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| Dr Thorndyke |
'Every fact,' replied
Thorndyke, 'is relevant to something, and if you accumulate a great mass of
facts, inspection of the mass shows that the facts can be sorted out into
related groups from which certain general truths can be inferred. The
difference between the lawyer and the scientist is that one is seeking to
establish some particular truth while the other seeks to establish any truth
that emerges from the available facts.'
R. Austin Freeman - The Cat's Eye (1923)
This quote is taken from a detective story in the Sherlock Holmes mould but it encapsulates a fundamental problem with
democracy. Within any government there tends to be an inevitable bias towards
the outlook of the lawyer. A bias which is seeking
to establish some particular truth. Inevitably that will be some particular
political or bureaucratic truth. We see it all the time - climate change is just one of its
outcomes. In other words, democratic governments cannot be both entirely truth-seeking
and entirely democratic.
Not only that but we should not expect democratic governments to be truth-seekers. Not merely because the political classes are too horrible and self-interested to be truth-seekers but because this cannot be the way democratic governments do business.
Not only that but we should not expect democratic governments to be truth-seekers. Not merely because the political classes are too horrible and self-interested to be truth-seekers but because this cannot be the way democratic governments do business.
Any democratic government would have great difficulty in
trying to manage its business from a standpoint where it seeks to establish any truth that emerges from the available facts. Such
an approach would be virtually impossible to sustain. It would be too slow, too
uncertain and the political classes could not easily project themselves as
active actors within the government process. The stage would too small, the
roles too limited to sustain large egos.
While this inbuilt difficulty seems to be the case with
democracies, a stable totalitarian state might well be able to watch and wait
as it seeks to establish any truth that
emerges from the available facts. Especially is such a government manages
to free itself from the conceptual restrictions of political ideology. I suspect this is where China intends to go. Put crudely it intends to seek out the truth and use it. Such a
government could be formidable indeed.
4 comments:
China: interesting. A theme for you to follow and develop over time, I suggest.
We already see something of this in the UK, whenever there is talk of "evidence-based policing", or "evidence-based educational policy". The idea is that such initiatives are free from the old taint of ideology, and can focus on what the facts tell us really works.
I think the problem with it (for China as well) is that the distinction between the lawyer's approach and the scientist's approach is not so clear-cut. Science doesn't begin with an open mind; it focuses on problems and issues which are selected according to non-scientific criteria. Governments which simply try to do what is effective, what the facts lead them to, are ignoring the issue that the facts are only there because someone chose to mine them, polish them, and present them to government.
Sackers - I'm following it casually, but there are too many aspects with China, too many perspectives which alter the entire viewpoint.
Sam - good point. Thorndyke's facts are selected by the crime he is investigating although R. Austin Freeman is always careful to stress that his fictional detective avoids conclusions until he has the facts. Impossible of course, but the ideal of the scientific approach is central to the stories.
Yes, I think the distinction between the lawyer's approach and the scientist's approach is more of an ideal than a clear-cut distinction but even the ideal seems to have faded into marketing hype. To my mind evidence is becoming something you buy or sell rather than the building blocks of knowledge. As an ideal the moral worth of evidence seems to be fading.
"China is two economies: one developed and wealthy along the coast, the other rural and impoverished. China's domestic strategy is to shift capital from the coast to the impoverished interior to raise the standard of living of its 600 million rural residents."
- http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/05/good-riddance-to-nothing-burger-trade.html
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