form of a girls’ private school in north London. I made what I think of as the liberal case for scepticism about two big assumptions associated with BLM, first that little has changed for black people in the last 40 years and second that claiming all white people are privileged by their race is a helpful way to promote race equality.
I cited lots of facts about the advance of black people and other minorities in education and employment, including into elite professional jobs — minority Brits now have higher representation in the top social class than white ones. I pointed to the private school itself — about half-white, half-Asian — as evidence of Britain’s relative openness. This did not go down well.
Afterwards a group of girls came up to me and told me about their experiences of racism in everyday life. It is true that the kind of micro-aggressions they were talking about are hard to capture or quantify in objective data. And for them, their bad experiences swamped my statistics of success and they felt by giving priority to those aggregate facts I was showing insufficient respect to their individual plights.
For someone like me, with privilege and power, to be challenged on these issues is obviously perfectly healthy, and if it makes me feel uncomfortable well that’s my own little First World problem. But too much subjectivism is also contributing to a less mature political conversation. Just as cleaving too exclusively to “the data” can produce a sort of blindness about human emotion (remember the Remain campaign’s focus on a dry cost-benefit analysis?), so, allowing your own personal experience to loom too large leads to a sort of equal and opposite blinkeredness, maybe excusable in 17-year-old students.
By chance I had an appointment with my mixed-race physiotherapist the same day as my sixth form talk. It turns out he is involved with a small group called the Cultural Health Club who are trying to make their profession more diversity-friendly. I asked what the problem was, and he said that physiotherapy was very white and middle class. I replied that this is a majority white middle-class country so that is hardly a surprise. No, he said, but did I realise that only 3% of physios were black? I did not realise that, but did he realise that according to the census only just over 3% of the UK population is black (meaning of black Caribbean or black African heritage). No, he had not realised that.
He took my point in his stride and asked me to send the relevant statistics. He lives in a majority-minority part of London where it is easy to assume that the black population of the country is much higher than it actually is. I use this example not to challenge or belittle his reality — he told me of a horrible experience of being rejected by a patient because of his race — but to suggest that in democratic argument subjective experience needs to be combined with some knowledge of the bigger picture.
That ought to include knowledge of the basic facts of UK demography and perhaps also of the huge range in minority outcomes and experiences and, indeed, of views. A recent YouGov poll found ethnic minority Brits split down the middle on whether race has had an impact on their ability to succeed.
So, we all see the world somewhat differently but there are also shared perceptions that apply to particular groups, though even they tend not to be homogeneous as we have just seen.
And the subjective individual experience of someone does not necessarily tell us much about the average experience of someone from that group. To take a trivial personal example, I’m unusually tall and that means that I experience the world somewhat differently from a man of average height. But the fact that I’m prone to knock my head on doorways doesn’t mean the country as a whole needs to adjust the height of the typical doorway.
(I do not imply by that example — as some critics suggested when I used it in a BBC Radio Four essay — that we should defund support for better disabled access!)
To try to understand the experiences of others, to walk in others’ shoes, is clearly desirable. And this applies especially to those whose experiences are untypical and a source of pain and suffering.
Some untypical experiences require public policy responses, others do not, obviously. We can leave those doorways that I have to stoop to get through where they are. Yet where does all this leave the wider argument?
Maybe one should not think of the subjective-objective as on a spectrum from personal truth to aggregate truth with the latter a higher form of truth than the former. Rather they exist on different planes, to some extent incommensurate. They both tell us different things about human experience and are both valuable in different contexts.
Meanwhile, the world is still coming to terms with the radical upending of our public information and communication systems. Elites have lost a lot of narrative control, to no one in particular. And the space for the objective stuff has been diminished, partly replaced by personal experience and emotion. That is not all bad but it seems to be making it harder to come to democratic compromises. And if a growing number of us come to believe that individual experience and perception is the primary truth then it just becomes your truth versus mine and we are all, like Fleishman, truly in trouble.
This is an edited version of an essay for BBC Radio 4’s ‘A Point of View‘
David Goodhart is the author of Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. He is head of the Demography unit at the think tank Policy Exchange.
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SubscribeWhite privilege does not exist
Money privilege exists.
I am sick and tired after a lifetime of being at the bottom of the heap as a poor working class man is to be told that the only thing that now matters is I am privileged because I am white!
Go to hell
You’re right, it is essentially wealth that is the divide. Calling something white privilege is too simplistic when many whites don’t feel it. From the minority point of view though, blacks are disproportionately poor and more likely to be profiled by police stop and search etc. You can see why ‘white’ seems to be the issue. In a better world we’d have a Poor Lives Matter movement.
I have been stopped and searched a few times in my life so welcome to London!
Not just London mate. I live in the Midlands. When my first nipper was born, I couldn’t afford the taxi fare home so I walked. It was 2 a.m. and I had to walk several miles including through the town centre. I was stopped three times by the police and required to open my wife’s overnight case which the nurses had insisted I take with me.
It was irritating but I felt no resentment against the police: they were just doing their job.
There was a Poor Lives Matter movement, it’s called the Labour Party (previous incarnation). Now, sadly, the Labour Party is the great divider and destroyer of society.
Indeed. What is a pity is that we have reached the point where the default assumption is “racism”.
In London, black kids are stabbing each other to death every week. Should the police really respond by reducing the number of black people they stop?
In 2005, I was working at Canary Wharf after the Tube bombing. One afternoon, I left the office to meet a colleague in the city for a lunchtime meeting. The only thing I had with me was a folder. The police stopped me at the bottom of the escalator and asked me to open the folder. I did so and was allowed to continue. While they were stopping me, a then 50 year old white male, Asian people with backpacks passed by unmolested. Now, they were obviously as innocent as I was (not one train blew up that day, or in the ensuing 15 years) but what was the purpose of that stop and search? It clearly wasn’t to detect a terror attack. It was presumably to reassure the public. I was not reassured.
It’s a shame that politically we cannot say “the police are more likely to stop black kids because black kids are statistically more likely to be carrying weapons”. That is, of course, if they are. Given the epidemic of stabbings I am assuming that’s true.
They have to search white people too so as to avoid being called racist.
You’re British right? The English socialites and english vanity-tearful have co-opted the American problem and shoved it down British throats. British do not remotely understand or experience the level that is here in USA.
(ex-pat Scot in America – see my main comment on this article.)
but more blacks commit crime so ,on a risk basis ,more blacks will be stopped and searched
Dead right, mate. I used to be a bit of a lefty and was an anti-racist campaigner from a young age. Now I’m told, if I dare to disagree with the identity politics crowd, I’m automatically a racist just by being white and my opinions don’t count for sh*t. The really galling thing is that it’s usually rich, white, middle-class yoof saying this stuff, as I eke out a living on a state pension in a council bungalow Their arrogance is stunning. It’s enough to make me a proper Marxist again.
Sounds like Maoism was not a path to success economically for you, surprisingly. But less so will be the the cultural indoctrination of racial self loathing in the people who will ultimately carry the national future success or failure.
Surely an exaggeration? You are old enough to recall Moa’s “Great Leap Forward ” of 1959-62.
During that mad marxist experiment China managed to kill about 45 million, out of its population of 660 million.
Had Harold Macmillan carried out a similar policy here, we would have lost roughly 4.5 million.
How ever bad things are, Marxism, in all its forms, is never the answer.
Excellent, but the reckoning is that Communism in China will have killed about 100 million when the final figures are known- imagine that ! Presumably the 45 million figures is just under Mao himself, the charmer.
Yes, I didn’t wish to exaggerate the facts. I also omitted the so called “Cultural Revolution”, which I gather despatched another 3 million or so.
We now have asymmetric diversity and tolerance……
We are supposed to “come together” around what the left say and think as they regard themselves as self evidently virtuous
.However the left would never dream of compromising with ideas of the centre right and spew hate ,bile and invective against them.
The US is in deep do do at the moment because of their attitude…..What happens in the US usually comes here.
God help us all in the west as this culture takes hold.
No David,turn right and fight them
Air head Dianne Abbott said that, on balance,Mao was much better than Stalin.
One has to ask…Better at what?…Killing people?,
You’re British right? The English socialites and english vanity-tearful have co-opted the American problem and shoved it down British throats. Just ignore them. British do not remotely understand or experience the level that is here in USA.
(ex-pat Scot in America – see my main comment on this article.)
A thoughtful article, as always from David Goodhart. That he had to write it is sadly indicative of the death of nuance within Western societies. If we sway too far towards the subjective, we risk losing our common humanity – I can only speak personally from experience in the arts, where for example a black character in an opera can now only be portrayed by a black singer, and a male author might well be castigated for attempting to write from a female point of view. Whilst these might well be valid in themselves, what they are damaging is the idea that we can, through our imagination, connect with the lives and experiences of others. Reductio ad absurdam – I may only represent myself on stage, and only write about my own life. We risk fragmenting into lonely individuals who can never understand others, or live a decent life together. Rather scary.
‘Whilst these might well be valid in themselves’. They are demonstrably not valid. Acting is BY DEFINITION playing something you are not. A male author in a free society can write something from any perspective, including from a putatively female point of view. It might not jibe with reality much, but he should be free to write it. You are simply accepting the rules as written by the woke.
I wobble a bit on these points, to be honest. I can really see how black people might have a grievance about blackface etc, and whilst I believe that a man can write anything he pleases, I have on occasion been a bit taken aback by sexist assumptions in literature.
I’m not saying that I believe these rules should be followed. Merely that following them without adequate thought will stifle free expression in the arts, and that will be disastrous for us all.
The only hope…and it’s a big one…is that although the whole of the media space these days seems filled with identy politics and all that stuff, ordinary life just isn’t.
And as usual the mass of people who just get by with ordinary common-sense can, when moved to express their views, flick a wrecking ball through the wordy nonsense that passes for a lot of political debate.
So we had the Brexit vote then 3 years of endlessly wordy blether filled with *unprecedented* defeats for Government, collapse of this that and the other a Brexit agreement impossible to find, an intractable EU that will never compromise…then last December ordinarty people roused themselves and the entire wordy edifice of doom (not to mention a Parliament that had become a Parliament of Clowns presided over by the biggest puffed-up narcissist in public life-which is really saying something) ended on the first bong of 10-00pm and the election exit poll prediction.
I do trust voters, they are neither, in the main, as thick as most political pundits think they are, or as thick as most pilitical pundits are themselves, nor as extreme as the extremist writers and broadcasters or as biddable as the likes of Alistair Campbell or Owen Jones to a fashionable viewpoint.
Whatever remainers may still think…and to be fair a large number have accepted the Brexit vote, and accepted last December represented the unmistakeable confirmation of that vote…. it was not a deluded, deceived or bigoted electorate who made there decison in 2016 and then in December 2019, it was ‘the people’.
As in *we the people* that is…and equally I trust in all of us to knock the current minority of pseudo marxist causes like XR and BLM…let alone the fruitloops and swivel eyed loons in Momentum and their fringe of activists playing at journalism… and the failed university thesis merchants of white privilege and white fragility…. and just get back to making things better for people bit by bit, which is how things do get better, and binning for another 30 years the millenernian whataboutery and me-me-me-centred bobbins of the last few years.
I think the British electorate invariably get it right.
Any chance of you becomming PM, hopefully?
And yet, we still have examples of white people being vilified for ‘cultural appropriation’… ie Celebs like Adele, for wearing her hair in a particular way or, Jamie Oliver for putting ‘Jerk Chicken’ on his menu…. I’m guessing in both cases the said ‘perpetrators’ were actually trying to embrace those cultures??
I feel that is an understatement. We have long been lost down the path of overvaluing the emotional response over a more rational, nuanced and objective one.
It’s in everything from law (victim personal statements), progression from vox pops on news to entire features on emotionally affected individuals (in contrast to more news or detailed investigation). Even the weather is not exempt with “feels like” or “real feel” added by some unfathomable metric.
Whilst anyone can tell that’s an awkward social situation to be in, people having to advise and make decisions need to avoid getting bogged down in these trivialities (in the broad big picture sense when talking about highly important issues). You mention objectivity, but perhaps its importance cannot be overstated. People without direct emotional involvement in issues are surely far better at coming to rational unbiased conclusions – provided the right calibre people of sufficient empathy levels are selected.
Not easy but surely that’s why it needs to be done properly.
“Even the weather is not exempt with “feels like” or “real feel” added by some unfathomable metric.”
I think that’s wind-chill factor. I don’t know the formula, but it is recognised by real scientists (for instance, meteorologists).
I found the entire article to be word salad of nu-speak where those who understand the key words can get what he is getting at, like ‘Office Meeting Speak’ is a language which is in code but otherwise meaningless. If this is English it is a different kind. The quotes you used are so fluid in meaning I cannot actually wring sense out of them.
For victims of crime how it has affected them is relevant.
Of course it is relevant to the victim(s) – nobody can or would argue otherwise. But this is why we have independent courts and not some kangaroo court commandeered by the victims, and the law is established for that court to interpret and enforce.
The victim statement is just a tick box to make the victim feel they have a say in what is going on. The judge then hands down a ludicrously lenient sentence and the farce that is our “justice” system moves on without further thought of the wreckage that has been made of the life of the victim and/or their relatives.
“Maybe one should not think of the subjective-objective as on a spectrum from personal truth to aggregate truth with the latter a higher form of truth than the former. Rather they exist on different planes, to some extent incommensurate.”
We should get rid of the idea of “personal truth” entirely, and call it what it is: an individual’s experience or opinion. We can respect and be mindful of those opinions and feelings, where they deserve respect, without equating it with “truth”, which inevitably diminishes the importance of objective reality.
If we want to call it what it is, how about “anecdotal evidence”.
Which has never had a meaningful place in any science.
Fair enough on one level. But, to take two examples:
Only a tiny proportion of people of Caribbean origin in the UK were illegally deported as part of the the Home Office’s incompetence/prejudice as part of the hostile environment policy. That’s a fact. The effect it had on those individuals and families and on millions of other people’s view of racial justice in the UK was profoundly more significant than that tiny proportion. That’s the result of subjectivity, empathy and personal truth.
Only a tiny proportion of Labour Party members have been accused of anti-semitism or expressed antisemitic beliefs. That’s a fact. The effect it had on those who experienced it and millions of other people’s view of the Labour Party was profoundly more significant. That’s the result of subjectivity, empathy and personal truth.
Objective reality only takes us so far. It needs to be contextualised for us to understand what it means, what events mean, what history means to us as people.
I’m pretty dubious that the antisemitism charges affected the views of anybody but partisans. The Labour Party vote collapsed because of Brexit.
I’m not sure what you gain by calling it personal “truth” over personal experience. And I don’t think it’s groundbreaking news that a tragedy doesn’t have to be widespread to affect an individual deeply.
Now consider what you lose: Truth as objective reality provides a yardstick against which to measure subjective claims, beliefs and experiences.
By allowing for “personal truth”, you create problems. First, you can have personal truths that are at odds with actual truth and demonstrably false. You can have personal truths that are actually harmful ““ the anorexic’s truth that they’re still too fat ““ or vile and not worthy of respect – the racist’s truth of white superiority.
I suppose we could maintain a hierarchy of truth, where we distinguish subjective truth from a more-respected objective truth to determine the worth or weight we should give conflicting truths. Even then, I can’t see how this doesn’t end up diminishing the importance and worth attached to objective reality ““ the truth. More likely, people will come to see competing truths as equally valuable (or valueless), and eventually discard the idea of an authoritative objective truth entirely.
You mean like Kier Starmer’s disasterous edict that led to the whole Carl Beech insanity…that we must *believe the victim*…rather than just respect them and listen to them properly, like we used to do before his guilty till proven innocent became the way it was done.
The fact that you have to write an article stating the obvious need for objective consideration of facts before making policies surely demonstrates how far we seem to have drifted from reality
The cherry picked subjective, discrimination narrative is purposefully unfalsifiable – it’s junk.
Genuine stats are all that matter for policy, and as far as group outcomes go the stats disprove the discrimination narrative decisively in everything except class.
Not true. Statistics only work for public policy decision-making when they are properly contextualised, and when they form part of a properly formulated policy methodology.
I agree with you that objectivity is of vital importance.
But, often it is difficult or time consuming to ascertain the facts.
Take the case of renewables in electricity.
Ignoring the cost argument, there is no doubt that renewables produce a lot of electricity and as a consequence we have almost stopped using coal as a power source. This is regarded as good by the Government & MSM and as most people do not delve into the figures; this is regarded as good by most people.
In fact, our PM has recently said that wind power could power cars & home heating in the near future. To power cars & home heating will lead to an increase in electricity usage of 3 times.
Emotionally and subjectively the majority of people think this will be brilliant.
But logically and objectively there is a flaw in this argument – what happens when the wind does not blow?
As of 9.50am today wind was producing 17% of our electricity. Gas 45%, Nuclear 16%, Coal 3% ( there other power sources to make the figure up to 100%). The rated capacity of wind power is approximately 4 times greater than the amount actually produced.
So this morning, without Gas, Nuclear and Coal we would lose 64% of our electricity.
More logic and objectivity please!
There are ways to smooth this out. Some countries (Australia?) are investing in effectively huge battery farms, to store excess solar when they have it, so it can be used as needed. That probably only forms part of the picture, and may cause environmental issues down the line, but it is an option.
I don’t think you’re the only person who’s ever thought of this.
And I read about iron burning plants which are about 50% efficient.
There is a feasible possibility we could use excess wind power to electrically turn iron oxide into iron, which then gets cleanly burnt inside a power station not too disimilar to a coal fired power station.
I know wind isn’t the be all and end all, but just 10 years ago wind was pretty much the most expensive power source, and now it’s pretty much the cheapest. Things change, sometimes for the better.
Possibly if the FIT was removed
That’s not exactly how it works…. it’s more technical about smoothing grid demand. Even unfeasibly huge battery farms can’t store enough electricity to power up a 100% renewable dependent system for more than a few minutes.
There are advances being made but there hasn’t been the big breakthrough in battery technology that would change the game…. the issues with electric car technology may only start emerging after that early-adoption stage ..anyone given the policy arc right now , we will see soon enough how the sudden lurch towards electric transport pans out.
May I suggest (purely anecdotally) that a contributory (but not the only) factor may be the increasing feminisation of western society?
The last 50 years have seen dramatic advances in women’s freedom, rights and education. Female influence in politics, the judiciary, business and the media is the greatest it has ever been and will continue to grow as the current generation of university students (now majority female in the UK) make their way into positions of power.
…and a very good thing too!
I make no comment on whether this feminisation is good or bad, nor where the appropriate balance may lie on the objective/subjective continuum. The important issue for me is that this debate needs to take place, which is where the problem lies. As freedom of speech is increasingly seen as an irrelevance how is it possible to discuss such a topic without allegations of sexism, misogyny or misandry shutting down the discussion?
In an era where being female is being considered to be included as a “protected characteristic” under the law it may soon be a criminal offence even to voice strong views on the subject.
The question may not be what is the right balance but rather will we even be allowed to discuss it.
I have seen nothing to indicate that with greater influence and involvement of women, institutions are better run, companies make more money, or life has improved in any measurable way.
Personal experience: female managers are much, much more likely to hold grudges, indulge in favouritism, act vindictively, bully, or speak unacceptably.
Not all – I’ve had several great female managers – but a sizeable enough number to make it significant in statistical terms.
My subjective experience differs from yours. I have found female bosses to be much less likely to find subordinates with better education than them a threat, and much less likely to square up for a fight over trivia.
Except perhaps for the women themselves which you might regard as being a good outcome. The down vote was a case of fat finger!
I work as a skilled tradesman, hands hard like leather, tools in hand much of the day. In my years in the construction work I have never known women tradespeople excepting one plumber and two female carpenters who worked for the Feminists in the city. I am on sites all day – the exception here is an increasing number of wives/girlfriends as helpers on the small Mexican crews, but I believe this is never going to be their primary work.
Men and women are different, I find it strange people cannot see this. Maybe because work now days mostly service/office.
The economists have surveys that suggest that companies with some female directors do better. I think it’s because it’s good to have a range of experience on the board.
Violet Elizabeth Bott who threatened to scream until she was sick is based on reality!
In my subjective experience, politically motivated women do not cope well with a world view that conflicts with their own. In fact they tend to find such views offensive. Could the growth of female influence in public life be fueling the cancel culture?
Goodhart was speaking about BLM at a North London private girl’s school when he was pulled up for not expressing the right sort of opinions.
In an era where being female is being considered to be included as a “protected characteristic” under the law it may soon be a criminal offence even to voice strong views on the subject.
You cannot be both equal and protected.
By what percentage is subjectivity on the rise?
14.6% You are welcome.
99%. Truth is banished. The obvious things of race can be easily quantified by numbers of rates of higher education, income, involvement with the Justice system, two parenting, uptake of state funds, and so on. But they are completely Forbidden! So subjectivity is all which is allowed!
Colleges have long become the place where the voices of the most reasonable are often ignored in favor of the voices of the most offended.
I first heard this on BBC Radio 4 and thought it was very intelligent and thought provoking. The problem is how can we make “democratic compromises” when we don’t even share a common baseline of facts anymore. We are operating in completely different information universes. If you believe everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that you no longer believe in anything anymore. And a people that no longer believes anything cannot make up its mind. They are paralysed. They are deprived not only of their capacity to act but also of their capacity to think and to judge. How is democracy going to work then?
I don’t think you’re totally right. It’s not that people think that everyone lies, they think that people outside of their group are either misinformed or liars. It’s the social media echo chamber where you only hear what you want to hear.
The paralysis happens because there’s no compromise when views get hardened in that environment.
I heard a great suggestion a while ago that the social media platforms should add another button below posts and articles ‘This changed my mind’. I think it would be an excellent idea and people should be embarrassed if they haven’t been able to click it on a regular basis.
Agree completely on that distinction you have made.
The ‘This changed my mind button’ is a good idea but I feel that the algorithms are designed to give us more of what we like on these platforms, and so the platform by design will always morph into your own echo chamber unless you actively try and fight it.
I think ‘I learned something’ might be more useful than ‘I changed my mind’.
One way forward would be to demand that the press present, not ‘both sides of every issue’ but at least 3 sides. If you cannot find a third side, then you need to work harder at understanding the issue. Right now, journalism has gotten lazy. Pick any issue. Present the subjective reasons why some people are very enthusiastic about it. Then present the subjective reasons why some people are outraged about it. You can interview people if you like, but mostly you know what you are going to write before you interview them. Repeat over and over and over again and notice that nobody learns anything, because there never was anything in the articles that needed learning.
Another thing that might do some good is a model where the readers/subscribers/viewers decide what questions they would like to have answered, and get to the truth about, and then have the journalists go out and try to investigate these things. I think that people still, for the most part, believe that there is an objective truth out there and that good journalism would discover and present it. It’s just that this isn’t what we’ve been getting in recent time.
That’s an interesting idea. I might well subscribe to something like that.
So would I. The idea of a button proclaiming ‘This changed my mind’ is not convincing to me but one which said, ‘I learned something’ would appeal. Changing minds takes time and I would be suspicious of anyone who said what I read today changed my mind. There are many good sources of alternative information (to the MSM) available nowadays on the web but often, and however good the interviews, essays, etc, they tend to be one sided. I welcome alternative points of view to my own especially when they are well thought through and toned down of the emotional ‘lived experience’ narrative we get fed with these days. Especially from those who are clearly more activist than analyst. I would very much like to hear a well considered counterpoint to David Goodhart’s opinion. Without emotion, subjectivity or veiled ad hominems.
Sounds like a great idea and I am totally in favour. In defence of journalists I think reduced funding, logistical support and training for journalists has led to the increasing reliance on regurgitating stories from alternative outlets and vox pops that give the impression of journalism but aren’t really cutting the mustard.
You’re absolutely right. What I meant to say was “when you think everyone outside your bubble lies”. Excuse the clumsy phrasing. Didn’t sleep well last night, brain is definitely sluggish today.
well in some circles there’s a term ‘sense-making’ and an evaluation of which media a source of good sense-making with a good signal to noise ratio. Some have concluded that there really aren’t any. If that’s the case then…well that is the stark reality.
It won’t do any good opining that people need to ‘believe’ again in a narrative that is shoveled out to them and then we can get back to ‘making our minds up’. That doesn’t sound like any kind of solution…
From what i can see there are plenty of people who are quite convinced that Donald Trump (was) going to round up all the criminal paedophiles in the Whitehouse and send them to jail. Even his now clear failure to fulfil the prophecy hasn’t dampened QAnon’s faith it seems. Similarly I know people who still cower in their rooms and have not seen the outside world since march because they are convinced that Covid is going to absolutely cause untold millions of deaths and cause the end of society.
I would say that kind of thinking is far more of a problem than those of us who, in a sober analysis of media offerings aren’t sure ANY of them are a remotely reliable source of sense-making.
It doesn’t mean i’m not going to make my mind up about anything – but it does mean i’m not in a rush to gobble down someone else’s carefully constructed optics (even if they come wrapped in insignia’s of supposedly ‘reputable’ news sources.)
I think its perfectly normal for people to disagree especially on complicated issues. I personally find it refreshing to read a well written article even if I don’t agree with the author. I tend to follow writers rather than the media organisation they write for, and I feel I have learnt from both writers on the left and right, liberal and conservatives. But I accept that not everyone will agree with this and that’s just how it is.
The problem I have is my belief that views such as those espoused by QAnon are becoming more mainstream. I suspect conspiracy theorists have always existed but the internet has certainly given them a global audience. In many ways the polarised world of the internet where everything tends to be a matter of opinion rather than fact, is the perfect breeding ground for conspiracies and misinformation.
I think its going to be very hard for our democracy to function if we’re operating on just completely different sets of facts. Democracy doesn’t work without an informed citizenry. The ideal subject for authoritarians have always been people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.
A point I feel the article really doesn’t develop is that these arguments are often made not from ones own subjective experience – but from what one takes to be the experience of others.
It’s often subjectivity by proxy, expressed by white and/or privileged individuals who feel it is their job to express the views that they believe others ought to have. So it’s not merely anecdote, but anecdote at second or third hand, or even complete invention.
It is, after all, a long-standing habit of the privileged to feel that they express the voice of the downtrodden better than the downtrodden themselves. It’s part of their privilege, if you like. And woe betide, should any of the people they speak for disagree.
How about simply suggesting that people think. That’s with their brains, not their emotions.
Wonderful concept, but I’d suggest that first we need to teach people how to think objectively – start when they start school and keep going up to and including university.
The problem with that is that the vast majority of people are completely incapable of thought.
Nobody ever thinks they’re making irrational decisions. Even the wackiest conspiracy theorist will have a collection of ‘facts’ that prove they’re correct. Those guys think they’re the smartest of all.
We’re essentially emotional creatures, even when we think we’re not.
Brain scanning technology shows we make gut decisions all the time, then selectively backfill the logical argument afterwards. Our strongly held views can be easily manipulated with some emotional cues.
What the writer is struggling to understand is a distinction that is covered in most first-year philosophy courses: the distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. Knowledge by description is objective, while knowledge by acquaintance is subjective. In fact, the two terms refer to two different types of knowledge, not the same knowledge “known” in different ways.
As an example, a woman who gives birth knows more about the subjective experience of being pregnant and of giving birth, while the man doctor knows more about the development of the embryo and its need for certain kinds of nutrients before birth. It is, of course, possible for someone who is both a mother and a doctor to know both, but that is irrelevant to the issue. Her knowledge by acquaintance remains distinct from her knowledge by description.
Another example is the smell of coffee as opposed to its chemical composition. These are not different ways of knowing the same thing, but different types of knowledge about the same thing. Both are useful in different ways, offering different perspectives, not competitors for the same perspective.
Disputes about subjective vs objective knowledge are based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge itself. A rigorous course in epistemology would reveal this disputes as being pseudoquestions, not real dilemmas. The real problem arises when, for ideological reasons, some people decide to privilege one type of knowledge over another. Claims that “women’s way of knowing” are somehow superior to men’s “ways of knowing” commit this basic fallacy. Any culture that deliberately conflates these two types of knowledge is building its house on sand.
This. Along with a macro-flamethrower to the word ‘micro-aggression’
Interesting article. Yes, more people need to learn about the hierarchy of evidence, with subjective experience being the least reliable and representative of the bigger picture. There is always going to be a grey area of things that can’t be quantified but this doesn’t mean facts should be ignored or only the most oppressed voices should be heard. Public policy cannot be made on anecdotal evidence and must be informed by a range of different factors, to account for everyone in this democracy. I agree it is important to listen to different people and try and understand them and remove any personal blind spots. However, some people can use their minority status to seek undeserved individual power. Some people pretend that they are fighting on behalf of their group, but really they’re just complaining and want to make political points or destroy things (statues). Obviously, racial abuse is bad, but policing it can lead to increasing censoring and policing of debate, which can be abused by people who would destroy all the good things this country has, to further their twisted world view.
Keep doing what you’re doing, David.
The sixth form example is really interesting.
We live increasingly in a world where lived experience is dominating policy and facts are no longer even considered.
‘those with a certain kind of academic/analytical intelligence have been too dominant in our institutions’- Yes, our institutions have been dominated by smart, rational people for too long. What about the idiots? What about the sentimental morons? Don’t they deserve to run things? Don’t they deserve a massive salary and the power to rule over us?
Goodhart isn’t dismissing academic/analytical intelligence. Just “those with a certain kind”. I think of those, for example, who mistake qualifications and academic success in their field as conferring wisdom.
It takes highly qualified people to design a ship. But they’re not necessarily the best people to decide where it should sail.
“those with a certain kind of academic/analytical intelligence have been too dominant in our institutions”
Is inaccurate.
The people leading our institutions are – as is becoming more obvious with every passing day – mostly complete morons.
Stupid, brainwashed dullards making stupid decisions that make life harder, more expensive and less free for the rest of us.
What they have is a combination of two things:
1) Family connections
2) An aptitude for navigating politics and bureaucracy of public sector institutions.
Intelligence isn’t really a factor.
Our institutions have not been ‘dominated by smart, rational people’ since, probably, WWII. The only reason the institutions worked so well during WWII was that some smart, rational people from the private sector played a prominent role in those institutions.
What is called populism these days often seems to have much in common with the other ‘isms’ of identity politics and culture centred politics.
False enthusiasms and fake passions are promoted with little or no attempt at rational discussion and the casual, lazy *evil Tories* type assertions and slurs by an Owen Jones or Alistair Campbell have more in common with Trump’s publicised late night lash outs than anything else. As much as anything it resembles the Calvinistic, Puritanical tendency in Society to mistake rigour for Right.
We need to promote Enlightenment virtues of fact based deduction, universal truths and the respect and commonwealth that came from that.
David Goodhart does as good a job as anyone in the public square at the moment of being on the right side of this argument and a better one than almost everyone else.
Perhaps you have Height Privilege, David!
This kind of subjectivity amounts to individualism on steroids. Individualism used to be a right wing thing. The Woke, it seems, have appropriated it and repackaged it. The idea that one can choose to be, or identify with, whoever one wants, that all should respect your identity choices and not offend you, and that the Law should protect you against such offence looks to me like hyper-individualism.
I think the right side version of individualism was live and let live. It never included a part that required everyone else to actively cheerlead for the individual. Today’s version of individualism looks very much like paternalism; the individual wants no part of being left alone.
Individuality, such as you are describing here, is only permitted if it confirms the the Woke’s collective narrative. I’m studying this stuff at college. Any black writer who rejects the label of ‘oppressed’, is then seen as ‘white-adjacent’ or an ‘Uncle Tom’.
It’s weird. In Critical Theory, a black person can only be considered successful if their interests converge with those of the privileged, white people that champion them. Critical Theory aka Wokeness is the ‘Whitest’ thing ever conceived.
Ah. I learned something here. Thank you.
Subjectivity has to be allowed primacy over objectivity or policies based on buII5h!t logic such as those espoused in Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Intersectionality and White Fragility will never be enacted. Don’t worry, we know that such philosophies are diametrically opposed to several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but we can simply, subjectively re-interpret them in such a way that they no longer oppose one another.
Objectivity is so 2019. White, male, cis-gendered writers must step back now and stop offering opinions to allow more diverse subjectivity to be heard.
You know that the left always end up eating their own. Now baste yourself and climb into this pre-heated 180 degree fan oven. It’s time!
If the premise is carried to the extreme, then you can only expect a doctor who has personally experience an illness or condition to be able to treat it.
I love the bit in this article where reverse height-ism slides into fat shaming… unless I l’ve over-interpreted the relevant paragaraph… “We can leave those doorways that I have to stoop to get through where they are. Yet where does all this leave the wider (!!!) argument?”
The glaringly obvious problem with subjectivity is how to use the information it gives. Two people have opposing views – how do you act on that knowledge to generate an improvement? Magnify that by large numbers of people and it becomes impossible to take anything other than random action. The only way out (as we now see) is a combination of being the loudest and privileging some viewpoints over others. That then becomes cart blanche for those people to do whatever the hell they like, regardless of consequences. And it’s goodbye society and hello dystopia.
I agreed with a lot of the article, but it did seem to cop out at the end, with the paragraph, “Maybe one should not think of the subjective-objective as on a spectrum from personal truth to aggregate truth with the latter a higher form of truth than the former. Rather they exist on different planes, to some extent incommensurate. They both tell us different things about human experience and are both valuable in different contexts.”
At least in the realm of public policy and politics, the objective truth must take precedence over subjective personal experience. There can be perfectly valid arguments about what is ‘the objective truth’ – what evidence is more persuasive in a given situation – and how much weight to give to values that cannot be quantified, such as the importance of social cohesion or ‘fairness’. But we are in big trouble if we ever equate objective, general, evidence-based assessment with subjective, personal experience.
As an aside, it would be a good idea if interviewers routinely asked a couple of relevant factual questions at the start of an interview to allow the listeners to understand how much the person actually knows on the subject and if their assumptions are well founded. David Goodhart’s example with the physio and the % black population of the UK is a case in point. I think the results would be informative and also entertaining, as I’d expect some woefully badly informed replies a lot of the time.
Well argued and closely reasoned. Which means it will have zero effect on the kind of people you’re talking about.
“”¦ and told me about their experiences of racism in everyday life. It is true that the kind of micro-aggressions they were talking about”¦”
Which girl in an all-girls school does not have to deal with “micro-aggressions”? The colour of your skin might make you a target for attack, but so might the colour or cut of your hair, your acne, your clothes, your weight, your accent ““ girls are endlessly inventive when it comes to being nasty to each other. So Goodhart is right. This kind of anecdotal evidence is worthless at the policy level. Where it does have a value is at the personal level. Learning to deal with deliberate or inadvertent offence ““ deciding when not to care, when to demand an apology, when to forgive and move on ““ is a key part of growing up and becoming a mature adult.
How many white people who blather on about “privilege” have given up any of theirs? Especially the younger set. Is there a single college student so racked with guilt that he/she gave a spot in school to a minority? Of course, not. The term is bumper sticker logic.
Is an oncologist only worthy if he/she had personally undergone cancer treatment? What’s alarming here is how far away we are moving from the concept of equality by fixating on skin color above all else.
Does this mean that an oncologist is only qualified if he/she has personally experienced cancer?
So your cancer doctor is only credible if he/she has also suffered cancer? Just keep in mind that the biggest champions of diversity and multi-culturalism are the first people to shout “appropriation” over hair styles or clothing choices.
I’m calling bullsh1t here.
This article did not have that title when it appeared on the site this morning.
The title has been changed to a clickbait one “raargh raargh lefties”. I wonder how many times that happens on this site. I often see a disparity between the tone of the article and the headline.
The headlines often change througout the day. I wonder who has the final say.
It’s probably an algorithm. Too few eyeballs on the piece ? Wind them up some more.
The ‘left’ has long been hijacked, one can’t help feeling.
‘The perfect being the enemy of the good’ might well be an annoying truism nowadays, but it still needs saying over and over again ad nauseam unfortunately until it hopefully eventually sinks into some people’s thick skulls.
Great essay, thanks.
Nice article!
Nothing is ever truly objective or subjective because we are not empty tabla rasa. We understand something because of the sum of our history and experience and thus any ‘fact’ has an interpretive element as does any ‘opinion’. I’m also a white male but have spent much of my life working with poor, non-white communities in different parts of the world, frequently focusing on gender issues. Does this mean I can’t understand such issues? Of course it doesn’t, but it means I have to keep my eyes open, listen well and triangulate information. And I have lived in such communities. So my ability to understand beyond generalities the lived experiences of others, based too on understanding that we all tend to have the same kinds of impulses, helps me perceive the nuances of different peoples lived experiences. At the same time as soon as one thinks one fully understands, one’s ability to do so immediately decreases.
“Facts’ such as the 3% of the population are black quoted here, obviously need to be taken in context too. If I lived in an areas where the population was 30% black, I would expect to find more than 3% of physiotherapists were black and would wonder why if I was not. The fact that the doctors in our local GP practice are usually white, but the specialists in our nearest hospital are usually not, provides me other data to interpret what is happening in our society. The challenge we have today to understand is that of obtaining relatively accurate information to interpret. If half Republican voters think the recent US election was rigged its because they have only been reading Trump’s ongoing litany of lies. Similarly to say that Biden is just another neo-liberal so he will change nothing, is also ignoring the context. It’s important that we all look beyond generalised utterances, because they in themselves are always false and mislead.
Quite right. Alasdair Macintyre said all this and more with regard to emotivism 40 years ago in After Virtue.
lies, damn lies, and statistics. Be careful how u interpret anything
Very interesting. I am very fascinated by context. “What context does is provide the background of which the information being examined is a part and allows a proportionate assessment of the significance of the new information.” I work with a database that stores scientific measurements. Without context, there is no explanation for the values of the measurements. ( Are the measurements high because we monitored an industrial discharge?) The scientific method is very good at explaining the ‘how’ but not the ‘why’, the context. I suspect Post-Modernism affected how we think – we no longer believe there is Meta-Narrative. With Science Method, there is often a mistaken belief that we gain access to reality. However, Science observations, like subjective experience, is relative to the observer. We have forgotten the importance of context – the need for abstract ideas to examine various subjective experiences to form a bigger picture of what is happening. What we have lost “Truth can be gained through structured debate” – Religion and the rise of capitalism, Tawney.
THE BRITISH DO NOT REMOTELY UNDERSTAND BLM.
As a Scot who has lived in America half my life (30 years x 2), I can tell you that the British do not remotely understand BLM. They should shut-up about it. It is embarrassing. The British socialites and vanity-activists in the British mainstream, got on their keyboards years ago, to feverishly jump on the bandwagon as if they are part of it. You do not understand it at all. UnHerd should interview me, since I’ve actually lived here, and am far ahead on this topic than either British or American. Any other Brit who has lived here this long, either has not taken a strong interest, has not analysed it, has not lived in Canada (very important experience, re. this topic), and has not thought long or studied deep into the history. Hardly anyone else understands this topic. And DEFINITELY not the British. Very few educated blacks or whites in America even understand what this is about.
To say you might use “data & logic” to get an understanding shows that you do not understand this topic. Yes, use data and logic, but that is a VERY superficial understanding on its own.
You have to go very deep into history, you have to be British to do that fully. Although an American can bring A LOT of interesting details to this topic, and I learn from them, they all have brain-damage (a form of PTSD) from centuries of propaganda, you have to have white, male privilege as I do, and on top of that, you have to have Scottish, white, male privilege, who lived in Scotland, England for 30 years, English family, born and brought up in Scotland, with a very British ancestry, and lived all over America for 30 years (and Canada). The reason you need the Scottish part, is because the Scots generally bring another aspect into the conversation that English do not have.
This is not arrogance, just reality.
UnHerdTV, interview me.
Tommy Barlow – Retired professor of Art & Art History (art history is the history of everything), and prof. of design, graphic design, art, and digital art. MA-SCI, MAT, MFA.
The fact that so much is written about and commented on this topic shows how far down the rabbit hole we have travelled. Every group now seems to have a grievance that they want to parade before us and to demand that we must take it seriously enough to seek out and prosecute the perpetrators. Failing that silence them and merely persecute them. I don’t know whether the writer is being just provocative when he talks about his white privilege but my initial reaction was ‘here comes the bleeding heart liberal clap trap again’ and when I got to the end and saw it was an edited essay originally on the BBC my second thought was ‘figures’. But then reading Ford and Soblewska’s evisceration of ethnocentric identity conservatives I now realise that though I have been on the left all my life and held what I thought were mainstream liberal views I have been entirely wrong by being old, white and not having had the opportunity of a university education. An identity group damned to perdition.
I have zero sympathy with this movement since they decided to break lockdown rules, not just once but three times, which we had all been obeying, to run riot in London and vandalise statues all over something that happened miles away in America. This was followed by the National Trust telling its members that we are all vile racists and don’t understand our own history. I wonder what other European country would put up with this.
I think the problem with looking at subjective microaggressions is that, though many may appear to be race based, there will be always be toxic people who are going to find some characteristic for their nastiness – and particularly within the adolescent age group. And external characteristics are easy to point out.
If the school bully mocks someones thick hair or narrow eyes, people are going to shout racism, yet this same person is likely picking equally on the person with freckles or a big nose or a low IQ. However when you actually consider the behaviour, it is not about any of these characteristics at all, it’s only about the bully’s own feelings of jealousy or inferiority and they are simply finding something to mock.
Stating that minorities have an exceptionally difficult time due to race based on these microagressions doesn’t look at how these same incidents are occurring towards many others, without having any racial undertones.
I think that the problem is also that when one believes they are subjected to racism, they begin to assume every negative encounter they experience has to do with their race, where often it is a completely irrelevant factor. If racism was as prevalent in society as some people believe it is, then it would be obvious to third parties, however we are increasingly being told that it is only the experiences of minorities who should be listened to on the matter, and that we should be taking their word as gospel. I think that if we are going to take individual viewpoints into account, we need to always hear the other side of the story.
The Left can only apply subjectivity because it is completely and utterly incapable of absorbing, understanding or analysing objective facts and statistics.