| Have we all lost the nerve to think? |
When a philosopher dies there is one less star in Heaven. Or so
we were once told. Philosophers guard the spyholes in the
firmament. They are supposed to tell us of the Great Beyond. As
the taxidriver asked Bertrand Russell: "So what's it all about then,
Bert?"
Last Saturday, The Times carried an obituary of one of the most
celebrated philosophers of our age, the American Willard Quine. I
understood hardly a word of it. Quine's work was not a window
on the Great Beyond but an intellectual microscope applied to
games he played with others. He was, it seemed, another of
Keats's dullards who "will clip an Angel's wings".
If ever there were a philosopher's philosopher it was Quine. He
prowled the frontiers of set theory and mathematical logic. In the
1950s he crossed swords with Viennese logical positivism and
questioned the "Kantian dichotomy which had become a basic
tool of analytical philosophy", between statements "whose truth
rested solely on the linguistic conventions determining the meanings
of words used to express them, as against those conveying genuine
information about the world".
This sort of distinction well demonstrates the distance philosophy
had travelled from public accessibility. To be fair, Quine protested
it as a naturalist who held that "physical facts are all the facts there
are". Philosophy is no more or less than a science. Yet to what
effect? I can think of economists and political theorists whose
ideas have changed my life. I can think of engineers, inventors,
jurists, even artists, who have upset the equilibrium of my days, not
always for the better. But the philosopher wanders the scholastic
desert alone, skirting any oasis where he might find beings who
speak a common tongue. The heirs of Socrates and Aristotle,
Erasmus and Hume wrestle with each other apart. Not
surprisingly, Quine's obituarist said of him: "He professed a liking
for desert landscapes, and his intellectual landscape was bare
indeed, indeed bleak."
Why then was Quine awarded more awards and honours "than
any other contemporary philosopher or than almost any other
academic"? What is it about philosophers that values them so
highly? Perhaps we have dumbed so far down that we celebrate
sheer abstruseness. Philosophers embody pure learning, pure
irrelevance. We value them not as intellectual snobs but as
ascetics, hermits defying the draconian quantification of David
Blunkett's quality auditors.
Yet showering philosophers with awards lets them off the hook.
There is work for them to do, urgent work that they seem to funk.
I doubt if public policy has ever had a longer agenda for them to
tackle, problems that would have delighted a Locke or a John
Stuart Mill. How far does our responsibility really extend to the
poor? What should be the limits of redistributive taxation? What
entitles us to interfere in the lives of strangers, or of foreign states?
(Does whatever it is extend to bombing their cities without
declaring war?) Does it extend to criminalising their governments
for growing narcotic crops of which we disapprove? Does it
extend to the unborn child?
Crime and punishment at present suffer acute philosophy
starvation. What right do we have to deprive of liberty teenagers
whose misdeeds may be the result of our own or their parents'
negligence? We hurl an unprecedented barrage of rules against
individuals. We stop them bringing up children as they wish. We
discriminate in favour of some groups at the expense of others. Is
there no point at which this should stop? The philosophy of identity
seems silent.
The greatest threat to personal liberty no longer comes from the
traditional enemies of war, poverty and disease. It comes from
ever more intrusive organs of the State, the more insidious because
often unintended and even denied. I am sure Tony Blair genuinely
believes himself to be something called a liberal. Yet the
boundaries to state action laid down by English philosophers in the
18th and 19th centuries are being overrun by stealth. Hayek and
Popper warned against socialism's abuse of state power. Their
socialism may have been laid to rest, but the extension of state
power continues unabated. The presses thunder out ever more
laws, filling prisons with those who break them. Each day a
growing tide of buff falls through every letterbox. The Stuart Mills
of today say nothing.
The "death of ideology" seems to darken rather than brighten the
gloom. Philosophers should hold up their tapers in this gloom.
What is the philosophy behind the present Court of Appeal's
eagerness to monetarise every personal hurt and match
compensation to every injury irrespective of fault? A sort of
communism is being reborn in the guise of cradle-to-grave
insurance. Is this fine? Nothing is discussed.
Or take the conundrum of the rights of the family vis-à-vis the
State. Families are said to underpin social morality, supplanting
religion in this respect. But why the family? Are familial rights not
pagan, a reactionary genetic construct that stands in the way of
equal opportunity and a fairer society? Appeals to kinship have
caused social conflict from the Tribes of Israel through the Wars of
the Roses to the ethnic upheavals of today. If the family is to
"underpin" modern morality, some philosopher had better redefine
it fast. What of the violent family, the family that wants to keep
Siamese twins, or wants to eat beef-on-the-bone? As politicians
talk gibberish, where are the philosophers calling them to account?
Some have sought to engage these arguments. Bernard Williams
has worked on theories of personal identity, Jonathan Glover on
the concept of "life", Roger Scruton on aesthetics and sexual
desire, John Rawls on justice and fairness. But they seem like
aliens beating on the locked door of Babel. When John Prescott
took power last year to imprison Britons for freeing budgerigars
into the wild or building steps to their front doors, I realised that
the debate over the rights of individuals versus the State had not
advanced since Plato's day. A Renaissance prince would not have
presumed such authority, nor any government before the 20th
century.
The dictatorship of liberty is the more odious since its major
premises are left unspoken. We can play with human life in a test
tube and throw over it the umbrella of liberalism. We can do the
same with policy towards prisons. Government can tax and
regulate in ways unimaginable to those who formed the British
constitution in the ages of Revolution and Enlightenment.
Political and economic innovation moves with the speed of light,
yet is debated in terms of numbed vacuity. Read any political
speech or read any political book. With the supposed death of
ideology, they offer no recourse to theoretical concepts to help to
resolve the natural conflicts that make up politics - just as fudged
buzzwords of the "Third Way" or "One Nation". Fierce battles are
about to be fought over refashioning the English countryside,
battles over long and short-term costs and benefits, over the rights
of newcomers over established residents. Philosophy should be
shouting aloud about this. Is it? Britain's leaders may have studied
philosopy at Oxford. But that school cannot be what it was. They
have lost touch not just with the ideology of liberty but with the
idea of ideology at all. They have lost faith in ideas as a guide to
action. Lost in short-term self-interest, in the sovereignty of the
opinion polls, they fall back on liberty's line of least resistance, and
find it ceding ground to the advancing battalions of big
government. The tyranny of Marx has given way to the tyranny of
accountancy.
I have no doubt that philosophers such as Quine enjoyed their
mental calisthenics. But they fiddled while Rome burned. Their
successors must rally to the colours. The linguistic analysts must
deconstruct the new authoritarians. The moralists must expose the
hypocrisies of "value politics". Epistemologists must reveal
politicians' speech codes that appear devoid of meaning.
Philosophers of mind need constantly to exorcise renascent
"ghosts in the machine".
Nobody expects philosophers to agree, any more than do
economists or political scientists. They merely need to make their
voices heard. The philosopher should once more be what
Nietzsche called the "terrible explosive, in the presence of which
everything is in danger". He should dare to make the earth move. | 
