A kind of wilful idiocy

Sebastian Milbank has an interesting Critic piece on the failure of government by technocrat, where even reliable government statistics may fail to reflect what governments and government supporters assume. Incompetence can be baked into the system.


Things can only get worse

There is a vast epistemic divide between those who experience decline, and those who don’t

Is London a terrifying post-apocalyptic city full of “no-go areas”, patrolled by violent ethnic gangs and raving drug addicts? Or is it a vibrant multicultural success story that is infinitely safer and nicer than the bleak city of the 1980s? This, in microcosm, is the argument playing out across the West over crime, migration and public space. Are things getting better, or are they getting worse?

On the one hand, as this example amply demonstrates, we are not able to have sensible conversations because of the levels of hysteria and ideological distortion involved. On the other, we struggle to articulate realities that can’t be captured by statistics, or haven’t yet been systematically researched.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a contribution to problems we are aware of but consistently fail to articulate within the hopelessly compromised arena of public debate.

The utilitarian experiment of governing society via selective statistics and scientific management has catastrophically failed, and has rendered otherwise intelligent men and women into a kind of wilful idiocy, unable to accept the evidence of their senses unless it can be translated into data. We are all, in a sense, living in a virtual world, having lost the old tools of grammar, logic and rhetoric that gave us a mental and linguistic handle on reality at a human scale. This problem is not academic, but sharply political, as it opens up deadly rifts between the experience of the common person, and an elite rendered complacent by its faith in a social scientific worldview.