A world of difference

Several people dismissed from French ministries after positive drug tests

Several people working in French ministerial offices and the wider state administration have been removed from their positions after testing positive for drugs, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has confirmed.

The revelation comes after Lecornu ordered an unprecedented campaign of surprise and mandatory saliva tests among ministerial staff, senior civil servants and officials with access to sensitive information.

“There have been positive tests, and people have been removed from their positions,” Lecornu said, without giving a precise number or identifying those involved.

There is a world of difference as to the resulting knowledge between a cursory observation that notes only generalities and an attentive examination that considers particular details.

R. Austin Freeman - The Surprising Experiences of Mr. Shuttlebury Cobb (1927)

Stupidity v Malice

  

Miss Boler sniffed. “Looks to me more like deliberate malice,” said she.

“Mischievous acts usually do,” I rejoined; “but yet they are mostly the outcome of stupidity that is indifferent to consequences.”

R. Austin Freeman - The D'Arblay Mystery (1926)


Leaping lightly back to the previous post, what we directly observe with people such as Ed Miliband is his public behaviour, especially his language. What we often assume but don’t directly observe is his thinking behind the behaviour.

With Ed Miliband we can be said to observe the stupidity that is indifferent to consequences, but we don’t directly observe the deliberate malice. We may as well call it malice though – it fits the likely outcomes of his policies.

The superior advantages of being alive

 

Thus reflecting, I opened the lychgate of Bouldersby Churchyard and entered. I have a strong liking for churchyards. They are quiet and restful places where one can meditate with satisfaction on the superior advantages of being alive.

R. Austin Freeman- The Surprising Experiences of Mr. Shuttlebury Cobb (1927)


It’s an odd business though, being alive. There is no alternative experience to act as a contrast to being alive, nobody we can ask for their experience of not being alive. Apart from various implausible notions of an afterlife of course, but they don’t help folk who have to deal with the world as it is.

During our recent holiday, we strolled past a churchyard every day. Quiet it was, as churchyards should be, with lichen-covered gravestones, many barely legible and ancient yew trees here and there. Peaceful yes, but Freeman was right about the superior advantages of being alive.

Although presumably there is no BBC in the afterlife, no climate change, no scam emails, no mobile phone updates, no having to drive up the M5 after an enjoyable holiday…

The Shadow of the Fabian

I once came across this quote in an old mystery novel, one of R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke series. It encapsulates a Fabian outlook which never disappeared and if anything is as entrenched now as it was in Freeman's day.


“The commercial standard isn’t quite the same as the professional, you know,” Jack Rodney answered evasively, “and financial circles are not exactly of the higher morality. But I know of nothing to Purcell’s discredit.”

R. Austin Freeman - The Shadow of the Wolf (1928)

Not likely to be ingenious

 

Source

For instance, I would devise an ingenious fraud and would plan it in detail, taking every precaution that I could think of against failure or detection, considering, and elaborately providing for, every imaginable contingency.

R. Austin Freeman - The Mystery of 31 New Inn (1912)

Adapt is the message

"The hooligan," pursued Thorndyke, as we walked briskly across the silent square, "covers a multitude of sins, ranging from highway robbery with violence and paid assassination (technically known as 'bashing') down to the criminal folly of the philanthropic magistrate, who seems to think that his function in the economy of nature is to secure the survival of the unfittest.

R. Austin Freeman - The Red Thumb Mark (1907)

Many of us probably know that we may not survive in a brutal, dog eat dog world. Not a remarkable assumption because we not adapted to that kind of world. Guardian readers may think they have been forced to adapt because of capitalism, but loons merely reinforce the point. Most of us would even struggle to survive in eighteenth century England for example - in spite of our superior knowledge of climate change, gender politics and diversity.

It is worth pushing this a little further because it is clear enough that even as supposedly free citizens in an enlightened world we cannot shake off the basic survival urge. How could we? A likely consequence is that many of us are clearly not afraid of handing over that freedom to an all-embracing managerial class. This is the class now engaged in taking away even our most basic freedoms and our ability to make our own decisions. All we appear to be offered in exchange are virtue, emotional massaging and a sense of belonging.

Of course the virtue is mostly fake, the emotional massaging is demeaning and the sense of belonging is akin to serfdom but that doesn’t seem matter to a surprisingly large number of people. In other words the exchange works and the managerial class now knows for sure that it works even if they didn’t know it before. The coronavirus debacle has hammered the lesson home very firmly indeed.

Modern survival angst may have been stimulated by familiar aspects of modern life. Professional sport, celebrity culture, racial tensions and a pervasive, constantly evolving confusion sowed by political correctness all make their not inconsiderable contributions.

I’m not a celebrity, not rich, not outstanding at sport… not outstanding at all.

Ironically, mass inadequacy is the starkly obvious message, rammed home every single day of modern life. An all-embracing managerial class is bound to have mass appeal if it merely projects a comfortable sense of belonging, especially if it reinforces that sense of belonging by the intrusive management of daily life. 

It works too. We see it all the time and mainstream political parties have already adapted to it.

When relevance becomes confirmation

'That is so. But your question, Anstey, exhibits the difference between the legal and the scientific outlook. The lawyer's investigations tend to proceed along the line of information wanted: the scientists tend to proceed along the line of information available. The business of the man of science is impartially to acquire all the knowledge that is obtainable; the lawyer tends to concern himself only with that which is material to the issue.'

R. Austin Freeman - The Cat's Eye (1923)

It’s an interesting quote this – yet another angle on what we already know. The legal approach of eliciting the line of information wanted is one reason why both bureaucracies and legislatures are so poor when it comes to gathering objectively relevant information. That which is material to the issue depends on whatever the issue is presumed to be. Everything else is screened out.

Today we might call it confirmation bias but we tend to apply it to individuals rather than government. Somehow we expect governments to be pragmatic behind the façade. Yet this is where the real damage is done – behind the government façade where relevance becomes confirmation and disconfirmation is irrelevant.

Objectivity is lost and some degree of policy failure becomes inevitable. Yet failure doesn’t always matter to those responsible because still the legal approach is followed – defend or deny failure by sticking to the line of information wanted.

Carstairs - how do we wriggle out of this one?
The usual approach Minister – stick to the official line.

There is no way round this endemic weakness as legislatures are rarely designed to attract people engaged in making something work in the real world. This requires pragmatic experience rarely found in those who embark on a political or bureaucratic career early in life. What we get from these people is the line of information wanted and it doesn’t work. The real world cannot be made to work merely by throwing words at it, however well crafted.

Even where objectivity is supposedly valued there are familiar problems. Science, engineering and construction don’t mix well with government bureaucracy for example. The legalistic approach subverts technical relevance and attracts ambition rather than competence. Again and again the line of information wanted supplants the line of information available wherever the greasy pole and prestige are career drivers. Policy-driven evidence usurps evidence-driven policy.

There is a similar problem with voters who lack experience of the real world. This level of experience is not acquired by the age of eighteen. The voting age is clearly far too low. The minimum age for MPs is clearly far too low. Take Jeremy Corbyn for example. He hasn’t mastered the role at 71.

Any truth that emerges

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.    

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.

Did they really?

Common black powder such as old women use to blow out the copper flues.

R. Austin Freeman - As a Thief in the Night (1928)

Apparently women sometimes did this when the washday copper was heated by a coal fire and sooty flues were a problem to be resolved without the expense of a sweep.

The intrepid ladies went out and bought little packets of gunpowder, threw a packet into the fire under the copper, slammed the door and – whoomph. The gunpowder blew a thick black cloud of soot out of the flue. Job done.

Different times, different ways.